Christoph Büchel, Häuser & Wirth Coppermill

A little more than a week ago, I attended the last chance to see Christoph Büchel's installation "Simply Botiful" at Häuser & Wirth Coppermill. Not at all clearly recognizable as an art space, the building located in Bethnal Green looks like a dingy hotel from the outside. The only hint I had that I was at the right place was the rather large cue of (mostly) fashionably dressed people in their 20s and 30s outside the venue. I can now say in retrospect that the wait was sure worth it because what I was about to witness inside surpassed my wildest imaginations. It actually took me a while to realize that the whole place served as an installation as opposed to the common spatial convention that you have a.) an artspace and b.) the piece hosted inside. But the inversion of these notions and conventions didn't really stop there. The whole place looked as if it had been occupied and abandoned shortly before the audience's arrival. Everything looked as if it was occupied literally hours ago and therefore creating a kind of haunting presence.

I overheard a conversation between a couple right behind me in the queue that they would have liked it better if there were also actors impersonating the occupants of the place we were about to witness. But I personally think that would have worked against the whole concept. A space crowded with used artifacts but void of individuals who might use them bears a better and more approachable possibility of reflection for the audience. Another comment I could overhear in the queue was that all these places looked strangely familiar and I can totally agree with that. It had this eerie attraction of the junkyard you're not allowed to trespass as a kid because it's dangerous but as one knows, kids of a certain age will go there anyway. The installation contained all these sensations of trespassing, looming danger and voyeurism.
The latter probably being the most powerful and emblematic of the whole piece because not only did the visitor seemingly trespass into a completely different set of lifestyles and locations, the references to sex, pornography and exhibitionism of the most intimate moments of private life were following you everywhere you went.
The most intense experience for me was to go down the dug hole and crawling through a tiny hand-dug tunnel on all fours. If one ever wonders what coming into a country without a valid passport or visa might feel like, I'd recommend the above experience. It was all very dark, narrow, dirty and cheap but once you come out of the whole installation and you feel the streets of London underneath your feet again, it changes the way you look and think about things.

From the press release:

A major exhibition by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel will be the second exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill in London's East End. Büchel works in a variety of media, including film, printed materials, sculpture and textiles, though he is perhaps best known for his conceptual projects and large-scale installation pieces. Büchel often appropriates mass media sources such as the Internet, printed political pamphlets and everyday household objects. His work is informed by an explicit political awareness, often telling of new forms of propaganda in an era of mediated war.

Büchel's complex installations force his audience to participate in scenarios that are physically demanding and psychologically unsettling. Cramped tunnels, claustrophobic chambers and frequent dead-ends induce feelings of panic and paranoia. He explores the unstable relationship between security and internment, placing visitors in the brutally contradictory roles of victim and voyeur. Gallery visitors to Büchel's 2005 installation 'Hole' at the Kunsthalle Basel were forced through small rooms connected by constricted passageways and steep ladders. Inside these fraught spaces, the chilling sight of a suicide caught on surveillance camera was juxtaposed with a psychotherapist's consulting room and the remnants of a bombed out Swiss bus. The frozen rooms that form the basis of such works as 'The House of Friction (Pumpwork Heimat)' (2002) offer spaces of oppressive cold, where preservation borders on the brink of obsolescence. Experiencing such charged spaces is usually a solitary task, though this private experience becomes the means by which collective tensions and traumas might be unearthed.

From kultureflash:

The gargantuan warehouse space has been transformed into a sweatshop seemingly housing and exploiting desperate asylum seekers. The operation room (filled with hundred of fridges, piles of computer innards, and mountains of junk-yard tat ripe for "revitalisation") lurks behind a scuzzy city hotel (the exhibition entrance) and a grimy cut-price shop selling row upon row of fixed-up fridges and VCRs. In the hotel, endless put-up beds are squashed into every conceivable spare inch of space -- corridors, bathrooms, the lorry out the back. There's a post-raid feel -- everywhere are half-eaten plates of food, work stations hastily abandoned, and ashtrays filled with cigarette stubs. But it's the secret room accessed by crawling through a hole in a wardrobe, the concrete bunker located beneath the freight lorry, and the subterranean tunnels with a disused deep freeze entrance portal that generate the most acute claustrophobia and bewildering paranoia. It's an unnerving meditation on the hidden hellholes lurking behind non-descript urban facades.

