A Bad Dream About A Bad Movie

by Drew Martin
I had a dream last night that The Cell was being refilmed and I was supposed to do a scene in it hanging from flesh hooks. It was a dreadful thought and throughout the dream I was like, "I am not going to do this." Fortunately, I woke up before anything weird happened. The Cell was a film from 2000 with Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn about a serial killer and having to link into his twisted mind in order to locate his final victim. It is not a good film but the director Tarsem Singh arrived at it from the world of music videos so it is visually loaded, but nothing original. The Cell borrowed heavily from the work of Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney. The scenes of the killer suspended from flesh hooks came out of the 1990's wave of body piercings that brought greater attention to artists such as Stelarc (Stelios Arcadiou) from Australia, who had been suspending his body with flesh hooks since the seventies. That era of performance art was shared with artists such as Chris Burden who did Shoot in 1971, where a friend shot him in the arm with a rifle. There was also his Trans-fixed in 1974, in which Burden was crucified on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle, with his hands nailed into the roof. Stelarc used flesh hooks to discover his psychological and physical limitations. He has concluded that we are "biologically inadequate" and need to be overhauled with cyborg parts. On his role of the artist he offered,

“I've always been uneasy about the artist as simply a craftsperson who just simply makes or produces cultural artifacts that are considered beautiful or sensitive or whatever. What's more intriguing is the artist who works with ideas, who uses (his or her) art as a means of exploring the personal and the public and who tries to get a sense of what it means to exist in the world. And I'm much happier if the artist is seen as a poet or a philosopher than as a craftsperson."

Edition Over Original

by Drew Martin
Galleries are just empty rooms that rotate art with the hopes of luring potential buyers. They are not lofty-minded museums or good-willed educational facilities; it is all about the business of art and the transaction. Would it not be more practical to have a gallery in a bank where there is a steady flow of people and cash? This is the smarts (but not the blatant intention) behind Art-flow's upcoming group show "Edition Over Original" at BankAsiana in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The city is directly on the other side of the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, high up in the Palisades. Fort Lee is best known for "Koreatown" the largest and fastest growing Korean population outside of Korea, which has been a very positive influence on the area. BankAsiana has been showing art in its public space for the past three years. I really like that the bank does this because it means that every month the employees and visiting clients are treated to an entirely new artistic experience. Art-flow is an arts organization that promotes artists and finds venues for their work. I am in this show, along with seven Korean artists am I am really excited about it. So far, it has been well organized and I especially like the theme, which challenges the participating artists to consider the relationship of editions to their originals. While most of the other artists will show reproductions, I have prepared seven original drawings made between 1995 and 2012 and will juxtapose them with interpretations that include a clay statue, stone carving, offset printer plate, book, online article, photograph and even a bottle of gin with one of the drawings worked into the label.

Edition Over Original

September 1-28, 2012
BankAsiana Public Space
172 Main Street, Fort Lee, New Jersey
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17th, 5 - 7pm

Bed Written

by Drew Martin
After a long run this morning, I ate a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, took a shower and fell into a deep sleep for a couple hours. When I awoke, I could not move. I was so heavy. It felt like my veins were filled with lead and that gravity had me pinned to the bed. So I thought about what I would look like from the ceiling and then I remembered an installation I did in college. The sculpture department had an abandoned house off campus for projects. I had a large room and a closet. For the main room, I cut out a slightly smaller footprint of the dry grass land outside the window and brought it into the space; like a carpet with a view of its source - not very interesting. The closet piece, however, is something that worked really well. I had a girlfriend from a rare and fleeting relationship take a picture of me lying naked in some kind of fetal position on a black roof below her window. I took that image (slide film) and projected it from the ceiling of the closet, down on a pile of sifting sugar in the small dark space. The projection of me was quite tiny, probably only six inches tall. It was interesting because the projected body changed shape with the way the sugar amassed, and the viewers were also moving the sugar around to contort the shape and were cupping mini-me in their hands.

