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Martin KerselsTumble Room (2001)
First presented at Deitch Projects in New York in 2001, Tumble Room is a newar lifesize recreation of a little girl's bedroom. Turning on an axis centered on its back wall the room slowly spins, tumbling its contents from floor to ceiling. The spinning room grinds its furniture much like a rock tumbler grinds its stones.
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Stéphane ThidetLe refuge (2007)
Le refuge is a piece wrapped up with absurdity: a wood cabin, supposed to protect from the weather’s mood, wherein rain is coming down in buckets. A scale 1 model, basically equipped, the shed’s door wide-open. The rain prevents anybody from going in. Outside, everything is dry.
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Mark PaulineMeat Toys (1981)
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Liudvikas BuklysMachine to Elaborate Wheat Flour Tortilla (2015)
Machine to Elaborate Wheat Flour Tortilla was and crafted in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was supposed to be workng in the restaurant Yucatan, but it was too heavy and big to fit in there. So, it has been interned in a storage local facility, unable to accomplish its main mission. Using the museum's elevator and floors as optimizers for the machine, Buklys also allows for it to carry out its capacity of catalyzing a curious choreography of cooking on a conveyer belt.
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Johannes VoglOhne Titel (2014)
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Johannes VoglMachine to produce jam breads (2007)
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Thomas BayrleUntitled (2012)
One of the largest rooms of dOCUMENTA (13) is dedicated exclusively to the work of German artist Thomas Bayrle. Bayrle, born in 1937 in Berlin, has already participated in Documenta 3 in 1964 and in Documenta 6 in 1977 in Kassel (Germany). Nearly 50 years after his first participation Thomas Bayrle is now celebrating his impressive comeback to one of the most important art events of the world. The sounds and movements of 8 kinetic works, draw the visitors into their spell. These sculptures are engines that are cut open. If you ever wanted to know how the motor of a Porsche 911, Moto Guzzi bike or the radial engine of an airplane works: It can be seen here.
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Roman SignerRampe (2008)
(Watch the video)
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Willem van WeeghelKinetic Megalith (2010)
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Liz LarnerCorner Basher (1988)
This piece consists of a drive shaft mechanism, the activation and speed of which is controlled by the viewer, that swings a chain into and destroys the nearby corner wall.
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Janet Cardiff & George Bures MillerThe Killing Machine (2007)
The Killing Machine is based on the device in Kafka's 1919 short story In the Penal Colony. The machinery busies itself around the chair, which looks as though it has been reclaimed from the surgery of a dead dentist. Vicious probes articulated on necks that look suspiciously like the arms of old Anglepoise lamps lunge forward and go to work about an invisible body. There's no one strapped into the chair, but you get the idea. The devices go in, stabbing and swiping. Lights go on and off. As the machine gets into the swing of things, an automated drum beats, and more drumsticks have their way on an electric guitar that has been plumbed into the superstructure of this grisly yet risible tableau. A disco ball starts spinning overhead, filling the room with movement and light. This, I suppose, is to illustrate the ecstasies and agonies of the prisoner, who by now will have been partially shredded by the enthusiastic and tireless operations of the pneumatically powered machinery.
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John SasakiA Machine To Release One Burst Of Confetti Gradually Over The Duration Of An Exhibition (2011)
A conveyer belt topped with confetti is programmed to run imperceptibly slowly. At a rate of roughly one flake every five minutes or so, the confetti trickles to the ground, with the entire 'burst' piling up on the floor two months later. An exuberant moment is drawn out to absurd lengths.
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Arcangelo Sassolino Figurante (2010)
The powerful jaw crushes a femur bone over 3 hours. Sassolino explains that what he likes is to take a material ‘by the neck’ and torture it in order to make it scream and admit the truth.
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Szymon KobylarzHommage a Roland Topor (2007)
Polish artist Szymon Kobylarz admits he has been interested for quite some time now in scientific matters and their processing, testing, and reading by people who have little to do with actual science. He considers himself such a person and in the wake of his fascination with maths, or, to be more precise, with the Fibonacci sequence, fractals, and the golden mean, Szymon Kobylarz constructs his wooden pieces in an attempt to translate the language of science into the language of art.
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Roger HiornsA retrospective view of the pathway (2008 - 2015)
In Roger Hiorns’s A retrospective view of the pathway, huge vats billow clouds of white foam onto the ground in a clearing on the wooded campus. The setup is simple, but the approach – the walk out to the farthest point of the campus, passing newly installed sculptures, and emerging from the live oaks and poison ivy – gives this piece some weight. You can interact with it or not. You don’t even have to look at it; you can hear and feel it instead.
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Roger HiornsUntitled (Youth) (1999 - 2015)
Hiorns has filled the Hepworth Wakefield's Calder exhibition space with his entire Youth series, a branch of his work spanning 15 years in which he has a young naked man approach and sit on some kind of found object. These range from a defunct jet engine to a coffee table embedded with plasma screens showing TV rolling news. There's a plastic bench lightly smeared with brain matter from a cow. The beginnings of these works – this "really awkward fleshy intervention between a machine or manmade object and a person"– came from a fascination with a photograph by Man Ray of his wife leaning against a printing press, "an act of merging" between the mechanical and the human. All the found objects have a kind of inherent power, either through their sheer bulk and heft, or, as in the case of the jet engine, a purposeful, potent former life. Hiorns has wrenched that power away and turned it to his own ends. The naked young men were cast through an open call.
