Wednesday, 14 May 2008
An essay on Paul Harrison and John wood
John Wood and Paul Harrison- The Odd Couple
Claire Doherty
Estragon: What shall we do now?
Vladimir: While Waiting.
Estragon: While Waiting.
(Silence)
Vladimir: We could do our exercises.
Estragon:Our movements.
Vladimir: Our elevations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: Our elongations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: To warm us up.
Estragon: To calm us down.
Vladimir: Off we go.
(Vladimir hops on one foot to the other. Estragon imitates him.)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot[1]
Are Wood and Harrison alter-egos for Estragon and Vladimir, Beckett’s existentialist anti-heroes condemned to wait for Godot? Are their ‘elevations’, ‘relaxations’ and ‘elongations’ similarly marking time, one small death after another? Certainly their procedures share the same apparent futility of Beckett’s piece of Absurdist theatre. They are baffling, inconclusive, yet deeply compelling. Enacting a series of choreographed experiments in silence, within the frame of a white void, Wood and Harrison remove themselves from time and place. Narrative is strictly contained within the parameters of each exercise and becomes cyclic, like the fate of Beckett’s protagonists, as each climax or denouement is replayed on a continuous loop. The artists assume random parts. They are victim and conspirator. They are stooge and hoaxer. They are the odd couple.
The comparison with Beckett is widely appreciated by admirers of Wood and Harrison’s work[2]. Having developed their practice collaboratively since 1993, it would appear that their brand of physical theatre has changed little in essence over the past nine years. For example, Table (1993), a video work produced after graduating from art school in Bath, shows them jumping together onto a trestle table and trying to stay on board whilst minimising wobble. It bears a close resemblance to the mutual dependence and agility required in the recent Semi-Circle (2001). But just as each of the works produced for the exhibition Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things) required an elaborate process of refining from sketches, storyboarding, set-design, rehearsal to post-production, so too the bristling co-dependency in Table has been heightened for Semi-Circle. The sculptural quality of the object onto which they climb has been perfected and their gestures and facial expressions, attire and timing have been fine-tuned through numerous exercises, so that only that which is absolutely necessary remains. It is this precise economy of means, this significant absence, which links them directly to Beckett.
To many viewers, they are not just Estragon and Vladimir, however, but rather the everyman double-act. (“At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us[3].”) They share the self-parody of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They bring to mind the slapstick partnerships of early 20th century film and music hall. They epitomise the, “if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again,” tactics of Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. Now and again they even venture into the mutually treacherous territory of Hope and Crosby, Morecambe and Wise. As members of this slapstick lineage, their physical comedy requires them to be masters of timing, uninhibited by potential danger and most significantly, poker faced.
The immediate impact of watching a Wood and Harrison video work (no single sequence lasts longer than three minutes – Jo to confirm!) is without doubt the physical nature of their endeavours – the ways in which their individual (or joint) uniform presence addresses each given obstacle. Gravity is the constant against which their bodies and/or objects are variously hurled, pulled, squashed and dropped. One could apply to their work a recent comparison of artist Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett, “(their work) is held or called by the ground. In both artists’ work, gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly. As with all human beings, the ground-ward tug effects or exerts (as an accidental by-product) shapeliness, grace and balance, even as it deforms those things, pulling them into disorganisation, flatness or comic indistinction[4].”
Similarities can certainly be drawn between Wood and Harrison’s obsessive/compulsive behaviour with that of Nauman. In particular, video and audio documentation of his studio-based performances of the late 1960s[5]. Nauman described his art-making process as, “I was trying to see if I could make art […] that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down[6].” (The spirit of slapstick once again.) It is this apparent effortlessness that belies a complex pre-production process in Wood and Harrison’s practice. Extraneous detail is stripped away, leaving the bare bones of each occurrence – Door Marking Floor, Box Test, Breeze Block, Ladder, Handle/Rope (it does what it says on the tin).
Wood and Harrison’s geometric drawings bear a close resemblance to Nauman’s pencil studies for performances such as Untitled (Study for Slow Angle Walk) (1968-69)[7]. John and Paul, the double-act – like Nauman the iconic conceptual artist – begin to disappear in these sketches. What remains is a sequence of arrows and rudimentary stick figures. Yet, cast as art objects in their own right, rather than preparatory studies, these drawings begin to give us an insight into the rationale behind Wood and Harrison’s work, beyond the superficial similarities to comedy double-acts. They are animated hieroglyphs, premonitions of premeditated accidents in space and time. As one moves from one screen to the next in Twenty-Six (Drawing and Falling Things), the characteristics of the individual (whether Wood or Harrison), as in the drawings, become less important. It is here that their work departs from Nauman’s performance pieces and crucially from the self-representational work of their contemporaries.
