|
The exhibition curators (Françoise Ninghetto, curator at Mamco, Catherine Pavlovic, assitant at Mamco and André Iten, director of the Biennial) have tried to show a large panel of the many uses of sound and music in contemporary art. From pure physical phenomenon transforming the perception of space to the use of music as a cultural (and industrial) product. Sound can be the very focus of the work, as is the case with Ann Lislegaard or Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; soundtrack is sometimes principal, leading the course of images (Pierre Bismuth, Eva Marisaldi, Martin Kersels). Music, its cultural codes, its production structures, its dramatic impact are at stake (Christian Marclay, Adrian Piper, Jeremy Deller). Nearer to a social critic of the fashions and utopic trends in pop music (Mungo Thomson, Sam Durant), or to the techno world (Sidney Stucki, Alexandre Bianchini), and last but not least the compelling story of rock’n roll and country music (Pipilotti Rist and Rodney Graham).
Alexandre Bianchini
Born in 1966, lives and works in Geneva
Pexandre Bianchini made drawings and collages, super-8 films and installations before he started with more cineman oriented projects. «Le chemins des fins» (1998) «Les mystères de l’ouest» (1999) and «Do you remember Tino Ranch» (1999) were large screen installations in dark rooms. Editing is for Bianchini a new form of collage, making frequent use of filmed photographs and always mixing several levels of reference, going from intimate images shot with friends to TV or feature-films excerpts.
Alexandre Bianchini’s last video, «The Undiscovered Country» is also screened in the Focus section of the Biennial.
Alexandre Bianchini, The Undiscovered Country (présenté dans la section FOCUS)
Pierre Bismuth
Born in 1963 in Neuilly-sur-Seine; lives and works n London.
Pierre Bismuth has long been working on signs and codes, concentrating on language (surnames, patois, commercial logos). Since the mid 90’s, he has been almost constantly interested in cinema, with several approaches centered on breaks in the object, in the narration or in the space. During the 8th Biennial of Moving Images in 1999, he produced a work consisting in microphones amplificating the noise of the street in the void exhibition room, the windows of which were thus suddenly turned into screens. In «The Party» (1997) and in «Post Script/Passenger» (1996), he used movies (respectively de Blake Edwards et Antonioni) as total perception phenomena (sound et and image), broken down into fragmentary objects (two simultaneous screenings of two different aspects or interpretations): on one screen, you can see the film, but mute; on the other, the «text» of the film, as it is heard, understood and restituted by a dactylographer. «The important thing to me is that the film and its description carry the same value; you cannot talk about original and about alteration. The written text is an event per se, withits own qualities and its autonomy». (P. Bismuth). His very recent works turn bak to words (Venice Biennial, 2001) and languages («Collages», 2000): newspapers are manipulated by duplicting some images in different columns.
Lee Bul
Born in 1964 in Korea, lives and works in Seoul.
Lee Bul is one of a few Korean artists who began to take part in major international exhibitions at a young age. As a graduate of Hongik University's Fine Art college, she began her career as a sculptor but she soon engaged in street performances in which she wore monstrous costumes to criticize the adorned beauty of women. She gained widespread attention through sensational works provocative sculptural pieces that self-consciously emphasized artifice, kitsch and decoration dealing openly with issues of the body, particularly the feminine body. Her artistic production developed dynamically, encompassing installations featuring fresh fishdecorated with brilliant sequins, huge inflatable "monuments" inviting audience participation, sculptures of feminine cyborgs, and videoinstallations dealing with elements of contemporary Asian popular culture, such as Karaoke. She is now one of the most prominent Asian artists on the international art scene, receiving high recognition in Europe and America, and a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Over the years, her preoccupations have deepened to include meditations on the shifting boundaries, both actual and symbolic, between the external and the internal, the skin and what lies beneath, the self and the world beyond.
Lee Bul, Live Forever (production still), 2001
Janet Cardiff et George Bures Miller
Janet Cardiff , born 1957, George Bures Miller brn 1960, both in Canada, where they ive and work.
Janet Cardif has worked with audio since 1989, incorporating sound into her installations and developping what has become her ownunique art form: the site-specific audio walk. Her pieces work intensely with our perceptions : tilting our reality so that we risk losing our ability to differentiate the real ffroom what her voice tells us. We hear words spoken directly behind us and whip around to find emptiness; we hear a fire burning, and we see on the installation video. Weaving drama around the ubiquitous, juxtaposin g reality with ficiton, Cardiff and Miller lure us into a parallel world. She collaborates frequently with her partner George Bures Miller, who has his own kinetic sculpturepractice. «Even inour separate works there is some crossover. ... Traditionnally the art world has tried to define artists as if they were a product. When we collaborate, it’s like mixing brands, like trying to sell Tide with Ajax, But a little confusion is good, i think.» (in art press 269, Summer 2001
Jeremy Deller
Born in London in 1966, lives and works in London.
