GEOMETRIE VARIABLE

Extracted from the exelent picture’ blog Them Thangs

WOLFGANG TILLMANS AT SERPENTINE

26 June- 19 September at Serpentine gallery (London)

The Serpentine Gallery presents Wolfgang Tillmans’ first major exhibition in London since 2003. Conceived by the artist for the Serpentine Gallery, the exhibition will present figurative and abstract work from the last ten years.

Over the past 20 years, Tillmans has redefined photography and the way it is presented. Known in the early 1990s for his seemingly casual images of the world he inhabited, his work reassessed photographic conventions and reflected the culture and identity politics of the time, capturing the fragility of human life and focusing on everyday objects. His work has always engaged with portraiture, landscape, and still life, but more recently Tillmans has turned to a deeper exploration of abstraction, and has pushed the boundaries and definitions of the photographic form.

The wide-ranging themes in Tillmans’ photographs are recon- figured with each site-specific installation. In this new exhibition, explorations into abstraction sit alongside a renewed focus on the figurative – a focus that is increasingly informed by recent colour-saturated works and experi- ments with process. Referring to his approach to installation, Tillmans has commented that in creating these ‘constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences. Multiple singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room’.

Tillmans continually challenges photographic practice by playing with exhibition methods, often pinning or taping his work to gallery walls, building study tables that resemble museological vitrines, or creating wall-based cases for selected works. Each exhibition is a renegotiation and rearrangement of material, ideas and subjects. For each installation, he investigates the process of exhibition and image-making, intuitively reflecting the politics of our shared contemporary society. Tillmans’ images capture the essence of a moment, and the pictures and installations that the artist has created over the last two decades are an alchemical blend of detachment and engagement.

The Serpentine Gallery exhibition reflects the artist’s acute sensitivity to the world around him, his ongoing fascination with colour, and his conceptual engagement with the technical processes of photography. His delicate yet challenging images capture the distinctive energetic balance between beauty and subversion that Tillmans has long embraced.

Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. In 1995, his work was exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and in 2000 he won the Turner Prize. His most recent solo exhibitions include Freedom from the Known at P.S.1, New York in 2006 (which toured North America), and Lighter at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin in 2008. In 2009 he was included in Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Tillmans lives and works in London.

Extracted from Serpentine Gallery

HEROIN STAMP PROJECT

The Social Art Collective is proud to present Heroin Stamp Project, an exhibition focusing on the branding of heroin in New York City. At once beautiful and unsettling, the images in the exhibit illustrate a complex narrative around public health and preventable consequences of injection drug use.

In the New York City drug trade, as in many enterprises, marketing and branding are key. Dealers distribute individual hits of heroin in glassine (a durable, translucent paper) packets, which are stamped with eye-catching insignia made up of colorful words and images. As individual branding agents, each stamp carries multiple layers of connotation. The designs tend to glorify the high (“Monster Power”), address the mortality of addiction (“Last Shot”), or draw upon pop culture references for notoriety (“Obama”). For decades, these stamps have inspired underground
brand loyalties that walk a thin line between the ultimate high and the last high; signaling a drugʼs potency, the most popular stamps often contain hits that trigger overdoses.

Collected from New York City streets over the course of the past five years, Heroin Stamp Project will present over 100 distinct stamped heroin packets. The exhibition is comprised of large-scale prints depicting these seductive, yet sinister symbols in startling detail. Blown up to monumental proportions, these images become confrontational, insinuating the complex
nature of drug use, from the market dynamics of suppliers and dealers, to the motivation and histories behind individual users. The gritty, torn glassine edge presented in each sharply rendered image imparts a visual trace of the drugʼs consumption. Each stampʼs graphic is nuanced by the confluence of highly charged words that accompany imagery or symbols assimilated from the domain of the everyday. “Game Over” borrows from the realm of the electronic videogame; “LIFE” appropriates the visual language of mainstream magazines; and “Notorious” nods to popular music. By juxtaposing the culturally familiar with the socially taboo, these loaded images trigger questions about the public policies and stigma that shape addiction and disease. Nearly 2,000 stamps arranged to represent one userʼs yearly consumption will chart a visual map of addiction on the gallery walls.

