Artist Guy Ben-Ner's Ikea Sitcom and the "Reality Stage"

As a student, Ben-Ner moved his studio practice to his home, and many of his works, such as Moby Dick, feature fantasy play with his family. In an unpublished interview with artist Boaz Arad, Ben-Ner said “I had to choose between being a bad father away from home a lot, and being a good father, staying at home and making concessions. To work at home is a type of compromise.” Themes of exile--of being on an island in the home--recur in other works, including Treehouse Kit (2005), in which the artist uses ordinary bedroom furniture kits to build a tree and other tropical accouterments. While the artist’s family has been on view in his work for years, the 2007 video Stealing Beauty brought their domestic life into a busy IKEA showroom. In this video the Ben-Ner clan, without permission, enacts home scenes in IKEA’s domestic vignettes (showering, sleeping, and bickering). With a humorous nod to their surroundings, father and children discuss the nature of private property and service-based commercial enterprise with a Marx/Engels slant. Pointing to the surrounding showroom as legitimate shoppers pass through the frame, Ben-Ner says, “This house belongs to us. We are the only ones who have the right to use it and the right to exclude others from using it…. Private property creates borders, son.” Source

All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places. What makes Ben-Ner’s art stand out is that he puts these ideas together so well, continually cannibalizing the culture and objects he encounters, trying to make these things work for his art and his family. In this way, he echoes the immigrant’s story and the artist’s quest - Jerry Saltz

A still from Guy Ben-Ner’s "Moby Dick" (2000). ; Courtesy of MASS MoCA

Biography

The video artist Guy Ben-Ner became internationally renowned when he represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 2005. The work he presented there, ‚Treehouse Kit’, deals with a tree made of pieces of furniture, which the artist turns into a tree of survival. It might, thus, serve the modern version of a Robinson Crusoe. Ben-Ner, who completed his art studies in New York in 2003, was the lone survivor already when he showed ‚Berkeley’s Island’ (1999) – the artist squatting, stranded next to a palm tree on a sandy island, in the middle of his kitchen. The quasi domesticated artist is reluctant to accept the roles allocated today to family members. He does the chores, but discusses his unsatisfied desires, and stresses the incongruity between the cliché-like fury of the artist or the savagery of man, and modern lifestyles. Ben-Ner uses his body in the performance videos in order to paint the self-portrait of the family man (Edelsztein). It is also the family man who tries to transmit everyday culture to his son in ‚Wild boy’ (2004), or who, in ‚Moby Dick’ (2000), converts his kitchen into a whaler, which does not hunt legendary animals, as in Herman Melville's novel, but gets to the bottom of traditional myths. Ben-Ner's filmed self-portraits show the artist after he has arrived in reality.

Marclay "Screenplay"

This is one of Marclay’s visual scores, in which found materials are collated as a representation of a sound performance to be interpreted by musicians. It is Marclay’s intention that his film be viewed by performers as a score. Screenplay is compiled from film footage that Marclay spliced into something of a narrative. In addition, he introduced simple, colorful digital animations of lines and waveforms and big, round dots on top of some of the footage. In following series of images, for example, a conductor appears on screen. It is one of the more explicitly music-related sequences in Screenplay, which is more often packed with seemingly random images of buildings and under-water scenes.






In this segment, a thick line traces the path of the conductor’s hand, until, over time, his face is almost entirely obscured:

Marclay’s art often has a magnetic quality, in which the world seems to conform itself to his mindset. For example, in the sequence depicted above, the actions of the conductor, which already were meant to give instruction to musicians, take on a whole new symbolic purpose.

There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to Marclay’s Screenplay. For example, at one point there’s a chase scene that ends up with a door being locked, followed by a close-up of the lock, and then when the key falls out of the lock, something on the floor explodes, which leads to numerous sequences of ever more out-of-control fires, which then leads to scene after scene of water. Each of the segments of the silent, unfolding story is taken from a different pre-existing source, but through Marclay’s editing, they’re combined into something fluid and whole. As with the numerous printed scores on display, Screenplay is running unaccompanied by music — if Marclay uses art as score, in this setting his score is the art.

Bio

Christian Marclay is a New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Born in California and raised in Geneva (Switzerland), he studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and at Cooper Union in New York. As performer and sound artist Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records and turntables since 1979 to create his unique "theater of found sound." Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Shelley Hirsh, Christian Wolff, Butch Morris, Otomo Yoshihide, Arto Lindsay, and Sonic Youth among many others. A dadaist DJ and filmmaker his installations and video / film collages display provocative musical and visual landscapes and have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunsthaus Zurich, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

some Watts - some Williams- a Watts Williams Stack

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Scott Kildall

Paradise ahead, in which he explores the possibillities of performance art in Second Life or Uncertain Location, about which he writes:

In the summer of 2006, NASA announced that the original Apollo 11 moon landing tapes were missing. The video broadcast on television was transmitted through space and then shot off a video monitor in Houston ground control. The originals were better resolution, higher contrast and crisp in detail. No one has seen then this footage. Many have asked questions about the truth of this event.

