Famous Forever
Genetologic Research 28/08/2008 10:11
Zatorski + Zatorski
Away from the Flock, 2008
In Away from the Flock (2008) we peer into a Victorian bell jar and a still-born goat skull smiles back with a wry cheeky grin, its mouth bejeweled with a 22ct gold capped tooth.
Piero Golia
Maybe not even a Nation of Millions can hold us Back, 2003
Complete skeleton with implanted diamond on the exact location where the (still living) artist has one as well.
Damien Hirst
For the love of God, 2007
A 19th century human skull cast in platinum and encrusted with 8601 diamonds (weighing in at over 1100 carats). Price: $100 million
Chinese Cryptozoology
Genetologic Research 17/06/2008 16:16
Shen Shaomin
Unknown Creature - Three Headed Monster, 2002
Shen Shaomin adopts the role of being anthropologist, scientist, and author of his own fabricated mythologies. Constructed from real animal bones, his sculptures collectively create a bestiary of fictional creatures that are wondrous, frightening, and strange. Reminiscent of Borgess Book of Imaginary Beings, Shens absurd assemblages exude an ancient wisdom, authenticating the magic of fable and folklore, while alluding to contemporary issues of genetic modification, consequence of environmental threat, and concepts of the alien and exotic.
In pieces such as Three Headed Monster and Mosquito, the skeletal remains of extinct creatures are presented with the validity of museum display. Their colossal scale reinforces their imagined prehistoric origin as Jurassic curiosities and spiritual totems. Assembled from genuine ossified animal parts, his creatures are simultaneously familiar and perplexing, indicating a warped and uncomfortable process of evolution. Often carving into his surfaces, Shen adorns his creations with scrimshaw, further entwining humanistic reference into his disturbing zoological evidence.
Unknown Creature - Mosquito, 2002
Genetologic Research
Genetologic Research 09/06/2008 14:00
Jin Jiangbo
Tyrannosaurus Rex of China, 2005-07
Interactive Media Installation
500cm x 230cm x100cm
When entering the room the Tyrannosaurus Rex starts moving and making sounds. Unlike the realistic Jurassic Park variety, Jins dino appears to have been assembled in the junkyard, using scrap metal and industrial bits and bobs. As a result, this T-Rex is less fearsome and more sympathetic than one might expect. Which, of course, is a reflection of the artist himself. Jin came of age as China was opening up to the world and that newfound curiosity, that need to communicate with the world, is the essence of his work.
Asphalt Aftermath
Genetologic Research 12/05/2008 17:23
Robert Smitson
Asphalt Rundown, 1969
Smithson’s interest in the second law of thermodynamics completely dominated his life and work. Much of his art is associated with the concept of entropy: the law that states that molecular disorder can only increase, and as such the universe will eventually run down (a law that has since been discredited). In this piece, liquid asphalt slides from the dump truck and runs down an eroded hill in a quarry near Rome, Italy forming an abstract expressionist canvas. However, the work cannot only be considered aesthetically –we’re forced to consider the ecology (What is the damage being done? Who will clean this up? How will the earth recover?). By performing an act with the weapon of urban sprawl–asphalt–we are forced to look at the effects of industrialization on the landscape under a hard light. - D. Scott Hessels -
Robert Smitson died in a plane crash while photographing a work in Texas, called Amarillo Ramp (1973), consisting of a 140 foot diameter partial circle of rock, which rises out of the level ground to a height of around 15 feet. The artificial lake in which the piece once emerged is now dry, and the sculpture is slowly eroding.
Trashology
Genetologic Research 06/05/2008 21:21
Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron
Hollywood’s trash and treasure, 2004
Ronald Reagan
Written by John Preston - Telegraph Magazine -
In 1988, French photographer Pascal Rostain had an idea. Or, to be strictly accurate, he nicked someone else’s. He read an article by a French sociologist who had set his students a project to examine the contents of 10 people’s rubbish bags. In garbage, the sociologist declared, could be found people’s true personality. Rostain wondered if it might take a little showbusiness twist. The next time he went on a job - to photograph the French singer Serge Gainsbourg - he took Gainsbourg’s bin-bags home with him. What he found astonished him. “It was like the key to Gainsbourg,” he says.
“Everything was completely distinctive: the bottles of Ricard, the packets of Gitanes. I felt as if I had a part of him in front of me.”
Soon Rostain and his partner, Bruno Mouron, were sifting through other famous people’s bin-bags. Brigitte Bardot came next, then French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. It may have been messy and smelly, but the results, the pair reckoned, were well worth the effort.
