#dmsa

Trisha Donnelly

Listen out for bells chiming through the Tanks in the artist’s untitled work. The source of the recordings have not been revealed by the artist, and they do not ring out at even times, but instead mark an unexpected moment, inviting the encounterer to pause and consider the passing of time. 

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Hermitos Children, the pilot episode, 2008

Sit on a multi-person beanbag stitched out of costumes from the video work in front of you. The artist arranges amateur performers in an almost pornographic mock soap opera. 

Nice video of the artist in her studio here:

Media Networks

Cildo Meireles

Cildo Meireles, Babel, 2001 

A stack of second hand radios, each tuned to a different international station, spurts out a multitude of languages. The tower is named after the biblical myth - God was angry at his people for building a tower almost reaching the heavens, so punished the builders by inventing different languages so they could no longer communicate. 

Meireles is an important conceptual artist, one of the younger members of Brazil’s neo-concrete movement. His seminal works address censorship and oppression during the Brazilian military government, a coup propped up by the US which removed the leftist government in 1964 and ruled through terror and dictatorship till 1985, notoriously killing students and disappearing dissidents. The artist printed names of the disappeared on Coca Cola bottles and asked ‘Who Killed Herzog?’ on banknotes that he returned to circulation, thereby hijacking the government system. 

Read more about US support of coups in the Southern Cone in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Whilst you’re at it, also read Angela Davis on the Military Industrial Complex. 

There’s a longer documentary on the artist here, beginning with a view of the making of Babel. 

Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013

This work is concerned with privacy in the digital age. We are constantly visible - CCTV recording our every move, networks recording and selling our browsing data. This tongue in cheek video recommends surreal strategies for opting out.

Interesting article by the artist In Defense of the Poor Image here: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Interview with the artist about the work here:

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik, Bakelite Robot, 2002

Pioneer of video art and Fluxus artist extraordinaire - Paik played with the emerging sensation of TV, stacking and reformatting monitors to create psychedelic installations. Paik collaborated with John Cage, and was a key player in Fluxus. For a period of time, Paik kept a pet violin, which trailed after him on a lead, enacting the Fluxus vision of liberating music from the confines of bourgeois traditional practices. 

More on Paik’s work with video:

Art of Participation

Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra, 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, Spain. December 2000, 2000

The artist pays four sex workers, in heroin, to have a line tattooed on their backs. In selling the action and documentation thereof to the art institution, Santiago makes the institution and viewer complicit in this unethical transaction, highlighting the inevitability of exploitation in the art world and, more generally, capitalism. 

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0, 1974

In a dramatic action, the artist assembled a table of objects, from food to weapons, and allowed the audience to enter the gallery and do anything they wished to her using these objects. In one scenario, the exhibition was closed by the gallery after a visitor pointed a loaded gun at the artist. Abramovic’s work often involves a level of risk or, as in Light/Dark, pain - testing the endurance of the body. 

Insights from the artist here:

Collective Actions

A group that invited the audience to board a train to outside of Moscow centre to witness a sometimes bizarre happening. The audience’s conversations and interpretations following the experience became the artwork. 

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/collective-actions-haensgen-russian-world-t14345

Turbine Hall

Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno, Anywhen, 2016

A small room in the corner of the Turbine Hall houses a complex machine reading the movements of micro organisms, turning them into instructions which alter the lights, sounds and visuals throughout the Turbine Hall. 

The artist explains: