Category Archives: Photography

Guido van der Werve, Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away (2011)

many photos of a person running around his house

Guido van der Werve, Effugio c, you’re always only half a day away

The artist ran around his house in Finland for 12 hours (65 miles).

From the Wanderlust catalog: “The artist notes in a statement about the work that, ‘Nowadays you can theoretically fly to almost everywhere in the world within twelve hours of less.’ Instead, he spends half a day going nowhere, his running is a futile act.”

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“Public collections:
– De Hallen, Haarlem
– Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Running in circles 1. Lit. to run in a circular path. The horses ran in circles around the corral for their daily exercise. The children ran in circles around the tree.
2. and run around in circles. Fig. to waste one’s time in aimless activity.

Guido van der Werve: a Dutch artist who started long distance running in 2007. Soon after, he got addicted to running. Guido van der Werve ran his first marathon in Helsinki in 2009, and has been running two or three marathon a years ever since. Currently his personal best was achieved at the Berlin Marathon in September 2013, which he ran in 2.57.06.
In 2010, Guido van der Werve ran his first ultra marathon running from P.S.1 in Long Island City, New York, to Rachmaninoff’s grave in Valhalla, New York. On the 8th of June 2011, he ran approximately two and a half marathons around his house in Finland in exactly twelve hours. In the summer of 2011 he finished his first triathlon.

Emotional poverty: suggests a depletion of emotional resources, an absence of emotional health and well-being, a state of lack rather than abundance. Emotional poverty is a state in which a person finds him/herself when he/she lacks the ability to deal with specific emotional circumstances or life in general, without totally breaking down into severe depression. Everyone struggles to deal with difficulties in life, but some simply cannot emotionally cope with difficult circumstances. They turn to escapes, or they may just shut down altogether. When a person finds him/herself in a difficult time, but is not able to process the difficulties and live life, he/she may very well be dealing with emotional poverty. It is defined by a limited range or depth of feelings; interpersonal coldness in spite of signs of open gregariousness.

Half a day: equals twelve hours. The 12-hour clock can be traced back as far as the cultures of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt: both an Egyptian sundial for daytime use and an Egyptian water clock for night time use were found in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep I. Dating back to approx. 1500 BC, these clocks divided their respective times of use into 12 hours each. Nowadays you can theoretically fly to almost everywhere in the world within 12 hours or less.
A day is a unit of time, commonly defined as an interval of 24 hours. It can also be used to describe that portion of the full day during which a location is illuminated by the light of the sun. The period of time measured from local noon to the following local noon is called a solar day.” [credit]

Nevin Aladag, Session (2013)

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“Session is a video triptych shot in Sharjah’s urban areas and desert. In this musical composition, different kinds of Arabic, African and Indian percussion instruments, all found in the United Arab Emirates, are played by the elements – the sand, the sea and the wind.”

From Wanderlust catalog: “Aladag’s work explores the textures of socio-spatial environments and global cultural identity. In Sessions we are thus invited to become not only viewers and listeners, but also voyagers and cartographers, navigating the enigmatic edges of our surrounding environments through surfaces and socially activated gestures.”

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture (1973)

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a person wearing a T-shaped sculpture on their head

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture

Head Sculpture (1973) by Efrat Natan (1947-) has photo documentation that presents a descriptive view of what occurred during the walking performance, and what it looked like from multiple angles. In this work, Natan used a wearable T-shaped sculpture that narrowed the field of view and hearing for the wearer, emphasizing concepts of surveillance and mapping. The photographs showcase both the sculpture and the figure in the street.

“Natan walked through the streets of Tel Aviv, her head covered by a hollow plywood, T-shaped box/mask/sculpture the morning after [the independence day] military parade [in Jerusalem, five months before the outbreak of the Fourth Arab-Israeli War], meld[ing] the language of minimalism, body art and installation art of that period with Christian influences (public self-signifying is a mark of Cain; the act is one of walking the Via Dolorosa).” [credit] The sculpture “can be read as a cross, as an airplane, and even as an angel with outspread wings.” [credit]

“The Minimalism went well with my shyness: it was a kind of mask. The space, which sits strongly in my body, led me to Body Art”, Natan says. Body Art sets up the artist’s body as a central object to be viewed, and puts the tension between the body as subject and as object in the center of the action.” [credit]

“The T-shape is reminiscent of the children’s house in her kibbutz. The sculpture’s visual appearance calls to mind Robert Morris or Charlotte Posenenske. Due to her restricted field of vision, Natan could only see part of the people surrounding her.” [credit] ”

“The kibbutz, where she had lived from her second year of elementary school until the end of her 11th-grade year in high school. The T-shaped structure of the children’s house, the most familiar architectural structure of her life in the kibbutz, contained bedrooms, a dining room, the showers, and a classroom. The long side of the children’s house, with the dining room in the center and the bedrooms on both its sides, faced west.” [credit]

