Art I Like

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!"

Nate Hill

(Via Kev.)

I have no words.

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."

Shannon Holopainen

(via Freakley.)

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.

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.

Gabrielle De Vietri

(Via Freakley.)

Various works showcased on noise.net.

The Relationship Contracts (well, the two I've seen) are beautiful.

(If these existed outside the realm of Art, they'd make life a lot simpler. But much less interesting..)

Audio interview, mostly about the Ideas Catalogue.

From statement:

Through my work I aim to address common personal, social, and artistic problems. My source material originates in the overlapping codes of behaviour in social, professional and legal interactions and transactions. Departing from flawed givens, misleading texts, and habitual human behaviours, I attempt to locate alternatives, however absurd.

...While my works are mainly text-based, they often expand to incorporate their contexts in performative or sculptural ways...

My central interests lie in a desire to affect and redirect our social imaginary, which disciplines the way in which we lead our lives. I intend to communicate the purpose of my works to individuals rather than masses, broadening and diversifying the way in which their social imaginary functions, and in turn affecting the way in which they think and behave. This public outlook makes for artworks which are frank, moralising, social, and instructional.

'Requiem' by Adam Costenoble

(Via Em.)

Seen at Conical yesterday.

In Requiem, Costenoble presents a new video installation that basks in the failure of human aspiration. The video presents a lone dreamer equipped with faux-wings and helmet, seemingly prepared for flight. The man, already conscious of his innate failure to overthrow encumbrance, enacts a token gesture of absurd rebellion.

Succeeding in his personal quest to surpass human limitation is self-proclaimed hero of Liberty: Jet-Man, whose aerial exploits over the Swiss Alps starkly contrast with the lone dreamer’s feeble urban exercise. Evading the fate of Icarus, these men resentfully succumb to the repressive rule of nature, falling not to the sea below, but back down to the everyday human condition.

It was alright. Not without a certain resonance. Heh (sigh). But not in any way I'm particularly seeking to cultivate..

Adam Costenoble is a Sydney-based emerging artist whose practice to date has focused on video and interactive/user-dependant installation works, however, Costenoble considers himself a non-medium specific conceptual artist. A self confessed existentialist, Costenoble's work draws on philosophy, literature and cinema that contemplates the human condition and the human experience in the physical world.

(Note to self: see art.)

Strangers & Intimacy

(Via Rob Hely.)

Strangers & Intimacy was an interactive performance work staged at West Space in Melbourne in early 2005.

The project began in September 2004 when eight artists were assigned a pen pal living in a city on the other side of the world. On the first day of September they all wrote a four line letter of introduction to their foreign pen friend. Over the four months, between September and December they continued writing letters to each other each week.

The development process was interesting enough all by itself..

Part One = Letters - The strangers meet via hand written letters, they reveal themselves, become intimate, share pasts, stories, memories and daily life.

Part Two = Melbourne - They establish a working relationship upon meeting at West Space in Melbourne, they stand face to face, sort through all the material, share ideas and create performances.

Part Three = Glasgow - The artists then travel together to Glasgow, the temperature drops, the poles shift and new intimacies form.

.. but what sounds really interesting (from the account related to me yesterday) is the actual performance, which - probably appropriately - isn't described at all on the page linked above.

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.

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.

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.)