Archive for January, 2004

Join NUCA

Published
by
Lucas
on January 15, 2004
in odds and ends and uncollectable art
. 1 Comment

The Network of Un-Collectable Artists (NUCA) is a brand new nation-wide affiliation. NUCA connects those who gravitate towards ephemeral projects, participatory experiences, illegal art actions, and activities that oddify everyday life. Some members make unwieldy installation projects, while others alter billboards, project images in abandoned spaces at night, or exchange ideas rather than objects. Some simply make dead ugly paintings that would never sell.

Because such artworks are often fiendishly tricky to document, they seldom grace the columns of "recognised" publications. NUCA is building a publicity machine of its own, so artists may exchange essential info about their activities, collaborate on new projects, and connect with Un-Collectable others.

For Next Wave 2004, NUCA will launch "Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists", a set of BubbleGum cards documenting the activities of these elusive individuals. The Un-Collectable BubbleGum Cards will be distributed by itinerant vendors at the various festival venues, and naturally, it will be damn hard to "collect them all".

NUCA would like to invite you to join its ranks. Please send an email introducing yourself and your interests, to nuca@bigfoot.com to get the ball rolling. We will publish members' pictures and information on our website, which will also house a discussion board.

A little more about Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists:

NUCA would like the project to explore "collectability/collectivity/collection etc" in its many senses.  
Just because the project is about being "un-collectable" does not mean that selling a piece of art disqualifies you. Problems with "collection" are to be explored. [NUCA member Mickie Quick, for instance, has complained that his small civil disobedience kits (Refugee Island) are collected and put on the mantlepiece by "politically minded" but not "politically active" friends and colleagues, which for him kills the piece entirely.]
 
The project should bring out those issues.
 
Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists is intended to be humourous, and by necessity it can't become self-important. That is what it should work away from: the dubious practice of cross-referencing by "credible" sources who "say" that an artist is collectible and are therefore slavishly followed by the market (who knows if this really works anyway, but it makes for some ghastly magazine filler).
 
Australia's 50 Most Un-Collectable Artists is part of the Next Wave Festival, whose theme for 2004 is UnPopular Culture.
 

SUTURED SOUNDS IN SPACE & TIME

Published
by
Lucas
on January 15, 2004
in Writing by others
. 0 Comments

The following is a review of a show that Tim Hilton produced for BlauGrau Gallery (inner Sydney) in 2001. At the time that the review was written, Tim emailed it to me. I am not sure if it has been published elsewhere, and hope that it's ok I post it here. If not, please get in touch! Cheers, Lucas.

 

SUTURED SOUNDS IN SPACE & TIME

by bunny star

31 may 2001

"Artists and creative thinkers will lead the way into
space because they are already writing, painting and
filming space. They are providing us with the only
maps for space travel. We are not setting out to
explore static pre-existing data. We are setting out
to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of
consciousness. … What you experience in dreams and
out of the body trips, what you glimpse in the work of
writers and painters, is the promised land of space."

- Burroughs

Travelling through a world of experimental art, the
explorer discovers a field of music branching inward,
and outward, in a spiralling, centripetal fashion,
revealing the industrial insect sounds of Tim Hilton.
Shadow Matter - his second CD - is a collection that
plays with the combined forces of technology and human
chance. Dinosaur bleating, liger growling,
extraterrestrial humming and hearts beating leaves
listening open to individual interpretation. The idea
is to access pathways through ‘coincidence’ by
locating form in surface using the random functions of
a computer. Hilton describes his process as a way of
‘revealing the hand of god at work’ - artist becomes
conduit to facilitate an interaction between universal
energy, human perception & earthly technology. An
aural mapping, if you will - a stitching together of
space and time in the 21st century.

Through music and art, Hilton investigates what lurks
beneath the surface of sound and sight. He is
interested in the response-ability of himself,
technology, an audience and the space in which we
locate ourselves.

‘I see the process of making these sound pieces as an
unknowing collaboration between person and machine
with the outcome due to guided chance - a personal and
impersonal documentation of existence.’

