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Yayoi Kusama and her beautiful dots
| Filed under david shrigley, dots, hayward, kusama, psychology, tate modern, yayoi, yayoi kusama
Yayoi Kusama
After visiting Kusama's exhibition on Friday (24th Feb) we left dot-dazzled, Kusama's dots are a form of catharsis to a woman seized by childhood torment and psychological trauma. Highlight of the show were the installation rooms at the end. Kusama and David Shrigley are reasons why art can be fun - even when it is drawn from dark underlying meaning.
Joy and Woe (up and running)
Latest video.
Stewart Home Workshop "Create your own novel in 4 weeks"
| Filed under art, creative writing, deconstruction, dorian gray, new vs old, oscar wilde, stewart home, traditional, writing
My half-hearted attempt at mixing both Dorian Gray and Lord of the Flies.
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. Though he had taken off his sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another.
'Hi!' it said, 'wait a minute!'
The undergrowth at the side of the scar was shaken and a multitude of raindrops fell pattering.
'Wait a minute,' the voice said, 'I got caught up.'
The fair boy stopped and jerked his stockings with an automatic gesture that made the jungle seem for a moment like the Home Counties.
The voice spoke again.
'I can't hardly move with all these creeper things.'
The owner of the voice came backing out of the undergrowth so that twigs scratched on a greasy wind-breaker. The naked crooks of his knees were plump, caught and scratched by thorns. He bent down, removed the thorns carefully, and turned round. He was shorter than the fair boy and very fat.
He came forward, searching out safe lodgements for his feet, and then looked up through thick spectacles.
'Where's the man with the megaphone?'
The fair boy shook his head.
'This is an island. At least I think it's an island. That's a reef out in the sea. Perhaps there aren't any grown-ups anywhere.' The fat boy looked startled.
'There was that pilot. But he wasn't in the passenger tube, he was up in the cabin in front.'
The fair boy was peering at the reef through screwed-up eyes. 'All them other kids,' the fat boy went on. 'Some of them must have got out. They must have, mustn't they?'
'What's your name?'
'Ralph.'
The fat boy waited to be asked his name in turn but this proffer of acquaintance was not made; the fair boy called Ralph smiled vaguely, stood up, and began to make his way once more towards the lagoon. The fat boy hung steadily at his shoulder.
'I expect there's a lot more of us scattered about. You haven't seen any others have you?'
Ralph shook his head and increased his speed. Then he tripped over a branch and came down with a crash, he lifted himself up dusting himself down, exclaiming ‘my Auntie told me not to run’, but the other boy wasn’t listening. Ralph looked up from his dirty shirt to see what the other boy was looking at. A small building in the distance, enveloped in a silvery light which flickered and radiated the sun’s rays, it was encased in a bed of untamed flowers which had grown for years. The boys were mesmerized by the rich colours that embraced the small bungalow as they walked hypnotically across the shoreline out of the forest.
The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coco-nuts and palm saplings.
When they approached the building, they realized the building was more vast and overgrown than they initially realized. The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Earley Gaten could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs. His calmness was disturbed by the two visitors who trudged into the studio curiously, their shadows were a constant attachment to their slow pace and remained permanent in comparison to the fantastic shadows of the birds in flight whicih flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains. They had not yet seen him, and if he remained hidden behind his large armchair, he would refrain from disturbing them back until it was absolutely necessary.
Piggy had gathered the unfortunate nickname from Ralph, he shook his head, put on his flashing glasses and looked across at Ralph as they walked slowly into the studio.
‘Didn't you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They're all dead.'
Ralph pulled himself out of the water, stood facing Piggy, and considered this unusual problem.
Piggy persisted.
'This is a studio, isn't it?'
'I climbed a rock,' said Ralph slowly, 'and 1 think this is an studio.'
'They're all dead,' said Piggy, 'an' this is an studio. Nobody don't know we're here. Your dad don't know, nobody don't know-'
His lips quivered and the spectacles were dimmed with mist. 'We may stay here till we die.'
