Intensity

Heather Hansen is a New Orleans-based artist who creates incredible geometries using her body on pieces of paper. Part performance art, the symmetrical forms made with her movements allude to the Virtruvian Man in many iterations.

The performance of creating a piece such as this is not completely new – in the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony in China, dancers-cum-artists danced upon a sheet, creating an amazing Chinese-style calligraphy painting whilst maintaining the grace of a dance.

Hansen's work is different in its intensity. The sheer focus given to her work and the piece is reflected in the centrally weighted lines she sits in. Her pose at the end of the piece reminds me of meditation and the spell circles of fantasy novels. 

She doesn't mind getting her hands (or her body) dirty. It's a show of the grit involved in art making, countering the usual sterility of the white, curated gallery. 

13

13 Rooms - the 27th Kaldor Public Art Project

13 Rooms is a collection of 'living sculpture', the 27th Kaldor Public Art Project. Is this performance art?  It has vibes of buskers on Queen St or Amanda Palmer's 8-foot bride but in the distilled gallery environment, these pieces confuse and confront. I love the ideas embedded in this variety of work.

Making a statement on the archetypal 'high art' plinth.

One of the curators, Klaus Biesenbach, talks about how you are compelled to think certain pieces are merely video installations, or a tricky projection, or perhaps a life-like model. Once you enter the room, you are faced with a live human. Art has too often taken the representation path. The realness of 13 Rooms is so much more engaging.

It is only on for 11 days so make sure you get in quick if you're in Sydney. It's free too! Probably only on for a week because of all the staffing - they really made the effort.

Trust

With the advent of 'internet piracy', the music industry is changing and there are some who are embracing new ways to make a living with making music (as well as those who resist of course). A great example is Amanda Palmer, whose style is a mix between punk and cabaret. Personally not my flavour of music but wow, the way she goes about sharing her music is powerful stuff.

Her main game is trust: trusting fans, couch surfing & crowd surfing (which she talks a bit about in her TED talk - showed above, well worth viewing) and allowing those fleeting moments of interaction with people to form that trust. An extremist devotee of trust (compared to most of us anyway), it has served her well. She keeps coming back to one of her jobs standing on the street as an 8-foot bride, kind of like busking for money. Short moments of bonding, the experience of being acknowledged (good and bad), and an apparently steady income taught her this new path of music making.

If she comes to Auckland for a free gig or something, would love to see her work her magic. She also has a very well populated Twitter account which has helped with real time crowd/fan engagement.

Worm

More correctly an aquatic caddis fly larvae, artist Hubert Dupprat sets up these insects to build their cocoon with materials of his choosing. The larva, in the absence of gravel, sand and twigs that is their norm, start decorating their silk cocoons with rather more precious materials: gold, semi-precious metals, pearls, gems...

Somehow the insects go about this with a sort of pattern making - some might call it "aesthetic" but for this little larvae who probably just wants to survive the ordeal, it's probably primal instinct. Strange but these sculptures are fascinatingly similar to contemporary jewellery. Minus the legs and little caddis worm head.

Something about it seems natural but the imprint of human intervention is so surely apparent. The poor creatures are also exhibited in little aquariums, showing the temporary results of a more long term experiment. From each lifecycle to another, a new insect may choose a previously made case and expand/rework it.

For more about The Wonderful Caddis Worm: Sculptural Work in Collaboration with Trichoptera see Leonardo Online or read an interview with the artist himself. 

Onwards

Just noticed that my blogging count for this year is right on the number of posts last year: 73. So I thought, onwards and upwards, lets keep it up and keep pushing the limits! As you can see with the archive, last year wasn't even as many as 2010, when I had 77 posts. It's that thing which many a creative person gets to - the creative block/writers block etc. When you don't feel like it (and it isn't strictly essential) why do it?

Eventually I end up breaking the blogging drought (like this one at the beginning of this month about the Mentawai people). Today I want to talk about something I watched yesterday: Skyfall. In many ways it is in the same situation as I. At a milestone (50 years) and choosing to continue, onwards and pushing the boundaries that define the franchise.

You either think it's incredibly lame or really cool but I thought Skyfall was a screenwriters' break from the formula. As a person who has watched all the Bond movies (dad is really into the Bond franchise) except Quantum of Solace, there are few that actually go beyond the usual 007 scenario to actually interrogate who Bond actually is.

In one of the films (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) Bond gets married then his wife gets killed almost instantly - one of the few times that actually delved into Bond as a person, not the womaniser, adventure craver that he often is. Brutal and breaking, did it show how little chance that Bond can be a regular person?

