Motherboard

Emma Ferguson
Motherboard, 2007

Αλλοι τρόποι

με τέτοιους τρόπους κερδίζεται η αιωνιότητα
Παπατσώνης

Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Το αεράκι ν' αφήσεις να φυσήξει την κάφτρα
Της στιγμής, που κοιτάς και σε κοιτάζει η αράχνη
Και σύγκορμος ένστιχτο σημαντικός ενώπιον της αμφιβολίας
Δρέπεις από κάθε λογής κήπο ταχέως τέλεια φυτά
Που τα κρατεί ορθά η ανθοφορία

Αλλος τρόπος η θέα ο καταρράκτης το πηγαινέλα
Των φθινοπωρινών κυμάτων στα ύφαλα των διαβατών
Το πηγαινέλα επίσης του γεγονότος του θανάτου ή της γεν-
νήσεως
Που λειαίνεται σε κάθε ταλάντευση
Και κάποτε απαράλλαχτο με την πραγματικότητα πάνω του
καθρεφτίζει το καθετί:
Ενα ρολόι φαγωμένο από τους χτύπους του
Βράχια και μάτια ονειρόπλεχτα με αλμύρες και με ανάσες
Και δυσκολίες να εκφραστεί η επαφή και η ένωση
Που βαραίνει το μέτρημα του υπολοίπου ή περισσεύματος
της ζωής

Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Της σιγής ο απόηχος να σου καίει το άσπρο πλάσμα που το
μάζευες αιώνες
Να το ξαναμαζέψεις
Αλλος τρόπος είναι να κρύψεις στον αντικρινό σου
Ο,τι δια της πυράς και δια της τέφρας άστραψε
Σε σπηλιά και ουρανό.

Δημήτρης Παπαδίτσας

Armchairs with Lions

Empire period, circa 1805.
Material : mahogany and mahogany veneer ; painted wood imitating
antique green patinated bronze ; chased ormolu ; metal.

Source: www.galerieperrin.com

The Short Life of the Equal Woman

Gustav Klucis's poster 'Young People - To The Aeroplanes' (1934)
Courtesy David King


Lili Brik on the cover of poetry anthology 'About This', designed by Alexander Rodchenko (1923)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow


Liubov Popova's 'Production Clothing for Actor no.5' in Fernand Crommelynck's play 'The magnanimous Cuckold' (1921) Gouache, Indian ink and collage on paper
Private Collection, Moscow


Maria Bri-Bein's poster "Hail the equal woman of the USSR" (1939)
Courtesy Christina Kiaer


Maria Bri-Bein
Female Telegraph Operators 1933
Courtesy Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Christina Kiaer on Russian Female Artists

The great generation of women artists of the Russian avant-garde, including Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Aleksandra Ekster, Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, is by now relatively well known, as is its largely gender egalitarian, or at least gender neutral, abstract imagery. But we know much less about women artists of the 1930s under Stalin. Work from this decade is most often simply dismissed as “Socialist Realism” or “propaganda art”, yet many worked in modernist figurative styles, and saw themselves as every bit as revolutionary as the previous generation. Like their Constructivist forebears Stepanova and Popova, they continued to produce exhilarating images of emancipated Soviet women well into the 1930s, until the state ideology of woman reverted to a more traditional, feminine and maternal model of limited equality.


Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova in their studio (1922). Photograph attributed to Mikhail Kaufman
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archive, Moscow

Take, for example, Popova’s famous costume designs for Fernand Crommelynck’s avant-garde play The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). The actors all wore prozodezhda, or “production clothing”, in keeping with the Constructivist programme of 1921, which called for artists to abandon painting and enter instead into Soviet mass-media and mass-production as “artist-engineers” or “productivists”. Popova’s Production Clothing for Actor no. 5 (1921) shows a costume for a female actor: a plain blue dress in the style of workers’ overalls with a big black apron – all rectangles and straight lines, forms derived from her earlier Suprematist-style painting. This costume barely differed from those of the male actors. As Popova herself put it, she had “a fundamental disinclination to making any distinction between the men’s and women’s costumes; it just came down to changing the pants to a skirt”. Her bold, consciously androgynous design is as good an icon as any for the new Soviet woman emancipated by Bolshevism, shedding the trappings of bourgeois femininity and becoming a productive worker equal to men.



Varvara Stepanova's poster for the play 'Through Red and White Glasses' staged by the Academy of Social Education (1924)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archive, Moscow



We find a similarly androgynous, emancipated female costume in the agitational performance Through Red and White Glasses (1924), designed by Stepanova. On the lower left of her poster for this event, under the phrase “through red glasses” (ie, the world as seen by Bolsheviks), she drew three figures dressed in her prozodezhda costumes. The gender of the central, female figure is discernible only by the rounded line of her jaw and the slight fullness of her short hair. Their four anti-revolutionary white counterparts appear on the right side, dressed in upper-class clothes. Here the lone woman is strongly differentiated from the men, with round breasts, a tiny waist and wide hips. The female icon of those who see through red glasses is, again, a productive worker no longer confined by conventional signs of femininity. In 1939 another woman artist of the Russian revolution, albeit a far less famous one, also produced what was meant to be an iconic image of the equality of Soviet women: the poster “Hail the equal woman of the USSR”. Although Maria Bri-Bein had previously worked in a more angular, modernist style reminiscent of Popova and Stepanova, this poster depicts the woman in gently rounded forms, the belted pink sweater emphasising her bosom and hips. She demonstrates her equality by voting at the ballot box (in itself an arguable model of political action in the Soviet context), but otherwise – with her downcast head and bouquet of flowers – she represents a traditional model of demure and fecund femininity. She is closer in style to the anti-revolutionary “white” feminine form of Stepanova’s poster. How did this profound shift come about?


Varvara Stepanova's designs for the performance of 'An Evening of the Book' with the protagonists standing in front, photographed by Alexander Rodchenko (1924)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow


Models and furniture for Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's play 'The Death of Tarelkin', designed by Varvara Stepanova (1922)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow


In the early 1920s, along with the Bolshevik campaign for the emancipation of women under socialism, the Constructivist refusal of conventional notions of artistic genius – traditionally associated with masculinity – and its rejection of the hierarchy between fine and utilitarian arts – women were more often linked with the latter – facilitated the unusual, widespread participation of women artists in the young Soviet art world. Popova and Stepanova, as we have seen, worked in costume and theatre design, but also designed mass-produced textiles, everyday clothing and propaganda posters, as well as producing mass-disseminated graphic works such as book and journal covers and advertisements. In 1923 Popova created her only propaganda poster based specifically on the theme of the emancipation of women – for the Bolsheviks’ so-called “battle against prostitution”. The slogan “Brother Worker Protect Your Sister from Prostitution” is blocked into a symmetrical arrangement of dynamic Constructivist horizontals, verticals and diagonals, and superimposed over hand-drawn figures (unusual in a Constructivist work) of a large “brother” in the centre and his proletarian “sisters” in the upper right corner, working in a factory and looking out beseechingly at the viewer.


Liubov Popova
Cover design for A Portfolio of Six Prints 1917-1919
Museum of Modern Art, New York


The next generation of women artists of the early 1930s would build on the achievement of the Constructivists in poster design, albeit with two major differences. First, many of them worked in the medium not because of Constructivist ideals of erasing the hierarchy of fine art over utilitarian art, but because the increasingly conservative and centrally administrated Soviet art system made the prestigious field of oil painting less accessible to women, who were always last in line for scarce studio space and supplies. Secondly, they concentrated on “women’s” themes not only out of commitment to the subject, but because they were often the only ones assigned to them within a still largely sexist institutional structure, in which male artists were given the “universal” poster topics. Valentina Kulagina, who had success in the early 1930s, is a transitional figure between the avant-garde women artists of the 1920s and their figurative counterparts of the 1930s. She had studied under the Constructivists in the 1920s and was married to the Constructivist Gustav Klucis, and she worked in poster design out of a continuing Constructivist commitment to the mass-dissemination of art – but also because she realised that the system would not support her if she attempted to practise in the fine arts. Her poster “International working women’s day is the fighting day of the proletariat” (1931) combines the Constructivist photomontage technique used exclusively by Klucis in his posters, on the right, with a monumental drawn figure of a fearless woman whose face appears hewn out of stone, on the left. Photographs of Soviet women in military uniform driving a tractor, working in a factory and laughing together float above a photo of a sexualised “flapper” flanked by two policemen, evoking the decadent bourgeois femininity and sexual violence of the West. As Kulagina’s diaries show, Klucis criticised her for using hand-drawn images in her work, because it departed from the avant-garde orthodoxy against any kind of figuration that was not photographic. Yet many modernist-inspired female artists of the early 1930s experimented with novel forms of figuration, attempting to develop a new kind of modern and realist art to convey the socialist ideal of a strong, equal woman no longer subject to the inequities and objectification faced by those in the capitalist West.


