Response to Tatlin's Monument to the Third International Conceived in the Mood of Ambivalence
12.1.06-12.22.06
Ranjit Bhatnagar’s documentation here
Why Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International?
Well, it’s quite a monument. Of course, it isn’t a monument at all, having never been built. But it is a striking and impressive idea for a monument. The model for it alone is unforgettable in pictures and drawings. It is a bold piece of work. Lacking any definitive function, it is the testament to a need, a desire, a concept. Pushing the very boundaries of human technological capacity at the time, it could only have been built using the newest methods in metal engineering and construction. It is an optimistic monument. You cannot look at the monument without thinking of the future and of human possibility. It is solid and dynamic at the same time. It portrays movement with purpose. It is beautiful.
Why €˜conceived in the mood of ambivalence’?
It is all form and no content. It is the idea of human possibility without any articulation of what human possibility actually looks and feels like. With so much life, it is dead. It is an ideal monument in the good sense, but in the bad sense as well. There’s no debate in it, no place for the contested milieu of civil society. It can’t be amended or changed, it just is. It would have to exist outside the boundaries of day to day urban life; alone, infinite, empty.
What do we mean by €˜response’?
Our monument will be Tatlin’s monument plus all the mess of lived experience. It’s the €˜hands-on’ approach to utopia. It will change and transform during its lifetime according to the fights and discussions and ideas of the people who interact with it. And so, it will have a beginning and an end. It will be finite. To put it simply, our tower will be the kind of place you’d actually want to spend some time in. It will have a café. It will have a room for napping. And still, it will gesture to something beyond what we are now, to a better version of ourselves that we still hope to attain, whether or not we know how.
ARTISTS
Briony Barr is English and Australian but has called New York home for the past 6 years. The daughter of a painter and a picture-framer, a life in art was on always on the cards and indeed, she has made a lot of drawings and other things in her time. Recent work has ranged from plotting the movements of a waiter on the floor of a restaurant with tape to making time-lapse drawings of people moving through customs at the airport. Most recently she worked with fellow friend of Flux Martina Mrongovius to create a line structure, grown over several weeks on a fence in Queens. Briony’s work can be seen as part of the viewing program at The Drawing Center and in Pierogi 2000’s Flat Files. She is currently having a solo drawing show in Mexico City.
Mikey Barringer studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany. There he learned how to act, make films, and speak German. All three skills have turned out to be quite useful for life at Flux Factory, and you’d think it was somehow meant to be that way. This is his first show.
Ranjit Bhatnagar has been exhibiting sound sculpture and alternative musical instruments since 1995, such as the Silence Organ and the MIDI Ironing Board. Recently, Ranjit has taught students at Parsons School of Design to make their own instruments and play in a band, contributed robotic musical instruments to Flux Factory’s Fluxbox show, and to Artbots NYC at the Location One gallery in SOHO. A selection of his photos are currently on exhibit at the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.
Jason David Brown
Mikala Hyldig Dal was born 1979 in the medieval city of Aarhus, Denmark. She is now an inhabitant of the great city of Berlin, Germany, a student of the infamous University of Arts Berlin studying media art, experimental film, graphic-, photographic- & digital design. Mikala is concerned about the transformation of 3-d space into a 2-d realm and vice versa, an ongoing subject matter being architecture on tape. A recurrent strategy is the intertwining of analogue and digital media creating hybrid visual expressions, in general trying to accomplish radical abstractions of source material (/subject matter) in the recording process rather than in the post-production.
Daupo is the Neo-Primitivist Folk Collective of One, and is known to the mundane world as David Gassaway. R.T.T.M.T.T.T.I.C.I.T.M.O.A. is his umpteenth collaboration with Flux Factory, with which he has dressed funny, made watercolour paintings, auctioneered, cartographed, demolished, constructed, construed, and conceived. Left to his own devices he is a draughtsman more than anything else.
Marie-Eve Jetzer believes in the multitude of the I. After her Central Swiss Ministry of Culture and Education residency in New York is over, she is looking to settle down in the city of the great and the mighty at least on a semipermanent basis. After graduating from Glasgow School of Art a few years ago, she has been working as a multi-mixed media artist and very much enjoys the materialshuffling spaceshifting explorations of her mental realm. If anybody has a room to spare from the beginning of next year please let her know.
Born-n-bred in St. Louis, Missouri, Nick Normal pursued his undergraduate degree overseas at Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design (London, UK) where he graduated with ‘honours’ in Fine Arts (and unbelievably, he didn’t pick up an accent, although he does now drink his body weight in tea every week). With a firm approach to working with whatever he can get his hands and mind on, Nick enjoys making scale models, maquettes and installations and buying dollar-store items to integrate into his surroundings – that is, both his life and his work. He is also a lifelong biblioholic, which has recently turned into assembling an ‘expansive library’ of cardboard books. Nick is also building an archive of press releases, postcards, flyers, brochures, etc. related to art exhibitions – in progress now since November 2003, it is estimated at 3,000 individual items and spans a plethora of three- and four-ring binders.
Emma Stone Mackinnon believes in both collectives and solitude. Growing up in Brooklyn, she learned to love other people; getting her degree from Harvard, she learned some philosophy and political theory, and also managed to learn to love making installations with other people (especially others of the Reasonable People’s League). She learned to make ice cream in Boston, ice cream capital of North America, at Toscanini’s, where Daupo also once worked (he made the cakes). These days, when not at Flux Factory, Emma spends most of her time doing political media strategy at Fenton Communications.
Ian Montgomery was trained as a carpenter and furniture maker. His current work combines found materials with organic patterns and processes. Ian received his B.A. in Studio Arts at Bard College in 2003 and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Lacoste School of the Arts in 2002. He received international attention for his project in Flux Factory’s NOVEL show.
Annie Reichert swears she is from Seattle, New Jersey, and Ohio. She enjoys photography, eavesdropping, gold paint, fake blood, avocados, good storytellers, and building things–even though she’s not very skilled at it. Professionally she keeps busy but rarely profits from it: her pictures have been published in USA Today and US News and World Report for free! As an artist, she is interested in making oblique references to her childhood, hoping that no one will notice. Annie has surprisingly soft hands and wishes she could tell lies better and less often.
Ksenya Samarskaya is a designer-artist-inventor concerned with narrating and structuring grandiose plans for the minutiae. Notwithstanding, it often ends up the other way around. She lives in Brooklyn, is fond of rotating dinners and would love to hear from you if you happen to have an electric kiln or a letterpress that you no longer care for.
Matthew Slaats is the new kid on the block, making his preliminary excursion into the New York art scene. Working in a multitude of areas, his main interest is in engaging people through his process. He accomplishes this by recontextualizing spaces through performance. He recently worked in Singapore as a project manager for the Ong Keng Sen’s production Diaspora. Other work includes working as a production manager with theatre artist Richard Gough. In the meantime, he’s out exploring the already explored.
For press inquiries, contact stefany @ fluxfactory.org
THIS SATURDAY’S HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:
Performances by Mr. Resistor and the George Galliano Jazz Trio starting at 7!
Ice Cream and Delicious snacks in the Kafeteriaeria!
illustration by Briony Barr
illustration by Briony Barr
illustration by Daupo
illustration by Daupo