28/07/2014

Guest Interview n°56: Stefano Cumia

The Blogazine met Stefano Cumia (b. 1980, Palermo), one of the most engaging and sophisticated Italian artists of the latest generations, who spoke with us about his artistic path and the reasons behind the new, challenging phase of his career, marked by “SCP 14”, the solo show curated by Helga Marsala currently on view at Rizzuto Gallery in Palermo.

First of all, could you tell us something about your background? When did you understand that being an artist would have been more than a status for you?
The personal story of an artist, the background, is everything people can know about him. People think they know who you are and what you do because they assume they know your roots and, whatever happens, there’s no way of changing their mind about you. Personally I prefer the freedom of leaving things open, nothing has to be taken for granted and nothing is an absolute certainty.

Your artistic path has mainly been characterized by figuration up to this exhibition, which represents and important turning point in your work, what are the reasons that made you change direction?
At the basis of SCP 14 lies the necessity to never give up on changing the internal, commonly accepted, order about the painting matter. It’s a way of reorganizing its syntax through a series of micro-tactical procedures focused on elements that form the object-canvas, making the painting implode, concentrating or pushing it to the edge. Consequently, narrations, evocative titles, iconographic references etc. are dimmed and trapped between the layers to give place to a summary work, an analysis aiming at the painting in itself.

In the collective imagination, painting is associated with the canvas hung on the wall, but during the years we’ve seen the development of an installative painting, which avails itself of devices that alter its perception and fruition (paintings laid on the floor, use of clamps etc.) What do you think about this approach that considers painting as installation?
Despite the collective imagination of painting being attached to the idea of a depicted surface, rectangular in shape and middle-small in size hung on the wall, we have to acknowledge that installative painting has somehow always existed. Just think about the polyptych created by Grunewald for the altar of Isenheim, it’s made of mobile and fixed shutters that change the appearance of the painting each time. Or again, without going too far in the past, look at “Plurimi” by Vedova, the “Cave of antimatter” of Pinot Gallizio, or the work by Kippenberger who took a monochrome by Richter and turned it into a coffee table using a wood-and-metal structure that changes its perception and fruition. I think it’s stupid to consider the segmentation of painting beyond its rectangular boundaries as a pleonasm.

What process lead the creation of the shapes characterizing your latest series of works?
After getting a track from the structure support and delimiting a field of action, I went on to overlap and interchange layers in succession, which ended up connecting and interacting one with another, amounting to these shapes.

Even if apparently the lines of your work seem to be perfect reiterations, they hide faint imperfections and deep differences in the brush strokes and colour intensity. What do these ‘bugs’ represent for you?
Lines are vectors that mark perimeters and cross the layers, which try to capture and hold everything close by them. The speed of lines’ flow determines phenomenon of viscosity or, vice versa, of precipitation and breakage that determine these ‘bugs’, which represent ‘quid’ to me.

Why did you choose to insert pieces of glass and other materials into your works? Is this a homage to informal art?
Actually no, it is not a homage to informal art, I just follow a scheme. The insertion of well-broken glass and other materials is functional and related to a matter of capture and stratification. Adding smashed glass to colour, for instance, helps me to thicken the mixture, making it more viscous, damming pigments and allowing the medium contained in them to split from the rest and overstep the perimeter’s shapes. This capture process enabled the pictorial substances to invade the knits of the bare canvas, stressing the parergon of the framework.

If you should select an artwork and/or an artist, who influenced or struck you in a particular way…
I’m afraid I cannot do it, I always try to screen everything.

…and a place, which inspires you and/or where you would love to live?
Places make no difference, I don’t care, the most important thing is feeling good wherever you are.

