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February 2010
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Idiom at the 2010 NoPassport Conference
by Idiom February 24, 2010
The arrival of widespread interest in performance amongst contemporary artists has not immediately translated into an expanded interdisciplinary interest in that other, classically time-based medium, the theater. Nor has the theater, broadly speaking, seen fit to expand its categories to correspond with the sudden promiscuity of its traditional methodology. What is the nature of this reciprocal ignorance? Is it simply a question of incompatible constituencies? No doubt there is a deep divide in each community’s respective method of production – but are we so determined? This panel aims to examine the recent history of performance as it relates to current patterns of production and dissemination, with special consideration given to the divide between contemporary art and theater.
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The Incidental Person at apex
by Joseph Akel February 18, 2010
More concerned with social services and the integration of “artists into a participatory role in business matters and decisions making,” the APG committed “to the making of no product, work or idea.” Indeed, this broader movement away from the art object was, at the time, in keeping with Conceptualism’s interest in dematerialization. Latham’s emphatic refusal to give either form or definition to the placement of art appeared as a direct confrontation and critique of a society obsessed with objects and products.
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Dinh Q. Lê at P.P.O.W.
by Hong-An Truong February 16, 2010
In Lê’s meticulously clean, hyper-real animation, rough waters lie in wait to claim metal wreckage as helicopter after helicopter falls into the sea. The helicopters are without pilots; some hover, struggling desperately to maintain air above the waters before finally giving in; some seem like lifeless masses being purged, thrown violently from a merciless sky, while still others dive into the waters manically, as if suicidal. In a spectacular, never ending display, the U.S. war machine, once symbolizing American might and technical prowess, fails over and over and over again.
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Omer Fast at Postmasters
by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn February 11, 2010
It is this aporia between the falseness of representation and the truth it communicates that Fast mines so successfully. Reality has no place in his work. It becomes impossibility. Recognizing that fidelity to the event, through the lens of representation, is absurd, Fast fully embraces that absurdity. We see the actor climbing out of the apparatus that hides his intact body, leaving gory stubs of the victim’s limbs lying abandoned on the set, and leaving us, in turn, with a perfect portrait of the mechanics of storytelling.
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Police, Adjective at IFC
by Lauren DiGiulio February 9, 2010
Beneath the scene’s cutting irony lies a subtle investigation of language’s relationship to power. Here, law enforcement’s strict adherence to the letter of the law rehearses the reliance of authority on language as a source of power. We see power derived directly from linguistic definition, delimiting itself according to the dictionary’s prescriptive code. Accordingly, each police officer must be the definition of a law enforcement official, and each offense of the law must be treated precisely as such. If language can here be read as an allegory of state power, then the act of definition performs as a metaphor for the law, delineating rules about how this society uses words much the way that laws demarcate boundaries of human behavior.
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The Storyteller at iCI
by Sarah Stephenson February 8, 2010
Two further artists investigate the combination of the mundane and the communal during a time of war. In Lamia Joreige’s piece Objects of War from 2006, interviewees discuss an object which represented their personal experience of the Lebanese War, in many cases something as simple as a radio or a key. Brought together, these items detail the shared experiences of many through the everyday. Daily life is also the focal point of Steve Mumford’s twelve watercolor sketches; in one, Mumford captures “Iraqi contractors waiting to be paid on a Friday morning FOB Thunder, March 2004″ while another depicts street trading as usual.
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Leonard Cohen at Isle of Wight
by Blythe Sheldon February 5, 2010
Cohen’s 4 am introduction creates a suspension of disbelief for both his concert and Lerner’s production; a performer so in command of his charms that, looking back, his mastery of the crowd seems almost preordained. Cohen is unobtrusive, yet firm. He does not hustle for attention. Even as a songwriter, he circles around the same melancholic themes. The flower children lit their matches and stared. “I would love to see those matches flare. I know that you know why you’re lighting them,” he continued, and broke into “Bird On A Wire.”
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Interview with Julia Weist
by Idiom February 3, 2010
And yet, once the book was published there were these gems related to its distribution that I had to give voice to, such as when I was outed on a chicklit book forum pretending to be a fan of the book and concealing my role as author. The forum administrator who suspended me was named FunkyTown, and the exchange became one of the vignettes performed in relation to the work. Another centered around an Amazon user named “soulnourisher” who identified Sexy Librarian as number 3 on his list “Ultimate Guide to Literary Soul Nourishment for Librarians” (other compendiums included “Ultimate Guide to New Modern Day Female Clerical Sleuths,” and “Ultimate Guide to Faith Based Scrapbooking”).
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Art and Culture in Haiti after the Quake
by Hong-An Truong February 2, 2010
To be sure, cultural objects, and the discourse surrounding them, have consistently served as pawns in our civilization’s long, ugly history of war and violence. Consider the collections of artifacts and antiquities housed in major historical museums across the Western world. These collections can be seen as a record of imperialist desire and the power to steal – often in the name of science and preservation. A weapon of nation-building, art objects are inextricably bound up with a kind of global ordering. They allow nations to claim history and shape it, to locate themselves via friend and foe alike.
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