An alchemical resonance is fused by choosing computer
samples and filters, leaving the technology to shape
shift the selection. Soundscapes form and like ‘making
pictures in clouds’ or ‘throwing grains of rice and
seeing where they land,’ the end result reflects a
surrender of absolute control. Unsolicited imagination
meets multi-media modes of statement. Laptop geek
music comes alive.

Like an apparition of the spiral entrance into a
galaxy seen from afar, Hilton’s music embraces
non-linear consciousness. The journey takes precedence
over arrival. As such, we are offered process-based
productions of anti-narrative, fantastical aural
visions sprayed out in the circularity of musical
loops. Finding form in spurts of crackle, beats &
rhythms looped at different speeds, a mutation takes
place. Bridging the microcosm with the macro- he
points to ways of bringing awareness to inner states
of realisation and magical energy through the
technology of this time.

‘I see the melding as a way of creating phantom-like
sound pieces that I could not have otherwise imagined
- like hypnagogic imagery. Although I produce these
images, I don’t conjure them, they appear in my
consciousness with other forces at play.’

Consider this - a space pulsates with the blueprint
energy of Hilton’s work. Three hand clap samples are
arranged randomly through the use of the software’s
random function pattern. Set to the beats per minute
(bpm) of his heart rate at the time (63bpm), the
composition is humanised, or mortalised, through an
interactive process. When installed, the piece
emanates from two red funnels which are suggestive of
big ears, or maybe eyes, that become a productive
organ, rather than a receptive one. The space is
anthromorphosised as the unit is attached to the body
of the room, endowing it with human qualities.

At the launch of his debut video clip at Squatfest
2001, critic Heath O’Brien comments on the effect such
sutured sounds had on the audience.

‘Everyone is silent, basking in the hypnotic rhythm
and pulsating response’orial psalm. Now everyone is
intensely aware and there is an electric sense of
expectation and a palpable curiosity in the air
mingled with an uncanny familiarity as if we are
immersed in a primreview collective memory.’

Hilton’s work delves further and invites the audience
to step outside of the subjective experience of human
ego, just for a moment, to stand on a stage of
unidentified experience, if only to broaden the scope
of inner vision or activate latent perception. Barbara
Freedman writes in Staging the Gaze, ‘The
objectification of the self by an alien viewpoint
enables, as it undermines, self-consciousness by
calling into play an unconscious look.’2 With a
Lacanian bent, Hilton encourages a destabilisation of
conditioned response by challenging the limitations of
conscious thought and, in doing so, allows space for
the collective unconscious to mingle with music and
mortal beings.

Is this by chance or specific intent of the composer?
Both - the essence of blueprint energy lies beneath
the surface of Hilton’s sounds, conceived in the
mind’s eye and ear, according to the subjective
experience of the collective unconscious. Working with
an interest in responding critically to the concept of
‘Mektoub’ - the idea that everything is written by the
hand of fate - he points to the significance of human
interaction in an age of art and technology, blazing a
trail of unique talent.

- bhs 2001

archive sohm - stuttgart

Published
by
Lucas
on January 14, 2004
in Fluxus, performance art and re-enactment
. 0 Comments
In November 2003, Jane and I went to Stuttgart and look at the Archive Sohm (which was bloody amazing)…
 
Dr Sohm was a dentist who tended to the teeth of many of the Fluxus/Happenings/Vienna Aktionists artists. There are letters to him from George Maciunas, for example, begging him to accept a bunch of flux objects in exchange for 1000 US dollars so he can look after the health of his mother (I hope i have that story right). Or maybe it was so that George himself could pay his medical costs after he was beaten by thugs who broke into his house (he was having problems with the city authorities). Anyway, Sohm always accepted these objects and sent the money. He now has the largest collection of Fluxus stuff in the world. He died a few years ago.
 
[If anyone intends to visit the archive in Stuttgart, I recommend calling to arrange an appointment a few weeks in advance. We emailed but got no reply, and just showed up. Luckily they accomodated us, but we were told to book ahead next time.]
 
My interest in fluxus was ignited when I went to Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation in 2002, looking through their fab fab artist book archive. I think that the old Irish fella Noel Sheridon who helped to set up the EAF must have collected it, either him or Donald Brook.
 
