Extraordinary and sad news, that Koyo Kouoh, most recently of Zeitz MOCAA, and the curator of the next Venice Biennale, has died. Aruna d’Souza posted the Zeitz MOCAA Instagram announcement on bluesky.
Having never seen a show of Kouoh’s, I found the most insight and inspiration from her two-partinterview in 2024 with Charlotte Burns for Schwartzman &’s What if…!? podcast. I’ve listened to it multiple times since.
Just a person of extraordinary and urgent thinking and action, now gone.
an installation view of Open Group’s Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024), from the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2024, photo: Jacopo Salvi via 601Artspace
Somehow the Ukrainian art collective OPEN GROUP’s powerful installation from the Polish Pavilion at Venice last year is being restaged in New York City, starting tomorrow, Thursday May 8th. The somehow is impresaria Magda Sawon, who has arranged with 601Artspace’s David Howe to showRepeat After Me II (2022, 2024), and Untitled (2015 — ongoing), two works that relate to the ongoing impact on Ukrainians of the fight against the Russian invasion.
OPEN GROUP was a last minute addition to the Biennale, after Poland’s rightwing government was ousted, the Polish Pavilion’s rightwing curator and artists followed. Curator Marta Czyż rapidly invited OPEN GROUP instead.
After the opening Thursday, Czyż and Sawon will give a public walkthrough of the show, in two adjacent 601Artspace spaces, on Friday evening. There is also a talk planned for Saturday the 10th, with Czyż, OPEN GROUP, and Columbia professor Mark Lila. [Obviously it will not be at Columbia.]
In 1993 Gabriel Orozco made sculptures by poking, clawing, and bending ceramic roof tiles on the Pottelberg factory floor in Coutrai, Belgium. Then they went into the kiln, fixing the artist’s slight gestures, marks, and even fingerprints forever. Or at least as long as you take care of them.
At least two variations resulted:
Pluie de Doigts (Rain of Fingers), was a group of sixteen flat, interlocking tiles, in which the main gesture was Orozco poking the clay with his fingers. Though a couple of the tiles show a little more aggressive manipulations, the overall effect of the stacked tiles is of the slightness of the raindrops’ traces.
Gabriel Orozco, Made in Belgium, 1993, terra cotta, one of 14, a 2023 gift of Howard and Donna Stone to the Art Institute of Chicago
There was also a group of fourteen half round tiles, with the title of the foundry’s stamp, Made in Belgium. They were each clenched in intimately ominous ways that evoked the clay lump of one of Orozco’s earliest masterworks, My Hands are My Heart (1991); and torqued into forms that Richard Serra would later explore in steel on another factory floor years later.
Gabriel Orozco, Made in Belgium, 1993, sold by the estate of Richard Anderson at Skinner in 2018
These were exhibited as an installation scattered across the floor of the vaulted cave of Chantal Crousel’s Paris gallery, but were sold individually, as unique editions.
So this body of objects is scattered, and their relationships and this installation, are basically lost. And the ostensibly more significant unique sculpture, which is fine but whose interventions are ultimately less interesting, is acquired by a privileged collector, and preserved and promoted—and is now to be purged.
This paradox is acute with Orozco’s work, which has often found extraordinary beauty in the most ephemeral gestures or fleeting observations that run counter to the market’s—and, frankly, institutions’—conflation of scale and effort with importance. While collectors were offered large, indistinguishable gold leafed paintings, Orozco’s tablesful of maquettes and tiny, perfect objects would only be sold en masse, to a museum. [Or a collector’s private museum, RIP.]
The Funeral was good, though, and its sense of being unresolved really comes through irl.
But the way bigger is better, and a unique [sic] work is privileged over an edition, is a real, net negative for artists who have some of their most important achievements in series or small works. I just saw a room at the Met filled with giant Manets, and all I got was a longing for a little dog. I bought the last of the Made in Belgium edition more than 25 years ago, and even on its own, it’s better than Rosa’s. She had some truly major Orozcos, and this ain’t one, but good luck Wednesday.
