Notes on art by Nathaniel Katz
The artist book that V and I sent to Moscow for the biennial.
Several Attempts at Drawing the Borders of Homelands and Promised Lands, 2010
A series of blind contour line drawings attempting to draw the borders of non-existant, unrecognized, wished for, or hoped for Homelands and Promised Lands.
“So much for poetry, the Jezebel that kept me treacherous company all these years. Olet lucernam. Now it would be nice to tell a joke or two, but I can only think of one on the spot like this, just one. What’s more, it’s a Galician joke. Maybe you’ve heard it before. A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a forest like the Parco di Traiano or the Terme di Traiano, but a hundred times bigger and more unspoiled. And the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who’re walking and crying. And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them why they’re crying. And one of the Galicians stops and says: because we’re all alone and we’re lost.”
-Roberto bolaño, The Savage Detectives, 421.
“Learning How to Milk a Cow from my Father” will be included in the Sherwood Festival as part of a selection of video art by the Fondazione March in Padova. The theme for the screening is “Territorial and Conceptual Dimensions”
“Nationalists claim that some groups have an inherent or primordial right to live as a ‘nation’ in a state of their own because they share a common ancestry, ethnicity or destiny. Most modern scholars, however, view nationalism in a different light, seeing it as an attempt to create an ‘imagined community’ based on myths, language and culture – and exploiting the means of mass communication made possible by industrialization – to construct a national identity and consciousness.”
-Jonathan Cook, Disappearing Palestine
My video performance “Getting Inside My Computer” will be screened at the DEEP LEAP MICROCINEMA in Portland, OR.
“The (more or less) monthly screening series combines thematically-curated video art and experimental film with commissioned performance. The next show, which takes place on the 25th of May at the nascent Grand Detour space, is themed around the phrase “THE INTERNET IS A TERRIBLE PLACE TO LIVE” and examines digital/physical presence, cybernetics and our increasingly technology-mediated lives.”
Also on program are Jeremy Bailey, Nia Burks, Rachael Morrison, Max Juren, Stephen Slappe, Grey Gersten and a performance by Weird Faction.
“The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), initiated in 1990 in Tartu, Estonia,[1] and formed in February 11, 1991, in the Hague, is a democratic, international organization. It is a roof organisation whose members are political organisations and governments representing indigenous peoples, occupied nations, minorities and independent states or territories which lack representation internationally. The organization educates groups in what channels to use to make their voices heard, and helps defuse tensions so that frustrated groups do not turn to violence to gain attention for their demands. Some former members, like Armenia, East Timor, Estonia, Latvia and Georgia, have gained full independence and joined the United Nations.”
-from Wikipedia
As a child I was a foreigner in a foreign country. I grew up as an American in Israel, though I had never before lived in the United States. On the Kibbutz where we lived there were many foreign volunteers, young folks in their twenties from all over the world (mostly US, Western Europe and Australia) that would spend some time working in exchange for living costs. Being the English speaking foreign boy, I used to spend a lot of time in the company of these volunteers, and I would imagine what the far away countries they came from were like. With the help of one volunteer, at the age of 8 I created a world atlas, creating a page of vital statistics for all of the countries I could think of.
This past month The second grade class to whom I teach Art and Computers in Monza was studying about homelands. An opportune moment considering the research around “Making Aliyah”. So I asked my second graders to create invented homelands, to construct maps and flags and cultural identities, they even wrote a national anthem. We did some reflection on what makes one place different from another, and how we know that we belong to a particular place.
Consensus around what is a homeland can be summed up with Stella’s comment, “Like an island or something. A piece of earth where some people live.”
We are compiling the invented homelands into an atlas of the World of Grade 2. Following are some examples.
As part of the project “Making Aliyah” V and I have been researching other homelands and promised lands; people with an ancestral claim to a land or a religious notion that there is a land that is theirs.
I started some drawings that are outlines of the borders of non-existant homelands, or homelands without autonomy, partial autonomy, or separatist movements. Starting at one place I was following the outlines, by the time I was back to where I started, where I started had changed. Seemed like a nice reflection on the shifting nature of claims to land and definitions of borders.
In a separate project, V and I have been working on a Frankfurt school activity book, with coloring and connect the dots and mazes. Seemed interesting to apply these activities to border making as well. We thought about connect the dots for the homeland drawings, and thought about the defining act that drawing takes on in this gesture. Connecting dots with a line, bringing into definition and committing a border. What is the role of the participant then? the drawer who is connecting dots? are they rendering the imagined land real, or are they forcing it into a specificity?
(an early version of Adorno connect the dots, feel free to download and try it!)
Milan’s Chinatown is concentrated on one main street, Via Paolo Sarpi, and then branching off into a few side streets. The main street is closed off to traffic so a common sight is that of chinese delivery men running up and down the street with hand carts loaded up with boxes.
Nearby there is the non-profit art center Via Farini, that hosts a well known residency as well as other projects. As a result of the proximity there is some casual mixing of artists into the Chinatown area.
At some point last year, the Italian Art collective Alterazioni Video were impressed by all the chinese delivery men and organized a somewhat impromptu hand cart race.
I wasn’t in Milan at this time last year, by all accounts it was a very fun spontaneous event, and so when V and I heard that the 2nd annual hand cart race was taking place this Sunday we went to check it out.
What we found was a hipster art crowd overtaking the predominantly Chinese neighborhood, drinking beers and being an art crowd (as you’d find at any gallery opening) Meanwhile Alterazioni Video, sporting their sharply designed hand cart t-shirts were organizing race teams. They smartly set a rule that for every Italian racer there must be a Chinese racer. The problem was that there weren’t many Chinese to be found… so we witnessed the sad sight of Italian art hipsters running up to curious Chinese on-lookers and pleading them to compete so that they could participate.
The sight was that of artists appropriating a means of survival/commercial activity utilized by an immigrant neighborhood, to have fun with it. In this it was quite ugly, and left me with a bitter taste in the mouth.
It seemed like any opportunity to get in touch with a neighborhood was disregarded. Even having a translator to make announcements in Chinese was not thought of, and on the fly some poor girl was recruited against her wishes to make announcements in Chinese.
If it was not the intention of Alterazioni to get in touch with the community, far enough, no need to force community involvement or dialogue. If it was the intention of Alterazioni to organize something fun and spontaneous and offer to the community, then okay, but make an effort to get the word out to someone other than the art crowd. If it was the intention of Alterazione to appropriate something impressionable to them from the neighborhood and then as artists utilize the language of art to organize an event that somehow offers a reflection on the community, then damn, this was a racist event to witness a bunch of priviliged Italians run around “slumming” like the poor Chinese.
V tells me that these types of silly competitions (like a race with a frog, and the first one to arrive with the frog still alive wins) are quite common during festivals in little villages in Italy, and that perhaps there was a reflection on that. Sounds like an interesting reflection, and they should go to some small Italian villages and enact silly art competitions there.
Christopher Robbins: we need a WPA field officer here in Milan!
Aside from all of the potential problematics that made me squirm while watching laughing drunk artists fall over their hand carts, I also couldn’t help but notice how well and expensively documented the project was. There were probably 5 very expensive still cameras and 3 very professional grade video camera carefully shooting the action and being sure to include a Chinese person in every shot. And of course it was carefully documented in high quality. This is a project that will look incredible in documentation. It will be written up very intelligently about how the action opened a conversation between the nearby art center and the immigrant neighborhood, how as a result an event was organized for the community, and the pictures will prove that there were Chinese and Italian mixing.
Here is the video from last year…
and of course the facebook page
