– LOVED
– LOATHED
– SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
– SELECTED UPCOMING EVENTS
– ART MARKET NOTES
– OUR TOP 8 ART TRENDS
– HOW TO BECOME A (SUCCESSFUL) ART COLLECTOR
– NOTES ON THE WHITNEY BIENNALE
– GALLERY PROFILE: CSA SPACE
– ARTISTS WE’VE GOOGLED FOR YOU
– IN DEPTH: RAUSCHENBERG
– WHAT’S GOING ON (WHO’S DOING WHAT)
– TALK TO US
– AND FINALLY..

Hello,

Welcome to View on Art - the collector’s newsletter.

This month we explore the art market. What art will be around after the next market crash? What factors determine the strength of an artwork or an artist’s career?

This month:

-We loved, we loathed, we were somewhere in between

-We went to New York!

-We predict our top 8 art trends

-We examine Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines

-We encourage new collectors

-We profile Vancouver gallery CSA space

-We Google a Brit, a Swede and a Hamburger

This letter goes to over 200 curators, artists, dealers, editors and collectors in London, Florence, Rome, New York, California, Washington, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Please forward it to anyone who you think would be interested! Thanks and enjoy!

With very best wishes, Andrea

LOVED
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1. The Elmgreen and Dragset talk at the Power Plant. I loved these guys. I find the way they have been dealing with the white cube of the gallery (not the art, but the context for the art) to be particularly relevant. I loved that they had a show where they showed renovators painting the white gallery space white. The viewer became part of the background, similarly to their piece that saw a white gallery space set deep into a museum’s front lawn, like some kind of an open grave. Lit up at night it was stunningly sculptural and voyeuristic.

They propose the minimalist designer boutique as the new gallery space. One well-known artwork involved building an exact replica of a Prada boutique in the desert near Marfa, Texas. Unattended and filled with merchandise, it has been left to slowly decompose over time. Going one better in Chelsea, they installed a sign reading “Prada - coming soon” in the company’s official font, on the front window of their New York dealer’s gallery. Tanya Bonakdar was apparently not terribly pleased with the phone calls of concern and sympathy she received.

I just wish I would have asked the duo about their relationship to Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Three works seemed influenced by his. The hole in the ceiling of the gallery/floor of a private flat, through which viewers could peek echoes Cattelan’s sculpture of himself peeking through the floor of a space. The Fiat and trailer seemingly rising out from the mosaic floor of the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan recalls Cattelan’s The Ninth Hour, a sculpture of the Pope crushed to the ground by a large meteorite.

The live performance piece Reg(u)arding the guards, comprising a number of security guards guarding nothing but themselves recalls, at least formally, Cattelan’s famous 1997 Venice Biennale contribution of taxidermied pigeons , I Touristi.

Elmgreen & Dragset

2. PFOAC at DiVA - Montreal dealer Pierre Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain brought Luc Courchesne’s rotating 360 perspective wall-mounted photographic and video discs to New York’s Digital and Video Art Fair. I love when dealers really consider how to present work well in the most difficult viewing conditions. Especially new media! There should have been more Canadian presence at the fair - Canada has so many fantastic new media artists.

3. The talk by Dr. Sarat Maharaj (internationally renowned art and culture theorist) at OCAD (the Ontario College of Art and Design), March 27th. He talked about the future of the art academy. Touching on Finnegan’s Wake and the term “Aufhebun” among other obscure things, his point was about the importance of the framework around which one studies art. The main question was ‘What modes of knowing must we construct to know the Other?’

His final four conclusions were for the need of laboratories within laboratories, of non-discursive thinking within performance, of the need to reexamine the relationship between body and mind, to re-affirm a self- organizing congregation and to provide a laboratory without name or protocol.

Maybe the quality of emerging art in Toronto will improve now that Sara Diamond is the president at OCAD.

4. Daniel Barrow and Duke & Battersby at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects. I love Barrow’s dvd of images gliding around on an overhead projector. It’s like the new puppetry. The artist’s presence is palpable, manipulating the gruesome yet finely rendered images. His works on paper are delicate compositions constructed from cut-out shapes. Their obsessive attention to detail is brilliantly at odds with their protagonist’s extreme dejection.

