MONSTERS OF NATURE AND DESIGN III

FRIDAY JUNE 26 2009

Craig Smith, Colin Beatty, Gary Nickard, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and the Vorechestra.

Big Orbit Gallery is pleased to present,
in collaboration with the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Monsters of Nature and Design III.





FROM TOP: The Burchfield Penney Art Centre, Photography by Biff Heinrich
Monsters of Nature and Design III, Photography by Amy Luraschi
Monsters of Nature and Design III (Smith/Beatty). Photography by Sean Donaher
Monsters of Nature and Design III (Nickard, Reitzenstein) Photography by Julie Knox.

Click here to see video documentation:

Click below for previews and discussion:

http://www.buffalorising.com/2009/06/monsters-of-nature-and-design-iii-critiques-sports-at-burchfield-penney.html

http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/story/717269.html

http://blogs.buffalonews.com/artsbeat/2009/06/monsters-of-nature-and-design.html


Craig Smith's Training Manual for Relational Art was exhibited at the Big Orbit Gallery between May and July, 2009.

TRAINING MANUAL FOR RELATIONAL ART

In 2009 the Big Orbit Gallery will host an exhibition of photography, video and installation artworks by London based artist Craig Smith. The exhibition has been accompanied by the publication of a catalog with essays by the curator Sean Donaher and by Craig Smith. (Catalogs available through Big Orbit Gallery.)




The photographs have been produced, in part, through three distinct, water-borne performances by Smith and his collaborator Colin Beatty (Boston USA). The performances feature the two men engaged in a series of push and pull activities coordinating the machinic action of chartered Niagara Falls helicopters and New England tug boats.



The coordination of these activities has been based on the measurable force(s) exerted by the human body with and against the machinic force of the helicopters and tugboats. The images also feature the texture and colour coding of communication between machine and human body. These forms for communication include coloured smoke, wind shear, momentum, and wireless/ mobile speaking and recording devices. The performer’s bodies can be seen in moments of extreme struggle but also at times of smooth, synchronized, coordinated movement and connection with the machines that sustain them.



The research context for this exhibition includes recent theoretical and historical publications on the 1966 installation, peformance and collaborative exhbition entitled: 9 Evenings (NYC Armoury, USA). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's List Visual Arts Centre published a catalogue of essays and image reproductions focused on this 1966 event in its 2006 exhibition entitled: 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre and Engineering (curated by Catherine Morris and supported, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts). 9 Evenings was a multiple-day series of performances utilizing physical action including dance, tennis and the playing of music by artists collaborating with technicians from Bell Laboratories (USA). Their collaborations aimed to produce multi-sensory experiences for the viewer, combining the aesthetics of the live art event simultaneously with that of a visual art exhibition.

In all of these new and contextual foundations for the exhbition, the images the performances coordinating human and machinic forces propose a differentiation of strictly land-bound or terrestrial modes to explore site-specificity and endurance artworks. Thus, the atmosphere (helicopter) and the water (tugboat) have been employed as two areas in which the human body is ‘immersed’ through the action of performance. Immersion becomes a category for classifying and formalizing the integration of human body and machine at the time of the action as well as in the context of an exhibition of contemporary, visual art forms. The result of producing ‘immersion’ as a new contextual or classification category for contemporary performance and visual art will be realized in a published monograph accompanying the exhibition. This monograph will feature articles developing a literary articulation of ‘immersion’ and photographic reproductions of the performances to further illustrate and clarify this contextual category.

http://www.bigorbitgallery.org/

SMITHBEATTY: PARTNERWORK

Craig Smith and Colin Beatty, Live in London!
9 Hours of continuous action in the gymnasium at St. Martin's Lane Hotel.

CRAIG SMITH: DUNDEE SCOTLAND 2009

Saturday, July 18, 2009
A lecture by Craig Smith at the 2009 Film-Philosophy Conference on the theoretical and technological construct of 'interface.'

This presentation is hosted by the University of Dundee and the journal Film-Philosophy. The conference keynote speaker will be: Alain Badiou.

TOP: Craig Smith riding Matthew Bakkom's Cinevator. (Photography by Matthew Bakkom)
BOTTOM: George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

Abstract:

This paper uses examples from the work of American artist Matthew Bakkom (Born 1968) and of Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Born 1967) to demonstrate significant differences between models of ‘interface’ and those of ‘interactivity’ in contemporary installations of projected film, video and photographic media. This media includes both traditional forms of projected celluloid film (Bakkom) as well as midi-synthesized and responsive forms of electronic and digital media including, but not limited to, video (Lozano-Hemmer).

The paper will seek to define and demonstrate ‘interface’ as a specific construct that has perpetuated the evolution of cinematic events into relational forms conducted through theories and practices of audience participation (Kaprow, Agamben), duration (Viola, Bergson) and site-specificity (Kwon, Deleuze). The paper will emphasize that the interface of relational forms designates a significant conceptual shift from user-to-technology (interactive) engagements to the instrumentalisation of a globally distributed "participant team." This "team" is simultaneously engaged with the event of time-based media across multiple locations in successive or simultaneous arrangements. The paper considers these works as those which take a relational approach, following the 21st Century, multi-national curating of Nicolas Bourriaud who applies David Harvey’s concepts of the dynamics of human value to the contradictions inherent in the relations of capital.

