International News Digest

FEBRUARY 4

Cindy Sherman sat down with Der Standard’s Anne Katrin Feßler to discuss the show of her early works, “That’s Me—That’s Not Me,” currently on view at the Sammlung Verbund in Vienna through May 16. (A complete retrospective of the artist’s work runs February 26–June 11 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) The fifty-eight-year-old Sherman told Feßler that, when approaching the artist with the exhibition’s concept, curator Gabriele Schor “had already done a lot of research, and her sincerity convinced me. […] I came to believe that it would be meaningful to see what preoccupied me almost forty years ago.” A 374-page catalogue raisonné for the years 1975 to 1977 accompanies the show, which includes Sherman’s early student works from Buffalo. When asked if it was a challenge to build her career on a medium that received little recognition at the time, Sherman stated, “On the contrary, it was liberating. Others felt liberated too, not to have to compete with anyone, to work free of influence. These new media were being used mostly by women, for example Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, and Sarah Charlesworth. One avoided referencing art by men, who got all the attention.” As for her art-world role models, she credited Lynda Benglis and Adrian Piper with influencing her twenty-two-year-old self. “I liked that [Piper] was subversive,” noted Sherman. “When I met her ten years ago, and told her how much her work had influenced me, she didn’t seem too happy about it. I had the feeling I should shut my mouth and leave.”

Swantje Karich has published an impassioned article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung concerning the global obsession with the premature “musealization” of protest and political movements. Citing the fact that protesters opposing the construction of the “Stuttgart 21” urban development project in Germany have become the subjects of an exhibition at the Haus der Geschichte der Stadt, Karich ascribed the institutional impulse to objectify such movements to a tendency to reduce political action to expression of lifestyle. In New York, Karich noted, the same phenomenon took place with Occupy Wall Street: Before the protests had even ended, museums were snatching up their ephemera and signage for collections. She stated, “While the protest movement hasn’t relinquished the desire for change, its message is ending up in a display case in a white cube. It no longer reaches politicians, but only curious museum-goers left to their own devices in front of the messages.” She pointed to several possible reasons for this musealization, one of which seems to be a rather convenient culprit: the Internet search engine. Karich’s point that “museums thereby relinquish their responsibility to function as a memory for the political present,” may be an astute observation, but her hyperbolic finale—“The museum tames, it hastily turns political provocation into mute history”—is a dangerous accusation indeed.

Speaking of global phenomena, curator Andrea Buddensieg and director Peter Weibel of Karlsruhe’s Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), along with scholar Hans Belting, have begun a project that attempts to measure the effects of globalization on the art world. The initiative, titled Center of Excellence for Global Studies, will focus on museums’ new function as zones of contact for artists, political activists, and citizens of the world. “We are experiencing a shift in meaning,” says Belting to Ingo Senft-Werner for Monopol, noting, for instance, that many look to Hong Kong as the new center of art exchange, since a third of all art sales now happen in China. The project is the culmination of four years of observation, international conferences, exhibitions, and three volumes—including Contemporary Art and the Museum (2007). The trio’s goal is to draw together all existing transcultural research, and to give grants to young scholars doing work on related subjects. As Weibel affirms, “Art history in its traditional form has come to an end. We therefore need new forms of access and have to overcome our Eurocentric training.”

American artist Tori LaConsay has accused the Swedish fashion brand Hennes and Mauritz of copyright infringement. In 2008, LaConsay found an unused billboard in Atlanta, Georgia, and emblazoned on it a red heart alongside the message YOU LOOK NICE TODAY. Now, reports Monopol and ArtLyst, H&M has distributed a range of household items—from pillowcases to a doormat—containing the same slogan presented with a similar heart. Though the company at first rejected LaConsay’s accusations, saying that it employed “more than one hundred freelance designers” and that “no copyright has been infringed,” H&M recently issued something slightly closer to an apology, stating on its Facebook page: “We have merely been inspired, after seeing many different varieties with different text messages, to create something similar in a different font, with the use of big and small brackets and the placement of the shaped heart. We are truly sorry if we have led someone to believe that we intentionally . . . copied someone else’s creation.”