The Great Exhibition

Wanting to see Paul Chan's show in the Serpentine, I bumped into friends on the way and joined them to see "a graduate show in a tent" instead (I had seen Paul Chan in Boston already) It turned out to be a afternoon of exitement, arousal and inspiration. The RCA has coined this year's presentation of its students "The Great Exhibition" in hommage to the original in 1851 - and as far as I can say I have discovered some revolutionary and thought provoking concepts and ideas.

Let's start with The Race by Michael Burton, a series of interventions tackling the issue of antibiotics - human mankind cannot live without it yet bacteria are developing faster than R&D labs can spin out drugs. He suggests that "with the end of the antibiotic era we have no other choice but to symbiotically evolve to meet the pressures of hostile new diseases. The photo above is called bacteria harbourer, and another piece on display (as well as video) is a fist-size fabric cage that is woven into a women's hair in order to hosts a praying mantis. Yes, it may sound absurd, but when you see it it kind of makes sense, for future generations though.


My favourite is EXTREME GREEN GUERRILLA, a project by Michiko Nitta, that responds to global warming and other threats to contemporary civilisation. Among other radical solutions, he proposes an Animal Messaging Service, in which humans send digital messages from e.g. London to New York - not through the existing infrastructure of glassfibre cables but - by using biological transmitters: whales, birds, rats and other species. The 'interface' to carry the information is stored on RFID tags that are implanted into the animals, as demonstrated below with a Mackerel.

Surely, this isn't exactly the most efficient way to communicate, but that would miss the point. Screaming of with and humour on the one hand (species are clustered into fast and slow, or low and high risk; think predator and prey...the Mackerel belongs to the latter) this project also gives amazing impulses to think about carbon footprint and other hot topics.

To Andreas Molgaard, the most pressing issues is mankind's survival in the 21st century. Focussing on the big picture of global change, he comes up with 11 ways to survive, ranging from the funny, wouldn't it be nice, to extreme thoughts of erasing one continent completely or limiting life to 33 years (like Jesus). Like it or not, this is somebody with the vision (and guts - since this is pretty controvertial stuff) to list some of the options, viable or not, the history of the future will tell...

These days however, a big imminent problem in cities like London is social unrest, in form of gangs hanging out on the streets, women getting harressed, juveniles drinking on playgrounds and so on. Nothing new so far. But did you know that the police can declare an area - ranging from a phone box to the entire borough - a so-called "dispersal zone" legally prompting suspects to leave the declared zone and keep them at bay with a 3 months prison threat if violating this order? I didn't! And I am very glad that Tamsin Fulton is pointing this out in her project www.thedispersalzone.org.uk Using the API of Google Maps she publicises all DZs in London with Tags when it was declared for what duration and what the reason was. The fact that she uses readily available yet hardly known information (to the local residents) makes this project very Mark Lombardi-ish (he re-shaped newspaper clips into intricate graphic webs of state corruption across the world) More on her blog http://tamsdesigninteractions.blogspot.com


From the Mean Streets of London to the Great Oceans of our Planet: Daniel Sjoholm thinks that current abundance in Yacht design suffers a misguided focus on marble, gold and other Oligarch toys. He sees a need for an update in Yacht design, and promotes a new luxury in the form of glass bottom "speed lounges" that look like spaceships cruising lagoons and reefs. Can he also somehow reconcile his vision with the manifesto of the EXTREME GREEN GUERRILLA folks?

Other highlights of bionic design included Il Hoon's aluminum table, that could both be interieur of Sjoholm's yachts and vanguard of a new wave of organism-inspired architecture and furniture design. Bauhaus is dead. Long live Colani.

Emphasising round forms as well are Henny van Nistelrooy's old-magazines-turned-artworks. Starting from the outside, he works his way through these magazines carving out holes of different sizes and angles to create a paper-based sculpture. When you then flick through the pages, these meticulously crafted holes appear like wormholes trying to link the (often shallow and meaningless) world of fashion and advertising with your own imagination of how you might fill these voids with your personal stories. Having always admired paper cuts (Matisse, Felix Droese to name two) I felt inclined to get one for £20, which rounded-up this fantastic endeavour on a Sunday afternoon.

