The Art of Building

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

27 June 2012

Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge


Rose like an Exhalation………

…………Not Babylon,

Nor great Alcairo such magnificence

Equall’d in all their glories………

The hasty multitude

Admiring enter’d, and the work some praise

And some the Architect……..

John Milton (1608-1674). Paradise Lost. Book 1,

Line 710 et seq.

As usual for the past 22 years, we took the tram from the Barfüsserplatz in central Basel to the top of Clarastrasse in Kleinbasel, the street that normally segues effortlessly into the Messeplatz (Exhibition Square).

Ye Gods!

Where were we?

Where the open square used to be stood a giant new building resting on huge concrete piles and festooned with metal ribbons. On either side of this leviathan, in two immense holes, the bowels of the earth were being gouged out by countless mechanical diggers. Workers in bright yellow hard-hats scurried about over the reddish soil like so many industrious ants. Huge caterpillered vehicles with claw-tipped booms were clawing up giant mounds of earth. Below were light-grey Tatlin-like derricks, above towered sky-high yellow cranes swinging ominously back and forth over the heads of the earthlings beneath. Everywhere bulldozers, supply trucks, earth-movers, blue-and-white cement-mixers, mechanical shovels, lorries laden with slabs of concrete and wooden shuttering, all racing back and forth about their business.

This was not the Messeplatz that we knew and loved.

Where were we?

In fact, we were bang in front of a building-in-the-making, 32 metres high, that will provide a new grande entrée to Exhibition Square, part of a comprehensive remodelling and remaking of the existing fair complex.

The construction work, naturally, was a major talking-point among visitors and journalists at Basel’s annual international art fair, which has just ended. In fact, the joke going round was that the building site was, far and away, the fair’s biggest exhibit – a marriage of installation and performance art – dwarfing the large-scale sculptures in the exhibition halls. Be that as it may, crowds of rubbernecks thronged the site viewpoints non-stop from noon to dusk.  To keep them happy, the sole contractor, HRS Real Estate AG, had posted up high-minded slogans on billboards surrounding the site. These included “Fantasie ist wichtiger als Wissen, denn Wissen ist begrenzt” (Imagination trumps knowledge as knowledge has its limits) and “Kapital lässt sich beschaffen, Menschen muss man gewinnen” (Money you can get your hands on, somehow or other; people you have to win round).

Many of the existing fair buildings, including a 1999 hall by architect Theo Holz, are being retained and will be combined with  this new three-story building on the west side of Exhibition Square to provide a total of 141 000 square metres of exhibition space, including 83 000 metres for multi-storey stands.  This compares with the present 161 000 metres of exhibition space, including 45 000 square metres for multi-storey stands. While this means a reduction in exhibition surface area, the volume of space available to exhibitors will not change unduly as the new build will have higher ceilings than at present as that is what exhibitors want.

The budget is 430 million Swiss francs. Work started in June 2011 and will be completed by April 2013. This being Switzerland, a country where the trains run on time, the project is running to schedule and within budget.

The architects are Basel’s very own Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, winners of the Pritzker, Schock and Stirling Prizes and renowned for prestige international projects, such as the Beijing National Stadium (for the 2008 Beijing Olympics), the Allianz Arena football ground in Munich and London’s Tate Modern art gallery. Both born in Basel in 1950, the pair also have their international headquarters in the city. The developer and owner of the site is MCH Messe Basel.

The cynosure of the new rectangular building is the outer façade of the first and second storeys.

To get an idea of the configuration of these two storeys, imagine two large oblong metal cake tins with high everted sides. Turn them both upside down and plonk one on top of the other, haphazardly rather than symmetrically, so that the sides of the top tin jut out beyond, and then retract within, the perimeter of the tin below.

The façade of the two storeys consists of horizontal ribbons of silvery grey aluminium. It is not clear from the computer-generated image of the completed building whether these ribbons will shimmer in the sunlight but in any case they are bound provide a startling eye-catcher that terminates the vista as one approaches the Messeplatz up Clarastrasse.

Another distinctive feature is the circular light well located at the centre of the new building. This will be open to the elements and provide natural light to all internal spaces surrounding the well. Having visited Rome recently, we were immediately reminded of the open oculus at the top of the dome of Hadrian’s Pantheon – and also of the compluvium opening in the roof of the atrium in a Roman town house, such as you find at Pompeii.

The new building will be energy-efficient. A photovoltaic array will be installed on the roof, which will also be greened over.

Besides Art Basel, held in June every year, the other most important fair at the Messe is “Baselworld”, the leading global exhibition for watches and jewellery, which is held here every spring. This year it attracted 104,000 visitors, 
1815 exhibitors and
 3300 journalists. Other regular events include Swiss Bau for the construction industry, an education fair, and a hotel and catering exhibition.

—————–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Architecture, Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ars longa

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

25 June 2012

Ὁ βίος βραχύς,

ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή,

ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξύς,

ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερή,

ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή.

Hippocrates of Cos (460-380 BC). Greek medic. Aphorisms, Section 1, Paragraph 1

Vita brevis,

ars longa,

occasio praeceps,

experimentum periculosum,

iudicium difficile.

Latin version

Life is brief,

art enduring,

opportunity is short-lived,

experiment risky,

judgement difficult.

English version

——————

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Greece, Literature | Tagged | Leave a comment

Basel Classics 2

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 Special note: Those who receive the text of our posts by email should know that the script is often revised, sometimes substantially, after initial publication. Yesterday’s post, for instance, “Basel Classics 1”, was re-written in part after it first appeared.

 24 June 2012

STRING THEORY

Today we conclude our review of a selection of the modern classics on show at last week’s international art fair at Basel in Switzerland.

Some people think there is not much to a work by conceptual sculptor Fred “String Theory” Sandback – and they are right.

But that’s the point.

Baroque excess is not his thing.

Sandback, who was born in Bronxville, New York State, in 1943 and died in 2003, made work with string. Or acrylic yarn, to be precise. That’s all.

A classic Sandback, untitled, was on display at the Galerie Annemarie Verna from Zürich. A construction dating from 1990, it consisted of three taut strings set across the junction between two walls. Uppermost was a vertical red string, which descended to meet a horizontal yellow string that spanned the corner. From the other end of the yellow string descended a vertical blue string.