The magazine Paris Match suggested they try their luck in Los Angeles. In 1990, Rostain and Mouron flew to California with a map of the stars’ homes and a garbage collection schedule for Beverly Hills. “The first thing we would do was locate a suitable home,” says Rostain. “For example, Jack Nicholson’s or Bruce Willis’. Next, we would find out when the garbage was being collected and grab it before the truck came round.”
Taking someone’s rubbish is not illegal in America, but then came the awkward part. Rostain and Mouron wanted to do the photography in their Paris studio where they felt able to do their best work. They travelled back to France with three trunks of rubbish. When French customs officers demanded the trunks be opened, they recoiled in disgust, then went into a perplexed huddle and finally waved them through as harmless lunatics. Once home, they washed the contents of their trunks before spreading them out in neat lines to be photographed. They decided not to shoot anything that was either directly personal or medical - despite finding American Secret Service papers in Ronald Reagan’s rubbish listing his bodyguards and details of the weapons they carried. This puts them in quite a different league to more scurrilous scroungers such as Britain’s Benjamin Pell (aka “Benji the Binman”) who has made a speciality of raiding the rubbish bins of the famous, then selling the contents on to the tabloids, or even the original “garbologist” A. J. Weberman, who obsessively pillaged Bob Dylan’s bin for three years in the late 1960s. But there were still embarrassing slip-ups. In the rubbish of TV host Larry King, Rostain and Mouron found what they assumed were babies’ nappies. However, they turned out to be adult incontinence pads, which King indignantly denied were his. “We never wanted to create a scandal with what we were doing,” Rostain insists.
“They knew we won’t take pictures of empty Viagra packets, for example.”
Sharon Stone
Yet what they have photographed proves to be both revealing and mysterious. While the objects themselves may be mundane, they throw up perplexing questions.
What, exactly did Sharon Stone do with 13 tins of pear halves? Was she simply creating a giant flan to delight her many friends? Or were darker, more fetishistic forces at work? Madonna, as one might expect, has glugged her way through a lavish array of bottled waters. However, there’s a faint poignancy about the empty pizza-for-one packet that nestles nearby.
Madonna
In Jack Nicholson’s rubbish we find a hearteningly large collection of empty booze bottles, but also a discarded hairbrush and comb. Does this mean that Nicholson’s creeping baldness has now reached the point where coiffure has become a thing of the past?
There’s nothing overtly strange about Elizabeth Taylor’s rubbish, but look more closely and a terrible bleakness starts to show through: the single-meal wrappers, the two bottles of non-alcoholic beer, the copies of the National Enquirer with articles about her in them. Is this how she spends her days, reading about herself in the scandal sheets while eating chicken enchiladas? It’s no wonder she chummed up with Michael Jackson; his life would appear to be equally empty, hedged about with ketchup wrappers and Cup O’Noodles.
It comes as no surprise to learn that several of Rostain and Mouron’s subjects - they won’t say who - recently bought the prints of their own rubbish at an exhibition in New York for $US6000 ($A8300) a piece, thus completing what even by Hollywood standards is a very peculiar cycle of self-regard.
“My brother is an archaeologist,” says Rostain, “and he’s always telling me that if he could find the garbage of a Mayan family, then he would win a Nobel prize.
Oddly enough, I think what we are doing is significant. In 200 years’ time our pictures will provide a very useful guide to how certain people lived in the 21st century. So, you see, what we’re doing is fun - but it’s not only fun.”
Biomimetic Chair
Genetologic Research 02/05/2008 16:42
Ai Weiwei
Monumental Junkyard, 2006
each 210 x 80 cm
Marble Chair, 2008
125 x 52 x 50 cm
The marble chair is made from a solid piece of a stone into a chair, into something which ironically overthrew the idea of the wooden classic chair. The work as one piece is strongly against its own form, its own way of structure. In the kind of making it really dismisses its own meaning. I enjoy that part. - Ai Weiwei -
Joris Laarman
Bone Chair
Joris Laarmans Bone chair takes its inspiration from the efficient way that bones grow (adding material where strength is needed and taking away material where its unnecessary). Made using a digital tool developed by GM that copies these methods of construction, Laarman says the ironic result of his biomimetic technique is an almost historic elegancy that is far more efficient compared to modern geometric shapes.
If evolution could create a chair…
Trees have the ability to add material where strength it is needed. But bones also have the ability to take away material where it is not needed. With this knowledge the International Development Centre Adam Opel GmbH, a part of General Motors Engineering Europe created a dynamic digital tool to copy these ways of constructing used for optimizing car parts. In a way it quite precisely copies the way evolution constructs. I didn’t use it to create the next worlds perfect chair but as a high tech sculpting tool to create elegant shape with a kind of legitimacy. The chair is the first in a series and the process can be applied to any scale until architectural sizes in any material strength…
credits to: Prof. Dr. Mattheck, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and Gravotech B.V.
