O r t a M i k l o s : 6 acts of confinement
FRIEDMAN BENDA 515 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10001
Waiting for permission: it’s so twentieth-century. When Leo Orta and Victor Miklos Andersen met a few years ago, as students at the Design Academy Eindhoven, they rapidly came to a conclusion. If they wanted to say something, they should just go ahead and say it. Born digital, they were raised in an era of information overload. In a generation saturated in immediacy. More knowledge than they could possibly use, available to them instantaneously, at the speed of a click. With that as their formative experience, how could they take seriously the conventional climb up the professional ladder? Its elaborate customs of credentialing, its well-guarded barriers to entry? Given that the line was arbitrarily drawn in the first place, they figured they’d just jump it. Accordingly, they crashed Dutch Design Week, staging an uninvited performance; since then, institutional doors have been more formally opened to them, including an impressive installation of their work at the Marini Marino Museum in Florence (2019), and inclusion in Kleureyck, an exhibition at the Design Museum Gent. Even as they have emerged as the proverbial ‘ones to watch,’ however, they have maintained a rebellious aspect, signaled in the effacement of their own identities. They often wear stockings over their heads, or otherwise mask themselves. To some extent, this is a self-conscious reference to other moments in the history of the avant garde, from Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (conceived in 1912) to the politically-engaged anonymity of the Guerrilla Girls (founded in 1985). But it is more indicative of the slippery, infinitely refracted condition in which Millennial designers like OrtaMilkos necessarily operate. As part of a generation that often approaches identity itself as a put-on (see: Instagram), or else a political minefield (see: intersectionality), they treat authorship as a contact sport, worked out rough-and-tumble in front of an audience. OrtaMiklos describe their own personae as those of “outline characters,” like those drawn by a cartoonist, which can be filled-in however they please. “Design for us is not necessarily about pleasant things,” they say. “It should address all human traits.” Depending on when and how you catch them in action, they can seem like hard-working artisans, black bloc activists, fashion models, mad scientists, a hazardous materials cleanup crew, or most likely, a provocative combination of some or all these things. One of their performances – staged at the Reference Berlin Festival, in 2019 – involved meter upon meter of electrical cable which they unspooled from a giant reel, gradually became hopelessly entangled in the skein of wiring. They wore bright striped outfits by the British fashion designer Martine Rose, poised at the midpoint between catwalk couture and prison uniforms. This was a pantomime of contemporary life, thoroughly enmeshed and radially contingent. It expressed the psychological condition of maintaining double identities, online and IRL, each in the thrall of the other: “you are a slave to the network,” they say, “but you are also the one creating it and sustaining it.” The actual objects that OrtaMiklos create often originate as props for their performances, and are similarly improvisatory in their execution. Spontaneity is one of their few constants. They describe their way of working as conversational, both with each other and the evolving designs – “action, reflection, action, reflection” – and they riff on the canon, from the Bauhaus forward, like jazz musicians making standards their own. They navigate design history like an obstacle course, moving through it for the purpose of moving beyond it. Occasionally, this results in a direct assault, as in their Melting Thonet and Melting Breuer chairs. More often, the results feel more shifty, a cascade of half-remembered references, with Pop designers like Verner Panton, Italian radical groups like Archizoom, Studio Alchimia and Memphis, the provocateur Gaetano Pesce, and recent stars like Maarten Baas and Max Lamb all in the mix.
