Mousse

Helio Oiticica: Parangolé

21 April 2023 in Books Comment

“De adversidades vivimos, sea marginal sea héroe.” — Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica: Parangolé is a conceptual art’s discourse around Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés. The tension generated between euro-centric and peripheral conceptualisms is put into question, in order to insert the work of Oiticica in the international Neo-Avantgarde logic, where life transits into art, and art into life. The research carried out by Delmari Romero Keith and Marc Pottier validates the idea that vindicates art’s power as a social denunciation vehicle and a poetic-politic complaint. This proposal re-dimensions Oiticica’s work and positions it beyond conceptual and performative trends. Parangolés rekindle the postmodern allegorical impulse that activates fragments which manifest structures of cancelled imaginary. They are manifestations of atavistic referents, ancestral rituals, and residual memory—appropriated from the Brazilian favelas and the carnival—and links between the rhythms of the body and those of nature. Performative action, which covers the sensorial aspects of a human being—a radical elaboration of Neoconcretism connected to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés are a manifestation of canons different to the euro-centric ones. In them, we find the crossing between the cult and the vernacular, a strategy of artistic renovation. They incorporate a multi-disciplinary proposal—dance, movement, contortions, music, rhythm, poetry and, above all, exuberant colors—to stage the displacement of a fluid and hybrid identity that harasses, agitates, and protests against social inequalities. Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé devours autochthonous customs and mainstream aesthetic influences. This genre hybridization, this anthropophagic awakening, revealed the centripetal force of the movement that, in the end, meant a criticism of the time’s statu quo.

Texts by Delmari Romero Keith and Marc Pottier

2023
English / French / Spanish
204 pages
Softcover, 16.5 x 23 cm
ISBN 9788867495658

Mousse

Yves Klein: Dreaming in the Dream of Others

28 January 2023 in Books Comment

Yves Klein: Dreaming in the Dream of Others / Rêver dans le rêve des autres

Published on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition held at the Opale Foundation (in Lens, Switzerland), the book Rêver dans le rêve des autres (Dreaming in the dream of others) presents the work of Yves Klein alongside with works by twelve Aboriginal artists (Angkaliya Curtis, Bardayal “Lofty” Nadjamerrek, Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Danie Mellor, Dhambit Munungurr, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Ignatia Djanghara, Paddy Bedford, Waigan Djanghara, Wattie Karruwara, Judy Watson, and Paji Honeychild Yankarr), showing how the link between the French artist and the world of the Australian Aborigines is anything but arbitrary. Klein was very interested in the non-Western: works from his youth have been discovered in his archives that were later identified as copies of Aboriginal motifs, and his writings confirm that he was familiar with the cave paintings of north-western Australia. In the ’50s, Aboriginal art, which was little known, was seen not as the expression of a different spirit, but rather as the survival of a vanished spirit, in short, that of the Neolithic: Yves Klein, like his parents, was fascinated by prehistory.

Edited by Mousse
Texts by Georges Petitjean, Wally Caruana, Didier Semin, and Kim Akerman

2022
English / French
224 pages
Hardcover, 20 x 27 cm
ISBN 9788867495610

Mousse Publishing

Mousse Magazine Issue #76

7 July 2021 in Magazines Comment

Mousse Magazine
Issue #76
Summer 2021

U in a movie called The Green Ray

“August the month it’s meant to happen. Plans get made, the fleetingness of the ruse. She gets dropped within minutes: no more vacation.” Straddling fiction and object-oriented writing, Travis Jeppesen revisits Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray (1986), sketching the main character Delphine’s torments as she (“U”) is left without plans just as Paris is emptying out for the summer.

Ten Short Fictions on Works by Joachim Bandau

Between 1967 and 1974, Joachim Bandau made a series of fiberglass works fusing the anthropomorphic with eerie appropriations from technology and industry. Entering into the playful, experimental, and uncanny spirit of Bandau’s sculptures, Nick Currie responds with ten short works of fiction.

Contact Barrier

Patricia L. Boyd speaks with Dora Budor on probing the architectural, emotional, and psychological boundaries of an institution; what the compartmentalization of physical spaces means for inner experience and thinking; barriers, negative spaces, and loaned perceptions; and Hold, her recent exhibition at Kunstverein München.

Primary Resistance

“With animals, the left turns right.” This was the outset for Fahim Amir’s award-winning book Being and Swine: The End of Nature (as We Knew It) (2020). In conversation with Sohrab Mohebbi, Amir deepens the subject of “solidarity with animals,” locating his discourse within a Marxist tradition and expanding it into a post-development train of thought that questions anthropocentric socialism and capitalist exploitation.

Focus on: Julie Becker
The Delirium of Digression
Outside the Vitrine (Julie Becker, Sparkle Woman)

“Distortions in time, changes in scale, senses of derealization and depersonalization. Makeshift force fields, cardboard boxes, corners of the mind, and iconic figures mobilized as transports of the imagination capable of stirring the mind out of its single room-squalor and into a ‘larger more complex world.’” In “The Delirium of Digression,” Sabrina Tarasoff ponders Julie Becker’s imagery as a domestically shaped fever dream, while in “Outside the Vitrine (Julie Becker, Sparkle Woman)” Mark von Schlegell recalls his friendship with Becker by way of her obsession with the immediate world around her: her studio, her apartment, her neighborhood in Los Angeles. “By revealing the illusionary foundations of cultural projects in which the only escape is for the purpose of eternal return, Becker approached the inside as a special case of the outside wasteland, a site of living, layered presences, fetishizing and fixing their absences on the flat surface of things.”

Once Upon a Time There Was a Phantasmatic Storyteller

Author of an autonomous, experimental, and both intimate and radically political practice, Giuseppe Desiato epitomizes the heterodox intellectual in the history of contemporary Italian art. According to Andrea Viliani, Desiato stages the archetype of a Mediterranean sensibility, that “southern” and popular exception that the tension toward modernity has systematically forced to the margins.

A Heart Pierced by an Angel’s Spear

“I want to disrupt the way language is formed,” notes Tarek Lakhrissi, referring to a practice rooted in literature. Conversing with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist unfolds his inspirations from pop culture and how his research on queerness, emotions, spirituality, education, decoloniality, and empowerment points to the creation of spaces of sharing and community.

On Those Shores But in These Shoes

Delving into Ingrid Pollard’s work, Ella S. Mills outlines resonances and interpretations of the sea in the artist’s practice. Combining photography, text, found objects, personal photos, and letters, Pollard explores traditional landscape, portraiture, ingrained social constructs, national identity, ownership, borders, and grand narratives of history.

Mousse Magazine

Mousse 71, Spring 2020

9 April 2020 in Magazines Comment

Mousse 71
Spring 2020

The Spiraled Heart of Abandoned Things:
Ann Greene Kelly by Andrew Berardini

“Weathering the sun and rain and chill, they linger, waiting for anyone at all to see in their bedraggled and jilted bodies some new purpose besides disintegration: the tire to become a planter, a tree swing, tread for new cheap shoes—or, in Kelly’s hands, art.” Andrew Berardini on Ann Greene Kelly’s sculptures.

On Psychotic Images and Other Visual Symptoms by Aurélien Le Genissel

Visual art encompasses countless levels of language, withholding unspoken fears, dreams, and ideologies. Aurélien Le Genissel scrutinizes the techniques that artists, in our image-saturated world, employ to represent psychological demons and the ways we deal with them.

Based on a True Story: Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters and New New Left Cinema by Emily Verla Bovino and Hera Chan

Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters (2019) prompts Hera Chan and Emily Verla Bovino to examine the reliance of U.S. cinema on the purported truth, and the way we experience such reenactments as banal naturalizations of history.

A World without Angles: Larry Bell by Marie de Brugerolle

From his first paintings to his angle-cut and unframed standing walls, Larry Bell has explored the interaction of light on surface, and the resulting effects of vision and perception. Marie de Brugerolle investigates his pioneering work and inventiveness, as well as his decades-long impact on other artists.

The Sleeping Beauty Concept Works by Sabrina Tarasoff

Inspecting the oeuvre of Eyvind Earle, lead stylist on Disney’s 1959 animated musical fantasy Sleeping Beauty, Sabrina Tarasoff draws a parallel between the main character’s dormant immobility and Earle’s manner of stilling perspective to say something about our fears and fallibilities—without all the unnecessary anguish of “real life.”

Beyond Latin America, The Perpetual Quest for Specificity: Gabriel Kuri by Chris Sharp

In conversation with Gabriel Kuri, Chris Sharp underscores the enthralling application of Minimalism in the artist’s practice and its particular Latin Americanness. Convinced that the more precise forms are, the more effortless they should appear, Kuri’s sculptural practice testifies to an insistence on procedure, eschewing the hand or facture.

