Elegy and Dissertation

I'd like to shrink nowadays
It's better if one is proactive with
event that happen to him.
The desire for death is a synonym for a willing compromise.
Reducing size is not that bad at all;
one can fit in a baby kangaroo pouch, in a sportbag,
in an urn.
shrinking creates less difficulties for a person.
Though he must gravitate. But chalk that up to
Mr. Newton's account.

Above all and after all
I would rather shrink into myself.
(I throng inside me. I contract.)
No community, no party, no corporation, no caste.
Jst to present myself: what I am, that.
Morevoer: becoming. Be
any side of the dice.
Not a turn, but a twirl.
Be it! Whatever will ber, will be. Prevailing

Gerade-so-Seinemet

I comprehend it as my own subevent.

I'd like to walk
on the "all bodies street" (Gyorgy Petri Boulevard),
beforehand I'd make
a good juicy beefstew,
just to eat a few more gristles and cartilages,
but first buy the ingredients for it
(calf, and maybe heartroot, oxtail)
and then take a walk in this
(perhaps the last)
spring with you, with you, with you
(Da capo el fine).

Gyorgy Petri 

Transl. by Michael Castro and Gabor G. Gyukics

 

Slapstick and sculpture. Thoughts about the comic syntax of objects

When we look for the word “slapstick” on search engines, we find the following clarification: that it refers to the knockabout farces of American cinema, in which the actors behave foolishly and blunder all the time. Yet there is an element lacking in this general definition, an element that determines the way in which I conceive the presence of slapstick in my own work. The description based on the theatrical tradition of clowns and mummers may seem satisfactory, but gags, false steps and falls are produced by an unexpected “meeting” with objects. My sculptures explore the comic and awkward condition of the object as projection of an anthropocentric narrative with allegories of everydayness and mythological narratives; therefore, it is quite understandable why I find so moving the American burlesque and all its laughter-producing intersections with dominant objects.

 

“Slapstick” corresponds literally to this test, since it is a device composed of two thin wooden boards that produce the sound of “slap”. Slapstick as an object is used in Commedia dell’arte, when one comedian slaps the other. Here, we cling to the beneficial role of slapstick, a.k.a. batacchio in its original Italian version, in producing with very little force a powerful noise, just like the forceful blow a comic actor would receive without feeling pain. A slapstick gesture-as-narrative might include the notion of a clumsy log, a material that resists and reacts against any attempt at manipulating it, and remains pure in its primitiveness, as in the story of Pinocchio.

 

In that sense, in the terms of a gag gesture, the awkward relation of action-reaction shared by the clumsy log and the rigid wood with the spectator is completed by Barnet Newman’s seemingly dismissive statement, that “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting”. Through this enlarged unity of “Slapstick Acts”, I mean a bare and restless form which participates in the comic plot of the object and into which it is always possible to bump. In this way, bumping becomes the occasion to wonder about the nature of sculpture as an obstacle, as part of an ontology that permits the subject to think. For all that, it would not be impossible to infuse to sculpture the charge of the ephemerous and of momentary pleasure. I notice a constant need for reflectiveness, and at the same time I make a point of annulling it. In the same way, the dominant narrative that preoccupies me is the gap produced by daydreaming and its frustration by reality. 

 

My sculptures also fuel a series of paintings in which there is an evident gestural dimension that starts with the erection of the line and moves downward, displaying the instability and the fragility of writing. In my three-dimensional constructions too, there is a fragile balance with the sense of an imminent breakdown of the materials. 

 

Quite often I notice the transcription of the process of an incomplete identity, of a clumsy construction, and in any case whatever perfection there is tends to be combined with an underlined incongruent point in the whole synthesis. It may be an irregular shape, a bump, symbolically equivalent to the idea of an incomplete sphere, as suggested by the etymology of “Clown”, clot + clod. I conceive Slapstick as a study on the moral consequences of error and clumsiness, a study that incorporates a tradition of non-conventional spirituality with the natural, material, and physical breakdown of the religious subject. This condition may justify why slapstick is laid bare and does not disguise itself. 

 

Kostis Velonis

To Do Without So Much Mythology

The Dream Machine, 2021

Acrylic, oil, pastel and pencil on canvas

100 x 100 cm

 

 

Picture a live comedy show. A routine, as they call it. Picture it starting with a widely recognisable pre-show tune. Something hummable. Somet-hing you’ve definitely heard before even though you might not recall the name of the singer. Then: a woman or a man appears on stage. The music swiftly changes for a much more upbeat song, almost danceable. The wo-man or the man walks the whole stage, emphatically waving and hailing while the audience is clapping hysterically. She or he reaches a mic on a mic stand. Hello everyone... thank you for coming. Or better: Hello Vien-na! Or again: Vienna, how you doing? Travelling through the mic, hers or his voice is blasting through the whole auditorium, the rejoicing audien-ce greeting back with all they have. And that’s how it starts. That’s how it should start. Every time. Always. Because a comedy show is nothing but a ritual. All based on an unspoken contract, a pre-rational agreement between a speaker and a listener. The whole point being: to surprise, fa-scinate, scare, excite, emotionally transport or simply amuse, we need a shared grammar. We need a ceremony of sorts. A liturgical harmony. Hello everyone and thank you for coming. Clap. Hello Vienna! Clap. Only at this point the contract is signed and we are all in it together. The woman or the man as well as the audience. Us. All accomplices. And yes, I agree, it would be better to do without so much mythology, but that’s not how things work. You and I both know that’s not how it works. So what has all this to do with art? I have no idea... but I bet a lot. Comedy as a perfect case study. Comedy as a product of human imagination that follows a different path than that of conscious, logical thinking. Because like myth, also comedy is a way to tell stories and, at the same time, a lens to read oneself and the reality as a whole... to give or take away meanings, anxieties, joys or sorrows. It is an organisational tool. So why not look at the comic (and its counterpart, the tragic) as another category of that mythical thinking that dominated human behaviour for centuries. 