[update: congratulations to the $15k bidder who got them for $18,900 all in] Previously, related, but kind of cranky of me, tbqh: Gabriel Orozco at Documenta 11
In 2021, on the occasion of the sale of the most significant artwork documenta IX curator and SMAK Ghent founder Jan Hoet received from David Hammons, his daughter Marianne Hoet, Head of Business Development and Deputy Chairwoman, Phillips Europe, reflected on accompanying her father to the artist’s studio in the late 1980s:
At the studio, we were able to touch objects and works, without being sure if it was an object or already an artwork. At that time, David always gathered objects and found inspiration in the streets. As an outsider in the contemporary scene, he was able to transform material into experience, which also alludes to an African-American tradition of creating art from found objects … Most important was to understand and feel the deep friendship between David and my father. It was a friendship as we remember from our childhood, soulmates as outsiders.
It echoed the uncredited lot description for the sale in 2018 of the most significant artwork Jan Hoet got from David Hammons that his family still owned:
Hammons’ oeuvre is a masterful narrative on the experience of the African American community in American society, introducing his own physicality into his work as well as the debris surrounding him. Through a deft reworking of found-objects, Hammons’ sculptures assume a quasi-mystical status; soldered, glued and nailed, these extracted materials are composed into beautifully rendered structures of detritus, utilising quotidian objects which are often loaded with associative connotations. The present work thus forms a crucial part of Hammons’ highly original artistic approach and, at the same time, symbolises a pivotal relationship between innovative artist and curator, both unified in their shared motivations.
And Marianne’s comment was considered worth repeating to sell in 2023 what is…what is a productive way to describe this…the most conceptual? most austere? most elemental? artwork Hoet got from Hammons, which is this stick.
David Hammons, Head Warmer, 1998, 99 x 4 x 4 cm, wood, img from a 2023 PhillipsX pop-up collab with AQUALEX a provider of fine drinking water systems in Knokke-Heist, the Hamptons of Belgium
In each case Hoet’s relationship to Hammons is considered an inextricable element of the work’s significance in ways that surpass mere provenance. This may explain why this stick, on which this phrase Head Warmer is carefully lettered, and which is is also signed, was made available first to the Belgian collecting world who also knew Hoet—or Hoets at this point—via a pop-up sale at the beach in August.
Well, Belgium passed, and now the stick is at Christie’s. And what does Christie’s have to say about Head Warmer? Just that it “is emblematic not only of Hammons’ ability to transform found materials into art but also of the close relationship that Hoet and Hammons shared.”
The Hoets’ claim for this work/these works as somehow manifestations of Jan’s relationship with Hammons exceeds but is inextricable from their view of Hammons as a quasi-mystical shaman of the Black Found Object Arts. For a curator who put himself on the cover of his documenta catalogue while writing off Africa as irrelevant, I guess we should expect nothing less. Me, I’d just be happy to have gotten three free Hammonses.
Tamás St. Turba, Czechoslovak Radio 1968, 1969, sulfur paint on brick, documenta 13 installation image via socks-studio h/t jeremy millar
I’ve been fascinated for days by Tamás St. Turba’s Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 (1969) since Jeremy Millar posted about the project on bluesky. St. Turba, who has like five spelling variants and alternate names, is a Hungarian filmmaker, archivist, activist, and Fluxus artist who took Fluxus seriously enough to stop calling himself an artist or his projects art.
Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is/was a conceptual artwork as protest against the Warsaw Pact military forces’ radio ban: a brick was painted to look like a transistor radio, which Czech residents pretended to listen to. This simple gesture was taken up as an act of defiance to the point that the military confiscated brick radios along with real ones.
St. Turba has made or remade the radios since, as needed, including for Documenta 13 in 2011, and one he remade in 2008 which found its way into Tate’s collection in 2016.
In an early conversation between the artist and myself about the Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 piece the artist noted that the brick could be ‘used to build the courthouse or as a missile to smash it’. On this occasion it seemed the artist had opted to deconstruct or ‘smash’ the format of the project. In terms of a public event, I can only imagine the audience perception of the piece as something thin and uncomfortable. However, in addressing the trickster-ish and conspiratorial nature of Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 it playfully presented a series of disruptive and subversive strategies that resonated with the impulse of the original work.
