┐ Endre Tót – 0000000 – Tót Endre └

Posted on June 18, 2013 by N

After works spanning from pop art collage and gesture painting all the way to minimal art object-pictures Endre Tót took a radical decision in 1971 and started his work completely from scratch. His collage paintings had already contained aspects of installation and his gesture painting had demonstrated the attitude that manifested itself in Tót’s life-long search for identity. His object-pictures (meaning the picture itself is an object, e.g. a tablecloth) signified his last step in painting and the first step towards installation. From the point of view of concept art, signals, messages, posted objects, ads and demonstrations can all be installations. Accordingly, Tót’s media include, among others, postcards, telegrams, letters, envelopes, stamps, rubber stamps, photocopies, faxes, objects, T-shirts, newspapers, electronic message boards, placards/posters, banners, boards, actions, graffiti, audiotapes, film and video.

“My Unpainted Canvases” were conceived as pieces of concept art, but with his slogan “Nothing Is Nothing” Tót entered the territory of “behaviour art”. This means that his behaviour is crucial to his art, since everything that happens to him – through his ideas – is manifested as art. In his gladness works the symbol of nothing, i.e. the zero-symbol 0, becomes an independent shaping tool with which anything can be expressed. In his ideas, in the nothing, gladness, rain, and later in his “mine-yours” works he created mature pieces of correspondence art. By using non-traditional media his documents, the nothing-, gladness-, and absent pictures, are simultaneously present in the mail art network. From the late 80s Tót returned to the use of traditional media, and in these (“absent picture”) paintings his gladnesses were temporarily left unseen. While “My Unpainted Canvases” are about what would make him glad if he could see them, his “absent pictures” made fifteen years later, imply what he is glad to have made disappear.

“I am glad to have stood here” is Endre Tót’s first “sidewalk table“, which he designed in 1996 to be placed in front of the entrance of what was to become the Artpool P60 exhibition space. At first, the sign in bronze, sunk into the asphalt, appears to be a commemorative plaque designating the place where a noteworthy event occurred. In contrast, the style of the text resembles tourists’ writing their name on monuments that will outlive them. The absences in the case of the commemorative plaque: when, until when, and why the person stood here, and once he did, who is this Endre Tót? a tourist? (By the way, Tót is definitely a space-time-traveller.) For a tourist a dusty asphalt sidewalk is not typically the place that would outlive him. So what are we talking about here?

This installation is a new type of absent picture, which harks back to “gladness pictures”; therefore it is worth comparing it with the “gladness pictures” Endre Tót made in the 70s: “I am glad if I can stand next to you” (he is standing next to a Lenin statue), “I am glad if I can look at the wall”, “I am glad if I can lift my leg”, “I am glad if I can go one step”; and a later work entitled “I am glad if this can hang here”, etc. These are all admissible attitudes for him in the present existing as a “kindergarten past”. Since Tót traverses a reverse path, the source of his present gladness is moved into the past (“I am glad to have stood here”), which can also be poetically understood in a way that he is glad about the present which is the past of the future. I am glad that Endre Tót stood here because in this way I myself became privy to a new space-time experience and from now on I will always be glad whenever I have the chance to (be able to) refer to the present as the past, since, as Flusser stated, “the road no longer leads from the past into the future but rather from the future into the present”.

Installing Endre Tót’s “sidewalk table” has been occasioned by Artpool’s installation project and the coincidence that as “self-assembling poetry” it can be directly linked with Miklós Erdély’s {SIDEWALK} table exhibition on Liszt Ferenc Square, as well as with Sándor Altorjai’s picture installations in Artpool P60. The idea was inspired by Miklós Erdély’s oeuvre exhibition in Műcsarnok.

text by György Galántai, October 1998, english translation by Krisztina Sarkady-Hart

┐ Berndnaut Smilde, the Weatherman └

Posted on May 5, 2013 by N

“I came up with a method using temperature controllers, moisture and backlighting. It took a while but I eventually got the hang of it. It’s not really a particular high tech process and the work does not function as a permanent installation. The cloud remains for only a few seconds. The physical aspect is really important but the work in the end only exists as a photograph.“

