Jan Holthoff interviewed on German Consular website

This variable relation between subject and object becomes particularly interesting when we encounter things philosopher Immanuel Kant calls “sublime”—vistas which are overwhelming, vast, occasionally terrifying, but nonetheless moving to behold. Mountains, canyons, and crashing seas are paradigm cases of grandeur that can shock us into feeling our own smallness. This kind of experience proved influential and inspiring for Holthoff, driving him not only to travel to some of the world’s most spectacular mountain ranges, forests and valleys, but also to probe his own encounters with the sublime through painting. His paintings depict realistic landscape features, but also abstract elements evoking experience and subjectivity.

— Robin Wilkins

See the full article on the consular website.

Jan Holthoff in "Guest List" at Lehr Gallery, Cologne

Three represented artists at Lehr Zeitgenössische Kunst in Cologne show their works opposite three guest artists. Jan Holthoff invited his colleague Ildefons Höyng, who like Holthoff studied at the Düsseldorf Academy.  The website explains that while Holthoff's romantic landscapes integrate representation and abstraction, Höyng's color field paintings explore the limits of the picturesque without falling into representation. Höyng was a master student of Gerhard Richter. The show runs through July 28.

The Bisected Moon – Takahiko iimmura at Microscope

Takahiko iimura: Between the Frames
Microscope, March 19-April 11, 2011

It was a supermoon over the Township of Bushwick. When the moon is full the penumbra of the City of Williamsburg draws inwards like a contracting tide, and the great heath of northern Brooklyn reclaims its Bushwickness for a night. And in the round ass of that very Bushwick lies the confluence of Evergreen and Myrtle, where in a pocket of that neighborhood is the gallery called microscope.

The more industrial the region, the more rarefied the event. The door to the place actually opens. And though the place is dark and silent, thirty people stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the room. On the wall the moon flickers, cast upon the wall by so many holes punched into a 60-foot loop of 16-mm film. Only the sputter of a projector sounds in the room. The loop of film careens like a cable along the length of the ceiling, and then drops in a corkscrew wiggle down in front of the jiggling moon, bisecting it.

Heads are transfixed, silhouettes are still, cellphone cameras raised all around. All the rest is space | space split open. Space bisected by the string of celluloid that also casts the dancing strobe. When the film finally jams up in a hot red toenail of light and the projector coughs and chokes and sputters out, the room erupts in applause, the house lights go up, and Takahiko iimura waves a springy bush of film triumphantly aloft.

iimura has been working in experimental film since the 1960s. On the press release Jonas Mekas writes, “He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else.” This is as basic, as classical a work of “conceptual” or “structural film” as you'll find, the work of a master axeman of minimalism. A piece of cinema, sculpture, and performance art, since iimura punches the holes into the film as it is rolling, until the film becomes too weak and jams up.

From an old school conceptualist, this is a poignant remark on Bushwick today. It was not only a clever film sculpture, but iimura deftly illuminated a neighborhood that has in fact made a transformation from manufacturing to a so-called "creative economy" that includes film production.

Jelena Tomic

Jelena Tomic arrived in Williamsburg in 1993 from Paris, ostensibly to study at a college somewhere in Queens. But it was I who ended up writing most of her papers. And in return she introduced me to the very scene of which I was supposedly a fixture. Experience counts for little in a youthful art scene. The ones who start the movement turn 30, and then they must be guided through their own invention by newcomers in their 20s.

Such was the case with Jelena and me. I had been in Williamsburg for a decade when she arrived. I met her at one of the illegal exotic restaurants that sprang up in the wake of the many illegal exotic nightclubs that had put the neighborhood on the map. And from that night onward, and for the year she was in New York, Jelena essentially re-awakened me to the neighborhood I thought I had invented. The music, the clubs, the fashion, the attitude. It was all new, a Williamsburg I did not know.

Only the year before I had been featured in New York Magazine as "Medea," queen mother of the hip new hood in Brooklyn. I ran the weekly paper, I mc'd the shows, I knew all the bartenders and politicians. And then, like an oblique turn in a film noire movie, I found myself being pulled into a side of Williamsburg I had not seen before, and by a beautiful young woman who had just arrived from Paris.

The soundtrack to this episode is undoubtedly "Crazy" by Seal. Jelena changed my life profoundly, and the change moved upon me with stealth, very much the way the opening grooves of that rapturous track by Seal slide up into the song.

I write about the history of the Brooklyn Renaissance, basically, and the afflatus of gentrification, and how art plays into it. And the matter of who started it all, when, and where, is interesting. Much more interesting, though, is what happens when the newer and larger numbers of young artists come to the neighborhood.

This opinion may be counter-intuitive. We look for the heavies, the giants who "pioneered" the place. But in real history, as distinct from the narrative of it, the opposite obtains. The scene gains in intensity and depth. The newcomers are frequently more intense than the veterans. A certain stark realism enters the picture, perhaps because the coziness of the old scene has been breached. And as a result, passion and energy actually increase.

The newcomers annoy the old guard to some extent, because they have an air of being motivated by a force that comes from before, from after, and from outside the scene into which they enter. It is not that the old scene is parochial, it really is not. But even so, the newcomers expand the scene. They cause it to darken and tremble. In any case, I write it down to a certain way of looking at history, and a lesson I first learned from Jelena.

Photo by Eva Schicker, 1993

See more pics of Jelena here.