Tomorrow, the excellent Polish artist Pawe? Althamer (I’ve written a short note about him before), will land with 160 other passengers of a Boeing 737 in Brussels. They will all be wearing golden suits that look like a combination of space suits and fairy-tale costumes. Even the plane will be specially designed and painted gold – all as part of Althamer’s work Common Task (the Polish expression “Wspólna sprawa” could also mean “common issue” or “common quest”). Their first stop in the city will be the Expo 58, a modernist dream-town. A model of an atom will be a starting point of the visit to the European Parliament and “meetings with the residents of the city” (How does that work?). They will be making a tour of the city as strange, alien visitors. 160 gold-dressed aliens.
Who are they? Mainly Althamer’s neighbors, family and friends, who have been joining him for other performances he organized.
Who are they? Poles. Strangers. People from outer space.
They are the winners. The visiting winners. The happy neighbors. The curious onlookers, the modernist dreamers, the naive children of freedom, the believers. They are the pure creators, the dreamed Europeans, the perfect people, they are the unexpected turn of events, where everything turns gold.

The words on the page of the entire commemoration state:

The motto of the commemoration, It all began in Poland, is a bold reference to the fact that Poland was the first European nation to oppose, in 1939, the spread of Nazism and communism, and was the first to remove their communist government from power in 1989.

The gold suits seem to fit. And yet, what I like about this social sculpture (as Althamer sometimes calls his works) is something quite opposite to that spirit of heroism and pride we so desperately claim. It’s… you guessed it – the lack of pathos.
Or rather – the way pathos is masked by the gold suit.

This might seem like something very unfocused, as if it lacked a form, a formula, a format to support it. Compare this first episode to Kie?lowski’s (amazing, amazing) Talking Heads (1980):

Kie?lowski has a format and sticks to it.
Seen from this perspective, Lynch’s project might appear as amateurish.
But then, it goes so well with the spirit of our times, with the thirst for simple, everyday stories…
After all, we can still feel quite a heavy dose of humanist ideals and pathos in Kie?lowski’s approach. Even the way he films his subjects is dramatic, often painting-like.
Lynch has this capacity too, as we know so well. Yet he chooses a very different approach, different texture. Different proximity.

One small, hardly noticeable element is similar in the two projects: the music. It is heavy, dramatic, as if contradicting the simplicity of the protagonists.
Is it nostalgia for the great narratives?

Oh, and one more thing. We can only get that far asking constantly the most basic questions. After a while, I get tired. I want more. The essential stops being essential. It becomes annoyingly abstract, unaccessible. That’s one reason to go beyond the existential questions, and one reason to ask other questions. One way of dealing with this is moving away from the person-as-biography to the person-as-projection. Take the famous work by Sophie Calle called Blind, where she asked people who were born blind about what is their image of beauty.

The pathos is still quite present. Yet the projection, the sensibility of the imagination, makes us… dance with empathy.

Take a simple object:

The effect of melting does not seem to challenge the object as such. It asks for fruit as loudly as any classic salver does. Nonetheless, it moves us towards a world where the concrete is, well, not so concrete after all:
Here we have a candelabrum, which is hardly a candelabrum any more. It has melted like a candle, apparently contradicting its main function: to withstand melting. Welcome back to the magnificent world of semiotic undoing, and sensual games with the intellect.
Too entropic for you? Why don’t you try something more positive, then? Sugar and cream, anyone?

The sugar bowl is the negative of its own shape, as is the creamer… or is it that none of them actually has the shape? What are they, after all, these shapes that are to be useful, that are to serve, as if their being objects were not good enough? What is left of the representation, of the concrete, once we put it to challenge in its very heart?

