http://www.curating.info/archives/406-Job-Curator,-Artspace-Visual-Arts-Centre.html
http://www.artspace.org.au/about_news.php?i=20110209164750
http://www.apexart.org/residency.htm
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
E-waste
http://www.poly.edu/news/2011/01/20/treasure-trash-recent-grad-ed-bear-works-curb-e-waste
Treasure from Trash: Recent Grad Ed Bear Works to Curb E-waste
Published January 20th, 2011
Ed Bear
January 28th, 2011View Slideshow
Turn an Obsolete iTrip into a Multi-purpose FM Transmitter
Organized under the banner of TERRE (Technical Education Reusing and Repurposing E-waste), the five workshops took place throughout the spring and fall semesters at NYU-Poly. They ranged in content from building an FM radio transmitter to reverse-engineering a common consumer product. Attendees were asked to solve equations and then were presented with an example of the equation in real life — taking apart a DVD player, for instance, and then using one of its motors to power a light and measure the efficiency of the motor as a power source.
“It’s maybe a complicated question if you want a really precise answer,” says Bear, “but behind it is a pretty simple idea that people haven’t encountered in a situation that’s kinesthetic and visual and tactile.”
Hands-on learning turns out to be the foundation of the TERRE workshops, which reused parts from the audited items as class materials. “A mechanical engineer that’s seen the plastic parts of a DVD player translating motion in these different ways is better prepared to do their job. They have a better chance of visualizing that system in the future or modifying it,” says Bear.
Growing more excited, the slight, bespectacled Bear fires off rapidly, “The student that feels a specific metal bend — sees how strong it actually is — doesn’t just have to trust a number, but can also develop engineering intuition, which is valuable.”
Bear acknowledges that other groups organize similar events, but he’s adamant about the importance of the TERRE workshops occurring in an academic setting. “This is something you can do on your own,” he says. “It’s not like you need a giant lab.” He’s once more emphasizing the importance of experiential learning at the college level, which Bear argues is glossed over by the scientific establishment.
In what may be the best example of experiential learning, Bear himself learned that the pedagogy he supports has its own lessons to each. Reflecting on the workshops, he says, “I kind of thought that it would be something I could pass off to people, but I underestimated the amount of skills needed to design and run a class like this.”
Aware now of improvements that could benefit the workshops, Bear hopes to hold them at other colleges around the country. Already one is scheduled at the University of Ohio in the spring, with others tentatively slated elsewhere. Asked his final thoughts on the workshops, Bear pauses before saying, “If you’ve got a DVD player in a bunch of kids’ hands and they take it apart and go through this cathartic learning experience, that can’t be a bad thing.”
Bear will present one of his workshops at the Dumbo Arts Center (30 Washington St. Brooklyn NY) February 21, 7 – 10 pm. Tickets are $30.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Abraham Cruzvillegas
On Valentines Day I listened to Abraham Cruzvillegas speak about Robert Smithson at Dia. I thought it was perfect for the holiday, a compassionate, subjective, rizomatic discourse on a day about connectivity, the untouchable, anti-capitalist personal identity, love- the only thing we truly own and that which unites us all. Abraham poetically linked glass, maping and Atlantis, he spoke about William Carlos Williams saying that all poems are about objects, Abraham's parents were shown to us, and they mapped, in their own words, the construction of their home. I appreciated the corporal simplicity of saying this is my mom and dad. I also appreciated that he wanted to break free of language, oh my god, excuse the expression, but it was so similar to the conversation that I had with Joey, Shelby and Julia about four weeks ago where the end result was that all art needed to be necessary, and that what is needed right now is the rebellion of zero, we have been about the attitude and force, the frenetic and commercial, and we really need that which cannot be named, or touched, we need that which is between two people, the exclusive, we need something outside of the repetition, or the boarder defined, we need something so big that it's small. This talk took those thoughts, and engulfed them, activated them and went further. I was very impressed and pleased.
Then I met him at the New Museum while working, it was a real joy to share with him my reaction. He is extremely, deeply, kind, a true artist. I think that we work with similar concepts, or he listed concepts that I related to, either way I respect him. During his talk at the museum he spoke about not liking nostalgia, I wanted to say that I made a piece about that five years ago called 'Before the Kiss A.K.A. the Creatures of Nostalgia' that slandered nostalgia as though it were a demon. Since then I understand the need, but I always have an eye out about it. He also spoke about creating hands off real porn in LA, he even used the word spontaneous, it was so similar to my own points in Narrator, I wanted to cry, or shake. The promotional card for Narrator talked about juxtaposing fabricated actions with spontaneous ones, and my performers who had sex on stage were told to 'perform' as little as possible, with a focus on privacy and sincerity on stage. Incredible.
ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS
Interview by Arden Decker-Parks
. . .
abraham cruzvillegas, la invencible, 2002, mixed media
Abraham Cruzvillegas prefers to be called an “intergalactic indigenous,” seemingly for his ability to walk the line between the local and the global—socially, economically, and politically. His multi-media objects are made of found materials, or as he calls them, “leftovers” (feathers, sheep dung, knives, bacon, maguey plants, etc.) from both his homeland, Mexico, and any number of international locales. The materials are joined together in constructions whose inspiration is drawn as readily from Duchamp as from the collaboratively-built homes of his childhood. These incoherent assemblages involve juxtaposing the organic and the manufactured, the handmade and the mass-produced, making them seem to have landed in the gallery as a result of a series of clandestine and possibly prodigious events. As a sculptor and writer, Cruzvillegas began as a central participant in a new wave of conceptual art practice in Mexico City during the late 1980s and 90s, when he first studied under Gabriel Orozco. He has since become a fixture in the global conceptual assemblage scene and has exhibited at the 25th São Paulo Bienal (2002), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (“Unmonumental,” 2007), and the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, where he opened the latest installment of his long-term project “Autoconstrucción.”
Arden Decker-Parks: This year marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968, a pivotal moment for Mexico and the world. Coincidentally, this is also the year of your birth. Could you talk a bit about growing up in Mexico following the tragic events of 1968 and how it impacted your work?
ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS: The brutal repression of students in Tlatelolco Square on October 2nd, 1968 is a black mark in the history of my country. It pointed to the death of the old political system and to an awareness for a possible democratic future, not yet achieved. Brilliant minds got together [to fight] against the government and for change at all levels of society. Since then, many young people have been looking for more equal conditions for labor, education, health, and culture. The events and consequences of 1968 deeply affected the development of culture and society and haven’t quite stopped doing so. The conditions for creation were considerably surveilled, with a paternalist control over every sentence, every brushstroke, and every image. But these circumstances also provoked diverse and autonomous [reactionary] practices, sometimes ideologized, other times just attempting to do things in a free way, open to non-traditional languages and techniques. Some artists created without funds, without support or collaboration, except for that which came from other artists and colleagues, and slowly, cultural institutions began giving money and scholarships. Meanwhile, independent spaces and projects developed different strategies, [providing] evidence of the rich, plural activity during all these years.
abraham cruzvillegas, aeropuerto alterno, 2002, wood, knives
Decker-Parks: How do you perceive your relationship to the Mexican conceptual tradition, if at all?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t perceive any Mexican conceptual tradition. I see some individuals attempting to produce knowledge from the field of art, and I’m grateful for their work, ideas, and energy. I prefer to invoke concrete persons and events that have influenced my work and intentions, and it goes back long before the so-called “conceptual” tradition and far beyond the field of visual art. In the Foucauldian sense, I think of this as my genealogy: Víctor Jara, Germán List Arzubide, José José, Xavier Villaurrutia, Héctor Lavoe, Adolfo Best Maugard, Jimmie Durham, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Medalla, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Höch, Piero Manzoni, Jean-Luc Godard, Lucio Fontana, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Picabia, Werner Herzog, Jorge Luis Borges, José Guadalupe Posada, Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Alighiero e Boetti, François Rabelais, Eva Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Smithson, Josef Albers, Lynda Benglis, Hélio Oiticica, André Cadere, Rosalind Krauss, Melquiades Herrera, Luis Buñuel, Lucy Lippard, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Cravan, Miguel Covarrubias, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Jarry, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alexander Calder, Gabriel Orozco, Carl Lumholtz, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham, Harry Smith, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Buckminster Fuller, Roberto Bolaño, Marius de Zayas, Erik Satie, John Cage, Julián Carrillo, Tom Zé, etc.
Decker-Parks: Is there a connective thread running through this genealogy?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I always wanted to state my belonging to something I call a delirious chain of delirious facts. I like to feel part of a chaotic thread of facts, related to the possibility of widening our understanding of reality in a non-linear way. Then, it’s not a thread but many threads in a disastrous hank, ready to knit with.
abraham cruzvillegas, canon enigmatico a 108 voces, 2005, buoys, wire, rope
Decker-Parks: Your work relies heavily on the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the mass-produced and is therefore often described as relating to a DIY aesthetic. In which ways, if any, did this quality grow out of your experiences in Mexico? Do you feel that it’s fair to understand your use of ephemeral and found materials as a product of the Latin American economic condition?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t see my work as being related to a DIY aesthetic. In fact, it’s hard for me to relate it to any particular aesthetic will. I think it’s fair to understand my work through the use of some materials in terms of local economic systems, depending on where I’m working and with whom. It’s possible that my relationships with particular objects and processes are determined by my own education and context, but this is circumstantial. The most important thing for me is to make work independent of my biography; even when the prime matter of it is my own experience, thoughts, and practice, it must be autonomous and free. I make works that do not talk about me, but do not talk about anything else either. They are supposed to be speechless and mute. They neither communicate nor express anything except that which the viewer wants or thinks. There’s no chance for mistakes or misunderstanding.
abraham cruzvillegas, ront point, 2006, glass bottles, aluminum, acrylic paint, tape
Decker-Parks: In works such as Los Danzantes and Slow Growth (both 2004), you inject references to Mexico with fresh approaches to material and symbolism. Has this artistic acknowledgment of your Mexican background affected the reception of your work, especially considering that you are often described as an international conceptualist?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like to play with titles, as they are sometimes used as keys for the “understanding” of the work. None of the references such as names for specific works are linked to any narrative, nor do they spark or activate any hidden meaning, as I usually try not to deal with meanings, much less try to hide anything. In some cases, the titles refer to the names of my favorite bars and cantinas, the names of beers and other drinks (as in Los Danzantes, my preferred mescal), the names of the streets of my changing neighborhoods, the names of diseases, people, places, catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes, or politicians’ nicknames. When I refer to the production of a self-portrait, it is almost always in a way in which the viewers reflect themselves in the work, imagining their own individual identities, as I’ve been trying to do all these years. I would prefer to be considered an intergalactic indigenous, instead of an international conceptualist.
