Ai Weiwei, Surveillance Camera, 2006. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Last week I presented a Season 6 Access screening of the Change episode featuring Catherine Opie, El Anatsui and Ai Weiwei. During the screening I made some notes to share when it comes to ideas for teaching with this particular hour…

First, what kinds of change are illustrated in this episode? Some of the art featured calls for different kinds of change and other works shed a light on changes occurring around us. Which works in this episode specifically engage with the theme? Which works ask the viewer to consider a specific kind of change?

Second, how does each of the three artists document the transformation and change of physical materials, places, and even ways of thinking? How does each artist work with transformation and change in multiple ways and how does collaboration affect the art created?

Finally, what kinds of things can students experience and learn from working with this episode? Possibilities include:

• Investigating how different artists document and perhaps provoke change.
• Exploring a single theme by engaging with diverse media and materials (and this goes for each Art21 episode- all twenty four of them).
• Engaging communities-small and large- as collaborators and subjects.
• Experiencing diverse approaches to storytelling.
• Enabling conversations that include topics we sometimes avoid talking about, such as how we perceive (not to mention treat) people who don’t look like we do or the role of surveillance in our lives.

If you missed the Change episode last month you can view it here as well as download the educators’ guide in a simple PDF file.

Until next week. Spring is here.

"Teaching with Change" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Well, it’s done. I am a Master(ess) of Arts. (Unofficially, though, since I won’t receive my diploma until I put the finishing touches on my thesis and submit it to the library.) Now for the hard part.

The great risk of going to grad school is the possibility that several years down the road, you will find yourself with another piece of paper and no better idea of how to gain entry into and function within the professional world. Luckily, I don’t doubt for a minute that pursuing an advanced degree was the right choice for me. I feel much better equipped to begin a career as a cultural worker than I did two years ago. Still, I worry that sustaining my current level of passion for issues in my chosen field will become increasingly difficult as the pressures of getting a job and figuring out the rest of my life intensify.

If only I had gotten my degree in mastering the universe...

In my last post, I wrote about my interest in dialogue, and discussed it in relationship to contemporary art, literature, and museum practice. I neglected to mention Paulo Freire, the scholar who is perhaps the most provocative theorist of dialogue. Freire, a Brazilian educator and author who died in 1997, is something of an icon in my social justice-focused art education program. Part of my reluctance to talk about his work is my conviction that I cannot do proper justice to its eloquence and meaning.

Paulo Freire: What a fox.

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire refers to dialogue as “an existential necessity,” and “the way by which men achieve significance as men.” He further explains:

Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming – between those who deny other men the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. (Excerpts from Paulo Freire, 1970, pp. 75-86)

This naming of the world through dialogue, Freire warns, cannot transpire “in the absence of a profound love for the world and for men.”

This part, I think – about the purpose of dialogue and its relationship to love – is fairly easy to grasp. It’s also something that I often catch allusions to when I listen to artists talk about their motivations and intent. Near the end of his commencement address at my school the weekend before last, the figurative painter Eric Fischl said: “I paint to show myself to myself, and ultimately, to show myself in relationship to you.” Is this not an act of naming the world?

Eric Fischl. "The Bed, The Chair, The Sitter," 1999-2000. Oil/linen. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery.

In a talk I attended earlier this month at the Art Institute of Chicago, the photographer Dawoud Bey said his job was to get people to perform themselves in front of his camera – indeed, to get them to perform the best version of themselves. If Fischl is thinking about his artmaking as an initiation of visual dialogue, then Bey, it seems, is thinking about the artistic process as an entire dialogue. His request to photograph a person is an extension of love to the subject, an affirmation of their “right to speak,” and an invitation to name the world together.

Dawoud Bey. "A Man In A Bowler Hat," 1976. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery.

Returning to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I am confronted with the more complicated, and most crucial, part of Freire’s argument. In it, he identifies “the essence of dialogue itself: the word,” and proclaims that the word must be authentic. An authentic word, to Freire, consists of equal parts reflection and action.

Freire discusses the danger of the word that is all action and no reflection, but it is what he writes about the all-reflection, no-action word that lingers in my mind:

When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action. (Excerpts from Paulo Freire, 1970, pp. 75-86).

Here is what I want to say to my fellow graduates, and to all educators, thinkers, and citizens: let us not forget Freire’s caution. We must continue to write, and to talk, and to work toward naming the world, but we must not lapse into verbalism. We must do everything we can to avoid the alienating “blah.” I am not yet sure what this will entail, but I think we can figure it out along the way.

"Open Enrollment | The Alienating “Blah”" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Melanie Gilligan. "Popular Unrest" (2010). HD video, five episodes, total running length 67 min.

Encountering Melanie Gilligan’s work only four years after the financial collapse of 2008, there is a uncanny sense of recognition: that she is providing an extemporaneous fiction for our time. Worlds nearly like our own, but set just beyond it, exaggerating its features. That she is also looking forward to a future time, a world that we might wish for in our present.

One quality that lends the work this sense are her uses of language. In both Popular Unrest, Crisis in the Credit System, and Self-Capital one feels the language is thoroughly of a discourse about financial capital. Gilligan understands this language so well that she can play with it, revealing its shibboleths and operative myths. One could start to talk about these uses of language in Gilligan’s Crisis in the Credit System, in which she shows financial analysts in workshop/group therapy improvising ways to cope with a volatile marketplace. Or in Popular Unrest, which imagines a social universe where market exchange has been perfected by a force called the “World Spirit.”

All of Gilligan’s work investigates the feeling of (political) economy. Which is to say, what the affective cultures and structures of feeling are that undergird economic relations in advanced Neoliberal societies. Crisis in the Credit System offers both a cynical view, in which traders/analysts know what they do all too well, and yet keep doing it (that is until the end of the miniseries when they become the victims of the very system they have been instrumental in creating). In Self-Capital, Gilligan’s latest video series, the individual is figured through its doubling in affective and im/material exchange. This doubling is envisioned through an actor who plays both analyst and analysand, among other roles that reverse the polarities of self and other.

The most radical kernel of Gilligan’s exploration of economy and affect may be found in Popular Unrest. While the World Spirit randomly murders citizens, stabbing them from above with a dagger—a situation that literalizes the brutal logic of the current world financial market—it also draws groups of strangers together inexplicably. On the one hand, these groups seem indicative of relationships facilitated by social media and Internet analytics, through which forms of intimacy and senses of community have obviously become thoroughly mediated. On the other hand, they also resemble the affinity groups and resilient swarms driving global occupations and revolutionary movements. Gilligan’s art reveals these intersubjective phenomena to be not exclusive but rather inextricable in our current political climate.

Melanie Gilligan. Installation image from Popular Unrest exhibition, Kolnischer Kunstverein, 2010.

1. What is your background as an artist and how does this background inform and motivate your practice?

I left Canada after high school to do an art BA in London. During my degree I began to feel dissatisfied with the type of life this was training me for: a professionalized career fit-to-order for art institutions and the art market. So after college, I went into other things. I co-edited a book on art, work and immaterial labour and wrote articles and essays on politics, science, economics and art. At the same time I worked quasi-professionally as a scriptwriter, an occupation that fed a dream I had of filmmaking.

When I returned to making art, my work was very influenced by my activity writing scripts and theoretical texts. My first performance, The Miner’s Object, consisted of a monologue I wrote, which was performed by an actress using public speaking teleprompters. The work told a series of stories within stories that conveyed different positions in a theoretical argument through characters and events. My two subsequent performance works involved a similar structure.

Melanie Gilligan. "Popular Unrest," 2010. HD video, five episodes, total running length 67 min.

2. Do you feel there is a need for the work that you are doing given the larger field of visual art and the ways that aesthetic practices may be able to shape public space, civic responsibility, and political action? Why or why not?

Need… that’s an interesting way of putting it. I think that when I started making my drama about the financial crisis, Crisis in the Credit System, I started to try to address what I thought was truly needed in the world. I made a work that was inserted into mass culture (without aping its forms or content) because I thought that the film was needed in that context, at that moment. Crisis… is a fictional drama that looked at the (then developing) financial crisis of 2007-onward when the world was still mostly in the dark on the subject (I started making the piece in 2007, it came out two weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed). I began making the film with the idea that people needed to know about the financial crisis as the event would have a profound impact on all aspects of our increasingly financialized world. But I wanted to use narrative, not documentary, to tell people about the crisis, and communicate the information by a different means. I wanted to get the work beyond art spheres to a wider mainstream audience and I realized that distribution would be key in this. I decided to show the work online, dividing the video into episodes so that it fit the size limits of online sharing sites back then. The episodic format led me to model the work around TV drama. I tried to insert information about the work in newspapers and news websites, which are the conventional means by which one learns about an event like the financial crisis.

As I continued to work in a similar vein in 2009, I looked at what would happen after the financial crisis and imagined that we would see intense austerity measures in which the conjoined forces of capital and state would cut back on the social spending that would normally reproduce people’s labor power through health care, education, welfare, etc. This would bring intense frustration, anxiety, pain and confusion (in other words, what we see today), not to mention hardship, hunger and death (e.g. suicides in Greece). So in 2009 – 2010 I made two more films, Self-Capital and Popular Unrest that dealt explicitly with this. Both films explore these affective and bodily impacts while, in Popular Unrest, the focus is capital’s new configurations of biopolitical control–for instance, the increasing importance of algorithmic data analysis in predicting people’s behavior. In the film, it is precisely these sorts of affective states that capital seeks to understand.

I make these video works to be watched online as much as in galleries or screenings. I guess I see my work as something for an imagined future moment, after the film and TV industries crumble and new hybrid forms of D.I.Y. video making, viewing, and thinking about what we watch have evolved. I would be happy for divisions between film, TV, and artists’ films and video to collapse along with the distinction between edifying information (e.g. news or documentary) and entertainment.

Melanie Gilligan. "Popular Unrest," 2010. HD video, five episodes, total running length 67 min.

3. Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work? Please describe.

Lots of things inspire me in my work but they generally aren’t art. That is, in the strict sense of visual fine art. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. When I was making The Miner’s Object I was anti-influenced by, or compelled to argue against, the increasingly dominant paradigm (or excuse for barbarism) that cognitive science and neuroscience provide in contemporary western culture. When I made Prairial, Year 215 it was Denis Diderot and the French Revolution; with Prison for Objects it was a mixture of Marx’s economic analysis, Panofsky, Medieval memory theaters and some excellent thinking by my friend Daniel Berchenko.

During the making of Crisis in the Credit System most of my inspiration came from the financial system and its crisis, though I was also inspired by The Wire, which took an ambitious new direction in television. The brevity and brilliance of [R. Kelly’s] Trapped in the Closet really stuck with me too. Also around this time I discovered the post-revolutionary Soviet theatre troupe Blue Blouse who called their plays “the living newspaper,” which was partly what I had been trying to do here and in my performances. With Popular Unrest I was visually inspired by David Cronenberg and was intrigued by contemporary American forensic crime TV shows (CSI, Bones, etc) as social symptoms of capital-state’s increasingly attention to the body (i.e. caring for it and rethinking it in monetary terms). Across all my works, my biggest influence is my political commitment to changing the economic and political system we live in and striving toward another, better one.

Melanie Gilligan. "Popular Unrest," 2010. HD video, five episodes, total running length 67 min.

4. What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

Ah, memories. I’m not sure if I’d ever call working on art massively enjoyable, but I wouldn’t call it un-enjoyable either. It’s work and it’s often physically hard to extract that work from oneself. If we are judging this on pleasurable feelings, I would say that I really like the feeling of directing films. Crisis in the Credit System was my first time directing so that was very exciting, in a frenetic, adrenaline fuelled way. I also really liked making Popular Unrest because this gave me the chance to direct and form the film in a more generous manner, with what was for me a large cast and crew. Popular Unrest also really satisfied my intense love of writing scripts as a mode of formal exploration. Again, I say love, not enjoyment or ease.

What I also “enjoyed” last summer was making a series of performances at Cage (a space in New York’s Lower East Side) where I presented performances every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 10:30am. This ran for around a month. I performed in the works myself, testing and molding the social dynamics between the audience and myself. I was trying out a set of ideas regarding the place given to emotion and feeling in art and in culture at large through chaotic, uncomfortable confrontations. It was exhausting making up a new performance every few days but at the time it seemed like it had to be done.

From The Miner's Object.

5. What projects would you like to work on in the future? What directions do you imagine taking your work in?

I’ll answer the first part of the question first. Right now I’m working on a project that is inherently confusing. I’m making another video series, which is about a global revolution taking place. In the Marxist /communist tradition it is understood that for revolution to be effective it has to be global but there’s never been a global revolution. There’s another component to the story, which is what’s confusing me. The revolution is happening at the same time, and is probably being caused by a new technology that allows people to feel each others’ feelings, affects, emotions. The subjective boundary of what’s individual and personal breaks down. The difference between the individual and collective bursts open. It isn’t simply that now that we can feel each other’s feelings everything is ok. The technology creates all sorts of difficulties and contradictions. In fact, I’ve realized that it poses incredible puzzles for me in terms of the acting and directing. When I made Popular Unrest I suppose I opened up a Pandora’s Box by experimenting in creating non-individual subjects – i.e. I developed that film using acting workshops in which I asked the group of actors to work together to make up different aspects of a particular person or of an emotional state. I was trying to push for a breakdown of individual, separate characters and to see if I could depart from making the type of drama that is premised on this separation. I didn’t get all the way there by any means but I think I made some headway. But now with this new film the questions that arise from the premise are potentially more difficult to handle – e.g. what would feeling someone else’s feelings mean, and how do I as a filmmaker represent it? These questions are challenging but fascinating because thinking them through has implications beyond the construction of the film to broader inquiry pertaining to political solidarity and collectivity.

To answer the second part of your question, the direction that I imagine taking after this is that I want to expand my work into creating actual systems that directly affect the culture and society that we live in, both in the art world and without.

Melanie Gilligan. "Popular Unrest," 2010. HD video, five episodes, total running length 67 min.

"5 Questions for Contemporary Practice | Melanie Gilligan" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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At what point does space become place? Questions relating to geography and identity are most often left to urban planners, ethnographers, and cultural theorists. Locality is defined as the social relationships produced by and through the built environment; in essence, a bringing together of cartography and sociology. There is disparity though between the permanence of municipal infrastructure—timeless architectural landmarks and preordained civic identity—and the evolving tangle of day-to-day lived social interactions. The context-specific experience of place is the research interest of choreographer Leyya Tawil and composer Lars J. Brouwer. Through their ongoing project, The Grand Re-Map, Tawil and Brouwer seek to observe, record, and reinterpret the perceptions, sounds, and physical interactions between body and landscape as a means to unpack locality and remap place.

Tawil and Brouwer’s journey through cities, neighborhoods, and even specific buildings captures the embodied experience of each location. They interweave sounds and gestures to create elaborately choreographed compositions that reveal the extraordinary character within mundane interactions. The two artists are urban travelers, surveying locations by foot, bike, bus, and car, to approach each site with the untarnished ears and eyes of vacation-happy tourists, even when the city has been frequented a number of times before. The Grand Re-Map proves that locality is necessarily an incomplete project, and much to the advantage of cities like Detroit, the project indicates that every place is ripe for remapping and reinvention. In effect, The Grand Re-Map transforms space into place, anchoring each location in time in order to cultivate narrative and meaning.

I spoke to Leyya Tawil in her Oakland, CA studio about The Grand Re-Map, Detroit.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: I feel as though I should begin by making a small disclaimer: I am an unabashed enthusiast of alternative mapping practices. What interests me about The Grand Re-Map is the project’s hybridization of various traditional practices—cartography, ethnography, and flâneurie—to produce, (and re-produce), a geography rooted in experience and context. How did The Grand Re-Map originate, and why the interest in mapping as a creative practice?

Leyya Tawil: Same!  I’ve always been drawn to maps and I’m really enjoying the contemporary mapping practices that seem to be exploding in variations.  I think of maps as guides for organizing and understanding information.  Sometimes that information is geographic space, other times embodied space, ideas, etc.  As a creative practice, my concept of mapping has taken various forms that have led to The Grand Re-Map project.  In 2010, I toured a solo work titled “Map of the World #1-6,” which was an identity-based work mapping facets of the world as I see it.  By touring the work to four countries, my research was to notice how the embodiment/presentation/symbolism of the work shifted in cultural context.  That led to a location-situation-based dance project called “Quieting Heart Series,” which was essentially a series of expressions determined by location, the artists at hand, and the ideas spurred in the moment.  We created maps of our slice in time/space together:  choreographies, improvisations, music, films, etc.  That was how I began working with music designer Lars J. Brouwer, my cohort and lead collaborator for The Grand Re-Map.  He had a take on location-based work that was rooted in sound, and also an approach to online/media practices that would become a huge element of the Grand Re-Map project.  Our conversations led to a waterfall of ideas and inspirations.

Our central idea is to create an experiential map of each location we visit, with a consistent method of research and production, so that the maps can stack up and be comparable in archival form.  Our maps are made of sounds, movement ideas, images, and spatial ideas all captured on location and then re-created through our performance frame.  It’s a fast and furious process!

SMP: Where have you worked at this point in the project and how were the communities selected? Were your expectations of these sites different than your experience remapping?

LT: We just completed our initial development and pilot tour of the work.  So far we have hit Amsterdam Noord, NYC Subway Lines 6 & L, Detroit from a Car, New Orleans Bywater, Oakland’s Arbor Café, and the ATL – the Atlanta Airport!  So you can see that our “locations” are pretty specific, yet variable.  Location in this project could be a city, a neighborhood, a ‘micro-location’ like a subway line or small business, etc.  In all of the locations, Lars and I had to negotiate our insider/outsider status.  This is an important aspect to the work, because we are capturing/creating a map so quickly (1-2 days), that we have to claim our “outsider” take on it, however having some insider familiarity with each city was vital in this initial run.  We chose these cities and locations based on opportunity, and some in-road that would facilitate some aspect of the trial period.  Our performance venues were also diverse:  a theater, a gallery, a bar, a café…All part of the experimental process.

SMP: Can you go into a bit of detail and describe the process for The Grand Re-Map in Detroit?

LT: Detroit was really special.  In some way because I’m from there, and in another way because it was always Lars’s dream to get there.  So I wanted to show him everything!  But how can we take it all in?  A car, obviously.  So in the one-day research time we allotted ourselves, Lars and I (with resident Jeremy Kallio), just joy rode from neighborhood to neighborhood, sharing stories and histories along the way.  It was St. Patrick’s Day, and we hit Corktown, Greektown, Southwest, Belle Isle and ended with Bakers Lounge.  Lars decided what sounds to sample, where and why.  For my own research, I tried to see Detroit as it was that very day.  Conversations played a big role in my read on it.  I do have both insider/outsider status, so it was pretty layered for me as well.  The live performance took place at Detroit Contemporary, an awesome venue directed by Aaron Timlin.  Lars composed a score based entirely on collected sounds, and I performed movement both composed and improvised, which was determined by the prior day’s experience. Our guest artist was violinist Mike Khoury, playing viola that night in fact.  At the end of the show, everyone was up and dancing (as we always hope will be the case).  So it was a great premiere!

SMP: It seems that you have a range of collaborators who participate in single instances or as ongoing partners. Who are you working with on The Grand Re-Map and what do their varying levels of involvement contribute to the project?

LT: The main artists involved in the work are myself and Lars.  At each location/live event we invite a local artist to collaborate and perform with us.  This was part of the performance arc.  We start with “the perimeter” (dance and sound samples in the raw), then spiral inward until Lars and I are improvising with a local “voice.” So far, all our guest artists have been musicians: in Oakland we were joined by guitarist Ava Mendoza, in New Orleans by composer/pianist Jeff Pagano.  We imagine bringing on dancers, poets, and visual artists as well in the future.  The final phase of the live show is to involve the whole audience in a “Re-Map Dance”—thus the performance is claimed by the people, if they want it!

In an ideal world,  Lars and I would tour with a documentary video artist and a poet as well.  We would love to add a literary voice to the maps, and also a thorough video capture of the process.

SMP: There are two concurrent iterations of this project: the research and performance, and the web-based platform.  How do the two aspects of the project approach remapping differently, and how do the two support each other?

