Tuesday, May 29, 2007

But is it art?

After a busy long weekend I feel like I have too many things to share in one post...so I will feed you all little pieces at a time! On Sunday I visited an exhibition from a Norwegian contemporary artist most well known for his performance art. His name is Kurt Johannessen and I have just fallen in love with some of the things he has done - lots of hippy, lets explore our relationship with nature, type stuff (see www.zeth.no but be warned that most info is in Norwegian). For example, in one piece he wandered through the mountains and read fairytales to stones. In another he stood waist deep in a river at dusk and slowly moved his hands above the water until it became dark. He also does things with the dust from vacuum cleaner bags and lots of other crazy stuff, but of course it is his treehugger work I love best. In one of his books I bought from the exhibition, he gives a range of less typical exercises that we should all try. I am going to try and share some of them with you over time and will refer to them as 'Kurt's crazy, but worth trying, exercises'....so the one for today is..."Turn suddenly into a wolf"

I am posting 2 pics here from one of his pieces in the gallery that I thought was just fantastic. It was a small corridor covered in mirrors on both sides. If you look closely you can see that one mirror reflected the line 'Everything is the same, it just looks different', while the mirror on the other side reflected the line 'Everything is different, it just looks the same'. And of the course the mirrors on each side of the corridor reflected these lines over and over for as far as you could see. Just fantastic! What I want to know is, what does this mean to you?

Off to see if I can turn suddenly into a wolf...xxx til i start howling...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Sis,

Not sure I get the waving hands over the water or mucking around with dirt from the vacum but I rekon the hall way is great and given I am sitting here trying to think what it means to me quite intresting.
Love Garth
Ohhhhhhhhh - supposed to be a howl Ha.