Zimoun – a live performance

Mark Cetilia, PhD Student, Department of Music

On Saturday,  February 4, Zimoun, the Swiss sound artist, came to Brown University’s List Art Center to give a performance in conjunction with the exhibition Nostalgia Machines at the David Winton Bell Gallery. Most readers will be familiar with Zimoun through his installations, which involve simple systems that exhibit incredible complexity through minute variations between multiple, seemingly identical, physical objects. These installations most commonly include prepared industrial-grade DC motors (of which Zimoun swept up a hefty stock when a Swiss manufacturer went out of business) in conjunction with other materials such as cotton balls, steel wire, and cardboard boxes. However, Zimoun also has a long history with experimental music-making. In 2003, Zimoun and graphic designer Marc Beekhuis founded Leeraum, a label and “networking hub” for artists who “explore forms and structures based on reductive principles and careful yet radical use of materials.” Since then, Leeraum has released recordings by artists such as Dale Lloyd, Richard Garet, Kenneth Kirschner, Mise en Scene, and numerous works by Zimoun himself. It is not often that one gets a chance to see Zimoun perform in the States, so I was very curious to experience his work first-hand.

His performance at the List Art Center was comprised of two pieces. The first featured a handful of DC motors, each of which was connected to a thin steel wire hosting a ping pong ball, and its speed varied using a custom control surface. The DC motor assemblies were mounted atop a single cardboard box, and as the motors rotated, the ping pong balls struck the box, which acted as a resonant chamber. The resulting sounds were then amplified via a number of contact microphones and then sent to a small mixing board, giving Zimoun the ability to change the equalization parameters for each microphone and adjust the overall contour of the piece. As in his installation work, the simplicity of the system allowed for complex results ranging from complex rhythmic patterns to dense textural material. His presence on stage was not performative; instead, he acted as a guide through the potential sound worlds created by his mechanical devices. Earlier in the day, Zimoun gave an informal talk about his work; during the talk, he spoke in depth about his documentation process, which involves a number of camera angles and microphones combined with careful equalization, mixing and editing. In a way, this piece served as real-time documentation of a miniature sound installation, allowing the audience entry from different vantage points which slowly shifted over time.

The second piece was a quadraphonic recording presented in complete darkness, and seemed to be comprised of manipulated recordings taken from his installation works. Though we had all been forewarned, the sudden darkness at the beginning of the performance took everyone somewhat off-guard. As the piece began, sounds of machinery in the distance mixed with the rustling and fumbling about of audience members as they gradually adjusted to their new environment. Eventually, everyone settled into the darkness and a new phase began, in which all in attendance were given over completely to listening. By stripping away the visual information, and thus the ability of the audience to see the “source” of the sounds they were experiencing, more intent focus was given to the sounds themselves. As in the first performance of the evening, this piece was not built on a recognizable narrative structure or compositional arc, but instead seemed to be centered around creating an environment for the audience to inhabit, a world where tiny machines roam the earth freely without need for light or human intervention.

“We Propose” by Alexander Lembersky

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery

Alexander Lembersky, "We Propose" (1988), silkscreen. (B95 97.48)

Late last week, I was preparing for a class visit by Stefan Gunn’s printing making and graphic arts students in the Brown Visual Art Department. Stefan was interested in inspiring his students with strong examples of formal imagery and typographic experimentation in the medium of print, and after a brief consultation of the Bell Gallery’s collections, we decided that the Bell Gallery’s lesser known collection of recent Soviet posters would be a unique body of works to show.

In this collection there is a total of approximately 280 posters from the Soviet Union produced between the late 1970s and late 1980s, with many strong examples of large-scale silkscreen prints. The subjects of the posters range from political issues to arts and cultural marketing to campaigns for social issues, and taken together constituted a remarkable show at the Bell Gallery in 1988 entitled “The Contemporary Soviet Poster.”

The example above is a silkscreen print by Alexander Lembersky – entitled “We Propose.” In the image, we see a bold, monochrome bomb being cut in two by a two-man saw created by the flags of the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Lembersky’s print is one of a discreet group within this poster collection that features anti-nuclear propaganda. A bold statement in favor of nuclear disarmament, Lembersky’s poster utilizes the structures and styles of formalist and constructivist propaganda inservice of a distinctly anti-Cold War message – an aspiration for a trans-national partnership between the United States and the Soviet Union in the deescalation of the nuclear arms race.

The machine as seen

Domenico Quaranta, Contemporary art critic and curator

Karl Gunnar Pontus Hultén 1968 The machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Some time ago I came up with the ambitious (let’s say crazy?) idea to work on a follow-up to Pontus Hulten’s seminal exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968). It should be called, of course, The Machine as Seen at the Beginning of the Information Age. The need for such an upgrade is so obvious that I won’t even try to demonstrate it here. Half a century later, the process prophetically announced by Hulten in the Sixties has completed. We now live in a Post Fordist society, and if a young Charlie Chaplin would like to depict today’s alienation and shoot Modern Times again, he should choose a completely different set. Probably a call center, or a Chinese gold farm.

Role playing game "gold farmers" in China.

We still have machines, but most of them are computer-operated, and rely on software and algorithms. We still love them, because we have been told to love them and because of the love for big, strong things we inherited from our childhood. When my 3 years old toddler sees my laptop, he immediately urges me to show him garbage trucks videos on Youtube; but he’s more familiar with laptops than with garbage trucks, and he will most likely work with the first than with the latter. This turn in society, and this evolution of the machine along the last decades, showed up in art practice in many ways, and I’m sure it would be great to see an exhibition talking about it.

This project is still a secret wish (well, not so secret anymore), but it came to my mind when I visited Nostalgia Machines, the exhibition curated by Maya Allison for the David Winton Bell Gallery. Nostalgia is of course a major feeling in our current relationship with machines. When we grow up, the childish love I described turns into nostalgia. We miss what we loved when we were children. We miss mechanisms we can understand, design, build and repair, because we are surrounded by mechanisms we can’t understand, design, build and repair. We miss an age in which we had the time to perceive novelties as such, be amazed by them, and slowly adapt to them, because we live in an age in which things become old in a day. We miss machines that looked like machines, with their wires and gears, because we live in an age in which machines look like everything else but what they actually are. Sometimes they look like humans, and they are frightening.

An example of the "uncanny valley" of robotic engineering.

And yet, surprisingly enough, Nostalgia Machines is not a nostalgic exhibition. The machines on show may trigger nostalgia thanks to their aesthetics, to the way they display their inner mechanism and working processes. They often make us think about time, deconstructing and reconstructing history (Jasper Rigole), reverting processes (Jonathan Schipper), emulating (Zimoun) or reproducing them (Gregory Witt, Meredith Pingree). But they don’t look back to a specific moment in the history of machines. They don’t use obsolete machinery saved from the rubbish dump, quite the contrary. They are automata that don’t need any input from the spectator. They use contemporary technologies – processors, webcams, Arduinos – and materials. Nostalgia Machines is the proof that we may miss the homeland – whatever it is – but also that the trip (nostos in Greek) is worthwhile.

"Odysseus und Kalypso" by Arnold Böcklin (1883), oil on canvas.

On Being OUTNUMBERED

Prof. Ed Osborn, Visual Arts Department

Jasper Rigole, Outnumbered, a brief history of imposture, 2009. Camera, photograph, computer, robotics, projection. Courtesy of the artist.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.  

Jasper Rigole’s OUTNUMBERED, a brief history of imposture (2009) takes this disclaimer and makes it both a starting and end point for the experience of photographic and documentary experience.  The phrase functions as an amen to any work of fiction (purported or otherwise): this is where disbelief ends its suspension and reality resumes. You laughed, you cried, just don’t call a lawyer.  The disclaimer exists because there is a chance that a legitimate claim of belief in resemblance could be made; it is a recognition of the existence and agency of the viewer.  It recognizes that the strength of the narrative it shields derives its power in part from the experiences we bring to it and our investment in it.

