Hasta La Ideas

There are many interesting and odd things to be found off the shores of the dying Salton Sea in southern California but maybe one of the most unique is the International Banana Museum. Recently transplanted from Culver City, the museum occupies a squat building on the side of the…

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Museum è un brand del tutto Italiano nato 25 anni fa dal desiderio di raccogliere e vendere sul mercato europeo un mood autentico di ispirazione nord-americano. È una collezione senza tempo che mixa conoscenza e interpretazione contemporanea del design. La ricerca è alla base di ogni collezione ecco perchè l’archivio Museum è in continua fase di sviluppo con materiali e soluzioni di altissima qualità.

An exploration of the relationship between artist and audience

Two years ago Maria Abramović wowed an array of visitors at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art with her emotionally engaging, 736-hour staring contest, “The Artist Is Present.” This powerful display of human connectivity caused a major shift in the conventional outlook on performance art. Now, at London’s Tate Modern, artist Tino Sehgal is continuing to explore creative interaction with his new live art installation in the museum’s massive Turbine Hall as this year’s annual Unilever commission.

Sehgal’s work lures museum-goers into running around one end of the hall and then the other, as spectators watch from the bridge and balconies above. Whether demonstrating that in our digitally hermitic worlds we still seek tangible interaction or just adding an artistic twist to the stillness of museums, like Abromović’s, his message is as magically engaging to participants as it is to observers. From above, the whirlwind of people running below in random formation feels a little bit like a Van Gogh painting brought to life. Down in the hall, you feel a strange surge of buoyant energy circling around you as people waggishly run by.

Sehgal’s installation is accented by a host of revolving exhibitions on display for 15 weeks in The Tanks, the museum’s underground chambers recently renovated by architects Herzog + de Meuron. An area dedicated to “art in action,” on our visit we wandered into interdisciplinary artist Sung Hwan Kim’s two-room video installation that befuddles you with a two-way mirror, before being even further entranced by Lis Rhodes “Light Music” installation—a work originally conceived in 1975 in which two projectors at either end of the room create a fanning strobe effect as the horizontal shadows fluctuate in size. Standing between them turns you into an active puppet-shadow.

For the full line-up of live art running through the end of October 2012, check out The Tate Modern online.

La Triennale est une institution culturelle italienne située à Milan. Chaque année depuis son inauguration en 2007, le Triennale Design Museum propose des expositions internationales et divers évènements. Le lieu se dévoile de façon incroyable dans une série d’images à découvrir dans la suite.

Family trees flung all over the world captured in photos at MoMA

Taryn Simon is part bloodhound, part photographer. For “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII,” she spent four years tracking down 18 families spread all over the world. Nine of those families, or chapters, as Simon calls them, are now on display at MoMA. Each chapter is made up of three segments, most notably a large group portrait shot yearbook-style with each family member photographed individually. “In each of the 18 chapters,” Simon explains, “you see the external forces of territory, governance, power and religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.” The sequence is arranged in order of the oldest living ascendants followed by their living descendants. This orderly family tree is accompanied by a short text and footnote images that add to the narrative.

This extremely organized coding system belies the complicated and, at times, even messy process of tracking down family members and getting them to agree to be photographed. Take the living descendants of Hans Frank, Hitler’s legal advisor and Governor-General of occupied Poland. In addition to his involvement in setting up Jewish extermination camps, Frank oversaw campaigns to destroy Polish culture by massacring thousands of Poles, all of which he denied when he was brought to trial at Nuremberg and subsequently executed. As you might imagine, his children and relatives aren’t exactly bragging about their family name, and most refused to participate in Simon’s project. Those who agreed to be photographed don’t exactly look thrilled to be there.

Not every bloodline is so full of holes. Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo’s polygamous Kenyan family is brimming with 32 children and 64 grandchildren, courtesy of his nine wives, most of whom he met through his practice, where he treats patients suffering from a wide range of ailments from evil spirits to HIV/AIDS. Ondijo is usually paid in cows and goats, but sometimes, when a family can’t afford that, they offer a daughter instead. Five of his wives came to him as patients; Three were plagued by evil spirits, one had asthma and two were suffering from infertility (they were cured and bore him children).

Reading about the Frank or Ondijo family, or about the stories in Simon’s other chapters—an over-crowded, underfunded Ukrainian orphanage, for example—is one thing, but seeing the faces of these people, and in one chapter, the animals, is something else altogether. In grid form, one right after the other, it becomes not so much about the similarities among relatives in each chapter, but how they’re so surprisingly unique—and depressing. Homi Bhanha notes in “Beyond Photography,” his essay about the exhibition, that “a precarious sense of survival holds together the case studies…It is the extremity of such precariousness that sets the stage upon which the human drama of survival unfolds…Survival here represents a life force that fails to be extinguished because it draws strength from identifying with the vulnerability of others (rather than their victories), and sees the precarious process of interdependency (rather than claims to sovereignty) as the groundwork of solidarity. We are neighbors not because we want to save the world, but because, before all else, we have to survive it.”

Simon’s subjects show that struggle for survival. Even the children look world-weary. With few exceptions, every slumped figure looks irrepressibly sad. Maybe it’s the bandaid-colored backdrop she used as what she calls “non-place, a neutral cream background that eliminates and erases any environment or context,” that renders the emotionless faces so flat. Collectively, Simon’s work sucks the energy right out of the room. Though it’s true that your DNA only determines part of who you are and that the rest is your own making, the subjects here look resigned to accept the fate of their forefathers. In fact, you can’t help but be touched by the overwhelming emptiness that pervades the room. Though the title refers specifically to one chapter in which a living man is declared dead on paper so that a distant relative can inherit his land, Simon hopes it acts as a metaphor for the entire show, noting that “We are all steadily heading toward death.”

“A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII” is on display at MoMA until 3 September 2012.