mexico woke up

In October artbeam will present Gabriela Leon's "Paseo dominical por el zócalo de Oaxaca" or "A Sunday Walk to the Zocalo of Oaxaca" at UC Riverside's Sweeney Gallery curated by Director Tyler Stallings. The exhibit will feature the dress Gabriela made from artifacts she gathered from the barricades that were set up by the People's Movement (APPO) here last year. APPO sought to gain benefits for the teachers of Oaxaca and subsequently for the ouster of its repressive Governor Ulyses after he ordered the teachers annual peaceful protest be broken up with the aid of tear gas and riot police. The video below, a series of images and an installation to be created at the space will also be included in the exhibit. The music for the video is from Nine Rain and Steven Brown who lives in Oaxaca.

...the robotic chair video a viral media hit

max & mark playing with
the chair in toronto


still image from prototype to
be completed in may, 2006





In just a few days more than 180,000 people have downloaded the "Robotic Chair" video at broadcast hub YouTube with more sites popping up daily. It all began following a talk by co-developer engineer Raffaello D'Andrea at Stanford University where he showed a preview video of "the Robotic Chair" by Max Dean, D'Andrea and Matt Donovan. Soon afterward the Cornell University website was overloaded from downloads of the video and it rapidly appeared across the Internet. Nearly 700 people have posted comments on YouTube. artbeam has just posted the most recent and unseen version of the chair on this site. The actual chair is scheduled to be completed in a month or two. Stay tuned for more video releases and news about appearances of the Robotic Chair.

mark
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the modern art market

With the launch of the artbeam website, preparation for the Armory Show in NY and a trip west with Max Dean I find myself recalling what brought me to this new crossing.

As a mid-westerner I grew up with tornadoes. I was both frightened and attracted by tornadoes. Yet as I got older the attraction grew stronger. I began to follow them…. world changing events, crises of humanity, revolutionary innovation, creative disturbances…

This passion to have my finger on the world’s pulse initially led me to trading. I wanted to know all that was happening in the world as soon as it happened. I wanted to understand the maelstrom, the ideas that gave rise to it and those that arose from the ashes- to contextualize them, to act on them.

I learned how to do that very well.

A realization that technology was unfolding as a primary catalytic force led me to San Francisco. I wanted to be there for the birthing process. To know it as it matured like a child, so I could create with it, so I could paint with it.

With the help of many friends I’ve learned how to do that very well too.

So now its time to paint with the world of ideas…to trade the “high-art” market.

I’ve had the best teachers in the world to prepare. I’ve had my feet in the water for some time now. If that were not enough I recognize a long wave forming from the tsunami of these last three or four years.

This is a “story” market led by insiders with deep pockets. I’ve traded these kinds of markets before. I’ve advised the best in the world at it and I’m ready to do it again.

Oaxaca has been like a nurturing friend these past two years. It provided me with another dimension of time. It cradled me in its ancient intelligence and it bathed me in light like no other. It challenged me. It tested me. It taunted me. It threatened me.

Yet through all of this something never died. Call it an unbending intent. It’s what’s left when everything else is washed away.

So here goes…

mark
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february 28, 2004

rest

"rest." video. nichola feldman-kiss. 2005.

Nichola has been working hard on several projects, one of which is called “Rest.” Rest is a meditation on the body, or perhaps the absence of body. It is a 90 + minute video of Nichola folding a collection of beautiful late 60’s garments. This is what I wrote after seeing it:

“After seeing Rest I became aware of the level of attention you placed on the absence of the body...in this occasion, in the colorful clothes that you have painted onto the screen… in the silent words spoken to yourself and the neurosis expressed in a ritual performance without meaning. it’s a different form of rest… a more conscious rest at the level of the body. As you lay down each garment its like laying down a collapse… a gesture of reverence to the absence represented in the unworn clothes… peace in the sense of completion… in reckless acts of positioning."

This was her response in an interview I did with her last month:

Nichola: Maybe my work is more about nakedness than it is about the body.

