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From Chronicle.com:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
This year is the fortieth anniversary of the student protests and worker strikes that marked 1968. Given contemporary art’s current fascination with tropes of re-enactment and restaging as ways of addressing past political moments and unrealised opportunities, it seems likely that these events will be re-looked at this year.
I discovered recently, quite by accident, that one of the students I lecture in my history of visual culture class attended the same art institution I did, then at a different location, in 1968. It struck me as uncanny, that I am in a position of lecturing such a person about the situationists. Me, who was not even alive in 1968, and she, who actually participated, if only tangentially in the events of time.
I carried out a short interview with her, extracted below, that touches on some of these ideas about memory, particularly its possibiltites and overlaps with fiction. This will likely develop into a more substantial piece of work in the future… many thanks to Linda for her time and conversation.
‘Ethnographies of the Future takes into account the vast geographies impacted by colonial rule by bringing together artists whose works present a critical relationship to post-colonial identity politics. The artists in the exhibition, with their diverse historical reference points, make clear that the terms of cultural identification are unstable. In installations, videos, and mixed-media works, they suggest an ever-shifting discursive field where the possibilities for defining ethnography are unending. Drawing on histories of the Caribbean, South Asia, Israel, China, Korea and Japan, the South Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, the exhibition addresses colonial rule from a contemporary, global perspective.
Ethnographies of the Future is staged in two parts: a gallery installation that resembles a museological presentation of ethnographic objects and a video screening. Both components of the exhibition capture the time-based aspects of post-colonial identity politics where locational identity, cultural history, and the body as territory, set the stage for a discussion on the construction of identity.’
Artists include Elia Alba, Rajkamal Kahlon, Seung Young Kim and Hironori Murai, Simone Leigh, Ohad Meromi, Marc Andre Robinson, Pak Sheung Chuen, Allison Smith Sriwhana Spong, Roberto Visani with John Movius. On April 16, film and video works by Pedro Barateiro, Lene Berg, Nao Bustamante, Katia Kameli, Grace Ndiritu, Sriwhana Spong, and others will be screened.
Image Credit: Ohad Meromi, Moon Colony, 2005, video still. Courtesy of the artist and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York.
Curated by Sara Reisman, March 18 - May 5 2008 at the Bric Rotunda Gallery
Artist Vanessa Beecroft, best known for her performative installations of naked, or semi-naked women, is a pertinent artist to think about in relation to the aesthetics of the crowd.
At the heart of this is the very question of the aesthetic, or the look, of the crowd (as seen from outside it) versus any potential agency it might have, which seems strictly limited within Beecroft’s work. The women on display in Beecroft’s installations are typically tall, thin creatures, their ranks reminiscent of fetish photography, fashion, porn, fascism and science fiction in varying measures.
Now that Beecroft’s predeliction has shifted from spectatorship of the Aryan blonde body to the black female body (as found in Sudan, a body sited within a particular racial and geopolitical discourse), it seems she has finally moved a fetish too far.
This is a short and admittedly slightly random post based on a collection of observations about table tennis/ ping pong: I saw an exhibition in IMMA yesterday by Mark Clare and it seems that table tennis is the mode du jour to address geopolitical issues. Very zeitgesity.
There is a pleasing symnetry to it when you start to see it in an epic,East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism kind of way. After the jump, a short anthology of culturally important moments in table tennis. Contributions welcome…
1. An impoverished ping pong table collapses in the midst of a game among youngsters at Santa Anita assembly center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry, California, 1942. Image held here
I just came across this work by Joseph Beuys while researching a Fluxus lecture… if I ever get around to it I resolve to compile a sizable selection of ’defaced money’ artworks. This piece is from 1979.
The irony of this particular work is the large, iconic artist’s signature that takes pride of place on the face of the note. This authorial statement, the form of a defacement, enacts a particular economic alchemy (such a suitable word in relation to Beuys’ oeuvre): it elevates it even closer to gold and exponentially further away from any intrinsic ‘use value’.
Perhaps, to give him credit, this was Beuys’ intention. Often though, his critical gestures were weighted heavily in favour of his own self-mythologisation.
[I think this might actually be the thumb of Engels, not Marx.]
Berlin, December 2007
My earliest connection with Berlin are two souvenir shot glasses that were a gift from my cousin Sean. Sean was my eldest cousin who lived in America, who decided to go travelling in Europe one summer, Europe, then as now, having a different meaning and weight to someone brought up in the States than to me. Especially me as someone who probably was barely ten at the time.
