┐ Eureka! self-portrait after Yunchul Kim └

excerpt from:
© Yunchul Kim, self-portrait.jpg, ink on paper, 90 X 140 em; 58,806 single handwritten characters, 2004.

“…when I deal with art after the media I do not mean art that can exist without media. Such art is no longer conceivable for me. Rather, I refer to artistic praxis that has passed through the media, but in a specific manner has left them far behind. The effect that the media had when they were still an attraction no longer plays an important role. The technical and media aspects of such artistic praxis are not the essence of its attraction. Media are utilized as a matter of course by artists; they are no longer the actual sensation.

(…)
In this perspective. the work of a young Korean artist is even more radical. Initially Yunchul Kim studied electronic music at Chugye University in Seoul. He is a programmer, computer and video artist, has created numerous performances with computer-generated music, and realized many installations that utilize the most advanced technology. Self-portrait.jpg is one of Kim’s most unusual works in that at first sight it disappoints all expectations that we entertain of the work of an artist working with advanced media. On a large sheet of finest white Japanese paper measuring 83 X 134 em curious signs have been written, or rather painted, with great precision in black drawing ink. Closer inspection reveals that these are not just any signs, but the character set of the ASCII code. If one were to count the characters, one would arrive at the impressive number 58,806. In a meditation exercise that lasted three and a half months Yunchul Kim painted the characters on the paper. Every time he made a mistake he had to start again from the beginning. The result of this almost Sisyphean task is a work with a high aesthetic appeal and a special bonus: when the characters are scanned into a computer that can read them and then sent to a printer, what is printed out is a portrait of the artist. However, this is just a second level on which the work exists and is perceived. The decisive factor in the idea of art after the media is that in this case, for example, the artist is a young man who passed through the advanced technical media in the course of his socialization. Self- portrait.jpg succeeds as art in any case, irrespective of technology-based art. It does not need electronics to be performed; it simply hangs on the walL That I know about the work’s technological side enriches my reception of it, but is not a precondition for its aesthetic enjoyment.”

excerpt of AFTER THE MEDIA: RESEARCH AS PRACTISED CULTURE OF EXPERIMENT, by Siegfried Zielinski

┐ Be prepared └

© Sofia Silva, How can you sleep at night (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

Can’t stress enough how amazing this video is

┐ Holiday Greetings └

© Sofia Silva, I got the blues (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

┐ Democracy Deficit └

© Sofia Silva, Democracy Deficit (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

from left top right it reads “Bread”, “Peace”, “Housing”, “Health”, “Education”

┐ Heart is a luxury └

© Sofia Silva, Heart is a luxury – womanhood 101 (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

┐ Freedom Fighters └

© Sofia Silva, Freedom Fighters (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

the rest of the videos from the conference via The Public School (along with other great lectures, interviews, etc)

┐ an eye for an eye └

© Sofia Silva, you who bring me death, I’ll give you chaos (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

┐ Jacinda Russell └

© Jacinda Russell, Strange Artifacts: A Photographic and Found Object @ J. Crist Gallery, installation view + details, Idaho, 2007
The wunderkammer or “room of wonder” draws heavily upon 16th century European cabinets of curiosity. I combined digital photography with found object sculpture by printing on canvas and encasing the images in weathered boxes, suitcases, drawers, and crates. Objects like false teeth, steering wheels, anonymous sculptures of naked bandits, jars of paint chips, sculpted cotton, and skull necklaces form the installation. All 50 of the objects are influential in defining my childhood and adult years, the various places I have called home, and the things that I carry with me, not yet willing to let go.

© Jacinda Russell, Residue (left) + Hoard (right), from Dark Mass, 2000

© Jacinda Russell, Detritus, 2000

Thus began the conscious decision to gather large quantities of objects, often undesirable items, placed in dilapidated environments and old containers. In Dark Mass, I want to visually portray the fine line between serious collecting and obsessing over a collection to the point where it controls one’s life. I search for the atypical, whether it is the accumulation of the article itself (hairnets, fingernails, and shredded books are not what one would hoard as precious objects), its placement (bicycles resting on their sides, photographs standing at attention, upside down doll feet), or its environment (globes and birdcages piled at the foot of a ladder leading nowhere). Most of the objects are fragile, poised to disintegrate into their surroundings.

