Emile Zile is an artist, filmmaker and performer.
THE PRODUCT IS THE MEDIUM
Artists: Anthony Antonellis, Anika Schwarzlose, Constant Dullaart, Baden Pailthorpe, Michael Manning, Emilio Gomariz, Adam Cruces, Niko Princen, Emile Zile, JK Keller.
Prosume This is organized and curated by Kim Asendorf, Anika Schwarzlose & Jonas Lund.
http://www.gouldgalleries.com/Exhibitions/tabid/84/ctl/ExhibitionDetails/mid/420/eid/18/Default.aspx
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
Presenting and performing in Indonesia for Video Vortex #7 part of CELLSBUTTON #5: Yogyakarta International Media Art Festival.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/7-yogyakarta-2
http://www.natural-fiber.com/cellsbutton/
In January 2012 I will begin a two-year studio residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.
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
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
tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.
tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.
what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability?
if facebook is the brightly-lit suburban mall of internet communication, i want to be under the bridges; in the torrent-swapping irc channels, small social networks, anonymous message boards and darker locations thriving with their own individual languages and codes.
tired of feeling exposed, of being infantilised, of being farmed.
the incessant ‘now’ of FB started to infect my creative process; making for ‘blip’ attention spans and the enormous appetite of the beast, as Geert Lovink puts it ‘feeding a machine’. I want to think in longer time frames to make deeper work.
tired of feelings of interpassivity and the formless mild angst it instills in me; spectacle 2.0 and the build-your-own-ego-ghetto.
hello friends, goodbye facebook.
