New article up on Escape Into Life magazine about the early kinetic light expirements of Croatian artist Antun Motika! Check it out here.
Category Archives: museum
Slides and More at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
When in Zagreb, I stayed an extra night to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in this new building, which was perhaps not intuitively laid out or well lit in the temporary exhibition spaces, but overall was large and interesting.
Their collection naturally focuses on Croatian artists, and I found their documentation from the Fluxis period–an interest of mine–especially strong. Overall the thematic curation was interrupted by a temporary installation of design pieces of Karim Rashid, complete with big video screen of him talking about his work, which I found distracting and repetitive, seeing as it was on every floor of the permanent collection. There were some outstanding artists from Croatia whose work I really enjoyed getting to see for the first time, including:
Mladen Stilonavic, 1993
1950s photography of Zvonimir Brkan, From Liliput and Fisherman
Milislav Mio Vesovic, Photo-sequence of the action “Zagreb, I love you!”
Zlatko Kopljar, K9 Compassion, 2005 (series of 5 photographs where the artist kneels in front of Parliament buildings)
But then, how can you not like a museum that you exit via Carsten Holler’s permanent double slide installation?
Antal Lakner’s Passive Working Devices at the Ludwig Museum
Antal Lakner’s retrospective exhibition Workstation at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, covers the artist’s oeuvre of engaging, design-oriented conceptual artworks that challenge the passivity of the museum environment and the individual’s response to contemporary life. My favorite works, which are representative of many of Lakner’s concerns, are the INERS Passive Working Devices. It is a scientific-sounding name for these cleanly designed machines that look as if they belong in a gym or an office–in fact, exactly the haunts of our post-industrial society of office workers who must pursue physical activity as exercise, a leisure activity, rather than as a necessary part of everyday life. Absurdly, these machines mimic the actions of formerly common labor, such as sawing, walking with a wheelbarrow, and house painting, transforming them into exercises that produce no result.
A demonstration of the Passive Working Devices in action:
Forest Master in action.
Home Transporter (1999) in action.
Wall Master (1998) in action.
These devices highlight Lakner’s interest in the individual’s role in society, here in relation to physical labor. The obviously playful, interactive aspect of these devices belies their critical nature. There is a tension in the absurdity of the work which mimics usefulness but serves no purpose, between the carefully manufactured aesthetic that is in fact hand-made, and in the interactivity of machines which call for action while questioning agency. All these tensions suggest that modern life might turn us into automatons if we do not remain aware of the issues that the INERS Passive Working Devices bring up.
Zoom Glove
Lakner’s newer work, First Life Tools, is based on web communication devices and here the critique of modern life breaks down a bit. The tools allow you to practice zooming, work out your scrolling fingers on a little track wheel, or drag a heavy, magnetized mouse that strengthens your hand and arm. After a day of Photoshop, these devices might seem incredibly relevant in a non-ironic sense. Certainly the technology the devices train you for is contemporary, but I think the anxiety over technology in contemporary life (think Marshall McLuhan) that the First Life Tools suggest feels dated. More than that, I can’t help thinking that the focus on the physical isn’t nearly as relevant to web communication as, for example, dealing with the mental schizophrenia of trying to keep up with many streams of online information on multiple wired devices would be.
Scroll Master