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Tommy Hartung’s ‘Ascent of Man’ (2009)

C Way — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:01:25 +0000

                     (Click to expand image)
         Video still from Tommy Hartung’s “Ascent of Man”, 2009
                  (Image from www.onstellarrays.com)

     Hartung’s “Ascent of Man” is one of the few pieces I remember from the otherwise lukewarm collection showcased at P.S. 1’s “Greater New York” exhibit — and easily the one I cared about most.
     Hartung’s video uses stop-animated visuals to great effect, delivering haunting, poignant scenes of biological processes matched occasionally to voiceover from a 1978 BBC documentary series of the same name. I remember that I just couldn’t turn my back on it, I had to see where it went next. I loved how full of reverence the work was for life, birth, decay, mutation, and in equal measure how irreverent it was, with its strange array of props, plastic anime dolls and lo-fi assemblages.
     I loved too how the video felt like a documentary doing its best to honor not some linear, tidy, rational “Ascent”, but rather a process altogether messier, more fractured, more alien, and much more modern-feeling (plastics and plastic+nature interactions a bounded, as in the above still; animals and vegetation at times existed with no sign of mankind other than the residue of synthetics and glass). What results is not so much a depiction of our “Ascent” but something much more powerful: a devotional to our frayed and frankensteined lurch from side to side — one step up, two steps down; progress over here, devolution over there; in danger of self-annihilation, with roaches rodents and lichen ready to take our place — all of it sad and funny at once, and in this somehow a more authentic document of what human biological experience over time means.
     I also loved the meditative, beautiful score that accompanied it (part of the original BBC series perhaps?). It felt dirgeful and yearning and thoughtful all at once, sometimes suggesting a lament of the processes depicted on the screen, sometimes suggesting a passionate tribute to them. Its delicacies also felt slightly out of place alongside the more rough-hewn/frayed-edge visual style — this contrast was delicious. So many video artists today are content to score with amelodic, atonal drone and ambient sound-art — that may suit some pieces, but ‘Ascent of Man’ absolutely gained from Hartung’s musical choice.

More Tommy Hartung over at New York Magazine

All writing © 2010 C. Way/ SnailCrow.com

Kathy Kelley - grr. (2008)

C Way — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:02:21 +0000

Kathy Kelley’s “grr.”, 2008 (Image from www.artslant.com)

More Kathy Kelley on artslant

All writing © 2010 C. Way/ SnailCrow.com

Sue Williams - ‘American Enterprise’ (2008)

C Way — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:14:54 +0000

Sue Williams’ “American Enterprise”, 2008 (Image from David Zwirner Gallery)

More Sue Williams on artnet

All writing © 2010 C. Way/ SnailCrow.com

Sharon Olds’ ‘Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-in-Life Boyfriend’

C Way — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:50:37 +0000

Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-in-Life Boyfriend
by Sharon Olds

When you touch them, their skin feels like the surface
of a soap bubble, tensile and shimmering,
the oils of many colors moving
in swirls, like the Coriolis winds of the globe.
When you hold them, it feels as if, within each,
there’s a solar system, majestic, lawful,
playful. When you hold one in your grip, a moment –
gently, but not sentimentally, and
shake it, there starts to snow a flurry
in my chest and belly, and lower belly,
where the flakes settle and sparkle. And when you
touch their centers, the tips of my ears grow
points, when your fingers nip their centers in the
bud, the blood flowers of engorgement
blossom. I like that you like that one of the
stem-stubs will sometimes draw inside, into
its hill, like an ostrich bloom which blooms,
lover of the dark, down into the ground.
When you hold them I feel like plunder adored
which adores being plundered. The mouths of your hands
honor the food of my flesh in its season,
and if it were reasonable to thank you
for doing what you like, I would thank you within reason,
but as it is not, I thank you beyond reason.

I love this poem for its meditative sensuous detail; its long, lingering caress; but I particularly love it for its last three lines. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this — about what it means to thank someone when giver has as much (or more!) to gain as recipient — and I’ve never met a poem that so elegantly, succinctly explored this funny little puzzle of human communication. I love a poem that can do this, that can skillfully occupy territories both abstract and tangible, and gain new power from the synthesis of both.

Found over at www.poetrylondon.co.uk

Browse Sharon Olds’ Poetry books at Powell’s

Encounter

C Way — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:31:09 +0000

(”Encounter” video and sound by treatpocket.com)

I know why I’m so nervous:

We need a judgment, we need a verdict.