Contents for January 05, 2016
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Justin Chin, FF Alumn, In Memoriam
1. Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumn, in Hyperallergic, now online, and more
2. Emily Roysdon, FF Alumn, at MoMA, Manhattan, Jan. 12, and more
3. David Hardy, FF Member, publishes new book
4. Dan Fishback, Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, FF Alumns, at La MaMa, Manhattan, Jan. 15-22
5. Simone Forti, FF Alumn, at The Box, LA, CA, thru Jan. 9
6. Royal Osiris Karaoke Orchestra, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, Dec. 31
7. Ken Friedman, FF Alumn, in Visual Language, vol. 39, now online
8. Elise Kermani, FF Alumn, at Electric Lodge, Venice, CA, Feb. 12-14
9. Andrea Kleine, Anya Liftig, Bobby Previte, FF Alumns, at New York Live Arts, Manhattan, Jan. 16
10. Vernita Nemec, FF Alumn, at AIR. Brooklyn, Jan. 7, and more
11. Hector Canonge, FF Alumn, at Glasscube, Bolivia, Jan. 5-10, and more
12. Arlene Raven, FF Member, at SOHO20 Gallery, Brooklyn, Jan. 15
13. Barbara Hammer, FF Alumn, at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, June 10
14. Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, in The Brooklyn Rail, December 2015, now online
15. Jay Critchley, FF Alumn, in Sculpture Magazine, Dec. 2015
16. Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumns, at National Gallery, Cayman Islands, opening Jan. 15
17. Rae C. Wright, FF Alumn, at Café LaMaMa, Manhattan, Jan. 22-Feb. 7
18. Brendan Fernandes, FF Alumn, in The Huffington Post, now online
19. Gabriel Martinez, FF Alumn, at VisualAids.org, now online
20. David Everitt Howe, FF Alumn, at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, opening Jan. 22
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Justin Chin, FF Alumn, In Memoriam
LGBT / Lit / R.I.P.
S.F. Poet Justin Chin Taken Off Life Support After a Stroke
Posted By Beth Winegarner on Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 5:45 PM
Justin Chin – R. E. MORRISON
San Francisco poet and writer Justin Chin is being taken off life support today after suffering a massive stroke last week, according to friends.
Fellow writer Kirk Read, who called Chin “the Kurt Cobain of our writing scene,” reported in an email to friends that after several days in the Intensive Care Unit at California Pacific Medical Center’s Davies campus, doctors said Chin was unlikely to recover. His family asked doctors to remove him from his ventilator today, Read said.
Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Chin came to San Francisco, where his raw and often funny writing made him a prominent figure in the Bay Area literary scene. His first book of poetry, Bite Hard, was published in 1997 by San Francisco’s Manic D Press. Two more followed: Harmless Medicine in 2001 and Gutted – a series of poems about Chin’s experience of taking care of his ailing, elderly father – in 2006. Gutted won a Thom Gunn Award for Poetry in 2007 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Chin also published Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes & Pranks with St. Martin’s press in 1999 and a quasi-memoir, Burden of Ashes, with Alyson Publications in 2002.
In both his poetry and prose, Chin explored his identity as a gay Asian American. Bite Hard studies – in vivid detail – lovers and dreams, crabs and HIV. But his work quickly shifts from gritty to nostalgic. In “Incontinence,” one of the poems in Gutted, Chin describes how one of his father’s medications robs him of urinary and bowel control. “And I just again want to be the one/who fell asleep in the stands with his head/in his dad’s lap at the home team’s first game,” he writes.
Read reported Tuesday that a neighbor discovered Chin unconscious in the early morning hours of Dec. 18 after hearing a loud sound from Chin’s apartment.
“Justin Chin is an important writer. I want him to be studied and remembered and read and adored for generations to come,” Read wrote. “As I was in the room with all the tubes and wires and him leaving, on a certain level it felt profound. But Justin would have made a catty joke about the divorce of Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon.”
This complete illustrated obituary is linked here: http://www.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2015/12/22/sf-poet-justin-chin-taken-off-life-support-after-a-stroke
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1. Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumn, in Hyperallergic, now online, and more
My show at Harvard’s Carpenter Center ends on January 10. In conjunction with it, here are a few links I would love to share.
(a) The Hyperallergic review, Dec 31, 2015
(b) The Boston Globe review, Dec 22, 2015
(c) The exhibition booklet for Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers
a. A walk through the world of Lorraine O’Grady by Heather Kapplow
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – When visiting an art exhibit, there’s a temptation to start at the entryway and work your way through it following the path established by the curator.
In the case of Lorraine O’Grady’s Where Margins Become Centers, at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA), resist the tyranny of convention and signage and enter via the back door.
Start with as little interpretation as possible. Sit in the dark on a bench for an entire 18 minutes, if you can spare them, and watch item #10 (of 10) on the exhibition checklist available in the catalogue downstairs and at the guard’s station at the main entrance to the gallery. In fact, open the publication, point to item #10 on the checklist, and ask the guard to direct you towards the back door to the piece to avoid being drawn in the intended way.
“Landscape (Western Hemisphere)” (2010/2011) consists of close-up footage of O’Grady’s hair and scalp paired with what seem to be a few varieties of ambient sound. It’s the climax of the show, but also the best way to prime yourself to absorb the rest of the show’s content as completely as possible.
If you move through things the way you’re supposed to, you’ll get caught up in the mathematics of identity, in the rights and wrongs of the art world, and in the aesthetics of documentation as art; “Landscape” will end up serving as a catharsis for all of the complexity and tension raised.
Avoid the catharsis.
Zoom in instead on the DNA of the matter. Meditate on all that gets coiled and released in the always-in-motion entanglements of our genes and history. Let the elusive, destabilizing scale of “Landscape” empty your mind. Let it hypnotize you, and then walk into the light of the main gallery, where questions begin to get asked more explicitly.
This is not a quiz, but consider these thoughts as you move through the inner gallery space: Can sexual intercourse encompass many contradictory experiences at the same time? What is the implication of a place becoming inextricably intertwined – grafted – with a body? When you lose your sister, can that loss be a conduit into a larger sense of what it means to be be “related” to people?
Use the exhibition guide and the following works to answer these questions: “Body is the Ground of My Experience (The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me)” (1991/2012), “The Fir-Palm” (2010/2011); and “Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters I)” (1980/1994).
In each of these pieces, which line the periphery of the gallery’s inner room, surrealism and juxtaposition are used to create spell-like parallels between the personal and the global, the past and the present – in the process problematizing distinctions between assumed binaries. For O’Grady, nothing is black and white. And yet everything is black and white.
