|
I'm quite a fan of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. No matter what they are showing i will go and discover something exciting. Such as the Kachina/katsina dolls which are part of The Making of Images, an anthropology exhibition that deciphers large artistic and material productions of humanity to reveal what is not seen directly in an image.
The wooden dolls exhibited in Paris have been carved by members of the Hopis, Native Americans who live in Arizona. The dolls, called tihu, are given to children to acquaint them with some of the many katsinam (plural form of katsina). Katsinam are spirits that act as intermediaries between the Hopis and the deities. There are some 400 katsinam, each of them different, each of them representing a being or a quality in the cosmos: animals, plants, locations, meteors, stars, natural phenomenon, social functions, behaviours, etc. Each year, from the end of December till the end of July, they take up residence in the hopis villages, investing the body of masked and costumed dancers. Here are some fairly poor pictures i took at the exhibition:
The Making of Images runs until July 16th. It's an extraordinarily fascinating exhibition. If the dolls carved by the Hopis didn't quite convince you, how about this stunning sculpture:
This statue of a man with the head and torso of a shark, represents Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey (Benin).
The King's coat of arms featured a shark, in remembrance of the words he pronounced when announcing his intention to fight the French fleet which was stationing at Cotonou: "The daring shark has disrupted the helm" ("gbo ouele fandan agbedui brou"). The statue was made by artist Sossa Dede, between 1889 and 1893. Height: 1.6m. Related: Tarzan, the Leopard Men and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. |
|
On Wednesday i had an alas far too short look at the Work in Progress show of the Design Interactions department Royal College of Art in London.
One of the projects i liked is by James Chambers . Chambers postulates the existence of an experimental research group within Texas Instruments. Mostly active in the '70s and '80s, they called themselves the Attenborough Design Group (after the famous English naturalist) and examined how behaviours in nature could be applied to design. Their first product was the 1972 Gesundheit Radio. Developed to protect early microprocessors from dust, the radio featured a sneeze mechanism that expelled dust from inside the casing every six month. A bellows system extracted dust from inside the unit, blowing waste from two outlets located on the front. Should the environment the radio lives in be particularly unclear, a convenient SNZ button enabled the user to activate the sternutation. Gesundheit Radio from James Chambers on Vimeo. Chambers is investigating the potential of other animal actions to be used as defense for a 'family' of between 3 and 5 products. In addition, he is re-interpreting the standing hard drive from last year (see video of the hard drive in action) as a portable floppy disk drive in the late 80's to fit in with the Attenborough Design Group timeline.
The exhibition is open all weekend and will close on Tuesday 9 February at 6pm. |
|
5 days in Berlin is a frustratingly short time if you're planning to follow half-closely what is happening at Transmediale and want also to see some exhibitions around town. I'll bring back what i can. Such as this lovely exhibition titled East Side Stories. German Photography 1950s-1980s at the Kicken Gallery.
As its title suggests, the show features some 30 black and white pictures from photographers who portrayed life at the time of the GDR, mostly in a way that steered away from the official GDR iconography. Under the regime of East Germany, photographers had a degree of licence denied to other artists - largely because the state did not regard photography as an art form (via).
East Side Stories. German Photography 1950s-1980s runs at the Kicken Gallery in Berlin until April 17, 2010. |
|
Previously: Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art.
Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta for Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, explores the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation of obsolete technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms, etc. Playlist follows a long long trails of game-related exhibitions at Laboral (see for example Homo Ludens Ludens) and just when i thought "oh nooo! Not another one!", they managed to bring an exciting new perspective on the world of game art.
Despite its geeky, garage, masculine aura, Chiptune music is less anecdotal a theme as one might think. It didn't exactly become the new "folk music for the digital age" nor the "next step in the evolution of rock and roll" that Malcolm McLaren, the legendary ex-manager of the Sex Pistols, had forecast but that's probably part of its charm. If chiptune music had found its way towards mass culture after roughly two decades of existence, you'd see this exhibition at MOMA or the Fondation Cartier, not at a more adventurous space like Laboral. This doesn't mean that chip tune music 'failed' to reach the music charts. It's just that it would probably lose its soul if it were assimilated by corporations and turned into mainstream candy.
