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Keep Going! Ethics and the Political in the Work of Alice Creischer

Editorial Team — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:14:02 +0000

(or, more specifically, today’s capitalist society), and their ability to act within it. Her central concerns since the mid-1980s have been the examination of political issues by artistic means, and, closely intertwined with this, ethics, which she understands as a moral imperative to strive for enlightenment – for naming, revealing and highlighting the manifold injustices of the world, and for ‘having the heart’ to be consequent to her unwillingness to accept things as they are.1 Creischer’s projects range from individual works – mostly in performance and installation form – to collaborative productions with other artists and cultural practitioners (first and foremost with her partner, Andreas Siekmann), curatorial projects and critical writing. The multidisciplinary character of her production emerged from the Dusseldorf Art Academy and the Dusseldorf and Cologne art scenes in the 1980s, where political (and feminist) engagement was rare.

Creischer’s work from that period, such as the text- based installations Alle Tage Jericho, Ich Die Posaune (All Days Jericho/Me the Trombone, 1982) or Der Geburtstag (The Birthday, 1986), were experiments with handcrafted machines, which she installed in the exhibition space or took through the city, transforming them into performative tools. All Days Jericho, for instance, was an apparatus on wheels that Creischer pushed through Dusseldorf on foot whilst reciting a text that discussed this very action and which was amplified via a tube with several membranes. A system of mirrors facilitated navigation for the ‘driver’, and two cones re-directed sound from the environment back to the pilot. These early experiments with DIY technology examined the relation between text and image, and the viewers’ apprehension of the two on equal terms. Such investigation was followed in works like Die Betrachtung (The Contemplation, 1984) and Eine Operette (An Operetta, 1986) in the 1980s, and she still pursues it in current installations, in which text plays a crucial part (see, for example, Apparat zum osmotischen Druckausgleich von Reichtum bei der Betrachtung von Armut, or Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005-08, which I discuss later).

While her early works concentrated on the individual’s relation to the world, Creischer’s later works began to deal more explicitly with the search for a meaningful life, the living conditions in a capitalist society, consumerism and the logic of exploitation. For her short play ‘Verbrechen aus Leidenschaft’ (‘Crime out of Passion’, 1987), she developed a simple structure reminiscent of Brechtian pedagocial plays: the character Delarue is confronted with a realisation of the ‘infinite lack of being’2 when he meets his counterpart Pourpaubre, in whom the insignificance and emptiness of his own life is mirrored. Delarue falls into despair and dreams, almost as an escape, of erasing all banknotes, shares and other capitalist values in the world, as well as people’s desire to own them.

This critical impulse also led Creischer, in the early 1990s, to temporarily stop making her own work and to collaborate instead with the artists’ groups Sammlung Brinkmann, Microstudio surplus and the initiative Park Fiction. With Andreas Siekmann, Birger Hübel, Michaela Odinius and Dierk Schmidt, she organised the alternative art fair Messe2ok. ÖkonoMiese machen in 1995. A self-organised, selffinanced project, Messe2ok took place parallel to Art Cologne, in the empty halls of the former Cologne post-office headquarters, and hosted panel discussions on the art-world economy from a critical perspective in addition to presenting artworks. As Creischer recollects in the project’s documentation, the fair brought together all those who ‘use the art context for project-based, theoretical and/or collective working methods’ and gave them the opportunity to approach ‘conventional art practice with a different kind of production and mediation’ [...].

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Afterall | Keep Going! Ethics and the Political in the Work of Alice Creischer by Ellen Blumenstein

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David Hall: End Piece, Ambika P3, London, review

Editorial Team — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:37:12 +0000

First impressions are always crucial – and the initial effect of David Hall’s new solo exhibition doesn’t disappoint. You hear it before you see it: an infernal cacophony created by more than a thousand television sets tuned to different channels inside the University of Westminster’s Ambika P3 exhibition space on the Marylebone Road.
In recent years, Ambika P3, a venue for contemporary art and architecture inside a cavernous hall once used to test concrete for Spaghetti Junction, has staged a number of visual coups – last year’s poetical light sculptures by Anthony McCall were a case in point. The work of the British artist David Hall, who trained as a sculptor but pioneered video art during the Sixties and Seventies, continues in this vein.

