For ART HK 12, Robin Peckham gives us the local run-down, neighborhood by neighborhood: where the art-loving visitor should eat, drink, and shop during off-time from the fair.

Wanchai, the neighborhood immediately surrounding the convention center in which the art fair is housed, is not normally a major gathering point for the art crowd. For a week in May, however, we learn to love it and make the trek several times daily from the fair through the parallel streets marked by aging stripped clubs (that’s a state of being, not becoming) and former naval watering holes to the few decent spots on the south side of the area abutting the mountain.

For lunch or dinner, the best choices are all delivered by restaurateur and arts patron Alan Lo, whose outlets the Classified Mozzarella Bar, The Pawn, and The Principal offer a selection of reasonable choices, arrayed here in ascending order according to the number of days ahead of time one might consider making a reservation. On the after-dinner walk of shame from one to the next, don’t miss the popular design stores and boutiques around the corner, particularly Kapok and Chen Mi Ji. There’s also the new bar Tai Lung Fung back in a much older neighborhood closer to the center of Causeway Bay; done up to look like a diner from the 1960s, it’s a bit rough around the edges and overly thematic, but the people-watching experience on the front porch is a pleasant one.

Of course, Wanchai is ground zero for Hong Kong karaoke, from the Cantonese chain Neway popular with local teenagers just across the street from the Foo Tak Building (365-367 Hennessy Rd.), the largest agglomeration of artist studios downtown, to MusicBox, a somewhat more refined experience. And if the evening doesn’t end until the sun comes up, stop in at Fu Sing around the corner for the absolute best char siu in town, as well as some of the most jaw-dropping dim sum.

Many times I have seen the pedestrian crossing, and felt its energy in movies and music videos. But it's like the rest of this city -- being in the middle of Hachiko is like nothing else I have ever experienced. The hordes of people are inconceivable, the density of the people traffic so inspiring that it felt like I had been on a lifelong pilgrimage to be there, only I didn't know it till I got there.

After one week, I think I am getting used to being in Tokyo, but still, the same things never cease to amaze me. And in Hachiko I am still astounded by the ease and comfort of being in the midst of these teeming crowds as they pour onto the pedestrian crossing in front of Shibuya train station.

No one pushes, no one is in such a hurry that they need to be frustrated by my pace. I am slowed down by awe at the magnificence of the neon-clad buildings, deafened by the noise of nightclubs, some kind of political speeches over loudspeakers, and wanting to absorb the thrill of being at what feels like the center of the world. And the Japanese remain as courteous and pleasant as ever, minding their own business, but when asked, ever ready to assist with my most inane enquiries. It is really the greatest privilege to be immersed in this civilized world.

Today, for the first time I got lost, though it is a wonder it hasn't happened earlier. I went to visit a friend of a friend who lives in a building by the tracks of Shinjuku station. Always eager to be above ground, I made the fatal mistake of leaving the train station a few exits too early. Naoko had given me a map and very clear directions on how to find her building, but I learnt today that this system of locating an address is still liable to baffle me. Nevertheless, I was only five minutes late because I asked at a store and with the courtesy and respect I have now come to expect, the lady telephoned Naoko, got the directions, and escorted me to the end of the street and pointed in the right direction -- and we wonder why the Japanese think the French are rude!

Fumbling with the street map, negotiating exits from a train station, looking for a building that sits next to a big hotel, making sure to keep the train tracks on the right (even though it is not always above ground), I realized that, once again, this is a culture in which images make more sense than words. Space, movement through space, conceptions of space, direction, physical orientation and location are all conceived visually -- just like the language. See My Day in Asakusa. The experience of looking for a building that has a number, but a number not displayed, on a street with no name, in a neighborhood divided into fifteen sections means that I am always looking at and for where I am going. In anticipation of my arrival, I envisage or imagine myself in that space; I don't see it as the goal at the end of a journey. And when I get there, I see it and am in the space, rather than thinking or knowing I have arrived.

This said, if I am honest, I am way too Western to believe that I have adapted to the Japanese experience of space and their city. Later this afternoon, as I sat, immersed in the enthrall of being in the futuristic bubble of Shibuya's dazzling facades, I felt as though I was at the center of the world. I had arrived. I was at a place that is an end of a journey, a place from where every other pedestrian crossing must now forever pale in comparison.

—Frances Guerin

(All photos by Frances Guerin)

Working to prepare for the first New York Frieze Art Fair has been a blend of anticipation and curiosity. To be honest I’ve never been to a Frieze Art Fair in London and to be even more honest I’m not a huge art fair advocate, but working for Frieze has provided me with an admiration for the collective effort needed to create a large-scale event. My art fair role, which has shifted from the art-admiring spectator/critical journalist to a true team player, has still left me with an impartial understanding.

At the age of 20, I studied abroad for a year in Germany at Justus Liebig Universität. There, on a whim, I took a film studies seminar. The professor opened the course with a field trip to the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. The class of seven made the trip down, a short ride on the Deutsche Bahn, and met the professor at the door to the museum. MMK is a rather odd building. Designed by architect Hans Hollein, it is shaped like a piece of cake wedged next to the Römerberg.

At the center of the Kuchen, in a small, darkened room, was Line Describing a Cone, McCall’s seminal work from 1973 in which a white line, starting with a dot at the bottom of the screen is slowly drawn with light from a 16mm projector. The first in his solid-light series, a line describes a circle and as one observes, a cone forms in the dust of the room. Over the course of thirty minutes, the physical presence of film becomes manifest. I saw film for the first time and the feeling remains with me. The cone, a shape synonymous with vision, first acts as a barrier, keeps you outside the scope of light but eventually draws one into the center, bisecting your body and entreating you to consider vision, projection, cinema and light all with the seemingly simple action of a line animation.

Prior to his solid-light series, McCall completed a series of performances including Landscape for Fire, 1972. He wanted to document these performances but soon found the act of documentation maligned the performative and simply was unable to capture the entirety of the performative act. This is, he believes, what lead him to create Line, where he allowed the act of projection to perform film. He first showed the film at a small gallery in Sweden, the first time he had seen the final print, while there for a performance from his fire-scape series.

The effect of the short film was palpable in the air, prompting McCall to comment during a symposium at the University of Chicago in 2012, “I couldn’t see the connection between what I’d done and what I’d seen.” Line became a success of interdisciplinary practices by allowing for the existence of independent disciplines, in this case film, sculpture and performance, to mutually inform and deconstruct one another due to the strict disciplinary constructions that existed between the divergent practices in the ‘70s. However, McCall recognized a correlation, something film theorist André Bazin noted of film in his seminal What is Cinema?: "The cinema is objectivity in time... Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified…" McCall refuted by exploring the contingency of time through light.

Long Film for Ambient Light, 1975, abstracted the practice of time-based arts even further. In a warehouse in New York, he installed a large globe lamp and hung white paper over the windows. During the day, muted light would flood the gallery and at night, the papered windows would become screens, whereupon the light from the central lamp was projected. McCall describes the filmic quality of the work in an essay written for the journal October in 2003; “the film existed in the space between the room, the statement, and the time schema, and could be grasped as such… The installation sat precisely on a threshold, on one side of which was ‘time-based’ art, and on the other, ‘non-time-based’ art.”

Twenty-two years passed from Long Film for Ambient Light until he would show work in a major way.

