The Multiple eXposure Project is a multimedia, multi/trans/inter-disciplinary artistic practice and research-based initiative that explores the many layers of image-making, participatory photography, visual ethnography, and performative encounter(s) between the image and the spectator; the subject and the viewer. As what the name of the project implies, this endeavor is profoundly interested in the notions of the “multiple” and the “exposure” both in their literal and symbolic sense.
Firstly, The Multiple eXposure Project seeks to examine the multiple potentials of image-making or photography (digital and analogue; still and moving) as a medium, a performance, and an instrument of social engagement and (ex)change, and the overlapping of it with other disciplines. As part of its exploration, this project involves a series of visual, photographic or lens-based workshops in collaboration with non-profit, grassroots volunteer groups. The concept of the multiple is also applied under the framework of collaborative work – of bring together multiple individuals with multiple philosophies into a plurality of shared experiences.
Secondly, The Multiple eXposure Project is equally drawn to the idea of “exposure” (subjection, experience, vulnerability, coverage, documentation, and so on) in the process of socially-engaged image-making that exposes what needs to be exposed; clarifies the obscure; and concerns itself with a gamut of critical questions and discursive issues of representation.
Through image-making, we aim to expose and get exposed.
Public Interrogation: Outside the White Cube (December 1-31, 2015)
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube
Organized by The Multiple eXposure Project
www.themultipleexposureproject.co.nr
Location: Public Spaces, Metro Manila, Philippines
Date: December 1-31, 2015
December 1-2 (8pm-10pm): EDSA Avenue cor. Kamuning Rd. Quezon City
December 5 (7pm-9pm): Ayala-Paseo Pedestrian Underpass, Makati City
December 13 (6pm-7pm): Alabang-Montillano Footbridge, Muntinlupa
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube is an alternative, traveling, curatorial project that features image-based works across different disciplines and media by emerging artists whose works discuss the notion of the “public” and its complexities.
What is public? What counts as public? The “public” is a multi-layered concept defined differently depending on how the term is used and framed. It is a notion devoid of singularity and is, grammatically speaking, a terrain of contradictions. As a noun and an adjective, the public constitutes the people, masses or community, and suggests anything that is staged, accessed, or seen out in the “open.” The public can also be used as a verb to describe something one does, as in make public or publicize, suggesting the movement or shift from the inside (private) to the outside (public). Paradoxically, however, the same term also points to the limits of such openness and movement. Given that it simultaneously refers to something “involving and provided by the government”, the public is always at risk of becoming merely an apparatus of the sovereign state and its institutions, thus making the flow of its production, distribution, and consumption partial and counterproductive.
Public Interrogation:
Outside the White Cube seeks to re-frame the practice of curating and spectating images outside the exclusionary, institutional borders of the “white cube” or gallery space. Public spaces are used as an exhibition site to stimulate a mode of spectator experience that revolves around displacement of the passersby (public) from their “habitus” by interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic. We alter a familiar public space and transform it into an unusual, dialogic site for image projection and exhibition, taking advantage of its accessibility and site-specificity in order to redefine the ways the spectators look at and engage with images. Adopting “guerilla urbanism” as a curatorial strategy, we make sense of the immediacy of the “public” and reflect upon its context, meanings, and intersections with representation, place, and discourse. In so doing, we intervene and reformat aspects of the urban landscapes and emphasize the “counter-spectacle” in art viewing and appreciation. This project also underlines the inherent ephemerality of an open-to-the-public display in relation to time and space. As a “traveling” exhibition which heavily depends on projection technology and public space as its “frame” or “canvas", this project celebrates the momentary nature of image-viewing, consumption, and mobility in the metropolis at a time of constant flux and transition.
Video Arts
Borders - Anne Murray (USA)
The Separation Loop - Leyla Rodriguez (Germany)
Gnomonicity - Amitesh Grover (India)
36&71 - Anthony Stephenson (USA)
Sully - Marbella Carlos (Canada)
You See Davis - Rembrandt Quiballo (Philippines, USA)
Untitled (Sleeping People in a Train) - Hannah Reber (Germany)
Into the labyrinth - Geordy Zodidat Alexis (France)
The Safest of Hands - Clint Sleeper (USA)
Hunt/Find - Dani Salvadori (UK)
Leaving My Skin - Ellen Wetmore (UK)
Presence of Absence - Matt Lee (India)
Untitled – Mohammad Namazi (UK, Iran)
Still Images / Photographs
Right Time Right Place - Robert Rutoed (Austria)
Peripheral Strangers - Julie Dawn Dennis (UK)
De Staat (The State) - Maarten Tromp (Netherlands)
Ruinophilia - Anna Garrett (UK)
Circling the Square - Arturo Soto (Mexico)
The Spectator, the Viewer, the Observer and the Perceiver –
Francine LeClercq (USA)
Magic Rooms - Carlos Collado (Spain)
Date of Consumption - Lita Poliakova
Street Photography - John Robert Luna (Philippines)
Walls - Elena Efeoglou (Greece)
Fitting Room – Megan Mace (South Africa)
Street art you can take home (for free) - Lorenzo Bordonaro (Portugal)
Victim – Solomon Eko (Nigeria)
Performance Videos / Public Interventions
Balloon Performance - Louise Winter (UK)
Somarts Mural Dance - Johanna Poethig (USA)
Unpatentable Multitouch Aerobics - Liat Berdugo (USA)
Disclaimer at Manchester Art Gallery - Laura Gower (UK)
Sustaintability – Dani Lamorte and Veronica Bleaus (USA)
Animations / Digital
Job Interview - Dénes Ruzsa and Fruzsina Spitzer (Hungary)
In Between - Sofia Makridou, Theodora Prassa (Greece)
Decadence of Nature - Olga Guse (Russia)
AsianGirl N40°42'54.488" W73°59'30.313" - Victoria Elle, Rocky Li, and Jennifer Mehigan (USA)
Get Featured in our Blog!
We are currently expanding the content of our blog and we would like to feature multidisciplinary/multimedia artists, photographers, image-makers, visual artists, performers, and so on, their portfolio, artistic practice, and research interests. The feature section serves as a virtual, archival gallery and a platform for free promotion. This call is open to all artists – individuals or groups; amateur or professional – anywhere in the world.
If you think your works are relevant to The Multiple eXposure Project, send your artist statement, sample of your portfolio, photos, videos, press releases, and other related materials to themultipleexposureproject@gmail.com.
Moving Still: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 2.0
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
I
n this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
Selected artists here make use of the “screen” as medium and performance space. By displaying, curating, and performing in front of the screen, self-image-formation is enacted while relying on playful encounter with unknown spectators in order to weave different webs of interpretation. In this regard, the screen operates as an intermediary in the artist’s performance that brings connections to identities, personal narratives, history, everyday politics, and imaginaries.
The symbiotic relationship between the screen and the subject cultivates the construction of an image or spectacle that is consumed – temporally and spatially - in a doubling of intermediation. They deflect and reflect a plethora of shifting, hybrid pretexts about ourselves within the digital ecology where the delineating lines between the public and the private; the human and the mechanical; and the material and the virtual boundaries become blurred.
Given their hyperreal structure, these video performances, visual interventions, and recorded choreographies trigger a mode of mediated encounter that heavily manipulates moments of reality – of space and time. Intimacy and presence are concomitantly altered as these pieces can be incessantly scrutinized by the gaze of many anonymous viewers floating in the digital currents, allowing us to re-locate the individual and re-think about the concept of selfhood more fluidly.
Self-as-Subject: The Multiple eXposure Project Zine 1.0
We are pleased to announce that the very first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Below is the list of contributors (artists and writers) included in the publication:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
"Who are you?” “Who am I?” “Who do I think I am?” “What am I made of?” There is nothing simple about such inquiries as they pose a number of phenomenological and ontological issues.
To ask yourself or someone about self-definition is to deal with its vicissitudes and fluidities, oscillating between the ego and the alter ego; the naturalistic (Hume) and the metaphysical (Kant); and the reflexive perception of one’s body and the relational introspection with the “Other.” The self is, arguably and fundamentally, a complicated subject matter. It is an ever-evolving object, a corporeal being, an affective body, a precarious entity, a discursive phenomenon, and so forth.
Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
In Chapter 1, The Self as I/Other, authors reflect on the dialectics between the ego and the alter ego and the multitude of ways the “self-as-subject” is defined by both internal and external contingencies, or philosophically speaking, by the binaries – “I” vs. “not-I.” Many of these selected pieces are visibly entangled with the act of self-mirroring, which is inherently reflective and performative: it involves the constitution of subjectivities based on visual imaginary reflected on the mirror that does not necessarily resemble the complex structures of the material body. What I highlight here is the notion of self-perception (internal) in relation to one’s experiences and the (external) world. As Anthony Giddens puts it, “A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography…cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.” (54).
In Chapter 2, The Fetishized Self, we see interconnected self-representations that examine the convergence of idiosyncratic fantasies with the phantasmagoria as an offshoot of the fetishized commodity. When I refer to the term, phantasmagoria, I emphasize the volatile strings of imaginations through which the public and the private dimension of identity becomes obscured, blurring the demarcating lines between reality and fantasy. This section functions as a provocation of the fetishization of self and the centrality of the individual as authority. Through role-playing, the self, as a fetish object imbued with power and discourse, becomes an agency displaying and interrogating the politics of gender, sexuality, identity, and bodily desire.
Finally, in Chapter 3, The Fragmented Self, the fragmentation of identity framed within the digital, virtual, or hyperreal context is explored. Featured works here represent the various modes the anonymity, simulation, multiplicity, and control in data superhighway allow the transformation of the self into fragmented, hybrid subjects. The concept of “self-fragmentation” also revolves around the nature of post-modernism: the absence of absolute truth and the presence of disembodied self.
Bibliography:
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.
Featured Artists
Click on the image to view the post.
Robert Mapplethorpe: Influential and Controversial 20th Century Photographer Artist
Mention the name Robert Mapplethorpe and people will automatically think of controversy and homo-erotic photography but the works of Mapplethorpe are much more than that.
Robert Mapplethorpe was born on Nov. 4, 1946 in Floral Park, Queens, New York. Mapplethorpe himself had said, “it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave." And he leave he did.
In 1963 he moved to nearby Brooklyn and enrolled in the Pratt Institute where he studied drawing, painting and sculpture. He also experimented in mixed media collages and used images cut from books and magazines. He did not, however, study photography.
In 1970 two significant, but seemingly mundane things happened in Mapplethorpe’s life that would completely shape his future. Firstly, he acquired a Polaroid camera and secondly, he moved into a tiny Chelsea apartment with a young girl he met by accident in 1967. That girl was none other than Patti Smith. Smith met Mapplethorpe when she went to New York to visit friends. When she arrived she found they had moved and asleep on the floor wrapped up in blanket was Mapplethorpe. She later described him as the most beautiful young man she had ever seen.
In 1975 he acquired a Hasselbrad medium-format camera and began shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He also worked on commercial projects, creating album cover art for Patti Smith and television and a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine, according to the Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Polaroids as Fine Art
Mapplethorpe enjoyed taking photographs with the Polaroid and found them valuable in their own right and started adding them to his mixed media collages. The Light Gallery in New York City mounted his first solo gallery exhibition, “Polaroid’s” in 1973. Between 1970 and 1975 Mapplethorpe made more than 1,500 Polaroid images. They include portraits, still lifes and erotic images which incorporated themes that can also be found in his later works. In 2008, the Whitney Museum exhibited 100 Mapplethorpe Polaroid’s.
Sylvia Wolf, the show’s curator wrote in the catalog that Mapplethorpe “learned how to see photographically with the Polaroid camera.” During this time Mapplethorpe was growing as an artist and starting to explore his own sexuality.
Mapplethorpe no longer had to leaf through pornographic magazines to find the perfect image for his mixed media works. He could simply photograph himself in the exact erotic pose he needed to convey his message. There are also numerous images of Smith.
Although the themes of the Polaroid’s are the same as his mature works, the images themselves are different. The Polaroid’s are more seamy and spontaneous, but the love of the human form is there. The Polaroid’s are raw, real and “off the moment.” His later works are more posed, carefully crafted, thought out and the human form takes on perfect, Renaissance statue qualities.
The Whitney Museum of American Art. Explore works, exhibitions, and events online. Located in New York City.
Fascination with Fetish
Mapplethorpe’s fascination with photographing the New York Sadistic-Masochism scene peaked in late 1970s. These photographs have gained notoriety for their shocking content; however they illustrate Mapplethorpe’s formal and technical mastery of photography.
It was also his images of gay male sexual practice, though not graphic in the examples I have found that caused quite an uproar among “polite” society. In fact many of those images where omitted from the Whitney exhibit. Of course these types of images had already been available in various seedier publications. But where they art? Many critics and detractors certainly thought they were not. There was public outcry and anger that the National Endowment for the Arts would use precious taxpayer dollars on this “filth.”
Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, "I don't like that particular word 'shocking.' I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them."
It was Mapplethorpe’s 1990 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati that created the “censorship battle that changed the world.” According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Dennis Barrie and the Contemporary Arts Center were indicted for pandering obscenity hours after the opening of the photography exhibit, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment in 1980. In question were seven portraits, mostly of sadomasochistic acts, which were also the subject of the Showtime Original movie, “Dirty Pictures.” This was also happening at the same time Pres. Ronald Reagan was trying the repeal the National Endowment for the Arts Act. A six month court battle raged on with Barrie and the arts center finally being acquitted of obscenity charges but the public debate continued for a decade. I think people inherently believe certain types of images available in skin magazines are not meant for public, but private consumption. They are also not considered art as they arouse sexual feelings in some or even most viewers. When similar images were displayed in a “public” place like a museum or art gallery it makes people uncomfortable and they then declare it’s not art but pornography because they don’t like it or it makes them uncomfortable. The technical and formal mastery of the image is no longer taken into consideration. It simply becomes obscene, filthy, unsettling, inappropriate and must be immediately censored and the perpetrators punished. Of course, you, I, your friends, neighbors, school teachers, policemen, soldiers, sons and daughters would never look at, let alone purchase, such materials. Right? That’s for deviants and sexual perverts.
Mapplethorpe was much more
Of course, when discussing Mapplethorpe everyone immediately thinks of his more controversial works, however, they are just a part of the total scope of his work. His images of both male and female nudes are reminiscent of Michelangelo’s depiction of the human form in perfect proportion.
Mapplethorpe had numerous beautiful friends, both male and female that exemplified the human ideal so much so that they are being exhibited in Florence alongside the great works of Michelangelo. Mapplethorpe photographed people who looked like statues. He was also interested in statuary and took many beautiful black and white images of statues.
I admire and am inspired by Mapplethorpe’s work because he had a different view of beauty.
Lady Lyon
Source: History of Art
Beauty and Brawn
Mapplethorpe was able to both challenge and honor the classical aesthetic standards in his stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities, which were just a few of his preferred genres. In the 1980s he met Lisa Lyon the first World’s Women Body Building Champion. They collaborated for many years on various studio projects to include a film and the book, Lady, Lisa Lyon . Lyon has described herself as animal. Female strength, charm and muscle suppleness, is both beautiful and empowering. The belief that muscle strength and its inherent beauty is solely for the realm of the male sex is false conception that only exists in people's limited understanding. Who better than Mapplethorpe to capture her beauty, strength and animalistic drive and power?
Interestingly he photographed her portrait as a sharp profile with the lighting accenting the muscles in her arms and the strength and determination on her face although somewhat softened by the hat and mourning veil she wears. Most of Mapplethorpe’s portraiture is stark, high contrast, and evocative.
Almost more than that image with its mix of femininity (the hat and corset) and masculinity (muscles), I prefer the androgynous image of Lisa Lyon and the snake. She stands in a doorway completely nude wrapped in a huge python. Only Lyon and the snake are lit. Her legs and feet are planted in a wide stance showing strength. The snake covers all the “naughty” bits except for one bare breast and her hair is slicked back and down. She looks manly, beautiful, strong and undeniably female all at once
A good example of his use of light and contrast is the portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman dated 1984. This example of two men in love, one black and one white, both with their heads shaved, look like they were carved from marble. His nude, Ajito, depicts a perfectly muscled black man on a pedestal, knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs and his head down. He shines like polished obsidian, and despite his obvious physical strength, looks very vulnerable.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit
Source: The Robert Mappletthorpe Foundation
Polaroids and Still Lifes as Learning tools
Although Mapplethorpe had moved on to professional cameras, he still used his Polaroid for experimenting and getting the light right before taking the final portrait or nude. In an interview in 2008 he explained his growth as an artist and his use of Polaroids, “When I first started taking Polaroids I was working with photographs that dealt with sexuality, portraits, at the time it was Patti Smith because we were living together . . . and still lifes. I used still lifes to experiment with lighting. I didn’t know anything about the technology so I would take certain chances with the still lifes that couldn’t do with the person because, I think again, it’s about being sensitive to the person. I don’t what to make someone go through something unnecessarily.”
Even his still life images of flowers have a subtle sexual nature to them. Jack in the Pulpit looks very phallic, but also beautiful. The light shines through the veins and the greenish-yellow plant pops against the red background. I have noticed in most of his images with the exception of few profiles he takes them from a dead-on angle. I feel this contributes to both the beauty and the stark reality, and in many cases, raw sexuality of his images.
He uses a very formal square format in which the flowers fill the space. While the majority of his other works are in black and white, many of his flowers are in color. Beautiful vibrant color.
Source: The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
The Mapplethorpe Foundation
Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. Despite, or perhaps in spite of, he pushed himself even more and took on more challenging commissions. One year prior to his death in 1989, Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective.
Mapplethorpe created the Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection. His legacy lives on in his vast body of work. He can be found in galleries and major museums around the world. He is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century.
The Multiple eXposure Project is run by a small group of image-makers, visual artists, and researchers coming from different backgrounds, with a wide range of interests.
profile
Please be patient, this page is under construction.
The Multiple eXposure Project incorporates theory and practice in image-making and publishes zine and scholarly articles, essays, stories on photography and visual narratives.
Collaboration with individuals and groups coming from different disciplines and backgrounds is of utmost importance at The Multiple eXposure Project especially in the workshops, exhibitions, and other projects. We underscore the potency of shared, ethical, participatory artistic process and accordingly of collaborative authorship by incorporating dialogical, performative interaction into image-making, bridging the gaps between the subject and the medium.
We curate our works in physical and digital configuration, applying methodologies on photo curation (of still and moving images) that are wide-ranging, alternative, experimental, and non-paradigmatic. To be specific, we delve into the concepts of photo curation, not just as praxis of selection or organization of images, or an archival method, but as a social intervention.
One of the crucial components of The Multiple eXposure Project is its practical initiative framed within the context of volunteerism, participation, and engagement. We believe in the collective power and benefits of sharing one’s skills and expertise with those who need them. We provide free photographic workshops, in cooperation with non-profit organizations, which are aimed at empowering marginalized individuals through photography or image-making.
PUBLICATION
The sophomore issue of The Multiple eXposure Project zine has been uploaded! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE.
Description: In this sophomore issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine,“Moving Still”, we feature a heterogeneous breed of new media and video artists whose experimental and provocative works emphasize the potency of “videos” or “moving images” in the exploration and expansion of self-representation in the discursive flow of transmission and mediation – from the screen to the spectator; and the perceptive to the conceptual.