“Warhol said that pop art was about liking things, whereas for me Folk art is about loving things.” This statement by Jeremy Deller indicates the nature of his relationship to the various social groups with which he has collaborated, whether it be acting as the curator/facilitator of The Uses of Literacy (1997), an exhibition of art works produced by fans of the Manic Street Preachers, or as in his current work in progress - Folk Archive - collecting and documenting artefacts and events from around the country (with Alan Kane). Other projects include Acid Brass (performance and CD - 1997) and Unconvention (Centre for Visual Arts, Cardiff - 1999). He has collaborated with Karl Holmqvist on the work Now it is Allowable. With his projects he demonstrates that pop music, brass bands as well as acid house music can be diverted from their basic function as commercial traps for mass consumers and become opportunities for creative social interactions.
A friendly fanatic, Jeremy Deller appears as a mediator or an event’s investigator. Inspirated by typical teenager and young adults’ codes; he investigates mass culture signs, he reversed a popular culture (and art is part of that) which is so familiar and so shared, it can be shocking when you find that it's actually so different. At Home moved art and popular culture to a new residence where they set up a home together.
Sam Durant
Born 1961 in Seattle, lives and works in Los Angeles.
The artist investigates many fields of representation, from the modernist ideals that emanate from architecture of the signs produced by the late 60’s counter-culture, he focuses his researches on the question how a myth can be built.His drawnings, photographs or installations refer to precise moments of cultural History. His works analyse the mechanisms of fascination and its psychological effects on a generation, like his, who only experienced these times through medias. Sam Durant addresses the collective memory and its relation to history. Entropy in Reverse is a reversed version of the Maysles brothers' documentary on the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, which with the death of Meredith Hunter, stabbed by a Hell's Angel, marked the end of the hippy era. Durant himself uses in this context the word “disintegration” (instead of the desired integration, which predominated in the action of West Coast Woodstock), backed up by the reversal of image and sound, which gives rise to a confusion which is not always perceived. In his works, Durant is attempting connections between events, which only through connection appear necessary
Rodney Graham
Born in 1949 in Vancouver, where he lives and works.
Since 25 years, Graham has been producing a complex set of works, includiing drawings, maquettes, photographs, videos and musical projects. Following his interest in universal stereotypes and established genres, influenced by Freud, Graham systematically questions the notion of authorship. He stands aside to appropriate the clichés of the mediums he uses, thus creating a new identity each time. This process is very clear with «How I Became a Ramblin’Man» (1999), (which is part of a trilogy with «Island», 1997 et «City Self/Country Self (Paris Street Scene 1865)», 2001) in which Graham turns himself into a lonely cow-boy This short film assembles as it samples a plethora of devices, stles, shots, and structures from Western movie, made-fr-MTV-music-video, and the echt advertising image, the Marlboro man, «the last survivor of the Western male in the heroic mode» according to writer Larry McMurthy. From these disparate sources, Graham builds a seductive work, mock-cyncal, wildly romantic and earnestly sentimental, which finally eludes classification. This «portrait of the artist as a lonely man» can be compared to another of Graham’s films «Aberdeen» (2000) made in tribute to Kurt Cobain, deceased singer and leeader of Nirvana.
Rodney Graham, A Little Thought, 2000
Martin Kersels
Born 1960 in Los Angeles, lives and works in Los Angeles.
Martin Kersels draws on the worlds of performance, film, video, popular and experimental music, and mechanical science for his inspiration and materials. He assembles mechanical machines made of found objects, moving parts, moving images, and sound. He employs humor, pathos, and kinetic energy to create works that explore the expressive potential of -as well as the inextricable connection between- the machine and the individual.
Kersels, who began as a performance artist, applies the imperatives of that discipline to sculpture, creating new forms that he calls “performative objects.” Whether a baby grand piano that winches itself across the gallery floor, a desk wired to trigger recorded musical scores as business is transacted, or a rubber band-powered prosthetic leg that frantically kicks the gallery wall, Kersels' constructions all share an innate sense of theatricality. They follow their own choreography, play their own soundtracks, and occasionally take pratfalls. The artist also includes himself as a performer in many of his works, either as a figure dancing on a tiny video monitor, as a street performer caught in stop-action photography, or as a disembodied voice on a submerged speaker yelling to raise the temperature of the water around it. Whether static or dynamic, silent or wired for sound, each of Kersels’ works is animated by its own distinct personality, an irrepressibly human spirit.
Ann Lislegaard
Born in Norway 1963, lives and works in New York.
Regarding Ann Lislegaard’s works, the american artist Matthew Buckingham has stated the following: “If perception is how an individual experiences the world and cognition is how an individual understands the world, then Lislegaards work locates itself in the space between these two processes.” By questioning the development of spatial and temporal knowledge Lislegaards work reflects the spatial and temporal development of knowledge itself, revealing that all cognitive experiences have social origins where there are no simple answers nor any innocent questions.
Christian Marclay
Born in 1955 , lives and works in the United States.