As GOOD Magazine wrote in their review of the project, “it’s a fascinating look at things one doesn’t otherwise get to see (which can make for great art), but the project also hopes to call attention to the public health issues surrounding drug use, and the associated health care costs that could be mitigated by things like clean-needle programs.”

Of all reported AIDS cases in the U.S. 25% have been transmitted through injection drug use. An estimated 75% of injection drug users are infected with Hepatitis C. The exhibit will leverage potent images to bring the health crisis among users to the public forum. Through this intimate, visual confrontation, a population that is often disregarded will have the opportunity to be humanized. Audiences are compelled to consider the problem of heroin addiction from a humanitarian and public health perspective often absent from public debate. Heroin Stamp Project draws its funding from community and grassroots sources. The project has been made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Significant funds were also raised through community members on the innovative startup website, Kickstarter, leveraging social networking to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors.

A percentage of all proceeds from the sale of the pieces will benefit the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center (http://www.leshrc.org/), a community based not for profit committed to serving the diverse needs of the Lower East Side with tools and resources necessary to meet the challenges posed by HIV/AIDS and hepatitis c.

Extracted from White Box

ANRI SALA / CREATING SPAGE WHERE THERE APPEARS TO BE NONE

Conversion/Inversion (June 12th - June 23rd) at ACC (Berlin)

Conversion/Inversion (July 1st- July 15th)

“Creating Space Where There Appears to Be None” is divided into two parts, where the works are proposed as outposts in space between common and unpredictable pairs: fore- and background, permanence and exception, corruption and abstraction.”

Conversion

One could almost imagine the mechanical hum of the focus ring – its automatic mode jammed in vain attempts to negotiate the depth with the surface. The mind, too, zooms its lens beyond the infinity mark in an attempt to extract space.

Photographs of a photograph, the botanic garden doubles as the backdrop for a newfound effect, an after-image of disco residue. The sound of the snare drum also conceals a hidden layer – inaudible low-frequency sounds incite vibrations on its skin and the rat-a-tat of drumsticks. Like a footnote without a note, the drumsticks enact the vestiges of an unseen dance.

 Inversion

“Through the rabbit hole we freefall into an in-between dimension to unfold the compressed space underlying a doodle (foreground) over the papers of a politician (background). We have put ourselves in an inane position by looking at the foreground through the background, in fact, reversing our perception of the drawing. A slight imbalance ensues, a tipping only legible to the mind and yet to be articulated. The concealed urgency in the background indicates a ripeness of the underlying issues: tied up in a vicious circle, the content of democracy has been placed at the mercy of its syntax.”  Anri Sala

About Change, Studio was initiated by Christiane zu Salm’s About Change, Collection. The aim of the About Change, Collection has always been to go beyond the normal situations in its exhibitions and convergences between people, in order to provide the possible intersections between different worlds. Change in conception and perception can only be triggered, when the normal ways of thinking are undermined. About Change, Studio provides a space to a certain artistas a location for production and recording.

With Anri Sala, About Change, Studio invited an artist whose works have been shown in numerous exhibitions all over the world, such as ARC in Paris, Tate Gallery in London and recently at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Miami. Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana. He lives and works in Berlin. His highly distinctive videos, performances and installations deal with hidden relations and different layers of reality.

 ”Creating Space Where There Appears to Be None” is the title and the topic of Sala’s project, which will be shown in two parts at About Change, Studio. Both parts – called “Conversion” and “Inversion” respectively – deal with possibilities of change in perception and awareness. For the Studio, Anri Sala decided not to show only his works, but rather to make room for others. With the advent of the recent crisis of democracy in Albania, he decided to involve his friend Edi Rama, the Mayor of Tirana who is also an artist himself. For the exhibition he has involved others to engage with Rama, namely, the art historian Michael Fried, the artist Philippe Parreno, and the philosopher Marcus Steinweg. With the help of these protagonists, Sala employs the Studio as a vibrant location for recording, replaying, and the convergence of different points of view.