More of Berndnaut’s work here

┐ Augustin Rebetez, from joy to colera └

Posted on April 22, 2013 by N

“Augustin Rebetez breathes energy in his works. He has developed a very ownable style over a very short period of time, even though this is not easy to put in a box. With a combination of free and staged photography using his immediate surroundings, he constantly surprises with his work. Augustin is not afraid to cross over with sculpture, film, photography and even drawings. He is one of the rare new and raw talents that the world of photography is waiting for. The fact that he studied in Vevey and lives in the region came as a pleasant surprise for the international jury. The proposed project will be a very welcome catalyst to further develop his creative madness.” excerpt from the statement of this year’s Vevey award.

Augustin’s website here and his vimeo channel here

┐ Stuart Sherman, performance after writing └

Posted on April 22, 2013 by N

Stuart’s Thirteenth Spectacle (time), 1980, can be seen here

“Stuart Sherman, a member of the important generation of American avant-garde performance artists who rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed his own unique style across various media, the impact of which continues to resonate with the avant-garde eight years after his death. He devoted a large amount of his time to the creation of performances he called “spectacles”, which often took the form of small tabletop performances. These performances involved the manipulation of both familiar and unfamiliar everyday objects atop one or more folding TV dinner tables. Performed by a poker-faced Sherman, the spectacle performances sit in a unique hybrid space that moves between references to various genres including comedy, magic, musicals, minimalism, surrealism, opera, three card monte games, fluxus, and vaudeville. Through these performances, which consisted of series of intricately structured object manipulations, he crafted a unique identity both as creator and performer. While the spectacle performances were generally miniature in scale, they were certainly not miniature in ambition, exploring with great wit topics such as time, language, mortality, eroticism, and personal identity.” via NYU 80WSE Gallery press release

┐ Oleg Kulik, the “it”, the “his” and the “I” dog └

Posted on March 25, 2013 by N

“A man is an animal first of all. And then he is a Social animal, Political animal and so on. I am an Art animal, that’s why, spectator, I need your physical and psychological efforts to make sense.” Oleg Kulik

“Kulik has suggested: ‘I wanted to turn into a sort of new Diogenes, a dog-philosopher’ (2004:56); and, like Diogenes, the active force and vital optimism of his disruptive conduct is perhaps best understood as an uncompromising, transgressive hostility toward the inertia of conventional aesthetic and political gestures. In the uneasy transition to a post-Soviet Russia, the interventions of Kulik as a ‘clown of the catastrophe’ (Viktor Misiano in Watkins and Kermode 2001:63) engaged critically with dominant ideologies and alibis, and presented a range of political, philosophical, and ethical propositions through his bodily actions and accompanying statements. Some of the work explicitly denounced the corruption of the international art market and the commodificatory domestication of dissident aesthetics, as well as the Pavlovian conditioning of socialized gallery-goers. Other actions referenced specific political contexts, for example: the introduction of new capital punishment legislation in Russia during the 1990s, Russian elections (in which, like Beuys, Kulik put himself forward as the representative of the “Party of Animals”), the exclusions effected by the European Union, epidemics of animal disease, the fate of Montenegro in the breakup of former Yugoslavia, and so on. In particular, he returned repeatedly to relations between Eastern and Western Europe, and representations of contemporary Russia in the constitution of a new Europe as a deprived, unsophisticated, mongrel “other” that is charming as long as it remains passive, submissive, excluded, and doesn’t bite back. Kulik’s explicit critique of anthropocentrism seems to be a posthumanist extension of his radical misgivings about Eurocentrism, and a logical development of his critical stance on democracy’s blind spots and limitations. Kulik’s utterances contain echoes of a “deep ecology” in their utilitarian critique of the human subject. There are all sorts of other knowledges outside of the center, he proposes, if only one could create a new “united culture of noosphere” (in Watkins and Kermode 2001:14), an inclusive zoocentrist culture of the senses and of embodied perception”

“(…)

