Ode that gives us wings
Kiba Lumberg’s (b. 1956) Shoe Tower (2009) is an ode that rises up almost to the heavens. It pays homage to all women in the world. To women, who carry the world and the planet in their arms from one generation to the next. “I realise that I carry my mother within me, and I will see her in my dreams for as long as I live,” the artist writes in her latest book Samettiyö (Velvet Night, 2008). At the top of the Shoe Tower is a child’s worn-out shoe. The trajectory of life from childhood to old age is constructed through women’s shoes that tell stories of identities, professions, everyday life, celebrations, human life in all its manifestations. Simultaneously the work pays homage to women’s feet that can also be an object of contempt. Lumberg has in recent years depicted women’s feet also in vivid black-and-white graphic drawings and powerful paintings. Feet are also associated with nomadism, travelling, homelessness as well as the home. The book Velvet Night is dedicated to all people, both living and dead, to sounds and silence, to the sighted and the non-sighted, to those who walk and those who don’t. The dedication is an apt image of the artist’s thinking. Simple, yet so difficult: all people have the right to life, to human dignity. Although Lumberg’s work has resonances both to the life of the individual and to the battlefields of social and world political struggle, it avoids all ideological contention. The soul of Venice is the artist’s muse, both black and white, just like her powerful drawings. Lumberg participated in the first Roma Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale with the work Black Butterfly (2007). This year the Roma Pavilion will not be presented, although human rights violations against the Roma in Italy and elsewhere in Europe are getting worse day by day. “To my great regret I must note that history repeats things, and I am unable to see the Gypsies’ situation good in terms of human rights. Gypsies are outlaws, vagrants, they do not fit in, they are not good enough… How can there still be a people who are forsaken by almost everyone?” the artists wonders. “The Gypsy people are part of world history. All ethnic groups have people who behave well and those who don’t, and conflicts will arise between different cultural communities, even physical conflicts, when people don’t have enough information.” History repeats itself in cruel ways in Venice, Italy, Belgrade, Serbia, Budapest, Hungary… throughout Europe. The way the human dignity of the Roma is being degraded at this very moment should give pause to the hearts and consciences of each and everyone of us. Hiding behind protestations of lack of knowledge is not enough of an excuse for the lack of responsibility. If we lose human dignity and humanity, what is left? “I refuse to submit to the rules of the horde”, Lumberg writes. The priority should be to bring out the human heart in a time of collective and individual fear. We must be able to rise against totalitarianism, even when individual voices, individual steps are being silenced. The responsibility is ours, we cannot hide behind structures. Pictures and words are not deeds, but they can become deeds provided they are shown and said in the right place at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Shoe Tower rises up from a red base, reaching up to cosmic spheres. Red, the colour of blood, is a symbol of energy and life. We are born in some place and we come from some place, we reach out to things. The artist’s wish is that the steel-frame tower that stands full four and a half metres tall would connect us to thinking which tells us that we all have our human dignity. Otherwise the world will become an empty, echoing, hollow place. It is obvious that the politics of the neo-liberal finance gave has not carried its responsibility. We are today paying for its yesterday’s consequences. The world was polarised into winners and losers. “If freedom means that you only care for yourself, why do we have society? How far do we have to go before we realise that, instead of greed, inequality and cruelty, we need other solutions? Nature does not need us, we need nature,” the artist claims. The world is ours, nevertheless, and it can be changed, despite its unpredictability. Although we may not be certain of anything today, tomorrow everything can be different. The Shoe Tower gestated for a long time in the artist’s innermost soul. It was not created in isolation, it was thought about and constructed together with colleagues and friends. Thanks are also due to all women who donated their shoes.
