Artwork: Paste-up by Marquise, La nuit des lucioles, on rue de la Lune, Paris
Poetic collage/paste-up by street artist Marquise (@marquise.streetart) that’s now gone, La nuit des lucioles, on rue de la Lune, Paris.
Our Labyrinth
I just wrote an art story for Lee Mingwei’s ongoing artwork The Letter Project, where viewers act as participants in the piece, being given the opportunity to write a letter and then leave it either closed or unopened to be read. Similarly, Mingwei sees his performance work Our Labyrinth as a gift to the audience for deep reflection and was inspired by his trip to Myanmar where he visited temples and watched volunteers daily sweep the pathways as a gift to the visitors, keeping the sacred space clean and inviting. The process was physically, spiritually and mentally cleansing, and Mingwei wanted to bring that sense of sacredness and beauty into the museum space. Dancers in Our Labyrinth perform a slow and meditative piece where they use brooms to shape the rice in unchoreographed movements. The dancers have been instructed by Mingwei to “be guided by the rice” and the performance is also inspired by a question posed by Mingwei: Can art be made out of attention itself?
Check out the video of Our Labyrinth being performed at the Tate Gallery in London, and an interview with Mingwei about the artwork.
L17 Matrix Bird
Artwork: L17 Matrix, Los Angeles, 2022
I’ve always loved L17 Matrix’s birds. Incredible colour, vibrancy, dynamism and a sense of freedom. Here’s his recent creation in Los Angeles.
Minotaur
Artwork:Pate-up by @a_r_d_i_f, Minotaur, Paris, 2022
Given my love of labyrinths and the Ariadne/Minotaur myth, I couldn’t resist posting this, the recent past-up of @a_r_d_i_f Minotaur in Paris. The melding of the maze structure with the minotaur is brilliant.
Song Zero
Great new track from Vaal (aka Eliot Sumner) Song Zero, from her recently released album Love Reversed (Bedouin Records). It’s a little dark with a lot of dirty reverb and a real kick at the end. Love it. Check it out.
Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen I, CandiDa Höfer
Artwork: Candida Höfer, Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen I, 2001; Photograph, colour, on paper
I seem to be on a Halloween inspired writing spree! Just posted a new art story of Candida Höfer’s eerie photograph from her series featuring libraries, Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen I, 2001. Check it out here
Top Gun with a cat...OWLKITTY!
After months being MIA OWLKITTY aka Lizzy is back just in time for Halloween…in Top Gun!!!! Awesome and hilarious and I love it!!! 😻
The Disappearing Artist
Artwork: Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, Paris, Salpetriere Chapel (1986)
One of the first Art Stories I wrote was inspired by Christian Boltanski’s installation series Lessons in Darkness/Leçons de Ténèbres. Recently I wrote a short piece on Boltanski looking more at his art from the point of view of the ideas, themes, and life experiences that shaped his work, and perhaps gives another dimension to the story I wrote about the boy who lived under the floor during WWII.
The Disappearing Artist
Christian Boltanski liked to describe himself as a preacher, a clown and a crook. He was a trickster playing and blurring the lines between fact and fiction, good and bad, art and life, reality and representation. And what he wanted most with his art was that it asked questions with no easy answers, or none at all.
Boltanski was born around Liberation day in Paris. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic. During WWII, Boltanski’s parents legally divorced (and remarried after the war), while his father hid under the floorboards of their apartment to evade capture by the Nazis. Growing up, the influence of Boltanski’s parents and this period of history was profound, such that he left school at eleven to paint at home, and didn’t go outside of his home by himself until he was eighteen. His father especially wanted him not to speak about being Jewish, associating his own Jewishness as negative, especially in regards to anti-Semitism. Boltanski believed his childhood was strange, but that most people’s childhoods are strange. Yet he revisited the recent past of WWII and his childhood continuously in his art, even as he said as an artist, when creating the work, he was becoming invisible, that he was disappearing, that the act of creating in some way negated the one creating it and their biography.
Boltanski’s art is replete with contradictions. He was obsessed with death, especially the idea of his own disappearance, but with his installations he focused on the lives of individuals who’d passed away, bringing them to our attention, often through photographs. Despite their absence, he gave them a presence. They might be strangers, but he wanted their lives to be remembered for their humanity, their uniqueness. In this respect Boltanski was interested in what he termed “little memory”, which was emotional memory and everyday knowledge, as opposed to memory with a capital “M” that belonged in history books. Boltanski said of this idea: “This little memory, which for me is what makes us unique, is extremely fragile, and it disappears with death. The loss of identity, this equalisation in forgetting, are very difficult to accept.” Death to Boltanski was inherently strange—to be an enlivened individual one moment and then gone. Which prompts the question: What enlivens the person; what gives them life?
