“Cinema Vezzoli” is part of The Trinity, a series presented at three international institutions—the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, MOCA and MoMA PS1—that explores and presents the diverse and fundamental aspects of the artist’s work and development. Organized by MOCA Senior Curator Alma Ruiz, “Cinema Vezzoli” is on view from April 27 to August 11, 2014 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Watch the videos from “Cinema Vezzoli” on MOCATV following this schedule:
• 6/9 OK, The Praz is Right
• 6/23 Il Sogno de Venere
• 7/7 The End
• 7/21 Jeu De Paume
• 8/4 The Return of Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing Balls
KEVIN McGARRY: I am looking at these images that you’ve created to accompany this interview: iPhone screens showing mock Grindr profile pages with your pictures.
FRANCESCO VEZZOLI: Yes, it’s a mix of professional photography and some of my artwork. It’s funny; just this morning there was an article by James Franco in the New York Times about the importance of selfies.
KMG: I saw that—it sounds like the perfect place to start. I didn’t read it yet, though, did you?
FV: Selfies remind me a lot of Andy Warhol.
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As a critic, I’ve often asked myself what makes Francesco Vezzoli such a controversial figure. Both influential and highly criticized, Vezzoli pushes his position as an artist to the brink of self-destruction. More than any other, Vezzoli seems at ease in that infernal, magic circle defined by the overlapping of the culture industry, underground counterculture, intellectual radicalism, infotainment, communication 2.0, the society of the spectacle and the global art market, which has come to define contemporary culture. His works oscillate between these contexts with a subtle nonchalance, the exact opposite of the conceptual, aesthetic and political coherence associated with a legible or defined — and therefore curatorially defendable — artistic practice.
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#FRANCESCOVEZZOLI is an online extension to a themed survey published in Kaleidoscope‘s issue 20 (Winter 2013/14) dedicated to the controversial Italian artist. Running parallel to “Cinema Vezzoli,” his major institutional show currently on view at the Los Angeles Moca through August 11, this program gives an exclusive access to the artist’s extraordinary and lesser-known video works, with a retrospective selection from the late nineties to the present which highlights Vezzoli’s mastery in deconstructing the vocabulary of filmmaking and analyzing how celebrity-driven culture influences art and the public imagination. Starring international film and TV icons such as Helmut Berger, Helen Mirren, and Sharon Stone, Vezzoli’s works ride the edge of contemporary art and show business, occupying a schizophrenic space between pop and conceptualism, high and low, cynicism and criticality.
Enjoy the video program.
Conceived as an ironic tribute, the “Bruce Nauman Trilogy” harks back to some of the works by the celebrated American artist, cross-pollinating their meaning with references to contemporary media culture. While Greatest Hits: Milva Canta Bruce Nauman: Vattene dalla mia mente! Vattene da questa stanza! is Francesco Vezzoli’s melodramatic rereading of the installation Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), in Flower Arrangement he replaces the flour in Nauman’s work with red roses. Similarly, in The Return of Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing Balls, Vezzoli abandons the conceptual coldness of the original work to present a slick video based on the canons of pornographic filmography starring Brad Rock and his the infamous American gay-porn testicles.
Courtesy of Prada Collection, Milan
Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Belle Haleine: Eau de Violette (1921), Greed, a New Fragrance by Francesco Vezzoli advertises an empty bottle of perfume. The label portrays Vezzoli’s face in drag, photographed by Francesco Scavullo, where Duchamp appeared on his perfume bottle as Rrose Sélavy, photographed by Man Ray. In the video, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Michelle Williams and Natalie Portman, the artist reproduces the launch of a commercial product that does not exist for the purpose of pondering the ephemeral nature of contemporary media culture.
Courtesy of MOCA – Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
“THE KISS” is a project including a video and several embroideries, focused on a reading of an episode from the cult soap opera Dynasty. The video The Kiss portrays a dialogue between Helmut Berger and Francesco Vezzoli as Alexis Carrington and her son Steve. It is a heated exchange of lines that ends with a kiss between the two actors. In a setting replete with citations from some of Luchino Visconti’s films such as Ludwig, the work presents an ironic reversal of roles, a play of juxtapositions and cross-references between classical cinema and the Pop atmospheres of American soaps, yet representing the first ever TV “coming out” sequence.
Courtesy of MAXXI - Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome
This video is a Hollywood version of a single live staging of Luigi Pirandello’s Così è (Se Vi Pare) at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The performance worked as the premiere of a play that will never run, starring Cate Blanchett, Ellen Burstyn, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, David Strathairn, Elaine Stritch and Dianne Wiest. In this visionary approach Vezzoli aims at subverting the public’s expectations by suggesting a provocative reflection on the world of contemporary art, considered by the artist to be “an entertainment industry” aimed at self-promotion.
Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York; PERFORMA, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
“An Embroided Trilogy” (1997-1999) is an ambitious apology for embroidery but also a journey through the creative imaginary of Francesco Vezzoli. From the cinema of Luchino Visconti to Silvana Mangano, 1980s quiz shows and the Pop music of Iva Zanicchi, the artist’s references are interlaced here, breathing life into a magmatic universe which blends together cultural references, personal memories and impossible linguistic cross-pollinations. In THE END (teleteatro) (1999), the trilogy’s last chapter directed by Carlo Di Palma, the queen of European melodrama and conceptual theatre Valentina Cortese recites the well-known song “Help” by The Beatles in a Douglas Sirk setting.
Courtesy of Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (TO)
The “Democrazy” project consists of several posters, embroideries and a video installation presented at the 2011 Venice Biennale that shows two faux campaign messages played by Sharon Stone, one of Hollywood’s most politically active stars, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the most controversial European philosopher. Reproducing strategies of political communication, the work mocks the spectacularization of U.S. election campaigns. In the words of the artist, the purpose of the work is “to infiltrate the systems in power today, observe them as though I were an invisible spectator and then snatch their secrets.”
Courtesy of MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome
Inspired by the documentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Comizi Di Non Amore (2004) is a pilot show for a reality dating game that will never go to air, starring female icons such as Catherine Deneuve, Marianne Faithful, Antonella Lualdi, Jeanne Moreau and Terry Schiavo. While Pasolini focused on the physical aspect of sexuality, Vezzoli looks at the degeneration of culture, the individual and sex, based always on a relationship of power, between dominator and slave, television and audience. The video belongs to the “Trilogy of Death,” also comprising … and aimed to create a continuous slipping and sliding of various genres and languages.
Courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milan
Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (2005) belongs to the “Gore Vidal Trilogy,” which also comprises several embroideries, drawing from the controversial project on Emperor Caligula staged by Gore Vidal in the 1970s. In Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, Vezzoli makes a film trailer for a movie that does not exist, interpreted by international stars and personalities from the world of television and independent cinema such as Gore Vidal, Helen Mirren and Courtney Love, among others. The result is a parody that focuses on the sex-power binomial, a scathing deconstruction of the strategies used by the entertainment world.
Presented at the 55th Venice Biennale, this work is a room-sized installation centering on an animated video. Setting forth a glossy and alluring world of free-floating and fragmentary objects excised from normal context and imbued with an impossible digital sheen, Marten’s video asserts the sheer proliferation and interchangeability of images in the physical and virtual realms alike. The voiceover – intimate diaristic revelations or idle chitchat – takes us on a surreal journey in which evocative images mass together into a heady melange of resonances, suggesting a sensual kind of catastrophe.
Helen Marten (b. 1985, Macclesfield, UK) lives and works in London. She has held solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Her works have been shown in group exhibitions at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, Venice; the 12th Lyon Biennal, Lyon; and at MoMa PS1, New York.
Courtesy of the artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Greene Naftali, New York; Johann König, Berlin; and T293, Rome/Naples.
The only way she could ever look good is with distance (2011) is a play; a tragedy of sorts, or perhaps a stream of consciousness. The presented video forms the documentation of a performance originally made to a live stream. Sides’s practice often explores the surface of images, visual and acoustic languages behind socio-cultural attitudes, technological infrastructures and how ideas create limitations, boundaries, and augmentations of experience.
Richard Sides (b. 1985, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. He has recently presented projects at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; Carlos / Ishikawa, London; Raum, Bologna; and Zabludowicz Collection, New York. He also runs the label BUS and co-organises The Woodmill, an artist run initiative in London.
Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London.
John Smith’s Associations (1975) sets language against itself by using the ambiguities inherent in the English language. Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a voiceover reading from the book Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by academic linguistic Herbert H. Clark. Combining a wry sense of humor with word/visual games and puns, Smith explores the boundaries of cinematic montage by combining elements together and against each other in order to destroy and create multiple meanings at the same time.
John Smith (b. 1955, London, UK) lives and works in London. He has held solo exhibitions at Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; and at Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden. His works have been shown in group exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; Jonathan Viner, London; and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London.
Players provides a documentary peek into the lives of six professional poker players who have chosen Bangkok as their home base. The daily routine of this poker community is structured and organized around the logic of the game and probability theory. One of them, the Finn Jaakko, soberly explains the rules within their community, while the artist herself plays all the roles. This work is a comment on how every community has internal rules whose logic escapes the outsider, and it’s primarily one’s perspective that determines whether these rules are strange or not.
Pilvi Takala (b. 1981, Helsinki, Finland) lives and works in Istanbul and Helsinki. She has held solo exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Künstlerhaus Bremen. Her works have been included in group shows at Apexart, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London.