McCall worked as a designer for arts publications. He saw no possibility for making a career out of experimental art in 1975, citing the impossibility of displaying Line in environments that were not thick with dust and smoke, the medium in the air that allowed the work to perform sculpturally. Not until the ‘90s did fog machines facilitate his ability to exhibit. This shift coincided with a desire by museums to bulk up their film and video collections.

In 2004, McCall exhibited Doubling Back at the Whitney Biennial as a continuation of his solid-light series, but now executed digitally. The continuation of the solid-light series have all been designed algorithmically and projected via a digital projector. Doubling Back consisted of wipes between two forms implied through movement: always there but never fully apparent, creating a gestural sculpture that relies on the expected perception of geometric entities. McCall, throughout his oeuvre, always returns to essential elements: light and dark, fire and, as we will see, water. To manipulate these, he approaches the problem of artistic construction mathematically and in so doing entreats a universal artistic language of expression: geometric expression through elemental forms.

You and I, Horizontal followed in 2005. I was able to see this piece at the Phenomenologies of Projection, Aesthetics of Transition Symposium organized by Michelle Menzies at the University of Chicago this last February. Screened at the Experimental Station, a gallery close to the university campus, You and I, Horizontal was familiar. The experience of walking into a darkened room, senses heightened to avoid unwanted collisions, eyes reaching to seek out shadows. The screening was held immediately following the symposium and so the large room was crowded with people, milling about. Most stationed themselves somewhere between the projector and the screen, again, bounding the white forms that materialized in the fog-filled room. Eventually, this reverence broke and people crossed through the beams of light. McCall describes You and I as a mobile of light. It is, as is Doubling Back, a transitional sculpture “never not fully there.” It’s hard not to mark these newer works, especially the horizontal pieces, as small variations on a theme. In some respects, that is exactly what they are, an expansion of the solid-light series, however, one cannot help but notice the effect that is still present in the viewing audience. There is a mythic quality, a primitive scintillation.

Line Describing a Cone 2.0, 2011, was shown following the viewing of You and I. The digital nature of this second version turned the sound of a clicking 16mm projector into the soft hum of a cooling fan. Striations in the light beamed from the projector could be seen as well as slight pixelization in the solid-light images, but the magic was still there. People crowded into the space defined by the beams of light, inching forward to the source of projection, mesmerized by the play of form and formlessness like a swarm of Icaruses. Film theorist, Tom Gunning, was present and the smile on his face was of a child as he walked down the tunnel towards the light, experiencing for the first time what he had devoted his life to studying. This experience of Line 2.0 was much less about the solitary contemplation as was my first encounter with the work—the sounds of my murmuring mind becoming the soundtrack; this screening was celebratory.

McCall was in attendance and wandered about, observing the crowd with arms crossed and a satisfied grin rightly adorning his face. McCall is in the ascendant. In April, a large exhibition of his new works, both horizontal and vertical projections, entitled Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture will open in Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart. This will mark the beginning of a series of exhibitions throughout Europe, culminating in his most ambitious project yet: Column. A spiraling, vertical cloud of steam that will project upward from a river near Liverpool to coincide with the opening of the 2012 Olympics, McCall is still working with environmentalists in the realization of the Column project that would be visible from sixty miles away.

—Joel Kuennen

(All images: Installation view of Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone 2.0, 2011.)

Francis Alÿs once did a walk from the Museum of Science and Industry to the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, mapping the journey with the unraveling thread of his blue sweater.

The Belgian native is known for his “walks”, performative perambulations numbering too many to list here. They link sites separated by space and time; they chart national and political histories onto landscape; they open onto questions of surveillance and urban existence; and perhaps most importantly, they playfully highlight the subjective journey of the individual in time and geography.

Miriam Böhm, Interlude IV, 2012, Chromogenic color print, 31 x 35 inches, courtesy Ratio 3.

If I’d been feeling cleverer and less exhausted from standing for an entire train journey from Rotterdam to Brussels, I might have planned an Alÿs-style walk on a recent trip to the EU capital. As in the artist’s Stockholm walk – and in the paths of so many visitors – one could map Brussels within and between its museums. Wander through the palatial Royal Museums of Art, stroll in a southwesterly direction to the modernist industrial building of Wiels, Brussels’s best-known contemporary art center, all the while charting the route with a trail of powdered sugar blown from a street vendor’s waffle. Or perhaps you could let loose one French and one Flemish speaker into the city. One carries a cone of chips, the other a bottle of mayo. When they meet, they must speak to each other in English.

Eddie Martinez, Dream Scape, 2012, oil and spray paint on canvas, © Eddie Martinez, courtesy Sorry We're Closed.

When asked about her working environment, one worker said she would like to feel the sun on her skin for a while – a simple but poetic request, fulfilled by moving her workstation outside the factory for a short period. Another worker took the opportunity to make a fluid sculpture out of the big barrel of grease he was using, giving it the title: “A piece of shit.” These little gestures came about as part of Italian artist Alessandro Rolandi’s Social Sensibility R&D Program, instituted in the factory of Bernard Controls S.A. on the outskirts of Beijing.

Bernard Controls is a French family-owned company producing specialist servo engines for operating valves in water pipes found in nuclear power stations, but also used in places like the Beijing Opera House and the Olympic Swimming Pool (AKA the “Water Cube”) in Beijing.

For a factory to embrace such a distraction from the serious business of production is down to the initiative of the boss, Guillaume Bernard, an engineer with a particular interest in corporate social responsibility. But while Bernard Controls already had a steering committee working to improve management personnel relationships using activities such as exhibition visits and music concerts, M. Bernard was looking beyond this. “He’s one step ahead,” Rolandi says. “He’s an engineer, not a psychologist, sociologist, or a philosopher. We talked a lot about this, and he seems genuinely open to more socially aware activities, which I related to relational practice within the art world.”

Rolandi’s background is in the theatre, which he explains is “very social, but you wonder how you can really go into something real?” In the case of Bernard Controls, he saw the chemistry as being “so random, it provided me with a little door.” The invitation to set up his R&D program became an opportunity to insert a little mischief into the regimented life of the factory.

Panoramic 1; Courtesy Alessandro Rolandi.

This particular factory is unlike the cliché of a Chinese factory: you won’t find thousands of workers performing mundane and repetitive tasks over long conveyor belts in an airless hanger. This factory is relatively small, with about a hundred staff, of whom only twenty to thirty actually work on assembling the product. The work areas are also relatively discrete in terms of their interior design. Rolandi says it’s not an environment where you feel you have no way out, where everything is under surveillance. But at the same time, “No matter how you look at it, it’s still a factory.”

To begin with he underwent the regular worker’s training, so he could understand the product from a technical as well as an economic point of view. Rolandi found that the practical work that the workers have to do, the physical labour of assembling these objects, led him to fully appreciate that this was a sort of sensibility that has its own value: “It’s not particularly creative work, but I’ve tried myself putting the pieces together for a couple of hours, and without the experience these workers have got, you get quite nervous!”

Also included in his standard training were the "5Ss," an overbearing work management system from Japan, which is all about efficiency, cleanliness and organisation; and the "4Rs" of security. Within these strictures Rolandi initially despaired: “I was sitting alone in this little space they gave me (which doubled as a kitchen) and just thought to myself: ‘What am I doing here?’ Creativity often deals with messiness, but the rules here were completely set against this. I felt like I was proposing something where I was dead before I’d even started!”

