surprise

The Best Surprise Is No Surprise covers a 7-year period beginning in 1999, and chronicles communiqués for exhibitions, publications, events and symposia chosen from the archive of electronic announcements originally distributed by e-flux, and selected both by the e-flux readers and by some of the most active international curators, artists, critics and art historians of our time, including:

Zdenka Badovinac, Ariane Beyn, Mircea Cantor, Binna Choi, Elena Filipovic, Liam Gillick, Jörg Heiser, Jennifer Higgie, Jens Hoffmann, Eungie Joo, Samuel Keller, Francesco Manacorda, Viktor Misiano, Naeem Mohaiemen, Jessica Morgan, Molly Nesbit, Ernesto Neto, Natasa Petresin, Brian Sholis, Nancy Spector, Christine Tohme, Barbara Vanderlinden, Octavio Zaya, and Tirdad Zolghadr.

The book, published by JRP|Ringier press, contains an essay by Daniel Birnbaum and an interview byHans Ulrich Obrist with Anton Vidokle & Julieta Aranda.

literature taste

Ways of World Making

The title of this book has a big influence on the latest Venice Biennial's name "Making Worlds"

I came upon it in a rather beautiful book called Ways of World Making, by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman. The title is there to communicate an atmosphere rather than be too strict. The idea of "making’’ is about art in a studio, or a sort of laboratory environment — something very different from a museum, says Daniel Birnbaum.

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/31535/conversation-with-daniel-birnbaum/

What is it that drives you?

Power Ekroth talks with Daniel Birnbaum in 2005..

PE: Your background with a PhD on Husserl in philosophy is by no means a natural way leading into a curatorial role and working with visual art. Why did you become a curator and what is it that drives you?

DB: Initially and fundamentally it is about a genuine interest to try to understand. It is about trying to understand ones immediate contemporary times which one is apart of and also not being merely a spectator of it, but instead being on the artists side of the fence so to speak. This way one tries to get into a dialogue with the contemporary “zeitgeist” and somehow also to try to formulate it.

I have always been around artists and working together with artists; 25 years ago I was already helping out artists with their exhibitions but not perhaps in such a conscious way as today, and also I started to write about art in daily newspapers which in a way also is about going into dialogue with the artists. However the role of the critic has been hollowed-out, perhaps especially so in the Nordic countries although it is a global tendency and my interest is much deeper inside the discursive moment, writing essays for example. I never wanted to become a museum curator, maybe because my mother worked as a museum curator, instead I was always much more interested in the production-side of art and being behind the scenes. It is an idea about immediate contemporaneaity I guess and to be able to formulate it. The exhibition as a medium is a very interesting medium; I regard exhibitions to be visual essays. If Harald Szeemann used the term of “visual poems” I would rather like to use the term “visual essays.”

To understand one’s contemporaneaity means that one must also see to the contemporary history and this was also what we had in mind with the more historic discursive element in the Italian Pavilion curated together with Francesco Bonami in Venice two years ago.

Strike

Strike by Hito Steyerl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpGobhaYT8Y&feature=related

The Curious Museum

Van Abbe Museum in NL attempts to enlarge the experience and understanding of traditional museum. They call it a curious museum and understand it as a research project.

Walking through the museum, visitors are likely to be asked about their personal background and motivations - the traditional wall texts have been replaced with wooden modules that provide questions as access points to the featured exhibitions: ‘Where were you in 1989?’ ‘What’s your idea of the perfect museum?'

http://www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en/browse-all/?tx_vabdisplay_pi1[ptype]=29&tx_vabdisplay_pi1[project]=704&cHash=40c97a2063

Must Have: Studio International

I am looking for the Vol. 195 No. 900.1/1980

Special Issue: Art Galleries & Alternative Spaces of Studio International Magazine.