Dave Hullfish Bailey, Nils Norman, Surrounded by Squares

Nils Norman, Exhibition view, Surrounded by Squares, 2009

For ‘Surrounded by Squares’ Dave Hullfish Bailey and Nils Norman have each constructed elaborate sculptural installations. Both relate to education and ecology, design theory and the creative industries, as well as to the site of Raven Row.

Dave Hullfish Bailey has generated polygonal sculptural forms by feeding patterns of information about Spitalfields’ history of dissidence into 3-D design software used by contemporary architects to model high-rises. Under the shadow of the encroaching financial district, Bailey suggests that alternative models may exist for the ordering of space and information.

Nils Norman is interested in the way corporate culture absorbs what is outside itself, aping innovations from the ecological movement and the playscapes of alternative education, and transforming ideas about collectivism and sustainability into those about management of people and quick profit. For his installation, Norman has designed ‘a prototype workspace for the creative classes’, a hybrid object using amongst other things, aquatic filtering systems, a rocket oven and an arid garden.

Dave Hullfish Bailey (1963, living in LA) has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna in 2006 and CASCO, Utrecht in 2007, as well as at Mesler & Hug Gallery in LA, where he also teaches at Art Center.

Nils Norman (1966, living in London) has exhibited in major museums internationally including Tate Modern and Kunsthalle Zurich. He is Professor at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and currently has an exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York.

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Annie Lennox; HIV Positive

28 December 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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While she is working to alleviate the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS, Lennox herself says she is not HIV-positive. “It will raise questions, I know, as to whether I am HIV-positive,” she said of the shirt. “And I can tell you, actually, the good news is I am not. However, many people are.”

“I think stigma is everywhere and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges anyone has to face when it comes to HIV whether it’s in a developing country or whether it is here, I’ve met people here who are HIV positive who can’t disclose their status because they are too afraid of the impact it will have.”

“At the moment we have had 33 million people die because of Aids, The scientific discoveries are proving that we can actually make a huge difference if people can get access to treatment.”

In the 1980s, when AIDS was first being talked about, Jean Kalilani travelled to other countries in Africa to persuade them that the disease existed. Many leaders were in denial. Others claimed it stopped at their borders.

http://www.ted.com/talks/annie_lennox_why_i_am_an_hiv_aids_activist.html

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Oscar Tuazon

9 December 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Installation view, Manual Labour, 2012 and Oscar Tuazon and Elias Hansen, Untitled (Kodiak Staircase), 2008

Born in 1975, Oscar Tuazon grew up outside Seattle, coming of age watching bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana. Having graduated from the elite Independent Study Program at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2003, he cut his teeth working for renowned extremist Vito Acconci, a performance artist and poet-turned-architect.

After moving to Paris in 2007, Tuazon set up the gallery castillo/corrales with a group of artist and curator friends, and the past three years have seen his constructions of wood and concrete take over exhibition spaces across Europe.

Inspired by what he calls “outlaw architecture”, Tuazon channels the freethinking of hippy survivalists who decide to go off-grid. Comprised of a combination of natural and industrial materials, the sculptures and installations of Oscar Tuazon reference minimalist sensibilities, extreme do-it-yourself aesthetics and vernacular architecture.

His works maintain an improvised, precarious quality that draws upon his long-standing interest in how the built environment is redefined and redesigned by the act of inhabitation.

Tuazon says, “I hope that the effect of my work is mostly physical. That’s what I like; walking through something, having an experience of the weight of things, or an experience of balance… That kind of really basic physical thing makes the work interesting; it makes it disarming and strange.”

Oscar Tuazon lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Artist: Jordan Wolfson

16 August 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Jordan Wolfs, Female Figure, 2014 and Colored Sculpture, 2016, Installation View

In a recent interview Jordan Wolfson artist traced a cycle of works produced since 2009 back to a moment of eye-contact: “It is something that became clear to me in Your Napoleon (2009) […]. For that work, I kept trying to figure out how to cut and paste these mock conversations about string theory and pop culture, and it felt like an ad-lib […]. I didn’t come up with the term formal bridge until I basically asked the actors to just read the script and look directly into my eyes, stare deep into my eyes” [Jordan Wolfson and Aram Moshayedi, “Tell a Poser,” in Ecce Homo / le Poseur, Walther König, Cologne, 2013, p. 92].If eye contact is both the semblance of a “truthful” connection and in the right hands a mask for falsity, Wolfson has pursued this “formal bridge” into a realm of heightened artifice and discomforting disclosure. His sophisticated animated constructions have achieved an unerring capacity to meld the giddy “anything goes” of computer-generated imagery with the telling fetish of the pop-cultural meme.

