This year, for the first time, at the fair’s invitation, DROME will attend the upcoming appointment with one of the most important annual art events of the world: The Armory Show, in New York City, the leading international contemporary and modern art kermesse which will take place from Thursday, March 8 to Sunday, March 11, 2012, on Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan.

While The Armory Show-Modern, a section dedicated to international dealers specializing in historically significant Modern art, will present 71 exhibitors representing nine countries, The Armory Show-Contemporary, on Pier 94, will feature over 120 leading international exhibitors, for a total of 30 countries represented.

For its fourteenth edition, The Armory Show will also inaugurate three exciting initiatives: Armory Film, Solo Projects and the new Media Lounge, which will host several unmissable on-site programs.

DROME will be glad to welcome you in the publishing area!

THE ARMORY SHOW 2012
Piers 92 and 94
web: www.thearmoryshow.com

New York City, 08-11.03.2012

Did maybe the nomads invent the identity between territory and law?

In 1950, Carl Schmitt used the ancient Greek word nomos, usually translated as law or order (translations that Schmitt didn’t seem to like), to refer to the primordial seizure of the land, with the related partition and distribution, and deriving from nemein, a Greek verb meaning both to pasture and to divide. To all traditionalist authors, at least on paper, nihilism represents the declared enemy, and by nihilism Schmitt understood a definitive and radical separation between order and spatial localization, that is the disappearance of the most authentic meaning of the nomos. In urban planning, nihilism would be the non-place coined by Augé and, at the same time, the utopia that casts some ideal regulations onto a non-localizable space. In political economy, nihilism would be the globalization and, at the same time, the internationalism of the workers. Nihilism would be the cosmopolitanism of the ruling élite and of the academic scholars and, the anarchic and libertarian dream of a world without borders. Nihilism would be the finance and, at the same time, the Web. Universal human rights are nihilist, the stateless persons and the people without a territory wallow in nihilism as well. Those who overrate Schmitt for the sophistication of his essays, should also understand what this author is driving at. Moreover, from this viewpoint, nomadism should be the most powerful antidote to nomos. Indeed, with all the types of nihilism that we have observed, it seems we will have to do with as many nomadic attitudes. To say nothing of psychic, gender, artistic, deterritorializations. In short, Deleuze and Guattari  showed great foresight. The philological reconstrution of the word nomos carried out by Schmitt is not wrong or incorrect, and it is strengthened by a previous study carried out by linguist Emmanuel Laroche, maybe the most comprehensive study on the matter: Histoire de la racine Nem- en Grec Ancien. The root nem-, in its most archaic meanings, signified to distribute, to divide, to pasture.

However, something doesn’t add up: the word nomadism shares that same root with the word nomos, and a nomad such as Bruce Chatwin was well aware of that. Did maybe the nomads invent the identity betwen territory and law? If that’s the case, we would also be allowed to have some doubts on the fact that nomadism is the most powerful antidote to political traditionalism, probably being the most ancient root, and we should therefore seek some theories that reject the dichotomy nomadism/nomos or that formulate it so as to permit escape form such limited paradigm. Meanwhile, we believe that an anticipation of a possible way out from such an impasse, which is typically post-modern, can be found in the following passage, written by a twenty-six-year old Karl Marx: “the landowner and the capitalist are mindful of their contrasting origin […]the landowner knows the capitalist as his insolent, liberated, enriched slave of  yesterday and and sees himself as a capitalist who is threatened by him […] The capitalist knows the landowner as the idle, cruel, egotistical master of yesterday, inoperoso, crudele, egoista, and he knows that he injures him as a capitalist […] This contradiction is extremely bitter, and each side tells the truth about the other.” The landowner “lays stress on the noble lineage of his property, on feudal souvenirs or reminiscences, the poetry of recollection, on his romantic disposition…” and  he depicts his adversary as a “sly, hawking, carping, deceitful, greedy, mercenary, rebellious, heartless and spiritless person who is estranged from the community and freely trades it away, who breeds, nourishes and cherishes competition, and with it pauperism, crime, and the dissolution of all social bonds.” The other, for his part, “points to the miracles of industry and movable property, he pities his adversary as a simpleton, unenlightened about his own nature (and in this it is completely right), who wants to replace moral capital and free labour by brute, immoral violence and serfdom; he depicts him as a Don Quixote, who under the guise of bluntness, respectability, the general interest, and stability, conceals incapacity for progress, greedy self-indulgence, selfishness, sectional interest, and evil intent; he declares him an artful monopolist; it pours cold water on his reminiscences, his poetry, and his romanticism by a historical and sarcastic enumeration of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarchy and rebellion, of which romantic castles were the workshops”¹. Try to read the legal logic of the “nomos of the earth” as the one of the landowner and the cultural logic of nomadism as that of the capitalist: if you feel tempted to align yourself, remind that the reason why they have always been at war with each other was their right to exploit you, the one as slaves and the other as wage earners.

