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Jesse Mockrin

The dandy cuts a paradoxical figure in culture. To some, he epitomizes style superseding substance: a man of vanity, disengaged from politics, who sees “the world as an aesthetic phenomenon,” according to Susan Sontag. Others valorize the dandy as a champion of individuality and expression, challenging standardization perpetuated by capitalism. 

Charles Baudelaire wrote dandies represented “the last gleam of heroism amid the decadence.” Such contradictions—between artifice and authenticity, massification and the avant garde—embodied by dandies has long inspired the painter Jesse Mockrin, who takes on contemporary dandyism in Korean pop stars and men’s high fashion for her project XOXO at Galerie Perrotin Seoul. If the fastidiously stylized exterior of dandyism conceals a subversive interior edge, Mockrin’s sumptuously rendered oil paintings similarly challenge the monolithic status quo with artful subtlety. Mockrin is interested in the ways dandy men’s cultivation of beauty and indulgence in pleasure unabashedly embrace traditionally feminine preoccupations, destabilizing gender norms. 

In mining and mixing imagery of Rococo frippery, K-pop pretty boys, and men’s fashion editorials, she locates a spark of authenticity and dissidence beneath the manufactured fantasy artifice of the Korean boy band industry, which co-opts and subverts colonial stereotypes of the Asian male as effeminate, and beneath the commodity fetish of luxury fashion, which has been pushing men’s dress in a foppish direction, replete with floral patterns, silk, and pussy bows. 

The tension between what is seen and unseen, the public and private, surface and content in the subject matter is also heightened in Mockrin’s striking employment of cropping in the paintings’ compositions. Mockrin continues the dialogue in painting exploring celebrity and sexuality in the work of artists like Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Peyton, integrating images from consumer culture into the realm of high art. 

But with XOXO, Mockrin takes the process a step further by reinserting the avant garde discourse back into mass culture as the paintings also serve as a fashion editorial in Document Journal. In Mockrin’s intercessions with consumerism, art is not subsumed by capitalist machinery but rather holds a mirror to the fraught contradictions of modern life in the neoliberal age, suggesting the liberative potential in commodity culture. 

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Au fil de la texture de l’esprit

L’exposition ORIGIN organisée par la Galerie Perrotin, Paris retrace le parcours du groupe Origin créé en 1962 par un groupe d’artistes coréens, issus du département de peinture de la prestigieuse université Hongik. Origin s’est développé pendant plus de 50 ans, fait rare pour un groupe artistique, renouvelant et repoussant les limites de l’art abstrait. Les membres fondateurs d’Origin, CHOI Myoung-Young, SUH Seung-Won et LEE Seung-Jio, sont des personnalités importantes qui ont exprimé leur originalité à travers l’exploration de l’art abstrait. Nés au début des années 40, ces 3 artistes ont connu la colonisation japonaise, la guerre de Corée et la révolution du 19 avril 1960. Ces événements de l’histoire récente ont blessé profondément le peuple coréen en lui infligeant des souffrances indescriptibles. Ainsi il convient de replacer les œuvres de ces artistes dans leur contexte historique. Au début des années 60 lorsque Origin fait son apparition, le monde de l’art coréen se divisait en trois formes principales: l’académisme, hérité du Japon, qui était centré sur l’imitation et la reproduction, l’ « abstraction chaude » qui sublimait les souffrances existentielles de la guerre de Corée à travers la peinture, et enfin la « peinture raisonnée » qui reflétait un nouvel environnement social au lendemain de la révolution du 19 avril 1960 pour la démocratie. Ces trois courants

sont intimement liés aux événements historiques qu’a subis la Corée, d’ailleurs les deux derniers furent créés par des artistes issus d’universités des Beaux-Arts inaugurées après l’instauration de la République de Corée en 1948. Ainsi ces deux formes d’art symbolisent les prémisses de l’art contemporain coréen et revêtent une grande importance du point de vue de l’histoire de l’art coréen.

Une décennie environ sépare ces deux courants et leurs concepts sont assez distincts. Il est intéressant de souligner que si le premier courant extériorisait la souffrance et l’horreur de la guerre, le second tente, au sein d’un environnement instable, de reconsidérer « les origines de la peinture » à travers une vision constructive du monde. « Pendant un certain temps, les membres d’Origin s’opposèrent violemment aux sentiments excessifs présents dans l’« abstraction chaude » qui avait envahi l’art coréen d’avant-garde. Leurs œuvres que l’on pourrait qualifier d’aristocratiques utilisaient la toile comme médium et prônaient la planéité de la peinture.» (LEE Yil « Vibrant Young Art », 1967)

Si on se demande si un art « à la fois réfléchi et sensuel » a réellement existé, nous pouvons en trouver l’exemple dans les œuvres des artistes d’Origin, en particulier, CHOI Myoung-Young, SUH Seung-Won et LEE Seung-Jio qui représentent et reflètent les changements de l’époque. C’est vers 1967 au moment de l’exposition « Korea Young Artists Combined » que leurs œuvres s’affirment encore un peu plus. CHOI s’essaie à une œuvre abstraite traitant du problème originel de la peinture, SUH expérimente une composition de l’espace stricte à travers la figure du triangle et des baguettes de couleurs tandis que LEE construit une œuvre abstraite géométrique par la répétition de structures cylindriques. Le critique OH Kwang-Su avait décelé dans ce courant la « nouvelle perception de la peinture objective ».

« L’abstraction géométrique révélée par Origin peut être considérée comme le contraire de l’« abstraction chaude », car elle possède une composante intellectuelle enracinée dans un raisonnement logique, c’est-à-dire l’« abstraction froide ». L’« abstraction froide », se concentre sur la reconnaissance de la toile, affirmant ainsi une certaine objectivité et une distance.» (« Chilled Fever, Chaos and Meditation », OH Kwang-Su, 1979).

L’émergence consécutive de différents groupes artistiques au début et au milieu des années 70 favorise la diffusion de nouvelles expérimentations en peinture et en sculpture ou encore la performance.

C’est le mouvement Dansaekhwa (peinture monochrome) qui se démarque dans les années 70. Officialisé en 1975 à travers l’exposition « Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White» à la Tokyo Gallery, le Dansaekhwa a continué sa percée en 1977 lors de l’exposition « Korea: Facet of Contemporary Art » au Tokyo Central Museum of Art, et en 1983 avec « The Latter Half of the 70’s: An Aspect» exposition qui a voyagé dans cinq musées au Japon. Figurant dans des manifestations artistiques de grande ampleur organisées par le Seoul contemporary Art Festival ou l’École de Séoul, le Dansaekhwa est ainsi devenu le courant principal de l’art coréen. CHOI, SUH et LEE se rapprochèrent des artistes Dansaekhwa de la generation

précédente qui développaient leurs oeuvres approximativement à la même période et partageaient une situation culturelle identique. Le Dansaekhwa, mouvement principal des années 70-80, privilégie la pureté et le côté intact des éléments jusqu’à leur maturation, propre à la culture coréenne. Ainsi, ils limitent leur palette de couleurs tout en insistant sur l’ascèse à travers la répétition de gestes, appliquer, vaporiser, marquer la peinture. L’abstraction n’était pas le but ultime mais plutôt un moyen d’atteindre le moi intérieur, un espace spirituel, la nature et l’univers. On trouve aussi cette spécificité esthétique dans les travaux respectifs de CHOI, SUH et LEE.

Sign of Equality de CHOI Myoung-Young révèle le caractère extensible de l’espace qui ne possède plus de limite et peut se dilater à l’infini. Cette dimension peut être perçue comme l’agrandissement de la surface de contact entre le corps et le sujet plutôt qu’un simple accent mis sur l’importance de l’espace. Si l’on considère que la toile est un petit univers, l’artiste doit sans cesse être en contact avec elle. L’artiste a utilisé son propre corps comme instrument, plutôt qu’un pinceau, et plus particulièrement ses doigts qu’il tamponne sur la toile. En fait, il ne s’agit pas seulement d’utiliser son corps comme medium, comme c’est souvent le cas, mais de rentrer en contact avec la toile. Chaque empreinte est unique, par l’expression, la place et la façon dont la peinture a coulé. La force, l’intensité, et la vitesse des doigts laissent une marque différente. Ainsi pour CHOI, la toile est un lieu de réflexion et d’expérimentation, d’harmonie avec l’univers. A la fin des années 1970, l’artiste formalise encore un peu plus ses recherches des “gestes accumulés” dans la série Conditional Planes.

constante avec le sujet. Leurs oeuvres sont empreintes d’un grand dépouillement, qui résulte d’une méditation sur soi et d’une introspection, ils expriment en noir et blanc, la lumière et l’ombre de la vie.

Cette exposition montre comment des artistes coréens, puisant dans la tradition, ont été confrontés et ont surmonté les problématiques de l’époque contemporaine. Les artistes coréens des années 70 ont sublimé l’art contemporain en « une topographie propre à leur langage maternel » tout en aspirant aux standards universels et en s’attachant à la modernisation de la tradition.

Au premier plan de ce mouvement figuraient les artistes CHOI Myoung-Young, SUH Seung-Won et LEE Seung-Jio. L’émergence de l’art contemporain issue de la tradition était cruciale pour les artistes coréens ayant vécu cette période difficile & sombre de l’histoire moderne. Il est remarquable de découvrir cet état de méditation qui se distingue d’un esprit confus. L’exposition ORIGIN qui se tient à la Galerie Perrotin sera l’occasion de faire connaître et mieux comprendre ces acteurs de l’art contemporain coréen.

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Stefane Perraud

Comme jadis Persée en quête de la Gorgone Méduse sur les bords d’Océan, Stéfane Perraud ne revient pas bredouille de sa seconde expédition en Isotopia, une île arctique rocailleuse et glaciale, incisée du sud-ouest au nord-est par une vallée étroite et cristalline dite de la Stabilité. Cette dernière a notamment fait l’objet de nombreuses études dans le champ de la physique nucléaire. Bien que fort peu de chercheurs s’y soient réellement attardés, encore moins se sont aventurés sur les terres escarpées et autrement plus hostiles qui s’élèvent dans une brume bleue électrisante de part et d’autre de la vallée. Ces réserves sauvages, qui enregistrent des concentrations anormalement élevées de radioactivité, pullulent d’isotopes instables d’autant plus redoutables qu’ils sont à peine perceptibles.

De fait, il faut être armé de patience pour espérer capturer l’une de ces créatures élémentaires et évanescentes. Susceptibles de muer en un même ou un tout autre atome à n’importe quel moment, elles émettent des rayonnements auxquels vous seriez bien avisés de ne pas vous exposer, car il n’est pas de miroir ou bouclier poli comme celui de Persée qui saurait vous en protéger sûrement. Si vous croyez que la monstrueuse Méduse à la chevelure de serpents était aussi effrayante que son regard pétrifiant, sachez que traquer des isotopes instables aux abords de la vallée vous risque à de bien pires maux que d’être transformé en pierre.

