Jason Maling (redux)

(Previously.)

His recent projects, Triangulation (in collaboration with Torie Nimervoll) and The Vorticist warrant an entry of their own.

Age article about The Vorticist.

Blog entries of mine about Triangulation, as mounted at the Abbotsford Convent in February 2010 and Melbourne Central shopping centre in August 2010.

Review I wrote of the two projects for school.

Once

By Katerina Kokkinos Kennedy.

Presented as part of of Punctum‘s In-Habit, a slate of live art projects mounted at the Abbotsford Convent in February (which also included Jason Maling & Torie Nimmervoll’s Triangulation):

We encounter strangers every day through chance. What happens when two strangers respond to an invitation and choose to meet? You are invited to encounter a stranger for 10 minutes, in silence, and then respond to that encounter. Record your impressions via written word, or voice recording.

From RealTime Arts:

There is a strange, aberrant tension in the convent’s Bishop’s Parlour. The age and restraint of the space and its imagined histories (vows of silence, ‘audiences’ with the Bishop) creep into the experience. I am seated by an usher at a small table with a lamp in the centre of the room. Left alone for a long moment, the tension is interrupted by the entrance of another. A woman sits and establishes direct eye contact. The lamp is flicked on by the usher. The shadows in the room retreat and harden. Silence.

Fast mind. Rapid passage of thoughts and images. Discomfort manifests in smiles and corsetted laughs. We look at each other and away to the edges of the spongy darkness. Our gaze returns to the stranger opposite—often, more often. Time slows. Somehow we begin a conversation in writing. Are we breaking the rules? What is forbidden? What is allowed? We relax into a playful meditation on the nature and quality of silence. An usher enters…the stranger is gone.

Subsequently, sharing experience with the usher is also charged—it too has its intimacies. Like the first stranger, the usher becomes the human face of an unknowable structure that refuses revelation—of intent, meaning and significance. Here, the work of the piece continues and takes the form of a kind of ‘confession’ of experience and of unusually open avowal.

The silence, the site and the two meetings form and frame the ‘work’ of the piece and its artifice, the pretext of its enquiry. Beyond this, the piece works ‘in’ the participants. Each stranger becomes the site at which a kind of alchemical fusion of projection and introspection lifts itself into consciousness. The work functions as a hiatus, a pause by means of which to see and experience another, to feel habitual avoidance, looking and being looked at, to sense movement towards and away from each other and all of the electricity, e-motion, ethics and responsibility of that…just once.

YES.

Reactor

(Via RH‘s PhD thesis.)

From website:

Based in the UK, Reactor is a group of contemporary artists whose collective practice is focused on creating projects in which audiences become active participants. By developing situations that leave no room for the passive observer Reactor create work in which, rather than being forced, active engagement becomes the norm. Group dynamics and social interaction come to the fore, as participants immerse themselves in an unknown that invites risk-taking and a heightened sense of reality. The multilayered and social nature of the experience encourages diverse interpretations of the meaning of the work and emphasises the responsibility individuals have in forming collective perceptions of reality.

As described by former member Dave Bond:

Reactor began life as an exhibition of the same name, staged in September of 2002, in which all the artworks focused around the active participation of the audience. The exhibition took place in the same warehouse building that also housed our two separate studio groups of Graze and Aldaran, and when we found out the building was doomed to be demolished to make way for student flats the core members of both groups banded together and formed something new: Reactor.

Reactor was both a collection of artists who worked individually but also an organisation that worked collaboratively to stage events and exhibitions, continuing the original ethos of interaction and involvement with the audience.

This collaboration reached another level with the development of GHAOS: where previously we had generally worked individually on our own elements of Reactor projects, GHAOS projects were created entirely as a group under the sole authorship of Reactor. GHAOS methodology evolved an exuberant and darkly comic attitude, entwining complex systems with elaborate wordplay, often confusing and manipulating the audience but simultaneously encouraging them to involve themselves in the bizarre fantasies presented to them to make the leap from being passive spectators to ‘GHAOS Actors’. In October 2005 this cumulated in the event Total GHAOS: a totalitarian utopia ruled by the Reactor Party under the principles of GHAOS.

Post-GHAOS and following a period of assessment, Reactor decided to maintain the group practice and develop less frequent but more complex, large-scale events. Continuing to misdirect and confuse audience perceptions, initially under the secret identity of Ivan’s Dogs, a fake artists group from Northern Ireland, and then going on to develop events exploring social and group dynamics and psychological experimentation in The Geodecity Project and The Tetra Phase.

Sophie Calle

(via J & Freakley.)

Official site.

From the Tate Britain’s catalogue piece on 1998 show The Birthday Ceremony:

Sophie Calle is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.

The Birthday Ceremony draws our attention to the way in which we construct our identity around secret rituals (from forms of self-indulgence to forms of self-denial) and surround ourselves with objects and activities that give meaning and substance to both our private and our public lives.

Description of Maria Turner, from Paul Auster’s “Leviathan“:

I found her a little scary, perhaps even perverse (which lent a certain excitement to our initial contacts), but as time went on I understood that she was … an unorthodox person who lived her life according to a set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systemized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations…

Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly described as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that would be shown in galleries, but this activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it. Living always came first, and a number of her most time consuming projects were done strictly for herself and never shown to anyone.

Calle’s work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. As she descibes (below), the form of the final product – the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees – is the least significant part.

Interesting June 2007 Guardian article.

I think so.

The KLF

Identified by many names, but effectively the partnership of Jimmy Cauty & Bill Drummond, active from 1987-1997.

Although best known for their musical endeavours, their real game was large-scale discombobulation. They terrorized the worlds of pop music and fine art in equal measure, in between writing an extraordinary book called The Manual, amongst numerous other curious exploits. But their most inspired Work was also one of their simplest: literally burning a million UK pounds in cash money on a remote Scottish island in 1994.

Both parties remain active in the fields of art and music. Cauty, notably, making and selling postage stamps for his own self-declared sovereign country, whilst in his spare time misguidedly buying dodgy second hand vans, crushing them into cubes, and sucessfully selling them back at cost to the dealerships he bought them from, as works of art.

Charles Shaar Murray on Drummond in The Independent, 2000 (via Wikipedia):

“[He] is many things, and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes… involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a worldful of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician.”

Hermann Nitsch

(Via J.)

Specifically the Orgies Mystery Theatre (possibly unstable Google cache link; original is down).

This 6-day play will incorporate all the elements that have made Nitsch so notorious: the slaughter, evisceration and crucifixion of (totemic) animals, the drenching of naked performers in torrents of blood and entrails to a cacophony of revved up tanks, scream choirs and orchestras, interspersed by wandering brass bands playing Austrian tavern music…. Among other materials the artist’s palette will consist of 300 actors and musicians, 3 live bulls, a great many slaughtered pigs and sheep, intestines, fresh flowers, 3,000 litres of fresh blood, gallons of paint, etc., and wine enough for continuous intoxication. One must bear in mind that this ‘work of art’, in a very palpable sense, will also be a public festival:
“the participants are sitting in every corner of the fields, the orchards and vineyards, happily eating and drinking wine…..happiness flows rich and intoxicating through our blood….”

Damn.

“the profession to practise art is the priesthood for a new view of existence…..[art becomes]…the means for a profounder, intenser rapture within life and must be intensified to the point of a shameless, analytical exhibitionism, that demands the sacrifice of total self-abandonment.” [Nitsch, blood organ manifesto, 1962]

That’s what I’m talking about. Or not.

In a strong sense, one has to be there– and in this being-there lies a subjective moment not readily transformed into discursive language.

Yes.