TODAYSART2012

TodaysArt is an annual Media Art festival that has taken place in the Dutch city the Hague every autumn since 2005. The festival features audiovisual and modern dance performances, concerts, clubbing, installations, and art exhibitions at the city centre’s two theatres, cinema, and the neighbouring buildings of the city hall. This year’s festival, the eighth one running, opened on the night of September 21st with a speech by its director Olof van Winden and a variety of performances. This year NTV Europe, which is based in Amsterdam, and has been supporting art projects over a period of twenty years, participated for the first time in the capacity of a trial collaboration. Through this, the up-and-coming Japanese artists Ei Wada and Ryoichi Kurokawa were welcomed to the festival, and gave their performances in a grand way.

At the centre of the four main venues was built what should be called a monument, put together out of old furniture and other discarded items found in the city: the Vortex of the Raumlaborberlin. On the inside, space was opened up wide to create a dance floor, and the Vortex seems to just fold itself over its visitors, and like a black hole, suck them in. The work is supposed to represent the state of consumer society. Since this venue was set up outside, it was also accessible to the general public who did not have tickets to the festival.

On the night of the 21st, Ryoichi Kurokawa’s “syn_” was performed in the grand hall of the Lucent Danstheater, one of the main venues of the festival; a delicate combination of digital animation and sound that created the image of countless thin lines interweaving.

This black-and-white contrast was impressive also because of Ei Wada’s Braun Tube Jazz Band. In this performance Wada projects sounds, “altered” into images, on twelve Braun TVs, which he strikes and strokes as if playing percussion, creating music.

syn_ by Ryoichi Kurokawa

Braun Tube Jazz Band by Ei Wada

Afer the Braun Tube Jazz Band on the second day, he performed in the Open Reel Ensemble together with Kimitoshi Sato, Takumi Namba, Haruka Yoshida, and Masaru Yoshida. While using the particular character of open reel tape decks, the ensemble recorded the crowd and directly used the material like disc jockeys during this performance, driving the entire sold-out hall wild.

Open Reel Ensemble

Directly beside the Lucent Danstheater is The Hague’s City Hall with its characteristic high-ceilinged atrium and white walls. It was here that a 500 square-metre space was brought to life with 65,000 unsold or discarded CDs put together by hand to create a sandy beach landscape: “Waste Landscape” by Elise Morin and Clémence Eliard. In its centre, the performance “Inneract”, featuring harp, electronics, and visuals. Taking the famous Dutch minimal music composer, Simeon Ten Holt’s “canto ostinato” as a starting point, this improv rendition lasted anywhere from forty-five minutes up to several hours. Visitors were able to enjoy the show from the venue’s upstairs passages and the elevator.

Electricity is indispensable for media art. It is very interesting that the building that supplied electricity, was treated as part of this year’s TodaysArt. At the old power plant building, a short distance from the central venues, in an enormous room, was a group exhibition which took its name from Nam Jun Paik’s artwork “Global Groove”; elsewhere was an exhibition of Turkish media art “Commons Tense”. In the “Global Groove” exhibition, the work “Ideophone 1:36” by Dick Raaijmakers (one of the founders and godparents of electronic music, and of great influence in the development of young people in the Hague), the sound created by the vibration of the speakers making metal spheres jump up, had a delightful ring in that great old power plant. Here, the work of celebrated, masterful artists was on display together with the work of young artists ready to take on the next generation.

The exhibition venue

The theme of TodaysArt 2012 was “the Search and Longing for the Undiscovered”. The sense that especially now in this time of change, an artist can go back to their own roots and treat old things preciously, while still creating novel and radical works, could be perceived in a variety of works. This message and accomplishment was summarized at the opening on the second day with the work “Elements of Light” by The Bell Laboratory and Pantha Du Prince, which made use of countless bells, and which closed with a magnificent standing ovation.

TODAYSART 2012

21+22 Sept the Hague

An audiovisual summary of the 8th edition of the TodaysArt Festival

http://todaysart.org/2012/
http://todaysart.org/2012/news-item/ntve-todaysart-japanese-program/

NTV Europe supports TodaysArt Festival

TodaysArt Festival, which took place for the first time in the Hague in 2005, is now entering its eighth year. This year’s festival, featuring spirited artists and researchers from around the world, will open on the 21st and 22nd of September at various spaces throughout the Hague. As a globally cutting edge, provocative art festival, it will not only showcase conventional art forms, but also actively introduce music, dance, and technology as art.
Furthermore, this year brings a new match: NTV Europe joins as a presenting partner, and has succeeded particularly in putting together Japan’s corner. As the first try, we introduce the musician Wada Ei’s Braun Tube Jazz Band and his Open Reel Ensemble, and look forward to drawing much notice.

By joining hands with TodaysArt Festival, NTV Europe hopes to achieve development in the relationship between Japan and the Netherlands in their respective fields of art and culture, and at the same time to spread not only to artists and specialists, but also to regular people, a high-quality program on the spearhead that is contemporary art.

Performance schedule:

Braun Tube Brass Band
Ei Wada
September 21st (Fri)
21.15 - 21.45
In the Foyer of the Theater aan het Spui


syn_
Ryoichi Kurokawa
September 21st (Fri)
22.45 - 23.30
at Lucent Danstheater


Open Reel Ensemble
Ei Wada, Kimitoshi Sato, Haruka, Takumi Namba, Yoshida, Masaru Yoshida
September 22nd (Sat)
21.00 - 22.00
In the Small Room of the Theater aan het Spui

*For details, please view the festival’s homepage.

TODAYSART 2012

http://todaysart.org/2012/
http://todaysart.org/2012/news-item/ntve-todaysart-japanese-program/

21+22 Sept the Hague

Seeing the Damien Hirst exhibition at Tate Modern

Damien Hirst  Sympathy in White Major - Absolution II  2006 (Detail)  Butterflies and household gloss on canvas  

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS 2012. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates

Could the reason that Damien Hirst is forever sensational, lie in how he combines the intense impact of his work with a tendency to replace the value of his work with monetary value, as if it were all only a game.The news of the current exhibition at Tate Modern was quite the topic even in Japan. We can speculate at the extent of attention considering the special feature put together by the popular art journal BT / Bijutsu Techo.
Furthermore, the commercial facility Hikarie which opened recently in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, houses the Koyama Tomio Gallery, which opens with the exhibition of Hirst’s Spot Paintings. News of this gallery space, which is effectively broadening the playing field, comes together with news of the Tate Modern exhibition


This exhibition is a lineup of masterpieces which, while opposing money and art in one way, in fact maintain a clever balance by looking to their value. The rotting cow’s head, the maggots spilling out of it; flies being born and then hitting the electrical insect killer, making sizzling sounds as they burn to death. Life born from death perishes in another instant before your eyes. The viewer experiences more than enough unpleasantness, and an immense impact. But Hirst’s work does not let the impact end there. It moves around life and death and directly connects to the fundamental themes of art; moreover the work connects to the art market, where it is transferred into monetary value.

At the time of the work’s first showing, he must have been showered in criticism. Now, fifteen years later, the image is known so widely that we can remember it and think, I want to see that work at least once. We can properly call Hirst the darling of the art world, the one which structured an era. It even produced the very peak, bringing work that is simply structured and displaying high quality. No one will disagree that this exhibition will allow us to appreciate Hirst’s masterpieces to our hearts’ content.

However if one were to ask if we got to know Damien Hirst any better, the answer would have to be in the negative. Whether the question of how he forms such distinct concepts as he has from the beginning, or of the sublimation of the process into the work, or the secret of the system that mass-produces such high quality pieces, you will not find the answers at this exhibition. I was expecting content that would show a glimpse of some expression or idea concerning that work. But considering the monetary value of his work has yet to fall, the Tate exhibition must just be another step in raising that value as far as the artist is concerned. Perhaps he wants to keep the thought of a grand exhibition to verify his artistry in the future a little longer, in which case I understand this exhibition. So I shall keep my own excitement for the next such a grand exhibition, in the future as well.

The Tate Modern exhibition on Damien Hirst will be open until September 9th.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst

Tate Modern

Bankside London SE1 9TG
http://www.tate.org.uk

Opening times:

Sunday – Thursday, 10.00–18.00
Friday – Saturday, 10.00–22.00

A Single Treasure on Display -Van Gogh Museum-

Pollard Willow, July 1882
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The newly purchased ‘Pollard Willow’, a watercolor painting by Van Gogh, is now on display for the public at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Although a watercolor, this work is a proper painting by Vincent van Gogh, and its purchase, the first in five years for the Van Gogh Museum , will prove an meaningful addition for the museum. Axel Rüger, the museum’s director, commented on this occasion that this work, as one of the paintings Van Gogh worked on during his stay in the Hague, would be an excellent acquisition.

