Re-View: Onnasch Collection

Until today I've new about four types of art collector:

• He/She collects art, but could be collecting cars, houses, boats, or, on a less pompous scale, stamps. Just for the sake of it. Without any reasoning behind it. Most of the time he uses a Prada scarf and she a leopard skin jacket - know a couple of collectors collecting on this base;
• He/She collects following a predetermined list with names on it. Tick the box anytime they acquire one of the artist's pieces. Easily recognised as artificial on their choices and decisions, more about what they hear than about what they feel - know, also, a couple of collectors collecting on this base;
• Those that collect as an investment. Normally associated to and with the finance sector - know some collectors collecting on this base;
• He/She collects according to a particular framework. It could be time, medium, geography, etc. They can be from different walks of life - fortunately, know quite good collectors collecting on this base;

While the first three are collectors that can be grouped under those who collect accordingly to economic demand and financial trends; the last one, collects taken in consideration personal taste and a sensorial social experience.

Today, I've meet another one, who fell's within the last group. Who collects taken in consideration personal taste and a sensorial social experience. However, the difference between these two, lies in that that is not particular framework on the collecting. He/She jump from one artist to another, from one medium to other, from one continent to other continent depending of what he/she socially and culturally is experiencing at the moment.

A London

These thoughts came about after reading an article at The New York Time on 'Useful Critiques'. On the article, Jonathan Klein, chief executive of Getty Images, expresses that:

«Anytime someone came to me to show me their work, I would critique it. I would almost behave like a schoolteacher — my mother was a teacher — and bring out the metaphorical red pen. And what I didn’t appreciate at the time is that before you mess around the edges, you’ve got to say to yourself, “Am I going to make this significantly better, or am I going to make it only 5 or 10 percent better?” Because in fiddling over the small stuff, you take away all the empowerment. Basically it no longer becomes that person’s work. And after a while, those people get into the habit of giving you incomplete work, and then you have to do it for them.»

A couple of months ago I have read a critique, written by a foreign critic, from Croatia, regarding a body of work in which someone that I know had a major participation. It finishes with this lines: «The performance is composed of an international team of mostly high-quality performers from Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Great Britain and Slovenia ... while the announced Croatian dancer Sven Bahat unfortunately got a poor substitute.» [Predstavu tako čini međunarodna ekipa mahom kvalitetnih izvođača iz Hrvatske, Austrije, Mađarske, Velike Britanije i Slovenije ... dok je najavljivani hrvatski plesač Sven Bahat nažalost dobio slabiju zamjenu.]

My question is, how can the reviewer, Jelena Mihelčić, suggest that the "poor substitute" was not the best substitute for "the announced Croatian dancer", when, firstly, as the word 'substitute' implies - a person or thing acting or serving in place of another - and, when, secondly, the reviewer is making a comparison between two performers/dancers, but there wasn't, however, any thing to compare with. The "announced Croatian dancer" was 'announced', but he did not performed. Not even rehearsed! So there is nothing to compare, even to mention!

Setting aside the semantic debate, let’s try to understand what that underlying reality is. To what for is this announcement all about. Unless the author of this words knows something more about the performance piece than me - and believe me, she doesn't; or, instead, she is just being a kiss-ass. Which for a critic - someone who professionally has o maintain an analytical distance from what is being criticised -, or whatever she might call herself, is not the best professional predication. Unless she is writing as a PR manager while working for the "announced Croatian dancer"!

Fiddling around the edges allows the "artist", i.e. "the announced Croatian dancer", to get away with things; it doesn't help him, or her, to reach success. Because, "after a while, those people get into the habit of giving you incomplete work, and then you have to do it for them." And, believe me, again, you might know how to write; but you don't know how to dance.

Tatsou Miyajima: I-Model

Tatsou Miyajima
I-Model
Lisson Gallery

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 18, 2013

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 15, 2013

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 18, 2013 (Detail)

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (Corps sans Organes) No. 17, 2013

«The show’s title, I-Model, refers to Miyajima’s collaboration with an artificial life expert, Professor Takashi Ikegami of Tokyo University, which has resulted in a computer programme that generates number sequences responding to the rhythms and speeds of others in the system. Instead of a collection of randomised counting circuits, these networks or clusters of flashing digits come together to create intelligent, ‘living’ organisms, which Miyajima calls Corps Sans Organe after Antonin Artaud’s term for an ideal, virtual body that could function independently from the interconnectivity of its constituent parts.