In the EAF I found a beautiful flux-event-score by Albert M Fine called Flux Orchestra for 24 Performers, and I conducted its "re-enactment" in the small cinema attatched to the Mercury, the Iris Cinema. I became fascinated with the legacy they had left, which was - very little tangible documentation of actual events, but indeed the recipes for the events themselves, which you, I, anyone, could recreate - thus experiencing DIRECTLY the "original" work for ourselves! This is why I was so interested to embark on the expanded cinema stuff.
 
…and also why i was excited to find out about the Carolee Schneeman
re-performance, and indeed all the Whitechapel Gallery pieces I looked at and wrote about on my blog.

expanded cinema/deborah k

Published
by
Lucas
on January 10, 2004
in expanded cinema and uncollectable art
. 0 Comments
yes i wish i could bring valie export too. recently she was invited to london to give a talk on her work (she lives in germany and austria) and she said she couldnt make it (at the last minute) due to the flying thing. she doesnt want to fly in aeroplanes. the transcript from that talk that she didnt give (but she sent the text anyway) is at sensesofcinema journal which is at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/contents.html
(but the site seems to be playing up at the mo, i cant make it work. hmm)
she writes really clearly about expanded cinema and its pervasive connexion to the rest of her work.
 
i hear ya about art about art. i must admit to having been a nerd about some of that conceptual art stuff (in the past, in the past!) which irritates the shit out of me now.
expanded cinema however is messy, its people getting together in small rooms and showing each other stuff and talking about it, its a bit like the sydney moving image coalitions super 8 nights. its about doing stuff with very little resources, and it was very much about the london filmmakers co-operative, a unique organisation which controlled the production, collection, and distribution of its work. i am very keen to see the project happen in sydney, partly because of the dire state of the film scene there (and the video installation "scene" if you can call it that). the film scene, well, squatspace has been ranting about that for a few years, the tropfest business and the fox studios hollywood production sweatshop. the video scene, because for some godforsaken reason it seems fascinated by the idea of "immersion" and "virtual reality" yet seems to do these things so badly. i even went to the zkm organisation in germany (the home of video-immersion-virtualreality) to see if i was wrong, but i dont think i am. its a resource-heavy parade of gimmickry. this is the kind of thing that expanded cinema artists were (and still are) against, yet theirs is a forgotten history. so its partly a historical-reconstruction project. i want to remind sydney artists that you dont need huge resources to make interesting moving image work.
 
yah, i wouldnt worry too much about the collectible thing. a few posters sold to a gallery certainly wont qualify you for a rush at the next madrid art fair.
 
but seriously, im keen for the project to explore "collectability/collectivity etc" in its many senses. so if you work with "collectives" often, that may be an interesting angle to explore for this one.
 
also, problems with collection are to be explored i reckon. mickie has complained about a similar issue, that his small disobedience kits are collected and put on the mantlepiece by "politically minded" but not "politically active" friends and colleagues, which for him kills the piece entirely. the project should bring out those issues.
 
for me, you are a prime candidate, even if you sell them posters to the gallery. i hope you do. we all need the cash.
 
50 most uncollectable is meant to be humourous and by necessity it cant become self-important. that is what we are working away from, the self-important cross-referencing of "credible" sources who "say" that an artist is collectible and are therefore slavishly followed by the market (who knows if this really works anyway, but it makes for some ghastly magazine filler).
 
ruark of course has his own motivations, and there is something to be said for his proactive attempt to insert the work into the collections of major galleries. strategic historymaking or something.
 
alla best
lucas

bourriaud/huyghe

Published
by
Lucas
on January 9, 2004
in Relational Aesthetics
. 0 Comments

…Huyghe fabricates structures that break the chain of interpretation in favor of forms of activity: within these setups, exchange itself becomes the site of use, and the script form becomes a possibility of redefining the division between leisure and work that the collective scenario upholds. Huyghe works as a monteur, or film editor. And montage, writes Godard, is a "fundamental political notion. An image is never alone, it only exists on a background (ideology) or in relation to those that precede or follow it." By producing images that are lacking in our comprehension of the real, Huyghe carries out political work: contrary to the received idea, we are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of the community.

