It’s about time. It’s the right time, and in business, timing is everything. With a newly expanded gallery space and a new business plan designed with the artist and management mentor Joe Scanlan, castillo/corrales is positioned to take advantage of the current economic climate. And it feels nice.
An old friend and shadow consultant of castillo/corrales since its creation, Joe Scanlan is making the trip to Paris to present a new exhibition, and a book, both entitled Red Flags. The book contains four essays on economics that the artist has refracted from original texts by Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman and Edward Said. The four essays of Red Flags— which reinterpret and rephrase developments about absentee ownership, stagnating markets, colonialism and government subsidies– come at the right time. But these economic arguments have been repositioned in light of Scanlan’s preoccupation with artists’ neighborhoods, Chelsea galleries, tae kwon do lessons, and Jack Kerouac and will be further extended in the form of a multi-part installation. Displayed on a series of supports—a shelf, a pedestal, and a salesman’s suitcase—the book insinuates itself not just as a commentary on, but in fact as an object of, the business of sales.
Slim, elegant, and beautifully designed by Francesca Grassi, Red Flags is the inaugural publication of Paraguay Press, a new development in the activities and the program of castillo/corrales in the form of a publishing department run in association with artist Guillaume Leblon.
ATELIER DE CREATION RADIOPHONIQUE / FRANCE CULTURE Un essai radiophonique de Frank Smith
Réalisation Marie-Laure Ciboulet
Avec les voix d’Olivier Steiner et Laura Revelli Beaumont
et les intrusions d’Emmanuelle Riva et de Laurie Anderson
A travers l’agglomération en expansion continue et en recomposition infinie que constitue la ville de Los Angeles, au cœur de cette galaxie urbaine d’une vitalité inépuisable, ville-monde posée sur une faille géologique d’où peut surgir la destruction, encerclée par la mer et le désert, on circule par la parole et en voiture. Des voix, des sons et des ritournelles surgissent.
Le colporteur comme guide dans cette traversée continue est comme un détective mais en-deçà encore du privé, à la façon dont il est vivant dans le roman noir américain. Il ne sait pas qu’il est privé, qu’il enquête, cette enquête se fait malgré lui, elle le porte aux quatre coins de la ville, le mêle, le trimballe dans le trafic. Il y a là une tentative de le cerner à chaque carrefour où il passe, dans les méandres du maelström autoroutier, chaque fois qu’il trace et traque le langage. Bien sûr, « notre héros », il n’enquête que sur lui-même, contre lui-même, et le lieu d’investigation s’étend, au final, outre la Californie : par-delà le monde entier.
Le texte dont est issue cette pièce sonore est publié au éditionsLe Bleu du ciel(février 2009).
“Cent pages, presque autant de textes brefs et denses, comme des plaques un peu liquides, chacune liée à un point précis de la ville. Mais le narrateur (parce qu’un récit s’ébauche, se centre autour de la notion de colporteur) est continuellement en mouvement dans la ville, un trajet comme cette ville qui n’a pas de centre, une ville qui ne se reconnaît plus d’un nom à l’autre nom, et qui exige l’habitat provisoire de la voiture comme seul trait commun.
De quelle façon aborder la complexité de Los Angeles, avec quels mouvements, quels arrêts, quel travail sur l’image, quelle saisie des silhouettes, visages, noms, enseignes, et quelles permanences au contraire ?
Et bien sûr, dans cette mise à l’épreuve, c’est la prose elle-même qu’on interroge.” François Bon
EUREKA Un film de Frank Smith
Avec Victoria Ambrosini, Olivier Steiner, Aurore Clément, Tcheky Karyo & Michael Lonsdale
Image & montage Arnold Pasquier
Musique Martin Davorin Jagodic
Février 2009, 35’, DVCam, Stéréo
A Eureka, une ville banale de Californie, tu les vois. Partout. Deux silhouettes fragiles et prêtes, tendues. Dans la foule de la ville, les Américains, ils sont là.
Tu les vois.
Tu les entends aussi ?
