25.1.10

statuut van Chinese Kunstgeschiedenis

Hal Foster citeert Miwon Kwon, a contemporary art critic and historian based in Los Angeles in verband met gedachten rond het woord 'hedendaagsheid' in de kunst :

For instance, what is the status of contemporary Chinese art history? What is the time frame for such a history? How closely should it be linked to Chinese art, cultural, or political history? How coordinated should it be with Western art history or aesthetic discourse? Is contemporary Chinese art history a subfield of contemporary art history? Or are they comparable categories, with the presumption that the unnamed territory of contemporary art history is Western/American?


http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/98

24.1.10

Chinese Whispers

NIKOLAUS GANSTERER was in december in de Vooruit met dit project!

Chinese Whispers: A portrait of a portrait producing economy
Chines Whispers is an art project focused on forms of imitations and appropriatons. A series of paintings produced in cooperation with several Chinese replica painters reflects a shifting practice of originality and authorship while an affiliated film documents the process of translating and copying cuktural commodities in aportrait producing economy.

Within the project we analyze specific forms of production and reproduction by looking at the oil-painting industries of Dafen Village (Shenzhen). We focus mainly on the errors in translation and reproductions. By researching these errors, we want to make an artistic statement about cultural practice, identity and authenticity.

Chinese whispers (also known as "Cadavre exquis") is the name of a children’s game. This game is about communication and its failures. A person whispers a word or sentence into the ear of the person next to them. This second person then whispers what he or she thinks the first person said into the ear of the next person, and so on. Each person changes the message a little. The original message is completely altered by the end of the whisper chain. This principle can be seen as ametaphor for for all kinds of communication systems.
“Chinese Whisper” is therefore a good method to create unpredictable innovation. We used this “Chinese Whisper Method” for our project with the painters of Dafen.

Geo-political context: The by now famous "Dafen painters village " is located in Shenzhen and therefore part of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ). The SEZ was originally established in 1979 due to its proximity to Hong Kong (by then a prosperous British colony). It was created to be an experimental ground of capitalism within "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Shenzhen: Shenzhen is now reputedly one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Being southern China's major financial center, it is home to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as well as the headquarters of numerous high-tech companies. Shenzhen also is also home to the second busiest port in mainland China, with Shanghai being the first. It eventually became one of the largest cities in the Pearl River Delta region, which has become one of the economic powerhouses of China as well as the largest manufacturing base in the world.

Dafen Village - The Copy Capital: Painters in Dafen produce exact replicas of historical and contemporary oil paintings. It has developed into an extremely profitable industry. Approximately five million paintings are produced annually at "the assembly-line" – usually copies of masterpieces. Many of the painters even specialize in specific styles (or masters). Major clients are western companies, such as hotels that want to impress with "classical" oil paintings but are unable (or unwilling) to afford originals. Good replicas fetch high prices and honors – in 2004, Dafen got the "Cultural Industry Model Base Award" from the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

Painting the painter: Our starting point is a portrait, taken from a scene in the movie Frida, in which the actress Selma Hayek plays Frida Kahlo painting a self-portrait. We asked a painter to reproduce this picture in oil colors. During the production, a photo was taken of the painter and his surroundings while painting the portrait. The photograph of this painter served as the start point for the next painter (with a different painting style). The motive of origin remains visible on the easel, but gradually recesses into the background as each successive painters make his or her modifications. Several oil portraits are produced using this procedure, documenting the work conditions and circumstances of these "assembly-line" painters.

Film: We also produced a video film based on this “painting-the-painter” project, which is a subjective portrait of Dafen and its inhabitants. This movie shows the bizarre scenary of an oil painting factory implemented in a suburban village based on interviews with various characters involved in the process, such as painters, frame makers and agents.

Set up: To provide multiple perspectives of this unique place we arrange the canvases together with a screen on which the film is shown.

