life in transformation
Open Source Art is the idea of rethinking to the discarts of human beens as a code produced by a huge community as the population of planet hearth. In this days I’m doing a workshop on re-think the re-cycle with a group of students of the Academy of Fine Art in Lecce. The results of the workshop will be exhibited into a beautiful “Chiostro” in Lecce during the event Ring2008.
05/10/2007 – 07/01/2008
Be-Bomb: the Transatlantic War of Images and all that Jazz. 1946-1956
Curator: Serge Guilbaut and Manuel Borja-Villel
Produced by: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS)
Bikini Atoll Atomic Bomb Test, 1946
This exhibition analyses the dialogue between different spheres of post-war political and cultural life in the United States and France, documenting a particular period between 1946 and 1956 and encompassing from the euphoria of the liberation and reconstruction following the Second World War to the shadows and fear of the Cold War.
Arshile Gorky, 1944
Films, newspapers, fashion, archives and interviews set out to compare and contrast the art produced in France and the USA during those years, in which New York replaced Paris as the nerve center of modern art. The exhibition begins on the second floor by showing the situation in France following the Second World War. The rapid deterioration of relations between the United States and the USSR soon dampened the thrill of victory. Many artists, like Jean Fautrier, Arshile Gorky, Pablo Picasso, Henri Michaux and Robert Motherwell, tried to address the impact of the Liberation on the individuals who still found themselves under the influence of memories of wartime horrors. The new French government also needed to be reborn and to situate itself once again in the international scene, which it did through Picasso, a hero of the Resistance who moved to Antibes to produce an anarchic, sensual work that transmitted a certain joie de vivre and provided a boost to fashion, the archetypal image of France, as reflected by Jean Cocteau in his Théâtre de la Mode, and later on, through Christian Dior ’s New Look.
The first exchanges between French and American artists took place in 1946, organized independently of each country’s internal debates and a rather incipient avant-garde. That same year, the United States took center stage in one of the most decisive events of the post war, the atomic explosions on Bikini Atoll. Fear of communism and the bomb defined everyday life in the US, and artists tried to manifest the deep anguish that permeated American culture through abstraction and primitivism. From the institutional point of view, winning the war and occupying the center space hitherto assigned to Paris represented the United States assuming leadership of the West in its confrontation with the USSR. On the other hand, the ideological battle in Paris was at its height: André Fougeron, a communist painter, presented work abounding in social realism and Picasso’s peace dove campaign was counteracted by the US Department of State. It was in this context that a few galleries such as the Maeght in Paris and that of Samuel Kootz in New York initiated the first exchanges between the two countries.
Bean & Bird: Ballade
Bebop and cool were the new styles of jazz that Boris Vian introduced and defended in Paris, and they became a sarcastic censure of American racism. Meanwhile, Paris also witnessed the introduction of a form of automatism derived from Surrealism and originating in Montreal, which placed emphasis on the importance of freedom of expression against any kind of dogma. Some of the most classic works of this period both in New York and Paris were produced around 1948. If, in New York, artists aspired with evident optimism to rebuilding modernism from scratch (the vitality of Jackson Pollock, sublimity of Barnett Newman and existential power of Willem de Kooning), in Paris they set out to reassert the freedom of the individual and experimentation with the self, as shown in the work by Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung.
Hartung, 1952
The exhibition route continues on the first floor, in the opposite direction, chronologically encompassing the late forties to the end of the fifties. At this time, the large United States presence in France went some way to offsetting existing anti-Americanism. The critic Michel Tapié and painter Georges Mathieu began introducing the American avant-garde by organizing exhibitions. At the same time a number of private avant-garde galleries (Galerie Arnaud and the Galerie Eight) presented the work of American artists resident in Paris, as well as the production of what was then known as the Pacific School (Mark Tobey, Sam Francis and Claire Falkenstein, among others), in opposition to New York. Trapped between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Paris became the battlefield in which an intense contest of images would take place. A photographic gallery contrasts two topics, the idyllic, pastoral vision of French life as seen by the American eye of photographer Paul Strand, and the representation of the French perspective in which nightlife and modern music predominate, as interpreted by Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis.
