Wikipedia Remix (2009, 34.7MB, 6:19 min)
Another Wikipedia Art remix, this time a splendidly accurate riff
on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf from Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert
Category Archives: performance
Doron Golan – recent work
figure rocks square (2009, 16MB, 2:52 min)
figure and birdcage (2009, 45MB, 8:14 min)
Studies for Figure (Isabel Rosenthal) (2009, 5MB, 1:00 min)
figure and birdcage (2009, 5MB, 52 secs)
Some recent work from Doron Golan, of this manor.
And it’s quite extraordinary.
In general Doron’s work has been marked by, not so much
a refusal to pander to passing fashion, but a complete
lack of interest in it or acknowledgement that it’s even there.
He goes his own way, he explores what interests, excites
and moves him.( And so, moves us)
When a seam is exhausted he moves on without looking back.
There is no attempt to create an artificial, marketable, surface unity
(which is not of course to say that a real, deeper, unity is not there)
I believe Doron is constitutionally incapable of acting otherwise and
he’s made a body of work of great beauty, and one entirely lacking in cynicism.
In the last months he’s been working on these, at first sight very odd,
study type pieces, with, as I understand it, a group of actors in Tel Aviv.
His methodology is a first sight unpromising -there is the obsessive restaging
of rather obscure -sometimes personal, sometimes, I think, Biblical- scenes and images.
These are then subjected to what appear to me to be out of the box transformation-of-the-plane
type distortion.
Unpromising because if, say, you were teaching a student you would probably
attempt to restrain this tendency, in the same way as one would with over-use
of Photoshop filters.
The thing is though – he pulls it off.
This is not an easy, passive view though -you have to approach the pieces prepared
to open yourself to them, to engage, to think, to do some work.
The work is not cosy; it will not flatter you.
but there is a beautiful & harsh poetry at it’s heart.
An obvious point of comparison is Bacon
but actually I think Soutine is nearer the mark.
(As a key, a way in, I’m not even beginning to suggest an influence. Although it would
be nonsense to suggest Doron is somehow without influences they are wide ranging and
very assimilated; Samuel Beckett is actually the one nearest to the surface.)
I urge you to explore not only all these pieces but all the work of the last ten years or so.
If you have a heart and mind and are prepared to use them you won’t be disappointed.
Wikipedia Art/Wikipedia Heart – David Kent Watson
Wikipedia Heart (2009, 36MB, 3:12 min)
Wikipedia Art (2009, 15.3MB, 1:32 min)
Being two songs by David Kent Watson inspired by the Scott Kildall/Nathaniel Stern
Wikipedia Art project, which has engendered some huffing & puffing amongst the humourless & imaginatively challenged.
The songs are neat – skillfully made, performed and recorded, & beneath the surface whimsy
there’s some depth ( in particular “Heart” seems to found a whole new hybrid discipline of
epistemological meditation through popular song).
This is in keeping with the whole WA project which unlike so many art projects which claim
to investigate something ( & usually my heart sinks when I see the word) actually does
and very effectively too.
Not only that (and I would expect this from anything involving Stern, whose work in whatever medium
or genre, is always touched with poetry) there’s a wonderfully twisted lyricism* to the WA project, which is very difficult to sum up in the usually one line required for much second rate conceptualism -the Duchamp epigone crew- which is possibly why it seems to have mostly drawn responses ranging from surly to mystified and back to grumpy in discussion in places like Art Fag City and Rhizome.
Now, generously & mischievously, Kildall & Stern have thrown the whole thing open for remixing, which is where these songs appear**.
The remixes in turn form an ongoing contribution to the padiglione internet of the current Venice Biennale -here’s the open call for contributions so what are you waiting for?!
And of course, coming back full circle to David Kent Watson, clearly one to watch. Bravo.
* & I use the term precisely & advisedly, not simply as a term of general approbation.
What I mean is this: it’s the very not-rightness, surface clumsiness
of the WA project that makes it resonate so much. This is what those who want their
art laid out like the ABC or like wonder pills, miss. It’s the failure, or refusal, of glibness,
the stimulus to real thought, that spawns the poetry of it.
Even the language the Wikipedia serf-bureaucrats use as they flounder blindly, hilariously and painfully
seems to have been dusted with a kind of magic satire brush.
** D.o.I – I have a couple of things in there also.
3 Poems from August Kleinzahler
3 Poems (2008, 21.3MB, 6:05 min)
Extracted from a longer video recorded at the Unversity of Chicago
last year.
To my shame I knew nothing of Kleinzahler’s work until I read about him
in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago.
To my great surprise ‘Before Dawn on Bluff Road’ ( from the Guardian article)
had me blubbing like a baby.
Anyway – see what you think to the three here.
Discount Video
Moley’s Adventures – Chapter 3
Moley’s Adventures – Chapter 2
Tinjail – Dante
Sondheim in Second Life
Beam Me Up #1 (2009, 34.3MB, 1:50 min)
Beam Me Up #2 (2009, 9.5MB, 31 secs)
Beam Me Up #3 (2009, 12.4MB, 25secs)
unique blah blah blah genius blah blah blah nonpareil blah
inimitable blah matchless blah blah sui generis blah blah
nonesuch blah peerless blah blah blah sondheim
Edward Picot & Rachel – Moley’s adventures – Chapter 1
Chapter 1 (2009, 27.3MB, 4:49 min)
Edward Picot has made an intelligent and generous contribution to
the creation of a serious critical tradition around web based literature,
(although his interests are wide and by no means limited to the written word).
A lot of people, me included, have cause to be grateful to him for his
acute, measured but sympathetic assessments of their work.
Apart from his invaluable critical writing he’s also a writer and maker
of work himself.
One of the engines driving his recent creative work has been his
relationship with his young daughter Rachel.
His fantasy story The Puzzle Box,written for Rachel, was one of last year’s
delights.
Here he turns his hand to video in a more active collaboration with Rachel.
This is work that has its roots in a particularly English form of lo-fi
moving image storytelling (I know the late Oliver Postgate is a figure Edward greatly admires.)
Does it work? – in truth, not 100% – I think we feel we are trespassing slightly
on a very personal world. ‘Slightly’, though, is the operative word – there’s
something here, no doubt, & old fashioned as it may be in some
respects there’s something about the kind of adult child collaboration rendered
possible by the digital which is unlike anything previously -a kind of levelling
of the playing field…
Anyway, we’ll post all three episodes over the next weeks and allow you to
make your own minds up.