Jun Yang; China. "Camouflage. LOOK like them - TALK like them" and the series "X-Guide"

Camouflage. LOOK like them - TALK like them
Jun Yang. /04, 16:33 min









Jun yang, who was four years old when his family emigrated from China to Vienna, makes videos and installations focusing on cultural and personal identity and the effects of migration and relocation. Filmed in the wake of 9/11, "Camouflage. LOOK like them - TALK like them" reflects the conditions of everyday life in the West for migrants - legal and illegal. - in a climate of paranoia. Migrant X was smuggled from China into Austria, where he is designated a person of 'suspicious appearance and behaviour'. The story of X's failed attempts to blend in with the crowd - and his eventual imprisonment as an illegal immigrant - is told against a background of newspaper headlines reporting extraordinary police measures, false alarms and wrongful arrests. As advice to others in the same predicament, Yang describes the camouflage tactics necessary in order to survive. Though the tales is not remotely funny, its reducio ad adsurdissimum points to the ridiculous situation where we will all have to look and behave exactly alike in order to be above suspicion.
The "X-Guide" pictograms reinforce the messages of the 'Camouflage' video in simple visual language, illustrating appropriate codes of Western behaviour for foreigners. But at the same time there are deeper ironies at play: while designed to enable us to communicate regardless of nationality, race and age, pictograms used as public information symbols are highly culture-specific and can often be misunderstood. Here, in order to make everything absolutely clear, the pictograms are accompanied by captions in English, though English-speakers presumably should not need these pictograms instructions.

*KATAOKA, Mami. "Laughing in a Foreign Language", The Hayward, London, UK, 25 January - 14 April 2008. Southbank Centre.
X-Guide: get a formal hair-cut Alucubon, vinyl, three-part approx. 116 x 160 cm .2004


"X-Guide: learn the local language." Alucubon, vinyl, three-part approx. 116 x 160 cm 2004

Artur Zmijewski, Them @ Documenta 12, Kassel, German. 2007

(Artur Zmijewski Them, 2007. Courtesy of Foksall Gallery Foundation)

Them documents a social experiment devised by Zmijewski in which representatives from conflicting social groups (conservatives, patriotic Catholics, nationalist Polish youth, leftist socialists, democrats and freedom fighters) are brought together through a series of workshops. Each group is asked to construct a symbolic centre and then to comment and react to the others. Forcing participants to interact: to negotiate, to fight, or to withdraw.

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“Though we often ostensibly apply actual labels to fictive things, we
can hardly apply fictive labels; for a label used exists.”
-Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art

‘I’m starting’ says an old lady in her modest but excited voice. Nobody anticipates the beginning of a battle. She draws a black line, then another, and more.
Four different teams illustrate their four diverse views in simple drawings. A catholic church, a word ‘’ in Hebrew framed in the contour of , Chrobry’s Sword, and the word ‘Freedom’ (in Polish) again framed in the contour of .
Each team’s members come from a different ideological background. As groups supposed to appear representative of the ideology they become stereotypical in themselves. Moreover – they use stereotypes to express their beliefs.
Their illustrations serve as emblems, also in a literal meaning, as they are printed on t-shirts that each group will wear. During the second meeting, dressed in their new outfits they become easily identifiable. Simple rules are set – there are no rules.
Teams begin to correct each other’s expressions, removing or adding elements until the message is in compliance with their own views. They each represent some type of an extreme, not one being a so-called typical Pole. However, it is the very use of stereotypes in which lays the strength of Them.
Their actions are a battle of representations, a war of images, symbols and gestures, which gain their intensity from being simple, direct and most importantly – not always adequate. The extremity escalates as the exchange of fire takes place.
None of the participants are artists; it is only for the sake of the video that they agreed to use visuals. The conflict is spectacular, almost thrilling as the actions develop.
If one ever asks the question whether art can be harmful, this video provides a particularly interesting answer. Only the elderly catholic ladies notice that the tumult is not leading the discussion anywhere. They decide to leave the room. The remaining three groups consisting of much younger people seem too excited to notice that their actions are destructive. The reason for that is as simple as it is peculiar. They have to invent ways of expression that are new to them and that will prove what they consider to be the strength of their argument.
There is no single attempt to explain any belief or the reason behind it. Nobody tries to reach an agreement. Nonetheless, members of each group seem to be satisfied with their doings. Perhaps it is because they are stubborn. But it may also be due to the fact, that they are engaged in a creative process, the most fulfilling act any human can undertake. The godly act of creating easily becomes opium for the brain.

