Caitlin Berrigan, "Teeth in the Wrong Places," 2004

Freewaves turned 20 this year. The grassroots new media organization that began in 1989 with a gaping, loosely defined mission to show Los Angeles to itself celebrated its birthday on June 26 with Video on the Loose, a  one-night festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In the wide-open plaza that links the museum’s newly built Resnick Pavilion and Broad complex to the older Ahmanson Building, 21 monitors each displayed a video from Freewaves’ double-decade archive. They made up a surprisingly compact circle and Freewaves founder and director Anne Bray originally imagined that viewers would look over the tops of the monitors and into the faces of people watching on the circle’s opposite side. But tall monitor stands prohibited this sort of voyeuristic camaraderie. Instead, to hear over the dint of the DJ and surrounding videos, viewers gathered close to the speakers and, at times, tight circles formed around screens. This close proximity added a subtle sense of peer-pressure to the evening’s experience. You didn’t want to be the first to leave your circle, especially if others were  intent.

The first time I watched Meena Nanji’s Voices of the Morning, a hauntingly rhythmic black and white film narrated by a young Muslim woman learning how to have a self, I stood beside a tall man with graying golden-blond hair. His intentness worked on me like a weight; even though the faster-moving imagery on the subsequent screen tempted me, I stayed put, acting just as focused as him (and by the video’s end, I really wasn’t acting; I returned to Voices of the Morning two more times that evening).

Social dynamics like these are, in part, what Freewaves is all about.

Meena Nanji, "Voices of the Morning," 1992

Two years ago, Freewaves hosted a festival on Hollywood Boulevard. Called Hollywould, it was a feat of bureaucratic juggling that required the cooperation of vendors, shop owners and civic powers-that-be. But hosting a festival in a tourist-heavy thoroughfare meant non-art viewers would at least co-exist with video art. “Someone would be looking at the sunglasses [on a store rack] and someone else would be watching the video and both were intent,” recalls Anne Bray when I meet her for coffee a week after Video on the Loose. Sometimes, the person who came with art-viewing in mind would get waylaid by sunglasses, while the person who came  for sunglasses would become engrossed in the art.

When Bray moved to L.A. in the early ‘80s, she found a city with no public art and no public. That wasn’t okay with her. “I was a grad student at UCLA,” she says. “I thought, I’m going to pump art into their homes. They’re going to see it between their toes.” She had hoped to do this via television—which she’s tried over the years with varying degrees of success—but the web has proven a more inviting and malleable medium. Before Bray founded Freewaves, she worked as the video coordinator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and video became the Freewaves’s signature medium, even though the medium was never the point. “Freewaves was trying to get all these people in the city negotiating each other.”

"Video on the Loose" at LACMA, 2010. Courtesy Freewaves.

It has tried this in a variety of ways. Bray, a small staff (which currently includes Assistant Director Heidi Zeller, who interviewed Bray for the Video on the Loose catalog) and her board arranged Internet workshops when the web was still young; they’ve organized video screenings of all sorts in all sorts of public places; and they’ve recently received funding for their upcoming “bus project.” GPS-sensitive video art will stream in L.A. Metro’s public buses, so that, as a bus moves, the video programming will move too, acquainting riders with the neighborhoods they pass through.

“The new identity politics is of place,” says Bray. It’s an idea she’s been thinking about a lot lately and, as she’s talked with others artist and academics, she’s found she’s not the only one. “It’s that we’ve worked on race and gender for so long that people’s interest has shifted. We’re not done, of course. But what about this group of people right here, at this café in Echo Park?” This group of people certainly fits a niche. Laptops abound; there are a few dogs. Most of us are white and, to be here in the middle of a Monday, must have unconventional day jobs. “People stay with people who are like themselves,” Bray continues. But moving outside those cliques and exploring how one community relates to other communities is how a city “grows up.” “L.A. is becoming a teenager. It’s not really responsible yet but it’s thinking about issues of responsibility.”

Brooke Alfaro, "Nueve," 2003. Installation shot at LACMA, 2010. Courtesy Freewaves.

In Brooke Alfaro’s  Nueve, a two-channel video installation that streamed during Video on the Loose, two rival gangs from San Felipe, Panama, appear in two separate, paired projections. The gangs look as though they approach each other, meet, and then dance together. Outside of Alfaro’s work, however, they’ve never met peaceably. Nueve nicely stands-in for how Freewaves wants to function: bringing together forces that oppose each other, showing people what they didn’t know they didn’t see. “I want people to face their shit,” says Bray, “but I want it to be an interesting process, one that replaces fear with understanding.”

The Great White North, as Canada is affectionately known, could be called something altogether different in the heated summer months. Try “Huge Hot Land” or “Expansive Land Mass Connected by Intermittent Places That Matter to Tourists.” The latter statement is definitely a bit crude, but every country is guilty of defining a nation’s arts and culture industries through a few select cities. And tourists help reaffirm the notion as they flock here when temperatures are more tolerable. In my following posts in this column, I will look at exhibitions in Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver and provide an entry point to begin to talk about art in Canada and how it shapes the nation’s identity and cultural landscape. For a country that normally gets treated like the kid sister across the border, the arts are surprisingly vibrant in Canada, with many of its artistic exports doing well internationally. And this deserves some attention. Let’s start things off with Montréal.

One of the great things about summer in Montréal is that the laissez-faire attitude which the French-Canadian city is best known for explodes to its greatest heights. As it stands now, bicycles have taken over the city, café patios (until yesterday) brimmed with boisterous World Cup watchers, and picnic real estate is at a premium in public parks. Background is critical here: Montréal’s financial situation has been on a permanent hiatus since the economically disastrous 1976 Summer Olympics pummeled it into debt. This has inadvertently contributed to a thriving arts scene and a bohemian café culture to support it. Like Berliners, Montréalers appreciate affordable housing and the leisure time to enjoy it.

Summer boasts Montréal’s submission to major international music festivals (International Jazz Festival, MUTEK, Osheaga, Fringe etc.), while major art galleries’ and museums’ stab at summer programming represents something more modest with lower-profile exhibitions.

Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal (MACM). Photo by Raji Sohal.

Right now, the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal (aka the MAC), is presenting Yesterday’s Tomorrows, exhibiting Canadian artists (John Massey, David Tomas) and international artists (Dorit Margreiter, Simon Starling) who deal with modernism; that form of art associated with divorcing the individual from the same history which the MAC posits is making a comeback. The show uses furniture, sculpture, and paintings to explore modernism’s emphasis on functionality. The end result feels like walking into one of the display rooms of IKEA, but perhaps this is the show’s bleak point?

David K. Ross, “Attaché” series, detail from installation view. Photo by Raji Sohal.

As usual, MAC makes a point to include a Quebec artist. David K. Ross’s new series Attaché features colorful, monochromatic, high-resolution photographs of art storage and packing crates from various museums. The textured surfaces recall abstract paintings, but the complexity and highpoint of the MAC’s summer show lies in its current film installation covering works by rising British contemporary art star, Runa Islam.

Runa Islam, “Assault,” 2008, three different photo stills from installation view edited adjacently together. Photo by Raji Sohal.

Refreshingly, Islam uses 16mm film, which allows for higher light intensity and color saturation. In Assault (2008), a film projects the image of an individual’s blurred face onto a thin eye-level screen suspended by invisible wire (think sleek, Matrix-like interface). The projector itself is an intentionally visible part of the installation and stands in the place where a camera would normally be, blasting a bright projector light to which the film’s subject appears to react, as much as the museum visitor would. The visitor is encouraged to walk around the installation and “try out” different angles or points of views.

Pointing to the devices used in the work — the screen, the projector, the film — Islam’s work is devoid of narrative structure, instead probing the phenomenological by engaging participants in what they see and how they see it.

In The House Belongs to Those Who Inhabit It (2008), Islam “writes with camera” by allowing the lens to follow the sound (and not the sight) of a can of spray paint as graffiti writers tag a building in which they squat. With Be The First To See What You See As You See It (2004), a woman dressed in white surveys a set of fine china tea service on exhibit in a museum, then slowly and deliberately knocks everything to the ground. Once again, Islam explores the relationship between sight and expectations (in this case social).

Runa Islam’s show at the MAC is its summer exhibition’s saving grace. It is also a welcomed contemporary foray into film experimentation, proposing — as we know all too well by now — that even with the continued rise of video art, there is still much more to be explored in film art.

Ryan Trecartin, "Any Ever," 2010, installation view. Photo by Steve Payne, courtesy The Power Plant.

It is neither a secret nor a surprise to know that, irregardless of broad worldly appeal, the average Louvre visitor views the Mona Lisa for a scarce fifteen seconds before moving on. In comparison to this unmoving matriarch of art history, one almost expects film and video art to defy this short attention span by virtue of its tendency to unfold over a longer period of time. However, in my capacity as both artist and critic, I have all too often witnessed people bring a new flavor of evasiveness to the viewing of time-based works. The darkened gallery space is approached tentatively like the site of an unseemly peep show, where the visitor clings hesitantly to the threshold of the room – inevitably hindering the entrance of braver souls – before slinking off with the visible shame of one who feels he/she has failed to get the point of it all.

Rather than turning a blind eye to this phenomenon, it is more productive to acknowledge the very real and physical challenges presented by film and video art in order to appreciate the transformative potential of a thorough engagement with this temporal, and sometimes spatial, burden. In a cumulative context such as the recent Images Festival (a Toronto-wide exhibition that pushes the time limits of even the most seasoned art viewer — after one day of gallery visits, my pupils had dilated to twice their usual size), these challenges can be rewarded or exacerbated by the intent of the artist, who is increasingly conscious of the viewer’s presence as an indispensable part of the finished work.

Peter Campus, "Anamnesis," 1974, installation view. Photo by Steve Payne, courtesy The Power Plant.

At The Power Plant, which contributed to this deluge with four separate installations, the role of the audience is immediately apparent in Peter Campus’s Anamnesis, an early work dating from 1974. From a distance, Anamnesis is a blank projection of the gallery’s empty wall with the sneakiest hint of floor, waiting for the viewer to arrive and fulfill its function as an artwork dependent upon human presence. The viewer’s arrival is captured on a closed-circuit video camera that literally pulls the body into the projected space. Even more insidious is the three-second delay that drags the appropriated likeness out-of-sync with time. These ghostly echoes preserve past movements for several disquieting moments, though even these vanish shortly after the viewer’s withdrawal from the camera’s reach, unrecorded and infinitely unique. Part of the work’s liberating appeal is owed to this lack of enforced duration and accompanying promise of a participatory voice.

Joachim Koester, "Hypnogogia," 2010, installation view. Photo by Steve Payne, courtesy The Power Plant.

The viewer experiences a similar sense of agency in Joachim Koester’s installation, Hypnogogia. The darkened space, with its repeating film reels rattling away, creates its own sense of non-linear time, leaving the viewers at liberty to wander through the room at their own pace. Given the angled placement of the suspended screens and the novelty of clunky film projectors unfamiliar to the contemporary eye, the need to move through this space is immediate. Much like the tarantism being feigned by the dancers in Koester’s films, this installation enacts a darkly psychedelic influence upon the viewer, whose body is absorbed into the space of the work as an active explorer.

Ryan Trecartin, "Any Ever," 2010, installation view. Photo by Steve Payne, courtesy The Power Plant.

In the hands of an artist like Ryan Trecartin, the immersive potential of what The Power Plant’s curatorial statement addresses as “screen space” reverses the active role of the viewer, lulling one instead into a state of passive reception. From the confounding maze housing seven screening rooms for Re’Search Wait’S and Trill-ogy Comp to the seemingly endless loops of erratically edited video (their combined duration exceeding the opening hours of The Power Plant), everything in this installation is designed to entrap the viewer within a narcissistic feedback loop of rapid-fire digital era imagery. This is not unlike the unwitting paralysis of a web addict losing an entire day watching Der Untergang video memes on YouTube.