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Victoria Miro, Parasol Unit, White Cube

Last weekend I took the time again to check on some of my favourite galleries.
Since Parasol Unit and Victoria Miro gallery are so close together, it always makes sense to visit them both in one go.

Parasol had a group show consisting of different kinds of video art. From animated short films with an actual narrative, some of them funny, some serious, to pieces without a narrative but focus on visual impact instead.

MOMENTARY MOMENTUM: an exhibition devoted to animated drawings, comprising a dozen installations and a film loop with the participation of Francis Alÿs, Robert Breer, Paul Bush / Lisa Milroy, Michael Dudok de Wit, Brent Green, Takashi Ishida, Susanne Jirkuff, William Kentridge, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Jochen Kuhn, Zilla Leutenegger, Arthur de Pins, Qubo Gas, Christine Rebet, Robin Rhode, Georges Schwizgebel, David Shrigley, Tabaimo, Naoyuki Tsuji & Kara Walker

Some impressions:







At Victoria Miro, there was another group show, this time, the focus was more on painting, installations and sculptures.

Absent Without Leave examines the ways in which contemporary artists might use elements of performance as a material in the production (or reception) of their work. The diverse practices on display here re-imagine performance and filter it into something 'performative' - expanding gestures, actions, characters, and roles into works which incorporate performance as process.

Conceptual and performance artist Vito Acconci has discussed how, at a certain point in his career in the early seventies, he decided to appear less in his work, so that his presence was more of an absence. Absent Without Leave borrows the spirit of Acconci's decision and uses it to platform an investigation of the idea of the 'absentee performer' - an idea in which the 'performer' (the artist ) is relocated from a visible presence, to a presence which is recorded in the conceptual fabric of the art works themselves.

The exhibition features works in which: there is potential within an art object for action to happen, which may or may not necessarily occur; there is a live event without a performer; there is a physical trace of an event which in fact never occurred; or there is a possibility to read the environment as something staged, or as a set awaiting a narrative.

My last stop for the day was White Cube gallery at Mason's Yard. I have to say that even after all this time in the city, some places are really hard to find. I spend some time circling around the area with increasing precision and with the help from local police, Transport for London staff and different versions of these handy area maps they distribute on the tube stations. Trouble was that the new editions of these maps don't contain the narrow streets and small open places anymore. Budgeting? Maybe, but surely not for the better. Anselm Kiefer currently has a few works on display at the West End outlet of White Cube. I was only able to take one picture before I was kindly asked not to take any more. In case you like what you see, I'd suggest that you check out the huge paintings of Kiefer in the basement for yourselves.

The title of the exhibition, Aperiatur terra, is a quotation from the Book of Isaiah, which translates as ‘let the earth be opened’ and continues ‘and bud forth a saviour and let justice spring up at the same time’. These contrasting themes of destruction and re-creation, violent upheaval and spiritual renewal underpin much of Kiefer’s work.

The focal point of the exhibition is Palmsonntag, an installation in the ground floor gallery comprised of eighteen paintings, hung as a single entity on one wall, with a thirteen-metre palm tree laid on the gallery floor. As its title suggests, the work evokes the beginning of Christ’s journey into Jerusalem prior to his arrest, Passion, death and resurrection. The paintings read almost as the pages of a book opened to reveal multiple layers and narratives. As is common in Kiefer’s practice, organic materials form the palette through which landscapes are created. These are then overlaid with texts which do not point to one single interpretation but rather suggest a rich, philosophically charged and resonant multiplicity of meaning and experience.

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All text in block quote is property of Parasol Unit, Victoria Miro Gallery and White Cube Gallery respectively.

Kinetica once more

Kinetica put on a new show since I last was there. This time, it's about "Visionaries & Luminaries", so all the works exhibited have something to do with light or its absence.

One of the works that struck me both with its simplicity and effect was Jim Campbell's picture of moving shadows.