Neolithic Coca-Cola
Genetologic Research 30/04/2008 14:14
Ai Weiwei
Neolithic Culture Pot with Coco-Cola Logo, 1992
Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo, 1994
Dropping a Han dynasty urn (detail) 1995
Chinese artist and architect Ai Wei Wei uses the skills of craftsmen to transform antique Qing dynasty (1644-1911) furniture into mysterious objects that no longer have a clearly defined function. Ai is a conceptual artist in the Dada tradition, there is no doubt that showcasing the technical virtuosity of his hired minions is low on his agenda. Yet their superb skill is inextricable from his work; it is their expertise that allows his ideas to shine through. According to Ai By changing the meaning of the object, shaking its foundation, we are also changing our own condition. We can question what we are.’ Shoddy workmanship would have distracted from the strange authenticity of Ai Wei Wei’s creations; we need to believe in their purposelessness in order to be persuaded to examine our own. - Tracey Clement -
Reanimated Tree
Genetologic Research 29/04/2008 17:29
Bruce Cannon
Tree Time, 1998
TreeTime is a computer-controlled robotic sculpture fabricated from parts of a downed tree.
Bruce Cannon: This past winter, Paul Stout, who helped me with this project, and I scoured the regional parks searching for the perfect tree to scavenge for this project. I think we found it. It was a slim, twisted, beautiful Laurel which had been struck by lightning. So like a mad scientist, I have reanimated it, excising undesirable elements and augmenting the natural materials with the best technology has to offer.
This improved tree has six large articulated joints fabricated from copper and brass, moved by cables pulled by gearmotors at the tree’s base. In addition, there are sixteen small motorized branchlets. Stainless steel cable housings and wiring bundles cover nearly every inch of the tree’s surface. On each branch is a light sensor which gives the computer information about the proximity of viewers. The computer sends microsecond pulses to the motors, in patterns derived from the sensor information. Near each motor is a tiny red light, which illuminates breifly each time the corresponding motor is pulsed. In this way the piece moves in response to viewer presence. However, the pulses to the motors are so short that the piece’s movement occurs over minutes, hours and days. To all but the most intrepid viewer, it appears to be a static object.
This machine is I think equal parts meditation on slowness and bastardization of nature. The obvious reference to Mary Sheeley’s Frankenstein in the lightning-struck tree, the garish reassembly, the electrification, the technological “improvement” upon the original organism, is intentional. Paul calls it eco-porn, which I think is nice; pornography is a rich word. And to it I’d add the word ecstasy, because it too carries multiple, sometimes contradictory and sometimes sympathetic, meanings. These words’ multiple interpretations evoke the dissonance I tried to create in the work.
I associate both words with TreeTime, because of the pleasure and the pain, the beauty and the obscenity of the endeavor. In that sense, Treetime is a morality story about limits. Its also called TreeTime because its a robotic sculpture whose movement is sessile; that is, plant-like. Its meant to be frustratingly slow. For all these reasons and more, I wanted this piece to be the anti-speed (the antidote) in an exhibition full of quick ruminations on accelerated culture.
The Beginning or The End
Genetologic Research 27/04/2008 17:08
Hubert Duprat
Aquatic caddis fly larva with case, gold, pearls, precious stones
2/3 cm, 1980–1996
In his works Duprats often borrows shapes and materials from the plant and animal kingdoms, and combines them with a pseudo-scientific frame.
In earlier works, as a kind of natures own ready-mades, he has for example let water-living larvae of dragonflies (genus Trichoptera) produce sculptures for him. The artist has disassembled the tubular shell of the larva and placed the nude creature in an aquarium where there are grains of gold, pearls and chips of precious stones. From this material the larva has then built itself a new shell. The process shows in what way the insect is capable of adjusting to new circumstances and materials, and the strength of its instinctive behaviour, but also poses questions about mans view of art, about what is manufactured and what is naturally created.
The work A la fois, la racine et le fruit (At the same time, the root and the fruit) from 199798 is a sculpture with a peculiar shape, a branch from a tree adorned with small polished tablets of bone in subdued mosaic.
Tree Torture
Genetologic Research 19/04/2008 20:28
David Nash
Ash Branch Cube, 1988-89
The Tree is central to David Nash’s art. He uses trees that have been felled for good reason and examines and selects them as the stone carver may choose blocks from different parts of a quarry. Nash also plants and trains trees, pruning and bending them to grow to preordained forms the best known example being the Ash Dome, planted in 1977. Through grafting and periodic fletching (a method in which a trunk is bent by taking a notch out of the bark and heartwood at one side only) Nash has manipulated the trees so that they are beginning to meet to make a rounded canopy.
Guiseppe Penone
Elevazione, 2001
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