Myth as a knowledge that is already sovereign in itself, that does not need or even tolerate any further developments. Myth as a construction made up of variations, alteration of the same.
Above all, myth as a “thinking in images”, a parallel form of knowledge. With the arrival of modernity and scientific thinking, the myth had to mig- rate into the peripheries of storytelling... into the curious, the weird, even the morbid. And nowadays a potential residue of mythical thinking might be found in that suspension of logic underlining our relationship to the comic and the tragic... two fields where feelings, habits and archetypes dominate as moulding forces. 

Again: what has all this to do with art? A lot. That’s why here you’ve got two shows. Two exhibitions running parallel to each other. One visible (with works by 5 artists: Beth Collar, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Sophie Jung, Lukas Thaler, Kostis Velonis), the other invisible (with spoken pieces by writers and artists Bob Kil, Paul Becker, Holly Pester, Luis Felipe Fabre, Sarah Tripp). The first show is silent, the second spoken. One exhibition becomes the shadow of the other, and yet they are both completely in- terchangeable. Like the two sidesof the same coin, like comedy and tra- gedy existing together, only together. Silent objects and bodiless words, both treating the idea of the comic as a mythological category of thinking, something that is all praxis, pre-reasoning, no real separation between concept and object. And yet everything here exists only thanks to an ag- reement between the two parts, between what is left there to be seen and who sees it. 

I have no real answer. I don’t exactly know what all this has to do with art. And I guess that’s the show. 

 

Text by Francesco Pedraglio 

 

 

Artists: Beth Collar, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Sophie Jung, Lukas Thaler, Kostis Velonis and spoken works by Bob Kil, Paul Becker, Holly Pester, Luis Felipe Fabre, Sarah Tripp

 

Curator : Francesco Pedraglio

 

Galerie Martin Janda 

https://www.martinjanda.at/de/ausstellungen/2021/9/216/curated-by-francesco-pedraglio-to-do-without-so-much-mythology/

 

Where This Essay is Going is Anyone's Guess.

If a woman gets nervous, 
she'll eat or go shopping. 
A man will attack a country– 
It's a whole other way of thinking

 

Elayne Boosler, 
quoted in In Stitches 1991

Fainting Perimeters: Carnival comedy is 
inextricably linked with tragedy.

Satin-masked Michael Jackson dangled his son over a balcony in Berlin's Hotel Adlon in a beautifully archaic, near-mythic moment in 2002 to some outraged people, others in hysterics, a few mildly amused, and several who got back to their laundry —an artwork so convolutedly funny and menacing, it should've been bought by MoMa years ago. Further dangled over the railing that day—aside from intelligibility— was the shapeshifting nature of carnival comedy, temporary humor that escapes consequences, creates consequences, a vitiligo pendulum that blurs and disorients our psychological orientation: borderline- splitting, a heroic dimension, the liberating deliverance of Otherness, homeopathic doses of glitter- baroque enlightenment. Carnival comedy and its philosophical tenets are inextricably linked with tragedy: it gives us an occasion, a license to look and act differently, to be out of control, zany, to be frightened or frightening. It rejects and embraces tragedy simultaneously. Comedy that is always becoming, 

The concepts of carnival—masks, floats, freaks, inversion, otherness— form a shell to inspect blurred lines: tragedy becoming comedy, comedy becoming tragedy, a dismantling of hierarchies—gloomy-gay imaginings of offhand comedic maelstroms and ultraviolet mental alibis. Carnival is a short-lived parody that lives in constant relation to tragedy: a very effective political tool. Singular narratives are interrupted, systems of exchange are fluid, circulation is privileged over stasis: a lyrical comedic libido and the aphrodisiac that comes with a healthy disdain for political correctness. Satire is a way of dismantling the house, without having to go to jail for it.

Caramel Dionysia: 
Tragedy becomes comedy.

Dionysia Carnival (5th Century Greece) originated as six days of madness, humor, freaks, masks, distortion, a petri-dish thematic that floodlights human behavior. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White describe funfairs as a loose amalgam of procession, feasting, competition, games, and spectacle, through which all our ideas of freaky, abhorrence, shell-colored sanguinity and comedy are purged or teased out. ¹ Which is to say, what is considered tragic, unthinkable, perverse is inverted— albeit momentarily. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Russian Eeyore theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s Ferris-wheel theories of carnivalesque pirouette alongside his theory of the shifting nature of language, which he called dialogical.² Left, perhaps, with a bad taste in his mouth after the Stalin purges suppressed his work, Bakhtin's dialogical seemed hellbent on dismantling a singular, authoritative interpretation of ideas. Indigenous to a Bakhtinian carnivalesque is pervasive, debatable laughter and its intrinsic democratic nature. On Eeyore's carousel, disparate elements mix in wild abandon, confound class, hierarchies, social positions, propriety— a 'festive critique,' a vague nebulous, reconfiguring the world through laughter. Abject categories of class are abolished, status obliterated: carnival liberates through rejection. She turns what’s shameful into a comedic coup. Also flagging the blurred lines of the funfair, Robert Stam notes: In carnival, all that is marginalized and excluded-the mad, the scandalous, the aleatory-takes over the center in a liberating explosion of otherness. The principle of material body-hunger, thirst, defecation, copulation-becomes a positively corrosive force, and festive laughter enjoys symbolic victory over death, over all that is held sacred, over all that oppresses and restricts.³ 

Here we are together, building on a new wing for the mistress. The effect of carnivalesque is no less than a revolution.

Coney Island Baby: 
Tragedy or comedy.

