Artipedia - Arts News

PARKETT vol. 79

PARKETT vol. 79: Jon Kessler, Marilyn Minter, Albert Oehlen

http://www.parkettart.com

Parkett ’s unparalleled explorations and investigations of important international contemporary artists by acclaimed writers and critics continue in vol. 78, featuring Jon Kessler, Marilyn Minter, and Albert Oehlen. Also in this issue, Herbert Lachmayer writes on Gelitin, Paul Bonaventura on Mark Wallinger, and Mark Godfrey on Spencer Finch. The special Insert is by Nate Lowman, and Cumulus texts are by Gabriela Rangel, and Marc-Olivier Wahler.

In the tinkered gadgetry of Jon Kessler’s retro sci-fi installations, among the analog programs crammed with vaguely familiar, pop-a-graphic detritus of all kinds, in the surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed within the work, we are likely so see our very own images. Meanwhile works from the past appear naked by comparison–exotic–crafted with the delicate touch of, say, a subversive, extremely skilled toy-smith. This time as a data-diver in an ecology of pure information, Kessler remains connected to the sculptural language of his past. All the while, his vista of devolving cyberstuff remains in a fluctuating, manic state of accumulation and make-shift composition. His Parkett edition, entitled "Habeas Corpus" shows a doll-sized detainee with hands cuffed, ears muffed, eyes shielded, and mouth masked. Crouching on his knees in an orange prisoner camp overall, the man’s silence and body language have a hauntingly realistic effect. With texts by Pamela
Lee, Lori Waxman, and Bruce Sterling

Marilyn Minter’s fetishistic, flawless pictures reveal a painter obsessed with the clear articulation of magnified sweat beads and pore-smeared glitter. In each successive lip-smacking painting, Minter sets out to perfect beauty’s disguise, affirming both her pleasure for an industry’s most tantalizing ads, but also for some of its vulgar mishaps: say, a drag queen’s eyelashes clumped together with too much mascara, or even her own mentally ill mother pulling out clumps of her own hair. Works that at first appear universally, if not fashionably stylish, wind up, along with freckles and pimples, a confession of Minter’s haunted infatuations, and impeccable… imperfections. Minter’s Parkett edition is a photograph from a recent shoot she did with one of our most celebrated present day pin-ups, Pamela Anderson. Minter’s photograph, with soapy bubbles floating in the foreground, peeks past the myth of this synthetic super femme, glimpsing a softer more private side of Pamela as sh
e washes her hair. With texts by Katy Siegel, Andrea Scott, and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

Albert Oehlen’s collage-paintings, as one Parkett writer notes, "seem almost bored of their own shock-value." And yet this painter–one of the most significant German artists of the past twenty years–has a way of making boredom appear rigorous, if not delirious experiment. Bountiful are his extractions that often aggressively combine elements of collage with expressionistic painting birthing often surreal, grotesque, but humorous aberrations. In his works, claw-footed bathtubs, lamps, asses, cannons, gilded frames, palm trees share the stage with a host of computerized paint-box options ("spray paint") and his trade-mark muscular brushstrokes. Oehlen’s edition for Parkett is an etching that continues his mining of avant-garde sensibilities, particularly surrealism and automatism. Oehlen’s dizzying image takes the viewer through the ear of a three-eyed man with a waxed mustache. With texts by Glenn O’Brien, and John Kelsey

Parkett is a small museum and a large library on contemporary art. Its unparalleled, available backlist includes some forty titles, more than ninety monographic collaborations with leading international artists, whose work is explored in several in-depth articles by acclaimed writers and critics. Published in a high-quality design, it features 200 reproductions of which more than 100 are in color. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the White Chapel Art Gallery in London have both presented major Parkett retrospectives.