As you can see, the method is achieved via an LED panel superimposed on a photograph, but the effect is stunning since the matrix of the panel can be addressed dynamically. The shadows look very convincing and vary in size, shape and movement.

There were also some pieces experimenting with fluorescent surfaces like this "lamp-shade" here:



The picture below is of a camera-obscura-style piece which works with strobe light. It's hard to document it with a single frame, so in case you like it, make sure to check it out for yourself.



Some more images below...










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RCA Interaction Design Interim Show

Last weekend I went to the RCA Interactive Design show which displayed several works in progress. Having attended the last two consecutive graduate shows which were held annually, I was curious to get a glimpse on future gadgets and conceptual ideas.

Among the works which really interested me was "Flat Future" by Miquel Mora which showed practical applications for super-thin microprocessors applied on tape to suit various everyday purposes. Whether it's labeling fruit, attaching speakers to a book you read at the moment or taking exact measurement via "smart tape", the possibilities are endless.



I was aware that Siemens are currently doing active research in the field of super-thin displays. The above project seems like the logical progression. While I would suspect that a lot of marketing experts would only deem these displays to have advertising on them all the time, Flat Future shows luckily enough that it doesn't at all end there.

The guys over at we make money not art also have a post about the whole show, for those among you who would like to check it out....

Next up was an Origami remote control. Nice one. Although I loved to play with the folded object which served as a model for the remote control, I wasn't able to fold one myself back in the day when I was a kid, as I focused more towards the perfection of the paper plane per se.



However, it is yet another example that new and exciting innovation with electronic media does not need to stem from more powerful hardware, as more hardware usually means that more things can break, lag or freeze, it is also more complicated. In the wake of Nintendo being the rejoicing third party while Sony and M$ are engaging in a console (and DRM) arms-race, this remote control not only shows that simple and effective is the right way to begin with, it might even have commercial success one day...

I also liked the emotoscope which gives you a vintage super-8 feeling while looking through it, along with the flickering and the sound.



Some more images of other projects below.












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Spire Live in York Minster

Last weekend, I was visiting a friend up in the cold North. Actually, it wasn't really that cold and the sun was shining as well. I also have to say that York is a rather pretty place indeed.
We went to the Spire Live Event at the famous York Minster to see Charles Matthews (organ), Marcus Davidson (organ and piano), Christian Fennesz (electronics), Phil Jeck (turntables), BJNilsen (electronics), Robert Millner, John Beaumont and Amy Moore (voices) as well as the Minster bell ringers and Leif Inge (installation).
Spire is running in its fourth consecutive year now with the same concept applied to a variety of European churches, among them Geneva, Linz, Amsterdam, Gøteborg and Brussels. Some of the live recodrings of theses events were later published by Touch.
As one might imgaine, the acoustics were rather amazing and it was really nice to experience Fennesz' ambience sound carpets in a setting like this.

Some pictures below.


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Richard Wilson at the Barbican

Sorry for not posting in a while. The last few weeks were unexpectedly busy.
Anyway, I had the pleasure to attend the last weekend of the Richard Wilson exhibition at the Barbican two weeks ago.

The show was free of charge and displayed three larger works along with two video pieces. First off was the gutted cab. Giving a somewhat dwarfing and bizarre impression already while being mounted on a structure and displaying its insides like an Emmental cheese, what was even more impressive is that all the alterations done to the cabs in- and outside happened in the shortest time possible. A video installation in the front showed the artist slowly but steadily piercing his way through the vehicle, starting at the engine and coming out at the trunk. From what I could tell, he used the same or similar tools which would be employed in professional rescue operations. Something which makes perfect sense in the light of the task ahead.



I found it interesting to witness how Wilson manages to capture the inherit and underlying force and violence of the machine and manages to throw it right back at its -or to be more precise, our- face(s). All the physical forces that a machine deploys and sets free seem to be captured in the aesthetic act of the performance, although its important alteration seems to entail a certain human element. It's still violent what Wilson did, fair enough, but it's not as cold and precise in its mode of operation like the mechanism he takes apart. The sweat, his problems breathing and getting the right angle with a tool to move on to the next step let the whole performance appear to be almost archaic. The humidity and elasticity of the human body against the solid and repetitive action of the machine.

