A year of Leeson

A year of Leeson

From the SF Cronicle

For film buffs, Lynn Hershman Leeson is the San Francisco maverick who makes challenging films (”Teknolust,” “Conceiving Ada” and “Strange Culture”) that explore genres and feature performances by her friend Tilda Swinton.

Since in the early ’70s, however, the art crowd has known her as a pioneer in multimedia experimentation, a gleeful pricker of stuffy convention. Now she’s the subject of “Life (Life to the Power of N),” an ambitious, yearlong exhibition series that’s been coordinated by six arts entities.

The first part, which opened in February and runs through June 1 at the de Young Museum, is “Lynn Hershman Leeson: No Body Special,” an exhibition using a 1965 Jean Patou pantsuit to explore the collision of art, fashion and display. deyoungmuseum.org.

The San Jose Museum of Art’s component kicks in Saturday with “Global Mind Radar/Reader (An Emotional Barometer),” a compendium of blog postings on consumerism, politics and climate change. The installation ends Sept. 7. sjmusart.org.

The Hess Collection in Napa offers “CyberActive: The Work of Lynn Hershman Leeson,” a retrospective of the artist’s explorations of interactivity and identity constructs. Next Friday-Nov. 16. hesscollection.com/web/art.html.

UC Berkeley Art Museum follows with seven hours of early video work under the unwieldy title “Lynn Hershman Leeson - Virtually Everything, Virtually: An Almost Complete Retrospective of the Single-Channel Works 1977-1984.” Noon-8 p.m. June 1. bampfa.berkeley.edu.

New Langton Arts presents “The Floating Museum,” a collection of documents and ephemera from 1974 to 1978, when Hershman Leeson experimented with public, site-specific art installations in untraditional locations. Sept. 4-Oct. 25. newlangtonarts.org.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s contribution, “Life{+2} (Life Squared),” is a refiguring of “The Dante Hotel,” an early site-specific work that Hershman Leeson staged in a North Beach hotel room in 1973-74. It’s part of the museum’s major fall exhibition, “The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now,” an overview of participation-based art by 40 artists. Nov. 15-Feb. 15. sfmoma.org.

Don’t go yet: Along with her muse Swinton, Hershman Leeson hopes to shoot a vampire film next year, set on Nob Hill. Then there’s a series of three-minute documentaries commissioned by the Tate Modern museum in London and the English TV station Channel 4. “They will appear just before the news and on the Tate Web site,” says Hershman Leeson. “Tilda will hopefully do or introduce the interviews.”

- Edward Guthmann

Installation shots, Once Within a Room

‘Small Things End, Great Things Endure’: New look for feminism

Reyhan Harmanci

Thursday, January 17, 2008

San Francisco Cronicle

Feminism’s vital signs have been taken - and its eminent demise predicted - for as long as women have organized for equitable treatment. And with Hillary Clinton holding her ground in the Democratic primaries, feminist issues seem more timely than ever. In New Langton Arts new show, “Small Things End, Great Things Endure,” the contemporary state of feminism is examined by group of local and internationally known artists.

Co-curator Jill Dawsey says the impetus for this show was a raft of shows in New York and Los Angeles in the past year that looked at feminism historically. “There was a lot of talk around those shows, and I wanted to put together a group of artists of a slightly younger generation,” she says, “who are looking at feminism in different ways. We wanted to take the pulse of feminism today.”

The conclusions of the investigation, Dawsey says, are mixed. “We began thinking of feminism and broadened the field to different offshoots.” Transgender and queer theory has been greatly impacted by feminism. “People are using feminist theory of the past to look at the body in new ways,” she says. Taking off on the historical shows, artists such as Emily Roysdon, who looks at the work of artist and gay activist David Wojnarowicz, and Anna Maltz, who pays winking homage to the Guerrilla Girls, wrestle with the questions of how far we’ve come.

Meanwhile, other artists in the show examine how retrograde notions of feminity are alive and kicking today. “Andrea Bowers takes up the institution of marriage. She uses Emma Goldman’s essay on marriage and love, which was written more than 100 years ago, and made a video installation where two brides stand in opposition to each other, as if reading wedding vows, but it’s actually an acerbic essay of Goldman’s,” Dawsey says.

She notes that the unease around the language of feminism exists in the liberal Bay Area as much as any other place. “A lot of people aren’t interested in gender today - it’s seen as a kind of closed question,” she says. “There’s a sense of well, that’s over.”

The problem, she says, is it’s not really over. Her show suggests that it would be a shame to consign feminism to a tidy historical dustbin; the issues being raised a century ago, as Bowers’ piece shows, still seem ripped from the news. “Feminism has been around for a long time, but I don’t think we even know what it looks like now. I hope there are new conclusions to be drawn. Things haven’t changed,” she pauses, “that much.”