Concept and idea: Nikolaus Gansterer and Matthias Meinharter
Year: 2007-2009
Thanks to bmukk for support

20.1.10

Over China: cultuur en copy

Over Roland Barthes, de filosoof-semioticus die bekend is oa om zijn boek "Empire du Sens" n.a.v. zijn reis naar Japan. Barthes ging ook naar (Mao's) China en daarover was hij niet zo enthousiast, zie oa. Scott McLemee:

"So when the chance came, he went to China—not as a true believer like his friends, perhaps, but certainly as a fellow traveler, in the strictest sense. And when the group came back, it took a while for the effects fully to register. The revolutionary engagement would give way in time, replaced by explorations of the sacred, the feminine, and the unconscious. (Not that these had ever been wholly absent: As Eric Hayot's fine study Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel [University of Michigan Press, 2004] reconstructs, a whole series of aesthetic and libidinal fascinations were at play in avant-garde versions of chinoiserie.)

It is worth remembering that Barthes was among the first to express disappointment in the trip to China, in a short essay published just after the group's return. He was polite about it, but it had bored him silly. He and his friends had gone to China to "shake the tree of knowledge," he wrote, "hoping the answer [would] fall to the ground and we [would] be able to return home bringing back with us our chief intellectual nourishment: a secret deciphered." No such luck. In People's China, the signifier was not in ecstatic excess of the signified, after all. "We leave behind us then the turbulence of symbols" and end up in "a vast land . . . where meaning is discrete to the point of being rare.

"As for the body," he wrote, it was obliterated by "the uniformity of the clothing, the prosaic gestures . . . the dense crowds." It was impossible to escape the "extraordinary impression—perhaps a heartrending one—that the body no longer has to be understood, that here it stubbornly resists signifying, refusing to allow itself to be caught up in any reading, erotic or dramatic (except on the stage)." And how many Maoist "model operas" did you really want to attend, anyway? It was an aesthete's hell."


'About Chinese copy':

The Chinese Internet: Why the “Copy Cats” Win

by Sarah Lacy on October 28, 2009
At first blush, it seems like Song Li is one of those stereotypical Chinese Web entrepreneurs. The kind who rips off successful US sites and hopes operating in the world’s largest consumer Internet market will magically create a successful company. After all, he made a good bit of money investing in ChinaHR—a job board site that sold to Monster.com for more than $200 million over two deals – and right now he operates Digu.com, a Twitter-clone, and Zhenai.com an online dating site that could be the Chinese Match.com.

But if you dig a little deeper into that dating site, you start to understand how differently Li thinks, and how that thinking reflects an aspect of Chinese consumer Web sites that Westerners frequently miss. Where Chinese Web entrepreneurs shine is in taking an existing business idea – ripping it off, if you like – but then completely rethinking and reinventing that idea’s business model and process. This not only makes the companies more profitable faster, it’s a big reason why home-grown Chinese versions continually beat US companies trying to expand into China.

To a Valley entrepreneur taking someone else’s idea, improving on it and taking all the credit may seem unfair or even unethical. But Google didn’t come up with the search engine and Facebook didn’t come up with a social network. What mattered was execution. Put another way: Sure the Chinese can learn a thing or two about original Web ideas from the Valley, but the Web 2.0 generation can learn a lot about monetization from China.

So what does a Chinese Match.com look like? In Li’s own words, it’s very “practical.” China has a long history of matchmaking so just going online, finding someone you like and messaging them isn’t going to appeal to a lot of the population. The ones who are comfortable with doing that will just use social networks. For those who aren’t, there are already an established off-line alternative in some 200,000 very local, fragmented companies that specialize in matchmaking, charging anywhere between 2,000 and 60,000 RMB per six months—depending on the service. Even in comparatively cheap China, they’ve got pretty high customer acquisition costs thanks to all that brick and mortar and heavy placement of classified ads to keep bringing in new singles.

That’s where the Web should come in, but it’s a bit trickier than that. Here’s the rub in China: The entire consumer Internet—along with “old world” industries like consumer packaged goods and entertainment—are all growing and developing at in parallel. In the US, you could argue social networks are the Web 2.0 answer to the Web 1.0 online dating sites. But how do you build a profitable online dating company in a world where a million MySpace and Facebook rip-offs already exist?

Li has struck an interesting middle ground: A Web site that’s free to join and free to search, with revenues provided by a 350-person strong call center of real-life matchmakers. Once you find someone on the site you like you place a call to a matchmaker to be set up on a date. Using the service costs 3,000 RMB (roughly $430 in dollars) for a six-month subscription—about the low-end of a traditional matchmaking service – and at least one person going on the date has to be a paid subscriber. The matchmaker determines whether both people want to go on the dates, or suggests an alternative date from amongst the site’s 22 million registered members (growing by 40,000 per day). The matchmaker then sets up the date, and then follows up afterwards.

