http://umelec.org Umělec en ligne, les derniers articles en français. fr2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/images/site/umelec_logo_small.gif http://umelec.org 100 29 Umělec online http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1577 1/2010 ... China was at last awake. Where the West had failed, Japan succeeded. She had transmuted Western culture and achievement into terms that were intelligible to the Chinese understanding. Japan herself, when she so suddenly awakened, had astounded the world. But at the time she was only forty millions strong. China’s awakening, with her four hundred millions and the scientific advance of the... Jack London 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1576 1/2010 …sounds good, don’t you think? We here in the West can really put together some cool sentences when it comes to progress or decline. So, this is one of my first contributions to the topic of the end of the West as a concept – something I thought up all on my own I’m not going to pretend otherwise , but which we’re going to make a big deal out of, since everybody is quivering in fear,... Ivan Mečl 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1575 1/2010 MECHANISMS There are no facts in front of which we would be silenced in the same way as in front of a reality that appeared on its own, such that „there is nothing to talk about“. Builders of universal empires require an agreement between them to be announced as an agreement with reality itself. If they succeed, there will be a worldwide universal empire, which won‘t stand anything but... Václav Bělohradský 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1574 1/2010 Everything that we use and devalue beyond our basic needs becomes a victim of consumption. The process of consumption is the devaluation of material resources and non material meanings. I was surprised to learn that this counts for thoughts as well. May this text be consumed too In response to the celebrations of the 1989 revolution, I have combined passages from the latest book by Czech... Ivan Mečl 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1573 1/2010 Several observations from the late modern era In Prague, Václav Bělohradský moves among many places, contexts, and generations. A column in a newspaper or an essay in its cultural section, the occasional university course or advising student theses, a television debate, lecture, a discussion with politicians. In the early 1990s, when Bělohradský began to travel regularly to Prague from... Tereza Stockelová 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1572 1/2010 I.D.: In one of our recent conversations, you described how the machinery of large art institutions alienates artists from their work. The artist, arriving at the museum to install his or her works, is sent to a �luxury hotel while an armada of professionals cares for the ‘proper’ presentation of his of her work. By this time, the curator and the museum’s PR and education departments have... Daniel G. Andújar Iris Dressler 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1571 1/2010 in OPEN SPACE What Would the Gallows be Without a Noose? Friedrich Nietzsche, the greatest psychologist of Modern times, noticed some 125 years ago that a war over Christian heritage was raging around him; former Christians were seeking out new prophets and a new religion. From the perspective of eternity, progressive ideologies and regimes shift with the wind; nonetheless, the triumph of the... Michal Vimmer 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1570 1/2010 An audacious adept of democratic metaphysics reads the motto on the entrance to the new world from the nineteenth century: God is Dead. Hiding in the shade an old butler awaits a reply. The postscript that opens the way says, „Everything goes.“ The man with no fear of God may enter. He became a citizen. The democrat by stepping into the world of equality and freedom, rejects the question of... Michal Vimmer 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1569 2/2009 (review) The shattered reality of Ben Cottrell from Cornwall and Berlin The first thing I �noticed about the Lost Eye1 exhibition were the drawings. They were new to me, all of them from the two month period when Ben Cottrell born 1982 in Cornwall was a �resident of MeetFactory in Smíchov. Drawings of faces and grimaces. Collages of decaying smiles. Masks with wrinkles of reality. The many smaller... Katarína Uhlířová 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1568 1/2010 (grayscale) Zhao Yunsheng is the exact opposite of the typical image of the contemporary Chinese artist. He is hardly a scrawny figure with a ponytail, glasses and a goatee, an ironic look, and a casual blazer. Yunsheng has the figure of a bull, the disposition of a panda, and a round head with a buzz cut. He is constantly drawing and painting in his apartment in a prefab housing estate on the outskirts of... Ivan Mečl 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1566 1/2010 (záhlaví ) I was once in a pseudo soft porn movie, but just as an extra. It‘s called Blue Movie and of course it’s not Warhol’s film of the same name. It was a B Movie that was never released: it didn’t even go straight to video—instead it went straight to oblivion. It was a seminal attempt to make a movie like Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but instead it had two college aged male dolts instead of... Tony Ozuna 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1565 1/2010 (The End of the Western Concept) Metaphysical ambitions in culture have begun surfacing, also amongst young Norwegian artists. In recent years a burgeoning attraction to irrational phenomena has been noticeable, and certain parts of the art scene are showing conspicuous interest in spirituality and metaphysics, often dystopically shaded. This is also reflected in commercial culture. Such an approach to art stands in stark... Line Ulekleiv 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1564 1/2010 (The End of the Western Concept) A Hieratic Story Almost every day, but in mid winter for the most part, innumerable flocks of naked women and naked men almost darken the grey winter morning while flying high above my house. Usually around ten AM, I see them coming from Dedinje, flying towards the confluence of the Sava and the Danube. In the evening, at dusk, as if obeying some primeval natural order, their flocks fly across... Raša Todosijević 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1563 