Mark: Why?

Nichola: Well because if you look at my work from early on I have been studying femininity from the point of view of the male gaze… a conscious understanding of what nudity represented from the male gaze. The idea of nakedness is where I get to the body and the performance of the self. There is no real stable identity. The acknowledgement of whatever “we” is - is a performance. The performance has support in the accoutrements of self. It is through things that we build our identity. We express ourselves through our actions and discourse and how we carry ourselves. These are written into the body over time. Earlier I worked to strip away, make minimal or concentrate those accoutrements down to the level of the body…those that penetrate the body. I was looking at nakedness by removing the body…becoming even more naked. You were talking about the place of that vulnerability. Can you go further than naked? What happens when you get on the other side of naked and the attraction to that vulnerability?

Read the full interview on the artbeam site: www.artbeam.net.


fashion institute of technology.

When artbeam arrives in New York one of the things Nichola will be doing is meeting with the Fashion Institute of Technology to discuss a project involving their museum collection of garments. I will also be pitching Rest as a 24-hour cable television show. We'll call it therapy for the masses.

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the armory show

artbeam is headed to the armory show march 11-13 in new york...

an appropriate venue for us given its history. shelley staples from the university of virginial recounted, "the shock and outrage proported from Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase and Matisse's Luxury connected the Armory Show, officially known as The International Exhibition of Modern Art, with an historic avant-garde whose duty was to question the boundaries of art as an institution."

artbeam will question these boundaries... and max dean will continue the duchampian dialogue with the unveiling of "the chair" this winter...max and i talked about this in the artbeam interview:


as yet unrealized, max dean 2001. Models of the robotic chair
and DVD of the original collapse and reassembly of the chair.

Mark: Max, The Robotic Chair you are now developing collapses, falls to the floor and proceeds to seek itself out and reassemble itself employing a custom mechanical robot in the chair’s seat. This is the first object where your viewer has no say in the matter. While this project was conceived over twenty years ago, only now does the visioning technology allow The Robotic Chair to look at itself, “to seek itself out” as you say. Have we reached a new era in the dialogue between technology and man?

Max: Well what you are talking about is that The Chair has the ability to determine the degree of functionality. It’s a state of being. It’s pretty interesting that an object can control its state of being, that it can create its own look. Technology is an essential part of the concept here for it facilitates The Chair taking control and determining its degree of functionality and this in turn questions the role of technology and the extent to which we use and give over to technology. I don’t know if we have reached a new level. It’s why I am making it. I am interested in exploring that functionality. When an object has this kind of power, what happens?

I am interested in contributing to the dialogue about the nature of everyday found objects, which Duchamp initiated. Throughout the 20th century, the integrity of the object though has remained intact and has not been invested with any new abilities or sense of self. The fact that the chair controls when it will fall apart and reassemble itself certainly would suggest a sense of self.

read the full interview at http://www.artbeam.net

mark
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explosion and implosion

guillermo roel. explosion-implosion. video still, madera, esmalte, vidrio.

notes from my conversation with memo (guillermo roel)

i only know that i know nothing. silencing mind and doing things that are uncontrollable...constructing, but then breaking things, again and again... crashing them against each other... all different space times. implosion and explosion. we are always in the midst of something between these forces.

mapmaking. the feeling of seeing the whole at some level. seeing the bigger picture. when the picture is too big, it gets claustrophobic. there is information in an image that is not readable to the eye. there is silent meaning...its not intelligible but has an effect in ways that we do not understand...

the relationship of life between the explosion and the implosion. is it possible to look at the range of expression between implosion and explosion...keep making and then breaking the work and seeing what happens. keep doing experiments over and over again until you see the aura of the experience. if you make enough experiments you will come with a great solution by chaos... so what would be the parameters of of the experiments?

explosion and implosion...

fragmenting and fragmenting and reorganizing without control... just letting things be. the budhists. practicing non-attachment. is there a number in the sampling of chaos that proportionately distills the intrinsic beauty in the chaos???

mark
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