Simple Stories

David Lynch's new project, Interview Project, is assumingly as simple as it gets: travel across the US. Interview people.
Here is the first episode.
First impressions? It's... nice. Potentially fascinating. Not quite yet. For the moment, it's too early to say.

This might seem like something very unfocused, as if it lacked a form, a formula, a format to support it. Compare this first episode to Kieślowski's (amazing, amazing) Talking Heads (1980):





Kieślowski has a format and sticks to it.
Seen from this perspective, Lynch's project might appear as amateurish.
But then, it goes so well with the spirit of our times, with the thirst for simple, everyday stories...
After all, we can still feel quite a heavy dose of humanist ideals and pathos in Kieślowski's approach. Even the way he films his subjects is dramatic, often painting-like.
Lynch has this capacity too, as we know so well. Yet he chooses a very different approach, different texture. Different proximity.

One small, hardly noticeable element is similar in the two projects: the music. It is heavy, dramatic, as if contradicting the simplicity of the protagonists.
Is it nostalgia for the great narratives?

Oh, and one more thing. We can only get that far asking constantly the most basic questions. After a while, I get tired. I want more. The essential stops being essential. It becomes annoyingly abstract, unaccessible. That's one reason to go beyond the existential questions, and one reason to ask other questions. One way of dealing with this is moving away from the person-as-biography to the person-as-projection. Take the famous work by Sophie Calle called Blind, where she asked people who were born blind about what is their image of beauty.

The pathos is still quite present. Yet the projection, the sensibility of the imagination, makes us... dance with empathy.

Looking up

Master, placid are
All the hours
We lose,
If, in losing them,
Like in a vase,
We put flowers.

(fragment of a poem by Ricardo Reis, aka Fernando Pessoa)

Tommi Toija, the author of the above sculptures, has an exhibition at the Institut Finlandais in Paris until the end of June.

Falling? Flying?

No fall is ever great.
The distance from the tip of the nose
to the dirt is always measured in the smallest units.
It is always ridiculous, always too human, the
concrete body against the concrete soil,
the sight losing focus, and the hands,
the hands.


Richard Beacham's drawing, at the Boxbird gallery in London.

Of the daemon

I am not a person particularly given to metaphysical beliefs.
I tend to be cautious in the way I describe the world, and the parts where I allow myself to travel further are, in my perspective, mere mental experiments, or even tricks of the (artistic) trade.
Yet I wish I could simply apply Elizabeth Gilbert's advice and speak out to whatever is out there, negociating with me what comes to my mind.
It's not an easy task. The skepticism rushes in, and I am reminded by myself that, after all, it all remains a metaphor, and although I might be producing things I myself do not expect (that seems to be the rule), I do not know how my heart functions, either, or why I start to sweat or how I fall asleep. The more carefuly I look at myself, the less of what I do can be divided into conscious and unconscious activity. Ergo, I can assume creativity is also somewhere within that quasi-conscious reign that to me should appear no more familiar, or "mine", than yawning.
But, deep down inside, I am also a dreamer. I love to think I'm lucky. I like pretty formulas, and feel very precisely how sometimes things go right. There you have it: here is an opening for metaphysics. If I am so easily tempted to create all these invisible structures, strings and forces, why can't I accept the simple idea that there is someone, something, a daemon, that negociates with me everything I do? Why, for heaven's sake, not accept something that makes your life easier? For the sake of truth? In art?

The Abstraction Game: Myra Mimlitsch-Gray

The problem with abstraction is that a subjective voyage into the unknown is precisely this: subjective. And, since the exceptional quality of my experience as the creator is something distinct from the experience of the spectator, the abstraction game becomes a hide-and-seek of subjectivities, a challenge which at any moment can be called a bluff, a mere ego trip. Thus, whenever the artist moves into abstraction, whenever we receive less (of the visible image of the visible), we find ourselves in a position of risk - the risk of losing track, of losing sight of anything that rings a bell.
It is a risk we have learned to enjoy. It is a risk justified by the way our historically-bound senses receive the world, and well-defended by an astonishing number of passionate theories.
Still, I look with envy at the art lovers who find abstraction as natural as air.
Most of the time, I find it easier to discover new worlds in a stone than in an abstract sculpture.
Yet there are artists who manage to create paths that lead from the world of re-cognition, of everyday objects and images and tastes, of the mimetic pleasures of re-production, to the very limits of abstract forms.
One such artist is Myra Mimlitsch-Gray.