Mechanisms set in place to control the viewer’s experience of these digital video projections reinforce this passivity. Audio accessible only by wired headphones keeps the viewer tethered to a seating arrangement that, more often than not, responds directly to the content of a given video, drawing the viewer ever deeper into Trecartin’s maddening world. From a picnic table to abbreviated bleachers reminiscent of high school, the viewer occupies physical spaces in keeping with the adolescent lives perversely at play on the screen. In cases where the viewer is made to lie in a bed or recline in an airplane seat, identification with the video’s neurotic subjects borders on the self-annihilation that already afflicts Trecartin’s media-obsessed characters. Much like Campus’s Anamnesis, the viewer’s presence is complicit in the making of this work, but Trecartin’s control of the scene drains action from the body, makes the viewer receptive and alarmingly malleable.

This hollowing out of experience to mere seeing and hearing is not without value, once one escapes Trecartin’s maze of rooms and crosses The Power Plant’s central dividing corridor into the blank cavernous calm of Sharon Lockhart’s Podwórka. Her documentary portrait of Lodz, Poland is video stripped bare to its essential form: light projected large upon a blank wall, insubstantial but impossible to ignore. As one watches the indifferently filmed children at play in their highly adaptable urban spaces, the emptiness of this gallery is amplified. Without distraction, there to do but on the glimpses Lockhart offers of these other, youthful lives. It is a contemplative work of the mind rather than an experience of the body, bringing the viewer back around to that first prolonged love between you and art, with nothing else in between.

Shana Moulton, “Whispering Pines 9,” video, 2009

In an essay titled “Cyborg Anthropology,” Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit and Sarah Williams offer a sort of manifesto:

Cyborg Anthropology invests in alternative worldmaking by critically examining the powers of the imagination invested in the sciences and technologies of contemporary societies. In the past, anthropology became a source of insight for popular theorizing precisely because it described alternative worlds and informed the imagination of radical difference. Cyborg anthropology offers new metaphors to both academic and popular theorizing for comprehending the different ways that sciences and technologies work in our lives – metaphors that start with our complicity in many of the processes we wish were otherwise.

In this monthly column, I will attempt to write about art inspired by the ideas of cyborg anthropology. Let’s call it cyborg criticism (in blog form). I am aware that I’ll probably mangle a lot of theory while doing it, but let’s be optimistic and call it “creating new metaphors” instead. While there is a certain cringe factor in embarking on a “practice” that includes the word “cyborg” in it (because of the nerdy implications of the term), it seems somewhat myopic to dismiss these ideas completely. In our current cultural landscape, contemporary technologies have completely shaken up the way we perceive ourselves and our worlds. To further explain my point, Downey et al. again: “cyborg anthropology explores a new alternative by examining the argument that human subjects and subjectivity are crucially as much a function of machines, machine relations, and information transfers as they are machine producers and operators.” In the end, it’s a matter of terminology and of shifting foci.

Perhaps an example is in order. For clarification, let’s look at Shana Moulton. In her series Whispering Pines, Moulton’s stream of exercise equipment, cosmetic products ,and new age rituals and paraphernalia show the way in which her character Cynthia is molded by these technologies, continually struggling to cure and improve her body and mind beyond their human state to become “better.” Cynthia leaks, melds, morphs, opens up, and transforms. Her body is a plastic body, an unstable mass created, bent, and shaped by machines, rituals. In Moulton’s video Whispering Pines 9 (2009), Cynthia uses an Avon foot massager posing as a Zuni artifact to regrow her mysteriously absent lower body. The climax of this video finds her joyfully dancing in the desert in the Southwest, each hemisphere of her body separate but somehow connected; a body reconstructed and improved by technology. The parallels Moulton makes between ancient Zuni artifacts as seen on Antiques Roadshow and the artifacts Cynthia finds in her living room provide clear examples of the changing ontological position technology holds in our society. Whereas Zuni selfhood was predicated on the artifacts they crafted, the massage equipment we have created shapes and rebuilds us in turn.

So why embark on this column? I think it’s a political move — or maybe political is too strong a word. It is an attempt to wrap my brain around these issues and to give Internet high fives to artists that are creating the “new metaphors” our society needs. In his book Metal and Flesh, Ollivier Dyens insists:

…we are physically very similar to one another but are separated by worlds (technologically specific worlds) that are increasingly dissimilar. We are not witnessing the end of great ideological stories but their infinite proliferation, and to such a point that formerly unwavering representations like time, space, life, and death are also mutating and muliplying. Like head trauma victims, we are now seeing space, perceiving time, experiencing life, and considering death according to “languages” that are not and cannot be universal. Because of technology, the world has become a series of exclusive and personal realms.

Art has the ability to help us build bridges between our “personal realms.” It can show us how to navigate our worlds and compensate for the increasing parallax our personalized 21st-century technologies add to our field of vision.

Alice Guy-Blaché, "The Ocean Waif," 1916. Courtesy the Library of Congress MBRS Division.

I’m new here.  I should explain.  At university, I wanted to be a video artist.  Maybe I should have been born into another time (and matriculated to another university) because the history, theory, and philosophy of what we were studying was never followed through at the quite the same pitch in the practical elements.  Of course, we were there to dissect the works of greats such as Martha Rosler, Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Michael Snow, though for me they always played in reference to the discussions around Maya Deren.  Thousands of words were written and much gas emitted spent talking about the migration from Europe to the USA of the leading avant-gardist lights during the inter-war period.  Less time was spent on the mainstream foundational actuality of film and video at the time, the context in which “the artists” were able to juxtapose their films.  One name I recall but have heard very little of since is that of Alice Guy-Blaché who, on July 1, should have the world celebrate the 137th anniversary of her birth.

It is difficult to imagine how the reactionary avant-garde would interpret and reinterpret its own narratives through the medium of film (and later, video), had it not been for the introduction of linear fictional narrative into the mainstream (or at least what constituted a mainstream in those seminal years) cinema of the time.  The experimentation with medium and the modes of effect are, very broadly, common elements that summon a direct link between the early experimentations of the inventor of motion picture film, Louis Le Prince, and the films of committed Dada/Surrealists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.  Both, in essence, unsurprisingly focus on the curiosity of movement either, say, through Le Prince’s documentation or Man Ray’s performances.  The early cinema was one of the most progressive and transformative mediums ever created and practitioners such as the Lumière brothers, Émile Reynaud, or Georges Méliès were instrumental in developing a visual art-based aesthetic for a mass audience. And though largely forgotten, one person was largely instrumental for developing the medium of film as cinema.

