"SEX", ANNE IMHOF, 2019 IN REPLICA MAN MAGAZINE
ANNE IMHOF AND ELIZA DOUGLAS INTERVIEWED BY BILL KOUGLAS, KALEIDOSCOPE MAGAZINE
BILL KOULIGAS On my way here, I was reading this transcript of a 1987 event hosted by writer Kathy Acker at the ICA, London, in which the performer Spalding Gray discussed his work. He was saying that he loved when people interviewed him because they always asked the same questions, giving him an opportunity to rethink his ideas—always going deeper into his own mind. Similarly, your work feels like an ever-developing process. There’s never this sharp delineation between one series and the next; they’re different, but there’s some cohesive continuation or re-thinkings of the same narrative.
ANNE IMHOF You’re absolutely right. It’s almost like a desire that things shouldn’t end—they manifest, but then they dissolve again into something that can be reconfigured.
BK It all becomes part of this singular universe, this experience that you live, and in this way, it never dies. Nowadays people tend to materialize something, and by the time they hang it on the wall, it dies there. It’s also my ongoing argument with recorded music that once a sound piece gets on a record, its life ends there, because it can no longer change. Of course, creators need to document their work and communicate their message—that’s why mediums exist—but I think it’s quite beautiful how with performance, you have this freedom to keep exploring ideas, or even yourself.
AI Yes, it all derives from one artistic world. When I was playing concerts while still in art school, there was always something that I kept open. There were parts that had a pre-recorded arrangement and were a solid anchor piece, but the rest—synth, voice and guitar, mostly—I left open. I think that’s a method that Eliza is also drawn to.
ELIZA DOUGLAS When writing music for Anne’s work, I was always thinking about how it was going to exist in the exhibition space. I wanted it to have a visually effective component, and thought about how it would support the aesthetic universe Anne has created over time. I was making these songs for a specific context, so the idea of making the music we wrote for Faust (2017) into a record was odd for me. When we were making it, I wasn’t planning on it existing as just recorded sound.
AI This makes me think of the bigger pieces with voice, especially “Faust Last Song,” which ended up on the album as a live recording. Eliza used vocal looping for it. Over time, the song is built up of more and more layers of metallic screaming and develops this baroque, operatic noise sound. Melodies come back as a crystallized layer on top. I am interested in these layers of sound that accumulate to an extent of their own negation.
ED For the performance at the German pavilion of the 2017 Venice Art Biennale, I liked the idea that the audience could witness me making a sound, and would then hear that sound repeat itself. I would be no longer making it—I’d be making another sound—so it had an enigmatic presence. I was producing a different track in each of the two rooms that mirrored each other outside of the main space, and it felt like an opportunity to make this huge stereo experience.
BK Speaking of the use of architecture in your performances, Sex (2019) took a very careful look at how space can be orchestrated to create a relationship between the audience and the display content. What lies behind this sort of experiential approach?
AI It always comes from the idea of composition or perspective, allowing the viewer to navigate the space while engineering moments of inaccessibility for the performance to create a very distinct viewpoint towards an image. In Faust, I wanted to work with industrially fabricated glass. I was walking through Frankfurt, with its large skyscrapers, banks. I noticed how glass separates you physically but not visually: its materiality is transparent while being reflective. I liked the simple fact of it being the window to something. In the German pavilion, there was the horizontal glass of the floor, and then there were vertical plates that parted the apse in the back of the main space. I was interested in how the glass reflected you as the viewer, while also allowing you to see what’s behind it and creating some sort of depth, all while serving as a framing device for the images that the performers created. The glass simultaneously reflected the viewers and the space in front of the surface, allowing me to create images that were partly mirrored on top of each other , almost like a thin layer of oil or a double exposure.
In Sex, I contrasted the vast space of Tate Modern’s Tanks, which had allowed performers to create huge pits in the audience, with the intimacy of the images created by people hanging out on high beds and mattresses under the paintings in the galleries. The aspect of dreaming as a form of resistance or imaginary action was very important to me. I just opened a show in Berlin with the title “Imagine” where this also stood central.
Exhibition view: Anne Imhof, Imagine, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (13 September–26 October 2019). Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
ED The installation and the sculptures in these shows often influence the performative elements taking place within. Some of the people we work with are trained dancers, but I’m not one of those, so I rely a lot on working with stuff in the space. That’s the case with the glass in Faust, and also props, which were part of the installation and could be used by performers. They determined very much what kind of images were made. An obvious one would be vaping in Sex. In Angst (2016), there were seeds that we could spit, or markers or spray paint that would be available to the performers to use within the performance.
BK Sound is also crucial, in how it makes you navigate through a potential narrative that the performers may create, but also allows you to remove yourself from a linear narration.
