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Artistic Research

Thursday, 14. March 2013 | 00:00 (tz: Europe/Amsterdam)

Aesthetic Journalism

aestheticjournalism

Although some readers might uphold the 20th century definition of aesthetics as concerning subjective forms or 'beauty' enforced by a group of modernist believers, others would rather engage with a more open-ended terminology. Take for example, Alfredo Cramerotti's: 'a process in which we open our sensibility to the diversity of the form of nature (and man-made) environment and convert them to tangible experience.’ So in other words, most anything that is produced nowadays could be considered aesthetics? What is perhaps most engaging is how aesthetics is taken up in journalism, in other words what Cramerotti entitles aesthetic journalism, with his eponymous book.

Cramerotti states that this concept makes possible contributing to knowledge building with a new aesthetic regime, which, in turn, questions the truth-value of a traditional regime. More importantly, it denounces that the system of representation is the same as what it represents as journalism is thought of trying to do -being the same as the facts represented. According to him it involves those artistic activities in the form of investigating social, cultural and political circumstances that take shape in the art context, rather than media.

 

Rich Streitmatter-Tran

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R. Streitmatter-Tran (b. 1972, Bien Hoa, Vietnam) is an artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He received his degree in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. His work, solo and collaborative, has been exhibited in several cities in the United States, Europe and Asia including the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, the Singapore Biennale 2006, the 2004 Gwangju Biennale, 2005 Pocheon Asian Art Festival, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, Asia Art Now at Arario Beijing, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, the Blue Space Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, the 7th Asiatopia Performance Art Festival in Bangkok, Art Tech Media 06 in Barcelona. Current and upcoming exhibitions for 2008 include the Singapore Biennale 2008; Post-Doi Moi: Vientamese Modern and Contemporary art in the 90's at the Singapore Art Museum; Coffee, Cigarettes and Pad Thai at the Eslite Gallery in Taiwan, and Strategies from Within at the Ke Center for Contemporary Art in Shanghai..

 

Ingrid Commandeur

‘It is interesting to withdraw from one’s own usual context and meet a new world, especially today, when cultural and ideological Hybridizations have become an irreversible fact. (…)

The winner is the one who masters the two sides of the battlefield’, Chen Zhen. Ingrid Commandeur (1970) is an Amsterdam based art critic and editor at large of METROPOLIS M, Magazine for contemporary art (2004-present). From 2003 until 2005 she did a research project about the institutional context of upcoming contemporary artscenes in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo. This has profoundly influenced her practice as an art critic. Next to articles related to this project she wrote articles about many different subjects, ranging from ‘Art and censorship after 9/11’, international exhibitions (Sculpture Projekte Münster, Documenta), to most recently an article about the international shift from public to private money in the arts: ‘Organized Magnanimity. The New Art Patron’.

 

Ade Darmawan - Ruangrupa

He was born in 1974 in Jakarta, Indonesia, then move to Yogyakarta (central Java) for 5 years to study at Indonesia Art Institute of (I.S.I), in Graphic Art Department. A year after his first solo exhibition in 1997 at the Cemeti Contemporary Art Gallery, Yogyakarta (now Cemeti Art House), he stay in Amsterdam for two years residency at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten. Back from Amsterdam in 2000, with five other artists from Jakarta he founded ruangrupa. He has been participated in art project and exhibition in several cities in Indonesia and more such as; Durban, Bangkok, Mumbai, Mexico City, Antwerp, Istanbul, Sydney. Now he lives and works in Jakarta as an artist, director of ruangrupa, and member of Jakarta Arts Council - since 2006.

ruangrupa - www.ruangrupa.org An artists' initiative founded in the year 2000 by a group of Jakarta based artists. A non-profit organization, which focuses in art and its relation with the social cultural context especially in urban environment, through research, study, and documentation. Along with intensive collaboration and cooperation with artists and people from other discipline through exhibitions, art project, workshop and publishing.

 

Dilettantism and extradisciplinary artistic collaboration

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Both Ingrid Commandeur has already alluded to something like what I'm about to talk about, and so has Stephen Wright. Though here I've divested it of its locational/global factor, it still relates somewhat to territory. In this post, I'll describe some practices I'm attracted to in relation to this discussion.

 

Pipeline|*

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Pipeline is a research tool commissioned by me and Anna Colin at Gasworks with Electronest, stemming from the project Disclosures (a longer post about the context of Disclosures will follow soon).