In the hands of Lady Carnival, appetites for fluctuant comedy are whetted, a yearning to cross-dress ways of acceptability, to provide a questionable, inexpensive tasting menu for political incorrectness, to laugh at others as a way of laughing at ourselves— or perhaps the inverse. Ourselves show up in all sorts of ways. A spontaneous trip to Coney Island or Sydney's Mardi Gras or the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade continues the ooze of narcoleptic desuetude in comedic theatricality, placing masks and freaks and drag queens and clowns on homemade floats–but not a pedestal. Blow-up sex dolls resembling politicians being fucked up the ass float on clouds, fairies eat rosé fairy floss, quotes we’re not sure are real or speculative fiction spelled out in pink-azure crêpe-paper, a quadrupled heteroglossia: I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong-un. (Donald Trump, 2019). Did he really say that? (The answer is usually yes). 

The carnival float is a mobile and hybrid creature, disproportionate, exorbitant, outgrowing all limits, obscenely de-centered and off-balance, a figural and symbolic resource for parodic exaggeration and inversion.⁴ We laugh at the unfuckable Elephant Man, jaundiced Frankenstein, hyperpigmented Michael, the congenital disfigurements of Phantom of the Opera: conditions considered tragic outside of carnival. We’re unrepentant. It's Lady Carnival who purchases a papier-mâché music box, replaces the ballerina with a horny, geriatric pregnant woman, or fully grown adults on the helter-skelter in the last vestiges of dignity. Nothing is beneath her. 

Freud's really bullshit ideas about hysterical women (Studies of Hysteria 1895)⁵ are, unfortunately, a worthy resemblance of carnival comedy-madness. Hysterical infusions of eating inversion, dirt, mess, bouffons, poor impulse control, certainly repressed and sublimated desires and terrors erupted into the extreme bodily attenuations and pantomimed gestures of the hysterical body, whose rigidly stylized postures referred to the impulses, pleasures, and excesses it was not free to indulge in.⁶ Comedy that transcends what is appropriate, transforms shock and injury into sitcom: a symbolic confetti-obfuscation of humor. And we love it; we just don't want anyone to know we do.

Speak No More: 
Comedy becomes tragedy.

A group of thespians continues the chaotic theatrical excess in a site-specific punchdrunk rendition of Macbeth in a five-story abandoned warehouse in downtown Chelsea. The Mckittrick Hotel transforms the play into a speakeasy film-noir where audience members roam the ghostly corridors wearing white Phantom of the Opera masks. Behind the mask, silence is demanded at all times. There must be, it seems to me, a psychological drive to create comedic worlds which serves to break up orientations, to weaken and frustrate the tyrannous drive to order, to prepare the individual to observe what the orientation tells him is irrelevant, but what may very well be relevant.⁷ A show deemed ‘participatory,’ so long as you don’t speak, but I’m not sure that’s relevant? Whatever, it’s a wager people are willing to take. 

The downstairs bodega hosts infinite pre-curtain, shitty first dates (I would know) before diving into the enlightenment of the sideshow in comical white guise— concealment, nuit blanche cover-up, a psychedelic camouflage. Nervous laughter is unavoidable. A fussy Rococo sonnet of political ambition's psychological effects on those who seek power for its own sake, starring a nervous, silenced, suicidal heroine— the usual markings of misogynistic attitudes. Tragic blood-on-her-hands Lady Macbeth gags the audience in ironic projection: it’s all very Fassbinder. Comedy that obscures tragedy and disorients just enough for us to forget the story is, in actuality, horribly prejudiced—an irony with consequences, without consequences. Our masks reveal a scarlet air of inattention, an inadequate (fortunately) knowledge of Shakespeare, a fact we’d never admit but probably couldn’t anyway behind helium-esque hyperventilation. Lady Macbeth has the last laugh—she who laughs lasts, I guess. 

But at least we get laid.

Four Seasons Hotel: 
Tragic metamorphosis;

Meme generators met their match on the 7th of November 2020 in a tacky asphalt car park in northeast Philadelphia. Mistaking it for Four Seasons 5-star hotel, the Trump administration booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping for their re-election campaign press conference. A hilarious happenstance between Donald Trump and Associated Press, triangulated by the blue-neon sign of an overworked sex shop and a very competitive crematorium: the odds of a resurrection were most definitely in the crematorium's favor. It smacks of jealousy. Trump and Giuliani's sweaty parking-lot electoral race to the end is history's undisputed winner for comedy, even before absentee counts. Donald’s chemistry with Kim Jung-un, fake tan, and the people of ‘Nambia’cresendoed in an uproarious (high art) prosthetic-aesthetic, built on the back of what is tragic. Laughing is a very serious thing. Healthy defense mechanisms and admissions not being Trump’s strong suit, he responded just relax; it was intentional. 

You relax; you’re the dead guy. (Whoopi Goldberg, Ghost) 

A tar garden of death-drive flowers, meme-busters, carcinogenic hand sanitizer, landscaping a springtime space where people misbehaving has been raised to a high art form— a fiasco sans mask. 

Beyond bourgeois hysteria, satirical regicides, and rubber vampire teeth, carnival comedy rejects and co- exists with tragedy. In the very least, it’s a break from the daily grind. The masks of Dionysus, of New York’s Speak No More, of Coney Island clowns are temporal spaces, ephemeral role reversals unrecognizable today. Carnival pours onto the floor yet another configuration, no longer relegated to six- day festivals or Thanksgiving long weekend. Her out-of-bounds attributes, unending metamorphosis, and slippery aesthetic invert and congeals in a carnival of sinister profusion: quotidian Covid. Again, the pendulum swings, carnival splinters and mutates before our very eyes, the temporary becomes perpetual perversion: our FFP masks of milky ubiquity, a symbolic reminder of the shape-shifting nature of carnival comedy. Lines are vague, reversed, inert, unresolved; a rainbow archway prolonged. Comedy and tragedy arm-in-arm. 

Lady Carnival is the prodigal son who returned and outstayed his welcome. 

Where this comedy is going is anyone's guess. 

LOL

 

 

Essay by Estelle Hoy

1 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1896), 178, 189.

2 David H. Richter, The Critical Tradition, ed. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), 725.

3 Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 86.

4 Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 9.

5 Sigmund Freud, Studies of Hysteria (London: Hogarth Press edition, 1955).

6 See Stallybrass and White, Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque, in idem, Transgression, 171-90.

7 Marcia Tucker, Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos (1965), in idem, Out Of Bounds (New York: Getty Publications, 2019), 85.

 

 

https://curatedby.at/essay

 

 

The Indiscipline of Sculpture

Venus Freethenipple, 2017. Papier Mache and polystyrene, 176 x 116 x 100 cm.

 

 This is the first solo exhibition held in a Brazilian museum dedicated to the work of Erika Verzutti (São Paulo, 1971). Verzutti is a key artist for understanding the practice of sculpture today, in Brazil and internationally. Her thought-provoking forms explore new possibilities for the medium, vis-à-vis the origins and materiality of sculpture, as well as its formal intelligence.

Using a variety of materials, including bronze, concrete, stone and papier-mâché, Verzutti’s works are sensual and tactile, coarse and refined. At the turn of the century, the artist began to produce sculptures in series, grouped into distinct families of “swans,” “Tarsilas,” “jackfruits” and “cemeteries,” among others. The exhibition presents examples of works from all these families, suggesting multiple connections and dialogues between them. The artist’s most recent production is also included: “wall reliefs,” works that blend painting and sculpture and reference the history of art as well as everyday life in a novel way.

Verzutti’s references include books on art and social history, elements of flora and fauna, images in circulation in social networks and the media, evoking animals and plants, landscapes and minerals, everyday objects and art itself—by artists such as Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), René Magritte (1898–1967), Piero Manzoni (1933–1966), and many others. With their unusual character, the sculptures lend themselves to the unpredictable, at times with an element of humor, refusing to accept established definitions or traditions—hence the subtitle for this exhibition: The Indiscipline of Sculpture.

The exhibition is divided into seven sections, based on concepts from philosophy, psychoanalysis, popular culture and art history that relate in a poetic and critical manner to the artist’s oeuvre. The sections connect the works in multiple ways, according to their shapes, materials, themes and chronologies: “Becoming-Animal,” “Tropical Pathway,” “World Metaphor,” “Totemize the Taboo,” “Wild Modernism,” “Under Tarsila’s Sun (and Other Stories),” and “Strangely Familiar.”

Erika Verzutti: The Indiscipline of Sculpture is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, and André Mesquita, curator, MASP. It includes works spanning from 2003 to 2021, including a new sculpture created especially for the occasion. The exhibition is part of the biennium of programming for 2021–22 dedicated to Brazilian Histories at MASP, and in this first year dedicated exclusively to female artists.

 

 

Erika Verzutti 
The Indiscipline of Sculpture
July 2–October 31, 2021 

MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand 

https://masp.org.br

 

Why Brownlee left

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.

Paul Muldoon

Normal Exceptions : Insite : Speech Acts

Speech Acts is a play based on a script crafted from fragments of artists projects, conversations, writings, and interviews commissioned over the past thirty years through INSITE, an organization founded in 1992 in the Tijuana/San Diego border region dedicated to art practices in the public sphere. The script, by Andrea Torreblanca, is a montage of texts published in the first five issues of the INSITE Journal: “Performing Resilience”, “Social Beings”, “Vital Forms”, “After History”, and “Speech Acts”. 

Speech Acts is a play in two senses of the term: first as a theatrical performance based on language; and second, as a playground—primarily inspired by INSITE artists projects—in which actors/dancers will perform daily to enact a form of public space on a stage designed by the architectural studio PRODUCTORA. Each excerpt has been selected to reveal the intersection (and tension) of political, social, and cultural contexts to which artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners have responded through INSITE for three decades. Speech Acts begins with a question by theorist and geographer David Harvey: “What does it mean to be human right now?” The premise of the performance is the notion that over time words become simultaneously powerful and fragile—and that even when written or spoken for another time and context, they can be asserted as propositions to motivate action in the present and the future. 

Founded in 1992, INSITE is a binational initiative committed to commissioning artworks in the public domain through collaborations among artists, cultural agents, institutions, and communities. Since 2018, INSITE has produced multiple projects based on material found in the INSITE Archive, including the INSITE Journal, a triannual publication of commissioned texts focused on the intersection of art and the public sphere. INSITE is currently working on a new curatorial platform, Commonplaces, that is unfolding simultaneously in South Africa, Peru, and Baja California (MX)/Southern California (US). 

Perfomance hours:
Tuesday: 3:30 and 4:20PM
Wednesday: 1:30 and 3:30PM
Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 12:30, 1:30, 3:30 and 4:30PM
Duration: 20 minutes 

Script: Andrea Torreblanca
Stage design: PRODUCTORA
Performed by: Proyecto Amplio Espectro
Choreography: Arturo Lugo
Performers : Joshua Sánchez, Arturo Lugo, Irasema Sánchez, Carla Segovia and Diego Vega 

5 Jul-15 Aug.2021

https://www.fundacionjumex.org/en/exposiciones/202-excepciones-normales-insite-speech-acts

Castalian Fountain

Η Κασταλία πηγή. Δελφοί, 1903. 
Castalian Fountain, where Pilgrims bathed before consulting the Oracle 

#ΚασταλιαΠηγη #Delphi #Δελφοι#underwoodbrothers #oracle #fountain

Monte Verità

Harald Szeemann, Monte Verità — installation view at Kunsthaus Zurich, 1978

 

 

 

 

 

Monte Verità: "The place where our minds can reach up to the heavens..."
Harald Szeemann , April 1985

 

In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, the Ticino, republic and canton since 1803, became a gateway to the south and favourite destination of a group of unconventional loners who found in the region, with its southern atmosphere, fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of the utopia they were unable to cultivate in the north. The Ticino came to represent the antithesis of the urbanised, industrialized north, a sanctuary for all kinds if idealist. From 1900 onwards Mount Monescia above Ascona became a pole of attraction for those seeking an ‘'alternative'' life. These reformers who sought a third way between the capitalist and communist blocks, eventually found a home in the region of the north Italian lakes.

The founders came from all directions : Henry Oedenkoven from Antwerp, the pianist Ida Hofmann from Montenegro, the artist Gusto and the ex-officer Karl Gräser from Transylvania. United by a common ideal they settled on the ‘'Mount of Truth'' as they renamed Monte Monescia.
Draped in loose flowing garments and with long hair they worked in the gardens and fields, built spartan timber cabins and found relaxation in dancing and naked bathing, exposing their bodies to light, air, sun and water. Their diet excluded all animal foods and was based entirely on plants, vegetables and fruit. They workshipped nature, preaching its purity and interpreting it symbolically as the ultimate work of art: ‘'Parsifal's meadow'', ‘'The rock of Valkyrie'' and the ‘'Harrassprung'' were symbolic names which with time were adopted even by the local population of Ascona who had initially regarded the community with suspicion.

Their social organisation based on the co-operative system and through which they strove to achieve the emancipation of women, self-criticism, new ways of cultivating mind and spirit and the unity of body and soul, can at the best be described as a Christian-communist community. The intensity of the single ideals fused in this community was such that word of it soon spread across the whole of Europe and overseas, whilst gradually over the years the community itself became a sanatorium frequented by theosophists, reformers, anarchists, communists, socialdemocrats, psyco-analysts, followed by literary personalities, writers, poets, artists and finally emigrants of both world wars: Raphael Friedeberg, Prince Peter Kropotkin, Erich Mühsam who declared Ascona ‘'the Republic of the Homeless'', Otto Gross who planned a ‘'School for the liberation of humanity'', August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Otto Braun, even perhaps Lenin and Trotzki, Hermann Hesse, Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, Else Lasker-Schüler, D.H Lawrence, Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan, Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky, Arthur Segal, El Lissitzky and many others.

After the departure of the founder for Brazil in 1920 there followed a brief bohemian period at the Monte Verità which lasted until the complex was purchased as a residence by the Baron von der Heydt, banker to the ex-Kaiser Willhelm II and one of the most important collectors of contemporary and non European art. The bohemian life continued in the village and in the Locarnese valleys from then on.

The Mount, now used as a Hotel and park, still maintains its almost magic power of attraction. Along with the proven magnetic anomalies of geological formations underlying Ascona, it is as if the mount preserves, hidden away out of sight, the sum of all the successful and unsuccessful attempts to breach the gap between the ‘'I'' and ‘'we'', and the striving towards an ideal creative society, thus making the Monte Verità a special scenic and climatic micro-paradise.

The Monte Verità is also however a well preserved testimony for the history of architecture. From Adam's hut to the Bauhaus. The ideology of the first settlers demanded spartan chalet-like timber dwellings with plenty of light and air and few comforts. Shortly after 1900 the following buildings began to spring up: Casa Selma (now museum), [...], Casa Andrea with its geometrical façade, the sunniest of the buildings (now converted), Casa Elena and the Casa del Tè - Tea House (now demolished) and the Casa dei Russi (hideout for Russian students after the 1905 revolution and now undergoing renovation). The Casa Centrale was built for the community and allowed for maximum natural light. Ying-Yang symbols were worked into windows and balconies. (In 1948 this building was demolished to make way for a restaurant and only the curving flight of steps remains).

Henry Oedenkoven built Casa Anatta as living quarters and reception rooms in the theosophist style with rounded corners everywhere, double timber walls, sliding doors, domed ceilings and huge windows with views of the landscape as supreme works of art, a large flat roof and sun-terrace.

In the mains rooms of this building Mary Wingman danced, Bebel, Kautsky and Martin Buber discussed, Ida Hofmann played Wagner and the community held its reunions. In 1926 the Baron von der Heydt converted Casa Anatta into a private residence and adorned it with his collection of African, Indian and Chinese art, now housed at Rietberg Museum, and a collection of Swiss carnival masks which is now in Washington. After the death of the Baron in 1964 the Casa Anatta, described by the architecture theorist Siegfried Giedion in 1929 as a perfect example of ‘'liberated living'', fell into disuse and dilapidation. In 1979 it was re-activated to house the Monte Verità exhibition and has been the History Museum of the Monte Verità since 1981. (Open to the public from April to October). In 1909 the Turinese architect Anselmo Secondo built the Villa Semiramis as a guest house and hotel. The Villa, clinging to the mountain side, presents many architectural characteristics of the Piedmont ‘'Jugendstil'' of which the triangular shutters are the most striking example. In 1970 work was carried out to remodernize the Villa, true to the original style, under the direction of the Ticinese architect Livio Vacchini. The arrival of the Baron on the Mount marked the advent of modern architecture in the Ticino The original contract for a hotel in the characteristically rational and functional Bauhaus style went to Mies van der Rohe and was executed by Emil Fahrenkamp, builder of the Shell Building in Berlin and later designer of the Rhein Steel Works. Like Casa Anatta, the Hotel is built against the rock face. The design both of the exterior and of the rooms is simple and clear-cut and the suites are furnished in the Bauhaus tradition. The reception rooms and the corridors are light and airy and the metalwork studied down to the smallest detail.Thanks to the construction of the Hotel, Bauhaus masters such as Gropius, Albers, Bayer, Breuer, Feiniger, Schlemmer, Schawinksy and Moholy-Nagy visited Ascona and the Monte Verità and there discovered what Ise Gropius was to put into words in 1978 ‘‘A place where our minds can reach up to the heavens...''.

