Not with a shout, but with a small cough.

by Rebecca Scott Lord | Föstudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english

Not with a shout, but with a small cough.

Step into Arna Óttarsdóttir’s solo show Allt Fínt (Everything is Great) and be enveloped by an overwhelming warmth of pinks and oranges and plush texture. The exhibition features mixed media works, which range from woven tapestries to patchwork wall hangings to sculptures of different materials, giving the impression of fragments of a home excised and rearranged in a gallery.

Innkaupalisti (Shopping List) is just that, a shopping list presumably written first on a scrap of paper and then blown up and turned into a weaving that hangs from the ceiling. It’s simple enough, a list of items down the left side, including milk, celery root, lamb, pizza, and an absent minded doodle at the top, as if scribbled while on a long phone call and needing an outlet for restless hands. That’s it, just a hasty scrap of paper reproduced laboriously into an object that declares itself with a tasselled flourish. The genuineness allows me to sink into the reality of it, imagining what was for dinner that night. Are the carrots and celery root to go with the lamb? Is this for a dinner party, or a simple family meal? Certainly not just a meal for one. I begin to imagine the morning routine, perhaps breakfast is AB mjólk and muesli every day, and the house has run out of AB mjólk. Or is there a baby in the house and that’s what it eats? Is the doodle actually an automatic drawing made by an adult, or a child’s intentional step towards self expression? The writing of Lydia Davis comes to mind, micro stories using brevity to such a degree that Davis creates entire narratives in stories that are only one or two sentences. This throw away object transformed into a tapestry has not changed in its meaning, but the transformation does reframe its value from utility into an entryway to meditation on routine, consumerism, self care, or any place the viewer cares to go when imagining all the context surrounding the artefact of this one shopping list.

Sápur (Soaps) is likewise engaging, 18 apparently handmade soaps arranged in an approximate grid on a table (itself composed of numerous folded white cloths like so much fresh laundry). Each soap is presented on a different plinth, a shoulder pad, a piece of hrökkbrauð, an overturned tupperware box, the plastic net that comes around a bottle of duty free wine, and more. Each soap is different, some translucent, some opaque, each embedded with various materials and items, from neon plastic netting to bundles of strings, to glitter and dried flowers, and most intriguingly, dried noodles.

Though there is a definite air of cleanliness and tidying present in the overall arrangement, these soaps are not for cleaning or sudsing. They become less functional items created and used for a task (cleaning) and more something else. What are they? Gems? Insects trapped in amber? Time capsules? A small and orderly sculpture garden? What is the relationship between soap and plinth? And why are these specific items all here together? They’re compiled of things you’d find while cleaning underneath the couch, or in a junk drawer, yet here they all are, arranged in their own specific places.

As I walk from piece to piece, I begin to have the thought “What is the point of this?”. I’ve been enjoying the intro and outrospection from some of the works, and certainly feel physically good in a room full of pink and orange and natural light. But why is this here? Visitors come in, look around for three minutes before leaving, and I imagine them thinking one of two things, either, “This stuff is nice, but who has time for this? The world is burning and I am supposed to lose myself in a landscape of dried flowers? And spend more than five seconds looking at an old grocery list? Everything is great? No, it is not.” or, “Oooh, these soaps are just darling, they’d make a fun Christmas gift.” I think about self indulgence in fine art, questioning what it means to make things that are pretty, to make things that are useless, that drive no change in the world.

But as I watch other people watching, I think that maybe we are all missing the point. The title of the show, Everything is Great, is so tongue in cheek. It’s the response to when someone asks you how things are going, and you don’t want to get into how things aren’t actually going great, but that’s not a socially acceptable response, so you just say, “Everything’s fine.” This work is well aware how the world is garbage, but it’s not so preoccupied with the worry that every effort and work must have a clear purpose of bettering the world in order to be of worth. Another clue comes from a textile collage titled Bleik klippimynd (Hvað get ég svo sem gert?) or Pink Collage (What Can I Do Anyway?). It’s got that question on there, and that becomes the thought pervading the entire show. It’s not despair, but rather permission to lose oneself, if only for a few moments, in a miniature world of soap sculptures, pondering why they are arranged the way they are, or to imagine the life of the person who wrote that shopping list.

Every piece in Allt Fínt has such delicious color and texture that the overall effect is like biting into a cold and refreshing fruit on an unusually warm spring day. Taken all together, the collected works are scraps gathered from around the home and re-presented as textile collages, textures draped over forms, swatches and samples, sketches and notes for later. These pieces are inconsequential things repurposed to demand thought, that expect consequence, not with a shout but with a small cough.

Rebecca Lord

Photo credits: Vigfús Birgisson

Allt Fínt / Everything is Great is on view at Nýlistasafnið until Sunday the 28th of April.

An interview with Cosmos Carl

by Bergur Thomas Anderson | Mánudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

An interview with Cosmos Carl

Cosmos Carl is a project by artists Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason. Their website can be described as an artist-run online exhibition platform that celebrates the democratization of the web while unveiling its potential when it comes to presenting artworks. Frederique and Saemundur are both based in Amsterdam, where we met to talk about the ongoing voyage of Cosmos Carl.

B: When and how did the Cosmos Carl adventure begin?

F+S: It started after we moved in to our first apartment together in 2014, along with two other people who are both curators. Two artists, two curators in one house. There was a separate room in the house that we thought to do something with, like hosting exhibitions or artists’ projects, which in the end didn’t work out. So we resolved it by doing something online instead. When we started out we saw Cosmos Carl as a response to the net-art at the time, which was very code-based. This made the presentation of art very difficult if the artist didn’t have experience in coding. Artists were already using platforms like YouTube and Vimeo to distribute and present their work online, but mostly through their private artist websites and portfolios. Cosmos Carl became a way to use these existing platforms to explore the online presence of artworks and a way to critique platform-based capital by misusing them for art.

Our first project was with Icelandic artist Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, and it was our contribution to the Frieze art fair of 2014. We made a film with him and originally hosted it on a special Cosmos Carl Vimeo page. Styrmir’s video recalls an encounter he had while buying fried chicken from a street vendor. At the same time the story is told, he navigates a little trip from an apartment, to the market, and to the vendors house where a humorous exchange of deals takes place. The visualization of his trip happens on Google Maps. It was after this project that we realized the full potential of Cosmos Carl, and the video was later moved to Styrmir’s own Vimeo account and presented as a hyperlink on the CC website.

Calling you from Cosmos Carl (2014) by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson.

The name came to us while watching the Cosmos series, made by Carl Sagan in the 80s. I (Frederique) kept referring to the show as Cosmos Carl, and it seemed to fit with what we were doing by creating an online exhibition space. The internet is often perceived as this infinite, non-material thing but vast enough to cruise around as Carl Sagan does in the series. Our intention is to expose and show our visitors corners of the web they wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise.

B: What advantages do you see in artists using these pre-existing platforms versus the traditional artist-as-coder approach when it comes to presenting art online?

F+S: We were already using platforms such as Google Drive and similar apps to communicate and work through. We find them interesting because the politics of those platforms are much more embedded in to the fabric of the world wide web. When we started, we thought net-art was really formal, in the way that artists were using code and software to create images and fictional worlds, almost like paintings and sculpture. We are interested in seeing art being presented online in a more casual way, within the flow of browsing social media sites or eBay. It’s important for us to see art contaminate and be a part of our every-day internet usage.

B: When I visit the Cosmos Carl website, I feel as if I’m at a virtual transfer station… I enter it, and I am immediately sent back to other, often more familiar interfaces. How do you see artworks contributing to this flow of images we are so strangely accustomed to?

F+S: The language of the Cosmos series has provided us with a good analogy, for the viewers travels through space on Carl Sagan’s voyager. Experiencing the Cosmos Carl websites means navigating through a constellation of artworks which exist on different platforms. It’s like a cross-section of the web, and more like a map in this sense. The page directs our visitors to platforms and content that they don’t usually belong to. From the perspective of the platforms that host some of the works it’s difficult to figure out what the interests of visitors arriving via Cosmos Carl actually is.

The online art crowd is pretty undefined to the platforms if you compare it to their subscribers and daily users. We see art occupying these spaces as part of our process to reclaim space for art and democratize the web. Artists used to feel hesitant by showing their work online because of the border that coding created, but in reality, artists use the internet as much as anyone else in their research and free time. As a consequence it has become much easier for artists to imagine their work online if they imagine it belonging to this flow. We encourage them to display their work as they would like to stumble upon it in their act of browsing online and contribute to this flow of data, images and sounds…

It’s been over a year now since an artist has supplied us with a link to their own website and sadly, most of those earlier contributed links are offline by now. In one case, a porn site actually bought a domain name once owned by Nicolas Riis. He made this website and named it cleancare.club It was a beautiful website with his research material and objects that belonged to his thinking process. it was actually a type of object porn. Then he stopped paying for it, so the domain name was taken over by this porn site and for a while Cosmos Carl was temporarily presenting Nicolas Riis’ contribution as a porn site!