The matchmaker isn’t your friend—she is doing a job. If you suggest someone out of your league, they might, ahem, guide your expectations. “We just want you to be realistic,” Li says. And in the event of a rejection, Li’s team asks a detailed questionnaire to determine exactly why one party didn’t want a second date. And then they call the other party to explain – in precise detail – where they went wrong. “At least you know why and there are certain things you can fix next time,” he says. It may sound brutal but it gives the service clear value. Zhenai.com is profitable, generating about $2 million in revenues per month, growing at double-digit rates month-over-month.

It may also sound like labor-powered, innovation-free China, but it’s not. Li has built a specific CRM system from scratch to walk matchmakers through the matching process and he’s hired a psychologist to help train them on what questions to ask, and what to say to the lovelorn. Li himself has a PHD in finance from Cornell, where he also studied evolutionary biology and molecular genetics.

And then there’s the statistics. Not even Max Levchin—the PayPal and Slide founder who has graphed everything down to his past girlfriends’ bra sizes over time— could match Li’s love for charts and stats. All those brutally honest conversations about why dates succeeded or failed have turned into a trove of statistical data that matchmakers turn into pre-date advice.

A random example? 60% of women with long, straight hair get second dates—even when the data is normalized for Chinese women being more likely to have long, straight hair. The worst group? Short curly hair, which has only a 5% second-date percentage. (Note to self: Good thing I’m married.) “We’re not telling them what to do, we’re just giving them information,” Li says matter-of-factly. Men also like black pantyhose and shiny color-less nail polish. (Li blushes a bit when he tells me about the pantyhose.)

Li has also found that men are universally attracted to women with a .7 hip-to-waist ratio—something he believes is genetically hard-coded as a reproductive trait. “I can’t do anything if a woman is fat, but I can tell her to dress so it shows off her waist,” he says dispassionately. It works both ways, by the way. Women prefer dates wear a suit and because women are predisposed to look for “good providers” Li says he can track for every extra 1,000 RMB you make a month, statistically what percentage more attractive you will be to an average woman. “It’s a math fact,” he says. “I can build you a model.”

It bears noting that Li is not some fratty chauvinist pig. He’s a brainy, bespectacled former derivatives trading executive on Wall Street and Hong Kong, and, yes, he is married. He just likes to break things down into numbers and trends in an obsessive attempt to quantify the seemingly qualitative behavioral patterns of it all. And that makes him the exact opposite of any US consumer site trying to blindly “localize” a site for the Chinese market by just changing the language.




Van Gogh From the Sweatshop







http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html

By Martin Paetsch in Shenzhen

Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.

A giant hand raises an impressive paintbrush into the sky at the entrance to the art village. The bronze sculpture outside the gates of Dafen in southern China leaves no visitor in doubt as to what the people do here. The "village" is in fact a modern suburb of Shenzhen, a city with 10 million inhabitants northeast of Hong Kong, and it has achieved unexpected fame and relative prosperity. But the city's ostentatiously advertized success has little to do with creativity: It's based on the reproduction of famous artworks on an industrial scale.

In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world's cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen's four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container.

Huang Jiang remembers the time when Dafen was really just a village. He came here as the first art-producing entrepreneur 17 years ago. He worked as an errand boy in Hong Kong before he started copying famous art works. Then he crossed the border into China, resolved to open up the first workshop in what was then still a no-man's land. Wages and rent were low, and the port of Hong Kong was close by. "When I arrived in 1989, there was nothing here besides dirt roads and bamboo," the now 60-year-old businessman remembers. "It was like Siberia for factory owners."

Huang has three identical, gold-colored busts of himself standing in his office. They remind him of better days -- the 1990s, when his business was at the peak of its development. Once he produced 50,000 paintings in a month and a half for Wal-Mart, the US retail giant. He earned as much as €200,000 a year ($256,000) -- a fortune in China. Today the roughly 40 painters he employs earn him only five-digit sums.

