Contemporary Art

Modern and contemporary art have redefined the relationship between information and matter. Whether in the readymade’s scrambling of the categories of art and commodity, or Conceptual art’s translation of matter into information, the artwork is embedded in a dynamic multi-media discourse. The NFT, or non-fungible-token, reverses this long genealogy of contemporary art by hijacking the category of art as nothing more than a tool for designing a new asset class, ripe for exuberant speculation.  In short, the readymade—whose purpose was to demonstrate the fungibility of artworks when shifted from one discursive category to another—has been reversed.

What defines avant-garde ink art? This issue was raised in
the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, from 2013 to 2014 titled Ink Art: Past as
Present in Contemporary China. A debate centers around
whether contemporary works of art without the actual
presence of ink material bear traces of the practitioner’s
praxis. Can ink works stand on their own, devoid of
cultural context (as long as they reflect ink traces)? Put
another way, how can ink transcend the burden of “Chinese”
culture? Or, vice versa, does the absence of ink
indicate lack of pedigree? This issue has broad
implications, raising the problem of national identity.
This essay considers the ways in which experimental
artists deploy this material on a conceptual level and direct
it toward a dialogue to expand audiences, using ink to
broaden the relevance of contemporary Chinese art
beyond China. Where is cultural performance situated: in
the material used or the context in which it was created?

Discussion with Xu Bing about his aesthetic philosophy and issues surrounding debates in contemporary art with members of the East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University,
community. Xu explores how he adjusts installations according to exhibition spaces and audiences; concepts of nature in his art, Chinese "counterfeit" culture, authorship and and challenges of contemporary artists. Held July
11, 2015 as part of the Institute’s Distinguished Visiting
Professor program supported by the Heinz Götze Foundation.

In the summer of 2020, the a-disciplinary platform K moved into the exhibition space of Lothringer 13 Halle in Munich. The event This House Is Not a Home that K organized there functioned both as an exhibition space for gallery visitors and also as a social format for meeting and sharing. Over the course of the intervention, more than 50 participants came together to inhabit the space, share their skills in art and other disciplines, eat together, and use the infrastructure. The space was furnished with artistic contributions that represented individual participants and were also functional. In this practice-based, autoethnographic essay, three organizers reflect on how the event was planned and unfolded in the light of the institutional regulations and demands that arose due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They discuss the dynamics of social, nonrepresentational formats in art institutions and processes for negotiating them.

This  essay  focuses  on  the  so-called  Poznań  expressionism—a  unique  manifestation  of  the  expressionist artistic style that existed in parallel to the second generation of German expression-ism, during the interwar period. It  concerns the history of the literary-artistic group Bunt (Revolt) and the polemics on the cathegorization of it and its circle as Expressionist and as a local/national phenomenon.

Artiste en transhumance, Martin Galtier habite aujourd’hui le Champsaur (Hautes-Alpes). Vivant en territoire agropastoral, tissé de fermes, de champs et de prairies pâturées par des vaches et des moutons, Martin Galtier renoue ici avec une mémoire familiale : l’histoire de son grand-père Antonin, paysan ariégeois, simple soldat de la Guerre de 14, prisonnier, militant communiste, pompier et éleveur berger à Marseille, dans la plaine de l’Huveaune. Antonin, ce grand-père tant aimé.
Ce catalogue présente une série d’œuvres sélectionnées (dessins à l’encre sur chiffons d’atelier et sur papier) pour une exposition qui a eu lieu à la Maison du berger du 12 juin 2015 au 31 mars 2016.
Cette exposition a fait suite à une résidence de Christian Martin Galtier à la Maison du berger. Lors de cette résidence, il a rencontré le grand peintre allemand Paul K. (1879-1940) en villégiature durant quelques semaines à Champoléon. Cette rencontre improbable, par delà le temps, a été racontée par Paul K. dans des courriers à son amie Polka. Ces lettres posthumes sont reproduites ici avec l’accord des épistoliers ; elles nous permettent de mieux connaître l’œuvre de Martin Galtier et sa démarche artistique.

