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Trace. 

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Fischli Weiss fin

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Abdel does B R E U E R M E T A L L M Ö B E L

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Western Standard 2C-120 by Alan Ruiz. Featuring Abdel Al Kubaisi at the Queens Museum. Queens International 2016

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Mariana Castillo Deball is a Mexican born Berlin working artist, who currently lives and works in Kreuzberg. After returning from walking the high line on a particularly cold day it was nice to research more about the work seen. Deball stood out to me the most, because of an article written by Karen White titled, “Marina Castill Deball, artist: ‘I need the distance from Mexico to be able to do my work.” This immediately made me think of a documentary I watched on Ai Wei Wei in which he sates he cannot leave the country, for his work is, for and about his people. Wei Wei believes he needs to be on the ground in order to make the work that he does. Deball and Wei Wei are two completely different artist, but I appreciate Deball’s perspective because it’s one that shouldn’t be underestimated. I respect this artists work for her utilization of distance as a working practice, and as a position to extract and transform culture. At the time the article was written by White, Deball  was working on an architectural curtain. Since the artist couldn’t remove or transport the architectural motif she aimed to reconstruct, she revisioned it onto a curtain painted the structure on the the fabric via projection.

Deball has practiced lifting work, by lifting architectural details, to moving, to reshaping and recontextualising symbols. It’s useful to study the different methods in which artists move from reference to conception. Wei Wei from within his culture, and Deball from outside of. Though Deball evidently returns to her country to acquire reference, this space allows her to reimagine, and even transport work across seas from stone or ceramic to textiles. 

From the high line, I was interested in Deball’s totem figures. These were reminiscent of  Northwestern Coast Haida totems that I frequently saw as a child in British Columbia. It was interesting to see this style of work transported to a completely different culture, and of material that is indicative of the land in which it is typically made. Often totem poles are made of red cedar on the North West Coast, which is a prime location for that species of tree. Making work from the land, or transitioning a life force into a work of art, from wood, to ceramic seems to be the first remove or transition of the culturally specific art. Though Deball works mainly in Berlin, she is reinstituting states of remove, and the reinsertion of culture across borders, seas and mediums. 

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Martha Wilson, new wrinkles on the subject, 2014 The second of our #5womenartists is founding director of Franklin Furnace and Pratt professor Martha Wilson. You can read more about Wilson’s work in “Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces,” available at both libraries.

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Starting up the spiral slope at Guggenheim I was not interested in the Fischli Weiss show. The first room I walked into there were sculptures of corners and tubes with a large video on the wall. It being my first time at the Guggenheim, the architecture is what I was admiring before finding interest in the How to Work Better show. I hadn’t read anything about the Fischli-Weiss team prior to attending the show, and stylistically the work wasn’t compelling. After the first room I walked into there were a series of plaster cars and flight attendants which aesthetically turned me off. However, by the time I ran into the smaller clay works displayed on pedestals the show was transformed. These tiny portraits were hilarious, and took the serious nature of their presentation out of the experience. This is when I began to enjoy myself, and my desire to invest in the work was whet. I wasn’t looking for anything to stand out or impress me, for these little vignettes began to work for me.

Imbued in philosophical texts such as Lacan’s, their representation of the philosopher as a two year old is hilarious. After reading this title, I was taken aback by my expectations, and my jaded approach to the work. I walked back to the beginning of the smaller clay works and began digesting them with relish. Others like “Jacques Lacan at the Age of Two...” were “Hooray the School is Burning”, “Japanese Rock Garden”, “Frankenstein Admires a Flower” and “Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied after Composing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” These were brilliant. This transition however, between the banal and the everyday onto the quippy and quick illustrative moments was important to the show, and I further appreciated its curation. This work is important to see because of this transition that might be lacking in our day to day. The title itself speaks to my transformative appreciation of the show. I was expecting the work to “work for me” and initially it didn’t. Perhaps some shows don’t end up working for you, but I got to readjust my default setting for a moment and reevaluate the banal, the humor and the lifetime collaboration of two artists. By the time I reached the top round I was completely undone. Everything from their studios, or at least what I take to be everything, had been meticulously reconstructed in polyurethane foam. I’m a huge fan of poly- as a material, for the work made by John Chamberlain, and for the fluidity in the practice of using the word. I’m poly, my cousins are poly, the work I’m making is poly, the work I’m seeing is poly, the material I’m wearing is poly. Poly means many and I’ve always been compelled by its diversity of applications. It’s the material to work. And this brought me sadly to the termination of the collaboration. I felt the ending of one life, and perhaps this wasn’t intentionally communicated through the curation, but after reading of the duo it’s clear that the work reached completion to a certain degree. After the polyester series, it looked as if the final spaces around the coil walkway were unfinished. There was chain blocking the entrances of each, and tape stuck on the barriers incongruously. It suggested an unfinished element to the final series, and it was fascinating that a show would allow for the unfinished, or the unpredicted. Many works we come across these days are termed, “works in progress” but tying back into the span of these two artists’ collaboration was terminally well conceived by leaving space for what could come next. 

