Tell Us How You See It - We Want to Know

Are you a cultural enthusiast? Do you visit exhibitions; attend the theatre and other various performances?

We are looking to expand our network on the popular Aesthetica Blog and get you, the readers involved. The Aesthetica Blog is a well-visited site that posts information from around the world regarding the latest in contemporary arts. We are looking to expand our network, and are inviting you the chance to become one of our regular contributors – acting as a correspondent from your local area. Are you in London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Oxford, or anywhere in between? Maybe a bit further a field? Dublin, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Beijing? Where ever you are, if you’d like the chance to contribute to the blog please get in touch.

Please send your CV and a cover letter to bloggers@aestheticamagazine.com demonstrating why you feel your style and approach would be suitable for the Aesthetica Blog, moreover the Aesthetica brand. It might be a good idea to check out not only the blog, but the magazine before applying.

We will be accepting up to 10 lucky people to take part in this unique project. Contributors will receive a complimentary Aesthetica subscription.

Marina Abramović: Personal Archaeology

Marina Abramović (born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia), is without question one of the most important artists of our time. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her extraordinary video installation/performance piece Balkan Baroque. I was fortunate enough to have a lengthy conversation with the artist, just days before she began her latest ongoing performance, The Artist Is Present at MoMa in NYC. She is an incredibly fascinating woman, dedicated to her craft but always in pursuit of taking her work, moreover, herself to the next level pushing all boundaries aside.

Personal Archaeology a new show opening at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City, is an intimate look into the development of Abramović as a seminal artist, beginning with her historic performance work of the 1970s through to her most recent work from 2010. Private Archaeology, a sculpture exhibited in the first gallery, has not been shown before in the US. This highly personal work from 1997-99 consists of a large wooden cabinet containing numerous drawers in which artefacts from Abramović's life are displayed. The public is encouraged to look through the drawers to view the variety of revealing objects and mementos that Abramović has collected, including photographs, handwritten notes and other material that has influenced her work.

The exhibition also includes an entire gallery dedicated to photographs from one of Abramović's earliest performances, Rhythm 10, in which she stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers in rapid motion, changing the knife each time she cut her finger. She repeated this process twice; tape recording it on the first occasion so that she could mimic the movements on the second.

A selection of Abramović's iconic photographs is installed in the main gallery, providing a visual time line of the evolution of this pioneering performance artist. Works such as Rhythm O, Lips of Thomas, Carrying the Skeleton and Cleaning the House chart the trajectory of her career over the last 40-plus years. The main gallery also includes one of her newest videos, which is a startling image of Abramović, her face covered in gold leaf, staring out at the viewer. The faint ruffling of the gold leaf is the only motion in the video and draws the viewer in close for further inspection, whereby they ultimately find themselves meeting Abramović's direct gaze.

Her work is included in many major public collections worldwide including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland; the Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven, Holland; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern, London.

Personal Archaeology is running concurrently with the major MoMA exhibition, Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, on view at the museum until 31May. During the MoMA's first-ever retrospective of a performance artist, Abramović is performing daily during the entire run of the exhibition, for a total of over 700 hours, in her longest solo piece to date. Abramović sits in silence in the museum's atrium during public hours, inviting visitors to take the seat across from her for as long as they choose within the time frame of the museum's hours of operation.

Personal Archaeology opens May 8 and continues until 19 June at the Sean Kelly Gallery, NYC www.skny.com

To read more about Abramović, read the current issue of Aesthetica – for an in-depth interview with the artist.

Image (c) Marina Abramović
Golden Mask (2009) courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery.

Mark Wallinger at carlier | gebauer as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin

Mark Wallinger opens tomorrow in Berlin as part of Gallery Weekend with new works. This is the artist’s fourth show at carlier | gebauer. The first piece, Steine (2010) is comprised of one thousand numbered stones that cover the floor in the main room. Immediately probing the viewer to ask, is there an order to this system? What happens when we number something? However, there’s no taxonomy involved. These stones, with their inherent contrast of human labour and the monumental timescale of geology, catalyse thoughts of mortality, of catalogues of the vanished and the anonymous.

Creating an uneasy sense of contemplation through the surrounding photographs - camera phone images taken from websites dedicated to pictures of unknown people who have fallen asleep on public transport. Now these photographs, magnified, make up The Unconscious (2010). Liberated from the tense consciousness of the waking state, their faces seem to exist somewhere beyond them, and yet, following an unconscious ordering principle, they resemble themselves more in this lapsed state than when awake. Wallinger’s inversions of individual and social consciousness are continued in a series of further compositions in this exhibition. In Word (2010), a wall filled with text from The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250 – 1918. However all punctuation and grammatical signs have been removed. This renegotiate the meaning, making it disorientating looking for rhythm and rhyme. Without titles, devoid of those conventions that otherwise endow this publication with its incontrovertible authority, a single word containing centuries of linguistic and aesthetic evolution.

In The Magic of Things (2010), Wallinger edits, in chronological order, all the unpopulated moments and spaces where acts of sorcery occur; in scenes that reference memories of suburban culture, in locations peripheral to the main action, in its unconscious interiors. Removed from their agency, floating teacups, self-mending mirrors and a car that arrives from the afterlife through the living room wall all acquire a level of supernaturalism as the internal rationale of the fiction is removed. There is an awkward parity here between The Magic of Things and contemporary art’s exorcism of the “aura” of the artwork, where the recipient of cherished ideas and peerless skills of the now absent artist animate inanimate material. And yet for all the obvious trickery we are not disenchanted.



In the second room Wallinger opens up an auditorium: 100 second-hand chairs, which are all different. They have been organised in ten miscellaneous rows of ten. Quite literally, making his mark, the word MARK is handwritten in marker pen on the rear of each chair’s back-rest and white threads run like perspective lines from each of these to meet their vanishing point.

In According to Mark (2010), everything belongs to MARK. In the reflection of the gaze the artist becomes his own audience here, his only perspective. In his book The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze describes a critique of the dominant ideology, which no longer seeks to pull back the curtain behind which it assumes truth will be found, but instead feels its way across the curtain, moving along it and mimicking its structures. Wallinger’s works unfurl across this surface. In his oeuvre social consciousness is dragged up to the surface.

If you’re in Berlin this weekend, don’t miss this show. Opening 1 May and continuing until 5 May.

For further information visit: www.carliergebauer.com or www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de