HuMan Ray

Man Ray, (1943)


Man Ray Statement

"I am an old man now
In sixty years you can do a lot of work.
I did a lot of things in sixty years,
my paintings, my photography, my objects.
I change all the time.
I have periods were I do one thing
then for a few years
I do something else.
I am a free man.
I do not work for a padrone, or a boss.
I am indifferent to things
that do not interest me.
But never would I attack them.
Especially in the creative arts.
Because I say anybody who does creative art
is a sacred person.
I do not care what he does.
Whether he paints academic pictures
or he is modern
or different
from anything else.
He cannot do any harm.
Whereas a bad politician
or a bad doctor
or a bad cook
can kill you!"

(Thank you, Man Ray.)


(pic via)

Preparing a performance

I have been working on a ("site-specific") durational performance.

It's about intimacy in times of distance, political, social, personal distance. It's about the possibility (?) of revealing and getting closer. The images you see are the "prototype" of the main structure.


Two things have surfaced during the preparation:
1) For a while we flirted with the idea of using fragments of (Sophocles' or Anouilh's) Antigone. It all seemed to fit: the tension between the private and the public, the drama of wanting to respect your private world/values, the overwhelming role of (social/state) structures in personal life, and even the isolation of a "cave" where the intimacy is "consumed" (burns out). But then, it didn't fit at all. The tragedies bring an incredible burden: they have a story to tell, which is an ancient story, not quite corresponding to the things happening around us. Of course, we can say, as is usually said (also about e.g. Shakespeare) that the whole world is there already. But this is exactly the problem! I don't want the whole world, not that world. I would have to choose and either a) destroy the tragedy by "manipulating" it to my needs, taking away everything that makes it the tragedy I admire, or b) listen to the tragedy and lose my play. I tried for some time to find the right balance. Then I let go - and feel relieved. "This tail does not belong to this cat", my Dad used to say. How does it ever?
2) I'm discovering to my surprize I have been developing more and more work in "non-traditional" theatre spaces. Now, this wouldn't be worrying, if it were the road I had opted to take. The problem is, I have never really liked this sort of work as a spectator. I never gave it much credit. And here, suddenly, I find myself digging in the same site-specific dirt I found so unthrilling.

(Off Topic) What makes a blog popular

As Wajcman (p.11) notes, “qualities associated with manliness are almost everywhere more highly regarded than those thought of as womanly.” In this case, discourse practices that construct weblogs as externally-focused, substantive, intellectual, authoritative, and potent (in the sense of both “influential” and “socially transformative”) map readily on to Western cultural notions of white collar masculinity (Connell, 1995), in contrast to the personal, trivial, emotional, and ultimately less important communicative activities associated with women (cf. “gossip”). Such practices work to relegate the participation of women and other groups to a lower status in the technologically-mediated communication environment that is the blogosphere, and more generally, to reinforce the societal status quo.

- Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright, Women and Children Last: the Discursive Construction of Weblogs

Breathing

I have just discovered a musical piece called Vvoi, by someone (person? group?) called meta. I'm happy about the coincidence (I had nothing to do with it), since I like the piece. I might even use it in a (durational) performance I'm preparing (providing the author permits it).

Sculpting your way out of sculpture?

"It is clear that I often craved to bring sculpture into a more direct involvement with the common experience of living.

At such times I felt there must be a more direct way of contact than the rather remote one of art.

Initially this may have been no more than an attempt to move beyond the narrowing horizons of artistic sensibility.

It bothered me that art so soon became a style with little creation added to its production.

Why should the artistic imagination be so contained, or be unequal to the broadening scope of our world awareness?"

- Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), A Sculptor's World (1968)



All the pictures are of works by Isamu Noguchi. In order of appearance:
Lunar Infant (1944)
Artist's studio, New York City(1945)
Detail of Playscapes, Atlanta, Georgia (1975-76)
Energy Void (1971)
Large Walking Box (1952)
The Garden of Peace, UNESCO, Paris

Logo

How do you like the new New Art image? It comes from here:

Surface

"The skin is what is deepest" - Paul Valéry



(From what I understood, Paul Valéry's idea was that, paradoxically, our surface is what makes us seem so human. Under the skin, there is only flesh - animal flesh. Maybe our secret is hidden within the skin? Or maybe humanity is skin-deep?)
(Do I need to explain why this picture appears on the New Art blog?)

Interaction

I just read my last post. It made me think about the nature of the two works. Is interactivity in art really a value?

Touch Me

We-make-money-not-art published a post a few days ago about Touchme, an interactive installation by the Dutch group Blendid:

Simply press a part of your body or objects against the frosted glass surface, and you'll leave a kind of imprint for you and others to see, as the results remain a part of the piece and are displayed when no interactions occurs for a given time.