At the center of the room, you’ll find two vitrines. They contain some of the copious documentation that O’Grady has created and archived relating to her most well-known work, a persona and performance-intervention practice known as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire.”
Decked out in a beauty-pageant style sash and crown, and a fabulous dress made of white gloves, O’Grady as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (“Miss Black Middle Class”) appeared uninvited at a few choice art openings and other events in the early 1980s. These events were promoted as radically contemporary, but were in truth as racially segregated as they would have been 30 years prior.
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s most famous appearance was at the opening of the (then brand new) New Museum’s 1981 Personashow, where she appeared with an entourage and paparazzi and whipped herself while shouting poetry inciting black artists to take bigger risks. That’s the short version of the story. See the vitrines and the gorgeous custom (CCVA-made) table in the outer gallery for the full details (including tallied cost of materials) of this intervention, plus some frank correspondence between O’Grady, New Museum staff, and members of the press that followed.
By the time you exit the inner room, passing “Sisters I” – an unexplained pairing of a personal photograph with a chunk of ancient history – you should be thoroughly confused about what happened when and where. With your mind full of a stew that’s half rage and half wonder – wrought by the combination of more abstract, image-based work and the cold, hard archival material – you can move to the main gallery space and access the contextualization you were supposed to get on your way in.
Boston-bred O’Grady’s biography explains a few things about the four decades of work represented here, most usefully siting her experience as a biracial woman in a particular moment in time and space. Curator James Voorhies spells out the rest: “Her work challenges what is unwittingly agreed upon on a society-wide scale in a march towards dismantling accepted constructs.” Though the approach she takes to rattling the cages of these constructs (race, gender, class, the complex power structures of institutions) has shifted over time, her rallying cry against complacency is, as Voorhies observes, “no less topical today” than it was in the 1980s.
Finally, for some ambiguous closure, take a trip down the passageway that you followed to get into “Landscape (Western Hemisphere)” the back way. Here find several quasi-stately portraits of Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire, bookending an impossible sociocultural divide in a way that makes it seem a possible one. The placement of this dual-portrait series, The First and the Last of the Modernists (2010), makes it a great exit point.
Before you leave, turn to look at the windows across from the series and you’ll catch yourself among the reflections of these two men (and the gaps between them), overlaid on the surrounding institution. It seems fitting to be reminded of exactly where you stand – within a complex of nested, refracted, sometimes oblique reflections, and encased in an institution to boot – before you step back out into the larger world, where what O’Grady’s work challenges in the art world continues to need challenging as well.
b. LORRAINE O’Grady’s diptych “The first and the last Modernists.” By Cate McQuaid
“The Fir-Palm,” a photomontage in “Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers” at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, might be a self-portrait. O’Grady, the child of mixed-race Jamaican parents, grew up in Boston.
A fir’s bristling branches top the sloping trunk of a palm. The tree rises from the dark, satiny ground of a black woman’s back. It blends the tropics with chilly New England. The piece comes from a series titled “Body is the Ground of My Experience.” of O’Grady’s body and her imagination spring quandaries about identity, race, and power dynamics. O’Grady, who is 81, has been using images to puncture social constructions for more than 30 years. Her show at the Carpenter Center proves a cogent antidote to hoary yet still dominant notions we fall into about self and other, white and black, man and woman.
O’Grady came to the art world’s attention in the early 1980s, when she showed up at openings in a gown stitched from white gloves as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle-Class),” striking herself with a cat-o-nine-tails, calling it “the whip that made plantations move.” Documents about this performance, on loan from O’Grady’s alma mater, Wellesley College, are on view.
In character, O’Grady crashed the 1981 opening of the New Museum’s “Persona” exhibition, spotlighting white artists who, like O’Grady, worked in character. Imagine the scene! Sly, yet explosive. Lucy Lippard wrote about it in the Village Voice; at least one other critic completely ignored the performance in his review.
In those early performances O’Grady brought the attention of a hermetic white art world to black art and the history of blacks in America. Work that followed grew more precise and searing.
A second photomontage from “Body is the Ground of My Experience” lays out the sometimes romanticized, always politicized, often violent history of sexual relationships between white men and women of color. “The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me,” is a diptych. The scene on the left looks gauzy and romantic, with an embracing, nude couple floating in the air and a pair of mixed race kids kicking a ball.
O’Grady places Chekov’s gun on a pile of shed clothes on the grass; it’s bound to go off in the next act. The second panel depicts a man in a skull mask and a Spanish conquistador’s uniform (a reference to Hernán Cortés, who partnered with an indigenous Mexican woman known as La Malinche) groping a stiff, naked black woman.
Working with diptychs, the artist presents pairs of images as unlikely kin. “Miscegenated Family Album: Sisters I,” matches a photo of a sculpture of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti with a portrait of the O’Grady’s sister, Devonia Evangeline. Both have narrow chins and high foreheads; this might be a family album. In her series “The First and the Last Modernists,” she links Charles Beaudelaire and Michael Jackson, cultural renegades who challenged notions of race – Beaudelaire’s common-law wife, Jeanne Duval, was a black woman.
The most recent piece here, “Landscape (Western Hemisphere)” poignantly echoes “The Fir-Palm,” made 20 years earlier. The hypnotic video in lush sepia offers a close-up of O’Grady’s hair. It kinks and it curls; it’s discretely black and white, then mashed-up salt-and-pepper. It blows violently, then looks like something you could rest in.
In its extremes, “Landscape” recalls “The Clearing,” but “The Clearing” traces history, and “Landscape” presents the product of that history – a body and mind at a juncture of opposites and power plays, complicated and captivating.
c. CCVA’s exhibition page for Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers
For four decades Lorraine O’Grady has consistently pursued a multidisciplinary practice in visual art and writing that challenges the societal conventions through which we understand and interpret gender, class, sexuality, art history, and race. She burst onto the New York scene in the early 1980s with her performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class), a beauty queen persona in a dress made of 180 pairs of white gloves, whipping a cat o’ nine tails at openings and shouting poems against the racial divides permeating the black and white art worlds. O’Grady subsequently found her way through photography, performance, writing, photomontage and film to critically engage the complicated power structures, institutions, and social constructs that guide feminist histories, interracial relationships, biculturalism, and Western subjectivity. Her potent observations are no less topical today and, in fact, even more urgent as we routinely bear witness on social media and news outlets to the dualisms between black identity and white identity, rich and poor, females and males.
The exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Where Margins Become Centers features art from five bodies of work including photography, film, collage, performance documentation and writing. The works collected for this exhibition reveal the artist’s ongoing interest in the systemic powers affecting social behavior. O’Grady was born in Boston to upper-middle-class West Indian parents and educated at Wellesley. Her inherited biculturalism-a young black woman coming of age in rarefied New England-and participation in interracial relationships are grounds for a unique perspective from both within and on the periphery of diverse social spheres. These binary oppositions provide the basis for astute observations on human civilization, often deployed in the form of the diptych and notable in the series Miscegenated Family Album and The First and the Last of the Modernists on view at the Carpenter Center. Juxtaposing and collaging seemingly disparate dichotomies, the artist uses the extreme margins to explore the central undergirding supporting social oppositions, challenging what is falsely agreed upon in a march toward dismantling accepted constructs.
Curated by James Voorhies, the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director.
Lorraine O’Grady
Born in Boston in 1934, Lorraine O’Grady’s work has been recently exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York (2014); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2014); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012 and 2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010 and 2012); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2012); La Triennale Paris, France (2012); Prospect.2, New Orleans, LA (2011); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2011); Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain (2010); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2008); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007). Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. O’Grady has been a resident artist at Artpace, San Antonio, TX, and has received numerous other awards, including the CAA Distinguished Feminist Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University, the Art Matters grant, the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship and, most recently, is a Creative Capital Awardee in Visual Art.
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2. Emily Roysdon, FF Alumn, at MoMA, Manhattan, Jan. 12, and more
Please join us for a book party to celebrate Emily Roysdon’s
UNCOUNTED: Call & Response
published by Secession
in conjunction with Roysdon’s Secession exhibition Comedy of Margin Theatre.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
6-8pm
Readings (tba) 7pm
RSVP: david_senior@moma.org
MoMA Library
Cullman Education Building 4 W. 54th St.
New York, NY 10019
Contributions by Marwa Arsanios, Doug Ashford, Babi Badalov, Morgan Bassichis, Gregg Bordowitz, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Jaime Shearn Coan, Moyra Davey, Michelle Dizon, Grace Dunham, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Miguel Gutierrez, Raquel Gutiérrez, Elisabeth Lebovici, André Lepecki, Robin Coste Lewis, Heather Love, MPA, Ridykeulous, Jen Rosenblit, Emily Roysdon, Sarah Schulman, and Martine Syms.
Edited by Kristin Poor.
exhibition and book info: http://www.secession.at/art/2015_05_roysdon_e.html
and
I’m happy to announce a limited edition with PARTICIPANT, INC in collaboration with Jelena Behrend Studio. My clock hands in silver! More info soon. Email me or lia@participantinc.org if your interested.
and
The Uncounted text and edition are from the series that Catherine Wood featured in her “Year in Performance” essay in Artforum’s December issue.
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3. David Hardy, FF Member, publishes new book
I have recently launched a new book, ‘BOLD: Stories from older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’. In the US, the book can be purchased via Amazon. The collection of 56 stories, published by Melbourne-based Rag and Bone Man Press, is mostly Australian in tone but has some international stories, including two from New York City. Press information follows below. Thank you. David Hardy
The Rag & Bone Man Press Inc.
BOLD: Stories from older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people
In Australia, the news is filled with debate around same sex marriage, and why we are the last English-speaking country to end this discrimination. Headlines broadcast news of sports people coming out, and stories of prominent transgender people go viral on social media. Behind these stories, who are the people who have championed the great changes in Australia and around the world? In this book, over 50 people – including prominent activists such as Bob Brown, Sally Goldner and the Hon. Michael Kirby – tell their stories. We can all gain a better understanding of the LGBTI community, in all its diversity, through the personal narratives from older campaigners who have been, and continue to be, part of the struggle.
David Hardy presents this collection of stories about love, hope, pride and the fight of older LGBTI people, then and now. They are ordinary and extraordinary people – from cities and small communities across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. These diverse stories unsilence lives. In print, these narratives enhance the history of the LGBTI movement by adding in the power of the personal – life stories that make their mark.
‘I hope this book helps people understand who we are and who we are not,’ says David. ‘We are not invisible. This collection celebrates the myriad ways we identify as LGBTI people. These stories will stir and agitate, comfort and caress, and make you mad and cry and laugh out loud.’
BOLD will be available online and from independent bookshops in November 2015 and pre-orders can now be made online from www.ragandboneman.org
About the Author
David Hardy is a freelance writer and long-time singer in Brisbane’s Lesbian and Gay Pride Choir. In 2014 he was awarded a PhD in Indigenous Knowledges at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. His research earned him the Higher Degrees Award by the Northern Territory Department of Education in 2015. Beyond exploring the diversity of expressions of his Indigenous and queer identity, David’s writing also draws on his career as a former diplomat in Poland, Indonesia, the Philippines and Samoa.
About the Publisher
The Rag & Bone Man Press Inc. is a Melbourne-based independent, not-for-profit publisher interested in publishing books for change and opening up discussion on global and local topics. Their aim is to collect and publish the stories of people who make up different communities, presenting them without agenda or politics – just in the spirit of sharing.
For all press enquiries, please contact Keira de Hoog:
Phone 0457 296 569 Email keira@ragandboneman.org
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4. Dan Fishback, Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, FF Alumns, at La MaMa, Manhattan, Jan. 15-22
La MaMa Presents
A Helix Queer Performance Network Event
La MaMa’s SQUIRTS
New Voices in Queer Performance
Curated and Hosted by Dan Fishback
Stage Managed by Naimonu James
January 15 – 22, 2015, Fridays & Saturdays at 10pm, Sundays at 6pm
The Club at La MaMa, Tickets $18 / $13 Students and Seniors
La MaMa makes 10 tickets for every performance available for $10 (advance sale only) as part of its 10@$10 ticketing program. Tickets are Available at the box office, www.lamama.org or by phone at 646-430-5374
www.lamama.org/squirts-2016
www.helixqpn.org
Starring (every night):
BANJELA DAVIS
JORDAN MARTIN & THE SEXTONES
YAYA MCKOY
METTE LOULOU VON KOHL
JES TOM
Plus Special Guests:
Friday, January 15
Guest of Honor: KATE BORNSTEIN
Guest Squirts: MIZZ JUNE and MYSTERY GUEST
Saturday, January 16
Guest of Honor: ELIZABETH “MACHA” MARRERO
Guest Squirts: AJA and TIMOTHY DUWHITE
Sunday, January 17
Guest of Honor: AGOSTO MACHADO
Guest Squirts: JOSHUA ALLEN and SHAGASYIA DIAMOND
Friday, January 22
Guest of Honor: HOLLY HUGHES
Guest Squirts: AUNT SHARON THE DANCE THERAPIST and CONNOR VOSS
Saturday, January 23
Guest of Honor: CARMELITA TROPICANA
Guest Squirts: BXK KWAN and LADY QUESA’DILLA
Sunday, January 24
Guest of Honor: DANIEL ALEXANDER JONES
Guest Squirts: MIEKE D, UNA OSATO
The queer communities of New York City are in revolt. In an age of possibility, everything shitty is fixable, everything unjust is critiqueable, and everything fabulous has unprecedented access to cameras, make-up and good lighting. Queer folks across the generations are waking up to a new (old) standard for greatness: total liberation. And so, once again, The Helix Queer Performance Network starts the year by bringing us all together in that dream of revolution, to encounter each other in all of our diverse eccentricities, passions and angers, at LA MAMA’S SQUIRTS: a two week festival of queer performance from a vast spectrum of communities, genres and generations.
The series began four years ago as a festival of emerging performance, but it has grown into so much more. While the main acts are all fresh young voices, they are accompanied each night by a Guest of Honor — a legend of NYC’s queer art world. Joining us this year are transgender icon Kate Bornstein (“A Queer and Pleasant Danger,” “Gender Outlaw,” “Hidden: A Gender”), controversial lesbian performance artist Holly Hughes (notoriously one of the “NEA 4” during the culture wars of the 1990s), spitfire L.E.S. original and international art star Carmelita Tropicana, the Bronx’s own comedic performance artist Elizabeth “Macha” Marrero, multi-disciplinary theater and drag artist Daniel Alexander Jones, and legendary star of countless performances since the rise of downtown theater in the 1960s – Agosto Machado.
But the stars of the show are our up-and-coming children! Upper Manhattan’s drag intellectual Banjela Davis welcomes us into her world of inquiry and gossip; stand-up comedian Jes Tom has but one goal: “To hurt the feelings of The Man;” jazzy lesbian art rock auteur Jordan Martin plays inexplicable songs of heartache and boundless imagination; multimedia poet Yaya McKoy brings ferocious honesty and insight into the realities of racism, trauma and violence; and Palestinian performance artist Mette LouLou von Kohl explores the life of resistance fighter Leila Khaled to solve critical puzzles about identity, sexuality and diaspora. Peppered throughout our festival is a series of guest Squirts, from drag queens and rock stars to poets and dance therapists — the range of talent keeps our line-ups alive with the unexpected.
In this moment of rabble rousing, with internet flame-wars casting a merciless shadow over queer culture, LA MAMA’s SQUIRTS is a time for celebrations instead of (in addition to) side-eyes. Join us as the queer generations encounter each other across all of the barriers that keep us apart and alone. The Helix Queer Performance Network insists that we start 2016 together, united in passion and purpose.
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5. Simone Forti, FF Alumn, at The Box, LA, CA, thru Jan. 9
Simone Forti’s “On An Iron Post” at The Box, Los Angeles
November 14, 2015-January 9, 2016
Dear Simone,
Your performances are the jump and splash of a brook, the color of a found leaf, a painted flag wrapping a woman as the river dances around her. At 80, your nimble movements inspire. When I stop to read back about your lifetime of accomplishments and confluences, I can’t help but admire you all the more: learning improvisation with Anna Halprin in San Francisco in the 1950s; trying and moving into your own through the techniques of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Trisha Brown; your presence at the birth of Judson Church; your collaborations with Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley. Just a few flickers from an enduring and illustrious career. I see all those layers and life here in your videos, objects, performances, deepening the grace of your movements and the susurrus of your words, knowing that such simplicity is not easily won.
In the long, high gallery at The Box, I watched the water crash and shiver over the stones on the monitor in Northeast Kingdom (2015), the headphones sounding a dinner conversation between two men about geography and Vermont. Plucking the headphones off (always like wearing an insect when looking at art), I turned to look at the trio of projections behind me. In Flag in the Water (2015) I couldn’t feel the difference between the sound of the flowing water and your movements through it as you stepped into the river in your white shirt and khaki pants, wearing the flag like a shroud, a wedding dress, a shield. Opposite the river is the ocean. You wrestle and rest with a sheaf of soaking newspapers and a tangle of seaweed in Zuma News (2014). I liked seeing the spooked viewers trying to jump out of the eye of the camera along the river, bemusedly passing a glance upon the beach, caught as witnesses in these cleansing ceremonies. I liked them because I felt like them. Not for a moment unwelcome, there’s a softness, a kindness in your performances, but even then I felt a gravitas to all this, a simple ritual with a flow that I wouldn’t want to ungracefully mess up.
And here, for me, that is what your exhibition is about: flow. The flow of water, of human events writ large, of time, of pure movement. Though most of the work dates from the past couple of years, there are a few things from the 1960s, and documents from the ’80s into the 2000s, that reveal a stream through the decades. The painting Sink (1960) lets water out. A sculpture of dynamic tension (entitled A Sculpture, it was dreamed in 1961 but made only this year) and a crumpled paper scrawled with the words “Past” and “Future” (Past/Future, 2012) both examine the tension of the present in time. The latter two rest on plinths painted a shade of green that your recent collaborator Jason Underhill told me was intended to match a leaf found outside the gallery.
Tucked around the main gallery are smaller rooms filled with monitors and relics of performances, including two from the series of “News Animations” from 2003 and 2004. These stories of a body and voice finding a way to process the comings and goings of the world make me see how each of us, however humbly or grandly, doesn’t have to be merely a consumer of the news but can find a place in the story through interpretation and understanding. That this process can lead to action.
In the video you made as part of a series organized by Halprin, Stone Face at Cascade Falls (1993), I loved watching you explain a drawing of the flow of water in a creek in a notebook on display. Those onomatopoeic phrases sound both silly and serious, poetic and dissonant, like Jack Kerouac’s linguistic renderings of the sea sounds in Big Sur (1962). How difficult it is to capture the sound and shape of movement.
This letter is a letter to follow yours to your father that stands in for the press release. And for me, letters are a way out of the sometimes alienating method by which we humans often talk to each other. A letter acknowledges that our reader is a person, a consciousness, and that by writing we are attempting to connect with them. Most writing is a kind of letter, the intimate communication of one human to another, even if we pretend otherwise. Reading is the whisper of words in my head, one of the most intimate places a voice can go.
Your letter was moving in its intimacy and as a way of passing thoughts. You wrote, “The show’s got lots of parts, like a day of experiences with different energies, lyrical, abrasive, adding up to something complex but without closing in on any particular meaning” and “There are parts that pull in on parts that push out. It’s the tension; like a dance. Yes, I still dance. I’m going to do a News Animation at the show’s opening. Wish you could be there.”
Ezra Pound wrote that “literature is news that stays news.”(1) Maybe this is true, but the news is not in its facts but in its flow. If literature stays news, it’s because it can move us years and years after it’s written. It is the movement inside of us, with each reading renewed.
