Aesthetica April/May - Issue 40 out today

I am so pleased to bring you issue 40 of Aesthetica Magazine. It’s an unbelievable feeling, especially when I look all the way back to issue one. Creating this magazine has been one of the most exhilarating things that I’ve ever done in my life.

In the spirit of celebration, this issue and the magazine’s future plans are incredibly exciting. In art, James Turrell constructs a spectacular installation in Järna, Sweden as part of See! Colour! Critically acclaimed photographer and director, Wim Wenders, returns to London with images that breathe life into landscapes with Places, strange and quiet. Sculptors Alice Anderson and Kate MccGwire present Bound at the new arts venue in King’s Cross, London, All Visual Arts. Zoë Gray discusses the ideas behind Making Is Thinking, which is currently on at Witte De With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, while Portuguese fashion photographer, Pedro Janeiro, discusses the cinematic in his highly aesthetic images.

In film, Matt Bissonnette’s latest film, Passenger Side, re-examines the idea of the road trip. We also catch up with Genna Terranova, the Senior Programmer for this year’s Tribeca Film Festival about what visitors can expect this year. In music, Esben and the Witch discuss what it’s like to reach notoriety so quickly and then we survey the mechanics behind the beloved synthesiser.

In theatre, taking performance to a new level, the One-on-One Festival offers visitors a chance to participate in 28 individual and intimate performances. Finally, Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué discusses his latest work, The People are Demanding, which is influenced by the ongoing conflicts in Lebanon and the Middle East since the Lebanese Civil War.

Inside this issue, you’ll find everything that you need to keep you informed about this season’s latest exhibitions and releases. Enjoy!

To get this issue visit your local stockist or the Aesthetica shop.

Outpost – Critical Spaces @ Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest

Review by Adam Harangozó

Stepping into the exhibition, it’s immediately evident why it is called Critical Spaces. It is in a small room, and all the exhibited items are visible from the entrance. In its resemblance to a warehouse, there is a feeling of almost post-apocalyptic desolation. But in Outpost it’s not the actual spaces that are important, rather the extended or shortened, and fictional ones, created by the exhibited items. Slovakian and Hungarian artists interpret the critical spaces of their region.

From the outside Stealth – First Form 3 by Péter Tamás Halász and Gyula Domián looks like a stealth aircraft made of polyethylene foil, but inside the living space with pillows and blanket shows that it is in fact a homeless shelter. The possible interpretations are created by the oppositions of the work: dissonances of inside and outside, material and function. One method of maintaining the illusion of advance is to turn a blind eye on the serious social problems - to set them to stealth mode. Huge amounts of money are spent using high-technology to cover problems, under which there is the disillusioning, low-tech reality. The installation almost cuts the exhibition space in half, making sure that the act of being stealth can only be seen as ironic.

Péter Tamás Halász’s Light Tent is a metaphor for technical advance. We see two frames on the wall, two fluorescent tubes in each, and mirrors behind them. The tubes are extended by the mirror in an angle that creates a semicircular shape resembling a tent. It is a mirror of our society: we are surrounding ourselves with electronic assets, and we begun to use them to seclude ourselves from each other. Advance becomes cyclic; society is cut to individual pieces, everyone hiding in their own high-tech tent.

A corner of the room is separated by Tomáš Džadoň’s Super Flat. It is the front wall of a wooden house with an entrance leading to a small inner space. But this space is illusory: if someone steps through the door, the bricks of wood in the wall turn automatically inside out, the inner space becomes the outside of the house, thus entering becomes impossible; the concept of private space becomes meaningless. Being constantly on the outside exposed to possible surveillance is strongly reminiscent of a socialist atmosphere. Not only space, but the mere possibility of space is illusion: instead of real wood, the wall is made of polyurethane beams, as if it only would be a part of theatrical scenery.

