category: text - Comments Off on One of the things I feel about the current art that’s being spotlit is that it claims to be subversive on some level, by imitating the culture that surrounds us, or the culture of people who are in control – which is ad, media culture, et cetera – but I think its subversiness is purely intellectual and it’s not visual. Because if you look at the work of these artists, their work has become the very thing that they hate or that they intend to disrupt or they intend to undermine. And I think it’s a joke. (…) I try to show my own sense of things and my own sense of time, creating a history that’s for me, or it’s a record of things for me – one that challenges the record we’re given daily, whether through the newspapers, through television, or through politicians. If I were a violent person, I would run out into the street and buy guns and go into the nation’s capital and start annhililating the people who I believe responsible for this pre-invented existence. But the originators of this existence are long dead. It’s like a machine that runs itself that can’t stop. – David Wojnarowicz, The Weight of the Earth, January 1989 31 March 2019
category: publication, web - Comments Off on Injuring, Wagering, Controlling: Looking Back at a Metalanguage, Diedrich Diederichsen, 2018 21 March 2019
image courtesy of the artist, and Kow, Berlin photos: AXEL SCHNEIDER
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I’m currently installing an exhibition in Frankfurt, part of Because I Live Here, a group show at the MMK, in the middle of the banking district. The installation is called 14 Words and, for it, I’ve transported a 90s flower store from East Germany to Frankfurt. After rebuilding it, I will fill it with objects: no flowers, only empty vases. The group exhibition looks to racism in Germany, going back to the 1970s. I’ve been looking back to the roots of contemporary white supremacism and a neo-Nazi group known as the Order, who were active in the US in the 1980s. One of the group’s founding members, David Lane, established the Fourteen Words, a set of slogans derived from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that have formed the basis of white supremacism. The most famous slogan is: “We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.” – HENRIKE NAUMANN, Studio International, October 30, 2018.
Because I live Here is on view at MMK Tower in Frankfurt until March 31, 2019.
The text above comes from the novel Blood and Guts in High School by KATHY ACKER officially released in 1984. The book is a composition of fragments of texts and drawings from her notebooks over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old.
category: hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, Vogue Magazine, 1961 8 March 2019
category: exhibition, features - Comments Off on YEARS. I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die 14 February 2019
all images:
I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die, installation views at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen, 2019
photos: DAVID STJERNHOLM
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YEARS is SØREN AAGAARD, DITTE BOEN SORIA, STEFFEN JØRGENSEN, ANNA MARGRETHE PEDERSEN AND MERETE VYFF SLYNGBORG, a Copenhagen-based artist collective.
They are currently presenting a body of work under the title I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen until 17 February 2019
A review of this exhibition is available via Mousse Magazine.
category: exhibition, hyperlink, publication, web - Comments Off on LANDSCAPE MODERN OIL PAINTING CANVAS PAINTING ABSTRACT OIL PAINTING WALL HANGING, group show by Jir Sandel 12 February 2019