[ Artist ] Jens Fänge

Jens Fange http://www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com/artists/jens-f%C3%A4nge

PAUL THEK YOU HAVE A GOOD LAST NAME

Paul Thek was exhibited in the Modern institue during the GI (Glasgow International) in 2012.  The exhibition entitled "If you don't like this book you don't like me." An exhibition shows the artist's private journals and pictures of his studio. As an artist in 60s, it seems that inevitably he carries a burden  with his uncombed hair and week but determined voice which you can hear in his interview video at the 2nd floor.

I decided to talk about his hair and AIDS rather than his artwork since the exhibition is mainly based on his private journals and drawings.  He was famous for his hyper realistic sculpture of himself dead, after one exhibit in Germany, the sculpture was lost or destroyed by anonymous or simply just disappeared at the end of shipping.  It has arrived where it suppose to be, but Paul never came to pick it up.  Some people said that it is because he doesn't want it to be exhibit ever again, some said that it is also because he was disappointed about the work didn't sell.

THe exhibition in Modern institue was mainly focus on Paul Thek's personal journal.  These private journals downstairs takes me to different places that Paul has ever visited, and the things that he saw and drew and everything that he decided to take notes for.  He is not a very good drawer I would say.  It is nothing precise about his drawing, there are several pages that he simply just marked lines in contrast with the ink line belongs to the notebook itself.  These private journal marked the Paul's life such as his breakfasts list or some questions has yet been made.

He seems to be a mediator constantly shifting between different values, sexs, dimensions or even more. He creates environmental art and installation, trying to build up dialogues between art and life, when art was getting more a mannerism in the US, he was trying to bring it to a state where art can meet with life, and being experienced more domestically.  He himself is a bisexual, sexual orientation is not for a single gender but depends on who you feel right with, he looks as if he pays a lot of attention to his body, you can not see much extra fat on his arms, and he is really fit, wearing a tight tank top. But he is definitely thinner than any men who does weight training would like to be.  His voice is solid and certain, but his looks give you a feeling that he might faint in any second, or scream out loud on nothing.

His famous piece is the life scale of himself, a dead body.  He creates and give birth to his death.  Experiencing the last journey by creating a possible representation of himself and then choose to lost it in a box.  A man who constantly in dialogue with things, with nature, with politics, and with rules.

I have always hated how there is a subject in academic institution called communication, or the sales man in Rocky horror picture show that shakes your hands with over performing friendly attitude.
Even if I saw and listen to Paul Thek's journals and interviews,  I would never being able to fully understand his thoughts or what he been through metaphysically.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't change the fact that we basically living in a total different time and space.

Should we abandon these history because they pull us back when we were being forced by time to move forward? Can anybody give me any answer?

All photos were copied from The Modern Institute.

Writing Process5: Allan Ginsberg

I have to say a lot of my writing is deeply inspired by the current situation and people around me.

I can still recall the feeling of seeing the London Riot, student protest when I was in Berlin.  Also deeply moved by the Occupy movements, by the people's voices.

They are true poets, they write words with their heart, and that is the other reason why I am so drawn to the Beat generation.

Although I still can't fully understand Naked lunch and all its mise en scene in the novel, but Allen Ginsberg's HOWL is definitely the reason why I related to these writers so much. 

Seeing my generation express how they feel alienated from the society, and seeing all the people (middle aged) or who has a position in the society that claim they have no control over the insane situation when they choose to shut up. 

I tried to imitate Ginsberg's rhyme and thoughts and put them into my writing.  Also my idea not only came from the occupy movement, also from the reading of Angela Mcrobbie on the young labour, and infinite internships, David Gaeber's sadness of immaterial labour.
After reading of Adorno's dialectical relationship between art and economy, saying that the financial income is actually a very important factor which supports Art's autonomy.  Well, well, I am not too sure about that.

