studio 8 June 2020


Back in Canada, but the Munich Project continues.

THANK YOU:

Dr. Christiane Menzfeld
Brigitte Schwörer
Lisa Breyer
Dr. Sabine Suppmann
Ieulian Iermak
Mahesh Lingaraju
Songwei He
Albrecht Herrmann
Thomas Linsmayer
Martin Rohmer
Carmen Nöhbauer
Ingeborg Ott
Päivi Naskali-Schrank
Uli Schaarschmidt
Mary Ann Wilson
Heather MacIsaac
Else Gebauer
 


This series is called Run Vitruvian. It is a sequential adaptation of Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man, which represented the body as the measure of nature through math and architecture, seen through the lens of Renaissance perspective. My running figure places the body in a world defined by the constantly evolving frame of reference set by the New Physics and New Genetics, a world where physical and biological boundaries that were once fixed are now mutable and malleable. Our current world circumstances keep bearing this out. 

What they study at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry is not strictly visible. The nature of proteins, molecules, cells, viruses, are not seen but deciphered from instrument data. My running figure functions as a reference framework that is able to picture any varied relation of the body to its surroundings and circumstances. Examples:

• The balance between foreign but symbiotic resident microbes and our own cells.
  
• The aerodynamics around our bodies that allow us to repel airborne viruses.
  
• The non-stop replenishment of our cells, and how the body constantly reconstructs itself.
  
• The body as a system of proteins fuelled by chemical fires, operating in a world that is
  fundamentally a swarm of electrons.
  

 

RUN VITRUVIAN 1 

4.2020  oil on canvas  183 cm X 152.5 cm  

RUN VITRUVIAN 2

4.2020  oil on canvas  183 cm X 152.5 cm   

HAIR PLANE is a nine-minute video shot during Air Canada flight 844 from Munich to Toronto on 23 March 2020, one of the last before the grounding of airplanes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The footage was edited and uploaded to Vimeo the next day.

We had just ended an artist residency and exhibition at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (BIOC) in Munich, and were preparing for another at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics when the world turned a corner and we had no choice but to leave Germany before a possible shutdown of travel, and visa restrictions.

We were very close to the centre of events because BIOC is a world centre of studies in molecules, bacteria, proteins, and viruses. The scientists are at the front lines of studying the   nearly invisible world that makes up the very  substance of our lives. So the work I made over the months that the pandemic was coming into view was directly related to the ongoing information I was receiving from experts.

The content of HAIR PLANE is an extension of the ideas behind the work I did at BIOC.

I shot several hour's worth of footage over the nine hour trip, which I boiled down to nine minutes. My challenge was the technical-aesthetic demand at the centre of minimalist art: how do you take a very small amount of visual material and shape it into a form that expands its meanings into something universal. How do you tweak a time-based flow of images so that a viewer is moved to forget about their expectations and to interpret the information they're seeing as a new form of narrative whose implications transcend their simplicity.

As usual, my friend bernard siller penetrated the whole thing right away. I would wish for every artist to get such a discerning review of their work. He wrote:
"a concentrated comment on ‘hairline hygiene‘  … fits all ways since cabin window can be an indexical for shape of the human skull … you exhibit eminent patience and control in the shooting … which i take to be evidence of the meditative powers infused by that ‘just about to have your ass saved‘ feeling ! … unfortunately all those poor refugee microbes inhabiting that dead hair may not have made it off the plane as efficiently as you did … and just imagine that one of them may have been a cure for cancer ! … i’d surely enter it under ‘ short epic '.
 
HAIR PLANE  A film from the end of the old world

Here's the link to Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/400407688

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