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Robert Kusmirowski does copies, simulacra, forgeries, mock-ups. Meticulously and masterfully. The result of his craft is an illusion. You believe you're in front of a relic from the past, complete with patina: a sepia photography, old newspapers, cigarette packs, but also a graveyard, the wagon of a '40s train or an entire train station. I never used to be fascinated by sculptures but the young artist put such a eerie, retro-innovative' spin to the genre that he won me over.
Information about the artist state that he started to make deliberate mock-ups as a child, building toys he couldn't get in socialist Poland. Elsewhere you will read that from an early age he painstakingly forged bus passes and postage stamps for his entire family.
The Polish artist currently has two works in Turin, one is UHER.C at Guida Costa Projects. The second one, DATAmatic 880, is on show at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as part of the Turin Triennale. Both use mechanics and electronics as symbols of a broader reflection on 20th century European history. They are suggestive, non-functional machines, they are nostalgic and absurd. They play with time and place. They evoke a period the artist is too young to have experienced. DATAmatic 880 is a 1960's computer lab that comes straight from the time machine. Its name recalls the DATAmatic 1000, a large-scale electronic data processing machine, launched by American company DATAmatic in the '50s. As you can guess, Kusmirowski's DATAmatic 880 never existed.
UHER.C is another non-relic from the '60s. Especially conceived for the Guido Costa Projects gallery, UHER.C is a recording studio. It is meant to be manipulated by rockers, not by neat scientists in white gowns. UHER.C is as cluttered, messy and dusty as DATAmatic 880 is glossy and hygienic. You can only observe UHER.C through a window panel. In turn, the recording studio lets you take a peak at the future that has been (or might have been) but which appears obsolete today.
UHER.C is a classical, archaic sculpture that has gone berserk: it is both the nightmarish and joyous side of machine. The press release says: UHER.C gets its name for phonetic, geographic and historical reasons (respectively Hertz; UHER a mountain region in the environs of Lubin; and Mr UHER.C, a researcher into the physics of sound). It is an extraordinary sculpture with a thousand souls, keyboard, oscillators, microphones, amplifiers, recording devices, cables, mysterious objects, pure inventions, sounds, voices and lights. It is a living sculpture that now and again unplugs one of its souls, caged in its circuits for decades, or it gives a voice to other souls born especially for the occasion. Slideshow of the exhibition: On view at Guida Costa Projects, Turin, until Saturday 28 February 2009. At the end of the exhibition a limited edition LP will be produced of music by Robert Kusmirowski. See also Vernissage TV coverage of the opening of DATAmatic 880 in Berlin. Previously: Wagon, a faithful reproduction of the vehicles that served to deport countless people. |
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Today in Italy, car manufacturers promise you that half naked ladies will throw themselves languorously over your car hood if you buy one of their models. Back in the 50s in the US, you would get a supply of Kleenex if you purchased a Pontiac. Photograph by Bill Wood - a commercial photographer in Fort Worth, Texas, whose negatives were bought by Diane Keaton and exhibited at the International Center of Photography.
The show closed a few days ago but i thought it was still worth sharing this image with you. |
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A few steps away from Piazza Duomo in Milan is the medieval Via Mercanti, a pedestrian area which includes Palazzo della Ragione. Founded in 1228, the brick building remained for hundreds of years the centre of the city government and trade.
Disused for some time, the stunning palazzo has been recently revamped to host Unknown Weegee, an exhibition of some 100 photos dating from from 1937 to 1964 and three videos shot by the notorious night-crawler. Large panels hide and protect most of the walls but the contrast between the old frescoes remaining on the walls and Weegee's pictures worked extremely well.
I thought i knew Weegee, the New York photographer who set up his sleeping quarters, photo lab and office inside his two-seater car. The man who listened to his police and fire department shortwave radio while he was in bed. 'Weegee the Famous' who lurked around the darkest corners of Manhattan on the lookout for the next crime, the looming car crash, the upcoming scandal, the starlet sneaking out of the ball room. The guy with a massive camera and a big cigar who always manages to take his subjects off guard.
Unknown Weegee proved me wrong. Of course Weegee did crime scene and villains, he documented life in the city from the 1030s Depression to the postwar period, but he was also keen on bringing into light urban social issues. In 1940, Weegee joined PM, a daily paper conceived as a liberal crusader to fight against oppression, to advocate for the rights of unionists, Jews, and African Americans (text by curator Cynthia Young.) Some of the photos pertaining to this series are deeply moving. I couldn't find any digital version of it online (actually i can't find most f my favourite picture online, which justifies the title of the exhibition after all), but there was one stricking 1941 picture showing a Washington movie theatre divided by a partition: one side of the theatre was reserved for the white and the other for black people. Elsewhere were the homeless, the immigrants, the riots in Harlem, daily tragedies, racism, people struggling to make ends meet, etc.
Unknown Weegee: cronache americane runs at the Palazzo della Ragione, Milan, through October 12, 2008. Photo galleries in kataweb and Panorama (sorry!). The exhibition was shown two years ago in Manhattan, the the new york times has a slideshow and so does the International Center of Photography where all the photos come from. |
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This year Turin is the World Capital of Design, a title that the city is holding fairly decently but without much panache. No critical design, no interaction design, nothing really progressive nor challenging either. Still, there's a couple of interesting exhibitions going on throughout the city right now. The one i visited on Thursday might actually be the best show about design i've seen in a long time.
Olivetti, Una bella società --which could be translated as something that sums up the ideas of a fine company and a better society-- was curated by Enrico Morteo and Manolo De Giorgi to celebrate the centenary of Olivetti's foundation.
The Italian manufacturing company was founded by Camillo Olivetti in 1908 in tiny Ivrea to produce typewriters and later on, calculators, and computers. Right from the start he decided that Olivetti would become a synonym of innovation and experimentation. His son, Adriano, succeeded him and cast the figure of an enlightened boss who would decrease the hours of work, build a library to encourage his employees and workers to get more intellectual education, and increase salaries and fringe benefits. By 1957 Olivetti workers were the best paid in the metallurgical industry and they showed the highest productivity. The company's vision didn't stop at mechanics and electronics, it quickly attempted to encompass new social values, look for a rational approach to producing things, and search for new ways to contribute to the development of society as a whole.
The 22 rooms of the exhibition in Turin host 700 objects and memorabilia: typewriters from the early 20th century, calculators, telephones, and portable computers but also office furniture, old commercials from all over the world, documentaries, videos, photographs and at the end of the exhibit, a labyrinth of rooms guides you through the spirit and story of Olivetti from the letter A to Z.
If there's one thing i associate Olivetti with, it's Valentine, the mythical and so red portable typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass , along with Perry King, and launched in 1969. If anyone could point me to a portable computer which looks as neat, fun and elegant as Valentine, they will receive my undying respect and unlimited thanks.
Olivetti produced many other iconic devices: the portable typewriter Lettera 22, designed by Marcello Nizzoli in 1949, the Divisumma 24, the first print-out calculator able to perform the four basic arithmetic calculations, the exquisitely portable Divisumma 18 calculator encased in pop rubber skin and designed by Marco Bellini in 1973.
At the time, enlisting designers to work on devices was far from being as commonplace as it is today. Olivetti understood almost immediately the concept of 'brand image'. They not only hired talented designers to shape their products (Sottsass, De Lucchi, Nizzoli), they also employed renowned artists and graphic designers to make their posters, well-known directors to handle their audiovisual communication and commissioned top architects and designers to create their flagship stores throughout the world. Carlo Scarpa, for example, was responsible for Olivetti's showroom in St. Mark's Square in Venice, 1957.
Olivetti, Una bella società runs at the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti through July 27, 2008.
All my images. |
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Ever since i saw that magnificent retrospective about Ant Farm at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla, i've been looking for the Ant Farm 'bible', THE book among the many books dedicated to the experimental architecture and performance group. This one is as close as it can get to being the best monograph i've found so far about the avant-garde architects, activists and performers (granted that i wouldn't call myself an expert in Ant Farm matters.) Ant Farm - Living Archive 7 demonstrates the relevance of Ant Farm's work by situating it within the context of contemporary events and culture. It is incredibly well documented and illustrated with pictures, sketches, and other historical images. I found the illustrations so amazing that i'm going to shut my mouth, leave you with this little video i made to show you what's inside the book and spend some time with that wii fit i finally managed to snatch in a little shop over there in sleepy Namur! |
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There's so much more i'd like to write regarding the PHotoEspaña festival which runs in Madrid until July 28. Time has come to cover other exhibitions and artistic events i've visited more recently. However, i can't turn the page without mentioning this little fellow playing as ghetto policeman. Almost every mainstream Spanish newspaper selected this image among those offered by the press kit to illustrate their coverage of the festival.
The portrait was made by Henryk Ross, a Polish Jewish photographer who was employed by the Department of Statistics for the Jewish Council within the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust. Ross documented everyday life in the ghetto while staying officially in the good graces of the German occupier. Before the closure of the ghetto in 1944, Ross buried his negatives in the hope to leave a record of the martyrdom. |
