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Chris Marker: Sans Soleil

With Spanish subtitles

Chris Marker: Metrotopia

Rip! A Remix Manifesto

http://www.ripremix.com/

CIRCA Blog entry about the Venice Biennale

When I read the following entry by Rayne Booth on the CIRCA website, I fully empathized with her struggle not to think of viewing art in a right or wrong way. I specifically had this issue with the Irish pavillion work; I understood the work, but was not gripped by it in such a way to entice me to engage with it fully. My response to Sarah Browne's and Gareth Kennedy's work was disaffected, although I recognized that with further research I might be able to benefit from a more wholesome experience of their work. However, taking into consideration the context of the Biennale, I did not have the energy or the willpower to dedicate an extensive amount of time to a particular piece of work to fully grasp it if I didn't already do so upon first or even second viewing (I had a similar response to the Belgian pavilion in the Giardini, and I left it before I could appreciate it as a new experience rather than a pavilion that had a remarkably similar formula to Sophie Calle's two years ago- a letter translated into several languages with grammatical corrections drawn onto it, drawings and photographs adorning whole walls, etc.)

Unfortunately, that is the way of a Biennale, and perhaps art in a grander sense- not to much time is afforded to realizing that the product is not the object but the thought. The audience is desperate to "get it", so desperate that the slightest kink in the path to artistic enlightenment throws them off and the piece is left to dwell in its own theoretical framework, untouched. But, as is alluded to in the CIRCA blog entry, art shouldn't be about the one winning formula, it should be about interpretation, the multiplicity of responses possible to (aesthetic) experience.

Venetian translations (Wednesday 24 June 2009)
It has now been over two weeks since I got back from Venice, and I'm slowly writing a full article about the exhibition to post here. It's taking much longer than I expected, and I keep procrastinating by reading online reviews and blogs so that now my mind is completely overflowing with the subject and, frankly, a little bored with it. It can be gratifying when I find an article where the writer's opinion is the same as mine, and I feel like I actually might have gotten it right. Then I have to slap myself on the wrist and remind myself that there is no correct way to interpret art. Just because someone has put their ideas down on paper (or online) it doesn't make them any more valid.

While in the midst of my procrastinating / research I came across an interview by Tim Griffin with Daniel Birnbaum, the Curator of the Biennale, in the May edition of Artforum. "I think that a Biennale can be seen as a place where more or less successful translations and productive misreadings take place." Caoimhín Corrigan, when speaking about his (slightly controversial) choice of Sarah Browne and Garreth Kennedy for the Irish pavilion, told an audience at their studio in Temple Bar Gallery & Studios that he wanted to select, not the best artists for the Biennale, but the artists that would be right for the Biennale "this time" That the Biennale can be seen as constantly in a state of growth and flux is a good thing. Rather than treat it as a stall on which to set out our 'best offerings' (artists at the peak of their career), maybe it is more interesting to give the opportunity to less tested artists and, in showing confidence in them, allow them to rise to the occasion.

In the same interview, Birnbaum went on to say, "...if it is true...that with each language's disappearance from the world something of the imaginary in the world dissapears with it, then it is likewise true that the imaginary is enriched with every language's translation into another." One of Kennedy Browne's works at Venice involves the translation of a text by Milton Friedman into 40 languages using Google translate, a game of chinese whispers that in the end results in a page of uninteligalble text a bit reminiscent of beat poetry. For the title of this year's Biennale, 'Making Worlds' was translated into several different languages, and Birnbaum has indicated that the fact that these words take on very slight differences of meaning in each language is an integral part of the title of the exhibition. Sarah Browne and Garreth Kennedy seem to have (unknowingly?) tapped into one of Burnbaum's overriding themes for Venice and, along with the millions of daily users of Google translate, enriched the world's imaginary at the same time.