Extracted from ACC

CIMITERO DRAWINGS BY SCOTT TRELEAVEN

June 5-July 10 at Marc Selwyn (Los Angeles)

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present a series of new drawings by Paris-based, Canadian artist Scott Treleaven.

The drawings are the result of a 3-month period spent exploring the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.

How to name what is unnamable? How to present a vision of that which is, by its nature, immaterial?

This is the purpose as well as the paradox of these drawings.

Treleaven began by photographing the cemetery statues. Forty-seven of these 35mm photographs were recently been assembled into a book, published by Printed Matter.

Then: A further transmutation. The artist asks the dead to speak. To rise again in brightness. To again breath fire.

Around the fragments, above and against them, explode patches of handmade color, and a fine but frenzied line that knots up and congeals only to then expand into wide circles and jagged stripes and drips.

On one level, these marks of Treleaven’s hand refute those mute markers of death, the fragments of photographed statues: the handmade instead of the mechanical; color instead of grey; motion rather than paralysis; and so on.

The orchestration of such contrasts no doubt accounts for much of these drawings’ power.

Still, it is only the beginning. As in any mystical system—or even faux-mystical system, which questions its own plausibility—there must always be levels of meaning, and orders of initiation. It is no surprise to find, over time, that the Cimitero drawings complicate (on an intellectual level) and simplify (on an spiritual one).

In another time, another place, there would have been names for all this: words as codes and codes that hide stranger and more potent names.1 Treleaven, being tactful, remains silent, like his statues. But in this silence, and right there in the drawings, hide intimations of immortality.

- David Lewis

1 Cf. The Great God Pan; various Sufi mystics; Hercules Powder Company; (a Book of the Dead); “Every man and every woman is a Star;” Performance; “One or Several Wolves” and “The Wolf-Man;” blue hydrangeas; Rabbit’s Moon; eyeball the size of the world, etc.

Scott Treleaven attended York University, Ontario College of Art and Design and University of Toronto. He exhibits internationally and his work has been featured at P.S.1, New York, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, The Montreal Biennial, among others. An accomplished filmmaker, his films have been screened at Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Independent Film Channel. He currently lives and works in Paris.

Extracted from Marc Selwyn Fine Art

ANN DEMEULEMEESTER: MALE RETROSPECTIVE

American photographer Erik Madigan Heck has carved a sure path through the cultural spheres of art, fashion, and film in the past decade – having graduated Parsons School of Design and going on to found Nomenus Quarterly, a niche visual product that is part online magazine, part printed art project. His selective eye and accomplished technical prowess have seen him cross paths with many of the world’s greatest fashion designers, influential artists and institutions to produce the nine past editions of Nomenus.

In the lead up to his tenth magazine (released in September this year), we present these archive images from Nomenus Nº7, entitled “Ann Demeulemeester: Male Retrospective, 1996-2009″. This selection of his stunning black & white photographs is chosen from a wider portfolio that will be exhibited in collaboration with Ann Demeulemeester in Antwerp this year.

Erik’s photographs capture the brooding quality of Ann’s menswear coupled with an unbridled youthful spirit. The bright, sunny images were shot in Mourning Park, New York, and break traditional barriers of fashion imagery, with liberal use of movement, unconventional framing and an inate human connection with the subjects. Styled by Emily Barnes, the models wear a mix of garments from across the Demeulemeester archive – with dramatic woolen capes and jackets, long white shirting, heavy leather boots and a myriad of hats, scarves and other subtly embellished accessories.

Erik Madigan Heck will be shooting Super 8mm film to document Haider Ackermann’s Pitti Immagine event in Florence this week, exclusively for Style.com and for a special feature in Nomenus Quarterly Nº10. Keep reading as A BLOG catches up with Erik shortly to discuss his photography, his magazine and inspiring beauty.