AI Yeah. Faust was the first time I structured a piece around songs. There is always a shift among the performers between who leads and who follows, and the images we create reflect who’s on top and who’s below. I think in Faust, it was about oppression: on one hand, the horizontal line was cutting the space in a half, like a horizon, but I wanted to take away that horizon when you entered the space. It’s this idea that there is an end inside, this moment of death, and then the vertical glass panels create a representation of that moment. I had this feeling when Eliza was lying underneath the floor and singing “Medusa’s Song.” There was this moment when she sang, “feast upon me.” I found it quite beautiful, in that it contained this idea of being there in this moment, being looked at and responding to that as a performer, while at the same time, completely giving in.
The very first idea I had for Sex was Eliza doing a four-hour concert, exhausting herself by performing in front of people, totally disregarding the span and the energy you need to keep up a concert performed from a stage. I wanted a doppelgänger for her, so the doppelgänger could just step in and take over. So Eliza had a doppelgänger figure, and Josh Johnson had one, and they would always step in when the performer was leaving. This was a bit of an odd moment, rather violent in a way. Sex really became this huge concert exhausting itself, though not as I had imagined it in the first place—happening in one place, on one stage. Eliza really became this figure that was constantly doing music. Of course, it was structured by these arrangements and how sound was traveling through the spaces, which allowed us to do the concert at one place and have it suddenly happening at the other space at the same time. We found ways to connect the two spaces, as the audience had to walk through the museum.
ED The mixed experience a performer can have is intensified in your work, because without a stage, there isn’t this strict boundary between the audience and the performers. So you’re surrounded by people with their documenting devices, at the center of this attention, but you’re also being consumed and objectified at the same time. It can be an intense coexistence of empowerment and disempowerment.
BK Speaking of the tradition of performance art, or what the rules are that specify an art performance or a theatre play, I wanted to ask if you conceive your works as a form of contemporary opera played in an art context. I say opera because it’s a form of theatre in which music has a leading role, with parts that are taken by the performers; it incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume and sometimes dance, which are all key parts of the shows you’ve done. It’s also divided into several acts, as your performances tend to be as well.
AI I used the term “opera” in connection to my work when I was making Angst. In early 2016, we staged the first iteration, which was called Overture, at my gallery, Galerie Buchholz in Köln. It was a small preview of the show, a prelude, and my first show at the gallery. It was basically us inhabiting the space with a bunch of falcons that sat on their falcon stands. I wanted to sleep with falcons in the gallery, to not leave the gallery at all while the exhibition was on. The falcon was in a way pointing to capitalism, in terms of the hunter and its prey. The loge, a central sculpture in the show, was this metaphor for solitude, which then manifested again in Sex in this figure of the person with the helmet, who was basically orbiting around the other people, as well as in Eliza as this performer that exhausts herself over a four-hour concert, where the voice stood for history. Somehow, through these ideas of the loge, the falcon and the voice, was where opera came in.
I think what was new in Angst is that I wanted to create a bigger picture, and I didn’t know what to call that. At the same time, I was pretty aware of what I was doing by calling it an opera. When I showed paintings and had the Overture performance in my gallery, it was like ditching this big history that painting and opera share—the bourgeois connotation, the exclusivity. So, by using the term “opera,” I created an expectation that was then smashed. When the second chapter of Angst was shown at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, people were not participating; they were wandering around like in a big, foggy park, surrounded by swarms of drones. For Sex, we created these pits to perform in, right in the middle of the crowd. In preparation, Eliza and I watched a lot of footage of old hardcore bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat. These shows are amazing. When there’s a pit for slam dancing, people fall while dancing and get picked up by others in the crowd. The people who came to see Sex in London or at the Art Institute of Chicago were confronted with bodies slamming against them or coming towards them with no intention of stopping.
BK Your performances and choreography often have this sort of stimulating catharsis state that one could almost call biblical—especially Josh’s more intense parts, or Mickey Mahar’s parts, which sort of give all the power to exercise demons.
AI Yes, that’s certainly true. One of the things we worked with was the idea of battling against yourself, both physically and mentally.
BK Can you tell me about your musical background?