Chip music is low-key. Its scene is relatively small, its sound is raw and lo-fi, but more importantly, its tools are outmoded goods of mass consumption. This obsolescence of the media was at the heart of curator Quaranta's reflections. The very essence of chip music is indeed at odds with the so-called 'planned obsolescence' model that has come to be part and parcel of the industrial stream of electronic goods since the early decades of the 20th century. By 'upcycling' vintage computer and video game systems, hacking, tweaking and bringing to light their untapped potential or turning their very shortcomings into musical or visual features, the artists and computer hobbyists not only defy any assumption that their passion is only driven by nostalgia, they also go against this almost universally endorsed model of planned obsolescence. In the florid essay he wrote for the Playlist catalog, Matteo Bittanti reminds us what a great purveyor of quotes McLuhan was. He believed that "obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning." Here's the first part of my report about the exhibition.
Jeff Donaldson/noteNdo's RESET v2.0 embodies perfectly the way the 8-bit community makes the most of the defects and limitations that come with old game consoles. Each NES console has been prepared to instigate generative system crashes/malfunctions which are triggered by laser light. As the participant walks through the installation space/laser field, different audio-visual effects are produced when different beams are obstructed. The work is inspired by system glitches, or imperfections, which are unique to the 8-bit NES hardware. In provoking these errors, abstract and colourful effects, unintended by the commercial systems designers, are produced. Eat Shit, by Jeremiah Johnson/Nullsleep and Don Miller/NO CARRIER, demonstrates again artists' interest for glitches and data corruption. The interactive installation explores controlled data corruption on the Nintendo Entertainment System, based around Johann Sebastian Bach's piano piece Minuet in G.
They might be using outdated instruments but the close-knit chiptune community has its feet firmly planted in today's sharing culture. Gino Esposito wrapped all the knowledge and the years of work of micromusic.net - the first 8-bit and low-tech music Internet community platform - into microbuilder. The "community construction kit" package offers amateurs all they need to create a successful internet community. The software can be installed easily, you learn quickly how to operate the system and the package is simple to adapt and extend. In the book you can browse through the history of Internet communities, the process of building up micromusic.net and other online projects. Illustrations and graphic art work from micromusic.net artists will give you a lasting visual impression and the installation guide makes the software installation process as quick-and-easy as possible. And of course you can listen to the included audio CD.
Homage to DIY/"pirate" multicarts often found in Hong Kong markets which take multiple games and illegally cram them all on one cartridge, Paul B. Davis's aptly called 5 in 1 crams multiple artworks from the Beige catalogue. There are stylistic nods to multicart culture in the somewhat awkward main selection screen, the misspelling of the component names (this is also a reference to bootleg hip-hop records), the lack of navigation instructions, and a slightly buggy feel. However, its authentic/illegal "pirate" nature is tempered by the fact that the source codes for most Beige artworks are freely available from their website. Anyone could download and make their own edition of the original pieces if they learned the technique and could be bothered. This is the paradox of "open source" software when manifested in an art object: the object is reduced to the application of a technical skill because the code/ concepts already exist in the public domain (except, of course, for Davis' code that runs this multicart). My pictures of the shows are not as good as Domenico's but that's ok i got used to be such a lame photographer a while ago. Photo on the homepage: Don Miller/NO CARRIER, glitchNES, 2009. Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, the second exhibition of Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, is open until May 17, 2010 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain. To be continued.... |
|
Having investigated the dissolution of the appearances and the infra-thin layers of the electromagnetic spectrum in GAKONA and SPY NUMBERS, Marc-Olivier Wahler concludes this 2009 cycle with CHASING NAPOLEON; equal parts art exhibition and instruction manual of how to withdraw into seclusion and take refuge in the limits of the visible. That's the premise of the exhibition currently on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Chasing Napoleon appears to be revolving around the year 1977, but i never managed to find out why this particular year is the focus of attention.
