SanArt

Have a look at this more than impressive artist line up for ‘One Foot In the Grove’ where Mutate Britain moves to a West London location – coming soon so keep an eye on the behindtheshutters blog.

watch the One Foot In the Grove artist trailer here:

Artofthestate is currently ‘out of the office’ – well, he would be if there was an office . Back soon.

masts: aots flickr

On October 2, 2008 I joined Graeme Sullivan, Maurizio Pelligrin, and Richard Jochum in Richard’s studio to discuss his upcoming exhibition. Until the previous day Maurizio and I were both unfamiliar with the artist’s work. By Richard’s own account it was a conversation that failed, beginning with two artists vying for territory and my own concerns about the role of conjecture in art criticism. Nonetheless, the conversation was published in the catalog as an important supplement to the exhibition.

What follows is a conversation held while walking through the exhibition “Intersections and Interstices” at Columbia University’s Macy Gallery with Richard Jochum, and subsequently joined by the sociologist of art Steven C. Dubin. Dubin writes frequently for Art in America and had just published a feature article describing his studio visit to Liza Lou in South Africa. I publish this conversation now on the occasion of Richard Jochum’s current exhibition “Unexpected Weight Loss” at the Dowd Gallery, SUNY Cortland.

Maurizio Pellegrin and Graeme Sullivan in Richard Jochum’s studio, October 2, 2008

CS: Richard, about a month ago we held a conversation in your studio about the exhibition before it had been realized, and there was immediate difficulty about that – were you prepared for that difficulty?

RJ: You can never project conversations, how they unfold, and a group of four can already be quite complex. When you are one- on- one with a person you can rely on undivided attention. And although I had no specific expectations, I hoped for us to have a somewhat choreographed conversation, one that would dig deeper into the matter step- by step. I planned for us to have breakfast with each other first, but because Maurizio was on a tight schedule we started right off. And I think it did not really help that I had provided a computer link beforehand so that people knew what this was about since it made Maurizio start with a dismissive statement: “Couldn’t this exhibition just be a blog?”.

CS: The sense of anxiety was really more like “Are you an artist?”! Maurizio’s work is installation-oriented, and very formalist in a sense.

RJ: So it really wasn’t until the conversation ended that things got into place and I thought we were actually getting somewhere!

CS: Richard’s studio was the site of a conversation about a show that had not yet appeared, and there is a kind of dissonance between the studio and the appearance of the work in a gallery context. So when we got to the beginning everything ended, and between then and now the exhibition has appeared. What is the place of the object in this appearance from the studio to the gallery?

SD: I have to jump in and say that Liza Lou’s work is such a meticulous process, literally individually placing tens of thousands of beads. In all cases the pieces were horizontal rather than vertical and they were covered up so that only a small area was exposed. I had to actually request that they be revealed and I was disruptive to the whole studio. Their work was all very Zen, there were thirty people in their own worlds with MP3 players doing something which is both methodical and creative. To see them horizontally and imagine them vertically, and then to see them three weeks later, more complete as well as more complex, and then to finally see them vertically – yes there is a huge difference.

CS: The piece that really drew me (Condition of Capture, 2008) looks like a painting, you don’t know what it is made of until you investigate it very closely and for a length of time, the difference you are describing between the studio and the wall, as you describe it with thirty people and their MP3’s, is a little more dramatic than Pollock’s horizontal and vertical movement from the studio to the wall.

SD: It’s really a privilege to see that whole process, she had to have the vision of what was going to appear, that’s pretty phenomenal.

Liza Lou, installation view of L&M exhibition, Sept.24th – Dec.13th, 2008, found here.

CS: Richard, what you are doing doesn’t resonate at all with a material craft but both your work and Liza Lou’s have strong resonance with Minimalist forms, that is the only link I see. I’m enjoying walking through this exhibition with you and with a different familiarity to what I’ve seen. Your work and Liza Lou’s are of course very different. There is a blog, and a studio, different formats in which you present your work, that are shaped by a sociality, reflecting conversations, individuals and their words, floated out there as bodies and words.

SD: One of the things that I said in my review of Liza Lou’s work is that it invites touching, it’s so seductive, it’s huge, it glimmers and you want to understand. There is something similar here, there seems to be an invitation to touch but at the same time there is a frustration in it, because there is the suggestion of something that is very tactile. And I think the key might be in something that you said about the craft, she is reviving a craft tradition. This is very seductive but it is seductive in a very different way. I almost hesitate to say this because it sounds like a judgment and it’s not, but there is a coldness here, it both seduces and pushes you away at the same time, whereas Liza Lou’s work is hot.

