“In many of the works I have chosen there is allusion to the way information can be recieved as cultural flotsam and jetsam, and somehow they all examine the erosion and projection of narrative. Mathilde ter Heijne’s Woman to Go is a series of black and white postcards featuring found images of anonymous 19th century women. Printed on the back of each postcard is the mismatched biography of a different woman from that age. Oliver Michael’s films from the Musem Postcard series are derived from photos of historical sculpture. Using crude software they are animated and anthropomorphised to become mouthpieces for discordant monologues. A ponderous ceramic lion muses poetically, and a marble monk rants excerpts from the Unabomber manifesto. Josh Tonsfeldt’s and Michele Williams Gamaker’s human subjects are cropped, decapitated and objectified. In Tonsfeldt’s film a figure dressed in boots and jeans dances in an American barn. There is no music, only the ambient sound of his feet. His old-time hillbilly dance slowly reveals possible undertones, of M.J.? Britney Spears? Eventually he kicks up so much dried horseshit that he disappears in a cloud of dust.”
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010,Installation View
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Picasso's Iberian Stone Head
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Picasso's Iberian Stone Head
Ziegler also used a video of a cat lapping milk by Swiss duo Fischli and Weiss. Since he was able to consult with the artists about the installation of their pieces, they allowed him to project this film extremely over-sized in the screening room in the back of the chapel, miniaturizing the viewer and placing them on the same ground plane as the giant cat, forcing an alternative way of visual investigation of such an experience.
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Hellenic hermaphrodite pair
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Installation View
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Installation View
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Staffordshire Dogs
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Staffordshire Dogs
Staffordshire Dogs Detail
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Mezzanine View
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Installation View
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010, Hellenic hermaphrodite pair
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010
The Alienation of Objects, 2009-2010
Mathilde ter Heijne, Woman to Go, 2005, postcard installation
Mathilde ter Heijne, Woman to Go, 2005, postcard installation detail
Mathilde ter Heijne, Woman to Go, 2005, postcard installation detail
Oliver Michaels, Lion (2010) & The Mourners (2010)
Oliver Michaels, Lion Detail(2010)
Oliver Michaels, The Mourners (2010)
Oliver Michaels, Lion (2010) & The Mourners (2010) Installation view
Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Busi (Kitty) 2001, DVD
Josh Tonsfeldt, Untitled, 2008, HD video
Zabludowicz Collection, The Alienation of Objects
Zabludowicz Collection Bookstore & Cafe
The Alienation of Objects is up from 7 October- 12 December 2010
The Chapel at 176 Prince of Wales Road
This post was meant to go up a month ago and while the show is no longer installed I still want to share these images. This is one of the few solo exhibitions that Roman Signer, the Swiss artist from St. Gallen, has had in the United States. Titled ‘Four Rooms, One Artist’ at the Swiss Institute in Soho, the show was a combination of installation and video documentation dealing with Signer’s signature scientific object experimentation- one of his newer videos show an Eames chair for instance moving swiftly down a river- an object whose function is normally induced by human needs, but finely addresses the relationship that fluidity has both in the subjects of the video and the video as subject. ” All of Signer’s actions are carefully choreographed. As well as working in his studio, which he calls his lab, Signer often takes off to the Swiss mountains to conduct larger experiments. “I’m no scientist”, he maintains, ” I’m a tinkerer.” The sense of the home experiment of course makes his results resonate so powerfully with immediate and fantastic transformations, a chair rocking next to a lone guest at the opening instantly gives them spiritual company; the umbrellas tied together in his Umbrella video become more of an unruly animal than the inanimate, humanly-employable plastic and nylon structure.
Because Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go, Fischli & Weiss 1987) was a profound moment in my comprehension and admiration of video work, it is a rare and lucky find to see a show of museum quality on such a small, intimate scale by an artist who essentially pioneered and inspired that way of using the medium of video, objects and natural phenomena almost 30 years ago.
Thank you to the Swiss Institute for supplementing my images. For more information their press release is quoted at the end of the post.
Roman Signer, Piano, 2010, Image courtesy of the Swiss Institute
Roman Signer, Piano, 2010
Roman Signer, Piano, 2010
Roman Signer, Piano Detail, 2010 Image courtesy of the Swiss Institute
Roman Signer, Piano Detail, 2010
Roman Signer, Shirt (2010) and Two Umbrellas, Iceland (2008) installation view, Image courtesy of the Swiss Institute
Two Umbrellas Detail, Iceland (2008)
Two Umbrellas Detail, Iceland (2008)
Two Umbrellas Detail, Iceland (2008)
PV Installation View
PV Installation View
Installation View
Roman Signer, Cinema (detail view), 2010 Image courtesy of the Swiss Institute
Roman Signer, Cinema (detail view), 2010
Roman Signer, Cinema (detail view), 2010
Roman Signer, Waiting for Harold Edgarton, 2010 Image courtesy of the Swiss Institute
Roman Signer, Waiting for Harold Edgarton, 2010 Image courtesy of the Swiss Institute
”
| Even though many of the works by Roman Signer do not deal with explosions, but rely on water, wind, sand, electricity, and fire, people tend to remember the experiments that blow up. All of Signer’s actions are carefully choreographed. As well as working in his studio, which he calls his lab, Signer often takes off to the Swiss mountains to conduct larger experiments. “I’m no scientist,” he maintains, “I’m a tinkerer.” Many of his happenings are not for public viewing, and are only documented in photos and film.
This exhibition at the Swiss Institute is divided into four rooms. The first room presents Piano (2010), which is comprised of a grand piano that is filled with table tennis balls. Two oscillating fans are placed on either side of the instrument. The gentle airflow causes the balls to dance on the chords, creating ambient music. The second room presents Cinema (2010) an installation with rows of wooden chairs and a projected film. In the back of the room, one chair mysteriously rocks back and forth, as if led by an invisible hand. The video is a transfer of one of the artist’s “Restenfilm,” or “leftovers,” clips of experiments that were never constituted into artworks and shots of places or events that are of particular interest to Signer. In the third room, three respective video projections of recent actions are shown: Shirt (2010); Two Umbrellas, Iceland (2008); and Office Chair (2010). The fourth and last room hosts the installation, Waiting for Harold Edgerton (2010), a minimal intervention that deliberately remains enigmatic. It gestures to the American photographer, who was well known for his speed photography and perpetuated as “the man who made time stand still.” It is in the bathtub that Roman Signer develops the ideas for his creations (an important detail in case you book him a hotel room). He then tests them as simple setups in his studio. That is often far from easy; but the failures and adjustments generate new concepts. Roman Signer has been creating his unique sculptures for over 30 years, earning praise and recognition all over the world. And he does not seem to run out of ideas.” Curated by Gianni Jetzer With kind support of Hauser & Wirth, Zurich London New York and Kulturförderung Kanton St.Gallen and Swisslos. |
Last Thursday a gaping pair of ostrich-leg boots patiently awaited a recipient at the closing reception of Christian Gonzenbach’s show at Gallery S O titled “Domestic Wildlife Collection”. It was here that a discussion started earlier in the day at the RCA continued; a discussion on his theories of whales. The Swiss artist studies histories and processes, how an animal or object achieves its identity through physicality and material composition. This is done in the language of nature and animals, with the use of skins, addressing and asking questions of the interior and exterior, of material and spiritual possessions. When does an animal become and animal, and how much needs to be removed before it attains a new purpose, perhaps a functional marketable skin? What is the molecular and spiritual composition of identity?
Gallery SO, Domestic Wildlife Collection
Inside-Out Pets
Ostrich Leg Boots
Gonzenbach was recently working on a mold of a whale, coating the inside surface with a self-formulated skin of clay and plaster, painted black. While the whale would never exist, the mold became a fossil. He stated that for him whales were imaginary, that he was from the mountains, not the ocean, and since humans no longer have a (legal) trade relationship with these creatures, we justify them in our minds based on modern mythologies instead of first-hand informed practices. When whaling was a valid business, people had to accomodate themselves to this size, creating machines and tools based on a mammoth scale, solidifying their existence.
The presumption of what makes the world we inhabit as it is, remains a human condition that he investigates and humorizes. We cant possibly experience or see the instigations of all form but we wonder. It wasn’t until after attempting to recount my experiential whales, I realized that with the exception of rather small beluga whales in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the famous, undying Shamu at Seaworld in 1993, I had never actually seen a whale in its habitat. Even on a whale watching boat off the coast of Maine, I spent hours with my parents and sisters imagining that each little white-capped wave would manifest into a fin or blowhole, to the point where it was a hallucinatory game- there were beyond doubt whales under the surface but none to be seen!
This presumption of experience is normal, and it made me assess how much of my knowledge is physically uninformed- the answer being most of it. Something as ancient as a whale is a poetic example of how severe this condition may be, and there is certainly the psychology of the oceanic unknown that renders it a beautiful example of loss. The philosophy of this thought is hundreds of books deep – my notion a miniscule particle topping an iceberg that I’ve heard is mostly submerged.
Inside-Out Donkey
Inside-Out Donkey
Gallery Detail
Stop animation of Chicken and Weasel exchanging skins
Eraser Arrowheads
Clay bear shot with gun
Meteor
Similarly to the whale mold, Gonzenbach creates his own meteors, not by sculpting a meteor but by creating the matter that would violently and gradually deteriorate a substance; Throwing rocks at clay. When I think of meteors there are massive rocks hurtling themselves towards our stratosphere, but of course I assume this is what happens, based only on the knowledge of huge blemish-like craters in the midwest and the shards of specimens in Natural History museums.
This work made me think of these two projects- which while being slightly different in conception, still represent the solidification of imaginary experience and the replication of an iconic source of greed and commerce.
Photo by Damon Winter for The New York Times
“The artist Duke Riley does some last minute work before launching his replica of a Revolutionary War-era submarine, built of plywood and fiberglass and ballasted with lead, off Pier 41 in Red Hook, Brooklyn on Friday August 3, 2007″ Quoted from the New York Times article.
Balaenoptera Musculus by Tom Sachs. Photo is copyright of Tom Sachs
“For the other installation, Balaenoptera Musculus (2006), a life-sized reconstruction of an 18-metre long blue whale, Tom Sachs took his inspiration from the whale model hanging in the ocean life hall at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. The whale, which, for its size, Sachs calls adolescent, is made in foam core, cardboard, and white polyurethane foam, a material often used or architectural models. ” Quoted from the Fondazione Prada Press Release.
Peter Fischli & David Weiss are basically my favorites from the realm of celebrity artists, and Matthew Marks currently has given them the attention of all three of his Chelsea galleries. This show is almost over! It ends on the 16th and I strongly recommend a visit.
The show is in three parts, the first (in the order that I visited them) is Clay and Rubber at 523 W24th. This show included 26 objects that span the past three decades of the duo’s rubber casting and hand-built clay works. I have seen some of these pieces at their Tate Modern retrospective, but the lot is an amazing spectrum of elemental beauty in objects. The clay pieces are primarily models of machined, recto-linear objects. Marks of the artists hands are proximally apparent, subtly highlighting the surface and distinguishing their over-sized forms from a real smooth-cast brick, sono-tube or chain-link. The rubber objects contrast as casts of natural or highly detailed forms, and the material is often hidden by the original detail of the pieces. Both of the materials engage the viewer and the object, negating the importance of purpose and true material, allowing the pure form of everyday objects to be considered. The gallery was also perfect, in that it didn’t overwhelm the objects with massive space, but was large enough to investigate the pieces with/out the context of the others.
Matthew Marks Gallery@ 523 West 24th
Wood Table, 2005, Black Rubber, 157 x 96 x 45cm
Raven, 1986, Black Rubber, 28 x 41 x 14cm
Chain, 2009, Reinforced clay, 14 x 107 x 14cm
Little Wall, 1987, Black Rubber, 77 x 34 x 41cm
Root, 2005, Black Rubber, 60 80 x 60cm
Stairs, 1987, Black Rubber, 36 x 87 x 53cm
Drawer, 1987, Black Rubber, 14 x 51 x 43cm
Down the street at 522 West 22nd is Sun, Moon and Stars, an exhibition of a book that F&W started as a project for an annual report. The book is pretty daunting to flip through, but here I spent quite a bit of time re-examining the flats which I thought were more successful than the original format in conveying the visual and topical similarities. Below is quoted from the MM press release:
“Sun, Moon and Stars is an encyclopedic accumulation of 800 magazine advertisements culled form hundreds of international periodicals. Begun as a project commissioned by a Swiss corporation for its annual report, the finished project is displayed in thirty-eight wood and glass tables, totaling 330 feet in length. A dizzying reaction to late capitalism in various chromatic groupings, the ads are shown in a specific order that exploits the formal, thematic and color similarities between advertisements.”
Matthew Marks Gallery@ 522 West 22nd
Case Detail
Case Detail
Case Detail
Case Detail
Gallery Detail
Resting next door at 526 West 22nd, are the deflated avatars of Fischli & Weiss, titled Sleeping Puppets. Rat and Bear were first shown in the film The Least Resistance, 1981, and The Right Way, 1983 ( translated dialogue quoted below) Click on the links to watch the films.
“BEAR: Do you see the moon? Look at it carefully.
RAT: I need more stones. We have hardly begun.
BEAR: I’ve been watching it. It’s like me.
It comes and goes.
Always on the move…looks at everything.
It does what it pleases.
RAT: So you want to leave.
BEAR: What am I suppose to do? Are you staying here?
RAT: Now all it needs is a roof
BEAR: Good. I’ll come with you.
RAT: I’ll leave the stones here..
BEAR: …but I’m taking the dream with me
Into the unknown.”
Bye Bye! Matthew Marks Gallery @ 526 West 22nd
Peter Fischli & David Weiss
October 30, 2009- January 16, 2010