PILVI TAKALA (Finnish, 1982) at the New Museum Biennial
The Trainee
The Trainee has been produced in a collaboration with Deloitte and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. In order to realize the project, the artist was working for a month as a trainee "Johanna Takala" in the marketing departement of Deloitte where only few people knew the true nature of the project.
During the month long intervention an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee starts to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe normal to the object of avoidance and speculation. The videos and slideshow reveal a spectrum of ways of looking after the odd member in a group. Sincere interest and bewildered amusement is juxtaposed with demands directed at the superior regarding the strangely behaving worker.
We see the trainee sitting at her workstation in the consults’ open plan office space or in the tax department library all day doing nothing. One of the videos shows her spending an entire day in an elevator. These acts or rather the absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable and force the colleagues to search for solutions and come up with explanations for the situation.
Masking laziness in apparent activity and browsing Facebook during working hours belong to the acceptable behavioural patterns of a work community. However, sitting in front of an empty desk with your hands of your lap, thinking, threatens the peace of the community and breaks the colleagues’ concentration. When there is no ready method of action, people initially resort to avoidance, which fails to set their mind at ease when the situation drags on.
What provokes people in non-doing alongside strangeness is the element of resistance. The non-doing person isn’t committed to any activity, so they have the potential for anything. It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a threat to order. It is easy to root out any on-going anti-order activity, but the potential for anything is a continual stimulus without a solution.
Supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation
Source:
http://www.pilvitakala.com/
07 April 2012
01 April 2012
FORREST BESS at the Whitney Biennial
Painter, fisherman, visionary, eccentric - Forrest Bess was one of the most original American artists of his generation. Born in Bay City, Texas, Bess picked up his love of art from his mother. His father worked in the oil fields and ran a bait fishing camp of the Texas coast in Chinquapin. After a short stint in the army where he suffered a slight breakdown related to a head injury, Bess moved to this isolated bait camp and began painting his uncontrollable visions.
Bess makes it clear that his paintings were only part of a grander theory, based on alchemy, the philosophy of Carl Jung, and the rituals of Australian aborigines, which proposed that becoming a hermaphrodite was the key to immortality. In 1960, Bess operated on himself to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. This physical manifestation of his theory never achieved the results he had hoped for and, ironically, this quest for immortality was the beginning of a slow decline in both his health and his creative output. In 1977, he died in a nursing home in Bay City, Texas after a long battle with alcoholism.
Source:
http://www.forrestbess.org/
Painter, fisherman, visionary, eccentric - Forrest Bess was one of the most original American artists of his generation. Born in Bay City, Texas, Bess picked up his love of art from his mother. His father worked in the oil fields and ran a bait fishing camp of the Texas coast in Chinquapin. After a short stint in the army where he suffered a slight breakdown related to a head injury, Bess moved to this isolated bait camp and began painting his uncontrollable visions.
Bess makes it clear that his paintings were only part of a grander theory, based on alchemy, the philosophy of Carl Jung, and the rituals of Australian aborigines, which proposed that becoming a hermaphrodite was the key to immortality. In 1960, Bess operated on himself to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. This physical manifestation of his theory never achieved the results he had hoped for and, ironically, this quest for immortality was the beginning of a slow decline in both his health and his creative output. In 1977, he died in a nursing home in Bay City, Texas after a long battle with alcoholism.
Source:
http://www.forrestbess.org/
WU TSANG (American, born 1982)
Wu Tsang is interested in blurring the lines between public and private space and, within the specific context of a museum, between the spaces occupied by artworks and those intended to be functional and “supportive” of the art. In GREEN ROOM, Tsang has created a private space, outfitted with customdesigned furniture, mirrors, linoleum, and carpet, to serve as a dressing room for the dancers, actors, and musicians participating in the Biennial. When not being utilized for this purpose, the space is open to Museum visitors, to be experienced as both an art installation and a lounge area. As GREEN ROOM oscillates between these two modes, it gradually loses the pristine qualities typically associated with a work of art, acquiring instead the wear and tear of use.
When open to the public, Tsang’s installation presents a two-channel video environment. Through the story of the central character, a transgender woman who recounts leaving the persecution of Honduras for Los Angeles and finding haven in a local bar, the video explores the concept of “safe space.” Narrative elements and talking head–style interviews are interwoven with atmospheric shots of the bar, the Silver Platter, as it transitions from day to night. The artist has positioned the screens on perpendicular walls, bringing the viewing experience into three-dimensional space. Inspired by the interior of the Silver Platter, the simple decor throughout the room reiterates the environment that offered a sense of sanctuary.
