Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.10.2006

Andrian Kreye travels to New York to watch curator Klaus Biesenbach at work in his new post at MoMA where he is setting up a new department for media. Biesenbach has commissioned a new video by US artist Doug Aitken and goes to meet him and the cast, Donald Sutherland included, on set. "What now follows is one of these society rituals which make life in America so pleasant while casually constructing new rungs on the career ladder... Biesenbach is one of those people who master these rituals with perfect ease. In MoMA he is already cultivating them with exclusive cocktail parties and glamorous openings, where a network has formed of young artists, actors and musicians who have been homeless since the decline of the downtown club in New York. Back in Berlin, where Biesenbach has built up the Kunst Werke art institute since 1990, his contemporaries were always suspicious of his social intelligence. Only recently a gallerist told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that Biesenbach's networking abilities were nothing more than 'slimy social posing'."


Frankfurter Rundschau 24.10.2006

Ulf Erdmann Ziegler portrays British artist Stephen Willats, who is now being featured in an exhibition at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Siegen. Willats moved out of Notting Hill in the 70s to do "folk art without folklore." That worked particularly well in Berlin's Gropiusstadt council housing estate, where he let the inhabitants speak into a tape recorder. The result was predictable, writes Ziegler. "Yet Willat's mouse-coloured, concrete-grey installation on '4 Islands in Berlin' (meaning West Berlin) – with photos criss-crossed with graphic symbols and bare loudspeakers rambling on above the suspended partitions – is a shock, because it really does succeed in arresting time, and in rendering the psycho-social atmosphere of the day. The work dates from 1979/80. Later Willats went back to Berlin and portrayed in a delicately coloured tableau the situation of a young woman, the last resident of a condemned student dormitory on Schlachtensee lake. The work 'I want to live in a democratically determined household', depicts the glaring gap between utopia and reality."

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich reports on a shocking development at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, one of the most important annual festivals of contemporary music: "The cosy little forum for contemporary music premieres is now bursting at its seams. Insiders of avant-garde music are now in the minority. Ever younger audiences fill the halls, which simply couldn't be big enough. A powerful tradition is, so to speak, reaping the profits of its brand name... Even now some new productions no longer have enough space. That the Arditti String Quartet had to perform its intense, arduous programme (Wolfgang Rihm's new piece 'Akt und Tag' is slightly disappointing despite its distinct qualities) as many as three times in a church (people still had to be turned away), is a tour de force for the musicians that's almost bad for their health. People back at the Südwest Rundfunk broadcaster, which organises the festival, are rubbing their eyes at how a seemingly marginal event has turned into a major cultural attraction."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 24.10.2006

Eleonore Büning was also at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, and was most impressed by Georg Friedrich Haas' sound installation "Hyperion", which in turn is conducted by a light installation by the artist Rosalie: "Very soon the sounds swell up and are hammered out in repetition. An avalanche of brass glissandi and chord shifts build imaginary walls before rubbing up against the audience from all sides. Five dozen strings saw away to the left, four grand pianos play to the right, and brass instruments blare out from the gallery. Across from them the woodwinds have formed a line of attack, while eight percussionists give a structure to it all."


Die Tageszeitung 24.10.2006

Benno Schirrmeister visited the Bremen Society for Contemporary Art where an exhibition "bin beschäftigt" (I'm busy) explores our neurotic relationship to work. "On the side wall, German artist Corinna Schnitt's video 'Between four and six' is being beamed. Schnitt has filmed the spare-time activities of an elderly couple and their grown-up daughter. In their housing estate, this family gets up early every Sunday morning - and cleans the traffic signs.... Schnitt's camera follows at a distance as they stride through the empty suburban streets: three people with ladder and bucket, always waiting for the green man before crossing the road, although there are no cars about. Three people doing nothing wrong, carrying out an activity which harms no one. Every Sunday, and in case of illness, a voice from the off says, the neighbour springs in to help - so infectious is the fire of involvement, so communicative the energy, yet so mysterious. Because there's no way of knowing what this activity is an ersatz for, what fears it numbs and what horrors it hides."