Hyperkulturemia 03 jan feb by Hyperkulturemia Fanzine

JAN-FEB 2016

Un hombre que observa el mundo, un mundo que gira al lado de un montón de sabiduría en forma de libros, sabiduría que acumula el hombre y que se encuentra dispersa en cada rincón del mundo. El mundo, el hombre y la sabiduría, un trinomio que he representado en mi fotografía para expresar el espíritu de Hyperkulturemia: “It is a common space in which you share different cultures, where you learn about places, where you discover artists, where you reformulate questions…” Quise atribuir el papel más relevante al mundo, que brilla e ilumina tanto al hombre como a la sabiduría y los envuelve con un brillo etéreo. La diminuta escala que empleé para representar al hombre en contraposición a la ciclópea montaña de sabiduría quiere trasmitir su naturaleza inabarcable, por mucho que sepamos, cada día se puede aprender más y más.

Dävu Novoa www.davunovoa.com Fotógrafo De Menziken, Suiza

JAN-FEB 2016 Eline Verstegen MA student, London from Antwerp, Belgium Meg Boulton, PhD in Art History Research affiliate at the University of York from York, England

Ramon Melero Guirado Profesional de la Cultura de Cazorla, Jaén, España Iskuhi Avagyan Artist from Toronto, Canada Sonya Tamaddon Independent Curator and Freelance Writer from Los Angeles, CA, USA

Mattia Casanova, Artist Personal Assistant da Cagliari, Italy Roberta Pirisi Dottoressa in Storia dell’Arte da Sant'Antioco, Italia

Matilde Ferrarin Studentessa di Storia dell’Arte da Verona, Italia

Armine Bachachyan, Project Coordinator, Urbanlab Yerevan, from Yerevan, Armenia

AN OCTAGON, A TORSO, AND A HASHTAG Iskuhi Avagyan Artist from Toronto, Canada

CULTURAL CAPITAL OF THE ARMENIAN CAPITAL Armine Bachachyan, Project Coordinator, Urbanlab Yerevan, from Yerevan, Armenia

‘THE (UN)HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH’ THE ART OF SOCIAL/MEDIA & PUBLIC/ ENGAGEMENT AT BANKSY’S DISMALAND Meg Boulton, PhD in Art History Research affiliate at the University of York from York, England

PHILIPPE PARRENO “H{N)Y P N(Y}OSIS” IN THE PARK AVENUTE ARMORY SHOW IN NEW YORK Mattia Casanova, Artist Personal Assistant da Cagliari, Italy

ETTORE TITO UN PAOLO VERONESE CON LA KODAK Matilde Ferrarin Studentessa in Storia dell’Arte da Verona, Italia

EROS Y THÁNATOS EN LA COLECCIÓN DE ARTE DE RICHARD Y ULLA DREYFUS-BEST Ramón Melero Guirado Profesional de la Cultura de Cazorla, Jaén, España

ANDY WARHOL E LA FOTOGRAFIA POP Roberta Pirisi Dottoressa in Storia dell’Arte da Sant'Antioco, Italia

LA GRANDE MADRE FONDAZIONE TRUSSARDI AUGUST 26-NOVEMBER 15, 2015 Sonya Tamaddon Independent Curator and Freelance Writer from Los Angeles, CA, USA

5 QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT HAVE ABOUT ALEC SOTH Eline Verstegen MA student, London from Antwerp, Belgium

An Octagon, a Torso, and a Hashtag I have a confession to make â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I love math. I mean, I really, really love it. I love its symmetry, ubiquitousness, and dependability. I am by no means a mathematical genius â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I could readily grasp basic concepts but advancing to quadratic functions and beyond tends to turn my brain to jelly. Nevertheless, I get a fantastic rush when equations balance and the numbers make sense, and I manage to glimpse through them a small facet of the cosmic order.

I am no a mathematician, however, I am simply an artist. This free and most spontaneous of professions is in many ways the antithesis of mathematics. Or that is to say, the clichĂŠ vision of the carefree and rule breaking artist seems to belong in an altogether different world from that of the studied, exacting and rigorous mathematician. This, of course, is a gross oversimplification, as the arts and sciences have often joined in spectacular fashion, but it is nevertheless important to point out that they do not always make for the most comfortable of bedfellows. Perhaps it is my love of these two opposing subjects that is at the root of my desire to join seemingly contradictory, but also complimentary streams of thought in my works.

In my current body of work, I paint figures contorted into the impossible angles of an asana, or yoga posture, realized in thin, translucent layers of oil paint on mylar, and interposed with flat, inorganic geometric forms. My intention is to capture the muscular tension of the body during the physically demanding act of yoga, and the (hopefully) still nature of the meditative mind. To that end I paint figures of classical, heroic proportions, and overlay geometric shapes that are derived from the proportions and symbolism of sacred geometry, and the architectural design of centrally planned churches in the Renaissance. These shapes mimic the angles present in the corresponding yoga posture, and are meant to act as a bridge between the visible and intelligible world. I come to yoga from a wholly Western perspective, and yet I try to combine, and sometimes blur the lines between Eastern and Western approaches to science, spirituality, and the body in my paintings. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that they are frequently at odds with each other. Western, humanist thought and philosophy, which originates in the Christian world, is epitomized by the elevation of the mind over the body. Hugh, the writer and teacher at the abbey of St. Victor in Paris, said, “that ‘arithmetic’ means ‘the power of number.’ And the power of number is this – that all things have been formed in its likeness” (Hiscock 13-15). It is posited that it is through reason and the rational mind that one can come to understand and know the divine – it is essentially a mental exercise. In contrast, yoga and Eastern philosophies offer a much more holistic approach – aimed at literally making one whole through the connection of the mind and the body. The practice of various physical techniques, such as yoga asana, is prescribed as a kind of moving meditation that endeavors to discipline the body and quiet the mind, so that an experience of the divine may be achieved, making the body the temple of worship.

All the same, these two seemingly opposite thought streams do intersect at various points. Namely, through the use of numbers and geometry as a kind of symbolic code meant to represent the divine order in the physical world, and in the subsequent imposition of those ideas on the realms of art and design. There are many parallels to the symbolism attached to numbers and mathematics in both thought streams, and in their scientific approach to spiritual knowledge (yoga is, after all, a science). In the beginning of my final year in University, when we were meant to make a cohesive body of work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or a thesis â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I decided that I would focus on the subject of yoga in my painting. This was about 2.5 years after I had begun the physical practice of yoga, and I had been drawn to explore the subject for some time. But my brain can never focus on one thing at a time, and I found myself consumed with nostalgia and recollections of a year spent in Florence.

It soon became clear that I was focusing on specific aspects of the experience. Namely, I was recalling the mathematical wonders of the city and its architecture. Brunelleschi came up often in these memories, and specifically the Pazzi chapel, wherein everything that our professor had tried to explain to us had finally made sense. In that crazy chapel, I had the euphoric experience of being able to clearly visualize Brunelleschi’s imposition of mathematical logic on his design. He was not alone in attempting to design churches with the proportions of the human body in mind. Leon Battista Alberti advocated for the design of churches, basilicas and temples in “accordance with essential mathematical harmonies” because being in those spaces, we intuitively know “when the building we are in partakes of the vital force which lies behind all matter and binds the universe together” (Wittkower 38). I soon became quite obsessed with this idea of math, the symbolism assigned to numbers, and rationalist thought as a dictate for design. So I started to look again at the works of Michelangelo and Da Vinci (especially his Vitruvian Man); the church of San Lorenzo and architecture of Brunelleschi; and even of the mathematically rigorous works of the abstract artists that we had seen in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, such as Mondrian, Van Doesburg, and even the cubists. It wasn’t long before geometric lines and shapes started to appear in my paintings. They are rendered as flat, taped, and measured planes of colour, similar to the vibrant bars present in the work of Wanda Koop. They interact with the figure, crossing over and under limbs, and mimic the lines of action and tension in the body. Like the trees that bisect the Nordic Pavilion in Venice, the figure and geometry seem to inhabit two different, yet coexisting, planes.

Overtime, I have begun to take out any evidence of randomness, and to begin to show the full geometric form. I use calculators, rulers, and protractors in an attempt at greater precision, and am thrilled to play with these tools again. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not exactly delving into quantum theory or trying to find the Higgs-Boson, but I still get huge satisfaction from even the shallowest of scientific and mathematical research employed in my process. A lot of my research and source material is gathered from Instagram. Search under the right hashtag, and you find a treasure trove of thousands upon thousands of figures practicing yoga â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is an inexhaustible source of reference imagery. It is important to me, however, to maintain anonymity in the work. Yoga is a practice for all - young, old, male, and female - and I therefore do not like to have any evidence of specific, individual details. In order to achieve this, I use a close cropping of the figure, and focus on the various, sometimes surreal, angular shapes and combinations that the body is making in the practice. I love that unsettling feeling you get from an unintelligible mass of flesh on a limited canvas space, such as in Jenny Savilleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paintings. This kind of work would not be possible without the medium of photography. Michelangelo, obsessed as he was with the body in a serpentine form, could hardly have asked one of his models to stay in a scorpion handstand for a sustained period of days or even weeks, so that he may accurately represent the figure in marble.

