ROCK MY WORLD

Sneak preview from Das Superpaper Issue 22 (out March 2012)

Curated by SuperKaleidoscope

View at Das Platforms

The Das Platforms website is up, and the Spectacle/Obstacle review from April’s Firstdraft show on Das 500 now has a URL. It is pasted below.

Sincerity
Michaela Gleave (2011) Image courtesy the artist

Spectacle/ Obstacle

Megan Garrett-Jones

Group exhibition by curatorial collective SuperKaleidoscope

28 OCT 2011 – 19 NOV 2011 · WEST SPACE · GALLERY 1
OPENING: THURSDAY 27 OCTOBER 2011 6-8PM

Gallery link here

SuperKaleidoscope examines the brighter and darker facets of spectacle. Spectacle Obstacle explores the way artists deal with the concepts of spectacle and optimism through installation, video and sound. Threads that will be explored include the origins of the spectacle as a captivating event, the spectacular versus the real and the spectacle as a means of capturing sensations of joy and delight.

Rebecca Baumann’s work encourages the spectacle in a poetic pursuit to manufacture a single joyous moment. Similarly, Michaela Gleave attempts to create a sensory spectacle in order to invoke a child-like sense of delight in the viewer. Justin Balmain creates an environment of visual destruction, the chaos of the aftermath of an event being the spectacle. Tim Brunige’s sound works and video sequences draw the audience into immersive landscapes. Using everyday objects, Pia Van Gelder is an inventor, transforming found materials and combining them with electricity to create the spectacle of an orchestra of technology.

On until the 1st October.

Meredith Birrell takes a peek behind the curtain…

You might be mistaken in thinking the art world has gone in for some cheap and tawdry entertainment at Firstdraft if you just looked in the front window. Inside a gold tinsel curtain shimmers provocatively. Part of Firstdraft’s emerging curator’s program, SPECTACLE/OBSTACLE is a group show that features installations, kinetic sculpture, video and photography. Yet it’s really the invitation to peer behind the glittering façade of the spectacle to the emptiness or ugliness beyond that is the serious business of this show. With such a theme, it might be tempting to take a bombastic standpoint, yet it is incredibly restrained and its logical flow-through allows for breathing space where conversations start to reverberate between works.

Gallery Installation (clockwise) SuperKaleidoscope, Universe, 2011, Mixed media, dimensions variable. Rebecca Baumann, Untitled, Cascade, 2010, Tinsel curtain, fan, 1.2k Selecon zoomspot
Pia van Gelder, Video Bells – Rimington Scales, 2011, Interactive 6 channel audio video installation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artists. Photography: Craig Bender

Rebecca Baumann’s glittering Untitled, Cascade marks the entry to the exhibition and functions as both a stage curtain and an obstacle. Do you burst through the middle or edge around the side? Its sense of fun sets a positive tone for the show, but it also makes one’s visceral responses an acutely self-conscious process. The viewer is now the participant. Perceiving is an active process, both in a phenomenological sense but also in the context of post-structuralist theory, where ideas of authorship and hierarchies of meaning (from artist down to audience) have been undone. As co-curators Sarah Mosca and Kim Fasher explain in their catalogue essay, “ the spectator is constantly observing, selecting, comparing and interpreting.” The works in this show demand audience participation. It is, after all, the audience for whom the spectacle exists, without one it loses all meaning.

Justin Balmain, AM.
Mixed media, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of artist. Photography: Craig Bender

In Justin Balmain’s installation, AM, a deconstructed memorial to deceased New York DJ, DJ AM, stands for the post-spectacle, the post-event, the death of the performance and performer. On learning of the passing of this popular cult figure online, Justin’s response was to make something that looked at the unpleasant side of celebrity culture. He first made the work in 2009 and has re-worked it for this show. When the lights go up and destroy the beautiful fantasy of the club environment, what is left, says Justin, are the “cigarette butts…passed out drunk people, people coming down, and the detritus of the night.” (via email, 2/5/11).

There is a kind of denial here too, for even as we see this ugliness, it is the beauty of the event that stays in our memory and the fantasy of celebrity lives on for the fans despite the observance of its dark underbelly. This refusal to see the darkness is underscored by the obstructing black mirrored wall that fronts and ‘props up’ Justin’s installation, an obstruction to our perception, but critical to the whole function of the spectacle. It is all façade and surface. The morning after, with all its destroyed artifacts and tackiness is a metaphor that functions here on several levels.

