Month: October 2007

Harmony Korine

Of course.

Gummo and A Crackup At The Race Riots especially. Julien Donkey Boy not so much. I’m looking forward to Mister Lonely, but I’ve no idea if I’ll actually like it.

It’s not about specific pieces of work, of course – it’s about him. Him and his Unified Aesthetic.

Introduction to Collected Screenplays:

charles eames was most notably an architectural engineer, a furniture designer, a man of scientific theory, but most impressive to me were his films – films about toys, spinning tops, toy towns, toy soldiers, toy trains. he will be remembered first and foremost as a creator of chairs. he did not give philosophical credence to his own separate and varied modes of creation; in essence his chairs and his films were one and the same. the content was king, and thus developed a ‘unified aesthetic’ that brought the walls down and allowed him to work free of any of the self-imposed restraints that most artists suffer.

personally, i have published books of fiction, books of photos, displayed my art in many galleries and in many forms, made recordings of banjo music, written and directed films, composed a symphony using only the same three black keys on the right-hand side of the piano, and i most importantly am now trying to revive the tap-dance scene by developing an entirely new repertoire of semi-improvised, extremely technical, avant-garde dance structures. (please do not think i am joking; it would be of the deepest misunderstanding to interpret my intent, my dream, as somehow being an ironic display. i am admittedly not as advanced at the moment as i need to be before i showcase this next phase in my career. if my dream comes to fruition and i am capable of a total tap revolution, then i declare without any hesitation or pause a complete and total abandonment of my involvement in the cinema and all other areas of artistic contention. i need to go where i am most useful.)

the point being: everything from me had previously been deposited inside me. this is due to the force of a sacred entity whose identity i will take to my grave. this curse/blessing was bestowed upon my being without any previous knowledge and total disregard of personal choice in the matter, with no consent. and when i am dead, perhaps i too will be best remembered for a chair i once built.

Yes.

Danielle Freakley

AKA The Quote Generator. See also: Artist Running Space, Text Masks, Fotolog.

Hero turned mentor. Unique case.

I wanted to post some excerpts from the surreal, amazing Neurocam application that brought her to my attention in the first place, but of course I can’t. Oh well.

I heart you, DF.

Keep on redeeming garbage and doing that beautiful, masochistic, discombobulating lived performance art. (And have fun in New York.)

Carol “Riot” Kane

I discovered Riot earlier this year via Chaos: Year Zero, a blog kept by her imaginary daughter from the future.

This was Kane’s homemade response-tribution to Nine Inch Nails‘ 42 Entertainment-executed Year Zero ARGstravaganza (which I also liked, incidentally. Despite its many dodgy elements).

Riot likes NIN. A lot.

She also has a (sporadic) blog of her own.

Website bio excerpt:

Riot is the gun toting, plaster casting, ass kicking, punk rock verison of the Greek poet Homer, brilliantly translating pre-existing legends of the band she follows into truly epic works of art. With preternatural determination, she writes and illustrates graphic novels, builds elaborate sculptural installations, and directs short films all inspired by her Rock Warrior Life.

Many Artists have constructed works of Rock Star fantasty, projecting themselves into Rock Music’s Realm. However, these artists sit safely on the fence between fantasy and dream reality. From their protected, pejorative, perch they can expound on the intricacies of the precise lighting techniques of each rock iron or reiterate, ad nauseam, the phallic implications of the microphone. They may cast an eye into this place contemplating the passions that motivate musicians and their respective fans but they have yet to stick a soft, well-manicured, overwrought toe into the fetid angry waves of the real Rock Arena.

Riot not only crosses that boundary, she does everything in her power to blur and destroy that line, slamming a well heeled boot into the glass wall to stand battered, bruise, and euphoric on the other side. Functioning in both the art and the rock worlds to the consternation of many an art patron and avid rock fan, Riot is often unsure herself in which world she stands; stomping through an art opening in all her purpled splendor or drawing at the rail while the sweaty screaming masses surge behind.

Art and music aren’t the only worlds she walks between.

(Apart from anything else, I like her coz she seems spookily like an alternate-universe manifestation of my long lost ex girlfriend Sarah – if she’d ended up becoming an artist, instead of doing a PhD in economics.

Hooray for alternate universes.)

Peter Greenaway

Of course.

My most enduring art hero.

I originally became obsessed with Greenaway in my midteens via his features of the 80’s. But although I still love and remain hugely influenced by The Draughtsman’s Contract, ZOO, Drowning By Numbers, The Cook, The Thief et al etc, it’s really his early (mostly short) stuff that gets me the most excited these days.