While using photographs of individuals in his work to facilitate remembrance, Boltanski also understood how photography could be manipulated to confuse what it truly represented. In the case of his work Les Enfants de Dijon (Children of Dijon), there is no way to tell if the child was specifically Jewish or German. While his work might allude to the Holocaust, Boltanski never directly referenced it in his work. The ambiguity was also deliberate, inviting questions and stories to be created by the viewer, keeping interpretation open and ongoing. Boltanski wanted to reclaim these children now dead from simply being a number. He lit each photograph of a child’s face with light bulbs like votive candles in a shrine, emphasising that each was an individual life, a light, a spark of humanity. It is elegiac, a kind of memorial, but an affirmation too, of life itself. While Boltanski was not religious, he believed the reference to creating these “monuments” highlighted the holiness of each person, their soulfulness.
Mostly Boltanski utilised simple, fragile materials he referred to as “stupid”. Materials that were close to people’s every day lives, such as candles, biscuit tins, photographs, light bulbs and magazines. With his installations of piles of clothes these ordinary “stupid” items had once belonged to someone; had intimate contact and held the memories of those people. On occasion, Boltanski allowed the viewers to purchase the clothes through donation, and the cycle of life was reaffirmed, the clothes changing hands, bodies and memories. There is the possible interpretation of the piles referring to the clothes and items confiscated from the Jews in WWII by the Nazis and left discarded in massive piles. Yet Boltanski prefered the idea that depending on the place these installations are shown and the people viewing them, the meaning will change.
Boltanski believed people could be touched and have an intuitive and emotive response to his work. He never wanted to create art for museums, seeing such places as repositories of relics and not close to people’s lives. Instead he saw his work at the edge of art and life: relatable to people, even as it might be mysterious, the meaning elusive and open to questions.
A large part of Boltanski’s work will disappear given the fragile “stupid” materials used, and he saw this impermanence as fitting, closer to real life. It also seems to suit an artist always on the verge of disappearing.
Freedom
Artwork: L.E.T, Freedom is not given, stencil and crayon on metal, 2022
Brilliant stencil work by L.E.T. (@l.e.t._les.enfant.terribles): Freedom is not given.
You have to fight for it.
Escape into the freedom of her own story
Artwork: Rebecca Horn, Unicorn, 1970
Rebecca Horn’s art is rooted in her own experience: "I use my body, I use what happens to me, and I make something." Originally from Germany, Horn leads a nomadic existence, often living in places where she’s asked to create her work, which spans drawing, sculpture, painting, installation and films. A defining experience in her life was the year she spent in a sanatorium in 1964 having contracted a lung condition from using fiberglass to make sculptures at art school. During this time her parents passed away, she was totally isolated, and that’s when she began producing her first body-sculptures, which she sewed while lying in bed.
Such works as Finger Gloves (1972), Pencil Mask (1972), Black Cockfeathers (1971) resulted from this experience, and the unforgettable Unicorn (1970) where Horn made a simple bandage-like costume for a fellow student with a unicorn horn atop her head. Naked except for the costume, the woman walked through a field as Horn filmed her. The strange beauty, grace, playfulness and daring of this work carries forth into the art made throughout Horn’s career.
What is fascinating is that Horn is also a poet and writer. She makes artist books featuring text, drawings and her artwork. Born at the end of World War II, language was always complicated, and she comments on this saying: "We could not speak German. Germans were hated. We had to learn French and English. We were always travelling somewhere else, speaking something else. But I had a Romanian governess who taught me how to draw. I did not have to draw in German or French or English. I could just draw." Apart from drawing, poetry seems to be a form of expression Horn gravitates to, creating a synergy with her art, another “extension” like the soft-sculptures, where she can reach beyond her own experience to a wider audience, to the world outside of her self.
One such book La Lune Rebelle (1993), recounts her time in the sanatorium and the strange encounter with a man in Barcelona that was not simply desire or sexual, but a way to reach out, reanimate herself, to feel alive. It became the springboard for my own art story inspired by her installation El Rio De La Luna (The River of the Moon). The art story explores ideas of intimacy, storytelling, desire, love and bodily sensation, how we experience the world and self through our bodies, emotions and connections. How we transfigure and grow. In this story I wrote a Scheherazade-like tale of lovers coming to an understanding of each other through a journey involving their bodies, language and feelings that is a transformative, perilous and revelatory experience.
