Censuur grap

(link is niet meer on line / website is vernieuwd)

http://www.paolochiasera.org/paolochiasera/Vuoto_files/Forget%20the%20Heroes%20.pdf

Gwenael Belanger

oefening

Exchange radical moments

http://www.fabrikanten.at/ http://exchangeradicalmoments.wordpress.com/
	Exchange radical moments! Call for proposals Deadline: 30 September 2010 Die Fabrikanten Promenade 15 4020 Linz, Austria +43 732 795684-0 moments@fabrikanten.at www.fabrikanten.at exchangeradicalmoments.wordpress.com

GROYS'TEKST

link naar artikel van Boris Groys over zwakke en sterke beelden (avant-garde)

The Weak Universalism
In these times, we know that everything can be an artwork. Or rather, everything can be turned into an artwork by an artist. There is no chance of a spectator distinguishing between an artwork and a “simple thing” on the basis of the spectator’s visual experience alone. The spectator must first know a particular object to be used by an artist in the context of his or her artistic practice in order to identify it as an artwork or as a part of an artwork.
But who is this artist, and how can he or she be distinguished from a non-artist—if such a distinction is even possible? To me, this seems a far more interesting question than that of how we can differentiate between an artwork and a “simple thing.”
...

Opmerkingen:

- Context, duiding, comment nodig bij het maken van fases/beelden?
- Plaatsing van beelden?
- Ordening door de hoek van het kijken.
- liggen - staan
- evenwicht - taoisme (evenwicht beeldend extern, evenwicht beeldend intern)

bart de wever spreekt chinees

http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.795948

horizontale nuchterheid ?

Questioning Ai Weiwei's sculpture

Een opstapeling van stoelen (metalen houten schoolmateriaal/vintage/modernistisch)
Erachter het witte vlak van de muur.
dixit: "Een sculptuur mag esthetisch zijn'.
Een bewegingssequens van stoelen met matig aanwezig centrum. Horizontale metalen buis.
Een minder utopische translation van Ai Weiwei's aarde en hemel verbindende vluchtlijnen.
"Om uit te nodigen tot interactie: bladen met tekst kunnen worden opgehangen"
Een interactieve format?
De sculptuur van positie veranderen: evenwichten doorbreken. Het kader van de ruimte doorbreekt het 'esthetische' kader.
Plat en neerwaarts. De sculptuur zoekt een ander evenwicht.
Posities expliciteren, Daoisme versus bouddhisme en de integratie van denkbeelden. Een sculptuur als een kaligrafie? Gesprek over de mogelijkheid van de metafoor. En de beperking. Iets belichten, de rest verdonkeren. Onderzoek laat altijd randvoorwaarden zien. Noodzakelijkheden en trivialiteiten en hoe het één in het ander uitmonden.
En uiteindelijk : politics. Elk kunstwerk is een politiek statement?
Verschillende posities laten zien, documenteren en afwijken van de regels van documenteren. Document als fictie? Anderen laten zien maar net niet alles zodat ze moeten verder zoeken. Hoe doen we dat morgen?
Op naar de Wereld van Shan...

reflectiemoment

we kunnen (nog) geen uitspraken doen

laat


vallen

iconoclasme

Art Power

Boris Groys

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11408



sterke beelden
(leegmaken)

er is geen ruimte voor het bouwen

joel verwimp:

COYOTL project with nicolas Galeazzi
The room of parrots / Raphael

GRIDIRON hotels papageienzimmer (room of parrots) is a deliver mechanism that uses a relatively simple device - a room - in order to instigate a much wider series of responses and relationships. Using Raphael’s salle as a departure point, Papageienzimmer re-examines the strategy of using an art work as a device to reflect the human condition. Amongst the key concerns of this endeavour lie issues of enticement, migration, public and private space, thresholds, planning, trade and globalisation. The GRIDIRON uses space as a medium to explore strategies of performative narratives. Based on fictional and found histories, we construct a factional account that addresses different forms of organising strategies and our construction of hospitality.

twitter. the key to democracy?

In a global exclusive, artist Ai Weiwei explains the role of social media and its effect on the Chinese government.

http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2010/03/17/twitter.amanpour.cnn

BP koopt zoekopdrachten op

Oliebedrijf BP koopt massaal zoektermen die op zoekmachines als Google en Bing verwijzen naar de olieramp om zijn gedeukte imago op te krikken. Intussen zouden er opnieuw boringen worden toegelaten in de Golf van Mexico.