 

 have you found nicholas bourriaud yet? he wrote postproduction. in speaking about pierre huyghe, an artist who does things like "photographing construction workers on the job, then exhibiting this image on an urban billboard overlooking the construction site"

i thought the following quote spoke a little to your tshirt screen idea, especially the notion that "we are saturated with images/we are saturated with the WRONG KIND of images"

…Huyghe fabricates structures that break the chain of interpretation in favor of forms of activity: within these setups, exchange itself becomes the site of use, and the script form becomes a possibility of redefining the division between leisure and work that the collective scenario upholds. Huyghe works as a monteur, or film editor. And montage, writes Godard, is a "fundamental political notion. An image is never alone, it only exists on a background (ideology) or in relation to those that precede or follow it." By producing images that are lacking in our comprehension of the real, Huyghe carries out political work: contrary to the received idea, we are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of the community.

by the way, do you know kirsten bradley and cicada (www.cicada.tv) - they often do quite interesting imageplay with video where they replay images of the city back into the spaces they filmed. i think this is a possibly interesting direction when thinking about exactly what kind of stuff is going to occupy these screens…

xxlucas

Expanded Cinema

Published
by
Lucas
on January 7, 2004
in expanded cinema
. 5 Comments

The proposed "Expanded Cinema" project is essentially about re-presenting some key cinema-performance pieces from the early-mid 1970s.

…here is a little quote from a general description of the project, to give you an idea:

Between 1966 and 1973, some groups of filmmakers in London and Vienna began to make cinema works which questioned the architectural space of the theatre itself. Conventionally, cinema creates a psychic space which takes the viewer outside of his/her body, transported through the "window" of the screen into the spaces and narratives beyond it. Artists like Anthony McCall, Malcolm le Grice, and Valie Export sought to draw the audience's attention to this conventionality by making "Expanded Cinema", which went beyond mere projection. They employed physical interventions in the cinema space, such as flashing light bulbs which illuminated the whole room, clouds of smoke which lit up the "cone of light" from the projector, and even the creation of small "mini-cinemas" where the sense of touch, rather than sight, was utilised.

 Pretty much what is involved, is bringing one or 2 key artists to Australia (from Britain) to set up their work and perform with it, as well as to re-construct the necessary elements of many other pieces for which the presence of the artist in not required. In addition, a small exhibition of documentation - writings, photos, and videos will be mounted.

I have confirmed with Sydney and perth, to be the hosts. Hoping Adelaide might come on board too…
 
here are a few descriptions of the works i want to present: (there will be many more)

William Raban: has a marvellous piece from 1973 (thanks to william for clarification, see comments below) called 2"45' (2 min 45 sec)

in this piece, a 16mm projector, not loaded with film, projects white light onto the screen, for the amount of time specified in the title. the artist announces the piece from the front of the room, and a film camera next to the projector records the entire event, including the screen, and the audience, and any sounds they might make.

the following evening the process is repeated, with the film shot the previous night (which has been rapidly develped) being projected, and so on.

every time the event occurs, the film shown is a record of every previous showing.

a previous showing's film "residue" can never be shown again.


Guy Sherwin has piece called man with a mirror.

originally made in 1974. involves live performance with the artist holding a square mirror (maybe 1 metre square) which is painted white on the back. the film is projected at the performer, who rotates the mirror/screen in front of himself. the film being projected, is of the artist (1974) holding an identical mirror/screen, standing in a field. the resulting overlap of reflection/image/overlay is visually, extremely confusing and fascinating. in addition, the audience is aware that it is the same man, but 30 years later. it is a strange and poignant ageing piece (although it was never intended to be).

both artists have many more such works, whose presentation is obviously much enhanced by their presence.