And that was it. This is minimalism in the raw.

The height of the work from the top of the red string to the bottom of the blue string was 228.6o cm. No dimension was given for the yellow string, but we would estimate its length at about 25 cm.

Sometimes Sandback made work with only two strings and occasionally only one string.

If you like minimalism – and we do – this is it.

We do not know whether Sandback ever took his work to its logical conclusion – no strings at all.

Think about it.

Quite a different work was the complex bronze “Libro” by Antoni Tàpies i Puig, Marquess of Tàpies, who was born in Barcelona in 1923 and died there in February this year. The 1996 work, on sale at Milan gallery Christian Stein, featured an open book into which various culinary implements were inserted: four forks, two knives, two spoons and a ladle with holes in it. The artist’s signature cross – for the role of the cross in Joseph Beuys’s work, see our post yesterday – was incised in the middle of the book.

Galerie Lelong (Paris, New York, Zürich) exhibited a classic black and grey painting – oil on aluminium – by Sean Scully. Entitled “Wall of Light Angel”, the impressive 2007 work measured 280 x 350 cm. Scully was born in Dublin in 1945. He now lives and works in New York and Barcelona and near Munich.

Galerie Lelong also showed two works by Greek sculptor Jannis Kounellis. One called to mind a giant sandwich. This featured a greyish metal base, resting on the floor, which measured 270 x 40 x 4o cm. The uppermost part of the work consisted of an I-beam (or RSJ) measuring 300 x 12 x 6.5 cm. Sandwiched between the metal base and the I-beam was the filling: five hessian sacks of coal. The work, untitled, was made in 1993/1994. The other Kounellis at Lelong was a much more recent work. Created in 2012 and also untitled, it consisted of a wall-hung oblong grey-blue steel base measuring 200 x 180 cm over which were pinned about six black and dark-blue militaristic greatcoats stitched together in a patchwork with what appeared to be twine. Kounellis was born in Piraeus, the port of Athens, in 1936. He studied art in Greece and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.

Politics reared its ugly head again – see our post “Big Brother”of 18 June – in the white marble 2009  sculpture entitled “Flat human (I want more)” by Olaf Breuning  at New York dealer Metro Pictures. This was a stele with heavily chipped back and sides and a flat front proclaiming  the following aspiration: “I want more and more and more and more”.  Well, you can’t say this guy doesn’t make his wishes clear. Seems to us as if he might be a capitalist. The work, created in 2009, measured 170 x 55 x 43 cm. Breuning was born at Schaffhausen in Switzerland in 1970. He lives in New York.

We never thought much of doodlebug Cy Twombly till we saw the 1966 painting “Hill (Rome)” at Galerie Karsten Greve (St Moritz, Cologne, Paris). An alder frame, 190 x 200 cm, encloses a striking blackish oil painting, immaculate save for seven window-like squares picked out in chalk. There is no obvious reference to either Rome or a hill and yet, looking through the windows, can one not glimpse in the distance……? No one can’t, and yet….As it happens, Twombly, who was born in 1928 at Lexington, Virginia, died last year in Rome.

Nor have we cared much till now for scrap metal manipulator John Chamberlain. Yet New York dealer Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art showed the best Chamberlain we have ever seen – a magnificent 2003 assemblage of strips of chromium-plated steel painted green, red, blue and orange, the strips marshalled in off-vertical columns inclining from the top right of the work to the bottom left. Most Chamberlain works we have seen have been irregular in shape, but this was flat-fronted and disciplined. From a distance, it could have been mistaken for a painting. The work measured 231 x 236.2 x 73.7 cm. Chamberlain was born at Rochester, Indiana, in 1927 and died last year in Manhattan.

Staircases going nowhere seemed to be ‘in’ this year at the fair. The Konrad Fischer Galerie (Düsseldorf and Berlin) exhibited one by Wolfgang Laib. Made of wood coated with a blackish Burmesian finish in 2006, it measured 221 x 142 x 52.5 cm. Laib was born in 1950 at Metzingen in Germany. Another by Carl Andre featured at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery. This was a much more rugged affair than the Laib staircase, but led nowhere all the same. There must be a message there somewhere. The Andre work consisted of a “stepped pyramid” (ie staircase) of red cedar timbers. Created in 1980, the overall dimensions were 182.9 x 91.4 x 182.9 cm.  Andre was born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts. In 1988, tried on a charge of murdering his wife Ana Mendieta, he was acquitted.

We conclude this review of Basel art works with a piece with literary resonance. This was “After Kerouac”, a substantial installation created in 2006 by artist Mike Nelson, who was born in 1967 at Loughborough in the UK and who now lives and works in London. The public was invited to enter a seemingly endless circular corridor that wound round and round like the coils in a spring. The walls of the corridor were white but the lower one-third had a continuous dado of irregular skid marks. The corridor eventually ended in an old wooden door with a piece of string hanging from it. You opened it – and were dumbfounded to find yourself unexpectedly in the middle of a scrap yard of old tractor, lorry and car tyres of all shapes and sizes. The work was Nelson’s homage to Beat writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and in particular to his 1957 autobiographical road-trip novel “On the Road”. The skid marks forming the dado in the corridor were a reference to the fact that Kerouac typed the novel on a continuous sheet of paper.

A description of the work provided by Nelson’s dealers at the fair – 303 Gallery from New York and Galleria Franco Noero from Turin – read as follows:

“After Kerouac” is not only a shrine-like homage to the era of American culture that the Beat writer has come to represent, but also a rhetorical question in regard to those ideals. In relation to the genre of Mike Nelson’s own practice, “After Kerouac” succinctly articulates what is often the starting point for many of his works: a literary structure translated into spatial structure. The black marks of the tyres through the spiralling corridor emulate the single continuous scroll of paper that “On the Road” was typed upon, but also the abstract mark-making of the [an?] expressionistic nature redolent of painters of Kerouac’s era. However, the conclusion is as deadpan as the rest, a cul-de-sac or dead end made with the sum of its own ‘happening’ or narrative.

So there you have it.

