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When it comes to contemporary art, the European city most likely to break all barriers and offend all senses (which, in turn, gives birth to the next trend) is…the city of London. Only in London will an artist—in this case Martin Creed, who won the coveted Turner Prize in 1991—be awarded a prize for exhibiting pieces of crumbled paper, half-opened doors and a room full of balloons in which visitors can play. And let’s not forget Tracy Emin’s soiled bed and Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. This is the English way of letting off steam while attracting an audience in a most spectacular manner. This explains, to a large degree, London’s influence on contemporary art institutions around the world, where waking up the brain-dead with entertainment is now of paramount concern.
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The Cool and Unusual: Art Tripping In Europe – Edward Rubin
London
When it comes to contemporary art, the European city most likely to break all barriers and offend all senses (which, in turn, gives birth to the next trend) is…the city of London.
Only in London will an artist—in this case Martin Creed, who won the coveted Turner Prize in 1991—be awarded a prize for exhibiting pieces of crumbled paper, half-opened doors and a room full of balloons in which visitors can play. And let’s not forget Tracy Emin’s soiled bed and Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. This is the English way of letting off steam while attracting an audience in a most spectacular manner. This explains, to a large degree, London’s influence on contemporary art institutions around the world, where waking up the brain-dead with entertainment is now of paramount concern. It also explains the recent flood of English curators and gallery/museum directors to our shores. It’s all in the accent, you know.
Having weathered the tumultuous week of the Frieze, Zoo, Scope and Year 06 art fairs this past fall—London’s answers to New York’s Armory Show and Miami’s Art Basel—the city of London is still awash with exhibitions. Currently drawing crowds to the Tate Modern is Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s five tubular slides, which can be entered from the upper levels of the museum.
Desperate to experience a roller coaster, people are lining up for a chance to hurtle from the top of the museum to the bottom. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the “inner spectacle” experienced by the sliders themselves—the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety as you descend. Also playing around town are Gilbert & George at Tate Modern, Hogarth at Tate Britain and Renoir’s Landscapes at the National Gallery.
The Kate Show
If “The Kate Show,” based on the life of über model Kate Moss, were to open in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, it would be roundly dismissed as a mere trifle. Here in Europe—more precisely at the Foam Photography Museum, housed in a beautiful old home on the Keizergracht canal in free-for-all Amsterdam—“The Kate Show” is considered more truffle than trifle. Like the presentation of minimal art at Dia Beacon, which allows for much walking and where thinking space is bolstered by great lighting, the beauty of this show is in its simplicity. We are not hit on the head with high analysis, but given just enough kinky visuals to playfully form our own story.
Curated by Oliver Zahm, the director of the hot and happening Purple Journal (a French magazine based in Paris), and New York artist Rita Ackermann, “The Kate Show” uses photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, sculptures and installations to document the model’s cocaine-rumored career. We get some 15 years of Moss—both nude and clothed, pregnant and not—as seen through the eyes of the countless photographers who’ve turned their lens on her since fashion photographers and artists such as Peter Lindebergh and Richard Prince made Moss a household name as soon as she was discovered at age 15. While the walls and floors of all four rooms were covered with images of Kate in various permutations, the pièce de résistance was Rob Pruitt’s humorous, telling and self-explanatory, Cocaine Buffet: a 16-foot-long, plexi-glass mirror covered in a white powder.
Biennale Austria
As the saying goes, location is everything. Nowhere is this truer than at the Biennale Austria, which is situated high in the breathtaking Austrian Alps in an old steel mill resembling an ancient castle—complete with a moat-like stream running alongside. The Biennale Austria is one of the few bastions of liberalness in the entire right-wing province of Corinthia. As such, they have been forced to play David to Vienna’s Goliath, which considers itself the “art capital” of the country; if there is to be any Austrian Biennale, it belongs in Vienna, so Vienna believes. The fact that Jorge Haider, the extreme rightist known for his praise of Nazism and Saddam Hussein, is the governor of Corinthia, does not sit well with the slightly more liberal Vienna. To kill two birds with one stone, on the opening day of the biennale the national government lowered railroad crossing signs, blocking the two main roads leading up to the biennale mean spiritedly and forcing visitors to take the long way around. Not to be daunted, the people still came, and the little biennale, after taking a deep breath, celebrated its second edition.
