Going back to what you knew (retracing)

I went to MoMA today and saw Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves, a multi-channel video installation. There was a section about ink, too. Not sure what to write about that, so might come back to it a later point. It, uhm, hit close to home? I often wonder what this fascination with East Asian culture is - not just for me, but for a lot of people. Well, I can only speak for myself. Either way, back to the point. The video installation was good, especially the motions where the videos would work like a wave, moving up in a circular motion. And then Bjork came by.

This is very strange. I wish I'd known about this artist about four years ago when I was making something very similar. Her name is Sophie Tottie, and this is Written Language (line drawings), #VI. Apparently she drew one line, and then drew the rest coming out from it. It makes me want to sit down and just draw and draw tiny little ink lines on paper, but then I remember that I'm here to be uncomfortable and do New And Challenging Things, and I curse and decide to perhaps do it in the early mornings when no one's in the studio to see it anyways.

Another little candy from Ten Thousand Waves. My phone likes to make little stop motion videos when I've taken a lot of photos consecutively. It's sort of nice, even better than when Google+ makes my "auto awesome" photos snow.

Again I forgot to photograph my studio. Basically, after going to MoMA and then to buy some sweaters I danced for the rest of the day. I've decided to get better control of my body, and if I'm going to have a go at performance again anyways and so on and so forth, you know, might as well get stronger at the same time! So I'm trying to do really slow exercises, and they work like this:

Sit on your chair. Fall of, really slowly. Get back onto the chair, also really slowly. 

Stand up. Fall to the floor, you guessed it, really slowly. Get up again, yes, slowly again!

I once saw a photo of a performance artist who fell down a staircase, but incredibly slowly. I am trying to find her name now, but that is something I'm very interested in. Otherwise, here's some eye candy (literally and, well, literary as in intellectually. Brain candy?). Notice the way he "falls" graciously down those stairs.

To be scared shitless, and being really, really cold

So I have arrived in New York! I came four days ago, and two days ago my program started. A brief introduction:

I go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I am doing a semester in New York. It's a studio residency program in Dumbo (underneath the Brooklyn bridge), where we get our own studios and work independently alongside 18 other students from art schools elsewhere in the United States. I have also moved into a little room, and installed myself accordingly:

Mmm, books. So delicious. I also have Norwegian chocolate, at least for a few more days, and even brown cheese. Was v. scared the first few days here; should I even be here, will I make good art, what if everyone's better than me, and so on and so forth. Fear have subsided, but have decided that being uncomfortable is a good thing.

Then, after that was done, I went to the Met and saw a great exhibition of Chinese ink art at the museum. This is Huang Yan's Chinese Landscape Tattoo No. 2 or No. 4:

And Xu Bing's The Written Word: Book from the Sky which was incredible. I'm probably jinxing myself by saying this, but I'd like to make something that makes me feel like this. And writing, and books, and paper.

I have also begun working in the studio... More pictures and updates to come on that note, but I think it will be a good semester. I've decided to keep a workbook yet again, as my high school art class prompted. It is good to write it down, which is why I decided to also blog about this experience. Processing something outside of my own mind is, for me, a healthy way of thinking about things.

We also went to the library at SVA (School of Visual Art) today, the school our program runs through. Amazing. Unfortunately, they have a great collection of manga. Good for me, not so good art- and career-wise! Had completely forgotten that Love Hina existed! Ok, back to work. MoMA next!

All photos are by me.

sound, playing and then, ando and ito

Christine Sun Kim, a sound artist: 

so I am thinking a little bit about sound, mainly because I recently made a piece about sound, sort of, and it is something I really don't know much about. It feels like technology to me, that scary thing he writes about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the it that 'romantics' are so terrified of... Because:

- I don't know how I am supposed to approach it. Differently from painting, which I am also not familiar with, I would... well, now that I think about it, maybe it's not that different. Learning something you are not already familiar with... 

SONIC EXPERIMENTS:

sound entering not only through the ears, but through the whole body and the psyche (Christine Sun Kim paraphrased); she writes about owning the sound and erroding the barrier between those who know it and those who don't. 

Which is why I wanted to make this into a weaving:

melbourne tryouts

pics by me, weaving by me

sound by Hans

can I understand it better, then.

DESTRUCTION OF ONE'S OWN ART

scenario: the weaving is slowly becoming unravelled through the sound: my sound and my brother's sound, or my re-make of it, potentially? or melbourne tryouts very loudly and very slowly, coming through speakers that agitate one thousand needles, pricking and pricking the fabric again... 

which reminds me of Kafka's In the Penal Colony:

thousands of needles piercing, making a pattern, torturing? unravelling, or rather, making it come apart; UNDO is a much better word, as it removes it a bit from the fabric, and many things can be undone, but not many things can be unravelled.

something my friend wrote to me about some time ago

Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.Buzz. Buzz.But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.I that sinned and prayed and fasted.A child Conmee saved from pandies.