The penultimate spectacle, deep space, is explored in the collaborative piece by SuperKaleidoscope, Universe. Like a seventeenth century Dutch perspective box, the content is concealed in a wooden structure and can only be seen from each side, for which you have to get down on the floor to access. Yet the interior rewards with manifold reflections and perspectives created by mirrors, commenting on states beyond the tangible. I find a direct link between those golden age Dutch painters and their sophisticated visual puns and these artist’s reflections on pictorial flatness and depth, real and virtual space and the impossibility of a genuine representation of anything.

Michaela Gleave, Sincerity.
Sparklers and paint, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of artist. Photography: Craig Bender

Our powers of imagination and recall are required for Michaela Gleave’s work, Sincerity, where the title word is spelled out in sparklers on a mustard yellow wall. Again, Michaela forces us to question the genuineness of what we observe. It is an often touted view that ‘true’ meaning lies behind the presented mask, of our personas or of art, but there is just as strong an argument to be made for the locus of meaning to be right on the surface and that the distinction between false façade and inner truth is actually a false one. These questions have no definitive answers and this work opens up this conversation. On opening night when I was there, the question on everyone’s lips was, will the sparklers be lit? In a surprising twist and against the gallery’s initial intentions, the work was set alight and we all had to evacuate because of the smoke! In this way, the work became an even greater spectacle, just not the one everyone had probably imagined. Like Yves Klein’s 1957 work One Minute Fire Painting, in which 16 firecrackers were set alight in a blue panel, it is the transitory nature of the spectacle and the powerful memory it evokes that are critical to its meaning.

Artists from as far back as the mid nineteenth century talked about the spectacle as a paradigm of modern life, in which our senses are constantly dazzled by the array of diversions in the newly industrialised, urban word. This sensory overload has surely grown, especially since the advent of the internet. One of the questions this exhibition asks is, what are our blockages as perceivers and receivers of information? This exhibition interrogates our relationship with the spectacle – as relevant today as ever – not with the aim of finding answers, but more likely, of finding more questions.

SPECTACLE/OBSTACLE
Firstdraft Gallery, until May 15th

Greta Alfaro, Justin Balmain, Rebecca Baumann,
Michaela Gleave, Pia Van Gelder
Curated by SuperKaleidoscope
Photography: Craig Bender

Upcoming  April-May 2011 exhibition that I am included in at Firstdraft, curated by Kim Fasher and Sarah Mosca at SuperKaleidoscope.

SuperKaleidoscope http://www.superkaleidoscope.com/current-projects.php

Firstdraft Gallery

Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian

I would especially like to thank Sevak Dilanchian, Kim Fasher, Sarah Mosca, SuperKaleidoscope, and the National Art School Sydney for their help, support, encouragement and love. Thanks Y’all.

This recent work, A Room for Emma Goldman, is one I had been thinking of for some time now, and had the opportunity to realize for the occasion of the SuperKaleidoscope ‘Featured Artist’ page for november 2010. Upon that page is text written by myself, and a bio put together by Sarah Mosca, along with some imagery of the installation. For this (fuck you image) post the aim is to go into the ideas behind the work in some more depth outside of the SuperKaleidoscope site, which can be viewed here.

I’ve always considered this work (the initial idea at least) best functioning as a duality, a contradiction, between what one is viewing, through the projection, to what one is potentially hearing via the headphones. In this work, the audio is the image maker, being facilitated through an Apple iTunes visualizer setting, using the Fountain Music plug-in as a means to generate imagery through the sound as it is played through iTunes.

This particular plug-in was chosen purely for its visual qualities. I really wanted to produce imagery that was alluring and beautiful, that generated a visual form to function as something inducive of a certain state. Here, the state I was after was one of bliss, akin to the transcendent aims of psychedelia and mysticism. This becomes the platform to create a shock between how the actual imagery appears, and the vehicle which gives that imagery its form.

iTunes functions well as the location for the audio, and the projection through the visualizer as it adequately facilitated my purpose as a means to bring together the visual, with the aural, components of the work. The aim was to give form, through a visual language, to the text of Emma Goldman.

This visual element becomes duplicitous, determinate on the viewers level of interaction with the work, through the audio text streamed within the headphones. The audio within the installation, that facilitates the generation of imagery through the iTunes application visualizer, is a reading of Emma Goldman’s 1927 book Anarchism and Other Essays (available through LibriVox). Here, then, arises a contradiction between the ‘blissed out’ intent of the imagery, and the content that allows that imagery to become manifest. I was very much interested in the possibility for the negation of a visual state, or experience, upon contact with the means that allowed the illumination to become manifest.