At a time when resistance to authoritarian stifling of culture has never felt more urgent, it’s been maddening to see how fragmented or detached discussion of St. Turba’s project is. Partly that could be because he refutes it artwork status, but also because he’s busy trying to fill in the archival gaps from Cold War oppression while Hungary grapples anew with another fascist. But it feels like the art apparatus has been failing in its job.
It may also be because the art apparatus, as such, can’t really deal with non-valuable or non-auratic objects. Even/especially when they look and sound uncannily familiar.
Weltempfänger (World Receiver), 1982, Multi-band radio receiver, 37 x 51 x 20 cm, Collection of the artist. PHOTO: Jens Ziehe, Berlin via leapleapleap
I only realize now I don’t know the origin of Isa Genzken’s concrete World Receivers. She first showed a working world receiver as a readymade in 1982, which was then a context, if not a gesture, of reaching information within borders and beyond. I think the non-functional concrete simulacra only came later, and I don’t know how. But maybe it’s entirely unrelated.
In 2003 Thomas Hirschhorn and Ink Tree Editions published Emergency Library, based on a collection of 37 books which Hirschhorn said were important to him, and which he could not do without. He discussed the project, and explained the reasoning behind each of the books, in a text, republished on the artist’s site.
The Library includes three books by Deleuze, two by Bataille, also Walser, Spinoza, all philosophers who Hirschhorn has created public monument/projects for—all but Bataille Monument, at Documenta 11 in 2002, came after the Library, so it could be viewed as a sort of sourcebook or roadmap for Hirschhorn’s subsequent practice.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Emergency Library (Degenerate Art), 2003, color copies on cardboard, 142 x 114 x 23 cm, sold at Rago Arts on 15 Aug 2024
Artists in the Emergency Library include Beuys, Duchamp and Warhol; Meret Oppenheim and Liubouv Popova; Hélio Oiticica and Jörg Immendorff; and somehow both John Heartfield and Emil Nolde. Speaking of Nolde, whose Nazi past was still being actively covered up in 2003, there is also the entire catalogue from Stephanie Barron’s 1991 exhibition at LACMA and the Art Institute, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.
Until I started writing this post, I had always read the photo on top, from Hirschhorn’s own site, as the books of Emergency Library on a table. It turns out to be a composite photo of the actual edition, arranged in simulation. It is only when the artist stands next to it, shirtless, that the scale is grasped. And now I want every single one, starting with the biggest, that sweet, sweet Duchamp catalogue.
Tits out Thomas Hirschhorn posing with Emergency Library, via inktree.ch
Sol Lewitt’s Black Form – Dedicated To The Missing Jews, 1987, painted concrete block, installed at the Schloss Münster/University of Münster for Skulptur Projekte, photo: LWL/Rudolf Wakonigg
Thanks to baileybobbailey’s reblog of archiveofaffinities I became aware of what Sol Lewitt described as his only political work: Black Form — Dedicated to the Missing Jews, which was one of two works he installed at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987.
The sculpture, an elongated block of painted concrete bricks, was at the entrance to the University of Münster, in the Schloss Münster. Lewitt felt compelled to give a politically charged title referencing not the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, but the generations of descendants of those Jews, who would never be born, leaving a permanent void in German society.
Lewitt was ready to donate the work to the city, or the university, but it was perhaps ahead of its time; in a divided country where Holocaust memorials were not yet a thing, Lewitt’s Black Form generated tremendous controversy and critique. It was actually destroyed after the Sculpture Project ended—in 2023 Stefan Goebel wrote a fascinating blog post about Black Form‘s fate—and in 1989, Lewitt ended up donating another version of it to the city of Hamburg, which still stands.
Oddly/amazingly, a carved and painted wood replica of Black Form, dated 1985, so perhaps a maquette, turned up for sale in Hamburg. What has not turned up yet is discussion of the relationship between this early Holocaust memorial to the Missing Jews and Peter Eisenman’s (and, once, Richard Serra’s) Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe that was eventually built in Berlin.
And bought some stuff. And made some stuff. The press release discussed it in the context of hashtag collector, and Roberta Smith called it “a resonant portrait of the United States.” But Robert Gober’s exhibition at Demisch Danant, “Cows at a Pond,” felt like the self-portrait of an artist trying to live and work ethically in a present where the injustices and suffering of history repeat themselves. So I guess they’re both right.