To address this difficulty, and to find his point of entry, he began by approaching the workers with small requests connected to his own knowledge of relational artwork. After talking with them, he showed them photos and videos to get them used to the idea of creating themselves. However, in the process of breaking the ice Rolandi committed his first cultural faux pas. He had taken photos of the workers around the factory and printed them out as little gifts. These black and white photos proved to be not so inspired, as he was politely informed that black-and-white photos were for dead people. On the plus side, he felt it was significant that the workers felt comfortable enough to give him this information, representing a bridge across the gap between them.

Indeed throughout the project Rolandi has been impressed by the time and courtesy he has been afforded. He trusts this was due to politeness or respect, but he was also very much aware of his privileged position in relation to the workers. At the beginning M. Bernard effectively gave him too much authority, so he took baby steps to gain the trust of the people he was working with. He started by provided the workers with notebooks to records their ideas, then gave them cameras to take photos around the workplace, and then asked them to make drawings and give him an idea of how they would like to develop those drawings in real life.

Gru & Gru project; Courtesy Alessandro Rolandi.

He found that although their idea of art usually began with painting and sculpture, when they were offered what Rolandi characterised as “the new territory” of these small tasks, they were very creative in their proposals: “One drew a beautiful bird, for instance, but then they said they wanted this beautiful bird to be on a restaurant façade with neon writing.” This additional information intrigued Rolandi, as he saw ways that it connected with contemporary art practice.

A later project involved asking the workers to create small performances. Rolandi was allowed to give a number of workers a thirty-minute break to think up something to do in their environment: “as a gesture, as a thought; I just called it (in Mandarin) suibian ‘whatever you want’ (without mentioning too much the word ‘art.’)”

The actions mentioned at the beginning of this article were amongst the results, from which Rolandi felt there was a kind of daring involved, more than just politeness: “I had the feeling they were really taking the chance to use this little bubble that was opening up.”

For eight months now Rolandi has been visiting the factory once or twice a week. This initial period has represented for him the negotiation between himself and his ideas, and the bosses, workers and environment of the factory – for Rolandi the immaterial but most interesting part of the whole process.

To get approval to make the project more sustainable and efficient, Rolandi was asked to make a business presentation to the committee, something which — as an artist — he was somewhat unused to. He brought along images of pieces by various artists, including Francis Alÿs pushing the ice cube through Mexico City (Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997), Rirkrit Tiravanija’s meals, Joseph Beuys' Oak Tree project (7000 Oaks – City Forestation instead of City Administration, 1982) and the Chinese artist Song Dong’s installation of his mother’s possessions (Waste Not, 2005). The Alÿs piece worked very well; M. Bernard was able to point to it, and suggest: “Look what happens: you’re pushing something for nothing, but eventually this big ice cube becomes a little ball and you can play with it!” This touch of humour proved to be the opening point for Rolandi, after which the committee were on board.

Delivery 1; Courtesy Alessandro Rolandi.

In the future Rolandi understands that the project may well be extended to the company’s other locations in France, Korea, Japan or South America. But for the moment he is planning on becoming a little more discreet in his own involvement, bringing other people in with different approaches. In the last few weeks another Italian artist, Andrea Nacciarriti, has been working in the factory getting the workers to collect objects related to their work and life that are then sealed in the same small boxes used for their product. These are then distributed randomly around another Beijing suburb. Next up is Ma Yongfeng of the forget art collective (whose practice I wrote about last year on GeoSlant), who will investigate the use of graffiti as a subversive information carrier within the factory, and then Japanese performance artist Megumi Shimizu will be invited to create her own work there.

From the outset Rolandi has discussed with M. Bernard all they are doing, and for both of them important questions are on the one hand how radicality enters the art world? And on the other, what is the value of radicality in the workspace? This, for Rolandi, is the value of social practices, but he hopes to address these questions without the idealism of the ‘60s or as simply an uncritical celebration of those activities. For all that, he is hopeful that they can still open things up without tearing the situations apart, which would mean a swift end to the project. In the positive sense, this opening up would be a situation into which other people can step. But as he says: “This shouldn’t be safe! Otherwise where is the communication?”

[Based on an interview with Alessandro Rolandi, 23 February 2012]

—Edward Sanderson

(Image on top right: Grease sculpture; Courtesy Alessandro Rolandi.)

As traditional South American modes of expression have fused with a strong lineage of European immigration, Buenos Aires has become the apex of chic. A unique street aesthetic, that predominates from cafes and clubs to boutiques and everyday dress, stands out among other capital cities for its eclectic edge and vibrancy. Strangely, the city's visual arts scene pales in comparison to its contemporaries of São Paulo, Berlin or Paris and only a handful of reputable galleries and small-scale art museums dot the city's otherwise varied cultural landscape. Arguably the top three cultural centers -- Fundación Proa, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and the Faena Arts Center -- were opened in 1996, 2001, and 2011, respectively. These institutions, known for their progressive programming, polished spaces, and promotion of an international dialogue are -- relatively speaking -- still in their infancy. 

The visual arts traditionally serve as a cultural mirror reflecting back into the world the current political, social and artistic climate. Art spaces act as facilitators for these conversations. While Buenos Aires still has a strong visual character, the conversation surrounding a national visual identity has instead largely moved to the streets. Graffiti and fashion have taken on the role of circulating visual culture intended for the masses. Murals are  pervasive in even the poshest of neighborhoods with content that ranges from politically subversive to purely aesthetic. This culture of street color has further influenced the commercial architecture, making it commonplace for city blocks to pop with cerulean blue or magenta building facades. 

Likewise, personal style is represented in an equal mix of striking statements of fabric and color and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Fusing traditional textiles, palettes and craft aesthetics with modern silhouettes, influences as far reaching as Peruvian knits and as far back as Aztec geometry are seamlessly incorporated into mainstream production. 

The traditional artistic practices of South America are rich, varied and, most importantly, exist outside the Western Art paradigm. In negotiating these two opposing historic modes of representation it seems as though contemporary visual arts in Buenos Aires have predominantly manifested through different channels of self expression. Regina Root, author of Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina, theorizes that in the political upheaval following the Argentine Revolution of 1810 "dress served as a critical expression of political agency and citizenship during the struggle to forge the Argentine nation."  This same theory can be applied to Argentine architecture and fashion today. 

The question then becomes, what stalled the development of arts spaces in Buenos Aires? The reasoning is complex and most likely the result of several factors. However one could theorize that during the late 20th century in Argentina, decades which served as a key time in other world cities such as New York and London as an era of exponential growth for arts related non-profits, publicly funded arts programs and rising arts university enrollment, efforts were instead positioned towards the immense social, financial and political disorder the country was faced with. 

Beginning in the mid-70s, and ending with a financial collapse in 2001, this crucial period not only halted the growth of institutional infrastructure but actively discouraged it. The Dirty War, which ran from 1976-1983, left thousands of the creative class dead or ominously unaccounted for. Some estimate as high as 30,000 "los desaparecidos" (the disappeared) were kidnapped or killed during this time by the military junta who, in an effort to surprise an impending uprising, targeted those with left-leaning political views.  

Twenty five years later Argentina suffered a financial meltdown that resulted in a government collapse and nearly a quarter of the citizens unemployed. In the years following, the country's rejuvenation process (started by President Nestor Kirchner and currently led by the now deceased former president's wife, Cristina Kirchner) reoriented national priorities towards housing, education and worker's needs. It is no wonder that the city's museums, cultural centers and galleries have only now begun to flourish.