The Rhizome series (all works 2013), are similarly complex and hypnotic works, formed of glittering grids or panels of coloured LED numbers, also following Ikegami’s unpredictable logic processors. Lisson Gallery is also debuting Miyajima’s seductively red leather-clad structure, Life Palace (Tea House) (2013), which occupies an entire gallery and invites one viewer at a time to step into a domed constellation of blue lights, with numbers glowing and blinking in the darkened space. This personal, meditative isolation chamber reinforces Miyajima’s Buddhist-infused philosophies about time and contemplation, reflecting the cycle of life through the progression from 1 to 9.» [PR]

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (rhizome) No. 1?, 2013

Tatsuo Miyajima, Life (rhizome) No. 1?, 2013 (detail)

«Tatsuo Miyajima was born in 1957 and lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan. Employing contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video, and computers, Miyajima’s technological works centre on his use of digital counters, or ‘gadgets’ as he calls them. These numbers, flashing in continual and repetitious – though not necessarily sequential – cycles, represent the journey from life to death and derive from his core artistic concepts: ‘Keep Changing’, ‘Connect with All’, and ‘Goes on Forever’. Selected solo shows include: SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo (2012, 2010); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2011); Lokremise / Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (2011); Miyanomori Art Museum, Hokkaido (2010); Lisson Gallery, London (2009, 2005).» [PR]

Li Xiaodong: Half Street

Li Xiaodong
Half Street
Lisson Gallery

Li Xiaodong, Egyptian Restaurant 8 (acrylic on paint, 40.5x50.5 cm), 2013 (detail)

Li Xiaodong's exhibition view

Li Xiaodong's exhibition view

Li Xiaodong's Diary 2013

«Liu Xiaodong (1963) is one of China’s foremost artists and a painter of international stature. Born in 1963 to factory worker parents in Jincheng, a town in northeastern China, he trained at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts where he now teaches as a professor. A pioneer of neo-realism, his work was integral in the transformation of Chinese contemporary art during the 1990s, radically diverging from the Socialist Realism that dominated artistic production during the Mao era. Politically and socially aware, Liu explores the human experience through his art, while expanding the possibilities of painting. Recent solo shows include: Today Art Museum, Beijing (2013); Kunsthaus Graz (2012); Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2006) and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2006).» [PR]

Ana Mendieta: Traces

Ana Mendieta
Traces
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre

A London

Kate Moss: From The Collection of Gert Elfering

Kate Moss From The Collection of Gert Elfering
Christie's

Lutz Bacher: Black Beauty

Lutz Bacher
Black Beauty
Institute of Contemporary Arts

«Lutz Bacher () has drawn upon disconnected information from popular culture and her own life, producing works that play with the inter-changeability of identity, sexuality and the human body. Bacher uses images and objects in a physical, sometimes visceral manner, conducting arrangements of seemingly disparate entities and allowing them to interact in new ways. The artist's expansive work explores human identity as it is defined through gender, sexuality and the human body. Lutz Bacher is as elusive as her work is ambiguous, perhaps preferring not to dictate how her works should be viewed.» [PR]

A London

Jane & Louise Wilson: False Positives and False Negatives

Jane & Louise Wilson
False Positives and False Negatives
Paradise Row

Jane & Louise Wilson, False Positives and False Negatives (16 screenprints on mirrored Perspex, 70x50cm), 2012

Jane and Louise Wilson's large-scale photographs arouses in me the same type of fascination, feelings and sensations, which, in the same way, I consider Tenochtitlan (the Aztec pyramids site North of Mexico City) as an attractive natural scenery to make love. Images of the expression of power, of man's intervention in nature, and the death and rebirth of those spaces through nature's repossession. Of cosmological energies being conducted to and into bodies laying down on the top of the pyramids, while waiting for a sacrificial death, in order to give birth to a new day. On those pictures, in particulary, in the Nature Abhors A Vacuum's series, they reveal abandoned interiors spaces - human constructions - that are being retaken and brought around to live by nature.

Jane & Louise Wilson, Atomgrad (Nature Abhors A Vacuum) III (C-type print mounted on aluminum with diasec, 180x220cm), 2010

«Jane & Louise Wilson's exhibition explores the act of surveillance, considering its form and presence in spaces burdened by potent histories.» [PR]

Jane & Louise Wilson, Blind Landing Lab (Lab 1) (cast aluminum and enamel plated), 2012

Jane & Louise Wilson, Blind Landings (H-bomb Test Site, Orford Ness) #2 (black and white print with collage photographic elements, 38x38cm), 2013

«Jane and Louise Wilson (1967) were born in Newcastle and received their MAs at Goldsmiths College of Art, London. They began working together in 1989 and since then have exhibited at major galleries internationally. They were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999. They have been in numerous solo and group shows internationally. Recent exhibitions include Tempo Suspenso CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal and Unfolding the Aryan Papers, CGAC Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2010 (solo), the Stanley Kubrick retrospective, LACMA Los Angeles, 2011-12, (group), The Toxic Camera, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 2012 (solo), Tomorrow was already here, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, 2012-13 and at 303 Gallery, New York, 2013 (solo). [PR]»

ICA Off-Site: The Old Selfridges Hotel A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now

A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now
ICA Off-Site: The Old Selfridges Hotel

«A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now illustrates a perceived thread of creativity between the post-punk era and the present day - a legacy that underpins London's incredible creative potential in the present.» [PR]