Bunkum layer or just curd cheese? Art ? The art of decomposition of Michel Blazy and other artists faces the burning questions of BILD and Le Monde: Qu'est-ce que l'art aujourd-hui?
Bunkum layer or just curd cheese? Art ? The art of decomposition of Michel Blazy and other artists faces the burning questions of BILD and Le Monde: Qu'est-ce que l'art aujourd-hui?
Nothing, fat and water - existentials which are experienced by people and articulated by contemporary artists of the cutting edge. A tendency to the amorphous and vanishing is brought to light by contemporary art, perhaps in untargeted differentiation to the arts in history, foreas this can not probably be judged as an expression of a western sense of doom in the 20th und 21. century. Well, as reasonable as this might be judged to be ! - But: It is a liberation of the avant-garde art against the seemingly duty to present a work in its apparent "being" - not only founded in "original" ideas, but also something with determinable existence, quantity, value, retention of value a.s.o.... Although the naturalistic aspect of Renaissance painting was originally perhaps less mimetic than scientific, involved in the documentary of natural sciences and medicine, like the ballistic and anatomical sketches of animals by Leonardo da Vinci let us suggest - who, by the way,. drew the sketches for Versalius's main ouvre about the anatomy of the human body, as explored on body parts stolen from furnitaries? Thus, the naturalistic approach of Leonrado or Dürer might be overweighted in its artistic meaning, as for example it was at first documentary, and even only in its second sense a sketch for the ephemeral. But as sketches by a master's hand they are, in their role as the historic walking towards the quasi-monumental Dürer Hare, traditionable, predictable, just monumental documents of a newly calculated access to reality in art. What is preserved in them, is the character of objects of art and its subjects. It is thus not surprising that observations of quasi-naturalistic features of the resolution of such foundations have a source in marginalized areas of art, especially the film as another, 'lower' media, and feminist art. Some of such films are from the pen of Peter Greenaway, whose "Draftsman's Contract" demonstrates how the "naturalistic approach" of the artist and he social implications of symbolic rituals are visually documentative - although they are sometimes unconsciously subverting - so that the drawings represent, finally, what they are not meant to show - not just the plot against the cartoonist but its backgrounds, the spirits that he painted unconsciously and such - called.
Foto
Michel Blazy
In Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" also two observers, two biologists, forfeit their academic subject the snails such, that they themselves (after all, and last and least) expose their bodies in the moment of death in front of a running film camera, to create an impressive document of the snails nutrition with biological 'waste' products. The film - not, strictly speaking, Greenaway's film, but his idea of the biologists' documentary, is so far the primary object of a perception and illustrative production of natural decay processes, that is in this case connected with both scientific and aesthetic standards. In the arts, too, the issue of decay and mold begins in its narrow sense not in the symbolic tradition of the vanitas images, but in the quasi-scientific naturalism and the documentary approach to nature. The self-portraits with moldy food by Cindy Sherman belongs to the first internationally presented art-works that aroused such, and interestingly opened up the consideration if to be disgusted was allowed now, but this discusssion kept for some time without the outrage which got visible finally in 2009, when the issue of 'exclusive', pointedly mold centered art awoke in Paris' Palais Tokyo for Contemporary Art - and a related issue with Daniel Braeg opened in the Stadthaus of Düsseldorf: "Mold-Show at the Museum - Is this still art or even disgusting? Take care if you see moldy living resources in the refrigerator the next time: It could be art !" headlined the newspaper "BILD" with an almost theoretical approach! This, while the museum Kunsthalle Düsseldorf shows the exhibition "Eating the Universe. About food in the arts“ from the 28th of November up to the 28th. of February 2010, this means, just now and still for some days: mold carpets, "pavement pizza" a.s.o.....Just look and do not "eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it...."
Whereas the town hall, attributed the issue clearly to the tradition of still-life, the first major solo exhibition of international reputation for the French artist Michel Blazy, born in 1966, in the new Paris Palais Tokyo for Contemporary Art, placed the topic more persuasive into the context of Land Art and describes the theoretical approach of the "mold-artists" far more correct as a "decomposition" - that is, more a kind of deconstruction in the discourse reflecting tradition of literary theory, not primarily connected to the Christian symbolism of the art tradition.