The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of the crash echoed like a distant organ into the studio. The boys’ conversation ran dry of its own accord as they silently walked through the corridor; at the end it opened like an estuary into another room where there sat a huge velvet armchair, but immediately the boys were struck by the room on the right hand side, it was clustered with props and objects. 'If it really is a studio -' 'What's that?'
Ralph had stopped smiling and was pointing into the clustered room. Something creamy lay among the fruit. 'A stone.'
'No. A shell.'
Suddenly Piggy was a-bubble with decorous excitement, they had forgotten that they were trespassing, in all the madness and their delirium they had forgotten the basic principle of territory, but at this moment, the object of still life held their undivided attention.
'S'right. It's a shell. I seen one like that before. On someone's back wall. A conch he called it. He used to blow it and then his mum would come. It's ever so valuable-'
Near to Ralph's elbow, a palm sapling leaned out over the lagoon. Indeed, the weight was already pulling a lump from the poor soil and soon it would fall. He tore out the stem and began to poke about in the water, while the brilliant fish flicked away on this side and that. Piggy leaned dangerously.
'Careful! You'll break it-' 'Shut up.'
Ralph spoke absently. The shell was interesting and pretty and a worthy plaything: but the vivid phantoms of his daydream still interposed between him and Piggy, who in this context was an irrelevance. The palm sapling, bending, pushed the shell across the weeds. Ralph used one hand as a fulcrum and pressed down with the other till the shell rose, dripping, and Piggy could make a grab.
Now the shell was no longer a thing seen but not to be touched, Ralph too became excited. Piggy babbled:
'- a conch; ever so expensive. I bet if you wanted to buy one, you'd have to pay pounds and pounds and pounds - he had it on his garden wall, and my auntie-'
‘Shh,’ said Ralph, after hearing the screeching of a chair…the armchair, they thought. Ralph turned around to see the gallery then expanded into a far greater space, the size of a small warehouse, open and white. The two boys crept further into the space.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. Piggy had to stifle his laughter, triggered by the melodramatic actions of the artist, they both stood behind the arches leading into this room unsure of what this zany artist was going to do next.
Suddenly Lord Earley’s voice echoed from behind them, startling them, but he didn’t seem to care for these visitors, he saw them as weak, their limping shadows convinced him they would be better as allies.
"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said Lord Earley languidly walking past the two boys. "You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place."
"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford, as he did so he noticed the two boys. "No, I won't send it anywhere – do we have guests?’
Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement, seeming to ignore the latter question, through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."
"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it." Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.
Tea.
Installation and pictures of painting.
Hypomovement.
Stop moving. Stop moving so completely and utterly fast. Why is quicker better. Why is the next thing better than the last. The duality of past and present. The sense that we are stuck in limbo. Limbo. Like a movement with no direction, ongoing. Interactive, social. Old not new.
soundboard from kasumi on Vimeo.
SOUNDBOARD investigates the potential for meaning that adheres in increments of physical movement: the marks it leaves through the materials of motion and sound. Using only the sound created from the dancers’ bodies as they come in contact with the floor and each other, it is a study of the human body as it marks its position in space and time, and the very intimate, organizing rhythms that musical force brings to the equation of world and self. Muscles and tendons, joints and skin respond to the recursive structure of repetitive musical forms, conjured into movement, into dance and music. SOUNDBOARD seems to have evolved from a similar aesthetic of the intensely controlled spontaneity of my large scale ink drawings (shodo) dating from the late 1980’s while still in Japan.
Dead Man Walking...
The video plays between the duality of stillness and movement, one emphasises the other and vice versa. The overlapping layer which contains the most movement lacks the opacity seen in the main video screen and suggests this ephemeral, ghostly feel which captures the viewers attention as it illuminates the faces of the two still individuals at the front. Dead Man Walking exploits the Creed-ian idea that if movement is the height of vitality, then stillness must equate to death (bit extreme), but for dancers, stillness is the conviction, it's boredom, it's mental paralysis. The movement here works like a level of consciousness, a sense of desire to become free and undetained.
Inspirations Kurt Hentschlager - interesting use of fluid abstract shadows, built up in layers --> Click
John Cage - can't stop thinking about 4'33, the sense of doing nothing, which equates to something, a finished product just like the dancers are doing nothing, they are not dancing but they are functioning as something else altogether --> Click
I developed the videos so the dancers appear more clearly.
