AND YOU WERE WONDERFUL, ON STAGE

A few weeks ago I participated in a workshop for this forthcoming performance, at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge.

The work is currently being performed in New York and I hope to join the chorus for the London edition at the Tate in the new year.

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PERFORMA 13

CALLY SPOONER
AND YOU WERE WONDERFUL, ON STAGE

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Friday, November 8, 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm
Saturday, November 9, 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm
Sunday, November 10, 6:30 pm

National Academy Museum, New York

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MOTINTERNATIONAL London and Brussels are delighted to announce Cally Spooner's most ambitious production to date: "And You Were Wonderful, On Stage", a new Musical presented by Performa 13, in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Tate Modern, London.

"And You Were Wonderful, On Stage" is a musical for an a cappella Chorus Line, relocated from the margins of the musical form, to take on a splintered lead role.

Spooner draws on the genre of the Broadway Musical to articulate the constructed mechanics of behaviour and a loss of live delivery in contemporary life. Teetering between moments of comedy and tragedy, the production is structured as a series of prologues and overtures, as the Chorus Line ruminate on fallen idols and dashed dreams, channelling distorted media feeds from current affairs. Prominent figures who have stumbled at a moment of liveness or authenticity, appear abstracted and episodically; Beyonce’s lip-syncing at Obama’s inauguration, Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal and public apology, and more besides, become dramatic public moments of standardization or mechanisation. Spooner sets up an interplay between the elegant, authoritative permanence of the National Academy’s architecture, and the ephemeral movement of songs, bodies, and conversations, asking ‘what it takes’ to become, and remain, visible. As the performance continues, the light, gossipy phrases become infected by an emerging language of “high performance” PR speak, which reaches toward sameness and automation, leading the performance to its climactic, spectacular finale.

"And You Were Wonderful, On Stage" is a Performa Premiere, curated by Charles Aubin and Laura McLean-Ferris.

The project is evolving and itinerant, with musical composition by Peter Joslyn and a core ensemble of singers who have been collectively developing the piece with the artist. The preliminary structure was commissioned and produced by the Stedelijk Museum, curated by Annie Godfrey Larmon with Hendrik Folkerts, and will evolve at and tour to Tate Modern in January 2014.

With very special thanks to Annie Godfrey Larmon and Wysing Arts Centre.

Supported by MOTINTERNATIONAL

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Cally Spooner (1983; Ascot, UK) is an artist based in London.

Using theory and philosophers as alibis to help her write, and casts of arguing characters to help her perform, she produces plotless novellas, disjunctive theatre plays, looping monologues and musical arrangements to stage the movement and behavior of speech.

Spooner’s productions have been presented at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; KW Institute, Berlin; Wysing Art Centre, UK; Jeu De Paume, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London. She is represented by MOTINTERNATIONAL

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Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Recent Readings

so you want to invent your own currency...
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/so-you-want-to-invent-your-own-currency/

Belief systems

Faith and understanding

Nicolas Jaar & Joshua Light Show @ The Barbican

MEGA.

The Source Family

The Weather Underground

VINCENT FOURNIER: Unnatural History

“These creatures are coming from the future. An imagined future caught between memory and projection, and based on current research regarding synthetic biology,” explains photographer Vincent Fournier, of his new publication Post Natural History.

MONITOR LIZARD [Varanus imitabilis] Mimetic lizard

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At first glance, the book is simply a collection of beautiful photography in the style of natural history documentation, but hidden in Fournier’s images of insects and jellyfish are a series of genetic quirks – the glass body of a dragonfly, adapted to detect volatile inorganics, the strands of a jellyfish, able to function as a data transmitter, and the colour-adaptive scales of a climate-tolerant pangolin.

“The viewer is not certain whether these species are real or not, or even when and how they were made” Fournier explains, “to me it is important that the species themselves are objects of beauty, with the reasoning of the transformation being uncertain.”

The book borrows from the style of traditional scientific illustrations, but portrays creatures taken from an unspecified point in the future, when genetic modification has played a hand in evolution, evoking an unsettled feeling that these creatures are at once real and unreal.

“These living species have been re-programmed by mankind to better fit our environment, as well as to adapt to human desires,” Fournier says, “it’s important to me that my stories are based on science, so that they can potentially be true. I like to play with the idea of a true/false archive, like in some Jorge Louis Borges novels, with several levels of reality.”

As well as borrowing from the displaced reality of Borges stories, Fournier turned to the Muséum National d’Histoires Naturelles in Paris, in particular, for real-life inspiration. He met with a synthetic biologist to explore the ways species could evolve in line with our current technology and changing environment, ensuring that all his modified species retained a tentative basis in reality.

“I was interested in the idea of exaggerating the present in order to create speculative fiction,” he says, “these hybrid creatures are also inspired from the refined and particular style of the encyclopedic board.”

Fournier describes science as a ‘link between the visible and invisible world’, and it’s this link he’s teased out in his Post Natural History project. The creatures function as a bridge between the world of imagination and the complex possibilities of genetic manipulation.

“I found in science the material to imagine possible fictions and generate a collective psyche. It is the imaginary and dream side of science that I am interested in, its fictional and extraordinary potential.”

http://postmatter.com/#/currents/unnatural-history/

Detroit

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rkm3y/Requiem_for_Detroit/

Julien Temple's documentary is a vivid evocation of an apocalyptic vision - a slow-motion Katrina that has had many more victims.

Detroit was once America's fourth largest city. Built by the car for the car, with its groundbreaking suburbs, freeways and shopping centres, it was the embodiment of the American dream. But its intense race riots brought the army into the city. With violent union struggles against the fierce resistance of Henry Ford and the Big Three, it was also the scene of American nightmares.

Now it is truly a dystopic post-industrial city, in which 40 per cent of the land in the centre is returning to prairie. Greenery grows up through abandoned office blocks, houses and collapsing car plants, and swallows up street lights.

Police stations and post offices have been left with papers on the desks like the Marie Celeste. There is no more rush hour on what were the first freeways in America. Crime, vandalism, arson and dog fighting are the main activities in once the largest building in North America. But it's also a source of hope.

Streets are being turned to art. Farming is coming back to the centre of the city. Young people are flocking to help. The burgeoning urban agricultural movement is the fastest growing movement in the US. Detroit leads the way again but in a very different direction. 

Seen: Renzo Martens, Episode 3

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message - 1977

From Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter

http://www.iftf.org/fanfutures/sterling

http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/th/IFTF_SR-1590C__AnAuraOfFamiliarity.pdf

OPEN HOUSE - Matthew Mazzotta 2013

Visited: Sounding The Body Electric @ Calvert 22

Sounding The Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984 is an exhibition on the first experimental approaches to sound and image in Eastern Europe during the 60s and the decades that followed, featuring artworks and recordings by Fluxus artist Milan Knižák, plus works by Sots-Artists Komar & Melamid, Hungarian artist Dóra Maurer and composer Zoltán Jeney.

In the aftermath of Stalinism, composers and artists in Eastern Europe were given new opportunities to experiment. New recording studios equipped with magnetic tape recorders and, later, synthesisers were established, first in Warsaw in 1957 and then throughout Eastern Europe. New and often challenging forms of music were produced in these laboratories of sound.

The connections between the visual arts and experimental music were closer in the 1960s than perhaps any time before or since. Sound and image combined in artists’ films, ‘happenings’ and sounding installations. Experimental forms of notation were also created to stimulate uninhibited musical expression.

The early happenings and actions of the 1960s were associated with intellectual freedom and reform. The exhilaration of experimentation declined during the decade and in the 1970s new critical forms of art emerged which associated sound with surveillance and censorship.

This exhibition explores both the optimism and the anxiety that was to be found in the experimental zone of art and music.

Curated by David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk

Artists: Walerian Borowczyk, Collective Actions, Andrzej Dłużniewski, Szábolcs Esztényi, Bulat Galeyev, Milan Grygar, Zofia & Oskar Hansen, Zoltán Jeney, Milan Knížák, Grzegorz Kowalski, Zygmunt Krauze, Komar & Melamid, Katalin Ladik, Jan Lenica, Dóra Maurer, Henryk Morel, Vladan Radovanović, Józef Robakowski, Eugeniusz Rudnik, Bogusław Schaeffer,Cezary Szubartowski, László Vidovszky, Krzysztof Wodiczko

http://calvert22.org/exhibitions/show/955/sounding-the-body-electric-experiments-in-art-and-music-in-eastern-europe-1

Seen: The Act of Killing

Incredible film.

'War crimes' are defined by the winners.

Protest By Way Of Marketing

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/07/27/opinion-sam-jacob-protest-through-media-and-marketing/

"I'd argue that the fact that there seems to be no single point is the point. The act and the subject of these protests have become delaminated. It's as though any subject can be attributed to any act, and the interchangeable relationship between the sign and signified makes it a postmodern form of protest. Doubly so, because the shifting arrangements of form and content take place within the media - in the representation of the act, not the act in and of itself. It's protest by way of marketing, PRotest, to coin a phrase. The worry is that by operating as a form of marketing, this kind of protest only serves to reinforce the mechanisms of contemporary society, only makes us more alienated, further from a position where we might be able to achieve anything.

Perhaps this kind of non-specific protest is a function of our own era. Maybe it's just harder to pinpoint what exactly is wrong because, quite frankly, everything is kind of wrong and there's nothing anyone can do about it." 

Bruce!

Capitalist realism

continued from 'Monoculture'...

The term next appeared in 2009 with the publication of Mark Fisher's book, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative?Fisher argues that the term "capitalist realism" best describes the current global political situation. His argument is a response to, and critique of, neo-liberalism and new forms of government which apply the logic of capitalism and the market to all aspects of governance.

As a philosophical concept capitalist realism is indebted to an Althusserian conception of ideology. Fisher proposes that within a capitalist framework there is no space to conceive of alternative forms of social structures. He proposes that the 2008 financial crisis compounded this position; rather than seeking alternates to the existing model we look for modifications within the system. The crash confirmed within the populace the necessity of capitalism rather than shake it loose from its foundations.

"Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action."^[6]

Toril Johannessen

http://www.toriljohannessen.no/

IAIN BAXTER& / Adam Chodzko @ Raven Row

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.E._Thing_Co.

http://www.barnism.com/2009/12/15/n-e-thing-co/

http://www.ravenrow.org/current/

Massive Attack V Adam Curtis

Wish I'd seen it!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jul/07/adam-curtis-massive-attack-review