Decker-Parks: Collaboration and participation are also essential components. How, if at all, do you relate your work to the broader dialogue of relational aesthetics?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like Nicolas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics (2002), which has fantastic examples, such as Rirkrit Tiravanjia and Gabriel Orozco. Some other references, not necessarily from art history, have also strongly influenced my practice and my language, as happened with my long-term project called “Autoconstrucción.” Here, I’m talking again about my experience of growing up in a particular environment as a trigger for shaping ideas and experience into sculptural processes. The house in Mexico City where I was born and grew up was built in a collaborative way over almost forty years and is not yet finished. It is composed chaotically, building, transforming, changing, adapting, canceling, and destroying itself, with the participation of every member of the family, along with relatives, neighbors, friends, and builders. Here, capitalist efficiency has proved not to be the best [strategy] for cultural production. Like much self-building around the world, my house shows the evidence of a social clash and uneven wealth distribution, but also of the ingenuity and the wisdom that [follow from] specific needs.
Decker-Parks: On that note, could you discuss the most recent installment of your “Autoconstrucción” project, which you just completed in Glasgow?
CRUZVILLEGAS: In “Autoconstrucción: Sound,” my exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), there are some sculptures made in Cove Park during the summer, improvising with materials from that context: wool, sheep shit, chicken wire, discarded furniture, cardboard, stones, grass, and my own hair. I’ve constructed unplanned assemblages, testing new dialogues with odd, contradictory objects and prime matter, inspired by my parents’ house in Mexico City as an improvised space, chaotic, ugly, made without budget, ideas, or plans, and definitely unfinished. The room attempts to be a messy landscape overpopulated with objects; as the groups of objects and materials will be chaotic and unstable, the whole will make walking through unstable as well. All of the sculptures hang form the ceiling or lie directly over the floor. Also, while in Cove Park, I wrote some lyrics about my house. They were written in a hybrid combination of inspiring sources, such as romantic popular music, folk, bolero, dub, rock’n’roll, salsa, reggae, Brazilian music, corrido, punk, ska, cumbia, trova, funk, protest music, commercial pop, norteño, hip-hop, etc. Then, I asked bands from Glasgow to create the music for the eighteen sets of lyrics, and we recorded eighteen songs, all eclectic. When the album was ready, I played the music in the streets and squares of Glasgow with a sound system constructed as a mobile sculpture. This street cart was made in collaboration with John O’Hara in a workshop in Bridgeton, which is part of a project called The Common Wheel, whose members present themselves as follows: “We exist to provide meaningful activity for people with mental illness by recycling and repairing old bicycles.” The sound system was made with parts from used, discarded, or old bikes and diverse furniture, pipes, sticks, and carpets, recycling bits and pieces. The sound system directly refers to people riding in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s, but also to DJ and MC practices around the world, and especially the Sonidero tradition of Mexico City. Important parts of this project are collaborative and are created in a contaminated cultural environment, which means shifting something personal, from my own experience, to a local platform and circumstance. For example, the appropriation of the lyrics by the bands into their own subjectivity was central for the collaboration. Earlier, for other projects, I cooperated with people from diverse contexts and fields: craft makers, historians, professors, physicians, builders, students, and artists. The sound system is in the largest room of the CCA, playing the music of the album. Everybody is allowed to ride it in the space. There is a video, showing a documentation of the spaces where the music was played in the streets. This was made with a fixed camera on the vehicle, registering its transit in Glasgow, randomly capturing people’s lives and activities. The video is projected directly onto the walls of the room from a projector attached to a pole on the mobile sculpture. I wrote the lyrics myself with a pencil on the walls of the room, around the sound system.
abraham cruzvillegas, ac mobile, 2008, customized bicycle, steel pipes, wood, cardboard, cables, car battery, speakers, mirrors, car stereo, video projector, dvd player, tea flask, bell, horn
Decker-Parks: Given the current global economic situation, how do you think the role of the art object and of the artist are going to change?
CRUZVILLEGAS: Recently, I met designer Michael Marriott, who used to wear a jumper with a printed slogan that describes his own practice: Shop local. As a statement, it is powerful and meaningful. As an everyday practice, it is something that goes into a humble territory, which means that it is important to support regional survival strategies, more than fighting against transnational business and corporations. In that way, producing in a local manner may allow creation to describe specific contexts and structures. Ideas are individual, local, and eccentric, not global, even when the individuals who produce them could be surfing the globe, without a national, ethnic, or group identity. Working in a collaborative way—no matter the field or the reach of the extent—will always allow artists to extend, via sharing risks and joy, the ability to produce knowledge in small-cell organic developments.
. . .
2009 http://www.museomagazine.com/938447/ABRAHAM-CRUZVILLEGAS
Interview by Arden Decker-Parks
. . .