Extracted from A magazine

ANTONY GORMLEY / TEST SITES

3 Jun—10 Jul 2010 at White Cube (London)

White Cube Mason’s Yard is pleased to present a new exhibition by Antony Gormley. The artist has created a major new site-specific installation and a new series of cast iron blockwork sculptures.

Engaging our mobility, Gormley considers how time acts on objects and how objects act on us.

In the lower ground-floor gallery, Gormley will exhibit a new installation of Breathing Room III the third and largest in this series of works which contain and implicate the viewer as the figure in a shifting ground.

As a physical manifestation of the gallery, Breathing Room III, is made from 15 interconnecting photo-luminescent ‘space frames’, the total volume of which is equal to that of the internal gallery space.

Time and light are the principal materials of the work. Breathing Room III encourages the viewer to enter into and interact with a defined sculptural space, where intense bursts of light interrupt complete darkness, unexpectedly jolting the experience from one of quiet meditation to acute interrogation.

A new series of sculptural works will populate the ground-floor gallery, furthering the artist’s investigation of the human body and its relationship to the built world. These new, massively extended block works use an architectonic language of stacking, propping and cantilever to suggest a tension which is indicative of our urban-bound human condition.

Antony Gormley was born in 1950 in London, England, where he lives and works. He has participated in major group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986), Documenta VIII, Kassel, Germany (1987) and the Sydney Biennale (2006). Solo exhibitions include The Fourth Plinth Project (2009), Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso, Mexico City (2009), Galleria Continua, Beijing (2009), Kunsthall Rotterdam, Netherlands (2008), The Hayward, London (2007), ICA, Singapore (2005), Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2004), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England (2003), and the National History Museum, Beijing, China (2003). He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994.

Extracted from White Cube

RINEKE DIJKSTRA AT MARIAN GOODMAN

RINEKE DIJKSTRA:
I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman), 2009-2010
Ruth Drawing Picasso, 2009-2010
The Krazyhouse, Liverpool UK (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), 2009-2010

June 29 - August 21, 2010 

Opening reception: Tuesday, June 29th, 6-8 pm

Marian Goodman Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Rineke Dijkstra which will open on Tuesday, June 29th and will run through August 21st. On view will be three new video installations as well as related portraits.

In the North Gallery the three-channel projection I See A Woman Crying (Weeping Woman), 2009-2010 and single channel Ruth Drawing Picasso, 2009-2010 will be presented.

In the South Gallery, The Krazyhouse, Liverpool UK (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), 2009-2010 will be on view. This new work continues the artist’s relationship with the city of Liverpool, where her celebrated early video work The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK /Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL (1996/97) was first created and where her work was recently on view in The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Space at Tate Liverpool.

Ruth Drawing Picasso is a single projection of a schoolgirl’s quiet observation of Picasso’s painting “Weeping Woman” (1937). Ruth sits on the floor and draws with utmost concentration the work of art in front of her. I See a Woman Crying (The Weeping Woman) consists of three projections side by side in which a panorama of school children respond to a Picasso painting. “They are looking directly at us; we are where the art is, which is of course the case given that we are standing in a gallery. It is a conceptual tautology all the more elegant for not advertising itself… an image which can double as a classical portrait as well as a social document” (Mark Prince, in frieze, 03/17/10).