 

 

Have you seen it?

Included in Langton’s exhibition of contemporary feminist art was a pair of Maja Bajevic works from her series Women at work. Now, the fourth in the series has appeared. Here’s what the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa said:

Maja Bajevic holds her first solo exhibition in a public venue in Italy, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa of Venice, together with the publication of the first complete monograph on her work (published by Charta, Milan, edited by Angela Vettese).

The artist lives between her native Sarajevo, Paris and Berlin, and emerged on the international stage thanks to her participation in events such as Manifesta, the Istanbul Biennial, and the Documenta in Kassel. She has gained prestigious forms of recognition, as demonstrated by her DAAD residency in Berlin.

The exhibition takes place in the sombre yet domestic environment of Palazzetto Tito, a venue chosen in the past by artists such as Marlene Dumas, Karen Kilimnik and Richard Hamilton by virtue of the original features of its lancet windows and its antique wooden flooring.

The visitors enter this typically Venetian house to find themselves immediately imprisoned in a room filled with a net of barbed wire. A number of women who normally work for the BLM use this grid as a frame, covering the most dangerous parts of the installation with woollen yarn. ‘Repetitio est mater studiorum’ is the title of this installation/performance, referring also to the professorship that the artist has held for the last three years at the IUAV University of Venice. The piece is part of a series of works entitled “Women at work”, in which Maja Bajevic asked women from specific places (Sarajevo, Istanbul, Barcelona) to work for her and use their feminine manual skills as a form of protection against the aggressiveness of our era, as well as being a way in which to keep their historical memory alive. In the other rooms, which may be reached by braving the wire found in the first room, visitors may view the videos of three other works from the same series: “Wo men at Work - Under Construction”, “Women at Work - The Observers”, “Women at Work - Washing Up”, as well as photographs from the series entitled “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”. The following room includes a reference to the performance “En attendant”: set in a field of clay ground full of earthworms; there are also a series of hand-written sentences scrawled on a wall saying, “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything. And I feel better. And I think I could go away, somewhere, run away – why not? “. In the last room there is a monitor showing “Here’s to Looking at You, Kid”: the face of the artist seems to weep black clay, like a clown who, once the makeup has been removed, loses his sense of happiness and shows us his real sense of desperation.

Imprisonment, feminine knowledge, the difficulties of sharing but also of bearing solitude and all other forms of constriction: these are the themes that emerge from the works, from the very first, an original performance which will then become an installation, to the others, which bring together the last 10 years of the artist’s work. The end result is an exhibition of great emotional power, one which speaks to us of an individual condition as well as reflecting a collective state of mind and a vertiginous historical condition.

***

Feminist Art in the Expanded Field

Small Things End, Great Things Endure
January 17 – March 15, 2008
Text by María del Carmen Carrión and Jill Dawsey

In the contemporary imagination, modern feminism is thought to be lodged firmly in the 1970s, bracketed by post-’68 “bra-burners” and 1980s backlash. Recently major museum retrospectives, collaborative initiatives, and symposia on feminist art (especially in Los Angeles and New York) have conferred an almost fashionable status on the subject. Does institutional interest in feminism signal the movement’s continuing relevance, or does it relegate it to the historical past, announcing its demise? Small Things End, Great Things Endure demonstrates that artists continue to insist feminism—its histories, its theories, its politics— is unfinished business. Far from a fleeting fashion, feminist art practice has gathered momentum.

Feminism is a movement that began long ago and has yet to hit its stride. As a form of politics and as a body of thought, it has been characterized by an uneven development: its messages have spread in slow and unruly ways, frequently hindered by lines of class and geography, by periods of backlash and denial, and by moments of revivalism quickly co-opted by the marketplace (riot grrrl to bad girl to spice girl). Visionary science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin once observed that the women’s movement can be said to have gone on for over one hundred and fifty years or nearly six hundred years, depending on whether one started with Seneca Fall (the first women’s rights convention in the United States) or Christine de Pizan (that medieval harbinger of the woman’s movement), but it has yet to last continuously beyond on generation. Today we see evidence to the contrary in the emergence of an “expanded field” of feminist art practice, with feminsit thought opening onto a host of related concerns.

Historical conciousness, for example, is foregrounded in the work of Anna Maltz, Ali Naschke-Messing, Jen Smith, and Mathilde ter Heijne, all of whom revist key figures or moments from the feminist past, retracing it as a means to counteract our culture’s pervasive state of historical amnesia. Eve Fowler, Emily Roysdon, and Jonathan Solo deploy the queer and transgender perspectives of discourses historically indebted to feminisim, staking a claim for the visibility of “non-normative” bodies in the public sphere. In this works, such claims are inflected by a palpable sense of pleasure that comes from eschewing norms and creating counter-narratives. Reflections on the mediated body and feminine performativity are found in works by Zoe Crosher and Wynne Greenwood. Investigations into social roles, the laboring body, and gendered institutions are trenchantly explored in the video works of Andrea Bowers, Maja Bajevic, and Akosua Adoma Owusu.

