Nevada Museum of Art: A+E Conference 2011

As you know, the SNC Gallery Club sponsored five student tickets to the Art and Environment conference at the Nevada Museum of Art from September 29^th to October 1^st. Out of the submissions, those selected were Anza Jarschke, Heath Pierson, Glen Cheriton, Karl Schwiesow, and myself, with Logan Lape also in attendance. We are planning to do a collaborative piece as a response to the conference, which I’ll post as a follow-up once it’s done, along with more of our thoughts as students attending the conference; in the meantime, here’s a brief rundown of some of the panelists and work that was discussed. As there were quite a few presentations, I won’t be covering them all, but here are a few that really piqued my interest.

Thursday night featured a lecture and performance from Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and four members of the Reno Philharmonic. Miller has created a project that he calls ‘Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica’, or just Ice Music; music composed as an acoustic portrait of Antarctica. He traveled there and set up a portable studio in order to capture and digitally reconstruct the resonant frequencies of the ice. It was a remarkable performance, in which he sampled, looped, composed, mixed, and spoke about the connection between music and information. Below is an example of the project; you can read more about it, and Miller’s book, ‘The Book of Ice’, here and here.

Friday was the first full day of panelists. The first panelist was Alexander Rose, director of the Long Now Foundation. Long Now is concerned with long-term thinking and an expanded sense of present time. Rose discussed the current Long Now project, a large-scale, fully mechanical 10,000 year clock that is currently being constructed in west Texas; the clock will be sealed inside a mountain, and will chime once a year, with a different chime each year, for the next 10,000 years. You can read more about the 10,000 year clock here.

10,000 year clock prototype 1, photo by Rolfe Horn

Next came a series of panels on the Altered Landscapes photography collection at the museum. Edward Burtynsky spoke about his work, photographing the effects of industry on the natural world. He uses images of quarries, tailings, refineries, mines, oil fields, etc., to remind us that we all participate in the degradation of nature:

Oil Fields 19a

Nickel Tailings No. 34

Oxford Tire Pile #8

Chris Jordan, who recently exhibited his ongoing project titled ‘Running the Numbers’ (digital manipulations which demonstrate the massive scale of human consumption), spoke about his work on Midway Island, photographing the decomposing corpses of birds whose stomachs are full of plastic. I won’t post those images here, for the sake of those who would rather not see them, but I would highly recommend taking a look here; it’s some incredibly powerful imagery. While showing these images, Jordan spoke about the need to reconnect emotionally with the ongoing environmental crisis.

There were many more presentations that day; Subhankar Banarjee, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Fritz Haeg, Thomas Kellein, Leo Villareal, David Benjamin, Geoff Manaugh, Mark Smout, and Liam Young all presented and spoke about their work and ongoing projects. As this is running a little long already, I’m going to skip ahead to Saturday and talk about a presentation that I really enjoyed, Amy Franceschini’s “This is Not a Trojan Horse”. Franceschini came onstage dressed as a pantomime horse, while Gaetano Carboni, commissioner of the project and director of the Polinaria Arts Center, introduced the project: a large-scale mobile sculpture of a horse, designed to travel through the Abruzzo region of Italy, where traditional farming techniques have suffered due to globalization. Franceschini spoke about how the traveling sculpture was designed to engage locals and farmers into conversation, and to prompt creative-problem solving. As they moved through the countryside, Franceschini and her group, FutureFarmers, collected/documented samples of traditional farming practices (interviews with locals, recipes, tools, etc).

Photos by Daniela d'Arielli

Other presenters on Saturday included Patricia Johanson, who creates functional and sculptural infrastructure projects; Richard Black, John Carty, Mandy Martin, Gerald Nanson, and John Reid, who all spoke about various aspects of water environments in Australia; Jorge Pardo, who gave a pretty fascinating presentation of his work in blurring the line between viewer and participant in design and architecture; and Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author and futurist, who gave one hell of a closing speech about the realities that we’re facing with the world at large.

Overall, I thought the conference was an extremely valuable experience to have as a student. We all appreciate the Gallery Club’s sponsorship of our tickets, and I’ll be sure to follow up with our collaborative response piece.

2011 A+E Conference at the NMA - Ticket Sponsorship

Upcoming this month is the Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art (http://nevadaart.org/conference2011/) from September 29 - October 1. The conference "brings together artists, scholars, designers, and writers for a dialogue that fosters new knowledge in the visual arts. During the Conference, the Museum's galleries feature exhibitions that question our relationships with natural, built, and virtual environments, while serving as a springboard for Conference sessions
and keynote presentations."

Art museums can be temples to culture or cultural catalysts. They can be passive and predictable or unpredictably idea-driven. Museums can watch the world pass them by, or they can shape the trajectory of its course. Art and ideas matter here. We see art that challenges minds, melds environments and cultures, and responds to the uncertainties of the future. Art has a point of view and it deserves a voice at the table. That's what the Art + Environment Conference gives it.

