One reason I like zapping through artist's pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist's statements and curator's notes is that I don't need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work. The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn't informative, which it often is. It's that it is rarely inspiring. (Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).
Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.
The picture - entitled (...) - is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)
11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound Camera: Bill Rowley Edit: Elaine Summers Dir: Elaine Summers Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University
There are two things about this short fragment I love. The first is the choreography of joy. The slow-motion allows us to better appreciate the flow of the common movement, the combining of the bodies, the contrast between them and everything that happens around them. But there is something else. The dance becomes obvious at the end, when the movement continues beyond what we expected. Yet there is one earlier moment, one step of the girl coming from "our" side, which makes that clear. At a very precise point, she deviates from the way she has been running, her body bends like a bow and then moves sideways. That is when the simple vectors of meeting become something else - something more complex, less obvious. The bodies, now, create a space for our meeting to go beyond the embrace.
It is the pleasure of imagining a performance - or rather, of imagining a universe. A narrative, an aesthetics, an experience, a unity. It is the pleasure of imagining a liveness, a directness, a presence. The pleasure of experiencing the echo, the recording, the extract, the fragment of a copy of a copy. The pleasure Plato was so afraid of. It is the joy of watching something on a small pixellated video image and imagining it live and juicily 3D. It is the ecstatic moderato of my computer screen, of yours, which acts out the world that supposedly tastes better off-screen (heck, it tastes). Yet it is not off-screen, not in the performance space, but here, at this very desk, dressed in dark-green boxers, brown socks and a t-shirt, among the hills of papers and books and accompanied by the delicate sound of the washing machine and an occasional sms, that I experience it. The pleasure of absence. The ecstatic moderato.
Fischli and Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), video, 30', 1987
Honda Ad, 2003
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass, 2009
I remember the choreographer João Fiadeiro once showing Fischli & Weiss's work during some seminar or workshop and talking about what in his mind made it so impressive: necessity. Although it might seem like anything can happen, what happens is exactly what needs to happen. A tautology that evolves in time? But isn't any proof precisely that - a dynamic tautology? So is it because it's a proof that it's so appealing? A proof of what? Of how things go, we are tempted to say. Which, of course, is just silly talk. It's precisely because things don't go this way that we enjoy it so much. It's because the unexpected becomes necessary.
What about this "evolution"? The work of art turned into a commercial turned into a music video. Don't expect any moral judgement on that. Actually, I enjoyed all three videos. We could discuss the question of authorship. But we won't. (Fischli & Weiss threatened to sue Honda). Here's what I've been pondering on: what exactly are the differences? Because, once you've accepted that they're all in the same category (actually, this type of inventions is called either Heath Robinson contraptions (UK), or (more commonly) Rube Goldberg Machines (US) and have been in popular culture at least since the beginning of the 20th century), you can see into how very different they are. So what makes it an art project, a commercial, a music video? If we turn the volume off, what changes? If we put music, or switch it from one video to another? The timing, the materials, the way things go and pass. What sort of universe appears in each of them? Yes, that's precious: they each have their own universe. They are entities. You can easily find yourself around them, with their texture, their dynamics, their smell... One more thing: aren't they each hiding in their specific ways this very basic urge for things to make sense? If that is so, it's beyond necessity or discovery. It's the comfort of order. The sense that somewhere beyond the frame, things are just waiting to come into action, to move into view. And their potential is already in perfect harmony with the moment when they will become what they are meant to be. The best of possible worlds. It shouldn't come as a surprize that these delicately balancing certainties remind us of childhood.
Do you know Tino Sehgal? You know, the artist that doesn't allow any pictures taken of his works? And doesn't write any introduction, or artist statement? Or make written agreements with museums? That wants no material artifacts in his works? Does it matter what the works are? They are performative. More: they are performances. They are people doing things in exhibition spaces. They are things happening with people within an exhibition framework. They could be happening to others (say, someone kissing). Or to you (say, someone talking with you). You might never discover which part was the work. Yet somehow, you often do.
Once again: Does it matter what the works are? Once you experience something, what good is the analysis? But we are pretty smart animals. We may experience, and still want to think about it. We may want to decide what we think, and if we will go to see this thing again or not. We may rework this experience in our mind until we decide, say, that this is just not enough. That a good ice-cream would have done the job. Or a meeting with a friend. Or both combined. Maybe in a museum. Maybe accompanied by a stranger, having a conversation about progress. The luxury of conversational art. Now isn't that progressive.
Then again, what is wrong with living a series of perfectly good conversations put into a gentle, clean formal frame? Can't we just accept this? What is it that makes one (me) so voracious? Is it the fact I've never actually seen a Sehgal, done a Sehgal? Isn't the picture enough? Or the reviews that seem to make a huge effort in taking the mimetic weight off the image and putting some of it on words? Paradoxically, all the effort put into keeping it live seem to make us focus not on the thing, but on this very effort. Would Tino Sehgal be at the Guggenheim had he allowed taking pictures? So what exactly is the work, here? How come I feel it so clearly, if it's all about presence? Or am I just feeling its double, its fake, the afterthought? But isn't that crucial in experience? Doesn't that re-constitute the experience once it is over? Can one re-construct something one did not experience in the first place? You would have to have been there. The most dreaded sentence in the world. What are we supposed to do with it? Take a hidden snapshot? Tino Sehgal is on at the New York Guggenheim until March 10.
Bloodshedding pieces of black-and-white happiness. The unfair balance of the picture.
The wider picture. The bloody wider picture always giving it the color that wasn't there in the first place. Notice: the wider picture is never the first place. It comes as we back up, until we are nowhere to be found, impressed by the relation of the Thing with that wide horizon, that swift encompassing of the Other into the Thing.