In An Ecosystem of Excess, Pinar Yoldas focuses on how the oceans are polluted with plastic garbage and how the litter on coasts and beaches can no longer be ignored. Just how much plastic garbage is in the oceans is virtually invisible to the naked eye at high sea because it is floating below the surface in the form of microparticles. Plastics and their chemicals, called plasticizers, are not biodegradable, but theyare still gradually broken down into smaller and smaller particles in the ocean through wave move- ment and intense irradiation from sunlight. Marine organisms confuse these artificial microplastics with plankton, meaning the plastics (and the toxins they contain) are increasingly becoming part of the food chain. While roughly 70 percent of all plastic garbage sinks to the ocean floor, scientists observed for the first time in 1997 that tiny plastic particles were collecting to an enormous degree in the vor- texes of ocean currents, also called gyres. The discovery of the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch made it clear that millions of tons of plastic garbage are drifting in the ocean, invisible to the human eye. Since discovering high concentrations of micropla- stics in all of the other four oceanic gyres as well, it can now no longer be denied that a new ecosystem has emerged in which the artificial and the natural are inseparably connected.
In An Ecosystem of Excess, Pinar Yoldas speculates, from an artistic point of view, on how this transformation of the world’s oceans into a future post-human ecosystem might evolve. The artist has created a highly aesthetic scenario of future life forms that have developed new survival strategies of adapting to the highly toxic marine environment created by the waste products of our affluent society.

With the emergence of Bio Art, biotechnology became part of the art world. By bringing cutting edge technologies closer to the public, Bio Art has provoked wider reflection about the ethics of turning biology into technology and in particular has raised questions about the aesthetic and ethical status of manipulating living organisms. By showing transgenic organisms in galleries and museum contexts, Bio Art drew attention to the fact that biotechnology had already crossed the divide between the artificial and the natural back in the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the selective manipulation of living organisms for artistic purposes provoked passionate debates about the shifting concept of life, a concept that has changed dramatically since the arrival of biotechnology within the frame of technoscience. Art emerging from the laboratory opened up non-normative debates about life and its limits in the crossover between Bio Art, ethics, sciences, and the humanities, and also framed controversies about the growing influence of science and technology and a bioscience-based economy on our societies as well as on the fine arts. Whereas in the early days Bio Art primarily sought to reveal the state of the art of biotechnology or tissue engineering, current Bio Art practices interrogate the limits, boundaries, frontiers, and frameworks within which life can exist and how fragile these limits are in an age that some have termed the Anthropocene. Altering nature deliberately using biotechnology – in a scientific laboratory or in the kitchen at home – is still a vital topic in Bio Art. However, because we have transformed our entire planet in recent centuries into a kind of laboratory where traditional distinctions between natural and artificial, subject and object, human and non-human agents no longer hold when confronted by the enormous ecological problems and challenges that exist today, speculative biology is now becoming a major issue in Bio Art. One of the most promising approaches of bringing Bio Art and speculative biology into a fruitful liaison is demonstrated in the work of the Turkish artist and researcher Pinar Yoldas, who has lived in the USA for more than a decade.

Nearly one hundred years ago, Hermann Hesse did an excellent job of describing the dilemma of modern society's materialist wasteland which is devoid of meaningful and spiritual life.

"This besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness!"

In the epic novel, Steppenwolf, written by Hermann Hesse and first published in 1927, it would appear that some of the writing in the novel could, in truth, be considered properly prophetic - especially in regard to some of the psychological and spiritual aspects of our contemporary society and culture. Steppenwolf, the character and the central individual in the novel, decries the empty essence and of his society, when he proclaims, "Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life that we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual blindness, its politics, its men! .... And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of cafes, these mass enjoyments and these Americanised men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong. I am crazy. I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him." (p. 48-49)


I think Isobel Helen did a great job in outlining some of the underlying issues. 

Isobel Helen, a logotherapist, a form of psychoanalysis based on Frankl, observes that, "The lack of discussion around meaning, spirituality, fundamental questions of man are seen by Logotherapist schools as the missing element in mainstream psychological study and psychotherapy. Essential Frankl believed that there is no psychotherapy apart from the theory of man. As an existential psychologist, he inherently disagreed with the “machine model” or “rat model”, as it undermines the human quality of humans. She went on to say that as a Logotherapist, "We train people to find meaning and spirituality in their lives - [there is] endless data on the seriously transformative effects of meaning in life. Frankl reduced suicide rates in young people to zero when he opened Logotherapy clinics in Vienna."