Léon Gaumont hired Alice Guy in 1894 at the age of twenty-one as a secretary for the still film-photography company that he worked for at the time.  The organization was soon declared bankrupt and Gaumont the following year set up his own moving-image film production company.  The company, which is still in operation, is the oldest surviving film production company in the world.  For the ten years spanning 1896 to 1906, Alice Guy was Gaumont’s Head of Production and was involved in the writing, production, and direction of films — the number of which is unknown but believed to between seven hundred to a thousand.  She is quietly credited as having developed narrative structure in filmmaking.  She was the first filmmaker to create genre films, writing, producing, and directing everything from slapstick comedy to domestic abuse dramas (in fact, in retrospect an interesting, though harrowing, double-bill would be Guy’s The Stepmother and Bresson’s Mouchette.  Understandably, Guy is more sympathetic to her heroine).  At the time, Guy oversaw Gaumont as the largest film production company in the world.

In 1907, Guy married Herbert Blaché, who was appointed as Gaumont’s United States production manager.  Three years later, the Guy-Blachés formed their own production company, The Solax Company.  With Alice Guy-Blaché as creative director, Solax was to become so successful that they were able to invest over $100,000 in a new studio and production facility to rival their neighbors in New Jersey — home, at the time, to the American film industry.

Film and video are my first love and for me, there are no differences between a video artist, an artist filmmaker, a feature filmmaker, or a documentary maker – all are classed under artists of the craft of moving image.  That Alice Guy-Blaché utilized film as a narrative storytelling device, and that audiences were extremely receptive to this offer of hers, does not detach from the fact that Maya Deren (as an example) appropriated what would soon be termed “cinematic” techniques.  The recent surge in feature-length artist’s films means that artists, too, have to borrow these techniques in order to sustain an audience’s engagement in an auditorium setting, be it a gallery or film theater.  Her legacy is very clear on this.

There remains one glaring omission from this post, but I am not writing about Women’s Cinema or women in cinema.  In terms of skill — actual, fertile skill — it is irrelevant that Alice Guy-Blaché and Maya Deren were women. Indeed, I have not at all mentioned the work of Germaine Dulac, who began her filmmaking career during the Great War. However, the legacy of women filmmakers, starting in the post-war period and continuing through the 20th century, has been bound within certain iconic figures whose successful creative and intellectual ambitions have been celebrated.  In deference to this point, is it important that Guy-Blaché and Deren were making films of their own creative endeavour, essentially only assisted by their husbands, despite how the films are credited (and in the partisan account described by Stan Brakhage in Film at Wit’s End)?  It is more than probable, yes.  Is it coincidental that Solax folded after the Guy-Blachés divorced in 1921 and, despite her track record, that Alice was never able to make another film where Herbert Blaché was?  It is more than likely not.

In particular, there has been this one female filmmaker in my head recently and it has made me wonder about the opportunities that are afforded to women in filmmaking when their background is trained in the fine arts.  Indeed, the best feature-length artist’s moving image works that I have seen in the past year or so have been Helen by Christine Malloy and Joe Lawlor, Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event and the outstanding Game Keepers Without Game by Emily Wardill — all of which have had extensive distribution, recognition, and exhibition.  The name Alice has been an enduring symbol in the language of cinema; today, as much as ever, it should be celebrated.

The act of codification that is enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights has ensured that the unspeakable has been cut down to size at the very moment that it is protested against.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, on the UN General Assembly’s defining of the term “genocide.”

"Voyage of the Doomed" from "They Spoke Out." Courtesy Disney Educational Productions.

This spring marked the launch of an ambitious motion comic series addressing the Holocaust, titled They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust. The project, a collaborative effort by comic book artist Neal Adams, Disney Educational Productions, and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, is a multi-part series, the first volume of which was recently screened by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York (and whose initial graphic installments have been made available here). Each episode of this ten-part series aims to chronicle little known stories of heroism by various Americans who spoke out against Fascist extremism or otherwise performed extraordinary acts of bravery, recounting, as the authors of the series put it, the “remarkable stories of Americans of all faiths who raised their voices, marched in protest, or even helped smuggle Jewish refugees out of Hitler’s Europe.”

The mission statement of the series is set forth as follows:

Each year, educators seek new and innovative ways to teach this difficult topic. They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust addresses this need by presenting an important but little-known chapter of Holocaust history – and presenting it in a unique and compelling way: through motion comics. Blending the features of comic books, animation, period footage, and photographs, motion comics are the newest, cutting-edge way to entertain and to educate simultaneously.

This graphic project, particularly its artistic strategies and goals as articulated in the above mission statement, inevitably calls to mind and invites comparison to Art Spiegelman’s own two-volume graphic comic project, Maus.  A project engaging with the Holocaust, such as They Spoke Out, also raises the question about artistic strategies of representing traumatic events and historical catastrophe, with the prospect that representing catastrophe is fraught with the risk of diminishing the enormity of the represented event, be it the Holocaust or 9/11. Indeed, as Theodor Adorno suggests in the epigraph, codifying catastrophe carries with it the danger of diminishing the specificity and enormity of the historical event. As Alex Thomson has described it, when representations “become a shorthand way of referring to the event and placing it into the continuum of history as such, then the risk is in normalizing and taming the traumatic singularity of any given catastrophe.” (The problem of representing the Holocaust was a subject explored in the Jewish Museum in New York’s controversial 2002 exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art and one of the reasons for the vocal opposition to the exhibition).

"Rescue Over the Mountains" from "They Spoke Out." Courtesy Disney Educational Productions.

While They Spoke Out and Maus both employ a blend of word, graphic images, diagrams, and documentary photographs, they take decidedly different stances toward the catastrophic past. For unlike the straightforward narratives of various historical figures and events in They Spoke Out, Maus is a complicated and deeply personal tale about Spiegelman’s father’s experience in the Holocaust and the author’s own fraught relationship to that traumatic past. Whereas the stories chronicled in They Spoke Out aim to recover for readers heretofore unheralded or forgotten acts of heroism from the historical past through what is essentially a conventional narrative framework—presenting a kind of narrative fullness, if you will—in Spiegelman’s tale, the reader is confronted with certain gaps and discontinuities, which confound the reader’s own process of meaning production.