The smile displayed by Huang's golden likeness no longer graces his own face. He seems tired. The competition is getting to him. His former apprentices have opened up their own workshops all over the neighborhood. Huang's idea turned out to be as easy to copy as an oil painting. "During the first few years, I was the only one in the business," he complains. "Everything was easier then, but the competition has gotten tough now."

The McDonalds of the Art World

The others are selling more paintings at lower prices -- like Huang's former pupil Wu Ruiqiu. His business "Shenzhen Artlover" ships 300,000 paintings a year and is one of Dafen's model companies. The businessman is dreaming of industrial mass production, complete with assembly lines. The creation of every painting would be divided into standardized production stages. Ruiqiu wants to "get into the business of oil paintings the way McDonalds got into the business of fast food." By the end of the year, he wants to have set up an art school for training talented new painters -- even if mass production doesn't require all that much talent.



AP
Painters compete during a facsimile match in Dafen Village. More than 110 contestants make facsimile of portrait or scenery oil painting in the timed match.
The Chinese government is proud of Dafen: It considers the art village an "important cultural industry," Huang says. The most recent product of the artsy economic miracle stands on the opposite side of the main street -- the town is running out of space. It's a replica of Michelangelo's David, flanked by flowerpots in front of the new "Dafen Louvre." The walls of the staircase are decorated with ancient Egyptian motifs more reminiscent of a comic book than of the land of the Pharaohs, and stamped with Chinese signature stamps. The melange of styles doesn't seem to bother anyone. In the Dafen Louvre, entrepreneurship and bad taste go hand in hand.
But what lies inside the building that sports such a pompous name? A shopping mall for cheap art. Many of the tiny sales stands are still empty. Eventually the town's elite producers will exhibit their very own masterpieces here. Some 10 percent of the paintings produced in Dafen are the product of the painters's own creative imagination, according to official statements. But even the originals are less than original. Technical skill may not be lacking, but genuine art is hard to produce on command.

Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it's not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen -- graduates of China's most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).

Artwork as Piecework

But artistic quality is in short supply in the Zhi Wei Art Gallery, where a young saleswoman sorts through unframed paintings of bare-breasted women and heroically posed horsemen. "The motifs are based on customer suggestions," the saleswoman says. Dafen's painters will produce whatever customers want. A few brushstrokes are enough to transform Gustav Klimt's famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer into a likeness of the customer's sweetheart. Copies of famous masterpieces -- sometimes more, sometimes less competently executed -- are also very popular. A store right around the corner is selling a copy of "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci. The savior hasn't come out quite right, but the copied painting is still "a bargain, the cheapest in the whole village," as the gallerist points out.

The copied paintings on sale at the Wong Kong Oil Painting & Art Plaza are a little better. A reasonably skillful copy of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" sells for €40 ($51). Buy 100 and the price goes down to €26 ($33), the gallery workers points out. The 100 paintings, guaranteed to have been produced by art academy graduates, ship within three weeks. Customers with less exacting standards can receive their 100 paintings within just one week, for €6 ($8) each. But those paintings aren't produced by academy graduates, the salesman adds.

Wu Han Wu is one of the workers who make their living as piecework producers of fake art. The 29-year-old man left school after grammar school. He shares a cramped top-floor studio with six of his co-workers. They work and live there. Small children play between rolled up canvases. Finished paintings hang suspended from the low ceiling so they can dry. The piecework painters toil away in the dim light for 12 hours every day. They always work on two paintings simultaneously. The workshop is specialized on flowers and landscapes, Wu explains.

A few routine flicks of Wu's brush and a forest appears on the canvas. A small photograph he holds in his hand serves as his model. He's working on a copy of an idyllic French landscape painting, a lavender field in southern France. Wu can churn out between 20 and 30 copies in a day. When a large order arrives, he may have to paint the same motif 1,000 times. "We don't get a fixed wage," he says. "We're paid by the finished painting."

Wu receives the equivalent of €0.30 per copied painting. That means he earns between €100 ($128) and €300 ($385) a month -- barely enough to cover his living expenses and send a little money home. But he doesn't complain: "It's much better in a workshop like this one, without a schedule." Once the painters worked in a factory owned by the company, where they had fixed working hours.

