1968 | 2008
This is not the first time that Summer Olympics Games are embroiled in environmental and political controversies. In 1968, Mexico City, with its high altitude containing 30% less oxygen than at sea level, proved to be a controversial choice. The lack of air led to terrible results for some, while others were able to achieve world records. Forty years later Beijing is faced with massive air pollution as it completes the preparations for the Olympics. The world renowned Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie has opted out of running in the marathon noting “the pollution in China” as a threat to his health. It remains to be seen how the environmental pollution in China will affect the athletes and the Games’ results.China is also plagued with its outrageous treatment of Tibet, resulting in massive protests around the world. Protest was also seen in Mexico City during the medal ceremonies when the two Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos “performed their Power to the People” salute. Peter Norman, the Australian silver medalist, wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge showing his support for Smith and Carlos.
Another athlete to cancel an Olympic Games participation was Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest chess players of all time, who passed away earlier this year. He had plans to play for the United States at the 1968 Chess Olympiad in Lugano, Switzerland and backed out when he saw the playing hall with its bad lighting.
As athletes were breaking records in 1968, artists were busy reshaping culture. Nancy Spero(Season 4) was working on her War Series (1966-70). Bruce Nauman (Season 1) produced his first video titled Pinch Neck. Romare Bearden, in addition to being involved in founding The Studio Museum in Harlem, also established Cinque Gallery with the help of Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow. Cinque provided support for younger minority artists.
1968 marked the passing of Marcel Duchamp and the coinage of “15 minutes of fame” when Andy Warhol stated “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Frank Zappa released his first solo album Lumpy Gravy and performed King Kong with the Mothers of Invention at BBC Studio in London. Chou Wen-chung, who had studied with Edgard Varese, completed Nocturnal (1961-1968), an unfinished piece by Varese.
In his 1968 Nobel Lecture, Yasunari Kawabata explained, “The excitement of beauty calls forth strong fellow feelings, yearnings for companionship, and the word ‘comrade’ can be taken to mean ‘human being.’ The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.”
How will 2008 be reminisced forty years from now? What will be the low and high points in our cultural and social achievements? Will 2008 be a critical year marking a pivotal change in the way we treat the environment and each other?
China Haze. Credit. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE
Pettibon’s Punk Epocha at BFAS
Raymond Pettibon’s (Season 2) Punk Epocha: 70 Drawings from the Eighties opens this Thursday at Blondeau Fine Art Services in Geneva. The solo exhibition runs through July 19 and includes numerous black and white works that incorporate cartoonish illustration, political satire, insightful absurdity, and preposterous predicaments that have come to define the artist’s ’signature style’. Punk’d indeed.
Don’t Miss: Mark Dion’s European exhibitions
Two exhibitions of work by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, The Natural History of the Museum and Systema Metropolis, are running concurrently in Sweden, Switzerland, and London, respectively, this summer and fall.
In both shows, Dion continues his wide-ranging investigations into art and science—the relationship between animals, humans, and environments, and the Western systems of classification and collection and modes of presentation. Through intriguing art installations, Dion examines how humans make order out of chaos by collecting and classifying organisms and, at the same time, recreating the categorization and exhibition practices of museums. Moreover, he specifically celebrates the 300 years since the birth of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern biological classification system that gives every species a two-part Latin name.
In The Natural History of the Museum, on view at the Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg, Sweden, until August 26, 2007, Dion uses irony, humour and allegory to build bridges between the traditional role of the museum as an authoritarian educator and a new role as a conveyor of knowledge and an entertainer. The show will then travel to Seedam Kulturzentrum in Pfäffikon, Switzerland, from September 15 to November 11, 2007.
Systema Metropolis, at the Natural History Museum in London until September 2, 2007, is based on a four-part installation that explores the strange and surprising biodiversity of London through wildlife samples collected at different sites across the city and its classification.
Alfredo Jaar retrospective opens in Switzerland
The Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, is hosting a major retrospective of the work of Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean artist based in New York City and featured in the upcoming fourth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images, curated by Nicole Schweizer and produced in close collaboration with the artist, offers a vast overview of his work, including previously unseen pieces and others that are being shown in Europe for the first time. The artwork on display goes from documentations of his first public interventions in Chile (Studies on Happiness, 1979-1981) to his latest installation to date, The Sound of Silence (2006). Other pieces included in the show are his works on gold miners in Amazonia (Introduction to a Distant World, 1985; Out of Balance, 1989), works related to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Real Pictures, 1995; Field, Road, and Cloud, 1997) as well as his latest film, Muxima (2005).
For more than thirty years, Alfredo Jaar, making use of multiple media as public interventions, installations, photography and video, has created an extremely powerful body of works that questions the nature of images and our relationship to them. The crucial questions that he explores in his work concern the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images runs through September 23, 2007.
[via e-flux]