I sat in Gober’s chair to read his notes—unfinished and unpublished, except, of course, for putting them in a show—of attending the art forgery lawsuit against Knoedler Gallery. One important observation was the purported shock at the naked fraud perpetrated by the “venerable” gallery, a term Gober remembered from the 2000-2001 coverage of the price-fixing crimes of two “venerable” auction houses: Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Chris Rusak, Zine: Survey of Liturgical Incense, 2023, via chrisrusak.com
A couple of months ago, Los Angeles conceptual perfume artist Chris Rusak published a zine with a 9000-word survey of liturgical incense, its history, culture, and performance, and details of fourteen current sources of incense, including “several brands that are handmade by artisanal monks, some of which are not widely known and are hard to acquire due to their limited production.”
Like all of Rusak’s productions, it is beautiful and provocative of both sensation and thought.
Then today I saw that 56 Henry is currently staging a show by the Los Angeles artist and mage L, which includes Talismanic toroidal altar (2022-2023). As barely a novice in these matters, I can only quote from the press announcement:
Talismanic toroidal altar (2022–23) was initially constructed at Documenta 15 last year, in response to a curatorial request for L to conduct magic in service of their fellow artists. The main structure is a chromed coat rack from the D15 exhibition venue St. Kunigundis church, that was gifted to L by the local anarchist priest. One accoutrement hanging from the altar is a steel lemon juicer, utilized at D15 as an incense burner. For this exhibition, a new incense will be activated – 333 – that L co-created with perfumer Christopher Gordon of Maison Anonyme.
L, Talismanic Toroidal Altar, 2022, Aluminum clergy vestment rack from St. Kunigunis, crocodile skull, chain clasps, wood and steel scythe, lemon, aluminum badminton racket, ritually poured molybdomantic lead, quartz crystals, L’s broken mirror, webbing, fishing hooks, galvanized steel spring, selenite wand, ceramic vessel, steel citrus juicer ceremonially utilized as incense diffuser, copal incense, St. Germain herbal blend incense, steel lock, hot glue sticks, yarn, horseshoe from Montauk, pyrite, selenite, lead, glass jar with copal incense, protective stone from Germany. image via 56 Henry
The medium description is an invocation in itself, though it does also seem to be for a previous incarnation. L’s creations at St. Kunigunis were part of the Ghetto Biennial organized by Atis Rezistans, a Haiti-based artist collective. They resonate both formally and etymologically with the altar conjured by the Los Angeles artist collective A.S.T.R.A.L.O.R.A.C.L.E.S in collaboration with Dual Forces, a creative agency for Adidas and Nike, who all seem to exist in harmonic resonance with each other.
There is definitely something in the air out there.
Lot 110: Sol Lewitt Sao Paulo Biennale t-shirt by M. Officer, est. $500-700, 7 June at Wright20
After he made a giant Italian fresco-colored wall work for them in Hartford, the Wadsworth Atheneum curated Sol Lewitt into the 1996 São Paulo Biennale, where he made giant fresco-colored wall works there, too. Bands of color radiated off of three-, four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight-, and nine-pointed stars. The project was memorialized in a t-shirt collab with M. Officer, the Brazilian Gap. The giant label on the front confirms it was sponsored by the United States Information Agency, The National Endowment for The Arts, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and Arts International IIE [The Institute for International Education].
Verso via Wright20
Five years ago, you could have bought two of these t-shirts for $418. Or you can get one right now on eBay for $1500. If you want to try splitting the difference, a t-shirt owned by modern design aficionados Michael and Gabrielle Boyd is being auctioned in a few days. Me, except for figuring out if these were really screenprinted, I’m not that interested. I’m happy to see what the next Uniqlo collab drags in.