Fier de sa chasse fructueuse dont il se garde bien de nous dévoiler entièrement les ressorts, Stéfane Perraud expose à la galerie de Roussan non pas un seul mais trois trophées radioactifs, quelques uns de ses pièges, ainsi que des cartes d’Isotopia et des échantillons de cristaux prélevés sur l’île au fil de son excursion. De délicats spécimens de Tritium (3H), Béryllium 10 (10Be) et Carbone 14 (14C) sont enchevêtrés dans les rets mêmes que l’artiste avait tendus afin de saisir l’insaisissable. Mais ne vous laissez pas leurrer par leur radiante fragilité. La vigilance et la prudence de l’artiste l’ont fait sceller fermement les deux premiers dans de petites boîtes transparentes, vous épargnant la curiosité dévorante et désastreuse qui poussa une fois Pandore à ouvrir sa jarre. Suspendu en l’air à l’entrée de la galerie, le troisième isotope, dont l’instabilité connue est plus prévisible et très prisée chez les archéologues pour son incroyable pouvoir de datation, présente un danger moindre pour les spectateurs.

Bien des explorateurs se sont laissés envoûtés par les prouesses transformatives de ces extraordinaires créatures qui prolifèrent en Isotopia. Parmi eux, les physiciens bien sûr qui y ont installé un réacteur nucléaire, mais aussi les alchimistes qui découvrent dans les détours tortueux de l’île et ses fréquents glissements de terrain le labyrinthe de leur Magnum Opus ou la possible transmutation du plomb en or. Sur un détail de carte, Stéfane Perraud a méticuleusement tracé le parcours idéal du chercheur d’or ou tous les chemins qui mènent au précieux élément. Glissement après glissement, mue atomique après mue atomique, d’un isotope instable à une toute autre substance, le mystère de l’île reste à ce jour tout entier. Pour ceux tentés de le percer, le nouveau guide initiatique rédigé par le spécialiste d’Isotopia Aram Kebabdjian, La chasse aux isotopes, est un passage oblige.

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Johan Creten

A creative dreamer, an undeniable seducer, and the ultimate outcast, through his practice Johan Creten essentially strives against progressivity in favor of a position that suggests dancing rather than marching, a position that embraces curves rather than straight lines. Challenging the pace of the reality in which we live, his artworks—whether monumental or minute, fragile or rough, straightforward or impenetrable—constitute a firm declaration against the traditional idea of dynamism, against the avant-garde, against the “new” for its own sake. Creten’s response, which is dynamic but unconventionally so, consists of objects that are controversial in the etymological sense of the word—from the Latin controversus, meaning “turned in an opposite direction, disputed, and turned against.” With this attitude Johan Creten has realized his unique desire to question modernism through various tools, weapons, incantations and incarnations. Trying to categorize his many tentacles, trying to count his (sculpted, casted, fired) armies of figures and forms against progress, five ideas might come to mind: “tactile experiences,” “unconventional displays,” “identity issues,” “triggering memories” and “fearless virtuosity.”

With a very strong sense of tactility, the art of Johan Creten seems to be made in order to be touched as much as to be seen. The skins of his works, their colors and even their tones are very important aspects of this quality. Pivotal to this achievement is the use of ceramic, a medium that was, until very recently, relegated mostly to outsiders—“too dirty, too proletarian, too popular, too feminine” writes the artist—and considered by the contemporary art language, the aforementioned “new,” as obsolete. It is thanks to this language that Creten was able to develop his seminal body of work “Odore di Femmina,” a series of torsos—some of which are featured in the New York show as well as flowery wall pieces of the “Fireworks” series—that are reminiscent of fragmented ancient Greek sculptures of Aphrodite. These fragile monoliths are covered by a myriad of handmade ceramic flowers, glazed and fired—linking beauty, sexuality and décor. Furthermore the possible danger of these sculptures, their details so sharp as to cut whoever touches them, brings another layer of meaning—a palpable marriage of beauty and violence. This tactile coefficient is also absolutely present in his bronze patinated sculptures—created using lost-wax casting, one of Creten’s signature techniques alongside ceramic—such as the figures God is a Stranger, Sad Woman and Bi-Boy, all exhibited in the show. Bringing another dimension to this physical tension, Johan Creten plays with different skins and scales, conflating the human and the monumental, the delicate and the strong, the refined and the crude in the same space. These creatures are surrounded by sculptures from the “Glory” series shimmering on the walls.†

It is interesting to see how Johan Creten’s sculptures animate the historical Upper East Side building that houses the New York space of Galerie Perrotin. Furthermore, it will be intriguing to compare this experience with the artist’s previous exhibitions, especially those that generated new understandings between the old and the new, the contemporary and the historical. Needless to say, context plays a pivotal role in the work of Johan Creten. His sculptures have been shown in pristine white cube spaces but also in historical buildings such as the Musée du Louvre, the Musée National Eugène Delacroix, and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. This desire to break with linearity, to avoid any singular perception, to go beyond any equation, has been with him since the very beginning.

Epitomizing this desire is a 1991 solo exhibition at Brise-Lames in the French city of Sète‡. For this occasion the artist deliberately eschewed the traditional gallery space in order to exhibit his work in an abandoned prison outside in the sea, a large building with several cells, which was only accessible by boat, a former site for quarantine in which people were kept for 40 days. The seeds of this project—which flourished in many occasions and especially when he presented his work in the Yerebatan Cistern for the 5th Istanbul Biennial or in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome—are a series of early performative works entitled “Kunstkamer” (1986-87). Performed while he was studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, these works—described by the artist as a response to Joseph Beuys and Franz West—consisted of a double action: during the day, his sculptures were shown at Galerie Meyer, a gallery specialized in tribal art from Oceania, and during the night the artist would carry them into the city of Paris. Through this action Creten turned his sculptures into magical antennae, or even “talismans,” linking opposite positions—on one hand conceptualism and on the other superstition.

The main element of Johan Creten’s iconic work The Collector (2008-2009), a beehive, is inspired by Hope from The World of Seven Virtues (c. 1560), an engraving by Dutch Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.§ Reading between the lines, we can consider this act of appropriation as a symbol of his desire to keep his Flemish roots alive. Identity is, in fact, a very important factor in Creten’s work. Legacy is another key word that places his work in relationship to the art of the Flanders but also to the practice of Marcel Broodthaers, whose humor, playful desire, and interest in the correlation between language and visual art deeply influenced Creten’s modus operandi. “I am a Flemish sculptor even when I am laying on a beach in Miami” says the artist. This dada-like statement perfectly summarizes Creten’s interest into possible links between art history and the mundane, between the theoretical and technical, between the place where he comes from—whatever that might mean—and the multifaceted global and possibly flattening reality characterizing today’s artistic discourse. At the same time, it underlines Creten’s necessity to stay independent, far from any direct associations, free to be mistaken, allergic to any possible reduction. One of the most interesting qualities of his work is the fact that it can often be misunderstood, taken for something else, not only conceptually but also visually; its aura resides somewhere between the revolutionary actions of Lucio Fontana and the sincere acts of a child working with clay for the first time. Within this realm, this continuous marriage of opposites, the works included in “God is a Stranger” become perfect canons, encapsulating the artist’s decision to embrace history—the use of pedestals, the employment of the ceramic and bronze techniques, the use of gold luster—without dismissing his outcast position; his decision to play with the macho stereotype without giving up femininity; and a genuine love for beauty that doesn’t deny the necessity of breaking the rules.

A joyful orchestration of historical references and yet a strong statement against nostalgia, Creten’s sculptures are capable of triggering memories from different eras; they are full of archaism but at the same time they look completely futuristic, echoing the sensation of a science fiction novel. From Ancient Egyptian art—“Dark Continent,” his 2010 solo exhibition at Galerie Perrotin—to Assyrian artifacts—The Collector (2008-2009); from the Venus of Willendorf—La Grande Vague pour Palissy (2006-11)—to Rapa Nui—all of his works create a double path, one leading to a forgotten past and another to an unimaginable future. Within this scope, his 2014 solo exhibition “The Storm” at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp can be considered the manifesto of his love for what is ancient, archaic, art-factual, and definitively creative. Furthermore the aforementioned exhibition in Antwerp can be also considered the breaking point of a series of conceptual connections that the artist has carefully mastered in order to energize his works with the power of the history of humankind. Pliny’s Sorrow (2011-2013), the monumental bronze sculpture of a hybrid eagle, and the centerpiece of this recent show, is now permanently installed in front of the Red Star Line Museum.‖ This work echoes the large bronze entitled The Price of Freedom—a focal piece in the New York show. In accordance with the artist’s desire to generate contradictory interpretations, this sculpture can be seen as the symbol of power and strength, the heraldic animal of many empires; at the same time it can also be understood as a bird covered with oil¶—fragile and vulnerable. In this piece, different ideologies—ecological and political, individual and multiple, evil and holy—come together.

Last but not least, it is not coincidental that while speaking about “God is a Stranger”—especially in relationship to Massu II (2014-2015), a four-meter-tall bronze column—the artist mentions Brancusi as one of his main ‘guides’. Just like for Brancusi, Creten’s works created for “God is a Stranger” reside in a limbo wherein the separation between past and present, between sculpture and pedestal, seems to have lost any meaning in favor of a state where all dichotomies are questioned and embraced simultaneously. As a matter of fact, in the Abbaye de Gellone◊, another version of Massu rises peacefully in the religious silence of the abbey’s cloister—an invitation to contemplate the mystery of life and god. With its primitive reminiscence, Massu symbolizes the relationship between humanity and nature—a tree, the first ‘sculpture’ of humankind. Its verticality becomes a metaphor of life and transcendence. At the same time its surface, full of thorns, relates to the importance of pain and sorrow in Christianity. Following these premises Massu II anchors the New York exhibition to these issues, becoming its central piece.

Through the aforementioned positions, the notion of virtuosity—described by the artist as a “dirty word”—comes as a natural factor within Creten’s phantasmagoric (garden of) Eden. His impetuous creative force can only exist when it is balanced with an acrobatic use of techniques, materials and textures. In Creten’s world the power of creativity is mastered via pure control and chaos becomes hyper-ordered. Things need to be reconsidered and recalibrated, avoiding all previous assumptions. 

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Media art ...

'If new media art wishes to be taken seriously then it is necessary to start to develop appropriately robust and convincing means by which it can be examined critically. He continues that a potential problem facing the discourse concerning so-called new media art was one of ghetto-isation; in other words, as Gere claims, 'not that there is no critical discourse, but rather that it remains the preserve of those involved, with little or no connection or engagement with outsiders.' 1

This is a claim that I, as an art historian, want to take very seriously. However in doing so a central problem needs to be overcome. This problem concerns the traditional art historical pre-occupation with specificity of media and how this may be reconciled with the proliferation of differing media employed in new media art. W.J.T Mitchell has diagnosed the problem in the following terms:

'In the field of art history, with its obsessive concern for the materiality and ‘specificity' of media, the supposedly ‘dematerialized' realm of virtual and digital media, as well as the whole sphere of mass media, are commonly seen either as beyond the pale or as a threatening invader, gathering at the gates of the aesthetic and artistic citadel.2

My main argument in this paper is that systems theory, and in particular the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, provides the basis for such an 'appropriately robust and convincing' theory of new media art. It does so by providing the basis for systems aesthetics in a manner that expands the discourse on new media beyond a discussion of a narrow set of art practices corresponding to a limited set of media into a discussion about systems art more generally. It does so in three important ways. First, by situating a discussion of art within the context of its relationship to the operation of social systems (of which, Luhmann argues, the art-system is a sub-system). Second, by situating a discussion of new media art within a discussion concerning more diverse practices occurring after modernism, practices that we might refer to as systems art. And thirdly, by providing a definition of artistic media that is not materially specific and is thus flexible enough to account for proliferation of different artistic media in new media and systems art. It is to this third issue that this paper is primarily addressed.

