Claire Mangan's 3rd Year Art School Webjournal

Robert Montgomery

The Heart of the World is a short film written and directed by Guy Maddin, produced for the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival.

Modern piece, sophisticated editing

Imagine if the the marble statues of Ancient Rome spurted out paint like a fountain, but the colors reflected the general mood of the empire's populace. MONOLITT, an interactive installation created by Syver Lauritzen and Eirik Haugen Murvol at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, experiments with a similar idea, as a miniature pedestal takes crowdsourced "sentiment analytics" and turns them into physical paint data visualizations.

In a video detailing the project, above, we see users tweet messages like "Annoyed" or "Feeling good," which triggers certain paint colors that then dribble out of the top of a white statue to make a "procedurally generated three-dimensional painting." Though the clip doesn't explain the technology, we'd guess that MONOLITT is equipped with Raspberry Pi and an API that turns the social media data into physical manifestations. 

Though the Oslo-based MONOLITT sculpture trickled out vibrant globs of pink and blue (presumably associated with positive tweets), we wonder what an NYC rendition of the installation would look like. If we had to guess, there'd be so many opinionated, impatient tweets that a Manhattan MONOLITT would look like a messy spray of bleak goop. 

Alter Bahnhof Video Walk; 2012; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller Here is an attempt to document our 2nd piece made for dOCUMENTA (13). Viewers are given an ipod and headphones and asked to follow the prerecorded video through the old train station in Kassel. The overlapping realities lead to a strange, perceptive confusion in the viewers brain. Hard to document and harder to explain. We only present the recorded audio here, but when doing the walk the real sounds mix with the recorded adding another level of confusion as to what is real and what is fiction. Wear headphones to get the full effect of the original binaural recording. This is a 6 minute clip of a 26 minute piece.

This was my submission for Artist Books and Sequential Artforms, University of Tasmania, College of the Arts.

My work attempts to exploit the more often than not narcissistic nature of social media and the practice of “status-making”. I have utilized a program that randomly collects fragments of messages and statuses that I have made on Facebook, which it then jumbles up to try and emulate what kind of status I might make. The results are a mixture of confusing, poetic, chaotic, sad, funny and weirdly ‘spot on’. Through the study of various ‘text-based artists’ I have found a great appreciation for poetry in art, and the aesthetic of the written word; the shape of each letter and the way that they sit within a space.

Inspired by nonsense poetry and the writings from the ‘Spectra’ movement, I sought to create my own aesthetic from something I consider to be quite ugly: narcissism. It is arguable that a healthy amount of narcissism is necessary for a healthy mind, however the internet has seen a surge of this desperate self-glorification that is at once disheartening and hilarious to a cynic like myself. I begin to question whether my work is just a pretentious form of vanity. But I think it has evolved past that point now, and is at the stage of being abstracted enough to fall short of categorisation.

I hand-carved the alphabet from lino. Using these letters, I stamped them in ink and printed each letter on each page with about as much preciousness as an earthquake. Fingerprints and smudges and marks became signs of ownership and presence. The process stained my hands black and made them ache for hours from the force of pressing into the paper and ink. Rather than being mere pixels on the screen, these jumbled up poems have a weight and density that cannot be replicated through a computer. The thickness of the black ink carries with it a sense of permanency and grit. The sentences could be interpreted differently if the letters weren’t as messy and heavy as they are on a stark white page.

The work then becomes a disjointed diary. Contained within each piece, like elements of code, are significant moments and also not so significant moments. Each sentence is nevertheless just as important as the next in the construction of these ‘almost confessionals’. 

"Most visual artists would drink their turpentine for the kind of attention that John Patrick McKenzie is receiving. He has a cult following in San Francisco. He has shown in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. His work has commanded four-figure prices and favorable mention in the press. A New York dealer who wished to represent him recently sought McKenzie out. In the now-trendy branch of the art world known as "outsider art," he is a rising star.

To say McKenzie hasn't let success go to his head is a gross understatement. He isn't aware, for instance, that Michael Stipe of R.E.M. bought several of his works. He doesn't know who collects his art, and he doesn't care what they pay, as shown in this recent exchange:

Do you want to be famous?

"No? Yes? No?"

Do you want money?

"No?"

Why not?

"Because money is hard to get."

