August 23rd, 2010
A Fine Line is the latest exhibition at Fabrica, by the Belgian artist Frederic Geurts.
With one week left of the show, and after invigilating the show, each time I thought I would finally be able to make sense of the work, perhaps understand it fully and appreciate what the artist achieved. I wanted to write about it for this blog but have found it hard because sadly, after countless times looking at it, I still have no feeling for it.
The sculpture was made as a response to the gallery. A fine line. An intuitive gesture and a counterpoint to the formal solidity of the surrounding architecture. The artist’s work is all about creating sculptures that are on the verge of chaos, structures which are seemingly fragile and on the edge of a tipping point, but in reality are strong and sturdy. I just felt that this just doesn’t work in the space. When I study it, I only see other ways in which it could work better, it seems to have an air of the unfinished, it maybe should have more space instead of seeming to fall and rest on one side of the hall. I liked the model of the sculpture that we were shown whilst he was putting the final touches together, but i just don’t think it translated well to this scale.
I see other works previous and understand his ideas and process. Looking at these I see the monumental works which are often held at a point of balance between forces of gravity, movement and material integrity. But I don’t think A Fine Line is one of his best.
UPDATE:
strangely in one final twist, or shift in weight.. the sculpture tipped over a week before the exhibition is to close. During my final volunteer shift for this exhibition I strangely and finally became excited about the work which is all about balance, the tipping point and chaos. I found an interest to talk about and I finally connected with it in it’s unfortunate state. It was about creating a dynamic line, and supporting it where it always seemed precarious but was in fact sturdy. Well, not after all. Over time the weight of the top-heavy plaster installation had its way and shifted causing the sculpture to fall to the side. But in ways it was the experiment in trying to create this balance maybe was the point and the challenge which sadly failed this time… but will probably be learnt from and work the next.
Tags: A fine line, fabrica, Frederic Geurts
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July 16th, 2010
janek schaefer
asleep at the wheel (Installation for IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2010)
Walking into the disused Sainsbury’s I didn’t expect to see such a vast dark open empty space that used to be a haven for consumerist culture. Maybe thats why this installation fits so perfectly.
In the far end is a fake road, with three lanes and perhaps around ten cars, all with their lights and blinkers on as if stuck in a traffic jam that will never dissipate.
The windows are covered as if it’s been raining and they’ve partially steamed up inside. It’s dark.. the car beckons.. so I open a back door and take a seat.
The radios of each of the cars play their own ‘radio’ crafted by Schaefer himself, and the subjects all vary around how we are living ‘with the expectation that the road goes on forever. Society’s pedal to the metal attitude to our world is not sustainable and is running out of road.’ (Schaefer).
Changing from the back seat of car to car, i felt like I was trapped in some fucked up traffic jam, hearing how we are simply ruining the world without care.. wait, i guess that’s usual in cars when you hear the news. But this time there was a sense that things can be different if we simply just said no more. But I hear this and know this and I still feel like I’m in this traffic jam. I’m stuck here and can’t get out of it until the cars in front move first. Maybe this is a point. Maybe there is no traffic jam. I can just get out of this car and walk where I want to go. We should’t have to wait for the ‘cars’ in front to move before we do. And therein lies part of the exhibition and it’s association with the 10:10 initiative. How we, I, you can make an effort.
www.1010global.org
The installation reminded me of Before I Sleep in Brighton in ways. The unexpected immersive experience in a very unexpected surrounding. In both cases disused consumer buildings and both with their connotations of the state of our consumer culture. If you are anywhere near Milton Keynes.. it’s definitely worth a look.
Tags: asleep at the wheel, IFMK, international festival, janek schaefer, milton keynes
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April 21st, 2010
Today i had my first shift invigilating at brian eno’s 77 million paintings exhibition for the Brighton Festival at Fabrica.
I was quite excited when i got there before it opened as the lights were on and i could quickly glance at the structure of screens before shrouded in darkness. After the lights go out you only see the large screens emanate colour shape and form like intense sunlight through a stained glass window.
