Contemporary Visual Culture and Translation: March 2010

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Talk on Photography and Text at Istanbul Modern

Istanbul Modern'in web sitesinden:

ÇAĞDAŞ FOTOĞRAF SERİLERİ

Fotoğraf kendi başına var olmayı ve belli bir öyküsellik sunmayı becerebilen bir görsellik alanı olsa da, metin ile birliktelikleri söz konusu olduğunda farklı boyutlarda bir anlatım potansiyeli sunuyor. Metnin fotoğrafın içinde ilk kertede algılanamayanları tasvir ettiği, fotoğrafın ise metinde yer almayan boyutları görselleştirdiği ideal birliktelikler, fotoğrafla sinema arasında konumlanabilecek bir görsel ifade biçimi oluşmasına zemin sağlıyor. İstanbul Modern’deki 19. Çağdaş Fotoğraf Serileri toplantısında, metni vazgeçilmez bir bileşen olarak kullanan sanatçıların işlerine odaklanılacak.

Tarih: 27 MART 2010 Cumartesi, 16:00
Yer: İstanbul Modern Sinema Salonu

Etkinlik ücretsizdir.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Robert Frost Typography: Mending Wall

Click here for an animation of the poem

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.  It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it
Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'  I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself.  I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Robert Frost

[Theme: Language - IV]

Rachel Berwick

may-por-e'

1997- present (ongoing project)

Dimensions: 10'H X 10' Diameter
Materials: two live parrots, polypropylene, plants, water fountain, sound, lights, shadows

Project Venues:
1996 Real Art Ways, Harford, CT
1997-98 Wooster Gardens, New York, New York
2000 Serpentine Gallery, London
2001 Istanbul Bienal, Turkey
2004 Mercosul Bienal de Porto Alegre, Brazil

From the artist's website:

In 1799, the German naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt, embarked on a journey through Venezuela to trace the Orinoco River to its source. During his travels Von Humboldt was said to have acquired a parrot from a Carib Indian tribe which, some days before his arrival, had attacked and eliminated a neighboring tribe, the Maypure’. During the attack, the Carib tribe had taken parrots which the Maypure’ people had kept as pets. Von Humboldt noted that the parrots were speaking words, not in the language of the tribe he was visiting, but in the language of the recently destroyed Maypure’: thus the parrots were the only living ‘speakers’ of the Maypure’ language. They were, in fact the sole conduit through which an entire tribe’s existence could be traced. Von Humboldt phonetically recorded the bird’s vocabulary; these notes constitute the only trace of the lost tribe...

For this installation I trained two Amazon parrots to speak Maypure’. The parrots live within a sculptural aviary and are only seen in shadow through its translucent walls. The birds chatter at will, incorporating the language with a multitude of sounds generated by them and their environment.

While it was first exhibited in 1997, "may-por-e'" has continued to evolve as I have worked with additional parrots, one pair in Turkey for the Istanbul Biennial in 2001, and another pair in Brazil for the Mercosul Bienal de Porto Alegre in 2004. For these two venues younger parrots learned from my first two parrots. I trained them largely through the use of recordings of my birds. Volunteers who were on site conducted lessons with the young birds and additional lessons were transmitted via the Internet. There are now a total of six Maypure' speaking parrots.

Lesley Dill

White Poem Dress

“Lesley Dill calls her sculptures and photographs "collaborations" with Dickinson.(…) More than interpret her life and poems, they translate transporting an idea, an expression from the medium of the written word to other forms and other materials. In such a move, of course, everything changes. Materializing her poetics, these works make palpable a condition of writing that constantly fascinated Dickinson: her poetry is largely committed to the effort of providing abstract ideas and emotions with an apprehensible form. Dickinson interrogates the relation between the abstract and the concrete, and in this project she finds language an unstable medium, since words both are, and are not, objects.”*

* Susan Danly,Martha A. Sandweiss, Language as object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art, 16.

[Theme: Language - III] Kay Rosen

Dear all,

As I remember you were excited by the work of Kay Rosen, here is a piece of text that I think you may be interested in reading:

http://www.kayrosen.com/artforum.html

Enjoy it!

[Theme: Language II] Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

Source: Oxford University Press

American conceptual artist, designer and writer. She enrolled at Parsons School of Design, Syracuse, NY, where her teachers included the photographer Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel (b 1924), a successful graphic designer and art director of Harper’s Bazaar, who was particularly encouraging. When Kruger’s interest in art school waned in the mid-1960s, Israel encouraged her to prepare a professional portfolio. Kruger moved to New York and entered the design department of Mademoiselle magazine, becoming chief designer a year later. Also at that time she designed book covers for political texts. In the late 1960s and early 1970s she became interested in poetry and began writing and attending readings. From 1976 to 1980 she lived in Berkeley, CA, teaching and reflecting on her own art. In photograph-based images she examined the representation of power via mass-media images, appropriating their iconography and slogans and deconstructing them visually and verbally. Such works as Untitled (You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece) (photograph, 1.82×1.16 m, 1982; New York, MOMA) exploit an economy of image and text to articulate and undermine the power-based relations established in such media images. Major influences cited by Kruger include films, television and the stereotypical situations of everyday life, and especially her training as a graphic designer. Her messages have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces, as well as on framed and unframed photographs, posters, T-shirts, electronic signboards, billboards and flyposters.

From Grove Art Online

[Theme: Language]

Allan Kaprow, An Apple Shrine, 1960.

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965.

"The content of this painting is invisible; the character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the artist."

Mel Ramsden, Secret Painting, 1967 - 68.