By way of a codicil to our critique of Nelson’s installation, we include here, for the convenience of readers of a literary bent, Wikipedia’s description of Kerouac’s modus scribendi when he was writing “On the Road”:

Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled “The Beat Generation” and “Gone on the Road,” Kerouac completed what is now known as “On the Road” in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty. The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac’s road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late-40s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. He completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him bowls of pea soup and mugs of coffee to keep him going. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, wide enough for a type-writer, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than what would eventually be printed. Though “spontaneous,” Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.

The novel was not published till 1957 as a result of the unwillingness of publishers to take it on.

This piece concludes our review of the artworks exhibited at Basel.  However, we are planning to write two more posts on other aspects of the fair before bidding adieu to  Augusta Raurica.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

 

Posted in Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Basel Classics 1

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

23 June 2012

And so to the Modern Classics, the Modern Greats.

Some reports at the international art fair just ended in Basel, Switzerland, suggest that in the current grim economic climate collectors are eschewing avant-garde contemporary art in favour of tried-and-tested examplars of modern 20 C art.

Thus the most talked about work at the fair was unquestionably the 1954 untitled orange-and-pink oil-on-canvas rectangle (222.3 x 176.2 cm) by Mark Rothko (1903-1970) at the stand of Marlborough Fine Art (Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Monte Carlo). This was a standard Rothko of excellent quality but its notoriety derived from the fact that at $78 million it was the most expensive work on sale at the fair. It is to be assumed that the elderly beret-capped uniformed private security guard straight out of Dad’s Army stationed alongside it was there simply to emphasize the gravitas of the painting rather than provide effective protection in the event of an attempted heist by today’s equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde.

For our money, however, the show-stealer was the magnificent 1940 black mobile entitled “Eucalyptus” by Alexander Calder (1898-1976). The work (created using metal, wire and paint) was on loan to Basel’s Beyeler Foundation from the Calder Foundation in New York. The presentation of the work was all the more dramatic from being displayed in the dazzlingly-lit white cube-like Beyeler stand. In addition, by way of contrast, the Beyeler Foundation had found in its collections a modest-sized 1912 black-and-grey oil-on-canvas entitled “Eukalyptus” by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) to hang on a wall of the same stand. No doubt a fine work in its own right, it was completely upstaged by the Calder. Unfortunately, no doubt to the disappointment of most of those who saw it, the mobile was not for sale.

Two other works at the fair also provided a striking contrast.

One was the much-photographed “Gekröse” by Franz West, who lives and works in Vienna, the city where he was born in 1947. Gekröse is German for “tripe” and the monumental 2011 work resembles nothing so much as a sausage-like cat’s cradle of huge pink entrails or puffed-up inner tubes. The medium looks like rubber, perhaps the sort of material used to make bouncy castles, and as a result the work has a light feel about it, but in fact it is made of lacquered aluminium. This is what the dealer, Gagosian Gallery of New York, has to say about it:

“Gekröse is a leviathan of a sculpture, simultaneously monumental yet playful; imposing in scale yet whimsical in its cheery rose hue and dynamic sense of movement. The complexly intertwining pink coils are reminiscent of any number of diverse forms, perhaps a gargantuan primordial cephalopod or an enlarged model of the human digestive tract. Often West designs sculptures as functional furniture-like sites of social interaction.”

Amen to that!

By contrast, nothing could be more solid and durable than the massive grey chisel-marked stone cross – “Das Liegende Kreuz” – by Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) at the stand of Düsseldorf dealer Galerie Hans Mayer.  The work was executed in 1971 and 1972 in Belgian granite.

The gallery cites a commentary by Friedhelm Mennekes:

“…nowhere does the cross prove to be as encompassing and fundamental in the plastic arts and a driving formative force as in the work of Joseph Beuys. It holds its own as a form of creation dominating the entire career of the artist…..In Beuys’s works the cross is a steadfast formal concept not just derived from art history but striving to form a wider conception of art and to formulate an ‘enlarged notion of art’.”

Mennekes goes on to quote Beuys himself as saying that for him the cross serves “mainly as a symbol of orientation in the natural sciences. Today science is unthinkable without the notion of a coordinate grid system, which means without the notion of space and the underlying problems of time. They are being dealt with in a systematic way by means of the grid. Even in weapons one has this guideline as in the cross-wires of machine-guns. Thus the cross has become part of our culture.”  

Rather surprisingly, the dimensions of this massive lapidary cross were not easy to pin down. We pointed out to the genial dealer, who had attended the fair every year since it opened in 1970, that the dimensions of the work given in the wall label – 234 x 61 x 237 cm – were implausible if one looked at the cross carefully, at which point he obligingly provided us with a new set of dimensions 234 x 45 cm x 254 cm.

So that was that then. But not quite. We then read in Mennekes’s commentary that the work “follows the concept of a Greek cross with four equally long beams”.

Now the Oxford  English Dictionary defines a Greek cross as  one whose four arms (“beams” in Mennekes’s terminology) are of equal length.

The two transverse bars which intersect a cross at right angles each consist of two arms. In other words, two arms constitute a bar. These two bars, if you are still with me, are supposed to be of equal length in a Greek cross.

However, according to the figures given to us by the Galerie Hans Mayer, the length of one bar is 234 cm, the length of the other is 254 cm.

Now unless mathematics recently effected a quantum leap which has escaped our attention, 234 cm is not  normally equal to 254 cm.

Which is to say that, unless we are a Dutchman, the bars of the cross are not of equal length. Hence, Das Liegende Kreuz cannot be a Greek cross.

But wait a minute.

Here is Mennekes again:

“In the dimensions of its large-scale implementation, the work violates the mathematical rules of an exact materialization. However, the character of this imprecision enhances the sculptural quality and renders it a weight of its own.”

So that explains that then.

Mennekes goes on: “While,  from the point of view of historical form,  the ‘Roman’ cross reminds us of historic incidents, the ‘Greek’ form takes on a rather symbolic and graphic character. It can easily be surrounded by a circle like the spokes of a wheel. In the context of Byzantine culture, it symbolically refers to the resurrection and the light of the new world, graphically to motion and cycle, on a metaphorical level to philosophical poles of dialectics as well as cognitive superimpositions and a combination of highly different perspectives – a characteristic of the keen mind of Joseph Beuys.”

Who could disagree with that?

We desperately need to take a break at this point.

