Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2008 by resolution3
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.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2008 by resolution3
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.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2008 by resolution3
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.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 18, 2008 by resolution3
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.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 18, 2008 by resolution3
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.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 11, 2008 by resolution3
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?
Posted in Uncategorized on November 11, 2008 by resolution3
On Saturday, November 08, 2008, Ismail Farouk led a small group of individuals through the MAK Center’s Schindler House for his show Canceled Without Prejudice.Ismail Farouk uses six of the rooms in the Schindler house to examine six urban sites in Johannesburg, South Africa and Los Angeles’ downtown Skid Row.Farouk’s work plays with the notion of interrogating space to uncover social inequalities, the impact of globalization and spatial injustices.He draws close parallels to these injustices taking place in South Africa and right here in Los Angeles.
Upon entering the Schindler house in the Clyde Chance Studio, Farouk uses the space of the restroom for his video Occupied Please Wait.In his video he placed a camera in one of the Automatic Public Toilets on Skid Row capturing the cleaning mode of the toilet to comment on the way that society is becoming more streamlined where machines are taking the place of people.In the main studio Farouk’s piece Notice of Scheduled Cleanup comments on the dehumanizing way in which authorities are dealing with these homeless communities.In the image 7th Street Storage Facility he shows us a check-in storage facility which provides storage for homeless people’s belongings, however critics call the facility a device used to clean the streets.The “storage devices” are in fact the same “storage devices” we use everyday to put our trash in and most of the time objects placed in these receptacles are placed there by someone else.Clearly theses people are not wanted and the city has set into place ways of pushing these people off the streets giving them no where else to go.
In the Rudolph Schindler Studio Farouk takes us to Joubert Park to examine the livelihood of the Trolley Pushers.Trolley Pushers are men who use stolen grocery carts (trolleys) as a service for transporting heavy baggage through the city.This activity creates much needed jobs in the city.The pushers are usually paid R5 per load and when these trolleys are confiscated because of the illegal nature in which they were obtained they are fined R300 by officials.Farouk held a protest in conjunction with the pushers as a way to “mobilize support for the formalization of a representative trolley association”.Since the protest and with the help of a German grant weekly meetings have been organized to further push the notion of formalizing these activities.
Although I’m sure the artist has put much thought into this project and made an attempt to acknowledge the temporality of the piece there are still a few unanswered questions remaining in my mind. To take a stance coinciding with Claire Bishop, I must ask: What is this piece really doing? Ismail Farouk is showing a very small; privileged audience these injustices. When you go to this beautiful location the meaning shifts. The artist did ask us, his audience to challenge the notion of public and private space by trying to test the boundaries of the L.A. “storage facilities” by checking in our own belongings. Let’s be real; how many of us are likely to pursue that? This house is not accessible to the very subject it depicts. Why not choose a gallery on 5th and Main near Skid Row to put these pieces? Let’s put them closer to home. Only, wait…the guard at the front of that gallery won’t let you in if you are homeless. People want to look at art, not the homeless.
In the exhibit, “Cancelled Without Prejudice”, Ismail Farouk takes on topics of “social justice and globalization” in Johannesburg, South Africa. His exhibition is held in the Schindler House in the MAK Center for Art and Architecture In West Hollywood. It includes photographs and video art installations that cover trolley cart protests he organized in Johannesburg and also footage from Skid Row in Los Angeles. The trolley cart protests are in regards to the business of people who make a living pushing shopping carts between places to transport heavy loads. The shopping carts are stolen from chain supermarkets rendering the activity illegal. When they are caught, usually on fridays, they are charged upwards of 300 Rand (10 Rand to the US dollar) and put in jail for the weekend. It is a difficult life and people are forced into it as there are not many ways to make enough money to support oneself in South Africa. He also looks at the issue of police corruption and migration rights. He has footage of police accepting bribes from people they abduct off the street and threaten to send back to their country if they don’t pay them. Farouk is concerned with human rights and protecting what it is that makes us human.
“The title of the exhibition comes from Farouk’s visa, issued by the United States so that he could travel for the MAK Center’s international fellowship program, the Urban Future Initiative. ’Cancelled without prejudice’ is a designation that enables detainment-free entry at a US border. It implicitly points to its opposite, the existence of ‘prejuedice,’ or pre-judgment, which is a growing phenomenon in the immigration policy of the U.S. and other nations”.
Ismail Farouk also addressed the issue of the upcoming World Cup in 2010 that will be taking place in Johannesburg and how the country is sinking money into making transportation available for the tourists, yet neglecting its own citizens.
