"I wonder if he ever told her"

In the C3 BAR in the CCCB.

You can rationalise it later

I am bemused by some people´s obsessive fascination with cars. Although I understand the fascination I do not share it and suspect we are being sold a myth.This piece tries to make sense of this obsession by juxtaposing the slogans used in car advertisements with photographs of one of my obsessions, trees.

In Can Felipa till 31 of january, Barcelona

Public Space / Two Audiences. Works and Documents from the Herbert Collection

Coming in the Macba soon are works from the Herbert Collection.

Gerhard Richter has stated, “I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us and which is incomplete and limited". The series on the Baader-Meinhoff events, October 18, 1977, for which New York MOMA paid some $15 million, depends almost entirely on a knowledge of the German history of the time; for the great many without that history, it is hard to see how those paintings will significantly communicate more than a rather vague sense of foreboding.
































The three paintings Dead 1, 2 and 3, are alternately-sized versions of the same source photo. The original image is of the dead body of Ulrike Meinhof, who hung herself in her Stammheim prison cell on Mother's Day in 1976. The original image is shocking, graphic, and gruesome; her neck having been cut through by the home-made cord she used to end her life. These images are also unique in the cycle; they represent an event that occurred more than a year before October 18, 1977.

There is and has been written loads about Richter, but quite an interesting article you can find here. And more about the exhibition of the Herbert collection in the Macba.

Poster Project - Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke is one of my favourite artists. He makes very intelligent, ironic and critical work that makes you think and wonder without being dogmatic. Or as Brian Wallis says it so well:
"One of the least apparent, though most politically expedient, aspects of Hans Haacke's work is the way in which it addresses and challenges its audience. For while the ostensible subjects of Haacke's works are the specific social and economic conditions he bares, the real political consequence is the education and transformation of the viewer."

To commemorate 9/11 he made a poster featuring negative space in the shape of the the twin towers. You can now download a desktop application version of the project from the New Creative Time website.

Video Times, 1965-2005

Finally saw Video Times in la Caixa Forum at the last day. There is little video art that grabs me. Thats what it should do preferibly, grab you the first moment you walk in and keep you fascinated for as long as the video lasts. Every frame should make you want to stay. Therefore it is such a difficult medium and very often it bores people because of being too long, too obvious, pretentious or simply incomprehensible.
A pioneer and a bit of a genius is artist Nam June Paik. He was the first to introduce TV images into a museum space, in 1963. Two years later, he created 'Moon is the Oldest TV'. A simple adjustment to one of the black-and-white televison tubes of the time produces an image that seems like a shot of the moon, and also appears in a sequence of phases when the deflector magnet is shifted.

Moon is the oldest TV

There were about 30 artists so impossible to hightlight them all but another piece I thought to be very strong was the piece by Isaac Julien, Baltimore.

Starring veteran actor Melvin Van Peebles, BALTIMORE was designed in part as an homage to Van Peebles' movies. The film installation includes three Baltimore institutions - the Walters Art Museum, the Peabody Library and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. As in previous series, Julien uses museums as a key location and theme, uniting these cultural institutions with blaxploitation cinema as a symbol of black empowerment, which Van Peebles helped usher in in the 1970s.

Text coming from the Progressive Art Collection.