Soundwalking

I went on a soundwalk today and wandered around Clerkenwell with a dozen of spaced-out bodies following each other, crossing the roads, entering churches and parks and standing there listening to the trees, banging on rubbish bins and chasing birds, without uttering a word for the whole duration of the walk. I felt awkwardly self-conscious when passers-by stopped and ogled at us like we were a bunch of lunatics. After 20 minutes, I began to concentrate on the surrounding sounds and to create my own compositions from stolen conversations, kicked-up leaves, the flapping of pigeon wings and, most poetic of all, ear-piercing car alarms mixing with mobile ringtones. It is incredible how one can block out the continuous, pervading noise of the city just by tuning one’s ears on a thing or two – admittedly, not achievable on Farringdon high street where the dominant sound is also the most polluting of all. What I thought would be a nightmare for a couple of hours in urban company – the strict requirement of ‘no talking’ – turned out to be pure bliss. My weekly meditation sessions are over. From now on, I will soundwalk around my house past my local in Fitzrovia and back, and shake the stress of London life out of my body – though my ears!

The Sound Ecologies seminar including artists’ workshops and soundwalk was held on 19 November at City University from a collaboration between sound artist and writer Katherine Norman and new media gallery Furtherfield.org

Of flesh and blood

For the last five hundreds years, women have had the place of honour as subject of art – stripped off their clothes and re-fashioned, fully fleshed, in the nude by men who thought they knew better. Kenneth Clark’s seminal book The Nude – A Study in Ideal Form, written in the 50s, spread the idea that Renaissance painters, Rococo artists and Modernist avant-garde all pursued the notion that the nude (in the female flesh) was the highest form of aesthetics and, incredibly, never questioned the double-standards applied to male artists and their models throughout the ages. Clark’s definition of the nude – a ‘balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed’ comes at the end of a century-long debate about what should be allowed in representation and justifies the noble pursuit of contemplating the female body as a pure aesthetic experience. The 1970s shattered the male connoisseur’s lofty (wet) dreams when feminists demonstrated the subterfuge at last: both the academic nude and the transgressive naked ladies of the avant-garde were pretext to show an exciting female figure and legitimised male fantasies in art. The objectifying male gaze was revealed. It was time for women to reclaim their body. They did, radically so, as part of the counter-culture movement of the late 60s, harnessing the new media of performance and video art to their pressing attempt at representing their true feminine self. What they found, though, is that their subvertive body art forms could turn back and bite them. Showing their attractive body to the world, even when aimed at an art audience and in complete self-awareness, was judged increasingly as just another form of objectification. Foucault and the postmodern consciousness revealed the layers of culture, lies and idealisation that produce the self when subjected to society treatment, desire and pain. The female body as the main sight/site of Western culture thus became the primary instrument with which female artists could divulge the internal structures of Western society controlling the production of experience and identity.

The Body in Women’s Art Now – Part 1 (Embodied) showcase four contemporary women artists whose beautiful and radical work follow onto the steps of these early female pioneers of body art. New issues have arisen as globalisation and cultural diversity have been brought to the contemporary art front. Israeli artist Sigalit Landau’s Barbed Hula (2000) is a powerful, sensual work that shows the artist’s naked body hula hooping with barbed wire on a beach somewhere between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Grey skies cast shadows on the sand, self-inflicted violence leaves deep imprints on her soft skin which quivers and strengthens as if to show the resilience of the body against our human irrational, destructive impulses. Belly-dancing the line between the surrounding danger and the playful escapism of her daily existence, Landau makes her dance act darkly attractive as she intertwines it with the hovering threat of death. Filmed in slow motion against the sea in an endless loop, waves of sensuality reach out to the viewer’s own bodily self who, both attracted and repelled, find her/himself hypnotised by her dangerous erotic game. Regina Rose Galindo’s Recorte por la linea (Cut through the line) (2005) is performed in Venezuela, the first port of call for cheap aesthetic surgery in Latin America. Like Orlan who, a decade earlier, broadcasted herself on the operating table under local anesthetic, Galindo stands naked on the grass while the country’s top surgeon draws on her body in preparation for surgical treatment. However, if the French artist dramatically portrayed society’s pressure to conform to Western feminine ideals of beauty, Regina’s performance emphasises the power relationships between the sexes, almost unchanged after 40 years of feminism, acted out by her passive, submissive attitude under the dominant, active male’s artistry. Looking like a cross between a beef meat cuts diagram and a tattooed aborigine, she also makes an incisive comment on the invading influence of the West, symbolised by neighbouring America, on the cultures of Latin America. Jessica Lagunas also comments on women’s obsession with cosmetics in a performance during which she applies make-up for an hour with grotesque consequences. Lydia Maria Julien’s photographs of cold, stultified bodies lying on floors and tables have a Schielesque aesthetics to be found in the anorexic, pale young girls and boys covering the pages of art and fashion magazines. Reflecting on the apparently superficial and the chronic, internalised violence against the female body, these women artists address the self as a battleground, the place where contemporary social and political issues are raised, debated, and so often ignored. Stripping bare their corpo-reality, the political games, war and day-to-day violence re-surface, again and again, onto the skin as stigma of our man-made, denaturalised culture. Barbara Kruger’s cry that We won’t play nature to your culture hasn’t lost any of its urgency today, as evidenced by the persistent, and ever so subtle ways the female artists’ body of work negotiates our complex, globalised contemporaneity.