Their material selection, too, is associative, and communicates high-speed expedience. They have said that their ideal would be to build with whatever lay ready to hand within a two-meter radius. In practice, they gravitate to widely available construction supplies like concrete and wood pulp, Styrofoam and fiberglass, metal mesh and steel bar, and more electrical cable. They approach all these materials in a radically open-minded manner, which they knowingly refer to as “ignorant design.” This means purposefully avoiding anything resembling correct technique, seeing what happens if they (say) pour wet concrete into stockings, or weave wiring into ad hoc upholstery. Their proportions tend to be exaggerated and weighty, with a sense of absolute rightness somehow won from extreme awkwardness. Color is also a big part of their language, typically in an aggressively artificial key, sprayed-on like overnight graffiti. Even at its most extravagantly expressive, as in Dripping Table, their approach evokes not so much an actual painting, oil on canvas, but the floor and walls of a much-used studio. For the current exhibition at Friedman Benda, which bears the cinematic title 6 Acts of Confinement, OrtaMiklos has arranged their objects into discrete scenes, in a multivalent response to the current coronavirus crisis. Like just about every other exhibition scheduled for this moment, this one was massively disrupted by the lockdown. They wanted to acknowledge that circumstance head-on. Admittedly, this may come to them more readily than other artists, for they have always embraced uncertainty as a core value. It was not the pandemic that first prompted them to make “forms that appear to be unknown, the same as we feel as where our future is going.” They were already doing it. Similarly, the themes that they take up in the exhibition are all trajectories that were already in motion prior to the pandemic, though no doubt accelerated by it: the liquidity of personal relationships; the rise of a frightening (but fragile) authoritarianism; the emergence of pocket utopias within the urban fabric; the reimagining of the home as an emotional wilderness; the imagination as a release valve, when one feels trapped; the sense that objects are taking on their own subjectivities, intertwined with our own. These narrative themes are further extended in a digital work, Temple of Confinement, which is set within a virtual reconstruction of the Temple of Dendur, the famous – and famously displaced – Egyptian sacred site that anchors the ancient collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Completed in 10BCE at the behest of the Roman Emperor Augustus, and dedicated to the goddess Isis, the Temple was the result of cross-cultural contact from its beginning. Its removal to New York City in 1965, a time when Nasser’s Egypt was actively cultivating diplomatic relationships with the United States, is a fascinating episode in geopolitical history. And today, it could be seen as an emblem of sequestered culture. Though the Temple cannot be visited due to the Covid-19 crisis, it can be seen by the public through the Met’s glass exterior, big as life. OrtaMiklos, of course, invited themselves right in. In their digital occupation of the monument, they respond obliquely but powerfully to all of these layered chapters in the Temple’s history, viewing it as a quintessential example of mediated and globalized space. Indeed, their unauthorized seizure is arguably far less strange and surreal than its physical transplantation over 5000 miles from its original site – not to mention its more recent roles as a selfie magnet and frequent backdrop for fashion shoots. The video they have created is a work of many hands, first and foremost the digital 3D artist Janis Melderis, who is based in London and also attended Design Academy Eindhoven. Melderis is responsible for a great deal of the project’s aesthetic, which he shaped in response to conversations with Orta and Andersen. Another important player here has been the writer Richard Johnston Jones, who constructed an allusive
accompanying text, laced with gorgeously suggestive phrases in both poetic and prosaic modes. A small troupe of performers was gathered to portray the inhabitants of this world that is and is not our own, Orta and Andersen among them (the duo appear at the end of the video, stockings distorting their faces, regarding us with an expression of mixed sorrow and defiance). A final spacious sound layer was contributed by composer Amédée De Murcia. OrtaMiklos have orchestrated all these diverse talents to forge an arresting compound of image, sound, and text, which ricochets through the disturbing psychological terrain of the present. As in the rest of the exhibition, OrtaMiklos focus in the video on transformative effects that were already underway pre-Covid-19, but have been further catalyzed by the crisis. The first scene, only a few seconds long, already manages to strike notes of personal alienation, entanglement, and instability. The Temple of Dendur looms in the background, transformed by an agglomeration of biomorphic appendages and allusive symbols, including a globe-shaped finial (it resembles the Unisphere at the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair, which was on when the Temple came to America). In a self-referential move, the performers wear costumes from Nexus Architecture (2001), a “social sculpture” by the artist Lucy Orta – Leo’s mother – which presciently explored interconnectivity as both a support system and an imprisoning matrix. As the video proceeds still other notes are struck, prestissimo: individual loneliness, suburban territorialism, and strongman politics, a wild pastiche of imagery from the museum to the street, antiquity to today, Michelangelo’s David to Kim Kardashian. In one scene, a shirtless figure sits astride one of OrtaMiklos’s tall thrones, a meteor shower of ruination swirling around him. In another, a helmeted, booted and gloved figure (an astronaut, or just an average citizen of planet Covid-19?) regards a façade of portals. They flap open and shut like butterfly wings. The scene is strangely reminiscent of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose Rückenfiguren (“figures seen from behind”) gaze out on awe-inspiring landscapes of mountain and sea. In OrtaMiklos’s version, the natural sublime is replaced by a technological one. And the vantage is not expansive but claustrophobic: a visual echo chamber, a false-front of quavering perceptual apertures. I thought of Friedrich, perhaps, because Temple of Confinement is laced throughout with references and resonances, for those who care to look: Orta’s costumes, Buckminster Fuller’s space frames, Richard Hamilton’s collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), the writings of Philip K. Dick, and above all, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969), a grid structure that the Italian radical design group imagined extending over the whole planet. If that project seemed extraordinarily prescient in anticipating an interconnected globe, then OrtaMiklos provide an answering vision, equally difficult to situate on the spectrum from utopia to dystopia, looking back from the end of the gravitational rainbow. They are in sympathy with the idea of “metamodernism” (as popularized by the theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, in 2010), a mode in which avant garde tropes and techniques are not undercut ironically, as in postmodern practice, but rather embraced as a pragmatic toolkit, a way of coping with the precarious present. It’s too early, obviously, to summarize the impact of the coronavirus and its resulting lockdown. Not a day goes by without a confident prediction from some talking head. Covid-19 will bring out the worst in us, tipping democracies vertiginously toward fascism. No! It will bring out the best in us, introducing community spirit where there was previously only raw division. Here’s my own guess: like any epochal event, the pandemic’s long-term effect, like the pandemic itself, will be chaotic. There will be no consensus on what happened. OrtaMiklos have already accepted this. More, they
have absorbed that indeterminacy into their creative process, bone and fiber. At a time when truth itself has become tribal, channeled by mutually conflicting ideological affinities, they voice the importance of multivalence and refractory thinking. To the extent that they are futurists – like so many other avant gardistes before them – this is where they’ve fast-forwarded to. It’s a reality of their own devising, alternately fascinating and dismaying, deeply in doubt, yet bristling with energy. A world that only they can see – though it is much like our own. —Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art
OrtaMiklos and Jānis Melderis Temple of Confinement, 2020 Video still
It’s during a moment of lockdown that the mind wants to escape. Perhaps it escapes into forms that appear to be unknown, the same as where we feel our future is going,� - OrtaMiklos
OrtaMiklos: 6 acts of confinement Friedman Benda, NY
Morphosis TV Bench, 2020 Styrofoam, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, spray paint, crayons, lacquer 55.25 x 110.25 x 29.5 inches 140 x 280 x 75 cm
Blue Haliclona Sponge - Coral Floor Lamp Series, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 69 x 35.5 x 19.75 inches 175 x 90 x 50 cm
White Haliclona Sponge - Coral Floor Lamp Series, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 63 x 31.5 x 43.5 inches 160 x 80 x 110 cm
Plantasia Tree Lamp 01, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, fiberglass, polyester, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 74.5 x 33.5 x 35.5 inches 189 x 85 x 90 cm
Plantasia Tree Lamp 02, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, fiberglass, polyester, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 71 x 33.5 x 35.5 inches 180 x 85 x 90 cm
Clathria Red Sponge - Coral Table Lamp Series, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 12.75 x 13 x 12 inches 32 x 33 x 30 cm
Green Staghorn - Coral Table Lamp Series, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 27.5 x 26 x 21.25 inches 70 x 66 x 54 cm
Orange Great Star - Coral Table Lamp Series, 2020 Metal mesh, steel, wood, pulp, paint, lacquer, light fittings 23.75 x 23.75 x 21.75 inches 60 x 60 x 55 cm
Concrete Lamp, 2020 Steel, pulp, concrete, pigments, fibers, lacquer 84.75 x 49.25 x 33.5 inches 215 x 125 x 85 cm
Doggy Caddy Chair, 2020 Styrofoam, steel, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, lacquer 38.25 x 49.25 x 43.5 inches 97 x 125 x 110 cm
Deer-in-Residence, 2020 Styrofoam, steel, fiberglass, polyester 45.25 x 37.5 x 39.5 inches 115 x 95 x 100 cm