5. Duke & Battersby’s video begins with a lovely shot of a tree, edited in such a way that it appears to be breathing, like a pair of lungs. The character of the whimsical soundtrack, native imagery and allusions to seedlings and plants runs alongside subject matter like urban sprawl, bullying, rape and scientific study. It’s bang on.

Jessica Bradley Art + Projects

6. Ulf Puder at Artcore. Artcore’s programming is really unique. The latest painting show by Leipzig painter Ulf Puder was wonderful. Would I have liked it as much had I been more familiar with the over-hyped Leipzig school? Perhaps not, but on its own, the quality of Puder’s painting and his mastery of the medium is impressive. His formal approach, together with an awareness of historical precedent, impacts on his use of color, content, medium and, finally subject.

Look for my upcoming review in ARTnews.

7. Toronto artist Shary Boyle’s sculptures at the Power Plant. Her finely rendered porcelain figurines at the Power Plant are stunning, perfectly balanced between delicacy and repulsion. I think it’s the exquisiteness of these figurines, as opposed to others by the artist, or her drawings, that makes them really special.

LOATHED
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1. The Nuit Blanche press conference: It was funny-slash-sad watching a bunch of out-of-touch city bureaucrats try to get all enthusiastic about this “fun, exciting” event “for the people of Toronto.” Billed by Mayor Miller as “one of the most innovative and exciting additions to Toronto’s already impressive roster of cultural celebrations” on the night of September 30, it will see “everything from swimming pools and car washes to churches and libraries.. transformed by contemporary art projects.”

Questions:

-Will the TTC offer free and/or all-night transporation?

-Will the city open the streets to pedestrians?

-Will the organizers provide street and open air performances?

-How will the city publicize it beyond their Live with Culture website?

-Will the city invest in this event beyond 2006, Toronto’s Live with Culture year? What about Scotiabank, this year’s sponsor?

-Will the organizers work to make the above happen?

-Will the media get on board and pressure the city to make this a really successful event?

-Will other cities rave about Toronto’s Nuit Blanche the way we rave about Nuit Blanche in Paris?

I’ll look forward to moving this event into the ‘Loved’ section.

2. Scope NY. Where to start? It was kind of refreshing to see so much terrible art all in one place. There were ‘performance art’ works that involved sing-alongs for parents and kids, art-mobiles honking as they drove down the aisles, again with mothers and children having a grand old time, and raucous installations of noisy junk that as well as being irritating, were nothing new. That so much horrible stuff is being churned out, indeed encouraged, must mean something. It was a spectacle, that’s for sure. If there were some good artworks in there, and I’m sure there were, they would have had to struggle to be seen. The presentation at most of the booths was ad-hoc, too. It was an improvement on the hotel model, though.

I heard the Perpetual Art Machine, a travelling video database exhibition, was good but I didn’t see it.

3. The Gehry renovation. The Art Gallery of Ontario is putting all this energy into promoting what might have been a really novel and exciting project for Toronto. Instead of getting a super design from a younger, cutting edge architectural practice who might really benefit from a high-profile Toronto building, we will get a “nice” Gehry addition. I’m sure that the renovation will be lovely - Gehry is an acknowledged genius - but does Toronto need to hop on the bandwagon of second- rate citites hankering for another Bilbao? It’s likely that even Gehry isn’t excited about this one.

Gehry has commented on the difficulty of securing funding for his projects in Canada, as opposed to in Europe, where they somehow manage.

Speaking of his current practice in Vogue magazine, Ghery says “You inevitably start repeating yourself. People want Bilbao, and I don’t want to do it.”

4. How people like to refer to Toronto as a ‘world class city’. It isn’t. Montreal is.

The Perpetual Art Machine

SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
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1. The Welfare Show: The works on view at Elmgreen & Dragset’s show were artistic puns. (Kind of like Brian Jungen’s work.) While it is true that they encouraged an intriguing methodology of thought around each object, I was disappointed with the show. Bringing reality into the gallery is old news by now.

Furthermore, when you know the story of the installation of the hyper-realistic wax baby inside a car parked in front of The Wrong Gallery in Chelsea, and the ensuing uproar from the NYPD, the same baby placed under a fake ATM machine inside a gallery space carries little of the same impact. The empty wheelchair with the bright blue helium balloon floating above felt like it belonged to one of Duane Hanson’s sculptures.

