JANUARY : word : NEIL O'ROURKE : art : ALBERT REYES

Shit Happens
The Art of Albert Reyes

if exposure is the measure of success, Albert Reyes is doing pretty damn well for himself.
After his spit art was featured in the New York Times ‘ Year in Ideas Review , a self-published YouTube clip of him in full spitting act has attracted some 1,542.950 viewers.

Assuming each of them watched all 3 minutes 27 seconds of his oral artistry, by Warhol calculations he’s snaffled some 336,363 people’s 15 minutes of fame from right under their noses. Some detractors may try to write off his spit art as a novelty act , but you can’t argue with those figures -- especially when Mr. Reyes is far from being a one trick pony. “To me the spit art is just another weapon in my arsenal”, Albert explains.” I want to do a lot of different art . I want to do idea art. I want to make drawings. I want to paint... do etchings. Make video. Make film. Act. Direct.


“My spit art is just part of all this. Just some performance art that happened to become really popular. Here in the US it got me on television, on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show. I never thought that spitting water out of my mouth could get me that kind of exposure.”

But exposure it gave him, and with his approach to art, the bigger the audience the better. To all intents, Albert is a reporter. A visual documenter of, and a commentator on, our times. His socially-charged aesthetic couldn’t have found a more exciting era to chronicle either.

Politically-fuelled wars -- or is that just political fuel wars?
Global warming. The ever-growing gulf between the rich and the poor. It’s all there for him to assimilate into his work and L.A. seems to be the perfect vantage point from which to observe the world as we know it. “Everything that happens in the world affects me and what I do. That I’m American , everything I do touches lots of other people too. The reason we can have so much in America is because other people have so little and I’m aware of that”

“I am aware of the impact of our foreign policies. How corrupt my government is. Being from L.A. , I’m also aware how materialist we are. People here are kind of shallow, superficial. They are obsessed with what is on the outside not the inside”

Balancing the political and materialistic shortcomings of our culture with scenes of everyday folks leading everyday lives, Albert’s work makes those shortcomings even more apparent. However, while he challenges the viewer to make a difference to the world we live in, his work is as pessimistic as it is optimistic. Such is the polarity of life, the two outlooks are inextricably linked. “You can’t have good without bad. That’s the yin and yang of life. We are all negative. We are all positive. It’s about the choices we make. Are we going to do what’s right or what’s wrong?”.

There is no doubting Albert has taken the path of light. Not just in terms of his art’s call to action with regards to tackling the ills of the world. Since graduating high school he’s been involved in various programmes teaching art to the young. It’s always been a two-way learning process though. “the kids I have worked with have really influenced me. They come at art from a different approach. they are untainted . They are not doing art for money. They are not doing it to be topical. They are doing it out of love. That’s how i try to approach my work. Trouble is , as an adult that is not easy. I’m trying to produce a diverse range of art. Trying to make a living... trying to put my religious and political beliefs out there. It’s very complicated now. I strive to be true to my artwork, but as an adult I have to function in the world we live in. A world that’s corrupt”

It’s ironic it was a symptom of that corruption that brought Albert’s work to much of the world’s attention. While it has its use , YouTube is in many ways a prime example of today’s fame obsessed cult of celebrity.
The Z-list Warholian nightmare we live in . At least Albert has the substance to back up his style. His 15 minutes won’t be ending any time soon.
NEIL O'ROURKE 2007
pimp magazine

NOVEMBER : word : GILLES DELEUZE + FELIX GUATTARI : art : FREDERIC VINCENT

Contemplating is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation… The plant contemplates by contracting the elements from which it originates - light, carbon, and salts - and it fills itsef with colors and odors that in each case quality its variety, its composition : it is sensation in itself.
GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI 1994
What is Philosophy ? 1994 / trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London, Verso

There are images, things are themselves images, because images aren't in our brain. The brain's just one image among others. Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producting and consuming. There's no difference at all between Images, things, and motion.
GILLES DELEUZE 1995
Negociations 1972-1990,/trans. Martin Joughlin, New York : Columbia University Press

By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another : to extract a bloc of sensation, a pure being of sensations.
GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI 1994
What is Philosophy ? 1994 / trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London, Verso