The babble emanates from the show-stopping central installation: 1,001 TV Sets (End Piece), a larger version of a work originally created in 1975. On a scaffold standing around 3ft off the ground, Hall has slung a thick net, upon which his plastic television sets rest. Each is tuned to one of five analogue channels still being broadcast from London’s Crystal Palace until next month’s digital switchover. On the day I visited, I saw several Sunday afternoon programmes vying with one another – EastEnders, The Simpsons, Murder She Wrote – as well as the fuzzy orange features of the Scottish broadcaster Andrew Neil.
The TV sets cast fluorescence into the gloom like the twinkle of a thousand skyscraper apartments softening the night. A thick electrical cable emerges from each one, snaking upwards towards a hook, where it gets bundled together with all the others, forming a kind of gigantic spinal cord pulsating with artificial intelligence. The whole piece has a distinctly sci-fi feel, like a set for Ridley Scott’s movies Alien or Blade Runner.
Compared with plasma-screen TVs or touch-screen tablet computers, Hall’s cathode-ray-tube television sets look ugly, boxy and old-fashioned. What in 1975 must have been a dynamic portrait of the channel-hopping modern world now appears like a mausoleum for obsolete technology. A vision of the future has become an elegy for the past.

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Telegraph | David Hall: End Piece, Ambika P3, London, review

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On Display: Museum of Broken Relationships

Editorial Team — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:44:37 +0000

Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb, Croatia, 2012

The Museum of Broken Relationships is a public space consecrated to a universal experience of sadness and loss.

A can of love incense, 1994, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

The premise is very simple. Disappointed lovers donate an object that held meaning for them in a relationship. They provide basic details about location and how long their relationship lasted, and write a little story to explain what happened. These anonymous narratives can be terse in the extreme. The can of love incense from someone in Bloomington, Indiana is accompanied by just two words: “Doesn’t work.” Most go into a little more detail and many are very affecting. After 13 years of marriage a man from Berlin decided to leave his wife because he felt their love had cooled. The woman returned to her own country, taking their little dog with her. She was brokenhearted and sent him a package of things that included a flashing dog collar light — she had bought one for the dog so it couldn’t get lost when it ran away in the dark. The man carried it everywhere. About a year after the split, the woman took her life in a hotel room. In the museum, the red collar light flashes forlornly on an illuminated shelf. The man clearly found it unbearable to own. He says it reminds him of a heartbeat.

“Rage and Fury” room, Museum of Broken Relationships

Olinka Vištica and Drazen Grubišić founded the museum in 2006 after their own relationship broke up. To date it has been shown in 21 cities, including Berlin, Belgrade, Cape Town, London, Istanbul, Singapore, Bloomington, St. Louis, and Houston; the traveling version is now at the National Centre for Craft & Design in Sleaford, England. Around 800 objects have been donated to the project so far by members of the public. The installation I visited in Zagreb is the museum’s permanent home and has become a significant attraction, featuring on the city’s street signs alongside other tourist destinations.

“Resonance of Grief” room, Museum of Broken Relationships
“. . . I realized how much you loved me only after you died of AIDS.”

The space is just right for the subject. The gently vaulted rooms are small and intimate, and the illuminated shelves give the incongruous collection of objects both consistency and presence. The most emotionally intense of these chambers, titled “Resonance of Grief” — where the dog collar light is on display — benefits from preserved areas of old, discolored tiling; it was presumably once used as a washroom.

