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The Surreal House
10 June 2010 – 12 September 2010
Barbican Art Gallery

Tickets: Standard £8 online / £10 full price
Concs £7 online / £8 full price
Members £6 online / £7 full price

Times: Open daily 11am-8pm (except Tue & Wed until 6pm)
Open late every Thu until 10pm
subject to availability
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Recommended by the BBC

You are invited to inhabit The Surreal House, a mysterious dwelling infused with subjectivity and desire.

Step inside a labyrinth of chambers, designed by acclaimed young architects Carmody Groarke, and experience The Surreal House – its haunted rooms, delirious forms, blasted architecture and cinematic dreamscapes – featuring a host of artists, architects and film makers including Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell and Maya Deren through to more contemporary figures, among them; Louise Bourgeois, Rebecca Horn, Edward Kienholz and Rem Koolhaas.

At times enchanting, playful and at others, deeply disquieting, The Surreal House is a dwelling that is essentially everything that the rational, functional Modernist house is not.

Talks, performances and artists’ film in the Gallery every Thursday until 10pm.

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Vooruit – Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space.

Alle rechten voorbehouden

For details: see link above  

The S.M.A.K. and the Vooruit Arts Centre are joining forces to overrun the town. “Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space” focuses on artists whose field of action is the ‘public space’. Unbounded and virtually unregulated, they hack into the town with unannounced interventions. Traces of this seep into the museum, where new and existing works are brought face to face with flashbacks from the seventies and nineties.

Electrified is the name under which the S.M.A.K. and Vooruit mount this biennial project. This second edition is taking up a decisive position on the crossroads of several directions in the visual arts. At the same time it will expose the friction between the areas where the two institutions operate: the S.M.A.K. in contemporary art and the Vooruit in media art, sound and performance art. In the quest for a shared ‘mentality’ in these different dynamics, the public space is taken as a common thread. In this case, the term ‘public space’ is all-embracing, without losing sight of the actual distinction between real and virtual public space.

In addition to probing the boundaries between the different fields of art and the way artists currently enter the public space, Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space is also a study of changing trends that have kept the notion of ‘public space’ in vogue for the last thirty years. In this sense, the project presents itself as a complementary triptych: sixteen artists, who operate internationally, with extremely varied backgrounds, will be showing new and existing work in the museum. More than half of them will also be undertakingactions in the town. These actions will be documented and gradually inserted into the exhibition. There is a supplementary Flashback section in which a framework for the project is provided by significant points in the quite recent history of ‘hacking public space’. This will involve the digital display of the work of about thirty artists who can count pioneering actions in the public space among their achievements. From the point of view of the plastic arts, a number of interventions from the 70s and 90s will be selected. They are closely related to, and are the predecessors of, later ephemeral public actions which were also recorded in non-artistic sectors (perhaps there more than elsewhere) as ‘Flashmob actions’. The so-called Flashmob activist entered the public space (usually unannounced) and hacked into it with temporary, interactive artistic actions. The intention was in the first place to arouse an ‘alienating’ effect in the spectator in the hope this would prompt him to engage in socially-critical reflection. This sort of rite-like development was also of some importance in media art. We can cite a number of striking actions from the mid-nineties that illustrate the ‘virtual’ shift in and broadening of the notion of ‘public space’. In recent decades this public domain has expanded infinitely with the rise and accessibility of the internet. In this sense, the term ‘hacking’ refers to the guerrilla-like nature of some actions on the internet and at the same time to the traditional, though equally clandestine ‘squatting’ in the real public space.

Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space: practical details
Both the Flashback section and the urban interventions are presented in visual form in the S.M.A.K. and the Vooruit. The exhibition itself is in the museum. A Salon evening is also planned in the Vooruit, with talks by Alessandro Ludovico and others. He is the publisher of Neural, magazine for hacktivism and also guest curator of the historical section.

Artists: Ben Benaouisse, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez, Amilcar Packer, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Dogma00, Javier Núñez Gasco, Roberta Gigante, Messieurs Delmotte, Ivan Moudov, Wilfredo Prieto, Lucas Murgida, Julius von Bismarck, Miet Warlop, Helmut Smits, Christophe Bruno, Pierre-Laurent Cassière.

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Ed Temleton

The Cemetery of Reason is conceived as a mid-career retrospective of the American artist Ed Templeton. The S.M.A.K. will be assembling into dazzling clusters of images the photos, paintings and sculptures he has done over the last fifteen years.

The exhibition tells the story of a pro skateboarder, a photographer, a drawer, a painter, etc. A story which, although it focuses on his own life and those of the people around him, transcends the autobiographical and exposes social and societal phenomena unhesitatingly but without pointing a finger.

Ed Templeton’s (b. 1972) work cannot easily be categorised. He was brought up in Orange County, a suburb of Los Angeles, and spent his youth in a world of skateboarding and punk music. While still very young he became a professional skateboarder and at the age of 21 set up his Toy Machine, a Bloodsucking Skateboard Company, for which he did all the artwork. From an early age he was passionate about drawing and painting, and was enormously stimulated by the work of Egon Schiele, Lucas Cranach, Balthus and David Hockney. Photography has also always been a constant interest. In the beginning he used his analogue camera as a recorder to capture inspiring images. In the mid-nineties he also started using it as a medium in its own right and since then his photos have been an integral part of his work. In the same way as he was never able to choose between skateboarding and being an artist – they fuel each other – nor has he ever been able to limit himself to one particular medium. Photos, paintings and sculptures complement each other, and are of equal worth, without hierarchy. Templeton often describes his drawings, photos and paintings by means of anecdotes, feelings and ideas that give a new, more profound interpretation to the images. When assembled in an exhibition, these images are deployed as parts of a broader story, but without losing their artistic independence.

