Stuff(s)

Rachel Youdelman: A Précis

by Sir Clive Nicely, Royal Payne and New Vecks University of the Arts, Swinebirch, Diddlesex

Rachel Youdelman (°1951, Fresno, California, United States) makes conceptual artworks, photos, and media art. By investigating language on a meta-level, Youdelman seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama, to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in everyday life.

Her conceptual artworks sometimes radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. By putting the viewer on the wrong track, she focuses on the idea of ‘public space’ and more specifically on spaces where anyone can do anything at any given moment: the non-private space, the non-privately owned space, space that is economically uninteresting.

Her works are given improper functions: significations are inversed and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their original meaning, by which the system in which they normally function is exposed. Initially unambiguous meanings are shattered and disseminate endlessly. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

She creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. By referencing romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humour and symbolism, she creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was regarded as the pinnacle.

Youdelman’s works are often about contact with architecture and basic living elements. Energy (heat, light, water), space, and landscape are examined in less obvious ways and sometimes developed in absurd ways. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, she tries to create works in which the actual event still must take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.

Focusing on the inability of communication which is used to visualise reality, the attempt of dialogue, Youdelman’s oeuvre embodies the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in the work. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, she tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface.

Youdelman’s collected, altered and original works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By emphasising aesthetics, she absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.

Her works are often classified as part of the new romantic movement because of the desire for the local in the unfolding globalized world. However, this reference is not intentional, as this kind of art is part of the collective memory. In a search for new methods to ‘read the city’, she presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed.

Demonstrating how life extends beyond its own subjective limits, Youdelman often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century, challenging the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Rachel Youdelman currently lives and works in Chelsea, MA.

BEACON HILL POETRY TOUR

A Poem by Rachel Youdelman

9 Willow Street

Sylvia Plath &Ted Hughes lived on 6th floor in 1958. They paid $115/month

76 West Cedar

W.S. Merwin lived on top floor in 1956; he paid $75/month

63 West Cedar

L.E. Sissman & Anne Klauer lived here in 1958

24 Chestnut Street

Stephen & Agathe Fasset lived here. They made recordings of many Boston

poets. Agathe was a friend of Bela Bartok & wrote his biography.

18 Chestnut Street

Robert Lowell's grandfather's house

239 Marlborough Street

Robert Lowell & Elizabeth Hardwick bought this house in 1955

270 Marlborough Street

Robert Lowell grew up in this house

"Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words"--Goethe
 

POEM for today, July 3, 2018. Thank you, Sir Clive.

Let Ralph debate.

Leave Britney alone.

Mars needs women.

I love you, Moschino Barbie.

Let Ralph debate.

Minnewawa: A Précis

by Sir Clive Nicely, Royal Payne and New Vecks University of the Arts, Swinebirch, Diddlesex

Minnewawa (°2018, Clovis, United States) creates mixed media artworks, sculptures, performances and installations. With a conceptual approach, Minnewawa formalizes the coincidental and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes, which are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream worlds, are frequently revealed as assemblages.

His mixed-media artworks are given improper functions: significations are inversed and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their original meaning, by which the system in which they normally function is exposed. Initially unambiguous meanings are shattered and disseminate endlessly. Through a radically singular approach that is nevertheless inscribed in the contemporary debate, his works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

His works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. By putting the viewer on the wrong track, he often creates several practically identical works, upon which thoughts that have apparently just been developed are manifested: notes are made and then crossed out again, ‘mistakes’ are repeated.

Minnewawa never shows the complete structure, which results in the fact that the artist can easily imagine his own interpretation without being hindered by historical reality. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, he tries to focus on the activity of presenting. The character, shape or content of the presented artwork is secondary. The essential things are the momentary and the intention of presenting.

The works are on the one hand touchingly beautiful, on the other hand painfully attractive. Again and again, the artist leaves us orphaned with a mix of conflicting feelings and thoughts. By experimenting with aleatoric processes, he makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.

The Minnewawa oeuvre features coincidental, accidental and unexpected connections which make it possible to revise art history and, even better, to complement it. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies. By choosing mainly formal solutions, he creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art can be found. The work is aloof and systematic, and a cool and neutral imagery is used.

Based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein, multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, he uses references and ideas that are so integrated into the process of the composition of the work that they may escape those who do not take the time to explore how and why these images haunt you, like a good film, long after you’ve seen them.

Minnewawa installations are presented with the aim not to provide an idealistic view but to identify where light and the environment are important. The energy of a place and its emotional and spiritual vibrations are always important. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.

His works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he tries to create works in which the actual event still has to take place or just has ended: moments evocative of atmosphere and suspense that are not part of a narrative thread. The drama unfolds elsewhere while the build-up of tension is frozen to become the memory of an event that will never take place.

The artist urges us to renegotiate mixed media art as being part of a reactive or – at times – autistic medium, commenting on oppressing themes in our contemporary society. By replaying the work for each exhibition and pushing the evocative power of the work a little further, he tries to approach a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical and believes in the idea of function following form in a work.

Minnewawa’s works directly responds to the surrounding environment and uses everyday experiences from the artist as a starting point. Often these are framed instances that would go unnoticed in their original context. With a subtle minimalistic approach, he creates with daily, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is confronted with the conditioning of his own perception and has to reconsider his biased position.

His practice provides a useful set of allegorical tools for manoeuvring with a pseudo-minimalist approach in the world of mixed media art: these meticulously planned works resound and resonate with images culled from the fantastical realm of imagination. By examining the ambiguity and origination via retakes and variations, he tries to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.

A drawn reflection upon the art of mixed media art itself, Minnewawa creates objets and installations which are thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism – made present most palpably in the artist’s exploration of some of the most hallowed of modernist paradigms.