DogEars from the series PaperWorks, 2007-present, dimensions variable.

CS: There is definitely something about their removal. With Liza Lou, there is a coiled pile of beaded rope (Continuous Mile, 2007-2008) protecting an interior we can’t access, and I’ve taken people to see it twice, people who ordinarily I never have to say “Do not touch the art work!” Of course they know that but still they automatically go for that rope, they want to feel the weight of it in their hand. So what is here in your work Richard clearly is an invitation to touch but an emphatic removal from it at the same time. In the studio they were flimsy papers on the wall, and so there was a sense of touch, these are mounted, pulled away from touch by their presentation in the gallery. And Richard, we didn’t once talk about materiality in your studio!

RJ: No it became a conversation about territory and it failed. I am absolutely not at home with territory.

CS: It’s true that that conversation became very much about territory, and I’m enjoying that in the gallery context we are talking about what is materially here. Not only what’s here but having it gravitate very quickly as well to illusion and withdrawal as what is here. That’s kind of curious.

RJ: Yes, it’s a bit of a Platonic trick utilizing both, appearance and disappearance, creating a division among reality and fiction. You know, I worked a lot with paper in the 90’s and created more than 40 artist’s books, most of them either small or thin and usually as multiple editions. They were very unique, they were very conceptual, and they were in German. Since I left home and came to this country, I have also left my frameset of language; so what’s left is paper in it’s its texture and shape without language. With one exception: the book «History of Art» from Janson which I had partly scanned and reconstructed as an accordion with two sides to look at: one with only the images and text while removing all the names of the artists.

Richard Jochum, Artist Book, 2005, 7 x 10 inches

SD: So there’s this purging that’s going on here.

CS: But look on the other side, don’t you put them back in?

RJ: Yes, this is the side which shows only the names, it’s an art history without discourse. History of Art embarks on my project dis-positiv, an exhibition series which puts on display not objects or images, but art historians, art critics, art curators, as a living embodiment of the contemporary art discourse, behind a plexi-glass wall, for two hours each, making them art objects, making them at the same time performers. While on display they are encouraged to reflect their own vision of art and their own work and where art is heading to in terms of its future. Looking at the relation between art and research, art practictioners and theorists from my own background and experience made me conclude that they are mutually inseparable, fundamentally intertwined and deeply interdependent. Boiled down to an artist’s point of view: it doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do, if we don’t show it to people the title “art” is irrelevant. We are artists through our connection to the institution of art.

Richard Jochum, dis-positiv, 2000-2003. Performance project with plexi glass sculpture 750 square feet, online component, and film.

CS: So do you find that art history and criticism are an extension of your work?

RJ: Yes, definitely. The art world is the framework and community I deal with. It’s not uncommon for me that I make the context in which I work become the topic of the work itself. In general, many of my projects are based on participation in one way or another, whether it is the world of art or another realm of the social. I find it particularly interesting that people in the arts are often noticeably weary wary???? of their own peers and the art world in general. I heard people criticizing the addressee of dis-positiv because “You are dealing with the art world!” And my response was, “Oh, come on, these are people too!”.

CS: Maurizio very quickly launched into the issue of your blogging and you were very frank that a blog does not constitute an artwork in itself, that it was merely a vehicle for installing it in the art world?

RJ: That’s right, despite the fact that there are numerous examples of intriguing blog-art out there. Over time I have created almost 60 blog sites, but almost all of them are representational rather than anything else. Only a couple of them take advantage of blogging as a particular artistic medium, such as My Favorite Saying.

CS: And it’s very social – I’m in your favorite sayings and I put it on my Facebook page and the whole thing! So it’s not only social in the presentation but in its use, you like to see an engaged community.

RJ: That’s a role I am aiming for: to engage, to instigate and complexify. Injecting sentiments; setting up platforms; influencing the course of a complex system and if only in invisible, unmeasurable ways. Once we have set up our work, we cannot further control our audiences. I think we artists often hope for a certain impact of our work for the society or time we live in; and that may be a noble attitude, but in fact we really don’t know in which way our sensibilities, visions and visual language speak to those who stumble upon us. The relation between art and society is not a balanced partnership among equals. It resembles more the connection between a parasite and its host. Like parasites we contribute in rather small ways to the spin of our society, a society however, which may or may not look alike without us. We are parasites mutually living from each other. An image in a gallery serves strictly speaking as a parasite, creating some of its meanings from its presentation and context. It lives off the frame, drinks from the white wall, eats from the space, no matter how much or little space there is.

