ELISE GOLDSTEIN - Restoration & Open Seclusion (New Blood III)
“I think that art – or at least installation – can be this moment of suspension,” explains Goldstein, “There’s a sense of saturation in our lives that we all live with, and although entering a gallery doesn’t just make that saturation go away, it does – in a sense – mean that we can walk in and forget our responsibilities, and the roles that we play outside of that space, because we feel like we’re elsewhere.”
Chicago Art Magazine; New Blood III at the Chicago Cultural Center
ELISE GOLDSTEIN
Because I could not touch what did not belong to me. But the vigil tick spoke, saying, “We must all swallow ourselves whole. Whatever remains will go on without our permission.”, 2010
MALI WU (WU MALI) - Follow The Dreamboat. Image: Wu Mali’s “Follow the Dreamboat” installation is on display at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Asian Art Museum photo by Kaz Tsuruta.
Wu’s “Follow the Dreamboat” has a room to itself. Colored lights tinge the whole space with an aquamarine glow. On the floor sits an old wooden rowboat, partially filled with inscribed and folded pages. In the Asian Art Museum venue, the rowboat may bring to mind the boat as a figure for the passage through life in classical Chinese painting. But in the wider modern setting, it evokes more readily the fate of a refugee, and the various realities other than water that set Taiwan apart in the world.
Vertical rows of folded, colored paper “dreamboats” hang throughout the space of Wu’s installation on nearly invisible filaments, aerating the room’s somberness like chains of blossoms. Visitors and others have made the “dreamboats,” each inscribed with a wish or greeting. Handwritten words and phrases snag the eye of the visitors who walk through: “life in balance”; “I pray for equality and justice for all people”; “Daddy.” People familiar with the paper prayer chits adorning temples in Asia will think of them here. Wu also intends a reference to the water festivals celebrated by Chinese communities throughout the world. But as more and more fragments of wishes and dreams come to one’s notice, a sense of frustrated yearning gradually swamps the giddy impression the colorful “dreamboats” make.
Wu’s pieces are examples of “relational art,” to borrow the term of French critic Nicholas Bourriaud. That is, rather than await completion by viewers, they await activation and endlessly defer closure.
MALI WU (WU MALI) -Victorian Sweeties. Scanned and printed computer images, furniture, wallpaper.
With a poetic sensibility and irreverent wit, Mali Wu enjoys subverting the hierarchial structures in her art. As an artist whom has exhibited internationally, she has contributed thought provoking insights into the social, political, and historical contexts of her home, Taiwan.
For the installation at the Mattress Factory, Wu has added to her collection of baby pictures of famous and lesser known people - ranging from Hitler to the Dalai Lama - presenting them in brass frames in a Victorian setting. This space is reminscent of a parlor found at the time of the building of the Mattress Factory. All the “babies” were born after the invention of the camera in the mid 1800’s. All have already made their mark on history.
Mali Wu points out, “irrespective of what has occurred or what these people have become, there are aspects of human nature that are common to all of us.”
