UDK Rundgang 08

[imomus]

For some reason -- partly because they're readers of this blog -- I've got friendly, over the last couple of years, with a bunch of students at UDK, the Berlin art college, and specifically from the Art in Context course there. This weekend the UDK opened its doors for its annual Rundgang, a degree show or "walkabout" so vast that one visitor we saw had opted to do it on rollerskates.



There was certainly enough on display to eat up, delightfully, an entire afternoon. Building after building, studio after studio, floor after floor was filled with new student art -- plus the obligatory paint-spattered stools, niched classical friezes with broken fingers, orange gaffertape signage, filthy fridges filled with beer, and other signifiers of eternal art school bohemia.



It almost felt like a biennial, but with a vaster range between the awful and the excellent.



Aus Dem Context, the Art in Context room, was undoubtedly the best thing in the whole school -- and I don't just say that because it's my friends' department! In contrast to the stale rooms of paintings and sculpture elsewhere, Art in Context's multi-disciplinary, meta-ish, museum-like, curatorial approach felt much better in tune with what's happening in the wider art world, as well as being much better connected with society.



There were displays devoted to "the flea as metaphor", Relational Aesthetics tables where "art advisors" guided aspiring artists through the likely pitfalls of their chosen careers, models of the monkey houses at Berlin Zoo, a section about experimental chairs, and a corner by Viola Thiele -- one half of a band called Mosh Mosh -- about the crossover between art and pop music which included big panels about Miss Le Bomb, David Bowie, Sun Ra and Goodiepal. This excited me because I've just written a song called "Goodiepal". Thiele spelled his name wrong in her presentation ("Goodypal"), but redeemed herself by offering this excellent picture of the reclusive Danish electronic music genius:



I think my favourite piece was a chart of elephant representations by Uli Westphal, Elephas Anthropogenus, a tree diagram showing the way humans have classified and represented elephants over the centuries. When we see such representations in museums, it's usually the elephant which is seen to evolve over the millenia, from mammoths to today's Indian and African species. In Uli's diagram (from her diploma Vom Elpendier zum Olifaunt) it's our own perceptions which change, from the ludicrously phantasmagorical to the banal.



It's also a piece about drawing, about hermeneutics, about the style of didactic design, and about a certain German pedagogy. I can't help relating it to my Click Opera piece The blind gaijin and the Japanese elephant, which was also about how we know what we claim to know, and how we draw what we see.

More rundgang pictures on my Flickr page. Oh, and if you're in Berlin, don't forget that I play tonight at West Germany!

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, it worked okay on my desktop and iPod alike!

Is that better now?

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

That worked, will delete these two comments now.

[bikerbar.livejournal.com]

"n contrast to the stale rooms of paintings and sculpture elsewhere,"

you've made it pretty clear where you stand on the so-called "traditional arts" in earlier posts, like the one comparing a video of a dirty sink with Michelangelo's David, and here you are at it again, the attack on traditional media, and the elevation of conceptual, contectual art as so avant and 21st century.

Do you think painting and sculpture are dead and shouldn't be pursued any more?
Do you believe in the avant-garde?
Do you feel like a revolutionary?

[(Anonymous)]

Whatever now is avant-garde - if such a thing is even possible in this postmodern age - it sure as hell isn't conceptual art, which has been around since Duchamp, has been dominant since the 60s, and became truly establishment in the early 90s with the YBAs. Once again, Momus talks the "make it new" talk, but ultimately sides with the hipster conformists.

Dictionary of Quotations

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"He seems to think that Relational Aesthetics is old hat because it's been going for five years, but painting isn't because it's been going for five hundred."

Momus on art critic Brian Sewell

Re: Dictionary of Quotations

[(Anonymous)]

There's a qualitative difference between something that's been going for five years and something that's been going for almost a hundred. Anyone with even the most tangential interest in art will have heard of Duchamp's urinal. Anyone with even the vaguest intellectual curiosity will be able to conjure up images of dead sharks in tanks or Emin's unmade bed. Conceptual art is what the man on the Clapham omnibus thinks contemporary art is, whether he likes it or not. It's the art that the big establishment galleries and big establishment art prizes are all about. It is deeply, deeply mainstream now, within middle class culture. I'm not saying there isn't interesting stuff going on there, but as an art genre, it's as conventional as painting ever was.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Uli should make that piece into a website. It would be fun to click through.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Oh, good, because I was getting worried you were running out of fangirls.

lol dear old Bowie, the only serious musician in the world, ever.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Her website is quite extensive, check it out! I'd think her Retrozoology (http://uliwestphal.110mb.com/retrozoology.html) piece would be right up your neck of the woods! Unfortunately I couldn't get the audio samples to play...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Hah. Well, there goes a couple hours...

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

Thought you might like this, which I recently got to see in Madrid's patio maravillas, a squat-cultural centre :

"The project “THEM” by Artur Zmijewski (Warsaw, 1966) is a social experiment he produced in a workshop with members of different (and opposed) organisations from Poland (Conservatives: Patriotic Catholics, and the Polish Nationalist Youth. Left-wing socialists: Democrats and Freedom Fighters…). Each one of them was asked to represent itself with a symbol they were supposed to present on a canvas, allowing the other organisations to intervene on it. The piece shows the process of creation and intervention of the different ideological symbols and the (aesthetic and political) negotiations and discussions of the participants."

I was aiming to post a link to it on youtube, seems to have been removed though....

Before the film, a talk was given by Ayse Gueleç, Head of Inter-Culturality and Learning at the Kultur Zentrum Schlachthof in Kassel. She descibed the issues involved in a cultural space which is really a part of the local community - run by the people with the people, through local networks and associations representing a wide spectrum of the population. The schlachthof is described as 'as a truly public space, where diverse collectives and cultural communities could converge and offer educational, exhibitive, and art mediation activities.'. http://www.liquidaciontotal.org/al_matadero.htm

....Now there's an encouraging contemporary art project guaranteed to lift cynicism, IMHO!