I’m flying to Tokyo tomorrow for my exchange, and before I leave, I wanted to share a few thoughts.
There is actually no native Japanese word that fully matches the modern Western idea of „Art.“ If you take a look at dictionary, you will find out the word “bijutsu“ (美術), but this term was introduced during Japan’s modernization around 150 years ago, around the time of the Vienna World’s Fair. In Japan, craftsmanship has traditionally been valued more highly than the modern idea of fine art.
During the past four years in Vienna, I come to believe that artworks are simply part of daily life. For me, what matters most is not the final object, but the process of making.
At the same time, I understand that this way of thinking is not widely shared in Japan. Because of that, I no longer feel motivated to organize exhibitions or curate projects there.
Instead, I’ve recently found hope in workshops, because they focus on the act of making itself. Since this year, I’ve also been teaching at a art school in Japan.
That is why, I do Erasmus programme at Tokyo Geidai, I chose the Art Education Department instead of oil Painting (In Japan, art departments are usually organized by medium) The Art Education Department is closer to the questions I want to explore.
I believe art should be a means, not an end. Right now, my goal is to think about how making things can help us live healthier lives.
I’ll be back in Vienna at the beginning of February.
„At White Columns back in 2010, Matthew Higgs championed the community of artists I was a part of when no one else was ready to do so. My point isn’t to drag the nonprofits. It’s about the importance of true artist-run spaces and about restoring agency to artists. It’s about what’s missing. There’s an important distinction between these institutional alternative spaces and real artist-run spaces. {…) In true artist-run spaces, the artists running them don’t check their identity as artists at the door. They don’t have to be professional.“
mich interessiert hauptsächlch der Aspekt: weg von den Institutionen, sich nicht andienen, nicht überlegen, was die wohl wollen und darauf hingerichtete Applications schreiben, um Unterstützung betteln, sondern umgekehrt: selber rausfinden, was man will und dabei die ganze Gegenwart einbeziehen aus eigenem Erleben heraus und daraus was machen. Eigene Räume. Machen, was es nicht gibt. Machen, was man will. das geht vielleicht nicht mehr in Städten wie New York, aber muß ja auch nicht. Da wohnen wir ja nicht. Andere Orte.
_________________ „American Artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Huma Bhabha, Black Quantum Futurism, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Jason Fox, Nikita Gale, Georgia Gardner Gray, Josh Kline, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Carolyn Lazard, Guadalupe Maravilla, Paul McCarthy, New Red Order, Monira Al Qadiri, Farah Al Qasimi, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Alicia Riccio, Tschabalala Self, Avery Singer, Tavares Strachan, Sung Tieu, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ambera Wellmann, Anicka Yi – Studio Visit: A Curatorial Project by Anicka Yi and Josh Kline for Performance Space New York – Hauser & Wirth – * This shit sucks, plain and simple. The gallery is a maze of cubicles, the walls printed with dumb AI-generated images of artist’s studios generated from written descriptions of their studios from early in their career, with a work from each artist slapped on top of it. It’s ugly as sin and, like Josh Kline’s crappy essay, clearly driven by a midlife crisis nostalgia for the salad days. You can almost smell the desperation of these artists, many of them trapped in mid-career freefall, begging the art world for a post-internet revival so they can get back to feeling cool and accomplished and financially secure. I guess I’ll use this opportunity to air the few thoughts I had on Josh’s essay, which, if you haven’t read it, is here. Obviously, by and large, everything he’s complaining about is entirely correct, New York is indeed very expensive and the whole art system is antithetical to supporting artists, sustaining artistic communities, etc., and for people who don’t already know these things it’s a good compendium of the facts. For those that already know that and live here, it’s embarrassingly out of touch and even naive. He seems unaware that anyone younger than him has ever started an alternative project space in the city, he feels entitled to an endless upward career trajectory and an infinite fabrication budget (three years out from a Whitney retrospective and having organized this exhibition at a mega gallery), as if it’s simply „not his problem“ that his practice has aged