HEyeRMEarS is a nickname used by artist Josef Cseres to document experimental and improvised music. Cseres, who lectures in Slovakia and Czech Republic, is interested in archiving artists who touch on the discursive and nondiscursive modes of expression. One such presentation was the improvisational violin works of Jon Rose, Violin Factory and Double Indemnity. I had the chance to listen in on some of the tracks from Rose’s album which Josef is archiving during the artist talk held at Post Museum on 19th August 2010. 

Documentation of R.I.T.E.S. #7 performance at The Substation, Singapore. 2010. Courtesy of Jason Lee.

In this talk, Josef shared that his appearance in Singapore was purely accidental. Having made plans to swing by Southeast Asia, he contacted Lee Wen, a Singaporean performance artist whom he had met in an international conference. At that time Lee Wenwas involved with an emerging new platform for experimental and improvisational musicians called Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak (R.I.T.E.S). It was a match waiting to happen, and Josef was invited to perform at the next R.I.T.E.S presentation.

Josef performed with a suitcase and a typewriter which were nostalgic elements rarely seen in today’s times. In this performance, he went on the mundane and monotonous task of typing words. He also integrated spoken word into the performance via a speaker that was drumming out muffled recordings of an unknown person reading letters of the alphabet which Josef proceeded to type out. He asked the audience to read from books he had laid out on chairs in the performance space at The Substation Theatre. The audience members read these books aloud and Josef kept typing. When they were done, Josef ended the performance with a lighted tea candle placed next to these typewritten sheets laid out on the floor. But this was not the end of the show — Josef retreated to the back of the wall where there was a board and using some chalks he wrote, “Terrorists destroy buildings. Tourists destroy places. Artists destroy both.” Josef was not done. He used a rubber stamp with the words ‘The Lazy Anarchists’ and stamped them on the papers he’s laid out near the tea candles in a public display of criticism against how young artists do not lay claim to anarchism as a critical response to the status quo anymore. Josef, who confessed to being a university lecturer weary of the institutionalized way of teaching art, was sending a non-verbal message about the monotonous and droning style of academia, education and learning in today’s contemporary times.

Documentation of R.I.T.E.S. #7 performance at The Substation, Singapore. 2010. Courtesy of Jason Lee.

In his artist talk, Josef admits that academic discourse does not satisfy him. He finds the arguments and discussions to be contradictory between those who practice art and others who interpret art. He went searching for alternative ways of expressing himself by dabbling into installation works in the past. When asked to explain the reference to the Greek god Hermes, Josef shared that it was a topic for his thesis which was devoted to mythology. He connected with Hermes, known as an ancient God who takes care of all travelers and thieves, as he was an unconventional God known to deconstruct the norm.  The other known phenomenon about Hermes was the winged shoes he wore to travel between the mortal and immortal world. It was Hermes who had influenced the use of ‘hermeneutics’ in language which translates to the study of interpretation. Cseres’ deeper desire to look for different interpretations of music and art is not a new finding amongst artists whose visions are far more stretched and far-sighted. There was little show of works from the museum aside from Jon Rose’s albums but a book documenting some images of violins were passed around to the audience as a sample of what the museum does.

Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak (R.I.T.E.S) is an artists-initiative organized as a platform for new ideas and artists in sonic art, time-based and performance art-related practices.

Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series

Today, Bean Gilsdorf looks at some of the artists that have broken the art world’s mold in her latest article Rebellion, Four Ways, as a continuation of our week-long series Rise of Rebellion.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a fellow artist.  “I’m thirty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never really rebelled.”  We talked about what rebellion means; it turns out that while I was imagining the traditional route of sex/drugs/rock-n-roll, she had something tamer in mind: “I was thinking about not bathing for a while.”  I admit that I laughed out loud.

She and I were both thinking about social nonconformity in general, yet there are forms of revolt more specific to art and its milieu.  True rebellion is a personal action, a stance to take against the machination of a system whether overt or hidden.  When people talk about “the art world” they refer specifically to the capitalist market-driven system of exchange that takes place in the slim area of overlap between makers, dealers, and buyers.  It’s a system of production and consumption like many others that relies on indoctrination, social pressure, and buy-in to a set of assumptions.  In order to succeed in this world artists must play the game and follow the rules—all very insidious in a field that is purported to be about freedom and expression.  Winners learn to play well and are rewarded for running within the confines of the maze and pressing the lever at the end. But the “art world” is not art, and never should the two be confused.  Below are some of the tacit rules of the art world and the iconoclasts who break them.  Consider this food for thought.

Paul Chan, The laws are my whores (2009). Suite of nine drawings, charcoal on paper, 39.5 x 27.5 inches each.

Paul Chan, Oh why so serious? (2008). Plastic and electronics, computer keyboard, 3.25 x 18.5 x 8 inches.

Paul Chan, Waiting for Godot (2007). Performance view, South Ward, New Orleans.

1.) Make all your work recognizable.  A body of work is consistent and easily identified.

You’re a brand, and if you want to sell you need to make your brand instantly recognizable—just like a Louis Vuitton handbag or an Apple computer.  Tell that to Paul Chan, the 37 year-old auteur of videos, sculpture, drawings, paintings, light projections, computer fonts, and the co-stager of five site-specific performances of “Waiting for Godot” in post-Katrina New Orleans.  There is no “recognizable” here, no direct sense of continuity from show to show or even piece to piece; if you didn’t read the wall label you might not know who made the work.  There is only a joy of making; freedom of expression, indeed.

Cady Noland, SLA #4 (1990). Silkscreen on aluminum, edition 4/4, 78 3/8 x 60 5/8 x 3/8 inches.

2.) Promote your brand incessantly: lectures, residencies, studio visits, and visiting-professor gigs will help you advance.

It’s true that for most artists there is a social context to the work: after all, if no one knows what you make, how will they know if they like it or not?  But is it true that one must exploit every connection, every opportunity, every possible avenue for social growth to create a career in the arts?  Ask Cady Noland…oh, but you can’t.  The reclusive artist won’t answer your email and won’t work with you if you she doesn’t trust you. Despite her many successes, Noland dropped out of the art world; self-promotion is not a game that she plays.  In a 1994 review of Noland’s work, critic David Bussel wrote with keen prescience, “Anyone can be made into a hero or villain because minor celebrity is just another disposable object of mass consumption.”  Despite Noland’s reticence to engage with the public, her work continues to be in demand.

Dana Schutz, Blind Foot Massage (2009). Oil and acrylic on canvas, 36.25 x 34 inches.

3.) Hit the big time: get rich, develop a waiting list, and hire a cadre of laborers to keep up with the demand.

(Bonus points if your laborers live in “developing” countries and you make this part of your schtick.)  This is the model proposed by Andy Warhol and adopted by Jeff Koons.  Some, like Kehinde Wiley and Takeshi Murakami, even make it an overt part of their practice to manage a hive of workers.  In the overheated atmosphere of the art world, it’s easy to think that the artist who doesn’t meet the production quota dictated by collectors is a species of failure.  It is said that Dana Schutz makes all her own paintings (unconfirmed by her gallery at the time of this publication), waiting list be damned.  For an artist of her stature to do so is a very passionate and hopeful gesture, proof that rebellion isn’t always some kind of adolescent sneer: sometimes it’s just sticking to one’s principles.

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, (2010). Performance at MOMA, New York.

4.) Be famous, get old, drop out.

You’ve got enough money, and maybe university tenure.  This is the time to take it easy: make work that just repeats your best years ad nauseum, or even stop working altogether.  Disproving this are John Baldessari and Marina Abramović, who continue to work hard and push beyond previous limits.  Baldessari is 79 years old; in the last five years he designed the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art, had strong new work at his show at Sprüth Magers (Berlin) earlier this year, and currently has a long-overdue retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA.  Abramović, now 64, describes herself as “the grandmother of performance art.”  Performing The Artist is Present this past spring at MOMA, she asserted the right and privilege of the artist to continue to explore her own work, to mine it and delve ever-deeper into unknown territory.  This is the benefit of utilizing a lifetime of knowledge, growth, and experience to make innovative art.  May we all be so blessed.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Helio Oiticica & Neville D'Almeida, "Cosmococa 5: Hendrix - War CC5-11," 1973 / 2003 C-print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy Michael Benevento, Galerie Lelong, NY and Joshua White Photography.