Small Things End, Great Things Endure surveys emerging art now, aiming to take the pulse of a new generation’s feminist activity. The exhibition proposes ways in which multiple and even contradictory models of feminism coexist in this expanded field of feminist art production. Approaching feminism art not as glossary of stylistics concerns, or as an archival moment embedded our recent history, Small Things End, Great Things Endure names an ongoing political quest.

Works in the exhibition

Andrea Bowers
Vows (Goldman, Emma. “Marriage and Love.” New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.), 2006.

In Andrea Bowers’ two-channel video installation, Vows, a pair of larger than life brides face off, reciting passages from Emma Goldman’s early twentieth century polemic. With witty, acerbic words, Goldman critiques marriage as a patriarchal institution that infantilizes and isolates women (”Ye who enter here leave all hope behind,” one bride quotes from Dante’s Inferno). Ventriloquizing the feminist, anarchist Goldman, the brides appear to listen and respond to one another, as though reciting enlightened nuptial vows. Goldman wrote her text nearly a century ago, yet her words are still apt in light of today’s booming matrimony industry, with its proliferating bridal expos, wedding planners, and themed ceremonies styled in visions of a Disneyfied Victoriana.

Anna Maltz
Gorilla, 2007

The Guerrilla Girls have served as the conscience of the art world for over two decades, yet today’s young women artists still face the same dire statistics that the Guerilla Girls first made public on Manhattan billboards. In Manhattan, for example, where women represent more than half of the students at visual art schools, less than one third of the solo shows at Chelsea galleries spotlight women. Anna Maltz’ Gorilla (2007)—a suit and mask knitted in black mohair, with leather pectorals and face—is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Guerilla Girls, and a playful self-insertion into this subversive yet exclusive sisterhood. Her previous suits—mermaids, super heroes, and the naked bodies of an “average” family: mom, dad, kids—negotiated the ways in which we see the self. By bringing the participant back to the childhood impulse of “playing dress up,” he or she is allowed the freedom to perform gender and identity roles beyond their usual limits. With Gorilla, Maltz also revisits feminist craftwork, claiming a territory conquered by feminist predecessors like Rosemarie Trockel and Judy Chicago. The suit is specifically made to fit the artist—as such it may represent Maltz’s own negotiation of how to fit in the art world.

Emily Roysdon
Untitled (David Wojnarowicz project), 2001.

In her Untitled (David Wojnarowicz project) (2001-2007), Emily Roysdon pays homage to the artist and gay activist David Wojnarowicz. She revisits his series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-79) in which Wojnarowicz photographed his lover disguised as the French Symbolist poet, wearing a mask—a facsimile of Rimbaud’s face. Roysdon in turn photographs a figure wearing a mask of Wojnarowicz’s face. As a queer, female artist, Roysdon’s identification with Wojnarowicz—a queer, male artist, who died of AIDS—crosses lines of gender and sex, time and space, life and death. Central to this work is the concept of identification. Idenfication, in psychoanalysis, means to adopt one or more attributes of another subject. It is through that process that human beings construct an independent self. The French psychoanalyist Jaques Lacan defined identification as “the transformation that takes place in a subject, when he assumes an image”, words that resonate strongly with Roysdon’s series. Yet, in Roysdon’s own words, her identification with Wojnarowicz is one that is “bound to fail by technical psychoanalytic standards” which poses the question of why this identifcation must remain incomplete and why it is bound to fail. One of Roysdon’s images directly recreates an image from Wojnarowicz’s series in which a figure lies in bed with his erect penis in hand; in Roysdon’s image the phallus is a strap-on. Even as Roydon’s recreation of the image is “bound to fail,” its divergence from the original opens new ways of imagining alliances between distant moments and different bodies.

Jen Smith
Citizen, 2007.

In 1994 the American artist Catherine Opie carved the word ‘Pervert’ on her chest, and photographed herself against a decorated black backdrop in a black S&M hood, her arms pierced by rows of needles. Opie’s now iconographic image challenged the parameters of normative sexuality, instigating discussion about queer issues and making underground subcultures more visible. Jen Smith revisits Opie’s gesture, recreating and strategically altering the image. In Smith’s version, the backdrop and the hood have both turned from black to white; the needles in her arms are still there, as in the “original” photograph. This time, however, the word on the artist’s chest is ‘Citizen.’ Smith’s remake is reverential; it also asks the question: what is lost and what is gained when the historically marginalized gain greater visibility in the public sphere?

