Clare McAllister

James Clarkson at Rhubaba

2012-02-06T01:36:00.001-08:00

Rhubaba are delighted to announce A Chance Encounter Between an Umbrella and a Sewing Machine, the first Scottish exhibition by James Clarkson. Taking its title from Comte de Lautréamont’s 19th century prose poem, ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’, a seminal work of literature often sighted as an influence on the methodologies of French Symbolist, Dada and Surrealist movements during the 1920’s. Lautréamont was himself influenced by the works of Baudelaire and the two share an interest in the random possibilities or associations that occur when two unrelated objects or concepts meet in an unfamiliar situation.

From this basis, and taking Lautréamont’s text as a particular reference point, Clarkson will present a number of existing works reconfigured for the Rhubaba Gallery in an attempt to tease out tensions and relationships between disparate pieces.
The title of the exhibition, aside from its significance as a historical reference, is also used as a means of reflecting upon Clarkson’s use of found objects in the fabrication of his works.

The work ‘Two Birds in Space,’ previously exhibited as a public artwork, has been moved into the gallery and is presented as an expansive print, becoming a backdrop to the sculptural works on show. Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ is pressed against a woman’s rear clad in gold hotpants that meld with the masterpiece. Clarkson brings together the formal attributes that circle between each of the images, allowing an equality of form to occur between them.

The Boyle Family

2012-01-30T02:45:00.000-08:00

Boyle Family is a group of collaborative artists based in London. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills met in Harrogate, Yorkshire in 1957. Joan had studied art and architecture and was bringing up her first son Cameron whilst running her own business. Mark was in the army, writing poetry. After a period of working separately on visual art pieces, they incrementally moved into a natural collaboration - agreeing that art should not exclude anything as a potential subject.

Wherever Mark and Joan lived became their studio, so it seemed natural and necessary that friends and family be co-opted to help whenever there was a big show going off or an event to put on. From very early on, Mark and Joan’s children, Sebastian and Georgia, went around the studio, doing bits here and there, gradually getting more deeply involved: going on working trips, expeditions, helping to finalise and hang exhibitions. This co-creational approach also was applied to the evolution of the work itself and led to innovative and collaborative partnerships with many artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers and dancers, notably Jimi Hendrix and the psychedelic jazz-rock pioneers Soft Machine.

Originally the work went under Mark Boyle's name, largely because Mark and Joan were more concerned with making their work than attempting to fight the stereotype that artists were solo and usually male. Labels never mattered to them - it was the work that was important, not the marketing, image or personal recognition. Taking the view that if the art world wanted to believe in obsessed, lone male artists starving in their studios, they could present their work in a way that would fit. However, as their work became widely known, and at the same time the artistic stereotype began to broaden, they began to exhibit as Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. As adults, Sebastian and Georgia both opted to remain part of the team and since 1985 the four of them have exhibited as Boyle Family. Following the death of Mark Boyle in May 2005, Boyle Family continues to work and exhibit internationally, and to progress the execution of their best known work, the huge global World Series.

Boyle Family aims to make art that does not exclude anything as a potential subject. Over the years, subjects have included: earth, air, fire and water; animals, vegetables, minerals; insects, reptiles, water creatures; human beings and societies; physical elements and fluids from the human body. The media used have included performances and events; films and projections; sound recordings; photography; electron-microphotography; drawing; assemblage; painting; sculpture and installation.

Boyle Family is best known for the earth studies: three dimensional casts of the surface of the earth which record and document random sites with great accuracy. These works combine real material from the site (stones, dust, twigs etc) with paint and resins, preserving the form of the ground to make unique one-off pieces that suggest and offer new interpretations of the environment, combining a powerful conceptual framework with a strong and haunting physical and visual presence.

These ideas are strongly enshrined in the major Boyle Family work, World Series, initiated in 1968 as part of the exhibition Journey to the Surface of the Earth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. The World Series has been developed over the past forty years alongside a number of parallel and related series and projects including: the London Series; Tidal Series; Thaw Series; Japan Series. Each of these groups of work has involved various random selection techniques to isolate a rectangle of the Earth's surface. In the case of the World Series 1000 sites were chosen at random by visitors to the artists’ studio and the ICA exhibition. Participants were blindfolded and either threw a dart or fired an air rifle at an unseen wall-sized map of the world, which now forms part of the work itself.

This random selection serves several purposes: nothing is excluded as a potential subject; the particular is chosen to serve as a representative of the whole; the subjective role of the artists and creators is re-designated to that of ‘presenters’. Boyle Family seeks to present a version of reality as objectively and truthfully as possible, calling this process ‘motiveless appraisal’.

Once the random selection of subject has been made, the artists recreate the site in a fixed and permanent form as a painted fibreglass relief. They recognise that each work is in some respect necessarily flawed because the selections can never be truly random and that it is impossible to eliminate themselves and their own subjective influences. They attempt to present a slice of reality as they found it at the moment of selection, but no matter how good the re-creation, it is still a re-creation and only an approximation of reality. Boyle Family know that it is impossible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but in their work they try to isolate and reduce randomly chosen elements to as truthful an approximation as is within their power.

Their search is to find out if it is possible for an individual to free him/herself from conditioning and prejudice. To see if it is possible to look at the world, or a small part of it, without being reminded consciously or unconsciously of myths and legends, art of the past or present, art and myths of other cultures. ‘We also want to be able to look at anything without discovering in it our mothers' womb, our lovers' thighs, the possibility of handsome profit or even the makings of an effective work of art. We don't want to find in it memories of places where we suffered joy and anguish or tenderness or laughter. We want to see without motive and without reminiscence this cliff, this street, this field, this rock, this earth.’(1)

Cyprien Gaillard - Pruitt Igoe Falls

2012-01-26T10:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YiQPVvSD7M

Between iconoclasm and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art, the work of Cyprien GAILLARD (born in 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Berlin) questions man's traces in nature. Through sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large scale interventions in public space, GAILLARD has established himself as a major emerging artist on the international art scene.

Whether he commissions a traditional landscape painter to paint colourful views of housing projects in Swiss suburbs, surrounded by their luxurious natural environment (Swiss Ruins, 2005), or introduces a view of a tower-block into a 17th Century Dutch landscape etching (Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005), GAILLARD shows contemporary architecture as a modern ruin on the verge of being taken over by nature. Just like 18th century French 'ruiniste' painter Hubert ROBERT did when he painted the Louvre as an imaginary ruin, GAILLARD follows French philosopher Denis DIDEROT's advice according to which 'One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest'.

In The New Picturesque series (from 2007), Cyprien GAILLARD questions the representation of nature through the notion of 'picturesque', literally 'what is worth being painted': originally, in the 18th century, rough or rugged landscapes, far from the 'beautiful' landscapes the notion later designated. Intervening either with white paint on 18th or 19th century landscape paintings or with torn white paper on old postcards of castles, GAILLARD covers all narrative elements and decorative details, thus revealing their truly 'picturesque' quality.

These series echo in a minimal gesture GAILLARD's seminal Real Remnants of Fictive Wars series (2003-2008), short-lived Land Art performances documented on videos and photos, where the artist activates industrial fire extinguishers in carefully chosen landscapes (amongst which Robert SMITHSON's iconic Spiral Jetty), stressing their beauty at the same time he vandalises them.

Confronting Robert SMITHSON's theory of entropy to issues such as urbanism, vandalism and the decay of modernists utopias, GAILLARD's ruined architectures and disappearing landscapes, just like Hubert ROBERT's paintings, romantically embody man's ineluctable fate through the passing of time. In the video The Lake Arches (2007), for instance, a young man breaks his nose after diving in the moat-like pond surrounding a ghostly post-modern tower block, thus making it look like a castle impenetrable by the youth.

GAILLARD's vision for an 'archaeology of the future' is brought together in his Geographical Analogies series (2006-2008): in wooden boxes recalling display cabinets in natural history museums, nine Polaroid photographs, shot by GAILLARD in locations around the globe, all baring some sense of entropy, are carefully arranged, according to analogies sometimes obvious to the viewer, sometimes personal to the artist.

Tatham and O'Sullivan

2012-01-26T08:55:00.000-08:00

'We consider our work as being in a tradition of conceptual art; its about questioning the parameters of art, what contemporary art is, whats allowed and whats not allowed. We're interested in making art that is very public; art that has a physical and intellectual effect on the viewer - whether you like it or not, you have to engage with it.'
(Tatham & O'Sullivan interviewed by Will Bradley, Berlin 2001).

Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan have worked collaboratively since 1995 creating work that is concerned with the mythic potential of art, and how art can exist as an event in a particular space and time. Their installations are often a re-staging of a vocabulary of images, phrases and forms which are part of a common history, though these reference rather than directly quote specific artists and artworks or reveal the origin of a motif: 'There's always more than one meaning. The pink lights in 'The Glamour' are Dan Flavin, but then theyre too camp, a backdrop for a seedy strip club, and in a way they refer to a whole genre of bad art.' (1)

Employing theatricality, Brechtian absurdity and Wittgensteinian word-play, the viewer is playfully complicit in the construction of meaning. Both 'HK' (2001) and 'The Slapstick Mysticks' (2002) use words as found things that can misdirect or mislead a viewer; 'The Blacks' (2002), a sculptural work commissioned by Cubitt, London, is both the title of the work and the work itself: 'a title, a label, a reading, a social indicator, a presentation, a construction a description of the letters themselves and a theatrical design: an absurdly flamboyant non-sculpture sculpture'. (Cubitt, London, 2002)

Helen Hirsch writes, 'Tatham & O'Sullivan proceed to the brink of intelligibility with their work, in as much as they play with the viewer's expectations and irritate them by means of technically diversionary manoeuvres. The title 'Think Thingamajig and Other Things' is symptomatic of the artists' complex rapport with form and speech. This installation begins with a tiny, enigmatic sculpture placed under glass on a made-to-measure wooden pedestal, standing almost unnoticed in the entrance corridor of the Glarus Kunsthaus. Whoever engages with it will irritably have to search for clues, since coded messages belong programmatically to Tatham and O'Sullivan's strategical thinking.' (2)

''Think Thingamajig' [is] a ceramic cube decorated with pink diamonds on a black background that the artists have described as an esoteric object, a thing for thinking. Thinking about what, though? About the artists straw-and black paint-plastered monolith 'This Has Reached the Limit Conditions of Its Own Rhetoric?' About their drawing 'This Is the Thing That Has Reached the Limit Conditions of Its Own Rhetoric', in which the monolith reappears, this time as a chess piece manoeuvred by a suave, top-hatted gentleman? About their recent sculptural work 'That is the Way, it is, it is, that is', in which the 'The Glamour', 'HK' and 'This Has Reached...' projects are smooshed together in what is at once a caricature of the artists oeuvre, a mini-retrospective and, quite possibly, an endgame in which each element cancels the other elements out?

In fact, it does not help us to think about these objects at all. It, like them, is a prop, a decoy. Its only purpose is to get us to think about thinking, and who might want us to do that thinking, and why. This may seem meagre, but it has its consolations. Thinking doesn't disappoint us or compromise us. Thinking guides us through glamour. Thinking is where compassion lives. (Tom Morton, 'Mirror, Mirror', Frieze, issue 87, November-December 2004, pp. 90-93).

Tatham & OSullivan (b. 1971 & 1967) are based in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Art Basel Statements, 2005, Oh We Will, We Will, Will We, Studio Voltaire, London 2005, That is the Way, it is, that is, Sutton Lane, London, 2004, and Think Thingamajig and Other Things, Kunsthaus Glasus, Switzerland, 2003.

