Remember when Banksy was actually a guerrilla street artist? Last week the artist debuted his “bemusement park” Dismaland in Weston-super-Mare, England. And no, it’s not a ripoff of Paul McCarthy’s WS show. The park features collaborations with 58 artists including Damien Hirst and Jimmy Cauty, and sets with Banksy’s trademark satire. Cinderella’s carriage crash sprawls in her castle while a village replete with police inhabits another corner. While tickets are priced at low low £3 per person, it’s hard to imagine Dismaland as the dystopian fortress Banksy purports to be when musical acts play weekends and the project itself requires enormous capital. No one can contest the Banksy’s brand power anymore.

Although his oeuvre spans little more than 15 years, British artist Mark Leckey (born in 1964) is already considered a reference for a young generation of artists. After his studies he withdrew from the art world for nearly a decade. In 1999, with the video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, compiled from found footage, he found his way back to art. This ode to British dance culture from northern soul to rave is considered one of the most iconic works on the intersection of visual art and popular culture – a field of interest that Leckey has addressed in much of his subsequent work. Today, Leckey’s interest lies in the exploration of digital technologies and their impact on the relationships between people, objects, and environments.

The exhibition’s layout at Haus der Kunst is structured according to four chapters: The show opens with autobiographical works – from “Are You Waiting” (1996), a precursor to “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”, to “MyAlbum: A Rough-Demo” Video,” (2014-15) a filmed autobiography, which is premiered as a demo version. Mark Says Leckey: “‘MyAlbum’ is a record of all the events in my life during the twentieth century that I feel were significant. It is a memoir from 1954 until 1999.” In the central space, all five of the artist’s “Sound Systems” (2001–12) are presented for the first time as an ensemble. The speaker towers have their origins in mobile discotheques and have been a recurring element in Leckey’s work since the early 2000s. Leckey understands music in general, and his “Sound Systems” in particular, as alternative communication channels. The “Sound Systems” form the exhibition’s control center; they are linked to the other works and rooms in the exhibition through an electronic circuit, and connect them as if they were a quasi-living organism. In the third space the exhibition continues with the installation “GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction” (2010) – a speaking refrigerator that shares its thoughts and living environment with viewers. In the videos and films of the fourth section, “ZooVidTek”, sculptural objects – in the shape of a cat, a rabbit, a duck, and a dog – are brought to life by means of digital slideshows or computer animations. In doing so, Leckey casually illustrates groundbreaking episodes of twentieth-century media history. As in other instances in the exhibition, the titular “as if” also defines these works: The (filmed) objects and sculptures that the visitor encounters here are not what they seem to be; they are duplicates and fakes that Leckey treats as if they were the real thing.

The starting point of all his works is the attraction that brands and products, as well as images and works of art, exercise upon us. The artist translates this pull into formative and entertaining reflections on our time.

A must see!

Mark Leckey: As If
30.01.-31.05.2015
Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstrasse 1
80538 München

The song is good, but the video is wonderful. Fueling the beats and lyrics with Parallax-inspired stop motion, Nelson de Castro’s take on Digitalism’s Wolves is insanely addictive, and rather than sapping the viewer’s interest, the cinematic trope increases the hallucinatory momentum of the visuals, culminating in a cryptic Pop Rocks stare-off. How I’d like to end every night.

Indie animation mainstay since “My First Crush,” (2007), her plaintive ode to infatuation, Julia Potts has in the last seven years only grown as an artist. Her most recent offering, “The Event,”  places her wry melancholy and signature animal-like creatures into landscapes that merge live-action images of Montauk and hand-drawn animation.  The digitalized special effects that normally manufacture cheap grandiosity here works to provoke terror and wonder.  The bright burst of the meteor is dazzling–to the 2-D protagonists a thing literally from another dimension.

As with many, I sometimes find The Art to be indistinguishable from fashion, design, or decorative art, which is completely fine. However, the trend towards their sugary, whimsical ilk sometimes gives me one too many (hot)flashbacks of semi-reluctant jaunts around Anthropologie and its twee brethren.

