Press excerpts on the exhibitions of Nam June Paik in
the Deutsche Guggenheim and Miwa Yanagi in the Museum Weserburg, Bremen
Techno party or classical Vanitas motif?
Nam June Paik in the Deutsche
Guggenheim
Although Nam June Paik is a video art classic, the
critics are divided on Global Groove 2004 in the Deutsche
Guggenheim. "Despite all the technological optimism and all the
invocations of philosophical and artistic traditions in Paik's texts,
Global Groove 2004 isn't much more than a highly refined,
self-satisfied, hard-to-take techno party with mystical airs, in contrast
to some of the artist's previous installations." Peter H. Feist's judgment
in Neues Deutschland could hardly have been more direct. On the
other hand, Alexander Kluy's review in the Frankfurter Rundschau
almost sounds contemplative. On the work Candle Projection, which
was also shown in the exhibition, he wrote: "A distinguished mood closely
related to the melancholy of the groove update resonates in this
closed-circuit work: the passage of time." With the seriously ill artist
in mind, Kluy sums it up thus: "Paik reanimates synchronicity in the
classical Vanitas motif - and reinterprets it."
In the
Berliner Zeitung, Ingeborg Ruthe praises Paik's Fluxus-tinged humor in
two articles: compared to the works of many epigones, Ruthe remarks that
"the master's art seems younger, laconic, intense, rich in story and
refreshingly ironic." In the Berliner Morgenpost, Gabriela
Walde joins in with a reference to the superficiality of today's
television landscape, noting: "This leads us to recognize how close Paik's
artistic vision of the cable mess has come to the globalized and highly
complex reality of the 21st century. But the viewer is allowed to smile a
little, too. Paik always did in his works." In the Tagesspiegel
, melancholic tones can be overheard in Nicola Kuhn's observation: "But
the oddest image was Paik himself, old and damned to passivity among his
'video walls,' almost as though he himself had somehow sprung out of the
tube. The procedures he developed have long since become a part of any
halfway professional advertisement; there's hardly a club without
projections to the music, hardly an exhibition without a video
installation. In the person of Nam June Paik, this art seems both old and
young at the same time."
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In the taz, Tilman Baumgärtel honored the ailing
artist's unexpected presence at the exhibition opening with a detailed
account of Paik's behavior throughout the press conference: "Even if Nam
June Paik has been sitting in a wheelchair since his stroke, he can't
refrain from disrupting the formal atmosphere a little bit." Following an
old impulse from his Fluxus days, and "having barely rolled up to the
microphone," Paik first greeted the public with the Kennedy quote "Ich bin
ein Berliner," after which he "indulged in his memories of Germany in a
mixture of English, German, and Korean that was difficult to understand."
Thus, Baumgärtel also couldn't refrain from crowning his appreciation for
the exhibition with a quote by the master himself: "Video is a kind of
time machine. You have all these tapes, and then you can look at your
beautiful past."
"Digital User Surfaces":
Miwa Yanagi in the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen
"Depths in
space and time on user surfaces" is the title of Arnulf Marzluf's article
in the Bremer Nachrichten, in which he subjects Miwa Yanagi's works
from the Deutsche Bank Collection currently on exhibit at Bremen's Neues
Museum Weserburg to close observation: "In contrast to the classical
perspective, where the viewer is situated opposite the vanishing point,
Miwa Yanagi's images contain several perspectives that mirror one another
as they unfold. The photo artist doesn't treat the camera lens
"ontologically," as a medium of objectivity; rather, global space appears
as the construction of a consciousness that refers to many social
locations, perceptions, and encounters and from there develops its own
topology." In the Japanese artist's two series, Elevator Girls
and My Grandmothers, Marzluf makes the almost sober observation
that our "dreamed future fantasies" and "experiential environments
assimilate" to the construction of "digital user surfaces," or: "The
future rises. In their cool magnificence, the large formats and stagings
seem realer than reality." In Verdener Aller Zeitung, Johannes
Bruggaier was also impressed by Yanagi's works: "Yanagi's photographs are
as plastic and rich in color as any ordinary advertisement. She also
utilizes modern society's consumerist impulse. Yet she neither deals a
precise blow to it, nor is she interested in creating a simple parody."
Instead, her works, "the most fascinating thing about which is the
technical precision," offer an impressive revelation of "the misery at the
heart of our lustful, instinct-driven culture."
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