V says that in Italian to say a bearded history is to refer to the official history.
Or maybe she just made it up…
My search for an alternative ideology for an alternative promised land led me to early zionist thought which led further back to pre-nationalist, pre-zionist central and eastern european jewish intellectuals. All these bearded men of study, were involved in the production of a history, either lost or non-existant, and by default in the construction of an ideology. These narratives were perhaps at first not entirely fixed on one location or even on a specific location for nationhood. Many of these thinkers came out of the mid 19th century explosion of central european nationalism, and countered with a jewish response. They were either advocating for a rightful place in the newly defined national identities (Jost), or were carving out a place for potential autonomy (Dubnow).
All of these bearded narratives were later used to construct the dominant ideology we recognize as zionism. And through their bearded histories there are other potentials, other stories, other ideologies and perhaps other promised lands. And so as a first stage to my aliyah to the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia, I am in search of the construction of an ideology. And this is taking place through a long bearded narrative. First attempt is a re-enactment of Herzl’s definitive Jewish State, sporting my very own Herzl’n beard.
Before action there must be desire.
A couple of months ago v and i were asked to participate in 1 hour art, an Italian/international project based in Bologna from the curators Viviana Checchia and Anna Santomauro. The project proposes the question “Have you ever thought about one hour of contemporary art at home?” and offers an index of proposals by Italian artists all over the world of a one hour art project that they will enact in your home if interested. Looking through the website and proposals we realized just how distant they are from any actual person inviting them to their house. At the same time, since arriving in Milan we have felt quite isolated from any art community and wondering if one even exists in an Italian contemporary art scene that values commodity over exchange. In fact many of the artists listed are no longer even based in Italy, choosing instead the more fertile contemporary art grounds of New York, Berlin, London. So, we decided as our proposal to create the conditions possible for the realization of the other 1 hour art projects by taking the role of the “ordinary” individuals being sought, and requesting the realization of a project for us. Through this we hope to get in touch with some artists and start a conversation about the potential for contemporary art practices in Italy. While you would think that Milan would be a good starting place for having a project realized, we still have not been able to schedule a time when one of the artists are present and available. Possibly next week we will host a visit in our apartment. However, while we were in Berlin we were presented with an option of three different available artists. Since we didn’t have a home to host the art in Berlin, we asked for an alternative proposal. Enrico Bressan proposed the following project for us:
“…a very short performance inside the Tacheles building. The Kunsthaus Tacheles, constructed in 1907, is a former department store which now houses a self-organized collective of artists on Oranienburgerstr. 54-56a in Berlin-Mitte. Though today Tacheles is a popular art center with a nightclub, the lease with the property owner expired with the end of 2008 and the future of the art house is uncertain.
After the many insistent voices about a probable demolition of the building I’d like to improvise a little tribute to this original art space. The impression when you are inside the entrance hall is strange because you find yourself arounded by multi-colours graffiti, posters and writings. But instead of joining to the writers and let my personal sign, I’d like to simulate a cleaning hour trying to dust and brush the stairs and the painted walls. In this way I’m trying to increase the graffiti value of those who pass there and in that way to prepare Tacheles to an other (maybe the last) challenge.”
We enjoyed meeting Enrico and spending the morning together cleaning Tacheles. It was funny cleaning while people that worked there passed us without thinking twice about why or who was cleaning the space (though this is a phenomenon i appreciated in general about berlin, the ability to enter and move in spaces that straddle the public/private line without being questioned or asked to leave). Tourists that entered the building asked us questions, which we tried to answer as best we could. While the act of cleaning may have been a symbolic one, what i appreciated most was the absurdity of the gesture. there was really no point to pick up cigarette butts or broken bottles from a space that is defined by its irreverence. and it felt silly to sweep the dust from a floor that has years of dirtiness caked into its surface. but it felt nice to care for the space a bit. to think of the walls as needing some caressing, and the floor of some agitation. now, writing about it, i am thinking about shel silverstein’s book the giving tree. the tacheles has been that for a couple of generations of german and foreign occupiers, and maybe it needed a little bit of love in return.
After the performance we presented Enrico with a certificate that we created for the actualization of a 1 hour art project. It is the way we hoped to insert our intervention, to acknowledge the mutual exchange necessary for any shared artistic experience.
Enrico documented the project here.
