Nam June Paik – FACT/Tate Liverpool

There are two things which I associate with Nam June Paik's work:

1. My university days (there where one or two Paikette's at my uni)
   
2. 80 Movies
   

I know the above remarks seem to be quite glib, what I am attempting to suggest the influence that Nam June Paik has had on generations of artists and creative types. Being one the early adopters of video technology recognising the potential of the emerging technologies of video and television as both medium and subject. Whose work was collected to form a blockbusting retrospective across two of the major galleries of Liverpool, they being FACT and the Tate.

Anyway before I go on a quick admission I am writing most of this from memory so forgive me as I go astray.

The first group of works on the ground floor of the Tate (again forgive me for not taking note of the titles of works) the first work to hit you is the video wall throwing various images from across the visual world. I have a strange reaction to this piece and it's to do with the way once avant-grade ideas worm there way through into society at large, I don't know about you but most of my experiences of video walls have been through the aforementioned 80's movies and in quite a few cheap nightclubs. Is this a case of art following life following art which forms part of the reading June Paik's work.

Another piece is video documentation of a performance between him and Jospeh Bueys, the performance itself is a Neo-Dada/Fluxus combination of guttural word sounds and piano. What strikes me the most is the editing, through which Bueys is subjected to, enabled perhaps to perform illogical and magical movements across the space and even to be able to move within time. I would like to think that this is recognition of videos ability not only to flatly record the events of a performance but to become an active part of the performance allowing us the audience to share an experience akin to witnessing the original performance. I can't recall many contemporary performers who use video in such away, of course that may be my ignorance but it does make me wonder why use of video editing doesn't seem so common in contemporary performance.

One of the pieces which strikes me here is a collection of Life Magazines in which June Paik has annotated with moments from his life. In this collision between the personal and public there arises the question of how we measure our life against a backdrop of mass media and media filtered events. For me at least it lead to me thinking about how I relate and reference my life against mass-media, how music, television and film have become part of what defines us at certain points in our life. Of course our relationship with mass-media and the images produced through said mass media is a fundamental part of June Paik's practice. In works like the TV Buddha where statues of Buddha's or lit candles are caught in a close circuit of television viewing, often while looking at these pieces I noticed my attention natural drifted towards the image on the screen. Now if this was years of cultural conditioning, through years of watching TV I have learnt to give more attention to screens rather than looking at the real thing just like those Buddha's.

A more direct use of mass-media was a number of works produced for television starting with Global Groove in 1973 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2c_H7AEOUs&feature=fvst ) which lead to the satellite broadcasted Good Moring Mr Orwell in 1984. Both feature a collection of mini films produced by various artists and musicians including Merce Cunningham, John Cage and even the Thompson Twins. For Paik this was a celebration of the possibility of mass-media to bring apparently disparate ideas and people together and to provide a way to disseminate these ideas to a previously unimaginable audience. Throughout Paik's work the reflection that technology is a positive creative force as long as there is a human element present, at the heart of it.

As I imaged many people have done, I have to wonder what he would have made of YouTube would he have seen it as an embracing of a utopian ideal? A continuation of the ideas brought fore by pieces like Good Moring Mr Orwell .I guess we have to wait to see what artists whose careers are concurrent with the development of the internet bring, for one such example we could look at the work Ryan Trecartin whose practice address the effect of a life spent on the internet has on language and culture (http://vimeo.com/5841178 )

Who know where it will lead but technology will always be a medium and subject for artists to explore and use thanks to the work of Nam June Paik.

 

 

Anish Kapoor - Flashback

What can I write about Anish Kapoor that hasn't already been written?

Not at lot, but my experience of the exhibition of his work at the Manchester Art Gallery (http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=77 ), had very little to do with having a dialogue, in the expected normal way, with the work on display. What the hell I am I on about? Well it all started just before I entered the space when I nice man in beige stopped me and simply requested that I don't touch anything, OK isn't that what we normally do in galleries? It did seem odd but sure.

