Pyros

_______________
Julius von Bismarck Fire with Fire, 2018 – 2021
‘The body of work Fire with Fire stems from Julius von Bismarck’s continuous quest to explore the aesthetics of nature’s calamitous force. Fire with Fire exposes unseen images of fire, which von Bismarck captured during various expeditions to forest fire sites in Germany, the Arctic Circle in Sweden, and across California. The year 2018 being determined by the most destructive wildfires since the beginning of records, a typical aesthetic of calamity became ubiquitous in the media. This led Julius von Bismarck to question how to see beyond this simplified, politicised perspective on wildfires and natural catastrophes in general. For his work Fire with Fire von Bismarck collaborated with various fire fighting forces, to be allowed admittance to the restricted areas, and seizure the aesthetic apocalypse of blustering flames. Using image mirroring as a technique to enhance the hypnotic effect of fire, von Bismarck’s Fire with Fire images differ greatly from the brutal reality depicted.’

 

_______________
Harun Farocki Inextinguishable Fire, 1969
‘One of Farocki’s first films, Inextinguishable Fire, from 1969, is a grainy cinematic essay that reflected on the then-still-unfolding catastrophe of the Vietnam War. The oft-cited opening sequence of this early work is vivid and complex in a way that few works of video art achieve. A young Farocki is pictured, sitting at a desk. He reads, in a steady voice, from testimony from a Vietnamese boy who was disfigured by a US napalm attack. And then Farocki takes a lit cigarette and snuffs it out on his own arm. “A cigarette burns at 400 degrees,” a narrator says. “Napalm burns at 3,000 degrees.”’

 

_______________
Jan Dibbets TV as Fireplace, 1969
‘Between December 25 and 31, 1969, public television station WDR III in Cologne rebroadcast Dibbets’s video of a burning fire every night for three minutes. The logs were lit on the first night, and the fire grew in intensity before slowly dying on the last one. Perfectly site specific, Dibbets’s piece turned the home’s cathode-ray tube into a flickering fire for just a few moments at a historical moment when the TV set had gone a long way toward replacing the hearth as the focal point of domestic space. Watching TV as Fireplace on YouTube would of course be completely different. Online video shatters the direct link that Dibbets made between physical viewing environment and moving image. Given that audiences may now watch videos on an iPhone at the beach or a computer at the office, is it still possible for artists to create this kind of dialogue between the physical space of viewing and the space on-screen?’

 

_______________
Mat Collishaw Burning Flowers, 2014
‘I like this because it is irregular. The object that usually destroys things like flowers is actually creating the flowers.’

 

________________
Martin Honert Feuer/Fire, 1992
‘In Honert’s polyester-and-resin sculpture Feuer [Fire] (1992), the artist was inspired by a dictionary illustration that, as a child, became the very definition of fire in his mind. Honert then translated this symbol into plaster, with a later work evolving into a three-dimensional floor sculpture of painted and illuminated resin.’

 

_____________
Bernard Aubertin Tableau feu, 1961
‘Following a visit to the Paris studio of Yves Klein in 1957, Bernard Aubertin was inspired to follow in Klein’s footsteps and passionately work within the field of monochromy, a style that he adamantly adhered to throughout his career. By the 1960’s, Aubertin had introduced fire into his repertoire, a medium that effectively becomes the physical manifestation of his chosen color. Many of the works consist of abstract compositions using matches that were later burned, creating variations caused by the spontaneous nature of flame. The process by which the works are created is inherent in the final product and the viewer can clearly see the charred transformation that took place.’

 

_____________
Adela Goldbard A World of Laughter, A world of Fears, 2017
‘A World of Laughter, A World of Fears was a theatrical spectacle combining fireworks, sound, and lighting effects. It unfolded with the Microbus serving as the main element of the reenacted/fictionalized event. The event’s narrative is based on a conflict in the community of Asuncion Nochixtlan in Oaxaca, Mexico. On June 19, 2016, federal policemen tried to remove professors and parents blockading highways to protest education reforms. The protesters defended themselves with stones and DIY bazookas as they blocked the roadway with burning buses. The police responded with tear gas cans, rubber bullets, and automatic rifle fire, which the authorities denied.’

 

_____________
Gal Weinstein Fire Tire, 2010
‘for his installation ‘fire tire’ israeli artist gal weinstein used wax, wool, polyester wool, styrofoam and graphite to replicate burning tires emitting smoke.’

 

_____________
Bill Viola Fire Woman, 2005
‘”Fire Woman is an image that appears in the inner eye of a dying man,” said Bill Viola, author of the video. A vision of a female figure whose dark figure stands in front of a wall of flames unfolds on a large vertical screen. In a very slow progression, the character advances by spreading his arms to finally sink into a pattern of glowing waves.’

 

_____________
Claudio Parmiggiani Untitled, 2008
‘The process the artist uses is “delocazione”, he sets objects on fire and removes them leaving behind smokey silhouettes.’

____________
Goran Bertok The Visitors, 2004 – 2015
‘The series Visitors depicts the gradual decomposition of the human body, testifying to the ending of the life cycle. Eschewing all sentimentality and moralising, Bertok obsessively documents and displays the mortality of the body, turned by physical death into a mere lump of insentient flesh doomed to decay. The motifs of burning corpses in an abstract non-space are a testament, naturalistic if aestheticised to the extreme, to the now ubiquitous process of cremation of the human body, hidden from the public gaze.’

 

____________
Louise Despont According to the Universe, 2015

 

________________
Lois Dodd Burning Houses, 2007
‘Each painting depicts the image of a rural house set fully ablaze. Bright orange, red and yellow flames with billowing smoke engulf a burning house that will soon be decimated. In two of the works a stream of water or a lone fireman seem ineffectual in reversing the devastation of the fire. Dodd’s unsentimental, no-nonsense directness grounded in observation is given an added poignancy with the subject of these paintings.’

 

________________
Bastiaan Maris Fire Organ, 2015
‘Bastiaan Maris’s “Fire Organ” major installation attraction at DarkMOFO Winter Festival, Hobart, Tasmania June 2015. The Fire Organ has been placed over the site of the former Hobart Locomotive Roundhouse turntable (1915-1984), in the old Hobart Railyards site.’

 

________________
Liza Lou Fire, 2002
‘Liza Lou is an artist who self-consciously examines and employs notions of seduction to examine American history, daily life, and the hidden values and terrors lurking beneath the glittering surfaces of the products we consume. Using glass beads, Swarovski crystal, and papier mâché forms, Lou probes the varied ways that our culture literally conceals its dullness as well as its dangers with ingenious packaging. Her surfaces dazzle the eye and tease us with familiar brand names and images. During the past 12 years, she has created free-standing sculptures and major installations, including the boldly colorful Kitchen (1991–95) and Back Yard (1995–97). In contrast, the series “Presidents” and the installation Testimony (1999–2002) employ a monochromatic palette. Testimony, exhibited at Deitch Projects in New York in fall 2002, is a narrative with 17 works, including a “falling” Man, a menacing Dog, a blazing fire, a wood grain-patterned Map of the United States, a hunter’s Trailer, and a Relief of a drowned blonde child in her communion dress.’

 

_______________
Tim Parchikov Burning News, 2012
‘As significant social, political and cultural changes are occurring daily around the world photographer Tim Parchikov has portrayed this concept literally in the series Burning News which has recently exhibited at The Hayward Gallery. Burning News depicts ‘hot news’ which develops and changes day to day highlighting the problem of how the human brain reacts to this flow of constant information and updates.’

 

_____________
Katarina Kudelova Sincères régulations, 2020
‘Katarina Kudelova sews, glues, braids, if necessary with barbed wire, draws, disguises herself, prepares to set off firecrackers, including on herself, on her companions or on her doubles: rabbit, bear , ermine, dog, saurian, sheep, cat and chicks. Never safe, never really settled into quiet introspection. Always on the alert for a territory on borrowed time.’

 

_____________
Dennis Oppenheim Digestion, 1989
‘Dennis Oppenheim, who died unexpectedly in January, began his walkabout as an artist in the early 1960s, hanging out on the West Coast exploring the surf life before he arrived in New York City with his Stanford art degree and a vision of wildness in his heart. In a fifty year art career that survived decades in an art world obsessed with the gamesmanship of shifting styles, fixations and flavors of the moment, Oppenheim managed to pursue his own interests, refusing to be pinned like a butterfly into a signature style or affect. The net result is a sprawling, protean oeuvre that occupies museums, collections and public spaces across the globe, from Zurich to Los Angeles to Beijing.’

 

______________
Christian Houge Residence of Impermanence, 2020
‘A Norwegian artist and nature lover sets old trophy animals on fire and gives them a last breath of life before they are set free.’

 

______________
Alberto Burri Morra, The Combustion (4), 1977
‘The plastic combustion pieces are suggestive of skin that has been cut or peeled back. These abstractions turn the body inside out, as if probing beneath the skin and into the tissues and membranes. When overlaid with clear plastic, they look as if they are excreting mucus. Burri not only was trained as a doctor, but also had an operation on his intestines just before he made these pictures.’

 

______________
Antony Gormley Waste Man, 2006
‘WASTE MAN was made over a six-week period at the end of summer 2006 out of about 30 tonnes of waste materials that had been gathered by the Thanet waste disposal services and by local people, and deposited in Dreamland, the area of Margate next to the sea and close to the station that had traditionally been the site of a vast funfair. Some works are made in wax to be cast in bronze; this was made in domestic waste to be cast in fire. The piece burnt in 32 minutes, sending showers of sparks over the crowd of spectators.’

 

________________
Peter Sutherland Kingsford Bench, 2016
‘Mr. Sutherland’s benches smolder with flames, fireworks, and sunsets (or are they sunrises?) as subjects. The colors are fiery reds and oranges, presented through screens that give them the optical quality of road signs. The town they reference in California is known primarily as the setting for the 1987 movie “The Lost Boys,” about a beach town beset by violence and vampires.’

 

_______________
Maurizio Cattelan Last Act, 2011

 

_______________
Forensic Architecture seek footage for Grenfell Tower fire investigation, 2018
‘Over the last few months, the team at Forensic Architecture, housed at London’s Goldsmiths University in Lewisham, has been working to piece together data and footage from the Grenfell Tower fire using a mixture of video and imagery from Youtube, Periscope and other forms of social media, as well as footage from Sky News, which is a partner on the project.

‘Stitching all the information together, and mapping it onto a model of the building, it is at the beginning of a process of building a navigable 12-hour video of what took place at Grenfell. “We have prototyped and are in the process of developing our own tool for visualising the projected videos,” Masterton says. Its working title is the Grenfell Media Archive – but it is currently only being used by the team internally. The long-term hope – in the wake of the call for footage – is to have a database substantial enough to begin sharing it externally as an interactive archive.’

 

_______________
Carolee Schneemann Flange 6 rpm, 2013
‘Carolee Schneemann’s Flange 6 rpm consists of seven motorized steel fixtures protruding from perpendicular walls. Atop each fixture, three cast-aluminum arms wave and rotate. (One fixture has only two.) Cast using a lost-wax process and left unpolished, these arms look like seaweed or badly burnt flippers. They suck at the air like whirlpools and waver like flames made solid. They throw shadows onto the walls, interrupting an otherwise floor-to-ceiling, slightly pixelated orange projection of actual flames shot in the foundry where the arms were cast. All of this makes for a weird kind of transparency, a revelation of process so total that the revelation itself comes to seem like the goal. But then, what is it revealing?’

 

_______________
Cai Guo-Qiang Mystery Circle, 2012
‘Art Type: Explosion Event. Medium: Gunpowder fuse, 40,000 mini rockets, 100 girandolas, 62 Tourbillon Mines. Duration: Approximately 2 minutes.’

