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AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAN WALTEMATH

BY CHRISTINE DE LIGNIÉRES

Christine de Lignières: Your work is visually related to a high-modernist formalism that includes Bauhaus, De Stijl, Mondrian … to aesthetic movements, at a certain period in history. Do you feel a kinship with those artists?

Joan Waltemath: I don’t really approach my work stylistically in relation to Modernism because the kind of geometry that I’m working with is so old, and I mean mostly it’s been used in architecture. If you look at plans from Gothic and Romanesque churches, from the pyramids, the Ziggurats — these geometric forms obey certain mathematical laws of nature. That’s the basis of the grid I work on using harmonic ratios. The lineage of modernism is something that I’m obviously in tune with, but my focal point is more on the timeless nature of the geometry itself and how it’s able to open certain doors of perception. Weiterlesen →

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BY ARTISTUNDERGROUND

Art, and the experience of looking at art in galleries or museums, has dramatically changed over the last few decades.

We believe that the forces that are driving this change have by now distorted art to a degree that we feel compelled to not only declare this a crisis, but to urgently call for a dramatic and fundamental revision and rethink of art in every area of its agency to avoid its own complete obliteration. Weiterlesen →

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VON MIMMO CATANIA

Wann immer ich unter der Woche eine Galerie besuche, erlebe ich eine Situation, an die wir uns anscheinend gewöhnt haben, und das schon seit einigen Jahren. Ich spreche nicht allein von den kleinen Galerien, sondern hauptsächlich von der großen, oder, wenn Sie so wollen, von denen, die auf dem internationalen Parkett der Kunst eine Rolle spielen. Weiterlesen →

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BY JOAN WALTEMATH

JOAN WALTEMATH IN CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT C. MORGAN

Joan Waltemath: When you said during a recent panel discussion that you thought there was a complete loss of critical consciousness in the art world, that really made my evening, the recognition that what is being written now is not critically conscious and that there must be a reinvestment in critical awareness in order to have art. If market value is really what determines what is being shown and seen in museums, well, market values are really the same everywhere, are they not?

Robert C. Morgan: It seems to me that we are in an era now where it is not enough to be from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Indonesia, or Mongolia, but you have to somehow take what that culture is about, and your own experiences within that culture, and make it palatable on the level of a kind of global system of exchange. In other words, you have to use the vehicle of some westernized post-colonial political theory to explain it. In fact, to prove it. But there is a fundamental problem here because art is not something you prove. Art is something that provokes, that generates ideas, and hopefully takes you to another level of feeling where you begin to open up and realize yourself as another inhabitant of the world. But that role for art has been temporarily displaced. Weiterlesen →

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VON RYSZARD WAŚKO

Neulich hat mich ein Dealer aus London besucht, der (glaube ich) nach Berlin von der Biennale in Venedig gekommen ist. Gleich beim Eintreten in mein Atelier fragte er mich: ‚Richard, do you know the actual tendency in art?‘ Ich antwortete: ‚I do know it. But, tell me what’s that?‘ (ich dachte, dass tatsächlich etwas wesentliches entstanden ist). Und er darauf: ‚The Name of the new tendency in art is art market!‚ und brach in Gelächter aus. Weiterlesen →