American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

“Between the American Revolution and World War I, a group of British colonies became states, the frontier pushed westward to span the continent, a rural and agricultural society became urban and industrial, and the United States—reunified after the Civil War under an increasingly powerful federal government—emerged as a leading participant in world affairs. Throughout this complicated, transformative period, artists recorded American life as it changed around them. Many of the nation’s most celebrated painters—John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows—along with their lesser-known colleagues captured the temperament of their respective eras, defining the character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities.

“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915″ presents tales artists told about their times and examines how their accounts reflect shifting professional standards, opportunities for study, foreign prototypes, venues for display, and viewers’ expectations. Excluding images based on history, myth, or literature, the exhibition emphasizes instead those derived from artists’ firsthand observation, documentation, and interaction with clients. These paintings are analogous to original—not adapted—screenplays. Recurring themes such as childhood, marriage, family, and community; the notion of citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of making art illuminate the evolution of American artists’ approach to narrative.”

Through January 24, 2010.

[Text and graphic from museum website. Caption: "Thomas Anshutz (American, 1851–1912). "The Ironworkers' Noontime, 1880." Oil on canvas; 17 x 23 7/8 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd.

During one of his annual trips to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he had spent his teens, Anshutz sketched workers taking a break in the yard of a nail factory, the sort of dreary industrial setting from which most painters averted their eyes. He then painted the men frozen in classical poses derived from life-drawing instruction, which he had received as Thomas Eakins's student at the Pennsylvania Academy. The painting's subtle narrative has invited multiple interpretations. For example, in 1884 Procter & Gamble quoted the image in an advertisement for Ivory Soap by adding washtubs to the foreground. Other commentators have read in it a message of labor's toll upon the men or a celebration of relations between workers and employers. Recent scholars have considered it a nostalgic account of skilled laborers in the face of impersonal factory production and an emblem of rugged masculinity in the face of feminized late-nineteenth-century American culture." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Sunday 8th November 2009 11 am – 4 pm
The Star and Shadow Cinema
Make and Mend Market
Stepney Bank
Ouseburn, Newcastle Upon Tyne England NE1 2NP

The Make and Mend Market is the 1st monthly craft, art & flea market in Newcastle. The event showcases new creative talent in the area and gives people the chance to recycle quality items no longer in use & help keep them out of landfill. The market alternates between the Grainger Arcade in Newcastle City Centre and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Ouseburn, Newcastle which was built and is run entirely by volunteers. It has been running for almost 2 years now and is a great alternative to High Street shopping.

At this event we will have 20 stalls from local traders, new designers and artists offering clothing, jewellery, homewares, art and more.

Some of the goodies we’ll have on offer:

Handmade retro jewellery from Candy Doll Couture
Vintage & 2nd hand homewares from Louise Bradley
Karon from Calmic Therapies giving mini reiki sessions & massage
Beautiful prints & wall hangings from Doris Illustrated
Lovingly handcrafted instruments by Mike Smith
Recycled vintage accessories from Make Do & Mend Arts
+ loads more.

MySpace

[Text and graphic from Cinema website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

“Jorn Ebner and Monica Ross cordially invite you to a housewarming in reverse.

On this site a row of council flats was demolished in 2008 to make way for the Byker South Redevelopment plan. The scheme has recently been shelved due to the current economic crisis – a situation that reflects the fragility of the social housing sector within society.

Housewarming will take place in open space, unsheltered and probably cold. No house stands here and another may or may not again: the artists imply the history of their private occupation of a flat on this site as the basis to host the sharing of social space. Tea, coffee, drinks and snacks will be provided by the artists, but guests are also welcome to contribute refreshments to be shared by all.

Housewarming is produced by Michelle Hirschhorn and supported by Wunderbar Festival, Newcastle City Council, ISIS Arts and the Friends of St. Lawrence Park.”

more on Byker and The Byker Wall:

• BBC on the original Byker Development
• City of Newcastle > Environment and Planning > Regeneration > Ouseburn Byker Sites >St. Lawrence Square

Wunderbar Festival Schedule

[text and graphic from Housewarming Facebook Event page. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

VENDORBAR
304 West 10th Street, 1A
New York, NY 10011
1.212 431 4571

“VendorBar is part of an ongoing series of itinerant exhibitions and interventions, organized by Kirby Gookin and Robin Kahn, in which art is presented to the public that is either free, with no copyright, or sold inexpensively. The goal is to open up direct lines of communication between artists and the public in order to make ideas and artwork more accessible. Past projects include Free Show, Disappearing Act, Holiday Shopping, Copiacabana, Copilandia and To Market to Market. For E/AB’09 VendorBar is inviting artists to directly engage the public by presenting actions, exchanges and services that result in the production and distribution of artists editions made specifically for the event.

Participating artists will include ARTifariti-Western Sahara Collective, Mike Bidlo, Gaye Chan & Nandita Sharma, Kirby Gookin, Geoffrey Hendricks, Nancy Hwang, Robin Kahn, Amanda Keeley, Alison Knowles & Alan Bowman, Cary Leibowitz, Larry Miller, Ken Montgomery, Peter Nadin, Yoko Ono, Tom Otterness, Sal Randolph, Showpaper, and Elaine Tin Nyo.”

[Text and graphic from E|AB Fair 2009 website. Capiton: "Free Show: Nancy Hwang, 'Hand Job', 2008. Unlimited edition.Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness
through September 5, 2010

“The quest for human rights and the search for personal fulfillment, as proposed in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, provide the starting point for this international exhibition. Works by the last surviving descendant of the Tsars of Russia, Iroquois Indians, French Revolutionaries, illegal immigrants, Algerian War veterans, Guantanamo Bay detainees, Holocaust survivors, incarcerated prisoners, African-American civil rights activists and Iraqi doctors are among the 86 visionary artists to be featured.”

[text and graphic from museum website and public information materials. Sculpture in situ by Adam Morales. Click on image to enlarge. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Operating from Delhi since the early 1990s, Raqs Media Collective has developed a multifaceted body of work with a unique take on globalized culture. Mixing contemporary art with historical and philosophical theory, their diverse work consists of a wide range of old and new media techniques, including image-text collages, installations, performances, and media objects.

Reflecting on the politics of mobility and dislocation, There Has Been a Change of Plan (2007) is a series of photographs of derelict airplanes. Showing removed noses, damaged wings, or other states of ruin, the work is an invitation to pause and converse about the “debris of the unrealizable.”

Raqs’ projects are open-ended, often incorporating open-sourced networks. OPUS [Open Platform for Unlimited Signification] (2001 onwards), for instance, is an online database of artist-submitted artworks. Conceived in the spirit of open-source software development, it’s an online space that enables visitors to view, create, and exhibit media objects, as well as appropriate and modify work originally produced by others. The collective’s devotion to free and open culture can also be seen in The Sarai Program at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Sarai, a network of artists and scholars, produces interdisciplinary research and practice on urban space, media, and information, all of which is subsequently placed in the public domain.

Raqs Media Collective reaches well beyond the confines of the art world to appeal to communities both on and off line. “Raqs” translates into “dance” in Farsi, Arabic, and Urdu. But founding members Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta once jokingly stated, however, that raqs stands for “rarely asked questions.”

NIELS VAN TOMME: Let’s start with the beginning: How was Raqs Media Collective formed? To which conditions did it respond?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: 2009 marks the 18th year of our work together. In 1991, we were new graduates from a film & media school in Delhi (the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia University) who had enjoyed the experience of collaborating. We then officially came together, wanting to continue exploring the documentary form as a collective.

The years 1991 to 2000 were spent chasing several essay-film proposals (that never got made), writing reviews for newspapers, working as assistants with other filmmakers, working as researchers, technicians, and producers on the fringes of the television industry in Delhi and making the occasional short film.