Rooted in the tropical underground of Los Angeles nightlife, art, and music, WILDNESS presents a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic landmark bar on the east side of Los Angeles that has provided a home for Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963. Through a magical-realist lens, in which the bar itself becomes a character in the film, WILDNESS depicts the creativity and conflict that ensues when a group of young, queer artists of color—including Wu Tsang and DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom—organize an experimental performance art party called Wildness on Tuesday nights at the bar. The film explores the concept of a “safespace,” teasing apart what it can mean for different/marginalized groups of people and what kind of protection it can provide, as well as its limits and failures. Through this exploration, Tsang documents the complicated and beautiful coalitions across groups and generations that took place at the Silver Platter.
GREEN ROOM, together with Tsang’s feature documentary WILDNESS and his essay in the exhibition catalogue, make up parts of a larger work, revealing how the interpretation of a single subject can vary as perspective and audience change.
Source: whitney.org
Wu Tsang is interested in blurring the lines between public and private space and, within the specific context of a museum, between the spaces occupied by artworks and those intended to be functional and “supportive” of the art. In GREEN ROOM, Tsang has created a private space, outfitted with customdesigned furniture, mirrors, linoleum, and carpet, to serve as a dressing room for the dancers, actors, and musicians participating in the Biennial. When not being utilized for this purpose, the space is open to Museum visitors, to be experienced as both an art installation and a lounge area. As GREEN ROOM oscillates between these two modes, it gradually loses the pristine qualities typically associated with a work of art, acquiring instead the wear and tear of use.
When open to the public, Tsang’s installation presents a two-channel video environment. Through the story of the central character, a transgender woman who recounts leaving the persecution of Honduras for Los Angeles and finding haven in a local bar, the video explores the concept of “safe space.” Narrative elements and talking head–style interviews are interwoven with atmospheric shots of the bar, the Silver Platter, as it transitions from day to night. The artist has positioned the screens on perpendicular walls, bringing the viewing experience into three-dimensional space. Inspired by the interior of the Silver Platter, the simple decor throughout the room reiterates the environment that offered a sense of sanctuary.
Rooted in the tropical underground of Los Angeles nightlife, art, and music, WILDNESS presents a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic landmark bar on the east side of Los Angeles that has provided a home for Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963. Through a magical-realist lens, in which the bar itself becomes a character in the film, WILDNESS depicts the creativity and conflict that ensues when a group of young, queer artists of color—including Wu Tsang and DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom—organize an experimental performance art party called Wildness on Tuesday nights at the bar. The film explores the concept of a “safespace,” teasing apart what it can mean for different/marginalized groups of people and what kind of protection it can provide, as well as its limits and failures. Through this exploration, Tsang documents the complicated and beautiful coalitions across groups and generations that took place at the Silver Platter.
GREEN ROOM, together with Tsang’s feature documentary WILDNESS and his essay in the exhibition catalogue, make up parts of a larger work, revealing how the interpretation of a single subject can vary as perspective and audience change.
Source: whitney.org
GISÈLE VIENNE, DENNIS COOPER, STEPHEN O’MALLEY AND PETER REHBERG
Dark fantasies and primordial urges lurking beneath the surface of day-to-day life are the subject matter of this installation, in which an animatronic teenage boy engages in an unsettling dialogue about evil and the nature of reality with himself via a hand puppet. The project was conceived and created by Gisèle Vienne, much of whose work explores the edges of normative human behavior, often utilizing puppets and human-size dolls. It is her latest collaboration with Dennis Cooper, whose poetry, experimental novels, and short stories have powerfully mined this territory for more than thirty years, inspiring a generation of envelope-pushing artists. The haunted house–like setting of this surreal scene is enhanced by the original music of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley, both of whom have collaborated with Vienne before. For these artists, working with transgressive material is not solely meant to create shock effects; on the contrary, there is a moral dimension. As Vienne has said, “We need to face horrible things, it’s healthier.” LAST SPRING: A Prequel is, as the title suggests, the prequel to a larger theatrical project, itself designed as a labyrinthine hotel (rendered in the wall drawings on view in the galleries), featuring a series of grotesque horrors and a teenage boy trying, and failing, to escape his own mind.
