contemporary monkey

ground zero for paradise

While the popular cry for the slow demise of Earth has been heard from every person, state, corporation, and politician for the past two decades, the Garden of Paradise appears to be handling it like a tough old grandmother. Think of a place on Earth that sees minimal human imprint. A green, square patch of pure, awe-inspiring, not a Rainforest Cafe in site, natural hunk of land. It’s still out there, despite the over-worked contortions and knee-jerk spams from the doomsday machine that is global media. Sure, plenty of bad news, with oil spills, mud slides, slowly advancing tsunamis, over-fishing countries, land-pillaging corporations, because that’s what sells subscriptions and page impressions. While the fear mongering certainly has a foundation, it’s good to see that ever-present Nature still presses mankind between thumb and forefinger, no what matter what we throw at it. The Garden of Eden, it appears, has seen tougher foes than the likes of us.

The artist Sergio Vega thinks he’s located the original Garden of Eden: ground zero for paradise on Earth. Using a document called, “Paradise in the New World”, the coordinates for which are said to be located in Brazil, Vega films the natural and makes a comparison with the unnatural (that would be you and me). The state of Mato Grosso has been claimed as the centre of all Earth’s beauty, which, if you believe Wikipedia, that non de-foresting but sometimes questionable web site, translates to “thick woods”. I reckon the Amazon is as good a place as any to call the centre of beauty as we know it.

In Vega’s current exhibition at Birmingham’s IKON Eastside, entitled, “Paradise: Real Time”, he underscores nature’s influence on one of its dependents: man. Through multiple, and very large, high definition video images, it’s apparent that the mother of all form, line and colour holds sway over us in not only what we build, and how we build it, but what we do when we’re not busy destroying each other. Tower blocks in urban landscapes mimicking palm forests. Brightly saturated clothing imitating tropical birds, and Birds of Paradise. Bee-like tribal dance rituals stirring up mini tornado clouds of dust. My take away is that, while the human race endeavors to suck the life out of the planet, we often don’t recognise the force of strength coming the opposite way. I found the scenes to be a very positive, and pleasantly refreshing take on the Man versus Nature debate that usually leads headlines. Unfortunately, the gallery notes would have you believe otherwise - another reason to consume art before the usual suspects lead you in their pre-determined, and biased, direction.

Local wildlife wearing Brazilian football jersey

It’s one of only two problems I had with this exhibit. In its gallery notes, IKON Eastside magnifies a “deterioration of the area’s natural beauty” when contrasting the side-by-side images. While certainly a valid, if not stale, viewpoint, it shows a true dramatic pessimism to emphasize what’s wrong rather than what’s right. The gallery notes chose to reflect despair and cynicism: “Rainforests, animals, insects and rivers - all filmed in real time - are projected across multiple screens around the gallery, juxtaposed with scenes of urban development, logging and local poverty.” After viewing beginning to end, I must admit not seeing any scenes of logging, or very much deforestation in general. If anything, the point made was toward the results from human progress, somewhat uninspired compared with natural beauty. As for poverty, it saw it more as a screen-shot for the natural way life is led in the Amazon, rather than an emotional tug for someone who isn’t donned with a Ralph Loren Polo shirt, clutching a chilled Coca-Cola, perched on a pink Vespa. Set closely adjacent to each other, the urban versus nature video images, if anything, suggests a dominion over mankind. More awe-inspiring than distressing.

The second problem with the exhibition is its overuse of the phrase: “Real Time”. The video wasn’t at all in real time, it was simply real, filmed in another time. It obviously reflected something that already happened, possibly recently, but who knows. Still, I think the artist missed a trick by NOT having a real time camera, or two or three, placed in choice areas that beam back real time images countering the urban with the natural. I understand this system would only work in a few time zones left and right of the Amazon, but even if delayed by half a day, the scenes would be closer, and truer, to our own daily lives, than what’s being claimed in the gallery.

But those are the only two problems I had with the piece. Let’s continue with the positive vibes and simply say it’s satisfying, finally, to see nature winning an innings or two. Even if we know the opponents (again, that’s you and me) to be more determined.

Attention all aliens from extragalactic nebula outside Earth’s Solar System (third planet from our sun, in the Galaxy called the Milky Way). Consider this a human plea for what was at one time, righteously ours, and to many people, fondly remembered.  We would like to have our Russians back please.  The ones that were on Earth before the black hole of what was known as the Soviet Union, where those of us on the outside were completely blinded by a lack of hard data, while those on the inside were vacuumed up by your molecular-level, cell-parsing tractor beams.  There are 180 million of them - you can’t miss ‘em.

Before the Frost of Irrelevancy: Kandinsky

For those of us Earthlings devoted to the subject of art, and who were forced observers from beyond the Iron Curtain (look it up, it’s too depressing to describe here), there are more than 70 years which cannot be accounted for.  It’s during this massive time void that we suspect you’ve taken our most significant Russians and hoarded them for yourselves.  For this self-serving act, we can’t blame you, but we’d like them back now.

Prior to our Western Earth Year of 1917, our collection of gifted Russian artists included Kandinsky, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and more.  Now we’re left with the heap that’s thrashing about the walls inside the London art gallery, Calvert22.  Gutov, Khanyutin, Zakharov, are all speaking visual gibberish to us with no claim on story-telling.  These androids seem to be using your indecipherable language on us, and have yet to master the ability to communicate with what we call “Homo Sapiens” or “man”.  Maybe you can make sense of this twisted jabbering, but they might as well be speaking Martian to us (ref: Mars, the fourth planet in our solar system, with no life form…the reference to Martian language is a obviously a glib remark, because, oh forget it).  Let’s make it a straight swap: you give us our soulful, complex, but engaging Russian artists back, and in return you can have what ever’s inside Calvert22.