McKenzie is 40 years old, and lives with his parents and two younger adult sisters in a Mission District apartment. A painfully shy and obedient son, he hates crowds and usually doesn't speak unless spoken to. McKenzie doesn't see himself as a cultural critic -- the way his fans do -- or a burgeoning talent in the art world. In fact he sometimes signs his work, in the rare case that he does, "John Patrick McKenzie is nobody." And he seems to want to remain that way. Also, he is autistic."

-http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/osama-bin-laden-dislikes-kelloggs-frosted-mini-wheats/Content?oid=2146371

Robert Montgomery

Interview & photographs by Virginie Khateeb & Chloé Le Drezen.

You read handouts pamphlets posters sing to you from up high There’s your morning poetry and for prose there are the newspapers Paperback police thrillers for twenty-five centimes Portraits of the great a thousand and one titles - ‘Zone’, Guillaume Apollinaire, in Alcools – 1913.

Robert Montgomery. 1972. There are pieces of poetry on the floor of the small Parisian studio ; a miniature billboard – ‘All palaces are temporary palaces’. Words are shaping the space ; that’s what the artist’s work is about, moving poetry from the pages to the street – where usually all we see are images, or in locations where it finds a new echo. Poetic resonances on our modern society, and a way to look for a little bit of magic in the mundane.

1990 likes to bring together texts and images. In Robert Montgomery’s practice, words become a work of art on their own.

1990 - What’s your story?

Robert Montgomery – I grew up in Scotland. I went to an Art college in Edinburgh, an old medieval town in the North, and after that I went to live in Houston, Texas, where I was artist resident in a museum of fine arts. It was a great thing because I kind of lived in a museum, but it was also strange because it was in Houston, which is a really strange place. After that, I lived in London for fifteen years. I still live in London, I still have my big studio there. Here, in Paris, is like a weekend studio. Like a garden shed at the bottom of the garden. If you want to be alone, you go to the shed. At first I had a studio in London, Shoreditch for 5 years. I have to say that I’m increasingly enjoying the idea of not living in one place!

Why Paris?

Simply because I really like Paris and I kind of like the art scene here, I think it’s really ‘healthy’ and I like a lot of french artists. I read a lot of french literature, a lot of french poetry. I always read guys like André Breton. When I was a kid, the poem ‘Zone’ by Apollinaire used to be my favourite poem. I also like the tradition of being at the same time a painter, a poet or artist and a writer, which is something I feel very close to. And that’s something that freaks the English out, they like you to be one thing or another, they like you to be in a little box, the English are a little bit afraid of polymaths. I like the atmosphere of Paris from that point of view. Also, I work with gallery Nuke here. We’re now in the gallery studio, I work and sleep here. I’ve worked with Jenny (Mannerheim), the owner of the gallery Nuke, since 2007, which is my longest relationship with a gallerist. It’s really comfortable to be here.

And what about New York? It seems like you have a gallery there too?

Yes, I work with C24 Gallery in Chelsea. It is the opposite scale of Nuke gallery: Nuke is really small while C24 is 800 square meters. I had my first show there last September, which was like doing a museum show. It was a big production and it went really well. My gallery wants me to move to NYC but I’ll see about that!

How did you start your work ? Why did you choose this text-based artwork as your medium instead of for example, painting or photography ?

I did start with painting in the very beginning – at the same time I studied english literature. My first job, when I left art college, was to be a writer for Flash Art Magazine, the italian art magazine. At a certain point, I just sort of merged the two practices into one because it felt natural. I was always really interested in typography, calligraphy and I also wanted to find a way of working that would be interventionist in the city, being able to interrupt the experience you had in it. Billboards are a perfect medium for that. They usually display beautiful and seductive images of artificial beauty, image-based images, but if you make the billboard black and do something with just text it really cuts that discourse and stops it. It becomes this new kind of voice, that’s almost non-spectacular, and by killing the spectacle you get this new space where you can just stop and think and I like this kind of idea. I see my work as coming from artists like Jenny Holzer but also a step closer to traditional modernist poetry.

And when you display those billboards or add spaces in the street what do you expect the public to take from them, what’s your message?

A therapy maybe, because I say quite emotional things sometimes. It’s taking that space away from a commercial space and making it a space of reflection, like a group therapy.

What’s your process of creation? How do you create your texts or poems? I don’t know if you call them texts or poems.

I call them texts. I sort of write them continually and then I edit them down, in fact they come from longer texts. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to write something short enough for it to be a sculpture of 28 words. A billboard can be around 90 words.