The Body in Women’s Art Now – Part 1 (Embodied) is at Rollo Contemporary Art gallery, London, until 20 January 2010

Secession’s monsters

The ‘Golden Cabbage’ glitters under the pale morning sun. It’s Sunday and the streets of Vienna are almost empty, even the marketplace of Naschmarkt, yesterday heaving with locals and tourists rummaging among displays of delicatessen, exotic spices and fancy chocolate, is desert and quiet, except for one cleaner and a couple of joggers sweating their way through the dusty alleys. I walk slowly, crossing the large avenues, not waiting for the green man. Not that I normally do this in London, but here people seem so respectful of the little fellow that I hesitate before jumping the lights. Today though, it feels so easy to reach Karlplatz from where I can admire the delicate splendour of the Secession building.

This key work of Viennese art nouveau, completed in 1898 by architect Joseph Maria Olbrich, was built to house the exhibitions of the revolutionary ‘Association of Visual Artists of Vienna Secession’ during the first decades of the next century. Its rather rigid structure, based on simple geometrical forms, is smoothed out by flowery design and sculptural features – the three intertwined Gorgons above the entrance were designed by Othmar Schimkowitz and the sweet, round-eyed jugendstil owls at each side of the building, were attributed to Kolo Moser. I roll the lens of my camera along them, following the sinuous, carved lines that seem to branch out in the trees brushing the walls, and fall on unusual patterns of fallen leaves and branches on the path around my feet. However, it is the shiny vegetal cupola, formed by 3000 golden gilt leaves and 700 berries that draws the eyes onto the building and gave it its derisory nicknames of ‘temple of bullfrogs’, ‘head of cabbage’ or a ‘cross between a greenhouse and a blast furnace’. Such were the contemporary reactions towards this outstanding novelty, standing alone and proud among the baroque, neo-gothic and neo-renaissance eclectism that made the urban landscape of conservative fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Similar fearful reactions hit the exhibits currently being shown inside the building as part of CINEPLEX, a selection of recent experimental films from Austria addressing the history, techniques, iconography and dramaturgic conventions of the medium. The curators wanted to divert the focus, directed on film installation during the last few decades, back to linear cinema and put each artist’s film into its own black box. In there, nothing can distract the viewer from wandering outside the screen – except for other viewers who stumble through the corridor, chatter in the dark and obscure my vista. I spray my legs as far and wide as possible and huff and puff loudly in order to disperse the intruders. Fortunately there is no need for my efforts as they leave as brutally as they have entered, stunned by the incomprehensible visual and aural gibberish rolling in front of their half-open eyes. Apart from a couple of student girls, they are mostly Sunday trollers and tourists coming up, like I did, from viewing Klimt’s Beethoven frieze in the basement, the main attraction for a visit inside the Secession, and wandering the building to make the most of the pricey exhibition ticket they had to pay for. The first film I watch convinces me to stay here rather than wandering off to the Albertina as planned. When I enter a claustrophobic room up the stairs, the floor is shaking and I instinctively walk across the room, past the black box on my left to the half-open window. The vibrations are becoming more intense, accompanied with the bass sound of machinery – I try to open a door but it is locked. I decide to face the box and fumble my way through a dark hole at its side leading to a small cinema-like interior. Is there someone in the corner? The light emanating from the screen is so dim that I can’t tell. My feet touch a hard surface and I sit on it. The vibrational noise stops at once and silence makes me jump. The credits roll: I will be starting the ride from scratch. The film opens with a scene in the forest that reminds me of a painting I have seen the day before. Forest at Dusk by Albin Egger-Lienz, a beautiful, dark green leafiness with a sinister depth – a place you wouldn’t want to get lost in when night falls. The thought made me shiver as my eyes wandered endlessly over the painting yesterday. On the screen, the scene in the wood is filmed in the bright daylight, the sun flashing through the branches. It is quiet and spacious enough to feel at peace. However, this calm is momentary as I notice that the camera’s lens keeps zooming back and forth, ever so slowly at first, then increasingly faster. It feels a bit like being hypnotised. Through a series of dolly zooms, a technique using a succession of camera movements of forward and backward motion, caught in individual images while simultaneously zooming in the opposite direction, Johann Lurf’s Vertigo Rush destabilises the normal human visual perception and provokes a kind of dizziness in the viewer. While the leafy background is forever shrinking and swelling, the front trees remain the same and my brain is getting confused, losing its sense of perspectives, while being compulsively attracted and repelled by the pendulum movement of the image. I originally thought it had been digitally manipulated. Hitchcock first used the technique in his film Vertigo, developed further by the New American cinema experiments in the 1960’s. Instead of the usual symptoms of increased heartbeats and moist hands and feet,  however, I get a headache and a churning stomach. In any case, it does convince of the spectacular potential of this simple cinematographic ‘craft’. When the speed of the back and forth movement reaches that of a TGV, the image suddenly forms a dense darkness from which the light flashes in patches and the silhouette of a tree passes by, once in a while, in apparent slow motion. The sound becomes unbearably intense like a concert of Sunn O))) and the image starts to flicker into splashes of nothingness. A re-enactment of the Big Bang viewed through my deceptively safe, little black hole. Blown-out, I hold onto my seat till landing and reluctantly step out of my space-traveling machine into 21st century Vienna.

