Dec
20
Last summer I was sitting at the swimming pool to keep an eye on my kids when I spotted these two teenagers. The girl was about 15 years old and she obviously had grown real fast lately. Her arms and legs were long and skinny and she was having trouble to figure out what to do with them. It was clear she was in love but had no idea how to handle this “new” feeling. I was really moved by her appareance and it was fascinating to witness her growing but still shaky self-consciousness.
This fascination with adolescents in search of their identity I also found in the photo’s of Rineke Dijkstra. Especially her magisterial series of Beach Portraits: austere, frontal shots of young people on beaches in the US, The Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Gabon and the Ukraine. She concentrated on the moment that a pose just begins to form, or is just being abandoned. Hesitancy and uncertainty are visible and refer to the existential loneliness of adolescents.
Rineke Dijkstra tends to work in series, concentrating on individual portraits. She focuses on people in a transitional stage of their life, such as these adolescents and pre-adolescents on the beach in her ‘Beach’ series or women after giving birth in ‘Mothers’, and new recruits in ‘Israeli Soldiers’. Her subjects stand facing the camera against a minimal background and it’s this simplicity which encourages us to direct all our attention towards the isolated person and leaves us moved and a bit uncomfortable by witnessing their vulnerability.
Website: rinekedijkstra.net
Dec
01
Ten friends having a meal on ten consecutive days in field in the Dutch countryside. Each day the friends, the tables and the food were shifted closer to the horizon. The photographs of the ten meals were assembled into a single image of a large party. Each friend appears ten times in the photograph, each time in a different outfit. The colours are carefully balanced: the outfits in the background are more brightly coloured than those in the foreground so that they attract equal attention and because of the expanse of blue sky there are no blue outfits.
Hundred different tailors in Beijing made their outfits, not because this made the outfits more affordable but to show that the real world is at least ten times larger that that of the friends in the field. Each of us in the West is probably connected with thousands of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Indonesian and Indian workers through the products with which we fill our lives.
By being multiplied by ten, each person in the photograph has been rendered an anonymous figure. However, the magazine ‘Ten To One’ introduces us personally to the hundred tailors behind the outfits. A hundred shop fronts, workshops, outfits and tailors were photographed. Even the labels sewn into the outfits and the sales receipts are given a place in the magazine.
It made me wonder how many people are there in my closet …
Artists: Zijlmans & Jongenelis
Website: www.tentoone.nl
Dec
01
Paris 28/11/2009 Galerie Magda Danysz
A life size statue giving the three fingered Serbian salute on a pedestal strewn with empty beer cans, while on one wall words in blinking lights proclaimed “No one like me”, pictures from the artist’s friends with the words “My friends are better artists than yours” were scrawled on the wall and photographs of glamorous looking people were presented with the statement, “My friends are better looking than yours”.
This installation about the ego of the artist presenting himself as a hero in a statue made of gold and the large format paintings and laser cut sculpture are all part of Serbian/French artist Vuk Vidor’s second stage of his American Quartet series.
His using of quickly identifiable elements, like the American comic book style and pop art, to define a new situation on the world’s political and power landscape is like a sugarcoating for a bitter reality.
Like kryptonite makes Superman helpless and weak, so are politics today making our world fragile and vulnerable. Vidor’s super-heroes are pathetic and deflated, dejected by the very system they fight to protect. Their conversation bubbles show no words anymore only silence and Captain America is a resurrected Atlas, no longer able to carry the weight of the American dream…
Nov
10
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Words: Haruki Murakami (from Kafka on the Shore)
Art: Ori Gersht
Oct
03
“I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in
Poppa, don’t you fence me in”
Looking at the soft and tender, yet strong and powerful fence from the Dutch design house “Demakersvan“ this Bing Crosby song almost immediately popped in my head. This fence looks so wonderful but make no mistake it’s still a fence, meant to lock you up, like a jealous lover.
Still it is great to see how something which was meant purely functional can also be beautiful. Rejecting the throwaway nature and sameness in modern production, trying to retrieve that uniqueness that once existed among our things. At the same time, also try to balance the practice with possible industrial manufacture, so as to make the products available to the public.
