The Blogazine

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Tony Oursler / Open Obscura

PAC (Contemporary Art Pavilion) in Milan hosts Open Obscura, the anthological exhibition by Tony Oursler, the American artist born in New York in 1957.

The show, curated by Gianni Mercurio and Demetrio Paparoni, presents – for the first time in a public venue in Italy – the works realised by the artist in the last decade. Huge and small size talking holograms projected on spherical, smooth or wrinkled surfaces, orbiting eyes and big mouths that whisper confused messages, which overlap.

Oursler isolates parts of human body – faces, mouths and ears, but mainly eyes – creating freakish creatures, grotesque and ironic anthropomorphic images that amuse and disturb at the same time. The dreamlike video-sculptures drag visitors into visionary and virtual atmospheres, analysing states of mind and mental health issues as well as the dialogue between human beings and new technologies.

The works created by the artist embody his idea of “making a breakdown in aesthetic culture”. Through the use of different languages and a sort of “frankensteinism” that distorts bodies, Oursler reflects his personal introspection and psychological research, focusing the attention on civil issues, which represent the darker side of human beings like consumerism, addictions, violence, sex and pollution. In works like Cosmic Cloud and Purple Dust, the artist explores the inner and the outer space, creating a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious – the external light space and the inner dark one, while in Peak, a series of micro sculptures made of an omnium-gatherum (glass, metal, clay and micro projections), he continues his research on the ways in which technology affects the human psyche.

Tony Oursler poetry is originally based on the importance of interaction and dialogue between the spectator and the artwork. Mixing irony and emotional tension he synthesizes uncanny elements that leave viewers stunned and astonished.

The exhibition will run throug June 12.

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Rafaël Rozendaal / Automatic Books

The internet has caused a bouleversement of culture faster, stronger and more far reaching than any similarly disruptive advent in history. The printing press, the pony express, radio, the telephone – all molasses-slow minor changes in direction. But in the past decade, media giants have been brought to their knees, music has been revolutionised, and our social networks made uncomfortably literal. But art, that last bastion of mysticism once so far removed from popular understanding, has been changed most profoundly of all. This is, of course, both fortuitous and unfortunate. On one hand, awareness of art and general notions about its roles have skyrocketed – previously obscure talent has been lifted to prominence through democratic media, and there has been a veritable renaissance of creativity from music to fashion to literature to all types of design.

But for all its equalising power, this wholesale democratisation has somewhat sullied the creative waters by empowering some who probably shouldn’t be artists in the first place. Quite simply, when the snobby art world was authority, that which was considered art was well considered at the very least. Today, all it seems to take is a narrative and an ego. And now, beyond legitimate art, a rubbish heap of amorphous and glitzy sub-artistic ideas have become trendy. We’re talking mass-market, Wal-Mart trendy. The amount of peripheral noise has become arduous to sift through. And when bubblegum-popping little girls no longer vapidly aspire to pop stardom and wish to become artists instead… where does culture go from there?

Clearly, art has some major branding issues to overcome as it screeches awkwardly out of post-post-modernism and onto the screens of seven billion humanoids, but I have faith in its eventual sorting out of the mess. In the midst of the chaos, paradoxically, is the glaring fact that the internet itself as a medium for art has remained widely unexplored. It has, however, been quite fortuitous as a platform for spreading hype.

As a most excellent counterpoint, enter the work of Rafaël Rozendaal, a Dutch artist who has been on the vanguard of internet art for the past decade. A deceptively simple practice, Rozendaal buys up vacant domain names and fills them with provocative and engaging content, then sells them. The work’s positioning is conceptually highly sophisticated, and opens a can of art theory worms hotly contested from the advent of reproducible art: the work remains public, but the propriety does not. Where does it originate? Who truly owns it if everyone has access to it? Where will it end up?


Beyond the deep questions the work incites, it is in and of itself cheeky, involving and disorienting, and definitely worth pondering on your next coffee break.

