From Discovery to Rediscovery is the titular theme of this year’s Art Brussels fair, which is on at the large former industrial building, Tours & Taxis, running April 22 – 24
This year the organisers have decreased the size of the fair by about 50 galleries, promising quality over quantity, and have opened up a strand titled ‘Rediscovery‘ —dedicated to art from the 20th century by artists who are either under-represented or have been forgotten about. In with the rediscovery will be the following, whose booths aqnb recommends to go and see if you are in the capital:
At the same time, there is Independent —the smaller art fair that was founded in New York in 2010 is coming to Europe (and Brussels) for the first time —running April 20 to 23.
Also happening in Brussels (no fair) and opening on April 19 running June 4 at GalerieJeanroch Dard is a solo show by London-based artist Dominic Samsworth called Lounge Elopes and Oscar Tuazon’s General Contractorat dépendance.
Artist Aram Bartholl will present a Speed Show in Los Angeles, the first of the series to be held in the City on the evening of February 18.
In 2010Bartholl initiated the series of Speed Showsin Berlin. Its set up is an exhibition that can take place anywhere in an internet cafe displaying for a moment (or evening) works that already exist online, leaving the job of the curator simply to find a good harmony of things to channel into the cafe space.
“A lot has happened since 2010”, as Bartholl, who aqnbinterviewed in 2013, states in the press release. He talks about how manifestos work and interestingly seems to be writing one as a press release that undoes a worded relationship between screens, the internet and artists.
Despite the dated format, the show’s premise is a moment pulled together in a room, and it kind of works to see and feel what it all looks like now, in one place -especially in a city like LA.
Yung Jake is presenting his solo exhibition, Hydration, at LA’s Steve Turner, opening February 13 and running to March 12.
The LA-based artist will be showing “powder-coated steel panels and furniture” marked with the graffiti tags and online and offline symbols of his contemporary reality, including “bottles of Fiji and Volvic water, Xanax pills”, along with text and image.
The opening will also mark the launch of a new music video by the artist-rapper called ‘I don’t remember’, as well performances by DJs Softest Hard, Sonny Digital and Lil Yachty, organized in collaboration with IllRoots. The event is listed as central to the exhibition, starting at 10 pm and running into the early hours.
Yung Jake recently took part in Steve Turner’s The Real Worldgroup exhibition and played the LA Art Book Fair opening closing party on February 11 (the fair runs to February 14).
Another afterparty on February 13 has an amazing line up and is on at LA’s Resident venue. Printed Matter, How Many Virgins? and Berserktown share the hosting for this one.
The artists involved in The Real World are no strangers to the internet. Running at LA’s Steve Turner from December 12 to 30, the work in the exhibition by Ann Hirsch,Jayson Musson, Casey Jane Ellison, Yung Jake, Petra Cortright and Ryder Ripps speaks to the space between art and the online, and how that space takes its form, be it in Coogi sweaters or ethereal data.
Four partitioned video pieces are located in the center of the gallery, installed on a free-standing kiosk. The main gallery space is filled with the sound coming from Yung Jake’s music video piece ‘Both’(2015) which sits at the exhibition’s natural middle. The video plays panoramically between two flat screen television monitors, oriented vertically on the wall. It’s a reference to it’s initial release in September via Yung Jake’s personal Snapchat, available in two parts and requiring two smartphones to be viewed correctly. The video follows Yung Jake and two woman companions through a variety of lively party scenes, cutting between places and people, non-sequentially playing out like a contemporary advertisement for Hypnotique brand liqueur.
The kiosk is bookended by Hirsch’s paintings ‘Ann Mirsch’ (2015) and ‘50 Shades Wedding’ (2015) on one wall and Musson’s mercerized cotton canvas ‘Black Bisector’ (2015) on the other. Mounted directly across from Yung Jake’s ‘Both’ is the kiosk that houses Musson and Hirsch’s respective webcam pieces, ‘How To Be A Successful Artist’(2010) and ‘Physical Contractions’ (2015), creating a unique triangular dialogue of success. Hirsch’s video piece and paintings all reference marriage and procreation. Musson performs as ‘Hennessy Youngman’, an invented vlog persona instructing his viewer on how to succeed in art (being both white and ambiguous are key). ‘Black Bisector’ comprises the shreds of several Coogi sweaters to create one huge composition as iconic as those worn by rapper Biggie Smalls himself, while Yung Jake’s opulent music video reminds us that he’ll take both, specifically when he can’t decide between “two bad bitches”. Also included is Yung Jake’s ‘Hypnotiq and Cîroc Bottles’(2015) wall-hung sculpture, made from found metals and digitally manipulated liquor bottle vinyl wrap transfers. It’s a mash-up of digital and physical spaces referencing the drinks’ history of promotion and advertising in hip-hop music and culture.
Installed directly opposite is Ripps’ ‘Unidentified Person 2 and 3, Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated Auction Party’ (2015) – a contrasting diptych of two portraits pulled from grainy surveillance footage and then UV-printed immaculately onto brushed aluminum. Ripps’ ‘dump.fm’(2010), a seemingly endless voyeuristic view into an online chatroom, is simultaneously entertaining and frustrating. The viewer has no control over pace, content, and can in no way interact. This frustration is complemented by Cortright’s video ‘banksi unbrush ponitaeyel’ (2015), which plays beside Ripps’ piece, showing the artist trapped in a corner by an endless barrage of colorful digital interference. It’s a reference to Cortright’s early video works posted originally to YouTube and serving as defining works of early online video art where the artist digitally manipulates her own face via webcam.
Casey Jane Ellison’s ‘It’s So Important to Seem Wonderful Part II’ (2014) utilizes a separate room to house a three-channel projection with accompanying sculptures and a smaller video piece at the room’s entrance.The moving images most prominently feature a crudely animated 3D self-portrait of the artist that glitches and meanders alongside the audio, obviously out of sync. It amounts to a sense of discomfort and fascination as the artist carries her monologues at a stand-up comedy pace.
Site-specific art is historically the anti-gallery practice. It is art created to exist in specifically one place. At its most refined form, it is a rejection of the commodification of art. This theme plays out conceptually in The Real World as the viewer is confronted with works that exist both in ethereal sites online, and within the commercial gallery itself. The exhibition title could be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the ‘real’ world as we know it becoming ever-more digital, or an obvious nod to the 3D pieces included in the show. It feels more as if it comes full circle, back to the digital origins of these six millennial artists and their website-specific works. **