AI I got into music in Frankfurt in my early twenties and played in bands. I also played live during my very early pieces, although later, it became important to me that music and image were not happening at the same time; they had to work apart from each other, as separate entities: a concert and an image. At some point, the shows got larger, and I couldn’t really perform in the pieces anymore. Billy Bultheel started performing in the work at the same time as Franziska Aigner, who also sings in some of my pieces, and sometimes he would play his own music after I opened the show with a song. We pretty much played back to back. Eliza and I fell in love, and we played each other the music we’d done. There were some similarities in our backgrounds; we also found out that we both had a song with the same name: “Anon.” Eliza first joined for Angst. There were only a couple of songs performed that I had written, and Billy’s pieces worked almost as a soundtrack. I loved Eliza’s voice and her music, and we had the same deep range, so she could actually sing my songs as well. Eliza brought in looping her voice with pedals, creating soundscapes that mixed with Billy’s electronics and the sound of the drones and falcons. With Faust, Eliza took over a major part, and music became more important again. And now we’ve all recorded this album together.
ED Music was a big part of my life in the early 2000s. I toured in bands for a while, and also wanted to make my own music, but often lacked enough confidence and focus to do so. I gave up on it quite a few years ago. Meeting Anne and starting to perform her work helped me push through these blockages, and I started engaging with music again. It’s funny: I am often referred to as Anne’s “muse,” but if I hadn’t met her, I don’t think I would have ever made music again. Making it in conjunction with her pieces has provided a framework. So the inspiration goes both ways.
BK Referring to goth, which is the main theme of this issue of KALEIDOSCOPE, I think all your performances, both aesthetically and musically, have an undeniably strong sense of romanticism and melancholia. What’s your relationship with goth culture?
ED The way the people in the work are dressed is a defining element of the overall aesthetic of Anne’s work. With Angst, a lot of my own personal t-shirts were used. I guess I have a goth style sometimes, and that spilled out into the performance. For instance, one thing I particularly liked was there was a rope that cut all the way through the space, and tightrope walkers would walk across it. I had them wearing oversized shirts that said DEATH (the band) in large letters.
BK OK, then—can you tell me now what death means to you?
AI Death is overrated, death drive underestimated."
Kaleidoscope.media. (2020). KALEIDOSCOPE – Anne Imhof & Eliza Douglas. [online] Available at: http://kaleidoscope.media/anne-imhof/ [Accessed 26 Feb. 2020].
https://contemporaryartdaily.com/2016/02/anne-imhof-at-186f-kepler/
I am attracted to the use of costume in the perfromance, which blends the perfromers with the background and gives them a sense of uniformity. The pace of the action (shown in the video in link) is very important because it slows down familiar movements to the point of makjg them strange and uncanny. Another significant aspect of the perfformance is how all the participants seem to be saying individual words taken from the same text, one at a time, making it, again, unfamiliar and eerie. I wonder if incorporating spoken word into my performance would make it stronger, even the participants are physically apart, they could be saying fragments of the same text and that could be a way of unifying them symbolically, not only through a uniform.
"If in doubt. Keep walking'. Hamish Fulton added these words to his series of prints called Ten Toes towards the Rainbow.
The title refers to ten seven-day walks he made in the Cairngorm mountains in Scotland. Fulton sees seven as a magic number, and it recurs frequently in his work. Here it appears in the 'rainbow' of the title: rainbows have seven colours, while the word itself has seven letters.
This series is more romantic and pastoral than much of Fulton's earlier work. Titles such as Song Path evoke his observations and emotions during these long, solitary walks."
(https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fulton-the-crow-speaks-p77616)
This is a very interesting way of documenting a performance and one that I may be interested in exploring, especially in delivering the instructions to the perfromers. I like how it is a very metaphorical piece, which is derived from the perfromances and documents them in a way that is not explicit, acting as separate artwork. It is also very relevant because of the action itslef, which involves walking, and the reference to crows which are considered to be an omen of death. This has made me think about the importance of birds in relation to death as they also play a key part in some of Anne Imhof's "Angst" perfromances in which they act as "The Prophets". This is making me think about the ancient Roman practice of divination called "Augury" which is based onn the observation of birds' behaviour and even interpreting their guts. This may be
"Balenciaga Winter 20 recontextualizes the structures inherently associated with desire, inverting the values of certain dress codes. The austerity of clerical garb and court robes are interpreted for casual wear. Classical traditions, hardcore aesthetics, and fetishized details are combined and rearranged, mixing business with pleasure.
Neo-gothic dressing looks back and forward at the possibilities of menswear, layering floor-length skirts and caped coats. Bodybuilder “made-to-measure” fits create oversized, anabolic suits for anyone. Sport, religion, obsession, and seduction are stripped of their functions, leaving only the sensation of a fashion object: extravagant, dramatic, erotic, or menacing.
Silhouettes defy convention, accentuating a garment’s technical construction, the body of its wearer, and the space between the two. Exaggerated pagoda shoulders and upright collars are created with technical processes that reinterpret past and present iconography.
