RESOLUTION 3 SYMPOSIUM

RESOLUTION 3: VIDEO PRAXIS IN GLOBAL SPACES

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2008

The Resolution 3 Symposium kicked off at 9:30 Friday morning October 24th with coffee and muffins in Broad Performance Space.  People milled around and at about the time when the caffeine kicked in the opening ceremonies began.  After the introduction and opening session, Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal took the podium to talk about his highly controversial body of work including “Virtual Jihadi”.  He talked about the purpose of his art– that he wanted to wake up the average American citizen to the reality of war.  He said that his work created interaction with the audience that made them into active participants and created discussion.  He spoke about the duality of the “comfort zone” and the “conflict zone”.  Bilal was a very captivating speaker and when he was finished it was clear that the audience wanted to hear more.  We broke up into 5 different groups to meet for Session 1 and I had the pleasure of having Bilal in my group called “Video, Technology, and New Media”.
As a group we decided to divide the time up into two parts and take the first half of Session 1 to come up with topics with wished to address during the second session. The following are those topics and questions we decided on:
1. The democratization of the media. How has asking for more machines and tools to create media changed it? How has wider access changed it? How has it changed the way that we understand the world? What are specific ways that the democratization of the media has altered our perception of it?

2. How does an artist contact their audience given the variety of the channels available like YouTube, TV, cellphones, etc.? How do these new forms of media change the way politics are understood? How does the decentralization of information serve to influence politics besides just offering a plethora of views?

3. How does the platform and context that we view art alter/change/influence the way that we experience or feel about it? What happens when a work is de-contextualized? In regards to Bilal’s piece in particular.

4. With the advent of YouTube and the like, more and more people are creating “video art” does it disturb the very notion of video art–does it make the art less pure if anyone can do it? Or does it fall in line with the notion perfectly because anyone at any time could always pick up a video camera and film themselves? What about content, context, and intent?

In the end we didn’t get to address all of these questions. Entire courses are based on some of these individual questions. However, we did talk about the democratization of the media after we picked Bilal’s brain for information and answers about his controversial art. First I want to discuss our conversation with Bilal.

Someone asked him what an “ideal” response to his work would be and he said that there was no such thing. In his mind he just wanted to keep the dialogue open to everyone–not just those who view the work as an art piece–but everyone, so that the piece can serve as a stage and a platform to open up discussion. He said it was essential to “build a platform, initiate it and step back”. The work is “dynamic” with an indeterminable end state. Bilal negates the context of “Virtual Jihadi” in order to provoke a response, to instigate conversation, to get people’s minds churning and blood pumping and out of their “comfort zone” into a “conflict zone” where they have an opinion. Art is meant to provoke. Censorship has become part of the piece itself. The fact that it is so widely censored is part of its allure now. It takes us out of the norm and that is one of his strategies of engagement. Bilal is highly successful at establishing and maintaining an active productive dialogue.

As far as democratizing the media goes we discussed the way that the artist and the public interact. The way that the artist now has access to groups of people that they wouldn’t normally have had access to before new media came into play (YouTube, TV, etc.). However, any of these platforms have limits that structure the democratization of the use. The artist must decide how he reaches the “target” audience. Artists must also be aware more than ever about intent, copyright, use, and compensation. Democratization of the media also brings issues of quality vs. quantity to the table. Has quality diminished? Who gets to decide? YouTube brings up so many new issues. Everyone becomes a curator on YouTube. It is also an extremely valuable database. But do “video artists” really post their work on there?

Whitney Jackson

Bilal and Farouk: Works and Bios

Lauren Sokolov

Wafaa Bilal, born in Iraq on June 10, 1966, is a video artist and former professor of art, and is famous for creating works demonstrating political, social, and racial tensions. His life and experiences in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and eventually the United States provide the basis for his works, along with their compelling yet sensitive and even difficult-to-confront subject matters.

Since his early childhood in Iraq, Bilal aspired to become an artist, and developed a specific interest in political matters and their subsequent social effects. Even one of the early pieces he made in Iraq led to his arrest, due to its controversial critique of Saddam Hussein. In 1991, Bilal fled Iraq upon his refusal to take part in the invasion of Kuwait, and spent two years in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a children’s art teacher.

Bilal came to the United States in 1992. He studied art first in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then in Chicago. Despite his success in teaching and giving lectures on the situation in Iraq, he was deeply affected by the death of his brother, who was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005. From that event, he was prompted to create one of his most memorable pieces, “Domestic Tension,” (2007). This digital-interactive piece displays his childhood in Iraq, along with the time he spent in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It is an installation-performance piece that brings his experience to life through a remote-controlled paintball gun and camera connecting him to the internet. It displays the contemporary issues of political and cultural tensions that we are forced to confront.

