Yves Klein – Blue is the color of our soul.

One day I found an ad on Artsjob.com. It said: we’re looking for cellists, no professional required; you just have to be able to play a D note. It’s for a performance made by Yves Klein in 1960 that we want to present again.




I thought it was a divine sign. I have the cello here in London and I use it very seldom. And also, I always loved Yves Klein and his blue. I didn’t know about the performance. Basically, it was a forty-minutes long show, with an orchestra playing the Monothone Symphonie (just an extended D note) and in the middle a pause of twenty minutes of complete silence, where the audience should contemplate the shapes left by the body of naked models painted with blue paint.



Being part of this was magical. I felt like the note and the color were all in one, on the same shade, the same tonality. I felt music was coming out from my body, from all bodies of musicians, and from our body it was going to the naked models’ bodies, to cover them with its blue vibration. Then silence. At the beginning it was embarrassing. But then I concentrated on the canvas on the stage, with shapes of blue body on them.

At one point I was so focused that I didn’t even notice that, in the silence, I started hearing the note D.

Mincemeat.

Mincemeat is a site-specific promenade performance created by Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working with homeless people.

Mincemeat is a show that takes the audience throughout a huge warehouse in the middle of Shoreditch, a narrative that deal with questions of identity and matters of life and death, unraveling the mysteries surrounding a World War Two intelligence operation. The story is based on a real fact: in 1943, the body of a military man has been founded dead on a Spanish beach. Was his death necessary to prevent the death of thousand? Or was he just a guinea pig?

In 1943 the Allied powers planned to make landfall in Europe via Sicily. In order to convince the Germans that the invasion would come through Sardinia instead of Sicily, they devised a plan called Operation Mincemeat, that consisted in dropping a poor soldier’s body off the coast of Spain.

Mincemeat is a psychological drama, extremely strong and passionate, it makes you angry and makes you cry, and the location is something incredible, a huge warehouse with several rooms putted to use as interiors of a re-imagined wartime Londoner building. Actors are excellent, and all of them were homeless people. The show ended with the last cues of The Great Dictator by Chaplin, a message of hope and joy:

“We are coming out of the darkness into the light! We are coming into a new world; a kind new world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. Look up, Hanna! The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying inti the rainbow. Into the light of hope! Into the future! The glorious future! That belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hanna! Look up!”

Just out of curiosity: while I was attending the show, I turned my gaze around and I discovered that behind me there was the actress Kate Winslet. Beautiful. I loved her in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry. Truly beautiful.

The Shunt. My experience, behind the scenes.

Video


I’ve been to Shunt in October for the first time. You enter through this tiny door, inside London Bridge Station. They ask for your ID. Security reason, they say. Then suddenly and unexpectedly you’re inside this cavernous space. Humidity and smell of cellar, walls made of bricks and darkness, but slowly your eyes start to see a lot of candles all around. At first, you feel lost, and also a little scared. You don’t know where to go and why. But then you realize there are paintings on your right side, and on the left a small room with live music. And you feel like you’re wandering in a place where there’s no time and no rules. We’re in the underground. Everything is possible in the underground. As in the movie by Emir Kusturica. The place is huge; performances are going on in the course of all the night. Musicians, workshop, and installation: all around you. It’s a truly strong experience. The night then finished with a DJ, dancing until someone fights you off.



This is Shunt. Which better place to spend your Friday and Saturday evenings? I felt in love with the idea of a multi-artistic venue, in a location so beautiful and big. The day after, I looked for more information on the web, and I discovered that an experimental theatre group composed by ten actors is running the place. They moved to the ‘vault’ in 2004, and before this, they were located in a small railway arch in Bethnal Green.
When I noticed on their website that they were looking for volunteers, I didn’t wait a minute. I send them my CV and the week after I was there, the light of the day outside, and inside: no time, no hours… only that magical atmosphere which struck me from the first time. Cleaning chairs, painting walls, preparing set design for the performances: these were (and still are) my tasks during the day. In the night I’m the usherette, giving information to lost people, as I was.

I also worked as an usherette (dressed as a policemen) in the theatre production that is running from October called Money. It’s an experimental piece of theatre: this means there is not a clear narrative structure as in traditional theatre and also they want to make the viewer feel involved in the act. The entire act is located in a warehouse with a huge machine inside that was constructed exclusively for the show. It’s really an impressive construction, with four floors all of them with glass, and the show takes place inside different rooms on different floors, so that the audience has to move around it, never knowing what is going to happen next.



I’m really happy about the opportunity Shunt gives to every kind of person that wants to get involved in something creative and satisfactory. Surely it’s a big help for them to have such a lot of people working for free, but on the other hand they’re always really concerned about the wellbeing of all volunteers, they always smile and thank everybody and they have a lot of rewards such as free guest list for friends of volunteers, free drinks and also the possibility to propose artistic projects for the nights.

Maybe one day I’ll be on the scene. But for now, I’m happy to be behind them. The shows are definitely more exiting from this point of view.

