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NY and the new transience of art spaces
X-initiative Space.
Until 2004, 548 West 22nd street in New York was the home of the Dia Art Foundation, one of the main institutions in the city. Founded in 1974 to support the new needs of the artists of the time, it required large-scale and technically complex or long-lasting projects, which could not be conducted in traditional institutions –as is the case of the 7000 Oak Trees by Joseph Beuys, Broken Kilometer by Walter de María, or his Field of Lightning–, it closed its doors in the city in order to install its spectacular collection upstate –with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Michael Heizer, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. The reason for the closure: the space no longer fulfilled the needs of the institution(1).
Read more...Primavera 2010: The Greatest
Cortesía: Primavera Sound
Magnetised by a simply spectacular line-up, a perfect balance between nostalgia and modernity, a hundred thousand music fans invaded, this weekend, the Parc of the Forum during the most multitudinous edition of this classic Barcelona festival. They are fans not only of music, it is true, but also of fashion and beer, as it was difficult to see a face free from the ubiquitous retro-style sunglasses or a hand not holding a cold and foaming glass, which leads me to suspect that the main sponsors of the event must be more than satisfied. If sponsorship involves the ability to organise this kind of line-up, you are welcome, you monsters of market research.
Read more...Self-Portrait on Convex Mirror. On Autoría by Julieta Valero
In the quotation chosen by Julieta Valero to conclude Autoría [Authorship], Miguel Casado points out that “the continuous thread of the voice has provided the subject with the only possible space for existence”. “Once concluded,” he had previously written “it all falls apart again”. Anyone who chooses to interpret Autoría in a linear way, without taking chance or omission into account, will wonder whether Valero wove the “only space for existence” for her discourse, or whether her voice can be heard, hesitantly, at ground level and ironic at times, rough and twisted at others: “at present, The Sublime is a membrane between words and the multiplicity of the bazaar”, suggests Valero in Ashberiana, a dialectic she establishes with a poetics of the writer and philosopher Alberto Santamaría, which we could perhaps see as the nucleus of Autoría, as well as, undoubtedly, a major footnote in the literary choice of Julieta Valero, not just because of the explicit reference to the North American poet (“all so Ashbery now”, she humorously, and accurately, pointed out in that text).
Read more...Cosmopoética 2010: El jardín de la inocencia
Perhaps one of the greatest virtues of Cosmopoética is its ability to create intra-stories in the streets, those corridors between high culture and citizens who intermingle like wild climbing plants until they form a thick and invisible blanket of experiences, encounters, smiles and discoveries. In addition to promoting reading and expanding knowledge to unexpected confines, the International Poetry Festival of Córdoba, one of the most important of its kind in Europe, turns the city, for ten days, into a true enclave for dialogue, a shared territory where different expressive disciplines overlap in order to soak naturally into the metropolitan epidermis and the day-to-day pulse of its inhabitants. In this sense, perhaps one of the most striking experiences in this seventh edition of the festival has been El jardín de la inocencia [The Garden of Innocence], a large joint work developed by four painters and twelve poets1, which has turned a central public space into an original oasis of synaesthesias where the literary and the pictorial coexist.
Read more...William Kentridge: Five Themes at the MoMA
“…circumscribing his own work to a world haunted by the invisible powers of the Other”1 seems to be a part of the art practice of William Kentridge. In his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on show until the 17th of May, his five most recurrent themes lead us into a universe of frenzied gestures, which are not usually the ones chosen to convey a violent and paradoxical social-political reality.
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