The unfair balance of the picture. Nothing should ever be framed. Frames should be prohibited, forcing us into oblivion, into focusing on the End nearest us. Who knows how many Santa Clauses are necessary?
What is it that we like about simplicity? Is it not that it's close to us? It is attainable, like something that is nearly us. Or, to put it differently - an it that almost makes it into me. Thus, an imaginary community. Yes, if I dared, I would say simplicity gives us an imaginary community. A universe we don't need to adhere to, as it has already adhered to us.
Two pictures from the Visitseries (2007/8) by Filip Berendt. The idea is so simple and to the point that it is irritating. Berendt put an ad in a newspaper saying he wants to make installations in people's homes out of the things he finds there and take pictures of them. Some people answered. He went to their homes, and, well, did what he said he would do. The series won him the Sittcomm award last year.
Can you spot me? What am I, within this overwhelming sight? Am I a humble creature? Do I not see myself? Or is it but a false humility, a false erasing of the onlooker's look? -- I was told twice in the last two days that one should not make art in anyone else's name but her own. You want it - you have it. Hank Schmidt In Der Beek, you have just made my day.
Other candidates can be found here. Also check out their blog.
Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains), an ECAL graduate project by Camille Scherrer
Nothing to stop us from getting lost. From deciding we no longer belong here, and using all our knowledge and craft to make this place just confusing enough to dream. Be it an augmented reality, be it a book, a picture that can actually be moving. Be it our imposing of what's in our head, or rather, what dropped by for just a second, only to fool us into believing we own it, we are it. Nothing to stop us from finding our way. With every single hesitating step we so confidently make into this our augmented reality, with more of you than I could ever have hoped for, with less of me than you would expect, with just enough of us to get the picture. And move on. As if nothing really happened. As if.
I love the CRA$H jewellery collection by Super Fertile because it's impossible to wear. Poor people can't afford it. Rich people would never dare. So who is it for? For us, of course.
Who is it for? Oh, what a dreadful question. How embarrassing, how belittling, how pitiful.
1: what is the music? 2: can't we think of circumstances where it doesn't matter? 3 (with some leftovers): but aren't we losing something essential here? Some mistery we break to put it all into the social gesture, as if art really could be effective, as if it ever were, but what does that mean, how do we measure it, but doesn't it become too close to being measurable? 4: can't it be enjoyable? Can't it be blatantly focused on the audience?
This, of course, does not mean it can't be personal. On the contrary, one could openly use this focus and transform it through the connection of the two sides, as in Dan Graham's Performer/Audience/Mirror. But this ever-sacriligeous focus on the audience need not be objectifying, or at least not so openly. Think of applying the conceptto the personal, the intimate. What sort of audience are we then?
How close to us. Ever closer. Until, say, we reach the peak, we go beyond the intimate, beyond the sapiens, we give the monkey a camera, dreamfuly believing this is what the monkey sees, dreamfuly hoping (with a tad of gentle self-irony) that this picture, taken by our object, of us, brings us closer, tells us something more about this subject, when in fact it once again brings us back to who we are, as an audience, an audience that acts. (more pictures taken by Nonja can be found here)
What I like most are the hands. And the neck. It's tense. See the two lines suavely drawing their way into the chest. And the hands, a pianist's hands, playing out their protagonism, exploring the absent look to shine, and yet tense, they remain, maybe, it's what they hold, and not who? (via)
To see the following video you should enlarge it (double-click once playing).
The above is a compilation of works by the Swiss artist Zimoun.
1. Funny, one keeps telling oneself, enough of the minimal already, somehow feeling that less is a bore should be embraced, and the outrageously overflowing art of the recent years - appreciated and encouraged. And then, something like this appears, and it's irresistible. We've seen things from this universe before, also on this blog, and yet, the simplicity, yes, the damn purity takes over again.
2. I had a chance, recently, to visit several large factories. There were wonders there that could probably match most of the things on this video. Yet there was one thing they couldn't do: be useless. It's the sheer uselessness of it that gives it the power. We are not attached to anything but the thing. Art as the thing-that-cannot-be-used? Not necessarily, not in some purist sense. Great industrial design is to be cherished. And yet, there is a level of insanity here, of out-of-this-world-ness, that takes us to an exotic land, allowing for the silliest and most delicious connections to be made.
3. Luxury requires waste. A truly luxurious lifestyle is one where perfectly good things get wasted, as if to outplay their natural use and dying away. The true master of luxury seems to be saying her opulence is so great, the very perseverence of things is no match - they lose their original function and only exist to the extent they are participating in this out-of-this-world-ness of luxury. You know what I'm aiming at? Here's the hypothesis:
4. This, this minimalist joyful pleasure-making, is the true luxury. Not the apparent richness of the new complexities. In the world of useless purity, everything only serves the joy of simple aesthetic pleasure. More complex works are not quite like that - they have an inner game to play. The elements enter a dialogue, start relations and societies, with their conflicts and functions and disruptions. Here, there is only the ping of a shot of pleasure. This engine moves nothing. It is here to make me smile (or bring inspiration, or scare) - and I turn it off as soon as I have. And don't be mistaken - if I had one of those and got bored with and could afford it, it would go to waste.
4a. Ah, you might say, but the truly great art is one we don't get bored with. Possibly. Yet how often do we actually go back to contemplate (not just think about or admire or analyze) a work of contemporary "minimalist" art? Does it mean it's because it's not that great? What if it's about something else? What if it is an element of luxury, a game we play with ourselves, to feel the exquisite taste of the sophisticated dish, and then to ditch it as soon as we're fed up? It wouldn't be a question of bluff, of fakeness, of shallowness. It would be a question of use. Of why we crave it, this new. Of how we make it useful after all.
N. Raghavan, Rain V (2009)