The life Wu and his roommates live is not so different from that of the artists whose works they're copying, at least as far as their average day is concerned: They start painting around lunchtime and work until late at night. But unlike many of his colleagues, who have made a name for themselves in town as artists in their own right, Wu will never paint an original. If he were allowed to paint whatever he wants, he would soon run out of ideas, the young man admits.

Ordos100. architecture in China. curated by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & De Meuron



° ORDOS

http://www.ordos100.com/


°Moving Cities

http://movingcities.org/embedded/ordos100/phase3/


° ORDOS is standing empty


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h7V3Twb-Qk
China's economy is continuing to grow despite the global recession, helped by a massive government stimulus package of $585bn. But doubts remain whether such strong growth can be sustained by public spending alone.
Al Jazeera's Melissa Chan reports from Inner Mongolia, where a whole town built with government money is standing empty.



° ORDOS: avant-garde architecture in the desert

http://www.artforum.com.cn/angle/596

Bert de Muynck on ORDOS100: avant-garde architecture in the desert. (Artforum. Asiart Archive. 22.04.2008)
...
The word “unprecedented” is too frequently used to characterize China’s urban development, a blind and uncritical epithet for a country in the throes of change. But here in Ordos, the “ORDOS100” project seems to be challenging the notion that this word has lost all meaning.
A villa with 100 different rooms, a villa for a narcissist, a new Gourbi Palace, a villa without distinction between inside and outside, a villa with a green heart, a monolith, a villa of different boxes colliding together into one unstable form, a villa defined by the idea of holistic materiality, a villa without a claim on its territory, a villa dug into a dune, a green mountain rising out of the desert. These were a few of the proposals the 28 architects included in Phase 1 of the project.
...
Only once the model was fitted out with these first 28 villas did the scope and intensity of the project become clear: a titillating conflict of creativity, a clash of cultures, a collage city where anything, or almost anything, seems to be possible. Afterwards the architects talked about horror, conflict, and creativity, and started analyzing each other’s models and motives.
...
After visiting the heart of the new city, we drove to the site. While approaching the site a strange buzz went through the buses: architects always get excited by an empty plot of land they know they will need to domesticate. By now more roads were finished and trees planted. At the edge of the site, the bus stopped and the architects flew out, all running in different directions, touching the sand, taking pictures of dunes, all the while dreaming about the direction this desert could take. Some planted flags (or did someone put them there before?) explaining this act with the same intensity one had when conquering the moon. In the end this wandering came to seem like an act of desert dérive or sand situationism.

...

° een overzicht van de nieuwste architecturale projecten in China...

http://www.artforum.com.cn/angle/1394



° China According to China:
a set of thoughts by five local architects on China’s current situation and history.
http://www.0300tv.com/2009/06/china-according-to-china-english-subs/#more-1567

China According to China / English Subs 

06.19.09 / · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

Completely filmed before 2008’s Beijing Olympics and edited right after its ending, China According to China presents a set of thoughts by five local architects on China’s current situation.
This special isn’t an effort to portrait a certain scene [the profiles of each character are quite diverse] but to establish four issues that every Chinese architect has to deal with in today’s practice [opening-up, speed, agriculture & education] all of which may set the parameters of future development for Chinese architecture.


° FAKE DESIGN: a self tought architect

JINHUA ARCHITECTURE PARK

http://www.0300tv.com/2009/05/fake-design-jinhua-architecture-park/#more-1087

05.06.09 / · · · · · · · ·

jinhua-post1
Constructed Area 176.000 sqm
Completed 2006
Location Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, China
Published in Domus n°894


° HERZOG & DE MEURON / VITRAHAUS

http://www.0300tv.com/2009/05/herzog-de-meuron-vitrahaus/#more-1097


05.08.09 / · · · · · · ·

vitrahaus-post


Eerste solo van Ai Weiwei in Peking - 2009

Bekijk via deze link de kleine eerste (!) solo-tentoonstelling van Ai Weiwei in Beijing. In dit 2 min. filmpje spreekt hij ook even over zijn project in Munchen. Kort maar interessant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqIpeNSIYBQ

Dit ik ook een heel interessant filmpje over de samenwerking van architecten Herzog en De Meuron met Ai Weiwei. Ze leggen hierin een link met de vorm van Chinese potten/vazen. Goed filmpje.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FynuR_g-ewo

