Installation view of Back to the Things Themselves (Lesley Punton & Judy Spark). Image courtesy of Lesley Punton.

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world.

Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of a feature on exhibitions presented during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art that place emphasis on the process of collaboration and the subjective experience within artistic practice.

Judy Spark, Like punctuation (symphoricarphos), Graphite on paper, 2012, (with Lesley Punton White out receding – Carn Dearg to right). Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: Shall we start off by talking about your individual practices?

LP: My work has always been concerned with landscape issues. In recent years, through the process of walking, it has become more explicit in relation to my lived experience of places that are usually wild and rarely urban. In the exhibition, I have tried to create a diverse conversation between different pieces of work, exploring the limits of experience; and polarities – of night and day, light and dark, and time and duration.

Lesley Punton, Schiehallion, silver gelatin 5 x 4 contact print made after placing a pinhole camera in the summit cairn, pointing South, whilst bivying on the summit of Schiehallion to record the duration of the hours of darkness of midsummer night ’09, 2009-12, with Jim Hamlyn. Image courtesy of artist.

In the past, a lot of the lived experience of my work resulted in long and complicated processes of making. There are works that are directly durational in their actual making, such as Flurry, which marks time. A participatory work is Schiehallion where Jim Hamlyn and I made a pinhole photograph that recorded the duration of midsummer’s night that year at the summit of the mountain. These have a very direct relationship to experiences whilst actually in land. Recent works respond more to reflection and recollections of those experiences. Some have literary connections. Gravesend is the place where the narration of ‘Heart of Darkness’ starts, with Marlowe sitting and recounting the tale of his experience with Kurtz up the Congo.

Lesley Punton, Gravesend, graphite on paper, 2010. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: Could you talk about the Duration pieces? They make me think of a journey, where the days refer to the duration, or the process of making the work.

LP: The duration refers to polar night and polar day and the idea of time as something that is not quite fixed. I’ve always been interested in aspects of time – deep time and geological time – probably from the experience of spending a lot of time in hills.

Lesley Punton, Duration 2, oil & gesso on board, 2010-12 (photo credit L Punton). Image courtesy of artist.

MC: When did you start looking at the idea of the lived experience and venturing into remote places?

LP: I’ve always believed that you would make something that has some relationship to how you connect with the world. The intensity of the experience of walking and climbing mountains was something important and I became a bit obsessed with it. It felt unnatural not to do something with it.

Judy Spark, The things themselves, Two FM radios / transmitters with digital soundtracks, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: My route to making work about lived experience was through a concern with mechanisms like environmentalism that are established to get people to recognize the value of their surroundings. Environmentalism of any kind – whether related to ecology, renewable energies etc., – depends upon the scientific mechanisms that have created the problems that we’re facing in the first place. In the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve begun trying to find ways to think about how people engage with their surroundings. Conversely to Lesley, my landscapes might be right under my feet. It tends to be urban because that’s the environment I’m treading on all the time, and that’s how things come to consciousness.

MC: Could you explain the basis of your philosophical approach. It seems to be about being within a certain environment, perceiving what is around you, and letting these surface.

Judy Spark, Instructions for creating a gap, Printed text, 2011 – 12. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: A big influence was a Master’s in Environmental Philosophy in 2006 which broadened my thinking. There doesn’t seem to be much between the poles of not really caring about the place that you inhabit, and having a code of rules that are scientifically directed on how you should behave. We’re not used to working out anything in-between that is more personal. Trying to find a subjective response to things might actually turn out to have wider relevance than “just my own personal subjective response”. I became interested in the phenomenology movement and the idea of trying to describe actions or processes in a way that allows people to find something more direct and new. I think there are parallels with more indigenous or Buddhist experiences of the world which I can’t be a part of. I’d love to be, but I would only be putting my own Western perception onto them.

Judy Spark, Listening in the gap, Bound, printed text. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: I had a conversation with Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, and we spoke about the subjective experience and values. When there is an objective framework such as environmentalism, it is easy to subscribe to it because it is clear what kind of values there are. When we move to the subjective, it opens the question of whether there are still values within this realm.

LP: As much as I might prioritise a lived experience and the subjective, my relationship with the audience is more objective. I’m always looking for a distancing mechanism. The act of translation in the artwork gives the potential for objectivity or a poetics of space, which the viewer could enter into with their own subjective experience. If I thought for one second that what I was making was self-indulgent work, I would run for the hills, literally. At the same time I have no interest in creating distanced work. While my work might be incredibly minimal, I hope that there is a poetic layer that subverts that sparseness.

JS: The notion of value is an interesting one because of the distancing that you talk about. I know that I have a bit of a drum to bang in some way, but I can’t use my artwork for that and I wouldn’t want to try. It really is about putting something out there and if it allows viewers to think about their own response to things, then great.

Lesley Punton, Flurry, silverpoint & gesso on paper, 2008. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: How did you meet and what led you to decide to collaborate on this exhibition.

LP: A mutual friend was planning on hillwalking in 2004 and we started regular weekend walks.

JS: We did talk about the possibility of showing work together for years and have had many conversations. When we secured the show, I became very busy. Lesley has a young son and we both work. The collaborative aspect probably starts now in the debriefing of what we’ve done.

LP: As we have individual practices, it was probably important that we had our time to make our own work.

JS: Now that we have put our work in proximity like this, maybe this is the beginning of the next stage

LP: Walking is a very interesting way to collaborate and to build friendships. There are extended periods of silence and these are different from the conversations you have when you meet somebody in the pub. You actively experience something together. I have made some works where I have collaborated with Jim Hamlyn, my partner. The notion of collaboration is still quite new for me in the actual making of artworks together. Up until very recently I’ve not formally collaborated.