Wie in de VS 'oil spil' intikt, krijgt een resem 'gesponsorde links' die doorverwijzen naar de nieuwssite van BP met commentaar op de ramp in de Golf van Mexico.

http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikels/2010/06/10/bp-koopt-zoekopdrachten-op

Ai Weiwei - Fairytale Project for Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007

http://cuids.org/images/uploads/ai_weiwei_documenta-2.pdf

Ai Weiwei – Fairytale Project for Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007

Once upon a time, a big book was lying among piles of others on the large wooden table of internationally acclaimed polymath artist, curator, writer, publisher and architect Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing), one of the most complex and influential personalities in the development of Chinese contemporary art for over twenty years. It was a book about space. Ai Weiwei cheerfully showed his guests a quotation by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the pioneering Russian space theorist, printed on one of the first pages:
First inevitably comes the idea, the fantasy, the fairy tale. Then scientific calculation. Ultimately, fulfillment crowns the dream.
These words condensed the whole process, conceived as an artwork itself, of the large- scale, multi-faceted project about “possibility and imagination” that Ai Weiwei will present this summer at Documenta 12. In reply to the three leitmotifs of the exhibition - “Is modernity our antiquity?”, “What is bare life?” and “What is to be done?”, Ai Weiwei will bring to Kassel, native town of the famed, fable writing Grim Brothers, an extremely extensive, variegated and inestimably valuable documentation of this moment in history, a concrete yet poetic evidence of the historical, socio-cultural, human landscape of today’s China. The project requires enormous financial, organizational, technical and human resources. With a 3.1 million Euro budget—sponsored by the Leister Foundation, Switzerland, the Erlenmeyer Foundation, Switzerland and Galerie Urs Meile Beijing- Lucerne—Ai Weiwei has merged his dream with reality, creating his Fairytale.
In terms of size and concept, Fairytale is the biggest and the most multilayered work ever developed by Ai Weiwei, and one of the most ambitious projects ever presented in the history of Documenta. Consisting of three installations, a part of the project will also include living individuals: Fairytale – 1001 Chinese Visitors is a living installation involving 1001 Chinese citizens who will visit the small town of Kassel (population 194,796) in a trip fully designed by Ai Weiwei and organized by the more than 30 people currently working in the FAKE team, the temporary travel agency that the artist set up for the occasion.
The 1001 Chinese travelers will be in this Documenta as tourists, viewers and as part of the artwork. The travelers will be divided into 5 groups, each group traveling in succession between June 12 and July 9, 2007, and were selected from the more than 3,000 people who enthusiastically reacted to the travel offer application published by Ai Weiwei on his personal blog (also a part of the project) over a three day period. Thanks to the support of the sponsors, as well as the Directors of Documenta, Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the German Ambassador to China, Volker Stanzel, Ai Weiwei was able to initiate an enormous process with several different aspects, including: the planning of the tourist and educational activities, the location of suitable infrastructures, the creation of proper living and sanitary conditions, the design of a specially created travel-set (luggage, clothes, computer related technology, etc.) and utensils and furniture, the recruiting of personnel (cooks, video makers, photographers, etc.), the processing of visa applications, the purchase of flight tickets, and travel insurance. Ai Weiwei’s travelers, whose ages range from 2 to 70, come from dissimilar social classes and have dissimilar occupations and lifestyles: among them, for example, are policemen, teachers, students, artists and designers, but also
farmers coming from a remote minority village in Guanxi Province, where women, not having a fixed name or identity card, were out of the public register before starting the bureaucratic procedures connected with Fairytale. Ai Weiwei comments: “This process made people really realize what it means to be a man or woman as an identity and with a Nation: you have to go through the system, and the system can be simple or more complicated”.