I, I and I. I.

I am not sure why, but seems relevant. another friend:

wild sound and room tone

tadao ando

and i am thinking about Tadao Ando, and here is a writing by Toyo Ito from a NUNO NUNO Book, which I wrote about before:

"Transparency, however, is not always so light and clear. We Japanese have willingly surrendered any opacity of self so as to blent into today's society. We live see-through lives, undistinguished from anyone else in an extremely streamlined regulating system. Urban Japan has become a convenience store peopled by instant snack foods wrapped in plastic and lined up on a shelf. We are more signs, wholly transparent, devoid of any scale of value. What's more, this mediocre transparent existence is entirely comfortable. And yet, as the individual in contemporary society turns ever more transparent, architecture and the city are becoming conversely more opaque.

One major characteristic of the contemporary city is that each space is utterly cut off from the next. Interiors portioned room from room, walls everywhere. Such perhaps is the destiny of social control: a vast homogenic cityscape is fragmented into places with almost no spatial interrelationships. This is especially true in commercial spaces, where divorcing the interior from the external environment facilitates dramatically 'staging' the premises. Spaces thick with shining products are clearly set up, when seen from a slight remove, on the basis of their uniformity and particularity; spaces seemingly so idiosyncratic are merely the accumulation of introspectively inflated fragments of homogeneity - this is today's city."

Yes, so that's that.

my friend who wrote about 

wild sound

and

room tone

gave me a book about sound... which i have only read a little about. now i will put this thought on pause, return to it when it has gone farther into my mind.

Three Transparancies

From SUKESUKE

Excerpts from an essay by Toyo Ito

1 Fluid Transparency:

To stand before a giant fish tank at the aquarium is to experience the curious sensation of being two places at once. With only a clear wall in between, 'here' on this side is dry land surrounded by air, while 'over there' on the other opens an aquatic world. Not so long ago, aquarium tanks were relatively small affaird, peered at through windows like openings in the wall.

Today's aquariums, however, have impossibly huge tanks where awesome volumes of water press at us with awesome force through layers of acrylic tens of centimetres thick.

To see through walls like this represent a major paradigm shift, as different as architectural elevations and cross-sections. When looking through a window, the view beyond is inviolate, self-contained. Not so with a transparent wall: an environment that ought to permeate everywhere suddenly cuts off at an invisible boundary, leaving its sheared face fully exposed. A visit to the aquarium in days gone by was like going to the circus; now one is fully immersed in the experience.

Lee Kit and casualty? failure? everyday?

I saw Lee Kit at the Osage Gallery when I was living in Hong Kong, and I recently stumbled across the photographs I took during the opening in 2010. I don't remember what I thought about it at the time, but now it feels very relevant.

Each cloth is hand-painted, and they have been used for 'mundane' or everyday activities, such as washing a window, or being hung up as curtains, or being slept on, in a bed. 

When I saw these photographs again I realized that yes, this is perfect, this is exactly what I want to do! 

In particular in terms of mundane everyday objects which have been made so particularly and beautifully. Just the idea of using a hand-painted cloth to wash a dirty window - why would you do it? It seems like a waste, but I like that so much. It is not so much invisible labour as it is something else... Failure, maybe? To use something in a way it should not be used. Of course, by putting them in a gallery setting they become those art objects again, and I don't know what to think of it (I suppose I like it. Ridiculous not to). 

But yes, I like the idea of failure, failure to do something, failure to realize something. A failure to use this object as it was meant to be used, or a failure to revere a beautiful piece of art, but rather, you sleep on it. That is the other thing I am so attracted to: sleeping on the cloth, making an impression of it. It makes me think about Do-Ho Suh's Home-series, where memory is embedded in the cloth, but it works in a different way. He uses the fabric to depict these interior and exterior spaces, and we can even walk around inside of them. Lee Kit, it seems, uses it more as a kind of... wasted labour. I am interested in this, this 'waste of labour' (no, definitively not about invisibility of labour), but I am even more interested in the memory we can embed into cloth. When I weave, the weaving is not finished when I take it off the loom or even when it is shown, and now it has traveled and lived with me for almost half a year, and I still have not 'used' it for anything. But I want it to be something, so I am sending it to Jordyn, and then we will see what happens.

Later on, I would like to make another weaving, and design it specifically so I can make pillow cases out of it. I think it will be a very simple design and form, probably white cotton plain weave, but the size will be so that I can get a set number of pillow cases from it. 

I feel like I am returning to things I used to think about, and ideas that began germinating when I was in Hong Kong, and I didn't think I would. I was trying to find back to the form of what I was making, but instead the ideas looped back on themselves.

(all the photographs are taken by me)