What we are presented is an eskewed portrayal of a conflict between what to look at, what to believe is a visual transcription of a mind talking, a dream, or what is infact the real-est out of the two. Is dancing an act and forced or is it the most natural form of movement, and stillness forced.
Capoeira
Speaking to the dancers, there is a potential to develop a narrative, perhaps to involve a piece of drama. It would be interesting to place these dancers under a spotlight on a stage setting. To film them with a piece of video projected on top of them completely still. All of this set up will be recorded and then placed back into the gallery. This will involve, the layering of complete opposites - stillness and movement. Through video I will then take it back to the gallery where I will project it and thus continue and ongoing framing of a video framed and layered.
Next week involves this filming. Watch this space.
Inspirations I watched this video initially for the dancers, however, the Seaweed video presented at the beginning is a piece of work developed by two artists practicing in London, still trying to get hold of them, it's proving pretty impossible. The dancers are incredible and a massive influence (here).
Out of the ordinary...
11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University
This video celebrates the 'slowness' of movement, the dynamics of each move is emphasised because each gesture is slowed down to such a degree we are sensitive to every movement. Movement is a way of designing space, like Creed once referred to appropriation as the manipulate of the air we breathe and the space we move in.
What about the movements we do but placed in a different context. Carsten Holler's exhibition in the US focusses upon 'experience', obviously within the exhibition environment and the gallery context. The fairground ride is the epitome of repetition, it places a number of people within the same mechanical transporation...
Research in Ballroom Dancing.....in context.....
Life In One Day
A video which aims to hijack our concept or perception of where we are and what we're looking at, how quickly is time passing by, and the assurance and consistency in repeating ourselves. There's no anxiety when we know what to expect.
Nedko Solakov
At the mention of Jameson's metaphor of art being a 'speech in a dead language' relates to the idea of postmodernity being a break in 'historicity' (is this even a word?!). We are in a state of chaos, no longer running along a natural historical timeline that once existed which should therefore prompt much more exciting work which is created in entirely new conditions. This work below suggests Solakov's attempt to make a new language via music.
Still reading about schizophrenia:
Time, Space, and Schizophrenia
Crucial to Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern and his project of a cultural politics is the transition from a temporal logic to a spatial logic in postmodernism. The global capitalist or late capitalist culture is, as we have seen, what Jameson calls postmodernism. The spatialization of time is a result of the destruction of the temporality of the subject, of societies move towards schizophrenia. Time is an organizing system, a continuity within which the subject may situate him/herself as a unitary individual. Within multinational capitalism we find ourselves able only to map the globe.
However it is critical for the subject to be able to mentally or cognitively map him/herself within not only a geographically global system but also within a social one. Humans used to map themselves temporally within the scheme of history. However, as the subject becomes more fragmentary, as the subject approaches a society within which one finds the end of historicity, the ‘real’ diminishes while schizophrenia flourishes. Postmodernism was originally characterized by its refutation of the objective and totalizing truths of modernity; truths are deflated as one is left with nothing ‘real,’ just the empty shell of the contemplated referent and the subject and his/her contemplation. This “breakdown of the relationship between signifiers”, between the subject and how he/she contemplates the object, results in a schizophrenic reality.
Run With Me.
A video which highlights and captures the nature of repetition in sync with a rhythm, the progression of the video accompanied the unfolding of the audio sound. Enjoy.
Life in a Day
The short documentary film 'Life in a Day' (2011) captures a day in the life of over 400 people as they wake up to and exist in July 24th 2010. The film pays homage to the moments, the rituals and the routines of humanity throughout the globe and identifies the differences and similarities in varying lives of people.
"Betsy Sharkey described the progression of the film: "Beginning with videos that start pre-dawn then moving through morning, afternoon and evening, ... the rituals that define a day begin to emerge. Beyond an extraordinary range of cultures, terrain and styles reflected, which are captivating on their own, the film stands as a stirring reminder of how ordinary and yet eclectic humanity can be. If "Life in a Day" is any measure, we are a quirky, likable, unpredictable and yet predictable bunch."
(BBC Life In a Day)
The Scientist.
| Filed under deconstruction, female, feminine, jog, movement, running
I directed the camera to move backwards, to chase after me and effectively reverse the set up seen in the previous videos. I had less control moving backwards, but there is something exciting in the way the backdrop seems to be moving against the runner. I want to develop running backwards in further videos as a way of recontextualising and DE-constructing the movement.
Location:
Reading, Berkshire, UK
The cinemagraph.
The cinemagraph encapsulates and highlights a short period of time and repeats it in a compulsive and infinite loop, it focusses upon the moments which are briefly forgotten by emphasising slight movement against a still backdrop. These are examples of my interpretations of cinemagraphs...
Appropriation: "learn to live with ghosts"
The act of 'appropriation' reveals the way in which artists effectively adopt a concept or an act from a previous artist or an object or concept from culture and features within their work to 'enrich or erode conventional definitions of what artwork can be'. Just like Richard Prince 'appropriated' (capitalised..) on previous artist's images such as Patrick Cariou, if Prince's work is a copy, which effectively becomes an 'original' because it is now owned and modified by Prince then what happens to the other original? Martin Creed's view on 'appropriation' is far more liberally interpreted, as he appropriates the 'air we breathe and the world around us with frantic enthusiasm' (reference).
In the article written by Jan Verwoert 'Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels so Different' she brings up Robert Longo, an artist who in the 1970s appropriated actors and put them in freeze frame photos where they expressing great potential of movement. Verwoert also cites Cindy Sherman who appropriated the visual language of Hollywood. Appropriation has two historical moments where its definition did not change but was slightly different, beyond the Cold War and World War 2 there was a break in historical continuity and therefore it was a natural progression to return back to the past. Currently "the reason why appropriation remains relevant as a critical (art) practice – is the undiminished if not increased power of capitalist commodity culture to determine the shape of our daily reality" (reference). It is through appropriation that we are able to cut a slice from the multiple layers that control it - essentially to detach it from any of its power relations associated with society - and to place it in a new setting which it acts or performs as something entirely different.
"How would you clarify the status of ownership of something that inhabits different times, that travels through time and repeats itself in unpredictable intervals, like for instance, a recurring style in fashion, a folkloristic symbol that is revived by a new political movement to articulate its revisionist version of a country’s history or a complex of second rate modernist architecture occupied by residents who know nothing of its original designs but still have to find a way of living with the ghosts that haunt the building" -
When I am running in my videos, am I appropriating from Martin Creed's work - or would there be certain qualities of his work which I would have to replicate, surely the replication of the concept of running alone could be appropriation. Furthermore, is it possible to appropriate something that is timeless?
'Things that live throughout time, in any unambiguous sense, pass into anyone's posession' - if I was to create a video of someone running, am I not therefore, owning them? Owning their act, their very movement?
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I am going to cling onto what Jameson says about schizophrenia as it is undeniably relevant to the points I am questioning about time and the confusion of time. Appropriation is the constant jumping back and fourth, where the present holds up a mirror to the past, which then points to the future as the new original and so on.
"Schizophrenia implies a loss of the mental capacity to perceive time as ongoing in a consistent order, which results in the inability to organise experiences in coherent sequences that would allow them to make sense, which in turn generated a heightened sense of the visceral and material presence of the isolated fragments of perception. He writes that “as temporal continuities break down, the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material’: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy.”
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’, p. 120.
There is a potential to perceive like a schizophrenic, to be unable to make sense and order of sequences and events resulting in this desire to cling onto the present. Continuity is broken and all sense and order is completely detached. It is possible to remove movement from its context, to place in a new setting, and to forget the order that the context attaches to it, what if time becomes an inconsistent and unsure element to the setting, what if it is completely hijacked and forgotten.
Derrida urges us to 'learn to live with ghosts' to approach them in a way in which we can hear the voices from the past, Verwoert uses the word 'guidance' as appropriation today is the acknowledgement that a death has occurred, but the ghosts of modernity are here to stay.