The 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, beginning the last week of september, will run a cinematic program on metamodernism. Curated by Jake Yuzna, No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism pairs recent video works by Mariechen Danz, Benjamin Martin, Sharyar Nashat and Pilvi Takala with free copies of Vermeulen & Van den Akker’s essay Notes on Metamodernism. …
David Shields’ Reality Hunger is subtitled “A Manifesto.” The whole title is: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. When was the last time you saw that sitting on a bookshelf–that word, “manifesto”? When was the last time you wrote one, or wished somebody else would, or waved one in somebody’s face and said, “Look, here’s how it’s …
Over the last few decades, the international art scene has moved to Berlin. En masse. Inspired by cheap rents, massive spaces, and a high quality of life. But also by the plethora of myths of old and new. The city appears to be home to more art magazines and blogs, galleries and artists than the rest …
Upon entering Nathalie Djurberg’s (1978) exhibition (Boijmans, 2011) one cannot avoid a sense of bewilderment. Set up around stop-motion claymation video’s of mostly naked figures dancing delightedly, flirting intimately and toying tenderly with the most gruesome of animals or each other, the exhibition seems to travel some well-trodden grounds. All too familiar themes such as …
Metamodernism is above all about oscillation. Or at least for me it is. It is about the oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, history and ahistoricity, optimism and pessimism, sincerity and irony, the concept and the material, the figurative and the formless, narrative and the plotless, discursive originality and individual intertextuality, meaning and meaninglessness. …
A few days ago, Gry Rustad wrote about cynical, “bullying” irony (“the joke that wasn’t funny anymore”) falling to the wayside as comedy focused on “community” and delivered with (nearly) wholehearted warmth has taken its place. This same shift caught my eye a few years ago. Ever since Napoleon Dynamite, my sensibilities were alive to the …