Since then we have e-mailed a bit, most recently I explained to him why v and i were interested in getting in touch with other artists, and that it was unfortunate that he wasn’t actually in Italy anymore. Enrico responded thoughtfully that “As you know, artists need to be in movement trying new experiences and collaborations. The geographical area where I come from (Veneto) is economically very rich but, about art, remains a desert (with only few exceptions). So I decided to move away trying to make a step longer, so I went outside Italy.”
So after the first 1 hour art, our question is still open, whether there is a potential for art community in italy that is engaging with challenging (social) issues in creative (artistic) modes from within.
On Friday Valentina and I attended the performance “Individual Utopias” by Bosnian artist Lala Rascic & Vuneny at Galerie Zero. The performance is a retelling of an experience the artist had a couple of years ago when she was invited by the Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti to participate in a project with mental health patients in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a accompanied by an edition of 500 artist books with the script for the story as well as drawings of the cast of characters involved. The story is a funny account of the missteps and miscommunications between artists, arts organizations, social organizations, and the beneficiaries of social projects. Rascic highlights, through various voice impersonations, sound effects and clean sound design by Vuneny, the absurdity of the situation and vis-à-vis offers an institutional critique of the naivete of artist social projects. In her story everyone is uninformed, unable to communicate, and looking after their own interests only. Throughout, Rascic is at a distance, not aligning herself with the artists or with the locals, seemingly the only objective observer able to note the ridiculousness of the situation. It was a funny story, as those stories tend to be, and Rascic is a good storyteller. It was the kind of story you can imagine began over drinks at a bar, impersonating and laughing at the situation and then the idea occurred to make it into a performance. I have an interest in storytelling as a mode of performance and documentation, however in this case I wished the story would have remained a story told in the bar over drinks. As a performance it offered nothing further toward an analysis of the situation, it gave no new meaning or an opening for meaning, there was no room for side effects. The act of telling the story and the meaning contained in the story were synonomous. It was the kind of performance that you enjoy but wonder how or what this does to further a dialogue. Cesare Pietroiusti when discussing modes of documentation speaks about the potential for side effects, “Maybe we can imagine a situation where a message, working on a symbolic level (so, conceptually, on a different level than a direct ‘real time’ experience), does not determine only the fixity of a specific meaning, but also ’side’ meanings.”
There was a moment in Rascic’s story when she told of the complete breakdown of the project. According to her account the director of the project is complaining to Pietroiusti about the failure, the artists are not connecting with the mentally ill, the hospital director is hijacking the materials, and “art” has not transformed the lives of the patients. At which point Pietroiusti states that this is an experiment, that there is no way it is supposed to turn out, but rather that the situation itself for him is the project. He is conducting research, and the process as it unfolds informs his research. While this quotation may have been meant to place Pietroiusti also in the absurdity of the situation, it functioned as a nice reflection on the role and goals of the artist in social practice. Pietroiusti understands very well that the intention or even implimentation of an art project into a social context does not translate into social transformation. His goals are often to see what happens in the encounter between art and social realities, his research is to see what the potential of art is in such situations.
At work a couple of days prior to the performance, Laura, the other art teacher asked me about my practice. I told her of some of the participatory projects that I was involved with Cali, Colombia and in Bologna, Italy. She asked me about responsibility; she told me of having attended a talk by an artist who had done a workshop with immigrant children. The artist showed pictures of himself interacting with the children and also some of the drawings that the kids had made. Some of the drawings represented scenes of domestic abuse and she was appalled that the artist casually displayed these very personal drawings and did not address how he dealt with this. When she asked whether he had a strategy, support system, or training to deal with these things, he said that he did not. What was my position on this Laura wanted to know. I answered first that having an institutional support system (as we do in a school) does not necessarily offer any kind of better support, it just takes the responsibility off of us. I recounted a time when I was teaching in the Bronx and a students assumed my confidence to confide to me that she was abused by her father. I had to inform her that legally I have to report this to the school psychologist and beyond that there is nothing that I can offer. In this situation I was completely rendered paralyzed, whether I was able to deal with it or not. I was put in a place as a teacher where students could grow confident and safe in my presence but that when anything at all private came up I was no longer an autonomous acting agent. In the Bronx case I knew that the school psychologist would completely neglect or botch the entire issue, but that she was the one in the legal place to respond.