Take a simple object:

The effect of melting does not seem to challenge the object as such. It asks for fruit as loudly as any classic salver does. Nonetheless, it moves us towards a world where the concrete is, well, not so concrete after all:
Here we have a candelabrum, which is hardly a candelabrum any more. It has melted like a candle, apparently contradicting its main function: to withstand melting. Welcome back to the magnificent world of semiotic undoing, and sensual games with the intellect.
Too entropic for you? Why don't you try something more positive, then? Sugar and cream, anyone?

The sugar bowl is the negative of its own shape, as is the creamer... or is it that none of them actually has the shape? What are they, after all, these shapes that are to be useful, that are to serve, as if their being objects were not good enough? What is left of the representation, of the concrete, once we put it to challenge in its very heart?

Let's move back to the first picture now. The title of the work is Trunk Sections, and it is made in cast iron. A tree made of iron. Or is it a mold of a tree? (What a strange idea: a mold of a tree!) Or just a part of their trunk? And why do they seem so... wooden? What, then is the matter with them? They are like ghosts, representing something we presume might have been here, but made of another stuff, another material, another essence, defying the way we see the objectness of the object.
We can, of course, go back to seeing them as just a few pieces of iron cast and assembled to create an abstract sculpture, like so many others.
The question is: with this delicious introduction, why would we refuse the voyage?

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray has an exhibition on until June 27 at the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia, and you can read an insightful text about her work by by David Revere McFadden here.

To-ge(t)-ther(e)

My last posts brought about several inspiring reactions, among them two great suggestions.
The animation made several people think of William Kentridge, whose characteristic style is a mix of playfulness and profound reflection, exploring what it means to draw, to create a world, to translate, to travel...
In this video, though, he is less focused on the means of drawing itself, and concentrates on an attempt of putting things back together – or is it, trying to find what was it about them that made them/me this and not that?




The simple, classic time reversal and the retro music combined with the “choreography” make it seem like an old magician’s trick. Indeed, undertaking the attempt of constructing myself seems like an impossible task, one that requires, among others, defying the basic entropy of time. Putting it all together is nothing short of getting the papers to fly right in your hand, dancing in the air as if you had trained them all your life.




Another great discovery is Dibujando un espacio (Drawing a Space), a series of 3 videos by two artists working together, Teresa Solar Abbout and Carlos Fernández-Pello.







At first glance, this is a work about distance and communication, and I must admit that given my personal history, it took me a while to go beyond this reading.
But then, once we get past the metaphor of a long-distance relationship, new layers appear: after all, every relationship is, on some levels, a long-distance relationship. Trying to construct something together is a mad project. Words only get us that far, and the only way of building it together is trying to construct primitive (always primitive) structures that can handle the heterogeneous spaces we bring with us.
Suffice it to say that contemporary analytic philosophy started with the idea that some things are simple enough to constitute a solid basis for communication, and by now, analytic philosophers focus on discussing what they mean by "communication", "constitute", "solid", "basis" and "for".

Both works have a desperation I appreciate and fear. They seem at once hopeless and surprizingly effective. Also thanks to the formal discipline, they become clear pictures of a very unclear, impossible structure, entering right at the point where philosophy struggles.
They share a powerful combination of obsession and self-irony which is both scary and enchanting. Also in art.

Love, Art and Coimbra

Coimbra, a city in central Portugal, has one of the most beautiful - and creepy - love stories ever to be heard. It is the story of Pedro and Inês, a Portuguese heir to the throne and a Spanish aristocrat's maid. It has a tragic ending, much more gruesome than Romeo and Juliet (Pedro's own father, king Afonso IV, fears a political scandal and has Inês assissined), and contains what is one of the most extraordinary episodes in royal history: Pedro, besides declaring war on his father, declares he had wed his lover in secret shortly before her death, has her body exhumed and placed on a throne, and has the entire court kiss the dead girl's hand as a sign of loyalty to their sovereign.
Inês spent her last years in a Monastery in Coimbra, and the city is to this day associated with romance.
Now, what is particularly enjoyable in the story you are about to read, is that it happened in the same town, and yet, none of it ever meant to deal with the legend. It is but a simple story of two people. One of them happens to be the architect and artist Juan de la Mora.