About this work, Rudi Fuchs writes: “‘Weeping Woman’ itself (the famous painting by Picasso from 1937) does not appear in Rineke Dijkstra’s new film work. What we do see are nine young teenagers looking at each other and wondering what they see. The film was shot with three cameras, placed on tripods along side each other, facing and equidistant to the casually formed row of youngsters. They did not see the painting itself, but a large reproduction of it that was attached to the tripod of the middle camera. This is why—because they were focusing on a point just below the camera’s ‘line of sight’—none of the youngsters ever (or, if so, just by chance) looks straight into the lens. As such they become a group unto themselves, and it almost seems as though no camera is present. For once their observations and comments begin, they gradually no longer look only at the painting; they then start responding to each other’s remarks. This work is therefore not a documentary group portrait but a reminder of the classic ‘conversation piece’ in English painting. A key part of the subdued atmosphere and tone in the film relates to the figures being concerned with something among themselves which does not involve complying with a story or scenario. Though the creative process is formal, the youngsters are not directed. Just as in Rineke Dijkstra’s photographic works actually, the protagonists are completely free, within the design and organization of the mise en scène—that is to say the very shaping of the work—to find a pose with which they feel at ease. Such quiet informality also comes across to us in this film, of course because that is ultimately guided and formed by the controlled cadence of the film images that we see being projected. … Just as in Picasso’s painting, where multiple ways of seeing converge, things happen simultaneously here…. In the kinetic rhythm of those film images, in the shifting of segments, in the severe lines of movement and their alteration –throughout the entire structure of the film – I detect the distant presence of Picasso. As if the film were an impulsive translation of the painting. That makes the rhyme beautifully complete.” — Rudi Fuchs, 2010 .

For both works Rineke Dijkstra collaborated with Tate Liverpool on the occasion of the exhibition The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Space. For this exhibition, the museum constructed a special studio in the Tate Liverpool galleries for the artist, where the video installation I See a Woman Crying and Ruth Drawing Picasso were created. The works were inspired by school groups’ visits to the museum, and the artist subsequently worked with the school children in the constructed studio.

The 4-channel HD video-installation on view in the South Gallery, “The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, UK (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee)”, 2009-2010 was first inspired by Dijkstra’s visit to a nightclub in Liverpool in 2008 whereupon the artist asked teenagers to come to a studio to film them dancing to their favorite tracks. The studio was constructed on the dance floor of the nightclub The Krazy House in Liverpool where the artist was able to work during the weekdays when the club was closed to the audience. “Each clip from ‘The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, UK’, 2009, shows one of the dancers against a stark white background. The clips which last as long as the songs, follow each other end to end, on the four walls of a purpose-built space…. Entirely undecorated, they make us more aware of their subjects and of how they decorate themselves. The single dancer performing for the camera is a scenario both resistant to generalization and symbolically suggestive of the solipsism of youth. It is an ideal template from which to study the drama between self assertion and self doubt. … The moving image is so transparent that we forget how mediated this experience is; how the way we move our bodies is as much a culturally inherited construction as the way we dress, and how these clips are as much about how the dancers mimic the images they have absorbed from the media as how the format of a figure isolated against a white background is itself a recollection of art and advertising conventions. …. We move as others have moved before us. A Goth head-banger plays air guitar; a techno boy preens himself on his slick moves; a shy soul girl lip syncs lyrics, clutching at her heart. … Dijktra does not miss how the Goth boy ends his histrionic mime by grinning sheepishly at the camera, shy at having just exposed to deepest self to its cool gaze.” (Mark Prince, frieze, 3/17/10).

The focus and strength of Rineke Dijkstra’s oeuvre throughout several bodies of work is capturing what is both uniquely personal and universal about her subjects in their rites of passage from childhood to adolescence: “Before our eyes, and quite unself-consciously, we see subjects constructing themselves – revealing themselves in their very process of self-construction.” (Therese St. Gelais, Parachute).

