domenica 28 giugno 2009

A Brief History of Invisible Art


Tom Friedman, Untitled (A Curse), 1992
Courtesy Feature Inc., New York


A Brief History of Invisible Art brings together artworks from six decades that place a pronounced emphasis on the conceptual and communicative possibilities of the work of art, while bypassing its seeming requirements of visibility and materiality. In surveying this terrain, the exhibition includes works that represent a wide range of aesthetic practices and that engage with surprisingly diverse concerns. Whether underscoring the role of the audience, mocking the theological aura of museum rhetoric or calling attention to the importance of linguistic description in cultural production, these works prompt us to see through the more grandiose distractions of contemporary art and so to think more clearly about its underlying functions.

Roman Ondák "Measuring the Universe" 2007



Viewers play a vital role in the creation of Measuring the Universe (2007), by Slovakian artist Roman Ondák (b. 1966). Over the course of the exhibition, attendants mark Museum visitors' heights, first names, and date of the measurement on the gallery walls. Beginning as an empty white space, over time the gallery gradually accumulates the traces of thousands of people.

The inclusion of viewers in the process of art making has a long tradition in the history of performance-based art. By inviting people to actively participate, artists attempt to overcome traditional divisions between art objects and spectators, and production and reception.

Measuring the Universe turns the domestic custom of recording children’s heights on door frames into a public event, referring through its title to humankind’s age-old desire to gauge the scale of the world. The process creates a work of art with a multitude of participants, merging art with everyday life in a confluence that is at the very center of Ondák’s artistic practice.

giovedì 25 giugno 2009

Giuseppe Penone "Rovesciare i propri occhi" 1970

Fernand Léger, Hans Richter "Dreams that money can buy" 1947



Sei episodi che corrispondono ad altrettanti sogni, immaginati da cinque artisti (Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder) e dallo stesso H. Richter, pittore dadaista e regista di film sperimentali, autore anche della sceneggiatura e delle scene insieme a Max Ernst e Jack Bittner.
1° (F. Léger): balletto di manichini in abiti nuziali in un emporio di New York; 2° (M. Ernst): un uomo cerca di avvicinarsi a una fanciulla dormiente, circondata da sbarre; 3° (A. Calder): sfere, unite da fili e asticelle, si muovono con le loro ombre su uno sfondo bianco; 4° (H. Richter): Narciso, uomo comune (J. Bittner), scopre per caso di essere differente da ciò che immaginava di essere; 5° (M. Duchamp): dischi ottici a due dimensioni che, messi in movimento, ne acquistano una terza; 6° (M. Ray – “Rith, Roses and Revolvers”): parodia satirica dell'ambiente di Hollywood. Le musiche sono nell'ordine di Libby Holman, John Latouche, Paul Bowler, Edgar Varese, John Cage, Darius Milhaud. Quello di Richter è senza musica. L'impaginazione degli episodi varia da copia a copia. È un compendio del cinema surrealista e astratto che, pur nell'eterogeneità dei contributi, ha una sua coerenza di atmosfera. Prodotto no budget (10 000 dollari del dopoguerra), fu esposto all'8ª Mostra di Venezia dove ebbe un premio per il “contributo originale al progresso della cinematografia”. Fotografia di Arnold Eagle.

martedì 23 giugno 2009

"Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement" Whitney Museum of American Art



Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, discusses 'Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement.' This exhibition brings together a group of new and rarely seen works by Paul McCarthy (b. 1945), one of the most important American artists of his generation. The installations, films, photographs, and drawings on view focus on a central element of McCarthy's practice: the way the body is destabilized through dislocations of architectural space. The disorientation that threads though all of the works shown here is at once formal, corporeal, and psychological. The screens, projectors, and rotating cameras of Spinning Room place the viewer at the center of hypnotic environment whereas the moving walls and doors of Bang Bang Room collapse our notion of stable architectural space. In Madhouse the walls and chair spinning at varying speeds conjure a similar state of physical and mental disorientation.

Dan Rees "The Postman's Decision Is Final" 2006



Two postcards are stuck together so that only the address sides are showing.
Each side is stamped and addressed to two different people, then posted.
Somewhere along the line a decision is made as to which person
receives the card.