Judy Spark, Orrery (gallium aparine), Graphite on paper, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: I’m usually a very isolated practitioner. I teach in an art school and that’s maybe where I get a lot of my energy. Collaboration is something I haven’t made a decision not to do. It seems to be closely connected to that thing of value. Maybe if I meet another artist whose work or practice, or something they say to me about my work or practice, chimes in a way. Maybe it’s to do with being a friend first.

LP:  I think collaborations grow organically. I don’t think you can just put two people together and say collaborate, do it now. It doesn’t work that way.

MC: Perhaps you need a lot of trust. It starts off from conversations and knowing that those conversations can take place even without the art.

LP: …and equality as well. If there’s an imbalance there, I don’t think you can collaborate, and that’s where your idea of trust comes in.

David Shrigley, How are you feeling today? (2012), billboard, 25 x 75 feet, courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Running alongside Tenth Avenue for approximately twenty blocks in Chelsea, The High Line has become a household term amongst Manhattanites since 2009 when it first became accessible as a public park. Since then – and especially within the last year – The High Line has ignited widespread murmur relating to its breathtaking architecture, imaginative urban integration and more recently its emergence as the local gallery district’s – if not New York’s – most imaginative sites for exhibiting contemporary art.  Opening April 19^th was The High Line’s first ever group exhibition entitled Lilliput which included the works of Oliver Laric, Alessandro Pessoli, Tomoaki Suzuki, Francis Upritchard, Erika Verzutti and Allyson Vieira. Alongside this exhibition, Uri Aran’s sound installation opened on the same day only then to be followed by Alison Knowles’ public performance Make a Salad on the 22^nd. David Shrigley’s How are you feeling? (2012), presented as a giant billboard over West 18^th Street, and Sturtevant’s Warhol Empire State (2012), a video projection that starts at dusk of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) video, debuted earlier in the month to launch the Friends of the High Line’s 2012 Spring Art Program and High Line Commissions program for public art. The openings this month, surpassing the previous years in numbers of art pieces alone, has proven that this year’s arts program is making a vigorous effort to present art to the public with a bang.

Sturtevant, Warhol Empire State (2012), video projection, image courtesy of the artist

The High Line as we know it today exists upon the skeleton of a freight line that once was the manifestation of a public-private project called the West Side Improvement during the 1930s. However, that was the date that the freight lines were lofted 30 feet above street level after having existed as street-level railroad tracks some odd eighty years prior. During this time, The City and State of New York agreed to take on this massive industrial project due to the fact that Tenth Avenue became known as Death Avenue, a nickname indicative of the innumerable deaths caused between street traffic and the railroad. This was no small project, not least of all financially as it was quoted to be a $150 million dollar expenditure then, and that’s more than $2 billion dollars today.

Building the high line, November 20th 1932. Image courtesy of www.thehighline.org

Trains of food freight and both manufactured and raw goods ran until 1980 at which point the ensuing minimization of the railroad became obsolete due to redundancy and the upsurge of trucking transport. In the face of threatening demolition, Friends of the High Line was established in 1999 as a non-profit by Joshua David and Robert Hammond to preserve the historical lineage and neighborhood aura that the High Line had solidified. An all-star architectural and landscape design team made up of James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (along with a large selection of horticulturists, gardeners, etc) was chosen in 2004 and by June 9^th 2009 the first section (Gansevoort Street to West 20^th Street) of The High Line as a public park opens, with the second section (West 20^th Street to West 30^th Street) to follow in 2011.

Allyson Vieira, Construction (Rampart) (2010), Bronze, 14 x 14 x 18.5 inches, courtesy of Laurel Gitlen Gallery, New York

Since 2009, The High Line has become known as a trendy jaunt-spot in Chelsea where the ultimate people-watching activities and pleasure strolling can be had. This year the public will see the launch of a program called High Line Commissions with the opening of the first ever group exhibition Lilliput to be held on The High Line. This exhibition will present the works of six artists working internationally with, as the title would suggest, small sculptures placed along The High Line’s pathway. This title is taken from Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels in which the imaginary country of Lilliput is home to gnome-sized people no bigger than six inches. The various diminutive sculptures are set within the various niches of landscape along the park walk and offer a sort of Easter-egg hunt of sorts, inviting the public to uncover the various works of art.

Pieces such as Allyson Vieira’s Construction (Rampart) (2012) respond to the local vegetation and ecology of the area with her pyramid of bronze cast paper cups that fill with rain or fallen leaves from the garden bed above. Other works such as The Seduction (2012) by Francis Upritchard are less so adapted for the localized flora but speak to the Lilliputian theme of fairyland idols with two miniature-sized apes frozen in an explorative embrace. Also apart of this spring’s High Line Commissions is Uri Aran’s sound installation Untitled (Good & Bad) (2012) provides a spoken list of arbitrarily categorized animals into “good” or “bad” that billows from gardens below. Coming in May, a much anticipated installation of Thomas Houseago’s sculpture Lying Figure will be on view under The Standard.

Francis Upritchard, The Seduction (2012), Bronze, 18 x 9 x 8 inches, Courtesy of Kate MacGarry, London

Friends of the High Line have initiated other programs such as the High Line Performances, High Line Billboard and High Line Channel that serve as varying avenues whereby art mediums can be exhibited. Opening on April 5^th, David Shrigley’s 25-by-75 foot billboard How are you feeling? presents a short dialogue in black and white speech bubbles, hovering over a parking lot at West 18^th Street. Shrigley’s dry and melancholy humor severs the socially fabricated fluff in monotonous conversation and pinpoints exactly what we all may be feeling but are too nervous to say: “I’m feeling very unstable and insecure […] I am in a bit of a rut creatively as well”.

