Jim Shaw (Mixed Media Artist)

Monday, October 25, 7pm
VAF Performance Space

SIMPARCH, with special appearance by Allora & Calzadilla

Since 1996, the artist collaborative SIMPARCH has created large-scale interactive artworks that operate on the borders of architecture, design and popular culture. Recent projects include Free Basin (2000), a fully functional plywood skatebowl conceived as “both a large sculpture and a forum for the expressive movement of the skateboarders,” and Clean Livin’ (2003) a sustainable live/work facility for artists and researchers at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Wendover, Utah. As their contribution to the 2004 Whitney Biennial, SIMPARCH designed and built El Tubo Completo, a cylindrically shaped social/exhibition space.

The work of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla ranges from drawing, photography and sculpture to activist interventions and the creation of new communication platforms. Their practice includes creating rubber-soled shoes worn by demonstrators at a US military base in Puerto Rico (Land Mark (footprints), 2001), installing illuminated signs on building rooftops located near airports (Signs Facing the Sky, 2004), and placing enormous pieces of chalk in public plazas (Chalk, 1998-2002). Their work has been shown at Tate Modern, the Wexner Center, and the Walker Art Center.

Both SIMPARCH and Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla will be creating new works for InSite 2005 (Tijuana and San Diego).

Thursday, November 18, 7 pm
VAF Performance Space

LIKENESSES THAT LIE: PUBLIC FICTIONS: Kellie Jones, Javier Téllez, and Aernout Mik

This discussion between art historian Kellie Jones and contemporary artists Javier Téllez and Aernout Mik will probe the ways that social configurations display ideologies and enact mediated fictions of public life. The conversation will delve into the ways that likenesses—like diagnoses—exert force, in the forging and feigning of social agendas and public perceptions.Aernout Mik, Glutinosity, 2001

Kellie Jones is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. Her writing and curatorial projects have focused on art of the African Diaspora and contemporary Latin American art. Recent publications include: “(Un)Seen and Overheard: Pictures by Lorna Simpson,” in Lorna Simpson (2002), and “AKA SAARTJIE, The ‘Hottentot Venus’ in Context” in Venus 2000: Baartman and Beyond (2003).

Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez has been exploring the constructed norms of sociality through a series of projects set in psychiatric hospitals, shantytowns and other marginalized sites. His works have been shown at the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil (Mexico City), White Box (NY) and at the Sydney and Venice Biennials.

Aernout Mik’s meticulously staged videotapes explore social codes and patterns of human behavior, revealing the displacement of civic dialogue by media messages. His work has been exhibited at the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), The Project (NY), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and at the 2003 Israel and Istanbul Biennials.

Thursday, January 27, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space

JUAN DEVIS

Filmmaker Juan Devis & artists Ruben Ochoa, Yoshua Okon and Rubén Ortiz Torres will screen and discuss: INTERSTATE: VIDEO ON THE GO (52:00, DV, USA, 2004).

This LA Freewaves TV pilot follows four Los Angeles-based artists: Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Yoshua Okon, Jones Sanchez and Ruben Ochoa, as they negotiate and re-imagine, from conception to realization, a unique vision of Southern California. Familiar in tone, Inter-State reveals that art practices, as much as any other profession, rely on instinct, personal histories, and a stubborn understanding of what lies outside of the artist’s studio.

Colombian-born Juan Devis wrote, directed, and produced this tape and other collaborative multimedia projects focusing on social and political accountability, often working with local communities. In all of his projects, Devis acts as an educator, editor and translator, embracing a conception of art that has concrete social goals

Juan Devis, Interstate:Video on the Go, 2004

Thursday, February 10, 7:00 pm
VAF Seminar Room

MICHAEL LEJA

LECTURE: Mass Culture's Happy Family: Social Relations and the Flood of Pictures in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States

Michael Leja is Professor and Sewell C. Biggs Endowed Chair in American Art at the University of Delaware where he is chair of the Department of Art History.  His  first book Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, Yale University Press, 1993, won the Charles Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. Another book, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp, was published by the University of California Press in 2004. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, and intellectual developments. He is especially interested in examining the interactions between works of art and their various audiences. Articles and reviews by Leja have appeared in Art History, American Art, Critical Inquiry, Representations, Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Journal of American History, Art in America, and other journals, and in several books and exhibition catalogues, including Monet in the Twentieth Century and Companion to Art Theory. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Clark Art Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty Grant Program, and Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts.