This year, the biennale, founded by Prof. Harry Jeschofnig in 2002 and run on a shoestring budget, invited 65 artists from 20 countries to exhibit their work. Flawlessly curated by Harry’s son Michael, the exhibition looked like a million dollars—proving that money isn’t everything. While nearly half of the artworks on display leaned towards the mundane, the other half included a great many highly accomplished and surprisingly innovative, eye-catching works. Strangely enough, the color pink ruled the day: A twelve-foot pink resin, nude statue of Picasso by Romanian artist Virgilius Moldovan guarded the exhibit entrance and Dutch sculptor Jackie Sleper’s stunning, mythological white porcelain deer, standing on a bed of pink porcelain roses with an arrow in its mouth, proudly overlooked the main floor while Catalina Swimmer, Carole Feuerman’s sculpture of a beautiful woman emerging from the water, overlooked the café area.
My personal favorite, and the jurors’ favorite, too (it won the First Prize of 2,000 Euros), was Vietnamese artist Tran Trong Vu’s interactive installation. Here, we come face-to-face with the images of Bush, Blair and Kim Jong II painted on hanging strips of plastic, which visitors had to wade through in order to reach the next room. Standing among pink flowers, these politicians appear to camouflage their patently false bromides.
Open 2006
“Open 2006,” the highly regarded international exhibition of sculptures and installations, is thrillingly situated on the beautiful island of Venice Lido—where the Adriatic Sea and the Venice Lagoon meet. This yearly thematic exhibition, founded by chief curator Paolo De Grandis, takes place at the same time as the Venice Film Festival: when the thrill-seeking crowds, not to mention the scores of international press members, descend upon Lido. “Open 2006” is essentially a walking tour with map supplied and a wonderful illustrated catalogue (if you buy one). This year, for the first time in its nine-year history, the curators chose to exhibit the work of current and recently graduated art students from the Macao Museum of Art, the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, alongside local and internationally established artists.
The magical tour actually begins immediately after disembarking from the vaporetto (water buses) onto the Piazzale St. Maria Elisabetta, when Swiss artist Alessandro Lo Monaco’s 12-foot-high, aluminum, Plexiglas and neon-constructed sculpture, Homeland Security Advisory Signal, confronts the viewer. Blurring the distinction between art, advertising and propaganda, this deceptively simple, post-modern totem pole, color-coded to indicate the likelihood of a terrorist attack, chillingly reminds us that we’re still under siege—caught, if you will, between the mechanisms of both government and terrorists. A few yards away, on the Piazzetta Lepanto, the mood switches from troubled thoughts to the pointed humor of Bench, Alex Bellan’s 14-foot-high, impossible to sit on, white park bench.
While most of the sculptures and installations are highly inventive (and, of course, weather-resistant) it is the surprising placement of each work—be it overlooking the beach, decorating the lushly planted walkways along the Lungomare G. Marconi (the island’s main street) or holding court in the lobbies and on the porticos of Lido’s most chic hotels—that sends our expectations over the top. It seems that our mood is changed by each successive work. Even before we arrive at Blue Moon, the combination entrance to the public beach/viewing deck, Giacomo Roccon’s Fallen Angel, a realistic, life-sized woman with long blond hair, stops us in our tracks; securely chained, wrapped in gauze and gently swaying from the steel beams of the deck, this cadaver looks frightfully real.
Further on down the road, John Henry’s Blue Rhapsody, arguably the only purely abstract sculpture in this exhibition, lightens our mood as we contemplate a refreshing medley of brightly painted, blue aluminum boards that resemble, in their assemblage, children’s Pick-Up-Sticks just before they hit the ground. Standing between the Hotel Westin Excelsior and the beach is Resi Girardello’s Danae’s Oracle, a startling, 14-foot-high, intricately hand-woven, wire bustier. Based on the Greek myth of the same name, this metaphorical, double-edged stunner—it shapes beauty while holding it prisoner—is also a cage that viewers can enter. Being the only interactive work of art in the exhibition, Girardello’s cage, a lovely and fun way to end our walk, and this article, became the exhibition’s prime photo-op stop.