……….pretty much what i am thinking, in terms of the conceptual framework for the project, is to present expanded cinema in its various levels of documentation/resolution. this will range from

-works which have only a written description/memory

-works for which there are photographs

-works with moving image documentation

-works which can be "enacted" live (the "real" thing)

thus, a small, quickly mounted exhibition of the first 3 elements, and some screening events (2 or 3 nights) for the 4th. and a catalogue. the exhibition i envisage will be something punters will want to look at before/during the screening events. but it could also run as a short exhibition.

[postscript]: 

expanded cinema is messy, its people getting together in small rooms and showing each other stuff and talking about it, its a bit like the sydney moving image coalition's fantastic super 8 nights.
it's about doing stuff with very little resources, and it was very much about the london filmmakers co-operative, a unique organisation which controlled the production, collection, and distribution of its work.
i am very keen to see the project happen in sydney, partly because of the dire state of the film scene there (and the video installation "scene" if you can call it that).
the film scene: well, squatspace has been ranting about that for a few years, the tropfest business and the fox studios hollywood production sweatshop. the video scene, because for some godforsaken reason it seems fascinated by the idea of "immersion" and "virtual reality" yet seems to do these things so badly. i even went to the zkm organisation in germany (the home of video-immersion-virtualreality) to see if i was wrong, but i don't think i am. its a resource-heavy parade of gimmickry.
[postscript - having said that, they have what looks like a great show at the moment (March 2004) about Peter Weibel, one of the earliest expanded cinema artists and collaborator with Valie Export...]
this is the kind of thing that expanded cinema artists were (and still are) working against, yet theirs is a forgotten history. so its partly a historical-reconstruction project. i want to remind sydney artists that you dont need huge (hi-tech) resources to make interesting moving image work.
There is an article, from late 2003, by Valie Export about her E.C. work at Senses of Cinema…
…and…what looked like a marvellous show in Vienna called X-Screen which ran until late Feb 2004…

 

planned execution date: october 2004. [as of march 2004, this project has been postponed... will keep ya posted!]

Gordon Matta-Clark’s Films and Videos

Published
by
Lucas
on January 7, 2004
in cinema and spatial politics
. 3 Comments

While I was at the CCA for the Teddy Cruz lecture, I also checked out the Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition. He's on show with 3 architects - Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, and James Stirling, in a show called Out of the Box / Sortis du Cadre.

Matta-Clark was the New York artist most famous for Splitting, a project in which he cut a house in two. He died in the late 1970s from cancer, which is a shame, as his work seems to have become very influential only recently. He co-founded a restaurant called FOOD, in SoHo, in the early 1970s - a project very much about creating a social space (…rather than an economic enterprise - the restaurant went broke after a few years.) He made architectural cuts into houses, office spaces, and vast steel warehouses, both with an eye to formal concerns (transfer of light, underlying construction, shapes etc), and to social concerns (such as real estate markets and anarchist-squatted buildings).

None of his significant projects exists today in any form other than documentary photographs, texts, stories, object fragments, super8/16mm films, and video tapes. I find his activities inspiring precisely because they exist in an imaginary state - and have not been fetishised into "mere" art objects.

Out of the Box presents video and film documents from Matta-Clark's work. In some cases, the video seems to be rough documentary evidence, say of various urban explorations (as in Paris Underground, or Substrait (from New York )), whereas other pieces are constructed as films in themselves. Indeed, some of the films were shown in the CCA's theatre, including Food, Fresh Kill, and Chinatown Voyeur. Jane and I went to some of these screenings late last year.

As interesting as Matta-Clark is, I found some of his "stand alone" films to be less-than satisfying. Perhaps this was because I was hungry for any information I could get my hands on about the artist and his activities - yet films like Food and Chinatown Voyeur were too piecemeal when presented within a cinema context.