A friend of mine, a sculptor with immense brown eyes and a long figure that that always looks both cautious and comfortable with itself, was standing next to her brother’s Ford Explorer outside an Illinois gas station. They’d just been to see their grandfather in a rest home and it was the morning of Louise Bourgeois’s death, so my friend felt reasonably subdued. A man in a black sedan with windows down drove by and slowed to a crawl. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?” he said to her, sort of jauntily. She dropped her eyes, turned and rammed her head up against the Explorer’s doorframe, keeping it there until the sedan drove off. She has no idea why she did this, and I’ve made her describe it to me, blow-by-blow, three times at least. Her behavior feels vulnerable, resistant, violent and yet weirdly liberated. It’s a reaction against sexy—or at least the breed of sexy the man in the sedan felt he could access. But it’s also sexy itself, the spontaneous assertion of an inexplicable instinct.

Spartacus Chetwynd, "Hermito’s Children," Video (color, sound), 2008. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Everlasting Gobstopper at Michael Benevento, an exhibition that’s more reflective than its title suggests, is sexy expressly because of the sexinesses it rejects. The show has a grittily commemorative mood, like the setting for a party that’s bound to be oddly romantic, Disco-indebted, yet still somber. The entry way walls are painted black—it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust—and a dark purple poster of a howling wolf, painstakingly drawn by Eva Rothschild before she moved on to Cold Corners and other wonky minimalist projects, hangs opposite the door. Next comes a posse of paintings from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Bat Opera series; Rothschild’s triangular black Perspex tower; counterculture queen Lil Picard’s terrifyingly delicate burnt polka-dot bow-tie; Michael E. Smith’s dry black paintings and crusty floor pieces; and Cindy Sherman’s piquantly pink autumnal death scene. But all these mostly serve as the supporting cast for Chetwynd’s Hermito’s Children, a three part video installation that plays out on 14 stacked monitors at the back of the main gallery space.

Like a filmic novella spawned by a Truman Capote – Jack Smith marriage, Hermito’s Children presents characters who are obsessive, articulate, eccentricity prone, and vested in one another’s sexuality, though only vaguely interested in sex. Watery graphics dance across the screen to the sound of portentous woodwinds as act one, The Case of the Poisonous Dildo, commences. Less mystery than cameo, The Case features a matronly protagonist who wears a zig-zagged muumuu and sounds like Edgar Oliver with a lisp. She tells viewers not to be frightened as she introduces her unconventional, androgynous family: an ex-husband who runs a raucously happy Jewish restaurant, an absent daughter, and a deep-voiced assistant with a hog’s nose. In act two, an innocent girl in a body suit listens to a worldly “puppet master” who tells her “a dancer who relies on the doubtful prospect of human love will never be great.”

Halfway through act three,called Helmut Newton Ladies Night, the muumuu-wearing matron reappears and refers to a tomboyishly debonair troupe of women. “You are seduced by these women,” she says. “[But] what they’re doing is not that dangerous. Your imagination exaggerates it.” Then “these women” ritualistically dance to experimental metal, spoofing on Helmut Newton’s iconic 1981 image, “They’re Coming,” in which four svelte figures advanced toward the camera.

"Everlasting Gobstopper," Installation View, 2010. Courtesy Michael Benevento and Joshua White Photography.

Newton once said he couldn’t work pornographically because he didn’t do rough: “Rough stuff is real; it’s not posed. The trouble with my pornography, it’s too chic.” The bodies in Hermito’s Children aren’t posed or chic, but they’re not rough either. They’re somewhere in between. One of my favorite moments comes near the end. A group of nude women form a  sculptural rectangle. It’s stoic, formal and literally objectifying. But then a face breaks from the group and erupts in an inaudible, punkish yell. I like the idea that incongruous, fiercely independent bursts of emotion could be a way to claim sexiness as your own.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Olivier Debroise and Rafael Ortega.  A Story of Deception, Patagonia, 2006 still from 16mm film (4:20). Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich © Francis Alÿs.

A Story of Deception is the title of Francis Alÿs‘ current retrospective on view at the Tate Modern. The title of the exhibition, which spans the artist’s two-decade long career is borrowed from a work of the same name, and appropriately provides the exhibition’s subtitle and introduces the gallery visitor to Alÿs’ work.   The 16 mm film, A Story of Deception, captures a mesmerizing and unobtainable mirage on the horizon.  The camera centers itself on a road, halved by a dotted white line and follows it across an arid Patagonian landscape.  The film’s imagery and intent are oblique and deceptively simple – allowing a variety of creative, metaphorical interpretations.  The road can be read as representative of a border and the unobtainable mirage as the often out-of-reach goal of border crossing.