Abraham Cruzvillegas prefers to be called an “intergalactic indigenous,” seemingly for his ability to walk the line between the local and the global—socially, economically, and politically. His multi-media objects are made of found materials, or as he calls them, “leftovers” (feathers, sheep dung, knives, bacon, maguey plants, etc.) from both his homeland, Mexico, and any number of international locales. The materials are joined together in constructions whose inspiration is drawn as readily from Duchamp as from the collaboratively-built homes of his childhood. These incoherent assemblages involve juxtaposing the organic and the manufactured, the handmade and the mass-produced, making them seem to have landed in the gallery as a result of a series of clandestine and possibly prodigious events. As a sculptor and writer, Cruzvillegas began as a central participant in a new wave of conceptual art practice in Mexico City during the late 1980s and 90s, when he first studied under Gabriel Orozco. He has since become a fixture in the global conceptual assemblage scene and has exhibited at the 25th São Paulo Bienal (2002), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (“Unmonumental,” 2007), and the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, where he opened the latest installment of his long-term project “Autoconstrucción.”
Arden Decker-Parks: This year marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968, a pivotal moment for Mexico and the world. Coincidentally, this is also the year of your birth. Could you talk a bit about growing up in Mexico following the tragic events of 1968 and how it impacted your work?
ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS: The brutal repression of students in Tlatelolco Square on October 2nd, 1968 is a black mark in the history of my country. It pointed to the death of the old political system and to an awareness for a possible democratic future, not yet achieved. Brilliant minds got together [to fight] against the government and for change at all levels of society. Since then, many young people have been looking for more equal conditions for labor, education, health, and culture. The events and consequences of 1968 deeply affected the development of culture and society and haven’t quite stopped doing so. The conditions for creation were considerably surveilled, with a paternalist control over every sentence, every brushstroke, and every image. But these circumstances also provoked diverse and autonomous [reactionary] practices, sometimes ideologized, other times just attempting to do things in a free way, open to non-traditional languages and techniques. Some artists created without funds, without support or collaboration, except for that which came from other artists and colleagues, and slowly, cultural institutions began giving money and scholarships. Meanwhile, independent spaces and projects developed different strategies, [providing] evidence of the rich, plural activity during all these years.
Decker-Parks: How do you perceive your relationship to the Mexican conceptual tradition, if at all?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t perceive any Mexican conceptual tradition. I see some individuals attempting to produce knowledge from the field of art, and I’m grateful for their work, ideas, and energy. I prefer to invoke concrete persons and events that have influenced my work and intentions, and it goes back long before the so-called “conceptual” tradition and far beyond the field of visual art. In the Foucauldian sense, I think of this as my genealogy: Víctor Jara, Germán List Arzubide, José José, Xavier Villaurrutia, Héctor Lavoe, Adolfo Best Maugard, Jimmie Durham, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Medalla, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Höch, Piero Manzoni, Jean-Luc Godard, Lucio Fontana, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Picabia, Werner Herzog, Jorge Luis Borges, José Guadalupe Posada, Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Alighiero e Boetti, François Rabelais, Eva Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Smithson, Josef Albers, Lynda Benglis, Hélio Oiticica, André Cadere, Rosalind Krauss, Melquiades Herrera, Luis Buñuel, Lucy Lippard, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Cravan, Miguel Covarrubias, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Jarry, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alexander Calder, Gabriel Orozco, Carl Lumholtz, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham, Harry Smith, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Buckminster Fuller, Roberto Bolaño, Marius de Zayas, Erik Satie, John Cage, Julián Carrillo, Tom Zé, etc.
Decker-Parks: Is there a connective thread running through this genealogy?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I always wanted to state my belonging to something I call a delirious chain of delirious facts. I like to feel part of a chaotic thread of facts, related to the possibility of widening our understanding of reality in a non-linear way. Then, it’s not a thread but many threads in a disastrous hank, ready to knit with.
Decker-Parks: Your work relies heavily on the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the mass-produced and is therefore often described as relating to a DIY aesthetic. In which ways, if any, did this quality grow out of your experiences in Mexico? Do you feel that it’s fair to understand your use of ephemeral and found materials as a product of the Latin American economic condition?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t see my work as being related to a DIY aesthetic. In fact, it’s hard for me to relate it to any particular aesthetic will. I think it’s fair to understand my work through the use of some materials in terms of local economic systems, depending on where I’m working and with whom. It’s possible that my relationships with particular objects and processes are determined by my own education and context, but this is circumstantial. The most important thing for me is to make work independent of my biography; even when the prime matter of it is my own experience, thoughts, and practice, it must be autonomous and free. I make works that do not talk about me, but do not talk about anything else either. They are supposed to be speechless and mute. They neither communicate nor express anything except that which the viewer wants or thinks. There’s no chance for mistakes or misunderstanding.
Decker-Parks: In works such as Los Danzantes and Slow Growth (both 2004), you inject references to Mexico with fresh approaches to material and symbolism. Has this artistic acknowledgment of your Mexican background affected the reception of your work, especially considering that you are often described as an international conceptualist?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like to play with titles, as they are sometimes used as keys for the “understanding” of the work. None of the references such as names for specific works are linked to any narrative, nor do they spark or activate any hidden meaning, as I usually try not to deal with meanings, much less try to hide anything. In some cases, the titles refer to the names of my favorite bars and cantinas, the names of beers and other drinks (as in Los Danzantes, my preferred mescal), the names of the streets of my changing neighborhoods, the names of diseases, people, places, catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes, or politicians’ nicknames. When I refer to the production of a self-portrait, it is almost always in a way in which the viewers reflect themselves in the work, imagining their own individual identities, as I’ve been trying to do all these years. I would prefer to be considered an intergalactic indigenous, instead of an international conceptualist.