I mentioned my visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships to a couple of Croatian curators and I wasn’t entirely surprised at their disapproving response. For them, this undeniably successful Croatian cultural export appeared to be, above all, an exercise in marketing and populism, curation by crowd-sourcing rather than a fully conceptualized exhibition underpinned by a deeper explanatory purpose. But the museum’s focus on ordinary objects as sources of meaning connects with a wider, developing interest in the role of significant objects in our lives. Two books sharing a similar concern with the hidden emotional life of objects appeared in 2007 not long after the museum first opened: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With edited by Sherry Turkle, and Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes. In both books, participants were asked to write short essays about an object they valued, exploring its history and personal associations. Contributors to Taking Things Seriously, serialized on Design Observer, included writer Luc Sante, photographer Rosamond W. Purcell, and designer Dmitri Siegel.

“We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences,” writes Turkle. “We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.”

A divorce day mad dwarf, 20 years, Ljubljana, Slovenia

An iron, no date, Stavanger, Norway

One of two figurines, 10 years, Dublin, Ireland
“These two figurines symbolize my two children. Today they are in their thirties . . .”

The emotional cast-offs in the museum add an additional layer of complication and resonance to this kind of inquiry. Many of these items — the garden dwarf thrown at an arrogant husband’s car; the iron used to press a wedding suit (“Now it is the only thing left”); the shaving kit bought as a birthday present (“I hope she doesn’t know that she was the ONLY person I have loved this much”) — have fallen from a state of acceptance, affection and need into an abyss of ambivalence, despair, guilt, rejection and hate. The thoughts provoked by this category of evocative object have become intolerable now the relationship is over. What was once taken for granted or treasured has turned into a poisonous and debilitating reminder that must be purged, once and for all, to obtain peace of mind. Donating the object to the museum might provide a form of release, without the finality and betrayal of throwing it away (as with the collar light), or it might act as a humiliatingly public form of revenge. One woman exhibits the hideous fake breasts her husband made her wear during sex (“our biggest relationship crisis”). How delicious if an errant partner should happen to chance upon the gesture of repudiation and disdain.

A wedding album, six years (1999-2005), Rijeka, Croatia

One of the most extraordinary exhibits in Zagreb, because it is so candidly personal, so openly and unreservedly dismissive of a former spouse and a wasted union, is an album of wedding photographs. “After six years I found a text message: ‘How are you, my puppy!’ The text was not mine, of course. It was his high school sweetheart. I left. Go to hell!!! Now I have a son Matej and a wonderful husband.” By exhibiting herself in a failed relationship, this Croatian woman physically disowns the earlier misguided self that could fall for such a two-timing jerk.

A red coat, 1998-2003, Zagreb, Croatia
“We bought it together on sale. It was cheap and he paid for it . . . I never really cared for red.”

Zagor that makes me cry, 2003, Istanbul, Turkey
“He liked comic books. Zagor was one of them . . . He was never my superhero anyway, I know now.”

“Whatever the motivation for donating personal belongings — be it sheer exhibitionism, therapeutic relief or simple curiosity — I believe people embraced the idea of exhibiting their legacies as a sort of a ritual, a solemn ceremony,” writes Vištica in the Museum of Broken Relationships book. So much of our once private experience is now conducted in public that such nakedly personal forms of self-display no longer seem so surprising. Yet there’s a quiet dignity in the way these stories are written and presented, and a visitor would need a heart of stone not to empathize with tribulations that are a fundamental part of our condition, as we struggle and sometimes fail to make connections with others, and are familiar to everyone. In 2011, the museum was recognized by the European Museum Forum with an award for innovation.

Photographs: Rick Poynor

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Observatory: Design Observer | On Display: Museum of Broken Relationships by Ellen Blumenstein

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Happiness and Other Survival Techniques @ Design Museum London

Editorial Team — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:47:50 +0000

We can cure depression with pacemakers implanted in the brain, move faster than the speed of sound and save lives using the thousands of bacteria inhabiting the human gut.

