What if there was nothing to discover? No story, no thousand words, no answer to a non-riddle? What if it was really, really, just a game of forms and colors?
Would it be a sin?
Does this lady need a past?
Is it really so bad for something to be “just” a pretty picture?
We know of the danger of beauty, we know the seductive spectacle means flirting with submission, yet is it really so immoral?

We possibly wouldn’t say it about Rafa? Wilk’s works. They are often witty, playful, insightful. They play with the idea of light, of bi-dimensionality, of what a work is.
But, to continue on my doubt – does having a story constitute a challenge? Or is it just because we like the indolence of layered thinking, the safety net of there being “something else”, so as to let our imagination ride a little further…? But haven’t we turned it into a rule for (a lot of) contemporary art? This story-telling capacity? (Can someone say a good story about this? If so, the author of the story and the author of the work get a bonus.)
What if it’s a pretty picture? What if it’s pretty, pretty, pretty, a thousand times pretty? What if it’s so damned pretty you don’t want it to be a story, to go beyond it being pretty?
Of course, I have the right to omit the depth. And then also, every good story is many stories deep. But some of the best works I know present a fascinating resistance to storytelling. They are like a stone, at once attractive and opaque. They make me want to read within the lines.

And here, somewhat related, is a summer holiday bonus:

N. Raghavan, Rain V (2009)

One reason I like zapping through artist’s pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist’s statements and curator’s notes is that I don’t need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work.
The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn’t informative, which it often is. It’s that it is rarely inspiring.
(Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture – entitled (…) – is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

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.

Who is it for?
Oh, what a dreadful question.
How embarrassing, how belittling, how pitiful.

1: what is the music?
2: can’t we think of circumstances where it doesn’t matter?
3 (with some leftovers): but aren’t we losing something essential here? Some mistery we break to put it all into the social gesture, as if art really could be effective, as if it ever were, but what does that mean, how do we measure it, but doesn’t it become too close to being measurable?
4: can’t it be enjoyable? Can’t it be blatantly focused on the audience?
This, of course, does not mean it can’t be personal. On the contrary, one could openly use this focus and transform it through the connection of the two sides, as in Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror. But this ever-sacriligeous focus on the audience need not be objectifying, or at least not so openly. Think of applying the concept to the personal, the intimate. What sort of audience are we then?

Part 2 etc

How close to us. Ever closer.
Until, say, we reach the peak, we go beyond the intimate, beyond the sapiens, we give the monkey a camera, dreamfuly believing this is what the monkey sees, dreamfuly hoping (with a tad of gentle self-irony) that this picture, taken by our object, of us, brings us closer, tells us something more about this subject, when in fact it once again brings us back to who we are, as an audience, an audience that acts.
(more pictures taken by Nonja can be found here)

To see the following video you should enlarge it (double-click once playing).

The above is a compilation of works by the Swiss artist Zimoun.

1. Funny, one keeps telling oneself, enough of the minimal already, somehow feeling that less is a bore should be embraced, and the outrageously overflowing art of the recent years – appreciated and encouraged. And then, something like this appears, and it’s irresistible. We’ve seen things from this universe before, also on this blog, and yet, the simplicity, yes, the damn purity takes over again.

2. I had a chance, recently, to visit several large factories. There were wonders there that could probably match most of the things on this video. Yet there was one thing they couldn’t do: be useless. It’s the sheer uselessness of it that gives it the power. We are not attached to anything but the thing. Art as the thing-that-cannot-be-used? Not necessarily, not in some purist sense. Great industrial design is to be cherished. And yet, there is a level of insanity here, of out-of-this-world-ness, that takes us to an exotic land, allowing for the silliest and most delicious connections to be made.

3. Luxury requires waste. A truly luxurious lifestyle is one where perfectly good things get wasted, as if to outplay their natural use and dying away. The true master of luxury seems to be saying her opulence is so great, the very perseverence of things is no match – they lose their original function and only exist to the extent they are participating in this out-of-this-world-ness of luxury.
You know what I’m aiming at? Here’s the hypothesis:

4. This, this minimalist joyful pleasure-making, is the true luxury. Not the apparent richness of the new complexities. In the world of useless purity, everything only serves the joy of simple aesthetic pleasure. More complex works are not quite like that – they have an inner game to play. The elements enter a dialogue, start relations and societies, with their conflicts and functions and disruptions. Here, there is only the ping of a shot of pleasure. This engine moves nothing. It is here to make me smile (or bring inspiration, or scare) – and I turn it off as soon as I have. And don’t be mistaken – if I had one of those and got bored with and could afford it, it would go to waste.

4a. Ah, you might say, but the truly great art is one we don’t get bored with. Possibly. Yet how often do we actually go back to contemplate (not just think about or admire or analyze) a work of contemporary “minimalist” art? Does it mean it’s because it’s not that great? What if it’s about something else? What if it is an element of luxury, a game we play with ourselves, to feel the exquisite taste of the sophisticated dish, and then to ditch it as soon as we’re fed up? It wouldn’t be a question of bluff, of fakeness, of shallowness. It would be a question of use. Of why we crave it, this new. Of how we make it useful after all.

David Foldvari, Wrestler

(via)

The Minimum Wage Machine (work in progress), by Blake Fall-Conroy

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.

Contrary to some other art experiments on work (I’m thinking of some of Santiago Sierra’s early projects, but had I any memory, I’m sure a dozen other works would come to my mind), this, here, is not about objectifying labor. It takes the paradox of work-as-product in a somewhat different direction. If there is a minimum wage, any job should be paid the minimum wage. So turning the handle should actually always give you this result.

You can read a technical description of how it was constructed (didn’t understand half of it) here.

I have no idea concerning the origins of the above.

Yet feedback is not the sound that comes back to its source. It is not the echo. It is the echo used as an input.
Thus, what you call feedback is the mere beginning, the source material of the process of creation. As the world comes back crumbling to the imperfection of our ever-childish senses, our feeble gestures, breaking through our inherited self-irony, make things possible. Better, they give us back the light.

Too light? Too naive?
Would you prefer this?

The Gospel was right: The meek shall inherit the Earth. Actually, they’ve inherited it already. Along with the self-irony, they took what was most precious, and what many seemed lost – the damn aura. Yes, the damn aura still shining and glowing through all the mechanical reproductions. We still want their bloody flesh, we still want to know this is where it’s at, right here, between the stage and you, between the song and you.

All this crossed my mind when watching the brilliant The Song Is You festival at Powi?kszenie in Warsaw recently.
The song that stayed with me the most was simple.
Here it is:

Do you get it? Beyond the gorgeous lyrics, can you feel how it was, listening to it in the club basement, with the grand piano behind Momus, the lights, the weekend dying away? Or can you imagine it? How different is the song you hear from mine?
More on the festival here. Don’t miss tonight (12.03), the last part of the festival, with Kyst and AU.