Art Bin- The Art of Destruction.

Is destruction necessary?

Destruction in art is an oxymoron, since art is creation. But is exactly the complex cohabitation of these two concepts that create an extreme act that stuns, upsets, provoking a reaction.

'The need to destroy is also an artistic need' declared Picasso.
Also Nietzsche argued that destruction is necessary to creativity:
'The man who breaks… tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker; …he is the creator'
(Nietzsche, Also Spracht Zarathustra, p.23).

Dadaism has already dealt with this issue: according to the movement, everything had to be overkill in order to create something new. In the case of Dadaism, it was a figurative and conceptual argument, that shoots for create a renewed conception of art that is not only a bourgeois whim.

In other cases, destruction has not just a figurative sense.

As we already saw with Baldessari, there are some artists that deliberately decided to destroy their works. Not only, there are artists that make destruction their own form of doing art. It’s a fact that really interests me a lot. In fact, in our society, the consumer society, destruction has only a negative value, whereas production and accumulation (capital accumulation) are the successful mechanisms.

I’ve seen Gustav Metzger’s personal exhibition at Serpentine Gallery in November. He is an artist and political activist and he developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art. From the manifesto: “Auto-Destructive Art wants to recreate the obsession for destruction (…), it demonstrates the man’s power in accelerate the disintegration of natural processes” From 1959, he started making works by spraying acid on canvas as a protest against nuclear weapons. The results were changing really fast, until the canvas was all consumed. In 1960 he organized a public demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art that was one of the first happening in the art scene.

Also Jean Tinguely, the Swiss artist known for his sculptural machines, created in the same years (1960) a machine called Homage to New York, which was constructed to be self-destroyed. It was a 27 minutes long performance, and at the end of it, the public was allowed to take the remnants of the machine for souvenirs.

The English artist Michael Landy realized an installation that is a direct consequence of the previous listed artistic acts. In 2001, he destroyed all his possessions (all of them!!!) in the installation with the title Break Down. This year he decided to hurl from a staircase all the paintings collected in his life, and some of them are by notorious artists such as Damien Hirst or Tracy Amin. He also open the installation to everybody wanted to bring his artwork and throw it from the staircase on the ground with all the else artworks lied. The exhibition called Art Bin was in South London Gallery until the 14^th of March, there were displayed all photographs and video of the performance and also the big glass bin with lifeless artwork comprehended.

I read in an article on the web that Kane Cunningham, a painter from Yorkshire, bought a house in Knipe Point, near to Scarborough. This house is located near to a precipice and it is highly possible that it will slide down. The artist decided to document the fall of the estate and transform it in a big artistic project. He wants to create a symbol for lost dreams and financial disasters, inviting also poets and musician and also visitors to leave their messages or artworks, in order to transform this precarious building in something creative and positive.

So, it is destruction necessary?

I think it is. Destruction is like death, people have to face with it, and start to see the good in it. Everybody should be ready to destroy a part of his property, as Michael Landy did. Things are not important to determine who we are, and artworks neither. What we do is basic, not what we own.. And destroying, we are the creator of a brave and proud act of rebellion.

Pete Townshend of The Who.

John Baldessari

In October I've been to John Baldessari's exhibition called Pure Beauty at the Tate Modern.
I enjoyed being there, the exhibition area was clevery arranged in a way that the viewer had the impression to walk through the artist's past, following a route that tells a story, with a sort of implicit logic and narrative structure.
I really felt like I was being conducted in Baldessari's mind, and this was a good sensation.




Baldessari's artistic investigation is addressed towards the language, and from the beginning of his work it is possible to notice it. He's also very interdisciplinar: he mixs painting, photography, performance and video, questioning the role of art in the society.
He questioned not only the role of art, but also the role of the artist: in the series called Commissioned Paintings he asked to some beginner painters to reproduce a photography of a hand pointing at some objects, and at the end of their works he signed the canvas writing "a painting by" and the painter name.


John Baldessari, Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A, 1969.

It seems really interesting to me, above all after having studied all the theory related with the debatable theme of authorship, a central point in postmodern literature, where Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault's essays are the core of the argument.

From the 70s, after the Cremation Project, where he burned all his artworks made between 1953 and 1966, his art become more focused on photography, incorporating in his works waste materials and freeze frame from cinematographic film.

Putting together daily or senseless images, the artist is able to build a particular narrative, and suggest different ways to look at the reality. Baldessari uses unusual elements and inadeguate combination to create a state of tension. It can be a kiss in a mass of guns, a small stream of blood on the face of an actress with a pelicans' flock behind, impossible dialogues between a couple; he asks to the viewer to redefine the relations and the reactions of a two-dimensional stravagant world.

From the 80s he starts to use white and black photographies, obliterating the faces with coloured discs, and putting together different images, creating balance and connection where there was any.


John Baldessari, Heel, 1986.

