The 106th Story

Young Star
The 106th Story (Do-It-Yourself Store)
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, December 5, 2008


Since 2001, Masahiro Wada has been director of the Tokyo artist-run-space HOMEBASE. Recent exhibitions in Japan include CUL-PORT, Tokyo Art Center and AIT, as well as the Third Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art in China.Masahiro Wada’s Stories makes use of the radio drama as part of his installation work. The original script, which was written and recorded in Japanese, was then translated to English using a web translation software. For these mistranslated, deconstructed and seemingly nonsensical stories, Masahiro Wada creates an invisible yet memorable sculpture, fictions that seem erroneous in syntax but nevertheless palpable in everyday life: much like real-life drama, or static on the radio.

***

It completed recently, and it boasts of the best floor space in this position region, and it is opposite with there no conversation for gay this and five minutes or more and sits also in the coffee multiple store in a huge do-it-yourself store. A small round table is placed and the coffee cup that has already emptied is put with 2 and the ashtray.

"Really take it ..tomorrow.. ..China... "

The husband is still face down and is fiddling with Cachacacha and the cellular phone.

Did not it hear, "It mailed and did to whom" it be from when? Even the thought thing becomes silly. It did not want to be mortifying and to think about the regretted thing for the lazy wife of not putting the nature on the husband who has become it.

Noriko took out carrying, and started the check on mail. It is separately an insinuation to the husband who is fiddling with carrying though the thing that important mail has not come to carry of I etc. were understood.

｢Ah. It goes really. Shanghai｣

The husband returned it without source natures with the face down. Is the thing that I watch mail tentatively anxious? The visited thing doesn't separately have this 2?3 year by the husband though Noriko was a little glad who the other party is either.

｢..referring.. ｰDo not it go by the business trip and do not it disregard t?｣"How much do you go?"

"Then, is not baseball with Kenft promised impossibility?"

It seems not to be understood whether to hear or not to exist and has begun to enter the husband who keeps seeing a portable screen with feelings Wawa to get irritated gradually as usual. In reality｢It sleeps in the Tema sit cross-legged tendon. It turns and the E-mailing point in the under when. Scamp it. Minimum manners when speaking with the person can be done, and because the married couple very much, it is executive job,, and ..encounter.. ? in Tema Cai Co. you see. When talking with the person, had not you learnt it from Babaa and Gegei of the miser of Tema that saw person's eyes?｣The barrage of a glance that it frightens it, is the colder might be received from a guest and a clerk near by ten people who is sipping coffee with carefree abandon in this coffee chain, and, according to circumstances, there be a thing that the clerk goes to call the guard member, too, if such a thing is done though it is a place where it wants to disperse the Steller's sea lion, and to throw out to one's heart's content by the coffee cup and the ashtray with an empty it is in the presence. And, from neat glasses to sit on the next｢When the bride scares only bean jam, the married couple's conversation is ..nature.. ..lost... Ccc. ｣It might be a disgrace sneer and be a thrown thing. In addition, this fellow will only have to be straightening only the appearance in the impact always suitably in the back because he is unpalatable when cutting though the fear husband keeps up the appearance, and this fellow will comfort it momentarily. The appearance would say, and run, and more and more conversations as the married couple were lost, and the sense of crisis of connecting with more and more disfunctional families finally ran at high speed in Noriko's head. When it seems to explode, becoming it feelings are subdued with a jerk, and a violent word that goes out of the mouth is swallowed, the word gotten off below begins to shake my right leg that Noriko is uniting naturally.

｢Is it about four days?The business trip｣

The husband declared while groping the cigarette on the table by the right hand. with stared at the cellular phone as usual

"Then, promise of Kenft after all. "

It violently took it out again of the fact that ..Noriko.. handbag of my carrying
saying.
Portable sound
Timing often thought by my carrying and thought that something was saved very
much at the beginning by the kite by business.

｢Yes is done. ･･･ Oh, Kenft?It has already come back from the school. ｣

The husband finished the transmission of mail at last, looked up, and was turning sea anemone's the second mouth to Noriko while igniting the cigarette.

｢Yes. ･･･ Yes. ･･･ Yes. Aspect of ..encounter.. ｰ. . Did you get it ..what..?｣
...decrease.. ｰ. From who?｣｢Ar aspect and. Yes. ｰ. Good sleep. ｣｢Do you return the elder brother?Yes. What?Do you pretend outside?Is .. It is so. Is Kenft?Getting and cake eating point. Present. Aspect of ..encounter.. ｰ. Good sleep. Yes. Because papa and the mama also ..Mousg.. return. Yes. Then, the sleep food. Yes. ｣

"Is Its?"

｢It eating what as for the cake of the present gotten in Christmas party. ..outside pretense.. . when ..elder brother.. .... hearing it. Is .. ｣

｢Is it so?. Is it pretense?｣
"The present is from Yumi. ""He tidy ..reward.. ..whether it was possible to say.."

Husband's face is laughing.
Even if a twin sea anemone that grew from the potato took food, the face seemed to move the Pacpac mouth.

The shake of the right leg had been installed a little more.
Noriko quite thought that it was able still to connect with this husband because there were sons. How on earth did we become it if it was this, and there were no sons?There are a lot of thought things recently.

Portable sound

｢Yes is done. Ah so. It asks suitably while I am not because I Mr./Ms. Yamada's matter to Tanuma though I am gone on the fifth the fourth from tomorrow by the business trip. Ah so. Yes. Yes. It has understood. Does the matter reach though E-mailed now?So. So. Yes ･･･｣

When it was understood to have sent E-mail that sold the face down hard to the subordinate in the company, Noriko felt relieved a little. It thought a little when saying as the business trip was an excuse for the husband to go on a trip somewhere with the mistress, and the reason for the immorality is to tell the truth that it was convinced that the other party who was doing in E-mail and the company that always the face down and took it. Perhaps, the husband will have the person who seems to be the mistress. There are some evidences and reasons that can be proven for this, and the intuition of the wife who cultivated it for 12 years works, too.
The delusion of sending mail of my.. presence to the mistresses always continued for a long time for these 2.3 years. Therefore, the mail that some husbands had been seriously striking thought that I was liberated from blind disgust where husband's cellular phone was felt a little in the thing that it was able to be confirmed that there was E-mail in work, too.

The husband hung up the telephone and lit a cigarette. Noriko also took out my cigarette of the handbag and the fire was set fire. The spoken thing did not float at all. It thought only of child's thing and it did not float though I wanted to do other some conversations.

The husband started and and started the cellular phone again.

｢Let's already go. Kenft and the elder brother are waiting. ｣

Noriko left the seat stubbing out a cigarette.