City Lights recently published an article, “Shoot an Iraqi,” (2008) expanding on Bilal’s story and on “Domestic Tension.” The article discusses how Bilal demonstrates his situation in Iraq by presenting the tense, nerve-wracking conditions he experienced – ultimately representing the conditions of all Iraqi citizens under Saddam Hussein’s regime. He builds seclusion and fear of violence into a reflection of his immigration to the United States, depicting the obstacles and eventual benefits he has encountered.

Other notable works by Bilal include “The Human Condition,” “Virtual Jihadi,” “Midwest Olympia,” and “Sorrow of Baghdad.” These projects, which contain photographs, installations and video, also display the situation in Iraq and its social and political effects. Examples of the heart-wrenching works include a statue (in “Sorrow of Baghdad”) depicting a mother trying to protect her child moments before her own death, and images (in “Human Condition”) of surreal (“hyper-real”) landscapes portraying oppression and fear, in a non-specific, open-narrative sense that allows audiences to draw their own interpretations and conclusions.
Wafaa Bilal continues to spread his art and political messages, through museum exhibitions, lectures, and travels around the world. His main incentive in presenting the situation in Iraq is, ultimately, to stress the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. His poignant, powerful works have left a significant impression on audiences worldwide, and his artistic presentation has added a large contribution to video, photography, and installation.

Ismail Farouk, the “Urban Photographer,” is an artist from Johannesburg, South Africa known for his videos and photographs examining spatial relations in urban places. The aim of his work is to display public space while conveying how private authorities and organizations have asserted control over them. His pieces force us to confront the truth about cultural inequalities based on class, race, and political matters.
Farouk began his studies of cultural inequality at Wits University, where he earned a degree in Fine Art and, later, a Masters degree in Urban Geography. From there, he began working with an architectural firm on a project regarding the modernization of Yeoville, Johannesburg. He applied his observational skills and the theoretical approaches he learned at Wits to develop the “network approach methodology.” It was then that he set the characteristic theme of his work: the idea of mainstream urban society, and the contradiction therein.

Amongst Farouk’s most famous works is “Trolley Pusher Project,” which shows globalization in Johannesburg and uses video to demonstrate cultural discrimination and pre-judgment in society. The piece contains footage of “trolley pushers” and their important but illegal service of transporting the luggage of people commuting from one Taxi service to another. The shopping cart trolleys are stolen from supermarkets by Zimbabwean gang members, and the trolley pushers use them to earn money by offering their services to commuters. The illegality of this service is well known by customers, who rarely pay trolley pushers more than a small fraction of their asking price. This and other exploitation problems exist in this service, including the issue of police raids, which result in heavy fines for the trolley pushers and, after repeated offenses, even imprisonment.

Farouk has used “Trolley Pusher Project” and his other pieces in Johannesburg to compare mainstream urbanization in South Africa and in Los Angeles, California, in exhibitions such as “Cancelled Without Prejudice” at the MAK Center. His comparison shows a surprising parallel between Johannesberg and Los Angeles: the similarity of their racial/socioeconomic issues in public spaces. He has also contributed to a collaborative project, “Urban Concerns,” again a social and political research piece in which Farouk used artistic approaches to connect citizens of Johannesburg. His aim was to spread awareness and unity amongst those living in the urban conditions he has studied.

Ismail Farouk continues to research geographic and social conditions throughout the world, and strives for spatial and economic justice within the urban locations he has encountered. The creative and artistic methods he uses to apply his subject matter have helped to empower countless citizens in the struggle for justice, and make audiences aware of the struggle and the importance of ameliorating it.

Sources and Information:

Wafaa Bilal

Ismail Farouk

MARTIN KERSELS

“I’m not a photographer. I’m an artist who uses photography when the idea dictates. And I think that’s okay because I’m also a performance artist who makes objects, or I’m an object-maker who does performances. I think these labels are less important than the ability to go in the directions I’d like for each work.”
—Martin Kersels

These pieces are excellent examples of the kind of work Martin Kersels creates. He doesn’t limit himself to one type of artistic expression. Here he combines performance art with sculpture/installation art. He also video tapes them and screens them at galleries and thus transforms them into video art.