Is that your rule, no more than 90 words?

With more than a hundred words the billboard starts to not look good graphically. The optimum to make them graphically correct is between 80 and 95 words, then the font stays the right size, etc. So yes, I write longer texts, longer poems and then I cut them down and reduce them by trying to keep some of the good images with as much economy of words as possible. And that economy of word thing, I think, is a thing that you see a lot in modernist writers like Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath or Samuel Beckett. You say complex things in a really simple way.

I’m fascinated by the way we have to do magical things but get bored of them very quickly. I find our capacity for that kind of frightening.

Do you build everything yourself?

Yes, I do, in the London studio. Lucy, my studio manager, works there all the time so we build most of the sculptures there. I don’t like to just send them out to a factory and have them delivered finished, I like to actually work on it with my hands.

Even the neon billboards?

Yes, however not much of the work is in neon, it’s almost all in low voltage LED which are this new kind of ecological lighting that they are developing to replace street lights. The lights I use consume 10% of the power for the same incandescence. Quite often, if the sculpture ends up living outside, I use solar panels. I really like that because when I use solar panels, the sculpture becomes sensitive to the weather. If it’s a sunny day, the lights are going to be super bright and if it’s an overcast day, it’s quieter, which is interesting. I build those too. Even the one for the India Biennale, which was 44 meters long!

You talk a lot about religion, death, ghosts and magic in your art. Are you a spiritual person? What’s your view on spirituality?

I used to be very religious. When I was a teenager, I was like a born-again Christian. When I was thirteen, I used to go around and preach about Jesus to other kids. But now I’m more fascinated by the ways we find these days to replace God. I wonder what would replace what God uses to do as a kind of a therapeutic presence. It’s not so much about being interested by a fixed idea of God but more by trying to find new forms of what God can be.

What inspires you?

I read quite a lot, I don’t read everything, I read quite deeply in quite narrow fields I think. I’m really inspired by the way that we feel and we think in the mediatic lives that we have. What is the poetry in the way we live life. I’m interested in trying to uncover the idea of the sacred in everybody or the magic in the mundane. I’m fascinated by the way we have to do magical things but get bored of them very quickly. I find our capacity for that kind of frightening.

For example, if you read the poem by Apollinaire which I was talking about earlier, which is from 1913, called ‘Zone’: in that poem he’s looking forward to the 20th century, which he’ll never see because he’s going to die, but he almost hallucinates the century. In that poems planes are this mystical thing – flying is a mystical thing, and I think it is magic to be a human being in the sky and to not be dead. We spent hundred of years to build this miraculous thing and as soon as we did them we just got bored of them really quickly. By 1970, people were just bored of the airplanes and now we get on them and just complain about the food, the leg room. You’re in the sky eating a dead bird, people have to understand that it is a really weird dark magic. We have to stop taking things for granted and be more sensitive to the actual existential meaning of things.

The angels vault past the all-time greatest pole vaulters Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana Gather around the first airplane Or make way for the elevation of those who took communion The priests rise eternally as they raise the host And the airplane touches down at last its wings outstretched From heaven come flying millions of swallows - ‘Zone’, Guillaume Apollinaire, in Alcools – 1913.

Speaking of our modern society, your art is getting more and more famous especially on the Internet. How do you feel about your art being reappropriated by other people through tattoos or social networks for instance?

I really like that. You know that 60s political slogan ‘messages to be disseminated by any means possible’. What the internet did with my work is really amazing because suddenly, it has a life of is own without me. I’m fascinated by the internet as a medium for poetry, for writing, for sharing. That’s basically how my work started to spread, when I made my website, like 5 or 6 years ago. You can just drag and share the images and that’s what people started to do.

What project are you working on at the moment?

I’m starting a project with with Each x Other, the clothing brand, to make my work affordable. They make collections based on artists work and it’s starting with artists from gallery Nuke. We’re trying to make affordable editions. Not just prints but also mini version of my pieces, like 60 x 70cm, which are also much more affordable than the original pieces. They’re sold at Colette. I’m interested in democratising the distribution. So that’s the next long term project.

