16cm Lunar Wah Wah: Perf 2

Haroon Mirza X

stagefright (chk vid)

http://move.southbankcentre.co.uk/
Stephanie Rosenthal: curator
'My hope is really the fact that, when u've been in the show, that u look at your environment differently.
because what I'm interested in is the fact that of chourse in the wider sense if u wanna to be choreographed by our environment, we are choreographed by architecture, we are choreographed by our social environment.'
'the visual artists move the visitor, choreograph the visitor in the sculptures and installation'
' the visitor actually engages w the installation or the sculpture'
'performances going on all the time'
'In the 60s there was a radical shift, in how ought perceives art and how to handle art, defining the art work by the presence of a visitor or a spectator. at thte time people were shocked and couldn't believe that that was still considered art.'
'if u look into how does choreography link in, whereas thinking about political structures, about society, about architecture, about urbanism. the exhibition allows people go out and realize that 'in a way i'm choreographed and manipulated every minute in my life because i am in spaces that are artificially built. and i think this is why choreography is so exciting for lot of artists today'
'u perceive art not only w yr eyes, u perceive art w yr whole body.I think it's really important to be aware of your body to realise that u perceive the world with your body. People who are not dancers, like professional dancers they are certainly nless aware of that. Watching an art work is alsofeeling an artwork. U can extend that to the whole world'

Robert Morris-BodySpaceMotionThings ('he does see his works as sculptures-makes u thing what    sculpture is and what it does')
William Forsythe-the fact of matter
Mike Kelley-Test Room Containing multiple stimuli known to elicit curiosity and manipulatory responses ('uses choreography more as a tool to show how degenerated society might be')
   La ribot-walk the chair ('it's a very classical, and theatrical object, it opens a question about whatt it is to be a visitor and participate in something)
   Bruce Nauman- Green Corridor
Joao Penalva -Widow simone
   Isaac Julien-ten thousand waves
Dan Graham-continuous past(s)
     Pablo Bronsten-sth
Boris charmatz/musee de la danse-heatre-elevision (it's like a dentist appointment, u have to book it , lay on a fake piano, then 52 minutes alone, u can do anything u like etc) The fire and the vision
   'the choreography of the viewer' 'i like this feeling where u don't know what it is' 'it's not that often yet, that is being considered as a subject of interest for museums'
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35164-2004Oct15.html
In one series, begun in the early 1970s when she was still a student in the experimental "intermedia" program at the University of Iowa, she dipped her hands in red paint mixed with blood, then dragged them down the wall or along a piece of paper stuck to it. This is art's fundamental proclamation, "I was here," captured using everyone's most basic tool, the hand, in our most immediately available and instantly impressive pigment, blood.
........ The silueta, now almost a generic form, begins to distance the artist herself from the mark she leaves behind. Mendieta's no longer acting as a kind of distillation of the heroic Jackson Pollock, whose ego-laden drips she had reduced to a single, bloody, hand-shaped smear. The siluetas aren't much about the person that made them. They're more like the prehistoric human hands we find outlined in pigment on a cave wall. We don't take pleasure in these kinds of ancient markings because of how they look or even for what they tell us about their makers. We just marvel that they're there, and love the way they point back at the absent ancestor who made them.

Ana Mendieta Untitled (grass on woman)

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/194
Alma Silueta en Fuego video

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/195
Untitled 1974 performance, body coming out of the sea

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/192
Body Tracks (smearing paint from hands to wall)

Random: Helio Oiticica CC2
(from http://www.galerielelong.com/artists/)

Marina Abramovic - Rhythm 10

marina abramovic interview.. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/do_it_again/

It’s an odd assumption that female artists should only use their own bodies. I’m thinking of Yves Klein ‘directing’ naked women …

MA: Or Manzoni signing female bodies. I think it’s fine to use an actor. It’s like conducting, or choreographing.
MB: I never ask actors to ‘get into the role’ – I’m not interested in their interpretation of what they are doing. I just ask them to do something very simple, like fucking the wall or banging their head against it. It is nothing psychological.
...MA: I am doing them because I feel that I am the only one left of my generation who is still performing. And I feel that I want to set history straight, because there are so many commercial rip-offs, like Steven Meisel, for example – his recent fashion spread in Vogue is like Orlan with her plastic surgery. Fashion takes art out of context and uses only the surface. Theatre also rips off performance like you can’t imagine; and of course it happens in art too. A lot of kids are doing copies. So my attitude is, if you want to do a performance originally done by someone else, it’s fine if you treat it like, say, a musical score. But you have to have a few rules. For my re-enactments I have asked the artists or their foundations for permission
...MA: I will be performing Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure [1974], which is like a script – a piece of paper that you can take home and which gives you instructions how to press your body against the wall, the floor, and the corners of the room. It’s kind of an in-between piece – he didn’t actually perform it; I doubt anyone actually did at the time.
.....MA: Yes. I’m also doing Seed Bed [1972] by Vito Acconci – the one where he masturbates under a floor in the gallery. That will be followed by Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic [1969], where she’s wearing a pair of trousers with the crotch removed. Then Gina Pane’s Self Portrait(s) [1973], where she’s lying on a metal bed above lit candles, and using a razor blade to make incisions around her fingernails and lips and How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare [1965], by Joseph Beuys.
...MA: That’s fine. I’m fed up with the Modernist attitude that nobody can ever repeat a piece because it’s an original touched by the divine artist.
...MB: Today performances are becoming more and more specialized, staged, theatrical. What do you make of this development?
MA: In the 1980s there was a huge change, because the market became so much more demanding. For an artist to make performances for all of her or his life would be hell. Many performance artists from the 1970s went into architecture, like Acconci. Only a few artists, such as Beuys, did performances all their life. I will probably do performance for the rest of my life too. Also I don’t like seats – they give you expectations, as if you were in a theatre or cinema.
MA: Yes, theatre is the only way for me to reveal things I am ashamed of – for example, my nose being too big and my ass being too large, and the war in Yugoslavia, which I left in 1975. People often see me as a tough, no make-up, spiritual girl, but I am not like that at all. I totally love fashion and bad movies and bad jokes and eat chocolate like there’s no tomorrow. My performances are always so heavy, though, which is why I put an image of me on the beach holding a beach ball on the cover of my catalogue Artist Body [1998]. Rebecca Horn said to me, ‘you’re crazy, people will think it’s an advert for a travel agent – no one will respect it’. But I need that lightness. Monica, why did you leave Italy for Berlin?
JH: Marina, what is the relationship between your performances and architecture?
MA: Many of my 1970s’ performances concerned the body – often naked – in relation to architectural space. Many of my pieces have titles such as Expansion in the Space [1977], Interruption in the Space [1977], Relation in the Space [1976] or Relation in Time [1977]. I’ve never had an architectural space built, though – I either worked with given or pre-chosen spaces.
...MB: Recently artists like Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal have worked with performance and not allowed any documentation. How people tell each other about the performance possibly becomes more interesting than the visual documentation could ever be.
...MB: This reminds me of one of my favourite works – Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 piece Window Blowout, where he walked into the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and blew out the windows with an airgun. It is pieces like this that give people of my generation the idea that in the 1960s and ’70s you could do anything you wanted, but I guess this is a distortion. It makes me think of Bruce Nauman’s first solo show at Leo Castelli gallery in 1968: the hang was surprisingly classical, conventional.
....MB: What has changed is that the time span between studying and entering a gallery is getting shorter, but careers seem briefer too – some artists are lucky if theirs lasts for five years, and even luckier if they get a professorship.
MA: I always thought that nobody needs artists, which is precisely why you have to make yourself indispensable, so they can’t live without you. It’s not only important to make good work – it’s important that you put it in the right place at the right time. So many good artists don’t have the energy to do all this other shit because they are not communicative. I spend 20% of my time on creativity and
80% looking for ways of financing it.

JH: Your recent film Balkan Erotic Epic [2005] must have been quite something to organize: it involves numerous amateur actors performing sexual acts in folklore costumes. It’s hilarious – like a parody of the Shirin Neshat representations of cultures and gender.
MA: Neville Wakefield approached me and several other artists about two years ago to make a 12-minute film for a DVD compilation he’s putting together of contributions by artists who are working with erotic or pornographic elements in their work. I thought, the most interesting thing would be to think about my roots and how sexual organs are used traditionally in my culture, in the Balkan region.
MB: Thinking about your origins when it comes to porn – that’s psychologically interesting.
...I don’t think its pornographic – anyone who sees this material bursts out laughing, but then looks at it for a long time, in silence. But at the same time there is something I can’t explain: the power of our genitals, and how we can use them for healing or against the forces of nature. But obviously even for this kind of film I can’t rub my vaginal liquid on the face of a three-year-old kid – I’d be put in prison. So I had a good solution – I made a cartoon out of this.
...MB: So you’re skipping the whole notion of sexuality as a sociological site of power and politics.
MA: But it’s amazing when you see a 75-year-old woman showing her pussy in the rain. I don’t even know what this material means; I’m really touched by it.