I have completely recreated a 1-minute segment of the original — where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin plant the American flag with the lunar lander in the background. At exhibitions, I give or sell prints from the recreated video. As the public takes home prints, I erase the corresponding frames from my own.

from uncertain location © scott kildall

1927: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Created by the new British theater company 1927, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea combines live music, performance and storytelling with films and animations. Using the aesthetic of silent film, a series of comic vignettes unfold in which the performers interact with the animations.


1927


The dark whimsy presented in these ten vignettes is fun for the whole family.

Reviewed by Ellen Wernecke

A cursory description of "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" would only pigeonhole it as the ur-Fringe show: A combination of hand-drawn animation, silent-movie acting and live vaudeville piano, invoking fairy tales and Satan, it seems (on paper) like the kind of show destined to stay on the edges of popular theatre, despite its award as the Best of Edinburgh at last year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But no one who caught "Between the Devil..." at its short stay at PS122 would have described it as morbid or Gothic; even though it occasionally touches those poles, this deeply weird show was far more funny than creepy.

The show, created by the performance group 1927 (actresses Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton are seen on stage, with Lillian Henley at the piano, and filmmaker and co-director Paul Barritt behind the scenes), consists of 10 "terrible tales" told through film and live acting, often simultaneously. The stories aren't related, although two of them are narrated by very similar pairs of creepy sisters. Some deal directly with death, as in the opening vignette, "The Nine Lives of Choo Choo le Chat," which depicts how each of the nine lives of an unlucky cat ended. Others apply the show's magical-realist logic to subjects like door-to-door salesmen ("Sinking Suburbia") and the allure of the deep fryer ("Home Sweet Home").

These vignettes feel (and thanks to Henley's accompaniment, sound) like a series of lost shorts unearthed from a five-cent carnival booth. Andrade and Appleton have the faces and mannerisms of silent-movie actresses, and perform with impeccable timing to the films shown behind (and around) them. But the night's funniest gag was the kidnapping of an audience member to pose as "Grandma," who is dressed up by the actresses and then taken behind the screen as the film shows the tortures two sisters enact on her. Even without that participatory interlude, "Between the Devil..." is a lively and inventive little show which, pending 1927's world tour, will hopefully gain a larger audience than Fringe-goers.

Sharon Hayes

In the Near Future
stages a set of anachronistic and speculative
actions in an ongoing investigation into the figure of the protester. Once a day, from November 1 to November 9th, 2005, Sharon Hayes stood on the street with a sign at nine different locations throughout New York City. Audience was invited to come and document these actions.

more pictures

Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29

play video

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California by a radical political organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). From February to April, 1974, the SLA and Patty Hearst made four audio tapes in which she addresses her parents on the subject of her kidnapping, the SLA's ransom (that the Hearst family feed all the poor people in California) and the family and the FBI's actions during the ordeal. In the last tape, Hearst renames herself Tania and announces that she is joining the SLA in their struggle. From June 2001 to January 2002, Sharon Hayes performed a respeaking of each of the four audio tapes. In each instance, Hayes partially memorized the transcript of the audio tape and spoke the text in front of an audience to whom she gave a transcript of the text. She asked them to correct her when she was wrong and to feed her a line when she needed it.

Born in 1970, Sharon Hayes gained her MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA’s Department of Art (2003). Part anthropological fieldworker, part dramaturge, New York based Sharon Hayes’ artistic role is to orchestrate and document collective activity in the public domain. Her video, performance and installation projects have engaged individual and group perceptions of political events and ideologies, employing conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism. Hayes’ work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, Dance Theater Workshop, and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also shown in galleries, exhibition or performance spaces in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vienna and Zagreb. Hayes was a 1999 MacDowell Colony Fellow; received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1999); and she was a participant in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program (1999-2000).

Virtual Performance

MTV Europe Awards marked the first live performance of Gorillaz, using the Musion Eyeliner System to beam three-dimensional holographic style performing cartoon characters on stage. Their appearance at the MTV Awards 2005 in Lisbon was billed as the 'world's first 3D hologram performance' and was one of the highlights.

As the world's most successful "virtual band", the human artists behind Gorillaz traditionally appear at live gigs as silhouettes on a giant screen combined with images of their cartoon alter egos.

