Marcia Vaitsman at Solomon Projects

I just wanted to do a quick review of my experience of Marcia Vaitsman's work currently on display at Solomon Projects in Atlanta.
The title of the show, "A Study of Strange Things" seems to be a bit simple and possibly naive, and when one sees the show, the sparse population of works can easily lead to confirming this reaction.  But then again, the appearance of simplicity is often due to a lack of investigation.  It is from this idea that the rest of my analysis will grow...
Two opposing walls in the gallery  each hold a tetratych of large photographs. Another wall has a video, while the other wall, technically holds nothing, instead has an installation of maybe forty small photographic light boxes.  Essentially, there is a visual-spatial intersection of two lines; one whose points connect images that are the result of a photographic process whose media absorbs (and reflects) light, the other connecting images created through a similar process, but whose end form emits light.  In this way, Vaitsman sets up a conversation around the ideas of photography (and video) in relation to the medium of light.  Her graduate thesis, of which I only had time to scan, mentions influence of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, so I will indulge.  In his lecture, On the Gaze as Objet Petit a, Lacan alludes to a subject that exists as the relationship between a light source, and the image that light source produces.  Imagine a film projector.  It is a light source.  The light it projects is caught by a screen.  When we perceive the image, we do not see it on the screen, but in or beyond the screen.  This situation explains the existence of the subject, where the subject is the screen.  [A two-dimensional image like a painting or photograph uses the inverse function of light to produce perspective, or the appearance of depth, within an image.  Still, in this instance, the image, or surface of the two-dimensional object is analogous to the existence of the subject.]

Vaitmans similarly sets up a site of subjective existence in a perpendicular intersection of images that produce and absorb light.
Another relationship I found in the work was a conflation and confusion of the large and small.  The large photographs on the wall are all macro images, who subjects are blown-up to be larger than their real world (pre-photographic) existence.  The images from the lighted sources, are fragmented and made smaller than their original existence (for the light boxes some may be similar in size.)  This dichotomy really fleshes out the understanding of all of the unused space of the gallery.
One of the most intriguing naturally occurring optical illusions is the changing size of the moon (or sun).  When on the horizon, the moon looks large, yet while it is in the middle of the sky it seems relatively small.  The actual reason for this illusion is still up for debate, but the common explanation is that the moon looks larger at the horizon because it has other recognizable distance cues for judgement - i.e. the horizon is obviously far away, so the moon is only perceived to be large, while the 'dome' of the night sky is immeasurable, so it is assumed to be closer, thus giving the illusion of a smaller moon.

When this idea is brought to the photographs and video Vaitsman provides, we begin to relate the vastness of the empty space in the gallery to the border (frame) of each work.  Similarly, we relate the size of each image to the size of its frame, and our assumption of the original size each image's subject to its subsequent photographic size.  When we assert ourselves into the intersection of the images that is representative of our subjectivity, we become Alice - one who changes size in relation to the (perceptual) tasks at hand.
Now, we can see the imagery in each of the works as a portrait of ourselves; a zebra with no stripes, who is not a zebra at all, but a voodoo doll of wound-up physical matter partly frozen, partly thawed; a fragmented peacock of sexuality, whose kaleidoscopic identity is constantly shifting; the list can go on with each image, and each grouping of images...

A Study of Strange Things is just what its name suggests, and as with everything that at first seems simple, the longer it is studied, the stranger it becomes.

Nathan Sharratt: Young Machete

Sometime around 8:00PM, after two hours of sarcastic live-tweeting, aimless-drifting, and general time-wasting amongst the hit-or-miss art installed on the mall at Underground Atlanta, I finally found a map for the events and artworks sponsored by Elevate, Art Above Atlanta.  Of course, I had seen most of them in my modern version of a dérive, but had not yet ventured out to the corner of Peachtree and Decatur Street, for what would be the highlight of my night, Nathan Sharratt’s interactive performance/installation Be My Blood Brother. (Note: the Elevate map is slightly off - Blood Brother is not on Edgewood and Peachtree.)

This was Sharratt’s third run at Blood Brother.  He first performed it for a Sculpture class at SCAD, then publicly in March 2011, at The Granite Room in Castleberry Hill.  Although, I did briefly see the performance in Castleberry, the Elevate opening was my first real interaction.

I walked into the small storefront to find it transformed into what may be best described as a slightly futuristic mash-up of a doctor’s office, DMV, and shaman’s lair.  In the center, Sharratt, looking more like a serial killer than a doctor, was seated on a small white stool, facing a small white table, wearing all white coveralls stained with fake-blood.  Opposite the artist sat an identical stool, empty and inviting.  On the table between the two were various syringes, jars, and beakers flanking the main props for the interaction: a small puddle of fake crimson-colored blood, a butter spreader, a rubber stamp, and a stack of card-sized certificates.  In the otherwise sparsely decorated red, grey and white room, Sharratt’s assistants guided viewers to their appropriate tasks.

Sharratt performing Be My Blood Brother (photo by Mona Collentine) ©2011 Nathan Sharratt

First, I sat down with the artist, who welcomed me with a deadpan, “Would you like to be my blood brother?”  Upon accepting, I was asked for my name, which he wrote on the certificate that he would also stamp with a serial number.  After this, he did not speak.  Sharratt proceeded to mix the ‘blood’ on the table with the completely blunt butter spreader, followed by pretending to cut the flesh of his hand, leaving the red residue in his palm.  Then, with an obvious gesture of sharing, offered me the knife.  As silly as this felt, I played along, repeating his actions with my own body.  We then justified our actions by clasping our ‘bloody’ hands.  This is where it became real…

Sharratt took a firm grasp of my hand and began to peer deeply and purposefully into my eyes.  Maybe it was a minute or two, but it felt much longer.  I felt helpless.  I did not attempt to release my grip, but was fully and overwhelmingly embarrassed.  Something metaphysical changed.  Through the artist’s gaze, I had been ‘subjectified’.

Sharratt performing Be My Blood Brother (photo by Mona Collentine) ©2011 Nathan Sharratt 

With ‘artist’s gaze’, I mean to arouse Jacques Lacan’s idea of the almost benevolent gaze that art allows, as found in Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A.  Generally for Lacan, the gaze is a property of inter-subjectivity where, when one perceives that he/she is being viewed by another, one is objectified by the other. A latent result of the psychic break that occurs in the Mirror Phase, to experience the gaze is to be reminded that one does not exist in the Real, but instead in a Symbolic realm as a sign (which actually has less of an existence than an object.)  This can be extended to include subject/object interaction, where observing an object reminds one that he/she is an object.  The gaze (as objet petit a) is a reminder of our inherent lack, the source of desire.    In good art, according to Lacan, the artist puts his desires into the work, laying down his gaze by revealing to the viewer that the other also has desire.  We are presented with an image, but an image that reveals itself as such.  In understanding that the image is a veil to be looked beyond, we are relieved, feeling that we have seen something more real.  We, in turn, also feel more real.  In Be My Blood Brother, this scenario plays out perfectly. 

In an interview on Google+, Sharratt shared with me the way that his  adopted father is thought of as his real father; so much so that his mother sometimes forgets, worrying that he will develop similar genetic traits.  The extended coexistence that formed the meaningful bond between  adopted son and  adopted father is translated in Be My Blood Brother via the sharing of fake blood.  In what Christians may read as an analogy to the Eucharist joining the Church family, Sharratt sees  his “bonding with a new Brother” as a way to form a constructed bond that is as real as possible.  The artist describes it as “try[ing] to be a mirror through which [the participant] can see themselves.”  Taking it a step further, Sharratt provides a digital forum (http://www.wearebloodbrothers.com/) for initiated Blood Brothers to share their stories.  Here, he gives an arena for what was once a group of strangers, a collections of others, to lay down their gazes and acknowledge each other’s subjectivity.

Maybe I have romanticized Be My Blood Brother by giving it the qualities that so many people who claim to be interested in “Relational Aesthetics” or interactive art usually espouse, but what I do know for sure is that for at least the rest of the night after I became a Blood Brother, I felt very Real.

Interview with Nathan Sharrat

Image from performance of Be My Blood Brother ©2011 Nathan Sharratt (Photo by Mona Collentine )

1) What is the inspiration for Bloodbrothers?

This goes back a ways. In 2004 I was living in New York City and working as a designer and photographer in the magazine industry. At the time, I didn’t really know who I was as an artist or where I was going or what I even wanted to do. I just knew I had a lot of shit building up inside that had no way out. Since I wasn’t finding any success with external sources, I started looking internally to the things that created the greatest personal emotional response. A big one was my family. No matter how much crap life threw at me (unemployment, homelessness) they were always my rock of stability. I had just finished a book by Margaret Atwood on writing called Negotiating With The Dead, and in it she talked about how the dead wanted our blood. Dead being our ancestors and blood being a metaphor for life and creativity. At least that’s how I choose to read it. I had also read an interview with Stephen King, where he was asked how he, a family man with children, could imagine and write such horrific stories. He replied that if he wrote it, it wouldn’t happen. So I decided to use those sources as a starting point. I took a color-printing class with a coworker at the International Center for Photography, and used that as a way to explore these themes of family and protection. I drove upstate to my family’s home in Cooperstown and took some portraits using a borrowed plastic Holga camera. I gave each family member, excepting my father, a tool from my father’s workshop and covered them with fake blood (http://nathansharratt.com/section/215401_Family_Portraits.html). At the time, the fake blood was an analog for real blood, and the portraits were meant to be a protective mantra.

            It took another 4 or 5 years before I started examining family in my work again, mostly at the behest of my sculpture professors. This time I began to get really interested in fake blood and the whole concept behind its existence. We, as humans, are obsessed with not spilling our own blood, yet we have such a bloodlust that we’ve created this blood analog to be used strictly for entertainment purposes. We love watching violence as long as it’s pretend. Action and horror films are just public executions and gladiator fights without the actual death. I started realizing the vast amount of content available in using fake blood as a material. The difficulty was in the execution, how to elevate fake blood as a fine-art material and have it be seen for what it is—and what content it brings to the table—and not just as a non-biological blood substitute. I made some object-based art using fake blood, So I started making connections between the constructed qualities of fake blood and my own constructed family history: my biological father (Robert) left before I was born, and my mother met my non-biological father (Dwaine) when I was two, and they’ve raised me ever since. When I was five my non-biological father wanted to adopt me, but Massachusetts’ state law didn’t allow adoption for a minor with a legal parent or guardian, so my mother had to give me up to the state for all of ten minutes, or however long it took to fill out paperwork, then they both adopted me. I remember sitting in the cavernous marble hallway of the statehouse while all this was going on. I was no longer Nathan Kaczynski, I was now Nathan Sharratt. The connection I felt to my parents had not changed, only some paperwork. So the idea of a constructed family led me to think about constructed bonds in general, and how we create this social construct called “family.” The fact that my father isn’t my biological father is such a non-issue in my family that my mom even forgets sometimes, and warns me about genetic health issues on my father’s side. There are no “half-sisters” or “step-fathers,” we’re just family and we love each other and in my opinion that’s how it should be.

2) What is your obsession with blood in general?

For me it’s a material, so it’s kind of like asking a painter what is their obsession with paint? Any material has a pre-existing connotation that viewers carry with them, and many materials were resisted in their initial introduction as a fine-art material (David Smith’s welded-steel sculpture comes to mind). Blood is one of our most primal common denominators. It’s also the challenge of using a material that isn’t traditionally associated with fine art, and seeing if I can find ways to elevate it to make new connections that maybe viewers hadn’t thought of before. Also, I went pretty in depth about it above.

3) You are interested in creating multiple layers in your work, what do you think is the most missed meaning/layer in 'BloodBrothers'?

Probably the connection to my personal history. I don’t make that a large part of the performance because the whole installation is about me, so when I’m bonding with a new Brother, I want to make it as much about them as possible. I give my Brothers my absolute undivided attention during the ritual, and try to be a mirror through which they can see themselves. I make my name really small on the ticket so that when it’s pinned to the wall you see their name most prominently, not mine, and I give them the opportunity to share their story through the www.wearebloodbrothers.com website. However, I will be adding a few new hidden clues to the room for sharp-eyed viewers to find.

4) What other projects are you currently working on?

I’m still looking for participants for Words On Shirts Project (wordsonshirtsproject.com), and I’m working on a public art installation for Art on the Atlanta BeltLine that should be up soon. I’m also building a sound-trigger box for Martha Whittington’s 100 Whispers installation, in addition to being her studio assistant for the MOCA GA Working Artist Project grant. I’ve been slowly peppering donated clothing with It’s All My Fault labels (http://nathansharratt.com/artwork/2115157_It_s_All_My_Fault.html) and last but certainly not least I’ve been hard at work on my Dashboard Co-Op “Ground Floor” installation which is coming in October.