Versions is an ongoing project by Oliver Laric, proposing that present methods of creative production challenge the hierarchy of an authentic or auratic ‘original’ image. Rather than privileging a primary object, Versions suggests a re-direction for image making, one in which copies and remixes increasingly usurp ‘originals’ in an age of digital production. This video from 2012 was presented alongside a series of polyurethane casts, sculptures and appropriated items, and aims to explicate contemporary image circulation and their exchange through present and historical conditions.
Oliver Laric (b. 1981, Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. He has held solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA; and at Seventeen, London. His works have been included in group shows at Fridericianum, Kassel; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; and Seventeen, London.
The work is based on the complex tale behind a traditional Thai egg-yolk dessert, adapted from a recipe that originated with Portuguese nuns in the 15th century, combined with the biography of a Japanese woman descended from survivors of the Hiroshima Atomic bomb. Reassembling the disjunctive layers of private and public dialogues, Golden Teardrop heightens audience awareness of the conspiracies triggered by institutionalized domination versus individual limitation. Revisiting pivotal moments in Thai history, the artist explores the layers of detail, accident and innuendo that congeal to form the identity of a nation.
Arin Rungjang (b. 1975, Bangkok, Thailand) lives and works in Bangkok. Recently he was invited to participate at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, for the Thai Pavilion. His works have been shown in group exhibitions including “Everyday Life: 2013 Asian Art Biennial” at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan.
Courtesy of the artist and West, Den Haag.
The cosmology of the Lakota Sioux describes the universe as “taku san san,” meaning “something that moves, that relocates.” This could also be a way of describing Yona Friedman’s apartment, a place of fluctuations and mystery, which Camille Henrot has explored in Film Spatial. Through Baltkis’s point of view – Baltkis being Yona’s dog, a key character in his world – the film shows its subjective and erratic view of the apartment, lingering over the details of Yona Friedman’s everyday but visionary life. The work is a coproduction by Kamel Mennour, Paris; Collections Saint-Cyprien; and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.
Camille Henrot (b. 1978, Paris, France) lives in Paris and New York. She has held solo exhibitions at New Museum, New York; and at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris. Her works have been shown in group exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, where she was awarded the Silver Lion.
Courtesy of the artist and Kamel Mennour, Paris.
GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) shows a shiny black Samsung smart fridge pondering its existence and mingling with like objects. In a scientifically-charged description that concerns its inner workings, the fridge’s anguished, robotic first person voiceover renders audible its inner life and its potential dreams. As we create increasingly smarter objects, Mark Leckey predicts a world in which things become sentient, start communicating, and alter our environment into new digital ecosystems.
Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) lives and works in London. He has held solo exhibitions at Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Le Consortium, Dijon. His works have been shown in group exhibitions at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju; and at New Museum, New York.
Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London.
The film features an egg-yolk jellyfish, as it drifts in its tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. A voiceover describes its baroque but literally brainless anatomy and its voracious cannibalism. Shifting from a seemingly banal wildlife TV programme about a sea creature towards a description of its display in the aquarium, the film looks at how the image pre-exists its own recording, approaching the window of the aquarium as a display device that informs the notion of the viewer. The work was commissioned to be inserted between ads and feature films within a network of commercial cinemas in the UK and Ireland.
Aurélien Froment (b. 1976, Angers, France) lives and works in Dublin. He has held solo exhibitions at Carlier Gebauer, Berlin; at Le CREDAC, Ivry-sur-Seine; and at Wattis Institute, San Francisco. His works have been included in group shows at CCA Derry, Londonderry; the 55th Biennale di Venezia, Venice; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.
Courtesy of the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris.
“Baby, you’re not born for this era. Nobody ever is. The firmware inside you had already made its one update at conception. You’re it and that’s it. So get to work on that software and don’t get hacked. Enjoy the conference. Meet someone new. See you after the break.” Baby feat. Bali is a live simulation that brings together three online artificial intelligence bots, typically rented and modified to converse with humans about a commercial product, be a sexting partner, provide therapy, and so on. Here they converse with each other, generating a dynamic conversation about life, data models, appearance and its material reality, that evolves indefinitely and without the human interlocutor.
Ian Cheng (b. 1984, Los Angeles, US) lives and works in New York. He has held solo exhibitions at The Vanity, Los Angeles; Standard (OSLO), Oslo; and Off Vendome, Dusseldorf. His works have been shown in group exhibitions such as the 12th Lyon Biennial, Lyon; at Museum of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami; and at MoMA PS1, New York.
Courtesy of the artist and Standard (OSLO), Oslo.