And when I spent those hours in your show, watching your performance at the opening, and all the passing moments and stories in the videos, the flow of all that water and time, everything looked like movement. The flowing brook over stones, the color of a found leaf (did you catch it falling or was it plucked from a rustling tree?), the flow of the river, and the shift of the cloth of the flag. All of it movement and all of it moving.
(1) Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 29.
Andrew Berardini is a writer in Los Angeles. In Spring 2016 he will be faculty for a residency on art writing at the Banff International Curatorial Institute in Banff, Canada.
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6. Royal Osiris Karaoke Orchestra, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, Dec. 31
The New York Times
THEATER | JANUARY FESTIVALS
Making a Show From Found Videos, Both Unsettling and Lighthearted
By MELENA RYZIK
DEC. 31, 2015
Everyone knows the YouTube sensations, the most popular cats and kiddos. But Sean McElroy and Tei Blow, the avant-garde theater duo who make up Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, were after the opposite: YouTube videos with almost no audience.
They especially wanted straight-to-camera chronicles of shopping sprees. When they departed for a residency in Skowhegan, Me., in 2014, they had a hard drive full of them, along with a trove of awkward dating and how-to videos from the VHS era.
Their residency ended up coinciding with a viral video of tragic dimensions, that of Elliot Rodger, the college student who shot and killed six people, and injured 13 others, in Isla Vista, Calif., in May 2014, after posting about being rebuffed by women. Mr. McElroy and Mr. Blow collected his YouTubes, too, and spent nine weeks holed up with all this imagery.
The result, “The Art of Luv (Part One): Elliot,” playing at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival from Jan. 8 to 17, is an experimental blend of video, performance and music – and comedy, drama, technology and guided meditation. It defies categorization, even for Under the Radar’s programmers.
“It’s not your play-play; it’s barely your performance art-play,” said Mark Russell, a co-director of the festival.
Mr. Russell and Meiyin Wang, his co-director, have been tracking the work of Royal Osiris since its 2013 debut at the Brooklyn performance space Jack. “What they were doing with YouTube and the found VHS tapes, creating a whole universe, I had never seen anything like that before,” Ms. Wang said.
Since an earlier workshop at the Public, “The Art of Luv” has been revised and reshaped. At a recent rehearsal in a basement TV studio in Downtown Brooklyn, at New York City College of Technology, where Royal Osiris has a residency, Mr. Blow, 35, and Mr. McElroy, 37, padded around in socks and white robes. They wore bad wigs and headphones for a run-through, aided by a technical director, Eben Hoffer. (For the show, they will also wear gold face paint, completing an ersatz ancient-god look.)
Their set includes a pair of dated video cameras; between them is a play mat from the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution that has been jury-rigged to play a keystroke whenever Mr. Blow or Mr. McElroy steps onto it. A handmade lyre and zither sit in a corner; two video screens loom over everything.
The action, such as it is, consists of the duo lip-syncing their found videos – which are projected on one screen – directly into the camera, which beams their faces onto another screen. The effect is something like real-time video collage, or postmodern theatrical karaoke. (They simply repeat the lines they hear through the headphones.)
The main idea? “An individual is speaking to a camera, in hopes that there are millions of viewers, and riches and fame and connection, on the other side of that,” Mr. Blow said, when, in fact, “you’re just talking to a piece of glass.”
Mr. McElroy added that they were inspired by “the myth of Narcissus as a personification of YouTube technology.” (Narcissus, after all, gets stuck looking at his reflection in a glassy pool of water.) Before his murderous rampage, Mr. Rodger was just another unwatched vlogger. His desperation for girls (as he calls them) to like him forms a lonely complement to the eager dating instructionals.
Royal Osiris is not looking to create sympathy for Mr. Rodger, who committed suicide after the rampage, or engage directly with charges that aculture of misogyny helped spur him – though they did interview one of his childhood friends, a woman who was mentioned in his angry manifesto. Nor do they take on the gun control debate, or mental health care. But the subject matter invites those questions.
Mr. Russell said that he was initially worried about how all this would fold together, without much context for Mr. Rodger’s crimes. But the earlier incarnation assuaged him. “I thought they were handling it really delicately,” he said, adding that he and Ms. Wang encouraged them to go further “toward the darkness.”
“I really trust Sean and Tei’s taste, and their eye,” he said.
The surprise is that, in rehearsal at least, much of “Art of Luv” is funny, thanks mostly to the retro vidoes, which offer advice on “how to build your body for more sex,” and the like. “It’s cheeky yet sincere at the same time,” Ms. Wang said of the show.
For the artists, juxtaposing disturbing footage with more lighthearted fare mirrors how audiences imbibe – and make – media now. “A lot of this material is just like how people interact with their world all the time,” Mr. Hoffer, 27, said.
Mr. McElroy and Mr. Blow don’t have much performance training, but they are skilled in multimedia. Mr. Blow is a sound designer for dance companies and Mr. McElroy a visual artist who works as a showroom builder. They met as Craigslist roommates in a loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn, around 2005.
Now back to living together, they formed Royal Osiris after trying to write a traditional musical about ancient Egypt, failing, then turning it into a karaoke show.
“I don’t like to approach it by thinking, ‘We want to challenge audiences,'” Mr. Blow said. “We want to just state as a matter of fact that this is the response to the world now, this kind of work. Anything else seems really ingenuine.”
Here are selected January performance festivals.
AMERICAN DANCE PLATFORM Jan. 12-17, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; 212-691-9740; joyce.org.
AMERICAN REALNESS Thursday- Jan. 17, Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side; 212-598-0400;abronsartscenter.org.
CIRCUS NOW: INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY CIRCUS EXPOSURE Jan. 14-16, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village; 212-998-4941; nyuskirball.org.
COIL Tuesday-Jan. 17, various locations; 212-352-3101; ps122.org. Coil festival tickets are also available in person at some box offices.
EXPONENTIAL FESTIVAL Jan. 13-30, various Brooklyn locations;theexponentialfestival.org.
PROTOTYPE: OPERA/THEATER/NOW Wednesday-Jan. 17, various locations; 212-352-3101; prototypefestival.org.
UNDER THE RADARWednesday-Jan. 17, most events at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; 212-967-7555,undertheradarfestival.com.
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7. Ken Friedman, FF Alumn, in Visual Language, vol. 39, now online
Dear Colleague,
For those interested in Fluxus and intermedia, the 2005 special issue of the journal Visible Language (Vol. 39, No. 3) on Fluxus and Legacy is now posted to the Fluxus and Intermedia section of my Academia page at URL:
https://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
Published as a full digital reprint with permission of Visible Language, you are free to download it, add it to your digital resources collection, distribute and use it as you wish.