“What kind of dog was being represented here? The Kulik-dog, “a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws” (Joyce [1922] 1960:52), was ill-tempered, confrontational, combative; a wild, mad or fighting dog devoid of any of the other possibilities dogs actually possess. On some levels, it seems to have been little more than a rather reductive cartoonlike vicious dog, a “beware-of-the-dog” dog, territorial and irredeemably antagonistic, although arguably a great deal of courage must have been required to carry out this degree of pretence in many of the performance contexts Kulik chose. Becoming-dog here seems to have been a mimicry of selected attributes of canine behavior, an imitation game as spectacle directed at human beings (rather than, say, dogs). As Phillips has remarked in her critical appraisal of the Deleuzean trope of becoming animal: “Becoming is a fantasy that we do not really want to play out to its very end: to remain on the border-a human in a partial dog site, a dog with a human attitude-is about as far as we are willing to go” (2000:130). What remains remarkable, however, is the level of Kulik’s investment, the monstrous, amoral, libidinal, and exhibitionist energetics of his performance as “dog,” and the contextual, critical focus of his interventions.

Recently, Kulik has expressed certain reservations as to the effectiveness of his strategies in the Zoophrenia series (see for example Kulik 2004:56)-the reiteration of metaphor and stereotype in his representation of the animal as “non-anthropomorphous other,” as it is described by his collaborator Mila Bredikhina (in Watkins and Kermode 2001:52); the tendency for him as performer to collapse through immersive mimicry into a state of incoherent affectivity-and his recent work has moved away from Kulik-dog interventions of this kind. Nonetheless, in the unrestrained excess of his mimesis of aberrant canine behavior, Kulik managed to produce an indeterminate creature within which elements of the “animal” lurk alongside those of the “human,” rendering both terms and their constitutive difference unstable and in question: in Alan Read’s words, a “divided self of species relations” (2004:244).”

excerpt of Inappropriate/d Others or, The Difficulty of Being a Dog, by David Williams, in TDR (1988-), Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 92-118

┐ The House With the Ocean View └

Posted on March 24, 2013 by N

This post serves the sole purpose of sharing documentation about my favorite Marina Abramovic’s performance: “The House with the Ocean View”. There are not many photographs available on the web, so here is a a contribution.

photo documentation (day 1 – day 4) photographs by Attilio Maranzano

photo documentation (day 5 – day 8) photographs by Attilio Maranzano

photo documentation (day 9 – day 12) photographs by Attilio Maranzano

“In The House with the Ocean View, performed at Sean Kelly Gallery as a continuous 12-day “living installation” of such a form of pure presence, Abramovic gives a new and unexpected twist to the art world’s current over-saturation with cacophonous multimedia environments and conceptual installations. The gallery becomes her “house”, a sanctuary for a limited period of time in a city smitten with paranoia and fear of terror. We attend her imaginary ocean front, watch her in silence as she watches us. We become the ocean, so to speak, and Abramovic needs us in order to concentrate her energies. The visit to the “house”, three specially constructed living units-bedroom, sitting room, bathroom-halfway up the wall at one end of the open whites pace, is subject to a strict agreement that we enter when coming inside. As she subjects herself to fasting and silent meditation, interrupted only by banal actions of showering, peeing, and drinking water, she expects us to respect he discipline and the restrictions of such an ordeal and observe her in equal silence.”

excerpt of Marina Abramovic on the Ledge, by Johannes Birringer, in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 66-70

┐ Andrea Galvani, ways to space out └

Posted on March 19, 2013 by N

Conceptually, Andrea’s work is amongst the most interesting I’ve seen recently. His works have their own language, both conceptual and documentary, buh also appealing to the senses, evoking sound and parallel universes. His photographs not only evoke sculpture as they are presented like one, as much as they are performances, with their own body, breathing in their own space and time.

“A Few Invisible Sculptures #1, a large scale photograph, captures a performance Galvani staged in one of the oldest clay pits known in Europe. Now abandoned as an open museum, the clay pit in question supplied materials for terracotta artifacts and sculptures for over four centuries of human development. For his intervention in this historically loaded landscape, Galvani constructed a geometric steel sculpture and used it to replace the fuel tank on a motocross bike. The volume of fuel was translated into discrete action by instructing a rider to drive the bike in a continuous loop until all of the fuel was spent. The resulting sculpture takes the form of an excavation, translating the volume of fuel into a displaced volume of clay.

