Carl Kostyal 1: Mike Bouchet etc

Today I tried a new gallery that seems to have made itself the new "it".
Artists that were showing their work there were Mike Bouchet, big paintings, and Yngve Holen, Katja Novitskova, Pamela Rosenkranz och Timur Si-Qin (mixed media).
And I was struck by the power of hipness, everyone there looked intensely arty, young, blackclad in 90sstyle and hungry for connections and success. I also saw a world famous pop artist there. She seemed tired and vulnerable(?). I hope she is well. Anyhow.

Nothing I saw of the art made me feel anything interesting or think anything new. It all felt flat and pricy. It was decoration for people who like to think they like contemporary art, and the pieces looked like you would have to pay some to get some. I dont know, it felt sort of like stuff you'd find at a fair, and not neccessarily an art fair. Perhaps the art itself was decontextualized and would be more interesting if combined and contextualized differently. Although I must say that the hamburger paintings, when seen together like this just felt slapstick hipster. Oh so that someone could have an oil painting of their favorite burger on the wall? How anti-establishment.... how in the face of established traditions and more deep-going values.

I was also struck by the perfection and expense in the sheer material and method, the slick finish the works had made me think of design and industrial design. There seemed to have been an idea and then a luxurious "print out", and the distance between the artist as maker and the work was remarkable.

 I dont know actually who has made these pieces (but one of the names above I gather). If anything I liked those above, and the lizard baby (see below). I like the form, although the hearts were a bit over the top (middle pic) and the material. But the fact that the materials are so expensive and the method so clean feels a bit, over-invested somehow. The same value in as out. Does that make sense? Seen like this, on the computer screen I like them better. Odd, dont know why.

And the lizard.

 
 Lizard: Its printed on metal (aluminium?), very neatly, reflected the light awesome, but the same as above, it feels very pricy, targeted directly toward a more wealthy strata and almost like something you would find on a industrial design fair to draw peoples attention.

Hm.
The whole thing also felt very unpolitical. Almost void on and standpoint for anything.

Stockholm
150509

ART ACTIVISM!!!! ! ! !

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A note to remember on the art-activism article by Sinziana Ravini in DN on the 26th of January 2013. 

1) Good article, read it. I would link to it here but haven't been able to find it either in SWE or ENG. 

2) The contenta being that the curators of the Berlin Biennale 2012 and Documenta 13 by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev were least to say inspired by an activist aesthetic/ (strategy?) in the forming of the two events. Ranging from inviting Occupy Wallstreet to occupy the Biennale space (you don't occupy something if you are invited to stay there...) (Berlin Biennale) to social gatherings where the visitors to the biennale could meet and eat couscous with refugees from Sahara and political slogans such as  "This is not your museum, this is your action space"..

> Ravini writes [my translation; see original Swe text below] The problem as I see it is that the political art looses its power when comissioned by big organizations like Documenta, as well as biennales and institutions that seek intellectual cred (1). She also writes Personally I got a kick out of it since it was enough to talk to the activists, artists and curators to discover the seriousness and political will behind it all (2).

But then, doesn't this lead back to the same problem as always = there is no bad guy. I personally believe very few people (if any) are innately evil - and we instead have to fight against is the potential disasters caused by  our well-meaning desires to do good mixed with general comfortabillity and selfishness. I don't think anyone at either the Berlin Biennale or Documenta would ever say "Yes, actually I don't care much for these issues but right now Occupy Wallstreet is really "in" and I also want some intellectual cred".... I'm quite sure they don't event think like that when they're alone in their villain's lair....

But still. There is nothing new about these forms of activism, so what is the mechanism that suddenly makes this art? (Is it made art?). What does the artworld get out of it? Is it the artists, driven by social-political consciousness to "do good" that decides to renounce art making for activism > but then, why call it art? Why place it in an art context that swallows it up without hesitation? Doesn't that somehow make it an aesthetic issue?

It seems as if the ideology and the activism itself becomes the new aesthetic mediums. Is this really political then? Or new? I would say no since these types of activities are already established practises and the only thing new about it is that they take place in a contemporary art environment (that effectively counteracts the political by "aesthetizising" the events). But is it art then? Yes, but only if we accept it as purely aestethic events, and its actors as mainly interested in the aestethics of social relations and politics. 

