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ORLAN

An interview concerning Harlequin Coat
By Bob Dickinson

In Britain to participate at the opening of Sk-Interfaces, an exhibition and conference, at FACT in Liverpool, Orlan is unmistakable as a physical presence. On either side of her forehead, each temple, left and right, contains a sparkling, semi-circular implant. Her hair is black on one side, white on the other, echoing the multicultural themes of Harlequin Coat, the piece she has on display.
Harlequin Coat is a plexiglass installation, shaped like a mantle, or coat, consisting of diamond shaped patches, in different colours, glowing with light. Instead of a head, there’s a custom-built bioreactor containing cultured, in vitro skin cells. The original cells (taken from Orlan herself, mixed with others, animal as well as human) were cultured at SymbioticA, the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory based at the University of Western Australia. Cultured cells have since been sampled and filmed, contributing to the illuminated patchwork design. Cells from the FACT showing will, in due course, be filmed and integrated into the Coat. And so the Coat will become more complex as it travels around the world.
“After the boom in digitalisation and the virtual, things are getting a lot more physical in art, not only in terms of the biological, tissue engineering and working with wetwork, but also in terms of the mechanics of things, of computers and DIY.”
Harlequin Coat is part installation, part sculpture, part living thing. Like her previous work, it refers to and springs from the human body – Orlan’s own body.
Orlan has been active since the 1970s, but she is probably best known for her projects from the 1990s, notably Omnipresence, in which cosmetic surgery was performed on her face, rebuilding it to conform as closely as possible to Western artistic ideals. Orlan will be 60 this year, and I wanted to know if age and the awareness of mortality were beginning to influence her work. “All my art”, she explains, “Is about questioning the body and how all the artistic, political and social, religious and cultural determinations and symbolism relate to the body. I’ve tried to subvert that and highlight it. I’ve always taken into account not only the particular context of where I’m doing a certain piece but also how that fits into the history of art.
It starts also from your private individual self and goes out to the media, and it’s about how to communicate this to a wider audience. In my work it’s all about breaking barriers between generations, between sexes, between people of different colours, between artistic media as well.”
In the preparation for Harlequin Coat, cells from Orlan’s body were collected biopsy, which took place in Perth in 2007, and photographed. Orlan has written about how she sees her body as “one material among other materials, oscillating between the the subject and my own object, and between object and subject.” The Coat is possibly her most ambitious mixture of materials – human and machine, human and animal, technology and “wetwork” - so far.
“Throughout my whole career I’ve made work that’s very complicated, expensive, not very sellable, and it’s a little bit against the art market, but even so I’m very much recognised within the art market.” Glancing back at the Harlequin Coat, she remarks, “Again, here, it’s a very unsellable work because you can’t really sell these cells, because they belong to someone else. So I don’t have the authorisation to do that.”
Orlan explains how she learned about tissue culturing during her residency last summer in SymbioticA. “I cultured my cells together with black foetus female cells and marsupial cells…it’s all very symbolic of the time ands the place they were being cultured together. The cells being cultured in this version are my own plus a black female foetus cells…the connection to Liverpool in that would be the slavery history of Liverpool. There are also bovine cells.”
The Coat’s theatrical inspiration came from the work of French philosopher Michael Serres whose book Le Tiers Instruit, or The Troubadour of Knowledge (1992), sees education and growth as a constant encounter and cross-fertilisation with the Other.
