Tagged: JdP RSS
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Photos by Jason Fulford
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In the film La Nouvelle Kahnawake the French duo Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin zoom-in on a Mohawk tribe of Canadian First Nations people, located on the south shore of the St Lawrence river across from Montréal (Québec, Canada). Yet the film is as much about the artists research and presence in Kahnawake as it is about the Mohawks who live there. The artists appear throughout the film, embedding and acknowledging their own position as outsiders noting, “If this is a documentary then the subject is us.” But it’s not just a documentary, nor a critical analysis of the legal loopholes, business practices and cultural histories of the Mohawks. It’s a poetic and performative investigation of relationships in the global sphere, impacted by a cluster of forces so multiple and complex as to become abstract, almost metaphysical.
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Reading of The Senses, by Lydia Davis
Download .wav audio -
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Pit three or four plump cherries and toss them into a cocktail shaker. Add 1/2 oz of the homemade rosemary cardamom bitter liquor and using a wooden spoon or a muddler mash the cherries and the liquor. Fill shaker with ice and add 1 1/2 oz the Willet’s Rye. Shake vigorously and strain into a cocktail glass. Squeeze a few drops of fresh lemon juice into the drink and add a sprig of fresh Rosemary as garnish.
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This game concept is the result of an ongoing series of conversations between two friends, curator Joseph del Pesco and game designer Al McElrath. McElrath was involved in the production of the single-player console (Xbox) version/translation of the popular PC game America’s Army (AA), the most successful tool ever deployed by the US Army’s recruiting department. “The game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.” But AA is more than an advertisement. Like a flight simulator used for the education of pilots, AA purports to “provide players with the most authentic military experience available”. In other words, it occupies a slippery ground between a simulator designed for soldiers-in-training and a commercial game intended for the entertainment market. In fact, its proximity to “authenticity” may be the very thing that makes it such popular entertainment.
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The conditions for artists in San Francisco have become increasingly precarious since the dot.com boom and bust of the late 1990s. Housing prices have ballooned as has the cost of living. In the US, California suffers from the least state funding for the arts as a result of the professionalization and privatization of the arts that began in the Reagan years and continues under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. The aftershocks of the culture wars continue to be felt on a national level as a general mistrust of artists as a political liability, despite growing audiences at major museums. The San Francisco Bay Area, however, has been feted as an oasis for the newly identified “creative class” which have, for better and worse, influenced policy makers and real-estate developers who see a thriving culturati as an important register in a city’s quality of life index.
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What experience in your life best prepared you for curatorial work, particularly exhibition-making?
I’m not primarily interested in exhibition making. I operate from the position that standardized exhibitions are an exhausted format, and that audiences are either oblivious to the narratives that curators propose, or that they are over-influenced by them and see groupings of artworks not as individual voices in proximity, but as singing the same song. Some would call this a lack of confidence in the viewer (who might be reconsidered as an active participant/producer in the attention economy), or say that I’ve just seen too many mediocre exhibitions, both of which are true. Ultimately I find it more productive to start from a position of not-exhibitions and only move in that direction when necessary.
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