In A Few Invisible Sculptures #5, a second motorcycle and fabricated fuel tank sculpture come to rest at the end of the action. Documenting the end point of the sculpture’s existence, the photograph allows both a sense of monumentality and one of impermanence to coexist.”

“Deconstruction of a Mountain is a complex project that started out as a video, but for which, for the time being, I’m presenting a series of stills. I don’t like to talk about projects that haven’t yet been finished. I can say that, at the same time, I’m working on Il muro del suono (The Sound Barrier): its title refers to the physical phenomenon due to which an object (most frequently a plane) that exceeds the speed of propagation of sound (1,200 kph) probably enters a sort of capsule of silence. Both projects are related to the time of history and that of individuals, the image and its representation, and also the geography of an area and the invisible geometries sustaining it.”

I like to think of velocity as an access code to another level, a propelling acceleration so rapid that resets all references. When a plane goes beyond the speed of sound, it enters a capsule of silence. Its mass meets with a physical limit, abruptly interrupting the diffusion of sound waves, which are compressed until they stick to its surface like a glove. In the project Wall of Sound, a selection of photographic images are blown up and moved physically around the shoot location. The collision between actual landscape and photographic clone generates a force field, a visual plunge built around the rectangular perimeter that borders the images. The time between production and reproduction is compressed to the point that it appears absent.Wall of Sound is the staging of an impossible simultaneity, a two-dimensional deception, a transgression in the hysteresis of reality. The images both reveal and subtract. They are erected as altars and they safeguard mystery.”

More of Andrea’s work here

┐ Andrea Polli, memories as possessions in virtual space └

Posted on March 16, 2013 by N

“Research into the concept of appetite led me to consider my personal appetite for possessions. It became clear to me that I (like many others) have multiple layers of possessions. We have possessions that exist in physical space, as well as possessions in virtual space: images, sounds and texts stored in analog and digital media. My work, entitled Appetite 4, consisted of 32 porcelain dinner plates suspended on the walls of a small space and containing actual materials symbolic of my personal desires. A cellular phone, for example, symbolized my need for protection-i.e. the idea of being untouchable or unlocatable; keys referred to power and control. I photographed the material on each of the plates in its “ideal” state-lit to resemble a commercial product. Objects of desire in the virtual world exist in a visually heightened state to compensate for the lack of physicality. Remote visitors could access the desires in the virtual world through the World Wide Web (WWW) at <http:// homepage.interaccess.com/-apolli/ appetite.htm>.
(…)
The idea of possessions in virtual space, which I explored in the Appetite exhibition, led me to the conscious realization that virtual possessions are actually an integral part of non-digital life. Every human being has a storage bank of virtual possessions: memories. In fact, the computer storage bank is understood in human terms only through a metaphor of memory.

Fetish, part of Command-Shift-Ctrl exhibition in May 1996 at NAME Gallery, Chicago, explored the issue of memory in virtual and physical space. The installation consisted of 12 objects suspended on glass panels acting as a drop ceiling over the heads of the viewers. A computer in the space provided a virtual replication of the objects. In positioning the objects, I attempted to create a metaphor for the act of remembering. There are physical correlations to many emotional states-for example, joy is experienced as a physical buoyancy, and, in contrast, grief is experienced as physical weight. When trying to remember, humans often will move their eyes up and to the side (Color Plate B No. 1).

I lit each object with a dramatic spotlight, which created exaggerated shadows on the walls of the space. As in Appetite 4, lighting served to give the objects a larger-than-life presence in the space. I wanted to create a physical space that would refer to the mind’s virtual space during the act of remembering events and objects. Certain events have prominence in the mind, and the physical metaphor of size in relation to importance importance is utilized in the space through oversized shadows-foggy reproductions of actual events/objects. I selected the objects as signifiers of personal experiences related to past relationships.”

excerpt from “Polli, Virtual Space and the Construction of Memory”, in Leonardo, Vol.31, 1998

┐ Heather Cassils, this is what a durational re-performance looks like └

Posted on February 15, 2013 by N

“There are two constants in my life: art and exercise. Art started first, then after a serious childhood illness I discovered my body through lifting weights. I am now a visual artist and a personal trainer. My brush with mortality is something I see in the clients that come to me on a daily basis. Whether it’s recovering from heart surgery or bringing news of a brand new osteoporosis diagnosis, many of these people have come face to face with the limits of the mortal body.

Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture consists of a two-channel video installation, a pin-up, a photographic series and a zine. Last year I was asked to become an artist researcher by Los Angeles Goes Live (LACE). They were mounting an exhibition called Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance in Southern California 1970- 1983. I was commissioned by LACE to create a new artwork that spoke to the rich history of performance in Southern California. I hungrily delved into their archives and chose two works to guide me: Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972 and Lynda Benglis’s 1974 Artforum magazine intervention advertisement. I wanted my new work to interpret these feminist pieces, which take on gender, power and the body. I project these works into a context exploring what it is to be transgendered in today’s society.

Antin photographed herself while dieting as a take on how Greek sculptors found their ideal form by discarding unnecessary material from their marble blocks. Rather than crash diet, over 23 weeks I built my body to its maximum capacity. I did this by adhering to a strict bodybuilding regime constructed by master bodybuilding coach Charles Glass. David Kalick, a nutritionist specializing in diets for sports competition, designed a diet where I consumed the caloric intake of a 190-pound male athlete. I also took mild steroids for eight weeks of the training.

I documented my body as it changed, taking four photos a day, from four vantage points. I collapsed 23 weeks of training into 23 seconds, creating a time-lapse video (part of the two-channel installation Fast Twitch Slow Twitch). Juxtaposed against the speed-up of the time lapse are painfully slow motion scenes that depict moments from my training — a raw egg dropping into a mouth or a face as it “maxes out.” The audio in the installation is by San Francisco-based band Barn Owl. The music’s sonic layering echoes my body’s growth.” Heather’s statement

More about the issue of Re-formance can be read in the article Re-performance: History as an Experience to Be Had, by Megan Hoetger

Heather’s website here

┐ The turning point: Coyote, American ™└

Posted on January 16, 2013 by N

This photograph by Caroline Tisdall is from Joseph Beuys: Coyote, a 1976 book documenting Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance art piece, Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the artist spent three days and nights caged with a wild coyote in René Block’s New York Gallery.