The techniques and materials used to make motocross, hockey, or scuba suits inform outfits for every day, softening the hard constructs of protective gear, while the softness of nightgown-like prints and fabrics are pumped up in powerful proportions, quilted, pleated, and layered with jacquard messages. The fictional Balenciaga Football Club places the obsessive quality of team sports in another fanatical context.
Evening streetwear presents minimal, elegant shapes from a patchwork of athletic textures. A modern take on waist-training, stretch materials are thermoformed to create an illusory cinch, eliminating the infrastructure of rigid corsetry. Gala dresses are all-inclusive: shoes, gloves, leggings, and gowns in one piece. Bodywear becomes a second skin, at once obscuring and revealing.
A collaboration with Vibram, the Toe and High Toe shoes twist and elevate an ergonomic innovation. Leather thigh high Texan rainboots provide another option for menswear silhouettes, while the Knife shoe reworks elements of lacey lingerie for the feet.
A sturdy Lunchbox clutch, along with crossbody backpacks and bondage wallets with chained wristlets reference other fetish objects; and in celebration of its 20th anniversary, the Classic Balenciaga bag is reimagined, called the Neo Classic."
(https://www.balenciaga.com/us/all/collections/winter-20-u_section)
I think this could be a possible aesthetic to incorpoarte in the action and have as a uniform for my performers. However, David suggested it may be associated with mass shooting in Maerican HIgh Schools and that therefore I should consider other costume ideas. I agree with this suggestion and will consider other alternatives, also nbecause long black coates seem a bit too simple.
"Martin Margiela is one of the most discreet creators in the world. He refuses many interviews and usually answers by fax. We find few photos of him, very few on the internet, he did not always greet his parades, or even never. Disappeared from radar for 10 years, Margiela was little known to the general public. For the press, this anonymity is an advertising strategy, although Maison Martin Margiela claims that this anonymity is a reaction to a fashion industry that had become too commercialized and a sincere attempt to refocus onto fashion, on the clothes and not on the characters behind them. An attitude that is also reflected in his brand. At Margiela, we do not advertise and the labels of the clothes remain white so as not to claim any brand. Creation comes before industry."
I am very interested in Margiela's approach to anonimty in his brand and how he consideres that eliminating fame and celebrity from his work will make the focus be on the garments. I wonder if making all my perfromers wear masks would have a similar effect, making the audience focus on the action itself instead of the poeple who are carrying it out. I am very attracted to the threatening and uncanny qualities that result from conceiling the face and the emotional responses they can create. How could this be affected by the wider use of facekmasks due to covid 19?
"Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom", engraving by Paul Fürst, 1656. The depiction was actually satyrical: Schnabel means more or less "beaky": the author was making fun of plague doctors working in Rome. According to the "miasma" theory (from a Greek word which means "contamination"), certain diseases (such as cholera, black plague, yellow fever) stemmed from a direct contact with certain poisonous vapors - an effect of putrefaction of the matter, swamps, corpses, or pollution. That is why, back in the 17th century, doctors used to wear masks with two lower holes, filled with spices, vinegar, herbs and roses, in order to protect themselves from the "poisonous" air. They did not know about virus or bacteria, but grasped the fact that something was wrong with the air. The stick was not a magic wand. It has in fact multiple uses: warding off rats, giving directions to people actually touching the diseased, or lifting the patient's linens. Such sticks usually had hands, not wings - in this peculiar case, it works as a metaphore for death: "time flies", to explain that this physician has not arrived to heal people, but to kill them. These costumes also intentionally terrified people: they vehicled the message that a serious sickness had reached one community."
Interesting use of mask for protection but also to scare people, make them aware of a threat. I am attracted to the metaphors used in the cotsume, reference to crows as omens of death and other motifs that suggest the passing of time and mortality
"He is best known today for photographs depicting his series of closely controlled "Aktionen" featuring such iconography as a dead fish, a dead chicken, bare light bulbs, colored liquids, bound objects, and a man wrapped in gauze. The enduring themes of Schwarzkogler's works involved experience of pain and mutilation, often in an incongruous clinical context, such as 3rd Aktion (1965) in which a patient's head swathed in bandages is being pierced by what appears to be a corkscrew, producing a bloodstain under the bandages. They reflect a message of despair at the disappointments and hurtfulness of the world."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Schwarzkogler)
USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN PERFORMANCE
PERFORMATIVE QUALITIES OF STAGING AN IMAGE
SUGGESTS ISSUES OF TEMPORALITY AND PAIN, FRAGILITY OF THE HUMAN BODY, SUBJECT TO AGING AND DECAY
"PORTAIT OF A MAN WALKING", FRANCIS BACON, 1953
"The romance in Vanderperre’s hurt, burn, ruin and more is that of imperfection and a personal rejection of the vanity of traditional fashion photography, in the way that 17th-century northern European Vanitas paintings or memento mori traditionally shunned materiality for spiritual enlightenment. In the large-scale representation of a decayed rose in Untitled #15, we are brought so close to the decomposition of the image that it becomes a new landscape of the imagination, an almost interiorised view, like a proto-psychedelic Blakean vision. “Oh Rose thou art sick,” writes poet and painter William Blake in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as he takes us on an electric ride through sexual pleasure laced with secrets, shame and guilt. ‘Sub rosa’ is the name given to the rose’s symbolic ancient relationship to silence and secrets. Here, Vanderperre’s scale of display unlocks the secret power of macro photography to fetishise our mortality. As much as it renders the seemingly useless and overlooked fascinating, almost fantastical, it also suggests a fresh life beyond death for the fate of this rose; a spiritual rebirth or even the promise of an afterlife."