With the headphones positioned with the beanbag’s, the invitation is to become comfortable before the work. Beanbag’s could be understood as a means to relax into a ‘blissed out’ type of space through their cushioning and enveloping of one occupying them. Certainly there is a reference to the Beatnik generation of ‘zoning out’ , facilitated through drugs, music, and psychedelia. On the flip of this, there is action, for it was in fact this generation that articulated the philosophies of people like Emma Goldman through protests, equality, sexual liberation, and destabilization of government. I like also the formal quality of coloured beanbag’s dispersed throughout the room. There is an interconnectivity of people within a space through the form of the beanbag, even though there exists a clear spacial separation between individuals. This is why I was adamant in their usage, even when they proved difficult to obtain and other options were more readily available for the installation.

At some future point I aim to discuss more in-depth the work of Emma Goldman and my interest in the philosophy of Anarchy in the context of what we now view as Subculture. I’m sure there is a dominant cultural thread that I am missing, and everything outside of this is either categorized as “kitsch’, or ‘sub’. Many subcultural groupings that I have experienced clearly have a lineage to the thought and outcomes of Anarchy. Punk is an obvious one, but skateboarding, disco and surfing culture have an invested location within ideas expressed in Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays. Some of these ideas and resulted sociological shifts, are what gives developments like Punk the possibility to exist.

A Room for Emma Goldman is a working project with an intent toward demystifying the stereotype of a male dominant expression of Anarchy, identified through the image of a young man hurling a bomb, crystalized through the May 4, 1886 Haymarket affair, where a pipe bomb was hurled at police, killing an officer. This image served to solidify public resent at the time toward the movement, and help form our (mis) understanding of Anarchist philosophy and action today: namely violence. Emma Goldman was arrested, jailed, deported and persecuted. She was however, often praised and celebrated as an academic and thinker, the outcomes of which are experienced day, and adequately negate the stereotype of Anarchism equating to destruction.

Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian

Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian

Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian

Photo credits: Sevak Dilanchian

Upon the framed work itself is placed black tape that becomes an obstruction into the imagery being presented. The motif for the tape came about in observations and interest in construction occurring around the city where windows, as yet without signage or inhabitants, would be made clear through the use of tape adhered to the surface to warn the public of the fact there is a window or glass sheeting ahead. These often take the form of a cross that runs diagonally corner to corner, here being the clearest signal of negation.

What also became significant to myself was another layer that existed that related to the act of looking itself. As with Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower paintings, where the viewer would be represented as reflection, these ubiquitous taped glass panels on renovation sites began to reinforce, for myself at least, the very act of looking itself. These simple safety mechanisms are actually put in place to make the public observe, through looking, a potential danger ahead, forcing one to become more aware of their vision in navigating space.

or…Reconfiguring Content Through Language (Text)

Here is a difficult post for me to get my head around, and one that I have definitely been putting off for some time. Basically it will aim toward observing some of the issues I am working through in regard with image proliferation, or saturation, as it exists, and is available, throughout the Internet.  Where is the potential for this visual information to be reconfigured, so that it exists as a new work of art outside of original intent?  What strategies are to be implemented to effectively alter context toward informing desired readings?

Within my own artistic practice I am very much interested in photography. This said, the realisation at this point in time is that the interest in this medium comes more from its use value, or function, rather than as a visual form in itself. On a critical level I myself found it extremely problematic to actually take my own photographic material. It just does not feel pertinent, or perhaps more appropriately, there is much more excitement in discovering the images others have made, in the objective relationship I have toward them, and the cultural significance that may be visually attached, notwithstanding, the cultural phenomena that is their source; the place of archive they now inhabit.

Thinking on a recent conversation with a colleague, John Bloomfield, regarding an upcoming show at Peloton, and his relationship to the photographic medium; obliquely follows some of my own considerations. Consciously directing discussion away from a Deluezian dialectic, following Barthes and his seminal ruminations on photography, Bloomfield’s position, as I understand it, is one of acceptance, almost symbiotically, of the photographic medium within his own painting practice. This is no trivial detail. Photography has been the single most important influence upon the painted medium since the use of oil paint. Within this artists practice I see the photographic functioning as painting, importantly, outside of the dialogue that is dictated by modernist, through to Postmodernist, considerations upon the act of photography as a visual institution.

