Between: video art

Showing posts with label video art. Show all posts

Monday, 8 June 2020

Artlyst - André Daughtry: Art, Rebellion And Racial Justice

My latest article for Artlyst is about André Daughtry’s Weight, a video work from 2014 that attempts ‘to visualise societal projections on the black male body’.

'Daughtry explains: ‘The piece was made in order to show the projections of race as an actual weight on the experience of Black men in achieving acceptable standards of living.' ...

Daughtry is currently the Minister of the Arts at Judson Church and continues to make work as an artist and facilitate conversations around contemporary art and spiritual traditions ...

From the mid-1950s onwards Judson has been a church with three inter-related missions; the political, the social and the artistic. Daughtry has explained how the Rev. Howard Moody encouraged his Associate Minister, Rev. Bud Scott, to establish the Judson Gallery with the artist Claes Oldenburg as co-director in 1958 in the basement of the building that was known as Judson House, an adjacent building that the church-owned and used for student and staff housing. Judson Gallery was where artists like Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Marc Ratliff, Allan Kaprow, Tom Wesselmann and others would have some of their first shows in New York.'

My other Artlyst pieces are:

Interviews:

Articles:

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Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).

Saturday, 9 November 2019

Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder

A transformer links together two or more electrical circuits in order to transfer electrical energy between the circuits. Similarly, ley lines are believed by many people to be metaphysical connections that carry natural or supernatural energies and link a number of sacred sites around the world.

This exhibition views artists as transformers, being those who, through ‘shamanism, technology, speculative realism, energy transference, intimacy and healing,’ enable ‘the singular to become multiple and prismatic.’[i] Such artists render the binary defunct.

The exhibition takes place in 180 The Strand which the curator Jefferson Hack believes, following site and historical surveys, to be intersected by London’s main ley lines and on the edge of an ancient holy well at St Clement Danes. This information has been ultilised in structuring the exhibition as a grid at the centre of which is Evan Ifekoya’s ‘Prophetic Map I: Toju Ba Farabale.’

Ifekoya’s multisensory and sonic installations are drawn from the practices of consciousness exploration and multi-faith research. So here, at the heart of the exhibition space, is a gold-coated steel Merkaba, studded with orgonite, which offers the visitor a space in which to unite spirit with body, while surrounded by light. The Merkaba, which takes the shape of a star with divine energy expanding in all four directions at all times, is designed to connect the spirit and body to higher realms.

This cavernous installation into which we descend on entry is where we ‘find true connection,’ a space in which ‘to escape to commune, contemplate and conduct emergent ideas and identities.’ This is art as religion. This is the art of tomorrow fueled by the beliefs of the ancients; a not dissimilar experience to the birth of abstraction fueled as it was by a variety of mystical strands including Anthroposophy, Christian Science, Eastern philosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and various Eastern and Western religions.

Such root influences on modernism were for many years suppressed by those who advocated formalist or rationalist readings of modern art. However, from the 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985’at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art onwards the religious roots of modern art have increasingly been acknowledged - albeit with a focus on esoteric spirituality rather than institutional religion - along with the recognition, as in this exhibition, that an astonishingly high proportion of visual artists have been and continue to be involved with these ideas and belief systems.

The journey in to ‘Transformer’ is via work by Donna Huanca, Doug Aitken, Lawrence Lek, Chen Wei, Quentin Lancombe, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Jenn Nkiru. The journey out takes in works by Juliana Huxtable, Harley Weir & George Rouy, Dozie Kanu, and Sophia Al-Maria and Victoria Sin. The show takes visitors on a subterranean journey through a series of worlds that explore themes of ritual, identity, magic, political reality, social transformation and the role of the individual in relation to our collective future.

Donna Huanca’s multisensorial work focuses on the idea of the collective body as a transmitter and vessel for change. Doug Aitken shows an expanded version of his ‘New Order’ artwork, which features an interview with Martin Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, whose reminiscences about the first call made in 1973 are transposed over haunting and desolate images of landscapes. VR artist Lawrence Lek recreates the interiors of a glossy nightclub – a virtual version of which is projected on screens above, accompanied by an electric soundtrack. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s three videos invite us into an uncanny spiritual realm of Thai folklore, music culture and animism. The diaristic observations and assertions of Juliana Huxtable highlight a critical engagement with interdependence, care and community. Held in the safe at 180 The Strand, Harley Weir & George Rouy’s works speak to the eternal cycle of energy and the transcendence of experience beyond flesh, time and space.