Ideologies and social relations used as (and as interchangeable as) different colours of paint or different expressions of form. The cultural event being the canvas upon which the image is painted, equally other to political struggle and reality as the white cube and the frame. But mindblowing by its sheer nerve and irony. 

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(1)"Problemet som jag ser det är att den politiska konsten förlorar sin kraft när den betälls av stora organisationer som Documenta, liksom biennaler och institutioner som söker intellektuell kredd"

(2)"Själv fick jag en kick av det, för det räckte att börja prata med aktivisterna, konstnärerna och curatorerna för att upptäcka allvaret och den politiska viljan bakom det hela."

Sinziana Ravini "Radikala konstaktivister på frammarsch"

Note: In the article Ravini also writes about a series of more successful examples of political art/activism like the Yes Men, Pussy Riot, Kultivator, etc. She writes: No, the true art activism functions like a thief in the night, it gets in where it is not welcome and succeeds both in destabilizing and change the order of things where it ends up.(3)

(3)"Nej, den sanna konstaktivismen fungerar som en tjuv om natten, den tar sig in där den inte är välkomnas och den lyckas både destabilisera och förändra ordningen den hamnar i". 

Stockholm

13-02-02 

on IRONY/ Opinions are a thing of the past -------------->>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A man I met on a party said to me yesterday that
"OPINIONS ARE A THING OF THE PAST", 
(...well well, are they now, not on this website...but maybe then I am a thing of the past...)

Stockholm
13-01-13 

Brief notes relating to this (subway scribbles on the inside of some book:
Why do I like Wing's singing? (well.. it isnt that I find it good....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovEASuIqVbY )

 

What  the ironic class craves are the products of someone elses naive care and will to respond in a somewhat serious way to whatever goes on around them. To want and to care and to produce is a less developed state. The ironic detachment indicates superiority in conceptual understanding and rational development. Opinions are a thing of the past. Instead, the individuals of the ironic class facilitate the opinions of others - they make art like this, and culture and money.  Television shows, reality shows, radio shows, political debates, artworks, music - its not about making something new instead sampling, collecting, arranging,  presenting, moderating, distributing,  CURATion. 

Note; I read a critique recently that Google,Youtube, FB essentially earn a bunch of money on advertising and market research and this and that because we use Google, and Youtube to read and watch things produced by people who might never get paid a dime for their work. Its clear that the production side of things is out of fashion.  

As a producer its much harder to just stop doing something something as soon as it isn't the coolest thing anymore. As a producer its about continuity, to do your thing and to get good at it. But to stay ahead of the wave you need flexibility, constant update and then its better to be the facilitator... you get all the cool by association - YOU FOUND THIS ARTIST, YOU FOUND THIS CRAZY ECCENTRIC for your Documentary, YOU HOST THe SHOW WHERE PEOPLE CAN SHOUT THEIR OPINIONS OUT. But you are above it. Opinions are a thing of the past.

And then it comes back, as enter/info-tainment and the ironic creative apolitical non-engaged class consume someone elses life force becuase they are dead inside. They facilitate the performance, watch someone else perform, and watch with jelousy and disgust and incredulity.
Oh and I think I am one of them....

Stockholm
130114 

AWESOME ARTICLE ABOUT IRONY 
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/?hp 
article is by -->By CHRISTY WAMPOLE

130114 

ON the onGoing Catastrophy

On a previous note. What to call this.. "style"? Its awesome.
www.adventuresofbarbiebarbie.com::::::::

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
and Lings cars
http://www.lingscars.com/

 

Visually it connects to the Ryan Trecartin, Captain Credible, Petra Cortwright hysteria that I have been mentioning earlier - what is it with this (?) that feels so strangely….precise in its description (or rather existence within and mirroring) of contemporary culture.
Im gonna try to answer my own question but it will sound like crap:

It is hysteric yet poetic.
It is violent, abusive, vain, post gender, post politics, post meaning.
It is the hyper presence of the sign disconnected from any significance.
Lots more, unlimited but less. 

I'm reading Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies right now (and since like half a year back..). Not being a philosopher or anything I can't lay claims on totally understanding or correctly interpreting what he's talking about but since this site is anonymous I can state my uneducated opinions anyway (yes I know this sounds defensive and I feel defensive). He talks about this stuff though:

"The transpolitical is also this: the passage from growth to excrescence, from finality to hypertely, from organic equillibria to cancerous metastases. This is the site of of a catastrophe and no longer of a crisis. Things rush into it at the rythm of a technology, including soft and psychedelic technologies, which drag us ever further away from any reality, any history, any destiny".  pg 46

And then, here somewhat out of context; "once it seemed to present itself as a revolution; today it ends up as special effects. And terrorism itself is only a gigantic special effect. However, this is not because no meaning is intended. Against the general transparence, terrorism wishes to call on things to regain their meaning again, but does no more than accelerate this sentence of death and indifference." pg 62-63.