Buenos Aires remains a beautiful place with a beautiful culture. In light of the city's post-colonial influences and political upheaval, the re-imagination and re-contextualization of Northern and Southern hemispheric influences takes on a new significance. The ubiquity of these essentially "low art" subcultures become loaded with questions of cultural authenticity, censorship and global capitalism. In a time when the world can feel frighteningly small and cities homogeneous, this unique visual voice will hopefully further express itself as the arts scene in Argentina continues to expand.

—Devon Caranicas

(All photos by Devon Caranicas)

“Be advised that the fourth floor galleries will be closing in about fifteen minutes for Sarah Michelson’s performance,” I was told when I arrived at the Whitney ticket counter, “So you should probably begin your visit there.” Yeesh. Fifteen minutes for an entire floor? I’d better hurry, I thought, as I dashed to the elevator.

On the fourth floor, one of Michelson’s dancers was warming up, stretching her limbs out with a couple quick pas-de-bourrées over the dance floor—a site-specific work in itself: the architectural plans for the museum were painted on the floor, dance floor as map, as blue-print. Watching the dancers warm up before their performances was a part of the piece, I gathered, but wondered why the gallery had to be emptied of visitors two hours before the actual performance. Warm ups we could watch, but not rehearsals? No chance of getting a ticket to the actual performance—all tickets had been reserved for weeks now. (I ran into some friends in the café a couple hours later who were waiting for stand-by tickets. I’m not sure if they got in.) I felt sort of bad for the other artists whose artworks were installed on that floor as I was ushered out by a rather stern looking, non-plussed museum guard.

I spent the rest of my visit to the 2012 Biennial alternately looking at art and being scolded by the museum guards for various boundaries I was apparently breaching. This iteration of the Whitney Biennial promises the “breakdown of boundaries between art forms” in its radical agglomeration of artists working in disparate fields, not only in visual art, but in music, performance, dance, and film. This breakdown of boundaries makes this Biennial an ever-changing, fluctuating three-month-long event that will look and feel different for each visitor on any given day, but also breaks down the boundaries between viewer and art object, installation, performance, what-have-you. This presents the visitor with unique challenges, equivocations, hesitations and confusions regarding the works of art and their thresholds and borders, not to mention the aggravation added to the duties of the museum guards.

On the third floor I opened a door into Nick Mauss’ curious, charming installation, then reached out to feel the sumptuous mustard-yellow velvet tapestry lining the door. “Please, ma’am, don’t touch,” I was warned. Ok, so I can touch the door handle but not the wall? I sheepishly retreated.

Nick Mauss, Concern, Crush, Desire, 2011, Cotton appliqué on velvet, brass doorknobs and doorstoppers, 131 x 94 x 115 in. Collection of Nicoletta Fiorucci; courtesy 303 Gallery, New York, and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

Sam Lewitt’s installation of ferromagnetic liquid was similarly policed. The black liquid spread over sheets of plastic, congealed over magnets, forming extraordinarily mercurial spiked balls, like little minesweeper mines, their liquidity revealed by small oscillating fans. The bizarre properties of this fantastic stuff required a really close look. Someone was inadvertently stepping on one of the fans’ electric cords, and the guard called his attention to his misstep. “Please step away sir!”

A few feet away Dawn Kasper was conversing with visitors in her installation, her studio transposed into the museum, replete with a bed, stacks of vinyl, papers, artworks, books, her laptop, and sundry other things. I walked through a pathway in her cluttered Nomadic Studio. I rifled through some of her VHS tapes; I’m not sure if I was supposed to do that.

Whitney Biennial installation view, floor 3. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art.

Most people know how to act (at least nominally) in museums. You don’t touch the paintings or sculptures. (In the crowd at MoMA’s Tim Burton show, however, I realized how many attendees weren’t frequent museum-goers as I watched them confidently handle the objects, dragging their fingers along the costumes and sculptures. The guards looked exhausted from calling them off. What a nightmare.) But in a show where the artworks overlap and spill into the museum space, where museum becomes studio space, or science experiment, or rehearsal room, things can get a little complicated. It feels very free-wheeling, but I soon realized those borders between viewer and object are still there, policed by the ever-vigilant guards, or by subtle sandpaper boundaries stuck to the floor scuffing the bottoms of your soles as you approach the invisible line between acceptable looking and craning too far.

In the lobby, at the end of my visit, I walked around and through Oscar Tuazon’s architectural sculpture, For Hire, a “formless tangle” comprising a staircase, a few doors, pathways, and room-like spaces. It seemed like the first construction stages of what would become a cheap apartment complex. Another visitor headed up the stairs—the museum guard protested. “Sir, please come down,” she stated exasperatedly, “you can’t go up there!” I had already been warned enough—I knew not to step on the stairs. I wandered a little bit more through the acceptable spaces of the installation, opened some doors, walked through some pathways. I approached the stairs, with no intention of walking up them, but the museum guard immediately called me back. “Please, ma’am, you can’t go there.”  I smiled and looked over at her. I could tell she had been saying these same words over and over again, warning the same warning over and over.

“This is your whole day, huh?” I asked her, “telling people not to go up the stairs?”

“Eight hour day, telling people, don’t go up there. You get to the top, but there’s nowhere to go!” She laughed.

--Natalie Hegert

(top image: Oscar Tuazon, For Hire, 2012 Mixed media, Dimensions variable, Collection of the artist; courtesy Maccarone, New York.)

“He says, ‘It’s crazy that you can’t get people to do it.”

“Ok, but tell him: ‘To me, it is crazy to think that you could get people to do it.’”

We are standing outside on the street late at night in February trying to figure out how we’re going to realize our project, which is to be on view to the public in three days. To complicate things further, I speak no Spanish and my counterpart, Carlos Martiel Delgado Saínz, speaks no English. This is a typical exchange that has made participating in Arte No Es Fácil such a challenge and excitement. In Cuba you can get plenty of people to come help with something in a few hours notice. In America, you need at least a week, especially if it’s a Friday.

Arte No Es Fácil is the work of Danielle Paz and Marilyn Volkman. As graduate students in the University of Chicago’s Departments of Visual Arts and Art History some of my colleagues, including Paz and Volkman, traveled to Havana, Cuba, in 2009 to document the Havana Biennial. The trip evolved far beyond the initial documentary into a project that now includes, among other things, a series of exhibitions in Chicago at Links Hall. While a creation of Paz and Volkman, it involves dozens of artists working in many disciplines.

Arte No Es Fácil, translates to “Art Isn’t Easy.” This title was adopted after the original group experienced the struggle just to accomplish even the simplest tasks in Cuba. But out of this has grown a unique spirit of collaboration and a collective effort, specifically in relation to art making. Arte no es fácil. A meaning everyone involved in the project has come to understand on many levels. Like most arduous journeys, it’s been incredibly rewarding and worthwhile.

I cannot begin to fathom what this must be like for some, though. When Hamlet Lavastida Cordovi first traveled to the United States, he was asked the question all Cubans entering the U.S, are asked, “Are you here for a visit or do you seek asylum?” The question had not even occurred to him until that very moment. Without hesitation he responded, “Asylum.”

When preparing for this essay I asked him if it was alright to tell his story and if I should not use his name. His reply: “Don't worry you can use my name as you want. When I come here I decide to refuse to participate in a tyranny, that’s real!!!!!”