Electric Wave Chair, 2020 Steel, concrete, pigments, fibers, electric cable, lacquer 47.25 x 28.75 x 25.25 inches 120 x 73 x 64 cm
Entangled Eel Armchair, 2020 Styrofoam, steel, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, lacquer 43.5 x 45.25 x 43.25 inches 110 x 115 x 110 cm
Melting Breuer, 2020 Steel, powder coating 31.5 x 31.5 x 47.25 inches 80 x 80 x 120 cm
Melting Thonet, 2020 Steel, powder coating 35.5 x 31.5 x 31.5 inches 90 x 80 x 80 cm
Surfing USA Chair, 2020 Styrofoam, steel, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, lacquer 49.25 x 47.25 x 33.5 inches 125 x 120 x 85 cm
U.O. (Unidentified Object), 2020 Steel, powder coating, pu foam, painted canvas 36.25 x 92.5 x 46.5 inches 92 x 235 x 118 cm
Floating Night Coffee Table, 2020 Styrofoam, wood, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, lacquer 17.75 x 59 x 59 inches 45 x 150 x 150 cm
Dripping Table, 2020 Steel frame, plexiglass, fiberglass, polyester, pigments, paint 30.25 x 55.25 x 41 inches 77 x 140 x 104 cm
Power Desk, 2020 Styrofoam, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, crayons, lacquer 40.25 x 74.75 x 47.25 inches 102 x 190 x 120 cm
World-Tortoise, 2020 Styrofoam, wood, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, lacquer 100.5 x 78.75 x 45 inches 255 x 200 x 114 cm
Rugrat Coat Rack, 2020 Steel, powder coating, electrical wires 67 x 78.75 x 25.5 inches 170 x 200 x 65 cm
OrtaMiklos and JÄ nis Melderis Temple of Confinement, 2020 Video still
Braulio Amado and OrtaMiklos A cabeça Ê um peso morto, 2020 Offset print 36 x 24 inches 91.4 x 61 cm Edition of 100
Coady Brown Moonshadows, 2019 Acrylic, airbrush, collage, and sand on paper 26 x 22 inches 66 x 56 cm
Salomé Chatriot Fluid Landscapes, 2020 Video still Edition of 5 Salomé Chatriot Liquid Breathing, 2020 Video still Edition of 5
Salomé Chatriot Plasma, 2020 Video still Edition of 5
Sarah Faux Little patch of sky, 2020 Oil on canvas 30 x 40 x 2 inches 76.2 x 101.6 x 5.1 cm
Reginald Sylvester II The Sun Sets on Greener Pastures, 2020 Oil and cotton paper on canvas stretched on wood board 60 x 48 x 2.5 inches 152.4 x 121.9 x 6.4 cm
the world’s largest store devoted to space memorabilia:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Classic NASA “Meatball” Logo T-Shirt Space Shuttle Atlantis Pullback Toy Fisher Space Pens Kids’ Astronaut Flight Suits Space Shuttle Atlantis Plush Reusable Bags Snow Globes NASA “Meatball” Logo Mug NASA “Meatball” Logo Sweatshirt Freeze-Dried Astronaut Ice Cream and Strawberries
well-being (mood-calming room odouriser): only by reassessing your burnt stockpiles can you inform yourself that the wax drip of nylon increases neural firing across the blank decks of stairwell glades diving from glass lighting boards onto the rushing steel of server farms
the ebbing field banks of telephone stations pour out stale honey for CBD bathwater drip
through these mood analogues new labouring curvatures add gloss to petal shavings repetitions of the Styx reduce the pool of chiselled leather to stagnant derricks while old candle script is used to divine the corrugated recesses of wallpaper print
this is why we step into holograms twice to be a slash across canvas an orifice in the centre of the room to trace the vertabratic dunes of bent coins asking for directions at integers of spilt feed on the corner of Grayscale and Maisonette I have used this phrase before, but you can only manage your disruption with sawn-off vocabulary and crazy paving name your dream ceiling fan and tentacular equine legs burst from pedestals like spring trees in marbled gardens you must control the aura of your objects
lift deep breaths from the damp air of the Charles-Potomac radiating audio shimmer from twenty-eight thousand tons of electrofished burrobrush
on a platform gently draped in stippled mirrors small beads are rolled handfuls of black orbs sliding like clutches of spiders on blistered sand resting in unreflective pools words are rendered ornamental fish anti-monuments to their markings
Black Friday sales: where and what to buy: In 2016, Bruce Sterling conducted a short interview for Wired magazine with a spokesperson for the private military company Academi. “The heart of poetry,” claims the spokesperson, “now lies in physics-manipulation, unconfirmed black-ops projects, and holo-projected religious mystery”. “Each four-dimensional stanza,” he continues, “is a digital reconstruction of a different wetware process”. In conflict zones in Central Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe this strategic technology has proven highly effective and financially lucrative for Academi and similar companies. Over the course of the interview, Stirling picks out some current examples: use of Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulators for laying and clearing minefields; leaked TR-3B surveillance footage uploaded to WikiLeaks; combat seminars on Herman Melville’s ‘Clarel’; projections of the RSC’s Hamlet overdubbed with Paul Williams’ account of an unsolved California burglary in 1971; the editing of Kurdish dream sequences by Ankara-backed militias. Closing-out the interview, Stirling asks the spokesperson about the correlation between commercial and military-grade interfaces for cognitive mapping. “One of the most striking comparisons,” says the spokesperson, “is between the holographic modelling carried out by the Andrew Wylie Institute (AWI) in the early 1980s and what we have now. The