PUMA.Creative at LOOP

Lunch and Conversation with Isaac Julien and Helga de Alvear

Isaac Julien and Helga de Alvear - Conversation and lunch with Isaac Julien and Helga de Alvear, Hotel Catalonia Ramblas restaurant, Saturday May 21, 2011.

Video artist Isaac Julian discussed his work at this year’s LOOP FAIR over an intimate lunch with curators, collectors and artists. Initially the conversation revolved around how his latest work, Ten Thousand Waves (2010), was conceived, produced and created as well as the narratives and collaborations that inform it. Julien’s engagement with the audience then turned toward the role of collectors, in this case Helga de Alvear, who co-financed the production of this complex, multi-channel video. Following the discussion we were treated to a screening of Better Life the single channel version of Ten Thousand Waves.

Mark Wallinger in Conversation with Adrian Searle

Mark Wallinger and Adrian Searle - Mark Walinger and Adrian Searle in conversation

In the evening, respected Guardian art critic Adrian Searle interviewed artist Mark Wallinger, best known for his sculptures engaging with British class-politics and British nationalism. It was fascinating how Searle saw a tension running through Wallinger’s oeuvre, a tension between localized British identity and a desire to connect to issues that transcend cultural barriers and therefore take on universal importance.

Searle continued by suggesting that Wallinger was among artists from the 1990s that were looking afresh at the moving image. For example Angel (1997), which was shot in the London underground station of the same name. The conversation came to a close with Searle’s conclusion that Wallinger has been a part of a shift in how we the audience have adopted a different frame of reference to view video art than the one that we use to view television. Within the context of why we were all in Barcelona, the LOOP FAIR, this point ran particularly relevant.

LOOP FAIR Highlights

Within the fair it was evident that a number of artists would not have agreed with the conclusion coming out of Searle’s premise that video art is a distinctly different viewing experience from television or film. Many artists took popular culture as a fundamental cue. Kent Monkman’s Dance to Miss Chief (2010) constructed images that dealt with queer identity and Marco Brambilla’s Evolution (2010) emphasized the role of American cinema as a dominant cultural reference.

Absurdity was another incidental theme that seemed to permeate the Fair. João Onofre’s video work Untitled (SUN 2500) (2010) presented a sailboat being lifted over a row of apartment buildings with a crane, only to end up in someone’s backyard pool—an ironically amusing disruption of the boat’s intended purpose. Similarly Julian Rosefeldt’s Asylum (2001/02) showed a group of men piling up stacks of newspaper only to have them repeatedly blown away, an indefinite Dada-like reference.

One piece that distinctly stood out captured the melancholy of contemporary ways of connecting. Meiro Koizumi’s touching narrative spoke of loss and unexpected connections. In My Voice Would Reach You (2009) a group of actors who have lost their mothers dial a call centre while on camera. They begin speaking and one realizes they are pretending that the service agent on the other end of the telephone is their deceased mother. Playing on a cultural norm in Japan, where it would be rude for the agent to hang up, the artist facilitates a surprising connection.