2. David Adjaye’s talk at the University of Toronto. I thought the most interesting thing about the ‘Young British Architect’ was the type of art-slash-architecture projects that he is involved with. It’s good to see artists like Chris Ofili, Olafur Eliasson (and other friends of Adjaye) incorporating architectural structure as an integral part of their works.

SELECTED UPCOMING EVENTS
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TORONTO Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art Jeremy Shaw: DMT April 13 - 23

With Tammy Forsythe and J.R. Carpenter

MoCCA

TORONTO Artcore Gallery Manfred Peckl and Marco Brambilla 25 March - 6 May

Artcore Gallery

TORONTO Art Gallery of Ontario Peter Doig: Works on Paper March 22 - June 18

Art Gallery of Ontario

TORONTO Oakville Galleries Body: New Art from the UK 8 April - 28 May

Oakville Galleries

VANCOUVER Tracey Lawrence Gallery Kathy Slade: Chart Through April 29

Tracey Lawrence Gallery

VANCOUVER Monte Clark Gallery Mark Lewis April 19 - May 21

Monte Clark Gallery

ART MARKET NOTES
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Some comments from a recent issue of New York magazine:

Five Theories on Why the Art Market Can’t Crash - And why it will anyway.

By Marc Spiegler.

-Art has become a luxury good. Consequently, while there’s a new class of people buying art, today’s market is by and large misinformed. Collectors are buying art based on market trends rather than art- historical standards.

-The art world has gone global. Competitive collectors and dealers now scour exotic places for new art. (China, Poland)

-Art Investment Funds are increasingly popular, but their popularity is proven to have been based on incomplete studies of the market. The author of one study now says “The return can be very high, but so is the volatility.”

-Today’s market is more diversified, with various levels and segments of popularity. Can this protect it from an overall crash?

Basically, only artists whose work looks good and also has art historical significance - for its technical or conceptual innovation - survives a market crash. The bigger the idea, the longer the career. Historically, bad markets tend to produce better art. Artists who continually push at the boundaries of their medium will survive.

OUR TOP 8 ART TRENDS
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1. TRANSFER OF MEANING (or looking at the gallery from outside)

Looking at the framework through which we view art. The greater context. Painting and drawing on paper is limited to what can be represented on a piece of paper. This was Vito Acconci’s motivation for stopping drawing and moving into alternate spaces in the 1970’s, inspiring his famous mastrubation work, Seedbed, (1972) where he lay beneath the gallery’s floor, fantasizing about gallery patrons overhead. Elmgreen & Dragset continue this tradition by making the gallery cube the art object, thereby placing the viewer at a greater remove. Neil Campbell’s nocturnal lighting installation Base at the Vancouver Art Gallery this winter also dealt with this. Of course Christo and Jeanne Claude have been doing this for years. The Berlin biennale, which takes place at venues in the city, (through May 28) seems a reflection of this trend. In 1976, Brian O’Doherty argued that the pristine, white gallery space was a more important reflection of the times than the artwork.

2. PUBLIC ART

Using the world as a stage. One of my favorite artworks is by Piero Manzoni, a large, simple bronze cube from 1961 upon which is printed, upside-down, Socle du monde - homage a Gallileo. It means ‘base of the world.’ German artist Gregor Schneider is also using the urban environment as an art space, as in the piece Die Familie Schneider that he did for Artangel last year inside two east London row houses. Organizations like Artangel and Creative Time in New York are great facilitators of this kind of work. And Canadian artist Kelly Mark uses the world as a stage in her performances, or ‘public interventions’ where she repeats the same trivial, but carefully choreographed routine every day at the same time.

3. THE SMALL SCULPTURAL OBJECT

As conceptual art becomes more popular, people are beginning to question the meaning of things. This is already what post-Duchamp art asks of the viewer. People will begin to question the everyday, and out of this small arrangements of objects may become popular. Small scale sculpture, and arrangements/tableaux that mean more together than apart. Tom Friedman’s obsessive manipulating of everyday materials to create the sublime. Also casts of bodily orifices by Canadian artist Massimo Guerrera. Thomas Demand’s photographs of meticulously constructed paper environments and James Casebere’s flooded rooms are part of this trend, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a return of interest to historical still-life painting, 17th century Vanitas etc. Also LA-based Canadian Jed Lind who blends an interest in mythology, architecture and the object with sculptures from antique model ships.