Below in the main hall is another peculiar machine that arouses my aural senses. A bright, uniform white light emanates from the double-glazed roof of the main room, empty except for a couple of weird inky blobs on the walls with what looks like analytic sheet of data stuck next to them. I follow the swooshing sound that becomes heavier as I walk towards the adjacent room. My hair immediately frizzes as I walk in. In the middle stands what looks like the monstrous steam engine in benoit Sokal’s video game Syberia, with pressure air powerfully shooting from both sides. Incidentally, Micol Assaël’s experimental machine, Fomuska, is based on a Russian test facility for simulating lightning discharges. I approach the fuming beast and my body reacts instantly to the electrostatic field produced by the steam machine. All my sensory perceptions are being activated from head to toe. A rusty, mineral smell filters through my nostrils, my skin dampens and my ears pulsate. If Vertigo Rush slowly builds up to a thick and intense sonic fog, Fomuska gives the impression of swimming in an aural sea whose tidal waves are dangerously swelling to breaking point. I’m hooked, wet, electrified.

Contrasting with Assaël’s installation and Lurf’s film, the work which also gets under my skin is far more subdued, internal and raw. Annja Krautgasser’s Innerer Monolog scans the façade of a concrete, 1970s building and exposes its surfaces and holes, by night, like she would expose herself in the naked flesh. A female voice brushes over, both frank and thoughtful, remorseful and indifferent – she’s older, nothing has changed except for the passing of time. I can still hear her voice a long while after my visit, while walking in the streets, while packing my bag – I’d like to change my mind if I like… you’ve improved so much, you used to be so plain… shouldn’t have said that… what happened?… is there a difference?… how come we’ve never been here before? The images overlap with the voice in a surprising synthetic language as in an attempt at concretising her psychological meanderings. I wander in my own thoughts, create my own narrative and, as often with women’s films and video work, find the experience satisfyingly therapeutic.

On my way out, I share a thought for Typhon, Klimt’s endearing monster in the basement and decide that his highly decorative piece of work lacks the depth of a chef-d’oeuvre made in honour of Beethoven’s powerful musical creations – some of the contemporary art I have seen today do it more justice in terms of emotional depth and gesamtskunstwerk power – with a little help from technology. The Secession art education programme offers a singular mix of art nouveau, architecture and contemporary art which works surprisingly well, probably due, in part, to the building’s white cube environment and to its rebellious place in the history of modern art.

Micol Assaël, Fomuska and CINEPLEX at the Secession, Vienna from 11 September to 8 November

Revival of an old tired horse

‘Empathy          By the sea
A coastal town view of it all
Alternative view      Alternative

Hello i’m waving at you!

I’m ahead of time    Not too far ahead’
(…)

Sue Tompkins’ evocative poetry covers part of the walls of the upper room at the ICA, 15 sheets of blue paper scribbled with words, interjections and thoughts, forming short narratives in a numerical order, none of it making much sense but nonetheless, I’m drawn to it – the language of the senses, words formed into graphic worlds, bitter-sweet odours emanating from the crunched letters, raw emotions betrayed by a bold typo, the pale blue sky showing through five paper windows – I can smell deep green algae and fish, I swear I’ve seen the sea, a distant boat bobbing up and down, and heard a scream over there, over the sand dunes, and some mechanics clanking, rusting in the blazing sun.

Sue also performs her graphic words mix – from the snippets I have watched on youtube the written and spoken words are now infused with the rhythmic dimension, the jumping body, the dancing foot, the grimaces that separate one’s inner, chattering mind from the raw, hypnotic performer’s act, that crack open an emotional gap between the other and the self and create an even more jarring experience between the message and its destabilizing, invigorating delivery.