Templeton mainly documents his own life and that of the people around him. He does portraits of himself and his wife Deanna, friends, family and the many people he meets on his skateboard tours. The photos he takes do not focus on skating itself, but on all the associated activities. The boys and girls who hang around near a skate park, the boredom of touring, the bloody falls, the late-night parties and the intimate encounters with his wife in anonymous hotel rooms. His career as a pro skateboarder means he spends a lot of time with youngsters who are at an uncertain phase of discovery in their lives. With dreams, hope, worries, the formation of identity and the presentation of the self to the fore. Templeton is ‘one of them’, a pro skate legend and an ‘example’. This gives him the opportunity to come very close to the world they live in and to record it. He depicts their sexuality, fears, aggression, joy and problems but does not judge them. Although his photo installations and paintings are often highly autobiographical, Templeton at no time tries to deal with his own difficult youth. On the contrary, he wants to create openness and offer insights and opportunities to those who want to grasp them.

The Cemetery of Reason takes the form of a whirlwind of photos, sculptures, drawings and paintings. In some cases, images are clustered by subject and reveal certain phenomena or events, but not in an imperative manner.

SMAK

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Arrington de Dionyso

Stephane Leonard

experimontag

Madame Claude

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Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker

Sean Dower / Staalplaat Soundsystem / Joris Van de Moortel / Els Viaene / Stevie Wishart

Sa 24 April → Sa 12 June 2010

Netwerk Center for contemporary Art Aalst Belgium

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Andro Wekua, My Bike and Your Swamp, 2008 Camden Art Center, London. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Gladstone Gallery, New York

Andro Wekua, born in 1977 in Georgia, lives and works in Zurich and Berlin.

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SEXTIES – Crepax/Cuvelier/Forest/Peellaert

In the mid-1960s, the four artists in question found their inspiration in painting (including the Pop Art movement), cartoons (‘Yellow Submarine’, etc.), cinema, music (anything from rock to innocent French ‘Yé-yé’ pop), literature and photography. Through the eyes of these four major artists, the exhibition will attempt to paint a picture of an era that saw many changes in quick succession.

Guido Crepax (1933-2003), an Italian, created ‘Valentina’ – whose physique was inspired by the actress Louise Brooks – in 1965 for the publication ‘Linus’. Éric Losfeld, an avant-garde publisher, put out the album in 1968. Right from the start, Crepax was considered an undisputed master of highbrow eroticism. The following decade, this top-flight graphic artist would adapt, in an inimitable black and white, the great classics of eroticism: ‘Histoire d’O’, ‘Emmanuelle’ and ‘Justine’. His layouts included a revolutionary narrative system consisting of stories within stories and flashbacks.

Belgian Paul Cuvelier (1923-1978) was a leading post-war Belgian comic-strip artist. His ‘Corentin’ gives us little glimpses, from time to time, of a sensuality that would be expressed later in a more adult work. Jean Van Hamme, then just starting out as a scriptwriter, drafted ‘Epoxy’ (1968) for the artist. In this mythological tale, Cuvelier finally and fully expressed his passion for drawing the human body, especially the female form. Indeed, drawing would remain a central part of his comic books.
In 1962, Frenchman Jean-Claude Forest (1930-1988) initiated a shockwave by creating ‘Barbarella’ in ‘V-Magazine’. The character, whose physique was inspired by Brigitte Bardot’s, embodied modern woman during a period of sexual liberation. Seen by some as scandalous, the album that appeared in 1964 turned ‘Barbarella’ into the first-ever ‘adult’ comic. Forest’s sensually drawn lines and his imagination made the strip a huge success, which was further amplified in 1968 by Roger Vadim’s film (featuring Jane Fonda in the lead role). Forest himself designed the scenery for the film. As an author in his own right as well as a scriptwriter (‘Les naufragés du temps’ with Paul Gillon and ‘Ici même’ with Jacques Tardi), Forest was one of the founders of adult comics.
Belgian Guy Peellaert (born in 1934) enjoyed a brief, but legendary, career in comic strips. His style, which was in keeping with the era, introduced ‘Pop Art’ into the frames. Initially appearing in ‘Hara-Kiri’, ‘Les aventures de Jodelle’ (a character whose body was inspired by that of French singer Sylvie Vartan) was published as an album in 1966. Two years later, Peellaert launched a new but equally psychedelic heroine: ‘Pravda, la survireuse’ (another French singer, this time Françoise Hardy, was the model for the character of Pravda). The artist then devoted himself to painting, a field that led him to design posters for films (‘Taxi Driver’/Martin Scorsese, ‘Paris, Texas’/Wim Wenders, etc.), album covers (‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’/The Rolling Stones, ‘Diamond Dogs’/David Bowie), and for books (‘Rock Dreams’ and ‘The Big Room’), all of which are now iconic works of art.

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Battle of Ideas
Museums for World Peace?

Photo: © Jessica Long

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