In this new body of work, the artists have distilled the movements of slapstick, coaxing the viewer with a nod to familiar comic scenarios. They have then erased extraneous detail so that the viewer is drawn to observe the monitor as a consistent two-dimensional surface on which they set in motion a series of three-dimensional actions. Wood and Harrison’s works are not documentations of performances, but rather single screen investigations in time and space. They are drawings. They are sculpture. They are paintings. They are theatre entirely without spectacle. They are certainly about the relationship between two figures, but also between those odd couples of form and line, perception and perspective, the body and the void. Each scenario is a small death, an inconclusive ending, that achieves a moment of at which as Nauman hoped, “art is there all at once” and then it is lost…until the next time.
Notes
fn1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot in The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1990, p. 11.
fn2. See for example, Charles Esche, ‘Nohow On’, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Film and Video Umbrella minigraph, ellipsis, London, 2000, pp. 7-15
fn3. Estragon in Waiting for Godot, op. cit. p. 13
fn4. Steven Connor, ‘Shifting Ground’, Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, 2000, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, pp. 80-7. Their touring exhibition Obstacle Course and Other Works (1999) was perhaps the site at which this aspect of the work became most apparent.
fn5. See Bruce Nauman, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, in particular Gijs van Tuyl, ‘Human Condition/Human Body’, pp. 60-75, Marcia Tucker, ‘PheNAUMANology’, pp. 82-87 and Willoughby Sharp, ‘Interview with Bruce Nauman’, pp. 88-97.
fn6. Bruce Nauman, 1987 in Willoughby Sharp, op. cit.
fn7. Also known as Beckett Walk Diagram
Bibliographical Information:
Originally published in John Wood & Paul Harrison, Chisenhale, 2002
Claire Doherty
Estragon: What shall we do now?
Vladimir: While Waiting.
Estragon: While Waiting.
(Silence)
Vladimir: We could do our exercises.
Estragon:Our movements.
Vladimir: Our elevations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: Our elongations.
Estragon: Our relaxations.
Vladimir: To warm us up.
Estragon: To calm us down.
Vladimir: Off we go.
(Vladimir hops on one foot to the other. Estragon imitates him.)
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot[1]
Are Wood and Harrison alter-egos for Estragon and Vladimir, Beckett’s existentialist anti-heroes condemned to wait for Godot? Are their ‘elevations’, ‘relaxations’ and ‘elongations’ similarly marking time, one small death after another? Certainly their procedures share the same apparent futility of Beckett’s piece of Absurdist theatre. They are baffling, inconclusive, yet deeply compelling. Enacting a series of choreographed experiments in silence, within the frame of a white void, Wood and Harrison remove themselves from time and place. Narrative is strictly contained within the parameters of each exercise and becomes cyclic, like the fate of Beckett’s protagonists, as each climax or denouement is replayed on a continuous loop. The artists assume random parts. They are victim and conspirator. They are stooge and hoaxer. They are the odd couple.
The comparison with Beckett is widely appreciated by admirers of Wood and Harrison’s work[2]. Having developed their practice collaboratively since 1993, it would appear that their brand of physical theatre has changed little in essence over the past nine years. For example, Table (1993), a video work produced after graduating from art school in Bath, shows them jumping together onto a trestle table and trying to stay on board whilst minimising wobble. It bears a close resemblance to the mutual dependence and agility required in the recent Semi-Circle (2001). But just as each of the works produced for the exhibition Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things) required an elaborate process of refining from sketches, storyboarding, set-design, rehearsal to post-production, so too the bristling co-dependency in Table has been heightened for Semi-Circle. The sculptural quality of the object onto which they climb has been perfected and their gestures and facial expressions, attire and timing have been fine-tuned through numerous exercises, so that only that which is absolutely necessary remains. It is this precise economy of means, this significant absence, which links them directly to Beckett.
To many viewers, they are not just Estragon and Vladimir, however, but rather the everyman double-act. (“At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us[3].”) They share the self-parody of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They bring to mind the slapstick partnerships of early 20th century film and music hall. They epitomise the, “if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again,” tactics of Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. Now and again they even venture into the mutually treacherous territory of Hope and Crosby, Morecambe and Wise. As members of this slapstick lineage, their physical comedy requires them to be masters of timing, uninhibited by potential danger and most significantly, poker faced.
The immediate impact of watching a Wood and Harrison video work (no single sequence lasts longer than three minutes – Jo to confirm!) is without doubt the physical nature of their endeavours – the ways in which their individual (or joint) uniform presence addresses each given obstacle. Gravity is the constant against which their bodies and/or objects are variously hurled, pulled, squashed and dropped. One could apply to their work a recent comparison of artist Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett, “(their work) is held or called by the ground. In both artists’ work, gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always visibly. As with all human beings, the ground-ward tug effects or exerts (as an accidental by-product) shapeliness, grace and balance, even as it deforms those things, pulling them into disorganisation, flatness or comic indistinction[4].”
Similarities can certainly be drawn between Wood and Harrison’s obsessive/compulsive behaviour with that of Nauman. In particular, video and audio documentation of his studio-based performances of the late 1960s[5]. Nauman described his art-making process as, “I was trying to see if I could make art […] that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down[6].” (The spirit of slapstick once again.) It is this apparent effortlessness that belies a complex pre-production process in Wood and Harrison’s practice. Extraneous detail is stripped away, leaving the bare bones of each occurrence – Door Marking Floor, Box Test, Breeze Block, Ladder, Handle/Rope (it does what it says on the tin).
Wood and Harrison’s geometric drawings bear a close resemblance to Nauman’s pencil studies for performances such as Untitled (Study for Slow Angle Walk) (1968-69)[7]. John and Paul, the double-act – like Nauman the iconic conceptual artist – begin to disappear in these sketches. What remains is a sequence of arrows and rudimentary stick figures. Yet, cast as art objects in their own right, rather than preparatory studies, these drawings begin to give us an insight into the rationale behind Wood and Harrison’s work, beyond the superficial similarities to comedy double-acts. They are animated hieroglyphs, premonitions of premeditated accidents in space and time. As one moves from one screen to the next in Twenty-Six (Drawing and Falling Things), the characteristics of the individual (whether Wood or Harrison), as in the drawings, become less important. It is here that their work departs from Nauman’s performance pieces and crucially from the self-representational work of their contemporaries.
In this new body of work, the artists have distilled the movements of slapstick, coaxing the viewer with a nod to familiar comic scenarios. They have then erased extraneous detail so that the viewer is drawn to observe the monitor as a consistent two-dimensional surface on which they set in motion a series of three-dimensional actions. Wood and Harrison’s works are not documentations of performances, but rather single screen investigations in time and space. They are drawings. They are sculpture. They are paintings. They are theatre entirely without spectacle. They are certainly about the relationship between two figures, but also between those odd couples of form and line, perception and perspective, the body and the void. Each scenario is a small death, an inconclusive ending, that achieves a moment of at which as Nauman hoped, “art is there all at once” and then it is lost…until the next time.
Notes
fn1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot in The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1990, p. 11.
fn2. See for example, Charles Esche, ‘Nohow On’, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Film and Video Umbrella minigraph, ellipsis, London, 2000, pp. 7-15
fn3. Estragon in Waiting for Godot, op. cit. p. 13
fn4. Steven Connor, ‘Shifting Ground’, Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, 2000, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, pp. 80-7. Their touring exhibition Obstacle Course and Other Works (1999) was perhaps the site at which this aspect of the work became most apparent.
fn5. See Bruce Nauman, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, in particular Gijs van Tuyl, ‘Human Condition/Human Body’, pp. 60-75, Marcia Tucker, ‘PheNAUMANology’, pp. 82-87 and Willoughby Sharp, ‘Interview with Bruce Nauman’, pp. 88-97.
fn6. Bruce Nauman, 1987 in Willoughby Sharp, op. cit.
fn7. Also known as Beckett Walk Diagram
Bibliographical Information:
Originally published in John Wood & Paul Harrison, Chisenhale, 2002
John Wood and Paul Harrison
The twenty-six works, which varied in duration from twenty seconds to three minutes, featured either Wood or Harrison performing a series of simple, deadpan gestures, using a range of objects - from doors to life jackets, chairs to platforms and boats to breeze blocks. These performative packages used the human body as a tool for exploring rhythm, synergy and spatial boundaries.
John Wood and Paul Harrison have been making collaborative video work since 1993. Their practice operates across the realms of performance, sculpture, installation and dance, and simultaneously alludes to the worlds of the comic and the cartoon. At the same time, their work essentially becomes research; their specialisation is the size, scale and movement of the body in relation to architectural environments, which the artists typically construct themselves.
John Wood and Paul Harrison have been making collaborative video work since 1993. Their practice operates across the realms of performance, sculpture, installation and dance, and simultaneously alludes to the worlds of the comic and the cartoon. At the same time, their work essentially becomes research; their specialisation is the size, scale and movement of the body in relation to architectural environments, which the artists typically construct themselves.
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
john balessari text
His work often attempts to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.
Arbitrary games
Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing 4 Balls in the Air to Get a Square, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of film.
Pointing
Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now, entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.
Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.
"If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art."
Arbitrary games
Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing 4 Balls in the Air to Get a Square, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of film.
Pointing
Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now, entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.
Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.
"If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art."
Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.”
Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.
“Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.” (Kaplan, 9)
WORKS
Rhythm 10, 1973
Abramovic performed the Russian game involving stabbing knifes between each of her fingers to create a rhythm. The sounds of this action was recorded and then played back . During this action each time her fingers were cut, one of ten knifes was swapped. Recording of the sounds were made and then the action was replicated with the same mistakes.
Rhythm 0, 1974
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) several people began to act quite aggressively. As Abramović described it later:
“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.” (Daneri, 29; and 30).
Death self
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
From November 9 through November 15, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces, seven consecutive nights of performances in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda from 5 PM to 12 AM.