 

________________
Anthony McCall Landscape for Fire, 1972
‘For Landscape for Fire, Anthony McCall and members of the British artist collaborative Exit followed McCall’s pre-determined score to torch containers of flammable material across a field. McCall describes it: “Over a three-year period, I did a number of these sculptural performances in landscape. Fire was the medium. The performances were based on a square grid defined by 36 small fires (6 x 6). The pieces, which usually took place at dusk, had a systematic, slowly changing structure.” The work brought the grid — a conceptual focus for many artists in the 1970s and after — into a natural landscape, merging it with the vagaries of outdoor space and fire.’

 

_______________
Claire Fontaine America (Burnt/Unburnt), 2013
‘I arrived just as the first matches were being lit. There was a hose ready in the gallery and fire extinguishers around in case things got out of control– I remember feeling relieved to see that. Everyone had their iPhones and camcorders out to document the slow burn of the piece. At first, when the map was lit on fire (intentionally), it burnt slowly and was rather gorgeous.

‘However, within about 15 seconds of burning, something went wrong and the flame began to surge out of control. We were not sure if it was part of the art piece… however, soon the smoke was billowing over the entire crowd and the sulphur was so hot and thick that it hurt the lungs.

‘Someone yelled “EVERYONE OUT!!!” and the small crowd stumbled out the front door on Mission Street. The smoke was so thick and yellow that one couldn’t see.’

 

________________
Ian Strange Suburban, 2013
‘In Suburban, the Australian-born artist Ian Strange teams up with a film crew (and presumably several local fire departments) to subvert and in some cases burn the common image of the American suburb. The project involves eight site-specific constructions in Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, New Jersey, New York, and New Hampshire.’

 

_______________
Hongtao Zhou Burniture (2010)
‘Burniture from Hongtao Zhou are a pair of wax chairs from the melting-obsessed designer. These two chairs are made out of 15 pounds of wax and are designed to be burnt to the ground.’

 

________________
Jeppe Hein Water Flame, 2006
‘Water Flame is an installation that combines two opposing elements in a spectacular yet minimalist design: a small vertical jet of water with a flame burning from the highest point.’

 

______________
Nathan Coley Tate Modern on Fire (2017)
‘We were in Paris, and had just finished lunch when my brother messaged me to ask if I had heard the news, about the fire. I got back to him saying that wasn’t something to joke about. He sent me a link to it on BBC news, and the terrible images were in my hand. I sat in shock, with tears in my eyes, at the sight of the flames ripping through the roof, and thick black smoke engulfing that so familiar building. How could this be happening? We couldn’t stop looking. It was irresistible, compulsive. Perhaps the most shocking thing about the image was its inevitability —unbearable and unbelievable but also as if foretold.’

 

 

_______________
Michelangelo Pistoletto Venus of the Rags, 2023
‘An outdoor installation of the “Venus of the Rags” artwork by Italian contemporary artist Michelangelo Pistoletto has been destroyed in a suspected arson attack in the center of Naples, authorities said Wednesday. A police investigation is underway to ascertain the cause of the fire, which broke out at dawn, the local government said in a press release. Once the flames were tamed by firefighters, the area was cordoned off.’

 

_______________
Dalibor Martinis Eternal Flame of Rage, 2013
‘The project generates procedures of those acts of rebellion that take place irregularly but frequently at the periphery of big cities, and as a rule, are embodied by a burning car. It seems that this fragmented, pre-political, and unconnected expression of rage needs a burning car as a common sign. By performing the “artistic” action of burning a car, we intend to appropriate all such acts of dissatisfaction, rebellion, and rage that have already happened or will happen in different circumstances and different places. By placing this action in the context of art, we will maybe understand all the future car-burnings as parts of some more clearly structured conceptual framework. At the same time, we return back to the public space and social memory all those burning cars which burned, or will burn in Paris, Kairo, Baghdad, Berlin or Rio de Janeiro.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thanks. ‘Là-Bas’ is worth you time, as you undoubtedly already know. ** ollie🐋🐋🎂, And as it is morning here as well, I wish you a good morning that you can use now or save until your next morning. I go to bed at 10:15 pm whenever I have the chance, which is mostly. So I feel you. Everybody loves Berlin. I’m a rare person who’s sort of only okay with it. It does seem like it would be a good place to live. Everyone I know who’s lived there sings its relative praises. It’s true LA gets hot, and I suppose it’ll only get hotter as time goes on. Oh, sure, I went to the Vrolick. I lived in Amsterdam for 2 1/2 years, and there’s not that much to do there, truth be told, so I saw everything there, I think. I remember it was cool, yes. A baby bird music box obviously sounds like a dream situation. How was your weekend? ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m overly busy, but good. I wish Rob Zombie hadn’t tried to go Hollywood/ semi-mainstream. I really like his first two movies. High five on cheese fries. Me, I’ve just been film film film. Making one, not seeing any. What’s new since you last graced here? ** Nick., Ephemeral works around here, so no problem. Oh, I’m just working on the film. That’s literally all that’s up and will be until this weekend at least. I swear I’ll try to be interesting (again?) ASAP. Do fill me in. ** Mark, Thanks! Thanks for giving Gregg the zine. I haven’t seen him in ages. I haven’t seen Cat Power live since the days when she had nervous breakdowns onstage because she was so shy. Fun show, I’m sure? You going to se the John Waters retrospective? I’m hoping to get to LA in time. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, Ben. Oh, man, I hope you’re feeling stronger by now. Maybe the DVD helped? ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Yes, we finished the sound work yesterday. Now we have to finish the color correction by Thursday. I actually really enjoyed the sound work. It’s great watching the film become what’s meant to be. There’s one scene in our new film that makes me cry a little, even after having watched it, like, a hundred times. You in the office again today? ** Steve Erickson, Mm, I’m pretty easy when it comes to haunted house docs, but, honestly, none I’ve seen are remarkable or do what I think they should do. As I was saying to George, we finished the sound work, and now it’s color correction work until our deadline on Thursday. We have to ‘turn the film in’ on Friday. You have to like that sort of relentless repetitive thing, but the work is enjoyable for all of its urgency. Thanks, Steve. ** John Newton, I’m well, and I hope you are as well. Two uses of ‘well’ in one sentence, not bad. I like the books too, and I think I was dragged to church two times as a kid, and that was the entirety of my religious upbringing. A lot of the experimental or independent fiction I like and read has pretty good goodreads score, but I don’t think that’s enough for the bosses. I did not know most of my books are on archive.org. Huh. Interesting. Thank you for the tip. I did know James Robert Baker, yes. If he read at Beyond Baroque, it would have been long after my tenure there. He was a complicated fella. I do, of course, accept guest blog posts happily. They would probably need to be more than just an article, or an enhanced article or something. Something blog-like. Sure, you can email it to me. Thanks. NYC hustler bars: My favorite was The Ninth Circle. My friends I hung out there all the time. Otherwise, The Phoenix, Rounds sometimes (good for spotting famous hustler buyers — Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Ray Bolger, and on and on), a few in Times Square whose names are escaping me. Haymarket might have been one of them. I wasn’t a big gay bar goer otherwise, just to meet up with friends. Cliquey? Mm, I don’t remember that seeming like an issue? But, like I said, I just popped in and out. Never was a big alcohol drinker. I guess I did hang out a fair amount at this East Village bar called Boy Bar. It was where my friends were. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’ll try to figure out who or what Donyale Luna is. ** Sypha, My pleasure, James. It’s a great-y. Congrats on your uncledom! Start getting ready to corrupt her. ** Corey Heiferman, Hey. Wow, I think I can honestly say I’ve never contemplated sex with celestial beings. I guess I think of them as non-corporeal. The sound editing is finished (for now). It went very well. Now color correction editing. I’ll see how that’s going today. I’ve heavily contemplated going to Temenos. It’s just that going south in the summer is not something I find appealing in theory, being a heat hater, But yes, I would like to, for sure. What’s new with you? ** Okay. Fires galore for you today. See you tomorrow.