John Baldessari, Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell (1966-68).
Guidelines research
Een mooi setje anamorphosis-foto’s van het werk van Felice Varini uit de jaren 80. Ditmaal in & rond een kerk en een kasteel.
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William Powhida, Oligopoly (Revised), 2011. Watercolor, acrylic ink, and colored pencil on panel
Mind map inspiration
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https://www.frieze.com/issue/review/lygia_clark1/
LYGIA CLARK
Psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and Corinne Diserens, Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, first collaborated on an exhibition dedicated to Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–88) five years ago. That retrospective brought together an impressive number of works and documents spanning three decades. It contextualized Clark’s pivotal role in the Rio de Janeiro-based Neo-Concrete movement (1959–61), which challenged rationalist Constructivism and promoted a subjective, organic interaction between the art work and the spectator; the show also revealed how Clark sustained those concerns throughout her career. Rolnik and Diserens’ second collaborative effort, subtitled ‘From work to event. We are the mould, it’s up to you to breathe substance into it’, focuses on the artist’s later production, notably on the experimental, collective ‘Nostalgia of the Body’ workshops she conducted at the Sorbonne in Paris during the early 1970s and on the individual therapeutic ‘Structuration of the Self’ sessions she undertook on her return to Rio in 1976.
The curators aimed to establish a ‘memory’ of Clark’s radicalization of the relationship between, artist, work-object and spectator through a presentation of archives, documents and, to a much lesser extent and effect, art works. Monumentally enlarged photographs of Clark’s corporeal experiments, which she called ‘propositions’, were arranged around the vast, luminous internal courtyard of the 19th-century Beaux-Arts museum. The architecture dwarfed the pictures as well as the tent set up for viewing Rolnik’s 52 video interviews with Clark’s friends, acquaintances, students and colleagues. The same interviews could be consulted individually at a self-service video station in the outer café space, which is what I did since the tent was being mounted when I arrived. Naturally, some of the portraits of Clark are more captivating than others. Without guidance the uninitiated viewer might find the prospect of sifting through the dozens of DVDs daunting.
While we never actually see Clark in the interviews, two documentaries presented on monitors in the central space – The World of Lygia Clark (1973) and Memory of the Body (1984) – help to clarify our image of the artist and her work. The former contains footage of her communal, psycho-sensorial experiments, such as the disconcerting Baba antropofágica (1973). A person lying on the floor is surrounded by a group of people with spools of coloured thread in their mouths. The standing participants unravel the saliva-coated thread from their mouths onto the supine figure, and then they collectively lift off the cocoon. In the latter video we witness an individual ‘Structuration of the Self’ session. Clark presents and describes her ‘relational objects’ – plastic bags filled with air, seashells, padded cloth, stones caught in nets – which she then rubs against or simply places on and around the naked body of her male ‘client’. She extends a rubber tube from her lips to his ear and blows or gently clucks through it. When the session ends, the man declares, ‘It was as if I was all surface, the place where we meet the world.’ At once kooky and clinical, it is an excruciatingly intimate interaction to watch.
Some of the original ‘relational objects’ invented and used by Clark are safely delimited in a no-touch zone. Given the progressive disappearance of the aesthetic object from Clark’s work, these feel like relics. Replicas are provided on two tables, and we are encouraged to explore them and their uses. These include the ‘Máscaras Sensoriais’ (Sensory Masks, originally 1967), coloured hoods with sewn-in noise-making elements, aromatic seeds or herbs, and ocular obstacles that provoke and destabilize the senses. Photo-documentation shows these masks being used in a group exercise; on my own and claustrophobic, I missed the element of ritual. I sniffed at them, peeked through them and shook them about but did not dare cover my head.
