Taryn Simon | | atractivoquenobello

Artsy.net‘s second film dives into Taryn Simon’s “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters”, the Moma exhibition which opened last May and will run until early September. A photographic project produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories.

18 bloodlines from test rabbits in Australia to the living dead in India, cohesive and arbitrary, and which maps the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. For this video Simon explores the inherent ambiguities and challenges of tracing, recording, and describing all these lineages—what she calls “a collision of order and disorder.”

Second film from that private web-collection and increasing database (one day their Art Genome algorithm will be complete) called Art.sy which despite still being on private mode keeps compiling and getting more & more comprehensive each day.

Taryn Simon’s art.sy profile page – header

Hopefully they’ll get videos & interviews in each and every artist page over the coming years… that would be big competition for Google’s Art project or Pictify….

“The impact of television on contemporary culture” is what the latest exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts aims to represent. A wide-themed and ambitious project, timed to fit in with the UK’s digital switchover, Remote Control dissects the many faces of a seemingly familiar, domestic object.

Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica, 'Videograms of a Revolution' (1992) Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

The top floor could be nicknamed ‘truth-mongering’. Photographs by Taryn Simon, Martha Rosler and Richard Hamilton present television as a powerful tool for journalists, capturing images of protests and war brought right to your sofa. ‘Cornered’ by Adrian Piper is perhaps the most artful of the truth-mongering pieces. She talks straight to the camera, flanked by two copies of her father’s birth certificate, one indicating that he is white, the other octoroon (1/8th black). This isn’t a piece of journalism, but rather a very personal deconstruction of racial identity. ICA Bookshop Assistant Michael Crowe says he finds Piper the most interesting in the exhibition, not only because she was an early user of television as a medium for art, but also because the piece is “very confrontational, which is not something you find in TV programs ordinarily”. Continue reading Eye Sweeteners