Daniele Vazquez
21.02.2012

1. Karl Marx, Manoscritti economico-filosofici del 1844, Einaudi, Torino, 2004, pp.89-91 / (Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)

The story of Stephen Jones (interview for D 16 – Outlaw) begins in 1979 with the line of hats designed for Fiorucci. The most talented “mad hatter” of the last two centuries got in. Jones can boast of having decorated some of the most famous heads in the world. And considering how blue-blood, British style and hats, you know, have always gone hand in hand, Jones is the one who gave life and strength, more than anyone else, to the endless show of hats of all shapes and colours. And it’s him that has been curating the Headonism initiative, launched in 2009 by British Fashion Council and supported by Royal Ascot.
The projects’ aim is to promote young talents in the design of the hat. Charlie Le Mindu, J Smith Esquire, Noel Stewart, Piers Atkinson and William Chambers are the five designers of hats selected by Jones for this winter edition of the London Fashion Week: they will show their couture creations in the East Wing of Somerset House, giving value to the idea of headonism as an image of “London in an hatbox”. Chapeau!

 
 
Headonism
British Fashion Council
web: www.londonfashionweek.co.uk

London, from February 17 to 21, 2012

The permanent installation Alchemist, a monumental sculpture on the MIT Campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the art work Echo in Madison Square Park and the retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 2011 was a year of great satisfaction for Jaume Plensa, and 2012 couldn’t have gotten off to a better start than the exhibition scheduled at the Galerie Lelong in Paris.
As in previous works, even the Silhouettes fit gently in the space, noiselessly. These new sculptures developed by the enigmatic Spanish artist are formed by the outline, steanless steel, consisting of hundreds of letters of the alphabet welded together and of the stone block on which they rest. The Silhouettes by Plensa seem like people in retreat, like quiet hermits or modern stylites: silent observers of the noise and fury that surround them. An energy almost mystical transports the viewer into a higher dimension and a series of explanatory drawings accompany him on this magical journey.

17.02.2012

JAUME PLENSA
Silhouettes
Galerie Lelong
13, rue de Téhéran
web: www.galerie-lelong.com

Paris, from March 22 to May 5, 2012

Brad Pitt is a phenomenal actor, believe it or not, and his detractors should admit it, sooner or later. Lucky him, he is also the sexiest man alive, but that does not mean anything when you are offering performances such as Twelve Monkeys or Babel, just to mention a couple. And now he is giving voice to Billy Beane in Moneyball, a baseball manager who reinvents the way to build groups, manage situations, hire men. Based on Michael Lewis‘s novel Moneyball, the art of winning an unfair game, the movie is inspired by a true story and it is written by two masters of the script, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, who had already wrote The social network and tells without any epic or heroic faux pas how mathematics and a strong belief (even when inside yourself you do not totally believe) can turn around and uplift completely a group of losers in the diamond field. A metaphor for everybody’s life and one to polish again that American Dream that certainly has been losing appeal between illusion and politics.

Billy Beane, ex great hope of the pro baseball, is the manager of the Oakland Athletics and suddenly finds himself in a dead end. His winning team has been dismembered and the budget he has to rebuild is close to zero. With the help of Peter Brand, a smart nerd recently graduated (truth is the real guy, Paul de Podesta, did not like the way his character was portrayed and denied the use of his name), he literally invents a system to assemble, in spite of the sense of the absurd, a winning team. By using pure statistics and mathematical analysis, something never done before them, the pair hire players who have good statistics but maybe poor character, trusting their instincts and just numbers. Stubborn even when the results are discouraging, beaten and disappointed, Beane keeps believing in his dream even when the board would like to fire him. Able to stay steady and be fragile at the same time, nervous, obsessed by the idea of bringing bad luck to the team (he never watches the matches), amazingly strong to suffer all kinds of losses. Even in personal life. Until the wheel suddenly turns. He is on the verge of rewriting the history of baseball without even realizing it. Baseball is a romantic game that repays its lovers, but no happy ending here, it is not the final score that matters but the experience of the journey, from A to B. Beane coud rise up and triumph, signing pharaonic contracts, but he remembers to have chosen money just once before and that was not the right choice. In the end, he already changed the game as it used to be, he can forget money and choose love. Because, as he always says, how you cannot be romantic with baseball?

