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Slumber

Antoni transforms the fleeting act of dreaming into a sculptural process. Between 1994 and 2000, the artist slept while a polysomnogram machine recorded her eye movement. During the day, Antoni would sit at the loom and weave shreds of her nightgown in the pattern of her REM. The patterns were woven into the blanket that covered the bed where the artist slept at night.

In developing Slumber, the artist researched dreams from the vantage point of mythology, art history, psychoanalysis, and science. Through her performance, she uses mythology to reinterpret the scientific. As Antoni discusses – “Science had made a machine for the body to make a drawing. I love the idea that if art comes from the unconscious, then this particular drawing is coming straight from the unconscious onto the page without an intercession of the conscious mind.”

➝ Website

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Panoramix (1993‑2003)

Los planos horizontal y vertical del espacio se reactivan en una nueva relación; en palabras del teórico de la performance André Lepecki, Panoramix se despliega “en una dimensión geométrica derrumbada”. El plano “vertical-representacional” tradicionalmente preponderante en las producciones de la alta cultura occidental es destronado y el “humilde” suelo –tradicionalmente asociado con la fisicalidad básica, la animalidad y la suciedad– recibe una nueva categoría y un nuevo valor.

➝ Video
➝ Info

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Threshold

«In this installation Bill Viola is concerned with making the spectator aware of the connections between body and mind, contemplation and action, inner and outer reality. Creating a space with very distinct inner and outer aspects, he establishes a threshold sitzation, in which the moment of crossing from one symbolic reality into another becomes the central event in the spectator‘s experience and the principal object of his consciousness. […] The spectator has to pass through the silent, but optically very ‹loud› electronic flow of data, in order to reach a dark space. Here, he will find himself confronted by the vast, blurred images of the heads and upper torsos of three sleeping figures, projected on to three of the inner walls. […] As the spectator observes the sleepers‘ deep self-absorption, he is drawn toward a state of meditative immersion in his own being. The threshold between outer and inner contemplation is thus crossed, and this passage is both enacted and comprehended in a consummately spatial form. […] Both realms are ubiquitous in their own way; and, for Bill Viola, each is also, in the truest sense of the word, the vanishing point of a metapysical horizon.»

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Dreamsound

Dreamsound is a subliminal musical event

For sleeping audience which encourages relaxation,
comfortable sleep, and pleasant dreams.

A variety of audio and visual media provide impetus to dream images. The event has been performed in many venues including the New Music America Festival and as an overnight radio concert.

➝ Listen

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The Sleepers

Since the early 1970s, Bill Viola has created video installations that explore degrees of human consciousness, the body, and time. His video installation The Sleepers consists of seven metal barrels filled with water. At the bottom of each barrel, a monitor plays a 30-minute video loop of a different person’s sleeping face seen in close-up, filmed in real time. Only the light of the black and white monitors fills the exhibition space, producing a peaceful, inviting blue glow, and a dream-like atmosphere conducive to meditation. As viewers witness the sometimes fitful, sometimes peaceful sleep of these strangers—including one entering his “final sleep”—they are confronted with a familiar yet troubling image, and invited to contemplate their own fragility and finiteness.

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Artist at Work

The decision to not enter the production logics of the art system is to be read in Mladen Stilinović’s 1993 manifesto The Praise of Laziness. His ‘laziness’ (augmented by the images of him sleeping in the 1978 piece Artist at work) is in fact an active process of critical statements about art and the self-perpetuating bureaucracy around it, both under the socialist and the capitalist systems.

➝ Praise of laziness

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Bed Piece

Performance artist Chris Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) in the Charles Eames Venice Beach, California, gallery Feb 1972. Originally filmed in 16mm film. Film is in collection of LACMA.

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Dream House

Dream House is a sound and light installation, and occasional performance venue, created by minimalist composer La Monte Young and multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. Since its conception in the 1960s, several versions of the Dream House have existed in various locations; a current version housed above Young and Zazeela’s Church Street loft in Tribeca dates back to 1993.

Beginning in 1962, La Monte Young had begun formulating the concept of a continuous sound environment. In a 1964 program note for his Theatre of Eternal Music collective, Young describes «Dream Houses [that] will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition of its own, but one with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum.» Their intention was to create an immersive environment where «all the sensory information is unusual and outside your normal frame of reference.»

➝ Info
➝ Mela Foundation