Insecurity and Crisis

2011-01-23T00:35:00.003Z

I now have a 'real' website which more coherently and extensively archives my sometimes problematic, sometimes interesting curatorial, academic and journalistic endeavours. If I may be so bold as to ask you to click here and be re-directed well that would be fine and dandy.

Ode to Grain

2010-07-04T22:46:00.008+01:00

"The first 'photograph'. Using a pewter plate coated with light sensitive salts inside a little box with a lens attached, Niepce made the first photograph, from an upstairs window at his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saone. The exposure was eight hours." - Gerry Badger.

When something exists in deplorable quantities, one should return to the point at which that something came into existence in order to understand the true consequence of its unrestrained production. Today, the sheer quantity of images being taken by camera-wielding blind-bargainers is the abhorrent consequence of the gross misunderstanding of the eight-hour importance of the photographic image: for Niepce's sake, please, please stop taking so many photographs...

Sweet jesus... Despite this guys idiocy, some of his asinine statements point in the right direction:

Confessions/Form: The Photography of David Birkin

2010-06-14T20:33:00.012+01:00

Diptych from the series 'Form', 2008

David Birkin’s work sits somewhere between the three paradigms of conceptual art, performance art and a tradition of abstract representations of the human subject paramount in portraiture from a number of art-historical periods. One can positively attribute Birkin’s work to a number of sources from the simply visually referential to the conceptually relevant. For example, Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement (1985) might spring to mind when viewing Birkin’s Diptych from the series 'Form' (2009), or perhaps thematically comparable is a selection of works by the symbolist painter Franz Stuck, specifically The Sin (1893) and Sisyphus (1920) – both of which show clouded human figures contorted out of natural perspective; reclined into dark, psychological spaces not dissimilar to the human subjects in Birkin’s photographs shown here.

Diptych from the series 'Form', 2008

This work has a consistent stamina to it, both in terms of its conceptual content (statements prevalent in the work which seek to comment upon the politics of torture and confession), and on the purely visual level (his constant rendering of cold, beautiful, grain- laden portraits which are well suited to their aluminium mounts and the panels of rich colour they are often presented on in the gallery space).

Diptych from the series 'Confessions', 2009

The series Confessions began with a 2007 self-portrait of the artist sitting in a chair, one cowboy-booted leg swung over the other in a casual pose seemingly not afraid of divulging information to the camera and an empty room. This is the basis of this body of work: to allow a human subject to have the space to confess to the camera, the exposure time of the film running out the course of the subject’s affirmation. ‘Sacrament of Penance’ as it is officially called in the Catholic tradition, allows the penitent to be forgiven of his or her sins. This sublimates or purifies the confessor, allowing for a distillation of guilt or a relinquishing of sin, as one might put it. As the room is empty and divulgence only witnessed by an open camera shutter, there is no priest to pass word to god, freeing the penitent of his sins. The taking of the photograph becomes the process of absolution here; as if to announce catharsis at the close of the shutter whilst simultaneously begging the question: where is God exactly? The nature of the confession cannot be known in this situation; instead the camera captures a silent bout of time that unfolds only to be compressed again into the confines of a single image – the entire and unpredictable duration of the penance reduced to a single photographic representation.

The act of confessing is a performance of sorts. One reference the concept behind Confessions can be seen to make is to catharsis in the dramaturgical sense. The term, supposedly first used by Aristotle in his Poetics, refers to the feeling the audience of a tragedy should sense on completion of the drama; despairing emotion is pent-up throughout, only to be released at the end of the performance. Much like the shutter closing after an unspecified duration in Birkin’s Confessions, as the tragedy reaches its conclusion the audience are purified of negative emotions associated with the inherent pessimism of the play itself. What is striking about Birkin’s series, both with regard to notions of conceptuality and performativity, is how these themes appear inscribed on the surface of the image.

Diptych from the series 'Confessions', 2009

This manifests in the contradiction between the unfocused, obscured grain of the photograph at its surface and the supposed process of purification that should take place during confession. The act of cleansing (the confession) is in actual fact shown to be tainted by inexplicability at its visual conclusion (the photograph) – the viewer is proffered the opposite of clarity at the surface of the image itself. “What makes an action political is not its object or the place where it is carried out, but solely its form, the form in which the confirmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute, of a community existing solely through being divided.” [1]

The series Form, like Confessions, shows a penitent figure. However, in contrast to Confessions, the depicted subject is not allowed the freedom of confession in his own time, but instead is tortured into disclosing information. The figures in these images hold stress positions, mimicking the discomfort a prisoner might experience whilst awaiting interrogation. The body is forced into a position that puts great quantities of pressure on its muscles, leading to severe pain and eventual muscle failure. Form represents Birkin’s nod to the relationship between politics and aesthetics, one of his specific interests being the events at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, which came to prominence in the media in 2004, and which were compared (visually) by art historian Steven F. Eisenman in his 2007 book The Abu Ghraib Effect to the following:

“Prisoners at Abu Ghraib were shown in the subservient position of defeated warriors from Hellenistic Greek sculptures; naked detainees from the global ‘war on terror’ were posed (as in a tableau vivant) like the bound slaves of Michelangelo; anguished bodies evoked martyred saints in Baroque churches. In short, modern Muslims appeared to have been transported – hooded and shackled – to the marble altar of Pergamon in Berlin, the collections of the Louvre in Paris, and the crossing of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome." [2]

'Confessions', 2009

The representation of torture in Birkin’s images does not depict sublimation or confession in the sense that we understand it in Confessions; there is no act of purification here, or even the basic premise that a sin has been committed. In this sense Form subverts the principles of confession further, begging questions about how information of any kind can and should be sought from human subjects, and under what conditions they arise, be they voluntarily or forced. Increasing secularity might be decreasing the quantity of confessions being undertaken in catholic religious practices in the West, but alongside this subsidence in religious activity is a demand on behalf of the West for confession to mandatorily take place to aid war and its illegitimate politics. This is not in order for sinners to be offered relief, but instead for the giving-over of information that might benefit a misguided and destructive politics; a discourse far from rarefied in the context of the US military and their occupation of Iraq.

Birkin’s photographs contribute to what Jaques Ranciere calls ‘the ethical regime of images’. This regime begins with the platonic idea that there is a difference between art (true art; forms of (in)valuable knowledge manifested as art objects), and the arts (that spectrum of creative practices that do nothing other than to represent appearances - “artistic simulacra” [3] - as Ranciere calls them). The artist’s titling of the Form series is an unconscious metaphorising of Ranciere’s position. The aesthetic and the political work together in a cycle of interdependence; they are not conflated however, but instead exist as a result of the form they comprise in collaboration with one-another. They are perhaps in a state where they consistently dispute the legitimacy of one-another’s position yet are somewhat reliant upon their engagement to function in the first place (art comments on flawed politics and politics comments on ‘unimportant art’ (by pulling its funding)). This interdependence can also be seen by the recent trend that along with the disappearance of any morally intact political discourse in the West, we are also witnessing a decline in the quality of cultural produce in the form of aesthetic statements (art-making, building design etc.). These two co-incidences seem to link to the same thing; the majoritative attitude from both politicians and the public that the only politics we can achieve at present is a politics of “It’s not ideal, but it will do” The same could be argued about art-making and cultural production too...

In the case of art-photography there is a further addition to this cycle; the notion of the mechanical arts (Walter Benjamin), of which photography is one. In this relationship, which has been essentially prevalent in discussions since the industrial revolution, technology joins the collaboration creating a cyclical movement where aesthetics, politics and technology revolve together. David Birkin’s work makes an important contribution to this cycle by retaining enough integrity that if two of the three elements were removed the remaining one could still stand up. It, importantly, is able to progress further than contemporary photography’s often tiresome hang-up - one of the constantly regurgitated central theses of modernism with regard to the arts - that the variance between the arts, and therefore photography’s novelty, is understood by the difference in its technological conditions when compared to other art-forms. David Birkin avoids relying on the novelty of the medium’s technology to justify his practice as many photographers do, and indeed on any single one of the three components of this cycle, understanding that they co-exist. Instead, he considers them all equally, acknowledging their form; drawing them together whilst necessarily leaving their discordances and contradictions intact.

David Birkin is completing an MA at Slade School of Art and Design, London. He has received a 2009 bursary from the National Media Museum to extend his series Confessions and is the 2010 winner of the the Sovereign European Art Prize, currently showing at the Barbican.

www.davidbirkin.co.uk

1 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, 1995, p.30.

2 Steven F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, 2007, p.11.

3 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2004, p.21.

Die Nacht Verschleiert den Geist des Ortes [1] The Photography of Rut Blees Luxemburg

2010-05-15T13:40:00.009+01:00

The Pattern of the Plans, 2004

We need a sign,

Nothing more, something plain and simple,

To remind us of sun and moon, so inseparable,

Which go away — day and night also — 

And warm each other in heaven...[2]

In The Fragment – Jumièges, Rut Blees Luxemburg frames a section of a ruined building - Jumièges Abbey - a Benedictine monastery in Normandy, France. The background of the image is black, reducing the subject’s context to a vacant hole. The stone ruin is lit with clouded blues, whites and greys; like the cold hand of an aged woman, its colour paled, its former strength relinquished; a fading symbol of experience - life given over to death.

The Fragment, Jumieges, 2008

The Idol – Portal to the Abattoir presents the entrance to an abattoir as a totemic symbol, an iconographic capturing of morbid, barbed-wire space that evokes both a sense of mild macabre and a strange aura of spirituality. This image makes clear the intense stature and materiality of concrete, whilst simultaneously using luminous colourings to ‘disclose’ the transcendental, one might say. Luxemburg embellishes her images’ colours and forms, creating a beautifully romantic vision of a decrepit nighttime world in burnt saffron, ambers, greys and blues…

The Idol, Portal to the Abbatoir, 2008

There is a grainy, other-worldly quality present in these images that surpasses the material subject of the photograph and instead meditates upon something altogether stranger. As Ludwig Tieck set out in his 1798 novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald) the artist must depict the appearance of God in nature; the ‘geheime ziffer’ (‘secret cypher’) concealed in every object. This so-called ‘secret cypher’, prevalent in idealist artistic and literary work from the period of Romanticism, is the artists attempt to fathom what is beyond the human world; what is beyond the possibility of empirical and material knowledge.

Like Tieck’s impression of the romantic artist, Luxemburg’s works beautifully allude to more than what they merely show; they perfectly combine the unexplainable beauty of the transcendental with the fervent romance of obscurity and decay; a kind of ‘verfallenden geheimnis’ (‘decaying secret’) – a subversive nod towards the spirit of the almighty that secretly reveals his inevitable decay (the growth of Atheism in the West).

The term ‘Transzendentalpoesie’ (transcendental poetry) was used to describe the work of, as exampled by the hymn introducing this text, such romantic German writers as Friedrich Hölderlin. Briefly, the term can be described as being a form of poetry that seeks to both ‘create poetry’, as well as reflecting on what poetry is, fundamentally speaking; it is both poetry and a ‘poetry of poetry’ (a never-ending reproductive cycle of poeticism where one can poeticise a poetry that poeticises a poetry and so on…) This of course begs the question: What is poetic? For the Romantics, specifically Schlegel, it was regarded as “A self-creation, an aesthetic invention that transforms everything it touches”. This implies a reflexivity on behalf of the writer; a way of analysing the very form of one’s written production whilst simultaneously writing it (a kind of inbuilt critique to an artist’s own practice perhaps; a way of acknowledging and justifying one’s own movements towards the act of creating).

This idea of self-reflexivity is important in Rut Blees Luxemburg’s work, and represents a self-consciousness that she displays that isn’t apparent in all contemporary art photography. Again referring back to the hymn that introduces this text: good photography should arguably have at its surface, at its first impression, the ability to give a simple ‘sign’ to something; an immediate beauty which is so striking that it could only beg questions about the underlying content of a work from a point of interest (“This is beautiful, does this image represent an idea or experience the artist had?”), not a question about form or composition from a point of criticism (“What is the relationship there between the red and the orange? They seem to fight each other somewhat, and certainly don’t do that section of the composition any favours”). It is essentially the artist’s ability to self-reflexively cover his or her back when it comes to the process or ‘craft’ of art-making; the ‘fine art’ of reasonable aesthetic judgements, if you like: the Romantic notion that an artist should posses the ability to create something undeniably and consensually beautiful based on considered and experienced decision making (whilst in the case of German Romanticism it was an attempt to relinquish the notion of mere human experience and instead give over your body and let the spiritual take hold in the act of creating: “Schließe dein leibliches Auge, damit du mit dem geistigen Auge zuerst siehst dein Bild!” (“Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye!”))[3]

Orificity 1, 2006

This is of course an obviously conservative opinion in many regards, one that reduces aesthetic judgements to, in the case of the Romantics, the existence of god or, in the absence of any god nowadays, to the level of correct or incorrect. It is, however, an idea I believe current art-photography could do with returning to, especially within its academies, which have a tendency to complicate notions of beauty and perception in art by bombarding their students with an unnecessary onslaught of theory in accompaniment to them. The result is that there is a lot of anaesthetic work prevalent that’s existence is justified by pseudo-theory, or a weak, default position of logic that states “If I oppose a norm I’ll create something new and original, and if it ends up looking shit I’ll just quote Deleuze and hope for the best”.

Caspar David Friedrich and Phillip Otto Runge produced works that, in Richard Littlejohn’s terms, “manifest tensions between empirical reality and spiritual vision”. Art of the Romantic period was not concerned with notions of what did or did not constitute ‘good taste’; instead it was made to put forward insights into the transcendental. It was, in other words, concerned with a project beyond human fathomability, and instead sought to communicate the almighty through his painterly representation (“We will never understand the power of the lord, but we may begin to visually represent it” etc etc). As a result of this representation, this period of art production developed a recognisable aesthetic. It is not this aesthetic that lies in Luxemburg’s work exactly, but more an interesting appropriation of it. Her work can be summed up perfectly by appropriating what Littlejohn states with regard to Wackenroder and Tieck’s 1797 comparison of great art to hieroglyphic scripts. From a truly romantic perspective, which is one I will generally condone, great art (including the photography in question here) contains: “A medium of communication which employs recognisable characters whilst remaining only partially comprehensible and thus offering tantalising but incomplete glimpses into ancient and arcane wisdom.”

There is something beautiful in art of the romantic period that allows for something sickly and overbearingly aesthetic to come to the fore; where as one can’t imagine that occurring nowadays other than in a stupidly ironic ‘Jeff Koons’ kind of way. I appreciate this in Rut Blees Luxemburg’s photographs, albeit in a much more nuanced form. She unashamedly takes beautiful pictures: she is willing to open her shutter and let all of that glorious, saturated, sodium quality light pour in and not have any reservations about whether it might be too aesthetic or ‘obviously beautiful’. There are of course subtleties to her photographing that extend beyond the simple representative ‘snapshotting’ of a Benedictine monastery for example, and as a friend of mine pointed out after hearing her talk at the a recent conference on ‘photography as alternative urbanism’, “in comparison to the pretentious waffling of the other panellists she was perfectly lucid and intelligent”. This work is historically relevant, intellectually engaged, and clearly signposts a beauty that is confident and unafraid.

Faith in Infrastructure, 2008

[1] ‘The Night Hides the Place’s Spirit’

[2] Two excerpts from Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn Der Ister (The Ister), translated from German by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover.

[3] Caspar David Friedrich

2010-05-05T00:27:00.004+01:00

Some very brief background on the new exhibition at HotShoe:

Video art came to prominence in the 1960s, first developed by artists such as Nam June Paik and Steina and Woody Vasulka in New York, and Stephen Dwoskin and Malcolm Le Grice in the UK (to name a few of the key players, as it were). Two parallel scenes emerged in these cities which have since paved the way for a vibrant and exciting form of art practice.

"Romanian Pavilion brings together five Romanian video artists whose works address the former communist president Nicolae Ceausescu’s failed utopian social experiments and subsequent dehumanising conditions, with an emphasis on the reality of the built environment and private life in Romania.

Any utopia is obsessed with the rehabilitation of man and the condemnation of our happiness; to make a tabula rasa of the past, to install the reign of the new self; the perfect polis of human beings. The totalitarian regime in Eastern and Central Europe did precisely this: for almost half a century, it built new cities for the ‘new man’- displaced in flats that look like prison blocks. Drawing its inspiration from Corbusier’ and Gropius’ rational architecture, modernist social housing was applied widely in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, but its profoundly alienating consequences have become evident after the 1990s, alongside the emergence of capitalism.

In Romania, the tensions between past and present are everywhere: ‘anything goes’ architecture mushrooms next to Stalinist substantial buildings, lavish casinos and ridiculous kiosks are built one over another, fast food restaurants and supermarkets replace old shops throughout urban areas. Ideas of territory and identity are continuously shifting, altering perceptions of space, human relationships and social and individual life.

The works in the exhibition examine how video art reflects, extends and manipulates private and historic remembrance associated with the period of transition. The exhibition aims to illustrate not only how the medium is used to portray the post-communist Romanian reality, but also how this reality, in its varying states of political, economic and cultural development, portrays facets of the medium."

- Simona Nastac

Curated by Marcin Dudek and Simona Nastac. Exhibition design by Ioana Iliesiu and Marcin Dudek.

Artist’s talk, Friday 4 June, 7pm: Dan Acostioaei in conversation with Vlad Morariu and curators Marcin Dudek and Simona Nastac.

Upcoming Abstractions

2010-01-26T19:18:00.003Z

"Hotshoe Gallery supports experimentation within photographic art, film, video and installation. This exhibition will pay particular attention to the concept of ‘exposure’, introducing new work by Torsten Lauschmann, David Birkin and Benjamin de Burca. Exposure refers both to the photographic technique of exposing light and to the idea of exposing the mind of the photographer and his subject.

In his new series, ‘The Darker Ages’, Torsten Lauschmann employs image-making techniques from the past and the present, in order to explore the tensions in the relationships between old and new technology. In ‘Contemporary Gear Box’, a slide projector is used to present a computer-generated image of a system of cogs. In this image Lauschmann uses 20th-century digital technology to re-create one of the oldest forms of labour-saving technology known to mankind. In his experimentations, with these technologies, he exposes “invisible” aspects of image making; framing, perspective, depth of space, perceivable illusions and narratives.

David Birkin’s work is informed by the history of photography and its relationship to performance in contemporary art. For the series ‘Confessions’, Birkin invited members of his family to confess a secret they had never previously revealed. When they felt ready, they opened the shutter and when finished they closed it again, so that each photograph’s exposure was determined by the duration of its subject’s confession. For the series ‘Form’, the exposures corresponded to the length of time the artist could maintain a ‘stress position’: an interrogatory technique employed by military personnel to forcibly extract a confession or other information. The works relate to certain aestheticised images of suffering in the Christian art historical tradition and Modernist preoccupations with objectifying the body.

Benjamin de Burca uses light in more than one way in the creation of his work. He has taken photographs of fire, at night, in the dark. The prints of these images are then sliced into using a laser cutter – the light of the laser literally burns the print apart – and the pieces are re-arranged into new configurations. The resulting collages oscillate between representation and abstraction; and the means by which the images are produced evoke the fundamental properties of fire: destruction and creation."

Louisa Adam, Curator, HotShoe Gallery

Marcus Munnelly’s 'In the Scene'

2009-09-18T23:21:00.005+01:00

Originally published in Hotshoe, August 2009.

The idea of undertaking a degree that allows for the possibility of studying imagery of the ‘everyday’, the shy aesthetics of ‘deadpan’ or ‘antitheatricality’ is indeed a strange one. It is not as paradoxical as it seems, however, because if one were to carry out a degree in photography this would be rightly encouraged. Since the late 1970s the appearance of large format art-photography on our gallery walls has increased, and with it a form of photographic discourse that embodies a variety of important questions about what constitutes, amongst other things, pictorialism and its appearance within the photographic image. Current art-photography essentially requires what could be called the study of a ‘negative aesthetics’, or, as Jaques Ranciere has rightly specified, a birthing of art-photography not in reference to the conventions of pictorialism found in historical examples of the fine arts but, instead, inscribed within the most banal or trivial of photographic imagery:

“Photography did not become an art by imitating the mannerisms of art. Benjamin accurately demonstrated this regarding David Octavius Hill: it is with the little anonymous fishwife from New Haven, not with his grand pictorial compositions, that he brought photography into the world of art. Likewise, it is not the ethereal subject matter and soft focus of pictorialism that secured the status of photographic art, it is rather the appropriation of the commonplace…” 1

Somewhat conversely, Michael Fried has asserted that art-photography’s inheriting of earlier pictorial issues - prevalent in 18^th century French painting for example – is the true reference point for its emergence in the 1970s. Whichever position one takes on the matter, the birthing of photography as an art form proper represents just the beginning of its larger quandary as a subject. Photography also necessarily takes on many of the predicaments associated with late-modern visual art discourses (abstraction, concept-art, minimalism), coupled with the lumber of a Bejaminian notion of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and many of the abhorrent impasses of postmodernism. Therefore to properly undertake a degree in photography is to attempt to view and understand numerous examples of the practice itself conceptually rooted within a plethora of other subjects including aesthetics (and its politics), art history, non art-photography, new media and both analogue and digital technologies.

Because of this challenge to budding young photography students, every year we award an undergraduate photographer from the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, a prize in the form of a feature in Hotshoe. This year, we chose Marcus Munnelly, because he has produced a body of work that is intriguing, coherent and professional (his dissertation on framing the land as landscape is also intelligently put together and serves to underpin many of the issues he explored when photographing In the Scene).

Many of Stephen Shore’s, Jean-Marc Bustamante’s or Thomas Struth’s photographs possess a flat, almost accidental quality, as if printed from a film still; a slice of a once moving image that now merely serves as a seemingly inconsequential abstraction from the sense of reality its moving counterpart might provide. When, for example, considering the most vapid of Bustamante’s Cibachromes – Tablea no. 17 (1979) - something of this lack becomes apparent. There is something absent in this image, namely, an immediate and approachable sense of the classically pictorial. Such photographs require the onlooker to do the work; to consider exactly what it is we are not seeing as a means to our eventual understanding of what we are seeing…

Marcus Munnelly describes his triptych In the Scene in the following way: “This series of photographs are motivated by the mimetic nature of the theatrical within constructed environments. The chosen theatre set depicted in the work is an artificial construction of reality. I am fascinated by the state of functionality of objects and props within a set as the original, intended function has been removed.” 2

Munnelly searched through London’s cultural events magazine Time Out, looking for suitable West-end theatre sets that he could arrange to photograph. He eventually settled with Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind (partly inspired by Oliver Sachs’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat), a play that first came to the stage in 1985.

The resulting image is staged, artificial, plastic-like and somewhat illusory. Munnelly is interested in how the various elements of the set converge to create this deception of reality; how theatre sets generate this false sense of reality that actors can then perform upon.

In the Scene, in its triptych form, is fundamentally a landscape image. Like Sarah Pickering, Munnelly is interested in the space itself as opposed to simply just its intended function. When there are no actors or seated spectators present the space becomes functionless, it can only be considered on the level of what it succeeds to be: a redundant landscape, brought back into view by being framed and photographed.

“The main reason behind the triptych was that to photograph the stage just seemed to simply represent it, but I wanted to make it my own, to break it up, so the parts could be individually scrutinised. People have asked me if it is my garden. I wanted the background to be as dark as possible; I wanted to specifically focus on the set itself. I chose the lighting myself; I sat there and instructed the lighting guy in the theatre, almost like a director. We had agreed this before-hand.” 3

In the Scene takes as its subject the birthplace of theatricality itself, but seems to represent something more deadpan and antitheatrical than one might assume would be the case. To use Ranciere’s term, it represents the ‘commonplace’ of the theatre. Like Tableau no. 17, Munnelly’s image is a frozen moment in anticipation of forthcoming action; a snapshot of the stage as the curtain first opens; or comparable to Bustamante’s photograph, a single image abstracted from the context of the time-based narrative of Woman in Mind.

Although embodying elements of deadpan photography, Munnelly successfully aestheticises In the Scene in a way that differentiates it from Tableau no. 17. Where as Bustamante’s image could be photographed off-the-cuff, so to speak, Munnelly’s does not offer up this illusion, it is openly considered, staged and lit as if in a photographic studio. Indeed, a theatre set contains all the usual objects of a photographic studio, but there is something about the potential presence of an audience in the theatre - a component that you wouldn’t find in a studio photograph. As soon as one knows what exactly is being photographed here, it is the potential presence of an audience that allows this image a certain tension: a tension that seems to attach a slight sense of theatricality to an otherwise deadpan photograph. In the Scene occupies a space next to deadpan; an impassive space, one with little but enough emotion to render it subtly and justifiably aesthetic.

1. Ranciere, 2004 33.

2. Artist’s press release, LCC undergraduate photography show, 2009.

3. Interview with the artist, June 2009.

Jim O'Rourke's 'The Visitor' - No Rancour Here.

2009-09-05T21:16:00.005+01:00

"What's certain is that you can't buy a download of The Visitor. Its meticulously layered mix turns to utter shit when reduced to an MP3 - believe me I've checked. It's a welcome blow struck for quality that also establishes O'Rourke as a fighter against the times.

The record's dedication to Derek Bailey likewise does more than acknowledge a late idol's passing. Bailey was notoriously unconcerned about who he pissed off, but the way he burned his bridges was the key to his ongoing relevance as his most celebrated alliances. Like Bailey, O'Rourke has punctuated his career with broken connections that have pushed him onto dangerous but fertile ground, and his anticipation that The Visitor will earn rancour suggests that that's what he's looking for. Perhaps he wants us to know that he, like Roeg and Bailey, doesn't need to be liked; he just needs to do what he's doing." - Bill Meyer, The Wire, September 2009.

