Aesthetica Wish List 2011

The Aesthetica Wish List 2011 offers interesting and creative options for your 'To Buy' list.

Michelle Oh ‘Twig Solitaire Ring’

Michelle Oh is an Indonesian designer and maker based in London. She trained in Jewellery Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and makes the most exquisite pieces. Her work is inspired by the commonplace and the everyday; the relationships we forge with others as well as our own environments. The whole collection is beautiful but we are particularly hoping to find the Twig Solitaire Ring under the tree. Cast from a real twig, this piece highlights Michelle’s interest in organic sources and challenging concepts of luxury.

www.michelle-oh.com

Stack Subscription

Stack is a unique service that brings together the best independent English language magazines from around the world and delivers them directly to your home. If you’re not sure which magazine they read, then this is the perfect failsafe gift. Beautifully made and offering an intelligent alternative view of films, music, art and whatever else crosses their pages, guaranteeing a fresh perspective on the world.

www.stackmagazines.com

The Nest Learning Thermostat

The highly anticipated next move of iPod designer Tony Fadell came, perhaps surprisingly, in the form of a thermostat. The Nest Learning Thermostat programs itself to keep you comfortable and manage your home’s energy use. You can also control the beautiful dial online or from your mobile device. This is truly one of the most interesting home designs of the year.

www.nest.co.uk

MAC X Iris Apfel

At the wonderful age of 90, Iris Apfel’s style influence has come full circle. The American interior design is the subject of cosmetic powerhouse MAC’s latest creative pursuit – a limited edition make-up collection inspired by the ineffable icon. Known for her uncanny ability to mix textures, materials and prints, Apfel’s eponymous colour collection is equally as varied and includes vibrant offerings like a matt teal eyeshadow named Robin’s Egg – definitely not for the faint-hearted.

www.maccosmetics.co.uk

Stella Mccartney ‘Hawaiian-print Top’

This might be a bit last season, but Stella McCartney’s Hawaiian prints are the perfect way to show the world that you won’t be kept down by the January blues. If you can’t quite stretch to these fabulous pieces then you might be able to find something similar in your Dad’s wardrobe.

www.net-a-porter.com

Roberts Bespoke Bike

There is a revival of interest in hand built, bespoke steel frames, which offer unrivalled comfort and durability. Britain still has a wealth of expert frame builders. Roberts, based in Croydon, has a very wide range of styles and options, and reasonable prices. We might just enjoy cycling on one of these.

www.robertscycles.com

Elin Høyland – The Brothers

Norwegian photographer Elin Høyland has captured a moment in time. Fascinated by two brothers, Harald and Mathias Ramen living in rural Norway, she photographed them, documented a way of life that is all but on the brink of extinction. This book is emotive and Harald and Mathias’ story is moving. Shot with sensitivity and realism – the narrative is gripping.

www.elinhoyland.com

Debut Contemporary x Agnetha Sjogren ‘Linea’

The Linea dog is built using original prints from a book printed in 1920 with an introduction by the Swedish professor Carl von Linné. The names of the flowers are in Latin and their very first classifications came from Linné. By making reference to Linné and the original nomenclature he awarded to all flora Sjögren reminds us that although cultural heritage is bound by time and place it has allowed ideas to be transferred the world over by breaking the boundaries of geography and language.

www.culturelabel.com

The Aesthetica Creative Package

What’s not to love about this? This is the ultimate creative package. Inspirational and elegant, this includes our beautiful new anthology of artwork from artists across the world, a book of collective writing to stimulate your imagination, and a stunning DVD of films from the Aesthetica Short Film Festival. On top of all this you also receive a 12 month subscription to Aesthetica, bringing you six issues packed full with the best in contemporary art and culture across the year.

www.aestheticamagazine.com

Louis Vuitton ‘Drawer Box Collections’

Louis Vuitton is of course famous for its associations with travel. This month, the house releases a portfolio of its most iconic travel photographs, shot by the artist Jean Larivière, who, for the past 30 years, has travelled the globe for the house’s Spirit of Travel advertising campaigns, capturing dawn-lit landscapes in destinations such as Patagonia, Thailand, Nepal and Yemem. Just 50 of the drawer box collections have been produced, comprising three sets of unpublished pencil drawings and 20 black and white photographers printed on pure white cotton.