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Isidro Blasco is an artist I’ve discovered online whose work I’ve yet to see in person, but which I find really compelling as it encompasses a sort of omniposition with its viewing. The viewing doesn’t have one spot or one viewpoint from which to see the work. It appears as if one would be attempting to peer in through each little window, because from no position are you satisfied you have the complete image, or the correct angle. The fragmentation of the image, the structure and its interior as a deconstructed house open up the breadth and visual potential to encapsulate the transformative process of living within a structure, molding it and in turn being molded and informed by it.  

The work looks unfinished, which I don't usually embrace as a standard for art unless it makes sense with its form or conception, but seeing the different layers and what looks like an “imperfect” form truly manifests the idea of the unfinished life. This work is very performative, for it asks you to keep moving. Moving through it, moving around it and perhaps consider how many perspective or positions you take within your current living situation. Is your home a static membrane? Is your home a shell, does your house bloom and then wilt in tune with the seasons? Do you actually consider your home static like that of a movie set, or like a jungle with many layers of foliage. This work seems to ask the viewer to step outside of their default setting, to think about their everyday rituals and how the sameness actual different through repetition. I feel Blasco encompasses a certain untidiness of life, and while also sculpture out smooth surfaces for those warm close moments of an enclosure might bring. Each surface leads either to a sense of completion or a playfully loose end. 

I find Blasco’s work to be effectively playful. This work plays with semblance, and with what we take for granted, or what we assume. This work is static, but asks the body to perform or move around it as if they were never seeing the whole work. This movement excites me. 

Isidro Blasco currently has a show up at the Black & White Gallery/Project Space called, Above and Under L-Train. This show, as seen on the internet, uses the artist’s obvious strengths in collage and the fractal motion created with the slight tilt of collages propped up on stilts. Something to check out over the weekend, for the show ends April 10th! 

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Michael Heizer’s Actual Size: Munich Rotary on view now at the Whitney! 

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A Performance With No Shame, 2015

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¡Sin Vergüenza! 

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I want to propose that performance and the performance body are just as much structures as a bridge or sculpture. The performance body is a structure made by a human and enacted by a body or bodies. Its stability is just as that of a bridge, in the belief of its physicality and that it will hold under the physical pressures of its consumers. Performance is now often less trusted than the trust it might require to cross a bridge or take an elevator. We assume at this point that the bridge and the elevator we take everyday is going to hold, we trust in these machines, and structures’ legitimacy. We might assume when initially confronted that the performance body does not offer anything new, that it is so inscribed in the everyday that we need not cross with the body, nor share a lift.

Performance is a rearrangement of everyday myths enacted by a body that is not performing its own identity. This body is piecing together an arrangement of the everyday, but also acting as the bridge to body and body-bridge. The bridge leads back to the physicality of the viewer, to the structure through which we consort, construct, decide, evaluate and perceive any reality constructed by a performance. The bridge leads to the termination of the performance. The body is the foundation, the pedestal, the only tool that can accentuate or cripple each individual’s viewing of the world. 

Therefore, the body when used as a tool, as an object, as a structure is performing. Everyday life is not performance, it is a maintained expression and masquerade of “self”. Either aligning oneself with or without the general majority or with the “big other”. Choosing to subscribe to a status quo or not. 

The body is the base, the body is the building, the body is the bridge, and the performance is the trust that these structures will be both reliable and transportative. A performance that doesn’t take is described as bad, as crude, as offensive and it’s the body that did not hook the viewer, perhaps due to the performance body’s undissolved ego. A viewer might feel jipped for their expectations were not met by the performance, and they weren’t “taken” in a manner they desired. A performance body that isn’t transformative is one that is still sorting through personal identity and cannot use itself as the tool. The performance body that falters, that is unbelievable or comedic is one that is working through a lens of self through which it performs. 

The performance body cannot be itself for then it cannot perform but through a filter. The limitations to performance arise in the limitations of the body, but are not filtered through an body associated self, for then the body doesn’t achieve performance but is an exaggerated presentation of the banal.

