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“勿失毋忘——雕塑家滑田友诞辰120周年纪念展”-展览场刊...

2021-11-29 10613 read

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勿失毋忘丨 不要忘了传统,不要忘了根脉...

2021-11-24 1649 read

“‘勿失毋忘’,这个小本子是滑田友先生当年的记录本,他自己特别标注‘不要丢了、不要忘了’。策展人有心用作展览的标题,这也是我们今天所要做的,不要丢了我们中央美院的传统,不要忘了我们文化的根脉。”中央美术学院院长范迪安的致辞深情表达了举办展览的初衷和对美院老一辈艺术家的致敬情怀。
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重要的是什么? ——对《重要的不是摄影》的展评...

2021-11-15 12027 read

如果乘坐电梯前往中央美术学院美术馆四层展厅 ,可以在电梯门对面的墙壁上发现一段话:“2018年,由中央美术学院发起的“国际版画联盟”宣布:将摄影纳入版画……” 策展人把这句话用9号字体(约3公分大小)不经意的打在展厅的第一面墙上,用一种只针对“有心人”的俏皮方式做了一个开场白。 展厅现场展厅现场展览标题“重要的不是摄影”,这句话比较容易让人联想到中外艺术史上两桩著名的公案:栗宪庭在20世纪80年代写下的《重要的不是艺术》。以及贡布里希那段广为流传的名言:“没有艺术,只有艺术家”①。 “重要的不是摄影”用一个关于条件的话语假设了一个展览的条件② ,设定了框架,但不明示答案。纵观整个展览,设计上脱离了美术馆以章节为区隔的惯常陈设,作品如“大珠小珠落玉盘一般”散落在暗房般的黑色空间中,似一首爵士的节奏,低回与急促,高低和起伏。类似暗房的空间设置,使得观者可以沉浸但不至于过分的沉陷。展览在对细节的处理上,可以看出策展人为重现“灵韵”(Aura)做出的努力,同时通过展示节奏的跳跃性一定程度上对摄影作品质感上的流畅感和统一的平面性做出了“抵制”。展厅现场 从艺术家和展览作品无一例外的与中央美术学院相联系,以及展览的副标题——“中央美术学院摄影纪程”来看,此次展览将视线放置在一个相对狭小的选题上。这种刁钻的选择或许希望通过展览反映出从这所著名艺术院校受业的艺术家们近年来在业界的影响力;同时也能提供一种研究视角:不同专业艺术学科背景的艺术创作者们是如何推动和拓展摄影边界的。展览避开了本雅明就摄影术发明以来对复刻问题的担忧,用思辨性、开放性的提问隐蔽了多元的线索。我们试着找出对展览标题恰当的回应,逐一拍下了所有的展品标签对照观看,毕竟左拉120年前在自己业余拍摄了十五年的照片后宣布:你只有在拍摄之后才能证明你真正看到了某物。下文尝试以“摄影作为某某”为结构,将展览虚拟的切分出一个个章节,展开对展览叙事的切入:“摄影作为收藏的书籍”展览序厅里醒目的书架是2011年纽约国际摄影中心(ICP)总策展人Christopher Philips通过美国亚洲基金会捐赠给CAFAM的1399册摄影书和画册,其中不乏一些西方摄影大师的签名版本。从展陈角度看,这个书架或书墙更像是一件独立的装置作品,与展厅中的作品相互对照。  展厅现场  捐赠的画册构成的书墙 “摄影作为展览“视频上循环播放着自2009年,中央美术学院美术馆举办的一系列有影响力的摄影展览,包括“景观•静观:中国当代摄影专题展”、连续三届的“北京国际摄影双年展”、“原作100”、“罗杰拜伦:荒诞剧场”等。展厅现场“摄影作为出版“除了2009年以来中央美术学院美术馆出版的数本摄影展画册。另展出了1984年中国摄影出版社出版的《画家谈摄影》,其中包括叶浅予、刘凌沧等艺术家浅谈摄影创作的文章。1994年出版的央美油画系毕业生蒋铎撰写的《抓拍——纪实摄影新闻摄影的基本方法》等。