But more children still die every year from diarrhoea, a banal stomach bug, than from HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. We might know how to fuel cars with peanuts, excrement and human fat, but over 90% of our transportation relies on an oil supply that’s running out. In spite of the financial crisis, the world is getting richer, too, but since you started reading this, seven people have tried to kill themselves, and by the time you finish, one of them will have succeeded. The world is a complicated place.

To help you find your way around it, COLORS Magazine presents “Happiness and Other Survival Techniques” at the Design Museum. The show brings our Survival Guides trilogy to London, leading visitors through Transport, Shit and Happiness.

From April 3 to April 13, visitors to the Design Museum may meet a peasant robot from China, learn to travel through the next fuel crisis, lock themselves in a latrine and discover the medicinal uses of human poo. In the spirit of DIY survival, we’ll also show a selection of handmade machines, vehicles and survival tools collected from the rest of the world.

Online visitors can read critiques of these objects by prominent artists, designers, theorists and musicians, recorded in a series of conversations with Colors Magazine and published here. We’ve also curated a selection of stories and animations from the three issues. For the exhibition itself, check out our photos of the set-up and the finished show. Or just stop by:

HAPPINESS AND OTHER SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES
an exhibition of the Colors Magazine Survival Guides

April 3-13, 2012

Design Museum London
Shad Thames
London SE1 2YD
10am – 5:45pm daily

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Survival Guide

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WORDS AND DREAMS – Fred Eerdekens / Kris Trappeniers / Mathias Schmied

Editorial Team — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:58:50 +0000

From 17 March, 2012 to 28 April, 2012
Magda Danysz Gallery – 78, rue Amelot – Paris 11

What are the significant of words? What are meaning of dreams? Throughout the evolution of our world how writing, reading, or perceptions of dreams and memories have changed? Fred Eerdekens creates works in which words and dreams seem to meet. His sculpture and installations form in to message on the wall in a set of shadows. He has given birth to these ghostly images without the real presence which draws only the shade of letters, like a dream in memory. The word is emerging as if by magic which unable to determine its origin without the viewer. Language is no longer presented physically but it takes the look and curiosity.

In the work of Mathias Schmied, the words are real as they are cut from plastic paper or painted on a canvas. Here, it is not the word that interests the artist but his graphical approaches. The work is constructed around linking and untying, but yet, word is repeated. The word “Never” or “Kiss” structure the work line after line and stir up your curiosity during the reading. The shape of the word is completely free from its meaning? Can the graphics be free from any interpretation? The work is inherently meaningless. The reading of the work is then determined by the meaning which we give to it. Mathias Schmied shakes the established codes and plays with the form as “empty the substance of narration.” Then one begins to dream about the meaning of word by its personal interpretation.

Thought out the work of Kris Trappeniers, the word becomes a line and a source of inspiration. More than just a word, poetry plays the importance in his work. Thus words and dreams joint together and combine. Kris Trappeniers chooses the well-known figure of Rimbaud to whom he gives its shape and fine black line. The light and flexible drawing of his stencil is a continuous line that forms like the line of writing. It looks like the Chinese calligraphy, this writing that able us to free our mind by its precision and figurative strength.

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Magda Danysz Gallery | WORDS AND DREAMS- Fred Eerdekens / Kris Trappeniers / Mathias Schmied
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Damien Hirst gets heavy at Tate Modern

Editorial Team — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:42:51 +0000

But it seems to coincide with a major reconstruction job at the Bankside gallery, leading to conjecture that the two events are not entirely unconnected.

Hirst’s tanks of formaldehyde, containing anything from sharks to sheep, weigh hundreds of tons, but is this why the upper floor of Tate Modern is being completely reinforced? “It’s odd as it’s a relatively modern building and Tate Modern should be familiar with heavy artworks,” says my source.

The Tate has already displayed Antony Gormley’s heavy bronze sculptures at Tate Britain. But Tate Modern, which opened in 2000 to cater for anything that 21st-century artists could throw at it, seems to have been taken by surprise by Hirst.