Venice Biennale 2009: Arsenale and Collateral Events

De-Forme/Distortion
This exhibition was held in a building close to the Arsenale, curated by James Putnam. It was a group show made up of British artists who mostly had a humorous approach. In the blurb about the exhibition in the Biennale's short guide, the tag line is as follows:

Distortion is central to creative expression combining elements of the comic and the grotesque with deviations from the norm in scale and space.

Australia: Once Removed

This was a secondary pavillion for Australia which was located near to the Arsenale in an old church. It's curated by Felicity Fenner and, like Shaun Gladwell's work in the Giardini, all of the work exhibited here made specific reference to displacement and the effect it has on culture (specifically and logically, the predicament that Aboriginal culture faces was a central topic).



There were three separate works on show; one was a stack of 195,774 VHS tapes arranged in a solid block by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro called 'Life Span' (the combined running time of the tapes would amount to an average life time of 66.1 years).

Ken Yonetani, a Japanese artist who immigrated to Australia 6 years ago, showed a work called 'Sweet Barrier Reef', an installation made out of sugar in the form of coral reef, arranged in a way akin to a Japanese Zen Garden. According to the catalogue,

Sweet Barrier Reef is an installation about coral bleaching...a symbol of colonisation and modernisation, sugar also represents human desire and consumption, both of which fuel the industries impacting disastrously on fragile ocean environments.

The third piece was by Vernon Ah Kee, called Cant Chant (Wegrewhere), a combination of an installation and a video piece. There were several surfboards hung from the ceiling, each covered with a tribal pattern on one side and a black and white illustrated portrait of an Aboriginal person. The video piece shows Aboriginal surfers using the boards on the beaches of Australia, usually reserved for the iconic caucasian surf culture.

Cant Chant (Wegrewhere) proposes an improbable story about Aboriginal surfers reclaiming one of Australia's most populated beaches. Interspersed with violent allusions to historical executions of indigenous people, it is a surreal, fairy-tale narrative, given that in modern Australia racial alienation is often most evident in the context of iconic cultural sites, such as the beach.

Ireland/Northern Ireland Pavillion

Work by Susan MacWilliam, Sarah Brown, Gareth Kennedy, and Kennedy Brown.

Visually rich across film, video, sculpture, and installation, this year the Ireland Pavillion offers unique Irish perspectives on identity, labor, craft, design, globalization, economics, language, architecture, beauty, money value, and being human.

Susan MacWilliam takes the paranormal as her subject and explores accounts of extraordinary sensory perception. The scope of her work is broad, encompassing research into psychic mediums, x-ray vision, and dermo-optical perception. She uses video, photography, and sculptural installation to investigate these accounts.

GLASS STRESS

This was an absolutely amazing collection of glassworks by artists such as Man Ray, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum, Robert Rauschenberg, and Tony Cragg to name a few. It examines the use of glass in contemporary art spanning from the first half of the 20th century up until the present day.










One of the highlights of the show would have to be Hye Rim Lee's hypnotic video piece 'Crystal City Spun'.



Arsenale

Michelangelo Pistoletti: Twenty-two less two



One of the halls in the Arsenale



Installation of Ulla von Brandenburg's work




Cildo Meireles

Venice Biennale 2009: Giardini

Exhibition

Tomas Saraceno: 'galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider's web', 2009




Nathalie Djurberg: 'experiment', 2009




Rosa Barba: 'Coro Spezzato: The Future Lasts One Day'


Hans-Peter Feldmann: 'Schattenspiel (Shadow Play)'


Richard Wentworth (installation): 'Untitled', 2009 and Susan Hefuna (drawings)" 'Drawing Poems'



Yoko Ono



Tobias Rehberger: 'Was du liebst, bringt dich auch zum Weinen'



Pavillions

Hungary: 'With Time-The W-Project'



Denmark and Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden): 'The Collectors'








Australia: Shaun Gladwell: 'MADDESTMAXIMVS'







Uruguay: 'Critical Landscapes'



Canada: Mark Lewis: 'Back Story'



Russia: 'Victory Over the Future'









Japan: 'Windswept Women: The Old Girls' Troupe'

Exhibitions at the FotoMuseum Antwerp

Theatres of the Real: Contemporary British Photography

There is currently a really interesting show on at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, showcasing the recent work of 8 british photographers; what connects all of them is a sense of the theatrical in relation to the photographic image. Although all of the photographers are concerned with contemporary sociocultural issues (in specifically British culture) they each take a unique approach towards their subject matter, redefining what it is to document a historical moment photographically.

My personal favourite series would have to be Mitra Tabrizian's work, a series which show familiar scenes with hints of the ominous, converting the photographed environment into a crime scene through the inclusion of simple textual and compositional elements that suggest a darker undertone.

Sarah Dobai


Emily (Corridor), Yellow Corridor, 2008

Born in 1965. Lives and works in London. There were about 3 diptychs of Dobai's on show in the exhibition- she had coupled scenes with a human figure with architectural shots made up of a comparable composition. On Galerie Zurcher's profile of the photographer, it says describes the photographs as follows:

'The shop windows are perceived in their double reality, as "display" zones where a "theatre of consumption" is played out, and as transparent glass plates that the eye traverses, or on which it captures the kind of "reflection" that Walter Benjamin associated with cinematographic effects. The models are photographed in settings that make up a universe in parallel to that of the shopping centres. As in Robert Bresson’s films, these actor-models are shorn of personal characteristics, their poses suggesting the brevity of their passage.'

Annabel Elgar


The Rehearsal, 2007

Joanna Lowry, 'An Imaginary Place' from Theatres of the Real
Photoworks/FotoMuseum Antwerp

The work of Annabel Elgar inhabits a more elaborate and gothic world of storytelling. Narrative here is not something that has been pared away but something that has been embellished and layered. The stories that lie behind these pictures are ones that extend back into a dark folk memory. Elements of legend, fairy tale and historical anecdote jostle with hack journalism, urban myth and B-movie storylines. The scenarios that emerge from this process of allegorical bricolage are ones that we instinctively recognize because, baroque though they might be, we encounter them every day in our newspapers and televisions and at night-time we visit them again in our dreams.

Annabel Elgar's sources are more mythic than literary or art historical, but they also operate through the sense of a shared set of scripts. Her carefully designed sets are sets for plays that will never be fully dramatised and whose full story will never be known: the actors may never appear within the frame- and if they do they will probably be looking the other way, their faces invariably hidden. The props have been carefully chosen to produce an endless proliferation of narrative choices, artfully posed between the fairytale and the everyday. The key characters in her half-told stories inhabit houses that we faintly recognise but they are clearly deranged and obsessive, dressing up in strange costumes, waiting for parties that will never happen, tying themselves up in the curtains, playing with ventriloquists' dummies, or setting the garden shed alight.

Elgar inserts a bleak Orwellian vision of sad bedsits, neglected kitchens and subterranean basements into a folkloric scenery of suspiciously lush green fields, tangled gardens and dark forests. If the uncanny is characterised by a sense of the unfamiliar suddenly revealing itself within the familiar, then it is surely Elgar's photographs that most effectively work at binding these two senses together. In her case she uses the conventions of staged photography to knit them together materially, arranging the objects in her pictures into enigmatic compositions that resist any clear resolution.

The stories that Elgar relates to us are cross-cut by familiar themes: madness and sadness and badness all have their role to play in these scenarios. In these stories the struggles between the rich and the poor are relentless and eternal, the home is a place of poverty and ruin, the family a potential site of treachery and despair.

Tom Hunter


Living in Hell

Tom Hunter graduated from the London College of Printing with a BA First Class Honours [1994], Hunter took his MA at the Royal College of Art, London [1997]. In 1998, Hunter won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award. In 2006 Hunter was the first artist to have a photography show at the National Gallery, London.