The program at Links Hall has taken place over three weekends in three months: January, February and March. This weekend marks the culmination of this phase of the project. Arte No Es Fácil continues, though. There are plans to produce a catalogue of the Links Hall exhibitions and the process of organizing a sister event in Havana in 2013 is underway.

Collaboration is the key to the project. After the initial documentary was completed Paz and Volkman were dissatisfied. They had failed in their eyes because what they created was an image, a representation, rather than an open form of communication.

“We started to see similarities between the practices of emerging Cuban artists we met in Havana and the work of artists we knew in Chicago. We thought, ‘If we know artists making work separated by location and context, yet sharing a resemblance in form, what would these modes of working look like when collaboratively translated from one context into the other?’” Volkman and Paz explain in a statement on the project’s website.

I was paired with Carlos. How do you begin to have a conversation about making a work of art with someone you’ve never met? We began communicating through email when I was living in Berlin, Germany, and Carlos was in Havana, Cuba. We faced not only an eight-hour time difference, but also a delay in sending our messages through an intermediary to translate. Additionally, access to email and the internet is sporadic in Cuba. We went back and forth, using Google Translate as a workaround. You tweak the sentences, sometimes word by word, and eventually end up with a message that makes just enough sense to be confusing to the recipient.

Being in Germany and Cuba respectively, neither of us could visit the site in Chicago where we were planning to realize our piece. Carlos suggested a performance that was incredibly simple but which we spent the next few months trying to explain to each other. It wasn’t until December that I suddenly realized what he had actually been proposing. And it wasn’t until I returned from Berlin and could visit the site in person that I knew it wasn’t feasible based on Links Hall’s architecture. And it wasn’t until he arrived in February and saw Links Hall in person that he could understand what I had been trying to explain. It’s kind of brilliant in its Beckettesque futility. It was a few days before the night we were to present our piece and it was back to the drawing board.

In the meantime, for the weekend in January, we presented separate but related works. Carlos’ piece Invasions is a sound installation of audio recorded of the street noise from his window in Havana. We presented it for him in his absence. The interior space of Links Hall was dimly lit in blue and as the audio came up from a speaker in the dark alongside the windows, I drew the curtains to reveal the Chicago alley, theatrically light in yellows and oranges by the streetlights. The El tracks just a few hundred feet away thundered with the occasional train. Every time someone walked into the alley they were like an extra in a film. Presented later in the evening was my piece, Drei Jahre in einer Linie / Three years in a line, a composition made of audio recorded, often by chance, during the three years I have spent time in Berlin. While Carlos’ piece focused on exteriority, drawing the viewer’s attention outside and replacing the local sound environment with that of another city, my work used sound as a way to tell a narrative and sought to draw the audience inward toward their own conceptions of a city heard but unseen. With the curtains down and a dim spotlight, the atmosphere was more along the lines of a classical music concert.

Back to February. We are hanging around Links Hall amidst all the other activity of artists preparing their works and Carlos pulls up his Word document of ideas for artworks on his jump drive. I have my list of “Art Ideas” on my iPhone. He starts reading them off. Scott Waitukaitis, a scientist and Marilyn’s husband, translates. We agree on a piece that involves covering the furniture in the office with white sheets the way you might when someone vacates a house or you’re storing a deceased relative's possessions in your attic. The room will be open as people file into the theater space of Links Hall. The catch is that an unseen performer will be among the furniture, an object himself under a sheet.

Carlos Martiel Delgado Síaz with Erik Wenzel, Sangre Azul (Blue Blood). Performance at Links Hall, February 2012. Courtesy of the artists and Arte No Es Fácil / photo credit: Kimmy Noonen

It’s Friday, the audience is directed down the hall to the room transformed into a ghostly sculpture. Some enter, others, unaware it is art, shuffle past and enter the theater. Three women sit around a nude man, sketching him. He goes through a series of poses. Later viewers would describe to me the uncomfortable sensation of watching people draw. “When you’re gazing at a naked man to draw him it’s a different kind of looking; you are studying. When you are in the audience, watching it feels wrong; it is like voyeurism,” explains one. Carlos, of Afro-Cuban decent, is the nude model. The young women are all white, a detail I was pleased to make happen.

What a great action, reversing the male gaze by placing clothed females in a circle around the sleek form of a bare-naked male. It is also problematic in an interesting way that it is the non-white, the other, who is being held up as an example of beauty, but also something to be consumed by white European Americans. At least this is what I think is happening; I am under a sheet in the other room. For once the white man is marginalized and obscured. I sit there for ages, a prop in our performance installation until someone comes up and says, “Carlos says, ‘you’re done. You shouldn’t have to sit here suffering while everyone is in the theater.’”

In the end we found people. Arte no es fácil, but it’s worth it.

—Erik Wenzel

(Image on top right: Carlos Martiel Delgado Síaz, Invasions. Installation view at Links Hall, January 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Arte No Es Fácil)

This year at the Armory (and Volta), take a trip to the icy North. The Nordic focus features Scandinavia's promising art scene, curated by Malmö Konsthall's director Jacob Fabricius, with a selection of galleries from Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. With all these galleries clustered together in a cul-de-sac at the north end of Pier 94, it’s a veritable village. In an act of pure generosity and goodwill, a lounge running through the middle of the action offers up not only places to sit and, well lounge, but also books of poetry, posters and other artworks for visitors to take.

Spend at least an hour here. The ambience is relaxed, the work is excellent and ranges from translucent and poetic to dark and complex, and right next door is the champagne bar lit by the pink neon of Ragnar Kjartansson's show-stopping work, Scandinavian Pain. Your first stop should be Iceland's gallery, i8, where you can find out more about Kjartansson's work as well as swoon over a selection of Olafur Eliasson's driftwood pieces.

The scene in Stockholm is well represented. Ranging from the established to newly emerging, these spaces represent international artists such as Miriam Bäckström, Leif Elggren, Goldin+Senneby, Johanna Billing, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Viktor Rosdahl and Christian Pontus-Andersson.

Swedish artists Miriam Bäckström and Leif Elggren are represented at Gallery Niklas Belenius' booth. Two of Bäckström's pieces from the Mirrors series are exhibited, focusing on the boundary between the staged and real via photo-mirror dichotomies. Elggren's displayed pieces are eerie photographs such as Swedenborg, King Carolus XII and Queen Christina as a Baby and an uncanny sound installation. Elggren regularly collaborates with others, such as Thomas Liljenberg and American artist John Duncan whose installation and performance work is based upon cajoling the audience to actively participate with his electroacoustic sound, video and radio pieces.

CRYSTAL is an emerging space located in Stockholm's central district Vasastan, co-organized by Jun-Hi Wennergren Nordling and Katarina Sjögren. They are highlighting artists such as the collaborative duo Goldin+Senneby (Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby) with the work Abstract Possible, which touts itself to be, “A detailed evaluation of the collecting opportunities presented by each of the works on offer in the exhibition Abstract Possible at Bukowskis,” purveyed by “Thea Westreich Art Advisory.” It was up for auction at a fixed price (contrary to auction house conventions but the rule for this primary market auction) at Bukowski's, as part of the Swedish curator Maria Lind's controversial exhibition at Tensta Konsthall “Abstract Possible.” Previous works by Goldin+Senneby subvert and examine financial structures as well as analyze theoretic versus actual value. The provocative photogaphs of Julia Peirone are also presented.