4. REARRANGEMENT OF SPACE

The displacement of space that makes us aware of the limitations of our existence. Adrian Searle, the art critic for the Guardian, calls it being “thrown into the illusion.” The audio walks and forced perspective installations of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, the famous Weather Project (a large amber ’sun’) installed in the turbine hall at Tate Modern and other works by Olafur Eliasson are some artists working with this idea. Both Do-Ho Suh and Rirkrit Tirajiniva have reconstructed versions of their New York apartments in the Serpentine Gallery, London.

5. VIDEO AND FILM

Almost since its inception, the question of ‘truth’ in photography has been under question. Jeff Wall was perhaps the most eloquent exponent of this idea and now artists like Scott MacFarland and others are ‘painting’ with digital technology. That story - the investigation of photography as photography - may be nearing its end, allowing moving image work to take over, due to its ability to comment on the nature of time. Mark Lewis, Alexandre Castonguay and Rodney Graham are some artists working in this way. Also younger artists Stuart Croft and the Toronto-based Daniel Cockburn. Michael Awad is a Canadian artist who builds his own still cameras to document extended moments in time.

6. A NEW SYMBOLISM

Now that perceived reality is being exposed as only one option, thanks in part to the investigation of truth in photography, there is a renewed search for ‘truth,’ manifest in the invention of new languages, signs, symbols and invented characters. Dance, performance and other forms of bodily expression may also become popular. Artists who are working in with these themes include Canadian Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Matthew Barney and even Richard Tuttle. Also neo-feminist artists like Gunilla Josephson and Pipilotti Rist.

7. INFILTRATION

Artists who wish to better the world, in a large sense, to get out of the ghetto-ized art world are beginning to infiltrate societal, even political systems. To move away from self- concern toward social concern. William Kentridge has partially dealt with these issues, and Takashi Murakami has infiltrated the economic system with his mass production of artworks, others like Dirk Fleischmann and Patrick Meagher are working with art and economics. Also artists working with virtual reality, surveillance and interface, like David Rokeby, Tasman Richardson and other web-based artists and artist-hackers.

8. OUTSIDER ART

Already people are doubting the benefits of a strict art college education for artists. Isn’t it more beneficial for an artist to apply artistic practices to a greater interest or experience? Probably. As artists critique the art institution, and as public art becomes more popular, as artists are developing their own languages and showing up the constraints of established systems, it stands to reason that there should be a renewed interest in those artists who stand emphatically outside of those systems. Daniel Johnston’s cartoon drawings included in the Whitney Biennale, the current exhibition Inner Worlds Outside , at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and recent films on the life and work of outside artist Henry Darger and The Devil and Daniel Johnston are testament to this interest.

HOW TO BECOME A (SUCCESSFUL) ART COLLECTOR
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From an article I wrote last summer for a Toronto publication:

These days, art is the new fashion. From the Takashi Murakami-designed handbags at Louis Vuitton to the Marc Jacobs ad campaigns by Jurgen Teller and featuring the artist Cindy Sherman - not to mention the major collections of Madonna, David Bowie and Elton John, everyone who is anyone seems to be getting in on the act. If you’ve got a good job, maybe a house or condo, why not think of starting your own art collection? Now that you’ve rid yourself of the university futon, the ‘vintage’ sofa and the Ikea paper lantern and even chucked out the posters..But you haven’t studied art and you leave most galleries feeling either ignorant or preached at. So what should you do? Don’t worry: there is a way to navigate the waters.

BROWSE: Try these Canadian galleries: (Toronto) Robert Birch, Jessica Bradley, Stephen Bulger, Monte Clark, Mira Godard, Susan Hobbs, Nicholas Metivier, Pari Nadimi Gallery, PM Gallery, Clint Roenisch, Wynick Tuck Gallery, Odon Wagner Contemporary. (Montreal) Pierre Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain, Rene Blouin, Joyce Yahouda. (Winnipeg) The Other Gallery (Calgary) Trepanier Baer, Skew Gallery (Vancouver) Monte Clark, Catriona Jeffries, Tracey Lawrence Gallery.

