I passed by Cuchifritos gallery space at the south end of Essex Market today and saw this awesome sculpture that I recommend checking out. The artist is Tamara Kostianovsky.

Bound, 2007

It’s called ‘siblings‘ and consists of a pair of large hunks of meat suspended from metal meat hooks, elaborately rendered in recycled clothing and cloth. Her other work is even more awesome. I have nothing particularly insightful to add to this, I just found her construction and idea to be extremely beautiful in a grotesque sort of way but also cute and sweet; it hit right in the center of the bullseye for me with its fabulous execution and unexpected placement in my otherwise totally ordinary day.

I’m not sure what her politics are because I just heard of her for the first time today, and I would wreck it for me just a little if she were to tell me that her pieces were about our gruesome death-culture etc. etc. capitalism etc. etc. waste etc. factory food production etc….. What I see in these pieces is an almost joyful, exultant playing with meats and bones, not necessarily vis a vis FOOD but rather regarding WHAT WE ARE MADE OF – I imagine ripping apart my stomach and chucking entrails at you and giggling and running away, leaving sexy red handprints all over your walls.

Actus reus, 2008

Seduction Print 8 x 11 inches by HidenSeek [via Etsy].

Yesterday I had the good fortune to attend the premiere of Montreal-based choreographer George Stamos ‘Cloak’ at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on the West side. I have a hard time making sense of dance performance as opposed to other art forms; I react emotionally rather than thoughtfully and often feel like I’m not equipped with the proper vocabulary to discuss it. In this case, though, I was very taken with the show and felt it was really “about” something that I’m not sure the choreographers would totally agree it was “about.”

Ostensibly the hourlong piece was an exploration, through original electronic music and a combination of classical and vernacular movements, of the degree to which humans conceal and create their identities, and how that masking affects the revelations we make about ourselves in the course of our day to day lives. The movements were cyclical and repetitive, switching rapidly between comic gestures of exaggerated sexuality and yogic poses, peppered with fluid body rolling that recalled (to my eye) hip-hop and rave club dancing. The performers appeared in a series of plain knit face coverings, whipping out felt tip markers to scribble marks like faces over them before pulling off the masks. (The point seemed almost eye-rollingly blatant.) Sure, I agree, we all wear masks, sometimes many in a day, in an hour, and we both hide behind those masks and use them to achieve a greater degree of self-expression than we would have the courage to commit to, maskless. The most memorable costumes of the evening were the literally balloon-boobed black bunny outfits. The bunnies model-walked up and down the space, hips and balloon breasts out, faces eerily blank, covered by plain black masks, seeming to communicate that sexuality is performative and often the opposite of intimacy; another mask.

There were truly beautiful sequences. At one point in the performance, a man and a woman dragged microphones over their bodies, creating a sharp and breathy wordless rhythm. Their motions were deeply, viscerally sensual and intimate, however incongruous and separate their actions. At other points, one figure stood on a stool behind a screen, while another danced on the other side of the stage, his movements captured by a tiny digital videocamera and projected in realtime onto the screen, creating a live dual dancing exquisite corpse.

Emotional reactions to the microphones aside, the integration of technology in the piece was what I took away as actually the most interesting thing about it. I recall that going to a gallery and seeing a video installation or video art in the 90s more often than not meant standing in a room while a video played. Maybe a video would be projected onto something, usually inexpertly mapped to the surface if it was not flat because artists didn’t use to also be programmers. Sometimes video would pop up inappropriately in places where a photograph or drawing would do. I’m generalizing, but these are my early memories of first exposures to “video art.” My problem with this has little to do with the content or “message” of the art works but with the forced state of their construction. I believe that in creating art we give reasons for the things we do, and that extends most crucially to the choice of medium. If something could be still, why film it? If something must move, why paint it? (This is my major complaint about the Italian Futurist painters and why they only really succeeded in their theatrical pieces, most of which were never actually performed and about which almost no one knows.)

‘Cloak’ fascinated the hell out of me because of the very callous matter of factness about its use of technology. It is a document of its moment, of the cheapness and utter ubiquity of portable, digital devices for rendering high quality and instantaneous visual and aural communication. Many would argue that our current level of social development vis-à-vis the internet and social networking sites is on a downward trajectory, because our social experiences are increasingly mediated by veils of screens and speakers; those grumpypants would say that we are losing sight of our manners and empathy and lay the fault at the feet of “technology.” (Look no further than the series of articles currently on offer in the NYT about the perils of the data-choked life for this sort of luddite hand-wringing.)

It’s easy to get caught up in that kind of worrying for a lost civility, lost civilisation. But we mustn’t forget that technology and the distancing inherent in social network communication allow us to wear still more elaborate masks while we communicate more frequently and with a wider range than we ever have before. For many of us, too much baldfaced honestly is too emotionally draining to sustain. Those masks keep our very souls alive and we invent codes that our closest friends can understand but the rest of our viewers, readers, public, cannot. That’s not an inferior form of communication or a loss of civility but a heightened degree of civil sophistication.

‘Cloak’ makes a compelling case for both the beauty and banality of technology’s place in our lives. So used to it are we, and so cheap and available is it, that we can use so much of it for fun, whenever we want, for no reason, to create neat performance art. We can play with things that, just ten or twenty years ago, would look like magic. We can play exquisite corpse with crayons or we can play it with what would once have been an unimaginably expensive and rare and precious video projection system. And that’s cool, it’s no big deal. To George Stamos, this once precious technology is just another tool in his arsenal which includes bunny ears and markers and black underpants and liquid-smooth shoulder rolls.

Finally, we have gripped our technology firmly and begun to use it to make art. We are no longer enamored with our technology, building our art around it and sticking it places it doesn’t really belong. That is a real, concrete step in the evolution of contemporary art and it is new. It has only been happening in the last few years. We are watching it here, now. We are incredibly lucky.

Postscript: The NYT hated it, by the way. I think they totally missed the point.

Recent MJ collages, sized for wallpaper. I need a good new art project.

tired of this (black or white)
[1920x1200]

only human.
[1920x1200]

did I scare you?
[1920x1200]

on the floor (cassettes)
[1900x1200]

flight. – (via hellovagina).

[via Look-E-Here.]

::krampussy::maybe:: : (via pussymoneyw33d).

pixeloo: rEvolve..>>>