New media and video artists included in the publication are as follows:
Jessica Buie /
Liat Berdugo /
Laura Hyunjhee Kim /
Nicola Hands /
Tony Radin Jacobs /
(c) merry /
Talia Link /
Justin Zachary /
Adrian Errico /
Matteo Pasin /
Jean-Michel Rolland /
Manasak Khlongchainan /
Boris Contarin /
Hüseyin Çife /
Suman Kabiraj /
Patrick Moser /
Francesca Fini /
Aaron Oldenburg /
Benjamin Grosser/
You Qi /
Dénes Ruzsa /
Fruzsina Spitzer /
Fran et Jim /
Amelia Johannes /
Heidi C. Neubauer-Winterburn /
Jess, Lau Ching Ma /
Scott F. Hall /
Eleni Manolaraki /
Elise Frost
Harrison Banfield
Jack Rees /
Daehwan Cho /
Wu Siou Ming /
Masako Ono /
Bárbara Oettinger
The first issue of the Multiple eXposure Project zine is now accessible online! You can read the e-zine at ISSUU or download the PDF version HERE. Feel free to share!
Description: Divided into three interrelated chapters, this zine features oeuvres by artists and writers from different localities around the world and, as what its theme implies, is an exploration of the “self” and its manifold permutations – its presence, identity, representation, liminality, and (dis)embodiment - in this day and age of digitality, hypermobility, and hyperreality.
Featured artists and writers in the zine are as follows:
J.D. Doria /
Dr. Sayfan Giulia Borghini /
Aldobranti /
Olga Sidilkovskaya /
Ana Rita Matias /
Anne Paternotte /
Rudi Rapf /
Leigh Anthony Dehaney /
Laura Knapp /
Jennifer van Exel /
Derya Edem /
Arushee Agrawal /
Utami Dewi Godjali /
Çağlar Uzun /
Mahmoud Khattab /
Noel Villa /
Dawn Woolley /
Teresa Ascencao /
Kalliope Amorphous /
Katrina Stamatopoulos /
Gaspard Noël /
Florian Tenk /
Petra Brnardic /
Sana Ghobbeh /
Alonso Tapia-Benitez /
Libby Kay Hicks /
Agent X /
Rina Dweck /
Yoko Haraoka /
Claire Manning /
Pietro Catarinella /
Anne Beck /
Gabriel Orlowski /
Ralph Klewitz /
Anthony Hall /
Alessandro Martorelli /
Robin Gerris /
Carol Radsprecher /
Veronica Hassell /
Daniela Olejnikov /
Jayson Carter /
Nathaniel St. Amour /
Jonathan Armistead /
Piotr Boćkowski
Workshops
Excerpts from digital and analogue photography workshops at Koseli School, a center for slum and street children in Kathmandu, Nepal (January 2015). These participatory workshops incorporated photography with "playing" and performance.
Visual Intervention
Speech Acts and the Politics of Repetition SeriesDescription: This series explores the repetitive nature and patterns of speech acts and ritualized rhetorics of some of the world’s powerful and controversial figures by incorporating twice-recorded video footages with open-source background music.
Through the process of repetition, new meanings of the moving images and spoken texts are simultaneously (re)created. Specific words are on purpose repeated to generate a multitude of views and reviews and to deconstruct the stability of language. As a mode of visual intervention, these absurdly distorted and edited images/videos are also meant to make a dialogue with, distract, entertain, annoy, and disturb the viewers on the other side of the screen, while highlighting the intersections and contradictions between reality and absurdity; speech and power of the speaker.
Feel free to re-play and re-share!
#1 >>> Obama: You Kinda Screwed Up My Ending But That's Okay.
Video, animated gif, and stills created by Sherwin Altarez Mapanoo
Background music courtesy of einzimmersound
DIGITAL ART
Urban DomesticationDescription: An attempt to represent the psychological state of the subject who was performing to exist (and persist) as a corporate animal in the harsh and precarious dog-eat-dog world of the urban jungle.
Note: Point or click on the image to view its original version.
Climbing Up The Walls (and Ladders)
Paths to Nowhere | Horror Vacui
Robert Mapplethorpe: Influential and Controversial 20th Century Photographer Artist
Mention the name Robert Mapplethorpe and people will automatically think of controversy and homo-erotic photography but the works of Mapplethorpe are much more than that.
Robert Mapplethorpe was born on Nov. 4, 1946 in Floral Park, Queens, New York. Mapplethorpe himself had said, “it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave." And he leave he did.
In 1963 he moved to nearby Brooklyn and enrolled in the Pratt Institute where he studied drawing, painting and sculpture. He also experimented in mixed media collages and used images cut from books and magazines. He did not, however, study photography.
In 1970 two significant, but seemingly mundane things happened in Mapplethorpe’s life that would completely shape his future. Firstly, he acquired a Polaroid camera and secondly, he moved into a tiny Chelsea apartment with a young girl he met by accident in 1967. That girl was none other than Patti Smith. Smith met Mapplethorpe when she went to New York to visit friends. When she arrived she found they had moved and asleep on the floor wrapped up in blanket was Mapplethorpe. She later described him as the most beautiful young man she had ever seen.
In 1975 he acquired a Hasselbrad medium-format camera and began shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground. He also worked on commercial projects, creating album cover art for Patti Smith and television and a series of portraits and party pictures for Interview Magazine, according to the Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Polaroids as Fine Art
Mapplethorpe enjoyed taking photographs with the Polaroid and found them valuable in their own right and started adding them to his mixed media collages. The Light Gallery in New York City mounted his first solo gallery exhibition, “Polaroid’s” in 1973. Between 1970 and 1975 Mapplethorpe made more than 1,500 Polaroid images. They include portraits, still lifes and erotic images which incorporated themes that can also be found in his later works. In 2008, the Whitney Museum exhibited 100 Mapplethorpe Polaroid’s.
Sylvia Wolf, the show’s curator wrote in the catalog that Mapplethorpe “learned how to see photographically with the Polaroid camera.” During this time Mapplethorpe was growing as an artist and starting to explore his own sexuality.
Mapplethorpe no longer had to leaf through pornographic magazines to find the perfect image for his mixed media works. He could simply photograph himself in the exact erotic pose he needed to convey his message. There are also numerous images of Smith.
Although the themes of the Polaroid’s are the same as his mature works, the images themselves are different. The Polaroid’s are more seamy and spontaneous, but the love of the human form is there. The Polaroid’s are raw, real and “off the moment.” His later works are more posed, carefully crafted, thought out and the human form takes on perfect, Renaissance statue qualities.
The Whitney Museum of American Art. Explore works, exhibitions, and events online. Located in New York City.
Fascination with Fetish
Mapplethorpe’s fascination with photographing the New York Sadistic-Masochism scene peaked in late 1970s. These photographs have gained notoriety for their shocking content; however they illustrate Mapplethorpe’s formal and technical mastery of photography.
It was also his images of gay male sexual practice, though not graphic in the examples I have found that caused quite an uproar among “polite” society. In fact many of those images where omitted from the Whitney exhibit. Of course these types of images had already been available in various seedier publications. But where they art? Many critics and detractors certainly thought they were not. There was public outcry and anger that the National Endowment for the Arts would use precious taxpayer dollars on this “filth.”
Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, "I don't like that particular word 'shocking.' I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them."
It was Mapplethorpe’s 1990 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati that created the “censorship battle that changed the world.” According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Dennis Barrie and the Contemporary Arts Center were indicted for pandering obscenity hours after the opening of the photography exhibit, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment in 1980. In question were seven portraits, mostly of sadomasochistic acts, which were also the subject of the Showtime Original movie, “Dirty Pictures.” This was also happening at the same time Pres. Ronald Reagan was trying the repeal the National Endowment for the Arts Act. A six month court battle raged on with Barrie and the arts center finally being acquitted of obscenity charges but the public debate continued for a decade. I think people inherently believe certain types of images available in skin magazines are not meant for public, but private consumption. They are also not considered art as they arouse sexual feelings in some or even most viewers. When similar images were displayed in a “public” place like a museum or art gallery it makes people uncomfortable and they then declare it’s not art but pornography because they don’t like it or it makes them uncomfortable. The technical and formal mastery of the image is no longer taken into consideration. It simply becomes obscene, filthy, unsettling, inappropriate and must be immediately censored and the perpetrators punished. Of course, you, I, your friends, neighbors, school teachers, policemen, soldiers, sons and daughters would never look at, let alone purchase, such materials. Right? That’s for deviants and sexual perverts.
Mapplethorpe was much more
Of course, when discussing Mapplethorpe everyone immediately thinks of his more controversial works, however, they are just a part of the total scope of his work. His images of both male and female nudes are reminiscent of Michelangelo’s depiction of the human form in perfect proportion.
Mapplethorpe had numerous beautiful friends, both male and female that exemplified the human ideal so much so that they are being exhibited in Florence alongside the great works of Michelangelo. Mapplethorpe photographed people who looked like statues. He was also interested in statuary and took many beautiful black and white images of statues.
I admire and am inspired by Mapplethorpe’s work because he had a different view of beauty.
Lady Lyon
Source: History of Art
Beauty and Brawn
Mapplethorpe was able to both challenge and honor the classical aesthetic standards in his stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities, which were just a few of his preferred genres. In the 1980s he met Lisa Lyon the first World’s Women Body Building Champion. They collaborated for many years on various studio projects to include a film and the book, Lady, Lisa Lyon . Lyon has described herself as animal. Female strength, charm and muscle suppleness, is both beautiful and empowering. The belief that muscle strength and its inherent beauty is solely for the realm of the male sex is false conception that only exists in people's limited understanding. Who better than Mapplethorpe to capture her beauty, strength and animalistic drive and power?
Interestingly he photographed her portrait as a sharp profile with the lighting accenting the muscles in her arms and the strength and determination on her face although somewhat softened by the hat and mourning veil she wears. Most of Mapplethorpe’s portraiture is stark, high contrast, and evocative.
Almost more than that image with its mix of femininity (the hat and corset) and masculinity (muscles), I prefer the androgynous image of Lisa Lyon and the snake. She stands in a doorway completely nude wrapped in a huge python. Only Lyon and the snake are lit. Her legs and feet are planted in a wide stance showing strength. The snake covers all the “naughty” bits except for one bare breast and her hair is slicked back and down. She looks manly, beautiful, strong and undeniably female all at once
A good example of his use of light and contrast is the portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman dated 1984. This example of two men in love, one black and one white, both with their heads shaved, look like they were carved from marble. His nude, Ajito, depicts a perfectly muscled black man on a pedestal, knees drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs and his head down. He shines like polished obsidian, and despite his obvious physical strength, looks very vulnerable.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit
Source: The Robert Mappletthorpe Foundation
Polaroids and Still Lifes as Learning tools
Although Mapplethorpe had moved on to professional cameras, he still used his Polaroid for experimenting and getting the light right before taking the final portrait or nude. In an interview in 2008 he explained his growth as an artist and his use of Polaroids, “When I first started taking Polaroids I was working with photographs that dealt with sexuality, portraits, at the time it was Patti Smith because we were living together . . . and still lifes. I used still lifes to experiment with lighting. I didn’t know anything about the technology so I would take certain chances with the still lifes that couldn’t do with the person because, I think again, it’s about being sensitive to the person. I don’t what to make someone go through something unnecessarily.”
Even his still life images of flowers have a subtle sexual nature to them. Jack in the Pulpit looks very phallic, but also beautiful. The light shines through the veins and the greenish-yellow plant pops against the red background. I have noticed in most of his images with the exception of few profiles he takes them from a dead-on angle. I feel this contributes to both the beauty and the stark reality, and in many cases, raw sexuality of his images.
He uses a very formal square format in which the flowers fill the space. While the majority of his other works are in black and white, many of his flowers are in color. Beautiful vibrant color.
Source: The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
The Mapplethorpe Foundation
Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. Despite, or perhaps in spite of, he pushed himself even more and took on more challenging commissions. One year prior to his death in 1989, Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective.
Mapplethorpe created the Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection. His legacy lives on in his vast body of work. He can be found in galleries and major museums around the world. He is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century.
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