This year’s itinerary for the High Line Performances will include performances by three female artists (Alison Knowles, Channa Horwitz and Simone Forti) on and around the High Line, the first of which was preformed last Sunday April 22^nd by Alison Knowles’ Fluxus score Make a Salad. Originally performed in Baltimore, Maryland in 1962 has been performed several times around the world and includes the preparation of a salad for a large group of people. Launching the High Line Performances program, Knowles’ piece included the preparation of locally sourced salad ingredients tossed from the upper level to the lower level of the walkway and then served to the public. Though it was a rather cold and rainy day, otherwise unpleasant to be frolicking out of doors to eat a salad, the performance was lively and ignited a grouping of people of all ages in an appropriately themed Earth Day get-together.

Alison Knowles, Make a Salad (1962–present), Image: Tate Modern, London (2008)

I have to applaud the work and organizational efforts of the Friends of the High Line for their inception of the public art programs, and not to mention their unmentioned but as equally remarkable endeavors in the realms of music and food. The High Line as a public park has provided the support for not only a exceptional pleasure destination, but also a cutting-edge platform for contemporary art. I am always fascinated with the seemingly pervasive dialogue relating to the inaccessibility of contemporary art and thus I have always been an advocate for the commissioning of public art. Public art, as inconspicuous or ostentatious it may be, has the power to engage a public (a cross section in a vast demographic) who may not otherwise seek out an interactive relationship with art. Pieces such as the ones mentioned above all own that quality of engagement: the characteristic of calling forth a questioning, a reflection or even a happenstance double take, and sometimes that’s all an art piece needs to fulfill its role in the social sphere.

Please visit  www.thehighline.org/art for a schedule of past, current and upcoming exhibitions and performances on The High Line and additional information on artists. Please visit the site for further information regarding The High Line’s events, public programs, memberships and history.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

***

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

Teresa Margolles, Las Llaves de la Ciudad (detail), 2011. Performance and installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Rafael Burillo.

There have been several recent shows considering how art is affected by nationality. Maybe it’s a response to the generic aura found on the floors of art fairs. Disponible at the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston is a good example that asks what it means to be a Mexican artist. It’s an incomplete exhibition that deserves a books worth of supporting texts, but as a rough exploration of Mexico’s current potential, it’s lucid and descriptive.

The title is taken from Mexico’s empty billboards, advertising that they are not currently taken. Disponible is an ambiguous word, translating to available or changeable. Disponible partially functions as a metaphor for Mexico’s adjustable, compelling, and dynamic contemporary art scene. The title also slyly points to the sizable share of international art sales Mexican artists and galleries are generating (See: Kurimanzutto). After all, the billboards in question are a constant reminder to “the job creators” that they could be enhancing their brands right now.

The most interesting pieces included in Disponible display Mexico as more than a place for drug dealers and low-wage workers. Marcela Armas‘s video Ocupación shows her 2009 performance where she walks like she’s a car in the flow of traffic. She wears a backpack that has an air horn like a car would and she uses it when she has to wait in the string of traffic. The crush of congestion is something we all have insights into, yet can’t keep from happening. It’s a material reality for all seven billion of us.

Hector Zamora, White Noise – Shed 6 Installation (detail), 2011. Installation originally developed for the Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand. Courtesy of the artist.

Hector Zamora‘s White Noise- Shed 6 is an installation about the relationship between land and colonial rights in New Zealand. After England made New Zealand a colony, land rights were delineated by planting white flags on the borders of private property. Zamora planted 500 flags on a Aukland beach to begin a conversation on this issue and after one day was relegated by the Mayor to exhibiting his work on private property. There was no physical connection to public space after that. This public question was exiled to a private location, transforming his artwork from a sociable interaction into a private sculptural territory. The Mayor tried to exclude the public policy issues and transformed the work from an investigation of a very local, esoteric law to a universal and emblematic colonial critique. Exhibiting it in Boston reflects how it will be a displaced art piece, deported from its appropriate venue no matter where it’s displayed now.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide, I Play The Drums With Frequency (detail), 2007–11. Drum set, sound installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide‘s I Play Drums with Frequency, is the stand out work in Disponible. It’s the least politically formulaic, the most seductively mysterious, and best example of the ambiguity in the title of the show. Is begs the audience to confront their stereotypes about Mexican art. This inventive sound sculpture plays a drum set not with sticks, but with small speakers. A electronic soundtrack composed by Itrubide vibrates the set, and in turn the room. I want to be able to play with this sculpture. I want to put my own soundtracks into the speakers and hear the results. It is a discrete and a most salable object that would look great in an art fair. The noise would draw as much attention as the empty billboards do in a city. “Come buy me! I’m available!”

Disponible, on view at SMFA from September 13- November 19, 2011, was co-curated by Hou Hanru and Guillermo Santamarina for the San Francisco Art Institute. In includes Natalia Almada, Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Edgardo Aragón, Marcela Armas, Manuel Rocha Itrubide, Mauricio Limón, Teresa Margolles, and Hector Zamora

Jimmy

Jaap Pieters, who is touring America for the first time with his silent 8mm films (he will be accompanied by electro-acoustic performances most nights), seems like one of the last types. He began to release his films in an art context during the mid 90′s. The first assortment of works filmed the street outside of his apartment in Amsterdam. He captured fleeting moments outside his window, asking questions about seeing and watching. He consciously captured homeless and drunks as they danced, bummed cigarettes, and staged mini-dramas for an invisible audience.

Kopjesdans (The Cupsdance), Jaap Pieters, 1992. Super 8, 2 Min 20 seconds.

These works challenge you to define them. They are slippery and dispute any single denotation that you provide. How they function is easier to explain than what they are. The assertive voyeurism that underpins these works creates an intimate dreamscape rather than an uncomfortable embarrassment. The images you see– a homeless person moving his or her (it’s hard to tell) collection of shopping carts filled with random detritus for example– are mini dramas, that begin and end as they move out of his window’s frame. Instead of feeling like you’re using them to entertain yourself, you feel like you’re finally actively paying attention to the people involved.

Blikjesman (The Tincanman), Jaap Pieters, 1991. Super 8, 3 min 20 seconds.