Since the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has always served as her subject and medium, and the parameters of her early works were determined by her endurance. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for transformation. With Seven Easy Pieces Abramović reenacts seminal performance works by her peers dating from the 1960s and ’70s. The project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performances from this critical early period; one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
November 9, 5 PM to 12 AM
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure (1974). Nauman constructed a false wall nearly identical in size to an existing wall behind it. A pink poster with black typeface invited visitors to perform their own action by pressing against the wall.
November 10, 5 PM to 12 AM
Vito Acconci, Seedbed (1972). Acconci occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors walking above in an attempt to establish an “intimate” connection with them.
November 11, 5 PM to 12 AM
VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Wearing pants with the crotch removed, EXPORT walked through an art cinema, offering the spectators visual contact with a real female body. Walking up and down the aisles, she challenged the audience to look at reality instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.
November 12, 5 PM to 12 AM
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973). Pane lay on a metal bed above lit candles for approximately thirty minutes. Her sufferiing was apparent to the audience, who witnessed her wringing her hands in pain.
November 13, 5 PM to 12 AM
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). With his head covered in honey and gold leaf, Beuys cradled a dead hare, showing it pictures on the wall and whispering to it. He wore an iron sole on his right foot and a felt sole on his left.
November 14, 5 PM to 12 AM
Marina Abramović, Lips of Thomas (1975, Galerie Krinzinger, Innsbruck). Abramović ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine out of a glass. She broke the glass with her hand, incised a star in her stomach with a razor blade, and then whipped herself until she “no longer felt pain.” She lay down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above caused her to bleed more profusely.
November 15, 5 PM to 12 AM
Marina Abramović, Entering the Other Side (2005). Abramović premieres a new performance created specifically for this project.
Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.
“Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.” (Kaplan, 9)
WORKS
Rhythm 10, 1973
Abramovic performed the Russian game involving stabbing knifes between each of her fingers to create a rhythm. The sounds of this action was recorded and then played back . During this action each time her fingers were cut, one of ten knifes was swapped. Recording of the sounds were made and then the action was replicated with the same mistakes.
Rhythm 0, 1974
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) several people began to act quite aggressively. As Abramović described it later:
“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.” (Daneri, 29; and 30).
Death self
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual's ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
From November 9 through November 15, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces, seven consecutive nights of performances in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda from 5 PM to 12 AM.
Since the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has always served as her subject and medium, and the parameters of her early works were determined by her endurance. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for transformation. With Seven Easy Pieces Abramović reenacts seminal performance works by her peers dating from the 1960s and ’70s. The project is premised on the fact that little documentation exists for most performances from this critical early period; one often has to rely upon testimonies from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given piece. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibility of redoing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
November 9, 5 PM to 12 AM
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure (1974). Nauman constructed a false wall nearly identical in size to an existing wall behind it. A pink poster with black typeface invited visitors to perform their own action by pressing against the wall.
November 10, 5 PM to 12 AM
Vito Acconci, Seedbed (1972). Acconci occupied the space under a false floor, masturbating and speaking through a microphone to visitors walking above in an attempt to establish an “intimate” connection with them.
November 11, 5 PM to 12 AM
VALIE EXPORT, Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Wearing pants with the crotch removed, EXPORT walked through an art cinema, offering the spectators visual contact with a real female body. Walking up and down the aisles, she challenged the audience to look at reality instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.
November 12, 5 PM to 12 AM
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, first action of Self-Portrait(s) (1973). Pane lay on a metal bed above lit candles for approximately thirty minutes. Her sufferiing was apparent to the audience, who witnessed her wringing her hands in pain.
November 13, 5 PM to 12 AM
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). With his head covered in honey and gold leaf, Beuys cradled a dead hare, showing it pictures on the wall and whispering to it. He wore an iron sole on his right foot and a felt sole on his left.
November 14, 5 PM to 12 AM
Marina Abramović, Lips of Thomas (1975, Galerie Krinzinger, Innsbruck). Abramović ate a kilogram of honey and drank a liter of red wine out of a glass. She broke the glass with her hand, incised a star in her stomach with a razor blade, and then whipped herself until she “no longer felt pain.” She lay down on an ice cross while a space heater suspended above caused her to bleed more profusely.
November 15, 5 PM to 12 AM
Marina Abramović, Entering the Other Side (2005). Abramović premieres a new performance created specifically for this project.
Thursday, 3 April 2008
The origin for the word Slapstick
The origin for the word Slapstick, or "battacchio", used in the "commedia dell'arte, originates from 17th century Italian popular theatre, to make a loud exagerated noice when hitting a performer.
Garry Stevens, Wake up and Hide
Wake Up and Hide is a playful video installation that responds to sounds made by the audience. Comprising two videos in a dual screen projection, each piece shows footage featuring a group of actors in the same interior, a space reminiscent of a drawing room in a stately home. On one screen, the performers can be seen furtively entering the frame from beneath tables and behind curtains, only to scurry away quickly back into hiding when the viewer makes a sound. On the other screen, the performers are stationary to begin with and if uninterrupted for long enough, they slump to the point of wilting completely. If a member of the audience breaks the silence, this relaxation ends and the actors return to their original positions, bolt upright.
