category: hyperlink, web - Comments Off on It is important to note that Natascha Süder Happelmann is not a pseudonym – such as Lutz Bacher, for example – but an adaption. While pseudonyms are used to avoid revealing one’s real identity, Süder Happelmann wants her name to be traced back to her real one. For this purpose, the artist evaluated collected misspellings and autocorrects of her name with which she had been addressed over the past 30 years and selected Natascha Süder Happelman to be ‘the proper name for this important task’ as her spokeswoman Duldung explained. In order to represent Germany at one of the most important exhibitions in the world, the artist considered it necessary to ‘integrate’ by using a more German-sounding with umlauts and ‘-mann’ suffix to her surname. – ‘Natascha Süder Happelmann’ will represent Germany at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Carina Bukuts, Frieze Magazine, October 26, 2018 28 October 2018
The text above comes from Film which seems to be the catalogue of an exhibition by DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER and EVA MARISALDI that took place at the Geneva based gallery Espace Analix in 1994.
category: publication, web - Comments Off on Saw myself in film. Odd, seeing one’s self as a puppet. Heightening of mirror effect. Narcissus stirs, walks, sees himself from the back, as he cannot see and could not imagine himself. Becomes aware of a whole area indissociable from him, a host of hidden bonds, a whole Other sustaining the Same. Receives the invisible self. One is cast out of one’s self, change into another. One passes judgement upon one’s self – If it could see or perceive, through this artifice, the mind thus externalized, and from forbidden angles – what awareness would one have? What effect on one’s sense of self? To see one’s self thinking, responding, sleeping. – Paul Valéry, Ego, 1973 from On the Eve of the Future, Selected Writings on Film, Annette Michelson 15 October 2018
category: exhibition, hyperlink - Comments Off on Sarah Smolders reproduced 10’000 tiles to create an exact copy of the floor of the Netwerk Aalst and then presented them on the top of the existing floor – Concrete, Concrete by Sarah Smolders, Netwerk Aalst, Aalst (Belgium) until December 16, 2018 29 September 2018
category: exhibition - Comments Off on Michael E Smith. Atlantis 28 September 2018
all images: MICHAEL E SMITH, Atlantis exhibition view at Atlantis, Marseille
copyright and courtesy of the artist and Atlantis, Marseille
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Lately I have been thinking a lot about the future, its erstwhile role in the avant-garde, and its more or less complete absence from contemporary art discourse. Who really imagines the future anymore? Or tries to? Is it even possible? What, in the anthropocene, is conceivable at this point? Maybe only forms of collapse. Sudden conclusions. Endings. And the elegies that alternatively succeed or in this case, precede them.
If I had to elect one artist to elegize the end of if not America, then the industrialized world, it would be Michael E. Smith. Working with found and appropriated materials, which have been known to include everything from animal parts to textiles to car parts to human bone, not to mention everything in-between, Smith creates supremely laconic and darkly comic sculptures that seem to come to us from a future that we would either prefer not to or cannot imagine. Whether or not we, as a species, actually figure in that future is unclear (indeed, whether or not we would even want to figure in it is something else entirely). But something seems to have happened there (where? looming on the horizon) in which the objects, tools and technologies we once used to negotiate it no longer seem to possess the uses for which they were intended. Something has happened. Is happening. Will have happened. Already.
category: hyperlink, text - Comments Off on I’ve come to think that the idea of a cinematic moment concerns a tension between lived experience and its representation. In other words, just as certain experiences can become iconic so too can certain representations be lived. The observations – propositions? – that I wrote for my booklet do not involve a camera, a projector or a theater. Their cinematic claims are instead rooted in perception and signification. The spectator comprises subjective consciousness in the act of self-observation, a somewhat tautological state. The moment of realization is predicated on redundancy. Moreover, to qualify as “cinematic,” an experience need not echo an actual film. Rather, it only would need to be representable and repeatable. These qualities suggest a narrative kernel. They pertain to both scenario, namely a setting that might engender a narrative arc no matter how minimal, and script, namely an anticipated sequence. A scenario need not be a literal place and a script need not be written. According to these terms, the “cinematic” could be a distillation. – John Miller, What is a Cinematic Moment? 16 September 2018
