David Sylvian: The God of Small Caresses

Uncommon Deities poem (Punkt 2011) on music by Jan Bang, Erik Honore and David Sylvian.

Uncommon Deities appears to be a reconstruction of an audiovisual installation by David Sylvian at the 2011 Punkt Festival at the Sorlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, Norway.  For the cd, Sylvian's poems are read against settings by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, Arve Henriksen and Sidsel Endreson.  

As all of this is alternative and for sale, the David Sylvian website has lots on information.  The piece that led me to this is The God of Small Caresses, of which one can hear an excerpt if you click on the image above.  

Otherwise, here is a rather beautiful video introduction to the cd with The God of Single Cell Organisms. 

Tales from the Bridge

Millenium Bridge, London.

The Millennium Bridge crosses the Thames from the Tate Modern to St Paul's Cathedral.  During the Olympics it was the site of a sound installation, Tales from the Bridge, by Martyn Ware and David Bickerstaff: a one hour loop composed of music and a poetry narrative for two voices about the Thames by Mario Petrucci.   Speakers were placed the length of the foot bridge creating a vast ambient sound environment: music spatialised in Ware's terms.  Plus Daniel Hirschman's interactive component means that walkers themselves trigger other tracks so that the experience is never the same twice.  The poetry narrative is about the river, its role in London, its poets, its economic lifeline, its anecdotes, its history.  The music is Water Night, written by Eric Whitacre and performed by Whitacre's Virtual Choir.

Not only does the sound literally come from and spread out in all directions, the technology and the content too come from all directions.  The immersive nature of the new urban sound works are both beautiful and sophisticated, complex and content-heavy.  It isn't just ambient music anymore, but something much more sited, in space and time.  We can listen to Tales from the Bridge, below, but it will be a much different experience than listening to it over the water, in London, on that bridge. 

Illustrious Company

prince valiant

A flaming figure of a cyclist enters the Olympic Stadium. Photograph: Dennis Grombkowski/Getty Images

seeing without eyes

The TopFoto caption: EU001059.jpg Chariots of Fire legend, Harold Abrahams, sprints blindfolded against a totally blind man at St Dunstan's. Abrahams lost the race, 20 June 1920. c. TopFoto

This is the banner photo that TopFoto is using during the Paralympics.  Clearly Harold Abrahams has lost himself spatially.  Without his eyes, he can't focus his mind and body in a straight line, despite the interesting guide flag thing.  
This is what was so interesting about the Paralympics – it is so much about the mind, and the intellect, driving everything forward.  Even the body, perfect and imperfect.

paralympic beauty

Supposedly the big bang, but so often whatever was going on looked like drawings, in this case a smudged Boullée. London 2012 Paralympic Games Opening. AP PhotographThe opening for the 2012 Paralympics, staged by Jenny Sealy, the artistic director of Graeae, was astounding.  Unlike the paean to seemingly eternal but tired British pop culture that dominated the regular Olympics' opening and closing, the Paralympic opening was narrated, alternatively, by Stephen Hawking and Ian McKellan as Prospero: books flew, people flew, apples fell: one realised that paralympians live in the world of science and technology in a way that non-paralympians do not.  Meanwhile, atoms collided, dark matter surged, Handel was sung, and it was beautiful.  

Not least, perhaps most, beautiful was David Toole, who dances like water down a river to his very fingertips.

Douglas Gordon: The End of Civilisation, 2012

The End of Civilisation is one of the True Spirit projects co-commissioned by Great North Run Culture, Locus+ and funded by Arts Council England for the Cultural Olympiad.  The site overlooks the Scotland-England border, in Cumbria.

David Borden: tribute to Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn

from the YouTube blurb:  'The Dawns.01 with Ted Shawn and his Male Dancers. This is a live performance by Mother Mallard in Ithaca, New York, September 2007.  Video by Noni Korf Vidal and Franck Vidal.  Shown are David Borden, kbd and Conrad Alexander, MalletKat. Out of camera view are keyboardists Blaise Bryski and David Yearsley. Everyone is playing sounds stored on Apple Laptops and triggered by USB connections.'

dancing

Ruth St Denis on the beach, 1916. NYPL digital gallery Image ID: DEN_0543V

This is Ruth St Denis dancing on the beach in 1916.  Unlike classical ballet where energy flows off the body in smooth waves, St Denis, who changed dance radically with Ted Shawn in the 1920s, flings off energy from her body but then snaps it back with a tweak of her wrists.  

It is similar to what one sees in some of the drawings of Patkau Architects in the 90s: a retaining wall shoots across the plan and then, when normally it would subside with a sigh into the ground where the topography finally meets the level, the Patkaus would crank the end and all the energy of the weight behind that retaining wall would jerk back toward the house.

It is a powerful ploy, no less in dance than in architecture, to embody resistance.  What was Ohm's Law?  resistance = voltage/current?  This is the problem with going with the flow, no voltage, no resistance, no energy.  Things change when energy is interrupted.

Giuseppe Penone, finding younger trees

Giuseppe Penone. Versailles Cedar, 2000-2003

Nick Cave's Soundsuits

Nick Cave, Soundsuit 1, socks, paint, dryer lint, wood, wool, 2006

Nick Cave, not the singer, but the artist from Missouri who was with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now director of the fashion program at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Above, is a Soundsuit.  Soundsuits' references are wide and deep, they are sculptures, costumes, installations.  They are assemblages, they make sounds, they refer historically to various African ceremonial garments.  They appear in performances and in art museums.

I lived in the middle of Kansas for a year, my first teaching gig, and spent a lot of time driving back country roads and finding installations of what was known as folk art then, outsider art now.  What they all had in common is their obsessive convictions and their marginal relationship to orthodox art and architecture – the Watts Towers in Los Angeles were not unlike Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in their mad-builder concentration.  

More recently, Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg project in Detroit has rejuvenated a despairing neighbourhood by saying, your house is yours, make it into something that is you.  And because this is an economically challenged place, such transformations inevitably are done with discarded and then re-found materials: the essence of folk art: all invention, no money.

What is interesting about this and where it comes back to Nick Cave and Soundsuits is that these projects cannot be included under the patronising rubric of outsider art: Nick Cave is firmly in the centre of American art production, and Heidelberg is a well-documented demonstration project of urban renewal that does not involve mass destruction.

Last week Gloria Steinem in an interview on Q  said it takes about a hundred years for a social change to really become an embedded part of the social fabric. Second wave feminism is about 40 years old and so, no, we are not in a post-feminist era, we still have 60 years of feminist struggle ahead.  The civil rights movement in the USA happened in the 1960s, just 50 years ago.  We are only now starting to find work that is  embedded in the orthodoxy of contemporary art discourse: it is not post-racial, for it is so very African American, an identity that is critical to the work.  But it is allowed to take its place within the discourse, and that is new.

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan: the illustrated dictionary of received ideas

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan. The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Gustave Flaubert. Dictionnaire des Idees Reçues
1911-13
A dictionary of received wisdom: misguided, banal, what everyone thinks and never questions.  In 1852 Flaubert wrote 'It would be the justification of Whatever is, is right'.

Jorn Barger in 2002 did an analytic reorganisation of the dictionary into broad categories such as 'things to make fun of' (Philosophy: always snigger at it), things to thunder against' (Whitewash (on church walls) Thunder against it.  This aesthetic anger is extremely becoming). 'Things to pretend (Illusions: Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all).

The kind of person, or people, defined by this dictionary of admirable philistinism is familiar to anyone who has ever read a British novel about the class system but to find it so sharply defined in France is surprising when most of what we know of France is Proust (one must claim to have read it, a long time ago though), Sartre (did him in university – brilliant), de Beauvoir (unrequited lover/feminist – really responsible for Sartre's success) — this is catching, this received wisdom stuff. The clichés come so easily, they must be just below the surface.

Anyway, wouldn't have known about Flaubert's dictionnaire if I hadn't heard about Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan's ongoing project to illustrate the dictionary.   They hold public drawing sessions, one of which was at Artexte last October and another is today, June 1 at the Art Gallery of York University.   They've built a special desk to do these drawings on, taken from Flaubert's last and incomplete book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, so we are looking at a large project, part performance, part book making, for there are books, small, that come out of this – one is published by Artexte (edition of 150, $40), others in smaller editions from other venues. 

Flaubert on what everyone knows about architects: Architectes --- tous imbéciles.
--- oublient toujours l'escalier des maisons.

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan. Illustrated Dictionary of Received ideas. here- Antiques: Are always of modern fabrication. Antiquities: Commonplace, boring.

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread. Parts 1-4 of House Study (Grove Road) 1992. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian, London © Rachel Whiteread. Correction fluid, pencil and water-colour on colour photocopy, 29.5x42cmThere is an absolutely wonderful interview/discussion between Rachel Whiteread and Bice Curiger, the co-founder and editor of Parkeet.  Rachel Whiteread has an exhibition of drawings at Tate Britain until mid January 2011.  The discussion looks at the things in her studio that she has collected, including a plaster cast of Peter Sellers' nose, it talks about what her drawings do, it revisits the Grove Road project.  It is delightful. 

