Two exhibitions

I went to see two really good exhibitions yesterday. Here are some thoughts:

First, Political/Minimal at KW…
The way I experienced it, this exhibition (or at least a lot of the work that I enjoyed) seemed to be about the legacy of minimalism in conceptual art and the way this relates to a dematerialisation of the object.

In the foyer there was Francis Alÿs’s video: Paradox of Praxis: Sometimes making something leads to nothing, in which he pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico until it melts into a wet patch on the pavement. And then in the first room, carrying on the theme of evaporation, was Hans Haake’s Condensation Cube, both of which involved a transformation of matter.













I like the way Alÿs’s work promotes walking as a productive activity. Maybe this video talks about a kind of disappearance of time and matter (as opposed to an accumulation of matter, which is the premise of so much art), and about an artistic practice which doesn’t have to be concerned with yielding a physical result, which might even be futile, but which at the same time embodies the transitory nature of all art…

Both works have to do with duration, the speed in which a change takes place, or in which something disappears. In Alÿs’s video the ice seems to melt quite rapidly, leaving a disappearing trace in the streets he moves it through, while in Haake’s cube, the movement or duration of the process is almost imperceptible, leaving you with that situation where you know a change or a transformation is taking place, and wanting to capture it, you concentrate your senses solely on that one object.

So there is a common theme of matter, materiality and transformation, but in a way, while Alÿs is advocating for the transitory, the ephemeral, in response to what he see as art’s “cult of the object”, Haake, in using a cube – the archetypal (minimalist) form, seems to be commenting much more on the legacy of minimalism, while subverting it by using it as the frame for a natural process, as ephemeral and unstable as the cube is inert and solid. It's a kind of static dematerialisation, in which the actual point of disappearance never occurs, but is framed indefinitely within this glass cube… but besides all that, it is also a really intriguingly beautiful thing.















Anyway, in the next room was a work by Tino Sehgal. To be honest, I was quite terrified of walking into the room, after pausing at the door and seeing a woman lying on the floor, hunched up against the wall, and moving very slowly in an exaggerated way. I knew it was Sehgal’s work, and from experience didn’t want to encounter it alone in case I ended up in some kind of awkward relational encounter. Finally I gathered courage and walked in, and the woman continued to roll very slowly along the wall, keeping her eyes on me.

Sehgal's resistance to re-presentation is almost an ideal form of a dematerialised artwork. There are no images, no objects, no wall texts to frame the experience, it is just an encounter (of which no two experiences can be the same), albeit one framed by the structures of the institutions in which it occurs.

It's interesting the way it invites voyeurism, but at the same time repels it. You end up relating to a person rather than an object, but at the same time it seems to be inviting you to objectify that person. In this way it highlights the kind of vision which the museum environment produces, and the power structures inherent in that subject/object divide. How do you look at an artwork that looks back at you?

There were a lot of other interesting works: Helen Mirra, (with stack of army and navy blankets) Felix Gonzales-Torres (with a stack of blank paper) Kitty Kraus (whom I hadn’t heard of before, but whose work looks really interesting) etc.

But one of my favourite, and showing the same work that I’d seen at her show at Parker’s Box, in New York, was Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt. In both exhibitions she displayed a huge black rubber ball filled with just enough air and helium to defy gravity and float in the middle of the room (Ground Control), as well as a video of an almost transparent flag blowing in front of an overcast sky. In NY she also showed a video in which two hands manipulate what appears to be a loop of white thread. Gradually you notice that there is something strange about the movements of the thread, that somehow it is not quite obeying the laws gravity, the thread floats slowly up and down with liquid movements. In fact, I think that the video is shot underwater, but there is no obvious way of telling. She also showed another text based video about the idea of “one minute silence”, and a series of photographs of barely perceptible oil spills on the surface of the ocean.








































Her work seems to employ a kind of weightlessness. Seeming effortlessly to defy gravity, or to hover on the threshold of visibility… I think ‘hovering’ is an apt descriptive term. I remember reading some press material while I was at the gallery and I noted one sentence down: “luring the unseen into substance”...

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Another Belgian artist with a vaguely similar concern is Ann Veronica Janssens, whose exhibition at Esther Schipper I also went to see last night. The work she was showing consisted mainly of models for large scale work she has produced elsewhere. The gallery had a sort of pseudo-laboratory set up, with many different objects and projections. Everything had the tone of a proposition, but in a way, all her work is propositional, never a static or finished statement, but open to a multitude of experiences.

I was particularly fascinated with Test pour le Théâtre National, in which a neon tube on a table flashes briefly every sixty seconds. I stared at it for minutes, but as hard as I tried I could not discern the flash of light at all. It may have been lost in the flickering yellow light which infused the space, or maybe it was beyond the limits of vision.

It is interesting also, how light physically becomes a material in her work. In one work, where a glass tank has been filled with water and paraffin oil, light seems literally to become matter as it diffracts through the different materials. In another, Rouge 106 – Bleu 132, red and green lights flicker rapidly at 7.5 Hertz, which is apparently the frequency of human brain activity. The sensory apparatus of the person experiencing it transforms the red and blue flickers into a barely visible bright white light. Light is the precondition of vision, yet it is strange the way it takes something like Janssens’ work to make it visible…


















This is the exhibition invite. I couldn't find any other images of the work I saw, but there is a really interesting article about her work here (also lots of other good writing on this site): http://www.hanstheys.be/about_theys/essays/avj_the_gliding_gaze.htm and other images: http://www.hanstheys.be/artists/ann_veronica_janssens/

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Thinking about the way Janssens makes light visible or observable makes me think about the quality of the light here. Even though my desk is in front of the window, I’ve turned my desk lamps on. The light outside is grey-tinged and pale, diffused by the vaguely overcast sky, even the shadows seem to be softer here. It gets dark by around four in the afternoon, making the day feel impossibly short, and waking in the morning is difficult because the light creeps up faintly only just before eight. It feels like there is something melancholy in the light here… (Maybe that is what helped spawn the great history of German Romanticism?) I’m not sure why light triggers such an emotional response. I suppose it has to do with the fact that we are, like most other creatures, inherently light sensitive. I read in A Natural History of Seeing, that we have something like a third eye – the pineal gland, which regulates our metabolism through its sensitivity to light. Apparently, without using our eyes, light still filters through our skulls to receptors in our brain, and even when we are still in the womb, light from outside helps our eyes to develop.

I am always shocked by the total difference in illumination when I come back to Australia after having been in Europe, especially at this time of year. I remember arriving at Melbourne airport a few years ago after having spent a few winter months in Europe, and being almost blinded by the harsh early morning glare. Maybe people who live here have learnt to see slightly differently from people on the other side of the world?

Anyway, I’ve started filming the light here for one minute everyday, maybe as kind of mapping of illumination… I guess I’ll see how it turns out at the end of the month…


















Light on the wall (the second is an average)

And, maybe inspired by Hans Haake's Condensation Cube, I filmed the condensation which appears on my window every morning...