www.louisvuitton.com

2011 Royal Mail Year Book

It’s not yet become cool to collect stamps, but give it a couple of years and philately may just become the activity du jour. Along with a whole year’s Special Stamps, this book includes contributions by experts relating to the Special Stamp issues, which this year include the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, with an exclusive interview with Seb Coe and an item from Melvyn Bragg on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, as celebrated in this year’s Christmas stamps. This is all good stuff, but the best thing about this collection is that it also includes a pack featuring every single stamp so you can not only look at the stamps, but use them as well. No excuses not to send Thank You cards this year.

www.royalmail.com

The English Caravan Company ‘Vintage Style Caravan’

This teardrop shaped classic caravan is inspired by the original caravan designs of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The Tilly caravan is the first of three innovative retro designs from The English Caravan Company, all of which are individually hand built in England, combining traditional workmanship and skills with state of the art materials and contemporary design to create a caravan for today.

www.coggles.com

The Language of Television| Dara Birnbaum | South London Gallery

Text by Paul Hardman

The main room of the South London Gallery is entirely taken up by Birnbaum's latest piece, Arabesque (2011). Before even entering the room, the gently ebbing and flowing piano of Robert Schumann's composition Arabesque Opus 18 reaches out to draw one into the space. Long benches face four screens, the furthest into the room shows video footage of a female pianist playing the music, the rest of the screens alternate between showing others playing the same piece (apparently various amateurs found on YouTube), text pages from a book, and black and white stills from an old film depicting a young woman and an older man conversing in a living room. Subtitles occasionally appear, perhaps from the book, perhaps from the film. A visitor will sit, observe the screens, listen to the soothing piano, and contemplate the text and images while considering the meaning the artist has constructed through this combination of elements. All quite pleasant, but this experience could hardly be in greater contrast to viewing the early film work from Birnbaum's career on display in the upstairs gallery.

Arabesque continues some of the main preoccupations of Birnbaum's ouvre – a fascination with media, (previously television in particular, and in this new work the phenomena of YouTube), and a focus on the representation of women in media. Perhaps her most celebrated piece, subject of a One Work book published by Afterall, is Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) a pre-VCR re-edit of clips from the television series showing Wonder Woman spinning, transforming, deflecting bullets. It is exemplary of her work, which asks questions about the possibilities of female empowerment – Wonder Woman only becomes empowered by becoming a hyper sexualised exaggerated male fantasy, but Birnbaum unsettles this simple reading by seemingly reveling in the transformation.

Arabesque approaches the subject of genre equality by bringing Clara Schumann's story to the foreground with the inclusion of both the stills from the film, Song of Love (1947) – based on the relationship between Robert Schumann and his wife Clara – and the text, which is from Clara's diary. Clara cared for Schumann throughout his troubled periods (he suffered from depression and even madness) and raised their eight children. She too composed music of great quality, but as the female in the relationship it seems that Robert's work would alway be given priority and prominence. The story is compelling, the issue pertinent, but there is a danger that the format of the installation is too pleasant, perhaps it soothes rather than challenges.

The curators have paired Birnbbaum's newest work with some of her oldest – the exhibition includes several of her first films and installations. Six Movements (1975) consists of six films shown simultaneously in a small room, in two rows facing each other. Here there is no possibility of calm and pleasant contemplation. Each film deliberately frustrates through a variety of strategies, and a viewer cannot watch any film without the sight of at least one other in the peripheral vision, and the sound of all six at all times. The sounds that dominate and therefore draw the attention initially come from Addendum: Autism. A young Birnbaum rocks on her haunches, staring out of the screen, straight-faced, intense, panting, disturbing. The two other screens in the same row are shot in the same grainy black and white video footage and show Birnbaum manipulating a chair, scraping it along the floor, adjusting it, sprawling on it. These two films are Chaired Anxieties: Slewed and Chaired Anxieties: Abandoned. A play on the phrase 'shared anxieties', these films are tense to watch and do indeed have a feeling of anxiety which one will share with the artist. The other three films in this room also contain performances of one kind or another as Birnbaum creates tricks through repetition, mirrors and projections creating sequences that further explore the possibilities of performer / camera / viewer.

