ZIRAN/ NATURE

Nature Art, Nature, and Ethics

Christiane Kruse & Antje Majewski (Eds.)

“Thinking about nature implies political thinking. The way we define our cosmos determines the way we live in it, the way we relate to others, to our environment, to agriculture and of course, to the way we make art.” Our current relationship to nature is the subject of this fascinating collection of artworks, conversations and essays by artists, scholars, teachers and students from China and Germany introduced by Berlin-based artist Antje Majewski. To better understand the connections between old Chinese philosophy, traditional Chinese painting and contemporary art practices, the texts introduce concepts more than 2,000 years old that raise relevant questions about our current relationship to nature—both to nature in the sense of environment and ecology, and to our inner nature and connection to the world we live in.

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BETI ŽEROVC

When Attitudes Become the Norm
The Contemporary Curator and Institutional Art

Urška Jurman (Ed.)

In her provocative book on the field of curating and “institutional art,” Slovene art historian and theorist Beti Žerovc questions the character and limitations of both the exhibition-maker as artist and the exhibition as a work of art. Given the inescapable conditions of capitalism, do the socio-political objectives of the curator manifest contradictory or even opposite effects? The book culminates with Žerovc’s queries about the ritualistic function of contemporary art exhibitions, evocatively expressed in her introduction, “There was once great discussion about how removing artworks from their original context and installing them in the museum meant their certain death. Today, it seems, we need to be thinking about different questions. Does the institution of visual art bring something to something to life…and what, in fact, are we summoning to life?” The softcover publication includes contributions by international thinkers Pierre Restany, Zoran Kržišnik, Harald Szeemann, Daniel Buren, Charles Esche, Beautiful Freedom, Walter Benjamin and Mary Anne Staniszewski.

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TIRDAD ZOLGHADR

Plot

Caroline Schneider (Ed.)

A speculative, existentialist novel on the melancholia of revolutionary politics and good intentions, Tirdad Zolghadr’s work is composed of the logorrhea of online communication and unpublished manuscripts. It takes place at the start of the New Zion Empire in 2016—a time of unprecedented dystopic stability with generous drone regiments, awesome capital investments, and more soft-power propaganda than ever employed in modern history.Sergeant Jim of the United States is taken hostage in Yazd, once the proud seat of the Persian Empire, and becomes a wildly popular mouthpiece for Third World rhetoric and anti-Zionist mottos. The abductors (a ghostwriter, an aspiring self-help guru, and an academic) invite a trusted celebrity blogger to their suburban compound to generate hype for their cause and possibly replace Jim as their new abductee. Hilarity ensues.

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TIRDAD ZOLGHADR

Traction

Following his futuristic novel Plot, polemical art theoretician Tirdad Zolghadr targets the moral economy of indeterminacy that makes curators and artists politically stunted, intellectually bankrupt and aesthetically predictable in his latest treatise. Curators, in particular, he sees as a necessary evil, at best offering one transgalactic statement, one buzzword after another. Even the mainstream is convinced it’s better off doing the curating itself. Drawing on texts and projects by both artists and curators, including some transgalactic blunders of his own, Zolghadr ventures suggestions beyond the gravitational pull of business as usual. Independent writer/curator and professor at Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, Zolghadr writes for frieze and other publications, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine. He organized the UAE Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2009 and is curatorial advisor to the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and frequent lecturer at the Intl. Academy of Art, Palestine.

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