Christian Larsen Gallery represents a melange of creatives including the intriguing Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Sidén who is known for The Queen of Mud works from the ‘80s (she recently won the Swedish Culture Prize from the daily paper Dagens Nyheter), and more recently, In Passing (2007) as well as the collaborations with The Royal Dramatic Theater and Mobile Art Production. The gothic works of Viktor Rosdahl (also on view at Norway's Dortmund Bodega), filled with layers of repressed violence, turbulence and psychological trauma are not to be missed, as well as the photographic collages from Cooper & Gorfer.

From Copenhagen, there is V1 Gallery at the far end of the lounge, and Beaver Projects has a surprising trio of works on paper by Christian Finne (they are not what they appear to be - look closely). Finnish (sic) the visit with a few moments of sound bliss at Helsinki's Galerie Anhava, where you can relax with the sounds of Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen's Wave of Matter.

With approximately twenty Scandinavian spaces present at Armory this year, there is no shortage of culturally specific stimulants for enthusiasts gathering from near and far.

Ragnar Kjartansson, Scandinavian Pain (twilight) (installation view), 2006, neon sculpture. Courtesy of i8 Gallery. On view at the Armory Show, Pier 94, Nordic Lounge.

–Jacquelyn Davis

(Image at top right: Cooper & Gorfer, Shola and the Cat, 2011, photographic collage. Courtesy of Christian Larsen. On view at the Armory SHow, Pier 94, Nordin Lounge)

Prince St

Unlike the great 21^st century cities, New York doesn’t always change so much. It’s true that there’s a whole lot of high rises especially in midtown and along the west side of the island. And it’s true that on most street corners there is now either a massive bank, a Duane Reade, or a Starbucks where New York used to be narrow-aisled, individual stores that knew nothing about chains or expansive spaces. And it’s true that my old neighborhood in Alphabet city (which used to be edgy and, in parts, dangerous) is now brimming with designer-clothed NYU students. But today, there are many corners of New York that are just as they were when I lived there almost twenty years ago. When I went for a run around the streets of Astoria, for example, I noted one new bus shelter on Vernon Boulevard, and the odd new building between Queensboro Bridge and Ditmars Boulevard. For the most part, Astoria is just as it always was: individually owned stores, the familiar New York brownstones and about sixteen different nationalities in any ten-square-meter radius. And Astoria is not the only neighborhood in New York that has not subscribed to the imperative to renovate, to stay up-to-date.

(All images: Frances Guerin)

Nick Briz and I hit it off immediately, proceeding into heady, full days of alcohol-fueled arguments and epiphanies. Nick was my new roommate and he had just arrived from Florida to start the Film, Video and New Media program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Nick was passionate about moving-image work that groped at the borders of the never-been-seen, he had played in noise bands for the majority of his college years, he is a prolific maker of Net Art and a budding academic and educator. He was the first to write a Wikipedia entry on Glitch Art back in undergrad at University of Central Florida as well as co-founding the first Glitch conference which just celebrated its second manifestation last fall in Chicago. He taught me how to make my first glitch piece by opening an image file with a text editor to gain access to the indexical Ursprung of the digital representation itself. He was incredibly excited to be in Chicago as it is the Mecca of new media, specifically, Dirty New Media. I wondered how Chicago, the Second City of all places, had become the center of the amorphous, although increasingly centralized (under Rhizome in New York) artistic practice known as New Media Art.  The answer lies four decades ago.

Dan Sandin. A 5 Minute Romp through the IP, 1973. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qh6jRzjmcY

At the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971, Dan Sandin began work on what would become known as the Sandin Image Processor, an analogue computer that could manipulate video images by manipulating the gray-level input. In effect, he had generated an altered field of vision – one that had been mechanically manipulated to transform the simulacrum of video into representations without the pretension of verisimilitude. In the world of the moving image, this was a schism-moment, to uphold the allure of the image or to reveal what the image was: a mirage made to shimmer through voltage oscillation.

Prior to this, Sandin had experimented with color photographs by using chemicals and enlargers to distort and, as he says, “abstract naturalistic images into something more psychedelic.” He had also been doing performances using musicians and Super 8 movies and it occurred to him that by taking the concept of a Moog Model 2, video could be altered in real time. One could “flow with image modification as a musician flowed with their instrumentalities.” What came out of this was the Sandin Image Processor (IP).

Image processors became the tool for popular moving images, ranging from pop music videos and movies, to Chris Marker’s high postmodern classic Sans Soleil. Initially devised to play audio/visual concerts, the Sandin IP became an instrument, a tool that expanded the field of aesthetics that is today called New Media Art. It was visually revolutionary.

When speaking with Sandin, one realizes that he is very aware of technology as media, as instruments for communication. Even when speaking of his latest work on virtual reality, a medium that holds the promise of a sci-fi future, he states matter-of-factly, “Virtual reality is a medium of expression and you can generate works and experiences with it… Powerful, but it’s a medium of expression.” New Media Art, then, is just that – art made with new forms of media.

Dirty New Media as a loosely defined genre of New Media Art is differentiated by its aesthetic and its practice. As an aesthetic, it mines the technoscape as the surrealists explored the dreamscape for meaning from the smear of life’s traces. Relying on appropriation and the beauty of chance as acceptable aesthetic components of contemporary art, Dirty New Media practitioners have constructed a practice that utilizes sensibilities culled from punk, lo-fi video art, pop culture, early Net Art and glitch to disrupt the smooth functioning of an almost imperceptible web of technology and data that underlies the everyday. As a practice, open-source, copy-left and DIY approaches inculcate the aesthetic of dirty new media both as a means of validating their practice that is oftentimes appropriational but also as a matter of principle that has been an aspect of the movement since the beginning.

When Dan Sandin and Phil Morton began to disseminate the Sandin Image Processor, they wrote their “Distribution Religion,” a two-page text describing their ethos when it comes to copying in the name of culture. As Phil Morton writes, “First, it's okay to copy! Believe in the process of copying as much as you can; with all your heart is a good place to start – get into it as straight and honestly as possible.” In a conversation I had with Sandin, he mentioned that this commitment to open-source work was very much an aspect of the zeitgeist of the time when those working on cutting-edge technology were used to and embraced DIY as a matter of transforming the means of distribution, and simply because there was nowhere to buy the equipment. He also went on to say that it turned out to be the most effective form of distribution in that his IP was disseminated and built far more than commercial IP’s of the time. The story of New Media in Chicago mimics this philosophy of distribution in a cycle of experiment, advancement, education and dissemination.

Dirty New Media (DNM) is at times a generative art practice (in that some artists create their “work” through creating an algorithm or code that then manipulates the input data) but does not feverishly attempt anything that isn’t derivative of something. In fact, it is the derivation that lends it its purpose and, one could easily conclude, that DNM is a very rational response to the kind of postmodern predicament many artists find themselves in: nothing new, it’s all been done. This, perhaps, is where the punk attitude enters with the cathartic swagger of aggressive indifference.

Kanye West. Welcome to Heartbreak. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMH0e8kIZtE

In the past few years, aspects of New Media Art have gone mainstream such as the datamoshed Kanye West music video, Welcome to Heartbreak, to the great lament of my friend Nick who then declared the creative upheaval of glitch was over. But just as the surrealists had been appropriated into design and advertising despite the desertions and detractions by its leaders, a successful aesthetic takes on a life of its own and becomes, if it resounds truthfully, popular – a realization that Briz has since accepted himself. So what makes the corruption of verisimilitude as an aesthetic a touchstone of popular culture?