Gorillaz has also announced plans to collaborate once again with Passion Pictures to produce a full live holographic tour for 2007-2008, or perhaps, a better description is that there may be several tours, since the members can be duplicated at will.

Video

Merging Myths

Merging Myths and the Everyday - “Fiction for the Real”

"Fiction for the Real" Exhibition

at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
in the Nihonbashi, Kudanshita area
This event has ended

In Reviews by Rachel Carvosso 2007-04-27

Chiharu Shioda, 'Bathroom' (1999)

Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

This eerie atmosphere is also present in Chiharu Shiota’s video piece Bathroom, a looped DVD shown on a TV set placed at the far end of a narrow white room. The minimal echoes of this work’s ambient sounds seep into the other gallery spaces, giving you an impression of the work even before seeing it. The first image is of a claustrophobically narrow bathroom with a women sitting in the bath, except that the bath is filled with something black and her face is obscured. As the video progresses various close-up black and white shots show her ‘washing’. The textures of the black material in the bath seem watery, half way between the textures of ink and mud. Sinister like the popular Japanese horror movies of recent years, the drama in this work builds slowly but without any final resolution. Where Yanagi’s females seem collectively bored, this woman’s emotion is understated and in its subtlety conveys a real sense of desperation. Shiota makes space for the imagination to make its own associations and conclusions.

Calle creates written and photographic narratives through her fictional diaries. They retain a suggestion of archetypes – animals, spirits, women are all visible in the the pieces but they ultimately remain stoically undefinable and visceral. Calle’s photo diaries are limited to two dimensions and therefore lack the immediacy of Ikemura’s work but their content still retains the power to seduce the viewer into a false sense of intimacy.

Sophie Calle, 'Letter B from ''B, C, W'' ' [part] (1998)

Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

In this exhibition, you find yourself forming a voyeuristic relationship to a fictional narrative, but by presenting us with this tendency through her fictional diaries, Calle highlights the fact that we behave this way more often that we at first realize. We ourselves become the protagonists of an ongoing ‘diary’ and act out our own roles.

The text presented at the entrance to this show suggests that the fictions represented “…tell you stories quietly or eloquently, to stimulate your ability to feel the real.” I came away from this exhibition unsure of whether I had felt the ‘real’ through these works or whether they perhaps came closer to showing the fictional nature of reality. The real that we experience is in part the fiction of our own consciousness in which stories, myths, everyday and fantastical elements merge into an indivisible whole. All four artists present us with intriguing worlds into which we can choose to enter and suspend our sense of reality. However as in any fictional world, once you leave there is no guarantee that things in the ‘real’ world will still look the same.

Sophe Calle

Sophe Calle
images: http://nachtergael.ifrance.com/gbworkssc.htm


“For ‘The Hotel,’ I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs, and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame . . . it’s the last thought in the process.”

—Sophie Calle

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle redefines through personal investigation the terms and parameters of subject and object, public and private. In her projects, Calle immerses herself in examinations of voyeurism and identity. Often playing roles or adopting guises, she recasts her own identity to reconstruct or document strangers' lives, examining the relationship between the artist and the objects of her investigations.





Article:


'The worse the break-up, the better the art'

Amelia Gentleman talks to Sophie Calle, France's most famous conceptual artist, about the upsides of misery, the pull of the bizarre and the joy of being in a Paul Auster novel

Monday December 13, 2004
The Guardian

Sophie Calle
Misery guts... Sophie Calle, in front of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Photo: AFP/Getty

Sophie Calle views the suffering that comes with the end of a relationship with uncontained glee. From a creative point of view, the worse the break-up, the better the art: even as she is experiencing pain, the artist in her is starting to calculate how best she can exploit it.

Her new book, Exquisite Pain, is the product of a period of intense grief she experienced 20 years ago - so bad that she packed up everything associated with the relationship and its end, and left it untouched in a box until she felt strong enough to deal with it.


The book, composed of photographs, reproduced love letters, air tickets and passages from remembered conversations, takes the reader through the 92 days leading up to her abandonment, and the three months of recovery that followed. Calle had won a young artist's travel grant in 1984 and chose to take a train from Paris to Japan, leaving her boyfriend behind. They made complicated arrangements to meet in India at the end of the trip, but he called her in a hotel room in Delhi to tell her that he had fallen in love with someone else.

