ELLIPSIS


Reflections…
September 30, 2009, 5:56 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Santiago stories, notes on cph

DR (The Danish Broadcast Corporation) has a daily programme of 25 minutes interview called VITA. It is a programme that I love to hear and that I admire a lot. When I went to Denmark this July/August I was interviewed by Helle Solvang about the art scene in Copenhagen and in Santiago and also a bit about how to let life take shape in a foreign country: VITA 1. September 2009

By Helle Solvang – Airsquare in Copenhagen on the day of recording



A fairy tale – or once upon a time in a forgotten attic of an old museum art-taxidermist Florencia Grisanti had honest anatomies on show
September 21, 2009, 11:36 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Santiago stories, bla bla on writing and language

Nicolas Cadavid is a Colombian artist living in Santiago and editor of the Colombian magazine La Caja published electronically by the art collective Galería LaMutante. Nicolas made me aware of the theme of the second issue:
Acá no somos de esos, which animated me to write an article about the exhibition Honesta Anatomia by the Chilean artist Florencia Grisanti:

La Caja #2

florencia



I am not submitting
June 26, 2009, 9:45 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Santiago stories, bla bla on writing and language

I have known about this competetion for months. I have known what I wanted to write about. And now, in the last hour of submission, I must admit that I have not done the job I should. I am not submitting.

If I won, I would receive more than 13 months of minimum wage in Chile. So why did I not just write it? Well, I did. I did my research, interviewed the artist, took notes, wrote a draft, and a second draft. And still I did not write, not for real.

Excuse number 1:
I did not find the exhibition I really, like really, wanted to write about.

Excuse number 2:
The exhibition I really wanted to write about was not fashionable and famous enough.

Excuse number 3:
The exhibition I wanted to write about would never win a competition like this.

At the end of the day, I am in the wrong part of the world, not finding the perfect exhibition. I can place all of the guilt on that. This city, this country is behind in the race of contemporary art, running on the same spot of latinamerican art, doing the same steps over and over again.

Or, at then end of the day I was in the wrong part of the world, a part that care about itself, its own problems and ways of expressing, obeying to the new, to innovation, and at the same time to forms, ways of doing artwriting about the new, that might in fact just be the same, as always.

And now, at the end of the day I am in a café, not finding the space in me to obey, either to this or to that, but to myself. And my own writings. And maybe this is where I want to be, for now, until something else passes by and things appear, things that complement, rather than contrast.



Queering – or what is queer, on what terms, and because of what, the fish?
June 3, 2009, 9:16 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, X

IMG_2328

Since Gavin Butt gave his talk Should we take Performances Seriously? at the PSI 14 conference in Copenhagen and since I saw the nutrition guru Anne Knudsen Larsen on the front cover of the Danish weekly Søndagsavisen I have been thinking; which one of these moments of “kissing fish performance” is most odd?

IMG_2484



But how she looks like my mother
May 29, 2009, 4:40 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Santiago stories

princess_soraya_esfandiary_life_story

So, we are watching this Antonioni movie, I tre volti. She looks like my mother, as young. We’re in an auditorium. There’s a cat on the floor.

It’s her lips, the lower one is ”dripping.” She’s calling her mother, she asks her to come. She’s alone, perdida en el mundo, sentimentalismo puro (a mí, no funcione). She asks her to come. In German. She’s a young German girl in Italy trying her way as an extra, as an actress.

The quality is bad, there are no subtitles. But how she looks like my mother.

”Why are you suspicious, I have the impression that you are very cold? Why do you want to be an actress?”

After the film he talks about participation, about a moment of fascination between a public and 3 melodrama actors. They believe, the public. Like my sister. We once went to a theatre to see Medea. When Medea killed her to kids, raised the theatre knife and stabbed them, my sister screamed. She believed. Her husband, a film director, always says she’s the best public ever, because she really believes. Yesterday she had her second kid and she never watches the tele at night in order to sleep undisturbed by the reality the tele brings her.
- – -
Neorealismus – that the actors participate. The moment where the actors believe, act what they are acting – or the other way around.

The gesture of pointing to the screen and saying to his wife; ”look, look, look what’s gonna happen!” Cada vez – otra vez, it happens again for the first time.

