Astonishment & Power

The ArtGorillas gallery (next to the Lido cinema, Bangkok) is currently showing Astonishment & Power, an exhibition of paintings and photographs by Bogomir Krajnc.

The exhibition includes abstract collages (painted over newspapers and old prints), and photographs of dead animals (including a bird's head, used as the exhibition's poster image). There is even a painting with an animal skull stuck onto it. Astonishment & Power opened on 10th November, and runs until the end of the month.

Baltic will not face prosecution

A private prosecution against the Baltic art gallery has been dismissed by the UK Crown Prosecution Service. The complainant, Emily Mapfuw, alleged that the gallery outraged public decency with an exhibition featuring Terence Koh's Gone Yet Still, a statuette of a tumescent Jesus. The case has now been discontinued by the CPS, and no action will be taken.

Traces Of Siamese Smile

Despite its very corny title, Traces Of Siamese Smile: Art & Faith & Politics & Love could be one of the greatest exhibitions of the year. It features multi-media works by Thai artists and film-makers including Wisit Sasanatieng, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. International artists such as Andy Warhol, Marina Abramovic, and Nobuyoshi Araki are also included, and there are over 100 artists in total. Apichatpong's new video Luminous People features an abbot blessing boat passengers while they sleep and a young man singing about the death of his father. Wisit is represented by his stunning short film Norashinghavatar.

The exhibition (siamesesmile2008.com) was originally scheduled to open on 20th September, at the new Bangkok Art & Culture Centre. Then, the opening was postponed until 23rd September. Finally, at the very last minute, it was inexplicably postponed again, to open on 24th September. It will close on 26th November (not 23rd November as originally scheduled).

artist not guilty of insulting Turkish PM

Michael Dickinson has been acquitted of insulting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister. Dickinson's collage titled Good Boy portrays the PM as a dog. He was initially arrested in June 2006 when he produced an earlier collage, Best In Show, which portrays the Turkish PM as a dog being petted by George W Bush. He was cleared of all charges relating to Best In Show two months later, though at the same time he faced new charges relating to the Good Boy collage.

Indian painting is not sacrilegious

India's Supreme Court has ruled that MF Husain's painting Mother India is not sacrilegious, and has dismissed an obscenity charge against Husain. The verdict upholds Husain's earlier acquittal by the New Delhi High Court.

Pope criticises frog sculpture

Pope Benedict has criticised a sculpture by German artist Martin Kippenberger on display at the Museion museum in Bolzano, Italy.

The sculpture, Zuerst Die Fusse, depicts the crucifixion, with Jesus replaced by a frog. Benedict instructed a Vatican official to request that the 'blasphemous' sculpture be removed. However, the museum has refused to withdraw the artwork.

Flashback '76

The group exhibition Flashback '76 commemorates the 1976 Thammasat University massacre. The exhibition includes Manit Sriwanichpoom's photo series Died On 6th October 1976; Manit soaked autopsy photographs of the victims of the massacre in blood, and the red images reinforce the violence of the event.

The 1976 massacre was also the subject of Manit's Horror In Pink series, shown at From Message To Media; incredibly, despite photographic evidence to the contrary, Thai Prime Minister Samak claimed that only a single person died in the massacre.

Flashback '76, at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok, opened on 2nd August, and will close on Saturday.

4th Project 6

Project 6, a film and photography exhibition, will be hosted by Gallery VER, Bangkok, next month. The event will include the short film Action! (premiered at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival) by Thunska Pansittivorakul, whose photographic exhibition, Life Show, is currently on display at VER. The 4th Project 6 will open on 15th August (the day Life Show closes), and will run until 30th August.

Baltic outraging public decency?