FLORIS NEUSSUS, Korperfotogram, 1962
Reblogging lormiguel
Thanks to/Posted by gatakka:
Floris M. Neussus - Untitled Körperfotogram, 60’s
Born in Lennep, Germany, in 1937, Neususs has dedicated his whole career to extending the practice, study and teaching of the photogram_alongside his work as an artist, he is known as an influential writer and teacher on camera-less photography_Neususs brought renewed ambition to the photogram process, in both scale and visual treatment, with the Körperfotogramms (or whole-body photograms) that he first exhibited in the 1960s_since that time, he has consistently explored the photogram’s numerous technical, conceptual and visual possibilities_
Shadow Catchers,13 October 2010 - 20 February 2011, will present the work of five international contemporary artists - Floris Neusüss, Pierre Cordier, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller and Adam Fuss - who work without a camera_
Camera-less photographs were popular with botanical illustrators in the 1840s and ’50s but the process was really taken up in a big way in the 1920s by artists connected with European avant garde art movements such as Da Da, Surrealism, including Christian Schad, Man Ray and Curtis Moffat_a way of exploring new concepts of light, time and space_
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info_
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8051406/Floris-Neususs-Interview.html
http://beelinetree.blogspot.com/2010/12/floris-neussus-untitled-korperfotogramm.html
http://www.designweek.co.uk/home/blog/from-the-shadows/3019035.article
ROBERT STIVERS - Craving the Seamstress, Photographs from Series 9, 2010-2011: Book Spine, Book with One Page Up, Book with Pages Up, Calla Lily, Glasses, Hand, Key, Rose, Skull, Sunflower (#1), Timepiece, Four Baby Roses
Robert Stivers’ early works 1980’s-2000’s : “What makes Robert Stivers work so disquieting yet compellingly effective is the way he subverts the modern photographic aesthetic to explore the nature of perception and identity. Stivers not only questions and challenges the degree to which the camera confers or imposes identity, but suggests that the external world can legitimately exert its own claim to identity, substance and meaning outside the one imposed by the camera…” (more Richard Pitnick’s review, B/W Magazine 2001)
Robert Stivers’ current works 2010-2011 (above) :
In his previous work, Stivers is known as a “pictorialist”, his out-of-focus approach to photography could be described as sculptural. Here, Stivers continues to work his images in the darkroom, sculpting areas of light and dark, softening edges and suspending his subjects out of context to produce an image closer to his own interior world.
In this series, Stivers does not record, he creates, he continues to push the boundaries of the material world to the outward manifestation of a “spiritual other” waiting to be discovered. In the 12 silver prints, the artist repeatedly turns his attention to objects that represent a deep longing for a time lost. Among the photographs’ subjects are a timepiece, a key, a book, a skull, and a rose. What ties these diverse objects together is the artist’s yearning to restore a tattered being.
He believes that it is the true nature of photography not necessarily to document, but to alter or transform objects, scenes and events, whether contrived or not, into a personal alternate reality.
In Buddhism, just as a seamstress sews together different pieces of cloth, so does craving sew together one life to another. It ties together the succession of lives. Craving is so powerful that it can bridge the gap created by death and rebuild the whole house of conscious existence again and again.
CARRIE LEVY - You Before All: The Series
In her latest series Carrie Levy has photographed men in submissive, vulnerable and passive role. She shows us that females can as well objectify the male body.
“Levy’s photographs of men have always been oddly fraught. In a new series of mostly small black-and-white images, her naked subjects twist, strain, and collapse in front of the camera in attitudes that suggest both agony and ecstasy, torture and sex. Inspired in part by vintage medical and forensic photographs, the pictures also zero in on details familiar from exposes on mental hospitals: contorted limbs, silent screams, drool. Levy is exploring female power and male vulnerability here, but her work doesn’t feel cruel or sensational. Instead it’s tender and genuinely moving.” New Yorker, by Vince Aletti, April 4, 2011
Carrie has exhibited her work extensively throughout the world. The following images (above) come from the series You Before All.
500, Carrie Levy
CARRIE LEVY. Untitled 2000.
1. Rocks, 2. Corner, 3. Dad, 4. Untitled
At a young age she released her book 51 Months. 51 months was the length of the prison sentence her father received when Carrie was sixteen, during this period she started photographing her life and the effects of her father’s incarceration. Her photography evolved and became more and more conceptual, however the experience of her father’s incarceration keeps coming back in her projects. Her series Untitled was still based upon the stories of her father.
Carrie Levy, 1979, USA, studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and later received an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London.
-P. Wisse / 500-
More images : Carrie Levy
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, The Clock — 29 March - 3 June 2012 @ MCA
Christian Marclay’s groundbreaking 24-hour video work, The Clock, which has attracted record crowds wherever it has been shown and gained numerous credits from art critics, was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion for best artist at last year’s 54th Venice Biennale.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac&NR=1&feature=endscreen
Just as the sentences in a novel build into patterns and story lines, so did Marclay’s clips. Marclay spent three years assembling “The Clock,” that comprises several thousand short extracts from cinema history, each suggesting a particular time of day or referencing a specific moment, often through the appearance of a watch or clock-face. They are edited together to form a continuous visual sequence synchronised with the real time of visitors in the gallery who watch the film; and they suggest countless interlocking narratives despite the constant changes in genres, eras, locations and plotlines. The result marks the exact time in real time for the viewer for 24 consecutive hours.
The Clock highlights the centrality of time within conventional cinematic narratives – the way it binds stories together and leads us through their events. Yet by the same token, cinema traditionally immerses viewers within an illusory sense of time, suspending momentarily the real time of the world outside. The Clock creates an uncanny correspondence between cinematic and real time, drawing viewers into a parallel awareness of what they watch on screen and experience beyond it.
Each hour of “The Clock” has a unique rhythm. Marclay has taken one of the most objective measurements humans have ever devised, one that now strictly governs our working lives, and found poetry and mystery inside hard numbers…
Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955 and grew up in Switzerland. He now lives between London and New York. He is an internationally acclaimed artist who has employed the concept of collage since the 1970s across diverse media including film and video, photography, installation, sound and music.
Image © Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. Courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Curator: Rachel Kent
Read more:
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Daniel Zalewski, The Hours: How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic. Daniel Zalewski, Night Shift with The Clock.
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Peter Bradshaw, Christian Marclay’s The Clock: A masterpiece of our times. This staggering artistic montage telling the time in film and TV clips will run on in your thoughts.
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Richard B. Woodward, Twenty-Four Hour View Cycle: A superb movie involves us so convincingly in an illusory world that the more prosaic one never enters our thoughts.
Funny, moving, intimate work by Sean Lee
”There is a kind of quiet delight in photographing the members of my family. In many ways, the process of making pictures has made life at home a little less mundane and uneventful. Sometimes, itʼs almost magical. Like the time when I made my parents hug each other. That was the first time I had ever seen them being so physically intimate. It was pure joy for me”.
Reblogging countessdiaries
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ALEXANDRA PASZKOWSKA, Sankai Juku in Schottland Highlands.
By accident or destiny I met Sankai Juku at the Munich Theatre Festival. On an impulse, Ushio Amagatsu, Sankai Juku´s director, invited me to come and take photographs at the nearby 19th century Castle Neuschwanstein at 6 am the next morning, I accepted this invitation. When we met at the castle the next day, the company improvised moments from their performance Kikan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed) for me. Later, while Sankai Juku was in Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival, I asked the company if we could drive to the ocean. There at Berwick, I was given the unique opportunity of photographing Sankai Juku outdoors at sunrise. The color photographs you see here are the result of that extraordinary experience.
Published in American Vogue, Stern, Spiegel and Andy Warhol´s Interview. Warriors From a Distant Star Münchner Merkur states:
“Alexandra Paszkowska has a genius for sculptural tranquility and the movement of the body, a sure sensitivity for partioning of area and the color. She has made Sankai Juku into a fine artistic phenomenon.”
Ushio Amagatsu:
… it is a paradoxical process of self-oblivion and self-realization. It has a spiritual dimension and has to do with life itself. It’s a living sign in space…
Julian Buchan: Catherine Opie @ Stephen Friedman
My mock ArtForum Focus Review of Catherine Opie’s recent exhibition at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London.
