First auction to be held Saturday, 19 March, 7pm, at Hackescher Markt 4/entrance Neue Promenade. To register as bidder and preview lots visit dejoodeandkamutzki.com

“Based in Berlin” is the title of the controversial exhibition project stemming from the debate around the installation of a permanent Kunsthalle for Berlin. We have expressed our concerns already and were not planning to make any further negative comments, but then we received the press release…

The press release contains a sentence which we herewith declare the most promising candidate for the “most ridiculous sentence in a press release of the year” competition (which doesn’t exist yet but we are planning to launch it soon):

“Die Ausstellung wird zeigen, welche Formen der Produktion und Präsentation Berlin braucht.” (The exhibition will reveal what forms of production and presentation [of art] are needed in Berlin)

Great! Finally! Funny, we were under the impression that for decades, public and private institutions and individuals in Berlin have tried to express their needs and show their concerns and make suggestions and fill voids and so on, and that this has generated a pretty clear picture of what’s needed in this city. But obviously, for decades all these people working in art must have done things wrong big time! And we used to believe that art can’t be told when and where to materialise in what form. And now this: it only takes one exhibition (pictured above: the planned main venue, the former atelier houses at Monbijou park) to determine how much art Berlin needs and in what form it should get presented? That’s brilliant! Obviously the Based in Berlin-team has found a panacea that can cure just about anything that’s been ailing the local art scene – including ignorant exhibition makers or authors of press releases, we hope.

www.basedinberlin.de

It’s a circus. That’s right. It’s a circus. It’s also the title of Jonathan Monk’s upcoming show at Yvon Lambert Paris (opening March 10), but above all, it’s a circus. Today is Monday. Have a nice week. And remember: it’s a circus.

Uncle Sam wants you as soldier and artist! With pictures ranging from World War I to the present, the United States Army Art Collection covers all major field operations that have been undertaken by the US Army. With graphic works, paintings and photographies taken by soldiers the aim is to document field operations and to make them accessible via exhibitions and an online archive. As of now new media works have not found their way into the collection but we are curious to see when the first performance or video installation is going to be acquired.

Until then you may browse the following links to view the not so great works of great soldier artists.

www.history.army.mil

wlajournal.com

On 17 July, 2007, Jeremy Blake delivered one of the most impressive and most mysterious disappearance performances of all times, when he walked into the ocean, motivated by his woman’s suicide and his failure to cope with a slightly confusing amount of conspiracies involving Scientology and other inexplicable matter. The genre, first introduced by Bas Jan Ader, is not very popular with artists, mostly because a disappearance performance, in order to be valid, prohibits any form of the artist’s re-appearance thereafter, which more often than not results in the end of the artist’s career.

Since Blake’s body was never found, and since no signs of a continued art-making from his side have emerged ever since the day of his assumed death, art historians have come to consider his disappearance performance perfectly valid.

And now this: While googling the artist’s work for reasons too complex to explain right here and right now, we came across a blog, written by none other than Jeremy Blake himself! He’s now a 20 year old web entrepreneur from Utah, and the name of his blog is: Elite Eternity…

For an upcoming exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, curator April Lamm examines the question, “Is it possible to employ an animal as a readymade?”, and to this aim has selected a number of artist films involving – animals. The exhibition announcement includes an artist list complete with a most concise and efficient synopsis of the selected works. A method we wish more galleries and institutions would apply instead of sending out press releases with an unnerving length/information content ratio. Lamm’s list:

fly / Douglas Gordon
fly / Lucy Powell
spiders / Anri Sala
snail and worm / Ulrike Heise
sea horses / Jean Painlevé
frogs / Henrik Håkansson
octopuses / Jean Painlevé
lizard /John Smith
finches / Carsten Höller
crow and pigeon / Julieta Aranda
chicken / Lucy Powell
sloth / Christoph Keller
pussy / Fischli/Weiss
monkey / Christoph Keller
donkeys / Douglas Gordon
cows / Franz Stauffenberg
horse / Anri Sala
bears / Werner Herzog
buffalo / Massimiliano and Nina Breeder
elephant / Douglas Gordon
rhinoceros / Christoph Keller
lioness / Nina Pohl and Patricia Woerler-Horzon

Pierre Huyghe’s most recent work “Aquarium Project” presents a fascinating approach on how to showcase a form of cultural practice and its main protagonist whose fame and recognition, as of now, has not crossed the boarders of special interest.

