Chto Delat or What is to be done is an artist group from Saint Petersburg explicitly demanding for a reevaluation of left values. An exhibition of their work is on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Here can be seen the video which was part of the exhibition: http://vimeo.com/12130035. The video stems from the documentation of the art collective of the social and political actors intervening in a controversial plan to build in the center of St Petersburg “the Okhta Center with a Gazprom skyscraper”. But more than this the video shows Russian society divided by fractures ironically sung about.

Today was launched a database that collects information about works of art plundered by the Nazi from Jewish owners in France and Belgium . This project is interesting as it offers this search-able database and it continues the judicial fights already under way in Austria and Hungary (some of the most visible scandals/trials of last year). Hitler’s project to create the art museum of his dreams also with the help of “loans” from other museums in the countries occupied is known but what seems still surprising to me is the way in which people like Goring would hold a discourse publicly and would thereafter try to do their best to collect some more “degenerate art” (!)
The database can be accessed at this address: http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/

A photographer and documentarist, Meiselas is most famous for her work on Central America both through the use of photographs and film. The most important body of work she did, from my point of view, concerns the portrait of a revolution (the Sandinist revolution in Nicaraguain the 1980s) by registering history in its making which she characterizes as follows: “what happened in Nicaragua, I wanted to register the voices of the subjects that are embedded, I hope, as objects in my photographs. By knowing and recognizing its limits, the voice of the protagonist within the picture, challenges the image as a fixed moment in time” (see more).

Kosolapov is a very interesting artist which mixes symbols or icons of both the West and the East in his work (a representative of Sots art, an ironic Soviet version of the Westerners Pop art). An exiled artist in New York during the Cold War he is most famous for his Lenin+ Coca Cola works; the mixing is the most interesting part of his work as it helps bring irony to the images created (see the Lenin series on the artist website at: www.sotsart.com).

Dragos Burlacu, from the Understanding History series

* allusion to the stencil showing Ceausescu and the tag: I’ll be back (see below)

the anonymity of the character is part (if not the most important part) of the street artist (turned film maker with the screening of his first “pseudo-documentary” at the Sundance festival) Banksy. where does the anonymity end and the branding begin (from street, fugitive art he has been transformed in a gallery sold artist) is another question. Banksy makes art with no official approval, even despite it, and he is sold, and famous for it. I wonder where would Banksy find himself in the planned – by the Romanian Union of Visual Artists – law to create an “official statute” of the artist to be confirmed by a committee or something as such.

I recently saw two great exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The first one was the presentation of the work by American photographer, Robert Frank, The Americans, an album in fact dating of 1959. Frank shows America the way he saw it by traveling across the country in 1955-1956. So many opposite images: political men, the desertness of the paysage, the new Hollywood stars, the diners, the poor, the left behind, the blues and the open horizon.

The second exhibition, American Stories looked at American painting of the everyday in the period 1765-1915 and spoke of the American society. The political was present everywhere: be it race discrimination, be it women disenfranchisement etc. What struck me is the way the two exhibitions could have been thought of together. Maybe because it was my first encounter with America, I saw these paintings also as historic snapshots, just as Frank’s photos. They spoke of the construction of a nation, of its different components, faces and perspectives. I particularly loved this one, by Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910), Dressing for the Carnival (1877).

The third element to my American equation was the Kandinsky superb exhibition at the Guggenheim. I was not a particular fan of K (I loved the painting that opens the exhibition) but the expo greatly recaptures his evolution in parallel to politics. He is the artist that invokes the right to create “art for art”, not tainted or influenced by the politics of the time. In his search for the spiritual in art he leaves aside the political.

Still at the Guggenheim I saw the work of an English artist, Anish Kapoor entitled Memory that seems so right these days when all is talked about is the memory of 1989. His work has to be seen on site to feel its weight, to be confronted to the feeling of asphyxiation. I of course took the literal translation of the work and saw it as the unbearable weight of the past… (a link to a recent show by Kapoor in England)