Her method of getting over the shock consists of recounting her misery to everyone she meets - 99 times, with gradually diminishing emotion - and asking them to describe the worst moment of their lives in return. She taped every word of these gloomy, shared outpourings with friends and strangers, collecting 99 stories of powerful grief - the woman who is told she will give birth to a stillborn child, the boy who hears his father has died. For the Paris exhibition on which the book is based, she had the texts embroidered on to large wall hangings, which were placed next to her photographs and her assorted bits of break-up memorabilia (images of the clothes she was wearing on that day, the red telephone he called her on to say she was no longer the one).

Calle is France's most famous conceptual artist, who has been teasing her admirers with stylised portraits of her own life and images of the lives of strangers for the past 25 years. Her work had been greeted by French critics with irritation and enthusiasm in equal measure, until last year when she became a member of the nation's art establishment with a large retrospective at the Pompidou Centre.

She would be horrified at any suggestion that there is a self-help element to her work, and yet the way the narrative becomes less hysterical and more detached as the weeks pass is a soothing demonstration of how misery fades.

The stories of other people's distress are captivating - beautifully and movingly written - and they save the project from being merely contrived and pretentious, or an exercise in self-indulgence.

"Anybody who stopped to ask me why I was crying, I would tell them," she says. "My friends were all asking about the exotic trip that I had been on, but all I wanted to talk about was the end of my relationship. Sometimes I would be crying alone in a bar and someone would ask me what was wrong, and I'd explain to them, and I'd get talking.

"At the time, I took on this project more for therapeutic than for artistic reasons. I can't remember whether I was planning to use it all later on as material - I think I must have been because I conducted the process seriously and with rigour. I knew the project would stop when I got bored with talking about my pain or when I became disgusted and ashamed of the way that my banal love affair was nothing compared to the stories of greater unhappiness they were telling me."

With the benefit of 20 years' hindsight, Calle now dismisses the break-up itself as "banal". "It seemed at the time that it was the worst moment of my life - now it seems ridiculous," she says. "Maybe, as my friends point out, I was not suffering that much because I was still able to take a picture of the room - with the telephone and the bed - where it happened."

After three months, she was so sick of the sound of her own voice and the tedious details of her story that the incident was packed away and left to gestate. "I look back on it now and I realise that I didn't suffer that much. In a way I feel I was really lucky, when you see how some people carry their sorrow. In the end it was an excellent deal: three months of mourning, one exhibition and one book ..." she says, with only a trace of irony; Calle has an openly cynical approach to her own emotions.

In her studio, housed in a converted steel factory in the south of Paris, Calle has many more grey plastic boxes stacked up against the wall, and each is full of material for a future project. She is a hoarder, and has decorated her workspace with a menagerie of stuffed animals - flamingoes frozen with their wings expanded, dusty owls, monkeys climbing by the windows, snakes, bison, and a huge tiger given to her recently by a taxidermist friend who stuffed it shortly after its death in a French circus; another friend gave her the necklace of huge glass baubles which hangs around its neck. There is a plastic roasted chicken resting on piles of books on the table and a collage of gravestones on the wall outside the kitchen window. But mostly what she hoards are extracts from her life or snatches of other people's existences.

Her most famous works consist of re-creating moments from other lives. She used to follow people around Paris, secretly taking photographs of them. Once, she followed a man to Venice, found out which hotel he was staying at and tracked him, disguised in a blonde wig, for the two-week duration of his trip, taking photographs and notes. Later she got a job as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel and took pictures of the guests' messy rooms, examining the contents of their suitcases. Calle's experiences working in Pigalle strip bars also became part of her work - she says she accepted a job as a stripper to test her own feminist principles, and she collected pictures for a series called Striptease.

Another time, she got hold of a lost address book and called everyone inside, asking them to describe the book's owner and then published their answers every day for a month in the leftwing newspaper Libération - to the horror of her victim, who tried to get what he hoped would be revenge by persuading the paper to publish a nude picture of her. She was simply delighted by his response.

Calle's notoriety was such that in 1992 Paul Auster, who had read about her projects, "stole" her character and incorporated it wholesale into his novel Leviathan. Auster's Maris "was an artist but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but ... in the end I don't think she could be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline ... [Her] activity didn't stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it."

Calle was thrilled by his decision to appropriate her for his book, and she in turn appropriated some of the extra details Auster had invented for Maris and incorporated them into her own life; the collaboration became another of Calle's projects.

More recently, the mysterious disappearance of a museum guard, who was last seen running barefoot away from her burning Paris apartment, became the subject of another project (A Woman Vanishes, 2003). After reading in Le Monde that the missing woman, Benedicte Vincens, was a fan of her work, Calle got permission from her mother to take photographs of the charred remains of the burnt-out flat, which she exhibited alongside her text recounting the strange story. Vincens has never reappeared and her body has not been found, but the exhibit received enthusiastic reviews.