“Tate Modern is undergoing a major building project, which will see the opening of the Tanks on the south side of the building this summer, and the completion of an extension above them over the coming years,” says a spokesman. “As part of this project, various developments are taking place in the existing building, too. For example, we recently undertook work

to reconfigure Level 3 for temporary exhibitions and Level 4 for collection displays. Damien Hirst will be the first of these exhibitions on Level 3, with new displays opening on Level 4 this summer.”

Director Sir Nicholas Serota says: “Tate Modern is responding to changing forms of art and to the changing expectations of visitors.”

Jowell takes a gamble and dismisses Olympics fears

The Olympics may be £2 billion over budget but cheer up, there’s some good news. Shadow Olympics minister Tessa Jowell made an astonishing pledge this morning

at the Editorial Intelligence Names Not Numbers conference at the Almeida theatre in Islington.

At the croissant breakfast, attended by Jemima Khan, Jon Snow and David Davis, Jowell listened as Harvey Goldsmith expressed concerns that London might grind to a halt because of all the restrictions on travel during the Olympic Games.

She replied: “I’m prepared to bet my house that that will [prove to] be apocalyptic nonsense.” Sorry, that ’s on the record now, Tessa.

The Editorial Intelligence conference will continue in Wales following a seven-hour coach trip. Let’s hope they have stocked up on plenty of croissants.

- Lily Allen, or Cooper as she prefers to be known these days, tweeted yesterday: “Was going to get a bikini wax today, then realised it’s International Women’s Day. So I cancelled.” The logic is undeniable.

Mum’s the word at prayer time

You have to give full credit to Baroness Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, for her candour. She is asked by the latest edition of The House magazine whether

the staff timetable for her day includes the traditional five daily prayers of Islam. “You’re going to get me in real trouble now, aren’t you? ” she replies. “If I tell you that I don’t pray five times a day my mother is going to be furious. If I tell you that I do pray fives times a day, then that would not be the truth.”

Here’s hoping her mother doesn’t lay her hands on The House magazine, then.

Judge wooed by Sondheim

Rules are important at the Garrick Club, where mobile telephones are banned, so it was embarrassing for Sir Michael Parkinson, a prominent club member, when his infernal machine started chirruping there yesterday, forcing him to leave the room during the speeches announcing the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.

The winner, Stephen Sondheim, was unable to be present, Sherry’s widow, Ruth Leon, explained, because of airport problems.

“When my husband was trying to persuade me to marry him, he sent me a cassette by Stephen Sondheim,” she explained. “You could say that, without the lyrics of Sondheim, none of us would be here today.”

The other shortlisted candidates were Steven Berkoff, Isla Blair, James Corden, and Caroline and David Stafford.

Hurd so civil about his dad

Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, was on Mumsnet yesterday when he was asked about Lord Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary under Thatcher.

“How did you feel, growing up, about your dad’s depiction on telly?” wrote “BeanAboutTown”. “I’m thinking in particular about the ‘ice-cream hair’ on Spitting Image. Did it upset you?”

Nick Hurd responded quick as a flash: “I am very proud of my dad and I tried to buy his Spitting Image puppet on eBay. It’s his birthday today!”

- If you thought there were no more royal beans to spill, you could be wrong. Hurry down to the V&A Museum at 7pm tonight to hear the official royal wedding photographer Hugo Burnand talking about snapping the royal family. No pressure, Hugo.

- Yesterday may have been International Women’s Day but a man dictated proceedings at the WIE (Women: Inspiration & Enterprise) Symposium Awards at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. Ed Miliband was 15 minutes late to present the final accolade, the WIE Inspiration award, to Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen Lawrence.

G&G and the fine art of distraction

Gilbert and George revealed the secret behind their new show, London Pictures, which opened at the White Cube in Bermondsey last night and is inspired by Evening Standard billboard posters.

