2062

Last week, we decided with the girls to head to the future. The departure from Paris is located at The Gaîté Lyrique. From there you can travel through fifty years along four floors.

In the future, people look dead

Hypnosis

Where does my Tweet go ?

Leaving a voice message in 2062

Sending a mail from year 2062 

Designers, artists, engineers and performers are asked to deliver their vision on creation and innovation in the social uses. To be honest, the real motivation of my visit was to see the hoverboard of Back to the future. When I was younger I was pretty sure that in the 2000's these skateboards would be flying everywhere (it was the rumor running on the playground) but I was disappointed once again. I found the video of the experience.

The skate slides without friction above magnetic rails and can carry people over 100kg. I've already experienced the strength of quantum physics while visiting my brother in China and taking the Maglev. The Maglev is a levitation train traveling through superconductor magnetic fields 30.5km in 7 minutes in 400 km/h. Not sure I understand every words of my last sentences.

I found a really interesting article in Vice Magazine THE FUTURE SEEN BY FASHION DESIGNERS IN 1982. Women were predicted to dominate the space...

BLUE BISOU

Video vintage at the Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou is currently showing some of its own collection video masterpieces around an exhibition entitled Video Vintage. A selection reveals fifty years of creation from famous works of pionner Nam June Paik to more contemporary artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, Lawrence Weiner, Marina Abramovic, Daniel Buren or General Idea (>see the article here<)

In itself the exhibition is interesting in a sense that normaly to see these works we have to go to the Pompidou videotheque and it's not organized and selected as it is in Video Vintage. The layout is set up around three main periods: performance and self-filming in the sixties and seventies, then television as a research and experimental tool to criticize society and finally the more conceptual approach of video questioning forms and concepts along with the medium in the eighties.
The only reproach I could formulate would be about the scenography. A video vintage exhibition with real seventies designed sofas and Tv's and psychedelic wall papers, isn't it too much ? I don't need to feel like I am in my grand parents living room to enjoy art videos that were not even, at this time, broadcasted on Tv (maybe sofas of the design collection must also avoid dust from Pompidou cave of wonders but at least it was very comfortable).Anyway, I will highlight some of the artists you have to know by now ! And they are all women, the seventies & eighties being the rise time of the feminism, art video has been taken over by those warriors in high heels. I always find interesting the subversion by which artists appeal to social changes.

Sanja Ivekovic

Instruction #1

Through her work of video, film and installation, she puts her body as the mirror image of society. By doing this, she engages a reflexion between sexual genres and power. I have not found the most interesting video Instructions #1 but I can describe it. The video shows a close-uphead of the artist herself. With a brush, she draws black arrows as a preparation for esthetic surgery. Then, she ground her face following the arrows to erase them gently. Correct the face, remove wrinkles and small defects...how to format the body ? Like many of her works, Ivekovic evokes the influences of media in the formation of female stereotype. She grew up in ex Yugoslavia and we can clearly see how she links personal identity construction to territory construction and the necessary deconstruction of one identity to build the following.

Personal cuts

In Personal Cuts, the artist head is veiled by a black tight and with scissors she gradually cuts the tissue and forms circles until it reveals the full face. Each cut is followed by short sequences of Yugoslavia documentaries representing the ideal society that is going toward a glorious future.

Monument

All I coud find for this video is that stupid footage but this video is amazing. She filmed close-up a shirtless man frozen like a statue and kept turning around head to foot. The entire body is never visible and all you can see are abstract fragments of "the monument" and this woman, offscreen walking around in cycle spirals, invisible and always one step below. A moment of sweet violence.

Valie Export

Remote Remote

Valie Export is often considered as a viennese actionist but her art is nothing but feminist. "Always and everywhere" were her words and her opinion is revealed along her works with a shocking radicalism. 

The short film Remote, Remote opens up with a photograph of two infants with their mouths open. Then appears several shots between the eyes of a woman who is sitting on a chair and the eyes of one of the child in the photo. The woman holds a knife and a bowl of milk between her knees. She starts to mutilate her hand digging with the knife into her fingers. The last shot shows her dipping her bloody hands into the bowl of milke. Female pain, one of the thing Export wanted to show to a male dominated society ( a bite like Annette Messager ). A woman hand is synonymous of sweetness and polished nails but here, hands are disturbing and produce a cold violence. She uncovers the socially hidden suffering and pain women experience in life.