One of the topics stressed in Fairytale is the person as a single individual (as opposed to a mass or collective), with his or her own unique story, background, ways of thinking and fantasies. For this reason each participant was asked to fill out a form with 99 questions and is filmed during the preparatory stage, during the trip and after returning to China by Ai Weiwei’s professional documentary team. If Ai Weiwei decided to offer a journey to a place about which many applicants never even heard before, to which many would have never traveled by their own accord or because of financial restrictions, it is because, as he says, “this becomes a very foreign experience in anyone’s personal life,” an experience that will help each participant to think differently. The logo designed for the project strictly follows this logic: graphically links the number to the “F” in “Fairytale,” and at the same time conceptually emphasizes “1,” and not “1001”: “That means,” Ai Weiwei states, “that in this project 1001 is not represented by one project, but by 1001 projects, as each individual will have his or her own independent experience.”
Besides Fairytale – 1001 Chinese Visitors, the second large-scale installation by Ai Weiwei for Documenta 12 is Template, a work that will be exhibited in the courtyard of the greenhouse designed by Lacaton and Vassel also known as the “Crystal Palace,” a temporary building erected ad hoc for Documenta 12. The architecture of Template is comprised of late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden windows and doors which formerly used to belong to destroyed houses in the Shanxi area, Northern China, where entire old towns have been pulled down. Ai Weiwei bought the last fragments of that civilization and relocated them in a completely contemporary setting: “It really is a mixed, troubled, questioning context,” explains the artist, “and a protest for its own identity.” Once counted, the pieces of which Template is made up surprisingly turned out to be exactly tantamount to 1001, a coincidence that Ai Weiwei finds significant. The wooden architectural elements of Template are joined together in five layers per side, forming an open vertical structure having an eight-pointed base. In spite of its large size (7.2 x 12 x 8.5 m), from afar the installation conveys the illusion of being something foldable, like a gigantic three-dimensional papercut. Where the external framework is massive and regular, the internal part of each wall made out of windows and doors is shaped according to the volume of a hypothetical Chinese traditional temple, giving the impression that the whole wooden construction was assembled around a building that later has been removed. While standing in the middle of Template, the viewer is surrounded by a space that is fictional, abstract and ethereal. Ai Weiwei explains: “To me the temple itself—you know I’m not religious—means a station where you can think about the past and the future, it’s a void space. The selected area—not the material temple itself—tells you that the real physical temple is not there, but constructed through the leftovers of the past.”
In Ai Weiwei’s eyes, “events like Documenta or Fairytale are like temples.” This idea serves as the point of departure for Fairytale – 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs, the third installation of Ai Weiwei’s Documenta project. The work is comprised of 1001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden chairs that will be spread in groups around the different exhibition venues. Islands for discussion and communication, the groups of chairs were also conceived as “stations for reflection” not only for Ai Weiwei’s 1001 Chinese tourists,
but also for the citizens of Kassel and all the visitors coming from all over the world in order to visit Documenta.
Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale will stage a massive encounter between totally different cultures, each confronting the Other and the unknown, in a context that is both familiar and strange. If Ai Weiwei will introduce the Chinese to the exotic, fabled land of Kassel, he will also bring the feared Asian dragons into the context of a small European town. “Kassel is a place where people gather, live and disappear on their own paths once the visit is over,” states Ai Weiwei, “I think that past and future, these two realities, which are both internal and external to each person, are all integrated in very different forms and possibilities that make each individual unique, with his or her own life, landscape, possibilities... To me it’s just reality. It can be sad, it can be magical, it can be wonderful, it’s a way for me to approach reality and to try and grab as much as possible. The whole West-East imagination or fear will be under the moon, across the street: they will meet. There is such a hype around China. Well, it is about 1/5 of the whole world’s population. There are a lot of fantasies and concerns about this country. I think that now it’s time that all these fantasies about life and art can meet.”
By Nataline Colonnello
All the quotations by Ai Weiwei are excerpts of an interview with the artist held in his Beijing studio on April 3, 2007.