Abstract:
Any community of thought and practice that expands beyond the circle of its immediate founders faces the problem of legacy and history. This problem becomes inevitable when a community endures long enough to survive the founders. When these problems enter the realm of history, they are multiplied by the number of scholars and practitioners involved. The intermedia nature of Fluxus brings in questions and histories of art, literature, performance, music and other fields, while the mixed feelings and motives of younger practitioners raise other questions: the desire to claim legacy, the wish to deny legacy, anxiety of influence and more. Finally, the needs and demands of collectors, gallerists and museums compounds the problem. This special issue addresses these problems. Copyright (c) 2005 by Visible Language. Published here with permission of Visible Language.
With best wishes for the new year!
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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8. Elise Kermani, FF Alumn, at Electric Lodge, Venice, CA, Feb. 12-14
MiShinnah Productions and the Electric Lodge*
*presents Elise Kermani’s*
*”Iphigenia: Book of Change”*
*at the Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Avenue, Venice, CA, on February
12-14, 2016 (Friday/Saturday @ 8pm and Sunday matinee @ 3pm)*
*Tickets: $20 general/$15 student/military/senior*
*Iphigenia:* *Book of Change **(BOC) *is a hybrid performance film produced
by MiShinnah Productions and directed by Elise Kermani. It involves a
collaborative effort by artists from many genres including puppetry,
theater, dance, visual art/video design, and music.
*Book of Change* was inspired by the 1977 film *Iphigenia, *directed by the
Greek filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis (who died in 2011); by the 400 BCE
play *Iphigenia among the Taurians, *written by Euripides (BCE 411); and by the stories and memoirs of contemporary women who have survived captivity. There is no
single story, nor is there a linear narrative; rather, *Book of Change* is
an experimental and multi layered audio/visual performance exploring
various mythologies of captivity and freedom.
*Book of Change *asks probing questions about the influence of imperial
authority over individual self-determination. The performance begins with a
woman (Sima) held captive in a dark prison cell, and ends with her escape
into a large wilderness of sky and nature. In prison, Sima is watched by
Hamid, a guard, and is visited by a pair of puppets. She survives her
captivity by reading and retreating into her imagination. Iphigenia, the
girl puppet, and Lupo, the wolf puppet, were both created by visual
artist/puppeteer Luis Tentindo.
*The project began* with an outdoor rehearsal/film shoot in Southern
California in the winter of 2012 with the three main collaborators: Elise
Kermani, Luis Tentindo and Laurel Jenkins. Each subsequent winter Kermani
returned to California to complete the next section of the piece. The
performance at Electric Lodge is the culmination of the project.
You can read more about MiShinnah here: www.mishinnah.org
Collaborators include (as of January 2016) :
Elise Kermani – Producer/Writer/Director/Composer
Luis Tentindo – Puppetry/Visuals/Choreographic Dramaturgy
Laurel Jenkins Tentindo (Sima/Iphigenia), Kevin Williamson (Hamid) –
Dancer/Choreographers
Yulya Dukhovny, Joe Small, ChuHsuan Chang – Performer/puppeteers/stage
hands
Larry Cedar- Voice of Agamemnon
Maria Garcia – Iphigenia’s Costumes
Ivaylo Getov – Technical Director
Chu-Hsuan Chang – Lighting Designer
Yao Zhang- Set Designer
Alexander Chinnici – Cinematographer
Melli Hoppe – Assistant Director/Movement Coach
Natasha Kermani – Production Manager
Julia Barstow – Intern/Assistant to Director
Todd Lent – Co-Composer, with Bagpipe by David Watson
Thank you to Conceptual Artist Consultants for their invaluable input in
the initial stages of this project! Thank you also to the MiShinnah Board
of Directors: Julianne Bond and Judy Bass, Esq., for their work as
co-producers for this project, and to all our donors for their
contributions and donations. Huge thank you to our co-producer Joel Shapiro
and to Jenny Hodges, Patrick Varon, Josh and all the wonderful people at
the Electric Lodge.
Sound Media Artist
mishinnah.org
elisekermani.com
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9. Andrea Kleine, Anya Liftig, Bobby Previte, FF Alumns, at New York Live Arts, Manhattan, Jan. 16
Andrea Kleine
Screening Room, or, The Return of Andrea Kleine (as revealed through a re-enactment of a 1977 television program about a ‘long and baffling’ film by Yvonne Rainer.)
ONE SHOW ONLY!
January 16, 2016. 1pm in the afternoon
Live Artery at NEW YORK LIVE ARTS
http://www.newyorklivearts.org/event/liveartery-screening-room
Andrea Kleine, an “enigmatic and eccentric” (The New York Times), “brainy, allusive Downtown artist” (Village Voice), whose work is “something like genius” (ArtVoice), has been absent from the stage for a decade. She resurfaces as the choreographer/filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and Rainer’s lion-tamer-turned-dancer character “Kristina,” transforming a verbatim talk show interview into an imaginary film recounting Kleine’s journey of disappearance.
Created by Andrea Kleine.
Performed by:
Michael Kammers
Andrea Kleine
Paul Langland
Anya Liftig
Bobby Previte
Vicky Shick
“The work itself is not unlike the title, a realm of alternate routes and nested stories, running its own kind of elaborate course. And though it’s largely autobiographical, it feels bigger: the story of anyone who has chosen one path and switched to another, anyone nomadic, anyone about whom the question “What is she up to these days?” has been asked. In other words, most of us.” — The New York Times
TICKETS & RESERVATIONS
http://www.newyorklivearts.org/event/liveartery-screening-room
http://andreakleine.com/web/screening-room-or-the-return-of-andrea-kleine/
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10. Vernita Nemec, FF Alumn, at AIR. Brooklyn, Jan. 7, and more
Just to let you know that I will be showing art in these exhibitions opening &/or closing this week! I dont just make performance art but make marks too!
Happy New Year & hope to see you @:
Thursday January 7 6-8 at AIR’s Razzle Dazzle show 144 Plymouth St, Dumbo & BANG BANG at Gaia Gallery 74 Hudson Av Dumbo – both reachable on F train at York St stop &
Saturday, January 9 4-6PM Closing of “In the Spirit” @Viridian with all art discounted 10%!
Best,
Vernita
www.ncognita.com
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernita_Nemec
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10. Hector Canonge, FF Alumn, at Glasscube, Bolivia, Jan. 5-10, and more
After the inauguration of his solo exhibition “SOMATOPIAS” in Arequipa, Peru, interdisciplinary artist, Hector Canonge, continues with the presentation of new exhibitions and projects in three major cities in Bolivia, South America.