In 1977, Paul Laffoley finishes The Renovatio Mundi in his fifteen square meter atelier, and i seem to be the only one to find his paintings of visionary systems as aesthetically detestable as they are engrossing.
In 1977, Theodore Kaczynski - who would late be called the Unabomber - was living alone in a small cabin in Montana, without electricity or running water. The year after, he would start sending bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. He sent 16 bombs until 1995 when he wrote to The New York Times and promised "to desist from terrorism" if a major newspaper published his manifesto. In his text, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, he argued that his bombings were necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization. The search for the Unabomber was FBI's most expensive investigations. His location and identity was discovered when his brother recognized Ted's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipped off the FBI.
Kaczynski's cabin was dismantled and stored in a warehouse in an undisclosed location. In July 2008 it was put on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., one of the approx. 200 artifacts featured in G-Men and Journalists: Top News Stories of the FBI's First Century. Kaczynski objected to the public exhibition of the cabin, claiming it violated the victim's objection to be publicly connected with the UNABOM case. I first saw Robert Kusmirowski's replica of the cabin at the New Museum's After Nature exhibition but crammed as it was among many other artworks it didn't have the impact that the vast space of the Palais de Tokyo gave it. I love Kusmirowski's work (see Wagon and Machines from a past that never was) but this is a frustrating piece. You want to get inside but all you can see is the stern outer shell of the cabin.
Another artwork sheds light on part of its content. Dora Winter managed to reconstitute most of the Kaczynski's library. Caesar's Gallic War, Psychology of Women, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, To Purge This Land With Blood, etc. Some of the volumes would entice you to believe they can only belong to a dangerous psychopaths, others reflect his remote and self-sufficient lifestyle. The presence of others, however, is more difficult to explain.
In 1977, Dieter Roth was keeping himself busy building up his collection of Reykjavik Slides. The artist had moved the capital of Iceland 20 years earlier. In the '70s and then in the '90s, the artist photographed every single house, building, street of the Icelandic capital. He collected a total 30,000 photographic slides. A few hundreds of them rotate imperturbably on projectors' carousels. The others are waiting their turn on wooden shelves. The sheer quantity of slides contributes greatly to the quality of the work. How can a man be so obsessed he'd want to photograph thousands of houses, one after the other?
Perhaps the work i liked the best was a monumental sculpturei almost didn't see. Charlotte Posenenske's Vierkantrohre is as unassuming as a ventilation shaft. The works in this series seem to come right from the industrial production, yet they have no function, no purpose whatsoever. The sculptures are conceived as modules that can be folded and shaped until they fit and almost blend into the context they found itself in.
Micol Assaël invites visitors to make the Vorkuta experience. You done a heavy overcoat. Enter a refrigerated cell. The door closes behind you. The temperature inside is -30 degree Celsius, there are small electrical sparks and remains of technologies that are by now obsolete. It seems like a hazardous place to spend a few minutes but then how can it really be dangerous? You're in a fancy contemporary art space after all. The installation is called Vorkuta, like the old coal mining town that used to be famous for being the harshest forced labour camps of the Gulag. The notorious labour camps are gone, most of the mines have closed. Only the bitter cold has remained. In 1912 (the more i write about this show, the more i'm convinced that 1977 was just a bait), Erik Satie composed 3 shorts pieces for piano which he named Véritables préludes flasques (pour un chien) [Truly Flabby Periods (for a Dog)]. 90 years after, artist David Allen took the title literally and created a sound installation that plays Satie's music at a high frequency in the Palais de Tokyo that only the dogs can hear. All non-dog visitors can detect are cues on the screen that betray the existence of sound we can't perceive. Chasing Napoleon is a collage of figures, ideas and historical facts that only the mind of a talented and whimsical curator can put together. Connecting all the lines of inquiries with one another, and adding a sense of logic on top of that is a bit of a challenge for me. It sometimes feels as if the show's main raison d'être is to embody the ideas of seclusion, secrecy and the existence of parallel universes it purports to explore. My pictures. Chasing Napoleon at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until January 17, 2010. Previously: GAKONA at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and SPY NUMBERS. |
|
Last Friday, it was sunny, i took the old tram number 44 from Brussels center through the forest of Tervuren and to the Royal Museum for Central Africa. This ethnographical and natural history museum was built to show off King Leopold II's Congo Free State (a rather cynical way to name his personal colony) for the 1897 World Exhibition. The museum was conceived as a window that would demonstrate Belgium's role in "bringing civilization" to its colony and show investors the economic potential of an unknown territory. Plundering and sufferings shadow the creation of the museum. Congo was after all defined by Rudyard Kipling as a territory "where there are no 10 commandments".
