Klaus Lutz: Titan

Klaus Lutz, still from Titan, 2008/13
Gelatin-silver print
Film still photographed by the artist from 16mm film projection
Edition of 3 (+1 Estate Print)
30 x 40 in
[click on the image for full view]

I had the pleasure of coming upon animation images I'd never seen before-- from an artist unknown to me--
at the Armory Fair.  It was Klaus Lutz, the late Swiss artist who
worked in Manhattan until his death in 2009.  A little bit like stills 
from a Georges Méliès film, the Lutz images cast a spell even more more mysterious,
 involving layered exposures, and drawings over 16mm film shots somewhere past midnight. 

The white figurative drawing on black

stopped me in my tracks.  Lutz made

a transfer of secret treasures, as if to pass images in small 

celluloid packets, from one hand to another, or left in an envelope

slipped between door and floor. Titan's lot is an ironic fight via

incremental stabs and jabs, left hooks and feints, against the

indifference of the world.

A fantastic play unfolds for hours before dawn...

- CM

Klaus Lutz, still from Titan, 2008/2013
Gelatin-silver print
Film still photographed by the artist from 16mm film projection
Edition of 3 (+1 Estate Print)
30 x 40 in
 [click on the image for full view]

"The oeuvre of Klaus Lutz comes together as a fascinating, densely interlaced universe all its own. Based the premise that written language would soon be replaced by entirely visual communication, Lutz created an intricate sign system that he deployed across a whole range of media (16mm film, film stills, drawing, etching, and performance). Initially his preferred media were small-format dry-point etchings and copperplate engravings of narrative image sequences, some of them based on the writings of Robert Walser, whose work was of crucial importance to Lutz. Later Lutz turned to experimental filmmaking and film performances. By means of multiple exposures, various types of lenses, and self-constructed apparatuses, he created films that combined and overlapped layers of animation, performance, drawings and scenes shot on the streets of New York, where he had been living since 1993. Lutz shot the films all by himself in his one-bedroom East Village apartment. Reminiscent of early silent movies by Georges Méliès or Charlie Chaplin, the films relate the adventures of one man, Lutz himself, in a quixotic universe poised between dream and reality and made up of signs, shapes, everyday objects, and footage of the outside world. Presented in the format of Lutz’ spectacular invention, the balloon projection, Titan tells the story of the space odyssey of “small titan,” who suffers from delusions of grandeur and who playfully and elegantly captivates us to the point that we allow ourselves to be enchanted and transported to far-flung territories..."  - Martin Jaeggi (Translation Laura Schleussner)

Klaus Lutz, still from Titan, 2008/2013
Gelatin-silver print
Film still photographed by the artist from 16mm film projection
Edition of 3 (+1 Estate Print)
30 x 40 in
[click on the image for full view]

Special thanks to Sabina Kohler and Bettina Meier-Bickel of Rotwand Gallery for these stills from Titan, a late work in the  oeuvre of Klaus Lutz ((*1940 St. Gallen - 2009 New York). The Rotwand exhibition of Klaus Lutz's film Titan, together with stills and documentation from the Lutz estate, is on view May 25 to July 6, 2013 in Zurich, following a retrospective of his work at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich 2012. A Vernissage.TV documentation of the retrospective installation is here.  "He always used his drawings for his films, and he put in double projections..different layers of reality together... an amazing world of somebody who is flying and walking and doing things in the universe..." - Dorothea Strauss, Director, Haus Konstructiv, Zurich. 

 

 

 Some installation views from Klaus Lutz at Rotwand, Zurich: 

 

Klaus Lutz, installation view, bubble projection, Titan, Rotwand, Zurich

 

Klaus Lutz, installation views, bubble projection, Titan, Rotwand, Zurich

 

 

 

 

tamara ke: we do not have to worry about the thieves

 “Everlastingly unfolding dynamic, something ex-static. Potlatch. Anarchy in a new way – to treat this world as one, undivided gulp. Where vital wind of unlimited desire joins pain and pleasure, deprived word and psalm, dark abyss and transparency of the heights of mountains. Here, within this new world castles are built out of boiling magma and we are knights of desire – able to turn colors into substance of seduction. This new desire chants with the most precious lyrics ever: ‘Remember only what you easily can forget.’ Not political, beyond social or linguistic, this is anarchy of (nomadian) consciousness.” — TKE

TKE's colors are hallucinatory spectra. Thieves might avoid her grids; these images could be traps. A faux-naive touch recalls Sonia Delaunay channelled through A. R. Penck. Something like the back of Philip Guston's head re-genders as a bit(ten) player in a sad play about clowns. The Tarot may be in order.  An egret casts an aura of salvation over the loss of a child by drowning, or drawing. Tamara is evading the curatoriat. She's in a game of hide and sink.  Things submerge in the 'sticky sublime' of her oil-gashes.  She doesn't take 'no' for an answer. 

