Photography: Dan Holdsworth

Dan Holdsworth's large scale photographies explore the limits of human knowledge. His extremely long exposures of the Arecibo Space Telescope (remember the movie 'Contact') document the movements this gigantic mirror that is listening into space is performing at dark.


Another stunning series is the Hyperborea where he captured the Northern Lights on Island. Filled with both time and timeliness, these photographs offer a window to another world, that feels literally alien to us mere mortals. You also see this in pictures of the European Space agencies, where the employees parking lot is framed by a rocket pointing to the main entrance. You feel like in a Bond movie, but this is real and the villain is not Dr. No, but probably you and I, not being able to grasp the many phenomena concerning the edge of space, and thus, reacting with further limiting aggression in our own little world.

National Maritime Museum, until 7 January, 2007

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: Hans Bellmer

Yeah - Finally! An art show of this (of course) German Maniac. I was waiting for this opportunity for almost 15 years. And now the great Whitechapel locked away in the East End displays the etchings, drawings and photo documentations of his famous dolls.What's all my raving about? Well, for those who didn't come across this hidden champion of Surealism so far (no he was never as accomplished as Dalior Ernst) this is the real surealist stuff, kinky, horrible, boundless, childlike, erotic and just a bit C-R-A-Z-Y. So if you think the Chapman brothers were revolting (in the 1990s!!!) and you would like to see how somebody was 10 times more pushing the boundaries of taste and conventions, then go and see what this man created as early as the - YES - 1930s before he had to flee Hitler and his Nazi cronies as an "Entarteter Kunstler".

Whitechapel, until 23 November, 2006

High Street: North Cross Road, SE22

Since my cousin has moved to East Dulwhich, I have become a real fan of this little bohemian enclave for two other reasons: Lordship Lane and North Cross Road for:
Shopping on the Saturday market and in the numerous bric-a-brac, interieur design and flower shops. My favorite is www.designsix.co.uk where I bought a glorious chest of drawer hand-made in Indonesia from mango wood. 10% of the profits also go to a Tsunami relief fund.2) After the shopping spree go for great dining and wining in idiosyncratic and fair-prized bars and restaurants such as...well, I am not recommending any restaurants as there are too many little starlets, just put your nose in the wind and follow your favorite smell. Have a closing drink at Liqorish!

Movie: Wal Mart - The high cost of low price

When I studied international marketing at business school, Wal Mart was invading the German Market in a "make em or break em" style. Deep inside, we all knew that this strategy was going to fail, but back then nobody was listening to us new economy kids in Cologne. So, we write the year 2006 and the behemoth has surrendered and is marching home - and we were right, he he.

That prompted me to finally see that movie about what's wrong with the Wal Mart business model. A lot! But the bigger picture is that of the corporation. Don't complain about fat cats, immorale values (e.g. to subsidise a profit machine like this with tax payer's money to only name one) and killing the little guy (independent local traders), unless you want to un-corporate Corporate America. The flaw is in the law.

Speaking of the devil, the movie "The Corporation" had the potential to make history, but unfortunately only the first 45 minutes are conceptually revolution calling followed by almost two hours of cineastic how-to-do-it enangelising.

However, the Wal Mart movie delivers what it promises and should become compulsary curriculum for all business and economy students. Definetively eye-opening and a milestone in critical documentary.

For those who are interested, the website www.truecosteconomics.org has an interesting call to action: to change the economic paradigm itself rather than fire-fighting the effects of the pre-vailing and harzarduous neo-liberal one. Or go back to the last remaining corner shop in your neighbourhood instead of Tesco Local.

Art Show: Surprise, Surprise

There is this magic triangle in the art market between artist, collector and gallerist/dealer. In the spheres of not-for-sale exhibitions it respectively is artist-viewer-and-this odd thing called curator. Beuys gave birth to the famous mission statement of "everyone is an artist" but who on earth transplanted this motto into curation?

Contemporary, the magazine has recently published a special issue on 'Curators' and there are now even university diplomas to be obtained. Where the point my generic rant? To be frank, creative curating on the edge of contemporary taste and discourse incurs some risk, and the ICA had a couple of hit-and-miss attempts too much to my liking. The only outstanding shows in the last two years were by Tino Sehgal, and coincidently (or not) there was no involvement of a curator putting together random stuff, because there was simply nothing to hang, place or install.

Also, a curator can only be as good as the material at hand, and maby here lies the problem: this exhibition shows pieces from very well-known artists, but not the usual stuff and that iss supposed to be the trick here. In general, the show dissapoints, as it is only an assembly of mostly mediocre stuff of big names. It feels a bit like detecting that your favorite art house actress has commited some sitcom-sins or worse, advertising sell-outs back in the 80ies.

However, there are some pieces that charmingly stand out, even though the critical question remains how much 'unusual' these are.

This very cleverly engineered optical-effect sculpture does have some essential Matthew Barney features (think prosthetic plastic), while my favourite piece, a perpetual-through-the-wall & red-coloured-water installation of Anish Kapoor somehow instinctively reminded me to the Marsyas commision in Tate Modern before I checked the name in the leaflet provided.

Perhaps the best 'positive' surprise in terms of unusual+good was Jenny Holzer's "Lustmord": 312 animal bones arranged on a table with engraved silver rings that made me think how archaic this world still is, despite human accomplishments like culture and creative curating.

Until 10 September at the ICA

Art Show: Thomas Demand

I guess it needs a fellow German to NOT photograph mind-boring stuff like empty town hall stairways, photocopiers and office desks, but to re-create these artefacts and places 1-2-1 from cardboard and paper - of course with the notorious meticulous attention to detail and perfectionist engineering - AND THEN to photograph THAT.

And it goes without saying that you fall into his trap at first encounter, until you are wondering about the dorky beauty of these random objects and spaces instead of the expected eerie emptiness that stuff like that would create if the photographs were capturing real things.

You are then asking yourself: But why? All this effort...what's the point? Well, it makes you better really see how boring and sense-numbing much our daily world is and how odd such a thing like a p-h-o-t-o-c-o-p-i-e-r is. Yes, say this word ten times while looking at the picture and you'll get start thinking about the bug in the matrix or check the glass table in your home is really that or.


I left with the notion that maybe we humans, that apparently inhibit all these spaces, might be only "paper-tigers" ourselves.

Until 20 August at the Serpentine Gallery

Artistic Theatre: Fuerza Bruta

I finished work. Hot home. Picked-up my fiance. Drove to Chalk Farm. Met friends. Had no idea what to expect apart from "this is not your normal theatre experience. How so? Well, there is no stage a start and things will be moving around you.


What followed then was 60 minutes of audio-visual + kinaesthetic magic. Yes, I felt like Alice in wonderland. Might a lot of people discredit its sensationalism as been there done that or well it was more circus than theatre. What the hell, I felt purely entertained for every single second and my jaw was dropping lower and lower with every change of scene.


Phantasmagic!

Until 31 August at the Roundhouse

Art Show: Bill Viola

Love/Death - The Tristan Project: Usually I become bored by the "more of the same" approach as this often thins out artist's creativity.

However, there are magic cooks of aesthetic ware of which you just cannot get enough of their spice, and in case of Bill Viola it is this monumental, ultra-slow motion video art that illuminates the 4 elements earth, water, fire and air as well as the usual suspect facial expression of people, projected at a pace that you assume to be better than sleeping pills.

Yet all the pieces at numerous Bill Viola exhibitions I have seen - and this includes a city-wide one-man show back in the 90ies in Frankfurt - make people seemingly stick to the wall to watch a whole loop even if that takes 50 minutes.

This is the opposite of 'what the hell' video art where you enter a dark room and leave after 7 to 60 seconds saying to your own high-brow that is screaming it wants to be a floor lower: "I know this might be an important piece of art, but hell I cannot be bothered to digest this here and now"

This stuff is just beautiful, erotic, deep, captivating and just excellent. And for the high-brows who need to grasp the intellectual decomposition of the leitmotif, go and see Wagner's opera.

Until 2 Sep at Haunch of Venison and St. Olaf College on the Southbank. The latter has the more opulent pieces in my opinion.