Image Credit: © Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1924-37
Schwitters is very well known for his monumental Merzbau, a structure which was his own house. And so Kurt Schwitters picked refuse up off the ground and attempted to build a place in which he could live. Is this not the very task that faces modern society the vitality of which depends upon urban infrastructure and city planning?
“[E]verything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of the fragments: and this is Merz. It was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.”
–Kurt Schwitters
Image Credit: © Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942, New York
In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings.
Virgin, April 4, 1979. Chalk on blackboard, chalk and soap bar on wood table, wood chair, electrical cable, socket, and light bulb, Dimensions Variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 94.4265. Joseph Beuys © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Beuys’s public discussions—lectures on politics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social relations that often served as catalysts for other work—exemplify his role as artist, teacher, and activist. One such discussion was held in Vienna on April 4, 1979, at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, where Beuys had been invited to speak in the context of a debate surrounding the use of Vienna’s Palais Lichtenstein as a museum for modern art. Earlier that same year, the gallery had given Beuys the opportunity to create an installation entitled Basic Room–Wet Laundry, a manifestation of his provocative contention that the baroque palace was as useful for hanging wet laundry as it was for displaying art. The April 4 discussion grew directly from that project. During the discussion, Beuys referred to a chalk drawing on a blackboard that showed the chemical formula for making soap. Using the soap-making process as a metaphor for social relations and its colloidal character as an analogy for the stages of fetal development, he then spoke of the cyclical nature of feminine cleansing, associating virginity and motherhood with cleanliness and impurity respectively. The lecture also related back to the notion of washing as “the traditional domain of women” presented in Basic Room–Wet Laundry. These themes were further brought to bear upon the machinations and politics of the art world, which the artist viewed with contempt. The installation Virgin, April 4, 1979, is a kind of “representation” of that lecture, and utilized the essential elements that comprised this cycle of works—soap, blackboard, a table and chair, and the single light bulb,
In the summer of that same year, Beuys made Virgin Basic–Wet Room Laundry for a major exhibition at the Vienna Secession. A further iteration of the previous two installations and lectures, this was to have been the grandest presentation of the subject of the Virgin. However, Beuys decided to isolate some (though not all) of the elements of the piece as independent objects after a vandal had damaged the work; Virgin, April 4, 1979/June 23, 1979, consists solely of the blackboard from the Vienna installation. Beuys reworked the imagery to evoke more painterly results, which he achieved by rubbing soap directly onto the surface in broad circular movements. The dual date refers to both that of the original idea—in this case, back to the April 4 discussion—and the date the piece was constituted as a self-contained object, rather than referring to the date of its actual creation, a practice occasionally used by Beuys to underscore his belief that “thinking=art.”
Matthew Drutt
Guggenheim.com
Image Credit: © Wenda Gu, ink alchemy
sherman galleries, sydney, australia, 2001
a site-specific installation
9 boxes of liquid hair ink, 9 boxes of hair ink sticks, 18 six inches flat tv monitors, hair braid and electronic cables, video document: making ink alchemy.
1999 – 2001, shanghai cao su gong ink factory, shanghai, china.
powdered chinese hair made into the biological liquid ink and ink stick format are the new materials for chinese ink painting. the hair-made genetic ink itself is an art object, and at the same time, it is a component of my new installation. this special invention has been possible by the collaborative effort and generous support of the bio-lab of shanghai university, the shanghai test tubing factory, the shanghai qunzhong furniture factory, the shanghai medical factory and the shanghai ink factory. through difficult process of experimentation, we have achieved a significant result in the historical development of chinese traditional ink-making methods.
the definition of “black silk” represents chinese hair itself, “rain” refers to the ink drop. traditionally, the shanghai medical factory produces hair powder for medicinal purposes. powdered human hair is used as a medical treatment for anxiety. in traditional ink fabrication, charcoal powder is used as the black pigment material. the medical factory has invented a hair powder especially formulated to be the fundamental pigment for my liquid ink and ink stick following the original chinese prescription of powdered human hair, ironically and symbolically, the human hair-made ink is now given a conceptual function to cure cultural anxiety.
#1, black silk rain (liquid ink)
because of it is biological properties, and link to the concept of our biological century, this new chinese ink is bottled in a standard biological laboratory container made of clear glass, resting in a gracefully designed jichi wood box. the ink glass bottle and jichi wood box are engraved with the words “black silk rain” both in chinese and english. the package traditionally displays the ink as a revered, chinese national treasure.
#2, black silk rain (ink sticks)
the human biological ink sticks are traditionally formulated and each made by hand. the ink stick shape is made to my custom specifications and includes the name carved into the surface and highlighted in gold. they are beautifully displayed in a jichi wood box with the three word title engraved on the lid: “black silk rain” .