digital activism as a strategy for fostering positive social change

Watch online as Ai Weiwei, a leading Chinese artist and pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China, has a thought-provoking conversation with Jack Dorsey, creator and cofounder of Twitter, and Richard MacManus, founder of ReadWriteWeb, the internationally respected technology blog. They will discuss the relevance of social media technology in our global society, and the emergence of digital activism as a strategy for fostering positive social change

http://www.livestream.com/readwriteweb

visuele documentatie

On the Chineseness of contemporary Chinese art

On the ‘Chineseness’ of Chinese Contemporary Art

by Paul Gladston 2006
Paul Gladston – The University of Nottingham Ningbo, China


In recent months two significant exhibitions have been mounted which seek to address the continuing question of the ‘Chineseness’ of contemporary Chinese art: The Wall: Reshaping Chinese Art at Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts and Entry Gate at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Although the curators of these exhibitions – Gao Minglu and Victoria Lu respectively - openly acknowledge the hybridity of contemporary Chinese art, they also argue that it has been continually misinterpreted by critics who frame its meanings solely from a Western theoretical/conceptual perspective. Indeed, each has asserted in essays published in the catalogues to their exhibitions that there is a pressing need to reassess contemporary Chinese art not only through the application of specifically Chinese philosophical/conceptual paradigms, but also through a more precise understanding of the relationship between the ways in which that art has been both produced and received and the historical development of Chinese culture and society.

According to Gao Minglu, the lead curator of The Wall, Western theory mistakenly upholds two interrelated conceptual models as the sole basis for its readings of contemporary Chinese art. The first is the binary ordering of thought characteristic of the Western rationalist tradition where an understanding of the world is articulated according to opposing, non-identical, asymmetrically valued terms. As numerous commentators have indicated, within the ambit of this conceptual order there is a persistent tendency to think of contemporary Chinese art not only as belated, but also as redundant of the earlier Western ‘historical’ and ‘neo’ avant-gardes. The second is the more recent, but now pervasively influential, theory and practice of deconstruction which, it can be argued, has severely problematized the categorical truth claims advanced under the aegis of Western binary rationalism. As advocates of deconstruction would have it, any notion of the straightforward historical primacy of Western avant-garde art can be understood to have been suspended by the evident supplementarity of contemporary Chinese art, whose hybrid status as an extension of, and addition to the Western avant-garde destabilizes any straightforward categorical opposition between the two; a condition often referred to, with reference to Homi Bhaba’s notion of ‘third-space’.

In Gao’s opinion both of these conceptual models are inimical to a thoroughgoing understanding of contemporary Chinese art: the first on the grounds that a categorical ordering of opposing concepts does not coincide precisely with discourse in the Chinese philosophical/cultural tradition, which has (somewhat paradoxically from a Western rationalist perspective) conventionally sought to emphasize mutuality and reciprocity (Yin Yang) and unity (Yi Ti; He Yi; He, Tai He) as persistent foils to difference; and the second because, as Gao would have, of an ahistoricism inherent to the theory and practice of deconstruction that effaces any precise consideration of contemporary Chinese art’s relationship to traditional Chinese society and culture by focusing persistently instead on the present spatio-temporal indeterminacy of its standing vis-à-vis that of the West (a move which can be interpreted, as Rasheed Araeen has indicated, as a perpetuation of Western Orientalism).

In short, Gao makes the point that, despite the counter-foundationalism of the theory and practice of deconstruction, there has been a continuing and paradoxically limiting tendency to assume the universal applicability of Western theory to a reading of Chinese cultural and social contexts which, it can be argued, have developed in relation to their own, distinct conceptual traditions.

What Gao then goes on to advocate is the necessity of an enquiry that does not see contemporary Chinese art simply in terms of its relationship to the artistic discourses of the West, but also (and - as Gao seems to imply - more importantly) in respect of its continuing interaction with a specifically Chinese historical socio-cultural milieu.

Although this intended shift of focus has been presented as a significant development in the debate surrounding contemporary Chinese art, it is in many ways a predictable one. More sober commentators, skeptical of the wilder dealings of contemporary Western theory, would almost certainly look to Gao’s intervention as one that seeks to make the now seemingly common sense point that in approaching a given object of historical analysis there is a continuing need for sensitivity to the specific contexts within which it is both produced and received and to the actual outcomes/effects of its production and reception in relation to those contexts. Indeed, more rigorous exponents of poststructuralist theory and practice would themselves - despite their adherence to the serial incompleteness of signification – almost certainly uphold such a view insofar as they would regard it as impossible to detach a text from its interaction with a wider socio-cultural milieu without re-entering into an unduly and arbitrarily limiting neo-formalism.

That said – Gao’s positioning in relation to this question is a potentially problematic one. Although the notion that the application of a Western conceptual (dis)order to works of art that have been produced within (or in relation to) a Chinese socio-cultural milieu with its own discernible intellectual tradition is open to criticism broadly in the terms set out by Gao, it is nevertheless possible to advance a number of qualifications which complicate his argument.