Source: Whitney.org
Dark fantasies and primordial urges lurking beneath the surface of day-to-day life are the subject matter of this installation, in which an animatronic teenage boy engages in an unsettling dialogue about evil and the nature of reality with himself via a hand puppet. The project was conceived and created by Gisèle Vienne, much of whose work explores the edges of normative human behavior, often utilizing puppets and human-size dolls. It is her latest collaboration with Dennis Cooper, whose poetry, experimental novels, and short stories have powerfully mined this territory for more than thirty years, inspiring a generation of envelope-pushing artists. The haunted house–like setting of this surreal scene is enhanced by the original music of Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley, both of whom have collaborated with Vienne before. For these artists, working with transgressive material is not solely meant to create shock effects; on the contrary, there is a moral dimension. As Vienne has said, “We need to face horrible things, it’s healthier.” LAST SPRING: A Prequel is, as the title suggests, the prequel to a larger theatrical project, itself designed as a labyrinthine hotel (rendered in the wall drawings on view in the galleries), featuring a series of grotesque horrors and a teenage boy trying, and failing, to escape his own mind.
Source: Whitney.org
26 March 2012
The Age of Illusions, Álmodozások Kora, Hungary, 1964 **
Istvan Szabo's first feature film about a group of young adults who start their career as engineers, struggle through difficult personal relationships and find a way to stick together. Fast paced with a lot of dialogues. You wouldn't say this comes from a country under a strict communist regime, but somehow this one made it through back in the sixties.
Istvan Szabo's first feature film about a group of young adults who start their career as engineers, struggle through difficult personal relationships and find a way to stick together. Fast paced with a lot of dialogues. You wouldn't say this comes from a country under a strict communist regime, but somehow this one made it through back in the sixties.
Mientras Duermes, Sleep Tight, Spain 2011 ****
The latest movie from Jaume Balaguero is about a concierge who is obsessed with one of the single women living in the building. He creeps inside her apartment at night, stays under the bed and drugs her so she cannot wake up. When her boyfriend starts staying at her place more often, the concierge has to find new ways to spend time with her alone without anyone noticing. Things get more difficult and turn up the wrong way, just as any of Balaguero's picutres do. Creepy and entertaining.
The latest movie from Jaume Balaguero is about a concierge who is obsessed with one of the single women living in the building. He creeps inside her apartment at night, stays under the bed and drugs her so she cannot wake up. When her boyfriend starts staying at her place more often, the concierge has to find new ways to spend time with her alone without anyone noticing. Things get more difficult and turn up the wrong way, just as any of Balaguero's picutres do. Creepy and entertaining.
22 March 2012
Sanja Ivekovic born in Zagreb, 1949
Also at MOMA, i had the chance to see the first North American exhibition of Sanja Ivekovic's work. She is a contemporary video artist. One of my favourite pieces, called Sweet Violence, the work that gives this exhibition its title, was among Sanja Iveković’s first forays into video. It presents one of the artist's recurring themes: the corrosive effect of media culture under the state doctrine known as the Third Way, a political experiment that took place in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, defined by an idiosyncratic mix of socialism and free-market economics, all steeped in propaganda. In order to create a distancing effect, and thus make obvious the contrivances and fictive qualities of media reality, Iveković superimposed black bars on a television monitor and then taped one of the daily broadcasts of Zagreb’s Ekonomsko Propagandni Program (economic propaganda program). With this simple intervention she visually disconnects viewers from the "sweet violence" of media seduction so that they may examine the power of images, the way they circulate in everyday life, the stories they purport to tell, and, by extension, the mythologies that lurk beneath their surfaces.
source: MOMA website
Also at MOMA, i had the chance to see the first North American exhibition of Sanja Ivekovic's work. She is a contemporary video artist. One of my favourite pieces, called Sweet Violence, the work that gives this exhibition its title, was among Sanja Iveković’s first forays into video. It presents one of the artist's recurring themes: the corrosive effect of media culture under the state doctrine known as the Third Way, a political experiment that took place in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, defined by an idiosyncratic mix of socialism and free-market economics, all steeped in propaganda. In order to create a distancing effect, and thus make obvious the contrivances and fictive qualities of media reality, Iveković superimposed black bars on a television monitor and then taped one of the daily broadcasts of Zagreb’s Ekonomsko Propagandni Program (economic propaganda program). With this simple intervention she visually disconnects viewers from the "sweet violence" of media seduction so that they may examine the power of images, the way they circulate in everyday life, the stories they purport to tell, and, by extension, the mythologies that lurk beneath their surfaces.
source: MOMA website
Uncle Boonmee Who Recalls His Past Lives, Thailand, 2010
A sort of fairy tale. A dying uncle who lives in the countryside receives two strange ghost visits. One is his dead wife who suddenly appears at the dinner table one night and another one is his cousin who has turned into a monkey ghost, with glowy red eyes. It is very weird, but the pace is slow, very meditational, with beautiful scenes and landscapes of the jungle. Amazing photography.
