I dare you to get them confused

     Ariel Orozco, Perro Balòn, 2003

     Gabriel Orozco, Black Kites, 1997

It's not just their names and where they work that are similar, but they also look alike! And their artistic practices share a certain degree of irony and conceptual discipline. Are they each other's angelic alter egos? 

Ariel Orozco is a Cuban artist born in 1979 that lives and works in Mexico City. He often works in video, installation and performance nad his work often has an ironical simplicity to it that deals with a bit of the romantic and the hard pragmatism of everyday life. For example, in the work above, Perro Balòn, the white dog painted with the black hexagons of the football seems like a light gesture of whimsicality, but in reality, he had rescued the maltreated dog and painted it like a football, as if the dog were walking around with a 'Kick Me' sign. 

Gabriel Orozco, a Mexican artist born in 1962 who splits his time working and living in Mexico City, New York, and Paris, is the famous artist that shows all over the world and has Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the major international museums listed on his CV. He does video, performance, installations, photography, sculpture and painting. His work often uses found objects from contemporary urban environments and manipulates and presents them in ways that uncover hidden meaning often ignored in their usual everyday purpose. He also deals with formalism and often works with complex geometric patterns, like above in Black Kites, where the black and white harlequin pattern on the skull that you also see on a chess board refer to the dualities of life and death.
  

barbarauccelli at L'ingresso Pericoloso

Artistic suicide has long been romanticized. For centuries now, society has cheerfully delegated artists to the outskirts where their bizarre, erratic, and emotional behaviour can happily take place while they create their masterpieces and kill themselves if they must. Suicide is just another example of artistic behaviour, as if their sensitive and emotional natures were too developed for this world. These artists are considered different, other-worldly, the 19^th century notion of madness being linked to creativity. Often times, after their dramatic exit, the public flocks to their work because it may suddenly hold the key to their tormented spirits, engaging in an act of voyeurism, witnessing the artist’s distress without being directly involved.

Barbarauccelli’s (written as one word) show “Writers” at L’ingresso Pericoloso challenges society’s romanticization of artistic suicide. The photography/video/installation show presents Uccelli as five women writers that have committed suicide: Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Sarah Kane. A minute-long video is dedicated to each artist, the minute prior to death, Uccelli as the writer photographing herself before she takes her life. Each room and corridor of the gallery is dedicated to a writer with a video, a life-sized photograph and the object symbolizing her method of suicide.

The show is called “Writers” but the works themselves do not address the women’s writing. These photographs and videos portray the women who have made a conscious, deliberate decision to commit suicide. It’s not a celebration of their writing, or their lives, of their personalities, or a celebration of their suicides as writers. It is about the force of their decision, they are not hysterical nor are they depressed, they look like iron, they are stubborn and heavy in their hot pink shoes.

Probably the most impressive is the room featuring Virginia Woolf. Stepping into a dark curtained room you encounter a pool of water with a giant photograph of the artist as Virginia Woolf standing in a pool of water with stones in her pocket. She stares at you with determination, her mind is made up, this is the moment before she dies. A small video screen on the side wall shows Woolf slowly taking photographs of herself before she dies.

All the photographs and videos share the same leitmotif of hot pink high heeled shoes. Each woman wears these shoes, a symbol of their female power and desire to express. The fact that each work was done in the studio places these women in a timeless position. The setting of the white concrete wall and floor is non-descript, makes the hard stare of these women even more affective. They stare at the viewer, at the public who made them famous, challenging our voyeurism. They are not victims of their personalities, their decision to die is just one more force of their will.

But of course it is not possible to ignore who they are, they are writers who expressed their torment while living in this society and thousands people could relate to their difficulties and unease. Barbarauccelli connects their suicides to their writing in the fact that their conscious decision and need to write is the same kind of decision to die.

"Writers" by barbarauccelli L'ingresso Pericoloso, Rome 3 October - 13 November

is this a dark purple jester story?

 yesterday i was on via dei reti by my house waiting for the bus to take me to the colosseum so i could see the barbara uccelli show at l'ingresso pericoloso. the tram passes by on the street so the sidewalks have barriers, with openings every now and then to keep people from spilling onto the street. there was an african on the other side of the street, he was really drunk, just standing there laughing, shouting, talking. but you could tell he was suffering, pushing out his misery through the air of words. he was shouting that he was educated, he had studied, and he still couldn't find work and shouted all these things against the berlusconi government. and then he crossed the street towards us, stumbling and laughing, talking to us who were waiting for the bus. but he was in the middle of the street, couldn't get onto the sidewalk because of the barriers. so he was just walking into the oncoming traffic. and suddenly the tram started to come. and he was walking, stumbling, laughing at the cars as he walked in front of them.
the tram was coming and he stepped onto the tracks, turned his back on the tram and raised up his arms, laughing and waiting to get hit. the crowd started to moan, a long hard moan, he was going to die. i turned my back, i was right in front of it, i plugged my ears, i didn't want to see it, didn't want to hear it. and the tram blared the horn and managed to stop within inches of the man.


the man wouldn't move. traffic was stopped. the conductor beeped the horn but the man just sat down in the street in front of the tram. a man on a motorscooter stopped and told him to move, not in an unkind way, he said 'listen, you need to move. you're blocking traffic.' but the guy wouldn't go.

he shouted, 'i don't have my mother anymore. i have no one in this world.'

an ambulance came from the other side, the siren blaring, we thought he was going to stop for the man but it just raced by. the conductor got down and went to the man, he said, 'come on, let me help you up.' and the guy raised his arm and the conductor took it, trying to steer him onto the sidewalk, his arm around the man. but the man lingered.

'give me a hug,' he said.

the conductor hugged him. the african followed him back to the tram. the conductor got on and then came back out and gave him some money and told the man to be careful. the man walked off into the oncoming traffic, we moaned again. but he managed to get onto the sidewalk and walked off singing and laughing.

wolfgang flatz at CELLA show, via San Michele, 25, roma

in parasitical mode, the moon was waning and my hormones were coming out. all i wanted was red wine and popcorn, but first the prison cells at the opening of Cella, a show organized by the university of innsbruck, austria at an old correctional facility in trastevere. each cell held an artist installation.

one of the cells was boarded up, the sign on the door said, 'SOLITARY CONFINEMENT' (in english). the window was covered in the front pages of La Repubblica with a little hole in the bottom. i peeked in and there was man in prison uniform at a desk pushed up against the desk. this was the austrian artist, wolfgang flatz, who made a lot of noise a few years ago by dropping a dead cow full of fireworks from a helicopter onto an abandoned building in berlin. i could only see his torso and hand holding a cigarette. he wrote in german on a piece of paper, fast, chaotically, like he was over-stimulated by the burning cigarette. old-time music played on the radio on the desk. there was a clock. it looked cozy with a bed and small bookshelf. i wanted to go in there, curl up and bleed all over the bed.

"that's nothing like solitary confinement," a young boy, maybe 16, said to me behind my shoulder.
"o no? what's it like?" i said.
he said that when he was in prison he fought with someone and they put him for 6 days in solitary confinement.
"there's no light, you don't know what time it is, you don't how much time passes. you don't have pencils or papers or books or music. they give you food two times a day."
"you eat in the dark?"
"yeah, and the cutlery is plastic. this isn't real at all!"
"it's not supposed to be real."
"yeah."