Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time), 1961-63

Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) 1961-63, Installation view, Magnetized Space, Serpentine Gallery, London, (7 December 2011 - 19 February 2012) © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones

This semaphore frieze will stop you in your tracks at the Serpentine. Lygia Pape calls her epic a (the) Book of Time. Well, it both is and it isn’t.

Yes, it has 365 elements which might be called pages. They are made from wood, which is related to paper. And they have a colourful grammar all of their own.

But this work may just be an echo of the real thing. It hints at an invisible 365 page book which could govern all of our days.

If time‘s tome is anything like Pape‘s we should be this happy. Bold colours, dynamic shapes, fresh possibilities are all in store. No two days are the same.

So Livro do Tempo is an antidote to the daily grind, a funhouse mirror to most folks’ experience of time. No Outlook calendar, you can enter or exit wherever you like.

And at the risk of some national stereotyping you might say the Brazilian artist here takes Russian constructivism on a carnivalesque parade.

But Pape loops her garland of abstraction around a whole year. So we should rather hope that the Ur-book of time, if it exists, feel the influence of this one.

And if as novelist Thomas Mann says, “only the exhaustive is truly interesting”, could this work at Serpentine be anything else?

Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) can be seen in Lygia Pape, Magnetized Space at Serpentine Gallery, London, until February 19. See gallery website for more details.

Also, read what blogger Chloé Nelkin had to say about the rest of the show.

Found Objects 23/01/11

Great links this week. Please tuck in:

• I’m still not entirely sure what SOPA is, but I vehemently oppose it. Even if it has thrown up this ace Jonathan Jones rant on Wikipedia
• As Prime Minister David Cameron calls for more commercial British films, comedian Stuart Lee offers a commercial response (via @NickMotown)
• Third and perhaps best Guardian rant of the week comes courtesy of novelist Will Self, who mines some previously untapped comic potential from the urban space that is Trafalgar Square
• I don’t know how it took the fashion industry 500 years to spot this trick: a handbag made according to a design by Leonardo Da Vinci. Do check the video.
• It’s local politics, but not as you might know it. Kriston Capps reports from Washington DC on hunger-striking auto-circumcision merchant Adrian Parsons.
• Another controversial spot of legislation saw artist Miranda July arraigned for kookiness. At least you could read it in The Onion (also via @KristonCapps)
• Musician and photographer Patti Smith gets a first museum show in Connecticut. NY Times finds it endearing if not groundbreaking
• Tickled with excitement by this interview with Brian Droitcour. The new poetry editor at Rhizome discusses the online potential of the medium, in effervescent verse
• Would love to see an Ed Keinholz show, more specifically this one featured in Daily Serving. The fiercely critical artist died in a place called Hope (Idaho)
• Theosophical dining on offer at Swiss Miss blog: a Mondrian Sandwich.

The Catlin Guide 2012

Say that two individuals began, at the same moment in time, to sit down with a pen and ream of paper. They will copy out the bible word for word.

One of the pair may have been Daniel Rapley, graduate of an art MA at Chelsea. His work is soon displayed on a plinth and beneath protective perspex, with a witty title: sic.

The other bible would most likely sink without a trace, unless it was the work of a religious nut. In which case, he or she may be deemed sick with a ‘k’.

Given the apparent futility and questionable sanity of much of what artists do, it is clearly important that graduates get support. Herein lies the value of the Catlin Guide.

“Making work after graduation can be difficult without the validation that art schools and tutors provide,” says Sophie Percival, who is now free to explore her preoccupation with striking environments.

Rapley and Percival are just two of 40 hot tips for the future of art. The guide is compiled by Justin Hammond who visits close to 50 degree shows, speaking to tutor, curator and collector alike.

More than just a list, these 40 are also validated by the production values of the guide itself, which comes in a highly tactile baize coloured slipcase.

And packaging is important because, as most graduates no doubt learn, a professional appearance soon matters. It could be the difference, for example, between Sic and certifiable.

You can get a copy of the Guide from the London Art Fair or any of the distributors listed on the Art Catlin website here.

Found Objects 16/01/12

Regular users of this internet thing will be pleased to know this week’s Found Objects are a spot free zone:

• Instead we have this awe inspiring NY Times story about geoglyphs in the Amazon
• News that Picasso and Warhol have been knocked off the top of the bestseller charts by Chinese artists
• A delve into the archives of the Guggenheim, which has digitized a mass of exhibition catalogues for free
• And a mammoth slideshow from Complex.com picks up on 117 art historical references from The Simpsons
• Good news for anyone who can’t drive. Artist Chris Burden predicts city freeways to be fully automated soon
• Laura Cummings reviews a promising show by footballer, doctor and artist Alberto Burri at the Estorick Collection
• A Kick Up The Arts blog approves of Grayson Perry’s daring British Museum show
• It shouldn’t work, but does it? These swiss modernist punk rock fliers from Another Design Blog could provoke a riot
• But this was always going to work. Chalk art typography by Dana Tanamachi on Beautiful/Decay blog
• Time stamp portrait and landscape prints on Prosthetic Knowledge have gravity
• Pure delight available from this animated video by Toronto bookstore Type.

Interview: Liliane Lijn

Liliane Lijn is such a hands-on artist that, within two minutes of arriving at her North London studio, my own pair were enlisted to help lift a Poem Machine from the floor onto a well-worn work surface.

There was an issue with this kinetic, text-bearing sculpture. It creaked as it rotated, so Lijn and a more capable assistant than myself were examining the drum, sketching the mechanism and muttering things about radial bearings.

It is the last place you might expect an artist with a background in Surrealism and Beat poetry to be. The workshop smells like a hardware store. Tooling machinery lies dormant on all sides.

There was barely enough time to note the spools of wire on the shelves or identify the pieces of industrial machinery. Lijn’s latest technical challenge was too baffling.

“I find engineering interesting, yuh,” says the American émigré, with an accent that belies her teenage move to Europe.

“If you make something, you’ve got to get it to work. I’ve never been the kind of artist who says, ‘I’ve got this idea, now who’s around to get it to work for me?’.”

This even holds true of a scheme to project text onto the moon. Lijn and scientific advisor John Vallerga have considered lasers, kites and lately heliostats for a project called Moonmeme. For recent work Solar Hills, they have even developed spectroheliostats to beam colour distances of 5km around the earth, .

The physics goes over my head, but Lijn points out: “I’ve been working with prisms for years. So I’m used to thinking about colour, refraction, the spectrum, what that is and how to deal with it.”

Moments later she demonstrates a wound copper sculpture and this is a wonder. As it rotates, a point of light rides up and down the column, like watching a vertical oscilloscope.

“The spiral does something weird,” the artist points out, seeming as confused as me by the two-directional waves. But today the penny drops. “I’ve figured it out,” she says. “It’s the direction of rotation.”

“Everything has an explanation,” she concludes. As the interview progresses, more and more of her sculptures come to life as Lijn moves around the studio switching them on at the wall.

In addition to Poem Machines and the tube of copper wire, the less industrial end of her workshop is home to rotating cones which are hooped with neon and a column made of solvent barrels. This rumbles away in the background as she talks.

Holes are punched in the side of these drums to spell out five words which fans of William Burroughs may recognise from Naked Lunch: “Way out is way in”.

It should be noted that the impetus from this piece came from a meeting with the Beat author, who “intimated” Lijn might draw on his work for a kinetic piece. (It was years before the artist came to the task, so sadly we cannot know Burroughs’ response.)

Soon it becomes clear that Lijn is as happy to discuss poetry as engineering. “The only people who liked these [Poem Machines] in 1962 when I first exhibited them were artists and a few poets.

“Though not many,” she adds with a laugh, “because they didn’t like the idea you couldn’t read their poems.”

Lijn moved to Paris in the late 50s and, along with Burroughs, got to know Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso. And whether they did or not, she still likes “that idea of words floating into your head and not being linear”.

If this is what she took from the beats, a crash course in automatic drawing was what Lijn came to through a meeting with the few remaining surrealists who André Breton had not expelled from the group.

“I’d done drawing at school and I never liked very much doing drawing from reality. So I started – which is probably a fault – doing drawings from my head.”

Now she says: “Drawing is very much about controlling the instrument that you’re using. It is, of course, an eye to hand thing, but it could be an inner eye to hand thing.

“You do have to control your hand and it’s very difficult; you find you’re thinking one thing and your hand is doing something completely different.”

As the many finished sculptures suggest, Lijn has got to grips with many instruments in her time. And as the odd creaking Poem Drum suggests, she may still not have total control, but practically speaking, she’s there.

Written for Culture24. Moonmene by Liliane Lijn can be seen in Republic of the Moon at FACT, Liverpool, until Feburary 26 2012. Read more about the artist’s work on her website.

Found Objects 08/01/12

With a major death, a minor spat and completely mad bit of art crit in Denver, the year has got off to an eventful start. Please enjoy any or all of the links below:

• Ronald Searle gets called “perhaps the greatest British graphic artist of the last 100 years” in this compelling obituary from the Independent.
• Two more British greats go head to head as David Hockney snipes at Damien Hirst. This is duly discussed in the pages of the Telegraph.
• And here’s the problem. Hirst’s spot paintings are soon on show at all 11 Gagosian galleries around the world. Art Fag City goes on the record with its verdict.
• But security will surely be better in these private spaces than it was in the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver. Watch a news report about the “criminal mischief” maker.
• This interview with painter Brigid Marlin told me as much about reclusive author JG Ballard  as a dozen of his books (via/ @rpeckham).
• Carsten Holler at the New Museum has mum-appeal, apparently. Max Weintraub considers this, and of course the relational aesthetics, on Art21.
• The Guardian delved in the archives to find this naive report on the menacing origins of street art. Bear in mind this was 1966.
• LA Times report a Polish museum has bought a Lego concentration camp. Sounds cheap at twice the price.
• Beat the back to work blues with this great photo of a Nintendo wielding salaryman from the Tokyo Times.
• Other commuters might like to try these 8-bit ancient Greek punishment games from Pippin Barr (via Animal New York).

Agnes Meyer-Brandis, The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Bird Migration (2011)

The ideal place to relate this piece of art might be in a pub. You could try a dinner party, but you may not get the requisite howls of disbelief.

“There’s this German artist, see, who wants to fly to the moon. No she’s not in a space training programme. She’s going to let herself be towed there by geese. Bear with me.

“So she’s got these eleven geese in a specially built lunar landscape in a place called Pollinaria. That’s Italy. She reckons it will get them used to the idea.

“She’s also been educating them. Teaching them about flying in a V, about space junk, orbits, etc. They’re all named after astronauts and the like. Like Yuri, etc.”

Such is the way with urban myths. Agnes Meyer-Brandis has taken a 17th century story by English bishop Francis Godwin, and turned it into a 21st century anecdote.

The original text is called The Man in the Moone and features the world’s first, goose-powered, spaceman. You could call it early sci-fi, and continue thus:

“Cut a long story short, she is their mum now. She imprinted herself on them by hanging out with the eggs and then 24/7 when they hatched.

“She even read Kurt Schwitters to them, some performance poem without words. No don’t ask me who he is. I don’t know either. Same again?

“Anyway my mate told me about it, knows someone who saw it in a gallery. They’ve built a sort of mission control. You can switch views of the geese on six screens.

“Swear by God, it’s true. You can watch them waddle in and out of the craters. It’s like they’ve already made it. Just imagine, hitching a lift with some geese.”

If you want a less bibulous experience of this work, make your way to FACT. There you will find the control room and a 20-minute film about the ’journey’.

Watching this reel in a sort of decompression chamber, it is hard to say where the art is located. Is it in Italy? Is it in FACT? Or is it simply in the mind, or in conversation?

Brandis-Meyer’s work can be seen at FACT until 26 February. See gallery website for more details. And read an interview with the artist on the Liverpool Echo website.

Found Objects 02/02/12

A rather sheepish selection of five post-celebratory links this week. Thanks for reading in 2011 and rest assured I’ll be back on it later in the week:

• Somewhere between art history and art criticism, this is a heavyweight consideration of either version of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. Elucidating (via @tds153).
• Good news if you’ve been tinkering with a screenplay for Finnegan’s Wake. Copyright has just expired on the literary oeuvre of James Joyce.
• You might not think that free jazz and population studies would make good bedfellows, but this vintage collaboration between Ornette Coleman and Pierre Hébert really works. Yowl!
• You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder why you didn’t get to the cinema more often in 2011. At least I did after viewing this supercut of films of the year (hat tip @hindmezaina).
• But it might also surprise you just how much goes on annually in just one artist’s studio. Painter David Dipré has made a slideshow of 2011. Music optional.

Liliane Lijn, Moonmeme (1992-2011)

Installation view at FACT as part of Republic of the Moon Photographer: Brian Slater

Investigations have taken place as to the feasibility of projecting a single word onto the surface of the moon. But Liliane Lijn is still waiting for a technical solution.

In the meantime, we can make do with a simulation. And the word which appears on the virtual moon, both online and at FACT Liverpool, is simply “SHE”. What else?

At time of writing, moonmeme is in near total darkness. So right now it works like a sound piece, the word ‘she’ breaking in layers of foamy sibilance.

Lijn and a co-conspirator take turns to utter the three letter word. It is purred, growled, sang, said any which way which reminds us of the essential strangeness of language.

Every 26 hours the piece updates to reveal a different phase of the moon. When it is full we can read the moon’s gender writ large across her face.

But when it is two thirds full we can read, ‘HE’ or even ‘SH’. It is curious that a male pronoun is contained in the female, stranger still it contains a prescription of silence.

Our creeping shadow (it is the Earth after all) connects moonmeme to earlier works by Lijn in which she made experiments with spinning words and kinetic texts.

The tidal motion of the soundtrack and the lunar motion of the visuals put the meaning of this tiny word into reserve. The feminine principle is everywhere, but nowhere.

Here we find only the reflection of reason, as we find ourselves washed ashore with only moonbeams to guide us. Moonmeme is as bewildering as a birth.

This work can be seen in Republic of the Moon at FACT, Liverpool, until Feburary 26 2012. See gallery website for more details. Alternatively, you can experience the project online, in realtime at www.lilianelijn.com.

Found Objects 19/12/11

Most favourite links from the past week, with a passing reference to xmas:

• Take in a whole book on deregulated capitalism at a glance with this wall chart by William Powhida. Better still, zoom in and scroll around.
• The Guardian interview the soi-disant Ikea anarchists, underemployed grads with time on their hands and photoshop on their laptops.
• Kieron Long in Architect magazine is also sticking it to the man, or at least the men behind the Arcelor Mittal Orbit Tower (hat tip @kristoncapps).
• Contemporary Art Daily showcases Merlin Carpenter’s scruffy, colourless cafe scenes (The cafe is in Tate Modern).
• Louis Wain, schizophrenic cat artist of the early 20th century finds his way onto the internet, where he always belonged. See Beautiful/Decay zine.
• The head of the arts programme at Cern argues the case for magic and mystery, even as particle physics illuminates all. (The Art Newspaper via @KatharineAllard.)
• You get the stalker you deserve. Claire Breukel has been following Vito Acconci for Hyperallergic.
• Van Gogh may have been an anomalous trachomat. Who knew? And Kazunori Asada has designed the software to prove it (via @inthecompanyof).
• Chloe Nelkin bemoans the lack of festive tree at Tate Britain this year. It’s a good excuse to look back at the trees of Christmas past
• And finally…Der Spiegel report on a rogue santa distributing ecstasy-laced drinks at a Berlin Xmas market.