Mostly known to aquarium lovers, Japanes designer and photographer Amano Takashi can be described as the key figure in the development of contemporary aqarium design. Taking Amano Takashi’s concept of “Nature Aquarium” as its point of departure, Pierre Huyghe’s “Aquarium Project” provides a fantastic introduction to the techniques and aesthetics which have been shaped and defined by Amano. Surprisingly the distributed press material shows no evidence of Amano’s influence on the Aquarium Project but a new publication will examine the relationship between Huyghe’s and Amanos working practice in greater detail.

www.amanotakashi.net

dismagazine.com

We’ve just returned from a little museum round trip including the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Tate Britain, the Museo Reina Sofia, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and 13 other of the world’s most famous art galleries. We only stopped to look at one work per gallery, as we only had two hours time for the entire trip. With 17 art galleries presented on one website we didn’t think we’d need more time. We didn’t know that viewing the digital reproduction of a painting in 7 billion pixels can easily take a lifetime.

They say a reproduction of a work can never capture its aura, no matter how good it is. But as the reproductions provided by Google art project prove, the eye of the digital camera doesn’t only see more than the human eye, it also augments the painting’s impact to such an extent that we lose all feeling of time and other dimensions at the sight of it. Zooming in, we expand into a maze of hues and strokes and crackle, and the more detail is revealed, the greater our distress at not being able to discover the painting’s secret.

Pictured above:
detail of The Merchant Georg Gisze, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532. ©Google art project/Gemäldegalerie Berlin.

This is a true story. This is the story of a city famous all over the world for its vital art scene, fed by the enthusiasm of private initiatives rather than the government, an enthusiasm so strong that it has even managed to fill an institutional void brought about by a lack of public funding and competence. In this city, there is no Kunsthalle, no public art gallery for contemporary art that would reflect what an international audience finds so appealing about this city’s art scene. It needs no such institution, you might think, because there are the great private initiatives, the commercial galleries, the off-spaces, the studio shows, the parties… and indeed: had this art scene ever relied on the city’s administration, it would not exist.

Now a strange thing is happening. The city’s mayor also happens to be its Kultursenator, which is the person presiding the culture senate so you might presume this person should know a thing or two about art but this is not the case with the mayor. He not only doesn’t know anything about art, he also hasn’t been able to do anything to establish a public art gallery over the past 10 years (yep, he’s been in charge for quite some time now as most people in this city don’t have a future anyway so they keep voting for him) but he sure sees that all that private enthusiasm and energy and money and everything has somehow contributed to making his city look cool. And now he thinks that he can look cool too. His idea of looking cool is to announce a “performance showcase of young Berlin art”, an exhibition that is to prove the existence of an art scene in this city so vital that it deserves pondering the idea of establishing a public gallery for contemporary art – um… ah… eh?

The really funny, pardon, really sad thing about this is not that all of the sudden the mayor is able to spend 1.6 million euro on one single exhibition project (the city’s annual art budget totals 4 million euro…), and it’s not the fact that nobody needs this exhibition anyway. The really sad thing is that it will look terrible. It won’t have anything to do with the real Berlin art scene. No serious artist will submit their portfolios just because a bunch of ignorant and incompetent politicians want to play curators. No serious artist will follow an open call which is sure to attract submissions only from those artists who never get selected to participate in seriously curated exhibitions.

Berlin’s art scene should not be messed with by an ignorant and pretentious administration. Rather let there be no support at all, than one contaminated by incompetence and shady intentions.

And therefore, we ask you to read this open letter by the “Haben und Brauchen” initiative, and, if you agree, to sign the corresponding petition (we actually do not entirely agree with all of the points of critique listed but this didn’t keep us from signing), and to spread the word and pass this on.

www.habenundbrauchen.kuenstler-petition.de