art

I will always remember the things of the past

and I have no need

to bow down to the golden calves of the future

which sleep in the cattle wagon

on the road to the new Europe

and its abattoirs

which have been turned into discos.

- Delimir Resicki

(HT: Greg Dotzauer @ Der Tagesspiegel Via signandsight)

In 2003 I worked for some weeks in Baghdad following the invasion of Iraq, based at the UN headquarters in the Canal Hotel. As many of you probably remember, the Canal Hotel was bombed up on 19 August - shortly after I left the mission - killing many of my friends and colleagues. This is a long way of explaining how I first met Soodad al-Naib, one of the Iraqi staff working in the Humanitarian Information Centre while I was there.

Soodad was injured in the Canal Hotel bombing but after moving to London, she’s made an amazing recovery and is now pursuing a career as an artist. Her paintings are dark and deep, almost abstract but with a mythic storytelling quality. Her work is going to be part of the Untitled Artists Fair in London this year, from Saturday 31st May - Sunday 1st June at Chelsea Old Town Hall. Admission is free but you need to have tickets - download them from this link. Come on, free art! What more could you ask for?

While reading this post, you should be listening to Modern Art by Art Brut.

I agree with Geoff Klock - Casanova is my favourite comic of all time, at least until my next favourite comic of all time comes along. Why? It’s a psychedelic pop culture mash-up that’s smart, funny and sexy - if it was a girl, you’d want to marry it, but it’s not a girl, so you’ll just have to read it. Luckily you can read it for free - well, you can download Issue 1 and Issue 8 for free, both of which are the start of new story arcs, so you should be able to pick up what’s going on pretty quickly.

Wait, maybe it would be possible to marry a comic. I’ll get back to you on that one. In the meantime, here’s a page from Issue 1, as our “hero” Casanova Quinn falls from a plane. I would attempt to summarise the plot, but I’m not that stoned - basically, he’s a bad egg turned good, in the process of hopping between parallel universes, while carrying out a range of spicy spy missions. There you go.

When I was touring the Seattle Art Museum earlier this year, a small child wandered onto the outskirts of the installation “Some/One” by Do-Ho Suh. Almost immediately a security guard stepped up to the hem of the installation and instructed the child to get off. The guard probably didn’t realise that he was going against the artist’s wishes, and definitely didn’t realise he was acting out the tension embodied in the piece.

In an interview with Art21, Do-Ho Suh explained that

Every time I install “Some/One” you always face the back of the piece first… And that means you don’t see the interior of the piece when you enter the room. You have to go through the steps and walk on the piece and then walk around the piece and then finally you face the front of the piece and then you are able to see the inside of the piece. And that moment is very important, I think. Not only experiencing the piece physically by stepping on the dog tags, but also when you see the reflection of yourself inside of the piece. Then you truly become a part of the piece.

While much of Suh’s work is really about questioning identities, it relies heavily on military reference points. As he says in the interview, since a two-year military service is mandatory in South Korea, “that’s a great deal of the Korean man’s identity,” and this militarism saturates “the whole Korean society, the whole system is actually based on this militaristic, very hierarchical structure.”

In countries which maintain national service - Switzerland is a good example - the military is more easily accepted than in countries where serving in the army is the exception rather than the rule. When everybody goes through the same institution, that institution comes to seem intensely normal, no longer worth discussing - and so it goes from being accepted to being politely ignored:

For me, again, this experience in the military was not something special because everyone had to go through and has to go through that process in Korea. So if you talk to someone who went to military, they all have similar stories. That made me a little bit more comfortable to use this military experience. Maybe it’s something special here in the States, but if I show “Some/One” in Korea then I think it will get a different response because it was part of their everyday life.

I wonder what that response would be? Read the rest of this entry »