What is argued here is grounded upon two premises. First, whilst the problems of critical purchase are undoubtedly fore-grounded by new media art they are not unique to it. This is deliberate. It is my argument that if there is to be a convincing theoretical model for new media art, then it should not be tied to a specifically narrow set of artistic practices, because this will rapidly commit it to charges of anachronism or lack of relevance. Today's ‘new' media, quickly becomes defunct, and the object of nostalgia and aestheticisation. For example the pioneering computer art of Ben Laposky and his Electronic Abstractions (from 1956 onwards) is a world away from the complex and aesthetically involving environments of contemporary popular video and computer games such as Tetsuya Mizuguchi's astonishing Rez (for Sony Playstation and Sega Dreamcast) or Valve Software's Half-Life I & II. Equally, given that they are all constituted by particular historical and technological social variants, the early video art of Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci from the early 1970s has a clearly different aesthetic to that of the Gesamtkunstwerk film projects of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. As W.J.T. Mitchell has recently claimed in his discussion on a theory of media, What Do Pictures Want? (2005), the first two of his ‘Ten Thesis on media' are that: '1 – Media are a modern invention that has been around since the beginning [sic!]. 2 – The shock of new media is as old as the hills.'3

The corollary position is that discourse can also become defunct and redundant if it is tied too closely to restrictively narrow objects of observation.

My second premise concerns the position that the concept of system occupies within the discourse of systems theory, and more specifically within Luhmann's work. In fact, the early systems art of the 1960s took a version of systems theory that emerged from Cybernetics, Communication Theory and technology discourse as its theoretical model. The more specifically sociological configuration of social systems was investigated by Luhmann from the 1970s onwards. In this sense, ‘system' and ‘systems theory' are operating here within what Peter Osborne calls a 'retrospective critical discourse'.4 By acknowledging this I mean to recognise the relationship between the discursive position of systems theory and the historical phenomenon that it both observes and constitutes by virtue of that observation.5 Systems and systems art, should be identified as a function of the discursive system from which they are constituted into a coherent historical and sociological narrative. As Osborne claims: 'A retrospective critical discourse does not need to discover its terms literally or empirically within the discourse of the period under discussion, and that any attempt to do that is a…phantasmatic illusion'. This is because, argues Osborne, the 'criteria of validity for critical discourse are different from those of empiricist historiography'. 6

In what follows I will give a description of the historical conditions of systems art and relate this to its reconstruction within the critical discourse of systems theory. In doing so a definition begins to emerge that is suitably flexible and robust enough to include new media art alongside a variety of other artistic practices (such as minimalism and institutional critique). These are practices that are not, necessarily, concerned purely with the effects of a new technology7 although may include practices which do explore the aesthetic implication of new media. I will then briefly survey Niklas Luhmann's systems theoretical conception of distinction medium/form (as it appears in Art as a Social System ) and argue that it provides a framework for theorising new media and systems art. It does so by recasting the issue of media specificity to one in which the observation of media becomes contingent upon the process of its differentiation via observation. My concluding examples of work by Jeffrey Shaw, and Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, will demonstrate how Luhmann's ideas may be applied to an understanding of new media and systems art.

Systems Art

At the Tate Modern show, Open Systems: Rethinking Art. 1970, 8 the curator Donna de Salvo used the concept of ‘system' as an organising principle trying to cluster a variety of artistic practice from the years bracketing 1970. In the catalogue essay which accompanies the exhibition De Salvo claims that these practices may all be linked by a common interest in the ‘systems' which the work exploits and within which they are situated. To reflect this shared interest in system, structure and series De Salvo explained the inclusion of works in the exhibition that 'are linked by their use of a generative or repetitive system as a way of redefining the work of art, the self and the nature of representation.” 9

The theme of system, when employed specifically as a means of critical retrospection, is especially appropriate in accounting for artistic practice at the extended end of the 1960s. There are two reasons for this. First, the 1960s artistic discourse was turning its attentions away from specific objects onto various systems within which they were embedded. This makes it particularly receptive to a ‘retrospective critical discourse' framed by the position of systems theory. Second, much of the artistic and critical discourse of the time reflected an interest in the emergent discourses of systems thinking, cybernetics and information/communication theory.

For example, looking back on the immediate past, in 1973, Lucy Lippard observed that the six years following from 1966 had been characterised by what she termed, 'the dematerialisation of the art object'. An interest in singular objects was replaced by work which explored its relationship with its various systemic environments. Her micro-history of the six years at the end of the 1960s focused, in her terms:

'on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia, (with occasional political overtones).' 10

At the heart of these activities lay a series of practices which radically challenged a cosy belief in an ontologically stable art object. In doing so it operated according to a self-aware artistic practice that placed the questioning of the relationship between a work of art and its various environments at the very centre of the work's meaning. In short, this was work which explored aesthetics of systems and thereby functioned by investigating the ways in which it was embedded in various networks of display, representation, meaning and control.

Jack Burnham, who was instrumental in theorising systems art at the moment of its inception, was more specific in his linking the post-formalist artistic attitude described by Lippard to the contemporary discourse of systems theory. In 1968 he wrote that:

'The post-formalist sensibility naturally responds to stimuli both within and outside the proposed art format… [but] the term systems esthetic seems to encompass the present situation more fully.'

He continued, more prophetically, that 'A systems esthetic will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present.” 11 Burnham's coining of the term ‘systems-aesthetic' in this context was an attempt to bring together artistic, technological and social conditions under the rubric of systems and a concern in them shared by a variety of groups including artists, scientists and social theorists. It was, in part, an account of artistic responses to new technologies that was manifested in early computer and video art. But Burnham also noted that such an artistic turn to systems-thinking was a reflection of a growing interest in systems that had permeated from biological and cybernetic interest in open systems and communication networks found in the writings Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, Ervin Laszlo (amongst others) into society at large. 12 This included the famous interest in systems analysis that President Kennedy and Robert McNamara brought into the United States government in the 1960s13 largely through its use as a strategy for modern warfare. In turn this was reflected in a proliferation of exhibitions with titles such as ‘ Information', ‘Software' and ‘Systems', around the time that took the concepts of system and structure, broadly understood, as their raison d'être. 14

The following examples, from the time and the Tate show, exhibit characteristics which may be taken to be illustrative of systems art:

(1) An interest in networks, structures and systems of measurement, such as is seen in the work of Mel Bochner, Measurement: Room, (1969);

(2) An engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs, such as is seen in the work of Dan Graham, Time Delay Room (1974), and the varied work of Hans Haacke;

(3) The prioritising of non-visual aspects of the work, such as in Martha Rosler's Bowery in Two Inadequate Systems (1974-75);

(4) The interest in unstable or de-materialised physicality as we see in Haacke's Condensation Cube (1965), or land art;

(5) The exploration of new technology and new media, such as in Bruce Nauman's video installations, for example: Going Around the Corner Piece, (1970).

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does demonstrate the vast stylistic and material differences exhibited by work that may be collected within the description of systems art. The central difficulty that such work presents to art historical method lies in precisely this diversity of media exploited by systems art, from technological apparatuses such as closed-circuit video systems to gallery systems. Writing in 1966 Dick Higgins used the term ‘intermedia' to describe a situation that he identified as: 'much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident'. 15 He also believed that the use of a wide variety of media in the Conceptual Art, Mail Art, Performance Art (and so forth) was a means by which art of the age (which he called the 'third industrial revolution') would identify its distinction from that of the art of the Renaissance.

Given its plurality, intermedia art, which includes systems art, is resistant to a Modernist account which requires the material specificity. Rosalind Krauss engaged specifically with this problem in her discussion of the specific historical role that the technological development of photography played in post-war artistic practice, and in particular in the convergence of art and photography in the 1960s. Photography, she argues with Benjamin, has brought about a challenge to the unique status of art. Krauss argues that this challenge plays out in a lack faith concerning medium specificity and a ‘re-invention' of the conceptual coupling between modes of artistic production and its media. As Krauss argues:

'This time, however, photography functions against the grain of its earlier destruction of the medium, becoming, under precisely the guise of its own obsolescence, a means of what has to be called an act of reinventing the medium. The medium in question here is not any of the traditional media – painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture – that include photography. So the reinvention in question does not imply the restoration of any of those earlier forms of support that the ‘age of mechanical reproduction' had rendered thoroughly dysfunctional through their own assimilation to the commodity form. Rather, it concerns the idea of a medium as such, a medium as a set of conventions derived from (but not identical with) the material conditions of a given technical support, conventions out of which to develop a form of expressiveness that can be both projective and mnemonic. And if photography has a role to play at this juncture, which is to say at this moment of postconceptual, ‘postmedium' production, Benjamin may have already signalled to us that this is due to its very passage from mass use to obsolescence.' 16

Niklas Luhmann's discussion on medium in art provides a theoretical description of the postconceptual, or ‘postmedium' production of intermedia, new-media and systems art.

Luhmann and the Medium of Art

Luhmann's systems-theory is an attempt to apply a systems analysis within a sociological framework. Society, Luhmann argues, is a system comprised of a variety of sub-systems. These are operatively closed and functionally distinct from one another. Each system operates according to its own internal and self-defined rules. These systems include economic, political, legal, scientific, religious and educational systems. Like these, the art system functions according to an intrinsic set of processes. For Luhmann both art and media are not only contingent upon the systems of their institutional and discursive situation but actually constituted by them. In other words, without an art system to observe it, art would not exist; and without art there would be no artistic media.

Luhmann calls the process by which distinctions are indicated from a position relative to the system in which it takes place observation . This is a paradigm shift from a more traditional sociological notion of representation to a concept of social meaning that is contingent not only on particular systems but also upon the process of observation itself. Without observation no differentiation would occur. Thus, the economic system observes and differentiates the world in terms of economic value while the art system differentiates what it observes in terms of artistic and aesthetic value.

Luhmann's most radical insight on art is his anti-ontological definitions of both art and its constitution. 17 He grounds this anti-ontological definition in the dichotomy of medium and form and his concept of the radical contingency of observation. His description of medium and form observes them as being independent of particular genres such as painting or music. Instead Luhmann presents a theory of 'the medium of art' as that which produces a special type of communication whilst not being media specific. 18 This involves an inversion of a traditionally conceived relationship between medium and form. In Luhmann's definition the traditional conception of medium constituting the form is replaced by the notion that form is constituting the medium. Luhmann explains this in the following terms:

'From a systems-theoretical perspective, by contrast, both media and forms are constructed by the system and therefore always presuppose a specific system reference. They are not given “as such.” The distinction between medium and form, just like the concept of information, is strictly internal to the system. There is no corresponding difference in the environment. Neither media nor forms “represent” system states of an ultimately physical nature.' 19

In the understanding that medium constitutes the form of a work of art, that Luhmann wants to reject, the genesis of a work of art is framed by the material constraints of the medium that the artist uses. Two examples to help explain this (not given by Luhmann) could be:

(i) Michelanglo's dying slaves, conceived as an expression of the tension between idea (as discussed by Panofsky20) and the marble within which that idea is manifested;

(ii) Pollock's painting conceived as an expression of paint and canvas, which thus has the medium specificity that made it so pertinent to Greenberg's defence of Modernism.

In the essay The Medium of Art (1990) Luhmann illustrates the application of his reconfigured relationship between medium and form in art via the example of music. Music is observed (in this case heard) as music only by those, Luhmann states: 'who can also hear the uncoupled space in which the music plays.' 21 He states:

‘whereas we normally hear noises as differences to silence and are thereby made attentive, music presupposes this attention and compels it to the observation of a 2nd difference – that between medium and form. 5

We ‘observe' the medium of music because we have paid attention to the sensuous form of the music's manifestation in contra-distinction to noise and silence of its environment.

In this sense, then, the form of an observable and presumably engaging sound constitutes the medium of music. Luhmann's argument that it is the form of music as it is heard constitutes the medium of music in the process of its hearing. This is in effect a conceptual shift from the perspective that 'there is already a medium to which form can apply' 23, to the position that form itself constitutes the medium within which it becomes manifested.

In Art as a Social System, Luhmann devotes an entire chapter to the discussion on Medium and Form, he gives the following example:

'In the medium of sound, words are created by constricting the medium into condensable (reiterable) forms that can be employed in the medium of language to create utterances (for the purposes of communication). The potential for forming utterances can again serve as the medium for forms known as myths or narratives, which, at a later stage, when the entire procedure is duplicated in the optical medium of writing, also become known as textual genres or theories. Theories can subsequently be coupled in the medium of the truth code to form a network of consistent truths. Such truths function as forms whose outside consists of untruths lacking consistency. How far we can push this kind of stacking depends on the evolutionary processes that lead to the discovery of forms.' 24

In this example we can see the stacking up of the following media, all of which act as the mediators for a variety of forms: air, sound, language, myths/narrative, the written word, genre/theory, the truth code (a system of discursive validation) and finally a discursive system which Luhmann identifies here as a 'network of consistent truths.'

Thus Luhmann's argument that form constitutes the medium effects a conceptual shift from the position that 'there is already a medium to which form can apply' 25, to the position that form itself constitutes the medium within which it becomes manifested. More significantly it is not only that the medium being observed is now relative to the form by which it is observed, but also and more radically, that it is relative to the process of being observed itself. In other words, different media may be observed at different times as emerging from the same physical phenomena. Luhmann describes this so:

‘The art system operates on its own terms, but an observer of art can choose many different distinctions to indicate what he observes. The choice is his. Of course, there is an obligation to do justice to the object and its surrounding. It would be wrong to say that an object is made of granite if it is really made of marble. But what about the distinction granite/marble? Why not old/new, or cheap/expensive, or ‘Should we put this object into the house or the garden?' Theory has even more freedom in choosing its distinctions – and this is why it needs justification!' 26

For Luhmann distinction and observation are the processes by which medium and form are subsequently constituted. In doing so, he provides a definition of artistic media that stands in opposition to one grounded in the Modernist prioritisations of both media specificity and the subordination of form to medium. Instead Luhmann provides a description in which the observer's own distinctions regarding which form, and thus which media they choose to observe are the constituting factor. It is my argument that, although he was not specific in the examples he choose, Luhmann's account of medium and form is commensurate with an historical shift from Modernist medium specificity that is reflected in intermedia, post-media, systems-art and new media art.27 And that it thus provides the basis for a theoretical account by which to critically examine it.

Concluding Example

Jeffrey Shaw is best known for his interactive multi-media environments. In the computer graphic/video installation, Place – Ruhr, (2000) the viewer negotiates eleven live-action and three-dimensional virtual environments from the industrial German region of Ruhrgebeit ( http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net).

The viewer uses a platform and interface centrally located within the cylinder of the installation projection screens. From this platform the viewer controls both their spatial relationship to the screens and their p rogress through the environments that are realised as a sequence of cylinders. Upon entering these panoramic cylinders the environment is cinematically realised around the spectator in relation to them. The installation contains further elements of interaction. Sounds made by the participant trigger projected words that move through the environment in paths dictated by the movement of the viewer. Mark Hansen describes this process of interaction in such computer-aided works as part of an embodied, phenomenological experience that:

'specifically invest the body as the site of a bodily, but also an ‘intellectual' event. In these works, the body, rather than being assimilated into the deframed image-space, stands over against a now vitualized image-space and thereby acquires a more fundamental role as the source of the actualization of images. If the corporeal and intellectual processing it performs still functions to ‘give-body' to the image, it does so by not lending its physical, extended volume as a three-dimensional screen for the image but rather by creating an image-event out of its own embodied processing of information. 28

From a systems-theoretical perspective informed by Luhmann, the observer takes the position of Hansen's embodied viewer. Shaw's multi-media environments provide examples whereby the observer constitutes the media they observe anew with each immersive interaction. Thus we can see a working example of how the form of the interaction, chosen by the participant, dictates the constitution of the media of aesthetic engagement and how the problem of media-specificity in systems art might be addressed by the application of systems-theory.

Notes

1. Gere, C. (2005), 'New Media Art', The Art Book, Vol. 12. 2, May, pp. 6-8.

2. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005), What Do Pictures W ant?, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 205.

3. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005), What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 211.

4. Osborne, P. (2005), ‘Presentation', Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 Symposium, 16th-17th September. Archived online at http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/OpenSystems/#friday [active November 2005].

5. Luhmann engaged specifically with the issue of discursive self-reflexivity and the contingent relationship between an observing discursive system and that which it observes. See Luhmann, N. (2000), ‘Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing,' New Literary History 24, pp. 763-82. See also Rasch, W. (2000), Niklas Luhmann's Modernity. The Paradoxes of Differentiation, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

6. Osborne, P. (2005), ‘Presentation', Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 Symposium, (16-17 September). Archived online at http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/OpenSystems/#friday [active November 2005].

7. Although this does not preclude the possibility of a relationship between art and technology, especially in the late 20th century. Edward Shanken, for example, has argued that, ‘little scholarship has explored the relationship between technology and conceptual art'. He believes that there has been, for example, an art historical impetus to artificially distinguish Information Art from Conceptual Art. See, Shanken, E. (2004), ‘Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,' in Corris, M., (ed.), Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

8. For a review of the exhibition and catalogue see Halsall, F. (2005), ‘Open Systems: Tate Modern', CAA Reviews, online journal published by the College Art Association at http://www.caareviews.org/, October; Halsall, F. (2006) review of Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970, De Salvo, D. (ed.), The Art Book, 13:3, August, pp. 26f.

9. De Salvo, D. (2005), ‘Where We Begin – Opening the System, c. 1970,' in De Salvo, D., (ed.), Open Systems Rethinking Art c. 1970, London: Tate Publishing, pp. … .

10. Lippard, L. (1997), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, California: University of California Press.

11. Burnham, J. (1968), ‘Systems Esthetics,' Artforum, September, pp….

12. Burnham, J. (1970), Beyond Modern Sculpture – The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century, New York: George Braziller Inc., p. 12.

13. In ‘Systems Esthetics' Burnham makes reference to the use of systems-theory by the Pentagon. For a fuller discussion on this topic see Dickson, P. (1971), Think tanks, New York: Ballantine Books.

14. Primary Structures: Jewish Museum, New York, 1966; Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts: I.C.A, London, 1968; The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968; When Attitudes Become Form, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information: Kunsthalle, Bern, 1969; Information: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970; Software ; The Jewish Museum, 1970; Systems: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1972.

15. Higgins, D. (1966), ‘Intermedia,' reprinted in De Salvo, D., (ed.) (2005), Open Systems Rethinking Art c. 1970, London: Tate Publishing, pp. …. . See also: Higgins, D. (1984), Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia, Illinois: Illinois University Press, and Spielmann, Y. (2001), ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images' Leonardo, 34:1, pp. 55-61

16. Krauss, R. (1999), ‘Reinventing the Medium (art and photography)', Critical Inquiry, 25:2, Winter, p. 289.

17. As Kitty Zijlmans has observed, a key feature of systems-theory is that its ‘starting point has to be an anti-ontological view of the world'. See Zijlmans, K. (1993), ‘Art History as Systems-Theory'. Unpublished translation by Annie Wright in Zijlmans, K. and Halbertsma, M. (1993), Gezichtspunten. Een Inleiding in de Methoden van de Kunstgeschiedenis, Nijmegen: Universiteit Nijmegen, Chapter 9.

18.‘Communication is, for Luhmann, the manifold of information, message and understanding. Thus a communication is an occurrence, specific to a particular system, that generates meaning within that system from the unity of a message as well as its communication and reception. Luhmann dismisses a theory of communication as the transmission of information from one agent to another as too ontological. Meaning is not something handed over like a parcel, rather it is something generated in an observer by a self-referential process. Communication facilitates the production of meaning by reducing complexity and contingency. It creates some possibilities whilst excluding others thus reducing the complexity of the world to terms intelligible to the system while re-inscribing the distinction between itself and its environment. Different systems generate communication according to their particular codes of self-reference. For example, the science system is ordered by a coding of differences between true/false that produce meaning by simplifying the complexity and contingency of the world to communications on truth and falsehood and the art system facilitates communication about art through the sensuous and aesthetic forms of works of art. For Luhmann, communication (and meaning) is the basic constituent of society, and therefore the basic concept of sociology. There can be no society without communication. The limits of society are the limits of communication. Individuals do not participate in society unless they engage in communication. Communication provides the opportunity for Luhmann to discuss the uniqueness and importance of the art system. The art system produces a special type of communication, one that mediates between the individual perceptions of consciousness (psychic systems) and the operations of the social system. It does this by being grounded in sensuous engagement with material, perceptual form, whilst also generating communications which then circulate in the social system.' From Halsall, F. (2006), ‘Niklas Luhmann', in Costello, D. and Vickery, J. (eds.) Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, Oxford: Berg Publishing.

19. Luhmann, N. [1995], Art as a Social System, trans. Knodt, E., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 103. See also the chapter, ‘Medium and Form', pp. 102ff.

20. See Panofsky's (1939) discussion of Michelangelo in Studies in Iconology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. For Panofsky on the concept of idea see Panofsky, E. [1924], Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Peake, J.J.S., 2nd ed. (1975), New York: Harper Collins.

21. Luhmann, N. (1990), ‘The Medium of Art,' in Luhmann, N. Essays on Self-Reference, Columbia: Columbia University Press, pp. 215-226.

22. Luhmann, N. (1990), ‘The Medium of Art,' in Luhmann, N. Essays on Self-Reference, Columbia: Columbia University Press, pp….

23 Luhmann, N. (1990), ‘The Medium of Art,' in Luhmann, N. Essays on Self-Reference, Columbia: Columbia University Press, pp….

24 Luhmann, N. [1995], Art as a Social System, trans. Knodt, E., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 106.

25. Luhmann, N. (1990), ‘The Medium of Art,' in Luhmann, N. Essays on Self-Reference, Columbia: Columbia University Press, pp….

26. Luhmann, N. [1995], Art as a Social System, trans. Knodt, E., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 102.

27. Burnham pre-empted Luhmann's medium/form distinction and related it to a position of technological determinism and in particular the emergence of the electronic computer: ‘The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal. The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, “inside” and “outside.” It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art.' In Burnham, J. (1970), ‘The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems', in Fry, E.F. (ed.), On the Future of Art, New York: The Viking Press, p. 119.

28. Hansen, M. (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, p. 60.

[bibibela-blog]

Stepan Ryabchenko... Architecture

"The idea becomes a machine that makes an art" Sol Lewitt

Contemporary architecture is a very sensitive essence. Its manner of narration is demanding and its character is full of declarative intentions. It speaks, It breaths, It serves and It dominates.

Playing on current aesthetic dimensions of visual culture and philosophical aesthetics, Stepan Ryabchenko composes the grace of unity of his architectural works from a wide perspective of conceptual art, which is primarily involved in his creative method. The abstract aesthetics, the dominant visual idiom of today’s architecture is religiously brought up in a conceptual shell of his art.

As an artiest he has his own chords in a resonant substance of contemporary culture. In a permanent aesthetic investigation he brings a radical approach to the architecture to achieve an embodiment of the ontological significance of emplacement and utilitarian value of his projects.

There is a very gentle attitude with a firm hand to provide a theoretical and practical approach to the architecture, which states its most sensual scheme «Form follows function». These have been developed from philosophical platforms, which instate a factual/material confirmation of contact forms of interaction between aesthetic value of the concept and utilitarian employment of a project.

Stepan Ryabchenko’s general approach to the architecture is based on a high appreciation of a history and environmental character of the space. In a dynamic interaction between inside and outside space, between form and function there is an urban-impact sustainable development of environment.

Adopting a general line of sustainable architecture - that is to take into consideration the needs of contemporary society with a future generations needs, Stepan Ryabchenko’s concept reveals socially constructed phenomenal experience of contemporary architecture.

Stepan Ryabchenko’s method is to design buildings based on progressive environmental principles: Scientific cognitivism – the knowledge of natural history, provided by the natural sciences; Organic and pragmatic technology; Sensual, but techno-rational source of knowledge. The technical progressiveness is a primary task for him as architect of a future.

Relaying on a scientific knowledge and aesthetic experience of nature, he appeals to intelligent/advanced technology of constructing. His style is manifested in expressive content of utilitarian areas, functioning as artistic body. Flexible and non-linear constructions have physical and emotive power of the form.

A guiding theme of Stepan Ryabchenko’s architectural pattern is a stylistic dyad: constructivism – deconstructivism. Taking constructivist tradition and theory which holds that knowledge is constructed by giving meaning to current experience as a contemporary epistemology, he is mentally close to deconstructivist restless spirit, which is characterized by fragmentation and an interest to manipulating a surface structure. Literarily, deconstructivist architecture is an attempt to deform a rationally structured space so that the elements within the space are forced into new relationship. Further, in a creative process, Stepan Ryabchenko produces his own way to structural constructivism as an international language of architectural discourse. It absorbs the concept of subjectivity of a current social and emotional situation in the world.

Today Stepan Ryabchenko is intended to support the integrity of the bone structure of his homeland, Ukraine. Socio- cultural experience that Ukraine is being through as a result of broken peace exposes a call for a new approach to the art and the architecture. As a resident of his country Stepan feels a new way of progress, a fresh air of chances and a need to preserve a high-grade culture of Ukraine… And with this feeling he sees new open horizons.

It is sensation mediated, quantified and shaped by philosophical, cultural, social characteristics and patterns of perception and by multitude forces that are part of everyone’s world. In Stepan Ruabchenko’s world of art a phenomenon of architecture has a readable connection with an aesthetic experience and with a solid ground. It is a political and economic sense of architecture. And in a form of philosophical production it goes in due to course of the entire contemporary architectures master subject.

. Katherine Belaeva

[bibibela-blog]

NEVER FOREVER

Falk Richter and TOTAL BRUTAL | World Premiere
Text and Direction: Falk Richter "Why you never hold me in your arms? Why you never say I love you… WITHOUT STUPID IRONIC TONE IN YOUR VOICE? " Сюжеты Рихтера сфокусированы в своей основе на той болезненной эмоциональной отрешенности, новой продвинутой форме одиночества, что испытывает человек. В Never Forever он снимает слой за слоем в толще этого одиночества. И, в отличие от прошлых постановок, где оно представлялось по духу диким зверем, Never Forever - картина трупных окаменелых форм эмоциональной жизни этого одиночества. Становится ясно, мы слишком быстро переключаемся в сфере наших интересов: между страстями, людьми и чувствами… Абстрактная машина медиа разгоняется для нас через социальные сети – для Рихтера именно они являются благодатной почвой для взращивания творческого метода. В своих работах он прорисовывает последствия иконической формы мышления, которая заставляет человека принимать за реальность череду стремительно меняющихся образов. Теперь категории медиа определяют реальность, мы мыслим картинками. Мы теряем телесную связь с реальностью. Мы достигаем небывалых высот неадекватности, когда сознание отвергает свою чувственную составляющую, будто снова и снова, с огромной скоростью пролистывая картинки из собственной медиасреды. Never Forever показывает это в холодном обаянии минималистической сценографии, в моментах, когда под меняющимся светом металлические конструкции поглощают оттенки серого. Где сцена иллюстративно разделена на две формообразующие плоскости: черные поверхности отражают теплый свет, который обволакивает тела актеров: а серая металлическая конструкция есть символическая телесность медиасреды. Медиа – есть внешнее расширение человека. В то же время, медиа не только инструмент, но и питательная среда, в которой растут образы. Материальная поверхность образа оказывается прозрачной. Материальные элементы образа простой человеческой связи будто растворяются в бесконечной череде этих связей. Улавливая начало феномена, “поздний Хайдеггер” считал, что Бытие/реальность выставляет вместо себя некое сущее, тем самым скрывается, ускользает и уклоняется, а истина скрывается в видимости. Результат: гармония, телесная и внутренняя возможна. Впоследствии, медиа – машины абстракции перерабатывают тело и эмоциональные формы его физической коммуникации в информационные потоки, избавляясь от тела, выбрасывая его из коммуникации. В результате – гармония потеряна. Социальные сети обезличивают человека в глазах другого человека, а затем и в своих собственных глазах. Never Forever показывает медиасреду пожирающей малопрочные связи человека с реальностью. Но, в постановке нет характерной академической схемы, когда момент катарсиса дает толчок решению проблемы. Рихтер сознательно уходит от укоренившейся нормы драматической постановки – актуальность вопроса заключается в том, что сюжет предоставляет проблему без решения. Уникальные взаимоотношения человека с человеком и человека с самим собой в определенных обстоятельствах теряют красоту калейдоскопической схемы и превращаются в череду хаотических связей, которые дисгармонизируют восприятие человека человеком, себя – самим собой. Момент разрыва с реальностью не ощутим. Просто однажды отпуская чью-то руку, человек едва ли понимает, что больше никогда к ней не прикоснется. Кажется, что любая следующая рука будет такой же или какой-то другой... Человек больше не допускает эксклюзивности в отношениях с другим человеком. Человек обесценивает человека. Never Forever представляет собой рассмотрение последствий влияния самых агрессивных веяний медиафилософии на современного человека. Структура постановки опирается на концепцию балета Total Brutal, с которым Рихтер работает впервые, что само по себе, обнажает острые углы в импровизационной манере подачи сюжета. Абстрактность, перфомативный характер хореографии и подачи авторского текста выступают в роли проводников, которые обеспечивают легкий доступ к пониманию постановки для обленившегося сознания зрителя. Человек, в общей массе, слишком ленив, чтобы победить свой паттерн поведения в медиасреде, которая давно вышла за рамки социальных сетей и будто просочилась физически в повседневное общение. Never Forever дает толчок к болезненному началу этого понимания. Автор обнажает большое красивое, чувствительное сердце, показывая, как оно работает в связке с бесчеловечным и обесчеловеченным сознанием. В невротическом характере хореографии заложено то самое животное сопротивление, вырывающее человека из социопатической дегенерации повседневности. Удивительная поэзия заложена в метод Рихтера. В цикличности повторяющихся сюжетов он разрабатывает универсальную концепцию саморазрушения, в которой зритель неосознанно видит моду, актуальность современной театральной постановки. Именно мода на эмоциональное обнажение и жестокость, превращает театральную иконокластику Рихтера в унифицированную систему кодов для интерпретации рассматриваемых сюжетов. Проецируя свое безумие на безумие зрителя, Рихтер стремится создать в Never Forever территорию чувственности. Осмысление этой чувственности показано в состоянии «Истерика – очищение». Never Forever будто раскрывает второй взгляд на вещи глубоко внутри сознания зрителя. Он ничего не меняет, он будто очищает эмоциональный фон и уходит без тяжких чувств... не оставляя после себя переживаний. Katherine Belaeva

[bibibela-blog]

Non-existence. Джеймс Таррелл. Световые инсталляции

Реальность есть восприятие. Реальность для каждого в отдельности есть поверхностный объективизм перемешанный с вязкой массой индивидуального опыта и переживаний. Реальность меняется в зависимости от того, с какой стороны она подсвечена… 2013 год. High profile artiest Джеймс Таррелл показывает красоту перемены восприятия реальности в рамках ретроспективного проекта Гуггенхайм Нью–Йорк. На практике инсталляция Aten Reign является примером световой пластики белого атриума Фрэнка Ллойда Райта. Выставка отмечена как наиболее масштабная демонстрация работ Тарелла за сорокалетний творческий путь в изучении поведения потоков света в пространстве. Общая масса его объектов подчинена единой логике преобразования иллюзии в среду для созидательного про��есса - световые фигуры ярких цветов не меняют привычные формы пространства, но преобразуют его. Работая, с тем, что не существует на самом деле, Таррелл четко формулирует стандарт своего творческого инструментария. Он говорит о том, что восприятие его искусства - ускользающий момент, в котором вовлеченность ведет к созиданию, построению новой реальности внутри сознания зрителя (интервью с Чарли Россом). Геометрические фигуры объектов, созданные при помощи света кажутся такими осязаемыми, что легче поверить в расширение реальности в пользу существования этих объектов, чем в оптическую иллюзию, в основании которой лежит знание пластики света. В концепции Восприятие – Свет – Цвет – Пространство есть существенный конфликт с парадигматическим стандартом «объективной реальности». Это момент, когда сознание теряет опору, сталкиваясь с тем, что не существует в вещественном мире, но имеет четкую форму. Затрагивая механизмы чувственного восприятия, воздействие его инсталляций доходит до интеллектуального уровня, на котором происходит конфликт «принципа очевидности» и «феноменологического подхода». Итог: увлекательный, конвульсивный и болезненный процесс понимания того, что есть реальность, старательное построение новых форм этой реальности. Очевидно, это происходит, когда разум подчиняется чувствам, но не теряет объективности. Воздействие контактной эстетики инсталляций Таррелла ведет зрителя к осознанию конструктивности привлечения новых видов эмоциональной и интеллектуальной активности. Не призывая к отказу от привычного опыта, оно подталкивает к расширению нормативного диапазона восприятия. Возможно, именно так его работы становятся недоступны для передачи посредством фотографии – они - само действие, вернее, начало действия, когда оно еще не связано с реальностью, а только зарождается в категории non-existence.