Francis Alÿs, Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling), Mexico City, 1992-present Slide projection. Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York. Image by Francis Alÿs © Francis Alÿs.

While Alÿs is most readily associated with the film or video documentation of his actions, this retrospective takes care to illustrate the multi-media nature of the artist’s practice and is curated thematically.  Film and video work is presented with related photographs, paintings, drawings or other ephemera.  In one particularly successful example, Paradox of Praxis I or Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997) is shown near photographs taken in Mexico City dating as early as 1992.  These projected photographic images from the series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) feature street vendors and workers bearing loads in the streets.  The connection is evident between these photographs and Paradox of Praxis, in which Alÿs pushes a block of melting ice through the city’s streets.  Both point to the often comical futility of contemporary labor.

The artist typically begins his work with an action, allowing other media to play a supporting or planning role, but that is not always the case.  The artist works in a variety of media, including photography, sculpture, animation, drawing and painting.  Paintings such as Le Temps du Sommeil (2003-present) and Silenco (2003-present) illustrate that Alÿs is influenced by urban advertising.  They also reference the precedent – intentionally or not – of past artists like Magritte.

Film or video documentation of Alÿs’ carefully planned actions remain the most compelling and most capable of conveying both subtle and overt political messages.  In Re-enactments (2000), Alÿs references the gun violence of his adopted Mexican homeland.  When Faith Moves Mountains:  A Project for Geological Displacement (2002) is one of Alÿs’ most well known works for its sheer monumentality.  In it, the artist directs 500 volunteers to form a line and physically move a sand dune located outside of Lima, Peru.  Armed solely with shovels and the spirit of collective effort, these volunteers complete a task whose apparent futility belies its profound metaphorical statement.  This great effort of ‘geological displacement’ points to the immense shared burden of geo-political displacement.

The contemporary nation-state border, as a contradictory line that is both increasingly restricted and crossed, is an important theme in Alÿs’ art practice. The artist addresses the hypocrisy of the border in works such as The Green Line or Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic (2005) in which the artist walks the 1948 armistice border line between Israel and Palestine.  Trailing a leaking can of green paint behind him as he walks a now defunct border, he quietly and profoundly points to the idiocy of human suffering caused by an arbitrary line of division.  Loop (2007) chronicles the artist’s purposefully ludicrous route across the US – Mexico border as he travels from Tijuana to Australia, up the Pacific Rim to Alaska, and then finally to California.  The epic route of travel taken in lieu of the actual distance between Tijuana and San Diego highlights the difficulty of this border crossing for illegal economic migrants.  Also referring to the theme of border crossing, The Rehearsal (1999-2004) features a red Volkswagen Beetle that continually tries and fails to reach the top of a dirt road.

The exhibition makes a strong conclusion with the premiere of Tornado (2000-2010).  This newly completed, 55 minute video documentation from hand-held camera footage was ten years in the making.  It captures the artist as he places himself in the path of high-altitude tornadoes in Mexico – enduring severe winds and no visibility brown-outs in attempts penetrate the tornado’s central vortex where the air becomes eerily still.   Alÿs places himself in peril – throwing himself blindly into chaos in hopes for resolution through the extraction of meaning.  Or, as curator Mark Godfrey argues Tornado is again concerned with the border crossing and the immense difficulty of entering and leaving geo-political zones in our increasingly mobile world.

Francis Alÿs Tornado Milpa Alta, 2000-10 Video documentation of an action and related ephemera 55 minutes Courtesy of Francis Alÿs and David Zwirner, New York Image: Video Still © Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs:  A Story of Deception remains at the Tate Modern until 5 September.  The show’s next stop is Alÿs’ home country where it will be presented at Wiels in Brussels (9 October – 30 Janurary).  The exhibition comes state-side next year to New York’s MoMA (8 May – 1 August 2011).

Francis Alÿs is represented by David Zwirner in New York and Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

Jeanne Jo’s diverse body of work, which includes video art, performance, sculpture, and collaborations with other artists, successfully evades categorization, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary culture. Often impermanent, her projects are theoretically sophisticated, aesthetically uncomplicated, and profoundly personal. After receiving her B.F.A. from the University of Nevada, Reno, Jo completed her M.F.A. in Digital Media at Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Digital Media at the University of Southern California, with an expected graduation date of 2014.