During this time, we traveled extensively across India. We pursued an oral history project on cinematography and camerawork that enabled us to have many long conversations with veteran cinematographers, some of whom were at that time struggling with neglect and amnesia. We were also active in the discussions within the expanding documentary film and video scene in India and spent long hours chasing ghosts in different archives. We had conversations with bystanders on the fringes of weekly anti-nuclear protests, read voraciously, and sometimes to each other, saw films and plays and wrote reviews of them for newspapers, and stayed awake through late night screenings of Bollywood films in grubby cinema halls. We generally kept ourselves going, high on enthusiasm and low on income and prospects, but with a cheer born of friendship, solidarity, and the evolution of a shared vision of practice.

In the late 1990s, the coalition of power in New Delhi — led by a right-wing party with avowed revivalist aims — had set off India’s second set of nuclear tests, ushering in a climate of intense anxiety. A new aggressive, triumphalist belligerence, buoyed by a discourse made up in equal parts of euphoria and paranoia, seemed to thicken the air. Everything from textbooks to the scripts of films and news bulletins on television were being written to the tune of a manic nationalism.

There was an urgency for a space for critical reflection, for practice forged on new terms. And it was during this period that our conversation with Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan (both scholars at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an independent research center and think tank with strong dissident credentials and a reputation for critical theoretical reflection) consolidated itself in the creation of Sarai in 2000. We wanted to build a space equally hospitable to intellectual rigor and creative dynamism. The challenge was to build new streams of public knowledge focused on the city as a space of communication and exchange, as a site for an intense level of media activity of all kinds. At the same time, we wanted to create a space that, through its practices, would question the protocols of entry and access to networks of knowledge, such that the production and nurturing of knowledge itself could become a democratic imperative.

NIELS VAN TOMME: You describe the Sarai Program as a “research center, publishing house, cafe, conference house, cinema, software laboratory and studio for digital art and design.” What have you achieved with it since its inception and what are you still aiming for?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: Sarai was a specific response to what we felt were the institutional crises of cultural and intellectual life at the turn of the 21st century. These were: a flawed, insecure contemporaneity that saw itself in terms of lack and anxiety, a poverty of sustained interdisciplinary dialogue, hermetic separations between the domains of practice and theory, a suspended engagement with the city and with urban conditions, and a failure to address or recognize communication, information, and media as objects of creative engagement or philosophical reflection. Apart from all this, there was nothing at that time that could offer hospitality to new and emerging practices, that archived contemporary culture, that even offered young people a safe space to be together and think freely outside institutional constraints.

The nine years of Sarai have seen an enormous change in all these areas. The Sarai fellowships have produced a tide of contemporary practice and practitioners. Forms that had no chance of developing a sustained body of practice in India, such as the graphic novel, sound art, software art, and performance, now have stable bodies of work around them, partly thanks to Sarai fellowships. We kick-started the revolution in the opening up of Indian languages to cyberspace through early interventions in free and open source software for Indian languages. Now there is a burgeoning new public sphere on the internet in Hindi and other languages that is directly attributable to Sarai’s efforts in the field. The robust challenges to censorship and self-censorship and the tyranny of intellectual property that have emerged in the last few years in India can be traced back to an extent to the work that began at the Sarai Program. Our preliminary investigations into surveillance, into the vibrant cultures of piracy and into the interface between politics, political economy, and information are beginning to yield a lively public debate on these issues. And a large number of questions that are now commonplace factors of public discourse — from the state of the urban environment to issues of eviction and displacement as a result of urban “redevelopment” to the rights of queer people in India —  were in many ways first “aired” within the hospitable safety of the Sarai cafe, and on electronic discussion lists hosted by the Sarai website.