This year, Gallery Club has sponsored the purchase of 5 student tickets to the conference. They are opening up eligibility to receive these tickets to all current Sierra Nevada College students. Any interested students can submit a 1-page, double-spaced paper addressing why they would like to attend the conference and what benefit it would have to their work. Submissions are due Tuesday, September 20 and selections will be made by the Fine Arts faculty. Please send all papers to Logan Lape (llape@sierranevada.edu). Notifications will be sent out later that week.

Due to the limited number of tickets available from Gallery Club, they and the Fine Arts Department invite any students not selected to purchase their own ticket join their fellow students at the conference (http://www.nevadaart.org/shop/productview?pid=659).

let there be

I'll have more to say about this show in the future, but wanted to post a quick note about the Leo Villareal show that just opened at the Nevada Museum of Art. I'm going to try to run a field trip to it for my current "Art & Advertising" class -- we'll soon be doing a project around projecting images onto non-traditional surfaces, and I think the show will be an inspiring point of reference. It's also pertinent in the way it translates visual operations you'd normally associate with advertising, and moves them into a "fine art" space. It's actually very appropriate that this show is running a few blocks from downtown Reno, where animated light is put to different ends (and on an even grander scale).


It's the first art show that my daughter Julia has attended. She seemed to dig it. If ayone out there is on Reno for the spring break, you should check it out. The show runs through May 22.

Of Prospectives and Pig Bladders

I'm still catching up on activities that happened towards the end of last semester or over the break; one of the highlights of that period for me was the Prospectives 09 festival, a digital arts festival organized by Joseph DeLappe, a Professor of Digital Art at UNR.

I wrote a review of a portion of the festival for Rhizome -- specifically, an exhibit hosted at UNR's Sheppard Gallery. Here's a quote:

It seemed there was a common desire to enlist the spectator as a participant. Open until December 16, 2009, the works included in the show involved a fair amount of “play,” but the artists seemed attuned to the complexities involved with the interaction between machine and participant, thus it’s play inflected with critique.

I didn't have room to cover the performance aspect of the festival, a cluster of multimedia pieces presented at the Nevada Museum of Art. The performances were worthy of a write-up in themselves, though at this point I only have a couple fugitive notes to offer. Below are two photos Joseph sent me. The first shows Stephanie Lie's Vibrating Milk, in which a camera trained on a drum head covered with milk sent a live feed to the big movie screen in the NMA's Wayne and Miriam Prim Theater. Modulated sound got the drum head vibrating, and the milk was perturbed into a variety of shimmering patterns -- on the big screen, we were treated to a mix of a constantly-shifting abstract expressionist painting, and a 60s psychedelia rock show backdrop.

The second photo is of Natalia Jaeger's Miranda. Jaeger offered the audience bananas, and then invited the audience to watch a clip of Carmen Miranda projected on her underwear. We watched the Busby Berkely-choreographed dancers navigate their giant bananas through their geometric progressions (even without the upskirt proscenium, it would be impossible to miss the phallic implications of a bevy of female dancers wielding massive bananas. But it was still a bit of a revelation to see the bananas, at one point -- as they were ranged into a circular bullseye -- suddenly become teeth in a canary vagina dentata). And while we watched, Jaeger regarded the audience with eyes of dull malice, slowly chewing the heads off a small bouquet of flowers.



Nor did I have space, in the Rhizome review, to elaborate on the swarm of flying pig bladders that were set whirling in the air above the UNR campus one evening. They were the work of Doo-Sung Yoo, who has created a variety of pieces that meld robotics with animal parts.

(first pic courtesy of Joe, the others are mine)




I actually caught the outdoor installation by accident, on my way to an unrelated dance performance at UNR. After the dance, on my way through the Church Fine Arts Building at UNR, I came across a cluster of the pig bladder balloons corralled at the end of an empty hallway, quietly jostling each other, unattended. It was gratifyingly eerie.

Local Event: Prospectives.09

UNR is hosting what sound like a very exciting three-day festival of digital artworks, starting this Thursday, Nov. 12. Events include a symposium, an exhibit at the Sheppard gallery, a projection at the Fleischmann Planetarium, and performances at the Nevada Museum of Art.


As the blurb has it:

Prospectives.09 is an international festival showcasing the work of graduate and Phd candidates working across a diverse spectrum of digital arts practice. The festival showcases the work of 37 artists and performers from throughout the United States and internationally (including artists from Australia, United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Chile, Sweden and Portugal).