Next up was a structure which resembled a squashed version of a chip shop trailer. Although the structure seemed chaotic at first, you realized that all the creases in the structure were done with mathematical precision. It served as a well-balanced contrast towards the concept of the first piece. Rather than struggling as human wetware against the mechanism, this tension is reversed and re-appropriated in this piece as a sort of artistic intervention into the shapes of chaos and complexity. Knowing that the creases on the structure would never exist like that in the event of its actual squashing, Wilson manages to liberate the common object from its sole teleology and transfers it to a new perceptive plane.



The last piece was a caravan mounted on a rotating frame and having one of the walls removed so that the audience could take a peek into it. It was interesting to see the caravan from all possible angles and in all detail, what was even more interesting was to see the inside move around, depending on what current angle the caravan was spinning. At the very end of the exhibition, you could find a video screen which displayed an inside-view of the caravan. The camera was mounted on the spinning part of the structure, so the only clue of movement which the audience had was the movement of the inside parts, since the camera itself was in perfect sync with the spinning object and therefore presented the illusion of a static view.

My impression of that piece was one of suspension. Firstly, a suspension from the obvious use of the caravan, to transform its usually horizontal movement into a rotation which didn't allow for an actual moving onward, but more of a perpetual movement. Secondly, the suspension of the observing eye via the static view of the camera. There was no movement to speak of judging from a quick glance at the video. It was only after a while that the eye recognizes cupboards being opened, cushions moving around in weird angles and doors being flipped open. It seemed very much like a recording of zero gravity, something one might be familiar with from movies like Kubrick's 2001.



All in all, a very good show and a very good concept explored in a lot of interesting and fresh varieties!


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Conrad Shawcross

Went to see some art again this weekend. First up was a show by Conrad Shawcross at the Victoria Miro Gallery. I came across his work during the last Frieze a couple of weeks ago. In the midst of a somewhat bloated undertaking which already gets more attention that it's good for the art exhibited there, I came across a cage-like structure among the crowded stalls. The type you would usually expect wild and strange animals being locked up in. Nevertheless, the setup was in a way befitting for Shawcross' work since some of his mechanical sculptures crafted from wood, rope, wires and metal are actually moving whereas others give the appearance that they should move but they dont. So, in a way, this wild and exotic animal of a contemporary artwork was locked up inside there, on display for the common folk.



Above you can see a larger version of the installation which was also on display at Frieze. The first thing that came to my mind was a reference to a large carousel, the type you might find at theme parks. Having been a kid that was rather easy to scare, I never had much for the scary rides but enjoyed the carousels that would take you on a sort of sightseeing trip around the area. The second impression was that you could actually immediately understand the mechanics at work there from the different spin ratios of the moving parts, being transmitted by gears and shafts from the intial engine.
That way, Shawcross accomplishes an experience which elevates the viewers impression on an abstract level without emphasizing the details of his concept for that piece too much.

"Binary Star, 2006, is the latest in Shawcross's series of kinetic light works and his most physically ambitious to date. Constructed specifically for the vaulted upstairs gallery, Binary Star takes the relatively recent discovery of stars that have found themselves locked in orbits around each other as its inspiration. As a model the binary star throws up an opposing reality to our own mono-solar system. The work, with its fast-moving geometry, is designed to engage the viewer through a complex and intricate dynamic revealing the arcing symmetries of this unfamiliar reality of space." (from the press release)





Another piece I really liked is pictured above. It first looked like some sort of knitting machine or mechanical loom to me. Having a closer look I discovered some sort of colour code on the ropes which, in combination with the display frame in the middle of the piece, made me think of some sort of notation processing system. I was only later to find out that I haven't been that wrong at all and that it was in fact a reference to Babbage's difference engine.