Recent group exhibitions include Sutton Lane in Paris, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, (My private) Heroes, MARTA Museum of Art & Design, Herford, Germany, Reflection part II, Sutton Lane, London, 2005, Aint no love in the heart of the city, Cardiff, 2004, and Zenomap, Venice Biennale, 2003.

Tatham & O'Sullivan are represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Sutton Lane, London.

Both artists are Research Fellows at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen.

References

1. Interview with Will Bradley, Berlin Biennale 2, Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2001
2. Helen Hirsch, Kunstbulletin 6, 2003, pp. 36-37

www.suttonlane.com

www.themoderninstitute.com

www.scotlandandvenicebiennale.com

Mark Dion - Thames Dig

2012-01-20T04:38:00.000-08:00

In this work Dion takes the Thames River, the heart and vein of London as his starting point in his quest to take on the role of excavator and explorer to discover a deeper understanding of the river, the city and it's inhabitants.

The finds of the excavation are meticulously cleaned, by a group of volunteers in tents outside of the Tate Britain in Millbank, then put on display in a large display cabinet which has echoes the Wunderkammer of the Victorian era in it's design and mode of display.

Alongside sherds of deft pottery sits a Pret a Manger soy sauce bottle. Assorted nails confirm the presence of London's first ship yards whilst a fossilised sea urchin hints at an earlier time and the farther reaches of the river and it's estuaries. Dion shows no reverence for any particular artefact he puts on display. All are of equal significance in building the greater picture of mankind. Like digging a pit in the sand, the present penetrates the past, creating layers of meaning that all go some way towards creating a fuller picture of the whole.

CMcA

Richard Wright- Wall Painting

2012-01-19T08:25:00.000-08:00

When you enter a room housing one of his works, for a split second it seems empty. Then you might notice a small patch of coloured pattern near the floor, or running up one edge of a corner. Occasionally you won’t see it until you’ve turned around to leave. Reminiscent of sculpture or, perhaps more accurately, modest pieces of furniture or personal belongings, they occupy the room in a completely original way. Most ‘wall painters’ either use the room’s dominant wall as a substitute for the stretched canvas (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson or Jessica Diamond, for example), or they cover each wall from floor to ceiling and corner to corner (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin or Martin Boyce). Essentially, the former strategy derives from the mural; the latter from wallpaper. Wright’s interventions tend to occupy very little of the total available wall space, often electing to work those parts of a gallery which no one in their right mind would choose, such as awkward thoroughfares outside the exhibition spaces themselves - stairwells, corridors, entrances.

When Wright does work in the gallery proper, he riffs off the eccentricities of the space and its door frames, skirting boards, alcoves, exit signs, pipes and shelving. Rooms with Rococo cornices don’t seem to bother him (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 1999); nor does beige floral embossed wallpaper (Belmont Hotel, Glasgow, 1995), stained concrete and scruffy windows (Luxembourg, 1998) or black rubber folding partitioning or views of obscene pink walls (Salon 3 in London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre, 1998). Sometimes the relationship between Wright’s painting and a certain fixture gels to evoke a new figurative association. At TeclaSala in Barcelona in 1999 he painted four strips of what look like arabesque ironwork in blue and black, starting from just beneath a protruding pipe and ending just above the skirting board. The effect half-suggests a shower curtain, with the pipe standing in for the rail. The odd colour change from blue to black implies that the pipe is casting a slim area of shadow. By bringing the space’s anomalies into play, Wright pulls off a paticularly sly version of institutional critique. While most other interventions tend to require, ironically, the authority of the most immaculate white cubes, Wright’s additions bring out narratives of historical identity lurking beneath the matt emulsion of a given space.

Hannah Sawtell

2012-01-19T05:37:00.000-08:00

Sawtell's videos and installations investigate the ways in which form and image are disseminated, interpreted and used. Interrogating how we categorize and respond to the barrage of homogenous and repeated imagery they generate relationships between objects, creating playful but critical dialectical encounters.

Clunie Reid - physical awkwardness & absurdity

2012-01-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

I Need You To Behave shows the Oval Office inset with a news clipping of guide dogs trained to operate ATMs. Adorned with a sticker and marker pen drawing, Reid’s photo-collage dissembles notions of power and corruption to ridiculously abject proportions. “The text is like a psychotic voice addressing the image,” says Reid. “There’s an imperative in the way that the text works in relation to the image. The drawing is a continuity of the photograph. It’s all organised quite formally and done very quickly. There’s not a lot of time spent considering, and I do more than I use, make and edit later. Each work is developed from a bank of association. It’s informed, but the connections come from the habit of making. Most of my work deals with the idea of absurdity – things like ‘Homer’s finger’s too fat’, cultural things that enter parlance, things that get picked up amongst friends: they’re like symptoms or a currency. This ties in with physical awkwardness; it’s related to our physical relation to things, like making art.”

Steven Claydon

2012-01-19T02:57:00.000-08:00

The Thingness of Things- Heideggers exploration of what differentiates an ordinary object from one which is inbued with cultural significance.

The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s writings on art. One of Heidegger’s philosophical problems was what exactly is it that gives art its special value? At what point does art become art and not just an ordinary object? Heidegger explored this question via a comparison between a stored work of art and potatoes kept in a cellar. Claydon’s own position in relation to this is “I see it as a more complex situation with subtle variations between the realms of material baseness and balanced subjectivity.” In The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) Claydon offers an assemblage incorporating domestic and institutional forms that reference both the everyday and the power systems that assign cultural worth.

Daniel Buren & Sol Le Witt

2012-01-18T06:49:00.001-08:00

Patterned plinths holding nothing. The wall as the canvas.

Nick Evans

2012-01-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

Figurative Objects and Patterns. Interesting modes of display

Investigations of a Dog, Deste Foundation, Hydra

2012-01-18T04:08:00.000-08:00

Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections
Athens, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art
June 22 – October 30, 2011

The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections, the first exhibition organized and curated by the FACE group that features works from the collections of the five partner institutions.

Investigations of a Dog takes its title from the short story by Franz Kafka (1922), whose main character, a dog, questions the limits of his canine existence, or rather, the sense of the community to which he belongs. This constant questioning distances the dog from the others and forces him into the position of the outsider. Nonetheless, in his solitude the dog expresses his most intense form of interest for the community and his compatriots.

http://www.deste.gr/en/index.html

Kippenberger's Wonky Street Lights

2012-01-18T03:56:00.001-08:00

In the absence of human life Kippenberger's street lamp takes on the character of the old drunk leaning against it. The inanimate becomes animate. The scene is lit by two real interior wall lights, transferring the light of the cosy interior out into the cold and blue outside of Kippenbergers deserted street. CMcA

Urs Fischer at The New Museum, NYC

2012-01-18T03:50:00.000-08:00

Comparisons may be odious, but Fischer's art betrays all kinds of influences and careless correspondences. A pink cast of a Beaux-Arts ornamental street lamp has gone all droopy, like a wilting guest at a Salvador Dali theme night. It reminds me of Martin Kippenberger's wonky streetlights, but they were funny. This is just rhetorical. Kippenberger's tempestuous spirit is one of several hanging over Fischer's work. In 2007 Fischer had a crew excavate a hole, eight feet deep, beneath the ground floor of Gavin Brown's New York gallery, while deliberately omitting to inform the landlord. He called the work You. It was a sort of grave; a belated continuation of an already familiar artistic gambit, but audacious and raw. Fischer has also cast heads in the manner of Bruce Nauman, and perpetrated a bewildering variety of works in his career, which began in the mid-90s. Some of what Fischer does may be unoriginal, but unoriginality is something all artists have to deal with. His art has always had a lot of spirit, even when he reprises the familiar.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/09/urs-fischer-review

The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika

2012-01-17T05:34:00.001-08:00

Martin Kippenberger

Although most of Kippenberger’s oeuvre tends toward the creation of a vast, interconnected artwork, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) is unique in that it might be considered his masterwork and the culmination of his achievement. Based on Kafka’s novel Amerika, the installation re-imagines a section of the book when the protagonist Karl Rossmann, having travelled across America, applies for a job at the ‘biggest theatre in the world’. ‘Everybody is welcome!’ proclaims the call for employment, ‘Whoever wants to become an artist should sign up!’. Kafka never completed the novel, which he abandoned writing over ten years before it was posthumously published in 1927, and Kippenberger claimed that he never finished reading it, hearing the story second-hand from a friend. The unfinished condition of the book leaves open the possibility, unusual in Kafka’s fiction, for a ‘happy ending’.

Gerry Bibby at Studiolo

2011-10-18T03:56:00.001-07:00

Yutaka Sone at David Zwirner

2011-10-14T01:40:00.001-07:00

Phyllida Barlow at Hauser and Wirth

2011-09-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the everyday objects of the city, Barlow has created a group of works that brings the cacophony of the gallery’s external surroundings inside. The urban congestion is ‘captured like something wild or feral’, says Barlow, and is evolved into a purely physical object, stripped of any symbolic context and resituated within the gallery. The verticality and mass of the sculptures, broken up by the staccato application of brightly coloured paints and draped fabrics, takes over the entire building from the basement to the attic.

Like the urban environment from which they are drawn, Barlow’s sculptures are not passive emblems, but instead active objects that swallow their surroundings. These new works are precariously positioned and obstruct the viewer’s path, forcing them to look around, underneath or above their great mass and imposing position.

For over four decades, Barlow has created anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim and cement. Barlow’s sculptural practice is centred on her experimentation with these materials and the process of re-contextualising them to create large-scale, three-dimensional collages. Her constructions are often crudely painted in industrial or synthetic colours, resulting in abstract, seemingly unstable forms: the seams of their construction left completely visible, revealing the dynamics of their making.

c Hauser and Wirth

Urs Fischer & George Herod

2011-09-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

The Modern Institute, Glasgow

Keith Richards at the Tate Modern

2011-08-24T04:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/jun/16/keith-richards-tate-modern-art?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

Dancing and Dogs

2011-05-03T07:32:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOnbM7X4BYg

Museum of Corn-temporary Art

2011-04-12T05:10:00.001-07:00

http://tigger.uic.edu/~victor/museum.html

FOR SALE 'Documentation for Artists'

2011-04-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Atget

Atget settled in Paris in the 1890s. Despite his limited background in the visual arts, he saw photography as a source of income, selling his photographs to artists in the nearby town of Montparnasse. He advertised his photographs as "documents for artists." It was common practice at the time for painters to paint scenes from photographs. By the mid-1890s, Atget bought his first camera and began to photograph more than 10,000 images of the people and sights of the French capital. By 1899, he had moved to Montparnasse, where he lived and earned a modest income until his death in 1927.

His death went largely unnoticed at the time outside the circle of curators who had bought his albums and kept them interred, mostly unseen. Atget would likely have been indifferent to his relative obscurity, given his preference for work over fame. "This enormous artistic and documentary collection is now finished", he wrote of his life's work in 1920, though he did not stop working at this point.
After Atget's death in 1927, Abbott acquired a large part of his archive and exhibited, printed and wrote about his work, as well as assembled a substantial archive of writings about his portfolio by herself and others. In 1968, Abbott arranged for New York's Museum of Modern Art to buy this archive, and through a series of MoMA exhibitions and publications Atget finally entered the pantheon of "Masters" of photography.

Museum of Forgery

2011-04-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Piazza S. Gaetano, Naples 1958/1992 [u]
29 x 21 cm
work on paper contributed to the oeuvre of John Baldessari; part of the MOF "generics" program; medium: baldessari.

America has become an obsessively DIY culture, in between extended bouts of tv watching. In honor of the subprime mortgage meltdown, which has suddenly made tinkering with one's home much less possible for many people, the museum offers a DIY forgery project that results in a unique small-scale artwork. Total material costs for this project will run under $100, especially if recycled items are used to the greatest extent possible. Final results will vary. Substitutions may be made for any of the items in the materials and tools lists.

The museum also holds that outsourcing forgery is ethically untenable. With DIY forgery, both the risks and the rewards accrue to the same individual.

Part of the museum's mandate is to examine the conditions under which individual works are accepted as art, or are excluded from that field. By extension, it also examines the process by which works cease to exist as art. With this in mind, the museum set up a virtual graveyard cum reliquary for unwanted art in 1995 called Box City. Currently, the only active area within Box City is the Potter's Field; an older, related project is Smothered Art.

Potter's Field is a free burial ground for art that is too impoverished, friendless, or 'worthless' to be entombed in a museum, including both original works and fakes of all kinds. It is so named because, like the traditional potter's field, it serves as a public burial place for the poor, the unknown, and the prohibited. The Potter's Field also serves as a conceptual model for real-world burial grounds that could be established to respectfully dispose of the 99.99% of all artworks that never make it into a permanent gallery.

Shark's Pocket is a generic duchamp produced posthumously by the Museum of Forgery. As such it is part of the Museum's program of "excessioning"; that is, of creating works that are then credited to the oeuvres of appropriate artists living and dead.

These generic artworks are a simple extension of the western tradition of treating art as a kind of brand-name product. In the world of commerce, highly successful brand-name products often pass into usage as common nouns, despite the efforts of the parent corporations to prevent this from happening. Kleenex becomes kleenex, Band-Aids become bandaids. Little-k kleenexes are not so much objects as categories of objects whose boundaries fluctuate constantly. Similarly, Mona Lisa the brand-name Leonardo has long since given way to the generic category of "mona-lisas" (whose number includes, among many other items, Duchamp's own L.H.O.O.Q.). Thus, a small-d duchamp is any object that it makes sense to categorize as by Duchamp. In this respect, the many objects that Duchamp did not make himself but nominated as Duchamps are also generic duchamps.

Taken From- http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~mof/gallery.html

Oldenburg - Mouse Museum and Raygun Wing

2011-04-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

Claes Oldenburg's Mouse Museum appropriates methods of museum display and, with wry humor typical of his work, comments on the obsessiveness of collecting and on the pervasiveness of consumer culture. The architectural shape of Oldenburg's freestanding museum is borrowed from the contour of Mickey Mouse. Thus a cartoon becomes the setting for the display of nearly four hundred found objects, popular knickknacks, and byproducts of the artmaking process.

Marcel Broodthaers - Department of Eagles

2011-04-11T04:57:00.000-07:00

http://fictive.arts.uci.edu/museum_of_modern_art_department_of_eagles

The Legacy of a Myth Maker

2011-03-14T07:20:00.001-07:00

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/legacymythmaker.htm

Plane Talking

2011-03-14T07:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/plane-talking/

Dia Art Foundation

2011-03-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.diabeacon.org/
Bernd and Hilla Becher

Christian Boltanski Speaks the Truth

2011-02-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue2/boltanski.htm

Images

2011-02-17T11:00:00.001-08:00

http://historyofourworld.wordpress.com/page/2/

Jana Sterbak

2011-02-07T09:31:00.000-08:00

Jana Sterbak- From Here to There, Venice Biennale, 2003

Herbert Dupret

2011-02-07T06:03:00.001-08:00

Duprat traces his work with the caddis fly larvae back to pioneering nineteenth-century entomologists such as François-Jules Pictet and Jean-Henri Fabre, who both conducted experiments in which structure-building insects were given alternative, non-indigenous materials. Seen within the context of the artist's work—a practice that has often addressed aspects of mimesis in the realms of both nature and facture through his conceptual sculptural activities—the caddis fly larvae project is an example of Duprat's ongoing interest in productive collisions between organic forms and technologized materials. Yet the work also provokes broader philosophical questions regarding behavior and intent, one that was summarized particularly astutely by the critic and philosopher Christian Besson, in a conversation with the artist conducted in the late 1990s:

Kant's distinction between works of art and those of nature leaves us in a quandary. The production of the artifact within nature herself poses a problem—even more so when an aesthetic aspect is involved. Whether the insect is a craftsperson or whether, more generally, nature is a creator of forms, the consideration, within nature, of an aesthetic dimension is the stumbling block of science. ...

Your activity as an artist, upsetting the ordinary ethology of the insect, seems to me to be the same thing as introducing a noise, complicating its umwelt and producing a response. In your diversion of the caddis worm's behavior, in your artistic manipulation, the effect is twofold. From a biological viewpoint, a random event triggers self-organization. From a human viewpoint, the experimenter's intent produces this effect. ...

Is the caddis worm's precious case the work of the insect or the work of the artist? This is not the right question. The contradiction can be resolved by the differing viewpoints. According to the first view, the caddis worm owed nothing to the artist (who is simply the author of one noise among the thousands of other noises in its environment). According to the second view, the caddis worm is merely the executor of the artist's project. The artistic statement plays on the confusion of the two levels by overlaying the two perspectives. The aesthetic result (at once natural and artistic) turns the caddis worm's case—which is more than an assisted ready-made or a diversion—into a doubly exposed object...1
—Jeffrey Kastner
Christian Besson in conversation with Hubert Duprat, from “The Wonderful Caddis Worm: Sculptural Work in Collaboration with Trichoptera,” translated by Simon Pleasance, in Leonardo, vol. 31, no. 3, June–July 1998.

The Failure of Rationality in Swift

2011-02-07T03:43:00.001-08:00

Man can never be purely rational because man is an animal. Is this the way man will end up should he attempt to become a purlely logical being, such as the Houyhnhnms This seems to be the point that Swift is trying to make. Although Gulliver so admires them, Swift does not mean us to take this admiration seriously. Once Gullivar leaves the island, he is disdainful towards the rest of his race who he sees as vulgar Yahoos. The fact that these creatures are horses, not humans, symbolizes how Swift believes that no humans can be so perfect. Their lack of strong feelings can be understood through their attitude to their offspring; "They have no fondness for their Colts or Foles, but the Care they take in educating them proceeds from the dictates of "Reason". Being face to face with man in his animal form (the Yahoos) further propels Gulliver into his futile effort to be completely reasonable and logical eventually leading to his insanity. Don Pedro treats Gulliver with nothing but kindness and affection, and yet Gulliver repays him with disgust. " This admiration grows and grows until he quickly comes to believe that these creatures are perfect in every way possible. His new attitude towards his fellow man is displayed in his treatment of Don Pedro. Mates are selected based on their coloring, and to produce offspring that will enhance the species as a whole. Indeed, Love plays no part in even the institution of matrimony. The extent to which Gulliver worships these creatures is further delineated by his self-loathing; "When I happened to behold my Reflection of my own form in a lake or a Fountain, I turned away my face in Horror and Detestation of myself. Gulliver can be looked upon as a human, trying (in an effort to escape his animal tendencies) to become supremely rational which is a futile effort.

Gulliver in Houyhnhnm Island

2011-02-07T03:34:00.000-08:00

In 1719 Daniel Defoe's story Robinson Crusoe explored the possibility of a solitary utopia.

Seven years later the poet, clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) published Gulliver's Travels - a satire on the society of the day and a warning about human folly.

Gulliver's Travels comprises four books. In each Lemuel Gulliver embarks on a voyage and is cast upon a strange land.

In the first book he becomes the giant prisoner of the six inch high Lilliputians. In the second he arrives in Brobdingnag -a land of giants. Book three takes Gulliver to Laputa, a floating island whose inhabitants are so preoccupied with higher speculations that they are in constant danger of collision.

In book four, Gulliver travels to the utopian island of the Houyhnhnms; ran by grave and rational horses devoid of any passion, even sexual desire. The island is also inhabited by Yahoos - vicious and repulsive creatures used by the Houyhnhnms for menial work. Gulliver initially pretends not to recognize the Yahoos, but eventually admits that they are human beings.

Gulliver himself, and each of the populations encountered by him, can be identified with distinct aspects of contemporary society and human nature.

The Promise, From Horse To Human

2011-01-31T03:33:00.000-08:00

Olly and Suzi

2011-01-24T14:10:00.001-08:00

"All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life."

Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko

Olly and Suzi on the web-

http://www.ollysuzi.com/index.php

Animalism in Orwell's Animal Farm

2011-01-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

The Seven Commandments of Animalism in Orwell's Animal Farm

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.

The Museum of Everything, London

2011-01-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12244403

William Wegman

2011-01-17T03:58:00.000-08:00

Barthes after Barthes

2011-01-12T05:43:00.001-08:00

Frieze Magazine Jan-Feb 2011

1. We thought we knew everything about Roland Barthes – the way he managed to glide effortlessly across the entire French intellectual landscape, in turn embracing semiotics and dismissing it, dissolving the author in the text and then bringing out the secret of its pleasure, all the while keeping his distance and the singularity of his style. Closely associated with the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, but unabashedly classical in his tastes, Barthes never wavered from his obsession with writing, even after philosophy in France superseded literature and, in turn, the new media culture dismissed them both by imposing its own language and reality. Right to the very end Barthes remained the quintessential French homme de lettres and literary oracle. As he himself liked to say, he was the ‘rear guard’ of the avant-garde, and yet he always remained one step ahead of himself. As for the self-styled avant-garde, it died on its own, just a few years before Barthes’ accidental death in 1980 at the age of 64. (He was run over by a van in front of the Collège de France in Paris.)
Barthes was spared ‘familialism’ from the very start. His father, a merchant navy captain, was killed at sea during World War i, when Barthes was still an infant. Later on, after the publication of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in 1972, he declared (somewhat flippantly) that he had ‘no father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration!’1 His mother occupied all the parental space, and he remained extremely devoted to her all his life. She was the only woman he ever loved. Her death in the autumn of 1978, a year after Barthes was elected to the prestigious Collège de France, tipped the balance. He wrote that it ‘profoundly and obscurely altered my desire for the world’.2 (A compilation of the notes Barthes made in response to his mother’s death were recently published as Mourning Diary, 2010.) Sensuality had always been paramount in his life and it didn’t help that by the time his mother died the garçons no longer found him desirable. For months afterwards he felt deeply disengaged, a kind of ‘listlessness which bears upon everything I do’. He envisaged making a radical break with his past. He would renounce everything – his courses and academic duties, Collège included – and settle into a life of writing. Dante had done it ‘nel mezzo del cammin’ (in the middle of life’s journey). Marcel Proust hesitated for a few years after his mother’s death, remaining ‘without will or clarity’, drawn between two contrary directions: essay or novel. Barthes was divided as well, between affect and intellect. Would he be, like them, capable of going over to the other side?
The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes’ last book, provides a direct account of what he experienced during that period. It gathers posthumously the lecture courses he gave at the Collège between December 1978 and February 1980, and his protracted attempt to turn his mourning into a new departure. Something happened that forced his decision. On 15 April 1978, while resting in a room in Casablanca at the end of a sluggish afternoon, he had a sudden illumination. He would remain at the Collège and write a novel. He would use his teaching to unlearn what he knew, to get rid of any critical language. Like Proust, he would look for a ‘third form’ to ‘treasure his suffering’, and transcend it. He would write about his desire to write, but in the language of writing. It was a pure moment of joy, the kind of bedazzlement that Proust’s narrator experiences at the end of Time Regained (1927). It was, Barthes wrote, the ‘beginning of an idea’, something like a literary conversion. It made everything possible. He was to invoke that date repeatedly in the outline of a novel, just a few pages long, that he worked on the following year, entitled La Vita Nova (The New Life), after Dante. But his intellect wasn’t entirely taken in. ‘All the same,’ he wrote in Preparation, ‘I don’t want to make too much of that April 15! And so will repeat certain elements of that “decision” in a more detached, theoretical, critical manner.’ Barthes was beginning to fictionalize his own biography.
Six months later, in November 1978, he gave an overview of his current work at New York University, in front of a crowd of admirers. The title of his talk, ‘Proust et Moi’ (Proust and I),3 was deliberately provocative, especially from the man who had written the celebrated essay ‘Death of the Author’ (1967).4 Was Barthes advocating the return of the author with a vengeance or was fame going to his head? Barthes quickly reassured his audience: he wasn’t comparing himself to Proust, only identifying with him. But the distinction wasn’t clear at first. Growing out of existentialism and Marxism, his generation had succumbed to the lure of a science of literature. They had repressed subjectivity for too long, he admitted, and it took him some time to erase all the traces of his previous involvement. Writing Le Plaisir du texte (The Pleasure of the Text, 1975) and Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1977), more subjective and fragmented, had made this turn explicit. He wanted to reclaim ‘the intimate which seeks utterance in me’.
But expressing the intimate publicly requires another kind of science, no less difficult to acquire for skirting generality. In any case, it was at the opposite pole from the narcissistic Moi that he put forward in his title. ‘Better the illusions of subjectivity than the impostures of objectivity’, he recognized in Preparation. Fair enough. But was his identification with Proust part of that illusion? And was this illusion deliberate? Barthes’ intention wasn’t to write ‘about’ Proust, only to identify what it was in him that desired to write. The project was challenging: he was probing at the roots of writing (‘intransitive’) at the same time that it was making explicit his desire to write a novel. Every literary critic wishes to make the jump, but everyone, himself included, knows that going public may bring bad luck, or provoke the Gods. ‘Writing requires secrecy’, Barthes admitted. So this ‘preparation’ couldn’t be the writing that he aspired to. Yet he kept that possibility floating, maybe hoping that it would make his decision irrevocable. Writers don’t ‘prepare’ for a novel by writing about what makes novelists write – they just write it.

2. Barthes was exploring the biographical element in the novel in other ways. The Preparation of the Novel includes notes on a seminar that he never had a chance to give, based on Paul Nadar’s photographs of Proust’s circle from the late 19th century. The project remains full of gaps and ellipses, but it makes it all the more suggestive. According to his own rule, Barthes kept his interventions to a minimum, simply providing brief biographical details on each individual character in alphabetical order. He was obviously enthralled by the project, but unsure that his fascination could be shared. Just in case, he warned that the seminar would not be on the world of Proust or on photography, but on Marcel and the ‘Marcelians’ who populated the Paris salons at the time. Marcelism, he wrote, was the way ‘the Proustian myth is moving toward the apotheosis of the biographical subject’. So biography and myth were very much on his mind. Barthes was trying to participate in that myth in order to become one unto himself. He didn’t seem to mind that the rumour was already circulating among the Paris intelligentsia that he was writing a novel. What he wanted was to locate himself at the point where biography and writing met. In order to prepare for his courses he also read notes, diaries and memoirs by Proust, Dante, Tolstoy, Chateaubriand and Kafka, and focused on episodes in their novels (the death of Tolstoy’s old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, or of Marcel’s grandmother in The Guermantes Way) that he perceived as ‘moments of truth’. It was only at these moments that pathos (suffering) broke through the work.
Barthes elaborated on these high points – he called them the ‘punctum’ – in Camera Lucida (1980), his essay on photography. The punctum is the poignant detail that pricks the ‘studium’ (codified knowledge) like a stroke of lightning, blinding everything else. Like Sigmund Freud, Barthes kept focusing the viewer’s attention on an unobtrusive detail, dismissing the rest as mere filling. And yet he denied that this disruptive element had any meaning. It was ‘the truth of affects, not of ideas’. Les Cahiers du cinéma had commissioned the essay three years earlier, and it was his mother’s death that put it back on the front burner. Barthes started writing it on 15 March 1979, one year to the day after his epiphany, and he finished it quickly, in two months, between his two series of lectures on ‘preparation’. The two books – the one on the novel and the one on photography – therefore overlap. Camera Lucida was published in Paris in February 1980, just days before his fatal accident. The reception was lukewarm, something Barthes attributed to the emphasis he placed on the ‘referent’, instead of on photography. Contrary to the reference, which belongs to the code (it is the capacity of signs to ‘represent’ something), the referent is the thing in itself, independent of its medium. Barthes couldn’t be further away here from the semiotic analysis he himself introduced in France in the early 1960s. Paradoxically, he had chosen to deny photography any specificity at the very moment when it was being recognized as an art form in its own right in the art world. He was bringing out instead its anthropological status: photography as a direct emanation of the referent, testifying that the event or the person had been there. It was this presence at a second remove that mattered to Barthes, its sudden return from the dead, death claiming its due from the living. A photograph was ‘what excludes me’. In the absence of religion, where else could death have taken refuge if not in these fragile images, which ‘keep producing death while attempting to preserve life’?
Photographs have a definite hold over us: ‘We dream,’ Barthes wrote in Preparation, ‘therefore we enter into a transference.’ Photographs fascinate, they intoxicate the viewer. But ‘to be fascinated = to have nothing to say.’ The seminar expected the audience to share in that fascination and to participate in the total ‘Marcelist’ environment, the way the young Marcel fell in love with the entire ‘budding grove’ and not just with one young girl, Gilberte. ‘No one falls in love with a physical appearance (with a “type”), you fall in love with an image in a setting.’ Barthes wanted his audience to investigate Marcel’s setting through Nadar’s photographs ‘as an ethnographer might’, intoxicated by their sight, as Proust himself had been. ‘The compactness, the powerful existence, the nature of that world couldn’t have been more tense, more intense, drawing closer to this world (in life, in the work) like an adventure, a frenzy: a wild desire.’ It was this wild desire for that world that exposed Marcel to the ruthless rituals of the Paris salons. It was ‘exhausting, like a veritable profession. More than a professional, a virtuoso of high society: a militant’.
Barthes wanted to identify with Proust in the way that natives identify with their totem: by ‘magic participation’ (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl). The seminar might have turned into a séance, with everyone entering in a transference: ‘Intoxicated with what? With the accumulation of these faces, these gazes, these figures, these clothes; with a feeling of falling in love with some of them; with nostalgia (they were alive, all of them are dead).’ This is what Barthes was trying to achieve with Dante, or with Proust: to become them, to identify ‘magically’ with their circumstances in order to immortalize his own ‘referent’ in an exemplary way. The Preparation of the Novel was his training to become a militant of the novel.

3. Contrary to rumour, Barthes didn’t start writing his novel straight away, but he behaved as though he had, hoping that it would occur magically. For magic is a practice, a ‘preparation’ (to quote Marcel Mauss), not a belief. ‘Will I really write a Novel? I’ll answer this and only this. I’ll proceed as if I were going to write one I’ll install myself within this as if: this lecture course could have been called “As if”.’ It was a propriatory ritual, a deliberate exercise in simulation. Simulating a reality to make it appear. He was well aware, of course, that what he desired was ‘fantasized and probably impossible’, but he would act as if it was possible, and might even learn something about writing in the process.
At the start of his career Barthes was deconstructing bourgeois myths. The time had now come to make up his own, a ‘crude fiction’ that would serve as ‘an energy, a motor’ and facilitate his writing. Unlike Claude Lévi-Strauss’ savages, who aspired to immobilize history, he would use this myth to set his own biography in motion. The fantasy would be to him what Virgil was to Dante, his ‘initiatory guide’. Dante started writing his Divine Comedy (1321) after he lost his Beatrice. Barthes would similarly turn his life into a Vita Nova, a new life dedicated to writing, mobilizing all his tutelary gods, all the writers who had inspired him and who had experienced in their lives a similar predicament. Writing as if he were them would help him unravel the knot that held together emotions and creation, death and writing. His idea was ‘to push that fantasy as far as it will go, to the point where: either the desire will fade away, or it will encounter the reality of writing and what gets written won’t be the Fantasized Novel.’
On the day of his death, Barthes left on his typewriter an unfinished text entitled ‘One Always Fails to Speak of What One Loves’. This realization made it all the more urgent for him to delegate ‘the discourse of affect’ to characters, as his illustrious predecessors had done. They would allow him to express his devotion openly, make sure that those he loved wouldn’t disappear, that they would not have lived and suffered ‘for nothing’. But first he had to tear himself away from his ‘acedia’. There were illustrious precedents, writers who identified with their own pantheon in order to regain their creative impulse. Antonin Artaud identified with Paolo Uccello, Peter Abelard, Vincent van Gogh, Comte de Lautréamont, Edgar Allan Poe, ‘all the names of history’ (as Nietzsche said) in the same way. Affects are like the plague, they come from the outside. Artaud urged his actors to become infected by them in order to build themselves a double, a ‘spectral effigy’. They required a special training, an ‘affective athletism’, using affects as a wrestler makes use of his muscles. (Peter Sloterdijk calls it a ‘bank of affects’.) Artaud drew from them while ‘preparing’ for his fatal journey to Ireland. Barthes used this bank of affects in his last lectures to embark on his own journey, deliberately propping in front of him a spectral fantasy – the ‘Utopian Novel’. He kept wearing it like a mask – as if – while pointing at it.
Four years after his mother’s death, Proust took the articles and short stories that he had written and miraculously transmuted them into a literary masterpiece. Barthes decided that he would also start from bits of texts, haikus, fragments, short forms that he had practised all his life, working from notations on index cards. He developed this rhapsodic kind of writing in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse. He was hoping to bring these fragments to the point where they would gel into a longer and more fluid narrative form. In practical terms, Barthes spent the entire first part of Preparation brilliantly unravelling his version of the haiku, but this didn’t seem to get him much closer to his goal. Often, in order to fill the gaps, he fell on technical or sociological commentaries about the novel, a biographical form that had become all the more desirable in his eyes at a time when it was rapidly becoming extinct – can one still use a novelistic form in an era that doesn’t allow for an individual life? His personal quest merged into something far bigger, an attempt to resurrect, maybe for the last time, a great narrative form that had sustained writers’ vocations for centuries and expressed the essence of life.
In The Theory of the Novel (1916) György Lukács wrote that ‘the journey is beginning, the novel is finished’. Barthes’ preparation was the beginning of the journey, but his novel never quite began, and its end was cut short before he could ever get there. He was hoping that, eventually, it would all add up, that the short and the long would mesh into a continuous narrative, a single thread that he could hold on to. But he never had a chance fully to confront the Minotaur, even beneath the mask. Many suspected – it was unavoidable – that his untimely death had in fact been all too timely. What he wrote about Proust in the Preparation may be more to the point: ‘Proust could do nothing but die; if he hadn’t, he probably wouldn’t have written anything new, only kept adding to the work …’

The Preparation of The Novel by Roland Barthes is published by Columbia University Press, New York, January 2011.