“The ritual, obsessional, and quasi-exhaustive character of this list of the roles he either assumed or impersonated (lacking – and this is significant – only that of worker and prostitute) sets up echoes between Beuys’s work and an already extensive litany of similar identifications, all of them allegorical of the condition of the artist within modernity, all of them leading directly – more than a century distant – to a mythical country peopled with all the romantic incarna-tions of the excluded as bearers of social truth.
(…)
Doubtlessly, the real name of bohemia is the lumpenproletariat, or at least, the name of its correlate within the actual world: a no-man’s land into which there fell a certain number of people incapable of finding a place within the new social divisions- expropriated farmers, out-of-work craftsmen, penniless aristocrats, country girls forced into prostitution. Dickens and Zola have described this dark fringe of industrialization, these shady interstices of urbanization. But, like Baudelaire, Hugo, and many other novelists who hardly professed naturalism, they poured their inspiration into it, contributing to the fabrication of the image of this marginal, lumpenproletariat society transposed into bohemia, functioning all the more as the figure of a humanity of replacement in that it is a suffering humanity, such that nothing but true human values–liberty, justice, compassion–can survive there, and such that it contains the seeds of a promise of reconciliation.
(…)
The proletarian - a term that transcodes the bohemian as a social type that excludes the bourgeois but includes all the rest of humanity suffering from indus-trial capitalism – is not (or not necessarily) a member of the proletariat, that is, the working class. Of this latter, the myth of bohemia offers a displaced and transposed image; it creates of a transnational reality an imaginary land, a quasi-nation, without real territorial frontiers, since it is peopled with nomads and gypsies, unreal, like Jarry’s Poland. The worker himself is rarely an inhabitant. The image of bohemia, one could say, is ideological to the extent that it occults the reality that it is precisely charged with transposing: the massive proletarianization of all the men and women who did not belong to the bourgeoisie. But the proletarian is a construction no less ideological – or mythical – of the same personage or social type that the bohemian expresses in the discourse of art and of literature. Simply, it expresses it in the discourse of political economy, that of Marx, and even more specifically, of the young Marx. What, then, is a proletarian for Marx? He is someone-no matter who -who finds himself to have everything to lose from the capitalist regime and everything to gain from its overthrow. Everything to lose-which is to say, his very humanity–and everything to gain – this same humanity. The proletarian is, then, from the origins of industrial capitalism, a figure torn from the future horizon of his own disappearance. He is literally the prototype of the universal man of the future, the anticipated type of the free and autonomous man, of the emancipated man, of the man who will have fully realized his human essence. This essence lies in the two things that define man ontologically, as both a productive being and a social being. He is also a historical being. But as historical changes are only conceivable against the ground of an invariant substrate, they postulate an ontology, and the history of men can be nothing but the growth of productive forces and the progress of the relations of production. For Marx only conceives of man as homofaber: labor – the faculty of producing – is what makes him man, and the consciousness he has of it is the import of his humanity. It transforms the simple biological belonging to the human species into conscious- ness of participating in humankind, and thus makes of all products of labor the privileged place of collective living. This is why the social relation is the essence of the individual as Gattungswesen (species-being), and why as well, in turn, all social relations are, in the last instance, reduced to relations of production. These latter will only be free and autonomous with the advent of the classless and stateless society, the communist society of which the proletariat is the avant- garde. In the meantime the class struggle will be the order, since the proletariat is exploited and alienated by the capitalist regime to which it is subjected, or, to put it another way, since the proletarian, dispossessed of his human essence by social relations of production which admit of nothing but the regime of private prop- erty, still needs to reappropriate it through struggle.
(…)
But subjectively speaking the modern artist is the proletarian par excellence, because the regime of private property forces him to place on the art market things which will be treated as commodities, but which, in order to have an aesthetic value, must be productions and concretions of his labor power and, if possible, of nothing else. (…) Marx calls this universal faculty of producing value labor power; Beuys calls it creativity. Beuys is certainly not the first to give it this name, far from it. He is more like the last to be able to do it with conviction. Beuys’s art, his discourse, his attitude, and above all the two faces presented by his persona-the suffering face and the utopian face–constitute the swan song of creativity, the most powerful of the modern myths.
(…)
“Everyone is an artist.” Rimbaud already said it and Novalis already thought it long ago. The students of 1968, in Paris, in California, and gathered around Beuys in Dusseldorf, proclaimed it once again and wrote it on the walls. It always meant, and this since the German romantics: “power to the imagination.” It has never become a reality, at least not in that sense. But all that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have implied for the will to emancipation and the desire for dis-alienation has always meant: everyone is an artist, but the masses don’t have the power to actualize this potential because they are oppressed, alienated and exploited; only those few, whom we stupidly call professional artists, know that in reality their vocation is to incarnate this unactualized potential. Hence the two faces of modernity, of which it is Beuys’s pathetic grandeur to have worn both: the public, revolutionary, and pedagogical face, the one that is convinced that an adequate teaching will liberate creativity; and the secret, insane, and rebellious face, the one that claims that creativity is already of this world precisely there where it lies fallow and in waiting, crude and savage: in the art of madmen, children, and primitive.”

excerpt of Joseph Beuys‘, or The Last of the Proletarians, by Thierry de Duve in October, Vol. 45