OUTNUMBERED is built around a quick illusion and revelation. A video projection of what appears to be a documentary, complete with British-accented narration and slow scanning of an old group portrait photo, occupies one space. In an adjacent space the video is shown to be derived from an elaborate construction in which a computerized camera glides across the face of an “historic” panoramic photograph.  The wide portrait image was made by a panoramic camera whose lens and iris pivoted horizontally across the scene and negative simultaneously.  We see not one moment in time, though it looks that way, but instead the several seconds it took for the camera to scan the courtyard. Even before Rigole got to it, the image is not what it appears to be. The chipcam that moves across the photograph’s face appears to reanimate it, but it was an unstill image to begin with. It used to be said that the camera never lies (that has long been an open question), but certainly here it never lies still.

Because the piece shows its hand almost instantly, it rapidly runs through the nominal questions any work of mediated experience might raise: What is it? What is it doing? How is it done? Is it for real?  That the piece makes no pretense of hiding the answer to this last question leaves several larger ones in its place: Are any images for real? How can they be trusted? How can we be trusted with them?

Looking at Rigole’s image-producing contraption, we seem to be standing in the place of the man behind the curtain, the place where the illusion is controlled.  But the reason the man was hidden was that he had an illusion to control, and in OUTNUMBERED we have neither illusion nor control: we are left with no narrative space – fictional or otherwise – and without it no agency of viewership.  We also have no place to hide from the fact that these images have no reliability even in fiction. There is no way to invest ourselves in the narratives here, even knowing that they are utterly fictional: they are so infinitely variable that any meaningful ordering of them depends solely on us, and the longer we look at the work the more undependable we become.

Before this piece we are outnumbered, our stories are outnumbered, our history is outnumbered.  Our objections would be outnumbered, except that there is nothing to which to object, least of all the object that spells all this out in flat detail. And this is the point. Objection needs veracity in order to exist, and this is precisely what OUTNUMBERED withdraws from us.  Not just the truth of the spoken narrative, which is revealed quickly to have no basis in anything beyond its own database, but more critically the chance to measure ourselves in relation to it. Once the construction of the piece is revealed, the question about whether its narratives are real or not ceases to matter.  And this cessation leaves a disquiet that easily settles over any constructed image, documentary ones most especially. I spent extended time with the piece on several occasions, and while it is fascinating to experience firsthand, even repeatedly, I know nothing more about the world after having seen this work than I did before. I probably know less.  This experience requires no disclaimer: nothing to believe here, folks, now move along.

“The Three Trees” by Rembrandt van Rijn

Jaclyn Melicharek, Class of 2012, Human Biology

Rembrandt van Rijn, "The Three Trees" (1643), drypoint etching.

One artist. Two colors. Three trees. At first glance, what seems like a simple country landscape soon becomes a natural inspiration, a sketch of the world. Rembrandt Van Rijn’s The Three Trees renders contradiction in the most detailed of etchings. One is immediately drawn to the central force of nature – the scratched wood bark, the haphazardly fine branches, the carefully arranged yet appropriately scattered billow of leaves. The three trees dominate.

A man fishes in the left-hand corner, almost lost in the shadow of darkness, the impending clouds. In the background, a farmer tends to his fields, an artist sketches on the hillside, a traveler walks alongside his wagon. A windmill turns, a bird flies. Light sweeps from the right, illuminating the facing leaves and letting the ground shine amongst the shadows. Bushes overpower the foreground, as clouds creep across the still, silent sky. An everyday scene, or a portrayal of man’s vulnerability to the overwhelming strength of nature?

Collectively, Rembrandt’s work demonstrates themes of contradiction: sight versus touch or vision versus knowledge. But does every work of art need a conflict, a story, a reason? One can almost always be found. The Three Trees – a representation of religious significance? A depiction of the force of nature? Or the capture of a moment in time? Any given day, to any viewer, it can be one, all, or something else entirely. Each requires a different engagement, a new perspective, an analysis of every etched line. Sit under a tree and think about it – after all, there are three to choose from.

