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The Andy Kaufman Blog
Keaton>040208>Olaf Breuning:Home 2
Olaf Breuning's video Home 2 (2007) in this year's Whitney Biennial rapidly fires off bad jokes which turn into good ideas by the time they land. In this combo-spoof of a TV Travel show and "Jackass", actor Brian Kerstetter plays the unbridled Id of a tourgroup member in Ghana. Together, Kerstetter and Breuning bowl a joyful game: as icons fall over and collide, a new set appears. Kerstetter is a cherfully naive equal opportunity prankster who plays with Ghanese market ladies, teases kids on a garbage dump, parodies tourists posing for photos in front of an "African village", mock fights a troupe of mudmen, takes a group portrait of women in burquas, chops vegetables in a gorilla mask, assembles an army of Japanese girls in Pokeman mask and more. Each scene is an arresting portrait of a global civilization united by primitive impulses. The transitions between scenes propose color comparisons as a viable new analytical tool for anthropology. But, don't worry, this video so revels in its immaturity, you won't notice it's one of the most mature artworks in the show until it's long over. [Note: you can watch it at home from web dot mac dot com slash olafbreuning slash Films slash home2 dot html, but better to click here: olafbruening dot com and hit the red dots to get to know Mr. Breuning a bit first, and better yet go see it at the Whitney where you can enjoy the custom reinforced Pearl River furniture. /ak] lol/bk
>Kaufman>03232008>peter coffin>you are me
There are a few works in the space: a musical interpretation of the keystrokes of the gallery staff that plays quietly outside; a series of color transition posters without any text; a roller coaster for a group of balloons that get released at the end of each day; and a block of monitors showing an arrangement of animals at play. The latter is sort of a youTube style best-of nature videos, with polar bears dancing, giraffes necking, dolphins playing with air rings, etc., and it's worth going to the back and sitting down for a spell first thing in order to get oriented and inspired. After a few minutes, you should have a sense of both puerile joy and reflection that will set up an appreciation for the rest of the work. After that, the track that takes up the main gallery, parading around its colorful balloons seems less of an aesthetic exercise in figuration and landscape (which it also is), but just something that ought to exist, and the color posters seem less about color fields, mass media, and propaganda, than an earnest attempt by a human animal to talk to a rainbow. Coffin is a sophisticated german hippie, something that would not play well if were carried out by less capable hands. He manages his mischief carefully and Is always welcoming with his work and so, in the end, you are happy to be him, or at least to understand something about him. Peter Coffin lol/ak
>Kaufman>03172008>whitney biennial
The Whitney Biennial opened a few weeks ago, and i've been remiss in coming to any proper conclusion or assessment. The armory is still hosting events, and until i have the chance to get some perspective on it all, i'll just include a few pictures as a place holder for my future thoughts. In the meantime, don't miss Carol Bove, Olaf Bruening, the New Humans, and Sherrie Levine. lol/ak
>Keaton>03012008>incomplete notes on my utopia In rooms all over the world, kids are longing for anyone to say something interesting. They sit quietly at the back of the class, biding their time until they are free to join us in our utopia. We look out onto an ocean, which always reminds us of endless possibilities we haven't yet discovered, the many journeys, adventures and experiments we'll undertake as soon as humanly possible. We have a long and storied past as the cradle of a civilization, yet we prefer to focus our attention on the ideas germinating in our minds, awaiting the moment when a personal obsession becomes a collective realization. Here, everything appears improvised, always on the verge of collapse, held together only by our belief in its in-destructability. This is an unlikely utopia, with a beauty we can only see when we're not looking for it. Often, our streets resemble obstacle rather than navigational courses. Our public transportation is archaic, noisy but oddly efficient. Our waterways are polluted, yet our carbon footprint is tiny. The architecture of personal and public space aspires to greatness, but mostly it fails. It's an unlikely , surprising, and at times, unwilling utopia, attractive mostly to those who prefer momentary knowledge to lasting wisdom. We can appear impatient, but we're really just focused on our search for subjective perfection: we have great capacity to wait for that which we deem worthwhile. We're arrested by endless variations of human DNA we encounter on our streets. We're awed by the cacophony of humans communicating in our houses, bars and universities. We love to laugh at the absurdity of it all. The best thing about this utopia is that it isn't one, because it already exists. There is no need to build a perfect or imagined space between heaven and earth. We require no higher power to dictate meaning or rules for our lives. Here, our warm bodies enjoy the movement of muscles, both mental and physical. Our conversation is like rubbing wood together until a spark ignites a new idea. This is the camp fire future generations will unearth. Nostalgically, they will long for our sensuality, primitivism and enthusiasm, they will declare us the stone age of the information society. lol/bk
