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I think i'll have to put a stop soon-ish to this avalanche of posts about ARCO, the contemporary art fair that closed 10 days ago in Madrid. But there's still a couple of stories i owe you. On top of the list is a report on Expanded Box, ARCO's section that specializes in new media art and video art. I'll focus on the former. Obviously. Art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta curated the programme with an eye on selecting artworks that feature both a marketable appeal and a critical approach of the cultural impacts of media and technologies. I think Quaranta was the ideal man for the job. He's digustingly young and as such doesn't come with the preconception and 'burden' of the old new media art crowd. He's nevertheless extremely well informed, respected by the nma family and has proved his caliber on several occasions, in particular last year when he curated Holy Fire, art of the digital age together with Yves Bernard at iMAL in Brussels. Everthing could only run smoothly.... The press release quotes Quaranta who explains that the programme "showcases a type of art that looks outside the parameters of contemporary art to art developed on the Net, the art produced in research centres and labs and that has all the potential to change our present-day notion of art. A change of perspective that should not scare collectors or art lovers, because these works are representative of the information society and of the globalised world we all live in."
Before i give more details about the artworks exhibited, allow me to write a few words about the experts' forum i participated to. Between Fields, New Media Art Between Isolation and Integration, Inter-disciplinarity and Media Specificity, chaired by Domenico Quaranta.
Because i had been suffering from a particularly vicious flu that week, i had to miss the first presentations. Fortunately, Geert Lovink dedicated a blog entry titled Discussing the Crisis in New Media Art @ ARCO Madrid to the talks of Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito , the charming and witty authors of the book At the Edge of Art, and to the one of Roberta Bosco, a journalist who has been covering media art for the mainstream and more specialized Spanish and Italian press with a remarkable knowledge and passion for the genre.
I regrettably missed Geert Lovink's talk. But i did catch the following speakers: HMKV has a talent for showing new media art works in a 'transversal' and very approachable way. The exhibitions of the Dortmund center focus on phenomenon that go way beyond the new media art sphere and take technology and media as a starting point to demonstrate their wide-ranging imprint on culture and life in general. Inke Arns illustrated that point with one example taken from the show Art in the Age of Intellectual Property: a copy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office certificate. Kembrew McLeod, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa but also a prankster, trademarked in 1998 the phrase "Freedom of Expression®" as a comment on how the intellectual property law is being used to fence off culture and restrict the way in which people can express their ideas. Trailer of the documentary Freedom of Expression based on McLeod's book of the same title: After Inke it was my turn. I'll spare you that part and offer you a video of dazzling Demis. Media artist and curator Zhang Ga gave a wonderfully well-researched presentation on the many links that tie closely new media art with other art forms, demonstrating how much media art refers to and owes to many of the most important contemporary art movements. Zhang Ga also gave an overview of Synthetic Times - Media Art China at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing (part 1 and part 2 of my review of the show). Finally he mentioned the art fair dedicated to new media art galleries that he is curating in Shanghai. Joasia Krysa was the last to speak. She analyzed brilliantly Cao Fei's RMB City and its bankable success, both online and offline. Now a quick selection of the pieces shown in the Expanded Box exhibition: One of the most popular art pieces of the Expanded Box section was a 3D animation piece by John Gerrard, on view at the booth of Galerie Ernst Hilger contemporary.
Grow / Finish Unit (Eva, Oklahoma) 2008, is a representation of an unmanned pig production site near to Boise City, Oklahoma. The scene represented unfolds in real time over the course of one year, its light conditions through dawn and dusk match that of the local site. At this start of the industrialised food production chain, pigs are raised on corn which is grown using nitrogen derived from oil and gas, thus rendering the occupants of these sheds in essence, oil derived pigs. At no point are the many thousands of occupants of the eight sheds visible, as this is the case in reality. An autonomous virtual wind animates the surface dust, creating the principal movements in the piece. However, a single transport truck pulls to each building every 6-8 months and waits for 1 hour. As in many of the artist's works the public can manipulate the frame to navigate a large arc around the scene.
Joan Leandre had a spectacularly suggesting video at Project Gentili. The piece puts viewers inside an unmanned flying vehicle that slowly glide over locations that are part of everybody's culture (from Disneyland to Chernobyl) yet, acquire an uncanny pattern when seem from above. Check out rhizome's interview with Joan Leandre and the PDF catalogue of the exhibition, it's bilingual italian / english.
Thomson & Craighead' homage to John Cage's Prepared Piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings) was minding its own business at the booth of the ARC Projects gallery from Sofia. Unprepared Piano is connected to a database of music MIDI files compiled from the web, no matter whether they have been intended for piano only or for a variety of instruments. The electronic scores are then "performed" automatically according to a simple set of rules.