"These hearts were painted by my girlfriend and I in Coimbra, Portugal a couple of years back. She is from Coimbra and I am from Chicago and we've been able to maintain a long distance relationship for the past 2.5 years. Since then, we continue to paint some of these hearts every time we are together in Coimbra. What is interesting about Portugal's Calçada (sidewalk), is that you can take a combination of a minimum of three stones and find the shape of an abstract heart form. The heart can grow by adding more stones to the original three."

Simpler than Blu

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg.
My favorite part is the chalk accumulating on the board. And the simple, obvious, yet powerful ending.
How different is this from Blu? Maybe not too different. I would call it a tribute. The style, the dynamics. Yet the addition of the canvas, the frame, turns it into a slightly different game, a play with pictures, and with types of spaces. I only wish this latter element were slightly more present in the film, and we got more often to travel outside of the canvas.

Guerrilla marketing

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Back to the Basics

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

It never stops being astonishing, the way the dynamics of a piece can outgrow the original input, the aesthetic conception, the initial conceptual framework.
I had heard a version where it was Rauschenberg asking De Koonig for a drawing that was dear to him. The story as told by Rauschenberg is so much more human, and impressive.

Dress-up

Two ideas for an eye-opening surrounding:
Chris&Ruby's Footies, socks for your chairs

and TRASH:Any Color You Like, a rapidly growing project by Adrian Kondratowicz, based the simple idea that trash bags are also sculptoric forms.



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Reality Show

(Working hard on a show with the Portuguese academic group CITAC...
Here's a teaser of the performance, called Reality Show:)

REALITY SHOW from Vvoi on Vimeo.

Jenny Holzer - The Meaning of Everything

There once was a man who wanted to discover the meaning of everything.
He wandered across the world, searching for someone wise enough to explain to him what all this was about, what was the meaning of everything.
After many years, in a distant land, he was told there is one Sage who knows the secret, the meaning of everything.
So he traveled to the huge house where the old Sage lived. He knocked at the door, but there was no answer. He tried opening the large wooden door. It was not locked. The traveler entered the house, to find himself in an enormous hall with walls covered in shelves with books. He walked further in and entered a large room also filled with books. He moved to the adjacent room - and discovered that there, too, shelves were everywhere, and on them - only books. He approached one of the shelves and picked up a random volume. He opened it, and inside it, he saw the letter N, filling the pages. The pages of the book were all but rows of NNNNNN...
He picked up another book, opened it - the book was filled with TTTTTTT.... He tried another one, and another, and each of them was filled with but one letter.
Flabbergasted, the traveler wanted to sit down, when the Sage came in. He was an old, grey-bearded man, just as the fairy-tales have it.
"Sir, said the traveler, I don't understand, there is... I don't understand!"
The Sage smiled, and replied, "Now all you need to do is connect the letters."






Although text is at the heart of her work, Jenny Holzer is not really a writer. She is rather a reader. Her work is not so much about text, as it is about giving body to text. But, as the authorship becomes blundered (Holzer signs the work, but none of the texts that compose it), writing is always re-writing, and thus, it is fundamentally about the embodyment reading.



Somewhat following the path suggested by the likes of Barthes, Baudrillard or Foucault, Holzer is a semiotic DJ, reconfiguring and re-shaping the meaning that seems to have been there long ago. If her own words appear in the works, they seem to remain transparent, undistinguishable from external sources. (Remember the famous line, "Protect Me From What I Want"? Can you say if it was Holzer's own sentence, or an appropriation of someone else's?).

In one of her recent projects included in the Protect Protect exhibition (read an insightful review here), Holzer takes on Iraq and the question of torture. In a work showcased at the TimeOut NY site, she reproduces original, recently declassified documents of the US Army. What is the artist's role? How different is it from strictly political work?



Yes, this is Warholesque. And yes, it is somewhat controversial to have an artist of Holzer's renown decide that this was the right approach and means for this specific subject.
One excellent and cruel review puts it bluntly: if it is about raising our awareness, Warhol's works were good proof that in terms of political awareness this can hardly be a success.
But we can see it from another angle: contrary to Warhol, Holzer gained her reputation on working on questions of morality, and contrary to what she herself claims, values have always been a crucial issue in her work. Thus, as her work can already be seen from this engaged perspective, can't we interpret the careful selection of documents as a sort of curatorial answer precisely to warholian esthetic relativism?