Then I’m working on a project with The Office Gallery, in Cyprus. We’re doing a project in a very interesting location: they have their gallery in this amazing part of the old town which is 20 meters from the United Nation Buffer Zone, which separates Greek Cyprus and Turkish Cyprus. I love that idea, that a bit of land is no country. I’m also getting interested in working in places like that, that have an interesting location and atmosphere. Also, I’m still trying to do some black silk flags in NYC, on the sides of buildings. I really want to do a really big black silk flag over the gigantic Calvin Klein billboard on Houston Street. I wanted to do that for my show at C24 in September but it’s difficult to achieve. However, I’m determined. I did a piece for the ‘depart du tour du France’ on July 6. In April we planted 20 hectares of wildflowers and by july 6 when it started, the poems were made of flowers.

Talking about fashion, your work with Each x Other, what is your relationship to it?

Dior Homme bought a sculpture for their store in NYC but we didn’t do anything together. Then I did a collaboration with Surface to Air, two years ago, clothes with my texts on them. Then Each x Other started and took over. Jenny’s idea is almost to use fashion as a medium. Fashion as a medium the way a magazine is a medium. It is an interesting perception. She uses fashion as a communication tool with a medium value more than an object value. It is basically hijacking that medium for displaying an art message and it has worked much more effectively than I thought it would. I also hijacked magazines few years ago, replacing the cover or a page with black and texts. It is part of working with fashion for me. And, it is a bit less illegal than hijacking billboards, I get into less trouble! I like fashion, I like clothes but I think you should keep it in perspective.

That’s a real example of recognising the magic in the mundane: it is magical to go to sleep on the feathers of birds. You’re sleeping on things that travelled 10,000 feet in the sky. I feel like sleeping on their feathers must bring somehow their memory of the sky. I feel that.

Keeping things in perspective – that’s something you did in Dresden. Could you tell us a little bit more about it?

Yes, I’m showing two pieces for this project. The first one is a building built in the 1850’s in Dresden, on the entrance that only the king could use, only the royal family, for the rest of the people it was an horrible entrance. It is kind of celebrating the death of empires, the death of kings. Only half of the piece is there: ‘You walk on the bones of the kings and their bodies fertilize your gardens’. If you want to see the second half of the poem you have to travel 200km into the East old farmland, 45km outside of Berlin. The contrast is that the second half of the text is on a really peasant building where they use to keep the chicken – no roof. But the really positive message is on this building: ‘You sleep on the feathers of birds and their flights fill your dreams’.

That’s a real example of recognising the magic in the mundane: it is magical to go to sleep on the feathers of birds. You’re sleeping on things that travelled 10,000 feet in the sky. I feel like sleeping on their feathers must bring somehow their memory of the sky. I feel that.

Last question, do you have any dreams or wishes for the future?

I don’t think I have massive personal ambition apart from being able to do my work, really. I just want to be able to do my work and find a sense of peace – which is not as easy as you think.

1990 Magazine

In 1916 a slender volume of poetry titled Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments introduced the Spectric school of poetry to the world. It joined many other experimental schools of poetry then currently in vogue, such as the Imagists, the Futurists, and the Idealists. 

The Spectric poems were rather bizarre and nonsensical, but were also fun, full of life, and decked out with colorful (albeit illogical) imagery. Lines such as these were typical: 

I have seen the grey stars marching, And the green bubbles in wine, And there are Gothic vaults of sleep.

The Spectric philosophy, as explained by its founders Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish, was to embrace the immediacy of experience, even if that experience could not be expressed rationally. Soon Spectrism had attracted a growing band of followers.  Despite repeated requests for meetings and interviews, the two founders, Morgan and Knish, never appeared in public. This led to rumors of a hoax, rumors that were confirmed in 1918 when the poet Witter Bynner admitted that he and his friend Arthur Davison Ficke were the true creative forces behind Spectric poetry.  Bynner explained that their goal had been to parody the overly pompous experimentalism that was the fad of the moment, and so they had invented the free-spirited characters of Morgan and Knish. However, many critics pointed out that the imposture appeared to have unleashed Bynner and Ficke's own inner creative energies. Not only was the Spectric poetry not that bad, but also the poetry that Bynner and Ficke published subsequently was lighter and more playful in tone, as if it had been infused with the energy of Spectrism.

Links and References

Smith, William Jay. (2000). The Spectra Hoax. (reprint of 1961 ed.). Story Line Press.

Work thus far for Artist Books and Sequential Artforms. Uses randomly generated segments of posts and messages made and sent from social media.

These are selected, then printed by hand using hand-carved lino alphabet pieces.