Archive for 'public art'
Human figure in public art
March 30, 2010 by admin, under inter-bodies / half-objects, public art, thoughts.
The human cannot be seen anymore through the figure of the body in its tradition sense. In order to engage with the human body is a question of ignoring, forgetting it, and replacing it with what ever we have leanrt it not to be. From here let the unexpected forms which we originally thought to be unrepresentable of the human a chance to develop and embody human manifestations. The paradox of this thinking follows the paradoxes which emerge with defining the human in the digital age.
The human figure has already gone a transgression embodying everything else but itself.
I want my audience to feel this flow from displacement to a “new” re-embodiment (Mark Hansen explains quite neatly the definition of “new” in new media). This is what I believe to be at the core of anti-monument public art. Anti in the sense of responding to the traditional and narcissistic attitude of engaging with the human figure and understanding what might be. Of course I’m in no way presenting a solution but a redefinition of the problem which I think is at heart in public art. (and public art which relates to its history and respondes to it in a constructive yet marginal way).
The first step I believe is to create a complete rupture from any narcissistic tendecies in the construction of any discourse related to identifying where ‘is’ the human and the self (if any definition of that still survives) inside the art in question. And focus on things that might have been disgarded and neglected in order to create this conventional perspective in the first place.
To understand the problem at stake we need to revisit the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in which the act of creating the world is partly through forgetting to insert the human in it. Their desparate solution to fix this problem was to give the human “fire” to compensate his lack of qualities. This act of forgetting I believe comes very much in play when considering new media and new media art: flows from disembodiment and reembodiment experienced through such systems requires us to rethink the origins of the human “figure” and human “essense”.
Yes, I do hate Anthony Gormley.
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A Self Burial by the Sea
March 15, 2010 by admin, under artworks, public art.
The Glue Society has unveiled its latest installation at the Sculpture by the Sea festival in Aarhus in Denmark. The piece, entitled “It wasn’t meant to end like this”, is a huge mechanical digger that seems to have buried itself under 300 tonnes of rubble…
As the Glue Society’s James Dive says, “[the work] has a subdued, still quality, despite its physical size.” It certainly gives the impression that this 25 tonne digger is attemtping to hide itself away.
“It wasn’t meant to end like this” follows previous artistic explorations via a sculpture of a miniature man defecating on a ten foot pigeon (shown in New York) and their infamous God’s Eye View project, which attracted hundreds of comments on the CR blog.
Sculpture by the Sea, the Australian sculpture festival, has recently added Aarhus to its roster of visiting cities. Other work by the Glue Society collective can be viewed at gluesociety.com.
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Nicolas Schoffer
May 6, 2009 by ric, under artworks, bio-feedback / cybernetics, public art.
1961 film showing the cybernetic tower (or tour), work by Nicolas Schoffer from 1961, working, showing the random programme and the dynamic-light show. I love the juxtapostion of stillness and motion that the sculpture has, I wonder if it was intentional.