En dit is voor het plezier : Ai Weiwei masseert het hoofd van curator Haus der Kunst Kris Dercon!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3T-gf4psYs

18.1.10

AI WEIWEI IN MUNCHEN: THE REAL THING!





the clown



concept/ statement

Je zou het een conceptueel kunstwerk kunnen noemen, of een politiek statement. Vanuit zijn ziekenhuisbed in MĂĽnchen stuurt de Chinese kunstenaar Ai Weiwei dagelijks via Twitter foto’s van zijn in verband verpakte hoofd de wereld in.
Weiwei werd vorige maand in de Chinese provincie Sichuan door de Chinese politie in elkaar geslagen. Sindsdien klaagde hij over duizelingen en hoofdpijn. Afgelopen week, tijdens de voorbereidingen voor zijn tentoonstelling in het Haus der Kunst in MĂĽnchen, werden de klachten opeens heviger. Weiwei werd met spoed in het ziekenhuis opgenomen, waar hij direct geopereerd werd aan een bloeding tussen zijn hersenvlies en schedel. Sinds zijn operatie doet Weiwei dagelijks op Twitter verslag van zijn toestand.
(NRC. Gepubliceerd: 19 september 2009 10:45 | Gewijzigd: 21 september 2009 16:25. Door onze kunstredactie) 


enkele commentaren:

Ai Wei Wei, censorship, earthquake, protest, police brutality, surgery, the press, trust, not necessarily in that order

Ai Weiwei, censorship and sacred facts 

 

zoeken naar info... via google

Resultaten 1 - 10 van circa 2.290.000 voor ai wei wei 

Resultaten 1 - 10 van circa 5.630.000 voor andy warhol 

Resultaten 1 - 10 van circa 1.040.000 voor marcel duchamp 

Resultaten 1 - 10 van circa 130.000 voor luc tuymans 

Resultaten 1 - 10 van circa 70.300.000 voor barack obama





14.1.10

Avantgarde: twee klassiekers

Een 'echte' klassieker voor wie zich in theorie wil storten; ik zoek nog verder naar reflecties over hedendaagse interpretaties...


Theory of the Avant-Garde

Peter BĂĽrger

Translated by Michael Shaw
Introduction by Jochen Schulte-Sasse



$19.50 paper
ISBN: 0-8166-1068-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-1068-6



This volume sets before English-language readers for the first time a fully elaborated theory of the 'institution of art.' The author argues that it is the social status of art, its function and prestige in society, that provides the connection between the individual art work and history. BĂĽrger's concept of the institution of art establishes a framework within which a work of art is both produced and received.

"BĂĽrger provides us with an expansive and compelling explanation of an immensely complicated phenomenon. He offers American principals in the modernism debate a degree of theoretical and historical reflection uncommon even in this age of theory. It deserves a wide and thoughtful reading not merely among literary critics but by all concerned with the fate of art." —The Minnesota Review

Peter BĂĽrger is professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Bremen. He is the author of The Decline of Modernism and The Institutions of Art. Michael Shaw has translated the works of Max Horkheimer, Karl May, and Hans Robert Jauss. Jochen Schulte-Sasse is professor in the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota.

150 pages | 1984January 2001, 7 x 9, 628 pp., 137 illus.
ISBN-10:0-262-02454-3 ISBN-13:978-0-262-02454-9
Out Of Print
Other Editions : Paper (2003)
SeriesOctober Books

Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry
Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.

This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Realisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villegle) art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman).

One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchloh's method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject.

About the Author

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University.

Reviews
"This is a terrific collection of essays...."
—Blake Stimson, CAA.reviews



Awards
Named one of The Art Book's Best Books of the Decade (March 2003).

gego versus Ai



























































Ai Weiwei versus

Gertrudis Goldschmidt (Gego), Hamburg, Germany, 1912. Lived in Venezuela 1939-1994.
Sphere, 1976
97 x 88 cm
Stainless steel wire

Until Gego, sculpture in Venezuela had the purpose of creating volumes through the usage of surfaces or solid masses that demarcated space and affirmed its solidity. Gego, in turn, resorts to the less perceptible of all of men's inventions, the wire, to create forms and spaces. This is what we see in this approximation to the sphere, built with multiple geometric forms that, in the most subtle manner, not only define and enrich space but fill it with the most transparent structures.