Like, puddling. Just thinking about it. Still, after all these years.

A Walk Through H, Dear Phone, Windows, The Falls.

OMFG, The Falls.

(Note to self: buy these two DVDs the second you have two cents to rub together. We need to watch them, repeatedly.)

Lynn Hershman

(Via J.)

Specifically: Roberta Breitmore.

ROBERTA BREITMORE was, for 9 years, a private performance of a simulated person. In an era of alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta’s first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction.

Yes.

(More links.)

On Kawara

(Via Em.)

From Wikipedia:

On Kawara (born December 24, 1932) is a Japanese conceptual artist living in New York City since 1965. He has shown in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.

Since 1966 he has made a long series of “date paintings” (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in simple white lettering set against a solid background. Other series of works include the I Went and I Met series of postcards sent to his friends detailing aspects of his life, another series of postcards, I Got Up At, rubber-stamped with the time he got up that morning, and a series of telegrams sent to various people bearing the message “I AM STILL ALIVE”.

Much like the Today series, Kawara uses a number of days followed by date the work was executed as his life-dates. So the piece entitled Title at the National Gallery of Art has Kawara’s life-dates as 26,697 (January 27, 2006) which, when calculated, place Kawara’s birthdate at December 24, 1932.

Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.

See also:

Other, related works in his oeuvre confirm the existentialism at the heart of his metaphysics. For example, in 1970 he began intermittently to send telegrams to friends and professional colleagues that always contain the same message: I am still alive. Once a medium of urgent news, the telegram has become almost obsolete as a means of communication. Normally it announces timely or memorable events, such as unexpected deaths, but Kawara’s messages invert these customary practices: given that everyone is assumed to be alive until the contrary is announced, Kawara’s reassurance that he is still living seems gratuitous—absurd. Moreover, even though it was true at the moment it was sent, it may not be so by the time it is received.

Imbued in equal measure with humor and pathos, these terse missives nonetheless offer testimony to a fundamental state: consciousness, a precondition to all other forms of being. Although destined initially for the attention of a single recipient, they were immediately understood to be a form of conceptual art and hence soon exhibited or published in catalogues and monographs on the artist.

Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.

No.

Yes.

(Update 20/10/07: I’d never heard of On Kawara when I posted this. Not consciously, anyway.)

Relational Aesthetics

Sez Wikipedia:

The term ‘relational aesthetics’ was coined in 1996 by French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to characterize artistic practice in the 1990s.


Bourriaud explores the notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls ‘relational art’.


According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”


A relational artist might, for example, convert a gallery space into a temporary stand for serving coffee, with the addition of background music, suitable lighting, books to read, and comfortable chairs. The artwork here consists of creating a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.”


In relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption. Bourriaud believes this collective encounter can be both democratic and microtopian. These intersubjective encounters may literally take place – in the artist’s production of the work, or in the viewer’s reception of it – or exist hypothetically, as a potential outcome of our encounter with a given piece.

Yes.

Statement

This is going up the front of my VCA app:

My central creative preoccupation is the constructed nature of experience, and the consequent power of belief.

We conventionally regard ‘reality’ as a solid, non-negotiable, bricklike entity. And it seems to be true that a physical world exists ‘out there’, independent of our senses. But all meaning is made in the mind. Our perceptions and ideas about the world are mental constructions – and they’re all we have to go on.

As such, we are all recognisable as ‘reality artists’. We constantly create ourselves and our lives through our thoughts, choices, actions and interactions, according to rules and patterns known and unconscious, arbitrary and systematic, learned and invented, self-imposed and dictated, playful and pragmatic; collectively, collaboratively and alone.

I’m fascinated by the myriad ways in which we pursue this ultimate creative endeavour – and by the mysterious power of belief that animates our existential fantasies.

I like to make and do things which explore this fascination.

I like mixing media and playing with ideas of form, structure, identity, purpose, power, desire, communication, control and transgression.

I like narratives, rules, lists, fragments, documents, artifacts, codes, puzzles, labels and diagrams. I also like imaginary worlds, magical thinking, obsessions, mysteries, secrets, illusions and dreams.

I like artificial distinctions – because all distinctions are ultimately artificial, and this intrigues me. I like things that intrigue.

I like exploring the boundaries of awareness and understanding; questioning what’s possible, what’s meaningful, and what’s real.

I think everything is recognisable as a game, and I like to play.

I’m okay with it.

It’s an improvement on last year’s.