Two years ago, Calle lay all night in a bed she had taken to the top of the Eiffel Tower (open for a night-time cultural festival) and invited passers-by to tell her stories to keep her awake. Beds appear frequently in Calle's work, prompting easy comparisons with Tracey Emin, but Calle, at 51, is a generation older than Emin, and points out that she has been doing this for much longer. Aside from their willingness to exploit their own emotions in their art, the two have little in common.

The daughter of a Parisian art-collecting doctor and a literary journalist, Calle never went to art school and only began working as an artist to counter growing feelings of boredom and aimlessness in her mid-20s. The medium was selected, she admits, to impress her father, who was keen on conceptual art. "I did this to seduce my father. He was seduced," she says. Her father remains immensely supportive of her work.

Calle admits that she is given to introspection when unhappy. Grief is inevitably a better subject than joy, she argues. "When I'm happy I don't photograph the moment to share with people on the wall of a museum. It doesn't translate so well. Do people like hearing someone's story about how happy they are? Not usually," she says. "I was happy with someone for seven years recently and all my friends were very worried about what I was going to produce in this pink period. I did produce a lot but mainly it wasn't about me; I didn't feel like I needed to use my feelings."

But spontaneous unhappiness is hard to come by, and when it does Calle seizes on it with delight, prodding it and examining it, until suddenly it evaporates and she can't re-create the sensation. "I had a project that I wanted to do when I split up with the last man that I was with, but the pain went before I had time to put together the idea. In a way it was very frustrating - there just wasn't enough pain and I couldn't continue to do the work once it was gone. It would have been too superficial. I had even started to film myself, but I had to abandon it because suddenly I felt fine again. That time I dealt with the break-up in the most normal way, the way that other people do: I met someone else."

Joan Jonas

JJ: "Organic Honey was the name I gave to my alter ego. I found video very magical, and I imagined myself an electronic sorceress conjuring the lines."

INTERVIEW

IMAGES

"Like many members of her influential generation, Joan Jonas stopped making sense in the late 1960's, replacing narrative continuity with a fragmented multimedia performance style that incorporates drawing, sculpture and video; emphasizes everyday objects and gestures; and often uses amateur dancers and musicians. Such strategies personify the art of the early 1970's, with its love of process, heightened banality and accident. To these Ms. Jonas has always added interests of her own: folk tales and songs, shamanistic ritual and mythic beings, favored props and, sometimes, one of several soulful white dogs she has owned. A result is an air of unabashed lyricism, a wildness that is less artistic device than elemental condition, basic to life since the beginning of human consciousness."
By ROBERTA SMITH
NYT REVIEW


Organic Honey Performance Script

Born in 1936 in New York City, Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

She began her career in New York City as a sculptor. By 1968 she moved into what was then leading edge territory: mixing performance with props and mediated images, situated outside in natural and/or industrial environments. In her early works, such as Wind (1968), Jonas filmed performers stiffly passing through the field of view against a wind that lent the choreography a psychological mystiquue. Songdelay (1973), filmed with both telephoto and wide angle lenses (which produce opposing extremes in depth of field) drew on Jonas' travels in Japan, where she saw groups of Noh performers clapping wood blocks and making angular movements.

Jonas’ video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast to one actor, the artist herself performing in her New York loft as Organic Honey, her seminal alter-ego invented as an “electronic erotic seductress,�? whose doll-like visage seen reflected bits on camera explored the fragmented female image and women’s shifting roles. Drawings, costumes, masks, and interactions with the recorded image were effects that optically related to a doubling of perception and meaning. For Jonas, in Organic Honey and earlier performances, the mirror became a symbol of (self-) portraiture, representation, the body, and real vs. imaginary, while also sometimes adding an element of danger and a connection to the audience that was integral to the work.

In 1976 with The Juniper Tree, Jonas arrived at a narrative structure from diverse literary sources, such as fairy tales, mythology, poetry, and folk songs, formalizing a highly complex, nonlinear method of presentation. Using a colorful theatrical set and recorded sound, The Juniper Tree retold a Grimm Brothers tale of an archetypal evil step mother and her family. In the 1990s, Jonas’ My New Theater series moved away from a dependence on her physical presence. The three pieces investigated, in sequence: a Cape Breton dancer and his local culture; a dog jumping through a hoop while Jonas draws a landscape; and finally, using stones, costumes, memory-laden objects, and her dog, a video about the act of performing.

In her installation/performance commissioned for Documenta 11, Lines in the Sand (2002), Jonas investigated themes of the self and the body in a performance installation based on the writer H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) epic poem “Helen in Egypt�? (1951-55), which reworks the myth of Helen of Troy. Jonas sited many of her early performances at The Kitchen, including Funnel (1972) and the screening of Vertical Roll (1972).