I'm not entirely sure about some of Meyer's statements of cross-purpose in this article - like the last sentence cited above - but what is indubitably clear is that Jim O'Rourke has, once again, composed a quite brilliant record; riff-laden, rested in all the right places, gloriously understated and, well, perfectly put together (purportedly there were over 200 tracks of audio recorded before he was happy wiv is mix).

'On Land' - Erich Gruber, David M Price and Francesca Owen at Fulham Palace Gallery

2009-08-31T22:43:00.007+01:00

My new exhibition (mine in a curatorial sense) of paintings and etchings launches next week at Fulham Palace Gallery. Contemplations on Land, death, religion, the pending apocalypse and a rather good text by Vince Stephen on John Ruskin (see the bottom of this post).

All Welcome, 6:30-9:30pm, Thursday 10th September, Fulham Palace, Bishops Avenue, London, SW6 6EA.

Bengel, Erich Gruber, 2008.

Black Sun, David M Price, 2009.

Contemplations on Land, Francesca Owen, 2009.

To John Ruskin

The vital principle is not the love of knowledge, but the love of change.

Up here above Coniston Water we walk your floors and play your piano. Children play raindrops on the white keys. We are surrounded by constructions of memories.

You came here to rest they tell me, to convalesce, when it seemed the country would never accept a different style of progress. When you took on too much and burnt yourself, you came here to build a garden and for quiet and for the view. You withdrew. For the light and the water. We follow you.

Dissidents they tell me passed through your dining room, with content for pamphlets - with front-line reports, out here far from Manchester, a slow revolution.

If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work.

For music, birdsong. For still-life, feathers. For landscape a circular turret connected to the edge of your bedroom. It collects light and it allows contemplation. Below my wife traces aimless circles with a mobile phone pressed to her ear. And somehow I know she is speaking her language.

I don’t know if you died alone, but they say the storm clouds which loitered above convinced you in your last days that the battle against evil, against the horrors of industry and uncaring capital, had gone somehow biblical, was taking place in the elements now, a skybound struggle for the soul of the Island. I don’t know if you died alone, but they’ve placed your walking stick on your tiny single bed. Somehow this arrangement of objects suggests so.

We buy our liveries, and gild our prayer-books, with pilfered pence out of children’s and sick men’s wages, and thus ingeniously dispose a given quantity of Theft, so that it may produce the largest possible measure of delicately-distributed suffering.

Vince Stephen, 2009.

Jacob Kirkegaard’s ‘Labyrinthitis’: Object Enters Subject

2009-07-28T14:06:00.013+01:00

Originally published in my research thesis Innate Response Vs. Socioaural Nostalgia: Towards a Post-Cagean Analysis of Sound Art, Royal College of Art, May 2009.

Labyrinthitis is, in essence, a relational artwork. However, it does not require active participation. One only need let the ear perform its function to hear the complete composition.

"In June 2007, Jacob Kirkegaard had a range of DPOAEs [a distortion effect in the cochlea of the inner-ear that produces a ‘ghost tone’ when prompted by two other corresponding tones fed into the cochlea simultaneously] recorded in a sound proof booth at the Centre for Applied Hearing Research in Copenhagen, Denmark. Different tones of various frequencies were sent into his ears through subminiature speakers. As the basilar membrane in the cochlea was stimulated, his ears started to generate tones. These tones, and the very process that generated them, serve as the basis of Labyrinthitis: an interactive composition that involves the ears of the audience in a multi-layered cannon." (Kirkegaard, 2008)

These recorded tones are ordered into an abstract composition that lasts thirty-eight minutes and ten seconds. The composition was released in 2008 by the London based label Touch. During an email interview conducted in November 2008, Jacob Kirkegaard responded to the following question: in terms of existence, objecthood and ontology, how would you describe Labyrinthitis?

"Your question makes me want to ask, “what is hearing?” Of course, perception is a main part of listening; and of seeing etc. - but then there is the mechanics of hearing. That is perhaps where the “objecthood” comes into question? As for Labyrinthitis (and for hearing in general) there is actually a physical vibration taking place. The hair cells move and generate air pressure waves that we “perceive” as sound but I would say that the objecthood is what happens inside our very ear, namely the trembling of our hair cells - or just the hair cells themselves; the hair cells as objects, sound objects, like a speaker which is also a sound object.

After Labyrinthitis performances, people from the audience have come up to me and told me interesting things about what they experienced. Some people felt that their skull literally vibrated. So when sound becomes physical the skull is almost a sound object. Or at least, if sound shakes the object, it “inhabits” the object." (Kirkegaard, 2008)

One of the original and intriguing aspects of the work is this idea that it is being ‘finished’ by the listener in an act of innate or physiological participation. With well-functioning ears, our cochlea generates additional sounds; in a sense, subjectivity becomes inferior to the physiology of the ear. The very act of hearing (as opposed to listening) adds content to the artwork. Despite the space inside our heads being very private, we may nonetheless consider this work to be participatory or relational to some extent, on the basis that we as hearing subjects complete it.

"Yes, this work is indeed interactive but in a way that you don’t decide for yourself. Normally an interactive work is about you being able to decide “within” the work, but here your ear responds by itself. The very fact that it responds makes it interactive because if your ear didn’t interact, you would be deaf, and therefore unable to experience the piece.

Listening to this piece also offers a way to understand hearing in a new way, that the ear is not just a black hole but an active organ, the hair cells are like piano strings under water… This idea could be applied to all kinds of actions in life, that we need to interact with our world in order to understand it: that things always function in two ways.

So with Labyrinthitis, you don’t even have the entire piece of music on the CD, like you have on all the other CD’s. Here some of the tones that are part of the composition do not exist on the CD. They only appear and are only heard when the CD is being listened to." (Ibid)

Kirkegaard’s notion of object is not sound itself; on the contrary, it is the material entity that produces sound (the hair cell, or skull, or loudspeaker). Sound finds materiality via a relationship with its producing (hair cell, loudspeaker) or resonating (skull) object. Kirkegaard talks of the sound as inhabiting the object; what produces is material (hair cells), but what is produced is immaterial (sound). Labyrinthitis lies on the boundary between the material and the immaterial, simultaneously creating two kinds of object: a dialectic between them. I asked Jacob Kirkegaard: as some of the tones in Labyrinthitis are literally generated by our ear, does it therefore complicate or divide the notion of sonic object into two halves – those sounds that exist on the recording and those which are generated by our ears?

"Yes, if we consider that the sound-object is the source of the sound (the loudspeakers or the hair cells) then we in this case have two sources, the speakers and the hair cells. In Anthony Moore’s text (on the packaging accompanying the CD) he even describes a membrane in between the listener and the sound…"(Ibid)

Anthony Moore writes about:

"Lectures I gave in the late 90s, for example “Acoustic Cells and Membranes”, which later mutated into the rather science-fiction like “Membranes in Space and the Transmitting Ear.” This came out of research in the field of active perception. One hardly need look, or rather hear any further than the phenomenon of Oto-Acoustic Emissions (OAEs, measurable sounds emerging from the ear), to grasp that unless some action takes place on the part of the receiver, then incoming signals may remain unperceived. Due to the active, mechanical components that make up the physiology of the ear, it is possible to construct a model where certain physical aspects of hearing actually take place outside the body, at the entrance to the ear." (Moore, 2008)

As Labyrinthitis is on CD, it is incomplete. As listeners we must allow our ear’s mechanical processes to complete the artwork. Kirkegaard’s work here is somewhat anaesthetic; the body is numbed into submission, entering a womb-like, cathartic sense of place. Our bodies are emptied of emotion, experiencing something purer and more subversive than common aesthetic experience precisely because it has lost its active musicality in replacement for a form of pure anesthetising sound.

Labyrinthitis is implanted in the subject; we are forced into engagement with the work by the very functionality of our own ears. Its object enters us via the ear, blurring the line between subject and object, perceiver and perceived. When listening, one inhabits a space where it is not clear whether the sound exists inside or outside our heads – in this case we host sound, as material beings: we become a vessel or carrier for sound through time. Like Jem Finer’s Longplayer, Labyrinthitis, although existing through time, has a kind of timelessness to it; it creates a space seemingly devoid of time; Labyrinthitis is a context. To engage fully with it as an experience in listening is to be unconscious and unaware of the passing of time, and rather, to immerse oneself in a pure sense of space and place. This is its paradox: although time is passing, it seems to freeze the listener, forcing an awareness of time through timelessness itself.