1 Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977, p.45
2 Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011; unless indicated, all quotes are from this book
3 Barthes delivered a similar lecture at the Collège de France on 19 October 1978, entitled ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ (‘For a long time, I went to bed early’)
4 Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, Aspen, 5–6, 1967 (original French version of the text published as ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Manteia, 5, 1968)

Sylvère Lotringer

Goshka Macuga

2011-01-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

Incorporating reference to eclectic historical materials, events, and concepts, Goshka Macuga’s installations weave subjective narratives from the fabric of accepted cultural knowledge or ‘fact’. Her works often take the form of faux museum displays that highlight the authority by which the past is framed and revised according to temporal ideas. Library Table was inspired by the architect Frederick Kiesler who, in conjunction with the collector Peggy Guggenheim, developed inventive methods for displaying art. Comprised of an imposing desk and five artists’ monographs, Library Table imprints scholarly assumption with Macuga’s own bias. The books are recovered in tooled leather depicting Macuga’s favourite images by the artists who have most influenced her work: Picabia, Polke, Warhol, Kippenberger, and Duchamp. Underneath the tomes, the table is carved with Kiesler’s drawings; the lamps were fabricated with reference to Kiesler, with one metaphorically branched to allude to the multiplicity of history’s interpretation and use

Text taken from
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/goshka_macuga.htm

Animalism in Orwell's Animal Farm

2010-12-09T19:08:00.001-08:00

Principles of Animalism 1: The basic ideas Old Major passes on in his first speech are that humans are the enemy because they overwork the animals and treat them badly. He says all animals should cooperate to overthrow the humans. He teaches that all animals are equal, even the wild creatures like rats and rabbits, and that they should all protect each other as friends. All humans are enemies. He warns the animals never to live in houses, sleep in beds, wear clothes, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, touch money or engage in trade - these are all the evil habits of humans. Particularly, no animal must ever try to exert power over another animal - strong or weak, they are all brothers. As a symbol of Animalism and its ideas, he teaches them the song, Beasts of England.

A Natural History of the Senses- Diane Ackerman

2010-12-09T19:01:00.000-08:00

Humans might luxuriate in the idea of being “in” nature, but Ms. Ackerman has taught generations that we are nature—for “no facet of nature is as unlikely as we, the tiny bipeds with the giant dreams.” In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations—of things ranging from the cloud glories to the human brain to endangered whooping cranes—urge us to live in the moment, to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles.

Marcus Coates Ideal Syllabus

2010-12-09T18:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/ideal-syllabus-marcus-coates/

Mark Dion- Tate Thames Dig

2010-11-15T12:37:00.001-08:00

http://edu.warhol.org/app_dion.html

Nicolas Bourriaud, Precarious Constructions. Answer to Jacques Rancière on Art and Politics

2010-11-08T12:10:00.001-08:00

http://classic.skor.nl/article-4416-nl.html?lang=en

Drawings of Freud

2010-11-08T12:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/health/psychology/25freud.html?pagewanted=all

Tony Swain

2010-11-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/guide-painting-tony-swain

Non-monumental

2010-10-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=291

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/3

Narrow Larry's Guide to American Folk Art

2010-10-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

http://www.narrowlarry.com/page1.html

Underwater Sculpture

2010-10-25T13:11:00.000-07:00

http://underwatersculpture.com/

Kippenberger Hotel Drawings

2010-10-22T15:26:00.001-07:00

The Life of an Object

2010-10-19T10:19:00.001-07:00

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/monumental-mission.html

Collective Memory

2010-10-19T09:47:00.001-07:00

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/SHEM_topics.htm

Haim Steinbach

2010-10-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.jca-online.com/steinbach.html

Art as Social Enterprise

2010-09-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

I wrote this short essay in response to a reading by art critic Polly Ulrich, which focused on the role of Functional Ceramics in the world of Contemporary Art. I took great deal from it in terms of questioning what we can define as contemporary art and how the establishment is opening up to a new way of thinking about the functionality of art in society. This is interesting to me as it's something I regularly question in relation to my own choice and efforts to make art for a living.

------------------------------------------

‘The meaning of something is in its use, not in itself.”

John Cage

Here Cage asserts that we can find profound meaning not only in abstract ideas,
but more often through the effective, relational and ordinary activities through
which we conduct our lives.

Increasingly artists tap into diverse sources for their practices, often aiming to
bring aesthetic experience closer to practical lived experience,
understanding that, even while working in a field full of disembodied work
practices, abstract language and virtuality, that it is still the sensuous qualities
which give art its emotional power.

Functional craft art has always been unacknowledged and remains a kind of
primal, subterranean field underlying the variable trends in our visual culture.
Functional Ceramic work finds it’s main foundation in it’s relationship with the
body yet we should not forget that it maintains a simultaneous relationship with
the abstract world of concepts: such as social meaning, tradition, culture and
connection to history. As literary critic Bill Brown commented-

‘There is no such thing as a dumb object’.

The art establishment has long ignored the practice of functional ceramics as, for
one, it de-stabilises where art is expected to be located, placing it in everyday life
situations, away from the white cube gallery or museum space. This situation
however, has long been the goal of avant-garde artists, and increasingly we see
art works emerging which are based on encounter and a recognition that art should engage embodied perception, as an endlessly evolving relationship between one’s body, one’s mind and the environment in which we live. In other words, art that reflects the dynamic model of human existence.

Classical Greek (carried on by the Enlightenment) ideas about the superiority of
reason and logic over the experience of the senses are being reconsidered in the
post-modern world we live in. We now hold a more nuanced understanding of
perception and the world around us, thus our attitude towards what constitutes
an artwork must change also.

Functional Ceramics could be seen to operate at the centre of Contemporary Art
as it brings us closer to actual experience through it’s location in the social
context of daily life. Since Duchamp’s ‘Fountain, in 1917, we have seen the avant-
garde try to push art out into the world. The Western-European attitude that
defines artefacts by whether or not they should be placed in a gallery or museum
is one which has been learned and maintained so this practice should not be seen
as being intrinsic to art itself.

The example of Joseph Beuys planting 7000 Oak Trees in Kassel, Germany can be
seen as an illustrative example of revolt against this kind of elitism, here Beuys
is aligning his art with a useful purpose, a clear social goal and placing it firmly
outside of the gallery context.

Art works do not just represent reality, they create reality: they create images,
narratives and points of view which we absorb, and in doing so we are led to the
constructing and reconstructing of our own beliefs.

Art that deals with experience, social interaction and that which is located in
daily life, owes a great deal to the aesthetic traditions of functional ceramics as it
is an art that implements both body and mind. It stands as an art form of
humanizing values and acknowledges the importance of both knowing and doing
in the making of things.

Image - Rirkrit Tiravanija- contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.

Today I Wrote Nothing

2010-09-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

Short stories and poems by Russian absurdist Danill Kharms

http://absurdist.obook.org/kharms/

Visions of Paradise Series on Folk Art

2010-09-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

http://folkstreams.net/film,102

Garden of Eden on Wheels

2010-09-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Museum of Jurrasic Technology, Culver City, LA

Introductory Essay by Erna Aljasmets, Eesti NSV udhariduskoolide opilaste toid

And swear by him who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer. Rev 10:6

In 1933 Mary Elliott Wing, a seamstress living in Roanoke Virginia, conceived of and constructed the first truly modern mobile home. Inspired both by the dimensions of the Biblical ark as well as Scriptural accounts of the Noachian deluge and promises of subsequent apocalyptic eras, Mary Wing devised a mobile dwelling capable of quickly adapting to a world of rapid changing environmental and social conditions. Whether driven by the lure of distant attractions or the threat of impending disaster, Mary Wing's mobile home was able to uproot at a moments notice and migrate to any location to which her 1930 Chevrolet could haul her and her mobile dwelling. Mary Wing's construction project was inspired not only by the physical Ark but by its plan and purpose as well. Living as she was in the early years of the economic downturn of the 1930's, Mary Wing carefully and lovingly equipped her trailer with all such things as would be needed to preserve life against the devastating economic storm that raged outside the protected confines of her land-ark.

Mary Wing's was, of course, neither the first mobile dwelling nor even the first mobile home in the contemporary understanding of the term. As noted by J.B. Jackson in his The Movable Dwelling and How it Came to America,

The verb to dwell has a distinct meaning. At one time it meant to hesitate, to linger to delay, as when we say, "He is dwelling too long on this insignificant matter." To dwell, like the verb to abide (from which we derive abode) simply means to pause, to stay put for a length of time; it implies that we will eventually move on.

As if propelled by a literal understanding of the verb, the dwellings of our forefathers were for millennia predominantly mobile in nature. As David A. Thornburg remarks,

The history of the house trailer really begins with the covered carts and wagons used by prehistoric nomads who wandered the steppes of Asia. Four thousand year old models of these ox drawn vehicles have been unearthed in Syria, and Assyria, some of them looking surprisingly like 19th century Conestogas.

The house trailer is, of course, but a sub-set of the larger age-old category of mobile dwelling. From the Basque sheepherder tent/coat and Bedouin woven goat hair "blacktent" to Mongolian yurts, human ingenuity has created an astonishing array of portable dwellings.

However, in America, it was the migratory worker and seasonal factory worker, tacking together small masonite trailers or packing up their home built housecars and assembling in camps as early as 1920; or, the evangelist, carpenter or salesman, who built their first trailer to follow some private dream; or simply the old time "trailerite" or auto camper, a casual, cantankerous and fiercely independent soul of the teens and twenties who together caused a brand new industry, mobile home production, to emerge and flourish right out of the depths of the Great Depression.

* * *

Coincidentally, as the seamstress Mary Elliott Wing was designing and constructing her mobile home on the Atlantic coast, 3000 miles away on the Pacific coast, the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, observing distant stars from the vantage point of a 5000 ft. mountain-top a short distance north east of Pasadena, California, was making important observations concerning the spectra of distant stars - observations that help place Mary Wing's unique efforts in perspective.

Hubble's keen, if fortuitous, 1933 observation that the more distant the star the redder the coloration of its characteristic spectra, was the first step in what was to become a cascade of deductive reasoning which culminated in two of the most significant understandings in the history of Western cosmological thought - namely that the universe is thousands or millions of times larger than was commonly supposed and secondly, the universe is not only much larger than had been assumed but it is dramatically increasing in size with each passing moment.

There is an important corollary to Hubble's second realization that all of existence is expanding: if the amount of matter in the universe is more or less fixed but the size of the universe is constantly expanding, then the space between the objects in the universe is that which is increasing. The amount of matter in creation is not expanding; the distance between the bits of matter is getting greater. In other words the stuff of existence is thinning out, getting colder, running down. Or in the words of W.B. Yeats "the center does not hold; things fall apart."

Ants Viires, the noted Estonian historian, responding in 1975 to Hubble's view of an ever expanding cosmos, wrote in his Puud ja inimesed: puude osast Eesti rehvakulturis "...time ravages everything, our person, our experience, our material world. In the end everything will be lost. In the end there is only the darkness. ...and despite the apparent fullness and richness of our lives there is, deposited at the core of each of us, a seed of this total loss of this inevitable and ultimate darkness."

Against this flood of darkness, against this inevitable annihilation, certain individuals are called upon to preserve what they can. And those of us who hear and heed this call to hold back for a time some small part of existence from the inevitability of entropic disintegration have come to be known as collectors.

* * *
Steven Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell in their poetic essay on collecting, Finders, Keepers, note that collecting is an act of passion. Speaking of the 16th through 19th century collectors, represented in their unabashedly beautiful book, Gould and Purcell note:

They all believed passionately in the value of their work; they were driven, sometimes at the cost of life or sanity, by this conviction, this urge to collect, to bring part of a limitless diversity into an orbit of personal or public appreciation. In an age of passivity, where Walkman and television bring so much to us and demand so little in return, we must grasp the engaging passion of these collectors, And we must also remember that passion, for all it public and private joys, literally means suffering.

If viewed from the perspective of self-preservation, this activity of gathering together, compiling and tending to often useless objects might appear illogical. In attempt to make sense of this seeming senseless and curiously compulsive activity, commentary on themes of collecting often focus on issues of scarcity and value, on the of amassment of objects as a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth and/or power. But it is all too easy to ascribe motives of self interest to this passion to gather - to view collecting as an act of hoarding, of taking for one's self when, in fact, to assume the mantle of gathering for aftertime can just as easily be viewed as a self-less if not sacrificial act.