Automatic Books, the Venice-based indie publishing house run by our good friends Elena Xausa, Tankboys and Tommaso Spretta, have teamed up with the artist to produce Domain Names 2011-2001, a nifty limited-edition book of the works, to be printed in an edition of 150 copies.

Gloria Maria Cappelletti, of the always brilliantly curated Gloria Maria Gallery where the book is being released next week, said in a short conversation with The Blogazine that, “We are facing down a new revolution in the art system. Rafael makes websites as art pieces, the pieces are sold to an owner yet the work remains public, with the name of the collector in the title bar. This is contemporary to me. Everything else is an old paradigm.”

You hit the nail on the head, Gloria Maria.

Links to some of Rozendaal’s works:
yesforsure.com
towardsandbeyond.com
everythingyouseeisinthepast.com
ringingtelephone.com

Release on March 16th at Gloria Maria Gallery, Via Watt in Milan, from 6 to 9 pm.

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Dismalware and Beyond

“The good thing about digital art is that you can always turn it off.” Such was the (witty and promising) start of Johannes Grenzfurthner’s lecture at Dismalware, an event featuring presentations by Jeff Mann and Baruch Gottlieb amongst others, organised by Monochrom and Telekommunisten in C-Base. It is an interesting and peculiar Berlin venue on the Spree canal, especially good for experimenting hackers, playing video games, drinking Czech beer and awaiting a visit from extraterrestrials. I’m hoping they drop by, too.

I’ve started from a parallel event to discuss Transmediale, which is quite a a bit bigger, invading Berlin between the end of January and the beginning of February. I have always attended smaller parallel events (if they sound inspiring) and to somewhat lose the plot of the baroque official program of big festivals. That’s probably why I went to the official Transmediale location only on the very last day, and checked out some of the very last performances (here and here) and screenings (both good!) But that’s just me spending too much time in my studio, from where I could listen to a stream to some of the Transmediale lectures (Bifo and Dmitry Kleiner).

You can turn off digital art, yes, but in the end, you can do so with any art. You can hide or destroy a painting you don’t like, or, to tread more lightly, you might simply avoid the venues which are likely to show it. The 90s are long gone and pointing out that a work is digital or that an installation is interactive is moot, like someone who continues to dwell on the question of whether photography is art not, or whether one should prefer figurative to abstract painting.

I don’t believe in strict categorisation of cultural production; it can be misleading and inadequate. Not that I don’t enjoy or draw inspiration by a great deal of what occurs under the umbrella of “New Media Art.” The graphic layout of Transmediale’s flier and website is nice in a way; it makes me feel like I am still eighteen. Too bad I’m actually thirty-one. Getting older can also feel good though, if you accept the challenge.

So I admit I would have liked to see more pure experimentation, more science, more research. Less Facebook. In general fewer “pranks” with angry emails from big companies printed and tacked on the wall. Nor detailed captions explaining that the project is ironic, fake, or symbolic (thanks). Yes Men and 0100101110101101.org, for starters, already covered those bases. Their stuff was (and remains) inspiring fodder for art students bored with Academy classes and the blah-blah cacophony of the art system. But, something fresh is needed! I know, it’s not easy. It takes ever larger budgets, efforts, energy and time. The show Liquid State Machine (again a parallel event in the frame of Das Weekend) was doing something more in this direction, with a quite simple (although very rich and diverse) equipment and few solid brains at work. Let’s keep looking…

Alice Cannava is a friend of the Blogazine and one of the masterminds behind Occulto Magazine.

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Passport to Trespass

A dozen years and counting in the making, Mikael Kennedy’s series “Passport to Trespass” is a chef-d’oeuvre in Polaroid if there ever was one. The epic work is set to launch its seventh chapter, billed “Hunt Them Out,” later this month.

Working with some of the last precious cartridges of Polaroid 779 – the authentic and dreamy genuine stuff – Kennedy has crisscrossed North America several times with his SX-70. Over time, an emotional narrative with his surroundings and the acquaintances he’s made along the way has emerged.

A spiritual successor to the likes of Kerouac, he looks upon life as a visceral, riveting adventure and his work comes accordingly saturated with this perceptible enthusiasm. His fine art images are made with such simple honesty, no doubt accented by his studied choice of such an anachronistic and mercurial medium, that it’s clear he positively lives through and within them.