[bibibela-blog]

Alexander Calder. Mobiles.

Смотреть на искусство сквозь призму вопроса « За��ем?»… Установить связь между физическим телом арт-объекта и медиальным образом, интерпретацией этого объекта… Выявить суть иконического значения арт-объекта, его default value… Найти в объекте личное… Все просто. Александр Колдер создал концепцию «mobile», что на практике является кинетической скульптурой. Работы Колдера – динамичные формы, собранные в соответствии с учетом баланса, соотношения опорных и подвесных частей, в которых отправной точкой являются законы физики и музыка природы. Из конструктивистских тенденций своего времени он выработал алгоритм структурирования реального мира и методы его познания через изящную тонкость натуры. Хореографическая четкость, чувственность и чувствительность объектов дает ощущение очищенной формы для чистого познания. Дело в том, что cуть работ Колдера лежит вне эгоистических сфер потребления искусства. Природа, движение, легкость, свобода – те категории, что освобождают человека от мелочности. В своем вступительном слове к каталогу Колдера в 1946 Сартр говорил о легкости ускользающей красоты частиц бытия, о том, как красиво само по себе совершение ошибок и исправление их в спонтанном течении жизни. Абстрактное воплощение, таким образом, раскрывает феномен «здесь и сейчас», который позволяет человеку превращать внешний мир во внутренний при помощи взгляда ( по К Вульфу). Это рождает переживание «чувственной достоверности», содержание которой придает ей видимость богатейшего познания. Явление, в котором предмет есть сущность, без опоры на спорные категории жизненного опыта. Системные задачи его искусства определены полемикой субстанциональной и реляционной концепций пространства и времени. То есть простейший механизм восприятия «mobile» в рассмотрении вопроса, является ли пространство вместилищем вещей, где атомы соединяются друг с другом определенным образом или же пространство есть совокупность мест занимаемых тел. Такой двигатель восприятия искусства позволяет воспринимать абстракцию с позиции осознанности, найти в ней личное. Материальная же сущность «mobile», материальные тела объектов представляют собой несоответствие между эмоциональной сферой и щемящим принципом очевидности, который в манере Декарта показывает, что истинно лишь то, что ясно и отчетливо дано нашему умственному взору. Так Колдер дает зрителю чувство контроля в восприятии и отвечает на вопрос «Зачем?»… Конструктивная сторона спонтанности… Осознанное восприятия природы материального… Звонкие звуки тишины….

[bibibela-blog]

Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk “RAUSCH”

Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk “RAUSCH” by Falk Richter “Rausch”… “The Intoxicatition” – to be more specific. In a refined manner of scenic speech there is a kind of retrained director’s mercy to his own work. With a disarming tenderness Falk Richter develops a structure of a plot made with his own hand. In collaboration with Anouk van Dijk, choreographer, artistic director and dancer he creates an out-of-genre dramatized performance. It seems irrelevant to talk about scenery in case of “Rausch”, it’s another sort of performing art: it is substantive and self-supporting. A strong spirit of production is going out of the frames of contemporary theatre. But it can’t be called experimental; “Rausch” is perceived as a mature product of reflex experience invested by its creators. In fact, “Rausch” is a substance containing a complex assembly of feelings: Love, Passion, Fear and a wide range of stereotypical reactions that are often caused by a human behavior inside social networks and, as a result, on public… An incontrovertible significance of interpersonal communication and private relationships accumulate a revelation of simple questions that are transformed into the most complex issues for each individual. “I want you to introduce me to your friends; I want you to change your Facebook status to “in a relationship” with me; I want you to call me late at night; I want you to text me every time, you think of me; I want you to say “fuck off” to everyone, who start flirting with you.” – a heartbreaking monolog accompanied with rapid mise en scenes of epileptic seizures with passionate erotic actions and a dancing human mass. This monolog outputs to a "non-Aristotelian" Brechtian techniques and practices of “epic” theatre. Bertolt Brecht’s view on an enlightenment project of a performing art determines a connection between mediated methods of aesthetic values development (characters, contents and a plot) and alienated reflexive background. The catharsis, here conserves a relation to Stanislavski (Russian pioneer of realism and actor training). Consuming the Stanislavski’s method Richter presents Friedrich Schiller’s idea of dramatic action movement either. “ A dramatic action goes ahead, and around of epic action I move on my own” – Schiller’s concept is announced in the “Rausch” by an interrogative manner of acting. Thomas Wodianka and Nina Wollny reveal characters no so much dramatic, but inquisitive in fact.Through gentle and passionate gestures and an incomplete disclosure of characters a bound with audience is formed. But actors speak different languages, either literally or figuratively. Ben Frost’s music connects layers of drama and choreography here. And both of scenic opposites are totally equal. “Countertechnique”, the movement system developed by Anouk van Dijk targets a unity of choreographic narration, which looks really raw in a connection with a scenography’s austerity. An expressive language of choreography seeks to immerse the action to abstract categories with natural aspiration to self-reflexion. One the other hand, the choreography here performs the function of accelerant for a launching the latent processes inside the original Richter’s conception of the play. It reduces an irritating pathos of political and social themes. In this case, the “Rausch” looks idealistic, but not primitively focused on the loss of capitalism. Interesting, that this play has clear age boundaries. Its sense opens to a grown-up audience; people who sometimes bemoan the days, when they used to be easy to enter into relations, love and romance were immutable and naïve and political conversations didn’t seem silly. It is the third production of collaboration between choreographer Anouk van Dijk and German director Falk Richter. Whereas “Trust” and “Protect me” were both created by Schaubühne in Berlin, “Rausch” is a production with Schauspielhaus in Düsseldoff.

[bibibela-blog]

Andriy Zholdak «Hamlet. The dreams»

Andriy Zholdak «Hamlet. The dreams» Schevchenko’s theatre. Kharkov. 2002 Hamlet… A high-emotional multilayered drama, it had been created to designate individual ambitions of every stage director, who had ever presented it… “Hamlet. The dreams” can possibly be considered as “an absolute value” for Andriy Zholdak’s career. The play indicates primary values of his artistic language, but it stays far from his insanity, which is going to wake up in some later works (“Romeo & Jolliet”). The great Shakespeare’s drama is presented in fragmental reflections of director’s emotional disorder, which can be considered as adesecration or a dedication. Zholdak uses allegorical categories to create his character of “Hamlet”. Displacing drama structures to an area of his over - personal experiences, Zholdak appeals to Shakespeare only for an inspiration. Destroyed trinity of space, time and dimension plunges into an abstract world with postmodern methodology. The play starts with images, styled in Charleston manner with inclusions of Magritte’s delusional world. Hamlet (Andriy Kavchyk) is painfully handsome; he allegorizes sensitive naivety, implied in his dreams. Occasional fragments of Shakespearian “Hamlet” dilute director’s thoughts, concluded in character’s dreams. Significance of dreams confirmed with dissociation, disunity of the action. The play pretends to perform poetry of a granulated imagination. In each of his works Zholdak finds a point of gravity for his violent, sadistic intentions. And disunity of the action provides a sore point for on an emotional level in the play. Far from concrete sadistic actions, he turns to deprivation manipulations with a viewer. Shakespeare’s original text here is separated from the action on the stage. So speech series have no resonance to a visual reality. A verbal text had been totally eliminated, so music and scenography are envisaged to be a resonators of the play. The stage, decorated in exquisite manner, provides a flexible space for reflexive manipulations. In a row with his own reflections Zholdak pays attention to original Shakespeare’s allegories. Throughout the play, Hamlet is consumed by the dichotomy between what seems to be (appearance) and what actually is (reality). The stage is sensitive to his allusion to the world as a ruined garden, also recalls Eve’s temptation in the biblical Garden of Eden, which according to Christian theology, causes man’s Fall. “The garden” is turning to issues of the grave consequences of suicide. However, words “suiscide” and “madness” can be seen in a program list, between the lines. The Scenography makes advances with musical accompaniment, which is probably one of the most significant components of the play. Gestures and movements are accurately included into a scenography concept and calibrated with audio row. The music demonstrates Hamlet’s undeniable narcissistic nature, calligraphically writes out dramatic effect and poetry of the play. A “singing away” manner of speaking emphasizes the beauty of Ukrainian language. The stage speech is set with pretentious declarativeness. This maneuver strengthens the course of Hamlet’s existential drama. As the most cynical interpretational source of “Hamlet”, the existential issues presented here restless and obsessive. “Hamlet” by Andriy Zholdak is not a story of a personal disclosure. It is a dark tale about symptomatology of existential crisis. The character of Hamlet never leaves frames of an archetypal level. Ophelia (Victoria Spesivceva) is a contrasting character. She is the center of erotic intentions of the play; so denuded Hamlet is not presented sexually on her background. Seems, that their relationship are absolutely contactless. There is just a moment to realize that they exist in parallel realities, when he stands on a pedestal, lightened with a golden sparkles and she seats nearby absently. In fact, Zholdak reveals a refined erotic line in the play, but it never exceeds the limits of high class. Zholdak reduces the power of a Ghost of Hamlet’s father; this play is swarming with ghosts and sick fantasies. But paradigmatic dialog determines his subsequent reactions. It is reflected in “The Mousetrap”, elegant and caricature moment, one of the most spectacular scenes of the play. It shows that this Hamlet is not burdened with the weight of philosophical reflections, but he is elegant and weightless. His traditional monologs are replaced with non-verbal mass scenes. Surprisingly, he awakes empathy like no Hamlet before… And this is a biggest director’s trick…. Engrossed by his own aesthetical formula, Zholdak seems to loose a connection with a reality. His moral turpitude has taken roots in fan’s hearts. “Hamlet. The dream” is his significant masterpiece: Zholdak acts like an artiest. His play is a collage. Mise en scene by mise en scene he atomizes his performance to pictures. Is it possible, that he is lost in a soigné aesthetics?

[bibibela-blog]

Andriy Zholdak «Phaedra. Golden spike»

Andriy Zholdak «Phaedra. Golden spike» Racine/Seneka. Theatre of nations. 2006 In an obscure light of a theatre hall… there are shining eyes of enthusiastic fans of scenical extremism. There are also a lot of people, who just love a trendy theatre. And after a first act the second part of audience will definitely leave and the first will enjoy it. Andriy Zholdak, famous Ukrainian maître is showing his “Phaedra. Golden spike”. The audience is expecting a wild dance on Racin’s and Seneka’s bones. From the first seconds Zholdak shows the main course of his director’s idea. A dirty ground is everywhere – a grave dampness absorbs sounds and voices. In a footlights area there are two boats in dark water. A space of the stage is involved into a fastidious game with an aesthetical collision of ugliness and beauty. This contradiction engenders a reflection of ugly beauty. The play starts with a video installation. White rats in a small reservoir are being tortured by electricity. Live video is being streamed directly from the reservoir based on proscenium. Tito Dimov, creative director, sets the tone with increased heartbeats in the odium. It is a gentle hint to a truly exquisite way of mental illness therapy by electroshock in USSR. Andriy Zholdak conceptually divides a reality on the stage into two parallels – action of a great ancient drama goes in accordance with a story in a madhouse. The reality is separated for a wife of influential warlord Pavlov (Vladimir Bolshov), having a multiple personality disorders, Vera (Maria Mironov) identifies herself with ancient Phaedra. And patients of madhouse “Golden Spike” are getting involved into Vera’s hospital chart. Mentally retarded guy (Evgenij Tkachuk) transforms into Hippolytus, and a cruel murderer Pavlov – into Theseus, Phaedra’s husband. Insolence and courage of director’s gestures had given a magnificent (in its liberty) connection of Racin’s and Seneka’s conceptions in an atmosphere of horror, called Russia. Myth of Phaedra’s involuntary passion for her stepson Hippolytus, the hunter who was supposed to be atavistically insensitive to erotic seduction, could have been reorganized on the basis of another mythological episode, which precedes it - the killing of Minotaur by Theseus in The Labirinth. Elaborate scenography intended to reveal and expand Racine’s concept of erotic passion and The Labirinth as Indifferentiation. Racine’s theoretical background of the Ancient “Phaedra” can be considered as a strong buffer, implementing protection from categories of surrealistic trash. Congeneric body of the play goes to a reflexive level of perception after the second act, making superpersonal connections with an audience. Throw a specific desire to shock appear the main motive and the collision. Zholdak strikes Rocin’s aesthetic formulation of mimetic desire. In Racin’s work, as in any other genuine literary masterpiece, there is a unity of content and form. On the stage Maria Mironov tightens a space and action to a unity of reflection sources. The many references to the Labirinth are determinant for the very subject of Phaedra, which is the representation of passion, the only subject of interest for Racine. The themes of The Labirinth and the monster hunt (Which, in Phaedra, are ultimately one and the same) have now began to appear as metaphor. The metaphor of war, hunt and domestication belong to the traditional clichés of preciosity. However, given his expert knowledge in this field, Racine could not have chosen other less violent metaphors. The most specific aspects of passion, particularly, embodied in the main character, Phaedra. The origin of Phaedra’s passion is explicitly and exclusively supernatural. The real conflict is theomachia taking place between two goddesses (Aphrodite and Artemis), who are using characters to serve their own purposes. Zholdak use it as acute move by making parallels between profound issues of ancient drama methodology and Vera’s mental disorder. In Seneka’s version, the hatred of Venus for Phaedra’s family keeps playing an important role in the genesis of Phaedra’s passion , but playwrights add a human factor: Phaedra (Vera) is an upper-class woman disillusioned by countless escapades of a husband. Phantasm flow fulfills the play with beautiful moments, like a dialog between Phaedra and Hippolytus, when their faces are reflected in water between unrefined decorations. Lifeless lighting and harmony of colors between grey and back reduce a level of theatrical affectedness in Maria Mironov’s actions. Her emotionalism looks natural. Character Vera – Phaedra tends to a delirious burning myth about women's passions. She is so lost in a contemporary reality, and the only thing she can do is to commit something insane taking people around to her reality just for a moment.

[bibibela-blog]

Thomas Ostermeier “Hamlet”

Thomas Ostermeier “Hamlet” “some kind” of Shakespeare?! Schaubühne, Berlin Berlin-Berlin… Thomas Ostermeier is so “Berlin” – it hearts. The play takes 2 hours 45 minutes without interval; the cast was drastically cut down to 6 performers; 5 male, 1 awe-inspiring female. Ostermeier is as damning as you would expect about the economic legacy of Thatcher and Blair, and impatient with the idea of private funding (The Guardian. UK). To perceive and accept this “Hamlet” it is necessary to renounce a sense of humor; and wade through cherished scandalousness of the director to see truly disadvantaged and injured Hamlet (Lars Eidinger). He appears … and it becomes clear, that construction of the drama is going to avoid a traditional pathos of contemporary “Hamlet”. A diversity of Hamlet’s nature (in a total mass of character’s interpretational options) is expressed by an image of a bloated guy, unattractive, down-to-earth in his own tragedy. A semantic load is entrusted to an interaction of Shakespearean drama and squalor of a real life. Unseparated from a beer, Hamlet demonstrates a greatness of drama, growing in a blockhouse. The play can be considered as an exploratory breakthrough: a new type of Hamlet’s character had been found. It is a domestic type of Hamlet. After he expelled aesthetic factors of Hamlet’s agony, the director created a character suffering in a casual manner. Desperation and a debauchery form a very strong life character… Allegorized dirt prevails all over the play. The first real scene of the play is a burial pantomime, it lasts a painfully long and is stunningly expressive. The gravedigger in a dirt is an unforgettable impression. Ostermeier’s fluffy allegory of dirt has a special solemnity. Characters don’t throw it around; they eat it! The actors spend a lot of time face-down in something, mostly food, and when they show their faces afterward, they look like ghouls arisen from the dead. It’s an allegory of kingdom full of ghosts and symbols of action-packed madness. The narrative was secondary in a production which aimed to focus on Hamlet’s madness, according to Ostermeier. Psychological processes here are so effectively translated into physical ones that the actual recitation of monologues seems almost irrelevant. The best scene in the entire production is the pas de deux between Hamlet and Ophelia when Polonius forces their encounter. The scene shifts back and forth so quickly between tenderness and violence. Particularly impressive was an euphoric victory dance after “the Mousetrap”. Breaking the space-time continuum, Ostermeier shifts angles of specificity. Ophelia’s victimized half - character is spliced with Gertrude (Judith Rosmair). And maintaining the balance of the living in the play, Ostermeier uses a video technique heavily (Frank Castorf). He is interested in hidden spaces;the actors often perform in closed boxes on stage, their performance visible only by means of the live video feed projected on large screens onstage. The video visually increases everything it shows. Hamlet is performing his famous monologue with his face blown up so large that just his eyes and nose fit on the screen appears a self-reflexive gesture, a comment on the hugeness of the lines themselves. A quality of the video production significantly increases the level of the play. And music inclusions of Deathcore compositions cause some kind of tenderness.

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Robert Wilson "Sonnets"

Robert Wilson "Sonnets" based on Shakespeare's Sonnets, music by Rufus Wainwright Berliner Ensemble, 2009 Shakespeare’s “Sonnets” by Robert Wilson and Rufus Wainwright is a demonstration of a kind of new disclosure of endless interpretational corridors, created by English playwright. Equally important is American stage-director’s flexibility. Robert Wilson’s production changes a shape of frames inside a structure of theatre and opera. However, “Sonnets” were not meant to be presented on a stage… Robert Wilson operates with 24 of 154 from Shakespeare’s sonnets. To express the depth of his feelings, poet frequently employed hyperbolic terms to describe different types of love between the young man and the speaker, the young man and “the dark lady”, “the dark lady and the speaker”. Wilson reveals hyperbolic structures by a casted stage decoration. From a first sight, it seems that, the decorative component of a play is the source of poetry revealed in masks in which the characters personify moral qualities or abstractions (as death or youth). It refers to traditional English elements of Italian Commedia dell’arte, naturalized in harlequinade and elements of pantomime. Melodiousness and rhythmicity work as accelerator of an action. And a total darkness directs to an allegorical drama of Morality play. The course of dominative choreography is a straight allocation of depersonalization. Detailed analysis of stylistic clichés can be the first step on the way of understanding dramaturgic and directorial thinking of Robert Wilson. In a stylistic tension there is new semantic space opening. It is poetry with principles of contemporary performance. Wilson’s play has no “film factor”, that takes away the sense of dramatic action, if it is filmed. He is, probably, crossing the line between the theatre and performance. Preserved by a video, his art keeps its dramatic charm. However, taken on video, theatre, usually loose its charm and sense. This fact opens the way to assumption about a displacement of the genre. “Dancing” through the edification, wisdom, exemplariness, Wilson found the way to connect the drama of human bodies to the Shakespearean sonnet (Sonnet №66). Hysterical sermons are concluded in a dramatic action, diluted with masks and ridiculous clichés. But tears through a harlequins greasepaint uncovers personalities, reducing a space between a personalities and conventional masks. It is a birth of a new flexible genre with classic allegory, poetic generalization and hypnotic action. A sharply and unambiguously a “social criticism” delivered with existential passion of moral indignation. Wilson’s exclusion of inter-gender issue from moral interpretation of human life made it necessary for him to redefine human genders. “Sonnet 20” is a crucial, sensual tale: the young man becomes the “master mistress” of the poet’s passion. The youth double sexuality, as portrayed by the poet, accentuates the youth’s challenge for the poet. As a man with a beauty of a woman, the youth designed to be partnered with women but attracts men as well. Shakespeare portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to the young man. Nature gave a young man a beautiful face, but it is the young man’s responsibility to make sure that his soul is worth of such a visage. Narcissism, both physical and emotional, the theme of narcissism and usury (meant as a form of “use”) are followed by issues concerned with “the defeat of time” and different “things” of love. Lightness of superficiality expands a wide specter of themes. Poetical language is created by variable sound patterns, including the effective use of alliteration – repetitive consonant sounds in a series of words. In the same time, Wilson works with structure of movement in a light, building strong connections between choreography and scenical speech. Robert Wilson seems to borrow his creative methods from different tendencies. And his art is a decomposing poetical compound. Fragile structure of the play assumes a shade of momentary. Colliding with sharp points of modern representations, Robert Wilson finds “his own Shakespear”.