Since the 70’s, uses all sorts of audio recording and transmitting materials, as well as detritus from the music industry to construct his collages and his performances; he used to perform in art centres and in clubs long before scratching and DJs became fashionable; he is a fully skilled musician, has recorded many cd or vinyle disks, while continuously working visually, producing sculptures, collages or photographs. He will show an installation at the Mamco and screen his video tapes at the Centre for Contemporary Images during the Biennial.
“ The intimate relationship between the visual record and recorded sound is the driving force of his art. But tied to that fundamental dialectic is another: that of personal space and public performance. from the pillow woven out of audiotape containing the complete recorded works of the Beatles to hhis teenage-bedroom fantasy poster of himself as arock star, Marclay has returned again and again to the place where private listening shades into public performance, and vice versa.” (Russel Ferguson, in Le son du silence, catalogue of «Amplification»)
Christian Marclay also screens a video program in the Focus sectionof the Biennial.
Christian Marclay, Guitar Drag
Eva Marisaldi
Born in 1966 in Bologna, Italy, where she lives and works.
Eva Marisaldi’s works force us to perfrom a reconnaissace exercise. Be they the endings of famous films embroidered on cushions («Disegni persi», 1996) or be they small plaster reliefs («Senza Fine», 2000, at Venice Biennial 2001), the works enlarge individual perception within the collective imagination, like for instance the cinema, with its kisses end tears or like handcrafts (specifically when feminine). The subtles variations and multiplications of points of view only seem to fill the missing point at the centre of marisaldi’s work. There are no shortcuts; the explorationof identity is always referring to the encounter with another, and only offers temporary assumptions. The awareness of the limits does lead to an opportunity of real dialogue and freedom of parcourse.
Eva Marisaldi, Pale Idea
Adrian Piper
Lives and works in the US
Adrian Piper does not defines herself as an artist but as a cultura activist; since more than 20 years she has been questioning race and gender topics, being a black woman in a cultural and artistic world dominated by white men. üiper’ws works are close to conceptual art in their simplicity and in their direct focusing on a topic. But the autobiographic element is always present, functionning as a concrete link between art and life. «Funk Lesson» (1983), one of her most praised works, stages Adrian Piper herself teaching a group of adults how to dance on a typical black music.
Pipilotti Rist
Born in 1962 in Grabs (Switzerland),lives and works in Zurich
Pipilotti is not interested in using video to criticise the media or to provide phenomenological reflection. She is interested in television as the jewel of culture pop. She follows radically on from MacLuhan and Nam June Paik, in the middle of the global village. In her monumental environments, (first one being La Chambre, an installation with a giant piece of furniture, 1994) she takes advantage of the sound and graphic potential of the television, and considers them as parts that form an atmospheric whole, consisting of design, fashion, sculptures and films and the omnipresence of music, which immerse the viewer into environments which have no clear cut boundaries or points of reference. Although she plays herself in many of her videos, she does not always identify herself with her artefacts, but instead keeps an ironic distance, capable of being rebel and flirt. She uses a multitude of everyday objects (clothes, handbags, furniture) and designs her works as clips - coloured, lively, funny, sometimes aggressive, brief but as effective as commercial designers. The difference is the systematic introduction of elements of the unexpected, stripes, broomsticks, violent and blotchy colours, hazy and trembling images, saturation sound clashes. For Pipilotti this niche is the possible niche for the emergence of the poetic. Moving art, false naivety, these are the spearheads of Pipilotti’s work, close to childhood dream world, familiar and totally utopian.
Sidney Stucky
Born in 1965, lives and works in Geneva
Techno culture, dance, parties, concerts are note only references in Stucky’s works; he really produces vinyles, he really organizes DJ evenings and is himself a well-known DJ. In the fild of visual arts, he produces flyers, wall paintings and computer animated videos. Electronic music is a rythmic pattern transposed into visual language.
Mungo Thomson
Born in 1969 in Davis California, lives and works in Los Angeles.
Mungo Thomson is able to turn the ideas that run through his work in on themselves and off again without collapsing their mechanism. His works often plays with the limit between art and non-art, showing his works in public spaces like bus stops, they merge in the cityscape. For example, The Collective Live Recordings of Bob Dylan, 1963-1995 (1999), an installation that brought together a recording and posters that were also displayed outside the gallery on public benches, as if they were part of an advertising campaign that reffered to the Margo Leavin Gallery. The original recording is a selection of live songs by Dylan from which Thomson has eliminated the music, keeping only the applause of the audience, their shouts and few remarks by the singer, “I believe in You”, “Thank you,” etc. This CD gives informations about recording processes or about the ambience’s evolution during the concert. The CD cover is the same as the original one. It could be considered as a portrait of an artist with the means of his work’s reception. On the other hand, it could also be understand as a specific archive, a document on mass culure, in an attempt to demonstrate that art is defined by the crowd and not only by the artist alone.
|