LAUGHING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, Hayward gallery, 25 January - 13 April 2008
Laughing in a Foreign Language explores the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art. In a time of increasing globalization, this international exhibition questions if humour can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or whether laughter can act as a catalyst for understanding what you are not familiar with.
Laughing in a Foreign Language investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire. The exhibition brings together more than 70 videos, photographs and interactive installation works by more than 30 artists from all around the world.
Laughing in a Foreign Language explores the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art. In a time of increasing globalization, this international exhibition questions if humour can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or whether laughter can act as a catalyst for understanding what you are not familiar with.
Laughing in a Foreign Language investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire. The exhibition brings together more than 70 videos, photographs and interactive installation works by more than 30 artists from all around the world.
Tuesday, 25 March 2008
Documentary, Joseph Beuys, Interesting Artists, Park VI
"I love America and America loves me" Documentary about Joseph Beuys.
Monday, 24 March 2008
Text, Larry Clark, Interesting Artists, Park IV
Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential American photographers of his generation, Larry Clark is known for both his raw and contentious photographs and his controversial films focusing on teen sexuality, violence, and drug use. Clark burst into public consciousness with his landmark book Tulsa in 1971, and has continued to use photography to explore urgent social issues pertaining to youth culture. In particular, he is interested in investigating the perils and vulnerabilities of adolescent masculinity, which he often explores from an autobiographical perspective.
Image, Larry Clark, Interesting Artists, Park IV
Larry Clark, Images from Tulsa, "1963-1971", series
Text, Gregor Schneider, Interesting Artists, Park III
Gregor Schneider
"Leonardo da Vinci carried everything in his head. He still knew everything. ... But today! Today it's no longer possible to know everything. The ties between oneself and things no longer exist ... one has to create a world of one's own in order to satisty one's hunger for knowledge, for understanding, one's need for order" But be careful. It was also Beckett who pointed out to us over and over again that this other world could not simply be equated with our world by interpretation. The other world is neither an image of this world nor is it an image of any particular thought. But how then, is this other world to be understood?
The hero of this other world, Gregor Schneider goes to absolutely remarkable lengths to reconstruct one and the same room, stone by stone - we're talking about a weight of 3 tons here - on another site. He takes the room apart. He digs, he carries, he tolls, he sweats, he is covered with dust, he is sinking in filth. He takes action; and as he takes action, he is assuring himself of his own existence.
Whether or not a room comes into being that too, is unimportant "I'm not at all interested in the room. When I put a room together the first time I wasn't even conscious of having built a room. Someone else told me that's what I'd done ... I'm interested in actions running idle," says Gregor Schneider in the second play while he's drinking coffee and eating cake. And he also admits in this speech that he considers "action a higher form than thought"
Gregor Schneider as I had been further instructed, was supposed, in the first play to have dismantled the basement of his own house, which he describes as "a dump", transported it to a museum with a rich history and rebuilt it there. Sometimes he also refers to the basement as a "bordello". But what do these names mean? They explain nothing. A damp cellar smelling of mildew is no bordello. And yet these words have an erotic coloration that transports the room into other contexts. They also have a "vulgar" undertone similar to some of Buckett's titles, such as "More Pricks than kicks".
The room that Gregor Schneider dismantles is-as has been described-a part of the house in which Gregor Schneider lives, thus it is a (part of his) home. The other room stands-as has likewise been described-in a museum. It is a work of art. One and the same room cannot, however be a home if it's a work of art, nor can it be a work of art if it's a home. But it isn't one and the same room. The one room fits in a house, the other in a museum. What a contradiction! (And not the sort that can be figured out by reasoning.) Yet, what can't be explained through reason seems meaningless and therefore puzzling. And not only that. It transgresses the boundaries of decency and quickly slips into the realm of the criminal. In Beckett, crime - vioIent death, for example - is always lurking around the next corner; sometimes it's even part of the plot. And who knows how many corpses Gregor Schneider has hidden beneath the rubble of his basement floor?
In the second play "Dining Room", as I had been told, Gregor Schneider answers, while drinking coffee and eating cake, the question as to the forms of his actions: "Yes, and constant screams, piercing. Constant screams, and the attempt to raise their expressiveness. I have known the greatest possible expression in human screams." Who is Gregor Schneider this kind of person who, after taking another sip of his coffee, obliviously continues: "Dug holes, buried myself, jumped from tree to tree and made swimming motions while doing so, since - after all - each tree is a world, and between worlds lies water" Who is Gregor Schneider? Do the plays, whose main character he is supposed to be, even exist? The plays exist But what kind of plays are they? Are they a form of art or a form of life? Despair not, one might answer this question in Beckett's manner the one form belongs to life. Rejoice not, the other form belongs to art. A contradiction not to be dissolved by reason! It can only be met through action. Which is why Gregor Schneider regards "action as a higher form than thought".