Pieters early films are almost all single shots, with no cuts or attempt at symbolic narrative, but there are some later works that have not only cuts, but were not framed by his apartment. 1994′s Raumschiff Schweiz (Spaceship Swiss) begins with what looks like a grey distant mountains surrounded by thick clouds. Slowly a tall cliff is revealed and the camera focuses on a series of waterfalls, trees, and turbulent water. The meaning and significance of any given shot is complicated by the cuts and constant shifting figurative ground that supports Pieters’s images. In the end, the most concrete, formal presentation of an object allows for the most abstract removal for the artist. His concrete surroundings are the least solid. The genuine is the least sturdy.

Spectacle, based in Boston, is a collaborative performance space for the under-programmed edges of music and visual arts.

Jaap Pieter’s travel schedule can be found here. Pieters is traveling and collaborating with musicians/sound artists Evan Lindorff-Ellery and Travis Bird.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (installation view), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery, photo: Jesse Milne

Though the show consciously avoids a thematic framework, the individual works (by a dozen Ontarians), gain a certain coherence here—not only in relation to each other, but to the relatively majestic space they occupy—it would be possible, you feel, wandering through the gallery, to make a bicycle tour of the exhibition itself, and the breathing room is crucial to the larger energy fields many of the pieces project.

Gareth Lichty, Enclosure, construction fencing, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

But it’s the relationship to the neighbourhood that’s most compelling, to me at least, as raw, industrial materials, some of which seem like they could have been scavenged from nearby construction zones, are here creatively re-purposed inside the gallery.

The room is anchored by James Gauvreau’s Really Long Lake, which narrows to the top of the 17-foot ceiling and incorporates a projection and a mirrored floor—a kind of meditative, rustic, fun-house.

James Gauvreau, Really Long Lake (interior), wood and video, courtesy 99 Gallery

It’s flanked by new work by Gareth Lichty, who turns vibrant orange construction fencing into minimalist vessels, and by Hamilton collective TH&B’s Transmission, an industrial radio tower topped by quietly sonic satellite dishes overgrown, seemingly organically, by a hive of burrs—a worthy follow-up to 2008’s Swarm, which generates a similar sense of electric energy and an underlying, pervasive anxiety.

TH&B, Transmission, burrs, radio tower, cable, satellite dishes, found objects, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

Surrounding wall-mounted works reinforce the sense of intensive craftsmanship and renewed interest in the art object’s meticulous construction. On the far wall, Markus Heckmann’s Reg Ex flashes neon lines that evoke the light works of Dan Flavin, but are here formed by whitewashed 2x4s mounted in vertical lines and generative animation, displacing the source of light as an external projection.

Vanessa Maltese, Wall Grid No. 2 (Studio Sculptures), wood and acrylic paint, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

On the other side of the room, the tiny, perfectly formed pieces of sculpted wood that make up Vanessa Maltese’s Wall Grid No.2 (Studio Sculptures) are a geometric counterbalance, revisiting modernist forms in the gem-like, obsessive shape of miniatures. With a similarly pared down aesthetic, Sarah Elizabeth McCaw’s suite of works pair texts like “I am not 100 percent sure we can do this” and “Everything is going to be all right” with wooden models reminiscent of broken wall clocks, with simple moving parts: completely mesmerizing exercises in futility.

Sarah Elizabeth McCaw, I Am Not 100 Percent Sure We Can Do This, wood, acrylic and motor, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

The first and last piece you see in the space is a panoramic painting by Toronto-based Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, a vibrant canvas that foretells and reflects the restless imagination and sense of absurdity in the room.

It’s worth a spin.

Gillian Iles, Eden is Tempting but Not to be Trusted, oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas, courtesy 99 Gallery, Photo: Jesse Milne

With additional work by Wrik Mead, Keith Bently, Tom Ngo and Scott Eunson. Art Spin’s Second Annual Exhibition at 99 Gallery is on view Tuesday to Saturday, noon to five, until September 24^th.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

A room filled with a new series of distinct wall works, Hypoxia 1-6 (all 2011) can seem overwhelming at first. Each piece is a mess of metal tubing, cables, motors, microphones, amplifiers and compressors that activate expandable balloons covered in brightly colored braided sleeving. But as you walk around the room, moving between one work and the next, the distinctive intricacies of each individual piece draw you in, each one a separate atmosphere responding to your physical presence with subtle noises and gestures. The contrast between the industrial materials and the sounds, like birdcalls and rustling wilderness, evoke an untamed landscape, and blur the line between the opposing forces of the natural and the mechanical.

Montreal artist Jean-Pierre Gauthier is known for his captivating, often charming kinetic sculptures, for which he won Canada’s prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2004. For this solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, Gauthier has created a synesthetic experience. His laid-bare approach – a part of the experience of these pieces is being able to watch each sound as it is formed – turns the often hidden technology of sound art into an integrated experience, in which the action of the visual plane disperses seamlessly into the soundscape it generates.

There is something decidedly primal and heaving about these sculptures, especially in the movements and forms of the inflatable pieces, which lend the room a faintly sexual charge. Despite the obviously methodical and painstaking construction of each work, they retain a sense of the unrehearsed and spontaneous – with the freedoms and the perils of that state.

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

In the adjacent gallery, Thorax, 2010, integrates a number of similar works into a single installation, each element connected and controlled by a central computer dangling precariously like the mothership in the centre of the room. The effect of this piece is more menacing, with sound building slowly to a cacophonous climax. It is a portentous, almost threatening installation, but it’s also seductive, like watching a storm come in. Thorax might benefit from a more isolated situation – as sound bleeds between these two rooms and becomes at times impossible to untangle.

Gauthier’s new work is decidedly more ominous and less whimsical than some of the artist’s earlier pieces, like the drawing machine, Le Son de Choses, 2004, that is on view downstairs.