1/2010 (eternal recurrence) This past February, a symposium was held at Prague‘s Academy of Fine Arts AVU not only as a forum to discuss the neglected state of the Czech Republic‘s foremost centre of higher education in the arts, but also as a call for concrete steps towards its reform. At roughly the same time, a conference was called in neighboring Slovakia to bring attention to the parochial, backward Slovak... Ludvík Hlaváček 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1561 1/2010 ( solutions) In her installation The Nature of the Beast London based Polish artist and 2008 Turner Prize nominee Goshka Mucuga has created a unique venue for public gatherings. Boldly setting her own sculpture alongside one of Picasso’s greatest masterpieces, and an assortment of past and current documentation, this forceful new work speaks of complex, historically informed, human drives. The work explores... Lizzy Le Quesne 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1560 1/2010 (profile) In the 19th century, Central Europe experienced a wave of National Revivals, which were heavily influenced by national mythology. Only now can we differentiate between the two – for a long time, national mythology and national history were revered as one and the same thing. It was not only unpopular, but also unacceptable, to question this presumption. As a result, national identity was part... Lenka Kukurová 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1559 1/2010 (eternal recurrence) That boredom is probably more widespread than ever before can be established by noting that the number of ‘social placebos’ is greater than it has ever been.1 If there are more substitutes for meaning, there must be more meaning that needs to be substituted.2 Where there is a lack of personal meaning, all sorts of diversions have to create a substitute – an ersatz meaning. Or the cult of... Lars Fr. H. Svendsen: A Philosophy of Boredom an extract Translated by John Irons 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1558 1/2010 (grayscale) Sometimes, we encounter the artists that appear in our magazine in an unusual manner. I �personally have a knack for coming across artists who show no interest in publicity. Take the art of Veronika Vomáčková, for instance: it was introduced to us by her mother. First she called our offices, and when she came in person, she told us about how her daughter had run off to Spain and was living... Ivan Mečl a Veronika Vomáčková 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1557 1/2010 Is life a story with a climax in the form of retrospective and reconciliation, or can it be limited to a series of successes without a clear goal? Today, we approach our own biographies in the same way as we do literary stories; life becomes a record of life. � Since 2002, Amsterdam’s KesselsKramer publishing house has published a series of books entitled In Almost Every Picture, featuring... Palo Fabuš 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1556 1/2010 (essay) In the 2008 film Untraceable, a �team of FBI agents is investigating a �series of murders committed via the internet. The murderer ties his victims to killing mechanisms monitored by web cameras, with their suffering and ultimate death directly dependent on the number of visitors. Users watch the website fully aware of their role, but visitor levels nevertheless continue to increase. The viewer... Palo Fabuš 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1555 1/2010 (editorial) We have just had the end of a decade, with all the requisite media retrospectives and reevaluations. Although the tendency to review and analyze has been ascribed to the entire modern era, it would seem that there has been an upsurge in looking back into the past. It has been said that the 20th century came to a close with the events of September 11, but we still seem to be coming to terms with... Palo Fabuš 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1554 1/2010 (profile) Today, more than ever, we find ourselves surrounded by images from the past. Yet we have a paradoxical tendency to describe our relationship to the past with words like disinterest, shallowness and loss. These words suggest a tendency to head through our daily lives with no significant concern for either the past or the future. Our contemporary society often feels disjointed, lacking in a... Palo Fabuš 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1552 1/2010 (profile) Three artists make up the Kassaboys. The group’s part catchy pop, part local patriotic moniker is a reference to their hometown, Košice, Slovakia. The “boys of Košice” are Radovan Čerevka b. 1980 Tomáš Makara and Peter Vrábeľ both b. 1982 . Their art collective is one of several products of a very strong graduating class from the Faculty of the Arts at the Technical University of... Lenka Kukurová 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1551 1/2010 (profile) Carrying a basket full of pens, pencils, paper, and ink, Mad Meg would go on walks—and be drawn into the depths of the earth, buried among putrefied human bodies, pursued by insect men and turbid animals. And she relates all this to us through her drawings of what she’d seen... Harmonious and nightmarish, her universe is a reflection of our time, our society. Her Tableaux de Digestions,... Noelle Papay 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1550 2/2009 (scholarship) The “Writing Central European Art History” seminar was put together by the Austrian Erste Foundation and the Austrian department of the international non profit organization World University Service WUS as part of the project “The Patterns Traveling Lecture Set” initiated by the Erste Foundation. The set included lectures by seven scholars from the so called Eastern Europe Czech... Eduard Freudmann, Ivan Jurica und Ivana Marjanović 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1549 2/2009 (scholarship) Vienna‘s Akademie der bildenden Künste, within the scope of a �course on “Post Conceptual Art Practices,” hosted a �seminar on “Writing Central European Art History,” casting a �critical look at the subject, contributions from which are now available in print. Apart from its integration of socio political themes, the seminar was quite interesting in its own right. Topics covered... Milena Dimitrova 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1548 2/2009 (art market) In a �Western capitalist world, art production forms miscellaneous structures concerning scope and content—ideas that tend to