From Art Spiegelman's "Maus," 1986.

These challenges to narrative fullness emerge throughout Maus—perhaps most evident in those moments when there is a discrepancy between the words and their accompanying illustration, or in the fragmentary presentation and limited scope of the shifting narrative perspective as the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, unfolds. One of the biggest gaps in Spiegelman’s tale however, is the absence of his deceased mother’s voice, which once it becomes clear that her journals had been destroyed and her story irretrievably lost, leaves a palpable and insistent void at the heart of both Spiegelman’s and the reader’s efforts to reconstruct the traumatic past. Effectively calling into question Spiegelman’s own method of remembering, these disturbances and abruptions in, and to, the narrative function not, or not simply, as representations of the enormous impact and consequences of the father’s traumatic experience, but as symptoms of the author’s own inherited trauma, its disruptive capacity and disordering effects.

Spiegelman’s graphic comic does not so much attend to representing the Holocaust, but to conjuring representation’s incapacity to coalesce around the enormity of such a traumatic event, and his own traumatic relation to that event. Thus, if They Spoke Out employs the comic book’s capacity for hero-formation and affirms the redemptive possibilities of inspirational narratives, Spiegelman uses the medium to gesture to the inadequacy of any narrative—personal or otherwise—to fully master a traumatic past. In this way, Spiegelman’s text resists the “normalizing and taming” trap articulated by Alex Thomson, by instead transmitting an undigested and indigestible trauma that is anything but normalized and tamed. Indeed, any possibility of normalcy and narrative mastery in Maus is dashed in the very last cartoon panel of the book, when Vladek tells his son that he is tired from telling his story and would like to rest, but in so doing calls him not Artie but Richieu, the name of Artie’s brother who died in the war—revealing to the last trauma’s disordering effects.

From Art Spiegelman's "Maus Vol. II," 1991.

In closing, it seems fitting to mention one other project that explores the problems that invariably accompany attempts at representing and memorializing the Holocaust: Beryl Korot’s multi-channel video work Dachau, 1974. Dachau, 1974 consists of video footage taken from multiple vantage points during a visit by the artist to Dachau, the notorious Nazi camp, at a time when the camp had been open to the public (Korot described it as an “antiseptic environment inhabited by tourists”). Indeed, as Korot’s video unfolds it becomes a record not of Dachau itself, but rather of tourists interacting with it. In situating Dachau as a symbolic stand in for the Holocaust, Dachau, 1974 ostensibly threatens to veer precisely into the problematic terrain warned against by Adorno and Thomson.

In Korot’s video, however, Dachau, that haunting symbol of an unspeakable catastrophe, becomes just that — a looming presence of an ineffable past. Dachau, 1974, becomes a meditation not so much on the Holocaust itself, but on our mediated and belated relation to that traumatic event, a posterity gestured to in the title of the work, which is of course not Dachau, but Dachau, 1974. And it is here that Dachau, 1974 and Maus might be said to forge a similar stance to a traumatic past distinct from They Spoke Out. After all, the works of Spiegelman and Korot, by transmitting a fragmentary and vicarious relation to a traumatic past rather than simply an explicit narrative of the Holocaust as catastrophic historical event, function as compelling reminders of that unfathomable trauma which resists psychical closure, and one that representation cannot fully decipher.

John Baldessari, "Tips for Artists to Sell", 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 56 1/2 in. The Broad Foundation, Santa Monica. © 2009 John Baldessari. Photo courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica.

In this week’s roundup you’ll read about a retrospective in the Golden State, a pack of wolves in Singapore, a dreamy gift in Berlin, de-monumentalisation in Italy, Oprah culture the world over, some fresh high-tops at Bloomingdale’s, and much more:

• The traveling retrospective exhibition, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, has opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This is the only West Coast showing and features the greatest number of works (more than 150) of any venue on the show’s tour. “Pure Beauty,” says Leslie Jones, LACMA associate curator of prints and drawings, “explores Baldessari’s lifelong interest in language and mass media culture, which seems increasingly relevant — even imperative — in an era of information and image proliferation.” Beginning with his little-known paintings from the early 1960s, the exhibition features the landmark photo and text works from 1966-68, photo-compositions derived from films stills of the 1980s, irregularly shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, as well as video and artist books. The show concludes with recent works by Baldessari (Season 5), including a special multimedia installation conceived for the retrospective. Pure Beauty closes September 12 at LACMA, and will then travel to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• On the occasion of Pure Beauty, Baldessari (working with the art media company ForYourArt) has created an iPad application that lets users rearrange a 17th-century Dutch still-life painting by Abraham van Beyeren. The painting, titled Banquet Still Life, is held in LACMA’s collection. According to the LA Times, Baldessari did another version of the project nine years ago. Learn more about the application at Artinfo.com.

• Stylus, a new project by Ann Hamilton (Season 1), opens at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on July 9. Hamilton’s installation was conceived as both “a sanctuary for listening and a laboratory for experiments in collective vocal exercises.” The installation asks the following questions: How do we communicate? What external forces act upon or inhibit our collective need for social contact and response? How are relationships enacted (or not enacted) by the architectural spaces we inhabit? Go behind the scenes of the installation by visiting the Pulitzer’s blog.

• Head On — a massive installation of 99 life-sized wolves — was created by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3) for his solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2006. It is now on view at the National Museum of Singapore. Via the museum: “Seen from afar, the leaping wolf pack forms an arc full of force and power, their fierce courage and spirit of warrior camaraderie seemingly serving as a reminder to people: humanity is easily blinded by a kind of collective mentality and action, and is destined to repeat such error to an almost unbelievable degree. The crux of this installation lies just before the glass wall, as the artist reminds people: invisible walls are the hardest to dismantle.” The second and third parts of this installation, Illusion II and Vortex, are also on view. Closes August 31.

• Works by Cai Guo-Qiang (Season 3), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the fourteenth edition of the International Sculpture Biennale of Carrara, Italy. The theme of this edition is the “radical process of de-monumentalisation which has freed sculpture from any celebratory, encomiastic function.” Browse the artist roster here. The biennale closes October 31.

• Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010, an exhibition of works by Beryl Korot (Season 1), has opened at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. This marks the artist’s most extensive museum project by  to date, featuring six never-before-seen works. Her new pieces reflect an ongoing interest in how our communication tools mirror the way we present and receive information. Among the works on view are Korot’s multi-channel video work, Text and Commentary, which premiered at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977. Curator Harry Philbrick points out, “Korot was the co-founder and co-editor of the ground-breaking 1970s publication Radical Software, the first magazine to explore the notion of alternative communication systems and formats for conveying information. Today, when new media is an imperative in our connected world, she continues to create fresh work that illuminates the structure of communication.” Continues through January 2, 2011.

• Dream Passage is the first major retrospective exhibition of works by Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman to be staged in Berlin. Presented by the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, the exhibition celebrates a new gift to the museum from collector Friedrich Christian Flick: Nauman’s Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984). This “architectural sculpture” has been installed in collaboration with the artist and will now be on permanent display. Other examples of Nauman’s “experience architecture,” also on view, include Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation) (1970), where visitors are recorded by a video camera and then confronted with their own image; and Kassel Corridor: Elliptical Space (1972), created for Documenta 5. Dream Passage closes October 10.

• Double Sexus, on view at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in Berlin, juxtaposes over 70 works by Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). The exhibition is designed to show their “striking parallels.” The artists never met, but they were both in Paris at the same time: Bellmer came to Paris from Berlin the same year that Bourgeois moved from Paris to New York. The central topics of the exhibition, according to the museum website, are “female fantasies and male fears, the ambiguous nature of everything sexual and the links between eroticism and creativity.” Closes August 15.

• Through July 10, new works by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) are on view at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels. In this exhibition, Pettibon continues to use collage, drawing, and painting to conjure earlier established themes and imagery mined from Noir and B movies, cult icons, literature, television, political propaganda, and old comic books. “This broad range of historical references not only foregrounds Pettibon’s own interest in appropriating past visual and literary styles,” states the Gladstone website, “but also invokes the schizophrenic and pathological impulses at work in the American imaginary.”

• Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing Projects) (1994/2001), an important video installation by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe, is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 19. It is included in the special exhibition Contemporary Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection. Huyghe’s piece is described as: “a fixed view of two residential towers in a bleak urban landscape, swathed in fog at night. Lacking any signs of human activity, the buildings appear to take on lives of their own as the video’s buzzing electronic soundtrack, composed by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot, builds in intensity. Windows in the two façades begin to light up rhythmically and with increasing frequency, as if communicating in some sort of code…”

• Pattern, Costume, and Ornamentation in African and African-American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art features works by Fred Wilson (Season 3) and Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), among others. The exhibition attempts to show how African and African-American artists incorporate design and decoration into photography, sculpture, quilts, and other forms. Wilson’s photographic series of antique dolls, titled Old Salem: A Family of Strangers, is included. Closes September 12.

• Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters, a new publication from Aspen Art Museum, is the definitive collection of collages that Bradford (Season 4) has been working on since 2006. The book features more than 100 full-color reproductions, as well as essays by Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne, Los Angeles-based artist and writer Ernest Hardy, Los Angeles-based cultural critic Malik Gaines, and Aspen Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson. Purchase Merchant Posters here.

• Jenny Holzer (Season 4) is in the New York Times again, most recently for her sneaker project to benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Protect Me From What I Want,” a line from her 1980s Survival series, is printed on canvas Keds sneakers that will be sold at Bloomingdale’s beginning July 8. The black-and-white high-top version retails for $75, low-tops for $70. Read more about Holzer’s project here.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) was also featured in the New York Times last week. The article discusses, among other things, Homeland, the artist’s first album of new material in nearly 10 years. Anderson is quoted as saying, “[The album] came out of frustration from living in this Oprah Winfrey culture where everything is done for you and people are just infantilized. I mean, that show is based on the premise that there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just a human being. It’s not easy being a human being.”

• Andrea Zittel (Season 1) speaks to Artforum about her project, Indianapolis Island, for the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

• The Guardian names Zittel Artist of the Week.

Note: We will not post a roundup next week, July 5, due to the holiday.

Christian Boltanski, "No Man's Land" at the Park Avenue Armory

With our poor economy and tough times in general, it would be natural for artists to look ahead to happier days. Like the rest of us, they are frustrated, and probably wish they could sell some more work. However, artists continue to deal with the past. They are looking back to difficult times, and making art that expresses fear, anxiety, and sadness stemming from events in their own lives as well due to world events like war, genocide, and state-imposed repression.

At the Park Avenue Armory, French artist Christian Boltanski recently mounted a large-scale installation called No Man’s Land, for which he assembled a giant heap of clothes in the center of the 55,000 square-foot Drill Hall. This mountain was surrounded by 45 rectangles—“plots,” the release calls them—of jackets and coats neatly laid out on the floor.  Throughout these plots, anonymous poles played the sound of hearts beating—each one different, and taken from Boltanski’s ongoing heartbeat collection project, Les Archives du Coeur. At the front of the Hall, an intimidating arrangement of oxidized biscuit tins formed a towering 66’-long wall halting a visitor’s entry into the large, dim space and forced him to consider a path left or right to get inside.

Christian Boltanski, "No Man's Land" at the Park Avenue Armory

The Holocaust connections seemed to be everywhere. Boltanski’s 40-year career has been absorbed with the Shoah, and he is known, to a certain extent, as a Holocaust artist. Born in occupied Paris in 1944, Boltanski grew up in postwar France. It was not only the pile of clothes in the center of the room that was reminiscent of victims forced to part with their packed belongings upon entering concentration camps, but also the rectangles of clothes on the ground and the steel beams holding up the heartbeat speakers that suggested the blocks of a camp. The sounds of the anonymous heartbeats reverberating throughout the old-fashioned Drill Hall and the massive amount of objects belonging to unseen people call the extent and anonymity of the Nazi genocide to mind.

Elisabeth Smolarz, "Farewell East Germany," 2009. 3-channel video with sound.

Working with the postwar Germany of her youth, Elisabeth Smolarz has made a three-channel video installation currently on view at Kunsthalle Galapagos called Farewell East Germany. The history of East Germany is partly the history of the artist: Smolarz’s family immigrated to West Germany in 1989 from Communist Poland, where she experienced food shortages and hours of waiting in line for basic items. Through re-enactments caught on her video camera, Smolarz depicts three scenarios related to communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and she also taps into “Ostalgie,” the nostalgia many former-East Germany residents continue to feel for the “good old days.”