João Mendes Ribeiro

João Mendes Ribeiro. Mala-Mesa, 1998

João Mendes Ribeiro is a Portuguese architect, set designer, performance artist, theorist. The core of Ribeiro's work, according to Vasco Pinto whose essay on Ribeiro one can read in the usual bizarre translation provided by Google, is Uma Mala-Mesa, a table which packs itself in and out of a suitcase.  This transformative action is minimal in form, going from motion to stasis, from parts to construction to object, from solidity to spatiality.  The suitcase-table has been constructed many times for different locations from Morocco to Berlin to Prague with slight variations each time, and presented as installation, performance, film and dance. Inherent in the suitcase-table is its double referencing, which Ribeiro takes into his architecture. 

Ribeiro came to my attention through a Portuguese architectural photographer, Fernando Guerro, FG+SG who regularly sends us portfolios of new projects.  Ribeiro and Cristina Guedes collaborated on the 2009 Casa das Caldeiras, a new art studies building at the University of Coimbra which used an old steam plant and added a new building to house a cafeteria, bookstore, academic spaces for graduate studies. Exhibition space is in the old coal room.

Pinto, writing from within Portuguese culture sees the Casa das Caldeiras as about the primacy of form, and in the 100 or so photographs of this project you can see the theatricality of many of the spatial decisions: staircases are great wood sculptures in white-walled galleries, an outside deck is as narrow and precarious as a gangway over a stage. 

If there are any double references it is in the elision of architecture and performance, the conceptual underpinning to Ribeiro's work.  The sense of architecture here is not narrowly described as programme, or brand, or image, or budget, or context.  If these five conditions circumscribe one's architecture, then that is the architecture that results.  Last week I went to an absolutely numbing lecture by a well-known and respected Canadian architect who spoke only in these terms.  When I wrote the other day about work being used merely as a trigger for topical critical discourse, it has to be understood that there must be something in the work to initially nourish the discourse, something more than a preoccupation with image and brand.

Why does new work from Europe often look so beautiful?  I don't think it is my un-decolonised self asking this question, rather it is a recognition that the terms of reference we work under are not the only ones that contribute to the making of architecture.

FG+SG. Casa das Caldeiras, Coimbra, Portugal. 2010

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

Ludens. Mobile LibraryIvan Hernandez Quintela is a Mexican architect who regularly publishes small urban guerilla projects in On Site.  He has a new web journal, interferencia: notas informales de ludens, which shows photos of inexplicable, ambiguous, enigmatic urban findings.   The pictures are like old polaroids used to be, square and soft.  His one line commentaries are enchanting – he turns a snap of a broken park bench into a note on who has expectations of comfort in the public realm.  It is a small observation, but an important one.  He takes the environment as he finds it seriously.

On his website he says 'i am not looking for conclusive answers but for a series of possibilities'.

This will do.

Geles

So there it is, how to tie a gele.  The material is either aso-oke – a Yoruba hand woven cloth, silk or printed cotton, but heavily starched.  How starched is subject to fashion, evidently they don't make them so stiff these days, but I found that on a Nigerian website so not sure how straight or cool that comment is.  Many of the commericial sites show them in rayon and quite floppy.

They are outstandingly beautiful when you see them on new Canadians parading down the horrible strip that is 17th Avenue SE in Calgary.  The women are like tall flowers, and I'm not being patronising here, they really are stunning.  The dresses and matching or contrasting geles are stately, calm, solid and absolutely individual.  I'm sure there are nuances in how one pulls out the top of the wrapped material, invisible to many of us, but again, subtle indications of class, wealth and self-worth. 

One does wonder how long it takes for such subtleties to disappear when there are so few people to take account of them.  Or do they become frozen, unable to develop with fashion trends in the original culture.  I remember hearing of people who had emigrated to Canada and, on going back to England, found that the England they had known was completely gone, and they appeared as relics from a bygone era.  It does happen. 

small things: Zoe Keating

Zoe Keating.  Pop!Tech, 18 October 2007 at Camden Opera House. 

video by Kevin Fox

A small assemblage of cello, Keating, laptop, a short composition of 9 minutes, a huge, complex and beautiful sound.  The large thing would be to compose a piece of music, find an orchestra to play it, record it, get it distributed, etc, etc.  The small thing is to sort it all out yourself with what you have: talent, new technology and an idea, or several ideas, and your own website.   

Issue 23 (call for articles) will consider small moves, small projects with large consequences.  New technological changes in the arts seem to appear when the art form is at its most corporate and most proprietal. Photography was seen as the death of painting, which was not what happened, however small cameras put the making of images into amateur hands.  Music sampling put the making of music into the hands of disenfranchised youth: it didn't kill off the recording business, it just allowed individuals to make and reproduce music themselves.  One might see all inventions as reinvigorating overstuffed productions that force audiences to be passive consumers.  New technologies are constantly put into the hands of ordinary people who use them in personal and idiosyncratic ways.  And these things start out small.  And then they get big.