The Blogazine

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Dismalware and Beyond

“The good thing about digital art is that you can always turn it off.” Such was the (witty and promising) start of Johannes Grenzfurthner’s lecture at Dismalware, an event featuring presentations by Jeff Mann and Baruch Gottlieb amongst others, organised by Monochrom and Telekommunisten in C-Base. It is an interesting and peculiar Berlin venue on the Spree canal, especially good for experimenting hackers, playing video games, drinking Czech beer and awaiting a visit from extraterrestrials. I’m hoping they drop by, too.

I’ve started from a parallel event to discuss Transmediale, which is quite a a bit bigger, invading Berlin between the end of January and the beginning of February. I have always attended smaller parallel events (if they sound inspiring) and to somewhat lose the plot of the baroque official program of big festivals. That’s probably why I went to the official Transmediale location only on the very last day, and checked out some of the very last performances (here and here) and screenings (both good!) But that’s just me spending too much time in my studio, from where I could listen to a stream to some of the Transmediale lectures (Bifo and Dmitry Kleiner).

You can turn off digital art, yes, but in the end, you can do so with any art. You can hide or destroy a painting you don’t like, or, to tread more lightly, you might simply avoid the venues which are likely to show it. The 90s are long gone and pointing out that a work is digital or that an installation is interactive is moot, like someone who continues to dwell on the question of whether photography is art not, or whether one should prefer figurative to abstract painting.

I don’t believe in strict categorisation of cultural production; it can be misleading and inadequate. Not that I don’t enjoy or draw inspiration by a great deal of what occurs under the umbrella of “New Media Art.” The graphic layout of Transmediale’s flier and website is nice in a way; it makes me feel like I am still eighteen. Too bad I’m actually thirty-one. Getting older can also feel good though, if you accept the challenge.

So I admit I would have liked to see more pure experimentation, more science, more research. Less Facebook. In general fewer “pranks” with angry emails from big companies printed and tacked on the wall. Nor detailed captions explaining that the project is ironic, fake, or symbolic (thanks). Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org, for starters, already covered those bases. Their stuff was (and remains) inspiring fodder for art students bored with Academy classes and the blah-blah cacophony of the art system. But, something fresh is needed! I know, it’s not easy. It takes ever larger budgets, efforts, energy and time. The show Liquid State Machine (again a parallel event in the frame of Das Weekend) was doing something more in this direction, with a quite simple (although very rich and diverse) equipment and few solid brains at work. Let’s keep looking…

Alice Cannava is a friend of the Blogazine and one of the masterminds behind Occulto Magazine.

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Passport to Trespass

A dozen years and counting in the making, Mikael Kennedy’s series “Passport to Trespass” is a chef-d’oeuvre in Polaroid if there ever was one. The epic work is set to launch its seventh chapter, billed “Hunt Them Out,” later this month.

Working with some of the last precious cartridges of Polaroid 779 – the authentic and dreamy genuine stuff – Kennedy has crisscrossed North America several times with his SX-70. Over time, an emotional narrative with his surroundings and the acquaintances he’s made along the way has emerged.

A spiritual successor to the likes of Kerouac, he looks upon life as a visceral, riveting adventure and his work comes accordingly saturated with this perceptible enthusiasm. His fine art images are made with such simple honesty, no doubt accented by his studied choice of such an anachronistic and mercurial medium, that it’s clear he positively lives through and within them.

In a short conversation with us, he recounted, “I got caught by the police, one summer, climbing over a fence onto an abandoned and crumbling pier. They let me go when I showed them my camera and told them I just wanted to take a picture. That wasn’t the first time I had gotten out of trouble by showing my camera and explaining that I was just exploring…”

“To me the most important thing is a life that is lived at the end of it, not wasting my life is the goal, every single day that I am alive is important and should be spent accordingly. I recently told a friend I don’t care why the world is the way it is, I just want to see it before I go.”

His blog, Passport To Trespass, is definitely worth exploring at length and is frequently updated. Catch “Hunt Them Out” from its launch on February 21st, in tandem with an online exhibition and sale of limited-run prints through his gallery, Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York.

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Terre Vulnerabili

Terre Vulnerabili is an ongoing project of four exhibitions – mirroring the lunar cycle – based on collaboration among 30 international artists asked to create site-specific works, thought or readapted for the amazing space of Hangar Bicocca in Milan.

Vulnerability can be seen as an absolute capacity, which gives human beings the sensibility and responsibility to understand others’ needs.

The second step of this “growing exhibition” (whose main issue is based on an assumption by Georges Perec to “Question that which has forever ceased to amaze us”), curated by Chiara Bertola and Andrea Lissoni, will last until March 3, enriching the first show with new works that constantly interact with one another. Starting from the precarious stability of our Mother Earth and the fragility of human beings, the artists reflect their personal vision of vulnerability: from the labyrinth made of cardboard by the Hungarian French architect Yona Friedman, to the transparencies representing the strange holes on the sand close to the nuclear centre of Yeong Gwang (South Korea) by Kimsooja, or the fireworks by Nico Vascellari, which recall the blast of a bombing.

Both the impalpable delicacy of the tube realised with horsehair by Christiane Löhr and the wall carpet made of grass that keep growing and turning yellow by Ackroyd & Haervey express precariousness and mutability. While wandering around the huge space of Hangar Bicocca, you’ll be hypnotised by the amateurish video Staging Silence, in which the Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck rebuilds locations, urban and domestic contexts, real or fictional, where the absence of people allows the visitor to jump into the stage and stay there alone in silence, in contemplation. Moreover, casting a glance to the ceiling you’ll be trapped by the “Web” (2006-2010), an installation that the artist Mona Hatoum realised with crystal balls and metal wire, so to encompass all the earth and human being pains that we have to face and fight.

After visiting the exhibition don’t forget to have a drink at the HB Bistrot, which combines an international atmosphere with original design and good food.