These galleries all represent quality artists, and each of these dealers really knows their stuff, investing time and money in their artists’ careers.

Ask questions. Gallerists are there to guide you through the variegations of contemporary art. The gallerist expects you to ask for information about work that interests you, and don’t worry, you needn’t know everything about the editions, prices or methods involved in an artwork. Most importantly, make sure that you love what you buy. Never buy just for resale potential - the art market is notoriously fickle.

READ: Even if all you do is read this newsletter! The more you read, the greater your chances of success. If you are looking to discover the best and the brightest upcoming artists, pick up magazines like Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C magazine, Art News, Art in America, Art Forum, Art Review, Frieze, Modern Painters. Artnet.com is a smart, easily readable online magazine. Don’t look at it as a job, just read whatever takes your fancy. If you see an image you like, read about the artist. Google his or her name and read as much as you can about the work.

DETERMINE A THEME: By now, you should have an idea of what type of art you want to collect. For beginning collectors I would suggest a relatively accessible (and affordable) theme like Emerging Artists, Canadian art, Photography, Prints, Video or whatever takes your fancy.

Having a theme allows you to focus your research. You can diversify later, but if for example you collect photography, you can familiarize yourself with market intricacies straight away, and buy what appeals to you within that. Remember, you are going for longevity. There’s nothing wrong with having a few bare walls around while you look around to find the right artwork for you. You should never feel pressured by a dealer, after all, the artist will always be making more work. That said..

CONSIDER YOUR PURCHASE: Once you have an idea of a piece you might like to buy, you should start thinking about pricing. Dealers try to generate excitement and interest around their young artists, because as interest grows, so do prices. Make sure the interest is justified. Make sure that you understand why the artist is being hailed as the next big thing. What is the dealer’s record? Have the artists works been bought by any museums (a hallmark of value)? Does the gallery do art fairs? Which ones? (Galleries are vetted, the best ones getting in to fairs such as Art Basel, Art Forum Berlin, ARCO in Madrid, the Armory Show in NYC.) Has the artist been part of any other exhibitions? (Museum and international group shows add importance) Who has written about the artist? Check the artists’ bio and CV carefully. This is very important: I strongly believe that the best artists have a Masters degree, because a secondary degree is enough financial investment for them to generate the necessary ambition to succeed.

GET THE DETAILS RIGHT: Will the work be signed? Will the gallery include certificate of authenticy on the back of the work? How long will the artwork last without fading or cracking? If it doesn’t, how will you be compensated? Will the gallery install the work for you? How is it framed? Is the work protected against light damage? Will you be kept up to date on the artists’ career? Can the gallery arrange for you to meet the artist?

DIVERSIFY: Once you have purchased your first few artworks, you have the makings of a collection. Your choices needn’t be dictated by medium, however. Looking at historical precedents for contemporary work can help define a contemporary collection. Look at curated museum exhibitions for inspiration.

NOTES ON THE WHITNEY BIENNALE
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People expect you to be able to come up with some enlightening synopsis of the overall show. Selecting stand-out works is much more useful, or strong curatorial strategies.

One of my favorites was Sturtevant’s re-creation of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades. It was a timely way of addressing the historical-ness of what the viewer was seeing. So smart, and useful:

- Sturtevant Born 1930, Lakewood, Ohio; lives in Paris, France. Sturtevant’s work centers on questions of authorship, authenticity, and the ways art acquires meaning through institutional contextualization, criticism, and market valuation. Since the 1960s, she has meticulously re-created works by other artists, ranging from Pop stalwarts such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol to Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Paul McCarthy. These projects have included repeating Johns’s iconic Flag (1965-66) and reconstituting, in its entirety, Oldenburg’s Store (1967). Warhol in particular recognized the collaborative rather than appropriative basis of her approach and even gave her one of his Flower silkscreens to use in creating her own canvases. When later quizzed about his own painting techniques, Warhol deadpanned: “I don’t know. Ask [Sturtevant].”

This collective’s hour-long film Pedestrian Cinema is a complex self-referential work about “keeping the borders of film open, the idea of an outside is revived - this exterior that the film studio confronts in its work..where the people who enter into the production process also elaborate it.”

