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Comment by artreview.com on 19 May 2008 at 5:53am

Day 2

The Experiment Marathon kicked off with what should be a warning of the dangers of mixing art and science in a symposium (or science fair) setting: a presentation by Thorstein I. Sigfusson about electrolysing water in fuel cells, which used assistants dressed up in shiny costumes and dancing around like atoms to demonstrate the process (which still remained inscrutable to me). It was silly even in its knowing silliness. It was interesting though in its reference to Iceland's cheap energy sources: geothermal power (harnasing the hot water that bubbles beneath the earth to heat all of Reykjavik) and hydroelectric. Both of which are extremely problematic though, a topic to which we'll return.

Next up: Israel Rosenfield, a lecturer and writer on neuroscience, who gave a presentation about body image – "how my brain perceives myself". Chiming with Olafur Eliasson's introductory statement that "The challenge today is not just to think but to act", Rosenfield explained how the classical separate scientific models of motor (thinking) and sensory (feeling) brain activity have now been shown to work in unison. Rob Storr's Venice Biennale title, Think With the Senses, Feel with the Mind, aptly summed up the spirit of the morning's predominantly scientific presentations on the power of game-playing and cooperation in artificial intelligence (Luc Steels), prosthetic science (Hilmar B. Janusson), the fact that our brains process only a tiny part of the full colour spectrum (Kristjan Leosson), and how a positive emotion can trigger a cataplectic attack (ie. ROFL (that's Rolling on Floor Laughing, for those of you who aren't web nerds). It was a classic Obristian polyphony of voices, though they felt like samplers and weren't yet adding up to more than the sum of their parts.

Unlike at the drink-supplied opening of the festival the night before, turnout for leg one of the marathon (to be concluded on Sunday) was pretty poor, and many of the people there were also at the London version. This one lacked the cumulative intensity generated inside Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen's pavilion last October: the march into the night, the circular arena, the nowhere-else-to-go-ness of it.

What's more, in all this happy phenomenology, sharpening of perception, and pop-science curiosity about the unification of body and brain, as fun and revelatory as it is, what gets lost along the way somehow is politics. With the exception of Pedro Reyes' presentation about his website ideasforiraqw.org there was very little explicit political thinking. It's hard to inject politics into phenomenology, I guess.

A couple of afternoon highlights were a haunting and sad performance by legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas, in which it wasn't clear which event was a desperate reminiscence and which was contemporary, the claustrophobic video loop of the lonely debilitated old mad or the live action of a Hemingway-esque hearty feast among friends.



Later, Jimmie Durham performed in his characteristic way, where you’re unsure whether or not if gives a damn about whether anyone is watching or not. He arrayed some objects on the table and staged a telephone call in which someone was apparently giving dodgy advice. Here’s what happened next:


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Later in the day we visited an exhibition at the Start Art Gallery by Iceland's 2003 Venice Biennale representative, Rúrí. One of her videos told how a new hydroelectric dam in Upptyppingar, near Askja, in the north of the island, had created manmade earthquakes and volcanic activity since the new reservoir had placed intolerable new pressure on the fault line over which it sits.

Later on we met an activist from New York who now lives in Reykjavik to protest with Saving Iceland, among other things, the construction of more aluminium smelters. Smelting is an energy-intensive and highly polluting industry, and companies like ALCOA are attracted here because of the cheap geothermal and hydrolectric energy -- thus putting pressure on the government to build more dams like the one above.

That evening we went to an exhibition of Croatian contemporary art in the gallery at the headquarters of Reykjavik Energy, which has been a target of protesters for helping to power the aluminium smelters and apparently mismanaging its geothermal plants. There was a performance for the invited guests by Slaven Tolj, who very slowly, gently and intently made two small curved cuts in his cheeks with a razorblade. It was horrible to watch, for two reasons that went beyond the basic visceral repugnance of the act. Gina Pane has done it before – this is not to be jaded about it, but if you're going to do something so demonstrative and radical there needs to be a very good and clear concept for it and preferably an original one, none of which was apparent in Tolj's performance. Secondly it was such a waste to do it here in the soaring lobby of the power company to a small polite crowd of disinterested people nibbling on cheese and fruit. No, it did not jolt anyone into empathic action. No one shouted out 'Not the face!', as they did with Pane. The performance hardly registered in fact, and people went back to nibbling and gazing at Hreinn Friðfinnsson's enourmous Foucault's Pendulum hanging from the ceiling. Now, if the performance had been a protest against Reykjavik Energy…

Comment by artreview.com on 20 May 2008 at 9:37am

Day 3



A day of excursions, first to the delightful-to-say town of Akureyri in the north of Iceland, a former industrial centre. We were parachuted in to see two shows here, the first of which was Facing China at the Akureyri Art Museum, featuring some consummate figurative and portrait paintings and sculptures from the collection of Dutchman Fu Ruide. Yang Shaobin's bloodshot, flaccid, massive mangled faces and Liu Ye's riffs on Mondrian landing in China were particularly outstanding works in what was the strongest, most consistent and measured exhibition of Chinese art I've seen.


Yang Shaobin, 2003 No.1, 2003
Then it was back on the bus to Safnasafnið, the Icelandic Folk Art Museum, in a white house on the other side of the fjord. The place was full of delights, especially a vitrine full of accumulated plasticy trinkets and a lounging wooden cat with different coloured eyes. It could also have been a folk outpost of the Experiment Marathon, with a room was full of games, curiosities, and optical illusions, all of which you could play with, like: spin the disk, stare at it for 15 seconds, then look at the small plastic rabbit and watch it grow before you eyes. It worked.

Back on the prop plane and a short flight over to the eastern town of Egilsstadir for an exhibition at a converted slaughterhouse. By far the best work here was this poster on the outside of the building:



We asked an Icelandic man to translate it, since it looked quite troubling – it must be an artwork, we hoped. He said it meant "Keep safe", but didn't seem to register the extremity of its political message – three white sheep conspiring to expel a black sheep from their territory. As more and more of these posters cropped up around the town, it became clear that this must be the work of Christoph Büchel, which had been billed as a large-scale installation. These are actual posters distributed by the Swiss People's Party (SVP) during the general election there last October. Büchel had them translated into Icelandic and pasted up across the country. It's an incredibly light, even subliminal, but still menacing touch for an artist in danger of suffocating under the sheer weight of the junk-strewn installation-worlds he usually creates, like the unfinished, unwieldy Training Ground for Democracy at Mass MoCA, which featured a house, a cinema, and several cars among thousands of objects, and drove the artist and the institution to court. A fantasy came to mind: a collaboration between Büchel and his equally fierce and brilliant compatriot Thomas Hirschhorn. Büchel could do the architecture, Hirschhorn the display; between them they'd distill the strange nightmare of twenty-first century politics.

Next we drove deeper into the wilderness to the Eidar Art Centre, and there (after an elvish, twitchy dance performance by a troupe of teenagers timed to begin as we got off the bus, as if we were visiting an orphanage for disturbed children), we witnessed a dream team collaboration that did actually happen, between Jason Rhoades and Paul McCarthy. We trudged through muddy cow fields, across a stream (that could have had a troll under its bridge), up a scrub covered hill stepping carefully on tufts of grass rising from the boggy moss, with utter silence except for menacing bird calls, the desolate countryside opening up infinitely, sublimely in front of us, and then suddenly Macy's emerged – miraculously, absurdly, devastatingly – in the distance.



People cheered or fell about laughing as this searing piece of desublimated land art honed into view: a corugated steel shell in the wilderness, miles from anywhere. Did you bring your credit card? Where's the wellington boot department? It was as if we were in the future looking at a relic of our dumb civilisation. Inside there was nothing; round the back there was originally one of Rhoades and McCarthy's 'sheep plugs' sticking out the building as if it was fucking the countryside (and it was), but it was missing, leaving a kind of big bullet hole instead, which was still suitably apocalyptic.



The final stop of the day was the industrial fjord town of Skaftfell, over a mountain pass and down into a snowy valley to what seemed like the end of the road, the end of the earth. We were greeted at the doors of the art centre – the town is apparently home to many artists – by a comforting hug from members of Skyr Lee Bob, who then began a performance inside a perspex box installation, in which they'd imprisoned a wheezing, screeching human creature that they were subjecting to mild torture. Again the artists were playing on the alienness and isolation of the environment, and the weird intrusion of a bus-load of foreign tourists landing there for an hour. It was like stumbling into the surreal and perverse world of Royston Vasey in the League of Gentleman.



Outside in the brisk mountain air, there was the atmosphere of a village fete or county fair as Peter K's performance began: a steamroller and a digger squished paint, milk cartons and other things you shouldn't run over on most days of the year, into Pollockian splatters of colour. A little up the road, more industrial vehicles were arrayed proudly – the machines that carve a living out of the wilderness.

In the distance across a field, The Internationale started up at mountain-shaking volume as a group of men in suits chased each other round with huge cardboard video cameras and microphones. This was the Soviet Reunion by the PONI collective, an exhilarating absurdity in the sublime surroundings.

Comment by artreview.com on 21 May 2008 at 9:51am

Day 4

Recently I was speaking to Veimir Abramovic, the Nikola Tesla scholar, philosopher and younger brother of performance artist Marina Abramovic, who was last on the bill of the closing day of the Experiment Marathon. "Do you still believe in art?" Velimir asked. It's not artists anymore who are at the forefront of societal, psychic, spiritual and technological change, he said. "Scientists are the ones who have a sense of the future today."

Obrist and Eliasson's Experiment Marathon is both a concession and a challenge to this depressing but gnawing argument. Obrist has been striving for the conceptual integration of art and science at least since his 2001 exhibition with Barbara Vanderlinder, Laboratorium, which compared artists' studios and scientists' laboratories. Eliasson might be the closest thing to an experimenter – and a businessman, an adventurer – in contemporary art. He and Obrist make a tight team, and when talking on stage about the importance of expanding the field of curating, of doing together with thinking, they have a cute system for handing over to each other – "ping", says one, and the other starts with "pong".

First up today was Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the TV sex therapist from the 1960s. She gave familiar sex-positive twentieth century advice – wisdom that she must in part be responsible for embedding in the popular consciousness so that it seems so obvious now. Dr. Ruth had in fact been scheduled to do a collaboration with Marina Abramovic and Hans Ulrich Obrist about the sexual behaviour of artists, but the project had broken down in its early stages. More on this later...

"Try saying your brain is a computer in the 1970s, and you'd get a lot of flak. Now it's old hat", said cultural entrepreneur and founder of edge.org, John Brockman in an on-stage interview with Obrist. "Who we are is a changing game." Let's hope art can keep up. At the end of the short interview, Brockman quoted James Lee Byars, who is perhaps the father of this kind of polyphonous, multi-disciplinary thinking in the contemporary artworld with his World Question Center (1968): "It's Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein" – you need all four in order to think; a man can't live on art alone.



Brian Eno, up next, demonstrated how man can't live alone either. Singing helps, and we don't do enough of it. Eno has been campaigning for a compulsory five minutes of singing in English schools every day, and it looks like he's succeeding. With a small group of volunteers leading us on stage, Eno soon got everyone in the audience (which was overflowing today) happily singing 'I can't help falling in love with you' a cappella. It was a joyous, silly, profound moment. You can listen to Eno's experiment in its entirety here, track one:


Usually when you're in any kind of art confrontation situation you are alone in the gallery, even if there are other people around; part of what makes the Experiment Marathon such a pleasure is being subsumed in a group event, swimming in a think tank, thinking with the same brain, and now singing with the same (shaky) voice. It's weird though that it takes something as rare as this – singing along with Brian Eno in Iceland – to remind us of one of the most primal, foundational functions of being human, singing in a group. "Singing is the heart of a civilization", Eno said. "When I sing in a group I stop being me and start being us." Eno is now campaigning for the mass set-up of a capella singing groups.



German artist Thomas Bayrle, another interdisciplinarian, with a background in graphics and an interest in cybernetics, biology and urbanism, was gregarious, ruddy-cheeked, rotund, and almost completely incomprehensible in his presentation about conveyor belts and motorways somehow being converted into bags – made up of something like mobius strips but without the twist. Bayrle kept insisting that if only he had the big bag with him, the one that he brought earlier but had since lost, then everything would be clear and his theory would be perfectly illustrated and vindicated. "Where is the bag? I need the bag." But when the bag did indeed show up right at the end of the presentation, it explained nothing!



Some experiments must fail; another that went charmingly wrong was by Bulgrarian artist Attila Csorgo. He has "a strong obsession with peeling". If every object had a surface that could be peeled, what would that peel look like when flattened out in a single piece? Pretty beautiful, looking at his slideshow of paper models of buildings that Csorgo has taken the knife to and unraveled. When he demonstrated it on stage though, he accidentally broke the pattern in two, which was like breaking the spell, and everyone sighed in sympathy.

It was a relief today to have certain performers who could really hold the stage. Naturally Eno was one, undoubtedly Marina Abramovic would be one later on; a younger one who enraptured the audience was Tris Vonna-Michell, who is by many accounts a highlight in the Berlin Biennial. The young story-telling photographer has evolved his performance somewhat over the course of three frantic years of pan-European travel in which he usually performs intensely, one-on-one, over a table covered with objects and a slide projector (there are faint echoes of tabletop object performer Stuart Sherman, whose videos were on display upstairs at the museum, as well as a similarity to the desperate energy of Spalding Grey). Now, Vonna-Michell also become adept at group presentation, probably a good thing since it's more efficient and ultimately less strenuous (Vonna-Michell was on the brink of facing the same dilemma body artists face: how much longer can I go pushing myself in public?). Here he concluded Down the Rabbit Hole, a story that has been evolving since 2006.





The last we heard of it was in fact at the previous Experiment Marathon, where the performance ended with an interview with a lawyer about how he might go about getting recourse from "an unnamed institution" in Belgium for the theft of the objects (something Vonna-Michell is prone to) that were crucial props, relics, evidence and bearers of the story. That story was Vonna-Michell's hunt for Henri Chopin, a man whom his father said could unlock the mystery of how his family ended up in Southend-on-Sea. In the final part today, Vonna-Michell told how he finally tracked Chopin down after hearing through e-flux that he was having an exhibition in the very same room in the museum where his objects were stolen. After hearing Chopin's incredible and humbling life story – world war, cold war – Vonna-Michell couldn't bring himself to ask anything of the old man, and he died a couple of months later, thus keeping Vonna-Michell's mystery – which is also his engine – in tact.

Inspired by a drawing by legendary Icelandic artist Erro, Carollee Schneeman arranged for a white horse with a naked woman riding on it to trot into the hall of the museum, so we could, she said, be confronted directly with the raw power of the image right in front of us.



It was indeed powerful, but Schneeman narrated the whole experience, leaving little perceptual room for it to really sink in. She then showed a video of photos of her kissing her cat, something she did every morning for eight years, until the cat's death. And she really means kissing, on the mouth, not a little kiss of its soft belly fur.

Last up was Marina Abramovic, who kicked things off with a full exposé of how her proposed collaboration with Dr. Ruth had broken down:



Opinion was split later over whether this was a bit unnecessary and harsh on an octogenarian (it was the complete opposite of Vonna-Michell's respectful restraint towards the elderly Henri Chopin in his story), one who was apparently flown into Reykjavik not properly understanding, or not sufficiently told, what she was in for. She clearly understood the event more as part of a traditional book tour – she was busily promoting her Sex for Dummies – than a multidisciplinary experiment. Still, her snub of Abramovic was done publicly on the first day, when she refused to have her photograph taken with her and said "I don't know who you are and I don't want to work with you" – so Abramovic felt justified in her full public disclosure of how the collaboration broke down.

With the opening salvo fired, Abramovic summoned volunteers from the audience – I was one of them – to put on a white lab coat and ear muffs and sit at the front holding a metronome. The idea was that we wouldn't be able to hear anything, so the audience, asked by Abramovic to do a series of exuberant relaxation exercises, would in fact be the mysterious performers for us. But I could still hear all Abramovic's instructions through the ear muffs ("Breath in ten times and let it out", "Shake your body around"). All the while Jonas Mekas was supine on Abramovic's Soul Operation Table (2000) above us all. The real point of interest was not so much the experiments in relaxation, as fun as they looked, but Abramovic's power to make the audience behave like this, flapping their limbs around freely, hugging strangers, panting like dogs. At the end of the science-art Experiment Marathon, it was the charisma, licentiousness and didacticism of an artist that really got people physically moving.

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