Curatorial parcour through ‘Imprints’
In “The Human Condition,” political theorist Hanna Arendt speaks about “vita contemplativa” (contemplative, passive life) as the condition of Western society. It is a condition that opposes “vita active,”or dynamic living, where the subject produces reality, instead of passively consuming its established narratives. This dynamism can be seen as one of the grey lines connecting works in this exhibition. One recent video and an object or drawing was selected from 5 of our represented artists to shape an accidental exhibition built on a series of coincidences and the bonds that grew out of them. Other lines appear in what can be seen and what cannot. Presence is given to the invisible ashes, traumas and concerns that shape each piece in the show.
The exhibition in June 2016 at Harlan Levey Projects featured works of Marcin Dudek, Amelie Bouvier, Petr Davydtchenko, TR Ericsson and Emmanuel Van der Auwera. More information.
Do You Speak Synergy?
group exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects gallery curated by Denis Maksimov with support of Harlan Levey
Emmanuel Van Der Auwera. “Cabinet d’affects” (2010), exhibition view
In his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” l French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes Cézanne’s impressionistic and paradoxical approach to painting, and implicitly draws a parallel to his own concept of radical reflection. Looking at the relationship between science and art in the context of Cezanne’s struggle to apply “intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and tradition” to his work, he concludes that theory and practice stand in opposition to each other. He sees art as an attempt to capture an individual’s perception, and science as anti-individualistic. From this perspective, natural science cannot grasp the profundity and subjective depth of the phenomena it endeavors to explain.
Ella Littwitz. “Uproot” (2015), exhibition view
Art and science may indeed oppose each other in certain senses, but they also share many things, for example a vigorous research drive that goes beyond practicality. In the currents of contemporary cultural discourse, this characteristic is becoming challenging to maintain, for science and art alike. “Key performance indicators” are applied literally to everything, including the traditionally metaphysical subjects of love and death. Art risks leaning towards the language of “social engagement” in regard to state funding, falling into categories of purely utilitarian design or vanity symbols for luxurious consumption. Science, on the other hand, is getting cornered exclusively into the “applied” category. This process is not a novelty: with constant re-learning and easy forgetting, valuable insights and original perspectives are often lost in favor of the “mode du jour” – sometimes by chance, sometimes in result of deliberate decisions by dominating institutions of a particular time.
Imposed planning and bureaucracy turn both artist and scientist into “eternal applicants” for grants rewarded to visionaries for design “solutions.” Research, findings, and output of each are quickly translated to market speak: Where is the business case? What is the product? Is there a customer for this? How are you going to promote it? The discourse of market economy is perhaps the most crippling enemy poetry has ever seen.
Benjamin Verhoeven. “Sculptural Movement, chapters I & II” (2015), still from video
Both art and science resist. Fundamental scientific research eludes pressure by forecasting long-term outcomes to illustrate a future where we’re all dead already anyway, and artistic energy continues to insist on the power of purposelessness in unveiling the truth content in art and commodities in general. A growing number of collaborations between artists and scientists, formed under the flag of “artistic research” firmly establish a vocabulary for this discourse. Following the logic of Merleau-Ponty, “Do You Speak Synergy?” aims to “return to phenomena.” It does this through a transdisciplinary conversation about the poetic essence of scientific and artistic investigation. The notion of “transdisciplinary” investigation is used more and more often in discussions about the future of research. However, the pathway towards meta-levels of inquiry is not so straightforward. Research has become the victim of an obsession with efficiency, predictability and target driven utilitarianism.
Haseeb Ahmed. “Fish Bone Chapel” (2013), exhibition view
The selected artists share the research language of transdisciplinary inquiry while remaining free from any disciplinary or corporate mandates. Modern physics calls this their “unified field,” ² which we refer to as “synergy,” where fundamental forces and elementary particles are approached as if they compose a single field – a field of truly universal language.
References:
¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le doubt de Cézanne” in Sens et non-sens, Gallimard, Paris, 1945. English translation by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus in Sense and Non-Sense, Illinois University Press, Chicago, IL, 1964.
