Contemporary Art Exhibition Research Articles

Teaching contemporary art history in China

Abstract In 2009, the author spent a semester teaching western art history to Chinese students in Beijing. And he was also able to review contemporary art exhibitions in that city. He has published books on the methodologies of art history, on the art museum and on a world art history. Therefore, this article draws some lessons from that experience, in light of these publications. To what extent can histories of art in China be modelled on narratives about western art? And, in what ways, does the art historian need to consider the distinctive features of Chinese culture? When the possibilities for misunderstanding by a foreigner are so obvious, how is it possible to develop plausible interpretations of contemporary art? A great deal of recent English-language art writing is being translated into Chinese. And yet, the availability of such cultural exchanges does not necessarily answer these questions. But here it is necessary to consider political issues, which are not easy to resolve.

Show time: the 50 most influential exhibitions of contemporary art

Show Time is the first book to explore the radical shifts that have taken place in the practice of curating contemporary art over the last twenty years. Tracing a history of the field through its most innovative shows, renowned curator Jens Hoffmann selects the fifty exhibitions that have most significantly shaped the practice of both artists and exhibition curators. The books nine thematic sections focus on a huge variety of exhibitions, including those that have explored public space; reflected on globalization; engaged audiences in revolutionary ways; and brought into the gallery other disciplines such as theatre and architecture. Short texts introduce and place each exhibition in context, accompanied by installation photographs and factual data about the participating artists, venues, dates, curators and publications, and many feature quotations from the originating curators exploring the premise of the show. The book concludes with a roundtable discussion by some of todays leading curators.

Blomstermaleren på rejse. I.L. Jensens brev fra Paris 1823

Marie-Louise Berner: The Flower Painter on His Travels. I.L. Jensen’s Letter from Paris, 1823On 15 March 1823, the flower painter Johan Laurentz Jensen (1800–1856) wrote a letter from Paris to his friend the sculptor H.V. Bissen. In it, he describes his journey from Copenhagen across the Netherlands to Paris, and he relates his impressions and experiences, especially during the eight months spent in that city. He describes in detail the salon and the exhibition of contemporary art at the Musée du Luxembourg that year. He also makes a number of observations about his daily life, friends and activities, and lastly states that he is on his way to Sèvres, to paint on porcelain.In addition to publishing the letter in its entirety, this article provides an account of the painter’s background, and an analysis of the experiences related and observations made in the letter. It further provides background on the salon: its format and organizational principles, its location, opening hours, visitors, contents and catalogue. Additionally, detailed commentary is provided on Jensen’s observations on the art at the salon and at the Musée du Luxembourg, as well as on Jensen’s life in the city. The article concludes with an appraisal of the importance of the journey to Jensen and his art.

Lübeck ligger syd for Kassel. Omkring to breve fra Kamma Rahbek og et mindedigt af Friederike Brun

Marie-Louise Berner: The Flower Painter on His Travels. I.L. Jensen’s Letter from Paris, 1823
 On 15 March 1823, the flower painter Johan Laurentz Jensen (1800–1856) wrote a letter from Paris to his friend the sculptor H.V. Bissen. In it, he describes his journey from Copenhagen across the Netherlands to Paris, and he relates his impressions and experiences, especially during the eight months spent in that city. He describes in detail the salon and the exhibition of contemporary art at the Musée du Luxembourg that year. He also makes a number of observations about his daily life, friends and activities, and lastly states that he is on his way to Sèvres, to paint on porcelain.In addition to publishing the letter in its entirety, this article provides an account of the painter’s background, and an analysis of the experiences related and observations made in the letter. It further provides background on the salon: its format and organizational principles, its location, opening hours, visitors, contents and catalogue. Additionally, detailed commentary is provided on Jensen’s observations on the art at the salon and at the Musée du Luxembourg, as well as on Jensen’s life in the city. The article concludes with an appraisal of the importance of the journey to Jensen and his art.

Curating Resistances: Ambivalences and Potentials of Contemporary Art Biennials

The idea of enabling resistant narratives to neoliberalism through dialogical and participatory works, steadily informs the agenda of perennial large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art (biennials) around Europe and the world. Somewhat paradoxically, the proliferation of such shows since the early 1990s depends on this very neoliberal model that values culture for its measurable outcomes. By discussing such predicaments of the “biennial phenomenon,” this article lays out its ambivalences and potentials within the current political–economic context. Moreover, through looking at the case of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012), a controversial exhibition that prioritized activism and the “real effects” of art in society, the article suggests that such biennial complexities could be better addressed through ethnographic methodologies.

NECROPHELIA AND THE STRANGE CASE OF AFTERLIFE

ABSTRACT Drawing on Allan Edgar Poe’s provocative statement that “The death ... of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world” (1951: 369), I will focus on the pivotal role of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in attesting to this assertion. Ophelia’s drowning is probably the most recognizable female death depicted by Shakespeare. Dating back to Gertrude’s “reported version” of the drowning, representations of Ophelia’s eroticized death have occupied the minds of Western artists and writers. Their necrOphelian fantasies materialized as numerous paintings, photographs and literary texts. It seems that Ophelia’s floating dead body is also at the core of postmodern thanatophiliac imagination, taking shape in the form of conventionalized representations, such as: video scenes available on YouTube, amateur photographs in bathtubs posted on photo sharing sites, reproductions and remakes of classical paintings (e.g. John Everett Millais), and contemporary art exhibitions in museums. These references will demonstrate that new cyber story - digital afterlife - is being built around the figure of Shakespearean Ophelia, unearthing the sexual attraction of the lifeless female body.

Korean Contemporary Art Exhibitions of the 2000s in Global Context: Global Mobility, Social Relation, and Realism

Korean Contemporary Art Exhibitions of the 2000s in Global Context: Global Mobility, Social Relation, and Realism

Gordon John Howes 1938-2013 (Fish Systematist)

Gordon John Howes 1938-2013 (Fish Systematist)

More than just Death in Venice: Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

We are all busy. When in our 12+ hour day is there time to read the BJGP , let alone an article on a contemporary art exhibition in Venice that you will never visit? But stop! This is no ordinary exhibition. We are presented with beautiful landscapes in crimson, purple, teal blue and hot pink hues. We see the end of a continuous stream of UN trucks disappearing into the distance, the militia learning how to patrol as they uncover burnt-out villages, or participating in what appear to be spiritual festivals. Shockingly, we also see bodies of the same militia, left in the middle of the road as a crowd gathers. While these visual horrors unfold, the delicate voice of a female folk singer is overlaid in stark contrast to the horrors unveiled on film in beautiful colours. Moments like this stop you in your tracks and grab your attention. ‘The Enclave’ is Richard Mosse’s installation representing Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale. With a fine art and photographic background, he looked for a way to portray this conflict so that it would attract attention in this media-saturated world in which we live. With his collaborators, …

Cripping Cyberspace Curator Acknowledgments

Cripping Cyberspace: A Contemporary Virtual Art Exhibition would not have been possible without the incredible commitment and support of Jay T. Dolmage, Editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and Geoffrey Shea and Libby Shea from the Common Pulse Intersecting Abilities Art Festival and Symposium. I thank them tremendously for inviting me to curate this project, through which my skills and ideas around curating have most certainly been challenged. I am also grateful to Jay for collating all the exhibition materials and formatting the special issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies in order to showcase Cripping Cyberspace, and providing the artists with technical advice. Libby and Geoffrey have been efficient administrators of the artist and curator contracts, travel arrangements and finding the appropriate resources. It has been an honor to work with artists Katherine Araniello, Cassandra Hartblay, Sara Hendren and m.i.a. collective (Arseli Dokumaci, Antonia Hernández, Laurence Parent and Kim Sawchuk). Thank you for being willing guinea pigs in this wonderful experiment in cyberspace, and participating in the additional Skype artist interviews and audio description process. Finally, I am grateful to Alexandra Haagaard for providing the excellent written transcripts of the Skype artist interviews.

