Conceptual Art

Nicola L., Red Coat, 1969

Nicola L.

Red Coat, 1969

Vinyl

Nicola L., Red Coat, 1969

Nicola L., Red Coat, 1969

Currently displayed at the Tate Modern in London under The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop, Red Coat for Eleven People or Same Skin for Everybody, 1969 is a plastic cagoule made of vinyl, designed to be worn by eleven people together who have to hobble along at the same time.

This vast frameless canvas, molded around 11 empty pockets tailored to fit the dimensions of 11 human bodies, was designed by the inventive French conceptual artist Nicola L.  The work was originally created for the Festival of the Isle of Wight in 1970, where musicians such as Gilberto Gil, Jimmy Hendrix and Joan Baez performed.  The artist designed this piece to be worn by the Brazilian musicians and she distributed gloves emblazoned with the message ‘same skin for everybody’ which provoke the audience into chanting in unison.

The Red Coat is exemplary of Nicola L.’s experimentation with the manner in which the body interacts with the artwork and the self is exposed to the other.  Designed to be embodied, it blurs the boundaries between the body and the object.  By inciting the desire to share a collective skin, it realized an experiment in collectivism and egalitarianism in which people have to change the original way they move and they walk.

The performances have been taken place in various public spaces since 1970.  On the streets of Amsterdam, Brussels and New York, the artist invited people to get inside the coat.  She took the lead to connect people who didn’t know each other five minutes before.  It strips the ‘body’ of any particular gender identity and immerses the wearers in a communal performance to declare a peaceful notion.  Another Red Coat was enacted on the snowy slopes of the French Alps with 11 professional skiers trying to ski collectively down a mountain.

When the performance was held in Barcelona, it was brought to an end by Franco’s police because they suspected that the Red Coat was a cover for secret meetings.  The Red Coat continued to be re-enacted in the 1990s and was followed by new versions in different colors and for smaller groups.  In 1995, Nicola L. designed the Black Coat, which is dedicated to the memory of nine women from different time periods which Nicola called “femmes fatales”, including Madame Bovary, Frida Kahlo, Joan of Arc and Ulrike Meinhof.  From 2001, Nicola L. started to present the ‘Blue Cape’, performances symbolizing protection, peace and cooperation, in places such as Havana, Venice, Geneva and the Great Wall of China.

Nicola L., Red Coat, 1969
Exhibition: The World Goes Pop

Nicola L. was born in Mazagan, Morocco in 1937 and now lives and works in New York City.  The artist studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris, followed by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the atelier of painter Jean Souverbie.  While still being an art student in Paris in the 1960s, Nicola L turned away from painting, destroying all of her works in a radical act, and began creating actions, performances, environments and body objects.  She began to experiment with works she called “Pénétrables”, a series of canvases in which the viewers could introduce parts of their body and get into the skin.  Nicola L. has interrogated the integration of the human body within the space of the artwork, developing conceptual works, functional objects, installations, performances and films.  Her conceptual work hinges on two approaches that open the door to a myriad of possibilities – to make bodies, and to embody.  To embody means to collect bodies within a single skin in order to inhabit a space collectively, organically, and see it from the vantage of a second skin.  Behind the playfulness of her works, these works were conceived as a political statement addressing, beyond the boundaries of painting, the individual’s social skin.

Influenced by second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement, the Red Coat reminds us our similarities as a species far outweigh our differences – issues pertinent today with transgender and gay rights.

The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop

Tate Modern, London

17th September 2015 to 24th January 2016

Cindy

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Cerith Wyn Evans, The Illuminating Gas… (after Oculist Witnesses), 2015

Cerith Wyn Evans

The Illuminating Gas… (after Oculist Witnesses), 2015

White neon

378 x 319 x 191 cm

Cerith Wyn Evans, The Illuminating Gas... (after Oculist Witnesses), 2015

Cerith Wyn Evans, The Illuminating Gas… (after Oculist Witnesses), 2015

The Illuminating Gas… (after Oculist Witnesses), displayed right at the entrance of the South Galleries of White Cube Bermondsey in London, is an installation of Cerith Wyn Evans  with three vast discs in bright white neon suspended from the ceiling at a skewed angle, imposing a foreshortened perspective.

The inspiration of the installation is drawn from the mysterious tripartite radial forms of the ‘Oculist Witnesses’ in Marcel Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, most often called The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre), 1915–23.  The Illuminating Gas… (after Oculist Witnesses) recreated the forms of Duchamp’s original work into multi-dimensional objects.