The influence of photography is evident in the material choices that I make in my paintings. For example, the very first figures on mylar were painted in a cerulean blue colour, similar to that of a cyanotype, and applied in thin and translucent layers, that are then erased in an act reminiscent of the development of a photograph in a darkroom. Furthermore, using mylar as a substrate and highlighting its translucency alludes to the depth of a light-emitting screen, the preferred object for modern image viewing. Indeed, my bright colour palette is derived from these screens, which utilize a heightened range of colours that are brighter and more saturated than what the human eye has been exposed to in previous centuries. Lately, I have begun to touch on other elements of Instagram, such as the ability to create all kinds of effects like light leaks, filters, and other colour manipulations, by further investigating the potential of the translucency of my materials. It is an interesting consequence of the modern world of self-promotion, whereby the images that were originally sourced from Instagram, become finished paintings that are then re-uploaded to Instagram, and often categorized under the same hashtags. #TheIronyIsntLostOnMe

Bibliography Hiscock, Nigel. The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007. Print. Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 1949. Chicester: Academy Editions, 1998. Print.

Iskuhi Avagyan www.iskuhiavagyan.com Artist from Toronto, ON, Canada

Cultural Ca Armenian

Armeniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capital Yerevan is a city rich in historical and cultural heritage. Despite its geographically compact space (227 km2) it houses over 30 museums, thus creating an amazing cultural landscape and a kind of leisure pattern for locals and visitors from around the world. Most of these museums were built in the first half of the 20th century. Basically, we distinguish the following main groups: historical museums, art museums and house museums. There is also a small subgroup of museums founded by single collectors. This article will attempt to briefly explore and introduce Armenian public collections of main state museums, as well as personal and/or private collections that were ultimately transformed into public collections.

apital of the

n Capital

STATE MUSEUMS: HOW THEY WERE FORMED?

While offered a variety of cultural institutions, the capital’s most visited destinations are considered the History Museum and the National Gallery of Armenia, the country’s repository of national and world art. Both museums were founded in 1919 and housed in the same building. And this coexistence continues up to date. The National Gallery of Armenia opened to the public in 1921 as Art Department of the State Museum. It was then located in a two-storey building of boys’ gymnasium. The museum building also housed the public library and concert hall at the time, simultaneously serving a refuge for the orphans who emigrated from Western Armenia after the Armenian Genocide in 1915. However, the museum building was later expanded and the spaces appropriated to house a major collection of Armenian, Russian and Western art which now counts over 40,000 artworks including old master paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck and others. The collection of the National Gallery of Armenia has been formed over decades modestly and painstakingly through donations and acquisitions from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, which was the cultural center of the Armenian community in Moscow back in the 19th century and boasted an extensive collection of Armenian and Russian art. In addition exquisite objects from the State Hermitage and the State Russian Museum came to enrich the art museum collection. First pieces to enter the museum collection comprised more than a dozen artworks after an exhibition of Armenian artists in 1921. Those included works by Armenian classics who contributed to the development of the national visual arts. At first the art was displayed in six rooms. Later however paintings and sculptures shared space in much larger halls. Since its opening to the public the museum changed status and names from Art Department of the State Museum to the State Fine Arts Museum and finally to the National Gallery of Armenia. Over the years the National Gallery expanded both its collection and spaces becoming the country’s undisputed treasury attracting, educating and inspiring generations of museum visitors. The second major state museum is the History Museum of Armenia, founded by the Parliament law of Armenia’s first republic and called Ethnographic-Anthropological Museum-Library then. Just like the National Gallery of Armenia it opened its doors in 1921.

The History Museum is fully subsidized by the State, which in fact owns the collection. And the museum collection includes 35% of archaeological items, 8% of ethnographic items, 45% of numismatics and 12% of archival documents that make up 400,000 objects in total. Through its exhibits, which include an exceptional collection of the 3rd-2nd millennia BC bronze specimens and a diverse collection of murals, ceramics, arms and weapons, the museum presents a complete timeline of the history and culture of Armenia from prehistoric times (one million years ago) to date, unfolding traces of cultural interrelations of Armenia with the East and the West. The History Museum is also a major scientific-research center that issues vast number of publications to further our understanding of history. There is something exciting behind the faĂ§ade of this impressive building which protects Armeniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historical and cultural heritage enticing us to see the future through the past.

HOUSE MUSEUMS: WHATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BEHIND THE WALLS?

In Armenia there is special reverence for people who through their legacy stimulate national revival. Luckily, such personalities are many with as many house-museums scattered around the city. These museums have become a somewhat sacred space, where the visitor is invited to be at home of the person who once lived and created here. The Sergei Parajanov Museum is one of the landmark museums of this kind dedicated to one of the greatest figures of the 20th century cinematography. An Armenian-Georgian film director and artist Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) made a significant contribution to Armenian, Ukrainian and Georgian cinema creating an unusual visual poetry. A friend of Fellini, Antonioni, Guerra and Tarkovsky, he earned both international acclaim and persecution by the Soviet regime for his unorthodox cinematic style and unlimited artistic vision. The museum of Parajanov was founded by the resolution of the government in 1988. Comprising about 1,500 exhibits, the collection includes installations, collages, assemblages, drawings, dolls, and hats he made, as well as furnishings and personal items brought from his house in Tiflis, which were donated to the museum upon his will. The museum also showcases unpublished screenplays, librettos, and various artworks which Parajanov created during the years of imprisonment. Ever since its opening the museum has organized over 65 exhibitions worldwide: Cannes, Athens, Tokyo, Moscow, Kiev, Boston, Rome, London, Tehran, Peking, Paris, Sofia and other cities still to come. The Parajanov Museum encapsulates beauty and magic of the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world and once you enter it, you immerse into the world of this great visionary.

FROM PRIVATE PROPERTY TO PUBLIC VALUE

Stories that tell how private collections went public are many, engaging and even controversial. Such philanthropic outreach emerged in the 19th century in major Armenian Diaspora communities, through such personalities as Grigor Zambakhchian and Calouste Gulbenkian, a petrol magnate and philanthropist whose extensive art collection is displayed at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. As a matter of fact Armeniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultural capital was formed mostly through the efforts of Diaspora Armenians. So the two important art patrons who gave away their art and established a museum in the heart of their remote homeland are Armenian-American businessman and philanthropist Gerard Leon Cafesjian and distinguished physician, professor Aram Abrahamyan. Housed in a building of breathtaking beauty the Cafesjian Center for the Arts invigorated Armeniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art world since its opening in 2009. It is dedicated to bringing the best of contemporary art to Armenia and presenting the best of Armenian culture to the world. Bearing the name of its founder, the Cafesjian Center for the Arts collection comprises over 5000 pieces featuring such artists as Fernando Botero, Barry Flanagan, Jaume Plensa, Marc Chagall, Arshile Gorky, Georges Braque, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, and others. It also possesses one of the most comprehensive glass collections in the Caucasus. The Center offers a variety of exhibitions, educational programs, lectures and concerts.

Interestingly enough, the building that now houses the museum was not originally designed to be an art museum. The architect Alexander Tamanyan (1878–1936) desired to connect the northern and central parts of the city with a vast green area of waterfalls and gardens cascading down a hill. However, the plan was abandoned until the late 1970s, when it was revived by Yerevan’s chief architect of the time Jim Torosyan, who recreated Tamanyan’s original plan incorporating new ideas that included a monumental exterior stairway, an intricate network of halls and outdoor gardens embellished with numerous reliefs bearing references to Armenia’s rich history and cultural heritage. Work on the building began in the 1980s by the Soviets but was called off after the 1988 Armenian earthquake and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In subsequent years Armenia entered a period of harsh recession and the Cascade was left unfinished for more than a decade. In 2002 Gerard L. Cafesjian, working with the City of Yerevan and the government of the Republic of Armenia, initiated a complete renovation project, transforming a Soviet relic into a stunning museum. Today the Cafesjian Center for the Arts is the vibrant cultural hub of Yerevan’s urban heart. As a matter of chance, the museum of the second savvy collector, Aram Abrahamyan is just nearby the Cafesjian Center for the Arts. A distinguished physician, professor and an avid collector Aram Abrahamyan lived and worked in Russia. During his life he amassed an outstanding collection of Russian art, which he dedicated to Yerevan as a token of immense love for his homeland. The Museum of Russian Art opened to the public in 1984 ever since presenting exquisite paintings, prints, sculpture and decorative-applied arts by Russian artists of late 19th early 20th centuries.

When asked why he decided to give away his collection to Armenia, Aram Abrahamyan answered, ‘The Armenians do love and appreciate Russian culture, and they are the right audience to share my collection with.’ After years since its opening the visitors can still experience intangible presence of the collector who acquired those items, lived with them and today invites the public to an intimate home-like atmosphere of art. Thus these museums serve not only as a monument to their founders reflecting their vision, choice and personal taste in art, but they are also used for public enlightenment. Today the cultural landscape of Yerevan has entered a dynamic development process. Inspired by the country’s rich legacy, new art forms and expressions are creating powerful statements rethinking the past and looking upon to the future.

Armine Bachachyan www.urbanlab.am/en/ Project Coordinator, Urbanlab Yerevan, from Yerevan, Armenia

‘The (un)Happiest Place on Earth’ the Art of Social/Media & Public/Engagement at Banksy’s Dismaland Dismaland, a site-specific art installation created by Banksy, combined monumental works that evoked kitschy sea-side idioms with subverted theme-park rhetoric where amusement parks were transformed into bemusement parks and dystopic, Disney-esque iconographies and stereotypes became distorted into razor-sharp hard-to-swallow political commentaries of the cost of consumption and the state of Society.