Liliane Lijn’s kinetic poetry, words generated from conic ‘poem machines’ to create narratives in circular fashion, was another exciting discovery in this otherwise short, tentative exhibition that leaves too much to be desired. The curators picked a selection of artists from the substantial pool of individuals that have contributed to the complex, hybrid movement of Concrete Poetry, born in the 1950s and expanding ever since into multifarious activities. What is lacking is a bit more than a passing remark on the source of these radical ideas – namely, the early 20th century performance-driven movements of the Futurists and Dadaists and the poets that gravitated around them. I also wished for a contextualization of the exhibited artists within the early principles of Concrete Poetry, objectifying language and ripping it off its logocentrist habits, and a peep through the post-activities related to it from phonetic poetry to xerography via performance and ‘mec-art’. Instead, the 4 rooms of the show contain disparate, famous and lesser-known artists arguably demonstrating the range of positions that the movement embraced, in a vague chronological order, with an emphasis on the British movement around Ian Hamilton Finlay. A few continental Europeans such as Henri Chopin and a couple of American Conceptualists have been thrown in for good measure. To round it up, we are served with a sampling of half-a-dozen contemporary, anglo-saxon, visual/textual/performative practices. The accompanying Roland magazine is an essential complement to the show, compiling visual poems and theoretical essays. This somehow reveals an aporic dimension at the heart of the Concrete Poetry ideas – the difficult liberation of the typed, written words from their entrenchment in books and literary zines into the wider art world, especially when expressed within a gallery format. The small ICA show did not create the alchemy to reverse this – a larger retrospective, with a clearer internal logic and punctuated with performances might have done a better job at reviving poetry as a visual and performative art. The British Library Art of Manifesto 2008 show had successfully rendered, as a free-standing exhibition, the written words of manifesto into its powerful expressive spoken and visual forms. I am looking forward to Liliane Lijn’s Power Game and  xprmntl ptry which, I hope, will give credit to Poor.Old.Tired.Horse and the wonders of the poetic arts.

Poor.Old.Tired.Horse is at the ICA till 23 August.

A contemporary allegory of the vanities of human life

Cindy Sherman’s exhibit at the Sprüth Magers gallery is yet another lurid display of human nature. In this particular show, however, I had the feeling that Sherman’s own camouflaged self was being unveiled as her fear of aging as a rich and famous woman of the contemporary art world was slowly creeping in. In one of the rare interviews she gave to the media she said that her creepy-looking photographs would prepare you psychologically for the things that you don’t look forward to having to experience. Her bottox-filled faces and digitally-manipulated, mutton-dressed-as-lamb women certainly create pathos but the sense of pity that seized me did not only come from those stiff upper-lips ladies but from the artist herself, showing through the layers of make-up and lies. While further adding to the photography-as-truth and feminist discourses, Sherman continues her exploration of the abject in her artistic practice. This time, she also exposed the abject in the art world business by provoking the disagreeable thought that one is passively watching, and thus contributing, to the surfeit nature of it all. The thought was bluntly illustrated while I was scrutinizing the imposing lady in the flashy red dress (Untitled #470, 2008) from the middle of the main room. A glittering couple suddenly walked in and stood in front of the picture, gesticulating widely and blurting out loud comments about it, completely oblivious to the rest of us contemplating the scene behind them. I left the room in contained annoyance and continued my visit. A little while later, the gallery assistant was helpfully describing the artist’s techniques to me when the couple erupted from the show rooms and rudely interrupted her. To our dismay, the jittery, trendy young male butted in, introducing his ‘important client from France’, a fake-tanned blonde that wouldn’t have felt out-of-place in one of Sherman’s new works, and asked to be cared for immediately. The assistant executed the order quietly, suggesting that they join a little group of visitors currently viewing additional works on display in the basement. To which the young male replied, apparently shocked, that ’special facilities’ should be made available to ’serious buyers such as his client from Frrraaance’ and that he would like to speak to the gallerist in a swift and sugar-on-top fashion. An embarrassing silence ensued. I gave a wry smile to the assistant and dashed off, overcome with a sudden urge to shake off the non-intelligent corrupting agency that had infected the gallery. Exposed was the facade of the art business that I have been, and I still am, desperately trying to ignore in hope that it will disappear. But of course, crushed hope has the radically opposite effect of lifting the veil that hides truth’s nakedness. Sherman might have genuinely attempted to exorcise my fear of physical decay but she hadn’t quite prepared me for such a real, in-your-face display of pretentious vulgarity. Even more poignantly, one is to question the relevance of her work if it all ends up in the living room of the rich and vane – an ironic sight of her decaying postmodernity?

Cindy Sherman’s new work is at Sprüth Magers gallery in London until 27 May 2009