The site of Gregor Schneider's acting - the site to which everything relates - is the "totes Haus ur" ("Dead House ur"). It's supposed to be located in a small town, in Rheydt, not far from Mönchengladbach in a shabby industrial region. Gregor Schneider has been working on this house for ten years. Occasionally he invites someone in for coffee and cake; one can even spend the night in the house. If one is lucky I was lucky.
One day I received a small card with the following content: "The guestroom hasn't yet been put back together / guests can't sleep here at the moment. But there's coffee and cake. Schneider/ Rheydt."
So not a play after all, at least not one by Beckett... or is it? The house really does exist. Tiled three-story façade, a door a narrow wooden stairway leading to a room in which a table set in white offers up coffee and cake. Here I am met by a short man with lively eyes whom I already know from the plays. The atmosphere in the room is one of petit bourgeois Gemütlichkeit. Then the man pushes a wall aside. I enter an in-between space which allows me to see that the coffee room rotates, like a stage, on its own axis, and that the window is an illusion. It's mounted, like a mirror image, in front of the window to the outside. Another wall is raised. I squeeze myself half bent over through a hallway and enter through the inside of a wardrobe, the guestroom, which - because it had stood for some time in a museum - is not yet rebuilt in its entirety. It's neat and white, and outfitted with a bed and a bathtub.
Back through the wardrobe, up a ladder it gets even narrower as the corridors wind like tangled intestines. I drag myself around the corner The cabinet of wonders: stuffed animals, skulls, a hand, a black mirrored ball hanging from the wall, an old armoire, rolled-up carpets, a mask, horns on the armoire. And again a window that isn't really a window; it provides no view to the outside. Is there any view from this house to the exterior? The cellar. Dark, cold, damp, and smelling of mildew. The oppressive cell whose walls are lined with lead and the room with the puddle from the first play
I stand again in front of the house and think back to the play "Dining Room", of which I'd been told. In this play Gregor Schneider is said to have expressed a wish during his coffee table conversation: "I dream of taking the whole house with me and rebuilding it somewhere else. My father and mother would live with me there; the older relatives lie dead in the cellar. My brothers live upstairs, here and there there live women and men who have no other place to go. Somewhere in the corner sits a large woman who's always having babies, churning them out into the world. I'm somewhere in there, too, constantly digging everything up." What a wonderful image, Beckett would say. The one house is blessed and therefore full of life; the other house is damned and the "Dead House ur".
Noemi Smolik
Gregor Schneider represents Germany at the 49th Biennale di Venezia."
http://www.postmedia.net/01/schneider.htm
"Leonardo da Vinci carried everything in his head. He still knew everything. ... But today! Today it's no longer possible to know everything. The ties between oneself and things no longer exist ... one has to create a world of one's own in order to satisty one's hunger for knowledge, for understanding, one's need for order" But be careful. It was also Beckett who pointed out to us over and over again that this other world could not simply be equated with our world by interpretation. The other world is neither an image of this world nor is it an image of any particular thought. But how then, is this other world to be understood?
The hero of this other world, Gregor Schneider goes to absolutely remarkable lengths to reconstruct one and the same room, stone by stone - we're talking about a weight of 3 tons here - on another site. He takes the room apart. He digs, he carries, he tolls, he sweats, he is covered with dust, he is sinking in filth. He takes action; and as he takes action, he is assuring himself of his own existence.
Whether or not a room comes into being that too, is unimportant "I'm not at all interested in the room. When I put a room together the first time I wasn't even conscious of having built a room. Someone else told me that's what I'd done ... I'm interested in actions running idle," says Gregor Schneider in the second play while he's drinking coffee and eating cake. And he also admits in this speech that he considers "action a higher form than thought"
Gregor Schneider as I had been further instructed, was supposed, in the first play to have dismantled the basement of his own house, which he describes as "a dump", transported it to a museum with a rich history and rebuilt it there. Sometimes he also refers to the basement as a "bordello". But what do these names mean? They explain nothing. A damp cellar smelling of mildew is no bordello. And yet these words have an erotic coloration that transports the room into other contexts. They also have a "vulgar" undertone similar to some of Buckett's titles, such as "More Pricks than kicks".
The room that Gregor Schneider dismantles is-as has been described-a part of the house in which Gregor Schneider lives, thus it is a (part of his) home. The other room stands-as has likewise been described-in a museum. It is a work of art. One and the same room cannot, however be a home if it's a work of art, nor can it be a work of art if it's a home. But it isn't one and the same room. The one room fits in a house, the other in a museum. What a contradiction! (And not the sort that can be figured out by reasoning.) Yet, what can't be explained through reason seems meaningless and therefore puzzling. And not only that. It transgresses the boundaries of decency and quickly slips into the realm of the criminal. In Beckett, crime - vioIent death, for example - is always lurking around the next corner; sometimes it's even part of the plot. And who knows how many corpses Gregor Schneider has hidden beneath the rubble of his basement floor?