以《画家谈摄影》为代表的这类书籍,直接反映了中国老一辈艺术家们对摄影艺术的重视,它像一个药引,将引出未来的艺术从业者们对摄影的理解和思考。 《画家谈摄影》 1984年中国摄影出版社出版    展览序厅“摄影作为行为”以鲁小本、刘勃麟为代表的行为摄影作品。鲁小本用摄影记录了自己在中国求学期间独特的具有个人身份象征的行为表演,偏纪实性与社会性。刘勃麟的作品没有强调行为的过程,而是去除了身体的社会属性,将“自我”和“他人”融入到所拍摄对象的物质属性中。刘勃麟  《印度出租车IndiaTaxi》  240×80cm  爱普生高光相纸  2014年 “摄影作为纪实“一张1960年普通的美院毕业合影、牛畏予拍摄的蒋兆和肖像、马克•吕布在1965年拍摄的美院画室。这种朴实的记录是日常的、习俗的和普遍的,今天同样被我们使用着,只不过传播方式已经改变。   展厅现场 马克•吕布   《北京,美术学院》   40×50cm   银盐感光照片  1965年  中央美术学院美术馆藏 “摄影作为组织”譬如,80年代末期,美院一批不同专业的学生发起的“中央美术学院学生摄影协会”,成员有洪浩、王友身、陈淑霞、刘庆和、毕建锋等。他们在1987年8月的《摄影报》上发表了一系列手法新颖、具有象征性的摄影作品,并撰文“我们的话”发出如下声音:“摄影与美术同属视觉艺术,我们以多种艺术相互借鉴为出发点,于是以相机为画笔,相纸为画布,运用自己的想象力、创造力进行创作,把自己的意念和感受体现于作品……”这类学生组织在各个时期各类院校都是活跃的生力军,从其中可以窥见不甚成熟却难得的初生之“元气”。 展厅现场洪浩  《过道1》   1988 “摄影作为传播”  故事由1935年的黑白影社,沙飞与李桦、李桦等创办的现代版画创作研究社开始,最终有了沙飞在第二回全国木刻流动展览会现场抓拍到的鲁迅经典肖像,这张照片成为中国美术史上的一个经典时刻,也成为20世纪图片传播史上的重要作品。  展厅现场 / 沙飞拍摄的鲁迅  “摄影作为教学” 同样是在学生时期,王川、姚璐等人一组90年代后期的作品联系的是学院的摄影教学。他们曾在1998年至2000年中央美术学院与昆士兰艺术学院联合举办的“MAVA”视觉艺术(摄影)研究生班受过系统的教育,此后成为了美院摄影系的创始成员与重要的教学者。透过他们在学生期间的创作可以寻找到摄影教学与个人创作方法论之间的勾联——譬如,王川在1998-1999年的学习笔记和1999年的一系列曝光与反差变化色环的练习等。但展览现场仅展示了2000年前摄影系的“前世”—— 一段受到国外摄影教学体系影响的历史,对于2000年成立的“中央美术学院摄影与数码媒体工作室”和2003年摄影正式作为专业招生的“今生”缺乏相应的梳理。如果假定学院摄影教学是链接展览比较重要的一条线索的话,此部分的不足未免有些遗憾。 展厅现场     王川《曝光与反差变化色环》  49×81cm  黑白胶片 1999年   中央美术学院美术馆藏Ulli   昌平兴寿镇  “MAVA”视觉艺术(摄影)研究生班研究生班集体春游合影   1998年 “摄影作为创作+延展”展览的主体部分当然是摄影创作。除了一些耳熟能详的当代艺术家和摄影师如洪浩、邢丹文、繆晓春、计洲、崔岫闻、陈漫、迟鹏等人代表性作品外,亦选取了美院在校部分师生作品,一定程度上反映了美院教师与校友群的原创性、实验性、国际化的创作面貌。周吉荣、卢征远、李天元、马刚等其他领域艺术家的摄影作品,直接或间接的对照他们阶段性的创作。 崔岫闻   Angel No。4  90.9x170cm  2006  中央美术学院美术馆藏 展厅现场 邢丹文   《复制NO。2》  148×120cm  收藏级艺术微喷  2003年  中央美术学院美术馆馆藏 从展厅的北墙开始,我们看到的虽然是摄影,却又不全然的是。艺术家将摄影作为创作中的一个环节。