The glitch aesthetic, probably the most distinct and visceral form of Dirty New Media, like most every aesthetic, comes from a reflection upon reality mediated by the contemporary individual’s experience of subjectivity. For this observer, it is the disruption within the smooth functioning of reality that lends glitch an appeal. I could make an overly generalized statement about the continued aspiration of our culture towards ever-more efficient and seamless forms of communication and experience but it need not even be said. The introduction of iCloud this past year says it all. Air is a data stream. A cloud is condensed, visualized data. Postmodernity is a hyper-rich environment, a cloud of images, information, and stimulation that, if it works correctly, succeeds in performing the real.

–Joel Kuennen

(Image at top: Vaudeo Signal, "Modulating Fashions in Fades and Wipes" from the GLI.TC/H 2011 conference. Image via flickr user Ignotus the Mage)

I didn't know what to expect when I touched down just before dawn in Rio de Janeiro, but a cab driver with an affinity for loud Whitney Houston music was not it.  We drove through the streets as the sun and heat rose over the city, and my new friend spoke and drove at a very rapid speed. I would later come to know this enthusiasm as the typical Brazilian sensibility, a character trait that makes even the most un-Brazilian visitor feel welcome.

The country of Brazil is at a fascinating place in its history. A recent economic boom has placed it as the 5th largest economy in the world, and the steadfast growth has given rise to a renaissance of sorts. Galleries from São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are successfully showing at international art fairs such as Miami Basel, and people are looking with fresh eyes at what the Southern Hemisphere has to offer.

For me, this visit was a chance to see first hand how a city such as Rio is negotiating its own cultural priorities and traditions while moving forward in an international arena. This is not a discovery, but instead an exploration. What I found didn't surprise me, but ultimately reinforced my notion of Rio as an artistically inclined and culturally vibrant city.

I began my stay in Lapa, the notoriously dangerous and bohemian neighborhood district far from the tourist coastline region.  My mid-January arrival coincided with the height of summer's pre-Carnival fervor and I wish I had something less cliché to say than people were dancing in the streets, but people were dancing in the streets. 

I was lucky enough to catch an opening on my first night in town at the atelier on my road, Casa Z. The small solo show by Brazilian artist Raimundo Rodriguez consisted of several hanging assemblage pieces. Rodriguez had constructed neat rectangular frames filled with painted and overlapping industrial metal panels. The muted colors and haphazard compositions couldn't help but be visually linked to the hillside favelas sitting atop one another down the street.  While the work itself was beautiful, albeit slightly unoriginal, the atmosphere buzzed with a casual attitude and dress. Artists and art lovers, in what felt more like a family gathering than a white cube space, spilled out onto the streets where beers were purchased from a man sitting on his bike.  Although the only spoken word in the room was Portuguese, people circled the room in the universal language of mingling. 

Call me naive, but I selfishly assumed that the art world in South America would utilize English as a second language as actively as any European art hub. While several top galleries do conduct business in both Portuguese and English, I was given an odd look when I re-entered Casa Z the following day to ask some questions, none of which could be answered in more than awkward smiles, shrugs and again, rapid Portuguese. That said Casa Z is not insular in their international perspective. The space generates revenue off of a back storage closet/bookstore that sells a mixture of publications by Latin American's art superstars, small-size print editions and international catalogues.

One photo-based zine of black-and-white images caught my eye. Created in Rio but produced by German artist Anton Steenbeck, the seven-page publication titled Gaivotas, meaning seagulls, catalogues the simple black graffiti scrawl that is abundant on the streets of Rio. Steenbeck has captured these repetitive gestural symbols independently and en masse with birds in a conceptual photo diary pointing to an urban impediment on our natural world. 

This odd proximity of natural beauty and urban development is something that is very apparent in Rio. Drastic inflation has created an even larger rift between rich and poor, resulting in a class division that is palpable. For every sandy beach, lush jungle refuge and quaint colonial architecture, there exists in equal measure violent crime, poverty and pollution.

This clash between culture, social issues and landscape is no more apparent than at the city's Museu de Arte Moderna. Affectionately called MAM, the industrial structure is an ominous concrete building that sits in the city's Parque do Flamengo. Brazilian artist Fernanda Gomes' installation has taken up the institution's infamous main hall. A curatorial nightmare, this second floor room is composed entirely of glass walls that provide a sweeping panoramic views of the bay and bulbous mountains that jet up from Rio's cityscape.

I attended the show on a national holiday, a day when the city had almost entirely shut down, and I had the museum almost entirely to myself. Gomes had filled the wall-less room with everyday objects. String, cardboard, glass, and fragmented furniture lay in casual groupings and arrangements that allowed me to walk through and over the discarded items.  I was able to meander in the way I imagine Gomes had intended it - in silence. The humble objects are transformed into a micro landscape within themselves, a connection that was further highlighted by the postcard-esque views that surrounded them. The installation retains a poetic simplicity that acts as a reminder of objective beauty regardless of worth. It was the one place in the city that was quiet and I found myself so pleased to be surrounded by the sublime silence of the visual.

Somewhere between the atelier and the monolithic institution there lays a small but ever-growing gallery scene. A Gentil Carioca has two locations, one in Rio and one in Berlin, and is led by artists Ernesto Neto, Laura Lima and Marcio Botnia. The original space opened its doors in Rio's Centro district almost a decade ago with the purpose of elevating artistic and critical debate cross-culturally. 

This sentiment of global expansion was echoed by Juliana Cintra, co-director of the esteemed Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box 4. Although the summer show was still in the process of installation, Ms. Cintra and I met at the gallery's new location to discuss Rio's burgeoning scene.  Her opinion?  "There is not 'South American art,'" the gallery owner tells me. "Latin American artists are talking about the same thing at the same time," Ms. Cintra explains further citing that the majority of her artists for her upcoming show are based in Berlin, Rio and New York.

Will Rio become the new cultural epicenter? I'm not sure. But the city itself is an undoubtedly exciting, established cultural hotbed in its own right. The city sits as a cultural nexus between African, Latin and European cultures and I can only hope the international conversation heads farther in that direction.

--Devon Caranicas

(All photos by Devon Caranicas)

In January, Paris can test our patience. The days are so short that by 3.30pm-4pm the cars begin to turn on their headlights. This winter has also been wet. Even on the days when it is not raining properly, a mist and a drizzle has filled the air, as if Paris had decided to be and look like London. There has been so much water that the Seine is now overflowing and I cannot run down through the sculpture garden in front of the Institut du Monde Arabe. And the Seine even looks more like the Thames than usual – it is churned up, dirty; as it flows west towards the channel it tows with it refuse, natural and man-made alike.

And for those of us lucky enough to find sun in the winter as many of my friends have, vacationing in Thailand, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, the difficulty of coming back to the cold, drizzle of Paris is compounded by having holidayed with happy people, people pleased to serve and to step aside as we pass on the street. In Paris, the pride, the pushing and the arrogance on the streets are hard pills to swallow after a week or two in the sun and surf, surrounded by personalities that complement the weather.

(The creatures on display at the gallery downstairs. Photo by Frances Guerin.)

