The Broken Circle Breakdown (2013, Felix Van Groeningen)

Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) falls deeply in love with Elise (Verle Baetens), a tattoo artist; she bears her cross like her tattoos tell the tale of her life in a very symbolic way. He is an atheist and devoted bluegrass musician.

Didier and Elise’s relationship is not like any other because it is tinged by this fragile and powerful humanity; also they are very different but not in the usual way, we cleary can define them in two completely different world.

After the first scene where the band is playing “Will the circle be unbroken”, we learn they have a little girl who has cancer. We make a step backward 7 years earlier and discover their first night and moments together.

We see them growing their relationship during a “musical interlude”. Elise has also joined Didier’s band in which she sings. They also get married, very simply with only their band around them.

A couple of months pass and Elise announce her pregnancy to Didier who is angry and surprised. Maybelle is born and their circle is complete.

The movie goes on showing their new lives, being the three of them and showing how the bound of a family evolve and grow stronger and stronger everyday.

The parents fight together in hard moments and also to support their child.

Maybelle dies despite all the treatments.

Didier and Elise are both at the bottom of themselves. Even after all that time where they tried to fight for Maybelle, they are not as close as before and as Felix Van Groeningen says in the interview on cineuropa.com:” The differences between them are more and more obvious” (A. Engelen, 2013).

Elise has changed her name to Alabama, when the band is about to go on stage Didier asks her: “Tell me Alabama…If you are…Alabama. Then who am I?” she answers “Monroe (?)”, it makes a reference to the day they first met and Didier said that one of Elvis’ best song was written by Bill Monroe.

The same night Didier starts screaming that “stupid” religious people slow medical research. Elise breaks up with him that night and commits suicide.

Didier calls an ambulance but once at the hospital she dies. The movie ends on her body at the hospital surrounded by the band and Didier, who whispers her to say hello to Maybelle when she sees her before the band starts to play a song.

The Broken Circle Breakdown is a drama about life and how the people live in it with their weaknesses and their scars. Everyone is condemned to live with his past but we need to move on and bring to a close this circle that is life. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, this is the never ending whirlwind of life. The circle is broken because the circle was an allegory for their love and the bound they had, Maybelle was the last missing piece but also the founding piece. Everything is not falling apart because of Maybelle’s death only, also because “Life” happens and people change, and they change their expectations too.

Felix Van Groeningen achieved his aim by taking us on a trip through real emotions sometimes so vivid that we might actually start singing along with the band. 

There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4'33" (MoMA, New York, USA)

"On a warm summer evening in August 1952 pianist David Tudor approached a piano on stage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Stopwatch in hand, Tudor sat before the piano and, without striking a note, premiered John Cage's composition 4'33". Commonly known as Cage's “silent” piece, 4'33" comprises three movements during which a performer—or performers—are instructed to produce no intentional sounds for four minutes and 33 seconds. This radical gesture upended the conventional structure of music, shifting attention from the performer to the audience, and allowing for endless possibilities of ambient sounds to fill the space." (MoMA website).

There will never be silence is an exhibition featuring John Cage's work and other artists such as "Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, and other artists associated with Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptual art who pushed preconceived boundaries of space, time, and physicality to new ends."

I love that show because it was so minimalistic and beautiful, aesthetically it was really increadible. I never heard of John Cage before and it was a really nice surprise to discover his inspiring work.

"Like much of Cage’s work, the show is suffused by a meditative wit that wears its transcendent ambitions lightly. Works that investigate chance and indeterminacy through found objects, monochrome canvases and the playful use of language invite the visitor to explore new ways of engaging not only with the art on the walls, but with the outside world, too. " This explain exactly what I thought of the exhibition and I think that this kind of work take us somewhere else and makes us think more about the how and the making etc and like the show curator, David Platzker says "It’s the possibility of passing through boredom into fascination." Which is a very good point because a lot of people tend to see this kind of art as "easy" or "boring" but this exhibition shows perfectly how wrong it is to say that. Here's an example : "Two paintings by Mark Tobey, a practicing Buddhist whom Cage met in the late 1930s, show the artist turning away from iconography and toward a mystical form of abstraction. After viewing his works one day, Cage wrote, “I happened to look at the pavement, and I noticed the experience I had was the same as the experience of looking at the Tobey.” It’s not that the pavement looked like a Tobey. It was rather the act of searching for patterns or noticing color and texture in the pavement that Cage now experienced as art." (MoMa website  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/arts/music/momas-there-will-never-be-silence-about-john-cage.html)

Biennal 2014 (Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York, USA)

Whitney Biennal is an exhibition happening every 2 years, a lot of artists (103 to be precise) work together to settle the "mood" of each floor and then they all create work that will be part of the exhibition. Usually it is a lot of not very known artists and it helps them to get know.