Just imagining a double portrait here. Superflex’s AlUla piece photographed by @colinjr
I have not yet heard from anyone who declined to participate in Desert X Al Ula, but I’ve started seeing reports from people who did. I would have said that the exhibition and all the spectacular work in spectacular scenery was taking place right where it had been planned all along: in the #desertxalula hashtag. But then I saw a slideshow of the artworks from a new instagram account, saudiarabianholiday, which promotes the same as a hashtag, but their link-in-bio is to an unfinished website registered two weeks ago to an anonymous tour packager run out of an Irish coworking space. The point of Desert X Al Ula is to turn Saudi Arabia into an international tourist destination.
While scrolling and marveling at the budget for the Desert X installations, I idly considered what project I would execute [sic] in the stark sandstone cliffs. I decided I would recreate the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Tinted shotcrete over foam block, how hard could it be?
Then I saw the post from @colinjr, a California real estate photographer who was attending the Desert X press/influencer junket. He captured fellow Desert X photographer Lance Gerber and their Saudi driver sharing a moment swinging on a tandem swing. It was Superflex’s contribution to the show, a multilevel swingset sculpture titled, One, Two, Three, Swing!, one of several elements from the group’s 2017 project that began in the Tate Turbine Hall and have since expanded to sites around the world.
I imagined MBS and Neville Wakefield sharing a similar moment, sitting next to each other, working together, in sync, on a common goal of an experience, toward a common spectacular end. And I marveled at the simplicity of the gesture, and the symbolic power with which Superflex captured the spirit of the entire exhibition enterprise. Superflex told people that by using the three-seat swings, they would set the orange line over their heads in motion and potentially change the trajectory of the planet. And it must be working; I do feel like a shift is happening. I apologize for ever doubting them.
I am struggling to understand the Desert X Al Ula collaboration with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and am interested to hear from people who have direct contact or experience with the organizers.
Did you visit Al Ula on that 2018 junket that was organized before Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, but which took place after it? Did you originally agree to visit, but then did not?
Did Neville Wakefield discuss or invite you to propose a project for Desert X Al Ula? Did he or someone else sound you out? Did you consider it? Did you take the meeting, then decline? Do you know of people who had this experience?
I’m not gonna lie, I am profoundly troubled and disappointed that Desert X, Wakefield, and the artists of Superflex, who I have long admired, are all involved in this exhibition.
I’m not sure whether I will write anything about what I learn. I’m happy to talk to anyone in confidence, off the record, or whatever you need to reach out. Text me at 1-34-SOUVENIR or reach me via email or twitter DM. Thanks in advance.
Felix Gonzales-Torres, “Untitled”, 1992-95, Carrara marble, water, fabricated 2007, installed at Glenstone [Ellsworth Kelly photobomb]. image: Carolina Miranda/LATimesThe Raleses bought Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled”, which was made for the 2007 Venice Biennale. It was based on an unrealized sketch the artist made while considering a public art commission. I believe it was for a university. The posthumous thing bothered me at the time, and Nancy Spector and I went around a bit on it, but I decided to roll with it, and it turns out to be fine. Art world shenanigan-wise, it could have been much, much worse.
It was a rainy autumn evening when I first saw it reinstalled at Glenstone. The shallow pools of water on the surface of the concave discs of white Carrara marble splashed and glistened with rain.
“They’re beautiful, and I think people will probably throw coins in them, or might actually get into them if it’s hot,” Ms. Spector said, smiling. “I wouldn’t mind.”
Andrea Rosen, the dealer who represented Mr. Gonzalez-Torres from 1990 until his death and who now oversees his estate, said she did not think he would mind either. He would probably jump in himself.
I did not back then, nor in the two visits since the new building opened, ever once get the sense that the Raleses would be chill with people frolicking in their Felix pools. But the fact that they have custom-fitted hot tub covers does make me wonder if the amount of frolicking is not actually zero.
Jenny Holzer projection for the Biennale di Firenze, 1996, photo: Attilio Maranzano via jennyholzer.com
Jenny Holzer made her first xenon projection in 1996 as part of a collaboration with Helmut Lang for the Biennale di Firenze. As Lang would describe it, the text, Arno, was projected from a canoe club across the river onto the facade of a brothel. [The 19th/20th c. Palazzo Bargagli held the offices of Corierre della Serra, at least. That’s all I’ve found.]