An installation by Terence Koh, Gone Yet Still, may result in criminal charges against the Baltic art gallery. Koh's work, a statuette of a tumescent Jesus, was shown earlier this year, and, in a private prosecution, a member of the public has accused the gallery of outraging public decency. Gone Yet Still also attracted controversy when it was shown in 2005, and a similar Koh sculpture, Medusa, was withdrawn by the Saatchi Gallery in 2006. Baltic came under fire last year for a Nan Goldin photograph, though the image was eventually cleared of obscenity.

Life Show

Life Show, an exhibition of photographs by Thunska Pansittivorakul, opened today at Gallery VER in Bangkok, and will run until 15th August. (The same venue hosted a retrospective of Thunska's films earlier this year.) The exhibition includes portraits, behind-the-scenes images, and some 'X'-rated shots. Life Show is also the title of one of Thunska's short films, in which an actor discusses his sex-life. Thunska's photos can also be seen, as a slideshow, in his film Endless Story.

The Art Of Time

Gaysorn, a shopping mall in downtown Bangkok, is hosting an exhibition titled The Art Of Time.

The exhibition is designed to promote Gaysorn's range of expensive watches, though of primary interest are works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, and other marquee-name artists.

The centrepiece is a bronze sculpture by Dali, a 3-D representation of his melting clock, a motif he first used in his 1931 painting The Persistence Of Memory. The sculpture was cast in 1980, in a limited edition of 500. (The massively over-rated Dali famously signed piles of reproductions, and even blank canvasses, each morning during breakfast, boasting that "I like to start the day by earning $20,000" and living up to the anagram, 'avida dollars', coined by Andre Breton.)

Most of the other works on display are signed prints. The 1963 Picasso linocut, La Dame A La Collerette, for example, was produced in an edition of fifty. The Dali clock sculpture is the only direct link to the exhibition's title, with the other works having no discernible connections.

The Art Of Time opened yesterday, and will close on 20th July.

Decorative Arts

Decorative Arts: Style & Design From Classical To Contemporary is an illustrated guide to glassware, metalware, ceramics, furniture, and textiles. The author, Judith Miller, has written numerous antiques price-guides, though Decorative Arts is intended as an historical introduction.

Like Miller's other guides, Decorative Arts is published by Dorling Kindersley. I'm not particularly a fan of DK, as I explained last year. However, I can't argue with the 3,000 glossy illustrations in Decorative Arts, nor with its wide historical scope (from pre-history to the present day). There are more detailed decorative arts dictionaries and encyclopedias available, though Miller's book provides a fascinating overview of the subject.

100 X France

As part of the 4th Month of Photography for this year's La Fete festival, the Queen's Gallery in Bangkok is hosting 100 X France, an exhibition of 100 images from the history of French photography. The exhibition opened yesterday, and runs until 8th July.

The exhibition includes some of the most famous photographs ever taken, and a roll-call of the greatest photographers: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, et al. The exhibition's poster features Theophile Feau's famous images of the Eiffel Tower in mid-construction. The earliest extant photographic image, an 1826 'heliograph' by Joseph Niepce, begins the exhibition. There is also an example of Etienne-Jules Marey's Chronophotographie. Photographs by several artists from other mediums are also included, such as a book cover by Marcel Duchamp and a portrait by Agnes Varda.

Bill Henson photographs not obscene

The twenty Bill Henson photographs removed from an Australian gallery last month have been cleared of obscenity. The gallery's Henson exhibition (Proof Of Age) has now finished, though the controversial images will be on view again in the near future.

Into Me/Out Of Me catalogue

Into Me/Out Of Me was an exhibition conceived by Susan Sontag and curated by Klaus Biesenbach. It brought together iconic works from the past forty years of body art, and was organised into three broad themes: metabolism, reproduction, and violence. Over 130 artists were represented, including Andres Serrano, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Judy Chicago, Hermann Nitsch, and Damien Hirst. The result was an extraordinarily comprehensive retrospective, probably the widest survey of body art thus far.

The exhibition catalogue is arranged alphabetically by artist, rather than according to the three categories of the exhibition itself. It resembles The Artist's Body (from Phaidon's Themes & Movements series), though its images are more explicit and its introduction is more anecdotal.

