Works on Water – Collect Pond walk!
Some would propose “water art” as a new movement along the lines of “land art.” This show in NYC, Works on Water, has so many great projects that would lead you to conclude just that! Check out my walking tour of Collect Pond.
/ /
Join interdisciplinary artist Rachel Stevens on a walking tour, discussion and augmented reality visualization of Collect Pond, tracing the edges of this lost body of water and unpacking histories and futures tying water to finance and speculation, from Collect Pond to Hurricane Sandy and beyond.
Since Europeans arrived in Lower Manhattan, water has been a contentious commodity and continues to be a flashpoint for struggles between private enterprise and human rights. Collect Pond, a 48-acre, 60- foot deep freshwater pond, used to occupy the land from the court houses to the edge of Chinatown in Lower Manhattan until it became polluted and then filled in. Chase Company, founded by Aaron Burr, was a private water distribution company that hoarded profits meant to provide clean water from tributaries feeding Collect Pond and used those funds to start Chase Bank.
Pippilotti Rist / MFJ 65
Millennium Film Journal issue No. 65, Architecture On Screen and Off, is out and it includes my review of Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest at The New Museum (October 26, 2016-Jan 1, 2017). The issue unveils a new, larger format and also includes an interview with Colleen Fitzgibbon on CoLab TV, writing on the invention of glitch video, DCTV, Sondra Perry and much more!
Image: New York Times
Course vs. Score
Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop within the Artist as Educator graduate class taught by Caroline Woolard, an artist I greatly admire, at SVA (School of Visual Arts) in NYC. While walking the class through the process of designing a semester-long, college-level art class I tried to talk about how, while on the one hand, a college syllabus is a very institution-friendly document that outlines what useful and necessary information and activities the course will cover, it can also operate as a set of instructions that facilitates a generative process or kind of performance. There are many important things to consider, such as “Am I teaching from my bias and how can I counter that?,” “How can I create an arc over a 16 week semester and break-down the material into ‘consumable chunks’?” or “What is my criteria for evaluation and how can I make it transparent to the students?,” but just as important are other questions: As teaching artists, how can we imagine our course as a laboratory? How can we design structures and assignments that are open, or balance instrumentality with a sense of serendipity, irreverence, playfulness, absurdity, intentional failure or other unquantifiable quality that may be conducive to making art? When I arrived at the class I was more than pleased to join in with their performance of a Fluxus aqueous event score, passing water around a circle with a spoon.
ELSE magazine launch: The Imperceptible Self
I am excited to be included in the latest edition of ELSE journal: “The Imperceptible Self.” In my contribution, “The Image of Empathy and Becoming in 1970s Star Trek Cosplay,” I have included a selection of images from a found slide archive and tried to contextualize it with some history and speculative framing. Launch and reading tomorrow at The Powerplant Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
ELSE Journal launch issue 2: “The Imperceptible Self”
Fully aware that in these times, our “interaction” with “other” cultures and with nature is both inevitable and profoundly altering; we will consider other modes of framing action and existence than identity politics, shepherding nature and “I.” How else can we consider the implosion of exiled states; the entropic influx into the largest cities; the sinking of smaller ones; the collapsing distance between us? How to live now in the “eruption of desire for the future which reshapes the present”—to become imperceptible?Join us for the launch of our next issue of ELSE Art and Cultural Journal with readings by select artists. An occasional journal that welcomes experimental and alternative forms of representing creative work.
Contributors include: Adrian Piper, Carol Becker, Akil Kirlew, Jean-Ulrick Desert, Alexandra Ross, Gayle Meikle, Analia Sirabonian, Caroline Koebel, Jennie Klein, Sonia Barrett, Ian Burkhart, Luisa Greenfield, Mark Roth, Morgan O’Hara, Rachel Dedman, Ayman Hassan, Rachel Stevens and Susie Quillinan.
ELSE is a peer-reviewed journal of works, projects, and research thematically gravitating towards memory, forgetting, trauma and the archive; language/image; international diaspora and post-colonialism; role of art in peace meditation; liminality; space/place; temporary architecture; foreignness, otherness and the uncanny.
Launch event at Powerhouse Arena
Readings, signings and a reception. Meet faculty, students and learn more about our three year research projects which began this summer with the Transart Triennale and continues with the journal.
www.elsejournal.org/else-launch / www.transarttriennale.org
Fish Stories at Bluestockings
Fish Stories Community Cookbook is now available at Bluestockings, a volunteer-powered and collectively-owned radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side, NYC! We are honored to be in the company of so many fantastic independent publications.