* text by Bartek Kraciuk from the whitehotmagazine.

“Borderlines: Digital art to produce social statements.”

Is it possible to produce an artwork that engages the society? Which are the tools, the techniques and the correct terms to represent the society today trough the well-know technological speed development?


Abstract:
This paper intents to analyze the work “borderlines”(a collaboration between artist using digital technology to represent immigrants aspects and conditions in London). The current essay use different concepts - related to the digital technology in the art field - to translate and illustrate the context about the work and also to create questions about the terminology ‘digital art’. What is produced today that we could call digital art? How we can identify this term in our contemporary production and how this technological evolution in the art field help to develop the society? Looking in the process of this art production the technology is inserted “as a tool” to engage social statements in different contexts, and at the same time, to represent and analyse the today’s society searching for further paradigms and aesthetics.

Keywords: digital art; social art; contemporary art; ‘work-in-process’; New British Art, Joseph Beuys.


*click here for download the paper.

Joseph Beuys at TATE collection

The German artist Joseph Beuys was highly charismatic figure whose sculptures, made from substances such as fat, felt, wax, honey, copper and bronze has distinctive symbolic associations that he derived from science, anthropology and identified with animals such as the stag, which Beuys associated with the power to move freely between the physical world and spirit realism. One of his last and most dramatic works, Lightning with Stag in its Glare 1958-85 brings together, in an apocalyptic flash of lightning many of the themes that had obsessed him throughout his life.

'In the massive installation Lightning with Stag in its Glare (1958-85), the suspended, bronze triangle embodies the energy of a powerful flash of lightning, which illuminates a group of half-formed creatures. The ‘stag’ of the title was originally made from an ironing board and then cast in bright aluminium to suggest the glare of the lightning. The cart represents a goat, and the clods of bronze on the floor are primordial creatures. A small compass, mounted on top of a box, is another reference, with the lightning flash itself, to the natural energies of the earth.'

Francesca Woodman at TATE Modern.

This week I went to the TATE Modern to check the exhibition about Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia, but what really make my mind was 2 works from the Tate Collection exhibition from the American Artist Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) and the German Joseph Beuys (1921-1986).

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In the Woodman room a series of videos and photographs.

"Selected Video Works 1975 - 1978"
Influenced by Surrealist photography, Woodman's self portraits possess a remarkable psychological intensity. She produced a series of videos in the mid-1970s after borrowing a camera from the Rhode Island School of design. Recently discovered and restored, they include a sequence in which Woodman is obscured by a sheet of paper which she gradually tears until her naked form emerges through the ruptures surface.


"Poetry and Dream"
Woodman's ethereal photographs appear to explore and dissolve the boundaries of the human body. Many of her self-portraits present her in otherwise deserted interior spaces, where her body almost merges with its surroundings, covered by sections of peeling wallpaper, half hidden behind the flat plane of a door, or crouching over a mirror. Often using slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence, Woodman seems to combine performance with self-exposure, suggesting the exploration of extreme psychological states.
Born into a family of artists, Woodman grew up in Boulder, Colorado but regularly spent her summers in Italy. She began taking photography at the age of 13, and her work reflects her absorption of range of visual material from Surrealist and fashion photography to Baroque painting. She sometimes included fetishistic found objects and phallic props which are seen in relation to her own body, or to the bodies of her models. Many of the photographs suggest a spirit of playful experimentation at odds with their sense of claustrophobia. Most of the photographs were given by the artist to her boyfriend, who appears alongside her in a double portrait. Although she was only 22 when she took her own life, Woodman left behind a significant body of work of more than 800 images.

TEXT & IMAGE, Wilson Rd gallery, Camberwell