The layout and design of the museum is in dire need of modernization (that's on its way i was told) but it's a fantastic place to visit. Especially until early January as the RMCA is running a spectacular exhibition dedicated to masks.
Persona. Ritual Masks and Contemporary Art features 180 ritual masks brought side by side with contemporary works by African artists or African diaspora members, which explore the question of identity, self-respect and representation of the Other. I was so impressed by the masks that i hardly paid any attention to the contemporary art pieces. Except one.
Yonka Shonibare's Un Ballo in Maschera (a Masked Ball) presents the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden in 1792. The video is actually about Iraq. When the invasion of Iraq was first announced, Shonibare was doing a residency in Sweden. He explained his work to Richard Lacayo: Gustav III was fighting wars with Denmark and Russia. Things were not great at home, but he had these expansionist ambitions. So I was thinking about America and expansionist ideas and the cost. Gustav spent a lot of public money on this useless project, his wars, ambitions that weren't going anywhere. Dancers wear masks and costumes which are styled like European ones but made in wax, a fabric worn by African women and originally manufactured by the Dutch. They were designed for the Indonesian market but ended up in Central and West Africa. Africans embraced the fabrics and made them part and parcel of their own culture. Un Ballo in Maschera (a Masked Ball) introduces perfectly Persona, a show that explores theme of identity, a mask's capacity to both hide or reveal.
In Latin, Persona referred to the actor's mask...In a very general way, the persona is the mask worn by each person in order to respond to the demands of life in society' (Encyclopaedia Universalis).
Many of the ritual masks were brought to Europe by missionaries, military officials, colonial administrators who had set foot in Africa convinced they would bring civilization to grateful tribes. Most of them accumulated masks as if they were mere trophies without taking the trouble to inquire about nor document their context. Zoologist Gaston-François De Witte (1897-1980), however, had enough good sense and genuine interest to carefully record each mask name and ask their wearer to pose in front of his camera, in full-length, three-quarter and profile poses.
The masks are arranged in 18 thematic groups: religious uses, witchcraft, communication with supernatural entities, funeral rituals, secret societies, mockery, masks representing female beauty, fertility, animals, etc.
It is almost always men who are responsible for masks, even when they represent women. Men sculpt and wear the masks and organize their related activities. One exception exists in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where women have a secret society within which they themselves manage the performances of the Sowei (wooden helmet masks). These objects, always sculpted by men, are worn by female members. They evoke a primordial ancestor, and the series of ancestors who are supposed to facilitate fertility. The Sowei appear especially to assist young girls during excision.
I can't recommend the visit of Persona. Ritual masks and contemporary art enough. First, there's the museum, its colonial-era hauteur is so un-PC, it sometimes made me cringe but it needs to be experienced before the place is renovated to a modern, polite and friction-proof version of itself. The Persona exhibition itself presents the most breathtaking collection of masks i've ever seen. Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, the curator of Persona, gives more details about the exhibition in an essay you can read over here.
More images in my flickr set. Loads of pictures and information on Arts Premiers. Persona. Ritual masks and contemporary art is open until 3 January 2010 at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, near Brussels. Related story: Tarzan, the Leopard Men and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. |
