Jumping jerking flesh

Jumping jerking flesh (JJF) (2010) is based on moments to myself in a 2003 studio residency at Bundanon in NSW. The work involves a DVD recording in which I employ key moments of catching light and shadow. These recorded sequences are based on chance events and spontaneous movements and reflect upon my memories that surfaced of initial visual encounters with avant-garde art practices of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the work reflects on Bruce Nauman's early video work in his studio from 1968.

The performances of catching light and shadows reference time (sun hour) in the illusion created through the reflected window onto the studio floor space. This video work is presented in New New as a wall projection in large format to recreate the illusion of the performance. Additionally, the rhythmic swinging pendulums suspended from the ceiling encase five speakers that emit a looping sound composition. The sound includes the last song of Franz Schubert's Winterreise, (Winter Journey) titled Der Leiermann (The Hurdy Gurdy).

The references to Franz Schubert and also to poet Wilhelm Müller suggest my attempts to understand the dramatic, and to some degree musical references to human isolation. My interest in the final song, (Der Leiermann) explores isolation. The lyrics are a yearning poem, in which no-one listens, JJF reconstructs a point in time where a deceptive self-perception of the artist in his studio, a moment to himself, is recorded and achieved with body in a horizontal position.

The recorded performance JJF could suggest a reflection on the problem of isolation in our time and resuscitation from emotional distance and absence. Unsynchronised sounds from the pendulums are so unexpected that each cancels out the other, making for dissociated audio memories. What does one remember?

The experience of the work seeks to contrast two existences: the recorded video performance and the unsynchronised audio. This chance disjunction reminds me of an instance on a train ride in Berlin, where I focused on the gesture of capturing a moment with my camera, while listening to the trains changing tracks. While on a moving train myself, my camera was focused out the window recording another passing train. What the moving photograph recorded became an analytical record that brought to my attention that in relation to visual information and audio information we have a way of selecting one input over another in striving to form meanings. Effectively we thereby block out perceived irrelevancies and somehow this process relates to the isolation of subjective life meaning from all of the possible layers of information passing through the light and sound.

I would like to thank musician David Christopher for his collaboration and his sound and electronic input in making this work.

Adelaide 2010 Joe Felber

Eleven blackboards and Rêve idèle Atlas

I began the blackboard series in 2006 during my 3 years residence in Lucerne Switzerland. There I explored the blackboard as a familiar early object of encounter at school. Later on the blackboard is associated with pedagogy taken up by both artists and scientists. In this work I am attentive to the absorption of light and consider the sensitive end of perception so close to blindness.

The illusive figurative images painted in black ink, watercolour, graphite or pencil associates them with the experience of blindness. Look I am blind by Swiss painter Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005) is a work that pursues this theme. Zaugg however worked exclusively with text and in particular with the perception of text. The eleven blackboards draw attention to lived time and to hasty conclusions made routinely and with lack of perception. Works with themes like dustmade, blackabstract, add remove time highlight how we look at art.

Beyond the overwhelming world archive of images and text Rêve idèle Atlas “strikes back” as reminiscence based on photographic reference. Unlike eleven blackboards, Rêve idèle Atlas summons up the idealised space of memory. I photographed the Atlas Mountains in Morocco more that 20 years ago fascinated by their geological age. As removed as I am from the first experience of photographing them, these documents connect me with this memory. I started to cross-read this complexity of distance and time to dream or idealize the mountains through an enlarged drawing. The work has associations with that of 19th century German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Friedrich is generally considered to be the most important artist of the movement and he calls attention to the viewer’s position in observing the sublime landscape. In my works for this exhibition, projection and perception meet as an ideal place of the dreamer.

September 2010 Joe Felber

VOM STAND DER DINGE JOE FELBER

We don’t do what we want to do. We do what we expect to do. Joe Felber 2003

These paintings are an individual and personal dialogue after the book Vom Stand der Dinge: Eine kleine Philosophie des Design by Vilém Flusser. Vom Stand der Dinge (From a Point of View) is the title of my painting cycle, ongoing since 2003, based on a philosophy for design. Vilém Flusser's phenomenological study, questioned the function and meaning of design, and has inspired me to respond through the gesture of painting, in turn exploring its rationale for existence. All works are painted on wood panel 45 cm x 45 cm in oil, enamel, acrylic, pencil, charcoal and involve screen-printing processes.

Flusser's writing awakened the realization of my relation to design and the responsibility involved in designing in painting. He questioned the destruction and violence increasing in Western culture each day. Since we live and function in a designed world, we must also question how we damage lives in this endeavor. Yet how difficult and complex is the phenomenon of the object. Paintings have their own individual existence, as isolated objects, cancelled out of any utilitarian function they are to some mere irrelevant fragments that satisfy a visual desire.

These works may be realized as figurative, abstract or text paintings. The text works for example, capture conversations about design with different interpretations. The intimacy of each plays an important role in this continued cycle of paintings that brings about a rhythm in its examination of design in consumer culture. The paintings are clustered to allow for complex cross-readings and are installed in response to the architectural context.

April 2010 Joe Felber

JOE FELBER

Lastingworldfragments

Photography

Photography for me is conceptual painting; a picture in or of physical motion; a moment captured in light and colour. My photographic works are studies, like components of a sketchbook or a document that captures a moment in an urban/architectural space or a landscape.

From 1988 - 1996 my photographs recorded images of passengers in public spaces that often captured their (and my) fleeting psychological responses as the expression of a fragment of time. Chance processes change the moment of time captured by the picture. After the photograph is captured, it becomes another picture and the image takes on another meaning. In another series, I photographed black and white pictures on art and architecture throughout Europe, surveying works in the new museum boom in Germany. I photographed the contemporary art display as a cohesive interface of materials developing a new aesthetic from another aesthetic. These photographs create a virtual space from the concrete forms of architecture disrupting photographic evidence as proof of surface. There are several hundred black and white photographs in this series.

Over the last two or three years I have also become interested in the Australian landscape. The Canola fields in South Australia, which I photographed across various locations, may signal 'crunch time' for the introduction of genetically modified food into Australia. These abstract 'painted photographs' are composed of blurred fragments and become the palette of colour and movement.

All works are printed on metallic paper size h.7 cm x w.10 cm to retain the intimacy when looking through the camera viewer.

COPYRIGHT: All images and text are the artistic and intellectual property of the artist. Use of this material is prohibited unless by direct permission of the artist.

Joe Felber: Moments of time

Lisa Harms and Stephanie Radok, Feature, Artlink vol 29 no 1, 2009, pp35–38

Joe Felber’s art practice is interdisciplinary and acquisitive, absorbing, assembling, composing and de-composing, playing and re-playing elements from a vast collection of fragments collected across the world in cities and art galleries.

Read full article (PDF file) of Joe Fleber: Moments of Time here

Back Issues of Artlink featuring Joe Felber: Moments of Time are available from the Artlink website: www.artlink.com.au/articles/3208/joe-felber-moments-of-time/