Dutch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader was last seen in 1975 when he took off in what would have been the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic. He left behind a small oeuvre, often using gravity as a medium, which more than 30 years after his disappearance at sea is more influential than ever before.
Fall I, Los Angeles, Bas Jan Ader, 16mm, duration: 24 sec, 1970
Fall II, Amsterdam, Bas Jan Ader, 16mm, 19 sec, 1970
I’m too sad to tell you, Bas Jan Ader, 16mm, duration: 3 min 34 sec, 1971
Broken fall (organic), Bas Jan Ader, 16mm, duration 1 min 44 sec, 1971
British artist Jonathan Monk replays, recasts and re-examines seminal works of Conceptual and Minimal art by variously witty, ingenious and irreverent means. Speaking in 2009, he said, ‘Appropriation is something I have used or worked with in my art since starting art school in 1987. At this time (and still now) I realised that being original was almost impossible, so I tried using what was already available as source material for my own work.’ Through wall paintings, monochromes, ephemeral sculpture and photography he reflects on the tendency of contemporary art to devour references, simultaneously paying homage to figures such as Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman and Lawrence Weiner, while demystifying the creative process.
All the possible combinations of five colours, 2002
35mm Slide projection with 120 hand-coloured slides
Sol Lewitt: 100 cubes Cantz/ Slow slow quick quick slow / front to back back to front / on its side, 2000
After completing her schooling she travelled for seven years. When she returned to Paris in 1979 she began a series of projects to acquaint herself again both with the city and people of Paris and with herself. These sought to construct identities by offering documentary ‘proof’ in the form of photographs. Her work was seen to have roots in the tradition of conceptual art because the emphasis was on the artistic idea rather than the finished object. The French writer Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay (1988) that described this project in terms of a reciprocal loss of will on the part of both pursued and pursuer. Another project, Detective (1980), consisted of Calle being followed for a day by a private detective, who had been hired (at Calle’s request) by her mother. Calle proceeded to lead the unwitting detective around parts of Paris that were particularly important for her, thereby reversing the expected position of the observed subject. Such projects, with their suggestions of intimacy, also questioned the role of the spectator, with viewers often feeling a sense of unease as they became the unwitting collaborators in these violations of privacy. Moreover, the deliberately constructed and thus in one sense artificial nature of the documentary ‘evidence’ used in Calle’s work questioned the nature of all truths.
Husband-and-wife duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller create beguiling installations, art objects, and “walks,” audio recordings meant to guide viewers on short journeys through landscapes. The two began collaborating in 1983, and as is indicated by their walks, the couple’s work often activates space through innovative interactions of sound and movement. The two first achieved international recognition for their walks in 1995, a medium Cardiff had been experimenting with beginning in 1991 and that in her words, “changed my thinking about art.”
“While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.
I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis. You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”
“A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it’s tough to discern what is live and what is recorded.”
– description from gregory volk, A Walk in The dOCUMENTA PARK, Art in America, June 15, 2012.
Experiment in F Minor, 2013
On a large table sits a collection of bare speakers of all shapes and sizes. Light sensors are inlaid into the edge of the table and as the viewers move around the room, their shadows cause the various sound and instrumental tracks to fade up and overlap, mingle and fade down. Numerous viewers in the room create a cacophony of musical compositions that vary according to where the audience walks or how many people are in the room. When the space is empty, the table fades to silence.
“These mysterious, beautiful recordings, which Cardiff and Miller first encountered on a CD intended for meditation and relaxation, are varied and mesmerizing–like movements of a slow, science-fiction-inspired composition. Neptune sounds like crashing surf, Saturn and its rings drone and throb, Uranus chimes like bells, and the music of Earth suggests a forest at night, complete with bird- or insect-like chirps. Reworked as ambisonic recordings in which sounds seem to rotate and tilt and played in random order, they form the score of The Infinity Machine.” – Toby Camps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection
By the mid-1960s Yoko Ono was an established figure in the underground art scene; she had begun performing musical pieces, presented events with a loosely affiliated group of artists who worked under the name Fluxus, published a book of instructional poems entitled Grapefruit (e.g. “Hammer a nail in the center of a piece of glass. Send a fragment to an arbitrary address.”), and was making films.
ABOUT BED PEACE 1969 was the year that John & Yoko intensified their long running campaign for World Peace. They approached the task with the same entrepreneurial expertise as an advertising agency selling a brand of soap powder to the masses. John & Yoko’s product however was PEACE, not soft soap, and they were determined to use any slogan, event and gimmick in order to persuade the World to buy it. BED PEACE (directed by Yoko & John and filmed by Nic Knowland) is a document of the Montreal events from 26-31 May 1969, and features John & Yoko in conversation with, amongst others, The World Press, satirist Al Capp, activist Dick Gregory, comedian Tommy Smothers, protesters at Berkeley’s People’s Park, Rabbi Abraham L. Feinberg, quiltmaker Christine Kemp, psychologists Timothy Leary & Rosemary Leary, CFOX DJs Charles P. Rodney Chandler & Roger Scott, producer André Perry, journalist Ritchie York, DJ & Promoter Murray The K, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, publicist Derek Taylor & personal assistant Anthony Fawcett. Featured songs are Plastic Ono Band’s GIVE PEACE A CHANCE & INSTANT KARMA, Yoko’s REMEMBER LOVE & WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND & John’s acoustic version of BECAUSE. “As we said before: WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)” – yoko
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI
“In these first performances by Ono, the artist sat kneeling on the concert hall stage, wearing her best suit of clothing, with a pair of scissors placed on the floor in front of her. Members of the audience were invited to approach the stage, one at a time, and cut a bit of her clothes off – which they were allowed to keep. The score for Cut Piece appears, along with those for several other works, in a document from January 1966 called Strip Tease Show.”
Tom Friedman was born in 1965 in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA. He now lives and works in Massachusetts, USA.
Friedman’s approach to understanding the world and its logic has long been expressed through the laborious, painstakingly precise and unexpected methods that he uses. His work is often autobiographical, recreating random elements from his own life and surroundings. To create these sculptures and objects he uses everyday materials including styrofoam, paint, paper, card, clay, wire, plastic, hair and fuzz. He pays obsessive attention to detail in each work, particularly in the replication of personal characteristics.
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