The terror of neutrality

Roman Ondak Retrospective, 2005

This is a series of 50 wall labels bearing the titles of Ondak’s 50 former works.

(I can’t remember what the titles were and I can’t find them online, if anyone knows this work please let me know…..)

This was the only artist that I liked at the Sunday Art Show, I’ve never seen his work before so it was an exciting discovery. The Gallery gb agency who show his work say

Another work I have seen online is Passage 2004. 500 chocolates were distributed to people with the request ‘to mould a sculpture out of the remained silver foil wrapping after eating a chocolate’

“Using a diverse media and methods, Roman Ondak explores in his installations, photographs, drawings, and performances a specific situation, which very often involve people he has some relationship with. These people either play a certain role in it or participate by creating of something what is based on Ondak’s descriptions. Inner structure of some of Ondak’s works is intentionally constructed in such way, that he expects people he personally doesn’t know to be partially motivated to take part in them.

That is also the case of his project conceived for CCA Project Gallery in which he collaborates with approximately five hundred employees of steel business in Kitakyushu. Without meeting them in persona, and only through another collaborators which have helped Ondak in distributing of his instruction to all of them, he is processually projecting his own perception and understanding of Japanese society into his work.

Each of his participants (the employee of steel business) was given a chocolate bar wrapped in its original silver foil wrapping with a simple request to mold a miniature sculpture from the silver foil after they would have eaten the chocolate. Sculptures made by all participants were then displayed in CCA Project Gallery.”

http://www.cca-kitakyushu.org/english/project/onda…

URIEL ORLOW is interested in what happens in the shadow of great narratives of history. Some ideas he presented that interest me are:

Heterotopia – spaces in our society that are outside of society such as hospitals, prisons etc. Uriel is interested in art as heterotopia – various things brought together to create new space. He also talks about history in a non linear fashion, can we talk about history in space not time. This links in with Bourriard’s Altermodern theory of artists using history in clusters. He talks about the Aesthetic revolution blurring fact and fiction which destabilises mechanisms of truth, but engaes with politics of truth. He says documentary must be fictionalised, playing of sources, to suggest new possibilities. He is also interested in how an image can only be a snapshot , never the whole picture. He says re fact and fiction that fiction might be a more powerful way to portray facts.

His satement is:

“Orlow’s work tackles the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and addresses the spatial conditions of history and memory. Spanning locations in Africa, the Arctic, Eastern Europe and Switzerland, his work can often be seen to employ a method of both horizontal-lateral and vertical-archival investigation in order to explore blind spots in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Orlow’s modular installations comprising video, photography, drawing, sound and text, can be seen as a re-mix of the ‘real’ which permeates perception and performs a subtle operation that activates the potential of ruptures and ruins as ethical concerns of the present.”

I went to see a show he is in at Gasworks Hydrachy: Power & Resistance at Sea.

Here he showed The short and the long of it “which takes as a starting point the failed passage of fourteen international cargo ships through the Suez Canal on 5 June 1967. Caught in the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the ships were only able to leave the canal in 1975 when it re-opened. While stranded, the cold-war political allegiances of the multi-national crews were dissolved and gave way to a form of communal survival and the establishment of a social system. This involved the organisation of their own olympic games in 1968, amongst other activities. Playing with different modes of documentary and narrative, the work focuses on this event hidden in the shadow of official histories. With sound by Mikhail Karikis.”

another piece I really enjoyed at the show was The Undesirables (2007). “Melanie Jackson revisits the incident of the container ship MSC Napoli, which was stricken off the South English coast in 2007. As containers washed up on Branscombe beach, the media announced that according to maritime legislation their content would become common property. While people rushed to help themselves to items as varied as BMW motorbikes, shampoo bottles and trainers, the authorities and right wing media became increasingly hostile to this scavenging. Made of paper cut outs and dramatised by lights and shadows, The Undesirables recreates the event, evoking the social context in this tale of present-day bounty.”

“in civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates”

http://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/detail.php?…

EXPERIMENTS

I have set myself a new method of working that incorporates a set day at the studio every week. This is to insure that my studio work is the continuing force that guides my research practice and enables experimentation when no predetermined ideas are forthcoming. Recently whilst gathering photographic imagery to work from I have had a few weeks in the studio of experimentation. Here are some of those experiments, these works might never leave the studio as finished work however they are useful as exploring different visual languages, and show a progression of ideas.

MONSTER

In the summer a group of us from college got together to put on a show. It was called monster, thinking in terms of Frankenstein to highlight the problems of disparate artists coming together to make a show.

I decided to take the theme as myself as monster, which links in nicely with Goethe’s idea as ‘I am the deciding factor’ and I drew a self-portrait called metamorposis (after Paula Rego after Franz Kafka). As the title suggests I am Gregor from the story who wakes up to find he has turned into an insect and is lying stuck on his back.