In a short conversation with us, he recounted, “I got caught by the police, one summer, climbing over a fence onto an abandoned and crumbling pier. They let me go when I showed them my camera and told them I just wanted to take a picture. That wasn’t the first time I had gotten out of trouble by showing my camera and explaining that I was just exploring…”

“To me the most important thing is a life that is lived at the end of it, not wasting my life is the goal, every single day that I am alive is important and should be spent accordingly. I recently told a friend I don’t care why the world is the way it is, I just want to see it before I go.”

His blog, Passport To Trespass, is definitely worth exploring at length and is frequently updated. Catch “Hunt Them Out” from its launch on February 21st, in tandem with an online exhibition and sale of limited-run prints through his gallery, Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York.

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Terre Vulnerabili

Terre Vulnerabili is an ongoing project of four exhibitions – mirroring the lunar cycle – based on collaboration among 30 international artists asked to create site-specific works, thought or readapted for the amazing space of Hangar Bicocca in Milan.

Vulnerability can be seen as an absolute capacity, which gives human beings the sensibility and responsibility to understand others’ needs.

The second step of this “growing exhibition” (whose main issue is based on an assumption by Georges Perec to “Question that which has forever ceased to amaze us”), curated by Chiara Bertola and Andrea Lissoni, will last until March 3, enriching the first show with new works that constantly interact with one another. Starting from the precarious stability of our Mother Earth and the fragility of human beings, the artists reflect their personal vision of vulnerability: from the labyrinth made of cardboard by the Hungarian French architect Yona Friedman, to the transparencies representing the strange holes on the sand close to the nuclear centre of Yeong Gwang (South Korea) by Kimsooja, or the fireworks by Nico Vascellari, which recall the blast of a bombing.

Both the impalpable delicacy of the tube realised with horsehair by Christiane Löhr and the wall carpet made of grass that keep growing and turning yellow by Ackroyd & Haervey express precariousness and mutability. While wandering around the huge space of Hangar Bicocca, you’ll be hypnotised by the amateurish video Staging Silence, in which the Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck rebuilds locations, urban and domestic contexts, real or fictional, where the absence of people allows the visitor to jump into the stage and stay there alone in silence, in contemplation. Moreover, casting a glance to the ceiling you’ll be trapped by the “Web” (2006-2010), an installation that the artist Mona Hatoum realised with crystal balls and metal wire, so to encompass all the earth and human being pains that we have to face and fight.

After visiting the exhibition don’t forget to have a drink at the HB Bistrot, which combines an international atmosphere with original design and good food.

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Larry Clark / What Do You Do For Fun?

The raw intensity of Larry Clark’s iconic work still carries its gloriously hormonal energy and frustration surprisingly well. And four decades on it remains as impacting and relevant as ever. Causing a stir since his publication of “Tulsa” in the early 1970s, Clark has worked extensively in photography and film, and links the two mediums together through the narrative of collage. In his first UK show since 2008, billed “What Do You Do For Fun?” and at the Simon Lee Gallery and following his contentious “Kiss The Past Hello” exhibition at Paris’ Musée d’Art Moderne last year, this outing highlights collage works, the debut of a silent film and also includes several vintage works.

On exhibition are “1992,” a collage of more than two-hundred staged photographs, and the more recent “I wanna baby before you die.” His subjects themselves are ever anguished, themselves also subject to a social fabric that places them in almost desperate situations. Manhood expectations. Drugs. But quite unlike the often pitiable, freakish subjects of, say, Diane Arbus, Clark’s always comes across as caught in the turbulence of coming of age. However jarring they might be, as can attest any of us who have seen his 1995 masterpiece, “Kids.” And though the world has changed drastically in the forty years since Tulsa showed its face to the world, Clark’s images continue to affect their viewers and to speak volumes about our relationships with our young, rebellious selves.

Running through the 2nd of April at Simon Lee Gallery, at 12 Berkeley Street in London.