LT: The multiple iterations are quite symbiotic.  Each body of research is summarized in the live event on location, but also parceled out as raw or edited material for online broadcast.  The live event provides an embodied, time-based map of our findings, and the web-map is growing into an intricate, comparative archive.  They contextualize one another and extend the life and reach of the work.  I would say the live dance and music element of the work is really rich, and it allows the live audience to feel and actually move/participate in the mapping event.  This is also really important–that the maps are born of the people onsite as well.

SMP: How will The Grand Re-Map continue?

LT: Lars and I will re-enter the development phase, analyze what worked on the pilot tour, and determine how to proceed.  I imagine our research methods will become more acutely focused, and the web-platform will go through an evolution as well.  We need to have a very tight methodology in order to clearly capture all the places we dream of mapping.  A Grand Tour 2013 is in the works.  We have European cities lined up, once funding allows, and we would also like to map locations in the Middle East and Asia.  I’m also interested in visiting rural and suburban areas, and also to re-map already visited cities from different angles.  So many possibilities!  This project will live on for some time.  We’ll be back to Detroit for sure!

Leyya Mona Tawil is a dance artist, educator, and the founder and artistic director of DANCE ELIXIR, an Oakland-based company that produces collaborative art in the form of live multidisciplinary productions, experimental films, and research-based projects. Leyya’s work has been presented in nine countries throughout Europe and the Arab World, and in seventeen cities in the United States. International highlights included performances at the Syrian National Opera House (Demascus), CESTA/Spektrum (Czech Republic), and Studio Emad Eddin (Cairo).

Lars J. Brouwer is an Amsterdam-based independent music designer specializing in music for motion and interaction. Notable projects include: developing and composing a piece for a unique sixty-speaker sound system commissioned by the fashion label NON by Kim during Amsterdam International Fashion Week 2010, and creating a composition exclusively from naval sounds that was presented to 400,000 visitors during the World Port Days in Rotterdam.

The Grand Re-Map’s Leyya Tawil & Lars J. Brouwer along with guest artist Megan Nicely will be performing at the Temescal Art Center in Oakland, CA, Friday and Saturday, May 25-26, 8:30pm.

**All photos in this post are courtesy of Steven Schreiber, Megan Nicely, and Lars J. Brouwer.

"Centerfield | Transforming Space into Place: An Interview with Leyya Tawil, co-creator of The Grand Re-Map" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Tim Hetherington. "Nevalla, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan," 2008. Digital C-Print. © Tim Hetherington, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

In her 2002 article “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death,” the late critic Susan Sontag considered the capacity of war photography to mobilize and affect the viewer, and whether such images might circumscribe our comprehension of events by functioning in the popular imagination as defining, yet only partial, evidence of an event.  Sontag does not deny the seductive power of a war photograph’s immediacy and authority, citing several canonical instances when images of war moved opinion, catalyzed sentiment, or bore witness to seemingly climactic events (for example, Nick Ut’s iconic 1972 photograph of Vietnamese children running down a road after their village had been bombed with napalm).

“The problem,” Sontag contends, “is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs.”[1]  A war photograph’s symbolic and emotive power is problematic, she concludes, insofar as it offers concision to what can only be our vicarious experience of the enormity and intensity of war: “We [as viewers] don’t get it.  We truly can’t imagine what it [war] was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is—and how normal it becomes.  Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels.  And they are right.”[2]  On some level the viewer must generalize from the particular, processing images of war by summoning forth more universalizing responses drawn from culture, and thus comprehending the images by contextualizing them within more readily relatable experiences and understandings.

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington has captured the experience of war through images like few others have.  The intensity of his photographs, however, rests in how they convey something of the realities of war precisely by not distilling to it down to the heroic or horrific climax of battle or some other decisive moment.  Rather, his photographs of war, several of which are currently on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, seem to resist any straightforward solicitation of stock sensations and emotional responses—outrage or sorrow, sympathy or antipathy—that might allow viewers to relate to and appreciate the moment depicted.  After all, as Sontag mused, how can we fully grasp such moments vicariously, and is there not something glib in thinking it possible?

Tim Hetherington. "Untitled, Liberia," 2003. Digital C-print. © Tim Hetherington, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

The photographs and captivating videos on view at Yossi Milo were taken by Hetherington during the Liberian civil war and while with American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during 2007-2008. The footage from his extended stay with US troops in Korengal became the basis for Restrepo, the 2010 award-winning documentary film that he co-directed with Sebastian Junger.  The suite of photographs on view from Hetherington’s time in Korengal consists primarily of images of sleeping American soldiers.  Laid out on spare plywood bunks, the soldiers are shown fast asleep, curled in a variety of positions and surrounding by various objects of distraction, domesticity and normalcy: magazines, books and music players.

These images of sleeping soldiers are haunted by stillness, and they prompt more questions than they seem to answer: are they exhausted in the aftermath of some intense firefight, or are they sleeping in anticipation of one that is forthcoming?  Perhaps it is both.  Within the discursive space of the war photograph, Hetherington’s images offer no clear response or interpretive refuge.  What is more, one begins to suspect that there is no decisive answer forthcoming.  Through their symbolic ambiguity, these images resist our desire to generalize from the particular—to perceive such images of war through a scrim of prescribed meaning by summoning forth more universalizing responses drawn from culture, and perhaps from the iconography of war photography, in order to more fully comprehend them.

Tim Hetherington. "Lizama, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan," 2008. Digital C-print. © Tim Hetherington, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

Hetherington’s photographs defy the conventional depiction of war, and in doing so challenge how we as viewers process, think and understand conflict through images.  His portraits and scenes are searing not because we can readily comprehend them as brutal, heroic, tragic or cathartic images, but precisely because they are documents of war that resist easy viewer identification and emotional response.  And they are all the more powerful for it.

Tending to focus on the intervals between battle, Hetherington’s photographs of interstitial moments push back against our attempts to abstract concise meaning and find some emotional purchase.  They are beautiful, compelling and finally unintelligible.  And I mean that in the best sense.  As placid as his images can be they are not simple; they remain complex and fraught with the weight of war, yet it is a weight without symbolic resolution to provide a foothold for easy comprehension.  One will not find in Hetherington’s images the decisive moment of a bullet’s impact as one does in Robert Capa’s iconic 1936 photograph of a militiaman knocked off his feet at the moment of his death during the Spanish Civil War.  Hetherington provides no such dramatic or symbolic encapsulation.  His images instead seem to pose questions without obvious answers: how does one begin to understand and imagine the things that he witnessed, and the full context in which he documented it?  How can one ever fully appreciate and record the enormity of these soldiers’ experiences, let alone distill it down to some decisive moment?

