Archived: MÄRZ Project Space: artist Tom Russotti
Having spend time traveling to spread the mission of Institute of Aestletics, Russotti has been around in Estonia for quite some time now, doing residency at Polymer.
On that evening Russotti will speak his mind about his practice as artist, game inventor and couch and will screen bets pieces form play field.
Remember summers filled with sno-cones and going to the pool and games of Wiffle Hurling and Straightjacket Softball? If you say yes you are a liar because Tom Russotti made them up.(1) Combining aesthetics aka art with athletics aka sport, Russotti invents one game after another that can be taken as sport and/or as participatory arts. Emphasizing instead of competition and winning-loosing spectacle and social situations, physical effort and adventurism is still very much there in aesthletics. If you have sometimes wondered why in Estonian Ministry of Culture and in National Endowment are sports and art under same roof, then one way how very elegantly and playfully to combine these two areas, would be aestletics!
Besides aestheltics is under the investigation other Russotti`s initiative – Pedalto, Institute for Incorporated Art, which was actively participating recently also in Polymer festival, executing several special missions, with participation of specially attending agents all over the world. Pedalto research is mainly focused on organizational systems and structures as creative practices, looking for overlapping points between artists and organizational workers. Pedalto has two main fields of interest: Incorporated Art and Bureaucratic Art and if it all scares you away a bit, then imagine Kafka- or Metropolis-like machinery approached as artistic practice. Technocratic society (as cursed by Theodore Roszak for example) is constant source of inspiration for agents of Pedalto and by over mystifying it, it sets us free. (But setting free is of course not the case here, suits on and fast forward).
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On the couch sessions at MÄRZ are artist talks complemented with self-reliant questionnaires from psychology, in order to analyze types, roles, duties, traumas and definitions of success and happiness of contemporary artists. Through possibility to share ones experiences, on the couch sessions help artist to get feedback to his/hers practices and existence, feel himself/herself more confident and purify therapeutically, in order to be ready for next challenges, which there is no doubt, many.
On the couch session with Tom Russotti is lead by art critic and curator Maarin Murky.