http://arttorrents.blogspot.com/
inactive since 2008, but the stuff thats there is interesting
josefin r
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Text for AVATARVARO, Premiere 8 dec, Stockholm
(this text will originally be published in SWE, here food for thought)
To be the body without the mind.
To reflect with passive distance on the actions performed by the body, as if they were not one's own.
To experience proximity to another person freed from the isolation of the “I”.
In the meeting of avatars there is complicity and trust, a twinkle of an eye, a silent undertone.
Whilst the operators' isolated “I”s desperately attempt to overcome the undefinable divide between them the avatars are already there, they are already mobilizing.
They have found that they have something in common, in the midst of freedom from power and responsibility. .
And perhaps this experience of community is about (for once) ending up on the "right" side in the great simplified Revolutionary drama - without hypocracy or divided identities.
In all of this, the hand-over becomes a happy one, like a romantic form of apathy.
Why do we want to hand ourselves over like this?
Is it not enough to be spectators in the society and time we are living in, do we also want to be spectators to our own lives, to the actions performed by our own bodies? Maybe it is the expression of a generations impotence in relation to the global problems and power-structures that define their lives. Why are we supposed to take responsibility of something we have no power over, of problems we haven't created?
Or perhaps it isn't a time-specific behavior, rather the opposite; it is this readiness to mental slavery and freedom of responsibility desired by our parents and their parents that have shaped the power-structures that we are now living with.
In that case, we should rather free ourselves from romantic notions from apathy.
Its all the same in the end though - we decide guiltily and throw ourselves into a liberation from all responsibility.
There is an image of an installation by Anish Kapoor - in the middle of the floor in a completely white room is a perfectly black and flat circle. (See Descent into Limbo, 1992) (1).
Except its not a circle but a hole, a hole that seems to open beyond the room, beyond the frontier constituted by the floor, wall or installation.
On the other side of the hole is the nothingness, a great dark dissolution of the "I". The void.
It is horrifying and seductive, and inviting.
The Operator has the power through agreement, and we can assume that there is also an agreement for how this power may be used.
Thereby we have crossed to the other side of the frontier, we have handed ourselves over and the discussion has shifted towards what comes next.
Marina Abramovic made a performance in 1974, Rythm 0, in which she handed over the power to the audience. She had placed 72 objects on a table, amongst others a rose, honey,
a feather, a whip a gun and a bullet. The audience was invited to use these tools on the artist, as they chose, for pain or pleasure.
The session lasted for 6 hours and when the time was up she walked of the stage bleeding.
She is reported to have said "What I learned was that ...if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you"(2).
The audience that caresses with a feather or loads a bullet into the gun hides behind both Operator and Avatar, and the relation between them is least to say ambivalent.
Both can view what is happening with distance; one because s-he does not make the decisions that rule his/her actions,
and the other because s-he always maintains the physical distance to any potential consequences that may come as result of these actions.
What comes next. Through the darkness.
Perhaps the only insight is that there is only more darkness, and if we hand over the power it will further or later be used against us.
Or perhaps - apart from the various monsters of humanity - there are caverns deep down in the dark, in the shapeless, blunt betweenspace where only the Avatars can fit.
And perhaps that is the strength of the avatars. Beyond the competition of the "I"s they are gathering an underground army. ;-))
(1) Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg, NL, Groen, Rianne,
http://riannegroen.blogspot.com/2011/01/into-unknown-void-in-contemporary-art.html
(2) A Daneri, et al., (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002), p 29
www. turteatern.se/avatarvaro/
Josefin r
To be the body without the mind.
To reflect with passive distance on the actions performed by the body, as if they were not one's own.
To experience proximity to another person freed from the isolation of the “I”.
In the meeting of avatars there is complicity and trust, a twinkle of an eye, a silent undertone.
Whilst the operators' isolated “I”s desperately attempt to overcome the undefinable divide between them the avatars are already there, they are already mobilizing.
They have found that they have something in common, in the midst of freedom from power and responsibility. .
And perhaps this experience of community is about (for once) ending up on the "right" side in the great simplified Revolutionary drama - without hypocracy or divided identities.
In all of this, the hand-over becomes a happy one, like a romantic form of apathy.
Why do we want to hand ourselves over like this?
Is it not enough to be spectators in the society and time we are living in, do we also want to be spectators to our own lives, to the actions performed by our own bodies? Maybe it is the expression of a generations impotence in relation to the global problems and power-structures that define their lives. Why are we supposed to take responsibility of something we have no power over, of problems we haven't created?
