Imagine yourself entering a dark space, directed towards a quietly swishing revolving door. There are signs everywhere warning you’re about to enter a “pressurized area” so if you’re pregnant, have breathing problems, or some curious disease: GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE, YOU’RE GONNA DIE. What do you think is going to happen.
Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan at the Grand Palais in Paris is probably the closest you ever get to experience how Jonah felt when swallowed by a whale. Instead of standing in an exhibition hall looking at an object, you’re in the object itself, a mixture between a whale’s stomach and a massive womb, with no sense of the surrounding environment. Your only connection with the outside world are the web-like patterns of the Grand Palais’s roof over the rounded surfaces. It’s surreal, kind of bizarre, and very beautiful.
Passing back out into the entrance area, you head through another door into the body of the hall where you’re hit by brilliant sunlight and overwhelmed by a 376,700 ft² dark purple globular monster, the exterior of the space you’ve just been in, which appears about to roll over you and makes you feel truly tiny. Kapoor really gets the scale of the Grand Palais. He didn’t fill the entire space so you can get a clearer perspective standing away from it. The mint green iron against the dark purple is beautiful as are the shadows the sun creates through the glass and iron slats of the roof.
These two very different, very challenging environments fulfilled Kapoor’s aim of creating “a contemplative and poetic experience”. There’s nothing more to say.
One of the most impressive exhibitions I saw during my recent trip to Paris was the Dreamland exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and the installation that really hit me was Malachi Farrell’s shocking “Nothing Stops a New Yorker”, a rich mix of menace and absurdity, borrowing from Arte Povera, Dada, Jean Tinguely and sound art.
What you get is artistic fireworks. Buildings standing in the middle of heaps of trash, suggesting the decline of our infrastructure, outfitted with cardboard arms, activated by a motion detector, which also triggers a two-part, high-decibel soundtrack. The first audio is an aerobics session, with the cheery voice of the instructor orchestrating the flow of the movement as the sculptures raise and lower their arms. The workout is interrupted by panicked news reports from September 11, 2001, along with terror-alert broadcasts and excerpts from Public Enemy songs.
Malachi Farrell’s complex installations link light and sound to the mechanical choreography of his invented objects. Their tinkered and handcrafted characteristics reinforce the dark humor and satire suggestive of circus and street theatre while confronting us with political, social, and ecological issues, creating uneasiness and prompt us to act.
“Imagine the Iranian art couple Farhad Moshiri and Shirin Aliabadi stepping out of an air plane into the surprisingly WiFi-enabled aisle of Tehran international airport. Struggling to digest the single serving of in-flight chicken salad, they follow the signs to the baggage claim. Because of the zero tolerance drug/alcohol policy of their country, there is another checkpoint after the baggage claim for a possible random check. The x-ray monitor detects chocolate bars, detergents, cereal boxes, a package of some unknown powder, and more. The inspectors immediately jump and stop the couple. A bearded officer in dark green uniform and brown slippers asks them to take their luggage and follow him to the small inspection room on the side – needless to say, not so politely. They put their suitcases on the table that he shows them and he starts going through their stuff. They ask him to be more careful and he gets angry and starts throwing their belongings out of the suitcase. He unwraps the chocolate bar that says Tolerating on the package, opens the Ask Why cereal box, empties a bottle of washing liquid that reads American.
Most of the pieces of the series called “Operation Supermarket” are destroyed by the custom officer in front of the creator’s eyes. After finishing the inspection, they are free to go. Then the officer takes a sip out of a bottle of mineral water with a Kit-Kat for a break”
“Thousands of bird species cut out from the New York Times move as a coloured swarm cloud through small alleyways and over the pavement. With New York City as a decor on the background, they map the route of the wind.”
It has been really nice weather for quite a while now but make no mistake; I live in a country where it actually rains a lot. Like most people here I hate rain! It seems some Dutch designers got inspired by that sentiment.
First Gerwin Hoogendoorn came up with the SENZ, a truly revolutionary umbrella. Now, Frederik Molenschot & Susanne Happle introduced their Solid Poetry tiles in Milan, the design only shows itself when it rains. Then, the water exposes leaves and flowers in the material of the tile, changing the environment in a surprising way and leaving a wonderful pavement that literally grows under your feet.
Sometimes I forget about an artist for a while. So when I rediscovered the Namaiki book in my libary I googeled them to see what they’re up to these days.
What a pleasant surprise!
Namaiki which means naughty or rebel in Japanese is actually graphic designer David Duval Smith and architect Michael Frank. They’ve been doing insanely colourful objects and installations, mad graphics and psychedelic videos since the mid-’90s.
And now they added another level to their fun and light-hearted installations by switching literally to more natural grounds.
Want to know more about their inspiring thoughts as to why ending up working with living things is just the most interesting thing to do…, here is a great interview with the Namaiki Designers published in PingMag.
Actually I didn’t know much about Chinese calligraphy techniques but since this work (HAN) caught my attention I did a little research. So I learned that to understand Chinese calligraphy first thing you have to know that in Chinese society script has a close connection with language and art.
There was a huge difference. In Western society we see the words and not the writing. But words have a sound, a movement, they even a texture and there was André Kneib who made this all visible to me.
Starting with a single Chinese character inspired by a feeling or experience, he infuses traditionally monochromatic characters with color, using lyrical abstraction coupled with calligraphy techniques
His characters come to life because of the varying pressure and movement of his brushstrokes, expressing emotions and physical engagement and capture the inner essence of the word.
Helen Levitt (New York City) American photographer, 1913 – 2009
Inspired by her mentors and friends, Walker Evans and Henri Cartier Bresson, Helen Levitt made – for most of the 1940s – black and white photos of children in Spanish Harlem in New York. Her portraits of young children are among the strongest in the history of photography and set the tone for a new documentary style of American photography.
She also was a pioneer in the area of color photographs. Her photos are visual poems in which shape, color and movement play a major role. In 2008 Levitt received the SPECTRUM prize, the Internationaler Preis für Fotografie der Stiftung Niedersachsen, which was accompanied by a new book:Fotografien 1937-1991.
‘Super Flat artists create their own version of popular culture to draw attention to the dominance of media, entertainment and consumption,’村上隆
Takashi Murakami, has made his final pit-stop over in Spain at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao after stops in Los Angeles, New York and Germany.With a complete selection of over 90 works in different media he has created a dizzying world filled with mood flowers, singing moss, magic mushrooms and morphing creatures and he didn’t stop at the museum. So imagine an entire city packaged with Murakami’s bright palette of pop, the flatness of traditional Japanese art and some Surrealist movement elements.
Now I’m only waiting for a jellyfish eyed plain to take me there.
I can remove two huge desires from my wish-list: I will visit Berlin and I will see the Pictopia exhibition this month. What a great combination: Berlin transformed into a wild, daring and stylish character biotope with no limits to any media or style.Cool exhibits with giant puppets, hidden love shacks, a koala bear peepshow. All made by artists who remix and sample, condense the surreal and uncanny, inflate all proportions and stage bizarre rituals to introduce their characters.