Decker-Parks: Collaboration and participation are also essential components. How, if at all, do you relate your work to the broader dialogue of relational aesthetics?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like Nicolas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics (2002), which has fantastic examples, such as Rirkrit Tiravanjia and Gabriel Orozco. Some other references, not necessarily from art history, have also strongly influenced my practice and my language, as happened with my long-term project called “Autoconstrucción.” Here, I’m talking again about my experience of growing up in a particular environment as a trigger for shaping ideas and experience into sculptural processes. The house in Mexico City where I was born and grew up was built in a collaborative way over almost forty years and is not yet finished. It is composed chaotically, building, transforming, changing, adapting, canceling, and destroying itself, with the participation of every member of the family, along with relatives, neighbors, friends, and builders. Here, capitalist efficiency has proved not to be the best [strategy] for cultural production. Like much self-building around the world, my house shows the evidence of a social clash and uneven wealth distribution, but also of the ingenuity and the wisdom that [follow from] specific needs.
Decker-Parks: On that note, could you discuss the most recent installment of your “Autoconstrucción” project, which you just completed in Glasgow?
CRUZVILLEGAS: In “Autoconstrucción: Sound,” my exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), there are some sculptures made in Cove Park during the summer, improvising with materials from that context: wool, sheep shit, chicken wire, discarded furniture, cardboard, stones, grass, and my own hair. I’ve constructed unplanned assemblages, testing new dialogues with odd, contradictory objects and prime matter, inspired by my parents’ house in Mexico City as an improvised space, chaotic, ugly, made without budget, ideas, or plans, and definitely unfinished. The room attempts to be a messy landscape overpopulated with objects; as the groups of objects and materials will be chaotic and unstable, the whole will make walking through unstable as well. All of the sculptures hang form the ceiling or lie directly over the floor. Also, while in Cove Park, I wrote some lyrics about my house. They were written in a hybrid combination of inspiring sources, such as romantic popular music, folk, bolero, dub, rock’n’roll, salsa, reggae, Brazilian music, corrido, punk, ska, cumbia, trova, funk, protest music, commercial pop, norteño, hip-hop, etc. Then, I asked bands from Glasgow to create the music for the eighteen sets of lyrics, and we recorded eighteen songs, all eclectic. When the album was ready, I played the music in the streets and squares of Glasgow with a sound system constructed as a mobile sculpture. This street cart was made in collaboration with John O’Hara in a workshop in Bridgeton, which is part of a project called The Common Wheel, whose members present themselves as follows: “We exist to provide meaningful activity for people with mental illness by recycling and repairing old bicycles.” The sound system was made with parts from used, discarded, or old bikes and diverse furniture, pipes, sticks, and carpets, recycling bits and pieces. The sound system directly refers to people riding in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s, but also to DJ and MC practices around the world, and especially the Sonidero tradition of Mexico City. Important parts of this project are collaborative and are created in a contaminated cultural environment, which means shifting something personal, from my own experience, to a local platform and circumstance. For example, the appropriation of the lyrics by the bands into their own subjectivity was central for the collaboration. Earlier, for other projects, I cooperated with people from diverse contexts and fields: craft makers, historians, professors, physicians, builders, students, and artists. The sound system is in the largest room of the CCA, playing the music of the album. Everybody is allowed to ride it in the space. There is a video, showing a documentation of the spaces where the music was played in the streets. This was made with a fixed camera on the vehicle, registering its transit in Glasgow, randomly capturing people’s lives and activities. The video is projected directly onto the walls of the room from a projector attached to a pole on the mobile sculpture. I wrote the lyrics myself with a pencil on the walls of the room, around the sound system.
Decker-Parks: Given the current global economic situation, how do you think the role of the art object and of the artist are going to change?
CRUZVILLEGAS: Recently, I met designer Michael Marriott, who used to wear a jumper with a printed slogan that describes his own practice: Shop local. As a statement, it is powerful and meaningful. As an everyday practice, it is something that goes into a humble territory, which means that it is important to support regional survival strategies, more than fighting against transnational business and corporations. In that way, producing in a local manner may allow creation to describe specific contexts and structures. Ideas are individual, local, and eccentric, not global, even when the individuals who produce them could be surfing the globe, without a national, ethnic, or group identity. Working in a collaborative way—no matter the field or the reach of the extent—will always allow artists to extend, via sharing risks and joy, the ability to produce knowledge in small-cell organic developments.
Smile by Lynda Benglis
What Lynda Benglis Wore
Posted by Jen Graves on Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:28 PM
A very well-groomed woman sits silently behind the desk at Susan Inglett gallery in Chelsea, with a large glass box on a shelf above her head. The box is empty except for a giant lead double dildo, lying on its side like a barely contained animal.We may as well say that this is Rosalind Krauss's dildo.
Here's the story: In 1974, when the artist Lynda Benglis knew she was getting a review in Artforum, she bought a centerfold ad. It cost her about $3,000. In the centerfold, she pictured herself—now famously—naked except for sunglasses, her body oiled, sporting an enormous dildo (or at least one visible end of a double dildo, that is).
