ISSUE 9Winter 2010-2011 Contents HIGHLIGHTS: Pedro Barateiro by Ricardo Nicolau; New Abstract Painting Joanna Fiduccia and Michael Ned Holte in conversation; Michael Clark Company by Catherine Wood; Pratchaya Phinthong by Alessandro Rabottini; Klara Liden by Chris Wiley; UK ’90s Dance Music Francesco Tenaglia, Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher in conversation. web features topPRACTICE MAKES PERFECT Combining a cubist approach to space with an innate impulse toward movement, dance anarchist MICHAEL CLARK choreographs the blurring of art and life, translating rigorous daily practice into sequences of extraordinary emotional intensity. come, been and gone, Simon Williams, 2009 In a square of white light projected onto the floor, a male dancer knots his body into angular shapes: arms rigid, fists clenched, and head to one side. He curves forward through his back to assume what looks like a stretching position, holding his legs beneath bent knees, but pauses only for a split second before rolling again, one crooked leg pressing to the floor against the direction of his torso. Set within the opening moments of Michael Clark’s project for Tate Modern, part I (2010), the continuous unfolding of movement in this sequence makes it hard to quantify its compositional elements as discrete units. Each movement is exquisitely unpredictable, truncating our expectations for the movement phrase that it begins. There is a cubist quality to the dancer’s striving to fully inhabit the space marked out by the flat white square on the floor, pressing his body’s surfaces to the ground, at times into near impossible contortions. But to think only of analytic cubism’s geometries detracts from the work’s extraordinary emotional intensity. The choreographed exposure of the dancer’s body—set to the charged strains of David Bowie’s Sweet Thing—is almost painful in its intimation of psychological restlessness, as though the dance is a search, without apparent end, for a still place to be. Read moretopThe Territory of Versions Pointing towards the digital condition as a source of renewal and mutability, OLIVER LARIC’s hyperlinked representational inquiries explore disembodied agency, Net-born avatars, and parallel worlds— channeling the Internet’s inexplicable uncanny. Icon (Utrecht), details, 2009 While movable type, radio, television, and telephones have successively changed the way we communicate, it was only when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web on Christmas Day 20 years ago that the linearity of thought that has characterized Western culture was challenged by the world view of the Internet. Today, the web accounts for almost half of our waking attention. We search through its data, click on its hyperlinks, skim its texts, download, upload, email, and Tweet. In The Shallows (2010), technology writer Nicholas Carr argues that Internet use is eclipsing our ability to think deeply and creatively. “The Net seizes our attention only to scatter it,” he warns, adding that the environment of distraction cultivated online inhibits learning. “We become mindless consumers of data.” Given this trajectory, Carr implies, we may one day do away with long narrative structures that string and weave ideas inefficiently for the near instantaneous apprehension afforded by RSS feeds and text-messages. #readmore# Much of Carr’s reasoning is supported by solid research published by science and medical journals; objectively, it appears, his is an incontrovertible claim. But we would be amiss to leave it at that. The world of facts, as is often the case, is only able to describe a reduced picture of the creative mind. To analyze creativity one synapse at a time, as scientists have done, is to harden a human function whose beauty and value lies precisely in its potential for unexpected flights, moments of self-reflection, and whimsy. For many working in the arts, the suggestion that developments in technology limit rather than expand the imagination is specious, if not completely misguided. For those who grew up in the 1980s, when both home computing and mobile telephony arrived on the market, life is naturally one that is interconnected. This generation of artists is maturing in a world mediated by the Net; the digitized world is the condition in which they experience the world. What is true is that the Internet has changed some very fundamental operations in daily living, and there is no question that, for those engaged with the world of ample information and instant correspondence—where we learn not in long, uninterrupted stretches of concentration, but in abbreviations and fragments of video and text, and where private life is laid bare by online social networking—we’re not less creative; we’re creative differently than before. Touch My Body (Green Screen Version), video still, 2008 Art has entered into a time in which the economy of the infinite is fast overcoming one that is bounded. Hierarchies are flattened—think Google—and it would seem that the old shackles of class, privilege, and wealth will fall away, allowing art and its institutions to move into a networked system of mass exposure and access. By his own admission, Laric originally made a website for his artwork to cut out the middleman and expose his work easily and directly to interested parties online. While performance offers a direct line of communication between artists and their audience, the intimacy of Internet art is different from its traditional counterparts in every other way. Online the work exists—outside of space and time—the moment it is accessed. “My website is not a space of representation but of primary experiences,” Laric said in an