Or perhaps it isn't a time-specific behavior, rather the opposite; it is this readiness to mental slavery and freedom of responsibility desired by our parents and their parents that have shaped the power-structures that we are now living with.
In that case, we should rather free ourselves from romantic notions from apathy.
Its all the same in the end though - we decide guiltily and throw ourselves into a liberation from all responsibility.
There is an image of an installation by Anish Kapoor - in the middle of the floor in a completely white room is a perfectly black and flat circle. (See Descent into Limbo, 1992) (1).
Except its not a circle but a hole, a hole that seems to open beyond the room, beyond the frontier constituted by the floor, wall or installation.
On the other side of the hole is the nothingness, a great dark dissolution of the "I". The void.
It is horrifying and seductive, and inviting.
The Operator has the power through agreement, and we can assume that there is also an agreement for how this power may be used.
Thereby we have crossed to the other side of the frontier, we have handed ourselves over and the discussion has shifted towards what comes next.
Marina Abramovic made a performance in 1974, Rythm 0, in which she handed over the power to the audience. She had placed 72 objects on a table, amongst others a rose, honey,
a feather, a whip a gun and a bullet. The audience was invited to use these tools on the artist, as they chose, for pain or pleasure.
The session lasted for 6 hours and when the time was up she walked of the stage bleeding.
She is reported to have said "What I learned was that ...if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you"(2).
The audience that caresses with a feather or loads a bullet into the gun hides behind both Operator and Avatar, and the relation between them is least to say ambivalent.
Both can view what is happening with distance; one because s-he does not make the decisions that rule his/her actions,
and the other because s-he always maintains the physical distance to any potential consequences that may come as result of these actions.
What comes next. Through the darkness.
Perhaps the only insight is that there is only more darkness, and if we hand over the power it will further or later be used against us.
Or perhaps - apart from the various monsters of humanity - there are caverns deep down in the dark, in the shapeless, blunt betweenspace where only the Avatars can fit.
And perhaps that is the strength of the avatars. Beyond the competition of the "I"s they are gathering an underground army. ;-))
(1) Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg, NL, Groen, Rianne,
http://riannegroen.blogspot.com/2011/01/into-unknown-void-in-contemporary-art.html
(2) A Daneri, et al., (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002), p 29
www. turteatern.se/avatarvaro/
Josefin r
"Escape Attempts" Lucy R Lippard
Good evening!
I just finished reading “Escape Attempts,” Lucy Lippard’s introduction to her book on conceptual art, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972:
I find it inspiringly pragmatic and there are loads of ideas from it that I think could be looked at and discussed further. At this point I was reading it 1) because I like the way she writes, 2) Im doing a little research as you may know on art connected to ideas of void/ emptiness/ postapocalyptic melancholia and its cultural/ historical context, and stumbled on this.
In any case, I think the final paragraph is somewhat of a cut-out-and-keep-in-you-pocket:
Perhaps most important, Conceptualists indicated that the most exciting "art" might still be buried in social energies not yet recognised as art. The process of extending the boundaries didn't stop with Conceptual art: These energies are still out there, waiting for artists to plug into them, potential fuel for the expansion of what "art" can mean. The escape was temporary. Art was recaptured and sent back to its white cell, but parole is always a possibility.
Cheerful and cynical at the same time.
/Josefin r
Monday, 28 November 2011
Intelligent Bodies
Intelligent Bodies and Ecological Subjectivities:
Merleau-Ponty’s Corrective to Postmodernism’s
“Subjects” of Education
This is a text my Mum forwarded on to me yesterday. It's categorized under philosophy of education but I found it relevant to multiple concerns. I really like that these ideas re-unite all aspects of lived experience and don't atomize the complexity of how we physically experience and navigate the world. the ideas in relation to location are particularly relevant to engage2012 as-well as ideas about 'encountering' the world rather than 'perceiving' it.
READ THE FULL TEXT HERE
//emma
Merleau-Ponty’s Corrective to Postmodernism’s
“Subjects” of Education
This is a text my Mum forwarded on to me yesterday. It's categorized under philosophy of education but I found it relevant to multiple concerns. I really like that these ideas re-unite all aspects of lived experience and don't atomize the complexity of how we physically experience and navigate the world. the ideas in relation to location are particularly relevant to engage2012 as-well as ideas about 'encountering' the world rather than 'perceiving' it.
READ THE FULL TEXT HERE
//emma
Thursday, 24 November 2011
Shoplifters of the World Unite - Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots
"Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning."
Real the full article HERE
Emma
Monday, 21 November 2011
Julia Kristeva - Strangers to Ourselves
This text by Julia Kristeva is very well attuned to our project. I have posted some extracts below, most of the text can be read online HERE. I particularly like how she suggests that we not attempt to solidify 'otherness' but 'merely touch it...without giving it a permanent structure'.
Emma
Thursday, 10 November 2011
PSYCHOSIS part I
I saw the exhibition Psychosis Part I at Färgfabriken in Stockholm. I thought these two works perhaps esp. interesting to Emma. Also these are works by artists in the nextdoor countries to Romania. I really liked the one below by Chto Delat?
Another note that I found personally interesting has to do with to contrast between this exhibition
and the one next door; works from the Master Students at Konstfack textile dep. The first was so incredibly dense, full of words, reference, overlapping sounds and importance, the second was whitish, silent, still, and as if hanging suspended mid air in no-time space.
//J
Thursday, 3 November 2011
JUDITH BUTLER QUOTEs-emma's notebook
Judith Butler from 'Undoing Gender'
Good to consider when thinking about the 'other'
I come back to this a lot
Sunday, 30 October 2011
These look like interesting people...definitely relates to our project
Thursday, 27 October 2011
TABLES FOR JOSEFIN
Wolfgang Tillmans does some cool work using tables for display
I thought I'd put these up to remind us of our table related conversation earlier,maybe the table could be somehow symbolic of what we're trying to do
Monday, 24 October 2011
the evil second paragraph?
The artists leave their homes, where reactions and interactions , are often familiar and defined. They come together in a foreign city, where they themselves are the others, simaltaneously being in the city, as well as apart from it due to their position as foreighners.
The artists who are participating in “engage” have during the course of their own practices, explored issues such as inside(r)/outside(r), seperate/integrated, subject/object. They have an interest in continuing this explorations, bringing their practices “onto' a city in an open and explorative process.
They intent to establish a dialogue with each other, with the city, and with the support institution.
The artists engage with the city, drawing from their own artistic practice and methods. There is space to experience, to explore, and to experiment. As strangers to the city, with unestablished social bonds and interactions, they have space to redefine and to question. The process questions where and how “art” takes place. “Engage” is shaped by the participants and the participants in relation to the city and to each other. In the end of the project, the artists will organize and “opening” or a dialogue with the support institon and the city.
Friday, 21 October 2011
These are the various organizations that I found that seemed of interest.
ACSL – Art and Cultural Studies “Art Commune” (Armenia, Yerevan)
Contact; Susanna Guylamiryan
info@acsl.am
They want min 2 weeks.
ACOSS (Armenia, Yerevan)
Contact; Mary Tonoyan
TICA (Albania, Tirana)
Gallery Friends Art Center (Bulgaria, Ruse)
contact: chr.stom@gmail.com
(deadline 15 jan)
Rex (Serbia, Belgrade)
contact: rex@b92.net
Polymer International (Estonia, Talinn)
Culture Factory Polymer, Artist in Residency Program
Contact; Jaanika Kuklase
/ Air Coordinator Ernest Truly (thats a proper name?)
GeoAir (Georgia, Tblisis)
Contact: infogeoair@gmail.com
(Seems cool but probably out of our league.)
IAL International Authors Lodge (Hungary, Budapest)
contact: authorslodge@gmail.com
NIDA art colony (Lithuania, Neringa)
contact: info@nidacolony.lt
Public Room (Macedonia, Skopje)
contact: contact@publicroom.org/ marija@publicroom.org
Bucharest Air (Romania)
Contact; Tudor Bratu
Young Emerging Artsists Residency Program in Cluj Napoca (Romania)
Contact:
(unclear if still active + must make work)
Air Celeia Celje (Slovenia)
Seems interesting and professional but I had problems in loading the page with their contacts.
MOTA Museum of Transitory Arts (Germany, Berlin)
contact; mota.museum@gmail.com
Im working on the practicalities draft this weekend,
hugs
j
Sunday, 2 October 2011
Here is the link to the online list for residencies and funds and stuff.
You can just go there add any more information that you have found, dont forget to save and
maybe place a note somewhere. its just to collect this informations somewhere, its a hazzle when it is scattered in 20 emails..
http://titanpad.com/sYDf97drif
With love,
Josefin
You can just go there add any more information that you have found, dont forget to save and
maybe place a note somewhere. its just to collect this informations somewhere, its a hazzle when it is scattered in 20 emails..
http://titanpad.com/sYDf97drif
With love,
Josefin
Friday, 30 September 2011
that troublesome paragraph
Please can we sign? I get so confused
Obviously there are some problems in formulating the paragraph of the conceptual frame.
We have all fibbled with it, but I still think words still just seems to slip of the issue.