In the second play "Dining Room", as I had been told, Gregor Schneider answers, while drinking coffee and eating cake, the question as to the forms of his actions: "Yes, and constant screams, piercing. Constant screams, and the attempt to raise their expressiveness. I have known the greatest possible expression in human screams." Who is Gregor Schneider this kind of person who, after taking another sip of his coffee, obliviously continues: "Dug holes, buried myself, jumped from tree to tree and made swimming motions while doing so, since - after all - each tree is a world, and between worlds lies water" Who is Gregor Schneider? Do the plays, whose main character he is supposed to be, even exist? The plays exist But what kind of plays are they? Are they a form of art or a form of life? Despair not, one might answer this question in Beckett's manner the one form belongs to life. Rejoice not, the other form belongs to art. A contradiction not to be dissolved by reason! It can only be met through action. Which is why Gregor Schneider regards "action as a higher form than thought".
The site of Gregor Schneider's acting - the site to which everything relates - is the "totes Haus ur" ("Dead House ur"). It's supposed to be located in a small town, in Rheydt, not far from Mönchengladbach in a shabby industrial region. Gregor Schneider has been working on this house for ten years. Occasionally he invites someone in for coffee and cake; one can even spend the night in the house. If one is lucky I was lucky.
One day I received a small card with the following content: "The guestroom hasn't yet been put back together / guests can't sleep here at the moment. But there's coffee and cake. Schneider/ Rheydt."
So not a play after all, at least not one by Beckett... or is it? The house really does exist. Tiled three-story façade, a door a narrow wooden stairway leading to a room in which a table set in white offers up coffee and cake. Here I am met by a short man with lively eyes whom I already know from the plays. The atmosphere in the room is one of petit bourgeois Gemütlichkeit. Then the man pushes a wall aside. I enter an in-between space which allows me to see that the coffee room rotates, like a stage, on its own axis, and that the window is an illusion. It's mounted, like a mirror image, in front of the window to the outside. Another wall is raised. I squeeze myself half bent over through a hallway and enter through the inside of a wardrobe, the guestroom, which - because it had stood for some time in a museum - is not yet rebuilt in its entirety. It's neat and white, and outfitted with a bed and a bathtub.
Back through the wardrobe, up a ladder it gets even narrower as the corridors wind like tangled intestines. I drag myself around the corner The cabinet of wonders: stuffed animals, skulls, a hand, a black mirrored ball hanging from the wall, an old armoire, rolled-up carpets, a mask, horns on the armoire. And again a window that isn't really a window; it provides no view to the outside. Is there any view from this house to the exterior? The cellar. Dark, cold, damp, and smelling of mildew. The oppressive cell whose walls are lined with lead and the room with the puddle from the first play
I stand again in front of the house and think back to the play "Dining Room", of which I'd been told. In this play Gregor Schneider is said to have expressed a wish during his coffee table conversation: "I dream of taking the whole house with me and rebuilding it somewhere else. My father and mother would live with me there; the older relatives lie dead in the cellar. My brothers live upstairs, here and there there live women and men who have no other place to go. Somewhere in the corner sits a large woman who's always having babies, churning them out into the world. I'm somewhere in there, too, constantly digging everything up." What a wonderful image, Beckett would say. The one house is blessed and therefore full of life; the other house is damned and the "Dead House ur".
Noemi Smolik
Gregor Schneider represents Germany at the 49th Biennale di Venezia."
http://www.postmedia.net/01/schneider.htm
Sunday, 23 March 2008
Mike Nelson, Interesting Artists, Park II
Using a jumble of apparently discarded everyday materials, such as timber, furniture, magazines and clothing, Nelson constructs large-scale, highly architectural, site-specific installations that often arise from a period of living and working in a particular location. In them he fuses literary, filmic, socio-political and cultural references, both associated with and imposed upon the site, to create haunting environments which evoke strange and disturbing narratives - a place that people have vanished from like the Mary Celeste, or where a crime has been commited, where something awful has happened or is about to happen. Nelson's arrangement of his materials is never arbitrary, but carefully crafted and organised, in an idiosyncratic way, to create his new fictions.
Nelson's pieces often suggest journeys to alien worlds. Taylor 1994, comprising a large makeshift raft with that name, makes reference to the marooned astronaut in the cult film Planet of the Apes, while Agent Dixon at the Red Star Hotel 1995, presents a ramshackle, Turkish space shuttle, its cabin complete with hammock, cooking pots and crash helmets. Such installations draw the viewer into their fictional, at first glance baffling scenarios, which, having no fixed point or answer; therefore depend upon the spectator creating their own reading of Nelson's visual symbols and clues. As David Burrows has observed, viewing Nelson's exhibitions becomes 'an act of storytelling, Nelson's fictional index transforms the everyday object by taking the visitor to another place'.