Eve Fowler
Untitled, 2005

Eve Fowler makes unexpectedly raw portraits of friends and lovers. Fowler’s photograph of fellow artist K8 Hardy wearing a pair of jeans with the crotch cut away immediately calls to mind the picture of Austrian artist Valie Export posing with a machine gun in a publicity photo for her performance Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969).

In that performance, Export removed the crotch from a pair of pants and wore them to a movie house, proceeding slowing through the aisles, challenging male viewers to confront “the real thing” instead of passively watching the fragmented bodies of women on the screen. The difference in appearance between Export and Hardy is slight but significant: Hardy’s closely cropped hair replaces Export’s Medusa-like mass, and Hardy holds no gun: her stance is non-combative. Her tender, direct look seems to ask the viewer to lay down their gaze, to engage her as human, female, queer, and equal. In addition, Fowler presents a selection of images that have been previously disseminated in zines that she produces. These are haunting images that exude sensuality. Their power resides not only within the image, but also in the viewer’s experience of a multiplicity of gestures and bodies – transgendered bodies that are preoperative, transitional, or postoperative.

Jonathan Solo
I am not who you say I am, 2007
Transgression, 2006
Done Apologizing, 2006

Jonathan Solo is interested in representing bodies that challenge the social inscriptions and constructions that determine gender. His carefully crafted drawings depict characters that transgress categories. He starts his process by creating digital collages, using sources that include photographs of friends and family, as well as images gathered from fashion magazines. He draws them with graphite, cuts them up, and reassembles them to create the final image. Solo’s work points toward an implosion at the limits of the body, introducing a fracture in the binary conception of male/female while emphasizing the political construction of the body and its subversive possibilities.

Zoe Crosher (in collaboration with Leslie Grant)
The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing), 2005.

The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing) (2005) presents a cluster of images drawn from Zoe Crosher’s on-going project, The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois. The archive comprises hundreds of images Crosher inherited from du Bois, an American woman who worked as an escort as she traveled through Pacific Rim countries during the 1970s and 80s, photographing herself every step of the way. In ordinary snapshot style, du Bois poses for the camera, primps before the mirror, lounges in evening wear, or hams it up in cowgirl get-up. Du Bois appears in such a great variety of costumes and hairstyles (including Farrah Fawcett’s famous flip hairstyle, a Dorothy Hamill wedge, and an off-kilter brown wig) that she bears comparison with Cindy Sherman, the artist who famously dressed in the guise of clichéd Hollywood heroines in her Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s. If Sherman’s work suggested that femininity is a kind of masquerade, rather than a natural or inherent set of attributes, Crosher and du Bois up the ante. In The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing), “femininity” is seen to be the site of multiple and conflicting fantasies relating to sexuality, exoticism, mass media, and capitalist exchange. “She’s the Real Thing,” Crosher’s title tells us, yet du Bois reminds us that the everyday self, like femininity, is a fiction.

Wynne Greenwood
Peas, 2007

Wynne Greenwood’s multi-media sculpture, Peas (2007) presents the body as a site of competing voices. A video projected atop the sculpture shows Greenwood in dialog with her anxious gut, which is represented by a face drawn on her stomach, and which is speaking in a stereotypical male way: “hey babe, um, I’m just doin’ my thing here,” it says, “Chill.” “You jerk,” Greenwood responds tearfully. The “face” drawn on the stomach appears with a boxy cardboard body that extends into the space of the room. Embedded in a cartoonish body at the hip region, a second video monitor shows a close-up of a vagina and pea-shaped faces drawn on the skin. The title Peas playfully refers to adages such as “eat your peas and carrots” and “mind your p’s and q’s” – bromides that govern our good behavior as children. Peas can be read as a female self buffeted by the myriad conflicting voices – of lovers, perhaps, or those of media and the state – that lay claim to her body.Maja Bajevic
Women at Work – Under Construction, 1999
Women at Work – Washing Up, 2001

Maja Bajevic’s videos are part of a series of collective performances that bring attention to women’s labor, history, and the juncture between public and private realms. In Women at Work — Under Construction (1999), Bajevic and five women refugees from Srebrenica perform a domestic activity in a public place, activity that seems directed to mend the wounds left by war. The performance takes place over five days, on the scaffolding that covers the façade of Sarajevo National Museum; the building had been damaged during the war. At the end of the day, when the construction workers have finished, the women, who make their living by embroidering, climb the scaffolding and start stitching patterns on the protective net. The work progresses, and we see that they are creating a secluded space in the public view, restarting a cycle of visibility and concealment.