“Head Sculpture (1973) was Efrat Natan’s first street performance to a chance audience. In many ways, this work was a harbinger of an artistic genre of quiet action in the public space, which was recognized thanks to the remaining photographic images. Such works, that combine body art and minimalist sculpture, are formed in a space that is devoid of institutional artistic context, with the very occurrence often affecting the content of the work. Thus, for example, the title of this work was given by two random tourists who were observing Natan walking along Dizengoff and Frishman Streets, her head stuck in a hollow MDF sculpture in the shape of a cross, or the letter X or a plus sign. One tourist said to the other: “Look! A head sculpture!”” [credit]

From the Wanderlust catalog: “Natan draws on her upbringing in her work, which reflects the Israel “religion of labor” and the ideological imperative of “making do with little.”

“The flattened aerial perspective transforms the human form into a sculptural object and suggests modes of surveillance and mapping, which are emphasized by the function of the sculpture itself”

“Her performance suggests a framing and reduction of the senses and the ambiguity inherent in collecting a narrow field of vision and hearing.”

Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

“In the very early spring of 1974, the artist put on herself a cress seeds coat grown earlier (the working method being a reference to the tradition of handiwork and “female labor”), and set out on a Procession through the streets of Warsaw, thus introducing the figure of Mother Nature into a realm specifically belonging to culture. This gesture, primarily referring to the relationship between the feminine and the natural being—also a main focus essential to feminism, albeit differently—present in corporal feminism, was at the same time a political one, an intervention in urban space which manifested a sensitivity extremely different to that officially valid in the People’s Republic of Poland.

The cress seed, a small fast-growing plant with a distinctive smell, became Teresa Murak’s trademark. Co-existing with the artist, in most cases the plant becomes the subject of her examination and the object of care while her art practice connected with the seeds is based on the idea of co-existence.

The action was documented on photos as well as oral history.” [credit]

Mary Mattingly, House and Universe (2013)

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Mary Mattingly, Pull, 2013

“Based on philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book Poetics of Space with a chapter by the same name, House and Universe describes duality and interdependency within local and nonlocal space. House and Universe is an allegorical series of photographs that combined living systems like floating geodesic capsules with bundles of personal objects I had collected and carried with me. When I was making this work in 2013, I had bundled almost everything in my possession into seven large boulder-like forms that could be rolled or pushed.

One photograph shows a place I lived in between a series of storms when the houses were covered in whatever scrap was available. A bundle sculpture is in front of the homes, symbolically connecting climate disasters with consumption.

That title alludes to the story of Sisyphus (the trickster who was tricked in the end) which stuck with me throughout the series, as I dragged these bundles from one place to another, across towns where I was invited to recreate performances, and back into and out of exhibitions and studio spaces.

Another image shows a naked body of a person in my life from behind, with a large boulder of things provocatively titled Life of Objects.

Own it.us was made at the same time: an online library that catalogs the things I bundled and illustrates the pathways of these objects, and how they came into my life. I’ve spent considerable time living in and within ecosystems or shelters I’ve co-built, some pictured in House and Universe, those experiences have asked me to reconsider my surroundings, to vision how collections can function as monuments to consumption, and how, as an inhabitant of NYC, I help make the collective monument called a landfill.

In absurd performances, I would pull the bundles through NYC, Really to emphasize the weight of these objects.

The sculptures’ wrappings are inextricably intertwined like cycles of production – through a chain of formal and informal exchanges, an object is mined, made, distributed, bought, exchanged, eventually thrown away, where it becomes something else. The photographs of these things echo the cobbled together things themselves: pieced together with images of disparate place, time, and space. Like time capsules, they function as obstructions and proposals. They block, interfere, and frame an encounter.”

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla “Land Mark (Foot Prints)” (2001-2002)

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The Land Mark series was a civil disobedience campaign. Over 2001 and 2002, Allora and Calzadilla, together with a group of activists, encroached into one of the United States Navy Bombing range in a beach of Vieques, Puerto Rico. The U.S. Military and NATO have used this location for various military exercises for more than 60 years.

The two artists collaborated with the resistance group to produce rubber shoes that came with distinct soles. The customized shoe soles were engraved with different messages and images that silently yet strappingly put forward the grievances, opinions, and demands of the protestors.

Even though the activists entered the realms of the bombing range illegally, their objective was to bring about their messages under the attention of the military staff employed in that particular military facility. Some of these memoranda were explicit, while the others subtly hinted at their claims. The primary objective, however, was to reclaim the disputed territory, thereby rendering the term landmark with a whole new meaning.

Land Mark discusses the discrimination and forceful acquiring of Vieques by the U.S. Navy, which was initiated during the Second World War and ended only in 2003. The military practiced bombing and secretly tested various technologies, including the hazardous napalm and radioactive shells on the island’s residents during 1969.

Mona Hatoum, Performance Still [from Roadworks exhibition] (1985-95)

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white woman with shoes tied to her ankles walking forward

Mona Hatoum, Performance Still (1985–95)

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Performance Still 1985 records one of three street performances which Hatoum carried out in Brixton for the Roadworks exhibition organised in 1985 by the Brixton Artists Collective. The performance consisted of the artist walking barefoot through the streets of Brixton for nearly an hour, with Doc Marten boots, usually worn by both police and skinheads, attached to her ankles by their laces. Performance Still, printed and published ten years later turns the original documentary photograph of the performance into a work in its own right, and has therefore come to identify this aspect of Hatoum’s practice.

Gallery label, October 2013

Richard Long, “A Line Made by Walking” (1967)

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Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking (1967)

Left a trace
Art made by walking
it was a fundamental interruption of art history: anticipates a widespread interest in the performative

This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.
Although this artwork underplays the artist’s corporeal presence, it anticipates a widespread interest in performative art practice. This piece demonstrates how Long had already found a visual language for his lifelong concerns with impermanence, motion and relativity.

Gallery label, May 2007

“Thus walking—as art—provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded in my work in the most appropriate way for each different idea: a photograph, a map, or a text work. All these forms feed the imagination.” − Richard Long

Rut Blees Luxemburg, “Chance Encounters” (1995)

In the series, Blees Luxemburg photographed herself and another woman as they approached strangers in London’s Square Mile. The photos could be said to create a pattern of behaviors of people who inhabit in this urban landscape.

Her “Chance Encounters” are by no means actual chance encounters. Luxemburg spends a long time with the landscape itself before she snapped every photo. She is patient with her production, resulting in merely more than 20 photos per year[2]. She put a lot of conscious thought into every single shot because she wants her photos to tell stories and generate possibilities of profound thoughts. She wants her audience to think about what may have happened behind the subjects of these photos. In a way, we can say that they tell stories of the habitat without involving the inhabitants.

Another theme of her photography is the beauty of the unexpected. She loves to visit marginalized spaces in the city where we don’t usually consider appealing. She described herself as a Flaneuse while working on Chance Encounters. She wandered in the city and observed for serendipity. These moments come from the ignored part of our life but it reflects so much of our life.

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Melanie Manchot, “Walk (Square)” (2011)

photos of children marching

Walk (Square), 2011, Single Screen, HD, 20′40″

Walk (Square) forms part of an ongoing series of projects investigating collective gestures or situations enacted in public such as walking, dancing or celebrating. The work extends a practice based on an analysis of the construction of individual and collective identities and their performative representation through photography and moving image. Walking en masse—whether it be in processions, pilgrimages, in carnival or protest marches—forms the starting point for this video work made with 1000 Hamburg kids. Drawn into the centre of the city from all directions, with art as the ‘Pied Piper’, the work refers to current socio-political situations of protest as well as to recent research across different disciplines into the meanings of groups and crowds. The piece questions whether the act of walking may constitute a ‘form of speech’. On the square in front of Hamburg’s contemporary art museum a crowd of kids performs a simple walking choreography, based on Bruce Nauman’s video Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967– 1968, creating a shimmering form of movement that brieﬂy produces a moment of collectivity and visual coherence before breaking apart.

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“At first glance, Melanie Manchot’s work shows us what might be a demonstration, a procession or a parade in the centre of Hamburg. The differences between the three, though seldom observed, are crucial. T h e historian David Cannadine has observed that when the French “put their social structures on public display they have parades (which are intrinsically egalitarian), whereas the British have processions (which are innately hierarchical)”. Demonstrations can be either hierarchical or not but, unlike the other two categories, are impossible to fully impose order on.

In ‘Walk (Square)’, a thousand children flock into Hamburg’s central square – with “art as the ‘pied piper”‘, as she puts it. Once inside the square, the children undertake what Manchot calls a “simple walking choreography” based on the Bruce Nauman work ‘Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square’, seen elsewhere in this show. Manchot’s recreation of the earlier work in new form asks us to imagine how occupying public space has changed its meaning between ‘then’ and ‘now’. At the time of Nauman’s work, the purpose of protest was not in doubt, even if its efficacy was not universally accepted. Walking is, here, the means of occupying public space by traversing it. As Manchot puts it, “the act of walking constitutes a ‘form of speech'”. To walk – together – is in certain contexts a political act in the purest sense of the term. It is to ensure that one cannot be simply ‘walked over’ by those in positions of authority. To walk is to create “a moment of collectivity”, in the artist’s words.”