This is...nice. It's nice, it's fun.
Now, thanks to The Man With The Red Glasses (blog in French), I recalled a piece from another world, of a different order, but also playing with afterimages and images hidden behind screens. I mean the work of the brilliant Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, called Tela Habitada, roughly translated as "The Inhabited Canvas" ("tela" also means "web" or "net").

Obviously, any direct comparison between these two works might seem superficial. But I love Paul Valéry's statement that "the skin is what is deepest" (yes, I know it's out of context), so why not confront these two ways of looking at things? at objects, at art? I'm afraid my thoughts here would be very similar to a recent post I wrote, so let me just add this: I do not mean to say that art should remain serious. That if it's not black-and-white and heavy with triple meanings and long, profound silences, it is probably worthless. On the contrary, I am always incredibly happy if I can be moved (shaken, shocked, bewildered, hit, tickled, blown-out-of-this-world: impressed) by some work that beams out of a thousand electronic screens which react to the average rate of blinking of the gallery visitors. Only this sort of effect seems to me as something incredibly difficult to obtain out of a mechanism that is so difficult to control. If it is so hard with a "simple" black-and-white photo, imagine the difficulty with all these wonderful new toys. That's why I still usually prefer Almeida. And that's why I appreciate new media artists: they dare to try the impossible.

Techno-drawing

When new technologies give old techniques the flashy look that attracts.

(via)

Beyond...

Is it possible to accelerate and catalyze social change through communication without reproducing market methods? This question is at the core of the Beyond... category of Memefest. Responses to this challenge should explore ways of shifting and disrupting existing power while involving people in ways other than that of the passive consumer.

If you have an idea of this sort, hurry up and send it - because the examples they show on their page are sometimes really desperate attempts to do something almost impossible - make a change.
(Not that some of them aren't funny...)

(via)

Reading Room

I have been thinking of creating a Reading Room for a while now. It simply isn't fair to recommend a book without telling you anything about it. This is what I did: the reviews will all be posted with a January 2000 date. This way, going to my January 2000 archives means going to my Reading Room. I have just posted my first review : of the book "Live. Art and Performance". I also changed the "Book of the Month" on the sidebar. It is now linked to the Reading Room, and not directly to Amazon, as it used to be (I know, it wasn't very nice of me, or very wise, since obviously nobody buys books they know nothing about).

Jan Family

Have you ever had the dream of creating art with your entire family? Having a sort of a big workshop where everyone participates, and we talk about it during the meals, and have fun doing it all together... If this idyllic vision has been yours, but the family just wasn't up to it - do what a few Danish artists in London did - create one. It's really as simple as that: call yourself the Jan Family (no, actually, that one's taken), or any other thing, and just be a family. With a little luck and effort your offspring will be as pretty as Jan Family's page. Their art is very diversified, ranging from songs to photos to net art, but it has a certain elegance about it which makes it quite appealing and easy to watch. Slightly too nice? Maybe not in the real world. And then, it seems like the internet spectator is a little abandoned sometimes, without a clue as to what he is watching. Which can be nice. Sometimes. Well, but go see the site and judge by yourselves.
(via r-echos)

Become an artist in 14 easy steps

Here is a guide for my pragmatic readers, courtesy of Donny Miller.
(I would never have dared to link to this if I hadn't originally found it at art.blogging.la.)
(Am I becoming cynical again?)

When avant-garde artists consume

Our guest from the future will not avoid yet another interesting discovery. Those who go to visit the exhibition of avant-garde art, who buy an "incomprehensible" sculpture or participate in a happening, are dressed and groomed according to the established cannons of fashion, they wear jeans or brand clothes, they put on make-up according to the model of beauty promoted by the color magazines, the cinema, the TV, that is, the mass media. They take example from the ideals of beauty proposed by the world of the commercial consumption that the avant-garde art has fought against for over half a century. How are we to interpret this contradiction? Without trying to explain it, we can say it is typical of the 20th century.

- Umberto Eco, The History of Beauty (2004), here in my translation from Polish.
(You can read several interesting reviews of The History of Beauty at Amazon. As always, I only send you to the books I find genuinely brilliant. This a truly amazing piece of work, as usually in the case of Eco it combines profound insight with unparalleled sense of humour and sensibility)

(Matthew Barney)

Changes

I have started to introduce some changes to the New Art blog's appearance. As you can see, so far it's very small-scale (strategic ;)) : the page now has a favicon (tiny logo next to the address). The little image has to do both with contemporary art and with Portugal. The logo in the top right corner - the "network" - is also about to be replaced. I will be experimenting with some new images, and writing about the proposed changes. I would like to know your opinion!