In 1998 Jenny Holzer told Joan Simon that the text for Arno originated in a music video for Red, Hot + Dance, which was a 1992 AIDS/HIV fundraiser concert/album. Mark Pellington, the MTV producer/director she mentioned, had done an MTV segment on Holzer, but he was also involved in producing U2’s ZOO TV, which had a video wall full of Truism-like texts that kind of pissed Holzer off. Anyway, there are no Arno-esque texts in the Red, Hot video.
“The texts involve all the reasons to be naked or clothed — from sex to humiliation and murder,” said co-curator Ingrid Sischy to Amy Spindler. The Florence projection only ran for a few days in September, during the opening of the Biennale–and Pitti–but the text remained as LED columns in a Lucky Charms marshmallowy pavilion by Arata Isozaki, which was also where visitors could experience the fragrance Lang and Holzer developed together, that smelled, as they said often, like cigarettes, starch, and sperm.
Arata Isozaki pavilions at the Forte Belvedere, Biennale di Firenze, 1996, image: gabbelini sheppard
[The six other pairings of artists & designers were: Tony Cragg & Karl Lagerfeld (lmao); Roy Lichtenstein & Gianni Versace; Julian Schnabel & Azzedine Alaia (which wut?); Mario Merz & Jil Sander (which, same, wtf); Oliver Herring & Rei Kawakubo (hmm); and Damien Hirst & Miuccia Prada (chef kissing fingers emoji).]
Holzer adapted the Arno text again for her 1998 nine-LED column permanent installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Catalan excerpts of it are also engraved in two large benches there now.
As we all know by now, a scrolling LED is a helluva way to take in a text, so it was interesting when Helmut Lang posted an image of the complete [English] text for Holzer’s Arno to Instagram last night. It turns out embedding it in a stream of emoji-filled comments read by a computer is also a helluva way to take in a text, but here we are.
virgil Abloh, J.W. Anderson, Diplo e Ricky Martin erano tutti presenti al progetto di partito di Carsten Höller
Benzoino Luccello
Se fossi a Londra intorno al 2008, potresti ricordare Il Doppio Club: un incongruo pop-up a tema congolese, ospitato in un magazzino del nord di Londra. Creato dall’artista Carsten Höller e bizzarramente sponsorizzato da Prada, il club / bar / ristorante temporaneo ha attratto celebrità, modaisti e club per oltre otto mesi. Probabilmente passerà alla storia come la più eccitante esperienza della vita notturna mai vista nella capitale.
L’EVENTO DI APERTURA DI MIAMI DOPPIO CLUB DI PRADA. FOTO: PIETRO BJORK
Quasi un decennio più tardi, Il Doppio Club è riportato in vita per la sedicesima edizione di Arte Basel Miami. Per soli tre giorni, questa seconda iterazione dell’installazione artistica esperienziale ha preso il sopravvento in uno studio cinematografico degli anni ’20 con un’imponente line-up, titolata dalla Principessa Nokia, Metodo Uomo e la Madonna Nera. È stato lanciato con una prestazione di Wyclef Jean, che ha radunato Miuccia Prada, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Chloe Saggio e Ricky Martin nel suo giardino tropicale illuminato al neon.
Il Prada Doppio Club Miami – in contrasto con la sua edizione originale di Londra – ha una divisione estetica, tra monocromatico e iper-policromatico. Mentre lo spazio esterno sabbioso e il suo palapa bar sono illuminati da neon colorati perfettamente proporzionati, la sezione interna sembra di entrare in un film di Tim Burton – nero, bianco e nient’altro consentito. “Prendo particolare attenzione ai dettagli”, spiega Höller, che aveva incaricato i buttafuori di confiscare le cannucce colorate all’ingresso del secondo spazio, per preservare la sua identità estetica.
VIRGIL ABLOH. FOTO: GETTY
L’artista tedesco nato in Belgio è noto per la natura interattiva del suo lavoro – spesso associato al movimento dell’estetica relazionale – in cui la percezione e il processo decisionale sono centrali. Per il suo sondaggio presso la Hayward Galleria nel 2015, i visitatori sono stati confrontati con una serie di scelte: tra la porta A e la porta B per entrare nella galleria; inghiottire una pillola da una pila sul pavimento o no (pensa Il Matrice blu e rosso); è stato buttato giù dal museo da una delle due gigantesche diapositive attaccate alla facciata della Rivasud (che ha fatto il suo acclamato debutto alla Tate Moderno nel 2006). Lo stesso concetto si applica al club di Miami, dove le persone dovevano scegliere tra due contesti drasticamente contrastanti (sebbene fossero liberi di viaggiare da uno all’altro).