Although I do feel stupid of imitating his writing, but apparently that is how writers practices writing.
You are either born with the gift, or you try hard and harder and more harder to become a writer.
你可能不知道駱以軍重打了幾次張愛玲的小說吧

[Artists] Marjetica Potrč 馬偕蒂卡 坡地胥

Lille: The Power of Pattern, 2009, ink on paper
56 x 76 cm

Burning Man: Tensegrity Structure and Waterboy, 2008, Building materials and energy infrastructure, Dimensions variable, Installation view at art berlin contemporary, Berlin 2008

Visionaries of the 60s Confront the Upheavals of Today I, 2007, Winsor and Newton inks on Fabriano artistico GF/CP, 300g/m2, traditionnal white paper, 56 x 76 cm, framed 63 x 83 cm

photo resources: Gallery Nordenhake 

Artists website: Marjetica Potrc

Writing Process 4: a post modern frankenstein

The Lips of Thomas (1976) Marina Abramovic

After starting to research on Post modernism and post humanism, also the idea of self- cannibalism that I started to get more interest on the idea of that the Doctor Frankenstein, the purpose of finding out the secret of creation of life, or the pursuit of God's power.  Instead, it is becoming actually rather freaky now. 

I started to have this idea that actually now, we are our own Doctor Frankenstein, but the idea we were being implanted by the mass media, self reflexivity, constantly criticising the self, the desire of wanting to be better and better, refusing to accept failure, finding another way out. 

We create our ideal social identity through our interaction such as posts and shares on Facebook so that we can show our friends that our interests and passion which now known as identity construction. 

other social media as such like twitter, creating witty comment and interact with hash words also tweeting constantly in order to catch up with new trends, using dramatic adjectives in order to increase followers. 

in this way we had to transform ourselves into another personality or agree, or pretend to be excited about things that we might not originally care. 

Here are movies and interviews that interests me recently and I found it is related to my research process. 

Also, I started to make these connection to what Judith Butler's argument on the performantivity of female  in the society. 

From Angelina Jolie talks about Self-Harm.

Teens self harm

Film- In my skin (2002) by Marina De Van 

Related reading: 

The French Extreme Wave

Nation as an interpretative context for extreme cinema?

Research Process 4: On Art and Fear/ Moral Panic

Reading Paul Virilio's Art and Fear is just like having a conversation in a park with an old man, who is afraid of technology or an experience like when you trying to teach some old ladies to work Excel (I would say it is a badly designed software though).

I constantly having the feeling that the reason of the whole book is full of warning is because he is just too old and too nostalgic about the world when Hitler or Stalin can easily control or brainwash people with cinema or radio.

Although it seems pretty impossible to manipulate mass's mind as what they did in the past, it doesn't mean that it is impossible to implant or create influential effect on the mass.  Thinking about social networks which is already dominated our life, we don't have to, but we applied for it because other people were using it, the twitter trends, or different portal for blogs, we don't actually need it, and we could simply just say no, such as facebook, but when everybody is using it, the force of connectivity, not only virtually, but when there are a lot of things are happening on these portals, we followed our wills to consent to these things. They didn't force us, but they make us think that we need it.

Talking about the deafness of the contemporary arts in the age of the multimedia, with the tele- age coming, also the digital era, he addresses concerns

"Meta-musical ambient music' what this means is a style music of the spheres without sound, presenting the symptoms of a blinding that would be the exact counterpart to the silence of the lambs... electro-acoustic music will generate new form of visual art. Eletro-optic computer graphics will similarl erase the demarcation line between the different art forms."

He warns that the contemporary art has a crisis of meaning, NONSENSE, just like Camus and Sartre was on about.  However, there are some points that I do agree with Paul Virilio, as the contemporary art is getting hyper violence and hypersexual, the mean of art becoming promoting rather than communicating, later thinking about the media presentation, and the immediacy of art and its ability to be perceived at a glance, to be heard without delay, without the necessitating attention, our reflex was conditioned before we even had time to reflect.

     With the indictment of silence, contemporary art can't quite shake off the accusation of passivity, indeed, of pointlessness       - Paul Virilio


Therefore Paul Virilio in this book challenges the freedom of expression and reclaim the pitiful art and the politic of silence from an art world enchanted by its own extinction because to refuse pity is to accept the continuation of war.

At the end of the essay he said, also stucked me the most is:

What has recently taken place in Austria in the aftermath of the tragedy that has been playing out for ten years in the Balkans proves yet again that POLITICS, like ART, has limits, and that democratic freedom of expression stops at the edge of an abyss, on the brink of the call to murder - Limits blithely crossed by those already going by the name of THE MEDIA OF HATE.    -Paul Virilio 

[Artist] Zhao Renhui

Writing Process 3: Sickness is part of it.

Having eczema on my body for more than 4 months now which I had never gotten before.  I have been trying to eat more healthy also seeing doctors. They said it might be the stress that I am having so I keep having eczema.

