favorite films

I’ve been a film junkie for a long time and realized that I never made ‘the’ magic list: the top favorites. It’s a great excuse to figure out what interests you not only about film, but about art, life, the world and all such things that are too big to comprehend which is, needless to say, the exact reason why we need film. Reducing the list to nine is perfect. It forces you to make tough choices (no two films from the same director or films that are too close in subject matter), and focus on what really matters (even though it truly hurts making some extremely difficult decisions). After the insane act of striking through 99,99999% of film history, this is what was left over (in any particular order):

more sketches

Still working on the same contribution to ‘This land is a land and a land and a land’, see some earlier sketches here. After working on the text I realized I need a new photograph, so I went back to Hisingen Park to shoot some new pictures. Rather than pushing the project ahead it seems that I’m simply adding more confusion; so many pictures came out that I really like. Please vote for your favorite! I could use some feedback.

Wim Crouwel magic

Trying to get around how to use text in an artwork. I’m interested in particular in the dynamics between text as a visual medium and text as an image. The former is about using text as medium to describe what one sees, the latter is about using text as pure image, deprived of meaning. Both deal with the visuality of text, but in complete opposite ways. The problem is to get them to work together in an interesting way.

To get some inspiration I dug up one of my old favorites, Wim Crouwel. In the sixties and seventies he designed all printed material for City Art Museum in Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum. He treats text always as an autonomous form, where words not only function to describe something, but also to create an image, composition, layout and feeling. Crouwel always mentioned how modernists movements such as Bauhaus and De Stijl inspired him. You can recognize their functionality, but at the same time his typography is very life-felt and sometimes it almost feels like the letters are vibrating on the paper.

sketches

Working on ‘This land is a land and a land and a land’, a continuing project in which I invite people who moved to Sweden to take me to a landscape that reminds them of their country of origin. Together we photograph that Swedish landscape. The photo is juxtaposed to a text in which the contributors describe the landscape from their country of origin.

At the moment I’m working on the layout of the text and the image of one of the contributions. The text is about an artificial forest that was being built at Delft, The Netherlands in the mid nineties. The forest is designed in squares with rows of trees and is a hilarious mathematical Dutch interpretation of what a forest is supposed to look like. Below you find sketches for the layout:

Shattered Glass

Reality is a reconstruction of our ideas of what reality is, as much as the social is a reenactment of what we think the social ought to be like.

This came to my mind yesterday when I saw the film Shattered Glass, which tells the true story of Stephen Glass, journalist and editor at The New Republic, who cooked up at least a dozen articles for the magazine. It’s one of the big scandals in the history of American journalism, The New Republic is one of the most influential political magazines in the USA, but it also reveals a lot about how we perceive reality.

“I wanted a story that I thought would be the perfect story. And that the readers would most enjoy to read.”
- Stephen Glass

Glass later explained in an interview how it all started with a fantasy about how a certain quote would really make an article work. It expanded to the devising of details and small events that never happened and ultimately climaxed into the cooking up of entire articles. Glass was known for being a kind, soft-spoken person and later he explained his motives were of social nature. He wanted to be appreciated.  A similar incident occurred at the New York Times and led to a crisis in the entire journalistic industry.

But obviously there is a problem in the rejection of such practices. Inevitably, journalism is always a representation of reality. And as such, all journalistic reporting is a manipulation of events through rhetoric, perception, editing, dramatization and so on and so forth. In fact, condemning what Glass did might even be dangerous. It dissimulates the corrupt and manipulative potential of news production. The status quo disarms any possible insinuation of news manipulation by excluding Glass’s practice. Denouncing Glass as a liar implies that conventional journalism is truthful and, needless to say, it isn’t. Or rather: it can’t be. It is interesting, instead, to rethink Glass’s way of writing in relation to our conventional conception of reality. It might prove the plot is thicker than Glass’s manipulation and not only conventional journalism is corrupting reality, but everyday existence is enhanced, dramatized and manipulated in great many ways.

The article that ultimately exposed his fraud, Hack Heaven, can be read here. It tells the story of a 15-year old pimpled hacker who gets a lucrative contract from a major software company after hacking their database. The entire article turned out to be cooked up.

New Town

A promotional video for New Towns, produced in a series of British Government Public Information Films, hailing the New Town as the urban solution for all city problems. The New Town was a concept for THE successful town and an attempt to control every level of existence, believing that there is such a thing as universal conditions for a happy life. The video is fantastic because it narrates in a sublime way the modernistic, utopian promise of the New Town. Check this link to see a great (Dutch) documentary about the way New Towns, around the world, have created a string of suburban ghost towns.

Click picture to watch the video

Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel was a 19th century naturalist with a remarkable imagination. For instance, he was convinced that the biological development of every creature was parallel to its evolutionary development. So, a bird in an egg would reenact millions of years of evolution. Furthermore, without any particular prove, he claimed that some of the earliest ancestors of Homo Sapiens could be found in Indonesia. Indeed, a few years later one his students would find the remains of what came to be known as ‘Java man’, at that time the oldest man found.

Besides sensational claims like this, Haeckel also had the unforgivable tendency, like many of his contemporaries, to mix biology with anthropology. So, despite the discovery, he claimed that the Caucasian race had developed to become a superior race. It is no wonder that naturalists in that time traveled the world in the slipstream of colonialism and were financed by colonial regimes. They  were an essential part of the wicked business of justifying the exploitation of the colonies, since they provided the scientific proof of ‘so called’ Western superiority.

But in one area Haeckel managed to direct his vivid imagination into something slightly more positive: he was a remarkable artist and produced a great heap of fantastic illustrations of nature. Again, with an imagination larger than reality, he  idealized the plants and animals he had discovered and rendered them slightly more spectacular and aesthetic than in reality. As if on acid he created somewhat haluncinary images of plants and animals he discovered and ultimately bundled them in a book tentatively titled Art Forms Of Nature. You can find hi res images of all the pictures in the book here.

scrutinized

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope
studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
- war of the worlds

Art video diet for lazy sundays

- Jesper Just, A Vicious Undertow

More and more great art videos are coming available at Ubuweb and more in particular, it’s more and more contemporary art coming available, such as this video by Jesper Just. Whereas they were initially very much focused on early video art – also fantastically interesting, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman (among others, Stamping in the Studio, love that one!!), John Baldessari (among others, Time/temperature, love that one too!!!) – more and more contemporary, recent art becomes availabe. Such as a few episodes out of the Art Safari program that Ben Lewis made for the BBC – the ones on Andreas Gursky and Relational Aesthetics. Also check:
- Francis Alÿs, When faith moves a mountain
- Guy Ben-Ner, Stealing Beauty (full version)
- Johan Grimonprez – Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (full version!!!)
and Brian Eno, Joseph Beuys, Sophie Calle, John Cage, the list is perpetual… perhaps i should just get back with some favorites.

In addition I have added a splendid tool in right column where you can find a collection of art videos on the internet.

Nykarleby

In 2002 I visited the town Nykarleby in Finland twice for two artists-in-residence periods at the Nykarleby Art School. Nykarleby is small… REALLY small. Nonetheless, there was a genuine and irresistible charm about the place that I felt during these visits.

Despite its remoteness, the residency has build a reputation and became a spider in a network of artists and organizers – or perhaps rather ‘the web’ that holds them together. So I met loads of interesting people there that are still among my best friends and at the heart of my network. Even though I am still figuring out what the magic is, I reckon that the combination of remoteness, quietness and emptiness on the one hand, and the creative minds and energies that gather there on the other, must have something to do with it. The mind starts wandering, stimulated by inspiration and the space and freedom to go wild. So, not in the last place due to my nostalgic disposition, you might find, once in a while, an article about Nykarleby on this weblog.

If you have the chance, go and visit it!
Click here to read all articles on this weblog related to Nykarleby.

Nykarleby artists’ residency studio