Ekaterina Zernova
Collective Farm Workers Greeting the Tank 1937
Courtesy Lubov State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSIZO, Moscow

Kulagina’s 1932 photomontage poster “Female shock workers of the factories and state farms, enter into the ranks of the Bolshevik Party” demonstrates the ease with which she moved back and forth between photomontage and figurative drawing in her work. For her, there was no absolute line of difference; she chose the imagery that would best convey her assigned theme. Here she places a giant picture of a kerchiefed peasant woman with upraised hand, presumably exhorting other female workers and farmers to join her as a Party member, on top of photos of smoking factories, tractors plowing fields andwomen marching. She was responding to the tricky assignment of presenting a positive image of the female collective farmer at precisely the most brutal moment of the Soviet government’s forced collectivisation of peasants. Because peasant women were particularly resistant to collectivisation, which destroyed centuries-old arrangements of domestic and religious life, the Bolsheviks made them the focus of their propaganda campaigns.


Valentina Kulagina, “International Working Women’s Day is the day of judging of socialist competition,” 1930. Courtesy of a private collection.


Valentina Kulagina, Female shockworkers strengthen the shock brigades, master technology, and increase the ranks of proletarian specialists (Rabotnitsy-udarnitsy, krepite udarnye brigady, ovladevaite tekhnikoi, uvelichivaite kadry proletarskikh spetsialistov), 1931


Unusually for this kind of propaganda, Kulagina chose a photograph of a woman who was not attractive for her central image. We know that she wanted to stress the seriousness of new Soviet women and their accomplishments, as a counterweight to their objectification, which persisted in the USSRin spite of the rhetoric of equality. In a diary entry of 1934, she complains that when she asked Klucis why he had chosen to foreground a photograph of a particularly pretty woman pilot in his aviation poster “Young people to the airplanes” (1934), he replied that he wanted to show that the pilot had “retained her femininity” in spite of her training and qualification. Kulagina writes: “And I’m thinking – but is that the purpose of the poster?” Of course it was not supposed to be the purpose of the poster, according to the ideals of women’s emancipation of the 1920s, and as illustrated in Constructivist and other images of strong women not bound by the traditional visual language of femininity.

A number of women poster artists of the early 1930s clearly sided with Kulagina when it came to making images of women. The accomplished figurative painter Ekaterina Zernova, who had been a member of the avant-garde painting group OSt (Society of Easel Painters) in the later 1920s, was one of the very few women who would achieve success as a painter within the Soviet art system of the 1930s. Her 1931 poster “The participation of women in socialist construction” offers an iconic image of the woman as a worker, rather than an object of visual pleasure: her face is schematically rendered and of medium attractiveness, while her body is encased in a jumpsuit that obliterates its contours. She is superimposed over smaller drawn images of the collectivised facilities of everyday life, mentioned in the poster’s long slogan, that will support her participation in productive labour: day care centres, nursery schools, public dining rooms and public laundry facilities. Zernova’s assignment would have been to produce an image fitting the slogan, so it was her choice to focus on the androgynous, uniformed and purposeful worker, rather than on the examples of everyday life (byt). Byt was considered a feminine sphere, and was therefore a less prestigious topic most often relegated to women poster artists. Zernova usually managed to avoid this kind of typecasting; she produced many works on industrial and military themes, and was particularly known for her intensely focused paintings and drawings of tanks. Maria Bri-Bein was assigned almost exclusively women’s topics for her posters, but she similarly avoided the stereotypically feminine themes of everyday life, producing instead, in the early 1930s, a striking body of images of steely, uniformed women capably performing various challenging tasks. Her 1934 poster “Woman worker and woman collective farm worker, master the technology of the sanitary defense of the USSR! Strengthen sanitary aviation!” presents a dashing female pilot in black leather and goggles, consulting with an equally square-jawed colleague as they prepare for a long-distance medical flight. Behind them, a group of women collective farmers and workers (one easily identifiable by her jumpsuit and wrench, as in the Zernova poster) is being instructed on the intricacies of the plane’s technology by a uniformed woman with an arm badge. Not only Bri-Bein’s feminist subject matter (fantastical as it no doubt was), but also her schematic, flattened visual language, have strong affinities with Kulagina and Zernova – even though she was a member of AKhR, a more conservative artistic group that favoured traditional realism. Even in her paintings, such as Female Telegraph Operators (1933), we see some of the modernist tendencies of her posters – the geometric blocking of space and almost purist depiction of technological gadgetry, as well as the loving attention to buttons, collars and straps on uniforms and the motif of women working together intimately. In fact, the gorgeously over-the-top butchness of the women in the aviation poster make them ripe for reclamation today as lesbian icons, whether or not (and most likely not) that was part of Bri-Bein’s original intention.