如冯梦波的《私人博物馆之美工室》,摄影被再加工成为光栅片后的立体幻觉构成了他的“私人博物馆”系列的第三种视角。叶甫纳以早期《民族画报》的头像为材料归纳出民族图像志。刘小东拍摄的纪实性质的照片是其绘画的密友,与其油画创作形成重要的互文关系。徐冰、王友身、赵半狄的照片则是对一次重要行为或观念作品的记录,成为再传播的媒介,并转换为一件新的作品。摄影在此是截片,是细胞,是繁衍,反映了摄影作为媒介的开放性对艺术家们的启迪,反之艺术家的创作也再次拓展了摄影原有的限界。 冯梦波  《私人博物馆之美工室》  60×100cm  光栅立体照片  2012年    叶甫纳  《55个少数民族》  尺寸可变  单屏幕影像  2008年赵半狄  《口罩吊床上的生活》  30×45cm   收藏级艺术微喷  2020年 徐冰  《何处惹尘埃》 30×45cm  收藏级艺术微喷  2014年 王友身   《报纸•广告》  215×150cm   丝网印刷、棉布  1993年   中央美术学院美术馆馆藏   “摄影作为记忆”个人认为“私人照片”在展览中的呈现构成了一个非常动人的板块,其中包含了王临乙、王合内、宋步云、李桦、刘凌沧等老先生们的私人相册。他们所拍摄的内容十分日常——均是稀疏平常的小景小物、自拍照或亲友照。“收集照片便是收集世界”③,这些记录的私密性或不经意性填充了我们对于时代与个人的想象。而今,它们都成为中央美术学院美术馆的收藏品,从原先的私藏身份转为公共身份,被展出和被透露。展出现场用双面玻璃将李桦的私人照片的“背面”特别呈现了出来,背面的手写文字是对照片拍摄状态的补充,比如说“1964年8月于黄山”、“1982年在长白山天池写生”、“1981年冬摄于画室内”,一张女孩肖像后写着:“俊英阿宝做了皇帝是这般快活的。” ……这种朴素的记录在当时是拍摄者为了使照片不被混淆或遗忘而使用的手段,同时作者也真实的记录下“此刻”的心情。如今这些文字佐证了一段历史,充满着温情,它们成为手冲照片时代特殊的“背书”。摄影作为记忆,触及了柔软,成为整个展厅最有温度的部分。  展厅现场展厅现场 李桦私人相册  明胶银盐照片  1930-1940年代  中央美术学院美术馆藏  宋布云相册  明胶银盐照片  1930年代  中央美术学院美术馆藏  王临乙  王合内与芍药花  明胶银盐照片  1980年代   中央美术学院美术馆馆藏  摄影或许是技术、是媒介、是手段、是工作方法,重要的永远不止是摄影。展览为了阐释一个具有开放性的概念,而缩小选择的边界,仅将着眼点放置在一所学府的学术成果和一家美术馆的馆藏上是一个颇具冒险性的选择。通过展览结构性的铺陈,观众似乎可以会心一笑,领会到其中的巧思——以管无法窥豹,但以学府为原点,展开关于摄影的发问确是将20世纪中国摄影与学院发生共振的一次策略性的计划。同时展览也正式宣告了在2021年,中央美术学院美术馆影像中心的正式成立。展厅现场 注释:①     出自贡布里希 (Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich) ,《艺术发展史》导论。原文为“There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists”. ②     法国哲学家让-弗朗索瓦•利奥塔尔在《后现代状态》一书中提到现代性的普遍倾向是用一个关于条件的话语来定义一个话语的条件,知识与叙事上是一个回行关系。笔者认为展览设定了以摄影为条件的前提,边界开放,但是最终落脚点依旧在摄影,也构成了某种回行。③     苏珊•桑格塔:《论摄影》, 湖南美术出版社出版发行,2005年6月第四次印刷,第13页。  文/ 耿菁华图片来源:中央美术学院美术馆 拍摄:   王睿莹,Apple 
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布展剧透丨滑田友诞辰120周年纪念展即将开展...