A short walk from the Grand L-train stop in Brooklyn, nestled between non-descript warehouses is a dark and dirty basement lair that has recently served as the pseudo-permanent home for the artist duo VenusX and $hayne Olivier, whose collaborative music project called GHE20 G0TH1K (pronounced ghetto gothic), and party of the same name, has been a definitive fixture of the underground party and music scene in New York for several years. The insane party that used to thump on far into the morning was virtually a weekly event in their Brooklyn space, after having bumped around temporary venues throughout the city.

VenusX and $hayne are the mainstays of the GHE20 G0TH1K stage, but are known for the amazing guest artists who come to dj for the night (ARAABMUZIK, DJ TOTAL FREEDOM, and SFV ACID for example), who are consciously chosen to highlight often marginalized populations within the electronic music world, namely women and people of colour -- rare in a genre that traditionally has the appearance of being dominated by white men. The crowd too is far more diverse – often labeled as a straight-friendly gay warehouse party, which attracts a distinctively queer crowd of a broad racial spectrum – something hard to find at the staples of New York’s nightlife, which tend to be far more homogenous.

What really keeps the crowd coming though, is GHE20 G0TH1K’s sound, which is like nothing else that can be found in New York. Often based in Latin-inspired beats, VenusX and $hayne blend together samples and sounds from a ridiculously huge array of artists and genres, manipulating and adding their own beats in order to make dark, fast and intensely electronic music that infects your body with the desire to move.

Everything they do is live and off the cuff, showcasing both of their acute djing skills and commitment to experimenting with and extending the boundaries of electronic music. Unlike many other artists who reside within the club/party scene, GHE20 G0TH1K is not interested necessarily in pleasing crowds in a calculated manner, but is instead focused on fully exploring the medium.

VenusX and $hayne Olivier in the Lower East Side. Photo by Brayden Olson and Zachary Ching, courtesy of Opening Ceremony. 

At this point, GHE20 G0TH1K has moved far beyond a weekly New York warehouse party, and now falls under $hayne and VenusX’s umbrella project called Clear, Inc. In addition to the music and the parties, Clear, Inc. is also responsible for $hayne’s newly founded fashion label called Hood by Air, which previewed its Spring/Summer 2012 line during New York’s Fall Fashion Week. At the intersections of music and fashion, $hayne and VenusX are trying build a lifestyle where the creative energies from both projects are working together to create a new scene within the electronic music world and the party scene that it is associated with.

The GHE20 G0TH1K aesthetic is craved by people outside of New York City, with $hayne and VenusX on a national tour right now as proof of that. They have also been known to pop up in high-profile places, like their show with Odd Future at the South by Southwest festival, or the multiple appearances they made at some of Miami’s biggest parties during the 2011 art fairs. Their reach beyond New York is difficult to gauge, but they are known for selling out parties around the country; this all from two artists who have yet to release an EP or CD in over two years of collaboration.

GHE20 G0TH1K djing at an after party during Miami Art Week 2011. Photo by Collin Munn.

In the coming months, expect to see this change, with $hayne and VenusX working on a soon-to-be released EP that will feature work entirely by female artists, and will be the first time that their music has been formally recorded and released. Watch out too for Hood by Air’s appearance on the racks of clothing stores around New York and the country, with an expected launch at Opening Ceremony in the coming months.

What is so amazing about $hayne and VenusX’s various projects, even if you do not like the music or the clothes, is the way in which they built their own scene within the electronic music world from the ground up, and always according to their own rules. While maybe their defiant attitudes and often difficult sound made their rise slower than it potentially could have been, they have now clearly established that there is a national population out there waiting in anticipation for GHE20 G0TH1K’s intervention into their party.

 --Collin Munn

Top image: $hayne djing the launch party for Hood by Air. Photo by Quentin Belt, courtesy of http://glob.anewyorkthing.com

They say that at any given time in London you are within seven feet of a rat.  My best friends say they suspect that at any given time I’m within seven feet of a snack.  My love of food equals my passion for art, and both nourish me in their separate ways.  One of the many truly wonderful things about living in London is its amazing ability to cater not only to art lovers and foodies but to combine the two, allowing you to justify indulging in both through the excuse of one or the other.

The Friends’ lounge at the Royal Academy does this in an elegant, quiet way and creates a haven of demure paintings, coffee and Chelsea buns within its historic confines.  Bethnal Green’s Gallery Café blends live music, art and food in an atmosphere of cheery togetherness, much like the café Tina We Salute You in Dalston. 

The restaurant Sketch, on the other hand, seeks to offer its visitors a very different experience, merging show-stopping contemporary art with mind-blowingly-priced haute cuisine.  The Conduit Street restaurant commissions site-specific video pieces from artists and collectives and displays their work on screens around the top of their subterranean Gallery dining hall.  It’s a fabulous space, its high ceiling putting sufficient distance between the diners and the moving images to get a great view, no matter where you sit. 

When I visited the design team Silent Studio’s London Revolve was being shown, which consisted of pieced together photographs of London’s skyline revolving slowly around the room, as if the restaurant itself were windowed and turning.  It seems that this was a London variation on the 2007 work the Studio created for Sketch, Revolutions, in which diners were taken on a journey around the world, moving from London to the Arctic through Paris and the Nevada Desert.  The intention then was to make Sketch the first rotating restaurant in London (and most probably the first restaurant that could cross continents between your main course and dessert). 

When you’re viewing the London section, however, the experience is less of rotating as of walking around a capsule of the London Eye, only without the drama of being high above the Thames.  Nonetheless, it’s never a bad thing to be reminded of the varied skyline of the city, especially when working and commuting dulls your receptiveness to the view, and the piece certainly brought home that we couldn’t have been anywhere else but in London at that moment.  The trouble is that after the first rotation of buildings, the impact of the piece is lost and you start trying to spot your office. 

This was taking site-specific art to its logical conclusion, reflecting the outside of the restaurant within its walls, but it did little more than this.  That’s the danger of combining art and food – you either need sufficient variation in what you are showing to last the length of a meal, or else you need to be able to eat as you wander around a variety of works.  I suspect that had the work on display been a more eventful video installation the effect of eating underneath it would have been a more exciting experience.  

With screens all around you this room could feel claustrophobic but the Sketch team has created such a sense of airy whiteness and contemporary luxury that you enter the space in the knowledge that this isn’t just about eating, it’s about the experience of eating at Sketch.  Even the bathrooms are an experience here, with each facility encased in individual white pods in a surreal vaulted room. 

The food is beautiful here too, each course a masterpiece of carefully composed ingredients.  Dessert in particular was spectacular; we shared a layered chocolate concoction with a tiny mound of ice-cream and praline on the side and lamented that the portion amounted to only a couple of mouthfuls each.  And that’s the trouble with Sketch, the portion sizes are so small and the prices so high that you leave unsatisfied, and you end up buying a pasty on the way home.  Whilst this is the case with many trendy London restaurants, the dual downside here is that the average art lover is priced out of viewing interesting, regularly updated site-specific art that would otherwise be a pleasure to keep checking up on. 

Sketch’s engagement with its space and the range of artist commissions that keep the Gallery restaurant fresh is certainly to be lauded and the concept is a great one.  It would be wonderful to see more collaboration between chefs and artists, but it should be about filling the senses with wonder and enthusing the taste buds as much as the eyes.  At the end of the day, there really is nothing better than interesting, thought-provoking art and a full belly.

~Alex Field

All images courtesy sketch.