ON Paris Hiltons Dog that will soon make an appearance in my work; Hi Doggie!
I think its extremely exciting to spend so much time and attention on something so ultimately trivial - Is this the artist way corresponding to a sad teenagers cutting up their arms? It feels like an insidious and sexy self-rape. Seductive for sure. Its a wilful and violent handover with the purpose of really proving that there truly aren't any boundaries to this state - the state of indifference, irony and pointlessness. Which is a point of liberation, because without meaning there is no boundaries. Anything is within reach. 

 















 
Stockholm, will go back to studio where I might have left my wallet (hopefully). 
Eat something first though.
13-01-06

AVATARVARO

AVATARVARO

To be the body without the mind.
To reflect with passive distance on the actions performed by the body, as if they were not one's own.
To experience proximity to another person freed from the isolation of the “I”.

In the meeting of avatars there is complicity and trust, a twinkle of an eye, a silent undertone.
Whilst the operators'  isolated “I”s desperately attempt to overcome the undefinable divide between them the avatars are already there, they are already mobilizing.
They have found that they have something in common, in the midst of freedom from power and responsibility. .
And perhaps this experience of community is about (for once) ending up  on the "right" side in the great simplified Revolutionary drama - without hypocracy or divided identities.

In all of this, the hand-over becomes a happy one, like a romantic form of apathy.

Why do we want to hand ourselves over like this?
Is it not enough to be spectators in the society and time we are living in, do we also want to be spectators to our own lives, to the actions performed by our own bodies? Maybe it is the expression of a generations impotence in relation to the global problems and power-structures that define their lives. Why are we supposed to take responsibility of something we have no power over,  of problems we haven't created?

Or perhaps it isn't a time-specific behavior, rather the opposite; it is this readiness to mental slavery and freedom of responsibility desired by our parents and their parents that have shaped the power-structures that we are now living with.
In that case, we should rather free ourselves from romantic notions from apathy.
Its all the same in the end though - we decide guiltily and throw ourselves into a liberation from all responsibility.


There is an image of an installation by Anish Kapoor - in the middle of the floor in a completely white room is a perfectly black and flat circle. (See Descent into Limbo, 1992) (1).
Except its not a circle but a hole, a hole that seems to open beyond the room, beyond the frontier constituted by the floor, wall or installation.
On the other side of the hole is the nothingness, a great dark dissolution of the "I". The void.
It is horrifying and seductive, and inviting.

The Operator has the power through agreement, and we can assume that there is also an agreement for how this power may be used.
Thereby we have crossed to the other side of the frontier, we have handed ourselves over and the discussion has shifted towards what comes next. 
Marina Abramovic made a performance in 1974, Rythm 0, in which she handed over the power to the audience. She had placed 72 objects on a table, amongst others a rose, honey,
a feather, a whip a gun and a bullet. The audience was invited to use these tools on the artist, as they chose, for pain or pleasure.
The session lasted for 6 hours and when the time was up she walked of the stage bleeding.
She is reported to have said "What I learned was that ...if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you"(2).

The audience that caresses with a feather or loads a bullet into the gun hides behind both Operator and Avatar, and the relation between them is least to say ambivalent.
Both can view what is happening with distance; one because s-he does not make the decisions that rule his/her actions,
and the other because s-he always maintains the physical distance to any potential consequences that may come as result of these actions.
What comes next. Through the darkness.
Perhaps the only insight is that there is only more darkness, and if we hand over the power it will further or later be used against us.
Or perhaps - apart from the various monsters of humanity -  there are caverns deep down in the dark, in the shapeless, blunt betweenspace where only the Avatars can fit.
And perhaps that is the strength of the avatars. Beyond the competition of the "I"s they are gathering an underground army. ;-))

(1) Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg, NL, Groen, Rianne,
http://riannegroen.blogspot.com/2011/01/into-unknown-void-in-contemporary-art.html
(2) A Daneri, et al., (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002),  p 29