So, I've gone a little while without a personal update. But I’ll let that come after Icelandic Love Corporation. Look for it in the “IN OTHER NEWS.”
For now, let’s focus on that black swan up there, which you can see at the gallery Kling og Bang in Reykjavík. Or maybe not, since Kling og Bang’s website doesn’t allow me to read too much into it, other than:
“A black swan is a metaphor for events that are unexpected. These events are high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare. Afterwards it seems that they could perhaps have been predicted. It is a question of reading into the signs around us, such as when the house cat licks itself and kicks its hind leg into the air. Then you can expect a visitor.”
You don’t have to go too far in reading this single work to know what it relates too. The effects of the financial crisis can be seen everywhere in Iceland – but considering the exhibit features an animated film alongside this portentous sculpture and surely others, it seems the ladies of the Icelandic Love Corporation have not lost their carefully-pinned humor.
So I’ll let you in on them a little bit more since I (sadly) cannot be in Iceland to see this.
The Corp. is made up of three artists - Eirún Sigurðardóttir , Jóní Jónsdóttir og Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir – who fill the void of strong, feminine perspectives in the Icelandic arts scene (but then Germaine Greer might lop my head off for that). They perform, they sculpt, they film and they install, whatever is most necessary to conveying their artistic messages – and isn’t that really where the future of art lies?
They’re known for targeted and satirized social criticism, dissecting areas from women’s roles to the predatory nature of corporate honchos. But one of my favorite shows, “Places of Worship” (2001), asks us to consider the things that make up ritual and sacred space, and to what degree those actually relate to spirituality.
“Without You” (above) consists of a haphazard coffin, clumsily placed on construction-like stilts, but the structure of which is painted pure white, as if the coffin is a human means of pacifying death by concealing its truth. This certainly shows little concern for the comfort and respect of the dead. Inside, where a body should lie, are placed many mirrors facing outwards at the viewer. They reflect not death as it is but ourselves – creatures of vanity and will who so vapidly admire ourselves that we feel all others (alive and dead) must reflect us. But it also calls upon our own mortality, showing that we will all be the corpses we hide in boxes some day.
“Magic,” on the other hand, calls for our humanity to rise out of the vanity in superfluous religious ornamentation. From white silk gloves spring small hands that embrace one another. Beneath the illustrious and physical comes something natural, that is to say, through the decoration and ritual of religion we reflect a desire to express our emotional truth and to form connections to other humans, to ourselves and to the world around us. It is the natural that is divine, but in ritualizing we reflect our humanity, and all physical places of worship are chapels to the cathedral of the human.
“Unreal reality
Possesses magical sensitivity.
Each finger is a hand
And on that hand each finger
Is another hand.
As things grow smaller and smaller
They also grow bigger and bigger.”
(from the text of “Places of Worship”)
IN OTHER NEWS:
In the last week, I started work, got an internship, published a few poems, got the CD for my "Teach Yourself Icelandic" book and put off seeing the Liam Gillick show because I am so tired. I'd say it's about time for a personal update.
Work: coral farm. As in the stuff under the sea. We farm it. Responsibilities: sweep, clean, move heavy things, laundry, grunt, help the contractor build things out of wood, not exist when my bosses are walking around together and pointing at things.
Basically, it's just manual labor, which is fine, since I'm being paid more than I would if I worked at Starbuck's. What's a little annoying is that my bosses will talk to everyone else working there and laugh with them but not even say 'hello' to me. But then I also took this over working in a restaurant because it means I don't have to deal with people much. My hands are like washer maids'.
The internship has to be the most exciting thing in this. A while ago, I sent my resume out to a bunch of galleries and organizations, hoping they'd keep it on file. Well, a very lovely gallery owner in Glencoe responded! Now, even though it's in the suburbs, she shows really great work there. It serves as a sort-of interstice between the best downtown galleries in the West Loop and River North and Northshore rich people. I start on Monday and hope to have some very exciting stories.
Poems. They're on http://www.ditchpoetry.com/, a Canadian online literary journal. It's pretty decent. I'm not the happiest with my stuff, but my poems "To Iceland" and "Shrunken Heads" I like a lot, still. What's upsetting is, like an idiot, I made some revisions to the both after I submitted them. So they're better on my desktop, but hey. I've also written about a page and half in my current piece...since I started it a month ago.
Icelandic is so fun. I only just received the CD yesterday so I just went through to make sure I've got the pronunciations down right, the alphabet, and a couple of conjugations. But, oh my, I hate declension. That's when nouns take on different forms for their place in the sentence. This really only occurs with pronouns in English. Egh.
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