Matteo Rubbi "Postcard" 2007



Il lavoro è una cartolina acquistata presso un museo di Oslo, esposta solo dopo aver compiuto il giro completo della circonferenza terrestre. L’oggetto non riporterà nessun segno di questo viaggio, la documentazione relativa ai suoi spostamenti rimarrà a disposizione di chi vorrà accertarne la veridicità, ma non verrà mostrata con l’immagine, che vivrà solo di questo supplemento immaginativo puramente aneddotico.

domenica 21 giugno 2009

Adrian Missika




Haris Epaminonda


Douglas Gordon "5 year drive-by" 1995

«5 year drive-by» refers to the duration of the storyline of «The Searchers,» the Western by John Ford. With a guaranteed happy ending, John Wayne needs five years—therefore the installation’s title—to find a kidnapped child. The actual film lasts 113 minutes and the installation just under seven weeks. The rest is a matter of calculating: comparing the duration of the film’s storyline to the duration of the film, and having five years, seen in relationship to seven weeks as 113 minutes, yield roughly three minutes. Gordon stretches these three minutes to fill the entire 47 days of the exhibition. The projection moves single frame by single frame, so that a second of film time lasts approximately six hours. Viewers imagine a stationary shot, when what they see in reality is a sequence: before a picturesque Western landscape, a posse on horseback makes itself ready to ride down into the valley. With John Wayne most likely in the lead.

giovedì 18 giugno 2009

Cezary Bodzianowski "Good morning" 1997


In Good morning (lodz, 1997), for instance, cezary bodzianowski came across a crane as he was taking a walk at seven in the morning and talked the driver into lifting him in the crane cage to the windows of the fifth floor of a tower block. he knocked on the windows, waking the residents, greeting them and leaving his regards to wish a good morning to all the other residents.

Tobias Putrih "Venetian, Atmospheric" 2007







Venetian, Atmospheric
2007
Plywood, OSB plates, scaffolding, PVC curtain, 16mm and digital projectors, digital projectors
13 x 8 x 5.5 m
43 x 26 x 18 feet
Installation on the Island of San Servolo for the 52 Venice Biennale, Slovenian Pavilion
Photograph by Michele Lamanna

Tobias Putrih "Cinéma attitudes" 2008




Cinéma attitudes
is an organic-looking structure of wood facets, occupying the whole exhibition room. For this "archi-sculpture", we conceived a programme of films and documentaries where architecture has a privileged place. We also gave carte blanche to three Genevan cultural associations : the Maison de l'architecture, the Maison de la littérature and the Association pour la danse contemporaine.

mercoledì 17 giugno 2009

Patrick Tuttofuoco "Chinese Theatre" 2008


Il Chinese Theatre è un'intrigante struttura architettonica praticabile, concepita nel 2008 per la collezione permanente di MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. Varcata la soglia dell'installazione si entra in un ambiente visionario con ventidue sedute di forme differenti.

Tobias Putrih "Cinema Solution" 2001


Underground Cinema - How the decline of the golden era of the classical cinema could be perceived today? The decline took place somewhere in the 1960s and the field of art it is represented in a unique way in an unrealised project “Underground Cinema” by Robert Smithson. The question would be as follows: what happens after the cinema is moved underground, what kind of transformation takes place? (T.P.)

Robert Smithson, Towards the Development of a "Cinema Cavern" 1971

Robert Smithson, Towards the Development of a "Cinema Cavern" (1971) Pencil, photography, tape. 12 5/8" x 15 5/8".

Marine Hugonnier - Ariana (2003)




Ariana was a major three-part film and photographic project that was shown concurrently at Chisenhale Gallery and MW Projects in Shoreditch, east London.

Ariana investigated the relationship between landscape and history. It explored ideas of utopia and resistance, questioning the tools of cinema and western ideas of viewpoint and panorama. Recorded in Afghanistan during 2002, Ariana details a journey to the capital Kabul, and to the beautiful Pandjshêr Valley, a region that has historically resisted the invasions of Soviet and Taliban ideologies.

Hugonnier's 16mm film, which was digitally projected at Chisenhale Gallery, charts the journey of a film crew. On arriving in the Pandjshêr Valley, their intention is to investigate how the landscape has determined the region's history. To do so, the crew attempts to find a vantage point to record a panorama of the entire valley. Access to this viewpoint is refused, because of its strategic value and the crew returns to Kabul to record the ruins and traffic of the city. The crew obtains permission to shoot a final panorama. The view allows them to gaze over Kabul and across to the Hindu Kush Mountains. They realise that this spectacle gives them a feeling of euphoria and totality. They decide to stop filming.

Ariana also featured a suite of large-scale 'portrait' photographs of unnamed mountains in the Pandjshêr Valley and a photographic album, featuring a collection of 36 small-scale images taken by Hugonnier throughout the trip.

Ariana was commissioned by MW projects and Film and Video Umbrella in association with Chisenhale Gallery. It was supported by the National Touring Programme of Arts Council England and was sponsored by Guy and Marion Naggar and Alan Djanogly.

Mark Leckey - Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)





"Described by one commentator as the best thing they'd ever seen in a gallery, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is an extended paean to the unadulterated bliss of nocturnal abandon. A documentary of sorts, Leckey's video chronicles the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth". - Matthew Higgs, ArtForum Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore uses found and original footage of discos and raves across Britain during the 70s, 80s and 90s. Details of clothing, technology, music and other cultural references surface briefly like uncanny folklore as the film explores a culture of collective leisure and consumption.

Dan Graham and Thurston Moore


Dan Graham: Congratulations on the BAM concert.

Thurston Moore: Oh, thank you so much. Congratulations to you too on your retrospective.

Graham: You saw my show when it was at MoCA in L.A., right? With your daughter? I hope she liked one of my favorite pieces, Girl’s Makeup Room.

Moore: She loved that piece! That was a great way to experience it, too, by going there with her. I told her, “This is the artist I met when I moved to New York.” I lived in the same building as you on 84 Eldridge Street. Those years were a crash course in discovering the New York art world, which I had sort of had some handle on when I was playing with people from the Rhode Island School of Design. Our shows were always at Jenny Holzer’s loft. That age group—artists like Robert Longo and Holzer and other ’70s art graduates— they were always talking about you and Vito Acconci. I first met Kim [Gordon] when I was playing in a band that [later] became Sonic Youth, but it didn’t have a name yet. I remember I was rehearsing at Acconci’s studio in Brooklyn and the first time I met you was when you were there one afternoon, sitting at the table with Vito, and you were both discussing punk rock and No Wave records. I was kind of fascinated that these two artists were having a really heavy discussion on Gang of Four. [Laughs]

Graham: Well, as a would-be rock writer, I was always fascinated by music. My closest friend for a long time was Steve Reich. I presented his work, actually, in the Paula Cooper Gallery. That’s why I moved to New York, not to be an artist, but to be a writer. I was a slacker, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I knew a little bit about art through reading Esquire magazine, which published a lot of writing about art. But at the time, everyone had this idea of being the artist-writer: Robert Smithson wanted to be like Borges. Dan Flavin wanted to be like James Joyce.

Moore: Interesting. Vito mentions that too, that he was interested in words. In fact, he was publishing with Bernadette Mayer in 0 to 9 magazine.

Graham: That’s how I came to meet Vito. I thought I might want to publish my work as poetry, among other things, and I found that all the people in the poetry field were gay, except Vito.

Moore: Ted Berrigan wasn’t gay.

Graham: Oh, well you know better than I do. But Abstract Expressionist writers like John O’Hara and John Roxbury, they were kind of a gay subculture.

Moore: Yes. But I think gays were very prominent in all disciplines of avant-garde art and literature in New York.

Graham: A lot of the shows back then were almost antigay.

Moore: Not antigay, they just weren’t gay. They weren’t homophobic.

Graham: Dan Flavin was definitely a little, because I think his twin brother was gay. But he also was from a working-class background. His father was a bus driver, and I think I can identify him very much with Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners. He was that kind of character.

Moore: How old were you when you moved to New York City?

Graham: In my early to midtwenties.

Moore: And were you considered the young guy on the scene?

Graham: I wasn’t on the scene. I was a virtual failure for many years.

Moore: [Laughs] Do you consider yourself a failure or do you just consider yourself someone who wasn’t involved in…

Graham: Well, I couldn’t get my articles published, and as a writer that was very difficult. In fact, that’s how I got involved with Vito. I showed him all my articles that couldn’t get published. Another thing was, I had burned my bridges. I used to be a little bit self-destructive in that way and self righteous. But I’ve gotten over that.

Moore: What sign are you?

Graham: Aries, the same birthday as Al Gore, Oshima and Descartes. But I’m also an optimistic horse—my Chinese sign—which is why you and I bond so much together; because you’re a dog.

Moore: You’re the dog. I just eat until I get sick.

Graham: It means you worry about other people. That you try to help rectify wrongs in life, and as a Leo it means you are a great producer. This is astrological psychobabble, isn’t it?

Moore: Is it? I don’t know, I find it serves a real truth to a lot of personality traits and the dynamics between certain people. I notice there’s a certain strain in your work of women-worshipping.

Graham: That might define you as well, but in a different way. When I was 13, I read Margaret Mead. My parents had Margaret Mead books, and I read them because I wanted to learn about sex, but she was a feminist, so I became a kind of feminist. I also read Shulie Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, which is a feminist book recommended [to me] by my sister, and when I was doing the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design work series, we had Shulie Firestone come up to do a possible book. But I’m against institutional critique, because I think museums have very important spaces. The lobby is a pickup place, that’s why I’m showing a lot of videos in places where people can lie down. Video is a little like television, and if you’re a teenager coming on your date, you should lie down and have a full program. There are also benches nearby for older folks who are there with their grandchildren or just want to hold hands. I think the great thing about the show is it’s taking place in the summer, which means a lot of people from the Midwest and middle America will be coming. Sometimes it’s very important for the avant-garde musician that you have a general audience response as well as the New York elitist intellectuals.

Moore: Do you have any advice for avant-garde artists turning 50 and beyond? Especially men.

Graham: I think there is a big problem at that age, because that’s when magazines and museums degrade artists. Because everyone prefers the young artist of the moment. It’s hard. When you’re young, you can collaborate with everybody. It’s very hard when you get older to find collaborative partners.

Moore: I find myself collaborating with very young people. Most of the people my age have either become domesticated or they’ve lost the fire. There are some people older than me who I collaborate with, but basically it’s people in their mid to late twenties and early thirties.

Graham: Brooklyn is another world, right?

Moore: Yeah, I should take you out there and go to some of these shows that I’ve been playing with these young noise artists. I think that’s something you might like. I have to go, though, because we have to go play.

Graham: Okay, I’ll catch you in the ’hood. Last I saw you play, I was in the bleachers, but the sound was absolutely great and it was an ecstatic experience.

martedì 16 giugno 2009

Marco Aime "Il lato selvatico del tempo"


In quel tempo quasi fiabesco che comincia sempre con "una volta", gli abitanti della Chalancho consumavano le sere nelle veglie, spegnendo le fatiche contadine nella narrazione di storie fantastiche. Stretti dentro una stalla, i montanari della piccola borgata della Val Grana esorcizzavano il buio raccontando vicende di masche, le streghe, crudeli femmine vendicatrici o più probabilmente donne che osavano fuggire dalle strette maglie del controllo sociale sfidando la notte, il lato selvatico del tempo. È stato proprio questo, nel 1987, l'argomento della tesi di dottorato di Marco Aime. Ora, a distanza di anni, l'antropologo rende omaggio a un mondo ormai scomparso riproponendo il racconto di quei giorni sulle montagne, e facendo così i conti con un'altra selvatichezza, prepotente come l'ortica che invade i sentieri dell'amata borgata, indifferente come l'asfalto che ne cancella i vecchi tracciati: quella dell'ineluttabilità di certe perdite, dello sprofondare di luoghi e persone in un niente al quale si può solo opporre l'ostinata volontà della memoria, la forza poetica della narrazione. L'assoluta verità del tempo vissuto.