© Jacinda Russell, Amass, 2000

Growing up in a house with 225 balloon-tire bicycles, thousands of bottles, telephone pole insulators, soda paraphernalia, rooms filled with cardboard boxes, golden age comic books, trunks of advertising material and endless amounts of artwork, I was convinced to live a life with minimal possessions. Suddenly the realization that I was collecting (never mind the fact that the object in question was trash) was unsettling.

For my 1999 installation, Fear of Schizophrenia, I collected nearly two thousand cigarette packs to understand my great-aunt’s obsessive behavior and paranoid schizophrenia. She collected paper, wrapping her possessions in Kleenex and storing them in sacks. She smoked incessantly, saving the foil of the cigarette pack to use as stationery and the cellophane as wallets. These filthy packages were an important feature of the installation. One year after reinstalling the exhibition and unable to depart from the packs, I kept them boxed in the backyard storage shed, elevated to keep the rain from seeping through the cardboard.

more of Jacinda‘s work here

┐ History is written by the disobedient └

© Sofia Silva, (sketch detail), from the series The Protester, 2012

I heard of a darkness, descending upon the old archive of words
And the muffled whispers of the elders drowning in the midst of the long rows of obedience
This you must know to be true brother: we are the dead.

The weeping past and his wretched son soon will be victims of their own doing
All else follows
And when all is done and the night is purified of all these thoughts, I will sell you as you sold me
All else follows

It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts

Rejoice, brothers and sisters! Rejoice, brothers and sisters, we are the dead…

So I tilted my head back and held on to what I knew to be true: the relief of nothingness
And reason my dear brother will not suffice.
These vast and silent glass eyed armies and their mirror shaped minds seek but virtue.
But I am corrupt. I am corrupt to the core.

It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
Yes, we’re the dead, brothers and sisters, we’re the dead

I heard of a darkness brothers and sisters, falling down on what remained of whom we were.
And it’s with whispers that our lives have become within a measurable distance of an end
What will become of dreams my dear enemy?
When this delightful destruction of words has rendered its means
When all is done and the night is purified of all these thoughts, I will sell you as you sold me

It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
It’s only by death that you own me

I heard of a darkness sliding down the streets
Tearing apart limbs and all their deeds
and reconstructing these new men, not out of hope, but of love and sorrow
All else follows
Because it’s by death that all these confessions have become my truth.

Words written and sang by João Rui, from a Jigsaw

┐ Ugo Rondinone – I don’t live here anymore └

© Ugo Rondinone, all Untitled, from the series I don’t live here anymore, 1996

“My discovery of Rondinone dates back to a sexy picture I noticed in Flash Art in the mid-1990s, of what I took to be a seductive model revealing a glimpse of appealing cleavage. I hadn’t actually meant to stop at the image, but biology had taken over, as it does. But wait a second. There was something weird about this girl. Why was she so swarthy? And wasn’t that a moustache on her upper lip? Someone had digitally transferred his head onto a photograph of an alluring model and seamlessly confused the two to create an unsettling self-portrait that wobbled between masculinity and femininity as frantically as a woofer.

So that was Ugo Rondinone. Except it wasn’t. A few months later, in Flash Art, he had another show. This time, what stopped me was a gorgeous set of abstract paintings, circles of coloured fog of such exciting brightness that the page seemed to throb. They reminded me of Kenneth Noland’s work: Rothko in the round. Who did these, I wondered? They’re fabulous. It was Rondinone.

Except, of course, it wasn’t. A few Flash Art issues later, I noticed some mad-looking drawings, skilfully achieved with Indian ink, of knotted trees, tossing and turning in the landscape as if they couldn’t get to sleep; and forest clearings writhing with unease, like an angler’s worms. An installation shot showed them to be wall-sized. Weird, I thought. Who did them? Oh, no. It was Rondinone.

As the years wore on, and the 20th century seeped into the 21st, it kept happening. Something in Flash Art would catch my eye, and it would turn out to be by Ugo Rondinone. It was never the same thing twice. Video, photography, painting, sculpture, sound pieces, projections, performance, comic stuff, serious stuff, things with him in them, things with nobody in them — you just couldn’t tell.

So the news that this one-man studio of artists was finally getting a British showing at the Whitechapel came as a blessed relief. I had expected to be put out of my confusion, and finally to be able to grasp who and what Rondinone was. But I was being optimistic.