– January 5 – 10 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Workshop in Movement and Performance at GLASSCUBE.
The intensive workshop explores various techniques of corporeal movement applied to Live Action Art.
– January 12 – 15 in Cochabamba: Exhibition and Durational Performance “A-Temporalidades” at ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE.
This project is a live installation that Canonge will create during 4 days intervening the space of the gallery using materials and objects brought by the public. The exhibition is accompanied by texts written and performed by the artist.
– January 20 – February 12 in La Paz: Exhibition “Tropologías” at CASA DE LA CULTURA.
Solo exhibition based on Canonge’s trip to his father’s homeland in Catalonia where he photographed small found objects, and created narratives using Concrete Poetry. The exhibit also includes experimental video pieces that refer to the various territories explored in the region.
– January 21 – 30 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Exhibition with Performances “Arenals” at ARTE 21.
Commissioned performance art project that will explore the dunes of the Pirai River, one of the largest in the Amazonian region in Bolivia. The exhibition will incorporate live streaming of Canonge’s incursion in the rives, photographic and video documentation.
Short Biography:
Hector Canonge is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and cultural entrepreneur based in New York City. His work incorporates the use of new media technologies, cinematic narratives, Live Action Art, and Social Practice to explore and treat issues related to constructions of identity, gender roles, psychogeography, and the politics of migration. Challenging the white box settings of a gallery or a museum, or intervening directly in public spaces, his performances mediate movement, endurance, and ritualistic processes. Some of his actions and carefully choreographed performances involve collaborating with other artists and interacting with audiences. His work has been exhibited and presented in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. As cultural entrepreneur, Canonge started projects such as ARTerial Performance Lab (APLAB), an initiative to foster collaboration among performance artists from the Americas, PERFORMEANDO, a program that focuses on featuring Hispanic performance artists living in the USA and Europe, NEXUSURNEXUS a virtual platform for Live Action Art, and PERFORMAXIS, an international residency program in collaboration with galleries and art spaces in Latin America. He created, and organizes independently the annual Performance Art Festival NYC, ITINERANT. Canonge is the co-founder of QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NYC. As curator, he has organized exhibitions at Centro Cultural Santa Cruz, Queens Museum, Space 37 Gallery, and Visual AIDS. He started the monthly artists’ program A-LAB Forum at Crossing Art Gallery, and created the monthly independent film series CINEMAROSA. Canonge’s work has been reviewed by The New York Times, ART FORUM, Art in America, New York Daily News, Manhattan Times, Hispanic Magazine; by major networks ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, UNIVISION, etc., and online by Art Experience NYC, Hyperallergic, Turbulence, Art Card Review, and New York Foundation for the Arts’ bulletin NYFA News.
Contact:
email: hector@hectorcanonge.net
cellphone:: +1 917.446.4472
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12. Arlene Raven, FF Member, at SOHO20 Gallery, Brooklyn, Jan. 15
Arlene Raven and her beloved Sophie Cat
(RE)PRESENT: A Feminist Dialogue Across Generations
SOHO20 GALLERY
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206
(718) 366-3661
Friday, Jan 15, 2016, 6-8pm
“Feminism, Who Needs It?”
In January 1988, Arlene Raven (1944-2006), feminist art historian, art critic, and curator – with Bea Kreloff, artist – held a discussion, Feminism, Who Needs It? at The New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI). Links to:
Feminism and Art, Four Lectures by Arlene Raven, by Phyllis Rosser and Toby Z Liederman Sept. 1985
Arlene Raven by Phyllis Rosser, The Brooklyn Rail, July 10, 2006
In keeping with the spirit of this discussion, and now at the start of 2016, what do we want from Feminism and how can we achieve it? How have things changed?
(RE)PRESENT 2016: What do we want from Feminism and how can we achieve it? Continuing in the tradition of the New York Feminist Art Institute, NYFAI (1979-1990).
An event of
For further information contact: Nancy Azara at (917) 572-7461 nancy@nancyazara.com
We hope you can come! PLEASE NOTE SOHO20’S new Brooklyn address. To get to the gallery by subway take the L Train to the Morgan Avenue stop. Click for Map
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13. Barbara Hammer, FF Alumn, at Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, June 10
Barbara Hammer, FF Alumn, presents a new film performance
Evidentiary Bodies
Sunday, June 10th @ 7 pm
Microscope Gallery
1329 Willoughby Avenue, Ste 2B
Brooklyn
Evidence, broadly construed, is anything presented in support of an assertion.
In these horrific times when lies are blatantly exclaimed as truths, when fear makes us withdraw from each other, when difference is maligned as xenophobia and when atrocities are committed in the name of spectacle, we must find and practice a quiet way of compassion, sympathy, and generosity through E M P A T H Y.
The artist armed with portable, fixed and live projectors and cameras, moves about the space uniting touch and sight with performance, inflated balloons, photographic prints and body screens that challenge the concept of the proscenium screen and the stable audience. One person extends to many and many people extend to one. Empathy emerges from seeing, touching as bodies mirror and the skin blooms eyes.
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14. Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, in The Brooklyn Rail, December 2015, now online
Joseph Nechvatal interview in the current Brooklyn Rail
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/12/art/joseph-nechvatal-with-thyrza-nichols-goodeve
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15. Jay Critchley, FF Alumn, in Sculpture Magazine, Dec. 2015
SCULPTURE MAGAZINE, December 2015
By Suzanne Volmer
Jay Critchley creatively uses the codified capitalist convention of incorporation. As a CEO, he orchestrates his participation in public discourse, with fascinating outcomes regarding AIDS/HIV, nuclear energy, the carbon footprint, the impact of offshore sewage dumping, and development destabilization. His conceptualist activist is subversive. “Jay Critchley, Incorporated,” a recent retrospective curated by Bailey Bob Bailey, explored 30 years of interventionist practices. The show highlighted Critchley’s prescient mapping of off-kilter variants on the American Dream, delving deeply into a contextualization of his performativity, which was intellectually agile, affable, organic, original, and often hilarious.
The product placement strategy for Old Glory Condom Corporation, unfettered by sexual taboo, was accompanied by the patriotic slogan “Worn With Pride Country-Wide.” Critchley’s interpretation of Miss Tampon Liberty trod an equally fine line of decorum, with a campaign that included a processional robe adorned with 3,000 discarded tampon applicators and worn by the artist in his role as the ambassador of TACKI (Tampon Applicator Creative Klubs International.) It was developed to raise awareness of the negative impact of plastics in the environment. The lurid sensibility of TACKI, the jokery in Old Glory, and the perhaps inappropriate “Scat Chat” conversations excerpted from his radio program, which aired on WOMR in Provincetown, all address bigger, dirtier problems like AIDS/HIV and the environmental effects of Boston’s sewage outfall pipe.
