Ethan art news

Artist/curator Sachiko Hayashi included Self-Portrait in the Net Gallery of Hz Journal's July issue.

I was selected to be a LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots) ReSiDeNt this fall. The month-long residency (ReSiDeNcY?) culminates in a musical performance. I'm very excited about the opportunity! More details to follow, but for now let me just say it isn't coincidental that I've been frequently blogging about sound art, musical instruments, & vocoders lately.

Read (or listen) to an interview Matt Fisher did with me for Muster Magazine. (It's a bit painful, to, you know, read your... what you say, like, verbatim :)

Benjamin Rosenbaum (who was my collaborator on Anthroptic) and I have a new work that will be coming out in December. The project was commissioned by Turbulence.org (the same folks who commissioned Self-Portrait) and will be hosted on their website.

Markus Copper at PS1

Markus Copper's Kursk (2004) is probably the creepiest piece of art I've ever come across. It's set up as a formation of old-fashion diver's suits hanging just off the floor in a unlit room in PS1's basement. When I first peeked into the room, I wasn't sure it was an exhibition space or if there was even anything in it... then I saw a jerking motion and heard a clanking. It was an uncomfortable feeling being in the room--it was barely larger than the installation itself, so there is no buffer space between the viewer and the the suits.

The suits occasionally make a spastic, unexpected motions. The sword-like tools in their hands might suddenly move, or a light inside a helmet might switch on or off. Even though I was alone in the room, there was the overwhelming sense of someone else being there, inside one of the suits.

It wasn't until the next day that I realized that the title refers to Russian submarine that sunk in 2000 with all hands lost. The installation certainly communicates the grimness of that event.

The images of the installation on Copper's website are fully lit. I wonder if this is how the installation was originally shown (or if it is just so that the photographs can capture all the detail). I'm glad I saw the the installation in the dark--I think a lot of its power came from the unsettling environment.

Kursk is part of a very interesting "Arctic Hysteria" exhibition of Finnish art that's at PS1 through September 15th. Also included in the show is a room that explores the work of Erkki Kurenniemi. I'll probably be blogging more about him later on.

PS1 Director Alanna Heiss made an interesting about contemporary Finnish art: "Finnish artists are independent from the contemporary mainstream, and open to new ideas and materials but not addicted to the new..."

Paul Chan's The 7 Lights Website

Paul Chan's First Light was my favorite work in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Above is documentation of that artwork which comes from a special website that the New Museum has put together to go with Paul Chan's new exhibition, The 7 Lights.

Here's what Ceci Moss wrote about the Paul Chan website on Rhizome:

The site presents elaborate documentation of the exhibition, in the form of video, text, audio, and drawings. In the spirit of Creative Commons, the source files for Chan's animations are also available for download and modification. This underlying feature inserts a unique interactive component to the website and, further, to the exhibition itself.

Four shows

I thought I'd write about the four art shows, of the ones I've seen, that most stand out.

The first gallery experience that I can remember is seeing Guernica when it visited Iowa City. I was around eight years old and my father took me to see it at the University of Iowa. The painting seemed humongous and I was particularly struck by the bull and the horse. I honestly don't know why the memory has stayed with me. It's a powerful painting and perhaps the reason is as simple as that. Maybe it's because it was something that I did alone with my dad--an unusual occurrence since I have two sisters and it was not that long after my parents divorced. As far as I can tell it didn't have an influence on my art or my decision to become an artist... but who knows?

Many years later I was visiting my friends Ben & Esther (this is the same Ben who would later collaborate with me on Anthroptic) in Basel, Switzerland. This is not long after I had returned to making art and, at the time, was focused on stone carving. Ben took me to the Jean Tinguely Museum (Basel was Tinguely's home town). At the time I thought Tinguely's work was pretty cool, but not very relevant to my art. It wasn't until years later when I was half-way through graduate school that I realized the impact Tinguely's work has had one me. The piece to the right is a Tinguely machine for automatically making abstract expressionist drawings.

Shortly before going to graduate school I took an introduction to sculpture course at UC Berkeley. I ended up dropping the course, but before I did the class visited SFMoMA. The museum had a show that explored automatically generated art. It included Roxy Paine's SCHUMAK and Karin Sander's Persons 1:10. SCHUMAK generates plastic out of extruded plastic. For 1:10, Sander invited people to be scanned in 3-D, from which a small plastic figure is made and then painted. Sander doesn't pose the person or dictate what clothes they wear... she doesn't create or paint the figure. Her art is in setting up the system, after it runs on its own. At the time I found Sander's work troubling, thou
gh I have come to love it. SCHUMAK, on the other hand bothered me more over time (though I certainly appreciate it on its own terms).

When my Email Erosion piece shown, I included a statement which contrasted it with Roxy Paine's work. Here's an excerpt:

Later this month, Roxy Paine’s PMU (Paint Manufacturing Unit) will be installed at the Portland Art Museum. Paine’s art-making installations create beautiful works of art and also offer an interesting contrast with the piece Email Erosion installed here. Paine's machines exhibit a kind of self-sufficient solipsism: they have no line of communication, with the viewer. The result is a stillness in the installations: the machines spend most of their time allowing plastic to cool or paint to dry, frustrating the viewers’ natural desire to see them at work. Perhaps Paine’s art-making mechanisms mirror an artist’s fantasy of uncompromising, wholly internal creativity, but the result for the viewer seems to be a machine in a sad and lonely existence. In my work, the goal is to have the machines be lively and engaged with the viewer, collaborating in the process of making art.

The final show in my list is Work Ethic which was at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003, not long after I started graduate school. Here's an ArtForum article about the show. Essentially it looked at conceptual art through the lens of work... whether the artist was creating work for herself/himself (such as Richard Serra catching lead), avoiding work (such as the art generating machines of Roxy Paine), managing work (such as Warhol's factory), or creating experiences (such as Edwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures). The timing of the show could not have been better--the experience of it launched me in a direction in graduate school that I'm still following today.

An Honorable Mention goes to Tim Hawkinson's Whitney show a couple of years ago... I was going to include it, but it's been a busy week and I decided to cut the list short. If I was to be fair, I would've cut Picasso and kept Hawkinson, but having Guernica as a first art memory is too cool not to include.

Any shows stand out for you? If so, please let me know in the comments!