Martin Kersels doesn’t pigeon hole himself into one category like so many artists do. He doesn’t define himself by the medium he works with and this renders him extremely versitile in the art world. Kersels is also not afraid to take risks. He uses his body as way to explore the boundaries and limits of space and of his impact upon it. Many artists that use their bodies in their art often have bodies that they want to show off because they are aesthetically pleasing. It is usually just an excercise in self-indulgence and narcissism, but not for Kersels. He has a less than perfect physique, in fact the whole nature of his work surrounds the fact that he is larger than life.

Kersels towers over most people at 6′6 and over 300 pounds. He uses his massive body to play upon how dwarfish objects in the world seem to be around him.There is one sculpture at the Santa Monica Museum that is just an enormous pot. It seems like sort of a tragic commentary on how this world isn’t made for someone as large as him–how everything must be custom made for him, even a simple pot to boil water in. The other sculpture of his that I spent a lot of time with was this enormous bird’s nest, entitled “Rickety”, that had a motley of different items woven into it. There were pieces of furniture, childrens playthings, articles of clothing, and all sorts of other miscellaneous household objects. It looked like parts of a dream or a memory stitched together–it was incredibly beautiful.

“Rickety (2007), the artist’s latest work, is a sculpture that compresses and oppresses furniture and other oversized objects beneath a platform. This lower, slightly topsy-turvy world stands in sharp contrast to the clean openness of the top part of the installation. Unlike some of the other sculptures in the exhibition that are surrogates for Kersels’ physical being, Rickety is about the experience of the trials and tribulations of navigating a large body through the world.”

It looks like the kind of nest he would need if he were a bird. Everything he creates reflects the way he experiences the world through his body. He gives the viewer a sense of what it is like to be in his body–to see the world from his eyes. In a sense, he endows the viewer with a literal “bird’s eye perspective” of how he navigates himself through a world that is too small for him.

BY: WHITNEY JACKSON

Video Art, Collaboration, and Public Space

The students in this class, MS71 PZ Video Art, was charged with creating a collaborative project that engages with the Resolution 3 Symposium, which took place from October 24-26, 2008. They chose to create a blog as an on-line venue for them to report, reflect, and comment on their experiences at the event. In all, this format lends itself well to a cumulative process of writing, and allowed different students in the class to adapt their individual experiences, their interests and focus in contemporary video practices, and their different writing styles into a coherent, collective expression. The multimedia platform also allowed the students studying media production to incorporate moving and still images into the project, which augmented its text-based main body.

In reading the posts, the reader who did not attend the Symposium will get a sense of the different programs that took place. Those, like myself, who attended the event, will encounter personal, and sometimes idiosyncratic takes that individual students had on the Symposium. In reading these posts, it seems that selected events—the twenty-four hour screening (in which one of the students spent the night!) and artists such as Wafaa Bilal and Ismail Farouk in particular have made an impression on them. This blog is by no means a comprehensive review of the Symposium, but it serves to convey subjective views of the events and discussions that took place. I invite other participants of the Symposium to respond with your perspectives and experiences in the “comment” section of this blog. This way, we will hopefully end up with a more comprehensive, multifaceted record and review of the event.

One interesting issue that arose with this project is the unease with its public and global nature. Specifically, some of the students are concerned that others, perhaps some of the artists and scholars they are discussing, will see what they write. I think this speaks to how the internet and communication technologies are changing the scope and reach of pedagogy (see my colleague and Resolution 3 participant Alex Juhasz’s course Learning From YouTube, where the class is held in and on the video-sharing site.) The audience (and potential adjudicator) of one’s work is no longer just the professor, but also one’s peers, one’s subject, (the artists and presenters at the Symposium) as well as strangers from all over the world. This can be both an impetus to create better work (these posts are more in-depth, personal, and interesting compared to the more traditional academic papers I received from the students in this class) or to self-censor (some students are hesitant to be critical of an artist’s work for fear they might actually read it).

Another interesting characteristic of the narrative presented here is the linear and non-linear representations of time in the blog. On one hand, each of the posts reports on specific events, days, or experiences at Resolution 3 in a linear format. But on the other hand, the chronology in which these posts are written and posted, and the events they report on represent a non-linear and roughly reversed chronology of the events—i.e. the students wrote about events they attended after the Symposium, for example Symposium participant Ismail Farouk’s opening and talk for “Cancelled Without Prejudice”, before they wrote about the Symposium itself.