“Creativity = Capital” by Joseph Beuys

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery

Joseph Beuys, “Creativity = Capital” (1983), lithograph. Gift of Ron Feldman. (PR 1986.110)

CAPITAL is at present the work sustaining ability. Money is not an economic value though. The two genuine economic values involve the connection between ability (creativity) and product. That explains the formula presenting the expanded concept of art: ART=CAPITAL.

-Joseph Beuys, 1985

Impassioned by economics and politics, Joseph Beuys’ art was one of social transformation. In this 1983 lithograph Creativity = Capital, we see a palimpsest of arguments, designs and proofs reminiscent of the artist’s blackboard drawings in which he “worked out” plans and found inspiration for his socially transformative art. Standing boldly on top of these plans, the slogan “Creativity = Capital” is printed almost as the final and resolute conclusion. The slogan (also found as “Art = Capital”) is repeated in many of his other works and is often interpreted as an assertion for an expanded understanding of art in which creativity and capital are the fundamental forces for the reformation of society.

In his thought, creativity was neither the unique domain of artists, nor capital the sole realm of corporations. Rather both were equally present and available to all within their daily lives and practices. His popular aphorism “everyone is an artist,” was perhaps misleading, as it was not meant to compel everyone to produce traditional fine “artwork.” Rather it was the logical distillation of his unique and sophisticated conception of human creativity as social sculpture. Social sculpture, for Beuys, was not a physical artwork. It was the conscious actions of individuals and groups to reform their social, economic, and material conditions to free human creativity. Beuys adhered to this conception of art as politics with a pointed urgency, founding two political movements – the German Student Party (1967) (later Fluxus Zone West) and the Organization for Direct Democracy (1971) – both charged with realizing projects to bring out political conditions underwhich social sculpture would be possible to reform society. “All around us,” he said, “the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped, or created.”

At the time of the writing of this short text, thousands of people are occupying public spaces around the world in an effort to renegotiate and reform the conditions of social, political and economic life. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations perhaps represent a testing of the possibilities of Beuys’ political and economic maxims. A “Beuysian” interpretation of Occupy Wall Street presents the demonstrations as direct action to invert the top-down hierarchy of supply-demand economics. They become social sculpture and an urgent call for shared global artwork reforming our economic-political structures as demand-supply – where the needs of humans are met by production rather than human needs being induced, formed or conditioned by production.

New Babylon

Prof. Ömür Harmanşah, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University
Providence, October 7-8, 2011

“Symbolic representation of New Babylon” by Constant Nieuwenhuys (1969)

I am intrigued by the idea of an architectural future formulated as a narrative that links the past and the contemporary to a necessarily distant future. If you favor a political reading of this narrative, you could also conceptualize it as a colonizing and modernist gesture that extends the grand narratives of western technological progress into the untouched spaces of the future. Nathaniel Robert Walker points to us quite insightfully that the future is first and foremost imagined as a place “as the new Promised Land, the Millennial Landscape, as Utopia” (Walker 2011: 4). This place-making practice in the landscapes of the future is fascinating as a representational project that aims to anchor future environments of dwelling as accurately constructed places, often depicted as living and even sometimes eventful spaces. Such realism effect in a way contrasts with a certain prevalence of floating buildings, vehicles and peoples, and an overall feeling of dislocatedness or visions of generic locales, which surely derives its arrogant anti-place attitude from colonial modernity.

Interestingly the projects of the future as utopias draw so much from the ancient past —or antiquity if you prefer— very similar to the nineteenth and early twentieth century modernist discourses. If the creation of a utopian social landscape involves and avant-gardism that cuts its ties with the recent past, the tendency is to turn to the distant past as a repository of ideas, forms, monuments, place-histories. In the scientific endeavors of future design, what is negated and abandoned is collective memory and emotional ties, senses of belonging to place. This is replaced by a rigorous archaeological science of antiquity, which is equally idealized as the future and imagined as utopias. Think of the so-called “democratic” and ideal society of fifth century bce Athens, Mussolini’s idealization of Augustus and his empire, Egyptian or Maya pyramids built by some technologically advanced but now vanished society. Atlantis, the vanished land of ancient prosperity and wisdom, is no less utopic than Robert Owen’s New Harmony.