┐ Yayoi Kusama └

Posted on January 2, 2013 by N

“Rather than confirming the ontological coherence of the body-as-presence, body art depends on documentation, confirming-even exacerbating-the supplementarity of the body itself. Predictably, although many have relied on the photograph, in particular, as “proof’ of the fact that a specific action took place or as a marketable object to be raised to the formalist height of an “art” photograph, in fact such a dependence is founded on belief systems similar to those underlying the belief in the “presence” of the bodyin- performance. Kristine Stiles has brilliantly exposed the dangers of using the photograph of a performative event as “proof’ in her critique of Henry Sayre’s book The Object of Performance. Sayre opens his first chapter with the nowmythical tale of Rudolf Schwarzkogler’ss uicidal self-mutilation of his penis in 1966, a story founded on the circulation of a number of “documents” showing a male torso with bandaged penis (a razor blade lying nearby). Stiles, who has done primary research on the artist, points out that the photograph, in fact, is not even of Schwarzkogler but, rather, of another artist (Heinz Cibulka) who posed for Schwarzkogler’se ntirely fabricated ritual castratio.

Sayre’s desire for this photograph to entail some previous “real” event (in Barthesian terms, the having been there of a particular subject and a particular action)leads him to ignore what Stiles describes as “the contingency of the document not only to a former action but also to the construction of a wholly fictive space.”23 It is this very contingency that Sayre’s book attempts to address through his argument that the shift marked by performance and body art is that of the “site of presence” from “art’s object to art’s audience, from the textual or plastic to the experiential.”24 Sayre’s fixation on “presence,” even while he acknowledges its new destabilized siting in reception, informs his unquestioning belief in the photograph of performance as “truth.”

Rosalind Krauss has recognized the philosophical reciprocity of photography and performance, situating the 16 two as different kinds of indexicality. As indexes, both labor to “substitute the registration of sheer physical presence for the more highly articulated language of aesthetic conventions.”25A nd yet, I would stress, in their failure to “go beyond” the contingency of aesthetic codes, both performance and photography announce the supplementarity of the index itself. The presentation of the self-in performance, in the photograph, film, or video-calls out the mutual supplementarity of the body and the subject (the body, as material “object” in the world, seems to confirm the “presence” of the subject; the subject gives the body its significance as “human”), as well as of performance or body art and the photographic document. (The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art event as an ontological “anchor” of its indexicality.)”

in “Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation by Amelia Jones
Source: Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4, Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century (Winter, 1997), pp. 11-18

Yayoi’s website here

┐ Tranimal – Hybrids before Photoshop └

Posted on December 20, 2012 by N

“Tranimal…Young’s new endeavor – a collaboration with Squeaky Blonde and Fade-Dra, is infused with the artist’s high voltage underground creative energy. Tranimal is a big and bold project. It incorporates video, photography, and interactive sound design. And its taking performance art to an operatic level. (…) Participants are put through an assembly line where Squeaky Blonde, Fade-Dra , Young costume them, make-them up and turn them into a cast of glamorous, genderless creatures. Mark Allen, director of Machine Project, makes light sensitive circuitry boards that are sewn into theor costumes. The boards have knobs that the performers use to change the sound frequencies, creating musical score with light and movement. Juliana Snapper, an opera singer and performance artist, guides the players to find the vocal expression of their new identities. The particpant-performers become collaborators in a musical performance. Then Young shoots formal portraits and video of the end result.” source: Phil Tarley, Fabrik LA

More of Austin’s work here

┐ Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) └

Posted on October 28, 2012 by N

“From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists’ books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender.

In her highly theoretical yet poetic video works, Cha uses performance, speech and text to explore interactions of language, meaning and memory. Much of Cha’s work balances a rigorous analytical approach with an almost spiritual evocation of transformation and suffering. Themes of displacement and rupture are articulated in forms derived from French psychoanalytic cinema and linguistic theory of the 1970s; Cha studied in France with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel, among others. Drawing on sources and strategies as diverse as concrete poetry, Korean cultural traditions and conceptual art, Cha speaks with a distinctive voice.

