Holes

 

Fabian Bürgy
Viktor Popović
Zdzisław Beksiński
Taryn Simon
Alan Saret
Neil Campbell
Sebastian Martorana
Banks Violette
Ryoji Ikeda
Ander Mikalson
Valentin Carron
Tara Donovan
Reuben Wu
Anna Sadler
Egill Sæbjörnsson
Thom Kubli
Bryan David Griffith
Noi Sawaragi
Alix Poscharsky
Daniel Arsham
Urs Fischer
Jacques-André Boiffard
Bert Flugelman
Catherine Chalmers
Deborah Stratman
Amie Siegel

 

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Fabian Bürgy

Smoke 1, 2013
Cement, hole, smoke

Smoke 2, 2013
Cement, pedestal, hole, smoke

 

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Viktor Popović

Untitled, 2008
iron, used motor oil

 

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Zdzisław Beksiński

Wife Portrait, 1956-57
Few works are darker than those of Zdzisław Beksiński. What does it all mean? Nothing – Beksinski never knew the meaning behind his works and was adamant against any sort of interpretation. His wife died in 1998. A year later, his son, a popular radio host and movie translator, committed suicide. Beksiński was stabbed to death in Warsaw in 2005. The killer was the son of his long time caretaker who murdered him over about $100.

 

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Taryn Simon

A Cold Hole, 2018
In Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole, participants jump into icy water while visitors in an adjacent gallery watch through a cinemascopic aperture.

 

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Alan Saret

The Hole at P.S.1, Fifth Solar Chthonic Wall Temple, 1976
In The Hole at P.S.1, Fifth Solar Chthonic Wall Temple, sunlight is the natural medium that influences the general shape of the sculpture. As part of MoMA PS1’s initial exhibition Rooms, this site-specific installation consists of a carefully sized and shaped hole dug out of the brick wall. When the sunlight faces the exterior side of the building, a focused stream light enters the hallway and shines down to the floor.

 

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Neil Campbell

Boom Boom, 2004
acrylic on wall

 

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Sebastian Martorana

Untitled, 2015
Marble sculpture of the impression made in the pillow of his late father in-law after lifting him up from his death bed.

 

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Unknown

The black painted spiral staircase at the Zeitz Mocaa Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town, South Africa, 1991

 

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Banks Violette

Black Hole (Single Channel), 2004
In works such as Black Hole, Banks Violette aptly portrays a phenomenon of excess. Heavy-metal aesthetics become a mirror of youth culture anxiety, an adopted language compensating and empowering sensations of immense sorrow and despair. Citing examples where musical lyrics become instigating factors to real-life violence, Violette refers to an over-identification with fiction where artistic expression exceeds critical confinement, and fantasy and reality are blurred. Black Hole lingers on this edge of transition: its aestheticised destruction offers both horrific contemplation and potential for misuse.

 

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Ryoji Ikeda

point of no return, 2018
concept and composition: Ryoji Ikeda
computer programming: Tomonaga Tokuyama

 

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Ander Mikalson

Scores for a Black Hole, 2019
With Scores for a Black Hole, events both quotidian and profound unfold daily around a seven-foot hole filled with black ink. Big enough to fall into, this void serves as a site for collective action and shared experience, exerting a powerful gravitational field. Numerous collaborators invited by Mikalson—from artists to actors to novelists to children to yogis and more—enact a scripted yet unrehearsed response of their own to the black hole, allowing for the spontaneous, unforeseen and unrepeatable to take shape.

 

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Anish Kapoor

Descent Into Limbo (2016)
Visitors enter the installation through a small doorway leading into a freestanding concrete and stucco room, approximately 20 feet square. In the center of the floor is a circular pit, the sides painted black so that it at first appears solid, hiding its true depths. Kapoor designed Descent Into Limbo to appear like an endless chasm in space; looking down into it is a dizzying experience. Last week, a 60-year-old Italian man fell into the hole. The man was hospitalized following the incident, which took place August 13, according to the local newspaper Público.

 

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Valentin Carron

A wall two holes, 2016
The “eyes” are the result of an elaborate and carefully constructed intervention. An entirely new wall has been built in front of the existing one, and the holes themselves are lined with concrete forms that subtly differentiate their perimeter from the plaster that surrounds them; even the surface of the wall behind the holes has been painted black, as if to further accentuate the overriding power of negative space.

 

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Tara Donovan

Transplanted, 2001/2003
“Transplanted,” first created in 2001, is an aggregation of brown tar paper that has been ripped to expose imperfect edges and stacked at varying heights and widths, suggesting, maybe, a mountainous landscape, undulating ocean, or topographic map.

 

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Reuben Wu

Lux Noctis II, 2018
Each image is a carefully-planned scene consisting of multiple lighting positions, layered to produce a theatrically-lit composition. Using the GPS-enabled aerial light/drone in specific positions in space, I am able to create moods of drama and tension through chiaroscuro, and the ability to illuminate isolated features of a scene and include unwanted elements.

