Domenico Quaranta on Gazira's "Hammering the Void"

Photograph courtesy of [DAM]Berlin - All rights reserved

Today marks the opening of Gazira Babeli's newest mixed realities show, which will run through July 31st at the [DAM]Berlin gallery in Berlin and concurrently in Second Life®. A new film will be screened.

May 29, 2009:
* 10pm - 12am at Locusolus - [DAM]SecondLife, teleport directly from here
* 7-9 PM in the gallery [DAM]Berlin

by Domenico Quaranta

“The world we actually have does not meet my standards.” - Philip K. Dick


In 1920, at the opening of a Dada exhibition in Köln, Max Ernst made an axe available for the audience. As far as I know, this gesture was never reenacted. That's a shame. An artwork should always come with an axe in attach. This would remind us that art must be loved, or hated. That it deserves more than an idiot gaze. Duchamp took years to make us accept his urinal, yet he's still unable to persuade us to use it in the more logical way: pissing into it. I bet he would be happy with this kind of interaction: turning an artwork into an urinal.

Gazira Babeli never reenacts – she acts. She's worshipped as a marabout, but she hates spells and she does her best to break them. Tell her “aura” and she'll throw an hail of meteoroids onto you. Tell her “virtual” and she'll shoot you into the air at 900 km/h. When, in 2006, she made Come To Heaven, she released the code of the performance through her website: she discovered the painful delights of being beaten up by a computer graphics card, and she wanted to share this feeling with everybody.

Yet, even on a computer screen, people keep on loving the moonlight instead of killing it, and being charmed by everything is introduced to them as “art”. Thus Gazira created the fourteen sisters. They are called Anger Erin, Envy Sixpence, Gluttony Aboma, Greed Petrovic, Lust Placebo, Pride Placebo, Sloth Swansong, Courage Sparta, Faith Radikal, Hope Varnish, Justice Kimono, Love Brandi, Prudence Miami, Temperance Navarita. They are Gazira Babeli, fourteen times. Carrying a wooden sledge-hammer, they move all together, and hit violently. When you, beloved art lover, meet them, feel free to think at the following references, at your pleasure: La Liberté guidant le peuple, The Night Watch, Il quarto stato, an army of models performing Vanessa Beecroft. At your first blow on the head, art will be replaced, in your mind, by Castor oil and gas chambers.

This platoon in Wellington boots and suspender belt comes without any notice, and intervenes in social events – mostly exhibition openings – making a hell of a mess. Is this the usual, boring self-referential crap we are used to finding in art? What Gazira likes is to intervene in the rituality of the real, and break up its continuity. The world she actually has does not meet her standards, and she hammers it. She works in this direction from the very beginning: just think to her earthquakes, her showers of pop bananas, her Campbell's Soup cans, her pizzas fouling up the gallery with tomato soup. Isn't she an arse-hole? If you need, Gazira's hammers are there for you. Use them, against her too. That's what she wants.

Postscript
When they are not swooping down on some crowd trying to smash an artist's head, Gazira's Furies are imprisoned in a claustrophobic office with a view on Windows' standard desktop, jumping around all the time. The office is encaged in a computer. The computer is encaged in a gallery. Gaz' en valise, finally. It looks like a storm in a glass snowball, until you don't open it. And it comes with an hammer, of course.

Gazira Babeli with a foot (and a show) in both lives: Gazworks

Call her a code-performer, a griefer, a virtual Goddess, an artist and Machinimator... the fact is, Gazira Babeli is all these things and much more.

Gazira's highly interactive "art" is the result of combining images and representational objects of things and concepts we know and are comfortable with, and code that takes liberties with our avatars and our heads. The sum of these elements never fails to challenge the participant's view of their virtual identity and their sense of self in any life. Gazira is also renown for her group participations with the both venerated and despised Second Front, an avatar performance art group in Second Life.

Her work has ingrained itself so profoundly into the cultural mind of Second Life, in fact, that people have taken to referring to things that look like, behave or seem to have been made by Gazira Babeli, as Gazworks.

