Moreism

 

More about Moreing here

Concept by Droga5
Produced by Revolver
Directed by The Glue Society's Matt Devine

Billy's Museum (excerpt) - Amanda Dunsmore

 

Billy's Museum (excerpt)  - Amanda Dunsmore here

Billy's Museum, video portrait of specific historic act, site and context. Billy Hull was the longest serving security prison officer (25 years) at The Maze/Long Kesh Prison, situated outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. Over 15 years and against prison policy, Billy collected items relating to various individuals, incidents and occurrences. Billy's Museum is a record of a presentation he was given permission to make in the Maze at the time of his retirement. Film by Amanda Dunsmore, as part of Outpost Artists Resources Cuts and Burns Residency program. Original: 4:3 20mins. 2 channel audio, 2004.

Paul Ramírez Jonas Asks What Constitutes a Public by JEANNE CLAIRE VAN RYZIN

 

William was among the first visitors on a recent Saturday afternoon to step up to “Public Trust” (2016–ongoing), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s participatory installation at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) that invites anyone to make a personal promise by publicly declaring and recording it. “Public Trust” is part of Atlas, Plural, Monumental, the artist’s much-deserved 25-year survey organized by CAMH curator Dean Daderko.

William sat down and pledged “to fail until it happened.” He added his signature and his inked thumbprint to the contract, a graphite rubbing made over a raised letter board. Then, with a ding of a desk bell, William finalized his promise, declaring “cross my heart and hope to die,” and watched as another facilitator put his pledge up in black plastic letters on an enormous marquee.

“Public Trust” debuted in Boston in 2016 and was staged at three different public squares. Throughout his practice Ramírez Jonas has thoughtfully questioned the boundaries between artwork and viewer. And he’s challenged conventional definitions of public art by openly asking what constitutes “a public” and what brings people together.

It was delightful to see “Public Trust” as busy as it was in a museum setting. Visitors took part eagerly. The CAMH facilitators — local artists chosen by Ramírez Jonas ­— were engaged and thoughtful. “Public Trust” invites participants to consider the impact of their words — but only on Saturday afternoons at CAMH. The rest of the time, not staffed with facilitators, “Public Trust” is inactive.

Graphite rubbing of a pledge made by participants in Paul Ramírez Jonas’s “Public Trust,” (2016-ongoing). Each participant keeps a copy and a second copy is displayed in the museum.

Much of Ramírez Jonas’s work is site-specific and engages the public in a variety of ways. And thus, much of what’s in the exhibit is essentially records (photographs, video, explanatory text) about artwork that already took place. That makes a fair part of the experience of Atlas, Plural, Monumental akin to surveying an archive and imaginatively connecting a few objects with residual information. Which isn’t at all an unpleasant activity. But it does provoke a question: With today’s proliferation of performance, social practice, time-based and participatory public art, how best to present such artwork after the fact and in the confines of a traditional museum setting?

Daderko gives it noble curatorial effort. Atlas, Plural, Monumental is thorough in its chronological presentation of Ramírez Jonas’s oeuvre, offering a robust picture of the artist’s diverse practice.

Paul Ramírez Jonas, “The Commons” (2011), cork, pushpins, steel, wood, and hardware (image courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler)

Daderko put Ramírez Jonas’s large cork sculpture, “The Commons” (2011), modeled after Rome’s landmark “Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius,” center stage in the CAMH’s rambling and awkwardly shaped main gallery. Ramírez Jonas erases the emperor from his version of “Equestrian Statue,” democratizing the immutable monument. Instead, the riderless cork horse tops a base that functions as a public bulletin board. At CAMH, visitors have covered it with diverse messages: drawings, Polaroid selfies, business cards, notes, and ticket stubs from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston across the street (the CAMH has always had free admission). There’s a poster for a free yoga class and a program from a funeral service, too. “The Commons” may not be that rigorous or complex a piece, but it is very engaging.

Kites from Paul Ramírez Jonas’s “Heavier than Air” (1993-94) series

At the beginning of his practice Ramírez Jonas plumbed history, choosing scientific accomplishments (experiments in flight, the first moon landing) and understanding those historic events as “scores,” riffing on them like a jazz musician. That riff is affectionate in “Heavier than Air” (1993–94), a series for which Ramírez Jonas faithfully replicated kite prototypes designed during the optimistic era of the early 1900s when myriad inventors competed to make a flying machine. Ramírez Jonas fitted his kites with an alarm clock rejiggered to depress the shutter of a single-use disposable camera. Just like the Wright Brothers, the artist launched his kites at the beach. But when the timer went off, the camera captured blurry pictures of Ramírez Jonas below. At CAMH, those blurry photos hang near the kites, proof that the designs of the early inventors still function.

Paul Ramírez Jonas, “His Truth Is Marching On” (1993), wood, glass bottles, corks, water, mallet, rope, and hardware (The Dikeou Collection, Denver)

Another charismatic early piece is “His Truth is Marching On” (1993), a hanging chandelier of water-filled, clear wine bottles. Amid the bottles hangs a mallet that visitors can use to tap the bottles in a counter-clockwise direction, causing the successive musical notes to play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which is also the melody of the 19th–century abolitionist song “John Brown’s Body” and the early labor union anthem “Solidarity Forever.” The tune of each song is the same. Ramírez Jonas prods us to recall that history.

Some of Ramírez Jonas’s most affecting works in the exhibit are also some of the most discrete. The “Assembly” (2013) drawing series features hand-printed and colored silk-screen tickets that enumerate the capacity of meeting places: the United States Supreme Court Chamber, an Atlantic City boxing venue, La Scala opera house. Ramírez Jonas lays out the tickets to represent the seats of each venue, mapping the taxonomy of places for public assembly. The massive “Assembly: Ghazi Stadium” (2013), for instance, uses different colored tickets to represent the 25,000 bodies that can be seated in the Kabul, Afghanistan stadium. Ghazi Stadium is a venue for soccer games and other sports. But during Taliban rule in the 1990s, the stadium was the site of public executions.

With “Assembly: Ghazi Stadium,” Ramírez Jonas suggests there are different means of public participation. Beyond the fundamental human need for connection — fostered through the artist’s participatory pieces — there’s an imperative to participate in the public forum. How else can people claim that forum a democratic space?

Paul Ramírez Jonas: Atlas, Plural, Monumental continues at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) (5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, Texas) through August 

Inflatable Instructions - Ant Farm

 

Ant Farm Inflatable Instructions here

More inflatable instructions here and here and here

Euthanasia Coaster by Julijonas Urbonas

 

Euthanasia Coaster by Julijonas Urbonas video here

Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being. Design, engineering: Julijonas Urbonas Health issues: Dr. Michael Gresty, Spatial Disorientation Lab, Imperial College, London Model making: Paulius Vitkauskas Photography: Aistė Valiūtė and Daumantas Plechavičius Video: Science Gallery Video footage (human centrifuge training): William Ellis Part of the HUMAN+ exhibition at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, supported by Wellcome Trust, Trinity School of Medicine and the Trinity Long Room Hub. sciencegallery.com/humanplus/euthanasia-coaster The rights to this video do not belong to Thrillmaster Media.

Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello (Rael San Fratello) Teeter-Totter Wall

Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello (Rael San Fratello) Teeter-Totter Wall video here

Since the early 2000s, architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello (Rael San Fratello) have developed numerous proposals for interventions and alternatives to the United States-Mexico border wall. Many of their designs were inspired by stories of “people who, on both sides of the border, transform the wall, challenging its existence in remarkably creative ways.” Their work reimagines the wall in ways that range from playful (volleyball net) and infrastructural (solar panels) to natural (cactus wall). “The borderlands have been an evolving context,” as Ronald Rael says. “There was a time when there was no wall. There was a time when the wall was just an idea for national security. There was a time when the wall began to be proposed. And now there's a time when the wall is clearly fixed within our cultural identity.” Recent actions to extend the wall and separate families seeking asylum at the border prompted Rael San Fratello to bring one of their proposals to life. On July 28, 2019, they installed three pink teeter-totters into the border wall for families to play on. Their design serves as a metaphor, as Rael said, of the “border as a literal fulcrum between US-Mexico relations,” with “actions that take place on one side of a teeter totter having direct consequence on the other side.” For an hour, a small section of the wall between the two countries became a site of joyful connection rather than violent division.

Edgar Heap of Birds

 

View Edgar Heap of Birds Pitzer Campus Installation here

Pitzer College’s Art+Environment program kicked off its inaugural year with a public art installation by Edgar Heap of Birds, the program’s first artist-in-residence and an internationally-recognized contemporary artist. The installation, Native Hosts, will be on display for two years in various locations across Pitzer’s campus.

Native Hosts honors the Tongva, indigenous people whose ancestral homelands lie in the Los Angeles area. Created with local Tongva elders, Native Hosts features signs displaying the names of traditional villages and sacred sites. Pitzer Associate Professor of Art History Bill Anthes describes the artwork as, “a point of conversation for members of our campus community and visitors to the campus about our local ‘hosts’ in Southern California.”

“A goal of the art+environment program is to think expansively about how we interact with non-human nature, and how art can help us imagine other possible relationships between humans and the environment,” said Anthes, the director of art+environment. “Edgar’s work with the indigenous Tongva, who have known these lands for generations and for whom geography is deeply spiritual, is a fitting beginning for our program.”

A member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Heap of Birds is a professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma. His artwork has appeared in numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia.

Art Guys Colossi

 

THE ART GUYS COLOSSI

a proposal for the Houston Ship Channel

2015

gold plated bronze

585 feet tall

The Art Guys are pleased to announce their latest public art proposal: "The Art Guys Colossi."

The Art Guys Colossi are the world's largest statues of The Art Guys. Towering at 585 feet tall, the two gigantic exact likenesses of The Art Guys are 15 feet taller than the San Jacinto Monument, which is 15 feet taller than the Washington Monument.

Plated in pure 22 karat gold, the humongous rendering of The Art Guys serves as a glistening welcome beacon to oil tankers, canoers and canoeists arriving from all over the world.

Visitors to the soaring statues will be able to ride an elevator to the tops of the figures and peer out of windows in the eyes and ears.

At night, laser lights will beam futuristic rays from "The Art Guys Colossi" eyes forming a sci-fi arch for barges and sail boats to pass under.

Said Jack, "We think 'The Art Guys Colossi' shows Houston's unique can-do spirit."

"I guarantee that there's nothing quite like this anywhere," gleamed Mike.

Funding for "The Art Guys Colossi" will come from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In a surprising move, the MFAH Board of Directors decided to redirect the $1/2 billion they planned to spend on their new building for modern and contemporary art. An unnamed official from the MFAH said, "We think it's the right thing to do."

Alfredo Jaar - The Cloud

 

The Cloud video here

Valle Del Matador
Tijuana-San Diego
Mexico-USA Border
October 14, 2000

The US-Mexican border embodies an enormous social inequality and an astounding disequilibrium of political and economic power.

As economic globalization is being celebrated as the triumph of international capitalism across frontiers, the border between Mexico and the United States has seen implemented the most draconian military measures in its history designed to prevent immigrant workers from crossing those newly "open frontiers".

An obscene amount of resources has been poured in recent years in an effort to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. More than 3,000 Border Patrol agents are patrolling today the 66-mile border in San Diego County alone. They have implemented military-style tactics to seal the border and erected miles of high-security fencing, buried thousands of motion sensors along border trails and deployed dozens of helicopters equipped with infrared detectors.

In the last decade alone, it is estimated that more than three thousand people have died trying to cross the border. These deaths have been the result of shootings by US Immigration Officials, drowning, extreme climatic conditions, and automobile accidents, some of them caused by high-speed chases by the Border Patrol.

In repeated visits to the area and in numerous interviews and discussions with activists working on both sides of the border, I discovered an intolerable situation and an unacceptable tragedy: in the 21st Century people still die trying to simply cross a border between two countries.

I created The Cloud as an ephemeral monument in the memory of those who lost their lives trying to cross the border. The Cloud lasted 45 minutes in which we offered a space and time of mourning. Music was played on both sides of the border, symbolically uniting a divided land and people. Poetry was read and a moment of silence was observed.
Then the balloons were released. Contrary to normal wind conditions, the wind that morning took an unexpected turn and pushed the balloons towards Mexico. Catalina Enriquez, Felix Zavala, Guadalupe Romero, Trinidad Santiago, Aureliano Cabrera and the others went back home.

Alfredo Jaar
Notes on The Cloud, 2000

alfredojaar.net

Tomás Saraceno - Museo Aero Solar

Tomás Saraceno Museo Aero Solar video here

Artist Tomás Saraceno's works often defy optical logic: they seem to hover or hang impossibly in the air, sometimes creating a space for people to walk in, other times floating above them in a gallery or museum. Saraceno is a collaborator, working with scientists, the local community and other participants to enact his mindbending installations.

This summer, one of his works hovered over a Mississauga site, daily, for 10 days during the The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (written about by our senior writer Leah Collins a few days ago). Called Museo Aero Solar, the work was made from plastic bags, collected at various sites in the city and laboriously taped together by community members with instructions provided by the artist, before the show opened. The piece, as curator Christine Shaw points out in this video by filmmakers Istoica, provokes "thinking about plastic pollution, something that we absolutely have to address worldwide." It might make you think of magic, too — or the American Beauty-esque mystery of a windswept plastic bag. Museo Aero Solar has already drifted away from Mississauga, but if you happen to be in Paris, France before January 6, 2019, you can catch Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno while it's taking over the Palais de Tokyo with the biggest spiderweb you've likely ever seen.

Ant Farm - Media Burn

 

Ant Farm - Media Burn video here

"Media Burn" employs performance and spectacle in service of media critique, featuring the explosive collision of two of America's most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco's Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the "ultimate media event." In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a "Phantom Dream Car"—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets. The spectacle of the Cadillac crashing through the burning TV sets became a visual manifesto of the early alternative video movement, an emblem of an oppositional and irreverent stance against the political and cultural imperatives promoted by television and the passivity of TV viewing. "Media Burn" appears courtesy Electronic Art Intermix. http://www.eai.org/index.htm Ant Farm: Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Uncle Buddie Artist-President: Doug Hall Executive Producer: Tom Weinberg Editors: Chip Lord, Skip Blumberg, Doug Michels, Tom Weinberg Interviews directed and edited by Peter Kirby

Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco - Couple in the Cage

 

Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco - Couple in the Cage video here

The Couple in the Cage documents the travelling performance of Guillermo Gómez -Peña and Coco Fusco, in which they exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the fiction, and thought the artists were real “savages”. The record of their interactions with audiences in four coun tries dramatizes the dilemma of cross-cultural misunderstanding we continue to live with today. Their experiences are interwoven with archival footage of ethnographic displays from the past, giving an historical dimension to the artists’ social experiment. The Couple in the Cage is a powerful blend of comic fiction and poignant reflection on the morality of treating human beings as exotic curiousities.

Michael Rakowitz - Enemy Kitchen

 

Michael Rakowitz - Enemy Kitchen video here

Michael Rakowitz discusses his mobile art project, Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck). The food truck will travel around Chicago serving a rotating menu of regional Iraqi dishes, with American veterans of the Iraq War acting as servers and sous-chefs. The food will be served on limited-edition, paper reproductions of china found in Saddam Hussein's palaces.

Learn more about Feast at smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/feast.

Krzysztof Wodiczko "Monument" Art 21

 

Krzysztof Wodiczko here

Episode #270: Video and installation artist Krzysztof Wodiczko amplifies the voices of refugees with "Monument," his 2020 site-specific commission for Madison Square Park in New York City. From his Manhattan apartment, Wodiczko shares his early drawings of the project, where he conceived of how he would project video onto a prominent 1881 monument to Civil War admiral, David Glasgow Farragut. "It was very important for me to imagine how this statue can be animated with the projection," says the artist. Monuments carry special significance for Wodiczko, as sites for public gatherings and protests, witnesses and recorders of history, and blank canvases upon which new narratives can be painted. With "Monument," Wodiczko decided to project video likenesses and spoken narratives of resettled refugees onto the Farragut statue. As Wodiczko explains, "There are more than 70 million refugees; people who are forced to leave their home countries because those countries are engaged in wars...to actually see a refugee speaking is a very rare opportunity for the public." During a video mapping projection test in the park before the opening of the installation, Wodiczko makes sure that the faces and hands of the refugees from his recorded interviews with them align with the Farragut statue's own body. As the final work plays in the darkened park each evening, passersby hear the refugees' difficult and at times heartbreaking stories. The artist sees this as both a moment of catharsis for the refugees who collaborated with him for this project, but also a way to make monuments relevant to contemporary life, "so that we can build a better future, maybe a future in which some of those monuments, like war memorials, will never need to be built, because there will be no wars and no refugees." By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Krzysztof Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society. Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/krzysztof-wo... CREDITS | Producer: Ian Forster. Interview: Ian Forster. Editor: Misha Spivack. Colorist: Jonah Greenstein. Camera: Jarred Alterman and John Marton. Production Assistant: Sara Schwartz. Music: Blue Dot Sessions. Artwork Courtesy: Krzysztof Wodiczko and Madison Square Park Conservancy. Archival Material: International Rescue Committee. "Extended Play" is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Art21 Contemporary Council; and by individual contributors. #KrzysztofWodiczko #Art21 #Art21ExtendedPlay