 

Text by Caitlin Murray 

 

http://www.impossibleobjectsmarfa.com/fragments/monte-verit?rq=monte%20verita

 

Slapstick και Γλυπτική. Σκέψεις για την κωμική σύνταξη των αντικειμένων

O όρος slapstick αναφέρεται στις χοντροκομμένες φαρσοκωμωδίες του αμερικάνικου κινηματογράφου, στις οποίες οι πρωταγωνιστές συμπεριφέρονται με ανόητο τρόπο και κάνουν συνέχεια γκάφες. Όμως από τον γενικό αυτόν ορισμό απουσιάζει ένα στοιχείο: αν και περιλαμβάνει τη θεατρική παράδοση των κλόουν και των μίμων, λείπουν τα gags, τα στραβοπατήματα και οι πτώσεις, που προκύπτουν από μια απρόοπτη «συνάντηση» με τα αντικείμενα. Το αμερικάνικο burlesque διασταυρώνεται με την πρωταγωνιστική παρουσία αντικειμένων που παράγει γέλιο.

Το slap stick είναι μια συσκευή που αποτελείται από δύο λεπτές ξύλινες σανίδες, οι οποίες βγάζουν τον ήχο του «χαστουκιού» (slap) και χρησιμοποιείται στην Commedia dell'arte όταν ο ένας κωμικός χαστουκίζει τον άλλο. Εδώ συγκρατούμε την ευεργετική χρησιμότητα του slapstick -ή αλλιώς batacchio στην ιταλική του καταγωγή- να καταφέρνει με ελάχιστη δύναμη να παράγει έναν δυνατό κρότο, όμοιο με το δυνατό ράπισμα που θα δεχόταν ένας κωμικός στο πρόσωπο. Από αυτήν τη λεπτομέρεια οδηγούμαστε σε μια ιστορία των πραγμάτων, που ως έπιπλα ή ως μηχανήματα δεν εξυπηρετούν μόνο τις θεατρικές ανάγκες για να καθορίσουν κάποιο πολιτισμικό περιβάλλον αλλά συμμετέχουν ενεργά στην κωμική πλοκή.

Όταν παρακολουθούμε τις κωμωδίες του Buster Keaton η του Jacques Tati δεν χρειάζεται να έχουμε ενημερωθεί πάνω στην κλασική πραγματεία του Henri Bergson για «Το Γέλιο» (Le Rire) για να διαπιστώσουμε ότι ο τρόπος με τον οποίο παράγεται το κωμικό στοιχείο προκύπτει από μια συνθήκη αποπροσωποποίησης του υποκειμένου, ότι εν ολίγοις γελάμε όταν ένας άνθρωπος αντιδρά ως αντικείμενο.¹ Το 1900, ύστερα από αιώνες αδιαφορίας για το κωμικό, ο Bergson με το δοκίμιό του μας εισάγει στον αυτοματισμό των κινήσεων στη φυσική κωμωδία. H σταθερή έλξη της σύγχρονης τέχνης από το κωμικό και τη σκληροπυρηνική φαρσοκωμωδία αποτελεί το προηγούμενο μιας ασυνείδητης πλευράς στην γλυπτική παραγωγή. Αναμφίβολα, υπάρχει ένα νοητό νήμα που συνδέει τη σημερινή γλυπτική που εμπνέεται από το παράλογο και το κωμικό με την παράδοση του batacchio.

Μονάχα που εδώ η μπερξονική επιχειρηματολογία αντιστρέφεται, καθώς το γέλιο και η ευθυμία προκαλούνται επειδή αυτήν τη φορά είναι τ’ αντικείμενα που θυμίζουν την ανθρώπινη φύση.

Ίσως το πρώτο παράδειγμα που θα σκεφτόμασταν ως προς την αποδοχή της κωμικής σημασίας του αντικειμένου θα ήταν οι δημοφιλείς performative γλυπτικές εγκαταστάσεις των Peter Fischli και David Weis, όπως στο video Der Lauf der Dinge (1987). Σε αυτό το έργο αναγνωρίζουμε ότι τ’ αντικείμενα διαθέτουν το δικό τους αυτόνομο σύμπαν και εντάσσονται σε μια ακολουθία αίτιας και αποτελέσματος, καθώς ετερόκλητα υλικά έχουν τοποθετηθεί με τρόπο ώστε να προκαλούν μεταξύ τους αλυσιδωτές αντιδράσεις.

Αρκετά από τα καλλιτεχνικά κινήματα του παρελθόντος συστήθηκαν μέσα από την επίθεση στη σοβαροφάνεια της θεσμικής τέχνης. Θα λέγαμε, επίσης, πως το παράδειγμα του Marcel Duchamp με τα objets trouvés του θα αποτελούσε από μόνο του το αντικείμενο μιας σπουδής πάνω στο slapstick. Η μοντέρνα γλυπτική παύει να χρησιμοποιεί τη γλώσσα του αναστοχασμού και γίνεται αξιοπερίεργη ενώ η αποδοχή μιας τρισδιάστατης σύνθεσης με παρορμητική διάθεση έναντι μιας εξειδικευμένης παραδοσιακής τεχνικής κλείνει το μάτι στην επέλαση του εφήμερου και της στιγμιαίας απόλαυσης. Η ευρωπαϊκή πρωτοπορία, θέλοντας να αποτινάξει τη βαριά τεκτονική κληρονομιά της γλυπτικής μέσα σε αυτές τις αλλαγές νοοτροπίας για το πώς ορίζεται η τέχνη στους μοντέρνους καιρούς, ασπάζεται τον λόγο του θεάματος, ακολουθώντας τις κινηματογραφικές τεχνικές του πυρετώδους περιβάλλοντος του αμερικάνικου burlesque. Εμπνέεται από τις στιγμιαίες εκρήξεις βίας και ηδονισμού, που μοιάζουν να είναι τόσο διεγερτικές αλλά και πολύ σύντομες.