Tales of transition, alienation and otherness also lie at the heart of many of Nelson's installations. The Coral Reef 2000, for example, lures the viewer through a labyrinth of shabby interconnected rooms, abandoned, inhospitable spaces in which disquiet and disorientation is evoked. These spaces all have the character of generic waiting or reception rooms, but particular identities become apparent through different ethnic and cultural decors and details, an empty sleeping bag, an Islamic calendar, a wall hanging of JFK, a smashed chair. Individual characteristics and cultural histories unfold and narratives accumulate by association. As in much of his work, Nelson here creates situations that attempt to raise questions about individual and cultural standpoints by presenting the viewer with an ambiguous range of readings from the overlapping narratives diffused throughout his network of objects.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/turnerprize/2001/Nelson.htm
Nelson's pieces often suggest journeys to alien worlds. Taylor 1994, comprising a large makeshift raft with that name, makes reference to the marooned astronaut in the cult film Planet of the Apes, while Agent Dixon at the Red Star Hotel 1995, presents a ramshackle, Turkish space shuttle, its cabin complete with hammock, cooking pots and crash helmets. Such installations draw the viewer into their fictional, at first glance baffling scenarios, which, having no fixed point or answer; therefore depend upon the spectator creating their own reading of Nelson's visual symbols and clues. As David Burrows has observed, viewing Nelson's exhibitions becomes 'an act of storytelling, Nelson's fictional index transforms the everyday object by taking the visitor to another place'.
Tales of transition, alienation and otherness also lie at the heart of many of Nelson's installations. The Coral Reef 2000, for example, lures the viewer through a labyrinth of shabby interconnected rooms, abandoned, inhospitable spaces in which disquiet and disorientation is evoked. These spaces all have the character of generic waiting or reception rooms, but particular identities become apparent through different ethnic and cultural decors and details, an empty sleeping bag, an Islamic calendar, a wall hanging of JFK, a smashed chair. Individual characteristics and cultural histories unfold and narratives accumulate by association. As in much of his work, Nelson here creates situations that attempt to raise questions about individual and cultural standpoints by presenting the viewer with an ambiguous range of readings from the overlapping narratives diffused throughout his network of objects.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/turnerprize/2001/Nelson.htm
Image, Mike Nelson, Interesting Artists, Park II
The Cosmic Legend of the Uroboros Serpent 2001
Mixed media installation, dimensions variable
Mixed media installation, dimensions variable
Roman Signer, (Interesting Artists), Part I
The use to everyday objects, set up to react against each others surroundings is very important to the work of Roman Signer. His interaction and performance approach to these objects is also apparent.
"Signer's moving everyday objects and motorized vehicles are regarded as a representative of an expanded concept of sculpture and work and has meanwhile become a role model for a younger generation of artists. His dynamic, sensitive and even mad sculptures that develop in the fourth dimension – of time – are by no means relics of performances, but rather precisely choreographed. The essence of the event determines the form, and even processes that only last a few moments become action or time sculptures." www.orbit.zkm.de
"The compelling strength of Signer's art lies in its complete obedience to the circumstances and structural rules laid down for his actions. Signer calls the slight modifications of a given state 'poetic events.' Poetic in the literal sense of poiesis, man-made creation, and not in its vaguely profound and emotional sense. The radical, factual simplicity of Signer's actions is the very source of their fascinating energy."» ~ Marie Louise Leinhard.
"Signer's moving everyday objects and motorized vehicles are regarded as a representative of an expanded concept of sculpture and work and has meanwhile become a role model for a younger generation of artists. His dynamic, sensitive and even mad sculptures that develop in the fourth dimension – of time – are by no means relics of performances, but rather precisely choreographed. The essence of the event determines the form, and even processes that only last a few moments become action or time sculptures." www.orbit.zkm.de
"The compelling strength of Signer's art lies in its complete obedience to the circumstances and structural rules laid down for his actions. Signer calls the slight modifications of a given state 'poetic events.' Poetic in the literal sense of poiesis, man-made creation, and not in its vaguely profound and emotional sense. The radical, factual simplicity of Signer's actions is the very source of their fascinating energy."» ~ Marie Louise Leinhard.
Saturday, 22 March 2008
Video Mash ups
Below a look at video mash ups. As Helen Ochyra writes,
"The explosion of video editing software has given rise to the huge (but illegal, copyright-wise) phenomenon of "video mash ups". This is where people with rather too much time on there hands take footage from well known film, subject it to some rigorous editing based around an entirely different plot, perhaps add new titles sequences, then post the spoof clip online with, usually, some hilarious results".
Some have been selected from Youtube and brought together here on Con-Doc.
"The explosion of video editing software has given rise to the huge (but illegal, copyright-wise) phenomenon of "video mash ups". This is where people with rather too much time on there hands take footage from well known film, subject it to some rigorous editing based around an entirely different plot, perhaps add new titles sequences, then post the spoof clip online with, usually, some hilarious results".
Some have been selected from Youtube and brought together here on Con-Doc.
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