Dirt

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Sarah Pickering Land Mine Explosions (2016)
‘Whether real or artificial, we enjoy looking at explosions and, as an artist I’m of course fascinated by their visual seductiveness. I’m also interested in the forms of violence they represent, in our relationship to them, and in identifying the imaginative references they instantiate.’

 

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Igor Eskinja Untitled (2009)
‘Igor Eskinja’s installation consists of a floor carpet realized with dust; dust that the visitors of the museum have brought in the building with their shoes and that the museum’s employees have carefully kept, following the artists’ directions.’

 

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Robert Morris Earthwork aka Untitled (Dirt) (1968)
‘2000-pound pile of earth, grease, peat moss, brick, steel, copper, aluminum, brass, zinc and felt – urban debris gathered from the surrounding New York environs.’

 

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Vik Muniz Various (2004 – 2006)
‘On the Pictures of Earthworks, I use the earth as a canvas, a support, perhaps saying that no matter how we try to distill the materiality that shapes our consciousness into a symbolic, linguistic environment, we are only left with that same primitive material canvas as the unexceptional means of fixing and transmitting our knowledge. My intention is to treat the earth as a single unifying depository for all ideas and concepts.’

 

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‘Experimental movie about the land art works of Slovak artists during one summer of 1981 in the tranquil Slovak countryside.’

 

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Alice Aycock Clay 2 (1971)
‘Clay mixed with water in wood frame. 16 elements, 48 x 48 x 6 inches each.’

 

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Naoya Hatakeyama Various (2002 – 2004)
‘The trademark of Hatakeyama’s work is his photographic series depicting limestone quarries. In these arresting photos, Hatakeyama captures the aggression and magnitude of the quarries’ controlled explosions, as unquantifiable fragments of stone and debris are timelessly suspended, providing proof of the extreme ends to which humans will go to conquer nature.’

 

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‘Iran’s Crazy Body Group was formed in 2005, with some motivated and energetic people in local and international realms of performing arts looking to communicate with people of every culture, language and nationality. The group terms itself an intimate mixture of the arts: martial arts, drama, music, visual, photography and costume. Their production “Mud” is an intense, at times visceral drama that uses lights, mud and other props along with contemporary physical theater to a stunning visual effect.’

 

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Andy Goldsworthy Untitled (2013)
‘Andy Goldsworthy’s works of art are not intended to stick around for long. Made entirely of natural elements – trees, ice, mud, rocks, flowers – these remarkable visions all eventually decay, melt or disintegrate.’

 

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Santiago Sierra House in Mud (2005)

 

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Michael Heizer Water Strider (1983 – 1985)
‘Effigy Tumuli is Michael Heizer’s only known representational work. Designed in the tradition of Native American mound building, Effigy Tumuli consists of five different mounds of earth that resemble geometrically abstracted animals, each chosen because they are indigenous to the region: a catfish, a water strider (insect), a frog, a turtle, and a snake. The work is located in Buffalo Rock State Park, near Ottawa, Illinois (approx. 85 miles southwest of Chicago), on Buffalo Rock, a bluff overlooking the Illinois River. The tumuli, like most of Heizer’s earthworks, are massive in scale. Water strider is 685 feet long. Given the nature of the work and the vegetation that has occupied the site over time (itself a function of the site’s intended reclamatory purpose), it can be difficult today to get a sense of the works. Water strider and catfish, however, is visible from the U.S.G.S. satellite imagery (taken in the late 90s or early 2000s).’

 

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Derek Brunen Plot (2007)
‘Sitting on the floor of the Or Gallery, I’ve spent about 45 minutes watching Plot — a six-hour and 15-minute video of Vancouver artist Derek Brunen digging his own grave — when a morbid sense of despair sets in. Brunen has already excavated about five feet of the six-foot-deep plot at Mountain View Cemetery. Occasionally, he wipes his brow and glances at the camera, which only heightens the uncomfortable feeling that I’m a willing participant as he digs himself deeper into the hole. Then, Mountain View gravediggers appear to check his progress and mug at the video camera. Their walk-on relieves the build-up of tension – – not to mention of dirt — since Brunen takes one of many cigarette and water breaks to chat with the gravediggers about technique and equipment. After they leave, Brunen returns to the task.’

