THIS LONG CENTURY

— I recently read Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein in which she describes her journey from managing her New England garden according to an aesthetic of visual control and order to a plate heaped with questions and contradictions about how we and our gardens function in the larger world that we live in. She reveals how enormously, unthinkably complex the ecosystems are that function around us; and how thoroughly we have disrupted them. The book is also full of suggestions and optimism for how we all could make different small decisions in our back yards that could have great impact.

As I am a New England transplant, this book gave me for the first time some understanding of and feeling for the landscape I live in. It also led me to thinking about art in relation to landscape. My work is always, at least in part about landscape and it’s always about picture making. Picture making, I believe grows from windows in architecture, and also from our marking of boundaries in relation to property ownership – usually rectangular parcels of land that we “compose” gardens and houses within. In both cases, but especially in relationship to architecture and the white cube exhibition space there is a remove from the wildness of nature that is achieved though our formal devices.

I was recently in Denver looking at the Denver Art Museum designed by Daniel Liebeskind. I expected to hate the building – but I didn’t. I found it quite beautiful especially in terms of how it makes space for the public to be in the building looking at art. It is a building for people. I grew up in Vancouver where I was from childhood quite taken with the totem poles of the northwest coast Indian people. Some of this work was in the collection of the Denver Art Museum. It struck me that Liebeskinds’ architecture makes an effort to find another kind of space to show art in. The totem poles are very involved in picture making. They are “pictorial.” But they were intended to exist outside, among trees. They don’t propose the same kind of division between themselves and the outside world as my work does. Instead of proposing a look through a window they incorporate a stylization that points to the shape of the eye. Perhaps they propose that the eye is the frame that forms our capacity to make “pictures” in mind. Carving out space for picture making on totem poles, in gardens, in paintings, or in architecture seem all related. The space drawn out as separate acts as metaphor for the internal space of mind and feeling, and in that space we can struggle to make sense of living.
—

Jessica Stockholder received her B.F.A. from the University of Victoria in Canada in 1982 and her M.F.A. from Yale in 1985. She has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, at such venues as the Dia Center for the Arts and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her work is represented in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, The Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Ms. Stockholder was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1999 and is currently professor and director of graduate studies in sculpture.

www.miandn.com

[neuespalte]

Jessica Stockholder, BIRD WATCHING, 2001
Part of the Site Santa Fe Exhibition BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM
Currated by Dave Hickey

The Denver Museum of Art designed by Daniel Libeskind

Douglas Cranmer, House Post, 1987-88, Denver Art Museum Collection 1988.19

All images and poems by Terence Koh
—

Terence Koh is a Chinese-Canadian artist who lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited at several prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthalle Zürich, Statements Art Basel and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. He is represented by Peres Projects.

www.asianpunkboy.com

LIGHT
“The light, reflected, its spirit contained in the stone”

“Once we had ascended its full height, the mountain turned back towards the white beach lying far below. It was at this beach the night before that we erected a wooden stand to greet the morning’s horizon. The first rays of light, skimming the surface of the sea, illuminated a path between the stand and the mountain’s crest. This is the trail that the animals have forever known. Even in the depths of night, there still remains the faintest trace of this light marking the path upwards. We placed a stone upon the stand and commenced our preparations for the eleven hour walk to the summit of the light’s path.”

Yukinori Maeda, LIGHT, 2007
Installation view of MELLOW FEVER, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris
Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery

LIGHT DEPOSIT

Yukinori Maeda, LIGHT DEPOSIT, 2008
Installation view of LIGHT CONSTRUCTION, Center for Cosmic Wonder
Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery

“Please leave (your) light in the space.”
This is a space where collected layers of light reverberate.
We are the souls and the light.

LIGHT LODGE

Yukinori Maeda, LIGHT LODGE, 2007
Installation view of SPACE OF YOUR FUTURE, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery

“Visitors to the Light Lodge may sense the presence of the light spirit. A vaporous inhabitor of the elements, this spirit transmits itself through the outer wavelengths, where sound bends toward light and the natural converges with the unnatural.”

HOUSE

Yukinori Maeda, HOUSE, 2003
Plywood, fluorescent light, fog, 130 x 130 x 99cm

Yukinori Maeda, House, 2005
Plywood, fluorescent light, fog, papier mache rock,
video projection various dimensions

Installation view of MAGIC VILLAGE COSMIC WONDER, YUKINORI MAEDA
MU Art Foundation, The Netherlands
—

Yukinori Maeda is an artist living and working in Japan. His work has been featured in multiple international art fairs such as LA Art, Frieze Art Fair, Art Nova and Art Basel Miami Beach. The central theme of Maeda’s projects has consistently been “light”. He has exhibited installations, consisting of reconstructed images of found photographs, objects, lighting systems and sound systems linked to the wave length of light. Maeda’s new solo exhibition UNIVERSAL LOVE will be held in Taka Ishii Gallery, February 7 to March 7, 2009.

www.takaishiigallery.com

— I was talking to a friend about a scene in Full Metal Jacket and he said “that is my favourite war movie”. Later, I thought, what does that mean? What does a favourite war movie satisfy? What makes it so desirable? All narrative cinema pivots on the transformation of a protagonist and so most war movies satisfy this requirement in spades. From An Officer and a Gentleman to Platoon, the young soldier is transformed into a man, either ruined by brutality or recused by structure, there is a simple pleasure in watching someone (other than oneself) abused into a potential killing machine. 