The Whitechapel show is called Zero Built a Nest in My Navel, which is not a title that gives much away. The line is taken from one of the haikus that Rondinone apparently writes every day, and which take the place of a diary for him.

A few examples are scattered about the walls of his Whitechapel installation, written in white on old bits of wood, of the sort you find washed up on beaches. Here’s an example: Fold back/my love/as you did/my sheets.

Here’s another: Air gets/into everything/even nothing.

While you’re solving these etymological sudokus (clue: there is no solution), I will run a few pertinent biographical facts past you. Rondinone was born in Switzerland in 1964, of Italian parents, so flexibility was his birthright. He studied in Vienna and spent his early career collaborating with the notorious Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch, who is probably the most gory artist there has ever been. Nitsch showered himself in blood as if it were bath water. From him, Rondinone would have learnt that life is messy, red, angry, scary, wet and violent. We can safely assume that everything he has done since should be viewed as an attempt to get over the trauma of Nitsch.” excerpt of the article Painter? Poet? Photographer?, by Waldemar Januszczak. continue reading here

┐ Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) └

© Hannah Villiger, Untitled, 1980 – C-print from Polaroid

© Hannah Villiger, Sculptural, 1993

© Hannah Villiger, Untitled, 1980/81 – 12 C-prints of polaroids

“When trying to describe physical feelings of any kind, we find ourselves shortchanged by language. I arrived at this conclusion after several, always hopelessly crude attempts to describe
fundamental moments in Hannah Villiger’s oeuvre. The public-at-large is quite capable of registering feelings of repulsion or extreme empathy when blood flows in the movies, when some-one is cut or surgery is performed, or when faced with eroticism, vertigo on a lookout tower or sports—all points on a scale that are clearly designated and defined. But in between lie immense micro-regions, dead lands, where words fail. This is the territory that Hannah Villiger explores. With a well-honed consciousness she masterfully negotiates the overall system of obstruction (of hindrance and enfeeblement). When communication is constantly kept in check, metaphor comes to the rescue. Perhaps this is why Hannah Villiger’s work seems so womanly and so strong.
It is conceivable that the vertigo caused by verticals (at the edge of the abyss) has a gentle partner in horizontals. A kind of window feeling. When it is very intense, you feel it in your nostrils, your ears, your chest or (in connection with speed) your bottom. The fixed point is not the abyss but the horizon. When I was a child and we went for a drive on Sundays, I would sit in the backseat and imagine—especially in fast curves—that I was riding a bicycle because I was never given one. Hannah Villiger can do it without a bicycle. That’s what I have to think of when I see her photographs of gushing water, swift birds or colliding boccie balls. And there is also the mute, squat airship, suspended in the sky, or the burning palm leaf thrown into the air. Here pleasurable and extremely subtle use is made of the potential of empathy, which in turn makes us aware of our own potential and position as part of a greater whole.
Hannah Villiger’s much enlarged color Polaroids no longer record the vehemence of directly transmitted physical sensations; they have quieted down. “He had teeth like luxury hotels on the beach in Florida and when he closed his mouth, there was a big scar.” (Laurie Anderson) These color photographs, usually one meter square, gradually turn into boxes the longer you look at them. Boxes into which you poke your head very, very slowly without noticing, because the pull is so gentle. And damp fog, pointed palm leaves, skin or gazes brush against us, passing by. But there are also pictures whose energy is directed outwards, pictures that radiate, so that we already notice from afar that we are being kept at bay. These are the cold pictures, like the eye with a razor-sharp gaze. Once you have stood in front of them, you know that the format of these photographs is incontestable.
Sometimes the subject matter of a picture ignites feelings; other times it is a vessel or a catchment for them. In memory such distinctions are often utterly irrelevant. For this reason, Hannah Villiger’s wooden or plexiglas objects crop up again in her photo works. Is Hannah Villiger the fog creeping around the mountain, or is the fog enveloping her? Movement back and forth, sudden clashes and leaps, simultaneous flowing and flying flit through Hannah Villiger’s work until a compact whole emerges—like her name HANNAH…” HANNAH and the Horizon, by Bice Curiger

more of Hannah‘s work here

┐ roots & fruits #12 – Gonçalo Figueiredo └

© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Lourenço

© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Rita Tavares (left) and Lara Brandão (right), from the series The Protest, 12/2009

© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Ricardo Baltazar (left) and Gonçalo Figueiredo (right), from the series The Protest, 12/2009

These portraits are part of a series made back in the Winter of 2009 and it depicts a group of students from the Photography Department to which Gonçalo also was part, both as a technitian and as a student. In December, confronted with the lack of conditions and materials the course lacked to offer, they decided to camp at school and endure a silent and peaceful protest until they were heard.