“The whole book talks about multiculturalism,” Orlan says, “The piece also talks about the acceptance of oneself. What we can see in the projection are all these diamond shaped little films or stop-motion animations – they are made with macro images of the cells that were made at the lab at SymbioticA. And of course they’re screened in different colours, as a harlequin is. On the head of the harlequin coat is the bioreactor that was custom made for the piece in SymbioticA. It represents the head, but it also represents an aquarium. So the cells that are being co-cultured in the bioreactor and that I was co-culturing at Symbiotica were taken from me. I got a biopsy and as I was having the biopsy made I was reading out loud the text from Michael Serres”.
So Harlequin Coat is, partly, alive – although you can’t see the living cells with the naked eye. It’s also difficult to keep the cells alive in the bioreactor, which has to be cleaned and supplied with nutrients regularly. “We’ve got a PHD student from the UK Centre for Tissue Engineering who’s going to be coming every week to change the medium,” Orlan says, “If we didn’t do this all the cells would die after twenty days max.” The cells actually do die once the installation is dismantled, and samples will be taken and added to Petri dishes which form part of the design of the Coat. When the Coat is re-installed, in its next location, a new cell culture will be added to the bioreactor.
However fragile, I wanted to know how the different living cells change once they’re cultured in the bioreactor. “It’s the same technology as tissue culturing where you start off with a few little cells but they slowly grow bigger and multiply,” Orlan replies. And do they hybridise? “The idea is a perfect balance of hybridity, but as in nature it’s always going to be the stronger who survives.”
The thought of the strongest cells being the survivors, despite being true, still seems disturbing. “As in life…” Orlan muses, “I was talking to Fiona Wood (the plastic surgeon based at the Royal Perth Hospital, who has developed a system of “spray-on skin”) and Fiona mentioned that it would usually be the youngest cells that would survive, but as in life, it’s a lot of other factors that come into play. And maybe it’s someone who’s younger than Orlan who will die before Orlan.”
If Harlequin Coat can be considered as a living installation, it can also be seen as a performance. It’s interesting, then, to consider the extent to which the performer is Orlan, or part of Orlan externalised and made separate.
“It’s not central to my work, having parts of me outside,” Orlan says, “I feel quite distant about that. The way I see it is it’s fun, it’s interesting and it’s good that that could happen technically. But in a way it also relates to relics – they
(the cells) are relics of myself, pieces of myself that are kept, beyond me. Interesting for future generations – but these are just tiny elements of myself. In any case there’s all the hardware that’s in my head, and all the other conditionings that need to happen to create Orlan. It’s not about what it says in the cells, really.”
The Skinterfaces exhibition, which also includes work by Stelarc, Julia Reodica, Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr, Jun Takita, Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin, Zbigniew Oksiuta, Maurice Benayoun, Critical Art Ensemble, The Office of Experiments, Eduardo Kac, and Zane Berzina, may have disturbed some visitors, and provoked much thought in many others. But Orlan remains fiercely optimistic about the possibilities her art continues to explore.
“We all have a responsibility as artists and human beings in relation to society and my work has always expressed, and this one in particular, hope for science, but also hope for society in relation to tolerance between people, and people living in peace. If there’s something I’ve taken account of in my whole career, when I’ve had my operations and everything, it is that science, technology and medicine have got to a point where we don’t need to suffer any more pain, at this point. We’ve got morphine, so we don’t die in pain as we used to. Human bodies have suffered for centuries and we’ve come to a point where we don’t need that pain anymore.”With thanks to Marta Ruperez of FACT for translation.
The Harlequin Coat is on show as part of Skinterfaces, at FACT, Liverpool, till March 31.

Juan Muñoz

by Federica Bueti

Playing with scale, using the minute and the immensely big to experiment with the possibility of perceiving the world in a different way. "You have to come, to look, to smile and despair." The words of Juan Muñoz, to whom Tate Modern have dedicate a wide Retrospective…
Interest in architectural space and relations in which the work and the viewer are immersed represented, at the end of the sixties, a crucial issue for many artists. From Minimalism and Land Art up until the early research of the 80’s and 90’s, where the conceptualization of relational aesthetics foregrounded Place in the relationship between work, viewer and environment, the investigations of Juan Muñoz (1953-2001), have centered around the relationship between spectator and architectural space through the use of dimensions and perspectives that allow the beholder to "meet" and immerse themselves in the work of the artist.
By creating a tension between reality and play, and the act of seeing and being seen, the Spanish artist investigates the spatial dimensions that define our relationship with the world, creating anonymous figures, or "muñecos" as they were defined by the artist himself. Real and at the same time far-fetched, these characters chat, mirror and take up the space of art as if it was a miniature of the space of life. Like all the investigations of Juan Muñoz, these dummies remain suspended in a continuous game between reality and fiction, a space "in between".
The exhibition proceeds chronologically, presenting the first work Balconies dating from the mid-eighties. Bridging intimacy and the public environment, balconies, as elements of the urban landscape, represent the privileged point from which to see the world and to be seen by the world. These elements in miniature size are an invitation by the artist to observe the space of everyday life, or more banally, to take part in this space.
Next, a series of installations that pose the viewer as a starting point for his utterances. In The Wasteland (1987), the artist’s first large-scale installation that invites the public to be involved in the space, this perception is at the same time destabilized by the use of an optical illusion which ‘lengthens’ the distance between the viewer and the bronze figure sitting on a shelf.
An entire room is dedicated to the Raincoat Drawings, paintings made with chalk on black canvas showing interiors of apartments where, as the artists explains, "It seems that something is about to happen, but nothing does happen because either we came to soon, or at the wrong time.” In Many Things (1999), one of Juan Muñoz most famous and probably well known works, one hundred figures with Eastern Somatic traits, all the same and dressed in the same way, seem to talk in the space of the gallery.
Whilst this retrospective of Juan Muñoz presents us with some of the key works by the Spanish artist, it does so from an overtly ‘textbook’ perspective. Without calling into question the thoroughness of the exhibition, it does seem devoid of interpretive momentum, the work of an art historian rather than a curatorial innovator seeking to propose a new contextual perspective from which to view Muñoz’s significant output.

Evangelia Basdekis

by Bob Dickinson

"I have a kind of tiny space in which I can breathe and survive."
At a meeting point between art and carnival, Eva Basdekis walks, wearing multicoloured boots which conceal the site of her latest work, entitled I Trust You. "Sometimes you feel quite strange because you walk through crowds of people and they don't know," she explains, "It has to do with the fact that it's on your foot and it will fade out and it doesn't have any value for the market."
Using a form of violent embroidery, recent performances in Sheffield, Munich and Bristol saw Basdekis using needles and coloured thread to sew portraits - the Mona Lisa and Mickey Mouse - on to the soles of her feet. The intense, detailed, iconic-ironic result demands close-up examination (and at her Sheffield performance, closed circuit television provided just that). Each piece of fleshly embroidery is done scrupulously, slowly, methodically, literally stitching the traditional and the transgressive together.
Unlike a tattoo, an embroidered picture on the skin isn't permanent. But neither does it disappear instantly. After the performance, Basdekis lives with the embroidery on her foot - or in the case of Art Is Beautiful, the palm of her hand - for several weeks, then pulls out the stitches as they become loose. In this way, the embroidery has a life extending far beyond the period of its public exposure. After her performance at Sheffield's Site Gallery in December 2006, Basdekis, alongside her former mentor, Franko B, took part in a public discussion, during which one audience member commented that watching the stitching of the foot was less painful for the viewer than observing Basdekis having occasionally to flex her entire leg in response to "pins and needles".
"I am trying to communicate the feeling of obligation to obey the rules," Basdekis comments later, "Repetition is a ritualistic and productive routine-gesture that helps me to indicate the power and violence of authority. I am trying to keep myself deadpan as the alienation becomes more clear. At the seven hour performance at the Site Gallery I was thinking at the same time how insane what I'm doing is.. I try to express the anaesthetisation of the body, of the human being, of the society. I felt quite tired during my performance…it was not so much the pain or the "pins and needles" but this tiring and upsetting obligation to the rule."
Evangelia's embroidered images deliberately polarise the over-exposed extremes of fine art and popular culture. "Sometimes I feel contaminated by my education," she reveals, "Mona Lisa is important because of institutions and museums and the way they make you think. When you stitch Mona Lisa you translate a masterpiece in a very low way - a craft, but I have to observe very strict rules to repeat it that way."
Basdekis' Greek upbringing didn't include formal embroidery, although she remembers its popularity in traditional Greek homes. The application of embroidery on the sole of the foot, however, does consciously refer to darker aspects of Greek twentieth century history: the falaka tortures (beatings on the soles of the feet) inflicted on political prisoners during the years of military dictatorship between 1967 and 1974. But Basdekis uses violence on her own body to open new possibilities.
"When I stitched my hand for the first time I released a kind of energy that would last a long time," she says, "Usually people think of self harm as a hidden wish for suicide. But for me suicide has no power. For me to harm yourself expresses control of the body. In my country it's sinful to harm the body. It's a kind of rebellion against that religious thinking."
Citing 2005's Art Is Beautiful as a turning point, Basdekis also refers to the importance of two earlier performances. In the case of Tama Art, Basdekis - on her hands and knees - proceeded through the centre of Athens and entered the municipal museum, where she remained kneeling in the position of prayer. The proceedings drew crowds of puzzled onlookers, and took the unwarned museum staff completely by surprise. It was, Baskdekis believes, "Bold to do it in an urban landscape. I used all the city in a different way. I made the viewers use the city in a different way. I decided to go into the museum without any permission. The people in the museum, they could see me praying - that's what Tama means - with 100 people watching, and the museum staff didn't know what to do, how to behave. It was my idea to make it a parody. All that kneeling at the museum made me feel like a piece of work in the museum! People were so quiet - like in church - and afterwards so excited. It was amazing."
In We Are The Revolution - a direct reference to Joseph Beuys' work from 1972 - Basdekis videoed herself wearing Mickey Mouse ears, repeating Beuys' phrase having inhaled helium gas from a balloon, undermining the confidence behind the statement. "Beuys changed the rules," says Basdekis, "But I was asking what I was doing. Could I change society? And so, by using helium, I gave myself a cartoon voice.."
Besides providing an unnerving quality, Besdakis use - indeed, sense- of humour reinforces the transgressive intentions behind her work. She has previously related her performances to the function of the clown, fool or jester in history, whom she sees as "eerie, insane..marginal in the palace…that he remains without a punishment is evidence that he (his truth) has not any power (over the king, authority)". Basdekis' transgressive actions therefore embody pessimism and rebellion, mysteriously made to unfold in a fixed continuum she sees as "the only time and space I can breathe as a proper Evangelia." She continues, "I feel quite free and original because I believe in what I'm doing. It's my manifesto. I don't have any sense of what the viewer thinks. But it's amazing how liberating it feels when you're doing that - you do the most right thing in the world."
During the year she spent being mentored by Franko B, Basdekis seems to have become reassured about the direction of her art. Franko offered her "A kind of philosophy about art and life. I'd been wondering why I was an artist and he put the question in a different way. He said okay you are an artist but why do you have to keep on doing it? He told me don't put pressure on yourself. For Franko B the first is to be a human being and an artist next."
Asked about the symbolic value of her body in performance, Basdekis replies: "All my gesture is symbolic - Mona Lisa on the flesh rather than on the canvas. I am considering the body as the subject for torture or action. You take your time to release truths from your body - out, out. I don’t know if it's a kid of therapy. My statement is you take your time to bring out your reasons." And for the onlooker? Basdekis smiles: "I don't look for emotionalinvolvement - it's just the mind."

Bob Dickinson is an arts reporter/producer for the BBC Radio 4 Front Row programme

ELI

S T E R T Z

Interviewed by Gianni Romano

Gianni Romano: What does culture mean to you?

Eli Sterz: I think culture plays a significant role in the development of ideas and in the understanding of my own place in time. Do you find culture as a point of departure of my work? It might be. If we think of my work as the consequence of a long process of reflection in which, of course, culture plays a role, it distinguishes my pictures from simple snapshots. Consider that for the last years I have been living in a culture different to my own and trying to absorb the thread of other premises/surroundings is stimulating.

GR: I am asking you, because in your work there are always people doing something practical, developing something, technically building something. Eventually like building a culture, this is why I connect this idea to your work. It could be agriculture or another form of experience. My perception, as a viewer, goes beyond the photograph, your figures seem to be involved in something bigger, in a greater plan.