In a sense, Hetherington’s images might be viewed as meditations on the uses and meanings of photographic representation of war as much as they function as a documentation of war itself.  His images don’t mobilize viewer responses by easy sympathy or provocation, but by keeping the viewing experience open, an openness that cannot be bridged by enough visual information or context or insight.   How could one photograph or even a suite of images ever achieve this?  It is through their status as the antithesis of straightforward and neatly unambiguous images of war that his photographs become memorable documents of the experience of war.

Tim Hetherington. "Specialist Tad Donoho, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan," 2008. Digital C-print. © Tim Hetherington, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

This, I suspect, is the “stubborn feeling” to which Sontag was referring in 2002: not just that the actualities of war are made up of such decidedly “normal” moments as sleeping, but the impossibility of faithfully and fully transposing into images the intensity and the extremity that is the norm of war.  Hetherington was killed along with fellow photographer Chris Hondros in Misrata in 2011 while covering the Libyan conflict.  The body of work that endures as his legacy gestures to the impossibility of providing viewers with a full understanding of the realities of war, and the seemingly unwavering desire—need perhaps—on his part to continue to bear photographic witness.  “We can never fully express the experience of war photographically and yet we must,” Hetherington seems to declare through his images.  And he would be right.

Tim Hetherington, “Diary,” 2010. © Tim Hetherington, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Tim Hetherington was on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York  April 12 – May 19, 2012.

"On View Now | Tim Hetherington and the Photographic Experience of War" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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*Ed. Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation between Marissa Perel and Dawn Kasper. To read Part 1, click here.

MP: So, this work [at the Whitney Biennial] is changing how you see yourself as a performer, and how you present yourself to an audience?

DK: Yes, definitely. As I said, before I would do an isolated performance, and then go home and collect myself, chill out, or whatever. And now it’s like I go home, but going to the Whitney is essentially a job. How is it different than anyone else working here on the fourth floor? I’m not really doing anything different. So with that in mind, this is a performance, and there are questions like “how am I not myself?” There was this group of teens, all hanging out here, chatting, looking at me, and one of the girls asked, “are you acting?” Teenagers that come to my piece end up asking me that. It stops me dead in my tracks, like “am I acting? I don’t know!” I think maybe I am, but I don’t know because I don’t feel like I am. Is it this environment? Is it the fact that there are people? The music? The art? Because this is, essentially, my stuff—my living space. But then right there, there are people coming, and there’s someone else’s artwork, and this is someone else’s establishment. No matter how hard I try to ignore the situation and do my thing, something will always dismantle it. Questions about art, my position in art, what I’m making come up daily.

Dawn Kasper. "Missing Kaspar Hauser." C-print. Image courtesy the artist.

MP: Does it make you think about re-contextualizing your work or your persona?

DK: That’s an incredible question. Yes, I’ve been thinking about my work in a different manner since being here. I feel like this is definitely a stepping stone, or really a milestone. In order to do the next work I want to do,  I needed to do this. I’m interested in durational performance, and it’s a bit blurred that in fact this is durational performance. It does address issues with respect to performance art and its lineage. The mess, clutter, bits of text and images, the “work-in-progress” feel form a subtext about durational performance and its effect on artists in this day and age–on my generation. Everyone’s talking about the word “performance” in lights, but I don’t see a huge need to compartmentalize it. I think it’s interesting to explore the degrees of ability that performers have under the umbrella term of “performance art.” Obvious forms are theater and dance, but there are also other approaches to performance art. Even within those forms, there are subtexts or sublevels of interest. I’m fascinated with exploring performance art in the many facets of what it has to offer.

Dawn Kasper. "You, Me, and Them" performance at LACE. C-print of performance. Image courtesy the artist.

In terms of my history with performance, it’s always been the means for me to realize art. Like when we talked about body modification, I feel like that work got me to the next work, and then that got me to the next work, and then I get inspired by other artist’s work. I’m learning as I go that there are artists that inspire me and that have inspired me through the years, and it’s interesting how I’m finding through my practice that it’s actually opening up doors to other ways of working. It’s coming together at different times. This particular piece is a lot like being in a relationship. You have to take responsibility for your baggage and whatever you’re bringing to the relationship, and if something the other person does is annoying you, it’s usually that you’re annoying yourself because it’s triggering some muscle memory or previous experience, based on some expectation that you have. It’s psychological.

MP: Or something from your childhood and the way you were treated?

DK: Totally! Part of this is that it’s an investigation into getting outside perspective of what’s happening in my “relationship,” my practice.

MP: It’s amazing to hear it put in these terms [laughs].

DK: Right? Because a lot of this stuff is my studio, and it’s pretty much everything I own, but I’m noticing that my experience of my “stuff” is based on all kinds of attachments.

MP: Oh! I wanted to tell you way before that when I was waiting for you, these two women came up, and one of them was like, “This is just like a boy’s stuff, like a boy with his stuff, his stuff in the space. I can’t handle it.” But then it seemed like she didn’t want to leave it.

DK: A boy with his stuff!

MP: Then the other one was like, “Are you sure it’s a boy?” And she was like, “I’m not sure.” And then they looked at the video and they were like, “Maybe it’s not a boy.” [laughter] And then the one who said “It’s a boy” said, “It might not even be the boy’s stuff, it might just be stuff, or it might be someone else’s stuff that he has here.” And I just listened to them for awhile, trying to conjecture what it was.

DK: That’s really interesting. I didn’t think of it as gendering stuff!

MP: Stuff equals boy, or something.

DK: Clutter.

MP: Clutter, or the ability to take up space, or like this on the wall—something about that.

DK: Well a lot of it too is that I think people don’t recognize that this is me in the work, and a lot of it looks masculine.

MP: How does it look masculine?

DK: Well because that looks like a guy, and I kind of look like a guy there…? But then there are breasts.

Dawn Kasper. "Inertia or Repeater." C-print. Image courtesy the artist.

MP: You’re wearing tights.

DK: It’s funny to process it even now because I didn’t think of it. I don’t think of gender, so it’s a bit…I’d like to think it’s ambiguous. You’ve opened up something because I never thought of how my objects reflect my gender. I mean this goes a little bit full circle to what we were talking about, whether this piece has changed my perspective on my practice.

MP: Do you feel like you’ve made it?

Dawn Kasper. "Bowie." Collage. Courtesy the artist.

DK: Oh, wow, that’s a great question. Yes and no. Like—yes, definitely. Yes. I mean this feels like a huge accomplishment and I’m still in it—not to talk about it in the past tense—but even just being here is a huge, huge honor. I’m so grateful. Also, my friends who have helped me and been so supportive, and my new friends who have helped me and been so supportive, Jane and Elizabeth being so supportive. I am interested in questioning, “what is success?” It’s relative. It’s successful if you get a good meal, or it’s successful if you get to meet up with a friend that you’ve been trying to meet up with for months, or you get to make a new friend. Basically I’m learning that it’s not so cut-and-dry. It’s not always what it seems.