Before the summer of 1882, Van Gogh worked largely in pencil and pen, and appeared not to have worked in watercolor often. However, from July of that year, he started creating sketches in watercolor, and a change is visible at the same time, from the portraits he had been doing, to landscapes; from sketching exercises to preparatory drawings; and from monochromatic, to colored work. Speaking in terms of Van Gogh the painter, these works were created in a period of important developments.

Letter with letter sketch from Vincent to Theo van Gogh, 31 July 1882
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

This watercolor depicts a landscape; a path runs along a river or canal, near which a tree -the pollard willow- stands, its top branches cropped. In the distance railway depot buildings can be made out, and figures of people. The sky is swallowed in pressing clouds; here is Holland’s specific brand of melancholy weather. In his letters to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh writes of things to do with this painting. In one letter, he refers to the willow tree on the road near his house. In another, he writes how pleased he is with the watercolor painting he made. The Van Gogh Museum was already in possession of these letters in which Van Gogh wrote of this painting, and the purchase of the work itself had been a particular ambition for some time.



The painting will be on display in the museum’s underground floor between May 10 and July 10, together with oil paintings from the same period, and related letters. Then, when the Van Gogh Museum enters a period of remodelling in September, the work will feature for another two months only as part of the exhibition at the Hermitage Museum. Because it is a watercolor, it will enter a period of ‘rest’ after this.

Not only the Van Gogh Museum but some others, as well, have recently created exhibitions centered around the display of one work in particular. In February, Madrid’s Museo del Prado featured Breughel’s work, the only just restored The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, in its own room. A painting acquired in the second half of 2010, it was displayed together with image panels showing stages of the repairs and information on techniques of painting restoration. Then there are the National Galleries of London and Scotland, which recently purchased Titian’s Diana and Callisto, on display in London until July. This work will make a pair with the purchase made in 2009, Diana and Actaeon. Such ‘single treasure’ exhibitions tend to get lost in the shadows of large-scale exhibitions, but they may increase in the near future, with a goal of reporting on restorations and displaying new purchases, and for the sake of connecting museums and people.

Van Gogh Museum

Paulus Potterstraat 7 Amsterdam
(From Central Station in Amsterdam, take tram 2 or 5 to the Van Baerlestraat stop.)
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl

Museum: daily 10 am to 6 pm, Friday to 10 pm
Ticket office: daily 10 am to 6:30 pm, Friday to 9:30 pm.
Shop: daily 10 am to 6:15 pm, Friday to 9:45 pm.
Museum café: daily 10 am to 6:30 pm.
Library Museumplein 4: Monday to Friday 10 am to 12:30 pm and 1:30 pm to 5 pm
Closed 1 January

*From 29 September 2012 to 25 April 2013, much of the Van Gogh Museum collection will be relocated in the Hermitage Amsterdam.

Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam)

The renovation work at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam is well underway with the re-opening aimed for the Spring of 2013. As one of the new parts of the museum, the Asian Pavilion was introduced to the Dutch media recently.

The department’s curator, Mr. Menno Fitski, explained that the Netherlands has developed a deep-rooted relationship with Asia through its longstanding trade relations, and has collected various works of art from especially China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. Of those collected works the museum owns some 7000 pieces. From this large collection, some 365 pieces will be on display at any one time in the new Asian Pavilion and of those, 250 pieces will be regularly rotated. Eventually almost the entire collection will have been exhibited to the public.

The uniquely shaped Asian pavilion, which is separate building linked to the old Rijksmuseum building, was designed by the Italian architect Antonio Ortiz. The pavilion has a ground floor and a basement with an overall area totalling 670 square meters. The plan is to display works of art from India and Indonesia on the ground floor, and works from Japan, China and Korea in the basement. A pair of Niō (strong, angry guardians of the Buddha) statues from Japan were recently added to the collection. Together with a 12^th century sculpture from India representing the god Shiva, and a statue of Guanyin (Goddess of Mercy) from China, these form the centrepiece of the pavilion.

Mr. Fitski highlighted three of the pavilion’s special characteristics during his introduction. First, the relaxed atmosphere allows visitors to view the works at leisure. Second is the unique look of the pavilion, which is designed to highlight the works of art displayed within it. Thirdly, despite the building being quite compact, its use of the stairs and hallways give a surprisingly spacious feeling.