 

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Fatma Bucak Numbing silence covers us like fine dust (2022)
Soil, ash collected from the 2021 Tunceli forest fires

 

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Abbas Akhavan Dirt/Table (2012)
‘An air of menace accompanies the musky ‘Dirt/Table’, covered in roughly enough dirt to bury someone.’

 

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Kazuo Shiraga Challenge To The Mud (1955)
‘Kazuo Shiraga’s seminal ‘performance painting’ featured the artist flinging himself, half naked, into a pile of clay, where he writhed and slipped around in the material while sculpting shapes from it – thus creating a picture using his whole body. Challenge To The Mud explored the place where physical action (represented by Shiraga wrestling in the clay) and ‘matter’ (the clay itself) collide. The pile of mud was left in situ after the performance for the show’s duration, and presented as an artwork in its own right.’

 

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Patricia Johanson Stephen Long (1968)
‘Interested in the physical limitations of sight and in measuring how far the eye can see, Patricia Johanson created this 1,600-foot-long by 2-foot-wide sculpture made of plywood planks painted with yellow, red, and blue bands. Sited on a portion of the defunct Boston & Maine Railroad tracks from Buskirk, New York, to Bennington, Vermont, the work is named after Stephen Long, a military officer who became a railroad surveyor and engineer. Both the location of the work and its title emphasize the impact of rail transportation on modern perceptions and experience of the landscape. The work gained considerable local media attention, and John Lindsay, Mayor of New York, invited Johanson to permanently install the piece in the mall at Central Park. As the available space was only 1,300 feet long, the artist, unwilling to alter the work’s length, declined the invitation.’

 

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Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Martins Ratniks, Voldemars Johansons BIOTRICITY. Bacteria Battery No 5 (2012)
‘The networked sound installation Biotricity No.5 uses a fairly new “green energy” technology called microbial fuel cell to explore the intricate relationship between nature and technology, biologic systems and electronic networks. The installation consists of neatly aligned bacteria-fuel cells. Once they are connected together, the cells form a mini bio-power plant that turns into sound the process of generating electricity from bacteria living in mud. Biotricity No.5 was developed by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Martins Ratniks together with sound artist and composer Voldemars Johansons and young biologists from the University of Latvia.’

 

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Katharina Grosse Wunderblock (2013)
‘huge mounds of colorful dirt cover the floor and spill out of the space in katharina grosse‘s new installation ‘wunderblock’. the immersive painted environment is filled from wall to wall with spray painted soil, that visitors are encouraged to walk through and interact with.’

 

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Robert Smithson Partially Buried Woodshed (1970)

 

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Vito Acconci Face of the Earth #3 (1988)
‘Vito Acconci’s Face of the Earth #3 is a soil carving that invites the viewer to activate the negative space of his sunken theater smiley face. Acconci’s dislocations of familiar things into unlikely contexts jolt the viewer from passive looking to a more active questioning.Face of the Earth #3 rejects the pedestal tradition by putting a jack-o-lantern expression into the earth. Instead of looking up at it, the viewer steps down into its eyes, nose, and mouth and can sit in the skull-like cavities. It proposes that a bland, easy-to-“understand,” ingratiating face is what the public says it wants in public art.’

 

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Lara Almarcegui Rennes Demolitions (2003)
‘Between April 1st and June 30th, 2003, artist Lara Almarcegui invited the residents of the French city of Rennes to watch the demolitions going on in their city. The dates and times were available at the local art space 40mcube.’

 

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Yuhsin U Chang Moving Cloud (2014)
‘Raw sheep wool, metal tubes, gratings.’

 

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‘In “Hands Scraping” we see two male pairs of hands, those of Richard Serra and Philip Glass, sweeping up steel filings strewn on the wooden floor with their bare hands, and carrying the gathered heap in their hands out of the picture.’

 

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Richard Long Walking a Line in Peru (1972)
‘Richard Long is known for turning walking into art. In 1972 he traveled to Peru and made a line by walking back and forth, again and again, until a line was defined on the landscape he had walked. “I had turned something out of nothing,” he said.’

 

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Chen Zhen Purification Room (2000)
‘Considering Zhen’s illness and death shortly following the debut of this piece, the installation could be looked at as self-assuring Zen environment, reducing a familiar space to monochromatic, lifeless, timeless dirt, and refocusing thoughts to one’s own vitality, temporarily and basic origins. The work takes death, inevitable, but oddly haunting and alienating when the clock is exposed, and layers it over everyone and their individual experiences. The Purification Room kills the viewer, the only element missing from the domestic space, presumably covering them in the same apocalyptic dust that’s drowning the rest of reality as we know it. This is not a grim installation though, maybe more of a personal apocalypse. An imagining of what happens, what it feels like, to be moments after death – dull, senseless, calm, elemental, reclaimed.’

 

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‘Each of Anastasia Ax’s performances is a new performance; this is essential to her practice. Each meeting between the performer and the audience, every destruction of the material at hand, points towards a situation of indeterminacy and free activity where inner and outer can switch place. The role of ink in these activities is double-edged. It belongs to the world of drawing, the physical acts of filling out the white spaces, but the black ink has an element of poison and bile, melancholy and destruction as well. The raw energies connected with the splashing, the spitting out, the havoc, transform time from linear dimensions into circular moments.’

 

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Petrit Halilaj Kosterc (CH) (2011)
‘Kostërrc (CH) consists of a hole (600 x 400 x 230 cm high) made in the Kostërrc hill in Kosovo. This hill is property of the Halilaj family and the original location of the house where the artist was born. The soil taken from the hole is transported to Basel, to nearly fill the booth at the fair.’

 

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Chris Burden Exposing the Foundation of the Museum (1986)
‘Chris Burden dug three large trenches in one corner of the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, exposing the dirt and rock underneath the modern museum floor. Underneath the posturing and pretense of the art world, underneath our amazing ability to create art, these trenches looked like beautiful altars where one could contemplate spirituality, sensuality, art or dirt!’

 

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Urs Fischer You (2007)
‘“You” is an art installation by Urs Fischer done in 2007 at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Gallery in Chelsea. Consisting of a 30 foot by 30 foot crater, 8 feet deep dug into the foundation of the gallery. The installation took 10 days and was done at a cost of over $250 000. The following warning greeted visitors “THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH”.

 

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Pierre Huyghe After ALife Ahead (2017)
‘The sensation of this year’s Sculpture Projects Münster, which opened on Saturday (until 1 October), is Pierre Huyghe’s futuristic “biotope” in a disused ice-rink featuring live animals, an incubator growing cancer cells and augmented reality. Huyghe has sliced into the concrete floor and excavated the earth beneath, as well as automating pyramid shapes on the ceiling. Chimera peacocks (a genetic mutation) and bees move within the landscape while an aquarium contains a conus textile, a venomous sea snail species. Each of the installation’s elements affects the others: Huyghe scanned the conus textile’s pattern, so that it can be “read as a score that makes the aquarium change from transparent to opaque. When opaque, the ceiling structure is closed. When transparent, the structure opens, leaving the rain or the sun to enter the building and changing the conditions within the biotope.”’

 

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Einat Imber Continental Drift (2012)
‘Einat Imber is an Israeli-born artist living in New York. Her most recent work, Continental Drift, consists of tortoises with images of the continents on their backs moving through a globe-shaped diorama.’

 

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Blane De St. Croix Broken Landscape II (2010)
‘Broken Landscape II is based on Blane De St. Croix’s travels along the length of the Mexico/United States border. Conducting research along the course of over 3,000 miles of fence construction, the artist visited fifteen border crossings, and spoke with people on both sides of the border communities (both geographically and ideologically speaking), including civilian residents, fence contractors, US border patrol and journalists.’

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Alice Aycock Sand/Fans (1971)
sand, dirt, four industrial fans

 

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James Benning Portrait of Wooden Boxes (2019)
‘The black belt of the deep South was named for the color of the rich soil of cotton plantations, and later for the skin color of the people who lived there after slavery. Benning’s installation, Portrait of 7 Boxes (2019), is a collection of Alabama dirt in different shades of brown. In wooden boxes, stamped with corporate logos, Benning references another fault line in American agricultural history: the colonial European purchases and theft of Native American communal lands.’

 

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James Croak Various (2001 – 2003)
Cast dirt

 

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Robert Rauschenberg Mud Muse (1968-71)
Bentonite mixed with water in aluminum-and-glass vat, with sound-activated compressed-air system and control console

 

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Yoko Ono Country A, Country B, Country C (2021)
‘I’m no art critic but I figure if a gopher can do it every bit as well, it probably isn’t a great work of art. Behind the piles of dirt is the famous “War Is Over” poster. That doesn’t say much for her creativity that she’s still re-living the 60’s protests and recycling John Lennon’s old slogans. This might be an interesting experiment if Yoko Ono wasn’t Lennon’s widow and she didn’t have all that Beatle cash to piss away. Would she be able to make a living on this so-called artistic talent of hers? Are there that many “suckers” out there who consider piles of dirt “art” and are willing to pay to see it? I wouldn’t rule it out–in any event a “work” such as this could certainly nail down an NEA grant. Lennon himself was an admirer of her artistic “talent.” Of course, in those days he was usually strung out on every combination of drugs known to man. Me? Well, I’ve always been a skeptic so I just have one question for Yoko–just what is it you’re shoveling here?’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I wouldn’t be a third of the person and writer I am if I hadn’t done psychedelics when I was young. The person in question deserves a herd of horn-chainsaw unicorns. ‘Cruising for a bruising’ was kind of a popular saying long ago, and every once in a while it stills pops out of people’s mouths. I only watched two episodes of ‘Succession’, and I totally get you, but, oh, the money. Love turning all the dirt in the world into crack cocaine for thirty seconds and not telling anyone when, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Um, from what you’ve said about your mum’s taste in films, I think your reticence in this instance is justified. Wow, peacock feather psychedelia. That used to be a minor ‘thing’, and maybe it’ll come back now. Interesting. ** Dee Kilroy, Hold on while I bring up google translate. Ha ha, it translated my name Dennis into ‘Potential s’. ディーさん、温かい挨拶のおかげで朝はずっと良くなりました。 Excellent: you know/like ‘Angel Dust’. I’m going to go hit up Hiroyuki Nagashima’s Soundcloud page, thank you for the alert. Huh, maybe I do have hypnosis on the brain. I should use that while it’s forefronted, shouldn’t I? I’m not sure how Dirt relates? Is there a tangent? What do you think? Can you imagine how good art would taste? Yum. May your day spoon feed you a Vermeer. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, that’s an interesting couple/combo. I’m going to dwell on that hybrid. Thank you, sir. ** Jack Skelley, Yes, we would have to hold the FOKA event on the sidewalk since After8 is on its summer vacation. But that could’ve been a thing. Sounds good: acid + the big D. Let’s have a 3-way brainstorming confab. I read the LARB interview. Excellent stuff, pal. Everyone, Jack Skelley is newly interviewed @ LARB about ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’ and a whole lot of other chewy stuff and you oughta visit. ** Mark, Me too, plenty of trips to Disneyland on acid, and not a bad trip in the bunch. Removing ‘Inner Space’ was one of their biggest ever mistakes. I think for me Ecstasy was the best Disneyland mind-track. On September 8, Sabrina Tarasoff and I and Mr. Jack Skelley via Zoom will be marking the occasion of ‘FOKA’s’ birth with an acid-centric themed live event @ Paris’s by-far greatest bookstore After8. So, sadly, not in LA. That is the point of zines, I agree. Exciting. Damn, I wish I could be there and go to the fair. Damn. I hope Delos isn’t one of the burning islands. I trust not. You’re set, otherwise. Thank you, buddy. Biggest up. ** Steve Erickson, Oh, wow, that is a nice coincidence. Agreed about ‘Angel Dust’. Everyone, Mr. Erickson shared this, and I’m not going to tell what it is, just go watch it. Okay, I will tell you that it’s called ‘7 minutos de baile do helipa 2021 pego fogo 🔥🔥 / paredão gentalha’. Two strikes against ‘Talk to Me’. Which isn’t playing here anyway as far as I can tell. ** Isabella, Hi, Isabella! Welcome! It’s great to meet you! Thank you so, so much for saying that. That’s incredible to hear. That’s the ultimate thing any artist would want to hear. Thank you. Would it be possible for you to talk about the films you’re making or want to make? I’m very curious. My work is definitely a combination. The things I write about are kind of, I guess, compulsive in the sense that I do seem to need to write about them. But at the same I’m very calculating and meticulous about my prose, maybe because the things I write about confuse me as much as they compel me, so I need to work my prose really hard as a way to figure out how I feel about that material and how to represent exactly how I feel about it. If that makes sense? So, yeah, both. What’s that process like for you in your work? Thank you again, and I hope to see you more. xo, Dennis. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m about the same as yesterday. Yes, ‘Angel Dust’ and ‘August in the Water’ are both very good, in my opinion, and they’re very different from one another, which is also very good. Fleischer’s amazing and really underrated. I mean shockingly underrated. Yes, Pee Wee/Reubens’ passing is very sad and painful. And your today involved … ? Manna, I hope. ** Tele from Darbz, That’s cool because ‘tele’ can either be a telegram or a telephone call or a telepathic message. And maybe other things. Teleport. Well, that is a quite a find you found there. And he/she/they look so dapper. I have less than zero hopes about the ‘Wonka’ remake. Hugely less than zero. Chalamet was kind of funny in ‘The French Dispatch’, but even there you could feel how he was straining to seem funny. I do remember you telling me that. Pen/math. Well, awesome that he turned out to be a sweetie. Well, you know, the 70s were long, and there was all kinds of stuff going on in those ten years, like, you know, Glam and then Disco and then Punk. It was fun. I did meet/know some cult members. Not from super famous cults. I didn’t meet any serial killers as far as I know. I was friends with some people who qualified as famous, yes. Hot as in, like, sexy? Mm, sometimes. Hot as in temperature? Sometimes, but not as hot as it is there nowadays. Well, have a very momentous weekend if I don’t get to see you pre-Monday. ** A, I wish you were my worst nightmare, ha ha. Things would be so much easier. Yes, Mikel was in touch, and I’m waiting to hear back from him about when would be good for the interview. Things with me have been a bit rocky but ok. I don’t know which Matt that is, but congratulations! Yes, that kind of feedback is what it’s all about, absolutely. Zac has been away, and we’re about to go back to editing, and we’re hunting for someone to do the special effects, and we’re applying for another grant. We continue to have no funds for the post-production thanks to the world’s hugest piece of shit. I haven’t seen ‘Barbie’ or ‘Oppenheimer’. Might on the first, won’t on the latter. I have a strange jones to see the ‘Mission Impossible’ film, so I’ll do that instead. Sending love in return. ** Bill, Hi, B. I have a post coming up next week about Kôji Shiraishi. Do you know/like his stuff? Have a legendary Friday. ** Okay. You already know what the blog has thrust in your faces today, so I’ll just say, ‘See you tomorrow.’