woensdag 17 augustus 2016

Essay: Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating for YEAR




For YEAR I wrote an article called 'Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating'.

YEAR is an annual magazine published by Komplot and David Evrard in collaboration with the designers Pierre Huyghebaert and Uberknackig. YEAR is thought of as a non-linear narrative inspired from the "cause and effect" paradigm or more: "TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCE."

Its subjective approach, closely ingrained with the artists, curators and the experiences they raise, slips in commentaries or reports about different elements - exhibitions, interventions, conferences, books, objects - that appear influential. 

According to the principle of chain reaction YEAR addresses the journalistic model, organizing its content in the form of sequences. And YEAR is a scene, an experimental constellation, a scene as obsessive accumulation opposed to archives, distinction opposed to evaluation, narrative to order, cool to distance, taste to energy, beauty to sense, sense to idea, idea to experience, experience to life and life to style and style to knowledge and knowledge to power and power to shit.


Here's an excerpt from my article 'Polyphonic Thinking / Thinking Polyphony: An inquiry into collective curating'

One wonders whether language can include a variety of voices and how collective work processes may be communicated. In Katharina Schlieben’s research on collective curating I saw my own questions, stemming from the practice of working in an Amsterdam based collective, repeated: questions concerning consensus and the possibility of a ‘shared’ language. These questions could be summarized as: If there is something like polyphony, than what does it consist of?

Question:
Would you consider the practice of Komplot to be polyphonic?

In between polyphony and symphony.
The polyphony is musical composition that uses simultaneous, largely independent, melodic parts, lines, or voices. It’s also the representation of different sounds by the same letter in a writing system. Composition. Independent. Voices and lines (as a narrative) are the words I have to recognize in that definition. It’s a system of writing, no more, no less.
If we decide to use a demo from a cheap sampler, that’s just something else.
It depends of what you wanna write, what story you have to tell…

- David Evrard, artist in Residency at KOMPLOT


Review: Volg de witte lijn: Esther Polak in Leeuwarden




Voor Metropolis M schreef ik 21 Februari 2011 een review over Esther Polak's project 'Nomadic Milk' dat de eerste etage van Hogeschool Van Hall Larenstein in Leeuwarden te zien was. 

Klik hier om het de review te lezen. 

Review: Eindexamens Academie Minerva 2011



Voor Metropolis M bespreek ik mijn 3 favoriete kunstenaars van Academie Minerva


- Janine van Veen

- Wim Peters

- Bastian Teeuwen

Klik hier voor de link naar de review op Metropolis M! 

Research article: 'The Murder' on the art of Jack Goldstein




I've written a research article called 'The Murder' for the publication A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture by Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, published by If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam, 2014.





Louise Lawler's A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture (1979) presents a movie in a regular cinema environment, but without any moving images. A Movie accentuates the experience of watching a movie and foregrounds the performative aspects of the practice of an artist who is perhaps best known for her photographs of ‘arranged’ artworks and objects. This publication is the result of an extensive research project into A Movie and its 2012 iteration, undertaken by researcher Sven Lütticken and Louise Lawler, as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme during Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication.




The publication includes a research essay by Lütticken that places A Movie in the context of cultural developments in the 1970s and contemporaneous works by the Pictures Generation, a sequence of images from Lawler’s archive selected by Lütticken and contributions by art historians Debbie Broekers, Eve Dullaart, and Daniël van der Poel.





Louise Lawler: A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture

By Sven Lütticken, Louise Lawler

Edited by Tanja Baudoin, Sven Lütticken

Designed by Will Holder

Distribution by Idea Books

Published by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2014

ISBN: 978-90-814471-6-4

Order via shop@ificantdance.org

Price: €15,–



Excerpt from 'The Murder'

by Debbie Broekers

Memory plays an important role in this context and Goldstein was very interested in the workings of the memory, working with sound precisely because sound sets memory in motion: “sound deals with depth, so it is much more analogous to memory – and that is what a lot of my work is about; trying to remember something or picturing it in your head”.[1] Goldstein’s usage of the verb ‘to picture’ is striking. As Douglas Crimp has also pointed out, ‘to picture’ can refer both to a mental process and to the production of an aesthetic work.[2] Both are at issue in The Murder, in which Goldstein created an image, or better yet, a representation of an image, in the minds of his viewers, with nothing more than a soundtrack and related light effects.


[1] Video interview with Jack Goldstein and Michael Smith conducted by Van Lagestein and students from the department of Art History (Groningen, 1979), archive of Art History Department, University of Groningen, Groningen. A copy of this interview is kept on DVD in the Corps de Garde archive.

[2] Crimp, D., ‘Pictures’, in October, Vol. 8, Spring 1979, pp 75-88.











Curated: I carried a watermelon


On the first of June 2014, together with Manus Groenen, I curated a one-day event for Locatie Z consisting of an exhibition, program of lectures, musical performances and a supper with artists, scientists, musicians and a curious audience.

This edition focuses on the allusion to Hollywood, film history and the cinematic in visual art.

download flyer

The program explores the potential of the subtle reference and the quote – the act of allusion – as an artistic strategy. Hollywood filmmaking is the point of reference for this afternoon of investigations in narrativity, cinematic memory and the blurred lines between fiction and reality. When we tell stories do we inevitably get tangled up in a web of codes and concepts introduced by Hollywood? Do we see life through Hollywood’s eyes?

With contributions by artists Sybren de Boer,Maurice BogaertLouise JacobsPaul de Mol andJowel de BruijnPeter van der Es, film critic Gawie Keyser and professor of film and literary studies dr.Peter Verstraten. Curated by Debbie Broekers enManus Groenen.

Download here the reader as presented with the exhibition, with more information on the artists and their work.