An enormous range and number of people have passed through the program over the last nine years. People have come to Sarai for events and conferences, for screenings and workshops, as designers and artists, as writers and readers, as interns and residents, or just to have coffee and conversations and feel unburdened of the heavy load of intellectual hierarchies and orthodoxies. Next year we plan to release ten new books, which range from comic books to a new issue of the Sarai Reader. We plan to launch some ideas that we hope can act as probes into new areas of practice and reflection. We’re currently working within the framework of Sarai to embed enduring yet provisional and lightweight studio situations for constellations of artists and practitioners into the fabric of the city of Delhi. We hope that this will allow us to work in a capillary vein within the city, infusing interstitial urban spaces with new cultural and artistic energies.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Notwithstanding your very active work as cultural workers and activists with Sarai, as artists you refuse to take an activist position. Why do you find it important to define a significant part of your work as “art practice”? Why is such distinction necessary?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: Activism, in the sense that it often gets framed, presumes a separation (and a hierarchy) between living, reflecting, creation, and action. We do not accept these distinctions. For us, an ethical and political strain runs through every aspect of life-practice, including those that are silent, or only apparently inactive.

Raqs Media Collective, Escapement, 2009

The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once said, “Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.” We think silence is not given its due in the world. Silence is important, because you can’t listen effectively if there is no space created through silence around any given instance of speech. Though we use text and words quite often, we have often preferred to work through an ethic of listening rather than speaking aloud. If we could be described as activists, then the only way would be to see (or hear) us as “activist listeners.” We listen to everything.

We understand the importance of bearing witness to the world but insist that there is no right and true way in which to bear witness. The language of witnessing is capable of infinite subtlety and delicacy, and allows for sustained exploration or ambiguities as much as it enables swift and sure slogans. The contemporary world is enthralled by the fear and delight produced by commodities; it is insecure about questions of identity, belonging and sovereignty. These issues demand not just “activism” but also sustained reflection. And the prerogative of activism (while not unimportant in itself) can never be allowed to replace, or overwhelm, the sustained need for reflection, and the creation of new contexts, ambiences, and situations for enacting new and different responses to our complex world.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Sightings is a series of photographs of decaying architecture. Taken together, these images seem to indicate the possibility of an entire map of the world that can be deciphered from the close observation of walls that need renovation. Could you elaborate on this remarkable project?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: We have this habit of walking around in Delhi or any other city we get to spend time in. These are walks without much orientation or intent. These walks open us to various ways in which a surface emerges, peels off, and vanishes. Walks have a quality of arresting you to slower rhythms. Sightings emerged from a surface that we encountered in our neighborhood. The wall opened itself to an amazing range of imagining. Forgotten places, mythical places, real places, cartographic habits — they all made their way into our conversation with that wall. So many lives were peopled in it.

NIELS VAN TOMME: You received international recognition with installations that suggest complex relationships between different media such as video, still images, text, sound, software, performance, sculpture, and found objects. In which way do these installations differ from your earlier film work?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: Clearly, they differ formally. And the formal difference follows from our view of the way the different mediums can be put to work. Film is mainly a single-channel medium, with a linear presence in time. The reason why we have on occasion abandoned single-channel formats is because we have often found it necessary to project on to more than one surface, use different temporal registers to express different ideas in a single work, and mix sound, image, objects, text, and textures of more than one kind.

The education of filmmakers in film schools involves an immersion in a wide range of disciplines. As a film student, you are expected to engage with theatre, photography, literature, sound and music, graphic design, and visual culture in general. These are thought of as essential inputs, the absorption of which shapes a cinematic sensibility. All of these influences are supposed to flow into the making of your scripts and storyboards.

Somehow, in our case, these “influences” did not subordinate themselves to the making of our “filmmaker” selves. They continued to hold a place in our practice independent of any one master-narrative. The many-headed hydra of our practice emerges from this entanglement with different forms. This is what makes our practice a growing, constantly transforming constellation of different modes of doing and making things.

