Die Freiheit wird jetzt einfach gesponsort - aus der Portokasse
Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored - out of petty cash
Hans Haacke, 1990
29.4.10
Hans Haacke
26.4.10
CSH proper, improper
Julius Shulman, Tremaine House, Santa Barbara, Richard Neutra Architect, 1950
I am reading Jealousy by Robbe-Grillet.
22.4.10
15.4.10
Uriel Orlow, 'Remnants of the Future' @ Laure Genillard
16th January – 10th April 2010
Remnants of the Future is a multi-part installation comprising video, photography and drawing. Taking as its starting point a number of sites in Northern Armenia near the Georgian and Turkish borders, in this new body of work Orlow continues his investigation of the spatial and pictorial conditions of history and memory.
Orlow’s video focuses on Mush, a housing project just outside of the north Armenian town of Gyumri. Mush is named after the once flourishing Armenian town in Eastern Anatolia, which in 1915, during the Armenian genocide, became the site of massacres and deportations. Construction of the 'new' Mush began a few months after the major Spitak earthquake of 1988 destroyed many of Gyumri's housing blocks and made thousands of people homeless. Promised by M. Gorbachev to be completed within two years, construction of the new Soviet-style suburb eventually came to an abrupt halt as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Russian construction workers were recalled by Moscow. The newly independent Armenian state did not have the means to finish this ambitious housing project and it has since remained in a ghostly state of incompletion and near desertion, inhabited by inhabited by migrating birds and gleaners who eek out an existence by slowly dismantling the Soviet style housing blocks.. The video is accompanied by a sound-scape by Mikhail Karikis using the radio waves emitted by dying stars (pulsars), which still reach us after the star has died and which were first mistaken for intelligent life messages from outer space.
A series of photographs explore the afterlife of a nearby textile factory, which had at one point produced over 50% of the Soviet Union's textiles and was destroyed during the earth-quake. Reaching even further back into history is a series of twenty drawings of death masks – including Lenin, Tolstoy, Eisenstein and Mayakovsky – made by Sergey Merkurov, a Gyumri-born sculptor who became famous for his monumental sculptures throughout the Soviet Union. A floating cover of Francis Fukuyama's seminal post-cold-war book 'The End of History - The Last Man' and a hand copy of a UK government document on Armenia operate as lose footnotes to the rest of the work.
Orlow's practice tackles the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and engages with different documentary forms. Spanning little known locations in Africa, the Arctic, Eastern Europe and Switzerland, Orlow's work explores blind-spots of representation and knowledge through a careful act of framing and re-arranging what he finds in a place. His modular, multi-media installations bring varying image-regimes and archival research into correspondence following associative, conceptual and formal threads.
‘Orlow’s challenge to our desire for continuity is radical: the truth of this peripheral space is not one, he suggests, that can be told narratively. […] Orlow’s work asks us how we can read the past in a way which does not involve a simple hierarchy with the present. More than this: he wants to know what history is and how it binds itself to an institution, a thing, a space, a face. The fragility of the whole project is its fidelity to its subject’s fractured nature […].’(Mike Sperlinger)
14.4.10
lines extruded from walls
I spent another afternoon at the Southwark Fire Training Ground, investigating the red line with the generous hospitality of the London Fire Brigade. The BA (Breathing Apparatus) Space is a dark blue chamber through which a slim red rope guide line is tied by a team of two men.
In the darkness the back of the hand is used to sweep the wall for obstructions and tie-off points on which to knot the line to keep it between shoulder and waist height. If the back of the hand is cut, through heavy gloves, the hand will still function.
Lights out. Gripping the shoulders of the man in front, gripped at the waist by the man behind, an eyeless theatrical horse, there was a slow conga through the tingling monochrome of zero visibility, tracing the line.
Two small cords hang at intervals, a longer one in front means that you are heading into the structure, and when a shorter cord knotted twice is in front it means you are heading back out towards the point the line enters the building.
It is impossible to see, to photograph the line as a continuum.
PAROLE is the unfolding in time of a set of possibilities given in space, that set of possibilities being what Saussure calls LANGUE.
*[diagram taken from Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics]
8.4.10
Body Architecture
Whitechapel, in association with Lux, screened:
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, Stan Brakhage (1971) 16mm, 32 min
Stan Brakhage has often described his films as documentaries, referring to his investigations of how we see, whether in experiments with cinema's unique capacities to view the world or attempts to replicate "closed-eye" vision. In 1971, Brakhage was allowed to photograph an autopsy, a word which comes from the Greek, meaning "the act of seeing with one's own eyes." In the resulting difficult, intensely disturbing work, Brakhage attempts to understand death. In seeking the ultimate mystery-in asking why-he encounters the physical, anonymous human body, and in the process "sees" the limits of knowing through observation.' Kathy Geritz
The film is part of Brakhage's "Pittsburgh trilogy", a trio of 'documentary' films Brakhage made about the city's various institutions in 1971; the other two are 'Eyes', about the city police, and 'Deus Ex', filmed in a hospital.
Calmly I have seen the scalp chiseled from underneath with a slim blade, and flipped over the face, so dead lips kiss the crown of their own heads. I have seen bone smoke, the way limbs shift, weighted, the way organs quiver as they are liberated, lifted like infants from the hollowing. Subcutaneous fat is a buttery foam, which spreads like curds away from the dark red straps of muscle, punctuated with calcium white. The big toe supports the final words not cast in Latin.
6.4.10
AA lectures
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1208
Marcel Odenbach
Artist Talk
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1133
Jean Louis Cohen
Architecture Drafted: Designing for World War II
5.4.10
Paul Ricoeur: Time and Narrative
preface ix
With metaphor, the innovation lies in the producing of a new semantic pertinence by means of an impertinent attribution: "Nature is a temple where living pillars. . . ." The metaphor is alive as long as we can perceive, through the new semantic pertinence--and so to speak in its denseness--the resistance of the words in their ordinary use and therefore their incompatibility at the level of a literal interpretation of the sentence. The displacement in meaning the words undergo in the metaphorical utterance, a displacement to which ancient rhetoric reduced metaphor, is not the whole of metaphor. It is just one means serving the process that takes place on the level of the entire sentence, whose function it is to save the new pertinence of the "odd" predication threatened by the literal incongruity of the attribution.
With narrative, the semantic innovation lies in the inventing of another work of synthesis--a plot. By means of the plot, goals, causes and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action. It is this synthesis of the heterogeneous that brings narrative close to metaphor. In both cases, the new thing--the as yet unsaid, the unwritten--springs up in language. Here a living metaphor, that is, a new pertinence in the predication, there a feigned plot, that is,a new congruence in the organization of the events.
In both cases the semantic innovation can be carried back to the productive imagination and, more precisely, to the schematism that is its signifying matrix. In new metaphors the birth of a new semantic pertinence marvelously demonstrates what an imagination can be that produces things according to rules: "being good at making metaphors, " said Aristotle, "is equivalent to being perceptive of resemblances." But what is it to be perceptive of resemblances if not to inaugurate the similarity by bringing together terms that at first seem "distant," then suddenly "close"? It is this change in distance in logical space that is the work of productive imagination. This consists of schematizing the synthetic operation, if figuring the predicative assimilation from whence results the semantic innovation. The productive imagination at work in the metaphorical process is thus our competence for producing new logical species by predicative assimilation. It "grasps together" and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events, thereby schematizing the intelligible signification attached to the narrative taken as a whole.
Finally, in both cases the intelligibility brought to light by this process of schematization is to be distinguished from the combinatory rationality put into play by structural semantics, in the case of metaphor, and the legislating rationality at work in narratology and scholarly history, in the case of narrative. This rationality aims instead at simulating, at the higher level of a meta-language, the kind of comprehension rooted in this schematization
To consider in terms of HOW one can understand the continuity of form under deformation.