Cha’s exploration of exile and dislocation in her art is informed by her own history. Uprooted during the Korean War, her family immigrated to America in 1962, moving first to Hawaii and then to San Francisco. After years in the Bay Area and time in Europe, Cha moved to New York City in 1980. As an editor and writer at Tanam Press, she produced two well-known works, Dictée (1982) and Apparatus, an important anthology of essays on the cinematic apparatus.” source: Electronic Arts Intermix

More of Theresa‘s work here

┐ Adad Hannah └

Posted on October 25, 2012 by N

“Safari is a collaboration between film director Denys Arcand and artist Adad Hannah produced for the exhibition Big Bang, which celebrates the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ 150th Anniversary and the opening of a new pavilion.
The set for Safari is the Safari Seating Environment designed by the Florence based Archizoom Associati in 1968 and produced by Poltronova. Archizoom was founded by a group of architects and designers in 1966 and dissolved in 1974.
Arcand and Hannah developed a 7-minute scene that takes place in the back of a nightclub in the middle of the 1980’s. The scene revolves around the Safari Seating Environment, its sleek white sides and leopard print covered seats providing the stage for the set of actions performed on it. The actors featured in Safari are all employees of the museum with no formal acting training. After workshopping the scene for two days Arcand and Hannah shot the same 7-minute sequence from six different angles. Each actor had a set trajectory, performing certain actions at a set place in the timeline and remaining as still as possible the rest of the time. The result is a staccato and haunting recording of a single scene performed over and over for the camera.”

“In 2007, Michelle Jacques, assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, contacted me about creating a new project for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. I proposed taking over Toronto’s oldest jazz bar, The Rex, to create a temporal shift by staging possible localized histories within the aging interior. The project was called Traces. Several weeks before the one night event I shot a series of over twenty videos of tableaux vivants arranged around the patchwork of tables that make up the sprawling bar. During Nuit Blanche the videos were shown in the very location where they were made, creating a dialogue between photography, video, and performance. The installation lasted from 7pm on the night of September 29th, 2007 until 7am the next morning. This selection includes four photographic details as well as four autonomous videos.”

Two Views, Installation with 2 HD videos, 2 plasma screens, 2 stuffed birds, 2 wooden crates, acrylic paint, and other materials. Installed at DAÏMÕN / AXENÉO7, Gatineau, 2011

“Making a self-contained project that integrates both the artwork and the production of the artwork is something I have been working towards for a while. I am interested in the way video and photography bridge index and fiction, the here and now and the same place at a slightly different time.
The two crates each contain everything needed for the installation, the windows, the branch with the stuffed bird, the plasma screen, the wooden stands, the costumes, the book the model is holding, and the media player used to play the video. The videos were shot inside the same crates they are then exhibited on – the plasma screen simply replacing the camera.”

More of Adad’s work here

┐ What is Pussy Riot’s ‘Idea’? – Maria Chehonadskih └

Posted on October 25, 2012 by N

knitting patterns via poppalina

article in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy. A must read!

pdf here:che_pussy_riot

The dark side of the Pussy Riot multitude is an extreme individualism, manifest in the gesture of the removed balaclavas, behind which a unique ‘Russianness’ appears: first, the face of the leader, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova; second, dissident moralism, spirituality and asceticism – the brand identity of Russian revolutionaries since the populist movement of the nineteenth century; and third, the visibility of the local art and intellectual scenes as such. Tolokonnikova wrote:

The people that I have had the chance to work with during my actionist years were quite unusual for Moscow. They were not interested in money or comfort… They preferred not to spend time and their consciousness, which was ready to include and transform everything around them, on the daily grind and the striving for creature comforts. When they wanted to eat, they would break a loaf of bread. Their hearts were not heavy from either overeating or drunkenness. Their minds were fully occupied with whatever they were currently working on. They worked a lot, with fervor and enthusiasm. Even their knowledge of the fact that they might have to pay for their activities with prison did not stop them.

We are all Pussy Riot in the sense that without masks we are of the touching, phantasmatic East – wild, risky and unknown. If I speak of an ‘Eastern exotic’ it is without any cynicism towards to the group. Thanks to Pussy Riot our local political and artistic scene has at last received some attention. We are now very busy: curators make exhibitions about Pussy Riot, activists give lectures about Pussy Riot, and intellectuals and art critics, like myself, write texts about Pussy Riot…

Nihilsentimentalgia

Tag Archives: Performance