Abstraction became the predominant style on the art scene around 1956, whether in the form of Abstract Expressionism or action painting in the United States, or in the abstraction lyrique, art informel and art autre of France. In this sense, Spain has not been a stranger to the debate. Three cultural events–the 1st Hispano-American Biennial in 1951, the abstract art course-exhibition in Santander in 1953 and the Venice Biennale of 1958–show how abstraction reappears in Spain after the war, and how its discourse was adapted to comply with the requirements of the Franco regime. This section contains a huge number of selected documents from the period, together with works by such artists as Esteban Vicente, José Guerrero, Antoni Tàpies, Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura and Luis Feito.
The exhibition finishes with the end of a decade, the fifties, in which a model based on progress and individuality was exhausted. This feeling of loss that permeated many artworks of the time is reflected at the end of the exhibition, especially in the hall that compares and contrasts the work of Jackson Pollock, Bram van Velde and Alberto Giacometti. The following decade would point in new directions, as shown in the art of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, and even in a film entitled Hiroshima Mon Amour, in which silence and black-and-white images–but also violence and irony–mark the end of a utopia.
Artista : Maria Thereza Alves
Origine : Ilari Valbonesi RAM Interview
Interview with Maria Thereza Alves
Durata 55.05
Formato Audio Windows Media
Qualità 24Kbps
Canali audio 2
Maria Thereza Alves , born in 1961 in Brazil, lives today in Berlin. In 1986, she co-founded Brazil’s Green Party in São Paulo. Amongst others, her work has been exhibited at the Liverpool Biennial; NGBK, Berlin; Villa Medici, Rome; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Venice Biennial; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Musée Portuaire, Dunkerque; CEAAC, Strasbourg; Spacex, Exeter; Gallery 101, Montréal; BüroFriedrich, Berlin; The House of World Cultures, Berlin; Galerija Miroslav Kraljevi, Zagreb; Porin Taidemuseo; Kunstwerkt, München; Zerynthia, Italy; Museum in Progress, Vienna; Werkleitz Biennial, Halle/ Saale; Insite, Tijuana/San Diego; Boxx, Brussels; Buersschouwburg, Brussels; Central Space Gallery, London; Temistocles 44, Mexico City; Casa del Lago, Mexico City; La Estación Gallery, Cuernavaca; Biennial Havana; Kenkeleba House, New York.
FEMME POLITIQUE
Today I would like to remember one of the most significative “femme politique” ever: Olympe de Gouges.
In 1789, in the French Revolution, French citizenship was defined in the document, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. From 1789 until 1944, French citizenship was limited to males — even though women were active in the French Revolution, and many assumed that citizenship was theirs by right of their active participation in that historic liberation battle.
Olympe de Gouges in 1791 wrote and published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen (Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne). Modeled on the 1789 Declaration of the National Assembly, defining citizenship for men, this Declaration echoed the same language and extended it to women, as well.
Olympe de Gouges both asserted woman’s capability to reason and make moral decisions, and pointed to the feminine virtues of emotion and feeling. Woman was not simply the same as man, but she was his equal partner. She was guillotined in 1793 as a reactionary royalist.
The Rights of Women 1791 :
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/gouges.html
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges
Sharjah Biennial 8: Arts & Ecology Symposium
5-7 April 2007
Produced in partnership with the curatorial practice Latitudes, Arts & Ecology is programming a three day symposium at Sharjah Biennial 8. The symposium will draw from two years of research and activities on the Arts & Ecology programme, and No Way Back? an enquiry presented by and at the London School of Economics and Political Science with RSA and Arts Council England in December 06.
Neural New Geography delicious.com/lucabarbeni Toshare.it 0280.org