From the 90s there is a return to the association of texts and images. The artist compounds words taken from Francisco Goya's paintings with pictures of banal objects.

I really liked the latest work by Baldessari: Brain/Cloud (Two Views): with Palm Tree and Seascapes (2009).
There was a camera that was projecting the image of you on the wall in front of you, making you feel actually a part of the installation. And part of the huge brain/cloud that was hanging on the wall/sky. Basically, part of Baldessari's brain.

Israel - Is real? >>Second part. The space outside the Institution.

While in Tel Aviv the Biennal attracts tourists and rich collectors, showing outsider art in little rooms and selling Bansky's prints for a lot of money, the city, silently and for free, shows how rich and wide is the street art panorama.
Every corner has a stencil or a stunning graffiti.



















Wandering in the streets one sees the surprising cohabitation of a harsh past with marks of air raids on the buildings, and a new and hopeful present represented by young creative artists that leave their messages on the walls.

I was positively stunned by this high activity of street art, because it made me understand that there is a new generation in Tel Aviv that wants things to change, that believes in artistic power to sensibilize people and criticize the actual government, that wants to speak to everybody through their signs on the walls.

To see more: Israeli Street Art on Flickr

Thanks to my friends, I knew there was an opening of a sort of exhibition in a squat.
It was hard to find, but finally we managed to get there, asking direction to everybody alive I was meeting on my way.

The daily light was about to disappear, leaving slowly the sky to the darkness.
It was one of the typical Israeli evening, incredible sunset and a dreamy atmosphere, with dust in the air and a vibrating sense of excitement.
The builing we were looking for so long was in front of us: it was an abandoned 19th Century ruin in the South of the city, once considered the poor end, and now known as the alternative and arty part.
We saw people sneaking in through a hole in the wall. We followed them.

KINDRED TIMES AND FUTURE GOODBYES



I personally took this pic above. The building was open in the ceiling, and from the inside it was painted all around. There was a true vernissage, with free drinks and something to eat. All free. People were estrange, looking up and around fascinated.



There was a journalist, Leah Borromeo, located in London. (all other pictures are her)
She was interviewing the artists and then she asked me some comments about the event compared with the Biennal.



I was happy to tell her my opinion.
Art for me is not art if it's not dangerous.
In other words, real art should hit the nail on the head, should create a space of crisis, should destroy or at least question something.
If it's not doing it, it represents just a nice idea, another nice and harmless idea that will bring no consequence. The world is full of nice ideas. They are all there, with a price on them, waiting to be bought.
The Biennal was a storage of nice ideas as well.
Nothing really striked me, but maybe they even did not want to strike people.
They just wanted to entertain the viewers. Yes, I know, art is often this.
But art as entertainment is not my art.

Leah smiled, she looked satisfied. I've never thought I would have met her again, here in London. But sometimes the world is a hole.

Here you can read her article.



"In a world tripping on its own undone shoelaces. (We are our surroundings.)"
(from a writing on a wall.)

Israel - Is real?

On September 2009 I've been travelling around Israel.
My Israeli friends, who I used to live in London with, gave me hospitality in Tel Aviv.
In that period, the Biennal of Art called ArtTLV 09 was running in various places all around the city.
It is interesting to know that the organization for the event started in 2008, and at first the curators were the well-know Zdenka Badovinac and Viktor Misiano. Then, in December, Israel attacked the Gaza Strip. The two curators decided to keep their jobs only if the Israeli government would not be the sponsor of the Biennal. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to find private sponsors, so they gave up, leaving the task to a local curatorial team, that makes the event something less international.

I've seen quite a lot of interesting and challenging artworks there, but not so controversial and politically engaged as I expected.


The work by Shelly Federman was a big surprise. The 34-years-old artist from Israel made an installation on the beach of Tel Aviv (see above) that wanted to recreate the West Bank barrier in a public place dedicated to amusement and relaxation as a beach.
She says "I wanted to make the wall visible, and in doing so make people feel uncomfortable." The installation was filmed and the result is a short video in which turists used the sponge wedges as surfboards and lounge chairs (maybe the best thing to do with the real wall as well?).




Another work that I enjoyed was an installation by the Moroccan artist called Mounir Fatmi (nice website!) that I already knew from an artwork he presented to the 2007 Venice Biennale.

In the installation I saw in Tel Aviv, he used 1.500 VHS glued to the wall in order to represent the shape of a skyscraper skyline.
The work gives me a sense of drama and darkness, mixed with a bit of irony.

Mounir Fatmi, Skyline, 2007.

Looking for Beauty in a Ogres' World

Hi there, silent and unknown users of this space of dispersion called Internet.
Today I'm starting typing my adventures in the world of contemporary art.
Sometimes it will be intimate, some others more theoretical, but I will try to make it as unexpected as possible.
Maybe inarticulate sometimes.
But always committed.
At least I'll try.
Enjoy the reading.
Image: Francesco Clemente, Abbraccio (Hug), 1983.