koiman
Koiman, 1998, site-specific installation, cast-concrete vessel, 80 gallons of used motor oil, pumping system, projected video, sound composition, dirt painted blue
Koiman
1998
site-specific installation, cast-concrete vessel, 80 gallons of used motor oil, pumping system, projected video, sound composition, dirt painted blue
Koiman, 1998, site-specific installation, cast-concrete vessel, 80 gallons of used motor oil, pumping system, projected video, sound composition, dirt painted blue
Koiman, 1998, site-specific installation, cast-concrete vessel, 80 gallons of used motor oil, pumping system, projected video, sound composition, dirt painted blue
Koiman, 1998, site-specific installation, cast-concrete vessel, 80 gallons of used motor oil, pumping system, projected video, sound composition, dirt painted blue
Credits
created, choreographed, filmed, composed and edited by Monika Weiss
production support: Jon Otte and Robert Richard Cheatham, Atlanta
Koiman premiered as a performative site specific installation at Space 1181 in Atlanta [1998] and was curated by John Otte
Essay Excerpt
Monika Weiss uses the surface of her own skin as drawing brush, as living elision, fluid boundary, rapturous syncope. We never doubt the stakes, for her, in so doing, and her radiant courage exerts its own magnetic pull upon us and stakes its own claim on our attention and our emotions. The body of the artist itself is protagonist here; and syncope its living, poignant primogeniture.
Consider Koiman, 1998, an ambitious mixed media site-specific video-sound-object work that was exhibited at Space 1181 in Atlanta, Georgia in 1998. Using a wall-sized video-projection, an 800-pound cast-concrete baptismal font, 60 gallons of used motor oil, a mound of blue-painted earth and prerecorded ambient train sounds, Weiss constructed a moving and interrogatory installation. The oil continuously overflowed the rim of the vessel, and the river of oil issued forth across the slanted gallery floor and led towards the wall where a video projection showed two androgynous figures. One was kneeling and suckling at the breast of the other, as though licking tarry, coagulated life's blood dribbling from the nipple of a breast.
The constant overlaid soundtrack of trains being switched and shunted at a station lent a haunting audio complement to the eerie tableaux that reminded us of a painting by surrealist Paul Delvaux and once again signaled the necessary role of sound in Weiss's work. In this powerfully synaesthetic work, in which all the senses were implicated, Weiss once again demonstrated her desire to breach all boundaries, dislocate the time sense and invoke the syncope.
Koiman (from the Greek "to put to sleep to coffin") was inspired by the confessions of Saint Catherine of Sienna, who claimed to have drunk sustaining blood from the open wound in the side of Christ. This work, concerned with the body, vampirism, memory and the self is also about ritual - and its intention is to effect a wholesale disruption of the condition of being here in the lifeworld. Syncope entails such a momentous ejection from the space-time continua. The ejection entails a loss of ordinary consciousness. Unlike most artists, who must return to the Real to use the knowledge and insight gained from a sortie in Outer Darkness, Weiss enacts, often with her own body as vehicle and palette, the travails and rituals necessary for the acquisition of self-knowledge and thus she resolutely pushes her work forwards. [read full text here]
- James D. Campbell, Drawing on Syncope: The Performativity of Rapture in the Art of Monika Weiss, in Monika Weiss: Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, and Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal, 2007
Exhibitions
Monika Weiss - Koiman, Space 1181, Atlanta, 1998, curated by John Otte
Publications
Monika Weiss - Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York and Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montréal, 2007