In The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, produced by The Renaissance Society in 2004, Jonas draws on Aby Warburg's study of Hopi imagery. Jonas sees something of a parallel between herself and Warburg who compared diverse geographical and chronological cultures through an analysis of abstract imagery taken from their various artifacts. Drawing on sources ranging from Noh to Nordic theater, from the Brothers Grimm to Homer, Jonas' extrapolates the magic of universal narratives from the most quotidian of circumstances so that she, as well as we, may become the heroes and heroines, victims and villains of the myth of self and origin.

Jonas’ works were first performed in the 1960s and 70s for some of the most influential artists of her generation, including Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and Laurie Anderson. While she is widely known in Europe, her groundbreaking performances are lesser known in the United States, where as critic Douglas Crimp wrote of her work in 1983, “the rupture that is effected in modernist practices has subsequently been repressed, smoothed over.�? Yet, in restaging early and recent works, Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years.

Jonas' projects and experiments provided the foundation on which much video performance art would be based. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre performance and other visual media. In 1994, Jonas was honored with a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in which she transformed several of her performance works into installations for the museum. In 2003 she had solo exhibitions at Rosamund Felsen in Los Angeles and the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York City.
In 2005 she was a professor of visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Her works include: Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), The Juniper Tree (1976), Volcano Saga (1985), Revolted by the Thought of Known Places… (1992), Woman in the Well (1996/2000), her portable My New Theater series (1997-1999), Lines in the Sand (2002), and The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things (2004).

Kate Gilmore

In her video performances, Kate Gilmore creates uncomfortable situations for herself and the viewer. These are real predicaments—sometimes painful and even potentially dangerous—but ones that she has created for herself. Gilmore’s video works force you to squirm in a strange empathetic reaction to her predicaments. Included in this exhibition will be two new works: “Main Squeeze�? and “Anything....�? “Main Squeeze�? is a two-channel video, showing the artist both coming and going as she attempts to pull herself through an ever-smaller tunnel. Her feminine, turquoise satin top becomes caught on screws and she appears to suffer bouts of claustrophobia before she finally reaches the end of the tunnel. In “Anything...�? Gilmore sets up a particularly resonant scenario for the viewer. Filmed from above, she appears to reach toward you, attempting to reach ever higher, as she builds a precarious assemblage of tables, chairs, and stools, strung together with a delicate pink twine, upon which to climb. “Her carefully constructed performances belie the impression of futility and hopelessness one might take away from her work. Rather, her meticulous control of both sets and costumes hints at the elaborate farce the artist is trying to create in her humorous video performances.�? (Katharine C. Ebner, 2005)

http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/gilmorek.html

www.realartways.org/archive/openCall/StepUp/Gilmore.pdf

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/2006/11/kate_gilmore_in_conversation_w_1.php#more

Robin Rhode

"Stone Flag," by Robin Rhode, Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, (Fund for the Twenty First Century), nine chromogenic color prints, each 12 1/16 x 18 1/16 inches, 2004

Performance is at the core of Robin Rhode's multimedia practice, which is often divided into the three categories of live performance, photography, and digital animation. Indeed, Rhode's performances, in which he is often the main actor, set the stage for a theatre of the absurd that incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music.

Some More Works

Rhode, who was born in Cape Town in 1976 and currently lives in Berlin, combines showmanship with social commentary, humor with art history, and urban poetry with artistic mastery. In the sketches he creates for make-believe stages before live audiences, in photographic series reminiscent of chronophotography, and in digital animations akin to flip-books, childhood memories and adolescent desires are constantly reworked into street-life scenes, playground games, and domestic activities.



In a fantasy world where second and third dimensions as well as vertical and horizontal planes are blurred, and where drawings stand in for actual objects, Rhode can ride a charcoal skateboard and invite audience members to join in, or entice children into playing games with chalk. His works are both personal evocations of his South African upbringing in the black community of the Cape and the urban jungle of Johannesburg and broader depictions of global youth subculture.

CADEN MANSON / BIG ART GROUP

is a New York City performance company founded in 1999. The company uses the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build culturally transgressive and challenging new works. Since its inception, it has toured nationally and internationally and produced five new major pieces including the 'Real Time Film' trilogy Shelf Life, Flicker, and House of No More.

THE BUILDERS ASSOCIATION

Founded in 1994 and directed by Marianne Weems, The Builders Association is a New York-based performance and media company that exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. Based on unusual collaborations and extensive periods of development, The Builders Association� productions feature a seamless blend of text, sound, architecture, video and stage performances that explore the impact of technology on human presence. From Bogota to Singapore and Melbourne, from London and Rome to Los Angeles, The Builders Association� shows have toured to major venues the world over.

