Gallery Hopping

Mat Collishaw at Blain Southern

It was the second time I visited Sprüth Magers to see John Bock’s latest movie. The first time I had O., A.’s dachshund, with me and that didn’t work in the darkened space. I must say I also didnt’ really like what I saw. As an historian I have a horror of historical costume films. Very strange indeed. Anyway, Saturday I decided to try again because people on social media are so enthusiastic about this show. I stayed now for 20 minutes, looked at a scene in which pus was distracted from a horrible abscess in some medieval hut. Again, I tried my best to get interested. I talked about it with a friend later and she said she had the same experience. We decided we probably need to read more background information to appreciate it because, so my friend said: “I trust John Bock.” 

Amen to that. 

Then I visited n.b.k to see an exhibition about A 37 90 89. The “A” stands for Antwerp and the number is the phone number of the project space that was founded the 1960s in Belgium. I got excited by this show. It’s beautifully curated and it was great to see how small events and actions can be big art. I loved the Jef Cornelis film of Marcel Broodthaers on the bus together with the visitors of the finissage of his museum exhibition in Brussels, driving to the opening of a new show at the project space in Antwerp the same evening. Doesn’t that show that Broodhaers had a great mentality?

Charlotte Dualé at Thomas Fischer Galerie

I had a little intermezzo at Café Einstein in Friedrichstrasse before I headed to Potsdamer Strasse. I can really feel I’m in Germany when I’m at Café Einstein and that gives me pleasure. At Potsdamer Strasse I first ran by Thomas Fischer because I knew Charlotte Dualé was exhibiting there in a group show. I’m a fan so although I know the work, I like to see it again and again. Then I visited the Mat Collishaw exhibition at Blain Southern. I got excited there, which I hadn’t expected because Blain Southern has been disappointing me too many times lately with its high-flying artists. 

Mat Collishaw at Blain Southern

First of all, the mise-en-scene of the Mat Collishaw show was immaculate. And the craftmanship was superb, which could be boring but there was such a humor to it. The whole exhibition had a baroque feel to it. It was over the top, it entertained but in such a voluptuous way it was fantastic. I enjoyed. On my way to the subway station I stopped at Gallery Klosterfelde where I saw a new publication on Ingrid Wiener. It wasn’t yet available for sale but on February 6, so Herr Klosterfelde told me himself, there will be a book presentation. Maybe Wiener will sing her Bananas song? 

Art Observation 2019

Tate has announced that it will only show women artists in its permanent exhibition for the period of one year. Everyone is so thrilled and excited about it. I can't get excited. Actually, it makes me tired. The same sales trick was put on by Saatchi Gallery with its "all-female exhibition" Champagne Life in 2016. It's a marketing strategy that looks great on the surface but changes nothing structurally really. Just the good old ways of putting women in a box. 

Talking about institutions and their wish to change power, look also at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. In 2018 it had a huge show called Hello World (weak title, I know) that tackled diversity in the own collection (which has like zero diversity). Shipping art works from India under huge costs, etc, was what "globality" in a museum seemed to be all about. Apparently, Hamburger Bahnhof never heard about diaspora in its own city Berlin, nor did it try to change anything structurally about diversity in the ways the museum itself functions. At the moment, there is a show with a long title, which involves artists from Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, France, Hungary, Poland, and Senegal, and the press text announces proudly they all have been invited by German artist Antje Majewski to show with her. Same old ...., I think.

It reminds of the introduction of Udo Kittelmann, director of the Stately Museums in Berlin, to the exhibition of Andrian Piper in 2017, in which he stated that Adrian Piper wrote him an email asking if he was interested in buying and showing her work The Probable Trust Registry. Interesting transparency, I thought, normally Kittelmann doesn't let us know what enters his mail box. Also, Kittelmann found it funny to let the visitor know that Piper had told him that the art work was much cheaper than for instance a Jeff Koons. 

I don't find that funny, I find it sad. 
I also find the above pictured article in Sleek Magazine sad.

New Year Jingle

I like to keep it short in writing: flash stories, picture haiku's, literature's hand luggage.... Accordingly, I changed the name of my blog from my full name into my signature letters AAAAA PPPPP. In November, when I was staying at HIAP on Suomenlinna, Andrea asked me how to pronounce my blog name. Often, people ask me the same about my full name. An Paenhuysen is a very common name in Belgium (Paenhuysen, Goedhuysen, Slechthuysen, etc.) I only started to enjoy it when living abroad where my first name An turned out to be a preposition in German and my last name became quite unpronounceable. So AAAAAPPPPP is way easier to remember, I thought, and at the same time a homage to my favourite Belgian artist who liked to shorten his name to M.B. 

Andrea practised  my blog name with her sister Elsa during her vacation in Mexico. I asked my fellow residents at HIAP to do the same during Coffee Morning. A new jingle for my blog came about! A blog with a jingle - so 2019! 

Many thanks to Eleni, Vera, Xan, Paola, Corinna, Amy, Annu, Andrea and Elsa!

Chris Marker at BOZAR

Les Statues meurent aussi, 1953

Chris Marker. Memories of the Future is on show at BOZAR, my favourite museum in Brussels. I love its architecture, its labyrinth hallways and rooms in art deco style. I remember seeing the Sophie Calle show here years ago and the Chris Marker exhibition is another one that will stay with me. What a remarkable intellectual curiosity and sensibility for people, cultures and society Chris Marker had. I took some notes here and there while watching. 

In 1962, at the end of the Algerian War, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme made the documentary Le Joli Mai with in-the-street interviews with residents of Paris and its suburbs.

“I don’t have an opinion.”
“Has that come with age and wisdom?”

In 1989 Marker directed a TV-series L'heritage de la chouette about the heritage of Ancient Greece in contemporary society. 

"Were they more virtuous because they gave speeches?"

"Symposium means drinking together and discussing things together. [...] There is a ritual. The wine is passed round in roughly the same order as the sequence of conversation. [...] Food - well, one must eat. But wine is on a different level, a spiritual level, I would say, the civilised level."

“I wasn’t born to hate but to love.” (Antigone)

In 1953, together with Alain Resnais and Guislain Cloquet, Marker co-directed Les Statues meurent aussi, an ode to African art, critical towards colonialism and thus banned in France for eleven years. 

"When men are dead, they enter History, when statues die, they return to Art. This botany of death is what we call culture."

“We put stones over our dead in order to prevent them from escaping.”

“Colonizers of the world, we want everything to speak to us: the beast, the dead, the statues.

And of course, La Jetée in 1962, on the pier of Orly.

"Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars."