SINGAPORE BIENNALE 2011 | OPEN HOUSE

Ming Wong, Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow (still), 2010, 5 channel video installation, 12:58 minutes, colour, sound, © the artist.

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues.

Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are laid open. According to Creative Director Matthew Ngui, the focus this year is “on the city as site and as home, where art engages audiences and represents realities through unique creative processes”. With the curatorial objective of prioritizing these artistic processes (founding ideas, initial emotional compulsions and artistic intentions) – all of which inevitably function within a complex network of socio-historical and cultural spaces and discourses –,Open House engages with the local experience by hosting its works in emblematic and culturally significant sites (read: converted colonial-style buildings carrying the collective memory of the country’s history).

Such site-specific installations however, invariably demand that the works are examined in relation to the difficult spaces created by the architecture of the buildings, and it is precisely therein that the Biennale disappoints. If process-oriented site-specificity endeavors to augment several things – like emphasizing performative aspects that such charged spaces are wont to engender or constructing an enhanced community network for instance – the paucity of connections made between particular spatial dimensions and the artwork generates instead, a random walking route that feels akin to an exhaustive tourist list of sightseeing spots to tackle before the sun goes down.

Matt Mullican, That persons work with single bedsheets, 2007, bedsheets, mixed media ( 26 sheets and 22 bars), 246 x 165 cm. Installation gesamt 8 x 8m, Höhe 2,5m Photo: Lisa Rastl. Image courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.

That is not to say that the show doesn’t try to explore what happens when traditional boundaries that demarcate private and public spheres are breached. On the contrary, it makes an earnest but at times literal attempt to do so through artists such as Arin Rungjang’s research piece on Thai-migrant workers who have made their private experiences for public consumption, or through Martha Rosler’s public garden that was constructed in dialogue with students, local community groups and artists. Roslisham Ismail’s investigation into the buying and eating habits of the local population offers us intimate, transgressive moments of the degustatory sort in Secret Affair (2010 – 2011), a food installation of 6 refrigerators storing the consumables of several families.

Staples of contemporary art themes – subversion, displacement and the extent to which how much one sacrifices for art – are revisited in other contemplative pieces. For Matt Mullican, an artist whose practices have since the 1970s, been informed by the creation of art under hypnosis, That Person’s work with single bedsheets (2007) documents the devices of the hyperconscious (his trance persona is aptly called That Person) and the fluidity of fiction and reality. Scandinavian art duo of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset known for “Drama Queens” at the Old Vic (a neat survey of 20th century art history enhanced by the voices of stage actors) and Prada Marfa in the Texan landscape, replicated an Old German Barn in the hangar of the Old Kallang Airport accompanied by hunky blokes clad in lederhosen.

Elgreem & Dragset, Installation, The German Barn, commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011. Image © designboom.

Ise (Roslisham Ismail), Secret Affair, (work in progress), 2010 – 2011, food installation, © the artist.

Video installations seem to dominate the Biennale and are arguably, the most exciting of the lot, though much of these works have already premiered elsewhere. The priority given to the moving image here seems to be a curatorial acknowledgement of ever-increasing expansion of the visual vocabulary of artists and of the changing relationship between spectator and the artwork. Named after Robert Rauschenberg’s near-identical paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), Candice Breitz presents Factum(2010), a multi-channel video installation in a series of in-depth video portraits of twins – and one set of triplets, exploring forces that drive individuality and identity. Breitz films each twin in isolation from their sibling and reveals their starkly differing personalities and beliefs in a video diptych that demolishes common assumptions about twins’ ideological similarities.

Candice Breitz, Factum, 2009, six dual channel and one three channel video and sound installation, various times, © the artist.

Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010. Duration: 28 minutes, 23 seconds HD Video. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In a 4-part video installation Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S) (2010), Ryan Trecartin’s cast of camera-loving characters compete for attention in an overstimulated sphere where non-existent hierarchies and social rules hold the power to unleash assaultive fantasies. In this digitized, exhibitionist space of web-video sharing, re-fashioning one’s own identity is a not an act of volition but a necessity borne out of escaping repressive forces. Over-the-top emotional exchanges, androgynous dressing and fragmented scenes of image-text combination are frenetically documented in a chaotic montage amid electronica and exaggerated sound effects. Trecartin’s mismatched and effortless cast ultimately deconstruct contemporary cultural sensibilities as unstable and farcical.

Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message), 2007. Image: Courtesy of the artist. Production still: Erik De Cnodder.

The fragmentation of narrative that video art permits is fully utilized in Omer Fast’s De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007). In 27 minutes, several panoramic shots of 4 scenarios create worlds marked by reversals and contradictions. Shot like a drama series with a convoluted plot that is centered on a dying elderly woman tormented by memories from the Second World War, Fast’s narrative is supercharged with racial overtones. Also exploring issues on race, identity and gender is Ming Wong’sDevo Patire. Domani (2010), an appropriation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which he plays all the characters in an archetypal family plunged into an identity crisis after encountering a stranger. The theatrical emphasis on the viewer’s experiential/spatial encounter with the moving image naturally engenders the need for interactivity, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003). Frequency and Volume assesses human perceptions and kinetic energies within a built environment, using the shadows of gallery viewers as a form of embodied representation.

Arin Rungjang, Big Moon and Waterfall, 2006, outdoor light installation, bamboo, Passage de Retz, Paris, © the artist.

***
The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House is the 3^rd Biennale held in Singapore since 2006 and will run until 15 May 2011. Conceived by Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, Open House is organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board and supported by the National Arts Council. It is held across several venues: Old Kallang Airport, National Museum of Singapore, SAM@8Q and the Singapore Art Museum.

SINGAPORE BIENNALE 2011 | OPEN HOUSE

Ming Wong, Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow (still), 2010, 5 channel video installation, 12:58 minutes, colour, sound, © the artist.

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues.

Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are laid open. According to Creative Director Matthew Ngui, the focus this year is “on the city as site and as home, where art engages audiences and represents realities through unique creative processes”. With the curatorial objective of prioritizing these artistic processes (founding ideas, initial emotional compulsions and artistic intentions) – all of which inevitably function within a complex network of socio-historical and cultural spaces and discourses –,Open House engages with the local experience by hosting its works in emblematic and culturally significant sites (read: converted colonial-style buildings carrying the collective memory of the country’s history).

Such site-specific installations however, invariably demand that the works are examined in relation to the difficult spaces created by the architecture of the buildings, and it is precisely therein that the Biennale disappoints. If process-oriented site-specificity endeavors to augment several things – like emphasizing performative aspects that such charged spaces are wont to engender or constructing an enhanced community network for instance – the paucity of connections made between particular spatial dimensions and the artwork generates instead, a random walking route that feels akin to an exhaustive tourist list of sightseeing spots to tackle before the sun goes down.

Matt Mullican, That persons work with single bedsheets, 2007, bedsheets, mixed media ( 26 sheets and 22 bars), 246 x 165 cm. Installation gesamt 8 x 8m, Höhe 2,5m Photo: Lisa Rastl. Image courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.

That is not to say that the show doesn’t try to explore what happens when traditional boundaries that demarcate private and public spheres are breached. On the contrary, it makes an earnest but at times literal attempt to do so through artists such as Arin Rungjang’s research piece on Thai-migrant workers who have made their private experiences for public consumption, or through Martha Rosler’s public garden that was constructed in dialogue with students, local community groups and artists. Roslisham Ismail’s investigation into the buying and eating habits of the local population offers us intimate, transgressive moments of the degustatory sort in Secret Affair (2010 – 2011), a food installation of 6 refrigerators storing the consumables of several families.

Staples of contemporary art themes – subversion, displacement and the extent to which how much one sacrifices for art – are revisited in other contemplative pieces. For Matt Mullican, an artist whose practices have since the 1970s, been informed by the creation of art under hypnosis, That Person’s work with single bedsheets (2007) documents the devices of the hyperconscious (his trance persona is aptly called That Person) and the fluidity of fiction and reality. Scandinavian art duo of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset known for “Drama Queens” at the Old Vic (a neat survey of 20th century art history enhanced by the voices of stage actors) and Prada Marfa in the Texan landscape, replicated an Old German Barn in the hangar of the Old Kallang Airport accompanied by hunky blokes clad in lederhosen.

Elgreem & Dragset, Installation, The German Barn, commissioned by the Singapore Biennale 2011. Image © designboom.

Ise (Roslisham Ismail), Secret Affair, (work in progress), 2010 – 2011, food installation, © the artist.

Video installations seem to dominate the Biennale and are arguably, the most exciting of the lot, though much of these works have already premiered elsewhere. The priority given to the moving image here seems to be a curatorial acknowledgement of ever-increasing expansion of the visual vocabulary of artists and of the changing relationship between spectator and the artwork. Named after Robert Rauschenberg’s near-identical paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), Candice Breitz presents Factum(2010), a multi-channel video installation in a series of in-depth video portraits of twins – and one set of triplets, exploring forces that drive individuality and identity. Breitz films each twin in isolation from their sibling and reveals their starkly differing personalities and beliefs in a video diptych that demolishes common assumptions about twins’ ideological similarities.

Candice Breitz, Factum, 2009, six dual channel and one three channel video and sound installation, various times, © the artist.

Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010. Duration: 28 minutes, 23 seconds HD Video. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In a 4-part video installation Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S) (2010), Ryan Trecartin’s cast of camera-loving characters compete for attention in an overstimulated sphere where non-existent hierarchies and social rules hold the power to unleash assaultive fantasies. In this digitized, exhibitionist space of web-video sharing, re-fashioning one’s own identity is a not an act of volition but a necessity borne out of escaping repressive forces. Over-the-top emotional exchanges, androgynous dressing and fragmented scenes of image-text combination are frenetically documented in a chaotic montage amid electronica and exaggerated sound effects. Trecartin’s mismatched and effortless cast ultimately deconstruct contemporary cultural sensibilities as unstable and farcical.

Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message), 2007. Image: Courtesy of the artist. Production still: Erik De Cnodder.

The fragmentation of narrative that video art permits is fully utilized in Omer Fast’s De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007). In 27 minutes, several panoramic shots of 4 scenarios create worlds marked by reversals and contradictions. Shot like a drama series with a convoluted plot that is centered on a dying elderly woman tormented by memories from the Second World War, Fast’s narrative is supercharged with racial overtones. Also exploring issues on race, identity and gender is Ming Wong’sDevo Patire. Domani (2010), an appropriation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which he plays all the characters in an archetypal family plunged into an identity crisis after encountering a stranger. The theatrical emphasis on the viewer’s experiential/spatial encounter with the moving image naturally engenders the need for interactivity, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003). Frequency and Volume assesses human perceptions and kinetic energies within a built environment, using the shadows of gallery viewers as a form of embodied representation.

Arin Rungjang, Big Moon and Waterfall, 2006, outdoor light installation, bamboo, Passage de Retz, Paris, © the artist.

***

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House is the 3^rd Biennale held in Singapore since 2006 and will run until 15 May 2011. Conceived by Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, Open House is organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board and supported by the National Arts Council. It is held across several venues: Old Kallang Airport, National Museum of Singapore, SAM@8Q and the Singapore Art Museum.

SHIGERU TAKATO | OUR ELUSIVE COSMOS

Shigeru Takato

Work from Our Elusive Cosmos.