Women at Work — Washing Up (2001) is a document of a private performance in a public bathhouse for women in Istanbul. Since the space did not allow men, the piece was accessible only to women during the bathhouse’s hours of operation. For five days, Bajevic and a group of Bosnian women washed pieces of fabric hand-stitched with quotes by Tito (“We aim for peace, but we prepare for war”). The women unsuccessfully try to wash out the text, as if trying to come to terms with their nation’s recent conflicted history.

Akosua Adoma Owusu
Intermittent Delight, 2007.

The intersection of identity and cultural appropriation is at the heart of Akosua Adoma Owusu’s video Intermittent Delight (2007). This carefully constructed work juxtaposes close-ups of batik textiles, fashion and design from the 1950s and 1960s, images of men weaving and women sewing in Ghana, and fragments of a Westinghouse 1960s commercial—aimed to instruct women on the how-to of refrigerator decoration. Constructed from a combination of 1960s Afrobeat, traditional Asante Adwa music, and field recordings of West African men and women during production of cloths and garments, the soundtrack pulls the piece together and imbues it with a jolty and festive tone. The work touches upon the idea of feminism’s uneven geographical and historical development, and the nuances of labor conditions women face depending on where they live.

Ali Naschke-Messing
Ode to Kristeva: A Treatise On We, 2007.
Dirty Love Poem, 3, 2007.

The source material for Ali Naschke-Messing’s threadwork pieces is the written word. To create her delicate webs of language the artist starts by handwriting fragments of texts chosen from different authors, such as psychoanalytic feminist Julia Kristeva and the structuralist literary critic Roland Barthes. After transcribing the quote, the text is sewn onto fabric, following the curves and angles of her calligraphy. The fabric that supports the needlework fades away, and, without its support, the writing stretches and dangles. The legibility of the passage is blurred, with the exception of a few words that remain here and there. These indecipherable texts point to the fragility of language, but also to the underground, hidden, and invisible systems of knowledge that one builds for oneself.

Matilde ter Heijne
Small Things End, Great Things Endure, 2001.

Mathilde ter Heijne’s video, Small Things End, Great Things Endure (2001), from which this show takes its title, shows the artist as a modern-day Joan of Arc engulfed by fire, flames eating at her clothing and hair. Yet her costume and hairstyle locate the events in the recent past of the 1960s, suggesting that this is not exactly a modern-day scenario. A voice-over intones: “Be patient, fast, pray. ‘Til this war is over,” inviting us to locate these images within the historical context of the Vietnam War.

ter Heijne took inspiration from Margarethe von Trotta’s film adaptation of Uwe Johnson’s novel Jahrestage. Part of that film describes a year in the life of the character Gesine Cresspahl who we find living in New York circa 1967/1968. Amidst media reports of the Vietnam War, the German-born Gesine recalls her mother’s profound guilt over witnessing Nazi atrocities, which culminated in the older woman’s attempt to atone for those crimes by setting fire to herself in the family’s barn in Mecklenburg. In Small things end, great things endure, ter Heijne adapts von Trotta’s version by casting Gesine as the one who cannot bear the knowledge of the wanton violence perpetrated in Vietnam. A voiceover borrowed from von Trotta’s film accompanies Gesine’s repetition of her mother’s suicide by fire. von Trotta’s film doubles back to Johnson’s novel, just as ter Heijne’s video doubles back to von Trotta’s. Gesine becomes the historical double of her mother, while ter Heijne serves as the double of Gesine. ter Heijne seems to ask: are we doomed to repeat the histories of past generations? If the artists in this exhibition are any indication, the answer is a resounding “no.”

Review of In Residence appears in Frieze Magazine

First published in
Issue 112, January-February 2008

by Julian Myers

Tercerunquinto (meaning in English something like ‘a third of a fifth’) is the collective project of Mexican artists Julio Castro Carreón, Gabriel Cázares Salas and Rolando Flores Tovar. Formed in 1996, the collective is responsible for dozens of actions designed, in their words, ‘to question the boundaries between private and public space, examining the organized frontiers around the constitution of such definitions’. In the past Tercerunquinto’s projects have taken the form of architectural or infrastructural interventions that aim to create or ‘amplify’ freedoms still present in an administrated and compromised reality. See Ampliación de un area verde (Enlargement of a Green Area, 2004), where the collective extended the grassy patch in a parking area, thereby disrupting the ordered system of cars, or Open Access (2005), installed at The Power Plant in Toronto, where the group negotiated the creation of a second public entrance so that intrepid gallery-goers could circumvent the ticket counter.

