The Perfect Apology

http://www.perfectapology.com/public-apology.html

Peta via Leigh

Mark Boulos

All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2008)

Excerpt from the two channel video installation (5 of 15 mins total)

Panel one: Traders at the Chicago Exchange buy, sell, and speculate oil futures

Panel two: Natives of the Niger Delta revolt over corporate occupation

Title taken from the Communist Manifesto

Collection of the Miami Art Museum

BURCHILL/MCCAMLEY
Pre Paradise Sorry Now (neon), 2001
neon, waferweld board, electrical cable and transformer
35 x 180 x 112 cm

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA- Two of Australia's best-known contemporary artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley are set to exhibit one of their latest collaborative works using neon lights and sculpture. An essentially 20th-century phenomenon, neon is largely associated with advertising and the glitter of big-city retail. It's also a medium Burchill and McCamley have used together extensively in the past and they are well aware of its visual impact, particularly in Sydney.For this exhibition Burchill and McCamley are proposing to exhibit a new neon sculpture built around a 'found' sentence. Yet in contrast to the pop, bold lights of Sydney's cityscape, the artists aim to create a fragile site sensitive experience, which communicates the visual power of language. Perhaps there is something uncanny about glass tubes flooded with a poisonous inert gas, contorted into odd shapes, shuddering with electric current.Language and the language of art have often been central to their work. Their neon sculptures constitute part of an ongoing series and a major new strand of their collaborative activities. The language that comprises the neon is 'found', with most phrases coming from literature or film. The titles, however, do not relate to the content of the film but are chosen for their poetic attitude and ability to condense many ideas into something succinct.About their choice of title and process, Burchill and McCamley have said: While there is often an element of homage in the choices, the pieces aren't primarily meant to invoke the original work. Titles are chosen because of the tenor and sentiment that they evoke and, in a way, our selection constitutes a new type of genealogy of art. The titles we choose have a hard poetic tenor, a tenor which is carried through in the materiality of the artworks. We aim to make our works highly condensed, both materially and conceptually.

Pre-Paradise Sorry Now

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most brilliant exponent of the German New Wave Cinema, also made a startling contribution to the theatre scene with his Antitheatre. Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, one of his most disturbing and nightmarish theatre works, is an exploration of human brutality. The central plot material has to do with an actual case: the famous English "Moors Murders," committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Fassbinder uses the murderers and their demented longing for a neo-fascist "paradise" to ridicule notions of man's higher nature. He surrounds them with a black-comedy circus of thugs, whores, transvestites and exploiters who enact repetitive cycles of violence that force us to examine the society we have made and the principles upon which it functions. Perversely entertaining, deeply serious, it is a chilling journey that takes us into the dark heart of human behavior and challenges us to change it.

Karen Finley - Impulse to Suck

From the site fracturedatlas.org


Karen Finley
Impulse to Suck: The Performance of the Apology and the Separation of Sex and State
Performance and pencil drawings, 2008


"Karen Finley was in Albany, New York on March 10 to waiting to hear a speech from Eliot Spitzer on Reproductive Health. Instead later that day, Spitzer performed an apology with his supportive, devastated wife standing beside him. Finley will speak about the performance of the apology, the erotic transference of the media's fixation on Spitzer's frown and the emotional starring role for his wife, Silda.


Finley will perform her latest spoken word text which examines the confession, the apology, the imagining of the sexual encounter, the travel of the escort, the compulsion, the immigrant father's plan for his son to succeed and the couples imagined therapy sessions. Looking at the psychodrama in the intimacy of our political leaders, Finley poses to see the agony of the son's need for the approval from the father and the ancient wrestling of the ancient wrestling of the feminine archetypes of mother and whore."


Roula

DIANA THATER - CHERNOBYL

28 January – 5 March 2011, Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly

Opening: Thursday 27 January 6 – 8 pm

A new video installation by Diana Thater will fill the interior of Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery with images of the post-nuclear landscape of Chernobyl. For this work, Thater spent time in the ‘Zone of Alienation’ which surrounds the site of the nuclear disaster, filming the eroded architecture and wildlife of the one-hundred mile wide radioactive territory. The animals she films have managed to survive amid the devastation of the only existing post-human landscape, demonstrating a wilderness of man’s making. The installation focuses on the rare and endangered Przewalski’s Horse. Once facing certain extinction in its native habitat in central Asia, this sub-species of the wild horse now roams freely in the ‘Zone of Alienation’.

The desolate remains of an abandoned movie theatre in Prypiat, a city founded to house the Chernobyl nuclear plant workers, will form the backdrop of Thater’s installation. The city’s decomposing architecture will be juxtaposed against the footage of the wild animals living in the ‘Zone of Alienation’. Through this installation, visitors will experience a world where a man-made catastrophe has abruptly halted all progress and animals inhabit an irradiated landscape. Overlaying physical and filmic spaces, Thater confronts the successes of civilisation with its profound failure.

For over two decades Thater has explored the precarious relationship between culture and nature. Frequently using animals and natural phenomena as subjects, her video installations are compositions of time and space. Their precisely choreographed imagery forms temporal abstractions that immerse the viewer in ambient environments and invite new ways of seeing the world.

PETA

A Measure of Remorse (2009) 
single channel video installation
color with sound
HD video 10:00 minutes

Shanghai protest against Japanese text books, April 2005 (2009)
photo transfer to paper
12 x 9 inches

Address by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at the Asia-African Summit, April 2005 (2009)
ink transfer to paper
12 x 9 inches

This project was provoked by the life of writer Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking (1998), which brought intense and overdue attention to the Japanese military atrocities committed against the Chinese in WW II. Exploring historical violence and the nature of apology through language, the body, desire, and trauma, the video re-imagines a confrontation on PBS in 1998 between Chang, the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., and journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth. The video is not a re-enactment of the past, but rather a kind of future made dark and deeply sensual, almost as an effect of Chang’s suicide in 2004. It raises questions about the effect of performative utterances - like an apology - when it comes to historical violence. The three figures acknowledge hurt, even death, and ask us about the claims our memories and voices can make against the past.

Please watch the video below

http://www.hongantruong.com/index.php?/project/a-measure-of-remorse/

Bruce Conner "Mea Culpa" (w David Byrne and Brian Eno)

"Mea Culpa" (1981)

Bruce Conner

This is a Bruce Conner film called Mea Culpa.  It was a collaboration between Conner and musicians Brian Eno & David Byrne.  The voice is sampled from an "inflamed caller and smooth politician replying,  both unidentified. Radio call-in show, New York, July 1979."  --What're you saying? He said "I'm sorry, I committed a sin, I made a mistake. I asked (?????) to forgive me... please forgive me." He said "Mea Culpa," can you put it better? "I'm saying I'm sorry, I made a mistake, I made... I committed a sin, I made a mistake. And I'm never gonna do it again, I never did it before and I'm never gonna do it again."  

-Dane