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Jonathan MonkVarious (2010)
Jonathan Monk is showing fourteen different electronic devices from the area of home entertainment. Powered speakers, a flat-screen monitor, an iPod, a radio alarm clock or an interactive video game console – the new and functional brand name devices selected by Monk form a cross-section of the range of products to be found in an electronics retail store. However, the artist undermines their usability by presenting the individual devices in custom-fitted plexiglass showcases, therefore conserving them as objects. While Jeff Koons keeps his focus on the visuality of the specific object and its symbolic formal language, for Jonathan Monk the seminal point is more the renunciation of a perspective that is bound to an object. By enclosing, almost nostalgically archiving a current object of utility the artist undermines its topicality. In the process of repositioning these products Monk demonstrates their transient, finite, even replaceable substance, which defines the image of such appliances in a world where consumer attitudes and product development are always characterized by novelty.
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Peter William HoldenArabesque (2008)
With its roots in Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" (1818) and the alchemist's laboratory, the installation presents itself as a mechanical flower: a simulacrum of nature. Life sized human body parts, impaled upon steel, move and sway and dance. The limbs, translucent and livid, bare their internal robotic mechanisms to the gaze of the viewer. The wiring itself is an aesthetic expression deliberately integrated into the installation to bring chaotic lines of abstract form to contrast with the organized symmetry of the body parts.
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Chris BurdenOde to Santos Dumont (2015)
Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who died unexpectedly on May 10, 2015, has one last exhibition: A miniature zeppelin that flies around the gallery at LACMA.
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Ingrid BachmannPelt (2013)
The artist wanted to give technology back its pelt, to reintroduce the animal, the bestial, back into technology and to continue her work in grounding the digital experience in the material realm.
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Abel BarrosoThe Emigrant’s Pinball Machine (2012)
Cuban artist Abel Barroso creates wooden sculptures in the shape of games such as pinball machines, fooseball tables, and monopoly boards. Barroso’s biggest project is The Emigrant’s Pinball Machine (Pinball del Emigrante), composed of seven interactive games, each offering the hope of entry into a glamorous capitalist city, symbolized by a row of skyscrapers. These wooden creations—eschewing the colors, lights and sounds of traditional pinball machines—depict various methods of getting there, but the illusory nature of the quest is evident.
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Wade MarynowskyThe Acconci Robot (2012)
The Acconci Robot is an interactive robot that follows people unawares. Appearing as a shipping crate of minimal design, the robot is mute and motionless as a viewer approaches. But when the audience member turns away and starts to leave, the robot begins to follow. If the audience member turns to look back at the robot, it stops in its tracks. The work draws inspiration from a 1969 performance work, Following Piece by Vito Acconci, in which the artist followed unsuspecting individuals in an urban setting as far as he could.
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Maurizio CattelanCharlie (2003)
Tricycle, steel, varnished, natural gum, resin, silicone, hair, fabrics
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Paul McCarthyMechanical Pig (2003-2005)
Mechanical Pig was the great disappointment of the auction. She is life-sized, breathes rhythmically, and has pulleys to move her feet, tongue, and eyeballs. Mechanical Pig was estimated at $2.5 to $3.5 million but achieved a high bid of only $1.9 million, one bid short of the reserve price. Mechanical Pig went unsold.
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p.s. Hey. Continuing gradual improvement. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. My best guess is that you're surely right about 'CP' and that 'filmed theater' is most likely just not something that talks with me in a general way. Now I'm eager to watch the film again. ** Steevee, Hi. Mm, yeah, that 'banal' accusation seems to be the go-to stance among people who don't like recent Malick. I have to say, whenever I hear or read that, it boggles my mind. I don't mean any offense by this, and understand that I'm a passionate, emotionally and aesthetically enriched devotee of Malick's work past and present, but when people say they think the content of Malick's newer work is banal, to me it's kind of like watching clips of people saying they like Donald Trump because he tells it like it is. I look forward to your new review. Everyone. here's Steevee's take on SONGS MY BROTHER TAUGHT ME, 'an interesting indie film set on a South Dakota Native American reservation'. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! No, no, they're real. Yeah, it's a real job to make those posts, but obviously I enjoy it. I read an interview with M.E. Thomas on The Rumpus site yesterday. Very interesting. The construct of 'sociopathy' is very intriguing to me. I think studying that idea and premise is helpful to writing, or to my writing anyway, as a way to think about portraying characters' interactions and also about fiction's relationship to the reader as well. I really might just spring for that book. It is very nice to be in lessening pain for sure, obviously. It's getting so I can actually use most of my brain to work again without my thoughts getting stabbed occasionally. Happy Thursday! ** _Black_Acrylic, Welcome back! To online-less. I almost wrote 'welcome home' but I then realized how spooky or something that sounded and stopped myself. Yeah, I pay zip attention to English soccer/football, but for some weird reason I did see somewhere yesterday about Leicester City's preeminence and how surprised everyone is. Yay for surprises. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thanks a bunch about the gif construction. I couldn't agree more with what you said about the bizarre fashionable consensus re: recent Malick. On the one hand, it's depressing, but, on the other, how rare and exciting is it for a serious filmmaker these days to find a cinematic language so singular that a lot of people appear to be unequipped to read it. I have read a couple of great pieces about 'KoC' and about recent Malick in general, but I don't remember where I did or who wrote them. I can try to track them down, if you're interested. Oh, wow, 'The Golden Fruits'! That is not an easy book to get one's hands on these days. Great! When you read it, I'll be very curious to hear what you think. Thanks, man. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Thanks! With the digital world, you have no control. I guess with a blockbuster that doesn't need to build up interest on the festival circuit, holding a film in private until just before the release works, but if your film is a nobody to begin with like our film, you don't have that luxury. Sucks, but that's the way of the new world. Yikes, weird, about that teacher. Also weird that her phone didn't have a password. I thought all phones had those now. But maybe just the Apple ones? ** Right. There's a lot of very interesting, cool, and even fun machine-related art in my gallery today. Why not wander through the goods with your fingers on the clickers and see what happens? Seriously, why not? See you tomorrow.