Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber from Laure Vermeersch on Vimeo.

Bombay Beach (2012)

Julien Temple, Requiem for Detroit (2010)

The Ethics of Dust

Series of installations by Jorge Otero-Pailos undertaken to conserve pollution.

• Jorge Otero-Pailos website
• Interview with Otero-Pailos
• Another interview

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)

Wrecked piers, empty swimming pools, drought, gangs of street kids, it's all here.

'Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor.'

--J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Clearly what Ballard needed was a board.

• Good pool skating stuff at Blue Tile Obsession.
• Also see Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Berg, 2001).

A Dry Porridge

Jean Arp, quoted in Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Order and Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 54:

About 1930 the pictures torn by hand from paper came into being. Human work now seemed to me even less than piece-work. It seemed to me removed from life. Everything is approximate, less than approximate, for when more closely and sharply examined, the most perfect picture is a warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge, a dismal moon-crater landscape. What arrogance is concealed in perfection. Why struggle for precision, purity, when they Jean Arp can never be attained. The decay that begins immediately on completion of the work was now welcome to me. Dirty man with his dirty fingers points and daubs at a nuance in the picture. This spot is henceforth marked by sweat and grease. He breaks into wild enthusiasm and sprays the picture with spittle. A delicate paper collage of watercolor is lost. Dust and insects are also efficient in destruction. The light fades the colors. Sun and heat make blisters, disintegrate the paper, crack the paint, disintegrate the paint. The dampness creates mould. The work falls apart, dies. The dying of a picture no longer brought me to despair. I had made my pact with its passing, with its death, and now it was part of the picture for me. But death grew and ate up the picture and life. This dissolution must have been followed by the negation of au action. Form had become Unform, the Finite the Infinite, the Individual the Whole.

Edgar Lissel

German artist Edgar Lissel uses microorganisms to produce images in petri dishes, utilising the light-seeking behaviour of cyanobacteria as a photographic technique.

The series Bakterium – Wasser licht(et) Geschichte uses the Kilian submarine bunker in Kiel (now demolished) to consider the relationship between architecture, power, and ruins. The partially destroyed bunker is evident in the shapes emerging from the petri dishes.

The text below is from Lissel's website:

Bacterium

Bacteria - water light ( s ) history ( 1999/2000),
Bacterium - self portrayal (1999/2000) , and
Bacterium - Vanitas (2000/01 ).

All works of the three series are products of a special procedure, based on the property of certain bacteria to orientate themselves towards light. Using this dependency on light , bacterial cultures that were subjected Lissel kept in petri dishes filled with transparent agar solution to pictures. As a result darken , the bacteria grew and aligned themselves to the pictures in a way Comparable to photographic processes, where those spots on photographic paper that receive light, whereas those that are little exposed remain bright.

For bacteria - water light ( s ) history , photo negative were projected onto the bacterial cultures in classical photographic fashion. The pieces of the bacterium - Vanitas series, in contrast , are Comparable to photo grams : The objects were placed between the petri dish and the source of light , which was shining from below. The resulting images were then photographed and enlarged to about 80 cm ? (31.5 in.) . They reveal themselves in an ephemeral state, a fleeting moment in the organic cycle of growth and decay . Shadowy and fragile , they recall the early days of photography. They are also, however , products of the modern laboratory, documented and presented like a scientific experiment, in uniform shapes confined by the scientist's petri dishes.

For bacteria - self- portrayal, Lissel took microscopic pictures of the structures of single bacteria and projected onto petri dishes filled them with bacterial solution. As a consequence , the bacterial cultures reproduced their own micro -images . Normally indiscernible to the human eye, a multitude of organisms here can be observed creating a " super sign " of themselves , with their livelihood being a part of their self -portraits .

The series bacterium - water light ( s ) history comments on the potential transformation of architecture in ruins. As an example, Lissel used the submarine bunker " Kilian "in Kiel (which then stood in ruins, but was detonated later). The contours of the gigantic , partially destroyed bunker are vaguely visible. Some parts seem to drown in the water like a shipwreck , while others still stand tall , even if affected by decay , with somber , cave -like windows and concrete walls that seem to be several meters thick. The decline of the building counterposes with the gaining and fading of its symbolic representation in the petri dishes.

The transitoriness of all matter is a central theme of the third series , bacteria - Vanitas . Here Lissel employed classical still life motives such as fruit or animal corpses , whose disintegration is reflected in the petri dishes. The silhouettes of the bright objects are distinctly visible, yet one can also see that the bacteria started growing even in those places that received little light , such that they will eventually " outgrow "their own image. The representation fading away, however, symbolizes the coming death of the object itself.

In this complex field testing of references and counter-references , Lissel juxtaposes three time levels: first, there is the object which once existed but has since virtually dilapidated or decayed . The second level is that of the reproductions, of images that existed for a couple of days by means of bacterial movements , set up in a laboratory. The third one is created by photography, which captures those ephemeral moments and keeps them alive for a long time.

James Benning and Spiral Jetty

Présentation de Spiral Jetty et casting a glance au Jeu de Paume from Independencia on Vimeo.

Coastal Erosion in Norfolk

Spiral Exhalations

From Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833):

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound. One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the duskyred appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below — not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears — but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled with a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

Partially Buried

Preparing for his stay at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau paid a visit to an Irish railroad worker, James Collins, with a view to buying Collins’s shanty for boards. “It was of small dimensions,” Thoreau comments, but not much could be seen of it since dirt was “raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap” (29). Striking a bargain with Collins, Thoreau unearths the cabin the next morning, dismantles it and removes the materials to the pondside.

Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed was created at Kent State University in Ohio during an arts festival in January 1970. The shed, part of an abandoned farm owned by the university and used as a storage space for dirt, gravel and firewood, had twenty loads of earth from a construction site piled on top of it until the central beam snapped from the pressure. The outmoded farm building and the forms of social and economic organisation it invokes are almost but not entirely obliterated by the overturning of earth by modern machinery. The shed becomes an instant ruin, a memorial to the Jeffersonian conviction that the small-scale, self-sustaining agrarian community might be the foundation of American national virtue. Sitting in his own shed in 1845, Thoreau had an idea that such a notion was already history. The once sacred art of husbandry, he complains, is now “pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely [...]. By avarice and selfishness, a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber” (103).

“It’s a Mud Mud Mud World” read the headline of a dismissive article in the local press following the completion of Partially Buried Woodshed (RS, 307). Mud had preoccupied Smithson since at least 1968, though it was too cold at Kent State for mud to flow and earth had to be used instead. In an essay for Artforum, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), Smithson envisions a disintegration of the “earth’s surface and the figments of the mind,” with “[v]arious agents, both fictional and real, somehow trad[ing] places with each other –– one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call ‘abstract geology’” (RS, 100). “Muddy thinking” for Smithson does not mean confused thinking. Instead, mud works as a solvent that collapses the distinction between mental and physical processes to produce a kind of materialist negative capability, with thought a form of entropic power that acts upon secure knowledge and wears it down: "One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason .[...] This movement seems motionless, yet it crushes the landscape of logic under glacial reveries" (RS, 100).

References

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods (Radford, VA: Wilder, 2008).
Flam, Jack, ed. Robert Smithson: Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).