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What is Public Space? Just ask a pigeon....

I went down a rabbit hole and found this Pigeon.

This is a video work by German interdisciplinary artist, Thomas Geiger. He stages humorous performance works in various public spaces and places with a gently disruptive and discursive style.

The pigeon (preformed by Julien Deransy) discusses what holds humans back in public space. He talks from the pigeon's perspective; the non-human (Post-Human) perspective.

“Dear public, this wonderful public space, in which I bathe in all freedom, is for you a corset …”

What is public space?.....I think maybe the question is what can public space be, depending who or what you are.

Speaking of who you are......

Thomas Geiger's website

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Art-isms: New Materialism

Goodwin, Elena., Estelle. Barrett, and Barbara Bolt. “Carnal Knowledge : Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts”. First edition. London [England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

This book has been recommended to me to help me position my current practice. Have just read the Introduction written by Barbara Bolt. Key concept so far is material agency. Got a lot of reading to do!

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William Kentridge - Triumphs and Laments

In 2016, William Kentridge’s work, Triumphs and Laments was installed in Rome. It was a 500 by 10 metre mural created on the banks along the Tiber River. In the form of a non-chronological visual narrative, it told the history of Rome. Its offical opening was an evening public performance with music, performers and projection.

Kentridge's style of drawing, using charcoal and ink, is in seen in much of his works on paper and in his animations, is very evident in this work. To create it, stencils were placed on the walls by the banks of the river. Water jets were sprayed around them to remove the grime of years of pollution. The city monuments commission and the river authorities did the installation and the water used was, from the river. Over the years, the grime would return and the image gradually fade. When I was in Rome in 2017, parts of the mural were still visible. 

Information on Kentridge’s website.

Video about the making of Triumphs and Laments.

The opening performance.

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Lara Favaretto - Thinking Head

This work was produced for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. The work originates from one commissioned for the Nottingham Contemporary in 2017. 

The project represents the working human brain as a machine that creates thoughts, and then progressing them into meaning. Above the entrence of Central Pavilion of the Biennale, a cloud of vapour was emitted, like steam from a strange machine version of a brain. Within the pavilion was a repository of objects, placed in groups on shelves. The labels were of 50 keywords and the combination of these archived objects with keywords would processed in the minds of the viewers. Each group signifies a section of the mind as in the manner of a phrenological map. 

The next part of this work was a series of talks with a small group of artists, writers and other would discuss one of the “Thinking Head “ keywords. This was live streamed at the time with no audience present.  For a least an hour, from within a WW2 underground bunker these groups of people would discuss, or decode a single keyword. Prior to the discussion, each  participant would be given a separate set of images to personalise further the individual’s response. 

Favaretto was in effect, producing a kind of organic super computer, processing and defining concepts through collective thinking.  

When I saw this work in Venice in 2019, I had not understood how it was structured. It was later on when I was working through the complicated website, I started to make a little more sense of it. The written reflections in the Distraction section are quite varied. Some are quite scholarly and others wonderful loose musings.

The collections of random objects grouped with no apparent connection to the key words funny, and yet at the same time, pushes you into different directions to rethink about what that key word could mean. The images given to participants to link to the key words for the discussions, can be viewed under the key words from the phrenological head.

Home page of Thinking Head.

About thinking Head.

Written responses from those participants not able to attend talks.

If you have trouble finding the links to the talks via the Thinking Heads web page, this way might be quicker.

“I like to shift from perfection to the fall, to push the work to its tipping point, its limit, to endanger it, to the point of making it yield, jam, collapse.” Lara Favaretto

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Sophia Brous - The Invisible Opera

Sophia Brous is a multi-disciplined performance artist originally from Melbourne, she is now based in New York. She curated this contemporary performance work, specifically designed for public space.

A live, spoken commentary is played over bluetooth headphones. In iteration of the work at Melbourne Rising, June 2022, the audience is seated on a stand in Fed Square, towards Southbank and down the Yarra. The voice describes the elements of the view and becomes more descriptive as seemly random actions of pedestrians become more choreographed. As participants, the audience are lead to an alternative view of the city, a shifted experience of what is familiar place to many.

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Sonia Leber and David Chesworth

Detail from "We Are Printers too" 2013

This work, by Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, is an exploration of ways which we share information. The approach to their work is described as being "speculative and archeological". The setting is the interior of the factory purpose build to print The Age newspaper. This building, no longer required, became a setting of a reactivation through sound and vision, revealing its past use and historical positioning in the evolution of human communication. A lone drummer, activates the space in the opening sequence, referencing ancient ways humans commutated over distance in historical times.

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Elizabeth Tomos - Performance Print

Elizabeth Tomos is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who works across performance, printmaking and drawing.  She is a lecturer at Falmouth University in the UK.

I recently attended an online event of her Performance Print practice as part of the Draw to Perform festival in Brighton, the UK. She was commissioned to produce a work as part of the Festival in July 2022. The work  is titled “Vibrant Matter”.