Liubov Popova
Painterly Architectonic 1918
Courtesy Nizhni Novgorod State Art Museum



The era of strong, skilled and unfeminine women in Soviet imagery began to draw to a close, however, in the mid-1930s. Stalin declared in 1935 that socialism had been achieved, and Soviet rhetoric shifted from the frenzied concentration on building up industrial production – including the participation of women in that process – to a new emphasis on an everyday life of cultured socialist consumption (kul’turnost), in which women would return to a more traditionally feminine role and appearance. They would be good mothers and wives, and they would be attractive. As the official Soviet women’s magazine Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker) put it in a 1937 article: “The Soviet woman… must learn to preserve her feminine countenance and to look after herself… she should pay attention to her appearance.” That same year, Zernova painted her large canvas Collective Farm Workers Greeting the Tank, in which the women – the younger one in a tight, fashionable skirt and sporting a big barrette in her hair – hold out bouquets of flowers to the approaching vehicle, while the men raise their hands in authoritative waves, much like the woman worker in her earlier poster. Even her favourite motif of the tank is all but obscured by the relentlessly fecund flowering trees and the Impressionist brushstrokes. And I have already mentioned Bri-Bein’s 1939 poster “Long live the equal woman of the USSR”, in which the solitary woman passively casting her vote for the Party line, again carrying a bouquet of flowers, replaces Bri-Bein’s earlier images of female camaraderie in skilled labour. The sad contrast between the docile womanliness of this figure and the bold, angular women of the aviation poster, bristling with authority in their caps and goggles and straps and buttons, signals the definitive demise of the artistic ideals and new iconic images of the women artists of the Russian revolution.

Text by Christina Kiaer
Source: Tate etc. magazine

A Dome

Vladimir Wassilievich Sterligov
A Dome. 1960.
Collage on paper, 65.9x51.2 cm

Poetry Marathon

The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is an ambitious two-day poetry event taking place in London during Frieze Art Fair week and featuring unique performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars and musicians.

An international group of major figures will be brought together to perform in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the acclaimed Japanese practice SANAA. The event will include performances of new work, collaborations, discussions and experiments.

There is a long and vivid history of exchange between artists and poets. Guillaume Apollinaire made a literary connection to Cubism with his great work of ‘visual poetry’ Calligrammes: Poems of War and Peace 1913-1916. In the same period, Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto (1916), a movement in which the poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara was also closely involved. A decade later, in 1924, André Breton, the proponent of ‘automatic writing’, published La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).

In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was an art movement with strong creative connections with writing and poetry of the time, from the work of poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to artist Robert Motherwell’s influential essays on the New York School. Later, in the 1960s, the international artistic network Fluxus formed innumerable close links between visual art and the written word.

The Poetry Marathon is the fourth in the series of Marathons staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion each year. The Marathon series was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006. The first in the series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, and the Manifesto Marathon in 2008.

The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects. It is held in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission was conceived by Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery Director and Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes in 2000.