To acquire the material, George would enter a newsagent on the pretext of buying something, distracting the shopkeeper while Gilbert made off with the Standard’s felt-tip-penned poster. “One time we got stopped by a young policeman, who asked us what we were doing,” said George. “I was bang to rights. I had to think on my feet. In that split second, all I came up with was, ‘Officer, at school we are making a display using these posters, to teach the kids about anti-social behaviour’.

“There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence. Then he said, ‘Oh sir, I just wish there were more people like you around’.”

- Literary agent Eugenie Furniss, who bagged Piers Morgan £1million for his diaries, is turning over a new leaf. She is leaving William Morris after 16 years to set up a new agency under the umbrella of James Grant Media. She is taking her clients with her and will be working with the Richard & Judy Book club. How about the Eugenie Furniss book club?

Swede dreams in Carnaby St

Singer-songwriter Laura Whitmore, below left, joined model Zara Martin and T4 presenter Georgie Okell for the launch of Swedish fashion store Monki in Carnaby Street. I’m A Celebrity … host Whitmore was DJ, commemorating International Women’s Day with a selection of disco sounds. Following her example, the others took to the turntables for a tour of duty of their own. No sign of any men in Louboutins, despite Jeanette Winterson’s call for a National Men’s High Heel Day.

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London Evening Standard | Damien Hirst gets heavy at Tate Modern
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Contemporary Sound Art | Haroon Mirza at Bristol

Editorial Team — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:48:49 +0000

His show /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| (the title being the “typographic representation of a sawtooth waveform” –that is to say, the representation of sound waves) consists of installations in which the auditory element heavily outweighs the visual. Each installation is pervaded by its own distinct mood, but all share a common denominator in the intensity of the experience and of the response each work elicits.

The artist has created a sense of insularity in which to experience his work through a spatial intervention in the galleries of Spike Island: the familiar rooms have been broken up and reassembled beyond recognition, with the help of temporary structural elements such as walls and latticed flooring. Upon entering what used to be Spike Island’s largest gallery, the visitor is almost sucked in, as if by a black hole, into Mirza’s award-winning The National Apavilion of Then and Now . Through a pitch black corridor soundproofed with thick, carpet-like material that swallows the sound of your footsteps, you walk into the unknown guided by a droning sound.

At the end of the corridor you find yourself in a dark and narrow triangle-shaped room, soundproofed with triangular pieces of dark grey foam jutting out from the walls. Overhead, a halo of white LED lights is the only light source, distorting the surface of the walls into apparent movement. The drone rises in pitch and intensity, the vibrations travel up through your body from the metal grille floor. When the lights and sound abruptly cut off, you are left in absolute darkness with the only sound a faint reverberation seeping through from the installations in the adjacent galleries; the only light a haunting afterimage of the LED halo. At that breathtaking moment you are engulfed by an overwhelming, absolute aloneness: a strangely welcome lack of any sort of context, temporal or spatial.

Once you’ve pried yourself away from the magnetic hold of National Apavilion, head to the gallery hosting I Saw Square Triangle Sine. The spatial arrangement of the installation -in the centre of the room on a raised platform- creates the effect of walking into a performance space, a recently abandoned set on which the instruments are still pulsing with life. The sculptures have clearly been positioned to bring to mind a band, including decks, drums, a keyboard, microphones and amps. This effect is however undercut by the physical reality of the undulating feedback noise, the sound of no music being produced at all. There is something distinctly menacing in the continuous rise and fall of the sound waves, intensified by the fact that the invisible line separating artwork and visitor is here erased: the visitor is welcome to play the drums or listen to the earphones, thus melting through the invisible barrier into the installation.

