Art I Like

The League Of Resonance

Latest Maling project.

The League of Resonance seeks out the intangible and barely perceptible. We detect vibrations that form the backdrop to the mythical narrative of daily life. We situate ourselves in places of intrigue, we listen, we talk, we connect and we hum. In collecting and combining the resonance of individuals: their stories, perceptions and rituals, we unravel the backdrop to this myth. Together we create a new sound. This sound is The League of Resonance.

Robert Guth

Old friend from high school (also by coincidence a mutual friend of Freakley's).

He is to blame for first introducing me to the term "relational aesthetics" in 2007 whilst telling me about his PhD project, which involves mounting events at which he hands out loaves of self-baked bread in exchange for whatever participants think they're worth, documenting the exchange, then exhibiting the documentation and the objects received.

From recent FB event blurb:

"Bring whatever you think a loaf of bread is worth down to the SmithDick venue in the bus interchange and swap it. It’s up to you – a toaster or tea cup, an old TV or maybe even a piece of art. We won’t question your sense of value; if you say it’s worth BREAD then it is worth BREAD.

Besides the joy of BREAD why is this happening? Why is this art, not a bakery? Robert makes artworks that encourage the viewer to think about the value of their time, stuff and money. He likes baking bread and has found a way to use his passion as part of his art making and PhD project at the ANU School of Art.

This artwork is part of his research in to how participants (people who like BREAD) value objects and participation. You may be documented and chatted to when you come down for your BREAD."

Canberra Times article about above event. Piece by Robert about the project.

Marina Abramović

(Via Duncan.)

Wikipedia:

Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art". Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

Proposition

by Paul Knight (via RH).

"Would you have sex with a stranger?

This is the Proposition:

Proposition is looking for two brave adults with a sense of adventure. You can be any age, gender or sexual preference.

We encourage your involvement and input.

The date has been set. Two people is all it takes!

Sunday the 17th of October, 2010.

Sound intruiging? Would you simply like to know more?

Please get in touch!"

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.

Nate Hill

(Via Kev.)

I have no words.

Joshua Sofaer

Joshua Sofaer (b. 1972 Cambridge, England) is an artist who is centrally concerned with modes of collaboration and participation.

From Perform Every Day:

In a world of natural look makeup where people spend hours putting on various different applications in an attempt to look like they are wearing none at all, is it any wonder that there is some confusion over what reality might really be?

Part of this confusion is to do with performance; how to discern ‘what is’ and ‘what is performance’? From the global ramifications of party and nation politics to the esoteric world of live art, from the tragic spectacular of international terrorism to the undergraduate drama student, from the stock-market to soap-opera, from high performance drugs to performance studies – ‘performance’ is the modus operandi of contemporary culture. It seems now that there is only performance.

Do not despair!

If we begin to understand the things we take for granted in our everyday lives as constructs of performance in and of themselves, if we relish these everyday performances for what they offer us, then there is hope. We become the audience of our very own private theatre.

Also: Any Questions; Seven Reasons Why Live Art Gives Great Value.

Robin Hely

Whatever his shortcomings as a human being, he's undeniably an amazing artist. And his sociopathy and his genius kind of go hand in hand.

"As an artist, I have a big problem," he said to me once. "I don't really like art. I just love fucking with peoples' heads."

Yeah.

"Interventionist performance art", he's calling it now. Previously known as "interactive public theatre". I still like "reality art". Whatever it is, it's something else.

Interesting review of "Sherrie". Origin of the spycam. Missing Person --> Who Is Robert Henley?. Oh, and then there's this. Changed my life, y'know.

I miss the evil bastard. He's never dull.

(Previously.)

The Telepathy Project

Whilst on the subject of interactional installations involving post-its mounted in windows as part of Next Wave '08, there's this.

See also; also; also.

(Sidenote: Another term for 'telepathy' is 'thought transference'. Both refer to a 'paranormal' phenomenon. But even the most hardened materialist skeptic with half a brain would concede that we all 'transfer thoughts' all the time, in all kinds of ways. Some very obvious and direct; some extremely subtle and amorphous.)

Hiromi Tango

(Via DF.)

Absence was a performance installation mounted in the Degraves St Subway as part of last year's Next Wave.

Japanese born, Brisbane based artist Hiromi Tango is inhabiting Vitrine at Platform in the Campbell Arcade subway throughout the 2008 Festival. During her time there her objective is to hand-stitch collected ‘feelings and voices’ and develop a collaborative sculpture with the theme of ‘absence’. Her personal engagement with the site, situation and the community that passes will determine the final outcome of the artwork.

In 2006 and 2007, Hiromi undertook 18 months of research in Hong Kong, New Zealand, the USA, Japan and Australia, which involved meeting people, listening to their stories and recording her interactions. Hiromi also received photos, personal letters, writings, drawings, diaries and personal items from the people she met. For the past six months Hiromi has been hand-stitching these stories and objects, while considering the authors’ absence.

Absence will contribute to a more critical understanding of how artist and public engagement is defined, and how the artist can intervene into a particular space, potentially generating unexpected moments of intimacy and tension.

How much of the exchange is me and how much of it is you? Is it possible to understand each other?

"During the month Vitrine was transformed into a site of incredible dialogue and culminated in Hiromi staging her own funeral."

Live Art

From the UK's Live Art Development Agency:

Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for.

Live Art practices have proved to be especially equipped to meet the complexity and sophistication of contemporary audiences’ values, identities and expectations. Live Art questions assumptions and defies expectations about who an audience can be, what they might be interested in, and the means by which they can be addressed.

Live Art occupies a huge range of sites and circumstances, from the institutional to artist led interventions; from actions in galleries and performances in theatres, to artists working outside of the constraints of official culture, within civic or social spheres, in challenging and unexpected sites, or at the points where live and mediated cultures converge. Some may experience Live Art in a gallery, others in a theatre, and others still as an occurrence in some unusual location or a process in which they are involved.

Live Art can also span extremities of scales – from intimate one on one encounters, to civic spectacles, to the mass participation of virtual events. Wherever they may take place or whatever shape they may be, Live Art practices are concerned with all kinds of interventions in the public sphere and all kinds of encounters with an audience.

Live Art offers immersive experiences, often disrupting distinctions between spectator and participant. Live Art asks us what it means to be here, now. In the simultaneity and interactivity of a media saturated society, Live Art is about immediacy and reality: creating spaces to explore the experience of things, the ambiguities of meaning and the responsibilities of our individual agency.

Live Art is on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located, who our artists are and where they come from, what an audience can be and how they can be addressed.

Jason Maling

From website:

From drawing and durational process, through to live workshops and public performance, Maling's work can best be described by the term ‘Live Art’. It extends through a broad range of media and is characterised by a formality of composition with a fluidity of outcome. Often appearing game-like, the roles of players and the rules of play continually evolve through individual and collective expressions of what is 'allowed’. The results can be as simple as a broken tool or as elaborate as a sprawling narrative. It’s about the space between what could happen and what did.

Of particular note: Project George.