“Let us now consider the time exposure, of which the photo-portrait is a concrete instance. Whether of a live or dead person, the portrait is funerary in nature, a monument. Acting as a reminder of times that have died away, it sets up landmarks of the past. This means it reverses the paradox of the snapshot, series to series. Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as departed. Reciprocally, whereas the former freezes the superficial time of the image, the latter releases it. It liberates an autonomous and recurrent temporality, which is the time of remembrance. While the portrait as Denkmal, monument, points to a state in a life that is gone forever, it also offers itself as the possibility of staging that life again and again in memory.

An asymmetrical reciprocity joins the snapshot to the time exposure: whereas the snapshot stole a life it could not return, the time exposure expresses a life that it never received. The time exposure doesn’t refer to life as process, evolution, diachrony, as does the snapshot. It deals with an imaginary life that is autonomous, discontinuous, and reversible, because this life has no location other than the surface of the photograph. By the same token it doesn’t frame that kind of surface-death characteristic of the snapshot, which is the shock of time splitting into not anymore and not yet. It refers to death as the state of what has been: the fixity and defection of time, its absolute zero.

(…)

Time exposure implies the antithesis of trauma. Far from blocking speech, it welcomes it openly. Only in time exposure (portrait, landscape, still life, etc.) may photography appear with the continuity of nature. The portrait, for example, may look awkward, but not artificial, as would be the case of a snapshot of an athlete caught in the midst of a jump. When continuity and nature are perceived, speech is apt to body forth that perception in the form of a narrative that meshes the imaginary with the symbolic and organizes our mediation with reality.

The word now, used to describe the kind of temporality involved in time exposures, doesn’t refer to actual time, since it is abstracted from its natural link with here: hic et nunc. It is to be understood as a pause in time, charged with a potential actualization, which will eventually be carried out by speech (or memory as interior speech), and is most probably rooted in the time-consuming act of looking.” excerpt from the article Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox, by Thierry de Duve, published in October, Vol. 5, Photography (Summer, 1978), pp. 113-125

More of Gonçalo’s work here

┐ roots & fruits #7 – Inês Beja └

© Inês Beja, The Roaring

© Inês Beja, Untitled #3, from the series Jumping at Shadows

Inês is a chameleon or, as she puts it, a shape-shifter. From my point of view what she is now is a creative force: obsessive, eager to learn, aiming for the perfect tool, the perfect dress, the perfect light, the perfect shot. I believe these are arguments enough to keep an eye on her and see where all this passion (borderline destructive force?) can take her.

Her work made me think of a written piece of work, so instead of dragging on parallels between her work and that of self-portrayed women in the history of photography, here it is:

“(…)The initial idea that images contributed to women’s alienation from their bodies and from their sexuality, with an attendant hope of liberation and recuperation, gave way to theories of representation as symptom and signifier of the way problems posed by sexual difference under patriarchy could be displaced onto the feminine.(…)and while feminist critics turned to popular culture to analyse these meanings, artists turned to theory, juxtaposing images and ideas, to negate dominant meanings and,slowly and polemically, to invent different ones.

(…)The juxtaposition begins to refer to a ‘surface-ness’, so that nostalgia begins to dissolve into unease.An overinsistence on surface starts to suggest that it might be masking something or other that should be hidden from sight, and a hint of another space starts to lurk inside a too plausible facade.(…)The sense of surface now resides, not in the female figure’s attempt to save her face in a masquerade of femininity, but in the model’s subordination to, and imbrication with, the texture of the photographic medium itself.