When curator María Del Carmen Carrión invited Tercerunquinto for a month-long residency at New Langton Arts, she may have expected the group to produce something along these lines; what happened was somewhat different. Titled New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act, their project proposed to put New Langton’s archive – including 30 years of documentation of past exhibitions, recordings of performances, ephemera, press releases, correspondence and even the institution’s economic records – up for sale on the open market. ‘After conducting an informal analysis of the structure of Langton as a non-profit institution,’ the collective writes, ‘acknowledging a history of chronic economic uncertainty – Tercerunquinto has identified Langton’s memory as its most valuable asset.’

For the exhibition Tercerunquinto presented mundane cardboard storage containers stacked atop metal frames at table height, as though dejectedly offering the boxes up for our perusal – although just what fetishistic goodies the archive actually contained was left to the imagination. For an art historian like myself the urge to dig around in the attic of the longest-running non-profit artists’ space in San Francisco was nearly impossible to resist. Fredric Jameson held a residency there in 1981, just after finishing his book The Political Unconscious – was anything left behind? Were there recordings of Factrix, Charlemagne Palestine, Survival Research Laboratories, a video of one of those crazy Tony Labat performances? Some evidence of Jean-Luc Godard, Fashion Moda, Mary Kelly, Winston Tong? My first reaction was: how could they dream of auctioning off this gold mine?

What initially seemed like an act of outrageous vandalism turned out, in its details, to be somewhat responsible. A number of qualifications would apply to the purchase. The archive had to be purchased as a whole – no cherry-picking the most attractive bits. The archive’s unique recordings, on various decaying magnetic media, would require conservation. And the collection must be kept publicly accessible. (None of this kept a couple of big-name collectors from nosing about and making offers.) So does putting New Langton’s history in a sort of rhetorical jeopardy make it the stake in an argument for New Langton’s present. Who cares enough to be angry? Who feels a sense of propriety over the archive, and why?

All of this makes the titular ‘sacrifice’ a little ambiguous, of course – and disappointingly ‘propositional’. Not to mention that an economic exchange is hardly ‘sacrificial’. In fact, exchange generates value, which Tercerunquinto and New Langton’s curators know full well. For non-profit organizations such as New Langton, ‘economic uncertainty’ is inevitable. Founded in the 1970s to capitalize on new forms of federal funding in the USA, these institutions found themselves high and dry when that funding largely dried up around 1990. There are other kinds of uncertainty too: New Langton’s founding purpose was to foster forms of art practice not then supported by museums: performance art, Conceptual art, video, installation, improvised and electronic music, poetry and so on. Now these forms have faded from view or been incorporated into the larger and more established museums, leaving the non-profit just one exhibition space among many. In the present New Langton must do more than support itself – it must figure out why it should survive.

In this light I wonder if New Langton ought not to follow through on the promised ‘sacrifice’ in Tercerunquinto’s title. While my initial reaction was conservationist indignation, I soon found myself attracted to the idea of a New Langton freed from the burden of its institutional past. It’s no coincidence that this ‘sacrificial act’ comes after New Langton’s 30th anniversary in 2005, a year their curators spent mining this very archive for ideas and resources, episodes from the glorious history of non-profit existence … They want to move on. Screw nostalgia. Il faut être absolument moderne.

Pete Nelson: “Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes”

Installation View, from the exhibit IN RESIDENCE: Pete Nelson and Tercerunquinto, now on view at New Langton Arts

Anthony McCall showing at Langton

As part of a loose movement exploring the notion of “extended cinema”, Anthony McCall has been creating film installations and performances for over 30 years. Four Projected Movements was produced in 1975 as a further exploration of a previous work (called Long Film for Four Projectors). It has rarely been shown in the US. On September 14 and 15, New Langton Arts offered audiences a chance to interact with this early McCall work, giving some art historical perspective to viewers who may only have seen McCall’s digital projection now up at SFMOMA.

Photo credit: Chris Anthony Diaz 

Repurposing one of the light wedges from Long Film for Four Projectors, the work explores the seeming gravitational pull that McCall’s solid light forms are famous for. During the screening, audience members trailed their fingers into the beam, navigated around and through it, gingerly stepped over it, and even lay underneath, looking up as the slowly moving blade of light interacted with the architectural frame.

Photo credit: Chris Anthony Diaz 

After placing the projector in the corner of the theater, parallel to the wall, a single fifteen-minute reel of film was run through in all four possible ways: head-to-tail, tail-to-head, head-to-tail back-to-front, and tail-to-head back-to-front. This produces four different sweeps through space: wall to corner, ceiling to corner, corner to floor and ceiling to wall. The plane of light transitions vertically and horizontally, confronting the viewer with a question of spatial orientation and movement. “Durational structure” is McCall’s term for the result, a work of art that exist somewhere between the spatial dynamics of sculpture and the time-based medium of film.