Interview by Monica Lombardi 
25/07/2014

An Excuse For Curiosity: Music Festivals

The music festival is many things, but for many people it is an excuse. Whether it is an excuse for excluding reality from your life, for acting up, for making new friends and sourcing new music, depends on the type of event that attracts you. Ovid tells a story which explains its historical status. After a great flood, earth was very fertile and bore a mutant snake the likes of which were unknown and terrifying for all people. After an exhausting battle it was killed by Apollo, though it required almost all his ammunition, every arrow. He was so proud of his accomplishment he created the Pythian games as a memento – an event which is said to have been the origin of both the contemporary music festival and other sporting events. The festival retained its competitive edge throughout the Middle Ages, and often became repetitious, annual event. Important to note is their basis as a reason to take a break from the everyday and celebrate the Gods. Or so it is said. It certainly depends on the festival, of which there are so many kinds: small and experimental, romantic, energetic, distant, in an exotic locale, hot and sweaty, sexy, young, sophisticated, wild or commercial. Some are very large, like Roskilde Festival in Denmark which has approximately 135,000 visitors, or Glastonbury which counts around 175,000. We have chosen a few that may or may not be on your direct radar, but which are providing the world with decently curated, interesting contemporary music in spicy locals and novel venues. They are using the music festival as an excuse to show you something different about the world, and may in fact be the perfect discovery for one of you this summer.

All Tomorrow’s Parties, Jabberwocky 2014, London ExCeL, 15/08/2014 – 16/08/2014

Staged by an organisation based in London that has been promoting festivals, concerts and records throughout the world for over ten years, and founded by Barry Hogan in 1999, All Tomorrow’s Parties is renowned for its famous curators and consistently diverse locations as well as its conscientious effort to avoid commercialisation. While based in London and organised by a stable team, the group is constantly collaborating with a diverse array of curators including TV On The Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The National, The Drones, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Sonic Youth and Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening – to name a few. Their next event is Jabberwocky, a festival staged in London which will feature Sun Kil Moon, Thee Oh Sees, Eaux, and Caribou.

Off Festival, Katowice Various venues, Poland, 01/08/2014 – 03/08/2014

Polish festival features three days of noise, post-rock, electronics, featuring Wolf Eyes, Bo Ningen, Earth, Evan Ziporyn, Fuck Buttons, Glenn Branca, Jerusalem In My Heart, John Wizards, Loop, 65daysofstatic, Mark Ernestus’s Jeri Jeri, Amen Dunes, Michael Rother performing the music of Neu! and Harmonia, Nisennenmondai, The Notwist, Ron Morelli, and Svengalisghost.

Flow Festival, Helsinki Suvilahti, Finland, 08/08/2014 – 10/08/2014

Annual Finnish festival taking place in a disused power plant area, with Bonobo, Darkside, Tinariwen, Neneh Cherry & Rocketnumbernine, Bill Callahan, Les Ambassadeurs featuring Salif Keita, Amadou Bagayoko and Cheick Tidiane Seck, Marissa Nadler, James Holden, I-F, Ron Morelli, Ceephax Acid Crew, Illum Sphere, and Mark Ernestus’s Jeri Jeri, Machinedrum.

Ultima, Oslo Various venues, Norway, 10/09/2014 – 20/09/2014

Contemporary music festival, this year themed around the idea of nationhood. With performances by Jenny Hval & Susanna, David Brynjar Franzson, Simon Steen-Andersen, Johannes Kreidler, Eivind Buene, Arve Henriksen & Eirik Raude, Maja Ratkje, Lisa Lim, Mauricio Kagel’s Exotica, Ben Frost, EMS’s 50th anniversary events. Plus talks by Laibach, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou.

Philippa Nicole Barr 
25/07/2014

Museum der Dinge, A Libertarian Parable

How should we “awaken the gods that sleep in museums”, wonders Antonin Artaud. The question is still a living matter in the design field: we have come to a point when we take for granted the need to preserve our industrial production, but we are still uncertain about the museographical model that best suits this particular type of heritage. The Museum der Dinge in Berlin hasn’t hesitated to tune its own concept. Opened in its current location – the multicultural Oranienstrasse in the very heart of Kreuzberg – in 2007, the museum boasts a collection of more than 20.000 objects showing the evolution of material culture in the course of 20th century. The core of its rich set is the archive of the Deutscher Werkbund, the glorious German institution founded in 1907 that, according to the spirit of the time, was meant to favour the fusion between applied arts and mass manufacturing.

Nevertheless, the curatorial vision that distinguishes the museum doesn’t cling on the beautiful legacy that best embodies the quintessence of the German way in domestic design – that is to say the idea of a product as a “silent servant”, a discreet yet performative tool accompanying everyday life with a compliant and shy touch. Instead, it has found the courage to enlarge its boundaries to all plebeian objects that, beyond the strict requirements of functionality, often support the symbolic sphere of our domestic landscape and contribute to strengthen our sense of identity.

Thus, it’s through a process of accumulation that Museum der Dinge displays its anonymous yet familiar crowd of things. The idea to cage objects into a case, as if we were in front of an antiquated anthropology museum, is intriguing: squeezed into congested yet eye candy cabinets, organized in categories running among the others from “packaging” to “housewares” to “early plastic” to “imitations and quotations”, the collection finds an engaging balance through the juxtaposition of its diverse elements.

Can good form go along with kitsch? By all means, if everybody respects the same sense of integrity and respect for the other. This liberal parable, which also reminds us of Alessandro Mendini’s «Quali cose siamo» exhibition at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan in 2010, seems to confirm the virtuous potential of mix matching, and perfectly reflects the spirit of the city where it is based.

Giulia Zappa – Images courtesy of Florian Hardwig 
24/07/2014

What Has Beene Done: Revising Geoffrey Beene

In today’s fashion, the cult of personality is of utmost importance. We are used to relating the name of a brand to that of a precise designer, always waiting for the next shift, the next reshuffling of fashion teams. To some extent, we have actually become spectators more than involved consumers, looking at fashion as a stage on which designers move, carefully playing their designater roles. In this context, the peculiar story of Geoffrey Beene has the shape of a paradox. Beene was among the first to openly advocate for individual identities of designers to be recognized, beyond the limits and restrictions imposed by the industry. Nowadays only a few, even among fashion students and industry professionals, are fully aware of the work of a man who dared to put his name – rather than that of a company – on the labels of his creations, sold in an eponymous boutique on the Seventh Avenue in New York. It happened in 1963, in a decade fraught with change and innovation: a golden age of individuality, personalities and character destined to stand out and make a difference.

Geoffrey Beene was, of course, one of these incredible personalities. His work must be noted for its capability of fusing together thoughts and reflections on different spheres of the fashion system, defending the autonomy and supremacy of creativity and originality. It could be that his short-lived experience as a medicine student, promptly abandoned to pursue a career in fashion, sparked an interest in the female body. Strongly interested in its curves and lines, Beene shared the same analytical vision of anatomy with his contemporary Charles James. His designs took into consideration the needs and desires of women who, after becoming Beene’s customers, were totally devoted to his vision: sometimes irreverent, other times extremely elegant, Beene brought pret-a-porter on the same level of couture for both structure and significance. “Design is a revelation to me. It’s like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life,” he used to say. Beene’s revelation was supported by hard work on unusual fabrics, always looking for new ways to break into a consolidated language with measured grafts, precisely thought to fit into a pre-existent discourse. He was the first to bring jersey and other ‘poor’ materials to the ballroom, minimising seams and cuts to “let the fabric move and flow”. This was just one of many ways for stating, again and again, that the value of a design is not just in the preciousness of materials and fabrics, but in the ability and wit of who is capable of taming its intrinsic characteristics, subduing it to his will.

A trailblazer, Beene was sure of his abilities and completely into each of his designs, which he followed from conception to production and retail. Beene tried to protect his work in every way, pointing out that what was to be protected was first of all the identity of the person behind (and inside) the clothes. The dignity of his designs was considered a value to be shared with the consumer who felt part of a wider project, as if initiated to a new philosophy. His admirers are numerous, and his legacy counts, among the others, the names of Issey Miyake and, above all, Alber Elbaz who worked in tight contact with Beene for many years. “He taught me everything”, Elbaz points out, showing that Geoffrey Beene was a protector and could still be a teacher whose lessons should be taken out of the shade of history to serve as precious tools for reading the contemporary.