"That is because I look at life as an endlessly moving sculture, an extension of the body's cavity into the galactic labyrinth. It is a genetic sculpture, bllions of years old and is unfinished. The trope of this sculture is caught in the realm between reality and potentiality"

Marina Abramovic

Expanding in space

Born in ex-Yugoslavia like Sanka Ivekovic, Marina Abramovic is an artist performer. At first, her performances were an act of rebellion against her strict education (and her parents that were on the repressive side of the polity). As Ivekovic, her body was one of her main tool but in a more agressive way than her. She put her body to the test through performances using drugs, or dangerous objects (one of her most famous video is a performance with a razor blade >see here<) and sometimes her performances are so dangerous that it ends when someone in the audience intervenes or when she looses consciousness.
In 1975 she met the love of her life Ulay and I <3 their story. They started working together and created a situation in which they can take care of their love and passion through their social circumstances. "We were looking for a key, a way to penetrate the body, to open something, one truth that comes from the side of the truth and the reality" They made together sixty-eight performances (most of them very violent) and Expanding Space is one of them. Both artists are naked back to back between two pillars themselves moving between two fixed pillars. They have to start from a same point and run by moving the mobile pillars to the fixed pillars. Ulay leaves Marina who is making so much efforts to move the pillars even further. The extension in space is done by gradually changing the proportions of the pillars in relation to each other. 

Finally after thirteen years of love, they both decided to end their professional and love lives. In june 1988, after having traveled nearly 2000 km across each half of the Great Wall of China (ninety days of walking), and finding themselves in the middle of the Dragon, they mutally said goodbye forever.

Three rules to become an artist according to Marina Abramovic :

1. art should be disturbing
2. art should ask questions
3. art should predict the future (she also seemed to allude that it might also/instead transform or change the future/present)

> See also An artist life Manifesto by Marina Abramovic <


Video Vintage from february 8th to may 7th - Centre Pompidou, Paris

The Nomadic Files

Olivia collects nomadic files on her blog. Discover Costa Rica with Amanda, Moscow with Sacha and fly to Kingdom of Jordan with me.

Bon voyage !

Last minute Diane Arbus

Empty movie theater 

 Clouds on screen at a drive-in movie

42nd street movie theater audience

 Self-portrait pregnant

This self-portrait was taken with her first camera her husband bought her this one for her birthday. It symbolizes the start of their professional collaboration.

Self-portrait with daughter Doom

 Family in Brooklyn, Nyc

 Dominatrix with her client

 Groom kissing his bride

 Flower girl at a wedding

 Girl in a watch cap

Her pictures of children reveal a poignant truth as if they knew something adults have lost, without wearing any social masks, facing life with innocent madness.

 Santa Claus bishop

 Seated man in bra

This picture and the one below remind be of religious icons.

Superstar at home.

 Blind couple in their bedroom

 Teenage couple on Hudson street

Probably the picture in front of which I stayed the longest. How old could they be ? They look so powerful and confident together. It's disturbing.

 Mrs Dagmar Patino at the grand opera

The 1938 debutante in her room

 Nudist lady with swan sunglasses (love this pair !)

For the exhibition closing I tryed hard to look like the old actresses Diane used to shoot with their duchesses furs but I maybe have mixed up with Peggy >here<

From october 18th, a blockbuster exhibition is on every mouth in Paris, the retrospective of the american photographer Diane Arbus at the Jeu de Paume. Yesterday was the last day and I was the last person of the thousands of visitors coming there since 5 months to exit it pushed away by the bouncers.

Approximately 200 photographs drawn from museum and private collections offered a sight on her most famous pictures but also on her unpublished works.

Arbus is famous for her clichés of the banged up America, its monster reality,and the mysteries of its banalities. Freaks, transexuals, child with grenada, these are all part of our collective memory and its impossible not to enjoy seeing them again but it was also the occasion to get acquainted with rare and previously unreleased works.

I was surprised to discover the spectrum of her work ( even if the layout of the exhibition was too smooth and polished, pics almost equal in both their presentation and put in very chic white frames !).
The series on circus reminded me a lot of Stanley Kubrick photographs Personalities of the circus I've seen at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Art, here are some examples.

 And the cinema series is the one I loved most because I think it is a metaphor of how she looks at life, dramatic and detached, through her camera lenses, watching passive audiences hypnotized by alienating characters.

The last two rooms were dedicated to her life, from her birth to her suicide with big quotes (she studied literrature and it appears obvious) I let you some with of them.

I see the divinity in ordinary things.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse.

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

See also one of her photograph the albinos sisters at the Fiac >here<

Kelley's last journey to Kandor

Today the contemporary art world lost one of his most influential talent : Mike Kelley. An occasion to remember one of his masterpieces "Kandors". 

For you, non-Superman fans, Kandor is a Kryptonian city that has been shrunk and placed in a bell jar.

Kelley created replicas of Kandor using colorful handblown glass bottles and bell jars. I had the chance to see  some of them at the Punta Della Dogana when I lived in Venice and it concentrates all the imaginary ingredients I love in artworks. 

A bizarre and beautiful mix of science fiction, mudane, retro-futuristic, industrial and intimate. Some sources said that the cause of death was suicide but I prefer thinking he found his way to the birthplace of Superman, Kandor.