In her video series Ephemeral Interventions (2007), Jo performs simple activities in front of surveillance cameras situated around her Providence, RI. In the video seen above, Jo writes on a city street, at night, with powdered sugar. The ephemeral white text reads “When I look up from my mind, I see what you are:”, a fragment of poetry by Michael Collier. In this series, Jo inverts the function of surveillance by actively, as opposed to passively, providing content for the camera. The growing presence of surveillance in urban space, and the awareness of constant observation, has triggered a creative response from artists, most cleverly utilizing the mechanics of surveillance technology itself.

This simple but profound manipulation of chosen medium is seen in Jo’s more tangible works as well. Intrigued by the intersections of craft (specifically female  handicraft, i.e. crochet) and technology, Jo produces woven sculptures that reference the historical connections between the fields of weaving and modern computing. The Jacquard Loom, a mechanical loom invented in 1801, simplified the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns and was an important precedent to the development of computer programming, with punch cards controlling a sequence of actions. Jo’s knit sculpture, If a Mouth were to Whisper.. (2010), which resembles a giant cream-colored scarf, is a crocheted love letter, woven in alphanumeric code, with words spelled out in crochet knots. According to Studio Fuse art blog, the artist plans to engineer a computer program that would encrypt any text into a knitting or crochet pattern.

Jeanne Jo will be participating in The Business of Aura, an upcoming group show at Broadway Gallery in New York, opening on August 19th. The exhibition addresses the multiple interpretations of “aura” and seeks to reclaim a broader understanding of the term in contemporary practices. The Business of Aura will remain on view until September 10th.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Kalup Linzy, Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005. Performance documentation. Courtesy the artist and Taxter and Spengemann, New York.

Because I don’t believe that big and bright equals beautiful, I am not a fan of West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center. A mammoth, reflective blue box that towers over the otherwise low-to-the-ground Melrose Avenue architecture, the PDC has more than its share of empty retail space. Inside, it often feels like a manicured ghost town. I voted for its simulated destruction last fall when artist Gustavo Artigas staged his Vote for Demolition project, which asked Angelinos to select the city’s least attractive building. Artigas virtually razed the winner, which turned out to be the Kodak Theater because, apparently, not everyone sees the world the way I do.

Despite my PDC resentment, I am fond of MoCA’s mini Pacific Design Center, a quiet beige cube that stands in the shadow of its big blue neighbor. It seems like an almost-joke—a Mecca of materialism’s carefully sized nod to the arts. Usually, design-related exhibitions that run in this MoCA satellite, like Las Vegas Studio and Folly–The View from Nowhere, cater to the curious without undermining the over-fabricated sterility of the whole PDC complex. But this past month, the MoCA mini-me has suddenly become a theater for outlandish projects that turn “over-fabricated” into a race toward synthetic delirium.

On June 24, during the invitation-only event Soap at MoCA, General Hospital filmed an episode starring James Franco. Franco played a demented artist, MoCA played the site of his opening, and artist Kalup Linzy performed in drag. Wearing a wig with bangs and a red and black floral print dress, Linzy recited the lyrics to Mad World while Franco yelled, “Don’t kill me! I know where the baby is!”, and then fell from a balcony to his fictional death. Linzy, accustomed to the drama of soap, wasn’t phased.

Ryan Trecartin, "Sibling Topics (Section A)," Video Still, 2009.

In his own soap, All My Churun (2003), a distraught, big-haired, striped-skirted woman (most women in Linzy’s films aren’t actually women) talks about the memorial service she’s planning for a murdered love named “Jo-Jo.” “Girl, you need to stop,” says her sister over the phone. “She needs to stop,” says her brother over the phone. Her mother and grandmother, also talking over the phone, act as if a memorial service for a dead man is the most flamboyantly frivolous thing a person could have.

Video artist Ryan Trecartin uses phones as liberally as Linzy, though his rarely have cords and sometimes they’re just pinkies and thumbs extended in the “call me” gesture. Phones turn life into a series of affected soliloquies and now that Trecartin has commandeered MoCA for Any Ever, a show that opened two weeks after the museum performed for General Hospital, soliloquies have become lurid and omnipresent. “You won’t recognize the PDC once you enter,” Trecartin’s New York gallerist Elizabeth Dee told the LA Times.