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Eimuntas Nekrošius/Meno Fortas Theatre “The Divine Comedy”

Eimuntas Nekrošius/Meno Fortas Theatre “The Divine Comedy” based on the poem by Dante Alighieri International theatrical festival «Stanislavsky's Season». 2012. A black sphere, associated with allegories of space appears as a symbol of “The Dark Planet”; a reflection of nine circles of the Inferno is constructed spirally. Reducing the epic poem to its basic elements, Eimuntas Nekrosius (Meno Fortas production) shows his interpretation of immutable Dante’s masterpiece. “The Divine Comedy” … eccentric chef – d’oeuvre of Dante, it is a mixture of different literary genres and themes and it is also a poem full of traditional symbolism. Significant as a supreme Italian, Catholic, Scholastic work of art, it has a unified scheme for dramas. The symbolism of a solid world, no distinction between mind and matter, everything is touchable. The physical expresses the spiritual, the spirit of God is physical and pervades the physical universe - it's all one place. There is no heaven and hell, it is just all here. And the first thing stoically felt from the outset of Nekrosius’s play is a strong respect, without obsequiousness, but with an underlying fear. The director’s fear provides piquancy in an expression of his original style. Some simple elements characterize both the theatrical dramatization and the scene, producing a piece of work of considerable lyrical and metaphorical value. Technically the play is based on two parts of “The Divine Comedy” – “ Hell” and “Purgatory”. Nekrosius sets it straight in the first act with a heavy load to a subject of exhausting (the positive meaning of the word) and all-consuming love. Romantic issues here are widely presented by a character of a shiny Beatrice (Leva Triškauskaitė). She acts with a sliding intangibility, her weightlessness reveals her as an over – character, physically existing on a stage her image seems to be sealed in a semantic canvas. In “The Divine Comedy”, the attention is focused on Dante – the Author of the Poem, and Virgil (Vaidas Vilius) who leads him through the realm of the dead from the first canto of Inferno. The director understands the plot as a friendship, a path undertaken out of love. Dante ( Rolandas Kazlas )… the leading character is full of passion and energy. By his character Nekrosius amplifies the original Dante’s curiosity. Indeed, Nekrosius’s “perfect” leading character appears in “Pirosmani, Pirosmani“(1981); it was the moment of his paradigmatic character revelation, which formed the heartbreaking representation of purity and sincerity as a moral compass of Nekrisius’s tragic hero. Empathy is one of Dante’s greatest attributes, and this is the source for the strongest of all Nekrosiuse’s gestures; the disclosure of overwhelming power of naiveté. Indeed, on a general level, the kindness and compassion of Dante the character often contrasts with the feelings of Dante the poet, this duality can be slightly noticeable in harmonious relationship between character of Dante and Virgil in the play. As the story progresses, Dante must learn to reconcile his sympathy for suffering with the harsh violence of God’s justice; the deeper he proceeds into Hell, the less the agonies of the damned affect him. Virgil encourages him to abhor sin and not pity the justice meted out to sinners. Virgil and Dante is a dynamic duo. Dante’s very first words to Virgil compare him to a "fountain / that freely pours so rich a stream of speech" and later he calls Virgil "the sea of all good sense." Dante paints this wonderful image of knowledge and learning that can flow from one source to the other and, thus, is open to anyone who makes the effort to unlock the dam. But all metaphors aside, both share an earnest mutual respect. Dante plays the role of a student – asking questions, listening to sinners’ stories, and imitating Virgil. Virgil acts the part of the sage professor, while Dante’s your typical overachiever. As befits a character that symbolizes reason, Virgil proves sober, measured, resolute, and wise. He repeatedly protects Dante from hostile demons and monsters, from Charon to the Centaurs. For instance, when Dante sees Brunetto Latini among the Sodomites in Canto XV, Dante the character feels deeply moved. One of most significant scenes is a moment with The Pope (Remigijus Vilkaitis). Although the motive of omnipotence and inflated ambitions had never made a deal for Nekrosius, here the motion of images mise en scene by mise en scene shows a pictorial world of the director. The scenography raises the emotional level of the play. Everything what is happening on the stage seems to be torn of darkness. Scenery made by Marius Nekrošius is based on contrasts. The colors are bright and structures are clear and concise. Andrius Mamontovas in teamwork with a sound designer Arvydas Dūkšta slightly disturbed the natural music accompaniment of Neakrosius’s concept. But they tided the music with scenery perfectly. A sharpness of illustrative clarity creates an atmosphere of hopefulness. A melody of Tchaikovsky’s symphony liquefies a precision of scenic speech and spiritualizes the action. Nekrosius cuts heaven out entirely. The journey was enough for him. “The heaven” could have ruined a balance between positive intensions and semantic pressure of the play. Through the gates of Hell, marked by the haunting inscription “abandon all hope, you who enter here”, It seemed that Nekrosius interested in a journey more then in outcome. He wildly appeals to Dante’s poetical term "Violent Again Art" referring to art in the context of the general definition of the word.

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Eimuntas Nekrošius/ Meno Fortas “Hamlet”/ “Hamletas”

Eimuntas Nekrošius/ Meno Fortas “Hamlet”/ “Hamletas” by William Shakespeare We live in a world where serial inhumanity has become the norm… Touching tension to a metaphorical enrichment of imperfect world by opportunities of a clear, self-destructive naivety became an ID mark of Lithuanian stage director Eimuntas Nekrosius. Powerfully eccentric vision of the work revealed new representative points in a flexible concept of “Hamlet”. This is the “Hamlet”, in which pain is no metaphor. There is something achingly touching in the way he appeals to symbols of helplessness, futility and frustration. Nekrosius’s style goes both nonrealistic and nonpsychological. He is placing the drama in a primitive and brutal world, picturing a basic impulse of the play with a pattern of illustrative metaphors. The center of gravity in his “Hamlet” is Ice; and sometimes it is a Fire. A poetic use of image and sound is observed religiously in all his works; it is a metaphysical foundation of exquisite sensitivity that indicates director’s line of thinking. So Ice is a central motif. Towards the beginning, the Ghost (Vidas Petkevičius) presented a blindfolded Hamlet (Andrius Mamontovas) with a huge block of it; Hamlet’s monolog scene littered with shards of ice as sharp as the dagger in his hand. A deluge of freezing rain fell on the characters, evoking the ghost of Hamlet's father as if he were seeping into their bones like a damp chill. A density of visual metaphor provides a thick homogeneity of the play. So intense is Nekrosius's vision, that the uniformly marvelous actors, completely focused and immediate as they are and not allowed to input anything to their roles. On his next appearance, Hamlet was sucking a shard of ice; later, the Ghost attached a chandelier of candles and ice to the circular saw, under which Hamlet delivered the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, slowly ripping apart his shirt. Though this scene is amazingly beautiful, mechanical precision of the actors is obvious. Furthermore, Nekrosius's Hamlet has accumulated the significance of natural elements present as an expression of human emotions in his performance. But the visual impact has an influence on the development characters and tends to the impossibility of Aristotelian catharsis. It can be seen in broad hints to immateriality of Hamlet’s essence beyond a gender, displaying him as an allegoric symbol of existential crises. Another reason is the actors acknowledge ideological and cultural codes and deconstruct its representation with the help of self-reflexive acting, or displaying the materiality of body and gesture. The production boasts a piercingly poignant Ophelia (Viktorija Kuodyte), drowning in insanity she becomes an emotionally opened, but not really cooperating figure. Nekrosius’s character of Hamlet is a frightened child lost in darkness and deadness. He is anemic and spineless. His madness causes the feeling of grief and sadness, the most important feeling from those that attract Nekrosius’s fans. A distorted plot of Nekrosius’s story seems to be crushing the play and waving it in the wind: transforming it into a reflective cloud. But iconoclastic director adds something invisible to the play, and it’s bloom with harmony and passion. “Hamlet” is full of traditional Nekrosius’s naivety. It is sharply detailed in the skull of Yorick signified by coconut, iconography of water, fire and smoke. As usually, a muscular energy of the vocal cords, voices raised to maximum. The manner of a scenic speech artificially pumps the atmosphere of horror. Аllegories of nature (sounds of birds and animals) are widely presented through all Nekrosius’s works. And they emphasize a catastrophism here and accompany a rationalism in the methodology of deaths. “Hamlet” is probably the darkest of all Eimuntas Nekrosius’s masterpieces. It is not necessary for him to point it by a scenography; it is wildly reflected in his sensitivity to unfairness. In this play he is the way too close to Strehler and Bergman.

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Kama Ginkas «Hedda Gabler» by Henrik Ibsen

Kama Ginkas «Hedda Gabler» by Henrik Ibsen. 1890 Alexandrinsky Theatre. 2012 Kama Ginkas presents his second revelation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler on the Main Stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre. Ginkas invented an absolutely new Gedda, different from character he showed 30 years ago with Natalia Teniakova. Kama Ginkas is well known for a wild intensity of his aesthetic paradigm, constructed by unconstrained connection of wisdom and youthful sensation of life. Monumentally complicated “Hedda Gabler” is now shown with a light breath, rapid rhythm and sliding intonation of unexpectedly new director's course. The character of Hedda (Maria Lugovaya) appears here as a dramatically young girl with an exquisite attractiveness inherent in an inexperience. In her manner of speaking and moving she is sharp and unpredictable, her speech sounds deliberately calibrated. Сlearly separating words, she destroys their meanings by her intonations. From the moment she enters, she presents the essence of the play, focused on persistently emphasized conflict between her out-and-outer nature and circumstances. Her exaggerated immature viewpoint separates her from everyone around her. Tesman (Igor Volkov), her husband, is presented as a parasitic tumor on her life. Lövborg (Alexandr Lushin), her sacred absolute, looks detached. He is so imperfect, but it makes him even more desirable for Hedda. They were in love once, but now he is cold and irresistible and she is restless. It is a prime cause of the chaos she creates all over her life. Emotional play with characters can be recognized as a director’s conversation with an author. “ Hedda Gabler” belongs to Ibsen’s decadence period. There are a lot of eschatological, painful points. Besides, It distinguishes opposing elements within the individual as social self and the essential self. The social self is a persona which conforms to the demands of family, friends, community and society and which an individual generally develops for acceptance or as a protection. The essential self is an individual’s thoughts, feelings, desires needs etc. The primary value for Ibsen is freedom, which he belived to be essential for self – fulfillment. Ginkas reveals the character trying to find balance between social and essential values without ability to compromise. He avoids the traditional image of Hedda ¬¬– here she is two times younger then every men character around her. This maneuver dramatically shifted semantic emphasis of the play. And this is a moment when the director takes a representational corridor that had never been taken before. Hedda Gabler is not longer that elegant player, constantly carrying out experiments on souls and destinies. Ginkas shows her turned inside out, with a fragile nature of a wild child. After a hundred years since this play was written, Ginkas hears the voice of juvenility requiring a retribution for cynicism. He works directly with a deeper emotional layer of Hedda, the layer that concentrates her real motivations. Younger Hedda reacts openly with youthful protest. The infantilism reconciles her with a sense of a delayed death. A traditional refined Hedda Gabler appears once – burning Lovborg’s manuscript work, the only thing he loved. By this representation corridor a keynote of the play turns to a stronger character of Hedda free from doubts of an adult mind. She doesn’t cover anything with a stamp of wise indifference. There is something childish in the way she coquettishly talks about suicide wondering if she will look pretty hanging herself on a tree. Practically she doesn’t protect herself from painful revelations she makes during three-hours play. Sensuality of emotional background is reflected in metaphorical values of scenography. Sergei Barkchin created contemporary scenery with transparent plastic. Video as a scenography element shows Heddas nightmares. Video with swarming creatures form superficial metaphor emphatically provided by Ginkas – ethical dimension of stable and unhappy life. Suicide by Ginkas interpretation is more than just a classical Hedda’s search for a beauty, it’s a chance to stop being disgusted by primitive life. And a final mise en scene with words “Suicide is inappropriate in a decent society” is a moment of true in the play. Katerine Beliaeva