ES: Yes, this is true. This idea of reality beyond the photograph is an aspect I consider deeply in my work, relating my ideas to culture has a brief thought in the work, but is not my point of departure. By stepping back now and looking at my narrative I understand the connection, and this actually leads to new ideas and innovations. Being involved in something beyond photograph is important for my work, because it makes me feel the whole story is neverending. This gives me the great pleasure of finding room for interpretation and taking my viewer to another place. I also enjoy when I reach my goal through the techne.

GR: Although you don’t actually seem to be a technogeek, what is your media equipment made of?

ES: My early series of photographs were made using a low-tech camera, a plastic camera, while the last series is made with a panoramic camera that allows me to put more emphasis on one of my favourite visual topics: the horizon.

GR: In other words, you are saying that the quality of your pictures is not the result of high-tech machines - that means there must be a sort of postproduction process that helps you to reach your results?

ES: I love the idea of postproduction, the idea of working and combining different cultural material made by someone else. However, I’m afraid it does not really match my method. First of all, I stage every scene for my photographs. Secondly, I think that postproduction very often gives us the perception of a digital manipulation which is very far from any process I’m involved in. Actually my process is very simple, as simple as the cameras I’m using, the shots are not much worked out in a technical way. I do make few adjustments to the film, very standard things like cleaning.

GR: When you have an image in mind, how much conceptual manipulation is considered? How much do you change the image from your original thought?

ES: This depends on how the consistency of ideas will reflect on my original. Staying true to my inspiration is the goal, but of course sometimes things work out in such a way that the idea leads to other ideas and becomes more successful. In many cases I find myself referring back to my original idea towards the end of my process to see if I stayed on track and to find the consistency in my work.

GR: Your photographs seem like still lifes from some kind of performance or film. This conveys a very strong narrative. How do you use this narrative for your work?

ES: I have always looked at film and wanted to develop a narrative that would freeze cinema in time. Before I started reading any kind of fiction or essays, film became an entry point was a fundamental point in my early education, whether it was from a surrealist film such as Louis Breton, Man Ray or, more recently, the Brothers Quay and their particular approach to film-making. I also developed my personal narrative with still imagery, to me it is like a performance made by objects and people. When I am in a location with my subjects I feel that somewhere in the background is a stage and an audience waiting for something to happen; the difference being that I do not always give very definite directions?

GR: Do you mean that your models are more or less informed by what your plan is and they might interact with their own decisions about performing a character?
That depends a lot from the amount of experience I share with the subject I’m working with. I enjoy much more when the model really becomes an actor and transforms him/herself into the protagonist of the photograph. This is an interesting side of my work. It has a lot to do with how people exchange ideas or apply your ideas to an open scheme. It is interesting in any case to see whether they understand perfectly what I want to do or if they completely misunderstand me.

GR: Open to suggestions?
As I said, my attitude is to stay true to the inspiration, but sometimes it is interesting to see how things develop by themselves.

ES: In terms of film culture, do you exploit that just as a visual source, or is it more like a cultural part of your knowledge?
I think a little of both. Film has definitely played an important role in the development of my work, visually and culturally. Film was always present from an early age - from my father holding a degree in film to watching classic cinema projections and footage of his own. But I do exploit it in a visual sense as well, I feel I have to.

GR: Do you mean it’s a sort of unaware process of mimicking movies, like that of Cindy Sherman?

ES: I don’t know if it is conscious or not; to an American mind film is part of our culture, just like you might inadvertently and vaguely quote a writer when involved in your writing. It is never a matter of simply quoting a precise movie scene or image. It deals more with images that eventually influence me emotionally. If you take my work “Load”, for example, it comes from a movie titled “Songs From the Second Floor”: the image of people and their baggages moving inside an airport. The image is not representing exactly a scene of that movie, but it definitely has something to do with it. Cinema again. In terms of visual stimuli one of my favorites is Swedish director of “Songs From the Second Floor”, Roy Andersson, touching on the idea of letting things slip out of control in the most minimal sense. Another influence has been the Brothers Quay. Their short films hint on the border between sculpture and film. They construct elaborate small sets and bring them to life with animation; using various materials they represent the hand of the artist throughout their process. Their fictional realities are visually compelling, focusing on ideas of creation through physical building.