Hence, our classical trail through the highways and byways of the Basel art fair will continue tomorrow.

Same time, same place.

Good night.

——————

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pushing the envelope

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

22 June 2012

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE

“Men are from Murmansk…Women are from Vilnius”

Citation displayed at Art Basel by the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

The centrepiece of an artwork that pulled in the crowds at last week’s international art fair in Basel consisted of the word “ART” in giant three-dimensional capital letters.

However, that was not all. Out of hidden orifices in the letters came an unending flow of a thick brownish bubbly liquid that resembled melting chocolate or toffee. Mouth-watering. Visitors clearly wanted to taste it to see if it really was what it seemed to be. Yum! Moreish, for sure.

The letters were set in a rectangular container filled with a lake consisting of the chocolate/toffee-like liquid that had flowed down the sides of the letters. Little islets of lava rock rose here and there out of the surface of the lake.

The work, at Galerie Eva Presenhuber from Zürich, was entitled “Fountain (earth fountain)”.

It was created this year by Doug Aitken, an artist born California in 1968, who currently lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.

The materials used in making the work included acryl glass, metal, a pumping system and lava stones. The chocolatey toffee-like liquid was methyl cellulose.

The work measured 136 x 198.5 x 92 cm.

Another crowd-pleaser – this time at Galerie Anhava from Helsinki – was a long metal tray measuring 400cm long by 30cm wide the middle of which rested on a 60cm high support rising from the ground.  The tray, which was three-quarters filled with a myriad small shiny chrome ball-bearings, acted as a see-saw.  Every so often one end of the tray would tip up slightly and the ball-bearings would career down to the other end of the tray. Then the other end would do the same and the ball-bearings would career back in the reverse direction. For some reason, people found this interminably fascinating and the stand was permanently packed. The work was entitled “Flux of Matter”. It was a creation of two Finnish artists, Tommi Grönland (b.1967) and Petteri Nisunen (b. 1962). The gallery’s blurb said that the artists “address issues of space and physical phenomena through sophisticated installations that often play with physical laws of nature”.

Another work in the same gallery attracted no attention at all. It was easy to see why. It consisted of 13 mouse-traps aligned along a wall, each featuring a trapped dead mouse. The extremely realistic mice were not in fact taxidermically reconstructed. They were made of bronze. The title of the work, made in 2008, was “Last meal”.  The Finnish artist Anne Koskinnen (b. 1969) also does bronze casts of road-kill animals. Nice work if you can get it.

Galerie Klüser of Munich was showing a life-size life-like three-dimensional sculpture of a bald man facing a wall, the front of his trousers open, his hands tied by a rope behind his back. The figure, naked from the waist up, was levitating about a foot and a half above the ground. The focus of attention was the interaction between the man’s head and a lit light-bulb, towards which the man’s tongue was stretching out in vain. The media used were polyster resin, a light-bulb and light. The work was created this year by Bernardí Roig, who was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1965. It was entitled “Practices to Suck the light (hanging man)”.

A striking hodgepodge of new and used metal kitchenware in various colours – essentially, pots, pans and buckets – by New Delhi artist Subodh Gupta (b. 1964) was for sale at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery (Zürich, London, New York). Entitled “Family Nest No 3” and created this year, the work measured 172.7 x 139.7 x 68.6 cm.

White Cube of London fielded its usual attention-grabbing array of Britart.

Damien Hirst (born in Bristol in 1965) provided works reflecting two of his signature subjects: (1)  a 2006 glass-and-chrome case containing surgical equipment (scissors, phials, saws, pans, pliers, knives and tweezers) entitled “Stripper” and measuring 103.3 x 361.1 x 92 cm; and (2) a giant representation of a black and phosphorescent blue butterfly constructed out of the corpses of real butterflies and set in a background created from the corpses of lighter-coloured (blue, yellowish, creamy, pinkish) butterflies. The latter, a square 2008 work entitled “Papilio Ulysses”, measured 213.4 x 213.4 cm.

Tracey Emin (born in 1963 in Croydon, London), another stalwart of the White Cube stable, showed two embroidered blankets hanging one above the other. The top blanket featured the representation of the bust of a naked woman picked out in white thread, while the lower half of the woman’s body was outlined in black thread. The 2009 work, “Trauma Time”, measured 261 x 217 cm.

Antony Gormley (also born in London, in 1950) supplied a figure made up of rectangular steel blocks of various sizes. The blocks were assembled in an L-shape, one part lying on the floor, the other vertical. Figurative or non-figurative? Hard to say. Since Gormley usually makes sculptures of men, one assumes that this was a very abstract representation of a man sitting on the ground with his legs out front. Semi-figurative?  The 2012 work, entitled “Stay IV”, measured 118 x 46 x 106 cm.

White Cube also showed “Small Adam”, a 2011 work by London-based artist Raqib Shaw (born in India in 1974). This featured a red-painted bronze crustacean encrusted with black diamonds, sapphires and rubies on top of and in the process of fucking an equally repugnant creature with a woman’s body and a bird’s head. Measuring 149 x 85 x 68 cm, this 2011 work just has to be the most repulsive object at the fair. It attracted a lot of interest from the public.

Most of the artists represented by White Cube are household names in Britain – well, to be accurate, in the  contemporary British art world – but they are seldom seen, in our experience, at art shows on the Continent.

         “From Lvov…..with Lvove”

Citation displayed at Art Basel by the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

——————-

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ladder

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

After a number of production hitches, we are now ready to resume our normal daily service, reverting to Basel to continue our coverage of the international art fair.

21 June 2012

LADDER

Last Friday, just before noon, we turned round a corner and into a stand in the ground-floor “E” section of the 43rd annual international art fair in Basel, Switzerland.

And there it was – the installation. A 6-foot-high aluminium ladder of twice three rungs (including the top platform), its surface attractively speckled with a random scatter of paint spots and blotches – the colour mostly a greyish white but this dominant tone being set off contrapuntally by a less conspicuous kaleidoscope of irregularly-shaped paint flecks embracing most of the colours in the spectrum. The metal structure of the ladder had clearly been artificially aged and the two lower rungs sported what looked very much like black soil marks – undoubtedly a not-too-hard-to-spot ecological reference to the G20 earth summit about to take place in Rio de Janeiro.  In its uncannily accurate reproduction of its real-life alter ego, the work reminded us – conceptually, if not visually or materially – of a cardboard box by Gavin Turk.