Untitled by Ádám Kokesch builds upon the tension between real and fictional worlds. The installation is covered by a red wooden shell; the viewer has to bend down to get under it, an alienating effect. Under the shell there is a clear abstract, Mondrianlike ambiance. Besides the geometrical shapes, there is a small box illuminated from behind. Inside we can see a picture of a sunlit, spacious room of a house. Looking though this little hole, we can see another world, free of abstractions, not sheltered – as if in the effort of protecting our private, abstract notions, we are losing connection with the freedom of space.

In Outpost we see a composite of fictional spaces creating a loose atmosphere which we could call the post-socialist identity of Central European countries – but as with Critical Spaces, maybe this identity is also artistically constructed.

Outpost – Critical Spaces continues until 23 April at
Trafo House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest. For more information visit Trafo.

Image: Pavla Sceranková: Nyitva Zárva / Open Closed, video, 2008
Courtesty Trafo and the artist

Resemblances, Sympathies, and Other Acts - Jeremy Millar @ CCA, Glasgow

Review by Alistair Quietsch

Seeped in conceptual layering and research, Jeremy Millar’s current show at the CCA is at times, a seemingly disparate show of literary nods with a thorough post-modernist upbringing in the use of meta-narratives and referencing. However, it's visually intriguing, as Millar seems unconstrained to a particular medium and seems happy to use various modes of expression, from wooden sculpture to video. Upon entering the larger gallery space immediately on the left is an unforgettable piece that resonates throughout the show even after viewing: the complete lifelike cast of the artist lying water logged and pale-white-dead on the floor. The piece is titled Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (The Willows) (2011) and was commissioned by the CCA itself and lies there, with suspicious gouges in its skin, begging for attention.

Self Portrait, as the introductory piece to the show, is an attractive starting point as it lays out the conceptual methodology Millar pursues. He mostly references authors as inspiration for pieces like Algernon Blackwood, a horror short story writer who dabbled in occultism and whose work, The Willows (1907), is accredited in the title. In Portrait he also references the movie adaptation of Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1957), shot in and around Glasgow. The piece can be seen as the formal representation of characters and plots created from these fictions. Millar employed the use of Grant Mason FX after seeing the life-like drowned body of the female victim in Young Adam and decided to create his own narrative for the CCA commission. As the blurb cites the piece also references Hippolyte Bayard’s 1840 photograph Self Portrait as a Drowned Man raising questions of paradoxes within the idea of the artist being dead yet being able to create. The text reiterates this and it is an interesting question, since semantically/etymologically you could produce self-portraits after death if you yourself were the titled dead portrait.

Millar’s use of literary sources as starting points can again be seen in A Firework for W.G. Sebald (2005), where he has taken the inquisitive path of looking into W. G. Sebald, a German author who died at the side of the A146 in 2001. In the authors book Rings of Saturn (1995), a walking tour of East Anglia, he photographs a lighthouse in Southwold, which also appeared in the film Drowning by Numbers (1988) which in itself has a character that marks the death of each person he knows by lighting off a firework. Millar takes this ceremony in hand and repeats it for the Sebald car crash site, with the blurb strenuously stating: “Sebald’s face seems to appear in the smoke, as if in acknowledgement of the gesture.”

The breadth of Millar’s research has to be applauded, and his use of varying materials from photography to sculpture is interesting and adventurous, like the burnt repetitions of Sol Lewitt’s cubes, reflectively titled Incomplete Open Cubes (Burnt) (2010). However as in the Sebald photographs, his use of ritual as the unifying theme between works seems almost secondary even though it is the core of the show: Lewitt’s statement of conceptual artists being mystics, the Virgilian Bronze Fly conjured to protect Naples and the droning kaleidoscope video piece The Writing of Stones (using text from Roger Caillois who is obviously a strong influence) which connects author to ritual to art product again in what is obviously Millar’s own rite to conceptual art. Millar clearly has an interest in literature and theory, his use of novels and stories as the starting point for pieces is exciting and seems full of potential plot twists and narratives.

Resemblances, Sympathies, and Other Acts continues at CCA, Glasgow until 7 May. For more information visit www.cca-glasgow.com

Image: Incomplete Open Cubes (Burnt)(2010)
Painted wood; burnt wood
Courtesy the artist and CCA, Glasgow