This "Decomposition" is otherwise an expression of a new bio-physical realism, philosophically speaking, because there is no discourse that is analytically represented but, on the contrary, a natural, bio-physical process comes back into favor of representation. In this respect is simply one aspect of nature the theme of the decomposing arts. As such, the false title of shocking kitchen-litter as Bild suggests or even Le Monde's overemphasize on a new theoretical approach oversiees the conservative aspect of classical mimesis in mold art,, which just put the point to something mrginalized but as natural as flies on a stillife of the 17. century or the hairs of Dürer's hare. Its innovative aspect is this neglected figuration the mold artists exhibit from nature - thus, their art is primarily representation of 'naive' extant, of something overlooked. The decomposition, which give Blazy, Greenaway's biologists and Sherman raise to in their representations, are someway discourse-resistent natural processes.
The relationship with land art, which - originally located in nature instead of the Museum, creates nature or transformes, is in this strictly mimetic impulse of the 'mold art'. As Blazy et al. also include traditional media and objects to make the experience of their artworks an easy and manageable topic, they dispense co,pletely with a critique of the institutionalization of the contemplation of nature as an activity in museums, but they rather strengthen and establish the potential of such institutionalized experiences.
Thus, Decomposition is boring backlash, mold of tradition? But well, the works are quite funny. We will shortly show this - parallel to the New Year's breakfast - Accompanied by the BacktotheRoots-art is, that actually the naturalistic view of the world and nature, for example, with Leonardo and Dürer, proves a monumentalist staging of an independent being - how thin and old it ever may be, like Durer's old woman. Likewise, the still lifes of the 17th century, with all their expiration suggestive crush, show the dead animals, after all, in all its former lively, physical beauty, even the insects in loving detail as a form of lush flowering of nature, which is, like the artist, lovingly giving shape to every little thing or being, even if only for a certain time.
Dürer
Hare, 1502
Decomposition now shows form, on one hand, as something that includes monstrous deformity and instability, as something that refers to processes and cuts off the pleasing detectability by the eye of a viewer, owner or artist. On the other hand, form presents deformity, which shows the existence - in fact almost in all its philosophical depth, beyond the nothingness - of the formless, or of the amorphous, as the discontinuous, as far as their existence is in a way empirically demonstrated and staged. "It" or rather "something" thus has not to firm as a continuing object to be existent. This is for the classical ontology - the philosophical theory of being - a problem, but especially contemporary physicalist philosophies - that should not be confused with their mathematical schemes - , show and confirm by reduction tests on electromagnetic fields, that the idea of stability is a simplified form-projection and at first an auxiliary assumption of the (human) brain and language.
* The ontic * - thus not to think as form ! - is difficult, but feasable, yes, almost conceivable. And we can even see it now, just look who trusts the mold artists. Spectator's expectation bursts within us ..... the eye hungers and lusts ....
While we meddle unriped bananas as our fresh cereal, we consider a Blazy collection of asomething looking like a Buddhist temple tower, but made of stacked orange peels in various states of decay, sometimes already pretty brown white, sometimes orange or tense.
The object proves to us, especially well photographed, that the vanitas still lifes were not pure inventions, but flies and mosquitoes certainly genuine, though it also becomes clear that the nature of fruit and vegetables in the Baroque Image type has not the soft elegance, smoothness of mature skin, demo staring at the oranges from Blazy.
Photo:
Michel Blazy
Le Monde reports about Blazy's solo exhibition of 22 works at the Palais Tokyo, that a wall made of carrots and mashed potatoes is shown, and even flowers from bacon sauce. The report's title is "Qu'est-ce que l'art aujourd'hui?" (Thus this is art today?). The video of the exhibition's opening shows that Blazy has done quite enough to fit actually even reactionary demands (!). This means for the contemporaries, they shall show pleasing craft skills in their presentation - that is, reflect the reality as "everybody" sees it and expects it - thus, they shall use their art do justice and glorify these expectations.