Described by its creator as a "family theme park unsuitable for children", the temporary art project was constructed in the slightly faded, formerly fashionable seaside resort town of Weston-SuperMare in a run-down and abandoned Lido – the Tropicana. Prepared in secret, the pop-up exhibition opened during the weekend of 21st August 2015 and closed permanently on September 27th, 2015, thirty-six days later. Banksy was the driving force behind the park, creating ten new works for the exhibition, including the monumental(ly) disturbing centrepiece on-site – the Cinderella installation, funding the construction of the exhibition and curating the work of fifty-eight artists to produce the sea-side spectacular.

Dismaland gained an

company called Atlas

spread, the very process of

exceptional amount of

Entertainment was preparing

accessing the site added to

coverage, from both

the location for a crime

the hype and desirability of

traditional and social media

thriller called Grey Fox. The

visiting the park for the

as it opened its doors and

public misdirection around

general public. 4,000 tickets

throughout the time it was

the site extended to its

were made available for

open to the public, granting a

advertising and visual

purchase every day, priced

surly and dismal welcome to

signifiers, as signs

between £3 and £5 each, to

its visitors. This interest was

proclaiming ‘Grey Fox

be accessed through the

arguably exacerbated by the

Productions’ were posted

Dismaland website, with

hush hush tenor that

around entrances to the site –

further limited walk-in

surrounded the construction

an ironic (or perhaps

tickets available on a first

of the Park, which was

deliberately prophetic) twist

come first served basis, with

shrouded in secrecy and

given the emphasis on the

no guarantee of eventual

wooden hoardings, with

transformative and hypnotic

entrance. The public response

local residents being

power of verbal and visual

to the show and desire for

propaganda seen in the works

tickets repeatedly crashed the

shown

throughout

online site leading to widely

Dismaland. As well as initial

circulated conspiracy theories

local interest in the structure

that the website itself, with

taking shape in the

its highly unsatisfactory user-

reclaimed Lido, once

interface and impossible odds

media interest

of securing a ticket, was the

told

Hollywood

real entry to Dismaland, foreshadowing the delights and experiences that awaited the visitor seeking Banksy’s theatrical spectacle of public art.

Once there, and there on

of Dismaland were glimpsed

that the doors would. The

spec, no-less, as the website

above the walls of the

event has been described by

reliably refused to produce

transformed Lido it was

Banksy as “a festival of art,

any straightforward money-

apparent that this was no

amusements and entry-level

to-ticket-exchange, the site

setting for manufactured

anarchism. This is an art

reared above the seafront,

happily-ever-after – instead

show for the 99% who’d

immediately recognisable in

quoting and critiquing the

rather be at Alton Towers”

the twisted and dilapidated

former, although maintaining

and

turrets that so memorably

it was not actively criticising

demographic of visitors was

evoked and displaced the

its forebear. The process of

an elaborate visual mix of

original and iconic form of

queuing to see if one would

slightly-out-of-place gallery

the fairy tale castles produced

gain access was one of

regulars, curious locals,

around the world by the

camaraderie and curiosity,

achingly hip teens dressed to

Disney corporation, with

standing amid a mass of

the 90s and those apparently

their pastel-promises of

people on the bleached, hay-

more drawn to the celebrity

happily-ever-after and fairy-

strewn grass that smelled of

of the event than to the art it

tale-fantasy. From the instant

old carnivals and quiet

showcased – the crowd

the chipped and charred

desperation, penned into

forming a visual spectacle

turrets and tattered banners of

metal lines, hoping the

that echoed the hype and

the tired castle at the centre

clouds wouldn’t open, but

melee of entry to the park.

certainly

the

Bringing together Banksy’s work with that of the “best artists he could imagine”, the show presented a dizzying array of spaces and objects to its visitors, too many to include individually here. Like the seaside resort activities and carnival atmosphere it evoked Dismaland contained something for everyone, with work from renowned artists such as Jenny Holtzer and Damien Hurst to that of emerging artists. Subjective (and highly selected) highlights included Block9’s Castle that formed the lynchpin of the exhibition, Dietrich Wegner’s installation of a mushroom cloud tree house, Josh Keyes’ astonishing satirical pseudo-scientific composite paintings, Jessica Harrison’s subversive and kitsch corruption of porcelain-perfection in her modified figurines, Kate MacDowell’s amazing and uncanny sculptures that twist nature and science - also in porcelain, Severija Inčirauskaitė-Kriaunevičienė’s impossibly intricate industrial embroidery, Jimmy Cauty’s sprawling and entrancing miniaturized dystopia Aftermath Displacement Principle, David Shrigley’s camp and political parody of the paraphernalia of fairground games and souvenir balloons and bracelets, the mesmerizing taxidermy of Polly Moran, Damian Hirst’s formaldehyde Unicorn, Ronit Baranga’s utterly disturbing and totally charming ceramics, the much vaunted Pocket Money Loans emporium created by Darren Cullen and the Museum of Cruel Objects curated by Dr Gavin Grindon – a bus-based museum space that displayed things made to hurt people, exhibiting a body of work whose subtext, I suspect, will flit around the edges of my darker dreams for years to come - to name but a few. One of the most seen/talked/written about pieces of the show was Banksy’s paparazzi-pastiche of Disney’s Cinderella placed in Block9’s eroded fairy tale castle.

Entering this structure from the lake that was home to the distorted, disfigured form of the Mermaid and a riot-van-turned-water-feature, through the jagged portcullis and down a dark, peeling chip-board corridor displaying a wall-mounted TV showing a loop of the technicolour finale of Disney’s Cinderella – with Cinders and her Prince Charming running down red-carpeted steps into the pumpkin-coach that would carry them into their happy ever after – it was with a jolt that the viewer rounded the next corner into the cavernous and darkened space of Banksy’s vison of their happily-ever-afterlife. There, flashlit, in the dark, was the overturned coach, with frozen, upside down horses screaming in agony (more Guernica than anything from the Imaginarium), with the slumped corpse of the Princess being held up by bluebirds of (un)happiness – the whole surrounded by hyper-real models of helmeted, leather-clad paparazzi and idling motorbikes, recalling unavoidable parallels with Diana. The viewer was forcibly placed amongst the flashes of the camera wielding pack, part of the crowd of anonymous spectators, often adding their own iPhone flashes to the work as they gazed upon the wrecked fantasy of a privileged forever. Emerging from the carnage the visitor had the chance to buy a fairground photomemento of themselves superimposed against the crash, in an exchange of voyeurism and commerce that was echoed both directly and indirectly in the other works placed around the park. Walking out of the castle, around the lake, past billboards and cinema screens, through tents, and games and sculptures, past the gargantuan Sandcastle turbine, the mini-Gulf course, refreshment tents, political graffiti, the Punch and Judy show and the fire-pit fuelled by burning the books of Lord Archer, seeking perspective (and a pina colada) on the rooftop bar, it was possible to gain a panorama of the park, and it was here that the beauty and paradox of Dismaland really came into focus.

Overlooking the site (in its dual-iterations of decayed 1930s Lido, faded from its former glory, possessing, as it once did, the highest diving board and largest open air swimming pool in Europe and its new and (be)/amusing identity of art event and public spectacle) and the crowds of visitors it was easy to see the Park as both critique and social commentary; full of sarcastic tongue-in-cheek art that angrily reflected the flaws and fallacies of contemporary society, and yet containing something that was celebratory, carnival-esque – critical, yes, but not caustic. While walking around and through the exhibitions there was a subtle leitmotif of mice not least in the implicit absence of the infamous inhabitant of the amusement park Dismaland referenced: mice in mazes, mice swallowed, mice trapped, mice experimented on: as evidenced in Banksy’s subversive sculpted silhouette of Mickey Mouse swallowed by a gold python; but echoed in the agonised death-throes of Cinderella’s horses who, let us not forget, are really mice; of MacDowell’s Quiet as a Mouse, 2011, that replicate the visual paradox and ethical horror-show of the Vacanti mouse, while asking us to look again at the assumed truth of visual images; of t h e caged and maze like spaces of Aftermath

Displacement Principle; of the performed identities of the disgruntled mouse-ear-capped Park workers seemingly stuck unhappily in situ and of the movements of the visitors themselves around the site of this experimental art-work with its inbuilt identity of surveilled space. Maze like and bewildering, these spaces and pieces asked those encountering them to step out of their domestic cages and look behind the curtain of society for other aspects, other views, to see… an alternative. Alternatives. From the roof, perspective on the park shifted and from placing the emphasis onto any particular piece or aspect of the show, it was instead possible to see Dismaland as one huge collaborative work; between Bansky and his chosen artists, yes; but also between these artists and the public who came to inhabit the space of the park. Without its visitors and viewers, without its audience, Dismaland was a witty themed art installation with carefully selected and curated works – with them, however, it became its own identity, living the mythology that had been created for the site. In the diversity of its visitors and in the manner they occupied the site it became a bemusement park. People were everywhere, sitting, standing, queuing, walking, eating, playing, watching, thinking, talking – consuming the site, enlivening it, living it. In playing its games, eating its food, viewing its art, in lining up to see Cruel, in sitting in deckchairs, in engaging with the workers, in watching the park and each other from the panopticon space of the roof-bar it was arguably the people who came to visit, as much as the art they came to view, that performed and created the highly social and public art piece that was Dismaland as they toured the park, with its self-aware and self-reflective works, entering en masse and exiting though the gift shop.