Then a strange thing happened. A middle-aged man in overalls and dirty boots suddenly appeared, mounted the ladder, pulled out a drill from a tool-bag and, working very fast, drilled four holes in the wall next to the ladder – at a height of approximately five feet from the floor. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, back on the floor, having stuffed the drill back unceremoniously into his tool-bag, he suddenly picked up the ladder, folded it under one arm – and disappeared round a corner without saying a word.

We were gobsmacked. What had at first seemed, without any doubt, to be a static verisimilitude of mundane escalation had suddenly transformed itself before our eyes into a dramatic display of gloriously kinetic performance art. Stand aside Marina Abramović ! The rotation of the bit in the drill, the whine of the drill motor, the phallic reciprocation of the bit as it went now in, now out of one hole after another, the quick professional movements of the artist as he deftly whipped the tool first out of the tool-bag and then, the job finished, with equal professionalism back into it – all this and more confirmed that we were in the presence of an artwork of consummate ingenuity.

We searched the wall in vain for the exhibit description. Of course! How silly of us!  Many of the grandest galleries have no truck with descriptive captions: they expect their collectors to be able to identify instantaneously the names and works of the world-renowned artists that they have elected to put on display.

And we at any rate were certainly not going to display our ignorance by committing the faux pas of asking the gallery owner for further details of an artist who was certainly unknown to us but undoubtedly a household name to art cognoscenti.

The day had begun well and we wandered off into the bowels of the giant exhibition hall, looking for lunch – as well as keeping a weather eye open for a man with a ladder in the firm conviction that our ambulant artist would at this very moment be erecting his prop in some other corner of this vast exhibition hall, ready once more to mesmerize la crème de la crème of the art world with a further of performance of his inimitable shtick.

——————

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Those were the days!

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

Foreword to the text below: this script has been misinterpreted as literally reflecting the views of Antigone1984. We wish to make it clear that that is not the case. The use of caricature to make a point is a well-established literary trope. We imagined the reaction of a stereotypical Little Englander or Empire loyalist to the admission by PM David Cameron that Europe was tanking as an export market for British exports. The xenophobic remarks we attributed to this fictional jingo were necessary in order to establish his authenticity: such a person would not have had the views or used the language of Bertrand Russell.  Readers of this blog will be aware that we are warmly appreciative of all cultures, whether native or foreign. One of the main reasons for our opposition to the European Union is the belief that this essentially market-oriented essentially economic institution is systematically homogenizing the cultural and economic diversity of its component nations with a view to creating a vast walmartized continental market along the lines of that in the United States.  Besides, we can hardly be regarded as xenophobic after choosing to spend nearly half our life on the Continental land mass. As to the replacement, in all but inessentials, of the Commonwealth by the Common Market, the export implications of this historic mistake are widely accepted among economists. Finally, we do admit that the blog is not always politically correct.  We have put words in the mouth of our mythical Chauvin that might not be the preferred choice in the higher realms of diplomacy. In France we are used to hearing Brits like ourselves described as “les rosbifs”. It does not bother us. The next step after political correctness is censorship. We do not intend to go down that road. We thought that all this was obvious.  Obviously, it was not. Hence this note. 

 19 June 2012

COMMONWEALTH  v.  COMMON MARKET

So Brit PM David “Dave” Cameron – Old Etonian descendant of King William IV –  dons a sombrero and confesses to the G20 summit in Mexico that Blighty may have to find new export markets as a result of the collapse of commerce in the Eurozone.

Cor Blimey, Dave, we told you that yonks, ago.

For most of the twentieth century, Britain had a fully-fledged hyper-efficient fully-functioning mega-sized export market – the alliance of 40-odd states known as the British Commonwealth.

We well remember those days. Butter from New Zealand at five pence a half pound, milk at twopence a pint, two loaves for threepence, and a leg of Commonwealth lamb for no more than a guinea. Ah, those were the days!

In fact, the terms of trade were so favourable and the living so cheap that a fellow could work only five mornings a week –  if he felt like it – and live like a king for the rest of the time. And that included a compulsory party, drinks and crumpet thrown in, every Saturday night. Elvis. Lonnie Donegan. Marvin Gaye. The Rolling Stones.

Enter stage right the Grocer from Broadstairs, PM Edward “Ted” Heath. Dazzled by too many nights out ogling the cancan dancers at the Folies Bergères or else clocking the Cabaret in Unter den Linden,  pullover Ted marched us out of the Commonwealth and into the Common Market.

And overnight we lost it. Everything. The lot.

Including 0ur Commonwealth export market – countries with which it was easy to trade, not only because of historical ties, but also because everyone spoke the same lingo.

Our exports were now subject to the tender mercies of a ragbag of  incomprehensible foreigners on the Continental Shelf.

Had we won two World Wars only for this? Only for the Huns and the Froggies to lord it over us at the end of the day?

The first thing that happened when we got into the Common Market was that prices rocketed. The second thing that happened was that they rocketed even more. And so it has continued till this day.

Our industries were destroyed in underhand competition from foreign conglomerates that had never heard of the words “fair play”. Our banks were sold to the Spaniards, our water to the French, our motor industry to the South Koreans.

Since we threw in our lot with Europe everything has gone to pot. Nowadays, in a family, both parents have to go out to work, if they can find any, the children are dumped with a child-minder, if they can find any. At night, dressed in rags, the family huddles together under a leaky roof, a chill wind whistling through the cracks in the window frames, dining, if they are lucky, on a few meagre mouthfuls of bread and dripping.

And now they tell us it was all a big mistake.

This Common Market thing isn’t working out, after all.

Well, it’s a bit bleedin’ late to be telling us all this now, Dave, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century.  In fact, it’s 39 bleedin’ years too late. Not a thing has gone right since that ill-fated first of January 1973 when your predecessor Ted the Grocer surrendered our Anglo-Saxon birthright for a mess of garlic potage.