Bill Henson photographs removed

Works from a photography exhibition by Bill Henson have been removed by Australian police from Roslyn Oxley9, a Sydney art gallery. The confiscated photographs are images of a naked teenaged girl. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has described them as "revolting", and censored versions of some images have been shown by ABC TV in Australia. (Nude images of minors have been removed from galleries in the past, most recently the Nan Goldin photograph investigated, and subsequently exonerated, by UK police last year.)

Indian artist cleared of obscenity

The High Court in New Delhi, India, yesterday cleared artist MF Husain of obscenity, and ruled that his painting Mother India is not sacrilegious. (After the painting was exhibited in 2006, Husain was accused of disrespecting Hindu culture, and he went into self-imposed exile in Dubai.)

Hrdlicka's painting removed

An exhibition of religious paintings by Alfred Hrdlicka, Religion Fleisch & Macht, at Vienna's Dommuseum, has provoked criticism from Austrian Catholic leaders. One of the paintings, a homoerotic version of Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, has been removed from the exhibition. The exhibition also includes paintings featuring a crucified (and, in at least one instance, erect) Jesus being simultaneously groped and tortured. (Tumescent Christs have caused several previous artistic controversies, including statuettes by Terence Koh and cartoons published in The Insurgent.) The exhibition opened on 12th March, and is scheduled to close on 10th May.

Tomyam Pladib

Tomyam Pladib, which opened on 19th March until 5th June, is an exhibition of Thai and Japanese art hosted by the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. The exhibition features Emerald, a video by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Emerald is the name of an abandoned Bangkok hotel, and Apichatpong's slow-moving camera films the hotel's deserted rooms filled with floating white feather-like objects. The effect is elegiac and contemplative, evoking the memories of the hotel's long-departed guests.

Apichatpong discussed his various films and videos in a presentation this evening (Apichatpong On Video Works). He explained the origins of his multi-screen video installations (one of the more surprising sources being Thai melodramas), and played extracts from several of his films. He also screened a few short films in full: Ghost Of Asia (a man follows the instructions of a group of children), 0116643225059 (a telephone call between the director and his mother), and The Anthem (a wonderful overture to cinema, first screened at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival). There was also a short Q&A session with the director.

Berlin gallery cancels exhibition

An exhibition at Galerie Nord, Berlin, has been closed ahead of schedule following threats of violence from a group of Muslims.

The exhibition, ZOG, by a Danish duo known as Surrend, satirises religious and political extremism. It opened on 22nd February, and was due to run until 29th March. However, a group of six Muslim men threatened gallery staff with violence last week, prompting the gallery to close the exhibition early.

The men demanded the removal of one artwork from the exhibition: a poster-sized photograph of the Kaaba (Islam's holiest site, a granite cube in Mecca's Masjid Al-Haram mosque). Above the photograph of the Kaaba are the German words "Dummer Stein", meaning 'stupid stone'.

Calling the most sacred site in Islamic culture a stupid stone is, of course, offensive to any Islamic person. But if you're offended by an art exhibition there's a very easy solution: don't visit the gallery! No-one should have the right to demand the removal of 'offensive' art. If I was offended by an exhibition (unlikely, I know), then I probably wouldn't go to see it, and I certainly wouldn't interfere with other people's right to see it.

The happy irony is that, while only a small number of visitors chose to view the poster at the exhibition, potentially millions of unsuspecting people have seen it reproduced in the media following the news of the exhibition's closure.

Artspace Germany

Artspace Germany, organised by the Goethe Institute of Bangkok, is an excellent opportunity to see works by highly influential modern artists. Arguably the highlights of the show are the sculptures by Nam June Paik and Joseph Kosuth.

Paik is regarded as the father of video art: in 1965, he and Andy Warhol, working independently, were the first artists to incorporate video footage into their work. Two of Paik's iconic video sculptures, constructed from TV monitors, are included in this exhibition: Internet Resident and Candle TV.

