Animal Estates in Port of Rotterdam Authority

The Port of Rotterdam Authority commissioned Fritz Haeg to produce some of his Animal Estates (most famously presented at the Whitney Museum Biennal in 2008). This short documentary about the port's fauna and flora accompanies the works.

The video is slow and grey and the Dutch sounds unenthusiastic, but this aesthetic emphasizes the industrial landscape's uneasy identity. Like Haeg's work, the short is a reflection about the relation animals and humans have with each other. At first some facts feel more humorous, such as the swans inhabiting the Port dangerously activating the container porter machinery or drunk thrushes in bushes, while others feel darker, like the decrease of Skylarks and their singing -- by 95% in the past decade in the Netherlands, -- or the arrival of fast reproducing rabbit colonies in the oil tanks' meadows (for more on the tragic rabbit-human relation check out myxomatosis)). But overall, all demonstrate how intertwined they are in the larger systems humans engineer.

In any case it seems like a great initiative!

ANIMAL ESTATES 9.0 van Fritz Haeg from DWARSBOOM STUDIO on Vimeo.

What in the World is Art: An Example from the Field

A few days before the 2012 Whitney Biennial opened, a web page with the museum's logo, template, language and a similar url (www.whitney2012.com instead of www.whitney.com) announced the institution's decision to give up on certain "generous corporate donations" by terminating its partnership with the Deutsche Bank and Sotheby's. According to this release by resigning from such benefits the Whitney was acknowledging and, especially displaying its role in upholding "a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers" (I would add art lovers). The Whitney was taking a stance against the Deutsche Bank's corporate conduct (the bank just settled a legal dispute of $202 million for reselling knowingly shaky mortgages between 2007 and 2009) and deploring Sotheby's recent internal policies (the lock-out of its art handlers while making record profits and increasing its director's revenue from $2.4million in 2009 to $10.3 million in cash and benefits in 2011).

The world of art is a weird one that exists through the belief that certain "things" have magical-like forces over us. Often these magical qualities are explained by using intellectual concepts, discussing production prowess or expressing notions of aesthetics, while actually most of these "things with agencies" gain their aura through the tricky powers of financial markets. So for a museum to use its own existence to reveal the inner-workings of this weird cosmology - for instance museums may use artists because their sponsors need to sell things that may gain value if the museum uses this artist's work - was impressive, almost as impressive as good art. That excitement, however, lasted only until I learned the website was a hoax and experienced the Whitney biennial's overall blandness.

If that fake virtual press release was the most creative project to come out of the Biennial, I'm also excited to say that their hoax is part of a series of fake press releases and that their latest has just denounced the Whitney’s recent actual request for donations from blue-chip artists of work valued over $500,000.