“Self-conscious is an implicitly contradictory description. It can mean to be positively self aware and also the opposite, to be painfully unsure of oneself. Pivoting between these two poles has always been central to Rineke Dijkstra’s portraiture. Her recurring subject is the bumpy ride from adolescence of late teens, when we first become self conscious in both senses of the term.” ( M. Prince, frieze, March 2010)

Extracted from Marian Goodman

SMASH HIS CAMERA: THE NOTORIOUS PHOTOGRAPHS OF RON GALELLA

June 1-30 ,2010 at Clic Gallery
424 Broome Street, New York

In conjunction with the premiere of the HBO documentary film SMASH HIS CAMERA, Clic Gallery is proud to present the photography exhibit SMASH HIS CAMERA: THE NOTORIOUS PHOTOGRAPHS OF RON GALELLA. The show will run June 1st to June 30th. There will be an opening reception with the artist at Clic Gallery on Thursday, June 10th from 6 to 8 pm. At the opening, Mr. Galella will also be signing copies of his books VIVA L’ITALIA, NO PICTURES!, MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAN IN THE MIRROR, WARHOL BY GALELLA and many others.

Ron Gallela is, simply put, the most famous celebrity photographer of all time. Calling himself “the bandit of images,” Galella has snapped every celebrity of importance since the 1960s, in photographs that are unrehearsed, unposed, and often hilariously candid. In the past few years, Galella has become recognized as one of the foremost chroniclers of twentieth century America, and his photographs are now in the permanent collection of the The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Helmut Newton Foundation Gallery in Berlin.

In 2009, the critically acclaimed documentary SMASH HIS CAMERA, about Galella’s remarkable career, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it earned a Best Directing Award by Academy-Award winning Leon Gast. The film will debut on HBO on Monday, June 7 at 9:00 pm ET/PT.

The exhibit at Clic Gallery will present the most famous shots from his archives, including “Windblown Jackie”, “Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall in the Limo” and “Andy Warhol at the Zoo.” This is an extremely rare opportunity to see the actual prints for some of the most iconic images of celebrity culture, for one month only at Clic Gallery.

Extracted from Clic Gallery

DAVID DELASCO AT THE 41ST EDITION OF ART BASEL /

Marc Bauer

FOR ALL ITS undeniable charm, Aarau is not an obvious destination on the art-world map. But there many of us were early on a sunny Sunday morning, hovering over a very orderly Swiss buffet brunch of käse and brot and kaffee. It’s possible that the art intelligentsia needed somewhere pleasant to cool their heels in between Zurich and Basel, and that Olten (poor Olten) just wasn’t cutting it. But pleasant’s not enough to draw Eva Presenhuber and Barbara Gladstone and Beatrix Ruf to your township. For that you need a Kunst-something of some renown—here the Aargauer Kunsthaus—and you need a formidable show, in this case Ugo Rondinone’s “The Night of Lead.”

“You’re going to make Kelley Walker jealous!” joked Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs, observing the painted brick-pattern covering the Kunsthaus’s glass-plate exterior. “Well we’re all indebted to Cady Noland,” Rondinone noted convivially, and he should know, having curated Noland into a show at the Palais de Tokyo three years back.

Rondinone was everywhere this year, his BIG MIND SKY rainbow text soaring above the Ramada on the Messeplatz, a massive wall of colored windows anchoring the rear wall of Art Unlimited. On Monday, the latter section of the fair opened at 4 PM, the week’s first real taste of the fair’s carnivalesque spirit. Attendees crammed into the cavernous space, grasping for flutes of champagne from the official sponsor, Ruinart. (“Ruin art, really?” asked a patron. The waiter corrected: “Roonärrt”—or something like that. “Okay, fine,” the patron responded impatiently. “But ruin art?”)

“I’m so glad we’re in Art Unlimited,” said one dealer. “I was getting so bored with all the limited art.” There was a lot to see—too much for a preview, really—though it would have been a shame to miss the roomful of Sigmar Polke “Laterna Magica” paintings, his final project before his death, or an installation of Nancy Spero’s “Cri du Coeur.” Visitors lined up for film installations by Ryan Gander, Doug Aitken, and Agnès Varda too—while others shuffled out, wide-eyed, from Christian Marclay’s “filthy” (to quote one stunned viewer) video Solo, featuring a woman who undresses and plays a guitar with her…

That evening, everyone, as they say, seemed set for the Gladstone dinner feting Matthew Barney, Rondinone, and Rosemarie Trockel—a tony lineup for feting indeed. Collectors queued around 7 PM behind the Swissôtel Le Plaza, across from the creepy looking “Crazy Sexy Center” (Basel’s red-light district isn’t very discreet), to wait for the coach service to the Reithalle Wenkenhof in Riehen, an impressive pile on the city’s outskirts, which, in autumns, is also home to the Basel Ancient Art Fair. (You thought Art Basel was the only one?)

