Tag Installation

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World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko | e-flux

Mar 21, ’12 12:44 PM

Stano Filko’s work is never just about the world. It is world. Because Filko speaks world. World is his medium, his language, his means of artistic production: using the medium of world Filko produces (anti)happenings, environments, installations, objects and diagrammatic drawings of all kinds. Some look very different from others. But that is the freedom of a mind that speaks world. It can choose the means and materials that seem apt in a given situation. What matters first and foremost is that each and every work articulates a particular stance, attitude, and point of view: it addresses the world as a whole from the limits of that world, that is, from the point where a world begins and ends, where α and Ω coincide. In each work Filko projects a view of the world as a whole by formulating conditions—and formalizing terms—under which the world could be viewed as a whole. When Filko builds an immersive environment, these terms and conditions are spelled out in a spatial and physical manner. But they can equally be rendered in a purely semiotic form, as a paradigmatic system, when he draws up diagrams and scribbles words on a sheet of graph paper. And finally (the conditions for articulating) a world can simply be given in a thought, as in the pivotal HAPPSOC 1 piece, in which Filko and Alex Mlynárčik designated all life in the city of Bratislava as a work of art for the time between May 2 and 8, 1965.

This is a provocation! And to see why, we have to grasp the radical sense of possibility with which Filko confronts us: in his work a world can be articulated through spaces, signs, and thoughts alike. From the point of view of his production, therefore, the spatiophysical, the semiotic, and the speculative (and to this we may add the spiritual, political, and sexual) are alternative prisms, but, practically speaking, as prisms they are tools with similar use value. As an artist Filko can use all of them. So, when it articulates a world, a diagrammatic drawing or simple gesture in principle has the same status as a fully designed room installation. Even the smallest thing can show the big picture. These are conditions of autonomy produced within a material practice: Filko creates the freedom to define the value of any artifact or sign according to his own terms, that is, according to the terms of the world systems that he constructs.

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Stano Filko at Emanuel Layr (Contemporary Art Daily)

Mar 21, ’12 12:42 PM

Galerie Emanuel Layr is pleased to announce Stano Filko’s first solo show at the gallery, an exhibition of new works by the Slovak artist, opening on Thursday, January 26.
The ‘vacuum’ originally represented the ideal of empty space in antiquity. For Plato and Aristotle such a substance was frightening and impossible. Aristotle refused the notion, stating, “a vacuum does not exist”. However, since antiquity generations of physicists and philosophers, as well as psychologists and artists, have considered the concept of “total emptiness” useful and inspiring. Yet the concept of the vacuum no longer represents an ideal empty space; it has come to simply mean a space that is empty of matter.  From modern particle physics we learn that the vacuum is considered the ground state of matter. The most representative and enigmatic moment for such a state of matter is the BIG BANG. This is what Stano Filko takes as the subject matter for his new show at Galerie Emanuel Layr – the vacuum as an intermediary phase between, before and after the UNIVERSE. Filko’s concept of the vacuum is, of course, not a direct answer, but rather an indirect conceptual and imaginative background to Leibniz’ famous question: Warum ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? (Fedor Blascak)

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Josephine Meckseper | The Final Shop « DIS Magazine

Jan 25, ’12 3:42 PM

The misunderstanding that my work should reference an idea of revolutionary chic probably has to do with a projection of that same audience of how they view their environment. Contrary to this belief, I see my work as a call for street activism, in opposition to a rarified elitist art viewership. My aim is to present consumer display systems that have an auto-critique built within. This can take place, for instance, by inserting images of the opposition produced by capitalist society, namely protestors and rioters, or by using pieces of shattered glass. As a starting point I usually work with films of riots and protests and confront them with forms that refer directly to shop windows smashed by demonstrators. The installations of display forms like shelves and vitrines represent the static face of capitalism. The collective performative aspect of consumption is frozen inside the vitrine and the flip side of capitalism (like images of exploited factory workers) is literally glued to the back of displayed objects. The concealed power structures that are the core of alienated production are made visible here.

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“New Document” at Johansson Projects Reviewed in Artforum

Jan 5, ’12 8:52 PM

My first review for Artforum’s Critics Picks section just went live to their site. I covered the group show “New Document” at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA. Teaser below, full article here.

Hunter Longe and Matthew Draving’s floor-bound sculpture Open Screen Unit (all works 2011) grounds many of the ideas afoot in this concise group show. Here, a projection of a mesh pattern shines through a sheet of mesh draped over a square frame, producing an ethereal illumination. The title indicates that this “screen” is not a surface for the serial, filmic play of images, but a site that responds to the simultaneous, software-enabled production of images. Indeed, throughout the exhibition screens are employed not as spaces of fixity or one-way transmission, but as sites open to fluidity and mutation by their environment and the user.

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A new documentation. an interview to joao vasco paiva – Robin Peckham

Dec 12, ’11 12:32 AM

João Vasco Paiva (n. 1979) is a Portuguese artist based in Hong Kong since 2006. He has taught at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media and Hong Kong Art School/ RMIT University. With a background in painting and advanced training in media technology, his work is characterized by the appropriation of observed phenomena, mapping apparently random situations and presenting them in an aesthetically organized framework through video, audiovisual performance, recording, and installation.