CS: Do you see a parasitic balance then between the artist and the critic?

RJ: All along. I once had two artists participating in dis-positiv scratch the shape of a milk stool from a piece of felt which they then had presented as an image. It was a nice piece of work which I liked particularly for its title: «Who milks whom?» It’s never clear cut and always fuzzy. Milking each other seemed perfectly descriptive for the relationship between artist and critic.

SD: Well you know the parasite is also something that can cause an upset, in your stomach, so is that the artist or is that the critic?

RJ: It can be either. Let’s hope for a good relation between the host and the parasite since the end of the host equals the end of the parasite. It sounds like a moral statement or judgement. But I think the metaphor of the parasite becomes most interesting when we remove it from its moral context and read it in a broader, more logical sense.

CS: Vampire is a good word. I like the idea of infection, of being infected. Artists and art historians can be like vampires.

SD: A vampire gives eternal life, right?

RJ: And a vampire can do things we can’t do, like sleeping with the eyes open. Or hide in front of a mirror.

Richard Jochum, ParasiteMacy, 2008, ongoing series.

CS: The Parasite here, is it unusual to have the split there?

RJ: It matches the crack in the wall. Creating these parasites is a bit like creating decals – transfer pictures or simulacrums – which I started with some of my first solo shows in the late 90ies; ever since I create and collect them from different exhibition locations to prepare for a big parasite-exhibition one day: displaying nothing but parasites.

CS: Do you see it as an institutional critique, is that how you see it?

RJ: You could say so. But it’s not just critique, it’s also care. I constantly think about the relevance of our practice, the role of me as an artist as a care-taker and the relevance for the world I live in. That’s where I am and who I am.

CS: So it’s a portrait.

RJ: I guess you are right, it’s a portrait, that’s right. We can’t change the world. We can’t fix global warming, but to aim for an impact is part of our work, it challenges me as a person and I don’t want to be oblivious to the world I deal with through my practice.

Richard Jochum, still from Atlas Goes Superman, video performance, Athens 2009.  Click here for video.

Copyright Catherine Spaeth 2009

The interior of the Arena Chapel (Scrovegni Chapel), Padua, Italy. Early 14th century, fresco. There are no historical documents- none- that state Giotto di Bondone painted these frescoes for sure. But in the last seven hundred years not one art historian has denied it. So I think we can safely say this is Giotto’s work.

The ceilings are painted a brilliant blue with gold stars (that makes it look like heaven, y’know). The murals on the side panels depict events from the life of the Virgin, the life of Christ, and Christ’s passion. It is a shame that the centuries have not been kinder to these frescoes; water damage is prevalent in these works (fresco is a very delicate medium to begin with, which is why it’s not really used anymore) and many of the more vivid pigments used, such as lapis lazuli, have limited permanence.

This painting, one from the first category, depicts Joachim (the father of Mary) being expelled from the temple because he and his wife are childless. I’m not sure if it was proper procedure for the ancient Jews to reject temple sacrifices from the barren, but in either way to me this image is particularly powerful. Giotto, a student of Cimabue, was possibly the first artist to paint raw and unhinged emotion, and one can see this in the sadness in Joachim’s face. (For those who weren’t lucky enough to be raised Catholic, this story does have a happy ending. Joachim was the father of Mary, after all.)

Giotto’s mastery of emotion is even more evident in this painting of Christ’s lamentation. Even the angels tear at their faces and hair, or just wail in utter grief; we can tell that Jesus’ death was no fun for anyone.

But the most interesting thing about this chapel lies in the story of the family that commissioned it. In the late 13th and early 14th centuries the largest and most powerful banking family in Venice was the Scrovegnis. Little is known about paterfamilias Reginaldo Scrovegni, except that he was such a wicked bastard that Dante Alighieri saw fit to place him in the seventh circle of Hell in his epic poem The Inferno. Guilty of the mortal sin of usury (or charging exorbitant interest rates on loans, much like the payday advance places that you may have in your own community), the elder Scrovegni was condemned to the unpleasant eternity of sitting in the hot sand of a burning desert with a continual rain of fire.