* * *
Over the past half century agricultural science has engineered remarkably successful plants with yields that would have been unthinkable a century ago. These remarkable successes have understandably rendered these hybrids nearly ubiquitous. This success and ubiquity, however, carry with them very real if often overlooked risks - risks of susceptibility of the world's hybridized food stuffs to disease and the very real potential for famine - risks which have been eclipsed in the largely justifiable euphoria of success. Against this possibility of potential wide scale famine, as well as out of simple concern for the loss of genetic material, there has developed a system know as The Indigenous Seed Bank Project, a loose network of gardeners around the world.

Like Adam and Eve tending to and caring for their Garden, the seed bank gardeners, by collecting, sowing and harvesting seeds of traditional indigenous plants, are similarly cultivating and caring for genetic strains, perhaps as ancient as the Garden itself - strains that would have surely been lost were it not for the seed bank's collective effort. Similarly, if less concretely, all collectors can be seen as participating in a larger species wide project of keeping and preserving the "stuff of life", nourishment in another but not less important form, from the ravages of time.

* * *
Four thousand three hundred and forty three years ago, Noah, was called to build an ark and provision it with all such as was necessary to withstand the impending apocalypse. That ark proved to be the first and most complete museum of natural history ever assembled and, by extension, Noah and his family, the first and most successful of collectors - collecting systematically, if urgently, to rescue from extinction all of creation. Sixty three years ago, Mary Elliot Wing was also called to build an ark and provision it with all such as was necessary to withstand the economic apocalypse of the 1930's. Like Noah and his family, Mary Wing also built and assembled those things necessary to rescue from extinction life itself.

* * *
And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. Rev 10:6

Whether by earthquake, seas of blood and clouds of human-faced locusts or the final entropic death of all star matter, knowledge of the end of time is part of human consciousness and Ants Viires' "seed of total loss, of inevitable and ultimate darkness" resides in us all. Against this inevitability of ruin, some of us are called to collect and preserve. And it is our belief that those who have been appointed collectors are in fact serving in that capacity for us all. This exhibition presents the fruits of the efforts of five such individuals to whom we are deeply indebted.

__ _____________________ __

Erna Aljasmets is Keeper of Folk, Traditional and Urban Handcrafts at the Eesti NSV udhariduskoolide opilaste toid in Tallinn, Estonia. Erna teaches Vernacular Art and Aesthetics at the Eesti vabariik kultuuripaevade raames and is a Research Fellow in Visual and Cultural Studies at the Vasteliina keskkooli optetaja. She has curated several handcrafts exhibitions in locations as diverse as Moscow, Yerevan, Kiev, Switzerland, Berlin, and Helsinki, as well as her native Tallinn. Her books include Ma ise ilutegija (1969), Laste loomeroom (1978), and Laste loomertoo (1988).

Jesse Howard instructional Signage

2010-09-13T14:39:00.001-07:00

Can Animals Think? Time Magazine Aug '10

2010-08-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978023,00.html

The Red Birds, Brigitte Cornand, 2009

2010-08-02T05:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.art-agenda.com/shows/view/956

Nauman - Hand Circle

2010-03-29T06:35:00.001-07:00

Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations - In this book (which was post-humously published in 1953) W would follow an idea until he could say that it either worked or that life doesn't work this way, so we have to start over. He would not throw away his failed argument, but would include it in his book.'

Bruce Nauman - Square Deression, Munster 2007 *** Donald Judd, Untitled, Munster 1977

2010-03-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

I Like America and America Likes Me

2010-03-10T08:57:00.001-08:00

Flood

2010-03-10T05:21:00.001-08:00

Birds Gather

2010-03-10T04:54:00.002-08:00

The Birds (1963)

2010-03-10T04:54:00.001-08:00

The Birds (1963) is a modern Hitchcock thriller/masterpiece, his first film with Universal Studios. It is the apocalyptic story of a northern California coastal town filled with an onslaught of seemingly unexplained, arbitrary and chaotic attacks of ordinary birds - not birds of prey. Ungrammatical advertising campaigns emphasized: "The Birds Is Coming." This Technicolor feature came after Psycho (1960) - another film loaded with 'bird' references.

Novelist Evan Hunter based his screenplay upon the 1952 collection of short stories of the same name by Daphne du Maurier - Hitchcock's third major film based on the author's works (after Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940)). In du Maurier's story, the birds were attacking in the English countryside, rather than in a small town north of San Francisco. The film's technical wizardry is extraordinary, especially in the film's closing scene (a complex, trick composite shot) - the special visual effects of Ub Iwerks were nominated for an Academy Award (the film's sole nomination), but the Oscar was lost to Cleopatra. Hundreds of birds (gulls, ravens, and crows) were trained for use in some of the scenes, while mechanical birds and animations were employed for others.

The film's non-existent musical score is replaced by an electronic soundtrack (including simulated bird cries and wing-flaps), with Hitchcock's favorite composer Bernard Herrmann serving as a sound consultant. It was shot on location in the port town of Bodega Bay (north of San Francisco) and in San Francisco itself. Hitchcock introduced a 'fascinating new personality' for the film - his successor to Grace Kelly - a cool, blonde professional model named 'Tippi' Hedren, in her film debut in a leading role. [Hedren reprised her character in a minor supporting role, in an inferior made-for-TV sequel, The Birds II: Land's End (1994), set in the New England fishing town of Land's End. The director was Rick Rosenthal, although the standard generic pseudonym 'Alan Smithee' is found in the credits. Leads Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are replaced by Brad Johnson and Chelsea Field.]

Initially, critics were baffled when they attempted to interpret the film on a literal level and measure it against other typical disaster/horror films of its kind. The typical Hitchcock MacGuffin is the question: Why do the strange attacks occur? But the film cannot solely be interpreted that way, because as the actors in the film discover in the long discussion scene in the Tides Restaurant, there is no solid, rational reason why the birds are attacking. They are not seeking revenge for nature's mistreatment, or foreshadowing doomsday, and they don't represent God's punishment for humankind's evil.

When this is understood, the symbolic film's complex fabric makes more sense, especially if interpreted in Freudian terms. It is about three needy women (literally 'birds') - and a fourth from a younger generation - each flocking around and vying for varying degrees of affection and attention from the sole, emotionally-cold male lead, and the fragile tensions, anxieties and unpredictable relations between them. The attacks are mysteriously related to the mother and son relationship in the film - anger (and fears of abandonment or being left lonely) of the jealous, initially hostile mother surface when her bachelor son brings home an attractive young woman. Curiously, the first attack has symbolic phallic undertones - it occurs when the man and woman approach toward each other outside the restaurant in the coastal town.

On an allegorical level, the birds in the film are the physical embodiment and exteriorization of unleashed, disturbing, shattering forces that threaten all of humanity (those threatened in the film include schoolchildren, a defenseless farmer, bystanders, a schoolteacher, etc.) when relationships have become insubstantial, unsupportive, or hurtful. In a broader, more universal sense, the stability of the home and natural world environment, symbolized by broken teacups at the domestic level, is in jeopardy and becoming disordered when people cannot 'see' the dangers gathering nearby, and cannot adequately protect themselves from violence behind transparent windows, telephone booths, eyeglasses, or facades. Numerous allusions to blindness are sprinkled throughout the film (the farmer's eyes are pecked out, the children play blindman's bluff at the birthday party, the broken glasses of the fleeing schoolchild, etc.), giving the hint that the camera's voyeuristic lens (and its screen-viewing audience) is also being subjected to assault.

Ways of Seeing 2

2010-02-22T06:24:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about the singular world view of humans and the widely held assumption that our social systems, communication and brains are superior to that of all the other creatures living on this planet.. I am interested in the subtle and non-comprehensible ways in which the world, unseen to human eyes, goes on around us, I see it as millions of parallel dimensions existing alongside one another.

I am interested in exploring the interaction between humans and animals, and in particular, the place where two worlds collide. It's that space that interests me, the gaze of one set of eyes to another, of two species connecting on different tracks. This connection happens from time to time and tends to give the feeling of having experienced a 'moment' with another creature, but animals are living a different by set of rules to us and the emotional connection we put onto these situations is something quite different to the reality of what actually happened, here lies my interest in the point in between, the point where it is possible to connect on some level.

In this way, I also think it is possible to consider this point of connection in terms of the object and the viewer. It's the place where a connection is made, a meta-physical space, nothing touching anything else, just a recognition of some sort happening, sparked by the meeting of two sets of world views, in the case of viewer and object, the object; inanimate yet communicative, represents the view/interests/personality and emotions of a non-present participant while the viewer looks on through eyes soaked in their own life experience.

In human and animal interaction both bring their own sets of life experience to the table, none more valid than the other and each putting their own way of seeing things onto the situation, in an effort to understand it. The idea that one possesses the capacity to reason while one does not is questionable and I am unsure that it even matters when one discards the singular Biblical worldview of human superiority and accepts that there are many ways of seeing.

http://www.kunsthalle-bern.ch/en/agenda/exhibition.php?exhibition=131
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=634
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burnett_Tylor

A Bird in the Hand

2010-02-03T04:11:00.000-08:00

If you get them at the right time of year, many birds are easy to catch. For an agile hunter, a small boy for example, there isn't much of a problem in collecting eggs and chicks from the nest; some adults can also be snatched by hand. Commercial hunters in the nineteenth century reported that Passenger Pigeons - once their eggs had hatched - could be plucked right off the nest.

Even among birdwatchers there are those who feel the need to possess the birds, if only symbolically. To have them is to tick them off your list. And the best list is 'the life list'- the record of all the species you have ever seen.

What is it, this urge to own another living creature? And why is it that we understand so well the universal symbol of the bird being set free from the cage?

The Biblical Flood

2010-02-01T06:53:00.001-08:00

After Nature - New Museum, NYC, 2008

2010-02-01T06:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/399

When Nature Takes Over

2010-02-01T06:32:00.000-08:00

http://blog.art21.org/2009/12/21/when-nature-takes-over/

Primitive Culture

2010-02-01T06:19:00.000-08:00

Tylor's "Primitive Culture"

http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S207.htm

Excerpt from by a review by Alfred Russell Wallace, published in 'The Academy', 1872

It is perhaps inevitable that in the present chaotic state of our knowledge of man's mental nature and its relation to his visible organism, a work like the present should be unsatisfactory. The minute anatomy of the brain has been long ago exhaustively investigated, while the comparative study of its form and size in different races and individuals has been carried on by means of extensive collections of crania and casts; yet, although the brain is almost universally admitted to be the organ of the mind, by neither of these lines of research nor by any combination of them, have any definite conclusions been arrived at as to the relation of the brain to the various mental faculties. Up to the present day our physiologists dispute as to whether the forehead or the occiput is the seat of the intellect, yet they scout the idea of giving up their hitherto barren line of investigation, in favour of that experimental method of comparing function with development which, the much-abused phrenologists maintain, leads to complete success. Equally unsatisfactory is the practice of leaving out of view, in theories of mental development, the numerous well-established cases of abnormal mental phenomena which indicate latent powers in man beyond those usually recognised. These are looked upon as obscure diseases of the nervous system, and although their occurrence is very rare to individual experience, the records of them are now sufficiently voluminous to furnish comparable cases to almost all that occur. They can thus be grouped into classes, and this fact, of each one forming an item in a group of analogous cases, is supposed to preclude the necessity of any attempt at a rational explanation of them. This is the method very largely adopted by Mr. Tylor, who in treating of the beliefs, customs, or superstitions of mankind, seems often to be quite satisfied that he has done all that is required when he has shown that a similar or identical belief or custom exists elsewhere.

Animism

2010-02-01T04:50:00.000-08:00

Belief in the existence of spirits separable from bodies. Such beliefs are traditionally identified with small-scale ("primitive") societies, though they also occur in major world religions. They were first competently surveyed by Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871). Classic animism, according to Tylor, consists of attributing conscious life to natural objects or phenomena, a practice that eventually gave rise to the notion of a soul. See also shaman.