Woman

The internet seems to be working particularly well for feminist art, or rather, for art centered on women. Here is another example: a simple "game" by Juliet Davis, called Pieces of Herself, where we compose a woman by exploring her surroundings and literally inputting the elements we choose on the anonymous figure. And they jump and dance and talk and ring, and all this inside of the woman we create. "You really should try and integrate all those roles into one", said one of the objects I selected.
Is this the specificity of a woman? Or is it just a person, and the gender/sex is irrelevant...?
Why is it a woman? What makes this experience unique for women?

(via Rhizome)

The problem with technology in art

Manual Input Sessions by Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman (I've recently written about Levin's other projects) is another one of these brilliant inventions that seem the beginning of something beautiful. We discover the technology, it is new, fresh, and has great potential. But it's not quite it yet. The video at the above link shows a study for an actual performance, that apparently is to last about 30 minutes (there is a short note about it here). Still, what we see in digital format is from a performance at the Whitney Biennial in 2004. Which means - we are to take it seriously.
The problem is - I don't. As many, many other brilliant technological inventions, it seems a tool for something else, a first step, a basis to be used elsewhere. Maybe it's because of my theater /performance background, or my appreciation of films - but I often want to include a work like this into a bigger universe. And here is my complaint: the artists whhich work in new media often develop the technology, then present it, and then abandon it, moving on to another project. The other project, of course, usually integrates the technical discoveries of the first one. But it doesn't use it in a (aesthetically, artistically...) more ambitious development. On the other hand, other artists will rarely profit from these discoveries using them as part of their projects. Question of copyright? I don't think so. There seems to be a fear (I hope I'm wrong) of staying with a given invention and working "sideways", to try and explore the various ways it can be used. Could it be that because the artists working "on the cutting edge of technology" are closer to the technological tradition than to the artistic one?
One of the objectives of this blog is to inspire. I love discovering new ways of looking at things - and then using them, consciously or not, to my own means. I am convinced that the artist should take advantage of the discoveries other artists make - and take the time to work sideways, also using other works as tools to present things in a different light

or give them a different twist

(by the way, I discovered two pretty sites about Marcel Duchamp - a simple but pretty one here and an informative one here)

I sincerely hope Golan Levin's work keeps surprizing us. Not only because his new program reacts to drawn images - but because of where it will allow him to travel. And us, to hitch-hike along.

Post-erotic art

Take a look at the picture:

Not exactly what you were expecting?
Erotic art, I suppose, has to do with subtly playing with our senses. It becomes pleasantly impossible to distinguish between erotic and aesthetic experience. One of the two guides us, the other follows us (the order of the two depends on the type of art...). Then again, we could go even further from the erotic than that. Associate anything with sex ("Doesn't that crack in the wall remind you of something?"). Our imaginations are full of erotic images, sensual associations and explicit links. But maybe it could be about not even following the links? About going the other way, "sublimating" the feelings, as Freud would say?
What are we left with, then? Conceptual boxes with no pleasure in them? Here is an example, a proof of the contrary - pleasure can come in numerous ways. Take the box.

Jack-in-the-box? Pandora's box?
Rose box. This is what it's all about: a labeled box. You can read the labels, but is that what you'll find in the box?
Start by approaching the object of your interest. What do you see? A sensual creature?


A sex object?

A goddess?


An awkward figure?


Or maybe something else?


Or maybe someone else?

How erotic is all of this? Together, it might not seem erotic in the least. But take a look at the pictures one-by-one. See how they play with curves, how they show and hide, how they tease you into believing something they don't say. Even the political one with the burka and bikini seems perversely attractive. I like them, because I can feel the tension between the sexual, and the human, and the political/social. It looks like an attempt to go beyond, but an honest one, which admits when it can't forget the stuff we're made of.

Linda Zacks's art is cool, fast, witty, pretty, funny, sad, commercial, anti-commercial, right and wrong. Zacks is a fine artist of the 21st century (I've always wanted to use this phrase). She is a designer, and a popular one. She has worked with big guns like VH1, MTV, great websites and magazines. And they seem to like her because of her talent and her tongue-in-cheek approach. She doesn't hide behind artsy talk and esoteric images, she doesn't snob herself into the art world - which would probably have gotten her out of the design world. She has strong opinions about things - some really inspiring, while others seem naive and make me sad that such a nice picture is "wasted" on such a poor statement. But at the same time that's the part I really appreciate - straightforwardness in art is a rare quality.

(via lisa's artblog)
(PS: Just don't tell me you didn't come here for the art)

More than clear

but clarity is the lowest form of poetry, and language, like all else in our lives, is always changing. our emotions are constantly being propelled by some new face in the sky, some new rocket to the moon, some new sound in the ear, but they are the same emotions.

- Merce Cunningham (1915-), 'you have to love dancing to stick to it', Changes: Notes on CHoreography, New York: Something Else, 1968.
(quoted from The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader (link to Amazon's description))