Wylie Institute was preoccupied with developing an information processing network that was archival, diagnostic, and holistic – a kind of virtual rendering of the mind. While the modern day equivalent is honed for field use, strategic coms, intelligence gathering, and ideological infiltration”. Indeed, this is a far-flung vision from what the AWI originally intended. Dr Herb Asher and his team were inspired by the archaeological scene of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna offices as a reflection of his pursuit for an adequate metaphor for the human mind. Here, as Peter Stilling explains, in the museum-like setting, “both analyst and analysand were caught in a visual and temporal nexus that spanned whole ages and linked in an almost tactile way the therapeutic work of the present to the evocative, even mystical, images and artifacts of the Mediterranean past”. Asher and his team used this as a springboard for the development of a “holoscope” – a manipulable holographic device – based on the New Jerusalem Bible. The result was a fully editable textual interface that could be navigated in three dimensions. Each alteration made to the text affected its structure and therefore changed its interpretive orientation and outcome. Following Asher’s death in 1982, his team’s research was annexed by the U.S. military, who adapted it for combat application. As the permanent war economy became increasingly decentralised throughout the 1990s, a number of Western governments outsourced the maintenance of their holoscopic libraries to private security firms. On top of this, private licences were granted to companies to build their own libraries and research facilities for the enhancement of their humanitarian and military consultancy capabilities. As Stirling reflects, what is so curious, is that despite its ubiquitous application in conflict zones across the globe, the holoscope garnered scant coverage outside military circles until the technology became available to the general public by way of Amazon’s home assistant ALIS (Amazon Living Information System).
MK ‘69: in Pluto’s park go spliced regions of space paraphrased across the BBQ pits of of Polish football firms which in 1976 metal works defenestrated TV sets and portraits of Lenin across smelted continents squandering movement like glaucomic boatmen paddling down clogged waterways cave-indexes and catalogue numbers straining the air from haunted burgs which lie flat-packed and crumbling to be convoked one evening as spidery whispers of the past and scleroses of the future. vaults, mines, libraries, and archives, shattered particles, reference manuals, and encyclopaedic footnotes, urban traffic churning the night time economy, daisies withering in cramped bowls, dredged recesses of spiralled reservoirs, the circumferences of vacant silos tracing the lost orbits of crop circles. Melville in the ruins: a recent search history: “foam on beach and pebbles like slaver of mad dog – ”
“leprosy – encrustation of curse – old cheese – ”
“I long for scenes where man hath never trod” G-M detector//release sensor pulse threshold and shaper//inverter low pass filter – comparator//comparator level switch arming AND gate//safing AND gate power xformer secondary – arming energy storage – safing switch//arming switch explosive switch – mix-tape for a pair of dead corals: archipelago of welts **written in soap bubbles** across part-stripped paintwork **bustin’** masonry dives **jeans commercial** off plaster reefs **torn condominium** chipped coracles **functional music** of plasterboard
“bitterness of life – thought of all bitter things”
sub-marinal Hilton vertigoes **contort yourself** sighted from trawler decks
- Text by Richard Johnston Jones
“plague-stricken splendour reigns in the painted and mildewed walls”
“mumbled – mere refuse and rubbish of creation”
“wandering among the tombs – ”
“overgrown with the horrible cactus”
OrtaMiklos Present
Based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands and Les Moulins, France
2015
Founded in Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Partners LEO ORTA Present
Lives and works between Paris and Les Moulins, France
2019
B.A., Design Academy Eindhoven, The Netherlands
1993
Born in France
VICTOR MIKLOS ANDERSEN Present
Lives and works in Eindhoven, The Netherlands
2019
B.A., Design Academy Eindhoven, The Netherlands
1992
Born in Denmark
Select Exhibitions 2020
Kleureyck: Van Eyck’s Colours in Design, Design Museum Gent, Gent, Belgium
2019-20
The (Functional) Art of This Century, Functional Art Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2019
Bagnols Garden, Functional Art Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Dissolving Views, Salone del Mobile, Milan, Italy 2018
Icebergs In Progress, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy
Creatures, Copenhagen Art Week, Copenhagen, Denmark Functional Art, Functional Art Gallery, Berlin, Germany Morph, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, The Netherlands La Totale, Les Moulins, France
OrtaMiklos
Published by Friedman Benda 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel. + 1 212 239 8700 www.friedmanbenda.com Special thanks to the studio of OrtaMiklos. Photography: Daniel Kukla, Emily Orta. Content copyright of Friedman Benda and OrtaMiklos. Published on the occasion of the exhibition OrtaMiklos: 6 acts of confinement, June 22 - July 31, 2020.