Monday 12 June, 2006

Die Welt, 12.06.2006

Peter Dittmar celebrates the Düsseldorf retrospective of the works of Martin Kippenberger, who nine years after his death has suddenly become so fashionable. "The painterly qualities are tolerable. The same goes for his drawing. And the ideas in his images are modest. But none of this belonged to Kippenberger's ambitions. Kippenberger's singular achievement was his unconventionality which drove him in his contempt for conventionalised subculture to invert Beuys' maxim 'every person is an artist' to 'every artist a person'. 'The museum is a load of antiquated nonsense, although everyone already knows that I'm the one who really saw what the 1980s were about.'"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12.06.2006

Jürgen Berger reports on the Festival International de Teatro Caracas, in the Venuzuela's capital city, where Germany was the guest country. This year's edition featured a Venezuelan version of the German production "X-Wohnungen", where parts of the Chacao District have been turned into a stage. "There you are standing on the terrace of a shopping centre, looking out over the tower block opposite, and in a number of the windows you see couples arguing furiously, before launching into having sex just as furiously whereupon the observer on the other side is given a pair of binoculars to look through. It's just like the bit in Alexander Kluge's film 'The Female Patriot' (1979) where Hannelore Hoger twitches the trouser leg of a civil guard armed with binoculars and says even peeping toms have to relax sometimes."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 12.06.2006

First it was to be a film collage, then a large exhibition, and now it's a "virtual ride through cultural history" and a few other things besides. Martina Meister is delighted at Jean-Luc Godard's show "Voyage(s) en utopie" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. "The visitor is presented with an elaborate pile of shards, and may start to feel like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, who wants to put the pieces back together. The show contains nine fragile cardboard boxes, initially models for the exhibition, that Godard is supposed to have constructed together with his companion, Anne-Marie Mieville. They contain artefacts of Western cultural history, a bit of Freud here, a Readymade there. Visitors can wander, or drift, through the three rooms, named 'Avant-Hier' (the day before yesterday), 'Hier' (yesterday), and 'Aujourd'hui' (today). There is no tomorrow: No Future. An electric train runs tirelessly from one room to the next."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12.06.2006

Vincenzo Velella writes on his Southern Italian family, whose first generation only partly integrated into German life while he studied physics and theology and became a German citizen. "All it took was a police clearance certificate, an application and a hand-written essay on why I wanted to be a German citizen. I wrote about Stefan George's secret Germany, and evoked figures like Rudolf Borchardt (bio in German) and Ernst Jünger. On the day I received my certificate of naturalisation, the civil servant was wearing a Donald Duck tie."


Saturday 10 June, 2006

Die Tageszeitung, 10.06.2006

Ali Sadrzadeh reports on the successful anti-Semitic propaganda of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. "The man who a year ago was largely unknown, even by the Iranian public, seems to have achieved much since then. His politics are read, evaluated and sometimes even taken seriously by the western press. In his travels through the Iranian provinces, his appearances in the market places and before students, on TV and in the world's capitals he is still permitted to visit, (...) he constructs his arguments about the Palestinian problem bit for bit, like a building."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10.06.2006

Bahman Nirumand attempts to explain the successes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "Ahmadinejad is a perfect populist, and a clever one. (...) But as opposed to most populists, he is no demagogue. He is convinced of the truth of what he says, which makes him more dangerous than other populists. His ideology abides no gainsaying. As opposed to Rafsanjani, for example, or even Khomeini, who despite their fundamentalist orientation were always ready to compromise, Ahmadinejad lacks the disposition to perceive reality and act accordingly. His world view only has room for friends or foes."


Berliner Zeitung, 10.06.2006

Ingeborg Ruthe presents the painting "The last Judgement in Cyberspace - The Vertical View" by Chinese artist Miao Xiaochun. Inspired by Michelangelo's "The Last Judgement," the work is currently on display at the Alexander Ochs Gallery in Berlin. "The 41-year-old artist has depicted the clash of cultures in his hovering figures: hordes of naked male bodies with hairless heads, all with the same Asian features, are sucked along in a cloudy maelstrom. Their necks are entwined with thorns. Some drag a cross, others carry broken cogwheels and saw blades. Still others blow on trumpets of Jericho or lurch through space in a trance, very much in the style of Italian Mannerism."