(…)For Freud, fetishism is particularly significant (apart, that is, from his view that it ‘confirmed the castration complex’) as a demonstration that the psyche can sustain incompatible ideas, at one and the same time,through a process of disavowal. Fetishistic disavowal acknowledges the possibility of castration (represented by the female, penis-less, genital)and simultaneously denies it. Freud saw the coexistence of these two contradictory ideas, maintained in a single psyche, as a model for the ego’s relation to reality: the ‘splitting of the ego’, which allowed two parallel, but opposed, attitudes to be maintained in uneasy balance.(…) This ‘oscillation effect’ is important to postmodernism. The viewer looks, recognizes a style, doubts, does a double take, then recognizes that the style is a citation, and meanings shift and change their reference like shifting perceptions of perspective from an optical illusion.“

excerpt from Laura Mulvey’s article A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman

Inês’s portraits can be seen here

┐ Lock, Stock and Teardrops by Ali Kepenek & Max Snow └

© Ali Kepenek, Jackee Gun Dance, from the project Lock, Stock and Teardrops, 2011

© Maxwell Snow, Untitled, from the project Lock, Stock and Teardrops, 2011

“A constant duality exists in Ali Kepenek and Max Snow’s recent work of photography, installation, sculpture and collage. Under the theme of pain, both artists address their life experiences from physical existence, through installation and sculpture, as well as the internal and emotional realm, as depicted in their portrait photographs and collages.

Kepenek’s photographs are the personal recordings of his world experience, depicting distorted scenes of self-destruction, substance abuse and sexual dissipation from the Berlin and London nightlife. The nude portrait subjects have had a strong personal connection with the artist, reflecting and unveiling layers of Kepenek’s stages in life appearing as a type of flip book of emotional memory. The photographic subjects posed in a kind of free fall motion, reaching their arms out in protection from hurt or painful infliction.

Kepenek’s installation constructed from slats of burnt wood forming a wall with the name ‘Tottenham’ inscribed on it. The wall is the result of Kepenek’s personal projections and emotional reactions to the riots in London this year. The sculptures presenting young rioters standing back to back with designer bandanas hiding their faces, depicting an aggressive action motivated from an inner pain. The artist believes the destructive action can be viewed as an emotional response fuelled by a frustrated desire to obtain money, luxury goods and designer labels.

Confronted with the theme of the exhibition, viewers are driven to not only seek out the artists pain, but also to confront what aches them personally. Max Snow’s portraits of individuals laden with scars expose, adages and selected lyrics from old country songs suggest, and sculptures reinforce objects and symbols of pain in Snow’s work.

Snow’s two portraits of a man known as ‘Crowman’ have a recto and a verso: one side hinting at elation and the other revealing agony. The dialogue that Snow creates by choosing to present the works double sided indicates the duality of pain itself: to experience pain one must also experience something that is painless. Accordingly, a salient sculpture reading Cry Forever in hundreds of small bulbs flashes in Morse code “But it makes me feel better each time it begins calling me home Hickory Wind,” lyrics chosen by Snow from Gram Parsons’ song Hickory Wind.”

excerpt of press release of their show by Duve Berlin

Ali Kepenek’s work here

Max Snow’s work here

┐ Iiu Susiraja └

@ Iiu Susiraja, Näytös, from the series Älä nyt suutu, 2008/09

@ Iiu Susiraja, Kannel, from the series Syömään, pöytä on katettu, 2010

“In Susiraja’s esthetics, an image does not remain an image; rather, it requires an entire life. Although Susiraja has focused on photography, her art genre is more comprehensive: to shape a work of art from life. Usually, the salesmen of this genre rely on the American smile, non-sense polished with first-class product phraseology, but Susiraja doesn’t work that way. She scavenges ultimate experiences and the most dismal version of reality, although sometimes the imaginative possibilities for light-hearted gliding on the surface. However, without the history of long-term exclusion and bullying, the pictures would be something entirely different.

The history of exclusion and feigned betterment repeats itself from one society and community to another. There is supposed to be a mold, into which everyone should fit and get stuck. There is still space for one more, ridiculed and excluded, who helps those feigning betterment to recognize their excellence. Susiraja becomes a sacrifice on the cross, saying: “Spit more”; except Susiraja doesn’t climb all the way to the cross, because there is bench closer, and a handy hostess can make a cross from the handle of the broom faster.

Susiraja shows how the crappiest experiences can mold an artistic counter-weapon: cripplingly mundane and fatally ridiculous all at once.”

More of Iiu’s work here