Jakub Julian Ziolkowski - contemporary Polish painting

The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006
Oil on canvas
190 x 165 cm / 74 3/4 x 65 in

The Garden, 2008
Oil on canvas
105 x 82 cm / 41 3/8 x 32 1/4 in

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski (b. 1980) - Polish painter, lives and works in Krakow, Poland.

Well, there seems to be a considerable, positive 'buzz' around this artist on the international art-scene... A Cinderella story, if one considers a newly graduated painter from a (still) 'provincial' Eastern Europe (Ziolkowski graduated from "Jan Matejko Academy of Art" in Krakow in 2005) having a successful, acclaimed exhibition in the Hauser and Wirth in London. At the moment, his paintings hang among others in MOMA - NY, at the prestigious "The Generational: Younger than Jesus" exhibition - a great, visionary event aiming at promoting the youngest, promising artists from around the world. And Jerry Saltz writes about them in the 'New York - Art Magazine': Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s paintings aren’t about academic ideas of formalism, happy doodling, or mannered figuration; they’re visionary Bosch-meets-Ensor. (click on the link to read the entire review).

Not too bad at all as for an emerging artist...

Personally, what I find especially compelling about Ziolkowski's work, is ... its perverse realism...

"Realism?!" - I can hear you doubting - Call it sur-, call it magical -, call it dada-, but not just 'realism', for Christ's sake ...

Well, they are realistic paintings - I can guess so, seeing this particular painter as my never-met mate from the same yard. We share our generation, our actual and, in parts - spiritual landscape - being born and brought up in one culture at the same time... Our education belonged to one of the most classical in Europe (in the world?), we were still taught that Greek/Roman mythology, classical philosophy together with The Bible are totally responsible for how we think and perceive reality and ourselves.

So, reality is anything but a plaything to be messed with, reality is the residence of gods' and humans' stories - it exists to be reported, to be told, not to be ignored or subverted for the rebellion's own sake... We may be tempted, of course, to turn our backs on it, to exorcise it from all the evil, cruelty and confusion so deeply ingrained into its tissue. We are the Polish X-generation from 90s, 00s - born out of oppressed parents into a world that could hardly offer us anything, except a perpetual struggle for survival - to a country being itself a huge mess due to a political, economic and cultural transformation... Millions of us from this very generation, from highly educated to those 'just' 'resourceful' ones, had left their homes as soon as the borders of Europe had been finally opened... And crossing borders, alike staying behind on a land being slowly deserted by familiar faces and ideas - that makes one a realist - not matter what - a realist in a deep conflict with reality...

And there are hints of those intimate wars being fought in Ziolkowski's paintings - battles between a duty to tell the 'gods and humans' stories as they are, and the perversion of imagination, troubled by the insecure, heartless world around. Battles are fought under a table, while a huge spider-web covers after-Van Gogh's-like wheat-field (Untitled, above) ... well, it didn't surprise me when I read a reputable Polish author (of the older generation) commenting on Ziolkowski's 'dreamy hallucinations' and his 'private worlds of phobias'... Traditionalists would never accept Francis Bacon's concept of the 'concentrated reality' - being conveyed not merely as an illustration but an extract of it - presenting itself so intensely real that... mesmerizingly or shockingly unreal...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liminality in Art (2)

The notions of boundaries, borders, limits, thresholds and so on may be as ancient as the human population itself. In Greek/Roman mythology they are expressed by names of different gods/goddesses, hybrids and monsters - Zeus cares for the Olympus, Poseidon is a guardian of waters, Hades rules in the Underground; forests, agriculture, arts and law - every human (divine and monstrous as well) activity and embodiment of the spirit has its own powerful protector/ rules maker and no interference is into each other territory is tolerated.

Religions exist due the numerous polarities, and the most popular story of creation (Book of Genesis) had started exactly from this - from a separation and making sharp divisions between elements and the mater. In order to survive the species would have to define and fight for the territories and the evolution of the human race is an 'epopee' of transcending the boundaries of nature, space and time...

The social, cultural and personal identity couldn't be possible at all without the ongoing, often uncompromising process of the differentation. And when philosophy tends to look for an unity and structure in the universe despite of all the intrinsic and imposed/created dichotomies, art in general would indulge in exploring the world as seen within the "frame" (think now about Derrida's "The truth in painting" and his deconstruction attempt of all the 'frames' we tend to see the art through) and beyond it.