For example, the wall that is to Le Monde quite scribbled of soft food, a shimmering, monumental wall, has a surface effect by a subtle network of lines and the color effects of carrot's red - a classical aesthetic effect develops that somehow recalls the emphatic lineation of Gustav Klimt, really not a naturalist. So too, that what is perceived as natural or as a representation of nature, is changing frequently and that art can not always - but sometimes, somehow - detect the artificiality of natural forms.
Photo: Michel Blazy, Little Chicken.
Another work shows a kind of rural idyll, a genre scene as sculpture, specifically, a chicken coop with animals, all made of chocolate. The forms are carefully tuned, feathers and rooster combs designed with almost gothical joy of details. Something like a pile of straw in the center is dedicated to organic food staples and to the discontinuity of existence.
André Magnin, the exhibition director of the Palais Tokyo, stresses, that Blazy's installation is indeed a case of "great" art that seeks to impress not only through its aesthetic development but also through their expansiveness and widening, say to so, its aspects of existence.
An installation of mashed potatoes, like a spacious, soft, lush carpet lends a special quality to the room , also forms the pedestal for a gigantic animal skeleton, which occurs to funny Le Monde in this context as something like dog food .....
The aesthetic effect is, as usual, rather the reverse. The sculptures remind us on Anish Kapoor's monumentalism, who works also with grease, wax and pure pigment, and builds such materials up to the monumental staging of huge "biological", sometimes "non existent" forms - called "voids" (as in "Archeology and Biology", for more information read Arts On.com "Svayambh - an irreducible monument, monumental. sculptures and installations by Anish Kapoor at Haus der Kunst in Munich, 2007-2008, http://www.arts-on.com/kapoor.html) - with 'fitting counterparts' (the fine sense of the term "le pendant", something for french language philosophy if understood as "le" in the sense of the personal pronoun for somebody male and "pendant" as adverb in the sense of "while" - in addition a quite indian way of conservative female existence as just and only married, - male, but only living as long as the husband lives, a "while-man" :) ) in artists like Joseph Beuyss, whose naturalistic material can be understood - see Vaseline and other oils and fats as its own representation of instruments - not with Beuys but with Kapoor: sometimes in the sense of Art Deco .. Michel Blazy, as in the Palais Tokyo, is somewhere in between: demonstration of composing their own material aesthetic, a kind of ironic reference to artistic types, genres, styles and concepts, and monumentalism, decay, decomposition, "mixed manure" in the best sense.
Anish
Kapoor at the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Photo: Ulrike Ritter
While I'm now turning to mix up the curd and honey mask with cucumber slices, I remember with what strange aggressive care it was controlled at home that no food were used for beauty games and treatments. In view of the starving children in Africa and elsewhere in the world, food was sacred? So at least my parents tried to explain it, although a connection is obviously highly artificial to construct. Suppose I'd buy my food systematically in third-world stores, then it would only be good if I increased my consumption, because use a portion of it was used for personal hygiene? Thus, the "Don't play with food "-philosophy was rather a figment of the hidebound late Forties, when milk and honey on the eyelids evoked the hatred of the incompletely denazified farmer next door against the Allies-whore. Now contemporary art has come loose with these limitations and fears finally. Since the square of yellow hazelnut pollen and land-art the installation as form of an artwork in the interior or the exterior is free to be built out of any kind of materials from nature. Land-Art is the origin of some more aspects of Blazy's decomposition art: the principle of natural decay, to which land-art installations are limited as far as sensitive to 'wind and weather': thus, corrosion, drift and dispersal, which soemetimes destroy, sometimes continue the artistic process. Even before the Hazelnut's dust Richard Serra's rusted steel sculptures, although formal within the classical sculpture, caused real indignation. Rust, in daily life a kind of signature of misery in the perspective of the motorist, and now in the arts used as a natural surface of the outdoor exposed steel - thus tis not as a provocation? At least, a cry of horror went through Bochum in the early eighties, while the city was knwon as revolutionary because of the few naked actors who were jumping around on Peyman directed theatrical stage in Bochum at that time.
