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What does a dear-man do

blaha — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:49:26 +0000

…when not accepted to play in the new Matthew Barney film.

Lightness is Difficult

blaha — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:54:16 +0000

As a wise man once said, life is serious, art is lighthearted. And this very description is what I find the most difficult about creating art. There is a tremendous distance between the seriousness of living a life (yes, even an artist’s life…), and the light that his art requires.
Or is it the heart?

Both works are by Collier Schorr.

Cattelan vs. Woodman

blaha — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:53:59 +0000

Looking for the above gorgeous image by Francesca Woodman, I came across Lucilees post where she asks the ever-recurring question about appropriation vs. plagiarism, in the context of the two works below:

Cattelan’s installation, untitled, from 2007.

Woodman’s photo, untitled, 1977.

The work seemed like a clear quote to me, but I searched a bit more.
Cattelan presented the installation in 2008 at his Bregenz Kunsthalle (the site seems to have almost no working pages) exhibition. It was on the highest floor of the building, and it looked like this:

Impressive. It’s quite interesting, though, to see to what extent the presentation of a work can obscure/transform its dynamics. The first picture of Cattelan’s piece without this second one creates a significantly different framework. (According to one commentator, this was the first time Cattelan used someone else’s architecture to stage his piece.)
My Polish coleagues have linked Cattelan’s work to feminism and eschatology. Crucifiction, yes, but what is beyond? Also, the white nightgown suggests a patient, eternal patient, hysteric person…
Although Iza Kowalczyk is right to point out that this work stresses the crucifiction more than the hanging in Woodman’s version (where the chair in the front created a classic reference to this way of committing suicide), there is something in both these installations that I found crucial, and missing in the comments: the portrayed woman is not crucified. She is suspended by her own arms. It is a very uncomfortable position and requires significant effort.
There is a play going on here between victimization, self-victimization and empowerment. The subject self-objectifies thus getting higher.
One other thing, concerning a discussion on one of the sites, about eroticism. Is this too pure to be erotic? To me it seems to bring about the right amount of frustration by being so unbearably decent, and yet stretched to the limits . This is much more explicit in Cattelan’s work – an installation, bringing about a specific, ambiguous visual perspective. This frustration of power, which plays namely on the the relation between the viewer and his subject, is a trademark of many of Cattelan’s works. It’s what often irritates me. And what makes me come back.

Higher

blaha — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:57:39 +0000

Beautiful Steps #2, by Lang/Baumann at the Utopics exhibition in the Swiss city of Biel.

A moment to cherish, although you’re not there

blaha — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:59:43 +0000

(thanks Maria!)

Don’t you hate it when big commerce does something real good

blaha — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:16:54 +0000

See Sprint’s Plug Into Now project (launched about a year ago and created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners). Get impressed. And then goddamn it, move forward, do things no commerce can think of. Because it does have the feel of some excellent live art that’s been around in the recent years. And let’s say it feels just a tad late (and shallow, and not moving forward – but it’s selling a product, for chrissakes!). Just late enough to feel that artists can still handle the commercial pressure.
Yes, they’ve been counting on viral marketing.
Yes, they think they might tap into a blog like this one.
Yes, they just did.
Because they’re good. Is it a sin for a commercial enterprize to be good?
Well, they have the means. Get it while it’s now. They play around with this idea, and they do it well.
I’m glad they do – it’s an inspiring project. It makes me want to move beyond this. Now.

Cheerup

blaha — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 06:58:00 +0000

Bibi Tanga.

Quote of the day

blaha — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 12:55:50 +0000

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.

Looking at Opa?ka. Can one focus on the focus?

blaha — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:55:39 +0000

I’m sure you know the work of Roman Opa?ka: he has been painting the same continuous picture since 1965, consisting only of numbers, from 1 to infinity. The work has had some changes over the years, among them, in 1968, the introduction of self-portraits.
At the very enriching exhibition of a part of the permanent collection of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Warsaw, there is a room with some six of his portraits, from various periods of his life.
Today I discovered a curious detail: in this particular collection of photos, the early ones are slightly out of focus. Or rather, the focus is on the hair in the back of the head. The later we get, the better the focus. The last two pictures, of Opa?ka past 70, have his eyes perfectly in focus. As if the disappearing of the numbers was accompanied by the appearing of the person. As if he was more himself.
I’m sure this is a coincidence. But why should I care? What’s wrong with a little hermeneutics? Can’t we accept conceptual art to have a life of its own, one that eludes its original readings? Isn’t the fact that Duchamp’s Fountain has long disappeared, and was recreated by the artist many decades later (in several copies) because of interest in the work, isn’t this a wonderful enrichment of the original work?
It might be considered a useless stretch of the pure concept. Like overdoing something that was meant to be simple. Possibly. I’ll have it my way.

Feeling of Landscape

blaha — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:36:06 +0000

This is what would be nice: for all this splatter, all this hazy spirit pollution, to suddenly (or progressively) make sense, and turn into a landscape.
Okay, I admit it, there is a world which I am pretending to ignore. There are those one loves and others which are close enough to be deeply missed, at times.
I admit, there is a light which remains and manages to outshine any particular chaos, any specific too-lateness. For a while, it remains with the body, or the view of the body, or the afterview, and then it moves away, into the back of the mind’s eye, and turns into an excuse to remain hesitating, instead of letting it all go.

But no. All this is happy-tuning oneself, it does not sustain. That is precisely why I miss the feeling of landscape: it sustains. While this? It feels more like posing steps on stones in a stream, where no single stone is certain, yet together they make an unexpectedly serious path. (Maybe not “serious”. Maybe “defined”. Or “path-like”. Or is it that looking for adjectives misses the point: that it’s the path that’s unexpected, not any quality it might have).

And at the bottom, in the water, remains all this, all that stuff that somehow never unbecame me. And lingers on as if too hazy to be rejected, too ridiculously gone. So if it’s gone, what is it, I ask.The first three paintings are by Andrew Hollis, and the last two – by Gemma Gallagher.