2021-11-12 1660 read

百年辉煌•中央美术学院艺术名家勿失毋忘——雕塑家滑田友诞辰120周年纪念展展览时间:2021年11月24日—12月26日展览地点:中央美术学院美术馆二层B展厅开幕时间:2021年11月24日上午10:00| 温馨提示 |因校园疫情防控要求,美术馆暂停对外开放期间校内师生可正常参观布展现场2021年是我国著名雕塑艺术家、中央美术学院雕塑系原主任、教授滑田友先生诞辰120周年,为纪念他为中国现代雕塑创作与教育做出的突出贡献,研究他的艺术与人生并由此而关联讨论中国现代美术发展的历程、问题与经验,中央美术学院党委宣传部在今年3月特别调集美术史系、美术馆、雕塑系三方人员组成策展团队,邀请美术史系曹庆晖教授任策展人,具体带领团队就展览的主题、剧本、物料、设计等展开策划筹备工作。策展团队拜访滑田友家属期间,策展人携策展团队在7月和9月两次向院领导、家属及各相关单位汇报工作方案和进度,及时听取意见与建议,积极与家属和院系沟通,多次召开工作协调会,最终在中央美术学院美术馆2层B展厅呈现《勿失毋忘——纪念滑田友诞辰120周年雕塑艺术与文献展》。展览方案汇报沟通会“勿失毋忘”,源于滑田友写在他日记本上的一个标题。策展人认为,“勿失毋忘”四字一方面对应并解释了中央美术学院在当下纪念和研究滑田友艺术的意义,另一方面也对我们思考哪些是引起滑田友心动而提示自己勿失毋忘的内容产生了启发,他的心动处即应是这个展览必须捕捉的要点和大面。在主题和方向明确后,通过走访家属、调研考察、交流讨论与设计实施,实体展览围绕“勿失毋忘”展开讲述。展陈线上沟通会雕塑系教师团队现场讨论《农夫——少年中国》复原工作藏书整理与拍摄书籍单页整理作品点交展览视觉设计物料亦从展览主题生发。展览海报与场刊均使用了“勿失毋忘”原始手迹与日记本外观作为主体形象。请柬基于原日记本对外观与内页进行了提升和设计,一柬多用,可纪事,又纪念。展览请柬以上前序后结的四章包容之外,展场特别编辑赠送一份与展览紧密相关的辅助场刊,其中整理收录的《教学方法论——滑田友的教学笔记与教学传授编》《滑田友年表简编》以及对重点作品的说明等文字,均未在展览中出现,请观众留意。我们希望展览纯化展览的视觉语言,贴近主题的视觉诉求,恰当高效而非形式主义地运用一切辅助手段,在加减乘除的展览形式与手段处理中,让大家专注于滑田友雕塑艺术的内在品质。展览将于11月24日开展。展厅搭建展厅搭建,制定作品上墙方案展览信息百年辉煌•中央美术学院艺术名家勿失毋忘——雕塑家滑田友诞辰120周年纪念展展览时间:2021年11月24日—12月26日展览地点:中央美术学院美术馆二层B展厅主办:中央美术学院承办:中央美术学院党委宣传部  中央美术学院美术馆  中央美术学院雕塑系总策划:高洪 范迪安学术主持:苏新平项目策划:秦建平策展人:曹庆晖展览总监:张伟 张子康 韩文超展览统筹:王春辰 高高特别支持:滑夏 滑玉策展助理:易玥 李展
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展出作品 | 我们在哪儿?未来在哪儿?——中央美术学院青年艺术家驻地实践成果汇报展...

2021-11-10 6190 read

展览时间:2021年11月5日-12月5日
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从“微不足道”的材料里看到设计的未来...

2021-10-26 1622 read

对于材料的充分利用和合理循环,已经成为人类社会持续发展的必然诉求。设计师们在“可循环”理念的引领下,对材料生命周期的往复进行着新的思考与阐释。
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材料的过去与未来:CAFAM新展“万物生息”开展...

2021-09-24 7808 read

“后石油时代”这个概念反映出我们这个时代面对能源问题的焦虑:工业革命以来两百年的发展使人类文明进入了一个加速时代。但今天,伴随着这些发展带来的一系列破坏(其中很多已经无法逆转),在全球变暖、极端天气、环境污染的背景下,新冠疫情又一次给了人类沉重一击,我们不禁要怀疑,这条高速公路通向的到底是天堂,还是地狱?
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We=Link: Sideways...