Paul Gaugins attempt to enter into the 'primitive' world

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://communitas.princeton.edu/blogs/wri152-3/altucker/GauTehura.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/altucker/archives/002058.html&usg=__RxUPd0_lC7yun7T5YHaVm_RAGMw=&h=285&w=384&sz=24&hl=en&start=10&sig2=gieOtE3tPpinxOdNl5U4KQ&um=1&tbnid=WqQlay9-6_C6QM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=123&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dprimitive%2Bculture%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1&ei=YM5mS9-2ItHK-QbNt4SyBw

Marcus Coates - Being Animal

2010-02-01T04:07:00.000-08:00

Joseph Kosuth

2010-01-12T03:47:00.000-08:00

One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a work by Joseph Kosuth. An example of conceptual art, the piece consists of a chair, a photograph of this chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph depicts the chair as it is actually installed in the room, and thus the work changes each time it is installed in a new venue.

Two elements of the work remain constant: a copy of a dictionary definition of the word "chair" and a diagram with instructions for installation. Both bear Kosuth's signature. Under the instructions, the installer is to choose a chair, place it before a wall, and take a photograph of the chair. This photo is to be enlarged to the size of the actual chair and placed on the wall to the left of the chair. Finally, a blow-up of the copy of the dictionary definition is to be hung to the right of the chair, its upper edge aligned with that of the photograph.

Kosuth's concern with the difference between a concept and its mode of presentation was prefigured in the "event cards" of Fluxus-artists like George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono. These artists also tackled the problem of presenting "concepts" to an art audience. One and Three Chairs is, perhaps, a step towards a resolution of this problem. Rather than present the viewer with the bare written instructions for the work, or make a live event of the realization of the concept (in the manner of the Fluxus artists), Kosuth instead unifies concept and realization. One and Three Chairs demonstrates how an artwork can embody an idea that remains constant despite changes to its elements.

Kosuth stresses the difference between concept and presentation in his writings (e.g., "Art after Philosophy", 1969 and interviews (see the quotation below). He tries to intimately bind the conceptual nature of his work with the nature of art itself, thus raising his instructions for the presentation of an artwork to the level of a discourse on art. In 1963 Henry Flynt articulated these problems in the article "Concept Art". This was a forerunner to Kosuth's thematization of "Concept Art" in "Art after Philosophy", the text that made One and Three Chairs famous.

The work One and Three Chairs can be seen to highlight the relation between language, picture and referent. It problematizes relations between object, visual and verbal references (denotations) plus semantic fields of the term chosen for the verbal reference. The term of the dictionary includes connotations and possible denotations which are relevant in the context of the presentation of One and Three Chairs. The meanings of the three elements are congruent in certain semantic fields and incongruent in other semantic fields: A semantic congruity ("One") and a threefold incongruity ("One and Three"). Ironically, One and Three Chairs can be looked upon as simple but rather complex model, of the science of signs. A viewer may ask "what's real here?" and answer that "the definition is real"; Without a definition, one would never know what an actual chair is.

There exist different interpretations of these semantic and ontological aspects. Some refer to Plato´s Republic (Book X); others refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein´s Tractatus or to Charles Sanders Peirce's triad icon-index-symbol. Dreher discusses the semantic problems of One and Three Chairs as inclusions of circles which represent semantic fields.

The work tends to defy formal analysis because one chair can be substituted for another chair, rendering the photograph and the chair photographed elusive to description. Nevertheless the particular chair and its accompanying photograph lend themselves to formal analysis. There are many chairs in the world; thus only those actually used can be described. Those chairs not used would not be analyzed. The enlarged dictionary definition of the word chair is also open to formal analysis, as is the diagram containing instructions of the work.

Kosuth's thematization of semantic congruities and incongruities can be seen as a reflection of the problems which the relations between concept and presentation pose. Kosuth uses the related questions, "how meanings of signs are constituted" and "how signs refer to extra-lingual phenomena" as a fundament to discuss the relation between concept and presentation. Kosuth tries to identify or equate these philosophical problems with the theory of art. Kosuth changes the art practice from hand-made originals to notations with substitutable realizations, and tries to exemplify the relevance of this change for the theory of art.

In "Art after Philosophy," Kosuth provoked a confrontation with the formal criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Both exposed the concept of the art work as a non-substitutable instance realized by an artist who follows no other criteria than visual ones. They defined this concept as the core of modernism. In the sixties, Greenberg's and Fried's modernist doctrine dominated the American discussions on art; meanwhile, the artists Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Henry Flynt, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson and Joseph Kosuth wrote articles on art exemplifying a pluralistic anti- and post-modernist tendency which gained more influence at the end of the sixties. In 1968, Greenberg tried to disqualify the new tendencies as "'novelty' art": The different mediums are exploding...when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over. Sam Hunter offered a more positive view in 1972: "The situation of open possibilities which confronted artists in the first years of the seventies allowed a variety of means and many fertile idea systems to coexist, reconciling through the poetic imagination apparent contradictions."

Malevich - Black Circle

2009-11-24T06:52:00.001-08:00

The Everyday in Art

2009-11-16T06:38:00.000-08:00

The presence in contemporary art of everyday, domestic objects such as a bed is now a commonplace of contemporary art, even if contemporary critics rarely ask whose everyday domesticity might be re/presented. Many of life's key experiences and rites of passage — being born, sleeping, dreaming, having sex, giving birth, and dying — happen in bed.

Rachel Whiteread made numerous bed pieces which she placed on the floor, inviting yet denying rest, cots by Permindar Kaur or Mona Hatoum, Richard Hamilton's brutal Treatment Room of 1984 (Arts Council Collection, London, recently exhibited in Protest and Survive at the Whitechapel Art Gallery) or Bill Viola's Science of the Heart of 1983 (shown in Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery) play on, prey on, the oscillations between life and death, the body's presence and absence. None have the comforts usually associated with the bed in consumer culture of the 1980s and 1990s with its boom in home decoration and plethora of styles from the minimalist to the ornate. One of Sarah Lucas's most complex pieces about sexuality and sexual difference is Au Naturel of 1994 in which a sagging, stained mattress is propped up against a wall. Impossible to sleep or rest upon, its surface is interrupted the objects placed upon it: a bucket, melons and a cucumber. So long a stage for the performance of the female nude, upturned the mattress becomes the site for the play of fantasies and cultural representations as the artist's trades with her audiences the crude sexual stereotypes in circulation in contemporary culture.

A Country Refuge

2009-10-20T06:59:00.001-07:00

The project was a collaboration born of a conversation about the mutual feelings of exposure and vulnerability Kirsten and I felt whilst on a drawing assignment to the rocky headland on the south coast of Skye a few weeks ago.

On facing the elements, unprotected and alone, we felt an overwhelming desire to find shelter, warmth and protection, and as there was none available, we decided to build our own safe haven, using the only materials we had available, those which existed naturally on the Island; branches, twigs, grass and rocks.

This work stems from a common interest in the theme of human vulnerability and the desire to protect, encase and self-preserve that comes instinctively to us. The built environment exists to give people places in which they can find shelter, thus in the natural environment we must, like animals, find a way to create shelter for ourselves.

Sadly we ran out of time so the shelter remains unfinished, however, for me, it has taken on a new character as a drawing in space, a natural curiosity that I hope future passers by will take a moment to ponder upon. Had the shelter been completed, our idea was that in it's very making, it would be unmade, the structure flowing from the lines of the rockface becoming an extension of the natural environment from which it arose from.

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Thank you Bob Dylan

The Everyday and the Extraordinary

2009-09-23T05:16:00.001-07:00

Sunday Afternoon in the Queen of Parks

2009-06-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Following all that heavy stuff about the economy and our world in crisis I thought it prudent to remember that some things are free, nature is beautiful, and for the paltry cost of a pencil and a piece of paper, a lovely afternoon can be spent, close to idle, whiling away the day drawing in the park.

To Let

2009-05-13T04:02:00.000-07:00

A Felt Covered Solution for a New Crisis

2009-05-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Joseph Beuys, Infiltration homogen für Konzertflügel (Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano), 1966

Beuys died three years before the reunification of Germany, in a time that is no longer our time. And history has changed the significance of his work. Freed from his overbearing presence, his art reveals its fullness. In his lifetime Beuys was the unequivocal author of his art, telling people, for better or worse, what it was. Now, his assemblages have to find their own place, without him to explain them.

Because Beuys is a German artist, it is impossible not to see the wounds of history everywhere, with a surpassing melancholy that dwarfs his attempts to commit his sculpture to an optimistic democratic politics. Beuys hoped his lumps of fat spoke of fluidity and progressive change. In fact, they are blocks of rancid yellow memory - fat from Germany.

The first Beuys I ever saw was at the Georges Pompidou Centre: a grand piano smothered in grey felt, with a red cross sewn on it. It struck me as tragic, and it still does. The piano is German culture, the heritage of Beethoven, sealed now inside felt, with an ambulance sign - damaged, wounded, recuperating. It is the sculptural equivalent of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

When I tried to find out more about Beuys, I was baffled. The felt swaddling the piano, according to Beuys, was meant to heal it, to save it. Yet this efficacious magic doesn't actually form part of the piano's aesthetic impact. There is no sense of redemption - just of sickness. Now I realise it doesn't matter what Beuys said; probably at some level he knew he was whistling in the dark when he claimed his art was upbeat and spiritually transfiguring, when really it is shockingly lumpen, and macabre.

Some other ways to make use of a 'For Sale' sign

2009-05-05T09:04:00.001-07:00

Simon Starling - Three White Desks - Tate Triennial - Altermodern

2009-04-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

This work by Simon Starling (Three White Desks) was created by sending 3 cabinet makers in 3 different countries photographs of a desk once owned by Francis Bacon. Starling requested that each cabinet maker recreate the desk as closesly as they could to the likeness in the photograph accompanying his instructions, no dimensions or further information was sent enclosed. Starling sent the instructions to each craftsman in turn.

When the first desk arrived, Starling photographed it and sent the image off to the second cabinet maker and so on, until in a Chinese Whispers style way, the likeness of the desks degraded, through the effects of transit, digital communication and distance.

This work makes me think of the way families and friends move or are diaplaced throughout countries and continents and are therefore forced to communicate in a second hand way, the ever decreasing quality of the desks serving as a metaphor for the weakening of the social structures and communities in which individuals find strength and inspiration.

The Sleepers on the Track Have Woken Up

2009-04-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

‘Why do cats understand what you say?’ ‘Where does hair go when you go bald?’ ‘How can the city control illegal bicycle parking?’ These are just some of the questions that Marcus Coates has attempted to answer by descending into the ‘lower world’ and consulting the birds and animals that he encounters there. Usually they respond in cryptic clues; uncharacteristic behaviour is what he is looking out for, which he then does his best to interpret for his audience on his return.

Coates was inducted into the ancient techniques of shamanism on a weekend course in Notting Hill, London. The workshop trained participants to access a ‘non-ordinary’ psychic dimension with the aid of chanting, ‘ethnic’ drumming and dream-catchers. Coates has explained the process as essentially being a form of imaginative visualization. Historically the shaman would have been employed to solve the daily problems of the community; since these usually involved the finding and killing of animals, shamans were valued for their ability to communicate with other species in the spirit world. Shamanism’s contemporary abstracted form in the West still relies on animals as ‘guides’, but it encourages practitioners to project personal spirit worlds in terms that are familiar to them. During his trance the man sitting next to Coates met and talked to a gerbil.

