David Kousemaker (Amsterdam) with Touch Me (2004). Photograph: Julie Clarke, 2010I just had to post this photo this morning because the hand traces in this image remind me so much of Jenny Holzer's work at ACCA, particularly since I left a hand-print (albeit only briefly) on one of the heat-sensitive bean bags in her installation. Although the work and concerns of these two artists differ, words from the Experimenta catalogue about Touch Me form a connection: Touch Me welcomes human imprint and suggests that utopia may be a world in which we can see ourselves reflected in our community and environment. Jenny Holzer's exhibition maps ways in which our bodies leave traces in the form of photographs or institutional documentation. However, there is a sinister overtone in the fragments. Not so, with the Touch Me installation, which keeps a record of those who interact with it. All images are stored and played back on the glass screen when the work is not being used. (Catalogue p.16). But one does think with both installations about the field of Biometrics - fingerprinting, data capture, pattern recognition, body scanning, facial recognition technology, surveillance, identity theft. I think I prefer the idea of the transient body reflected in Shilpa Gupta's Shadow 3 (2007) (above). My own shadow - third from the right in the image above lasted only long enough for me to capture it. Ok, so what's happening here in my mind. Trace becomes about recollection, memory, trails and treads, a mapping of what is important and what is retrieved, but also about momentary, fragmentary history.
It is perhaps a little frustrating to see experimenta repeating the utopian theme over and over. Biometrics is so twentieth century, like fingerprints. In 21C trace is much more electric. Have you seen Wolfgang Schemmert's shiftomat?
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Steve, the biometric reading was mine, don't think it was a concern of Experimenta. Here is last sentence of essay in catalogue by Daine Singer, Associate Curator and I quote:
ReplyDelete'Rather than try to achieve actual utopia, a better way to be utopian is to hope for more than can be achieved and to use utopianism as an imaginative means of debating changes that could result in practical steps towards a better world.' I looked at shiftomat and it looks fascinating and I love the idea of 'ghostly images' suggested in the work. But this too is somehow like the ghostly images in Kousemaker and Gupta's work as well as in the work of Jenny Holzer - all different kind of traces - perceptible and imperceptible.
...WE ROMANTICISE EPHEMERA...THE TEMPORAL...FRAGMENTARY MOMENTS...ALL THE WHILE...WE DESIRE THE IMMUTABLE...AN ETERNITY FORVER SOUGHT IN THE UTOPIAN UNIFORMITY OF PHOTOGRAPHY...
ReplyDeletePhotographs certainly pin down those temporal and fragmentary moments, hence (as you said) their allure! The presence of the photograph can be overwhelming, but what of absence? For me there is also a sense of what is outside the frame, what can't be seen, what else might be remembered apart from that one fraction of a second, how the thing or idea captured bleeds from the past into the now.
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