Communitas, Among Others at Camera Austria

Unless you’re using it as in the very inclusionary context of “my brother from another mother”, most of the time signaling someone out as coming from somewhere else than where you come from becomes, to some degree or another, a confrontational act. Let’s face it, people like to belong, and so much so that even if it’s an idea that isn’t working out all of the time, most also like to believe in the growing global community. The current cultural currency of that ideal of global community is never more evident than in recent telecommunications ads, and if you take their message at face value, buying that new phone or switching provider isn’t just going to put you in touch with people in every corner of the globe, that virtual net is the very fabric of a new and better world. Certainly owning these products won’t do anything to further the cause unless you actually use them to communicate with people in every corner of the globe, and not many will, but there’s still one question left hanging unanswered: is there any sincerity to it, or is all the “brother from another mother”-style inclusionary rhetoric just covering up the truly exclusionary nature of our times?

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Why Can’t We Be Ourselves Like We Were Yesterday?

When I walked through the darkened entry door of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last week, there were a few things I expected to find, and even to feel, when visiting the first major survey of the movement. A Michael Graves tea kettle, for example. Maybe an occasional twinge of repulsion as well. Postmodernism was, in a way, very reactive; surely not all of its expressions could hold up decades later. Add to the mix that no one seems to know how many more “post” prefixes to add on to accurately describe where we’ve philosophically been at in the last 10-20 years, and what I really expected was an almost indescribable suffocating nausea. I also expected that to fuel a good few conversations about why we, in a collective sense, seem to be struggling to throw over the weight of post-modernism (or post-post-modernism, or so on…) the way they had done with modernism, and just get on with it.

The last thing I expected was to be slapped in the face, almost immediately, with an overwhelming and incongruous sense of nostalgia. How on earth did that happen? Jenny Holzer’s Protect Me From What I Want never seemed so relevant…

In one way, I was relieved. That kind of reaction must really mean that post-modernism really is dead. The discussion is over. We are free. So why did I still feel such a sense of loss?

For one, the curation and exhibition design were excellent, and they knew what they were doing: throwing a funeral service. The low lighting, ostensibly to protect the objects exhibited, worked with the dark industrial display units to create an extremely somber atmosphere that at times created the perfect backdrop, by means of contrast, to postmodernism’s most colorful and playful moments. Pieces by early postmodernist Italian design group Memphis were among the works that looked more joyous for this context; the expected Michael Graves tea kettle, however, could have been an Egyptian relic in its low-lit vitrine.

Postmodernism covered a lot of ground, and the stand-out achievement of the exhibition was the successful transition between art, architecture, product design, film, fashion and, perhaps most importantly, music. Pop songs become siren songs, irresistibly pulling you around dark corners to discover the next chapter in Postmodernism’s story, and then decline. Indeed, the room on pop music seems to serve as the exhibition’s control room. Here costumes from Grace Jones, David Byrne, and Klaus Nomi are displayed at unnatural heights, elevating the characters they represent to a God-like status. If any doubt remains as to music’s importance in the exhibition’s narrative, that becomes as dead as the movement itself at the exhibition’s end. Staring at Andreas Gursky’s Tokyo Stock Exchange (1990), you’re pulled around one last corner, past a Robert Longo drawing, by the sound of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle. In this last dark room is the video Longo directed for the song, and it’s almost impossible not to see it as an epitaph for a movement that, at that time, was just beginning to crash under its own weight:

I feel fine and I feel good
I’m feeling like I never should
Whenever I get this way
I just don’t know what to say
Why can’t we be ourselves like we were yesterday

Far from its funeral service, London’s Bethnal Green is still just off average tourist’s radar. For a different London experience, base yourself at White Line Hotels edit Town Hall Hotel & Apartments.

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Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

Photos: Victoria & Albert Museum

Interlacing Ai WeiWei

There are a lot of variations in the expression of the sentiment, but “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is probably the cleanest and the most classic. How true it is. Ai WeiWei was certainly a far cry from unknown at the time of his April 2011 arrest – his installation Sunflower Seeds was concurrently housed in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – but the outpouring of outright love from the art world that followed his arrest and detention in an undisclosed location brought the artist to an even higher level of fame. As speculations of his death in detainment were growing, nearly 3 months after his initial arrest he was finally released. Hopefully without being too glib about what was indeed a horrific experience for the artist, a speculated death can be as good the real thing in terms of a career move.

Now nearly 3 months after his release, his exhibition Interlacing at Kunsthaus Graz demands one additional question when viewing an Ai WeiWei: is it possible now to separate the persona of the artist from the body of work? Was it ever so with Ai WeiWei anyway, or was his persona always “interlaced” with the work? True, you could easily ask those same questions in relation to just about any artist, but when the body of work is so centered on cultural and political criticism, the position of the ego within it, justified or not, more easily becomes a point of debate.

