« Art Critics' Reading List
SUSANNE PRINZ
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Susanne Prinz is a freelance international curator based in Berlin. She has curated numerous shows throughout Germany and Europe. Among the most recent are the retrospective show «Porträts by Clegg & Guttmann» in Innsbruck and «After four Rotations of A, B makes one Revolution» with Rossella Biscotti and Kevin van Braak, as well as «No Light» with Michael Sailstorfer in Berlin. Since 2005, she has also been head of APT-Berlin. |
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Francesc Ruiz. Manga Mammoth. Francesc Ruiz en Tokyo. Save as…, 2009. Manga Mammoth is an amusing and charmingly drawn comic book about the adventures of a European (the artist himself) pursuing the gay scene in Tokyo, while investigating forms and variations of Japanese mangas – or more precisely Yaoi. These belong - despite the fact that they feature rather explicit gay porn stories - to the extremely popular genre of mangas called Shojo, which are made by girls for girls only. Watching the protagonist blunder through the pertinent bars of Tokyo and trying to understand why Yaoi were an accepted part of the mainstream cultural production but somehow not embraced by gay sensibility, the reader finds himself pondering the fact that everything we read or see and consequently react to is highly determined by the culture we live in. As cosmopolitan a polyglot as one might be, in order to interpret signs and gestures, it is not only what one knows that is important, but more so who one is, what milieu one comes from and what point of view one takes.
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Harald Szeemann. «Individual Methodology.» 16th Session of the Ecole du Magasin, Grenoble. JRP|Ringier, 2007. The choice of Harald Szeemann as the subject of the combined editorial efforts of the participants of the curatorial school at the Magasin in Grenoble seems self explanatory. After all, Szeemann practically invented the profession of independent curating and was the first to focus on exhibition spaces as one additional possibility to express subjective ideas. More than one of the spaces he sought out for his big, wild exhibitions – such as Hamburger Bahnhof or Deichtorhallen - have subsequently become established museums. Through several interviews, collected texts and documents by Szeemann himself and close collaborators, the aspiring curatorial candidate can infinitely learn about the organizational and financial hazards of self-produced shows. One also gains insight into the precarious equilibrium of constellations needed to fulfill the artists, the audience and the institution and the curatorial ego at the same time. A task one learns that even Szeemann, who has always been associated with curatorial practice as an authorial artistic notion, has considered impossible at times. I find this a truly consoling insight. Owing to the number of authors, styles and variety of original sources, the book is at times tiresome to follow. Still, an interesting and largely untold story unfolds.
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Hans Belting. Florenz und Bagdad, Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. Munich : C. H. Beck Verlag, 2008.With this year’s biennial in Istanbul in mind, I decided to go academical and read Orhan Pamuk’s novel‚ My Name is Red (2000) and Hans Belting’s latest publication on the difference between occidental and oriental views of the world. The former deals with the conflict through a metaphoric thriller about the bloody clash between traditionalists and innovators in sixteenth century Islamic painting, whereas the latter surprisingly states that in fact long before the proscribed perspective was commonly used in western art, its mathematical foundation was developed in Arabic science. Through film and photography, central perspective has of course effectively pervaded almost all aspects of visual culture and has thus turned into an instrument of colonization, a norm for “natural sight.” This at least is the main thesis of Belting’s book. Although not exactly based on a multitude of empirical facts in case of the Islamic and Arabic regions, one has to admire Belting’s stupendous knowledge and concise argumentation.
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