"It's Not Dry Yet"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/arts/design/28painting.html?emc=eta1

Lady Gaga & Beyoncé : alter movements



NYTimes Blog: Lady Power
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/lady-power/?scp=1&sq=stone%20feminism&st=cse

Lumiere Brothers 1899

March 8

"Bust" 2009: Carol Bove

"Walt Disney Products": Bertrand Lavier

Is the discussion of the crisis and chaos of contemporary art even more about the struggles of how to interpret art history/general history in a multi-layered, heterochromatic, whole world of the multiple? As we are all experiencing having too much to choose from, so is the historian whose job now is even more complex and overwhelming and with no previous examples and tools for interpreting this new kind of river of information. He/she must invent or find a more encompassing way of discussing a barrage of historical points of view; a more difficult task than for the artist who, able to start from his/her own island, now exists in an archipelago environment, seeking out pathways and traveling through signs.

Pauline Fondevilla

a·le·a·to·ry adj.
1. Dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain outcome: an aleatory contract between an oil prospector and a landowner.
2. Of or characterized by gambling: aleatory contests.
3. also a·le·a·to·ric Music Using or consisting of sounds to be chosen by the performer or left to chance; indeterminate: An object placed inside the piano added an aleatory element to the piece.
[Latin letrius, from letor, gambler, from lea, game of chance, die.]

According to Etnologue there are 6 809 languages in the world, however near the half of them is on the way to disappear totally. There is a paradox in the trying to hold on to ones culture and language in a globalized world. NB : “Alterglobalization …expresses the struggle for diversity” while at the same time trying to find common pathways to understanding and communication. This paradox is at the crux of the crisis. Eventually something always gets lost in translation. In reference to English attempting to reach the world as a language of business something is happening like in the game of telephone.

Language Fail:




“Form encounters new unity in copying/sharing/appropriating…form with a new use in a new combination.” NB

There is a metaphor here for referencing theater and choreography. Just as a script is appropriated, read and performed or a dance combination is interpreted, or a score played for the hundredth time the notation is translated, shared and used. Is visual art becoming closer to performing art in its taking of and making combinations of previous forms and movements? If a Picasso painting is copied or a book written word for word over again is it not similar to reading the music or performing notated choreography in a new time and space?

Labanotation: Symbols for Choreographic Movement

Small Dance Combination:




"A work of art today appropriates from other works and has ceased to be an end in itself but rather a generator for other activities." NB

The world has, since the oil crisis in 1973, become more aware of the end of progressions and has been facing an insecure, unknown future in terms of renewable energy. This event with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the advent of the technological advances over the last ten years, has created an awareness and a drive for artists to not only negotiate these changes but to express them with a sense of conscience in regards to the excesses of the 20th century. Raw energy is scarce so why shouldn’t artists draw from what is already available and renewable instead of adding more to the clutter?

"Is this the way you Measure the World?" 2008 Saadane Afif

"Exhibition View" 2008 Angela Bulloch

"Oh Dear Painter, Not Again 1,2,3" 2008 Jonathan Monk

John Armleder and Gerold Miller

"Fur Spaceships on Venus" 1999 Sylvie Fleury

"Del impenetrable nos podras zafar" 2008 Pauline Fondevilla

j o u r n e y a r t

Family Farm: Mathew Ritchie

According to Bourriaud we’re in a society governed by the quest for perpetual novelty. Since he feels we don’t expect novelty in art anymore or that it is not important, the role of art has changed in society (once again) and what is that role? I think that much of the art mentioned by Bourriaud is very novel and that even contemporary artists are by nature driven to find new inventions and original ways to express current themes. This is also expressed in the fact that artists are distancing themselves from “established fields and disciplines.” They are looking to creating new disciplines that may be more relevant to the 21st and coming centuries.

Kendal Geers

Painting used to be a window into the world and humanity; is film the new “window” into human emotions and is contemporary art taking on more the role of making us take a closer look at elements of media, entertainment, travel and other tangible products while film takes on the role of shaping consciousness? There seems to be less importance placed on emotion in visual art now unlike during modernism.

The idea that we are in a disposable world but if an art object is disposable it contradicts the idea that ‘cultural objects need to endure” and is an interesting paradox. If we are in a “precarious aesthetic regime” one of uncluttering, then the idea of leaving behind art that documents our times is not possible unless, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the art is documented digitally; much like our digital books. There will be no need for the tangible book/object to remain.

Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers. January 16-February 12, 2007

In many ways the accessibility of high-speed air travel has everything to do with this idea journey as an art form. Connecting, wandering and interpreting signs: cultural orientation can be altered in a matter of hours as never before. Bourriaud mentions contemporary paintings and its use of visuals that resemble cartography in the age of GPS and that all geography becomes “psychogeography.” One can simply look out of a plane window and see the landscapes from a cartographer’s vantage point. We are more and more seeing things from afar.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s 2001 underwater film Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam is a haunting poetic meditation on Vietnam’s journey into an unknown future.

Place is depicted but unidentifiable in much of contemporary art today often being “a place anywhere in the world.” We are by nature nomadic creatures and now that we are released from the bonds of agriculture and that the earth is known, we search unchartered territories/spaces in our dreams that is manifesting in our arts. It would seem we also seek new places of solitude in contemporary art, virtual realities and extraterrestrial fantasies because our world is becoming overpopulated and cluttered.

Mannequins Relies (2006) Tom Hirschorn