It was part of a game of one-upsmanship she was playing with fellow artist Robert Morris, according to an exhibition at Susan Inglett this summer. Morris had produced a poster image of himself flexing his biceps and wearing S&M gear; Benglis had made other images provocatively using her body as a putative advertisement for her art, too (both at right).
But while Morris's poster hadn't made a ripple, Benglis's ad in Artforum exploded as soon as it hit in the November issue. A man walked into the Philadelphia Museum of Art and hurled one of Benglis's sculptures on display to the floor in protest.At Artforum, five editors—most prominently Krauss, one of the most respected historians of late 20th-century art—got very, very pissed. They wrote and published in the next issue a letter denouncing Benglis's centerfold, calling it "an object of extreme vulgarity"—not the first in the magazine's history, but "it represents a qualitative leap in that genre, brutalizing ourselves and, we think, our readers."
Krauss and another editor resigned, split off from Artforum to create October, an exceedingly somber and dense quarterly still in print today that, in its first issue, promised to be "plain of aspect" (check) and to "restore (to criticism)...an intellectual autonomy seriously undermined by emphasis on extensive reviewing and lavish illustration" (check, but to what end? Only academics read October these days).
When curator and art historian Robert Storr visited Seattle last year, he accused Krauss of having been a hypocrite for letting Morris's ad pass but flying into a rage over Benglis's.
“Ros didn’t mind when Bob put in a photo of himself all buffed up, because she was living with him and she liked his work, but that a beautiful woman would be sassy enough to show up him at his own game…”
Back to our dildo—it's a work of art Benglis made in the summer of 1974, one in an edition of five casts of a work she made earlier in 1974 called Smile. That work preceded the Artforum episode, but the edition of five was too perfect: Benglis quickly realized that she wanted each one of the already created casts to refer to each of the five offended Artforum editors. Each is made in a different metal (bronze, tin, aluminum, lead, and gold plate); Benglis hasn't said which metal corresponds to whom. So we may as well say that lead is for Krauss—hence, Rosalind Krauss's dildo.
The rest of the exhibition, called Lynda Benglis / Robert Morris: 1973-1974, is made up of the ads by Morris and Benglis, a few sculptures, and videos, and, best of all, letters sent to Artforum in response to the dildo ad. New York magazine has a few choice responses listed here, and here's another one of my favorites:
"I am not a prude, but this is not even 'Erotica,' it is 'Dirty-ca.'" —Art dealer, Israel
What's most amazing about the responses is that several of them came from middle-school and high-school principals: Middle schools were subscribing to Artforum???? There's even a local angle: The head librarian of Mercer Island High School wrote a letter in typical polite Seattle style, inquiring delicately about whether this was merely a "bad error in judgment"?The artist Elizabeth Murray called the editors' response "fascistic." (I'm inclined to agree with her, minus the hyperbole; like Richard Meyer, I've always been drawn to the ad.) Dorothy Sieberling, writing a piece called "The New Sexual Frankness: Goodbye to Hearts and Flowers" in New York (a caption described the ad as a "bisexual shocker"), explained, "One person's hell may be another person's health." And from the New York Times report at the time: "'What it turns out to be in practice,' John Coplans, the editor of Artforum, said, 'is that the California intellectuals say the advertisement is a woman expressing herself. In New York, the intellectuals are more Victorian."
Two of Benglis's pieces are at Seattle Art Museum in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78, a gaudy, glittery knot hanging on the wall (above left, titled Chi), and a dried puddle of poured paint on the floor. She was originally scheduled to be here to talk about the show last week, but had to cancel, and the museum is still trying to pin her down for a visit. Maybe we'll hear more about this, or simply more about where the dynamic artist's head is today, if she does visit (no luck yet, according to SAM).
Anyone in New York this summer, don't miss the show.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/07/02/what-lynda-benglis-wore
Sunday at the New Museum
In my dream last night I was skiing and hit a fresh new patch of snow, I thought, 'Fuck, I am really not that good on powder, even though most avid skiers flock to find it', so I lifted my skis and pointed them across the slope, I leaned back and turned abruptly, 'Phew, I got out of that one', I directed myself into a groomed patch. I was on a hill at Copper Mountain in CO, it was the spot where I learned to skate backwards on small skis when I was in high school. The dream probably had to do with looking at second job options this past week, searching for what comes next is like having to make my own tracks, an interview with Kogeto, my quick application to be the Head of Tours at the New Museum. I like the gamete, irregularity breads personal growth outside of the demarcating stamp of our hyper-capitalist economy. Fuck, it makes my legs hurt, or was that my pride. Okay, I'm okay, I lift the tips and drift to the charted groomed area of the slope, a day job, it is calmer to take hold of what one has. 'You are a little Napoleon,' that is what Joey said, why is he right all the time, 'you go into that Museum, work there for two weeks and now you want to run the place'.
The next day my co-worker crouches behind Lynda Benglis' 'Sherbet' a pile of neon polyurethane foam, he is a part of the artwork, the cherry on top. The works seep onto the ground like a drooping ice cream on a hot day, possibly its drips creep over the side of the counter, maybe we are at Dennys, those old bright runaways from Lynda's treat, drying and sticky.