Horn’s mechanical sculptures and installations such as Metamorphosis (1986), The Hydra Forest, Performing Oscar Wilde (1988), The Kiss of the Rhinoceros (1989) and Missing Full Moon (installation in Bath, 1989) similarly feature these elements of transformation and animation, of the potential for regeneration, to break down, alchemize, fuse, collapse, expand, cause chaos, harm or protect, touch, or spark with electricity. They are human-scaled, relatable, humorous, confronting and surprising. They also evolve Horn’s deeper concerns of “being-in-the-world”, where our journeys are not merely physical but spiritual, and Horn’s art engages these liminal points where states of being intersect. This cosmic, spiritual dimension is explored further in her artist book Cosmic Maps (2008), featuring Horn’s paintings and poems. One poem The Universe in a Pearl, speaks of origins and creation that has the quality of myth:
I
The Universe gathered in a Pearl
In primeval blue—hovering.
Crashing through veils into the deep
reflection of the orb of heaven
in water of sapphire.
II
Fire ignites the suns
in the body of the beloved.
The light under her feet
Reaches out far beyond the sphere of heaven
Horn believes in the mysteriousness of life, of cosmic, creative energies that shape experience, and she seeks connection with this: "Every day," she says, "for an hour in the mornings, I breathe, I open my spine, I put up my light. A swami taught me." A poem she wrote in her book, Tailleur du Coeur (1996) gives expression to this process:
Reverse the law of gravity
The spiraling movement drawing energy upwards,
Leaving the body,
Rising into the vast expanse of light.
And with this expansive, dimensional perspective comes a sense of purpose, of giving to the world her extraordinary life-experiences through her art.
(Note: Title of post comes from Rebecca Horn’s La Lune Rebelle: “Whilst dreaming, the Keaton-face reappeared and she realized that he would be the catalyst for her escape into the freedom of her own story.” p.8.)
To feel infinity
Artwork: Wolfgang Tillmans, in flight astro (ii), 2010
Digital pigment print
Alongside photography, astronomy has played a lifelong role in Wolfgang Tillman’s search for the “boundaries of the visible”.
Tillman’ s affirms this saying, “When I was ten or eleven…I fell in love with the stars.”
This led Tillmans to observe astronomical phenomenon such as sunspots through a telescope and placing the camera against the eyepiece to take photographs, and specifically in 2004 and 2012 he photographed the transit of Venus, the planet’s passage across the Sun over several hours.
Commenting on this fascination, he says, “Astronomy is located at the limit. Can I see something there? Is that a detail or is it just noise in the camera sensor? By going to the limits, to the borders, I find comfort in being in-between the infinite smallness of subatomic space and the infinite largeness of the cosmos. It gives me comfort to feel infinity.”
[source: Interview with Aimee Lin, Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Limits of Seeing in a High-Definition World, ArtReview Asia, 2018]
underfoot ephemeral impossibilities
Artwork: David Zinn, “Philomena, steward of the Strategic Sky Reserve, always keeps a keen eye out for squirrels”, 2022
Every time I see David Zinn’s art I can’t help smiling. Whimsical, funny, poignant and plain silly, Zinn creates what he calls “underfoot ephemeral impossibilities”. Utilising an approach called “pareidolic anamorphosis” or “anamorphic pareidolia”, Zinn’s temporary street drawings are composed of chalk, charcoal and found objects improvised on location. These impermanent pieces incorporate grass, twigs, cracks, flowers—any surface or object becomes the inspiration for the wonder-world of characters Zinn creates, such as his regular creatures “Sluggo”, a bright green monster with stalk eyes, and Philomena the flying pig. You can check out more of his work at www.zinnart.com or @davidzinn.
literature versus traffic
Recently in the city of Utrecht for the ILFU festival, Spanish collective Luzinterruptus created an iteration of their installation “Literature versus Traffic”, previously featured in cities such as Madrid, New York, Toronto and Melbourne. The site intervention of 10,000 illuminated books placed haphazardly in the street literally disrupts the usual flow of traffic, and according to Luzinterruptus, “For a few hours, stories and poems replaced with their silent whispers the noise and pollutions”. People are then given the opportunity to walk among the books and even take them away. The books are recycled through people claiming them, giving them another life beyond the installation, and the story/project continues.
Of this ongoing project, Luzinterruptus said: “We want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word.‘
Upgrade
Artwork: Paste-up by Alban Rotival (@agrume_), Upgrading a laptop, Paris, 2022
Love this. Paste-up on wall in the Paris district La Defense by artist Alban Rotival (@agrume_): Upgrading a laptop. I wonder what would sprout from my laptop if upgraded—hopefully some new stories!!!
A Yoshitomo Nara Day
Thinking, dreaming, wishing…
More...
Artwork: Paste-up by @strassenmaid, Hamburg
More of all of these! 😊
Tell Me A Story
Artwork: Chiharu Shiota, Tell Me A Story, Kosovo, 2022
Chiharu Shiota’s recent installation at Manifesta 14 Biennial in Prishtina, Kosovo, is about storytelling and how interwoven stories and memories are in people’s lives. Featuring her distinctive red thread, the installation Tell Me A Story is a collaborative project inviting the people of Kosovo to write a story inspired by subjects such as birth, childhood, their family, nation, country, religion, love and death, and in a language of their choice from Albanian, English, Turkish, Serbian, Roma or Egyptian.
The installation takes its inspiration from the main theme of Manifesta 14—with its rather convoluted exhibition title, “it matters what worlds world worlds. how to tell stories otherwise”—which is about generating new practices and ways of collective storytelling.
Secret Garden
Artwork: Mural by Seth, Jardin Secret, Jersey City, USA, 2022
I love the idea of a secret garden, whether imaginary or real. To have space that’s a sanctuary, hideaway or simply a “secret” space that allows you to just let go and be. Recently artist Seth (@seth_globepainter) completed a mural in Jersey City, USA, focusing exactly on this, Jardin Secret (Secret Garden). A door to another world, just like in the wonderful story by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden. And with spring coming, it’s a reminder of nature’s fundamental importance to inspire, heal and connect. Kind of need that right now!
Now You See Me, Now You Don't
There’s something absurd, joyous and uplifting about Saudi artist Manal AlDowayan’s temporary landscape installation Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (2020). Situated in the desert of Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia, for the Desert X festival, it’s basically a series of 12 trampolines dug into the ground where people could lie on them, jump on them—have fun. Yet the installation is a serious dialogue with the environment, its desertification and the impending water crisis the country faces with the prediction it only has 13 more years of groundwater reserves left. The trampolines represent puddles of water, an incongruous sight in the middle of a desert, more akin to an oasis. AlDowayan says this about the installation:
"Puddles are humble, beautiful things, and they used to have a longer life on Earth. Al Ula was founded because it had plentiful springs, it was this oasis in the desert, but as the climate changed these local communities had to start tapping into the underground reserves, so even when it does rain, puddles disappear almost instantly."
And, “In the evening they become Moon Circles through a series of lighting techniques used to create this effect. They are activated by people interacting with them, and through the body and this experience we may reflect on the environment this artwork has been placed in.”
The Book of Everything
Last night I reread a story written by Dutch children’s book author, Guus Kuijer, The Book of Everything (translated by John Nieuwenhuizen). It’s been a while since the last time I read it, but it left such an impression, I’ve never forgotten it. It’s a story about a family, set not long after WWII in Holland, and told by 9 year-old Thomas who sees what most people do not.
He sees swordfish swimming in the canal; he sees the witch who lives next door and who fought in the Resistance; he sees Jesus who befriends Thomas and visits regularly; he sees frogs inundating the street and coming through the letterbox; he sees the beauty in his sister’s friend Eliza with her leather prosthetic leg and hand with only one finger; he sees the undercurrent of fear in his family and how his father abuses his mother, himself and his sister. He sees the magic and wonder of the world and the darkness as well and writes it all down. It’s a heartbreaking tale of domestic violence, but is elevating in its humanity, humour and ultimate goodness, told in poetic, simple prose.
It’s a story where love overcomes fear; where kindness and compassion triumphs over meanness and closed-mindedness; and where bringing what is kept hidden behind closed doors to light transmutes it into truth that can be known and understood without shame or terror. It’s a short story with a big heart and a world-widening view, and I simply love it.
And when the witch next door, Mrs Van Amersfoot asks Thomas in one of their encounters, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Thomas says, “Happy…When I grow up, I am going to be happy.” And Mrs Van Amersfoot responds, “That’s a bloody good idea. And do you know how happiness begins? It begins with no longer being afraid.”