overlap at some points but also burgeon out in order to pursue opposing trends. The continuing trend has become that artworks are being valued primarily based on their monetary values and a �there is a �disconnection from works of that demand a �critical attention; arts... Walter Seidl 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1547 2/2009 (scene) The urban display offered by the modern western city tends to function as a monitored play scape, a stage set for the globalized iconography of capitalism. We can counteract this abrupt “instant urbanism,” one whose urban typology and rapid consumability evince striking parallels with the structure of shopping malls or theme parks, with the situative urbanism of artistic interventions in... Ursula Maria Probst 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1546 2/2009 (scene) Vienna's off space scene is currently experiencing a �veritable boom. Its artistic interventions have a �most stimulating impact on the city's cultural dynamics. All the time there are new temporary art spaces emerging. With names like Pro Choice, clubblumen club flowers , Bell Street Project, Saprophyt, or Ve:sch they allude to socio political aspects of art practices respectively the... Ursula Maria Probst 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1545 2/2009 In common parlance a �project proposal is addressed to an audience of experts who are thereby asked and invited to ponder the possibilities and risks of a �realization of the proposed. Due to their generic status as proposals for sculptures and buildings, Volker Eichelmann’s new collages, shown along with sculptures by Manuela Leinhoß at the Vienna based Andreas Huber Gallery in the fall of... Tom Holert 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1544 2/2009 (art market) 1. Learning from Attitude The underground, although hermetic, always attempts to effectively change the mainstream world that surrounds it. We can say that its effectiveness increases proportionately to the underground’s potential to be visible in the public sphere. Actually, this is a characteristic of utopia that in part, paradoxically, disables a complete realization of the underground’s... Sezgin Boynik 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1543 2/2009 (theater) All human societies are spectacular in their daily life and produce spectacles at special moments. They are spectacular as a form of social organization and produce spectacles like the one you have come to see. Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and voice modulation, the confrontation of ideas and... Nadine Jessen 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1542 2/2009 (cultural policy) Ask anyone—tourists, locals, immigrants—and they will all argue that Austria is a �nation of culture. People will mention the Staatsoper, the Burgtheater, the Kunsthistorische Museum and the Salzburger Festspiele as proof of the country’s great cultural endeavors. But don’t ask questions about cultural policy to contemporary artists and those actually involved in any authentic cultural... Monika Mokre 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1541 2/2009 (Meri Disoski) Gini Müller delves into forms of change and intervention in theater through varying manifestations of public and collective uprisings and protest in her book “Possen de Perfomativen” The Posse of the Performative . The foundation for Müller’s conflict with forms of political action is set in post structural, post dramatic and feminist discourse. The author explains the dual meaning of... Meri Disoski 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1537 2/2009 (cultural policy) Escape, convulsions, stiffness and, in the worst case, a �loss of all self control. These are symptoms of a �panic attack; they are triggered behavioral patterns. It was no panicky loss of control; rather it was a �calculated dosage of voices—an outcry in reaction to Austrian Interior Minister Maria Fekter of the conservative Austrian People’s Party ÖVP and her attempt to garner media... Martin Wassermair 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1535 2/2009 (art market) In Ukraine, water does not flow, and colors—if there ever were any—have long faded away. People do not take their hats off when they are inside, they do not greet each other, and they are often ill. Austria cares a �great deal about neatness. Perhaps it’s thanks to the abundance of corpses? Dead stuffing, dead relationships, population growing old. People are closer to buffers than to... Magdaléna Bažantová 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1534 2/2009 (new face) I’m hesitating how best to introduce Jana Kochánková born 1979 . I �want to touch on, but not slavishly recite, everything surprising and fun about her work. So, by way of a �very short, cursory introduction: Jana Kochánková, AKA Koko, American sculptress, graduated in 2006 from Vladimír Skrepl and Jiří Kovanda’s studio at the Academy of Creative Arts AVU in Prague. This article is... Katarína Uhlířová 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1533 2/2009 Chapter 1 Tossing Records at Evil At the start of the new millennium, I �am sitting in my favorite club, Rhiz, famed as one of the testing grounds for experimental electronic music in the 1990s. On stage: a �giant angularly formed skull made of Styrofoam hangs from above, its horns point evilly upward. At the front of the stage: a �white guy dressed in a �tunic like garment and a �black... Karl Kilian 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1532 2/2009 (comics) “Children’s books... bound children’s books?” the customs officer on the Czech Austrian border asks Nicolas Mahler and Heinz Wolf. The two independent publishers of Edition Brunft, which they’ve produced in Czech, are trying to check 2000 copies through customs. “Actually, they’re comics,” says Wolf. “Comics,” the official repeats while taking a �quick look through the book.... Karin Kirchmayr 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100 http://divus.cz/umelec/article_page.php?item=1531 2/2009 (cultural policy) The past doesn’t determine the blossoming of international cultural contacts: Nikola Tesla 1856 1943 in the tradition famous US inventors, broke off his technical studies in Graz because of nationalistic trash talk. The German nationalist dominated student community was less than pleased with that talented Serb from Gospić. Hollywood director Otto Preminger 1906 1986 carried with him bad... Herwig G. Höller 2010-08-25t12:06:12+0100