Most of Skyfall was a perplexing mixture of a truly psychological villain and a setting all too familiar but at the same time foreign to the Bond franchise - London and the UK. The brief escapades to Turkey and Shanghai alluded to the usual rush but then literally quietened down to the recesses of Scotland. Forging the past of James Bond and whittling out the relationship between M and 007 would have been a real work of creative wit.

Add the tumultuous situation of the political pressure at M's seat of power and then you have the real deal. It had hints of the subtle jiving of JK Rowling's Harry Potter at the British government and, in general, of institution. That is, if you choose to read it that way.

Without spoiling anything, I reckon Skyfall is a game changer for the franchise. This is the 50 year mark and with an extremely different world of criminality as a subtext, Bond will have to reinvent himself to make it work. They ended this chapter of James Bond with great poetic effect and double take moments that made you think over. Goodness, they even broke out a poem right in the midst of crisis.

I thoroughly enjoyed this indescribably different take on 007.
4.5 stars
Feel free to let me know what you thought of it/this rather high rating in the comments.

Turn

Now that all of that fashion business is over, let's move onto something more architectural and reorientate ourselves... or not.

Turning the Place Over by Richard Wilson

NZFW5

To conclude Fashion Week, Sunday was a strange mix of last minute activity and packing up. A bit of fresh stock for the Designer Sale and the last lot of weekend shows. We shot the last of the Designer Selection Shows (been to 5 of them, and all exactly the same!) and tried to get a better angle. Some of us even got a few goodie bags for our efforts.

Once again, the shows were more about entertainment than hard fashion:

Moochi

A medium calibre fashion label, Moochi launched their new brand with this show. A live performance by singer Tali opened the show with high spirits and an explanation of their new kiss-kiss logo.

Popping colours and prints really stood out in this collection. Moochi is also the more public-friendly and accessible brands there too which is why they were put in the weekend.

Servilles Hair Show

Starting off with a powerful taiko drumming performance, the rest of the show was dominated by large costumey hair pieces and colourful bob cuts. I was expecting a lot of sculptural hair work which would show off Servilles' skill but it wasn't really about that. I don't really know what it was about other than being a dramatic statement show.

And that's the last of my NZFW posts! I hope you liked them. I certainly enjoyed sharing this rare opportunity to go to the all the shows and whatnot. It was so much fun hanging out with the other photographers and running around trying to get the best shots (I've never taken this many photos in one go in my whole life). Maybe next year...

Mist

Cai Guo Qiang's Endless presents a poetic collision of culture. However, without the bang and boom of other cultural advents such as the symbolic collision of 911, this installation shows two types of traditional boats (Chinese and Middle Eastern) lost in a mist. The encounter is sombre and the inherent stillness of the mist infects the piece.

The ephemeral and anti-stability theme is explored by many Chinese artists. Just today, at the Auckland Art Gallery I saw a series of photographs by Song Dong which spoke a similar language. A Pot of Boiling Water contained elements of performance art, as Dong pours boiling water from a kettle onto an old street of Beijing - the steam is temporal and the words written fade to the stability of stone.

Inception

I know the movie Inception is old news, but it never fails to sneak into conversations in my circles. That might have something to do with one of the supporting roles being an architect and that most of my crowd have something to do with architecture. So what is the fascination with it? The complexity? How the movie screws with your mind? From my point of view, I think any architect/architect-in-training with a drop of imagination revels in the idea that there could be a boundless creative space that one can make sheer creation. Cue the architects' god complex.

The point is, creativity is defined by its bounds. It is also limited by its bounds. For an artist, it might be funding, what space you can get hold of and how to stay alive in your freezing studio, but that is an influence on the work produced. An architect deals with an assortment of complexities that all have to work together: resource consent, building consent, will the thing stand (if it will stand in an earthquake is another matter) and, quite importantly, with all that in mind does the building still work?

The characters in Inception are stuck in a place where the creative bounds are stretched. The architect has full control over the environment. A forgery expert is like an extremist actor turned identity thief that can become the person he is acting. People can battle without gravity. There's even an avant-garde pharmacologist.

Infinite creativity, stretching back to the creative psychological theories of Jung, is both a theme and an ongoing movement. The movie itself has spurred a lot of thought. Graphic designers have made countless infographics to try to untangle the mental knot that is left after watching it (possibly a few times). Memes have sprung up and it seems to have become a common reference for whenever something is within something else or not knowing how you got to certain places.

Whether you like the movie or not, and beside it's action packed drama, clever motifs and award winning everything, Inception carries a lot of themes about creativity that creative people can relate to.