‘Disabling’ the Museum: Curator as Infrastructural Activist

This paper will explore how I attempt to ‘disable’ the museum through curating my third exhibition containing disability-related content, that I consider to be part of my work as a radical, infrastructural activist: Cripping Cyberspace: A Contemporary Virtual Art Exhibition (2013) hosted by and in conjunction with the Common Pulse Intersecting Abilities Art Festival and Symposium and the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies . The space for this exhibition offers a new experimental virtual platform hosted by an online journal. I argue that part of the decolonizing work of disability studies is to offer opportunities to both curators and artists where their work can be displayed within unconventional gallery settings (such as the virtual platform) in order to ‘crip’ art history and contemporary art practice.

A Study on Type Classification and Case study of Extended contemporary art exhibition space to outside of urban space

A Study on Type Classification and Case study of Extended contemporary art exhibition space to outside of urban space

Konst som deltagande metodologi

While Art is often defined in opposition to Science, artistic research is often legitimaced by a positivistic classical scientific paradigm. For example the artist as scientist was highlighted in 2012 year’s Documenta – one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art. In contrast to this position, I intend to show the fruitfulness in positioning art in a feminist, qualitative-oriented research tradition. An important point here is the definition of an artistic methodology, where art is a reflective process and where artistic work is both means and goal. This includes the use of artistic practices to break the own pre-understanding of a phenomenon. It is the personal motive that determines what is relevant, while this perspective is exposed to critical scrutiny. Based on this, I discuss how art can be described as a participatory methodology, and use a research project in urban planning and information and communication technology as an example. Here, the art project functioned as a creative and critical room that created a greater understanding of the significance of discursive practices and the importance of reviewing the information that is the foundation of how we formulate the research problems. The most significant conclusion is that artistic research in this sense may well be, and probably should be, an important part of a scientific research and is a prerequisite for scientific development.

What Kind of Postcolonial Museum? The Circulation of Objects as a Postcolonial Lever: Study Day at Bétonsalon, Paris, December 2011

December 01 2012 What Kind of Postcolonial Museum? The Circulation of Objects as a Postcolonial Lever: Study Day at Bétonsalon, Paris, December 2011 Margareta von Oswald Margareta von Oswald Margareta von Oswald is a sociologist doing an ethnography of the contemporary art exhibition “La Triennale” in Paris, which opened in April 2012. mvoswald@googlemail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Margareta von Oswald Margareta von Oswald is a sociologist doing an ethnography of the contemporary art exhibition “La Triennale” in Paris, which opened in April 2012. mvoswald@googlemail.com Online ISSN: 1937-2108 Print ISSN: 0001-9933 © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California.2012 African Arts (2012) 45 (4): 5–6. https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_a_00023 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Margareta von Oswald; What Kind of Postcolonial Museum? The Circulation of Objects as a Postcolonial Lever: Study Day at Bétonsalon, Paris, December 2011. African Arts 2012; 45 (4): 5–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_a_00023 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Tipping Point: A Conversation with Charlie Humphrey