First, it is not entirely clear that a Chinese intellectual/cultural tradition can be disentangled cleanly from its Western counterpart. While there are areas of substantial and problematic difference it is nevertheless possible to discern numerous areas of similarity and congruence. Indeed, the fact of their comparability as ‘traditions of thought’ is by itself an indication of an inescapable degree of resonance. Moreover, it would be wrong to assume that both have proceeded historically in total isolation one from the other. Western philosophy has had a long-standing fascination with a Chinese ‘other’ which it has attempted both to marginalize (Goethe, Russell) and assimilate (Leibniz). Conversely, the tradition of Chinese thought has been marked by reciprocal strivings to come to terms, amongst other things, with the instrumental force of Western scientific rationalism (viz. the May 4th movement and Mao Zedong’s upholding of dialectical materialism). Further to which, while it would almost certainly be wrong to map one straightforwardly and simplistically upon the other, there are arguably undeniable similarities between the seemingly paradoxical modes of thought characteristic of the Chinese intellectual tradition and the counter-rationalism of deconstruction. Here, rather than simply being inimical to one another, the trajectory Chinese and Western intellectual traditions can be understood to have found in recent years a certain degree of common ground.

Second, it could be argued that Gao significantly underplays the potential of deconstructive theory and practice to attend to the ‘historical’ structuration of conceptuality. Here, it might be averred that rather than simply being a ready means of destabilizing any rational spatio-temporal ordering of the ‘present’ relationship between the Western avant-garde and contemporary Chinese art, deconstruction also offers the possibility of a close attention to the extended circumstances surrounding an interaction between Western and Chinese artistic/aesthetic traditions. Put another way, while the theory and practice of deconstruction can be understood to severely undermine conventional notions of historical accretion and continuity, they are not, as Gao and others would appear to assume, straightforwardly antipathetic to ‘historical’ interpretation. Indeed, the most cursory inspection of the writings of Jacques Derrida reveals that the conceptualization of deconstruction is indivisible from a close and extended scrutiny of the historical narration of thought.

Third, contemporary Chinese art is, by dint of its ‘historical’ positioning, inescapably enmeshed – regardless of any genealogy of cultural hybridity which could and can be drawn up to undermine the primacy of Western art – with the prior example set by the Western historical and neo avant-gardes. Consequently, despite the undeniable, and indeed necessary, openness of that art to reception from a position immersed in Chinese socio-cultural discourse, it is arguably always already, itself a hybrid that, as such, invites attention both from the standpoint of the Western and Chinese social and cultural traditions; and indeed from an undecideable, deconstructive ‘conceptuality’ that plays across the boundary between the two.

Fourth, there is a danger in relation to Gao’s positioning – more sharply drawn by writings published in the catalogue to the recent Entry Gate exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai – of the invocation of some sort of alignment between the presentation of contemporary Chinese art and reassertions of a belief in the distinctiveness of a Chinese national cultural identity. Seen from a Western standpoint - with its now ingrained distrust of ontological certainty – an alignment of this sort runs the risk of an unjustifiable appeal to some form of cultural essentialism.

Gao Minglu’s position while a telling and timely critique of the de-territorializing tendencies of the trans-national scholarly and curatorial presentation of Chinese contemporary art, is therefore open to criticism on the grounds that it implies an inversion of the polarities of Occidental-Oriental cultural reception in a manner that does not seem, in its present form at least, to pay sufficient attention to the complex and potentially un-resolvable discursive interaction between the two played out in relation to the corpus of contemporary Chinese art.
What remains, perhaps, is then another archeology; one that countenances from the outset the validity and necessity of the reception of contemporary Chinese art from the locus of an engagement with the history of Chinese culture and society, but which does not overlook by turns a detailed comparative study of that reception in relation to the analysis of Chinese contemporary art from a Western cultural and intellectual standpoint; a bifurcation of view points arguably prefigured and embodied by the hybrid standing of contemporary Chinese art. More grim workers in this field will surely follow.

china conduct in Gent!

Zie dringend:
http://chinaconduct.com/contemporarychin.html
Wat is er toch allemaal onder de zon!

eetbare sculpturen - belgische chocolade

Dit is een zeer interessant filmpje over Belgische chocolade die de Chinese markt verovert...


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8486259.stm