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Gregor Schneider

Wall in front of wall, wall behind wall, corridor in room, room in room, wall in front of floor, floor above floor, ceiling beneath ceiling, lead around room, lead in the floor, light in room, cube in front of wall, red stone behind room, black stone in wall, piece of wall in front of wall, piece of wall beneath ceiling - many works of Gregor Schneider (b. 1969 in Rheydt) can be described as easily as he once has done in a list of his works.

For 12 years now, Gregor Schneider has been building in an inconspicuous, undated house in which he lives in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt walls in front of walls and rooms within existing rooms. The multitude of layers and the mass which the house has devoured over the years have led to even the artist being unable to reconstruct the original layout of the house without destroying it. "No one can access the final layers, except if the house were destroyed". (G.S.) There are concealed constructions; a room slowly revolving around itself, and rooms insulated with lead and sound-absorbing materials; the curtains are moved by air from a ventilator, and spotlights give the impression of daylight. It may happen that one exits this house oblivious and unsuspecting. "The irritation remains on the surface. We accept the room we are in". (G.S.)
However: Do invisible shifts and spatial superpositions also have an effect, do they alter our mood or our behaviour? In his search for places that are charged with energies of a past event, Gregor Schneider has time and again pursued the question pertaining to the way this radiation can be felt, remembered, suspected or imagined. No perceptual mode is excluded. "The concepts of visible and invisible do not play as big a role as conscious and subconscious perception, recognition and non-recognition."(G.S.)
For the exhibition at Portikus, Gregor Schneider takes down the first storey of his house in Rheydt and rebuild it in the exhibition hall. By uprooting and moving works of art or living spaces into an art space, the question of the status of the work becomes more pertinent. How does the transport and the shift of location influence the work?
"Exhibition is always a mortification of works. We all fail because of our high demands. After the exhibition I am alone again. Then I begin with the work all over again". (G.S.)

Description ofTour of the DEAD House

Erwin Wurm

"Is there a specific point where action becomes sculpture?" ~Erwin Wurm 1

The use of technology is not a fundamental element of the work of all interactive artists. One such “traditional�? artist is the Austrian sculptor, Erwin Wurm. Wurm creates interactive “sculptures�? using nothing more than instructional drawings and everyday found objects. His work demonstrates a heavy influence from the work of the conceptual and body artists of the 1960s and 70s. Wurm's “One Minute Sculptures�? continue the avant-garde tradition of questioning the very foundations of art. Like Hoberman and Lozano-Hemmer he takes on complex issues such as the definition of the medium of sculpture, and the role the audience must play in the existence of the work Wurm's sculptures simultaneously pay homage to and mocks the work of earlier artists such as Bruce Nauman and Yoko

Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy Black and White Tapes 1970-75


Paul McCarthy
Painter, 1995. Video

McCarthy Videos - Be Warned

McCarthy's work is heavily influenced by Viennese Actionism, seeking to break the limitations of painting by using the body as a paintbrush or even canvas; later, he incorporated bodily fluids or food into his works. In a 1974 video, Painting, Wall Whip, he painted with his head and face, "smearing his body with paint and then with ketchup, mayonnaise or raw meat and, in one case, feces."[2] His work evolved from pushing painting to the limit, using the body as canvas and as paintbrush, and eventually substituting bodily fluids or food for paint and then moving on to psychosexual events that fly in the face of social convention, testing the emotional limits of both artist and viewer. An example of this is his 1976 piece Class Fool, where McCarthy threw himself around a ketchup spattered UCSD classroom until dazed and injured. He then vomited several times and inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum.[1] The piece ended when the audience could no longer stand to watch his performance.[1] McCarthy's work in the 1990s, such as Painter (1995), often seeks to undermine the idea of "the myth of artistic greatness" and attacks the perception of the heroic male artist.[1]


Paul McCarthy
The Garden. 1992. Installation
Collection Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY

"These shows reveal—in at times excruciatingly nauseating depth—an artist who has to be considered and learned from, if not exactly embraced. McCarthy's art is hardcore and hard to take. It's bitter, monotonous, histrionic, and juvenile. His stories have no moral, his performances barely any structure. There's little variety or nuance to his art, and his babbling, nincompoop characters are often psychos. In many ways, all his performances are one performance, and this ur-performance can feel limited, hammy, and vicious. Still, McCarthy's art has a lot to give. Although his expressionism feels dated in these cleaner, more cosmopolitan times, he's proof there's a dark side to modernism. A sort of amalgamated reincarnation of Egon Schiele, George Grosz, Ed Kienholz, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, he's a corrective to art history's fondness for—in Celine's acerbic words—"shitless epics." McCarthy's art is nothing if not full of shit."
by Jerry Saltz