Tamara's oil stick drawings from the project 'we do not have to worry about thieves' were installed along a black tape/white wall grid--almost like a geologic timeline-- for the exhibition "Disoriented Orientation/Oriented Disorientation," at Wharton+Espinoza, Los Angeles, November 15 to January 4, 2013. To the Pharmakon Library, she is contributing these four images, which as drawings are oil on paper, 18 x 12 inches each.

-cm





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Tamara K.E. was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her master’s degree from Academy of Art Düsseldorf (2002). She represented Georgia in the 50^th Venice Biennial and the 1^st Prague Biennial in 2003. She has participated in museum shows that include Kunsthalle Hamburg (Hamburg), CoBrA Museum (Amsterdam), Daimler Contemporary (Berlin), House of Artists (Moscow), Van der Heydt Museum (Wuppertal), Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Oostende), Sprengel Museum (Hannover), Suermondt-Ludwig Museum (Aachen), and Museum am Ostwall (Dortmund).

Shana Moulton: Green Screen Glorious Cure

  "Of all the changes of language a traveler in distant lands must face, none equals that which awaits him in the city of Hypatia, because the change regards not words, but things. I entered Hypatia one morning, a magnolia garden was reflected in blue lagoons, I walked among the hedges, sure I would discover young and beautiful ladies bathing; but at the bottom of the water, crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks, their hair green with seaweed."  - Italo Calvino, Cities and Signs 4, Invisible Cities

Hypatia, a Neoplatonist mathematician, inventor and philosopher b. 370 AD) was the librarian of the Alexandria Library in Egypt. She was murdered by Christian fanatics led by the patriarch Cyril in 415, on the pretext that her death would quell the Neoplatonic political and religious opposition to Christianity in the city. "The fanatics caught Hypatia on her way to the University. They proceeded to pull Hypatia from her chariot, strip her naked, drag her to the church, butcher her into pieces, and then burn her body." Her mathematical treatises, written for her students, survive in fragments.

Hypatia is reborn fragment by fragment in the Pharmakon LIbrary.  At the moment, in a rebirth of restless signs. Shana Moulton changes them up in her new video, Restless Leg (2012). Logos used to mean 'word', now it may mean nothing more than a sign for a brand. Shana Moulton's alter-ego dreams of a cure...

To the Pharmakon Library, Shana offers two image composites. The first she compiled from commercial and non-profit marketing logos that associate women's wellness and potential life-enhancements with geometries of flow and a recreational palette; she first published these fragments as a suite for the IMG_MGMT series on ArtFagCity.

images courtesy Shana Moulton

The second is a trio of video stills from Restless Leg Saga (2012). Shana Moulton's video (together with a video  from her "Whispering Pines" suite of 2006), appears within the exhibition "Disoriented Orientation / Oriented Disorientation" at Wharton+Espinoza through January 4, 2013. 

Shana Moulton's 'cure' takes animation to the invisible city of Hypatia. The suicides' green eyes, from the bottom of the lagoon, emblazon a green screen, or is it algae, coating the surface of the azure.  At the surface of the lagoon, the green screen, laid like a blanket of life, warms the temperature of another room where Shana's alter ego waits in anxious desperation.  Animation becomes elemental.  The glorious body may appear.

Shana Moulton, installation view, Restless Leg Saga (left) and Whispering Pines (right) at Wharton+Espinoza, Los Angeles 2012. Images courtesy of Wharton+Espinoza.

 -cm

Shana Moulton earned her BA from UC Berkeley in Art and Anthropology and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Moulton has exhibited/performed at The New Museum, SF MOMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, Electronic Arts Intermix, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Wiels Center for Contemporary Art (Brussels), The Migros Museum (Zurich), De Appel (Amsterdam), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), The Times Museum (Guangzhou), and The 29th Ljubljana Biennial.

Claudia Hart: Food for Children

Claudia Hart
The Real and The Fake series are a set of still-life photographs that contemplate the death of food. They are Hartʼs response to surreal trips down the aisles of her local supermarket, where the opportunity to buy anything that is not highly artificial or toxic is severely limited. The Real and The Fake photos are classical still lives of nutritionally-empty industrial snack-foods that nevertheless have appealing Platonic forms. Photos of these fake real foods are integrated with obviously simulated computer graphics of apples. In these images, the real and the fake implode.They are representations that are fake but seem real, and are real but seem fake. Their style is also a hybrid, bridging between classical still-life painting - Cezanne's apples! - and an industrial product shot.

images courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery new york

Claudia Hart (b. 1955, New York) has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She creates virtual paintings that take the form of 3-D imagery integrated into photography, animated loops, and multi-channel animation installations.