The work itself has been exhibited in venues across the world already in slightly varying formats but feels so apt positioned in the alter of an old church. The piece compels people to surrender to it and you find visitors sitting comfortably on the couches for easily 15 minutes at a time. Brian Eno describes it as almost being a religious piece for this reason. He has said that the artwork is equal to drugs, sex or religion in this act of surrender, you find yourself slowing down to the rhythm of the piece in an almost meditative way. People stay longer than they probably ever would looking at a painting or photograph.x
In the atmosphere of the church and the layout of the couches it could almost be the most comfortable pews with the artwork acting as a priest or minister, but instead of preaching the bible, the art just emanates a state of serenity.
Whilst on my first shift I was fascinated by how Brian Eno arrived down and watched the piece for perhaps 20 mins. He had told us that he tended to view the work every now and again, being its biggest fan, and loved to see all the various combinations that evolved. Being a potential 77 million I guess it would take awhile to tire of it. I found it inspiring that he easily finds the same excitement in the work as the person sitting on the next couch who knows perhaps little about how it works or maybe about him. In this way it transcends borders built by galleries where it is accessible to everyone without the need to understand it or be a critic of any sort.
Walking out Eno was amused by someone’s comment in the guestbook “Better than McDonald’s”. A strange comment to make indeed as I can’t really see the relation. McDonald’s as a meditative artistic space? Maybe it could be a development of their faux attempt to go green.
Tags: 77 million paintings, brian eno, brighton, fabrica, festival
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April 20th, 2010
I got home tonight just before midnight and stepped into the backyard to take a moment. Looking out over the east side of Brighton, there was a light fog covering the city and few sounds echoed up the hill.
I remembered being on a trip to Florence with my art school over ten years ago. Obviously there to check out the great city of the Renaissance and all its great art, but I remember being struck by some other art. In the hotel, on the shitty television, Madonna’s latest video was on. She hadn’t released anything for awhile and I was surprised to see and hear it. I turned it up. The song instantly got me. It was alot darker and very different from what she had released before and the video complimented this. The video showed her dressed in black, moving and dancing in the desert and I was struck by its brilliance. The song was ‘Frozen’, and I soon found out that the director was a guy called Chris Cunningham.
It was still at least 5 years before I would begin to make music videos but the seed was planted.
From then on, I followed, like many, the genius of Chris Cunningham, never failing to create astounding and amazing edited videos. My work had always involved visuals and animation to tracks that I loved, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would come to direct and edit music videos always looking up to this master of the genre.
Ten years later my passion for making music videos had been quelled and I got more involved with writing music. A natural evolution for someone who played instruments and worked closely with the Belfast music scene. Music has become an important form of expression for me but tonight I re-found something I hadn’t felt in awhile. Not sure whether I could afford it or not, I bit the bullet and bought a ticket to see Chris Cunningham at Brighton Dome. I would regret it if I didn’t, and I was keen to see what he was up too these days. I wasn’t disappointed.
The show was an audio/visual feast of pscyho-sexual-violent imagery, remixing past video work with new videos cut along to their respective music which was also remixed. Playing a false start as if the equipment failed to work, a screen showed him plugging in, lights activated, lasers kicked off and it began. The series of shots soon led into a remix of his video art installation Flex, first shown in 2000 at the Apocalypse exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art. A show that for me bettered the infamous Sensations the previous year. Even though I was familiar with the piece, he managed to take it to new levels. The naked couple, embroiled in graphic sex and violence now beat each other and fucked to the new electronic track. Full-on yes, especially on the large screens watching the close-up of a guy pull his foreskin back while standing over a woman beaten and bleeding. Next up was from a promo for The Horrors Sheena is a parasite starring Samantha Morton. I only just watched the original video now… great tune, and video, but nothing could compare to it presented on the big screen and remixed longer to a typically dark aphex twin style track. My jaw stayed dropped for a long time, my eyes wide open, I was almost horrified at this girl freak almost possessed by music and lifting her dress to expel who knows what toward the camera.. but I was loving every minute. The atmosphere was like a festival, it was intense and being right up at the front looking up at the screens amplified this.
This was simply amazing, and I instantly re-found my desire to create video/visuals to music again, even though it could never be as good as this.
The only disappointing thing about the show was that it ended too suddenly and on a calmer track based on New York is Killing Me by Gil Scott-Heron. It was, however, a stunning sequence based on the New York subways. The show ended, and I hate encores.. but the mind went wild thinking, what about All Is Full of Love, what about Come to Daddy, what other footage could he have performed… but it was over… and it WAS amazing… just go and see it.
Tags: brighton, chris cunningham, dome
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March 31st, 2010
While in Belfast to perform at the IMRO showcase, I quickly pooped in to see The Lives Of Spaces Exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery. This show included work originally shown at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice 2008.
All based around architecture and space, presented through video, I was fascinated in the different physical ways used to present the footage. The photo above is taken of the show in Venice. There were photographs of the original show showing the installations in an old Venetian building and it made the work all the more striking.
The videos and their soundtracks created a very ambient atmosphere. One of my favourites was Real-Unreal by McCullough Mulvin Architects. I posed a very important question. To take directly from their statement:
Do architects ever dream of their spaces in use? If they do, are they visions of control rather than open-ended acceptance of flux? How does the exotic circus of real life affect the visionary original? Can they be weighted against one another? Can they be read in unison? And what might be learnt from the comparison?
The work focuses on the Waterford Library.
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March 31st, 2010
I went to a lecture in the ‘In Conversation’ series at Brighton University between Ken Loach & Terry Atkinson. The Filmmaker & Artist (respectively) spoke about their art forms and experiences throughout the years particularly in relation to politics and how it informed, aided or hindered their process.
It was quite a fascinating discussion and there was a fair amount of time reflected on Northern Irish politics. Growing up in Northern Ireland, our history and politics was the focus of half our historical studies, the other half being the World Wars and subsequent Cold War and any other Twentieth century war that was going.. all about war, war and more war and political struggle. It fascinated me when Terry said he was never taught about Northern Irish politics at school. It was something they avoided, therefore encouraging English thought that why were the Irish fighting amongst themselves and why were they hitting out at England?
I asked a few English friends after and they said the same, that they were never really taught about it at school. Interesting eh. Do you think they avoid talking about Iraq and the Gulf Wars in schools aswell?
Aside from Politics they mentioned their schooling systems. They spoke about the 11+ and how crazy that was back in the day and how it hindered learning.. but don’t we still have that in Northern Ireland? I know changes are being made and education is going through big makeovers at home, but my generation still had that exam.
Funnily I scanned in my sketch book with the notes I took, because I thought I wouldn’t remember much to write about. So here it is too, my doodles as I listened:
Tags: brighton, in conversation, ken loach, nothern ireland, politics, terry atkinson, university
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February 23rd, 2010
Sam asked us to find some kind of data-visualisation or feed-based project and after a looking around sites which Mary had recommended to us, there was a project in particular which caught my eye..
FM Radio Map by Simon Elvins
My group has talked about producing a piece centred around audio and is still floating ideas around but this piece attracted my attention as it not only visualises data of where commercial and pirate radio stations are around London..but by placing pins into the map at radio station locations, it broadcasts the audio from that station through a circuit board system. Although we have talked about various software we aim to use, it is interesting to see a more physical piece to interact with.
I have also been inspired by a more modern take on William Burrough’s Tape Cut-Ups.
Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups (3:43)
K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens (13:29)
William Burrough’s is famous for his fiction and cut and paste method of writing novels, typing pages of text, cutting the pages up then re-pasting sections together at random. He developed the idea and began to record audio, sounds and words on tape and would cut the tape and re-stick the pieces at random, creating new words and sentences at random as the tape played.
Our group has spoken about taking stories from countries participating in the Olympics and maybe we could use this idea in a modern digital way to create new, more abstract yet maybe universal stories…
just found this video clip somebody made using one of Burrough’s audio:
▶
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February 4th, 2010
After a long day with Jorn Ebner, I hung around for the talk with Bonnie Mitchell in the Lighthouse that evening.