Art21 - Borderlands

 

Video here

Art21 - Borderlands. This episode is set in the region between the United States and Mexico—long a site of political conflict, social struggle, and intense creative ferment—four artists respond to one of the most divisive moments in the history of this area. Featuring artists Tanya Aguiñiga, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Richard Misrach, and Postcommodity.

“Film props have to be legible and support plot development; they have to be readable, which undermines their potential to surprise and challenge.” Speculative props expands our imaginations and provides new perspectives.

 

“Objects used in design speculations can extend beyond a filmic support function and break away from cliched visual languages that prop designers are often obligated to use.”  Patricia Piccinini’s The Young Family is a perfect example.  She triggers an imaginative response for viewer by creating “a hyper-realistic life-size model of a transgenic creature with vaguely human characteristics suckling her children.  Although the object is presented in hyper-realistic detail, the world it belongs to will be different for each person who sees it.  

 

It really cleared up the difference of a prop verses a speculative prop when Dunne talked about Barbies and toy guns being props representing real objects, and speculative props being like a box that a chile pretends is a house, or a rock is pretended to be an alien.  Speculative props facilitate imagining and function as “physical synecdoche.”  This enables the viewer to “creatively engage with the props and make them their own.”

 

“Viewers need to understand the rules of the game and how a speculative design prop is meant to function in a given situation.  This is very difficult because viewers are not used to encountering designed objects with this purpose either in the press or exhibitions.” This statement for me helps to gain some understanding why a lot of people do not appreciate fine art the way art lovers do.  They simple don’t understand the rules of the game.  Many most likely have never even heard the term speculative design and have no idea what it means.  I myself, when viewing an artwork I don’t understand, have never thought of the speculative design perspective.  

 

Dylan Yan - 6 Ft

Wanderlust Video For my project, I wanted to focus on the idea of social distancing in public during this pandemic. I will construct a wearable art piece that has a large ring and measures to be 6 feet in radius which surrounds my body. I will take this piece into crowded spaces in public and demonstrate the boundaries at which we should stand to keep a safe distance. By obstructing people's path and getting in their way, it will reveal the proper distance that one should stand. As I get people's reactions, it will show myself as being the safe one, while revealing how many people are not following safety protocols.

Kimberly Toribio - Wanderlust

 Wanderlust Project

                                                        Within the Frame

The origin of this project idea came from a Shift from Reality where I would place a mini door in a local escape place like the park and inspire a wanderlust escapist piece. Following throughout critiques and meetings, I went along the direction of showcasing various significant areas in Gainesville that frame community and culture. The places where groups of people from various communities gather and meet, chat, put on cultural or community musical events, etc. The idea then became to frame Gainesville through the frame of the door but also with a lens of personal impact and significance of the community. The materials I used included acrylic paint, a 3-foot stack of wood, a basswood frame, door hinges, artificial moss, and clay for the door handle. 

Utilizing an electric saw, measuring tape, an electric drill to nail all wooden parts together, gorilla wood glue - I put together the basswood frame and attached cut up pieces of wood, and made a door reminiscent of a Gainesville community door. With 352 as the door number and the addition of artificial moss to signify the very green, dark woodsy areas all around town. 

Inspiration from places came from a personal place where I set out to go out to the few places that throughout my years in Gainesville, I've watched people come together and connect as well as choose places that have a place in my heart and a tie to the town. 

Dylan Yan - 6 Ft

For my project, I wanted to focus on the idea of social distancing in public during this pandemic. I will construct a wearable art piece that has a large ring and measures to be 6 feet in radius which surrounds my body. I will take this piece into crowded spaces in public and demonstrate the boundaries at which we should stand to keep a safe distance. By bumping into people and getting their reactions, it will show myself as being the safe one, while revealing how many people are not following safety protocols.