Once we’d arrived and passed through the majestic-looking gate, we decided the appropriate word for the mise-en-scene—verdant grounds and pleasingly expensive interiors—was splendid. The place also, somewhat ominously, recalled the set for Dynasty’s season-five cliffhanger, the so-called “Mordavian massacre,” though this probably says more about our limited (i.e., mostly televisual) reference points for mansion-like settings, generally.

In any case, the crudités were also splendid, as were the guests: Here’s Peter Eleey, new curator at MoMA PS1, and Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, and the charming Nicholas Baume of Public Art Fund. There’s Neville Wakefield, who put together the exceptional (also splendid) Barney show at the Schaulager. (“We finally have an American Beuys,” raved collector Mera Rubell on seeing it.) And, then, of course, there was Barney’s wife, Björk, a rather significant artist in her own right, wearing a weirdly elegant pumpkin-y dress. Collector Maja Hoffmann showed up near the end of the cocktail hour. “And now it’s time to eat,” said Team Gallery’s Jose Freire.

A parade of maybe a hundred walked to the “barn”—more like another mansion—and then to our assigned places. “Is this impressive or is this impressive?” asked Wachs, and we all knew what he meant. Flowers as weird and beautiful as the art lined the centers of the long tables. The aubergine salad was suitably dressed. I sat next to an intelligent Belgian collector, who admitted she prefers to buy art that’s already established. “And I don’t like to meet the artists,” she said sagely. “You might be disappointed.”

The next morning, under a cloudy sky, the crowds amassed, as they do every year, at the main entrance for the 11 AM First Choice view. There is, after all, so much choosing to do, and no one flew here to play seconds. The jostling and waiting to flash your card seemed particularly uncivilized this year. “Isn’t there a VIP entrance?” asked one clueless collector, not realizing that this was it. “Being a VIP on Tuesday is like being a Jew in Israel,” Leap editor Philip Tinari later quipped.

The rich have their rituals, Art Basel among them. They also have “spendorphins,” a new term (not hers, she assured me) that I acquired from writer Sarah Thornton. Spendorphins seemed to be running freely this year. “No complaints—and for good reason!” Hauser & Wirth director Anna Helwing happily announced. (The “good reason” might have been a sale of a set of Paul McCarthy sculptures that sold Tuesday for $3 million.) Dealers weren’t taking low bidders, either. “I don’t bother with them,” one dealer sniffed at a pair of collectors. “Their limit is twenty-thousand dollars—they can’t afford anything here.”

Since it’s not a Venice year, this fair was low on celebrity-wattage: Bianca Jagger shipped in for her first Basel experience. Val Kilmer hit the ground running with collector Peter Brant. (“I guess becoming an art collector is a better fate than Dancing with the Stars,” meowed one observer.) But then we spotted Jeanne Greenberg, who now has a reality show on Bravo—that counts, right?

The big advance news, at least for journalists, was the fair’s sophisticated new iPhone application, replete with an (actually functional) 3D map. “We’re ranked number three in the ‘Productivity’ section,” bragged Art Basel director Marc Spiegler. “But does it show prices?” asked one perfervid journalist. “Look, you have to do some work,” Spiegler said. Demonstrating Apple’s complete dominance of the art market, the new de rigeur accessory on the booth this season was an iPad. Emmanuel Perrotin’s staff brandished them like the high-tech menus for art that they were, while 303 Gallery was slightly more discrete. “We thought we’d be the only ones,” said Carol Greene, looking at hers. “Maybe it’s a bit embarrassing now?”