Last month I vomited 4 times in two weeks, others I don't remember.  It wasn't because I was drinking heavily or whatever, but I always vomit before I went out to see friends, or after any sort of social gathering.  I guess I started to feel guilty to go out.

Also one of the situation really kills me is it seems I am all on my own.   Nobody ever taught me what to do, and what's not to do.  It seems like that when I accepted by the school, I should automatically equipped with research methods.  BUT I DIDN'T KNOW.

I guess this is part of my master degree symptom, it is such a solitary situation that I am in.
My emotion starts to change radically according to any incidents that happened in my life.
I cannot control my emotion, which I used to be able to. I have difficulties to talk with friends about it, because it would only make them feel bad.  Not to mention my family, because their worries don't really have any practical help.

[Artist] Dorothy Iannone

Dorothy Iannone was born in 1933, Boston, now lives in Berlin.  Her new exhibition in Peres Projects, Berlin titled Sunny Days and Sweetness showing her artworks depicting female and male sexual intercourse.  The way she portrait female sexuality is not repressed or exploited like the teacher in Ghost World would have loved.  The stiffness of her portraits these human figures and the deliberately white space on human subjects, in contrast with the back ground, clothing, accessories, vivid typography, makes me thinking of the old paintings in the cave, or on the wall when people still thinks the cave can just be the natural skin colour for human, or there is no need to put colour onto human skin. 

I am not sure about my attitude towards hedonism representation in painting yet, after all, I do think our generation is not so much hedonistic, at least not in 70s sense.  I think we really need a new vocabulary to represent the state of mind of our generation, although nothing can ever be fully represented - from lot of philosopher's point of view.  so we can only put words such as post-, alte- super-, alter- in front of or after to state the chaotic feeling that we can never make sense of unless we are remote to a certain degree.  

Photo credit: Peres Projects

Resources: http://moussemagazine.it/dorothy-iannone-peres/

Writing Process 2: Monologue.

So here is the thing, that I started to do writing that contains three different time and perspective in the same writing piece that I am about to submit at the mid may.

One of them I have decided to make it as a monologue from the writer.  The content will mainly concern with anything the writer encounters or interested in, and wanting to put in the novel but feel struggled to put in the novel.

The reason that I started to use monologue was because the other day at a dinner party at my friend's in Leith Walk.  We started to read The Vagina Monologue by Eve Ensler.  I was deeply moved by such performative literature, also I started to think about all the stand up comedian that I saw recently, not like I have seen a lot, but it just seems that they are the smartest person in the world.

Monologue as the speech in the play that the actor address his/hers thoughts to either another characters, or the audience.  From researching Monologue, I remembered an event that I partly attended during our FAIR presented by my fellow classmates Joseph and Lia, The Soapbox, simply speaks, soapbox is people who have anger towards the society but there is no one to talk to, they would pick up a soapbox and place it at the corner of a park or some public space and stand up to make a speech of their thoughts out loud which appears in a lot of labour party speech, the content is usually very political related, and these people were sometimes being treated as maniac.

Later I came across performance poetry, Laurie anderson, and then I endding up in the Happening initiated by Allan Kaprow.  The performance piece is in Spring, 1957. The key elements in the performances were planned, but its welcome improvisation and participatory audience,

later came across the Zombie walk, which was seen related to the Happening performance.

video from Laurie Anderson - The Language is Virus.

Writing Process

Today I finally came up with some idea for my art writing piece and I am quite exciting about it.

Thanks to my eternal inspiration resource : FILMS that makes it happened.
Since I started to write also doing research altogether at the same time, I thought it might be also helpful for me to document a little bit of my writing process.


Here are the movie that really strikes me this morning.

Stranger than fiction

This afternoon I bumped into Lewis in the library and the movie clip I was watching happened to have some sexy scene involved. I started to defend that the sex scene wasn't part of my research, and we laughed about it. But later I started to wonder why I feel the necessary to over explaining it. I found it is very interesting so I decided to to create a sort of writer's manifesto alongside of my writing piece.

Writing a fiction on contemporary art is actually very difficult.  It seems no way to rationalised the conversation between artists and those bourgeois.  By watching the clips above, I found out that a way to portrait a personality is actually not really about the way they dress or what they said when they are angry, but appears when they are trying something they were afraid of.

Check it out~