For more details on the new Parkett, its content and artist editions, as well as for subscriptions and back issues, please go to http://www.parkettart.com

For more information go to: http://www.parkettart.com

Tate Liverpool

Peter Blake: A Retrospective
29 June - 23 September 2007

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock
Liverpool, L3 4BB

Curated by Christoph Grunenberg and Laurence Sillars

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

Peter Blake is often described as the godfather of Pop art. At the core of Blake’s work has been his fascination with the world of popular culture and entertainment, including music, film and sports. Blake’s pioneering images of the 1950s and 1960s, including On the Balcony (1955-57), Self-Portrait with Badges (1961), The Toy Shop (1962) and The Beatles (1963-68), are iconic not only within art history but as more popular recordings of the social preoccupations of that time. Yet as this exhibition shows, his work goes far beyond this. From his earliest work of the 1950s, Blake’s paintings and drawings have been fundamental to the traditions of figurative realism in this the UK and abroad. His engagement with the Victorian imagination, myth and folklore during the 1970s as a Ruralist continued his nostalgic pursuit of a dream world while introducing a new cast of characters and themes. Since the 1980s, a substantial body of work has developed out of an increasingly conceptual
and self-evaluative practice. Peter Blake: A Retrospective provides a comprehensive survey of his rich and diverse oeuvre from the late 1940s to the present concentrating on the media of painting, drawing and printmaking.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, the most comprehensive publication on the artist to date, with essays by Simon Faulkner, Christoph Grunenberg, Marco Livingstone and Laurence Sillars.

For more information go to: http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

KVB Kölner Verkehrs-Betriebe AG

Artistic Competition of the KVB Kölner Verkehrs-Betriebe AG
Design of the new North-South Light Railway Cologne
(Nord-Süd Stadtbahn Köln)

Call for entries
Submission Deadline 31 July 2007

For further information please consult the section Kunst/Art at:
http://www.nord-sued-stadtbahn.de

contact: art@neumann-luz.de

The KVB Kölner Verkehrs-Betriebe AG (the public tranport company of the city of Cologne) have initiated an international art competition for the artistic design of eight stations - seven below and one above ground - of the new North-South Light Railway Cologne (Nord-Süd Stadtbahn Köln). -In two resolutions of the Cologne City Council on 14 November 2002 and 4 April 2006 the KVB, as awarding authority of this major underground railway project, were commissioned to organise the competition, which was launched on 18 May 2007 with the international call for submissions. National and international artists are to be involved in this multi-stage international art competition. Through the artistic design of the stations, the "city below" shall be made accessible for both Cologne’s inhabitants and its visitors as a new place of discovery which sensitises us for associating with art, and at the same time makes an important contribution to the discus
sion about topics of urban living, the "city before our eyes". The financial means for the competition, including the realisation of the art works, amount to 1.75 million euros.

Application procedures

The competition will be run in two phases with a preliminary application procedure. The preliminary application procedure is open to national and international artists who can prove themselves experienced with projects in public space in general, and with buildings and interiors in particular. With proof of no more than three already executed projects the entrants should illustrate the way in which their art conceives space as a unity, and explain the use of spatial references.

Out of the applicants of the preliminary application procedure, 27 artists or artist groups will be accepted for the first phase, to which further 13 artists have been separately and directly invited in the run-up to the competition, namely: Baren-brock + Osterwald (D), Guillaume Bijl (B), Ceal Floyer (NL), Doris Frohnapfel (D), Hans Haacke (USA), Stefan Hofmann (D), Peter Kogler (A), Thomas Schoenauer (D), Stefan Sous (D), Joëlle Tuerlinckx (B), Brigitta Weimer (D), Lawrence Weiner (USA), and Eusebius Wirdeier (D). In October 2007 these 40 artists or artist groups will be asked to develop a basic concept of their planned entry.

Starting in May 2008, the second phase will require ten selected artists re-spectively groups of artists to refine their ideas into tangible plans. Out of these ten proposals the competition jury will select the finalist, or even finalists, as it is in the jury’s power to recommend that the KVB commission one artist or artist group for each separate station, special construction or tunnel section. The winner or winners will be announced in April 2009. It is planned to display the proposals submitted for the second phase in an exhibition, for the benefit of an interested public and of the competing artists. The realisation of art works is scheduled to finish by the end of 2010.

Entrants to the preliminary, open phase must submit their documents by 31 July 2007.

Rules and information relating to the competition can be downloaded at:
http://www.nord-sued-stadtbahn.de

Queries can be addressed to Kathrin Luz at art@neumann-luz.de

For more information go to: http://www.nord-sued-stadtbahn.de