GR: In terms of photography what have your references and/or inspirations been?

ES: In school, I was introduced to the artists Kahn & Selesnick. I became aware of the possibilities offered by photography of stretching ideas and formats to new boundaries. I was also interested in Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Robert Parke Harrison.

GR:Do you feel that an American well-read person could have an easier understanding to the work of an artist/director such as Matthew Barney rather than a European just because it’s so symbolic and “pretty American?”

ES: I believe so; from an American-school point of view we focused so much on conceptual thought. To deliver some kind of direct answer to our question, in the case of Barney, he is in a lot of ways “pretty American,” and he delivers this idea through his films. Symbols confront the viewer in such a visually direct way that dialogue becomes obsolete.

GR: In some way it is typical of American art to be more visually straightforward than European art which is ambiguous in many ways. But your work looks more European based in this sense, because it contains a lot of ambiguity. Do you perhaps draw from literary sources rather than just films, or can it be because sometimes you leave the process open-ended?

ES: Many of my sources are derived from European literature such as Italo Calvino, who brings a different and rich visual reference to his novels. But I feel that living in Europe has enabled me to bring out the ambiguity that I am trying to create. I was doing this before as well but it was more focused on answering my own questions. Now I can answer this question with less, which is more satisfying, and, as you say, leave the process openended.

GR: Are all your photographs visually built in terms of scenography or do you find a spot which looks just perfect to you and therefore you just shoot?

ES: That almost never happens, I do find places that look perfect for what I plan to do, but I don’t shoot at that moment. Almost all the work is built around the scene, planning and drawing; using sculpture and the surrounding landscape the installation becomes an extension of my hand. I try to pay attention to detail as much to the natural landscape as to the constructed set. Finding the right combination of objects to disrupt the landscape and alter its reality is a technical task that keeps me motivated to continue on my development.

GR: When you see something that attracts you, though it is not ready yet, do you try to find some order to fit your mental idea at that time?

ES: I think I am always trying to learn from my work, in the sense that I will try to stick to an idea throughout the entire process. If I can change anything I will redo the shot, so I might end up with three or four versions of the same photograph and will finally use one. It usually happens that I will find order in this process, learning by not being satisfied and wanting some kind of order.

GR: Is this order mental or physical?

ES: Mental. Disorder is attractive, but I have to find the right key and the right order to make this disorder meaningful.

GR: When do you consider yourself satisfied with the result? Are you ever surprised by the results?

ES: I find that I can almost always see an idea through to the end by accomplishing what I set out to do. Being satisfied for me is looking at the final print and forgetting my original idea, becoming disattached from it and placing myself with the image as the protagonist. Finding new ideas to explore is surprising in itself.

GR: My question also relates to the status of things, when you change the order of things you are a sculptor, putting pieces together, physically developing.

ES: Yes, I do feel like a sculptor sometimes. I enjoy working with materials; always building from the landscape and making choices that affect the surrounding environment. I find myself carefully considering how a piece might be photographed. Details have to be exaggerated in order to photograph well.

GR: Since moving to Europe have your visual influences changed?

ES: Well for one thing, there seems to be a lot more possibilities, in the sense that there is an abundance of art from many different cultures and styles. Traveling to different countries to see shows and experiencing the European scene, it seems like the filters have been lifted. In this lies the ambiguity and the concern. My influences have only grown since living here, not changed. I am intrigued by the video works of Anri Sala, his work is very refreshing with this blending of different styles. The Finnish photographer Miklos Gaål too, with his large format set ups of everyday life with the slightest touch of focus. A major influence has been Pierre Huyghe and the concrete truth he brings to his work. He is also one of the few artists I know of that spans many mediums, bringing together so perfectly video, installation, and sculpture in such a way that he can reach many levels of discourse in his work.

GR: In your work, there is also an element of time that is being elaborated. To me they look like they are an interruption of a process. The idea of timelessness and no connection to now are very evident.