There is also a second level to be observed where the perception of Labyrinthitis is concerned. This level is emphasised by Zizek’s notion of the ‘parallax view’ (MIT Press, 2006). A parallax view is defined as a phenomenon in which one thinks one has perceived a change in an object, but has in fact just unwittingly changed one’s position on viewing said object; the change then, is not in the object itself, but rather in one’s subjective position. This is precisely the case with Labyrinthitis.

The process by which the human auditory system completes Labyrinthitis as an artwork via the production of OAEs (Tartini tones – after Giuseppe Tartini, the 18^th century Italian composer and violinist) emphasises the gap between the sciences and the arts: specifically scientifically proven physiological phenomena (OAEs) and philosophies of perception (theories of subjectivity). Labyrinthitis is an artwork created under the influence of science. This artwork creates an aesthetic experience using science as a tool or informant to its process. Such processes of art making can be read as attempts to bridge the gap between nature and culture (be they conscious or unconscious attempts). Zizek elaborates on the gap between nature and culture as follows:

“Bridging the gap” – namely, the gap between nature and culture, between “blind” biological (chemical, neuronal…) processes and the experience of awareness and sense – what, however, if this is the wrong task? What if the actual problem is not to bridge the gap but, rather, to formulate it as such, to conceive it properly? Here, more than anywhere else, the proper formulation of the gap is the solution to the problem." (Zizek, 2006: 214)

It is precisely a formulation of this gap that Kirkegaard brings to light in creating Labyrinthitis. In doing so, he reveals Zizek’s parallax view or gap between subject and object: the subject as the listener of Labyrinthitis, completing the artwork via one’s OAEs, and the object as the artwork itself – the artwork being the totality of the sounds on the CD combined with the OAEs the subject’s ear generates. When listening to Labyrinthitis one thinks one is hearing a change in the sound coming from the speakers (and thus the CD), but in fact the change in our subjective position (the fact that we as subjects have generated sound in our ears) is the real change; the view onto the perceptual act that is listening to Labyrinthtis is fundamentally a parallax one.

Butterfly - Catrin Morgan and Rachel Pedder-Smith

2009-07-08T21:43:00.008+01:00

My newest curatorial endeavor is now available for a view if you find yourself in Fulham (again, woe betide - I apologise for the location of the gallery but beggars can't be choosers, can they?). There will be a full-blown website to accompany my new painting show in September (and document all the past exhibitions) - until then the blogosphere will have to suffice.

Here is a couple of photos courtesy of my tight designer Francisco Laranjo, his glorious ouvré and accompanying design criticism can be found here. Additionally, here is the 'introductory text' for the exhibition I wrote for the A4 FOH handout a month or so ago and the two artist's statements.

Background:

What we have come to understand as botanical illustration, and additionally collections of texts or objects that illustrate a specific literary or scientific theme, can be found rooted in the medieval Latin ‘florilegium’ (singular) or ‘florilegia’ (plural). This translates to modern English as ‘a gathering of flowers’. While the term was originally used to describe the way specific passages of scholarly and classical texts were selected and compiled to illustrate a specific theme, after the medieval period the word was used to refer to any collection or compilation of objects, in both scientific and literary contexts.

This exhibition brings the history of florilegia into the context of the art gallery, presenting two contemporary florilegium: on the one hand, a collection of watercolour illustrations of insect specimens (a form of botanic study rooted in art practice), and on the other hand, a collection of deconstructed texts with their pages meticulously cut into and fanned-out like the wings of a butterfly. This exhibition seeks to update the definition of florilegia, asking the visitor to consider the idea of collecting, or collections, both as scientific pursuits necessary for the accurate documentation of our natural world, and as a form of contemporary art practice that intends to give a sense of visual beauty to the inexpressive rigour and systematisation normally associated with purely scientific study. This exhibition both respects and questions botanical science, but above all adds something arguably necessary to it; something it might otherwise lack - a sense of consideration, elegance and craft through artistry.

Presentation and Further Information:

The placement of the artworks reflects the flight of a group of butterflies. The objects climb the gallery walls, fluttering around before settling on an available surface. The two artists’ works are mixed; blended to avoid the formality of hanging in set and separated groups. Additionally, the title of the exhibition, displayed on the wall in vinyl lettering, suggests the form and shape of a butterfly’s wings. In this respect, an element of the design process, normally restricted to the catalogue, is incorporated directly into the display of the artworks.

Many of the insects in Rachel Pedder-Smith’s paintings can be found in the gardens of Fulham Palace. Her work in this exhibition features both original watercolour works and photographic reproductions.

We wish to give special thanks to Daunt Bookshop for supplying the books.

Artist's Statement/Catrin Morgan

“I set myself problems and then create sets of rules determining the means by which I am allowed to solve them. In the case of the Butterfly Library, the problem was that I wanted to find a way of illustrating the shared moment that three particular works of fiction (The Satanic Verses, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Everything is Illuminated) entered when they all used the word butterfly. I had the idea that the word could act as a doorway between the texts. I thought of the problem in 2005, but didn't begin to come up with a solution until two years later whilst studying at the RCA. After I had decided that the solution would definitely involve pins, other rules began to emerge. I now have a framework of rules inside which the work is growing. Although I do use rules and systems to help me create work, I'm not dogmatic; sometimes rules must be broken or amended and in fact extending the project for this exhibition has led to the creation of new rules necessary to allow the project to continue.”

Artist's Statement/Rachel Pedder-Smith

“My painting is as representative as possible. I use watercolour paints and very small brushes. For the butterfly paintings I looked at the surface through a magnifying glass in order to try and capture the full structure of the wings. Most of my paintings are produced at exactly life size and I measure as many dimensions of the object as possible. Before I start painting I produce a faint line drawing as a guide. I don’t produce any preparation studies. I use a style called ‘dry brush technique’, where not much water is mixed with the paint.”

Carabinero

2009-07-05T19:35:00.008+01:00

My mother and her partner are writing a rather good travel blog as they eat their away around Spain as cheaply and cheerfully as possible. If you ever find yourself in Swindon (woe betide), their modest seven table cafe-bar Los Gatos is about the only place worth visiting. I wasn't invited, but all the same, her is a link and a slice of their empanada to wet your taste buds - fnar fnar!:

"Arturo’s is an unprepossessing place from the outside – an aluminium door with a small sign on the wall outside leads in to a single room with a small bar to the right and a few fishing and bullfighting pictures adorning the otherwise plain yellow painted walls. There is no pretence at being anything other than a neighbourhood restaurant, there to feed people."

Lubetkin's Sivill House

2009-07-04T15:50:00.007+01:00

Oh, now I get why drinking in the Bird Cage is ok, we (Entschwindet und Vergeht and I) get to walk past this on the way... I'll (rather unsteadily) raise a drink to that.

Fragmented Narrative of a Remote Island - New Photographic work by Noemie Goudal

2009-06-26T11:50:00.008+01:00

All images courtesy of the artist. Essay originally published in the June/July 09 edition of Hotshoe.

She Was 19 When She First Left the Island, 2009.

“Here was Pala, the forbidden island, the place no journalist had ever visited. And now must be the morning after the afternoon when he'd been fool enough to go sailing, alone, outside the harbor of Rendang-Lobo. He remembered it all - the white sail curved by the wind into the likeness of a huge magnolia petal, the water sizzling at the prow, the sparkle of diamonds on every wave crest, the troughs of wrinkled jade.” (Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962.)

In Aldous Huxley’s Island, a narrative is constructed to present a particularly utopian ontology: a space where occidental and oriental philosophies meet, predominantly through two characters - the landed Scottish medical doctor, and the local Buddhist Raja. These two characters represent part of a fictional community of islanders who attempt the development of an emancipatory form of living - an interest predominant in several of Huxley’s writings, and a vast fictional alternative to the 1950s post-war capitalist West (a time of great economic growth in Huxley’s then home America). On Pala monetary value is decentralized, spiritual enlightenment is welcomed, and talking parrots descant political slogans.

Islands are remote places; they are alone, autonomous, disconnected. Isolated from continental life, they are locations many writers and artists have turned to for inspiration (the term ‘islomania’ has been coined to describe one’s passion or craze for islands). Islands are secretive, often lonely spaces that have long associations with fantastical literature (Jules Verne, Herman Melville, or Robert Louis Stevenson). Islands are in this sense conducive to storytelling; they may be ideal spaces - through their separation from mainland reality - for the creation of secluded fictions, as well as spaces for productive meditation and work (George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four while living on the island of Jura, Scotland).

The Wind Blows, Ceaselessly, Rasping Upon the Nerves, 2009.

Noemie Goudal’s practice uses the photographic image to interpret stories told to her during her time visiting the island of Orkney, Scotland. The central question of her project is this: How can a story which occurred over time, be represented via the stasis (or single moment) of the photographic image? Each image represents a chapter; these images come together to form a fragmented narrative that suggests more than an isolated moment in time - instead, they collectively reveal the passing of a sequence of events.

These images tell tales of nostalgic memory and a want to escape from island life. They are not stories that describe an island as a place for escaping to (as is the case with the aforementioned Huxleyan islomania), but rather of an island as a place that may be escaped from, made clear by the presence of the boat, the empty longing bleakness of the yellow-lit harbor, and the flooding of the local church in these photographs. These images seem to represent the end of a period of time for the characters that appear within them – the photographs describe a youthful reminiscing of sorts, while the character’s expressions simultaneously reveal a calmed need for desertion, or an uneasy consolidating of past experience. These children have out-grown this limited space, no doubt witnessing others leave along the way.

In Goudal’s work, stories from Orkney are staged or reinvestigated within the confines of the photographic studio. The landscapes in these images are imposed on an artificial space. The image hung as a backdrop is comprised of a multitude of photographic prints, linked together to evoke a concise sense of place. Like a theatrical production still in rehearsal, all scenographic elements are exposed: the set itself is laid bare, the contents of the backdrop feed directly onto the stage, and foreground objects such as lights and electrical cabling - usually obscured from view - are present for all to see.

Les Passeurs (The Smugglers), 2009.

Les Passeurs shows three siblings longing for escape from island life. The toy boat does not represent a real, seaworthy vessel, but instead an object that limns hopeful escape. The long, hilly lane symbolizes the end of a vast journey; a passing of time in which the characters have come to realize the limitations (both geographical and experiential) of isolated life.

On Charles Avery’s fictional island of Onomatopoeia, recently featured in the Tate Triennial in London, there sits a number of pyramids. In amongst these pyramids resides a beast called the ‘Noumenon.’ Linguistically (and in Kantian terms) a noumenon is an object that is fundamentally unexperiencable by thought - the simple opposite of a phenomenon (that which can be experienced by thought). Avery describes this beast as residing in the dark interior of his island, suggesting that the beast itself – the core of the island – is an unexperiencable noumenon. It is as if Goudal, like Avery, draws out the very insides of what it is to inhabit an island as somewhat baffling and unthinkable. It takes a story to make sense of this lonely existence; a narrative that attempts the tale of a utopian ideal, or a hopeful escape.

These images coherently feature spaces and an array of implicating objects that conjure a side of island life that, suggested by the expressions of the characters, must be absconded from. Empty fish baskets, disused rope and a deserted harbor – what are these objects representative of, if not an overwhelming sense of dejection or melancholia? Les Passeurs shows the playing-out of the children’s escape, while The Flood depicts the girl seemingly occupying herself with a story of another place, despite the rising water that surrounds her, hurrying forth the inevitable disrepair of the church (after the flood the church was temporarily set-up in a local house, the original religious building eventually being sold to a BBC journalist).

The meticulous setting-up of these studio environments embodies a passionate need to recreate the original stories Goudal had described to her on Orkney. The strength of these pictures lies in this attitude of commitment to recreating narrative space (she could have displayed the backdrop images as the finished works, or digitally imposed the characters and objects of the island onto the images foregrounds).

This intention to position the objects and consider the hierarchies and relationships between them comes from Goudal’s interest in painting composition, for example Piero della Francesca’s works from the early Renaissance. In the central panel of Francesca’s polyptych Madonna della Misericordia (Virgin of Mercy, which, incidentally, was referred to by Aldous Huxley as a most beautiful painting) the figure of the Virgin Mary is greatly enlarged, her cape shrouding her confraternity as they kneel at her feet. Francesca’s interest in perspective is important here - the enlarging of the Madonna within the composition increases the importance of her character, forming a hierarchy over other subjects. Additionally, in Francesca’s later masterpiece The History of the True Cross, an entire narrative is compressed into a sequence of Frescoes derived from a 13^th century text on the lives of saints. This piece, like Goudal’s work, reduces time-based narrative into simple static representations. Certain subjects are brought to the foreground in order to emphasize importance, and objects are placed carefully within the staged scene so as to imply their greater significance.

The Flood, 2009.

These photographs do not just simply portray a set of stories, but additionally, and rather interestingly, the construction or insides of the narratives they examine. We can literally see the studio in the images, unashamedly revealed; staged not as the original stories once were, but instead as open and appropriatable space. The originally ‘found’ narratives have been reconfigured, not to the detriment of their accuracy through reinterpretation, but instead to the benefit of their revealing through representation (these stories would have otherwise remain isolated on the island they were born on). Goudal reinvents, not just simply the narrative itself, but the way in which one comes to view it; time is compressed into the singular space of the still image.

This body of work, ‘Fragmented Narrative of a Remote Island’, represents the beginnings of Noemie Goudal’s MA at London’s Royal College of Art. Her photographic work to date, predominantly focusing on fine art, has also seen her shooting for Artworld, Wallpaper, and The Telegraph Magazine, and recently selected as a finalist in ITS8 (she will make the trip to Trieste, Italy for the final in July of this year). Goudal is one of the founders of ‘Hal Silver’ – a collective of young photographers emerging from the RCA.

BNP, NAC, LMC, CRiSAP (No Deleterious Affiliations Implied)

2009-06-09T10:12:00.013+01:00

A bad start to the week as the BNP sneak two seats on the European Parliament. Absolute f***ing scum.

On the plus side, having at last found the time (my viva is on Thursday!) to read this months Wire magazine, I am pleasantly surprised to find this wonderful LMC archive available for browsing on the CRiSAP website. David Toop compiled it, and the wonderful (ex-tutors of mine) Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle facilitated it - CRiSAP is now in charge of the LMC's archive since Arts Council England pulled their funding in 2008.

As you navigate your way around the four sections of the archive, there are some weird and wonderful sound pieces to accompany your reading of Posters from various LMC events over the years and pictures of the likes of the Feminist Improvising Group, Steve Beresford, Jim O'Rourke and Caroline Kraabel et al. But most interestingly, the above fantastically indifferent letter to David Toop from the Noise Advisory Council in 1978 in reference to the Music Context festival the LMC organised that summer. Toop describes the festival in the following manner:

Music Context was a festival of environmental and contextual music held at the LMC from the 28th July to 5th August, 1978. The idea for the festival derived initially from the participation of Paul Burwell and myself in similar festivals organised by acoustic ecologist Albert Mayr in Florence and Milan. The focus of the festival as it developed became increasingly centred on the idea of presenting an overview of soundwork specifically concerned with contextual problems and relationships, touching on issues such as the anthropology of listening, music in physical space, conceptual art and sound, temporality and performance, music and gender, and community engagement with the sonic environment.

Shaking Paper

2009-06-01T23:41:00.007+01:00

I have been most impressed with this lately (the drum parts especially - both in terms of playing and engineering). It has that sense of hope I enjoy in much music; normally set up by a steady, intricate beat and a series of forlorn chords. I don't know what it gives me hope for exactly, it's not as if there is anything much worth looking forward to presently, but at least Cat Power 'shakes paper' better than Darling does (granted, it's a cheap joke).

Steve Dwoskin's The Sun and the Moon: Eroticism and the Filmic Avantgarde

2009-05-30T16:00:00.022+01:00

I have never seen as strong a piece of experimental moving image as Steven Dwoskin’s The Sun and the Moon (what a sweeping statement that is!). As a piece of ‘personal cinema’ it intensely provides an insight into - not just the camera as a tool for the representation of the world (as a profound, obscured and obliterated entity) - but also the ever-present and ugly phenomenon of sex (yes it is! - even when conducted by the most ‘beautiful’ of people). Abstraction and sex incontestably sit side-by-side (as of course do art and sex historically). Sex only ever seems to make sense before and during, both then merely introducing the inevitable occurrence of post-coital guilt and confusion: What is this act? What does it actually involve? Why this consistent and depressing desire to partake? Through an acknowledgement of the inevitable degradation of the human body (accelerated by physical illness), the unfathomable urge for sexual interaction, and an overwhelming obsession with the moving-image avantgarde, Dwoskin's filmic abstractions are unbelievably compelling.