MP: It takes a very strong individual to do this, not just exposing your things, but to talk to people every day. When I came to interview you, I thought I’d watch you make a collage or something, or we’d put on masks [laughter]. I didn’t expect to see all these points of convergence.

DK: The room has become a sort of catalyst for this happenstance of intersections, things, time frames. I’m fascinated by how Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, or Jason Rhoades have made immersive environments. I don’t feel like I’m addressing anything new. It’s not a new topic. I’m not suggesting that this is anything that hasn’t been done before [laughs].

MP: The room makes me think of Dieter Roth most.

DK: I love Dieter Roth!  I have been thinking about his work in relationship to archiving the room. I recently got gallery representation, so one of my next projects is archiving all of the items in this piece.

"Gimme Shelter | Anti-Establishment in the Establishment: Dawn Kasper at the Whitney Biennial, Part 2" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Arturo Herrera. Detail from "Chicago" (2012). © Arturo Herrera. Courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey.

In this week’s roundup, Arturo Herrera presents a series; a Jeff Koons retrospective; Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman are honored; and more.

• Arturo Herrera opened a show of collages at Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago). Series features groups of related collages ranging from diptychs to ten-piece works, each cluster of work providing a different vantage on the nature of a series as a theme. Series is presented simultaneously in three different galleries: Corbett vs Dempsey, Thomas Dane Gallery (London), and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (NYC). The Corbett vs. Dempsey show closes June 23.

• Jeff Koons‘s retrospective is on view at Fondation Beyeler (Basel). The show focuses on three central series of works: New, Banality and Celebration – which represent crucial stages in Koons’s development and lead to the nucleus of his thinking and creative activity. The New comprises the ready-made-like cleaning appliances of his early period, symbols of newness and purity. This work is on view through September 2.

• Cao Fei: Simulus at Surrey Art Gallery (Vancouver) features work by Cao Fei. The show includes an interactive game environment and two films constructed from “real” events that have taken place in the simulated online environment Second Life. Apocalypse Tomorrow depicts an expansive seascape where the viewer-player, as a stoic, surfboarding monk, must avoid obstacles made up of familiar architectural forms and monuments from China’s recent past. Videos from the RMB City are composed of montaged scenes from a fictional city collaged from existing cities in turn-of-the-millennium China. The exhibition closes June 10.

• Mark Dion has brought his vision to the Explorers Club (NYC) for Phantoms of the Clark Expedition. Dion was commissioned to create the new work as part of the Institute’s commemoration of the centennial of the 1912 publication of Through Shên-kan: The Account of the Clark Expedition in North China, 1908–9. The installation consists of a series of dioramas and sculptures representing objects and specimens that would have been used or collected during expeditions that occurred in that era. This work is on view through August 3.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto’s current exhibition at the Pace Gallery (Beijing) features gelatin silver prints that elegantly demonstrate the value Sugimoto places on the technical aspects of photography. Through a keen understanding of the nuances of silver-print making, he captures the medium’s full potential for tonal richness in his seemingly infinite palette of blacks, whites, and grays. This, his first solo exhibition in China, closes July 7.

• Cindy Sherman was recently awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Swiss Prize. The Roswitha Haftmann  jury awarded Sherman for being, next to Andy Warhol, the most important representative of film and photographic introspection. Since 2001, the Haftmann Prize has been awarded each year by the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation to “a living artist who has created a work of outstanding quality” according to the foundation’s press release.

• Laurie Anderson has been named Inaugural Distinguished Artist in Residence at EMPAC (Troy, NY). The residency provides Anderson with wide access to space, technology, and support for creative experimentation, but just as important, brings the artist into ongoing dialogue with students and faculty at the nation’s oldest technological university.

• Laurie Anderson: BOAT at Vito Schnabel (NYC) is the first exhibition of Laurie Anderson‘s series of paintings that bring the scale of the theater onto the canvas. The show also includes a video installation, From the Air, in which Anderson has created a three-dimensional holographic reality. A series of drawings titled Lolabelle in the Bardo depicts the forty-nine day transition described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead as the period between death and rebirth. The show closes June 23.

• Carrie Mae Weems is collaborating with pianist Geri Allen on a multimedia installation for Celebrate Brooklyn! (NYC). This event is one of New York City’s longest running, free, outdoor performing arts festivals and was launched in 1979 as a catalyst for a Brooklyn performing arts scene and to bring people back into Prospect Park after years of neglect. The festival will take place June 5 – August 11.

• Mark your calendars now for LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital at the Brooklyn Museum (NYC). The show will contain more than 40 snapshots by LaToya Ruby Frazier that feature the artist’s family and the city of Braddock in Pennsylvania where she grew up. The exhibition will run from June 29 – October 31.

• Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series at Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA) will feature over forty of Laylah Ali’s Greenheads created between 1996 and 2005. According to the Museum’s website, these gouache-on-paper works “chronicle the development of her dramatis personae—thin, round-headed two-dimensional beings of indeterminate sex and race—who anticipate, respond to, or enact unseen power struggles.” The exhibition will run August 18 – November 25.

"Weekly Roundup" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Production still from "Glenn Ligon: Installing 'Warm Broad Glow II.'" Art21 Exclusive video.

Our latest Exclusive video is now live! Watch Glenn Ligon: Installing “Warm Broad Glow II” on Art21.org.

Filmed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in early 2011, this Exclusive video shows artist Glenn Ligon as he installs his twenty-foot neon artwork Warm Broad Glow II (2011) in the museum’s front window before the opening of his mid-career retrospective “Glenn Ligon: AMERICA.” With assistance from curator Scott Rothkopf and neon fabricator Matt Dilling, Ligon works to determine the best placement on the neon while battling against wind, rain, window mullions, and a view-obscuring hotdog vendor. Ligon selected the text “Negro Sunshine” from the Gertrude Stein novella ”Melanctha” (1909) and has used the phrase in projects of varying media.

Glenn Ligon is featured in the Season 6 (2012) episode History of the  Art in the Twenty-First Century series on PBS. Watch full episodes online for free via PBS Video or Hulu, as a paid download via iTunes, or as part of a Netflix streaming subscription.

"Exclusive | Glenn Ligon: Installing “Warm Broad Glow II”" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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3:00 pm: I show up and wait. I spend time observing the piles of artwork, stacks of DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, shelves of books and equipment, photographs on the walls, videos playing on monitors, a drum set.

"Fragments," from Dawn Kasper's "This Could Be Something If I Let It," 2012, at the Whitney Biennial. Image courtesy the artist.

Two women walk by me:

“This is just like a boy and his stuff. It’s too much, I can’t take it.”

“Oh, you think so? It is quite a lot. Do you remember who this is?”

“No, but come to think of it, this might not be all of his stuff, it might belong to someone else and he just showing it.”

“You might be right, but I get the feeling this belongs to the artist. Are you sure it’s a man? I can’t see the name anywhere.”

“I think so, or it could be a woman.”

I break the news to them that it belongs to a woman. I say “Dawn Kasper, D-A-W-N.” They laugh, shrug, walk away.

I start to panic; could she just not show up to her own show? Impossible, if she’s here, she is going to have to come up eventually. I read an article on her desk about hoarding, and the lengths a son had to go to in order to empty his parents’ house. I see the connection. It’s not about the things themselves but about her attachment to them.

3:30pm: Dawn comes in, a little frayed, spinning about the installation, fixing the video, straightening something up. I start recording.

Marissa Perel: How long have you been living in Los Angeles?

Dawn Kasper: Twelve years.

MP: So, that’s home definitely?

DK: I thought to live here [New York]. But, it’s hard here. I understand there are rewards for putting up with this place, but, I’m poor so in order to live anywhere in the world, I need to live somewhere where I know how to hustle. I’ve lived in L.A. for so long that I know where to go to get food, I know where to go to eat for free. I know that kind of stuff. I don’t know that here. I mean, it’s great here, but it’s unnecessary. Eight hundred dollars for rent? It’s unnecessary. I don’t how people live here. It seems like it could be a lot of fun, but everyone’s too busy working all the time to hang out with each other.

MP: That’s true.

DK: When I first got here I was super stoked to be here and connect with people here and they were like, “Oh my God, I am so busy! Can I meet with you in a couple months?” People have to have a ton of hustles. They have to have a ton of different things going on. Then they have to manage it and micromanage it. It is amazing! I have been here for almost four months and I have adapted. I can see how much quicker I am able to process certain things since I’ve got here.

MP: Like what?

DK: Surviving! All the walking, the weather, allergies, what kind of food to eat, what not to eat. I got food poisoning when I first got here.

MP: From a Coney Island hot dog, right?

DK: Either that or some bad fish.

3:40pm: A friend from L.A. shows up: writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer. She joins in on the conversation about the difference between New York and L.A. and we have a little Lesbian gossip circle that takes many turns. Kasper recounts an argument with a friend over a woman that happened in the installation, right before the Michael Clark performance. The scene became so boisterous that a security guard came to intervene, but the viewers weren’t phased. Kasper said a woman was looking through her purse and muttered, “we’ve all been there, honey, it’s nothing new.” Then we flip through Mousse magazine, where an interview between Kasper and Lehrer-Graiwer is featured. Kasper asks her about what else she is doing here, and she talks about her research on Lee Lozano and the latter’s drop out of the art world in the 1970’s.

Lee Lozano in her studio. Image via www.thebookbeat.com.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer: She [Lozano] dropped out of the art world in the early ’70s, but she stayed in New York. It’s this weird thing. That’s what I’m writing about—her “Drop Out.” She wasn’t participating in the sense of showing, but she was present in the art world after the “Drop Out.” I went to her grave, which is unmarked in Grand Prairie, Dallas, very depressing….

DK: How’d you find it?

SLG: There was this obituary, when she died, in the Dallas Observer, which mentioned where she was buried. I tracked it down.

DK: Did she die of cancer?

SLG: Cervical cancer.

DK: Fuck, no!

SLG: It’s rough. She died in ’99. I did my Master’s thesis on her. I made an exhibition and a book that went with it a couple years ago in L.A. with Lozano, Dan Graham and Stephen Kaltenbach, whom she was close with. They had work that overlapped. Now I’m working on a book-length project on her. You guys should get back to talking! I’ll come back tomorrow.

4:00pm:  We get back to the interview.

DK: I am looking forward to completely changing the space. I change it often but I left it open in the middle because the students are coming today. I am doing a workshop.

MP: What are you going to do?

DK: We are going to talk about collage. I’m going to talk about my piece and we’re going to work together to make these color-specific sculptures with objects found in the space.

MP: Cool!

DK: I think it will be fun.

MP: So, is this all of your stuff?

DK: Yes, this is everything.

MP: When you’re in L.A. do you have a studio?

DK: No, I work from home. I work from home and sometimes, and I work at my friend’s house. My friend Eric will let me use his living room to have studio visits. I met with [Biennial curators] Jay [Sanders] and Elizabeth [Sussman] there. I rearranged it and a lot of the flatwork  [2D framed work] in the space was actually stored at Eric’s house. It’s the first time this work has been together like this.

MP: It seems like sometimes you capture private events, and sometimes you capture the aftermath of a performance, or something that was public. I want to know about these things, like the mattress we’re sitting on, and the band-aids and exacto blade that are framed above us.

Gina Pane. "Action Sentimentale," 1974. Image via http://www.italystar.it/.

DK: In the early 2000s when I was in school, I experimented with body modification in performance. I was interested in body art. I was inspired by Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane and Catherine Opie. In the framed piece, I branded the word “love” into my arm, and I cut a heart into my chest. I did each piece twice. I also did a tattoo piece that’s over in the corner on the other side of the room.

MP: I made a piece in art school where I carved the word “Hero” into my arm with that exact type of blade. I was trying to be the antihero of male performance artists who are very macho about their bodies. I was trying to create a dialogue with artists like Andre Stitt and Vito Acconci.

DK: Oh yeah, I was into Vito Acconci, too!

MP: Yeah?

4:20 pm: Wendy Yao, another L.A. friend, shows up. A tour comes through at the same time, where a viewer named Harvey greets us with, “Hello Ladies!” Dawn fills Wendy in on her life…at the same time Wendy and Dawn are talking, a woman comes in with a tour. There is a cacophony of voices that seems symbolic of the piece: a presentation about a performance that is a conversation where a conversation is happening. Harvey comes back to talk to Dawn, then Wendy and I talk. She tells me about Dawn’s gallery, Human Resources in L.A., and about her own shop Ooga Booga. Then they catch up about The Red Krayola, which performed at the Whitney in April, and Sandy Yang, who borrowed Dawn’s drums for the show. Wendy starts to talk about bands, and it turns out she is a virtual encyclopedia of the Riot Grrl scene.  For the next 20 minutes, she gives us an imaginary tour of the 1990′s L.A. Riot Grrl, describing venues like Jabberjaw, Madame Wong’s, and Hong Kong Café, and reminiscing about Bikini Kill, Raquel Gutierrez, Jen Smith and others.

Lady Noise, MIXTAPE Vol.1. Image courtesy Dawn Kasper.

5:00 pm: Aaron Cometbus comes by and Wendy chats him up about Riot Grrls in the days of yore. Wendy leaves and Aaron stays to talk to Dawn. She starts moving things around again….

AC: You remodel?

DK: I do. That’s part of the work. It’s a sculptural installation and it’s in flux and it’s supposed to mirror my moods or mirror my intentions for that day.

AC: You don’t ever put a curtain up and hide or anything like that?