In his first solo exhibition for David Zwirner in New York in 2014, comprising a projected film, an installation and a number of digitally printed reliefs, instances of engineered eye contact between an artwork’s protagonist and the viewer anchored the show. The looped film Raspberry Poser (2012) featured a medley of animated forms layered against stock-image backgrounds and tastefully shot locations, set to a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Mazzy Star. Bouncing HIV virus particles and ethereal floating condoms emitting cascades of love hearts roved the streets and luxury lifestyle boutiques of New York’s SoHo. Meanwhile a generic cartoon boy gleefully strangled and self-eviscerated himself, as if to prove his immortal otherworldliness. Intercut with these characters, a series of live-action sequences showed Wolfson dressed as an archetypal punk on a “dérive” through a Parisian park. A close-up shot sees him turn to the camera and hold the prolonged gaze of the lens, an insouciant smile flickering across his face. The camera, of course, mediates the connection between Wolfson and the viewer. But the intentionality and persistence behind “the look” is unnerving. It holds both an arrogant knowingness and something of the contorted power play of a fashion model’s stare into the camera.

Female Figure 2014 is an almost absurdist endgame for discourse around the theatrics of the sculptural object and the tendency towards stagecraft within the contemporary art exhibition. While the robot’s routine was scripted, programmed and seamlessly looped — not unlike Raspberry Poser playing nearby — the physical nature of the encounter was heightened through the restriction to one or two people entering the room at any time. This conceit, a gesture towards an individualized performance, allowed for the singular experience of being “seen” by “her,” a phenomenon made possible by the use of advanced facial recognition and motion-sensing technology. The robot is the distant figure in the park in Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). Thought of as a puppet, its relation to the objects around it is purely additive; it creates no new relations in the world of the viewer. In its locking of sight-lines, however, the viewer is momentarily yet disconcertingly aware of becoming an object in the eyes of the automaton.

In many regards, Jordan Wolfson artist work embodies the internalized contradictions of a generation whose teenage years spanned the twin poles of a burgeoning hyper-sexualized cultural economy and the media-stoked specter of sexually transmitted disease. In conjuring up a social imaginary around HIV and AIDS activism, Raspberry Poser echoes a young adult asking: “What does it mean about me?” — what writer Sarah Schulman has described as a “suburban narcissism in which one is able to ‘identify’ in order to internalize value”[Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, University of California Press, Oakland CA, 2012, p. 7]. The “place of distortion” Wolfson moves toward is undoubtedly agonistic, as it rests on a neurotic self-identification that appropriates positions of sexuality, gender, race and class — positions that themselves are present in the work only through inflated, vulgarized stereotypes. “Do you think I’m homosexual? Do you think I’m rich? Will you tell them what it’s like to be with me?” The artist’s needy voice is caught within the performance of a hyperbolized role, a meta-dialogue with the viewer that challenges their presumptions of identity and the “honest” disclosure of inner angst. While Wolfson is evidently not himself the loose-skinned, tired man of the poetic monologue in Female Figure 2014, the psycho-sexual inner world of the creator of the Bellmer-esque robot-as-sex-object looms large as an involuntary fiction.

There is a clear sense in which the artist’s work from 2009 onward has rejected a reliance on acquired methods and signifiers of artistic validity and rectitude. The complex cycle of works that culminates in the twin gazes of the female automaton and the languid punk instead offers witness to an unadorned self-image at odds with the governing techniques of the self-enterprising individual. Wolfson’s adoption of animation and animatronics locates this externalization within structural ambivalence; the ability to warp, inflate, distort and fantasize offers a fitting testimony to the splitting of contemporary subjecthood.

Source: Kunstforum International, June July 2016 Issue.
Text: Richard Birkett, Flashartonline.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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Everything leads to another: “Me, dead at 37”

28 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Matthew Day Jackson, Me, dead at 37 and Domestic drawing (LIFE, December 12, 1969), 2011

“In my work there is no past. History is a part of everything. Everything leads to another. As the sum of history moves out in 360 degrees from its center, which does not exist, it envelops the present. Perhaps you could say I am interested in moments of sublime beauty which carry their counterpart, otherwise known as terror, so closely that it is difficult to delineate one from the other. This has been the guide from the beginning. In my search for the edge, I meet heroes along the way and see myself reflected in the surfaces of the things I encounter.”

“We are not simply flesh and bone, but also the materials through which we express ourselves to the world outside. The siding of our home, the brand of automobile that we drive to the clothes we wear, these things become who we are. Much, if not all of this is shared, so as I become me, I become you.”

Me, Dead at 37 continues an ongoing series of photographs documenting fantasy scenarios of the artist’s own death.

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Liliane Lijn

4 October 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

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Liliane Lijn, In The Valley of Darkness, 1973

Partly, perhaps as an act of mourning; more obviously as a reparative act, Lijn conceived of her manipulation of prisms as giving them a kind of restorative posthumous existence to remedy their mutilated identity: “A prism on its own is lost. It has no feet, no legs to stand on”. Her fantasy ran that they had lost their function in a world of technical forms by no longer being “anchored into a machine, which one way or another will be a machine for seeing… I must give it a body”.

Liliane Lijn (born 1939), is an American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text (Poem Machines), exploring both light and text as early as 1962. She has lived in London since 1966.

Utilising highly original combinations of industrial materials and artistic processes, Lijn is recognised for pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and female mythology. Lijn is particularly known for her timeless, cone-shaped Koan series. In conversation with Fluxus artist and writer, Charles Dreyfus, Lijn stated that she primarily chose to ‘see the world in terms of light and energy’. Lijn describes her work as ‘A constant dialogue between opposites, my sculptures use light and motion to transform themselves from solid to void, opaque to transparent, formal to organic.’

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