Eva Presenhuber’s booth gave good face. “This looks like a museum,” said one wowed reporter. “You have to be on the committee to get this kind of booth.” Team Gallery’s stand popped, too: “It’s black-and-white and Cory,” observed an artist, referring to Cory Arcangel’s massive “Photoshop CS3” prints so bright they hurt your eyes. The big (both literally and artistically) standout of the fair, though, was Cindy Sherman’s strange new prints on “PhotoTek adhesive fabric” at Metro Pictures. Just “her” gussied up and printed large on some intriguing new chiaroscuro landscapes of her own design. “She’s playing around with her props, just doing things for whatever reasons she does them,” the gallery’s Helene Winer said blithely. If only we could all play with such panache.

At 9 PM, after ten hours of Olympics-style cubicle-dashing, the fair ended with typical Swiss punctuality. There was still more to see and do—dinners for Marian Goodman and Emmanuel Perrotin, a “BallyLove” (?) party for Philippe Decrauzat. It seemed we arrived either too early or too late for everything, swooped quickly into (and out of) a Gavin Brown dinner around the corner from New Jerseyy’s compact space on Hüningerstrasse, and then on to the Perrotin shindig on Das Schiff. The crowd was dense, but our soles were wearing thin, so we taxied back to the Kunsthalle bar, where dealers danced with unselfconscious abandon in that way only European’s can manage. I turned in early…ish—after all, the next day was Art Goes Brunch at the Schaulager, and contrary to popular Basel belief, it’s breakfast (not cocktails) that’s the most important meal of the day.

Text by David Velasco

Extracted from Artforum Diary

RED MANNHEIM BY MARK ALEXANDER

St Paul’s has chosen two new works by the British artist Mark Alexander to be hung either side of the nave this summer. The installation forms part of  the St Paul’s Cathedral Arts Project, an ongoing programme which seeks to explore the encounter between art and faith. 

Both entitled Red Mannheim, Alexander’s large red silkscreens are inspired by the Mannheim Cathedral altarpiece (1739-41), which was damaged by bombing in the Second World War. The original sculpture depicts Christ on the cross, surrounded by a familiar retinue of mourners. Rendered in splendid giltwood, with Christ’s wracked body sculpted in relief, and the flourishes of flora and incandescent rays from heaven, this masterpiece of the German Rococo is an object of ravishing beauty and intense piety.

Alexander’s Red Mannheim works show the empty, shadow-marked wall space where the altarpiece once hung, the crucifix now a soaked impression and the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene dark silhouettes. Emerging from the side of the cross is a gnarled tree, at the foot of which two cherubs are placed to guard against the return of Adam and Eve. This combination of baleful symbolism and pastoral idyll is deepened by the crimson colouring, which seeps into the canvases like a stain, metaphorically enacting the blotting of memory. The idea of reaching into the past is underscored by the patches of blackened red which become darker and less easy to read towards the margins - this sense of removal, as if one is looking through a veil, is sealed by the thimble-shaped outline that rises from the altar ledge up to the top of the cross, revealing the subject as if both through a portal and a gauze.

Replicating the vast size and power of the Mannheim altarpiece, Alexander’s works offer a contemporary reflection on loss and the desecration of icons. They are devotional images that recall the eternal image of Christ’s crucifixion and the atrocities of war, but also lament the passing of the innocence of youth and provide an elegiac remembrance of things past.

The placing of these modern masterworks in St Paul’s is fitting given the cathedral’s spiritual and architectural connection to the Mannheim Cathedral, yet there is also a symbolic parallel between the history of St. Paul’s as a bastion of British defiance during the Blitz, and Alexander’s resurrection of a bombed and blasted icon.

Canon Giles Fraser, Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral said,

“St Paul’s offers a powerful context in which to explore the relationship between art and faith. We hope that these images will enhance the experience of those visiting the cathedral, and provide a fitting focus for reflection and contemplation.”

Extracted from St Paul’s Cathedral