Atelier de Lyon: Bunker 599

All images courtesy Atelier de Lyon and  Rietveld Landscape

'Bunker 599' by Dutch firms atelier de lyon and rietveld landscape is a project which lays bare two secrets of the new Dutch waterline (NDW), a military line of defence in use from 1815 until 1940 protecting the cities of Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk and Gorinchem by means of intentional flooding.

A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. The design thereby opens up the minuscule interior of one of ndw's 700 bunkers, the insides of which are normally cut off from view completely. In addition, a long wooden boardwalk cuts through the extremely heavy construction. It leads visitors to a flooded area and to the footpaths of the adjacent natural reserve. The pier and the piles supporting it remind them that the water surrounding them is not caused by e.g. the removal of sand but rather is a shallow water plain characteristic of the inundations in times of war.

The sliced up bunker forms a publicly accessible attraction for visitors of the NDW. It is moreover visible from the A2 highway and can thus also be seen by tens of thousand of passers-by each day. The project is part of the overall strategy of Rietveld landscape / Atelier de Lyon to make this unique part of dutch history accessible and tangible for a wide variety of visitors.

With thanks to designboom

http://www.designboom.com/

Lee Lozano - Tools

Lee Lozano’s turbulent tool paintings and drawings can be understood as critiques of both sexual and art world decorum at a moment when the feminist movement had yet to coalesce and actively question either.
With the tool paintings and drawings, Lozano’s intense relationship with language, perhaps the most continuous thread in her oeuvre, is invisible but still acutely felt. While these tool works bear no writing, the viewer is always aware that a ‘tool’ is both an implement used to build the world, and a slang name for a penis. Perhaps more meaningfully, the word ‘tool’ describes a dupe whose low self-esteem or limited knowledge invites others to take advantage.
The tool paintings and drawings might be viewed also as a form of late 20th century self-portraiture. The imagery allowed Lozano to advance an important tradition in the face of the challenges of photography and conceptualism, while exploring her own womanhood and her individuality as an artist at a moment when gender roles were being radically redefined. Whereas the prevailing atmosphere of early feminism demanded sisterhood and collaboration, Lozano grappled with consolidating her artistic self above all through a highly independent solo studio practice and absolute refusal to join in the group-oriented consciousness of the day. Her tools are proxies – monumental, fractious, and insistent. They suggest the mechanics of creation and illustrate Lozano’s tenacity in completely intermingling art and self.

With thanks to Hauser and Wirth

http://www.hauserwirth.com/

Zhang Enli

Zhang Enli works invest life into the most common of signifiers from details of trees and lace curtains to bare mattresses and rubber tubing. Imbuing his subjects with human relevance, he has said ‘I deal with reality in order to express something that goes beyond reality’ and as such he draws on the viewer’s desires for the most simple aspects of existence. Painting with thin washes of pigment, which often leave traces of turpentine dripping down the canvas, he achieves a sophistication and richness that balances the apparent simplicity of his technique and subject matter.
Having grown up in the provincial town of Jilin in the north of China, his work continues to be strongly marked by his experience of this transition, 20 years ago, to the sprawling metropolis of Shanghai. He represents this extreme contrast to the smaller city he was accustomed to, not through the consumerist preoccupation so common in contemporary Chinese painting coming from its major cities, but by looking at the ordinary, unpretentious objects that surround him and the immigrants coming from the countryside to Shanghai.

With thanks to Hauser and Wirth

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/

Michael Borremans

Michaël Borremans’ paintings look straightforwardly realistic, but beneath the clarity of his images there lies an unsettling world that calls for closer scrutiny, which in turn offers up a whole lot more to discover.

Many of the paintings render private and unremarkable environments in which human figures are apparently engaged in simple everyday activities. Time seems to stand still in them and the humans appear to be ‘still-life’ figures rather than living beings. Borremans’ paintings are also about paint and its infinite potential, about the activity of painting, and about what painting can be and represent. The paintings are also about the endeavours of a painter who can create, on an inanimate canvas, a fascinating world that engulfs the viewer.

With thanks to Parasol Unit http://www.parasol-unit.org/

Whitechapel Art Gallery - John Stezaker

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.
His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention
This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning.

John Stezaker is organised by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg.
With thanks to:
The Approach, London.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/john-stezaker

Hayward Gallery - Christian Marclay

 

For three decades Christian Marclay has deftly manipulated recorded sound and its associated imagery from his early work as a pioneering turntablist to assemblages of record covers and montages of clips from Hollywood movies.

His new work, The Clock, features thousands of found film fragments of clocks, watches, and characters reacting to a particular time of day. These are edited together to create a 24 hour-long, single-channel video that is synchronised with local time. As each new clip appears a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another. Watching, we inhabit two worlds; that of fiction and that of fact, as real-time seconds fly inexorably by.
http://www.britishartshow.co.uk/



The Clock
Edition of 6
Single channel video
Duration: 24 hours
Photo: Ben Westoby