NIELS VAN TOMME: You often explore the nature of knowledge, learning, and creativity. In which way can we engage differently with such notions through art and culture compared to more straightforward channels of pedagogy?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: We remember well what it is to forge one’s ideas, not with books in sumptuous libraries, but with faded, smudged, stained photocopies of texts passed eagerly from hand to hand in the days before the internet. This experience of “knowing” can never be separated from the solidarity and sharing that underwrote the knowledge. It also implied that the sources of knowledge never had for us a somber, authoritative totality. When your library is a patchwork of torn pages, your learning has to be a matter of live improvisation more than it can ever be a performance of leaden completeness.

As incorrigible autodidacts, we have a good sense of the pleasures and perils of swimming the rough currents of knowledge. In our understanding, nothing, not even what you call “straightforward pedagogy,” can communicate a sense of these pleasures and perils better than art. Most importantly, as autodidacts, we have a good measure of the radical incompleteness of our intellectual horizons. This does not limit our practice; rather, it fuels our quests. The space of contemporary art today is hospitable to this experience of a joyous radical incompleteness of knowledge. That is why art practice allows us to develop and nurture our keen awareness of what we “do not know” as an instrument with which to forge knowledge itself.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Although internationally very active, you are still based in Delhi and often make work that directly relates to that city. Nevertheless, you refrain from labeling yourself as “Indian.” Can you explain why you prefer to identify yourself as being “from Delhi” instead?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: As a city of around 16 million people, Delhi is a world in itself. And it is possible to think the world from Delhi. Like many contemporary global cities it is too complex an entity to allow oneself to fully belong to it, and too dynamic to produce a sense of apathy or disinterestedness. You can neither let go of it, nor let it overwhelm you. We find this challenge to maintain a fine balance between commitment and distance, which repeats itself on an everyday basis, an intellectually and affectively demanding predicament. It keeps our thinking, and all our senses, on permanent alert.

Nation-states seem either too large or too small a frame to allow a real and concrete sense of engagement with the issues of our times, be they economic realities or ecological issues like global warming (for which they are too small), or the day-to-day arrangements of people’s lives (for which they tend to be much too large). They are the blunt instruments of realpolitik, but come laden with a sense of historically ordained arbitrariness and abstraction that makes it impossible to conceive of them as organically evolved entities. The “origin myths” of national culture are usually conceived by dominant classes as ways to cover up the artifice of nation-building.

The specific histories and realities in different parts of the world do not necessarily map out in absolute accordance with the borders marked by the current system of nation-states. They are not independent of the nation-state system, but they are not identical with it. Local particularities can be larger or smaller than nation-states, depending on the question that they pertain to.

Given this reality, a more precise and acute application of national parameters (only when necessary) to questions of classification, taxonomy. and analysis of global realities is probably a better idea than the random and indiscriminate usage of the term “national” for all things, and to all ends. The application of the “national” framework in relation to the production of contemporary culture needs to be rigorously and thoroughly unpacked.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Are you currently working on any new projects?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: We have just finished designing currency for a hypothetical Bank of Time initiated by e-flux. We are editing the eighth Sarai Reader, which is going to be on “Fear,” and are finishing a book, titled Seepage, that collects some of our writing and image and text-based essays.

We are working as dramaturges with a theatre director, who later this year is doing a new production based on Ibsen’s play John Gabriel Borkman and our texts. We are working on a long-term investigation of spaces and histories in Warsaw, Berlin, and Bombay that is likely to culminate in a work early next year. We are in the middle of designing and conceiving some public art projects that we hope will be realized sometime next year. We are working on a screen-based work that grows out of Sleepwalkers Caravan that we made last year with sculptural insertions into the urban landscape of Delhi.

So, as you can see, as always, there are many different processes in motion, and we are just as eager as our publics to see how they will unfold.

Niels Van Tomme is associate director of arts and media at Provisions Library. He is also an independent curator, art critic, and contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. This series on new media is part of a special collaboration with Provisions Library supported by the Arca Foundation.

The reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest and most controversial hydropower project, will reach its final height in November at 175 meters. The 660 kilometer-long reservoir displaced 1.3 million people and is wreaking havoc with the environment.

International Rivers has published a new factsheet and will continue to monitor the social and environmental impacts of the Three Gorges Dam, working to ensure the right lessons are drawn for energy and water projects in China and beyond.

In a hip hop and R’n’B world dominated by men and noted for misogyny, the unstoppable female lyricists of Say My Name speak candidly about class, race, and gender in pursuing their passions as female MCs. This worldwide documentary takes viewers on a vibrant tour of urban culture and musical movement: from hip hop’s birthplace in the Bronx, to game on London’s eastside.

Featuring interviews from a diverse cast of women including Remy Ma, Rah Digga, Jean Grae, Erykah Badu, Estelle and newcomers Chocolate Thai, Invincible and Miz Korona, this powerful documentary delves into the amazing personal stories of women balancing professional dreams with the stark realities of poor urban communities, race, sexism and motherhood. The more then 18 artists featured in Say My Name battle for a place in a society that creates few changes for women. From emerging artists filled with new creativity, to true pioneers like MC Lyte, Roxxanne Shante, and Monie Love, these are women turning adversity to art.

More here.

Showing 12:00 pm, Wednesday, November 29 at Montgomery College, Takoma Park Campus, HC 122

Wednesday, October 28, 6:30 pm
Public Talk:
To New Horizons

Emre Huner, current apexart resident, and Lauren Cornell, Executive Director Rhizome, will discuss utopian constructs, speculative fiction, and the juggernaut of modernism. In their conversation they will touch upon the inspirations for Huner’s latest work from the New York World’s Fair, to the NASA Space Program, and Walt Disney.

Born in Istanbul in 1977, Emre Huner is an artist producing drawing, video and spatial works following different techniques. He now lives and works in Istanbul after being in Milan for eight years. Central to his oeuvre are over technological, industrial progressions and the concept of society of risk in this respect and the themes such as the affinities of the modern man with architecture and nature. Huner creates a common language in his works through using an archive he formed out of various sources such as internet, found out pictures and books.

Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome, oversees and develops Rhizome’s programs, all of which serve to promote and contextualize art engaged with technology. Previously, Cornell worked as a curator and writer in London and New York.

Part of apexart’s international resident lecture series.

[text and graphic from apex art website. Caption: "Trylon, Perisphere and Helicline. Photo by Sam Gottscho." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Opening Oct 29 6–8pm
Erratic Anthropologies

“Art in General presents three performance installations by Guy Benfield, Shana Moulton, and Rancourt/Yatsuk that mine the visual culture of flawed but influential community structures: the hippie commune and the American suburb. Using narrative strategies the artists act as quasi-anthropologists, investigating domestic objects and architectures to pick apart the promises identified with these cultures — wealth, power, happiness, and transcendence. With a dose of the fantastic, these artists highlight the psychological, economic, and environmental fallout from the failure of idealistic attempts at redefining western social dynamics.”

Presented by Art in General for Performa 09

[text and graphic from Art in General website. Graphic: "Rancourt/Yatsuk, Phase IV."**

** Update: Claire at Art in General wrote to identify the image above as one from "Shana Moulton's The Undiscovered Antique." Click here for a graphic for "Phase IV."

In Phase IV artists Rancourt/Yatsuk enact the story of fictitious star realtor Don Donavucci and his desperate attempts to construct the model home for his idyllic community during the height of the housing market crash. Donavucci’s fantastic architectural vision (a mixture of elegant suburban excess and raw construction materials) will house a series of “OPEN HOUSE” days, where Don will be on-site to show his creation and attempt to make the sale. Drawing inspiration from failed suburban housing developments of the past century, Phase IV will investigate issues of sustainability, urbanization, and limitations of natural resources. Phase IV seeks out the dramatic extremes of the housing crash to reveal the grim human ecology that has spread throughout United States and the world." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]