The momentary place where youth stands is both a constant and a variable – with a lifeforce of its own. While unsure of their mark, they know that it is a sure thing that is to occur. Featuring: Butt Johnson, Libby Pratt, and Sam Wilson.
—
Gallery Space presents Slam Dunk
Curated by Slow and Steady Wins the Race.
Show running from May 9 to June 11, 2009.
Opening reception Saturday May 9th from 7-10p
With a special live performance by NO AGE
+ DJ Jesspeleta.
Christian Marclay (born 1955 in California, raised in Geneva) is an Americanvisual artist and composer based in New York. Marclay’s work explores connections between sound, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramaphone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collage, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the “unwitting inventor of turntablism.” His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the mid-1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop‘s use of the instrument.
“For me the record is this strange object that has completely transformed the way we think about sound,” Marclay says. “First of all it turned sound into something material that you can hold in your hand, and it turned it into a commodity you can make money with, which pretty much changes everything.”
Hair, 1992, Collage with record.
Where hip-hop artists revolutionized what was possible as a Dj Christian Marclay upped the ante with making the turntable into a legitimiate instrument itself. Since the late ’70’s, in performances, recordings, installations and exhibtions at clubs, concert halls, galleries and museums around the world, Marclay has taken the stereo components that we take for granted and made them into expressive tools. Creating a dizzying array of sound collages with dozens of records at a time, with no steady, reassuring beat to go along with it, he makes and remakes the sounds from all kinds of sources something much different from their original intention. If there’s a way to scratch, break, bend, warp or reconstruct a record, Marclay knows how to do it. One important point here- it’s not just the WAY that he uses records and turntables that is astonishing because his sound sculputures themsevles are provactive, funny, challenging and inventive.
People like Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and Laurie Anderson, but more directly from Punk Rock. There were a lot of bands, everybody started a band. In New York, a lot of this music experimentation, like No Wave music and Punk Rock, was taking place in clubs and had a strong influence on the art world. Art people would be directly connected to the music, and a lot of bands came out of art schools. At the time there was a lot happening in clubs, and it was more interesting to me than what was happening in the galleries. Right now that symbiosis between music and art doesn’t exist anymore; throughout the 1980s the galleries became powerful and things got very commercial, people were in the art business to make money, and that kind of killed live art. People gave up performances and went back to the studios. I feel now there’s a possibility of a return to more ephemeral activities. Maybe it’s in times of economic crisis, like the one we’re experiencing right now, that people find more innovative and daring ways to make art. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the experimentation was really happening in clubs like the Pyramid or 8BC, where tons of things were taking place every night. At the time I was not showing in galleries, I was only performing.
Excerpt from video installation Video Quartet, 2002.
In 2001 Marclay spent a whole year in front of the screen, producing his most celebrated work to date, Video Quartet. This staggering montage of musical scenes from Hollywood films was the centre of his solo show at the Barbican in 2005, and is now in Tate Modern’s permanent collection. Making it was painstaking. Marclay stitched together 700 clips, including one of Harpo Marx playing the harp and another featuring Holly Hunter in The Piano. The result was an awe-inspiring cinematic installation across four screens.
Excerpt from video installation Crossfire, 2007.
In Crossfire Marclay is concerned with the experience of sound in a visual context. The piece is comprised of four video screens that are arranged so that they form walls to enclose the viewer in the space. Using a montage of clips taken from film scenes where we see, details of cowboys, soldiers, criminals, and police engaging in gun conflict. We witness a variety of scenes, from the disclosure of the weapons, the loading of guns, the aim, the crossfire, the intervening tension and the aftermath. Selected scenes are repeated on alternating screens to create a dynamic movement in the sequence. Although the viewer is under a continuous assault, Marclay’s precise arrangement of sound and image allows the gunfire to become a kind of percussion instrument, and Crossfire coaxes a strange music from the Westerns, gangster flicks and war movies that the artist has used as raw material. Some scenes from different sources are paired on opposite screens giving the effect of integrated conflict, the viewer stuck in no man’s land.