ES: This is something I take into careful consideration while approaching my work; I am very careful not to make art that can be labeled or dated and that can fall into the background. I am not talking about political or social issues on the surface but the ideas behind the curtain. This is how I have always felt about the work. It’s an interruption of a process and, being the author, I am the interruption. I am drawing from my life in the present day, yet changing it by freezing the personal perspective. Speaking about time, when working with a subject I will have him rehearse as an actor would to enter the role assigned to him and get him to execute the task at hand. The set becomes a kind of experimental performance.

GR: I see references to waste in some of your pictures; do you have any concern for ecology?

ES: No; I know I make references to this idea and I like the idea that someone can perceive it. As a citizen I take responsibility for it, but as an artist I do not have any specific intent on focusing on this in my work.

GR: You have produced three video works recently, do you feel they complete your work as a photographer?

ES: I think in many ways making video does complete my photography, although I feel I should spend more time making films in order to fully understand. I enjoy video and its difficulties; video is one of the hardest forms of media to work with because of how accessible it is. There is so much video today in art that I think it is in trouble to some extent. I started making video after I realized that I needed action and movement in my work, like coming alive, not trying to capture the moment. I have now three videos finished. They are all fixed on the movements from the perspective of the viewer. I made experiments by using ideas of exaggerated movements and using different camera angles to achieve this. It is a weird feeling because photography makes me want to shoot videos and video makes me want to go back to photography. But do no ask me where I’m heading.

Ok, not this time.