UBERMORGEN.COM's EKMRZ Trilogy engages in a shrewd and critical with the cultural consequences of media and technologies. The booth of Fabio Paris Art Gallery which hosted their installation was certainly the most creatively designed of the section . One of the pieces exhibited was awareded the ARCO Beep new media award this year.
The award for the 'artwork everybody wanted to try' goes to Compass by Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf and presented at the booth of the Fortlaan 17 gallery. Domenico Quaranta images |
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Yesterday i met with the other members of the jury for the fifth edition of the ARCO Beep Award. The aim of this Award is to promote the research, production, and exhibition of art linked to new technologies, or new media art. The art pieces are submitted by commercial galleries participating to the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair ARCO. It was a real pleasure to discuss with the other members of the jury: curator and art critic Domenico Quaranta, Fernando Castro from the Reina Sofía National Museum, the mythical art critic Arnau Puig and the charming artist Marie-France Veyrat. It was the fastest jury deliberation i had ever attended in my life. Although most entries were of remarkable quality, the work that stood out was a triptych part of the EKMRZ-Trilogy, by UBERMORGEN.COM.
Presented for the first time as a single installation on view until the end of the art fair at the booth of Fabio Paris Gallery, this "e-commerce trilogy" is the outcome of almost four years of work which i'm sure most of you are quite familiar with. Its episodes are called: - GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself, an operation aiming at buying Google with Google's own money (in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio) Fabio Paris Gallery had made a rather audacious challenge in choosing to present the EKMRZ-Trilogy and i'm delighted to see that audacity pays once in a while. The ARCO installation presents the iconography and mythology of the trilogy by means of prints, a google cheque, projections, music, animations, etc. You can visit it at the Pavilion 6 of ARCO, it is part of Expanded Box, the section dedicated to the intertwining of technologies and art. On occasion of the event, FPEditions is publishing the book UBERMORGEN.COM.
And if you live in the area of Milan, you might want to check out the Fabio Paris Art Gallery itself which is showing the world preview of the Austrian duo's latest project Superenhanced, which is dedicated to the issue of torture. |
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Previously: Winners of VIDA 11.0 announced (part 1) The second Prize of the VIDA competition was given to Performative Ecologies, a work by young artist, architect and too rare blogger Ruairi Glynn.
Performative Ecologies is made of 4 independent 'creatures' that observe the public and dance for them. At the beginning of the exhibition, the creatures are rather dumb, they have little understanding of the way to move their heads and react to visitors. The only instinct they have is 'to be looked at" so they search their environment for people. As soon as their camera has detected that someone is watching them, they start dancing in order to keep the attention on them. In the beginning, they perform randomly. As time passes however, the little machines learn which kind of dance is more successful with observers, they improve their movements and choreography. They become increasingly smart and informed. The dancers learn and behave as individuals. In fact, they even compete with each other to get your attention. But they also form a community. When foreigners are out of the room, the dancers share what they have learnt. Just like what happens in real life, their relationships is based on mutual understanding but also on disagreement. Glynn believes that his role is not to come up with a pre-choreographed set of 'interactions', he merely built an environment for these creatures and gave them the ability to develop their own individual personality. Instead of working on the usual action-reaction mode that characterizes many of the so-called 'interactive installations', Performative Ecologies evolves through a series of experiences that generate genuine and new information, unexpected results and multiple layers. The third prize of the competition went to Chico MacMurtrie's Sixteen Birds.
The inflatable robotic birds extend and move their wings in a coordinated flight-like motion as they sense the presence of visitors. But beware! If people come too close and in too high a number, the birds suffocate and deflate, as if deperishing. A strong environmentalist position is already implicit in the bio-mimetic shape of the birds, and is reinforced in other features of the work. For example, in the first exhibition of Sixteen Birds, the configuration of the sculptural group as a whole suggested the flow of the local river, threatened by over-development. Ruair Glynn made a brilliant little video about the VIDA exhibition: The list of Honorary Mentions is full of small jewels. Here's just two of them:
Meet the two robots of Sobra La Falta: the "dibujante" (sketcher) is in charge of drawing sketches on the floor using rubbish thrown on the floor by the audience. Dibujante collects the rubbish and arranges it on the floor to create a drawing of a stickman, a "@" symbol, or other iconic symbols. The second robot enters when the drawing is over. It's the "barredor" (sweeper) and it will diligently undo the drawing by collecting the rubbish and storing it to one side. With this work, Argentine group Proyecto Biopus questions the point of creating a work of art using technology in a country like theirs, which has to face so many social problems.
Allison Kudla's Search for Luminosity stars six living shamrocks, arranged on a disc; an array of six lamps above, and in the center, a rotating custom optical scanner. Because it has a programmed memory, or an endogenous rhythm, the Oxalis plants open up their leaves in the morning in preparation for the sunrise. The scanner detects this movement and switches on the lamp for that plant. The plants have been prearranged such that they awaken in a clockwise sequence over 24 hours. The lighting of a lamp, based on the respective plants behavior, also switches off the lamp diametrically opposite, putting that plant to sleep. Viewers are therefore able to see in one look the plant in several periods of its cycle from fully awake to fully asleep. An ironic echo of those dreaful floral clocks found in old gardens. |
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One of the issues raised by the development of new technologies, is how they will impact our identity of human beings. Interested in the conversation between art, science, technology and society, Fundación Telefónica has launched an International competition dedicated to art and artificial art called VIDA . This years they are celebrating the 11th edition of the competition by launching an online archive that documents thematically and chronologically the evolution of the discipline it has been so closely following for more than a decade. Besides, Fundación Telefónica is setting up for the first time an exhibition of the winners of its competition (outside of the usual booth at the ARCO art fair that is). The three winners of VIDA 11.0 as well as a couple of other pieces are currently on view at Matadero Madrid. During the press conference yesterday, Francisco Serrano, Director of the foundation, couldn't help but point to the irony of hosting VIDA (which means 'life' in spanish) into a stunning art center called Matadero ('slaughterhouse' in spanish.)
The winner of the first prize this year is the uncanny, poetical and fascinating Hylozoic Soil, an immersive sculpture by artist and architect Philip Beesley. Hylozoic Soil takes its cue from Hylozoism, the philosophical view that all or some material things possess life. It takes the shape of an artificial environment that seems to be made of the same substance as jellyfish, breathing like one, wrapping itself around you and exhibiting complex behaviour as you walk through it.
Delicate arms made of a shape memory alloy called nitidol gently move in reaction to people's behaviour, while hanging pillars transmit a very quiet energy, miles away from the more direct and manly energy displayed by most robotic installations. Although the work manage to almost absorb visitors it has been developed using as little material as possible. The structure was expanded into an ethereal meshwork. Allow me to copy and past a short text that gives more details about the artwork: Video documenting the construction of Hylozoic Soil, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in September, 2007: More information in the book Hylozoic Soil, published by Riverside Architectural Press. Part two of the report: Winners of VIDA 11.0 (part 2) More details about the VIDA awards: Interview with Daniel Canogar. Last year's coverage: Winners of VIDA 10.0, Honorary Mentions at VIDA 10.0. |
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There's so much more i'd like to write regarding the PHotoEspaña festival which runs in Madrid until July 28. Time has come to cover other exhibitions and artistic events i've visited more recently. However, i can't turn the page without mentioning this little fellow playing as ghetto policeman. Almost every mainstream Spanish newspaper selected this image among those offered by the press kit to illustrate their coverage of the festival.
The portrait was made by Henryk Ross, a Polish Jewish photographer who was employed by the Department of Statistics for the Jewish Council within the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust. Ross documented everyday life in the ghetto while staying officially in the good graces of the German occupier. Before the closure of the ghetto in 1944, Ross buried his negatives in the hope to leave a record of the martyrdom. |
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I found this edition of the PHotoEspaña festival amazingly good. One of the most thought-provoking shows, Committed Places, Topography and the Present, displays the work of ten photographers who use the genre of topography photography as a medium to go beyond the representation of physical places and reflect on a series of social, historical or political issue. These photographers know how to work their public: first you grab their attention with a spectacular or intriguing image then you tell them the story that lurks behind the print. Some of the participating artists were familiar to me (Geert Goiris , Walter Niedermayr and Taryn Simon) but i discovered other photographers worth a mention and some praise:
The show opens with Beate Gütschow's puzzling B&W S series (the S is short for Stadt, or "city"). What looks like vaguely familiar, yet slightly post-apocalyptic, urban spaces are in fact digital assemblages of details from the artist's archive of images of buildings, people, and concrete structures seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, Sarajevo, Kyoto and other urban environments. The depressing urbanscapes are inhabited by small human figures who are actually the only element we recognize: they are mostly tourists, homeless people or drug addicts.