Arrangements of clean towels are presented in isolation from their locations whilst a computer-generated narration describe the items missing from the shot, including camera directions, descriptions of individuals on the street and phrases taken from personal ads, concluding with a sequence of flash photography shot in a black marbled bathroom in Sao Paulo. Exploring subjects such as loneliness, health and the manipulation of these concerns through advertising, Matters of no Very Peaceable Colour is an anxiety-ridden experiment that flips between visual styles – from low-fi animation to found footage.
Rachel Reupke (b. 1971, England) completed her MA at Goldsmiths College, London. She received the LUX Associate Artists Programme in 2008. Reupke recent exhibitions have been held at Stadium, New York; Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, France; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2011; and Picture This, Bristol, UK.
Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London.
A fast-moving sequence of written commentary and excerpts of everyday incidents and pictures construct an inferred story where the whispered voiceover tells of love and implied violence, as the viewer sees innocent and pleasing images. Then, by reinforcing the oppressive rhythm of a drum which accompanies snatches of music and speech, the mood of the film gradually becomes darker, even though nothing is stated directly. Testing the limits of perception, Prouvost highlights the slipperiness of meaning and notions of reality.
Laure Prouvost (b. 1978, Lille, France) lives and works in London. She has held solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; and Tate Britain, London. Her works have been included in group shows at the 12th Lyon Biennial, Lyon; at Sculpture Center, New York; and at Portikus, Frankfurt.
Courtesy the artist and MOT International, London/Brussels.
November is a self-reflexive video that examines the role of images in the post-revolutionary moment, primarily through the figure of Andrea Wolf, a friend of the artist’s from her teenage years who eventually fought alongside Kurdish rebels. Undertaking the question of what is nowadays called terrorism and used to be called internationalism once, the film’s starting point is a feminist martial arts flick the artist and Wolf shot in the Eighties, when they were 17 years old, on Super-8 stock. Now this fictional material has suddenly become a document, questioning the notion of political memory when revolution seems to be over and only its gestures keep circulating.
Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. She has held solo exhibitions at e-flux, New York, 2011; The Art Institute Chicago, Chicago; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Her works have been shown in group exhibitions such as Taipei Biennial, Taipei; Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju; and documenta 12, Kassel.
Courtesy of the artist.
A related screening event curated by Shama Khanna will be held at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, on March 10, accompanied by a public conversation with featured artist Richard Sides. Featured video works include:
• Ed Atkins, Even Pricks, 2013, 8′
• Steve Reinke, Great Blood Sacrifice, 2010, 4′
• Peter Wachtler, Untitled, 2013, 11′
• Richard Sides, The only way she could ever look good is with distance, 2011, 8′
• Laure Prouvost, Monolog, 2011, 9′
• Andrew N. Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, 2010, 11′
• Pilvi Takala, Drive with Care, 2013, 13′
A related screening event curated by Shama Khanna will be held at Kaleidoscope’s newly opened project space, Milan, on March 14, accompanied by a public conversation with featured artist Andrew Norman Wilson. Featured video works include:
• Ed Atkins, Even Pricks, 2013, 8′
• Steve Reinke, Great Blood Sacrifice, 2010, 4′
• Peter Wachtler, Untitled, 2013, 11′
• Richard Sides, The only way she could ever look good is with distance, 2011, 8′
• Laure Prouvost, Monolog, 2011, 9′
• Andrew N. Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, 2010, 11′
• Pilvi Takala, Drive with Care, 2013, 13′
The memorable reveal of the man behind the curtain twiddling knobs and simulating the booming, god-like voice of Oz by rascally Toto the dog is an apt metaphor for how the authority of the voice-over crumbled towards a post-historical pluralism of voices. The persistence of enlightenment theories of the West, however—where objective knowledge of the world is key to the progress of civilization—signaled that a hierarchy between the mind and body, and the attitudes and cultures that subscribe to this way of the world, still remained: “It is the confrontation of mind with matter which brings the object into being,” reads a female voice in Duncan Campbell’s recent film It For Others (2013), underlining this power relation. Contemporary artists working with the moving image analyze this separation of mind over body. Read more.
#VOICEOVER is an online extension to a themed survey published in Kaleidoscope‘s issue 20 (Winter 2013/14), dedicated to the deployment of off-camera commentary as a conceptual device in the moving image works of a new generation of artists, including Ed Atkins, Laure Prouvost, Pilvi Takala, Hito Steyerl, Helen Marten, Camille Henrot, Ian Cheng, Mark Leckey, and Oliver Laric. The following selection of featured videos, exceptionally made available for online viewing, explores how these artists resort to the disembodied voice to find expression beyond language, elevate sound from background element to a character in its own right, and tackle issues of neutrality, animism and miscomprehension. Referencing the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard while also drawing from advertising and text-to-speech, these artists use voiceover to analyze the separation of mind over body, lending the works their alternating intimacy and alienation.
Enjoy the video program.