"Ah"

The husband tightened the cap of the cellular phone.

"That and my paper bag Mo"

Noriko said so, had the paper bag with which the home kit of the thing and the present for children were blocked in the hand, and went out of the coffee place previously. It completely gave the day when going out outside the building. It shines on at constant intervals of a huge parking lot and the light of the halogen light of O cooking stove color is ..innumerable car.. ..coming to the surface... The thing splendidly decorated surrounds the entire building when looking up at this huge do-it-yourself store from the stopped car. The do-it-yourself store shone on about one mono-vicinity with brightness.

Watching Deleted Scenes

Young Star
Watching Deleted Scenes
Sleepwalking by Yason Banal
November 28, Friday



Heman Chong is inspired by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Michel Houellebecq, Thomas More, Haruki Murakami and countless other science fiction writers. His art practice involves an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future. Charged with a conceptual drive, this research is then adapted into objects, images, installations, situations or texts. The artist represented Singapore at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. He has collectively written a science fiction novel entitled "PHILIP" with 7 other collaborators, published by Project Press in 2006. Heman Chong works with Vitamin Creative Space (Beijing/Guangzhou).

***

When I began the series of collages, Deleted Scenes, I had in mind, a process that reflected something completely violent on a seriously extensive level. I have been researching for 2 years now, this topic of the representation of imposed solitude, where an individual is deliberately taken out of society, and a huge portion of it deals with the idea of being imprisoned by a authoritarian body. This has always been a thorn in my side for a long time, as we are surrounded by many reports, especially in South-East Asia where we know for a fact that people are being put away for their political beliefs.


Please don't get the wrong impression that I am some sort of a political crusader, making art as political statements. On the contrary, I am an escapist. I have never involved myself directly in any form of protest, neither am I part of any political party or NGO. I stand alone. As an artist. And my work is political (I believe that all work is political, whether you label it that or not).


My position as an artist is informed by the fact that I am neither the beginning nor the end of anything. I find it really difficult to accept art that speaks of itself as new or innovative. For me, its such an impossibility. To state that it came from nowhere, plucked out of the clouds. I reject this notion.


This position of an escapist interests me much more than being active in politics. I have always been drawn to characters in narrative who exist outside of the active arena of a situation rather than the main heroes. People who have no strings attached to anything, who are capable of saying anything they like and want without having to justify themselves to any side or form or shape. Loose cannons, we call them.


To make the work, I begin by taking photographs with my camera phone. As I have my phone with me at all times, these photographs are of anything and everything. There is no selection process involved when selecting what to capture. Buildings, plants, people having sex in clubs, people crossing a street, people eating in a cafe. Mostly I make the photos while spending time with my wife, hanging around, doing nothing on a warm tropical afternoon.


Then these photographs are sent to the cheapest photo lab in Singapore to be processed. It is really important that they are produced in a shop where other images from the general public are being processed. It means that the photograph in this instance has the same status as an ordinary snapshot by the man on the street, without any kind of artistic consciousness to it. Just memories. Nothing else. Nothing elite or high-brow about it.


The photographs are ready. They're 4 by 6 inches each, what we call 4R size. The most common size for snaps. I usually print up to about 100 to 200 prints at one time. I bring them home. I take a pen knife and cut a rectangle out of the center of the photograph, leaving a 1 cm border all around.


What remains is a curious little object, resembling a frame without a picture but which is a picture in itself. You immediately develop this sense of loss when you look at the sad bastard.


I remember years ago, when Singapore was still pretty anal about censoring pictures of naked bodies in magazines, I would find missing pages in magazines (mostly from European magazines like Dazed & Confused and The Face) you find off the shelves and wonder what these images are. It represents a lost idea, floating around, being horribly de-contextualized from its mothership.


I digress. This project is NOT about censorship.


Imagine being imprisoned. For a long, long time. So long that you don't even remember the face of your mother. That is what this work is about. The fragility of images. You try every morning to remember the outline of her face, the shape of her nose, the softness of her lips. But you get nothing out of this except for something that resembles a Josef Albers painting.


Now that is violent.


I haven't made a photograph in years. I just can't. I can't bring myself to bring into this world another image when we're already surrounded by so many. And so many that are so senseless. Even the important ones.


We are confronted everyday with a massive amount of images through the internet. Google something and you can instantaneously get an image of it. We view our friend's lives through their snaps on Facebook. We are bombarded with visions of the past, the present and the future, all on that 12 inch laptop. It de-sensitizes us to the power of images : as rare objectified reflections of the human condition. What we have today is just fluff, lint from the neither world of endless snapshots of banal minutes we spend drinking coffee at Starbucks.


So this is the result of my problematic relationship with photography. To make them and to immediately erase them. And to forget. Just like the man in the cell, waiting, indefinitely for the day he sees the sky again, to experience rain on his face.

Yet Another Rather Terrible Slaughter of the Tour Guide!

YET ANOTHER RATHER TERRIBLE SLAUGHTER OF THE TOUR GUIDE!
Sleepwalking by Yason Banal
November 14, Friday



Since being named ‘The Most Promising Young Artist’ at the UOB Painting of the Year Competition at the age of 18, Kai Syng Tan (born 1975) has been out & about in the art world (hopefully still with some degree of ‘promise’). Kai Syng is a die-hard Made-In-Singapore Artist ‘trained’ in the both the ‘Wild West’ (B.A. Fine Art 1st Class Honours, top student, Slade School of Fine Art University College London 1998, and School of Art Institute of Chicago 1996) & the ‘Far East’ (M.A., Excellence Award, Department of Imaging Arts & Sciences, Musashino Art University, Tokyo 2005). An insatiable tourist-digger-hoarder, she scavenges, swallows the surrounding clutter of signs/information/noise; as a compulsive editor she chews up, re-arranges, regurgitates - and re-maps – the found fragments into densely layered works that question our ‘realities’, via the image (she was trained as a painter and sculptor), music (she tinkled the ivories for 11 years) and text (for all her pretentious philosophical and semiotic inquiries) in time and space, about, and for our here & now.

***

Hello there! Welcome to our super shiny city called SHINY CITY. Ours is the world’s number one shiniest, sparkliest (sic), slickest city! Uniquely familiar, authentically ‘modern’, really unreal – and it feels just like home!

Before I forget, I am your Tour Guide. Allow me, your Tour Guide, to take you for a spankingly dizzying ride! Please. Come. With me.

Time code 6’32”
PLACE OF INTEREST I: CITY SINK

Let us begin our Shiny City DETOUR. Are you ready? We are now at the amazing never-ending underground world called CITY SINK.