Critchley’s voice has three-dimensional authenticity, with a marker’s mindset that expresses itself in meticulously crafted objects imbued with the porosity of conscientious objection. His work also has a playfulness that adds power to loaded constructs. Influenced by Joseph Beuys, Critchley uses pageantry to a similar shamanistic effect angled toward healing.
The retrospective included printed materials stamped with the authority of Critchley’s “NRC” corporation (Nuclear Recycling Consultants) and documentation of the action Nuke Soup, an exploratory dialogue regarding nuclear energy. Maskuerade Ball Project speaks of the global threat posed by epidemics in works neatly fashioned from surgical masks.
A re-creation of Critchley’s living room printed life-size onto a banner that hung like a shower curtain in a circular formation occupied the museum as a floor-to-ceiling installation. At the far end, flashing twin towers made from repurposed single-use cameras, could be interpreted as relating to Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” comment in an overall scheme of audience immersion. Helmet-like fascinators from Critchley’s International Re-Rooters Society (IRS) and the image of a burning pyre at his cleansing ritual on “Re-Rooters Day” (January 7, since 1983) held sway at the front of the museum. Ceremony, quirky logos, wordplay as double-speak, and debris reconfigured into new object-ness all exemplify Critchley’s creatively.
Although shocking to some, Critchley’s work has given him access to Three Mile Island. During his career, his work has been a vehicle for environmental legislation. He has garnered attention at Harvard University, and his performativity has engaged Manhattan’s creative elite at Freight + Volume gallery in New York City.
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16. Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumns, at National Gallery, Cayman Islands, opening Jan. 15
International Exhibition EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean to open at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands
15 January – 19 March, 2016
EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean is an exhibition curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson; organized by the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), New Orleans and Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.
The international travelling exhibition EN MAS: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean will make its way to the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI) in January 2016. EN MAS’ is a pioneering exploration of the influences of Carnival on contemporary performance practices in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Conceived around a series of commissioned performances across six different countries, the exhibition considers the connections between Carnival and performance, masquerade and social criticism, diaspora and transnationalism. Its title comes from a pun on “Mas” (short for masquerade and synonymous with carnival in the English speaking Caribbean).
EN MAS’ takes a look at the history of performance that does not take place on the stage or in the gallery, but rather in the streets, addressing not the few but the many. The exhibition introduces performance art with a focus on the influence that Carnival and related masquerading traditions in and of the Caribbean and its Diasporas have had on contemporary performance discourse and practice, in both the artistic and curatorial realms.
“Carnival has a long history in our islands and we are excited to host EN MAS’ as the first venue on its regional tour. The nine artists featured in the exhibition have created a series of contemporary performances that draw on the tradition of carnival as a vehicle for social commentary, while bringing contemporary performance practice into the wider public arena. We hope the exhibition will be well received by our diverse audiences and that it will encourage dialogue about the role that carnival can play in contemporary Caymanian art practice.” says Natalie Urquhart, NGCI Director.
Featured artists include: John Beadle (Bahamas), Charles Campbell (Jamiaca), Christophe Chassol (France), Nicolás Dumit Estévez (Dominican Republic and USA), Marlon Griffith (Trinidad), Hew Locke (UK), Lorraine O’Grady (USA), Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaica), and Cauleen Smith (USA).
The exhibition is made possible by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. Additional support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and by the Institut français in support of African and Caribbean projects. The exhibition debuted at CAC New Orleans in spring 2015.
EN MAS’ will be open to the public from 15 January to 19 March, 2016. A members’ reception event will take place 14 January, 2016 starting at 6:00 PM. Admission is free and guided tour bookings available. For a series of other screenings, lectures and education programmes related to this exhibition please email info@nationalgallery.org.ky or visitwww.nationalgallery.org.ky.
Photo caption: Nicolás Dumit Estévez, C Room, Museo Folklórico Don Tomás Morel, performance, Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Photo: Raymond Marrero.
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17. Rae C. Wright, FF Alumn, at Café LaMaMa, Manhattan, Jan. 22-Feb. 7
Rae C Wright, FF Alumn, joins Will Badgett, Shelley Fort, Mary Schultz, Tina Shepard, Debargo
Sanyal and Sam Kulik in The Talking Band’s lastest work – Burnished by Grief — a love letter to
the chaos of cramped NYC living. Directed by Paul Zimet, this “music infused, sinister romantic
comedy” is inspired by OBIE Award-winning playwright Ellen Maddow’s work as a mediator in
Brooklyn Civil Court — Burnished by Grief will play January 22-February 7 at LaMaMa’s First Floor Theatre.
The show will play Jan. 22 at 7:30 PM, Jan. 23 at 2 PM and 7 PM, Jan. 24 at 2 PM, Jan. 25 at
7:30 PM, Jan. 27* – 30 at 7:30 PM, Jan. 31 at 2 PM, Feb. 3-6 at 7:30 PM, and Feb. 7 at 2 PM.
The four tickets and information call the Cafe LaMama box office @(646) 430-5374
66 East 4th Street – Mezzanine Level 1 (between 2nd Avenue & The Bowery) NYC, NY Email: web@lamama.org
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18. Brendan Fernandes, FF Alumn, in The Huffington Post, now online
Dear Friends!
As I end this year I am excited to share that the Huffington Post has named me one of 17 Artist to watch in 2016. I am thrilled for this honor. Through this hectic and productive year you all have continued to support my work and projects and for that I am truly grateful and thankful. Wishing you all a happy and prosperous holiday season. I am looking forward to seeing and being in touch with you all in 2016. Sending my best to you and yours.
Thank you,
Brendan
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19. Gabriel Martinez, FF Alumn, at VisualAids.org, now online
Alex Fiorentino responds to and interviews Gabriel Martinez about his recent exhibition “Bayside Revisited” at The Print Center in Philadelphia….
https://www.visualaids.org/blog/detail/gabriel-martinez
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20. David Everitt Howe, FF Alumn, at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, opening Jan. 22
Flood
Charles Harlan
Opening Reception
Friday, January 22
6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
A 10-ft. by 10-ft. brick cube, 10 feet high, with a basin of water inside.
A chain link fence, 6 feet wide, draping 33 feet from the ceiling, resting on the concrete.
A piece of fencing, into which a tree grew.
736 sq. ft. of roofing shingles, tiled on the floor to walk on.
Curated by David Everitt Howe
On View January 15 – February 28, 2016
For media inquiries please contact Allison Knoll at press@pioneerworks.org
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