Hart’s recent solo exhibition at bitforms,  When A Rose is Not a Rose, reflects on the Gertrude Stein poem of the same name (1913) and explores the artist’s own denial of death.
 

William S. Burroughs : TIME/HEMISPHERE (excerpt)

Now pay attention we are going to give a few hints..Look at your book
of Egyptian hieroglphs.Just here is a boy sitting down.  Now instead of
the stylized glphy suppose we had a painting of a boy which would
logically lead to painting others and some of them would be doing more
than sitting down in my army or just here is a plough we now I can
see a plow in the window of Sterner’s Hardward store that Jew in Cold
Spring charges too much for fence wire and I can see bronze plows in
corn and youn farm boys too in the old outhouse doing what boys will
do so charge it all up to fertility rise and her is ‘to pout out
water, to micturate’ hummm looks to me likes he pouring out more than
water and that brings up some pretty pictures.So you see I take a
picture that stands for and by God is a word and it just naturally
opens itself out feeling for other pictures doing what pictures will
doSO just let the words XXXXXX desolve in the picture.Why listen to
one house when you can see all the houses??So my words just disintegrate
in Gysin.I dont know if Mr.Graham Green is going to like this but he has
his place in the garden along with Truman Capotes  music across the golf
course echoes from high cool corner of the dining room a queer little
breeze flutters candle s on the table and swishes away down the dead
dead days..’ Now that could just swish away calkigrapghic like mice that
slph for you. Charcter pouring water wer his self “the Priest” they called
him.  A sick old junky pour water over hiself????Blood of Christ where
they made the atom bomb I went to school there..saw some boys glpy no
phallus, what is masculine glypy 94. male organs ghpy 74 to receive
77.to hold in the hand 92 and93 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge refuses to trans
late but we get the general idead and just here i Time as kin Tutt saw
it remember  ‘I’d rather be a mummy’ .. secon.. We have here on screen
some dried poppy pods a hawke and the sun and a skull cap near as I can
make it out from remote landing..Well an old junky in off the xxxxxx
parched plains of Kanas ate the poppy pods and got relief..The howk
xxxxx circles in the shattered bloe sky over Mexico..the skull cap is
still there..Minutes we have here a boxer dog a skull cap and the sun..
Now that boxer dog was called Shane and he was called in to lick a girl
out of her coma I Read about it only today in the Daily Mail for June 29
her father said ‘I prey that Shane will help her to get better’ ..Well
now I would’nt want to see too much sun light on a thing like that..Is
one expected to remove one’s skull cap?? Hour:: Well we got a hare here
setting down, some nice blue water a jar the sun and a roll of film
negative..Well the hare went thataway.A film boy stripped hiself naked
filled the jar with water from a blue river magic of all movies is
remembered kid standing there poured th water over himself and jacked
off into his skull cap. So left an old junky selling Christmas seals on
North Clark St.  Yes there’s the boy and there’s the blue river.Remember
the song. Yes I can see all the bandoned country clubs and weed grown
old courses a thousand lost   skull caps red mostly see the boys spitting
blood in the violet evening sky over Lima?   ‘Fight tuberculosis folks’
An old junky on North Clark St. Selling Christmas seals used too be me
Mister remember the caddy shirt o open on the golf course you’ll find him
here by the Blue River when the wind is right.And remember the old
junk on North Clark St.?? The Priest’ they called him.  Used to be me
Mister..cold blue alleys of Chicago..Lake wind like a knife..Pour water
on a sick old junky??Sacred Blood of Christ you son of puta..And here is
a picture from Spain.. the abandoned railroad..tunnel in th iron rock..
Weeds in front of the tunnel..two boys in there.. I see some white gobs..
boy on a long grey beach with dusky rose colored genitals, ankora on the
beach..all the old blue calandar pictures over here..Now as to how to
present it on page and how to indicate just where I am in pictures when
I write what this poses a problem..Unless the picture just lights up when
you press a button..What I mean is why not extend  our uh analogy of a
map and give precise coordinate points subject of course to change without
notice as when Clark street shifts from one picture to the other the way
an old St. will..And maybe next time I pass the tunnel those boys wont be
there just winds of Spain stirring the weeds in front of the tunnel so
refer you to The Book of the Dead..” field of grasshoppers..bushes--the
olive tree is my name..North of the bushes did you see there the leg and
the thigh’ washed back on Spain Repeate Performance page-. Maybe it was’nt
just hash Hassan J. Sabbah picked up on in Egypt..What about the glphies?
Now here is the progression.Words..glphys..drawing or painting expansion
of the glphys into a Gysin picture..You can do the same of course with
any photo..The “Priest they called him..The photo..Draw and old junk
there--blue grid of windows Winter sunlight..ice on the street..wind cold
from the lake..  Now as to presentation on page within a pracicl
budget.  First page text and the phoot.Second page..drawing  on image
lines-- Third page a Gysin picture.. That is using your time format   a
sapce on eace page for photo or picture..We could then wind it up with
a page of the intersection photos followed by a page of pictures..  Two
silent pages that could be immediately read by any attentive reader who
had followed the text and the intersections of text xxx wtih photos and
pictures.. (Alternately we could use  glyphs instead of photos or of course
both.. -------------------------------------------------------------------
a-----------------------------------------------------------------------ns
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                        love, Bill



excerpt from “The Hemisphere.” in TIME by William Burroughs with 4 drawings by brion gysin

“C” Press  1965

Transcribed from a copy in the Getty Research Institute Special Collections, accessed 10.17.2011 -
Christina McPhee

Katharina Sieverding: En Face World Line

Katharina Sieverding: WELTLINIE #9 A/D/A process, each 100 x 100 cm
courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

 Katharina Sieverding, Weltlinie, 1999 A/D/A Process, each 190 x 125 cm
courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

 Katharina Sieverding, Weltlinie #1, 1999 A/D/A Process, each 190 x 125 cm
courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

 Katharina Sieverding, Weltlinie #2, 1999 A/D/A Process, each 190 x 125 cm

courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne 

(please click on each fragment for the full image)

The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse.... 
The first word of the face is the “Thou shalt not kill.” 

-Levinas

 A world line: A special type of curve
in space-time. Each point of a world line
an event marked as barcode
Date time expiration SKU number almost forgot that

Polaroid hangover: photobooth mixagraphia made that contrast
Cured it to a ripe selection by one or another hair of another, my other, the curve
of my-story when I was in the nineties;
Follicles disorder the petri dish: if curved, could only grow effluvia,
pixels, plexis or else, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, mayhem, mass hate,
Digital-insensate eliminates, fields of kills.
Twenty year kills, so throw a curve on it, go check the contrast,
Intensify the chroma, spit out of photoshop, slide into baths,
carmine garance acetone alizarin anthrazine alliterate at last
attention deficit disorder, analog digital analog,  the face
of another commandment, love one another--

christina mcphee en face katherina sieverding / october 2011

upon encountering  her photo-based work at Art Platform Los Angeles / special thanks to Christian Lethert

Darren Banks: BLOBS

all images courtesy Darren Banks and Workplace Gallery


Darren Banks: Blobs

The Blob first crept onto movie screens, and into the collective consciousness in 1958, as an unstoppable, flesh-eating, gelatinous mass. In the fifties as we pushed to the outer limits of Space (Sputnik was launched in 1957) and the innermost realms of DNA  (discovery of the double helix, Watson and Crick, 1953), so the Blob was found during excavations in remote territories...

Examined under a microscope, the Banks Blobs occupy the fragile states between animal instinct and artificial intelligence...we see visceral qualities of genetic material--held in a tenuous equilibrium with industrial looking elements, though warped and melting...with delicate menace...

In Larry Cohen's 1985 film The Stuff, an amorphous, sweetly tasting, highly addictive substance  is commercially marketed to the public, gradually permeating and infecting every corner of American society...the stuff is actually a parasitic alien substance which uses humans as its hosts, manipulates them until it finally discards their dead, husk-like bodies...

Post millenium,  Banks' Blobs are best viewed through a kaleidoscope...we catch glimpses of the potentially familiar debris of our everyday landscapes...could that be the arm of an easy chair, raising its head like a dinosaur from the primeval swamp?...are those collected globules the remains of an X-box controller, melted and deformed in a house fire?...

 

excerpt from an essay on Banks' blob drawings by Iris Aspinall Priest 2010

Leigh McCarthy: Doppelganger

 

Tp 

The project "doppelganger" developed as a response to the curator, Tricia Lawless Murray, who invited me to contribute photography to a group show titled "eros/thanatos" about the life/death drives.  "Doppelganger" functions both as an ethereal-double and a harbinger -- the self and its shadow – and incorporates a process whereby I double expose film to create ghost-like images.