However you feel about it – and who says you have to make up your mind now anyway? – from September 16^th Kunsthas Graz will be presenting Interlacing, the first large-scale exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s photographic and video work, just taken over from the Fotomuseum Winterthur. It is certainly one not to miss if you’re in Graz between now and the 15^th of January next year.

What else is not to be missed in Graz, aside from the building of Kunsthaus Graz itself? The Schlossberghotel, as chosen by the crew at White Line Hotels, is Europe’s finest Art Hotel.

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Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

Photos: From Kunsthaus Graz, all © Ai Weiwei.

Liu Bolin, The Invisible Man

There are many ways to protest, as many as there are reasons to do it for. This has been a particularly hot topic in the wake of the recent riots in London, where scattered amongst deplorable and arguably self-defeating acts of violence and vandalism, one consistent sentiment was beamed out of the city via the international press: we are now visible. For many, feeling invisible is among the worst of the spectrum of human emotions, and probably for the volume of negative emotions it incorporates: powerlessness, worthlessness, disenfranchisement, and so on. Considering the amount of destruction and violence that has taken place – not exclusive to the recent events in the UK – for the sake of feeling visible, why would anyone chose then, of their own accord, to become invisible?

One part magic eye puzzle, one part Where’s Waldo (albeit somewhat easier but with a darker background story), Chinese Artist Liu Bolin’s Hiding in the City series only needs to be seen quickly before the viewer will understand why he’s called “The Invisible Man”. The series started in 2005, when the Chinese government ordered the demolition of Beijing International Art Camp (BIAC), also known as Suojiacun Artists’ Village, which housed several studios, including Liu Bolin’s. In response, Curator Zhang Zhaohui organized the exhibition Demolish! Demolish! Demolish!. For his contribution, Liu Bolin painted himself to camouflage with the rubble of the building. That’s right, these images are not the product of Photoshop or any other form of photographic manipulation; they are the artist hand painted into the scene.

Liu Bolin maintains that his art is a protest against the actions of the Chinese government, who is known for censoring their artists. In a way it is very literal; the government tells you, more or less, to become invisible and you become, more or less, invisible. In another way, it is not so straightforward. In the family tree of protest strategies, his methods may be most closely related to the sit-in, but the visual pun of taking away his own voice hollers as loud as a rally.

Check out Liu Bolin at Fotografiska in Stockholm until September 11^th. If you’re looking for somewhere to disappear into in the city, White Line Hotels Stockholm edit Nobis Hotel, Hotel J, and Hotel Skeppsholmen provide all the backdrops you need.

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Photos www.fotografiska.eu

Work in Progress Photos: www.spiegel.de

Three Works by Hans-Peter Feldmann, or a Feldmann Triptych to Collecting?

As much as I love an exhibition title that expands on a thought, or gives a further piece of information to unlock hidden secrets in the work, there’s also something to be said for a more direct, no-frills approach. Tres Obres de Hans-Peter Feldmann (Three Works by Hans-Peter Feldmann) is one such title, but is the directness somewhat deceiving? Trios and trilogies, after all, have long held a mythic or holy position in society (the three graces, The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost, the original Star Wars trilogy). Or, could it be that the exhibition really is just three works by Hans-Peter Feldmann, without the weight of meaning of three, the magic number?

Feldmann’s practice is generally built on collecting, ordering, and re-presenting. These three works, whether you see them singularly or as a collection among themselves, are no exception to that generality. To start with the triptych within the trio, Seated women in paintings uses the classic triptych form, but resembles more the pin-board of an obsessive than the usual alter pieces for which the form is usually reserved – once again, a case of threes falling in the realm of the holy and mythical. It begs the question, however, if collecting raises its objects to the status of the holy. If you’ve ever known an avid collector, or spent enough time on Ebay, that question might be easier to answer.

Rounding out the trio of works in the exhibition are Bookshelves, a large scale 5-panel photograph of the artists’ own bookshelves, and Amateur photos held by hand, a series of 28 photographs of the artist holding pieces of his collection of found photographs. Here our pleasure as the viewer is not in appreciating the collection, but in the peering into the life and mind of who collected it; they serve as two voyeuristic side-panels to the centerpiece of Seated women in paintings in a greater triptych alter piece to collecting itself.

The exhibition is running at Barcelona’s Projecte SD until the 10th of September. While you’re collecting memories, and maybe some souvenirs, be sure to check out White Line Hotels edit Hotel Omm. More than just a name, here you’ll have all peace to you need to meditate on life’s greater questions, or just chill out by the rooftop pool.

Photos: www.projectesd.com