Q. Back in the day a ton of interesting artists were doing performances. Now that energy seems to be directed toward video and film. Artists acting up for the camera. Where has performance gone? Why aren't people working with the live, high-risk moment? Why do the majority of artists insist on being mediated? Why the distance and safety, why behave on a big installation screen, or a monitor on the floor or a pedestal? I know it's hard on a performer (physically draining) but that used to be the appeal, the rush, which is why all actors want to perform in plays, the venue of the real. It's odd to see a whole form almost disappear. There used to be performance magazines and regular venues at museums and galleries for performance. Not too long ago theater and performance were blurring; it was a fertile time.

A. When I perform for the camera there are others standing on the sidelines in the void. It's very Hollywood to stand and watch a movie being made. I am planning a performance in a theater in Berlin this year at Christmastime. I don't know yet whether it will be on the stage or not. I think I would like to use the entire theater as a performance room, the theater as a set. Maybe I will extend the stage out into the audience, reduce the seating. I am interested in blurring our positions. I've always been interested in the audience being a prop.

Paul McCarthy
Piccadilly Circus, 2003. Performance, foto, videoprojektioner
(En tilsølet dronningemoder, der slås)
Foto: Jan Madsen

William Pope.L

William Pope L. is best known for his street performances – most notably a continuing project in which he crawls on his hands and knees down a city street dressed in a business suit or a Superman costume. The self-proclaimed ‘Friendliest Black Artist in America’ repeatedly stages his own clownish degradation in his work – eating the Wall Street Journal while perched on a toilet-throne, portraying a drunken Santa Claus or creating grotesque, scatological spectacles involving mayonnaise, hot dogs and peanut butter. Both literally and politically messy, Pope L.’s absurdist enactments of abjection are designed to force confrontation.

Laurel Nakadate

Artist Website

Danzinger Images

Interview

Laurel Nakadate was born in Austin, Texas in 1975. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and graduated from Yale's MFA program in photography in 2001. Originally working as a still photographer, she was selected as one of "25 under 25" in the seminal 2000 book and show of that name. Since then she has worked primarily in video. Her first video installation, "I Wanna Be Your Mid-Life Crisis", was one of the highlights of the 2002 Armory Show where it was exhibited by the Daniel Silverstein Gallery.

Nakadate's 2005 solo show at Danziger Projects, "Love Hotel and Other Stories," was featured in The New York Times, the Village Voice and FlashArt. Art critic, Jerry Saltz named her a "standout" in the 2005's "Greater New York" show at P.S.1.




Whatever Laurel Wants
by Jerry Saltz

Laurel Nakadate, "Love Hotel and Other stories," Apr. 9-May 14, 2005, at Danziger Projects, 521 West 26th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001.

On the planet Heterosexual there is a race of men who lack the ability to seduce women and whom women never attempt to seduce. Their numbers are unknown, although, in some metaphysical way, all males may carry their recessive gene. Nevertheless, these men make feeble, sometimes touching, often offensive, but always failed attempts to lure women to them. Typically, these women are much younger than they are.

Enter artist Laurel Nakadate, the half-Japanese 29-year-old 2001 Yale MFA photography graduate and standout in the current "Greater New York" exhibition. Nakadate puts herself into a position to encounter these men, allowing herself to be partially drawn into the webs they hope to weave. They "hit on" her, then she strikes like a trap-door spider, responding with her own counter-proposal. Arranging to go to their apartments or elsewhere, she arrives with a video camera and convinces them to enact strangely suggestive but asexual scenarios with her. ... Continued



Michael O'Sullivan at the Post :

Nakadate is similarly unafraid of the dark, but in a way that's more troubling. In photographs and videos, the artist documents episodes of semi-public striptease, most notably in front of the window of a moving train's sleeper car, from which she also tosses -- and then photographs -- her panties. At times evoking the abusive aesthetic of kiddie porn, at others the joyless rote of pay-per-view peep shows, this body of work, bundled under the name "Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind," is almost sickening in its soul-deadness.

A mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism, naiveté and hard-eyed self-appraisal, cool cynicism and sexual heat, Nakadate's cutting-edge art is meant to get under your skin, and it does. That she offers no easy antidote for -- or even any convincing argument that she's fully aware of -- its toxic effects on the viewer is both the source of its problematic nature, and its undeniable power.