2020-11-19 30099 read

Written by ZHANG GaHistory often began on the periphery and the fringe and ended up sucked in by a centripetal pull, becoming once again the story of the core. It seems the inevitable power of gravity. When in the mid-1990s the Museum of Modern Art reluctantly set up its innocent looking website at the persuasion of Barbara London, MoMA’s evangelist of media art, and a number of other upward-looking curatorial staff[1], the Thing.net, which had recently moved to the still dilapidated West Chelsea neighborhood, had been already, along with its European sister nodes, operating on a different cultural front for some time and its Berlin-styled monochrome website with plenty of perl scripts under the belt, compared to MoMA’s rudimentary html pages, appeared sophisticated enough to rival the mammoth establishment, at least at face value and for the time being.These days are long gone – today, the Thing is still frequented by its old-time confrère, while MoMA has moved on to command the attention of millions online with its immense collection digitized and through a sleek interface design and elaborate web technologies. The recent impeccable installation of Jodi’s My%Desktop (2002) has again proved MoMA’s indisputable licensing power of rectifying the fringe to the center and canonizing the once avant-garde, transforming and elevating the one-person (desktop) show to a collective immersion of visual ensemble.Net.art, and netart or net art (a serendipitously adopted term with a mélange of connotations describing its hybrid contention by origin and heterogeneity by nature[2]), was also later realized by many to have been the last art movement of the 20th century, albeit without a collectively concerted manifesto.[3]By 1997, a few short years after its emergence, net art seemed to have already “reached a dead end or a turning point.”[4] For according to Dieter Daniels, the three fundamental principles that had been pursued by the instigators of early net art, i.e.: “construction of an independent, partly self-designed technological infrastructure; formation of a self-organized community and the collective design and testing of a corresponding model of discourse; development of a form of art specific to the network, exploring the medium’s potential in an experimental, self-reflective way,”[5] had all but been sabotaged by precisely the opposite of what the pioneering visionaries had strived for: commodification of network and territorialization of the online milieu. The web had turned into a distributional and promotional channel propagated by art of all forms and kinds, not to mention that the internet had become the Internet and the economic engine of the next few decades, and more.[6]A signifying indicator of such a demise evidently was also the eventual institutional admission of net art into the 1997 Documenta X while at the same time the miserable failure of the institution’s comprehension of the medium. The presentation was kept apart from the rest of the artworks in an isolated office-like blue-colored room, and the web works were installed on a local area network that would inevitably lead people browsing hypertext links to dead ends.[7]But this presumable deadend also enabled the birth of, probably, one of the best known, or most infamous works of net art: Documenta Done. Upon hearing that Documenta organizers were to take down its official website and package it, along with online projects, and sell it as a CD Rom, Vuk Ćisic, the Slovenian net artist, cloned the entire website prior to it being taken offline and reposted on his own sever with a pseudo press release under the sensational headline “Eastern European Hacker Steals ‘Documenta’ Website.” He then redistributed the Documenta website for free and exhibited it on many occasions and configurations. Asked of his motivation, in lieu of various speculations by commentators that saw the stunt as a typical Dadaist prank or else as an institutional critique of its digital reincarnation, Ćisic replied, “So obviously we were looking for mischief, ways to subvert it.”[8]This exhibition takes the purported net art’s “dead end” as a new starting point to chart a discursive trajectory of the practices since then, in the many manifestations of network-based art. Instead of prescribing it a categorical definition, the exhibition attempts to uncover the variegated developments, diverse strategies, critical positions and aesthetic experiments after the crash of the dot.com bubble, amidst the prevalence of neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, and the rise of populism and nationalism. Sideways reveals the continuum of the Avant-garde “nettitudes” inherent in the works of these artists.It is within this tradition of mischief that net art marked a particular strand of genealogy with the historical avant-garde. Much like Documenta Done, in the guise of a Dadaist prank, launched a roundabout attack on the artworld’s powerful, subsequent works such as Bumplist (Jonah Brucker-Cohen & Mike Bennett, 2003 - 2020) would devise a mechanism to boot out a subscriber as soon as another user signed up, in order to insinuate a playful take on law and order, or else as in those deceptive clones endlessly propagated in the work of TraceNoizer – Disinformation on Demand (Annina Rüst, Roman Abt, Fabian Thommen, Urs Hodel and Silvan Zurbruegg, 2001), in which users would let go viral a piece of false information so as to perform a counter-surveillance stunt. A more recent incarnation of such an impulse to do away with capitalist consumerism can be found in The Internet . Click (Jonas Lund, 2017). Harron Mirza’s triptych of live feeds of Instagram via VPN (Inappropriate Appropriation, Biter, Toy, 2019) alludes to a complex exchange of artefacts by which we have learned that knowledge sharing is never wishfully innocent, and the global network is always locally conditioned. The seemingly innocuous exercises of artists’ whims underlie a playfully recalcitrant instinct that shares its genes with the fanfares of Cabaret Voltaire[9] and the uncanny persona of Rrose Sèlavy.