Tag Politics

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1990s

Jul 20, ’07 10:10 AM

I spent yesterday afternoon doing a project for an art show about the influence of music in the 1990s and how it shaped my generation. I decided to make t-shirts using youtube footage of bands from the ’90s that were paramount for me- ones I would’ve liked to see live and, in some cases, did see live. My thought was to create mementos for these past events using the material and the format- youtube- available to us now. I placed the images on old thrift store shirts- many of them ringer and baseball tees- which recall the sort of shirts I use to buy at shows or make myself at the time. I know the show and my project are meant to be a playful reflection on my generation’s teenage years. However, the process also made me think about the politics which dominated that era of my life- specifically riot grrrl- and I remembered how real and imminent revolutionary change seemed to me at the time. Perhaps I’m out of touch, but I don’t feel that there’s a cultural phenomenon with that sort of presence now. Which is sad- because community and feminist awareness remain extremely relevant and especially so for teen girls. Spending a few hours yesterday watching videos and interviews of Sleater Kinney, Excuse 17, Bikini Kill, and Heavens to Betsy- and combing this archive of flyers and stickers- reminded me that riot grrrl was the punk rock of the 1990s. Except it was way cooler and smarter. All of my girlfriends who were involved have now gone on to do incredible things- evidence that the movement was a critical one.

That said.

A banner ad for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 campaign appeared on all the youtube pages I captured yesterday:

Originally, I thought to crop the ads out and focus just on the concert footage. I decided to keep them- as a reminder of where we are now- post 9/11 rhetoric, the war in Iraq, and the upcoming elections. Where is our generation now? What happened? How did things get so fucked?

I think a lot of people in my age range are asking the same questions. And the few art shows this summer focused on the ‘90s- Let’s Bolt (discussed above), My Own Private Reality or Values (information below)- are all an attempt to take stock of our teen years in the ‘90s and the various cultural factors (emergence of the internet and online communities, riot grrrl, D.I.Y., grunge, etc.) which formed our experience.

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If you’re around Sunday afternoon – come to Art in General in Tribeca. Anthony Marcellini and Josh Kline have put together a one-day video show of works exploring the influence of 1990s underground music scenes and their values… The show will be up from 4-8pm, there will be free beer, air conditioning, and videos by the following artists:

Alex Bag
Sadie Benning
Slater Bradley
Martha Colburn
Forcefield
Devin Flynn
Klara Liden
Anne McGuire
Stephen G. Rhodes
Pepo Salazar
Ryan Trecartin
Yacht (Yona Bechtolt)

Also, there will be some bootleg footage on some monitors for you to look at of the following bands playing live back in the day: Bikini Kill, Nation of Ulysses, the Boredoms, Underground Resistance, Fugazi, Huggy Bear, Los Crudos, etc. I’m sure you can see where this is going! 1992 was 15 years ago!

  • SUNDAY JULY 22
  • 4 – 8 pm
  • Art in General’s 9th Annual Video Marathon: VALUES
  • 79 Walker Street, 6th Floor
  • Between Broadway and Lafayette – just below Canal
  • A,C,E to Canal / 4,5,6,J,M,Z,N,R,Etc. To Canal
  • Map: http://www.artingeneral.org/aig/General/Visit/Visit.htm
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Informal Architectures

Jul 2, ’07 2:14 PM

Via Subtopia

Relevant to previous discussion of documenta. This looks great.

Informal Architectures
Curated by Anthony Kiendl
for Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre

Informal Architectures is an exhibition gathering the work of a number of artists exploring the intersections of architecture, social thought and failure. The exhibition presents predominantly new works (some commissioned and produced by artists at The Banff Centre) with select historical works. When viewed together, these works form a narrative about the often unspoken role of architecture in controlling people.

This exhibition describes a contemporary landscape of social, political and cultural assumptions. These ideas are incorporated into the structures of the built environment —economic, physical, and institutional—affecting the recent past, uncertain present and near future. In this landscape, technology and consumerism are the primary vehicles of a utopian modernity. But waste, materialism, entropy and abjection form incessant counter-narratives haunting modernity’s ideological projections. In and around these scenes of our post-9/11 environment, artists re-configure our surroundings.

While monumentality continues to weigh on contemporary art and architectural practices in western societies, alternative strategies in spatial culture have proliferated since the 1960s. By considering work by artists from diverse and unconventional perspectives, the assumptions and dream-narratives of modern art and architecture may be re-imagined. The artists in Informal Architectures visualize economies of both excess and lack —chocolate and dirt, shopping malls and ruins, humour and destruction—proposing alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation and inhabitation of space—or of how to be in the world.