The downstairs bookstore has become a dark gallery. Cluttered with brand new benches, space heaters and superfluous metal chains, it looks like a graveyard for un-bought patio furniture. Trecartin’s Trill-ogy Comp (2009)—note the “trill”—screens on the wall opposite the entrance.  Comp consists of three videos, all of them loosely related. K-CorealInc.K (section a) follows a group of all-blond white collar workers called the “Koreas”; Sibling Topics (section a) follows four quadruplet sisters, all played by Trecartin. P.opular Sky (section ish) is a bit of everything. Upstairs, in a bedroom, office space, faux-stadium and family room–each with nick-free Ikea-style furniture–four videos from the R’Search Wait’S series play out. But following storylines is precarious. As Trecartin pointed out in a recent lecture, “Consequence can just pop out of nowhere and cause can have no effect.”

Ryan Trecartin, "P.opular S.ky (section ish)," 2009.

Everyone wears some form of garish make-up, women play men acting like women, or men play women posing as men dressed as women. The physical gets slippery. With rare exception, characters use winy, effeminate teenage voices and speak confrontationally. No one is melancholic, though plenty are restless. All wear brightly colored clothes that match their bronzed, painted faces and, since Trecartin is an obsessive editor, the brash, sashaying footage has no non-orchestrated lulls. Soliloquies–there’s never really dialogue, even when characters purport to address each other–use language in a way that feels almost-but-not-quite familiar:

“She hates diversity and women. She’d probably shoot me if she saw my very extreme breast reduction that I love.” “Put your breasts back on.” “I never had any.”

“How will I make drive to find you when I’m in automation?”

“Cut my hair shorter. I like that kind of person.”

“Put on your comfort pants and say things in nice voice because.”

“I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t. I can go on and on but I won’t.”

About thirty minutes in, Any Ever begins to feel like a dream that’s apolotical, political, apathetic, aggressive and increasingly fluorescent. It becomes exhausting and disorienting, enough so to make me want to hate it. And this means it’s perfect.

Note: Critic Jennifer Doyle recently wrote more extensively about James Franco and Kalup Linzy for Frieze Magazine. Read her essay here.

On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread.

Last summer, British artist Antony Gormley was also invited to complete a project utilizing the Fourth Plinth. Instead of creating a static sculptural form to sit elevated on a pedestal before the city, the artist took a risky move to randomly invite 2,400 people to occupy the structure for a period of one hour, twenty four hours a day for a total of 100 days. Titled One & Other, the pieced allowed each person that inhabited the plinth to become the work of art,  leveling any hierarchy that defines who should be represented in a work of art. Each attendee occupied the structure alone, but was allowed to do anything they like for the hour, providing that it is legal in the UK.

For a brief period, participants could address the world at large and speak to any issue that is of concern to them.  Certainly a momentary equality of voice doesn’t exactly elicit the illusions of grandeur that are usually associated with political or societal utopias, but the ability to speak openly to an audience about an idea or issue that you are invested in without consequence is certainly the first step to identifying a common ideal. To further extend the impact and reach of each participants voice, every minute of the 100 day project was streamed live over the internet and then archived for indefinite public access.

However, Gormley’s work isn’t just interested in the idea of or struggle for utopia in relation to society, politics or even a specific place. Most often the work quietly references the notion of balance and harmony as a state of being. Gormley’s training in archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University, mixed with years of practice with Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka has positioned him in a unique place to express the experience of inner balance to a greater audience though the language of visual art. When describing the material usage for the majority of his figurative sculptures, the artist will state air as a fundamental material. This is because Gormley is as interested in the inner ’space’ of his forms as he is the ‘outer space’ that the form itself occupies.

For his first US public art project, the artist is presenting Event Horizon, a current project that includes 31 life-sized figures cast in iron and bronze modeled form the artist’s own body and now populate Madison Square Park and rooftops throughout New York’s Flatiron District. In an area that is vibrant, hectic and anything but still and quiet, these forms serve as a reminder of the balance and utopia that can be obtained inwardly even in the most chaotic of locations. However, this reminder often happens in an abrupt and oddly irritating way. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the artist addressed this notion stating, “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.”