Marta Franceschini 
24/07/2014

The Talented: Maiko Takeda

Originally from Tokyo, Japanese designer Maiko Takeda recently completed an MA in Millinery at the Royal College of Art in London and is currently working for Issey Miyake on the brand’s line of accessories. Before joining the RCA, Takeda has studied Jewellery Design at Central Saint Martins and has worked both with Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy. Her bold and original pieces have been frequently shown in fashion magazines and other pop cultural contexts, where they are appreciated for their sculptural qualities and intricate design.

Maiko Takeda’s design aesthetic is far from traditional and the creation of her latest collection started with a question: “how would it feel to wear a cloud?” The aim was therefore to create three dimensional objects which pushed the boundaries of the wearer’s surrounding space, taking inspiration from Robert Wilson’s 1976 production of Philip Glass’ opera “Einstein on the Beach”. Many of her pieces focuses on the area from the neck up which, seen from a historical point of view, is usually adorned with objects displaying symbols of wealth and luxury. Huge jewelry pieces were symbols of power – showing that the wearer was not afraid of taking physical space or being noticed and looked at. The view on this kind of attention-drawing jewelry has, however, changed from being a symbol of money and wealth to a pop cultural phenomenon. Takeda’s jewelery is the prime example of this shift of focus and re-appropriation of cultural meaning. Maiko Takeda has made a modern version of the old status symbols, where the most significant effect of wearing them is still left intact – they undeniably draw attention.

Hanna Cronsjö 
23/07/2014

The Power of the Fashion Muse

The story of relationships between artists and their muses is an old and well-know one. Creatives from all over the world have always been inspired and guided by other human beings: by their needs, their styles, their attitude or, simply, by the alchemy that sparked from their mutual relationship. Debra N. Mancoff, Adjunct Professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, investigated this parallel world of complex and fascinating ‘creative couples’ in a recently published book titled “Fashion Muse”.

The tome’s narrative is guided by photographs and drawings, which animate the lives of fashion muses throughout history: starting from ancient Greek goddesses to Charles Frederick Work – the very first couturier from 1800s – who created clothes inspired by his wife, up to Elsa Shiaparelli, inspired by an entire art movement, the Surrealism. Fashion designers’ muses can often change with the evolution of their style or, simply, life. Like Yves Saint Laurent, who praised different, yet equally bold, female characters, from Lou Lou De La Falaise to Betty Catroux. Madame Coco Chanel and Diane Von Furstenberg, on the other hand, have always been the inspiration for themselves meaning they didn’t really have another source of influence other than their own persona. “Fashion Muse”, published by Prestel, is a volume that aims to investigate the reality behind the flimsy idea of ‘inspiration’ – the life, the cultural and historical background, the origins of women, men and sometimes movements, who animated the creativity of fashion.

Francesca Crippa 
23/07/2014

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

A rebel, outcast, innovator and explorer, Dennis Hopper was the icon of last century’s troubled youth, fascinated by his restless wanderings and unnerving psychedelic exploration captured in 1969 masterpiece Easy Rider. “With its portrait of counterculture heroes raising their middle fingers to the uptight middle-class hypocrisies, Easy Rider became the cinematic symbol of the 1960s, a celluloid anthem to freedom, macho bravado and anti-establishment rebellion.”, Ann Hornaday wrote in Hopper’s eulogy in the Washington Post in 2010. More interested in “the reality of things going on around me than the fantasies of the world I work in,” Hopper captured America’s dynamic social and cultural life of the 60s in more than 18,000 photographs moving between humour and pathos, the playful and the intimate, the glamorous and the everyday. A body of 400 photographs – initially selected by Hopper for an exhibition at Fort Worth Art Center in Texas in 1970 – is now staged at London’s Royal Academy in an exhibition titled “Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album” running through October 19th 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of the Royal Academy 
22/07/2014

Pierre Charpin for Appartement N°50

Designed immediately after the end of Second World War and built between 1947 and 1952, Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is an imposing building: 137 meters long, 24 meters wide and 56 meters high, with 18 stories set on massive piloti that can house up to 3000 people. Structured as a rigid architectural grid based on a single, carefully proportioned, apartment unit, Cité Radieuse represents the synthesis of Le Corbusier’s thought, a monument to the Modern Movement and a concrete utopian dream. Unlike many similar large housing units, Cité Radieuse remains popular with its residents, mainly upper middle-class professionals and intellectuals. One of its residents is Jean-Marc Drut. Since 2008, Mr. Drut has asked Jasper Morrison, Erwan and Ronan Boroullec, Konstantin Grcic and now Pierre Charpin to furnish the interior of his n°50 apartment.