My coworker says that he will defend Lynda's neon foam, so he stands closer to it, now it is his land, flag on top, laughter happens, from him or me? Who started that, or finished it? Things are arid and desolate, the pauses between people at a work place, standing around with nothing between us to accomplish except slight regulations, endless time and space. Who starts and stops the warbling in the valley of silence, the murmur bubbling out, a break in the otherwise still? I chime in right on top of his reactions, finishing his quips with an assurance 'You and me buddy, we get each other'. He knows our relationship more than me, he has friends at the job, so easy, when you get each other. I think they are all very smart. I think that everyone is smart, everyone has a land that they are the master of, taking care of the territory of their perception and logic. I know that they are picking up things I cannot see, and same for me.
Sometimes for fun I look to see what each persons 'good' is, it tells the truth about their personal morality, none of us are deeply reliant on what we have been told without translating it into our own thoughts and active truths. Besides, each one of us is changing daily, making something, the will of the world, our greatest desire, the sinful fruit of purposeful labor.
If we are different all the time, and the artwork lives in each of us, after all the audience is the one who enlivens the work with observation, than where does an artwork end? Or a country for that matter, or history? The document of our shared reality keeps evolving in its people, the audience, the makers, I call that the active object, that is the theater that I wish I could make, the moving kind, with no master, not even language, or a stage, but a brewing understanding, not a religion, not a doctrine, that is for the weak willed, but a theater that is all about what people make because they saw what I showed, what can I help you to generate, poetic, charged, did marketing teach me that or did I teach that to marketing, through this blog, Google said what I said what Google said, the flag is on top, my co-worker laughs for me and with me, passing time, two months ago I would not have seen him and he would not have noticed me, just another guest, but look at me, I wear a neon pink sweatshirt in my off hours.
Next I dreamed about the theater, all these people in colorful clothing running around and kicking their legs on the floor, 'That is where Doris went wrong,' I thought, 'the theater is about action, it is so fucking god damn absolutely physical' I cuss here because I think that is more physical, like the Lynda Benglis piece 'Blat' that I stood at the tip of yesterday for five hours without moving, so my dreams have told me that the theater is charged through action. This is why I am afraid of the image filled stage that I always desire to make, I had wanted to create energy pieces before, went to Dia for the big sit, fuck, it was so slow, fuck, fuck, so slow, fuck, it was so fucking god damn piece of beauty slow.
I want to talk about all my artworks in ways that are made of dirt from now on. There is so much promotion, to me it feels more graphic to go the other way, if I say 'This show truly sucks, you probably should do something else with your night like getting blasted on crack and Four Loco, it is an utter waste of time, don't even think about being thoughtful or considerate here, it is a true piece of shit and I recommend going to work, or talking with your mom, or getting stuck on the G train over trying to make out what these pretentious naive brats are pulling out of their memories of a liberal arts education that seriously, ended five years ago, why aren't they over that shit? Why are they drawing you in with this spectacle of multi-media crap, show me the photo and don't waste my time. This show is part of the new movement in theater that is trying to get you in the door rather than present you with gut wrenching, truth involving, deep characters caught in a tragic plot, but do you even care as an audience? Life is too draining to not spend your off hours watching TV on your own clock, with the invention of the cell phone, and the internet, you don't even have time for coffee, so fuck theater for its watered down comment on life, which these artists have such small contact with anyway, they are speaking to you without finances, desperately expelling a voice that is unrefined, nebulous, and eccentric yet static. You want a beer, or a stir fry, or your bed, but not the crap being put on the stage and passed off as the theater. These artists have not earned it, you have not heard their company name before, you do not feel that the $10 you will give to this waste of time will be well spent, these people should go back to their low-end employment and stop asking for your attention'.
The reason to say things is that it might be true, I am an artist, not an entertainer, so, fuck, keep it moving.
The next day my co-worker crouches behind Lynda Benglis' 'Sherbet' a pile of neon polyurethane foam, he is a part of the artwork, the cherry on top. The works seep onto the ground like a drooping ice cream on a hot day, possibly its drips creep over the side of the counter, maybe we are at Dennys, those old bright runaways from Lynda's treat, drying and sticky.
My coworker says that he will defend Lynda's neon foam, so he stands closer to it, now it is his land, flag on top, laughter happens, from him or me? Who started that, or finished it? Things are arid and desolate, the pauses between people at a work place, standing around with nothing between us to accomplish except slight regulations, endless time and space. Who starts and stops the warbling in the valley of silence, the murmur bubbling out, a break in the otherwise still? I chime in right on top of his reactions, finishing his quips with an assurance 'You and me buddy, we get each other'. He knows our relationship more than me, he has friends at the job, so easy, when you get each other. I think they are all very smart. I think that everyone is smart, everyone has a land that they are the master of, taking care of the territory of their perception and logic. I know that they are picking up things I cannot see, and same for me.
Sometimes for fun I look to see what each persons 'good' is, it tells the truth about their personal morality, none of us are deeply reliant on what we have been told without translating it into our own thoughts and active truths. Besides, each one of us is changing daily, making something, the will of the world, our greatest desire, the sinful fruit of purposeful labor.