She is an acclaimed digital artist and academic and has developed numerous interactive installations. The works began with the advent of the internet back in the early 1990’s and have developed since Chain Reaction, a manipulation of images by people around the world. An original image was uploaded and passed on to someone via the internet, the next person altered it, uploaded it and passed it on. The interest was in how the work developed over the generations of transfer.
Her work now comes in the form of fully immersive installations, reactive audio/visual projections controlled by programming to affect the participants emotion, usually with an element of philosophy.
The works are a more successful method of achieving her aims of setting out to affect the viewer. It was interesting t0 hear that she finds online art never as successful as installation simply because we are programmed to see computers as tools which function for information and work rather than as a potential as being an art piece.
Through predictions of what would become popular or successful with the internet, she is quite surprised at the modern values in privacy and how we have become accustomed to having our personal lives and data freely available for all to see.
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February 4th, 2010
Jorn showed his various works at The Lighthouse. Online works which he found hard to update to suit the browsers as they develop and change so rapidly and his works rely on them. To combat this he has the idea to develop his own browser which will always display the work as intended.
Makes sense. But it made me realise that works online probably will never last by the nature of its constant development. He said maybe the internet as we know it won’t exist in the future. That may seem a little extreme but I understood what he meant.
I also enjoyed his various songs created quite lo-fi, reminding me that songs don’t have to always be so polished to be enjoyable.
Later we all chatted about project number 2, involving social networking. Thats what I’m currently researching at the moment.
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February 4th, 2010
Our class went to the V&A Museum to see the DECODE: Digital Design Sensations exhibition and the Digital Pioneers exhibition.
The Curator of the Digital Pioneers exhibition gave us a talk and tour of the work on show, part of a new collection of work by the V&A of computer based art created between 1960’s and 1980’s. I found this time frame interesting as she said after this date, computers became more widespread in homes, whereas before it would only have been fewer artists and scientists or programmers who would have had access to this equipment and produced art using it.
The varied experimentation interested me, and also the fact that the type of art produced was still quite traditional, for example, in the form of print or photography.
There was video work to be added the next day and I hadn’t a real chance to take my own notes on the art, but I’ll be back up soon to view it again.
Downstairs is DECODE, a showcase of the latest developments in digital and interactive design. My second time visiting was better as it’s a small space with the artwork quite compacted in and viewing the first time on a busy Sunday took away from the enjoyment of it. With more time to breathe, physically and visually, I was able to take more of it in.
Still, there is alot of ideas that aren’t necessarily new, various ways of movement creating image, processing imagery, but it is the artists own take on the method and the programming that makes it interesting. Flight404’s Solar was a beautifully designed interactive piece where the sound you made separated and altered the particle like imagery.
My favourite was Weave Mirror by Daniel Rozin. The interactive installation captures the viewer on camera and reproduces the image using many interwoven discs. What made it more fascinating was being able to see the mass of electronic hardware behind it used to create the piece, being able to catch a glimpse of the complexity of what is going on.
This, I wondered, might be interesting in how the viewers might react to various works in the show. Alot of the initial works are flash or processing, moving imagery on a screen. To someone who does not know basic code or the kind of programming involved it may not have an impact. I have an understanding of what goes into to making those lines move, so am impressed. Others may not and may just see simple line.
The best comment came from a group of teen girls. I remember being younger and looking at abstract art whether that be a Pollock or someone else and thinking, “oh I could do that.” That kind of ignorance of process that has been involved to achieve the work. Well I heard the modern day version. The girls looked at… I think it was Swarm Draw by Joshua Davis, a piece made in Flash that constantly draws lines which fade to the background. When they found out it was made in Flash, one of them said, “Oh I could do that!”. I know I bloody well couldn’t and I’m sure she couldn’t either. I can use a paintbrush and flick paint but I couldn’t make a Pollock. I’m sure it’s the same for her and Flash how she spoke. But this amused me none the less.
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