Poetry Marathon Programme

Saturday 17 October 2009
12.30 – 9.00 pm

Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Tim Griffin
Tracey Emin
Tacita Dean
Agnès Varda
Kenneth Goldsmith
Holly Pester
Eleanor Bron
Enrique Juncosa/Boulevard Magenta
Michael Glover/The Bow Wow Shop
August Kleinzahler
Sean Landers
Tom McCarthy & Henry Blofeld
John Giorno
Mladen Stilinović
Édouard Glissant*
Jimmie Durham
James Fenton
Nick Laird
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Maria Mirabal
Dominic Eichler
Barry Schwabsky & Sean Bonney
Eileen Myles
Olivier Garbay & Cerith Wyn Evans
Richard Hell
Keren Cytter & Andrew Kerton
Kenneth G. Bostock, Cibelle &
Pablo León de la Barra
Don Paterson
Charlie Dark
Joan Jonas*
Nancy Spero*
Sara MacKillop

Sunday 18 October 2009
12:00 – 8:00 pm

Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Karl Holmqvist
Olivia Plender
Etel Adnan*
Eugen Gomringer*
Susan Hiller & Sue Hubbard
Michael Horovitz
Caroline Bergvall
Gerhard Rühm & Monika Lichtenfeld
Franz West* read by Gerhard Rühm
Liliane Lijn
Alasdair Gray
Jacques Roubaud
Stuart Brisley
Gilbert & George
David Robilliard read by The Robilliards (Leo Burley & Rosemary Turner)
Daljit Nagra
Nathan Cash Davidson
Jonas Mekas* & Edward Eke
Vito Acconci
Geoffrey Hill
Brian Eno & Karl Hyde
Jeremy Reed/Itchy Ear/The Ginger Light
Saul Williams
Philippe Parreno*
Karl Holmqvist
Grace Jones* & Mark van Eyck

Going There

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

Jack Gilbert

Remota Hotel

Architects: German del Sol
Location: Provincia de Última Esperanza, Magallanes, Patagonia, Chile
2004 - 2005

Source : www.archdaily.com

Fences, Neighbors, Wars, Decadence

The winner of this year’s DESTE Prize is Eirene Efstathiou. The other five shortlisted artists for the DESTE Prize 2009 were Athanasios Argianas, Haris Epaminonda, Rallou Panagiotou, Yorgos Sapountzis and Vangelis Vlachos . They show their work in an exhibition that is presented this year in the spaces of the Museum of Cycladic Art and is scheduled to run from 14th March until 30th September 2009.


Eirene Efstathiou
Fences, Neighbors, Wars, Decadence, 2007
acrylic on 4 panels


Eirene Efstathiou
Five Walls from the 80's, 2008
acrylic on 5 panels


www.deste.gr
www.cycladic.gr

Li-Sun Exotic Mushrooms

Pink oyster mushrooms cropping on racks inside the tunnel.
Dr. Arrold came up with the simple but clever idea of growing mushrooms in black bin bags with holes cut in them. Previously, mushrooms were typically grown inside clear plastic bags. The equal exposure to light meant that the mushrooms fruited all over, which made it harder to harvest without missing some

Source: bldgblog.blogspot.com

Bocca della verita

Jules Blanchard, Bocca della verita (1871)
Paris, Jardin du Luxembourg.

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits
in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How
pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she
scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out
in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my
country."

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!"
But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib.
"Thunder
And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall
Popeye's apartment
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or
scratched."

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as
you know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened,
duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the
scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and
thunder."
She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country."
"But you can't do that--he hasn't even finished his spinach,"
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant
Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from
spinach
Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon
over"--she scratched
One dug pensively--"but Wimpy is such a country
Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

John Ashbery

Arno Breker Holding a Picture of Joseph Beuys

Photo: Gottfried Helnwein
Helnwein meets Arno Breker at his Studio in Düsseldorf
10. May 1988

Solitude

Martin Eder, Solitude, 2003

Zwölf

Eins Zwei Drei Vier Funf
Funf Vier Drei Zwei Eins
Zwei Drei Vier Funf Sechs
Sechs Funf Vier Drei Zwei
Sieben Sieben Sieben Sieben Sieben
Acht Eins
Neun Eins
Zehn Eins
Elf Eins
Zehn Neun Acht Sieben Sechs
Funf Vier Drei Zwei Eins

Kurt Schwitters

Hotel

Paul Carter Hotel, 2009 (work in progress)

In 2008, Robin Klassnik invited Paul Carter to transport his workspace to the gallery in an attempt to recreate the conditions of the studio in flux. In June 2009 the artist moved in and has been working in residence towards his first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery.

Hotel is a sculptural installation that disrupts the architectural features of the gallery, incorporating elements that have been transplanted from the artist’s studio or reclaimed from other sites. Found materials – including a derelict goods lift and a series of day beds that look like renaissance icons – are re-crafted to explore notions of value and function. Resembling a life-size architect’s model, the installation includes a series of compartments and fixtures that echo the commercial or private buildings from which the materials have been salvaged, suggesting an expanded ‘elsewhere’ beyond the gallery walls.

Hotel is a transitory place: a temporary home or live-work space that sets up a new relationship between the individual and the objects and architectures that surround him. Transferring material elements and pre-existing works from the studio and elsewhere becomes an extension of the acts of editing, layering and containment that take place in the original sites. Reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, where sculptural and architectural interventions spill over from one place to another, Hotel extends the artist’s practice beyond the notionally private space of the home or studio.

Paul Carter, "Hotel" at Matts gallery
9 September–1 November 2009

The Fortune Telling Doll

In the spring of the year of Horeki (1751) many officers and craftsman were dispatched from Edo (present day Tokyo) to build a large bridge over the Yahagi River in Aichi.
One day a head craftsman was standing at the edge of the river when he noticed what seemed to be a child's toy boat floating by with a doll in it. The boat was only a wooden board, but when he picked up the doll he saw it was too beautifully made to be a child's simple toy. He liked the pretty doll and took it back to the inn where was staying and put it in his room.
That night, in his sleep, he heard a voice in the dark.
"Today such- and- such a thing has happened. Tomorrow such -and- such things will happen to so- and- so. So-and-so will be sick tomorrow. So-and-so will travel to such-and-such a place."
When he woke up the next morning, he thought it had all been a strange dream, but then all the things the voice had spoken occurred to those people just as it had predicted. He thought this was very interesting. "Maybe this was created as a tool by a shaman for sorcery." He thought, as he held the beautiful doll in his hands and looked at it with awe.
The next night, as he lay in bed he heard the voice again. Then the next night he heard it again, speaking and speaking in the dark foretelling the future. In the beginning he loved it and felt he had found a rare treasure, but soon the voice seemed so loud he couldn't sleep and it began to bother him. He wanted to throw the doll away, but when he thought of how much care the previous owner had taken to float it away, he decided he had better be very careful. He took it to the master of the inn and showed it to him. The innkeeper was astonished at the sight of it and backed away fearfully. "This is a dangerous thing you have," he said "I have heard in Shizuoka of shamans who practice this kind of sorcery. That's why the doll came to you. This doll likes you now. It will bring misfortune to you if you try to throw it away now that you have picked it up."
The craftsman became very afraid of the doll now, and wondered what he should do with it. An old man who lived near the inn heard of the doll and told him "I've heard that there is only one correct way to dispose of this kind of doll. You must do as the previous owner did, and put it respectfully on a wooden board. Then place it in a stream as a child playing with a toy boat. This is a doll with a doll's heart, and you must play with it like a little child playing with a toy doll and comfort the doll's heart. Then you must turn your back slowly on the doll and let it go on the stream, pretend to be distracted. Go back slowly, without looking back to see the doll off. In this way you can accidentally 'lose' the poor doll in the stream the way a little child might. If you do this the magic doll will believe it has been lost by accident. It will forgive you and not bring misfortune to you."
The man was happy to hear this. He took it to the stream, and placed the doll on a wooden board and played with it just like a little boy. Then he let the boat go and returned to his inn. The doll floated forlornly away, and he felt relieved to know it go from his life.

Mr President Said

“Mr President Said : I can’t do well when I think you’re gonna leave me, but I know I try..Are you gonna leave me now, can’t you be believing now?”
Wood, plywood, acrylic, felt, iron
2009