These films reveal a link to the generation of artists just preceding Birnbaum, the conceptual, performance and body artists of the mid to late sixties, and in another of her works on display here, Attack Piece (1975) it is possible to spot Dan Graham who is one of several artists in the installation's film. This is one of the earliest examples of Birnbaum's work with moving image, and again contains her central themes of gender and media. She is the only female in the film (the installation consists of two projections, a film and still photographs). She sits in a static position while circled by the male artists who take turns filming her in such a way that making an image becomes a form of aggression.

Birnbaum has consistently found ways to investigate the moving image and problemetise it over her long and undersung career. Her body of work more than bears revisiting as we move into a situation where the image, and particularly the simulation possible in the moving image, becomes ever more inescapable. It is encouraging that she has begun to turn her attention to the phenomena of the internet and the new psychological spaces it is creating. The pianists in Arabesque repeat Schumann's composition, and attain some kind of affirmation by uploading their performances to the internet, but each achievement in perhaps lessened and nullified by the presence of the others. Is each performance of Schumann's Arabesque a missed opportunity in which one of Clara Schumann's compositions could have been played, redressing the balance between them? It is not obvious where Birnbaum is going with her new investigations, one can only hope she continues with as much curiosity and originality and continues to 'talk back to the media' for the rest of her already long career. Arabesque has a scale and depth that makes it imperative to visit, but it is the formative films that really give this exhibition its depth. The exhibiton also includes Everything's gonna be... (1976) and Liberty: A Dozen or So Views (1976). Perhaps this exhibition could bring one of our other galleries to consider a much needed full retrospective of this influential and highly relevant artist.

Dara Birnbaum, 09/12/2011 - 12/02/2012, South London Gallery, Peckham Road, London. www.southlondongallery.org

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoy reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary art and culture you should read us in print too. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Captions:
Dara Birnbaum
Arabesque, 2011
Four channel video installation, four stero audio, 6' 30"
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York - Paris
Photo: John Berens

Paloma Varga Weisz | Spirits of my Flesh | Chapter Gallery | Cardiff

Text by Luke Healey

Taking its place in Chapter’s 2011 roll call directly after Resident (30/10/11 – 06/11/11), WITH Collective’s über-conceptual Autumn show, Paloma Varga Weisz’s solo outing at the Cardiff gallery is a difficult one to approach. The former exhibition had seen the café extended into the gallery space, but with the latter the habitual reverent hush has returned. Now, nine ceramic objects and one somewhat anomalous watercolour sit (or perch) in vast pools of white space, each one looking heavy, mute and sullen. In a text accompanying the artist’s 2007 show at Vienna’s Kunsthalle, Angela Stief wrote of Varga Weisz’s work, that “it requires the classical, pre-modern conditions of observation and feeling, of contemplation of the opening up of the works of art and an atmosphere of stillness”. Her advice is appropriate, and there seem to be few alternatives in confronting this artist’s output. But what are we to expect from opening ourselves up in this way?

A great deal of affect, for sure. The surfaces of Varga Weisz’s ceramics seem to smoulder with angst. This is as much an observation of the artist’s rough approach to moulding and glazing her clay as it is a figurative assessment: with the exception of Volcano (2011), Varga Weisz’s subjects are all human, and the haunting effect of such an evocation of roughshod, damaged flesh cannot be easily ignored. A degree of cathexis may well have intruded here – while attempting to find a way into these sculptures I was simultaneously negotiating an agonising toothache. But the effect of Varga Weisz’s work seems equally dependent upon canonical iconographies of suffering: Kneeling (2011) carries the melancholy charge of monumental dedications to the war-widowed, a trope which itself casts its memory back to medieval depictions of the bereaved Virgin Mary. The palimpsest of history and its representations seems to speak through the soot-black glaze that covers this figure’s face, from which her eyes, nose and mouth are eerily picked out in white.