There was an attempt to re-arrange the posts to better approximate a linear chronology, but the subjective and participatory nature of this project asserted itself against a strictly linear representation of the events anyway. What we ended up with here is a reflective, multi-vocal, and looping report on the Symposium and follow up events we did as a class. It would have been interesting to see a more conscious manipulation of and play with this attribute. Perhaps that could be addressed in some of the responses and upcoming posts on the blog?

Posted by Ming-Yuen S. Ma, instructor

Keeper of the Shrine

On November 15th artist Amitis Motevalli opened Santa Monica’s 18th Street Gallery to our class to view her piece Threshold of the Innocents and Martyred. 18th Street Gallery’s current exhibition War as a Way of Life looks at the way different people and communities in Los Angels are responding to “conflict as a constant refrain in their daily lives” as a way to understand the “collective psyche” as it is essential to create change that is affirmative and practical. For more on this project please see: http://www.18thstreet.org/futureofnations/WarAsaWayofLife/index.html.

Amitis Motevalli is originally from Iran and immigrated to the United States in 1977. The name Motevalli literally means “keeper of the shrine” in Farsi. Her family has been the keeper of the Imamzadeh Yahya shrine for hundreds of years.

Her work has “centered on signage and symbology from Iranian and Islamic art such as pattern and miniature painting. (She is) also influenced by symbology used in American pop culture in particular, symbols generated by American media”. She relates a “near-eastern aesthetic with (her) western art education” creating a “dialogue that critiques dominant views of oppressed people”. Most of her work has to do with an intersecting of Iranian and Los Angles’ visual culture. She is interested in how power is given to images and how in turn that represents events. (For more on her other work, please visit her site: http://www.amitismotevalli.com)

For her piece Threshold of the Innocents and Martyred Motevalli has recreated a beautifully hand crafted scaled down version of a traditional shrine dedicated to “those who have lost their lives in recent homicides (in Los Angeles since January 2008) at the hands of Law Enforcement upholding occupation”. The walls of the room display an Arabic prayer that is said before a body is laid to rest in the ground.

by Nina Becker

While traditional Islamic art does not allow for any representations outside of pattern and images of nature, because depiction of the human form is idolatry which is forbidden in the Qur’an and therefore a sin against Allah, Motevalli’s piece displays representations of some of the men her piece is dedicated to. She says of these depictions: “Actually, in the Shia tradition, images are quite often used. That is why I’ve used them, but I also wanted to push the way we define “Islamic Art”. There is an inner dialogue that other Muslims (practicing or cultural) will recognize which looks to expand our definitions of Art/ritual”. During the opening of the piece, and every Sunday during the month of October, Motevalli stood inside the shrine writing on a glass wall boarding the inside of the shrine, the accounts of these men along side the accounts of victims of war slain in the Middle East or those who died as martyrs. One account reads: “Christian Portillo, 35 – July 23 Murdered by Sherriffs in front of his home in Lennox. He was waiting in his car for his girlfriend when the sheriff crept up beside him. Sherriffs claimed he reached down for something when he was shot, yet he was shot point blank in the heart. No gun, no drugs were found anywhere near him. Sherriffs also claimed that he was wanted drug dealer, yet everyone knew he was not.” Another reads: “Eddie Felix Franco, 56 – August 31Was a homeless man on Market St. in Inglewood. When police attempted to “sweep” him off of Market St., he refused. They asked him to put his hands in the air, but he refused. He never acted violently, or had a weapon, but he was killed for not obeying orders. The many bullets from the Inglewood police hit a passerby and Mr. Franco’s dog.”

Haram Eh Massoumeen Va Shohad Ha

The binary created between the East and West is beautifully exemplified in Motevalli’s shrine. She points out that “People live in similar oppressive conditions” and that these “dominant narratives have defined (the) third world”. While I’m sure there has been some controversies in choosing to depict some of these men as some of them were defying the police, the larger picture for Motevalli is not the so-called crimes that were being committed but rather the way the militant Los Angeles police choose to respond to such defiance. During our reception she spoke of the way that the Los Angels police are trained in that they are the most militant force in the country. This is important in the comparison she makes to those killed by military or other forces in the East.

To speak of the logistics of her piece, Relational Aesthetics and contemporary art more generally allows for work outside the traditional contexts of the institution, when asked about the shrine Motevalli says “I do consider the piece to be art. I think the piece is both art and a shrine (I did not add Holy to that title). I also consider shrines to be art…be they temporary, such as street shrines or more permanent like the shrine that my family cares for. There is also a genre of “Shrine” art or alters or sacred spaces. I don’t believe things are so concretely defined as shrine or art, they can be varying degrees of both, so the answer in terms of the performance would be that it was both as well”.