Duchamp’s art does not lend itself to simple interpretations.  For The Large Glass, while some critics read the piece as an exploration of male and female desire having complication as its upper and lower realms are separated from each other forever by a horizon; other modern critics see the painting as an expression of the artist to ridicule criticism.  The installation of Cerith Wyn Evans stages the exploration of established and establishing time-space relationship, separating itself from the surrounding visual field.  The forms fold and mesh different figures into each other, thereby evoking unforeseen registers of perception.

The Illuminating Gas… (after Oculist Witnesses) – Details
The works induce us to explore the relationship between time and space

Born in Wales in 1958, Wyn Evans studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, where he first began to use unorthodox materials in his artwork.  Wyn Evans began his career as a filmmaker — it wasn’t until the 1990s that he turned his attention to installation artwork as well.  Looking at his creation, his background in the visual becomes extremely obvious.  Much as a director uses light and darkness in his movies to create a desired emotional response, the artist plays with refracting mirrors and flashing lights to guide his audience’s reaction to his work.  As a conceptual artist, sculptor and film-maker, his installations, sculptures, photographs, and films direct to evoke “polyphony, superimposition, layers, levels, the occluded, and the visibility”.  What drives his practice is his fascination with perception—how we understand texts, language, our surroundings, and each other.  The artist combines and re-presents recognizable objects, texts, and images to catalyze a multiplicity of new, open-ended meanings.

In the same room, the artist also displays three neon works which are suspended from the ceiling taking their forms from the codified and precise movements of Japanese Noh theatre (Neon forms [after Noh I, II and III], all 2015).  These works present a maze of complex lines that trace the trajectory of alignments, gestures, folds, orientations and footsteps; transposing and transforming energies into both material charge and visual form.

Cerith Wyn Evans, Neon Forms (after Noh I), 2015
Cerith Wyn Evans, Neon Forms (after Noh II), 2015
Cerith Wyn Evans, Neon Forms (after Noh III), 2015

According to White Cube, Wyn Evans’ works exist and take their form through the reflection on and interrogation of the world about us, adopting what Martin Prinzhorn has identified as strategies of ‘superimposition and contradiction, by concealing and revealing’, to create moments of rupture within existing structures of communication whether visual, audio or conceptual.  The artist has focused on ideas around the flows of energy via material and immaterial conduits, circuitry and choreology – the practice of translating movement into notational form.

Interspersed amongst the neon works are plants placed on turntables that rotate almost imperceptibly, enhancing the otherworldly atmosphere.  At the far end of the room a sound sculpture constructed of 19 “breathing” transparent glass flutes emit what White Cube describes as “a mellifluous breath-like sound.”  In the corridor space Evans has reconfigured an existing ceiling light fixture to convey in Morse code a text that describes the transit of the moon creating a solar eclipse.

Cerith Wyn Evans, Still life (In course of arrangement…), 2015 © White Cube
Cerith Wyn Evans, Composition of 19 flutes, 2015 © White Cube

The works on display takes on Evans’ signature style of tracing the complexity of gestures, motions and shapes in light.  It is a characteristic paradox that Wyn Evans chooses light to transmit obscurity.  His creations make viewers question their preconceived notions about artwork and perception, making them ponder whether they’re looking upon bright neon lighting or translated versions of philosophical questions.

Exhibition of Cerith Wyn Evans

White Cube Bermondsey, London

23rd September to 15th November 2015

Cindy

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Nedko SOLAKOV, Good News, Bad News (Villa Manin), 2008

Nedko SOLAKOV

Good News, Bad News (Villa Manin), 2008

12 spotlights and mixed media

Variable dimensions

 

Good News, Bad News is the title of an installation of the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov.  It consists of islands of light on the floor, and in the spotlight of which are the small scenarios of good and bad news.  Life is full of good and bad news, some of which have a positive side.  The same underlying meaning also found in the classic example of a half-full or half-empty glass, presented by Solakov as an ironic paradigm of bifurcation, a sly commentary on human existence.

Nedko Solakov was born in Cherven Briag, Bulgaria in 1957.  The artist has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia and lives and works in Sofia.  Since the beginning of the 1990s, Nedko Solakov has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, such as Documenta 12 (2007) and Documenta 13 (2012), and the 2001, 2003, and 2007 Venice Biennales. His work has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Stedelijk, and the Israel Museum.

In this installation Good News, Bad News, Nedko Solakov employs an ironic, metaphoric and poly-semantic style to analyze the role and contradictions inherent to the contemporary art system, its communicative mechanisms and its schizophrenic relationship with the society and cultural geopolitics.  The text in each scenario plays an important role in the whole installation.

Language was an important tool for Conceptual artists in the 1960s.  Many Conceptual artists used language in place of brush and canvas, and words played a primary role in their emphasis on ideas over visual forms.  Thinking about using text in contemporary artwork, we may probably recall the work of conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965).  Joseph Kosuth was among the first to give words such a central role.  Another example could be I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art by Baldessari, who has repeated the same phrase over and over again.

Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of artworks.  An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera.  From the mid 1960s through the mid 1970s, conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art.  Language itself has an ultimate significance in Conceptual Art and there are far more examples than we can cite.

Text of some scenarios of the installation Good News, Bad News:

  • The good news: the bird finally found (in this hostile environment) two semi-enclosures that might be suitable for giving birth.

The bad news: no bad news, just a hot sex related thoughts.

  • A big problem is pressed under this stone (and it looks it would stay forever pressed), which is good news.

However, there is a hint of bad news: the stone has to pee and he is very shy – he can’t do it in front of you.

  • There is no data on it, which maybe a good news.There are also many colorful reflections on its surface (because of the spotlight), which for sure is a bad news because such reflections are, in general, useless.
  • The bad news: too much “Holy Shit!” expressions nowadays.

The good news: there is a device to clean them out.

  • The bad news: these pebbles are not precious at all.

The good news: there is at least one of them (somewhere at the bottom) who will become a big shot, eventually.

  • Four good and four bad news are going to be filed*. It seems that they will become friends which may be both – good & bad news – it depends on the point of view.
  • A very simple, casual ornament wants to be as beautiful as the sophisticated features in this room. Needless to say that he can’t, which is not necessarily bad news for there are a lot of foundations that will make him look beautiful (or at least expensive).
  • Very soon he (from the Big Book) is going to destroy (to melt down) these bloody figures/ numbers which is a pity because they are not really bad and evil. Why?

This is the answer, which is still classified information because of the global warming.

  • The good news: she finally got the pet she wanted.

The bad news: the pet didn’t like her.

The good news: she was still a noble lady.

Another bad news: the cat was even more noble than her, because her grand, grand, grand mother used to be a court cat in a much bigger castle than the young noble lady’s one.

The final good news: a pet dog with no noble predecessors whatsoever is on his way to join the two of them

  • As many historians (and gossip makers) wrote, Napoleon had a big problem. The good news: luckily his problem was hardly visible.

Follia Continua

CENTQUATRE-PARIS

26th September to 22nd November 2015

Cindy

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The 13e Biennale de Lyon (Lyon Biennial) – An Interpretation of Modern Life

The 13e Biennale de Lyon (Lyon Biennial)
The 13e Biennale de Lyon (Lyon Biennial)

The 13e Biennale de Lyon (Lyon Biennial) has begun on 10th September last week.  This year, it begins a new trilogy under the theme of “modern”; a theme that Thierry Raspail, artistic director of the Biennial, gave to Ralph Rugoff, guest curator for the 2015 edition.  60 artists from 28 countries have participated in the biennial and their works are mainly located in 3 venues namely MAC Lyon (Museum of Contemporary Art), La Sucrière, the Musée des Confluences.  The artists offer their personal vision of the contemporary world and invite the audiences to go into this contemporary world through their works.

A visual and auditory experience actualized by the installations in the space

The visual and auditory effects of the installations mingle together to yield a novel experience for the audiences.  The work Taut Eye Tau created by Alex Da Corte is a study of the color yellow undertaken through the exclusive use of its “opposite color” blue.  It consists of a decor that recalls both the Stanley Kubrick-style science-fiction and the subtle processes of Sol LeWitt-style abstraction.  Taut Eye Tau is a total environment: it includes pieces of furniture, a carpet, sand, neon tubes and a video projection whose soundtrack is also based on the color blue.  This single color of blue brings to mind the seas and the sky, absence and desire, the horizon and the immaterial.  It implies to us that what we see as real is instead usually not too complete.  A strong visual implication exists.

Alex Da Corte, Taut Eye Tau, 2015
Alex Da Corte, Taut Eye Tau, 2015

At the other side, the Glass Troll Cave (glass cabinet and flat screen) and Erysichthon (HD video) created by Jon Rafman provide a combined visual and auditory experience.  The digital technology and the new media hold the world at a distance.  In his installations, photographs and videos, Jon Rafman expresses a sense of melancholy and irony to our social tradition and virtual communities.

IMG_9914

Glass Troll Cave (glass cabinet and flat screen) and Erysichthon (HD video) created by Jon Rafman

We cannot go round this point without mentioning the work of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, aura, 2015.  In his work aura, the drum head is struck by cherry stones, triggered by the electromagnetic aura given off by each owner of a cell phone who visits the Sucrière.  The sound produced by the fall of the cherry stones is thus random and variable.  This work gives a new interpretation to his previous work in 2013, in which water falls to strike a drum kit.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, aura, 2015
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, aura, 2015
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, aura, 2015

Conceptual artworks leave room for the imagination and participation of audiences

Perhaps what makes this year’s biennial interesting to the audiences is the room for their imagination and participation.