² Peter Weibel, Beyond Art: A Third Culture. – A Comparative Study in Culture and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary. Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1997.
pdf version of the book “Do You Speak Synergy?” co-written by Denis Maksimov and Harlan Levey
more images from the exhibition
Underneath the socio-political matter of perceived reality: ‘video sculptures’
courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera
Interview with Emmanuel Van der Auwera (EVDA) by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (February 2016 issue)
Emmanuel Van der Auwera is a recent HISK graduate, and the winner of the 2015 Langui Prize awarded during the Young Belgian Artist Award exhibition. In Van der Auwera’s series of Video Sculptures, the notion of screen as window to reality is literally stripped of its flatness, symbolically revealing the underlying mechanics of the media through deconstruction by the artist’s hand. Prior to sculpting the hardware, Van der Auwera continues his extensive research of contemporary video content and identifies those he feels accurately reflect cultural currents in the flux of postmodern bizarreness. These range from all-encompassing, full of manipulative symbols messianic political events to cultural events and intimate confessional moments.
DM: Can you describe the process of making ‘video sculptures’?
EVDA: The screen, technically, composed of LED lights that lit up liquid crystal glass, two sheets of it. On the top of the screen there is an LCD filter. If you remove this filter, all you can see is a white screen - to catch the image you need to apply this filter somehow externally, for example by applying glasses with this filter. Depending on the brand of the screen the filter reacts very differently. Samsung screen is easy to tear off, takes half an hour, while Sony one takes a full day. I don’t pre-cut in advance - it’s not about creating the designed solution. I can only have a relative control over the process. In this way it reminds me of painting and drawing. I am organising it until I feel I reach sort of an equilibrium. It sometimes quite painful - right now I’m building the new sculpture and it’s Sony screen (the decision of buying which I almost now regret, for the reason given before), so the process is very complicated, kind of violent. I am shredding the LCD filter in separate pieces. I keep all of the remaining materials, this outer layers.
DM: Do you see that unpredictability of the result makes the process sort of impressionistic?
EVDA: Indeed. It’s an experiment all the time - I don’t feel control over the process of making. It’s reassuring, because it’s not an automatic gesture. There is no intention and possibility therefore of mass producing the sculptures, despite the fact that material is quite ‘industrial’ in a way. The magical in way transformation from the regular screen into the conceptual sculptural screen is done through the artistic process. There is an ambiguous border in the format of the work.
DM: Is there rituality in process?
EVDA: Yes, I always start from the around the screen with very precise cut. I quickly switch blades for cutting, depending on how the screen is reacting. There is something autopsic in it. An ambiguous border between painting and sculpture in my work is something that I’m still figuring out in the process of continuous work on the new pieces.
courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera
DM: Do you have ‘the bank’ of the videos or the list of the subjects which you are choosing from?
EVDA: I don’t have a precise idea of how I put the videos and screens together, it’s quite empiric. For example with the video of President Obama first inauguration. Initially I received a lot of criticism from people that they don’t want to see this image, so embedded in reality of today. Instead of being reminded and pushed towards self-reflection, they would rather want to see some aesthetic abstract images, beautiful and completely open for the widest angles of interpretation.
DM: Have you ever made live performances?
EVDA: I am thinking of doing a performances again, with cutting the screen in front of the audience. The one I made where I was cutting the screen while it way playing scenes of the first night the American invasion in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, specifically the CNN cover of the intense bombing. I heard the gasp of people in the audience who didn’t realise what was happening. The tearing in Samsung was very easy and you could have heard these sounds of static electricity, those kind of broken radio waves sounds. It’s almost humanising and definitely relates to the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance, while the human body is replaced with the ‘moving pictures machine’, that is so mystified in contemporaneity.
courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera
DM: How do you reflect on symbolism in your researches?
EVDA: There is sort of iconographic analysis. For example Kasimir Malevich, who was a spiritual man, was aiming to create the icon beyond representation. In my case of the white screen, the image is still there, but whiteness of the screen after the LCD layer removed and presents this cleanness of the surface. This what I connect to Suprematism of Malevich. You sort of see the magic and the awfulness of artificiality of the image which is represented to you on this screen - as soon as the top layer removed, you are confronted by bare whiteness of the surface. The image is still there - however to see it you need to apply LSD glasses.
John Carpenter’s demonstrates it interestingly in the cult movie ‘They Live’ - when the protagonist finds the box with glasses, that reveal him the nature of the control society around him. All the advertisements suddenly appear as ‘orders’ - obey, buy, consume, behave, etc. My work is the criticism of iconoclastic approach towards the everyday objects which we are surrounded with - I am bringing back the physics in the technology through the deconstruction of this ‘machine of illusion’, sort of an awful power of control over our vision of reality. Through it’s important to mention that I don’t have an ambition of patronising or teaching anyone - this is rather a critical assessment of the immensity of it’s impact on our perception of reality and everyday behaviour in modernity.