DK: You know, once I kind of hid under the covers. I had some sheets [laughter] for a little bit. But I couldn’t help it. It was too funny, because tours would come through and talk about me like I wasn’t there. So we’ve definitely developed a relationship where they’ll come and address me like, “Are you okay if we talk about you? Do you want to answer questions?” I know I’m a little moody sometimes, but we all are, right? So they are more conscientious. Whereas before, they would just kind of turn it over to me and let me describe what’s happening, but then it just got a little redundant. That’s a lot of work.

MP: And you’re not really here for a tour. You’re here to be here.

DK: That became pretty present pretty quick. It was interesting. There were a lot of things that happened in the first few weeks that became apparent. Like the tours, and certain questions, and how to answer certain questions that kept coming up. Once  I even closed it off, and there were times when I’d push everything to the front, to kind of barricade the space. There was a day when I spent the whole morning blocking it off, and it didn’t work. People came in anyway. I mean, it worked and it didn’t. It was an interesting exercise because in doing that I was trying not to talk to people, but it would spark conversation and questions and people would make an effort to come and penetrate my half-assed barricade and talk to me specifically, and ask “What is this?” and “What are you working on?” and the more I talked to people the more I felt better.

Very similar to what happened with Sarah coming in, and you coming and my friend Dia coming before that, it’s like each friend that comes helps me to recognize that a lot of what is happening here is about being able to relate to people. It’s interesting because it’s changing my performance perspective. My performances have changed, even prior to coming here—I think this is the result of wanting to relate to people more and more. I don’t want to distance myself. I’m so used to having an intense performance, like one hour of intensity, and then I’m tired and I go home and I don’t even really talk to anybody. I connect, but in a specific way, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing.

*Part 2 of this conversation between Marissa Perel and Dawn Kasper will appear on the Art21 Blog this coming Monday, May 21.

"Gimme Shelter | Anti-Establishment in the Establishment: Dawn Kasper at the Whitney Biennial, Part 1" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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A bust of George Ellery Hale in Mount Wilson's Solar Tower.

For the past couple of months I’ve been watching as my life partner, Christina Ondrus, embarks on a massive artistic, spiritual, and logistical undertaking.  Christina is the Founder/Director and co-curator of KNOWLEDGES, a non-profit arts organization that she runs with Associate Director and co-curator Elleni Sclavenitis.  I wanted to wrap up my Guest Blogging stint with some thoughts regarding their upcoming event KNOWLEDGES at the Mount Wilson Observatory, which will be held June 23rd and 24th.  The event is free and open to the public.  For more information and to donate or volunteer, visit theknowledges.org.

Space exploration was once a reliable source of national pride.  Enormous resources were poured into the study of the heavens. Today, our country is mired in massive debt and draining colonial wars, with little moral support for government spending on the development of anything but outright weapons, military subcontractors and invasive body scanners. The U.S. government is gradually extricating itself from the business of exploring the heavens, just as it has washed its hands of developing the country’s art.  I don’t mean to infer our government will not continue to explore and exploit the entire known universe in order to figure out creative ways to kill people, retain supremacy, and maybe control the weather, but the whole thing doesn’t really grab people’s imaginations like it used to.

Today’s frontier is cyberspace, a human-generated thought cloud of neurotic dark matter that permeates all interpersonal communication.  The seeming infinitudes of outer space are too vast and impractical for us to think about.  Better to colonize the digital wilds of personal information and cultivate them to yield money.

Mt. Wilson Observatory as photographed by the Observatory's live towercam.

In this smartphone-hampered context, The Mount Wilson Observatory stands as a temple of a bygone era of scientific advancement.  It’s a pre-digital site of immense scientific significance. The 100-inch telescope built on the site in 1911 held the title of largest telescope on Earth for a solid 30 years.  Edwin Hubble used this telescope when discovering the general expansion of the universe.   The telescope’s mirror was the largest in the world and was crafted over the course of six years by a team of French artisanal glassmakers. The looming domes of the telescopes evoke cathedrals. On Mount Wilson you may hear contemporary, digital-based telescopes dismissed as “light collecting buckets.”

There is a dignity about the place, a sense of the value of craft and the import of preservation. Is it any wonder, then, that this place would appeal to a community of contemporary Los Angeles artists, who see these values receding from their own institutions?

It was this literal and figurative rarefied air of Mount Wilson that led Christina Ondrus to consider the grounds for a show of site-specific artwork.  The disastrous Station Fire of 2009 threatened the existence of the Observatory itself, but this only heightened the sense of its priceless historic value and steeled Ondrus’ resolve to make something happen there. In 2011, she teamed up with Elleni Sclavenitis and together they co-curated KNOWLEDGES at Mount Wilson.  Since then, an impressive assortment of established and emerging artists, writers, musicians, and performers have been brought on board, representing a broad array of responses to the site and its many implications.

Installation by Katie Grinnan for "Crescent City" at Atwater Crossing, 2012.

Katie Grinnan plans to create an Astrology Orchestra which includes ten unique planetary instruments, tuned to the frequency of planetary spin.

Cloud Eye Control, still from "Final Space," 2012.

The multimedia collective Cloud Eye Control will perform “Final Space,” which will employ puppetry, optical illusions, performance and video to tell the story of “a woman who abandons her oppressive technological world, only to land on an inhospitable moon landscape.”

There will be a screening of James Benning’s Nightfall, “a study of real-time light changing from day to night” filmed in a California forest, concurrent with the actual transition from day to night in the midst of a California forest.

Sneaky Snake. "Imaginary Landscapes" CDR with unique collage covers - edition of 50. Self-released.

The experimental ambient duo Sneaky Snake will create sounds “whose explicit purpose is the creation of altered states and well-being within the viewer/listener” during a Night Time Viewing event in the Hale 60 Inch Telescope.  Many other artist are participating, and details can be found on the Knowledges website.

Christina Ondrus. "All Encompassing (Cosmos & Psyche)," 2010

Beyond politics, astronomers and artists are people who do what they do for their own reasons.  They are people concerned with looking, concerned with listening, concerned with observations and recordings.  Telescopes are simply devices meant to magnify what you can see.  The technology creates its own interpretive vocabulary, and though these technologies and vocabularies are no longer new to us, they are still useful.  The Mt. Wilson Solar Tower continues to use decades-old equipment to record and print images of sunspots.

Interior of Solar Tower, Mount Wilson.

A painter knows as well as any astronomer that an image does not cease to contain value simply because the methods of its creation are considered obsolete.  Science and art, so often preoccupied with being at the vanguard of culture and thought, can also find a mutual ground where both recognize they are only as powerful as the limits of human perception.  As our age becomes increasingly digitized, concerned with 1′s, 0′s, and conveying it all in 124 characters, Mt. Wilson’s battery operated, analog behemoths with their eyes pointed at the sky remind artists that in some sense vision itself is tactile, and that there’s much to learn from the allegedly obsolete.

"Eyes in the Sky" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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