The exception is Sweeping Spirals, 2008-2011, which acts as a Fantasia-like gateway between the street and the central gallery spaces. Here, two broom heads dance on extended, multi-sectioned, dislocated red handles. As the brooms dance around the space, they ineffectually shift and poke at the debris on the floor beneath them – apparently left over from the actual installation – snipped ends of industrial plastic ties; colored thread; drywall dust.

The choreographed movements are beautiful, even mesmerizing; the rhythms of contemporary dancers reenacted as puppetry. Like all of the new work here, though, they have moods that keep you guessing – changing registers fluidly from acute frenzy to crouching anticipation.

Marianne Mueller, FreePort No. 002 (Any House Is a Home, 2011). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

One way of considering the meaning hidden in a collection is to open it to an artist. Of course, by allowing these creators access to your stacks, you allow them to consider your museum’s position within the community of museums. The latent desires of the past reveal themselves as current realities. Like mirrors, a museum’s various collections reflect our personal and social spirit. It’s a brave decision to reverse the reflecting surface inward, showing what the museum has become and what it has accumulated over time.

Following this logic, The Peabody Essex Museum commissioned the FreePort series, an ongoing exhibition series installed within the museum’s permanent displays. In October of 2010, Charles Sandison‘s projected installation, FreePort [No.001] or Figurehead, launched the series. Sandison began by studying the PEM library’s collection of captain’s logs, and produced a lengthy, computer-based text that was projected in the East India Marine Hall (one of the oldest parts of the museum).  Sandison’s projected text circulated around the room, moving in computer-controlled flows that forced viewers to try to find sense in an immersive environment of words.  Even though Sandison didn’t express any value judgements, the piece was a chaotic report on what texts the museum finds most important.

Charles Sandison, FreePort No. 001 (Figurehead, 2010). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

This past March, Marianne Mueller, a Swiss artist known for her formal photographic explorations, installed the second FreePort work: FreePort [No. 002], or Any House Is a Home. Her vigorous engagement with PEM’s collection resulted in a installation of forty-one of Mueller’s photos, three new video portraits, very specific paint colors in blocks on the wall, and over 150 objects and images from PEM. An exacting installation layered with possible meanings, opposition is the first theme that jumps out. Objects are placed in relation to each other, forcing comparisons to be made between them. Even the painted walls are alive with polarities: sometimes the paint color matches the art work, while at other times the color opposes the chosen object.

Mueller hopes that these relationships are formally exciting, instead of connotative and bound with personal narrative. One of the more successful moments is a pair of especially rare elastic chairs by the eighteenth-century furniture maker Samuel Gragg, placed back to back in a display case from the early 1900s. Their formal qualities, including the curved motion of their backs, are enhanced by this display. The display case surrounds them and becomes a likeness of the museum that holds and collects. The case, purchased for the protection of the chairs, is presented as a piece in the museum’s collection.  The protection becomes as much the subject as the object on display.

Mueller has added a personal theme that connects to her own career by creating an extensive photographic archive. The home and house, an emotional connection to a space, comes from a shared history with a space as much as anything else. Mueller’s intention to create an “open-ended associative field rather than a narrative” fights against this notion. Her intention to “liberate objects from history” and bring them into the present questions the authority of the museum to map and define the objects in their care via a historical timeline or a specifically defined function. This is as true for the museum as it is for Mueller’s personal archive of photographs; her artistic home. Her years of engaging with her own personal archive allows her intense insights into the museum’s archive that may be overlooked by other artists who are invited to respond to the museum’s collection.

Marianne Mueller, FreePort No. 002 (Any House Is a Home, 2011). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

Also currently on display is FreePort [No.003], a sound piece and installation from Susan Philipsz. Philipsz chose to sing a ballad from a book of English and Scottish ballads in the PEM collection. “The House Carpenter’s Wife (The Daemon Lover),” tells the story of a man who returns home from the sea after a long absence to find his former lover with a husband and a child. The eight parts of this installation riff off of the figureheads and portraits of old captains in the East India Marine Hall, bringing the objects’ hidden narratives to the fore.

Freeport [No. 002], by Marianne Mueller, is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, through December 31, 2011.  Freeport [No. 003], by Susan Philipsz, is on view through November 1, 2011.  Freeport [No. 004], by Peter Hutton, will be on view from September 1, 2011, through December 31, 2011.

Javier Téllez, still from Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, 2008. Image courtesy Arthouse at the Jones Center and Peter Klichmann Gallery.

Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (16 mm film transferred to HD video, 27:36 minutes looped) opens as six blind people enter the deserted and drained McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, New York.  Once each is seated in a row of chairs, an elephant walks into the center of the vast concrete space.  Next, one by one, each person stands and walks over to the elephant and touches it in the round.  A voice-over plays as they take this brief journey.  Through it, we learn a bit about each person’s background, their approach to blindness and their ‘tactile recognition’ experience from feeling the elephant.  The film uses documentary methods such as narrative as it records the seemingly real event.  Yet this sense of authenticity is false; the entire experience is just a fictional re-staging of an ancient parable.  Each participant is blind, but is cast by Téllez to act out a role.

Letter on the Blind performs a difficult exercise in attempting to convey a non-visual reality through visual means.   In response to this challenge, Téllez has composed a visually restrained film that gives studied emphasis to sound.  The film has a slow, measured pace and is shot in black and white.  The decision to forgo color consciously strips the viewer of an element of sight and heightens the awareness of the dichotomy between sight and blindness.  Sound clues like urban background noise help describe the setting.  The same series of notes from a woodwind instrument play to introduce action, such as when one of the subjects stands to walk toward the elephant.  Finally, during the closing credits, each participant’s name is spoken as it appears on screen.

Javier Téllez, still from Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, 2008. Image courtesy Arthouse at the Jones Center and Peter Klichmann Gallery.