Her process includes contact dance improvisation performance to produce a set of prints. Some of this work forms part of her research for her PhD Performance/Print methodolgy.

In 2019, Tomos had a residency at Cozens St studios in Brunswick. (Joel Gailer, a lecturer in Printmaking at RMIT is a member of Cozens St Studio and a practitioner of Performance Printmaking)

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teamLab and Autonomous Resonating Life

teamLab produced this immersive, sound and light sculputral installation, resonating microorganism of life - solidified colour.

It represents the connections of life, including the relationships with people, natural phenomena, physicality, continuity and new colours. The light bodies respond to changes in light levels, movement and touch. As people move around and activate them, the free standing "ovoids" make sounds and respond with changing colours that will effect all of them.

teamLab is an international art collective. It is interdisciplinary team works collaboratively and includes artists, mathematicians, programers, CG animators, engineers and architects. Their projects explore how humans relate to and understand the world, through a practice that navigates art, technology, science and the natural world.

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Max Meldrum, painter - Founder of the Australian Tonalism school.

Max Meldrum's painting style was a kind of meld between formalism and abstraction. It is now considered as a precursor of minimalism, and though Meldrum himself railed against Modernism, his work was leading towards that direction in Australia.

Through half closed eyes, and painting directly onto the canvas without preliminary drawings, Meldrum theory was based on pure observation without subjective feeling or personal expression.

In Memo, an online Art Journal, Jarrod Zlatic has written a review of the exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Light and Shade: Max Meldrum and his Followers.

His teaching influenced a group of Melbourne artists in the inter war years. They include Clarice Beckett and Justus Jorgensen who were students at the Meldrum School of Painting.

(The above image is of a detail Ballarat Gardens, 1923, from the Australian Art Auction Records site.)

In my relief printmaking practice, I regularly print using a reduction method. Translating zones of images into tonal blocks of individual colour is integral to the process. In planing a print , if I am using an image such as a photograph, I will look with at it with half closed eyes to try to identify those colour zones.

(Disappointing, are his views on women artists. In a quote cited in the Wikipedia page ("Can a Woman Be an Artist". The Mail (Adelaide). Vol. 27, no. 1, 391. South Australia. 21 January 1939. p. 1. Retrieved 10 August 2019 – via National Library of Australia.), Meldrum said that "to do some things equally as well as men is sheer lunacy". )

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Mia Salasjö

Mia Salasjö is an artist and composer. She writes musical scores using a numerical system that she developed. A series of her works are based on translating architectural drawings and building them into sound works.

This is a detail of some of her work recently exhibited at Gertrude Glasshouse titled 1000 Year Plan for Gertrude Glasshouse. Using coded and sequenced numbers systems and different colours representing different elements, Salsjö constructs her score through these detailed schematic drawings. Her hand drawings become works in themselves and brings herself into the composition along with the architectural elements.

A major new commission by Fed Square and the National Gallery of Victoria will be part of a birthday celebration for Fed Square, to be performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

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Umberto Giovannini - Xiloreportage Petrolio, 2020

Umberto Giovannini is an Italian printmaker and teacher who works mostly in woodcuts. He has developed a process that he calls Xiloreportage, where he produces a form of journalistic, visual diary as he travels.  He travels light, carrying a kit of woodcarving tools and materials.

Giovannini undertook several journeys, starting in London, following the oil road into Basilicata to report on the environmental and social disasters there and ending in the Apennines following a trade route of a now lost, ancient ecconmy centred on coal and chestnuts.

He walked and cycled on the most recent journey, staying out of contact, offline. This series, he considers as a voice of protest against the destruction caused by the oil industry in the south of Italy.

Each work is 12×31.5 cm. So far there are 58 images, here are five.

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Katie Stackhouse's Sculptural Vessels: sounding and performing 

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Nick Cave - Semiotics and Codes in his writings

Nick Cave wrote in the Red Hand Files, Issue 136, February 2021, a response to a question regarding his referencing of Christ in his songs. The questioner wondered if Cave regarded himself as being a christian.

“Personally, I need to see the world through metaphors, symbols and images. It is through images that I can engage meaningfully with the world. The personalising of this invisible notion of the spirit is necessary for me to fully understand it….”

Cave is saying here that he understands the world through signs, in the form of metaphors, symbols and images. He further states,

“I find that using the word ‘Christ’ as the actualising symbol of the eternal goodness in all things extremely useful. The Christ in everything makes sense to me — I can see it — and helps me to act more compassionately within the world.”

Cave, despite not considering himself to be a christian, is consciously using the christian belief of “eternal goodness” as a code to interpret the world, in a sense, in a spiritual way. Using christ as a symbolic figure, effectively as a visible embodiment of that sense of goodness existing in everything. 

For Cave, this drives a more compassionate way of acting in world. 

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"Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous"

Joan Miro, 1936

This is a fragment of a longer quote from Miro.

I read this quote as a way to consider anything as a source for investigation and exploration for art making.