Course vs. Score
Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop within the Artist as Educator graduate class taught by Caroline Woolard, an artist I greatly admire, at SVA (School of Visual Arts) in NYC. While walking the class through the process of designing a semester-long, college-level art class I tried to talk about how, while on the one hand, a college syllabus is a very institution-friendly document that outlines what useful and necessary information and activities the course will cover, it can also operate as a set of instructions that facilitates a generative process or kind of performance. There are many important things to consider, such as “Am I teaching from my bias and how can I counter that?,” “How can I create an arc over a 16 week semester and break-down the material into ‘consumable chunks’?” or “What is my criteria for evaluation and how can I make it transparent to the students?,” but just as important are other questions: As teaching artists, how can we imagine our course as a laboratory? How can we design structures and assignments that are open, or balance instrumentality with a sense of serendipity, irreverence, playfulness, absurdity, intentional failure or other unquantifiable quality that may be conducive to making art? When I arrived at the class I was more than pleased to join in with their performance of a Fluxus aqueous event score, passing water around a circle with a spoon.
ELSE magazine launch: The Imperceptible Self
I am excited to be included in the latest edition of ELSE journal: “The Imperceptible Self.” In my contribution, “The Image of Empathy and Becoming in 1970s Star Trek Cosplay,” I have included a selection of images from a found slide archive and tried to contextualize it with some history and speculative framing. Launch and reading tomorrow at The Powerplant Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
ELSE Journal launch issue 2: “The Imperceptible Self”
Fully aware that in these times, our “interaction” with “other” cultures and with nature is both inevitable and profoundly altering; we will consider other modes of framing action and existence than identity politics, shepherding nature and “I.” How else can we consider the implosion of exiled states; the entropic influx into the largest cities; the sinking of smaller ones; the collapsing distance between us? How to live now in the “eruption of desire for the future which reshapes the present”—to become imperceptible?Join us for the launch of our next issue of ELSE Art and Cultural Journal with readings by select artists. An occasional journal that welcomes experimental and alternative forms of representing creative work.
Contributors include: Adrian Piper, Carol Becker, Akil Kirlew, Jean-Ulrick Desert, Alexandra Ross, Gayle Meikle, Analia Sirabonian, Caroline Koebel, Jennie Klein, Sonia Barrett, Ian Burkhart, Luisa Greenfield, Mark Roth, Morgan O’Hara, Rachel Dedman, Ayman Hassan, Rachel Stevens and Susie Quillinan.
ELSE is a peer-reviewed journal of works, projects, and research thematically gravitating towards memory, forgetting, trauma and the archive; language/image; international diaspora and post-colonialism; role of art in peace meditation; liminality; space/place; temporary architecture; foreignness, otherness and the uncanny.
Launch event at Powerhouse Arena
Readings, signings and a reception. Meet faculty, students and learn more about our three year research projects which began this summer with the Transart Triennale and continues with the journal.
www.elsejournal.org/else-launch / www.transarttriennale.org
Fish Stories at Bluestockings
Fish Stories Community Cookbook is now available at Bluestockings, a volunteer-powered and collectively-owned radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side, NYC! We are honored to be in the company of so many fantastic independent publications.
See Stream: Chapter 3
Stream: Chapter 3, our exhibition in South Windham, Vermont on August 4th and 5th was super. You can see the work in context by visiting the links below. Like Two Chairs on Facebook to get future updates on Two Chairs projects.
FOREST
artists here: Yu Jin, Juneau Projects, Zoe Walsh.
STREAM & AROUND
artists here: E.E. Ikeler, Yu Jin, Louise Lawler, Arrow Mueller, David Nash.
MEADOW
artists here: Peggy Ahwesh, Annie Berman, Kenneth Pietrobono, Rachel Stevens, Marina Zurkow.
Stream 3 is almost here
Two Chairs has organized a third year of the exhibition taking place in Vermont around a stream. This year we have an official Two Chairs Facebook page and a successful Kickstarter campaign!
Artists this year: Peggy Ahwesh (US), Annie Berman, (US), E.E. Ikeler (US), Yu Jin (China), Juneau Projects (UK), Louise Lawler (US), David Nash (UK), Kenneth Pietrobono (US), Rachel Stevens (US), Zoe Walsh (US), Marina Zurkow (US)
