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Alexis Blake Selected works For Artists Research Laboratory, Yvonne Rainer March 29, 2015

How to Handle an Object

2014

p.3 — Silkscreen posters tracing and announcing the 21 daily ‘handlings’ Van Eyck Gallery, Maastricht, NL p.4 — Documentation of the final ‘handling’ with 5 previous participants p.7 — Observational text written by resident, Nina Thibo, about the first ‘handling,’ How to Handle a Wall

Allegory of the Painted Woman

2012-2015

Video, choreography, performance and publication. p.9 — stills from video The Prologue, 2012 p.11 — documentation of Allegory of the Painted Woman, performance, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, NL, 2014 p.14 — documentation of Allegory of the Painted Woman, performance, Jan van Eyck Academie, NL, 2015 p.17 — Allegory of the Painted Woman, publication, 2014 p.19 — A visit with Dr. Ann Hutchinson Guest, research documentation, video 2014 p.21 — Notational prints (silkscreen and embossing) of 7 out of the 48 poses from Allegory of the Painted Woman

Studio 2.7

2015

p.23 — Presentation and ‘handling’ of sculptural props made from foam, wood, steel, aluminum, copper and elastic string. Open Studios, Jan van Eyck Academie

Re-present: Revisiting past work in the now

2012

p.27 — Performance Presentation. Spoken word with overhead projector, video and slide projector. MACRO/ Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma, Italy (for ‘Covoiturage’ invited by Francesca Grilli)

How to Handle an Object

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How to Handle an Object Invited to make a work for the exhibition space of the Van Eyck gallery, Netherlands, Alexis Blake played upon the ambiguous space that functioned both as a site of exhibiting and a cafe. For the duration of the exhibition she invited participants and staff of the Van Eyck to handle an object, which they used on a daily basis, within the exhibition space/cafe during the 12:00 lunch time. Every day the tables were rearranged into a new configuration in the space, which blurred the boundary between what was the space of exhibiting and what was the space of utility. The space automatically became a stage, where those eating became just as much a performer as the person who was ‘handling’ the allocated object. There was a module system of blocks that were used as props to support the ‘handling’ but they also became a sculptural element in space when not being used. Also present in the space

was a wall of silkscreen prints that announced and traced the ‘handling’ of each day. These prints became the score for the project. As a way to further document the project, Blake invited writers to write observational texts of each ‘handling.’ She then used the daily ‘handlings’ as a method to create a choreography. For the final ‘handling’ she reviewed and observed the previous ‘handlings’, and allocated the number of the ‘handling’ with one movement. She then used these numbers to create a score in the space. Five of the former participants joined her in realizing this final ‘handling.’ Handling - an exploratory and/or commonly known action that is performing itself; can change depending on the cultural relation between the object and subject.

https://vimeo.com/104799807 password: Howtohandle01

How to Handle an Object

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How to Handle an Object

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How to Handle an Object

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How to Handle an Object

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How to Handle an Object

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How to handle a wall I.

II.

III.

A body that is accelerating.

You turning, you shape-shifting and

Between dry walls, thin skin is sweating.

Rubbing against the walls of an exhibition

showing us pastels inside the system.

Calculating.

space, keeping them from coming closer.

You instrumentalizing the female body,

Fiberglass insulation behind those walls.

constructing, building and scaffolding.

Waiting for the hand of the body, waiting

Your feet are walking towards a wall.

for its back or its forehead.

Towards the staircase, or giant chair, that

Sophisticated violence; thermal insulation,

you constructed.

intertwined glass fibers looking for thin

Behind you, another white wall is looming,

skin.

waiting, keeping the fiberglass at bay.

Between these white walls, the body has

Tasks, the staircase is deconstructed

placed a modular system as a nucleus.

and put back together again in another

A starting point, objects that can be referred

constellation. Again, these are things we

to. These are things we can count and

can count and measure. You are there,

measure.

connecting and correcting.

Allegory of the Painted Woman

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Allegory of the Painted Woman Allegory of the Painted Woman is a project that began in 2012 when Alexis Blake went to Rome to research and build an archive of female poses found in historic Italian paintings and sculptures – ranging from the time of Renaissance to roughly the start of Modernism. The archive was then used to create a physical choreography in space by piecing together the female poses. Allegory of the Painted Woman translates the historical artworks into choreography, and then into a performance, as a way to question notions of movement, representation, reproduction and seriality. During her time in Rome, Blake developed the choreography by working with art models, who pose for the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. She gave

each model a section of the choreography, directed them and created a video from this development, which is titled, The Prologue, 2012. This video was the catalyst for the performance, Allegory of the Painted Woman. Upon returning to Amsterdam, Blake started working on the performance and further researching the poses by examining the transitions between poses and the lines, planes, and volume of the pose within in the space. The video is 3 channels and to be projected onto 3x1.5m screens, and looped.