This was the last exhibition I was able to visit in London before lockdown measures and possibly the eeriest experience I have ever had in a gallery space. Not only was I the only person visiting the exhibition, but the guards even asked me if I worked there. The show was strangely timely as it was mainly made up of still life photography referencing motifs of Baroque painting such as memento mori and vanitas which are intended to make the viewer reflect on their own mortality and the passing of time. The images shown were brutal and violent in a very aesthetic way, many of them were placed in shattered frames and had monumental proportions, which confronted the audience with abstract, abject compostitions of some sort of unidentified rotting biological matter. In the centre of each room were a set of large speakers which blasted odd, powerful soundscapes of what could be considered experimental noise music. The audio resonated through the empty gallery spaces, making it extremely poowerfl. I felt very uncomfortable while visiting the exhibition, almost as if I was not meant to be there. I was fascinated by the imapct that the current situation ahd had on the themes of the show and how there significance had been altered by the current situation. I wonder what elements of it I could use under lockdown, since monumentality and the physical weirdness of both the images and the experience of seeing them created a deep imapct on me.
Text
MEMENTO MORI AND VANITAS
"A memento mori (Latin 'remember that you must die') is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. The expression 'memento mori' developed with the growth of Christianity, which emphasized Heaven, Hell, and salvation of the soul in the afterlife."
"Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit (decay); bubbles (the brevity of life and suddenness of death); smoke, watches, and hourglasses (the brevity of life); and musical instruments (brevity and the ephemeral nature of life). Fruit, flowers and butterflies can be interpreted in the same way, and a peeled lemon was, like life, attractive to look at but bitter to taste. Art historians debate how much, and how seriously, the vanitas theme is implied in still-life paintings without explicit imagery such as a skull. As in much moralistic genre painting, the enjoyment evoked by the sensuous depiction of the subject is in a certain conflict with the moralistic message."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanitas)
As I mentioned in my PPP, I am looking into motifs and elements present in memento mori and vanitas paintings that reference death and mortality. I felt very compelled to do this after the strong impact that the Willy Vandepresse exhibition at 180 The Starnd had on me. It was a very strange experience and most of the art seemed to occupy an uncanny threshold between beauty and abjection as well as abstarction and figuration. I was very interested in finding out the specific elements that those works referenced and how they seemed to adress the same themes using very different visual languages. I wonder how the impact of the diffrenet visual elements might have on an audience and how I could use dvelop my own. I was also curious to know if any of those motifs refernced walking in any way and discovered the phrase sic transit gloria mundi.
"The phrase was used in the ritual of papal coronation ceremonies between 1409 (when it was used at the coronation of Alexander V) and 1963. As the newly-chosen pope proceeded from the sacristy of St. Peter's Basilica in his sedia gestatoria, the procession stopped three times. On each occasion, a papal master of ceremonies would fall to his knees before the pope, holding a silver or brass reed, bearing a tow of smoldering flax. For three times in succession, as the cloth burned away, he would say in a loud and mournful voice, "Pater Sancte, sic transit gloria mundi!" ("Holy Father, so passes worldly glory!")
These words, thus addressed to the pope, served as a reminder of the transitory nature of life and earthly honors. The stafflike instrument used in the aforementioned ceremony is known as a "sic transit gloria mundi", named for the master of ceremonies' words."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic_transit_gloria_mundi)
I am interested in how the action of walking could signify mortality and the tranisent nature of life and how I could establish this relationship. I think that appropiating the phrase as a title could do this successfully.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC, "CLEANING THE MIRROR", 1995
"According to Abramovic, the human skeleton is a metaphorical representation of '…the last mirror we will all face' , referring to death and temporality, which are recurring themes in Abramovic's work. As she is 'animating' the skeleton, life and death are simultaneously made visible."