It is significant that this figure is positioned in such a way that we are forced to look down on it. Throughout this show, the craning of the viewer’s neck is repeatedly milked for emotive effect. The contemporary comes flooding in to Varga Weisz’s otherwise stolidly traditional practice with this gambit, for it implies an engagement with works as conceived from the vantage point of a curator. What looks at first glance like a series of passive, autonomous, craft objects opens out onto a more experiential plane: hung high up on the back wall of the main space, the platinum-coated Father, Young (2011) reads like a frustrated, childish interpretation of parental megalomania; while the air around Mother (2011) crackles with a charge of profound alienation, the sort that can only be experienced while looking down upon the person that gave one life as she lies, prostrate, vulnerable, and surrounded by childish wallpaper patterns. Walking round Spirits of my Flesh is like being sucked into the artist’s own psycho-biographical vortex, and it is to Varga Weisz’s credit that she has worked this degree of affect from a subtle tweaking of the white cube’s normative display model.

It is also to the artist’s credit that this psycho-biographical vortex never becomes banal, a common pitfall after more than a century of psychoanalysis. Even with knowledge of Freud’s theorisation of the Elektra Complex and its attendant anxieties in mind, the disembodied-head-in-a-pail that is simply titled Father (2010) is still a powerfully strange object to confront. This may or may not have everything to do with a suggestion that, once again, the traditionalist Varga Weisz is subtly opening the floodgates to contemporary discourses: looking down into this work lucidly evokes the famous scene from the 1995 thriller Seven, directed by David Fincher, in which a box revealed through reactions and dialogue to contain a severed head triggers the film’s denouement.

If there seems to be an imperative in this review to glean aspects from Spirits of my Flesh that situate Varga Weisz’s work within identifiably contemporary concerns, then that should point to what is so prickly about viewing the works on show here. It is easy, and somewhat entertaining, to pull apart Varga Weisz’s traditionally executed works for their art-historical associations – here a Fontana or a Giacometti; there a Rodin and a Grünewald. This somewhat melancholy exercise in referential relativism – one inevitably turns here to the artist’s compatriot, Gerhard Richter – is what might seem to be the determining factor in Varga Weisz’s formal preoccupations, but only at first glance. Neither can her historical reiterations be tied down to the mere spectacular appeal of anachronism. Rather, the historically rich but contemporarily devalued materials from which the artist creates her sculptures suggest an exercise in trans-generational contact that is entirely in tandem with her choice in subject matter.

This affective dialogue with previous – but not lost – generations seems emblematic of a movement within the art world as a whole, into which might also fit Dominik Lang’s installation for the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, where the artist displayed sculptures realised by his father in Eastern Europe’s heyday of Modernism; and Becky Beasley’s 2009 work Brocken, a hinged wooden sculpture whose dimensions are based upon the arm span of her own father. These artists may in fact be illustrating a prediction made by Benjamin Buchloh in 1998, that an era in which all forms of material practice have been more or less equally devalued might prompt among artists, “a more conciliatory approach to the continuing viability of the genres”, and “more moderate claims concerning the social consequences of artistic strategies at large”. It is the jarring tension between the hospitability of Varga Weisz’s works to both the recent and the distant past, and the disorienting personal affect that pours out of it, that makes spending time with this artist such a vital proposition.

Paloma Varga Weisz: Spirits of my Flesh, 25/11/2011 - 04/01/2012, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, Market Road, Cardiff. www.chapter.org

Aesthetica Magazine
We hope you enjoy reading the Aesthetica Blog, if you want to explore more of the best in contemporary art and culture you should read us in print too. You can buy it today by calling +44(0)1904 479 168. Even better, subscribe to Aesthetica and save 20%. Go on, enjoy!

Captions:
Paloma Varga Weisz, Installation at Chapter
Paloma Varga Weisz, Mother, 2011. Glazed ceramic and installation
Paloma Varga Weisz, Mother, 2011. Glazed ceramic and installation
All images taken by Phil Babot and courtesy of Chapter.