Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Macchi Talkie


The Artist of the Month for March 2010 is Jorge Macchi (b. 1963), who lives and works in Buenos Aires. He was selected by Jens Hoffman, director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and his archival inkjet print is Film Noir, 2010.

MB: The clippings you've collaged together appear to come from Spanish-language newspapers. Did you select the papers for specific characteristics, such as date, region, or writer? Or did you draw them randomly?




JM: The clippings come from Argentinian newspapers. They are words taken out from articles' headlines. I didn't select them for date, region or writer. First of all: the words are nouns. And second: they are nouns that could create a synopsis of a film: who? how much? where? what? are the questions that the words try to answer.

MB: Behind every crime is a motive, coupled with an opportunity. Does your print, Film Noir, tell a story? I see the Spanish words for "assault," "a man," and "a billion dollars," so I'm tempted to link them together as a crime story.

JM: They are placed in a kind of loop as to create the feeling that the story could start in every word. The inclusion of the Statue of Liberty reminds me of the end of Hitchcock's North by Northwest with the actors going around the heads of the presidents at Mount Rushmore.


JM (continued): But what is more important for me is that in fact the words are clippings from real newspapers creating bridges between fiction and everyday life. If you see carefully almost every clipping has a subtext related to a story that is far away from the possible plot of the unexisting film. For instance the clipping of the Statue of Liberty says in the small text: "the crown of the monument was reopened."

MB: Is there room for images in this work? Why not include newspaper photos and graphics within the "story?" I'm thinking of Warhol's Disaster pieces, which harbor several dimensions of meaning by combining images and text. What effect would images have on the piece?


JM: The film exists just in your imagination. This is why I dont include images. On the other hand, there is an image: this loop made out of cut outs, and several formal elements as contrast, colour, transparence. In order to allow imagination to develop from the words, I need to work on formal aspects such as contrast, colour, transparence, which don't go in the same sense as the images the spectator could produce.

MB: Some of the drawings on your website look diagrammatic, which in the context of print news, endows them with some journalistic qualities. If images could find a place in this news loop, would any of your drawings be candidates?

JM: I insist on this point: other images than the collage itself would go against the film.

MB: Throughout the genre we call "film noir," we find in almost every film a "femme fatale:" Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Mary Astor in Maltese Falcon, Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. The story you set up for the viewer to complete seems to omit the femme fatale. Is she hidden between the lines? Or do you have a different motive?

JM: The femme fatale is the Statue of Liberty - or she is the place where the action could be developed.

MB: That sounds subversive. The femme fatale is often seductive, shrewd, and dangerous. The Statue seems to be none of those, except seductive, though more "welcoming" than "seductive." She is an icon, an immigrant, and her monumental statement is:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

How do you reconcile the role of the femme fatale with America's Mother of Refugees?

JM: Complete freedom can be seductive and dangerous.


MB: I can see from the work collected on your website that many of your projects are very responsive to their immediate surroundings. If you could place Film Noir - at its current scale or larger - at any site in the world, and for any eyes in the world, where would that be? On Wall Street? In Dubai? The Statue of Liberty?

JM: It is a film shot in NY and Buenos Aires, with actors speaking in Argentinian Spanish.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Slipping Up

The Artist of the Month of February is John Russell, as selected by Performa curator Mark Beasley. His inkjet print on metallic silver polyester is a kitschedelic fantasy vignette called Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time/External Recurrence/Monad). Here, John talks about his recent, cinema-scale murals within the chronology of his earlier collaborations with the collective BANK and Beasley himself.



MB: Let's begin with a brief history of Mark Beasley/ John Russell. In 2005, you and Mark co-curated a group show at MOT International called "The Prop Makers." Was that the first time you worked formally with him?



JR: Actually, in 2004 or maybe 2003 we organised a show called Angloponce at the Trade Apartment in Brixton, London. The invites were these hand-written personalised love letters where we told people we loved them and how we had had a dream about them where we were standing naked in a strange lake together and how we had seen Jesus and got an erection and other stuff. That was a good show. Then after that we organised a show in 2004 called Angloponce at Vilma Gold in London. Then also there was a project at PS1 called The Thinking. We tried to produce a horror film with the Los Angeles-based director Damon Packard. Things didn’t go so well - we got into trouble for filming – and interacting with - other artists work and in the end they confined us to one room after some of Damon’s footage was deemed to be pornography. It proved difficult to make a horror film in one room. Me and mark ended up wearing masks and making paintings of transvestites/shemales and Bambi with a penis – we regressed (I can’t remember why). The film ended up being pretty good – its on Damon’s site.