Steel Sculpture by Richard Serra, 2009
Thus, decay as moment of aesthetics is not new. But the monumental, theoretically and arthistorically systematized form of Michel Blazy's "decomposition" is still new and, as the already mentioned artworks show, it is not reducible to still lifes or naturalism, but in addition to any shown materiality it is intellectually stimulating - really enlightening - by the reference to the natural and material term of art. The questions of the newspapers Le Monde and Bild, if this can in fact be art, just fail the bull's eye, because they overlook completely that such a form of employment with artificial and natural decomposition has always been art in history. The right approach would have been to ask, especially in the case of Le Monde: Qu'est-ce qu'etait l 'art? (That was art?)
A somehow related subject is "Eat Art". It can be visited now in the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, featuring the artists Sonja Alhäuser, Christine Bernard, Michel Blazy, Arpad Dobriban, Thomas Feuerstein, Carsten Holler, Thomas Rentmeister, Philip Ross , Mika Rottenberg, Judith Samen, Shimabuku and Jana Sterbak. They show the continuing relevance of art dealing with food as a foundational interface between art and life. The exhibition also affects critical aspects, such as the contrast between affluence and famine in the various world regions, consumption and globalization, modern nutrition lessons and cooking shows, health neurotics and fast food. "
The exhibition "Eating the Universe. Vom Essen in der Kunst“ runs from 28th November to 28th February 2010. The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is open daily except Monday from 12 until 19 clock, Sundays and public holidays from 11 until 18 clock. The entrance fee is 5.50 euros, concessions 3.50 euros. A catalog is available.
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4
D-40213 Düsseldorf
Phone: +49 (0)211 – 89 962 43
Telefax: +49 (0)211 – 89 291 68
Citied from Kunstmarkt
Now there are coarser, but also scary-funny asides of the arts in innovation of decomposition, such as the chocolate pralines by the American artist Stephen J. Shanabrook. He is originally from Ohio and gondoladed a few years around the world before he decided to settle down with his shop in New York. He produces chocolates using molds from corpses, which he had stolen in a Russian morgue. Recently his chocolates were served with coffee in Tasmanian, in the city's new Museum of Modern Art. They offered of course, teeny versions, to evoid a devaluation of the real, major works: These chocolate candies stage death and decay, and are also rich in allusions and stories: they are shaped by impressions of body parts that did not belong to quite normal mortals, but to victims and perpetrators in the context of criminal offenses, so scars, bullet wounds, cramps, etc. determine the gruesome aethetics of the horror-sweets. Well, that is, of course, in a way perverse, and somehow even evokes the idea of cannibalism, which brings us finally back at the start, which I, given that New Year's Eve is the ultimate chocolate night, after which food with excessive sugar would be destroyed to litter, well, reject as culturalless. "The thief, the cook, his wife and her lover" - another film by Peter Greenaway, who deals with decomposition, with the destruction of culture through the lower cooking, which eventually, in a classic scene that leads, if we remember well, that the cook who let the well educated lover of his wife brutally, letting him be filled up with books and picked up like a Christmas goose - well, this cook ended finally in fornt of the chocolate-covered body of this victim of him and was forced to eat him..... In short, less human contact seems to be more.....finally moldy orange peels reflect art quite likewise, even if already gradually moldy. However, this story about art and mold is now more and more getting into psychologizing and narrative films, what will of course end up with Chabrol and the famous classical work "Disgust" ("Ekel"), where a highly undisgusting blonde can be watched to loose the difference between fat men and moldy rests of fat food.... just feels to be forced to clean up with them in a similar way as she knows from food.....the chocolate criminology, etc., etc. .. Just try a piece of it, but keep your distrust against sweets....:)
Interview with Shanabrook on VICE
Report: Ulrike Ritter