I LIVE IN THE CITY / I LOVE THE CITY
The city is a rich and complex site. It is noisy, cluttered, chaotic, grand, unfriendly, expensive, overcrowded, crime-filled, default target of terrorism, a site of political demonstrations and state-organised street parties, polluted, anonymous, cruel, has strange smells, forgetful, forbidding, capricious, charming, voyeuristic, paranoid, intrusive, vulgar, selfish, materialistic, sparkling, fake, authentic with small mysterious nooks and crannies.

It is a rich and dramatic stage for the dwellers’ behaviours, rituals and performances. How we catch the train; how we avoid eye contact with strangers and non-strangers; how we invent our own time and space for privacy. It is a terribly exciting mise-en-scene - in shallow, not deep focus - for the Tourist and Tour Guide. It is flawed as it is perfect. It repels as much as it attracts; we travel to the City Lights with Hope; we leave it disillusioned, we struggle to survive there; we die there, we return.

I love the city. To death.

CITY AS MUSE, MISE-EN-SCENE & MONSTER: CITY IN ART; ART IN THE CITY
The city has been mapped, interpreted and imagined in the arts for as long as its formation. Think Oliver Twist, Trainspotting, Fight Club, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, Christo, Jenny Holzer, Babara Kruger, Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers at New York’s MOMA. The city has also inspired and housed genres such as jazz, rap, hiphop, graffiti art, street busking.

Endless cinematic reconstructions of the city has also existed ever since cinema was born: Ruttman’s Berlin Symphony, a combination of 5 Soviet states in Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, Fritz Lang’s futuristic Metropolis, Godzilla’s post-nuclear disaster of Tokyo, King Kong’s New York City, San Francisco in Hitchcock’s Veritigo, the Roma of the Italian Realists, Tokyo in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, London in Patrick Keiler’s London, Tsai Ming Liang’s Taipei, Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

Many art festivals and art Biennales have long been associated with the City or city-state. During festival period, entire cities become exhibitions, and every one is a collaborator. Think Singapore Biennale, Sao Paolo, Documenta in Kassel, Cannes Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

URBAN FANTASIES / URBAN NIGHTMARES
Urban denizens (apart from the Tourist and Tour Guide) include Superheroes fighting nasty urban nemesis, such as Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Robin, and even The Incredibles. Set in a ‘Liberty City’ which is based by many accounts on New York City, the video game Grand Theft effectively explores the tensions between the real and imagined. Which are the bits that have been parodied or sampled from the ‘real’ world? Which has been modified? Which are the bits that resemble the real McCoy? Why? Which do not? Why not?

The creation of a parallel world is a lovely device to critique one’s own, via mimesis and from (critical) distance. This is seen powerfully explored in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: each universe Gulliver visits is a little parable about OUR values and mores; every thing gets deflected back to us; are these strange beings he encounter strange, or is he the stranger?

Time code 23’07”
Place of Interest II: WHERE

Welcome to the next place of interest! Here we are, up in the heavens, called WHERE.

THROW YOUR INHIBITIONS AND DOUBTS OUT OF THE WINDOW!
Just look out of the window. You can see only civility, grace and comfort in this ambitious city. There are no moles or freckles, just smooth skin. None of that freakish curly hair or bald patches, but hair of the same length throughout. It’s rather neat. She’s a great way to fly.

DISCLAIMER AT CUSTOMS: NOTHING TO DECLARE, NO EXCESS BAGGAGE .
Today’s world of simulacra, Second Life, virtual universes, cloning, piracy, reality TV, everyone an artist,
everyone a laptop artist, everyone an idol for at least 15 minutes, space tourism, the revival of religious
fundamentalism et al means that the notion of ‘reality’ gets increasingly conflated, expanded and complex.

AUTHENTI-CITY, DOMESTI-CITY
Things are exacerbated here, as Artifice is the New Reality. She is bigger faster better sexier wealthier shinier than Las Vegas+Dubai+Anna Nicole Smith+Shijingshan Amusement Park combined. The city is uber po-mo and ambitious. It wants to be global centre for everything under the equatorial sun. It is one giant theme park – and a successful one too. Just like her ‘3-in-1 coffee’ and ‘all-in-1 departmental stores’, not only is it compact, but efficient, convenient, ideal, tropical paradise, microcosm of the world. It has everything under the sun and tropical rain. The theme park is well-organised, with different lands, each a perfect miniature of life itself. (See gigantic hypermarkets in land-scarce island everywhere; cineplexes; multi-storey carparks; ‘Integrated Resorts’, Sentosa). The mash-up has interesting ready-made empirical example that would thrill Baudrillard to death.

Everyone plays an important role in this show – including the Operator, Visitor, Cleaner, Tourist, Tour Guide.

Now please make your way down to earth again.

Time Code: 38’44”
OPEN END: POINT OF NO RETURN

I’m afraid we’ve reached the POINT OF NO RETURN. Now it’s time to say goodbye. It’s been truly great knowing you. Thank you very much indeed. All the very best in your future endeavours. See you at the next City!

Tour Guide dies.

Tour Guide travels back and forward in time.

Tour Guide enters another world, and meets her alter-ego from TOUR in the parallel world. She screams.

The end

As Yet Unnamed

Young Star
As Yet Unnamed
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, October 24, 2008


As Yet Unnamed is a collective of emerging artists, currently based at Misiem’s (About Studio/About Café) in Bangkok’s Chinatown. Apart from exhibitions, As Yet Unnamed hosts regular events and discussions, with the aim of opening up conversations about contemporary art.

*

“The lesson to be learnt here … is that the divide friend/enemy is never just the representation of a factual difference: the enemy is by definition, always – up to a point, at least – invisible; he looks like one of us; he cannot be directly recognized – this is why the big problem and task of political struggle is providing/constructing a recognizable image of the enemy.” in Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: (Slavoj Zizek)

Bloodshed

Thailand’s recent political history is marked by bloodless coups, but uprising against those in power are often brutal. It happened again yesterday, and blood is once more flowing in the streets of Bangkok.

The first incidents of violence erupted early yesterday morning in front of parliament on Ratchawithi road. Riot police launched a surprise tear gas attack on thousands of People’s Alliance for Democracy supporters who had sealed all entrances to the building since Monday night to stop the government from delivering its policy statement.

As the day wore on, further incidents of ferocity broke out. Irate demonstrators who had sealed off the metropolitan Police Bureau were hit with a barrage of tears gas and flash and smoke grenades fired by police. When they turned back to parliament to isolate it yet again, they were hit with more. By that time, hundreds of people, including MPs, senators, and parliament officials, were trapped inside the building.