Also the main purpose of Biennal is to set the trend in the Contemporary Art World, all the artists, every 2 years, have to answer a question :"What is contemporary art?", of course we speak as today, what is contemporary art.

The exhibition was simply amazing! So many great artists and a range so broad on used materials to express contemporary art. It was just really really great.

The exhibition was organised a bit differently than other year, Holland Cotter, working for The New York Times explains :"It picked three curators from outside the museum and outside New York. (One just recently arrived.) It gave each of them free rein on a floor in the museum’s Breuer building to work solo, with no cross talk required, though, of course, there was some, and some space sharing, too."

 On Fourth floor you find a lot of Abstract Expressionism and mainly female too, Cotter sums it up : "In general, Modernism — recycled, retooled, whatever — hangs like a mist over the fourth floor, particularly over ceramics that might as easily date from 70 years ago as from today. So it’s tonic to encounter an inky storm cloud of a vinyl-and-neon wall piece called “People in Pain,” made in 1988 by Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) and restored (“remade” is the term on the wall label) by Philip Vanderhyden this year."

Second Floor is more political and also filled with very young atists! In my point of view, the first floor was the most innovative and the third too because they were showing something really different.

I can't say if I liked one piece more than another because it was all working together, as a unity and it would never have had the same feeling if all of these artwork weren't in the same exhibition.

I remember a couple of artists that I really liked like Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft's botanical specimens.

Bjarne Melgaard's installation was really mind-blowing. I can't explain but this video will help visualise better. I love the voice recording and all the videos were playing at the same time and there was also a side where you could sit, put on glasses you can't see throught and put headphones on and you were transported somewhere else in the Universe. It was just crazy and the sound/voice choice were really great and they putted you in the mood directly.

A.L. Steiner's installation "More Real Than Reality" was really beautiful too. 3 wall almost fully covered of photographs and 2 screen and 1 projection. It was very aesthetic and beautiful.

There was just so much art in this exhibition Holland Cotter, working for The New York Times, sums it up pretty good :" Despite some good work assembled for this Biennial by three bright curators, I left feeling pretty much the way I do when I leave an art fair, full but empty, tired of dessert, hungry for a sustained and sustaining meal.".

John Smith (Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, UK)

The Ingleby Gallery exhibition has one work by John Smith and the rest is Jonathan Owen." Jonathan Owen's work, in both two and three dimensions, involves reducing and rethinking existing objects and images. He employs a kind of elegant vandalism to reconstruct and reinvent his ‘material’, transforming something found into something new." (Ingleby Gallery website).

Althought it was very intersting and his point of view is really fascinating, I wasn't really driven by his work, aesthetically at least.

John Smith's short film "The Girl Chewing Gum" is, on the other hand, completely absorbed me.

In a busy street of London, Smith film what is happening in front of his camera. He comments what is happening and simulate himself as a director, as if he was controlling what is happening on the street but the commments go funnier and wierder so we realise quite soon that he is not in control.

Here's what Collier White says about it : 

 "In a twelve-minute take of an ordinary busy street, a voice-over seems to direct the random events that unfold there. It quickly becomes evident that the scene is not responding to the voice, but vice-versa. Through staggering image and sound track, the voice seems to gain powerful authority over the scene, predicting events that the images thus confirm. How much is this simple trick like viewing the evening news? Much like Chris Marker’s best work, Smith’s film exposes the constructedness of the real in a way that is fundamentally destabilizing."    Collier White, review of exhibition at Artists Space, New York 2007

I quite agree with that review because it is destabilizing because he gets very autoritary sometimes and it feels like he was really ordering things to happen, it's a control/ no control relation and also he focuses on the clock at a certain moment and I believe that clock is to show how we are controlled everyday by the simpliest things in the world like Time.

The film touched me and inspired me so much because it is filmed in a very simplistic way but has so much to offer when you focus on it, here Michael Maziere from Undercut Magasine explains : 

"In relinquishing the more subtle use of voice-over in television documentary, the film draws attention to the control and directional function of that practice: imposing, judging, creating an imaginary scene from a visual trace.  This ‘Big Brother’ is not only looking at you but ordering you about as the viewer’s identification shifts from the people in the street to the camera eye overlooking the scene. The resultant voyeurism takes on an uncanny aspect as the blandness of the scene (shot in black and white on a grey day in Hackney) contrasts with the near ‘magical’ control identified with the voice.  The most surprising effect is the ease with which representation and description turn into phantasm through the determining power of language."    Michael Maziere, ‘Undercut’ magazine 1984

I totally agree with Maziere because it really not only has the directional function of control but it order to do so, like some sort of trap. 

Aesthetically I love that it's in black and white, it give not only the vintage taste of the 70's but it also creates an ambiance that goes perfectly with the control he tries to give himself, it reminds me a bit of Chapin film in the sense that the black and white gives that authority more credit than it should but our brains just work like that and I think it's working really good.
Also I love the last shot, in the countryside where there is no one and "no control" but just calm.

The Girl Chewing Gum
(1976)  12 mins. B/W. Sound. 16mm.

Louise Bourgeois (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art/ Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh UK)

I went to see Louise Bourgeois's exhibition at the National Gallery the same day I went to see her other exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery.

I first went to the National Gallery and I really loved the exhibition, which is actually called " A women without secrets" and I dont' know if it is appropriate, at least to my eye. I think that even if Louise Bourgeois is categorised as a "confessional artist", my feeling was that it was a women with a lot of secrets but she could express them. I don't believe she just gives it away and confess herself, I think that her work is more of a "psychological cure" or "treatment" to her demons. She found a way to let it out, channeling all her fears, joy, questioning, etc into her art to create something honest and true.

I really enjoyed the exhibition I think Louise Bourgeois has a delicate way to express a lot of darkness and I think she really putted a lot of herself in her work and I really admire it, because indeed putting so much of her in her work, it reveals her and bares her to the eye of the world.

The exhibition is really beautiful, her work touched me and inspired me so much. I really related myself to her and her work because I really understand it, in the way that it really made sense to me directly, instead of just being really inscredible work, it really moved me.

I felt how her work was filled with emotion and how gigantic and strong that power was.

The works that really marked me were her spider called "Maman" (see above) in the same room as a poem of hers.

Also her bronze sculptures (see above) were really amazing, because the material always makes things seem more heavy and still than they are, but her sculptures look like they are going to move in a moment, it's really crazy and so beautiful, the way she succeed to make something so delicate with a material that, at least for me, makes things seem like they stopped moving and will never move again.

Her fabric sculptures are also really inscredible because they are flowing, like they are sitting exactly how they would want to sit in the space given. They give that strange sensation of comfort but also discomfort because they are very odd-looking and arose curiosity and sometime makes you really uncomfortable as it might look maybe disgusting or too figurative.

In another exhibition from last year at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, it was called "From Death to Death and other small tales",there was a sculpture of Louise Bourgeois and it made my friend very uncomfortable I rememeber because she said that it looked so real but at the same time you see that it's not real but the texture and the composition disturbs you because of that real/not real "illusion" and in that way it's a bit disgusting.

At the Fruitmarket Gallery, it was only Bourgeois's drawings and paintings, amongst the drawings there was her serie "Insomnia". I felt so mezmerised by them because firstly they reflect the concept so well and also because once again I related myself to her because it is exactly what I do when I can't sleep and I really feel the drawings more because I can feel the stillness of the night and the silence and the repetition drawings makes so much sense really. i don't only visualise the drawing but the whole situation and I am really touched by it.

In the room upstairs here was really big paintings/drawings and quotes she wrote next to the drawing or as a composition.

It was almost scary when I realised that I almost wrote the same words with almost the smae drawings, I had to go home and see in my sketchbook if I wasn't dreaming... it was so crazy I completely let myself go into her work and I just saw it so clearly it was really incredible.I think that the drawings in the room upstairs were my favorites because you could really stay in front of one of them and stare for a really long time without finding the answer to your question or without finding the detail you were hoping for but it makes you think and analyse and it bring you into her world.

My name is Sara Talib. I am a second year student at the Edinburgh College of Art.
This blog is my journal to keep my reviews as a project for University.