‘Mental Pressure’ (2009) by Yasi Ghanbari
Edited copy of Bruce Nauman’s ‘Body Pressure’.
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Bruce Nauman
‘Body Pressure’, a 1974 performance piece by Bruce Nauman.
The performer is instructed (through a poster hung on the wall) to press himself against the wall in various positions. The poster is also a free edition.
The text from this poster is below.
Body Pressure
Press as much of the front surface of
your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek)
against the wall as possible.
Press very hard and concentrate.
Form an image of yourself (suppose you
had just stepped forward) on the
opposite side of the wall pressing
back against the wall very hard.
Press very hard and concentrate on the image pressing very hard.
(the image of pressing very hard)
press your front surface and back surface
toward each other and begin to ignore or
block the thickness of the wall. (remove
the wall)
Think how various parts of your body
press against the wall; which parts
touch and which do not.
Consider the parts of your back which
press against the wall; press hard and
feel how the front and back of your
body press together.
Concentrate on the tension in the muscles,
pain where bones meet, fleshy deformations that occur under pressure; consider
body hair, perspiration, odors (smells).
This may become a very erotic exercise.
Sofia Leiby
Work from ‘Salutary plank’ (2010) by Sofia Leiby
Screenprint on found book page.
‘Salutary Plank’ is a modest memorial ‘plaque’ installed at Ox-Bow School of Art commemorating the absence of happiness in a specific domain, or, the infeasibility of nostalgic fulfillment in the modern “natural” landscape.
Patrizio Di Massimo
‘Oae’ by Patrizio Di Massimo (2009)
‘Oae’ is a video work which takes Italy’s colonial occupation of Libya as its subject matter. Patrizio Di Massimo examines this dark chapter in his native Italy’s history by overlapping excerpts of his own footage with black and white documentary and archive material taken from The Lion in the Desert, a film made in 1981 by Mustapha Akkad and censored in Italy at the time for its exposé of empire building and military atrocities. Filmed in high-definition colour on the streets of modern day Tripoli and amongst historical ruins across Libya, the artist sought out the monuments and architectural remnants of both Ancient Rome and more recently Fascist rule from 1911-1940.
Ken Okiishi
Stills from ‘(Goodbye to) Manhattan’ by Ken Okiishi
Okiishi has been living between New York and Berlin since 2001, and (Goodbye to) Manhattan combines materials from that experience (filmed between 2006 and 2009) into a seventy-two-minute, semiautobiographical transposition of Woody Allen’s classic Manhattan. Okiishi’s cast of characters is pared down to Manhattan‘s three female protagonists, interpreted by key players in the artist’s actual New York/Berlin life; its script is the Google translation, into English, of the German version of Allen’s original.
Watch the video here
Tadasu Takamine
Stills from the video ‘God bless America’ (2002) by Tadasu Takamine.
Tadasu Takamine and his lovely assistant shared a room with a huge clay face for eighteen consecutive days. Before the eye of the camera, they ate, slept, read, had sex and made continuous changes to the face, animating it to keep time with a scratchy, halting recording of the American patriotic classic “God Bless America”.
Erin Shireff
Stills from ‘Live feed’ by Erin Shireff
In Shireff’s online project Live Feed (2007–ongoing) we can watch her walking around a vaguely human-shaped mound of clay that dominates her tiny studio. Though this is supposedly a ‘live feed’ of artistic creation, despite Shirreff’s constant movement the clay monolith lies inert, failing to take shape as a sculpture.