Kosuth's work demonstrates the principles of semiotics, with a real object exhibited alongside a photograph and dictionary definition of the object. Kosuth first demonstrated this concept in 1965, with a real chair, a photograph of the chair, and a written definition of 'chair' presented side-by-side. In this exhibition, the same principle is applied to a frying pan (One & Three Pans).

Artspace Germany is showing at PSG (Silpakorn University) from 6th-27th February.

Seduced catalogue

The catalogue which accompanies the current exhibition Seduced: Art & Sex From Antiquity To Now presents representative images covering all aspects of the exhibition alongside contextualising essays by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp, and Joanne Bernstein.

Seduced

Seduced: Art & Sex From Antiquity To Now, an exhibition at the Barbican in London (from 12th October 2007 until 27th January 2008), presents an historical survey of sex as represented in various artistic media from Classical sculpture to contemporary photography.

Every significant field is included: Japanese illustrations from the 18th and 19th centuries, Victorian and early 20th century erotic photography from the Alfred Kinsey collection, outrageous drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Surrealist images by Man Ray, illustrations for Justine and The Philosophy Of The Boudoir, and the Kama Sutra. There are even late drawings by Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and an early (self-satisfied) Picasso self-portrait. Sex in contemporary art is represented by Andy Warhol's film Blowjob, and collections of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (his most sado-masochistic, homoerotic images), Nobuyoshi Araki (close-up, eroticised images of isolated organs and snails), Jeff Koons (quasi-pornographic self-portraits with Illona Staller), Thomas Ruff (out-of-focus images appropriated from porn websites), and Nan Goldin.

Goldin's work, a slide-show of naturalistic images, is the only exhibit to carry an individual 'explicit content' warning, although the Kinsey slideshow is far more graphic; the Goldin warning may be a precautionary reaction to the fuss over her recent Baltic exhibition. There are very few notable omissions, though Warhol would have been better represented by Blue Movie, and Carolee Schneemann's film Fuses should have been included, as should Andres Serrano's History Of Sex photographs.

2008: A Film Odyssey

The Barbican in London will present an exhibition of Kubrick artefacts early next year (21st to 27th February 2008). Archive material has previously been shown in Germany, Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. The exhibits are on loan from the Archive at the University of the Arts.

Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra is an artist with a social conscience, whose work highlights the capitalist exploitation of labour, though by paying marginalised individuals to perform demeaning tasks the artist has become a part of the system he is critiquing.

His latest work involved Indian scavengers collecting dried human excrement and moulding it into twenty-one large blocks, which are currently on show with six other works at the Lisson Gallery in London (30th November 2007 until 19th January 2008). The show is titled New Works, accompanied by a catalogue titled Seven Works. Collectively, the excrement blocks are known as Twenty-One Anthropometric Modules Made From Human Faeces By The People Of Sulabh International India.

Get Real

Get Real is an exhibition organised by furniture design company Herman Miller. The exhibition features classic pieces of furniture (principally chairs) designed for the company since 1946. The highlights are George Nelson's bright, quirky Marshmallow sofa (1956) and, especially, the mass-produced moulded plywood (1946) and plastic (1948) chairs by Charles and Ray Eames. Get Real is at Siam Paragon from 10th November until tomorrow.

From Message To Media

From Message To Media (its title inverting Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message") is a retrospective survey of Thai new media art 1985-2005, at Bangkok University Gallery from 22nd September until 10th November.

The exhibition, part of the Bangkok Design Festival, features video art and digital photography by ten artists. (Eleven were originally planned, though for some reason acclaimed director Apichatpong Weerasethakul was unfortunately omitted at the last minute.)