- Bernadette Corporation Founded 1994; based in New York, New York, and Berlin, Germany. Bernadette Corporation produces films, publications, and interventions that pose the question of how to defect from modern living within the capitalist system. Through the shifting nature of the group’s composition and their diverse modes of production- and, paradoxically, by branding themselves as a corporation- they elude any definitive, image-based identity.

I love Fischer’s blown out walls on the top floor of the Biennale. Also I had seen this large sculpture last year at the Camden Arts Centre in London. A long tree branch, suspended from the ceiling and hanging close to the ground, had at its end a lit candle. The piece slowly rotated like a needle on a record:

- Urs Fischer Born 1973, Zurich, Switzerland; lives in Zurich, Switzerland, and Los Angeles, California. Urs Fischer’s artistic practice is founded on a consideration of the nature of substances, the act of making, and the unpredictable processes that can result from combining the two. With an extraordinarily wide range of materials- Styrofoam, clay, mirrors, fruit, wax, wood, glass, paint, sawdust, and silicone, to name a few-he resuscitates art historical genres such as still lifes, nudes, portraits, and landscapes in potent sculptures that reflect the complexity, wonder, and banality of everyday life. His works reverberate with material transformation and decay as well as with poetic internal collisions and contradictions that cause his sculptures to oscillate between seeming beautiful or ugly, elegant or awkward, graceful or burdened.

Meckseper’s slick window displays were an enticing way of approaching sculpture. Almost mini-tableaux, the consumer products and broken glass made for a kind of historical push-pull, recalling Kristallnacht:

- Josephine Meckseper Born 1964, Lilienthal, Germany; lives in New York, New York. Josephine Meckseper’s installations, photographs, and films explore, as Nicolas Garait has described, “the questionable links the media establishes between images of political news, the fashion industry, and advertising.” In The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art (2005), she assembles everyday objects (a stuffed rabbit, stockings, a toilet plunger) and imagery related to protest culture. Deconstructing the media’s strategy of mixing advertising and editorial content, she exposes how we have become consumers not only of products but also of news and politics. In displays that recall ethnographic museums, her work sets up absurdist juxtapositions that reflect and absorb the interrupted desires created by the ideally lit shop window at midnight, where consumption is temporarily deferred and the projection of ownership meets the transgressive impulse toward looting.

*All bios taken from the Whitney Biennale website.

GALLERY PROFILE: CSA SPACE
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Opened in September of last year above a bookstore in Vancouver by critic Christopher Brayshaw, gallery owner Stephen Tong and photographer Adam Harrison, this space is less a commercial gallery than a showcase for Vancouver’s latest young art. Each of the three owners has a day job, allowing them the freedom to program work that they truly believe in, regardless of its saleability.

They give artists one-off shows, and have become a destination for visiting national and international curators, in search of the Next Big Thing. Their aim is to become a “very activated space that stands for autonomous and critical thinking about art and a place where personal aesthetic tastes are the basis for each show.”

Of particular note are Sylvia Grace Borda, currently showing at CSA:

Sylvia Grace Borda

Because CSA’s artists tend to be young and without gallery representation, here’s a link to an artist collective in Vancouver, some of whose founding members (Khan Lee and Derek Brunen) have shown with CSA:

Inter-mission

Co-director Adam Harrison is also founder of Doppelganger magazine:

Doppelganger

ARTISTS WE’VE GOOGLED FOR YOU
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The following info gleaned from our web search:

Mans Wrange

MÃ¥ns Wrange’s work frequently consists of major socio- political studies that span several years and resemble research projects more than anything else. This is an artist with a social commitment above all. His choice of subject and method of approaching them affirms this. Wrange devotes enormous attention to every separate part of his work, be it the drawn-out processing of the subjects or the spatial presentation of the works.

For The Average Citizen project, MÃ¥ns Wrange studied how statistical averages influence and govern our everyday lives. With help from Statistics Sweden, he deduced the statistical profile of the average Swedish citizen. The result was a 40-year-old woman who lives in a one-bedroom apartment and has an annual income of 180,000 kronor. Through a media campaign, MÃ¥ns Wrange made contact with a person who matched these criteria exactly, and by interviewing this person, whose name was Marianne, put normality into perspective. As in so many of MÃ¥ns Wrange’s works, this was an analysis of the means by which society is described and indirectly normalised. The Average Citizen poses questions about the relationship between mean averages and representations that can shed light on how the welfare state, in its striving for equality, through the simplifications of statistics, might contribute towards certain groups being perceived by others as deviants.

