Dan Graham, Performer/Audience/Mirror

Dan Graham Performer/Audience/Mirror

1975
B & W, 23 minutes

From UbuWeb.
For full screen version click here.

UbuWeb is a vast non-commercial online resource of avant-garde material. They have one of the largest archives of sound and video works on the web, all available to view without charge or registration. I will be posting personal favourites from the archive over the coming weeks and months.

This first posting is an unfortunately incomplete video document of a Dan Graham performance from 1975.

Text from UbuWeb:

"This work is a phenomenological inquiry into the audience/performer relationship and the notion of subjectivity/objectivity. Graham stands in front of a mirrored wall facing a seated audience; he describes the audience's movements and what they signify. He then turns and describes himself and the audience in the mirror. Graham writes: "Through the use of the mirror the audience is able to instantaneously perceive itself as a public mass (as a unity), offsetting its definition by the performer ('s discourse). The audience sees itself reflected by the mirror instantly while the performer's comments are slightly delayed. First, a person in the audience sees himself 'objectively' ('subjectively') perceived by himself, next he hears himself described 'objectively' ('subjectively') in terms of the performer's perception.""

John Baldessari, The Pencil Story

John Baldessari The Pencil Story
Two B-Type prints on board with coloured pencil
1972-73

Florian Hecker, Chisenhale Gallery, London

Florian Hecker
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ
11.02.10 - 28.03.10
Preview Thursday 11 February 2010 6.30 – 8.30pm
Wednesday to Sunday 1 – 6pm
Thursday 4th March until 9pm

Musician and sound artist Florian Hecker presents a new installation at one of London's best established and most consistently interesting contemporary art spaces, East London's Chisenhale Gallery. The public gallery undertakes 5 shows each year, each an ambitious newly commissioned solo project by an emerging international artist.

Hecker's installation at Chisenhale comprises of 4 separate works, displayed in a sequence which guides the viewer (listener?) around a sparsely empty gallery space, ornamented with slick, black, ceiling-mounted speakers. The collection of works utilise immaculately produced electronic noises to lead us aurally and physically through a shifting landscape of auditory experiences; At turns disorienting, intriguing and captivating, the largely multi-channel works give us an awareness of the physical contingencies involved in the process of listening, and invite us to explore modes of interacting with what we hear.

The most visually striking work is an untitled new piece featuring a single speaker pointing concentrated bursts of sound at a ceramic-tiled section of the gallery wall. Beautifully lit, the speaker casts a symmetrical shadow across the minimal white-on-white of the tiles on the wall, while the sound oscillates and reflects back to the on-looking viewer.

The pieces are durational works that, through a variety of approaches - sounds generated through the audience's movements, exercises in three-channel panning that alternate between clockwise and anti-clockwise rotations and works spread between speakers placed a gallery's width apart - form a continuation of the artist's exploration of sound in relation to the body and space.

Hecker's list of collaborators includes Carsten Holler, Cerith Wyn Evans and Aphex Twin. This exhibition of 4 new sound installations is definitely not to be missed.

Read more here.

Rachel Reupke, 10 Seconds or Greater, Picture This, Bristol

Rachel Reupke, 10 Seconds or Greater
Picture This
Corner of Sydney Row & Mardyke Ferry Rd, Spike Island, Bristol BS1 6UU
23.01.10 – 06.03.10
Thursday to Saturday 12 - 5.30pm

10 Seconds Or Greater, is a new video work by British artist Rachel Reupke. Her multidisciplinary practice employs video, text and sculpture to examine ideas of taste, status and social position as defined and expressed in the mainstream media.

Produced as part of Picture This' residency program, the video is made using a group of actors to construct scenes reproduced from royalty-free stock footage; Formally a composite of unrelated scenes, that are here tied together by the uniformity created through the film's limited cast and small set, it is a fascinating and novel take on the process of creative appropriation. The title suggests the arbitrary kind of search term one might use when browsing through the bank of sources utilised in the creation of these shots.

Set to a score that alternates between long draughts of silence and a specially written R&B soundtrack, the video presents a group of attractive young adults carrying out scenes of domesticity and sociability, channeled through interaction with a range of products. The tracts of silence create a situation in which our voyeuristic position gives us the sense having of an objective eye into this situation. The real effect is in fact far from objective. Inevitably when faced with a world that we do not take part in (nor want to take part in), we adopt a critical stance and begin passing judgement and examining opinion.

Reupke is an artist who 'engages in the artisanal production of the generic.' 1 The look and feel of the setting of this film - the kind of pristine interior we can imagine existing in a suburban new-build, punctuated with functional objects displayed with a designer's precision - is an exercise in blandness that appears like an advertisement stripped of its logos and slogans. Intentionally reminiscent of the language of the corporate promo, everything is utterly devoid of human touch and believable personality, everything contrived and paired down to portrayal of a kind of self-satisfied success that induces a cringing distrust bordering on disgust.

