Limited Edition Poster of ARTSHO5, Experiment, designed by Kwame Charles, 2014 |
It’s a fact, isn’t it: Berlin is the hubbub of contemporary art. Other cities have been trying to catch up and even take over. Belgium is eager to promote Brussels as the New Berlin but it’s never a good idea to try being something else. And then there is Istanbul that just wants to be Istanbul and it’s quite rocking at it. I made my first trip to Istanbul over the weekend to visit Onika Simon’s ARTSHO5, titled “Experiment.” Istanbul might not want to be the New Berlin, but the show did remind me of my first year in Berlin in 1998 (yes, I’m getting into that life phase in which one starts to have memories). The winter of 1998 felt like the coldest winter in the history of mankind, but the parties were exotic and literally located underground. Similarly, the 2014 Istanbul-based ARTSHO5 was to be reached by going below ground level through a long and narrow corridor and similar to Berlin 1998 it took place in the middle of a construction site. It was the first show I’d seen where construction workers and artists worked side by side, both wearing overalls and doing their thing, which was renovating a building or making experimental art: on the surface it’s hard to see the difference in who’s dismantling what. The artists had various reactions to the circumstances. While some went along, getting high on the foams of melting nails or making paintings with tools like blow dryers, others worked desperately against it, playing Sisyphus by trying to clean the fine dust from the floor so one could start making art to begin with. The push and pull actually led to a great dynamic. Olafur Eliasson’s recent Festival of Future Nows at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin was just lame compared to this one.
Winston Chmielinski, Valerie Schmidt, Onika Simon and Carleen Coulter in ARTSHO5 outfit. Photo by Anders Pearson |
A world wide web event: opening talk of ARTSHO5 with Onika Simon, Seyhan Musaoglu from Space Debris and Budapest curator Gaspar Bonta |
So does experimentation lead to innovation? Well, ARTSHO5 gave me a new perspective on what the next revolution will be about. The turn of mind happened upon encountering Winston Chmielinski’s art piece that invited the spectator to write something down. Chmielinski sighed when he saw me thinking hard to come up with an original idea and said he secretly wished for something plain and ordinary. It was then that it suddenly dawned on me that after centuries of living in the Age of the Extraordinary (with traveling to the moon, and making paintings through dripping, and other exceptional originalities) we have now arrived in the age without the extra. The Age of the Ordinary has this particular ambivalence to it that it looks simple but is complex at the same time (which is my favorite combination). I found more evidence for this theory at the Istanbul Design Biennial, which showcased the 2006-2007 show Super Normal at Axis Gallery in Tokyo that did not exhibit new work but existing objects that “favor synthesis over innovation, invisibility over ostentation, and they achieve their status through use”. Its catalogue said: “Super normal [...] is re-realizing something that you already knew, re-acknowledging what you naturally thought was good in something... super normal indicates our ‘realization’ of what is good in ‘normal’.” And then there was my encounter with innovation strategist Richard Watkins at ARTSHO5, who tried to convince me of the benefits of repair as a way to go forward and not so much the search for the new. The Repair Society at the Istanbul Design Biennial gave Watkins food for his argument: “Repairing is about the constant struggle to make things work, from language, to things, to relations between people, to systems in society.”
Amazing thermo-reactive screen printing: Dolly Demoratti proves that blow dryer and Becks go well together |