LECTURES

Boris Groys, Art in the Age of Democracy
The John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture
Monday, November 17, Wollman Hall
Lecture: 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.

The fourth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture will be delivered by philosopher Boris Groys who will speak on design and branding, and how nature and God have been replaced by design and conspiracy theories.

A Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Global Professor at New York University, Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, curator, media theorist, and an internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet postmodern art and literature as well as on the Russian avant-garde. Groys’ writing engages the wildly disparate traditions of French post-structuralism and modern Russian philosophy.

For Ours, Dave Muller has expanded his site-specific work Interpolations and Extrapolations (2002-03), which features various signature logos and “looks” that The New School has adopted since its founding in 1919. Installed in the lobby of The New School’s first “signature” building, Muller’s work refers to the multiple re-branding initiatives of the exhibition’s host institution, The New School, and reflects the changing political and economic conditions both within and outside the university.

Installed in atrium of Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Building, 66 West 12th Street

IN THE GALLERY

Disembodying the National Army Tune, 2001

The reprise of an installation first exhibited by the artist in Israel in 2001, the piece is now positioned at the entrance to the Kellen Gallery. A loudspeaker on a 13-foot pole plays a recording of the Israeli national anthem in the voice of a person imitating a trumpet. Triggered by the viewers’ movements, the loudspeaker climbs up and down the pole, simulating the raising and lowering of a flag and emphasizing a phallic subtext to patriotic displays. The work satirizes tropes of nationhood that are arrived at through pomp and ceremony.

Soundtrack: Keren Rosenbaum
Voice: Noa Frenkel
Production Assistance: Yuval Kedem

PERFORMANCES

Wild Seeds in America, 2008
Performance: Sunday, October 19
10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Union Square South
New work, commissioned by Parsons for "OURS"

In the first "Wild Seeds," Yael Bartana filmed a group of 18-year-old Israeli pacifists playing a game called the “Evacuation of Gilad’s Colony,” based on Israel’s forced removal of Jewish settlers from the Occupied Territories. Against a breathtaking rural backdrop, the participants tried to resist and break away from two of their own teammates who had volunteered to act as “authorities.” The game’s serious subtext became more explicit as the players’ language mimicked the actual words used by the evacuated settlers.

In "Wild Seeds in America," the game is repeated, but this time as a commissioned performance against the urban backdrop of New York City, with New School students who learn the original context of the game in progressive stages. The experiment looks at how one society’s rituals and behaviors of dissent are received outside of their original social context, and how knowledge shapes that experience. In a broader context, it is a portrait of a community that declares its ideology in opposition to the policy of the state.

The Yes Men use “culture jamming” and “identity correction” as devices to resist and expose the machinations of corporate and political culture. The activist group was founded by Andy Bichlbaum, a faculty member at Parsons, and Mike Bonnano. As an employee of the computer games company Maxis, Bichlbaum inserted controversial code into the game SimCopter which caused male sprites in swimming trunks to appear on certain dates and kiss each other. The code was intended to highlight harsh work practices.

In 2004, Bichlbaum appeared on BBC News as “Jude Finistera,” a supposed representative of Dow Chemical, whose subsidiary Union Carbide was responsible for the Bhopal chemical disaster in India. Finistera accepted full responsibility for the disaster, igniting one of the biggest controversies in art activism as Dow virulently denied the claim. The Yes Men will present a new work that considers personal responsibility in an age of war.

IN THE GALLERY

In 2005, Judi Werthein, an Argentinean artist based in New York, came to national prominence when she was accused by CNN anchor Lou Dobbs and Fox News reporters of aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Her uniquely designed sneaker, manufactured in China, had been distributed for free to Mexican immigrants about to attempt an illegal crossing into the U.S. Trademarked “Brinco” (Spanish for “jump”) after the local nickname for crossing the border, each pair contains a map of the border-area (on the inside of the soles), a compass, a wallet, pockets to hide money and medication, and necessities, such as an image of Santo Toribio Romo, the official saint of the Mexican immigrant.

Meanwhile, Werthein sold the sneakers for $215 a pair at a boutique store in San Diego, explicitly linking migrants’ efforts to illegally cross the Mexican-American border to the global circulation of goods and labor. The heavily branded sneakers are exhibited in an installation that includes video documentation of the media firestorm that ensued.

CHARRETTES

Monday, October 27
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
Charrette with Judi Werthein and Parsons class:
10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Presentation: 6:30 p.m.
Both events open to the public

In the charrette, the students (from a product design class) split up into groups and develop “survival” kits for different geographic regions of the world, taking into consideration local adversarial conditions whether political, environmental, or economic. The kits respond to contextual criteria such as poverty, mobility, and belief systems and must contain 10 items.

This charrette is hosted by Parsons faculty member Robert Kirkbride.