Title (didn't decide yet) - Joo young Jung

 

Materials: mask, straw, balloons, hoop petticoat (I might use different material instead of hoop petticoat) 

I'm going to make a hole on the face mask and attach the hole with straws (three or four). 

hoop petticoat will be the base for the balloon cape. 

balloon cape inspiration:

the flower cape from the movie named Midsommar. 

going to blow the balloons with the straw attached to the face mask and going to cover the petticoat with "the" balloons. 

Performance: 

I'm going to show the process of making the balloon cape. I'm going to blow the balloons in several places: my room, bathroom, backyard, in the car, restaurant, coffee shop (outside), at the park. 

As the place changes, the hoop petticoat will be covered with balloons. In the last scene, I'll take off my mask and pop all the balloons, producing a scene that comes out of the balloon cape.

Extremities

 

Extremities by Karina

Rendezvous and Imprints

 Rendezvous and Imprints 

by Rowan

My project will be conducted along the trails and sidewalks around Gainesville. My chosen paths reference my imprint in the city, specific to the areas I visit regularly. The items and rubbings collected will reference the people in these spaces that occupy my space but I have no connection to and through the objects gain a deeper connection to these spaces.

Items will be collected pertaining to memory, time, and has a trace of a story. These items will be collaged on paper, with drawings on the background, rubbings of Gainesville infrastructures (manholes, plaques, etc.), and some maps of the walks taken along Gainesville.

There will be ten collage pieces that accompany maps of the walk. The pieces will be one artwork, all referencing the experience of the process. The compositions of the collages will be influenced by the objects so there will be an aspect of spontaneity.

Mimi Diep - Reconcile Solitude

Sketches of what the final suit should look like

It will be entirely made out of fabric

Devin Ozmon Mask Life

 

For my Project, I will alternate between collecting and distributing masks in downtown Gainesville. I will wear a “uniform” that matches the surgical masks. I will also have a box made with/covered with masks. On the days that I will be distributing masks, I will hand out masks that each have a unique fact stamped on the front regarding COVID-19 and respiratory health, as well as an informational card with contact information. On the days that I collect masks, I will wear the same uniform and wear gloves to safely pick up the discarded material

2319

 

2319

For this project I wanted to focus on the current pandemic particularly the masks. Being that COVID is a virus that has killed many people it should be treated as a biohazard. As part of Wanderlust I will create a large scale mask and dress up in a hazmat suit to interact with the mask. It will involve me sectioning off areas as if it were a contaminated zone and possibly other interactions as discussed today.

Francis Alÿs

 

Francis Alÿs Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing video

Francis Alÿs Reel/Unreel, 2011 here

In Francis Alÿs’s video REEL-UNREEL, the action takes place along the bare cityscape of Kabul, Afghanistan. The cameras follow a reel of film as it unrolls through the old part of town—pushed by two children, uphill and downhill, like a hoop, inspiring an improvised narrative. It’s an example of “doing/undoing,” Alÿs says. And that interplay became the axiom of the film.

REEL-UNREEL was made in collaboration with filmmaker Julien Devaux and architect Ajmal Maiwandi in 2011, and it touches on the multifaceted, open-ended nature of Alÿs’s art, his social and political concerns, his appreciation of film itself, and his fascination with children’s games. (Alÿs has a 13-year-old son.) It was shown earlier this year in a chilly white viewing room inside David Zwirner gallery in New York, where Alÿs and I met to talk about his practice.

Hanging in neighboring rooms were many mostly small drawings—of people and landscapes, some with color bars (in the style of TV test patterns) painted on top of them. These bars, often done later than the diaristic sketches underneath them, block the image, as if to distance their author from the memory of his experiences, and also to leave room for interpretation.

He made the drawings, he says, to keep in touch with the film when the crew wasn’t shooting. “Eventually,” he explains, “I found it very difficult to represent what’s going on in Afghanistan. It’s not easy to translate the experience of being there—it’s very conflictive in the sense that you can’t help being seduced by the place and the people.” He found that “painting color bars is a kind of take on a Bruce Nauman expression, ‘bound to fail,’” he says. “It was my own kind of material way of expressing my frustration and recognizing that in any kind of representation I was going to fail somewhat.”

Like almost all of Alÿs’s projects, REEL-UNREEL was founded on a performance or action, and from it emerged a range of related works—from hand-drawn animation loops to small sculptures, paintings, and drawings—which Alÿs sells to support himself and his larger projects.