Dismaland has closed its doors, the site has been dismantled and even the website has been transformed. No obsolete online archive here, but rather a page that echoes and furthers the complexities of the park as public art work. It documents the transformation of the temporary structure of Dismaland into Dismal Aid, with the fabric that made the park transformed into building materials subsequently taken to Calais to build shelters and a playground in the refugee camp there - becoming a socially (inter)active Euro-Dismaland that practices what its artworks preached; in an ongoing performance of social criticism and activism. As a public art work Dismaland ran the gamut of the profane, the profound, the sublime, the spectacular, the sadistic, the fantastic and the ultrareal â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not perhaps an artwork that will transform what art is in the art world bur rather something that has the potential to transform the public perception of art, and moreover to transform the perception of what art can do in the world â&#x20AC;&#x201C; presenting a visual output that has both transformative purpose and political agency â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that has been reconstructed as a real world outcome that enacts the principles it portrayed and attempts to redress some of the many societal issues it recognised.

Meg Boulton, meg.boulton@york.ac.uk PhD in Art History Research affiliate at the University of York from York, England

PHILIPPE PARRENO

“H{N)Y P N(Y}OSIS” IN THE PARK AVENUTE ARMORY SHOW IN NEW YORK

During this July, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been at the Park Avenue Armory Show in New York, where Philippe Parreno has produced his Masterpiece: all his most famous videoworks have been rethought to create a whole new relationship between them.

The Armory Show has become a container of elements from totally different places: it was a large concert hall, but also a cinema or an American road with lights, signs and his typical sounds. Time and space were freely manipulated to create an immersive experience, unique compendium of an extraordinary career. But letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s try to understand how all of these concepts are expressed into physical elements.

As soon as one had the chance to get into the great room of the Armory Show, there was a road made of lights, marquettes and seemingly silent pianos. The elements of a piano-bar found their dignity in the state of apparent abandonment that surrounds them. At the end of this suggested path, there was an atypical moving stage: the seats were oriented at 360 degrees, so that it was easy, while rotating, to see three screens placed all around this stage projecting videos. The videos presented ranged from the classic Anne Lee, the manga character that seeks her identity, to June, 8, 1968, a reconstruction of the journey from New York to Washington of the body of President Kennedy after he was assassinated, ending with Invisible Boy , a portrait of a young illegal Chinese immigrant who lives in Chinatown, all seen through his adolescent paranoia. The only unpublished work among the videos was titled The crowd (2015), lasting 24 minutes, the longest of the work presented in the room, displayed in the central screen. The camera takes up a number of people who were caught carry out the most varied activities within the same Wade Thompson Drill Hall: some sleep, some dance, some just lies in the floor etc. In this way, Parreno makes us witnesses of a daily life that takes place without worries and without any conditions.

At a certain point, however, the scene changes: all the people are real estate, faces tight, almost in front of an inevitable apocalypse. Later on another surprise: a round of applause, that makes us protagonists of the scene and makes us realize that perhaps they are viewers, while we are the attraction. A reshuffling of roles that is typical of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;hypnoticâ&#x20AC;? art of Philippe Parren.

In the interval between one movie and the next, in a sort of operatic interlude, it was staged a real piano concert. The strange thing though was the fact that the piano played by itself. A fast music took suddenly shape all in connection with the sounds that are recorded directly from the Lexington Avenue just outside the Armory Show. In this exhibition, Parrenoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main aim was, in my opinion, to let the visitor enter into new relational and immersive rhythms, giving us an environment that tries to suggest new relationships with the everyday reality that is located immediately outside of the Armory.

A strong, immersive and outstanding piece of art, for one of the most important artist of this century.

Mattia Casanova, matt.cas19@gmail.com Artist Personal Assistant from Cagliari, Italy

Ettore Tito

“un Paolo Veronese con la Kodak”

Se dovessimo indicare tre protagonisti ulteriori, oltre ai personaggi che affollano il dipinto, dovremmo citarne tre: la luce, la tecnica e il mare. La luce, in Ettore Tito, è calda, avvolgente, fa vibrare di vitalità non solo i personaggi, di cui ammiriamo anche la ricchezza di dettagli (basti vedere la veste della donna in primo piano: il pittore ha reso in modo impeccabile le parti bagnate), ma financo le increspature di un mare lambito da una dolce brezza, a giudicare dalla spumetta bianca che si forma sulla superficie. Questo realismo, che non arrivò mai ai livelli di crudezza di quello della pittura di altri pittori suoi contemporanei, ma che, al contrario, spesso trasudava poeticità e tenerezza, proseguiva una secolare tradizione, quella della grande pittura veneta di cui Ettore Tito fu tra i principali esponenti a cavallo tra Otto e Novecento, a dispetto delle sue origini napoletane.Storici e critici d'arte lo hanno accostato ora a Giambattista Tiepolo, ora a Francesco Guardi, ora a Paolo Veronese. Si è voluto vedere in E t t o r e Ti t o u n a s o r t a d i continuatore della libertà e della leggerezza tiepolesche: alcuni suoi affreschi mostrano chiarissime suggestioni tratte dall' ar te di Tiepo lo, e in un'occasione, nel 1917, si trovò anche a dover sostituire un distrutto affresco dell'illustre pittore settecentesco.

Ma in Tito si possono rivedere anche i generosi corpi e il vivace colorismo del Veronese: non a caso, Roberto Longhi definì Ettore Tito "un Paolo Veronese con la Kodak”. Abbiamo detto infatti che il secondo protagonista dei dipinti di Ettore Tito, è la tecnica, che possiamo quasi considerare mutuata dalla fotografia: tipicamente fotografico è l'uso di disporre alcune figure, molto grandi, vicinissime all'osservatore, quasi attaccate al bordo inferiore della composizione, allontanando via via tutti gli altri personaggi. E quella che vediamo in Luglio non è neppure una delle inquadrature più ardite: ci sono dipinti, come Sulla laguna del 1897, una delle sue opere più celebri, in cui i due protagonisti, il gondoliere e la ragazza trasportata sulla gondola, sono così vicini a noi che sembra quasi che il pittore si sia messo anche lui sulla gondola, davanti alla ragazza, e lì abbia creato il dipinto. E, ovviamente, parte della gondola è tagliata fuori dalla composizione: un espediente, anche questo tipicamente fotografico, per suggerire il movimento, l'incedere dell'imbarcazione sull'acqua. La fotografia, del resto, esercitò un certo fascino sui pittori di fine Ottocento, e indubbiamente anche Ettore Tito fu ammaliato dalle nuove possibilità che questo mezzo offriva agli artisti: non sappiamo se scattò delle fotografie, perché non ci sono rimaste prove al riguardo, ma sicuramente ne conosceva tecniche, trucchi, inquadrature.

Infine, il mare, elemento costante e pressoché onnipresente, anche per motivi geografici, nell'arte di Ettore Tito. E anche quando non è visibile entro i limiti fisici della composizione, spesso se ne percepisce la presenza, si avverte che una scena è ambientata nei pressi della costa perché la luce avvolgente e abbacinante fa percepire la vicinanza del mare. È vicino al mare, su una spiaggia, che si svolge la vicenda delle Pagine d'amore, opera conservata presso le Raccolte Frugone di Genova, e che conobbe un grande successo quando fu esposta per la prima volta, alla Biennale di Venezia del 1909. Una gustosa scena di genere ambientata sotto un pergolato sulla spiaggia, dove alcune donne ascoltano la lettura di una lettera d'amore da una di loro,

che porta i capelli rosso fuoco avvolti in un velo bianco, suggerito da brevi e rapide pennellate sulle quali perĂ˛ si posano tocchi di colore per cercare effetti luministici, come un po' in tutto il quadro. La luce Ă¨ quella fresca e radente di quel particolare momento in cui il giorno sta per cedere alla sera: le ombre si allungano per trasformarsi poi in una penombra che avvolgerĂ la spiaggia e il cielo si tinge di rosa. Il dipinto Ă¨ suggestivo: sembra quasi di percepire il silenzio della spiaggia interrotto solo dal rumore sommesso della risacca, dai fruscii delle vesti mosse dal vento e dalla voce soave della ragazza che legge la lettera. E magari delle timide risate di quella che sorride poggiando il mento sul dorso della mano.

Realizzato nel 1909, e anch'esso esposto alla Biennale di Venezia, è un altro dipinto "acquatico", ambientato però in un fiume invece che al mare: l'opera è Il bagno e ci presenta una ragazza, dalle forme leggiadre e sinuose, che si sta rinfrescando sotto le fronde di un albero, mentre con fare vezzoso si sistema i capelli. Il pennello di Ettore Tito crea effetti di luce sull'acqua che crea cerchi concentrici attorno alle gambe della giovane, immerse fino a metà polpaccio, ma soprattutto crea, sempre col tramite della luce, un corpo bello, che ispira sensualità e amore, che ricorda, come molti notarono anche all'epoca, i voluttuosi nudi di Anders Zorn, ma che riporta anche alle dee greche dell'antichità: non bisogna tralasciare l'influenza che anche l'arte classica giocò sulla poetica del pittore campano di nascita, ma veneto d'adozione. Non di rado capita di imbattersi, nella sua produzione, in scene mitologiche: ninfe che giocano sulle rive del mare, Veneri che nascono dalle onde, sirene che emergono dai flutti.