Until 28 June at Kensington Gardens

Art Show: Anthony Gormley

Event Horizon - that title reminds me of a pretty scary movie from the late 90s exploring concepts of dents in space and memory journeys back and forth into your darkest past and greyest future. Event Horizon is Antony Gormley's latest environmental installation, scattered across the Southbank of London.

30 odd casts of his own body stand on roof tops of predominantly 60s grey concrete monsters. It is an exiting journey for your eyes to wander around and discover their location and juxtapositions with the surrounding urban landscape.


Whilst not really empathising with some by-passers' concern passed on to the police that "somebody is intending to jump off the IBM building" as reported in the press, I did have an eerie moment this morning that reminded me to these people's experience: when driving on the M4 westbound just before crossing the M25 at 5:30 am on a sunny Saturday morning, I saw somebody sitting on the edge of a pedestrian bridge gazing at the approaching traffic. He seemed to contemplate whether to jump or not (Of course I called 999 and they said they were aware of the incident and sent somebody - I hope it all ended positive...) In my mind I connected this scene with Gormley's installation that reminds us of the fragility of the human body, and the anonymity of urban life.


Inside the Hayward Gallery you find typical sculptures from various periods, all good and all thought provoking. The horrenduous and cold interieur of the gallery provides a menacing platform for Gormleys messages.

The attention grabbing bit though is the cloud-filled room that I suppose gives this fabulous exhibition the title Blind Light. Once inside the cube, you are really distressed and disoriented and do what everyone else seems to be doing: meanering around the glass walls from edge to edge until you reach the exit again, but when two opposing traffic streams hit each other you might loose track and sight of the secure pathfinder and off you go back into blindness. A very physical and psychological experience.

Until 19 August at the Haywards Gallery

Art Show: Ricky Swallow

On my last exploration tour through Hackney, I found a couple of good shows in Vyner Street, the most impressive being Ricky Swallow's wood carvings. The sculptures of this Australian artist and Venice Biennale representative are a result of extraordinary craftsmanship. There are arms, shoes and other small scales pieces mounted on the wall or positioned on the floor.

My favourite is 'Younger than Yesterday', a skull that grows barnacles out of its vessel. Both outstandingly beautiful and disturbing at the same time. Swings and balances. Giving and taking. "The deterioration of the skull's former life becomes the root from which the barnacle's macabre decoration pushes forward and flourishes." It definetely invokes some scary thoughts on brain tumour and the notion of getting older.

What a shame that the gallery rep on the day was very uncommunicative - otherwise a nice conversation could have blossomed...(post note: as happened at the current exhibition:-)


Until 21 December 2006 at Modern Art

Art Show: Gabriel Orozco

Remember the chess board-like texture drawn on a human skull in the Serpentine a few years ago. That was my introduction to one of Latin America's most prolific artist. For the opening of the new White Cube in St. James, the Mexican artist has applied the same technique - but on an exponentially larger scale.

There is only one "drawing" - called dark wave - that fills the biggest gallery room in the West End, and that is on the sceleton of a whale. The exhibition is called 12 paintings and a drawing; the paintings displayed on the ground floor are from his famous undertaking to "examine the range of permutations possible within a defined spatial and colour system based on circles.

Having seen whales in Samoa (a 60ft humpback) and others in South Africa, but from a distance, I got completely overwhelmed to be able to walk around the sculpture (takes about a minute at moderate gallery-strolling pace!) which makes you able to grasp its 'real' size. Monumental, given that this guy is of a similar tree of animal species, a mammal, like us humans. And when you stand underneath the hanging installation of this multi-ton construction of nature with a man-made graphic pattern drawn onto it, then even a Christian-turned agnostic person might easily recall the biblical story of Jonas and the whale in a moment of awe.