Film is a perfect vehicle for Letter on the Blind and Téllez capitalizes on its capabilities.   Not only is film a universal and increasingly accessible contemporary technology, it can reflect reality through layers of sight and sound like no other medium.  Time-based and experiential, film allows the viewer to tag along on sightless encounters.  The camera shot, as much as the spoken word, introduces each person to the viewer.  It is the camera that records each person’s eyes (or sunglasses) and carefully documents their movements and appearance.  In some ways, the limited black-and-white scheme provides visual emphasis.  It depicts the craggy maze of wrinkles and texture of the elephant’s skin in strong contrast.  This central theme becomes a compelling nonobjective exercise in grisaille during close-up durational still shots paired with spoken narrative.

Téllez’s staged encounter does not re-conceive of blindness in the context of sight-driven society.  Yet, he does reveal the humanity behind the condition.  The visceral, emotive reactions from those touching the animal are particularly poignant and the viewer is made to almost feel a part of the experience.  The elephant’s skin is described as feeling, among other things, like ‘a strange fabric’, ‘thick rubber’ and a ‘big plastic wall’.  One person finds the experience decidedly unsettling.  For another, the elephant is ‘nature’; touch connects him to her ‘beauty’, ‘power’ and ‘tenderness’.  Through seemingly candid (although scripted) interaction, blindness is presented as an alternative way of experiencing the world.  As one participant states, ‘the visual concept doesn’t exist’ for him.  It’s ‘dead’ and he doesn’t wish to have it back.

Javier Téllez, still from Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See, 2008. Image courtesy Arthouse at the Jones Center and Peter Klichmann Gallery.

Javier Téllez was born in Venezuela.  He lives and works in New York.

Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See was commissioned by Creative Time and co-produced by the Peter Kichmann Gallery as part of Six Actions for New York City.  It is on view in the Film and Video Gallery at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas through July 31st.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

This show reminds me of the time I danced for hours at a club in Cologne, caught part of an arthouse film next door, and then somehow ended up at a bar where a bunch of people I didn’t know were drinking like it was the end of the earth. Ok, so that never happened. But I feel like Cosima von Bonin’s current show, The Juxtaposition of Nothings at Friedrich Petzel is a close approximation of that experience.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Von Bonin has always balanced her killer soft sculptures and fabric wall pieces with a deep investment in context and place-making. At Petzel, in collaboration with musician Moritz von Oswald, the focus is less on individual works and more on a sort of behind the stage/back alley voyeuristic adventure where the spectators are exhausted and drunk with cultural consumption. A puppy lies limp, arms laid out flat, staring at a video on loop. A floppy eared pimp-like bunny character with an eye patch appears to have found a friend in a bright red dog.  Even the light post is out for a smoke, as this show is at once chuckle-worthy and noir.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

Viewers accustomed to the almost clinical reimagining of minimalist form in Von Bonin’s previous work might be put off by the glut of audio and video equipment on display here. But the sound is sharp and deployed with precision.  Each tightly contained audio zone adds a different layer to the show as pulsating dance beats blend into more spaced out jams. Moving around the gallery, you become part of the orchestration, as most of the animal sculptures are either on a sound stage, absorbing a video, or emitting a sound track of their own.

Cosima von Bonin and Moritz von Oswald, The Juxtaposition of Nothings, Installation View.

The back room seems to unwind from the activity of the main gallery like a club that lets out into the street at the end of the night. Sophisticated cardboard sculptures of a mailbox, café signage and a street lamp hang on the wall. A slumped over bloodied bird sits alone on a bleacher—here, the alienation of today’s technological self-absorption sets in.  While this theme isn’t terribly new (think Kraftwerk, Radiohead, or Kanye), von Bonin and von Oswald play the space between the handmade and the machined perfectly. While a lot of technological collaborations seem to blast off with an über-corny futuristic vision, the artists here spare us the space travel allusions.  The characters in this little drama are too busy livin’ to know that they don’t have a future anyway.

Group on a Bench, 2009. Courtesy the Artist.

Peter Granser is a self-taught artist that began his career in photojournalism – allowing for a natural transition to his current practice.  Yet the depth of Granser’s on-site, immersive research is better equated to the work of an anthropologist than that of a journalist.  Using photography, Granser documents select phenomena such as the American theme park as in Coney Island (2000-2005) or an expansive retirement community as in Sun City (2000-2001).  The artist capitalizes on the specificity of his projects by aiming to reveal layers of meaning with archetypal resonance.

Portrait 18 and Portrait 19, 2009. Courtesy the artist

With recent project, J’ai perdu ma tête (2009), Granser’s intrepid curiosity led him to a psychiatric institution in France where he took part in the everyday lives of inhabitants.  As with past projects such as Alzheimer (2001-2004), Granser walked a tightrope between spectacle and measured representation of a complex condition.  His approach is to inhabit the world he documents.  For a time, Granser lived nearby and each day followed the schedule of eating, working and sleeping.  He slowly earned trust and was able to photograph special outdoors excursions, clay figures from art therapy sessions, and private rooms.  By the end of his stay, Granser was invited to photograph individuals.

Flickering, 2009, video still. Courtesy the artist.

J’ai perdu ma tête marked Granser’s first foray into video and sound, which has given the artist a new way to present his subject matter.  In Flickering, the artist examines the marriage of function and malfunction – presenting his piece in a blackened dead end tunnel accompanied by the sound of fluorescent lighting cutting in and out.  In Forest, the pleasant sound of chirping birds is juxtaposed with an increasingly smoky wooded image.  Presented rear-projected onto wall-sized plexi barrier, the video confronts the viewer with contradiction.  Granser states that he uses video to explore the passage of time ‘by using a single camera angle (like in a photograph) without any cut’.  His video work thus becomes an extension of his photographic practice.

Forest, 2009, installation view. Courtesy the artist.