And now that everyone can see that things are not working out, along comes Dave with time on his hands – Ascot being come and gone and he no longer too keen on hanging out with his old chums around Chipping Norton now that they have had their collars felt by the Old Bill – and starts groaning on about how everything is going to the dogs in Europe and wouldn’t it be nice if we had some handy foreign markets to export to.

Well, don’t look to the Aussies or Kiwis for help this time, Dave, old boy. We limeys ditched them when we thought we didn’t need them any more and they kind of  haven’t forgotten that. They are a bit like that, the Aussies and the Kiwis, you know, a bit like the Bourbons.

They don’t go in for niceties, those johnnies down under. “You whinging pommies, you know what you can do with your bleedin’ exports….” That’s how they will be thinking, Dave. Take care, Dave, take great care when you find yourself sidling up to them with cap in hand.

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Europe, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Big Brother

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 Basel, 15 June 2012

It is often energising to do something different from what one normally does. Antigone1984 is largely about politics. Which is why we can recharges our batteries by focusing, for a change, on something completely different –  like art for instance. Which is why we have come to Switzerland to report on Art Basel, the world’s major annual international market for modern and contemporary art.

But hang on a minute….We are mesmerized by a huge sinister bronze bust just inside the stand of Galerie Thomas from Munich.

We have never seen this bust before…and yet it seems… strangely familiar.

The head is an angular block topped by a peaked cap, the nose a continuous sharp edge from forehead to chin. The eyes are two large round holes close to the edge of the nose. The figure has two large ear lugs which appear to be tilting forward to catch every word that you say. There is no mouth. The neck and shoulders take the form of a cone supporting the head.

The sculpture measures 152 x 100 x 94 cm. The bronze sports a greenish patina.

We look over at the exhibit description on the wall behind.

The title of the work turns out to be a name that is indeed familiar to Antigone1984. It is “Big Brother”, the ubiquitous fictional policeman who personifies the totalitarian dystopia created by George Orwell in “1984”, the novel which, along with the Sophocles play “Antigone”, provides the direct inspiration for this blog.

So it seems you can’t get away from politics after all! Not even at the Basel art fair.

The sculptor is Max Ernst (1891-1976). Ernst made a plaster cast for the figure in 1967 but it was not cast until after his death – in 2001. It is one of an edition of eight.

Galerie Thomas interprets and describes the work as follows:

“BIG BROTHER”, the boss, reminds us of the vision of a surveillance state as described by George Orwell in his novel “1984”. Interestingly enough, the figure with the angular features lacks a mouth, underlining his function in the sense of “Big Brother is watching you”. Max Ernst’s expression of a time “in which you constantly have the impression of living in a prison” is based on his wretched experiences during the Nazi era and is as current as ever.

This work is a single figure from the group of sculptures with the title “Faculty for a School of Homicides”, consisting of three large figures. It is one of the most surprising figurative ensembles of the artist.

Max Ernst was born near Cologne in Germany. He did have horrific war experiences, but our understanding is that these occurred during the First, not the Second, World War.

In  the First World War Ernst was drafted into the German Army and served on both western and eastern fronts. According to Wikipedia, the war had such a devastating impact on him that he subsequently referred to his time in the army as follows: “On the first of August 1914 M[ax] E[rnst] died. He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.”

During the Second World War, soon after the Nazi invasion of France, Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo but managed to escape.  In 1941, with the help of his wife-to-be Peggy Guggenheim, he fled to America, where he remained till after the war.

Of course, it is naive to think that one can ever get away from politics, even in the world of art. Some of our friends say that they have no interest in politics. They care only for art.

Such a stance, to us, is incomprehensible.

You can’t separate the one from the other. You can’t even understand the one without the other. Politics and art are Siamese twins.

As if to make this point, this very evening (15 June) the 2012 film “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” by Alison Klayman is getting its Swiss première at Art Basel.

Yesterday (14 June) art patron Princess Alia Al-Senussi moderated a talk on “The Arab Spring and its Impact on Artists” with contributions from Dubai collector Mohamed Afkhami, New York artist Shadi Habib Allah and New York/Munich curator Till Fellrath.

On Sunday 17 June, the last day of the fair, Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, is moderating a public discussion entitled “The Artist as Activist”. Taking part are: Tel Aviv/Amsterdam artist Yael Bartana; Seville architect Santiago Cirugeda; Chicago artist Theaster Gates; and Cairo artist Huda Lutfi.

Ah, well, must find some way to relax other than by attending art fairs!

——————

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Death of Pericles

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

Special note: we have had to interrupt our coverage of the Basel international art fair to report on the result of the momentous parliamentary election held yesterday 17 June 2012 in Greece. We shall resume coverage of the fair immediately after our election report.

18 June 2012

SPARTA DEFEATS ATHENS

Sparta wins again. Two thousand four hundred years after the glory that was fifth-century Athens succumbed to the rude phalanxes of Lacedaemon in the Peloponnesian War, the people’s will to resist finally crumbled and the heirs of Pericles and Ephialtes handed the wreath of victory to right-wing New Democracy party boss Antonis Samaras, an epigone Lysander for these degenerate times.

Yesterday 17 June 1212 the Greeks went to the urns to elect their parliamentary leaders as they have done ever since 462 BC when the people’s tribune Ephialtes wrenched political power from the Areopagus – the  conservative-leaning judicial and administrative council of elder statesmen and old freddies – and transferred it to the new-fangled institutions of democracy (popular courts, elected councillors, and an assembly of all citizens that met on the Pnyx plateau overlooking the city of Athens).

Last week as we stood before the rostrum of the orators in the fan-shaped Pnyx little did we realize that in less than a week the denizens of this cradle of democracy would – in effect – be handing back power from the Pnyx to the Areopagus.

The turkeys have voted for Christmas. The result was a triumph for national masochism.

For 18 months the Greek people had cried out in agony at the suffering imposed on them by the Germans, the Eurocrats of Brussels, and the Americans.

Now was their chance to say “No.  Enough is enough”.

They fluffed it.

They voted to put back into power the incestuous political elite which has licked the jack-boots of its troika of dominatrix creditors as they whip the Greek economy to within an inch of its life in exchange for a few paltry obols from the piggy-banks of Frankfurt, Brussels and Washington.

“We have suffered so much,” the people of Greece told their masters. “Now make us suffer more. Thrust the iron yet deeper into our soul.”