Absence

Far from leaving this post empty as the title might suggest (I am not quite that avant-garde), I'll leave a link to a brilliant article I just read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/10/ten-best-invisible-artworks-hayward?CMP=twt_gu

I couldn't have put it better myself. 10 art works that are 'invisible", some take on humour, others, a stark seriousness. After reading about each one, each so unique in its approach of the theme, I see how they have influenced others and their art on that which is not present. Do they remind you of something else despite the absence? Enjoy!

Kudos to @YolundaHickman, an artist herself, for retweeting it over my way.

Harmony

In Bb 2.0 is a music collaboration that was prepared over the interwebs. It takes the form of a bunch of Youtube clips with their creators making a sound. Follow the instructions, turn them on and you get a symphony that somehow works. I'm afraid my musical knowledge only goes that far - perhaps they all use the key B flat? It's a key that I often enjoy when playing music, for its melancholic yet strong qualities.

Make sure you take a look and listen at http://wwww.inbflat.net/

Robot

Flying robots playing the James Bond theme music. Sounds interesting right?

The last time I watched a robot play music was at the Shanghai World Expo in the Japanese Pavilion that literally took hours to snake into. A humanoid robot played the violin and that was the highlight of the show. Various other augmented reality and android demonstrations fitted around that and the future of Japan was made to seem like a really advanced and different place.

But still, it's not the music that is in any way impressive. It's the feat of programming these mechatronic dream children to coordinate that is amazing and, I think, still a developing art. The Japanese robot goes as far as trying to replicate the subtle humanesque features of musicality but it is still lacking qualities of human made music.

Bounds

What exactly is the connection between performer and audience? How distant is that gulf between them and how close can that boundary get? Not only with performance; how close can a consumer get to one's design, house even and is there always a distance to that relationship?

Sculpture by Chiharu Shiota.

Whitney

Remake

This rehash of Rihanna is possibly the best thing that's happened to the song and the dancing is just extraordinary. Seems inspired by the Roaring Twenties.

Choreography and dancing by Keone Madrid and Mari Martin. Song performed by James Cullum.

Poses

'Poses' (2011) by Yolunda Dominguez highlights the absurdity and artificiality of posing in the fashion industry. Whilst touching on some serious consideration into modelling, it's also a hilarious video!

Real

When you first look at the painting above, what do you think? Do you see the real life 3D person there posing? Alexa Meade's hyper-realistic acrylic body painting plays with making real life people into the realm of painterly expression. There are amazing possibilities for this technique - reportedly Meade wants to experiment more with video and other media. I can't wait to see where this experimentation will take her! I can't imagine she would get much income from this work in terms of selling art work - the works are more akin to installations/performance art.

Distanceless

There's no such thing as distance in our globalised society, only the distance we put between ourselves.

Livestream

Right now I'm at a fundraising event for Architecture for Humanity. Only it's no regular event because I'm watching the charity concert with nearly a thousand people all over New Zealand and possibly the world. Imogen Heap has spontaneously come over to Christchurch to help with raising funds.

700 people have packed the live venue in Christchurch. A great turnout watches the livestream event at the University of Auckland several hundred kilometres away. In various other places, nearly 200 feed into the livestream, capturing the efforts of the event, enjoying the music and supporting the cause of rebuilding Christchurch. And there are snacks (at least in Auckland which I helped organise).

What an amazing thing it is to have this made into a grassroots national movement.

For the livestream, go to http://songsforchristchurch.org/archives/164

For updates via Twitter, follow me @BobbShen or @AfhAuckland

Box

A little while ago I went to see the joint exhibition by Kentaro Taki and Ko Nakajima at AUT's St Paul Street Gallery. They work with the digital media along with installations. I was initially looking forward to seeing Bild:Muell (2008) but upon getting to the gallery, I couldn't find it. I still wonder if it is there in the gallery somewhere but seeing that work on the promotional material reminded of me of a graphic explosion of the video culture presented in Rauschenberg's Retroactive I.

It was a strange exhibition. It felt messy, and although this may be the artist's hand at play, I couldn't help but feel it was a bit of a post-explosion zone. It even made it hard to appreciate the great moments of the exhibition. One segment (amidst shattered CRT screens and bits of banal bush) that I did like was Living in a Box (pictured) which was truly enrapturing. In the video projection, bits of body writhed around in what looked like a white bento box. In particular, the hand was creepy visually and aurally (the nails clicked on the sides of it's compartment), and even the gestures were charged with some cryptic emotion.

There was a great range of work, prints and Japanese calligraphy too, but it didn't seem to completely mesh together. Instead I found myself making trivial links between pieces and media. Upon leaving the exhibition, I caught the last act of Living in a Box, the orderly bento box being bashed to smithereens by a mallet-wielding female. Well, that says something at least.