Tag Archives: installation

Doris Salcedo inspiration

One of my art heroes who continues to inspire me…

“The act of sewing together each piece of cloth in an act of reparation, of knitting our own peace and is especially important at this time of uncertainty,” -Doris Salcedo

Participants in an artistic intervention by Doris Salcedo at the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, Oct 11, 2016 Photo: Leonardo Muñoz/EPA

Participants in an artistic intervention by Doris Salcedo at the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, Oct 11, 2016 Photo: Leonardo Muñoz/EPA

DORIS SALCEDO, has covered Bogotá’s central plaza in a massive white shroud.

In an act of protest against a civil conflict that has raged for more than 50 years, the plaza was covered in a massive white shroud bearing the names of the war’s many victims.

The public statement of mourning by artist Doris Salcedo was temporarily installed as the country grapples with the rejection of a peace deal with leftist Farc rebels that would have ended the war. [read more]

More on the intervention in an article on Hyperallergic

Watch this video for more on/by Doris Salcedo >>

And even more on this great artist on Art 21

And her Guggenheim exhibition is a great resource.

MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS

Great piece from ArtForum on the Laura Poitras exhibition at the Whitney. Includes excerpts from her diaries.

MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS by Stephen Squibb – artforum.com

excerpt from diaries:

By asking people to lie down in Bed Down Location, I want them to enter an empathetic space and imagine drone warfare—not simply to understand it from news articles but to ponder the sky and imagine that there is a machine flying above you that could end your life at any moment. What does that feel like? Many people in the world are living under skies where that is a reality. [read article]

Holland Cotter in the NY Times also has a good, informative review

Images from Laura Poitras’s “Anarchist” series, which are drawn from documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden.

[The title, Astro Noise, refers to the faint background disturbance of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang and is the name Edward Snowden gave to an encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency that he shared with Poitras in 2013. ]

 

Chantal Akerman:

Chantal Ackerman died October 5, 2015. This post honors her.

 

Chantal Akerman: a primer | Sight & Sound | BFI

It’s a well-known fact, often rehearsed in interviews, that at the age of 15, Chantal Akerman saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and decided that her vocation was to be a filmmaker. Today, looking back over the career of this Belgian-born, mainly France-based director, we can happily conclude – and this cannot be said of everyone who makes such statements – that her own work has been worthy of the film that inspired her cinephilia. [read more]

At the age of 25, Ackerman made the film Jeanne Dielman,
23 quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles (1975),
3 hours and 21 minutes,

Considered her “masterpiece,” it is a hugely innovative statement that made no concession to mainstream convention.

 

 

She also created many video installations.
Below: Chantal Ackerman, installation at the Venice Bienniale, 2015

More Links

LAURA POITRAS and HITO STEYERL [together]

A conversation between two brilliant minds,  LAURA POITRAS and  HITO STEYERL, in the pages of Art Forum May 2015
 A few excerpts:

LP: The limits of my imagination are much less interesting than what I encounter going into the field and filming. So yes, it obviously changed the narrative. But part of vérité filmmaking, and documenting in the present tense as things unfold, is going where the story leads. It’s uncertain and scary at times, but that is why there is drama.

HS: What kind of storytelling can adapt to the technological novelty and also to the vastness of the database as an archive?

….how does the editor work in the twenty-first century? Especially if, as in your case, the editor is also the person with the movie camera and the Soundbeam and the encrypted hard drive; she is a writer who designs a whole infrastructure of communication.

HS on Editing:
… And I think that editing, not only in filmmaking but in a lot of different activities, is a crucial activity. Postproduction is not working on content in retrospect but creating the content. Editing is where the meaning is created.

Godard said an edit could be an “and” or an “or.” That is how traditional film or video editing works. But now editing, with newer media and with physical reality becoming mediatized to a large extent, becomes a much more expanded activity, being able to channel and process information and to put together meaning in a much more expanded field.

Now instead of expanded cinema, it’s expanded editing, expanded postproduction, and circulation across different platforms and formats. I think it’s one of the crucial lenses through which to analyze contemporary activities.

LP: I think in the art world, duration is often seen as transgressive because it’s somehow forcing the audience to go beyond their comfort level, to subject them to an endurance test. And yet duration is absolutely accepted within mainstream cinema. So duration is perceived very differently in those two domains. Warhol, of course, was the supreme example of really pushing that in beautiful ways.

[read entire article]

“Hito Steyerl” is on view at Artists Space, New York, through May 24. “Laura Poitras” will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Feb. 5–May 15, 2016.

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013more links:
Hito Steryl in e-flux and more articles in Art ForumLaura Poitrais Praxis Films

Bill Viola

Bill Viola’s Moving Void > good read

Insightful article on video artist Bill Viola’s exhibition in Paris on Hyperallergic. [Good introduction to his work if you don’t know it.]  There are several embedded links to view videos online, but the power of Bill Viola’s work is to see it in installation form. See this if you are in Paris before end of July. If we are lucky, the exhibition will travel.

How to Create a Performing Arts Video Work Sample

How to Create a Performing Arts Video Work Sample Part 1 of 3: Your Video Is an Artifact • tips from NYFA.org – NYFA Current.
NYFA current is a great list to be on >  grant opportunities, artist profiles, professional advice, etc. This article about video documentation of performance (or installation) is very useful.

A video work sample is a tool you should probably have if you create work in the performing arts or make installations. Many grant applications and festival submissions require it, or even if they don’t, your application still may need one in order to be competitive…

A good work sample video draws you into the performance. It makes you feel like you’re there. And it compels you to keep watching.  read complete article

I will update this post when parts 2 and 3 are online.

Crows in the Dining Room and Other Messy Histories

Fascinating Installation interventions by Valerie Hegerty at the Brooklyn Museum.

Crows in the Dining Room and Other Messy HistoriesCrows in the Dining Room and Other Messy Histories

In three of the period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum, something is amiss. When visitors step into the cutout nook that offers a view of the Cane Acres Plantation dining room, they find, rather than the usual placid and civilized scene, one slightly more mad: crows have descended upon the dinner table. They are pecking at brightly colored globs of fruit strewn on the table, attacking the paintings, and leaving crumbs everywhere. Meanwhile, in the parlor of the Cupola House, George Washington’s face has fallen grossly out of his portrait, while a Native American–patterned rug decays on the floor below. In the hall of the same house, a painting and furniture are studded with nasty holes, which look like bullet wounds that have oxidized.

Click to read more and see more images

 

Mike Kelley @ PS1

MoMA PS1: Exhibitions: Mike Kelley
A show not be missed (until Feb 2, 2014).  I was very inspired by this show. Mike Kelley was an incredibly prolific artist that was not afraid to take risks—he did not hold back and followed his ideas and passions.

Mike Kelley @ PS1

From the PS1 website:
Born in Detroit, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his tragic death last year at the age of 57. Over his thirty-five year career, he worked in every conceivable medium—drawings on paper, sculpture, performances, music, video, photography, and painting. Speaking of his early work and artistic concerns at large, Kelley had said, “My entrance into the art world was through the counter-culture, where it was common practice to lift material from mass culture and ‘pervert’ it to reverse or alter its meaning… Mass culture is scrutinized to discover what is hidden, repressed, within it.” Through his art, Kelley explored themes as diverse as American class relations, sexuality, repressed memory, systems of religion and transcendence, and post-punk politics. He brought to these subjects both incisive critique and abundant, self-deprecating humor.

Kelley’s work did not develop along a purely linear trajectory. Instead, he returned time and again to certain underlying themes—the shapes lurking underneath the carpet, as it were—including repressed memories, disjunctions between selfhood and social structures as well as fault lines between the sacred and the profane. The work Kelley produced throughout his life was marked by his extraordinary powers of critical reflection, relentless self-examination, and a creative—and surprising—repurposing of ideas and materials.

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Reviews and More Info:
Official Mike Kelley Website
Mike Kelley at Art 21 (video interview and more)

Review by Holland Cotter in the New TImes
Review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker
Review by Ben Davis in Blouin ArtInfo

MoMA | Installing Cindy Sherman’s Mural

Cindy Sherman @ MOMA

Cindy Sherman Show is great. Here is an interesting blog post from the curator:

One of the most exciting features of the Cindy Sherman exhibition is Sherman’s photographic mural, which is making its North American premiere at MoMA. Before MoMA visitors enter the sixth-floor galleries, they will encounter her monumental mural. Like wallpaper, the mural adheres directly to the surface of the wall, and wraps around several walls and corners to transform space and create an immersive fictive environment. The artist designed this configuration of the mural specifically for MoMA’s grand sixth-floor space. The soaring ceiling height allowed her to scale the figures to a colossal size—they stand 18 feet tall—the largest she has ever made them. The effect is utterly jaw-dropping. read more >  MoMA | Installing Cindy Sherman’s New Photographic Mural at MoMA.