The title of the show is inspired by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘I Am Waiting’, which comments on the societal problems of America in his day and time, and calls for a change of consciousness – the rebirth of a new wonder: ‘I am waiting for my case / to come up / and I am waiting / for a rebirth of wonder / and I am waiting for someone / to really discover America.’ Ferlinghetti ‘s impassioned call for social change through a new sense of wonder continues to ring true in today’s fractured political landscape. Jefferson Hack sees these ‘Transformer’ artists as contemporary equivalents to Ferlinghetti: ‘They are world-makers,’ who ‘look deeply into the present and see the future.’ To visit is to engage with the spirituality of consciousness and change, as much as with their creative, political and social sources.

[i] Jefferson Hack, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Transformer: A rebirth of wonder’, 180 The Strand, The Store X & Vinyl Factory, 2019.

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Lou Reed - Satellite Of Love.

Friday, 26 July 2019

Church Times review - Che si può fare: Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Helen Cammock

My latest review for Church Times is of “Che si può fare: Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Helen Cammock”, which is in Gallery 2 at the Whitechapel Gallery:

'A response to the contemporary political situation in Italy, Che si può fare, like much of Cammock’s work, consistently addresses the complexities of our geopolitics ... The Long Note, for which she received her Turner Prize nomination, also brings women’s distinctive and diverse voices and perspectives to the fore, while Shouting in Whispers, exhibited alongside The Long Note, traverses the history of conflict from the period of the Vietnam War to the present day. All these works reveal Cammock’s ability to relay universal struggles and give a voice to the voiceless ...

Cammock, whose path to art and current success has been winding, is not among the entitled. Her focus is on others: she thrives and feels alive when meeting people — and hearing their voices. What is to be done? For Cammock, it is to hear the hidden voices of those on the edge.'

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Barbara Strozzi - Che Si Può Fare.

Saturday, 8 June 2019

Mark Dean: Color Motet

In his book God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art Daniel Siedell suggests that many works of modern and contemporary art are ‘poignant altars to the unknown god in aesthetic form.’ He makes this claim because such works manifest the priestly function of ‘yearning for a liturgical reality that reveals the world as gift and offering.’ These altars/artworks become a ‘place in which the visible and invisible creations, the tangible and intangible creations, are linked together.’

Mark Dean made his first looped film appropriation work in the 1970’s while studying photography and painting; in the 1980’s he began working with musical loops in bands and as a DJ; he eventually combined these practices in the methodology for which he became recognised as a video and sound artist. The ‘votive’ implications of Dean’s work took on new significance when he was ordained in the Church of England in 2010. He is not seeking to make images of God, however, but rather the representation of personhood; that is, the experience of being a person in a world where there is a God. His practice has synergies therefore with Siedell’s citing St John of Damascus in identifying humanity as the ‘place in which the visible and invisible creations, the tangible and intangible creations, are linked together.’

In 2017 Dean began to incorporate actual altars into his work when his 14 Stations of the Cross videos were projected onto the Henry Moore altar in St Stephen Walbrook church during an all-night Easter vigil. With Color Motet (2019) he is projecting onto a relatively new altar, in blood red Venetian plaster, created by the ceramicist Julian Stair as part of the re-ordering of St Augustine’s Hammersmith. The RIBA award-winning refurbishment of the church, was undertaken The Order of St Augustine as the first phase in redeveloping its headquarters in Hammersmith. Fr Gianni Notarianni, parish priest and artist, commissioned the architect Roz Barr together with craftspeople and designers such as Stair and John Morgan to transform the building. Stair’s altar now sits below a large cast iron circular light fitting surrounded by a hand-painted fresco incorporating gold leaf on the rear wall of the altar.

Dean’s piece is a new video and sound work which combines film extracts of Sister Corita Kent’s pop art Mary’s Day celebrations, with footage taken from wedding videos where people are fainting. Additionally, Thomas Tallis’ 40-part Renaissance motet plays over them. The work continues the artist’s investigation into the liturgical potential of his art works, in this instance with video functioning as an altar frontal.

