Falling Slowly: the three works show

Exercising is vital.

I have been neglecting the blog and writing terribly lately, but in the rush up to Christmas things picked up and distraction is not an option, otherwise mistakes occur.
I have to say that they do occur even without distractions, but that's another story.

Talking about University and MA instead, I would like to report here an "exercise" that our tutor gave us:
Choose three artworks and make a show out of it, completed of an exhibition plan.


That is what I came out with and, I must say, I really like the idea of a small, virtual show.
The title would be Falling Slowly, taken from a song:

Take this sinking boat and point it home / We've still got time

Raise your hopeful voice / you had a choice / You've made it now

Falling slowly sing your melody / I'll sing it loud

Glen Hansard, musician

These would be the artworks on display, in an ordinary, four walls room:

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851 ca, Oil on canvas, 76 x 111 cm

First one to be seen from the entrance: it's quite a large work and has to make its impact. Not to mention the incredible importance that it had for many future generations of painters, so the spot of honor is definitely for it.

Lee Miller, Dead SS Guard in Canal, Dachau, Germany 1945

This small photograph goes in front of the Millais. I am very interested in the dialogue between the two mediums, painting and photography. And that is why the third selected work is:

Yigal Ozeri, Priscilla in Ecstasi, 2006, Oil on canvas, 20 x 26 cm

This one would go on the bottom wall between the two mentioned artworks. 

The text accompanying the show would be this:

John E. Millais’ Ophelia is the depiction of a tragedy: an exceptionally young woman, who was driven crazy by death and loss, lets herself drown while singing until the very last moment. From painting to photograph, Lee Miller’s most famous war reportage picture of a dead SS soldier in Dachau’s canal has often been described by the critics as a contemporary take of the above painting. In the middle, here it stands Yigal Ozeri’s small work: at first sight it does look like another photograph but is, in fact, an incredibly detailed painting; the reprise of Ophelia is, this time, turned from agony to ecstasy, with the techniques of the other two works fused together in a confusing, hybrid result.

The dialogue between the three pieces moves on from the investigated technique to explore the meaning of a fall: according to Eduardo Cycelin, who in turn drew from Deleuze, “falling is the most vivid of sensations, and it is here where one recognizes the feeling of being alive. The staging of death is not its content, but rather indicates the place where the tension of representation is highest and the fall most rapid.”
These look like Apollonian, perfectly represented forms: from the obsessive precision of the Pre-Raphaelite painting to the photograph’s automatic depiction of reality, culminating in the surgical exactness of a painting copied from a photograp; at the same time, they seem to hem in the expression of our Dionysian bestial selves, the intensity of the sensation expressed by gaping, singing mouths and culminating, at the end of the fall, in the self-contemplative silence of death.

It would be nice to hear your opinions: is this a show worth seeing?

Warp and Weft

This is the critical essay accompanying the performance "Scala 1:18" by Marco Dalbosco

Behind the intertwining of textiles the remnants of the history of modern society are concealed. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the middle of the 18th Century, brought about the textile industries that drove people from the countryside to the city, to serve in the factories. The constant and never changing rhythm of factory machines has since lasted for centuries upon centuries.

With a long experience as a worker in an Italian textile factory, Dalbosco, originally from the Trentino region of Northern Italy, has taken on the meanings of factory work, investigating its dynamics. Following Guy Debord’s idea of society as a spectacle, instead of the spectacularization of the production system, the alienation of the individual, the suspension of a thinking being and the unavoidable conformation to the masses underline Dalbosco’s work. Still following Debord’s ideas, the same suspension is applied to the definition of art: every artwork holds a crystallized and closed eternity within it, whereas the direct experience of the ephemeral carries forward the concept of situation. A situation’s flux expires in the space of an action, and in this clever passage suspension is transformed into movement.

Dalbosco’s performance not only engages with but also engrosses the public; there is no account of its fleeting passage but for the films and photographs, today’s techniques of reproduction. In Scala 1:18, five performers, all dressed and with their hair in the same style, move according to the imagined trajectory of a warp and weft. They weave the void, pushing it towards something unknown as if to redeem the mechanics of alienation. It may succeed for a second, yet they can neither go beyond their starting point nor change a predetermined trajectory, as this would result in the breakdown of the machine put into motion. Hence, the dancers/performers are stuck in a never-ending production. A performance that appears to be a metaphor for our own thoughts: the movement may appear free but it is, without our knowing, constructed and constricted.