Pull over time created by Michel Blazy is a combination of technological objects like computers or cell phones, and manufactured objects like a branded sports shoe.  The artist grows things in them, as if in a vegetable patch.  Colored water runs down the walls all the time.  All the visual effects produced by the decay of these objects are an integral part of the work, and this goes against the belief that the finished products are impervious and resistant to change.

Pull over time created by Michel Blazy
Pull over time created by Michel Blazy
Pull over time created by Michel Blazy

Nina Canell’s installation Mid-Sentence gives concrete expression to the lightness and intangibility of the everyday life.  Mid-Sentence consists of subterranean cable-cuts and compressed fiber-optic “sheaths” like conductors and transporters.  Arranged like relics, these cables evoke both the idea of dissolved geography and corrupted representations of language and body.

IMG_9948

Nina Canell’s installation Mid-Sentence

Lai Chih-Sheng’s work Border provides a vivid example of conceptual of the space.  The artist displays waste materials from the construction on the floor, with a border/ platform suspended over a vast space.  The artist places the importance on the audience’s experience.  Visitors are invited to walk on the border.  They would find themselves on the visual border between the physical reality of the space where the work of art is deployed.

Lai Chih-Sheng’s work Border
Lai Chih-Sheng’s work Border

Modern life – the past, present and future

One may ask in what sense these works are related to the theme “The Modern Life”?

Perhaps the first thing to put in place about “modern life” is the “problems” nowadays, in the context of “everyday life” scenarios throughout different regions in the world.  “La vie moderne” includes works that take on some of the most perplexing and troubling issues of our moment — from the growing inequality of wealth in society and consumer culture to the questions around immigration, post-colonial relations and our changing relationship to the world around us and our relationship with each other.

The artists explore the contradictory and contingent nature of the modern, both on an aesthetic and philosophical level as well as in the area of social formations, subjectivity and technology.  They express their ways of seeing and thinking about the world around us.  Like in the work of Guan Xiao, he has created a video installation made of ten screens and surrounded by three sculptures.  The particular materials used come from various different periods and cultures, bringing together a time where the future and the past will overlap.  The video installation is a collage of found images from the internet collected by the artist over the course of several years.  The artist has staged her own vision of the world – one with overexposure to images that surround us.

He Xiangyu, Cola Project-Extraction, 2009-2015
Simon Denny, The personal effects of Kim Dotcom, 2014
The installation of Guan Xiao
Simon Denny, The personal effects of Kim Dotcom, 2014

Another point worth to notice is the relationship between the past, present and future.  “Modern” is shrouded in uncertainty, as is our relationship between past and present. To describe something as “modern” today imbues it with an aura of uncertainty — it suggests something haunted by various “modern” episodes in history while at the same time retaining something of its traditional sense.  We cannot mark a significant break with the past. We cannot escape from history.  Instead, our only choice is to work through and re-direct its legacies.  We would rather interpret modernity as an evolving process, which embrace the past and elongate to the future.

Emmanuelle Lainé brings to us similar intonation in her work « Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer? ».  The artist used elements that she had made beforehand (flat screens molded in silicone) and others that she “arranged” on the spot (pieces of furniture, plants, packing cases…etc.) to set up a vast treasure hunt.  She kept adjusting and correcting the scene until she finally made a wide-view photograph of her creative process.  After the photograph was fixed to the wall, she then destructed and modified the scene.  Objects now become images, which then become objects again.  These narratives through time and dimensions reflect also a shuffle between the past and present – an echo with the underlying interpretation of modernity.

Emmanuelle Lainé, Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer?
Emmanuelle Lainé, Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer?
Emmanuelle Lainé, Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer?
Emmanuelle Lainé, Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer?
Emmanuelle Lainé, Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer?

Along with this sense, we may believe perhaps the most truly contemporary art doesn’t present us with endless novelty, but with new ways of working through history.

 

T.J. Wilcox, In the Air, 2013-2015
Anthea Hamilton, Vulcano Table, 2014
The installation of Avery Singer
Camille Henrot, Hello & Thnak you, 2015
Jessica Diamond, Le Vin Avant La Roue, 2015 and The Modern World, 1989/1991
Jessica Diamond, La Mort Du Papier, 2015

The 13e Biennale de Lyon will last from 10th september 2015 to 3rd January 2016.

Official website of the 13e Biennale de Lyon (Lyon Biennial) : http://www.biennaledelyon.com/

 

 

Cindy

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