PILVI TAKALA

The Trainee:

http://www.pilvitakala.com/thetrainee01.html

“The Trainee has been produced in a collaboration with Deloitte and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. In order to realize the project, the artist was working for a month as a trainee “Johanna Takala” in the marketing departement of Deloitte where only few people knew the true nature of the project.

During the month long intervention an initially normal-seeming marketing trainee starts to apply peculiar working methods. Gradually she shifts from the position of someone others believe normal to the object of avoidance and speculation. The videos and slideshow reveal a spectrum of ways of looking after the odd member in a group. Sincere interest and bewildered amusement is juxtaposed with demands directed at the superior regarding the strangely behaving worker.

We see the trainee sitting at her workstation in the consults’ open plan office space or in the tax department library all day doing nothing. One of the videos shows her spending an entire day in an elevator. These acts or rather the absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable and force the colleagues to search for solutions and come up with explanations for the situation.

Masking laziness in apparent activity and browsing Facebook during working hours belong to the acceptable behavioural patterns of a work community. However, sitting in front of an empty desk with your hands of your lap, thinking, threatens the peace of the community and breaks the colleagues’ concentration. When there is no ready method of action, people initially resort to avoidance, which fails to set their mind at ease when the situation drags on.

What provokes people in non-doing alongside strangeness is the element of resistance. The non-doing person isn’t committed to any activity, so they have the potential for anything. It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a threat to order. It is easy to root out any on-going anti-order activity, but the potential for anything is a continual stimulus without a solution.”

Event in Garnet Hill:

Click to access event%20on%20garnethill.pdf

2005

A harcover book
32 pages in colour
size A5
200 copies
Published by Pilvi Takala and Finnish Academy of Fine Arts

see PDF

Event on Garnethill is based on a performance in January 2004 in Glasgow, where the artists dressed up in a catholic school uniform and spent time on the streets among the school kids.

Distributed in British public libraries, covering all libraries in Glasgow. Some copies are in Finnish libraries and private collections.

Above from the website: http://www.pilvitakala.com/index2.html

 

 

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES: MAINTENANCE ART WORKS 1969–1980

“The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939 in Denver, USA) concerns the everyday routines of life. In 1969, following the birth of her first child, Ukeles wrote her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” as a challenge to the oppositions between art and life, nature and culture, and public and private. Her work looked to highlight otherwise overlooked aspects of social production and questions, still very relevant today, the hierarchies of different forms of work, especially of housework and low-wage labour. Ukeles was interested in how artists could use the concept of transference to empower people to act as agents of change and stimulate positive community involvement toward ecological sustainability. Since 1977, Ukeles has acted as artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation and realised radical public art as public culture in a system which serves and is owned by the entire population.”

http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/mierle-laderman-ukeles-maintenance-art-works-196920131980

Written a year after the birth of her first child, Ukeles’ Manifesto calls for a readdressing of the status of maintenance work both in the private, domestic space, and in public. Through this she attempts to break down the barriers between what we think of as ‘work’ and what can be labeled ‘artwork’.

The Roof is on Fire

“Suzanne Lacy’s career as an artist, educator, and activist spans multiple decades and major movements in contemporary art history (Feminist Art, New Genre Public Art [a phrase coined by the artist], and, more recently, Social Practice). It offers one of the most important models we have of a practice that explores complex social dynamics and political issues while never losing site of art as a source of imagination and as a catalyst of change.” http://blog.art21.org/2012/11/13/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-with-suzanne-lacy/#.U87hLVbi5g0

Between 1991-2000, Suzanne Lacy worked with a broad coalition of activists, artists, youth and politicians under the acronym TEAM (Teens + Educators + Artists + Media Makers) to produce large-scale projects that included youth workshops, media intervention, and institutional programs and policies. Socially oriented public performances with youth in Oakland, California challenged negative media images. Funded in part by the Surdna Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Oakland’s Kids First Initiative and many others, this was one of the most developed explorations of community, youth leadership, and public policy in visual arts practice.

