Julien Bismuth, ‘The saddest funniest sculpture in the world’ (2007)

The saddest funniest sculpture in the world’ – Performance.

‘The saddest funniest sculpture in the world’ – Installation view.

‘Dead Air Comedy’ (2010)

Video still

Don was asked to compose and improvise a series of monologues, inspired by stand-up comedy routines, and to perform them in the empty theater of the ACF, letting the silence of the absent audience amplify the tragi-comic vacuity of his solitary performance, and of the genre from which it stems.

‘Plouf’! (with Jean Pascal Flavien)

Video still

On 26 July, 2006, two boats met somewhere off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, near the Ilhas Cagarras. A sailing ship, party of Rio, accommodated the public and Flavien and Bismuth were held in a smaller boat, party of the beach of Copacabana, which left one hour later. The moment the two boats were within range to communicate marked the beginning of the performance. Reading texts punctuated by signs and signals, the performance was completed only when the two boats drifted too far apart. Plouf! was then re-invented on Feb 21st, 2009 in the context of the river Thames, outside Tate Modern.

Interview with Bismuth and Flavien by Tate.

Simon Faithfull, ‘Accident book’ (2009)

Accident Book is an intervention in eight Accident and Emergency wards across London and Cambridge. The book tells the story of 33 accidents that befell the writer over a period of 42 years.

From June 2009 onwards, people waiting for treatment, prognoses or friends, began to discover books lying amongst the copies of old magazines in these Accident and Emergency wards. The 500 copies of Accident Book distributed through these eight hospitals are each individually numbered and the finders of these books are encouraged to take them home but also to register them here.

Two examples:

The gut region.

The toes.

Jon Sasaki, ‘Flyguy triggering his own motion sensor’ (2010)

A flyguy (one of the familiar dancing inflatables that wave people into carwashes and fast food restaurants) has been moved into the gallery and hooked up to a motion sensor.

Click here to view a videoclip

‘Toronto’s Official Y2K Mascot, Autumn’ (2008)

With “2000″ emblazoned on his CN Tower-shaped body, an obsolete Y2K mascot sits contemplating his few, if any, prospects.

Click here to view a videoclip

‘Fireworks’ (2006)

Sputtering fireworks are thrust into a gallery display case, which, while containing the danger and violence, also highlights and reveals.

Click here to view a videoclip

‘Black Light Thrift Store’ (2007)

Intervention in a second hand store.

‘Jon Sasaki’s Best Friendship’ (2006 – ongoing)

The artist is offering his lifelong best-friendship.
Purchasers of a pendant are asked to break it in two, select either the “BE-FRI” half or the ”ST-END” half for themselves, and leave the other half with a gallery representative. The artist will then collect and wear his component as an official symbol of the newly formalized friendship.

Ingo Vetter (for the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop), ‘Adaptation Laboratory’ (2004)

Exhaust-air driven greenhouse growing a ‘Tree of Heaven’ (Ailanthus altissima), a rare deciduous tree of tropical origin.

Eric Von Robertson | C.A.R.L., ‘Gentle Load’

‘Autoportraits’ by Vladimir Nikolic (2001)

Click here to see the video

Sjaak Langenberg, ‘Mental expansion of Schiphol Airport’ (1999)

The school canteen of Cals College in the Dutch town of IJsselstein was connected live, at varying times each day, with the announcement headquarters of Amsterdam Airport, Schiphol. This audio art-work was provoked by the link between noise pollution around Schiphol airport and the Lopik broadcasting mast, which causes IJsselstein particular nuisance.

Avi Krispin & Steven de Jong, ‘Steven’s pitch’ (2005)

Michael Lentz, ‘Wie es früher war’ (2002)

A performance by German sound poet Michael Lentz at Proposta ‘02, Barcelona.

]]> http://pietmondriaan.com/2010/06/27/michael-lentz/feed/ 2 http://pietmondriaan.com/2010/06/24/oskar-dawicki/ http://pietmondriaan.com/2010/06/24/oskar-dawicki/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:24:19 +0000 mh http://pietmondriaan.com/?p=4374

Oskar Dawicki, ‘I’m sorry’ (2010)

Live in front of the audience Dawicki reads a text explaining he’s sorry for the failed performance he’s giving. Finally, to make up for wasting the audience’s time and the curator’s chance of putting on a good show, he hands out sweets while a taperecorder plays the sound of him crying and once more apologizing.

A performance seen in Rotterdam during Witte de With’s performance cycle ‘Let us compare mythologies’. Pictures by Peter Rakossy.

More fine work by Dawicki downstairs….

‘Vanitas’ (2005)

‘Vanitas’ (detail)

A collection of groceries whose before dates expire during the exhibition. The timers placed by each of the products display the time left to their “death” – each day of the exhibition another product expires, as the exhibition ends all products are inedible.