Η γλυπτική, μέσα στον ορυμαγδό των επανασυστάσεων του μέσου, θα συμπορευτεί με το κωμικό στοιχείο, το οποίο θα διατηρηθεί ακόμη και όταν ο τελικός καγχασμός θα απευθύνεται στην κρίση του θεατή που δεν κατανοεί τη σχέση φόρμας και περιεχομένου. Αυτή η αμήχανη στιγμή εμπεριέχει μια slapstick αντίδραση. Το slapstick αφορά άλλωστε εξίσου και τη διάθεση του θεατή που αντιμετωπίζει τη μοντέρνα και σύγχρονη τέχνη ως μια φάρσα.

Η επιμονή μας να συλλάβουμε την επιρροή της φυσικής κωμωδίας στην τέχνη και ειδικότερα στη γλυπτική θα μας επιτρέψει να την ψηλαφήσουμε σε έργα και καλλιτέχνες όπου το κωμικό στοιχείο σπάνια επισημαίνεται από την κριτική της τέχνης. Το slapstick στην εικαστική παραγωγή δεν γίνεται αισθητό με την ίδια ευκολία όσο η φαντασμαγορική και πληθωρική επιρροή του καρναβαλικού στοιχείου, παρόλο που και αυτό συνυπάρχει στη διευρυμένη κατηγορία του θεάματος και της θεατρικής performance. Αυτή η παράβλεψη μας αναγκάζει να δούμε ξανά την απορρόφηση των οπτικών gags στη μεταπολεμική γλυπτική σε καλλιτέχνες όπως, για παράδειγμα, οι Joseph Βeuys και Bruce Nauman. Οι δυο καλλιτέχνες, ενώ κινούνται σε διαφορετικούς και αντίθετους πόλους, επιδίδονται σε μια απογυμνωμένη και ανήσυχη φόρμα η οποία διαμορφώνει τις σχέσεις δράσης και αντίδρασης μιας gag χειρονομίας.

Αυτό που κάνει κάποια γλυπτά να συνωμοτούν με μια θεώρηση του slapstick είναι και ο αυτόνομος -σχεδόν χειραφετημένος- χαρακτήρας τους σε σχέση με τη συνηθισμένη στοχαστική φύση της κλασικής γλυπτικής. Από μια διαστροφική γενναιοδωρία του δημιουργού τους κάποια γλυπτικά έργα μοιάζουν να «επαναστατούν».²

Στη σύγχρονη γλυπτική παραγωγή δεν επικρατεί μονάχα αυτό το στοιχείο της ανέγερσης αλλά συμπληρώνεται με τη συνθήκη μιας εύθραυστης ισορροπίας, η οποία μπορεί να καταλήξει σε πτώση. Μαζί με τις συνήθεις ποιότητες της γλυπτικής φόρμας συνυπάρχει και η αίσθηση της προσωρινότητας, της κατάτμησης της κάθετης δομής, της αντιμνημιακότητας, της αστάθειας, της αναταραχής. Σε πολλές κατασκευές έχεις την αίσθηση του κίνδυνου της κατάρρευσης των υλικών. Αυτή τη φορά γνωρίζουμε ότι το βίωμα δεν προέρχεται αναγκαστικά από τον χώρο της τραγωδίας.

Σε ό,τι αφορά την ελληνική τέχνη και ειδικότερα τη σοβαρή και με ιδεολογικοπολιτική κατεύθυνση ελληνική avant garde, έχουμε συνηθίσει να αποδίδουμε περισσότερη σημασία στην τραγωδία, ενώ τα κωμικά στοιχεία τα θεωρούμε παιδαριώδη και άνευ σημασίας. Όμως ήδη από τη δεκαετία του '60 μια υπολογίσιμη ομάδα καλλιτεχνών προσθέτει στα αντικείμενα ένα επιθετικό και συγκρουσιακό status, χωρίς να αποκλείει από τις πολιτικές και κοινωνικές προεκτάσεις του έργου το μειδίαμα και τα χαχανητά του θεατή. Με ή χωρίς πολιτική ρητορική, αρκεί να αναφέρω τις κατασκευές και τις performances του Αλέξη Ακριθάκη, του Βλάσση Κανιάρη, του Θόδωρου, της Λήδας Παπακωνσταντίνου και του Takis. Ως προς το εύρος του slapstick σε νεότερους καλλιτέχνες θα ανέφερα ενδεικτικά τα παραδείγματα της Χρυσάνθης Κουμιανάκη, του Διονύση Καβαλιεράτου, του Γιώργου Γυπαράκη, της Μυρτώς Ξανθοπούλου, της Ειρήνης Μίγα, της Μαρίας Γεωργούλα, του Γιώργου Σαπουντζή και της Μαλβίνας Παναγιωτίδη. Σε όλες αυτές τις μεταφράσεις του κωμικού αποδίδονται στιγμιαίες εκρήξεις βίας ή και ηδονισμού που είναι ταυτόχρονα τόσο εφήμερες όσο και ευχάριστες.