E mentre il “divertimento” gioca chiaramente un ruolo importante nel lavoro di Höller (è in qualche modo sconcertante pensare di essere stato addestrato come scienziato agricolo), Il Doppio Club va ben oltre il puro divertimento. È un viaggio in cui arte, design e musica coesistono.
“IL PRADA DOPPIO CLUB MIAMI”, UN PROGETTO DI CARSTEN HÖLLER PRESENTATO DALLA FONDAZIONE PRADA MIAMI, 5-7 DICEMBRE 2017. FOTO: CASEY KELBAUGH CORTESIA FONDAZIONE PRADA
“A volte vengo a conoscere le culture attraverso la musica”, ci dice Höller, indicando la line-up caraibica e sudamericana del palcoscenico all’aperto (un momento saliente del secondo giorno è stata una performance del locale, 7-pezzo Tallawah Mento Banda ). “Volevo celebrare queste comunità, che sono così centrali nel tessuto culturale di Miami”, continua. Nel frattempo, la musica elettronica pesante ha dominato lo spazio al chiuso, grazie a spettacoli come Mimi Xu (conosciuto anche Coniglio Nebbioso) e il produttore di Chicago la Madonna Nera.
Allo stesso modo, nel 2008 a Londra, il dialogo tra culture occidentali e congolesi è stato al centro dell’attenzione. Höller (che divide il suo tempo tra la Svezia e il Ghana) ha viaggiato in Congo estensivamente negli ultimi 20 anni. Questo interesse, senza dubbio, fu alimentato dalla sua educazione in Belgio, la cui violenta eredità coloniale segnò profondamente il paese centro-africano. “Volevo adottare un approccio più positivistico”, racconta Höller. “Il Congo è un posto enorme. Volevo celebrare quella cultura in tutta la sua vitalità e potenza. ”
HANS ULRICH OBRIST E CARSTEN HÖLLER. FOTO: PIETRO BJORK
Ora, Arte Basel Miami – uno dei momenti più esclusivi dell’agenda culturale internazionale, in cui l’uno per cento affluisce da tutte le parti del mondo – non è esattamente l’ambiente ovvio per un autentico scambio culturale. Quindi, la diversità ha in qualche modo abbandonato l’agenda, a favore dell’esperienza esperienziale glamour e guidata dal marchio? “Tu hai l’intrinseca diversità di Miami, e in più la natura internazionale di Arte Basel”, spiega l’artista. “Era una folla molto variegata, imballata dall’inizio alla fine.”
Indipendentemente da ciò, Il Doppio Club sarà probabilmente ricordato come la cosa più bella che è successo a questa edizione di Arte Basel Miami. E, chissà, potrebbe anche creare un campo in una città vicino a te in futuro: “È certamente una possibilità”, dice Höller, che ritiene che gran parte del suo lavoro possa essere concepito come un doppio club. Si spera che la prossima tappa duri abbastanza a lungo per segnare davvero la coscienza collettiva locale.
“IL PRADA DOPPIO CLUB MIAMI”, UN PROGETTO DI CARSTEN HÖLLER PRESENTATO DALLA FONDAZIONE PRADA MIAMI, 5-7 DICEMBRE 2017. FOTO: CASEY KELBAUGH. CORTESIA FONDAZIONE PRADA
previously, suddenly related: Rem Casafresca
![what happens when you want the unique work, the bigger work, instead of the edition, is you might end up with the more boring work, like rosa de la cruz [rip] did with this set of 16 terra cotta tiles which gabriel orozco poked with his finger a few times each. no disrepect, and these are definitely the best ones selling this week (december 2024), but the other ones are better](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/gabriel-orozco-pluie-delacruz-christies-2024-1024x732.jpg)