"Paradigm (Ode to the Difference Engine) 2006, is a giant double rope machine unraveling its rope as fast as it can ravel it . Comprising two identical machines, each made of hundreds of cogs, spools and pulleys, the twin structures turn in mirrored opposition to each other, countering all the other does. Built rationally and with intricate empirical precision the work was designed with the knowledge that it could never function - Shawcross's process from the outset was impossible. The artist has spoken of the work being reminiscent of Charles Babbage's unrealized Difference Engine conceived in 1822 and widely regarded as the first computer, also imbued with the same tragic elements of the unobtainable. "




Another fine piece which has no moving parts this time, not even fake ones, and is entirely made out of wood. After being exposed to the previous works of the artist, I begin to understand the overall conceptual nature of his pieces. It's not only the perfection of "hard science" which is expressed in his works, it is also the 'failure' of machines as so happened with "Ode to the Difference Engine". What is often overlooked is that evolution is not a linear process although popular science expresses it that way. Evolution by itself is nothing but an attempt to historically map the tragedies and failures of its potential and to reconstruct this way why and how certain life forms came into being. In a way, evolution is a huge tragedy of the attempts of realizing potential.
I also think that repetition plays a certain role in his works. It is due to redundancies that large parts of the universe exist and even abstract "man made" things like langage. Against the backdrop of that observation the tetrahedrons of the last piece pictured explore the space that is reserved for some form of creative practice due to their redundancy, although they don't create a uniform shape or surface. The potential of their combination leads to a heterogenous arrangement which can be said to be unique and does not necessarily have to be reproduced in exactly the same way in order to create the same experience with the viewer. In that important aspect, the piece differs from the 'hard sciences' and manages to distinguish itself as art and not science.

"Space Grid (Mirrored tetrahedron system), 2006 pursues the binary theme of the exhibition. With the help of a cosmological mathematician Shawcross has developed a system of tetrahedrons that tessellate universally in space. The system comprises of two types of tetrahedron that are identical but are in fact mirror images of each other. Shawcross arranges these tetrahedrons in a multiplicity of combinations and directions to form a 6-D grid of dense geometry that has infinite possibilities."



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Dada 2.0

I came across the portfolio webpage of Portuguese digital and robotic artist Leonel Moura. There are some really cool things on there so I suggest you check it out. One of his latest works is a destructive robot called Dada 2.0. It apparently destroys everything which is in the reach of its sensors.

You can find a video of the performance here.


Digging a little bit further while trying to find out more about Leonel Moura, I followed some links to a really nice genealogical tree of robotic art, for anybody who's interested...

Kinetica

Last Sunday I went to the rather crowded Spitalfields market in order to check out this little gem which is located right inside the market space: the Kinetica Museum.

It is allegedly the UK's first museum dedicated to kinetic, electronic and digital art.
Some impressions:


This is a mechanical installation which simulates the movement of a feather and is hooked up to a motion sensor in order to detect the blades of grass. I personally like the rustic, nature-like look of it.




A huge inflatable sculpture which simulates the breathing process of a human being. There are two of these attached to each other and the air always floats from one to the other. A bird-view of the smaller version below.




Several snapshots of "writing machines". The German word for typewriter is Schreibmaschine which loosely translates to "writing machine". Seen in this light, that notion becomes an unforeseen twist and opens up a new perspective to think about these media.





An interactive projection piece which responds to moving objects inserted in the projection range -like a hand for example- and changes its shape accordingly. My suspicion is that along with the projection, it features a camera with real-time imaging software which analyses the projection grid and changes the objects' shape. The kids loved it.



A solar powered mobile which generates its own movement by tiny propellers which are attached to the particular parts. Neat and simple. I liked it.




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Tim's graduate piece

Last week I went to Germany again to visit the graduate show of my friend Tim. He made a very nice interactive installation piece. It's kind of a plotter which paints a picture according to certain set algorithms.
One of these algorithms -for example- entails the command that it is not allowed to paint a previously exisiting line twice. The plotter is therefore forced to branch off into another direction every time it crosses a previous line.
The whole process is triggered by a motion sensor, which results in a situation in which the piece only actively works when somebody is present in within the range of the sensor.

The concept of the piece derives from the ways in which composers like John Cage were trying to find different ways to transcribe their pieces. I have yet to read the essay which accompanies the piece but I will keep you posted!