“These are photographs of landscapes on Earth relating to the exploration of space and our cosmos. These relations could be scientific, mythological, factual, or religious. We often analyse, philosophise and romanticise our cosmos. Our knowledge of it is limited and much remains unknown and a mystery. In the late 60’s and early 70’s we began to see images of the lunar landscape. NASA’s Martian rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” send images of the Martian landscape everyday. These landscapes we see of space are loaded with thoughts, beliefs, ambitions and imaginations, in which we search for more clues and knowledge. But are we seeing anything other than what we expect? Are these landscapes from outer space anything beyond our imagination? When we are faced with these images, what are we really seeing? Can we imagine any extraterrestrials that do not look like our typical aliens?” - Shigeru Takato

RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER | CARLSON

Artist: Richard Artschwager

Venue: Carlson, London

Exhibition Title: Richard Artschwager Curated by Rob Pruitt

Date: February 25 – March 31, 2011

Curated by: Rob Pruitt

Images courtesy of Carlson Gallery, London

Press Release:

When I was in my early 20s, after I graduated from art school, I worked at Sonnabend gallery. On the side, to supplement my income, I got a job working for Richard Artwschwager. At that time, in the late 80s, there was an explosion of interest in Artschwager’s work. I remember, in particular, a show at Leo Castelli gallery called “Artwschwager: Peers and Persuasions,” with artists like Ashley Bickerton, Meyer Vaisman, and Peter Halley. As a 23 year old, it was a tremendous privilege to get to know the man – I was in awe.

Artschwager’s studio was in a garage behind his house, and after a morning of work, we would all have lunch in the main house seated at a twelve foot long oak dining table. That table is depicted in the “Two Dinners” painting that is in this exhibition, and that painting was made in 1988, the year that I worked for Artschwager. So essentially, I have lived in that painting, and that’s my point of entry when I look at it. This seems appropriate, as so much of Artschwager’s work is about bridging the gap between the real, practical world, and the other, more mysterious worlds depicted in art.

In “Two Dinners,” there are a multitude of worlds depicted – the world atop the table, the world of the room that the table sits in, the world outside through the double doors, the world of the painting, cut off, which hangs next to the doors, and of course the world outside the Formica frame, of Carlson Gallery, in which “Two Dinners” now hangs. But this is really a painting about the two people you can’t see, and the spaces that their lives and conversations fill. Like with Artschwagers’ chair sculptures, the people are not depicted, but the human form is always a phantom presence.

When I look at “Two Dinners,” I can’t help but hear Artschwager’s voice. Part sage, part Nutty Professor, every word seemed considered and wise and I was always enthralled. Most of what I know about Artschwager, I learned in that dining room. I know that he was a Navy man who spent hours in front of a radar screen, where locations are signaled by electronic blips. I know that in the 1960s, he made chairs and tables for a store in NY called The Door Store, and that he was also commissioned to make functional objects for a church. The ‘dots’ that compose his iconic works — the recurring blips, sculptures of tables and chairs and pulpits and kneeling benches — were easy enough to connect. Like that twelve foot oak table I saw those works as locations for both everyday and transcendent experience, stations between physical and spiritual worlds.

I remember one day Artschwager talking about mouse holes, like in cartoons. He was obsessed, and went on and on. These little black arched portals – sometimes graffitied on walls, and of course familiar from children’s fairytales – are emergency exits for the little pretend mouse, another world, a safe place. This is how I feel when I look in to one of Artschwager’s non-mirror mirrors, like I’ve left the room and have entered a safe space inside my mind. When Artschwager takes the archetypes of our daily existence, a mirror, a door, a dining table he provides us with the space to consider the lives that we live. The objects become signifiers of our own existence, challenging us to consider what it is that we do, the relationships we have, including the relationship we forge with the spaces we create or enter into, they are frameworks for the time we spend, and reminders of our own profound physicality.

Rob Pruitt, Feb. 2011 – London

FAN MAIL | INTERVIEW WITH AMY REVIER

Each month, DailyServing selects two artists to be featured in our Fan Mail series.  If you would like to be considered, please submit to info@dailyserving.com a link to your website with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line.  Keep checking the site – you could be the next artist featured!

For this edition of Fan Mail, Austin, TX based artist Amy Revier has been chosen from a group of worthy submissions to discuss the process and ideas that fuel her art practice.  With an imminent move to London on the horizon, Revier also fills us in on what’s next.

Woolly Headed, image courtesy the artist.