IN THE GALLERY

Man of Characters, 2006

Franklin’s head, as printed on the one hundred dollar bill, is blown up to cover the wall from floor to ceiling, greeting the gallery visitor from afar. Upon inspection, the lines comprising this giant drawing emerge as writing: aphorisms by Franklin himself. They reveal something of the complexity of this multi-faceted revolutionary. Tolle’s play with distance points towards the relationship between the iconic symbol and its everyday referent, i.e. money, and suggests how the manipulation of “character(s)” or letters produces both an iconic image as well as latent meaning. Challenging what we think we know, the work makes us look twice, and questions the ways in which a culture saturated with logos and icons allocates meaning.

Tolle’s work is strikingly graphic, as if to acknowledge that the brilliant populist Franklin himself employed cartoons and then state-of-the-art public communications strategies to promote political unity.

Die, or Join, 2006

Tolle’s elaborate sculptural installation refers to a famous political cartoon by Benjamin Franklin from 1754. Titled “Join, or Die,” the original publication featured a woodcut of a snake severed into eighths, each segment of which was labeled with the initial of a British-American colony. The cartoon appeared along with Franklin’s editorial about the disunited state of the colonies. The impact of the work was such that during the wars the snake became a popular symbol illustrating the importance of colonial unity.

Tolle has updated Franklin’s snake to reflect current political circumstances: made up of red and blue segments, it is aggressively animate and its two heads further complicate notions of unity and the nation-state. By updating the historical image, Tolle creates a highly ambiguous and complex emblem that deconstructs the ideas and genealogies underlying present global politics and their imagery. After the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. Navy created a new flag to be flown on all ships “during the global war on terror.” It replaced a blue flag bearing 50 stars that represented 50 equal states. In the new flag the snake is aggressively lashing out, all its segments in full support, with a text warning “Don’t tread on me.”

IN THE GALLERY

Tirén’s posters employ familiar and somewhat generic-looking imagery: a line of people holding hands, scenes of nature and historical monuments—all of which suggest quotidian bourgeois life. The friendly black-and-white silhouettes are accompanied by familiar slogans often heard in debates about nationality and patriotism. Here, however, they are curiously devoid of any attribution to a specific political figure or party (not just because they are in Swedish). Some of the familiar slogans are slightly altered, like “A democratic nation has never started a war.” The combination of the images with the texts is gently discordant as the seeming affability of the works is undermined by a deeper, more reflective sense of unease.

IN THE GALLERY

Hank Willis Thomas’ Branded series depicts the bodies of African-American men literally branded with a Nike logo. The muscular men bearing the scarred Nike swoosh—an international symbol of strength, freedom, and victory—evoke slavery as well as actual Nike advertisements. They become symbolic of the complex dualities of history and identity, explicitly connecting the brand to its original function as a symbol of ownership and control. Now the brand has become a catalyst for purchasing a sense of identity in a society where cultural belonging has become ever more intertwined with the politics of consumption. The work proposes the urgency of developing alternative modes of identification.

IN THE GALLERY

Dammi i colori is an enthralling portrait of a city in transition, the Albanian capital Tirana, and its mayor, the artist Edi Rama. Shot in what one might call “documentary style,” the video captures Rama as he speaks to the camera in a car riding through his city, reflecting on his project to have Tirana painted in vivid colors, the dramatic results of which can be seen in the background. The mayor/artist conceives of the community as a super-brand, a literally all-immersive utopia for everyone to buy into, but derived from one central and sovereign mastermind (even if it is supposedly “popular sovereignty” in this case). As the mayor reflects on what comprises community, the artist in him suggests that political problems may really be problems of form and design. Dammi i colori highlights the conception of the (democratic) body politic as in fact one (sovereign) body, and poses the question of the form that a “multitude” in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s sense would take.

IN THE GALLERY

Americana, Version Two, 2008
New work, commissioned by Parsons for "OURS"

"Americana, Version Two," is a sound sculpture created for the Kellen Gallery and consisting of two speaker-stacks facing each other, each bearing a logo with the American flag. The speakers play historic and present-day samples of American political speeches, however, the artist has replaced moments of applause with stock recordings of laughter. This slapstick-like gesture expresses Robinson’s deep mistrust of democracy’s power to bring about justice and real change. It is her conviction that the “little improvements” that democratic politics offer are merely cosmetic, distractions from deep, long-term injustice that displace the desire for real change.

This critique of mild-mannered hope for progress, the better future that is so central to the democratic process, is reflected in the visual aspects of this work as well. The perfect geometric shapes of the black speakers built into the white cube of the gallery allude to the sites of Modernist art and African-American urban “sub-cultures.” Robinson confronts two sets of aesthetic codes as markers of social difference, and at the same time conflates them into a hybrid object of displaced desire, pointing out that in their respective cultures they both signify taste and status.