It’s currently offline again, but I’m sure the domain will get another resurrection. Actually, now it has become a sort of video platform! Dropbox, eBay and the like just stay online however. The biggest websites don’t renew their links, the URLs just get longer. One work was actually presented as a poetic tour through a fictional apartment on AirBnB! No one has yet reported it as a fake place, so it stays there, which is a really fun thing.

To sell a river? (2016) Josephine Callaghan

B: It’s very beautiful to think about art belonging more and more to the gesture of browsing the web… Jorik Amit Galama’s work is hosted on liveleak.com, and it’s interesting how the work appears next to advertisements, click bates and videos that could relate to his film called Cateater. Do you think it can take over at some point? What’s the influence of art taking up online space, where does it lead, besides a more inspiring and cultured web experience?

F+S: We believe we are continuing the trajectory of culture jamming, a movement which has its roots in activism. Google and YouTube are “bad” corporations, but we use them anyway. By using them you are forced to agree to their specific terms and conditions which concern your privacy online. We see Cosmos Carl as being quite mischievous because it uses the platforms in an unintended way. Culture jamming made use of already existing advertisement images to alter them and therefore shift our understanding of corporate identities and capitalism. We like the idea of using these existing platforms in an unintended way, to undermine and critique them.

Cateater (2019) Jorik Amit Galama

Jorik Amit Galama’s film Cateater is a good example. The work is an essayistic film and poem which pops up on the very dodgy platform liveleaks.com. The platform allows for very violent and disturbing content, and Jorik’s contribution to Cosmos Carl involves uploading a video to liveleaks that responds to it in a way that hopefully confronts its daily users and their addiction to this unhealthy material. The impact is probably more if you don’t get introduced to the work via Cosmos Carl, but stumble upon it through its clickbait title Cateater. It’s interesting for us to see artworks in these different contexts of the web and claiming space there in a gesture of disruption and critique.

Few contributions are really on the edge of our own ethical borders. One piece took place on a sex workers platform named myfreecam, used by two artists who were raising funds for a future exhibition. The piece consisted in them doing live nude drawing in front of a webcam. The concept was that they were wearing socks, and I remember there was a dog involved as well. Viewers could therefore attend the event, chip in and ask for specific drawings. It is of course very different when you enter these kind of chatrooms with the interest of looking at it from an artistic perspective to a perverted one. That line really blurred there and we felt the work confronted notions of the male gaze by dealing directly with a platform that encourage it. In a way, it’s interesting to think about these two different groups coming together in a chatroom like that, and all of them being anonymous as well.

When you visit this link now you are redirected to Camilla Rhodes’ profile on this platform. She is the alter ego of an artist from Mexico who finances a part of her practice by doing these types of performances.

Nude with Socks (2018) Camilla Rhodes and Zoe Claire Miller

B: Cosmos Carl is accessible 24/7 and provides visitors with a private experience of art. How do you feel about the accessibility and intimacy the web provides? How does it influence your visitors?

F+S: It’s tricky with online art. In a way it very much conforms to the on-demand attitude, but at the same time it’s not a social act. We feel like people might ignore Cosmos Carl for a few months and then come back to it to binge artworks. Just statistically speaking, people spend around 3 minutes on average on the site itself, before they embark on the journey provided by the hyperlinks that are there. It’s a very light site with almost nothing on it, and therefore becomes a pretty easy task to immediately jump out of it as soon as you enter.

B: Can you tell me how the design of the site came together?

F+S: We borrowed the design from the Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem) and the typeface is made by Gabríel Markan, also known as Gnax Type. The typeface, available through the Cosmos Carl website, mixes references to digital aesthetics and traditional calligraphy. We like it because it makes the interface and design of Cosmos Carl very unfamiliar and therefore fits with this idea of being a portal.

B: I’m curious to know how an online opening works, and how you introduce yourself to the rest of the web?

F+S: We have a launch every other Friday. There is a ritual which takes place with the introduction of each new link. It’s good for us to keep it rigid. Adding works to the site is practically as simple as sharing a link. We announce each new work on Facebook with an event, and afterwards the links exist on our page as undated, infinite hyperlinks. We feel positive about branching out through interviews and doing more things in public, hopefully belonging to more intricate networks of websites. People are going to be led to our page via artzine, which is a great thing. A Wikipedia page would also be helpful.

We had a contribution as part of a collaboration with the Young Art Biennial in Moskow with Art+Feminism. They are a group of online activists who edit and add pages about women artists, writers, thinkers, musicians, and the more forgotten female figures in history. This needs to be done because Wikipedia is sadly a very male-dominant place. If you look at any male writer who has done something and compare it to a female one, there will undoubtedly be more information and praise about the male one. It’s also very likely that the woman you’re looking for doesn’t even exist on Wikipedia. How we present ourselves outside the CC website is something we are thinking about now, and hopefully we can find a solution to integrate more creatively into people’s calendars. Facebook served us well so far, but we feel there could be a more old-school, analog way to announce the launch of each new link. To be resolved.

B: …and how do you tackle issues relating to the lifetime of the page and the links provided?

F+S: Rhizome started a service which lets you record websites. It started by archiving the net art works from the 90ies and records them in a way that enables you to experience them in the technological context of the time. For example, Constant Dullaart made a work which used Google, and when you visit the piece through Rhizomes archive, you see the work through a browser from that time. You see the piece in its original quality and resolution.

You can do it to your own page as well, and we’ve started archiving Cosmos Carl through their service. The archive of the internet (archive.org) has also been archiving the internet, but in a less precise way. It visits every single website every now and then, and skims over it while taking screenshots. It then creates an overview of the development of your website through screenshots, which you can of course download in case you want to make a biography about your website. But Rhizome is more precise and works better for what we need, it enables us to record the whole website experience with all its links.

B: …So online archiving methods lets you store entire websites similarly to how you store image information inside a .jpg file?

F+S: Precisely. We were wondering if Cosmos Carl needed to be archived, or if we should just celebrate the temporal nature of the internet. The more a link is shared, the longer it lives. But links die out, websites disappear. There are companies which maintain everything very well, but even there, images take up a lot of space and disappear for no reason. No one knows where they go.

As far as artworks go, well, we think it’s important to see them as just being a part of the internet. We decided to start archiving Cosmos Carl because we are making a guided tour through the website that places it within the context of what is happening in the world of platform capitalism today. Capitalism is becoming more and more platform-based and we are interested in reflecting on what the status of art works are within that process. Our work speaks of these less-obvious layers of the internet, but in the subtle activist way that art does. We are able to critique it while being the users of it.

B: You recently did a presentation (at Page Not Found in Den Haag) in the context of the website being a publishing practice. How does the notion of publishing strike you as a part of Cosmos Carl’s qualities?

F+S: We believe that the notion of publishing has been inherent in the workings of CC since the beginning, but we are only finding out now through these interests coming from other publishers. We use these opportunities to give lectures and talk about the works we have on the site, and we are happy to be branching out at the same time we are starting to archive and preserve the websites qualities.

B: It’s interesting you are branching out more and more in to offline territory. What are some of the upcoming activities of Cosmos Carl?

F+S: We have an opening at Banner Repeater in London on the 26th of April. It’s great, because the space is actually located on the platform of a train station! Banner Repeater is an exhibition space and a bookstore, and we were invited to make an exhibition with them around the notion of online publishing. We will show a video where a guide takes the viewer through the city of Amsterdam, with characters entering the story and presenting different parts of Cosmos Carl through their smartphones and tablets.

Our plan is to go through public and platform-based spaces to further elaborate on the blending of offline and online living, and how that distinction is becoming less and less relevant today. For us, those two experiences are constantly merging, and it’s a bit scary what is happening today with state- and privately owned platforms merging in to more fluid entities. It is becoming a bit like a Black Mirror episode.

In parts of China they have actually started doing everything through the phone. You pay for everything with it and what you do online and offline is running together in to one coherent story. That’s one extreme of it and we plan to show another, which presents situations in real platforms such as libraries and public squares while browsing our platform-based website.

In the work we will also visit an exhibition space in Amsterdam where Alex Frost’s piece, ‘Wet Unboxing (Big Mac)’ 2018, will be on view. Alex presented the piece on the website recently, and this part of our voyage is made to compare an online exhibition experience to an offline one. The video is still in the making of course, but we want to create a Carl Sagan-inspired voyage which presents the story of Cosmos Carl as an entity which merges offline and online living and explores the status of the artwork within the age of platform capitalism.