GEGO was ook bezig met architectuur. Zij zocht naar lichte, beweeglijke structuren. Dit resulteert in beweeglijke, dynamische netwerken. Ai Weiwei gebruikt bestaande gebruiksvoorwerpen om ook een ruimtelijke netwerkstructuur op te bouwen. In zijn werken "installation Piece for the venice biennale" 2008 en "Through" 2007-2008 speelt hij ook met orde/chaos in de ruimte telkens gebruik makend van stoelen, tafels, balken uit tempels van de Qing dynasty. Ook het vogelnest speelt met die begrippen orde/chaos op architecturaal en ruimtelijk niveau.

Wat betekende ruimtelijke structuur ala Gego in '76 in Venezuala tegenover de orde/chaos van Ai Weiwei in 2003?

Catalogue raisonné (aan te vullen).

works

2010  


2009



2008



2007



*Divina Proportion
Huanghuali wood

2006

2005
*The Wave


2004

*Newspaper Reader
Fiberglass, clothes and newspaper, Life-size

2003

*”Forever” Bicycles

“Forever” Bicycles comprises parts of 42 bicycles of the “Forever” brand, a classic reconfiguration of utilitarian articles bordering on abstraction. The interplay of these dramatic circles and lines change constanly from different perspectives.

*Map Of China
Tieli wood, height 120cm

The borders of the People’s Republic of China are given an extra dimension in this three-dimensional walnut wood rendering – an imagined geological construct that echoes the manufactured political boundaries of regular two-dimensional mapping.

*Feet
Installation of fragments of stone sculpture from Northern Qi period (550 BC - 77 AD)

A reverse take on the looting and vandalism inflicted on Buddhist sculptures, most prized for their exquisite heads, this work comprises the oft-overlooked feet and pedestals of ten sculptures. Collectively, these exquisitely sculpted fragments form an ecclectic and intriguing gathering of double displacement. Not only are the feet haunted by loss of identity separate from body and head, but pedestals are also robbed of their ritual bearing function.

*Crossed Beds
Tieli wood

The wood from which this sculpture is made was taken from a destroyed temple. The scale and symmetry of the beds intimates some unspecified ritual or symbolic function.

*Painted Vases

2002

*Chandelier
Chrystal and scaffolding, height 6 metres

Conjoined like a pearl in an oyster is the first hint of the building’s existence: steel scaffolds and a chrystal chandelier. Dislocated and amplified to spectacular effect, the glittering pieces of this custom-made, five metre tall chandelier becomes a looming, enveloping fantasy.

*Table and Beam
Table and Pillar

These Qing Dynasty tables were taken apart and reconstructed to accomodate the beam and pillar. These enigmatic, powerful intersections appear to arise out of the energy and dynamics of matter and motion.

2001

2000

*In Between

Built into the framework of a residential complex between the nineteenth and 20th floors, In Between is a literal symbiosis between art and architecture. Identical in material and color to the concrete floor from which it emerges, the house-shaped sculpture is tilted at an angle , playfully raising the question of alternative axes and spaces in which contemporary life takes place.

*Concrete
Height 12 metres

This sculpture consists of a C-shaped concrete structure set upon an ascending platform. A rigidly linear stream leads up to the mouth of the sculpture, and the sound of running water is audible from inside the sculpture.

*Coal Hives
Bronze, steel and gold
Diameter 19 cm

A common but dwindling source of fuel in northern China, these hive-shaped coal cylinders are emblems of traditional energy in yet-unmodernized homes and communities. Cast in bronze and set out in large-scaledisplay, the ubiquitous, mundane objects become a lustrous study in circular form.

1997-2000

*Furniture series
Furniture, Qing dynasty (1644-1911)

The Furniture series chalenges the predetermined class and ritual functions of Ming and Qing Dynasty furniture. The style, proportion, and type of wood of classical Chinese furniture are long established factors that, put together, naturally imply the entire context within which the furniture existed, including the owner’s social status, the piece’s function (often strictly ritual or ornamental), and how it might be situated in relation to other furniture. Such furniture was ingeniously constructed without use of a single nail and could be taken part piece by piece, emphasizing harmony with the elements down to the tiniest of details.
Despite the alteration of the original furniture, the fundamental laws of construction are actually adhered to and employed in creating the new work of art by Ai Weiwei. Each piece is taken apart and the new piece constructed using the same technical principles of joining.