Elisabeth Smolarz, "Farewell East Germany," 2009. 3-channel video with sound.

In the first video, a middle-aged man named Uwe B. sings songs and recites poems he learned as a schoolboy. Though he is German, these are delivered in Russian, the language of this man’s East German youth. In the second frame, the camera slowly pans the library of the former Manhattan home of the West Germany’s ambassador. It was in this room that leaders from West Germany and the Soviet Union purportedly planned the demise of the GDR back in 1989. In the installation’s final segment, Peter S. attempts to disassemble and reassemble an AK-47 rifle while blindfolded, a skill he learned as part of his compulsive military service for the GDR. Smolarz chose to represent these two men because to her, they represent typical former citizens of the GDR. In an email message Smolarz noted that, “symbolically I found the language and the military service reflected the influence Russia had on the Eastern Block best.”

Paul Chan, "The 6th Light," installation view in "Haunted" exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum

Lastly, the Guggenheim Museum’s new photo and video show, Haunted, is a composite of art from the museum’s collection dealing with memory and the feeling of being haunted by the past. Divided into four parts: Appropriation and the Archive; Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time; Documentation and Reiteration; and Trauma and the Uncanny, the works incorporate original and archival material and deal with both personal memories and artists’ desire to bear witness and keep traumas from the past alive.

The types of memories range widely. There is a set of beautiful seascapes by Hiroshi Sugimoto, offering a sense of timelessness in nature. Sugimoto is also represented by a picture of a drive-in movie theater, a relic of past decades. In An-My Lê’s series Small Wars, men are shown reenacting battles from the Vietnam War. Lê’s photographs show the war through her modern eyes; her memories are likely tainted from outside sources like articles and movies of the period and the pictures were taken in Virginian forests instead of in Southeast Asia. Lê is working with photography’s evidential quality, the impression of authenticity the medium gives.

This spate of exhibits brings Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida to mind, particularly his interest in photography and death. Likewise, these works have been inflected with memories and thoughts—often related to death—that have stayed with their artists.  Perhaps this desire to engage memories—some unpleasant—and make work that is not only difficult to produce but also to view is a reminder that though things are bad, they could indeed be worse.

Aligning smoothly with the start of Art Basel for the first time, the 6th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (BB6) opened this past week, two months later than its previous April time slot. While this meant that Berlin’s gallerists had to juggle between the openings of their own summer shows and a smooth departure to Switzerland, art buffs and collectors from abroad seem to have appreciated the synchronization of the two major art events — similar to 2007’s “Super European Art Tour”: Skulptur Projekte Münster (every 10 years) / Documenta XII (every 5 years) / 52nd Venice Biennale (every 2 years) / Art Basel 38 (every year).

While using multiple alternative exhibition venues is standard practice for the Berlin Biennial, the BB6 marks the first major departure from Berlin-Mitte and the location of its central hub, KW Institute of Contemporary Art. With six different sites, mostly located to the south in the district of Kreuzberg, the Biennial asks its audience to consider more rough and tumble situations in which to view art. Although the drive to stake out new neighborhoods is nothing new for Berlin’s art crowd, it seems this curatorial decision is fueling the discussion about the gentrification of (already hip) neighborhoods, such as Kreuzberg. Below, Art21’s Berlin columnists discuss this shift in locale among other developments in the 6th iteration of the Berlin Biennale.

Anna Milandri
The atmosphere of major Berlin arts events often hinges on the city’s unpredictable weather patterns. Fate had it that Thursday evening’s opening of the 6th Berlin Biennale coincided with the hottest day of the year to date, and so after a tour through the different locations surrounding Oranienplatz, most attendees found themselves on beer benches or sitting on the grass, sipping cold beers from local kiosks.

While Oranienplatz — a city square in the middle of Kreuzberg 36 — is certainly not exempt from the rapid changes visible all over the city, it is still a long ways away from the renovated district of Mitte and the heart of the Biennale, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The regulars sitting on the benches of Oranienplatz usually include those that live in the area: elderly Turkish men having a chat, teenagers smoking cigarettes, punks having a beer, mothers rocking baby strollers. For the duration of the Biennale, Vietnamese-born Canadian artist Ron Tran has moved these benches closer together, so that people sitting on one side are now facing those opposite at a distance of about 1.5 meters. While not quite uncomfortably close, one can no longer easily ignore his counterpart. Tran’s work does not implicitly comment on the gentrification process that big arts events (such as this one) help to accelerate, but the piece could be read as symbolic for the complicated relationship this 6th Berlin Biennale forms with its venue locations and their neighbors. It will be interesting to see whether this relationship develops into one of mutual disregard or one of real interaction.

Ethan Hayes-Chute

John Smith, "The Girl Chewing Gum," 1976. Installation view, 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin. Photo: Uwe Walter, 2010.

The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), one of the innumerable film and video works featured in the 6th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, is very likely one of John Smith’s masterpieces. Off-camera, a shouting voice directs, in an oft-humorous yet deadpan manner, the normal day-to-day goings-on of a busy London street corner. Shot on grainy black and white film, the visual qualities of The Girl Chewing Gum relate nicely to the graphic, high-contrast, typographically-oriented photographs of Shannon Ebner, despite being exhibited at venues in different neighborhoods in Berlin.

Installation view of Shannon Ebner in the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Photo: Ethan Hayes-Chute.

Also set rather far away from the central hub of the biennial, KW (Kunst Werke), are the strangely perverse and claustrophobic videos of George Kuchar, which are presented in a similarly perverse and claustrophobic manner (22 video monitors in one hot, stuffy room) — a good portion of which depict Kuchar holed-up in his motel room in Oklahoma fretting about the weather outside and the possibility of a tornado touching down.

George Kuchar, "Centennial," 2007. DVD, color, sound 13'14''. Courtesy the artist and the Video Data Bank, Chicago.