Despite the increasing globalization of cultural production, art still frequently revolves around questions of place and whether or not one is in the right place. Do global and national markets exert hegemonic control, essentially creating taste, and therefore act as the drivers of regional and local art markets? Does this create a landscape of art in which the larger markets dominate not only the economic side of the art equation but also the intellectual and visual culture of smaller cities? Is it possible for the visual arts in mid-sized art markets, and the artists who live there, to really matter in the grand scheme of things, or will they always be peripheral? Pittsburgh has received many national accolades of late, including for its vibrant visual arts culture. Here Charlie Humphrey, the executive director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, two long-standing nonprofit pillars of the Pittsburgh arts community, gives his take on these and other issues related to the state of visual arts in Pittsburgh. This interview was conducted in Humphrey's office at Pittsburgh Filmmakers on April 13, 2012. SCOTT TURRI: Tell me a bit about your background. How did. you become involved with Pittsburgh Filmmakers and then the Center for the Arts, and how did they come to be affiliated with one another? CHARLIE HUMPHREY: Well, when I was a kid I shot miles and miles of Super 8 film. I was always really interested in film and in photography. I had a variety of cameras and I was by default the family historian in capturing images, so I always kind of had an obsession with that, and when I graduated from college I had a degree in philosophy. ... I worked for a couple of different commercial radio stations. ... and went to work for WQED here in Pittsburgh as a producer and administrative assistant, and I did that for about five years. Then, I transitioned into the weekly newspaper business. There was a weekly paper here for a number of years: the alternative paper of record called In Pittsburgh Newsweekly. I was the editor and publisher of that, and after I left-this is twenty years ago-I became the executive director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers. So, it's all media related-I mean media defined in the broadest sense of the term. It has always been an obsession of mine and something that I have always really cared about, so to come to Pittsburgh Filmmakers is really a dream come true for me even though I don't make films anymore. About eight or nine years ago Pittsburgh Center for the Arts had some financial problems and they asked Filmmakers to get involved. They were bankrupt, they had closed their doors, they had laid off all of their staff. They were over a million dollars in debt, and so a group of volunteers there and my staff got involved and we were able to help nurse them back to health and then it made sense after that to simply merge the two organizations into one, because their missions are identical, if you think about it. It's about the exhibition of contemporary art, it's about teaching contemporary art, and it's about supporting contemporary artists. Filmmakers is more about film, video, and photography; [at Center for the Arts] it's printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics-so it's a wider focus, more disciplines involved, but it's really the same. ST: In the past, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts has mounted a biennial featuring regional artists. This year the biennial had a different format, which was a collaborative effort between the Carnegie Museum, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Could you speak about how this came about and what was the intent of this expanded format? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] CH: Well, your timing in asking that question is really good because we are now looking at the 2014 biennial, planning that, and we will have all of those characters involved again, plus a couple of new ones, which is pretty exciting. …

Archival Remembering Exhibitions

This article examines the variant of remembering exhibitions that adopts a documentary approach rather than attempting to replicate, riff on, or reprise the remembered exhibition. Case studies focus on examples that remember more than one exhibition. Discussions of Stationen der Moderne, Telling Histories, Parallel Chronologies, L'Attico and Recollections present the interplay between their celebratory functions and political import in relation to institutional, geographic and temporal considerations. In addition, the archival remembering exhibition is positioned in relation to the archive as it appears in recent contemporary art exhibition practices.

Post-colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness’, contemporary art and the market in the age of neoliberal capital

Arjun Appadurai has argued that ‘the materiality of objects in India is not yet completely penetrated by the logic of the market’.1 However, the entry and the visibility of modern and contemporary Indian art into the circuits of the global art world increasingly challenge this argument. The story of modern and contemporary Indian art is one of the inscription of local objects and their ‘Indianness’ into the above circuits, with market value being created inthe process. If the globalisation of the art world provides a conceptual and material arena where objects are circulated, displayed and bought and sold through auction houses, exhibitions, biennales and art fairs, this article analyses an event that epitomises some of the forces at play in this arena: the contemporary art exhibition ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today’ held in 2010 at the Saatchi Gallery, London. An artistic cum business instantiation of ‘India in Europe’—and one that challenges the visual and aesthetic canons ‘traditionally’ associated with India—this article examines this exhibition as anentry point into the analysis of how neoliberal capital produces ‘culture’, and into the tension between the commodity form and the infinite possibilities, and unintended consequences, opened up by this very status.