I then wondered why show it in a gallery (other than for funding issues)? She replied: “I was honored by being invited to be a resident fellow at 18th street. That invitation gave me access to space which is very much a privilege if you are not wealthy. Most of the people I know who love the piece can barely house themselves, let alone the piece. I thought it was a great opportunity for me to create and show the installation. It is the first run. It may be up somewhere far less “institutional” for another run. Another issue is that institutions have been inaccessible to many people of color, so if I can create the piece I want and open this door, I will”.

Why not show the media documentation of the performance along side the shrine? Motevalli: “The documentation was presented in the form of my writing. Anything that documents the space it’s self, I didn’t believe belonged inside the space for many aesthetic and symbolic reasons”.

I hope to come into contact with more of Motevalli’s work and would encourage Pitzer College to invite her back to speak. Her work is meaningful and important.

-Delaine Ureno

One of the Them

As I mentioned previously, it was amazing to be amongst so many heady names packed with credentials towards which I am still aspiring. Throughout the first day, Friday, I was encouraged through subtle looks and gentle smiles to alter my thinking a bit; it was as if they, the experienced practitioners and clout-laden intellectuals were, through slight gestures, inviting me to consider myself as one of them. During the early discussions, it was totally possible to psych myself into feeling like a peer in such a savvy crowd, but that sentiment faded along with the orange glow of the evening sky. I attended the evening dinner/reception prior to the scheduled dialogue between video artist Richard Fung and scholar Holly Willis, and felt out of place, green, naive, an intellectual runt amongst giants of the institution.

In the dim, cozy light of one of Scripps College’s nicer meeting rooms, a friend and I waded through heavy conversations spouting from the intelligentsia huddled in small knots of discussion around the room. At times the guests would look up from their disputes, grimace (what I assume was supposed to be a smile) and then fly back into debate. Just listening to the talks was enough to squash any silly ideas I had about trying to join the conversation, that is until I got the chance to interject the smallest of felicitations into a pre-dialogue chat between Fung and Willis. I’m pretty sure you could guess that I made an ass out of myself, and they of me. Talking to these people, so well established in their trades, all that I had to say rang out loud and clear just how callow and utterly puerile I am; if you had been there, I’m assure that you could have read “trite” in bold letters across my face.

Needless to say, they did not take much interest in me for the rest of the evening as my friend and I slunk away into the corner sulking over half-sipped glasses of wine. The line between me and them may have disappeared earlier in the day, but in those few awkward minutes, it was apparent that the line hadn’t actually gone anywhere.

Jeremiah Gregory

Oh well.

Resolution 3; Day 1&3

The three day “Resolution 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces” symposium took place at Pitzer College and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) on October 24-October 26, 2008. I had the pleasure of attending partial days on Friday and Sunday. Friday consisted of 5 roundtable type discussions revolving around issues of: “boundaries of video discourse; independent and experimental video, gender, and sexual politics; video and globalization; video, technology and new media; and video and locative praxis”. I sat in on the discussion for Video and Locative Praxis, which is essentially the notion of using video in defining and inducing space. I choose this group specifically because it resembles another topic I’m interested in: Relational Aesthetics, or the inkling of art developing an environment for social engagement.

Friday, October 24, 2008 Session I, Group V

Ken Rogers, Professor of Media Studies at UC Riverside led our discussion. This was the first time I participated in an event of this nature. I was initially intimidated but once we broke into smaller groups I was eager to start a conversation.

Our group started by going over a brief intro to video art history which led to issues around media: What constitutes a public versus a private space for viewing video art? This has to completely change spectatorship and the way content is made and shown.

Here is a video of Ken Rogers going over some of these issues:

What else did we talk about…??? The way video is made and shown today is not as disruptive as it once was, that impact is gone because of the bombardment of imagery today. The Freewaves Hollywould Festival that took place in Hollywood the week before was a perfect example to our discussion. Videos were being shown throughout the stores and galleries on Hollywood Boulevard but with the world happening around it, how was the art affected? Was it effective? In this “cyborg generation” everyone is always plugged in and our attention spans have lessened which limits the function of the medium.

The location of where this medium is held addresses our own social contracts, the role we take when encountering a space. There was mention of a park bench in Los Angeles situated in a public space but across from a giant CNN television monitor reminiscent of a living room. The public and private boundaries have been blurred even further.

