International News Digest
FRENCH “ART” PAVILION CENSORED IN SHANGHAI?
The French pavilion at the Shanghai Expo seems to have been unofficially censored. As Le Monde’s Emmanuelle Lequeux reports, there is no official act of censorship, nor complaints and retributions. Yet the entrance to one of the French exhibitions has been restricted, its entrance blocked by a guard. The exhibition in question features artworks by the finalists for the 2009 Marcel Duchamp prize: the winner Saâdane Afif as well as Nicolas Moulin, Philippe Perrot, and Damien Deroubaix. Deroubaix’s work, a sculpture showing a grotesquely large head swallowing up the local Yuan currency, seems to have posed a problem during an early visit by a censorship committee.
Yet despite the presence of a guard, the commissioner of the French pavilion José Frèches denies that there has been any pressure from the Chinese government. Frèches has assured Adiaf, the association of collectors who organized the Duchamp Prize and funded part of the Expo exhibition, that the exhibition is not fully closed but rather half-open in order to improve the flow of visitors, which has already passed three million and is expected to reach ten million. For Deroubaix, the claim is ridiculous. “I was told ahead of time not to put any pictures of naked women, swatiskas, or Mao portraits,” Deroubaix told Le Monde. “But by attacking me for the money, I have touched a new sacred god. For a country that calls itself communist, that makes me laugh.”
Deroubaix is not the only French person to have difficulties with the censorship committee. Curator Ami Barak, who is responsible for the exhibition of twenty sculptures in “Art for the World Expo,” found the ways of the committee to be impenetrable. While it was no surprise that the committee refused a work by Paul McCarthy, a giant Santa holding a dildo, Barak did not understand the reasons behind refusing Mike Kelley’s Petting Zoo, 2007: a petting zoo complete with a lickable salt sculpture of Lot’s wife. “With its academic professors and its civil servants aged on average seventy,” said Barak, “the censorship committee is a Jurassic Park.”
GERMANS PONDER TEARING DOWN PAVILION IN VENICE
The German pavilion in Venice may be facing a shorter future. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, there seems to be a growing movement in Germany to tear down the pavilion in the Giardini and to build a new one. Both the president of the German chamber of architects and the chairperson of the German federal association of artists have spoken against the pavilion which is burdened by the country’s Nazi past and poses many architectural challenges for showing art. Designed by Ernst Haiger under Hitler’s orders, the German Pavilion was inaugurated in 1938 for the twenty-first Venice Biennale. The artist Tino Sehgal, who co-represented Germany in 2005, has added his support to the proposal. By contrast, the current curator of the pavilion, Susanne Gaensheimer, has spoken against the proposal. She believes that the pavilion’s architecture exists as a witness of history and that its destruction would constitute an “a historical act.”
THE (ART) WORLD ACCORDING TO OBRIST
Die Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Christoph Bartmann takes a closer look at the Swiss magazine Du (You), which has been, not edited, but curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist for the current issue. The magazine’s cover features ten theses by the Swiss über-curator: 1. Every place can be a center; 2. We need new maps; 3. We live in an archipelago; 4. The city and the village are global; 5. The realities are parallel; 6. There is no longer an authoritative medium; 7. Identity is a choice; 8. Art is in between; 9. The twenty-first century is a conversation; and 10. This is not a manifesto. For Bartmann, the issue could not be larger and more flamboyant with contemporary art’s claim to cover not only aesthetics but also scientific research and human practices. “The art capitals are not longer called London, Berlin, Paris, and New York,” notes Obrist, “but also Beirut, Cairo, São Paulo, Zürich, or Tehran.” Bartmann can only agree with this assessment but has more troubles with Obrist’s claim that contemporary art is “the X-ray apparatus of the future.” One hears such prognoses otherwise only from other grand prediction branches, like from the analysts of the financial market,” writes Bartmann. “Like an analyst of the art market, Obrist sets the trends while he is still recognizing them.”
ZOBERNIG HONORED
Heimo Zobernig has been awarded the Austrian Friedrich-Kiesler prize for architecture and art. The international jury praised Zobernig’s “incomparable work” and his artistic development as well as his “artistic agility to undermine subtly established perspectives and to expose the unforeseen.” The Austrian artist, who was born in 1958, will also receive $68,000 as part of the prize.