When I first saw a feature praising Juan Fontanive, I spotted the Merian hummingbirds nested under the alliterative heading “Beautiful Flip-Books Made From Recycled Bike Parts,” I was skeptical. But less novelty wall art and more an almost holographic zoetrope, the pieces in action reveal a frantic corporeality unable to be contained by the  frames: the animated images hover suspended in margins of air. The rustling slaps emitted by the paper resembles the sound of wings–which in essence, if not in form, the paper is. In some ways then, the image of birds and butterflies act as a visual proxy, the projected spirit, of the actual sculptural work.

The films of Peter Tscherkassky (1958-) hearken back to golden period of experimental cinema.  Despite the capabilities of today’s film editing software, they engender not the uneasy multiple exposures, the interruptions of sprocket holes, and eruptions of grinding sounds populating Tscherkassky’s films.  Since his introduction to the everyman’s Super 8 in 1979, his works, frenetic and phantasmagoric, have sprung from his unyielding dedication to the often unfruitful and always painstaking analog processes undertaken by the explorers of film’s frontier before the advent of software.

Since the 1980s, the Austrian steadily created an unique aesthetic counter to the romantic, one could say Instagram, visuals of much independent filmmaking today.  Reaching for comparisons: in look, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures come to mind; in sheer dedication to process, Tacita Dean.  Perhaps his closest relative stylistically and chronologically is the American filmmaker Guy Maddin (of Brand Upon the Brain!, Heart of the World, and My Winnipeg fame), a producer of rambunctious, theatrical pieces, sly in his impeccable imitation of silent cinema.  However, Tscherkassky’s retro aesthetic denies nostalgia for atavism, painting grinding scenes of emotional tumult and psychological confusion.

Indeed the most seductive aspects of the films undeniably trace back to cinema’s roots–the aftermath of the vision, the remaining question: How did he do that?

Broken Fingaz -Graffiti Stop Motion from Broken Fingaz on Vimeo.

Broken Fingaz

Broken Fingaz

So I was minding my own business on Warshauer…you know, just loitering…when a blast of fuchsia and chartreuse, conjoined in the oscillating razor gaze of a floating beheaded B(e)ard grabbed my eye.  This looks even better than it sounds.  Then today, I was looking out on the wasteland of S-Bahn tracks on the other side of the street since there’s nothing better to do in such a gloomy day.  Lo and behold, limon and cherry hues washed over unsuspecting me.  The image: a psychedelic sunset blessing a very distressed looking gentleman literally trapped in the surreal.

Lads and gents, I hype the work of Broken Fingaz, who were visiting Berlin until last week.  For your information, the street art collective, known separately under pseudonyms of Tant, Deso, Kip, and Unta, hail from Tel-Aviv and have graced the walls across three continents.  Their style, luscious, hallucinatory, and applied with clashing yet oddly cooperative hues, recall the grandiloquence lines and selective eye for super-realistic detail in pre-90s comic books, and indeed, a lot of their work lay out on the wall separated as if in or actually in frames.  Brazen shock though perverse sexuality (think Panda) and other cultural symbols can often be found in their artwork, yet while their work isn’t explicitly political, like that of BLU (or even Robert Montgomery, if you think about him as a kind of street artist), Broken Fingaz don’t just flaunt technique for hipsters needing stuff.  Their larger meticulous, regimented compositions often appear like (ahem) postmodern dissections of clashing narratives and symbols, daring the sleepy pedestrian to reconstruct meaning their clues.

Best known for their street art, they work across a range of medium, non-commerical and commerical..such as stickaz.

Pringle of Scotland – Animation by David Shrigley from NeutralZurich on Vimeo.

Everyone loves David Shrigley drawings.  At least a lot of people do.  I really like this one (which by complete coincidence can be bought in various forms through mono.konsum).  If you like David Shrigely drawings, you’ll really really like David Shrigley animations; even the BBC does–and it is so posh.  Because animations are usually 12 frames per second, so it is like seeing a whole lot of his drawings in a minute pretty much.   And by like, I mean It Is.  And if you really like the way this post is written, then you’d really really really like that animation right up there.  Not because the narrator speaks funny kind of like I do in this post or because cardigans are so useful all the time, but because David Shrigley is so cool.