MB: Evident even in your early years working with BANK, you have maintained a strong interest in working with the human figure. We see this in early work, such as Zombie Golf and Light Brigade, as well as the porn; and in the later work, especially in the new digital murals. What are the origins, if any, of the people who appear in the new work? Are they people you know? Are they allegorical?



JR: I like the way figures, figurative images, especially on a large scale, include the viewer. Or rather predict the viewer perspectivally and/or compositionally in the way they are structured. It’s the way History painting works, for example, David’s Oath of the Horatii. The viewer is kind of positioned or articulated as witness. The other thing that interests me is the way in which in the human figure might be used to act out or perform ideas. In this case there is a perverse relationship between the idea and poses of the figures, that is whether these poses are the result of ‘free-will’ or whether they are fixed as narrative or compositional elements within a wider ‘philosophical context.' Bit like your drawings: are the figures acting/moving/performing or are they trapped and restricted by a pattern you impose?





MB: Right, I ask myself the same question all the time! It always reminds me of Han Solo being frozen and "Relieved" into that wall. And the free will vs. trapped/restricted figures does also extend to and through the viewers. When you compose a life-size mural, you are trying to foretell the motion of a viewer's eyes and maybe even attempt a hierarchy of images for the viewer to sequence.

You have exerted great effort in generating "lifelike," "realistic" images (we know how tricky those terms are, but let's use them just for convenience). Even though they are surreal, hallucinatory, or implausible, the laws of physics still apply. The unicorn could be a token symbol of this relation: it doesn't exist, but it seems as if it could, and it isn't even difficult to envision. As you work, do you wonder whether "realism" and "plausibility" affect a viewer's response to the imagery? Does more information deprive the viewer of agency? Does less information enable a viewer to apprehend the imagery and add something to it? I guess I'm asking what would happen if one of your murals shared a gallery with a Keith Haring mural.



JR: Yes, I guess the argument goes that realism is a kind of a problem technically (regardless of whether or not it is also a problem philosophically/theoretically etc) because the illusion can never be strong enough. Whereas a less realistic approach ('less information' as you put it) leaves space for the viewer to see their own picture and to include themselves in. There's something in that, although whatever style or format of represention is used from Haring to Pollock and/or wherever/however this is presented (gallery, grafitti, internet, formal, casual, less information, more information etc) we are always already structured/articulated/positioned as viewers by the images.

That is not to suggest there isn't room for slipping/transformation/re-performance. The type of realism I use (if realism is the right word) is very conventional and stereotyped - tied to the restrictions of 3d modelling which uses conventional preset perspective - modelled on a cinematic camera format. I'm interested in the spacing/spatialising effect this articulates - as the space of the cliche/stereotype/archetype. And the potential of spectacle.

In this respect, technically, I don't really know what I'm doing, anyway (technically). I use all the cheapest and easiest 3d software and adapt pre-existing 3d models I find on the web (or buy cheaply from 3d sites). And then spend a long time (too long) in Photoshop working on details in hundereds of layers.

All the figures are kind of found objects, or cliches (found objects are a kind of cliche - yes?), including the unicorn for instance. What interests me in this is the way 'sense' (in a Deleuzian sense) slips across the surface of these type of objects. So technically/formally 3d objects are wrapped or surfaced by photographs.



With digital imagery and in particular 3d imagery – not only is there a move away from the indexicality of the photograph (Barthes etc) – as a kind of proof of something that 'happened'. But increasingly imagery (photographic imagery) is used to wrap around 3d forms or models within 3D files, as a kind of surface affect or texture - of 'shininess', 'skin-ness', 'wet-ness', 'rock-ness', 'grass-ness', 'face-ness' and so on - thats how you select which photos to use.

Admittedly, this effect is contained and frozen within a larger image in whatever format it is finally outputted. But the way these wrapped images slip ‘like meaning’ or ideas across the surface of forms or models is reminiscent of Deleuze’s description of the way ‘sense’ slips across the surface of events, passions and forms. The structure is similar in my mind. It's an effect you see a lot in cinema - think spaghetti westerns - Once Upon a Time in the West or The Good the Bad and the Ugly - the characters abstracted from American Western films operate as archetypes/dead forms - when you watch Clint Eastwood you are watching sense slipping across the surface of a found object. Very exciting/ecstatic as well.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Mark Beasley on John Russell



British Invasion! John Russell is the Artist of the Month for February 2010, fingered by curator/selektah Mark Beasley.

