Eugenio Dittborn - To Return (RTM) Airmail Painting

Eugenio Dittborn, To Return (RTM) Airmail Painting No. 103, 1993


Born in Chile in 1943, Dittborn based much of his work on the critical examination of the marginal position of his home country in relation to wider international developments.

He adopted photography as a means to document his surroundings and combined this with excerpts found in books and newspapers. The paintings are made using traditional craft based skills such as stitching and screen printing onto thin folded sections of cheap non-woven fabric. Since their production in the early 80's, the Airmail Paintings have constantly been on the move;  the large panels are neatly folded into cardboard envelopes and are sent by post to the gallery they will be shown in. 

"These itinerant artworks collect meanings like souvenirs, as they journey from place to place, across borders, over time. Made, in part, in response to Santiago's place at the periphery of the international art scene and partly to circumvent the oppressive and regimented structures of Chile's military government, (as well as to reflect previous periods of colonization and repression) these mobile visual messages are free to go anywhere and initiate an evolving dialogue with their global audience." 



"The Airmail Paintings were conceived for at least two specific sites; that of the sender and that of the receiver, as well as for breaking/producing the distance between the two." Eugenio Dittborn.




Eugenio Dittborn, To Travel (RTM) Airmail Painting No. 76, 1990

Janek Schaefer - Recorded Delivery

Janek Schaefer Recorded Delivery 
1995

In 1995 Janek Schaefer packaged up a voice activated Dictaphone and posted it to the venue of  the group show 'Self Storage', organised by Art Angel, curated by Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson. The resulting work is a recording of loudest (or 'most sonically interesting') 72 minutes of the parcel's 15 hour journey to Acorn Self-Storage in Wembley. Predominantly comprised of the incidental clatters, rustles and bangs of a parcel passing through the postal system, the piece is interspersed with snippets of music and conversation, plus some bawdy back-room banter from some postal workers. The work is a succinct  self-contained document of its own creation; a composition set into motion by the artist's act of defining its parameters.

Walead Beshty - Fedex Sculptures

Walead Beshty - Fedex Sculptures

2005 - present

Beshty's 'Fedex Sculptures' are a series of cubes made from shatterproof glass to fit the exact interior dimensions of a standard Fedex box. Each occasion the work is exhibited it is posted to the gallery using the international postal service instead of professional art couriers. As the work gets moved from Beshty's studio to the gallery and back it enevitably gets damaged en route by its handeling.

The Fedex box's precise dimensions are patented and have been described as 'a corporately owned unit of space'. As these specified unit's travel through the 'non-places' and voids of international airspace they accumulate cracks and scratches which act as a trace of the objects transit. A critical glance at the customary systems of art production and distribution, the works not only act as material representations of the processes involved in their transportation, but the number of impacts and cracks on the sculptures  add their creation as much as their destruction. 

Gustav Metzger - Auto-destructive Art

Documentary portrait of Gustav Metzger at Regent Street Polytechnic, 1965
Directed by H. Liversidge

Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.

Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.

Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological techniques.

The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception.

The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.

Self-destructive art can be machine produced and factory assembled.

Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a life time varying from a few moments to twenty years. When the disintegrative process is complete the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped. 

Gustav Metzger Auto-Destructive Art (1959)

Gustav Metzger painting with hydrochloric 
acid on nylon. South Bank, London, 1961/1966.

In 1959 Gustav Metzger began spraying hydrochloric acid onto sheets of nylon as an 'auto-destructive' artistic act. These 'paintings' often lasted only a few seconds, creating rapidly-changing holes in the material which disintegrated under the effects of the acid, before totally disintegrating. After the works were completed the supports and remnants were scrapped.


The term Auto-Destructive Art was coined by him around this time and cemented in an article of 1962 entitled Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art, in the art journal Ark. Initially conceived as act of protest against nuclear weapons, the artistic direction proved highly productive for him and led to him produced numerous works in this fashion as well as well as later works that were simultaneously Auto-Destructive and Auto-Creative, an example being his Liquid Crystal Light Projections that create a new form through the destruction of a previous one.

Liquid Crystal Light Environment 1998 - 1999

Max Ruf - Boomerang (1-3)

Max Ruf - Boomerang '2'

Acetone, bleach, floor stripper on archival print, aluminium frame, 2012

Born in Germany 1982, Ruf's work explores ambiguous manifestations of narrative and recent histories via an images' relationship to its materialistic entropy. 

Boomerang is a series of 'paintings' made from photographs of arial landscapes taken by his father whilst pursuing his hobby of balloon riding. Utilised as a readymade, Ruf investigates the materiality of his fathers photographs by painting over the images with a series of toxic substances such as Acetone, bleach and 'floor stripper'. Ruf's act of 'painting' dissolves the pigments of the prints, erasing the photographic resolution to a wash of abstract marks and consequently the objects connection to its past.

The re-surfacing effect of the toxic substances on the surface of the photographs creates images of a different sort of topology; Perhaps one that is further removed, alien and ambiguous: There is a suggestion of strain on the faculties of memory and history as the abstract forms become reminiscent of systems found in macrocosmic images. Encased back into their original frames the Boomerang paintings further propose the reliance on display and presentation that both images and concepts such as narrative have. 

Ruf's work is currently on show at Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Cooperas Hill Building, Liverpool until 25th November 2012. and ICA London,  27th November - 14th January 2013