Artista di grande sensibilità coloristica, che si manifesta soprattutto nelle vedute e paesaggi lagunari e nelle scene di animazione popolare (come nella festa in Piazza San Marco per l’inaugurazione del nuovo campanile), ma anche pittore di figure e ritrattista di forte impianto e penetrazione (come in ritratti famosi, non solo di veneziani, da Albertini a Volpi, e in quelli femminili, di particolare suggestione ed eleganza), o nei nudi tra verismo e simbolismo, Ettore Tito è stato non soltanto la vedette di molte Biennali veneziane (1909, ’12, ’14, ’22), ma l’artista scelto – forse il solo possibile – per ricreare il soffitto tiepolesco della chiesa degli Scalzi, distrutto durante la prima guerra mondiale, di cui in mostra è presente il grande modello.

Matilde Ferrarin matilde.ferrarin@gmail.com Studentessa in Storia dell’Arte da Verona, Italia

Eros y Th谩natos en la colecci贸n de arte de Richard y Ulla Dreyfus-Best

Una cajita para limosnas en forma de calavera datada a mitad del XVII, al lado hay una plancha para la ropa, pero tiene soldada una fila de puntas que recorre verticalmente su superficie plana, justo arriba, colgado en la pared, hay un precioso cuadrito de Gustave Moreau, a cuya izquierda un Francesco Clemente juega con nuestro punto de vista, del techo pende una colorida bola de demolición con un flotador y en la mesita de la esquina hay una esculturita de bronce del siglo XII que gira y echa humo. ¿Dónde estamos? En la casa de Richard y Ulla Dreyfus-Best, en Basilea. Un espacio muy privado, un lugar mágico y personal donde se hablan de los grandes temas del arte: el amor y la muerte. Durante tres meses la casa de los coleccionistas suizos quedó vacía de sus más preciados tesoros, por primera vez el alma de ese hogar se llevó lejos y se reinstaló intentando recrear la misma esencia. “For your eyes only” fue el título que se eligió para la exposición que la Colección Peggy Guggenheim de Venecia le dedicó a la colección de arte de Richard y Ulla Dreyfus-Best entre los meses de mayo y agosto de 2014. A priori, esta variopinta selección de obras puede parecernos desordenada, confusa y anacrónica, pero nada más lejos de la realidad, estamos ante una colección fruto del más educado y refinado sentido del gusto.

Pero ¿qué es lo que une épocas y obras tan dispares? Para responder a esta pregunta tenemos que enfrentarnos a una reflexión que fractura la historiografía artística tradicional. Cuando estudiamos historia del arte, comenzamos con un período, por ejemplo el Gótico, una vez que terminamos ese tema, seguimos con el siguiente, que en este caso sería el Renacimiento ¿qué provoca este planteamiento? Nada más y nada menos que estar ante muchas historias del arte. Lo que Richard y Ulla plantean con su colección es unificar en una línea de tiempo diacrónica los grandes temas trasversales al ser humano, sea de donde sea, venga del siglo XII o del siglo XXI. Entramos en una lúgubre habitación aterciopelada y nos asaltan decenas de imágenes preciosamente espantosas, parece todo muy complejo, porque nunca antes vimos una colección así, porque justo antes de entrar en el Guggenheim aquella mañana visitamos la Galería de la Academia, donde cada sala está perfectamente etiquetada en el espaciotiempo, y también visitamos la Colección de François Pinault, donde todo es muy contemporáneo. Entonces ¿cuál es el hilo conductor en esta extraña exposición? Es mucho más sencillo de lo que parece, los grandes dilemas del hombre, de la filosofía y del arte: el amor y la muerte; Eros y Thánatos. Entre las obras de Johan Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) que hay en la colección, destacamos el derroche de erotismo de Callipigia. Dama con la falda levantada delante de un espejo apoyado sobre columnas fálicas, este pequeño dibujo es una declaración desinhibida del autor, que emerge entre el mundo onírico de religión y literatura que tanto lo caracteriza.

Un Eros provocador que muestra la dominante voluptuosidad de una dama consciente de estar siendo observada, una versión voyeur de la iconografía clásica de la Venus Callipigia. De la misma pared cuelga otro pequeño dibujo a tinta y acuarela muy divertido, es del artista japonés Katsushika Hokusai que representa a una pareja tradicionalmente ataviada sorprendida en pleno acto sexual por una divinidad cuyos rasgos faciales están representados por penes y vaginas. Volviendo a Europa, en la pared de enfrente, la obra Cefalopode 1900 de Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) nos vuelve a mostrar una erótica visión traducida al personal lenguaje del artista. Piernas, bocas, manos y muslos se ensamblan en inquietantes mutaciones corpóreas que se retuercen y se comprimen sobre una red de pesca como fondo. Al igual que estos tres ejemplos, otros tantos nos hablan del Eros en la colección DreyfusBest, con Dalí, Not Vital, Dürer o Doré. Sea en pleno Romanticismo inglés, durante el periodo Ukiyo-e japonés o en pleno siglo XX, lo que estamos advirtiendo es un fenómeno transversal en el arte, una clave constante que se traduce en cada momento histórico de un modo diferente. Junto al amor, la muerte ha sido una de las grandes cuestiones que el hombre ha abordado desde la filosofía, la religión y la ciencia. En la colección de Richard y Ulla, también la muerte tiene un peso muy fuerte. Paseando por los pasillos de su casa podemos ver un fantástico juicio universal cuya autoría está atribuida a un discípulo del Bosco, en esta escena rocambolescas figuritas zoomórficas sodomizan al hombre por sus pecados.

Pero la muerte y el infierno no es un asunto cristiano, también el mundo de ultratumba y los dioses infernales paganos tienen su cabida en el fantástico mundo DreyfusBest, tal es el caso de un dibujo de Giulio Romano (1492/1499-1546), o el de un pequeño Memento mori anónimo del XVIII que se encarga de recordarnos que moriremos antes o después. No olvidemos que este tema fue muy recurrente durante toda la historia del arte, especialmente durante época romana, donde incluso espacios domésticos de esparcimiento y disfrute como la cocina estaban ricamente decorados con mosaicos con un memento mori. Es en este preciso momento cuando cobra sentido ver la obra Romeo y Julieta de Füssli o de Doré (1832-1883) entre toda esta amalgama atemporal y variopinta. Sendas obras no nos están representando gratuitamente la escena literaria, sino más bien a Eros

Thánatos del modo más evidente posible. Otras dos bonitas estampas

en la que el amor y la muerte se dan la mano, aparecen en un grabado a dos caras de Gustave Doré. Por un lado Cupido, revólver en mano, reposa recostado sobre una montaña infinita de calaveras. Justo en el reverso, Cupido pasea protegido bajo la capa de la muerte, personificada al más puro estilo tradicional, mientras le ayuda a llevar su guadaña justiciera. Este tipo de colecciones nos hacen reflexionar acerca de la universalidad del arte, de los grandes temas del hombre, de su simplicidad y complejidad, de binomios aparentemente imposibles, de temas sellados a fuego en el ADN del ser humano y que convierten nuestro juicio en un valor universal, a pesar de ser el resultado cultural de puntos muy distantes en el espacio tiempo.

Ramón Melero Guirado rmeleroguirado@gmail.com Profesional de la Cultura de Cazorla, Jaén, España

Andy Warhol e la fotografia Pop Quale è stato il contributo che Andy Warhol ha dato alla fotografia contemporanea? E quali sono state le sue tecniche di “postproduzione”? A partire dai primi anni 60 i rapporti tra fotografia e pittura iniziano a modificarsi rispetto al passato, fino a quel momento i contatti tra i 2 erano stati sporadici ora l’intero scenario di arti visive si stava modificando. Pur essendo ancora il quadro il “padrone di casa”, ormai la fotografia si stava affermando in un ruolo più rilevante.

Daniela Palazzoli riteneva che per Andy Warhol la fotografia era un materiale bruto che entrava a far parte della tela, prima sotto forma di collage e poi sotto forma di serigrafia e di riporto fotografico su tela. Per lo studioso Claudio Marra questo tipo di considerazione è corretta, ma limitata, quindi bisognerebbe verificare se tra il complessivo apparato teorico della fotografia e la poetica della Pop Art esistono connessioni implicite. Ma qual’è il ruolo che ha veramente la fotografia? Marshall McLuhan nel suo saggio del 1964 intitolato “Gli strumenti del comunicare” aveva diffuso il celebre slogan “Il medium è il messaggio”, la riflessione di MchLuhan spinge a interrogarsi sul ruolo giocato da un mezzo di massa quale la fotografia all’interno della produzione artistica con riferimento al contributo che poteva scaturire dalla sua identità teorica. Lucy Lippard scrive l’arte pop è più “estroversa che introversa ed arriva al dunque istantaneamente”; infatti basterebbe sfogliare un qualsiasi catalogo che riguardi la Pop Art per che situazioni, oggetti, cibi sono tutti raccontati in modo ricognitivo e distaccato, senza pretesa di approfondimento psicologico. Allo stesso modo anche la fotografia è estroversa, per generarsi ha necessariamente bisogno di stare “in faccia alle cose”, di stare appunto al di fuori di queste. Per generarsi la fotografia ha bisogno quindi di essere in presenza, funzionando da traccia. Rifacendoci alle teorie di McLuhan si può ipotizzare che proprio la forza plasmante della tecnologia fotografica abbia contribuito in maniera determinante allo sviluppo del clima di estroversione poi fatto proprio dagli artisti. L’ipotesi che dunque Marra sostiene è che il carattere di estroversione della Pop Art abbia trovato alimento nell’abitudine all’estroversione prodotta dalla diffusione di massa della pratica fotografica.