As an artist working in a social practice I state very clearly my area of research and the framework of each individual project; this is no different from an artist working in any other media. By being clear I am able to explore with specificity and intention my interests while allowing for new discoveries and unexpected outcomes. My interest is not solely to work with people, and what comes out comes out. I am specifically interested in the potential to imagine alternative realities and relationships. Each of my projects in some way addresses this specifically and the as people are participating in the project they are participating within a tightly defined frame. There is always a potential for unexpected outcomes, especially when working with people. However, since I have defined for myself what my area of research is, I also know what my capacities are, and how to deal with the unexpected within my framework. Like Pietroiusti, I view the process of people coming into encounter with art as research, and the potential “failure” as equally valuable as some pre-ordained idea of what success may be. In the mode of representation that a project assumes after its completion it is important that it act in a way reciprocal to the way a project unfolded. Allowing for meaning to be generated instead of illustrated, and that in this phase of the project there is still potential for new meaning and side effects.
Collaboration with Valentina Curandi. Five performances in the everyday, inserting romantic ideas of Bohemia in front of the Jan Žižka monument in Tabor, Czech Republic. Performances were documented by passing tourists, pausing to photograph the monument.
For our residency at CESTA in Tabor, Czech Republic, Valentina and I collaborated with berlin artist Sibylle Hofter.
Since we only physically shared about 5 days together, we took collaboration loosely as an opportunity to develop themes and bring separate projects into conversation with one another. Valentina arrived in Tabor first and spent time exploring the monument of the great Czech hero Jan Žižka, who succesfully defended Bohemia during the Hussite Wars of the 15th Century. In the monument Žižka is the symbol through which Czech tourists project a national image and have the state re-project it back at them. A romantic and ideological exchange in which nothing is actualized and all is validated; where any complexity of Žižka the man (and his recently in question sexuality) are ignored.
We responded to this romanticism by inserting our own romantic views of Bohemia, and enacting them subtly in front of the Žižka monument. The only way for our performances to be viewed and appreciated was through the camera lens of passing tourists pausing to photograph the monument. We enacted five romantic gestures: Waterfall: by pouring a Czech beer from one glass to another; Mountains: by shaping traditional Czech cakes into mountain like shapes; Thunder: loudly blowing one’s nose; Passion: using a magnifying glass and the sun to burn discarded cigarette butts; and finally Death: performed on the fifth day by an absence.
Meanwhile, below Tabor, at the CESTA residency, we were struck by the actualization of romantic ideals: American anarcho-punks bought the place 16 years ago, renovated it, established an art center with an annual international festival and inaugurated the first Czech gay rights parade. Here the projection of romanticism is given place for actualization. To acknowledge this we renovated an old shed into a love shack, a room for intimacy and lounging, replete with straw beds, collapsable lean-to seating, and a hand cranked karaoke machine equipped with the lyrics for B-52′s Love Shack. The space was open to the public during a wedding celebration that took place at CESTA in August, as well as for the three days of the festival, and we hope for future use…
Sibylle arrived after us, and her response was not just to the area and our theme, but also to the work that we already completed. Her contribution took to the hilltop in picking up on small “invisible sculptures” around town, as well as reacting to the seemingly romantic relationship that the Czech have to militarism. You can see her wonderful contribution here. Since she was the last to leave, it was also in her charge to bring the whole thing together into a coherent piece. She did this by creating an exhibition space in her trailer, neighboring the love shack, where she displayed photographs taken in town, documentation of our Žižka performances, and romanto-militaristic objects that she created.
Last October in Bolzano I saw two performance by the French Choreographer Xavier Leroy, they were incredible.
The first was in the museion museum and it was a performance of one of his first dances, called “Self Unfinished.”
It was an affecting and existential piece, but also smart and challenging. He is alone in a brightly lit white room with just a table and a chair. He periodically gets up and walks around the room stopping at one place and laying down. Eventually he removes all of his clothes and balances on his shoulders so that from the vantage of the audience you cannot see his head, and his shoulders become his buttocks, his arms his legs and his buttocks his shoulders; like some strange creature moving around the room. It left me feeling empty and alone for the rest of the night. It felt such an urgent and complete artistic statement. But it also made me think of my relationship to and expectations from dance, to and from a performer. Leroy insists on calling his work dance, although some would like to categorize it as performance art. He is engaged with a dialogue in the dance world and questions of performativity and audience as they relate to the dance medium. He also claims that (contrary to a traditional performance art definition) his work is dance as it relies on a frontal audience, and that he intentionally performs his works more then once.
The second piece I saw was his newest piece and in this one he was very clearly engaging in a dialogue on dance. He stood in front of the audience and conducted us as if we were an orchestra, beneath the seats were speakers that played various tones. His movements were very beautiful, but it felt overly theoretical in his attempt to activate the audience. Instead he left us all sitting passive. After the performance he did a question and answer session and explained how he is so interested in breaking the traditional dancer performer relationship. I’m not so up to date on dance theory, but as far as an audience relationship question in other fields, it felt like a bit of an outdated idea, but perhaps this is still a hot topic in dance.
