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Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis

4th June-27th July 2007

"Hulk Elvis represents for me both Western and Eastern culture, a sense of a guardian, a protector, that at the same time is capable of bringing the house down"
--Jeff Koons

Gagosian Gallery has opened Jeff Koons's new series of paintings, Hulk Elvis. These large paintings burst with energy and precision yet mystify with their complex permutations and combinations of figurative and abstract elements. A charged mix of inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, The Incredible Hulk, and The Liberty Bell jostle against realistically rendered landscapes, gestural paintings, steam engines and horse-drawn carriages, negative silhouettes, and underlying dot screens.

In these paintings, whose titles string together dominant compositional elements – Hulk Elvis I, Monkey Train, Geisha, Landscape (Waterfall), Girl (Dots) – the exuberance of image and texture is rendered, paradoxically, with an uncanny level of exactitude into a wealth of smooth, vivid detail. Images are manipulated and interwoven into volatile palimpsests of color and form. In these spectacular pictorial inventions – which reject any attempt by the eye to find a resting place – brightly colored silhouettes slice through multiple layers, contours of images surface rhythmically across the field of vision, and forms loom and recede in the swirling delirium of color and line.

Geisha, 2007; Oil on canvas,102 x 138 inches (259 x 351 cm)

From the outset of his controversial career, Koons turned the traditional notion of the work of art and its context inside out. Focusing on unexpected yet banal objects as models for his work, from vacuum cleaners and inflatable flowers to novelty drink caddies, china figurines, and children's toys, he eschewed typical standards of 'good taste' in art, instead embracing what he perceives as conventional middle-class values in order to expose the vulnerabilities of aesthetic hierarchies and value systems. Koons's declared strategies are to make art beautiful, to strive for objectivity, to give back the familiar, and to reflect, and thus empower, the viewer. Moving through various conceptual constructs including the new, the banal and the heavenly, his work has evolved from its literal, deadpan beginnings into visceral manifestations that dazzle the eye and confound the senses.

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Orlan: Le Récit

Saint-Etienne, France 26th May-26th August

Orlan’s Retrospective will tale place from 26th May to 26th August 2007 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, the greatest retrospective ever organized on the artist’s work ; “ORLAN: Le Récit.” It is the opportunity to pay homage to the artist on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, in her hometown of Saint-Etienne. The exhibition is curated by Lòrànd Hegyi and Eugenio Viola. The French performance artist Orlan was born in the industrial town of St. Étienne, France, has got an extraordinary position in the contemporary art world. She states “art is a dirty job, but someone has to do it” and makes her dirty job with her own body in the most incredible meaning of the word. In her artistic performances she defines as Carnal Art, Orlan transforms her body and her face through surgical operations to criticize the beauty concept of the men-power and the construction of female-subjects in the modern Western societies.

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Meir Gal: Longing for the Ghetto

Tel Aviv, Israel 1st June- 30th June 2007

Meir Gal’s one person show at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art is the second part in a series titled “The Story of Israeli Art”. The first part was shown in 1995 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

In this show Meir Gal continues to survey and document the writings of numerous writers, critics, curators, etc. active in the Israeli art world since the 1940’s. He selects various sentences and statements, uses them as quotations and places them in a new context alongside popular images from contemporary Israeli life. By doing so Gal reframes Israeli writing about art and lays out the textual conditions under which visual artists have been operating for decades.

Also included in the show are two objects titled “Sky Shield for the State of Israel” as well as "The Complete Jewish Lexicon" and "The Concise Israeli Lexicon".

Meir Gal would like to acknowledge and thank all the writers quoted in this show, but are too numerous to mention.

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The La Caze Collection / Paintings

Paris, France 26th April-7th September 2007

In 1869, the Louvre received the most fabulous bequest in its entire history! This was the year that the exceptional collection of 583 paintings acquired by Dr. Louis La Caze (1798–1869) joined the museum’s holdings. This bequest included some of the greatest masterpieces of French and European painting from the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as lesser known works, thus enriching the French national collections. A number of these canvases by Rembrandt, Ribera, Rubens, Van Dyck, as well as by Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard had never been presented to the public before and filled gaps in areas that had previously been neglected. These works had a particularly strong influence on late 19th-century artists.

The design of the exhibition, which provides an opportunity to view major works from the La Caze collection held in the Louvre or in regional museums, with the paintings grouped together closely and hung on purple picture rails, is consciously reminiscent of typical 19th-century presentations. The exhibition includes documents relating to Louis La Caze and several canvases by artists of his time influenced by the collection (Manet, Fantin-Latour, among others). A special leaflet has also been prepared pinpointing the locations of all the other paintings bequeathed by La Caze that are displayed on a permanent basis at the Louvre. The presentation of this remarkable selection of works centered on Watteau’s Gilles allows visitors to fully appreciate the quality and consistency of the collector’s choices and serves as an event encouraging us to rediscover a key figure in the history of taste.

This exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of Barclays Bank and of Countess Serge de La Bédoyère, a descendant of the La Caze family.

Curator(s) : Exhibition curator: Guillaume Faroult, curator, Department of Paintings, Musée du Louvre, assisted by Sophie Eloy.

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Yevgeniy Fiks / Communist Party USA

Moscow, Russia 24th May 2007

Marat Guelman Gallery has opened Yegeniy Fiks’s exhibition on 24th May: Communist Party USA

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. At the core of his work is the critique of post-Soviet identity politics. His work often departs from historical research and is usually approached through analytical, conceptual, or interventionist tactics. Areas of consistent interest include 20th century Russian history, Soviet-American relations, and the Communist legacy in today's West.

Exhibition "Communist Party USA" consists of portraits of current members of the American Communist Party, which Fiks painted from life at the Party's National Headquarters in New York in 2006-2007 as well as blitz interviews and biographies of his sitters that he compiled. Also included is a Russian translation of the latest (2005) edition of the Program of Communist Party USA and the artist's own collection of books on the history of American Communism.

"My intention is to inform. These paintings portray those who identify as Communists in the present-day United States. It's about stating facts – and the fact is that there are Communists in the USA circa 2006. How can a post-Soviet subject come to terms with the fact of existence of American Communists today? How can she explain it? Communism is dead in Eastern Europe but Abdul, Sheltrees, Dan and others whom I painted are living, breathing, and thinking New Yorkers of the 2000s. It's precisely in this context of the proclaimed death of Communism and the end of the Cold War that I focus my attention on American Communists today."

Why I Paint American Communists?
Yevgeniy Fiks

I've been asked on several occasions recently Why I paint portraits of American Communists now, in 2006. Those who questioned me, including members of the art community (most of whom were politically on the Left as a matter of fact) pointed out that there is still hidden discursive dangers in addressing Communism today and that the New Left must continue to divorce themselves from the past of Communism, let alone the present-day Communist Party USA, a discursive living dead.

The fact of having contemporary Communists as the subject of my paintings and their apparently realistic language was read by my critics as a gesture of either radical and irresponsible affirmation of the horrors of Communism or a type of sinister nostalgia for utopia. My critics seemed to be disturbed by the fact that American Communists in my paintings appeared "too human" and "dressed too casually" and that I painted them directly from life without irony and deconstruction, that has been a commonplace for tackling this subject matter in progressive Russian art ever since the 1970s. However, among various reactions to this project, my all time favorite was an earnest and naïve question "Are you a Communist yourself?" directed at me, which took me mentally for a moment back to the Cold War era, far away from the America of the War on Terrorism.

I want to try to refute some of these charges and accept others, while perhaps creating ground for a whole new set of charges.

I came across the Communist Party USA in fall of 2005 and went to their national headquarters on West 23rd street in New York City. The Party occupied four floors of a six-story building. As I later learned, the rest of the building (which the Party in fact owns) they rent out, including to an artist's supplies store on the ground floor. The headquarters was not much different from other business offices that I've seen here in the States. It was rather modest, with cubicles, desks, computers, phones, sentimental pictures of loved ones, est. One would have never guessed that it was the office of the Communist Party if it wasn't for abundance of portraits of Lenin and Marx on walls in almost every room.

The atmosphere in the office was of normality, routine, and "business as usual". The first person that I met there was Jarvis Tyner, the Executive Vice Chair of Communist Party USA, an older African-American man who has been with the Party for 40 years, a sidekick of Gus Hall. Believe it or not, but Tyner gave me his business card. The card was exactly the same size and format as any other business card but carried the traditional hammer and sickle "logo". A business card being one of the attributes of the capitalist economy, I couldn't get away from an uneasy feeling that CPUSA has become just another non-for-profit organization, with an office, business cards, an.org web address, est. As far as I was concerned, this was a site of the post-Soviet condition, which I experienced on West 23rd Street in Manhattan.

Having been broad up in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the 1970s and 1980s, I'm forever connected to the history of Communism whether I like it or not. This relationship is complicated, characterized by trauma, denial, mourning, and disavowal. It is precisely because of the fact that I lived through the last two decades of the "really existing" Socialism, I have very little patience for both the Communist ideology and the practice of Socialism, an attitude natural for an overwhelming majority of thinking/responsible (post) Soviet subjects. On the current American political spectrum, my own politics is only slightly to the left of the Democratic Party. It's not Communist ideology that I'm interested in, but the historical and personal dimensions of it, as a way of understanding, articulating, and critically-engaging both Soviet history and the post-Soviet present.