Elena Dal Forno
17.02.2012

MONEYBALL
A film by Bennett Miller
Sony Pictures International, 2011
web: www.moneyball-movie.net/site

synusi@pills ::: guest – azt 

synusi@: what do you strike more when you just met someone.
azt – The unexpressed variables. There is an infinite range of variables and possibilities to discover, verify, investigate… the person in front of me is a world to tell and my brain begins to structure our conversation in shots – I live in a world of images – what I see are possible frames of an impossible short film, a narrative sequence full of waiting possibilities, of minimum positions, of physical details that break violently into my imaginary world like falling asteroids. Also, all that a photographic image doesn’t say but must contain: the smells, the tone of voice, the speed or slowness of movements, the time passed, the future. When I meet a person, very often I undress them on my mind: I need to delete everything they did to “represent” themself, I need to remove the armour, to go beyond, deeper, to see what’s underneath, what really is, I need to get to the essential to find their more authentic diversity.

sy@: according to the dizionario dell’omo salvatico (i.e. the dictionary of the savage man) by domenico giuliotti and giovanni papini: when you see written “adult entertainment” is implied that it is obscene – and thus adults becomes a synonym for pork. in reality, poetry is capable of penetrating everywhere, and art can explore every path to deconstruct false imaginary. let’s talk about it!
azt – I have neither the interest nor the presumption to do any art “for everybody”, and I am not interested at all in childhood. The term “adults only” doesn’t worry me at all. The categories of morality and censorship fascinate me very little, except for that brief and incidental thrill I feel when I violate them, a very fleeting charm indeed. But this is not the point. The fact is that there are those who live and support a world in which “poetry” is synonymous with “naïve” and people like me who prefer a broader view at 360°, exploring a more extended horizon, going through the least explored and most intense regions of the human nature. I deal with some “removals” of the mainstream imaginary: the nudity, the sexual sphere in its specific genital meaning, the loneliness of the human being and the transience of bodies. All this is the essence of poetry to me, art always had to deal with this in a more or less explicit way. If I find beauty and poetry in what is universally considered as “obscene” I represent it, as I do if I find them in something socially acceptable (from my point of view, a photograph of a face or one of an erect penis are not that different, they are both “portrait”, there is no hierarchy between bodies and between parts of the body). It’s a matter of language, of poetics: sex – like death – contains an expressive potential of infinite beauty and truth. The paradox is to show this truth through the lie of an image, which is by definition a liar who says anything but the truth. It’s an insolvable problem that gives birth to some kind of mystery.

sy@: how to live a secret in the best way.
azt – I tell you a secret: I am the best person to tell secrets to, because I immediately forget them. My respect for secrets is total, absolute, and my mind practice it by erasing all of them (I have an eraserhead), moving them in a remote inaccessible area, a distant desert land with sand dunes and high rocky pinnacles. Some say that secrets are what you tell to people one by one, others that the best way to hide something is to put it under everybody’s eyes. Quite often, people consider their body as a secret, especially the genitals or their own shapes that they don’t like. This is kinda waste to me, because doing this way we limit the amount of visible beauty in the world, which consists precisely in the diversity, the defects, the secrets of our bodies, that should be naked instead of covered with cloth. In any case, art lives on revealed secrets. I’m sure if you think to one the most famous artworks – your favourite one, the most beautiful to you – it’s for sure one that reveals a secret, that makes visible the invisible, that dares to say what cannot be said… Did I get it?

concept ::: casaluce/geiger
17.02.2012

Il mondo nuovo (i.e. “The new world”) touches the African borders, walks from England to Baghdad and it mirrors the body of the Italian country. No luck seems to be left and many dissatisfactions float back up to the surface. Within this third album, it is now the entire world, the main protagonist of the sharp judgements of an eternal “horrors theatre”.