Running concurrently with the biennial, Sophia Hultén’s Past Particles at Konrad Fischer takes everyday objects (a tool box, a set of broken windows, small objects often found on a workshop floor) and stretches their functionality, with wit and simple ingenuity. Zak | Branika’s Minimum Maximum showcases mid-70s work by Stanisław Dróżdż, Carl Andre, and Robert Barry, consisting mostly of incredibly obsessive typewriter works that could put any present-day ASCII artist to shame (no undo!).

Stanisław Drożdż, "Untitled (Numerical Texts)," 1974. 40 x 80cm. Courtesy Zak | Branika.

This weekend also inaugurated the new location and impressive new exhibition space belonging to the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, which recently moved from its longtime home a few blocks away amid turmoil and aggravation fueled by local politics and pesky and persistent squatters.

Ali Fitzgerald

Ana Witt, "Die Geburt," 2003. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Cologne.

The Berlin Biennale is a fascinating study in social space and shock-and-awe gentrification as the art elite, often in dress unfit for adventure, find themselves shimmying down staircases of indeterminate material or slinking into gritty studio apartments (as is the case with Danh Vo’s modest contribution of his own apartment this year).

Given Biennale curator Kathrin Rhomberg’s interest in a firmer engagement with social realities and a more stringent realism, it makes sense that most of the venues are in Kreuzberg and that many of the video artists included are Frederick Wiseman devotees who rely on the dictates of political documentary. But unfortunately, at the Oranienplatz space, individual works dissolve into a kind of “protest ambiance” marked by swiveling camera work, escalating voices, and the occasional sound of street fire.

Some of the more successful pieces depart from the meandering pace of investigative journalism in favor of a more distended reality.

Andrey Kuzkin, "Resistance," 2009, Courtesy the artist and Open Gallery, Moscow.

Andrey Kuzkin’s manic Resistance (2009) reaches the same disquieting speed of a Ryan Trecartin video without the stretch pants or dorm room vertigo. In an incredible act of brute force and frustration, Kuzkin scours the glossy visages of women from chemically steeped issues of Vogue and other high fashion mags.

Phil Collins’s Marxism Today (Prologue) (2010) is an engrossing and uptempo look into the reunification struggles of Marxist-Leninist educators from the former GDR. Set to an emo Stereolab soundtrack and undeniably slick, the monologues are interspersed with East German educational material and sexy footage from the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Ana Witt’s Die Geburt (2003) shows the artist naked and twitching under her mother’s surprisingly elastic gown in an unnerving yet touching recreation of the womb. The artist’s head lies stubborn and content along her mother’s leg in a gesture that, while not overtly political, is apropos in a time of threatened survival and tenaciously guarded personal freedoms.

Alex Freedman
Given a sizable portion of the KW Institute, Petrit Halilaj bolted reconstructed beams of his family’s Runik, Serbia home to the ceiling before letting his signature bourgeois hens loose to mingle with visitors. A floor up is a selection of drawings, videos, and installations which continue the theme of flightless birds as a metaphor for rural-to-urban migration. A surreal exploration of intergenerational dreams, Halilaj’s work is smart and subtle, making it this politically heavy Biennale’s comic relief.

Petrit Halilaj, "The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real," 2010. Installation View, 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Dimensions variable. Photo: Uwe Walter, 2010. Courtesy the artist. Copyright the artist and Chert, Berlin.

But over at Oranienplatz, the “hens” weren’t feeling so free last Friday night. Marlene Haring’s performance Door Policy, or, Biting the Hand That Feeds Me transformed BB6’s gender ratio into a policy of admitting 12 females for every 33 males during the public opening. Unfortunately, a lack of signage led to viewer frustration over the WC-like queues. Responding to the disgruntled public, the policy was temporarily altered to women-only, sparking another more important debate: which line would RuPaul stand in?

Marlene Haring, "Door Policy, or Biting the Hand that Feeds Me," 2010. Courtesy the artist.

Haring’s work wasn’t the only effort mangled by bad signage and public perplexity. Staging a move to defend their turf, the makers of Forgotten Bar launched the 1st Berlin Kreuzberg Biennale for Contemporary Art. At times witty, othertimes jejune, the Kreuzberg Biennale maps onto the Kiez an ambitious roster of nearly 50 works, including Christian Jankowski’s classic video The Hunt, now on view at the Cafe Schönlein Backerei. The only trouble is that by Monday, several signs had been stolen, transforming this art walk into a search mission, as scores of work became undecipherable from the area’s mosaic of graffiti and event posters. Yet the show’s precarious future levels a potent critique for assessing the Berlin Biennale’s temporary foray into the neighborhood: while one show assimilates to its environs, the other will pack up and leave.

Christian Jankowski, installation view of "The Hunt," 1992, at Cafe Schönlein Backerei, Kreuzberg Biennale for Contemporary Art. Photo: Alex Freedman, 2010.

…but finding it difficult to get enough people together? Let Art21 help you out!

Join us this Saturday, June 19, in front of the Brooklyn Museum as we set the stage for anyone to participate in performances for Oliver Herring’s Three Day Weekend and The Present Perfect Weekend.

All are welcome to participate or observe. Collaborate with friends new and old to create a filmed performance, some of which may be selected for screening during the June 23rd live event, The Present Perfect with Art21. We’ll bring the equipment—you just bring yourself! Or, bring your own cameras to create and contribute footage of your own!

Details for the Art21 Pickup Performances
Where: Brooklyn Museum
When: Saturday, June 19, 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m

Be sure to join us on Twitter to keep track of where we are or to call us out during the performances

Our cameras will also be ready to film responses and questions for Laurie Simmons, who will also be featured at the June 23rd event. Have something you’ve been itching to tell or ask Laurie? Flag us down and let us know!

Come alone or with friends, and please help us spread the word. The more performers we have, the more possibilities there are to reinterpret the performances. Oliver’s instructions were just suggestions, after all—the true performance comes from what you bring to it.

Not able to participate this weekend, but still interested in contributing your own performance or responses? Visit The Present Perfect site for more information about how to get involved in advance of the June 23rd event.

Update: The University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, IL, is organizing a performance for Thursday, June 17, and will screen the live event on Wednesday, June 23rd.

Additional sample videos are available after the jump.

Oliver Herring filming Three Day Weekend in Austin, April 2010. Photo courtesy of testperformancetest.