Angela Bulloch
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art
21.1.-9.4.12
Installations
Two floors of Witte de With Center are dedicated to the works of Angela Bulloch. She needed the space, as the installations and wall paintings are demanding large areas.
Short, big, yellow drawing machine
Three different drawing machines are triggered and commanded by sounds; the viewer, music or computer sounds. The viewer commanded one is connected to a microphone, which I did not notice, I read it in the catalogue afterwards. This underlines the importance of knowledge in understanding a piece. Instead I get the feeling of "oh, I should go back and try it".
Vanishing Waiting Room
Sitting inside this mirror-lined bus stop waiting room there is a fluorescent road ahead. The lines continue into infinity, or at least to the horizon. You know it is just a visual trick, but it works just the same.
Gang of four blue + Gang of four yellow + Gang of four brown + Gang of four red + Gang of four mixed + Gang of four 16
Pictures are broken down to the single units, the pixels. The different boxes contain different series of color, slowly changing. These could be part of something bigger, it could be a miniature piece of a video playing.
Rules for an understanding of conceptual art
All the walls of the upper floor are covered with text. There are texts containing the rules of the Casa Nostra mafia, the contents of a Big Mac, and so on. My favourite one is this: "Rules for an understanding of conceptual art". Can a phenomenon be broken down to only a set of rules? Are these rules crucial to understanding the phenomenon? If you know the contents of a Big Mac, do you know how it tastes? If you know the rules of understanding conceptual art, do you really understand, and get an impression of it? Or are these texts just put together from randomly chosen topics, just there to fill the space, as decor, like a bombardment of information?