The adjacent space, set up as a corridor lined with sky blue foam, provides a welcome break from the intensity of the auditory experience that is The National Apavillion and Square Triangle. The mutedness and light spilling across the space sharply contrast with the sense of engulfment created by the previous installations. With head still vaguely throbbing, the visitor can examine a mixture of preparatory drawings for installation projects: some with the playful, careless quality of pencil drawings, thoughts absent-mindedly scrawled on paper; others precise, colour-coded diagrams with explanatory keys and notes. The juxtaposition of the doodle-like notes and almost mathematical blueprints make for a tongue-in-cheek reminder of the mixture of flash of inspiration and meticulous planning that inhere in the creation of any artwork.

The break, however, does not last long: already the exacting clamour of Untitled Song featuring Untitled Works by James Clarkson next door flows in and penetrates the visitor’s consciousness. Entering the adjacent gallery you are greeted by a symphony of energetic sound-snatches running alongside each other, collapsing, and dividing again. As time passes, different installations come alive at different points, gradually building a soundscape as if in reaction to each other and to the visitor.

A small, barely noteworthy speaker next to the entrance suddenly gives out an authoritative thump that vibrates its surface; from the other end of the room, a contraption made up by a wall-mounted speaker, a ceramic lamp, and a glass table responds and develops the thumping. In the centre, a modified shop display case, empty but for a lonely small speaker inside it; above it, a chain is suspended with its end curling on a woofer. As if swept along by the soundwaves rising and falling across the room, this installation comes to life too: the vibration travelling through the ear forces the chain to dance, adding its own jangle to the orchestra. Close to the entrance, suspended from the ceiling hangs a mobile-like structure, made up of a visibly vibrating small speaker, a string of red LED lights, a drum rim, and two more speakers on the other end.

Across the room lies an old-style turntable with an analogue radio spinning on it, strongly echoing the decks of Square Triangle; an energy-saving bulb overhead sheds intense white light and creates a not unpleasant grating sound crossed with the static emitted by the radio spinning past. Untitled Song employs the lyricism of looped feedback and static sound waves to create an auditory experience precariously straddling the border between noise and music. The use of muted speakers through which music –presumably- flows only to be discarded in favour of the pure sound of vibrations renders the work all the more poignant.

In /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| the most promising young artist of the 2011 Biennale has put together a daring, original, and deeply moving solo exhibition that helps to carve a distinct niche for sound art in the landscape of the contemporary art world.

Haroon Mirza: /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|, 21/01/2012 – 25/03/2012, Spike Island, 133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6UX.
www.spikeisland.org.uk

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ArtSake | Contemporary Sound Art | Haroon Mirza: /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| | Spike Island | Bristol, text by Regina Papachlimitzou
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Studio Views: Lisa Nilsson

Editorial Team — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:34:49 +0000

How did she come to make this work, this way? We asked the artist for a look into her work space, and into the history and process behind this enthralling series.

I was out “junking” and came across an antique quilled piece of religious art. It was a very fancy filigreed crucifix-gilt. I later learned that nuns and monks used edges of old bibles to make pieces like this. I incorporated the technique into some assemblages I had been making that contained many different found and made elements. Around this time I encountered a French hand-colored print of an anatomical cross section. I loved the colors and shapes and felt that the way paper behaves when rolled and shaped in quilling could work very well in representing what I saw in the anatomical print.

I started creating anatomical cross sections made of Japanese mulberry paper and the gilded edges of old books, using that same quilling (or paper filigree) technique.

Here I’m just getting started on a new piece. I build the work over an image or drawing, pinning parts to a piece of Styrofoam insulation (probably the single most useful and versatile material in my studio). I tend to work from the center out. When the piece is finished, I turn it over and brush the back with PVA (the white glue that book makers use) and the piece takes on enough strength and rigidity to hold its shape without pins.

I like to have several sources of reference material for each piece so that I can pick and choose elements from each that work to the piece’s advantage, and I can more fully understand what I am looking at.

This piece represents a cross section of hands in prayer position. The section passes through laterally at the level of the metacarpals (the bones of the main part of the hand).