For the Pharmakon Library, I present unedited contact sheets rather than individual cropped images in order to reveal the photographic process which initiates a game of chance that generates latent discoveries in which a filmic narrative emerges.  Paired with the seascape, this technique allows for the fecund nature of the dialectic to emerge: the self/shadow, love/sickness (madness), death/rebirth, beauty/sublime, and love as remedy/poison and the poison as panacea.  By simultaneously dissolving these oppositions, the meaning constantly shifts creating a permanent state of ambiguity.

The narrative that propels “doppelganger” derived from a dream that my brother had where we climbed to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. In his dream, I was picked up by the wind and floated into marshy seagrass below.  Trapped by image-repertoire, my brother described the dream by referencing a Nestea commercial and an Aerosmith music video to depict my descent – his mind re-edited pop culture images he previously consumed. In my brother’s reformation of this imagery and in turn my remaking and doubling of his dream, meaning and essence become unhinged.  At the very end of the dream, just when he thought I was dead, I said, "that was fun, let's do it again", creating another doubling into an infinite narrative loop.

Leigh McCarthy is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and has exhibited her work internationally including group projects at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Special thanks to Jaime Beechum who assisted with photography.

--

leighmccarthy.com

bdy dbl: new drawings

Kristen Alvanson: Spells (Poison-In Poison-Out)

Lucas Michael: Rough Magic (10 Years in LA)

LUCAS MICHAEL
Still Life (LM Squared), 2008
30 x 40 inches
Black and White digital print on Fujiflex
edition of 5 + AP   
courtesy Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

click on the detail above to see the full image...

ROUGH MAGIC

Lucas Michael:10 Years in LA

EGHQ, Los Angeles, Jan 8th – Feb 15th 2011

Lucas Michael traces. Literally. At Emma Gray HQ, a survey of subtle objects from the artist’s years in Los Angeles, takes on the complex relations between tracing, inscription, imagined identities and over-writing.  Michael superimposes his signature on meticulously hand drawn frontispieces from books on Sylvia Plath.A photograph shows him ‘being Borg’ kissing the iconic tennis player’s trophy. The artist superimposes his own face, barely visible, onto a classic Liza Minelli from the Cabaret era.

Oliver Sacks, in his new book Mind’s Eye, takes a hard look at recognition. He considers the condition of not being able to recognize things visually except by placement.  Even faces are unrecognizable: the sufferer must impose some clue, some note, some mental mark, to cope. A related condition is alexia, the loss of the ability to read while still being able to write.  Michael takes up tracing like that: writing, as if not being able to read.  Something about ten years in LA: can he (we) still see the lines of flight, like jet trails over Santa Monica?

Lucas Michael does not lay claim to impersonation. His objects are intrigues, shards left at a site, from which he himself is long gone. “A ruin is an accident in slow time,” observes Cocteau.  We look for patterns at the archaeological site, as if Emma Gray HQ has become a dig, the objects study samples in search of pattern recognition: but we cannot read the signs.  In a low res performance video, the artist films himself taking Polaroids. The footage unfurls repeated Polaroid images as his face emerges from the emulsion. Beyond this, nothing happens.  Lucas brings us right up to the edge of visibility.He overwrites just to the edge of the legible imprint....almost-Borg, almost-Minelli, almost-Plath, almost-Lucas Michael.

Autobiography is ‘a discourse of self-restoration - by which one’s name...is made  as intelligible and memorable as a face.” (Paul de Man, via Kristine Stiles, in “Correspondence Course: Letters of Carolee Schneeman, MIT Press 2010). Lucas Michael will write that ruin and finesse that face: evidence is  to the contrary.  Site and citation conflate.  Lucas Michael’s ambivalent attachments make light work of a heavy tranche, that deep desire to identify with the beloved who may or may not be there. Lucas Michael’s erotic economy limits love to the accidental meeting. If you want to know the glory hole in Silverlake, you have to be able to read the signs.

-cm

Bertien van Manen: "Tirana: Mother and Bride" in MOMA's Pictures by Women 2011

Jean Watters : My Great Recession #barbies

Jean Watters as Avon Representative Barbie with inventory

Barbie Legs with Shoes from the Gallery Opening Outfit

Midnight Tuxedo Barbie

Jean Watters as Midnight Tuxedo Barbie with inventory

alexandria morgue in near-realtime, egypt 29 January 2011 (courtesy Aljazeera/live video clips)

parker tilghman / pharma 1 - 7

pharma series parker tilghman 2011