Dialogue with Masa
CK: I am interested in how language can come to behave like topology in its modelling of objects (or images of objects, as we tend to trade images). As I understand it topology is the study of models (cast in points, lines and numbers?) of objects where spatial properties are preserved under deformations. Immediately this reminds me of the Sea Change passage from the Tempest - something which is not a spatial, but a material deformation... When things/ideas are modelled in natural language they tend to be cast as material, and the spatial arrangement of these materials are also articulated in order to have a function within the system. The spatiality is then extruded as a system of temporal positions (using the sequence and semantics of language) in order to encounter the object. In this case language is shifting objects, while maintaining their structures (describing what I think could approach topological function) but not performing it itself, within the language. ???
MK: Hey, this looks very interesting. I try to clarify/repeat what I think you meant.
Your focus on langauge is interesting and challenging, because it is by virtue of its own existence relational. The question is, does language or a model shift because they need to correspond to shifting external objects? Dont you disagree with an idea that it is a passive thing that merely follows the changing objects? Do you propose to understand language as a model? If so, doesnt it indicate a certain autonomy/independence from what it is modeling and becomes an object in its own right? then, shouldnt there be a crack between the external object and the model/language, and acquires its own quality?
The object-word relation is of course the central aspect of language, but the challenge for you, I guess is to liberate it from the definition that only takes reduced variables (the idea that language always stands in for some external objects or meanings) and shift the discourse towards understanding it more as a collection of "signs" that necessarily undergoes various relations in concrete duration externally and internally, spatially and durationally. I think that a "model" does that because it forces itself to have a certain manipulable qualitative reality irregardless of what it supposedly represents.
Language as object (or object in general as a sign) changes its characteristics according to what it establishes its relations with. I still need to do a lot more work on this, but C.S.Peirce seems to be our master sign topologist. He has three categories of signs: Icon/Firstness/quality, Index/Secondness/Fact and Symbol/Thirdness/Imputed Character, cardinally rather than ordinally related to each other. Something quite interesting is going on in Peirce, he seems to be revealing that all three are involved in language, and criticize the reduction of complexity into just 2/3 or either 3 or 2. There is a topology of object-language, but also within language/model as well no?
My focus is more on the debates over body vs. number, particularly in relation to biodatabases. The concept of multiplicity is important for me, because I would like to argue that it takes us beyond the false dualisms of "either or", continuity vs. discreteness, numerical being vs. vitalism, and allows me to agree/disagree with both at the same time. It is difficult to delineate qualitative and quantitative through space, matter, and so on, since it depends which kind. The two aspects always co-exist and grapple against each other. Perhaps we can only talk about purity as a sort of methodological separation, and have to say that in reality they are necessarily impurely mixed. The task is to discern how much and how little the power balance is shifting towards either side, and determine what it is. But I do think that thinking in terms of continuity already liberates us from the confinement of the "human" and takes us closer to the ecology of relations that we are in.
4.4.10
co-ordinates
FROM: http://moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/2009/05/is-that-utopia-in-your-valise-hans.html
More Milk Yvette, sadly in stasis...
CO-ORDINATES AND TUNNELS.
If each interview proposes a private language then what of the activity that language arises to describe? Perhaps what the interview form reveals best - particularly when, as here, most subjects are remembering things from 30-40 years prior - is the curator as a particular way of thinking, responding, making connections and arguments in space and through history, geography and the contemporary. Often this involves the establishing of certain spatial coordinates. So whilst Pontus Hulten produces a trilogy of horizontally conceived exhibitions (Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, and Paris-Moscow), Werner Hofmann observes:
"I then became aware of the period of Goethe as a quarry, as an inexhaustible conglomeration of periods of artistic experiments. I worked with these coordinates for a long time. (134)"
And this (conceptual) spatiality develops further as a method for the making of exhibitions:
"I bored into the tunnel from two ends. On the one hand from the material that was on offer, and on the other from the theory. So both deductively and inductively. Twelve chapters arose from this about everything that can happen with art, or what it can be misused for, and what results from it. (145-6)"
Documents
Black Audio Film Collective, Handsworth Songs, 1986
http://www.ubu.com/film/ivens_bridge.html
Joris Ivens, The Bridge, 1927-8
Interview with artist/art theorist Hito Steyerl on her work and the document
3.4.10
Paradjanov
http://www.youtube.com/user/arunah11#grid/user/3D9518D423052DEA
until they kill the link...
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