Tagged: work RSS
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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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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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As 40% of the adult population, you are a majority — in number and wisdom; therefore you are the force — which is justice. Some of you are aging activists, others are retiring shareholders; a glorious day will come when the activists shall be shareholders and the shareholders activists. Then your great potential will be revealed, and no person will protest against it. Until that supreme harmony is achieved, it is just that those who are but shareholders should aspire to become activists; for participation is no less of an enjoyment than the free time allowed by retirement.
The government of this country has been in your hands, and that is just, for you have been the force. But you must also be capable of recognizing new possibilities for social agency; for as not one of you could do without individual liberties, so not one of you has the right to do without community.
You can live three days without bread — without community, never; and those of you who can say the contrary are mistaken; they are out of their minds.
The aristocrats of spectacle, the arbiters of cultural value, the monopolists of the screen, have told you that you have no right to feel and to enjoy — this is deception.
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Since the 1960s more than a dozen contemporary art magazines have circulated in the San Francisco Bay Area. A few have left but continued printing, but at present no printed periodical addressing contemporary art remains. There have been some gaps in coverage over the years, but looking back over the timeline, from the Sixties up to the present there’s always been at least one critical journal. This doesn’t, of course, mean they’ve been wildly successful or even widely distributed. This turn-over and transience is typical of the Bay Area, a place where new ideas are tolerated if not encouraged, and the persistent appearance of yet another new initiative means there’s always been an active scene here, if only just in the process of becoming.
Last January, I began the work of locating origin stories of Bay Area periodicals. I knew of artist initiated publications like Wallace Berman’s Semina and the mail-art magazine VILE, both produced at least in part in the SF Bay Area, but I wanted to find critical and editorial perspectives. It’s common knowledge that ARTFORUM was founded here in 1962, so I’ve used their first issue as my point of departure moving forward in time.
For this DISPATCH, I’ll think through these historical magazines as a way to address the present—starting in 1962 up to the most recent instances. During the course of research I became particularly interested in the opening statements of these magazines, as presented in their first issues. I’ll excerpt a selection of them here. Then, borrowing their perspectives and purview, I’ll consider events in the current moment.
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“Following the California launch of Fillip 6 in the summer of 2007, we had the opportunity to tour the Collective Foundation exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and meet with Joseph del Pesco to discuss some of his recent projects…”
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Joseph del Pesco: Marisa, you open the book with a personal note indicating that there are more individuals and groups than you were able to include. One might think of this kind of information overflow as a byproduct of your research. Some were examples you chose to leave out, but others were stories or histories you either couldn’t fit into the pages, found too late, or couldn’t find enough information about. What are some of these byproducts?
Marisa Jahn: There are a few kinds of individuals and groups whose embedded practices I couldn’t cover.
For one, I didn’t cover projects initiated by institutions that sought to embed artists in non-art contexts. Examples include the artist-in-residency projects in the late 60’s/early 70’s by Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and CAVS at MIT. While I think these are all important and fascinating moments in transdisciplinary work, in Byproduct I wanted to focus on projects in which individuals had approached institutions where they sought to embed themselves. What I saw was that when institutions sought to embed individuals in non-art contexts, there was a certain amount of scholarship dedicated to contextualizing these works; this critical attention was lacking in most of the selections I featured. Also, when an individual decides to approach an institution, there is a certain admirable chutzpah or gall involved. It’s this kind of miraculous and laudable got-nothing-to-lose attitude that engenders political and social change…
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Chris Sharp: Can you tell me a bit about Kadist San Francisco? What kind of space is this? How is it supposed to function? And what role does it intend to play in the local community?
Joseph del Pesco: In part, Kadist San Francisco mirrors its counterpart in Paris, starting with collections and residencies, but then the reflection shifts, or maybe becomes more like a ‘true mirror’ in that each venue considers and responds to its own city and the particular matrix of attitudes and needs that define its role in a cultural climate. For example, in addition to artist and curator residencies we’re prototyping a new residency for art magazines…
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Sean Dockray: Mainly I’ve been trying to think about how the projects could weave into each other a bit, instead of being like Coke and Pepsi; but how our thoughts and the projects could cohere and illustrate the world around, how they can remain distinct on the one hand but also how we can make something together (an argument, a discussion as project, etc.) that is deeply interdependent…
Joseph del Pesco: Yes, I like your proposal for discursive entanglement and of, perhaps more in terms of relative functions, the pages of PA interleaved within TPS. While TPS and PA both remain discrete programs in this experimental iteration in Paris, they are conceptually and programmatically overlapping and perhaps in the process are able to highlight their implicit values and attitudes via compare/contrast.
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