Kelly Nosari: Textiles, significantly wools, and the process of weaving are important elements of your practice and have potential feminist implications.  In performance work such as Woolly Headed and Yolk Yoke, you wrap and confine your body in woven textile.  Your Woven Drawing series relieves woven textiles of their utilitarian nature, giving them new creative life as drawing comprised of texture and color.  Please talk about your work in this medium and the ideas that inform it.

Amy Revier: I became interested in textiles through weaving.  The practice of weaving has such a dense relationship with ritual and placing oneself into a kind of solitary, psychological space.  Wool is a reference to that density – and it became a tool for hibernation in my performance work. I was also using wool to reference something wild and very animal. The head-wrapping performances would often become stiflingly hot and disorienting. I wanted them to waiver at that point just before something loses control, blows apart, and becomes lost. Performance was a way to become more intimate with the material – to dig into its structure and, while doing so, work in a very concentrated, obsessive manner, as weaving often demands.

The most recent work in textiles step away from performance and sit closer to drawing and painting. While living in Iceland, one of the projects I started was making portable woven drawings on handmade looms. It was during the dark winter months and making those drawings were like little daily rituals. They accumulated time, and also acted as parallels to text I was reading on otherworldly places – Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Italo Calvino’sCosmicomics.

Woven Drawings, image courtesy the artist.

Textiles used in the recent sculptural, body-board work are rolled to resemble rescue blankets or camping equipment.  I was interested in taking what is usually a very durable, non-descript blanket and making it handwoven in the most meticulous way (hand spinning the yarn, using paper and thin steel as warp and weft). I’m also beginning to explore the idea of a body-board unit (such as Riding on the Back of Another) as an object for ceremony more than rescue – for navigating unknown or mythical territories.

KN: Looking at a work like Riding on the Back of Another or Blackfog one can’t help but recall The Pack(1969) by Joseph Beuys.  Is Beuys a source of inspiration?

AR: Beuys’ work has definitely been a reference for me – specifically in the way he weaves myth, ritual, performance, and repetitive action or objects together.  I would also say I had a strong reaction to how he places architecture and textile together.  When I first saw Beuys’ work I thought of tribal cradleboards, which was my direct reference for [my earliest board work] Blackfog.

Riding on the Back of Another, image courtesy the artist.

KN: Your series A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler depicts explosive clouds of smoke emanating from prams in otherwise quiet and empty urban settings.  Please tell us about this recent series.

AR: This series is a project that came together while in Iceland.  While on walks I quickly began to notice that prams are left outside with infants in them, while the parents go for coffee, groceries, shop, or socialize.  I found it linked to my research on the tribal cradleboards. Both cultures use an apparatus to keep the infant safe and secure while they gather food, or in the modernized Icelandic version, go for coffee and drinks. I made a daily habit of photographing these prams with infants in them, seemingly abandoned. The collaged image of the volcanic ash plumes came much later, after I had time to experience and understand the political, geological, and economic upheavals.  The ash cloud images are from Google, and are mostly of the Icelandic volcanoes that occurred in March-April 2010. But it was the apparatus that interested me most, and the fact that it became a metaphor for Iceland’s situation as a whole.  It contained something very alive and active, wild but slumbering – similar characteristics of volcanoes, and also of the unforeseen economic corruptions that caused Iceland’s devastating 2008 financial collapse.

KN: What are you working on at the moment?

AR: Currently I’m building a garment collection in collaboration with artist Natalie Northrup. Everything is built from the ground up – we’re weaving and quilting sculptural drawings, then slowly arranging the pieces together to form garments.  It’s a project that forms intersections between sculpture, drawing and painting, performance, and fashion. This first collection will be comprised of roughly fifteen pieces, installed in a space that allows them to waiver ambiguously between garment and sculpture.

I am also making woven drawings and new sculpture for an upcoming group show at Champion Contemporary in Austin, TX.

A Quiet Root May Know How to Holler, image courtesy the artist.

KN: Can you offer one piece of advice for emerging artists?

AR: I think about this when making work… a line from Eileen Myles in The Importance of Being Iceland:

One thing I was thinking about imperfection is that it’s exactly enough. It’s the beginning of something.

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