Yet the question remains: do we really need this reader? Do we not see the same documents elsewhere? Our performativity-sensitive eyes are accustomed to seeing the terrific game of language that, say, the map of the Iraq invasion represents. What does purple paint and canvas change in this reading, for us, today?
(image on top from here)

Answering myself

Writing a post is often like making a test. The etimology of essay comes to mind: an attempt. A blog is a great place for such attempts - yet at times it also gives space to texts I would rather not have written, ideas that were still premature or ungrounded, preconceived...
Yet this, I think, is the perfect space for such struggles, for discovering possible points of view one might feel tempted to adopt.
In my last post, I wrote about the move from product-based thinking about art to research-based thinking. The idea of a cultural universe that looks like a big lab is quite appealing to the artist (discovering is so exciting!), and often problematic for the public.
This is also related to the issue of funding: public money for such a private culture seems absurd. Why give money to people who don't want to reach out to the society that supports them?
The excellent writer Alessandro Baricco recently wrote a very polemic article (here is a poor google-translation) criticizing the elitist dynamics of supporting culture, in which he suggested that public funding should be taken away from the likes of theater and opera, and instead moved to TV and education to create very ambitious programs and actually reach out to the masses and create a true evolving dialogue.
It's a very strong and shocking article.
I went back to it after having written the previous post.
There was something about it that seemed profoundly wrong and unjust.
I think the film Il n´y a pas de Colin dans poisson, by Isabelle Taveneau, Zoé Liénard, and Odile Magniez, tells it wonderfully well:

In all the discourse about elitist art, we often forget that the consumers (yes, consumers) of this art are very often people and communities quite distant from what our stereotipical eyes seem to notice. Culture, when supported in a wise, and smart, way, is an ever-evolving process of education. Open-source, open-ended, and potentially surprizingly democratic. Having been teaching contemporary performance to groups of very varied milieus, I feel it all the time.

PS (22.03.09): I am now in Coimbra, Portugal. Today I discovered the charming and thoughtfuly renovated Museum of Science. It is a unique venue situated in an 18th-century laboratory, on the very top of the highest hill in the city. It was completely empty. Later, I went to the riverside, and discovered to my astonishment that it had crowds of people, mainly families with kids running around and adults drinking coffee. If we were to follow Baricco's ideas, we should shut down the museum (with its great program for kids and parents with kids...), as it seems to be appreciate by an irrelevant minority. Instead, we should invest more in events at the riverside, where the people are. Why, I ask, can't we try and bring these crowds to a higher level? Why are we to forget the centuries of culture we could profit from, replacing them by an «ambitious TV programming» and «education», and allowing product-based thinking to take over?
All this having said, it truly is a shame that the museum was empty. And a little product-based thinking, just a little, couldn't do much harm, could it?

Good, Honest and Effective

The above excerpt (and pic) was taken from The Cost of Living, a film (and performance) by the British physical theatre company DV8.

I think art is something that makes us look at our lives and to think about them in a way that is more rich. I think there's a big argument for poetry and for the construction of elements. When somebody writes a great essay, they have taken the words and placed them in a certain way to make you think more deeply about that subject. That is for me the very function of art. You get together, you get a group of people, you place things very carefully in order, and the placement is artificial, but if the integrity and the focus is clear, then hopefully it makes people see their roles more clearly. And think about them. And that's what I would like to do.
- Lloyd Newson, DV8 director, in a great interview.