Tidbits:

Matthew Angelo Harrison by Rahel Aima; Bri Williams by Harry Burke; Elif Saydam by Kristian Vistrup Madsen; Eva Gold by Chloe Stead; D’Ette Nogle by Attilia Fattori Franchini; Virginia Overton by Ian Wooldridge; Jibade-Khalil Huffman by Lumi Tan; Pati Hill by Maurin Dietrich; Theodora Allen by Stephanie Cristello; Gina Fischli by Isabella Zamboni; Olivia Erlanger by Laura Brown; Pierre Guyotat by Estelle Hoy; Christine Sun Kim by Sofia Lemos; Jenna Bliss by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe; Anthea Hamilton by Laura Herman; Tao Hui by Alvin Li; Aki Sasamoto by Charles Aubin; Jes Fan by Billy Tang; Ko Sin Tung by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu; Anna Witt by Joshua Simon; Tears of a Foreman by Noah Barker; Rebecca Morris by Tenzing Barshee and Camila McHugh.

Mousse Magazine

Lucio Fontana: Ambienti / Environments

7 January 2019 in Books Comment

Lucio Fontana: Ambienti / Environments
English Edition : Italian Edition

Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vicente Todolí, eds.
Texts by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, Enrico Crispolti, Paolo Campiglio, Luca Massimo Barbero, Orietta Lanzarini, Anne Rana, Jennifer Josten, Maria Villa

“The spatial environment was the first attempt to liberate the viewer from a static plastic form, the environment was completely black, with black Wood’s light. Upon entering, you were absolutely alone, each visitor engaged with their own immediate reaction, not dictated to by an object, or by things laid out like merchandise, man was faced with himself, with his own conscience, his own ignorance, his own physical being, etc. etc. The important thing was not to do the usual exhibition of paintings and sculptures, and enter in the spatial debate—immediately afterwards I did the ‘holes,’ the rupturing of a dimension! The void, etc. etc.” —Lucio Fontana

This publication is produced in conjunction with Ambienti/Environments, held at Pirelli HangarBicocca from September 2017 to January 2018. Focused on Lucio Fontana’s pioneering work in the realm of installation art, the exhibition presented a selection of his most experimental yet least-known works, Ambienti spaziali (Spatial Environments), seen together for the first time. Fontana’s environments, conceived before the famous “holes” (Concetti spaziali), were revolutionary for their time for their use of innovative materials such as neon and Wood’s lamps and they anticipated the research on light and space that would develop in the following decades. But the endeavor also has contemporary relevance inasmuch as Fontana’s research touches on several aspects of relational aesthetics, and is connected to contemporary practices of an environmental character, such as those of Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, or Tomás Saraceno. The exhibition was the result of long and in-depth study in several museums and private archives carried out by the co-curators, the art historian Marina Pugliese and the art conservator Barbara Ferriani. Some of the environments were reconstructed for the first time since the artist’s death, in collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Fontana.

The book collects the most up-to-date research on this body of Fontana’s work and will prove useful for any future investigation of the spatial environments, as well as meeting the need for a new and critical look at the historical and artistic period in which they were conceived. A detailed collection of work entries dedicated to the entirety of Fontana’s environmental production accompanies an extensive selection of essays, historical images, and installation views.

2018
English
228 pages
Hardcover, 22 × 28.5 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 291 6

Mousse Publishing

Furla Series: Time After Time, Space after Space

20 August 2018 in Books Comment

Furla Series: Time After Time, Space after Space

2018
English / Italian
152 pages
Softcover, 19 × 26 cm
ISBN: 978 88 6749 331 9

Texts by Helga Christoffersen, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Hendrik Folkerts, Aram Moshayedi, Bruna Roccasalva, Joanna Zielińska

Dancing, talking, singing, playing music, walking, writing, eating, screaming, sleeping… we’ve seen artists do all this and much more, at museums, galleries, art fairs, and foundations. In books, catalogues, and art history texts, we’ve read about works made of bodies, gestures, movements, and actions that unfold in space and time. We’re talking about performance art: a constantly evolving language that artists have always used to respond to change, the “avant-avant-garde” that even today “continues to defy definition, remaining as unpredictable and provocative as it ever was.” –Bruna Roccasalva

Time after Time, Space after Space, realized in co-production with the Museo del Novecento in Milan, is the first edition of Furla Series, the project that from 2017 sees Fondazione Furla engaged in the realization of exhibitions and events dedicated to some of the most important national and international artists, in collaboration with major Italian art institutions. The partnership with the Museo del Novecento is a unique opportunity to meet past, present, and future that activates a dialogue between the masters of the twentieth century and the protagonists of the contemporary art scene. From this premise comes the idea of reflecting on performativity starting from a relationship with the work of Lucio Fontana, which marked a fundamental point in the recognition of the artistic value of the gesture, paving the way for subsequent spatial and performative research. The book contains an introductory text by the curator of the project and five essays dedicated to each artist that explore their approach to the practice of performance. For each artist is provided an extensive photographic documentation of the performance held in Sala Fontana.

Mousse Publishing