Tomorrow, Gazira will have a show opening at the fabioparis art gallery in Brescia, Italy. The exhibit will feature her much-celebrated film work, photographic prints of some of her performances, and a 3D object/sculpture: a "hand-made" avatar.




Concurrently, Gazira will host an event on Saturday, March 15th in Second Life at her strangely ingenious and farcical Locusolus sim (teleport directly from here), at 9am SLT, which I plan to attend.



I've written about Gazira Babeli's work before, but this marks the first time I share a conversation I've had with her (at her consent). No text on this flat thing we call the web can adequately convey the sharp wit, the bravado, and the charm that is Gazira, but here is a taste.

Bettina Tizzy: At what point did you understand yourself to be the Gazira Babeli that we know today?

Gazira Babeli: At the first login. When I saw Buster Keaton walking in front of me. I have never used animations to humanize my way of walking... I still walk like Buster Keaton. Maybe-I-am-Buster Keaton!

Bettina Tizzy: As I understand it, you had not done any programming prior to your introduction to Second Life. Is this true?

Gazira Babeli: No, I knew a little C language, and Second Life scripting has a very similar, simplified grammar.

Bettina Tizzy: What kind of griefing did you do, early in your Second Life? Did you mingle with other griefers and are any of them still around?

Gazira Babeli: I didn't consider it griefing. I tried to "interact" with the enviroment and its residents and some of them considered my acts as "griefing." Basically, I was only applying the rule "Your World, Your Imagination," but apparently human imagination is quite an unstable product. I never met any griefers. Could you introduce me to some of them?


Late last year, Gazira participated in a Second Front "Miami Vice" event

Bettina Tizzy: What is the purpose of your artistic "interventions" with our avatars, and what is "Gazwork?"

Gazira Babeli: At the beginning of the Sixties, Philip K. Dick, with his "Perky Pat" dolls, was already thinking about avatars. Literature and theories arrived much earlier than facts, creating superstition and bias. I try to bring back experience to the basic "real fact," by wondering "which kind of body is this in front of me?," "which is his space and where does it end?," "who are the -others-?," "who imagines what?," "what is the difference between all this and spending eight hours working on Microsoft Office?"... and so on. These questions are Gazwork. Is it artistic? Possibly yes. By asking these questions I use instruments and rules of the artistic tradition/convention.

Bettina Tizzy: In your view, what is the distinction between avatars and objects?

Gazira Babeli: I apologize to the animists, but I don't think objects have a soul.

Bettina Tizzy: So, avatars have a soul?

Gazira Babeli: Many souls! Geographical soul, cultural soul, generational soul... feel free to go on. Ask your avatar to use the imagination soul.

Bettina Tizzy: Do you laugh a lot sitting at your keyboard as you perform these interventions?

Gazira Babeli: Yes. I laugh when I perceive intellectual fun; I cry when I see mental pain.

An 88-page catalogue "Gazira Babeli," curated by the Italian art critic Domenico Quaranta, (FPEditions, Brescia, 2008) with texts by Patrick Lichty, Alan Sondheim and Mario Gerosa, will also be presented.

Domenico Quaranta on Art in Second Life

Curator and NPIRLer Domenico Quaranta is a man of proven scholarship and also a searchingly thoughtful art critic whose writings I much admire. His blog, Spawn of the Surreal, is a compendium of analyses and reviews on New Media and a geniune source for astute observations on the topic of art in virtual worlds.

Last night, DanCoyote Antonelli - don't miss his exhiliratingly beautiful Second Spring: ZeroG SkyDancers which closes at the end of March - made me aware of this cogent paper by Domenico, which was published in Hz, an online journal run by the Swedish non-profit art group Fylkingen.

You will find many familiar names in this essay, entitled REMEDIATIONS: Art in Second Life, including Stella Costello, Fau Ferdinand, Adam Ramona, AngryBeth Shorthbread, Sugar Seville and her Odyssey Project, Juria Yoshikawa, AldoManutio Abruzzo, and of course, DanCoyote Antonelli. Domenico also pays particular attention to Cao Fei (aka China Tracy in Second Life) and Gazira Babeli, without whose early support the Not Possible IRL group would probably be but a twinkle in my avatar's eye.