Apinan Poshyananda's video installation How To Explain Art To A Bangkok Cock (1985) features footage of the artist interpreting Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa for a group of chickens. He was presumably inspired by Joseph Beuys's performance How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare - the difference being that Apinan's chickens were all alive. Apinan also printed photocopies of Leonardo's painting onto crates, so that they resembled Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. (He has also silkscreened the same image, titled Metamorphosis Of Mona, in a further Warhol parallel.) He cites Walter Benjamin's fascinating essay The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction as a key influence, and he is one one of the most interesting of the many artists inspired by Benjamin.

Several videos by Vasan Sitthiket were shown, including There Must Be Something Happen [sic.] (1993), in which he was filmed while urinating and excreting (similar in content, if not in style, to the Aktionist films by Kurt Kren, such as The Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Film). Vasan's other videos include I Manning Myself Around (the artist's fruitless attempts to grab some money dangling in front of him), Top Boot On My Head (performing everyday tasks with a boot balanced on his head), Goodbye Thailand (in which he pretends to kidnap himself at gunpoint), and How To Make A Good Art For Get Win Award [sic.] (in which he presents a lecture on art to an empty classroom).

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook was represented by her video Reading For Female Corpse (2001). [Confusingly, I saw a different Araya video two years ago which had the same title and date.] Araya can be seen reading aloud to a woman's corpse which is positioned in a coffin-like glass box.

Manit Sriwanichpoom's trademark 'Pink Man', a man in a bright pink suit pushing a shopping trolley incongruously inserted into photographs, is seen here as a spectator at the public lynchings of Thai pro-democracy protesters in 1976. The images (Horror In Pink) are extremely powerful, especially Horror In Pink I, in which a hanged man is about to be savagely beaten with a chair. This horrifying photograph (taken by photojournalist Neal Ulevich) should be on permanent display, lest we forget.

A few of the exhibits were slightly mislabelled, and these typos mostly go uncorrected in the exhibition's otherwise amazing 100-page, full-colour, free catalogue.

Goldin photo not obscene

Nan Goldin's photograph Klara & Edda Belly-Dancing, investigated by UK police last month, has been cleared of obscenity. The Crown Prosecution Service confirmed yesterday that the image is not indecent.

monk painting withdrawn

A painting by Withit Sembutr titled Doo Phra, depicting a group of Buddhist monks crowding around an amulet-seller, has been withdrawn from an exhibition in Bangkok.

Withit, an art student, entered the painting in the Young Thai Artist 2007 competition, and the winning entries are currently on show at the Esplanade mall. There is, however, a blank space where Withit's painting should be.

It was withdrawn due to controversy surrounding a painting by another artist, Anupong Chantorn, which is currently being exhibited at Silpakorn University in Bangkok (at the 53rd National Exhibition, until 30th October). Anupong's painting, Perceptless, shows monks with beaks, presenting them as bird-like scavengers. There have been demonstrations against the painting by Thai monks, though it has not been removed.

Creativities Unfold

Creativities Unfold 2007 at TCDC (10th-14th October; creativitiesunfold.com) featured a series of design workshops, seminars, and symposia, and was part of the Bangkok Design Festival. We went to the final day's event, the Genius Loci & Design symposium, to see Pen-Ek Ratanaruang and Stefan Sagmeister.

Pen-Ek, one of the leading directors of the Thai New Wave, explained that the uncommercial, depressing nature of his films reflects his personal interests in grief, death, and funerals. Alongside clips from his own films, he included sequences from Manhattan, and revealed that he is a fan of Woody Allen. (Unsurprising, as Allen appears to have a similar personality.)

Austrian graphic design superstar Sagmeister showed examples of his previous work, concentrating on the written mottoes (similar to Jenny Holzer's Truisms series) which have appeared in a wide range of typographical styles (as a digital spider's web, written in sugar, a microscopic image, and others). He was candid about the problems some of his commissions have created, such as when the full-page message "Money does not make me happy" was mistakenly printed as "Money does does make me happy", instantly reversing the intended meaning. Unfortunately, though, he didn't mention his most famous project, which involved carving the text of a poster into his bare flesh in 1999.

