Two scraps from magazines. The small one I found on the floor of the studio when I arrived. I’d been kicking it around for a few days meaning to throw it away. The shape cut out of it corresponds to something on the reverse side of the image (I can’t tell what because it’s been cut out) but what’s left on this side seems like a reaction to the hole suddenly opened up in the reality of the man who’s had to grip hold of a rail to keep himself safe. The other I pulled out of a magazine and shows a man staring intently and at close range at a chip in the stonework. The man above him grits his teeth: initials have been scratched into the side of his face.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about the two artworks I posted yesterday – the ones by Gryzmala and Kempinas.
I’m interested in the way these works are constructed from objects because I’m troubled by the flatness of the videos I’ve been making over the past two weeks. I’m working with a projector rather than a video screen in an attempt to address this, and moreover specifically addressing the three-dimensional space between the projector bulb and the screen it throws the light against — but finally what I’m working with is light, and flatness. The exhilarating thing about the Kempinas work is its perpetuity: it’s on loop, a single proposition in continuous movement, and to do this it just uses stuff. Some industrial fans and some loops (yes, loops) of film. This stuff gives the work a satisfying kind of inevitability.
Well. This morning I tried to open a blind in my Wohnung but it got caught and stopped halfway. The catch of the plastic against the metal, and the way it tugs the cord taut and stops the blind short: all this has the kind of inevitability I enjoyed in the Kempinas piece.
I re-contrived the episode immediately afterwards so I could record it on camera, but it’s not the video but the material episode I want to keep: the apparatus, the disagreement among objects, the shock of it in the middle of the morning. I wonder, could I have recorded it in a different way?
I’ve been reading about a 2011 MoMA exhibition called On Line. It surveys 100 years of expanded drawing practice between 1910 and 2010, looking particularly at the way drawing has moved off the page and into space and time.
Ten short videos appear on the video page, one of which is the piece I’ve embedded below: “Double O” (2008) by Zilvinas Kempinas. What a thing! Here’s a link in case the embed isn’t working: http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/onli…
I’ve had “Double O” in mind all day while I’ve been playing about with my biro flinging video of a couple of days ago — this and the image above, which is a photograph by Monika Gryzmala of her Berlin studio.
It snowed so hard last night I didn’t know what to do with myself. I got so covered in snow walking down Altstraße that I stopped in an archway to brush most of it off before I went into a shop, in case they thought I was weird or a snowman. But I suppose they’re used to it here.
Anyway there was a bit of a panic when I got back to the studio and found layers and layers of snow still racing past in the air outside, and me with no way of keeping the sight of it in my eyes. I stared at it for a long, long time and with eyes very wide but there was still too much snow to take in. So like any good tourist I made a video.
Here I am trying to get the snow to stay horizontal.
Here’s the video I finished last night, with a little more tweaking this morning. This one I find very satisfying. With a couple of adjustments it might be the work I choose for the exhibition.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned the exhibition yet. My invitation to Aterlierhaus Salzamt was in part an invitation to make new work for this show, which will put together a handful of practitioners working with text through visual art, music, literature and performance. Three of us are resident here at Salzamt, and intentionally or otherwise, as we’re regularly in conversation about what we’re working on, some nice connections are developing among among our works.
I’ll post more information when it arrives, but here are details in case you’re in the area..
DER HANDEL ZEIGT SICH ZUFRIEDEN
Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz
Akram Al Halabi (SYR), Martina Conti (SM), Inga Hehn (A), Andreas Karner (A), Petra Maria Kraxner (A), Tamarin Norwood (GB), Ursula Maria Probst (A), Esther Strauß (A), Thomas Rhube (A), Tonverbrechung & Sophie Reyer (A), Anna Witt (G).
Private View: 18 December 19:00
Exhibition open 19 December – 14 February
(Gallery open Mon-Fri 11:30-14:00; Mon, Thur, Fri 16:00-18:00)