Welcome to Italy. Welcome to the sunshine country, welcome to the place where the sea is always blue and where people are distracted by a job they won’t ever be happy with. Welcome to the dissatisfaction, welcome to Rome, which is nothing but disgusting, but I can’t help to love this country.
No surprise, the third album opens up with incredibly hot topics, whose texture has been cleverly sewed together by the well-known “noir” storyteller; its lyrics and music have been labelled under the definition of noise-rock, but, however dark the story-line may be, we would be foolish not to distinguish a light at the end of the tunnel. God curses in English, but he will probably have mercy on us. Values such as peace, democracy won’t be worthily anymore, but it is people, at the end of the day, which deny their wish of change. The album draws its narrative within a broad geographical frame, reaching far out spaces, also though the ocean; the ocean as the metaphor of an anonimous urban sea made of indifferent citizens and the ocean as an actual force, out there, behind us. There is room to talk about utopias, there’s room enough for experiments and featuring, such as the one with the excellent Italian storyteller Caparezza. The artistic anger within the effective truth of representation gives birth to a shameless poetic composition. The concepts are sharp, the sounds hard, but the corners of the frame, are always rounded off. The album embraced stories about humanity, love and resignation, it faces problems of travelling and migrations, it talks about God, the war and about us, those people who still look for a new world, in vane.

Giulia Frigieri
16.02.2012

Il Teatro degli Orrori
Il Mondo Nuovo
La Tempesta Dischi/ Universal, 2012
web: www.ilteatrodegliorrori.com

For the art lovers, even if doubtful on the contemporary developments, a retrospective explores the first steps of video art: the Centre Pompidou opens an exhibition dedicated to the first two decades of this medium, which, first in analogical and then more and more in an avant-garde way, has been able to cross the aesthetic trends of those years with revolutionary communication skills.
“Vidéo Vintage. 1963-1983”, a project by Christine Van Assche, curator of the New Media department of the Parisian museum, consists of 50 works that span the speculative and expressive development of this art, from performance to the Fluxus movement, from the modulations of minimal art to post-conceptualism. A retraceable journey through signatures known and authoritative today, but unripe and experimenters in the frames of the retrospective: Marina Abramovic, Jean-Luc Godard, Nam June Paik e Bill Viola, just to name a few. If you find too daring and complex some contemporary artistic experiments, you can take refuge here: it will be heartening such as finding a Bible in Babel and take a look on it, hoping to be able to draw some conclusions.

Ilaria Giordano
16.02.2012

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VIDÉO VINTAGE. 1963-1983
Centre Pompidou
web: www.centrepompidou.fr

Paris, until May 7, 2012

All the senses, including sight, are extensions of the sense of touch;
the senses are specializations of skin tissue,
and all the sensory experiences are ways of touching
J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin

Constantly bombarded by “a continuous rain of images”, as defined in Italo Calvino’s American Lessons. Six proposals for the next millennium, we feel the sense of touch so essential to take it – paradoxically – increasingly for granted. Young designer Lee Sanghyeok, with the desk Listen to your hands, selected for the D3 Design Talents Competition and nominated for the Interior Innovation Award 2012 at IMM Cologne 2012, criticizes the current tendency to focus on the iconic value of design, and invites us to rediscover touch as the only effective way to interact with things.

In the promotional video of the project, desk drawers are opened and closed suddenly: every violent push forces the hasty opening of another drawer, and it is only when all are closed gently that, finally, there is peace. As suggested by the work of Lee Sanghyeok, it is exactly this ability of action to distinguish design from other creative arts: the objects are not contemplated, but lived.
The first to explore the tactile language of design was Bruno Munari in 1931, with his boards made of wood, sandpaper, cork, rope, metal, leather and other extravagant materials, designed to lead to different stimuli in direct contact with skin. In this research about the material appearance of the product, experiments are run that play with surfaces and textures in order to provoke unexpected poly-sensory reactions: it’s the case of Plastic Chair in Wood by Maarten Baas, a masterpiece in wood in the likeness of the classic plastic chair. The tactile sense is the foundation/basis of our cognitive relationship with the world: the body “feels”, and in virtue of its sensitivity, it deserves our complete attention. In the era of touch screen, as we are accustomed to barely touch objects to get a pulse, it is essential to re-educate our body to the pleasure of touching. Because design is in our hands.

Giulia Milza
15.02.2012

Further Recommended Bibliography

 
- M. Mezzeo, Tatto e linguaggio, ed. Editori Riuniti, Roma, 2003
- B. Munari, I laboratori tattili, ed. Corraini, Mantova, 2004
- J. Pallasmaa, Gli occhi della pelle, ed. Jaca Book, Milano, 2007

If you love those dreams with crepuscular tonalities, where the ambience is saturated like a crime scene, this is the place for you.