Un altro punto fondamentale riguarda “l’isolamento degli oggetti” nelle opere Pop: i barattoli di minestra, le bottiglie di coca-cola, i frammenti di fumetto, le icone pubblicitarie risultano sempre separati dal proprio contesto. L’artista taglia intenzionalmente tutti i possibili riferimenti di situazione, fa il vuoto attorno all’oggetto come in un’ipotetica inquadratura fotografica. Si può quindi parlare di isolamento in 2 sensi: come modalità “1 ad 1” facendo cioè il vuoto sul singolo oggetto per quel rapporto col mondo che costituisce il fondamento filosofico della poetica pop e come espediente per sottrarre gli oggetti al cortocircuito della praticità nel quale risultano immersi irrimediabilmente. Rapportarsi col mondo facendo il vuoto sul singolo oggetto, evidenzia una chiara volontà alla sospensione del giudizio, la volontà di prendere atto senza giudicare perché una volta sottratto al contesto di valori che potrebbe significarlo, l’oggetto vale solo per se stesso, fuori giudizio appunto. Si tratta ancora una volta di un atteggiamento che rivela analogie con lo statuto della fotografia. Per fare un esempio basta citare i Formalisti Russi, per i quali l’isolamento del segno/segno in versione arti visive, costituiva una dato negativo, ma ovviamente la cosa può essere vista anche come occasione di sguardo differente sulle cose. Il modo più evidente di operare il riscatto dell’oggetto resta quello di rivolgersi frontalmente ad esso e di fargli vuoto attorno, così facendo gli si conferisce un rilievo eccezionale. La pop art sospende accuratamente tutte le affinità pratiche e si propone di darci una sorta di percezione assoluta sciolta da intenti di fruizione immediata. Questo tipo di atteggiamento è senza dubbio fotografico specie se si fa riferimento all’idea di “straniamento automatico” che la fotografia si porta dietro. Se infatti il processo basilare della fotografia si riferisce all’esposizione alla luce di un materiale sensibile, chimico o elettronico, occorre riconoscere che già il significato etimologico della parola “esporre” ci suggerisce l’idea del porre fuori, dell’isolare evidenziando una vocazione straniante della fotografia. Un’altra questione interessante è quell’ingrandimento di proporzioni che quasi sempre caratterizza gli oggetti coinvolti nelle opere, lo studioso Roland Barthes ritiene che la Pop Art, voglia desimbolizzare l’oggetto e non è forse nello stesso modo che agisce la fotografia? la sua funzione primaria riguarda proprio questo esercizio di separazione dal contesto che ha come scopo di metterci davanti a singole presenze oggettuali. Peter Sager in questa stessa direzione afferma che un principio essenziale della Pop Art è quello della reciproca oggettivazione di valori formali astratti

e della formalizzazione di oggetti reali, in effetti quello che Warhol si trova ad oggettivare sono i suoi ripetuti ritratti (Marylin e Mao) e non è tanto la persona fisica, quanto il valore formale di icona precostituita che quella persona incarna. Allo stesso tempo però si potrebbe avanzare anche l’ipotesi contraria, ossia che si tratti di presenze di vita. Un’altra citazione di Barthes dice che la Pop Art è un’arte dell’essenza delle cose e cerca di spiegarlo facendo l’esempio delle lunghe sedute di posa necessarie un tempo al fotografo per produrre un ritratto, il motivo era dovuto alla mancanza di tecnologia, ma questa necessità pratica finiva comunque per trasformarsi in occasione estetica in quanto, fuori dalla logica dell’istantaneità il soggetto era portato a dare un’immagine idealizzata di sé, quasi un’immagine interiore, un’essenza appunto. L’intenzione artistica della pop art, è quella di spogliare l’oggetto da ogni possibile collegamento di situazione per ridurlo a pura essenza. Maurizio Calvesi poi parlando di Pop Art ne aveva chiaramente indicato le esplicite risonanze fotografiche nel campo del reportage che in questo caso indica un incontro fisicopercettivo, diretto e frontale col mondo o l’ambiente. Il reportagismo della Pop non è più un dato virtuale, ma assume direttamente tutti i caratteri dell’effettiva relazione con le cose, anche se poi l’immagine dell’oggetto più che rappresentarlo specularmente, spesso lo spiega nel nostro rapporto attivo con esso. Il reportagismo della Pop è per dirla come McLuhan attento al messaggio del medium più che al messaggio-contenuto. La questione riguarda la caratteristica di estroversione, ossia quella vocazione a stare in faccia al mondo che il mezzo già possiede in origine e che si riflette sul soggetto, facendogli assumere un atteggiamento reportagistico anche quando non sta

dietro ad un obiettivo. Nella nostra contemporaneità il fotoritocco e la post-produzione sono diventati ormai un dibattito aperto. Le radici si cui si fondano questo tipo di pratiche sono antiche. Il primo fotoritocco è datato alla fine dell’800. Ma uno degli artisti che ha portato questa pratica ad originali ed importanti risultati è senza dubbio Andy Warhol, il quale per tutta la sua carriera si è basato principalmente sulla fotografia ritoccata nei più svariati modi. E’ dunque lecito chiedersi se la fotografia e il fotoritocco siano visti come una pratica artistica al pari della pittura ad esempio, grazie anche all’apporto datoci da Andy Warhol? Andrew Warhol Jr. è nato a Pittsburgh nel 1928. E’ stato un artista multiforme, fra i più influenti del XX secolo e figura di spicco del movimento della Pop Art. Aveva studiato arte pubblicitaria al Carnegie Institute of Technology di Pittsburg e dopo la laurea, nel 1949, decide di trasferirsi a New York dove ha modo di affermarsi nel mondo della pubblicità lavorando per riviste come Vogue e Glamour. Aveva esordito pittoricamente all’ inizio degli anni ’60 con delle riproduzioni di fumetti e illustrazioni trovate su giornali, rifacendosi a Rauschenberg e Johns che aveva visto negli anni precedenti alla galleria di Leo Castelli e dei quali amava la capacità di rielaborare l’immaginario collettivo, trasformando la banalità di oggetti e immagini comuni in opere d’arte. Warhol come il giovane Roy Lichtenstein, all’epoca indagava l’immaginario popolare in chiave di fumetto. E’ probabilmente questo momento, quello in cui prendeva coscienza del fatto che l’orizzonte culturale in cui si muove è lo stesso di altri personaggi che gravitano nel suo mondo e che ciò che gli rimaneva da fare era mettere a fuoco linguaggio e strumenti. Probabilmente per questo dal1962 Warhol, aveva deciso di abbandonare definitivamente la tradizionale tecnica pittorica per la serigrafia prima e la fotoserigrafia poi, rinnovando non tanto i soggetti quanto le sorgenti da cui proviene l’iconografia dell’artista: le immagini fotografiche. La fotografia era diventata così centrale nella vita e nella pratica artistica dell’artista, è il punto di partenza del processo creativo. Infatti, pressoché tutte le sue opere nascono da fotografie (solo nei primissimi anni le immagini provengono da inserzioni pubblicitarie non necessariamente fotografiche): le fotografie degli attori che collezionava sin da piccolo, quelle trovate sui giornali o acquistate nei mercatini, quelle realizzate nelle macchinette automatiche e infine quelle realizzate da Warhol stesso a partire dalla seconda metà degli anni’60. Quando inizia ad utilizzare la Polaroid, diventa un fotografo vorace. Scattava centinaia di migliaia di immagini che solo raramente espone come opere in sé compiute, considerando la fotografia come un mezzo per registrare ciò che aveva

intorno. Ma la fotografia aveva permesso a Warhol anche di documentare la sua vita sociale, gli incontri con i personaggi celebri (non bisogna dimenticare che era ossessionato dalla fama, sua e altrui), la quotidianità nei suoi innumerevoli aspetti e questo accadde in particolare, a partire dal 1976. Il gallerista Thomas Ammann gli regalò una Minox 35 El , al tempo la macchina fotografica portatile più piccola in commercio. Da questo momento la sua produzione fotografica era diventata un incredibile archivio della propria vita e uno spaccato della società del suo tempo. Negli anni ’60 con i “Vanity Portraits” Warhol aveva riportato in auge il ritratto su commissione. Questo veniva realizzato fotografando i soggetti con polaroid e scegliendo insieme a loro gli effetti dell’opera. La foto veniva scattata con il flash di modo da coprire grazie alla luce, i difetti del viso che erano ulteriormente coperti da cerone bianco. Il modo di fare i ritratti di Warhol era simile al lavoro di un truccatore, un trattamento del viso a fior di pelle piuttosto che un sondaggio del carattere dell’individuo e non importava se conoscesse o meno i suoi soggetti. Aveva creato delle icone commemorative in cui non importa se i suoi soggetti fossero vivi o morti, celebri o sconosciuti. Come stilista del volto umano, egli conferiva un’aura del tutto particolare anche ai volti più ignoti. Il più delle volte i committenti di Warhol, erano persone abbienti. Secondo la critica Barbara Rose a questi non importava avere un’opera che si burlava di loro stessi. I grotteschi ritratti in cui l’artista accentua ogni tratto del vuoto narcisistico dei suoi clienti, rimarranno come uno spietato atto d’accusa contro la società americana degli anni 60, così come i ritratti di Goya avevano stigmatizzato crudelmente la corte spagnola. L’artista aveva cominciato anche a realizzare degli autoscatti in cui usava parrucche grigie per nascondere la perdita progressiva dei capelli. Alcune opere dei primi anni ‘60 possono essere viste come allusioni a questa ansia di trasformazione che s’era impadronita di lui. Negli anni ’70 realizzava invece una serie di polaroid dedicate a Drag Queen, a nudi maschili, torsi, ecc… Usata frequentemente nei ritratti femminili fatti con la Polaroid, la maschera bianca acquista un significato particolare negli autoritratti di Warhol travestito. Si ha l’impressione che l’artista fosse alla ricerca di un principio di estetizzazione che

gli permettesse di problematizzare la definizione dei ruoli sessuali basati sulla sola apparenza. La propria trasformazione in un personaggio femminile infatti destabilizza il concetto d’apparenza con la proposta di un’imitazione imperfetta. La fotografia è sempre stata il fulcro dell’arte di Warhol. Anche per realizzare le sue famose tele, la foto è tutto meno che un mezzo più rapido. Trascorreva delle ore a scegliere la foto più appropriata e farla riprodurre nella tela di dimensioni giuste, tracciando le zone di colore sulla tela, sorvegliando lo sviluppo fotografico e abbellendo la superficie una volta concluso il procedimento. Parte del procedimento adottato era quello di inviare le sue polaroid a “Chomacromp Inc.”, uno stampatore d’arte di Manhattan, dove le fotografie vengono stampate con una tecnica particolare della stessa dimensione del quadro finale. Quando i positivi mezzo tono venivano finiti, tornavano nuovamente nelle mani di Warhol per l’approvazione. Si ricercava nella procedura serigrafica, non solo la perfezione tecnica, ma anche la casualità. Dopo la scelta del soggetto egli manda il modello ad una stamperia serigrafica, accompagnato da precise indicazioni relative ai colori o al numero di telai. La stamperia manda poi i telai pronti alla “Factory” di Warhol. In questo modo il processo riproduttivo toglie all’opera d’arte ciò che essa ha di autentico e conferisce l’autenticità all’immagine riprodotta nel quadro. Il dipinto assume così un carattere d o cu me n tar i o , c o s ì co m e l a fotografia. Nell’epoca della

riproducibilità tecnica, sia con il processo serigrafico di Warhol e sia in un certo senso con la fotografia, viene meno l’aura dell’opera d’arte (Walter Benjamin). Un esempio di serigrafie è del 1979, anno in cui Andy Warhol creò “Shadows”. Egli aveva già realizzato il proprio autoritratto, ma mai in questo modo era stata sfruttata la modalità espressiva del negativo fotografico. Demoltiplicazione e rovesciamento erano ora i temi della sua indagine. La tecnica era serigrafia e vernice polimerica sintetica su tela. Si potrebbe affermare che l’autoritratto non rappresenta solo l’immagine in negativo e moltiplicata di Andy Warhol, ma anche la sua immagine polimerizzata. Un polimero è una sostanza formata da 2 o più molecole dello stesso composto, così che il suo peso molecolare risulta un multiplo di quello del composto originario (monomero). La polimerizzazione è cioè l’unione di più molecole di una stessa sostanza per formare una grande molecola. Nel suo autoritratto del 1978 porta questa alleanza tra la forma e la tecnica della rappresentazione dell’estremo. E’ un’immagine fondata sul doppio gioco del negativo fotografico. Warhol è presente in due gruppi formati da tre immagini, ognuno di queste lo rappresenta in tre diverse angolazioni: di 3 quarti, in semi profilo e di profilo. Più che una tecnica, la fotografia, è stata per Warhol un atteggiamento mentale, un modo di essere, una filosofia assorbita in profondità che andrebbe forse recuperata, prima ancora che nelle opere, in episodi all’apparenza estranei alla fotografia. Ad esempio il tentativo di farsi sostituire da un sosia in occasione di conferenze o inaugurazioni di mostre: con la fotografia duplichiamo ogni giorno cose e persone, ma sopratutto le sostituiamo, conferendo all’immagine uno statuto di verità ormai inattaccabile. Inoltre se a qualcuno spetta il merito di aver definitivamente liberato la fotografia da tutti gli equivoci connessi al persistere di un’identità pittorica, questi è proprio Warhol. Inoltre se egli ha definitivamente depitoriccizato l’uso della fotografia nell’arte visiva, bisogna allo stesso tempo riconoscere che grazie alla fotografia egli è riuscito a portare avanti il suo progetto di commercializzazione dell’arte.

Roberta Pirisi 850813@stud.unive.it Dottoressa in Storia dell'Arte da Sant'Antioco, Italia

La Grande Madre FondazioneTrussardi August 26-November 15, 2015 Simone de Beauvoir once said; "One is not born a woman, one becomes one.â&#x20AC;? It is a fantastic and enduring analysis of how the idea of womanhood is constructed, and an entryway to understanding the seminal exhibition La Grande Madre (The Great Mother.)In over 400 works by 139 artists, the Nicola Trussardi Foundationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recently closed exhibition uncovers the complex and continuously evolving iconography of motherhood from the 20thcentury to present.

Curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, New Museum Artistic Director, and Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Massimiliano Gioni transforms Milan’s historic exhibition space Palazzo Reale into a playground where ideas of femininity are not just celebrated but thoughtfully challenged. Spanning from the early avantgarde movements to the present, most notably three quarters of the participating artists are female. A nomadic museum, Nicola Trussardi Foundation has been at the forefront of the promotion of contemporary art and culture in Milan. Producing iconic shows since 1999, they have hosted scores of exhibitions far from conventional routes of contemporary art, often in public sites throughout the city, notably Maurizio Cattelan’s 2004 work Untitled, installed in the oldest tree in Milan. Considering this, La Grande Madre is the first Trussardi exhibition to engage with a major museum. Closer examination of the Palazzo Reale and the iconic history it represents helps us understand this careful choice of venue. Occupying the historic Palazzo Reale of Milan, the former seat of the Italian government, the exhibition directly confronts the primarily male dominated history of the space. The stately rooms of the palace once set the stage for Mozart’s “Ascanio in Alba” in celebrating the marriage of the Archduke Ferdinand’s wedding. They were home to Napoleon Bonaparte as he occupied and ruled Lombardy for over two decades. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson would later live inside the palace during an official visit to Italy. Bombed by the English in 1943 during a raid targeting Nazi occupation of the palace, the famed Hall of Caryatid’s was irrevocably destroyed. In 1947 the building was restored by the Superintendence of Culture heritage, who purposefully restored all rooms but the Hall of Caryatids, as a testimony to the horrors of the war. In 1953 Picasso chose this symbolic room to display Guernica, his monumental historical mural conveying the tragedies of a Nazi bombing on the Southern Spanish town. In 1980, at the same venue, Lea Vergine curated the famous show “The Other Half of the Avant Garde,” which included solely women artists. Meret Oppenheim, refused to participate in this show precisely for this reason. Directly confronting this exhibition spaces’ history, Oppenheim’s work is included in La Grande Madre, which features over 400 works by 139 international artists. Notably two thirds of these artists are women, though the works of other prominent featured artist’s: Ernst, Dali, Picabia, Fontana, are also crucial to the narrative and dialogue at hand. As Gioni noted in the exhibition’s opening press conference; paradoxically throughout the 20th century the image of motherhood was also built for men by men, so it was important to include men’s works. Gioni begins his groundbreaking exhibition in the year 1900, the year Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was first published, a work that has reconstructed the way family and relationships between mothers, fathers, daughters and sons were imagined in the public conscience. Histories of art and culture have often evolved around this idea of maternity, through the earliest existing sculptures identifying female fertility (Venus of Willendorf) to depictions of Mary with Christ. Women have often been the subject matter of history’s most celebrated artworks, until the 19th century rarely agents of this visual narrative. In this context, La Grande Madre confronts and examines the complex and often contested relationship between womanhood and motherhood, female power and iconography. It explores not only the life giving power of mothers but the power denied to women over the course of the 20th century, from sexual politics, gender struggles, tradition, and emancipations, also exploring clichés of femininity.

The 29 palatial rooms are organized like a family photo album, fluctuating between historical events and artistic movements, rather than chronological order. In the earlier rooms, Lucio Fontana’s fleshy pink Fine di Dio (The end of God) invites us to penetrate the surface of motherhood’s primordial form.Directly responding to Yuri Garagin’s ground breaking travels to outer space in 1961, Fontana announced the end of art as we knew it, and thus the Fine diDio Series was born and serves as a seminal point in t h e show

L e n t f r o m Miuccia P r a d a ’s private art collection and one of thirty eight artworks in the series, Fine De Dio was a surprising treat to see as it is not usually on view at Milan’s Fondazione Prada.

Installed in one of the museum’s bare but stately halls is Nari Ward’s seminal work Amazing Grace, consisting of 280 abandoned baby strollers the artist collected on the streets of Harlem. Arranged with lengths of fire hose in the shape of a ship’s half, the eponymous recording of “Amazing Grace” playson loop overhead. The piece conveys a sober insight to what Haarlem endured during the crack cocaine epidemic. The song, about redemption and change, adds a hopeful optimism to the work.