Through the formal act of gathering these unconnected scenes into a lingering gaze, Reupke creates an opportunity for us to reflect upon the kind of the world promoted in the ideology of consumer capitalism. Scenes of social interaction, the hand-shakes re-shot again and again, endless introductions and unheard conversations, are played out repeatedly by a succession of recombinations of the 5 or 6 characters. Lingering product shots, the occasional, unnerving, long look or smile into the camera, and the underlying banality of stylised acts such as food preparation and the use of communications technology, point us towards the language of aspirational lifestyle marketing. The scenes take on a hyper-reality that sits at an awkward intersection of the idealised and the vacuous - a misplaced or misguided ideal of aspiration and self-actualisation.

1 Marina Vishmidt, Reverting To Type (accompanying essay)

A clip from the new video can be seen here.

Žižek! 2005, Directed By Astra Taylor

Žižek! 2005
Directed by Astra Taylor
1 hr 09 mins

This film, the first of a number of Žižek videos I intend to post over the coming weeks, is a documentary in which filmmaker Astra Taylor joins the Slovenian writer, philosopher, sociologist and theorist on various packed (literally to the rafters) speaking engagements around Europe, the USA and South America, and at his home in Ljubljana. Set to a specially written score by A Hawk And A Hacksaw's Jeremy Barnes, it serves as an excellent introduction to his all-encompassing thought, rigorous approach to analysis and enthralling manner of speaking.

A charsimatic and compelling individual, Slazoj Žižek examines society through discussing the complexities of phenomena including ideology, politics, and Hollywood cinema through the lens of Lacanian analysis. In this film he shares views on amoungst other things, 'the post-ideological era', Utopia, catastrophe, his audience, and vegetarians ('degenerates, they will turn into monkeys').

Michael Rakowitz, The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own, Tate Modern, London

Michael Rakowitz The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own
Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern
53 Bankside, London, SE1 9TG‎‎
22.01.10 - 03.05.10
Sunday - Thursday 10am - 6pm, Friday & Saturday 10am - 10pm

Michael Rakowitz's The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own coalesces around a series of bizarre and uncanny crossovers in American popular culture and Iraqi military history from the 1980s to the end of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. The stories, told through a series of drawings, texts, artifacts, found objects and sculptures, reveal unexpected links between the Hussein family's interest in George Lucas's Star Wars franchise, American Politics of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, the fantasy and history found in Jules Verne's adventure stories, physicist Gerald Bull's dream of building the world's largest gun, and the career of an Iraqi former WWF wrestler.

At times the stories seem simply too good to be true - the tale of a 15-year-old Uday Hussein's fascination with Star Wars, and subsequent design for his father's army's new uniform, complete with Darth Vader-inspired ski mask and helmet, would be unbelievable were it not for the collection of helmets that the artist has acquired on display in the nearby case.

The sculptures and framed works are executed with a handmade quality that adds an aesthetic delight to a narrative that is largely told through a straight-forward written prose. The pencil drawings that accompany these episodes have an illustrative quality that suggests appropriation, but we are left to wonder. Found and acquired objects, such as copies of magazines ranging from Wrestling editions to Time, toys, books, articles relating to those found in Saddam's palaces, soldiers' photographs and a video clip from YouTube are selected with curatorial precision, and serve as some kind of 'proof' for the far-fetched story the artist is telling us.

The exhibition is one of the best contemporary art shows I've seen at Tate in a long time. The Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde exhibition is well worth seeing while you're there, as is Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall, if you haven't seen that yet.

Oliver Laric, Versions, Seventeen Gallery, London

Oliver Laric Versions
Seventeen Gallery
17 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8AA
13.01.10 – 13.02.10
Wednesday to Saturday 11am - 6pm

Seventeen Gallery presents a solo show and curated exhibition by artist and vvork.com contributor, Oliver Laric, featuring a 4 screen video installation of four versions of his film, Versions, and a series of individually made, moulded polyurethane sculptures, also entitled Versions.

The show explores the circulation, manipulation, and interpretation of images and their ideological functions, historically and in the contemporary digital-information age. Laric describes his practice in the version of Versions featuring his voice-over, as being a process of ‘cropping,’ and talks about his delight in embracing the abundance and endless variation that can be accessed via digital media.

Laric’s curated show Real Talk sits alongside this exhibition in Seventeen’s basement space; A show of 4 video-based works by Seth Price, Aleksandra Domanovic, Marjolijn Dijkman and Samuel Beckett. Bringing together a mixture of influences, peers and artists who explore similar territory to that traversed in Laric’s work, the show offers a satisfying extension to both the processes and the themes found in the work upstairs.

If you can’t make it to the gallery 3 of the versions of Versions on show can be seen here.