וגם לינק לקריאה מקוונת
Velvet Underground, Interview by Yonatan Amir
Originally
published in Timeout
Tel Aviv, 30.01.2014,
extended
version at
Erev
Rav: Art. Culture. Society
,
as
The
Visual as the Experience Monster
10.02.2014
Kitsch
and prostitutes, glam and porn- Aline Alagem tests the limits of the
image in a new solo show
The
painter Aline Alagem stands next to a large scale, hyper-realist
painting depicting fragmented
images form porn films.
The images are partly concealed by a pack of flamingo birds, through
which a woman’s eye is
showing.
In another painting appears a fountain, ornamented with galloping
horses' sculptures as a sort of a climax moment. Here
as well, one horse looks directly in the eyes of the spectator. “The
eye that watches you is the political moment”, says Alagem. “As a
painter I'm less cautious when I'm making eye contact. It's as if I
tell the spectator: stop, pay attention, ask a question”.
The
conversation with Alagem is
taking place prior
to
a
solo show that will open next week at Artstation Gallery in the Thana
compound in Tel Aviv. We meet at a studio in the Florentin
neigberhood to which the Alagem recently had moved after years of
working
in keriat Hamelacha (an
industrial area in the south of Tel-Aviv,
that
despite it being a primary location for art studios and small
industry- is known for prostitution, drag traffic and violent nature)
and after feeling she can no longer stay in a place lurking with
prostitution and drag traffic. “It became an impossible place
to work at, with
condoms lying
around
everywhere and the need to lock the studio from the inside in every
hour”, she tells
Timeout.
“I found myself trying to work at the studio meanwhile on the other
side of my door a pimp is getting his way with a
prostitute, and to top that I have to clean up
the leftovers. On the one hand- the city's
municipality sends
detection companys to
investigate whether
or not artists are teaching in their studio against
the city
law,
and on the other they ask the same artists to hang sings promoting
their “love at, make art” events. Of
all the things that are being looked away or made off the record in
this city,
they choose to witch hunt the ones that are in the margins
and are
unable
to make a living.”
Do
you feel that you're in the margins?
"If
I wasn't in the side-stream, the street lights by my studio would
probably have been fixed and the police would have bothered to come
when I call them”.
In
your past shows you kept it separated- art in itself and public
busyness in itself. On the surface, this time is no exception, and
still it seems that experiences from working in Kiryat Hamelacha had
penetrated the canvases.
"Days
will tell how things are interlacing one into the other, but they
clearly
have
an influence. It's
very unsexy to worry for the realistic living and to sweep away after
a
basic distress. There's a more alluring way to speak about the
paintings than to say that the whores in kiryat Hamelach had
influenced me to work with images from porn. But it did help me to
clarify the nature of the gap between the hermeticity of the
pornographic image and life itself. Maybe life itself, portraid in
asphalt, condoms and cum in Kiriat Hamelacha are not present, but the
moment where another smoothed, bleached, tempered pornographic image
appears in it, it is the abundance that creates the volume and the
impossibility of this.
Explain.
"when
you enter a porn site you get tags for everything: one black with one
Asian, with an aunt watching from the side and so on. There's a
specification of so many narratives characterized to the micro
details, and you can't help but feel that this is apocalypses.”
Because
it's so characterized?
"because
of the nature of
the
place that the need to characterize come from, when the visual aspect
has turned into a monster that becomes the experience itself. I don't
mind something specific turning on someone specific, however the
inflation is only at image level and not in credibility. Porn actors don't become better actors- everything stays
still,
while the images clone
themselves like cancer.”
Alagem
pulls out another painting, highly different, that's based on a
satellite picture of iceberg movement. “It's an image from a
perspective that I’ll never have”, she explains' “And since
eventually, in a very analogical manner, I have to decide how to
translate its stains,
it undermines a little this hyper-image in the other paintings. This
painting is like a lullaby, while the rest
of the paintings our a state of snorting-whether
cock or Ritalin.”
If
the kitsch, emptied image deters you so much, why choose to paint
horses galloping out of the word
Dior on
the background
of a
stormy
sky?
"This
is a romantic, childish image. The fact that it's an oil painting
makes it even more so, but to me it's also a bit of a voodoo act on
an image that existed in past time, when people meant it with no
irony.
Do
you want to go back there?
"I
understand that I'm
not free of it as I'd like to think. I too am looking for the flash
beneath the stretched skin. It's pathetic and desperate, sure, but
the only way to be in a place that creates a feeling, is to go deep
enough in order to find an image that touched you before you dulled
it. Unfortunately this means that your like regressing to being
pretty dumb. When I was 12 I painted horses and suddenly I go back to
them.
When
looking at the whole of the paintings we understand that this isn't
at all a show about porn, it's about the meaning of an image.
"porn
is everything: It's
your profile pic, it's
the food photographs on instagram, it's the fact that everybody knows
where you are, what you ate and how you arranged your schnitzel and
how everybody “likes” it though
no one cares. Earlier I herd a noise from the window and when I
approached I saw a group of parakeets
siting outside chattering.
It was an amazing sight
to
look at, but instead of experiencing the moment It immediately came
to my mind to take a picture of it”.
Your
basic thrill from screaming parrots is also an environmental
product.
"I
don't think that we must
get excited from/in the moment, rather than
we're chained to the anti-moment. The
branding is the moment, not the thing itself. If there's
no title to the experience- it is not happening, and through porn I
can talk about
that. When you eat, you don't need to look at “sexier” food in
order to eat. In eating as well as in sex, all the senses are active.
But porn- despite being totally flat, and thanks to its visual
availability- has become a leader and a
formulator of a script that's one sense based: uber sense. And now
this script is enslaving us, people try to act like the porn stars
they saw in sub-genres,
like the step grandma with
the Asian
girl and the pool guy. But, the in scripted orgasm is banal at best,
so in the end of the day when a man cums like a porn star, it doesn't really excite him, on the contrary- it intensifies the emptiness that follows.
This is an emptiness that grows bigger and bigger
turning into violent energy that looks for other drastic scripts to
manifest through,
and so the loop goes
on”.
And
still, knowing your passion for glam from past works, I can't help
but feel that there's also a yearning and love to the glittery, fake,
exaggerated world, to its mega production and its spectacle.
"When
I was 14 I was a punk. Punk wants to undercut the granted, the
consensus and the structured.
So you walk around in your Mohawk
hairdo and you put on the studs and the patches, then the question
can be asked- if it's all done in order to despise
something, why make it such a big, colorful deal? But this is an idea
of volume- you turn it on and by that you create a dissonance. It's
the same
in my art, I turn on the images, the pinks, the kitsch and the sex.
You could say that if my work
responds
to asphalt it necessarily means I accept
it's authority- the one of gray and sewage. But I guess it isn't like that, cause hey, punk manages to remain
alternative
with the purple Mohawk
and all the power that comes with it.
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