A sort of fairy tale. A dying uncle who lives in the countryside receives two strange ghost visits. One is his dead wife who suddenly appears at the dinner table one night and another one is his cousin who has turned into a monkey ghost, with glowy red eyes. It is very weird, but the pace is slow, very meditational, with beautiful scenes and landscapes of the jungle. Amazing photography.
21 March 2012
Cindy Sherman
The MOMA is currently showing an exhibition on American photographer Cindy Sherman. Her work spans more than 20 years. Her self-portraits are games and tricks to the eye. Not everything you see is real. Her first black and white pictures of supposedly actresses are all fake. She plays the roles of stereotypical women and takes an incognito picture. The result is astonishing. In the 80s she concentrated on her centerfold pieces, which tried to imitate Playboy celebrities. However, there is less erotic and more mystery in her pictures. She then focused on imitating portraits from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; kings, Popes, royal families, artists, painters, etc. Her old-age women portraits are both whimsical, esthetic and fake. The prosthetic noses and breasts are evident and that is the way Sherman wants them to show. There is a sense of mockery in her work. She wants to fool, surprise and deceive her audience and achieves this wonderfully.
The MOMA is currently showing an exhibition on American photographer Cindy Sherman. Her work spans more than 20 years. Her self-portraits are games and tricks to the eye. Not everything you see is real. Her first black and white pictures of supposedly actresses are all fake. She plays the roles of stereotypical women and takes an incognito picture. The result is astonishing. In the 80s she concentrated on her centerfold pieces, which tried to imitate Playboy celebrities. However, there is less erotic and more mystery in her pictures. She then focused on imitating portraits from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; kings, Popes, royal families, artists, painters, etc. Her old-age women portraits are both whimsical, esthetic and fake. The prosthetic noses and breasts are evident and that is the way Sherman wants them to show. There is a sense of mockery in her work. She wants to fool, surprise and deceive her audience and achieves this wonderfully.
18 March 2012
Tasman Richardson at MOCCA
I discovered the work of Canadian video artist Tasman Richardson during my last visit to MOCCA in Toronto. The exhibition is called "Necropolis" and is a set of 6 different installations put together in a labyrinth-like tunnel. The experience for the viewer is one of discovery. The room is completely dark and you have to move around touching the walls to make sure you are going the right way.
His works involve fast-cut editing of pre-existing footage, everything from classic movies to videos. The result is a sort of music video with a lot of images stacked up and rolling before your eyes at a pace of one image per 4 frames. Super fast and eery is the end effect. Definitely worth watching.
Richardson proposed back in 1997 his own manifesto for video creation. The Jawa Manifesto, revised in 2008, is the basis of his work.
Here is an article on the exhibition at MOCCA:
http://www.canadianart.ca/online/see-it/2012/02/23/tasman_richardson/
And here is Richardson's website with a link to his previous video works and his Jawa manifesto:
http://www.tasmanrichardson.com/
I discovered the work of Canadian video artist Tasman Richardson during my last visit to MOCCA in Toronto. The exhibition is called "Necropolis" and is a set of 6 different installations put together in a labyrinth-like tunnel. The experience for the viewer is one of discovery. The room is completely dark and you have to move around touching the walls to make sure you are going the right way.
His works involve fast-cut editing of pre-existing footage, everything from classic movies to videos. The result is a sort of music video with a lot of images stacked up and rolling before your eyes at a pace of one image per 4 frames. Super fast and eery is the end effect. Definitely worth watching.
Richardson proposed back in 1997 his own manifesto for video creation. The Jawa Manifesto, revised in 2008, is the basis of his work.
Here is an article on the exhibition at MOCCA:
http://www.canadianart.ca/online/see-it/2012/02/23/tasman_richardson/
And here is Richardson's website with a link to his previous video works and his Jawa manifesto:
http://www.tasmanrichardson.com/
25 February 2012
22 February 2012
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