Bangkok Design Festival 2007

This year's Bangkok Design Festival (bangkokdesignfestival.com) runs from 10th-21st October. Among the many events are Creativities Unfold 2007 at TCDC and From Message To Media at Bangkok University Gallery.

Goldin photo cropped in UK media

Nan Goldin's photograph Klara & Edda Belly-Dancing (removed from a UK gallery last week) has been published in The Sunday Times today, though the 'offensive' lower part was cropped. The image appears twice in the newspaper's News Review section, on page one and page seven. It was also included, again with the lower portion cropped, in a BBC TV news report on Thursday.

[The picture has previously been printed (also in censored form) in the tabloid News Of The World on 11th March 2001.]

There's a full-page, uncensored and uncropped, reproduction of the image in Goldin's monograph The Devil's Playground (2002), on page 115. The Thanksgiving exhibition at Baltic has now been closed, on the requests of Elton John (who owns the photos) and Nan Goldin herself.

Nan Goldin photograph obscene?

Staff at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (UK) have alerted local police to a potentially obscene image of a child, and they are currently assessing its legality. The picture was to have been included in a retrospective exhibition by photographer Nan Goldin, titled Thanksgiving. The exhibition is currently on show at Baltic, though this single image is missing.

The photograph (Klara & Edda Belly-Dancing, 1998) shows two young girls, one clothed and the other naked, both of whom have their legs spread open. It has previously been seen in several international exhibitions: Thanksgiving (White Cube, London, 2000), I Am A Camera (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2001), Le Feu Follet (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), The Devil's Playground (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2002; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2002; Castello di Rivoli, Rome, 2002-2003; Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2003), and Still On Earth (Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, 2002).

Photographs of children by Robert Mapplethorpe, Graham Ovenden, David Hamilton, Tierney Gearnon, and Annelies Strba have previously been seized by UK police as potentially obscene. In America, the FBI investigated photographer Jock Sturges after raiding his studio, though no charges were brought.

'roundabout dog' Mohammed

These drawings of Mohammed as a dog, by Swedish artist Lars Vilks, were recently removed from a group exhibition and have since been published in two newspapers.

Mohammed is portrayed as a 'rondellhund' ('roundabout dog'), stylised canine sculptures which appear on Swedish roundabouts and roadsides. The exhibition, The Dog In Art, took place in Tallberg, Sweden, and the images were removed on the opening day. The excuse given was that the drawings, like the Danish cartoon caricatures of Mohammed, might be too provocative. They were published in the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda on 18th August. Three Swedish Muslim organisations are now claiming that publication of the cartoons constituted an incitement to racial hatred, and the claim is being investigaed by the Swedish Chancellor.

Kubrick exhibition in Rome

The Kubrick exhibition, previously held in Germany, Australia, Belgium, and Switzerland, will open in Italy on 5th October, appearing at Rome's Palazzo delle Esposizioni until 6th January 2008.

Love & Money

TCDC's new exhibition, Love & Money (20th July to 16th September) features twenty examples of modern and contemporary British design, including the Berliner redesign of The Guardian and Channel 4 TV's new corporate identity. There's even a video of the original Channel 4 idents from the 1980s, which makes me feel very nostalgic.

Coincidence

Coincidence is a small exhibition of observational photographs by Thai director Pen-Ek Rattanarueng, taken while he was filming on location in various countries. Many of the images capture incongruous advertising images, one of which (titled Bean) recalls my comment in March about Mr Bean's face plastered around Bangkok underground stations. The exhibition is running from 16th May until 17th June at Siam Paragon; it's not advertised, but go to the 5th floor cinema box office and you'll see it.

What Is Design?

Thailand Creative & Design Center's permanent exhibition, What Is Design?, features a VW Beetle and other modern icons. It's only a small exhibition, though it's the kind of permanent showcase of classic design that's sadly missing from London's Design Museum.

