Cardoso Flea Circus

Video here and here


Cardoso Flea Circus

1997
8 min colour video, co-directed by Ross Rudesch Harley and Maria Fernanda Cardoso to accompany the Cardoso Flea Circus tent installation produced by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philladelphia.

These are real live perfoming fleas, with Cardoso performing as Queen of the Fleas.

Cardoso Flea Circus Installation, including video installation, tent, arena, props, audio works, DVD compilation (color video, duration variable), purchased by the Tate Gallery London in 2007.

Blog Prompts 01

Explain how nostalgia (as discussed/defined in the reading) is apparent or identifiable in a. your actual work or b. your studio practice/research/methodology. or c. both.

In my own personal work, nostalgia is defined through conversations of vulnerability. While I am photographing 50 LGBTQ+ and gender non-conforming humans for the grant I am working on, I ask them to bring a prop that represents them. Almost always the object they bring has a nostalgic resemblance or collection value. For example, in the image I took (above) the person depicted is carving an apple. The apple signifies nostalgia because for the person it reminds him of his traumatic childhood. He grew up close to farms with an extremely religious family, who sent him to conversion therapy for being homosexual. "A nostalgiac mourning" (p33) as Susan Stewart said; some slight elements do coincide. 

Refer to the text and poetically describe the essential/intrinsic qualities of an everyday type of space that fascinates you and in some way or another is a type of site that is an important part of your work. Deconstruct it, describe it as a social construct, how it is shaped by language, signs, cultural understandings, history, or any other creative insights you can think of. 

"The profundity of illusion in order to accomplish his impossible task of accounting for the planet" pg 

52 On Longing by Susan Stwert 

A space that starts off everyday with the first immediate task of my day,

A space that involves spending time trying to wake up after probably another sleepless night. 

A space that I can be happily naked in for a relatively short period of time. 

A space that I often take advantage of without even noticing how many times I use it.

A space that is publicly a social construct, and in private a way to escape them.

A space that has historically promoted indifference in race, gender, and class.

A space that culturally has different customary features across the World. 

A space that has more nicknames than people, but is what I refer to as the bathroom.

I have started to deconstruct gender and sexuality roles in my art work, and how social spaces negate to be more inclusive, or in opposition make people uncomfortable to the fact that it does not always exist in a heteronormative finite. This exploration is inspiring me to push these boundaries, and I am really interested in exploiting to further expand conversations revolving these factors.

Paul Pfeiffer in "Time" ART 21

View video here

Courtside at a San Antonio Spurs NBA game, Paul Pfeiffer remarks “I’m really attracted to images of amazing spectacle.” Both Pfeiffer’s sensibility and his technique are products of contemporary culture as he pulls video of sports events, pageants, and newscasts off television and then digitally manipulates the images to comment on the frenetic pace and dehumanizing qualities of a consumption-oriented, media-driven culture.

“There is a kind of humiliation in that process of simply becoming objects of admiration or people simply becoming consumers,” he observes. In his Long Count pieces, Pfeiffer explains he worked meticulously, frame by frame, to erase the boxers from the ring until they are mere shadows.

[Joe] Fig’s Representation (2017)

See video here and Joe Fig website here

Hiroshi Sugimoto: The Infinite and the Immeasurable

Chad and India's posts in response to the the blog prompts made me think we should also be considering Hiroshi Sugimoto's art in our discussions. His extended exposure images of theatres (spanning the length of films like Godzilla) fit with some of our reading discussions but his other work as well.

Watch video here and here

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work spans decades and, rather than seeking to capture the magic of the decisive moment, aims to evoke ‘the infinite and the immeasurable’. We visit the artist in Tokyo where he discusses his celebrated images of old American movie theatres — offered in our New York sale on 6 April — and shows us the first photographs he ever took when he was a 9-year-old trainspotter. ‘The most advanced evolution of life is a human brain… that’s why I want to go back to the point where humans gained consciousness.’ Hiroshi Sugimoto is discussing his practice from his 7th-floor Tokyo apartment — a minimalist retreat high above the city, its rooms cut with streams of light. ‘I practice photography, architecture, performing arts — many things,’ Sugimoto explains. Today, however, it is his photographic works, which have become among his most renowned, that we are here to discuss. Working with a large-format camera, he often uses long exposures to capture scenes over an extended period of time. The approach is one that has resulted in some of Sugimoto’s most famous works, such as the Theatres series, begun in 1978. To make these images of American movie theatres — using only the light from the screen — the artist matches the exposure to the film’s running time to distil a feature-length production into a single frame. Sugimoto’s interest in photography began when he was a child — now aged 69, he still keeps the first album of photographs he made when he was just 9 years old, in 1957. With the trains in a Tokyo station as their subject, these early shots demonstrate a remarkable awareness of composition — indeed, only the height of the camera indicates that they were taken by a young boy. One of his latest projects, the design for the Odawara Art Foundation, is set to open in Kanagawa in 2017. ‘Architecture is the most beautiful illusion that you can ever make,’ he observes. ‘The human presence may not be for ever, of course — look at Greek or Roman times, or an Egyptian Pyramid. In five or six thousand years, if people still remain, they’ll look at the ruins of modern civilisation. ‘A sense of time is a very important factor of early human consciousness,’ the artist continues. As Sugimoto becomes more distanced from that 9-year-old boy at the train station, his meditations on time take on a more personal tone. ‘I’m going backwards; people are going forwards,’ he muses. ‘The gap between me and the world is getting bigger and bigger. But I don’t care. I just do what I want to do.’

Prompt 2

Although not an everyday type of space, some of the most fascinating spaces to me are the turn of the 20th century Broadway theaters.  The "New Amsterdam" theater, built in 1903, is like walking back into a time forgotten.  Its like walking inside a big piece of sculpture, architecture, and painting all in one.  For a lot of people this space might be a bit much, but for me its like walking into a warm hug.  My work is in a completely different style, but still inspired by spaces like these.  I'm attracted to the ornamentation, and the sheer majesty of the space.  The pavilions I have been working on lately are designed to be majestic with their share of ornamentation.  I'm sure that I am not alone in feeling nostalgic inside dream like spaces.  These theater spaces were created to bring people together for an entire, all encompassing experience.  When having the opportunity to see a show in one of these types of theaters, maybe, just for a short amount of time, you can leave the real world, travel back in time, and through the space, and performance, defy the rules of nostalgia.

Prompt 1

“Nostalgia’s longing for absolute presence in the face of a gap between signifier and signified reminds us that narrative is a signifying phenomenon made up of another signifying phenomenon: language means before narrative takes it up.” (Stewart, p24)

I had an aunt that lived in New York, and I was taken to Broadway shows as a child.  Broadway is something that is very nostalgic for me, and I’m sure it is for lots of people.  Half the shows on Broadway are steeped in nostalgia.  When I ran my own dinner show at the Funky Monkey Wine Company in downtown Orlando Florida, I offend performed nostalgic Broadway numbers, which in its self was nostalgic for me.  I used the narrative of timeless Broadway performances to create nostalgia.

    "I Don't Wanna Show Off No More", 06/07/2007, Performance

Not sculpture, but musical theater artist Michael Stewart, Mark Bramble, Harry Warren, Al Dubin, and Johnny Mercer are masters in their field.  They created a multi dimensional musical narrative rich in nostalgia called 42nd street.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt8AGmbMatk

Here are two clips from one of my favorite cinema musicals, "The Wiz".  Screen play by Joel Schumacher, directed by Sidney Lumet, and many musical artist came together to reinvent a nostalgic classic, and created nostalgia from a different time period.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsgO_zQoQdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-UJR2tip3c