>Kaufman>02282008>orientation So, just to let you know where i'm coming from or to get it out of my system, this is why i like art. I don't believe in god. The concept of god is at best an insufficient and demeaning metaphor for reality, and at worst an excuse for ignoring reality all together. Reality is a lovely thing, with its trees and glass and weight, from the swirling galaxies to the barbed wire on a chain-link fence. The abstract rules that physics tries to describe and the minute and particular ways that they manifest in the light reflecting off of a trail of snail slime on asphalt - this reality is beyond sufficient. To personify it and reduce it to a name is an arrogant refusal of the mystery and magnificent tangibility that surrounds us. God is a refusal of honest experience, and our experience as an interaction with reality is at the core of our humanity. The consciousness of experience is (as far as i know) distinct to humanity. The weight of a sandwich, the view of steam billowing from a building, the smooth texture of a plastic lighter; there is an abstract and distinctly human delight in my awareness of these interactions, in not only having these experiences, but my active reflection upon them as they happen. There is a mental symmetry that takes place in human awareness that seems unlike anything else that i know of: we create information. But the best thing about being human is that this information is processed and shared; that i can vicariously experience something that happened to you. My experience of yours is a distinct and different experience, but one which shares a similar pattern to yours. We are all constantly engaging in this huge exchange, and that fulsome echo-chamber of this information and re-experiencing creates a meta-experience that is our culture. This is not a collective consciousness or some sort of higher brain; this is the particular and beautiful thing that we call culture, which i experience as a human with my own consciousness, and which is a magnificent thing to be a part of. Art, in all of its many manifestations, is specifically focused on the consciousness of experience. The echo-chamber of information exists in boardrooms and construction sights, but within the white boxes of galleries or the black boxes of theaters, i am given a space without the distraction of necessary function. I'm not directed to do anything with the information presented, i have only to pay attention. Art presents me with a frame in which to present or attend the experience of human interaction with clarity. And this attention seems to be the most human thing i can do. And the most fun. lol/ak
>Kaufman>02262008>Dispatch>Justin Matherly
Dispatch is a rather small space on Henry Street in the Hip Gentrification zone of Chinatown, and the showcase work, a particleboard version of an overturned, inside-out writing desk designed to keep balance only when the drawers are out, did a good job of taking over the entirety of the space, making the comings and goings of the visitors this last Sunday a series of slips, squeezes and elides to navigate around the work. A companion work quietly reflected our elisions from on the wall: a framed piece of plastic and glass embossed with a line of braille so that a fairly wobbly reflection slipped seriously around the distortions of the dots. A large stack of press releases related some references to Gilles and Felix, Franz and Sophocles (the braille reads, according to my falting memory, something like: No Defense Against Necessity, a line from Antigone). There was crumbcake and mimosas, screwdrivers for the brave and the human spirits were convivial too. My thought, inasmuch as i have one, is that the descriptions, explainations and Deleuzian/Rhizomic (con)texts or whateva, aren't worth thinking of so much in looking at this work, but that it is a lovely closed book. I have a great affection for closed books and for the art that is sometimes like that. Which is not to say that it is an opaque experience or even that one can't read it, but that the reading of it as a work is actually not as rewarding as an apreciation of it's weight and form and the the precise weight and form that the text inside has given it. Reading the book can expand the appreciation, but the experience is in the closed object, in the human relationship to the closed cover and pages, whether the spine is cracked or no. That the work has a subject is necessary for me. Having no subject is impossible to execute and boring when attempted, and self-reflexive work just feels like being cudgled by ego and material. It's 2008 after all; if you don't have an intentional subject, you're just being lazy. Matherly's subjects tend toward the intelectual and academic, a fact that comes out more in the execution of his work than in any direct communication of the subject itself. This weight on the experience of subject being implicit in the the production lends itself directly to the idea of reading a closed book: whatever the text says, the book itself is made with the understanding of the text, and can be understood though attention to the object itself. The text is only knowledge, the book is the knowledge embodied and manifest. Blah blah blah. It's pretty. Go see it. Dipatch 127 Henry Street NY NY 10002 lol/ak |
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