Kubrick exhibition in Switzerland

The Kubrick exhibition, previously held in Germany, Australia, and Belgium, will open in Zurich, Switzerland, later this month. It now has a new official website, stanleykubrick.ch.

It will be on show at SihlCity's Kulturhaus Papiersaal centre, Zurich, from 26th April until 2nd September. It will then move to Italy in October.

Imagine The Sky

Kathmandu photography gallery is currently showing an exhibition by Kraisak Choonhavan titled Imagine The Sky (from 3rd February to 28th March).

Kraisak was a senator in the Thaksin government, and these images represent his frustration at the red tape which prevented him from generating any real changes. They were a private, stress-relieving Photoshop experiment until Kathmandu suggesting exhibiting them publicly.

Bangkok, like any city, is full of advertising billboards. Kraisak has used Photoshop to digitally remove some of this clutter and present idyllic images of an advertising-free Bangkok cityscape. He juxtaposes 'before' (real) and 'after' (Photoshopped) photographs, and the contrast is startling.

If you look up close at the 'after' images, imperfections in the digital manipulation are revealed, though the immediate effect is highly impressive. (Like Pop Art, these works should be seen from a reasonable distance, generating a sudden impact.)

Idomeneo staged in Berlin

Idomeneo, the Mozart opera directed by Hans Neuenfels featuring the decapitated head of Mohammed, was performed yesterday at Deutsche Oper Berlin. It will be performed again on 29th December. A triumph for freedom of expression!

Women In A Society Of Double-Sexuality

Tang, a gallery of contemporary Chinese art, is currently showing an exhibition titled Women In A Society Of Double-Sexuality. The exhibition features paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos by thirteen female Chinese artists, most notably Chen Lingyang's photographic series Twelve Flower Months (2000).

Twelve Flower Months is a collection of a dozen images, each depicting a different flower. Each photograph was taken as the artist was menstruating, and her menstrual blood is visible in each image, as it trickles down her leg or stains her crotch. The age-old fear of menstrual blood, perhaps the most potent cultural taboo, is directly challenged.

Chen was interviewed for the fascinating Channel 4 programme Beijing Swings in 2003 and she discussed the deeply personal nature of Twelve Flower Months. The exhibition runs from yesterday until 20th January 2007.

Willing To Be Lucky

An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York (mcny.org), Willing To Be Lucky, presents photographic images of New Yorkers from the 1940s and 1950s, taken from the archives of Look magazine.

The exhibition includes a section devoted to Stanley Kubrick, who was a Look photographer in New York before he became a film director. It opened on 21st October, and closes on 3rd January 2007.

Victor Hugo & abstract art

One of the many intriguing subjects in Marina Warner's new book Phantasmagoria is her chapter on the Rorschach inkblot test. It's fascinating because it suggests several progenitors of abstract art.

Herrmann Rorschach's inkblots were purely abstract shapes, though they were designed not as art but as psychological tools, as patients were asked to discern form and meaning from the symmetrical patterns. Rorschach's research [try saying that as a tongue-twister] began in 1921 (after abstract art had established itself), though more interesting are the earlier, similar experiments of Justinus Kerner.

Kerner also produced abstract, symmetrical inkblots (much earlier than Rorschach, from circa 1853 onwards), though he then added eyes, limbs, and other recognisable features, transforming them from abstract blobs to figurative images. These designs were known collectively as 'klecksographien'.

The real revelation, though (at least to me), is the work of Victor Hugo, who painted abstract images in ink circa 1850-1870. Hugo's 'tache' stain-paintings were created from random splashes of ink, prefiguring Abstract Expressionism by 100 years. Earlier this year, I wrote about early cinema progenitors, and it seems that abstract art may require a similar antedating.