The Prologue, 2012 https://vimeo.com/81714663 password: FAR01

Allegory of the Painted Woman

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Allegory of the Painted Woman

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- Performances: De Oude Kerk + Jan van Eyck Academie The performance is encounter between two performers, the audience and the space. The performance is based on the choreography that studies the transitions, dynamics, direction and spatiality of the poses in motion through the use of repetition and varying tempos and rhythms, which were played live on an organ in the Oude Kerk by an organist, and by two tuba players and two clarinet players in Jan van Eyck Academie. The choreography is made up of one main sequence, which is a movement of 48 poses. This sequence is repeated throughout the duration of the performance. The performance adapts to fit within the context of the space it is showing in; for example, in the Oude Kerk’s space, Blake used the organ as a way to incorporate the space and to deconstruct the baroque instrument into metronomic sounds.

Blake created a set sound score, which assigned the high notes to one performer and the lower notes to the second performer. There are different categories of movement, and therefore there are different sounds assigned to each of those categories. The sounds are simple and metronomic, and the tempo and rhythm of the sound informs the quality of movement; thus changing the reading of the pose depending on how it is moved and positioned in space. The location of the performance is very important in relation to the content of the piece. Performing it in the Oude Kerk gave the performance another layer of meaning. Amongst the white washed walls - stripped from its Catholic origins - and on top of the graves of those that passed, evoked a certain history that came into dialog with the content of the 48 poses. The two performers were Alexis Blake and Stephanie Lama.

The Jan van Eyck was a white cube space that provided an intimate and relatively neutral space where new relations were made between the older dancer of 63 years and the younger dancer of 22 years. The two performers were Truus Bronkhorst and Marika Meoli.

Allegory of the Painted Woman - Oude Kerk

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Oude Kerk

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Oude Kerk

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Jan van Eyck Academie

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Jan van Eyck Academie

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Jan van Eyck Academie

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Publication

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- Publication

Created for the occasion of the premiere of Allegory of the Painted Woman was a publication that Alexis Blake made with designer, Dongyoung Lee and curator, writer and researcher, Alena Alexandrova. Dongyoung Lee and Blake have been working with each other for the last year to find ways of documenting Blake’s performances in a nonconventional way. She is interested in how the publication can be used as a site of documentation but how it can also reflect a score or script, and exist in its own right. Alena Alexandrova, who Blake has been in dialog with for the last couple of years, wrote text fragments in response to her work and research. The text fragments were placed on the back side of the poster, which held a booklet. On the front of the poster was the index of all of the paintings and

sculptures where the poses came from. This index followed the border of the poster. The booklet attached to the poster are line drawings, which are notations that Alexis Blake made while choreographing the sequence of poses. The notations mark out the lines and plane of the poses. These notations in the booklet are printed on transparent paper, so one is able to see the lines from one pose to the next, which creates a visual movement.

Allegory of the Painted Woman - Publication

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Dr. Guest

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- A visit with Dr. Ann Hutchinson Guest; translation of a movement As part of Alexis Blake’s research into notational systems and investigation into creating a visual trace of a time based form, she came across Rodolf Laban’s main pupil, Dr. Ann Hutchinson Guest, who developed the Motif notation. In December, 2013 she started working with Dr. Guest’s center, LODC (Language of Dance Center) to translate her choreography in Allegory of the Painted Woman, into Motif notation. This documentation video captures her visit to Dr. Guest’s home in London, where Dr. Guest reads and moves for the first time the first draft of the notational score, which was translated by Valerie Farrant. Dr. Guest reads the first draft of the notation without having ever seen the score or movement before.

https://vimeo.com/123513103 password: Dr.Guest01

Allegory of the Painted Woman - Dr. Guest

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Allegory of the Painted Woman - Notational Prints

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- Notational Prints of Venus, Artemisia, Porcia, Diana, Teresa, Hermaphrodite, Maddelena In further exploring ways to notate Alexis Blake created her own notational system that uses the grid. She was investigating different ways to document the performance, Allegory of the Painted Woman, since she didn’t want to perpetuate the representation of the female body yet again in these poses by showing a video or photographs. Therefore she was looking for more of an abstraction. She used wooden cutouts of the notations, took them out of the grid, threw them down on the silkscreen before it was exposed and on the press before it was embossed. By using the element of chance, a new configuration of the pose was made, and this action echoed that of what happens in the performance - the poses are repeated again and again and again, however with the different tempos of sound, the pose starts to deconstruct itself.

Allegory of the Painted Woman - Notational Prints

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Studio 2.7

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Studio 2.7

For the Jan van Eyck Open Studios, March 2015, Alexis Blake created more of a porous and open reading of her studio by presenting the process material and sculptural props that she used during her research. At the beginning and end of the day she had two performers play with the props and reorganize them in the space. By showing the selected forms developed in her process within the context of the ‘studio,’ she aimed to disclose the abstruse space between conceiving a work and presenting it as ‘finished.’

Studio 2.7

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Studio 2.7

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Re-present: Revisiting past work in the now

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Re-present: Revisiting past work in the now

The performance presentation wove in and out of presenting and performing Alexis Blake’s previous works and her work-in-progress at the time, Allegory of the Painted Woman. She also used found footage of Yves Klein’s Symphony Monotone while creating new drawings. Thus blurring the line between where the artwork ends and where it begins. It took place at MACRO/ Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma, Italy as part of ‘Covoiturage,’ initated byFrancesca Grilli, who invited Alexis Blake.

Re-present: Revisiting past work in the now

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