Bergur Thomas Anderson

www.cosmoscarl.co.uk

Featured image: Wet Unboxing (2018) Alex Frost

Prime Matter – Kathy Clark at Studio Sol

by Erin Honeycutt | Föstudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english

Prime Matter – Kathy Clark at Studio Sol

In an industrial suburb of Reykjavik surrounded by car dealerships and warehouses, the home gallery of Studio Sol transforms the large working spaces of the area through a wholly other use than industry. Entering on the lower floor of the building, one is overcome by the immediate shift in atmosphere to something that operates in a softer manner than the surroundings – you have to listen intently to hear its message.

In the exhibition & Again it Descends to the Earth, American/Icelandic artist Kathy Clark creates this initial atmospheric shift of the senses through the weather sounds that greet you (rain and thunder, plus the chords of a lute) and the subdued dusk-light in which a series of bright, shifting symbols dance across the floor. At first, you wonder if you have stepped inside a folklore museum display related to an offshoot of the Hidden People who have magically been making enigmatic sculptures out of lava rock for centuries. Every element comes across as being part of a larger narrative, informed with research carried out by the creator, yet transformed into a personal narrative that blends with a larger, timeless one.

With a tactile sensibility of handmade materials made of clay, yet reminiscent of bone and stone, Clark makes clear the significance between the activity of craft-making to connect their maker to an elemental reality through the timely, repetitive gestures involved in the process of building with natural materials. Large, mound-shape sculptures alighted with ceramic creatures, ambiguously deer-like, have become totems of the exhibition. The beehive motive is also prevalent, but in its completely black display with white lines showing the coiled shape of the structure, the pure symbol is returned to the viewer, as though the signifier were removed. In fact, all of the handmade sculptures in the show are painted a deep, matte black, creating a shadow-like fantastical landscape.

Like the prima materia, or the first matter in alchemy, the matte black color of all the sculptures create a seemingly unified base material of chaos reflecting one of the fundamental theories in alchemy, that of the universal nature of this first matter. The titles of works in the exhibition come from Isaac Newton’s translation of The Emerald Tablet, a text known to have existed between the 6^th and 8^th century attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the mysterious figure who is known as the father of alchemy. The cave-like space of the exhibition operates like some kind of prime material that has been burned and distilled, purified into an essence of all things, resonating with the act of purifying materials from nature throughout time.

Other early alchemists are echoed in the wax prints on which are etched in black acrylic, landscape scenes featuring massive stone figures, such as the one onto which The Emerald Tablet was purported to have been written. The alchemical manuscripts depicting scenes of processes laid out in metaphorical narrative landscape scenes found in Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617), for instance, are especially reminiscent with the etchings of large stones upon which text is carved. The wax casting of the tableaus creates a tactile overlay making them seemingly reach further into the past than even their vast landscapes suggest.

Clark has created a kind of feminized tablet in her tableau, a rewriting of the text towards a matriarchal base in which it is explicit the metaphor of the female figure being anthropomorphized into a landscape. The fantastical archaeological complex of landforms makes an homage to the landscape as inherently female with the ribs and vertebrae making a middle world, upper world, and a tree of life erupting towards the sun, the mountain temple pyramid of the female figure’s head. Clark answers mysterious origins of landscape forms with her own landscape reminiscent of the Funk Art movement of California in the 1960s; large-scale assemblage works of cultural detritus. Yet instead of mid-20th-century cultural detritus of Americana, Clark’s Funk Art is pulled from the ruins of Neolithic pagan sites.

On the black walls are situated grids of palm-sized, ceramic icons, also painted black, creating a further sense of meaning arriving from depths of depths. It is possible to read the icons as a wall poem from multiple directions as a spatialized incantation, even more so if you choose to read the symbols out loud. The black symbols’ onto which white details have been etched makes it particularly stark in creating a distilled sense of the meaning behind the symbol being brought into form, as though they were tools in relearning the entire theatre of their meaning in a pantomime. The icons of sun, bird, eye, snake/earthworm, triangle, branch, and beehive create a continuous incantation, a poem brought to life through the low hum of a beehive making all of the pieces seemingly vibrate on the verge of vocalization. Everything alludes back to the female figure as both a tomb and a womb where the entirety of symbols, images, and sounds originate as an empathic response to a confrontation with the unknown.

The home gallery of Studio Sol with its location in an industrial neighborhood makes a further integument to the many layers of the landscape, capturing the New Weird Divine*, in the most unsuspecting places.

Erin Honeycutt

*A term used by the writer, Elvia Wilk: ‘The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine.’

Sources: Pereira, Michela. „From the Tabula Smaragdina to the Alchemical Fifth Essence.“ Early Science and Medicine 5, 2 (2000).

All photos by Svenni Speight.