Stool, Table with Two Legs on the Wall, Slanted Table, Cornered Table (1997)
Table with Three Legs, Tables at Right Angles, Crossed tables, (1998)

1993-2000

*Whitewash
Clay urns dating from the late Stone age (10,000-4000 BC) and industrial paint

Dating from 4000 years ago, the clay vessels used in Whitewash represent the evolution of early design and function. The designs painted on them are among the first known instances of art. The artist has painted a selected number of vessels white, obscuring their artistic and historical symbolism and transforming them into abstract ciphers.

*Still Life
Installation of stone tools dating from late Stone Age to Shang Dynasty (10,000 BC – 11 AD)

Still Life is composed of 3600 stone tools including axes, chisels, and spools datingfrom neolitic times which were collected over ten years and individually catalogued. The primitive, almost abstract objects embody both the crudeness and functionality of civilisation’s earliest instruments. Placed together in large-scale display, these elemental shapes symbolize the elementary lifestyles and already burgeoning power of early men.

1997

*72 Standard
72 black-and-white photographs

This work comprises 72 photographs of a moon eclipse which occurred during the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Chinese festival where the moon is traditionally full. This ironically timely confluence of science and superstition is documented through these 72 photographs taken every 5 minutes through the eclipse cycle.

1996

*Blue-and-White
Replica in Qing style, Qianlong period (1736-1795)
Various dimensions

As with all artifacts, imitations of these prized blue-and-white porcelain vessels abounded. Perfectly constructed they could only be exposed by carbon-dating. It is these assumptions of authenticity and value – aesthetic, cultural, and monetary – that the Blue-and-White works play upon.

*Breaking of Two Blue-and-White “Dragon” Bowls
Blue-and-White dragon bowls, Qing Dynasty, Kangxi perios (1662 – 1722), diameter 19 cm

This pair of bowls litteraly goes “under the hammer.” In this classic iconclastic gesture, Ai Weiwei confers a new status on these bowls; their shattered fragments take on a very different artistic import as the subject of these photographs.

1995-2003

*Study of Perspective (Reichstag, Viking Line, Eiffet Tower, White House, Tiananmen Square
Series of photographs

The Tiananmen Square, the Eiffel Tower and the White House are among the familiar attractions serving as symbolic backdrops for the Study of Perspective series. They document the artist performing his gesture against various political and cultural landmarks.

1995

*Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
Series of three black-and-white photographs

The artist makes a rare personal appearance to shatter a genuine Han artifact. In this photographic documentation of events occuring in less then a second, a vase two thousand years old is simultaniously smashed and acquires new artistic significance.

1994

*Tang Dynasty Courtesan in Bottle
Clay sculpture dating from Tang dynasty (618-907) and glass bottle

Within this traditional repository of peripahetic desire and fantasy materializes an elegantly poised stone courtesan over one thousand years old. This work humorously combines symbols of two of man’s chief intoxications while playing off the opposites of unique artifact and disposable object, painstaking craftwork and mass production, antiquity and modernity.

*Seven Frames
Black-and-white photographs

The ramrod-straight stance of a uniformed sentry in Tiananmen Square is displaced into seven continuous frames, breaking up his visage of authority into a linear progression of temporal images.

*June 1994
Black-and-white photograph

This surreal scene on a summer’s day in Tiananmen Square ranks in the annals of contemporary Chinese modernity – the young woman matter-of-factly hoisting her skirt, the unseen expression on the driving spectator’s face, and Mao’s benevolent visage bestowing the new generation with indeterminate blessings.


*Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo
Urn and paint, Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-8AD)

This branded Han Dynasty vessel is one of the earliest works employing antiques. Artefact and modern marketing propaganda meet in a single utilitarian form, a tongue-in-cheek comment on temporal and aesthetic dislocation.

1989

*Fur


1987

*One Man Shoe

1986

*Safe Sex
Textile and Holzbox

1985

*Vilion

*Hanging Man



Bronnen:

“Ai Weiwei – Works: Beijing 1993-2003”, Timezone 8 Ltd, China 2003
ArtZineChina.com