Russell was most recently praised for his digital collage murals, which The Guardian described as "stupendous cinema-scale, Pollock-wide Photoshopped phantasmagoria...the digital marriage of Peter Paul Rubens and Jeff Koons in the mind of a mad sea god."



Russell calls his AMC print by the featherweight name Untitled (Abstraction of Labour Time/ External Recurrence/Monad).
The archival ink shimmers on metallic polyester film, and reminds me of some of the "collector's edition" superhero comics marketed with irresistible "chromium covers."


John Russell has exhibited work in solo and group shows for over 20 years, and has teamed up with Mark for several projects. Let's hear from Mark about their knockin' about...

Michael: In 2004, you worked with John at PS1 on a film and painting project titled ‘The Thinking.' Was that the first time you worked formally with John Russell?

Mark: That was the first time that we produced a jointly authored work, with the help of cult LA film-maker Damon Packard: the resultant film ‘Lost in the Thinking,’ won mocumentary of the year at the Berkeley Film and Video Festival! I was firstly aware of John through his work with BANK, a cult of another kind. They produced a series of exhibits in London throughout the nineties that were both artwork and group show, with heady titles such as ‘Zombie Golf,’ Cocaine Orgasm’ and ‘Charge of the Light Brigade.’ BANK was a key group for many fledgling curators and artists in Britain at the time, whose story as such hasn’t been fully explored. I was drawn to the work of BANK, and particularly, John, for his irreverent, witty and theoretically savvy, but unleaden approach to art making. It appeared lively and didn’t follow any prescriptive approach, the fact that it was hard to pin down appealed to me; it seemed wonderfully at odds with the one-liner work being produced at the time. Prior to ‘The Thinking,’ John and I worked on a series of co-curated shows, such as ‘Angloponce,’ at the Trade Apartment, London and 'AXXXPRESHUNIZM' at Vilma Gold, also in London.

Michael: And you've worked with John a few more times since then: 'Barefoot in the Head' (2009) and 'The Prop Makers' (2005), for example. This AMC print, along with the mural-scale vinyl prints he has unveiled throughout the last three years or so, adhere to lofty production values. I mean "lofty" when compared to his earlier work with BANK, which coughed up cheaply printed tabloids and posters, handdrawn cartoons, and various figures made of paper, wire, and sometimes wax. The BANK projects often looked decidedly provisional and lo-fi. How do you account for this stylistic transformation? Does it seem to you to be a departure?


Mark: On the face of it, yes, I guess it feels different. But fundamentally, it’s in tune with John's continued interrogation of the vernacular of the day, whether it’s the Xeroxed zine of the BANK Tabloid or his 800-page anthology ‘Frozen Tears,’ which mimics a Stephen King bestseller. The AMC print allies itself with the explosion of rendered digital imaging. It also riffs on 70s psych poster art and the seventies pomp and prog rock connections with science fantasy - specifically, Tolkein, it seems. It’s an aesthetic that strikes fear into many - Roger Dean meets DalĂ­ by way of Peter Paul Rubens - strictly for the strong of heart. It’s certainly not the Peter Saville studio of clean cut, well-behaved lines.


Michael: Yes, while looking through his digital images, I had to switch on Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Fanfare for the Common Man, which still gets unfairly shunned from most libraries. The BANK stuff felt more like Pavement or even SST records, though that wouldn't be a parallel timeline. Anyway, the timing of John Russell's digital, sci-fi pastiche is perfect, given the sensational spectacle of Avatar, the coming Tron remake, and the other epic, digital IMAX features that are imminent. Personally, the print, the vinyl murals, and Avatar all make me wince at their excesses, which more recent art and music have shaven away; but eventually that guarded skepticism can give way to the undeniable sentiment that "this stuff is really cool." I guess by understanding that Russell's newer imagery is profligate and over-the-top, we can then permit ourselves to really have fun with it. Of course, the images aren't thoroughly kitsch; the crucified hands, permeable bodies, and flowing internal organs make things makes things a bit morbid - yet no worse than the maggots and armed Nazi corpses of Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Mark: ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ is perfect; it is more a knowing banal excess than kitsch. Fantasy is key, not as a function of intuition or in opposition to reality, but rather as something suggested through knowledge, something that grows through montage, citation and digital reproduction. A fantasy let loose from closed and dusty volumes, a liberation of impossible worlds. A form of baroque, digital triumphalism, a becoming aesthetic that as yet isn’t fully understood. The potential appeals to me, rather than simply quoting the past so as to be clearly understood, it presents something of a curveball. What is good or bad taste and who decides?