Perhaps this is only to be expected. FOOD (the restaurant), unlike Splitting, is a complex and unwieldy project - it can't be summed up with a sequence of well-framed shots. What Food, the film, presents, is a day in the life of the restaurant: disorganised (bounced cheques); grisly (gutting and cutting a fish); chaotic (a dozen raucus friends gathered for lunch, and dishes piling up on the table); and also beautifully poetic (the final sequence showing the kneading and baking of bread). It left me wanting more, and made me feel like I, too, could open up a restaurant - and wouldn't it be fantastic! One thing it didn't do, though, was leave me feeling intimidated about the process of making a documentary film…

Fresh Kill, on the other hand, was specifically made for cinema viewing, using a professional film-crew. It's a kind of film-poem about the trashing of Matta-Clark's old red pick-up truck, as it is left at the garbage dump, and crushed, repeatedly, by bulldozers, until no longer recognisable. The analogy implied in the title is fairly obvious - the red truck is a sacrificial cow gored by predators, and picked over by vultures (there are many shots of circling gulls). I think Jane felt it was a bit too un-reconstructedly macho, but I wasn't so sure, I felt it was simultaneously beautiful and ironic.

The screening of Fresh Kill was juxtaposed with a bizarre early Spielberg number, which certainly deserved Jane's irritation. Entitled Duel, the film was a "made-for-TV feature starring Dennis Weaver as a motorist plagued by a crazed truck driver." The truck repeatedly tries to run the car off the road, but is eventually fooled by the fed-up motorist, and ends up flying off the edge of a cliff in a ball of flames. It's ghastly, but arguably simpler and better than a lot of Spielberg's later work.

Chinatown Voyeur, I would argue, shouldn't have been screened in a theatre context at all. Matta-Clark filmed the cracks in windows, looking into peoples apartments, one hot hot New York summer night. What you get on screen is a totally black field with these white punctuated window spaces, and some very minor activity within. like an old fella washing his jocks and hanging them to dry. It is long and boring. Shortly after seeing the film, I wrote:

"Chinatown Voyeur was originally intended to be projected ON THE SIDE OF BUILDINGS out in the street. Can you imagine? It would punch a window into a solid wall! And you wouldn't be forced to sit there like a zombie in the cinema watching the thing, it would be as fascinating as being a real voyeur looking up at windows, wondering what would happen next."

Matta-Clark's film and video work presented on monitors within the exhibition itself is all fairly watchable. I particularly liked Tree Dance, a series of super8 moments documenting dancers cavorting in custom-made hammocks and coccoons strung up in a huge old tree. And Splitting, of course, is captivating from start to finish, not only for the wonderful taboo-breaking house-sliced in two, but also for the film's home-made construction - the inter-title sequences look like they were pieced together manually on the kind of text board used for school class photos.
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[ Post-script #1: This "problem" about how to go about presenting or re-staging work (specifically in relation to Matta-Clark) is taken up by Lisa Lefeuvre in an article called The W-hole Story. Originally published in Art Monthly Magazine (UK) April 2002 / No 255, pp12-15. I recommend it. She asks, and then makes a good attempt to answer:
"what does it mean to place an artist working some three decades ago within these contemporary discourses? How can an artist of the 70s who made ephemerality a part of his practice be allied to the present?" ]
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
[ Post-script #2: some Gordon Matta-Clark links:
Matta Clarking, a thesis generously posted online by architect Robert Holloway. I haven't read it yet. Also at this site there is a page of links to other GM-C sites. Some of these links don't work, but a few definitely seem worth perusing, especially Visceral Facades: taking Matta-Clark's crowbar to software by Matthew Fuller. ]
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[ Post-script #3: an email from Jake:
"You're a bit tough on Duel, which I think is pretty good myself, but maybe it was the wrong context for it."
Jake, you're right, I was a bit harsh there. Sometimes I can be sloppy and cavalier in my judgement - but thinking back to the screening itself, I think I actually enjoyed watching Duel. It was such a simple concept, without all the pretension of plot and moral-of-the-story etc. It's just this bizarre situation where an ordinary fellow is targeted for no reason by an insane truckie, and begins, in a way, to go mildly insane himself. I think it quite successfully captured that "I can't believe this is happening to me!" sensation that you get when involved in a car accident or near-death experience. So, in that its ambitions were fairly low, I think it was a sturdy piece. I also liked how the maniacal driving of the truckie was superimposed on an otherwise banal and extremely ordinary situation...a salesman returning home, listening to the radio in his car...which sets it apart from The Dukes of Hazzard, for instance. ]
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