The work of Hungarian
architect Yona Friedman (*1923, Budapest, lives in Paris)
is the starting point for this exhibition with the title
itself being a reflexive reference to Friedman's 1975 book
'Architecture Of Survival' (MIT Press, USA). The book looks
at the precarious nature of modern society and suggests
creative strategies for countering the problems thrown up
by hyper-consumption and capitalist modes of spatial and
social organisation. Friedman rose to prominence with his
manifesto 'Mobile Architecture' (1958) and plan for a utopian
city 'The Spatial City' (1959) ; his ideas led him beyond
architecture and to engagement with sociology, economics,
mathematics, information science, planning, visual art and
film-making.
Today, his writings have become influential
as architectural ideas which take as their starting point
the perspective of those existing in a state of generalised
poverty within capitalist economic model. He proposes structures
for the unpredictable, providing the means and ways for
people to determine, re-appropriate and re-invent their
own living environment beyond the normative functional ability
of new social forms to shape their own living spaces.
Relative to Friedman's method of re-appropriating
architecture as a creative tool -through the creation of
"do it yourself" manuals, instructions and recipes-
the exhibition will articulate the way in which the actual
creative process integrates the notions of survival and
mobility. Fundamentally, how the artworks 'survive' their
original context. The artist's work will deal with 'traces'
and 'remains' of performances and actions, this being an
area of investigation privileged in the project, the participative
and performative aspects of the works being crucial within
this context. One of the common material characteristics
of the works exhibited is 'lightness' and economy of means.
Whether they are constructed from recuperated material,
fabric, objects or paper or are audio-visual, they are designed
to be easily transportable – allowing improvisational
flexibility of creation and presentation.
"All artists are alike. They dream
of doing something that's more social, more collaborative,
and more real than art." - Dan Graham. With Architectures
Of Survival, there is the creation of a certain 'critical
distance' apropos artistic social utopian trains of thought
and a desire to revive the exhibition model and its relationship
with the spectator.
Launch evening
Mandrake
25th November, 8pm
Videos by Ivan Argote, Fayçal Baghriche,
Pauline Bastard, Matthew Burbidge, Jean-Philippe Convert,
David Evrard, Michelle Naismith, Kurt Ryslavy, Ivo Provoost
& Simona Denicolai and Michael Van Den Abeele
Performances by
NG
(no birth-date, no country, lives everywhere) is
looking for a new way of living/moving/making art. Two years
ago NG began a nomadic life project. Before Los Angeles,
she was resident in Air Antwerp (Belgium), Villa Arson Nice
(France), Villa du lavoir Paris (France), the bubble house
of Antti Lovag Nice (France, Quelle Vienna (Austria), Bad
foundation Rotterdam (Netherlands), Flux Factory NY (USA),
La Generale Paris (France). NG will perform ‘Break
Hotel’, a reading of a text re-writen from her
conversations about how to live, work and move from one
residency to the next. The reading is accompanied by images
from the places she has lived in.
Jaro Straub (*D 1973) will
perform with field-recordings from his stay in Mexico, on
the way to Los Angeles. This piece will represent a survival
record of his travel with soundscapes ranging from remote
mountain areas to overflowing city markets. He will serve
Mescal as an accompaniment to the listening experience.
Jim Skuldt (*US 1970),
over the last several months, has been capturing feral cats
from the alleyway surrounding his studio. Those captured
have been spayed and neutered and returned to their environment.
As strategies of entrapment and evasion have evolved in
tandem, Skuldt and the feline population have become acquainted
with certain subtleties of mobile architecture in relation
to survival on the streets in the urban built environment,
arriving at a level of grid-based obfuscation he refers
to as Rapid Mobile Architecture (RMA) whereby rapidly shifting
walls serve to simultaneously mimic spatial environments
and problemitize control asserted amongst its inhabitants.
Complete Communion Celebration
An eight-hour video
installation by Jaro Straub & Matthew
Gallery
533
13 December, 6pm to 2am
Jaro Straub (*Germany 1973)
& Matthew Burbidge (* GB 1970) made
the video installation Complete Communion Celebration
based on an eight-hour performance during which the
artists juxtaposed improvised guitar sounds and voices with
passages from Guy Debord’s autobiographical book ‘Panegyric’
for an absent public, under a river-side bridge in Berlin.
The performance is presented as two distinctly filmed parts,
which are projected simultaneously: in one part the artists
are performing in a seemingly interior space; in the other
the sun is setting over a landscape, which rapidly becomes
obscured in darkness.
Gallery Exhibition
Open Gallery, 4-14 December, 2008
Opening Reception, 4th December
at 6pm
Featuring works by Ivan Argote, Pauline
Bastard, Aline Bouvy / John Gillis, Francisco Camacho, Matthieu
Clainchard, Jean-Philippe Convert, Messieurs Delmotte, Simona
Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, David Evrard, Yona Friedman,
Hugues Marechal, NG, Pichler, Frédéric Platéus,
Jim Skuldt, The Centre of Attention, Michael Van Den Abeele,
Andrea Winkler
Ivan
Argote (Columbia) presents a video which documents
his efforts to give money to passengers on the metro and
two photographs of his street actions. Most of his work
originates from everyday (ab)normalities, slightly modifying
what is supposed to be accepted by all as either a belief
or a reality. Using photographs and video to document his
in-situ actions, he highlights the absurd or non-sensical
aspects of things that are often unconscious to us.
The French collective Bad
Beuys Entertainment (France) presents the video
Champion (2003), an animated gif file that is a
series of logos of products, brands, companies and organisations
called CHAMPION collected on the web.
Pauline
Bastard (France) works on the detournement
of functional objects, transforming their use value in moments
of contemplation. Her work Fresh associates a plastic
bag and a ventilation fan in a very literal visual pun.
Movement and playfulness are also characteristic of the
fountains she creates out of domestic wrapping paper.
Aline
Bouvy (*L 1974) / John
Gillis (*B 1972) use 'street cred' reality
from the suburbs of Liège to Berlin, London, Brussels…,
fashion systems, sexy music, graffitti and lifestyle magazines
as the source material for their work to speak about seduction,
misunderstandings, primitivist and futurist icons. Representing
the hypnotic gaze on the other as well as the division of
labour in the creation of the artwork, the duo thumb their
nose at ‘straightness’ probing the limits of
bad taste, formalism, luxury, deviance and pop culture.
Francisco Camacho (*Columbia
1979, resident at Rijksacademie, Amsterdam) proposes this
project : “One year ago, X was caught by the police
trying to smuggle 2 kilos of heroin from the airport Al
Dorado in Bogota to Texas. Description of the jail where
X is now imprisoned. Using this description and after recording
conversations with X's family, I will reconstruct the image
of the space where X is now jailed. The tales will be linked
only by the conception of the jail's space built up in the
memory of X's family; many aspects will be practical but
others will be more sensitive.”
For more info, http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=bLUCqo7Je7M
Jean-Philippe Convert (*France
1972) made a piece by associating the Flemish flag with
the cover album The Wall by Michael Jackson. Like in his
video Iraki People, he put together different sources
to question poetically what seems to be accepted in the
general media.
Simona
Denicolai (*Italy 1972) & Ivo
Provoost (*Belgium 1974) will show an announcement
that was published in the local magazine Zitty, in Berlin,
for the previous ‘Architectures of Survival’
exhibition, describing a mental image, repeated until this
image attains more street credibility than its actualization.
This project is also the occasion to show the video To
Be Here (Happy) in which the artists traveled with
both a fake and real cactus from Brussels to the Californian
desert.
David
Evrard (Belgium) proposes new Rorcha test patterns
made with euro cents change pasted on found objects. The
architectural object and its urban context are at the centre
of his drawings, texts, photographs, songs and sculptures
that often speak about the relation between Europe and America.
Fascinated by the imagery of the West from cinema and music,
he recreates situations that function like fragments of
that mythology.
Yona Friedman (*Hungary/France
1923) will be in Los Angeles, in January 2009. Before his
visit, we wish to introduce his work by distributing manuals
for building and creating spaces and structures that he
puts together like recipes for public and private environments,
sculptures and shelters.
Hugues Marechal (*France
1974) will stage a re-enactment of a performance where he
stood at the entrance of an exhibition opening, demanding
cigarettes from the visitors, whilst sporting a tattoo of
the crocodile logo of Lacoste reversed on his chest in place
of a shirt. A photograph of the original will act as a teaser
for the visitor. Operating on the margins of the art world,
Hugues Marechal tackles the question of survival facing
artists in society & nature, with idiom based works
on T-shirts (images from military survival manuals), plastic
bags (Y€$) or graffiti tags which point to social phenomenon's,
sex, community.
Messieurs
Delmotte (*B 1967) will premiere his new video
The Mental Reason and perform in his most unfamous
“infra-mince” style. The deadpan, Buster Keaton
like mystery artist poses as a dandy. His actions are so
blatantly topical, so banally urgent they can’t be
postponed. They have to take place, here and now. Coarse
and crude, his videos make a mockery of just about everything.
They stand aloof from smooth perfection and are realised
with the simplest of audio-visual means and a unity of time,
place and action. Mimicking the world of animals and objects,
Delmotte is a great pretender whose whimsical feats need
no explanation--they're just absurdly cheerfully and dogged.
NG
presents the video Limits of Paradise: Free
Solo, which resembles a survival dream : The artist
wandering in differing landscapes (snowy mountains, post-industrial,
river side, wild nature), gathering, naming, eating herbs,
bays, plants. The video is accompanied by her drawing and
text Statement, a manifesto for a utopian way of life plus
the sound piece Give Me A Break, a series of ‘detourned’
songs about the artists position in society.
