A sponge becomes a popsicle. A loofah is exotic jungle flora. A cucumber morphs into a candle. The artist duo PUTPUT excels at transformations that turn everyday objects into something unexpected. The sleight of hand works through repetition. On first glance, a stick and a sponge might be no more than the sum of its part, but seen again and again, the combination becomes natural, almost expected. How did we ever not see the popsicle-ness of the common house sponge? The viewer ends doing her own repetition in the form of a double take.

Based in Copenhagen, the Swiss-Danish duo PUTPUT prefers to remain anonymous and keep the focus exclusively on their work. They will say, however, that both artists have a background in design – one in fashion, the other in graphic design. PUTPUT became their chance to create artwork without commercial influences or the pressure to please clients. Their keen eye for colour and form can be seen in the arresting use of two-tone palettes that train the eye on the revised object in question. Formed in 2011, PUTPUT has featured work in the German publication Die Zeit and Der Greif and exhibited in Copenhagen and Milan.

In their words: “PUTPUT explores the duality of objects and situations associated with everyday life, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary and capturing the previously unseen. Perception and recognizability are challenged through distinctly staged scenarios and tableaus that underline a metaphysical relationship to the material world. The highly stylized visual universe has clear references to Pop Art and Surrealism, and reinterprets classical genres such as still life through a contemporary lens.”

The group’s name is a reference to the space between input and output –  a creative place that artists are intimately familiar with. But it also takes the viewer back to what makes the magic possible in their photography – repetition.

© 2013 PUTPUT

It is always wonderful to find a poet’s work that grabs you and brings you to new and unexpected tropes, whether it be in form, concept, use of language, or artful accretion of ideas. Elizabeth Willis and John Taggart are two American poets who remain fresh through reading and rereading; their poems expand poetry’s window of possibility.

In “Slow Song for Mark Rothko” John Taggart repeats words, images, and actions persistently, insistently, while moving forward line by line, pulling, with an incremental momentum, those repetitions through in a meditative weaving of meaning and sound. Technique here is matched perfectly with the poem’s dedicatee, Mark Rothko, painter of large reverential, meditative paintings which shift colour ever so subtly. If you know the paintings, they, mysteriously and magically, come to the inner eye, through Taggart’s words, which do not literally describe the artworks.

In two of Elizabeth Willis’ poems included here – “The Witch” and “Blacklist” – “witch” is a recurrent word, appearing in some form in almost every line – “witch,” “witches,” or “witchcraft.” Each poem is a listing of witchy people and events, yet there are constant surprises in the statements, images or meanings. In “In Strength Sweetness,” while some terms are repeated, it is the repetition of structure which is most striking, a weighting of terms on each side of a backslash – “/”; the juxtapositions are provocative, entertaining and often surprising. “Classified” is an imaginative take-off on personal barter ads, which repeats familiar language and juxtaposes this with surprising images. In each poem the repetition throughout provides a progressive cohesion; these are process poems that float in a kind of ‘on-goingness’.
It is intriguing to see the different ways John Taggart and Elizabeth Willis use repetition to structure shape and meaning in their pieces. Each brings a particular musing and music that rings.

Light Wave in Geneose

 
You might not know what a GIF is, but if you use the internet you’ve seen one. GIF (pronounced with a soft “J” rather than a hard “G”) stands for Graphics Interchange Format – a small file format that contains one to two seconds of animation or video and loops it continuously. GIFs are so ubiquitous online that websites, such as The Rumpus, post a GIF of the day. Entire articles are comprised of GIFs. There are  seizure-causing GIF parties and parades where hundreds of GIFs are crowd sourced in a hurry. Tumblr thrives on the easily sharable GIF –silent and perfect for the office. And guess what the Oxford English Dictionary dubbed the Word of 2012? You guessed right.

The GIF is often used as a way to make an easy (and sometimes mean) joke – and it is incredibly good at highlighting an odd expression or a misplaced foot and repeating it ad infinitum. But the GIF as a low-fi art form is gaining practitioners. The GIF can bring out the beauty in a still image with one perfectly placed flicker of movement, such as in the New York Times’ Still Life series. At last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, an entire exhibit entitled “Moving the Still” was devoted to the GIF. This show included Erdal Inci, a Turkish video artist showcased here in Boulderpavement. Inci sticks out from the GIF-making crowd by accentuating a single unbroken movement. He specializes particularly in beautiful movements, such as in the hand-weaving figure in “Poi by Devrim”, and in the light movement of “Light Wave in Geneose” – commissioned for this issue’s focus on repetition. The result is repetition in its most pure, hypnotic, and beautiful state.
 
© 2013 Erdal Inci

Poi by Devrim, 2012. Performed by Devrim Ekin Sahin, Sundance, Antalya.

Self in front of Laleli Fountain, Galata 2012.

Runner on the cliff, 2009. Performed by Ogun Kekul.

Jaap Blonk is a remarkable self-taught composer, performer, visual artist and poet. To see him on-stage is to be dumb-struck at first by the seeming oddity of his work – the presentation of abstract vocal sounds and extraordinary facial and bodily gyrations; if one can get past that, one marvels at the sheer inventiveness of his art. He is funny, serious and virtuosic at the same time. He is part sound poet, part sound technology artist, part experimental theatre performer, and he uses improvisation within a structure, or to shape the structure, in many of these modes. He takes his voice and body far beyond the normal range of expression which the rest of us use in daily communication.

