Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)
Friday, November 28, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Ben Walters
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)
Every culture comprises big reservoirs of visionary sayings and proverbs. They often help us to struggle with events that ask us either to change our attitude or to find comfort in handed down knowledge and oral history. The purpose of this project is to collect them by asking 30 people to speak their favorite saying and tell the short story of it: when and how the phrase first entered his/her life. The result will be a series of short video blog entries which are posted on the internet and which are accessible to the exhibition audience. Sharing these gems of personal wisdom and landscapes of human resilience with each other will teach us about each others developmental whereabouts; and it will also bring cultural flavor into an often quite impersonal web.
Every culture comprises big reservoirs of visionary sayings and proverbs. They often help us to struggle with events that ask us either to change our attitude or to find comfort in handed down knowledge and oral history. The purpose of this project is to collect them by asking 30 people to speak their favorite saying and tell the short story of it: when and how the phrase first entered his/her life. The result will be a series of short video blog entries which are posted on the internet and which are accessible to the exhibition audience. Sharing these gems of personal wisdom and landscapes of human resilience with each other will teach us about each others developmental whereabouts; and it will also bring cultural flavor into an often quite impersonal web.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Mama
Watch this clip
“Mama” is a short video (TRT 1’ 35’’, looped) by the Austrian media artist Richard Jochum, New York 2008.
“When my father turned 60, I asked my siblings to produce a book for him as a gift. We entitled it “Our Father” and I wrote a few chapters. Being able to do so, surprised me. I was not aware of how easily words came to me about my father; some of the texts were a bit dada, others theatrical, some more analytical and although I praised him to the skies, there was criticism, too. When my mother a few years later turned 60 I could not produce anything like that at all. The relationship that I had with her, proved to be beyond words. I could not capture it, could not verbally describe it, felt way too embedded in a relationship that was “bloody” to start with: coming out of her womb.
The video that I created goes back to this observation of a visceral relationship with my mother beyond the grip of a verbal structure and language. I never was able to produce this somewhat very personal piece of video until an open call for submission intrigued me to set the idea into tape. The short movie is made to be looped, because addressing a mother and calling out for her will always escort us and keep being an indelible impulse.
P.S. If the video is shown in a space, I envision it to be displayed on an old tv-screen which is placed at the height of an imagined crib and would stand in the corner of a room. Crying out for a mother would then turn into what it was planned to be: an installation piece and not only a video."
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Atlas
Atlas is the Greek God and Titan who led the rebellion against Zeus for which he was condemned to bear the heavens upon his shoulders. The story has it that he became the personification of endurance. The short video picks up on the ancient legend and continues a series of trials, tribulations, and enactments by the Austrian sculptor and media artist Richard Jochum. The artist is digging his way through the territory of Greek mythology. Atlas will be performed on the summit of the Austrian Alps in August 2008 and shown at an exhibition at Columbia University in fall 2008. The video shown serves as a first draft for a project in progress. Atlas is the sequel to "Sisyphus on Vacation" which was performed 2006 and shown in 2007.
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)
Monday, July 07, 2008
Selfportrait with Jesus
I was about to become a Jesuit in 1985, but then I did not. It seemed not the right thing for me to do at that time; the order supported its member's personal development and intelligence at a cost to their social skills and intelligence. I felt it would be more beneficial for me to improve my social abilities than to reinforce the idiosyncrasies and quirkiness of a premature high-schooler.
It turned out to be the right decision, and instead of becoming a highly supported individualist I became a highly educated, politically-engaged artist. Religion did not play that big a role in my life. But that changed through the arts, as my artistic practice began to draw from the resources of my childhood upbringing.
While religion returned to be a topic in my life, the public stance towards religion changed; religious beliefs after 9/11 became a major signifier in defining cultural differences very much to my dismay. My observation might admittely be specific to the country where I reside the United States where I find many great achievements of secularism, such as the segregation between church and state, slowly taken back by increasing fundamentalism.
Secularism, though, is a major achievement that protects societies from unnecessary heat since religious beliefs unfold an ability to incense quickly when they become societal. Selfportrait with Jesus reflects my take on religion as I see it today. If anything, religion should serve as a source of intrapersonal resilience and stability, reaching out vertically rather than horizontally, fostering spiritual growth rather than societal uproar.
Depicting myself in a 360 degree rotation with Jesus hanging from the cross shows doubtlessly some signs of tragic, but as the world is depicted upside down, there might be humor, too. The video track is dubbed with a field recording from the main post office in Manhattan (by opodo.org); I thought the busyness of hectic customers makes up with the self-indulgence of contemplation.
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)
Friday, March 28, 2008
Fog Dance
Aphrodite Desiree Navab and Richard Jochum dancing in an Antony Gormley installation.
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)
Saturday, January 19, 2008
The Rosary | Sibha as a Communal Sculpture
Installation: The rosary / sibha as a communal sculpture. American University Cairo, New Falaki Building, Egypt. The installation was built in a collective effort on March 8, 2007 and is on temporary view on the roof top of the New Falaki Building.
Visiting Professor of AUC Richard Jochum invites students, faculty, and the public to become part of a communal sculpture: a huge, 40 meter large communal prayer necklace.
"The sculpture of the magnified rosary beads changes the scale and sector of the original. From the private meditation of an individual holding her rosary, the sculpture becomes a public one inviting communal contemplation. By moving it from the private to the public sector, the rosary becomes an object for discussion and debate. At the same time, however, the change in scale from hand-held to larger-than-life transforms the giant rosary into a subject commanding a presence within the same space of its viewers. Its uncanny resemblance to a chain recalls both the positive and negative connotations of the many types of chains in our world: from the chains that are used for prisoners to the chain that links memory itself. A chain that connects one religion to the next in the significance of prayer, could also be a chain that prevents connections to be made. Painted sky-blue and being a site-specific installation on the roof, the rosary beads seem to bring a piece of the sky down to sit on the rooftop for conversation. As both an object and subject of inquiry, the sculpture re-presents the locals relation to the global, inviting discussions of the ways in which we are linked together and implicated, and ways that we could forge better relations."
More Information: http://richardjochum.net
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Snow II
Snow II is a video performance by Richard Jochum, Austria/New York 2008 and shows how the artist rolling a ball of snow until he gets exhausted. The ball is growing and continues to grow after help arrives. But there is a limit to it; soon the group of helper is bigger than the ball thus making progress impossible. Most of the video has no sound; as if snow pacified the noise; only at the end and when a tractor arrives to assist the human crowd can we hear the humming of a machine.
The short video (TRT 00:02:41) deals with the relationship between human labor and natur, complexity, ritualized trying, and Sisyphus. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" (A. Camus); even more so in winter wonderland where the stones to be rolled consist of snow and the laboring effort is shared by a group.
With many thanks to: Robert Jochum, Irmgard Wehinger, Magdalena Wehinger, Mathias Wehinger, Fidel Jochum, Irma Jochum, Aphrodite Desiree Navab, Werner Walser, Evi Walser.
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)
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