A motet is a polyphonic sacred choral composition, usually unaccompanied, in which ‘the fundamental voice (tenor) was usually arranged in a pattern of reiterated rhythmic configurations, while the upper voice or voices (up to three), nearly always with different Latin or French texts, generally moved at a faster rate.’ Dean’s piece is also polyphonic as it fuses and collages its two videos and mixes two versions of Spem in Alium – Tallis’s motet and a plainchant setting of the same text:

I have never put my hope in any other
but in Thee, God of Israel
who canst show both wrath and graciousness
and who absolves all the sins
of humanity in suffering
Lord God
Creator of Heaven and Earth
Regard our humility

It is likely that Tallis designed Spem in Alium ‘to be heard ‘in the round’, with the audience seated within a circle of singers.’ ‘Beginning with a single voice, the composer deploys as many effects as he can, displaying a mastery of counterpoint and scoring all 40 voices together at four key moments.’ In a similar way, the Mary’s Day processions organised by the art department of the Immaculate Heart of Mary school in Los Angeles and led by Sister Corita Kent, were designed to be immersive happenings. Such immersive liturgical rites can be overwhelming, as with Dean’s second video in which people faint or collapse during services. Color Motet celebrates such rites and the connection between heaven and earth, the human and the divine, that they attain.

As a priest, Dean mediates between creation and Creator. Alexander Schmemann has asserted that the priest: ‘stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with his Eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with him.’ With Stations of the Cross, Stations of the Resurrection, Pastiche Mass and now Color Motet, Dean is exploring the extent to which his art can also become a ‘place in which the visible and invisible creations, the tangible and intangible creations, are linked together.’

Color Motet is exhibited by Austin Forum as part of HF ArtsFest (Hammersmith & Fulham Arts Festival). Austin Forum aims to re-establish a strong and creative relationship between the Catholic Church and the Arts, especially within contemporary visual art. In the twentieth century, the Catholic Church invited its members to “read the signs of the times”. In response to that, Austin Forum is working with artists whose artistic expressions say something about the world and the human condition today. Austin Forum celebrates the creativity and practice of emerging and established artists and invites them to engage and respond to the sacred space thereby enhancing worship and contemplation in the church.

Mark Dean - Color Motet, 1-9 June, Mon-Fri: 9-11.45am, 2-7pm, Saturday: 2-5.30pm (please note: closed Saturday morning), and Sunday: 2-6pm. https://www.austin-forum.org/mark-dean-color-motet. Mark Dean - the artist - https://tailbiter.com/.

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Thomas Tallis - Spem In Alium.

Wednesday, 30 January 2019

HeartEdge Mailer | January 2019

HeartEdge Mailer | January 2019

HeartEdge is an international ecumenical movement of churches and other organisations developing mission, focused on commercial activity, congregations, cultural engagement and compassion. Join us! Details here.

Each month we collect and email stories, web links, news related to our 4C focus: commercial activity, congregations, cultural engagement and compassion. Useful, inspiring, practical - it's a resource. Sign up here to make sure you don't miss one.

This month:

Church gardens, allotments, growing food & eating together
Video art, video installations & church buildings as art gallery
Hymns, liturgy & bible studies on migrant & refugee themes
Church run book clubs and poetry groups
Doug Gay on the lectionary, preaching and prophetic empathy

'One of the powerful things about HeartEdge as a UK wide network, is that it stretches us beyond the locus of our churches as Churches of Wales or Ireland or Scotland or England. It moves us beyond a single denominational identity to reflect on being in a network which includes Baptists and Methodists as well as Anglicans and Presbyterians.' (Doug Gay)

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Elbow - One Day Like This.

Saturday, 10 November 2018

Strange Days: Memories of the Future

“Strange Days: Memories of the Future” brings together video and film installations by twenty-one of today’s most radical image makers, all of whom have exhibited at the New Museum in the last ten years. Enigmatic and oracular, the works on view blend visuals and sound into polyphonic, dreamlike compositions that consider the power and fragility of images as the raw material of memory, reverie, and visions the future.

The works in “Strange Days” emphasize a fractured sense of time: history collides with the present, and future speculations are vexed by a distant past.

The exhibition includes Camille Henrot's Grosse Fatigue about which I have written for Artlyst:

'Camille Henrot’s single-channel video Grosse Fatigue blends together origin narratives from many cultures and disciplines combined with images of work, exhibits and spaces at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, where, as part of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, she was granted permission to film aspects of the collections. To these, she adds ‘images found on the internet and scenes filmed in locations as diverse as a pet store and a domestic interior that appear like pop-ups at the screen’s surface.

Henrot creatively layers origin accounts and imagery as a visual equivalent of the knowledge and wisdom juxtaposed within an Institute like the Smithsonian.'