The Nightjar is a cocktail bar in Shoreditch, London, that, after just one year from its opening (2010), has been listed among the ten best bars in the UK, and ranked eighteenth in the Drink International Top 50 Bars in the World 2011. Its name explains everything. The nightjar is a medium-sized nocturnal bird that is hard to see and that, unlike most of the birds, perches along a branch rather than across it. In the myths of certain Western cultures, this animal guides the souls to the afterlife; in other cultures, he represents death, or a bad omen. It is featured in the Garden of Earthly Delights of H. Bosch (1504) as the Prince of Hell, it is object of a poem by Sylvia Plath and a story by H.P. Lovecraft. In short, it is an animal of a certain reputation, quite perfect for embodying the concept of speakeasy, which turns the Nightjar into a unique bar.

The cocktail menu is divided in four sections and it offers recipes of the Pre-Prohibition, the Prohibition, the Post-War, but also Nightjar signatures. You will see Luca Cinalli and Marian Beke behind the bar shaking your drinks with elegance and exquisite theatricality. Their cocktails are unique not only for the use of house-made syrups and liqueurs, but also for their renowned garnishes, which have been studied along with herbalists and perfumers for a complete sensorial experience. If a jazz or a swing band is playing, you’ll see few people shyly dancing: the true attraction here are the drinks. Customers study minutely the menu for hours, they wait for the drinks to arrive and then they talk about them with the rest of the table. Hence the cocktails become, in this place, the principal subject of conversation. In alternative to the mixed drinks, there are wines and liqueurs of course, some as rare as the Old Time Gin (1910) or the Straight Rye Whisky (1863), both for £60 per shot.

I went to the Nightjar for two nights in a row, and I sat at the bar. I won’t hide the fact that I lost myself in the movements of the barman’s arms and hands: at times they were fluid as those of an ice skater, at times they were robotic, but always somehow connected to a ritual, in which I have always been included. For two times I ordered this signature cocktail made with a house spiced campari, Amaro Italiano, a quail’s egg and more. Well, yes, “More,” says Luca Cinalli, because “the recipes are tailored around the customer, and there’s always that unrepeatable touch. We are and we believe in the Speakeasy. Those are the ingredients: the rest, it’s between the customer and I!”. The Nightjar really seems the bar on that pier from which the souls get ferried to the hereafter. You go when it gets dark, when London becomes more silent and is ready to receive your secrets.

Sada Ranis
14.02.2012

THE NIGHTJAR
129 City Road
London – EC1V 1JB
web: www.barnightjar.com

The first article on musical tips signed by Alpacha Distro and published on the DROME magazine website could only be about a standard-bearer of the DIY culture, one of the most important heroes of the past 15 years of indie label: Bruno Dorella, composer and guitarist of music band Ronin.

The first features of the latest masterpiece by the Ronin are also the soundtrack of the first Snake video game. Do you know how to play Snake? You move around in every directions with the goal to grow bigger and to try to last out, also reusing the same paths, as your body grows longer. A record with no words, which gives voice to personal and subjective views through circular arrangements that open and close a number of stories. A rock in the desert witnesses the last clash in the old West. A costume ballad features an obscure rite. A commercial for a 70’s pastel-coloured car. An unwritten episode of Breaking Bad. A snake roams around the world from north to south, from east to west as if it was the last gift before turning into something else. Each one find his/her own meaning in that, as the album is a complete expression of sound changes set in mix of landscapes for tales of passions or of rancors.
In a word, a classic Rock album. A work that alive might result even more enthralling. The band will kick off their tour in February and it will be hitting Italy and North Europe. Save the date!

Edo Tetsuo [Alpacha Distro]
14.02.2012

RONIN
Fenice
Santeria/Audioglobe, Tannen Records, 2012
web: www.ronintheband.com / www.audioglobe.it / www.tannenrecords.com

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DROME recommends:

RONIN – live at DAL VERME
Via Luchino Dal Verme, 8
web: dalverme8.tumblr.com

Rome, 16 February, 2012

ALPACHA DISTRO is open every day, 5.00 p.m. – 9.30 p.m. (and open late thru 11.00 p.m. in case of events).

Alpacha Distro c/o Forte Fanfulla
Via Fanfulla da Lodi, 5
00176 Pigneto, Rome
mail: alpachashop@gmail.com
web: alpachadistro.blogspot.com

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