Text by Marita Muukkonen
CYPRUS - ANDREAS SAVVA
Putting up a system
Andreas Savva creates complex impressions for even more complex affairs without omitting the importance of the ideas represented. He addresses his artistic temperament, demanding critique from the impressions. The value of those ideas is always based on observance and experiment. He draws from different values and contexts in order to arrive at new horizons. The unending need for selection and the necessity for decisions remain the greatest challenge. In the end, he brings ideas into effect with certainty while mirroring life itself. These aren’t just unemotional, intellectual mathematics. He employs calculations and measurements in order to locate the position or value. His attitude towards contemporary art upsets well-established forms and asserts impressions of a functional, yet abstract system which, like nature, is a material system striving to be transformed into spirit. This system is therefore expressed through the conditions of matter. Savva’s language of ropes handles every theme and space with incredible ease. A web made of ropes seems to devour space as it seizes every point to which it can be tied and consumes everything that crosses its path like a crazed cell. Ropes and items are geometrically arranged, scrupulously constructing works which indicate a figure in space as an image, as an impression of the avoidance of gravity, and as an idea of an allegorical description of human fate. Andreas Savva has long been engaged in an effort to define this complicated relationship as an impression which he presents to us with this installation of a mechanism behind the action. The audience has already undergone a transformation through everything presented. The artist’s story and the works he has created, the places where he has installed them and everything that has occurred until now, define an invariable quest for the point of observance. The works’ history is not permanent, as they allow multiple interpretations. It is a procedure of identifying the theory which will express the content of Andreas Savva’s artistic work. In contrast to kterismata (burial gifts) offered to the dead as the beloved items they would always want to keep, the anti-kterismata include clothes and personal items that someone uses while alive.The sculptures extend everywhere like a giant multicoloured snake that winds along the path, representing the adventure of life. The rope-made routes of the artist’s comprehensive sculptures evolved into the anti-kterismata. The object acquired a special form that has the potential to contain anything that might be desired in another arrangement. They are objects which we have kept with us for a while, and which now join together to acquire gigantic proportions and to describe our everyday events like a diary. The meanings behind Anti-kterismata surpass opportunism and succeed in giving value to all the things we stubbornly keep close to us for a lifetime. They concern a comprehensible evaluation of the instinct of possession which is fundamental in human nature. Along with everything that may entail. It is evident that his work, Martyrology, carries a type of cross symbol. The cross symbol combined with the work’s title leaves no room for questioning. Here, it is dealt with as a symbol and form with a multitude of implications about faith, fear, torture and the exhaustion of the individual. The cross, a religious symbol and a human body in dimension contains rugs again. This time, kterismata and antikterismata are selected in a hypothetical relationship. Every interpretation is real. The rope journey sweeps through a global symbol, a universal one in mathematical terms but also a multicultural symbol which exists in every social and philosophical system. Set in Lido, Venice, Martyrology has much to say about human fate.
Text by Olga Daniylopoulou
CHINA - ZHAO GUANGHUI
Evolution of creature-machines
Zhao Guanghui (born 1972 in Yunnan Province, China) takes the prospectus of commercial car promotion as the model of his own prospectus for his mock vehicle designs. A vehicle the size of a Mini Cooper in the shape of a goldfish rumbling on shore is titled the Nimi-Z, and its prospectus claims it is a wheel-less magnetic suspension racing car, the miraculous product of bio-technology and engineering. Another vehicle that looks like a cross between a sting-ray and a shark is called Subaro - Imprezo; it is illustrated in its prospectus together with an array of engineering tools and an engine. They are the imaginary vehicles of tomorrow, the next step in the evolution of machines, when machines acquire a biological capacity to develop into more spectacular creatures. The biomorphic tendency of engineering products has long been the trend in the history of civilisation. When machines take over the tasks of domestic animals they also take over the animals’ special features of physical capacity that first fired human imagination. Ever since the advent of the industrial age, when new sources of energy were harnessed, engineering development has accelerated without looking back. We now know only the potentially boundless power and capacity of industrial products, and have lost sight of the limits set by nature on the powers of living creatures. We have also lost sight of the purpose of these powers, which were first there to serve specific biological ends. For the new urban generation that only knows animals first hand through pet cats and dogs, the sense of wonder at the special abilities of the animal kingdom continues to be sustained by wildlife programmes on TV and Digimon cartoons. For this generation Zhao’s wonder vehicles are not impossible engines, instead they would appear to be perfectly legitimate products waiting their turn in the production line. Even the impossible leap in technological solution does not always deter the expectation of the modern youngsters. Zhao looks forward to the next evolutionary step of machines, but his mode of thinking also prompts him to look backwards as well. He has created a series of works since 2005 titled Excavated Future. In this series he presents bone-like fossil fragments covered in heaps of sand; the fossils turn out to be parts of a car, or parts of a computer. With this series Zhao takes us forward to the age when humans may look back at the pre-historic present to excavate the fossilised bones of our machines as modern dinosaurs. If this is the prospect of the evolutionary future of creature-machines, it does not necessarily mean this mode of evolutionary change is also a correct picture of the history of the animal world. The evolutionary premise of survival of the fittest implies that the biological world leaves us with the most fitting creatures; but this is an assumption that may not go unchallenged. Perhaps the traditional optimistic view of evolution of species is prompted by the observation of the evolution of machines, which become obsolete with changes in technology and human needs. Perhaps our reading of the world of living creatures has been unduly coloured by the idea of scientific progress, in which case Zhao’s creature-machines may serve as an amusing symbol of our age, and represent a fitting caricature of our collective imagination.