Catherine Opie @ Stephen Friedman Gallery
By JULIAN BUCHAN
Catherine Opie is best known for her self-portrait Pervert (1994), a colour photograph in which Opie poses with her head in a leather fetishist mask, her bare arms lined with needles and the word “pervert” carved into her chest. It is an image typical of her work in the 1990s – provocative, confrontational, sexual – but always treated with a “formal classicism” (Guggenheim, 2008) rooted in the traditions of portrait-making. Her series Being and Having (1991), Portraits(1993-97) and In Houses (1995-96) established her as the “official” on documentary photography of LGBT and radical performance-art communities (VICE Magazine, 2011) back when gender identity and sexual politics were beginning to be discussed and represented in art and the media. Since the 1990’s Opie’s attention has shifted with the times, from gender identity and representing LGBT communities in the early 90’s, to same-sex families in a domestic setting in the late 90’s, to other communities such as high-school football players (2007-09) and surfers (2003-04), to globalization at the end of the 2000s. The format and scale of her work has also changed, beginning with up-close interior portraits, to a wider context involving household scenes, to the outdoors and her dramatic landscapes and seascapes.
Her exhibition at the Stephen Friedman Gallery nicely illustrates her work’s shift in focus by separating it into two rooms. In one, small black and white portraits of her friends, girlfriends and acquaintances ranging from 1987 to 2009; in the other, a series of very large colour seascapes all taken on one 11-day trip in 2009. Whether it is the intention of the exhibition or not, the two rooms show her interest in globalization move from the human level to the geographical level – an “accompanying narrative of globalization is ever present in these works”, it’s about the “changing face of a nation on both a macro and a micro level” (Photomonitor, 2011).
On the ‘micro’ level,Opie is perhaps better known for her colour portraits of the lesbian community than anything else, which, through props or disguises such as moustaches and military attire, play with the viewer’s perception of gender identity. Influenced by Hans Holbein’s very formal portraits (Menéndez-Conde, E., 2008), she placed her subjects in front of brightly coloured backgrounds, which, by mimicking a traditional art form, aimed to subvert any notions of heteronormativity (a term which itself only arose when Opie began exhibiting). The year before Opie’s first photographic series came Judith Butler’s bookGender Trouble exploring gender identity, in which she states “all aspects of gender are performances of culturally determined signifiers with basis in biological fact” (Butler, J. 1990). In Capp St. House, one of the only multiple portraits in the show, she touches on the idea of “performance” and inverted sexual roles. The facial expressions of the ‘performers’ turn what would be a fetishist scene into one of familiarity and playfulness, and the men and women play both dominant and passive roles allowing us to see the fetish culture as both natural and equal – an egalitarian free-for-all.
Her black and white portraits in the Stephen Friedman may lack the vibrant colours of these photographs but they address the same themes. Using a blank studio background (for example Pig Pen (studio), 1994), Opie eliminates any social context other than what you can read from the subject. She says, “If I had taken portraits of my friends in the streets or at the clubs where they go-go dance with moustaches and jockstraps on, then [the work] would focus on the notion of peer performance. When you isolate the face and put a nametag on the frame, you emphasize the question of identity” (Guggenheim, 2008). Her elimination of context from her photographs achieves two opposing results; it emphasizes individuality as linked to the person not the social setting but also equalizes her subjects when shown as a collection, as if they have created their own rules for normalcy.
What Opie is putting across is that identity is fluid and not concrete – a blank background is like a blank canvas, it is up to the person how they want to be perceived – so many of her subjects are made to look sexually ambiguous. InAngela (boots) (1992) Angela is put in a ‘masculine’ pose dressed in ‘masculine’ clothes, and the emphasis in the title and in the composition is on the boots, which are symbols of power, weight, even military. The same subject in Angela (head) (1992) is given a short grease-combed hairdo like that of a 1950s male pin-up. There is a Cindy Sherman-esque quality to the work (especially when Opie herself features in the photographs) where ironically role-playing, pretending to be something else, reinforces the subject’s own feminist sense of identity and individual power. In other photographs she does not show the face, only body parts with tattoos (Hand (Pig Pen)), piercings (Cathy (needles by Julie) or jewelry (Necklace (Kate)) as though someone’s identity is the artifice they choose to wear. In Feet (Ian) (1994) only the feet of a man are shown, but they are so softly lit and intimately positioned that one cannot help but think they are a woman’s. In Opie’s words, it does not matter whether you can tell the subjects’ gender “the point is that we are very fluid with gender” (Hoban, P. 2012).
In the other room, Opie explores the fluidity of identity on the ‘macro’ level with her seascapes. Shot during an eleven-day journey from South Korea to California, these large colour prints range from sunsets to sunrises both clear and foggy, but work better as a collection than individually. On their own, the photographs are indistinct and subdued but together they are atmospheric and powerful, while the changes in light and texture suggest a span of time and space. By contrast, her black and white portraits contain enough social meaning and visual information to be displayed alone, though they are of course more powerful as a whole. Like Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes (1990-2002) (Karapetian, F., 2004), Opie keeps the frame and size constant, lining up the horizon in a continuous line around the room. These feel like the logical progression from her Surfers series, but are this time void of human presence or in the case of Sunrise #4 caseof any details full stop, the implication being that perhaps only when removed from all social context can identity be unrestricted and free. Sunrise #2 and #5 do show traces of human activity in the form of the ship, standing out as imposing and invasive objects. While her earlier work investigated and represented communities in the western world, this work goes further (in the literal sense, to Korea) communicating a “shrinking ‘glo-cal’ world in the new millennium” (Photomonitor, 2011) and the invasion of human life.
In the 1990s Opie’s work on subcultures was provocative and immediate, but perhaps with positive changes in attitude concerning gender politics and sexuality (though still a ways to go) since, and a growing concern in the decline of the environment and the growth of commercialization, Opie is striving to remain topical. She has come under criticism, along with other photographers, for how classifiable her work is: “start with the word “surfers” and completely illustrate the concept … what happened to starting with a picture and seeing where it takes you?” (Karapetian, F., 2004). Her seascapes, while atmospheric, suffer from this monotony, and ultimately lack the sharpness, diversity and immediacy of their black and white companions.
Bibliography:
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.
Hoban, P. (2012) The Cindy Sherman Effect. Art News, February Issue. [Internet] Available from < http://www.artnews.com/2012/02/14/the-cindy-sherman-effect/> [Accessed 12 March 2012]
Karapetian, F. (2004) Catherine Opie: Surfers. The Brooklyn Rail. April Issue. [Internet] http://brooklynrail.org/2004/04/artseen/opie [Accessed 12 March 2012]
Websites:
Guggenheim Museum (2008) Catherine Opie: American Photographer [Internet] Available from <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/past/exhibit/2470> [Accessed 10 March 2012]
Kellner, A. (2011) Interview with Catherine Opie [Internet] Available from <http://www.vice.com/read/catherine-opie-934-v16n7> [Accessed 10 March 2012]
Menéndez-Conde, E. (2008) Catherine Opie. Guggenheim Museum, New York. [Internet] Available from < http://artpulsemagazine.com/catherine-opie-guggenheim-museum-new-york> [Accessed 11 March 2012]
Photomonitor. (2011) Catherine Opie [Internet] Available from <http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2011/12/catherine-opie/> [Accessed 10 March 2012]
JAN WENZEL dedicates his entire artistic practice to the art of the photobooth. For the last twenty years, and much like David Hochney’s Polaroid compositions, Wenzel had created “tableaux” by juxtaposing vertical strips of photobooth images. He started working in a booth located in the Census Office of the city of Leipzig, and in 1998, finds an old out-of-order Fotofix booth that he repairs and sets up in his studio. Instant History is a kind of tribute to the artist’s working tool. The series is a set of individual “portraits” of the different components of the booth carefully propped up against a black drop. As suggested by its title, the project also involves a historic approach, as it includes parts specific to the conventional photobooths (such as the box containing the developing solution), today increasingly replaced by digital booths. (Credit: Ponge, Série Porträts [Série Portraits]© Courtesy of the artist et Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs)
It also looks a bit like the shots used in TV programmes where they split up the screen for multiple camera angles to be included. It is like this is a picture of the room, with the corner having a picture of someone using it, someone in a different part of the room which has been shown on these photographs.