I’ve partially made the bones of the thumb knuckles and some tendons.

This part of my studio was originally the laundry room, and is where I make the boxes that contain my pieces. I make them out of cherry wood and old glass and cover the outside with Japanese silk book cloth. It is beautiful stuff to work with. I’ve had the good fortune to have friends in the book arts that have taught me good paper and paste technique. It’s fussy, precise, clean work that I enjoy in a certain state of mind.

This piece represents a lateral section through the head at about nose level. It is life-size. I love how asymmetrical the body looks in cross section. We are so symmetrical on the outside and so asymmetrical on the inside and everything inside fits so perfectly. This is the connection I made to quilling. Rolled pieces of paper are amenable to being squeezed, shaped and shifted to fill a space. I use mulberry paper for its fabric-like strength and flexibility and the sophisticated color palette it is available in.

This piece represents a midsagittal section (the one that cuts through the center making a left half and a right half) of the head and chest. I employ a device of making all of the bones in my work from the gilded edges of old books. I do this for aesthetic reasons as well as a means of pulling the pieces away from the world of scientific specimens and a bit more in the direction of religious reliquaries. I like to emphasize the reverential and the precious; to have a look inside is such a privilege.

I continually challenge myself to increase my vocabulary of quilling shapes and textures while sticking to the inherent grammar of the technique. It is important to me that the viewer’s eye does not grow weary of looking at swirls.

I like for my works to read more as objects than as images. To that end, I show the lateral sections lying flat on shelves and the vertical ones, standing upright in an altarpiece-like fashion.

Lisa Nilsson is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied Illustration, and more recently of the McCann Technical School’s medical assisting program, where her life-long aesthetic interest in anatomy and cool-looking medical things grew a bit more informed. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts.

All images courtesy of Lisa Nilsson.

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ArtSake | Studio Views: Lisa Nilsson
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The Red Ball Project

Editorial Team — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:45:29 +0000

The Red Ball Project is an initiative which sees huge vinyl red balls popping up in tight spaces all over various cities, including Portland, Chicago, Taipai, Sydney, Aru Dhabi, and Barcelona. The main aim of the project is to “access the imagination embedded in all of us” says the artist. “On the surface, the experience seems to be about the ball itself as an object, but the true power of the project is what it can create for those who experience it. It opens a doorway to imagine what if?”

The project is touring, so look out for it in a city near you soon.

www.redballproject.com

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HUH. Magazine | The Red Ball Project by Jack Lowe
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A new solo exhibition by Chen Man

Editorial Team — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:28:12 +0000

Born in the 1980, she grew up in Beijing and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Before her graduation in 2005, she had already begun her career as a fashion photographer by photographing the front cover of the popular lifestyle magazine Vision. Since then, she has created a rich body of striking images for Chinese editions of Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue. She has also won advertising commissions for international brands such as Adidas, Nike and Motorola. Chen Man’s images play with the juxtaposition of old and new, real and imaginary, ordinary and ideal. She frequently uses modern city landscapes and historical buildings in China as the backdrop for her images and mixes it with street culture, animation, sci-fi and pop references.

Chen Man’s images are often heavily manipulated and involve painstaking and complex layers of post-production. The hyper-real aesthetic of her images alludes to a desire for unobtainable perfection.

Chen Man’s rise coincides with emergence of a consumer culture in China and the desire for luxury consumer goods. The power and poignancy of her work lies in her ability to understand people’s desires and to visualise them through her striking images. A role model for the post-80s generation, her images capture the personalities and attitudes of a new generation of Chinese.

This is Chen Man’s first UK solo exhibition from February 10th to April 7th 2012.
Collaboration with Redeye
In the Steps of Chen Man is a fashion photography workshop inspired by Chen Man’s solo exhibition and led by Manchester based photographer Ray Chan. For more details please visit here.

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Chinese Arts Centre | A new solo exhibition by Chen Man
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