 

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Anna Sadler

Mouth Endoscopy, 2011
apparatus, body, flesh, installation, machine, medical, bed, kinetic, light, ready made, space, breath, hole, internal, mouth

 

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Egill Sæbjörnsson

Hole, 2007
A hole in the ground that speaks Icelandic.

 

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Thom Kubli

Black Hole Horizon, 2016
What kind of relations exists between oscillating air, black holes and soap bubbles? Black Hole Horizon is a meditation on a spectacular machine that transforms sound into three-dimensional objects and keeps the space in steady transformation. The nucleus of the installation is the development of an instrument that is operated by compressed air and that resembles a ship’s horn. With the sounding of each tone, a huge soap bubble emerges from the horn. It grows while the tone sounds, peels off the horn, lingers through the exhibition space and finally bursts at an erratic position within the room.

 

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Bryan David Griffith

Wane, 2016
Smoke from open flame accumulated in encaustic beeswax.

 

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Norimizu Ameya

The shape of me, 2010
Holes weren’t dug as such. Rather, these particular holes were dug to open our eyes to the “holes” that existed inside us from the beginning. As well, it is precisely because they can’t be shared with everyone that they are “holes.” However, the fact is this was also pointed out clearly from the very beginning in Ameya’s own words. By this I mean the very title, “The shape of me,” which excludes others. Accordingly, even if the holes were filled in with dirt after the exhibition, the loss would have actually been deeper on account of them losing their shape. And so rather than sharing our sins, all we can do is – as Ameya says – take these holes that the other in the form of Ameya has exposed inside of each of us and, instead of trying to fill them in, make full use of them as “tools” that belong to no one.

 

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Alix Poscharsky

One Morning, 2015
A coffee cup at filmed from above. The coffee starts swirling and finally explodes into a universe.

 

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Daniel Arsham

Dig, 2011
Artist Daniel Arsham turns his attention to Storefront for Art and Architecture, March 1-April 23, for an unprecedented archaeological quarry delving deep into untapped streams of process and form. Dig unfolds in 3 segments, the final in which Snarkitecture create and inhabit the exhibition. From March 29-April 4 Storefront will be transformed into a deep façade filled with EPS industrial foam. From April 5-23 the public will be invited to view Arsham removing pieces from solid white infill, carving tunnels, crevices, and peepholes. In this final stage, Dig will become accessible to the public through rotating doors acting as windows on the site’s exterior, and by appointment through navigable passages that Arsham has excavated.

 

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Urs Fischer

Untitled (Hole), 2017
Cast bronze (based on plaster mold), patinated

 

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Jacques André Boiffard

Bouche (Mouth), 1929
Boiffard uses light in very different ways. In Bouche the light makes everything appear to be disintegrating. In the extreme close-up of the torn-open mouth, the light fragments in the reflections of the saliva and so dissolves what it first made visible: the inside of the mouth. The camera is sharply focused on the uvula at the back of the throat, which opens and closes the path into the body. The uvula regulates breathing in verbal expression and the entrance to the esophagus.

 

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Amie Siegel

Black Moon/Hole Punches, 2010
Black Moon/Hole Punches, is a series of photographs derived from the hole punches, or black moons, that a laboratory cuts into the first frame of the film negative. Siegel printed the hole-punched frames, which are always omitted from a final edited film, from the digital transfer of her Black Moon dailies.

 

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Bert Flugelman

Earthwork, 1975
Why did Bert Flugelman bury one of his sculptures in Commonwealth Park? Bert Flugelman’s sculpture, called Earthwork, was indeed buried as photos from the time show. He decided in fact to bury it and to make a moment out of it and to leave that question in the air hanging; does it still exist? Is it a sculpture if it’s buried and we can’t see it? Today, in the grass, is a plaque. It’s not known exactly where the buried artwork is, but a map from the Australia 75 exhibition where it was buried shows it sitting around 50 metres away from the plaque.

 

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Catherine Chalmers

Builders of Greatness, 2022
Builders of Greatness shows thousands of leafcutter ants as they dismantle the gallery wall.

 

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Deborah Stratman

The Swallows, 2013
Sinkholes are thieves, events that literally “take place.” Unintentional aspirant to the conditions of cinema, a sinkhole is fundamentally an edit in the landscape. Terrestrial features, intimating an incremental, geological time, they can also be sudden, cataclysmic events. As with caves, sinkholes are living organisms, with “bloodstreams and respiratory systems, infections and infestations. They take in matter, digest it, and flush it slowly through their system.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Eric C., If you do go to Miasma, let me know how it is. I’m very curious about that one. I just looked up Acres of Terror. It looks really nice. I hope it lives up. Halloween is only very slowly getting to Paris. The only thing I’m doing is this event where they turn a park here into some kind of outdoors haunt. Le Parc de l’Étrange. Bit of a crapshoot, but it’s all there is. Haha, yeah, my ‘sex dwarf’. Thanks! ** Dominik, Hi!!! At the one successful screening, the audience loved it, asked tons of questions. At the screening where there were only ten people, they mostly seemed to like it. At the last, depressing screening there were only five people and during the Q&A they just stared at us like dead bodies. I go to Ghent for the screening there on Saturday, but only for one night. Then I’m here until I go to Houston for that screening on the 12th. Zac’s going to the Bainbridge Island screening (near Seattle) on the 8th. ‘The Long Walk’ … I’ll peek at the evidence. Gosh, I want to go to every single one of those haunts except the victim ones. Not my thing. A Haunting in Hollis, Dent Schoolhouse, and Haunted Hoochie are legendary haunts, and I’ve always really wanted to do them. I am really drawn to Raisin Hell Ranch because it looks really homemade and imaginative. Love feeling proud of himself because he managed not to put a butthole in the post today, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Twisted Fears does look especially good, I agree. Concrete is such a good name for fragrance. What a shame. But you can display it proudly at least. ** Bill, Haha, the words Thirwell and excess do go together. Winston Tong, wow! I’m curious about that. I wonder if he does the old stuff or is still cooking new things up. ** Hugo, Hi. Cool that you can go to the screening. I’ll try not to be distracted and a bit out of kilter, but I probably will be. Björn Andrésen, RIP. Did he do other things than ‘DiV’ and ‘Midsommar’? I guess he must’ve. Well, there you go. Later. ** Carsten, That does sound like a very good situation with Uncollected Press, yes. Sure, that seems like a good cover. Heck, it could’ve been in the post today. I know of UnCollected Press, sure, but I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book they published. I’ll have a look. Yes, the good Hof screening made it all worthwhile. The Q&A for that screening was really good, lots of audience question and warm words. Because no one over here in Europe knows what home haunts are, we inevitably get asked about them and what they are and why we’re interested in them a lot. ** Rene, Hi, Rene! I’m pretty good how about you? Thank you so, so much about our film! That’s so heartening. Thanks! I don’t know of Crippling Alcoholism, but I will go listen to their stuff. Sounds up my alley. Thank you for that tip too. What’s up with you? How’s Halloween treating you? ** Steeqhen, I just looked for haunted houses in Ireland, and I found three: The Nightmare Realm, Farmaphobia, and The Haunted Trail. So there are some tips if you want to venture into that realm. Yes, I think you’ll end up explaining many times about your costume’s origins, so maybe memorise a little speech. Like I always say, I don’t watch TV, so I have no idea. We’re searching for an opportunity to show RT in London, and I suspect we’ll find something, but not yet. It won’t be in early November though, that’s for sure. ** Steve, Mm … I think the only film we saw at Hof that we liked much at all was a documentary called ‘Ms. Wu’s Garden’. The rest were quite meh. Acid reflux is such a drag. When I got it in the early 80s, I had to change my diet pretty much permanently, but that plus Maalox and a med worked pretty well. Ugh, sorry. Well, I’m just basically obsessed with haunts, so … There are these sites that gather haunts either nationally or locally and spread the word about them to aficionados, so I mostly use them to find the prospects. ** julian, Crowded and not very scary is a pretty standard haunt problem. I like the not very scary part, but crowded sucks and contributes to the scare-free problem obviously. Your Camera/Edit project sounds pretty exciting. I’m imagining it and my mind is taking off. So in theory and via your description, it sounds worth building up your confidence about. Let me know how it’s going. Yeah, it sounds super promising to me. ** HaRpEr //, Yes, I saw that he died, and I did watch that documentary. It must’ve been pretty mindfucking to have been so objectified like that. But I remember seeing ‘DiV’ when it first came out and looking at him and feeling, Oh my God! You make me wish I remembered my dreams. I’ve had that happen after taking certain drugs, psychedelics and so on, and I guess try to maintain your belief in what it was teaching? Awful that your financial fate is in the hands of such miserable people, but hopefully not for long. ** DonW, Hi, Don. Oh, good. There are also people who dread the return of Halloween to my blog, but fuck ’em, you know, haha? Favorite Cycle book is hard to answer because I think of them as one work, but, generally, when people ask me that, I usually end up saying ‘Guide’. Why … I think that’s the novel where I made a big leap in my writing and my in my ability to write what I wanted in the way I wanted, I guess. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a fight where I threw a punch at anyone. I used to get beaten up after school by some bullies sometimes when I was in 6th grade, but I didn’t fight back. Since then, no, weirdly, I seem to have evaded fist fights. What about you? I’ve had guns pulled on me, but that’s a different experience. What’s this project you’re working on again? Thanks for wanting to know, pal. ** Uday, Remind me exactly where you are, and I can try to find a haunt in your vicinity. Weirdly, thinking back, I think my imagined romances were more powerful than the real ones. What a world. Boredom can be a great cure, absolutely. I have some Post-Its, but I’ll need to pull out a pair of scissors to make them visually appealing. Maybe I’ll do that. I wish you a day full of apple trees. ** Right. Today you’re being asked into look into, or, rather, to imagine looking into a bunch of holes. See you tomorrow.