My review of "Strange Days" has been published in Church Times:

'Grosse Fatigue provides the perfect entry-point to an exhibition of 21 installations, which provide a dizzying more than 11 hours of filmed or videoed images. Just as Grosse Fatigue suggests that the universe and our human perceptions overwhelm and exceed our understanding, so the breadth of this exhibition replicates that experience.'

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Bruce Cockburn - Creation Dream.

Saturday, 1 September 2018

Knots, Dust & Epiphany

Exhibitions of multiple drawings are relatively rare, but, like the stereotypical buses, two have come along together at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.

Francis Alÿs has created an installation of hundreds of drawings, which are suspended in enclosed space at the centre of the exhibition. The drawings are the stills required to produce three minutes and fourteen seconds of an animation showing a woman repeatedly tying a simple knot in her long hair that then undoes itself. The massive number of drawings required to form this short animation demonstrate the huge disproportion, on which Alÿs regularly reflects, in much human activity between effort and result, work and labour.

Much of that involved and repetitive activity centres on knotty problems – Catch 22 situations or paradoxes – that cannot simply be unravelled and straightened out. In this work, Alÿs activates a game of opposites - joining and unravelling, arranging and disrupting, doing and undoing, drawing and erasing – while also emphasising the human nature of what it is that we are doing, as knots require the work of our hands and untangling knots is one thing a machine is unable to do.

In Big Series (1983-85), Vladimír Kokolia is showing a large number of fragile figurative ink drawings produced during the final years of the Iron Curtain – when the Communist Party reinforced its censorship of the politically subversive arts as part of a programme of ‘Normalisation’. This programme of censorship included a ban on ‘politically subversive’ exhibitions, films, publications and concerts. Kokolia’s drawings are on display for the first time after more than thirty years in storage; synergies, perhaps, with the ‘Unpainted Paintings’ of Emil Nolde.

Kokolia has described the atmosphere of suppression in which these drawing were produced as being ‘a horrible time’ because ‘your enemy was everywhere and nowhere’ meaning that you ‘could never meet him.’ As a result, these early works acquired a sense of political commentary in the depiction of grotesque stories of cruelty and weakness. They show the wretchedness of human endeavour in which human figures struggle for a glimpse of meaning in absurd circumstances. As such, they hold their own against similar series such Goya’s Disasters of War or Rouault’s Miserere.

This first room of Kokolia’s exhibition, with its deliberately subdued lighting, has significant synergy with the notion of turbulence found in Alÿs’ exhibition. In addition to the surreal horrors of the Big Series, we also find Storm Centre (2001) which draws us, helter-skelter, into a deep blue spiralling vortex. Similarly, we enter the Alÿs exhibition through Tornado (2000-2010), a video projection which records Alÿs’ chasing of “dust devils” in attempts to enter their eye with a camera in hand. He then films their windless core, a monochrome of dust that literally abstracts him from the outside world.

The lianas, mazes, or winding footpaths of Kokolia’s paintings – generally depicting the trucks, branches or leaf canopies of trees around Veverské Nnínice, the small Moravian village where he lives – also resemble the knots which form a central image in Alÿs’ exhibition. In Kokolia’s work, his tangled coils of shifting patterns and colours are skeins through which we glimpse the light beyond. In Alÿs’ work they enmesh us in the repetitive and demanding round of human activity from which we cannot emerge.

While there are many synergies between these two exhibitions, the heart of the difference between the two is found in Kokolia’s sense of wonderment with the natural world and Alÿs’ sense of constraint in the human world.

Both touch fleetingly on spiritual language in their work, demonstrating by this not any sense of personal proselytization, more the enduring strength of religious language and concepts even when secularized. Kokolia expresses his sense of wonderment in his exhibition title ‘Epiphany’; ‘a profound {and unexpected) revelation borne out of everyday experience.’ Alÿs entitles his new animation Exodus 3:14, in which God speaking from the burning bush names himself before Moses as, ‘I am who I am’. For Alÿs this is another knotty paradox that we cannot resolve. Even when we run into the eye of the storm, nothing is revealed. For Kokolia, however, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Francis Alÿs: Knots’n Dust and Vladimír Kokolia: Epiphany are at Ikon Gallery until 9 September 2018

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Gungor - Vapour.

Friday, 17 August 2018

Palma: Es Baluard & Museu Fundación Juan March

Es Baluard Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Palma was opened in 2004 as a cultural institution for research and dissemination of Balearic & Mediterranean art from the 20th and 21st centuries. The museum is housed in a former military fortress - the Baluard de Sant Pere - which dates back to the 16th century, and was part of the Renaissance wall that surrounded the city of Palma.

The collection of the Foundation Es Baluard consists of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and drawings by artists emerging from the late 19th century: Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Miro, Picabia, Magritte, Giacometti , Motherwell, Tàpies, to more recent artists such as Horn, Plessi, Polke, Kiefer, Schnabel, Barceló, and Scully. There are also outstanding examples of Catalan and Mediterranean landscapes, and artists who directly or indirectly have been associated with the Balearics: S. Rusiñol, J. Mir, A. Gelabert, H. Anglada-Camarasa, J. Or MH Mompó Ramis, among others.

The museum covers a total surface of 5,027 square metres, with 2,500 sq.m of exhibition space. The museum features one of the largest cisterns from the 17th century, known as 'The Aljub'. This fresh water reservoir was used to supply the Sant Pere quarter,as well as ships that used to dock in the harbour. It is now used as a setting for installations of contemporary artists, and for shows and concerts. The exhibition space extends on to large terraces and external spaces, from where wonderful views of the Bay of Palma can be enjoyed.

The main current exhibition is a retrospective of Majorcan audiovisual artist Bernardí Roig. Eighteen films have been installed on the lower floor of the museum creating a hellish environment through the conflicting soundscapes and the absurd, violent performative acts depicted in repeating loops from which the characters are unable to escape. 'These works tell us about an insatiable and nonsensical sisyphic absurd where the solitary figures of each of the videos act, caught in the repetition of gestures, in a sameness spiral. Either carrying a lamp on his back, sewing his mouth forever, spinning with a spotlight on his head without being able to get out of the claustrophobic spaces of rationalism, climbing a mountain constantly to never reach the ruins of the language philosopher’s cottage, or trapped between laughter and the aphonia of mute insults.'

The Museu Fundación Juan March in Palma de Mallorca has a permanent collection of seventy works by the most important Spanish vanguard artists of the twentieth century (Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Juan Gris and Salvador Dalí among them). The collection also includes representative examples of the innovative artistic movements of the mid-twentieth century with works by the most recent generations of Spain's artists. A total of fifty-two artists are represented. The Museum's galleries for temporary exhibitions display works by both national and international contemporary artists. The current exhibition is of prints by Picasso from the Fundación Juan March collection. Inaugurated in 1990, the Museum is centrally located in Palma, in an eighteenth-century building of regionalist style with touches of modernist inspiration.

Among the collection I was particularly interested in La estancia which 'brings together all the "ingredients" that make up [Guillermo] Pérez Villalta’s universe: Renaissance and mannerism, trompe-l’oeil and contorted figures, narrative and autobiographical elements, narcissism, cultural references, the blurring between reality and representation, interest in southern landscapes, and the neomodern style of the Costa del Sol. The naked and reflective man on the left is a self-portrait. Next to him, an empty glass has been knocked down, while one of the two figures depicted in the central mural prepares to place a crown of thorns on his head—this image brings to mind Cristo en la columna [Christ at the Column, 1980], a work where Pérez Villalta portrays himself in a similar manner. The figure on the right is also a self-portrait. Lying on a neo-modernist multicolored mattress, the artist lies with his back turned to the spectator. A full glass of wine rests on a palette beside him, as a Mediterranean landscape appears to unfold on the background. The mural also features a lamb pierced through by an arrow.'

Also, Jordi Teixidor's High Altar. Teixidor is 'an artist who remains faithful to the essence of modern painting, he has learned and experimented extensively, creating extremely personal works characterized by the liveliness of the colors, the subtle nuances of the brushstrokes and the serenity of the compositions. The result is expressed in large fields of color that respond to the restrained geometrical structures that precisely delimit them. The title of the work ['High Altar'], however, seems to refer to history, albeit to the history of painting itself. The words "high altar" bring to mind the large-scale altarpieces in which baroque artists experimented widely with colors And the effects of chiaroscuro. The succinct geometrical form that bites into The rich chromatic field at the upper edge of the painting offers the only reference To the title, although, in its minimalist essentialism, this flat form in the shape of a double T Is an abstract element devoid of any reference or expressivity.'

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Eurythmics, Aretha Franklin - Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves.

Tuesday, 25 April 2017

Stations2017: Stations of the Cross & Stations of the Resurrection

Stations of the Cross brought together fourteen video works by Mark Dean that reinterpreted the medieval tradition of spiritual pilgrimage through contemplation of the path Jesus walked to Calvary on the day of his crucifixion. The videos are not literal depictions of this journey. They rely upon Dean’s trademark appropriation of film and video footage and music, to introduce visual and aural puns that generate and interrogate meaning within the work, setting up disputations between the different elements being sampled. Although the work is carefully constructed, the reverberations created by placing potent symbols side by side are myriad. The work was projected in sequence onto the circular Henry Moore altar at St Stephen Walbrook throughout the night on Easter Eve, interspersed with readings and space for meditation. Participants were invited to stay for the duration but remained free to come and go, as part of a vigil culminating in a performance of A Prelude to Being Here by two dancers from Lizzi Kew Ross & Co and an optional dawn Eucharist.

If you would like to view these video works, they are now online at: http://tailbiter.com/art/stations-of-the-cross together with the catalogue essay and the readings used during the Vigil.

Here Comes The Sony is a twelve-screen video and sound work, installed for the first time under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral during Eastertide (Wednesday 26 April). It reinterprets the less definitive tradition of the Stations of the Resurrection, which emerged to encourage meditation on the resurrection appearances of Jesus recorded in the New Testament. Being Here, devised by choreographer Lizzi Kew Ross and the dancers, is performed on the stage formed by the circular placement of television monitors under the dome. Five dancers emerge from the shadows around the edge of the stage and start to navigate the space, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups of far-off and nervous proximity. The on-lookers find themselves within the action of these movements. While not enacting the narratives, the dance performance is an interpretation of the moment, producing a sense of a shared journey and progression through time and space and enabling the audience to curate the tension and distance between the installation and their own responses.

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Planxty - As I Roved Out.

Thursday, 22 May 2014

Bill Viola: Martyrs at St Paul's Cathedral

Having made a point of highlighting the programme of temporary commissions at St Paul's Cathedral in my sabbatical visit report, I now discover that two permanent video installations by Bill Viola have been commissioned. As The Guardian reported today, the first of these has just been installed:

'It has taken more than a decade to agree on, plan and install Viola's eerie multiscreen work Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), a quest that started when the cathedral's overseers were struck by his exhibition The Passions at the National Gallery in 2003. This exhibition revealed the depth of his interest in traditional religious art. St Paul's has a steady programme of commissioning modern works but there simply is no other artist today of Viola's quality who is so committed to the idea of religious art. He is making a second work for St Paul's, to be unveiled next year, called Mary. He says he hopes the pieces are not just art but "practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion".'

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Gene Clark - White Light.

Friday, 26 July 2013

Bill Viola: The slowing of time to create meditative space

Bill Viola is described by the American Academy of Religion as a "pioneering video artist whose internationally exhibited work explores universal human experiences - birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness - and has its roots in religious traditions including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism."

Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures is a museum-scale exhibition of nine new works by Viola at Blain|Southern. "Created between 2012 and 2013, both on location and in the artist’s studio in Southern California, the exhibition presents three distinct bodies of works; the Frustrated Actions, the Mirage and the Water Portraits series. Through these works, Viola engages with complex aspects of human experience, including mortality, transience and our persistent, yet ultimately futile attempts to truly and objectively understand ourselves and the meaning of our brief lives."

Much of Viola's work features the slowing of time (see, in particular, the four works from the Mirage series) in order to create meditative space for reflection on his core themes, all of which resonate with religious beliefs and significance:

"In Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013) a man and woman in the later stages of their lives emerge out of the darkness, pausing to explore their own naked bodies with torches, a daily routine search for disease and decay. The figures are projected onto two seven-foot high black granite slabs, suggestive of tombstones, which evoke a sense of impending mortality. The diptych, Man with His Soul (2013) presents us with a man sitting on a chair, waiting, though we will never discover exactly what he is waiting for. The left hand screen – in high-definition video – depicts his conscious self, while the right – shot in grainy black and white – portrays his soul, his inner being. Thus, the viewer is confronted with a juxtaposition of physical and psychological realities. Angel at the Door (2013) continues to explore this theme of the ‘inner self’; a cycle develops whereby a man hears a knocking at the door, but each time he opens it, he finds no one there – only a dark void. When he opens the door for the final time, however, there is an explosion, revealing a mirror image of himself – offering a thought-provoking insight into man’s inevitable and unavoidable confrontation with his ‘inner self’."

Viola has said that art resides in life itself, "that as a practice it derives primarily from the quality of experience, depth of thought and devotion of the maker": "Everything else, virtuosity with the materials, novelty of the idea or approach, innovation in craft or technique, skill of presentation, historical significance, importance of the venue, in short, almost everything I learned to value in art school - was secondary."

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All Things Bright and Beautiful - The Transfiguration Part 1.

Monday, 17 September 2012

ArtWay Meditation: Reto Scheiber

This weeks ArtWay meditation written by Johannes Manz is of particular interest as it focuses on works by Reto Scheiber utilising minimal imagery to explore belief.

Scheiber is a freelance artist and designer, who lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. After his studies at the College of Colour Design in Zürich from 2000-2003, he worked as a designer, creating numerous projects in the area of art within architecture as well as complete architectural designs. In 2006–2007 he studied fine art at the University of the Arts London/Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts. He has taken part in solo and group exhibitions in England and Switzerland . He works in various visual art forms, such as painting, sculpture, video, photography and installations.

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Blind Boys of Alabama - Free At Last.

Friday, 2 March 2012

Resurrection of Alchemists

Braco Dimitrijevic's Resurrection of Alchemists, currently in Room 6 of the States of Flux display at Tate Modern is well worth seeing as it "humorously reflects on the relationship between the current economic market and the place of art and the artist in society."

"The artist plays the role of a television presenter, addressing his audience earnestly about 'the importance of art in contemporary society...' He soon has to share the screen with a moving strip similar to those used on news channels to list current monetary indexes and fluctuations in stocks and shares. Further 'rolling news of strips appear, gradually filling the screen with messages about tax increases and economic markets. Dimitrijevic continues to discuss art as the expression of 'the most profound strata of human spirit' but has to edge his body towards the corner of the frame to ensure that his head can still be seen."

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Mark Heard - Satellite Sky.

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

A Fire In My Belly

Once again Christians are shooting themselves in the foot by seeking to get art which they don't like banned. This time it is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights who are the culprits having successfully pressurised the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC into removing a video by David Wojnarowicz from their current HIDE/SEEK exhibition.

"A Fire in My Belly," Wojnarowicz's 1987 video, is, in the words of a New York Times editorial, "a moving, anguished reflection on the artist’s impending death from AIDS." The video "shows very quick glimpses of challenging and, at times, disturbing images, including masks, a meatpacking plant, various objects on fire and the artist undressing himself." One of these images features ants crawling over a crucifix and it is this that has drawn "an outraged denunciation from the Catholic League."

There are multiple issues with the action taken by the Catholic League in this instance. First, there is no attempt on their part to engage with the work itself. Their action has been taken in relation to 11 seconds of a four minute video which is intended as a response to the reality of Aids. As such, the theme of the video is not Christ or Christianity and the imagery of the ants and crucifix needs to be understood firstly within the context of the video and its flow of imagery instead of being taken out of context in order to be misinterpreted as an attack on Christianity. Wojnarowicz said that the ants were a metaphor for society. In context, therefore, it would seem that Aids victims are being associated with Christ and experience additional suffering as society swarms all over those who already suffer (something which could be said to be happening all over again as a result of the Catholic League's intervention).

This has been an unfortunate aspect of many Christian protests against works of art. For instance, many Christians tried to prevent the film The Last Temptation of Christ from being made and protested against it once it was made. Central to these protests was the content of the last temptation dream sequence with Jesus marrying and sleeping with Mary Magdalene and later fathering children by Mary and Martha. Yet the whole point of this scene in the film is that it is a temptation which Jesus rejects and that the visible rejection of the temptation makes the necessity of the Jesus’ death all the clearer.

Second, the Catholic League exaggerate and misinterpret for effect in claiming in two of their press notices that the crucifix was being eaten by the ants, which is not the case. A similar case was that of the invective used against Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Rabbi Abraham Hecht, president of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, declared, "Never have we come across such a foul, disgusting, blasphemous film before." Robert E.A. Lee of the Lutheran Council, spoke about "crude and rude mockery, colossal bad taste, profane parody.” Malcolm Muggeridge, without having seen the film, claimed it was “morally without merit and undeniably reprehensible.” While, on the same discussion programme, Mervyn Stockwood, then Bishop of Southwark, declared that the Python’s would get their thirty pieces of silver. But it is difficult now to establish exactly what is was that people were up in arms about as the film patently makes no attempt to satirise Christ.