As the area around the Royal Plaza rocked to the sounds of explosions, two people lost their lives, one in a car explosion, and another later in hospital. Hundreds of demonstrators and police were wounded, with five demonstrators losing parts of their legs. Although the government managed to complete its policy statement to legalise its administrative power, outside it seems the political chaos has risen to a level it will be unable to manage. (Bangkok Post, Wednesday October 8, 2008)

Donald Rumsfeld philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknown. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knows,” things we don’t know that we know—which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself.” (Slavoj Zizek)

The princess of Thailand said Thursday that she does not believe protests in her home country are being staged to benefit the monarchy.

Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn talked about the importance of public service Thursday at the Choate Rosemary Hall prep school in Wallingford. She later headed to the University of Pennsylvania for a U.S.-Thailand education discussion.

Her visit came amid the worst political violence in Thailand in more than a decade. Thousands of protesters have camped at the main government office complex to demand electoral changes and an end to corruption in Thai politics.

In violent clashes on Tuesday, 423 protesters and 20 police were injured, Thai medical authorities said. One woman was killed, and a man died in what appeared to be a related incident.

It was the worst political violence since 1992, when the army killed dozens of pro-democracy demonstrators seeking the ouster of a military-backed government.

The princess was asked at a press conference following her talk whether she agreed with protesters who say they are acting on behalf of the monarchy.

"I don't think so," she replied. "They do things for themselves."

Asked why the king has not spoken out, she said, "I don't know because I haven't asked him."

Protest leaders have called for the prosecution of people who insult the monarchy. One leader wants to abandon Thailand's popularly elected Parliament for one in which a majority of members would be appointed.

Some academics have said the plan would enhance the power of the country's military and monarchy at the expense of the poor.

"There are a lot of political problems," the princess said. "I told my friends, colleagues just to do what is their duty."(Hartford Courant:www.courant.com: Associated Press October 9, 2008)

Slavoj Žižek quotes an old Eastern European joke in the introduction to his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real . The joke goes like this: A Czech (or East German or Polish) worker is transferred to Siberia. He know that when he will write letters from Siberia to his friends at home they will be read by the censors and so he tells his friends : "Let's establish a code: if a letter you receive from me is written in normal blue ink, it's true; if it is written in red ink, it's false." After a month, his friends receive a letter written in blue ink: "Everything is great here in Siberia: the shops are full, there is plenty of food, there are great and beautiful apartments, you can see all the latest Western films in the cinema and there are beautiful girls ready to go out with you - the only thing that you cannot get here is red ink."(missing ink(preface): Welcome to the desert of the real, (Slavoj Zizek)

A comparatively small group of soldiers and civil servants, however, felt that the time for a change had come. This led to an almost bloodless "revolution" in the early morning of June 24, 1932 by the so-called People's Party (Khana Ratsadon - คณะราษฎร) who took control of one of the royal palaces in Bangkok and arrested key officials (mainly the princes) while the king was at his summer retreat in Hua Hin. The People's Party demanded that Prajadhipok agree to become a constitutional monarch and grant the Thai people a constitution. The King agreed and the first "permanent" constitution was promulgated on December 10, 1932.

His arrival back in Bangkok on June 26 dispelled for the time being any thoughts the promoters might have had of establishing a republic. One of his first acts was to receive some of the leading promoters in audience: as they entered the room, the King greeted them with the words "I rise in honour of the Khana Ratsadorn."
[1] [2]It was a very significant gesture. According to Siamese tradition, monarchs remain seated while their subjects make obeisance. [3](wikipedia)
[1]Thawatt Mokarapong. (1972) History of the Thai Revolution. Chalermnit.
[2]Pridi Phanomyong (1974) Ma vie mouvementée. Paris.
[3]Stowe, Judith A. (1990) Siam becomes Thailand. Hurst & Company.

“The king descends into despair when the three leave for the forest, and dies soon afterwards. All this while, Bharata and Shatrughna have been away from the kingdom. They are summoned upon their father's death, and when they arrive, are told what has happened. Bharata is aghast at his mother's greed (ostensibly for his good), and promises that he will restore Rama as king. He travels to the forest to convince Rama to return to Ayodhya. Rama refuses on the grounds that he must obey his father's command but allows Bharata to take Rama's sandals back to Ayodhya so that Bharata can symbolically enthrone Rama's sandals and rule as regent for Rama.

The story details with the experiences of the trio in the forest, especially how the royals, used to soft living and multitudes of servants, train themselves to live frugally amongst nature and be self-sufficient. It also covers the interactions between them and the various hermits and sages living in the forest, some of who realize the divinity of Rama. Rama and Lakshmana frequently battle the forest demons that disturb the hermits' meditations.

One of the demons who had been defeated by them decides to take revenge. She describes the beauty of Sita to her brother, Ravana, the demon king of Lanka (modern day Sri Lanka). Ravana decides that he must possess Sita, and has one of his brothers take the form of a deer to attract Sita's attention. Sita sends out Rama to capture the deer for her as a pet. The deer leads Rama far away from their cottage, and when Rama realizes that this is no ordinary deer, he kills it. The dying demon shouts Sita's and Lakshmana's names in Rama's voice, causing Sita to send Lakshmana out to help Rama. When the cottage is thus unguarded, Ravana sweeps in, kidnaps Sita and flies off to Lanka. When Rama sees Lakshmana approaching him, he at once realizes the trick. They both run back to the cottage to find it empty.”

*

Arts Network Asia (ANA) is a group of independent artists, cultural workers and arts activists primarily from Southeast Asia that encourages and supports regional artistic collaboration as well as develops managerial and administrative skills within Asia. Arts Network Asia is motivated by the philosophy of meaningful collaboration, distinguished by mutual respect, initiated in Asia and carried out together with Asian artists.

Excursion Modules in Tension Island

Young Star
Excursion Modules in Tension Island
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, September 26, 2008

Poklong Anading clearly is an experienced communicator of new perspectives. His originality lies in his willingness to engage with audiences. It is interesting to note how he revisits earlier debates on the relation between community networks and the artistic avant-garde. — Jo Holder, director of The Cross Art Projects, Sydney

YASON BANAL: Can you talk about the first image here, what happened?

POKLONG ANADING: I was inspired by the transportation flow during rush hour. I’m usually put in that situation. So one time I brought my friend Enteng along to the MRT station, but it proved difficult to get in because it was too crowded. He had a plastic laundry basket with him, so when the next train came he didn’t have a choice but to place it on his head.

YB: He probably did it because of his circumstance in reality, perhaps (not) art. If there were more space in the train, what would have happened?

PA: Nothing. Maybe he would have just held it. We even laughed about it. He placed it on his head because he couldn’t do anything about it.

YB: You guys had art/work in mind?

PA: It’s a study that could become work. Cameras aren’t allowed in the MRT, but how can you stop this gesture? People discreetly get footage.

ENTENG VIRAY: They can’t do anything about it. It was very crowded and I wanted to hop on the train. I told Poklong that we should just see each other at the next station.

YB: With influential artists like Adrian Piper who explore boundaries of public space, gender, race and socialized rituals, streets and other modes of transportation such as the subway become potent platforms for similar tensions. I wonder how the Filipino mindset and audience react to or localize such concerns.

POKLONG: It’s quite passive here, it’s hard to make an audience participate. It’s either they get mad or just stare blankly, perhaps out of fear that they might get reprimanded for joining in. As a group they could, but on their own and separately, especially if they see a camera, that would be tough.

YASON: The presence of the camera either drives them to engage and/or perform, or look away to avoid getting photographed.

POKLONG: The audience reaction was secondary. The important thing was being able to translate my actual, spontaneous experience — how I got the idea when I had Enteng react without prior plans — to reenact a spontaneous act via photography. I think it’s important. I just see Enteng’s photo and I laugh.

ENTENG: I can imagine people thinking, “What’s that basket doing on his head?” and I’d think, “Well, there’s nothing you can do, it’s tight in here!”

POKLONG: The second image is another guerrilla project — it’s like an unplanned architectural space. Vehicles would pass the intersection of EDSA and Aurora Boulevard and at times there would be a beggar sleeping there from 6 to 8 p.m. That’s the first thing I thought, I was hoping there were squatters living there. If there was a shower curtain, would they still be visible and privy to stares and heckles? Traffic is noisy underneath and people crossing the street obtrusive. So I got interested in this kind of space, it’s like a gallery where people can throw trash in. There are kids who get high there as well.

YASON: That’s really tempting spatially, with or without the aid of narcotics. Everything seems nice. In reality though, this residual error or accidental structure can be quite dangerous. One has privacy and free lodging, but becomes isolated. Solitude as both trip and trap.

POKLONG: Just think of the people who can potentially live in similar spaces. If they built a bridge then there would already be a community living there right now.
Are you still interested in the space?

POKLONG: It’s been a while, a lot has happened. So every time I pass there I develop the urge to throw something in its direction just so that the space will get noticed. People don’t even mind it anymore. There’s no one there, but I didn’t want an easy task so I chose the megaphone. You can hang around with it and no one will probably mind you.

YASON: How did you decide on the gesture? Did the megaphone come first or the space?

POKLONG: I decided on the megaphone because most of the props here in the studio are just scattered. When we were transferring houses I saw the megaphone. It’s noisy, it’s like a musical piece. When I heard it I got really nervous. I remembered the space again all of a sudden — Enteng and I can do a guerrilla scene there using the megaphone. I wanted to make it into a timer, to make it tick like a time bomb.

YASON: Did Poklong explain what you had to do?

ENTENG: At first. There was nothing I could do. I just wanted it to finish.

POKLONG: It was a bit risky, despite the many times I’ve told him about it.

ENTENG: We were caught so many times already.

YASON: Yes. I miss those days.

ENTENG: Sometimes, shit, I don’t trust Poklong anymore. I think he just likes putting me in danger.

YASON: That’s what happens in a collaboration; in a way it gets rehearsed but nevertheless it is still nerve-wrecking.

ENTENG: You face the police, and here we go again.

POKLONG: I just wanted to see what would happen — like if the ambulance would arrive, if passersby would think it’s a bomb. But I wanted to be invisible in all this.

YASON: It’s a better idea — more spectral and suggestive.

POKLONG: That’s why I get it more. At first I was hoping I’d toss it, and the cops would pick me up. It’s funnier if I was the one to admit the fault instead of Enteng getting into trouble again. It’s kind of dramatic. But since consecutive bomb threats have been happening in the city, Enteng got scared. He was already traumatized from our past encounters with the authorities so I thought there was no point in making the same point.

YASON: The idea of something being thrown in that awkward space is already more troubling than bearing witness to the act. The work is more the suggestion (in a photograph) rather than its execution (in reality). It would probably look silly in actual life, but the frozen gesture in a fictive and reproducible document becomes something more open to projection, more prone to rumors, and potentially disturbing. You could be throwing anything. The siren as object, thought and sound triggers fear and hysteric talk.

POKLONG: Speaking of fear and growling, this last image is a study inspired by walks in a neighborhood where dogs are everywhere. In such places one needs a tactic, especially when you’re drunk and not so alert.

YASON: It’s like sexual harassment, but of the canine kind!

POKLONG: It’s just a hassle when you get bitten. Worse, the owners often claim that their dogs don’t bite, as if putting the blame on you. I get annoyed by such incidents, so that got me thinking of dog collars/traps made of metal. Basically you lock the dogs’ heads together while they’re asleep. When they wake up faced to each other, they’d probably end up gnarling and fighting ‘til kingdom come. Eventually they’ll get tired, energy drained. Ready for release.

YASON: So you want to teach the dogs a lesson, to make them feel the way you do (laughter).

POKLONG: I want to know also how far their patience will go. It’s like a war dance. I can’t do anything about the culture because it’s the government who should find a solution. But I want the dogs to know their effect on people when they bark. I want to place the stress on them.

YASON: Do you see a common thread in the works you mentioned?

POKLONG: The connection is that they all comment on experiences that are both tragic and funny. Just like the Bawal Ang Tao Dito image — I want to explain and show that it’s funny, that despite the warning there is still a person there, albeit butt-naked and face covered. These contradictions and small observations are interesting to me.

YASON: It’s a way of coping with the world but not providing a neat solution. Where the stress falls is, after all, part of the joy. Are the studies important, or do you have to execute them?

POKLONG: It depends. The ideas Enteng and I come up with have been there for a while, but they have to be executed with timing. That’s why we turn them into studies. They just happen when the right time comes.

YASON: It’s a good thing you remember. I quickly forget an idea.

POKLONG: The idea’s always been there. That’s why it’s more interesting this way, when it’s a pure study.

Type. Error. Silence.

Type. Error. Silence.
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Philippine Star
Friday, August 1, 2008



YASON BANAL: Your work still doesn’t have a title.

MARC GABA: I’m considering Spell “News.” It’s taking me longer than usual because I don’t know what sort of title would encompass the different ideas that I’ve hoped would be part of the piece. And partly because I don’t know what precisely is the relation of the title to the artwork here, especially since as an abstraction it’s already text. To a certain extent I want the work to be untitled.

I saw the other day this documentary entitled Helvetica, which delves into the history of typography and the changing type/face of visual culture. I’m curious as to the decisions you made on this particular work — was it the content of the headline, or was it the typeface, the visual aspect of the text?

The most important thing is that they are headlines from the Philippine STAR. And also there is a hope that the work will somehow recall the type from the first page of the newspaper, but this time unreadable. I wanted it somehow to look like an error, a typographical error, which would shift the attention to form. It’s not corruption.

How do you see this work in the context of your practice as a poet and more recently, as a student of architecture?

I think the work is related to the rest of what I do in the sense that I work on a per project basis with some sort of a defined limit. I see a work of art as a unit of attention, so however much one can say against the frame, how it can fetishize the piece of art or something like that, I think that it generates meaningful limits. In this piece I should maybe say that it’s not something that I would do for an art show. Its terms are very specific to the site of the newspaper.

The fact that you work on a per project basis, that you consider the framework and the context where it will be shown, you learn the form that can best execute it. Does having this multidisciplinary background give you a certain leverage?

Coming into visual art as a poet sort of protected me from any kind of totalizations regarding how art is thought about, and it gave me a freedom to look at things as a hopefully intelligent and informed outsider. Visual art is not anything that I operate in exclusively, so I’m free from any kind of pressure to play along.

Do you see architecture as a separate field of inquiry and expression? Is it the fact that you’re back in school that you find appealing, or is architecture another approach that you feel contributes to your art practice?

I think they all contribute something. The leverage, if it is leverage, that I have coming at visual art and then now going into architecture as a poet, is a certain respect for silence, and maybe a more bodily knowledge of the limits of what we can describe — genuine ones — the limits of the speakable. It’s a training in silence, almost. I’m studying architecture now because I do think there is a way for structures to alter perception in an instant, or in a brief experience of moving through all sorts of relations that it can make…The thing is, I love architecture, because I feel the difference it can make. I was at the National Gallery in Washington DC and there was this fantastic moment when I had to ask where I was. Because the architecture was just so awesome and irreducibly itself as a place.
You do approach the printed page as a structure.

The fact that you wanted the work here to be of a particular size is a consideration of architectural space — it becomes an interesting confluence. You have an artist like Vito Acconci who started out as a poet, then delved into conceptual and performance art, and later started doing architecture. Are there figures who have inspired you with regard to lateral movement, as well as the silence you speak of? Silence by the way of Susan Sontag, as an aesthetic strategy, as refusal.

Lots of figures. I would mention the poet Cole Swensen, who almost always works with the page. I think Fanny Howe is an influence — but more because of how she handles syntax, and how she makes lines behave tectonically. In my first manuscript there’s a series of poems called “Studies of Linearity,” where a whole line can function as a form of punctuation.

(coughing)Definitely -

Also there is this figure, George Oppen, who stopped writing poetry for a time for political reasons. Maybe visual art is a form of silence, in that I don’t want to talk about some of the things that I nonetheless want to express some things about.

Spitting Images

Young Star
Spitting images
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, June 6, 2008

Dear Yason,

I hope this e-mail finds you well. Sorry for being out of touch. I’ve just come from a show of paintings. It was called Ebenbild. I’ve asked my German friends and none of them know exactly what it means. I checked online. Loosely, it means a spitting image, as in, “a spitting image of your father.”
That’s perfect, then. The paintings were exactly what paintings normally are, and the young German painter boy, my classmate, was a spitting image of an artist as a young man. If there was any irony I didn’t catch it, but my bad — too busy nursing my warm beer and the awkward small talk. Or maybe the irony was in the normalcy. Or the edginess was in the conservatism. Shit, death and violence can be so fuddy-duddy. I don’t know. Anyway, at some point a mini Dachshund arrived and stole the show, and that was that.

I didn’t finish the machine I was making for you. Sorry about that. I’ve attached the study for the machine. It’s called Melencholia I Rainbowmaker after Durer. Melencholia I is an etching of his. Wikipedia says that Panofsky says it’s his “spiritual self portrait.” Google it. I like that one about how it’s about Agrippa’s Melencholia Imaginativa, the third kind of melancholia, affecting artists. I don’t know if I have that much drama in my life but I’m making this machine so cheers to Durer on that. The machine is like a very elaborate hose with fancy housing and floodlights. I mean, I can make rainbows with a fishbowl of water and a flashlight, but that’s just not as sexy. It’s going to look like a pre-fab, German kitchen mod Tony Smith in his black metal phase. It’s going to be fabulous. Hyper-modernist fountain spraying water all over the gallery awash in Klieg lights. That is so sexy. If I ever get it done you’ll be the first to know.

Love,

Maria Taniguchi


* * *


Dear Maria,

Many thanks for your e-mail. I just came from a comedy night with no name. No Germans nor Irony, just (g)old plated humor, as evidenced by a status-anxious youngster who dishes out “hey is dude” and “emo is jologs” jokes — his silly hat earning the most applause — and a Hong Kong socialite who was talking on the phone while his sketch was ongoing.

Is this still, modern life? Is Modernity melancholic or hysterical, ridiculous and boring? Are we the new Antiquity? I ask these questions because the preppy young comedian and the Chinese doyenne seemed to have hit it off well after the show.
I like the idea of the Ebenbild, by the way, “the spitting image of your father.”

It could mean an exact likeness to one’s father, or more exactly, the image of a father spitting.

The first description seems appropriate to both machinery and melancholia, the “mmmmm”s of modern life. Isn’t a machine after all a technological tool aimed to re-present reality by enhancing it? And isn’t melancholia via Durer a waiting for inspiration, because reality fails (and thus no spitting image to be likened or aspire to)? Can machines, spitting images of modernity but better, be melancholic? Machines cannot be, I know, and I know the questions aren’t sexy enough, but to me it’s interesting how these 3 Ms intersect. It’s kind of the reverse of your hyper-modernist fountain, where water comes from a single source but sprays in different directions.

The second description is funny but one-dimensional. He spits and we know why, and where it goes we’re sure it’s still within the plane of reality. The original father has limited strength and range, while his spitting image replicates, learns and destroys.

So I guess an eventual third is spitting the image of the father. Now this could be the triumph of design over law, of simulation against the symbolic. The elaborate hose you mention can be an initial vessel and all the fancy housing and floodlights, a sexy future retreat.

Besitos,

Yason

P.S.: Your studies for the machine wonderfully intersect figuration and containment — they invoke varnish and vegetation, of moss coated in and liberated by gloss.

Our Body Electric

OUR BODY ELECTRIC
Sleepwalking by Yason Banal
Friday, March 28, 2008



Over the course of many years, artist-run organizations have made significant impact in society. On one hand there are the alternative spaces, non-profit and independent galleries run by and for artists. Storefronts were converted, apartments refurbished, empty buildings occupied – unconventional places transformed in order to produce and showcase art that was fresh, anti-commercial and challenging. In Manila during the 90’s, such spaces as Surrounded by Water, Third Space and Big Sky Mind served as hotbed for experimental artistic activity, paving the way for the vibrant Filipino contemporary art scene of today. On the other hand some artist-run organizations are modeled from associations, guilds or collectives, while others have been molded into small-scale enterprises and philanthropic foundations. A few still have grown into full-blown art establishments themselves, complete with staff and major funding. In any case, most are formed in order to support the work of emerging and exciting artists in various disciplines such as painting, sculpture, performance, film and multimedia. While the cultural industry (and much of consumerist society) is oftentimes made out as being driven by capital interests and empty spectacle, others brave attempts to counterbalance such totalizing trends by focusing on humanitarian and social issues as well as creative organization, developmental communication and cultural collaboration.

One such entity is ANA, or Arts Network Asia. It is a group of independent artists, cultural workers and arts activists primarily from Southeast Asia that encourages and supports regional artistic collaboration as well as develops managerial and administrative skills within Asia. Arts Network Asia is motivated by the philosophy of meaningful collaboration, distinguished by mutual respect, initiated in Asia and carried out together with Asian artists.
It is a network where individuals from around the world, through residencies, researches and projects, develop local communities in Asia. It pays attention to the diverse perspectives of a global Asian urban metropolis, the continuities and disruptions with Asian tradition, the multiple contexts of everyday life.

For ANA, art can be an instrument for meaningful collaboration, dialogue and exchange among diverse communities co-existing in Asia. Art as a social tool creates positive impact on communities, such as in the case of the Wedikã Group of Artists’ “art-as-social-process project” in 2007. Using multi-media and theatre to bring different perceptions of war and life onto the stage in Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka, the production was developed and performed by youths from the community where the first major fighting broke out between the Liberation Tigers and the government forces.

ANA supports wide-ranging projects with contents that vary. However, they all have a shared philosophy with the mission of ANA, so each project is itself important and noteworthy. But like any artists’ organization, the reality is that funds are limited and selection is competitive. ANA Director Tay Tong adds: “I appreciate all these projects and their intentions and achieved objectives, (so) it is really difficult when we can only support only 16 projects out 223 applications. This was in 2007. And in 2008, we received a total of 430 applications and we are only able to provide support to about 20 projects.”

Last year (2007) ANA has offered a total of US$78,000 to 16 arts organizations and individuals to support a diverse range of inter-disciplinary projects with a strong focus on sustainability and capacity building.

This included a performance festival of young visual artists in Vietnam called Sneaky Week; sustaining the OK Video Festival, organized by a Jakarta-based artists collective; and ruangrupa, a documentary project with villagers and Asian young film makers in Beijing at Caochangdi Workstation.

Art universities were not forgotten through the training exchange between the Cambodia and Vietnam schools of circus arts and the more experimental school of art and life in The Land Foundation, Chiang Mai, Thailand planned by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and others.

For the first time, ANA has also initiated support for the development of infrastructure in arts and cultural organizations: a group of Thai independent film artists called Thaiindie, as well as Cambodian artist Linda Saphan who proposed encounters between female artists locally and regionally in Selapak Neari Art Exchange. Finally, ANA also offers a Travel Grant programme that is aimed to support Asian artists traveling within Asia for their work.

Entities like ANA does help significantly in getting Southeast Asian art around. More importantly, it supports the here and now in our own backyard: one that is bristling with energy, ideas and talent, setting the scene for a new cultural renaissance.

ANA Director Tay Tong is as exhilarated and hopeful. “The Southeast Asian art scene is extremely diverse and constantly evolving and developing. It is exciting. There is such a hunger for knowledge sharing and the want to exchange and dialogue. ANA received 430 applications this year. The highest ever, demonstrating a need for such a body like ANA to support such interests.”

Invisible Imaginative

Philippine Star
Invisible Imaginative
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, February 29, 2008


On October 31, 1938, an article appeared in the New York Times:

RADIO LISTERNERS IN PANIC, TAKING WAR DRAMA AS FACT!

A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners between 8:15 and 9:30 o'clock last night when a broadcast of a dramatization of H. G. Wells's fantasy, "The War of the Worlds," led thousands to believe that an interplanetary conflict had started with invading Martians spreading wide death and destruction in New Jersey and New York.

The broadcast, which disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems, was made by Orson Welles, who as the radio character, "The Shadow," used to give "the creeps" to countless child listeners. This time at least a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.

*

Sixty years later and a decade ago - but with an entirely different take on the “invisible, imaginative and interventionist” - curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book Unbuilt Roads: 107 Unrealized Projects attempted to explore the notion of a complete “art/work” by listing down projects of some prominent artists that were never realized. Unlike the unbuilt projects of architects, “which are published, debated, and considered critically important, artists' unrealized projects are invisible, almost a shame or a failure.” However, such “unbuilt roads” can reveal so much more about the artist’s process and his/her negotiations with reality, i.e. the museum, funding, and the public. Studying such invisible works (and the highly visible obstacles which thwart their production) may thus lead to their fruition in the reader-viewer’s mind.

*

Proposing yet another effect is artist-curator Lena Cobangbang’s Nomenclature Project, the latest commission for Utopia: Sleepwalking. Applying notions of “projection” and “classification” in various fields such as cinema, language, community and commerce, Cobangbang flies (and fills) the invisible imaginative by announcing names (of artists, venues, and titles) and scenarios (via exhibition statements), pointing at the tongue-in-cheek tenses of both grammar and p/recognition: a naming of that present, some indication of this future.


THE NOMENCLATURE PROJECT
by Lena Cobangbang

These exhibit notices may serve as curatorial templates for would-be taxonomists of a various growing number of aesthetic tendencies, some of which are superficially engendered to serve a certain theme, usually imposed for civic/commercial purposes. Some have been encountered a few times before, while others are novel combinations that might work given the proper venue or compensation for the artists mentioned.

Vacuum Is Only Vacuum On Average, works by Poklong Anading, Felix Bacolor, Bea Camacho, Nilo Ilarde, Pow Martinez, Manny Migriño and Alvin Zafra deal with the notion that the presence is much more sensed in their disappearance. A purely documentary-based exhibit.

Predicated on Veritable Facts, works by Bembol Dela Cruz, Gary Ross Pastrana, Gerardo Tan. On the duplicitous nature of copies, and thus transformed to being objects themselves with their own histories, their own authentic origins as art objects.

I Lick Ur Motherland, works by Peewee Roldan, Wire Tuazon, Cos Zicarrelli on history paintings that document an alternative theory to world domination and post-colonial conquest; Or the insistence of art’s relevance by media and global market trends.

