Fischli and Weiss, Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go), video, 30′, 1987

Honda Ad, 2003

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass, 2009

I remember the choreographer João Fiadeiro once showing Fischli & Weiss’s work during some seminar or workshop and talking about what in his mind made it so impressive: necessity. Although it might seem like anything can happen, what happens is exactly what needs to happen. A tautology that evolves in time? But isn’t any proof precisely that – a dynamic tautology?
So is it because it’s a proof that it’s so appealing?
A proof of what?
Of how things go, we are tempted to say.
Which, of course, is just silly talk. It’s precisely because things don’t go this way that we enjoy it so much. It’s because the unexpected becomes necessary.

What about this “evolution”? The work of art turned into a commercial turned into a music video. Don’t expect any moral judgement on that. Actually, I enjoyed all three videos.
We could discuss the question of authorship. But we won’t. (Fischli & Weiss threatened to sue Honda).
Here’s what I’ve been pondering on: what exactly are the differences?
Because, once you’ve accepted that they’re all in the same category (actually, this type of inventions is called either Heath Robinson contraptions (UK), or (more commonly) Rube Goldberg Machines (US) and have been in popular culture at least since the beginning of the 20th century), you can see into how very different they are.
So what makes it an art project, a commercial, a music video?
If we turn the volume off, what changes?
If we put music, or switch it from one video to another?
The timing, the materials, the way things go and pass.
What sort of universe appears in each of them?
Yes, that’s precious: they each have their own universe. They are entities. You can easily find yourself around them, with their texture, their dynamics, their smell…
One more thing: aren’t they each hiding in their specific ways this very basic urge for things to make sense?
If that is so, it’s beyond necessity or discovery. It’s the comfort of order. The sense that somewhere beyond the frame, things are just waiting to come into action, to move into view. And their potential is already in perfect harmony with the moment when they will become what they are meant to be. The best of possible worlds.
It shouldn’t come as a surprize that these delicately balancing certainties remind us of childhood.

Video directed by Takafumi Tsuchiya (TAKCOM).

What is it that we like about simplicity? Is it not that it’s close to us? It is attainable, like something that is nearly us. Or, to put it differently – an it that almost makes it into me. Thus, an imaginary community. Yes, if I dared, I would say simplicity gives us an imaginary community. A universe we don’t need to adhere to, as it has already adhered to us.

The video, directed by Johannes Nyholm, is both a music video for Little Dragon, and a pilot of Nyholm’s short film Dreams from The Woods.

Video directed by Sou Ootsuki.

Is it as coherent as we like to think it? Does it demand coherence?
And does beauty differ dependent on categories? After all, we do watch differently than we listen. And when we watch, the pleasure of, say, seeing a beautiful feature film is quite different from the pleasure of seeing a piece of video art. And although of course the merging and the postmodernism and the over-all mishmash exists in discourse, the categories are still quite strong, our (my) attitudes vary tremendously depending on what I’m watching. It’s a tricky area, tagging. But the fact that it’s tricky should only encourage to explore, no?

Between from Via Grafik on Vimeo.

(via)

Sonnet 44
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow,
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.

(Shakespeare)

One more thing: The bone in the film is a wishbone:

The wishbone, known in anatomy as the furcula, is a sternum bone found in birds which is shaped like the letter Y. It is used as an attachment point for the wing muscles. It is so named because of a tradition: Two people pull on each side of such a bone, and when it breaks, the one who gets the larger part is said to have a wish granted.

The mechanical sculpture in the film is by Arthur Ganson. Some of his stuff is really awe-inspiring. Check this Machine with Artichoke Petal #2

Of course, it may bring to mind other art machines (Rebecca Horn, but also manyothers), but what I really appreciate here is the simplicity. Modest art is something to be cherished. It also reminds me of some of the musical experiences by the Portuguese musician Nuno Rebelo:

Even the really simple ones are really something: Machine with Chinese Fan

Is it kitsch? I don’t care.
(via)

in collaboration with David Ellis.

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

To me it seems as though a lot of this… this work is people who are scared to live a life in the first place. Incredibly unradical people who play a game of a radical life within very safe confines of some Kunsthalle or other museum in Germany or France.

- Gavin Brown, gallerist, The Gavin Brown enterprise, about artists related to “relational aesthetics”.

The quote comes from a film by Ben Lewis called “Relational Art: Is It an Ism?” (2004).
What I like about the film is that it’s (sometimes) funny and doesn’t fuss around.
What irritated me though was that beyond the humor I kept feeling a bitterness I despise. So when we discover in the film that Ben Lewis used to make art (with vegetables) and then decided he wasn’t good at it and stopped, Lewis’ slightly too aggressive attempts to ridicule the artists he talks about become, well, put into context. I would love to see the rest of the Art Safari series to see if it’s juat the case of this episode, or is this the “intelligent irony” we should expect in every episode. (correction: I just realized I had seen an episode with Sophie Calle. And it’s pretty much the same thing).
But then… I found this famous article of his about the art world – “Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?” which basically claims it’s all an evil world, a clique that only wants profits. And although I agree with some of the statements he is making, it’s the tone that really discredits him. (The joker became the prophet!) Especially given he is publishing on the site of… the Saatchi Gallery!


The paintings, (which in my humble opinion are rather unrelated to the topic of relational aesthetics), are by Peter Doig, at the Gavin Brown enterprise. (They are here because of solitude, reflection, one’s place in the world as an artist and a person. And skiing.)
The photo is by Ryan McGinley.

David Lynch’s new project, Interview Project, is assumingly as simple as it gets: travel across the US. Interview people.
Here is the first episode.
First impressions? It’s… nice. Potentially fascinating. Not quite yet. For the moment, it’s too early to say.

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.

My last posts brought about several inspiring reactions, among them two great suggestions.
The animation made several people think of William Kentridge, whose characteristic style is a mix of playfulness and profound reflection.
It explores what it means to draw, to create a world, to translate…
In this video, though, he is less focused on the means of drawing itself, and concentrates on an attempt of putting things back together – or is it, trying to find what was it about them that made them/me this and not that?

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.