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
The Forty Part Motet | Musee d’art Contemporain, Montreal
ART:21: Your work has often been described as ‘installation art.’ Could you talk about what an installation is and what it means to you, personally, to work in this way?
HAMILTON: I think the form, for me, of working in installation is one that always implicates you actively within it. So that unlike an object, which we are very comfortable standing outside of and looking at, to work in installation is to work in relation to a particular place and all of the confluences and complexities of whatever it is that creates that (space). And so, as a viewer, to come in, it’s the experience the minute you cross the threshold: it’s the smells, it’s the sounds, it’s the temperature, it’s how all of those things have everything to do with the felt quality of ultimately what the thing becomes. I started in weaving, in textiles. I think that my first hand is still a textile hand in some ways, but I was very dissatisfied with the flatness that things actually had when they were done. It seemed like they were dead in some ways. And working, for me, in the form of installation in the way that I have, it’s that you’re coming in and you’re in some instances animating the space, and the process is often very social; for me, that part of it is very satisfying. There’s a way that it (the installation) has an ongoing life as it meets the public. Every moment that it’s up it’s different. It’s different from moment to moment, and somehow it’s that live time that’s just a factor of the form really, or something that is characteristic or inherent in the form is something that makes it continually interesting for me. It’s like there’s no real repetition in that time. Every day you’ll come in and every day it may be the same, seemingly, but within that there’s a difference and it’s only…I don’t know, I guess it allows that to be experienced and to be felt and registered.
(click on image to see a larger version)
ART:21: And there’s also the way in which installations are impermanent, being specific to a particular place and time.
HAMILTON: Well, certainly. It’s almost like the attitude about this space is not necessarily to alter it or deny it or erase it in any way, but to make present something that’s always here, make it more experienceable, perhaps. And part of that is its live time, and so the duration of that time means that it’s ephemeral in this form here. I don’t think it means that it can’t be reinstalled or have another iteration, but that will always be different. The experience of it will be different because of all the factors that actually give this the atmosphere that it has; it won’t be there in another situation or context. I suppose it is that live quality that is the thing that keeps it animate for me. You know, it’s that it’s never quite fixed, and so I don’t really think that it’s ultimately ephemeral. I mean, I feel like the video could be installed in a lot of different ways, and could take on different layers of meaning depending on whatever context it goes into. But it will only be like this once.
Artist Website here: www.annhamiltonstudios.com
Filed under: Installation
Installation views at Galerie DARE-DARE, Montréal, Quebec (January, 1998).
Mixed media, electronics, sound (dimensions variable).
In Night-Sea Music, many small music boxes are driven by slow electric motors attached to them via rubber cables which curl and release intermittently. The piece is titled after a John Barth story, Night-Sea Journey, which is narrated by a confused and not altogether enthusiastic single spermatozoa on its journey in search of…well, something (the narrator is not very clear on the concept). The twisting and spasmodic movements of the piece alludes to those tiny twitching travelers whose brief existence is a suicidal mission to carry information through a difficult environment. The music boxes all play the old folk tune “The Merry Widow,” which serves as a wink and a nod towards the overwhelmingly futile energies expended by all those determined sperm.
The motors run at slightly different speeds depending on the amount of slack between them and the music boxes to which they are attached, so there is no way to synchronize the content of music boxes. While the flavor of the melody is heard, the overall contour of its progress is diffuse and meandering. This diffusion is both temporal and spatial since individual notes or clusters of them are heard randomly from various points across the wall where the piece is mounted. The factors causing the different rates of playback – the amount of slack on the rubber cable and the angle of that cable on the wall – are clearly visible and intuitive. The rubber cables make a mark of their motion against the wall, thus emphasizing the piece’s tactile presence and leaving a physical trace of the amount of its efforts.
Filed under: Installation
An introduction to Lars Vilhelmsen’s project The Sandwich Box
The Sandwich Box, having grown out of his earlier artworks, inscribes a new element onto Lars Vilhelmsen’s art practice. The following text explains its evolutionary process, beginning with Lars’ work, How Scandinavian Of Me, The Travellers Secret Box and Scandinavian-t-ransit, and arriving now to The Sandwich Box. There is also an explanation of how The Sandwich Box project will operate, what intentions and concerns will be searched out and examined, and how these will be incorporated into the project.
The Sandwich Box will be ongoing and continuous, and will involve a number of artists on a collaborative level. The resulting collaborative artworks and ongoing project documentation, will be evaluated and published on the www.thesandwichboxsite.org at each stage of the project.