Bearing witness to a particularly visionary moment in design history, apartment N°50 sets a challenging background for any object placed within its walls and it is particularly difficult not to draw comparisons between the original Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé-designed furniture and its contemporary counterparts. At the same time, it is also difficult to view apartment N°50 as a regular residence, rather than a house-shaped monument. Aware of the building’s significance, Charpin said “For me, it was clear that I didn’t want to propose just an exhibition of my own objects in a famous apartment. I wanted to do some kind of arrangement with my own objects in a way that respected the lives of the owners. The challenge was to be present but not invasive.” Differently from his predecessor Konstantin Grcic, whose choice of punk-zine prints transformed the apartment in a sterile gallery, Charpin opted for a more subtle and homely touch. By mixing limited edition objects, such as his Série Écran vases with industrially produced furniture (Desa table lights, Via shelf, Chaise Empilabile chair, Stump side table), Charpin created a visually rich project – colorful, slightly lived-in and far more authentic – silently acknowledging the apartment’s past – though bold use of colour reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s facade and rich drawings –, and its present everyday use.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Philippe Savoir 
21/07/2014

Style Suggestions: Summer Whites

Nothing says summer like a white on white look and this season it is a trend that has gone from catwalk to the street. Whatever your trajectory, this is your blank canvas to run with.

T-shirt: Rag&Bone, Skirt: Christopher Kane, Sandals: Ancient Greek Sandals, Ring: Maison Martin Margiela

Styling by Vanessa Cocchiaro 

21/07/2014

Germany Divided — Baselitz And His Generation

Following the end of the Second World War, Germany undoubtedly developed into a hotbed of artistic talent. Mainly focussing on meaningful and monumental painting and sculpture, German artists reflected on thorny issues of social change raised throughout the then society. The cultural atmosphere of the period – or rather its Zeitgeist – politically and physically divided by the iron curtain is the starting point of the exhibition currently on view at the British Museum rightly entitled .

Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941), Blinky Palermo (1943-1977), AR Penck (b. 1939), Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) would all move from East to West Germany both before and after the borders were sealed in 1961. This would mark them as key players of an art grown breathing the collective guilt experienced by German people, while living the contrast between Capitalism of “free” West and Communism of the Soviet bloc – a collective cultural spirit which this exhibition aims to retrace.

90 works produced during the 60s and 70s by six artists, who still remain leaders of contemporary art scene, are exhibited here as evidence of the reaction of an artistic generation to the heaviness of its recent past. Without a common stylistic fil rouge, but united by an authentic spirit of sharing and exchange, along with a taste for large scale and a pronounced expressive fervor, each artist developed his own personal language. Half-composed by works on paper and canvas, the peculiar research made by Baselitz, central figure of this show, focuses on a vibrant, provocative, somehow brutal figuration characterized by strong and stylistically extraordinary gestural acts. The artist, who challenged the powerlessness of a certain kind of abstraction by inverting his paintings upside down, is particularly able in objectifying an artwork. His upside down works allowed him to go beyond the subjects and maintain his artistic approach in a period when more cerebral forms of art like abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism were imposing their rules.

Paraphrasing the curator and art historian Sir Norman Rosenthal “every great artist since the Renaissance who has lived a long time – from Titian to Poussin, from Goya and Turner to Cézanne and then Picasso and Munch – has had to find ways to deal with the need for constant reinvention. After a career of almost 50 years, Baselitz still has the capacity to shock and behave unexpectedly, as he succeeds in being both out of his time and profoundly of it.” 34 of the works on display coming from Count Duerckheim’s prestigious collection, have been generously donated to the British Museum. The exhibition runs through August 31st 2014.

Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy of the British Museum 
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