Fascism in Ruins

Dan Dubowitz, Colonia Marina della Federazione Fascista di Novara Rimini 3 (2008)

Dan Graham "Cinema" 1981





Graham’s «Cinema,» which today exists only as an architectural model, is integrated into a typical office building. The «Cinema» is located on the ground floor of a corner building, in which on the side facing the street corner a slightly curved projection screen made of two-way mirrored glass is inserted. (We see only a flat plane instead of a cylinder segment in the model.) The passerby on the street can see the film, without sound and reversed, and, depending on the lighting in the film itself (that is, depending on whether or not a film sequence is very bright) can look through the projection wall at the cinema audience. In contrast, the side walls of two-way mirror glass do not allow the passerby to see inside during a film screening, since the streets are normally more strongly lit than the interior of a cinema is by the film projection, so that the glass façade becomes a mirror from the outside. Before and after each film screening, however, the movie audience inside can be seen as it disperses or assembles anew.

Gregor Stemmrich

lunedì 15 giugno 2009

Jean Painlevé


The mesmerizing, utterly unclassifiable science films of Jean Painlevé (1902-89) have to be seen to be believed: delightful, surrealist-influenced dream works that are also serious science. The French filmmaker-scientist-inventor had a decades-spanning career in which he created hundreds of short films on subjects ranging from astronomy to pigeons to, most famously, such marine-life marvels as the sea horse and the sea urchin. This definitive three-disc collection brings together the best of these, and also includes the French television series Jean Painlevé Through His Films, rock band Yo La Tengo’s eight-film score The Sounds of Science, and an essay by film scholar Scott MacDonald.

Anne Aghion "Ice People" (2008)


ONE OF ANNE AGHION’S go-to images in Ice People (2008), her documentary about South Pole scientists, is of tightly lashed tents against a backdrop of towering mountain peaks. When the film’s four main subjects—a pair of geologists and their two undergraduate assistants—aren’t hunkered down inside these wind-whipped shelters, boiling water and struggling to make small talk, they’re digging outside with picks and shovels.

It’s an earthbound, stubbornly unromantic depiction of Antarctica’s modern-day explorers—the polar opposite, perhaps, of Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Herzog saw his subjects as a community of “professional dreamers” who play rock guitar, glide through crystal-blue ocean waters, and tiptoe along the rims of volcanoes. Aghion’s take is decidedly less exciting; the most dramatic moment in Ice People comes when the group’s most enthusiastic member, Dr. Adam Lewis, uncovers a leaf impression he guesses to be twenty million years old and exclaims, “That’s a beauty!”

Aghion does a commendable job letting this frontier land speak for itself. She’s not offended, as Herzog is, by the banal mining-town aesthetic of Camp McMurdo, the researchers’ base; on the contrary, she embraces its spartan dwellings as part of the atmosphere. And she captures some wonderful images from the community’s everyday activities—snowplows working in twenty-four-hour darkness, visible only as globes of light, or a technician flapping his arms to stay warm as he repairs a control tower.


Despite the serious work and the grim surroundings depicted in the film, there’s a subtle wit at play in Ice People. Aghion cuts between a geologist typing up his findings on a laptop and his reclining, dirt-encrusted partner studying rocks outside like a Cro-Magnon. They’re both sitting on layers of freeze-dried history, and when one of them submerges an ancient sprig of moss he’s just unearthed in water, it expands like a Chia Pet.

When the film’s protagonists talk, it’s often about the satisfaction of figuring stuff out. The undergrads are deciding whether this sort of rugged fieldwork is for them; the professors, it’s obvious, made their minds up a long time ago. “Now I’m just rocks and tills and glaciers,” Lewis says. Although the film never explicitly pronounces him and his colleagues the vanguard in the battle against global warming, the thump-thump of their helicopters flying over scree-covered slopes (Antarctica, or Afghanistan?) suggests these devoted “ice people” as that conflict’s special forces.

Ryan Trecartin "A Family Finds Entertainment"


Ryan Trecartin’s film A Family Finds Entertainment is a camp extravaganza of epic proportions. Starring Trecartin’s family and friends, and the artist himself in a plethora of outrageous roles, A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.