The movie that influenced my earlier work was Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. A very violent, almost balletic film, Cross of Iron pits Russians against Germans in a blood sport of WWII. Without the Americans and without the Jews, this was the first war movie where there were no good guys or bad guys. Just a bunch of men in uniforms shooting, stabbing, raping, beheading. There was no transformation that I remember, only my own suspended sense of allegiance and the relief of not being represented in the film. 

When I starting making drawing’s based on a young friend of my father’s who was killed after just on month of serving in Vietnam, I re-engaged with all those Vietnam movies I thought I loved and I no longer could love them. The fact that they were a fetish for me, and an ideal about masculinity that I couldn’t afford to indulge. My father’s friend was named Charlie and he was a race car driver, so he was already fully engaged in the fantasy of adventure and death defying acts. He wanted to get his tour of duty over as quick as possible so he could go back to Queens and continue racing his Corvette. I met him when I was four years old, when my Dad, who was an automotive photographer took me to a track in Long Island. Charlie looked like a movie star. But most of my Dad’s pictures were of the car, because at that point he was just a kid and the 67 Vette was more important than he was. Then he died and the car was raced by his friends for a year until it broke the track speed record. The winning times were written on the back window and Charlie’s sister put the car in her garage for over 30 years. It became the holy grail of muscle cars. There is no happy end to such a story. Just a lot of bullshit letters from low level military officials explaining how Charlie died. There was a cover-up and all the things we have come to believe, about casualties, friendly fire and missing paperwork seem like any number of future war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan. Like I said, there is no happy end to the story.
—

Collier Schorr is an artist and photographer. Her work explores issues of adolescence, sexuality, national identity and the body. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Jewish Museum in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Images courtesy of www.303gallery.com
www.artandcommerce.com
 

[neuespalte]

Collier Schorr, PURPLE LZ SMOKE, 2007

Collier Schorr, STRUMMER, 2007

Collier Schorr, LEAVING HOME, 2007

Collier Schorr, FRAGMENT, 2007

Collier Schorr, STING RAY, 2007

Collier Schorr, CHAS POSING FOR MY DAD, 2007

— Thursday, August 7th 2008, Punta Banda. Quiet this summer on the peninsula – bad US ‘economy’ plus weekly TV reports about car-jackings and kidnappings around the border. “You take your life in your hands going down there,” someone told me. In fact it’s much riskier here for the middle class Mexicans. Miguel Pabloff, who owns the campo I stay at, resigned from his post as mayor of Maneadero because of threats to his family, and there are regular kidnappings of local business owners. The guy who owns two Pemex gas stations in Maneadero was kidnapped and ransomed for $100,000 by his family … the owner of a local flower farm was kidnapped and murdered. “It’s the Colombians,” everyone says, “they are crazy.” The common belief is that Mexican narcos would stop short of murder – mutilation, okay, but symbolic, not fatal. During last year’s assembly election, the incumbent’s campaign manager was seized outside his office, bound, gagged and blindfolded, and finally released with his boss’s nickname cut into his face with a razor.

La Jolla Beach

Still, for us summer residents, it’s blissfully quiet. There are still a disturbing number of jellyfish washed up on the beach, but not as many as last year. And no red tide this year, no sting-rays.

Miguel Pabloff with his father Alejandro Pabloff

Working on a novel about states of mind in underclass Bush America, I’ve been trying to learn more about psychoanalysis and therapy … the disciplines that, presumably, directly address daily forms of personal pain, numbness. I ask a few friends in this field what the new treatments are. Has anyone in the last 20 years undertaken transpositions of theory to clinical practice on the order of R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall or Felix Guattari’s Le Borde? The answers that come back surprise me. I’m referred to a website for Social Dreaming ™, a group of mostly-British psychoanalysts who contract “dream workshops” to large corporations. They claim to have successfully resolved a labor dispute at an Italian factory by having bosses and workers (they don’t use these terms) pool their dreams … This seems truly innovative, a great advance on the Blackberry. From 40 hours a week to boundary-less time to the unconscious … although, as a more cynical friend points out, the unconscious has been pretty much drained of its content.

I’ve been watching Louis Malles’ remarkable documentary, Phantom India, on DVD. Malle spent several months in India during 1969 with a small crew making this seven-hour film for French television. It’s a beautiful artifact of 20th century humanist generalism. Malle, then 35, resolves to keep an open mind about India, allowing impressions to float as they travel. Coming from the ideologically-steeped era of barely post-’68 Paris, Malle is not unaware of the political struggles then being waged between the National and Communist parties, but as an outsider he’s free to also consider the intractable beauty of folk religions whose meanings are reaffirmed in primitive daily routines. As an amateur ethnographer at the end of ethnography, he’s aware of the battle of time taking place in front of his eyes between urban and rural. And yet: caste has morphed into class, and this gently sanctified daily routine occurs within a grossly exploitative framework. He draws no conclusions. I think about Malle’s later life, his marriage to Candice Bergman, how naive this work might have seemed retrospectively. And yet: unrepeatable. The film seems to be having a small revival – a Michigan friend, former pedophile activist – is screening it publicly. (The friend never exactly recanted – his “boy” just got older.)

Jon Isaacs tells me he’s recording his music this summer on cassette, not CD, because it’s harder to upload. “One reason,” he emails, “for the music industry’s downfall is that music is too readily accessible. I remember seeing lines of people at record stores in the early 90s when an album came out b/c that was the only way you could hear the music.”
—

Chris Kraus is the author of three novels, most recently TORPOR, and a collection of art essays. She is presently working on a new novel about American justice and flawed reciprocity called SUMMER OF HATE.

www.semiotexte.com

All photos by Iris Klein