Text by Chang Tsong-zung
CHINA - LEE SUN-DON
Art: the field of subtraction
Lee Sun-Don is a talented painter born in Taiwan, a creative writer, a classical music composer, a self-taught pianist and an advanced chess player. He is a man and an all-round artist, who practices mind-awakening aesthetics through an artistic approach that aims to develop the viewer’s spiritual enlightenment and massage the atrophied muscle of collective contemplation, thus delivering society from a merely spectacular concept of beauty. His art reminds us of the inspirations revealed in the works of Balla, Kandinskij, Klee, Arp, Mirò and Matisse. The main constant of Lee Sun-Don’s painting is his twodimensional space arrangement that inhibits prospective depth while subtracting material thickness. His two-dimensional space transfers painting to a state of pure visibility, a specific and selfevident condition governed by rules based on optical perception alone, without any illusive depth or reference outside the image. Lee Sun-Don reproduces this mobile concept of field by abolishing spatial depth and pushing his language to the proliferating condition of an organic state where signs are tied, untied and freed from any form of paralysing geometry. Nearness and distance, foreground and background no longer exist: there is only total simultaneous interpenetration. The goal is achieved by introducing a colour, black, that enables the space to appear according to the characters of uniformity. Subtracting also means memorising and accumulating the idea of a thickness subtracted from the surface. Painting necessarily has the character of a resplendent superficial nature, which does not mean superficiality, but rather the acceptance of the specific and structural nature of painting that, historically and laically, tends to overcome prospective illusionism. The Eastern culture that animates Sun-Don’s sign enables the image to convey a sense of life and, at the same time, the idea of a concrete measure. The whole composition is supported by a sort of abstract-concrete substance that is never metaphoric, but is always sustained by its inherent autonomy. In conclusion, the work of Lee Sun-Don creates its own original and distinctive style through the combination of several philosophies in a language that escapes its formal order. Form is the threshold through which imagination declines its attitudes. In his case, painting is the tool that directs a linguistic universe not according a freezing project, but rather according to a bias for taking away, a subtle discipline based on the subtraction of certainty to the benefit of a rigorously structured probability.
Text by Achille Bonito Oliva
ARGENTINA - LEÓN FERRARI
The last shaman of Art
Ever since antiquity, well before the word, the sign was a means for communication with the divinity, for relating to men and transmitting and handing down one’s beliefs, experience or hopes for the future to later generations. For thousands of years it has been a conscious or unconscious investigation that has left behind amazing images, over the centuries and for those that are still to come. Many artists have used the sign to express their emotions, their certainties, joys, or the dramas that they wished to show to the world. In modern art, many have investigated the sign through an unconscious analysis of their own; we need only think of Jackson Pollock or Mark Tobey, great names in twentieth-century sign, or of the Parole in Libertà dei Futuristi (Balla, Carrà, Cangiullo, Boccioni, Marinetti), signs that are closer to us, arriving then at Tancredi or Capogrossi, at Visual Poetry (Pignotti, Sarenco, Miccini) or at the Fluxus (Yoko Ono, Beuys, Ben Vautier, Spoerri, Maciunas). The Argentine artist, León Ferrari, is an outsider, defying classification in any group, who for years has been using the sign with a profoundly and constructively provocative attitude. He has always dared: ever since his first works, when he started creating unusual ceramic shapes, scattering conventionality with curious lines and thus declaring what his art was to be. In 1964 he began an investigation which resulted in a work entitled Quadro escrito, which is internationally acknowledged as one of the cornerstones of Conceptual Art. He personally paid a dear price during the atrocities of the military dictatorship in Argentina, an experience that left its mark on all his future work. Another milestone is a work of 1976, Nosotros no sabiamos, a sentence that is steeped in all the tragedy of an evil regime. His sign, his hand, his intelligence and his art protest against all forms of power and abuse of man, who is viewed as an individual with his own rights and his own culture. His work is not an ideologized search, but a hymn to freedom: a queen that reigns over everyone and everything. He is without a doubt one of the great living surrealists (let us not forget that the major critic of this movement, Arturo Schwarz, wanted him to show his work in Milan, in no uncertain times); he has dialogued, and today still disputes with the established power. Who can forget the scandal that surrounded his work back in 1965 that showed Christ crucified on an American bomber? The image went round the world several times. For some time now, he has added another primary means of communication to his research on the sign: music. He constructs huge cages in which naked women, their bodies covered in writing, interact with the spectator through music, which is created by striking the bars of León’s sculpture with their skin covered in signs. An initiatory work. In the work of a shaman there is certainly more surrealism than in lots of other art. León is one of the few shamans left in the art world. Beuys, another great shaman, in his famous work with the Wolf, a performance held at the Guggenheim Museum, also stressed the importance of symbols in the contemporary art world. For the artist the symbols on which his new work is hinged are to be found in his latest study: cages and musicians. Musicians, impertinent and irreverent characters that people his studio in Buenos Aires and now all over the world, and who, with their image, confirm how important it is for the message to reach hearts through music. Music which has always expressed symbols, messages, beliefs and hopes in a better world. Hopes that the young heart of a great old man, a great artist like León Ferrari, knows how to transmit to the world.
Thank you, León.
Text by Daniele Crippa