Being honest, good and effective is a rare combination in arts. Most contemporary artists avoid at least one of these concepts: honesty is considered by many as a ridiculous idea from art's perspective, others consider art as being beyond moral issues. But the favorite scapegoat has in the recent years been effectiveness. Many associate it with a commercial, product-based approach that an artist should never accept. Effective, for them, is a synonym for McDonald's. Effectiveness is about price/quality ratio and looking for the best buy. It goes against the spirit of experimental research we are encouraged to follow. Work-in-progress, work-in-process, open art forms and new modes of production are all back. In some milieus it seems impolite to speak of a finished work. This is a twist of the modernist idea of the "independent" artist, and a curious travesty of the fin-de-siècle artist enclosed in his universe and refusing to give in to the evil, ignorant and lost society. In this updated version, the artist retains the independent status, while accepting a parallel funding of his work. If no form of effectiveness is allowed, we can only rely on a funding that is based on some other form of quality. But what is this quality? How far from the spectacular (the show, the product, the work, the to-be-seen) can it go? It is no coincidence that somewhat similarly to the Grotowskis and Allan Kaprows of the 70s, several contemporary artists decided recently to stop showing their work (or creating any sort of showable work, which amounts to the same). The difference seems to be in how one sees one's position in the world. While Grotowski and Kaprow moved away to work in relative seclusion from the art milieu (Kaprow concentrated on academic work, but stopped creating public performances). Today, the very shift from product-to-project-to-research is what the milieu is all about.
What is left for the spectator?
The spectator can certainly join the ride and follow each artist's struggle.
Or wait and see what happens.
Or appreciate the DV8s that go on believing art can be good, and honest - and effective.

How to show performance on the internet?

The new Performa site is attractive and frustrating at the same time. The fragments of the Performa07 New York biennal are great, they give us an insight into the feel of the festival that was doomed to be famous (and to some extent, doomed to fail to meet the incredibly high expectations).
(My favorite of the excerpts is Stage Matrix 1 by Markus Schinwald and Oleg Soulimenko, which seems like a deliciously elegant and disciplined play with space and contingency. The picture above is from that performance.)
The thing I find frustrating about Performa's site is the way the videos are displayed - one can only move forward (by pressing the space tab), there are no other controls, no notion of what is there in store for us...
Yes, this might come close to the experience of watching a performance. But doesn't it seem a little silly? Isn't it moving us back to the sort of hierarchy the internet has been freeing us from? It does make sense in the historic context of performance, where the utmost respect for the work is frequently an unspoken condition of appreciating the work, and often flirts with the sanctification of the aesthetic. And although there have been exceptions, it won't be an exaggeration to say performance art audiences are usually surprizingly well-behaved and develop a tolerance for time-stretching experiences...
However, the internet has developed a set of rules of its own. One of them is a certain predictability of content. And a non-linear approach to video-watching. The possibility of scrolling forward, or checking several things at the same time, is today as "natural" as reading a book and listening to music, or being able to read the last page of a novel first. The sort of proposal Performa makes goes against this. And gives stage to a difficult exercice of disciplined watching - with no pauses, no repeats, no selection. Take it or leave it.
It is an interesting exercise to perform (pardon the pun).
And yet, in practical terms, doesn't it limit the actual audience of the performances (virtual, and later, real) to the viewers already accustomed to be the well-behaved time-stretched spectators of contemporary art?
The step from live performance to showcasing it on the internet is huge and very tricky. It requires feeling the dynamics of the "aesthetic experience of the net", and that is still a very fresh ground. The trick is, if one of the greatest motors of performance art has been the idea of the avantgarde, entering a new platform will eventually (and once again) have to mean redefining what this idea(l) means.

ps.: For more info on the Performa 2009 biennal and many other events happening now in NY, see their blog here.

Reconnaissance - installation view

Andy Warhol the computer geek

This video, and the interview re-published at artnode, seem like more proof that the brilliance of the artist is often quite distant from the brilliance of the onlooker. Surrounded by "modern technology", he might, in retrospect, appear like a child enjoying his toys. Especially in the interview, it seems like it's the journalist who has all these great ideas, and Warhol just happily agrees with what he hears...
The enthusiasm for new technologies, when watched twenty years later, has something funny, but also something eery about it.
But if you read carefuly, there is one remarkable moment: when the journalist suggests that Andy (and the other artists) can now do everything by themselves - music, video, editing, etc., the artist agrees. But when asked if he has been doing it, he answers he hasn't had time because he is still exploring the visual art side of the computer.
So beyond this enthusiasm for all that is new, lies an aproach that is at once pragmatic and somehow... healthily conservative?