On March 16, 2003, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush met in The Azores (Portugal) to reconfirm their intention to continue the war on terror that took a stern turn after 9/11. The distressing images of the New York tragedy have been broadcast over and over again on TV in all their spectacularity and pathos. This stress put on the importance of the deaths occurred in New York is somewhat at odds with the abstract images of fireworks diffused by the same tv stations to illustrate the Gulf War. Augusto Alves da Silva went to the Azores and shot eleven photographies between 7 am and 7 pm. 3 as each of the planes of Blair, Aznar then Bush landed, the others were taken before and after. As in 1991, the massacre that was decided on this meeting is not shown. Instead we have the idyllic images of the Azorean landscape.
I almost missed what is probably the most fascinating piece of the exhibition: a series of 5 identical medium-size images. Simon Starling's One Ton, II aims to raise our awareness on energy consumption and in particular the huge amounts of energy used to produce tiny quantities of platinum. Both the subject matter and its mode of production strikingly allude to the fact that one ton of ore, mined from the South African open cast mine pictured in the images, was needed to produce Starling's five platinum prints.
One Ton, II suggests also that art cannot be totally dissociated from the complex networks of historical, economic, and geopolitical forces that bring it into existence.
Themain (albeit invisible) protagonist of Joachim Koester's pictures is Count Dracula. The photographer embarked on a trip to the Bargau Valley (Transylvania), the very location where Bram Stoker situated Dracula's Castle, Jonathan Harker's ride against the wolves and the final crumbling to dust of the nasty vampire. Stoker never visited Transylvania, he researched the setting of his novel in the comfy environment of the reading rooms of the British Museum.
Koester's photos invite us to a journey that roughly follows the steps of Jonathan Harker but has more to do with suburban sprawls and kitsch tourist industry than ghoulish "undeads". Instead of the "bewildering mass of fruit blossoms" described in the novel, what can be find at the outskirts of Bistrita is more like a blossoming of big suburban houses, not much different than the ones you can see anywhere else in the world. The photographer proceeded to Borgo Pass where he met with decaying remains of the Communist era and ended the trip at the Hotel Castle Dracula located where the Count's castle is in the novel and built in the '80s to tap on the touristic appeal of the region's most illustrious inhabitant. At the time of Koester's trip the area was "haunted" by scandals involving illegal loggings which were plaguing even the most remote mountaintops and leaving treeless spots in the landscape. A situation which obviously hints less to any evocation of a fictitious characters than to the transformation of the environment by the forces of market economy. An at least equally sinister place, The Barker Ranch, located inside the Death Valley National Park in California, was caught by the lens of Joachim Koester. The isolated place gained fame for being the last hideout of Charles Manson and his "family" during and after the Los Angeles murder spree which saw the death of 8 people, including Roman Polanski's wife Sharon Tate. The exhibition text explains that when the "family" was not roaming the desert in dune buggies, they would look for an entrance to a subterranean world that would serve as their shelter during the upcoming apocalypse. The photographer evokes the connections between the Family's dwellings and western-style sceneries. The Spahn Ranch, where Manson and his group of followers lived before Barker, was a ramshackle movie set for westerns. In fact most of the Family meals were prepared and eaten in the former prison. As for the Barker Ranch, it was a classic hideout in a region which used to be populated by prospectors, gold seekers, scientologists and ghost towns. Most of the film rumoured to have been shot during the Family stay at Barker Ranch has disappeared The dilapidated site has been left vacant since the departure of the Family.
In 2003, An-My Lê was granted permission to photograph U.S. military training exercises in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq. The series 29 Palms takes its name from the Marine base in southern California's Mojave Desert where Lê photographed, in her distanced documentary style, American soldiers both rehearsing their own roles and playing the parts of their adversaries. Their practice includes dressing as Iraqi police and tagging former military housing with mock anti-American graffiti. Found this video about her work on you tube: Peter Piller collects images he finds in the filing cabinets of regional newspapers, police archives or other more-or-less public sources. By rearranging them in series and displaying them in frames he gives them a new purpose and a new meaning.
Von Erde schöner, the series he is showing in Madrid, has its origins in the archives of a company which, in the 1980´s, was seeking to commercially exploit the pride of German house owners. Colour aerial photographs of single family homes and the surrounding property were taken and offered, neatly framed, to the respective owners. In 2002, Piller came into the possession of 20,000 negatives of the pictures.
Unlike the company that often offered just a larger detail of the photo, avoiding unattractive things in the surroundings to make the house appear more attractive, Piller always uses the entire picture of the negative. By refraining from intervening in the image, interesting details emerge. Excavation or the foundations of another house under construction can be seen, for example.
Piller arranged the aerial photographs according to the various criteria: some have shut Venetian blinds and other features indicating that the occupants are not home, others come with swimming pool, or show a person in front of house, birds are flying another series, etc. Of course, none of these elements played a role when the photos were originally taken. At the Museo de Colecciones ICO in Madrid, until August 24. |