Nathan Sharratt's "Be My Blood Brother" preview

Here is a link to images from the performance that will be the subject of my next article on BURNAWAY: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathan_awesome/

Seana Reilly at Whitespace

Seana Reilly is currently in a two person show with Ann Stewart at Whitespace. 

Seana Reilly Mean Curve

There is really only one way to describe the formal aesthetic of Seana Reilly’s current work on display at Whitespace: undeniable.  In a series of experiments with liquid graphite, Reilly posits myriad dualities that coexist harmoniously to produce art that calls for serious contemplation, perhaps even meditation.

According to http://www.insightatlanta.org:  “Vipassana meditation…was taught by the Buddha as a means for investigating the nature of reality through cultivating awareness of present experience with acceptance.”  Reilly cites Vipassana meditation as a source for the insights for her practice, which is apparent in her process.  Reilly sets up resists or boundaries around which she allows the liquid graphite to freely flow, establishing the symmetry between human will and letting go.  Her awareness of her materials, and the moments in which they interact result in images of sublime beauty and delicate balance.  The viewer is given a wide open space to peacefully exist in the dialectics of drawing and painting, light and dark, organic and geometric, order and chaos, presence and absence.

But the work is not without regions designed to create tension and unease.  Reilly also sites as influence her experience as both a justice and healthcare planner, a career that surely imbued her with a desire to analyze, predict and control.  In many of the works, especially the smaller pieces, Reilly goes back into the work (after it has become a historic document of the aforementioned process) to articulate a pseudoscientific analysis in its margins.  It is in this act that her work separates itself from a Romantically idealized mise-en-scène, and asserts itself as a battleground of contemporary semiotics.  It is in this duality, between the mostly organic relationship established in the experimental stage of the work, and it subsequent analysis, where the most pressing issue arises for the interpreter of meaning. 

It seems understandable that there are dualities, and that in one way or another these dualities assimilate into a workable medium that is life.  This is a quotidian understanding of Yin-Yang, a basis for much Eastern Philosophy.  The problem of contemporary awareness comes with the monkey wrench that is Western Philosophy.  Socrates tells us that the unexamined life is not worth living, and the rest of Western history delivers us the hegemony of Science.  While, theoretically, Eastern and Western philosophies are not necessarily at odds, the implementation of science as a predictive, thus active awareness, separates it from the more accepting, passive consciousness of Eastern thought.  What becomes difficult to grasp for many thinkers of either school is the way in which self-aware observation alters our perception of any such dualities.

By quantifying, thus categorizing the results of the experiments that take place in materializing her work, Reilly pin-points the problematic of scientific inquiry: when we observe a phenomenon, we necessarily alter that phenomenon.  There is a growing number of scientists studying quantum physics who would go so far as to say that our observation causes the phenomenon.  To complicate the matter, Reilly’s analysis of her process mimics scientific notation, a codified language that, except to its author and her cohorts, is a meaningless series of marks and signs.  So what could have been a simple experience of a phenomenon becomes a self-sequestering feedback loop.  

Reilly’s work puts the impasse of actual experience and our attempts to control our experience in our face, causing us to ponder: If our passive awareness generates reality, then does an active awareness destroy it?  Returning to the idea of Yin Yang, perhaps it is this relationship, the codependence of creation and destruction, that gives meaning to the show’s title: Perpetual Assembly. 

The Dream of Reason

The Dream of Logic Produces Reasonable Monsters (© Casey Lynch 2011)

It is illogic, not logic, that makes humans human.  If a dog thinks at all like a human, then when he is hungry, he thinks, "I will eat."  Then to the best of its ability, he will eat as soon as possible.  When a human thinks, "I am hungry," he/she will go through a long list of reasons to, or not to eat, and when it would be best to eat.  Further, he creates all sorts of rules on the appropriate way to eat.

Humans seem to possess a multi-tiered logic, meta-logic, or more simply, social self-awareness, that causes us to play out many if/then scenarios in theory before acting.  I think that we have the ability to create too many scenarios, somehow forgetting our initial intention, to the point that our 'then' statement often ends up no longer matching our 'if'.

Even sound logic may become illogic when we make assumptions about another's needs or desires.  This kind of other-awareness is at best empathy [which elsewhere I have called the unconscious,] and seems to be a foundation of civilization. 
So, it is possible that society is based on illogic.  If this is true, then culture, being the pinnacle of society, is the apex of illogical discourse.  This seems clear presently, as it could be argued that Art is (and maybe has always been) based on illogic, i.e. make believe, hope, or the denial of the probable.  Of course, in the exponentially growing feedback loop between the mirrors of culture and society, what was once illogical is now logical.  This illogical logic is Reason.

Making and Breaking Meaning: A Critical Mash-up of Trecartin and Mallarme

Below is an essay comparing Ryan Trecartin to Stéphane Mallarmé using only a computer mouse to complete copy, cut, and paste functions.  All text was borrowed from the Wikipedia entries on Stéphane Mallarmé, Fin de siècle, and Ryan Trecartin; and Brian Droitcour's article Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet as found on Rhizome.org's website. 

None of the individual words was composed by me, only the rearrangement of the language found in said sources.

If you own the rights to the sources above, and do not approve of this usage, please contact me and I will remove it at once.

Stéphane Mallarmé  (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism,Surrealism, and Futurism.

Ryan Trecartin (b.1981, Webster, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles.^[1] He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004.^[2] Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.^[1]

Mallarmé's earlier work owes a great deal to the style of Charles Baudelaire. His later fin de siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the next century.  Roberta Smith grasped for precedent, naming Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Pipilotti Rist. But, she admitted, the comparisons fell short. To find another artist who engages a plurality of art forms with simultaneous, equal intensity—all while rethinking what art is and how it touches its audience—you’d have to go back to Wagner. The critic and translator Barbara Johnson has emphasized Mallarmé's influence on twentieth-century French criticism and theory: "It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature.

Trecartin says he starts each work by writing a script. Language—the primal, biological system of symbols—is the model and vehicle for art and commerce and every other manifestation of social activity. And the forms of all the aspects of Trecartin’s work—the camerawork, the editing, the music, the makeup, and the costumes, as well as Lizzie Fitch’s sets for the videos and “sets” for their viewing in “Any Ever”—are prefigured in the way he works with words.  Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem.'"^[3]  The space-time properties of attending suit the names. These are not distinct individuals, but inflections

Punctuation was invented to represent the pauses and pitches of speech; long after it moved beyond this purpose to become a set of standards for clarifying the meaning of written language, punctuation marks were remixed as emoticons when writing began to take on the phatic functions of speech. Trecartin’s unruly use of punctuation draws on all stages of its history.  It has been suggested by some that much of Mallarmé's work influenced the conception of hypertext, with his purposeful use of blank space and careful placement of words on the page, allowing multiple non-linear readings of the text. Trecartin’s writing responds to the internet, but it defies an assertion made by Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of ubuweb, who wrote that flarf and conceptual poetry are the quintessential poetic responses to the digital age because they employ cut-and-paste techniques.  This becomes very apparent in his work Un coup de dés. When, in the script’s first lines, Mexico Korea says “Yaw,,,,,,”, the comma does more than make a pause. It’s a winking eye torn from a smiling face, repeated until it’s a nervous tic.

 Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English.^[1] The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry.  One plus one is two ones and the ozone emitted by their collision. Combos like these are a favorite device of Trecartin’s. So is the willful disregard for parts of speech. A character’s “first name” can be a noun or an adjective or one of each. Grammatical difference meets geographical difference as both are jettisoned.  When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé's Sonnet en '-yx'opens with the phrase ses purs ongles ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words c'est pur son ('it's pure sound'). Indeed, the 'pure sound' aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions. These phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.^[2]

Trecartin exploits the coincidence of homophony to elide the difference between an ontological position and a physical one. Just as the corporation’s abstraction of the body is returned partially to the concrete, identity sits somewhere between a state of mind and the location of the body.

Both reject traditional ideas of authorships by imitating the impersonality of machines. Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century".^[2] The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning.^[3] The "spirit" of fin de siecle often refers to the boredom, cynicism, pessimism and the widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence, Trecartin keeps everything. His flamboyant use of the patterns of chat and ads and other types of cliché isn’t a direct form of copying, but a concentration of a normal condition of language use: A speaker is obliged to use words that come from outside her—and can be understood by others—while making them her own at the moment of the utterance, in order to make it seem like the utterance comes from inside her.

Mass-market things become fluid and ephemeral, subject to exaggeration, misunderstanding, repetition and play. Their origins are indistinct or irrelevant, and the same things are used in other contexts by millions of people. They are like words.