(https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/catalogue/art/marina-abramovic/cleaning-the-mirror-ii/8599#)
IUSE OF THE BODY AS A MATERIAL
UNCANNY MOVEMENTS AND IMAGERY
INTERESTING WAY OF WORKING IN DIFFERENT ITERATIONS OF SIMILAR ACTIONS, HOW OULD THIS CHANGE THE MEANING OF MY PIECE?
DICHOTOMY AND DESIRE (LIFE/DEATH), SEX
PERFORMERS ARE INSTRUCTED VIA WHATSAPP CAN BE CERY HELPFUL TO ORGANISE
EXHIBITION WITH PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURAL WORKS THAT BECOME "ACTIVATED" WITH MOVEMENT AND SOUND (MUSIC)
PERFROMERS AMONST THE CROWD AS WELL AS ON STAGE
CHARACTERS?
DOESN'T SEEM TO BE ANY OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION BY THE ARTISTS TO BE DISPALYED IN GALLERY CONTEXT, PERFROMANCE HAPPENS ONCE AND IS DOCUMENTED BY VIEWERS
STAGED IMAGES AND IMPROVISATION, DURATIONAL QUALITY
NEW DESIRE FOR DARKNESS BECAUSE OF BLEAK HISTORICAL CONTEXT (CLIMATE CHANGE, REGRESSIVE POLITICS, TECHNOLOGY)
UNCERTAINTY CAN BE PRODUCTVE, EVEN SUBLIME
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE NOT ABOUT REASON BUT MYSTICISM AND THE UNKOWN (RELICS)
THE NEW GOTHIC KNOWS THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG AND SHOWS IT
Reading about this article in Kaleidoskope Magazine was very interesting as it was an intrduction to the section which contained the interview with Anne Imhof and Eliza Douglas and it has offered me a greater contextual awareness for the development of my project and possibly a better understanding of the cultural issues and debates my work is typically interesested in. I found it very inspiring how the article reflected the influence of the bleak times that we are living in both high art and popular culture. I am especially attracted to the way it draws parallels to the Middle Ages and gothic art and architecture in particular and how they address uncertainty and fear through mystcism, as this is particularly relevant to my project. It also provided me with some other reference points to research, for example the book "New Dark Ages" by James Bridle. Overall, I think the article really helped me have a better understanding of how in an age of uncertainty and obscurantism, a sense of lack of knowledge and, therefore, fear, can develop a taste for darker aesthetics and concerns.
TINO SEGHAL
"Tino Sehgal and his seven rituals
The enigmatic performances of the artist of German-British descent will be shown in two museums in Moscow
INTERESTING MEDIUM, CONSIDER TRYING OUT PASTELS AND INK EVEN IF ONLY IN SKETCHBOOK
DARK IMAGERY, LONELY LANDSCAPES REFLECTS SENSE OF EXISTENTIALISM, AWARENESS OF MORTALITY
INFLUENCE FROM GOTHIC AND SYMBOLIST LITERATURE
SHARP ANGLES AND LONELY FIGURES REMINDS ME OF STEEPNESS OF WATERLOW PARK, CONSIDER IMAGERY FOR PARK PROPOSAL
LOW LIGHTING, EVENING AND NIGHT SCENES, POSSIBLE REFERENCE TO THE THERSHOLD BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT, CONSIDER FOR PARK PROPOSAL
"Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce WET SLIT, a solo exhibition of new works by Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca. This is Huanca’s debut exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in London since SCAR CYMBALS, her 2016 commission at the Zabludowicz Collection. Incorporating painting, sculpture, sound and scent, Huanca’s site-specific installation immerses viewers in a total environment which synthesises her unique aesthetic with a politics of the body as it relates to space and temporality.
Huanca’s practice draws particular attention to the skin as the complex interface via which we experience the world around us. Her ‘skin’ paintings – layered on magnified cross-sections of her models’ painted figures photographed during performance – refer directly to the body. During the artistic process, she layers colours and forms with paint on her models, resulting in an indexical practice that places emphasis on the interaction between the ephemerality of experiential art and the permanence of painting. This exploration of the transient pertains directly to the temporal experience of the body, invoking themes of mortality and calling to mind the fleeting connections, both corporeal and emotional, brought about by physicality and touch.
Entering the gallery, viewers find themselves in a cocooned space, the walls hung with swathes of diaphanous polythene that engages with the tactility of the artist’s work. These sheets will be recycled in future pieces of the artist’s sculptural practice, further engaging with her method of reusing and extending materials in multiple iterations and forms. As though islands, two sculptures form an archipelago in the space. Coated in layers of highly textured oil paint mixed in with sand, their totemic proportions act as surrogates for Huanca’s models, who are both sheltered and observed through the negative space of their compositions during performance. By introducing her organic statements into the white light of the gallery, Huanca emphasises the primordial in her practice. All her materials refer directly to the human body and denote an engagement with the cultural traditions of her Bolivian ancestry.