We don’t just perceive fictional worlds from without, we live with them, sharing their sorrows and joys. We are perfectly aware they’re fictional, but from within they look real.
- – -
Now the cat is cuddling his leg.
- – -
El participación en la obra del arte es constitutiva. The artwork exists in this tension, in this difficulty of being within these two, inside and outside, real and fictional, of being constitutive.
- – -
Ambigüedad con el arte
- – -

(Inspired by the lecture “Quasi. Antonioni y la participación en el arte” by Alex Düttmann at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago)



transition and what place does to you; the “in” and the “out” of art scenes
April 16, 2009, 4:31 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Santiago stories, notes on cph

The fifteenth of January 2009 Sisi moved. From Copenhagen to Santiago de Chile. One month and five days before, on the tenth of December 2008, Sisi attended an art event in Copenhagen and got photographed by the local “talk of the town” art organ, Kopenhagen.dk. One month and 25 days later, on the 12th of March 2009, Sisi got photographed by the major Chilean newspaper El Mercurio at an art opening.

Sisi in Copenhagen, Denmark
Sisi in Santiago, Chile

In Denmark the local newspapers do not have pages of “who went to what opening” paid by the hosting exhibition/gallery space. In Chile the local art scenes do not have homepages with small talk photography, interviews and a weekly calendar made primarily by young volunteers.

K, a friend and artist of Sisi, recently moved from Copenhagen to Beirut. When flickering through a kopenhagen.dk “small talk” with photographs from an opening in Copenhagen she felt ambiguous; on the one hand she couldn’t see herself in a Copenhagen art scene setting, on the other hand she felt anxious from being deleted from the Copenhagen “picture,” from her root. Looking through these photographs of a Copenhagen art life evoked a feeling of rootlessness. In what image did she belong?

Are belonging, photographs and imaginary images connected? If they are, how is one’s belonging related to art scenes and their economical structure of visually choosing, photographing and displaying the people of this art scene? How does one engage with art scenes and their visual gossip organs, whether being private, state and volunteer funded or being capitalistic and neoliberal?



Seven Songs
November 19, 2008, 6:51 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, bla bla on writing and language

Check the new SUM #3 magazine for contemporary art – an international magazine in danish and english published by U-turn Quadrennial for Contemporary Art and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
this time the theme is on re-enactment and i’m participating with an article on Black Audio Film Collective/biography/re-enactment.
the magazine is available in selected bookshops and museums.
enjoy!



Hvad ellipsen slugte / What the ellipsis swallowed

Hvad jeg gerne ville skrive om på bloggen lige nu:

En intro om at læse en intro, der udreder et kludret og endeløst forgrenet stamtræ, som vokser og vokser og bare bliver ved og ved og er kortlagt bagest i bogen, så man bladrer frem og tilbage og repeterer på vejen, men forstår kun lidt – min intro ditto.

Om det hemmeliges potentiale som værende det ultimative skabelses-frirum i en kunstnerisk kontekst

Om Walid Raad, “performance as faith” og Raads fascination af enkeltpersoner i historien.

Om at vågne op og ikke vide hvem man er eller hvor man er, men være sikker på, at det er juleaften.



legacy genealogy
September 9, 2008, 3:29 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art

“Artists, art worlds, and artworks are three very distinct ontological categories, but a brief glance over the discourse of black art criticism at various moments in the 20th century – from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the Negritude movement of the 1940s, to the US Black Arts Movement of the 1960s – shows a consistent emphasis on the first and the second elements that tend to undermine the quality of attention given to the third”
p. 138

“The rehabilitation of Duchamp by the American neo-avant-garde was as crucial as the late 1960s re-assesment of Russian constructivism in the institutional-critique that animated conceptualism”
p. 153

Mercer, Kobena in “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-garde” in Mercer, Kobena (ed.) Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, London / Cambridge : Iniva / MIT Press, 2007



How I love this film
August 27, 2008, 1:09 pm
Filed under: Kunst / Art, Lyd / Sound

India Song (1975) by Marguerite Duras - 1 minute and 3 seconds are now available on YouTube

the music, the painful cry of one of marie stretter’s abandoned lovers, the incense, the sense of death, the slowness and the spatial use of the mirror. isn’t it great

(a former comment on India Song)