Life is sweeter than jewish wine

some photos from “Several Attempts at Drawing the Borders of Homelands and Promised Lands” performance

Nathaniel Katz performance at the Synagogue of Pesaro

Background for conclusion and conclusions

In fact, this work has roots back to 2000, when I first started working as a teacher. At the time I had put aside my “artistic” work in favor of “political” work. It was difficult for me to see a potential relationship between the two. So, I spent a year in Guatemala and Chiapas working in an orphanage and doing human rights work. When I returned to New York I spent another year continuing political work within the frame of the pacifist organization The War Resisters League, and with a series of affiliations in the popular anti-globalization protests of the pre-Bush, pre-9/11 days. All of this naturally led to my seeking a teaching position in a high school in the Bronx.

For five years in the Bronx I worked as an art and computer teacher. As with my other political work, I always applied the creative sensibility of the artist, out of the fact that that is who I am, because that is the language that I speak, the education that I had, and because it was often necessary in order to survive a difficult and often frustrating situation of a public school in New York. Although I approached this job creatively, and often did some very creative things (such as co-founded a Spanglish theater company for Bronx youth) I never presented it as my artistic work. Rather, I often found myself frustrated that I was exerting so much energies (creative and physical) towards the job and that I was unable to find the time to be in “the studio”.

I finally left the school in 2005 and in 2006 started graduate school at RISD. When presenting work in grad school I often found how naturally the work of a teacher fit into the narrative of the “artistic” work that I was now doing as a graduate student. I was starting to re-evaluate and re-appreciate exactly what it was that I did for those five years on artistic terms.

As the intentionality was lacking so was the contextualization.

Conclusion of (and conclusions from) a two year durational performance

Two years ago I proposed the following sixth category to Alan Kaprow’s five categories of art:

Work in nonart modes and nonart contexts, do not present the work as art in nonart contexts while simultaneously presenting it as art in art contexts.

I then spent two years working as a school teacher in Italy, in the context of the school presenting it as my work, while in the context of art presenting it as my creative work.

I will try over the next few days and blog posts to write some reflections on what turned out to be, for me, a hugely disappointing failure and compromise. Both for obvious reasons, and some surprising reasons.

Don’t Go To Dongo: Open borders

Last week we drove about 45 minutes up along the western shore to the village of Menaggio. On April 26, 1945 Mussolini passed through there and then turned inland headed to Switzerland. He spent his final night as a free man in Grandola ed Uniti. After Menaggio we also followed the inland route and headed up to Grandola. The road there is a state road that connects with Lugano in Switzerland. There wasn’t much to look for in the village, but we followed a road, Via alle Alpi, that headed way up to the village of Naggio. From there we had a great view of the lake and the Alps, but when we asked the locals for ways to get to Switzerland, they only referred us back down the mountain to the state road. The state road continues for a little while along Lago di Piano, a smaller lake, before arriving to the shores of Lake Lugano and up to the border control. The afternoon was still fine and the road was pretty so we continued all the way to the border. Hoping for some encounter to provide material for our performance we arrived at the border only to be waved through. No stop, no control, no passport check, nothing.
I made it to Switzerland without a problem. We kept driving through to Lugano and then we were free, in Switzerland.

Don’t Go To Dongo: Border crossing

Last week we drove about 45 minutes up along the western shore to the village of Menaggio. On April 26, 1945 Mussolini passed through there and then turned inland headed to Switzerland. He spent his final night as a free man in Grandola ed Uniti. After Menaggio we also followed the inland route and headed up to Grandola. The road there is a state road that connects with Lugano in Switzerland. There wasn’t much to look for in the village, but we followed a road, Via alle Alpi, that headed way up to the village of Naggio. From there we had a great view of the lake and the Alps, but when we asked the locals for ways to get to Switzerland, they only referred us back down the mountain to the state road. The state road continues for a little while along Lago di Piano, a smaller lake, before arriving to the shores of Lake Lugano and up to the border control.

This week the weather was fine again and we drove up to Dongo. On April 27, 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Carla Petacci were hiding in a convoy of retreating Germans, dressed as German soldiers. They were stopped at Dongo by the Partisans 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, identified and later executed.

We arrived at Dongo with a map of historic mountain passes that were used to smuggle contraband from Switzerland to Italy up to the 1960′s and 70′s. In particular we were interested in the Rifugio San Jorio, which only has an elevation of 2010 meters and according to local hiking books is quite a doable day hike in the summer. Unfortunately this is January, and although the weather was sunny along the lake at the high altitude the temperature was quite low. We arrived at the nearby village of Garzeno. From there we were hoping to pick up the hiking trail, but when we asked the local old men hanging out by the church, they pointed us in the direction of the car road instead. This could have been because the hiking trail was impassable in the winter, or maybe they just assumed we would do it by car. We didn’t realize our mistake until we were farther along. So we followed the small car road up along some smaller hamlets with the hope of reaching as close as possible to the nearby rifugio San Giovo. When we reached the ice line we pulled the car over to the side of the road and continued by foot. After a couple of hours of hiking clouds were starting to descend on the side of the mountain and we reached an impassable icy field. Without appropriate winter gear we reached the limit of our abilities and we turned around and started to head back. At that point three pickup trucks pulling snowmobiles drove past us toward San Giovo. We waved them down and hitched a ride to the rifugio. We found out on the way that they were planning to go by snow mobile all the way to the border at San Jorio, and we joined them for that leg as well. We made a symbolic border crossing at San Jorio, but without a contact or a way to continue down the Swiss side we didn’t have much of a choice but to head back with our snowmobile friends.