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Suspended bodies

Mario Flecha

At some point during the search for a new way to express the dynamics of our changing time, the artist's body has both become part of and supports the work of art.
The body has been exhaustively explored inside out , art has been produced from any human bodily fluid and excrements .
Helen Chadwick's "Piss flowers" is a work where the process of peeing in the snow making a mould and casting the result is as relevant as the piece itself. On the other hand , Mona Hatoum's "Corp etranger", introducing an stetoscopic camera to circulate inside her vagina , stomach and intestine, exposing and as a consequence controlling the more intimate parts of her body is related to how the establishment survey not only our exterior movements in the street , banks and supermarket but the interior of our bodies too.
The zealous application of some artists are somehow similar to the martyrdom of a Saint and the images of dispair are identical.
Saint Sebastian suffered because the events on his life were uncontrollable , the Australian artist , Stelarc, stage manage his performance with scientific precision, the most notable act was at the Tamura Gallery in Tokyo in May 1980 in a performance called Sitting/Swaying where pain and madness are united.
"Encircled by 18 granite rocks, which counterbalanced its weight, the body was suspended in a sitting position. Each rock weighed between 3.5 - 4.2 kgms, one rock for each insertion point. The rocks were first suspended from eye-bolts in the ceiling, then connected to the body sitting on the floor.
The rocks were then lowered, lifting the body into space. During the suspension time of approximately 17 minutes, the body swayed, gently swinging all the rocks in different directions."
This is how the experience is described in Stelarc's web page. No pain or emotion; a dry description of the event. It does not mention the hooks he introduced into his skin or that the weight of his body must have expanded his skin to breaking point.
This performance act is similar to those in a Hindi Festival in Malaysia, where some of the believers put hooks inside the skin of their backs, attach these by chain to a cart with flowers and in this way pull the cart along. The context of their suffering is a religious one.
Both actions conjugate in their visual horror and in our fascination with the violence we are able to perpetrate on our bodies even when this is disguised as art or religion.
It is not strange that artists are using the same path as the church because throughout the history of mankind there has been a constant exchange between them. They share the same passion for persuading others of their knowledge of the mysteries of life.
For a long time they established a tacit dialogue, where the aims of both were complementary .
They married their interest early in history and have been using each other ever since.
The church became a patron of the arts, commissioning artists to represent the life and martyrdom of Jesus and the glory of God . They provided the narrative , the artists gave their craft. For the artist, I suspect it was an opportunity to further knowledge of human nature and for the church, a way to persuade illiterate people of the word of God through an apparently direct and simple illustration. At the peak of the renaissance, the artist became god.
Vasari in his prologue of The Lives of The Artists in the Renaissance said '...that the origin of the arts we are discussing was nature itself ...... and the master who thought it was the divine light infused in us by special grace, which has made us not only superior to the animals but even , if one may say so, like God himself"
The two artists who began the process of change were the Florentine painter, Giotto di Bandone, a disciple of Cimabue famous for his crucifixion paintings , and another Florentine painter, Paolo Ucello. The Italian "trecento" has influenced the art of painting up until our day. Giotto's draughtsmanship was the clue which allowed him to move from the flatness of the Byzantine painting to a kind of sculptural drawing. He discovered the way to create a sense of volume which had been absent before him and at the same time he was the first painter to personalize his work by signing it. Before him painters were considered anonymous artisans. The other Florentine, Paolo Ucello, the greatest painter of all, had very little interest in painting or representing nature or God; his main concern was his fascination with perspective. In the Rout of San Romano he revolutionized painting. For the first time in history, perspective appeared on a canvas. He painted imposing white horses in the foreground followed by all the complicated elements of a battle becoming smaller and smaller until they vanish in the depth he created in the canvas.
After this he became obsessed by perspective spending his life drawing objects in this way and murmuring -Oh ! what a sweet thing is perspective.. -Their main subject matter was representing the material cruelty of Christ's life and that of his disciples and to explain the abstract being of god.
The image of Jesus nailed to a cross had been painted and sculpted by them an others millions times which resulted in a certain insensibility towards his pain and since the middle of last century the catholic church's inspiration has faded away, and artists have found themselves with a need to replace the subject as a way of surviving . This has produced one of the most dynamic and exacting 150 years in which the visual artist has broken the boundaries attached to the creation of art and now investigates and creates by any means and medium with a freedom unknown before, all sorts of movements as well as new disciplines have emerged. The surrealists occupied themselves in expressing the unconsciousness where the dream like vision are sign related to a broken narrative , where the abstract expressionism to mention another is represent the heroic action of the new world , many others groups have being active since
The search for truth has somehow lost its ambition to explain God and nature and now concentrates on the urban tragedy of the individual. A century without God has facilitated the development of hysteria in the studio.
The artists know that they need to produce work to justify and further themselves. The main problem is that some of the important concerns in any creative process have been lost. Religion lacks the agglutinative power it previously held. Morality and the knowledge of God gave the church an important role in the development of the arts which now has been eroded . Love and sex have been demystified to a point that they cannot be a serious subject and death has been monopolized by Damien Hirst and Charles Saatchi's shark .
Yet this never stops artists pushing the limits of our understanding of life and religion appears from time to time in the most unexpected ism. Donald Judd, founder of the minimalist movement, borrows concepts from the Muslim tradition, according to Rashed Areen, and fakes a theory to support his work .
The Church and Art as institutions are using the same strategy to be able to seduce and persuade people that they and only they possess the truth about human nature. For this reason they attempt to occupy as much space as possible, going inside everything at all levels. The arts hold such an open mind that at times it is difficult to know what they are about; a man marries a piece of furniture, another makes an event of changing his name, a group of painters 'discover' the German expressionism of the early 80's. These innocent banalities are not that simple. They intend to meet the needs of everybody keeping all the concepts under one umbrella. The church in some troubled parts of Latino America is playing the same game. The hierarchy support the most conservative part of society while the priesthood supports the struggle of the peasant and the working class. In this way they secure their position as a winners.
To close the circle, Stelarc's practice goes from martyrdom to becaming and icon, after filming inside his body and performed many suspensions, in his latest events which he describe it as
The body performs in a structured and interactive lighting installation which flickers and flares in response to the electrical discharges of the body - sometimes synchronising, sometimes counterpointing. Light is treated not as an external illumination of the body but as a manifestation of the body's rhythms.
The performance is a choreography of controlled, constrained and involuntary motions of internal rhythms and external gestures. It is an interplay between physiological control and electronic modulation, of human functions and machine enhancement.
Sterlac went from an image of pain , control and repulsion, to one of sedative state of illumination and is in work like his that art and religion meet in an extraordinary alliance.

Mario Flecha is the editor of Untitled and Baston Blanco. Director of the Jafre Project