Witzenstein

Inventing Hot Water, part 2

2012-02-21T15:37:00.009+01:00

Some "clever bastards" try it again:
http://www.brokenwindowprints.com/contemporary_urban_street_art_gallery_457848.html

They even have the nerve to state the following on their website:

"

About copyright
All images/photographs, design ideas, art work and text within this site are copyrighted to the names and web sites of Broken Window Prints, ~~Michael Unwin~~, ~~Mike Unwin~~ and ~~Joanna Bury~~, and are not to be reproduced, distributed, sold or printed without prior consent of Michael Unwin. Please use the contact us form to enquire about permissions and usage rights.

"

the original spoof is here:

http://witzenstein.blogspot.com/2007/07/robert-indiana-in-temple-of-doom.html

Es Geht Um Die Wurst, or... the future of abstract painting

2011-10-17T15:57:00.006+02:00

Wurst on canvas. (salami)

© eddy gabriel

Wurst on canvas. (salami 2)

© eddy gabriel

Wurst on canvas. (mortadella)

© eddy gabriel

Inventing Hot Water

2011-09-07T20:23:00.012+02:00

Recently some folks are cashing in on an original idea I had in 1993.
I don't really mind, but It would show some respect if they, at least, would mention where they got the inspiration from...

http://bolder.gva.be

http://www.bollart.be/index-2.html

http://www.project187.be/nl/project-187.html

And somewhere in England too...

and here...

The original is here

Blurt - Cut It (limited edition)

2011-06-22T10:41:00.002+02:00

A limited edition, one-sided, seven inch vinyl single packed in a handmade sleeve by Ted Milton.
The cover comes from a methodist church songbook for the blind ;-)
A lyricsheet is included.
It's an edition of 50 numbered and signed copies, costs 50 euros and you can order it via blurtstuff@yahoo.com

Cinderella in Germany

2011-06-15T15:39:00.003+02:00

Speedfreak

2011-06-15T15:28:00.001+02:00

First Aid

2009-05-14T16:48:00.002+02:00

Portrait of Wout Vercammen (Hahaha! Ja, man!...)

2009-05-14T16:42:00.004+02:00

Martin Maloney.

2009-05-14T15:44:00.008+02:00

Martin Maloney.
1938 New Jersey - 2003 Antwerp

Not the British Painter.

“To live,” Walter Benjamin once famously wrote, “is to leave traces.” But one could almost say that the recently deceased artist Martin Maloney (1938-2003) lived to efface his. Largely forgotten and omitted from art history, the American artist is all but invisible in institutional collections of the conceptual art he participated in from an early stage.

Thus the title of Maloney’s first posthumous exposition, “Here to Stay”, captures all of the ambiguity of the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition fills the vast decrepit spaces where the artist lived and worked in solitude for the last 8 years of his life while the Antwerp building was waiting to be demolished.

The works, like the space they occupy, are not there ‘to stay’ at all. Immanent destruction is a ghost that has haunted the building for years. And even though his arrival in this space was relatively recent, Maloney’s works made from the recycling of building detritus have evoked architecture and entropy since the late ‘60s.

He made floor-bound geometric ensembles, each composed of thousands of pieces of any one element: neat piles of fallen ceiling plaster, pyramids of broken bricks, layers of split timber from his studio’s oak doors, or thousands of identical maniacally cut squares of carpet. In his work, the ceiling sat on the floor and wall elements became precarious rubble in the corner. In short, boundaries were elided between architectural elements and sculpture, between object and installation.

These ensembles made infinitely mutable, fragile works—more often than not with nothing holding the components together. They could change form a hundred times… or simply be swept away. ‘Structure’, ‘edge’, ‘edged’, ‘angle’, ‘cut’, ‘split’, ‘split space’: these words line Maloney’s texts, canvases and painted brick-works. Even a sampling of his exhibition titles, “Up Against the Wall” (at Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf 1971) or “White Walls are Animals” (at Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp, 1980), give the sense that the constraints of architecture and space — particularly the exhibition space — were never far from Maloney’s thoughts.

For him, the gallery’s symbolic ‘white walls’ needed to be fought, resisted and shown for what they were. In 1971, he locked himself in the confines of the MTL gallery in Brussels for five days and nights. His solitary act and refusal to allow the gallery space its role in visual presentation was the ‘exhibition’, with only a published version of the texts he wrote during his stay in the gallery as material trace.

For his exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in London that same year, he painted the walls black and wrote lines of conversation and provocation on them during the gallery’s opening hours to incite the visitors who came to communicate with him. Little, if anything, is left of these meetings of the conceptual, the textual and the architectural, and one has the sense that this is somehow as Maloney wanted it.

Maloney was active as a conceptual artist in the ‘60s close to the likes of Lawrence Weiner, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth and Dan Graham. He made his material pile sculptures and conceptual projects alongside a vast body of intricately shaped canvases, highly structured language pieces, box sculptures, and painted statements on canvas.

To see some of what remains of this work on exhibit is to feel a ricochet of influences, references, and dialogues (with Weiner and Andre, of course, but also Frank Stella, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Arte Povera…). Over time, however, he managed to alienate himself from his fellow artists, galleries, collectors, curators and art history alike. With the exhibition’s end, the works on show will travel to museum spaces that share little of the precariousness that make a building in ruin a fitting context for the artist’s complex, volatile work.

The form of the works and their dialogue with space will necessarily change, and Maloney would probably never have accepted such an exhibition at all. As he knew too well, white walls are animals indeed.

Elena Filipovic is an art critic and independent curator based in Paris and Bruxelles

The remains of his studio in Antwerp.

Dopey

2008-11-21T10:01:00.006+01:00

Found Footage Art

Untitled (Tension Study)

2007-08-21T16:30:00.001+02:00

at "Pofferd De Nul", Antwerp, 1998

© eddy gabriel

In The Shadow Of The Church Of Bank

2007-08-15T17:03:00.001+02:00

Where The Land Ends, Where The Sea Ends, Where The Land Begins, Where The Sea Begins...

2007-08-10T18:11:00.002+02:00

Study For A Road Work (Morse Code Striping: S.O.S.)

2007-08-09T15:25:00.003+02:00

Philosopher's Stone (Study For Turning Silence Into Gold)

2007-08-08T11:04:00.003+02:00

The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth

2007-08-06T15:15:00.002+02:00

"La gaz d'éclairage" - "The Illuminating Gas" - fArt In A Bottle

2007-08-02T16:46:00.005+02:00

Ode Vie, mis en bouteille.

© eddy gabriel

"Slice Of Life" - Cover for a book of poems by Philippe Van Beek

2007-08-01T15:42:00.001+02:00

"State Of Mind" - Design For A Hat

2007-08-01T10:17:00.001+02:00

Ich Habe Einen Vogel

2007-07-31T12:11:00.002+02:00

at "Pofferd De Nul",Antwerp 1998

at first Freespace in NICC, Antwerp 1999(?)

in catalogue Freespace NICC, Antwerp

© eddy gabriel

Page From A Children's Reading Book

2007-07-26T15:44:00.001+02:00

Zizi n'est pas une pipe

2007-07-25T10:26:00.004+02:00

Robert Indiana In The Temple Of Doom

2007-07-25T09:40:00.003+02:00

A modern day reply on Robert Indiana's famous "Love" emblem from the 1960's as a wry comment on the "Love generation"'s accomplishments since then...

I know it's sad.

© eddy gabriel

Jacob's Ladder - Tempus Arti 2006

2007-07-24T20:42:00.004+02:00

© eddy gabriel

With this ladder I was selected as one of the "laureates" of "Tempus Arti" 2006 in Landen, a small town in Belgium.
The idea behind this 7 meters high sculpture is that it is a ladder consisting of separate stackable elements; the capital letters "H" and "A"; stacked alternately on top of each other. Climbing it (mentally) and taking more elements, i.e. a "H" or an "A", elongating the ladder as you climb higher, your position becomes more and more unstable as you approach "a state of hybris".

After installing it I went to the official opening where I got confronted with the catalogue in which the work was described with some quotations from the bible and some more besides-the-point blabber (despite my suggested contribution) and a "romantic photograph" shot at sunset, in which the essential elements of the work, the alternation of red and white elememts, were completely lost, only showing a silhouette, making it seem like an ordinary ladder you probably have somewhere in your own shed.
Some weeks after this insult I received an e-mail from the organizers that the ladder had been "damaged", due to the "poor construction". No further explanation whatsoever. I had this sculptture made by a professional carpenter, a man who knows his business. Anyway, disgusted by the "catalogue event", I figured it best to just forget about this "Tempus Arti" debacle and never even answered the mail.
A few weeks later I met a colleague-artist who was also represented in this shambolic affair and he told me he received a phone call from the "curator", Dirk Lambrechts, telling him to "clean up his mess" and more of that kind of politeness. It took a while before he figured out they were refering to "The Ladder" and he could make them clear they were talking to the wrong guy.
My colleague got to know this way the reason for the collapse of the art-work; a bunch of drunken people actually tried to climb it, altough the proportions were designed so as to make this physically nearly impossible.
I never received this explanation from the organisers, possibly due to the fact that they owe me quite some money, since they stated beforehand they were insured against that sort of occurences.

Let's hope these people will restrain from organising another edition of their "biennale".

Who told you not to believe in fairytales?

2007-07-24T20:36:00.011+02:00

© eddy gabriel

Bollard by the river Schelde, transformed to a toadstool, as part of an off-off art exhibition during "Antwerp 1993 - Cultural Capital of Europe".
The outset was to include it in a groupshow of gallery "Si & La", managed by Werner De Vos, but after he learned of my idea he declined and asked me if I wanted to have him jailed...(lol)...So I decided to go on on my own and spray-painted the bollard with the help of fellow artist Fons Brepoels.

A few weeks later most of the bollards in the area were sprayed-painted by many different people, flattering me by copying the idea, but ruining the surreal effect originally intended, as now this toadstool became just one in a long row of painted boulders.