I have been spending some time trying to figure out the common denominator between all these aspects; inside/outside, static/dynamic, safe/unsafe, majority/minoriy, home/away, and on and on. Such a fundamental conflict of states, but I can find a good way to phrase.
So I have tried to rewrite it completely, if not for anything else than to give us a new startingpoint for potential twists and changes.
/.../
The conceptual frame is concesquential to how the project is laid out. By leaving our "home"-environments we seek change/ and to be changed but we also construct a situation that strikes on all situations in which being included/ excluded, majority/ minority plays a significant role. These issues tend to become tangible first when one is not included, that is, part of the majority; at home. All of the participants in Encounters; 2012 (/whatever name) have dealt with dealt with such situations previously both privately and in their practise, and so Encounters function as a space for dialogue and experimenting.
/.../
Gaaah!
I feel like I am trying to utter a name-less -----.
//jo
Obviously there are some problems in formulating the paragraph of the conceptual frame.
We have all fibbled with it, but I still think words still just seems to slip of the issue.
I have been spending some time trying to figure out the common denominator between all these aspects; inside/outside, static/dynamic, safe/unsafe, majority/minoriy, home/away, and on and on. Such a fundamental conflict of states, but I can find a good way to phrase.
So I have tried to rewrite it completely, if not for anything else than to give us a new startingpoint for potential twists and changes.
/.../
The conceptual frame is concesquential to how the project is laid out. By leaving our "home"-environments we seek change/ and to be changed but we also construct a situation that strikes on all situations in which being included/ excluded, majority/ minority plays a significant role. These issues tend to become tangible first when one is not included, that is, part of the majority; at home. All of the participants in Encounters; 2012 (/whatever name) have dealt with dealt with such situations previously both privately and in their practise, and so Encounters function as a space for dialogue and experimenting.
/.../
Gaaah!
I feel like I am trying to utter a name-less -----.
//jo
I REALLY THINK WE SHOULD LOOK INTO FUNDING WITH KICKSTARTER
it allows us to fund not only our costs, but also to fund the ammount of time we would need to take off of work.....
but it also enables us to be completely autonomous, and is something I have wanted to try.
http://www.kickstarter.com/
we offer something to the participants in return, prints of our work perhaps, the book of our documentation
it allows us to fund not only our costs, but also to fund the ammount of time we would need to take off of work.....
but it also enables us to be completely autonomous, and is something I have wanted to try.
http://www.kickstarter.com/
we offer something to the participants in return, prints of our work perhaps, the book of our documentation
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
I rewrote the first paragraph and raised some questions about the second.
Bucarest? http://www.bucharestair.com/
Bucarest? http://www.bucharestair.com/
During Encounter, five artists will travel from their different cities of residence, to a city where none of them have ever been before. They will stay in the new city for ten days. The artists will go out on their own into the city, where they explore, engage, and interact with the city, drawing from their own artistic practice and perspective. They are aware of their surroundings. They develop an active relationship with the city Each day the group will meet together and share their thoughts and experiences, developing both their dialogue with the group and with the city.
Encounters; 2012 is about location; relocating to one place and dislocating from another. It questions how we navigate and move through a city; how we choose to relate ourselves, while in relation to a new city. These simultaneous experiences are played out as a conceptual frame that references the individual and shared experiences of moving from one place to another, feeling disjointed or connected to the surroundings, acting to promote a minority which is, or isn't our own, answering for national ideas or actions and struggling with a burden of history, tradition and culture. Don't want to sound critical but I feel a little bit that the word “burden” sets carries a sort of negative implication, If I reflect on this sentance I feel a bit like it touches the issues, that we already as others investigate a city which is not our own, , come with our own otherness into a culture with it's own traditions, maybe there is a way to reword it.
Encounters; 2012 can be shaped in whichever way the participants choose to do so. At the core of the project are issues that we all have in common; how we negotiate our lives around lines of inside/ outside, home/ away, majority/ minority, connected/disconected and how this relates to the place where we are at.
Encounters; 2012 attempts to establish a meeting point and dialogue, in which a group of people with very different perspectives can exchange ideas and experiences. Each participant is encouraged to explore the location in accordance to their own artistic preference, and at the end of the day, the group comes together in a dialogue concerning questions objects and experiences. There is no intention that the participants produce collective or individual work, or that a final “concept” is reachd. Rather, the project is partly intended to question and explore where, or when in a process, “art” takes place. In Encounters; 2012 the art takes place in the real time and space, engagement that is facilitated by the project. Encounters 2012 is an artist initiated and led project, developed through ongoing dialogue and text based exchange.
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