When teaching archaeology courses on the Ancient Near East here at Brown, I often talk about the city of Babylon and its legacies in medieval Islamic and post-Enlightenment West. I ask my students why Babylon, unlike any other city in ancient Mesopotamia, have been in the forefront of historical imagination, from Pieter Brueghel, the Elder’s 16^th century painting Tower of Babel to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 movie Babel? One of the fascinating examples of the intersection of ancient utopias with architectural futures is “New Babylon” by the famous Dutch artist and city-planner Constant Nieuwenhuys. Constant was a founding member of the Situationist International and his “New Babylon” was his long-term project of a utopian city of the future designed as a polemical provocation that critiqued the corruption and alienation in cities of industrial modernity (Wigley 1999; Sander 1999). The experimental idea of “New Babylon” was presented in a series of constructivist designs in the form of city models, experimental architectural drawings, sketches, etchings, lithographs, and photocollages, and elaborated in manifestos, essays, lectures, and films. This city was intended to be “ephemeral and without a future, passageways” an eventful landscape of constructed situations that allowed “a nomadic life of creative play, a modern return to Eden” in Constant’s own words (Sander 1999: 105). The urban space in this truly utopic but a collectively constructed world that generated rather than restricted movement, uprisings and social encounters.

The architectural futures that Nathaniel Robert Walker presents us in Building Expectation is a politically charged field of imagination about space and spatiality that appropriates utopias of the past to rethink utopias of the future.

References

Sadler, Simon; 1999. The situationist city. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

Walker, Nathaniel Robert; 2011. Building expectation: past and present visions of the architectural future. Providence RI: Bell Gallery, Brown University.

Wigley, Mark; 1998. Constant’s New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire. 010 Publishers.

http://vimeo.com/14336720

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Read more about the exhibition <a href="Read more about the exhibition “Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future” here: http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2011/08/future

I am and will be once I am.

Timothy Simonds, M.A. student, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

"L.A. 2013" by Syd Mead (1988)

A two-storied boulevard runs into the horizon, with non-combustion cars skimming down the road’s slick surface. Office towers frame the road’s path, drawing our eyes up to a clear and unpolluted sky. This is Syd Mead’s “L.A. 2013,” the front cover of a 1988 issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Although Mead’s vision is not an accurate representation of L.A. today, it doesn’t seem that farfetched. Neil M. Denari Architects’s High Line 23 or nearly any of the new buildings over-hanging the highline line in New York could easily be figured into the scene, and the Prius’s silent float would fit perfectly among the white noise that the traffic in Mead’s image evokes. Like Mead’s other creations, the rendering reorganizes the existent within the realm of emerging technologies rather than presuming a completely reinvented world.

In just over a year it will be 2013, and there is something uncanny about existing in a time that has been rendered “a future.” What does it mean to share the same temporal space as a utopia? When utopia – which comes from Greek οὐ τόπος meaning “no place” – becomes right here.

Do images of the future exist when these “futures” become the contemporary moment? The literary traditions of utopia, dystopia, and Sci-Fi might say, “no…but yes.” Utopia is always nowhere and right here. It reorganizes the existent and estranges itself from reality with some kind of border. It is lost in a lacuna of some navigator’s memory, beyond some insurmountable wall, or held in the graves of those that have got there but could not return. In the case of Mead’s “L.A. 2013,” a temporal barrier separates our reality and its own, a characteristic akin to Sci-Fi. But as our 2013 approaches, this divide seems to fall. “L.A. 2013” entangles temporal landscapes and places “a future” in the past. I am (the image exists in its own time) and will be (presents the plausible evolution of our built environment in 1988) once I am (the plausible of 1988 and our time collide, giving us nostalgia for “a future”).