With this slight tangent, I am aiming toward an understanding of this functionality touched upon in the context of photography. Artists, I am arguing, have realized that the parameters of discussion relating to photography have shifted. I certainly can’t help but wonder if the functional shift within this medium, through digital formations like Flickr and Photobucket, cheaper cameras and printing, phone cameras, and more to come, liberate visual artists, like Bloomfield, to exploit, or explore, other implications outside of these past dialogues? If so, photography then has emerged as another visual tool at the disposal of the contemporary visual artist. Hierarchies have became destabilised and artists are much more willing to negotiate an idea using whatever visual language is out there toward their own purposes. This varies from the Modernist hangover where a responsibility, or allegiance, toward a particular medium, style, or whatnot, is indistinguishable from holistic praxis.

An immediate problem that presents itself in re-using photographic material is this placement or context that locates the imagery outside, or in a more interesting interstice, than display, of the chosen work (as pointed out by my supervisor Su Ballard following my MFA seminar presentation). Merely displaying serves no purpose and is artistically lazy. The problem remains however to successfully reform the imagery outside this area of display and into a new formal placement of purposeful intent, and criticality.

One area of focus within my practice is manipulating chosen images from my collected photographic archive on the computer, and arranging them somehow into new modes of interpretation and understanding. The problem is realizing new forms to make this task possible. The first area of praxis I am working through is changing context through subtle, or non-intrusive means. By creating an environment for the images to function within, independent of their original source, the intent is that alternate registration is obtained through this act of placement, or displacement, dependant on your position.

The two images of the male and female portraits above are configured using such a visual structure. Each a webcam self-portrait (although I feel this is an inaccurate terminology on my part) these people have taken and posted online, I imagine, under the auspices of social networking. My interest in this as subject came out of the space where personal and private collides in a very formal way. There is an engagement with the screen (looking), and through posting, indication of an awareness of the broader online community, purging this of an intimate communicative act. What does this act do the individual? To what purpose? In any case, by taking these separate images out of the ‘computer’ space, and into an actual space, with actual form, the photographs, being placed opposite each other, enter a new form of dialogue. The images, detached from the online, take an alternate registration through relationships created within their placement and interaction within new visual constructs.

The second method in reconfiguring context is more intrusive through the use of text, or literature, to successfully (and most evidently) direct new readings for the imagery being re-used. Although interested in both applications, I am particularly curious about this direction for the implications that exist beyond this project, and consequences for broader artistic viewing and understanding within exhibitions, Museology, and other relative functions. Important for my current considerations with pre-existing imagery is the manner in which wall text functions toward understanding and viewer comprehension of works of art within their exhibits.

Presently, I am not aiming to make an argument for, or against, exhibition wall text. What is of interest is the methodology and mechanism institutions implement in directing viewer engagement and experience within their spaces. Such texts sit anywhere from purely didactic information relating to artist, title, material, provenance, etc; toward full explanation and artistic intent regarding artworks. These evidently, become very powerful devices in negotiating the public not only around an exhibit, but in establishing relationships with individual works and artist’s practices.

The possibilities for manipulating meaning and shifting context in my own re-use, or remix, of pre-existing photographic imagery become infinite. If Magritte raised the point that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). Rene Magritte La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) 1928-29.), text then, is able to function in a way that potentially tells us anything. As long as there is a part in us that wants to believe it.

The above is a screen-saver work that I made after arriving in Sydney from Dunedin. With no studio I turned to the computer as a means to create work that I was starting thing about whilst in New Zealand. This initial exploration into constructing work came out of my time spent researching and thinking about the space, and relationship, with being within the space of a computer, as object, and the virtual space that is the territory of the Internet.

After making this work I discovered the Twitter feeds of the artist On Kawara that relate to his telegram works, regularly posting “…”, followed by, “I AM STILL ALIVE”. This successful usage of the medium, or platform, Twitter, articulated what it was that interested me as an underlying proponent of social networking on the Internet. It seemed so much of the use value of such sites really functioned as a form of online graffiti, affirming to others that “I am here”, or in On Kawara’s instance, “I AM STILL ALIVE”.

I’m giving away the YOU screen-saver to anyone who wishes at no cost. Just contact me through the ‘Contact’ page under the header with your computer type and specs, and I will reply with information on how to install as a screen-saver if your system supports it.

Some of the most recent investigations being made (aside from a proposal being made for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery) within the studio is a series of digital works that look at web-based communication and information delivery. With Something More Real the text comes from actual news events from the date 20th February 2010. The accompanying A Quest for Something Different is a stream of my own thoughts which are directly configured to relate to Twitter feeds on the Internet. Each word used is added onto a coloured background (or alternate black and white) and run at .05 seconds each, creating a dizzying succession of colour, and a stream of undecipherable text that aims to function similarly to web information.