Hunter currently lives and works in London. His work is often particular, but not exclusive, to the community of travellers he knows as neighbours and friends in East London. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, in solo and group shows and is also a Senior Research Fellow of the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. source

Sarah Pickering


White Goods, 2007

Sarah Pickering's startling and somehow dreamy images of explosions have been featured in magazines such as Art Review, Art Monthly and The New York Sun. Sarah states, "My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality. The images are a representation of society's coping mechanisms, which are often happening out of the public arena."

"My previous body of work, Public Order documented the ambiguous urban landscape of the UK's Metropolitan Police Public Order Training Centre, an unreal constructed world of civic intransigence and imagined threat. The Explosions series further develops this investigation into the crux of reality and its simulation."

source

Nigel Shafran

Joanna Lowry - An imaginary space [Theatres of the Real]
Shafran’s domestic photographs, taken amidst the more benign clutter of his own home, also test the autonomy of the object. In these photographs – photographs that situate themselves more firmly in an observational mode, based upon spaces that are known and loved – objects seem to compose themselves into gentle still-lives, assuming an independent life that the photographer happens upon by chance. He photographs the odd collections of things that accumulate in his Dad’s office, flowers on a table , the washed up dishes by kitchen sink. Yet these objects also share in the strangeness of the prop table, they are, after all the things that prop up the photographer’s life.

Clare Strand

Gone Astray Portraits borrows from the 19th century street portrait convention of using painted murals as backgrounds to photograph city dwellers. Each sitter is carefully styled and propped to assume an urban generic type, on close examination each subject shows signs of wear, from ripped tights to bandaged wrists. The title of the series is taken from a Charles Dickens text, Gone Astray 1853 which is an account of a young child lost in the City of London. A story filled of references to anxiety and vulnerability and to people leading double lives. source

Mitra Tabrizian


White Nights

The Way We Live Now, Stuart Hall

An appreciation of what is radically novel and innovative in Mitra Tabrizian’s most recent work must begin with on understanding of what her previous work had already accomplished: for the latter provides the creative platform on which the new work stands. Powered by her deep involvement in the debates in the 80’s and 90’s around subjectivity and ideology, psychoanalysis and feminism, gender, race and sexuality, and deeply informed by the explorations in photographic practice and the image which her earlier projects represented, Mitra Tabrizian’s has now vigorously mobilized and resumed all the ‘lessons’ of that whole body of work in order to address radically new subject-matter and to attempt a challenging project– a critique of the everyday life of contemporary corporate-post-modernity and its ‘systems’ of representation.

source

Danny Treacy


Them 2. 2002

By definition the monster is incapable of reproduction: to do so would be to abandon deviation through the continuation of a genus, or genre. Invoking the law of the monster in his series Them, wherein a body is understood, but one which does not obey the rules, Treacy has nevertheless, managed to offer Them an equally deviant offspring. His most recent series, Those, is a series of what the artist calls protuberances, the parts of the body which stick out or intrude into space. Treacy's photographs stem from his own body parts- nose, penis, belly, knee, elbow, fingers. Although they appear suspended in space, a ground is indicated by the way they recede slightly into blackness. They transgress genre, emerging as part human, part object, part animal.

source

Nude Visions Exhibition at the Muncher Stadtmuseum

link to museum website

When I visited Munich about a week ago, I was lucky enough to come across this amazing exhibition spanning 150 years of nude photography at the Muncher Stadtmuseum. It chronicles the development of the human body as a photographic image throughout the history of the medium, starting off with daguerrotype and the like and working its way up to modern nudes. I was really excited to see a photo of Charis Wilson by Edward Weston, and there was an interesting video documenting different world cultures' approach to the body as a performative tool.

Edward Weston

The exhibition also included the famous nude shots of Marilyn Monroe, and artists included ranged from Auguste Belloc and Alfred Stieglitz to Juergen Teller and Gerard Vormwald. Nazi propaganda images of Olympic athletes were also an interesting feature of the show, and a breathtaking image of an elderly woman's wrinkled belly was among the highlights of the show.

Gerhard Riebicke



Bert Stern

Jan Saudek