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Read more about the exhibition <a href="Read more about the exhibition “Building Expectation: Past and Present Visions of the Architectural Future” here: http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2011/08/future

“Donald Duck meets Mondrian” by Eduardo Paolozzi

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery

Eduardo Paolozzi, "Donald Duck Meets Mondrian" from the portfolio Moonstrips Empire News (1967), Color screen print. Gift of Dr Jack Solomon. (PR 1986.31)

Today we were viewing British and American prints from the collection with the students of Prof. Cathy Zerner’s class for an upcoming exhibition they are curating. Amongst the Jim Dines and Patrick Caulfields, we came across a discreet group of prints by Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005). Paolozzi is somewhat less well known than his pop contemporaries, perhaps due to his own disavowing of his pop influences, often preferring to discuss his connections and continuities with the Surrealists.

While popularly known for his distinctive, almost Cubist, public sculptures, Paolozzi’s heady, dense and electric screen prints reveal an impassioned engagement with color, pattern, and form and their transformation through the developing socio-cultural visual mechanics of the 20th century. Paolozzi’s complex image overlays and juxtapositions are often bound together by an almost weaved texture of proto-pixels deployed almost as a reckoning between British and American pop styles or a deresolution of the promises of 20th century modern cultural progress.

In the print pictured above “Donald Duck meets Mondrian” from his Moonstrips Empire News series (1967), we can see Paolozzi juxtaposing “high” art (a stereotypical Mondrian-style work in the bottom right) and Western popular culture (represented in Walt Disney’s character Donald Duck in the bottom left). Set underneath a “glossy magazine-style” image of a happy child playing with toys, this work perhaps questions mid-20th century expectations of cultural and childhood development within the clash of images competing for representation of increasingly globalized cultural forms. A provocative element of this work is that through the necessary use of shared color tones in the printing process, Paolozzi has offered something of a shared (yet dissonant) cultural space – where both Donald Duck and Mondrian exist in shared shades of yellow, blue, violet and red.

In the David Winton Bell Gallery’s permanent collection, we are fortunate to have a selection of Paolozzi’s screen prints from his Moonstrips Empire News (1967) portfolio (such as “Donald Duck Meets Mondrian” pictured above) as well as a few individual lithographs, all of which offer an insight into the vibrant visual tensions and influences Paolozzi negotiated in his work, making him a uniquely distinctive pop artist of the 20th century.

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Read a tribute to and interesting discussion of the then recently departed Paolozzi by writer, critic and curator Rick Poynor here: http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=3287

“The Beast with Two Horns Like a Lamb” by Albrecht Dürer

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery

Albrecht Dürer "The Beast with Two Horns Like a Lamb" from The Apocalypse (1498), Woodcut. (PR 0.334)

On one of my first days as the new curator of the David Winton Bell Gallery, it was a wonderful serendipity to be hanging a print from one of the earliest printed books “The Beast with Two Horns Like a Lamb” by Albrecht Dürer. As part of our fall lobby exhibition “Selections from the Permanent Collection,” the woodcut is is one of fifteen which comprised “The Apocalypse”, a book published in 1498, two years before the dawning of a new century. Ripe with anxieties of impending times to come, Dürer’s images convey a tense forboding in 15th and 16th century life as much as they probably induced it – they were some of the first widely circulated representations of the end of days.

This woodcut depicts Revelation 13:

(1) Then I saw a beast come up from the sea with ten horns and seven heads, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy… (11) And then I saw another beast coming out of the ground, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. (13) And he prompted great portents, even that fire pour down from the sky to the earth for all men to see. (14) And I looked, and beheld a white cloud, and sitting upon the cloud one who was like the Son of Man, wearing upon his head a crown of gold, and in his hands a sharp sickle. (17) And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he is also having a sharp sickle.

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Here is an introductory reading of the image of Dürer’s “The Beast with Two Horns Like a Lamb” by the Clark Art Institute. More information from their recent exhibition “The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer” can be found here: http://www.clarkart.edu/exhibitions/durer/content/exhibition.cfm