Record Without a Cover, 1985 Vinyl record.
Excerpt from a conversation between Kim Gordon & Christian Marclay (2005).
Gordon: To me, your most interesting work is the most simple, like Record Without a Cover (1985). That’s so brilliant and it’s such a simple gesture, yet it works on so many different levels. You’ve done lots of pieces like that. Often, an artist will have only one idea and base a whole career on it. You’re one of the few I know who can go between the music world and the visual art world and be equally respected. There aren’t really many others, possibly Michael Snow. There’s a certain tradition, but it seems to be much more visually oriented. A true crossover is very rare.
Marclay: I don’t like repeating myself. I’m lucky that I have more than one interest. I can make some music when I’m not inspired to make sculpture; I can shift worlds. It’s refreshing. Right now, I’d like to make more music, but in a different way, without necessarily using records. I try to find new methods to challenge myself musically, like Graffiti Composition (1996), or Guitar Drag and Video Quartet (2002). Video allows me to work with sound and image simultaneously. Working with video and doing live performance are two different things; video is more like recording. Performing is great, because it’s all about the moment, and that’s what I like.
Zzzz, 2006, Pigment print on Arches paper.
Whistle, 1989, Collage with staples.
Marclay is an artist who works with the embedded ubiquity of sound. He has located sounds in so many settings that their accumulation has begun to signal a new sense of how wide-ranging the state of sound might be. An important part of this effort has been aided by his willingness to pursue sound where it is ostensibly silent, harbored in the private audition of thought or registered in normally mute materials and representations.
They Only Come Out at Night, 1991 (from the series “Body Mix”).
Marclay has gone beyond the limits of the modernist battery of sounds to include everything we can and cannot hear, and will never hear: all the symbolic and imagined sounds with their poetic, corporeal, and political resonances on display. He includes the sounds he has tracked to their existence in bodies, objetcs, images, scenes, texts, inscriptions, and in the mix of their complex relationship, where they can be heard as at least a whimper of an echo, as background radiation, as misfired memory. He releases sonds from their obligations as vibrating air, puts them in new lodgings, and relocates them trough performance. The diligence with which he has investigated so many sites has had a cumulative effect. The work progressively generates an unfolding parallel of the embedded and ubiquitous nature of sound in the world. The way Marclay operates as a general discoverer of sounds wherever they might occur and however they might operate makes us all better listeners as a result. What makes Marclay’s work thrive is how the context within which it can be understood has itself grown. Marclay is working the groove, cultivating the surround sound.
6—9pm at Brachfeld Gallery
78 rue des Archives, Paris 3
Show running from May 7 to 17, 2009
Opening hours Tuesday—Sunday, 2—7pm
L’ Ancienne église de Colombes, 2008, oil on canvas, 187 x 250 cm
Michel Perot (born 1981, Paris) lives and works in Paris. A 2008 graduate of the L’École
Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Perot received the “Félicitations du jury,”
and will be included in the forthcoming exhibition of 2008 “Félicités” at Beaux-Arts.
Artist’s statement
“The paintings presented here are void of the human figure as the drama is situated in the
landscape itself, shaped by traces of human occupation. These subjects, often disgraced,
or already condemned, need, for me, to be painted in their grotesque state. The large
format canvases become a means, by rendering the neglible significant, of allowing the
antiquated form of landscape painting a contemporary relevance.
Painting maintains the same impact for a fragmentary subject as photography. It’s by the
adopted process that photography, always present in the smallest details of the work,
continues to recall something seen. As underlined mainly by their toponymic titles, each
work is, if not completely naturalist, at least realistic, and preserves the quality of
photography as an objective document.
However, these landscapes are also fantasized and mnemonic. The lighting is not natural,
and the colors are sometimes entirely recomposed, in isolated areas or sometimes across
the whole painting. A certain freedom, expanded from photography, enables me to
develop an autonomous pictorial logic, one that arises from memory, as well as the
emotional resonance of melancholy.”
—Michel Perot
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