The exhibition continues into the basement where viewers are enveloped in a dark, hermetic environment that counteracts the sterile light of the ground floor. This inversion of the traditional gallery space positions institutional critique at the heart of Huanca’s femme-centric practice, upending prevailing power relations and realising a sanctuary. In both spaces, she facilitates an amplified connection between the senses with the introduction of sound and scent, bringing sight, hearing and smell into congress. The galleries are suffused with a fragrance derived from Palo Santo, a holy wood native to South America used in ritual purification ceremonies in both folk and church traditions. The sound piece, which uses natural sounds of water and liquid, serves to further displace the viewer from their surroundings and into a transcendent state, while underlining the fluidity of the subconscious. Huanca’s background in sound art generated a practice based around sensory experimentation, which brings bodies and architecture into direct contact. Fundamentally, Huanca’s emotionally instinctive body of work challenges the viewer through an invocation of the mutable, interactive and non-conforming."
Simon Lee. (2020). Donna Huanca: Wet Slit. [online] Available at: https://www.simonleegallery.com/exhibitions/180/ [Accessed 4 Mar. 2020].
I was very inspired by Donna Huanca's exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery as I believe it is very relevant to my project and my overall areas of interest. Although I did not enjoy the overall aesthetics and colour pallette (mostly blue, white and orange) that Huanaca uses in her performances, sculptures and paintings, the relationship between all the apsects of her practice and the themes they deal with are of special interest to me. The tensions between the body and perfromance exsiting for a limited timespan, conveying ideas of mortality, in opposition to the permanence of painting provided a very interesting answer to my question of how can a perfromance be documented and dispalyed once it has already happened. I wonder how I could turn my performances into paintings in a similar way that Huanca does, taking large format phtographs of them as a starting point. Likewise, I am fascinated by her sculptural practice which acts both as set for her perfromaces and "surrogates" for her models. This idea of surrogacy and representation in the context of perfromance art is something that I seek to explore in this project, especially with the goal of submitting work for the Lethaby Gallery. Finally, I would like to highlight the immersive quality of the exhibition, with sound and scent as well as an installation that encompassed most of the main room and that fully immersed the viewer in Donna Huanca's world.
UNCANNY FEELINGS OF NOT BEING ABLE TO RECOGNISE A FACE, ALMOST THREATENING
PEOPLE ONLY TEND TO COVER THEIR FACES TO PROTECT THEIR IDENTITIES, USUALLY WHEN ENGAGING IN ILLEGAL OR VIOLENT ACTIVITES.
MAKES ME THINK OF THE LIMITIS OF FIGURATION AND ABSTRACTION, HOW CAN WE RECOGNISE A HUMAN FIGURE IF IT DOESN'T REPRESENT ANYONE IN PARTICULAR?
HOW WILL THE USE OF FACEMASK DUE TO THE PANDEMIC IMPACT PEOPLE'S PERCEPTIONS OF OTHER'S FACES AND PORTAITURE?
HOW WOULD AN AUDIENCE REACT IF MY PERFROMERS ALL HAD THEIR FACES CONCEALED? THIS COULD BE AN INTERESTING WAY OF UNIFYING ALL OF THEM. MAKING THEM FEEL LIKE PARTS OF A WHOLE
INVOLVES WALKING AS AN ARTFORM
ESPECIALLY RELEVANT IN OUR CONTEXT, TAKES SPECIFIC ELEMENTS RELATING TO THE COVID 19 CRISIS IN AN ACTION THAT IS ONLY SIGNIFICANT NOW
INTERESTING CHOICE OF MATERIALS AND HOW THEY INTERACT WITH THE BODY
FRANKO B, "I MISS YOU" AND "HAUTE COUTUTRE"
I am attracted to these two pieces by Franko B because of the way that employ perfromamce art to highlight the fragility of the human body, which is a way of suggesting mortality, and they use the act of walking as an artform. There seems to be a very sinister interest in making the interior exterior in quite a literal, physical way and of objectifying the body, considering it as a sculptural form with special focus on its materiality, in which the passage of time is made visible. I am intersted in how the fabric that covered the runway over which the artist bled in I miss you was later made into garments in Haute Couture and in some way this made the garments be a relic, a form of documentation of the previous performance. The shape of the trousers in Haute Couture suggest a limitation of movement, as it would be difficult for the wearer to walk backwards in them. If I had had the chance of considering costume for my project on a depeer level, I wonder if I could have recreated a similar shape and inverted it so that the wearer would be forced to walk backwards. They also remind me of medieveal shoes that were popular during the Black Plague which were extremely long and pointy.
