07.05.2010
ArtBoom Film
Barbara London will be visiting Krakow – the curator of new media and creator of the video collection at New York’s Museum of Fine Art (MoMA) London has followed the development of media art from its humble beginnings in the 1960s and 70s, and she continues to diligently trace the development of artistic practices, discovering artists and new fields of artwork, and examines the effect of interdisciplinary co-operation and analyses breakthrough moments in the development of new art media. She has organised over 120 exhibitions including solo shows and presenting such early individualists and experimentalists as Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Stein Vasulka, Joan Jonas, Gary Hill, Mako Idemitsu, Vaile Export, and Laurie Anderson. During the second edition of the ArtBoom Tauron Festival, Barbara London will give a guest lecture connected with a presentation of the works of such forerunners as Nam June Paik – known as the father of video art, and Joan Jonas – one of the most important female figures of the breakthrough years of the 1960s and 1970s, who combined gender discourse, performance, and the emerging form of video art in her work.
At this year’s ArtBoom Tauron Festival, audiences will also be able to see the most recent, widely acclaimed, full-length film by the contemporary star of film art Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9. By the age of 24 the artist was being hailed as the “enfant terrible” of contemporary art. The American magazine Newsweek called him a representative of androgyny and a new decadence, and the German Der Spiegel, “a showman of mutants”, while Michael Kimmelmann of the New York Times acclaimed him as the main artist of his generation. He gained attention with his cycle, Cremaster, which consists of five films made over the course of almost 10 years — one of the most important and complex works of the end of the twentieth century. Drawing Restraint 9 is a continuation of the Drawing Restraint series, which was been developing since 1987, in which while investigating the possibilities of creative action, he creates situations forcing him to break through the limitations of his own body by driving himself to the limits of human effort. The latest instalment of this project, Drawing Restraint 9 was made in 2005. It is a full-length film with a soundtrack composed by Björk, large-scale sculptures, photographs and drawings. This year’s ArtBoom Tauron Festival marks Krakow’s first showing of this extraordinary work of film art, which is has bases in Shintoism, the Japanese tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the replacement of whale oil with products created through the process of refining crude oil. The action takes place at a Japanese oil refinery, in a port, and on the whaling ship Nisshin Maru. The hero is a gelatinous, “Barney-like” substance. In the background, the story of the voyage of two people (Barney and Björk) takes place, who become lovers on board the ship. They give subject themselves to Japanese customs in order to finally be united in a cruel embrace. The film is filled with paradoxes, contrasts, conflict and tension, which the director invokes between nature and tradition, pain and pleasure, and sea and land.
At this year’s ArtBoom Tauron Festival, audiences will also be able to see the most recent, widely acclaimed, full-length film by the contemporary star of film art Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9. By the age of 24 the artist was being hailed as the “enfant terrible” of contemporary art. The American magazine Newsweek called him a representative of androgyny and a new decadence, and the German Der Spiegel, “a showman of mutants”, while Michael Kimmelmann of the New York Times acclaimed him as the main artist of his generation. He gained attention with his cycle, Cremaster, which consists of five films made over the course of almost 10 years — one of the most important and complex works of the end of the twentieth century. Drawing Restraint 9 is a continuation of the Drawing Restraint series, which was been developing since 1987, in which while investigating the possibilities of creative action, he creates situations forcing him to break through the limitations of his own body by driving himself to the limits of human effort. The latest instalment of this project, Drawing Restraint 9 was made in 2005. It is a full-length film with a soundtrack composed by Björk, large-scale sculptures, photographs and drawings. This year’s ArtBoom Tauron Festival marks Krakow’s first showing of this extraordinary work of film art, which is has bases in Shintoism, the Japanese tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the replacement of whale oil with products created through the process of refining crude oil. The action takes place at a Japanese oil refinery, in a port, and on the whaling ship Nisshin Maru. The hero is a gelatinous, “Barney-like” substance. In the background, the story of the voyage of two people (Barney and Björk) takes place, who become lovers on board the ship. They give subject themselves to Japanese customs in order to finally be united in a cruel embrace. The film is filled with paradoxes, contrasts, conflict and tension, which the director invokes between nature and tradition, pain and pleasure, and sea and land.