Unmissable! (it was until November 2006)

Art Show: Fischli & Weiss

Many of us know the 30 minute video 'The way things go' - the most inventive, bizarre and unique domino effect that humans could possibly create, where, based on chemical, mechanical and physical effects, household appliances and other gear sets themselves in motion in an empty factory hall. The sources of inspiration for this Swiss duo are endless, yet their art is shockingly mundane and plain in execution. However, what makes it stand out is this odd combination of aestethics and philosophy by two Alpenlaender Anoraks with a cheeky humour.You have to see it to believe it. However, you also should see this exhibition at Tate Modern, the best I have seen there since the Joseph Beuys Retrospective last year.The only major area of their work I haven't seen immediately turned into one of my favorites: an entire room full of little clay models, mostly left unfinished and unfired, capturing the most inportant events in human history filtered by the duo's own perception of what's important and what not, hence, the title of this microcosm 'And suddenly this overview' couldn't be more poignant. You see moments in technology, fairy tales, civilization, sex, religion, nature and entertainment, and the funniest in the latter category is the clay model of "Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing I Can't Get No Satisfaction"

Another room is filled by large scale photographs of flowers/plants and airports, beautiful and stunning. But perhaps the most intriguing room is "Visible World": three flat screens present an archive of 3,00 photos taken by the artists on journeys across the globe. It is not so much the material, but the curation and the way the images are fading into each other. Here is a lake. Now a boat emerges. Then the boat dissapears again, and the lake is joint by mountains in the back. Of course the boat and the mountains are not around the original lake, but another one somewhere else. Better than photoshop and digital imaging effects could ever be...

Don't miss it!

Tate Modern, until 14 January 2007

Art Show: Pierre Klossowski

"Claiming not to be a writer, philosopher, or even an artist, "but first, foremost, and always, a monomaniac," Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) has long remained a cultish figure..."

When you enter the ground floor of the Whitechapel gallery and gaze at the ginormeous drawings and their three-dimensional sculptural elaborations, your first association might be 'this must have been De Sade's artistic dream - interpreted by Freud on LSD: Stags do business with Robin Hood looking women, young pageants make out with old ladies, and above all and through out the show there is an eerie non-explicit athmosphere of erotic violence. You don't feel as observing an act, but moments before it happens, when one might pause to give his or her rationale a chance to win over dark desires in the hope to withold yourself and not do it.

Oh, what? Do I sound weird? Well, I somehow feel surrealised by this double-bill of phantasmagic art.

Whitechapel, until 23 November, 2006

Art Show: The Art of Climate Change

Not even Bush denies it categorically anymore. Polar caps are melting and so forth. But how does large-scale and long-term transformation look like?

This show at the Natural History Museum has sent a bunch of artists to a cluster of Swedish Islands up in the Arctic Sea to discover the given topic in their way - and the result is great. The work displayed is critical, beautiful and most important relevant: it catches your attention and makes you think, like Gary Hume's Hermaphrodite Polar bear.

At a first glance it makes you laugh because the title is kind of cute or funny in reference to the comic-style painting, but when you read that growing trash and their chemicals battle this majestic species to fight against the threat of extinction by undermining biological reproduction, then this assumed tongue-in-cheek turns into a rather nauseous lump in your throat.

My favorite piece was an installation though that consists of a weird mechanism that can send your audio-visual senses into delirium, yet it captures best what our pre-conceptions of nature are: that we think it doesn't change rapidly, but slowly and invisible. Stay a while, study the movements and you'll understand the undercurrents below the surface that don't make it into the daily news.

Antony Gormley delivers good stuff as most of the time, wheras Siobhan Davies' Endangered Species - an extremely filigran and subtle holographic video piece took me by surprise and changed my perception of "available space".

-> until 3 Sep 2006, free entry, Natural History Museum, SW7