Sunday, October 26, 2008 Roundtable Discussion

On the final day of the symposium a roundtable discussion was held at LACE focusing on “Politics of Transcultural Production” with Ismail Farouk, Grant Kester, Gina Lamb, Amitis Motevalli, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Each of the guests spoke of and sampled their projects, all which had to do with mixing “boundaries of race, gender, nationality, and culture”.

Ismail Farouk

panel

Alex Juhasz

Ismail Farouk spoke of the way he uses video to exploit the bribery corruption of undocumented migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa. Farouk uses his work to “empower and mobilize citizens in the struggle for social and spatial justice”. For more on his work http://resolution3.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/cancelled-without-prejudice-2/

Grant Kester, Associate Professor, Art History Visual Arts Department, UCSD, is concerned with collective art practices, the way activism and art are come together to create new social boundaries. He spoke of projects he is writing about in Senegal, India and Burma. These projects all deal with the notion of dialogue in a public space in order to solve very surface level problems, thus creating agency and solidarity in these communities.

Gina Lamb, artist and activist, spoke of her project with inner city youth. Their project tackles the idea of artists as outsiders dealing with issues of identity. Her work creates a safe haven and a place for ownership.

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne are Los Angeles based artists producing videos that deal with post 9/11 global politics.

And finally Amitis Motevalli, artist and activist, deals with issues relating to the western perception of the “eastern aesthetic”. Her projects concern the injustices and “dominant views of oppressed people and culture in general”.

After hearing about all of the panel’s projects the time left for discussion was very short but the artists on the panel did manage to touch on issues of collaboration and authorship; locative praxis; and the global versus the local. The concept of crossing boarders emerged repeatedly where video is the global phenomenon reaching all these places with the ability to start locally and can spread out communally creating value. This is where the conversation wrapped up for a break. I was a little disappointed that Grant Kester did not say more during the discussion, perhaps because he was the only art historian on the panel. This is also where I had to leave LACE. I wish that I could have heard the rest of the discussion as I heard it got very interesting after the break.

-Delaine Ureno

The Resolution Will Be Televised

Resolution 3 was a new experience for me, I attended all three days and each day was completely different. I had seen Video Art displayed in museums before, but I had never attended a symposium, so I was good for anything and any experience. I strolled in from my dorm room and saw my teachers who were helping hand out flyers to the crowd who had gathered at the Broad Center at Pitzer College. I entered and saw many of my teachers and classmates sitting down so I was able to say hi as new faces walked in. The very first person who was introduced was Wafaa Bilal. There is more info on Wafaa on a blog post below, but here’s the gist. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi born man who lost his father and his brother in the war in Iraq within a season. He created first an interactive exhibit in which he was in a studio space with a paint ball gun. He called it “Domestic Tension.” For a month the paint ball gun was able to be controlled by people who logged onto a website and shot him for whatever reason you could think of. He was hailed by critics for his use of interactive political art. His new project he created was “Virtual Jihadi.” After some programmers created a video game in which the viewers are shooting Iraqis, he used the origin code the game was written in and changed it to shooting an army of George W Bush’s. Controversial? Yes, considering how the original art gallery had many complaints against it and suspended its showing. The game was another attempt at changing the perspective of the Iraqi war. The game itself was not impressive by any means. The game code (or engine for geeks) was dated and it was like playing the first “Half Life” game back in 99. However, the response from it, or the “social capital” was what he was looking for instead of attracting people with the greatest graphics. Again, for more of the artist’s exhibit check out of the blog entry below. That day ended early for me. The gallery exhibition started at 10 and I stayed until 12, because I had class not too far from there.

The next day I traveled to L.A. to see the 24-hour showing starting at 7. I was having a pretty hard day and naturally, got excited when I saw free wine at the table in the hall close to the seats for the viewing. Obviously, I had no idea what to expect. I walked in, with my wallet out expecting to pay, but this broke college student was even more in favor of Resolution and Video Art in general when he found out you didn’t have to pay. I stayed for about an hour. The videos varied in subject matter, topics, and execution. One artist was physically exhausting to watch. His exhibition consisted of about 10 movies shown in a row. Although they were maybe a minute each, they were physically exhausting to watch. The first one was of him on top of a moving semi-truck. His body was filmed at an angle that made his look as though it was cut in half, or more like a hood ornament. In another film, the horizontal axis of the film was split in half. His head was on the top half and the bottom half had a shot of his feet. He would jump several times. When he jumped his feet and head switched shots. Near the last of his set, two shots switched rapidly between a close up of him yelling and his penis. This piece was called “Mating Call.” Another artist collected scenes from the movie “Sid and Nancy.” There, whenever the actor who played Sid arrived on the screen he had himself covering the actor with a cutout of himself, reenacting the scene. Around 8:10 I felt as though I had enough of the experience. It was thought provoking, to say the least. I had to make the 45 min trip back to Claremont and prepare myself for my first full day of the symposium the next day, which was Sunday.