[10]Sometimes a head-on clash could also be necessary in order to provoke more commotions and therefore sensations. When Knowbotic Research installed their New York debut of Minds of Concern at the New Museum in 2002, they would have been beholden to legal implications should they fulfill the work as conceived, and that could have led to potentially shutting down the exhibition and other unpleasant consequences. In this Art Hacking Show, the Knowbotic Research artists had planned to use Security Scanner to unveil the IP addresses of various grassroots organizations and media artists to bring to public attention the vulnerability and security loopholes in cyberspace among these ill-protected front-liners, thus to directly engage in legal practicalities which would have lasting impact in the political ecology of the internet. Such real-world intervention also finds its predecessors in the likes of Dada, Fluxus, Situationists, and even in the provocateurs of Conceptual Art. Hans Haacke, for example, who had repeatedly made his patron museums anxious and uneasy, if not more in recent records of performance art. In Domestic Tension (2007), Wafaa Bilal, the Iraqi-born artist, staged a situation in which highly divided American options on the controversial Iraq war were mirrored by those who were drawn by the temptation of “shooting an Iraqi” (the work’s online tagline) to virtually pull a trigger that via the internet would physically shoot from a robotically controlled gun a paintball at the artist, confined 24/7 in a gallery-transformed living space, and those who came to his defense. Through this unforgiving online exchange, the political complexities of the Iraq war were made open not only symbolically but also experientially, alongside it the mysterious gamification of killing was stripped bare.Cultural spaces are also marketplaces, the dialectics of the cultural logic is that art teases the market (Banksy comes to mind, for example) and capital loves art. But as the world of wealth is owned by the one percent, so is the art market. Paolo Cirio determined that the astronomical auction prices should be redistributed via the supposedly democratic reshuffling of the internet. A derivative can be earned by buying a Jasper Johns at a fraction of the Sotheby’s auction price. The artist clearly was serious about the sale but not just striking a symbolic gesture. Real action vs. speculative auction.In examining contemporary art from the 1970s onward, art historian Hal Foster contended that “The shift in conception — from reality as an effect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma — may be definitive in contemporary art.”[11] Today the traumatic and the abject prevail online as a parallel world of misery and wretchedness. With relentless rants and raves, bombastic swerves and vortex, Ubermorgan once again unapologetically forces upon us a squeamish reality as is rampant in the likes of the ultraright Breitbart publicity, where “transhumanists, fashionable fascists, anti-vaxxers, incels, and Silicon Valley supremacists” roam.  Breitbart Red’s stylized propaganda and sensational catchlines are reminiscent of the indelible memory of destruction. Disruption comes in many styles and flavors. When Wolfgang Staehle set up The Thing BBS in a basement on White Street in Tribeca in 1991, he wasn’t thinking in such lofty terms as to overthrow something, but rather desired an act of enabling, the act of taking ownership of the network infrastructure, which, by bypassing the encroachment of a corporate network, the German artist saw as the foundation for the nascent potential of Social Sculpture in the digital era, thus seeded the first social media by the name of art. By the same token, People’s Computing, a rare collection of ZHOU Pengan, which is comprised of antiquated artifacts of the DIY group CFido, electronic dictionary, PDA, Flash animations and Opensource wireless firmware hacks, sheds light on the forgotten story of the early Chinese Internet culture during its formative years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The amateurish enthusiasm and self-propagated autonomy mark a striking similarity with the pioneering spirit of their predecessors. Maciej Wisniewski (Netomat, 2002) set out to create a browser for he doubted Netscape’s or Internet Explorer’s navigational logic, which he thought could fixate a way of looking at the world and cast consumer behaviors in the interest of companies. In the case of Name.Space, artist Paul Garrin, once a student of Nam June Paik, reinvented himself as an entrepreneur so that he could negotiate with the executives at Network Solutions, which managed and controlled top domain names. Name.Space made headline news in the New York Times, The Economist, etc. The artist wanted to run domain names, too, for a romantically wished-for autonomy and for a new model of service as art – much like the Thing BBS's enactment of network as art. Both predated the soon-to-be buzzword of artworld of the 1990s: Relational Aesthetics proposed by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud.Disruption elicits invitations, too. Ursula Endlicher (Light and Dark Networks, 2011-2013) and the artist duo Exonemo (0 to 1 / 1 to 0, 2019), among others, were commissioned to sabotage the Whitney Museum of American Art by taking over whitney.org each day at the liminal moments of sunrise and sunset by the invited artist’s self-intuited references and preferences. The precious ten to thirty seconds mark the institution’s generous consent of the validity of net art, and an homage to the self-styled reverie of the avant-garde as Christiane Paul, curator of Whitney’s art port, the museum’s portal to the internet art, spoke about the program; “Using whitney.org as their habitat, Sunrise/Sunset projects disrupt, replace, or engage with the museum website as an information environment.”