I paint my subjects – current members of the Communist Party USA – in trivial interiors of their New York offices and wearing everyday cloth. These paintings are a site of struggle against specters of both Socialist Realism and Sots Art, which are inevitably evoked when a genre of a "portrait of a Communist" is concerned. The project also problematizes the historical relationship of the medium of oil painting to the rhetoric of both Socialist Realism and Sots Art, as painting was clearly the most paradigmatic form for both. I had to use painting for this project as these two ideologies had to be addressed by their own means.

My intention is to inform. These paintings portray those who identify as Communists in the present-day United States. It's about stating facts – and the fact is that there are Communists in the USA circa 2006. The existence of Communists in the USA, a quintessential late-capitalist nation, fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc is highly subversive and problematic for a post-Soviet subject. How can a post-Soviet subject come to terms with the fact of existence of American Communists today? How can she explain it? Communism is dead in Eastern Europe but Abdul, Sheltrees, Dan and others whom I painted are living, breathing, and thinking New Yorkers of the 2000s. It's precisely in this context of the proclaimed death of Communism and the end of the Cold War that I focus my attention on American Communists today. It's the contradiction between the notion of death of Communism and a sense of life emanating from those whom I painted that is so disturbing.

This project is about the meaning of an act of painting a portrait of an American Communist in New York today, in 2006. A fundamental question here is How can one approach painting a Western Communist today? From what political, ideological, aesthetic, personal or otherwise position can one attempt that? Does the contemporarineity afford us an option of addressing Communism today with choices that extend beyond the prescribed affirmation, critique, or post-ideological neutrality? Are there any alternatives?

I would not have done this project in the 1970s and 1980s, when the future of Communism was still in question. Back then I would most definitely have done what Komar and Melamid and other Sots Artists did. And I applaud them for what they did! Even now it's not so easy not to fall into the trap of Sots Art and not to represent American Communists as Soviet Communist leaders in official Soviet art – with a low point of view, as heroes, larger than life, with the masses in the background – and therefore to ridicule them through the ironic gaze. However, now when the demise of Communism is a reality as objective as it gets, the tactics of Sots Art seized being adequate for addressing this subject. Today, a more direct, observational method (at least in the realm of representational strategies) appears to be more fitting and critical than deconstruction. Especially after I've got to know members of CPUSA personally I felt that I had to paint them directly from life, observationally.

Indeed, these paintings are indifferent toward 20th century ideologies, but not toward their subject. I don't reaffirm or critique my sitters on the basis of their political believes. However, I'm affirmative and very interested in them as individuals that they are. This project is about the politics of everydayness in the West, about the triviality of being a Subject in today's United States, even a Communist subject. These are portraits of individuals, of Americans, who happened to be Communists.

I don't sympathize with the cause of American Communists, but I empathize with them as subjects in the context of the legacy of the impossible 20th century. This empathy is an oblique projection of a sense of my personal (as a post-Soviet subject) guilt and responsibility, if you will, for the Soviet history. And Western Communists are an integral part of our Soviet history from which there is no escape. It was us who instilled hope in them, then misinformed, and later betrayed them. However, there is an element of rational self-interest to my appeal for such a responsibility. I see this assumption of responsibility on the part of a post-Soviet subject for Western Communism (both past and present) as a necessary stage in her effective dealing with the consequences of the traumas of both the Soviet history and the post-Soviet present.

I tried to put my finger on precisely what type of fiction American Communism is in 2006. These paintings are portraits of people in the work place. Members of Communist Party USA are depicted in their offices and not in the streets, where revolutionary struggle used to take place in the past. The paradigmatic site of today's American Communist Party is in the office, behind the desk, in front of a computer. These are individuals and no longer part of a collective and they are employed by an organization called "Communist Party USA".

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Venice Bienale 52nd International Art Exhibition

Venice, Italy 10th June-21st November 2007

The 52nd International Art Exhibition from La Biennale di Venezia, entitled Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense, takes place in Venice from June 10 to November 21, 2007.

The director of the 52nd International Art Exhibition is the American curator, critic and artist Robert Storr.

The exhibition venues are the Italian Pavilion and the national pavilions at the Giardini, the Corderie and the Artiglierie at the Arsenale, as well as other venues in Venice.

52nd International Art Exhibition  Speech by the President of the Biennale di Venezia
Davide Croff 

Venice, June 7th, 2007

The International Art Exhibition’s specific symbolic value goes beyond the Venice Biennale premises, which it contributed to found over 110 years ago.
The Art Biennale has always borne witness to trends, schools, movements, avant-garde individualities, constituting a hub for artistic research where contemporary arts are the focal point of a creative international laboratory.
International challenges have, however, called for a renewal of the exhibition and the promotion of contemporary art. For this reason, three years ago, the Foundation began to redefine its own role, providing the Biennale’s artistic directors with longer-term perspectives for their work.

Robert Storr is the first critic from the United States to hold the post of president in the extensive history of the International Art Exhibition. Think with the senses – Feel with the mind. Art in the present tense is the result of the vision which he has conveyed beyond the frontiers of international art, looking not only towards rapidly evolving artistic languages, but also towards personalities, countries and emerging trends from all five continents.

Robert Storr has therefore chosen to include a Turkish Pavilion at the Artiglierie dell’Arsenale, as well as an exhibition representing African contemporary art. In addition, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 52nd Exhibition will be awarded to Malick Sidibé, an artist born in Mali, epitomizing the worldwide value of this Biennale, which is also highlighted, among other things, by the record number of national contributions:

76 foreign countries will be displaying their own artistic avant-gardes, freely and autonomously, in this edition of the Art Biennale. Some of these countries, such as Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Moldavia, Mexico and Lebanon, a country on the difficult road to peace and reconstruction, are taking part for the first time. China also confirms its presence at the Arsenale, which hosts another debut in the Visual Arts with the Italian Pavilion, created in collaboration with the General Direction for Contemporary Art and Architecture of the Ministry of the Cultural Heritage and Affairs. This collaboration continues, also at the Arsenale, with the Premio per la Giovane Arte Italiana (the Prize for Young Italian Art) at the Sala Marceglia. The Venice Pavilion goes back to its roots, marking the return of art from the Veneto region with a tribute to Emilio Vedova, with the contribution of the Veneto Region, and the City and Province of Venice.

There are also 34 collateral events in which the artists, with the support of international cultural institutions, will be free to express their own artistic experience. Some of these initiatives are collective exhibitions with a national theme, others are monographs of famous artists. All these events expand the Exhibition throughout the entire city of Venice, including the islands of San Servolo, San Lazzaro degli Armeni and Sant’Erasmo, and complete the plurality of artistic forms; this extension enhances the international dimension of the exhibition, bringing the total number of the Biennale exhibitions in the historic city center of Venice up to 70, including the countries not hosted in the pavilions.

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Dali & Film

London, UK Until 9th September 2007

One of the most enjoyable exhibitions of the Tate Modern could be seen until 9 September: Dali&Film.
Salvador Dalí (1904–89) is one of the most famous and notorious artists of the twentieth century. This unprecedented exhibition brings together more than one hundred works by Dalí, including major paintings, photographs, drawings and films, in order to explore the central role of cinema in his work as both inspiration and an outlet for experimentation.

Overflowing with imagination, the exhibition displays collaborations between Dalí and legendary film makers, such as Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock and the Marx brothers, presenting some of the most stunning images from twentieth century cinema. It includes his early collaborative projects with Buñuel in L’Age d’or and Un Chien andalou - featuring the infamous image of an eye being cut by a razor. Dalí explored his obsessions in all modes of practice, so that the relationship between his paintings and his films provides a fascinating insight into his imagination.
As well as showing how Dalí fashioned film imagery from his paintings, Dalí & Film also exposes how he responded to cinema. Film was a major passion throughout his career and Dalí was one of the first artists for whom film was a key influence as well as a creative outlet. In his younger years he loved the bizarre slapstick humour of Hollywood comedians, such as Harry Langdon, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He saw this mass entertainment as an antidote for the pretensions of high culture and this cinematic vision became a model for his own work. Dalí & Film presents this great artist in a light you have never seen before.

Exhibition organised by Tate Modern in collaboration
with the FUNDACIÓ GALA-SALVADOR DALÍ.

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santralistanbul Pre-opening Exhibitions

İstanbul, 11- 26 July 2007

Istanbul's new culture, arts and education center “santralistanbul” opened its doors on Wednesday. The new center is a project led by İstanbul Bilgi University to convert the Silahtarağa Power Plant into a museum of contemporary arts. Pre-opening Exhibitions are realized with the collaboration of three leading contemporary art institutions from Europe: CENTRE POMPIDOU – Contemporary Perspectives , ZKM – Touch Me İstanbul, MUSAC – An Interpersonal Journey. It will be open at 26 July.

Located in the Eyüp district of Istanbul, the Silahtarağa Power Plant was built in 1911 as the first electricity powerhouse of the Ottoman Empire and closed down in 1983. The Santralistanbul project aims to protect the building as well as the broader neighborhood. All parts of the new center will be open on September 8.