The show is full of furthersurprising installations and complex ideas, in its broad roster of artists: The hyper masculine Thomas Schütte sculpture Vater Staat (Father State) (2010) at first seems intrusive within the exhibition, even more so as it looms over Sarah Lucas’s humorous, cocoon like sculpture of fluff filled tights. Rather, it serves as a jarring reminder and apt presentation of patriarchy’s enduring power. As Gioni notes in the exhibition catalogue, if we are to analyze representations of motherhood over the last 115 years, we must consider first and foremost who had the right to make decisions regarding bodies and desires, and whose right it is to represent them. Equally fitting, VaterStaatstands nearby a display of 1930s Italian pamphlets outlining the role of women under Fascism.

The following room is dedicated to Camille Henrot’s outstanding media work Grosse Fatigue, recipient of 2013 Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion Award. The focused, historical hangings showcasing the women of Surrealism, Dadaism, and Futurism are so inspired that they could be the basis for their own follow up exhibition: Sophie Tauber Arp’s whimsical shiny robots in her Dada M a r i o n e t t e s , C l a u d e C a h u n ’s androgynous photographs and the esoteric symbolism of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini, Hannah Höch’sphotomontages, and Dorothea Tanning’s poetic and sexually charged mythologies. These female proponents of Surrealism at its height are all too often omitted from contemporary surveys of the movement and its oeuvre. In these varied portrayals of the female body and power, we see Rineke Dijkstra’s photographs of disheveled mothers, moments after giving birth, clenching onto their newborns. In the Surrealist gaze on the female body, Salvador Dali’s 1932 painting William Tell and Gradiva is rooted in Dali’s paranoia throughout the 1930’s of being castrated by his father as a result of his affair with Gala Eluard, the married wife of fellow Surrealist Poet Paul Eluard. This erotic scene portrays a man and woman nude and isolated in the desert, left to confront their sexuality and materiality, nodding to Adam and Eve and the very origins of Western narratives of maternity and motherhood.

A lavish hallway is dedicated entirely to the works of Louise Bourgeois, including Nature Study (1984)fabric models of pregnant women sitting in a mirrored vitrine. Marking a turning point in the exhibition, another theme in the show is women’s bodies and desires, manifested in artist’s re-imagination of the female anatomy. Anatomy becomes reinvented and reshaped in order to follow personal desires, instead of suffering and relying on desires conceived and imposed by others. The large-scale phallus sculpture that became iconic in her oeuvre, Fillette’s title translates from French as “little girl,” calling to mind Freudian theory of penis envy first published in Interpretation of Dreams. Likening the influence of Surrealism, Bourgeois transforms this influence into a powerfully unique mythology of the individual, with extraordinary symbolic value.

Cindy Sherman’s nearby History Portraits also make an appearance, playing at traditional stereotypes and depictions of women. The “mamma” is one of the symbols and clichés of Italian identity, and in Sherman’s Untitled #223 re-appropriated and explored through a female gaze. With her play-doh breasts and archaic costume, the artist weaves together biological elements of motherhood with traditional social expectations of women.

Pregnant with important counter narratives, these inspired thematic connections are also made through excerpts from popular press, a multicultural high low sampling approach to this ambitious thematic show. There were many tremendous women artists of the avantgarde,which is a well known fact, but through these Dali and rare Max Ernst collage works, juxtaposed with Frida Kahloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Wounded Deer and the alluring work of Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini, we can see that though these movements were forward-thinking, they also proposed misogynist attitudes The show refreshingly refuses to deliver a sole thesis, rather La Grande Madre provokes questions about cannons of art history, and women artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agency within these histories. Central to the curatorial vision is the transition of the woman in the 20th century from object of representation to storyteller In its avoidance of a clean cut linear message to its audience, La Grande Madre embodies one of the strongest contributions of feminism, the idea of embracing difference, as long as one confesses their partial point of view.

Sonya Tamaddon sonyatamaddon@gmail.com Independent Curator and Freelance Writer from Los Angeles, CA, USA

QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT HAVE ABOUT

ALEC SOTH The Telegraph described him as the

“greatest living photographer of America’s social and geographical landscape” and an article in The Guardian headlined “America’s most immaculate, intriguing photographer”, but many people do not even know how to pronounce his name correctly (it rhymes with ‘both’). He now also has his first major exhibition in the United Kingdom, and so it only seems appropriate to introduce Alec Soth.

1) Who is Alec Soth? Born, raised and still working and living in Minneapolis, Alec Soth (1969) is a contemporary documentary photographer. When he was 16, an art teacher completely changed his life by opening his mind to the possibility of an artistic career. However, at first it did not seem like he would become a photographer. He moved to New York to study painting at Sarah Lawrence College, switched to sculpture and it was only then, when taking pictures of those works that he realized he could also just skip the sculpture-step and focus on photography. He has been famed for his beautifully composed images, often taken with a large-format 8x10 inch camera, documenting life in â&#x20AC;&#x153;the big middleâ&#x20AC;? of the United States of America. Besides working on his own fine art projects, Soth runs a small publishing house focused on new ways of creating and distributing visual storytelling, Little Brown Mushroom. Oh, and he is also a full member of the internationally renowned photojournalist cooperative Magnum Photos since 2008, travelling around the world for various assignments. No big deal.

2) What kind of art does he do? Soth is a photographer, choosing the open road as his subject. For each well-researched project he sets out for, often with a list of the types of shots he wants attached to his steering wheel, he photographs people and places in a most poetical way. The key element for him however, is not the capturing of these fragments, but bringing them together in a meaningful, almost literary way. Soth also has a keen interest in printed books and magazines, and by editing his photographs in this format, he creates the ultimate coherent whole in which they all resonate off each other. Four of such projects that were intended as photobooks (which are now often out of print, grumble) are now considered to be his signature series. In Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004) Soth travelled along the Mississippi River, photographing remnants of a dream-like wanderlust. Next he concentrated on the Niagara Falls, a popular tourist attraction, honeymoon destination and suicide spot. NIAGARA (2006) hence records the hopes and disillusions that converge there. Feeling a certain unease with the art world and the medium photography after these series Soth hit a bit of a rough patch. Being himself on the verge of buying a cave in nature to retreat to, he sought for people who had turned their back on the world completely. He caught hauntingly glimpses of people who went ‘into the wild’ in Broken Manual (2010), which he also provided with an escape and survival instruction. But he then felt the need again to reconnect with society, and so for Songbook (2014) he travelled with writer Brad Zellar, publishing their images and texts of everyday life in small-town communities on the go in an A3 magazine. The tie that binds these projects is Soth’s aesthetic approach. It is not what these photographs are of, it is what they are about. Soth manages to evoke states of mind, moods that linger in the twilight zone between the romantic and the real, shot through with a dose of desolate, yet intimate melancholia. In every image, in every series, he shows a most honest and tender rendition of human emotions. They are at once subtle and raw, emphasizing the beauty of vulnerability. His subjects expose themselves freely, share their dreams and fears. As he himself said, he has “a nose for a visual story”, and looking at his work, one has to admit he is storyteller like no other.

3) Who was he influenced by? Of course, Soth is not the first one to take a camera, travel and record life as he sees it. Particularly in America there is a strong tradition of documentary photography, linked to the likes of Walker Evans and his iconic photographs of the Depression-era (although Soth is less detached from his subject) or Robert Frank and his pioneering project The Americans. Joel Sternfeld and his eye for the American oddity are also worth a special mention here, since after all he taught Soth for a while. Their images, just like Sothâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, are not made under strict control or staged in a studio environment. They do repeat certain themes, but they succeed in casting the world anew every time.

4) How is the reaction to his work in the USA and Europe? Working in the United States, depicting American life, there are slight different responses to Soth’s work in his home country and in Europe. In America, his star rose immediately after Sleeping by the Mississippi, resulting in one of the most prestigious galleries, Gagosian, wanting to represent him. This only reaffirmed his art world status, but in hindsight it was not the best fit, Soth has admitted. In the United States he is now represented by Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. His works can be found in major private and public collections there as well, including MoMA, Whitney Museum, LACMA and Walker Art Center. By contrast, Soth only now has his first major show in the United Kingdom ever – however, he has had solo exhibitions on the continent, for instance at Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2008. Generally, the reactions are slightly different: his works are perceived as bleaker, perhaps because there is lesser affinity with this particular American culture. However, Soth has said that even in America the East and West Coast interpretations of his work can differ – which he finds interesting, because all are always contrasting his own.

5) Why haven’t I heard of him? There can be multiple reasons why Alec Soth was a blank space in your otherwise without a doubt beautiful brain. If you happen to live in Europe, this might already be (partly) one of them. Also, Soth is not the genius artist seeking fame and attention living in a contemporary art world hub. In addition, given the anonymity surrounding photojournalists, his Magnum work might have passed under your eyes without you even knowing it. But hopefully that will not happen again soon.

Eline Verstegen, eline.verstegen@skynet.be MA student “Curating the Contemporary”, London from Antwerp, Belgium

Alec Soth, Gathered Leaves: Photographs, Media Space London until 28 March 2016. The exhibition then tours to National Media Museum Bradford, The Finnish Museum Helsinki and FotoMuseum Antwerp.

Also experiencing the Stendhal syndrome and a reverse writer’s block? Become a contributor! If you are interested please contact us at hyperkulturemiafanzine@gmail.com Good luck, enjoy and thanks!

Coordinated by Ramón Melero Guirado Designed and edited by Matilde Ferrarin Revised by Eline Verstegen