In an influential account written in 1986, a prominent British historian Timothy Garton Ash described Central Europe as “territory where peoples, cultures, languages are fantastically intertwined, where every place has several names and men change their citizenship as often as their shoes, an enchanted wood full of wizards and witches”. This evocative characterization challenged the…
In this seminar Nelson Brissac reviews artists’ interventions into the city of São Paulo as part of his Arte/Cidade project, and reveals some of the issues that characterize its inhabitants’ everyday experiences and perception. Touching upon the 2014 World Cup and Brazil’s widespread urban protests, Brissac introduces extraordinary artist projects by Vito Acconci, Rubens Mano,…
Eight years ago I was told the story of two Chinese coolies who had escaped to the Peruvian Amazon, founded a village called El Chino, which means “The Chinese,” and begun a small tapioca business before vanishing mysteriously. I grew curious about what the Chinese were doing in South America, let alone, the rain forest.…
“Would you have participated in this activity if it was truly revolutionary?” The Poema Colectivo 2014 project invited a group of artists from Mexico to create a new “collective poem” for today based on the 1981 project Poema Colectivo Revolución. Each invited artist was asked to nominate another friend to join the project. With many thanks…
In the second half of an extended interview with Tone Yasunao for post, the composer, artist, and writer discusses the trajectory of his work from graphic scores in the 1960s to his recent work with digital media.
Governed by a unique “Right to Shelter” mandate, New York is distinct from other municipalities across the U.S. in its legal provisions for temporary housing assistance. While this constitutional right may provide some relief for homeless New Yorkers, the extra-legal reality is that the cost of shelter has forced far greater segments of the City’s…
What are the goals of an archive based in a region where the local art scene is still finding its place in the world map of contemporary art? How to approach contemporary art in the region if no linear social, political, and art history can be told? How can archives be instrumental in helping regional…
The three short essays that follow were written in response to works composed and performed by Tone Yasunao as part of the program “Tokyo: Experiments in Music and Performance” presented at The Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Theater on January 10, 2013. I. Smooth Event (1962) Tone Yasunao walks onstage and approaches a table.…
Mimi Zeiger considers how Uneven Growth’s curatorial method invites designers to go beyond numerics in their approach, taking a critical stance on the perils of the “statistical sublime.” When Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s outgoing Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, took the podium at an October workshop for Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities,…
The word feminism was the subject of a public conversation that took place on November 18, 2014, at MoMA. Under the heading “Translating Feminism,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Agata Jakubowska, and Gayatri Sinha discussed the term’s implications for artistic practice in their respective areas of scholarship. In Latin America, Fajardo-Hill argued, feminism has often been regarded as a bourgeois…
“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970. In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception. “Let’s convert all systems into poetry”…
I believe that painting ultimately still rests on a linguistic level, which enables us to make proper judgments regarding the proficiency and profundity of expression. In other words, what matters to artists is what kind of language they authentically have a feeling for and whether they have entered a desirable linguistic state….Sometimes the feeling for…