Forgiving Dr. Mengele: Levels of Understanding

by Drew Martin
After visiting both of the Auschwitz death camps last week, I thought I would need some time to digest the experience. One of the guys in my running group told me this morning during a long run that his father survived Auschwitz and that his grandfather was killed there. When I was in Krakow, I helped a young couple from Mexico, both medical students, make their way back to Prague. One of them had bought a book at Auschwitz about a survivor of the twisted experiments by Dr. Mengele. So, this afternoon I found myself watching the documentary, Forgiving Dr. Mengele, which is about how one of the twins he experimented on has coped with what she experienced. The film is centered around Eva Mozes Kor who is from Transylvania and was sent to Auschwitz with her whole family when she was nine years old. As she explained, as soon as the people were unloaded from the trains in Birkenau, the Nazis searched the crowds for twins. Dr. Mengele set up experiments at Auschwitz on twins because of their genetic similarities. Eva described the experiments and how one injection made her so sick that she overheard Mengele say she had two weeks to live. Not only did Eva fight to survive to prove him wrong but she also knew that had she died, they would have immediately killed her sister, Miriam, in order to do a comparative autopsy. The Russian army liberated the camp ten months into her stay. In the top picture here the two girls leaving the camp in the front of the line are Eva and Miriam. All the other members of their family were killed. The twin sisters ended up in Israel and then Eva moved to the United States. Miriam's injections had left her with stunted kidneys and died later in life due to this, even after she received a kidney from Eva. Of course the film is about all of this, but its central theme is about forgiving. Eva speaks about how forgiving makes you a stronger person and is the only real power you have as a victim, and the only way to heal yourself. Eva is challenged by the other surviving Mengele twins and finds herself exploring what forgiveness is really about when the tables are turned and she is asked to listen to the victim stories of Palestinians. Eva's young adult daughter describes her as unhesitant and that  having Holocaust survivors as parents is about levels of understanding. Eva raised her family in Terre Haute, Indiana. She made a Holocaust museum in that town, which was burned down as a hate crime. It has since been rebuilt. A friend describes her habits: saving every scrap of food, and sleeping on her purse. Eva shows off what she calls "survivor ingenuity": they did not have money to buy an electric grill to make grilled cheese sandwiches for her children who wanted to have them like their all-American neighbors so she prepared them by ironing cheese sandwiches between layers of tinfoil.

Art Bunker: "The Ugliest Building in Krakow"

by Drew Martin
Krakow is a gorgeous old city in southern Poland. It has the second largest medieval square in Europe and a castle that the Tibetan monks marked as one of the most spiritual sites on Earth. Its museum collections include priceless gems such as Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine and the astronomical instruments of the local-boy-made-good, Nicolaus Copernicus. Even a nearby salt mine boasts fine art: one of the more ornate chambers was transformed into an underground ballroom with salt crystal chandeliers and illuminated salt statues. Modern art fits like a square peg in this traditional region where the people not only take great pride in their past but depend on it for a tourist-based economy. To make things worse for the avant garde, the museum that brought contemporary art to Krakow during the Soviet era demolished a beloved art noveau cafe in order to claim its lot on the edge of the old town. The raw concrete building immediately earned the reputation as "the ugliest building in Krakow." The exterior is tagged with the name, The Exhibition Pavilion, but has now embraced its derogatory nickname, the Art Bunker. I visited it last week and liked it a lot. For one thing, the thriving Krakow tourist industry does not know what to do with it. In a city of overpriced carriage rides, locals who pose as statues of knights, and flocks of tourists that gather like pigeons in the old town square to hear the Hejnal play his trumpet from the church tower every hour, the Art Bunker is a refreshing oasis from all the gothic- and renaissance-glory. The entrance fee is less than four dollars and is half that for artists with an example of work. The museum's giftshop/bookstore looks like a messy flat of the friendly and helpful biker-hipsters that work there. I also really liked the exhibits I saw there: Nicolas Grospierre - The City Which Does Not Exist and Laura Pawela - The Sky Won’t Fall in, even if You Walk Backwards.
 