I remember him as charming and full of plamás, and a bit of chancer, so it was little surprise in retrospect that he brought back a piece of the Berlin wall. I’m not sure if it had even been taken down at the time, and I remember having difficulty understanding the significance of this smallish, innocuous looking piece of grey concrete. I don’t remember that much about it except that it was smallish (maybe the size of a ten year old palm) and was lighter than I expected something so important to be.
I was born in 1981 and for me the falling of the Berlin Wall is a memory but it feels like fiction. It belongs to a time of the Live Aid concert, mullet haircuts, a certain cut of leather jacket, and not being allowed to watch Home and Away (‘too much sex in it’). I can feel all these memories even though I was not even four when the Live Aid concert happened. They are impossible memories, recorded on the grainy analogue of VHS, and played on a video player our household did not possess until the mid nineties.
Sean died in the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001. I felt his loss and remembered him in Berlin.
Last night I saw the film This is England.
I’d heard good things and generally was not disappointed - was a very well directed, superbly-acted skinhead flick, to be reductive about it. Given my interest in nostalgia and collective memory, particularly in constructed memories and the collision of the pop with the political, I was interested in how the texture of Thatcher’s England would be portrayed. It was actually fairly intoxicating - Rubik’s Cubes, Buckaroo, clock radios and 80s fashion-fashion-fashion was interspersed with the Falklands war and miner’s protests. It was kind of gorgeous.
The kind of nostalgia used in the film portrays the issues (nationalism/ racism and its associated nasties) as entities discrete in time, that can be reflected on from the same comfortable distance as Doc Martens, Culture Club eyeliner and clunky analogue technology. Skinny jeans have made a comeback in recent years, so maybe this is an unfair assessment. Does ideology get recycled with fashion or is it an empty recuperation?
The throwing of the flag into the sea was an implausible closing gesture… it did strike me though that most of the significant action in the film took place within the timespan of one little boy’s haircut, which seemed accidentally, significantly poignant.
A show at the Whitney I’m sorry I’m missing. More here
Image: Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, 1973
A previous post dealt with the Sligo Silver Rush - now the propsecting focus has shifted to Co. Mayo.
A company’s plan for a “small scale” gold mine in Co Mayo is running into determined opposition from groups who fear the project would damage the landscape and environment. The controversy echoes the row which embroiled mining companies Glencar and Andaman Resources when they tried to exploit gold resources at Creggaunbaun, near Louisburgh, and Croagh Patrick in the early 1990s.
“Mayo’s Gold Limited”, a subsidiary of Aurum Explorations, is seeking the go-ahead for what the company describes as a “tourist gold mine” at Creggaunbaun which would primarily be involved in the manufacture of jewellery. Mining would be carried out in an environmentally sensitive process similar to “keyhole surgery” the company promises, and Croagh Patrick would be out of bounds for the venture.
However, concern was expressed at the weekend that Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan had declared his intention to grant prospecting licences to the company in respect of 135 designated townlands. Mayo County Councillor Margaret Adams says there are a lot of unanswered questions about the company’s plans. Representatives should be invited to a meeting to explain their exact proposals, she said. Westport Tourism has also discussed the company’s proposals and says all its members are strongly opposed to them.
Paddy Hopkins, chairman of the Mayo Environmental Group, says the proposal will meet the same level of determined opposition as the plans by Glencar and Andaman to mine gold at Cregganbaun and Croagh Patrick did on the last occasion. “We are trying to get as many groups and individuals as possible to write to Minister Ryan opposing the granting of the prospecting licences.”
In a document sent to local landowners in the Creggaunbaun area, Mayo’s Gold Limited says it is offering “a completely new approach” to any potential extraction of local gold resources.
Company spokesman Tom O’Gorman said it is thought sufficient gold resources can be established to provide a sustainable development which would provide long-term employment and a unique tourism attraction in the area for 20 or more years.
From Tom Shiel at The Irish Times & Friends of the Irish Environment
Richard Florida was the keynote speaker at a Creative City Regions conference in October, hosted by the Dublin Region Authority and the Dublin Employment Pact. (Info on the conference here)
Florida’s presentation didn’t say anything he hasn’t said before, but the North American, evangelical-influenced delivery was extremely impressive. He is at points very persuasive in his thesis of what the ‘Creative Economy’ is and what it needs. He paraphrased the conference chair in his diagnosis of the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (old hat terminology now) as being “the last gasp of the industrial age”.