NOVEMBER : word : REM KOOLHAAS : art : CANNELLE TANC

Goodbye to Hollywood

After some complex foreplay, Edgar Bronfman Jr. asked us on December 15 1995,
to design a new headquarters for Universal Studios Hollywood, a compagny he had recently acquired. Edgar was the grandson of Samuel, the founder of the « Seagram Compagny » who had in'54 asked Mies Van de Rohe to design his Headquarters on Park avenue, reputedly at the urging of his daughter Phyllis Lambert, an architect herself. To position the building in the right location on the Universal City site-a hybrid of Film Studio and Theme Park-Bronfman also asked OMA to look at the huge property as a whole…A large team spent six weeks in an office on John's Jerde's City Walk- a mixture of purgatory and fascination. It soon became apparent that the commission was less straightforward than it seemed. Where in'54 Seagram was a single entity that would be relatively stable during the five year minimum that any architectural enterprise takes from beginning to end, that was no longer the case : by the mid-nineties, the substance and nature of any corporation was in constant flux, if not turmoil.
Where in'54 a building could be a « portrait »of a known entity, forty years later it needed to be a device that was able to create a degree of wholeness from a permanently changing cluster of ingredients and latencies. A building was no longer an issue of architecture, but a strategy.
That insight triggered the birth of OMO-OMA's mirror image- a new organization that proposed, given a situation where built architecture was simply too slow to capture mutating organizations, to explore the possibility of applying architectural thinking in its pure form-liberated from the need for realization. If we could not build a building for an organization that was in an absolute state of flux-from the share value to the permanent buying and selling of its components and the constant imminence of mergers and acquisitions, we could at least imagine a conceptual model of a « structure » that could, if not anticipate, at least accommodate almost any eventuality and actually exploit the given instability to define a new territory for architecture…
The trajectory was a sobering confrontation with architecture's most inconvenient demands- time and money-and a first glimpse of a distant, seductive hint of its return as a purely conceptual medium. REM KOOLHAAS Content ed.Taschen 2004

OCTOBER (Paris) : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : AMANDA HUGHEN + ARNGUNNUR YR

AMANDA HUGHEN

2005 Firmament : Turpentine gallery : Reykjavik Iceland
2006 Firmament : ampersand international arts : San Francisco Ca
2007 Firmament : galerie Immanence : Paris France

ARNGUNNUR YR

FIRMAMENT

According to the Book of Genesis, on his second day of work, God created the firmament right after separating light from darkness, when the earth was still “void and without form” . It is interesting to note the priority given to shaping the expanse over shaping the void. First there was the edge of comprehendible space, and somewhere below it, existed a raw, unseen, and unformed earth. The word firmament derives from the venacular firmamentum, used to translate the Hebrew raki'a, which specifically denotes something hammered or forged in order to be extended. Ancient civilizations - Hebrews, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans - all believed the firmament to be a solid dome beaten from the hardest metal, a wall strong enough to separate the celestial reservoir from the waters of the earth.

The intention to configure nature to the specifications of the built environment is also evident in Hughen's wall sculptures and drawings. Evocative of the rugged and fog-laden coast of Northern California, whose dominating atmospheric conditions create an ever-shifting vista, her landscapes are vast, abstracted, and still in the process of formation.
The marks Hughen makes are repetitive, uniform, and mechanical. The artist strives to remove herself - her hand, her judgment, her experiences - from their creation, allowing the process to take over and this new world to form its own geological history. Bunched together, the shapes coalesce into undulating and overlapping patterns that resemble eons of physical upheaval compressed into a single space and moment.

Multiple histories collapse and intertwine upon each other; eddying streams and eroding cliffs occupying the same plane as shifting continents. Unfettered by scale, these panoramas are as intimate as they are vast. Hughen's drawings become objects which become land masses with attending incisions and outcroppings. We as viewers are caught between a state of suspension and submersion, hovering above these topographies and crashing down into them when we shift from observing the whole in order to focus on a detail.

It is this elevated perspective - as if viewing from the crown of the firmament - which Hughen's drawings share with Yr's oil on panel paintings, whose weighty accumulations of cumulous clouds stretch the atmosphere to dizzying heights. Both artists expand their views beyond what the eye can naturally register, as if placing the viewer at the edge of comprehension. Each builds careful layers in their work, eschewing a simple association between surface and dimensionality, but with very different results. Where Hughen's patterns swoop across the surface, Yr's accumulated brushwork saturates it. The former entangles the viewer; the latter absorbs; yet both exert a force that aspires to penetrate the heavens.

In Yr's landscapes, voluminous clouds build larger and larger, expanding over a barely discernible ground. Simultaneously evoking the majestic heavens of 18th C. vedute - or view - paintings and the volatile, sparse Icelandic terrain, they impart a muted, infatuating beauty and uncompromising sense of isolation. The skies are dense, energetic and almost solid. Closer inspection discloses a surface that is scraped away, revealing layer upon careful layer of riotous color. Rifts and gouges erode the celestial barrier; scars shape the horizon. It might be difficult to affix oneself within this space - the atmosphere climbs beyond any possible point of contact - if not for these fissures. They create a subtle push and pull, drawing one in, continually shifting one's gaze until all the breaks in the firmament appear.

The paintings convey a Baroque sensibility with their soaring spaciousness, evocation of grandeur, drama, and tension.
Just as the firmament conceals the mysteries of the deities, Yr's indomitable and wondrous skies probe at something deeper.
Yr's world - where the canopy covering the feeble earth seems to threaten to tip it over - is perhaps a reflection of our own, where the certainty of life could easily be upended.
The earth shifts on a regular basis, both below and on the surface, so it was not accidental that the ancient myths affixed the concept of eternity to the solid and immutable heavens. They wrought it as metal, and gave it the potential to be infinitely forged. In turn Hughen and Yr shape the world over and over again. For them, void is never formless, but an endless number of places to make visible and real. "
PATRICIA MALONEY 2005
(excerpt from exhibition catalogue )