Don’t Go To Dongo: Attempted border crossing

Last week we drove about 45 minutes up along the western shore to the village of Menaggio. On April 26, 1945 Mussolini passed through there and then turned inland headed to Switzerland. He spent his final night as a free man in Grandola ed Uniti. After Menaggio we also followed the inland route and headed up to Grandola. The road there is a state road that connects with Lugano in Switzerland. There wasn’t much to look for in the village, but we followed a road, Via alle Alpi, that headed way up to the village of Naggio. From there we had a great view of the lake and the Alps, but when we asked the locals for ways to get to Switzerland, they only referred us back down the mountain to the state road. The state road continues for a little while along Lago di Piano, a smaller lake, before arriving to the shores of Lake Lugano and up to the border control.

This week the weather was fine again and we drove up to Dongo. On April 27, 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Carla Petacci were hiding in a convoy of retreating Germans, dressed as German soldiers. They were stopped at Dongo by the Partisans 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, identified and later executed.

We arrived at Dongo with a map of historic mountain passes that were used to smuggle contraband from Switzerland to Italy up to the 1960′s and 70′s. In particular we were interested in the Rifugio San Jorio, which only has an elevation of 2010 meters and according to local hiking books is quite a doable day hike in the summer. Unfortunately this is January, and although the weather was sunny along the lake at the high altitude the temperature was quite low. We arrived at the nearby village of Garzeno. From there we were hoping to pick up the hiking trail, but it was closed due to the weather. Instead we followed the small car road up along some smaller hamlets with the hope of reaching as close as possible to the nearby rifugio San Giovo. When we reached the ice line we pulled the car over to the side of the road and continued by foot. After a couple of hours of hiking clouds were starting to descend on the side of the mountain and we reached an impassable icy field. Without appropriate winter gear we reached the limit of our abilities and we turned around and headed back. The path will probably not thaw until late spring, at which point we will try again.

Don’t Go To Dongo

These past couple of weekends the weather on the lake has been sunny, which has allowed V and I to head up along the lake and begin work on our project Don’t Go To Dongo. Originally conceived in response to an invitation to develop an audio piece for Radio 3 in Italy, the project is an action/ performance crossing the border from Italy to Switzerland, following the trail that Italian dictator Mussolini took sixty six years ago before being caught and executed at the lake side town of Dongo. The Project description follows:

Don’t Go To Dongo

This past year we moved to the lake Como area for some work opportunities. After a couple of months we had some visa complications and had to find a way to quietly slip out of Italy. Since immigrants are allowed a maximum of 90 days within the Schengen Community of European Countries, we decided to flee to nearby Switzerland.

Taking the route along the western shore of the lake, we attempt an escape from Italy through the route that Mussolini attempted sixty-six years earlier before being captured in the town of Dongo.

The real need to leave the country is interwoven with an artistic performance, from which we extract an audio segment documenting an escape attempt from current day Italy.

The audio segment documents an attempted escape from Italy. It is a combination of documentary and storytelling, reality and fiction. A real necessity to leave the country is interwoven with an artistic performance.

The 20 minute radio piece brings together moments from the enactment of the action, including voices encountered along the way, the atmosphere of place and suggestions of the “historic drama”.

Through this action we hope to get a feel for the current political situation of Northern Italy and confront it through a hypocritical act: the flight of illegal immigrants through an infamous route.

/////

Green New World – Project Alpha

Another addition to the ongoing and growing New Natives series.

performance embodiment of text written by individuals seeking to form community, appropriated from the directory of intentional communities.

The de-valuation of the artist knowledge

Finally this month in Milan an exhibition opened on the themes of school as art and alternative knowledge production. if the artistic topic finally made its way to Italy (which is quite slow in acknowledging relevant contemporary art trends) then it must be a topic that is well spent and out of date. The show of course has it’s usual cast of characters, with the grandfatherly willats and rollins and the overrated (it doesn’t really have anything to do with learning, even if it calls itself a school) copenhagen free school, and of course the necessary sidekick of a temporary library.
Thinking about it made me reflect about my work from three years ago that was dealing with topics of education, it seemed I was working on this just before the big peak of art and school in 2008-09 and at the time I couldn’t get too many curators or residencies so interested in my ideas. At first I thought to myself that maybe I just missed the trend and then I thought that actually the artistic research that I was doing at the time was on the performativity of education and the educational potential of performance (the topics of performance of self is still a primary area of focus in my work) and that the later trend of school as art that stemmed from the 2006 failed manifesta and followed into this past year of hot new york shows and free schools focus primarily on the topic of education as one of economy. A research into the performance of education has not surfaced in this wave of school as art. It came to me that the focus on economy is quite convenient for the art market, and although it is seemingly a radical proposal of alternative forms of knowledge acquisition, in reflection it seems to me as being more of a neo-conservative reinforcement of status quo. Because while artists are creating alternative models of education and knowledge acquisition as art, they are proposing the despecialization of fields of knowledge. And while most of these models bring into conversation some philosophy or some science or some craft, the truth of those fields is that they are commodifiable areas of expertise who are unthreatened by their brief free dispersal in an art context. But the creative process itself is the big loser. The artist comes out of this exercise as acknowledging within their own context the inability to place value on the creative process. This may in fact seem like a desirable statement to make until you realize that its repurcussions do not fall on the art market or on the larger market or even on the art education industry, but rather on the artist’s ability to demand some recognition of their non symbolic material value within society. So now if i want to present my skills as a teacher of creative processes I am confronted with a society that does not put as much material value on this skill as on maths or sciences (which is already a given in our culture) but also of other artists who are re-enforcing that idea that my skills don’t have a material value because they will do it for free.