Third, the Catholic League are claiming that they have a right in US culture for Christianity to be respected and not mocked but, in this instance, the exercise of their right can only be at the expense of the artist's right to self-expression and the right of other US citizens to see the artist's work. In other words the League are calling for their rights to trump those of others. They want rights but only for themselves. A more consistent position is that of gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell who criticised a Scottish court for fining an American Baptist evangelist touring Britain, for telling passers-by in Glasgow city centre: "Homosexuals are deserving of the wrath of God – and so are all other sinners – and they are going to a place called hell."

Tatchell argued: "Shawn Holes is obviously homophobic and should not be insulting people with his anti-gay tirades. He should be challenged and people should protest against his intolerance. However, in a democratic, free society it is wrong to prosecute him. Criminalisation is not appropriate. The price of freedom of speech is that we sometimes have to put up with opinions that are objectionable and offensive. Just as people should have the right to criticise religion, people of faith should have the right to criticise homosexuality. Only incitements to violence should be illegal."

Fourth, this third point reveals that the Catholic League are yearning for a return to a Christendom model where Christianity had power and could both decide and enforce what was acceptable and what was not instead of engaging with the reality and opportunities of a Post-Christendom world. As Simon Barrow has written: "That Christians do not rule others in the way they once did, in the fading Christendom era, does not amount to "persecution". Rather, it is an invitation, in the midst of some pain and adjustment no doubt, to rediscover patterns of church life in a plural society which show the heart of the Christian message to be about embracing others, not isolating ourselves; multiplying hope, not spreading fear; developing peaceableness, not resorting to aggression; and advancing compassion, rather than retreating into defensiveness."

Fifth, to call for an offending item to be banned is to avoid or rule out debate which suggests that the arguments being made do not actually stand up. If the arguments of the Catholic League had substance they should be keen for them to be heard and debated instead of simply trying to close down all debate through censorship of the offending item. The approach of seeking to have an offending item banned actually always has the opposite effect to that intended by making people more interest in seeing the item itself. This is so in this case too, where the co-owner of the PPOW Gallery which represents Wojnarowicz’ estate, Wendy Olsoff told ARTINFO: "The controversy is exposing a lot of new people to the work … It's a lot of young people who are involved with this, new people who don't have experience with activism, but are outraged."

Finally, the League are playing up to the stereotype of Christians as kill-joys forever seeking to prevent others from self-expression. Again, the same was the case in relation to protests against Life of Brian. Eric Idle said that it became clear to the Pythons early on in writing the script that they couldn't make fun of Christ since what he says is very fine but the people around him were hilarious and still are. John Cleese agrees. "What we are is quite clearly making fun of the way people follow religion, but not religion itself.” This was, perhaps, the real reason for those religious protests; it was us being satirised in the film and we weren’t able to laugh at ourselves or to deal with the accusation of unthinking gullibility. Protest and invective as the Church’s response to Life of Brian just seemed to reinforce in many people’s minds those depictions of unthinking gullibility that run throughout the film.

None of this means that Christians cannot protest against depictions of Christ or Christianity which may be offensive to us. What it does mean is that we need to think carefully about when and how we do so. A positive example is the response of much of the Church in the UK to The Da Vinci Code book and film.

Dan Brown uses the same storyline in The Da Vinci Code as appears in the dream sequence in Last Temptation; the idea that Jesus did not die but married and fathered a bloodline which continues to this day. When The Last Temptation of Christ was released this storyline, although it was clearly depicted as false, led to major protests but when The Da Vinci Code was released, although the book (and by implication the film) claim that this storyline is historical fact, similar protests did not occur.

Like Life of Brian, The Da Vinci Code also criticises the behaviour of Christians. Life of Brian portrays the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced this stereotype. The Da Vinci Code portrays Christians as scheming hypocrites knowing the truth but covering it up in order to sustain organised religion. But the reaction of Christians to this film did not reinforce that stereotype.

Finally, it seemed that the Church had learnt that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites etc. that the Church has used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code have been reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised and making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims.

Unfortunately, the Catholic League has done the reverse in responding to A Fire in My Belly.

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The Source Featuring Candi Staton - You Got The Love.