Debord, Guy. 1967. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press.
Image from https://libcom.org/library/society-of-the-spectacle-debord
Saturday, 23 January 2016
Society of the Spectacle quote by Guy Debord
“The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere."
Debord, Guy. 1967. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press.
Debord, Guy. 1967. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press.
Thursday, 14 January 2016
Suzannah
Suzannah
Your half pint caused me distress:
I thought if we drank enough
we might become sisters,
already now.
We talked about sex with men
and sex with women
so I thought us all inaugurated
with one another
as we organised our own bodies on the couches in our living room.
"There's a koala in you"
you told me that afternoon we drank rice tea and lived together, separately
and I felt you understood me.
When we agreed it was hard to write about love
I secretly swore never to do it.
Maybe I'll sing to you one day
some kind of country song
that I haven't written yet
about beer and bodies.
It was that man who spoke about concrete
that brought us together
and made us old to each other, known to each other.
When I washed my face
I thought about not doing it
and going out to roll in snow,
but England didn't make enough of it.
Your half pint caused me distress:
I thought if we drank enough
we might become sisters,
already now.
We talked about sex with men
and sex with women
so I thought us all inaugurated
with one another
as we organised our own bodies on the couches in our living room.
"There's a koala in you"
you told me that afternoon we drank rice tea and lived together, separately
and I felt you understood me.
When we agreed it was hard to write about love
I secretly swore never to do it.
Maybe I'll sing to you one day
some kind of country song
that I haven't written yet
about beer and bodies.
It was that man who spoke about concrete
that brought us together
and made us old to each other, known to each other.
When I washed my face
I thought about not doing it
and going out to roll in snow,
but England didn't make enough of it.
Monday, 11 January 2016
Frank O'Hara and David Hockney
Today, at the talk given by Martin Hammer (University of Kent) at the University of York as part of the research series, he related to a series of prints titled 'A Rake's Progress' made by David Hockney from 1961-3 during a visit to New York. The talk discussed Hockney's autobiographical experiences in New York, which coming from Britain, seemed like a glamorous city that was fuelled by aesthetics and desire. Hammer explained how Hockney was influenced by a spectrum of (homosexual) artists and poets in New York, including Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers. In this context, I was introduced to the following poem by O'Hara, which I immediately responded to with affection:
Song
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in the twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now
David Hockney. 8a. Bedlam. From 'A Rake's Progress', 1961-3.
Poem source: http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Song_Did_you_see_me_walking_by_the_Buick_Repairs_by_Frank_OHara_analysis.php
Image from: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/P/P07/P07044_10.jpg
Sunday, 10 January 2016
Thursday, 7 January 2016
Dance and the communication between bodies
I think it is probably appropriate for my first post of the year to be related to the PhD I have just started at the University of York on gender and abstraction in women's video art. Lately, I have been doing a lot of reading on LA-based artist Sharon Lockhart's interactions with and rereadings of Israeli choreographer Noa Eshkol's work.
In a volume printed on the 2012 exhibition Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, Daniela Zyman expresses Eshkol's approach to dance as mirroring the ways in which our bodies interact with one another on a day-to-day level, the pedestrian dance, if you will. She says:
"The dancing body for Eshkol, was never singular. She never wrote dance compositions for soloists. The dancing body is always a figure of two – it reminds us that outside the sphere of self-referentiality it encounters, harmonizes, and withdraws from other bodies. It also reminds us of being totally one with ourselves, enclosed in an abstract sphere of coordinates. The body is always on the boundary, movements emerge between bodies, bodies touch, intertwine, embrace, and encounter” [1].
My hope is that this notion of the conversations between bodies will fuel a significant portion of my dissertation, whereby I hope to read the collaboration between Lockhart and Eshkol through a feminist perspective in which a certain democracy of gender becomes possible.
In a volume printed on the 2012 exhibition Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, Daniela Zyman expresses Eshkol's approach to dance as mirroring the ways in which our bodies interact with one another on a day-to-day level, the pedestrian dance, if you will. She says:
"The dancing body for Eshkol, was never singular. She never wrote dance compositions for soloists. The dancing body is always a figure of two – it reminds us that outside the sphere of self-referentiality it encounters, harmonizes, and withdraws from other bodies. It also reminds us of being totally one with ourselves, enclosed in an abstract sphere of coordinates. The body is always on the boundary, movements emerge between bodies, bodies touch, intertwine, embrace, and encounter” [1].
My hope is that this notion of the conversations between bodies will fuel a significant portion of my dissertation, whereby I hope to read the collaboration between Lockhart and Eshkol through a feminist perspective in which a certain democracy of gender becomes possible.
[1] Zyman, “Who Am I, Dancing Body?”, 29.
Saturday, 26 December 2015
A sentiment describing right now
A sentiment
describing right now
I’ll always remember you
reading Walt Whitman that summer
but now its warmer than it should be
outside,
nearly five years later
and it feels like we’ve barely spoken.
I’m having one of those moments
I know I should try to hold onto on
purpose,
where music can almost levitate you
(maybe its just the air mattress)
but I could swear it’s the fiddle.
Wondering now what the new Star Wars
sounds like with a Polish voice over –
always that same man-voice –
for folks with bellies full of carp and
pate,
or for me.
When you said it was ok to cry
in public, I could never have predicted
it would stay with me this way,
this way that it has,
and yet, I cry less often now.
I thought about your gestures,
though it seems I’ve forgotten how
you move your body to tell me something.
I read books quickly these days, flipping the
pages
as they dictate the angles of my hands.
Friday, 18 December 2015
Repeating and Mirroring in Ingleby’s ‘Resistance and Persistence’
Originally published in Art plus Thought.
Edmund de Waal, - and gone -, 2015
8 porcelain vessels in a pair of aluminium and plexiglass vitrines
38 x 60 x 10 cm
Image courtesy the Artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
Repeating and Mirroring in Ingleby’s ‘Resistance and Persistence’
The current exhibition at Ingleby Gallery, Resistance and Persistence, might be best described as elegant, as in fact, it exudes an overt and agential poise in its clean and often minimal appropriation of unusual materials such as slate, sunlight on wood, and terra sigilata. Instituted by the etchings and oil still lifes from the 1930s and 50s of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, the curation of the works included is such that each room initiates a unique mirroring and repetition so that the artworks, distinct in their media, are involved in active conversation with one another.
The largest wall in the side room on the ground floor is dedicated to a small Morandi etching – titled Natura morta di vasi su un tavolo – of a series of vessels presented only in negative space, their varied shapes left to expose the glowing white of the paper. Yet, the viewer’s access to gain a closer view of the etching is impeded by a significant cluster of plaster casts of cardboard boxes in the centre of the room: Rachel Whiteread’s Garage. The theme of the trace is already evident through the missing forms in Morandi’s print, or the absence of the actual boxes Whiteread used to produce her casts that now serve as indeces of the original objects. Yet, Francesca Woodman’s paired photographs and Edmund de Waal’s cylindrical porcelain vessels reflect one another’s engagement with the notion of absence and removal so poetically that the curatorial decision for the particular congregation of these works becomes even clearer. In Woodman’s first photograph, a nude woman sits gracefully on the edge of a chair in a domestic setting, while the second shows the chair empty, and a bare hand and forearm of a woman coming from the left edge of the picture, as if she is exiting a set theatrically. De Waal’s powder blue vessels, each the approximate size and shape of an index finger, are also presented as a dyptich, placed asymmetrically in two plexiglass vitrines, the first one containing seven vessels, the second containing only two. The work’s title - and gone - explicitly accents a certain absence, a lack of that which once was, and could just as easily be allocated to Woodman’s photographs, where the woman, once seated, becomes gone, the trace of her initial presence suggested only by the extended arm.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Boulder, Colorado, 1978
gelatin silver estate print, edition of 40
9.7 x 9.7 cm image size, 38.5 x 39.2 cm framed
Image courtesy the Francesca Woodman Estate and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
Another similarly generative interaction occurred between a set of ten distinct monochrome lithographs of grids on vellum by Agnes Martin made between 1974 and 1990 and James Hugonin’s 1993 Untitled IV, a large multi-coloured grid made of oil and wax on wood. Perhaps more implicit than the connections in the side room, these two works, albeit abstract in form, imply the presence of a body, in Martin by her use of skin as foundation, and in Hugonin by the acknowledgement of the artist’s body as he would have navigated the large scale of his support to trace his geometric pattern and colour in in each tiny rectangle.
The upper floor appeared to be more concerned with the potential dialogues between objects consistent with the scale of still lifes and larger matter, best exemplified by Richard Long’s Cairgorm made from fifteen slabs of slate and organised in an ascending and then descending stair-like outline laid on the floor. One of the walls housed a projection of Robert Morris’s iconic 1968 film Hand Catching Lead beside another Woodman photograph, Untitled, Rome, Italy, portraying an outstretched hand holding an anthropomorphized glove. Both works unambiguously attend to the mutual and interdependent relationship between hand and object, whereby the shape of the hand is determined by the shape and malleability of the object.
The title of the exhibition, given to accredit the artists and their works with a determination to endure the unlikeliness of their projects within their particular moments of production, is not necessarily what excels in the show, as there is no effort to explain these historical circumstances. Rather than clinging to the notion of resistance, it is perhaps more fruitful to view these works in terms of an openness and a readiness to receive. It is ultimately the understated and intimate nature of the artworks in and of themselves as well as their at once subtle and loud correspondence with one other that is most compelling.
Installation view of the group exhibition Resistance and Persistence
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (28 November 2015 - 30 January 2016)
Photograph: John McKenzie, Courtesy the Artist, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Gagosian, London
8 porcelain vessels in a pair of aluminium and plexiglass vitrines
38 x 60 x 10 cm
Image courtesy the Artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
Repeating and Mirroring in Ingleby’s ‘Resistance and Persistence’
The current exhibition at Ingleby Gallery, Resistance and Persistence, might be best described as elegant, as in fact, it exudes an overt and agential poise in its clean and often minimal appropriation of unusual materials such as slate, sunlight on wood, and terra sigilata. Instituted by the etchings and oil still lifes from the 1930s and 50s of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, the curation of the works included is such that each room initiates a unique mirroring and repetition so that the artworks, distinct in their media, are involved in active conversation with one another.
The largest wall in the side room on the ground floor is dedicated to a small Morandi etching – titled Natura morta di vasi su un tavolo – of a series of vessels presented only in negative space, their varied shapes left to expose the glowing white of the paper. Yet, the viewer’s access to gain a closer view of the etching is impeded by a significant cluster of plaster casts of cardboard boxes in the centre of the room: Rachel Whiteread’s Garage. The theme of the trace is already evident through the missing forms in Morandi’s print, or the absence of the actual boxes Whiteread used to produce her casts that now serve as indeces of the original objects. Yet, Francesca Woodman’s paired photographs and Edmund de Waal’s cylindrical porcelain vessels reflect one another’s engagement with the notion of absence and removal so poetically that the curatorial decision for the particular congregation of these works becomes even clearer. In Woodman’s first photograph, a nude woman sits gracefully on the edge of a chair in a domestic setting, while the second shows the chair empty, and a bare hand and forearm of a woman coming from the left edge of the picture, as if she is exiting a set theatrically. De Waal’s powder blue vessels, each the approximate size and shape of an index finger, are also presented as a dyptich, placed asymmetrically in two plexiglass vitrines, the first one containing seven vessels, the second containing only two. The work’s title - and gone - explicitly accents a certain absence, a lack of that which once was, and could just as easily be allocated to Woodman’s photographs, where the woman, once seated, becomes gone, the trace of her initial presence suggested only by the extended arm.
gelatin silver estate print, edition of 40
9.7 x 9.7 cm image size, 38.5 x 39.2 cm framed
Image courtesy the Francesca Woodman Estate and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
Another similarly generative interaction occurred between a set of ten distinct monochrome lithographs of grids on vellum by Agnes Martin made between 1974 and 1990 and James Hugonin’s 1993 Untitled IV, a large multi-coloured grid made of oil and wax on wood. Perhaps more implicit than the connections in the side room, these two works, albeit abstract in form, imply the presence of a body, in Martin by her use of skin as foundation, and in Hugonin by the acknowledgement of the artist’s body as he would have navigated the large scale of his support to trace his geometric pattern and colour in in each tiny rectangle.
The upper floor appeared to be more concerned with the potential dialogues between objects consistent with the scale of still lifes and larger matter, best exemplified by Richard Long’s Cairgorm made from fifteen slabs of slate and organised in an ascending and then descending stair-like outline laid on the floor. One of the walls housed a projection of Robert Morris’s iconic 1968 film Hand Catching Lead beside another Woodman photograph, Untitled, Rome, Italy, portraying an outstretched hand holding an anthropomorphized glove. Both works unambiguously attend to the mutual and interdependent relationship between hand and object, whereby the shape of the hand is determined by the shape and malleability of the object.
The title of the exhibition, given to accredit the artists and their works with a determination to endure the unlikeliness of their projects within their particular moments of production, is not necessarily what excels in the show, as there is no effort to explain these historical circumstances. Rather than clinging to the notion of resistance, it is perhaps more fruitful to view these works in terms of an openness and a readiness to receive. It is ultimately the understated and intimate nature of the artworks in and of themselves as well as their at once subtle and loud correspondence with one other that is most compelling.
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (28 November 2015 - 30 January 2016)
Photograph: John McKenzie, Courtesy the Artist, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Gagosian, London
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