[12] Perhaps it is a euphemism for a new kind of Institutional Critique of the information age. Capital absorbs, culture assimilates, and art re-appropriates, much like gravitation pulls. When Radical Software Group released Canivore, an open source packet sniffing library, they offered their own line of flight about data types, operators, control structures and functions in a flare of manifesto, not unlike the romantic outcry of the world-change ethos of the Futurists, they called it Notes for a Liberated Computer Language.[13] Although Carnivore in the end was no more than a data visualization toolkit, its radicality lies in its intrinsic disobedience to the given norms, whether the clandestine appropriation of FBI surveillance software or the radicalization of programming language itself. It was only later revealed that the core members of the group, Eugene Thacker and Alex Galloway, were on their way to become radical theorists of media culture.The hacker instinct has always been part of the genes of net art. It still thrives today after a short pause during a period some dubbed the post-internet, which more or less was a misnomer if not a misconception. In default filename tv (2019), Everest Pipkin exposed the backstage logic of YouTube videos. His mesmerizing installation of Lacework (2020) again is an ingenuous improvisation of one hacker’s persistence to turn vastly mundane datasets into a new expression of generative sublime. In We leak (2020), Leon Eckert and Vytas Jankauskas have extended the legacy of Carnivore to give a fresh 2020 update of the original, albeit quite idiosyncratically. The visual is now substituted by the audible to resonate with the surrounding sound of Alexas. “Every time a packet goes through its local network, the device will announce it being logged. If a plain-text packet gets intercepted, its content will be read aloud.”[14] If data visualization is a representation of probable messages, then We leak unforgivingly tells the uninterrupted truth. Noise removed, entropy defeated, and pure information attained.Artists were sincerely excited and inspired when the arrival of the internet finally seemed capable of fulfilling the telematic embrace that had been dreamt about for decades. It was not only a way to communicate bi-directionally or through multi-nodal hyperlinks as promised in a decentralized network, but also through which a new form of autonomy implicit of a literal realization of the Beuysian “Everyone is an artist” could come true or that now, at last, everyone could indeed have his / her fifteen minutes of fame. Net Art Generator (Cornelia Sollfrank, 1999) was a classic of such aspirations. That tradition continued to update itself into mobile phones with the 2013 creation of Raoul Pictor Mega Painter (Hervé Graumann / Matthieu Cherubini, 2013). The App store tagline reads “With Raoul Pictor Mega Painter you can make art whenever you want and wherever you want.”At a time when Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and WeChat reign supreme, online social networks have grown ever more homogenized, it is cognition capitalism working at its best: consumption of freedom and democracy are among the most profitable under the scrutiny of corporate gazes. Guo Chen set out to dispute such premediated habitats of social media. In Wind Verification (2020) he transforms user uploaded video clips of the invisible force of wind into embodied sensory experience in the physical space of the gallery – a fan blows out the wind aligning with the directions of virtual wind in the video. It is an illuminating gesture of the unanimous many weaved into the potential of a storm in the making in a world in which the unreal is no less real than the real.Lauran Lee McCarthy teamed with Kyle McDonald have distributed a product that “tracks, analyzes, and auto-manages your relationships.”[15] The app pplkpr (2015) conveniently automates one’s social life. Like many of her works, the overly optimistic anticipation of technologically optimized life is often infused with sarcasm and castigation about the very things it proselytizes. Likewise, in Later Date (2020) her seemingly melancholic sentimentalism was nevertheless evocative of wit and hope. It is the “zany, cute and interesting” as the aesthetic supplements (as opposed to the dire prescriptions of Hal Foster) for a critique of the new reality, as Sianne Ngai aptly articulated in her 2012 volume Our Aesthetic Categories.When Heath Bunting interrupted the routines of the Kings Cross Station in London on August 4 1994 by inviting people, via email, to call in from all over the world, it seemed a reminiscence of John Cage’s 1966 ambitious episode Variation VII, during which he had ten telephone lines set up in various locations in New York City and the incoming voices would be mixed and amplified with other mechanical (blender, juicer, fan), environmental (Geiger meter), and physiological (pulse generator)[16] sounds onside transmitted via sensors by the performers at the Armory for the legendary 