It is said that The Sun and the Moon is a lyrical evocation of the Beauty and the Beast story. Four directors shoot a 69-year-old Dwoskin showing the scars from the poliomyelitis he suffered in his childhood and the oxygen mask he wears since contracting pneumonia. However, what can seem terrible is not: does eroticism exclude certain bodies? Dwoskin's favourite writer, Georges Bataille, knows well the depths of Eros. Tears, aversion, terror and tenderness: Dwoskin re-establishes light into his marginalised body and claims an eroticism without words for himself. (Cece, 20th April 2008, translated by Jose de Esteban – quoted from the BFI notes on the current Dwoskin retrospective)

Dwoskin claims, not just a personal eroticism through the actions he conducts as a subject in his own film, but also the consistent maintaining of a weird sense of the erotic through the filming itself: the camera moves in an overtly sexual manner: zooms in and out, blurred close-up confusion followed by resting steps back into momentary clarity, 360 degree rotations, and dizzying changes of angle and general camera position (all filmic metaphors for sexual movements, it seems).

The film features three characters, Dwoskin himself, a brunette middle-aged woman (Beatrice Cordua) and a young-ish Scandinavian girl (Helga Wretman). Dwoskin sits uncomfortably on a bed, his face covered by an oxygen mask. He sits-up, lies-down and rolls around grunting, rasping and masturbating while the younger woman parades around naked and the older woman cries and screams out from the sidelines. The entire film is slowed down into recondite, grainy video with obscure time-stretched sound. Dwoskin has the various camera operators zoom in close on his body, revealing his strange form up-close, the texture of his paled skin full-screen, and the wispy fine hair that lines his stomach and chest: these shots are not abhorrently pornographic, more considered, abstracted images of the human body through close swoops and zooms with a modest hand-held camera.

The various shots appear to fall into two categories: those that show the room itself and the placement and actions of the three characters, and those that reduce the characters themselves into bare-breasts reflecting in mirrors, screaming mouths, and rolling lumps of naked flesh. The older woman seems to represent Dwoskin’s anguish as a disabled, but never-the-less sexuated subject with her time-stretched yelps and howls, while the younger blonde combines looks of potential lust for Dwoskin, with teary-eyed stares for a man that may not be able to fulfil the expected rigours of sexual performance/ritual. For 61 minutes this harrowing yet strangely beautiful affair continues. The viewer is lead away into textural abstraction, before once again being reminded of the reality that is taking place between the three characters: all bodies are gradually and progressively becoming eroticised.

The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity. (Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, 1967.)

Eroticism, then, is a breaking down; a replacing of structure and order with dissolution (disunion, disintegration, decay). Dwoskin reveals the point of tension in this decay: is his body capable of performing a sexual act? As in several of his other works, will the women actually engage in any tactile sex act? Or, will they just eroticise their movements in space, simply providing entertainment for Dwoskin’s self-gratification through masturbation? The point of tension is this brink between stripping, nakedness and heavy-petting; the point between being naked in a space with another body, and actually engaging in some form of tactile intercourse. This tension is paramount throughout the entire film, and it dictates its extraordinary atmosphere.

Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognised and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it: particularly if the erotic act follows, consummating it. (Ibid)

Shots of the moon are cut with those of Wretman’s naked body. The female form eclipses the moon, pushing back a celestial body only to replace it with an eroticised one. The eroticised female seems controlled by the moon’s glow, working for it through a strange double reflection.

In another film, Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994), Dwoskin edits together archive footage of his father’s video tapes, creating an autobiography in black and white footage with classical music accompaniment (Sibelius’ violin concerto, amongst other pieces). He talks of his move to London from New York in 1964 and the strange affect it had on his career as an artist and filmmaker. Apart from the following video interview for Lux, this was the only footage of Dwoskin’s work I could find:

Stephen Dwoskin - vodcast

Florian Hecker’s Pentaphonic Dark Energy: Object Becomes Context: Or, a Prefatory Statement on the Curating of Sound in the Gallery

2009-05-29T16:38:00.015+01:00

Pentaphonic Dark Energy further enforces the notion of sound becoming space:

Pushing the envelope of algorithmic software, the works of Florian Hecker reshape listener’s perceptual processes, taking the spatial soundworlds imagined by Xenakis a step further into psychoacoustic black holes. (Cain, 2008: 34)

Florian Hecker’s installation is sound infecting its surround. It relentlessly attacks the listener, before pulling back into quiet. And then again it comes, this time with a pure tone, and a second, before spitting sound around the room in a primal display of aggression. The speakers hang like Jurassic birds from the ceiling. The listener poses little threat, so the birds don’t move, they merely attack aurally, covering all directions, all frequencies it seems, confusing and engulfing space.

Pentaphonic Dark Energy is an object of context. It simultaneously exists as an independent artwork, and the space itself. Hecker’s interest in Psychoacoustics is paramount here. Hecker understands the human perception of sound is beyond a physiological or mechanical phenomenon; it is also a sensory event, processed in our auditory cortex, beyond the physiology of the human ear. Hecker’s piece distorts perception, creating a bodily experience that resonates deeper than the act of merely hearing; it is a physical and vibrational experience that takes listening beyond the scope of the ear and the brain, into the body. The title Pentaphonic Dark Energy pays homage to ‘Dark Energy;’ a hypothetical kind of energy proposed in cosmological study. It is apparently responsible for the expansion of the universe, nonetheless.

The sound of Pentaphonic Dark Energy fills the art gallery space, creating a space of its own that in turn submerges the body of the listener (the embodied subject, embodied by the context). This idea of space is not geometrical, mathematical or acoustic space, but bodily space.

The thinking of Descartes was viewed as the decisive point in the working-out of the concept of space, and the key to its mature form. According to most historians of Western thought, Descartes had brought to an end the Aristotelian tradition which held that space and time were among those categories which facilitated the naming and classing of the evidence of the senses. The status of such categories had hitherto remained unclear, for they could be looked upon either as simple empirical tools for ordering sense data or, alternatively, as generalities in some way superior to the evidence supplied by the body’s sensory organs. (Lefebvre, 1974: 1)

And later Kant supplied his own update. Merleau-Ponty elaborates,

Kant tried to draw a strict demarcation line between space as the form of external experience and the things given within that experience. There is naturally no question of a relationship of container to content, since this relationship exists only between objects, nor even a relationship of logical inclusion, like the one existing between the individual and the class, since space is anterior to its alleged parts, which are always carved out of it. Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible. (Merleau-Ponty, 1958: 284)

Merleau-Ponty suggests space is in front of what constitutes it. Space is anterior (ahead in time) of what it is made up of. Therefore sound must catch up with space in order to fill it. In such a case sound is not only chasing space, constituting it, but also redefining it. Sound in the art gallery becomes the art gallery; the sound object becomes the context.

Florian Hecker’s installation changes the sterile white-cube environment of Sadie Coles’ gallery into a place of confusion and infection. It contrasts the comfortable, still experience of the subject’s body, with a dramatic, perplexing and hugely physical experience.

Again, it is clear that no causal relationship is conceivable between the subject and his body, his world or his society. Only at the cost of losing the basis of all my certainties can I question what is conveyed to me by my presence to myself. (Ibid: 504)

It is precisely within sound that one can lose physical certainty. When entirely immersed in a variety of sonic frequencies and intensities, we become aware of our own presence - the outside world renders itself conclusively unimportant. It is denied an existence and pushed away into unrecognisability by low hums, high squeaks, and attacking volumes of sound. Any references to external circumstances are actualised internally; they are the stuff of nostalgia, a version of history filtered through the self. There is no causal relationship between subject and body in sound, not because there is no correspondence between them, but precisely because they are so correspondent that they become one another; there is no separation between subject and body when immersed in sound; they are overwhelmingly united.
Pentaphonic Dark Energy is a purely aesthetic experience. The listening curator will acknowledge this pure and physical aesthetic of sound, encouraging and intensifying the experience in the art gallery. Musicality is not the only power sound possesses – there is also the pure volume and intensity of noise and sound devoid of 12-tone structural relations. By presenting a contrast to musical sound in the art gallery, the curator of contemporary sound art will dislocate sound art from the potentiality of musical listenability, forcing the gallery visitor to consider sound in its most pure and abstract form. By presenting music with abstract sound in the same curatorial space, the curator is not contextualising experimental sound practices within the history of music, but rather setting up a scenario where the very basis of the socioaural cannot be questioned because of the presence of musical sound. The human emotional response to musical sound will always win over abstract sound when the two forms are presented together in the same exhibition – history shows us this.

There must be a complete liberation of abstract sound from musicality and visuality in order to present sound art as an autonomous and progressive contemporary discipline. The space in which it should be presented is dark - the possibility of seeing removed. The gallery visitor should not consciously be hearing, for as neurobiological research shows, hearing is an act with two levels of understanding: linguistic and musical. Instead, the visitor should listen (attend to sound), not to their past (socioaural) experiences of sound, but to their bodies and the physical intensity that occurs. The aesthetic experience of sound art is not one of listening to the sound itself, but rather of listening to the body, and its interaction with sound and space. Appreciating abstract sound is to ‘feel’ sound, to understand the phenomena of tactility and spatio-temporality.

