practice | dual body patterns in the 'ico-fit'

On March 15 the 'ico-fit', formerly known as 'movement infrastructure' has been used as framework for a practice performed by two movers. Two movement sequences were performed. One practice was based on 'Finding the Axis Mundi', a flow of movement based on a vocabulary of yoga asanas.

The other movement practice was inspired by the geometry of the structure, in the sequence Octahedron in the Icosahedron. Each mover performed movement in rotational symmetry connecting arms and legs to the midpoints of the edges.

Season Greetings 2016: Resilience

My sunrise celebration at Playa del Carmen (Mexico) in the tropics: 20.69726, -87.01423

vernissages, camminando, practice | NYC, June 24

The "Summer Group Exhibition" at Marian Goodman Gallery presents a cohesive mix of conceptualism and minimalism, blended in the gallery space. The works —ranging from geometry based murals of Sol Lewitt to subtle sculpture of Fred Sandback or large text wall writings of Lawrence Weiner— generated immersive spatial perceptions, where scale seemed to be the cohesive element.

:Summer Group Exhibition"

Niele Toroni

North Gallery hosted Maria Nordman’s FILMROOM EAT, 1967 – PRESENT and two Standing Pictures.  The press release also announced that "Nordman will also enact THE WHISPER in Central Park with ‘persons met by chance’, continuing a work that started several decades ago in different public spaces in cities all over the world." The work somehow reminded me of Michel de Certau "everyday practice" which is so close to my own heart —and practice. In these days of brutal attacks from my still legal husband and his lawyer, where greed overcomes any ethics and rationality, a rigorous art and movement practice has become an anchor to rationality and attempt to find meaning and beauty in urban places.

Maria Nordman’s FILMROOM EAT, 1967 – PRESENT

I ended my urban practice with a body prayer by the Hudson river waterfront while the sun was setting.

exhibitions | The Self in the Practice and Space of Everyday Life (and Art)

What we need is not the Gesamtkunstwerk, alongside and separated from which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-embracing Gesamtwerk (life) which abolishes all isolation, in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity.  

László Moholy-Nagy

Three seemingly disconnected and unrelated art exhibitions are currently on view in New York: “On Kawara: Silence” at the Guggenheim Museum,  “In the Studio: Photographs” at Gagosian and “Self: Portrait of Artists in Their Absence" at the National Academy Museum. The exhibitions share instead a strong commonality about making art intersecting with living life: the studio is an experiential place and the artist is a maker of artwork impregnated with existential questioning and awareness of self image. Uncannily these three exhibitions are located a few blocks apart from each other in the Manhattan Upper East Side and seem to complement each other in terms of media: photography, video, sculpture, found objects, newspaper clips, installation. 
    The most compelling exhibition is probably the On Kawara retrospective: a recording of the conceptual artist's existence as art practice, explored in many different media, from paintings to mail art, artist books. The exhibition starts with work from 1964, produced in different places across the planet during the artist numerous travels and includes several series:

• date paintings from Today; 
• postcards from I Got Up; 
• telegrams from I Am Still Alive; 
• maps from I Went series; 
• lists of names from I Met;
• newspaper clips from I Read;
• inventory of paintings from Journals; 
• calendars from One Hundred Years and One Million Years.

Walking in the continuous six-floor ramp of the Guggenheim Museum feels like joining On Kawara on his  meditation on living in the awareness of space and time as recording of his existence. Life is recorded with the accuracy of a database. I feel particularly intrigued by this art practice which I experienced in a participatory mode in 2009, as one of the readers for reading for One Million Years 

The three exhibitions made me think of Michel de Certau "The Practice of Everyday Life": a welcomed diversion from many contemporary art exhibitions where often gimmicks camouflage the lack of contents.