However, while the conference was eager to attach Florida’s prestige to the proceedings, the presentations that followed him (in his absence, having jetted off to another conference) showed a notable difference in their opinions/ agendas. The talk was all about the Knowledge Economy, not the Creative Economy: even the DRA website fudged the issue by describing the conference as addressing ‘the creative knowledge economy’.
Florida himself is part of a broader trend in culture where economics is becoming ‘pop’: described as a public intellectual (and he has earned a PhD so I don’t wish to imply he is in any way underqualified), his manner of delivery draws on that of the motivational speaker, informed by the legacy of North American television and evangelicism.
In Ireland, Eddie Hobbs and David McWilliams have become similarly vocal pundits in the national media, particularly McWilliams, whose economic background has seeped into a large scale social trendforescasting. He is particularly fond of coining neologisms (Breakfast Roll Man, Decklanders, the Pope’s Children, etc – see his books and TV programmes, The Pope’s Children and The Generation Game). From this perspective, the field of economics is undeniably more enmeshed in mainstream popular culture than it has previously been.
Richard Florida visited Ireland in October 2007.
See www.creativeclass.com and www.creativeclass.typepad.com
A full report on the conference will be published in the Visual Artist’s Newsheet, January 2008
Image held here
Key to Artwork Diagram:
- Concept (raw commercial intervention)
- Initial Transaction (unanticipated relations)
- Economic Filter (seven models of transaction)
- First Advancement of Transaction (Cork alternative auction)
- Bipolar Field of Constraint (Liberal Capitalist – Socialist)
- Second Advancement of Transaction (Belfast alternative auction)
- Transformation of Capital (exchanges of goods – further relations)
- Investment of Transformed Capital (constrained models of social transformation)
- Analysis / Assessment
The National Sculpture Factory commissioned Art / not art to create a project in tandem with the NSF seminar Do You Speak Art? (or where are you coming from?) exploring the relationship between art and globalisation. In response, Art / not art purchased and auctioned (three times) an exceptional sculpture by Thai artist Pornpraeseart Yamakazi, entitled ‘Want to Be Rich?’ (see below). As part of the seminar on 3 Nov, Art / not art presented the sculpture for auction. A bid of €500 was accepted for consideration in the ongoing art-transaction.
| Now Art / not art have purchased ANOTHER exceptional piece of contemporary art, a painting by Thai artist Mit Ja-In. You are invited to join in deciding its fate.
Using contemporary means of communication, cosmopolitan connections, transnational standards of artistic accreditation, modern money transfer systems and freight networks we have purchased and imported from the other side of the world a sculpture by an artist previously unknown to us, all in a matter of weeks. The nature of this intervention, however, has yet to be decided. It all depends on what Art/ not art do next. |
The friendly attitude of continental diplomats and businessmen to the emerging Irish Free State, in the form of investment and expert labour, arguably led to the successful founding of the sugar industry in the 1920s. Reubenshafen or Port de Bettavres was the name for the ‘beet port’ behind the sugar factory in Carlow, its name depending on the origin of the speaker (Germany or Belgium).
Reubenshafen Quarter is the only name in the proposed Greencore development on the sugar factory site that refers to sugar, even obliquely, or the site’s previous use. The potential Reubenshafen Quarter is linked to an obscure and little-known history, appropriated by Greencore in order to claim a new corporate identity.
(images courtesy Greencore & First Impressions Ltd). See also issue 3 of The Fold - ‘The Disappeared’, a Workroom Elsewhere project curated by Alison Pilkington and Cora Cummins. Below image: Rabbi Zaiman Alony, a senior member of the Jewish community in Ireland, supervising the packaging of sugar in 1976 in the Carlow factory. For more about internationalism and the Irish sugar industry, see the ‘extras’ section here.
I’ve been reading up quite a lot lately on pop economics, and am particularly interested in the emotional and irrational side of it, as well as the visual culture it generates. Somewhere along the line I came across this charming-sounding idea, the ‘personal hedgehog concept’ - see graphic. (full blog post is here, apparently is a thought authored by one Jim Collins in a book titled Good to Great)
In addition to Dingle’s impressive ‘wall of democracy’ (a forum for all the newspaper clippings about the name change, plebicite etc, full story here) I noticed this sign in the local Spar. This kind of unstaged, sponataneous talking really impresses me.
It also seems to make many potential artworks seem redundant.
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