On the last day of Resolution, I saw more familiar faces, teachers, friends, and I briefly studied artists who were all in one room together in the back of LACE. The exhibit started a little bit after 11, and by then I had already had a cup of coffee in my hand and was ready to see more artists and more of the work they were doing. This symposium had a diverse array of artists to come speak. Ishmail Farouk, a grant-winning artist from South Africa showed the lives of the Trolley Pushers, low wage workers who push luggage for you at airports or groceries. His work showed how they were being trapped by police and basically being robbed of their money every week. He put a camera on a trolley during a nonviolent protest to show how Trolley Pushers, primarily immigrants, were being mistreated in the country. Another artist and teacher at my very own Pitzer College, was Gina Lamb. She works for a program called REACH/LA. Their initiative is to help the urban youth stay healthy and make their transition into adulthood complete ( HYPERLINK “http://www.reach.la” www.reach.la). Amitis Morevalli is an artist/activist who speaks out against Police Violence. Amazingly enough, she keeps a shrine for all her friends who are victims of Police Violence. It’s amazing because her surname, Motevalli, means “keeper of the shrine.” After all the artists spoke there was a panel discussion with the artists that didn’t last long due to the fact that the artists didn’t have enough time for their presentations.

The last scheduled program on Resolution 3 was the dialogue of Alex Villar and Maria A Diaz. They are two masters of bodies in space. Maria A Diaz’s work was like visual poetry. In one of her pieces she carried a little girl through open beautiful and bare landscapes. In another she ran a loop of a family’s silhouette running through a bushel. The silhouette was similar to the immigrant warning sign found throughout southern California. The next artist, Alex Villar, uses space but draws comparisons and contrasts within the urban landscape. He is photo based, and he puts himself in drawers and odd spaces in offices. His work has focused on space within waste management. He is often the model for his own work, and I had a brief discussion with him. I asked him if he finds wasted space interesting, if he felt like we were wasting some of the space, and exactly what kind of space was wasted space. He felt that these questions raised interesting issues that he should talk about later. I felt proud of myself. Afterwards there was a dialogue with the two artists. However, everyone was in a circle listening and asking questions. The two artists focused on language, shapes of female and male bodies, space, and gender within their art. They mentioned how the space they put their bodies in was unique to their gender and that there is in fact a difference. The group also talked about how Diaz’s work was more poetic and grandiose in landscape. Villar’s work was more gothic or harsh. There is also a sense of humor within his art, a humor that makes you think that the body is capable of warping around a displacement of a situation, but physically.

By far what made Resolution 3 so enjoyable was how all the artists were different in what they were trying to represent. All of the artists that I can remember, except for one artist, were activists. They all had a different story to tell and represented their themes in their own style. I was expecting the symposium to be a lot like the last Resolution. However, it was not. The last symposium focused more of the technology and blending of the images to tell the story. This Resolution was more at ease with its use and innovation of the video technology. I’m sure some would say they would want it pushed even more. However, what was being done with video art was what this show was about, and it reminded me of how you can never run of out ways to express your views or concerns about society.

-Latham

An Awful Experience

To say that my time spent at the Resolution 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces Symposium was awful is an understatement. Quite frankly I feel, and I presume that my cohorts in learning share my sentiments, that being present at the conference was close to if not actually a true peak experience. Having the opportunity to sit amongst, discuss, and learn about the current state of things in video with some of the people to whom it is most familiar was positively exquisite, a treat being able to drink of knowledge directly from such very prominent sources. From the get-go, the symposium was sure to be a spectacular event.

I arrived late Friday, October 24, the first day of the symposium, just catching the tail end of Wafaa Bilal’s presentation of his highly controversial work Virtual Jihadi (2008). As the projector settled back to its menu screen, Bilal began to speak and the room sat quiet, still, yet perceptibly attentive to the monologue being given to them in tiny installments of dense words heavily accented by the orator’s native tongue. A sense of purpose resonated through the room like a charge surging just below the surface, behind the vivid, absorptive eyes of the crowd, most possessing names as notable, if not as controversy-infused, as that of the man speaking at the podium. The sense of poised intellectual minds ready at any moment to launch into discussion persisted until the end of the first presentation.