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Watching this with you would have been so much better

Here is what I imagine:
I invite all of you to my house (Warsaw, Poland), and together we sit and watch I Love Alaska. Maybe it's not because this is the perfect work to be enjoying with a group of people you've only just met. (It probably isn't). Maybe it has more to do with how surprizingly far this blog has led. In many ways.
One of them is you. Right now, there are hundreds of you coming to this blog every day. There is over a hundred people following New Art "formally" via blogger.com, plus many many others via feeds and such, plus the hundreds of people who drop by every now and then... I've been receiving your kind e-mails, and enjoy visiting all the blogs, portfolios, sites that you publish or recommend. Some of you have been coming here nearly since the beginning, but it's also very exciting for me to get feedback from newcomers. I've come to know you a little, and, so to speak, enjoy your company on this ride. Many of you are in the arts, others are students, for many of you I suppose this is more of a curious entertainment. All this means not only that you enjoy the art I showcase, but certainly, to some extent we share a common sensibility. Wouldn't it be delicious to have just a part of us meet and enjoy some of this art together? Sit down, have a glass of wine, watch the film, then talk about art and life and simplicity and complexity, and how the mountains are majestic, and America does or doesn't influence the world, and share other references (all the Brokeback Mountains, Into The Wilds, Cremasters that come to mind...), ideas, passions. (You know, meeting in real life someone you've hardly even known online ;))
Not a festival, but a get-together.
And then of course we would party all night, and probably go to the shore of the Vistula river, and maybe make a field trip the next day. But the moment of a genuine and common esthetic experience, together, would have been ours.
This is what I imagine.
And you know what? - we actually could do it.
(To be continued)

Two works by Christiane Löhr

Oh were this the universe!
Were it but a combination of lines, a simple picture of perfection, were the universe a set of twigs and seeds with their mathematical omnipotence!
Oh were there nothing else, nothing but the point where everything meets, nothing but the shape it all embodies. And the shadow of the reflection of a shadow of the Work, just to outscore its very depth of space, just to give us the distance we need to be closer.
Oh were it all we need, the joyful meeting of vectors, the unswerving presence of fragility.

Oh were there no shadow in the top left corner, coming from elsewhere.

Both pictures are of sculptures by Christiane Löhr.

Robin Hood Above

The artist going by the name of Above made this stencil in Lisbon. (I actually know the lady sitting on the right - she is one of Lisbon's classic characters). In a gesture the artist herhimself admits robinwoodesque, Above is selling prints of this picture and will give all the profits to two charities she has previously selected. More info here.

The Actors - Reconnaissance, by Wojtek Ziemilski

This is a short fragment of my work called The Actors. The first volume - Reconnaissance lasts 50 minutes. You can see this excerpt in sort-of-HD here.
Any galleries interested in showing this work, write me, and I'll send you a DVD.

My New Art

I've been very very busy with the opening of my video installation.
Today is the opening night
I won't tell you much, and will leave you with the small text that accompanies it instead:


THE ACTORS
Part 1: RECONNAISSANCE

reconnaissance. or: finding oneself. or: recognition. the recognition of someone else. someone is recognized. or: recognizing. you are (this) someone. this is (this) someone. or: meeting again. discovering again something one knew already. electra's paradox: electra knows, and does not know, that it is her brother standing before her.

reconnaissance. checking. how far. how far one can go. how far one needs to go to. where are the borders. when do i fall into something else. and whatwho is this something else.

i like knowing so little about them.
i like that they remain actors.
and that they are actors in a way no different from all the others.
i like what they're able to do because of how we called them: actors.

The Actors opens (link in Polish) at the TR Warszawa in Poland.
Hopefuly I'll be able to post a short excerpt of the video soon...

A performance by Public Movement in Łódź

UPDATE (4.February):
Public Movement is an Israeli performance group. The action you see below was made by them in Łódź, Poland.
A short explanation: before WW2, Łódź used to have a very large Jewish minority. The Jews were, among others, the owners of a significant part of the textile industry thriving in the city. Today, there are practically no more Jews there - and no more industry as well (although the industry did go on until the 70's, I believe). It is a poor and degraded city, with a lot of social problems, and where antisemitism is still present (although the vast majority of the inhabitants have never seen a Jew).
It is one of the very few places I know where one can still find antisemitic slogans on the walls.
So here you have it: the Israelis arrive and correct the Star of David. They basically make a grafitti of how it should look like, and put the correct form over the incorrect one.