Coates himself is a keen ornithologist and naturalist; the animals that he encounters in the ‘lower world’ are usually from areas of British landscape that he knows intimately. Much of his past work has reflected his sense of alienation from such places, a frustration that manifests itself in the sentimental yearning to ‘get back to nature’. Indigenous British Mammals (2000) was Coates’ ludicrous attempt to reverse the flow of anthropomorphism and subsume himself within the fabric of the natural world, emulating wild animal calls while buried under the turf of deserted moorland; in Goshawk (1999) he persuaded foresters to fasten him to the upper branches of a Scots pine so he could see the world through the eyes of a hawk scanning for prey. While the humour of these works springs from the naivety of the desires they embody, by subjecting himself to such vivid, visceral experiences Coates holds on to the possibility of personal transformation and so restrains them from snide satire.

The ambiguity of Coates’ own investment in the processes he embarks on creates a constant itch in the understanding of his position; who is laughing, and whom exactly are they laughing at? This question was at the forefront of his first shaman work, Journey to the Lower World (2004), in which he filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual in the front room of a Liverpool tower block that was scheduled for demolition. The audience of bemused residents fought to suppress their giggles as Coates, dressed in the skin of a red deer, began by vacuuming and spitting water onto the carpet, then emitting feral whistles, grunts and barks as he entered the ‘lower world’.

Despite his audience’s obvious scepticism (of both shamanism and of the contemporary art world), the question they asked Coates about the lower world was sincere and unguarded: ‘Do we have a protector for this site? What is it?’ He had gained their trust and implicated himself in an intimate system of exchange. His tentative answer, interpreting peculiar feather patterns on a sparrowhawk’s wing as being indicative of the community’s need to ‘stick together’, acknowledged this responsibility. While remaining deeply uneasy about the employment of artists in the public sphere as ‘problem solvers’, Coates has said that often the most valuable thing that comes out of such performances is the audience’s sense that they are being listened to. This in turn prompts them to begin talking objectively about issues that concern them, even if, as in the case of Mouth of God (2006), it is to a man with a stuffed hare strapped to his head.

This is Coates’ best trick; despite looming large in the production of his works, he somehow manages to usher people towards a revelation of sorts within themselves. He achieves this again in his work Dawn Chorus (2007), the most recent and accomplished of an ongoing series of works in which he teaches people how to mimic birdsong by copying slowed-down recordings of birds, filming them and then speeding up the footage to avian pitch again. The multi-screen video installation shows 19 people caught alone in quiet moments, intermittently breaking into birdsong. While the ornithologist in Coates clearly relished the challenge of reproducing the sequence and positions of a dawn chorus in the gallery, the real magic lies in the videos’ knack of not only creating highly convincing birdsong but also accelerating human movements into the nervy fidgeting of birds.

The melancholy of Dawn Chorus is born of the solitary figures’ isolation, not only from the world of the birds and the beasts but also from each other. Deceptively, Coates’ real subjects are not the outdoors and the unknown but interiority and introspection. This is the true locus of ‘nature’ in the modern world, he seems to imply; not in the open spaces of the countryside, so obscured by cultural projection and anthropomorphism, but in the withered memory of something wild and ancient, buried deep within ourselves.

Insects, Insects, Insects

2009-04-23T03:24:00.001-07:00

As surveillance?

I went along to the CCA yesterday to see the Edwyn Collins show, it completely renewed my enthusiasm for drawing from nature. So, I've been left thinking about how to incorporate the natural world into this project... the institution as metaphor for our increasingly controlled society, ooh that sounds a bit serious.

Rabbits lurking in corners in our yet un- CCTV'd countryside, birds with camera's, capturing the movements of rebellious sheep. I hear dissent is brewing up north, it's time to act....

The Institution as Metaphor

2009-03-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

Some key themes I am interested in -

Dualism (the body as a machine/the idea of the essence/ephemeral nature)
Identity
Social Control/Obedience to Authority
Reward
Individual liberty
Psychoanalysis
Self presentation

During the course of the last project I became interested in looking at the unconscious, particularly the idea of the idea of ’woman’ and the unconscious. I took a particular interest in the Iconographie Photographique de La Salpetriere as the work embodies many of the themes which I became interested in exploring.

The Iconographie Photographique de La Salpetriere is a visual record of various states of hysteria recorded at the Salpetriere Clinic in Paris (c1900). In attempting to record the physical manifestation of hysteria for the advancement of medicine, Charcot (the doctor who compiled these records) tried to visualise the troubled mind, much like groups such as the Surrealists (Kahlo/Cahun/Ernst) and the Gothic/Romantic painters (Fusilli/Rosetti) attempted through the creation of works of art.

The experiments at the Salpertiere are also of interest to me as the women depicted in the photographic records appeared to be obedient and compliant to the demands of the doctors. I am interested in why they freely ‘performed’ for the camera. It could be because they longed to be in favour of those in power or simply because they had been taken from the real world and placed in an institution where this mode of behaviour became the norm.

I am interested in why, in the real world, people chose to perform/conform ‘freely, outwith the confines of the institution. Acceptance of the expected modes of behaviour is a condition perpetrated by the society we live in; few people express any interest in acting to change the status quo or can see how they can remove themselves from the confines of a mundane/non-questioning existence.

Following from this I intend to use the institution as a metaphor to investigate areas such as social control, individual liberty and the perception of the self as thinking and acting being.

Orlan - Le Baiser De L'artiste

2009-02-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

Charming Augustine

2009-02-20T05:46:00.000-08:00

The film is inspired by series of photographs and texts on hysteria published by the great insane asylum in Paris in the 1880's under the title of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. It is an experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient, Augustine. At fifteen she was admitted to the hospital suffering from hysterical paralysis. The doctors were captivated by her frequent hysterical attacks. They appeared extraordinarily theatrical and photogenic. She became the star, the "Sarah Bernhardt" of the asylum. Yet at the same she was deeply disturbed. She had visions and heard voices. She hallucinated.

The film explores connections between attempts to document her mental states and the prehistory of narrative film. The role of the motion studies by Marey and Muybridge in the birth of cinema is well known. However while they attempted to study the mechanics of the body, the doctors at the Salpetriere, working with similar cameras, aimed to unlock the secrets of their patient's minds.

The film attempts to show how patients like Augustine supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D.W. Griffith. Thus the language of the film changes; at first it is simply a medical document, then it becomes is an indication of Augustine's interior perception, her hallucinations. Finally she becomes "disenchanted" both in the contemporary sense of that word and in its original meaning of being awakened from a magnetic sleep or hypnotic trance.

Shattering the Hard Shell of Certainty

2009-02-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

Today... I have been having a look at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA. This curious museum first first came to my attention when I watched a documentary about the German filmaker, Werner Herzog. During the course of an interview, Herzog took the interviewer there and introduced it as his favorite place in all of Los Angeles.

The museum's name is a puzzle as the Jurrasic period ended 150 million years before humans made an appearance on this earth... however, that's beside the point and the museum houses a most fascinating collection of items and curiosities.

Here are a few of the permanent collections on display-

- A collection of decomposing antique dice once owned by magician Ricky Jay and documented in his book Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck

- A collection of micro-miniature sculptures and paintings, such as a sculpture of Pope John Paul II carved from a single human hair and placed within the eye of a needle

- A collection devoted to trailer park culture, entitled "Garden of Eden On Wheels."

I've always had a bit of a thing for trailer parks so the last exhibit is of particular interest to me.

Going back to my earlier point, I first heard of this place through Herzog, and today, it came into my life again when I was searching the net for information on the Salpetriere Clinic in Paris.

The Salpetriere was a clinic where 5000 women, who were all thought to be hysterical, where incarcetaried duing th first part of the 1900's. Charcot, a pioneering/deeply disturbed doctor there, was interested in recording the physical manifestation of the illness through photography. I have found a few books covering the topic but today, excitingly, I found a film. The film is called 'Charming Augustine' and it deals with the same sort of issues, using the Salpetriere as a backdrop. The filmmaker, Zoe Beloff, is interested in the doctors attempts to record the mechanics of their patients bodies in their efforts to unlock the secrets of their minds. This is mega interesting to me. I had a look into her page and found her father to be a philosopher who wrote extensively on dualism and had a very keen interest in art. It all comes together; philosophy, hysteria, photography, trailer parks and Werner Herzog. I'm sure the Museum of Jurrasic Technology would approve of such an eclectic mix.

Wunderkammer

2009-02-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, or wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of types of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Modern science would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities. "The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction."^[1] Of Charles I of England's collection, Peter Thomas has succinctly stated, "The Kunstkabinett itself was a form of propaganda"^[2] Besides the most famous, best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe, formed collections that were precursors to museums

Archiving the 1970's Art World - Das Schubladenmuseum

2009-02-02T14:45:00.000-08:00

The Museum of Drawers by Herbert Distel

From 1970 to 1977 Distel started working on his landmark 'Museum of Drawers' (Das Schubladenmuseum)], a found cabinet with 20 drawers each containing 25 tiny rooms where he invited living artists to contribute a miniature work of art. Artists included were: Arnulf Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Mergert Christian, Pablo Picasso, Robert Cottingham, Billy Al Bengston, Joseph Beuys, John Baldessari, Carl Andre, Chuck Close, Tom Blackwell, Tom Phillips, Joe Goode, Charles Arnoldi, Camille Billops, Nam June Paik, Frederick J. Brown, Robyn Denny, Valie Export, Mel Ramos, Edward Ruscha, Dieter Roth and John Cage. At the same time George Maciunas was working on his Fluxus "Flux Cabinet" (1975-77).

Snow!

2009-02-02T14:06:00.001-08:00

Lynn Hershman Leeson - The Secret of Eternal Youth

2009-02-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson Discovers Secret of Eternal Youth: Reynolds Wrap

5/30/08 at 3:15 PM 00Comment 00Comments

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Wrapped (2007).Courtesy bitforms gallery nyc.

Clint Eastwood spoke out recently about the proliferation of Botox in Hollywood. His role model, the woman he cites as a delectable throwback to the time when Hollywood embraced individual beauty: the impossibly radiant, effortlessly delicious Angelina Jolie. What, pray we, does he suggest today’s leading ladies do to upkeep Jolie’s Botox-less miracle? Perhaps something like this: a woman, wrapped in plastic, self-preserving, stewing in her own ruddy fumes like a lemon in a Moroccan kitchen. Lynn Hershman Leeson presents this sealed woman in many more elegant to indelicate positions at bitforms gallery through June 5. —Emma Pearse

You Can't Bottle it

2009-02-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

Essence, athmosphere, ether. Buy some air from Mecca. Grass from Celtic Park. Holy Water from Lourdes. A chunk of the Berlin Wall. A bit of Mackintosh to take home - a minature chair, a necklace.... or just walk about and inhale the place.

I once went to the Louvre and it seemed that most people were more interested in taking home a photograph of the Mona Lisa than actually looking at her.

You can buy a new face in a bottle, knock off 20 years, or a new lifestyle in a sofa, it'll change everything, you'll be much thinner when you lie on it .... and your adoring husband, will, of course, be buff with chiselled cheek bones.

Reflecting......

2009-01-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

Light Comes, Light goes

2009-01-28T07:50:00.001-08:00

Following last week's visit to the GSA archive, I've been thinking a lot about the non-archivable elements of the Mack building, the light, the atmosphere, the fleeting glances and conversations, largely passing by unnoticed, but put together creating the whole that gives the space it's atmosphere and character

Some elements are ever changing, never emerging in the same way twice. The light is one of those things, it changes subtley minute to minute and, in the passing of a few hours, can completely change the way one percieves the space. I took a trip round the stairs and back corridors, aiming to find some interesting light and explore the effect that it has on the atmosphere and in turn, probably the work that's being created too.