Interview with Tercerunquinto (Part 1)

Maria del Carmen Carrión, Associate Curator at New Langton Arts, recently interviewed the Mexican collective TERCERUNQUINTO (Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores), who are featured in Langton’s exhibit IN RESIDENCE: Pete Nelson and Tercerunquinto. The following was translated from Spanish.

Maria del Carmen Carrión: I would like to start by talking about some of the projects that Tercerunquinto has produced in the past, which would help contextualize the proposal that Tercerunquinto has made to Langton. I am thinking, for instance, of the project that you developed for MUCA Roma in Mexico City (a Museum of the UNAM University), the project for the 9th Havana Biennial, and the most recent proposal for a project at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

Tercerunquinto’s project for MUCA Roma

Rolando Flores: All of these projects that you mention share a starting point in a process that involves an institutional negotiation, a sort of institutional analysis, and an understanding by us of what the institution might represent and signify. In these specific cases, we are working with institutions that are devoted to art. The ways in which we have approached these discussions are varied. In the case of MUCA Roma, what we did was propose that the museum slightly alter each of the small galleries within the museum with a door and a lock in order to offer them as small storage spaces for street vendors to store their merchandise, in particular the street vendors working in the area surrounding the museum. The project’s starting point was a negotiation with the Museum’s curators. The curators then proposed it to the General Direction of Cultural Diffusion, and then it involved the Law Department who were charged with regulating and legalizing the project. This last element was important because the street vendors practice a commercial activity that, in Mexico, is called “informal economy” which is illegal.

MdCC: To give a brief overview of the project at MUCA Roma, let’s summarize by saying that the Museum — which is the space where cultural capital is preserved — was turned into the space where the street vendors were preserving their own capital. The project emphasized a porous relationship between the inside and the outside, which is something that you have addressed in the past. But the project was also a questioning of the logic of this cultural institution. It was asking questions such as: what is culture? what kind of capital gains access to the Museum? while also questioning ideas of legality in the use of the urban and private space. The Museum was validating…

RF: an illegal activity. We were interested in this aspect because it allowed us to connect the Museum with its immediate context.

MdCC: The other project that I consider relevant in this context is Iluminacion Pública — developed in 2006 for the 9th Havana Biennial — because of the entanglement between State cultural policy, and the specific problematic of Cuban society.

RF: What we did was identify the resources that an institution like the Havana Biennial offers you as an artist when you participate in their event. In this case it was a space with X number of square meters, electricity … very basic aspects that they offer you to install your work. The element that caught our attention was the electricity allowance that was given to us. Our project consisted of using that electricity to install two spotlights of 1000 watts each on the building’s façade, so that this resource was emptied out in the streets of Havana. Basically this resource was taken out into the public space, and in the context of Havana this had a very specific significance because in Cuba, cultural institutions like the Havana Biennial, are privileged to the access and use of services when compared with the rest of the population. We decided to use this allowance of electricity out in the public space as a “street light” (which is the name of the piece); the site that we were using was the Center Wilfredo Lam, located in the Old Havana, one of the most touristy sections of the city.

Tercerunquinto in Cuba, Iluminación Púlica

Julio Castro: This work was also a comment on context, specifically in relation to public security. We were commenting on how an element like streetlights, which are a social service because it provides a sense of security, can turn into something extreme. An element like this can turn from security into surveillance, and become a form of harassment, an element that became very aggressive in this touristy plaza.

MdCC: I would like to ask you now about the most recent project that you developed, a project for the Ikon Gallery, who recently invited you to do a residency and make a proposal. I found that project interesting because like Langton, Ikon is a non-profit space and the two projects respond to very different localities, and different realities.

RF: The project for Ikon is a proposal, that they have accepted, but are now working on the possibility of bringing us back to produce it. We arrived in Birmingham at a very interesting moment, because Ikon is part of a very important urban renewal project where a lot of money is being invested, a project that has the support of the European Union for the redevelopment of an area in the eastside of Birmingham. This is an area that is very depressed in economic terms, an industrial area that has storage facilities, and factories, and is currently going through a process of gentrification. We were thinking about how cultural institutions, commercial galleries, and non-profits are used as “shock troops” to elevate the real estate value of the site, and in this case Ikon was invited to be part of this urban renewal project by opening a new space on the eastside. We started thinking about the relationship between the institution and its context, and how the institution might do a sort of honest act of defining itself in the middle of this real estate strategy. It is a strategy that has a very concrete and practical aspect that involves the displacement of people who live in the area.

Gabriel Cazares: They inject an enormous amount of money and the people who live there can’t afford to pay rent, and they end up being displaced.

MdCC: What was the proposal that you presented?

RF: The proposal was very simple. We gravitated around a phrase, and the metaphor it created. The phrase was “I am what I am”, a phrase that can be read as an act of honesty.