The main link is here:
http://www.unr.edu/art/prospectives09.html

And even if you can't make any of the local events, they're hosting some net art as well, which you can experience from the comfort of whatever seat you happen to be sitting in right now. The direct link for that is:
http://www.unr.edu/art/prospectives09/netart.html

Nevada Museum of Art: Romello Yu

I took the two sections of the Beginning Digital Darkroom class to the Nevada Museum of Art. As usual, there was a good mix of exhibits on display; I hope to post about some of the other exhibits in the coming days, but thought I'd start with Romello Yu's "Remembering Abu Ghraib," now in the media gallery. It touches on some issues that recently came up in class, particularly in regard to an assignment in which the students had to make a poster-sized image that was in some way a response to the war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq.

One of the problems that immediately comes up in the assignment (at least for those who focus on the horrors of war) is: how do you represent something horrible without abstracting it in such a way that the horror is aestheticized?

It's a bind that I don't think Yu escapes. He has created stylized versions of the poses found in the Abu Ghraib photos, utilizing Tangrams. The work is clearly not done in bad faith -- I don't have any sense that Yu is trying to exploit the photos, or the people in them, in any way. He wants to show the prisoners as manipulatable objects, but I don't know that his commentary -- "prisoners as playthings" -- is an insight that's compensated for by the aura of abstraction and aestheticization it's wrapped in.


It reminded me of Botero's paintings and drawings on Abu Ghraib, which I saw displayed a couple years ago in Berkeley. Those were clearly acts of sympathetic imagination; the focus of the paintings is squarely on the prisoners, usually to the exclusion of the guards, in a way that is meant to put the viewer right there in the prison cell with them. And yet I felt there was something redundant about these images, which affected me far less viscerally, less deeply, than the photos themselves. Seeing the originals -- displayed on my computer in the middle of a work day when I was working as an art director, taking a break from my current assignment to take a peek at the day's news -- was a real gut-punch. I felt like I was covered with a nauseating slime for about a week afterwards.

That the Abu Ghraib photos seem to make subsequent visual interpretations seem redundant is not to say there's nothing to say about them, beyond the blunt horror of their evidence of abuse. They could be talked about in relation to a number of things: the history of lynching photos and postcards (it wasn't until I read an article on the book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" that it occurred to me that lynching photos weren't taken as exposés, but rather as souvenirs), gender relationships, frat hazing rituals, pornography.

In some way, in their cruelty and in the strangeness of how the cruelty was expressed, they beg to be examined, to be understood. There's something fundamentally mysterious about their existence at all, as photos. Why were they taken? Why do they seem to have a sickening veneer of tourist photography to them? Certainly some of them were taken in an extension of the cruelty of the acts they were recording -- underlining an act of humiliation by making a note of it, something that could be distributed beyond the moment itself. Keeping the humiliation for posterity.


Some of the motives for the photos seem to have been more complicated and conflicted. Sabrina Harman, who took several of the photos, claimed in an interview that one of the reasons she took the photos was because she could hardly believe what she was seeing, so she wanted to record what was happening, as a way of confirming it to herself. She wasn't the one who leaked the photos, and her rationale may be self-serving, but I suspect there's at least an element of truth to it.

I have a suspicion that the Abu Ghraib photos will always defeat the visual artist (though I can imagine a play, a film, a novel or a documentary expanding our understanding of those images). I think visual artists will nonetheless continue to respond to them -- partly because their impact is so visceral, and responding to them visually is a way of trying to psychologically metabolize them. I think, also, there is an impulse to cling to the social relevance of image-making, in an environment where visual culture seems to have its own autonomy, its own overpowering ubiquity, rendering the visual artist a mere asterisk in a strangely impersonal and massive transaction.

The Abu Ghraib photos are facts that defy art, even the artfulness of looking: in the way that even photos taken in extremis -- the photo of Robert Kennedy's assasination, say, or Eugene Smith's photo of a WW2 American soldier holding a dying baby in the Saipan mountains -- seem composed, seem to have been taken in by a thoughtful eye. The Abu Ghraib photos weren't taken by witnesses, but by perpetrators -- images that weren't taken in an act of seeing, but in an act of blindness. There's a powerful feeling of schizophrenia in them -- what is so clearly evident in the photos is something those who took the photos were not seeing. It's natural for an artist to attempt to reclaim those images from the blank stare that first captured them. No matter how quixotic that errand may be.

Louise Bourgeois film at NMA

The Nevada Museum of Art is showing a documentary about Louise Bourgeois several times this week. Bourgeois is a fascinating artist, someone who defies easy categorization, and who has a bracing disregard for making her audience comfortable.


The showings of "Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress And The Tangerine" are:

Today at 6:30
Wednesday at 6:30
Saturday at 1:30
Sunday at 1:30

There's also a good recent article on Bourgeois in the New York Review of Books online, by Sanford Schwartz:

"Perhaps the most amazing of the many remarkable aspects of Louise Bourgeois is that if she had died in her middle seventies we would not have known how daring, strange, ambitious, or disturbing an artist she could be."