art

A Donor Presented by A Saint

Written by Rebecca Lamarre, 01.12.2014
 
Here is A Donor Presented by A Saint, attributed to the Flemish painter Dieric Bouts, a painting I have been using as a focal point to play with different material relationships between artworks and texts, to see what this can and cannot tell us about the people who produce them. As an artist and performer my primary interest is in people, and this puts me at the exact point of tension where it is unclear where a person begins and an object ends.
 
I first noticed the painting because of the hovering hand.  Why is it there? Who does it belong to?  I read the painting’s information card and learned that it was cropped from a larger alter-piece, dismantled during the Calvinist Reformation in Belgium.  Typical of church paintings at the time the tableau would have been an allegorical lesson from the Bible.  The faces of the characters would have been painted by monks in the church’s employ, using faces from members of the community for reference - it was not uncommon to see, for example, the face of the local baker masquerading as one of the three wise-men visiting the baby Jesus.  The more money a patron donated to the church, the more likely their face would be used to depict a more desirable character, like St. Peter guarding the gates to heaven.
 
How does it feel to have someone’s hand resting on your shoulder in that way? How would it feel to see your face painted on the church wall in such intimate proximity to your landlord? Before I read to you I want to try an experiment.  Please form a pair with the person sitting in front or behind you.  The person in the back should put their hand on the shoulder of the person sitting in front.  Please rest your hand on their shoulder and leave it there while I play you a song.
 

Profusely

Written by Robert Prouse, 18.02.2014
The integration of an athletic discipline into daily life in the Soviet Union is no undocumented phenomenon, it is acknowledged rather as a fundamental facet of its outward facing image. The body of the worker was symbolised in the athlete as the pinnacle of production, a subject perfected in use value. No less was this true of fascism, epitomised by Leni Riefenstahl's formally groundbreaking documentary of the 1936 Olympics, Olympia. The establishing of a link with the classical Olympian, a tacit recollection of a classical conception of the body prior to a Cartesian body-mind split. The body, of the athlete, of the Aryan, as historically determined, as perfectly suited to its goal. Olympia found its post-war place in the history of film but does it present the body as object of history and object of perfection or an aesthetically somatic concern? Let's not forget that Riefenstahl was a dancer, but we'll return to this later.
 

A Modest Proposal (after Jonathan Swift)

Written by Nathan Witt, 06.02.2014
Vandalised mansion in Aley, used as an IDF outpost during the 1982 Lebanon War.
 
This text started as a result of a workshop in June 2013 called On the Politics of Silence and Speaking by the Danish artist Sidsel Nelund and philosopher Nikita Dhawan at 98 Weeks, Beirut, part of Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks 6. I have tried to incorporate Sidsel and Nikita’s ideas to my own disparate ideas and footnotes about conceptual art that are not necessarily about identity and representation and to tie in ideas from Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance into some of my own ideas about Palestine, Israel and Lebanon - and finally two despondent scenes from Richard Linklater films.
 
I would like to discuss the legal ambiguity of other but it is such a large subject and it needs serious legal qualifications. Examining The Special Trial for Lebanon in The Hague, to the cases of Assange and Snowden and also the Protected Characteristics Act in relation to the case of JK Rowling’s moniker Robert Galbraith being leaked; they are all of great importance and hopefully to be addressed at a later date.
 

Zakira/Memory

Written by Nathan Witt, 11.09.2013
This text comes at the time of great worry for the neighbouring countries of Syria as the violence threatens to spill over further and that there is a consensus to let Syria sort its problems out itself without foreign intervention. It is important to consider the fact that this following text exists as a result of illegal activity in neighbouring Israel that has continued since the second world war to present day and that any military intervention against Syria only serves Israel’s interests, either as a diversion for the continual expansion and even advancement further into the West Bank, or for any additional advancement that borders Syria, either for water or land, or for testing out military capabilities.  I find it genuinely hard to see if Israel has any concern for its civilian population given its behaviour in international and regional affairs over the last 65 years and the State’s refusal to desist in both the advancement of settlements or further attacks and incursions into the West Bank, Gaza, Southern Lebanon, Jordan River or Golan Heights. An allied attack by the US, France - or Israel - on Syria is going to be catastrophic for the region’s stability. Watching Britain’s offering of televised democracy to pull out of military intervention was a tormenting relief that was almost surreal in both the immediacy of the decision and that the government was actually listening to the public.

Abandoning Nationality and Superstition

Written by Nathan Witt, 06.05.2013

If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,’ or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances, which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.(1)
Ernest Renan, lecture given at the Sorbonne, 1882.

This is an idea inspired by a comment about Cairo’s City of the Dead as a place where the spiritual goal is to celebrate the absence of judgment, which is to be left for God(2) and in many other people’s case in God’s absence. The City of the Dead reveals more than a vernacularized classification of death or the cultural appreciation of idol worship - regardless of being urban or rural. It is also a place of mutual habitation between the living and the dead where people live, cleaning the family house: the Leichenhauser. That habitation is mirrored, anchored, by the collective memories of people and amnesia, trauma and other emotions. This text is nothing but an attempt to try and encourage an aspiration and joy towards an abandonment of judgementalism in social spaces without discussing participation or religion. The migrancy of people from the countryside to a necropolis might not be borne out of a desire to participate but socio-political pragmatism, or human despair- and motives that are also prone to migrate and change.

Syndicate content