PART I

The first edition of BAD+ Bordeaux + Art + Design, a new art and design salon, will launch in Bordeaux, July 6 – 10, 2022, presented in the iconic two storey concrete and steel industrial building HANGAR 14 on the banks of the Garonne.

At the initiative of Jean-Daniel Compain and Congrès Bordeaux Exposition, joined by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, BAD+ intends to illustrate the exceptional diversity of creation, honouring the alliance between past, present and future. Contemporary is always new and fresh in its time.

By taking root in Bordeaux—a historic territory, rich in great cultural institutions such as the CAPC, the MECA, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design or the FRAC Aquitaine, BAD+ will be part of a week of art, design and l’art de vivre which will implicate the whole city and its surroundings.

PART II

“BAD+, is art and design exhibited, seen, deciphered, debated and appreciated in a renovated iconic industrial building, HANGAR 14.

BAD+ is about discovery, it should be fun, exciting, spontaneous, adventurous, joyful, questioning.”

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Artistic Director

Excerpt from an interview between Jean-Daniel Compain, General Director, and Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Artistic Director:

“How did you think about and decide on the artistic line of BAD+ ?”

“As Jean-Daniel said, art is consubstantial with l’art de vivre and everything that is undertaken must support the idea that art is part of life, everyday life, from the birth of the modern spirit in the 19th Century with Impressionism, photography, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism to contemporary art and design today.

BAD+ makes this idea a reality. BAD+, is contemporary art and design exhibited, seen, deciphered, I would say ‘experienced’, debated, appreciated and we hope, purchased, in a renovated iconic industrial building—HANGAR 14, on the banks of the river Garonne—set against the backdrop of an internationally renowned 18th Century city—Bordeaux.

BAD+, is about discovery, it should be fun, exciting, spontaneous, adventurous, joyful, questioning. It is all of these things, while being a think-tank, a community for artists, galleries, collectors and cultural institutions, a destination for art lovers.
The BAD+ art line is a unique thread that winds between art, design and architecture, between art and climate change, between art and sustainability, between art and urbanism, between art and agriculture, between art and wine. Everything that makes life today.”

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Artistic Director

PART III

“I have been telling people that it is new concept that is based on the intimacy and creativity and informal qualities of art making in the studio and the casual relaxed qualities in the back rooms of galeries where the work is seen in a manner that is not simply theatrical. It is closer to the artist himself. And as such more open and accessible for viewers of all experiences.

It is not the same old model.

It is putting the content of the work front and center where intrinsic value can shine. Where the visitor will be enchanted and impressed to ask about how the work is created and why before they ask the price.

We are doing two dialectic processes. Opening the art world in a transparent way and demystifying the snobbery and frumpery that makes people feel there is nothing in art for them because they are not super wealthy. We want to share the passion for art and show with grace the way collecting over time with passion leads to great pleasure. Whatever ones economic bracket.
It is for everyone!! And one of life’s most enduring human experiences.”

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Artistic Director

PART I

New arrivals from the archives of Helmut Federle. It has been an unusual early spring here at JSVCprojects. As I am again spending all my time between the couch and my book cases under house arrest like the long months of the pandemic when it was not possible to go out the door. This time, however, it is a compression fracture of a vertebrae not a nasty virus that is keeping me away from the studio visits and exhibition openings where you would normally find me. It leaves a lot of time staring out the window, at the wood pigeons perched on the chimney stacks and at the roses blooming in the private garden below my windows. Everything I see becomes an abstraction of something else, as if the creamy sandstone and rooftops can be compressed in two dimensions instead of three. Such is my open-ended thinking after a month of associative daydreaming.

Which brings me to four vintage publications that I found during the crisp cold days of January, adding to my library of Helmut Federle’s books and catalogues. It seemed a good moment to share them with you. Sometimes it feels as the decades behind us have simply disappeared into ether, the countless exhibitions in galleries and museums that I worked on since 1980. So, when sitting around, images of these sometimes pop into mind as a counterpoint to Instagram, catching a glimpse of what I have been missing between the Venice Biennale and other current events. I try to remind myself that art is one arched continuum when the works themselves carry energy and time.

Obviously, there is nothing like a cracked back to make you feel a sense of the years passing: the days are long, but memory is longer when you can keep the pain at bay. I am buoyed by the discovery of these four small volumes because they, in their way, punctuate the decades of my knowing the work of Helmut Federle and the museum directors, curators and writers who were once among the crowds of people we greeted in Venice or Basel from one year to the next. So, though I am alone in my library, all of these people are still part of those memories. It is worthwhile picking up each of these volumes to see how relevant their observations and insights still are today.

PART II

“The Image of Abstraction” was a group show organised at MOCA, LA by Kerry Brougher and director Richard Koshalek in 1988, four years after Federle’s debut exhibition at John Gibson Gallery in New York where I was gallery director. The catalogue opens with a famous picture of the installation “Exhibition 0,10” of Malevich from 1915, an image I have used in my own publications to begin the discussion of the power of abstract painting in the 20th Century. As we are now living through a period of dynamic rethinking of the canon of art history as well as opening the boundaries of artistic practice in a vibrant and important manner, it can feel arcane to some to reflect on abstract painting as it emerges through the last quarter of the last century and continues today, striking in its connection to Malevich and his interpretation of The Non-Objective World. Federle is in good company with Gerhard Richter, Imi Knoebel, Sherrie Levine and Ross Bleckner among others. A large painting from The Emily and Jerry Spiegel Collection in New York is included. The curator writes:

‘Federle’s compositions suggest that the pursuit of the spiritual and absolute is still worthwhile even if it must be tempered by reason and restraints and tainted with a certain amount of skepticism’.

Federle wrote:

‘Only I must say that the quest for absolute truths is no longer feasible or rather you can still look for absolute values and ideals but you will have to face up to the fact that they can no longer be found in our materialistic, jaded world. This does not, however, diminishes the value of ideals.’

Almost 10 years later, in the art journal “Noëma”, Federle plays with his cat in front of a large painting in his studio. There is one article in German by Swiss art publisher and translator Max Wechsler and an interview with Erich Franz who was the director of the Westfälischen Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster. It is the commemorative issue when Federle represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

PART III

A very thin but elegant publication published by Verlage Weltkunst Und Bruckmann in Munich with a text by Barbara Fischer shows an assortment of works on paper (double page 4-5) and major paintings (page 12-13). It is in their series “Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art”.

The Gulbenkian catalogue is from 2017 curated by Jorge Rodrigues with a text by Edmund de Waal writing about Federle’s collection of ceramics, several of which are installed in the show next to his paintings and then a text by Elisabeth Samsonow about abstraction perception and the spirit:

‘Holy Fear, which is actually a moment of the highest calm under concentration, a moment of serenity, is a thing of beauty which must accompany the evidence, the literal clarification of a painting. It is the encounter with the organization of self that surpasses all efforts of philosophical reflection. From this point on, the link from art to art’s companion, religion, can again be drawn with remarkable ease. Religion nourishes a vital interest in the production of this evidence, though it has used and continues to use other ways and methods for this purpose. What it could not do, however, was to forego the aesthetic experience in order to achieve its goals.’

More info:

Mark Lammert

Esther Shalev-Gerz’s exhibition at the Bauhaus-Museum, Weimar

PART I

JSVCprojects is happy to announce Ishmael Annobil’s exhibition at L’Interstice Gallery, Arles, which will open on Friday, 15th of April.

Location:

L’Interstice – Josette Sayers

45 rue du 4 Septembre

13200 Arles

Stay tuned!

& Discover Ishmael Annobil’s trailer for ‘INSOMNIA’:

PART II

Ishmael describes himself as:

a London-based poet, journalist, photographer, graphic designer, filmmaker, inspired by the vigour of contemporary society; its cultural overlaps, processes, and visual glories. I have an undying love for realism, social consciousness, and the purity of the frozen moment. […]

I run Chiaroscuromagazine.com, an international arts journal, and Stonedog Productions, a filmmaking collective, based in Camden Town, London. Anthologised in Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World (The Poetry Foundation, America, 2014), I have published two books of poetry, namely, Seven Horn Elegy and Ethiop, one monograph of Gadangme emblems, Abetei, a photographic monograph, Insomnia, and one music album, Zingliwu.

Ishmael Annobil

Previously we have written on his works:

A WALK IN MY LIBRARY:
3 LOVE POEMS IN THE SUMMER
Part Three
Ishmael Annobil

I met London-based poet, filmmaker, journalist, drummer and digital composer Ishmael Annobil working on a project last year in London with artist, Linda Karshan. They collaborated for several years with film and photography, making an important documentary Choreographing the Page.

He started writing poetry as a child in Ghana, became a journalist after high school and lived in Southern Sudan and Kenya where he performed his acclaimed poetry show Criers on the Thresholds of Reality for the homeless. He came to London in ’83 and moved with his family to Wales where he energized the poetry scene for eleven years founding an international poetry festival and a pioneering newspaper for the arts, Circa21.

When we met for coffee at the Curzon in Bloomsbury in February I knew little of this. The pretext was to speak about Karshan, his profound understanding of her creative process was a doorway for me. It began our ongoing conversation. He is a bearish figure, warm and present, twinkly and solid, acute photographer’s eye. His brilliant collection of black and white night photographs INSOMNIA was just out; I published excerpts here. The poet was still to be discovered, slowly, almost accidentally on my side. Now I have ordered Ethiop, reissued in 2017, “acclaimed and rare collection of Poems dedicated to the African Diaspora and other similar historic realities.” His early collection Seven Horn Elegy, 1998 is out of print. In 2014 he was included by the Poetry Foundation of America and Tupelo Press in Another English. Anglophone Poems from Around the World. I am writing this listening on Spotify to his album, Zingliwu. Amazing.

In March he called to check on me. Full blast baritone on the phone amidst the sirens and helicopters. A poet’s heart felt voice across the pandemic silenced urban space. His poet’s voice. An email in July: “asymmetric like The mirth of love and providence – jazz” the finished poem. How lucky we are to read here, part of a cycle he is writing for women.

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts – JSVCprojects, “A Walk in my Library: 3 Love Poems in the Summer”, Publication on August 18th 2020 on Realtime

More info:

L’Interstice, Arles

Ishmael Annobil’s projects:

Photojournalism & Art

Abëtëi

Totem Books

Founder/Editor at Chiaroscuro Magazine (International Art, Design and Culture Journal)

Founder/Writer/Producer/Director of Stonedog Productions

Cine Afri

In the midst of these suddenly fraught and dangerous times, we have a bit of good news to share today. I am happy to announce the print portfolio by ART & LANGUAGE that we showed in our post of 20 September 2021, published by René Schmitt has been acquired for the French national collection. This does make sense as the Collection of the Musée national d’art moderne has one of the most important BLACK SQUARE paintings by Kasimir Malevitch. Following logic, this group of prints was inspired and informed by the Russian artist; the acquisition then makes perfect sense.

We are proud to have been involved in offering the work to the Print Department through our long-time colleague Jonas Storvse who recognised its importance and singularity from the outset. Through the generosity of the publisher the work has found its way into the permanent collection, where it will also be in good company with the other ART & LANGUAGE works that have been bought over many years. You will remember I refer to them as the Rolling Stones of Conceptual Art, take a moment and look back at our original post where I described the background of these remarkable prints and hand-painted portfolio box. You can see in this post that it is almost a mini exhibition in a box.

More info:

Our previous post about ART & LANGUAGE at Art Basel 2021

René Schmitt, Berlin

PART I

I first came across Dan Graham’s work in 1980 when I began working with John Gibson. He had made a series of exhibitions earlier of Graham’s photographs at the time many of which were called “Homes for America”. John was also often talking about performance works like “Present Continuous Past(s)”; I remember seeing these fading cibachrome snapshots mounted one above the other that looked like many of the houses in areas around Philadelphia where I was raised. Suburban track housing which was typical of American culture after the war, when the GI’s came home. Every major city suddenly had suburbs being built, and in this period after 1968, artists were looking at these typologies as fertile grounds for conceptual art.

Gibson also worked with Gordon Matta-Clark—who had already died much to young in ’78, after making radically brilliant work cutting holes in these abandoned places near Jersey City. Somehow cutting and dissecting was as exciting as photographing or filming them. Cutting shapes out of walls or through the exterior walls of houses or reams of paper gave Matta-Clark a sense of making sculpture from the built environment or in anything you might find. Graham was seeing what the post-war world looked like and needed to make this documentary kind of work to set the stage for what was coming later. I met Dan during this period, he was living not far from the gallery on Broadway and Prince; sometimes he came in to see John. Dan’s look was very relaxed, a well-worn t-shirt often with a stain from breakfast, pants that had been not laundered in a while. But he had a physical friendliness that was not present in other people. He talked easily to the youngest member of a gallery team. Asked questions.

Dan never made much of a fuss, I would go out and get something for him and John from Dean & DeLuca, sometimes he was already gone by the time I arrived back. There were panels and installation drawings of performance ideas that involved his looking at things, and being seen by audience members. This sense of how looking happened, and what it was to see interested me a lot. At the time I was writing on dance and performance art which was starting to get very interesting in this time. I saw the photographs as a key to how he looked at stuff. Simplifying the terrain.

PART II

Fast forward to the late 90’s I am in London at LISSON. Dan Graham is arriving in London and I am meant to work with him again. He shows up in the gallery with a shoulder bag and that is all. There is an important dinner with a museum director and curator; I see his flight on his shirt and take him to his hotel for a change of clothes but not before stopping at a store to buy him a clean shirt. He refuses trousers. That night there is an exhibition planned and one of his architectural models is sold. He said something like “oh it is you again, good.” Then we just were a duo, he trusted me. He liked to talk about Gibson, and New York but was more interested in what I could do for him in Europe. So we set on a path of work.

We met again in New York as I flew over to take him from the city down to Dallas to site the “Argonne Pavilion II”, 1998, for the great collection of Howard Rachofsky, it was 2002. I picked Dan up in a taxi and by the time we got to LaGuardia he realised he didn’t have a photo ID of any kind. We had to make our morning plane because there was a big crew waiting for us at The Rachofsky House with crane, truck and tractor for 3pm. Dan was going to place the work in the landscape with all the people supporting him to settle it into the lawn. There was no time to go back, so I told him not to say a word, asked him to wipe the remains of his breakfast off his chin which was then a bit of beard, and marched in to the check-in desk to asking see the manager. I brought out a book that showed something he made at MOMA and convinced the man to let me take Mr Graham to the plane, I told him I would call the director of MOMA and they would vouch for this artists’ world importance.

We just made the flight, we sited the work after a long period of moving it back and forth to catch its sight lines correctly, and the reflections were magic that day; afterwards he insisted we drive to the Kimball with Christian rock blaring loud in the convertible. “It must be a convertible Jill,” he had insisted at Hertz. “An acquired taste,” he said, “after Rock My Religion.” We were caught in a tornedo the following day and ended up staying in Dallas airport for a third day. I missed my flight back to London but thinking back, I remember he insisted on Kosher hot dogs and X rated magazines to keep him amused. I was in charge of his contentment, managed to find both in Dallas.

PART III

These snippets do not do justice to his voracious mind, his endless curiosity, his interest in physical space, his own continuous discomfort with the world. He presented a kindly child-like manner that allowed him to do the serious work alone well protected from the aspects of the world that made him so uncomfortable. I remember his early performances about being seen, how a group observed him, how he observed them. His uncanny capacity to boomerang his own emotions through a room, through a camera lens, the delightful way he rolled down a hill with a camera hand held at his chest to see what the camera could see, was no less important than the way he conceived a skate board park. Or a public swimming pool as sites where one group would observe another.

The development of his iconic pavilions now all over the world, with the mirror glass that allow us to control what is being seen, and then what is being mirrored, expanding the doors of perception and allowing the subject of how and what we see to be parsed in a new way. I am thinking of the John Berger’s famous comments in his “Ways of Seeing” of the early 70’s about men seeing women being seen by men. The object of desire always being aware of what is being expected of them, and whose gaze will present itself the longest. This was in the artworld a period where questions of visibility were rightfully front and center in politics. It was ripe and then grew less so for a number of years, we have seen it coming back now. Dan Graham was ahead of his time always, and for this his monumental contribution in photography, film, performance, texts, architecture and sculptures will be long analysed by art critics and curators, as well as collectors and young artists.

I don’t remember the last time we spoke; there were years I stopped by his place whenever I was in New York. The papers piled high on his work table, the odd collection of dolls and model parts. Maybe it was in Venice. He always gave me the same cryptic smile and we realised it had been ages that we were in this together.

David Gibson wrote about these two last images:

Dan Graham was one of the early pioneers of installation art in which gallery visitors create the everyday content by which the interactive dynamic is fulfilled. Works like Present Continuous Past (1975) would be transformed into ones like The Rooftop Urban Park Project at Dia Chelsea (1991-2004) “Constructed from a two-way mirrored glass, the walls of the pavilion shifted between transparent and reflective states as the intensity of light changed, creating changing and complex visual effects with the sky, surrounding landscape, and interactions with people on the roof.”

David Gibson on Instagram

PART I

I was holding my breath this weekend watching every day to see when exactly the magic numbers would appear letting us know that we had managed in the past two years, pandemic and all to create a loyal Instagram following of two thousand. If you had told me in March of 2020 when I announced to my assistant from lockdown in London that I would replace my busy travels with a walk down the library shelf with my fingers, or notice things so much closer to home that I was noticing again, as if for the first time.

To say thank you to you all, I decided to follow last week with a bit more about our new set up here in Paris on Île-Saint-Louis. Had the second part of my library delivered last week, another twenty boxes, more books and bookcases and glasses and old carafes and other objects that had belonged to previous chapters of my life. Emotions rising like steam out of brown cartons and bubble wrap. Sometimes life takes unpredictable turns and you have it, the egg cup, or silver dish that belonged in another generation or continent. Safe keeping, I mumble to myself. Wondering what are we meant to do with all this history when every day is so vibrant and new, fresh and captivating, and there are all of you there that I have learned to share these thoughts with, as well as the work and activities of our artists and galleries.

What have we accomplished in these ensuing months of masks and shots; for someone who has always been petrified of injections the self talk and yoga involved in regulating my emotions and melancholy, well it has been a challenge, but art has gone on, literature has gone on, the earth still turns but not without letting us all know we have to help. In some small way we have tried to bring serious content to this new virtual community, thank you all again for signing on. I am touched by your confidence.

PART II

Hail the personal moments, save them as they slide through our fingers. We cannot wrap them and take them out years later. We can only breathe them. Which brings me to this post and my decision to start with a photograph taken of me at the Groucho Club in London one year before the pandemic. I was in a daring mood with my leg on the arm of the club chair by a fire I seem to remember. Not my mood all these months on. But taking a moment of excitement from showing you how sometimes slow bloomers like Pavlova II, (wanted to show you the two flowers on the windowsill by my desk) lead your eye out the window to the small garden below us. This photo was taken by artist Esther Shalev-Gerz who came over last week to help with the boxes, along with Julian Marshal.

And as we are in the realm of time passing and seasons and being in it all together, a glimpse at fifty years ago, taken by my father if I remember when I was just twenty. We have survived all two thousand of us, while others have not, and I don’t take this lightly. From my side of the desk, a hefty birthday looms in Pisces. Stay tuned and tell your friends to follow us too please. There is more where all of this came from I promise you. Thinking out loud is what we have been doing, and shouting about the great works of our collaborators and friends.

To be continued.

PART I

There is something reassuring about watching an artist develop in his craft; through long days and hours in the studio, technical mishaps, lost moments of doubt, quizzical self-anhiliating fear everything shows up one way or another. We have been working with Robert Stone for sometime, and the bi-weekly pleasure of visiting and talking in his studio thanks to FaceTime has been a journey like all creative roads. The part you need to know is that this new body of work made in a flurry of deadline pressure for Haines Gallery’s exhibition at FOG Design + Art 2022 in San Francisco last week, marks a new step in Stone’s practice. It is the first time he has worked small; the transition from large mural size commissions that fill new architect designed homes and apartments around the country to something discrete and concentrated raised a new set of questions for the artist. Set off a new range of misgivings and technical challenges. 

For a painter whose early history fell in the realm of design, moving to a full time life as a painter presented its fair amount of drama. But we can now safely say that he is fully present in these works in his early mid-career with assurance and power that makes these works sing all on their own. One after the next decries his unique way of layering a grid, lines, brush strokes through a prism of compressed space in a way we have never before seen. There is nothing that prepares you for originality except the sense of rightness you feel in your mind’s eye when you see the tension created by something magic and unusual, just hanging together as if by a serendipity like breath. His new paintings are a gift that have been long in their gestation, but here they are full-blown pageantry of planes and lines swimming through space. It is an exciting moment to take notice.

PART II

As described by Haines Gallery in their press material, Robert Stone (b. 1961, lives and works in San Francisco, CA) creates striking canvases that blur the boundaries between two-and three-dimensional space, precise production and expressive gesture.

Using customized, trowel-like brushes, Stone applies ridges of layered paint that catch the light, causing elements to advance and recede as viewers interact with the work. Rendered in a palette of blacks, whites, and greys, the interlocking geometric forms and lines give way to sheer passages of paint over poured resin and bare linen canvas, further animating the interplay of elements that comprise each dynamic work. In these complex compositions, layered, tactile geometries and intersecting planes guide the viewer through abstract, ambiguous spaces and structures.

Stone studied at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. His work has been included in group and solo exhibitions in San Francisco, where he lives and works, Los Angeles, and New York, and is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

“Looking for Order

Painting after Covid.”

Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Paris

August 2021

PART I

I began the day with grey dawn, nervous that the blue sky and sun I longed for might not appear, but then I realised it was not yet six in the morning. Another early start, in these months of awkward starting and stopping, convincing ourselves the world as we once lived in it was still there, waiting, throbbing. The conversations and days and nights of artists, conversations, studio visits and then relentless watching over exhibition making, candid reflections and cynical interlude, I imagined all of these would be as before. Our world would be as before.

In the reflection of this, there is a lot to tell you right now. Richard Höglund’s paintings have a lot to tell you right now. But for you to understand in what way, and how, and why you have to follow me through this digression that will whip a bit back and forth, I must take you back in his life and mine, to a different time completely. Do this and your patience will be rewarded. Afterall, we have learned in the last two years of Covid about the elasticity of time, its strengths or weaknesses. We the lucky, are still alive, and we have finite time. For the ones who are not here—they have endless time; the reflections of this we see in the night sky, in the darkness that every twenty-four hours overcomes the light. This shadow land is not fearful on its own accord it is here that we understand the light, not the other way around.

PART II

Imagine a busy gallery with exhibitions going up and down monthly, dozens of people working in three floors, in this case in Paris. There are earnest young people in positions of importance, helping to make the machine or the beast run smoothly; there is a red headed man, tallish, curls, not French obviously, some kind of accent that is a mix of American and something else, but he is shy and doesn’t talk much, but he is very observant as we install one exhibition, then another, then another. He watches like a hawk. Has an easy laugh. Is prone to coffee with the youngest staff members, they cluster across the road in a makeshift lunch room/storage. There are a trio who work in this way as installers. I am told by my assistant that he is, like the others, an artist. I nod. Too busy to respond; a few months later I see an exhibition of his work at a small gallery off rue du Turenne. The surprise for me that day was just how coherent this installation appeared in the brief visit we made—wall drawings, wall writings, some kind of superimposition of text with drawing. His description of what the show was struck me as overly rhetorical, like many he had been reading all the critical literature popular a decade ago. “Useless” I think I may have muttered to him, but in spite of this need for literary justification there was something promising, as I referred to it at the time over a decade ago.

Since then, I have seen a smattering of exhibitions where the work depicted a kind of minimal painting that yearned to be something more expressive. Every time I stood in front of these light hued monochromatic canvases with colour appearing incidentally, I recalled how much critical reading he always wanted to discuss, how bound up he seemed to conditions of language and text. But, in fact his painting struck me as little connected to these ideas and more to something else, but he wasn’t seemingly aware of where they might be going, so my job was to wait.

PART III

This June, a short text message insisted I come to his studio, an hour from Paris. Impossible. I am still not doing studio visits, please send photos. In a shaky moment I agree. He is married now with two small children, his splendid wife a former archivist at the same gallery—so I feel connected to them through this lineage, like members of a tribe who have survived a war together.

He met me at the train, the sun glaring as it can in early summer, his red hair shorter, the beat-up Land Rover familiar, the small house on a large estate where his two children had been enrolled in local school was inviting. I held my breath because the life itself in this rose filled lane was intoxicating in its colour and vibrancy. He took me to a chapel that had been turned into his unlikely drawing studio, and it was here I caught a glimpse of a small dark painting above the wood burning stove. Then another. I relaxed because these were good works, and it meant there might be others in the tractor garage where he was working on large paintings.

He talked to me about pigment experimentation and discovering the invaluable Craftsman’s Handbook of Cennino Cennini published around 1400 that had recipes for pigments, going on from the Roman’s using Cinnabar to make vermillion, the Mercuric Sulphite of this mixing with Dragon’s Blood. He explained how long he had been working on these concoctions, trying to understand how colour was possible for his canvases; I let the words go, never wanting to hear too much because it was not always helpful in what actually the paintings embodied; he was giving me more classical back story that was leading up to more narrative behind the upcoming exhibition. 

The biggest problem visiting an artist in the studio working on a new oeuvre for an upcoming exhibition is figuring out what to say when the work isn’t doing what it could be doing. And they don’t know it. It is not fun at all. These moments can make you cry; the pressure being in front of work that has taken years to evolve and still isn’t there, isn’t singing because it is hanging there, limp and awkward, but not in a good way. How you address the good news and the bad news, is often one complex kettle of fish.

PART IV

Here, was one sumptuous dark triptych on the wall (Minyades III) with what looked like silver point drawing on the surface of the central panel. I am able to let you understand the complexity of the surface made up of silver, lead, Titanian on Indigo, marble dust, bone Pulver and acrylic emulsions on Belgian linen. What I didn’t know looking at this in the studio was that he mixed bone and marble which are crushed into powder and into this he adds dry pigments. Something in the surface is radiant and light hits every which way, the surface appears unstable, or rather you can’t rest your gaze upon it without it flinching back. There is a lot to see and a lot going on. Which is the attribute of these dark works, (there will be three in all) they are agitated as much as settled. I find myself thinking about Brice Marden’s early encaustic paintings, because for most of my life looking at work, I am always curious about materials, about how and why the work looks as it does. With Richard Höglund I am just looking to see what I don’t recognise, what is unfamiliar in the depth of this darkness. It has a liquidity that is hovering in some mid distance. The silverpoint is not for me as important as it is for him, but I just say briefly when he tells me it is unfinished and he shall add more silver point to the lower quadrant. “Why?” I ask him.

“Have you put a chair and sat in front of this work for a few hours to listen to it? You have to really understand what it is saying and how it is talking to you. There is something remarkable here, but I don’t think you sense it yet.”

I don’t want to look at the rest of the works just yet, but ask him if there isn’t another like this he has made for the project, and he takes me into the back room to see a smaller dark painting (Minyades IV—Silver, Lead, Titanium on Indigo, Dragon’s Blood, Marble Dust, bone Pulver and acrylic emulsion on Belgian linen) which he has explained in the narrative of the exhibition (which begins with the Carl Andre sculpture form 1990 Pyramus and Thisbe, Western Red Cedar that has unleashed his deep study of this story, and that led him to the story of three sisters weaving, alone in their room refusing to become worshipers of Dionysus and in their purity hope to escape the Bacchanal). This smaller work he suggests shows the three sisters who have been turned into bats shrieking into the night. Unconvinced by the story I ask him to hang this in the light next to the Minyades III; when they were both on the wall, I again asked him, “do you see what you have cooked here?”

At this point I wanted to just sit in silence. Which we did. The paintings are stronger than your story, I may have said. I wandered to see the preparatory sketches and research materials he had splayed across a studio work table, a book on Poussin open to the page on his Bacchanal, a book on Late Monet’s abstract Waterlilies from the period when he was almost blind. He had been struggling with the last painting, Bacchanal, now three panels on the wall, blank linen with layers and colours and curlicue gestures, conjuring up everything from Chagall to Poussin in the most untethered display of luxuriating layered decoration. Nothing to be said except to go back and sit in front of the dark works and let the velvet surfaces assuage our rustled spirits. Here was something long standing and true. Here was the radical zone of his midcareer finally appearing out from the collection of light works he had come to consider his primary subject. Here was painting you could sink your teeth into.

We spoke then about the tough aspects of understanding how and where light is created on the surface of paintings. The depth of field that arises even from a seemingly oily landscape of deep aubergine nearing black. There is no black you see, it is all tonalities of colour, and in these two works the sophistication and foreboding mingled with such ease that it almost escapes the viewer but then it pulls you back. “This is the sweet spot,” I say to him, before leaving for the train. “Understand what is happening here, in this darkness, it is not death, it is night. It is filled with the richness of your experience.” In my mind we are all of us sitting in these dark canvases trying to make sense again of a world we don’t recognise because it has changed, we have changed. It sounds like a cliché now to even imagine this as we try to ramp back up into the gear we were in before February of 2020.

PART V

In my thoughts that day were the grace of watching someone happy go lucky become a man, a father, a husband in the time of a pandemic; he had managed to get them out of harm’s way, deftly into the countryside, into a new school, into a new life, and having done that, what come through him was this darkness, these dark explorations of Indigo and Dragon’s Blood mixed with bone and marble. As if the antique world (marble) and our human/animal skeletons (bone) could provide a glistening molecular architecture for the most beloved shades of red and blue/violet. In this mix we have a glint of Abstract Expressionism of Rothko and Reinhardt, we have the early mottled surface of uneven wax encaustics in the minimalism of Marden, but his is another species now of painting. If it is fair to say the following day when he sent me a video of Bacchanal which he had worked on overnight, as a work that had “painted itself” I knew that he had indeed understood where he was at that moment, with the underpainting conjured from his mentors Poussin and Monet, but the surface was completely his condition here and now, in this maelstrom we will remember as being so turbulent and troublesome.

Here small episodes of colour playfulness seem to rise from the surface like a carp in dark water. Are we seeing through a glass darkly or is this molten thickness just slipping in front of our eyes like dusk? There is something original here that also conjures the mysterious nature of Ross Bleckner’s night sky or chandelier paintings. Having not seen this in person I am aware that the light variations and textures caught on a phone in a light filled former tractor garage may have very different values to this work on the wall in a gallery setting with incandescent light. I expect the inner structure of its visual array will be no less than what I saw articulated from this distance. Geometry hidden just beneath the surface, order amidst the chaotic rivulets of colour and drawing that had been strewn across the raw canvas in all versions of violet, purple, pink, red, blue from left to right filling the entire lower half of the work in a noisy turbulent cacophony. This was certainly no Bacchanal I may have said archly. Refusing to be drawn into how he was going to finish the most important work in the exhibition.

Surfing through the requisite vibrations of Poussin’s figures cavorting from top to bottom, edge to edge, lying open on his work table, alas were not going to help him now. Though these struggles are not dissimilar. Which took me back to reread John Berger on Poussin from 1959 where he lays out the stones in a path from Poussin’s need for order while being revolutionary, being picked up by Cézanne who was looking at the small elements to make painting new.

“For Poussin there was chaos beyond the town walls, beyond the circle of learning—as there was bound to be until it was realised that human consciousness had as material a basis as nature itself.”

The wild frenzy that was on the canvas in the studio unfinished, a rapture of uninhibited gestures redolent with appropriation from worthy helpmates, the lines or contours of Poussin, the colour and overlapping pools of late Monet, the rakish colours of late Chagall’s lovers flying in the air, what were these doing on a giant raw canvas was waiting to be clothed by night. The spell breaks, the sacrifice is made, the blood is spent and night comes back. Have we had to live through months of confinement where we could assiduously re-enact such things in mind, frozen and cut off in our own private worlds, far from each other, losing our minds? Then night. These flecks or episodes of narrative suggestion fill Bacchanal now with a reason to look, to be vigilant, to understand the texture and energy that can come only from painting. And maybe only now. Using a vintage piece of Carl Andre sculpture that presents a seemingly strong solid floor bound gravity about separation and weight, what enclosure actually signifies, as a pretext for an exhibition that goes from the floor to the wall, into the night sky reminds us that painting can still take us to uncharted, uncomfortable territories.

In this exhibition we see painting has still the capacity for dialectics. Just as Berger saw, his text concludes with a riff on Cézanne picking up the torch from Poussin—

“Cézanne’s incredible struggle was to find some system of order which could embrace the whole of nature and its constant changes. Against his wishes this struggle forced him to abandon the order of the static viewpoint, to admit that human consciousness was subject to the same dialectical laws as nature… Even today the process is incomplete, the solution only partial. Bur for those who will take the next step forward, Poussin, straddling the two periods in our culture when men sought order in life before they sought it in art, will remain an inspirer.”

In no way can we dismiss the ancient stories of the rites of Dionysus, the throngs dancing wildly under the influence of all the substances that were available, pulling apart of one human being as a sacrifice with the bare hands of the participants in this annual ritual these Bacchanalia were not unlike our own. We see aspects of these flagrant mind-numbing exercises playing out in real time with disturbing cult practices among our communities in many parts of the world; whether the cult figure is Dionysus or someone else, the sense of our possible immunity to these demigods and demagogues is a viscous fluid that covers everyone in the same way; thinking one can retain purity by sitting at home weaving as the story of this show suggests, is naïve. The purity we aspire to, the clarity, control and order we long for, this righteous moral certitude we insist upon, are in the end only simple illusions. Darkness absorbs us all. That is the fearsome aspect of life and art. In this exhibition of extraordinary paintings, we see something like a slice of this time through fine veined alabaster; opaque it draws us even closer.

Quotations from Selected Essays, John Berger, Bloomsbury, 2001, pages 48-51.

More info:

Richard Höglund

The Bonnier Gallery

Link to the exhibition catalogue

Something to be grateful for, I can leave my office in Paris and fifteen hours later pull up the drive to my mother’s house. You might take this for granted as I have for all the years I have lived on this side of the ocean. It was no big deal to fly around, just time and money. Like taking the bus, I was known to say because I spent so much time in the air. 

Since Covid I think differently. The sky driving between Newark and Philadelphia never looked so blue, clouds hanging like backlit Boucher above the scrubby landscape of turnpikes. Four days to see my three younger brothers, their families and my mom. Thanksgiving. Fifteen of us ages 8 months to 90. Blessings. Rapture. Craziness as usual. 

The trees were still protecting the house, hovering like giants every decade. The house was built and first landscaped in 1929, old trees planted well before, do still tower and sway in the high winds. Climate crisis afflicts them. 

Jet lag sent me out at dawn to see what had happened since my last visit.  They stood firm as we held our collective breaths; mom looks out during powerful storms hoping another one doesn’t pull up from the roots and crash down. But it happens. Even they have their limits. 

When we moved into this house, I was 11; there was a rose garden and banks of rhododendrons and azaleas throughout the woodlands. There was a beautiful flowering dogwood tree, long gone just next to the sun porch, and a tall pine just outside my bedroom allowed squirrels to look in when I did my homework. Cut down many years ago, my view is now deep into woods, the middle distance.

“What are you thankful for,” one young nephew asked as we sat down to our turkey. Everyone looked across the table and then one by one replies began. That we managed to be safe in the wake of Covid. That we were all together; and had each other after a long two years amongst the trees rooted and alive, growing still. I was grateful for each one of them.

All photos by JSVCprojects

The idea was to debut this new feature on our website after the summer but the sudden acceleration of going places again swept us off our feet quite literally. The interest in mapping our projects was definitely a pandemic response to the inability to go anywhere. Our clients and projects were out in the world and we were not flying at all. We were not taking trains. Now since midsummer that has eased up and much to my chagrin, I am feeling again the scrambled sense of being in too many places and seeing too many people and works of art. This is a state of mind that follows several fairs since midsummer.

Last winter our web designer Mr Hide (Richard Lem in Berlin) came up with a surprising idea to fly across the screen instead; a novel approach for a very tiny bespoke agency with large ambitions and modest resources. What you see here is a world map with our collaborators and clients in their current working environments. Each of them are doing stellar jobs to be the best that they can, which is what we bring to their studio tables, or gallery tables, or living room tables.  Their strategic best as we see it through our lens.

Head’s up anyone going to Miami next month. Do not miss Richard Höglund’s elegant and startling exhibition the MINYADES which will open on Thursday 2, December at The Bonnier Gallery —Inc. An earthbound presence of a wooden sculpture of Carl Andre Pyramus and Thisbe (1990) sets the stage for a cycle of intense paintings we have waited for from Höglund.

Here is the link to our Collaborators

And here Mr Hide‘s website

JSVCprojects is happy to share Filmmaker Ishmael Annobil’s good news.

“Just when we thought providence was done with us, it gives us four more accolades, starting with this selection late last night by the inspired Bettiah International Film Festival (Bihar, India).

This selection is especially significant because Tongues on Fire, the organisation behind the festival, is a not-for-profit organisation with a goal to entertain, inform, educate and effect change in mood, emotion or thought to empower women. They are led by Richa Sharma.”

“Our film, ‘Linda Karshan: Covid19 Conversation’ has been selected by KIIFF (Kurdistan International Independent Film Festival), Erbil, Kurdistan, in their very first outing. I am proud to have anything to do with favourite people, the Kurds! Joy!”

“We are Semi-Finalists at the International Moving Film Festival, Iran. 

On August 21, I received this note from the festival’s director and legendary filmmaker, Mahmoud Reza Sani:

“Dear Ishmael, your documentary “LINDA KARSHAN: COVID-19 CONVERSATION” is well made, with quality material, great directing and interesting subject. It has the documentary quality with artistic techniques. Looking forward to see more of your films soon.”

It is worth more than any award I get from that most creative of all filmmaking nations, Iran!”

“Proud to say, Linda Karshan: Covid19 Conversation has been selected by Amdabad Film Festival 2021!”

To watch the film:

https://covid19conversation.info

PART I

I don’t think anything prepared me for the exuberance and edgy freshness of the prototypes produced by the IDE TO POLAND, Ceramic & Food Route Expedition. After six weeks in situ, working with local makers, the three designers Eimear Ryan, Zhuo Qi and Goliath Dyevre and expert designers Mathilde Bretillot, Miska Miller-Lovegrove, Marc Bretillot, Pierangelo Caramia, with the additional input of graphic designer Robert Czerniawski pulled off an off the cuff exhibition of sparkling originality.

Arriving at the end of a project is always challenging, alliances are already formed, complicities interwoven, and the haphazard difficulties of producing something new and original in a nomadic environment are not to be minimized. As in any live performance, once the curtain goes up it is show time. When I arrived in the glass pavilion at the Raffles Europejski Warsaw Hotel inside the buildings’ elegant inner courtyard, it was a challenge from start to finish to improvise an exhibition of quality with, as is the IDE way, an economy of means.

It was rock and roll. The banners of the original IDE TO POLAND alphabet created by Robert Czerniawski set the backdrop with its colourful typologies that were originally imagined from a list of ingredients, but then developed into these stylized pictographic composites that became the 26 letters of the alphabet. The long scrolls hung floor to ceiling giving us a backdrop that set the mood and presented a visual paparazzi location not far from the bar where food designer Marc Bretillot had created a “foodtail” of delicious frothy coolness. A base of our vodka—sponsored by the Polish Vodka Museum—, a whipped up steamy potato mousse topped with a spoonful on the edge of Antonius Caviar.

Special cups were designed and created to hold this heady drink that was warm and cold at the same time on the tongue. Salty and earthy with the mix of vegetal and sea. This first series of ten photos is a bit before the opening. You will see how the tables were turned into exhibition display surfaces with rolls of thick white paper. We used café tables, and outdoor furniture as the structures. Whatever was at hand.

PART II

The excitement of watching objects take the stage is no different than having choreography or film presented before your eyes. They are creatures into themselves, whether cups or plates, centrepieces or quirky elements to fill a table with humor and charm. The narrative is felt in the colors and forms, the differences between smooth polished surface or rough hewn dark matte materials. Here in the Polish landscape both kinds of energies are present, there is a lot of the darkness everywhere, the daily, the unexplored, the places you walk past because the history is too stark, and you look up into the sky and wonder how it all goes on.

Then there is a delight in the thing itself. A story of a vodka cup that cannot be put on the table as it has no flat side, but must be passed from hand to hand at a banquet. This leads to imaginary leaps of fantasy that give rise to all kinds of vessels. Here on the table they march out and pose heroically, large and small, black or white, sometimes multitudes of colors. If you look closely you will see. Then there are the subtle elegance of Miska Miller-Lovegrove’s interpretation of mushrooms now turned into bowls of any size, Mathilde Bretillot’s simple ceramic bottle with a golden apple on the summit, Pierangelo Caramia’s monument to the moment, a concrete portal supporting a golden plate.

PART III

The game of the Apple and the Goose designed by Marc Bretillot and Laurent d’Estrées was used in our partner Epoka restaurant dinners, while a juicy beet platter designed by Goliath Dyevre lets its juice create the color of a plate. Zhuo Qi’s black vessels are held by bricks and Eimear Ryan’s delicate apple platters surprise and invite us to just pick them up and fill them with fruit. It was altogether sensational and I am still feeling the energy and strength of the designs and the makers who worked alongside pushing the envelop of what is or what could be possible. Nothing is accepted at face value, the makers are pushed by the designers beyond their own experience and the designers are pushed by the energy and creative voices they hear flying through the air at night in Poland. These works could not be produced anywhere else at any other time. That is what you feel standing there just before the opening, looking at the tables.

Six weeks earlier there would not have been the possibility of any of these objects being in the world, and here as if by magic, we have a symphony orchestra all playing together. Utterly amazing.

© All photographs by JSVCprojects

More info:

IDE TO POLAND in collaboration with @creativeprojectfoundation

Part of CERAMIC & FOOD ROUTE

Co-produced with: @fondationmartell

Designers: @goliathdyevredesign @argot_studio @zhuo.qi

Co-creative direction: @mathildebretillot @miskamillerlovegrove

IDE Experts: @jsvcprojects #marcbretillot @pierangelo.caramia @laurentdestrees

Producer: @ankasimone

Sponsors and Partners: Adam Mickiewicz Institute @culture_pl
Institut Français de Varsovie @if_officiel @institut_francais_de_varsovie @raffleseuropejski @autor_rooms
Polish Vodka Museum @polishvodkamuseum

Food: @restauracjaepoka @antoniuscaviar

Academic: @schoolofform

Ceramists: @majolika_nieborow @dominika_donde @moskoceramics

Communication: @14septembre

Media partner: @kukbuk_official

International Design Expeditions

I am in Warsaw. The second trip in two months; talked to Joanna Fikus the chief curator of exhibitions at POLIN on Thursday about this very work which to my mind is one of the masterpieces of the Shalev-Gerz oeuvre. It was made on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005; the work is a record of the 60 survivors from this camp who were then alive in Paris. The entirety of the video testimonies was presented in a large installation in 2005 at the City Hall in Paris. It also appeared at the retrospective exhibition in Jeu de Paume, Paris, in MCBA Lausanne, in The Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, Vancouver as well as in Montreal and Detroit.

For this Nuit Blanche 2021, large screens will be projected on the wall above the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, lighting the night sky. When talking to Joanna Fikus I said that to my mind, this work with its intuitive strategy of showing the silences in-between the spoken interviews was perhaps the most stirring reading of the human experience of living through what has become more and more unspeakable as time passes. It has also the potential of becoming beyond understanding once the survivors are no longer living. So the sculptural and visceral changes in the larger than life faces of these witnesses leaves a deep mark in the spirit of the viewer. In these moments of time passing, the brow becomes a landscape of pain, the eyes look away into a distant memory of things impossible to render in language, the chin, the lips, the cheeks become elements in the act of memory that transcends understanding. It becomes a mirror of our own capacity to empathise and listen in silence. We watch, we listen, we witness this silence. Shalev-Gerz allows both the healing of silence and the loud music of silence to wash through these long sequences in filmic terms. These are our relatives, even those of us with no connection to the Holocaust at all. They are our family members in the lost tribes of centuries ago, all of whom somehow managed to be in a part of the world that became nothing but a killing field.

Dinner last night in Warsaw a question fluttered across the table; how large was the Jewish community today in Warsaw. An affable heartfelt native said not more than 30,000. Which included those who were members of the community as well as those with secular associations. There was a pause among the four of us; and then he continued, ‘we once had the largest Jewish population in the world second only to New York, but that was before.’ Shalev-Gerz may well have been with us in the dining room in spirit. Certainly her work emits a transmission of human strength and resolve that certainly followed me to Poland.

Photo captions:

3-10 Esther Shalev-Gerz, “Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz 1945-2005”, 2005, Video triptych, 40 minutes

More info:

Esther Shalev-Gerz
Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris
Nuit Blanche à Paris

PART I

I am writing this on the eve of the opening of ART BASEL 2021. It is the first time René Schmitt Druckgraphik, Berlin, is exhibiting and he is showing a very special portfolio that we worked on together with ART & LANGUAGE (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) in 2016. During this time, I made an exhibition THE NON-OBJECTIVE WORLD at SPROVIERI London, about the Black Square works of Kabakov and ART & LANGUAGE. The exhibition led to a book. A result of the unanimous excitement and praise of the project (it was displayed in Basel that year) René asked me if maybe the artists would consider making a group of prints on the subject. A new project was born.

It is a vital, robust and strong portfolio that captures the edgy dialectic at the heart of their disruptive approach to the art world as a whole. Having found a place on the edges of artistic creation that often confounds and baffles viewers, this collective project now in its almost 6^th decade makes it clear that the radicalism of the 1960’s is never far below the surface; as aesthetic discourse or digression. They have resisted the siren’s song of pandering to market forces and stuck to their guns, and those guns are coming out brightly in Basel this year.

Their long-time gallery in Belgium Mullier-Mullier will display early works, and Schmitt will offer THESE SCENES, five prints as an iconic mini collection, a testament to a kind of understanding of the reality of modernism, while questioning all the while, what it is to be contemporary. Suddenly in this very disruptive time ART BASEL is trying to catch up with itself and a market, offering us something daring in September, while the carrot of next June is not far away from the tip of our noses.

PART II

In the months before my 2016 exhibition, I interviewed Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden about what they remembered of the appearance of the Malevich ‘The Non-Objective World’ in English during their early 20’s. The interview I will share in snippets here with commentary. The images you will see are the five monoprints made each with a different medium and by hand, they arrive in a hand-painted wooden portfolio box which is a work of art as well. As we have come through a period of great upheaval and it is still with us, it seemed that the social and political dimension of the discussion was still very relevant.

B: The glamour of the appearance of ‘The Non-Objective World’ in the mid 60’s (Malevich was an artist of myth and mystery) may have been attributable to the fact that the work was inaccessible. Remembering that the Soviet Union was at full cry in the Cold war, the Cultural Revolution in China was happening… There was a connection between various discourses about abstract art—heavily reductive abstract art—and questions of social change. Those connections were of a great deal of interest to us. Nobody quite knew how they might really be connected—how social change, revolution and an apparently revolutionary artistic style were connected.

R: About the Malevich book the fact that he went on in this really weird language about a world without things, about art without objects, art without things. What he meant I think was without depicting things. It was still kind of interesting. Remember in 1965 I didn’t know Michael. For me, some of the appeal of the Black Square was that it had a connection to Ad Reinhardt… We were attracted to the possibility of deflating the ‘metaphysics’ of the Square. ‘Conveying the feeling of universal space.’

B: We turned away from those overheated metaphysically grand statements and were being directed by voices which were a lot drier, a lot more analytical and a lot less enchanted with universality and philosophical grandeur.

PART III

B: We have been fucking up monochromes and Black Squares for years. Intermittently, but it has nothing to do with us, well a little bit to do with its formality and a great deal to do with its cultural guise as a sign of purification and distillation. Most artistic purifications and distillations are, to my mind, intrinsically good.

R: But Black Squares can get boring. There is always a sense in which what we produced were guises and sign-exchanges and (dis)guises for these culturally overheated products.

Which is why perhaps in this portfolio you have five different costume changes for the Black Square. They incorporate the strategies and interest ART & LANGUAGE have evidenced from the beginning of their careers. 1) The Suprematist Squares; 2) Secret Painting; 3) Guaranteed Painting; 4) Cracked surface with text beneath; 5) No secret at all. Together this set of works illustrates the varied and unrelenting commitment these artists maintained for decades, to the discussion of language and its place in the visual process we call art.

These works raise issues with a crisp authority. Is reading a text the same thing as looking at a black abstract square? If you put one behind the other is the meaning changed? If you open fissures in the foreground of the abstract monochrome so rivulets of text seep into the visual field, is it still a text work or a painting? How do you read? Is it the same kind of seeing used when looking at a Black Square?

THESE SCENES (2016)
A portfolio of 5 mixed media collage works including:
Monotype, woodblock print, aquatint etching, Xerox print, pencil drawing, crayon drawing and Letraset on 300 gr laid paper in wooden box, each with unique painting.
Each 120.4 x 81 cm, Edition of 12 + 2 H.C (each set is unique).
Each hand-signed, numbered and stamped Art & Language.

Quotes from the book:
The THE NON-OBJECTIVE WORLD. ART & LANGUAGE / KABAKOV, Sprovieri, Edited by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts.
Texts by Art & Language, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Ilya Kabakov, Rod Mengham, Andrei Nakov.
Sprovieri, London, 2016.

More info:

René Schmitt, Berlin

Art Basel 2021, Basel

PART I

Have just learned that I can post on JSVCprojects and IDE at the same time.

So following on our road trip yesterday took us to a place called Kwaśne Jabłko where Marcin Wiechowski and his wife have bought a farm a few years ago and are now producing cider from historic orchards called Acidic Apples. He has created a BnB with a restaurant in the farm on a beautiful spot in a container. The idea is it is a formula other farmers can adopt too. You will see the blue painted container. Lunch was enchanting. Fresh and vivid flavours in an array of vegetable combinations. Stuffed zucchini flowers with cheese and eel on a lemony layer of thinly sliced courgettes, baked pumpkin.

The big tree you see on the porch in front of his chaix where he makes several varieties of cider from different varieties of apples. He told a story about the place being without history without objects without remnants of the past except the oldest apple trees that were over a hundred years old. He is trying in his way to make a new history.

Then we drove again to another special place for the night Stara Szkola Wysoka Wieswhere Jacek Trocz and his wife served dinner and breakfast you will see redolent with petals and flowers from their abundant gardens. Colourful vegetables and lively flavours in their dishes and table settings. This is my last day on this expedition and the the ideas are coming fast and feverishly among the designers and experts. You will see the results in a month when I come back to see the results.

PART II

This is the first painting you see in @wilhelm_sasnal exhibition SUCH A LANDSCAPE at @polinmuseum. His affection for this particular slightly acidic green is present in many works a kind of electric charge that makes a neutral scene feel far from bucolic. This menacing charm is an irony not lost on us today.

© All photographs by JSVCprojects

More info:

IDE TO POLAND in collaboration with @creativeprojectfoundation

Part of CERAMIC & FOOD ROUTE

Co-produced with: @fondationmartell

Designers: @goliathdyevredesign @argot_studio @zhuo.qi

Co-creative direction: @mathildebretillot @miskamillerlovegrove

IDE Experts: @jsvcprojects #marcbretillot @pierangelo.caramia @laurentdestrees

Producer: @ankasimone

Sponsors and Partners: Adam Mickiewicz Institute @culture_pl
Institut Français de Varsovie @if_officiel @institut_francais_de_varsovie @raffleseuropejski @autor_rooms
Polish Vodka Museum @polishvodkamuseum

Food: @restauracjaepoka @antoniuscaviar

Academic: @schoolofform

Ceramists: @majolika_nieborow @dominika_donde @moskoceramics

Communication: @14septembre

Media partner: @kukbuk_official

International Design Expeditions

PART I

It is with great excitement that IDE TO POLAND launches today in Warsaw; the designers and experts are making their way now as I am writing this for an expedition that will be full of creative surprises and conceptual developments.

For those who have followed IDE, you will know that I am the “strategist” who is responsible for thinking out loud, about the content driven mindset underpinning IDE’s unique approach to design in its deepest social position. Call this an idealist’s vision or even mildly utopian stance.

It is safe therefore to tell you that for me it is obvious that the roots of IDE date somehow back to the late 1970’s and 1980’s when social discussions surrounding design and architecture manifested in centers like New York, London and Milan; where people believed design and architecture could have social impact, even change the world. The origins of IDE may have been planted then—in these locations where Mathilde Bretillot and Pierangelo Caramia found themselves as young designers in Milan during the heady days of Memphis; and I found myself in New York working at the infamous think-tank Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, while Miska Miller-Lovegrove made the risky journey away from Warsaw to London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture.

These early trips away from home comforts aimed towards a new reckoning with what design and architecture could do under extreme circumstances; it seemed at that time to offer up unique and creative possibilities to real problems. Such beginnings remain lodged calmly at the heart of IDE’s work with young designers today taking these ideas forward.

PART II

I was looking this morning for a text by Ettore Sottsass as a case in point and found his 1949 piece, “The Significance of Standard” where he says:

“Entire civilizations that have flourished over centuries and centuries in the distant past used the same forms, the same materials, the same colours and the same decorations for furnishings, fabrics and all kinds of products, with such rigor, insistency and precision that archaeologists have no trouble in understanding the age of a find from even the tiniest remnant discovered in a stratum of earth.”

“The ancients were defined by and had no fear of defining themselves through a few forms that, having come into being goodness knows how and having been experimented upon for centuries, endured and held good for more centuries again. In a few forms those people marked the sense of their civilization and were satisfied with that, leaving the costly and dangerous game of expressing new and profound things to a few great artists.” “But now, instead, our civilization must be an achievement of democracy. With the aid of machines this civilization wants to construct pure and simple symbols. These symbols that can be easily and miraculously replicated by machines must come into being, live and hold good as a sign of a gigantic new union of men and women in a sole faith: that of a new society.”

PART III

So then what is IDE?

International Design Expeditions AISBL is a non-profit organisation with a mission to develop a new design language that puts the history of terroir and local savoir-faire in the heart of new creativity. Highlighting direct local narratives that provide a basis for innovative designs solutions and new prototypes production, the IDE principle of Haute Collaboration involves designers and makers in a new virtuous economic model.

CERAMIC & FOOD ROUTE puts in place an ambitious expedition program in situ and in real time, making a new pilgrimage route between international territories joining all the creatives (designers, chefs, architects, artists, artisans, manufacturers, design students, strategists) in a jazz-like model of improvisation and unedited making to create together a practice of co-creation where conception and production are simultaneous. Designers and partners (Food Designer Marc Bretillot is the expert here for culinary discoveries with local ingredients) are chosen to participate in this extreme choreography (a six-eight week residency in situ) where the lively working process is in the moment, in the experience of real time, immersive and intuitive. Adopting a farm to table model, IDE brings new forms, based in a deep connection to “terroir” like wine, into the world through mingling creative energies and new conversations. Why Poland you might ask. Without having the tools of a historian or social anthropologist or even the history of art and design from this very fertile area, IDE is conscious in a way of the very rich ground upon which we are planting ourselves, to cook up something new and magical. Pulling up some of the long-ago-planted and even long-ago-lost roots that will add power and efficacy to the new ceramic forms and special recipes that shall be uncovered. On this day of the launch, we are all looking forward to seeing what new and radical proposals might take root in this fertile landscape.

PART IV

For over 1000 years Poland has been at the centre of cosmopolitan life, in the crossroads North to South, East to West of Central Europe. From the Middle Ages until today it has been a sweeping history of social, religious and political diversity. A thousand years of coexistence, cooperation, rivalry and conflict, autonomy, integration and assimilation—all of which has left traces of physical materials, pottery, textiles, recipes, raw agricultural ingredients, architectural styles; a myriad of colours and textures brought together from the four corners of Asia Minor, the Middle East, Europe and the Nordic regions, carried first by peoples on foot, then with their possessions strapped on horseback, later piled in carriages, or later on trains, eventually in automobiles and trucks and now also in planes which still criss-cross the area, which is this largest landmass in the heart of Europe.

Trade routes continued one century after the next, bringing products and goods through periods of thorny conflicts, or through alternating bright chapters of common history, where religious communities and peoples from different origins lived peacefully together sharing and evolving their arts and crafts and developing eventually new regional styles. Poland offers a unique history of middle Europe through its artefacts and objects, and through the contemporary designers and artisans today who are interested in revisiting some of these deeply held traditions. Accidentally Poland has had the advantage of being out of the centre and in many parts not affected by certain of the levelling and homogenizing aspects of globalisation that might involve such things as large-scale farming with pesticides; or mass production of housewares. There is currently a new generation of young farmers, chefs, designers, makers and artists looking back to a slower more locally sourced positions—searching out new forms rooted in the “terroir” itself.

PART V

IDE has come to understand through its Ceramic & Food Route projects, that every object is important and fills a gap in memory—personal memory as well as collective memory. Through this virtual community of Eastern and Central Europe there are over 1,900 cities, towns, villages located within the historic borders of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth spanning the territories of today’s Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Russia and Moldavia. Each population centre has its own stories to tell, family traditions, manufacturing specialities, culinary highlights, recipes and festive occasions galore.

The excitement of seeing this history and these personally evolved habits that make Poland its own alphabet of experience—through new eyes, new design impulses, new awareness—will bring the magic into the kitchen and ceramic studios to create a new vision of this very old culture and its objects. With the warmth of a family’s historic hearth and wood burning oven, to the most contemporary updated revision of ancient delicacies through experimentation and daring re-interpretation. This is IDE TO POLAND, CERAMIC & FOOD ROUTE, an adventure in the end having food on the table in vessels and platters that have evolved from 1000 years of history.

More info:

IDE TO POLAND in collaboration with @creativeprojectfoundation

Part of CERAMIC & FOOD ROUTE

Co-produced with: @fondationmartell 

Designers: @goliathdyevredesign @argot_studio @zhuo.qi 

Co-creative direction: @mathildebretillot @miskamillerlovegrove 

IDE experts: @jsvcprojects #marcbretillot @pierangelo.caramia @laurentdestrees

Producer: @ankasimone

Sponsors and Partners: Adam Mickiewicz Institute @culture_pl 

Institut Français de Varsovie @if_officiel @institut_francais_de_varsovie @raffleseuropejski @autor_rooms 

Polish Vodka Museum @polishvodkamuseum

Food: @restauracjaepoka @antoniuscaviar 

Academic: @schoolofform

Ceramists: @majolika_nieborow @dominika_donde @moskoceramics 

Communication: @14septembre 

Video: @antilope.tv

Media partner: @kukbuk_official

PART I

I have been back from Copenhagen for well over a week. In this period many other things have happened. But in the last post I shared with you the pleasure of serious work on a catalogue raisonné project on the Kirkeby Bricks, The Unrealised Projects. But I was so taken by this that I neglected to share the unassuming brilliance of the exhibition on view at the gallery by Polish born artist Nina Nowak. “A Timeline Starting on the Surface”, a sculpture exhibition of such originality that I had to stand in the gallery for quite a moment before bursting into the office to see Susanne and the team after such a long absence of almost a year.

What you see walking into the gallery are odd sculptures in which have a combination of materials, organic and inorganic, large clumps of some material you can’t put your finger on, crumbled, forms in tan cratered lumps with pigment splashed on them. There are two large lumps and metal tubing leading to an upended white plastic industrial tray. Best of all I must tell you is the thin plastic sheeting on the floor. It made me laugh out loud for its brilliance. Not something I am used to these days, walking into a gallery and smiling much less laughing because an artist has surprised me so deeply with such a dazzle of normally inarticulate materials.

I walked around this work for a long time, and then saw the drawings on mylar-like film hanging like dish towels on the wall; superb in their matter-of-factness. Then turning around the angle of wall the rest of the show opened up like a chorus. It took a while and a conversation with the gallerist to focus on the aspect of liquidity in the constructions. But on their own as a constructed series of never-before-seen combinations of odd clumps and metal in various interactions, I thought about the early works of Cady Noland, and more recently Tatiana Trouvé, these lumpy bumps reminded me of the almost ugly early polycarbonate works of Eva Hesse and many years later, British Sculptor Richard Deacon, who was a tutor in her studies in Düsseldorf. This is sculpture as installation and construction. The aspect of playing around with how things could mash together is very evident. You have to be very assured in your practice to make unattractive materials sing.

PART II

Coming around that corner there was a long work with an orange painted metal structure that somehow seemed to connect another strange object/form that without touching you would assume was concrete, leading somehow to a kind of transparent collapsed balloon of enormous proportion. You wanted to understand the relationship between the parts because it implied a cause and effect, but on its own it was so damn beautiful the lightness again of this plastic collapsed parachute like form, the orange non-machine and this organic boulder of some mysterious content.

The show’s apotheosis was a very large installation in the final and largest gallery space —  many component parts that took the structural columns of the gallery, the walls and floors as part of the set up. Amazing but complex in a way, quirky in a way that is very hard to describe here. Astonishing though is Nowak’s use of structures that seem to be doing one thing but actually do another. There are small touches that catch your eye like small punctuations quietly placed at certain moments of dramatic implication. In the first work my gaze settled on a small u-shaped metal support that seemed like an afterthought pinched from a game of croquet.

Reading the press release, you learn these clusters of stone are drawn from the interior tunnelling of the mountain that come to morph over time through their interaction with an exposure to various external factors. The constructions are called borderlands between organic and inorganic, the sculptures have moving parts, liquids that flow includes water and copper oxide used from various containers into basins, dispersed via a network of pipes. Some on a regular basis and other too slow to notice. The work with the huge balloon, presents cement itself composed of grains of marl, transformed into a tool in its own right which when pumped back and forth along a track bears the capacity to inflate a room-sized cube with air.

PART III

The uncanny formalism of this challenging family of odd children is a refreshing confrontation with expectations of what sculpture can be and might be. It was surprising to me in ways that reminded me of seeing the Eva Hesse show in New York at the Guggenheim Museum in 1973. Maybe it was there I learned that odd materials had unemphatic power. In a text that accompanies the project by Rosa de Graaf, Curator at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly the Witte de With in Rotterdam), we learn about Nowak’s view of tunnels inside a mountain incurred over millennia of excavation. An approach with both a sculptural and very human problem,

“regarding the space of art as a conduit for the questioning the scale of things we cannot see. Especially fitting, considering art as a form of meaning making that is felt, beyond the sole register of sight. Nowak takes the excavated material itself — marlstone — as her base, seeing to grasp its conditions invisible to the human eye, using her chiselling tool as a focal point. Whether carving or drawing, working in photogrammetry or animation, each affords a unique lens through which to zoom in and out of the borderland both materially and conceptually, and as guided, in turn, by each materials’ distinct set of realities.”

More info:

Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen

PART I

I remember clearly meeting Mischa Kuball at the opening of the Venice Biennale in 2009. It was a warm afternoon, which was not unusual with the Biennale over the years. I have been to every one since John Armleder’s Swiss Pavilion in 1986. John Gibson and I were there because Armleder showed in those early years in John Gibson Gallery on Broadway at Prince Street. I learned from a seasoned dealer that just being in the Giardini and hanging around with the artist you were representing was the easiest way in the world to meet and talk to people. It was just like that. Nothing special. Art was the pretext that brought everyone to this small collection of pavilions in Venice.

Twenty-three years later (2009) it was a very different art world; I left New York in 1995, spent a decade at LISSON and was in Paris as partner at ROPAC. I remember feeling a bit footloose and fancy free that year. In 2007 it had been very tense, openings of several artists meant great focus because there were dinners and receptions for Richard Deacon and the Kabakovs. In 2009 there was nothing particular to be responsible for, so I was enjoying the freedom and walking around with then Director of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Ulrich Krempel, with whom I was collaborating on the traveling exhibition of Richard Deacon, and later in 2012 with the traveling exhibition “Return to Painting”, by Kabakov. 

It was a moment to catch ones breath, I went back through the archives and discovered that Daniel Birnbaum was curator that year. Of the artists he showed in the Arsenale I remembered a remarkable tribute to Chen Zhen who had died prematurely in 2000. It is funny what the mind remembers: an elaborate seemingly childlike installation of Hans-Peter Feldmann, the large presentation of Gutai. Joan Jonas having her moment of recognition, Aleksandra Mir, Gordon Matta-Clark. Stopping to get a bottle of water, just outside the Italian Pavilion we stopped to speak with Mischa Kuball. 

PART II

I remember at that moment saying something about having met him in New York in the 80’s; he mentioned coming to John Gibson. That was the start of walking and talking. His work was well-known in the realm of public art; he had a large reputation and had made work I followed from a distance. This kind of artist was out of my radar in those years, because in large galleries one was rather blinkered. Eyes and brain tethered to the group of artists represented by the gallery. Loyalty was everything as was deep focus. So I missed a lot in those decades, and I am only now waking up to how wide the art world was outside of my direct line of vision.

That early summer in Venice I remember feeling intrigued by things I didn’t think at all resembled the artists I knew. There was beginning to be a feeling that everything was speeding fast forward. This was just a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the Damien Hirst sale at Sotheby’s. Certain things were in the air. It felt as if something was shifting. Mischa Kuball was interesting to think about in this context for me because his work was outside the box. It didn’t fit somehow neatly because his interests were in the public domain, art as a social construct, and his research and text writing attest to his dialectical position. 

Something about this settled in the back of my mind, and in the period since starting JSVCprojects it has been easier to walk through doors into the parts of art that don’t fit into the white cube. Ironically even when they do sometimes the works can be both dialectical and still objects of importance on a wall in a gallery. Not everything needs to be enacted in a public thoroughfare, or using public buildings and streets. But I have to say, looking at Mischa Kuball’s works over the years, I can safely say, hand over my heart, this kind of work is damn exciting. Fearless to go into the streets and ask the public to come over and walk from here to there in a certain way, or propose with a billboard or text above a train station that they think about something new as a proposal. His ability to make suggestions and then let people get on board energizes and animates the field.

PART III

Imagine how pleased I am too now, after many more years visiting Venice, to be working with this great artist in the peak of his career. He has a significant body of work under his belt, just several weeks ago, there were two important projects at the same time in Hanover and Wolfsburg.

Just a quick note, in the sequence of photographs included here, we chose as well a catalogue for an important exhibition that closed last winter, but I thought it important to present it in this context, Emile Nolde, A Critical Approach, has already garnered quite a bit of discussion since its presentation at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen. We will return to the topic of this brilliant research driven investigation of the new revised historically accurate position of Nolde in the art world during his lifetime and see how this has/had influenced or not his works and their position and influence – at a later date.

Today I wanted to begin by showing you images of Kuball’s recent video installation “lost artefacts, lost presence” that was for a short moment in the Arne Jacobsen Foyer, Hanover. It had a pop-up lifespan between May and June of this year while it revealed a river flowing through space just below the ceiling. Priceless cultural assets appeared to fall before your eyes into a never-ending stream of transience. 

This unusual space between the Grosser Garten on one side and a busy road with a tram on the other, between the Baroque Galerie and the rebuilt palace, this Arne Jacobsen Foyer was an ideal space for Kuball, whose conceptual work investigates architectural spaces and their social and political contexts. Here he used a historically charged passage whose significance he deconstructed in this video work, “lost artefacts, lost presence”. Aside from the function of the foyer as an interlude between history and the present, between original and copy, the artist raised the question of provenance of these passing objects. Are they being brought back to their original homes, or are they lost to all cultures forever. What is our position on the edge of this debate or in its center. 

PART IV

This summer there is a large and important exhibition in Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg ReferenzRäume which you can see until September. I will visit in mid July in case anyone wants to join me. Here curator Holger Broeker has given the artist wide latitude to offer large scale installations that allude to the media-technological development of our society from Plato’s deluded cave dweller to the cognizant space traveller.

At the same time the work juxtaposes classical metaphors of light and its concept of enlightenment with the experience of social/political spaces. Where public and private space is interconnected utterly. I am smiling because the exhibition presents a series of works under the collective title “public preposition”, developed since 2009 (the year we met in Venice). This is Kuball’s ongoing investigation of public space, that questions our perceptions of seemingly familiar environments and creates moments of irritation.

I don’t want to go into this right now, would rather see the exhibition first hand and report back; but want to entice you to make an effort to come in July with me to experience it. Curator Holger Broeker writes, “The ongoing character of “public preposition”, as an open project series enables the possibility of developing new works or publications from the documentation of projects.”

Order this spectacular book. Edited by Andreas Beitin, Holger Broeker and Fritz Emslander published as an artist’s book by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. The publication with its extensive pictorial section designed by the artist, is the first comprehensive compendium on Kuball’s work since 2007. Texts by Lilian Haberer, Daniel Horn, Christina Irrgang and Marcus Steinweg offer an in-depth examination of central themes in the artist’s work. German/English 360 pages, 500 illustrations.

The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen.

Photo captions:

1-3 Mischa Kuball 2021, “lost artefacts, lost presence”, Exhibition view KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Arne-Jacobsen-Foyer, Hannover, 2021
Room / Video installation Projection on the ceiling 46 x 2,5 m

Photo: © Helge Krückenberg / KunstFestSpiele 2021 © Archiv Mischa Kuball, Düsseldorf / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

PART I

L’Interstice is a new addition to the growing art world based in Arles. A city that I visited with John Gibson in the early 1980’s for the first time, when he was making his usual southern tour to stop and see collectors and museum directors with his Citroen CX filled to the brim with 30×40 black portfolios that zipped up full of conceptual art. Twice a year, we made six-week swings across Europe to place works in collections. These trips allowed the income the gallery needed to get through another six months.

We made our way circuitously to Arles after he stopped to see Marie-Claude Beaud then director in Toulon. Arles was grey and cold; it was March if I remember. It was like something from a film noir. The streets were empty in the middle of the day, we were spending two days to rest before driving to the Camargue to visit Luc Hoffmann at Tour du Valat; he was a longstanding client of John’s, unusual having left his larger well-known family in Switzerland to set up an ecological foundation.

I have snippets of memory, children playing in the open spaces of Arles following me when I left the hotel to find something in a small market near the hotel. It was the first time I had come head on with what was then called gypsies. The sense of menace I felt was not from these children, it was more from the dusty emptiness of Arles in winter.

PART II

By the time we drove to the Camargue, the sun returned and we made our way past the salt marshes, saw the flamingos and the wild horses both of which Luc Hoffmann was protecting with his conservationist research center. I remember Luc Hoffmann as a kind of handsome and warmly curious man; I was in my early 30’s and trying to fit into this already established art world. He was obviously very interested in a British artist living in New York who used nature as his primary material, Peter Hutchinson, but too Dennis Oppenheim who at this time had been making ground-breaking work about glaciers. All of this work was photo-based.

Four decades and his daughter Maya has revolutionized Arles as we all know with LUMA Foundation, a center of research, artistic practice and exhibitions. In many ways the family history has given this corner of France a richness beyond anything we might anticipate. In the midst of this complex and ripe corner of the world a fearless Josette Sayers decides to take a small corner shop and turn it into a new gallery.

This small mighty outpost will become a stellar light in this new landscape that is Arles; Irish born, and dual French/American national, Sayers is, as I have written before, a well-known art world player who has been a high-profile headhunter in art, high-tech, retail luxury and museums. L’Interstice offers a fresh voice putting forward exhibitions of international artists with an accent on photo-based work, with a quick pop-up sensibility. The pleasure of sharing interests, bringing together players from a variety of art world niches is a big part of what the gallery will do.

PART III

The opening, a collaboration with Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris, is a splendid show of L.A. based French artist Guillaume Zuili, known for his deep fascination with high contrast, sober dark black and white images that have a purposeful and resounding reference to great American work made during the Depression by people like Paul Strand, Dorothea Lang, Imogen Cunningham among others. He also has a taste for the dramatic side-lit images of Orson Wells.

This is my first exposure to Zuili, the work is grainy and dense; in his short ARTE film, he walks around Corbeil-Essonnes taking photographs with a small box camera. Of course, this is territory we know from the iconic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the great artists and legendary teachers of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. But in Zuili’s lens we see not the monolithic industrial architecture but a shadow play of back-lit flat shadows, he is caught up in the oblique as he says himself, “lumière frisante”. This is not minimal art, his works are not serial in any way, they have inner pull and feel closer to the early years of photography as social history, both in their compression of space and time.

They have the power of political photography of say John Heartfield mixed with the twist of Edward Steichen. But Zuili’s eye is not American and this is a saving grace. He is connected to the subtle empty stillness of nineteenth century French photographers Atget and Le Gray. I hear a lyric double base sound in his profound use of shadow like Robert Longo who pulls black from the very white paper it is drawn upon. It takes a mature artist to be so comfortable in this darkness. One is especially sensitive to this right now coming as we are out of these historic months of Covid. In some way, Zuili is making work about how we see the lightless. He is masterful in leading us just to this moment he refers to as “Dieu dans le labo.” Giving us magic even if there is a resonance with something we have seen before; heat comes from the deepest planes absent of light, he builds a photograph on these notions.

Selection of works from the “Smoke & Mirrors” (2006-2016), “Urban Jungle” (2017-2021) and “Memory Lane” (2019) series.

More info:

L’Interstice, Arles

Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

PART I

This is the tale of a unique visionary website team and our launch today of a new feature. REAL TIME features evolving posts from JSVCprojects weekly social media platform now live on our site highlighting what our artists, designers and galleries are doing or sometimes just what we are seeing, reading or thinking.

Shout out our 3B’s – BRAINY BOYS IN BERLIN – who have worked months to make the website function elegantly retaining our still rebellious nature. Their edginess is key in navigating the art life. Designer Jochen Mahlke of mahlke.one and Richard Lem mrhide.de have made this process exciting every day.

It began as iconic work with Jochen seven years ago; since then, we have collaborated together on two incredible books, our website, and a bespoke typeface. Richard is the webmaster of your dreams. We are not finished.

In 2014, Jochen designed a hard cover book about the earliest certificate works of ART & LANGUAGE. MADE IN ZURICH, SELECTED EDITIONS 1965-1972 from The Philippe Méaille Collection. Not an easy job. These great artists Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin are still, even now, under the radar; I like to say they are very much the Rolling Stones of Conceptual art. The certificate paintings in this book are the DNA of their dialectical practice that spans now over half a century. The challenge for any graphic designer is text-based work, its type from the old manual typewriters of the 60’s starred on certificates. These are blown up into large paintings.  The exercise of creating a typography for a book became at once abstract and specific. How to discern a template around art that is type? Texts, images, interviews, analysis in three languages English/French/German to accompany a traveling gallery exhibition. How can the book clarify a position that the certificates represent? Making the painting is the action of making a blow up. It is collaborative.  Instruction drawings made as editions.

PART II

The book, a collaboration with The Philippe Méaille Collection, I curated the exhibitions and edited this book in collaboration with Galerie Bernard Jordan, Paris, Zurich, in Berlin with Emilie Seydoux as Galerie Jordan/Seydoux — they ran from 2014-15. Mahlke chose black, white and pink as the palette for this. 

We had a conversation early on about radical practice. Growing up in the DDR, he had a strong intuition about the use of typology in early 20th political communication. He had books of typography from the DDR, which we looked at in his Berlin kitchen the summer of 2014. In the case of the early manifesto- like works of ART & LANGUAGE the voice was in the third person, like Biblical writing, or political propaganda. It was vital not to interfere with their energy.  So the book was black and white with high-resolution images of pieces of paper that had enormous texture. “We must see the edges, warts and all,” I said to him. The documentation is the first iteration of these ideas and the artists were in their 20’s, it was a rock and roll time.

Pink screens lay over large double page spreads to shift the viewer out of documents and texts. The French and German translations on colored papers. A handsome, bright, studied visual structure for the works on display. The second book in 2016 was again ART & LANGUAGE but with KABAKOV for SPROVIERI London, THE NON OBJECTIVE WORLD. Another deep-dive into early modernism; the evolution and influence of Malevich on two of the most important artists of our current period, both of whom discovered the famous writings of the founder of Suprematism in the 1960’s. The exhibition juxtaposed the impact of the Black Square on both practices. 

PART III

The book moved into the color of black, the vivid aspect of documents and writings with a spare typeface that provided a warm envelope around this discursive historical landscape that swept the reader or the exhibition visitor from the early 20th century straight through the century of evolution in understanding Malevich and his dialectical position in the reading of abstraction. It accompanied the exhibition both in Basel at the Fair in 2016 and that fall in London at SPROVIERI on Heddon Street in London.

On the subject of the Black Square, I will share with you the important realization the book highlights, which is something Ilya Kabakov said to me many years ago in his studio, we were going through watercolors in preparation for the exhibition “A Return to Painting”; we were talking about minimalism and the difference between European and American minimalism and the understanding or misunderstanding of the Black Square. He explained to me that in 1915-6 during this pre-Revolutionary moment, Malevich knew anyone walking in to see the 0.10 exhibition would see the Black Square up in the corner where the Icon of the Madonna would normally hang. So there was content in the square it was a language that everyone understood an overlay of image on image.  Redolent with vibrations. The opposite of American minimal painting that was stripping content out of the picture plane for the purposes of reductive emptiness.

It was this confidence and maybe over zealous romantic heroism in the position of Malevich which ART & LANGUAGE took to task in the late 1960’s in their drawings, installations and texts on the Black Square, also included in the book.For the inside back cover, we made a family portrait you will see.

PART IV

In 2018, the discussion of a website slowly began. Jochen knew very well the maniacal way I obsessed over content, railing at him about the preponderance of bling-bling. We met on the intersection of polemics and clarity. When I told him I would only make a website without images because I felt there were too many in the art world, and on social media. He did not try to talk me out of this. I think he realized trying to talk me out of anything was a lost cause. But he thought about this and found a way to let us say what we needed to say. That we were different, that we were unapologetic in being so. If people need images let them see the person and then discover the project. Click on the links and see what everyone is doing. Take time to think for a moment. Breathe and think.

In the meantime, he listened as we discussed everything from the name of the agency, how to refer to myself, and all the growing pains of trying to find a small chink in the armour of an apparently monolithic industry to allow in a little light, time and breath for another kind of awareness. Another voice. He designed and brought in Richard Lem (mrhide.com) the warm comic genius programmer to work with us on the website; we developed the site one chapter at a time, the typeface was new, the structure was new, it all began to work slowly. The moving red line an artwork of Esther Shalev-Gerz. The 3Bs loved it. I never paid much attention to social media, but when I was locked up in London a year ago, I started with my assistant Hélène I. posting long digressions on Instagram and was delighted by the idea that they could then be dropped into Facebook and eventually LinkedIn. We have been on a weekly basis trying to open up our strategic agency bringing you into the fray, the experience of a creative life in its various shades.

PART V

Last year, Richard Lem smiled when I added in our weekly Zoom that I wondered whether it would be possible to take the social media posts and have them appear on the website. “We can call it REAL TIME”. He laughed and rolled a cigarette. “I think we can do it”. Jochen, also on the Zoom, nodded. Months and months later, we have REAL TIME so if life is busy and you forget to check on Instagram what we are doing, you can catch up on a big screen and see the photographs, read the long winding conversations and thoughtful analysis of what we have cooking here. I like to imagine that JSVCprojects is just a big kitchen and we are looking at the ingredients in our collaborators studios and galleries and wondering what can we possibly cook up next. Mrhide is phenomenal and has made it possible to track all these goings on in different parts of the world for you. If you miss a week or two don’t worry, we are archiving. I think that he and Jochen and Hélène I., my assistant, thought I was kidding when I wanted to make a post to launch REAL TIME. Small accomplishments after this past year seem even more vivid. I am grateful and happy to work with such creative thinkers, and willing partners in crime. Hélène with her “hacky” intelligence figured out a surprising way to insert my long digressions into to rather inflexible formatting of Instagram. It was Richard who coined the phrase, hacky, and now I look for as many ways as I can to be just that way. Bend the edges, walk over the line with one foot if possible. Stray just a little and think about the impossible that you can do in a myriad of ways.

PART I

When I was growing up my parents came back from Paris with a small group of colorful plates which became “the dessert plates” for major family events. They were not fine china, nor earthenware but something apart, bright scenes of different storefronts for the butcher, the baker, the cheese store etc. Today there are six of the original eight and they still have pride of place in my mother’s cupboard, next to the pile of much-loved white Rosenthal plates she chose as a bride in 1951. Color was always to be used sparingly on the table, she said.

When you grow up in a modernist house with an orange garage door painted bright in homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, with uncomfortable Eames chairs and Mies tables when all of your school friends live with softness and comfort, design takes on many levels of oddness and discomfort. The arrival of these dessert plates from GIEN were a lively surprise in my adolescence, when the split-level house had given way to one with slate roof and stone walls built in the 1920’s. A Bauhaus interior, my mother said. But still the GIEN plates were there, and brought something else to the table with festive homemade dinners with pecan pie, or apple pie made by my mother, and then those added by various sisters-in-laws.

How do you put any kind of judgement on plates that have lived with generations from different countries and traditions? Originally designed for grand dynasties, royalty even, GIEN ended up there on the shelf in my childhood kitchen, and there remains as I write this today. After a year of pandemic and not getting home, these plates take on yet a new vibration. Which is why it is interesting to me that Mathilde Bretillot, the visionary French designer, still to some a well-kept secret like mom’s cake plates– has been invited to rethink the new museum at La Manufacture de GIEN, to begin the celebration of their 200th anniversary.

PART II

I caught up with the designer and asked about the project as it is developing into something special adjacent to the factory where the plates, bowls, pitchers, object de vertu are still being produced in a process that incorporates mechanical with the human touch that is unique to each object, a hand finishing. We do not have a word in English for such a combination of machine with hand. But the French have coined it well with “La Manufacture”. Nor do we have a word for “faïence” which is glazed ceramic pottery.

This project of redesigning the museum which takes the public into the spirit of GIEN is more complex than it first sounds. After all, you could say, how difficult is it to explain what has been going on for two centuries of plate making? But as a place, a real heart beating environment, where people and kilns and machines work in a studio atmosphere, where the factory complex includes, gardens where artisans sit under the trees to have lunch, or the much-loved factory store where treasures with slight flaws find new adoptive parents, as a creative hub and a battery for social history, ah this is something else entirely. This is not just a story of plates.

In situ the outside of the complex is a series of buildings including a 17^th century austere building which was once a former convent. The idea of La Manufacture dates back to Colbert (think Louis XIV) who was interested in collecting the best makers of France. Ergo the Comité Colbert today which does very much the same thing, and GIEN is a member. The place was founded in 1821 by an Englishman, Thomas Hall. The special quality of the faïence is a recipe of clay, sand and kaolin, fired for the first time between 1160-1180°C (to make the biscuit) Then the rich colors and additional shapes are added with patience and minute detail, one of three hand processes at this stage — painting, printing, or stencil transfer — then the object is put again into the oven.

PART III

One of the marvels in all this is understanding that clay is a living thing, it is fundamentally an unstable substance. The historic process has become a channel for cultural transmission of all the hands that have ever worked in this studio for two hundred years, and the singular precise knowledge is why the cake plates in Philadelphia still vibrate with pleasure. Such energy is timeless and precious; the life is in the material itself and its sublime content is traced by how it has been touched by artisans day after day. This is why GIEN is rare and sought after. This is what Colbert saw so many years ago, and we see this inner creative engine through Bretillot’s treatment of the new museum opening in the fall. She begins,

“The aim is to feel you are always in between the objects as they come out and what do they show us. But you are wondering about the life, the emergence of things, the social evolution, the technical evolution. They show all of this. How many people are working, the wars, the change of energy, the ovens, the shifts in taste.”

“We are mindful that history is changing on all sides. From Chinese décor, trees or flowers for the table ware, monograms, simple outlines, then pitchers and basins for the bathroom, bowls; how do you create a new way of looking by putting new things together?”

One room is very 19^th century, big heavy mantle piece, chimney, huge vases. Some were made for the universal exhibitions. One of the famous ones with the peacock is so big we cannot move it to do the works; this room will be more like a room, more domestic with faïence lining the walls, the owners would sit around a big table to take it in, and we will have a huge library with an alphabet of images and objects. Each of the rooms will have a way of organising it differently.”

PART IV

The lower ground floor will look like a contemporary gallery with a long ramp and the idea of the open book within the space itself. The ground floor with arches frame a sloping lower space like an open book with long pages, objects on the left and on the right, pictures, texts photos on the right. On the first floor there will be alcoves with clusters of objects, settings for tables and otherwise, which are still very much alive. The top floor is full of columns so you will go around the spaces with a set of smaller views, niches.

Part of the discussion is the transition in history GIEN has experienced. Director, Yves de Talhouët wants to show the production through the history of social evolution, economic evolution and industrial innovation. There will be one big gallery where the products as real objects will be juxtaposed to the other side with historical documents showing how they were made and why, the change in energy, ovens, making a better paste which was stronger, the developments of materials and machinery.

“Years ago this site went all the way up to the Loire, which was how materials once arrived; a series of financial crisis in the 20^th century saw this campus cut back to include the major buildings we have today. You arrive through the gate, the museum is the long building on your left on three floors. Ahead of you, across the court, will be a café, garden and the factory shop, of course. The campus is very mineral so we are working with the idea of a garden from the front of the buildings to the gate which will mirror the interior garden used by the artisans behind the studio building.”

PART V

In the end, the brand of GIEN is the story telling, what the brand is saying and what this very unique kind of production is saying; it is interesting to have this for GIEN to show what the roots have been, and these are specific and strong.

It is very rare to have such a “Manufacture” going, it is a real luxury, a French domestic project. Faïence de GIEN is much warmer than porcelain. Europe was once so rich and still is with these things. The competition is mad, especially with mass production everywhere. But the goal for Bretillot here is to really reveal and invite the audience to experience — see, feel, even smell the culture behind these objects, “if they don’t understand why it is worth what it is worth, there will be no audience for the future. The story behind the objects talk about the content, and this is how we know they are not just objects on a shelf.”

PART I

JSVCprojects is delighted to announce our new collaboration with Gallery Wetterling; I first met Björn Wetterling in March of 1990 at the Tokyo Art Fair. It is worth sharing here this story I told at the 40th anniversary dinner for Björn in Stockholm in 2018. I had left John Gibson Gallery after a decade and wanted to learn about the business of Modern Masters from a New York dealer with a great eye, Barbara Mathes. She was also one of the few women dealers on Madison Avenue trading with the great and the good. I wanted to learn from the best, and she was and remains so. We arrived in Tokyo at the top of the market with a very elegant installation of Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Futurist, Constructivist works on paper. A very impressive collection of works installed artfully in a convention complex, just outside the city in a park designed for such fairs. I was staying in the cheap and cheerful hotel inside the convention park to be close to the fair.

Across from us was a booth from Stockholm displaying major works of the American Pop and Post-Pop generation, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine, Bleckner, James Brown, Wesselmann, Stella, among others. This very personable man was uncrating his own works with one assistant. I had a crew because we had old and expensive art; art handlers were needed. As luck would have it, the art market collapsed the night before the fair’s opening. The Mitsubishi Scandal that is now legendary in the annuls of art world crashes, started the long painful five-year art market collapse; the Japanese head of state issued a warning that was on the front page of every newspaper the morning of the opening. “Anyone who buys art will bring shame on his house, his family and his nation.”

PART II

Our translator read me the article and it became clear she said to me, no one would come to the fair. It was to be a long fair, Barbara Mathes went home, and I was on my own. When I was minding the stand, with our translator, the man from the booth across the aisle, who wore very colourful ties, and socks simply came over with a plastic cup of whiskey every day at six o’clock. We toasted across the aisle and then waited for the closing bell. It was a memorable experience, a fair where nobody came. Dealers accustomed to talking to each other at great length managed to do a bit of business, as people were still buying art as gallery stock. We made no business. Collectors from Seoul arrived briefcases in hand and stopped to talk to Bjorn Wetterling. He had a great fair, and was pleased because he had been visiting Korea for several years and had collectors who had braved the Japanese interdiction to fly in and see him.

By the end of the ten-day fair Mr. Wetterling as I called him, had become Bjorn. The more we talked about the art market in New York and the wider American scene. He was selling great American work to Europe, and I believed there should be clients for these works in the USA who never managed to get to Leo Castelli or Mary Boone to buy them. As we left, Tokyo he presciently said to me, if I ever left Barbara Mathes, he would be happy to have me work with him in New York. After arriving back, the sudden crash and the no-sale fair meant we lost money on Tokyo; I was suddenly without a job. I typed a message and faxed it to Stockholm asking Bjorn if he was still interested in working together. This began a period representing the gallery together in the USA doing art fairs, and visiting museums and collectors on behalf of the gallery and its great artists. I also came to every opening in Stockholm and had the pleasure of getting to know so many of these important artists.

PART III

It was a very long five years for those too young to have lived through it. The contemporary market stopped from one day to the next. We became very strategic and focussed on the pockets of opportunity that remained in our global village. It was also a time of change, in taste and trends, as well as generations. Sweden was late to enter the recession so there was business in the Nordic region long after the market stopped dead in New York. We went to Chicago, to L.A. and found new collectors. I curated an exhibition in Santa Fe with James Brown and Ross Bleckner; worked with wonderful artists like Jane Hammond and the Starn Twins. Then I moved to London and became Managing Director at LISSON. A new chapter.

Björn and I kept in touch. Our paths moved in parallel lines; he was very early to see the importance of Asia and after working so much in Korea, he set up an outpost in Singapore and was instrumental in Tyler Graphics making a home there as well. From the very strong American artists of the last century, he moved into another ethos looking at the fast-rising groups of women artists working in the Nordic arena. Today there is a striking new and rich cast of artists in the gallery with a brilliant team supporting the international program. We are looking forward to helping shape the next chapter of the gallery’s history; as Björn has written in 2018 when the gallery turned 40, “My life as a gallerist has been a journey filled with joy as well as grief, sometimes almost despair, but above all, of anticipation and curiosity.” Watch this space for the innovations that are just around the corner.

As a gallerist, BW believes that it starts with the artists. “Being an artist means never going home from work. As a gallerist it is my job to ensure that the conditions for this laborious work are equitable so that artists can, at the end of the day, support themselves by means of their art.”

PART I

Coming up on the one year anniversary of Covid; I am mindful of things that have escaped notice, small things, light against the wall in my new office. Very cold weather again in Paris, the sun unrelenting wants to say, spring is near. Temperatures falling. Small fires light vineyards and orchards across France, ominous as if even here, in the most basic of activities, wine making and fruit cultivation nature will not let us rest in this dark year.

Enough you want to say, isn’t this enough. To lose an entire year of wine or olives or fruit feels like a slap at the end of a long argument with nature; after premature spring and almost summer heat last month, hail, sleet, freezing temperatures again. Time and light, cold and heat. Relentless nature again.

Things do not look the same even if we think they are the same. Today a colleague will for the first time in a year have friends in the back garden of his London home for drinks. Paris is still confined. I walk daily as if I am my own pet, going out for air and to feel my legs taking quick steps again. Everything looks different. Is different. I have had the vaccine.

We are all changed. Even the most anarchistic among us — brazen in the face of this. Sneaking out to private gatherings, private bars, underground dancing and indiscriminate travels. I do not judge. Trying to outsmart this by staying in my shell like a turtle. Nose popping out from time to time. Catching light against the side of a building, or the turn of a man on the street near me, a car speeding at the light near the Hotel Bristol.

This is how seeing the patience in a black and white photograph by Lukas Hoffmann feels like art for this time. Of course these works were made earlier, but in their austerity I find comfort now more than ever.

PART II

These works he shows now in a gallery exhibition in Zurich* and a group show in Biel** reference moments in time when we thought life was there for the taking, a second lost as it presents itself in the blink of an eye, which is after all what we have when his shutter closes. In street scenes where he hides the small camera (not like the large box camera we recall from the pictorial landscapes redolent with detail).

I know this work; I have known this artist before and after he creates these works but I want to say that he has been making these works to show us now, in this spring of 2021, that these very moments are the best of all. The most important moment. Now. As all the wisdom traditions have been telling us, this expansive beautiful present moment is what artists fight to catch. Hoffmann is no exception. Like all good artists, he makes this fight disappear from our eyes. The photographs appear with a certainty of someone older than he is.

This old or timeless eye in his young body gives the tension to the forms that cry out for a wind or sing to us of time spent generating folds in a linen jacket hanging just so down the back of a man crossing the street. Or the light on a white tee-shirt becomes classical armour against ebony arms and neck of someone just there who becomes, in a split second, heroic, a god. Hoffmann’s subject is never what shows us, it is time itself, this moment. In this his work is conceptual not image based.

He has been lauded by CNAP in their acquisitions of two kinds of walls, one divined by mother nature, the other man made; again thinking of the fires between the repetitive rows of vines and olive trees, the regularity of nature belies her chaos. Hoffmann understands this and sees it as a given, with its complexity and its urgent now-ness. It is not that he uses the camera to stop time; it is that he can slow it down to us as light and shadow. A trauma inside appears, a crack, slowly opens into a pause, like a breath.

*(Passages (solo show) Galerie annex14, April 10 – May 22 2021)

**(Aeschlimann-Corti-Stipendium 2021 (group show) Centre d’Art Pasquart, Biel, April 18 – June 13 2021. Opening April 17, 11 am – 6 pm)

JSVCprojects, Associate Producer, is proud to announce:

Ishmael Fiifi Annobil’s latest film “LINDA KARSHAN: COVID-19 CONVERSATION” has just been selected by two film festivals, Nawada and Hollywood Boulevard, in three categories.

SYNOPSIS: The first Covid-19 lockdown in New York invoked artist Linda Karshan’s memory of her father’s crippling polio affliction in the 1952/53 epidemic, and his gallant battle against it. This inspired her to “push back” by producing her most prolific body of work to date, “…because I can stand, and he could not”.

Producer/Director/Editor: Ishmael Fiifi Annobil
Cinematography/Sound: Max Mallen
Associate Producer: Jill Silverman Van Coenegrachts
Audio Post-Production: Nick Kulukundis

WEBSITE: https://lnkd.in/gPecq9M
TRAILER: https://lnkd.in/gddhvgv

In response to her PHAIDON book that has just been published, Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing.

Excerpt from the PHAIDON article, Why I Draw by George Vasey and pictures by Stephen White.

Who are you and what’s on your mind right now?

I’m Deanna Petherbridge, a drawer and writer, and the state of the world is very much on my mind. This is what I have been drawing this year, mainly in pen and ink on paper diptychs, and possibly will be doing in 2021 as well. When I refer to ‘the state of the world’ I don’t only mean Covid 19 and the impact of this pandemic, but also global warming and the destruction of the environment that is reaching apocalyptic levels, while wars and bad governments proliferate and add to the sum of human suffering in our interconnected firmament. I am old enough to care passionately, and while I welcome the hopeful activism, positive stance or occasional detachment of so many young people, I also believe that dealing with these issues through visual imagery is the very function of being an artist … even if what we make isn’t all irony or good cheer and false bonhomie. This is the profoundly serious subject-matter today: how can we avoid it?

When do you draw and what sort of physical, spiritual, mental or geographical place do you have to be in generally for it to work?

[…] And I have so often seen that drawing is the only means to hand of those in poor countries or in oppressive conditions, where expensive media are the tools of controlling institutions and hegemonies or gestures of gallery profligacy . This background (I was born and grew up in South Africa) supplies me with the confidence that pen-and-ink lines are the key means for challenging large themes and complex ideas as well as modest gestures: doing much with little. I draw most days, except when writing about drawing, and it has always given me pleasure to work in places other than my studio, travelling light with a roll of paper and a bottle of ink – plus a straight edge for moral compass!

Excerpt from the Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing text, pp. 202-203, George Vasey, 2021

Peter Blum Gallery finishes 13 March, 2021

PART I

The Brooklyn Rail has published a very fine review by David Rhodes of the current exhibition of Helmut Federle: Basics on Composition that everyone should see before it closes at the end of next week. This is the fifth solo exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery, so for those who love painting this is a precious moment to visit these works.

I met Federle in 1984 when at John Gibson Gallery we made his first exhibition in New York. I had first seen the works on paper driving through Europe with Gibson, at a dinner with Catherine Duret in Geneva and then in the library of Peter Herzog in Basel. By the time we got back to New York it was clear John wanted to meet the artist who was working in his downtown apartment.

There is something about experiencing an artist’s early work as an explosive force; ironically Gibson was not a lover of painting. He built his reputation first showing Beuys in New York and Broodthaers, the European conceptualists. But Helmut Federle changed that. I remember the look on his face after the studio visit as I was minding the gallery. “This will blow people away,” he said seriously. It did and it continues to do so, because it is painting about the condition of poetics, with a serial edge, European minimalism descended from the family tree of Malevich with an eye on Barnet Neuman and dare I say Robert Ryman.

The difference being that Federle is a European minimalist in spite of his many years in the USA. His somewhat BEAT early years in the American West has been chronicled but not enough to my mind. He is an uncanny mixture of threads which we can pull here and there, but the works themselves tell their own story.

PART II

Basics On Composition is a series of 71 paintings 40 x 50 cm painted between 1979-2019. As of this writing I can say the artist is not yet finished with the series as there are works on the studio wall that join this group. For some reason I think of these works as a kind of serial music in the tradition of composers Michael Nyman or Phil Glass, where certain elements repeat in a block-like way with variations shifting the timbre and rhythm; at the same time they are as varied as they are alike.

Rhodes writes, 

“The characteristics are often felt rather than seen to begin with, registering in time because incidents of many kinds are wrought by the many changes in paint application and color….The eye follows the perimeter of the painted object unlike an unpainted object, and registering a physical change at that edge because of the color. These varying qualities poetically charge the painting with an inexplicable immanence so unlike regular hard edge formal abstraction.”

Here I want to jump from this notion of immanence back to Malevich’s 1927 treatise The Non-Objective World which for the first time delves into this experiential aspect of feeling a painting’s presence as something powerful. This text was taken under his arm on a train fleeing the Soviets, who he thought were after him, to Berlin and published by the Bauhaus in German. Later, a small Chicago press republished the English translation in 1959. Its appearance was noticed by a new generation of artists in New York at that time.

He insisted that Suprematism as a break with the past, had to do with freedom from the objects (analogous with smells), and the thing and the concept were to be substituted for feeling. He divided the past into the world of “Will and Ideas” (object making) in favor of the “Thing and Concept” (feelings).

PART III

From The Non-Objective World

Malevich writes:

“A kind of timidity bordering on fear when I was called to leave “the world of will and ideas” in which I had lived and worked in the reality of which I had believed. But the blissful feeling of liberating non-objectivity drew me into the ‘desert’ where nothing is real but feeling and feeling became the content of my life. This was no ‘empty square’ which I had exhibited but rather the sensation of non-objectivity.”

Malevich writes that the Black Square is not devoid of content, to the contrary it is redolent with sensations. Note this and draw a direct line through to David Rhodes’ comment about Basics On Composition and their “inexplicable immanence.” This overwhelming energy that comes from Federle’s paintings is as present today as it was in his first show in 1984 in New York. Quite odd really that he has been so invisible in the United States and we still look forward to the first and then a series of museum exhibitions that will bring the works to a wider audience.

What resides in this immanence? How are these paintings so unique and moving? I like to think it is something related to what John Berger in Ways of Seeing in 1972 writes about a “place of meaning” referring to art in churches, which is an extreme example in the Icon, behind it’s image is God, “worshippers coming upon it close their eyes before it, knowing that its marks the place of meaning.”

Berger gets busy with a discussion of the impact of photography….”.the days of pilgrimage are over, it is the image that travels now!”

Original works are still unique, he continues, they look different than from how they look on the television or on postcard.” I could add here, on line, but this is better than you never seeing the work!!!

But somehow I am drawn back to the subject of time, which is in the end very relevant to Federle’s works. These works fill time. Transmit time, sing about time.

PART IV

Whether the paint is fluidly rich to the edges, thick and solid, sometimes maybe a bit erased, Federle paints as if he is translating time into something visible. During this year of pandemic we have all felt this empty elastic time that surrounds us like ether. Basics on Composition is like a metronome in one way and a tuning fork in another, there is a constant rhythm like a heartbeat, but there is something subtle and invisible he is trying to show us. Like a magician who is able to seemingly raise a body up in thin air.

I was never particularly involved with the structure and its relationship to the letter H. For me the question to answer was how did they project so much energy at me; how could the partially wiped away moments on the surface seem so luxurious and rich. Why was so much happening with such a reductive palette some would say? Where did this force come from, the technique, the flatness, his visceral use of paint itself.

In some ways because I came to the work young, and his paintings were so much bigger than I was, the experience of being overwhelmed by them was my first recollection alone in the gallery with a handful of very large paintings. The force field was palpable. This feeling was exactly the same all these decades later in Vienna when I stood in Galerie Nachts St. Stephan with recent Basics On Composition. Each one pierced space with a complete voice, distinct, audible, uncompromising. They both want to be looked at, and to be left alone. They have a quality of object-ness and animation that make you want to speak to them and imagine they will reply.

This immanence is the masterstroke of an artist still in his prime. We need to see more of these works, with the large ones we know from the books in his long bibliography; a good series of museum exhibitions would be a homeopathic remedy for this very complex moment. I need his time sensitive painterly tension between reduction and opulence now.

PART I

Paralyzed last week by the Impeachment Trial. The vote found me here at this desk on Rue de la Baume, where I have worked for eight years. A frozen Saturday evening, two computer screens blazing with MSNBC and CNN for the lead up to the vote. My 90 year old Mom sharing this with me on FaceTime. I heard her television on the kitchen table in the house where I was raised. Where my father lectured us at the dinner table about civil rights and Democratic politics. We are so far away and still we are together. She is not emotional, her raw cynical survival skills are greater than mine; I still live in hope. I thought a few more Republicans would vote their conscience. Ha!!

When the vote was called, she turned to me with a dry breath, “talk tomorrow, this is what we expected.” I could not look away as House Manager, Jamie Raskin with a voice like an Old Testament sage, seemed to be talking about people dancing around golden idols, destruction and violence surrounding their intoxication. I won’t reiterate his words; having lived through the first Impeachment while still traveling the world, tuning into C-span from a hotel room in Moscow, another in Milan. The second winter of pandemic, I am here still, in Paris for what feels like the end of the world. Not a virus, but evil wrong headed thinking, a big lie. THE BIG LIE.

Tears of sadness, frustration? I care too much; it is not a moot point, watching an accident in real time, frame by frame. How they hunted the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. Blood lust. I am not inventing this. Senators speak of Violence not seen since the Civil War. A vote allows witnesses. The counsel for the former President is an ambulance-chasing attorney from Philadelphia flashing a list of 300 people allegedly. Then one testimony that describes callous disregard for life by the former President.

PART II

The political and moral outrage that has rumbled through our veins since 2016 inspired Richard Milazzo, my esteemed friend, poet, critic and curator to accept the guest editorship of the online magazine OBSzine 3. In the wake of my wanting to reprint and share parts of this again, he has written me a letter.
But in large part it is for “our European Friends.”

“Jill,

How kind and generous of you to remember this project (Art, Poetry and the Pathos of Communication, published originally in OBSZine, No. 3 (2007), which I edited, it seems so long ago I can hardly remember, and to which so many splendid artists, critics, poets and writers, yourself included, contributed. (This online magazine, OBSzine, was founded an spearheaded by Lucio Pozzi, who years ago founded New Observations, when he reacted and broke away from the originators of October magazine. Quite the spirited young man!) And you are right: the words and insights of these contributors still seem pertinent, even if we have a new administration which would emphasize decency and the common good. “Still pertinent,” because the former failed CEO of the United States is now running a self-styled Jeff Davis, parallel, confederate (and counterfeit) administration from a red State that geographically looks more and more like a panting tongue.

I wonder if you would be kind enough to remind our dear European friends, whom I miss so terribly much, that the U.S. has not only a horrific foreign policy (I accidently typed policing) history, and an equally horrifying domestic legacy of racial and social injustice, but that we also have two abiding features I am extremely proud of – the only two I am really proud of: we are still capable of self-criticism or self-critique)even where we may fail, as in the case of the two recent impeachments, including the impending one); and all that is good and worthwhile about our country is built on the shoulders of our immigrants – those who often begin their lives here as poor and helpless but hopeful, and then, almost without fail, become an inspiration to all, endure, log and hard, and come to embody some of our proudest moments as a nation.”

PART III

PART IV

“Here, again, sculpture and poetry speak to each other in one diverse but unified language Dialectics at work… Emma, who was Jewish, an activist, a poet, and extremely gifted in so many other cultural fields, died at the age of thirty-eight. But she has without a doubt inflamed our imaginations and those of others around the world forever with words that have become the soul of freedom inspiration, and potential.”

I grew up in an extremely racist family in one of the worst Housing Projects in America, and yet I am, or think I am, as far as I can see, color blind….but not really. I see all the colors – all the genders, all the spiritual persuasions – that comprise the United States of America, suddenly I become ecstatic, feel so full of life. This, despite the odds, the physical and spiritual (collective) illnesses we must bear at the moment as the pandemic continues to rage around the globe, giving us tragic but common cause to unite. (If I were going to call this text something, Jill, I would call it “the Poignancy of Dialectics.”)”

PART V

Richard continues his artful rhapsody on the nature of poetry, political thought, sculpture and social justice with “the young” and the dream consciousness of John Lennon — a fitting update since the magazine’s appearance three years ago. In many ways those of us in New York in the 1980’s would have perhaps been just a bit over that age delineation of being “the young” it seems a reflexive musing about time. In the articles and artworks that fill the pages of OBSzine, N.3, there is a flavor of rebellion and frustration which one carries always if this is the nature of your perceptions and poetic impulses. In what way were we young in those years?

Hard to say, the political climate felt oppressive, New York was transitioning from the bankrupt years of the 1970’s into the high blown shining city and art world mega capital that it would embody until the crash of 1990. The East Village was vibrant, Soho was starting to clean itself up. John Gibson Gallery opened the building at 568 Broadway. It was a time of possibility and seriousness, much of which is pointedly apparent in the memory rich poetics and pathos felt deeply during the last four years by this community. Richard Milazzo in combing the landscape, carries a lamplight of cultural possibility that might redeem us in the darkness. Read On. We will post selections later this week– collected views of this cultural neighborhood now thirty years on.

Part I

I planned to see January as a moment of reflection –to look back at the year that ended none too soon; highlighting courage and pluck of artists with whom I work. In this year of pandemic it seemed the best we could all do was to keep our collective heads down, stay safe and work like crazy to keep a tenuous sanity.

My idea last Friday was to shout out the poets for work at years end. But events in Washington changed my thinking or rather upended it. Felt like a momentous event to watch in real time hour by hour, and subsequent days since, we have seen and heard the pundits unpack sedition in plain view.

Poetry is on the surface, as far away as you can get from a man with face paint and a Nordic hat pirouetting through the Capitol building in a crowd of people set on destruction and injury to anyone in their path. Rioting thugs breaking down the house to destroy the electoral process, interrupting the smooth transfer of power, this is domestic terrorism. The Capitol building did not accommodate Trump’s big lie. His followers were hell bent on tearing it down.

Maybe poetry is part of the truth of our understanding what we consider to be the true and it is linked to notions of beauty sometimes, because it is in this true speech that our humanity lives, with different points of view and diverse emotions. Words we share and the lives we have, mean something unique to each one of us. But in poetry and art something ties us together with a common form.

When I was young, maybe nine or ten, I wrote my first poem inspired by seeing my mother prepare the dinner table on a Friday night. Everything just so, candles waiting to be lit. Challah covered on a plate. I had a feeling of anticipation, something giddy in my stomach. That we would all be there at the table, my younger brothers, my father tired after the week working for his father, perspiration around his shirt collar and the tie slightly loose.

Part II

I wrote a poem about this highly stylized preparation because it seemed to me as a little girl to have something to do with bliss, something I felt cut off from. A state of affairs that existed outside of all the participants, it was in the air so to speak, a specialness in the air. This was the purpose of my poem to catch the temperature of the air in that hour before the noise of another end-of-week-dinner overtook a tumultuous family, and mostly to celebrate my mother’s calm above us.

The poem led to a massive argument and punishment weeks later about the truth and lies. Perhaps this is why I am writing here about poetry and sedition. My teacher called my parents in and asked them how I had written such a poem it was clearly taken from a book somewhere. It could not be the work of ten year old. My parents came home and confronted me wanting to know what book I took the poem from, didn’t I understand how serious plagiarism was.

The big lie they believed was that I couldn’t have written it. I was punished for lying because I did not admit taking it from another source because it was my work.. This is the truth. But I was punished just the same, and the nasty teacher was fired a decade later for being an alcoholic, my mother said.

Poetry reminds us what is true. What we share, what is in the air between us that has no form whatsoever, just there floating all that stuff, unspoken but not unfelt. My awe at the dinner table on a Friday night was also how we felt being taken into the Capitol building for one of my younger brother’s Bar Mitzvah trips. By then I was fifteen and he thirteen. We walked quietly, heads straight, we were in a sacred place for our country; I studied the American Revolution and knew what the Constitution was. We sat in the same gallery where members hid on the floor, because our Congressman gave my father passes; events of last week made me crave poetry and then I recalled all the rest.

Part III

A book I discovered on my bookcase in my mother’s house was a volume on Robert Frost that was given to me by a teacher in 1968. In junior high school I first read Saroyan, Hemingway and Frost. I remembered having seen the very elderly poet in 1960 (I was eight) when we watched him on a big black and white television during the inauguration of President Kennedy. He was elderly and spoke off the cuff, my mother said, the sun too bright to read. For some reason today the memory of that event, sitting on the floor on a cushion, having the day off from school because Dad had been campaigning for Kennedy. All doubles back on the insurrection we watched last week.

This paperback book is dog-eared and yellowed. It did not come with me when I left for college in 1970. Nor anywhere after that, it stayed behind on the shelves in my old bedroom that had many years since become a room for my brothers and wives and children, and occasionally on Thanksgiving for me again. I brought it with me a year ago, two months before the pandemic began. Along with other papers and archives of interest. I reached for it today thinking about poets and politics. A chapter called Courage, quotes Frost,

“You’ve got to be brave and you’ve got to be bold. Brave enough to take your chance on your own discriminations – what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad.”

Found this interesting in light of last week. Again a poet thinking about right behavior, like the upright birch trees in his woods. I understood poetry through his eyes as a young girl, through craggy images of him on the New England landscape, in black and white photographs, through stanzas that I memorized sometimes.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

The Road Not Taken

Part IV

Cynthia Kraman Genser was my downstairs neighbor at 16 Charles Street in NYC for two decades. When I moved in it was June 1976. She published her first book of poetry the next year Taking on the Local Color by Wesleyan University Press and this, her second, was published in 1978. I was writing for The New York Times and she was writing poetry. It took a couple years for us to become friends but then we were real friends. She had also a life as a rock music chick in Seattle but then came back to the Village.

People tend to glamorize and romanticize New York in the 70’s. It was gritty. The city was bankrupt. We had black and brown outs in the hot summers. The art world was edgy. We had the sense of political breakdown. She caught the despair and tawdry smell of things. When people talk to me about the scene in New York at that time, they always seem to forget that smell. I can’t, it was thick in the cold of winter, and acrid in the humid summers. But we were young and I ran around the city like it was my backyard, feeling free and smart and excited to be there in the middle of everything. Waiting for new things to appear before my eyes and they did. Was introduced quickly to cynicism and loss of hope with the AIDs epidemic. But that is getting ahead of us here.

“Take two pills and it goes away a headache he has his whole

life. Says to the wife “I remember something but I don’t

know what it is” reaching for a limb of the imagination,

there’s nothing there. And he moves over the land a marked

man crying “O my friends have pity on me. Have pity on me.

For I am one touched by the hand of God.”

CKG November 1975
Club 82 New York City

Part V

Coming back to the present I will leave you with three poems by my friends and colleagues Ishmael Fiifi Annobil and Richard Milazzo. In talking about the stamina of our human hearts for order, kindness, right action and our better angels, to strike at the moral abyss we saw open before us last week in Washington, I offer a poem Ishmael wrote for his mother — which moves me profoundly. Richard has written two recent works that were in the last month of the past year a kind of beacon through the turmoil of daily life.

I am grateful to them both for allowing me to share them with you here.

Jersey exhibition kindly hosted at a private residence by ArtHouse Jersey

PART I

The year finishes tonight. I look back at all we have come through. Instability underpins a quiet nerve-wracking uncertainty. Maniacs in office, political certainties cast adrift, a virus overwhelms our human community everywhere. There is no safe place, unless you just stay home, like a snail in its shell. Ha-ha-ha, I say everyday outsmarting the virus, I just won’t go anywhere. I will live in my shell with Zoom as portal to the world.

But we know this is unsustainable.

I look back tonight at so much loss amidst collective strength; how do we look at the climbing figures and make sense of this anymore. Yes, we go out and glance one to another over our face masks trying to read a smile, or catch a reassuring furrow that says, hold on, lets keep our heads up. Do not give in to fear, grief, and the diet of reactionary lies floating like seaweed across airwaves.

We eat podcasts like candy; follow self-help webinars that promise new businesses for us all on social media. We meditate. We do online yoga and ballet. We take a business coach. To keep from being pulled under this dark crashing sea of “nothing being the same again;” looking for safety somewhere new – within perhaps if you believe the wisdom traditions, or thankfully in art.

PART II

You recall my commentary about Jason Butler’s sumptuous abstract paintings in the Summer back in our studio visit. At the end of this fraught year he finished a body of work. This has not been easy, not at all. How can something so captivating be difficult you might ask?

In this arduous moment a new body of paintings give me hope. When he sent me the installation views of this group of paintings now out of the studio – I was so elated as if they were like a child being sent off to a first overnight at a friend’s house. You wonder, how will they hold up in a new environment, under objective scrutiny?

It was a happy moment, more than that I was delighted to see the paintings in the living room of a neutral space. Holding their ground with bold determination and verve. They spoke in a language that was as loud and clear as the architectural surroundings, like a person striding into a party with charisma everyone sees in a first moment. You have seen them in the studio months ago, but now they are something powerful and forthright. Independent and not part of the artist any more, they exist on their own terms.

Which made me today look into my library for help unpacking their possibility, thinking as well about the loss of Barbara Rose, a brilliant writer, thinker, a colleague and friend who loved painting. But I will save this for another time. Today I reached for the art historian Meyer Shapiro and the 4th volume of his collected writings On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content. Some of you may think his writing is outdated but he can take apart the visual field like few others. His teaching a generation of young men at Columbia influenced two old friends whose work I esteem and know from that time in New York during the 70’s, writers Sanford Schwartz and Nicholas Fox Weber.

PART III

“Content and form are plural concepts that comprise many regions and many orders within the same work. The vagueness of the form-and-content usage is due to the failure to specify in which region the connection or the unity lies. In any work, form and meaning cover several layers and scales of structure, expression and representation. Line, mass, space, color, dark-and-light constitute different orders in painting, as do words, actions, characters, and the large sequence of narrative in a play or story. Besides, within each of these aspects of the work are elements and characteristics that belong to the style of the time, others that are personal, and still others that are unique solutions for the particular work. To disengage these in their contribution to the content, even to interpret their expression, is beyond the power of an immediate apprehension of the whole.”

Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, published in 1984 by George Braziller, New York, p. 43.

“I have argued that we do not see all of a work when we see it as a whole. We strive to see it as completely as possible and in a unifying way, though seeing is selective and limited. Critical seeing, aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole. It takes into account others’ seeing; it is a collective and cooperative seeing and welcomes comparison of different perceptions and judgments. It also knows moments of sudden revelation and intense experience of unity and completeness which are shared in others’ scrutiny.”

Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, published in 1984 by George Braziller, New York, p. 49.

So here Shapiro invokes this process of “others’ seeing.” Which is what takes the painting from the personal space of the studio into this other communal realm where it lives or dies on its own merits. Again it is the multitude that sees it, that looks for whatever coherence might be on offer.

PART IV

In the case of Jason Butler’s works we have clarity in public view. Anytime we may experience this it has a homeopathic affect on us, makes the breath a bit easier, the sense of safety almost tangible in an instant. We are on stable ground for the moment the order and language of the painting washes through us as nothing else possibly can.

As 2020 comes to a close I can think of nothing more beneficial for the soul than to witness art do what we need it to do – which is to assuage the pain of our collective human condition. Right now, it is our last hope it seems to me. I am grateful for its power; grateful to be part of a community that holds its inherent values and content so dear.

We are the lucky ones—I have said several times in the past week watching this year come to an end—with the hope of seeing my soon-to-be-90 year old mom again amidst the raw crazed commotion of four generations beneath one roof. She is stoic and sage, not betting on next year for Thanksgiving yet. That is another subject and one that wants to project into the future a sense of certainty again.

But Jason Butler’s spontaneous exhibition remind us that light and color are fleeting, bombastic if we are lucky, restrained if we are calm but fundamentally unpredictable. And for this they seem an apt end to the year, and my inspiration alone here in Paris in my library with art, friends, and colleagues in my head welcoming 2021 with a sense of relief and trepidation. We have made it gratefully this far to see another day.

Watch here “Love Letters” or clic on the image

In this lockdown year 2020, and in honor of the 20th anniversary of the artist’s Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), we invite 1000 people from around the world to become a co-writer in a handwritten edition of the Book of Genomes.

Vanmechelens ‘Book of Genomes’ artwork is an ode to diversity and an archive of 20 years of crossing. A unique code of letters and numbers that make up the DNA of the 20th generation Cosmopolitan Chicken. A book of more than 1000 pages, laying out the building blocks of life.

With this ‘Love Letters’ project we create a unique version of this Book of Genomes; a handwritten copy. Made possible only by the contributions of many. Many people, many manuscripts, many hours. Love letters invites reflection on the cryptic code of DNA which develops in all its facets into the complexity of life.

More on mouth.be/loveletters

Video by studioTROPICS

Film Producer and Director: Ishmael Fiifi Annobil

Associate Producer: Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

Part I

Sometimes projects emerge from days and weeks of discussions and emails with an artist. Working with Karshan at a distance since our last in-person studio visit last December in New York has been a lesson in weekly talking. A collaboration started May 2019 at DRAW ART FAIR, I invited LK to make daily walked drawings in Saatchi Gallery, London, up the historic staircase across the mezzanine and down the other side. This she achieved each day at four o’clock precisely with tap shoes amplified with microphones.

This work “Blackbird Song” filmed artfully by Ghanaian filmmaker and poet Ishmael Fiifi Annobil. They have worked together for years, see his thoughtful radical films on the LK website. A retrospective of works on paper hung in Redfern Gallery’s stand in quiet elegance; the minimalist open fair spaces designed by London based architect Miska Miller-Lovegrove with Paris designer Mathilde Bretillot; the third part of this team was Fernando Gutiérrez whose obvious genius sang from the signage and catalogue, to his graphics visible in the Underground and along streets of Knightsbridge. His splendid blue danced from walls, visibly along the staircase Karshan articulated daily.

Eight months later in a Manhattan studio before New Years, looking at decades of drawings I said, “Lets have a quantum leap in the practice. Now is your time.”

Part II

Then we reach March, I am caught in London by the virus. Distraught in stillness I have a feeling this is going to be two years at least. I say to LK in New York, “think about this period as something that will have a beginning, a middle and an end.” Breathe. Body as tuning fork, you sense, you see what is happening. Channel it. I did not know anything at that moment of her personal history. On a train she once suggested she was inspired by her father. He was heroic. Charitable. They set up a human rights award in his name.

Dread mounted as I became overly sensitive to ambulances speeding and helicopters swooping into in Bayswater on their way to St. Mary’s hospital; I imagined sounds of breathing machines. Alone I relived of my late husband’s last weeks with a breathing tube intensive care, 2012; my father’s labored death from lung cancer, 1995 breathing slowed to nothing.

LK one day mentioned her father’s polio, a beginning of recollections. Drawings came one after the next, in New York, in Connecticut. “Standing upright, good conduct, I walk and turn because I can”, she said. Paper on the table, feet moving in their repetitive steps as her pencil marked the grids, the circles, the intersections, turning the paper, turn and turn again.

Weeks pass, one month to another, discussions, emails, discursive texts, jottings. She calls herself a common reader, but the thinking is lucid beyond any pandemic. I exile to Paris in July. LK arrives in London. The first group of Covid works finished, I suggest she shift outdoors, parks and gardens for walking, Ishmael thinks how to chronicle this. Together they talk and look and she finds a jotting dating back in 2004 where she writes of her father’s polio. He films her reading this on the steps of her London studio. We wait to see what the middle period of Covid walked drawings will reveal. Just midstream now. We call the drawings “In Pursuit of Knowledge & Grace.”

Part III

March 20, 2020/LK JOTTING/NYC

“Just before lockdown. I found myself at MoMA, then fled, keen to get home and produce drawings with life. In silverpoint – a new technique for me. I was just getting the hang of it, by virtue of the squeaky sound produced by silver on clay and by its similarity to etching.” It took several trials to create the good-enough matrix; I also needed to find a way to re-use that grid-like form.

Then Eva Hesse’s small drawings of disc-like circles came to mind, held in perfect balance with her grid. Hesse used the grid as both a prison and safeguard against letting an obsessive process or excessive sensitivity run away with her. Thus outwardly rational work can be saturated with a poetic and condensed intensity that eventually amounts to the utmost in irrationality. Repetition and repetition of moveable units in particular, leads to fragmentation, the disintegration of one order in favor of a new one.“

I found my way. With a faint, silver grid as my ‘safeguard’, I carved half, or three quarter circles with speed: up and down the grid, across and back, always with rhythm and speed. THIS way, the circles added up/knit together. Sometimes they were just the result of an ‘S’ form, drawn fast/fast, with purposiveness. They reminded me of the ‘S’ forms on a Greek geometric-period vase.”

Part IV

April 2, 2020/LK JOTTING/ CONN. STUDIO

“Day one in the new studio one drawing, clean and clear. I have written a brief jotting addressing art in the time of Covid 19, from my point of view, taking into account my personal experience of the polio epidemic of 1951.

It is unsentimental, but to the point: the sound of my graphite on paper, on a new drawing table—a wooden door—sounded to me like a ‘breathing machine.’ This I noted in an August 2004 jotting.

I had in mind an iron lung; I did not say so then. But as breathing, or its loss, is at the heart of the current pandemic, the point can be made now.

I send you the new jotted thoughts. Dated yesterday, it is a spare picture of where I find myself now, and how I intend to move forward, upright and alert.”

Part V

April 5, 2020/ LK JOTTING

“This jotting for its relevance to my thinking in today’s linear, profane time. I find myself overwhelmed by sadness and buoyed with courage, thinking of him now.

Science beat polio in 1955. The victor was Jonas Salk, then 39, who had undertaken the challenge to find a cure seven years earlier, an effort sponsored by the March of Dimes.

How well I remember. My father Roger Joseph had been stricken with polio in the epidemic that raged throughout the US in 1951. After two years in an iron lung my father was now by side at home, in his rocking bed. Together we watched telethons to raise money for the March of Dimes, an initiative conceived by FDR.

Our posture mattered greatly to him; he could not stand. I am one of three girls. What mattered to him above all was that we conduct our lives with moral uprightness, of which he was an exceptional model.

Today I remain as upright and alert as possible. I can stand and I can walk. I do so for the sake of my art, but also to redeem my father’s illness, which he bore with resilience and courage, as he had done during the Second World War, commanding an iron tank division called the Thundering Herd.”

Watch here “Linda Karshan: Covid Conversation” or click on the image

Part I

Simplicity takes pride of place.

To be simple sounds so easy. Yet it is always the most difficult achievement for an artist, architect or designer. It takes a lifetime of self-editing to understand the rigorous difficulty involved with peeling things away. What is essential after all? Very little. The breath maybe.

We reflect on this differently in the slowed down gears of 2020. Do we need this? Do we need that? For a seasoned celebrated designer like Bretillot (early work with Sottsass, Michele de Lucchi, Martine Bedin, Ross Lovegrove, Philippe Stark) her signature is often one elemental curved line with a will to power. Empty space, hard edged colored mirrored surfaces mix wry elegant historicism with a fresh restrained minimalism. Bretillot’s eye is purposeful and certain, a designer who takes no short cuts and seldom embraces the decorative.

There is more to say about this practice that includes interior architecture and product design. Bretillot has worked with the best French houses: Christofle, DAUM, la Manufacture de Sèvres, Boffi. Currently designing the Musée de la Faïencerie de GIEN. Esteemed for passionate teaching at Camondo and now in Toulon, this jewel-like new office for a perfume house in Paris might pass easily under the radar.

But its pristine clarity, light, breath and simplicity makes us want to sit at the bespoke-two sided desks bathed by sunshine in central Paris. What Bretillot has not included makes these rooms strident and calm. What began as a question of raw space, the most basic of all, ends with a festival of surfaces, parallel and perpendicular that invite the eye to settle and relax. Not just in visual coherence, but a textural safety protecting the energies of a team working and thinking about something as ethereal as perfume; sheer artfulness here reflected in a few rooms where the invisible—in this case scent—is allowed to speak.

Part II

Bretillot plays with notions of refinement, detachment and non-conformist aesthetics, hovering along the knife-edge of modernism where the seduction of whiteness fuses with an unconventional flip of a desk’s edges. How to create intimacy in an open plan office amidst high ceilings and spartan elegance of double desks and a co-working space? Just flip up the edge of the desk so papers can’t sail into the room as clients pass. A touch of privacy along the table-top.

Bare minimum. Space and light sing. Graciously designed double sided desks with refined detailed edges mimic lightness in the overall plan. Elegance with promised functionality. Through the double doors into the office, an open aisle creates fluidity of movement, strolling down the center of everything then turning along the side office where two smaller desks face mirrored panels which catch the daylight reflections from the courtyard outside the opposite side of the office; to the right, just beyond is the view directly into the co-working space with its simply designed standing desk; solid oak on a honeycomb structure. Nothing more.

Bretillot has a talent for work surfaces; one of her custom built desks in aluminum and carbon, lacquered wood veneer and leather above embossed leather was created and selected for the Mobilier National collection in 2018. It is now in the office of a government minister. Here an appetite for luxurious materials treated in a formal reductive language sparks a complete satisfaction of surface texture and structure little seen today.

All photos by JSVCprojects

Part I

Gallery weekend

11, 12 September, 2020

Everything takes longer now, including the decision to fly to Berlin after so many months staying home. Last year spent real time there with our collaborative Art & Language exhibition at Galerie Michael Janssen; I missed my friends, artists and colleagues. It seemed a moment to celebrate the last project MJ would mount in this great storefront gallery I love. They just now moved to offices down the block until a new gallery space is found.

Super fresh painting. Till Gerhard, We’re all like Mirrors, dreamy and exciting surprises galore. Not the kind I usually embrace, but suddenly, in this time, having spent months looking at art only in my library and on my laptop, the sheer delight of his unique convergences, color and narrative, wicked and magical at the same time; partially recognizable scenes, photo albums from long ago family outings, or odd Scandi Noir television moments. His taut ambivalence between innocence and destruction drives their pictorial nature into something compelling.

Acid colors, transparent veils over quasi-photographic imagery either come in or out of focus. Sometimes the subjects are directly in your line of vision, walking at you, staring at us blindly. What are they doing? Something unsettles the eye and sets it deep into the foreground looking for clues.

Groups of children, or adults caught in another reality where something has just happened or is about to. His night scenes of lovers in a lake hover under psychedelic skies. Washes of color across Gerhard’s work are high voltage and filmic. His subjects dissolve in and out of focus; painterly prisons of layered color like camouflage keep us from getting too near what is going on. But he makes me want to see, keeping my eye fixed on this unsettled territory. Idiosyncratic voyeurism couched in radical painting. Keep looking.

PART II

Customary dinner outside at Paris Bar the night before the opening of Till Gerhard’s show. I stay around the corner always at the Savoy, a habit since 1997 when Thomas Schulte booked me there in the Marlene Dietrich suite for 75DM; we shared a booth at an early edition of Berlin Art Fair. I was MD at LISSON then, wanted a satellite in Berlin. Walking in Charlottenburg I always felt oddly at home. Many dinners and parties always at Paris Bar. Maybe then still homesick for the New York art world dinners at Barocco in Tribeca, a place where there were always people you knew, at the bar, at a table.

Paris Bar is this, like the Kunsthalle in Basel, or the Kronenhalle in Zurich a place you can go alone and always fit in; the waiters are the same, the menu is the same, the art on the walls and reverence for artists makes it feel like an extension of the gallery or artists studio. So this year after months at home, sitting with Till and Michael outside for dinner, like a genuine holiday yet also an extension of the last time. Nerves taut the night before an opening. The show is up, the work lives or dies on its merits. Few people say anything about how hard this feels. Even for a gallerist who hopes to place the works well. Expectations run high, fear mounts higher. Without a word you finish the installation, and leave the gallery looking for relief.

Dinner is my first meeting with Till Gerhard, lanky tallness and physical calm; I am surprised after hours with his fiery, edgy, nervy paintings, feeling dangerous. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful. Easy going, experienced, one would say, artist entering mid-career. His fourth show at the gallery with a place in the German art scene, but is new to me. I try to contextualize his work in a neighborhood with artists I once worked with like Daniel Richter and Jules de Balincourt. He is near but still quite far his piercing melodramas embrace an oddness you cannot decipher.

The world we are living in today is not the world of the 1st of February 2020. There are orders around us that are so much vaster than we are. Everyone has been fundamentally changed.

JSVCprojects

EPISODE III – UNCOMFORTABLE

08 September 2020

In this third episode of The Battery Channel, UNCOMFORTABLE, Jill Silverman Van Coenegrachts talks to Koen Vanmechelen. Together they explore the meaning of this moment in time. JSVC has been working with Koen Vanmechelen since 1999.

Your work has been building up a head of steam for 25 years to arrive at this point in time.

JSVCprojects

We’re very pleased to speak on the subject of this transformative moment with Vanmechelen, whose work has made a singular point around diversity and transformation.

Coming out of the pandemic – we have seen this huge human awareness of social injustice. This is a moment of social change we have not seen since 1968. […] Every culture is trying to balance the economic needs of their community v the public health issues.

JSVCprojects

Over this period, the work has systematically examined the relationship between human beings and nature. It continues to do so.

His work deals with these questions and these paradoxes from the very beginning by looking so clearly at the macrocosm of the chicken family.

JSVCprojects

The conversation on art and COVID-19 starts with Joseph Beuys, on balance and nature.

The power of [Beuys’] vision was so palpable and it was a universal vision. Joseph Beuys was an artist who saw how everything was interconnected. He came to become a lightning rod for social change and a recalibration of the social order.

JSVCprojects

The conversation looks at links between the death of George Floyd and the pandemic,

We have seen […] this huge human awareness of social injustice coming out of the terrible experience in the United States with George Floyd.

JSVCprojects

It’s been over five months since COVID-19 forced us into a new way of connecting.

Art and the art world have a huge role to play in whatever is coming next and wherever we are right this minute. […] This is a transformative moment and I think art has an homeopathic position in the body politic of the world. […] Art has a way of influencing hearts and minds.

JSVCprojects

The sculpture, UNCOMFORTABLE, defines this episode and title.

As Koen Vanmechelen describes:

I think the future is freedom. Freedom of thinking, freedom of speech.

Koen Vanmechelen

With this crisis, my work has become more visual, I can feel that.

Koen Vanmechelen

In the LABIOMISTA park you see all the installations with the animals, the chickens, the drama.

Koen Vanmechelen

How do we let a child be in the new world? Shall we block it from freedom, put in quarantine, shall we give him the liberty to exist?

Koen Vanmechelen

When the environment becomes more violent, we become more social.

Koen Vanmechelen

When I hear you, Jill, I can feel an energy and a passion that there is something about the future.

Koen Vanmechelen

I hope this pandemic but also its reaction bring us in a less designed world and in a more real and authentic world where true culture true art is knowledge and a discussion platform for further generations.

Koen Vanmechelen

Children are our immune system, their future is our health

Koen Vanmechelen

The pandemic has brought a profound change to our sensitivities as one global community.

JSVCprojects

There has never been a more exciting time to be an artist.

JSVCprojects

CLICK and LISTEN below to The Battery Channel podcast

Let us know what you think.

A studio visit, filmmaker and poet Ishmael Annobil and artist Linda Karshan, August 2020.

In late December 2019, I visited Linda Karshan in New York for a long exploration of her work, and what we might do together. I could see her practice clearly as performative, though her reputation in most circles has been as an artist who works with drawing. What over the years has slipped through the cracks is the very unique and body generated way that she produces works that come from physical movements of her body at the drawing table, and also from performances that she does in any number of architectural places, indoors or out.

This discussion together gave us a moment to look at the future, where she could take her work, into what arena, exhibitions, publications and more art making in general. I planned to go back and see her again in early March, but this was like all travel plans for the spring, cancelled.

We started talking as the pandemic worsened. I said that she should imagine making a specific body of new work during this period considering these weeks in March as the beginning, and whenever it was possible to travel again, would be the end. She worked at first in New York City and then went up to her studio in Connecticut, and you have seen this studio here.

I had an instinct her body would take in the emotional subterfuge of these dire weeks in March and April, going on into May like a dousing fork and find the core of this period, which could then be processed onto paper. She sent photographs. Then returning to London in early June, brought the works.

These weeks of Covid-19 produced a rare and engaged body of prints and drawings; in this new film project Karshan talks with her collaborator Ishmael Annobil about how the works emerged. You can have a sneak preview of their shooting last week in London. I will share some of the jottings that came during this time as background.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

20 March 2020

In silverpoint—a new technique for me. I was just getting the hang of it, by virtue of the squeaky sound produced by silver on clay, and by it’s similarity to etching.

It took several trials to create the good-enough matrix; I also needed to find a way to re-use that grid-like form.

Pouncing, a la Renaissance, served me pretty well. It was ‘inelegant, assuredly. But sound; sound, like Malloy’s method with his sucking stones, turn and turn about.

I now had my ‘way’; I had my grid. Then Eva Hesse’s small drawings of disc-like circles came to mind, held in perfect balance within her grid:

‘Hesse used the grid as both a prison and a safeguard against letting an obsessive process or excessive sensitivity run away with her… The first of my ‘Hessian’ silverpoints looked too much like hers. It was stunning; it was not mine: I had simply, and reductively, circled round.’

Then I found my ‘way’, turn and turn about. With a faint, silver grid as my ‘safeguard’, I carved half, or three-quarter circles with speed: up and down the grid, across and back, always with rhythm and speed. THIS way, the circles added up/knit together.

Time went on; the drawings developed. SOME of the time—often—the curved, triangular intersections between the circles asked to be ‘hit’: they called for an intense, quick ‘two-step’ to better define and hold the form.

As intense as I my lines could be, the drawings are delicate. They are in silver, after all.

On cue, or so it appears, the Greek Cross, or the ‘simple’ grid asserted/inserted itself into the process.

Then, to my surprise—this IS new—that ‘circling’ made its way within the diamond forms of the extended grids.

A ‘cover up’; I was NOT ‘filling in’! The cover-up lines were drawn with speed; they NATURALLY CURVED as I turned the sheet to fill in the triangular forms. And what a loud, squeaky sound they made! Astonishing; it held me in pace, and in place. One sees speed; sound; and shimmering lines.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

1 April 2020

Human conduct matters

With social distancing the name of the game; with all non-essential businesses closed; where do we stand with art?

How must conduct our lives?

‘Upright and alert’; human conduct matters.

Now more than ever, art seems essential… as does love, walking in the park, and domestic jokes. But this period is not a laughing matter; family dynamics have never been more strained.

What solace, then, to step inside the studio, where my body finds its natural reach. I mark my measure, as I enact time, itself. Poise and grace are all.

And breath. What an irony, then, that my art is made of the very breath at risk to millions of lives, worldwide.

This is familiar, familial territory. In 1951, my young father, Roger Joseph, was stricken with polio during the deadly epidemic that year. Confined to an iron lung, he returned home after two years in hospital. Breathing for him was not involuntary: during sleep, he was aided by a rocking bed. He conducted his law practice from a wheelchair, upright and alert in mind, reminding himself to breathe.

I have often thought that the sound of my graphite pencil moving through paper, marking my breath, was very like a ‘breathing machine’. This I noted in my jotting dated 27/08/04.

That thought haunts me now. I breath easily, because I can; I remain upright and alert because I am able.

I am ‘two feet walking’ because I must.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

2 April 2020

Day one in the new studio: one drawing. clean and clear. I have written a brief jotting addressing art in the time of Covid 19, from my point of view, taking into account my personal experience of the polio epidemic of 1951.

It is unsentimental, but to the point: the sound of my graphite on paper, on a new drawing table—a wooden door—sounded to me like a ‘breathing machine.’ This I noted in an August, 2004 jotting.

I had in mind an iron lung; I did not say so then. But as breathing, or its loss, is at the heart of the current pandemic, the point can be made now.

I send you the new jotted thoughts. Dated yesterday, it is a spare picture of where I find myself now, and how I intend to move forward, upright and alert.

Linda Karshan, Jottings

16 May 2020

I am struck by how often I make mention of cuneiform, and the clay-ness of the tablets, themselves.

They are ‘fragments’, we learn, again and again. Holding them—the small ones that fit into the palm—a most powerful compression of time.

The fragments of an ancient poem, originally in several languages from around the ancient world, have given rise to many modern versions. The fragments we study, in ‘a confusion of languages’, were copied more than 1000 years after the times of their origins. King Ashurbanipal, in the seventh century BC, aspiring to complete knowledge, and wishing to collect this knowledge within his Library, commissioned copies of the ancients. Most of the later fragments were discovered in the mid-19th century, within the remains of his great Library.

In the BM, I spotted in the early Babylonian galleries a striking pair of clay tablets, picturing ideal, geometric forms. These forms unfolded in a logical order, just as do my series of drawings. And they could be read horizontally OR vertically—turn and turn about—anticipating the moving figure assigned to me.

These tablets, too, were used for measuring, as their cuneiform inscriptions note. They prove that within the Fertile Crescent, where trade was highly developed by 2000-1800 BC, the theories of Pythagorus were known, and used, for commercial purposes, a century before the master. Like cuneiform, they mark a logical frame of mind.

If ‘the Euclidean constructions were an attempt to prove, in motion, the logical power of mind’, these early Mesopotamian tablets are proof positive. That they so closely resemble my drawings is less astonishing than inevitable, I suggest: to count thus; to mark one-self vertically and turn the sheet/tablet; to think and move rhythmically in concert with the universe; all this is an example of ‘THE TRUE’. ‘The true:’ this is a term used by a scientist-friend, describing my work. She spoke it so unequivocally I have never forgotten it.

7 August 2020

Manifest the True

Part II

Karshan:

To manifest ‘the TRUE’; I shall continue to ‘go on and get on’, for as long as, and with as much energy as, I can muster.

To be sure, I have the ‘true figure’ in my being. To picture it does take time, effort, concentration and daily practice.

Linda Karshan

JSVCprojects:

The conclusion is not in any way surprising, it is why we recognise this already present aspect in your practice; as if you are a channel for bringing this lost information back into our world.

The oddity is to learn that The True is not personal it is a state of being, awareness, balance, in relationship to other forces; how culture or man/woman kind have found it and tried to notate it, or form it into pictograms, writings, images, later photographs, paintings, etc, poems, books, spiritual tracts varies from place to place and culture to culture but the wisdom is there for the tapping if we are able to get centered and let it in somehow. We are each one a vessel for something that we can bring into the world in a way that no one else can. Your practice is as i said earlier like a tuning fork and you have located this perfect pitch and called it the TRUE. Identifying its aspects is one thing to be sure, but manifesting is the hard part. This is what you work is talking to us about. To make manifest is the alchemical transformation of one substance into another or one kind of knowledge into another form. This is why your work holds the eye and is so compelling to our spirits.

JSVCprojects

Cinematographer: Max Mallen

All photographs by Ishmael Annobil

Hello dear friends, summer news:

JSVCprojectsis back at work in Paris and we are continuing our activities which you can follow in real time on our social media posts. Keep track of our artists and projects with BEHIND THE SCENES portraits in the studio and elsewhere. By popular demand, I will continue to amuse you all with WALKS IN MY LIBRARY.

Still, our goal especially in these challenging times is to work where we can to keep art in the center of our lives so that it nourishes and supports us all. We have seen the medical teams around the world do their heroic work on our behalf during the first months of the COVID crisis, this was the beginning of a much longer trajectory, I’m afraid, so please

Wear masks and stay Safe!!!

We have all been moved to action by the worldwide call for social justice. Art plays a fundamental role transforming hearts and minds during this time. We are committed to working towards social and political equality in a time when BLACK LIVES MATTER. We all have a part to play here.

Please keep in touch and follow the dancing red line.

Esther Shalev-Gerz will give a talk “Between ‘The Shadow’ and ‘The Monument Against Fascism'”.

Organized by the Research Forum of the Courtauld Art Institute and as a consequence of a University strike, the talk is now organized by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts at the Freud Museum London.

Please take into account the change of venue. The date and time remain the same. February 25th, 2020 6-7pm Freud Museum London.

February 25th, 2020
6-7pm

Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London.
Free admission.

Esther Shalev-Gerz is represented by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts and her team at JSVCprojects/london.

You are invited to Stefano Cigada’s “Frammenti” exhibition opening, curated by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, from 6.30-9.00pm.

Book available.

Exhibition: January, 21st – March, 8th
Tuesday-Saturday, 10.00am-7.00pm.

Per Kirkeby “Brick Sculptures” opening 14 September at Gallery Axel Vervoordt, Antwerp, through February 22, 2020.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the artist’s estate and Galleri Susanne Ottesen Copenhagen, and JSVCprojects/London.

Do not miss it.

More information on the gallery’s website:

https://www.axel-vervoordt.com/gallery/exhibitions/per-kirkeby-brick-sculptures

JSVC HIGHLIGHTS: Art & Language, Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin talking with gallerist Michael Janssen at Draw Art Fair London.

Their exhibition continues in Berlin through 3 August.

A great Summer weekend awaits.

Don’t miss it.

JSVC curates ART & LANGUAGE, Devinera qui pourra (Figure It Out Who Can) opening April 26, 6-9pm thru June 8, 2019 at Galerie Michael Janssen, Potsdamer Str. 63, Berlin.

Spring 2019 ushers in another season for Galerie Michael Janssen, who proudly present Devinera qui Pourra (Figure it out who can), an exhibition of works both new and newly conceived by Art & Language and curated by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts.

A trademark quality of Art & Language’s critical artistic output is an unflagging challenge of art’s definitions, parameters, assumptions, and genres—a dedication to questioning, “what art might become when it becomes conceptual.” Devinera qui Pourra continues their investigation. Named in reference to a comment Gustav Courbet made about his painting L‘Atelier du peintre (The Artist‘s Studio) (1854-1855), which depicts the collision of the painter’s discrete social circles in single scene, the exhibition invites attendees to “figure it out who can.” It challenges viewers to unravel the intellectual knots that Art & Language tie within each artwork. It is also an assessment, in the spirit of Courbet’s painting, of global politics in the present—a complicated world incommensurate with, yet inextricable from, itself.

PART I

Koen Vanmechelen opens “IT’S AOUT TIME”, Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä Finland.

Produced in collaboration with JSVCprojects/London. Curated by Timo Valjakka.
Until September 9, 2018.
Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland.

PART II

Good Summer reading!

“IT’S ABOUT TIME”…
ART AND POPULATION HEALTH AT A CROSSROADS

LinkedIn original overview of Koen Vanmechelen’s unique artistic practice from the perspective of scientific engagement.

By Adam Silverman, Vice President, Population Health,
Saint Francis Healthcare Partners, Hartford, CT, USA:

When art and science mix, great things happen. And that is what happens when Koen Vanmechelen gets in your head. Koen is a Belgian artist known for the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP) – http://wassermanprojects.com/cosmopolitan-chicken/#1475108318857-94863590-382f

I had the opportunity to meet with him during his newest opening at the Serlachius Museum in Mantta, Finland in May.

The CCP is an experience and a philosophy of life that uses the chicken as the metaphor of the amalgamation of human interaction with our natural environment, the dependency that exists among species, as well as role that art and science have in mutually re-enforcing the other. The CCP depicts life as art but also provides us solutions to some vexing problems.

The fates of humankind and the chicken have been intertwined for millennia. As a reliable source of nutrition, early human settlements gravitated to the chicken as a renewable food source. As a social construct, the chicken has been a part of every major human settlement. Koen’s work recognizes this interdependence and highlights the importance of “place” in determining who we are and who we can become.

By raising awareness of the importance of genetic heterogeneity in species’ survival, the artist’s work reminds us that our current culture of hyper-specialization and genetic homogeneity presents survival risks. By placing importance on select genetic qualities, our industrial agricultural mono-culture has created a food supply that is inherently vulnerable to disease and has removed a key element of health and well-being from our local communities.

As population health is really about preventing preventable illness, enabling our communities to provide basic human needs in a reliable and safe way, the CCP reminds us that while we believe our modern societies have the ability to provide superior health and well-being, we actually are building on a shaky foundation. In particular, the industrialization of our food supply leaves it vulnerable to epidemic, promotes human disease through rearing practices that are dependent on antibiotic over-use, and promotes food insecurity to our most vulnerable populations by financially and geographically limiting access to nutrition.

By crossbreeding national chicken breeds to create new hybrids, Koen’s art has created a scientifically more resilient chicken. A chicken that can be re-introduced into a “cosmopolitan” environment and thrive, therefore promoting the notion of local stewardship over food production. From a population health perspective, this gets about as far upstream into a community as one could imagine. If well-being is defined in terms of the ability of a community to provide for itself, then the CCP gives us a roadmap to get there.

Adam Silverman MD, FACP
Chief Medical Officer at Syllable
Article published on LinkedIn