If the performance body removes its spectacles it is seen. The performance body must be stripped naked of its everyday, like a blank paper to construct the bridge between viewer and body. Tabula Rasa body.

This body isn’t taking the audience anywhere but deeper internally. The act of watching performance is like deep reading. It is perhaps restive but it allows the viewer to follow a reconstruction of an idea that was inscribed into the everyday, reinscribed in a new context, for a particular audience and from a naked body. There is a great set of negotiations that occur between the performance body and the viewer. The one watching the body perform is the one allowing for a performance to occur by trusting in its stability. If one does not trust the structure, they will not be compelled to enter or cross but stay on the periphery in doubt. Should they cross or enter anyways they might still only pick apart its shabby construction, its inauthenticity or at some point be transported, but remain in the opinion that the performance didn’t work, it failed and was transparent.

figure 1. Die Brücke (The Bridge) group of German expressionists founded by Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluiff

figure 2. Dance Around the Golden Calf, Emil Nolde 1910. 

figure 3. The Skat Players, Otto Dix 1920

figure 4. Masks, Emil Nolde. 1911

figure 5. Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy

figure 6. Fountain R. Mutt. Marcel Duchamp 1917.

figure 7. Selbstidentifikation (Self-Identification) Ewa Partum 1980. 

figure 8. Breyer P-orridge Certificate of Authenticity, Genesis Breyer P-orridge 2016. 

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Iain Baxter& “Bagged Place” 1996

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Thomas Hirschhorn Laundrette, 2001

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Delicious Movement Workshop given by Eiko Otake at the Danspace project in St. Marks church. For the workshop, Eiko instructed and moved with participants to act as water. Eiko asked us if we knew what a waterbed was, and if we had ever lain on one before. She told us about her experience on a waterbed, and said that as much as the water moves with you and fills the space around you it also pushes against you. Then the performer laid down on some carpeted steps and began to move slowly towards the edge as if moving with and against a current. She instructed the class to find a spot on the floor, close their eyes and begin moving as water. “How does water leave our bodies?” she asked, “How do we accept water back into our armpits? How are we made of water, and how can this change? Where did we come from?” After moving slowly towards, beneath, without and against a current we were to brush against another body in the room and move with them like one body of water. Very slowly I felt my way over to someone else, and we pushed against one another and become a gently confused mass of liquid. Then Eiko had these pairings act as “supporter” and “mover”. 

The first step in each pairing was for one person to support the mover by watching them, actively. Active watching isn’t something that is often considered a supportive quality, and moving vulnerably with eyes closed for a complete stranger was surprisingly calming. Surveillance be damned, to have a physical body caring for your movement by watching you was perhaps the richest moment of the experience. After watching, the supporter began to brush their hand, an arm, a foot or some body part against the mover to suggest a physical current. The pairs then switched when the supporter joined the mover on the ground and began to reintegrate themselves into the wave until the first mover opened their eyes and stood up to return the support. Opening my eyes and seeing the stranger who had just been supporting my movement was warming. I stepped away and watched this person, attempted to figure out how they were experiencing water and if it was internally felt or as if a body of water were pushing against them. I watched this person, and then I aided them in suggesting a current, but for the second orientation Eiko asked the supporters to walk around the room and see if there was anyone else they were interested in moving. 

Taking Eiko’s workshop was disorienting, but truly reorienting. After the workshop was completed I left St. Marks and wandered around the LES. About an hour to two hours later Eiko ran in front of an ice cream shop I’d happened to be sitting in dressed in a kimono, with her face powdered white. This performance is a part of her Delicious Movement Workshop and is called A Body in Places. Her last performance will take place on March 19th at midnight. Check out http://www.danspaceproject.org/calendar/eiko-otake/ for more details. 

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concept           mechanical  organic     repetition   measure   prime numbers        rhythms   products      left. :measure.      Rhythm  quantitative       qualitative   Rational   natural  analytic      and        measure.   relative   measure frequency.    measure frequencies. almost objects         almost          duel         dialogue      (two     dialectic (three        triadic        world    dialectical three     ‘melody-harmony-rhythm’.           anti-                  proved        rhythm     immeasurable rhythm   rhythm  (a) (b) (c)   rhythm     Polyrhythmia analyses itself.       What is it to think?    rhythms? perspective conception      sensible     nothings       rhythms present present presence? no                                     secrets   rhythm secret    public    (a) Secret            (b) Public    (c) Fictional  (d) Dominating-dominated   agent rhythms.