vehicles of thought
< Hope Hippo, Allora & Calzadilla, a life-scale hippopotamus made of mud for the 2005 Venice Biennale, supported a volunteer who read the daily newspaper and blew a whistle upon encountering an instance of social injustice in the news.
from BOMB Magazine, Fall 2009: Allora & Calzadilla by Carlos Motta
An interview of the artist collaboration Allora & Calzadilla
“We see a fundamental relationship between violence and form in the sense that the creation of all forms entails a certain violence—the exclusion of everything the said form is not.”(Guillermo Calzadilla)
“All the same we are interested in the ruin of language, with words that slip from their intended meanings, that work against themselves, that topple into nonsense, that push language to its silent end or beyond.” (Jennifer Allora)
For Nancy’s class, I curated my Collected Buttons series with a piece of Allora & Calzadilla and this piece by Matthew Buckingham >
from Murray Guy’s website about Buckingham’s piece: “A single 35mm slide-image of a public sculpture depicting the mythic founder of Copenhagen is projected over the duration of the exhibition. Over that time the heat from the projector lamp slowly alters the emulsion on the slide, creating a protracted, almost cinematic ‘fade-out’ or dissolve which challenges the monument’s attempt to fix meaning against the flow of time.”
Matthew Buckingham, Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001 “12 c. warrior-bishop absalon was the 1st dane to realize the importance of narrative history in forming national identity, and an equestrian statue was erected to his memory in 1901.” (text with the piece then tells the story of the building of the statue.)
Allora & Calzadilla, Under Discussion, 2005, Single channel DVD. 6 min 14 sec. from the San Diego Natural History Museum: “Under Discussion (2005) features a special boat, a simple wooden table that Allora & Calzadilla flipped upside-down and enhanced with a motor. The video’s protagonist, Diego, circumnavigates the island on this craft, a witness to Vieques’s uncertain situation as well as an actor in determining its future as he moves the discussion into surreal waters. The table has become a vehicle-a means to get somewhere-and also a stand-in for other tables around which those seeking to resolve Vieques’s future have gathered. As Yates McKee has noted, however, such tables are imperfect vehicles. ‘In liberal thought, ‘sitting down at the table’ suggests an ideal space of conflict-resolution through rational dialogue [...] Yet this ideal fails to account for the inequalities that underwrite the space of the table to begin with, such as the hierarchical division between scientific expertise and local ecological knowledge, which rarely register at all in planning processes. Under Discussion is an experimental device for publicizing such counter-knowledge.’”
Here are some note fragments about the work that I wrote for this project::
Desire and intention communicated / Seeking an impact upon contemporary events / Sometimes desire is foolish. An impulse followed.
Narratives reiterated / Again and again / A holding pattern
A vague recollection / Icons still a part of our consciousness / As Nancy asked, is there a sale by date on certain information? On certain information vehicles? / How do we relate to what remains? Do we? Do we have a choice or not? / What is our ongoing relationship to past events whose impact is still reverberating? / What of differences in impact? Myself? Someone half way around the world? Someone up the block? / Can we have a common platform to speak? Can we hear each other? What constitutes a collective platform? What overlaps and what does not?
A statue intended to solidify meaning, particular /Memory of a national identity / Guarding against forgetting, / Insistent of a particular set of meanings
But as memory works— It is what must be forgotten /Who decides what vanishes over time? / When is it a decision? When is it not? / What endures?
Vieques was never upon so many radars. / Lost in a constancy of information / Who decides what is heard? / Communicates collective desire to be heard, / To have an impact for change— something realized.
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i was re-reading an earlier blog post about the work of akram zaatari. the vehicle (picturing moments of transition in a modernizing society), 2001
this quotation was taken from an article about related work so it is relevant to quote here:
“…exhibition that traces the infiltration of modernity into the Arab region [Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria] through the representation of the vehicle. Motorized means of transportation, whether cars, planes, ships or automobiles are often very present in family albums. They somehow reflected peoples desire to picture themselves during moments of transition. It is the moment that takes them from a place to another: traveling distances in a vehicle signified speed, technology, liberation and reflected the passengers personality.”
in my earlier post, i reflected on the feeling of traveling in the landscape by vehicle, particularly train. there was a scene in the video that i was relating to shooting photographs from the windows of the amtrak train.
i know that i was thinking then too about cultural perspective, modernization (by who? of whom? which power directs the progression?) what drives our thought (in the from birth sense, in the sense of cultural vision). though i unfortunately made no notes about it in the post.
what is the vehicle of our thought? do we see it or just ride it? is it seen in the frame of our view or do we just look through the pane of glass out at the world?
in terms of our work, how do we challenge and break our own formal inclinations? think about the language choices we make? what are the foundations we rest upon as assumptions? what are the conversations that we are not having? how do we know? how will we ever know? how do we bend and stretch and break ourselves across the knee of what we have ever and always known?
i wish that i had the james baldwin interview book. my writing group and myself are starting a new reading series. it is entitled:: From Here to the Corner: A Reading Series. The title is taken from a 1980 interview of James Baldwin by Wolfgang Binder in Revisa Interamericana. when i have the book at hand, i will insert the quote here. but it is this gigantic question about how far western thought will take us and as baldwin suggests, it will take us from here to the corner.
the way that baldwin speaks. about how we can understand ourselves. through how we are seen. through the image made of ourselves by the other. and how this other also secures their sense of self in relation to the vision of us. how we cannot understand ourselves from outside. that we are always and forever subject to relationship.
James Baldwin in an interview with Kenneth Clark. Sometime in the mid-1960s.
“… I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an epidemic matter. So I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe we can survive whatever we must survive. But the negro in this country. The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they’ve relied on for so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts, why it was necessary to have a n*gger in the first place. Because I am not a n*gger, I am a man. But if you think that I am a n*gger, it means you need him. The question you have got to ask yourself , the white population of this country has got to ask itself, north and south, because it is one country. And for a negro there is no difference between the north and the south. It’s just a difference in the way they castrate you. But the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I’m not the n*gger here, and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether I am able to ask that question… Simply to face that question.”
so for us, as we write and create artwork . . . how are we examining our artistic production alongside and as our social production? how is it class and race and gender production? how do we dig into ourselves? ask ourselves who outside us has helped to define ourselves to ourselves? how is this a relationship of privilege?
as we cycle through questions of writing for instance… pronoun problems? understandable or incomprehensible metaphor? emotional or intellectual expression? cliche or newness? how are we cycling into these questions, the questions of race, privilege, oppression, class, gender, etc, etc? how do we push and push and push ourselves? how far can we go? what will take us beyond that corner?
more soon………..
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