How hollow now sound the boasts that the Greeks made when New Democracy and its fellow party quisling, the nominally socialist Pasok (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), took the troika’s thirty pieces of silver in exchange for the betrayal and impoverishment of the people of Greece.

At that time, the Portuguese had meekly opted to accept their punishment from the nation’s creditors. With hardly a murmur, the Irish too had caved in. Faced with the same threat of austerity, however, the Greeks took to the streets shouting: “We are not like the Irish. We shall resist”.

It is true, they did resist for a time. There were daily demonstrations, organized marches, battles with the police and violent clashes in front of the Parliament building in Syntagma (Constitution) Square.  Cars were burned, shop fronts smashed, buildings torn down.

Yes, the little dogs barked – but, crushing all opposition, the caravan of capitalism moved on regardless.

Just over a week ago, in the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Syntagma Square, we discussed the Greek predicament with Dr Caius Traian Dragomir, former Rumanian Ambassador to France and Greece. Dr Dragomir made a shrewd point. “Do you remember the riots that took place a year ago when the austerity measures were announced?  They lasted for a time, it is true, but look around now. Where are the demonstrations today?” In fact, we had witnessed only one tiny demonstration since our arrival in Athens six days earlier.

Dr Dragomir’s remark prefigured yesterday’s election result. The Greeks have lost the stomach for a fight.

With almost all the votes counted in the 17 June 2012 ballot for the country’s 300-seat parliament, the result is as follows: New Democracy (129 seats, composed of the 79 seats it actually won plus a free bonus of 50 extra seats) 29.66 % of votes cast; the radical socialist party Syriza (71 seats) 26.89 %; the nominally socialist party Pasok (33 seats) 12. 28 %; the right-leaning Anel (Independent Greeks) party (20 seats) 7.51%;  the extreme right-wing Golden Dawn party(18 seats) 6.92 %; the Dimar (Democratic Left) party (17 seats) 6.25 %; and the KKE (Communist) party (12 seats) 4.50 %. Other parties fell well short of the three per cent threshold needed to enter parliament.

The percentage of the electorate that turned out to vote was 62.47 (a slight drop compared with previous parliamentary election on 6 May 2012).

According to Greek election rules, an extra 50 seats are granted to the party winning the largest percentage of the vote. What can possibly justify this negation of democracy that makes a mockery of the ballot?

The system of voting used in Greek is, on the surface, proportional representation, that is to say, parliamentary seats are allocated on the basis of the percentage of votes cast.

So why give an extra 50 seats to the party with the highest percentage of the vote? According to Le Monde, the idea is to “stabilise the result of the proportional ballot”.

In fact, the idea is to shut out from government the smaller parties. The aim is to give the largest party – for free – enough votes to form a parliamentary majority by itself or in coalition with the next largest party. In plain language, the object is to ensure that the two big traditional parties, New Democracy and Pasok, continue to exercise a stranglehold over the government 0f Greece.

The result, moreover, is to make the ballot non-proportional.

 The vote yesterday was a re-run of the parliamentary election held on 6 May 2012 in which, like yesterday, no party won an overall majority. Nor were any of the parties able to cobble together a coalition. Hence, the need to repeat the ballot yesterday.

With a turnout of 65.09 % of the electorate, the results of the 6 May 2012 ballot were: New Democracy (108 seats, composed of the 58 seats it actually won plus the free bonus of 50 extra seats) 18.85 %; Syriza (52 seats) 16.78%; Pasok (41 seats) 13.18 %; Independent Greeks (33 seats) 10.6 %; the Communist KKE party (26 seats) 8.48 %; Golden Dawn (21 seats) 6.97 %; and the Democratic Left (19 seats) 6.1 %.

A comparison of the results for 6 May 2012 and 17 June 2012  show that both New Democracy and Syriza  substantially increased their share of the vote yesterday. The big losers were the Independent Greeks and the hardline “dodo” Communist Party, which refused to ally itself with any of the other left parties.

However, the great disappointment for the left was the failure of Syriza to dislodge New Democracy as the party with the largest share of the vote. Had it done so and – again a Herculean challenge – had it managed to form a working alliance with the Democratic Left party (possible) and the intransigent Communist Party (extremely difficult), it would have been in with a shout to form the most leftwing government in western Europe in living memory.

In particular, Syriza pledged to reject the troika’s austerity package hook, line and sinker.

This is what Syriza thought, quite reasonably, that the people of Greece wanted.

Not enough of them, as it turned out.

Our investigations in Athens earlier this month led us to believe that Syriza was by no means as leftwing as its enemies painted it (see our post “Felipe González”  published on 10 June 2012). All the same, it would have given the fat cats a run for their money.

But then had Cleopatra’s nose been longer…..

We can speculate on the reasons for the failure of the left to do better. One explanation suggested during our recent trip to Greece was that Syriza is essentially an urban-based middle-class party with young well-educated supporters, including writers, artists and the intelligentsia. Its appeal outside Athens and Thessaloniki and particularly among older people in the conservative countryside is said to be limited.   Another reason may be that the electorate had had enough of the current political impasse and was reverting to tribal voting patterns, particularly in the case of New Democracy. Moreover, while Syriza ran what seemed to be an extremely well-organised campaign, its election posters in Athens in particular far outnumbering those of rival parties, it may be that the turnout for the radical left had reached its maximum possible extent.

As it is, the elites in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington are chortling with glee. Their candidates (the tweedledum and tweededee parties of New Democracy and Pasok) have won. Greece is no longer in danger of making a “disorderly” exit from the euro, thereby setting an ominous precedent for other larger eurozone nations such as Spain.  The pliant government about to be formed will be more than willing to inflict on the Greek people the savage austerity programme demanded by the troika of overseers from Brussels (the European Commission), Frankfurt (the European Central Bank) and Washington (the International Monetary Fund) that now police the Greek budget.

The austerity measures involve slashing the living standards of the Greek people by cutting pay and pensions, social security benefits and so on.  The meager funds left in the public coffers will not be used to alleviate the plight of the long-suffering Greek citizen. Rather, they will be exported to pay back loans and bailouts from international public creditors, such as the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as from international commercial banks.