‘Advertising project’ (2002)

‘Advertising project’ (detail of one of the hidden portraits)

Working for over two years as a graphic artist in one of Cracow’s advertising agencies, Dawicki had placed his microscopic self-portrait on posters, leaflets and folders commissioned by producers of heating equipment, medical and health products or heavy industry raw materials suppliers. All prints have been reproduced in thousands of copies and distributed according to their function, while the hidden miniature artist’s face remained largely unnoticed.

The following pictures were taken at the Dia:Beacon, one of the Dia Art Foundation’s residencies in the state of New York. They have an impressive collection of iconic pieces of art, and each artist has their own room inside their wonderful building, the former Nabisco box printing facility built in 1929.

Here’s a very incomplete report, because it’s not allowed to take pictures there. These were taken from the hip by Anna.

Imi Knoebel, 24 Colors – for Blinky (1977) installation view

Walter De Maria, Silver Metres (1976)

John Chamberlain

Sol Lewitt

Dan Flavin

Andy Warhol

…more Knoebel

In my view, the best work in the collection was by Michael Heizer, for really competing with the overwhelmingly beautiful location.

Michael Heizer

Louise Bourgeois

Richard Serra

Leaving through the backyard…

Tue Greenfort, ‘Bio-Wurstwolke – After Dieter Roth 1969′ (2007)

‘Daimlerstraße 38′ (2001)

The animals were allured by a sausage. When the fox bit in the bait, it activated the camera connected by a cord with the sausage. One week later the animals had learned to eat the sausage without being photographed.

More more more

‘Chaudfontaine Condensation Cube – after Hans Haacke’ (2006)

‘Closed Biosphere’ (2003)

While inside a darkened room filled with the sound of waves breaking on climbs, dehumidification equipment imperceptibly extracted moisture from unsuspecting visitors. The condensate body water was refilled on used PET water bottles as the ones sold during the art fair. The refilled bottles were exhibited in a showcase next to the sound chamber entrance.

‘1,5l PET water bottle transformed to a 0,5l bottle and filled with local tap water from Berlin’ (2005)

Shrunken PET bottle.

‘Langsamkeit’ (2006)

Photograph.

Untitled (Bins) (2008)

Modified trash bins for Frieze projects.

‘Water cooler’ (2006)

‘Water cooler’ uses frozen fruit juice to cool water brought up from the point in Witte de With’s cellar where it enters the building.

Adam Cruces, ‘Vertigo’ (2008)

Check out his website for more nice videos, such as ‘Shane (After Jack Goldstein)’, a remake of Goldstein’s 1975 video.

‘Healing relaxation’

‘Air drums’

‘Floppy Disk’

The other highlight for me was the video ‘Annotated Plans for an Evacuation ‘ (2009) by Alex Hubbard.

In the video, Hubbard continuously alters the look of an old, used Ford Tempo. He does this with styrofoam, plaster and spraypaint in a way that makes it seem like he has a very clear plan for the make-over. However, over the course of the video, the purpose for his alterations becomes increasingly unclear, while their pointlessness becomes ever more clear.

The video, as installed at the Whitney.

A definite highlight (for me) of the Whitney Biennial was the work ‘We like America and America likes us’ (2010), by The Bruce High Quality Foundation.

With its title and form referring to Joseph Beuys’s performance ‘I like America and America likes me’ (where Beuys was picked up from the airport with a Cadillac ambulance and brought to the gallery, where he lived with a coyote for three days) an old ambulance stands in one of the rooms of the Whitney, a film playing on its windshield. The film is comprised of different clips taken from youtube videos. The female voiceover tells us about her difficult relationship to America, while it is constantly unclear whether America is a man, a woman, a lover, a friend, or really just the country.

The original video that’s shown on the windshield of the ambulance.

I saw Sexy Neighbors play live at The Charleston, NY, last Monday.
Below are three songs from their album ‘Dream Out’, which is currently growing on me…

Check them out!

Currently up at Gavin Brown’s in New York is an exhibition of Martin Creed’s newest work.

The picture above is a variation on his work ‘Work No. 300′ (2003)

Some pictures of the work inside below.

Typically Creed, the exhibition was, at first sight, empty. In the exhibition spaces of GBE, Creed had laid a new floor comprised of over 100 different types of marble. This resulted in a kind of Op Art work, dizzying to look at, and very beautiful!

Herman van Ingelgem, ‘The visitor’ (2007)
Fan and aerated cement blocks

‘The visitor 1′ (2006)
Wood and socks

‘The visitor 1′ (detail) (2006)

‘Resort’ (2008)
Handkerchief, wood, nails

‘Pink mobile sculpture’  (2008)
chewing gum on ceiling, 25 cm

‘Resort’ (2007)
Mixed materials – 1200 x 500 x 260 cm
Installation view De Fabriek, Eindhoven

‘Resort’ (detail) (2007)

‘Resort’ (inside view) (2007)

‘Resort’ (detail) (2007)

‘Resort’ (2007)

‘Area’ (2005)
Wood and sausages

Seen last Friday at Gregor Podnar in Berlin; Ariel Schlesinger’s solo show called ‘Reverse engineering’. Although not many works and not all of them as good; a nice show, with quite some energy!