J’ai perdu ma tête, will be on view from May 12th through July 2nd at the Atelier de Visu in Marseille, France.   It will also be on view at the Guislain Museum in Gent, Belgium from June through August 2012.  Kodoji will publish the project in book form in March of 2012.

Granser has been working on a new project in China since 2008, which he hopes to have completed by the end of this year.  To keep up with the artist, visit his newly launched website.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Sydney-based emerging artist Dara Gill has been chosen from a group of worthy submissions.  Just back from a project in the New South Wales bush, Gill took the time to discuss his passion for ideas, his creative process and to share his thoughts on anxiety – that omnipresent 21st century condition.

Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits), 2010. Courtesy the artist.

Kelly Nosari:  Your practice is so diverse.  You work in video, performance, sculpture, painting, sound and installation.  Where does your creative process begin?

Dara Gill:  My creative process starts first and foremost with research.  In this stage a formalisation of the research made is complied into a fluid ‘definition’ of the topic as I see it.  This normally includes the ideas of others coupled with my own ideas and this definition then informs the artworks themselves.

KN:  Anxiety is an overarching theme in your art practice.  How do you creatively engage an experience that is both personal and collective?   What is it that interests you most about this universal human condition?

DG:  Anxiety tends to sit at the top of the human emotional hierarchy, thus most emotions stem from anxiety.  It is the ubiquitous nature of the emotion that drew me towards it and its ramifications for daily life.  My yearning to understand the emotion stems from both wanting to know myself and my fellow man a little better, objectifying what is in essence subjective.  Initially my interest tended to sit with the neurotic forms of the condition, that is phobia driven anxiety, but as I discovered more about the emotion its daily ramifications became much more powerful and interesting.

Creatively engaging with anxiety, or any emotion in fact is often the hardest part, because for each it is truly personal.  Therefore the challenge of creating works that do not involve personal motifs or stories, but rather commonly shared experiences, is the trust of this creative engagement.  I always aim to communicate without relying on the texts created from my research or any over explanation of the meaning behind a work, but rather letting the work communicate through is imagery and processes.

Sisyphus Triptych #2 from Dara Gill on Vimeo.

KN:  The influence of the Greek myth of Sisyphus is evident in video works like Untitled (Sisyphus Triptych #2) or To Roll, in which you attempt a tedious or impossible task.  Please talk more about this myth and its influence on your work.

DG:  For me Sisyphus is a parable for anxiety.  Very briefly, anxiety stems partly from a foreboding sense that something is ‘not quite right’ – a negative reflection on ones current place in the world.  Anxiety is a general ambiguous feeling that something is missing or looming (Lack), and a wish (Desire) to rid one of this feeling.  The desire to change transforms into a desire to work or maintain a sense of busy-ness in order to quell anxiety.  This characteristic produces mundane work, work towards a perpetually unfulfilled and ill-defined end result.

My first point of interest within the myth Sisyphus is the mental state of Sisyphus as he completes each cycle of his task; his naive and instinctual habitual compulsion to push the rock up the hill, thinking that his toil will end once the rock reaches the summit, the horror as he watches it roll back down, and the amnesia he suffers each time the cycle continues.  Sisyphus is to constantly work towards a goal that has no foreseeable end to it, born out of a compulsion from nothing.

KN:  In much of your work, you aim not to reconcile or to perform anxiety, but to rather mischievously induce it in others.  Whether aiming rubber bands at peoples’ faces as in Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits) or surprising them with bright lights as in Untitled (Blinding Light Box) you create a very physical stress experience for the participant.  Talk more about this process.

DG:  Often the work that involves the use of people is born out of the research into the topic.  I often think that the best way to explain anxiety is to induce it in others.  For instance, in Untitled (Rubber Band Portraits) and Untitled (Blinding Light Box) I utilised one my observations of anxiety as being both a simultaneous Fight and Flight response, the effect of this causing a paralysing stillness or as Kierkegaard describes a ‘shuddering before nothingness’.  I drew a parallel with this ‘Deer in the headlights’ type moment, where the Deer is both mesmerised by the cars headlights but also fearful of its demise, both culminating again in a paralysing internal dizziness.  This motif was then manipulated into the bright lights in Blinding Light Box and the rubber bands in Rubber Band Portraits.

Untitled (To Roll) from Dara Gill on Vimeo.

KN:  You have described your work as ‘situational based research’.  I see that some pieces mimic psychological experimentation by facilitating discomfort and documenting it.  In Horror Vaccui Experiment (2009), for example, you record an unwitting subject as they wait alone in an empty room.  How do you go about this process?  What is the Knowledge Barter Experiment?

DG:  A key methodology within in my developing practice is the survey, that is, an attempt to engage with the public in situational based research where a subject responds to stimulus or a constructed environment, often with a visual outcome.  These works are performative in nature and documented through video, text, photography, and sound.  Through this process documentation becomes art object.  The tenor of these works is that of objective scientific research, but the parameters of the interaction are poetically manipulated in order for the outcome to become expressive of visual art.  The use of the survey has played a pivotal role in my investigation of anxiety, and is the tool that is used by the sciences to gain useful information on anxiety.  I wish to employ the survey in an almost playful sense, as pseudo-scientific investigation.  This methodology was used during the initial stage of my research and its findings inform more formal aspects of my artistic practise.

The Knowledge Barter Experiment was a fun side project that I always wanted to do but its connection to anxiety is very direct.  It forces a participant to actively reflect and comprehend ones own abilities and weaknesses, what they know and what they want to know.  Here they must define with some confidence their ability on a chosen topic.  This is not easy, as one attaches a value to what they know and thought they knew, and compares this to already existing teachings.  Secondary to this process is the defining of what one wants to learn.  This involves again identifying what one perceives they have little knowledge of and what they feel is valuable to know.

KN:  What are you working on now?