Neoclassicism and local artistic tradition in the sepulchral monuments of the Certosa cemetery in Bologna during the napoleonic era and the restoration

The Cemetery of Bologna was founded in 1801 in the former monastery of the “Certosini” (Carthusians, a monastic order dissolved shortly before this period by the Napoleonic government). The cemetery is a special place where the architectonic and natural beauty of this ancient site blend in with the funerary sculpture, painting and architecture, but at the same time presents particularly important implications with regard to urban planning . This paper examines the development of the monumental Neoclassical section, whose expansion centred around the fourteenth to sixteenth century cloister. It was in these arches that the Þ rst monumental tombs in the Carthusian monastery, known as the “Certosa”, were built and involved the work of most of the local painters, sculptors and architects from the Napoleonic era and the early days of the Restoration. The number and grandeur of these works of art, unequivocally demonstrate how, during the Þ rst half of the nineteenth century, this site was the most artistically s ourishing in the city, as well as being a constantly expanding exhibition of contemporary art. For this reason, learned Italians and foreign travellers s ocked to visit this place when passing through Bologna. The cemetery, of international renown, was a source of great pride for the Bolognese, and was added to, by becoming the frequent subject of literary works. The town authorities soon wanted to promote its prestige by enriching and enlarging the site, as well as introducing methodical checks in the mid 1810s, regulating the artistic quality of the sepulchral monuments. In this way, the empty spaces and cloisters of the exmonastery continued to be adorned with an increasing number of funeral monuments.

‘China’ on Display for European Audiences? The Making of an Early Travelling Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Art: China Avantgarde (Berlin/1993)

Exhibitions have always been at the heart of the modern art world. They are contested sites, where the joint forces of the art objects, their social agents, and institutional spaces temporarily intersect and provide a visual arrangement to specific audiences, whose interpretations feed back into the discourse on art. From this perspective, “contemporary Chinese art,” both as phenomenon and discursive category referring to specific dimensions of artistic production in China post-1979, was mediated through various exhibitions that took place in the People’s Republic of China. After 1989, exhibitions of artworks from the PRC in European and North American museums significantly contributed to the broadening of Western knowledge about this artistic production. Since then, the two strains of exhibition activities grew while becoming increasingly entangled and the discursive category of “contemporary Chinese art” has gone global. This paper reviews the beginnings of this complex process by investigating the conditions that configured the first large group exhibition of contemporary Chinese art from the PRC in Europe after 1979: the travelling group show China Avantgarde , which opened in Berlin in early 1993. The first part of the paper explores the wider historical conditions that impacted on the exhibition by contextualizing the event in relation to two important, if very different forerunners: the 1989 shows Zhongguo xiandai yishu zhan. China/Avantgarde in Beijing and Magiciens de la terre in Paris.Yet the important entanglements between the respective curatorial concepts, affiliated art discourses, and the agents involved are also analysed. Constituting a specific network of mediators, mediating factors, and mediating institutions, these forerunners influenced the making of China Avantgarde in Berlin three years later. The second part of the paper discusses the Berlin exhibition in detail. It argues that the title reflects the contested use of the discursive categories “avant-garde” and “modern art” in Beijing and Berlin at the time, which helped translate and thereby shape a certain image of contemporary Chinese art beyond the actual artworks on display. Of paricular interes are the concerns of the European curators, who had to overcome various political, logistic, as well as conceptual challenges when selecting artists and artworks. Examining the catalogue as an instance where diverging strategies of how to present artworks from thePRC become visible, the paper argues that China Avantgarde was not so much a clear-cut, singular, and–by now–canonical event, but formed as well as informed a complex canonizing process that is still relevant today.

Seven Billion Humans and 98 Trillion Medicine Doses

In 2008 a contemporary art exhibition at the British Museum called Cradle to Grave aimed to represent modern approaches to health and explore the medicine histories of a typical British man and woman. Each of the “pill diaries” in this exhibit consisted of a 13 meter long by 0.5 meter wide net