interview with Domenico Quaranta, “You are viewing the real thing. And when the work travels to other sites, it is still the real thing.” This freedom of access inscribes a new aesthetic for both the artwork and its viewing. As cultural categories that once operated within social and spatial limits, the Internet has all but eliminated such borders. “I really enjoy putting up work for free and not asking for anybody to pay to see it,” Laric said on LumenEclipse.com. “It’s less elitist… You don’t have to be in one of the art capitals to go to one of the galleries… you can just get the information from wherever you are and participate.” An image published by the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2008 shows four missiles. The above illustration [in which portions of the image are highlighted] suggests that the second missile from the right is the sum of two other missiles in the image. The contours of the billowing smoke near the ground, and in the immediate wake of the missile, match perfectly. Three days after the initial doctored image was published, an alternate version was released, showing only three missiles. This exposed enhancement was followed by a public continuation of image manipulation. Anonymous authors, all over the world, played through numerous possibilities of missile potency. Variations spread with online forums, news blogs and image boards acting as platforms for the communal call and response. When Googling this missile incident, different versions of the image appear. The initial four missile version coexists with the forty missile version. Authenticity is decided on by the viewer. The more often an image is viewed, the more likely it makes the top of search results. An image viewed often enough becomes part of collective memory. 50 50, video still, 2007 Online, it continues, “logical reality is almost always omitted.” Versions also exists in many versions, due to the fact that Laric re-edits the film every time it is exhibited. However, even as different narrators are used, what remains constant is the soullessness of their tone. Like the prerecorded voices often heard over airport PAs—inhumanly articulating each word in a mechanical cadence, kind-sounding but insouciant—the tone is the same comfortless lull that Kubrick gave HAL, the computer in 2001 programmed with artificial intelligence and a logic that would ultimately lead to its user’s demise. Bring in your ship so that you might hear our voices. In 1959, Ella Fitzgerald performed “Mack the Knife” in Berlin to appeal to an audience she knew would know the melody from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Though under rehearsed, Fitzgerald added it to the end of her set. The crowd roared as they recognized the tune, but halfway through, Fitzgerald forgot the words. True to form, she improvised the rest, and the words she made-up on the spot to Weill’s melody were about the song being sung. The song was about itself: She sang about how she was making up the words, and how she was making a wreck of it. She sang about Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong who, separately, had previously made the song popular as pop and jazz hits. For a few bars, she scatted in Armstrong’s trademark growl. She sang about the performers on stage with her, describing them before embarking on an impersonation of Armstrong imitating a trombone—a reference of a reference of a reference. It seemed that many thought this was the most beautiful song in the world, at least in 1960, when she won two Grammy awards for the live recording of this concert. For decades after that night in Berlin, Fitzgerald would continue to sing made-up lyrics every time she performed “Mack the Knife.” New versions came into being with each show, and with each subsequent recording, another version would henceforth coexist with all the others. As if by magic, like a clown car from which emerges an endless succession of clowns, it would expand and reshape our expectations of the known world. —CARSON CHAN is an architecture writer and curator. He is a regular writer for cultural publications like West East Magazine(Hong Kong) and 032c(Berlin), where he is also a contributing editor. Carson is the co-director and founder of PROGRAM, an initiative for art and architecture collaborations in Berlin. He is currently working on a series of essays on architecture, exhibition-making and curating. topNo Success Like Failure Serving both as a film set and a workshop, the studio of artist MATEO TANNATT is the scene of a practice that holds the theatrical representation of the body at its heart, in the best tradition of Los Angeles’s “pathetic art.” All photos: Marina Pinsky The name smacks of myth and antiquity, of battles and work. Minerva was the Roman goddess of war and the crafts. Minerva Street is one of the main roads in the district of Vernon, Los Angeles. South of downtown and west of Culver City, an area in which a large number of the city’s galleries are concentrated, Vernon is a sort of no man’s land devoted to the collection, recycling, and processing of various materials, such as scrap iron and paper. A wholly industrial district, Vernon is made up of a sequence of sheds and nondescript low buildings. Some of these are occasionally converted into studios for filming movies. Next to a building where a spectacular amount of paper and cardboard is collected, and another where rows of Hispanic workers cut cloth and stitch clothes under a cold neon light, you may come across the remains of a movie set that has reached the end of its brief existence. Illusion sent for scrap. Read more |
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