John Cage, Water Walk

John Cage
Water Walk
1960

John Cage performs Water Walk on popular American TV Show I've Got A Secret. Exhibiting an unusually light-hearted approach, Cage introduces and plays a composition on a water pitcher, an iron pipe, a goose call, a bottle of wine, an electric mixer, a whistle, a sprinkling can, ice cubes, 2 cymbals, a mechanical fish, a quall call, a rubber duck, a tape recorder, a vase of roses, a seltzer siphon, 5 radios, a bath tube and a grand piano.

Slavoj Žižek on Children Of Men

Slavoj Žižek gives an enthusiastic review and reading of Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 film Children Of Men.

Crash, Gagosian Gallery, London

Rachel Whiteread Demolished 1996

Crash
Homage To J G Ballard

Gagosian Gallery

6 -24 Britannia Street, London, WC1X 9JD

Februaury 11th - April 1st 2010

Tuesday - Saturday 10 am - 6 pm

Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of a mixture of relics, influences and works inspired by the dystopian ficiton of J G Ballard, in particular his most famous novel Crash. The novel - made into a film in 1996 by David Cronenberg - is a psycho-sexual tale of car-crash fetishism (Symphorophilia). We are treated here to an all-star line up of artists in an expertly curated exhibition that moves between pieces that by turn inspired Ballard (Dali, early British Pop Art), or reflect his concerns and fascinations - autophilia, crashes, accidents and disasters, high rises and suburban wastelands, destruction, and an often sexually charged mixture of the organic and the mechanical.

Installation view Crash, Gagosian Gallery, foreground: Adam McEwan Honda Teen Facial 2010

Upon entering the gallery we encounter the disembodied undercarriage of a Boeing 747 - Adam McEwan's Honda Teen Facial (2010 above). The piece resonates with a sense of disaster and sets the tone for the exhibition. The rooms are arranged thematically, begining with a selection of surrealist works that inspired Ballard to find a "fiction for the present day"1, works that traverse similar territory to his writing in the main galleries and a 3rd gallery of works inspired by or made in honour of the writer. Against the somber grey walls of the 3rd gallery, Rachel Whitereed's Demolished (1996 above) stands out, activated and invigorated by the context.

Jane and Louise Wilson's Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard (2000), a 4 screen video projection, depicts shots of the abandoned sites of the former USSR's space program - a depopulated mixture of desolate wilderness and awesome technological construction. The bassy rumble of the soundtrack permeates the entire exhibition intermittently.

The list of artists included (below) is an undeniably impressive one and the pieces selected are all fine examples of their work, arranged in a structure that creates a looming and prolonged discord. Locked within the visual language of a show loaded with associations, the works function to create a fractured, rhizomatic network of signs, informing one another in counterpoints and harmonies in order to extract the dark, foreboding, and perverse terrors of Ballard's vision of society. The powerful sense of narrative allows the work to operate in interesting new ways, generating new readings of familiar practices. Damien Hirst's arrangements of surgical implements, Jenny Saville's grand-scaled, expertly daubed images of mutilation (below), and Roger Hiorns' crystaline BMW engines are cases in point. Paul McCarthy's Mechanical Pig (2003 - 2005) was perhaps the most striking example of a piece to under go this transformation for me; it's combination of the mechanical and organic, the maternal and the monstrous, with it's working parts laid bare, is so perfectly situated within this context, it's almost as though it were created with this exhibition in mind. Jeremy Deller's Another Country (The Mall London 3/9/97) 1997 was one of the more surprising inclusions in the show. A collection of photographs of floral tributes and a poem to Diana, Princess of Wales, taken in the aftermath of her death in 1997, it was a somber and poetic record of a moment in the collective consciousness, that abounds with associations of an underlying widespread public fascination with death.

Jenny Saville Witness 2009

One of the best contemporary art shows I've seen in London this year, Crash is at Gagosian, Britannia Street, until April 1st. The full list of artists included is as follows:

Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

Images here.

1. http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-02-11_crash/

Armando Iannucci Talk, Tate Modern, 17th October 2006

Sorry, your browser doesn't support the embedding of multimedia.Armando Iannucci at Tate Modern
17th October 2006
1 hr 23 mins

Comedian Armando Iannucci talks about the roles and positions that comedy plays in the media today. Insisting that it is not the job of comedians 'to talk about what you can and cannot say and do because, thankfully, by definition [they] are irresponsible', he discusses when it is deemed appropriate to make jokes about serious issues, and the relative failings of our broadcasters to adequately explore them through other means.

There's a few clips he refers to during the lecture - it was a little frustrating not being to see them, so I've done my best to find them for you:

Francis Alÿs

Railings Francis Alÿs
2005
7 minutes

I'm already getting excited about the Francis Alÿs exhibition at Tate Modern this summer. Here are 3 video works by him.

Sitting somewhere being poetic, allegorical and occasionally absurd, Alÿs' ephemeral actions often have the feeling of an old tale recounted - 'The man who pushed an ice block through the streets of Mexico City', 'the man who moved a sand dune' (both below) - and often grow out of stories recalled by the artist or incidental happenings in his day-to-day life. With a strong participatory element, the works have a socially-engaged, politicised quality, while avoiding any explicit political message. Though largely comprising of actions and their documentation, his practice also includes drawing, animation and painting.

When Faith Moves Mountains Francis Alÿs
2002
7 minutes
Fullscreen version from UbuWeb

Algunas Veces El Hacer Algo No Lleva A Nada
(Sometimes Making Something Leads To Nothing)
Francis Alÿs
1997
5 minutes

Chritian Marclay & Others Live In London This Weekend

Steve Beresford's Birthday

Cafe Oto

18 - 22 Ashwin street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL

Saturday 6th March 8pm

Tickets £8 adv/£10 otd

Following last week's post, I have just read that Christian Marclay will be playing live as part of Steve Beresford's 60th birthday celebrations at Dalston's Cafe Oto this weekend.

The line up will feature the following:

Christian Marclay on turntables, Veryan Weston and Tania Chen on pianos, Lol Coxhill and John Butcher on saxophones, Satoko Fukuda on violin, Ute Kanngiesser on cello, Guillaume Viltard on contra bass and Steve Beresford on piano and electronics.

Expect an atonal celebration of all things free and improvisational.

Slavoj Žižek, Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken

Slavoj Žižek Maybe We Just Need a Different Chicken

2008

My second Žižek post is a talk that was meant to be about his book, Violence, delivered in Portland, Oregon in 2008. Instead Žižek talks, in his usual wandering style, about politeness and censorship and their function in ideology today. In his inimitable style, he extrapolates metaphors from a joke about a psychiatric patient who believes he is a piece of grain, terrified of being eaten by the chicken of the title. Žižek discusses how ideology manifests itself in the media and politics today, while covering cinematic references that span from Batman to Hitchcock's Vertigo to Kung Fu Panda.