9 Evenings of performance. Of course, Bunting's setup was not nearly as sophisticated as Cage’s and the purpose was also different. It foreshadowed that net art was from the beginning not just something that happened on a web browser, but a much more extended scope of operation even though in those days the net could mostly only be experienced through a browser window. Today, we ever more understand that the net is the membranes of a symbiosis which connects machines with blood vessels, in dialogue with elongated rivers and lands, intercepts wind and rain, permeates from the tangible to the invisible. The networks bricolage silicon with flesh, traverse the organic through to the inorganic, fusing humans and nonhuman, all reciprocal and comingling. A new generation of artists are particularly sensitive toward this precarious posthuman condition in which we live and by which they make art. An intricate installation triggered by online users that in turn feeds back to the browser behavior with the unflattering title Miasma of the Rocks (CHEN Pengfei, LIU Xing, LIANG Yuhong, XU Haomin and ZHAO Hua, 2020) is characteristic of such reciprocity of human-machine mutuality rippling through bodies and networks, akin to the posthuman explication in the words of Cary Wolfe:It comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanism…. [It] comes after in the sense that it names a historical moment in which the decentering of human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.[17]ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe was prescient to organize a show in 1999 after “the dead end of net art,” titled net_condition before most art institutions had come to an awakening that a new epoch had descended and it would be defined by the network. The net condition has reaffirmed, by now, a perpetual condition, and it is a posthuman condition with the net condition as its circulatory and respiratory prerequisites. In a world that is stricken by a rampant pandemic and virulent misinformation, a world bankrupted by corporate rapacity, a world of tumults and crises, accelerated by glorious artificial intelligence in the feedforward anticipation of the Kurzweilian transhuman singularity; a world of hardened passion and redemption, a world in every way reminiscent of the fertile ground in which the Avant-garde germinated and thrived, net art, the last avant-garde of the 20th century, may once again at this “turning point” take up that Quixotic spirit of intrepidity and strive on, once again from the periphery and the fringe – with a little mischief, a pinch of agitation too, via action, through the beautiful, and by sideways, to remake history.[1] Barbara London, Video Art the First Fifty Years (New York: Phaiden Press, 2020), p.184.[2] Josephine Bosma, Netitudes Lets Talk Net Art (Rotterdam: NAi Publications,2011), p.22 - 61.[3] Dieter Daniels & Gunther Reisinger, “Reverse Engineering Modernism with the Last Avant-garde” in Net Pioneers 1.0, eds. Dieter Daniels & Gunther Reisinger (Rotterdam: NAi Publications,2009), p.15.[4] Ibid., p.31.[5] Ibid., p.27.[6] Net Pioneers 1.0, p.31.[7] https://rhizome.org/editorial/2017/mar/02/the-copy-and-the-paste/, accessed 10/18/2020[8] https://rhizome.org/editorial/2017/mar/03/repo-man/. accessed 10/18/2020[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabaret_Voltaire_(Zurich), accessed 10/18/2020[10] Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego.[11] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), p.146.[12] https://whitney.org/artport/commissions/sunrise-sunset. accessed 10/18/2020[13] http://r-s-g.org/LCL/[14] From the work description[15] https://lauren-mccarthy.com/pplkpr. accessed 10/18/2020[16] http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/variations-vii/; https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=272. accessed 10/18/2020[17] Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p.XV.
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From Collection to Exhibition: Foundation of Chinese Museology and its Originality...

2020-05-01 36269 read

Under the national art system and the disciplinary guidance at that time, it was not art museum that China lacked, but a fixed, national museum built for exhibitions of artworks. At the time, art museums were rather “art expos” instead of professional art museums. It was an important premise for studying Chinese art museology and New Museology. Art museums in China originated from the transformation of state policies and political system. They were endowed with fixed and important public functions right after they were established. In the discourse space of the new era, whether Chinese art museums have been separated from the “expo” context still remains a question. How to expand its dimensions, and breathe new life into our time with new perspectives and practices while leading to new reflections and criticism, should be the center issues that New Museology scholars should discuss.
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Online Conversation: Art Museums in Times of Epidemics...

2020-04-24 36340 read

On March 26, 2020, an online conversation initiated by the Student Union of the Central Academy of Fine Arts(CAFA) and organized by the Learning and Practice Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was held online as scheduled. In this dialogue, Zhang Zikang, director of the art museum of CAFA(CAFAM), and Wang Chunchen, deputy director of the art museum, discussed the topic of "art museums in times of epidemic" and answered the questions raised by the students based on their working experiences.
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