Στους καλλιτέχνες που επισήμανα διαπιστώνω αρκετά συχνά την καταγραφή της διαδικασίας της ημιτελούς ταυτότητας μιας αδέξιας κατασκευής. Σε κάποιες περιπτώσεις η επιδεξιότητα είναι τόσο εμφανής ώστε να καταλήγει σε μια καρτουνίστικη απόπειρα μιας λιτής γεωμετρικής κατασκευής ενώ άλλοτε η τελειότητα ή η ατέλεια συνδυάζεται με την υπογράμμιση ενός αταίριαστου σημείου στο σύνολο της σύνθεσης. Η τελευταία στηρίζεται σε μια ανήσυχη ισορροπία των συνδετικών στοιχείων της, τη στιγμή που ο ρυθμός και η κίνηση επιτείνουν τον εύθυμο χαρακτήρα του έργου. Όταν υφίστανται μηχανικά «αξιοπερίεργα» μέρη στην κατασκευή τότε αυτά είναι φανερά. Το slapstick απογυμνώνεται, δεν καμουφλάρεται.

Εκείνο που θα έκανε κάποιον Γάλλο τεχνοκριτικό να επικρίνει το slapstick γύρω στο 1916 ως μια «αμερικανική επιληπτική εισβολή των κωμωδιών»³ βρίσκει μια θεραπευτική λειτουργία στο «άξεστο» και το «καλλιεργημένο» κοινό εδώ και δεκαετίες, ώστε ακόμη και οι επιφυλακτικοί διανοητές της σχολής της Φρανκφούρτης, για να θυμηθούμε ειδικά τον Adorno, να το ασπάζονται στην πολεμική τους ενάντια στην κατεστημένη τάξη πραγμάτων.

Η χαλάρωση μας μπροστά σε μια τρισδιάστατη κατασκευή μπορεί να απέχει από τις αντιδράσεις που θα είχαμε παρακολουθώντας μιαν αμερικάνικη κωμωδία του βωβού κινηματογράφου με τα σωματικά ξεσπάσματα και τα απανωτά γέλια. Εντούτοις, όταν το εκτεθειμένο έργο ξαφνιάζει με την παιγνιώδη υπόστασή του απελευθερωνόμαστε από το βάρος της επιστημολογικής κατανόησης και ερχόμαστε σε ρήξη με τον κομφορμισμό μας. Και είναι ευτυχές και παρήγορο ότι η θεσμική «σοβαρότητα» του εκθεσιακού χώρου γίνεται αντιληπτή σήμερα ως καρικατούρα μιας αναχρονιστικής αγωγής που θέλει να καταστείλει το γέλιο, τη στιγμή που το «κοινό» επιχειρεί να ανακτήσει το χαμένο αριστοφανικό έδαφος.

* Ο Κωστής Βελώνης είναι εικαστικός καλλιτέχνης, αναπληρωτής καθηγητής στην ΑΣΚΤ

¹ Henri Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Paris: Alcan, 1900

² Σε όσους αρέσουν οι αφηγήσεις χειραφέτησης θα απολάμβαναν την εξέγερση των πραγμάτων στην stop motion αντιναζιστική ταινία της Τσέχας σχεδιάστριας Hermina Tyrvola, όπου τα παιχνίδια συστρατεύονται και επιτίθενται σ’ έναν στρατιώτη της Gestapo που τα κακοποιεί χωρίς λόγο όταν εισβάλει στο εργαστήριο ενός κατασκευαστή παιχνιδιών στη διάρκεια του δευτέρου παγκοσμίου πολέμου και τελικά υπερισχύουν του εισβολέα τους (Vzpoura Hracek, Επανάσταση στη χώρα των παιχνιδιών, 1945).

³ Steven Jacobs and Hilde D'haeyere. “Frankfurter Slapstick: Benjamin, Kracauer, and Adorno on American Screen Comedy.” OCTOBER 160, 2017, 30-50.

https://www.avgi.gr/entheta/anagnoseis/391657_slapstick-kai-glyptiki

When Disciplines Hit Dead Ends

In recent years, I’ve noticed a lot of think pieces in which people talk about their academic fields hitting an impasse. A recent example is this Liam Kofi Bright post on analytic philosophy:

Analytic philosophy is a degenerating research programme. It’s been quite a long time since there was anything like a shared project … People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place … The architectonic programmes of latter-20th-century analytic philosophy seem to have failed without any clear ideas for replacing them coming forward … What I think is gone, and is not coming back, is any hope that from all this will emerge a well-validated and rational-consensus-generating theory of grand topics of interest.

Another example is Sabine Hossenfelder’s 2018 book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which is about how high-energy particle physics has made itself irrelevant by pursuing theories that look nice instead of those that try to explain reality. The book followed on the heels of a number of pieces noting how the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model (though we still have to wait and see if the Muon g-2 anomaly turns out to be something new). And of course there are many books and articles about the apparent dead end in string theory.

Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen thinks economics hasn’t done a lot to enlighten the world recently. I personally disagree with him, given all the great and very accessible empirical work that has come out in recent years, but Cowen might be thinking mainly about economic theory — back in 2012, he told me that he thought there had been no interesting new theoretical work since the ’90s.

There are seemingly endless warnings of disciplinary dead ends. In 2013, Keith Devlin, director of the Stanford Mathematics Outreach Project, fretted that “mathematics as we know it may die within a generation.” Some worry that the field of psychology will be rendered irrelevant by neuroscience. In general, if you pick an academic field X and Google “the end of X,” you’ll find an essay from the last decade wondering if it’s over — or declaring outright that it is.

Is this normal? Maybe academics just always tend to think their fields are in crisis until the next big discovery comes along. After all, some people thought physics was over in the late 19th century, just before relativity and quantum mechanics came along. Maybe the recent hand-wringing is just more of the same?

Perhaps. But an opposing notion is the “end of science” hypothesis — the idea that most of the big ideas really have been found, and now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for the universe’s last few remaining secrets. This is the uncomfortable possibility raised by papers like the 2020 American Economic Review study “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” by Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom and co-authors.

In between these two theories, I offer a third hypothesis, striking a middle ground: The way that we do academic research — or at least, the way we’ve done it since World War II — is not suited to the way discovery actually works.

More : https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-disciplines-hit-dead-ends

By Noah Smith , August 3, 2021