world art, new art, london art, paris art, siberia art, art on the net

Apartments in Paris

Click here to join our monthly mailing list. Just send a message with subscribe as the subject.

other articles
Radioactive spring: Sarah de Teliga revisits nature.

Tania Mouraud: Martin Luther King speeches, nails and brass rings, violins, accordions, and computer generated sounds: an ode to music.

Emily Harvey: a life in fluxus.

Swept off my feet: Keith Donovan in poetic frame on Jerome Borel's Paris inspired paintings.

America it seems, is holding vast quantities of Codeine, Tiger Balm, Tylenol, Preparation H, Chanel No. 5, and Vaseline.

Fear and painting in America: flagging multiculturalism.

Jeremy Stigter's Japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness.

Strange money: Peggy Preheim makes a buck.

The lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably ours: Caterina Verde in Eindhoven.

"This coming together between video, photography and paint involves the environment and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush" says Valentina Loi.

[Warhol Factory hand] Billy Name once said of Ray Johnson that he "wasn't a person, he was a collage, a sculpture."

Exacting images of people in the celebrated and banal act of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms.

On a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese in Rome, romantic minimalist Livia Signorini unfurls a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers.

Painting is either back, or, never left the building. A discussion around the state of art today.

Did Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology questions?

MADE IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS

"What I do is not really art, not really furniture," chairs from the throne to the unsitable.

Michael Mandiberg is selling everything. Everything is art, everything is for sale

"...Images of the Towers being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke." One illusion of Heaven against other illusions of Heaven. Fought to the death?"

A letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel reviewed.

Swiss artist thomas hirschorn, in association with the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Jean-Noel Laszlo: liberty is still controversial.

Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web enabled art show reviewed.

part 1 Art, Paris, porn and the web.

part 2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film.

part 3 asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction?

letter from paris : : matthew rose

letter from basel (by way of paris)
Art 32 Basel
13 June - 18 June, 2001
Jakobsen, H.P.
nasdaq forever. Courtesy of Galleri Nicolai Wallner.

Like an annual duck hunting season, the Europeans took to the boggy sites in Switzerland and Italy to shoot down and cook up some of the rare and common birds, most of them not particularly new birds, but tasty nonetheless. While the 49th annual Venice Biennale has and will be covered to an extreme, the gamier field for art remains in Basel, Switzerland, home of the fiscally sound art fair. New, young, hot artists are generally not molting around this pond, largely because, says an American friend and collector, Garret Siegel: "There's not yet enough meat on their bones."
The tome-like catalog, a colorful guide to what's for sale at the 32nd installment of the fair, and underwritten by, what else, a giant Swiss bank - UBS - features about 1000 artists scattered among 252 galleries from the world over. It serves as the serious document it is supposed to be, without being a sales catalog from Sotheby's or Christie's. The following is a run through of some of the highlights and double takes from Art 32 Basel from veteran Garret Siegel:
Basel was as always a lot of fun and too much to see. This year my daughter Cooper was not vomiting three times a day and it was not a kabillion degrees, so we actually had a more peaceful time. A tired pregnant lady (my wife, Alexandra) and two-year old, means we saw less than I would have liked but hey, dems de brakes. I walked around the fair while they slept late afternoons so saw more than they did. I'd say - and Allie agrees - that the quality was high, and my main criticism of the fair remains the same: the artists shown in Basel are those with proven fiscal appeal, and so the younger artists (with no sales records) are generally not on view. That said, Basel is still a kind of high-end standard of quality in the contemporary art market.
While I'm not a great fan of video art, one video by American Bill Viola entitled "Silent Mountain" at Anthony D'Offay (London) was particularly arresting. On two separate and large LCD screens, a male and female gesticulated as if they had just had an argument and were now going over the blows and the pain of it all in their heads. The more one watched, the more the little synchronicities of their gestures seemed to replay what was not seen, so that it became a sort of shadow replay. One could argue this Silent Mountain was a metaphor for the impossibility of love, moving from the schism of the sexes to the febrile connectivity of the digital age. In any case it was moving and the title just perfect.
D'Offay offered three other Viola videos on the stand, all sleekly displayed on high quality LCD screens. Only one of them qualified as bad, a piece about a man in such emotional pain that the whole thing seemed overdone and overacted to the point of being comical. Another featured a rather monkish woman in her room at different times of the day spread over four (or was it five?) screens.

