OIL: a new town in a resource extraction region

Just a reminder of On Site's exhibition / competition / call for entries for a new town in a resource extraction area. 
We are looking for ideas, ideas, ideas.  There are resource links on the call for entries page for general starting point information, however, you are being asked to figure out what the strategy should be, in 2011, for starting up a new town. 

On the Strand over the weekend there was a piece on video artist Diana Thater's installation on Chernobyl, which was effectively a new city built in the 1970s, something I hadn't realised when it was abandoned just 20 years later.  It is now inhabited by animals, wild horses walk the streets, swans nest on the tailings ponds.  Thater says it is a necessity of nature to persist.  She also talks about what a post-human world looks like, where political systems that built such installations were abandoned along with the site. 

We usually think of designing or planning a new town from point zero, or near to it, that builds into a community with shape and form.  One might also think of the new town when it becomes a discarded post-nuclear installation: what will it say about what we were?

Didier Faustino: don't trust architects

Didier Faustino. Flatland. Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. In Flatland, a spectator becomes an actor by projecting himself into the backside of a movie screen using a swing. The other spectators seated in the theater can see the surface of the screen frontside distorted by the swing of the body, as an empirical three-dimensional effect. Flatland questions what is reality and what is fiction, offering the possibility to a spectator to become the main character of his imaginary.Didier Faustino, such an architect despite the title of his exhibition: lots of brilliant talk while other little bods run around making the piece.  Click on the image above to take you to a short video of the setting up of this project. 

From the press release: '"Don't Trust Architects" by Didier Faustino at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation.  Didier Faustino is presenting a series of new pieces at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation (Lisbon) from 14th January to 3rd April 2011. Five new installations produced for the exhibition will immerse visitors in the permanent confrontation of the body with architecture and architecture with movement, via visual and sound tools implemented by Faustino.'

distressed fabric

  Joseph Beuys. Felt Suit, 1970. Felt, 1700 x 600 mm sculpture Tate Collection T07441Shelley Fox and scorching fabric reminded me of Beuys's use of felt: distressed fibres for one reason or another, aesthetic or metaphoric.  The material of construction is changed in some way, not just the form. 

As architects we tend to use material as it comes to us, at most the colour changes.  A long time ago , so I don't even know if it was recorded but the idea was a powerful one and so persists, Wally Mays, a Calgary sculptor, built a wall out of warped 2 x 4 studs.  It curved, it leant, its form was entirely dependent on the natural tendency that thin pieces of wood have to bend.  It was a lovely thing.

Joseph Beuys told the story often of his winter rescue in the Crimea during WWII by nomadic Tatars who covered him in fat and wrapped him in felt: felt was protection, life-giving, dense and felted with meaning. 
Shelley Fox found the qualities of fabric burned in machinery, something that could normally cause the operator his job, gratuitously more interesting than perfect production.  Somehow the materials are given a history of making, a history of use, a social and cultural history that, if one wanted to deconstruct them, simply add more layers of meaning to the form such fabrics make.

There appears to be an interest in both abraded material and form – Oikos  and Jellyfish, the theatres made of scraps and pallettes as examples.  I wonder if this is a harbinger of an architecture interested in material processes and a collaborative understanding of materials which might lead to a different understanding of a building's deep context.

Shelley Fox

Shelley Fox. Installation, Fashion at Belsay, 2004.

Shelley Fox was one of the fashion designers invited to an exhibition at Belsay Hall, Northumbria in 2004.  She took a small anteroom, typically with a 15' ceiling as Belsay Hall is an early Georgian house.  It was built between 1810 and 1817, but so badly afflicted by dry rot by the 1970s that it was made structurally sound and then left as an empty shell.  This is why it is used for art installations, one of which is Fashion at Belsay Hall. 

Shelley Fox lined the walls of this small room – well, not so small, it looks about 10 x 10m and has both a beautiful sash window and a large fireplace – with bundles of white cloth representing the sheets, towels, dust covers, pillow cases, undergarments, shirts, night gowns and night shirts that went through the laundry of a typical country house with its small army of servants. 

The appearance of bundles of white cloth is transgressive: this material in this form would never have appeared upstairs.  It all had to be transformed: washed, bleached, dried, starched, ironed and folded before it could leave the nether regions for the rooms occupied by the family.  We seem to have, today, more interest in the processes of running a large house, than the occupants of the houses themselves, which over the centuries have been so very well documented. 

Shelley Fox was interviewed for Fashion Projects issue 3.   It is an interesting interview as it is not so much about fashion, but about the processes of making things, of burning cloth, of adjusting and readjusting a garment as the body underneath it changes over time.  Much of what she says is about accommodation of accident and change and the shifting of perception.  It goes way beyond frocks.

Jamelie Hassan: Poppy Cover

Jamelie Hassan. Poppy Cover. LOLAfest, London Ontario, 2010Poppy Cover was installed during London Ontario Live Arts' LOLAfest, September 16-19, 2010. 
Two thousand poppies were attached to a large camo net which then covered a Sherman Tank that sits permanently in Victoria Park, London.  The WWII tank was dedicated to the park in 1950 by the 1st Hussars of the Canadian Forces, based in London.  It was the only tank of the 6th Canadian Armoured Regiment to complete the entire European campaign from D-Day to the end of the war.

Jamelie Hassan's Poppy Cover restores this WWII history (the tank mostly provides an ad hoc climbing frame for children outside Remembrance Day services) and adds the current Afghan conflict to it.  The poppies reference the WWI Flanders field poppies, the Canadian Legion poppy tradition for Remembrance Day and the poppy fields of Afghanistan which flood the world with opium and heroin. 

As with all Hassan's work, objects have deep histories and consequently multiple readings.  History is not simple, it is striated; monuments are not fixed and stable, they are ongoing and mutable.  

PLANT: fallen firefighters

Proposed Memorial to Canadian Fallen Firefighters. PLANT + Douglas Coupland, 2010

from PLANT's website:  PLANT and Douglas Coupland have been awarded the commission for the Canadian Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Ottawa. The competition jury selected from among five collaborative teams. The project will begin design development this fall, with a projected completion date of Autumn 2012. 

One of the sticking points with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington is the obligatory presence of over-sized bronze soldiers nearby, something insisted on by Vietnam veterans themselves, not sufficiently versed in the power of the abstract statement.  Such statues, of soldiers, or flyers, or seamen, or firefighters, or nurses are either shown engaged in battle, or are standing exhausted after it.  Leaders are shown in dress uniform standing tall and stern, untouched, as in real life, by the grit of fighting.

PLANT+Coupland's proposal clearly refers to Maya Lin's Vietnam project: also a wall, also engraved with names, also shaped in some meaningful way, although from this one press release image it isn't quite clear what the shape refers to.  It also refers to the controversy over memorials and the degree of representation needed to show effectively the collective individual tragedies that constitute natural and man-made disaster.

In this firefighters memorial, the naturalistic bronze statue points at the abstract list of names.  We are admonished. We are not out for a pleasant day on LeBreton Flats looking at the increasing array of national monuments and memorials, we are being told to go and look at this particular sacrifice.  We are being instructed.  It is quite exhausting. 

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007. Imperial War Museum, London.

Originally Jeremy Deller had proposed a bombed car from Iraq (called The Spoils of War (Memorial for an Unknown Civilian)) for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, an ongoing rotating sculpture competition. Unfortunately, it wasn't chosen.  Unfortunate, because for the countries responsible for the war in Iraq, collateral damage is very abstract.  Four thousand American troops were killed in Iraq; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Iraq.  That abstraction alone is near meaningless: numbers as synecdoche.

What Deller did do was to take a car from Iraq that had been completely crushed by the bomb in in the Mutanabbi Street book market in 2007 which killed 38 people. He installed it at the New Museum in NY (called It Is What It Is) and then towed it through the red states of the US showing what a bombed Iraqi car looks like.  It is now installed at the Imperial War Museum in London (called Baghdad, 5 March 2007) in a hall full of the official hardware of war. 

It isn't art, but Deller said on the Strand last night, I am an artist, so I can propose things.  And in this case, the Imperial War Museum took it – a statement they clearly felt they had to make.

Jeremy Deller. It Is What It Is, 2008. On view in the United States.

Philip Beesley

programming Hylozoic Soil: Méduse Field, 2010. studio d’Essai of the Coopérative Méduse

Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Ground is at studio d’Essai of the Coopérative Méduse in Québec City as part of Mois Multi, a multidisciplinary and electronic arts festival that runs until February 28.

Hylozoic Soil: Méduse Field, a biomimetic installation, includes a first generation of protocell chemistry systems developed with the University of Southern Denmark and integrated sound and light devices developed with Quebec’s Productions Recto-Verso. Dense arrays of sensors, mechanisms and digitally fabricated elements shiver  when someone walks by and then generates movement of geo-textile structures which withdraw, release and open up again.

This project has been developed by Philip Beesley Architect with Waterloo's School of Architecture.  It was chosen for the 2010 Venice Biennale next fall, and then it will tour around after.  The Canada Council and the RAIC are collaborating in the presentation of Hylozoic Soil in Venice as, they say in their press release, 'part of a larger project to investigate developing support for the advancement of the presentation and appreciation of contemporary Canadian architectural excellence in Canada and abroad.'

Nicole Dextras

Nicole Dextras. Yucca Prom Dress.

Nicole Dextras is a Vancouver artist who works with ephemeral materials: plants, water, ice, names, myths, clothing destined to last and yet never to be worn again.  It is her work, Toronto Island 2007, on the cover of On Site 20: museums and archives.  It shows a delicate organza skirt and a black velvet jacket caught, frozen in the ice, all the immanent life in clothing pinned the way that iridescent beetles are pinned in natural history museum specimen trays. 

Dextras has contributed several articles to On Site, beginning with 'Belonging.  Sous le pont', an extended series of installations under Burrard Bridge that crossed First Nations narratives with blackberry vines, willow branches, Mountain Ash berries woven and tied into fragile, but flexible structures (On Site 18: culture).

On Site 21: weather showed work she'd done in Dawson City in the Yukon, constructing moulds for large free-standing ice letters.  What does one write with 10'-high letters in ice?  Dextras wrote L E G A C Y .  She wrote names: Cléophase, Elphese, Gédéon – noms a coucher dehors.  The past  is the subject, the medium is the weather, the tools are un-constructed materials at hand.

If Dextras' winter material at hand is ice, her summer material is plants. Still ephemeral, still delineating the structures of other, past lives.  I just find this work so beautiful, the antithesis of the world of war On Site has been engaged with now for months and months.  War does grind one down.  Nicole Dextras's work does lift one up. 

Nicole Dextras. Sunday Bestwww.nicoledextras.com