From the gallery’s exhibition text:

“In the sculptures shown here, Ariel Schlesinger applies techniques inspired by the reverse engineering process – by tapping into the process of their creation, he investigates hidden possibilities trapped in devices.”

‘A car full of gas’ (2009)

In the first work, two large gastanks sitting side by side in a brand new Mini Cooper breathe gas into the car. A small flame comes out of a hole drilled in the car’s passenger window.

‘A car full of gas’ (detail) (2009)

I’d never thought burning a flame from its window was one of the Cooper’s hidden possibilities, but I think the work’s best part is that it’s subtle, but also quite dangerous-looking. Ofcourse it’s quite a muscle work, but the humour and the energy that comes from it make up for this fact.

‘The sound two empty spaces make when they meet’ (2009)

‘The sound two empty spaces make when they meet’ (detail) (2009)

Untitled (pair) (2010)

A glass mug filled with water cramped into a paper cup makes for one of the two best works in the show.

Untitled (pair) (2010)

‘Oil lamp’ (2010)

The flame coming from the handmade lighter in ‘Oil lamp’ becomes a bit of a boring example of one of the many ways in which the idea can be given a form. You can see flames coming from a lot of Schlesinger’s works…

Untitled (socks holder) #3, #5, #9 and #10 (2009)

And the socks-turned-neckties are actually a bit too corny to become more than a little joke.

Untitled (socks holder) #5 (2009)

The exit.

Goshka Macuga, ‘The nature of the beast’ (2009)

Macuga was commisioned to make new work by the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ had once been exhibited. Inspired by this historic fact, Macuga made a replica of the Guernica tapestry that Nelson Rockefeller commisioned in 1955.  Some thirty years later this was lent to the United Nations Headquarters in New York where it has hung ever since outside the Security Council. Offered as a deterrent to war, in 2003 the tapestry was covered by a blue curtain in front of which Colin Powell delivered his fateful speech on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Macuga’s installation ‘The nature of the beast’ in the Whitechapel Gallery consisted of the Guernica’s replica, as well as a round meeting table (a symbol of democracy) in front of it. The room had been designed to accommodate meetings, discussions and debates around the central table, with Guernica once again as a backdrop. Groups were invited to organise these events free of charge during opening hours.

To be seen at Witte de With is the ‘remainder’ of this installation; the work ‘On the nature of the beast’. This work consists of a large tapestry on which we see the installation Macuga made, crowded with people. The image consists of several pictures of meetings held in Macuga’s ‘The nature of the beast’ photoshopped together.

Such as…

Prince William holding a speech.

Escaping the crowd, almost like the little girl in white in Rembrandt’s ‘Nightwatch’, there’s Macuga herself.

And there’s the strangely photoshopped incident where one man pushes his finger into another man’s hands.

Some more pictures:

Jack Goldstein, ‘Shane’ (1975)

‘The knife’ (1975)

‘MGM’ (1975)

‘The jump’ (1978)

Stan Brakhage, ‘I… Dreaming’ (1988)

‘Dog star man’ (1962)

9 minutes from the beginning of Brakhage´s Dog Star Man.
(Be patient – the images only start to flow after one minute black.)

‘Kindering’ (1987)

Kenneth Anger, ‘Invocation of my demon brother’ (1969)

In 1967, the footage for Anger’s Lucifer Rising was allegedly stolen by Anger’s “Lucifer”, Bobby Beausoleil, who was later convicted for his participation in the Manson murders (Beausoleil denies stealing the footage to this day). Anger went into a deep depression and publicly renounced filmmaking via a full-page “In Memoriam” in The Village Voice. He later moved to London and met up with Mick Jagger and the Stones.   By this time, Anger had begun editing two other versions of what was to be Lucifer Rising, although by the final edit it had taken on a very different form, which led to the incarnation of Invocation, a mind-bending collage of sonic terror and subversion and fast paced ritual ambiance which found the union of the circle and the swastika, a swirling power source of solar energy. Mick Jagger contributed a suitably eerie soundtrack with a newly acquired synthesizer.

It is Anger’s most metaphysical film: here he eschews literal connections, makes the images jar against one another, and does not create a center of gravity though which the collage is to be interpreted, as the images of Christ could be interpreted through the actions of the motorcyclists in Scorpio or as the images of Crowley could be interpreted through the ritual of Inauguration. Thus deprived of a center of gravity,the very image has equal weight in the film,  and more than ever before in an Anger film, the burden of synthesis falls upon the viewer. The most demonic of Anger’s films, as well as the most fast  moving.

Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer February 3, 1927) is an American underground avant-garde film-maker and author. His short films, which he has been producing since 1937, have variously merged surrealism with homoerotica and the occult. Whilst he has produced almost forty short films in his lifetime, only six of these have received distribution, and have come to be referred to as the “Magick Lantern Cycle”. He has been described as “one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner”, and some of his homoerotic works, such as Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1964), were produced prior to the legalisation of homosexuality in the United States.

‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ (1954-’56)

The title of the film comes from the poem “Kublai Khan” by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge claimed that the poem came to him during an opium dream. The poem tells the story of the Mongol general and statesman who built a pleasure dome. The film, subtitled “Lord Shiva’s Dream” is a complex meditation of ideas that Anger absorbed from his interest in the occultist Aleister Crowley.

“A convocation of magicians assume the identity of gods in a Dionysian revel. Lord Shiva, the magician, awakes. The Scarlet Woman, whore of heaven, smokes a big, fat joint; Astarte of the moon brings the wing of snow; Pan bestows the grapes of Bacchus; Hecate offers the sacred mushroom, yage, wormwood brew… The orgy ensues – a magick masquerade at which Pan is the prize. Lady Kali blesses the rites of the children of light as Lord Shiva invokes the godhead with the formula Force and Fire.” – Kenneth Anger

‘The man we want to hang’ (2001)

Comprised of images of Aleister Crowley’s paintings that had been exhibited at a temporary exhibition in Bloomsbury, London.

Centennial Society (Packard Jennings), ‘Walgreens coupons’

This coupon is made to be inserted in the Walgreens EasySaver Catalog available every month at Walgreens, a chain of superstores comparable to Walmart.

‘W.T.F.?’ (2008)

Sign to be used in combination with existing commercial sign and sandwich-signs.

‘Lottery tickets’

These lottery tickets were given out for free with other Lottery purchases or upon request from few of the culturally engaged stores in Oakland’s Lake Merritt and Temescal districts, and San Francisco’s Mission and Western Addition districts. Each district has its own ticket design and eight unique “prizes.” The intention is to transform an instant of personal focus into a moment of contemplation about the local environment, community, and culture. The tickets come in perforated strips of five tickets. Twelve thousand tickets are being given away through January.

Drawings by Dan Perjovschi.

‘Just popped out back in 2 hours’ (2008) by David Sherry.

‘High speed cultural reverse’ (2007)

‘Depth of face’ (2009)

‘Looking through Tom Cruises eyes’ (2005)

‘Eye swap’ (2009)

‘Breadman’ (2009)

‘Bic lid’ (2009)

‘Lamp performance’ (2008)

Christopher Chiappa, ‘Hermit crab’, video (2010)

‘Hermit crab’ is a video manipulating common childhood pet hermit crabs in a way that
depicts power and abuse. The artist’s head is cropped out of each frame as he methodically
glues each of the twenty-five hermit crab shells together to form a circle. The crabs’ behavior
during the gluing evokes human struggle and strategies for coping as a group.

Photograph taken at the end of the production of the film.

‘Wiper’, 2005-2008
Automobile back windshield wiper mounted on wall making a drawing from the rubber residue

Video of ‘Wiper’.

‘Cornball‘, 2010
Pigmented resin and spray paint over carved Styrofoam

‘Albino Knife’, 2010
Hand carved pine and spray paint

‘Speed Stick’, 2008
An arch made of cast Speed Stick deodorant

Wesley Willis, view on Chicago

Wesley Willis (May 31, 1963 – August 21, 2003) was a busker, musician, comedian and artist from Chicago. A diagnosed chronic schizophrenic, he gained a sizable cult following in the 1990s after releasing several hundred songs of simple but unique music, with emphasis on his humorous, bizarre, and frequently obscene lyrics. In addition to his large body of solo musical work, Willis fronted the punk rock band the Wesley Willis Fiasco. He also produced hundreds of unusual colored ink-pen drawings, most of them of the Chicago skyline and CTA buses.

On August 21, 2003, Willis died due to complications from chronic myelogenous leukemia in Skokie, Illinois. He was 40 years old. A memorial service for him was held on August 27, in Chicago.

‘Cut the Mullet’

And here are some of Wesley Willis’s songs on famous people:

‘Alanis Morisette’

‘Kurt Cobain’

‘Jesus Christ’

‘Oprah Winfrey’

Stephen Wiltshire draws Rome from memory.

Stephen Wiltshire is a British man who was diagnosed as autistic when he was a child. He’s also been noted for his exacting memory, which allows him to recreate [in drawings] vast scenes he sees only once. This video shows his 16-foot-panorama of Rome after taking one helicopter ride above the city.