Suzanne Lacy, Chris Johnson, and Annice Jacoby produced TEAM’s first large-scale performance art event, which featured 220 public high school students in unscripted and unedited conversations on family, sexuality, drugs, music, neighborhoods and the future as they sat in 100 cars parked on a rooftop garage. This one-hour documentary by Craig Franklin aired on KRON Channel 4, the Bay Area’s local NBC affiliate.

The Modern Procession

“In it’s form and title The Modern Procession refers to the long tradition of image processions.”

Francis Ays’s procession of art was led, to the sound of a Latin brass band, by a riderless horse which added a funerary flavour to the event-performance/ an unmounted horse often leads buried cortège a in military tradition.

“To celebrate the moving of The Museum of Modern Art from it’s midtown Manhattan location to MoMA QNS, to welcome MoMAs most sacred icons to the Periphery, come and revere The Modern Procession on it’s journey to Queens on June 23rd. For they bring pleasure, peace and sometimes redemption”…. -Frances Alys, New York City, 2002

Francis Alys, The Modern Procession, Published: 2004, the public art fund

Park bench postcode

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/oct/21/raekhaprasad

“Light, airy and centrally located, it has the making of a des res. However, the lack of a few essential features in this residence – namely walls and a roof – would present even the most tenacious of estate agents with a challenge.

Welcome to Park Bench, Portland Square, Bristol BS2 8QD – the official address of six rough sleepers.

Since 1990 all NHS patients have needed a postcode to be able to permanently register with a doctor. The bureaucracy has made it difficult for rough sleepers to receive medical treatment.

Montpelier health centre, a practice in inner-city Bristol that has many rough sleepers, came up with the idea of using the bench as a fixed address to allow homeless people to register with a GP.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/1371139/Bench-not-suitable-address-for-homeless.html

“A HEALTH centre was told last night to abandon the practice of using a park bench as an address for homeless people.

The bench, in a square surrounded by Georgian houses, has long been a favourite haunt of down-and-outs. For the past 10 years Montpelier Health Centre in Bristol has been combating NHS red tape by registering homeless people there.

However, following local publicity, Avon health chiefs ordered the health centre to stop using the address of Park Bench, Portland Square, Bristol BS2 8QD. Instead, homeless patients will be registered at No Fixed Address, c/o Montpelier Health Centre, Bristol.

The instruction to drop the park bench address followed a report in a local newspaper in which a homeless man was quoted as saying he was insulted by the bogus address. Tony Palmer, practice manager of the health centre, said: “It is rather sad that a less poetic address may now be necessary but the last thing we want to do is cause offence to anybody.”

Staff at the inner city practice have been faced with the dilemma of either excluding homeless people from medical care or inventing an address that would satisfy the NHS computer system. If a patient is not registered at an identifiable address the money to pay for their treatment will not reach the GP.”

Its hard to know if the bench still has its own postcode from what I can find online, these reports explain the idea behind it though, a clever idea. Its concerning that following a comment made by ONE man to a newspaper there was calls for the postcode to be removed.

Work in Progress: Considering Utopia

http://www.artpractical.com/review/work-in-progress-considering-utopia/

“The three artists in Work in Progress: Considering Utopia at the Contemporary Jewish Museum offer varying perspectives on attaining a social and pastoral golden age. The works are united by a shared interest in collective activity. Elisheva Biernoff’s and Ohad Meromi’s installations in painting and sculpture invite audience participation, and Oded Hirsch presents videos and photos at once documenting and fictionalizing communal labor on a kibbutz.”

The exhibition as a whole positions art as a space to think through, test, and potentially develop goal-oriented models of human interaction. Biernoff, Meroni, and Hirsch present complex works that affirm a desire for peaceful collective labor and a sustainable group relationship to the land and one’s neighbors, while still acknowledging that realizing social dreams relies on negotiating participation and the various goals of others’.”