Let’s move back to the first picture now. The title of the work is Trunk Sections, and it is made in cast iron. A tree made of iron. Or is it a mold of a tree? (What a strange idea: a mold of a tree!) Or just a part of their trunk? And why do they seem so… wooden? What, then is the matter with them? They are like ghosts, representing something we presume might have been here, but made of another stuff, another material, another essence, defying the way we see the objectness of the object.
We can, of course, go back to seeing them as just a few pieces of iron cast and assembled to create an abstract sculpture, like so many others.
The question is: with this delicious introduction, why would we refuse the voyage?

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray has an exhibition on until June 27 at the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia, and you can read an insightful text about her work by by David Revere McFadden here.

The simple, classic time reversal and the retro music combined with the “choreography” make it seem like an old magician’s trick. Indeed, undertaking the attempt of constructing myself seems like an impossible task, one that requires, among others, defying the basic entropy of time. Putting it all together is nothing short of getting the papers to fly right in your hand, dancing in the air as if you had trained them all your life.

Another great discovery is Dibujando un espacio (Drawing a Space), a series of 3 videos by two artists working together, Teresa Solar Abbout and Carlos Fernández-Pello.

At first glance, this is a work about distance and communication, and I must admit that given my personal history, it took me a while to go beyond this reading.
But then, once we get past the metaphor of a long-distance relationship, new layers appear: after all, every relationship is, on some levels, a long-distance relationship. Trying to construct something together is a mad project. Words only get us that far, and the only way of building it together is trying to construct primitive (always primitive) structures that can handle the heterogeneous spaces we bring with us.
Suffice it to say that contemporary analytic philosophy started with the idea that some things are simple enough to constitute a solid basis for communication, and by now, analytic philosophers focus on discussing what they mean by “communication”, “constitute”, “solid”, “basis” and “for”.

Both works have a desperation I appreciate and fear. They seem at once hopeless and surprizingly effective. Also thanks to the formal discipline, they become clear pictures of a very unclear, impossible structure, entering right at the point where philosophy struggles.
They share a powerful combination of obsession and self-irony which is both scary and enchanting. Also in art.

Coimbra, a city in central Portugal, has one of the most beautiful – and creepy – love stories ever to be heard. It is the story of Pedro and Inês, a Portuguese heir to the throne and a Spanish aristocrat’s maid. It has a tragic ending, much more gruesome than Romeo and Juliet (Pedro’s own father, king Afonso IV, fears a political scandal and has Inês assissined), and contains what is one of the most extraordinary episodes in royal history: Pedro, besides declaring war on his father, declares he had wed his lover in secret shortly before her death, has her body exhumed and placed on a throne, and has the entire court kiss the dead girl’s hand as a sign of loyalty to their sovereign.
Inês spent her last years in a Monastery in Coimbra, and the city is to this day associated with romance.
Now, what is particularly enjoyable in the story you are about to read, is that it happened in the same town, and yet, none of it ever meant to deal with the legend. It is but a simple story of two people. One of them happens to be the architect and artist Juan de la Mora.

“These hearts were painted by my girlfriend and I in Coimbra, Portugal a couple of years back. She is from Coimbra and I am from Chicago and we’ve been able to maintain a long distance relationship for the past 2.5 years. Since then, we continue to paint some of these hearts every time we are together in Coimbra. What is interesting about Portugal’s Calçada (sidewalk), is that you can take a combination of a minimum of three stones and find the shape of an abstract heart form. The heart can grow by adding more stones to the original three.”

Firekites – AUTUMN STORY – chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg.
My favorite part is the chalk accumulating on the board. And the simple, obvious, yet powerful ending.
How different is this from Blu? Maybe not too different. I would call it a tribute. The style, the dynamics. Yet the addition of the canvas, the frame, turns it into a slightly different game, a play with pictures, and with types of spaces. I only wish this latter element were slightly more present in the film, and we got more often to travel outside of the canvas.

It never stops being astonishing, the way the dynamics of a piece can outgrow the original input, the aesthetic conception, the initial conceptual framework.
I had heard a version where it was Rauschenberg asking De Koonig for a drawing that was dear to him. The story as told by Rauschenberg is so much more human, and impressive.