Christian Marclay’s The Clock is built from film fragments showing clocks, watches and references to time, edited so the work follows the actual time of day for twenty-four hours. The clever mechanism is obvious. What interests me more is what happens to thousands of unrelated films when one rule connects them. Narrative disappears, but another structure appears. Editing can create relationships between images that were never meant to meet.
Drawing That Remembers Erasure
Silencing Part of an Orchestra
Samson Young’s Muted Situation began with a deceptively simple idea: what happens if one layer of an event is deliberately removed from what we hear? In an orchestra, muting pitched sound can reveal breathing, movement and physical effort that music normally hides. I like the thought that silence does not necessarily mean absence. Sometimes removing the thing we expect to hear exposes an entirely different composition underneath it.
https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/samson-young-unheard-sounds/
mplus.org.hk Samson Young: Unheard Sounds | M+ Museum Artist Samson Young explains the origins of his Muted Sounds series, in which musicians are instructed to perform without creating music
A Portrait Needs Its Surroundings
Gordon Parks argued that portrait photographers should leave the controlled studio and photograph people where they actually live and work. That sounds simple, but it changes what a portrait can contain. A room, workplace, gesture or background stops being decoration and becomes information about the person. Perhaps a face alone rarely tells us enough. Context can be part of the portrait rather than something to remove from it.
https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/press/exhibition/2024/5842/5842-walltext.pdf
#GordonParks #Photography #PortraitPhotography #DocumentaryPhotography
The Garden That Wasn’t a Garden
Kerry James Marshall’s Many Mansions emerged partly from the contradiction he saw in Chicago public housing projects carrying names such as “Gardens.” The painting places an idealised landscape against the reality suggested by the housing blocks behind it. Names can be tiny pieces of architecture too. Call somewhere a garden and language begins constructing a place that may never actually exist.
https://www.artic.edu/files/aa3ebf14-5f78-489a-a75f-2613336d614d/TX-CR1103.pdf
Hair Becomes a Line
Mona Hatoum made Composition with Circles using her own hair on handmade paper. At first the marks can simply look drawn. Knowing the material changes everything. The line once belonged to a body. Something normally cut away, swept up and discarded becomes evidence of physical presence. It is a remarkably small gesture, yet it makes the boundary between drawing and body difficult to locate.
https://shop.tate.org.uk/mona-hatoum-composition-with-circles-2016-framed/ed1029.html
Drawing That Remembers Erasure
William Kentridge repeatedly draws, erases and redraws charcoal images to make his animations. The previous state never vanishes completely. Smudges remain inside the next frame. That makes movement carry its own history. In a practice concerned with apartheid, colonialism and memory, the technique feels inseparable from the subject. The page remembers what has been removed, even when the image tries to move on.
Zeitz MOCAA William Kentridge - Zeitz MOCAA The major exhibition, Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work by William Kentridge opens at Zeitz MOCAA in August 2019.
Mario Left, the Clouds Stayed
Cory Arcangel removed almost everything from Super Mario Bros. and left only the blue sky and slowly scrolling clouds. No Mario, coins, enemies or goal remain. A game becomes a quiet moving landscape. What fascinates me is how little information is needed before recognition disappears. Remove enough function from software and the interface stops being a tool. It becomes an image with a memory attached to it.
Whitney Museum of American Art Cory Arcangel | Super Mario Clouds For this video installation, Cory Arcangel “hacked” a cartridge of Super Mario Brothers, the original version of the blockbuster Nintendo video game released in the United States in 1985. By tweaking the game’s code, the artist erased all of the sound and visual elements except the iconic scrolling clouds. On a formal level, the project is reminiscent of paintings that push representation toward abstraction: how many elements can be removed before the ability to discern the source is lost? Arcangel, who was trained in classical music, considers computers and video game consoles his instruments, and insists on mastering them prior to creative exploration; he will often learn a new programming language in order to develop a work. What might be viewed as nostalgia for the popular entertainments of an earlier era depends, in fact, on a rigorous conceptual approach to computer hard- and software as well as a refusal to participate in contemporary culture’s lightning-fast cycle of technological turnover.
A Glitch Becomes the Structure
Joan Jonas built Vertical Roll around a television malfunction: the rolling bar that appeared when video signals fell out of sync. Instead of repairing the error, she performed with it. Her body appears fragmented by the unstable image while sound follows its rhythm. I keep returning to that decision. Technology often becomes creatively interesting at the exact point where it stops behaving as intended.
A Sky Made From Fragments
Sarah Sze’s Tracing Fallen Sky combines steel, marble fragments, projected images and traces of the process that produced it. Physical objects and moving images overlap until it becomes difficult to decide where sculpture ends and image begins. I like that uncertainty. We increasingly experience the world through objects and screens simultaneously. Sze turns that ordinary condition into something we can actually stand inside.
https://www.fondationcartier.com/en/ways-to-visit/parcours-un-monde-reel
Fondation Cartier Parcours « Un monde réel » — Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain L’un des volets de l’Exposition Générale met en avant les relations entre sciences, fiction et création artistique. Il réunit artistes et chercheurs qui tentent d’imaginer d’autres manières de percevoir et de représenter le réel.
A Sculpture That Refuses One Shape
Lygia Clark wanted spectators to manipulate her hinged metal sculptures rather than simply look at them. Poetic Shelter belongs to this world of forms that can change through handling. What I find interesting is the loss of a single correct appearance. The artwork does not wait for the viewer in a finished state. Touch becomes part of its structure, and every configuration is temporary.
Music Without the Pianist
Samson Young’s Carillon includes a prepared Disklavier player piano alongside documents, books, tickets and personal objects. I like the contradiction of a piano playing while the performer is absent. Sound makes the archive temporarily physical again. Paper can describe a past, but a mechanical instrument fills the room with an event happening now. Presence survives even when the person producing it has disappeared.
https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/carillon-2019584/
mplus.org.hk Carillon (2017) - Samson Young | Objects | M+ Museum Discover some of the world’s foremost collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture.