Francis Alÿs - Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing)

Francis Alÿs Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing) 
1997

In 1997 Francis Alÿs pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it had melted to nothing, nine hours later. The act is at once absurd and poetic. This strenuous and also fruitless act of self-enforced labour has no output as such - the work is entirely ephemeral, all that remains is this 5 minute video.

The work is intended as a meditation on the life and economic situation of the people of South America; a parody of the massive disproportion between effort put in and outcome achieved. The ice block itself acts as both a reference to the hyper-materialist practices of modernist and minimalist sculpture (and their disapearance in post-conceptual contemporary art) and a mundane day-to-day object plucked from the environment the artist works in.

Alÿs has yet to make Parodox of Praxis 2 (Sometimes Doing Nothing Leads To Something) though he intends to when he finds an action that demonstrates point suitably succinctly.

Santiago Sierra - 3 Cubes of 100 cm On Each Side Moved 700 cm

Santiago Sierra - 3 Cubes of 100cm on each side moved 700cm

Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 2002

Santiago Sierra's '3 Cubes of 100cm on each side moved 700cm' was performed in a public art institution in Switzerland in 2002. Employing six illegal Albanian refugees with out work permits to move by hand three large cement cubes from one wall of the gallery to the opposing one.

Although using clear references to Minimalist sculpture Sierra's work is more-over an exploration of arts relationship to labour and politics. Understanding people as he would any other material, "Persons are objects of the State and of Capital and are employed as such". Paying a tiny wage to the six Albanians for their exhausing work '3 Cubes of 100cm on each side moved 700cm' illustrated how easily the human body can be exploited for labour.

There is a good article written about Sierras work and the surrounding notions of labour by Heidi Kellett which can be found here. 

Tina O'Connell - Cube Descending A Staircase

Tina O'Connell Cube Descending A Staircase

Bitumin 2006

(Day 1)

(Day 2)

(Day 3)

Tina O'Connell's works in Bitumin at first seem as static and solid as the minimalist forms they reference. In fact they are transient and never fixed, moving just outside the visual register and transforming both the object and the space in which they move. 

O'Connell draws a parrellel between this non-fixity of form and the non-fixity of interpretation,"Sculpture no longer operates on a formal or figurative level," she says, "liberalist attitudes have rendered purely aesthetic readings of a work difficult, and the complex structures of a relational era of making and viewing, in which both positions are collapsed, mean the object is in a constant state of transition... It is my intention through this and other research to reveal this relational context in a world that is still materially evident. This is the phenomenology of perception through familiarity, expectation, time and material, perhaps."

Kitty Kraus - Untitled

Kitty Kraus - Untitled, 2009-10

Ice, ink, lightbulb, light fixture.

Untitled by Kitty Kraus begins as a large block of ice with a lightbulb and black ink trapped inside. As the light is turned on the large block gradually starts to melt and a puddle of ink begins to make its way across the gallery floor.

With close associations to Minimalism, what starts of as an ominous frozen black cube transforms into a delicate abstract floor drawing. Its impossible to describe the work as either a cube of ice or an ink stained floor, it is moreover an impermanent process akin to the effects of glaciers in the real world.

The Below video was taken at Cornerhouse gallery in Manchester as part of Constellations June 2011.

Katie Paterson - Vatnajökull (the sound of)

Katie Paterson Vatnajökull (the sound of)

Live phone–line to Vatnajökull glacier

2007

In June 2007 an underwater microphone was placed into Jökulsárlón lagoon, an outlet of the glacier Vatnajökull in Iceland, by artist Katie Paterson. Connected to an amplifier and a mobile phone, for the duration of the week-long show the sounds of the glacier's movement - the melting and cracking of the icebergs - could be heard by anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to a telephone. A neon sign with the phone number was displayed in the gallery space.

An recording can be heard here.

Ian Giles - Listen Harder

Ian Giles - Listen Harder, 2012

44,000 sound clips of Acoustic Emissions on endless loop, glacial rocks, MDF

Listen Harder by Ian Giles are a series of found glacial rocks connected to a pair of headphones. The rocks sit static on plinths emitting the sound of 44,000 pre-recorded clips of Acoustic Emissions from glacial sites on headphones. 

The sound was collected by the 'Rock and Ice Physics Laboratory' at University College London, naturally occurring emissions formed by events such as earthquakes and small movements within the rocks identifies notions of precarity on both the micro and macro scale.  

Giles is currently graduating from the MFA Slade School of Art, London, where Listen Harder is currently being exhibited. 

Mark Leckey - BigBoxStatueAction

Mark Leckey BigBoxStatueAction

2003 - 11

In BigBoxStatueAction, Mark Leckey places a high-modernist sculpture 'in conversation' with a purpose-built sound-system.

Strapped together and reaching the same proportions as its sculptural counter-part (Henry Moore, above at the Serpentine Gallery, Epstein, left at Tate Britain), Leckey's speaker stack explores the space in sonic equivalence to the solidity of the form in front of of it. Occasional emissions of largely appropriated sounds address the mass as if to probe and interrogate it in a manner that suggests it is trying to understand it, testing it out. When utilised for performance the sounds hit rib-rumbling low ends at ear-ringing volume.

Lecky is an artist who has talked about his pratice being a response to whatever cultural ephemera he finds around him. He is an artist whose work animates the inanimate, be it objects, products, spaces or other artworks.