Blonk’s background as a mathematician and saxophonist has fed his flight into sound composition and performance, and his influences can be found in jazz, performance art, conceptual creation, sound art, and electronic music. He is a unique artist working in a narrow, yet distinctive, exciting and entertaining field of avant-garde expression.

In the late ‘70s Blonk began his engagement with sound poetry, an art form with a variety of antecedents, but often identified strongly with the Dadaist movement, in particular the events known as Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich 1916. Dada intended to turn the art world on its head, to make revolutionary and undefinable art, a kind of anti-art. Cabaret Voltaire, a series of cross-disciplinary performances held on the small stage in Zurich’s Hollandische Meierei café, provided a venue for collaborations amongst musicians, poets, visual artists, and playwrights. Hugo Ball composed and performed what we now call sound poems (“verse ohne worte”) – seemingly nonsense pronouncements of phonemes, vowels, consonants and unnamable sounds in the form of chants, growls and hums – an exploration of the capacities of the mouth and its components.  Sound poetry has survived and evolved consistently since then. In 2001, the National Center for Contemporary Art in Kaliningrad, Russia, published Homo Sonorus, a CD anthology and print catalogue featuring one hundred and ten artists from twenty-two countries, male and female, who perform sound poetry as part of their art. Jaap Blonk is included and is representative of these artists and of the evolution into inter-disciplinary forms.

One of Blonk’s early inspirations was German artist Kurt Schwitters, whose extended sound poem Ursonate inspired Blonk to memorize and perform it in part or whole hundreds of times in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Blonk has since expanded his repertoire with his own compositions and in collaboration with other sound artists and musicians.

Listeners who find Blonk’s work intriguing might also want to investigate Kurt Schwitters’ visual and sound art, Hugo Ball’s diary Flight Out of Time, recordings by French sound composer and performer Bernard Heidsieck, British sound poet Bob Cobbing, Estonian surrealist poet Ilmar Laaban, and those by Canadians bpNichol, Paul Dutton, and The Four Horsemen sound/performance ensemble, among others.

The Jaap Blonk performance captured here was recorded in The Club at The Banff Centre on October 12, 2012, as part of WordFest.

© 2013 Jaap Blonk

Buildings, houses, cabinets, desks and refrigerators are all box-like containers that hold our belongings for a limited time. When we move or die, our belongings are packed into boxes. Mostly empty, sometimes collapsed, often stacked, with flaps open or closed, the box—that most elemental of forms — has played a significant role in my work for years now.

In this series, I show boxes in a more absurd, near-animate representation with finger holes for eyes, as if the boxes that contain our discarded lives have taken on a life of their own. Ghostly, finger-like images can float out of one box and hold up another. Drawings and scraps of paper with old titles and cut-out dates are pasted randomly on the surface to hint at the passing of time.

Since the mid-1990s, my process has been to make and photograph objects and then create paintings from these photographs. I continue to combine all these processes into individual works on paper, wood, and canvas. I began using encaustic (wax) to integrate photos and drawings through transfer processes and collage. The wax provides a unique method of layering and building images, colour, and meaning, while also unifying the surface and materiality of my work. While these worksmight seem a departure, I continue to explore themes of transience, emptiness, and cumulative loss and, ultimately, our inability to hang on to what is most meaningful to us — our homes and possessions, our workplaces and our lives.

© 2013 Betsy Rosenwald

This is an audio piece built from recordings of a warm-up exercise for the annual Melissa’s Road Race – a 20-km fun run held in Banff, Alberta every September. This year, 4,500 runners took to the streets of Banff and the race kicked off with a massive group warm-up right outside my bedroom window. I woke to the sound of speakers blasting warm-up instructions to the runners. I made this piece by placing microphones out my window and recording the action.

The context of this recording is important on one level, but ultimately this piece is about repetition and repetition decontextualises. When stripped of its context, repetition can also recontextualise and transform the repeated object and its surroundings into new shapes and expressions of that repetition. Shout in a valley and the echo can tell you the dimensions of the space. Light a match in a dark room and you reveal its shadowy corners.

In physical exercise, a movement repeated and repeated and repeated again manifests a desire to alter the body, making it into a more ideal form. I see repetition in exercise as effort, longing, and rebuilding. This recording layers and processes multiple repetitions, transforming them into new shapes, contexts, and intentions. This transformation is echoed in the voice of the instructor shouting to the runners: “The reason why I do this move is because you look like birds!”

Every sound and instrument in the piece is built from or triggered by audio samples of the routine, offering a radical transformation of the original recording. Voices shift in pitch and speed. The backing track rises, falls and is built into evolving reiterations. The repetition of individual sounds breaks apart linear meanings and creates a new space and interpretation of group exercise. In the visual culture we live in, audio art is often understood as an abstract medium. Sounds occupy any space and the transformative potential of repetition is realized. In “Practice Grounds,” all sounds can become birds.

© 2013 Chris Wood