Grime is dead! Long live UK Funky!

2009-05-26T13:03:00.020+01:00

My long-time friend Ali came over last night and we discussed, as we always do, her 'Real Drama' theatre project from which she had just arrived, having been at the weekly meet in the NT foyer (due to the bank holiday their usual meeting place was closed so they decided to infiltrate a much-used public space to rehearse in instead, good idea I say - and they didn't get chucked out either!). Aside from one guilty American, who over-actively and patronizingly [sic] commented on how it was great to see 'vulnerable youths' doing something with their time, there was no bother and the rehearsal/sing-off went down a treat.

Ali and I then got on to the topic of grime, dubstep and skank dancing - which she has discussed and participated in at length with her youth group, and as a result has quite a lot of interesting things to say, and demonstrate, on such matters (some of which I am regurgitating here). As a middle-class white Londoner, all of my insights into black urban music come from four sources: my two-year stint living with much sunlight on the 5th floor of the Wendover block on the Aylesbury Estate (also see these abhorrent plans for its regeneration), Wire (the magazine), youtube and Ali. I think Ali is by far the most accurate.

Anyhow, so the story goes, grime and dubstep are old hat, and the ever-changing morphology of trend has produced a hybrid form of grime which sounds a bit like electro with funky house tendencies! I wanted dirtier and bassier, and what I got was synthier and more production-hungry. I think it sounds a bit like Paul Hardcastle or even a slightly faster digital version of Marc Almond (think Tears Run Rings with Skepta's voice replacing Marc's):

Example 1:

Example 2:

After that Ali showed me how to skank-dance to it. You start with these moves:

And then:

And then (with a strangely Lynchian introduction):

And finally (as the NHS probably suggest):

The Grapes Are Sour Anyway! - The Photography of Karen Knorr

2009-05-25T19:05:00.016+01:00

The Passage, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 2008.

All images copyright Karen Knorr/Villa Savoye series courtesy of the Le Corbusier Foundation. Originally published in Hotshoe International, April/May issue, 2009.

In his book Science and the Arts (1935), Jacob Opper describes the change in the theory of nature from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century as one that involves a shift from Cartesian and Newtonian mechanics, to biology – the science of life. It is this turn from the rigidity of mathematical physics to natural history that sparked a parallel movement in the arts of the time. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who eerily shares his place of birth with Karen Knorr (Frankfurt-on-main), straddled this change in the sciences and carved out one of the most prolific series of writings of the age of enlightenment. These writings are best known as works of fiction (namely the great tragedy Faust,) but also prolific to the time were his developments of scientific study - particularly anatomy and colour theory. In 1784 Goethe published his independent discovery of the inter-maxillary bone in man, therefore relating man to other ‘higher animals’ and understanding that man and nature are fundamentally tied in evolution; governed by the same natural principles. It is these discoveries in good science that should force a perceivable equality between man and animal today, so why then, is an imbalance still prevalent?

The Shelf, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 2008.

Nature and man-made culture are antithetic; they are distinct in as much as nature, on the one hand, retains a certain integrity and honesty, and mankind, on the other hand, seems to thrive on the principles of greed, arrogance and deceit. As nature and mankind have drifted apart, nature, which was once by its very definition natural, has become a spectacle. The appearances of the objects of nature into the built space or environment of the modern city come as a surprise to us - they are somehow regarded unnatural (the fox in my garden, the mouse in my kitchen, the pigeon in my chimney). It is this incongruity between objects and space that is central to Knorr’s photographic practice.

On two levels, the taxidermised animals - as foreign objects unusual or ‘other’ to the environment they inhabit - recall the central intent of the pagan fable. The first level represents the traditional definition of the fable as a fictional narrative that uses animal characters to teach a moral lesson. For example Aesop’s The Fox and the Grapes where the central and only protagonist, a fox in this case, realises he cannot reach the grapes he desires and therefore defaults to a position of indifference, exclaiming “The grapes are sour anyway!” – the moral of the story being – “it is easy to despise what you cannot get”. And the second, more complex and to some extent subversive level, admirably seeks to hold the anti-humanist position that animals need not be anthropomorphised by the writers of folkloric literature in order to teach a moral lesson to humankind; but instead, simply by being their animal selves, they are equally capable of moral teaching. In this sense Knorr’s work removes the need for allegorical storytelling, and uses the animals in their purest, non-fictional form to deliver a striking ethical lesson. These animals are removed from their natural habitat as a means to directly compare ‘pure nature’ with ‘high culture’.

The Stairs, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 2008.

In these images the photographed animals defy the construction of human spaces for solely human use; they enter into our domain reducing the human-defined gap that separates animal nature (as base and untamed), and human culture (as relatively advanced and refined). By appropriating the fable, Knorr represents this gap between nature and culture and calls into question the very logic of the institutions in which the animals are placed. By re-staging nature in the built environment by way of positioning these animals in a variety of museum spaces, Knorr seeks to question why cultural institutions such as the museum remain so fundamentally unnatural. Many museums are, after all, narcissistic reminders of human cultural worth - built and adored by humans themselves - which deny entry to nature other than by way of pictorial representation. Museums are, as art theorist Danielle Rice has put it (referring to a consensus amongst theorists) “ideological symbols of the power relationships in today’s culture.”

The Rooftop, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 2008.

Circa 1929, Swiss architect Le Corbusier completed his Villa Savoye, a building that would come to epitomise high-modernism. Just prior to the Second World War, the building developed a structural fault in the roof (initially designed so it’s flat surface could be of some practical use to its owners), but has since been fully restored and made available for public viewing. It has, quite literally, become a museum.

“The idea of this house is that it is a free-flowing space that blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside. I chose birds as the animal type to go into this building because all the work with the animals and these architectural spaces is about blurring the boundaries, disrupting the boundaries, or transgressing the boundaries between nature and culture. These birds [the crane and the magpie] formally echo the architectural space with their colour; they are, in a way, playfully formalist devices. The building is very clean – you can’t imagine organic matter. The birds are unnatural in this environment, totally unnatural, like the building itself.” (Interview with the artist, February 2009.)

The slick, hard lines of Le Corbusier’s design contrast the natural and soft aerodynamic curvature of the birds in these Villa Savoye works. Both the shots taken in architecturally Baroque museums, and the newer pieces at the modern Villa Savoye, seem to point directly at some of the issues facing the art museum as a supposedly accessible cultural institution today. In his essay Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era, Nick Prior recounts Bourdieu and Darbel’s 1969 study of art museum audiences. This study reveals the poignantly elitist nature of museum culture as a phenomenon that breeds and reinforces social difference (class, education, distinctions between high and low culture). Although the situation has vastly improved since the late sixties, with more diverse education programs and increased museum visitor numbers being recorded (surely a reflection of museums doing better work?), there is still an issue prevalent, elucidated by Knorr’s concerns of why, when directly compared to nature, such institutions remain fundamentally unnatural and possibly immoral? Her appropriation of the fable into a photographic device necessarily raises this fundamentally important issue.

Installation shot, Gallerie Cenrale Electrique, Brussels, 2008.

Knorr’s work subverts the power of the museum setting. While creating artworks of visual beauty and conceptual clarity (a pairing rare in much contemporary art), Knorr’s photography consistently challenges the spectator’s assumptions about the nature of representation, and indeed, the representation of nature within the art museum.

From a curatorial perspective, it is work such as this that functions well as an apéritif to exhibition strategising; by way of its critique of high culture it provides a lucid reminder of the ever-pervading didacticism in contemporary museum curatorial practice (important, as we have now just been subjected to the next implausible neologism, ‘altermodern,’ courtesy of the Tate Britain’s Gulbenkian Curator of Contemporary Art).

In conclusion, Karen Knorr’s photographic practice is a constant reminder of the essentially unnatural phenomenon of the classist, hierarchical structure of modern society. It is within the very institutions that Knorr photographs, and in turn displays her work, that these issues still ubiquitous in contemporary culture can be most readily understood.

Installation shot, Gallerie Cenrale Electrique, Brussels, 2008.

Beginnings

2009-05-25T16:02:00.015+01:00

I've been obsessing over these today, asking myself what the man who once showed so much promise with his lo-fi Brixton-hop thought exactly he was doing with everything (well, most things) that followed his first release proper, Brand New Second Hand. It serves well as a point of contrast (in a strange regressive way) with Dizzee Rascal's Butterfly - recent b-side to the single Bonkers. Simon Reynolds' Guardian blog post on Butterfly hitting no.1 in the singles chart can be read here. The b-side is much more worth the listen in my humble opinion, however.