And a few little ideas:
- The grafitti they choose to work with are not openly antisemitic. They simply replace one of the letters of the name of a soccer club (ŁKS) with a Star of David. So this is a "neutral" correction on a "neutral" sign.

- The ritual. Ah, the ritual. Turns it all into an action of purity. Precious.

- Notice one other, much more hidden, interpretation: the Jews are back in town. They are here, after our land. They put their stamp on the walls. They claim what is theirs (the club, the building). They are tagging their city.

- But one idea I think is crucial, and might be overlooked in all this will to interpret every single aspect of the work. Public Movement seems to be saying "Yes, this is who we are. We see no reason to be ashamed of it. Do you? Are you not embarrassed to have thought this was inappropriate or even silly, in any way?"

This is some brilliant playing with street art, semiotics, identity and politics.
The one question that I find problematic is - yes, this is on the spot. But for whom? Who is the audience? Is it public art, or just private art in public space? Or maybe it is public art, only for the audience that is reading about it now? So where does that leave the people who walk by this daily? Do we expect them to have a surge of initiative and paint over the whole signs? Or are we, deep inside, enjoying the fact that it's still there, everything is just the same, while we, the smart ones, know and watch?
I really do not know. I do not have better solutions. This, of course, is not a solution either - it is highliting the question(s). But what are we to make of this insistent neutrality right in the middle of a political issue? Is it a curse, the curse of constant distance? Or the blessing of a delicately balanced gesture, for once?

Of Light Dreams and Dark

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance (2007)
Upload by: IgnitionVM

Jerzy Kucia, The Ring (1978)

A Self-Portrait by Nam June Paik

The young WRO Center, devoted to new/media art, is hosting one of the first serious exhibitions of Nam June Paik's work since the artist's death in 2006.
This is not the largest exhibition, and fans of his complex multi-media installations might be disappointed - few of those are present here.
But if the budget did not allow to bring the lasers, projections, and intricate video circuits, the taste and knowledge of the organizers allows for a fascinating and multi-faceted look into Paik's creation.

Here is an example - Self-Portrait-Head, created in 1982.


On the TV screen, a young Nam June Paik stands facing the camera. His eyes are closed. Very slowly, his hand moves through the surface of his face, up and down. He is feeling his own face. The movement is slow and delicate, and after a while we realize he is not touching the face. The hand seems to know the face so well, this becomes a movement of recognition, as in, re-calling one's face. This is me. This heat emanating from the surface of my face, this is my boundary.

Facing the TV set is another face.

This one is a sculpture. A metal cast of the artist's face, made many years later. He is an older man now, and it takes some imagination to become convinced this is the same person. His eyes are closed, and the gesture is similar to the one on the recording.


They are looking at each other with their eyes shut. They are feeling each other - as they are the very same. Time has gone by, and yet stands still, trapped in the matter, the reproduction, the loop.
They/he are/is having a conversation with them/him selves/self.
The young man is moving, as if unable to realize his movement is still. The old man is cast, he is immobile, he is the return of the sculpture, the mimetic power of art, the noble texture of statue. He is the deathmask of the other, his self. And yet, he is life-size, he is freed of the flatness and squareness, he is a real fragment, as if ripped away off the face, a witness. And yet, he is facing the TV, as if watching it, or feeling it with his unmoving gesture.
It is clear, here, that the Narcissus' myth got it all wrong. The reflection is not a risk - it is a reality we may wish to ignore, but that will remain nonetheless, echoing our past in a loop that designs the warm and uncertain borders of identity.
Watching this installation reminds me of a curious definition of art: art works, to the extent to which it is the opening of poetry.

Zbigniew Herbert, I Would Like to Describe (fragment)

(...)
I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain
(...)

The exhibition at the WRO Art Center in Wrocław, Poland, is open until January 25. I highly recommend a guided tour.

Obama and Performance

Apparently Barack Obama has a similar view to mine on what could be developed in the [art] world. He has just created a new post of Chief Performance Officer. From what the papers say, Nancy Killefer, who was assigned this function, will have, among others, the task of helping "set performance standards". The expectations run high, although we have to be prepared for the standard performative desillusion when it comes to watching them do it for real, onstage.