Imogen Stidworthy

Imogen Stidworthy deals with language and its translation into sound and image in her videos, films, photos and sound installations. Her newest installation Alex simulates a waiting room in which the audience is transported into a therapeutic situation: the treatment of a psychosomatic problem in which the vocal cords are distorted into a permanent, silent scream. A further installation is devoid of a specific plot .. here, the voice is liberated from both body and language. As an acoustic entity, this video installation allows a spatial experience that breaks through the physical presence of the visitors and the space.

Imogen Stidworthy, born in Great Britain in 1963, lives in Amsterdam. She has taken part in numerous international exhibitions, including “Exploding Cinema” in the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam; “Power and the Subject,” in the Central House of Artists, Moscow, and the Ninth Biennale de l’image en movement, St. Gervais, Geneva (all in 2001).

Ulla von Brandenburg

Ulla von Brandenburg works with different media such as drawing, video, film, space installation and performance. Motives of historic originals are brought forward by the illustration in a current time context and therefore act as filters that switch between the illustration and the viewer.

In Untitled (2003), von Brandenburg created a larger than life-size wall painting based on an early composite photograph by pioneer photographer Henry Peach Robinson. Enlarged and abstracted, the image leaves only the whitest areas of the photograph unpainted so as to create a striking negative effect. The figures loom out of the painting, at times reading only as abstract forms. Shot on Super-8 film, von Brandenburg’s Tableaux Vivants depict static arrangements of figures that hold their carefully choreographed poses for the length of the roll of film. Occasional movements betray these grainy images as films. The nexus of gazes that temporarily binds the figures together (all of whom are contemporaries of von Brandenburg and recognisable members of Hamburg’s artistic milieu) suggests possible relationships and stories between these characters.

IN DEPTH: RAUSCHENBERG
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In a nutshell:

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” - Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg is one of those rare artists who has managed to continue pushing the boundaries of art, making strong statements and reinventing his practice for decades. Born in Texas, he studied at the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina with John Cage and Merce Cunningham before moving to New York. By 1958 he was showing with the renowned gallerist Leo Castelli.

Early on, in 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made what is arguably one of the more brilliant moves of the twentieth century. His Erased de Kooning drawing involved “the simultaneous unmaking of one work and the creation of another.” He got hold of a drawing from de Kooning, simply erased it, and presented the result as another artwork. This was done at a time when Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock were practicing in their distinctive styles, and this move opened up possibilities for artists.

By the mid-1950’s, he had begun his series of famous Combines. The first lines in the catalogue accompanying Rauschenberg’s recent retrospective of these works at the Met in New York: “Much late-twentieth-century contemporary art is unthinkable without Robert Rauschenberg..(he) paved the way for new possibilities, creating a space between painting and sculpture and between performance and the object. His work opened the door to the practice of drawing the artist’s own life - even time itself - into art.” The Combines are paintings that famously incorporated other paintings, items of clothing, buckets, lightbulbs, cutlery, furniture, an entire bed and most famously, a long-haired taxidermied angora goat into a painting/sculpture hybrid.

The most striking thing for me, walking through the show, was how palpable the sense of being in the artists’ studio was. Pieces of his studio were literally incorporated into the works, so the effect was almost of being transported into that era. This was art of experience, and perhaps Rauschenberg’s signature achievement .

Charlene, from 1954 is a case in point. It appears at first impression to be a mess of junk glued with paint onto a wooden brace. A closer look reveals that many of the objects in the composition carry a personal significance for the artist, including a white sweatshirt, a flattened umbrella, paint can lids, a postcard of the Statue of Liberty and most particularly, a letter written to him by his mother.

When you see a contemporary artwork, particularly a sculptural piece made from seemingly unconnected pieces, or of ‘junk’, it is worth asking how this relates to what Rauschenberg was doing. Or in trying to find the thread that leads from Rauschenberg’s work to today’s work.

WHAT’S GOING ON (WHO’S DOING WHAT)
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-Last week the whole of the Cultural section at the Canadian High Commission in London was made redundant.

-Curator Ried Shier makes the move from Toronto’s Power Plant to Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery