http://www.gouldgalleries.com/Exhibitions/tabid/84/ctl/ExhibitionDetails/mid/420/eid/18/Default.aspx

http://prdctvsm.com/

Marc de Jong FLOCK WORK
Gould Galleries, 270 Toorak Rd. South Yarra
Opens Thursday 08 September 2011 – Saturday 08 October 2011

EXPANDED FERVOUR (SUBTERRANEAN UNDERGROWTH)

In Marc de Jong’s FLOCK WORK we are presented with explosive moments of energy controlled and contained. Removed from their origin as stock photography they appear to be slowed to the point of growing organically. His images of curling ocean waves, fireworks, volcanos, black holes all deal with brutal, spectacular energy. Electricity, water, gravity, fire – elemental forces man has tried to contain. These are portraits of entropy – a moment of peak energy about to dissipate – the greatest force frozen and permitted to grow a mould-like flock veneer. In this manner they are meditations on the speed of global image culture, overgrown phosphorescent works that contain our shared visual culture.

COPY PASTED (SIGNED AND SEALED)

Stock footage and universal logotypes have long been a fascination for de Jong. From the early sign-jacking of the re-advertising project to his re-appropriation of Mad Max in oils, to the alternate reading of nationalist pride in his combination of Australian Aboriginal colours and the Eureka stockade flag. Marc has continued a tradition of very precise and controlled re-use of contemporary imagery. In FLOCK WORK we are witness to a sifting of imagery from stock photography libraries that privilege moments of dynamic intensity only to seal them in their explosive state and alchemically make them permanent on canvas. Somewhere between printing, painting and electrostatic experimentation lies de Jong’s flock process. Generating sparks in their big bang moment in the studio, these canvases represent and also contain the energy used to make them.

SERENE SMILE (YOU VAIN CREATURES)

de Jong’s Buddhas stare out from the walls, peacefully surveying the folly of man’s attempts at longevity and permanence. These heads stand apart in this body of work as the only manifestation of a human form. A humble, resigned, knowing, curling smile that sees the world from it’s jungle home at Angkor Watt, Cambodia. These faces are the key to understanding Marc de Jong’s metaphysical concerns – they are the serene reflections of man surveying and attempting to understand the world. Fame dissolves, humanity is extinguished, but life continues in the pores of the earth. Surfaces of the world will again creep with lichen and moss, much like de Jong’s flock seems to grow and emit a faceless living energy.

Emile Zile 2011

In January 2012 I will begin a two-year studio residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.

http://www.realtimearts.net/article/103/10353

Philip Brophy, in his catalogue essay for Five Production Company Logos in 3D, sees Emile Zile’s groin-level gesturing aptly as a ‘spoof’ on masturbatory corporate excess. It strikes me also as a kind of post-mass-media shadow-puppetry, almost as though Zile might be telling us a story around the campfire, his flickering hands casting the shape of mythical battles or god-heroes onto thin air.

Orginally screened at Lost and Found, Amsterdam’s long-running night of cultural oddities, video and storytelling hosted at the Theatrum Anatomicum.

http://limboland.tv/kunst/het-beste-van-lost-found/larry-emdurs-suit

http://diannetanzergallery.net.au

My new video Five Production Company Logos in 3D is showing in Melbourne at Dianne Tanzer gallery + projects in April 2011. Philip Brophy wrote a catalogue essay available at the show or online at PhilipBrophy_EgoLogos.html

An excerpt…

Emile Zile’s Five Production Company Logos In 3D presents an imaginary ‘real man’ behind these grandiose charades born of selfimportant declaration. Just as design company CEOs probably come in their pants when they look at their Maya-rendered fonts casting shadows on planets, so are Emile’s hands ‘working magic’ as he performs aerial jack-offs synchronised to Adam Milburn’s gilded melodic refrains. His hysterical hand movements hilariously replicate the excessive overload of those corporate logos which move around like Jane Fonda doing Zumba on crack. Best of all, it simply looks like Emile is masturbating as if he uses some amazing technique to whack a super load into our faces. Which is exactly what the proud designers of those gleaming chromed star-cruiser logo-ships imagine they’re doing. And a grand tradition it is, for what is Coke’s ‘dynamic ribbon’ but the allusion to a frothy foaming cum shot.

April 2 – 23, 2011
Diane Tanzer gallery + projects
108-110 Gertrude St. Fitzroy
Melbourne Australia

This week I will be conducting a workshop at the Netherlands Media Art Institute for Video Vortex, an international conference on the politics and aesthetics of online video. Netherland’s Beeld en Geluid archive have opened up their state collection of broadcast media for participants to remix and re-release into orbit.

On Saturday night I will perform a new work, *best*RapidEssayNSFW!!, a live essay-video using prepared and online a/v sources. Caveman VJ’ing. Brutalist effects. Think of millenial dot com crash cult leader monologues, evolution and decay, language and  truth, animism and portraiture. Constant Dullaart, Anja Masling and Giorgi Tabatadze are also showing work, Katja Novitskova will be the DJ.

Production still from *best*RapidEssayNSFW!! test.

1. Laibach – Predictions of Fire 1996

In the early 80’s, an industrial rock band named Laibach emerged out of the Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. Incorporating what many took to be fascist imagery in their performances, they shocked this small Balkan republic and, after signing a recording contract with London’s prestigious Mute Records label, went on to shock the rest of the world as well. Laibach was soon joined by a painting group, IRWIN, and theater group, Red Pilot, at the helm of one of the most ambitious and cutting-edge arts collectives in the world. Modeled after a socialist state bureaucracy, and calling themselves Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Arts, or NSK), these three groups became the titular heads of a micro-state within the independent republic of Slovenia. NSK recently began issuing its own passports and opened embassies and consulates in Moscow, Berlin, Ghent, Florence, and in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziivUUKHf-I

2. Aleksandra Domanovic – Turbo Sculpture 2010

Turbo Sculpture is questioning the emergence of a new kind of public art in ex-Yougoslav republics. The title of the video is a reference to Turbofolk, a popular style of music from the Balkans that freely samples traditional and contemporary sources. A sculpture of Bruce Lee, or of Rocky are politically neutral and common cultural references for the different communities that were at war for over a decade in the 1990s. While the war time Turbo Culture was mostly associated with exaggerated nationalism, almost pornographic kitsch and crime glorification, the post war Turbo boldly contrasts nationalist xenophobia while retaining its stylistic identity.

https://vimeo.com/17523698

3. BBC4 – Nicolae Ceausescu, The King of Communism 2003

Nicolae Ceausescu created a unique personality cult in the 1970s and 1980s, transforming communist Romania into one of the strangest regimes Europe has ever seen. Newspapers had to mention his name 40 times on every page, factory workers spent months rehearsing dance routines dressed as soldiers and gymnasts for huge shows at which thousands of citizens were lined up to form the words Nicolae Ceausescu with their bodies. When the Romanian economy and living standards plummeted in the 1980s, the line between theatre and life blurred completely. Ceausescu went on working visits to the countryside where he inspected displays of meat and fruit made out of polystyrene, and closer to home began work on what would have been the largest palace in the world. At the final parade in 1989, workers walked past their leader to the sound of taped chants and applause.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5gVsYNGycc

*best*RapidEssayNSFW!! is a live audiovisual essay film using prepared and online video sources.

Keywords: Prose, Essay, Monologue, Video, Sample, Spirit, Compression, Revelation, Transmission, Belief, Future, Transparency, Magic, 3D, Animism, Portraiture, Apocalypse, Truth.

On the 11th and 12th of March 2011 Video Vortex will be organized in TrouwAmsterdam. Conference themes are: Online Video Aesthetics; It’s not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database; Country Reports; Platforms, Standards and the Trouble with Translation; Online Video as a Political Tool; and Online Video Art.

More information:
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/6amsterdam
Tickets for the conference:
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/6amsterdam/info/tickets

This conference is taken place within the SIA-RAAK Publiek program Culture Vortex. Culture Vortex is an innovation program to encourage public participation in online cultural collections.

Consortium Partners: University of Amsterdam, MediaLAB Amsterdam, Institute for Sound and Vision, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Virtual Platform, VPRO, Amsterdam City Archive, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, IDFA, and the International Urban Screens Association.