Text and image from: http://www.artpractical.com/review/work-in-progress-considering-utopia/

Christoph Schlingensief – PLEASE LOVE AUSTRIA – FIRST AUSTRIAN COALITION WEEK

Thank you Tess for telling me about this work.

 

Picture from the performance “Please love Austria” (Image: Baltzer)

“Amid intense public interest, twelve participants introduced by Schlingensief as asylum-seekers spend one week in a cordoned-off, CCTVed shipping container complex next to the Vienna opera house. Blue flags representing Austria’s far-right populist FPÖ party are hoisted on top of a container.

As onlookers applaud ambiguously, a sign bearing the slogan “Ausländer raus” (“Foreigners out”) is unveiled and then attached to the container together with the logo of the Kronenzeitung, Austria’s biggest-selling tabloid.

Excerpts from speeches by FPÖ chairman Jörg Haider resound across Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz. With clear references to the BIG BROTHER TV show, the Austrian population are asked to phone in and vote out inhabitants, the two least popular of which are ejected each day. Votes can also be cast via the Internet, where Webfreetv broadcasts events from the container live – 24 hours a day for a period of six days.”

Text and image above from:

http://www.schlingensief.com/projekt_eng.php?id=t033

“In a disarming manner, Schlingensief’s practice holds a mirror to western society. By scratching off the cheap veneer that camouflages the ruthless capitalist democracy at reality’s core, he stripped the so-called West down to its fears, obsessions, and banal cruelties manifest in power and possession. The artist seriously challenged the world of Contemporary Art as it became known to us as a field of hegemonic practice developed in parallel to global neoliberalism over the last 20 years. Having resisted the field’s normalizing tendencies, working against its “business-as-usual” mode, and tirelessly advocating for the undoing of the dominant consensus in both art and politics, Schlingensief’s legacy can be seen as a provocative proposition—an urgent appeal even—to speculate about the possibility of another future.”

Text above from: http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/christoph-schlingensief-fear-at-the-core-of-things/

Catherine Yass: High Wire

http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2008/high_wire/about_the_project/high_wire

Ninety metres above the ground, a thin metal wire stretches between three tower blocks in North Glasgow’s Red Road. A solitary figure steps off the edge of the building, moving slowly and gracefully, step by silent step, along the wire…

Longlining

Longlining involves rigging a slackline over long distances (usually 30m+).  When slackliners rig a longline to see how far they can walk it is about endurance of the body and mind.  Slackliners also rig longlines within their length comfort zone to enjoy the different dynamics achievable through different rigging techniques.

Text from: http://ukslackline.com/code-of-conduct/

Funambulism

 

Philippe Petit, New York, on 7 August 1974

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tightrope_walking – Acrobats maintain their balance by positioning their centre of mass directly over their base of support, i.e. shifting most of their weight over their legs, arms or whatever part of their body they are using to hold them up. When they are on the ground with their feet side by side, the base of support is wide in the lateral direction but narrow in the sagittal (back-to-front) direction. In the case of highwire-walkers, their feet are parallel with each other, one foot positioned in front of the other while on the wire. Therefore, a tightwire walker’s sway is side to side, their lateral support having been drastically reduced. In both cases, whether side by side or parallel, the ankle is the pivot point.

A wire-walker may use a pole for balance or may stretch out his arms perpendicular to his trunk in the manner of a pole. This technique provides several advantages. It distributes mass away from the pivot point, thereby increasing the moment of inertia. This reduces angular accelerationbecause a greater force is required to rotate the performer over the wire. The result is less tipping. In addition the performer can also correct sway by rotating the pole. This will create an equal and opposite torque on the body.

Tightwire-walkers typically perform in very thin and flexible, leather-soled slippers with a full length suede or leather sole to protect the feet from abrasions and bruises while still allowing the foot to curve around the wire. Though very infrequent in performance, amateur, hobbyist, or inexperienced funambulists will often walk barefoot so that the wire can be grasped between the big and second toe. This is more often done when using a rope, as the softer and silkier fibres are less taxing on the bare foot than the harder and more abrasive braided wire.