"NOSTALGHIA", ANDREI TARKOVSKY, 1983
"NOSTALGHIA", ANDREI TARKOVSKY, 1983
23/03/2020
"Andrei meets and befriends a strange man named Domenico, who is famous in the village for trying to cross through the waters of a mineral pool with a lit candle. He claims that when finally achieving it, he will save the world. They both share a feeling of alienation from their surroundings. Andrei later learns that Domenico used to live in a lunatic asylum until the post-fascistic state closed them and now lives in the street. He also learns that Domenico had a family and was obsessed in keeping them inside his house in order to save them from the end of the world, until they were freed by the local police after seven years. Before leaving, Domenico gives Andrei his candle and asks him if he will cross the waters for him with the flame. (...)
Domenico delivers a speech in the city about the need of mankind of being true brothers and sisters and to return to a simpler way of life. Finally, he plays the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth and immolates himself. Meanwhile, Andrei returns to the mineral pool in Bagno Vignoni (Val d'Orcia) to fulfill his promise, only to find that the pool has been drained. He enters the empty pool and repeatedly attempts to walk from one end to the other without letting the candle extinguish. As he finally achieves his goal, he collapses. (This shot has a duration of 9:07.)"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalghia)
"TOMORROW IS THE END OF THE WORLD"
I wateched this film because I had seen some of Tarkovsky's other works and had found it very inspiring both in its cinematography and meaning. I thought the main theme of the film, isolation, is very relevant to the current context we are living, that of a global pandemic and enforced quarantine, and might add an interesting layer to my project and how it is affected by this new situation. I am very attracted to how the idea of isolation is visually expressed through composition in the distance and separation between both the objects and people in the film as well as the camera, making use of very wide shots. I think this may be a strong composition to use in the images I produce in this project, whether it be in the documentation of the perfromance or whatever other outcomes I end up producing.
The theme of death appears indirectly in the film through ideas of illness, both physical and mental, and faith. There is a sense of mysticism in the film that appears in the form of references to gothic paintings and the charecter Domenico, which seems to be obsessed with doom and therefore acts irrationally out of fear in superstitious actions such as locking down hios family or trying to cross a mineral pool (physical health) holding a candle, probably as an act of devotion to Saint Catherine of Sienna, patron saint of sickness, after whom the pool was named (spiritual health).
When Andrei finallly carries out the action he was commanded to, which makes me think of how I am directing perfromance and the significance of instructing others, he collapses and probablly dies, indicating that the action of crossing the pool sugnifies the transition from life to death and failing to save the world. This reminds me of river Styx in Greek mythology, which is the boundry between Earth and the Underworld. I think it is remarcable that it is shot in one continous take that almost 10 minutes and this makes me think about durational performance and how it is docuemented and exhibited. I wonder if a piece of moving image work that is so long would be viewed more as a painting rather than a narrative film in which people sit and watch, as it seems that our attention spans are becoming increasingly reduced due to an overload of visual information on the internet.
THOMAS RICHARD WILLIAMS, "THE SANDS OF TIME", 1850-1852
I was interested in this still life photograph by Thomas Richard Williams because it contains all the traditional iconography relatd to memento mori, typical of Baroque still life painting, such as a clock, a skull and a candle or lamp and also because of his use of the stereographic daguerreotype to create an immersive 3D image. This malse me think of more current types of immersive lens-based media technologies such as Virtual Reality and how they can be used in order to create a fuller experience of an artwork for the viewer. I wonder if I could achieve some kind of similar effect with the footage that I have even if the production value isn't very high.
"FAUST", ANNE IMHOF, 2017
GINA PANE, "DEATH CONTROL", 1974
"Pane's work created controversy for the way she cut or lacerated her body to express the pain and fears of a society overwhelmed by media, war, and death. In that sense, she used her body once more to address this last theme in Death Control. Although the only evidence from this performance are witnesses’ accounts and a few close-up photographs of the artist, what we know about the piece is that it exploited the underlying fear of death that comes as we grow older and witness its effects on the body. To represent that, the artist lay on the floor and covered her whole body with maggots while a group of children surrounding her sang “Happy Birthday” as the worms crawled through her face, eyes, and ears. Putting it briefly, the idea behind this performance is that with each birthday you get closer to death."
(https://culturacolectiva.com/art/gina-pane-artist-covered-her-body-in-maggots)
JANA STERBACH, "FLESH DRESS FOR AN ALBINO ANOREXIC", 1987