DG:  Right now I’m working on my next few solos that branch out into the topic of Hope and its connection to anxiety.  Hope for the most part sits in direct opposition to anxiety.  For Ernest Bloch, anxiety stems from a feeling of “something lacking and [the] want to stop it… [the] dreams of a better life”.  This hunger never ceases, “we never tire of wanting things to improve.  We are never free of wishes…”.  Friedrich Nietzsche opines that hope is ‘the worst of evils for it prolongs the torment of man’.  It is the space between such varied opinions that interests me, and the space in which I would like the work to exist.

KN:  Can you offer one piece of advice for emerging artists?

DG:  Document everything.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File Under Sacred Music, 2003. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artist and Kate MacGarry, London.

British duo Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard are masterminds of re-enactment as an art form. Their current exhibition at the South London Gallery opens onto one of the best examples of this with the seminal work, File Under Sacred Music. This painstakingly detailed and dead-on remake of the infamous bootleg video of The Cramps’ live performance at the Napa State Mental Institution in California in 1978, was meticulously re-staged by Forsyth & Pollard at the ICA in 2003. With grainy, damaged images, delays, jumps, gaps and feedback, there is nothing about this footage that would distinguish it from an original, straight from the 70s, carelessly-shot home video.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File under Sacred Music, 2003. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

Music has always permeated the work of Forsyth & Pollard, and it extends through explicitly here not only in subject matter but choice of collaborators as well. Their nod to Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up (1967-68) features the world’s longest running Kiss tribute band, Dressed To Kill.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Kiss My Nauman, 2007. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

The work, cheekily titled Kiss My Nauman, is a forty-seven minute video installation that follows the members of the band as the carefully apply their stage make-up, allowing us to witness their transformation into their alter-egos. Nauman’s singular performance where he successively paints his face white, pink, green and finally black, is fractured into four screens, four bodies and four identities that are culturally specific and locatable. It is a re-enactment of Nauman’s work by a band whose have made a livelihood of nightly re-performance. Everything here has a reference in the past.

Forsyth & Pollard’s work continually re-performs history, and by doing so, attempts to transfer the past into the present, collapsing the linearity of time. The past is relocated into the present and the present indistinguishable from the past, creating a sense of displacement that runs through the work.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Silent Sound, 2006. Installation shot. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

Silent Sound is the only work in the exhibition that does not use video as a medium to perform re-enactment. Instead it is primarily an audio installation (although there is always a visual accompaniment of some sorts…) based on a 2006 work originally performed live in Liverpool.

As we are warned upon entry:

‘You are about to enter Silent Sound, an ambisonic installation with a subliminal message.’

The work was inspired by a public seance presented by Victorian entertainers Ira and William Davenport in 1865 and the ongoing interest of the artists in methods of silent, non-verbal communication. During the original live performance Forsyth & Pollard repeated a secret phrase into a microphone which was embedded within the ambient music that filled a concert hall and now fills a black box in the South London gallery.

In an attempt to get inside your mind, Forsyth & Pollard worked closely with a former employee of the American Ministry of Defence’s ‘non-lethal weapons’ programme which allegedly exploited the power of subconscious messaging as a military strategy. Immersion is the key here, not only in the subliminal sense, but also in a time past. While based on parapsychology, these voices are not speaking to you from beyond the grave, but they are speaking to you from the past, a inaudible message replayed here in the present. A presence that cannot be heard, or seen, but as the artists argue, will affect you and be taken forth into the future.

What is the message the artists are trying to spread? We don’t know – all we are told is the following:

‘The signal needs to be carried. The truth doesn’t matter.’

What does music meant to manipulate your mind sound like? A soothing, yet emotionally charged classical composition – calm, beautiful, haunting, electrifying….

Some interesting, albeit not really surprising, news: According to Calvin Tomkins’ profile of George Condo in this week’s New Yorker, Kanye West wanted the cover art for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to get his album banned — because he wanted more publicity. From the feature:

“West came to Condo’s studio, where for several hours they listened to tapes of his music, and over the next few days Condo made eight or nine paintings. Two of them were portraits of West, one in extreme closeup, with mismatched eyes and four sets of teeth. Another showed his head, crowned and decapitated, placed sideways on a white slab, impaled by a sword. There was also a painting of a dyspeptic ballerina in a black tutu, a painting of the crown and the sword by themselves in a grassy landscape, and a lurid scene of a naked black man on a bed, straddled by a naked white female creature with fearsome features, wings, no arms, and a long, spotted tail. West chose that one.”

Condo’s mid-career survey exhibition, which will feature more than eighty paintings and sculptures, opens at the New Museum on January 26th. Let us know if you think any of his Kanye-commissioned covers (which are pictured after the jump, with commentary from Condo) should make the cut.

“That’s a good painting. She’s a kind of fragment, between a sphinx, a phoenix, a haunting ghost, a harpy. And then Kanye is also in some sort of strange 1970s burned-out back room of a Chicago blues club having a beer — so far away from the real Kanye West that it’s just a scream.”

“It’s sort of cubist, you know, this portrait with all these different dimensions to it. Like an African mask with almost a modern face. I wanted to get that feeling that he’s almost a Miles Davis-like guy.”

“His tragedy was a kind of exile that Kanye imposed upon himself. He was free from exile by having the cathartic moment in the image. He’s alive in the painting, you know what I mean? In a strange way it’s like, he opened his eyes.”

“We were hanging around one night, and we were listening to that tune ‘Runaway,’ and somehow Kanye grabbed onto that idea of the ballerina. He just said, ‘Hey man, I’d like to have a great ballerina painting.’ I thought of a ballerina toasting. You know, ‘let’s toast to the scumbags.’”

“[Kanye and I] talked about paintings in the early baroque era depicting religious figures, and wanted to push that out into the open in today’s world. It mirrors the ‘paranoid’ riff on one of the tracks.”

All images and quotes via Vulture.