The paper will use visual illustrations and diagrams of two artworks by Matthew Bakkom (The Intimacy Machine, 1998 and The Cinevator, 2000) and one repeating installation of work (originally commissioned by the East Midlands Development Agency) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Under Scan, 2005-present). The artists’ works create references across media formats in their critique and application of projected, interactive film and projected media requiring community participation. Under the dynamic theme of interactivity, the artists’ work references a diverse range of ideals for community participation such as self-betterment, democracy, populism, truth, contingency, nationalism and representation. A crucial aspect shared by these three illustrated examples is each artwork’s inability to function without the participation of an audience (group) or viewer (individual). The paper will recount successive moments of participation and describe the dynamic actions of participation for each of these artworks. These moments and actions of participation, as well as the technological forms that structure such participation, will be mapped upon one of the two categories of ‘interactivity’ and ‘interface.’

The author hopes that the mapping of these categories can be applied by artists, curators and other researchers to distinguish ‘interface’ in theories of expanded cinema and related lens-based, projected media practices from those practices and audience engagements traditionally defined as ‘interactive.’

Registration and Programme Information:
http://www.film-philosophy.com/conference/


Support for INTERFACE: THE MOVE TO GLOBAL PARTICIPATION provided in part by the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

SMITHBEATTY SWIM TURNS

Craig Smith uses the photographic to provide a comprehensive ‘demonstration’ image. The ‘demonstration’ image is an organised, totalised set of procedural methods. These methods are intended to outline the successive steps necessary to stage an audience’s encounter with an artwork and with an artist. A demonstration image allows the photograph to operate like a witness, calling out with an exaggerated sense of the circumstances leading to its production.

In the Swim Turns Craig Smith and Colin Beatty used the momentum of Massachusetts Water Taxis to suspend themselves upon the surface of the Boston Harbor. Upon suspension the artists performed a series of choreographed movements along with newly emerging, spontaneous movements. These movements were intended to moderate the visual demonstration of the human body opposed or in confluence with forces of gravity and sources of momentum.


Turnaround/ Stepover. Boston Harbour 2008. Digital C-Print

Stepover 2. Boston Harbour 2008. Digital C-Print


By doing so Smith and Beatty's move erupt upon the surface which suspends them. Not aerial, not submerged, but suspended through repeating, durational exercises. This application of the photographic as a ‘demonstration’ of the body and surface is an attempt by the artist to visually compose the total and complete system of a relational artwork. Such a composition includes a visual record of the event and of the sentiment and dialogue that can exist between an image and a viewer.

MAKING MAKING MAKING: C at RARE GALLERY - NEW YORK

C is Matthew Bakkom, Lilah Freedland and Craig Smith.
Performance and exhibition at RARE, NEW YORK CITY.

PRESENTATION/ REPRESENTATION

Craig Smith presents:
Presentation and Representation in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer
Theatricality and Delinquency in Michel Foucault's Discpline and Punish

A seminar for the London College of Communication, Faculty of Media, October 2009.



Smith convening Fine Art Graduate Seminar.
State University of New York at Buffalo. 4/2009

Some intentions of the seminar and the artist:
I am invested in the creation and analysis (through my art practice and research) of Relational Art practices or those practices named as art by the practitioner, starting from a conceptual origin and realized in the time/ space and event of an exhibition, performance, or any specific time/space to be encountered (that which is designated or made ‘sacred’ by the artist). These practices often include the use of the artist himself/ herself; not as a self-portrait but as a ‘social representative’ involved in an aesthetic arrangement that parallels and eventually intersects real, lived life. Relational Art practices also situate a change in the consideration of the art audience. This is a change from considering the audience as a ‘beholder’ of images and instead posits the audience as being an integral, formal element used in the making of the work. The audience is being combined with the artist in the making material or actualizing of the conceptual framework for the artwork.

With this interest, and coming to performance and media art practices from a background in music composition I am trying to understand or at least to make trouble for dominant writings on the media object that treat it solely as a medium for ‘representation.’ I wonder what else can it do in an era of free-market capitalism- or at least during the tail end of such an era. What do global communication networks, virtual aesthetics and relayed theatrical productions of dynamic media make possible for informed, political practice? The economy and notion of spectacle in 2009 is different than that of 1968….but the ‘limits’ posed on the manner in which/ and the categories through which these issues are discussed has been similar over the 40 years.

One of the things this brings up for me, for my use and analysis of media, are relations to ‘truth’ (gasp)….to represent the real….we can deconstruct this yes, through the application of Jacques Derrida’s analysis of cruel theatre and of the postcard and of the act of writing….but I’m curious for all that deconstruction, the ‘real’ and the ‘representation’ of the real continue to be a dominant force in the writing and expectations (curating, historical writing) of media art production.

This is why the Agamben….as he looks at processes, truth processes, for the application of late 19th century scientific methods (the use of photography among them) to consider the plight of the human body engaged in events that are both representational of truth and of a model for mankind to emulate, but also a presentation of unintelligible realities, horrors or revolting potentials that have yet to be lived by the reader, viewer or receiver of the image / message.

References:
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer; Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (Trans. By Daniel Heller-Roazen.) Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison. (Trans. by Alan Sheridan.) London: Penguin Books, 1991 (1977).