like milk and no one cares about it anymore. Of course the whole situation is terrible, but moving to Philadelphia is not going to bring back your twenties and no one can manifest the return of the early ’00s by force of will. For all his focus on economic structures, he doesn’t go so far as to comprehend that the financialized economy that’s made everything more expensive is the same one that enriched the people who bought his art, which, if he could admit it, might at least suggest the entropic complexity of the problem and curb his self-righteousness about declaring that things should go right back to how they were back in his day. What’s most annoying, though, is that his „political“ outlook appears to be trapped in a literally 20-year-old mode of liberal participatory optimism that actually believes that artists can simply use their agency to make rents cheaper, and then I guess we’ll „make this the funnest summer in world history.“ So his diagnosis is fine, although I thought most of it went without saying, but the prescription is hopelessly undercooked and narcissistic, incapable of conceiving why the world wouldn’t stay the way it was when it worked for him and focused only on getting it back to that, even though his only idea is to gentrify a smaller city. What he can’t face up to is that the world has changed, certainly for the worse, and artists have to come to terms with that as an unfortunate fact of life. Those changes very much don’t work for him, but younger artists have to get by somehow and, in fact, some do. I’m not even saying artists shouldn’t move to Philly if they want to, I don’t want to dictate the correct way for anyone to do anything. The issue is that the article presents itself as a principled insight when it’s really just the author trying to avoid admitting his career has been left behind. Which I understand, the art market has been particularly cruel to artists who were on top of the world 15 years ago, and after you’ve had major museum retrospective it’s fair to expect that you won’t need to give up and go back to school to become an RN or whatever. Still, times change, and if you want to improve anything you have to adapt to those conditions. Josh’s fantasies about a revival of the Providence DIY scene in Pennsylvania (or Indonesia) are like expecting to step in the same river twice or, I dunno, thinking Woodstock ’99 was going to be like Woodstock ’69.“
Rauschenberg gilt als der innovativste Künstler dieser Generation. Sein Freund und Liebhaber Jasper Johns sagte einmal, er sei der erfinderischste Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts nach Picasso gewesen. Der Kritiker Jerry Saltz nennt ihn einen „dionysischen Rebellen des Experiments.“ Rauschenberg befreite sich selbst und die Kunst von jedem vertrauten Vokabular und erweiterte den Kunstbegriff ins Unendliche.
toller Film von Lutz Dammbeck (DDR, guter Mann, lebt noch) über Arnulf Rainer, die Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, TUMULT, Nationalsozialismus, die schöne Stimme von Hannelore Hoger uvm.
Wir treffen uns nächsten Dienstag den 16. Dezember 2025 zur Jahresabschlußfeier im 117.
14 Uhr spätestens Abgabe der Kunstwerke, die unter allen Beteiligten verlost werden. Alle Techniken sind erlaubt, Maße unter 30 x 40 Zentimeter.
Bitte verpackt eure Werke. So daß man nicht erkennen kann, was von wem ist. Wir werden dann alle durchnummerieren.
15 Uhr Präsentation von Lilly Gummerson
16 Uhr XmasZappyLecturePerformance2025
Aufbereitete Lesung: „das phänomen wiener gruppe im wien der fünfziger und sechziger jahre (im letzten Jahrtausend) von Gerhard Rühm, 1967“, ca. 30 Minuten mit pünktlichem Beginn
Danach Verlosung Essen Trinken Musik, Ausklang
Wir freuen uns auf euer zahlreiches Erscheinen Euer Fachbereich Abstraktion
°°°°°°
Dear congregation!
We will meet next Tuesday, 16 December 2025, for our end-of-year party at 117.
Artworks must be submitted by 2 p.m. at the latest and will be raffled off among all participants. All techniques are permitted, dimensions should be less than 30 x 40 centimetres.
Please wrap your works so that it is not possible to tell which is by whom. We will then number them all.
3 p.m. Presentation by Lilly Gummerson
4 p.m. XmasZappyLecturePerformance2025
Edited reading: „The Vienna Group Phenomenon in Vienna in the 1950s and 1960s (in the last millennium) by Gerhard Rühm, 1967“ approx. 30 minutes, starting sharp
Followed by a raffle
Food, drinks, music,
closing
We look forward to seeing many of you there. Your Department of Abstraction
… Hanna Mittelstädt war neulich an der Akademie und hat gelesen aus der surrealistische Zeitschrift. Hier Nachtrag (zum hören) und weiter mit Situationisten und Subrealisten:
