We learned of the death of a far relative in the age of 28 in the Western Georgian Region of Guria. He drunken made a race with his friend on the back of his horse along a fast going train. As if they wanted to jump from the horseback on the train. Whacking his horse with a short whip, the whip got tangled up at some part of the wagon. He felt fatally at the direction of the train, his fellow luckily the other side.
The photo is from a website dedicated to the Georgian trick riders in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show http://www.georgians.ge by Irakli Makharadze
By the way, this weekend I learned a good medicine used very successful by Georgian and Tatarian shepherders to help your cow, if it has a fatal colic with flatulence, what could lead to let her stomach explode:
Take half a liter Diesel fuel, Add 50 ml vinegar
Shake it good
and fill it in the open mouth of the cow, that she drinks it
You'll need three man for that, one to turn the heads cow in the right direction with the mouth up, another one to hold the mouth open and the third to fill the medicine inside. It needs around 30 minutes until all gas from her stomach is gone and pain is reliefed, and she is fine again.
I am though not sure if this has bad influences on the quality of the milk for a while.
Mamuka was exited of a more recent personal invention, painting on dark, black-blue-greyish grounds.
As dark grounds are giving depths almost from itself.
Mamukas wife Lia Shvelidze is a very successful painter.
This is a view in Tbilisi.
Another artist was today in Mamukas studio with a bunch of small paintings and drawings: Avto Meskhia, he probably heard about the French coming
Composition, 1996
Despite this brilliant works, Avto lives under very difficult living conditions. Luckily the French bought some of his drawings. After they left I too could not resist to buy a small collage from 1992. I was thinking, how he made in those terrible days of shootings in Tbilisi and Civil War such lighthanded works...
Composition, 1992
Such a day with art and artists is always a very happy day, the smell of the paint, some red wine and good talks, you know, what I mean. Maybe this is also a strength of the good old medium Painting.
"In Globalization and Its Enemies, Daniel Cohen, a professor of economics at the École Normale Supé-rieure in Paris, provides a refreshing antidote to some of the most misleading features of this consensus. His starting point is the seemingly paradoxical claim that for most people in the world it is not a reality but a mirage. As Cohen sees it, the ongoing wave of globalization—the third in a series that began in the sixteenth century with the conquistadors and continued in the nineteenth with British imperial free trade—occurs largely in a realm of virtual reality and leaves much of everyday life untouched. Nineteenth-century globalization involved large-scale movements of population to new lands, while the present phase involves mainly commodities and images."
I see much parallels in todays art world in this astonishing insight. Through the magazins, websites and blogs we think to have an overview on what is happening in art, but do you remember the time, when only galleries +- 200 km around your living place had been accessible ? I then had my focus in Berlin on 15 galleries and 5 major museums and regulary found a startling show, a promising artist or an intriguing image from time to time. Instead of texts and .jpg's I saw the originals. If I travelled an hour by subway to a special show in a Gallery, then in most cases I wouldn't leave it in 5 minutes, but watch carefully even at works I didn't like on the first view. In 1998 I saw a first show of Neo Rauch at G.H. Lybkes EigenArt in the Auguststraße and this show was to me like a spell. Not one of the 8 or 10 paintings, as I remember, was sold (prizes then 6000-8000 Deutsche Mark), but I spent the big amount of DM 20.00 for the catalogue and brang it a couple of month later to my friend Guy Richards Smit in New York and we had good talks on that. Lybke, as one of the smartest guys in the contemporary artworld did a very good job and pushed Rauch in the right direction and made him successful. I still remember a couple of Rauch's work from the 80s in the late GDR, what I saw then I found pretty terrible. He used the ignorant years of painting through the 90s to develop his new language very well.
With my discovery of artblogs a couple of month ago a lot changed. All the dimensions of crap, all that waste bag called art, all that many and often smart opinions. The distant mirror got me closer, but the art world created mirages.(By the way, what a cool name for a Fighter) Picking it up, and spitting it out. Next discovery, next little scandal, next emerging artist, next, next ,next. Some comments next and ok, work done for today ?
With the demanding RSS-feeds on my screen, I got lazy to go to the next gallery here in Tbilisi. Probably that's anyway crap, maybe. And the next crap awaits me right here at my screen also.
I developed a good mistrust in artworks in generally, thanks to many of the professional art lyers and emerging success ghosts at paintersnyc and others. It became a real mirage, (great word, again !) to me. Blogging in many cases creates halfgrown mirages and a many lies, exept the few true star-bloggers, for those its worth the whole reading. But isn't it, that we still don't realize our doing and fail most of the time, in front of easel or screen ? A mirage, what we create.
became an authority in the art bloggers world in quite a short time, not only because of his blog, but also because of his straightforward and thoughfull comments combined with a cool brooklynesque humor on other art blogs. I always liked his alias profile image, a painting of an eagle-nosed face (R.Reagan?), that added to his authority a lot. ( The left face on the above painting.) Somehow anonymity started to bore him and he outed himself as the painter Jason Laning, and now it's very good to have his paintings in the back mind, while reading his comments. His paintings are as straightforward as his writing is, but offer hints on uneasiness with the political circumstances in our time. The model for "Law Becomes Law" may have been a precise event here or there, but the system to do so, lately became common and a sad normality in countries all over the world. Jason, thank you, for showing us your paintings.
Horse drawing by Darcassius Darcassius makes some good horse drawings and shows also their different stages in progressing. See other horse drawings from her here at flickr
What are they doing in Berlin ?
I have not been at Berlin Biennial yet, but what I read sounds very lukewarm, like
""By using the Gagosian Gallery's international brand name in a humble space and highly local context, Mr. Gioni said, the curators sought to "create a kind of tension between the global and the local.""
Wow, Global and Local had been topics for years, I thought the Istanbul Biennial is specialized on that... Why to create a tension, wich is obviously common all over around and in us for a long time ? We artists want no mainstream, but visions
"With a budget of about $3 million from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and nearly two years to prepare..."
Wow, curators, good deal
""But what we came to understand in Berlin were the incredible layers of history and all the different ways that artists work and show here — not just in institutions, but in temporary spaces, apartments,"..."
Oh, my god
"Mr. Gioni said. "Art used to be about making something eternal. Now it's about a product with programmed obsolescence, almost with an expiration date."" He probably knows best, what he is talking about.
What kind of art I am now waiting for (if its not done already these days...)
- Circus tents, curators, collectors and jumping Bears and Bulls. - Artists painting their Gmail-Inboxes on huge canvases - Selling frozen or endless repeating stock monitors as "top emerging art products" - Rss-feed- sculptures shaping human dna's