The birth of abstraction in art is generally dated to the first decade of the 20th century. In 1908, Wilhelm Worringer published Abstraction & Empathy, and there was an explosion of geometric abstraction in painting circa 1913, including works by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrain, Frantisek Kupka, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, and Kazimir Malevich. Of these artists, Kandinsky is most often singled out as the father of abstraction.

Kupka's Amorpha: Fugue In Two Colours (1912) is regularly cited as the earliest abstract painting, though in fact it is a depiction of movement, thus not strictly abstract (though perhaps Futurist?). Arnaldo Ginna's 1908 painting Neurasthenia has been described as "probably the first abstract painting in the history of Western art" (in Cartoons, by Giannalberto Bendazzi, 1994), though I have not [yet] been able to find a reproduction of it.

However, the random tache paintings of Victor Hugo predate all these examples of abstract art. Hugo even titled one such painting Abstract Composition, and, while it is undated, it was probably produced in the early 1870s. The origin of abstraction is one of the most fascinating aspects of modern art, and perhaps Victor Hugo's Abstract Composition is the earliest candidate?

Ayodhya opera censored

Following the banning of Idomeneo in Berlin, another opera has been censored, this time here in Bangkok. Ayodhya, Somtow Sucharitkul's operatic interpretation of the epic poem Ramayana, was performed in Bangkok on three nights last week. Each of the performances was censored following intense pressure from the Ministry of Culture.

The opera's final scene, as originally staged, included one character, the demon Thotsakan, being fatally wounded. However, the Thai Ministry declared that, according to the tradition of 'khon' dance-drama, it is bad luck to depict Thotsakan's death, therefore they would not permit it in Ayodhya (even though Ayodhya is an opera, not a khon performance). Somtow, who has an extremely high reputation in Thailand and internationally, did fight the decision, though he later reluctantly caved in.

Kubrick exhibition in Belgium

The Kubrick exhibition, previously held in Germany and Australia, has moved to Ghent in Belgium. It is on show at the city's Caermersklooster from 5th October this year until 7th January 2007.

I saw the exhibition with my friend and fellow Kubrick obsessive, Fili (of archiviokubrick.it), which was the best possible way to see it. It features various props from each of Kubrick's films, including iconic items such as the typewriter from The Shining and the 'starchild' from 2001. There are also pages from Kubrick's notebooks and scripts, and hundreds of previously unseen Kubrick photos.

Terence Koh installation withdrawn

An installation by artist Terence Koh, titled Medusa, has been withdrawn before the opening of a Saatchi Gallery exhibition in London. Medusa was due to be part of the group show, USA Today, though Charles Saatchi has announced that, due to limitations of space, it will not be included.

Saatchi is not usually afraid of controversy, and Koh's work has attracted extensive publicity for the new show, though it does seem that Saatchi is concerned about the potential consequences of showing Koh's work. The installation features statuettes of Jesus and Mary, each with enormous, erect phalli, posed next to a urinal.

Koh also included a statuette of a tumescent Jesus in his installation Gone Yet Still last year. Equally provocative images appeared in The Insurgent magazine earlier this year.

Germany drops Mohammed's head

Deutsche Oper Berlin has cancelled performances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1781 opera Idomeneo originally scheduled for November, following advice from the German police.

In his interpretation of the opera, director Hans Neuenfels includes a scene featuring the decapitated heads of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and Poseidon. The production was performed in 2003, though it was felt that a revival this year may incite Muslim protests and thus put the safety of the performers and audience at risk.

Presumably Christians and Buddhists (and ancient Greeks?) would also be offended by the opera, though it is the possible Islamic reaction which has prompted the cancellation. Christians and Buddhists may be offended, though they wouldn't try to burn down the opera house or issue death-threats against the cast, whereas Islamic extremists might have done so.

Dickinson acquitted; Dickinson charged

Michael Dickinson has been acquitted of all charges relating to his collage Best In Show. However, he now faces similar charges in relation to a new work, Good Boy, again portraying the Turkish Prime Minister as a dog.