If we are different all the time, and the artwork lives in each of us, after all the audience is the one who enlivens the work with observation, than where does an artwork end? Or a country for that matter, or history? The document of our shared reality keeps evolving in its people, the audience, the makers, I call that the active object, that is the theater that I wish I could make, the moving kind, with no master, not even language, or a stage, but a brewing understanding, not a religion, not a doctrine, that is for the weak willed, but a theater that is all about what people make because they saw what I showed, what can I help you to generate, poetic, charged, did marketing teach me that or did I teach that to marketing, through this blog, Google said what I said what Google said, the flag is on top, my co-worker laughs for me and with me, passing time, two months ago I would not have seen him and he would not have noticed me, just another guest, but look at me, I wear a neon pink sweatshirt in my off hours.
Next I dreamed about the theater, all these people in colorful clothing running around and kicking their legs on the floor, 'That is where Doris went wrong,' I thought, 'the theater is about action, it is so fucking god damn absolutely physical' I cuss here because I think that is more physical, like the Lynda Benglis piece 'Blat' that I stood at the tip of yesterday for five hours without moving, so my dreams have told me that the theater is charged through action. This is why I am afraid of the image filled stage that I always desire to make, I had wanted to create energy pieces before, went to Dia for the big sit, fuck, it was so slow, fuck, fuck, so slow, fuck, it was so fucking god damn piece of beauty slow.
I want to talk about all my artworks in ways that are made of dirt from now on. There is so much promotion, to me it feels more graphic to go the other way, if I say 'This show truly sucks, you probably should do something else with your night like getting blasted on crack and Four Loco, it is an utter waste of time, don't even think about being thoughtful or considerate here, it is a true piece of shit and I recommend going to work, or talking with your mom, or getting stuck on the G train over trying to make out what these pretentious naive brats are pulling out of their memories of a liberal arts education that seriously, ended five years ago, why aren't they over that shit? Why are they drawing you in with this spectacle of multi-media crap, show me the photo and don't waste my time. This show is part of the new movement in theater that is trying to get you in the door rather than present you with gut wrenching, truth involving, deep characters caught in a tragic plot, but do you even care as an audience? Life is too draining to not spend your off hours watching TV on your own clock, with the invention of the cell phone, and the internet, you don't even have time for coffee, so fuck theater for its watered down comment on life, which these artists have such small contact with anyway, they are speaking to you without finances, desperately expelling a voice that is unrefined, nebulous, and eccentric yet static. You want a beer, or a stir fry, or your bed, but not the crap being put on the stage and passed off as the theater. These artists have not earned it, you have not heard their company name before, you do not feel that the $10 you will give to this waste of time will be well spent, these people should go back to their low-end employment and stop asking for your attention'.
The reason to say things is that it might be true, I am an artist, not an entertainer, so, fuck, keep it moving.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
New Museum Links
http://www.lynnhershman.com/http://www.thetownhousegallery.com/main7.html
http://www.museotamayo.org/uno-sin-el-otro
http://www.altpool.org/
http://www.bard.edu/ccs/graduate/faculty/#A_4857661
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/of_recent_note/pwl/lauren_cornell.php
http://12glowingmen.com/
http://messhof.com/randy-balma-municipal-abortionist/
http://www.whitewallmag.com/2009/05/06/lauren-cornell-adjunct-curator-at-the-new-museum-speaks-with-wws-sascha-crasnow/
http://www.museotamayo.org/uno-sin-el-otro
http://www.altpool.org/
http://www.bard.edu/ccs/graduate/faculty/#A_4857661
Lynda Benglis 
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/of_recent_note/pwl/lauren_cornell.php
http://12glowingmen.com/
http://messhof.com/randy-balma-municipal-abortionist/
http://www.whitewallmag.com/2009/05/06/lauren-cornell-adjunct-curator-at-the-new-museum-speaks-with-wws-sascha-crasnow/
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
scream
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Whitehead/Gregory_Whitehead-We_All_Scream_Alone_1992.mp3
last week i was searching all over youtube for screams, then I found this, a week too late, but perfect.
last week i was searching all over youtube for screams, then I found this, a week too late, but perfect.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Shelby, Molly, Thomas Bradshaw, Bard Dinner Parties
Shelby's got taste:
http://sit-read.com/
Molly's made a film:
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm18646272/tt1823157
Thomas Bradshaw blew up:
http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/theater/91485/thomas-bradshaws-mary-at-the-goodman-theatre
The Onion tells Bard inside jokes to the general public:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/bard-college-named-nations-no-1-dinner-party-schoo,19032/
http://sit-read.com/
Molly's made a film:
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm18646272/tt1823157
Thomas Bradshaw blew up:
http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/theater/91485/thomas-bradshaws-mary-at-the-goodman-theatre
The Onion tells Bard inside jokes to the general public:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/bard-college-named-nations-no-1-dinner-party-schoo,19032/
Friday, February 4, 2011
Albert York
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2011/01/vintage-footage-norman-mailer-marshall.html
Lying and Politics March 4-5 2011
Lying and PoliticsWhat is the fate of politics in the age of lying, advertising, and mass market deception?http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=55 | |
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| 'Bloodlands' Timothy Snyder | |
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Krum (Next Wave 2007)
'Krum' by Hanoch Levin TR Warszawa Co-produced by Stary Teatr (Cracow) Directed by Krzysztof Warlikoski
This is the show that Joel and I went onto the stage at BAM as two happy young lovers.
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