Website: www.demakersvan.com
Aug
15
They say that just before you enter heaven you’ll see your life pass before your eyes. Usually imagined as a fast-forward flip book of sentimental still images: birth, parents, school, holiday, first girlfriend, first sex, job, wife, kids, etc. and all the little things in between, summating a totality of meagre existence in a split second flash.
Yeondoo Jung, however, is a man who likes to take a bit of time with things, savour every precious moment, sit back and enjoy the ride.
Documentary Nostalgia is a one-take one-chance-only performance shot in real time. No stops, no pauses. This is Jung’s magnificent autobiography. Birthday party clown tricks, slapstick humour, cartoon exaggeration, and the clumsy ’special effects’ of silent movie cliche; Jung draws from all the low-fi mysteries of childhood delight to reconstruct his own reality.
Not as it was, but as he prefers to remember it, a make-shift mythology in its conception, wide-eyed, innocent, and confounding.
He offers the possibility of not one existence, but many: to be urban and rural, contemporary or ancient, Eastern or Western, to be anywhere or anything at all. Everyone can do this simply by daring to dream.
www.yeondoojung.com
Jul
01
Meter-high heads in baroque style, men with streaming locks and women with expressive faces, scattered around as fragments in space. They evoke associations of a battle having been fought between the gods and the titans, the remains of which have now become visible.
The work shows a conflict, an inner battle, but also the result of aggression; figures are tied together, they seem to be startled, sometimes wounded, and we occasionally see fragments of bodies indicating that the battle can also be fought at the level of life and death.
With Javier Marín, art is emotion, an emotion that balances on the edge of the shocking reality of today full of fear and horror on one hand and a world of ideal beauty on the other, the edge between the vigour of youth and the decline of old-age.
Website: www.javiermarin.com
Jul
01
The street where I live used to be quite a boring street until Florentijn Hofman decided to do something about that. He applied a layer of only 2 micron of blue paint onto one of the most unseen blocks of houses in my street and it became Rotterdam’s most photographed one. His redecorating made people start looking again at what was and maybe even think about what they will get in return.
Florentijn Hofman is not an average gallery-exhibited artist. The world is a playground and he likes to play. A giant rubber duck, too big to fit into anyone’s bath and impossible to ignore, floating in the Loire river in France, a 12 meter tall thatched musk rat reclining against a life-sized cottage and his latest: super sized stuffed animals.. All integrating, intriguing and interactive installations. To amaze and make life more fun.
*The blue houses in my street are unfortunately demolished, my street is now boring again.
Website: www.florentijnhofman.nl
Jun
10
I met a lot of interesting, talented and funny people lately. They are located in different countries all over the world. We follow each other’s activities, we share dreams and thoughts, we make plans and we even party together …….
And it’s all happening in a virtual world.
I never expected to find myself chatting with complete “strangers” but here I am. And I’m truly enjoying it. Only together with these new friends a new problem has entered my life. Not being used to the virtual existence I’m getting frustrated by the inability of actually getting together. Thinking about that it occurred to me that it could easily happen that I ran across one of my virtual friends without knowing.
It could be one of these.
Simon Høgsberg captured 178 people over 20 days standing from the same spot on a railroad bridge in Berlin. Then he put the photos together in what could be the world’s largest panorama (100 meters, yes meters, wide!).
website: www.simonhoegsberg.com
Jun
02
When I was in high school there was this group of kids whom I considered to be really cool and I desperately wanted to join this group. So I asked my parents for the same (expensive) sneakers they wore convinced that would do the trick. My mum then bought me the cheap fakes, which off course were very wrong and obviously I never made it to the cool kids.
So I started to present myself as as a “not wanting to wear ridiculously expensive sneakers original person” and joined another group. Like most people I was looking for a common language to express my individuality… by dressing alike
It’s this universal human desire to conform that’s led to Exactitudes
Photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have traveled the world to identify and document modern tribes, focusing on groups as diverse as Brazilian beach honeys in matching bikinis and Dutch grannies in identical beige raincoats. Whether the catalyst to fit in is created by class, gender, rebellion or other faces of identity, each individual subject in a series is posed and shot exactly the same as the others. When placed together in groups, it’s the ubiquitous style code that’s immediately apparent.
Note: looking at Exactitudes may cost you a lot of (fun) time.
