The Touch Festival (review)

Leonardo Reviews 335 legacy. To me, the surrealists’ legacy of sexuality as a subject in art—with or without Freudian associations—seems second only in import to their use of the subconscious—dreams, fantasies— as a subject. SR: Because of the surrealist movement, the surrealist woman artist was given a legacy to be naughty and brazen, but she also became nervous. Janine Antoine’s video of wringing hands shows them as no longer either restricted or protected, as in Merit Oppenheim’s Pair of Gloves, and a surreptitious hand holds a flower under the nose of an anxious pig in Lindee Climo’s oil painting Pig with Moly Plant (1996). BLW: Oppenheim’s grey-blue suede gloves, with their delicate, painted veins, vividly demonstrated the historical distance of the original surrealist movement. I suddenly realized how long ago this movement happened—in the 1920s and 1930s, when soft, ladylike gloves were the norm. The animism of these elements and objects— hands, shoes, a mirror, a child’s dress—is one aspect of this show that rings true to me. Such vivid linking of apparent identity and associative potential is sometimes dark and sometimes humorous, and always elevated beyond considerations of the artist’s gender. In fact, several of these pieces—like Cross’s jarring cow-teat shoes—transcend the original models. SR: What I find so interesting is that some works do transcend the original models, and I think it is because they evoke a feminism. The materials are soft, caressable and decorative. Flowers proliferate. Personal messages dominate . In art of this moment, content concerning women’s issues is being updated politically. This has culminated in an art form beyond the purely visual that is a hypertext format. Surrealism has completed its literary-art cycle. BLW: That is a wonderful perception, and it goes beyond my original notion that the opening up of content was a great part of surrealism’s legacy. Moreover , if the women of the original surrealist movement were struggling to express themselves in the profound way offered by surrealist theory and beliefs, the contemporary artists who followed them seem liberated and able to create simply as artists, as human beings who then choose to focus upon their femaleness as part of that humanness. SR: This is an important show for the implication of the surrealist legacy in general, not for the uneven quality of its art. The fact that the early women surrealists existed and depicted their “stories” is legacy enough. Women artists came out of the closet. EXPERIMENTAL ARTS Manege Hall, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1–11 August 1998. Reviewed by Mikhail S. Zalivadny, Vernost str., 13-132, St. Petersburg, Russia 195220. The St. Petersburg Central Exhibition Hall (also known under its historical name, Manege) was the main scene of action for the second biannual Festival of Experimental Arts. During the festival , more than 200 artists from 15 countries exhibited performances, installations , dance and other projects at the Manege Hall and other locations throughout the city. Among the various forms of art at the festival, there were collage-paintings and photo-montages, action-painting performances (some of them accompanied by musical improvisation ), body-art displays, sculptures (among them, kinetic works made from non-traditional, “everyday” objects and materials), installations with music recordings and video/film components , as well as examples of computer graphic art. Artistic companies from Russia (Interstudio Another Dance a.o.), the U.S.A. (Paula-Josa Jones Performance Company) and Austria (Lux-Flux) presented several “choreo-dramas” (dance performances that are very different from traditional ballet) and “happenings .” The St. Petersburg State University of Air/Space Structural Devices exhibited a large-scale project entitled Informational Space Behind the LookingGlass ; according to the author’s conception of this project, it is addressed “to the problem of a human personality in the virtual world.” The artist Andrey Melnik, together with the St. Petersburg KEY computer center, produced his synthetic art composition, The Theater of the Alive, which combined real and virtual elements, and the Hatoyama Itiro Electronics, Acoustics and Music School Studio (which is affiliated with the St. Petersburg State Conservatory) gave three concert performances devoted to the history and contemporary state of computer music...