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At the Artissima art fair last month in Turin, i discovered a new player on the local art scene: the Parco d'Arte Vivente (Park of Living Art). It all started when i almost fell on my knees in front of an installation by Michel Blazy. The first time i saw his work was at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The installation Post Patman stank, rot, crumbled and formed mushrooms, attracted insects and birds but i love it.
The work on show at Artissima, Le tombeau du poulet aux quatre cuisses (The grave of the four-legged chicken), is a skeleton laying on a bed of earth and surrounded by mushroom. The skeleton looks indeed like the one of a chicken, a giant chicken and as it is made of dog biscuits (made themselves from animal products) will be slowly desintegrating over time.
The PAV was also exhibiting one of Jun Takita's sculpture Jusqu'aux recoins du monde, the sculpture of a brain recovered with bioluminescent algae. For years, the Paris-based artist has been interested in bioluminescence.
According to traditional classification, photosynthesizing organisms
It is easy to perceive a figure in the landscape within 10° of one's line of sight (the size of the visual field of a fist held out at arm's length). For example, constellations are based on the principle that one reads stars at a distance of up to about 11° from one another as part of a group. Even when we look at the sky, the human hand is the unit of reference for measuring an image. If an object exceeds this 10° visual field, we have to move our eyes in order to perceive it in its entirety. Vision is then constructed by the accretion of several images memorized by the brain. In 1998, the artist started to work on a garden project based on this phenomenon.
The elevated garden is to be situated on top of a building in Tokyo. As Tokyo is a very polluted city, it is not unusual to see gardens being grown on the top buildings by inhabitants in order to cool down a bit the temperature of the city. The central element of Takita's own garden is a mineral sculpture composed of three walls forming a cave and a bush pruned into a hemisphere. The inside of the cave is to be covered with a bioluminescent moss produced with genetic engineering technology. The moss will emit light via photosynthesis. The visitor is led to a viewpoint along the axis of the sculpture, where the bush is framed by the cave. The distance from this point to the bush will permit the eye to perceive the whole installation at once. The visitor is invited to discover a visual experience made possible through genetic engineering. During the day, the light of the sun is much stronger than the one emitted through bioluminescence, therefore the form of the bush will be lit by the sun, and its shape will serve to distinguish it from a dark background. After sunset the opposite happens: the bioluminescent background will be broken up by the silhouette of the bush, forming a negative figure (via Takita's paper and the notes i took during the artist's presentation during the round table, titled Places and creative processes of the living arts, and organized by the Parco d'Arte Vivente at artissima). One of Jun Takita's works will be part of sk-interfaces which opens at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool on 01 February until 30 March 2008. Last week i went to the temporary headquarters of the PAV to check out their exhibition Living Materials. It closed yesterday but will be traveling to Austria. I do not have the details about that second show yet. But when i do, i'll let you know because Living Materials is a very charming exhibition.
Every work presented involves the public in a timed process cadenced by the cyclic rhythm of biological and ecological phenomena. Life and death are simultaneously present and aesthetically represented in the continuum of procedural works which ask us about the man-nature relationship in the age of biotechnology. The works on show include Le Poulet and photos of Jun Takita's work but also:
An array of hundreds of lemons are pierced with small metal sheets, they are in fact Volta batteries supplied with citrus energy which powers tiny Leds, one every 4 lemons. Originally the lemons looked like the ones you can see on the image above but when i visited the PAV, the lemons were a yummy green as you can see on the image on the right. I actually liked that a lot, in yellow, they were too perfect, too plastic looking, but covered with decay they were more living than ever. The artist writes: I imagined that the lemons during their "work" of withering and decomposing would give back the sun stored by the tree in his fruits during its productive phase in form of small flares. I think it's fascinating that a fruit of nature through an electronic device can palpitate for some days. It seems the proof to me of our dependence on the environment, of our tight and deep bond to nature. The project proposes a reflection on the energetic resources of our planet and re-explores one of the artist's theme of predilection: time. Six months of ripening, several days of life for the work and very short flashes of light, like snapshots of the passing by of time.
The last work on show is Food Island, by Andrea Caretto & Raffaella Spagna. The complex water system feeds several interconnected little islands containing various natural elements: stones, plants or animals. A pump dipped in a water container sends water which reaches each island through transparent tubes. The water produced through various natural mechanism or which is not needed by the island is then collected and sent back to the main water container. the whole installation constitutes a kind of hypertextual narration which explains phenomena of growth and transformation of the material, from inorganic to organic and vice-versa. All my images. |
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Starting with Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk whose psycho puppies were pretending to behave kind of decently on the floor of the Alison Jacques Gallery booth. The fugly pets are made using mostly trash materials: scraps of wood, bits of fabric, felt, fake fur, glitter, and glue.
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You left me no other action / cool off whiner, 2004
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Fabio Paris Art Gallery (from Brescia, Italy) was showing a couple of nice works at Artissima, such as Space LED, by Tonylight (see previous post.) My favourite piece at the booth was an eerie picture of a guy i though i'd recognized. He was dressed in white and was cautiously walking in the greenest fields you can dream of. Looked like Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen to me ;-)
The gallery's press release explained the work as follows: "Hans Bernhard is loaded with 10 years of internet & tech [digital cocaine], mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore [illegal] drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set... Hans Bernhard's neuronal networks are connected to the global network, and his mental illness - the bipolar affective disorder that in March 2002 sent him to a mental hospital - is the network's illness." That experience, in which those two levels - digital and real, bio & tech, nervous system and operative system - merge is summed up in several works, Psych|OS - Hans No. 02 is one of them.
At some point i heard the gallery owner talk about the artists he was representing. Adorable. Like a dad who's dead proud of his kids. He was particularly delighted to explain visitors the latest project of Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG), a portrait series of Second Life avatars they made after having lived in the virtual world for over a year. Btw, the 01.org are presenting "13 Most Beautiful Avatars", a Second Life portrait series, at Second Life's Ars Virtua gallery, as part of rhizome Time shares exhibits, on November 15 - December 29, and a "real life" show at the Italian Academy will run November 30 - December 19. SL is very trendy these days, the Jen Bekman gallery's current exhibition is called Photographs from the New World. The work, by James Deavin, documents user-generated landscapes in Second Life. In New York until December 9, 2006. |
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I don't like everything Bruno Peinado creates. But when i do, i spam all my friends with images of his work. Now it's your turn, you're my friend too:
At Artissima, he had several pieces, the only one i really dug is Untitled, Vanity Flight Case, a giant disco ball-like skull that was slowly spinning and projecting bits of lights onto the black walls of a small room. You were either hypnotized by the skull or disoriented and nearly sea-sick if you had the bad idea to watch the little lights turn around the room. A year ago, i fell in love with The Big One World. It was nowhere to be seeen at Artissima but here's the portrait of this Black-Panther version of the Michelin Man.
Peinado a gogo. |
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Artissima, the art fair that closed yesterday in Turin, was even more recreative than the last edition i attended (two years ago.) Best moments (ex-aequo): buying for peanuts art magazines i'll never find the time to leaf through and catching hilarious snippets of conversations all over the venue: "The problem with contemporary art is that if you don't pay attention, you end up thinking that the dust bin is an art piece" (note that this phrase exists in "urinoir" version) or "I've seen enough shit for today, if you want to stay here, feel free. I go home!" As befits my happy-go-lucky nature, i just ignored the crap (there was a fair dosis of it i guess, but i'm not an expert) and focused on what made me smile. Here's a selection of the gadget-related art pieces. A warning, first. None of them were doing anything interactive. Either because they were out of order or because they were not meant to. But Artissima is an art fair, the traditional kind, so at least the pieces had some eye-pleasing value.
Artissima set on flickr. |
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Just back from my first trip to Artissima. Ladies with necklaces, chihuahua under the arm and super shiny smiles, men wearing (gasp!) crocodile shoes and designer foulards. Do they still exist? Yes, and it is so not my scene. So, i quickly decided that they would be part of the fun. And it was indeed a fun afternoon. I'll write some proper posts this weekend. In the meantime, let's have two fast and easy picks. Super star Tom Sachs' cute Lost in the Wilderness:
Oh! Bliss! I finally saw Kent Henricksen's bourgeois embroidery blemished by little men with hoods and bad intentions.
More Sachs images and Tom Sachs at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Artissima picture set (to be continued on Sunday.) |