Facing Failure. A visit to Bethlehem

Tragedy has a way of playing ironic games that we only begin to understand once it's too late.

About a year ago, I wrote about a project called Face2Face, by two artists who go by the pseudonyms JR and Marco. The simple idea was: bring people to see how similar they are, and how funny. Show the two sides their faces. A charming, courageous project that meant to show the urgency of seeing the other.

That was one year ago.

A few days ago, on December 25th, I visited Bethlehem, the capital of the Palestinian Autonomy.
When entering the city, I discovered street art I had written about.
And the site was sad.





It is true, the works survived on the walls for quite a while. But especially in the case of some of the portraits, the damage was more than just a random act of destruction.

It made me feel like that particular project failed.
Possibly, someone still got influenced by it. But the statement it was making now was much stronger, and seemed to correspond better to the tension. And to increase it.
Among the many question that arose, one came back often: isn't this ridiculous, to think you can just put some funny faces on both sides of the wall, and people will feel closer to each other? You know, We Are The World... Here is what the artists were saying in 2007:

In a very sensitive context, we need to be clear.
We are in favor of a solution for which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders.

All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nussibeh, Geneva Accords) are converging in the same direction. We can be optimistic.

We hope that this project will contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today, "Face to face" is necessary.
Within a few years, we will come back for "Hand in hand".

Hand in hand? Today it's tempting to ask, so what does each hand hold?
What is left for the artist? This cute idea of the artist being a social engineer can look ridiculous in the face of the violent tragedy we're witnessing. The Greek tragedy appears in all its seemingly unsolvable power.

But what made this particular artistic project end up like this?
1. It felt like it was a declaration: we don't think you're funny.
2. Maybe it said: your language is not ours. You have no clue about us (but implying: and we - about you).
3. But let us go back to the face. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said that

the face says to me: you shall not kill.

Is that why the work was torn? In a way... I would be tempted to say that Levinas gives a reason a little further in that interview:

Accordingly, my duty to respond to the other [because of being confronted with his face] suspends my natural right to self-survival, le droit vitale.

Ergo, a work showing the faces of others can somehow take away my power to consider myself ahead of the other, leaving me at their mercy. They are facing me. In front of me. (Laughing at me?)(Mocking my way of life? My seriousness and attachment to my culture? My people's suffering, maybe?) By looking at me, constantly, they demand recognition that goes beyond any recognition they can give me.

Yes, this seems like a dead-lock. And a sad time, also for art.



One desperate attempt at a positive note.
Not all ancient Greek tragedies ended badly. For instance, The Eumenides, the third part of Aeschilus' trilogy Oresteia, ends well. It is Athena who comes and convinces the goddesses of vengeance - the Furies - to accept a judgement democratically made by a jury. Athena renames the Furies (Erinyes) the Kindly Ones - Eumenides. (And everyone lives happily ever after.)
Can we paint ourselves into being Athenas? We'll keep on trying. But we could certainly use some of those sound democratic judgements to defend.

Selected fragments of Levinas on the face:
The face resists possession, resists my powers.
The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation.
The Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me.
The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill.
The manifestation of the face is already discourse.

Declassifying the data, right on the street

One of my points of interest recently has been the social identity and its various levels (going from such a broad thing as being a citizen to being a "part of a relation").
This is what the author, cirka, says about the work, on the Wooster Collective site where I discovered the work:

"I've been thinking a lot about public information vs. private information and why it's so fascinating to read about the mundane details of someone else's private life (like finding their grocery list that they dropped in the parking lot, for example). So, I decided to reverse this by choosing "declassify" some of my own personal documents: letters that, at a different time in my life, I would have been mortified for anyone else to see. All are letters that were written to me (except for one, which shows a short email correspondence). They span from a letter written by my pen pal when I was about 10 to a letter that I received last summer. I silk-screened all the letters in the original color that they were written in. The only things that I altered were the names of people mentioned in the letters, which I censored in black ink."

I love when an artist plays with the idea of a genuine self, flirts with exhibitionism, and yet the work remains a presentation, a mise-en-scene.

Traveling here and there

The text was part of the On the Wing series, printed on six Air Luxor Boeing 737 planes in 1999 by Nedko Solakov.

(as usual, I had trouble classifying it. ideas for better tags are welcome)