In a show largely consisting of documentation or material traces of experiences that were not made for display, the inclusion of Clark’s paintings, early wall pieces, the ‘Casulos’ (Cocoons, 1959) and ‘Contra-relevos’ (Counter-reliefs, 1959), and her hinged sculptures the ‘Bichos’ (Animals, 1960–3), grouped together in an area that is not visible from the central space, was disorienting. Not because they highlight the fact that certain items are more artful than others, or because painting and sculpture throw us back into our comfort zones, but because each item brings into play a different mode of attention and solicits its own form of response. Clark was a great advocate of reciprocity, and perhaps no exhibition can really deliver on her promise. All I know is that, facing the works on the walls after catching a glimpse of the artist’s later propositions, I felt a heightened awareness of my physical presence as part of a more anonymous public, rather than the vital, psycho-social fabric Clark envisaged.
Vivian Rehberg
image:Baba Antropofágica
CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE STROZZINA: Manipulating reality 09/2009-01/2010
The exhibition focuses on the meaning of the term “reality” in contemporary artistic research, as it explores different ways of visually representing the world in the ambiguity that lies between the real and the verisimilar, the concrete and the apparent, the present and the past.
In today’s mass-media society, only what becomes image is considered real. In a process of reversal, the representation of the world comes to replace the world itself, a world in which the user operates digitally.
Several different scientific disciplines have already defined a paradigmatic change when they contend that the “real world” does not exist as an independent category, merely as a projection or a construction by the individual; and this, even though in daily life we still tend to raise concepts of reality and truth to the lofty rank of objective facts, on which we then base our actions and our beliefs.
Photography and video art have always been based on the conflict between recording reality and, at the same time, becoming themselves a falsification of that reality. Today, with the spreading popularity of easy-to-use digital technology and the massive dissemination of images through the mass media and the Internet, that ambiguity has if anything increased, pushing the conflict between appearance and reality to its outer edges and demanding that the spectator play an active role in defining what he or she is seeing as real.
Rather than set itself the impossible goal of finding the answer to the question of the nature of a reality reproducible in image form, the exhibition Manipulating Reality presents a selection of 23 artistic approaches that work through photography and video to develop possible models of reality. Its aim is not to understand whether photographs can convey reality but how this can occur. The works exhibited represent different artistic strategies addressing the construction, reflection or distortion of reality in images. In addition to investigating the value of documentary photography today, many of the artists presented reflect in part the conditions of the tool of photography and adopt known artistic techniques such as collage, presentation in model form, abstraction and the assemblage of different elements. Visitors find themselves faced with different constructions of reality, thus being prompted to reconsider their criteria for what is real and subject them to critical reappraisal in the light of the works exhibited.
http://www.strozzina.org/manipulatingreality/e_about.php#content
Mik thus reverses his customary artistic practice but obtains the same effect in making us aware of the sheer lunacy of a society in which children or old people take up arms in the name of centuries-old nationalistic sentiments. The critical attack is, however, aimed above all at the viewer. While exposing the media’s censorship and manipulation of information, the artist is primarily concerned to challenge the common sense of decency of people who feel a morbid curiosity or attraction with respect to these images but nevertheless remain inert and passive.
Raw Footage is an assemblage of television footage shot during the civil war in former Yugoslavia but discarded by the news agencies not particularly interesting or useful for the purposes of coverage. Commonplace but incredible at the same time, the scenes bear witness to the war in all its “rawness” with non-manipulated images, as the title of the work suggests. Soldiers and civilians intermingle. Shooting and fires form a background to the actions of ordinary people doing their jobs or walking through the streets.
The second installation in the Situation Envisaged series and first shown at
South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, England 1980.
‘Sixteen domestic TV receivers are arranged in a circle; each facing away from the viewer into the enclosed space; each playing a different TV channel from the next.. A videotape playing on a revolving monitor is glimpsed at the centre through small gaps.. each so fine that vision is restricted.. suggesting an attempt to assemble information coherently as the viewer moves from one to the next. In doing so, the continuum is broken. Expectations of narrative progression are both implied and rejected.. sometimes phasing (by coincidence) with the movements of the viewer, sometimes not. Fragments seen are of private ritual.. The work confronts issues of power and the individual; the public and the private; the viewer and the viewed…’ DH, from notes for the exhibition, 1980.
http://www.davidhallart.com/id4.html