Anyway into the main space, which isn't the biggest space and other then the sculptures, in fact possibly more than that, I notice the three gallery assistants doing their job watching us, watching the sculptures. Now it may have been too much caffeine in a short space of time but there making me fidgety, I feel like giggling, being naughty. Turning someone else's work in my own little performance piece. Maybe it's Anish Kapoor that brings it out of me, once while his big walk-in pieces where in Liverpool I did run inside one of them much to the annoyance of the gallery assistant. (After working in many gallery spaces I really should know better)

It did make me think about our role while looking at art, and of course the context in which we see art. By that I mean that my awareness of being watched seemed to both at once emphasise and devalue the work, somehow by accidently setting up this relationship it brings into focus the role the gallery space in the evaluation of art work. Imagine if the work had been replaced by crisp packets and still guarded with nervous reverence; it would still have to regard it as art, because that's why people are watching over it, right? Of course this has been concept explored many times before it was just odd to experience it with actual art objects.

Having rambled on I am going to ramble on a little bit more, this time about physicality, this is sculpture and we do experience it bodily and no more so with the piece Her Blood. Her Blood consist of three large concave mirrors, not unlike the sound mirrors built during the First World War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror ). Maybe this fed into my experience of the piece I felt surrounded by a thunderous noise, a noise that didn't exist, well that didn't exist outside of me. In part good sculpture/installation/art should make us aware of ourselves as much as it brings attention to itself, even my caffeine filled paranoia over the gallery assistants fed into that experience.

MeMeMeMe

For a few years now I've been making work which takes from what you might call 'contemporary myths', what be I mean by that? Well in part it's an exploration of that hinterland that is imagination and also in part the result of watching too much television as a child. Especially the guilt of sci-fi shows and 'factual' shows like Arthur C Clarkes Mysterious World, ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKnAG_60QEo ) these programmes help fill the world with strange histories, creatures and in the case of the forgotten Nigel Kneale series 'Kinvig' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIPBxl_Wu-k) and of course Doctor Who these incredible things became connected to the everyday.

Of course this was all back in the early '80s, so flashfoward thirty years and I find myself on a Master's degree in Fine Art and struggling with what I was making. What I was making at the time where video pieces that where focused on empty spaces, both real and imagined, this was mostly a reflection of my state of mind rather than the pursuit of some pure critical theory, I am afraid. Then at some point I became interested in the invisible forces which exist within these 'empty' spaces, the path of light, the movement of atoms bouncing around and through. I started to explore these concepts by using the means at my disposal, which meant video and domestic materials such as Torches. In a series of performative videos I attempted to recreate what I imagined to be happening at some galactic level. (http://www.youtube.com/lepiggy#p/u/38/lrjndm4ve_4 )

I was exploring science through art, wasn't I?

No, I wasn't far from it, it was through the making of these pieces I realised that I didn't have enough understanding of the scientific concepts to make the pieces works; in a sense my science was fiction.

Previously I had confessed to be informed by authors such as Philip K Dick and the aforementioned TV space opera's, along with people with a certain mentally who could make experience based on little evidence and completely put themselves within, I hate to say it, a fantasy world. This is an ability of humankind to see patterns and make connections with very disparate things to give themselves to their imagination.

So this is how I came to create the Artistic Research and Special Experimentation Organisation it seemed the best framework to explore and to recreate the conditions in which these beliefs can arise. The creation of this organisation was also to allow the viewer to become part of the work and have and active role in the completion of the work, and be involved in the interpretation of the materials being presented to them. As for why I should choose to work with such exotic materials luckily I can reflect the sentiments of Susan Hiller that "this stuff has charisma" and that it is the artist prerogative to select the materials they work with, and thanks to the demeratialisation of the art object an art object made from physical materials can have the same weight as one made from an abstract idea.

And this seems to be what my work is fundamentally about (possibly) is the way ideas spread, become real as it where, whether these ideas come to us from books, TV, art or the sandwich boarded street preacher.