One of his best known projects in this rubric is Experiments on the Notation of Shapes (2010): taking the city as a sculptural playground, two projections present images of the Hong Kong skyline at a distance: largely still, contemplative, and gray, they offer a dispassionate glimpse of urban planning and architectonic monumentality. Facing the ceiling in a box on the floor, a monitor depicts a different vision, frenetically winding through back alleys and service roads amidst the architecture of spectacle, and generating an audio signal that is, in turn, modulated in frequency by the projected images. The resulting cocoon of sound and image runs the gamut of the urban experience, from the quietest moments of stillness to the madness of the intersection.

More recently, the project Forced Empathy (2011) consists of a single-channel video, a kinetic sculpture, and a series of prints. A number of floating objects in the harbor of Hong Kong subject to wind, waves, and other factors causing them to bob and sway, sometimes gently but other times rather wildly, are recorded by a stationary camera. When edited, the filmic object is computationally “forced” to remain stable and equidistant from all edges of the frame, such that the background environment inversely adopts the motion of the floating platform and takes on the role of visual noise. A wooden sculpture of the floating object is kinetically animated to inversely follow the motion of the video, causing a moment of confused parallelism in flat image and habitable space. Behind this kinetic moment of mimicry sits a simple graphic print, an abstraction of the harbor background.
 
His aesthetics often emerges at the point where generative processes come into contact with urban topographies, exploring control through randomness and quotation. The work discussed here is concerned with new modalities of documentation that rewrite originary aesthetics—creating new worlds as it restructures our shared sphere of perception. As Paiva prepares his latest solo exhibition, Palimpsest, which consists of an electronic installation, generative video, prints, and paintings based on the non-space of the mass transit station, he responds to a few questions about the role of new media in his practice and the status of the outsider in cosmopolitan Hong Kong. The exhibition opens at Saamlung in Hong Kong on 18 November.

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Object Orientations

Nov 22, ’11 6:23 PM

In his 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood”, Michael Fried bemoaned the theatricality of minimalist sculpture, which replaced the presentness of compositional sculpture with the staging of an experience for the viewer as performer. His argument has since been inverted by artists and art writers invested in the idea of sculptures as props forming part of an artistic experience economy. This discourse has accompanied the rise of relational aesthetics as a dominant paradigm for contemporary art. More recently, however, there has been a turn away from relationality to ‘object-oriented’ art, where objects are seen to stage their own theatrical experiences, performing themselves without requiring the activation of a viewer’s body. In this essay, we trace parallels between the philosophy of Bruno Latour and the and this emerging trend in sculpture. In ascribing agency to objects, Latour proposes a radical shift from philosophy’s traditional investigation of the relationship between the mind and the world. Drawn to the idea that matter can be creative, artists have embraced his thinking. However, we would like to argue that this has lead to a generalized, universalizing humanism that disables political action. Moreover, it undermines the potential for anti-humanist critique latent in object-oriented philosophy.

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Rhizome | Artist Profile: Artie Vierkant

Nov 10, ’11 8:29 PM

The thinking behind Image Objects has always been that by introducing distortions (and layers of other imagery) into the images I can make the viewing experience on the Internet or through other mediated sources fundamentally different from viewing the objects in an installation setting. It also allows me to make a lot more pieces than I could otherwise. These all start as digital files, so ultimately it’s rather arbitrary at what point I decide that a file I’m working on is ready to be physically produced—any one of these could easily have undergone more changes, had more or less layers, &c. So by having a piece produced physically and then splitting it into all of these different variations I have the opportunity to sort of go back into it and reshape it into all of the other shapes it could have been.

All of this does stem a bit from, yes, feeling that for the most part installation photographs very accurately represent what a physical sculpture looks like. When I see documentation of works before I visit the exhibition, usually the act of visiting does little more than produce a sense of deja vu. Even if not, install photos are usually an idealized version of the pieces that make them look closer to how the artist intended them to look.

The problem with this is that, really, it’s so much easier and for the most part makes so much more sense now to just Photoshop or 3D-sculpt how you want your work to look rather than ever printing it or painting it or assembling it. That was part of the impetus behind Image Objects as well. If I’m going to be making a physical object that will be seen 99% of the time through another image I felt there should be something unique about both types of experiences. Otherwise, why have the physical object at all?

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Review of Jennie C. Jones’s Exhibit “Absorb/Diffuse” in the Wire

Nov 7, ’11 5:30 PM

I wrote a review of a solo exhibition by Jennie C. Jones entitled “Absorb/Diffuse” in the November issue of the Wire. The exhibit was up at the Kitchen in New York City from September through October. I won’t give it away, but I examine how Jones integrates aspects of graphic notation into her practice. You can read the full article in the print or digital edition, available here.

"Absorb/Diffuse" at the Kitchen (Photo: David Allison, courtesy of The Kitchen)

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Solo show in Sim City

Nov 2, ’11 5:37 PM

Sim City 2000 Performances and Installations by Kim Asendorf

Legendary at&t gophone refill here at Comfi.com

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Institute 193 | Blog

Aug 16, ’11 9:17 PM

In his show, “Cream Grid Reruns,” Robert Beatty repurposes outmoded technologies to create hybridized sculptures, drawings, and installations. An anagram for “recurring dreams,” “Cream Grid Reruns” blurs sensory boundaries, and presents a unique vision of the fusion of the organic and the artificial. Beatty’s work will be on display at Institute 193 until mid-September.

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