MB: Do you see this film as a reappropriation of pre-modern, ‘primitive’ sexuality, a power that doesn’t exist any more? Because now we are living in a strip-tease culture, where you are expected to be sexy as a woman, but it doesn’t even mean having free sex. You just have to be available, on display.
MA: Do I think an Italian weather girl on TV who looks like a porn star is healing somebody? No. But in regard to my film material, I don’t know yet what it means. Monica, do you ever get obsessed with an idea and know you have to do it, but you don’t know why? And then all of a sudden it seems so logical. That has happened to me so many times.
...
MB: I really love Waiting for an Idea [1991]; ‘what am I going to do next?’ is such a recurrent feeling for an artist.
MA: Nowadays I don’t care, because after working for 30 years I know I can’t force it. But when the idea comes, I get really afraid, although there’s an incredible feeling of relief after it’s realized. One thing I hate is when people come up to me after a performance and want to engage in a deep conversation when all I want to do is have an ice-cream and do nothing.
...MA: I think that performance is very strange – it comes and goes. It was all over the place in the 1970s, but there was too much crap; then in the 1980s it was all about the self and the market, with the exception of the night-club scene and artists like Leigh Bowery – it was all connected to music and AIDS and the awareness of the body. In the 1990s many performances became an element in video installations, and there were lots of performance elements in contemporary dance – people like Jan Fabre, Pina Bausch, Jérôme Bel. Now I find it very interesting that a performance piece doesn’t have to be performed by the artist who created it. Any artist who has the courage to do a performance without documenting it is the most radical. But I can’t help it – I document all my performances, because my mother is such an orderly woman – I believe in KGB files. But in an ideal world, it should be just word of mouth.
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Carl Andre

Sarah Lucas X wiki

Nud-Cycladic

Tent is a four letter word

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Monica Bonvicini interview
Don’t Miss a Sec.’ is also an ironic comment on the idea of modernism, particularly through referencing the pavilion works of Dan Graham. Don’t Miss a Sec.’ is about the desire and failure to “see it all” which is a strong trait in modernism. This work absurdly pushes at the limits of what is public and what is private and offers a performative element in which inside and outside are blurred together.
...My interest in architecture came later. I have been always very sensitive toward space. I always preferred to be outside, on the streets, rather than inside. While studying at the California Institute of the Arts in the nineties I started rationalizing my interest in architecture. An aspect that was, and continues to be, important to me is the relationship between language and architecture – the idea of a structure and the social, political, and economic implications of architecture.
Architecture is a representation of power. In my works, I try to specify its grammar, deconstruct its sentences, and expose a codex of historical behaviors and assumptions. I don’t think I could have a language for what I do if I would have studied architecture.
...
I do not see contradictions everywhere. That would be quite exhausting! I rarely use the word. To me, it has a cheap negative value and if something is not contradictory than what is it? Harmonious? Something like that does not exist in life.
I think more about questions of relationships. Do they work or not? Why? What does history say?

...The work is also a comment on modern architecture’s desire for transparency and tricks to avoid it. The installation is glass, transparent, and beautiful, but it is difficult to read. The blinking lights make you dizzy and, by the time you understand the sentence, you have it tattooed on your retina. It is not a big step to see this work and to think about (modernist architect Adolf) Loos’s (1908) essay “Ornament and Crime” and to think about architecture as a crime.
KG: Are you drawn to white cubes as much as to architecturally unconventional art spaces, such as the Sculpture Center, that reveal their history?
MB: I do not think that conventional space exists at all, but to answer your question: I find white cubes, or let’s say modernistic sorts of situations, easier to handle than spaces with, let’s say, red bricks. Last year, I was invited to a talk in Basel about artists’ experiences in various spaces and how to build an exhibition space that is really made for art. This leads to the real question: What kind of art is going to be shown in a given space?

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Mike Kelly

Elmgreen & Dragset http://expander-film.de/videos/drama_queens/drama.html
handing out cards to visitors: 'u come here for forgiveness'

Humanimalia http://www.janisclaxton.com/works/humanimalia/

Geese and Ducks and Bird flocks

Michael Clark