Artists in the exhibition include: Rita McKeough, Gordon Matta-Clark, William Pope L., Eleanor Bond, Jimmie Durham, Lida Abdul, Ryan Nordlund, Edgar Arceneaux with Vincent Johnson, Olga Koumoundorous, Rodney McMillan, and Matthew Sloly, Dan Graham, Luanne Martineau, David Hoffos, Kyohei Sakaguchi.

See more about this at the Walter Phillips Gallery Website

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documenta 12/some thoughts

Jun 18, ’07 9:57 AM

I picked up the first installment of the three proposed magazines for documenta 12 and read it over the weekend. Three overarching questions guide this documenta- Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and What is to be done?- and each magazine explores one of these leitmotifs in depth. The first issue asks, “Is modernity our antiquity?” and it begins with an essay by the same title written by artist Mark Lewis. His essay had a few revelatory morsels that fit in well with the Gillick article I reposted and some other thoughts I’ve been kicking around.

Lewis begins the essay by describing his draw to a crumbling modernist apartment building in his hometown of Vancouver. Over five years, he has taken hundreds of photos and hours of footage of the structure, and he admits that the project is partially underwritten by a desire to construct an elegy to its demise. He acknowledges that in romanticizing modernity’s decay he skirts a larger issue- that being the transformation of modernist forms into historical ones. The crux to him is how to articulate this distance. He ends this section with:

…we look to the (monumental) history of modernism to tell us something about the conflicts at the heart of the modern, about the latter’s failure to make us free, its failure to provide us with a future in which we might recognize ourselves. In the end, this may not be so very different from the desire to find the truth in the classical past.

The essay gets more interesting in the next section- Lewis goes onto to discuss the fundamentals of modernity according to Baudelaire and elaborates on T.J. Clark’s statement in Farewell to an Idea that “modernism is our antiquity”. He continues:

The aesthetic ideas and practices that came to be known as modernism initially had some stake, investment, and predicative power in how modernity was going to shape up. Modernism tried to make sense of the modern revolution in the world; it produced aesthetic objects, images and ideas in relation to the fact that modernity was deemed not yet complete, nor its ideas fully actualized. Modernism was, in other words, the idea that modernity could be figured and interpolated with utopian possibility. If one concludes that this power of predication is now impossible, then the grounds upon which today’s artistic ideas and practices stand are littered with the archeological remnants of modernism. What is shocking that, whereas modernity and modernism were cast as relentlessly forward-thinking, we now find “signs” of the modern in the past, in the unfilled dreams of what never came but still might. It is precisely this failure (of the modern and of modernism too) that is given a kind of noble profile in its unrealized potential.

I believe it is precisely these “archeological remnants of modernism” which back Gillick’s statement that:

…contemporary art is not well placed to confront the recent clarifications and extremes of conflict in a direct way.

I have not viewed the Memorial to the Iraq War exhibition at the ICA but I imagine, from Gillick’s response, that the effect is similar to the peace tower built for the Whitney Biennial last year. The peace tower came across as a trite simulacrum of a modernist utopian protest- an artifact glaringly distant from our present time. I understand, however, the impulse to scavenge this “antiquity” for some sort of answer or truth to guide us out of the mire. Artist Josephine Meckseper wonderfully expresses both the yearning to look back to 1960s protest culture for direction and the futility of such an exercise.

Simply, her work evidences the fact that direct political statements are commodified in the contemporary culture of consumerism. Which is why it is so difficult to assert them, in or outside the realm of contemporary art. This is something I thought about after the show for Incapacitants at No Fun a few weeks ago. I was on stage during the entire performance and the emotional response from the audience was absolutely overwhelming to witness. The outpour of visceral, directionless rage shared by the audience and the band evidenced the pervading feeling of hopelessness in our time. If anything, this shared sensation itself was the “direct statement”, not any explicit political declaration. If political messages are communicated at all- they are imbued in the action itself and intuitive reaction of the audience. I see examples of this “overwhelming feeling” all the time- from Christoph Buchel’s total installations to assume vivid astro focus’s equally elaborate installations to Sunn O))) to even the increasing resurgence of rave culture….There’s an immediate, instinctive effect there. And on the heels of the rampant irony of the early 2000’s, this may be what we have.

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Repost: Is there anything for art to say about Iraq?

May 23, ’07 9:37 AM

Liam Gillick published this comment on the ICA’s show Memorial to the Iraq War on the Guardian’s art & architecture blog yesterday, I think it’s really interesting:

Is there anything for art to say about Iraq?
There doesn’t seem to be much point in conventional artistic responses to the Iraq conflict – artists need to be much more direct.

Artists have been responding to the war in Iraq since the build-up in 2003. The exhibition opening at the ICA this week is only the most visible manifestation of a whole matrix of works, actions and protests over the last few years. The problem is that many people, artists included, feel increasingly trapped between extreme forces of ideological perversion.

Read full article HERE

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