Video seems to be their choice of parlay with us, possibly because of your presumption that all human beings drink a form of electricity through reflected-light screens and energy-emitting monitors.  Only some of us, e.g. Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson and Peaches Geldof, are able to accomplish such a feat, but assume that most of us cannot.  What’s more, your Russian replicants seem to enjoy duplicating each other’s work by using our black and white video format to shed light on their bleak, cheerless, barren land, with a life short on human emotion.  If that is indeed the point of their art, they had me at ten seconds of the first video.  The rest of the works were simply superfluous.  Next time, have your automatons draw straws and send down a single humanoid, armed with just one of his human videos, limited to 15 seconds in length (preferably shorter).  Oh, and can you beam down the latest human that resembles Kandinsky, or Malevich so we can remember what Russian artistic talent was like, before your photon-separating magneto-pulse device chemically reduced our Russians to their component parts.  You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you can’t put them back together.

Something that Jeffrey Deitch said in the book, Collecting Contemporary (by Adam Lindemann) I thought was a very useful idea for understanding contemporary art.  Deitch is one of New York’s art dealers, with a background in finance as well as art.  Although he doesn’t come out and say it, his perspective is one where art is collectible for financial gain.  Still, what do you do with a Harvard degree, and Citibank Art Advisory on your CV?  I’m guessing the phrase “capital gain” comes up in his conversations with clients.

But everyone has their reasons for existing in the art world, and for a moment, let’s give Deitch credit for creative thinking.  He looks for an artist who “creates his or her own aesthetic world, as opposed to an artist who’s just making a nice object.  There are a lot of artists who make very nice objects, but you can’t really say that there is a whole vision of the world that you can grasp in their work.”

Creating worlds is a place where traditional story tellers excel, and artists should be held to the same level of expectation.  For example, in film, the Coen Brothers create their own worlds, and whatever the outcome to the protagonist, we’re always someplace we’ve never been.

Fargo: Joel and Ethan Coen

There was an online video once about a London artist by the name of Richard Galpin (Hales Gallery) where we followed along with him as he created his own invention using existing photographs.  Working with an enlarged C-Print of an existing city centre, he slowly peels away slices and sections of the original photograph, revealing his version of a futurist’s cityscape. The result shares very little with the original photo, but is useful as a “blank” screen for ground breaking results after a few hours.  It’s a revolutionary approach in that the world he’s given is not the world he’s taking.

Richard Galpin: Distructure 1

Finally, a reason to like a film by David Lynch, the American film writer and director.  In all of his films, the strangeness of people and their stories is magnetic, but in the end, the appreciation evaporates into common voyeurism.  Good fun watching mysterious characters do creepy things.  I always thought it was a bit inventive to the point that, the point was to invent odd people, and thus become odd yourself.  Sort of like Paris Hilton being famous for being famous.

David Lynch's new project, The Interview Project

Through a site called new-art.blogspot.com, I’ve learned of Lynch’s new endeavor called The Interview Project, which provides for better storytelling than any of his previous films.  The concept is pretty straight forward: get a camera, turn it on, ask people to sum up their lives so far.  The start line is the statistical hottest place in the USA: Needles, California.  That’s hot as in ambient temperature, not hot as in Michael Jackson popularity (-ness).  I haven’t any idea what the eventual journey is supposed to look like, but given its starting line, and the comments made from average folk, this could be a look back on just how America handled its pot of gold rush to anywhere-but-here on the old Route 66.  America’s elevator pitch, as they say in sales circles.

To Lynch, it appears just any old person will do as a subject, although so far it’s older white males.  Still, the comments could come from anybody with a past.  The writing, because there isn’t any, is better than anything from Hollywood.  The soul-exposing honesty revealed throughout makes for curious entertainment, not to mention a good dose of American tragedy in these days of slow death by General Motors.  Though, maybe it’s a human thing, not peculiar to any country.  America is, and has been the chemistry lab for The Next Big Thing, and travelers from around the world have attempted to make it large in the country’s 230 some odd years of existence.  These stories could be the tragedy of the human being to venture into the wild for understanding and personal purpose.  The scientist’s conclusion to an unsettling experiment.

The length of interviews is easily consumed - about five minutes in length.  Whatever you’re doing throughout the day, you’d have a difficult time finding anything better that delivers a refreshing outlook to life. You think you’ve got it bad, try listening to the stories of the other amoebae in the test tube.

http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com

Two quotes I thought would help build a solid foundation for any Contemporary Monkey for understand art developed after the invention of the camera.

Tony Cragg, a British artist living in Germany suggests a difference between art and design.  I work on design projects in addition to writing for Contemporary Monkey, so for me this has particular resonance.  “…the designer always has a recipient in mind, but an artist has a different, non-utilitarian agenda and it opens up enormous possibilities for new language.” (from Art World, April/May 2009).  A designer might say something differently, but artists see themselves as striving for a higher goal, using a different tool than the agreed upon standards in visual communication.  However, a “new language” sounds about right to me.  If artists can pull ideas out of their heads, or hearts, and make a difference somewhere beyond their own skin, success would certainly have a chance.  All it would take is just one other person to “get it”. The important point though is for artists to get beyond themselves.

Another quote originates from the film industry, and picked up from The Times (UK) quoting Charlie Kaufman.  A completely original screenwriter, Kaufman is the pen behind “Being John Malkovich” , “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.  If you know Kaufman’s work, the following quote makes complete sense that it would come from his mouth.  Answering a question about his latest film, “Synechdoche”, he responds, “I mean it means what it means, and it means what you think it means, and it means what somebody else thinks it means.” If you can get your head around all of that, the point should be taken for art generally. If an artist means to communicate one way, you and I, separately, could take on completely different meanings, and still we would all be correct.  Or I guess the word would be “satisfied”.