Grave Masses at Auschwitz

by Drew Martin
I went to the southern Polish town Oświęcim last week, more commonly referred to as Auschwitz. The original Polish name actually means enlightenment. The German approximation has no meaning but references three places: a quaint town with a beautiful historic center, and the two Nazi-run death camps; Auschwitz I and II. Auschwitz I is across a river from the town and not so close from the center. It was originally built for Polish political dissidents and Russian prisoners of war. It is an organized complex of sturdy brick buildings, a gas chamber and a crematorium surrounded by not-so-high guard towers and barb-wire fences that were once electrified. Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, is a huge place and even farther from the town. The are many brick buildings left standing but the original wood barracks have disintegrated. A few were recreated to show what the structures would have looked like. What remains of this area are endless rows of the brick fireplaces and chimneys that would have (poorly) heated the barracks. It was hard to make the connection at the site to all the stories, documentaries and movies I have seen about the Holocaust. I was there on a warm summer day with a strong, refreshing breeze. The brick buildings were cool inside. Most of their interiors were converted into museum spaces with bare interiors and a lot of oversized photographs. The tours are given by whispering guides to flocks of visitors who listen via amplified headsets. Sometimes two or three groups merge, but the dedicated channel per group makes sense of their respective tour guides. The impression of both camps are quite different. Central to Birkenau is the train track that leads into the site and the ground platform where the deportees were deboarded. The shock is that there is nothing really left. Most of the structures are gone so you have to conceptualize the events that took place. The shock of Auschwitz I is the display of piles of hair, shoes, pots, prosthetic legs, glasses and suitcases from the people who were sent to the camp. The displays are overwhelming, especially the room flanked with mounds of hair, but all of the items are behind glass so you do not smell the hair or leather. The hair is so old and matted that it does not read as human hair any more. If you do not know the history of the camp, the displays have a purely sculptural presence, like you might find in the installations of artists such as Ann Hamilton or Tara Donovan. There is nothing saddening about a pile of old spectacles but as a proof of genocide that same mass is horrific.

Tereza Damcová and the Magical World of Children's Spirits

by Drew Martin

The most interesting artists are the ones who are embedded in their art and make you think not only about what they do but (more importantly) why they do it. After a year of brief correspondences with the Czech artist Tereza Damcová we finally met at the opening of Rituals and Sacred Spaces. At the show Tereza did a doll dance in front of a small crowd and was joined last minute by Peter Boyce Le Couteur who improvised and sang a melody with Tereza. The front row of enthralled children perhaps made the event read a little bit like children's theater but Tereza's work is not so simple. She is working on a Ph.D. at the Faculty of Landscape Design in Brno, with the topic of the magic garden. In 2008 she started to work on children’s playground artifacts, which were placed in a park in the historic center of Plzeň. She writes on her website:

The motive of this work is fairytale metamorphosis of a little doll, Bubačka, who in children´s eyes springs to life and transforms into flowers, animals, fairytale creatures, people and so on...I am interested in drawing, painting, performing, creating artifacts, objects and audiovisual installations. My inspiration is metamorphosis of dreaming into reality, the magical world of children´s spirits, jumping into a freezing-cold swimming pool, running around in the landscape of airports covered in snow. I am interested in fairytales, legends and authors who work with dreams.

Tereza's dolls are hand-made, with stuffed bodies, sewn costumes and ceramic heads. They all have names and are characters in a never-ending story she spins. Tereza and her friend gave me a ride to Brno after the opening. The ride lasted for several hours and was one of those here-and-now magical moments. Her friend drove her white Škoda along the winding roads of southern Czech into the night, with a full moon in front of us. I sat in the back with a laundry basket full of her dolls by my side. She spoke about a city where we had both lived, in Sudetenland. People familiar with the place typically speak of the city's factories as an eye sore but Tereza affectionately referred to them as giant sleeping dinosaurs. Her favorite doll is one that "loves everyone and everything, and everyone and everything loves him." On the back of one of the tiny jackets were a couple words I did not recognize. I asked her what they meant and she replied, "I do not know either, they are in his language, which I do not understand."