Society for The Confusion of Useless Knowledge, works by Bandoy, Kurt Gloria, Kim Landicho, Kaloy Olavides, artists whose predisposition almost always relegate them into subgenius savant in simply presenting the mundane ness of the absurd or was it the absurdity of the mundane?

Falling With The Weight Of It All, paintings by Amy Aragon, Bubbles De Leon, Popo San Pascual, Trek Valdizno, all featuring colorful canvases of unrestrained palette pattern making in thick globules of oil.

Why Cant Monsters Get Along With Other Monsters, works by Victor Balanon, Mariano Ching, Louie Cordero, RM De Leon, Robert Langenegger, Romeo Lee and MM Yu on the squalid metropolis as veritable playground for perverse apoplectic storytelling, envisaging pre-apocalyptic medievalist scenarios. Or why trash is sometimes more appealing.

Subterranean Head Candy, photographic works on subcultures by Jed Escueta, Pol Mondok, Sam Kiyoumarsi and Arvin Viola because we really haven’t had enough of vicariously living off of other people’s kicks.

Altruisms of Terrible Liars (And Kick Some Giant Bum Ass), a presentation of several treatise by painting on painting from Ronald Achacoso, Jet Melencio, Jonathan Olazo, Jayson Oliveria, Raul Rodriguez, Kreskin Sugay and Miguel Sandejas , pitting modernist aspirations to romanticist heroics against the Hamburgian squalor of post-pop, post-surrealist expressionist undifferentiated subjectivity. The techniques employed begs for an affirmation of universal truths of existence, but obvious enough to obfuscate the cheekiness of such questioning. All in all, these painters won’t allow painting to be such a lazy bum, or painting, thus becomes a lazy bum and thence the maker of it. But then if the picture works, why call it a bum?

The Fashioning of A Formal Casualty, works by Lara Delos Reyes, Patricia Eustaquio, Nona Garcia, Geraldine Javier and Yasmin Sison, generously supported by Hermes Singapore. This exhibit plays like a Clue-do game in a labyrinthine questioning of roles and types fashioned from what’s usually represented in the glossies. Which then is a far more worse crime – framing the stereotype or widening the frame to accommodate all as victims?

The Means Won’t Justify The End : Death To Death or The Ultimate Painting Show, an exhibit in the form of a book that is as big as a painting, meant to affirm painting’s privileged position, as it was and has always been, forever and ever. Featuring works by every painter who matters and have invariably produced iconoclastic works.

Puppy Draining A Teat

Philippine Star
Puppy Draining a Teat
SLEEPWALKING By Yason Banal
Friday, January 25, 2008


For the second installment of UTOPIA:SLEEPWALKING, I’ve asked young artist Robert Langenegger to contribute, in this case, two drawings. The first time I encountered Robert’s work was in Mag:net Katipunan – Poklong Anading curated a programme of recent video art from the Philippines, and included works by the likes of Louie Cordero, Lena Cobangbang, Cocoy Lumbao and myself. His video piece, entitled Emotional Intelligence, combined drawing, sound and stop animation to create surrealistic vignettes that resonate with dystopic energy and desire. Figures and scenes swiftly dissolve from one to the next like torrential rain, as if the in/stability of nature itself (and our perception of it) hangs in the balance. There is no closure, no exit; only transitions and rebirths.

An email conversation is similar in this aspect. As a regular conversation is a model for the fruitful exchange of ideas, online chatting also produces a generative relation – a virtuality that simulates a soft “seeming” of ideas and attitudes, open to mystery, multiplicity and mutation. In a way both the “conceptual structure” of Robert Langenegger’s work and the “feel” of this online conversation reflect an approach that is both systematic and emotive, factual and fictive, dissolving in-between the precipices of thought and form.

Yason Banal: Hi Robert, where are you doing this email conversation?

Robert Langenegger: I’m at a doctor’s house.

YB: Really? That's interesting. What kind of a doctor?

RL: An aspiring neurosurgeon specializing in lobotomy

YB: Now that you've mentioned neurology and lobotomy, do these medical fields, or medicine in general, bear a strong influence in your art practice, if not a significance in your view of the world?

RL: I am more versed in the field of veterinary science so I treat humans as mere mammals with the same basic organs and bodily functions . I value the canines higher than primates. My influence is nature, particularly Darwinism or evolution.

YB: In 2003 you had a series of photographs of animals, dead or on the way. There was a puppy sucking on a teat, and someone's finger inside a reptile. There was also a gecko, an ostrich, a rat - all in various states of death and decay.

RL: I just wanted to document the various evolutionary dead ends or the process of achieving our imprinted evolutionary code which is to contribute to the gene pool of the natural world - in other words - to prove your mettle as a specimen able to adapt and contribute to the world’s evolution.

In my photos I wanted to cover the pre infancy all the way to the very end where the atoms dissipate into convertible energies of lower life forms in no way less important than the ones in the photos.

YB: How does the grotesque play in the evolutionary process you think? I mean on one hand there is the idyllic scenery, and then on the other there is your photograph of excrement forming a heart in a field of grass. It's as if the feces has offered the earth a gift of what the future could be like.

RL: Grotesque only applies to humans. There is no such thing in the natural world.

YB: Nature is violent, even virulent, and in representation, including art and science, the grotesque does play a role in evolution. In your work Untitled 9, the numbered drawings seem to indicate another transformation of some sort. Was it based on a surgical procedure or did you conjure the sex operation yourself?

RL: That work was the sum of all my rationality and understanding of mammalian functions. I see it as a crude short cut to a similar end.

YB: What do the scribblings say?

RL: They are a vague guide to muscular inversion.

YB: There is quite a lot of inversion going on in this work, but, not in a way that is grotesque or perverse. It's like a surreal scientific method, odd but nevertheless convincing.

RL: It lacks the grotesque element for me because it is done in a systematic manner. For me it isn’t the process which is surreal. It’s the person doing willing to do it.

YB: Who are the other surreal figures you find possessing a systematic manner in creating work - be it art, music, or other forms that interest you?

RL: Everyone I know is a surrealist to a certain extent. For me it’s safe to say that everyone’s a surrealist if we look at it relatively.

I am not really discerning when it comes to what I like or not. It just has to connect at a certain level like a private joke or if you get that feeling of "why didn’t I think of that" you see the genius of the work. I can appreciate all kinds of music except R & B. The heavier the better. Films with dogs make me cry.

YB: Whatever gets you through the moment, or gives you one. Can you talk a bit about the other work, Untitled 08? The girl's expression is quite ambiguous, as is what's in the plastic packet.

RL: It was a plate for my class in Kalayaan College. The sachet attached is full of my pubic hair when i got infected with pubic lice. I had shaved it all off and applied Quell to the stubble.