Speaking of Gaz, most assuredly my favorite persona in Second Life, I'm eager to learn more about her upcoming show at the fabioparis art gallery in Brescia, Italy


Cover art for the show's 88 page catalogue, "Gazira Babeli," which was curated by none other than Domenico Quaranta

Gaz tells me she will be in-world for the opening of the show on March 15th at 9am SLT. I'm so there.

Concept Art that's fun, or intellectual - you decide: Gazira Babeli's "Collateral Damage"

The day that code performer Gazira Babeli (rezzed March 31, 2006), joined the Not Possible IRL group, I became so excited that I informed my Real Life friends and family. It's just that no other content creator in Second Life has managed to encapsulate, illustrate and celebrate the core concept of our group better than Gaz. Plus, she's got one wicked sense of humor.

Gazira's "Collateral Damage" show at her Locusolus sim is simply the most sumptuously diabolical and hilarious venue in Second Life. If you haven't experienced it, then allow me to nudge you as politely but as firmly as is necessary: on your feet, go, go, go, get a move on right over there quick quick. You can thank me later :P Oh, and your experience will be greatly enhanced if you take a friend or two along. Really.

Until today, I had held back from revealing much about "Collateral Damage" other than to gently but enthusiastically urge you to go, largely because the element of surprise is a bonus... but alas, some people won't take a friendly hint. ;) Fact is, I am always astonished when I learn that someone hasn't been there.

Art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta has already done a brilliant job of analyzing the show, and numerous other fascinating write-ups exist, such as this one by Esther DeCuir, so I will limit myself to sharing a pop/superficial - though blissful - review, and here it is: Gazira amuses herself and you by taking liberties with your head and your avatar.

Earlier this week, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing three charming individuals to some elements of the show, on the pretext of snapping some pics for this very blog post...

There are two very tall towers near the sim's entry point marked with a plaque that reads: "Unbroken Eggs: Monument to Luciano Fabro, July 2007." Chance Abattoir and I watched as Jurin Juran walked between them.



Within seconds, the buildings collapsed atop Jurin.




This being a virtual environment, the buildings promptly reassembled themselves and Jurin rejoined us, along with SuezanneC Baskerville, who had just arrived.

SuezanneC got into the spirit of things right away, and began trampling the pizzas, which responded by melodically bouncing her off, all the while bleating riffs from that Neapolitan tune "O Sole Mio," and emitting generous clouds of particles.



Meanwhile, Jurin had been caught inside a can of Campbell's soup and was getting a peppy shake. Chance was mid-air, having disobeyed instructions that read "don't say new media," and being subsequently possessed by a mini-tornado that didn't let go until some precise words were uttered.



Then, SuezanneC and Jurin discovered some large slabs of concrete that simulate a rather vigorous earthquake when stepped on.



They proved to be brave souls and forged on. We all reconvened at a platform surrounded by poseballs, and hopped on. "Come together" - as it is called - would be putting what happened next, lightly. Each avatar is taken through a series of fun and silly animations separately, but all participating avatars are merged together.




There are several other remarkable pieces within the installation, but probably the most controversial is "Avatar on Canvas," where Gaz has set up three Francis Bacon paintings with chairs that - once used - deform the avatar. Most of us treat our avatars with the same degree of narcissism and reverence that we do our Real Life bodies, so participating in this exploit requires a bit of open-minded loosening up. Speaking for myself, I can't recommend this enough. No matter how many times I've done it, it invariably cracks me up all over again.





I heartily recommend jumping back on the "Come Together" platform for some after-merging, and suggest that your little group consider following that up with a shopping or dancing expedition. It's guaranteed to bring down the house, not to mention the distinct probability that you will never feel quite the same about your avatar again...



...and, I believe, that is exactly what Gazira set out to accomplish.

Ready? Teleport directly from here.

Many thanks to Jurin Juran, SuezanneC Baskerville and Chance Abattoir for being such good sports, as well as great fun and top-notch conversationalists all through this comical experience.