Underwater The Bluecoat, Liverpool

Something to listen to while reading
splish

This planet we cling to is predominately covered in water, it’s one of the reasons we exist. The very first forms of life where shaped in the ancient oceans before crawling slippery out onto the dry land. Since our relationship with the vast oceans has been complex, at once benign and terrifying a place so alien the connections between the life that started there seems so remote from the life we know.

Still it’s part of the alien nature of the sea that seen the sea become the focus of so much of humanity’s cultural output Take the works of the Romantics like Turner or Caspar David Friedrich,, through so many poems, books and music, it’s e be too much to go into it now.

The sea remains a preoccupation of artists as can be evidenced in The Bluecoats current exhibition Underwater, which has collected a number of artists who explore our relationship with the sea. The exhibition includes Bill Viola, Ed Pein, Dorothy Cross, Mark Anstee, Cut and Scrape, Shirley Kaneda, Ellen Gallagher, Janaina Tschäpe, Klaus Osterwald. Though I’ve only selected to write about a few of them.

The first Leviathan to be encountered in the exhibition is Mark Anstee’s Removed and Destroyed without Warning, a full sized 3D rendering of a submarine upended jammed into the Vide space. It sits there like the corpse of a Giant Squid washed ashore emptied of its threat and majesty, but there it is a reminder of the things we don’t understand and don’t know, evidence that monsters live just below the surface.

Then onto Dorothy Cross’s disconcerting video, which sees an unidentified woman wade through the water which teems with jellyfish. It has the quality of a dream, as the images are loaded with meaning. In this dream you are submerged in the unknown surrounded by the unformed creatures of the imagination. Apprehension fills this dream, somewhere between the inhuman intent of those creatures and the need not to surrender to the waters deadly suspension. For me it’s easy to read as a representation of the fragility of our position and the difficultly of understanding the motivations of others.

One thing I’ve failed to mention is that throughout the gallery space there can be heard the classic sonar ping, which is being emitted from a piece by Cut and Scrape, it turns out to be the distress call of a submarine under attack from a luminous squid. This is the most playful piece in the exhibition taking all the things I’ve said about monsters from the deep and knowingly plays with these clichés. Of course you can argue that this playfulness is an attempt to control and manage our fears.

Sharing the space with this distressed sub is Seunghyn Woo’s sculptures though they don’t seem to be sculptures but rather flora dredged from the bed of the ocean, along with the flora there has also been a series of unidentifiable objects dredged up maybe once they were once human objects but the sea has claimed them, transformed them Seunghyn Woo Seunghyn Woomade them creatures of the sea a kin of thousand wrecks who now colonize the sea bed.

The Creatures of the sea feature in the appealing grotesque drawings of Ed Pien , well there not creatures we would not recognise these could be the proto humans who crawled out of the sea all that time ago. Equally they could be the bubbling spawn of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu waiting, dreaming until the time they can leave the sea and take their place on the land.

This exhibition shows the power of the sea as symbol for our fears and hopes, a spawning ground of the imagination.

http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/exhibitions/926

The Temple of a Thousand Bells

It is strange how stories can stay with you, how a story can just float just below the surface of the sea of your everyday thoughts occasionally breaking the surface to remind you of its presence. This is the essence of Laura Belem’s installation The Temple of a Thousand Bells, which has it origin in the recounting of such a story to the artist.

That story itself was the tale of a mythical temple which sank under the sea and the sailor who was haunted by the idea of being able to hear these bells despite them being held silent by the pressure of the ocean.

It’s not hard imagine the sound of these ghostly bells ringing in the artist head as on her travels she herself recounted this story only to find that the temple and the bells had a place within many cultures around the world. It has now found a spiritual home amongst the tributes and columns within the Oratory.

Throughout the piece the nature of narrative and memory is bought to the fore, and our role, as audience, in the narrative is questioned. Rather than simply take a passive role within the story the nature of the installation seems to allow you to take on the role of protagonist, to become originator of this tale.

If you forgive the pun you become submerged within the fiction, in a space which temporally reconfigures the normal boundaries of the everyday and sets us free to explore the boundless nature of this ocean of memory and fiction.

http://www.laurabelem.com.br/home_eng.html