Dante and Giotto were contemporaries and friends (Giotto painted Dante’s most famous portrait), but the details of this time period are so sketchy that no one really knows for sure which came first- The Inferno or the Arena Chapel. What is known is that while Reginaldo’s son Enrico began his career in the family business he carried on his father’s dubious practices, but soon after saw fit to atone for his sins (and his dad’s) by building a chapel on his family’s property. Did Enrico read about Reginaldo’s unfun fate in The Inferno before he chose to build the chapel? We may never know for sure.

The mural on the entry wall shows a Last Judgment scene that’s possibly creepier than Michelangelo’s. This was the last thing a person would see before exiting this chapel- sort of a way of saying, “Have you made your decision yet?” The bottom right corner of the painting, which obviously depicts Satan in Hell, is particularly Dante-esque.

And if you look a little closer (toward the bottom, on the left side of the door frame) you can see Enrico himself, handing the chapel (or a small model of it) to the Virgins of Charity and the Annunciation, to whom the chapel was dedicated. They are willfully accepting his offer of repentance and Christian charity here.

This isn’t the only place in the chapel where you’ll find Enrico Scrovegni either. During the Italian Renaissance, when a wealthy family commissioned a chapel, it was usually built on their property and often attached to their residence (this one was originally built on to the Scrovegnis’ no longer extant palace in Padua). This chapel, though built with the Pope’s blessings, was probably meant only for the Scrovegni family; it only accommodates about twenty-five people. The family would also have perpetual masses said in the names of their deceased relatives (no doubt there were plenty for Reginaldo, just in case Dante was wrong) and the family themselves were interred within the chapel. Enrico did them one further- his tomb is directly behind the chapel’s altar (you can see it in the first picture). Ummm… I’m not too sure how to comment on that one.

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God. 2007, diamonds, platinum and human teeth.

John LeKay, Spiritus Callidus #2 (Crystal Skull). 1993, paradichlorobenzene. Do you see a similarity? To me, this looks a little more like something they’ll be using as a prop when Shia LeBoeuf finally gets to play the son of Indiana Jones again. But For the Love of God- now, that’s decadent. More like something a gangsta rapper might display on top of the refrigerator where he keeps his Cristal.

Time spent alone is a series of projects conceptually linked through their being conceived in solitude and intended for display in the isolated social space of the internet. They are daydreams, worries and solitary trips. As a website, the state of Time Spent Alone is never fixed. It grows as viewers contribute to the Destinations section, and as I find new ideas to add to it.

I made a machine inspired of the texts by Oyvind Fahlstrom. He wrote about the future of art and how we could use technology to create art. The art piece is about how we could reproduce paintings with help of technology.
The machine creates pictures and you pay a small amount and with help of different buttons you print your picture. The machine is made of old found thrash like skateboard wheels, furniture old electronics.
Yesterday’s ideas of the future becomes real.

The art-piece is a computer program that creates and recreates pictures of the Swedish artist Olle Baertling. Olle Bærtling (1911-81) is one of the few Nordic artists of the second half of the 20th century who made a name for himself internationally. Initially inspired by the Concretists, he developed a style of his own with bright colors in triangular shapes, which, in his later works, appear to move out of the frames into the infinity of space, which has become the distinguishing characteristic of Bærtling.
I have been writing a computer program that creates new pictures that tries to recreate the work of Baertling. The code uses randomness to make every picture unique and different based on the work of Baertling. The program works fast and creates hundreds of pictures a minute and store them in PDF format that archives in a database. After some hours the program has created a million pictures and they are all are different from each other. The program is visual and you see the process when the program creates pictures in a pulsating and rapid move.
It could be seen as the art worlds Deep Blue, the computer that won against the world champion in chess, Kasparov.
The art piece is a comment on a society where productivity, effectiveness and profitability is keywords and where people get replaced by computers at work. How will the computerized world affect art? Will painting be replaced by code or computer or just be a tool for creating?
This art piece could be seen as a humoristic comment, but it also raises questions that we need to ask ourselves when our world is chaining and people live their life’s in front of computer screens.
The art piece could also be seen as a big experiment where I try to find the perfect picture in a database of millions of pictures. In the context of millions of pictures and the fact that a computer created the work the art pieces seems to get empty and pointless like something is missing..
The projects was also made into an artistbook.