UJINO AND THE ROTATORS
18 February - 24 April 2009
Ujino Muneteru's The Rotators is the title for a series of installations, sound sculptures, and performances put together using household electrical appliances, power tools, and other bits and pieces, taking "global culture" as its motif. At first sight they simply resemble a chaotic collection of household goods, but they all reflect the artist's unique improvisational style of assembling objects, which he calls "electric bento" or "plastic ikebana".
A product of the extensive economic growth of
In the sixties, Jean Tinguely, a leading proponent of kinetic art, was making kinetic sculptures out of waste including household electrical appliances and machine tools. The mass-production, mass-consumption society that formed the backdrop to the rise of junk art also provides inspiration to modern-day Tokyoite Ujino in the form of "various bits of scrap that pass by my house". Ujino's approach, although it shares a similar critical spirit and recycling ethos, derives mainly from a penchant for the tactile work associated with manual training classes and DIY.
In the post-1990 Internet age, materialism, which once symbolized the age of mass production and mass consumption, has been superceded by nonmaterial virtual space, while design, which continues to move in the direction of multifunctionality and size and weight reduction, has contributed to a weakening of the presence of actual "things" with volume and gravity. Viewed in this light, The Rotators, in which secondhand household electrical appliances, furniture, and other objects are combined to produce noise, could be described as a new materialism whose goal is to restore and rehabilitate the innately human senses of touch, hearing, and weight.
For this exhibition at The Hayward Project Space, Ujino is transformed the space into his workshop, continuously welcoming ‘new band members’ from
Curator: Mami Kataoka, International Curator, The
LINKS
Hayward Gallery / Southbank Centre website
Tim Lee, Installation Shot, Hayward Project Space
TIM LEE
9 January - 8 February 2009
In a recent interview, the Canadian artist Tim Lee (born
For his exhibition at The Hayward Project Space, Lee presents a number of recent and new works that turn on the notion of optical experimentation. Here, formal strategies such as spinning, tilting, rotating, splicing and cropping combine to create a series of unstable representations of various artistic figures – the Russian constructivist photographer Alexander Rodchenko, the American artist Dan Graham, and the American comedian Steve Martin – underlining both Lee’s relationship to them, and their (perhaps unexpected) relationship to each other.
Speaking about his Untitled (Studio Roll), 2008 – a piece that draws on Dan Graham’s seminal double projection Roll (1970) – Lee has said that the video emerged from his interest in how ‘one person’s stable perspective might be another person’s warped one’. Multiple ways of seeing are also foregrounded in Untitled (Alexander Rodchenko), 2008, an optical device comprised of angled mirrors which allows a Leica I camera (a tool heavily associated with Rodchenko’s dynamic form of photography) to take images of itself, heterogeneously reflecting on its own history. In Untitled (Steve Martin), 2008, Lee re-enacts a 1970s stand-up routine by Steve Martin, a comic who once famously informed his audience that his entire act would consist of one joke, repeated over and over until the final curtain. Martin claimed that this ‘will be like a new thing’, and as Lee’s work demonstrates, repetition gives rise to fresh possibilities. Time, space, and our own fluctuating selves ensure that we can’t quite ever say the same thing twice.
frieze magazine review of Tim Lee's 2009 show at Johnen Galerie Berlin
Artist's pages at lissongallery.com