Famous works of art that are very popular with visitors, for example Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and works by other 17^th century painters that the Dutch are proud of, will be displayed together in the central part of the new Rijksmuseum. Also, to allow visitors with only a little time to capture the essence of Dutch painters, a special elevator has been built that takes them directly to the Night Watch Room where the “Night Watch” is on display, and then on to the adjacent “Gallery of Honour”.

Starting with the call for a new design, the Rijksmuseum faced many difficulties during the renovation process, but the end is now finally in sight. However, the renovation is not the Rijksmuseum’s only problem. Despite being one of Europe’s model countries economically, the Netherlands has not been able to escape the current economic crisis. Last year the Dutch government drastically cut subsidies to art and music. Therefore, the various agencies involved in the world of art have been forced to find sponsors and funding in order to financially support themselves.

Many organizations are of course sympathetic towards the (fine) arts. An appeal has been sent out to companies with a long-term outlook for public relations and advertising; donations have been requested through ‘patron’ type groups and a campaign has been set up requesting ordinary individuals also to make donations, which in the Netherlands are tax-deductible. Everywhere great efforts are therefore being made to find support for the arts.

Rijksmuseum, The Masterpieces

Jan Luijkenstraat 1, 1071 CJ Amsterdam
http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/

Opening hours:

Every day from 9:00 to 18:00
Closed: 1 January
On 25 December the museum closes at 18.00
Please note: the museum ticket counter closes at 17:30!

Exhibitions in England: Da Vinci and Vermeer

Cambridge, the Fitzwilliam Museum

There are two exhibitions currently on display in England which are being flooded with attention.
The first is the exhibition being held at London´s National Gallery: Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. As you may know, Leonardo da Vinci underwent training to be a painter in Florence, but from 1482 to 1499 he was in the service of Ludovico Sforza (nicknamed Il Moro, the Moor for his dark skin color), the head of the Sforza family and Duke of Milan.
In the exhibition, the focal point is da Vinci’s work as a painter from his Milan period. Beside the work Lady with an Ermine (Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland), thought to be a painting of Ludovico’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani, the two famous versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, owned by the Louvre and the National Gallery of London, and the Madonna Litta (from the Depository of the Hermitage) are on display. The two paintings of the Virgin of the Rocks have been exhibited facing each other in one room so a viewer may make comparisons. This exhibition provides a golden opportunity to see these famous works, brought together.
 　
On view for the first time is the painting Christ as Salvator Mundi (private collection) which came to light this year as having been painted by da Vinci specifically. Since it is a work that has been missing for so long, I expect we will not be able to avoid a debate on its authenticity, but I certainly felt fortunate to see it with my own eyes.


Of da Vinci it is often said that nearly all of his works are unfinished. However, the painting of The Last Supper, remaining on the wall of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, is known as one of few exceptions. The Last Supper is one of the last on display at this exhibition -but not the wall, of course. It is a faithful reproduction in oil from around 1520. It has retained its vivid colors, and moreover, several details, such as Christ’s foot, can be seen which are no longer visible on the original. We still remember the long period of restoration for the original mural painting, lasting from 1977 to 1999; the reproduction on display was vital to the restoration of details lost to the original.


Next is the pride of Cambridge: the Fitzwilliam Museum, currently showing the exhibition Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence. The exhibition is compact, featuring 32 paintings, all in oils. The group of works are paintings of women taken away from the ordinary, by the 17th century Dutch master Vermeer and several of his contemporaries. Of the works, Vermeer’s are these four: The Music Lesson (Royal Collection, St. James's Palace, London),  A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (National Gallery, London), The Lacemaker (Louvre, Paris) and a second version of A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (private collection). The works by Vermeer’s contemporaries Gerrit Dou, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolaes Maas, are all in very good condition and make a wonderful addition to what I am not afraid to call a gem of an exhibition. Surprisingly, there is no entrance fee. The daily amount of visitors, I was informed by happy museum staff, is indeed as large as when the Fitzwilliam Museum first opened.

National Gallery

Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/

Opening hours:

Weekdays 10am – 6pm
Fridays 10am – 9pm

Fitzwilliam Museum

Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RB
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/

Opening hours:

Tuesday to Saturday: 10:00 - 17:00
Sundays, Bank holiday Mondays: 12:00 - 17:00
Closed on Mondays, Good Friday, from December 24-26 & 31, and on January 1st 2012