My collaborative project Fare il Pane a Bologna (Making Bread in Bologna), with Valentina Curandi and Chiara Landonio is part of the Iceberg Festival in Bologna, Italy and will take place between May 21-23 in several market locations and outside of the MAMbo Museum of Modern Art.
Following is a description of the project, we are also keeping a blog to accompany and document the project, with background and historical information that we are gathering around the process. It is both in Italian and English and you can follow it at http://fareilpaneabologna.net/
We would like to investigate the idea of the workshop as a place for putting in common hands knowledge and abilities, personal involvement and process based ways of relationships and transmission.
We have chosen bread for its real importance, for the social and metaphorical value, and for its special relationship with Bologna and the surrounding territory (the tradition of bread production is celebrated by a poetical street of bread that runs through town and connects surrounding villages on the mountains).
We chose bread production as a process, based on the idea of taking time as a way to take place. The many ways in which personal knowledge is actualized, through sharing, comparison, and mixing, mirrors the process of bread production.
WORKSHOP STATION IN STREET MARKETS
We would like to set up a stand for the daily preparation of bread along side other commercial stands in some of the local markets of Bologna.
We will offer ingredients to participants that are interested in producing their own bread.
As a consequence of this invitation, the workshop aims to show and open possibilities of sharing knowledge and techniques on preparation among the participants.
Possible locations are:
- the organic market, c/o the occupied space called xm24, via Fioravanti
- the Earth Market, c/o the courtyard of the Cineteca
- the weekly market, known as la piazzola, Piazza Otto Agosto
WALKING PATHS THROUGH BOLOGNA
During the time necessary for the bread to rise, participants will organize a route to walk together and carry the bread to reach the site of baking, the former Public Bakery of Bologna, now converted to the Municipal Modern and Contemporary Art Museum (MAMBo). Since each market is located in different parts of the town, we hope to draw, and realize together several alternative routes to reach our bakery, according to our needs and the available rising time.
BAKING BREAD IN A MODERN ART MUSEUM
We’d like to build a brick and clay oven for baking bread in the green area in the backyard of the museum, near the future public park located at the center of the District of the Arts which in the future will connect several institutions and organizations dedicated to cinema, visual arts and music. In this way the oven built for this occasion will last as permanent sign of the intervention, becoming available for the use of visitors to the park. Starting the wood burning oven and waiting to bake could be a time to spend in relation to, and we hope to get more confident with, the spaces of the museum. Inviting people to visit together the contemporary art collection while the bread is baking.
When the bread is baked it is for the participants to enjoy.
RENEWING THE MEMORY AS A GIFT
At the end of each day of production we’d like to offer participants a piece of pasta madre, a special kind of yeast produced from the fermentation of flour and water, that requires daily care through simple manual gestures to remain alive and productive. We’d like to find out if there is still in Bologna an old kind of pasta madre, as we know it is usually jealously kept and passed on as a family heritage and secret. I found, we will ask for a small piece to start our bread production. We’d also like to offer this pasta madre as a gift to allow its story to cross new and different paths.
Otherwise, we will bring with us the pasta madre we use in our daily bread baking, a young pasta madre and a gift from Central Italy.
two months (that were originally one month) at lugar a dudas is quickly coming to an end.
besides the work on the playground in nashira, which has really happily occupied most of my time in cali, i’ve also been finishing some editing projects, and working on a new body of work and research about (the language of desire for) intentional communities (as you may have noticed from previous postings on my reading of the history of black mountain. artist residencies are really such a wonderful productive and creative time.
so for my open studio next week i will show some paintings (yes, paintings!) of posters, and three or four (if i finish) videos that i think work quite well together.
for you i offer a preview…
new natives (part of the intentional communities research)
i am currently in cali, colombia at an artist residency in lugar a dudas for about a month, maybe two. curator and friend veronica wiman invited me to collaborate on a project that she initiated with the association of women heads of household. the association is building an eco-village social housing project called Nashira outside of cali for about 90 families where the women will be the homeowners. our project is to design and build a playground/social space for the community, young and old. also collaborating on the project is the cali artist collective helena producciones. at the moment we are in the idea generating phase, and planning some workshops for this weekend to do at nashira and get a sense of how this space will be utilized.
i have some photos from nashira, lugar a dudas and a walk in cali here.