For more info (in french), http://www.radiophonic.org/grille/sam-sat/
Michalis
Pichler (Germany) shows works made mostly in
New York. WAR Diary (2005) is an edition made of
collages, using front page headlines from the Daily
News and merging them with images from the New
York Times. In line with Dada tradition, the random
mix of visual references and sensational lines from the
two rival papers produces startling results. The book Hearts
gathers images of discarded commodities, which carried depictions
of hearts, found in public space in Berlin, Greece and New
York City. For the book New York garbage flag profile,
Pichler collected and documented discarded paper cups and
other mass-produced materials emblazoned with the American
Flag.
Frédéric Platéus
(*B 1976) makes graffiti ‘tags’ and
sculptures inspired by spray paintings. The two dimensional
‘tags’ are transposed into 3D objects such as
his light-boxes and Twisted Puzzles, relocating
street culture to the living room, the sculptures look like
thick tags, abstract labels for branding. When he works
with Aline Bouvy / John Gillis, they tackle the relation
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,
creating trash decors for the white cube. In a similar collaboration,
he worked with Matthew Burbidge & Jaro Straub for the
project Complete Communion Celebration in Komplot,
Brussels.
For more info, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNoHqSweDTQ
Jim Skuldt (*US 1970),
over the last several months, has been capturing feral cats
from the alleyway surrounding his studio. Those captured
have been spayed and neutered and returned to their environment.
As strategies of entrapment and evasion have evolved in
tandem, Skuldt and the feline population have become acquainted
with certain subtleties of mobile architecture in relation
to survival on the streets in the urban built environment,
arriving at a level of grid-based obfuscation he refers
to as Rapid Mobile Architecture (RMA) whereby rapidly shifting
walls serve to simultaneously mimic spatial environments
and problemitize control asserted amongst its inhabitants.
Jaro Straub (*Germany 1973)
has picked up a packaging for a childrens miniature piano
from the streets of Los Angeles outside an artist studio
complex. He rebuilt the missing musical instrument which
was originally made in China out of the cardboard remnants
as a nonfunctional sculptural object. The keyboards of the
piano are made of Crayola wallpaint samples, thus creating
a color range which substitutes the black and white keyboards
for a chromatic scale.
The
Centre of Attention are a duo based in London.
They propose a piece linking to Yona's architecture mobile
where "inhabitants are enabled to flexibly shape their
spatial and social worlds" which is to do their "Gemeinschaft
und gesellschaft" piece. In the previous 2 versions,
this has started with an installation by them. But in Los
Angeles, the work of the other artists will have provided
that installation already. Their work is that « visitors
can make changes to the exhibition by adding, moving, editing
and recombining elements, etc.
Jason Wallace Triefenbach (*US
1978) « I am inspired by human interaction, and
our seemingly natural ability to misunderstand one another
correctly. The city as hive only works as a metaphor so
far as we can ignore the great lack of compassionate coordination
birthing tragi-comic transgressions of human dignity and
the wasting of potential inherent in any system-run-amok.
I look for the details of accidental architecture: the accumulating
ambiance of angles, curbs, pipes, electrical boxes, signage,
graffiti, litter, scuff marks, erosion, bike racks, trees,
cracks in the sidewalk, construction barricades, surveillance
equipment, flowerbeds gone to weed, etc. Beauty is the chance
meeting of Donald Judd and Robert Rauschenberg in a McDonald’s
parking lot. How then to abstract these urges? (…)»
The combined use of music, costuming, sculptures and props,
physical actions, and the presentation of written texts
constructs a complex formal terrain upon which autobiography,
fantasy and politics mingle, morph, and grow beyond this
author’s original intentions..
Michael
Van Den Abeele (Belgium) presents the animation
video and poster Smoking (2005) evoking the attraction
and repulsion aspects of the cigarette, eros and tanathos
in the object of desire and destruction. The work of the
artist is concerned with the relation to death, childhood’s
imagination, haunted by cruelty and erotism and political
geography.
Andrea Winkler (Germany)
creates works of intense sensuality and minimalist elegance.
Her delicate reliefs and often frilling objects are made
from everyday-materials like paper, foil, tape or glossy
magazine pages. Located between an object trouvé
and a site-specific installation the pieces are sparingly
dispersed in the space attached to the walls, spread out
on the floor, fixed to architectural protrusions and hanging
from the ceiling. Carefree, playful and seemingly existing
there only temporarily, things appear light and mobile like
transit passengers. But the picture is well composed and
catches the passer-by with powerful seducement.
For more info, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83YE2NZghV4
With the support of the Commissariat
général aux relations internationales, the
Ministry of Culture of French Community of Belgium, the
French and Belgian Consulates in Los Angeles
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