Friday, September 07, 2012

‎"The Castle of Vooruit"

‎"The Castle of Vooruit" 
The Castle of Vooruit | helium-filled balloon floating above the ground at a height of eleven meters and diameter of eight meters, Waalse Krook, Ghent | Commissioned by S.M.A.K. for TRACK | 2012 | photo by Clément Philippe
‘The CASTLE OF VOORUIT’
Ögüt takes the socialist history of Ghent as the starting point for his contribution to TRACK, which is entitled ‘The Castle of Vooruit’. He concentrates on the Vooruit, the cooperative where the working-class people of Ghent assembled from the end of the nineteenth century until the early 1970s and which ran both a centre for festive occasions and a newspaper. Making reference to ‘Le Chateau des Pyrénées’ (1961) by the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, Ögüt is sending up a gigantic helium balloon in the shape of Magritte’s floating rock, launched near the Vooruit Arts Centre. He is replacing the mysterious castle on top with a replica of the Vooruit building. Ögüt captures the traces of a set of utopian social ideas in a single surreal image.



Thursday, September 06, 2012

Artforum: 50TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL ISSUE: ART’S NEW MEDIA


50TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL ISSUE: ART’S NEW MEDIAArtforum has turned fifty: To mark the occasion, we devote our special anniversary issue, titled “Art’s New Media,” to an examination of the past five decades in media, technology, and art—from the Plexiglas and Porta-Paks of the 1960s to the networked production of the present. For the story of media is in many ways the story of contemporary art, both its history and its future. If, in 1962, when the magazine was founded, artists were beginning to question traditional categories of painting and sculpture, now the language of new media and social media abounds in galleries, exhibition titles, and press releases. How can we rethink the art medium in terms of new media, while reckoning with the fact that new media is always becoming old? How can we understand Artforum itself as a medium for criticism and for art, while looking at the ways in which it registered sea changes in how information is transmitted and indeed defined? These questions open onto a vast and ever-shifting terrain, explored in this landmark issue—the magazine’s thickest to date—by ninety distinguished critics, artists, curators, and historians:
Ai Weiwei · Stephen Antonakos · Cory Arcangel · Alex Bag · Jack Bankowsky · Eric Banks · Lynda Benglis · Daniel Birnbaum · Claire Bishop · Mel Bochner · David Bordwell · Hans Breder · Merlin Carpenter · Paul Chan · Jake Chapman · Tony Conrad · Lynne Cooke · Douglas Crimp · Thomas Crow ·Tacita Dean · Liz Deschenes · Eric C. H. de Bruyn · Thomas Demand · Diedrich Diederichsen · Mark Dion · Stan Douglas · Harun Farocki · Lara Favaretto · Peter Fend · Hal Foster · David Frankel ·Michael Fried · Isa Genzken · Dan Graham · Tim Griffin · Wade Guyton · Ed Halter · Thomas Hirschhorn · J. Hoberman · Eva Horn · David Horvitz · Robert Irwin · Joan Jonas · Caroline A. Jones ·David Joselit · Branden W. Joseph · John Kelsey · Alison Knowles · Max Kozloff · Rosalind E. Krauss ·Barbara Kruger · Oliver Laric · Pamela M. Lee · Rhonda Lieberman · Glenn Ligon · Greil Marcus · Dave McKenzie · Shana Moulton · Takashi Murakami · Molly Nesbit · Hitoshi Nomura · Albert Oehlen ·Ahmet Ögüt · Ida Panicelli · Robert Pincus-Witten · John Rajchman · David Rimanelli · Scott Rothkopf ·Ed Ruscha · Cindy Sherman · Richard Serra · Dayanita Singh · Ingrid Sischy · Michael Snow · Keith Sonnier · Morton Subotnick · Bruce Sterling · Amy Taubin · Wolfgang Tillmans · Ryan Trecartin ·Bernard Tschumi · David Velasco · Anthony Vidler · Anne M. Wagner · Kara Walker · Jeffrey Weiss ·Robert Whitman · Stephen Willats · Geoffrey Winthrop-Young · Yang Fudong
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