Ian Whittlesea

Ian Whittlesea is holding our wednesday visiting lecture and I have been looking him up in advance. I have been looking at various works of his and finding him quite interesting, though I feel the same as with Adam Chodzko that I can't really get a grip around Whittlesea's work.

Whittlesea's Judo project is interesting he has translated the book 'Le fonduments du Judo' by french artist Yves Klien. No one has ever translated this book into English before, also while doing this Whittlesea worked to get a black belt in Judo as well, this took him 5 years to do. Whittlesea is a member of Europe's oldest Judo club the budokwai in London.

Whittlesea is working alot with typography in different kind of ways, as I have seen from one of his exhibitions that leaflets with a text taken of of it's original context forms a relation on it's own. These sentences are from text's other artists has written.

here

Hello

Hi, At the moment I'm trying to research Steven Connor, last weeks wednesday lecture which I couldn't attend. I'm waiting to borrow my friends dictaphone to listen to the lecture so hang on tight, soon I can properly write about Steven Connor. What I have heard about the lecture was that he is a very funny character.

I am also writing my Bluecoat gallery proposal (one person or a group of people in fine art lvl2 will be picked to have an exhibition at the bluecoat in may), I finding it quite hard to get started. I feel that my current project might not be as relevant to the theme of the exhibition wich should be reflecting the changing nature of artists studios and practices. I will do my best. I'm also planning to apply for volunteer work at the bluecoat when my work isn't stressing me out so much. everything is piling up as we get closer to the assesments. (I am once agian angry at myself and my relaxed view of what needs to be done and my time optimism)

Have a wonderful day.

Adam Chodzko

Before the lecure I researched Chodzko, I found that I couldn't grasp really what his art was about from the still pictures from his video art and was intrigued by the lecture where I hoped we would going to see some of his videos.

I read about Chodzko's video work "Hole" which I found very interesting, the way the artist is creating an imagined future in which an museum mount a LED sign outside an art museum to connect with a women that transmit it's thoughts on this sign. The reason that the sign is put up is that the art museum felt it being obsessed with the crowd and then wanted a relation with an individual, an outsider.

However potentially an unexpected situation occurred by the influence the relation put on the individual involved and the women terminates the relationship. What's left is then these holes in the wall of the museum where the LED sign was mounted, a kind of ruin.

"The holes exist in the present as a trace of something that is imagined to occur in the future."

a futuristic love story. I love the was Chodzko investigates interactions of human behaviour and the way he creates feelings in his video art, mostly it was an uncomfortable feeling of something i couldn't put my finger on. This is also quite weird as I would describe his way of filming style as documentary. In the video piece "yet" I noticed the way he used language in his video art was very interesting and gave almost a surreal tone to the works, as in one of his videos I believed it was Finnish, Chinese (actually it was Cantonese) and English. I'm going to quote the description of this work, I really like this text.

“ It was only early summer… but all the plants were already dying,…

Time had accelerated again.
A small group of IKEA employees go to the local landfill site to try and retrieve some data they had accidentally thrown away.
Instead they found some bags of documents which recorded the history of a place where people met and showed things to each other…Distracted from their original search they took the archive to the editing station in order to look for its questions. But…something bad happened…a disagreement …well, anyway… they fell out…They split up the information in various, but particular ways, each to take it to a separate place for safe-keeping, agreeing to reunite its parts only when they themselves had resolved their differences.
One took it to the ark where everything precious had been stored…
Another chose to entrust it to strangers, offering it to the chalkpit people… And the other took it to the comparison house….And so because of ‘and yet despite all this’ the plants slowly began to recover …..and time….. stood …..still.”

I could go on and on about Adam Chodzko's work but I'm not, I have heard that pictures says more than a thousand words so I'm posting a couple of pictures of his works.

Here