JC: It is a form of apparent humility, but it can also come across as something extremely arrogant, it can have that double interpretation.

RF: We proposed to demolish a section of the building, and with this material design the sign for the institution, to present that double entendre of being defined by what you already are, and what constitutes you.

GC: Just to clarify, the new facility that Ikon is going to occupy in the eastside is a previous storage facility — a quite emblematic and representative construction in the area. As such, the institution was using the space of someone who had been previously displaced because of the renewal strategy, something that is reflected in the current urban phenomena that the place is going through.

RF: We wanted to design a sign that is still a sort of architectonic element that gives identity to the institution.

GC: There is a really close relationship between the Ikon project and the project at Langton, in the sense that here we are also proposing that the institution redefine itself.

MdCC: Let’s talk now about the project that you have developed for us, New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act.

RF: The project started with an integral and structural analysis of New Langton Arts, in particular its characteristics as a non-profit organization with a 30-year history, and more specifically, what we considered to be the “maximum capital” of an institution like this, which we concluded is its archive or what we call the “documented historical memory”. This came out from the way people refer to Langton, and how those references were made mostly in historical terms —Vito Acconci was here, Nam June Paik did a project, Olafur Eliasson had his first American show here. When talking about Langton the people we interviewed talked about its history. New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act proposes that New Langton capitalize on the sale of what is their maximum capital.

Installation photo of Tercerunquinto’s project for New Langton Arts

MdCC: How is this project different from the ones you have realized in the past?

RF: In a way it is sort of new for us, because in the past the relationship of the institution to its surroundings, was something we approached from an architectonic perspective, or a spatial perspective to use broader terms. In this case, the analysis of Langton came from a more conceptual perspective that related to its history and its archive.

GC: We saw that the “real” site of Langton is not it’s building but its archive. The building doesn’t matter here, the institution is represented in a different way, not by its building but by its history.

MdCC: Julio, you mentioned the other day something I would like to go back to, the idea of how places like Langton have been “at the bottom of the chain”, they have been places that function to nurture the gallery and the museum system.

JC: If you had to do a chart of the art system as a whole — artists, non-commercial spaces, galleries, museums — and differentiate their personalities, you would see that a place like Langton, any other non-profit, or spaces that exist in an intermittent one-off-way, are at the bottom of the chain. In terms of diffusion and distribution of work they are the ones that open up the trench (?) art by offering artists, and new art forums, they open the way for the other spaces, for the places that sell, commercialize and legitimize. On the other extreme of this spectrum you could find a franchised museum that has spaces all over the world, with a very specific historic profile, and a methodology of circulation. The non-profit spaces are the very first step for an artist after their studio, or their own house. In this sense the project we are proposing looks to test the institution, and its parameters as a non-profit.

MdCC: Your project creates an interesting friction between non-profit spaces and the art market; by proposing the sale of the institution’s archive you are proposing that the non-profit space insert itself in the market. Could you elaborate on this?

RF: With this project we are asking Langton to face itself, its mission and values, to rethink what it means to be a non-profit nowadays. Beyond the price the archive might reach on its own, a key aspect of the project for us will be the speculation, the possible different offers, the appraisal, and all the other elements that will come into play the moment this offer is made. Something that is really interesting to us is the way the institution is confronted with itself the moment it needs to decide on something like this. The metaphor that comes to mind is how in very precise circumstances you might be faced with the need to give away the one thing that defines you. In another way it is a sacrificial act made to be able to survive.

GC: It also speaks to other things; how the artists that ran spaces from the 70’s — which play a significant historical role in the development of contemporary art practice — are now facing the challenge of rethinking its mission and values, and in many cases are in danger of having to close down.

- Fin - 

Archive detail, New Langton Arts

New Langton Arts’ Archive For Sale: A Sacrificial Act

The collective of Tercerunquinto has proposed to New Langton Arts to put the organization’s archive, or “the documentation of its historical memory”, up for sale.

After conducting an informal analysis of the structure of Langton as a non-profit institution — acknowledging a history of chronic economic uncertainty — Tercerunquinto has identified Langton’s memory as its most valuable asset. Langton’s history is closely tied to the emergence of new art forms — performance and time-based art, video, installation, improvised and electronic music, and language poetry. Langton’s archive reflects this diverse history, containing photographic, audio, and video documentation, as well as communication with artists over the past 30 years. Additionally, the ‘behind the scenes’ of the institutional archive, mostly fiscal documents, were deemed equally as important to the makeup of the organization’s history.

Besides the economic value that the archive might reach in the market, Tercerunquinto is interested in the “sacrificial act” implied in the gesture of relinquishing one of the most valuable resources that the institution possesses — an accumulation of artifacts that reflects its very character and institutional mission.

— Tercerunquinto
San Francisco, September 2007