Perhaps the participants were steeling themselves until a specific question was presented for debate in the next part of the symposium, the session 1 discussions, or perhaps those languid tongues were merely suppressed by the lure of slumber and the deprivation of caffeine. Either way, the poised minds sprang upon the questions offered to them like tigers on a defenseless bird. The subdued air shifted at once to a slow-churning, quickly escalating debate about the present and future of video practice.

My group was set to the task of discussing in particular the roles of and attitudes towards independent and experimental video, gender, and sexual politics in contemporary work. Again, a warm, overwhelming feeling of privilege and luck washed over me as I sat amongst the ranks of esteemed artists, curators, and educators, including the likes of Irina Contreras, Frederic Moffet, Ciara Ennis, Jessica Lawless, and coordinators Ming-yuen Ma, Patti Podesta, and Erika Suderburg, to discuss not only as a student but as a peer and fellow practitioner the in which video is to go. Almost as soon as the discussion started gaining momentum, the group was in the thick of it bringing up and picking apart questions like what specific gender/sexual political/experimental themes were at the forefront of current times, to whom the material should be presented, in what spatial, cultural, and economic contexts, with what degree of vigilante vigor, and with what amount of finesse. As the discussion rushed on, I could not help but imagine that this is what Dara Birnbaum meant by talking back to the media, using its means to recontextualize messages and ideas to redistribute to the appropriate audiences. Sitting in the cold, hard chairs of the classroom, I rode a wave of nostalgia, imagining that this was the way the early collectives conducted themselves, full of hot passion and spitfire tongues breaking down the subtle nuances of reality to build a strong, combative force against a stagnant, mind-numbing hegemony.

Of course the question that presents itself immediately is whether or not such a meeting of the minds even effective in this context, whether or not a group of artists, activists, curators, and educators coming together and discussing problems is any more than pissing in the wind. This kid answers confidently that such a meeting may not create a resounding splash in the stream of time, but it is the start. Thoughts are the seeds of creation, and what better place than a meeting of the minds, this symposium, to germinate the kernels that may provoke undeniable change? To quote, and perhaps bastardize, William Carlos William’s Patterson, “No ideas but in things.”

I immediately made this connection, sitting amongst some of the great minds in art of my time. In the presence of such realizations, to that feeling of nostalgia and to those beside me, all I wanted to utter at the top of my lungs was an emphatic “Hell yeah!” Instead, I was satisfied to exchange smiles of recognition and approval to those awe-inspiring minds in whose company I felt lucky to find myself.

Jeremiah Gregory

More Ismail Farouk

Lauren Sokolov

I also attended Ismail Farouk’s exhibition at the MAK Center/ Schindler House on November 6, 2008. I have been fascinated by his themes of social justice and discrimination, and his presentation of these themes through video and photography. It was very interesting to be introduced to his work through pieces like “Trolley Pushers” and other videos illustrating globalization in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was even more interesting, however, to see the same issues of immigration and prejudice in works created right here in the United States. I learned that the issue of “pre-judgment” is still prevelent in ways we may or may not acknowledge. An example that stood out to me was not even necessarily a video work or photograph, but a story that Farouk recalled, and was joined by a friend/woman in the audience. He recalled a petty “offense” he commited – jay-walking – for which a police officer penalized him. The woman in the audience added that she had been right next to Farouk crossing the street, and that she tried to protect him and insist that the police officer give her a ticket. She was unsuccessful because the police officer claimed not to see her and “probably thought [she] was crazy for WANTING to receive a ticket.” It demonstrates a real-life scenario in which pre-judgment based on race leads to prejudice and discrimination. Farouk, with his skin color and ethnic name, has faced many instances like these in which pre-judgment has affected his everyday life.

On the topic of everyday life, I also would like to add that I enjoy Farouk’s depiction of social justice with videos and photographs representing everyday life/scenarios/people/objects etc. – it presents his views and experiences in a realistic, relatable way that delivers his point very strongly/effectively. I liked his presentation at the MAK center also on the basis of his attitude and speech because they were very everyday, true to life as well. He dressed, spoke, and interacted with the audience just as he would in an everyday scenario. He was poised yet approachable and open to questions. He spoke before the group without needing a stage or microphone or any technological or physical pieces to put himself above the audience. All he needed to make his point was the truth and his own well-supported evidence, all of which were well received by his audience and successfully conveyed.