Rituals and Sacred Spaces of Bohemia

by Drew Martin
Last week I set up for and attended the opening of Rituals and Sacred Spaces at Galerie Califia in southern Bohemia. The show was inspired by sacred clay figures from India that were collected by a Czech doctor, Jan Petránek. A video by the art group Rafani loops in the main gallery. Petránek has an adjoining room with an installation of terracotta figures that are viewable through a peep hole in the side of a wooden crate. There is also a two-meter-wide print of a photograph he took of Tubrad hill in India. Veronika Richterová  installed a pagoda made of colorful recycled plastic bottles, which also looks a lot like a bell and sounds like a clunky wind chime when a breeze enters her space. Another room has a video by Alejandro de Tuddo and a small installation of photographs and a glowing sink by Natalia Vazquez. She also wrote phrases in Spanish and English on walls with the tips of burned wood found in a local campfire. I have a room as well where I hung a large silk print of a photograph I took of my neighbor's hands. Central to the space is a shrine I made to the town, using found objects that I gathered there for two days. A few other little shrine-like pieces fill the space and I made line drawings along one wall with a blue chalk line reel, which my grandfather had owned. Another key part of my room is a multi-paneled series of drawings and text I made during my three-day "pilgrimage" from Newark to Horažd’ovice. The show opened with a nice crowd and included a performance by Tereza Damcová with an improvised collaboration by Peter Boyce Le Couteur.

Art Pilgrimage: Rituals and Sacred Spaces in the Czech Republic

by Drew Martin

If art serves as a kind of an alternative religion, then the journey to a museum, biennale, or any other art event is a kind of pilgrimage. At least, this is how I am approaching the show Rituals & Sacred Spaces that I am in, which opens August 1st at Galerie Califia, Horažd’ovice, Czech Republic. In addition to making shrine-like sculptures at the gallery, I will create a series of drawings while I am traveling, documenting my way from New Jersey to Germany and finally, the Czech Republic. The invitation explains:

The exhibition Rituals & Sacred Spaces is inspired by a collection of sacred, votive clay figures and terracotta collected from several places in Western India, from the Gujarat state, near the south Rajasthan border. In their raw simplicity, there is a purpose to their existence. They are used for a centuries-old Hindu ritual ceremony, and essentially sacred from their inception.The contemporary artists participating in this show explore religious ritual or attempt to create their own sacred space in the gallery and its nearby vicinity.

The show is curated by Tony Ozuna, who grew up in Los Angeles but has been living in the Czech Republic for more than twenty years. The other artists include Veronika Richterová and Jan Petránek from the Czech Republic, Alejandro Gomer de Tuddo from Mexico, and Natalia Vasquez from Colombia. There will also be work by the Czech art group Rafani and a special opening performance by Tereza Damcová.

Pictured here is a photograph I took of my neighbor's hands. The image is on the invitations for the show and will hang in the gallery as a large silk print.

The Woman with the 5 Elephants

by Drew Martin
I just finished watching The Woman with the 5 Elephants, which is about Svetlana Geier, a Ukrainian who translated Fyodor Dostoevsky's five major novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov into German. Geier died in 2010 at the age of 87. The film is made when she was 85. She speaks about what is lost in translation when a word does not have a fitting partner, like the German gnade (grace), which she says sounds like a stuffed mattress. She explains that German and Russian are incompatible simply because you cannot say in Russian..."I have... (something)." In German, as in English, the object depends on the subject but in Russian it is the other way around. In this, Geier says you not only lose your nominative, but also your autonomy and your freedom.

Geier returns to Ukraine during the film with one of her granddaughters and gives a talk to young translators. She says translating is not like a caterpillar inching along, but that the meaning must emerge from the whole thought. Geier relayed this to a journalist in the beginning of her career and said you need to keep your "nose in the air," instead of tracking the sentence from left to right. To her dismay and amusement, that comment was published as her being "stuck up."

Stepping back and comprehending what is before you, is not only Geier's approach to her profession but also to how she views her environment and life. Geier is full of poetic comments. While pressing cloths, she talks about the relationship of text and textile and the need to iron out both when they lose their original form. She compares fresh linen on the bed to fresh snow - virgin territory.

Geier was deeply human. At the age of 15 she cared for her father when he was dying from the harm of the abuse he received as a political prisoner under Stalin. She referred to this time as the dress rehearsal to the main performance; taking care of her son who was debilitated from a shop accident. At the Ukraine border she is in awe that the conductor waited for her and her granddaughter to finish their conversation before asking them for their tickets and makes a comment about having to search for politeness on this planet. Geier concludes that language can remedy the hardships of life and of the profound effect good literature has on one's soul.

Shell-shocked: Michelle Jenneke Goes Viral

by Drew Martin
The video that went viral of Michelle “Shelly” Jenneke warming up and winning her heat for the 100 meter hurdles at the 2012 World Junior Championships in Barcelona this July, brought on 14 million views (to date), Australian pride, marriage proposals and jealousy rants. Jenneke prepared for her race by dancing in place, shaking off her nerves and getting psyched up. From the stands she would have appeared as a far-off, fidgeting speck but the zoom-lens close-up and the slow-motion replay matched with a number of dance tracks stole the fleeting moment and turned it into a never-ending lap(top) dance for YouTube viewers. The brilliant filmmaker Stanley Kubrick loved commercials for their ability to tell an entire story in a minute. I think he would be fascinated by the short Jenneke video because of the set-up. You cannot take your eyes off her and then she goes on to win the race by a full stride, so you feel rewarded because you are rooting for her even though you know nothing about her. The fastest man on Earth, Usain Bolt glamorizes the thrill of speed but running any distance of a mile or more conjures up pain and agony, and men and women who have run themselves down to their bones. Malcolm Gladwell captures this so well in this week’s The New Yorker article on running, Slackers: Alberto Salazar and the art of exhaustion…especially in the quote from Salazar…”I crossed the line and did not so much collapse as disintegrate.” Jenneke adds something to this sport that has been reserved for posturing sprinters and disciplined long distance runners, pure joy. Her bouncy gyrations shatter a repressed view of a sport that is naturally sexy. Jenneke pulls off the thin veil of times, bib numbers, lanes and corporate sponsors. Alenka Bikar from Ljubljana is no stranger to this. “The Pride of Slovenia” is known better for her derriere than her 200 meter performances. But why is this surprising? As Christopher McDougall points out in his best-seller, Born to Run, humans have large buttock muscles because of our natural running talent.

Spiral Jetty IPA

by Drew Martin

Last night I bought a pint of beer solely because of its name, Spiral Jetty. On the label is the following text: In 1970 American sculptor Robert Smithson broke artistic barriers and created a 1,500-foot long rock coil jutting into the Great Salt Lake. Smithson never set limits for himself or his art - so why should you?

The first time I drank beer was out of an aluminum can, on the tracks. It tasted awful. Since then American beer has taken off, and dare I write it - has become something of an art form. There are many domestic beers that are as good or even better than the European beers they were trying to match. I never imagined seeing a beer that would pull a page (742) out of my college tome History of Art by H. W. Janson. Smithson (1938-1973) intended for his Spiral Jetty to be submerged and erode. Nature reclaiming the work was integral to his design but he probably never envisioned such an embrace of his project. Although Smithson might object to the commercialization of it, he would probably be won over by its flavor. Spiral Jetty IPA is a great tasting beer.

Pictured here is my bottle in front of a model of Spiral Jetty, which I made to teach a class on sculpture.

Local Anaesthetics: The English Surgeon and The Flying Scotsman

by Drew Martin
I watched an interesting film yesterday called The English Surgeon. The first impression was "Oh, this is a real documentary about real issues. It is not trying to entertain, distract or fool me." The English Surgeon is about a leading British neurosurgeon, Dr. Henry Marsh, who leaves the comfort of his hospital and home to help Igor Petrovich perform brain surgeries against all odds in Ukraine. The premise is moving but sometimes the film reads like a Monty Python skit or a mockumentary such as Spinal Tap or Borat. Ukrainians must hate this film. All the landscapes are muddy. All the architecture is bleak. All the people seem to be peasants with brain tumors who cannot even form a proper queue. Bespectacled Marsh is a quixotic character, who shouts 'bloody hell' at his computer, salvages medical equipment from his London hospital and builds his own shipping crates in his garden. Adding to the potential farce is a young patient who is epileptic due to a large brain tumor. He is a bit of a town fool, who all-to-willingly goes under the knife. The Ukraine hospital is ill-equipped and does not have all the anaesthetics Marsh would typically use so he recommends to the young man to have the whole procedure under a local anaesthetic since the brain has no feeling. This means that while the young man is having his skull cut open and the tumor sucked out, he is also alert and babbles. After listening to the drilling and sawing of his cranium, he remarks that he understands why boxers can fight so long.

I also recently saw a film called The Flying Scotsman about Graeme Obree, a young bipolar and suicidal Scottish cyclist. Obree builds his own bike, using parts from his wife's washing machine, in order to break the world hour record, which is one of the most grueling sporting events. Obree's life is a great story but this was not a particularly good film. I am, however, drawn to tales of resourceful people who can tinker with and transform things into elevated objects. This ingenuity is taken to another level in The English Surgeon. The Marsh-Petrovich duo shop around second world markets to look at power drills for operations. They sit in a small apartment kitchen, modifying discarded penetrators (drill bits for bone). Petrovich saws off the sheathing of a penetrator on the edge of his kitchen table with a hack saw just before eating dinner. One wonders if this team could even jump start a car together but soon enough we see them in scrubs performing a successful operation on the young man, who is thereafter cured of his epilepsy.

Marsh was discouraged by others to help and Petrovich even received death threats for trying to buck the system. Petrovich questions what to do with one's life that will be most beneficial to others. While he and Marsh challenge the left-over Soviet system, they also know there are limits. In many instances we see them simply turn away patients, telling them it is too late to do anything and that they have inoperable tumors. In these moments we see the souls of a good people. The patients do not counter with anger and threats of lawsuits. Instead, they apologize for wasting the doctors' time and thank them. In one instance they tell a beautiful 20-something woman to return with her mother who is in Moscow. The young lady thinks she has something like Lyme disease, but Marsh explains to Petrovich that she has an inoperable tumor, will likely go blind in the next year and probably will not live for another five years. Petrovich says he does not know how to tell her this because she is so carefree and giggly, Marsh offers that he always has someone else with the patient when breaking such news. Marsh says they are constantly playing Russian roulette with two loaded guns to the patient's head. One gun is their illness, the other, the possibility that something will go horribly wrong. Contrasting the success of the epileptic's operation is a botch job with a young girl. Marsh operated on her in London but it was failure. He further damaged her brain and she lived out her remaining two years in misery. Marsh keeps in touch with the family. The film even takes us into the home of the mother where he is greeted lovingly by her relatives and then he visits her grave, marked with an enormous headstone with a bust of the young girl.

Francesca Woodman

by Drew Martin
I just watched an excellent documentary on Netflix about Francesca Woodman. It is called The Woodmans and is stitched together with very sobering interviews with her parents, brother and friends. Her parents, George and Betty Woodman, and brother Charlie are all artists and had quite an aesthetic life together in artsy homes in Boulder, Colorado, New York City, and Florence, Italy.

Francesca was a photographer who focused on black and white nude pictures, mainly of herself and other young female models. In 1981, at the age of 22, she committed suicide by jumping off a building in lower Manhattan. Her father said she was having a bad day; she found out she was not going to get an National Endowment for the Arts grant and her bicycle was stolen. Her parents question how they raised her, immersed in their own projects, fulfilling roles as professional artists, which Francesca never became. Interest in her work bloomed after her death. Her posthumous fame is met with mixed emotions by those who survived her.

The Woodmans is a well made film, punctuated with Francesca's beautiful photographs, which feel very fresh and relevant today. Click here to see a trailer of the film.