A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N

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A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N is a collaboration between artist Cerith Wyn Evans and Throbbing Gristle, the once notorious Industrial music act now enjoying a resurgence of activity and attention. Evans and TG have an earlier connection via Derek Jarman, for whom Evans worked as an assistant. Given how much I enjoy seeing mirrors used in art, I’m very taken with these, and knowing that they function as drifting speakers transmitting specially recorded TG audio makes them doubly interesting. The mirrors-plus-audio aspect is reminiscent of Josiah McElheny’s recent Island Universes with Paul Schütze but that’s not to imply any influence, both artists have been following their individual paths for some time.

The title of this work comes from a poem by Stephan Mallarmé (1842–1898), a poet closely associated with the Symbolists. Looking at an English translation, the piece ends with the line “a snow of white bouquets of perfumed stars”; that final, impossible flourish—perfumed stars—is a very Symbolist touch. Claude Debussy, who took the title of his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune from Mallarmé, set Apparition to music in 1884.

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N can be seen at Tramway, Glasgow until September 27, 2009.

A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N test run on Chris Carter’s Flickr pages.

Previously on { feuilleton }
In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman
The art of Josiah McElheny

Andy Paiko’s glass art

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The Glass Chair.

Today’s glass artists continue to astonish. Andy Paiko‘s one-off creation above is a chair whose vitrines contain a rhesus monkey skull, a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat, and a mountain lion skull. The piece below contains a 24 carat gold-plated coyote skull with the work as a whole being described by the artist as representing various stages of the alchemical process. Go and feast your eyes on the rest of his creations. Thanks again to Thom for the tip!

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Canis Auribus Tenere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The art of Josiah McElheny
The art of Angelo Filomeno
IKO stained glass
Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
Glass engines and marble machines
Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
The art of Lucio Bubacco
The glass menagerie

Paul Schütze online

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One of the drawbacks with recommending Paul Schütze‘s music lately has been a lack of availability, with most of his CDs being out of print. That changes this month with his back catalogue returning via iTunes sporting a range of impressive new artwork (above) created by Mr Schütze himself.

Schütze’s electronic music stood out for me in the mid-Nineties for a number of reasons: firstly, and most obviously, it wasn’t always tied to the rigid metronomic pulse which governed the rest of the dance world. There were 4/4 beats at times—and he even had an album on Belgian dance label Apollo under the anagrammatical pseudonym Uzect Plausch—but his music was equally subject to unusual time-signatures with chiming timbres borrowed from gamelan orchestras.

Those timbres and their attendant tropical atmospheres were a second point of distinction. Like Jon Hassell, to whom he pays homage on Stateless (1997), there’s an acknowledgement of non-Western music without any falling into pastiche. This realises one aspect of Hassell’s Fourth World concept, whereby a meeting of the First World and the Third World creates an exclusive temporary zone that nonetheless can’t exist without the contribution of either party.

A third distinction would require a detailing of Schütze’s notable collaborators—Bill Laswell and Raoul Björkenheim among them—and his inventive track titles, many of which sound like Surrealist paintings. But describing music is always a poor thing compared to experiencing it. If you want a place to start, I’d recommend New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of Metals (1993; reissued 1996) or Abysmal Evenings (1996), two constant favourites.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The art of Josiah McElheny
The Garden of Instruments

Infinite reflections

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Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kusama (2002).

One of my favourite contemporary artworks, Fireflies on the Water by Yayoi Kusama, receives a new showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Her mirrored room features 150 lights and a pool of water and while most photos show an impressive work, none of them can match this fantastic 360º panorama by Australian photographer Peter Murphy. Kusama isn’t the only artist to use mirrors this way but mirror rooms and reflective surfaces have become as much a recurrent feature of her work as her trademark spots.

Fireflies on the Water is being shown as part of the Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years exhibition and can be seen until June 8th, 2009. (Via Nevertheless.)

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Mirrored Room by Lucas Samaras (1966).

I’ve often wondered how far back the invention of the fully-mirrored room can be traced. Halls of mirrors are historically common but the mirrors tend to be on the walls only. American artist Lucas Samaras produced his Mirrored Room (with mirrored chair and table) in 1966, something which fascinated me when I first encountered it in art books.

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It evidently fascinated ex-art student Brian Eno who I’m sure must have borrowed the idea for the cover of his collaboration with Robert Fripp, (No Pussyfooting), in 1973. I’ve always assumed this was a room in Eno’s home at the time but never seen that confirmed. Anyone know whether this is the case?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The art of Josiah McElheny
Yayoi Kusama
The art of Yayoi Kusama
Exposure by Robert Fripp

The art of Josiah McElheny

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Island Universe (2008).

Island Universe is a new work by American artist Josiah McElheny at London’s White Cube gallery. McElheny’s recurrent use of glass and mirrors would be enough to capture my attention anyway—I particularly like the Modernity piece below—but Island Universe also features a specially-commissioned sound accompaniment by one of my favourite musicians, Paul Schütze.

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Modernity circa 1952, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely (2004).

McElheny collaborated with cosmologist David Weinberg for Island Universe to create abstract sculptures that are scientifically accurate models of Big Bang theory as well as illustrations of the ideas that followed the general acceptance of the theory. The varying lengths of the rods are based on measurements of time, the clusters of glass discs and spheres accurately represent the clustering of galaxies in the universe, and the light bulbs mimic the brightest objects that exist, quasars. Island Universe proposes a set of possibilities that could have burst into existence depending on the amount of energy or matter present at the universe’s origin.

I can’t help but compare that description of McElheny’s new work with another exhibition that opened this week, TH.2058 by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster which will be filling Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall for the next few months. Josiah McElheny extrapolates from documentary fact and creates something beautiful at the same time. Ms Gonzales-Foerster borrows from pre-existing works of written and filmed science fiction and has to rely on those works to sustain much of the interest:

It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.

This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. As well as erosion and rust, they have started to grow like giant, thirsty tropical plants, to become even more monumental. In order to hold this organic growth in check, it has been decided to store them in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of bunks that shelter – day and night – refugees from the rain.

A giant screen shows a strange film, which seems to be as much experimental cinema as science fiction. Fragments of Solaris, Fahrenheit 451 and Planet of the Apes are mixed with more abstract sequences such as Johanna Vaude’s L’Oeil Sauvage but also images from Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Could this possibly be the last film?

On the beds are books saved from the damp and treated to prevent the pages going mouldy and disintegrating. On every bunk there is at least one book, such as JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but also Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

On one of the beds, hidden among the giant sculptures, a lonely radio plays what sounds like distressed 1958 bossa nova. The mass bedding, the books, images, works of art and music produce a strange effect reminiscent of a Jean-Luc Godard film, a culture of quotation in a context of catastrophe.

There’s a list of works used in the Tate installation, nearly all of which are far more stimulating artworks in their own right than the one which is hijacking them into its “culture of quotation”. I’m sure I can’t be the only person to think that the Tate would have been better served asking McElheny and Schütze to expand their work to fill the Turbine Hall instead. Those Island Universes could only get better if they were bigger.

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Studies in the Search for Infinity (detail, 1997-1998).

A PBS feature on Josiah McElheny

Update: Writer M John Harrison reviews TH.2058 for the Guardian and fails to be impressed:

It occurred to me that the biggest disaster in that room is the disaster for art. TH.2058 seems to finalise the hollowing-out of everything into the shallowest of semiotics. Foerster’s reading list is more powerful and important than her installation. Every one of the books on those bunk beds will give you a frisson that you don’t get from the show, so you would be as well just reading them for yourself.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth
The Garden of Instruments