Tag: liminal

“’Vespers Pool’ continues Schneemann’s dissolution of imagistic and technological boundaries. Relying on dreams and signs, the work moves between conscious and unconscious worlds, melding realms that are commonly kept apart. This six-channel video installation fractures distinctions between human and animal, reason and the irrational, even between life and death. (Some of this text is from Eleanor Heartney.)

Vesper was suffering from a vascular disease which thinned veins in his neck so that when he sneezed or moved suddenly there were splashes of blood. Vesper always slept close in to my body. One morning I woke up and saw that his blood had splattered my only good nightgown (coincidentally, it belonged to the brand of cotton clothing, Cornell). I took the splotched nightgown to the sink to wash it out and I was suddenly commanded “Stop! Don’t wash this! Wrap this in tissue, in a safe place.” This was my first indication that there might be a work of artifacts tracing Vesper’s illness.

“Vespers Pool” is preceded by a corridor lined with illuminated niches that contain artifacts—a dead dove, a bloody nightgown, a deer tail, splintered wood from a tree struck by lightning—lit within the facade. These artifacts, presented as rare objects, while of no explicit value, point to a set of coincidences, to paranormal events centered on a death.

Schneemann advances her work in reconstituting psychic spaces as part of ordinary phenomena. The installation raises questions of interspecies communication, deepened by the wall of artifactual coincidences, as well as suggesting unexpected cultural taboos.

Entering the darkened gallery, viewers see seven video projections in a stream of images of a cat (Vesper) ardently kissing a woman; these images flow vertically into a projected pool of water. Schneemann spontaneously photographed the continuously kissing faces—human and animal—over an eight-year period. Questions of interspecies communication are deepened by the wall of artifactual coincidences, as well as suggesting unexpected cultural taboos.

“Vespers Pool” (1999 – 2000) includes six LCD projectors, two slide projectors, and motorized mirrors; a blue wall (8 × 15 × 14˝, with illuminated niches enclosing found objects. Four video projectors cast images down the walls, onto the ceiling and onto a circle of sand on the floor. Two other video projectors cantilever enlarged video loops side-by-side, detailing six-second sequences of the life and death of a companion cat. Edited on a Media 100 system, a multiple channel audial track layers ordinary sounds into a disquieting surround.

—Brooklyn Rail

childmagazine:

Min Jeong Seo – To live on
infusionsbags, roses, 2005

The stalks these flowers are already dried up but their blossoms are preserved and kept fresh by the medical infusin bags. The life-span of every living creature is limited.The infusion bags stand for the progress in medicine and the prolongation of human life.They somehow carry an ambivalent message as they refer to both death and life an the same time. Both states are immanent here. To preserve the beauty of the flowers artifically with the help of the infusion bags points out man’s inclination to repress the fact having to die and to postpone death

Source: childmagazine

standingatthefence:

Ana Mendieta | Untitled (Maroya) (Moon).1982, Nasher

‘Betwixt Between’

‘All her life Mendieta was torn between direct, bodily contact with the ground,
clay, sand, water and rocks, on the one hand, and photography and film, on the
other, which allowed her to document and to present her work in controlled
conditions. Mendieta often came back to the fact that it was precisely this
mid-way realm that was her sphere of operation as an artist. In all areas of
her life she resisted any kind of cliché, any prefabricated thought patterns
and categorizations. And it was not only in her art that she developed her
own language; she also took an entirely individual political stance.

A central source of the power of Ana Mendieta’s art lies in her occupation of
in-between spaces. Her work, her biography, her political position, her whole
worldview were defined by the way in which she strove to ‘explore new land’.
Categories such as feminism, body art and land art simply did not apply to
her work, because she had carved out her own creative space – the ‘Betwixt
Between’. Her work is intangible; its essence is absence: the absence of the
human body, the absent sculpture, the absent moment that is only captured
on paper as a photographic echo. Mendieta’s magic is the magic of the ‘space
between’, of the ‘very little’, of ‘slightness’. In her own words: ‘I wanted to send
an image made out of smoke into the atmosphere.’ 

Stephanie Rosenthal 

Source: standingatthefence