Between them, New Democracy (129 seats) and Pasok (33 seats), whose policies are virtually identical, now command a majority of 162 seats in the new parliament. They are likely to form a coalition, with or without the participation of other parties.

While both parties are committed to implementing the externally-imposed austerity package to which they signed up under a previous coalition government, they will be hoping, for presentational purposes, that the Troika cut them some slack by alleviating the harshness of some of the measures contained in the package.

However, as we said in our post “Arsonists putting out fires” on 8 May 2012:

“Asking New Democracy or Pasok to rescue Greece from its current economic travails is like recruiting arsonists to put out fires.

The exclusive dominance of New Democracy and Pasok has resulted in a political duopoly that has exercised a stranglehold over Greek political life since the military dictatorship collapsed in 1974. When the electorate has tired of the one party, the other has automatically replaced it in government. The alternation in power of these two parties, however, has not resulted any significant change in government policy, as they both come from the same capitalist stable.

The current implosion of the Greek economy took place, accordingly, during a time when one or other of these parties was in power. It took place on their watch and under their eyes. Hence, they are the last people one might think of calling on to extract the country from the morass in which it is currently mired.

Moreover, both of these parties, happy to suck up to Greece’s international creditors, have endorsed the savage austerity packages exacted by the country’s international creditors. Better the Greek people suffer than have long faces in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington.”

——————

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Greece | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dust

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 Basel, 14 June 2012

ARTE POVERA ?

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Old Testament (Michael Gove Bible), Genesis 3.19

Peter Buggenhout seems to have taken this text to heart, for dust is the signature material that characterizes all this Belgian sculptor’s works.

We first encountered the Buggenhout oeuvre last April Fool’s Day at Paris’s Galerie Laurent Godin during the annual “Art Paris” fair staged under the sensational iron-and-glass dome of the Grand Palais just off the Champs- Elysées.

Now we come across him again at the stand of Düsseldorf’s Konrad Fischer Galerie at the 43rd annual international art fair which is currently being held (from 14 to 17 June) at Basel in Switzerland.

How to describe what you see when you hit upon a Buggenhout?

Impossible.  You just can’t do it.

It is appropriate then that the 2012 creation on display at the Konrad Fischer Galerie in Basel is entitled “The Blind leading the Blind”.

Actually, it might also be misleading to call it a creation.

Much of the work consists of ready-made “found” materials. Paper, steel rods, scrap metal, textile tape, plastic. However, according to Konrad Fischer’s Thomas Rieger, it is also the case that Buggenhout sometimes – but not always – refashions the materials he finds into shapes of his own imagining. Like any artist. Sometimes, also, he paints them or at least some of them. And, in any case, his creative imagination is at work when he assembles the whole thing into its final Gestalt.

It is then that the operation gets interesting.

Buggenhout buys boxes of dust from industrial cleaning firms.

Hands up how many of you knew that you can actually buy dust?

Most of us, if we think about dust at all, regard it as something we want to get rid of, usually by employing a vacuum cleaner.

They say, if you try hard enough, you can sell anything. Whatever it is, someone will buy it from you.

And so it turns out to be the case with common-0r-garden dust. Filth. Scum. Scuzz. Scunge.

Buggenhout is clearly in love with the stuff and will do anything to get his hands on it.

Because dust is the by far the outstanding feature of the sculptor’s work. The other materials he assembles are just a receptacle, a platform, nay an excuse, for the dust. It is the dust that dazzles you. It is the dust – thick layers of disgusting blackish grey dust – that hits you in the eye.

The exercise involved in applying the dust to the assembled materials is more complex than you might imagine. Dust is not normally applied. It just settles – on floors, on tables, on chairs, on window sills, on everything.

In Buggenhout’s case, however, we are talking about the creative application of dust.

The artist’s modus operandi is no secret.

Having bought the dust, he then has to rid it of harmful micro-organisms – in effect, to purify it. He does this by deep-freezing it. You can maybe think of one or two bizarre uses for domestic deep-freezers – occasionally murderers use them to stash away the corpses of their victims – but deep-freezing dust to sanitize it surely takes the biscuit.

Using fixatives, Buggenhout then applies the dust to the assembled materials in accordance with the dictates of his imagination .

And hey prest0! There you have it – a finished Buggenhout sculpture in pristine condition.

As we said above, it is impossible to describe a Buggenhout – think only of a shapeless heap of dingy ramshackle debris such as you might find on a bomb site or in the unkempt grounds of a dilapidated disused factory – but it can be measured.

“The Blind leading the Blind” measures 297 x 83 x 50 cm.

And, of course, it can be priced. This is after all a market, not an exhibition. The price being quoted yesterday for the Buggenhout in question was 35 000 euros. A snip in terms of headline Basel sale prices.

We have one practical query.

Most works of art need to be dusted down from time to time……….

We confidently predict that Buggenhout is the next big thing – post-Tàpies, post-Kounellis, post-Hirst. Buy now – while stocks last!

London’s Saatchi Gallery seems to think along the same lines. In 2011 they exhibited Buggenhout in a show entitled “Shape Of Things to Come”.

Here is what they said about him.

“At first glance, Peter Buggenhout’s large fuzzy masses, seemingly covered in thick layers of dust, look like readymade objects, rubble found in the aftermath of a building site, an archaeological dig, or at the scene of a cataclysm – an earthquake, explosion or other force of violent destruction (natural disasters or terrorist attacks?)….. Buggenhout’s sculpture raises questions around the subjects artists choose as their models and the strong influence of projection on the way art is perceived…..”

They go on to quote Buggenhout himself:

“I consider my works as analogies. All these analogies bear the consoling thought that they were created by human hands, that they are viable and bring viability that is hardly, if at all, bearable into a chilled, inhumanly large world. These analogies do not operate within the standard artistic norm because they do not intend to pass judgment, preach or pass on emotions. They simply are, there is more than meets the eye, after all.”

Buggenhout was born in 1963 at Dendermonde. He lives and works in Ghent.

The Konrad Fischer Galerie is holding an exhibition of Buggenhout’s works in Düsseldorf as from 7 September 2012.

——————

You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question(3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich(6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices(2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat(31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——————

Posted in Art, Belgium, Switzerland | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment