Serpentine Gallery Pavillion 2007

serpentine gallery
Originally uploaded by sherryworld

Every year for the past eight years, the Serpentine Gallery commissions various badass architects from around the world to build a series of temporary pavilions in the quiet Kensington Gardens of southwest London.

After a carnal night out in town, David and I found ourselves a month too early for the completion of this year's program, a collaboration between Scandinavian architect Kjetil Thorsen and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.

In the past, the Serpentine Gallery has commissioned internationally acclaimed architects who, at the time of the Serpentine invitation, have not completed a building in the UK. Figures such as Rem Koolhaas, Cecil Balmond, Alvaro Siza, Eduard Souto de Moura, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Daniel Libeskind, and Zaha Hadid have all graced the soils of this garden. To top it off, the bulk of these projects have been topped off by the finesse of engineering firm Arup.

Arup is not your typical engineering firm. With a mission statement of "working noncompetitively with colleagues", Arup pursues the philosophy of "total architecture," in which structural, aesthetic, human, and environmental considerations are treated as parts of a whole. In a lecture to his firm before his death, founder Ove Arup said, "By creating a model fraternity, so to speak, we make a contribution to what is almost the central problem of our time: how to overcome the social friction and strife which threatens to overwhelm mankind. We could become a small-scale experiment in how to live and work happily together." (Woah, constructivism. Woah, Ayn Rand.)

With this fraternal approach to sharing ideas and social harmony, it's quite fitting that this year will be the first year in which the Serpentine Pavilion will host a series of lectures, in which it will act as a ‘laboratory’ every Friday night with artists, architects, academics and scientists leading a series of public experiments.

Open this month and to close end of November, the project will culminate in an extraordinary, two-part, 48-hour marathon laboratory event exploring the architecture of the senses.

Ranting on Chinese Art

Is China ready for the contemporary art world? I live in a country rich with breathtaking scenery that allows for ample creativity and imagination. Yet, present day Shanghai seems to fall behind two years in practically everything.

Generally, biennials feature new and emerging artists that have brought the meaning of art to a daring new level. One after another, biennials provide a macro timestamp to mark the progress of contemportary art and to let give us a sneak peek into its future.

Which brings me to the Shanghai Hyper Design Biennial and how it sucked ass.

The exhibition started with mediocre wood models of traditional architecture from Souzhou by Xu He Sheng and Xu Yong Fe. OK, I thought, it's a start. Wandering down the hall I begrudgingly noticed a few kitschy pieces so boring they were placed near the bathroom (why even bother then?) Oh wait- hope! Chen Wen Bo's "A Tribute to Huang Binhong" is a series of florescent lights mounted on a huge wall that oscillates on and off based on an algorithm drawn from a gu zheng note's freqency and amplification. Very Dan Flavin meets the creators of MAX/MSP meets Chinese zitherers. I then came across Joe Scalan's DIY coffin piece, which I thought was a creative politcal concept when I saw it in 2001, but come on- that's SO five years ago.

After a decent fiberglass car model by Tetsuya Nakamura, I sauntered to Wang Chin's work, a series black and white paintings of Russian intelligentsia which he titled "Portraits", (all of them were people captured in the works of Russian historian and author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn) Now -IF- the art description had mentioned any word such as "homage to" or "dialogue with" or "copied directly from" or "Gerhard" or "Richter", then I would have been less inclined to rant. In 1970 and 1971 Richter painted a series of black and white portraits of intelligentsia which he aptly named "48 Portraits." Perhaps Chin was attempting to juxtapose German and Russian creativity- I'd give that to him if he were Russian. Or the curators chose this artist because they felt copying the artwork of others exemplifies "new and emerging art" of China. Ungh. I am staring at a dialogue between this artist and his own self-absorbed interpretation of contemporary art and a curator's attempt to artify this art.

I continued on: Cody Choi's "Gone with the Wind" series drably takes digital stills of landscapes... A.D.D. A.D.D. A.D.D...
But what the hell is ART anyways? The pop art I saw towards the end of the exhibition is just as "art" now as Hieronymus Bosch's crazy paintings. Perhaps what I need to start doing is rather than treating art as a conceptual idea, a painting, or even a noun- I need to start thinking of it as a verb: e.g. "That piece really arts" or "His style of arting resembles that of neo classical painters" or "He arts in the style of post Russian constructivists" or "Such an arting idea surely deserves praise from our community!"

I finally found myself A.D.D.ing out towards the end of the exhibit- "Ah yes, this shadow box by this Indian artist draws its influence from Indonesian puppetry and is making a statement on technology in the developing world and our oooh shadowboxatExploratoriumIlovetheExploratoriumwhat aboutthosebighugebubblestheymadeIwonderwhereEdandAndreaareifthisis whatartinChinaisitsucksI'mcoldwhereareallthecuteguysthatareintoartihavetogethomeit's
12aminSanFrancisco...

Shanghai Biennial

How did I miss this? I have a few more weeks to check it out as the show ends November 5. Biennials have disappointed me greatly in recent years, showcasing trendy art rather than breakthrough art. Then again, that will bring us back to the never ending question that's racked so much neural space of recent art historians: What is Art? Update to follow.