Ketter, C. (1999). cold kitchenette. Image from www.artnet.com
Clay Ketter's work [1] was definitely interesting. He is represented by Sonnabend (NYC) but shown at Daniel Templon (Paris) and Jay Jopling/White Cube (London)--home of Brit sensations Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn as well. . Ketter's nice sparse geometries of different materials didn't have the brick-a-brack NYC approach of sticking any kind of surface or found object on a canvas of a bunch of years ago but something cooler and apposite. He's actually around my age - mid-30s - and qualifies as "young" here.
Caught quickly as I passed Wallner (Copenhagen) was a work on paper by Henryk Plenge Jakobsen called "Nasdaq Forever." A sort of flag I guess. Divided horizontally in three, the top field was yellow with Nasdaq written in green letters, and after descending rows of blue and white stripes, a blue field with "Forever" written in dark blue letters. Interesting I guess in how a year makes you read it differently. What once would have read with a sort of bravado had almost a sad resignation to it. [The editor notes that The Nasdaq has tanked more than 50% since March 2000]. No great work of creation but it grabbed me all the same.
[Editor also notes: Wallner also showed the dead pan drawings and c-prints of favorite Scottish artist David Shrigley, such as "River For Sale," and "Untitled pocket knife." River For Sale is a sign planted in a, you guessed it, river. The knife, is labeled as such with a cross of white paint to tell us it's Swiss, and anorexic black lines to show off the variety of its tools.]
At Art Unlimited, a space for larger works, you pretty much got the best and worst of installation art. Half of the video pieces lamely stuck to gore or sex. Maybe more than half. There was, however, a cool Paul McCarthy piece of a big metal squaw banging a drum. But the one that caught my attention was a very well produced installation by an artist named Barthelemy Toguo (who shows at Anne de Villepoix in Paris). The latter was a large room of outsized tables full of even larger carved wood stamps (one said "fiscal" stamp; another "immigration officer"). Each had been used I assume once, and one of the walls had framed prints from each stamp. At a right angle to this wall was framed documentation of the performance of making the prints. The floor was carpeted in banana cartons.
My favorite piece there was a pink sequined Buddha hung horizontally from the ceiling by a Korean artist named Sang-Kyoan Noh. The piece, called, "For the Worshippers" at the Galerie Hyundai (Seoul) was fun and well made.
American dealer Richard Feigen (NYC), who represents the estate of Ray Johnson, had several handfuls of his collages, and they were nice to see, particularly some late 50s and early 60s works. Feigen also showed a piece by Jeremy Blake, the artist discovery of last year's fair for me. He does these beautiful video paintings which slowly shift and change. They're hard to explain - kind of like perpetually evolving Rothkos.

Frize, B. Title unknown. Image from www.artnet.com
Alex & I bought three pieces. A painting by Bernard Frize (our second one), who we actually met on the plane to Mulhouse. We also bought yet another piece by the Irish artist Dorothy Cross; and lastly, a heat transfer by a young British artist named Darren Almond. Almond, I'm convinced, is a genius. We've been tracking his work for a couple of years, but the pieces we have wanted have always been sold early. For a 30-year old, his work has a developed both fluidly and logically while maintaining a perpetual sense of adventure to it.
notes
[1]. Further images by and text concerning Ketter's work are at:
http://www.konstig.se/titles/ketter.htm
http://www.artaround.dk/art/art-list.asp?AID=291
Art Basel takes place annually in the Messe Basel in Switzerland. More information, plus images from the catalog, can be found on their web site: www.ArtBasel.com . An addition venue of Art Basel will take place in Miami, Florida from 13 December to 16 December, 2001. For information: info@ArtBasel.com or + 41.61.686.2020.
Matthew Rose is a Paris-based artist and writer. His e-mail is: mistahrose@yahoo.com.

affiliates