And so it goes - Christ would be a 'worthy' subject, but even some of his disciples not exactly; harmonious human body was only true representation - the ugly/mutilated one was worse than some of the animals ; one 'breed' of art-view was 'high' (read: 'true'), the others were 'pseudo-'; painting the landscape naturally excluded the sky-view and the figurative works were exorcised of all the abstract elements (and vice versa). The universe seen as in an atom of a very particular concept/meaning or a set of those (lets say: christian version of god, humanists' vision of a man, romantic vision of a landscape, modernists' subversion to the classical art) which had to be frozen, clearly and in a division to its possible and apparent opposites... This is basically what all the history of the Western Art is about. About Old Testament God's job of making the world happen by creating borders between chaos and order, good and bad, light and dark, sky and earth, the animals and the human beings, the human beings and the Holy one.

Where the 'liminal' creeps into all of this? Well - right at the start, I guess and simply because the artistic activity in itself situates man on the existential threshold; a bit like a prayer or a sexual act - two different worlds meet and penetrate each other; the universe as it is (or appears to be) and the universe to be created... And the conscious artist is very likely to aim at or to be the 'passeur' -'a boatman', 'smuggler' - the man of passage, the guide who leads his audience beyond the status quo crossing social, cultural, psychological, spiritual and sometimes very physical boundaries in order to show/explain/challenge...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article is a part of a series "Liminality in art" where I intend to define and explore the philosophical and aesthetic notion of the liminality. Please, refer to other articles from the series in order to get the fuller view.

Liminality in Art (1)

This is meant to be an attempt in coining a new term in the Art Theory field.

Curiously enough, the term Liminality continues not to be recognised by the modern dictionaries of English; even though numerous (stated below) researchers have been using it in academic papers. It doesn't exist as an aesthetic concept or any distinguished phenomenon in the contemporary fine art. Yet, what I would like to claim and what is the reason of this article is my knowledge that this very notion has been persistently influencing the way of defining and interpreting art of the last decades at least. Though never or very rarely (in its adjective form of the liminal) applied as such by the art critics and scholars it has been circulating in the air each time the hybridity, borderline qualities, formlessness or intersemiotics of the Postmodernism has been loathed or admired.

From Latin limen meaning threshold 'liminality' is an existential (metaphysical) subjective, state and realm of hovering 'between and betwixt' of two (or more) different planes, spaces and/or existential qualities. First described in anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner) as a social theory of the liminal states - spaces of a 'temporary outcast' when an individual or a group is being placed by the society on its margin in a ritual of purification and/or recognition. It has got also its usage in the contemporary psychology where the liminal means sub- or unconscious state with one's sense identity being 'hold' or dissolved to some extent. In contemporary philosophy J. Derrida has been called the 'philosopher of the liminal' due to his deconstruction attempts of the integral and solid tissue of materiality (more about it in the next parts of this series).

In visual art the 'threshold's ' aesthetics has been described on the theatre, cinema and performance field (notably S. Zizek, S. Broadhurst) and some curatorial and critical attempts has been made to embrace the liminality of the contemporary artistic expression done by more or less traditional media. Yet, it's basically the 'no man's land' when painting or sculpture is considered - those realms remain, for the today's critique and theory (and not surprisingly, by any means) immune to any 'revolutionary' 'new' aesthetic refurbishment; it became a sort of an ideological cliche - that it's more convenient to blame painting for its impotency (it's 'dead' anyway, why bother then?...) than to inject any potent conceptual spirit into it by an affirmative reflection.

When J-F. Lyotard has called Postmodernity the nascent state, the state of a permanent 'becoming' (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) he basically admitted its innate liminal character; and those artworks that seek to address this condition (both deliberately or not) are probably best recognised for their aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) of incompleteness - sculptures/installations look as if the artist ran out of the materials to finish them to a decent level; paintings seem to be painfully 'hanged' by their own guts with indescribable forms, unidentifiable colours and freaky techniques; videos cry out for any structure, even a hint of a narrative. Their 'becomingness' is the only existence they know and it comes invariably as disquieting or even disturbing for the audience. No without a reason the primitive societies considered the liminal states as dangerous, unclean (Turner); and those affected were isolated 'pro publico bono'.

As hazardous and monstrous in moments as the liminality in art (and beyond it) seems to appear it is also probably the only truly creative state, which - if used wisely - can result in some profound discoveries and metamorphoses. This fructile chaos and the storehouse of possibilities (Turner) is a goldsmith's workshop of the contemporary art; even though some purists rise an alarm that the state of the constant flux and indeterminacy (where 'everything goes') will annihilate all the miserable bits of art that left - let's be positive... Art is best cared for if it's accepted just as it appears and shapes itself through the mill of the human spirit; even if refuses to 'become' and fit any new uniform - so what?... As far as minds and hearts are enflamed by it, even with a doubt, even with a turmoil - it fulfills its calling of the 'fifth element' - the force of life and death, possibility and danger, sanctus and profane...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the further studies on Liminality in Art (being a part of my studies on the Contemporary Art) I would bring closer the views of the scholars, philosophers mentioned above, as well as I will try to illustrate the theory with some artworks.

Troubled art - Chaim Soutine

He was that kind of a difficult snotty kid, who appeared from nowhere as if fully formed, then, like a meteor glowing with dark, perpetual fire he flashed through life fulfilled with struggles, suffering, torment and passions. He left one of the most compelling collections of paintings in the Modern Art; despite of the quite ferocious competition from Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and many others...

Chaim Soutine was a painter of his own obsessions. Only. Buying his place in the art world at a high price of the family rejection, exile, extreme poverty, illness and the life-long emotional disturbance he remained an outsider in Paris of Modernists; moody, clumsy Jewish oddball from funny-sounding village (Smilovitchy) in Belarus.

He painted like a man possessed, staining canvasses with his own guts and each time risking that he won't survive his own probe. He handled paint like one handles a chunk of meat - he penetrated it deeply as if with a knife in order to spread it thickly across the canvas in violent patterns. An ultimate, genius painting animal - no real training, no theory or concepts behind, no alternations or preparations - only the creative act, urgent, necessary, exhausting and virtuoso at the same time.

He was often called 'the painter of death' due to his eccentric fancies for smelly carcasses and hanged turkeys; yet - I cannot agree with that. For Soutine's perpetual greed and hunger for life is much more stronger than his apparent melancholic flirting with the extinction forces... His forests and fields, dead birds and fish seemed to be endowed with life simply because they breathe with Soutine's own fever, intensity, complexity and beauty of the character. His admired master - Rembrandt has taught him that - that reality is there to be respected; the materiality, sensuality of things is at the foundation of a spiritual strength. That's why Soutine was probably the only major painter in Fauvists and Cubists' Paris having painting only from life and with no interest at all in participating in the revolution going on in art at that moment.

I have a strange fondness for that dirty Jewish kid, I envy his purest, unadulterated 'gut feeling' of paint and creative experience; and when I was looking for his grave at Montparnasse Cemetery (it took me a bit - the grave itself is a very simple, horizontal tombstone in a small, Jewish part of the place) I had in mind the words of a distinguished Polish art historian (Waldemar Lysiak) - that Chaim Soutine was forever a banished child - the one thrown out of a nest who has never fully managed to exorcise his childhood and to grant the world his absolution... And he painted, again an again, the most poignant images of little children (just like the one featured above) - alone on a road, with ominous, stormy world towering over them... Little exiles, at home in no place; so sad yet so truthful - and with no sentiment or self-pity at all...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Doig or 'Viva la peinture!'

A friend has challenged me to pick out one artist, whose work will still 'matter' in 40 years time. Well, imagine we've got 2050; the number alone looks pretty surreal; doesn't it? The same can surely be said about the quantity of the imagery out there - buzzing, flashing, tempting, repulsive, genius and rubbish... But - what will be there considered as the great 'classic' - something that had been created at the turn of the centuries? Will be there any need for the 'classics' at all; who knows, maybe the 'classic' will actually mean the 'clutter' of no other than an abstract, historical value?

Well, we are we?

An artist important for my children' children, for generations with a different sense of time, space, culture (presumably); with a changed view on the 20th/21st century... That all makes the guessing game a pure shot in the dark really...

I put Peter Doig in the title as a sort of a 'tease' and a challenge. I do consider him influential and important now; I would risk stating that his particular vision of painting (notably - changing/being modified all the time) will survive through his own generation of artists - let's say - 10 more years; as well as I can predict than many of the painters from my 'class' will carry Doig's 'germs' with them for some time. Yet - to tell - that P. D.'s impossibly romantic and surprisingly (in comparison with the majority) well painted magical landscapes will break the price records in 2050? Simply impossible - and - a bit pointless perhaps... Because, why to bother with that in the first place in the era of the flux? Let's enjoy our present time - future is nothing more than the act of accepting, respecting and giving the foundations to the 'here and now'...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Peter Doig (b. 1959) - Scottish-born painter, brought up in Canada and art-educated in London. From 2002, living and working in Trinidad (studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts centre) . Professor at the fine arts academy in Duesseldorf, Germany. Considered as one of the most important and influential painters working today.

Doig is both acclaimed and criticized for his paint-handling - carefully layered, with the impressive sensitivity to the colour scale (his landscapes look like there is 'every colour' in it; a reason for clapping or doubting?) - his paintings are a triumph of the contemporary painterly technique. Even if his concepts seem for some to be too 'eerie' to be true; in moments strangely sweet-ish and naive; he's managed to capture hearts and imagination of hundreds, both from the 'professional' and the 'spectators's side...

What I find especially compelling about his older (late 1990s - early 2000s) works is their ongoing chase for the uncanny - there is, in some of the landscapes that extremely difficult to create moment, where a beautiful on its own, sophisticated yet 'just' - mark-making transforms into magic - the very essence of all art; the moment when you feel you hair raising at the back of your head - because you've just spotted and experienced the unsaid, the inexplicable, the horrific enchanted into a 'lovely' scene.
Other thing is - if this all was really meant there to be or 'came by' as a 'happy accident'?

Anyway, and despite of all - Doig is one of those artists who made me to believe in painting again...

To review P. Doig's recent retrospective at Tate - click the Exhibition.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Art World - The Collectors

The collector's position within the art world is probably the most comfortable of all, since s/he is unlikely to act under any pressure from any part of the AW (Art World). He or she is the shaper and mover, the blessing and the curse for art in general. Despite having often a little or no artistic background or competency the collectors due to the sheer power of their social status and money make the AW what it is and what it is going to be.

Nowadays, the collectors are likely to treat their occupation as a professional sport and an (one of many) investment. They will engage actively in the dynamics of the AW- being, in fact, the stockholders of 'goods' on a highly risky market, where artists (artworks) are their portfolio and their actions (buying/selling - especially considerable amounts of works) influence directly the entire AW. Being the main clients of galleries and museums they are able to carve art accordingly to their taste channeling paths for a particular trend and discouraging the evolution of an another. Like in any sport (and investment) the good collectors display a well-built, competitive 'body' of the collection with the quality/quantity of works especially taken into account; they also take an active part in a public life of the AW and beyond it promoting and educating, curating and supporting the public institutions.

The good collector would comply with un-written code of ethics of the profession:

- to take the responsibility for the AW - especially the artists in his/her collection and those not yet included; take care for the healthy development of the AW as a whole

- to avoid abusing his/her status within the AW; this includes pressurizing artists, dealers or curators to comply or showing 'empty' interest in a work (without any serious intentions to buy)

- to support emerging artists and art colleges

- to avoid any pretense and deception games - the best art collectors are art lovers and investors; yet (since nobody is perfect) the ethically correct 'shoppers' will admit their predominantly commercial interest in art

- to foster the freedom of speech in art-related media and topics

Some famous art collectors:

• Bernard Arnault - French billionaire businessman and the richest man in France
• Alan Bond - Australian entrepreneur
  
• Eli Broad - Eli Broad Biography - Jewish American billionaire businessman and philanthropist
• Walter Chrysler - founder of the Chrysler Corporation
  
• David Geffen - Founder of Geffen Records, listed on Forbes Rich list
• Steve Martin - Famous comedian, actor, writer and art collector from the United States
• Charles Saatchi - Founder of the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi
• Sakip Sabanci - Billionaire Turkish businessman and famous philanthropist
• Kerry Stokes - Australian billionaire media magnate
  
• Steve Wynn - Las Vegas Casino and Resort Developer

Exuberant struggle for integrity - Burkhard Held

Flicking through the last issue of ARTFORUM I came across this not known to me German painter. Burkhard Held (b. 1953) lives and works in Berlin. He's been exhibiting persistently and widely for the last few decades.

His "Roter Berg" from 2008 - oil on canvas, conventional size, yet another application of the neo-expressionist language. Yet, it has the potential to catch the attention, not merely due to the exuberant, affirmative palette which looks confident comparing to many other propositions from the same trend. The portrayed scape conveys the impression of stability, self-assurance despite of the patchy construction and nervously wobbly marks - the imposed, inner discipline puts a form and an order on this would-be pictorial anarchy.

Held's work seems to explore the phenomena of a form and formlessness, integrity and a collapse, an existence and a hypothesis - and while some of his paintings appear to be deliberately suspended on the verge of 'melting down' (in a very fashionable today pictorial 'explosion' of shapes, spaces, meanings) there is a struggle to be appreciated - a fight for a structure and a sense; which both remain an endangered species in the contemporary art in general and in painting in particular.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To see artist's page (in German) - Burkhard Held

Till February 21st, 2009 Michael Schultz Gallery in Berlin hosts the exhibition of the latest paintings of this artist.

Art Forum International is a well-edited monthly magazine featuring tens of oncoming and current art exhibitions and shows from around the world. Recommended to buy from time to time for the record-value, to visit online - ARTFORUM.

Modern Art by Louise Bourgeois

Art is a privilege, a blessing, a relief. (...) Privilege entitles you when you deserve nothing. Privilege is something you have and others don't.

Art was a privilege given to me and I pursue it even more than a privilege of having children. (...) It's a fantastic privilege to have access to the unconscious. I have to be worthy of this privilege and to exercise it. It was a privilege also to sublimate. A lot of people cannot sublimate. They have no access to their unconscious. There is something very special and very a painful in the access to your unconscious. But there is no escape from it and no escape from an access once it's given to you, once you are favoured with it, whether you want it or not...The life of an artist is basically a denial of sex...

(...) I'm not interested in art history (...) Art is not about art, art is about life and that sums it up (...)

Modern art(...) is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it. It is about trying to be sane in this situation, of being tentatively and temporarily sane by expressing yourself. All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs that we have.

It is about the difficulty of being a self because one is neglected. Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

Louise Bourgeois in an interview with D. Kuspit; excerpts from her Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998

What can be said more? Perhaps, being a bit bold - that art is not a therapy alone. Art is not an introspection only. Art is about the Other, about the conscious, real, about the self-rejection of the sublime and about cherishing sex. Because sex means to cherish the Other. The Other can be and is your Sublime. No one sane could possibly claim - I'm the only source of my art, of the sublimity, of the privilege and - of the pain my unconscious implies and my art excavates...

The story of Bacon's studio...

Well, the story is simple, yet it remains, as for my current knowledge without a precedence in the contemporary art history. It goes like this:

At 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, London; at the last floor in a shabby, industrial-looking building Francis Bacon has lived and worked for the last thirty years of his life (1961-1992). It was there, where all the best works of his were created - in solitude and in the 'ordered chaos", as he would call the towering pandemonium of his workshop.

John Edwards, the artist's old companion became a heir of the space (and its contents) and after its main occupant's sudden death, he has donated Bacon's studio to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art in Dublin. For three long years art historians and conservators, supported by archeologists were documenting, removing and reconstructing every inch of the room and every bit of dirt in the new 'home'.

In May 2001 the studio was open to the public, drawing significant numbers of visitors - art students/researchers/admirers to the gallery. However, some bitter discussions and arguments has sustained for years over that 'transplantation' as London's art world - never truly giving any credit to Bacon's Irish roots (artist was born in Dublin, then moved to London in his teens) had to swallow a bitter pill indeed, after Edwards had decided against everyone's expectations (of leaving the treasure where it was). Irony adds a grotesque element to the whole story - the perpetrator of the mess, the painter himself had nothing to do with all that phenomenon germinating as happily and unstoppably as the mould has been in his beloved studio. He remained loyal to it despite numerous offers of much better (objectively speaking) locations, and never truly concerned what will happen to it after he's gone.

But, what is that phenomenon all about? Does it exist at all beyond the claustrophobic circle of Bacon's fans and London-Dublin microcosm of the local politics? What is the matter - after all?

A relatively tiny attic space, gray and dark, with no widows except of a skylight. Its contents - beyond any description (hence photos). Treated with awe, respect and a sort of a silenced admiration which one adopts facing a great artwork. Is Bacon's Studio an artwork on its own? There are many, who have never doubted it... If so - can a significant artwork be created without its creator's conscious will, sometimes - even against it; as Bacon would 'fight' his chaos from time to time, removing a part of the mess? What sort of the methodological and aesthetic tools one needs to approach 'an artwork' of this kind? Questions just keep flowing raising some controversial issues on the nature of art, its very core/sense/meaning...

I remember seeing it at Hugh Lane, with a long, elegant corridor of a very well-behaved art decorating the walls leading to it - the contrast was almost sublime, yet - all the project of that post-mortem 'repatriation' seemed pointless to me, even cruel for some reason. Great artist's spirit locked in a maze of his belongings was right there - mocking mercilessly all the 'gentile' surroundings, yet - paying an unfairly high price at the same time - the price of being the perfect stranger, the alien "Other"... Packed in a sterile cage of a gallery's room like a bizarre gift and a trophy for the visitors - that intensely private (Bacon would never let anyone to enter this space, except the closest friends), and - must say - profoundly moving and in a deep sense beautiful room seemed like the loneliest, the most misunderstood space within the art-world. An amusing 'freak-show' for some, a perfect epitome of the genius-artist's workshop for many...

What else can be said - would you ever consider a couple of your old socks, you've had used as wipes becoming a gallery/collection jewel?... would you ever give a thought, that your online 'studio' - your 'e-space' may look as madly creative, legendary and desired to 'possess' by dozens as 7 Reece Mews had been? Would you... this makes all the art-creating business even more interesting... Doesn't it - after all?...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both photos above of F. Bacon's studio by Perry Ogden; scanned by me from 7 Reece Mews; Francis Bacon's Studio, Thames and Hudson, London, 2001.

Copyright Issues

The issues to consider:

(as outlined by Georgia K. Harper, Manager, Intellectual Property Section for the University of Texas System Office of General Counsel):

1) What is the character of the use of my image/text/video?
2) What is the nature of the work to be used - educational/entertaining/'mature'?
3) How much of the work will you use?
4) What effect would this use have on the market?
And my own reflections:

- do you intent to present the image/work in a way it was meant (by its creator/s) to be presented/read?

- why do you use the image/work - is it because you want to illustrate/stress your educational point or due to the pure 'decoration' of your site?

- how clearly/fairly the credits to the authors are displayed?

- have you made an attempt to contact the owner/s, how long are you prepared to wait for the response?

- have you considered your own intellectual property to be shared, how would you inform your readers/viewers about it?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright may apply to a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or "works". Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but these can include poems, theses, plays, other literary works, movies, dances, musical compositions, audio recordings, paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, software, radio and television and broadcasts.

Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed. For example, the copyright to a Mickey Mouse cartoon restricts others from making copies of the cartoon or creating derivative works based on Disney's particular anthropomorphic mouse, but doesn't prohibit the creation of other works about anthropomorphic mice in general, so long as they're different enough to not be judged copies of Disney's. In many jurisdictions, copyright law makes exceptions to these restrictions when the work is copied for the purpose of commentary or other related uses (See Fair Use, Fair Dealing). Meanwhile, other laws may impose additional restrictions that copyright does not — such as trademarks and patents.

Copyright laws are standardized somewhat through international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as the European Union or World Trade Organization require their member states to comply with them.

Text in italics reprinted from (emphasis mine):

wikipedia

Intimate spaces of becoming - Douglas Kolk

Douglas Kolk, Nurse City, 2007, Collage on paper, 189.2 x 189.2cm

Douglas Kolk, Where You Went, 2007, Collage on paper, 188 x 210.8 cm

Douglas Kolk, Help me Nasal, 2005, Collage on paper, 97 x 81 cm

Douglas Kolk (b. 1963 Newark, New Jersey) lives and works in Boston. He seems to be preoccupied with the notions of identity and the contemporary experience of the visual/mental overload. His collaged drawings hover somewhere between the finished artworks, huge posters and the studies torn out of a sketchbook. Although their visual impact, highly individual language and emotional/conceptual intensity (touching the level of an intoxication) makes them the independent, strong artistic statements, the media used (paper on paper, some drawing, some painting) stress the fragility and the provisional nature of the subject.

Drawing influence and the original images from pop art, TV imaginary (commercials, cartoons), newspapers, popular stories/mythologies Kolk's fragmented, troubled yet intimate works appear as the 'organized anarchy' and a 'fructile chaos' - the space of possibilities and becoming. The confusion, the lost innocence and the verge of a collapse constitutes the expressive negativeness of the language, yet - with the relatively generous patches of the white space left and the general impression of indeterminacy the propositions seem to 'open up' towards the new/different (desired?) state, which they are pioneers to.

The artist work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany, and The Royal Academy in London. His work features in several prominent collections including The Falckenberg Collection and the Saatchi Gallery. He is represented by Arndt & Partner in Berlin and Zurich.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David Altmejd - the purposeful audacity

David Altmejd (b. 1974 Montreal) is a Canadian artist - a sculptor/installation artist - who shares his work-place between Montreal and London. Since graduating with his MFA (2001), he has taken part in many high profile group shows at important spaces as impressive as Artists Space and Deitch Projects, both in New York City. In 2007, he was Canada's officially selected national artist for the Venice Biennale at the Canadian Pavilion, curated by Louise Déry. Altmejd is represented in New York City by Andrea Rosen Gallery and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Altmejd's grandiosely-scaled sculptures and installations are like the Hitchcock's celluloid narrative and the High Baroque poems embodied: they're monstrous, formless, excessive, bizarre, creepy, impossible - they seem to be hanged on a very thin line of the common sense, the postmodern 'hybrid-werewolf' aesthetics and the boundaries of the laws of physics.

They have grown out of the artist's existential need to create 'huge, super-intense objects in this world' (Altmejd in one of the interviews) that would work as a shock therapy - I do exist! Using random, both fairly grotesque and quite 'common' materials, such as decapitated werewolf heads (for which he 'earned' the 'werewolf man' nickname), stained Calvin Klein underwear, faux hair, towers made of mirrors, plastic flowers, electronic and steel elements etc. he awakes the fairy-tales, mythology and horror-movies most atrocious, deadly 'aliens' and 'beasts' that would keep us awake in beds in childhood and sinisterly amused throughout our entire, adult life.

Altmejd's purposefully audacious propositions are bizarrely seductive and irrationally convincing; they possess the energy and dark charisma, which provokes mind-teasing dilemma like: why, generally speaking, do we find those beastly incarnations so alluring (just think about the evergreen pop-cults of Dracula, Alien - series or Hannibal's story), why do those monsters keep coming back through ages in different forms/concepts? Is it maybe that we need them to be more 'human', or - perhaps they do us a favour of symbolizing and abstracting those of our 'persona' that our conscious, sensible mind would have never admitted to be existing in the first place...?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Polish Theatre gets the 'oohs'...

I just couldn't miss this great opportunity to dive in the memories of my family town - Krakow ('Cracow' as it is misspelled sometimes).

The annual, intensely energetic festival of theatrical performances - the "Divine Comedy" hosted by Krakow's stages has made the arts news in the Irish leading newspaper. In the recent edition of the "Irish Times" Peter Crawley reports from Poland in all the acclaiming terms, tinting the relation with a bit of jealously ('why something similar cannot be done here, in Ireland?' - one can read between the verses).

To emulate the success of the cultural event is equally difficult like - I guess, to gamble if a transplant will be accepted by the 'mother'-body or not. In Krakow, as far as I can remember, there were at least three major national theaters (independent companies) functioning all year long and few minor ones - all employing the set of full-time and excellently prepared professionals - actors, directors, stage design artists and so on. To be a respected theatre personality in Poland has meant to be more than the talented painter, even some of the writers didn't get the same devotion; some of the poets only (mainly Nobelists and other great-s) would equal or surpass the actors and directors on the Pantheon of the 'moral' and 'existential' guides. The most famous academies for the future 'theatre people' have got the magic aura around them; fine art centers only rarely could have matched them in the sky-high level of the artistry in their principles and the artworks produced.

Above that, Poland's social, political and cultural life has been always evolving around the drama-comedy sweet-sour swing - it's been full of a struggle, bloodshed, brain-washing, oddities and bizarre elements, hate and vanity - a bit like in Ireland, yet - in Poland there is ten times more hands to meet the challenge of becoming a professional playwright or a performer. Adding to it the long tradition and the comparatively recent excitement with the 'showing Europe who we are' (Poland joined the EU in 2005) - and you got a high-quality international festival, prepared and 'powered' mostly by the young generation and - what's important - getting the claps!

Well done Krakow. Looking forward to hear more good news.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Read the original article here.

Saatchi's Art-World-View

It's a story that has been cherished in British artistic circles. Charles Saatchi in one of his rare interviews (The Art Newspaper) has been asked how he sees the contemporary Art World. He answered, in his usual way, with a teasing, sharp-edged tale about a game, he would like to play with his friend, an art critic...

The game goes like this: Considering, that you are stuck on a deserted island with a representative of one of these: the critics, dealers, collectors, curators and artists circle - who would be the least welcomed companion of yours? And the answer goes, respectively - from the least welcomed:

- The Dealers: Pompous, power-hungry and patronising, these doyens of good taste would seem to be better suited to manning the door of a night-club, approving who will be allowed through the velvet ropes.

- The Critics : The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life. (these) critics swooning with delight about an artist's work when its respectability has been confirmed by consensus and a top-drawer show - the same artist's work that 10 years earlier they ignored or ridiculed. They must live in dread of some mean sod bringing out their old cuttings. However - when a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

- The Curators: With very few exceptions, the big-name globetrotting international mega-event curators are too prone to curate clutching their PC guidebook in one hand and their Bluffers Notes on art theory in the other. (...) These dead-eyed, soulless, rent-a-curator exhibitions dominate the art landscape with their socio-political pretensions. The familiar grind of 70's conceptualist retreads, the dry as dust photo and text panels, the production line of banal and impenetrable installations, the hushed and darkened rooms with their interchangeable flickering videos are the hallmarks of a decade of numbing right-on curatordom.

- The Collectors: However suspect their motivation, however social-climbing their agenda, however vacuous their interest in decorating their walls, I am beguiled by the fact that rich folk everywhere now choose to collect contemporary art rather than racehorses, vintage cars, jewellery or yachts. Without them, the art world would be run by the State, in a utopian world of apparatchik-approved, Culture-Ministry-sanctioned art. So if I had to choose between Mr and Mrs Goldfarb's choice of art or some bureaucrat who would otherwise be producing VAT forms, I'll take the Goldfarbs.

- The Artists: If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Guess, that affection is reciprocal. It's more than extremely difficult to find an authentic art passionate these days, who - with an intelligence, insight, devotion and talent takes care of the art as it is 'now', supporting the 'new' and 'emerging'; some of Saatchi's choices and moves made him 'persona non grata' in all the circles of the artistic world - from dealers to artists; yet - what is undeniable and impressive is the strength of his belief and love for good art, for which he will be known beyond his lifespan.

Visit Saatchi's Gallery web-page - one of the most welcoming, professionaly kept pages of this kind.

Elliot Hundley

Elliot Hundley lives and works in Los Angeles; right after finishing his MA in Fine Art in 2005 he had rocketed to a sort of a local celebrity (see the appraisal of the artist in the Herald Tribune). Yet, his talent has been noticed beyond the 'family' ground and he enjoyed few interesting projects/exhibitions in 2006 and 2007. Especially the one in Andrea Rosen's Gallery in New York has captured my attention due its unconventional, fresh appeal (visit the show here). In 2008/2009 program of the Saatchi Gallery in London Hundley's work has been placed into the "Upcoming exhibitions" and "Abstract America: New Painting from the US" section and one can see his works with this pleasant critical brief:

Mining the nostalgic and sentimental qualities of his eclectic materials, Elliott Hundley’s collages create condensed ‘dreamscapes’, entwining the personal and symbolic into friable mythologies. Hundley engages with the dramatic in the staged emotiveness of his structures and in the performative element of their intensive making process. (...)Using formalism as a platform for narrative structure, Hundley’s exquisitely delicate consternation transforms the act of looking into an adventure of exploration and discovery. (see the artist's page at Saatchi)

Well, fair for him. Looks like the recently lost in flesh and body Rauschenberg's spirit lives on (R. Rauschenberg has died in May, 2008;) and its rebelliously exuberant impact continues to inspire artists of the youngest generation (either consciously or via different mediate sources).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------