Thursday, February 17, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space
Co-sponsored by Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies

CHIAPAS MEDIA PROJECT

The Chiapas Media Project is an award winning, bi-national partnership that provides video equipment, computers and training enabling marginalized indigenous and campesino communities in Southern Mexico to create their own media. Its mission is to nurture processes that, through video and computer technology, empower communities struggling for democracy, land reform and autonomy to develop alternative media so that their voices can be heard. The CMP began in 1997 with a series of consultations with indigenous community leaders throughout the state of Chiapas. At each of these meetings, the leadership explained the importance of information in their struggles for human rights, democracy, and land reform. Project founder Alexandra Halkin will screen and discuss some of the 22 videos currently distributed worldwide by the CMP.

For more information: http://promedios.org

Thursday, March 3, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space
Co-sponsored by OGSR Student Affairs and Critical Gender Studies

LAWRENCE BROSE

Filmmaker Lawrence Brose will screen and discuss his work, including De Profundis (1997, 65 min), a three part, hand/alternative-processed experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter De Profundis. Incorporating home movies from the 1920's and early gay male erotica along with images from Radical Faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals, drag performances and images of confinement, this 65 minute film sets up a haunting investigation of queerness, masculinity, history and sexuality. These images are buttressed against a soundtrack composed of Wilde's aphorisms, a voice and piano setting of Wilde's prison letter, and multi-tracked interviews with a diverse group of contemporary gay men.

Lawrence Brose, De Profundis, 1997

Wednesday, March 9, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space
Co-sponsored by California Cultures in Comparative Perspective

WILLIAM POPE.L

William Pope.L, aka The Friendliest Black Artist in America©, has been using art to question culturally ingrained categories (of race, food, sex, poverty and work) since the mid 1970s. Combining conceptual rigor, visceral impact and humor, his works expose layers of social absurdity and confound expectations about what “black art” should be.

Over the years, Pope.L’s work has involved crawling through the streets of major cities, eating and regurgitating the Wall Street Journal, mapping the United States in hot dogs, and exploring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. via writing, rumor and bioengineering. Most recently, Pope.L has been touring the country with The Black Factory, a mobile exhibition/work space that collects and processes objects of “blackness.”

Many of Pope.L’s pieces take place on the street and use his own body as a figure of menace, abjection and physical vulnerability. In ATM Piece, he chained himself (with sausage links) to the entrance of a bank in Manhattan wearing only a skirt made of $1 bills, which he handed out to passersby. In Member (aka Schlong Journey) Pope.L walked along 125th street in Harlem with a 6-foot white cardboard penis in an effort to “own whiteness, male whiteness through the phallus,” and to do so “in a black environment, where I became a spectacle and the site of questions.”

As part of his larger eRacism project, Pope.L has performed more than forty “Crawl” pieces where, giving up his ‘verticality,’ he has crawled for miles on his hands and knees along public sidewalks until the point of exhaustion. In 2001, Pope.L began The Great White Way, a five-year, 22 mile crawl. Wearing a store-bought superman costume and with a skateboard strapped to his back, he will travel from the Statue of Liberty to his mother’s home in the Bronx.

About his work, Pope.L writes, “you can hold contraries, bound together, without blurring them together… The fact is I am black and I am influenced by historically European-based art. I am interested in formal issues and I am interested in social issues. Think of it as a bunch of flowers—daisies, lilies, daffodils. I want you to hold them all in a bundle, but see them each distinctly.”

William Pope.L, The Great White Way, 2001-ongoing
Photo Credit: James Pruznick

Tuesday, March 15, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space

CHARLIE WHITE

"Charlie White doesn't take photographs. He constructs them. Like a Hollywood director, he orchestrates scenes, commissions sets, hires actors, and employs a visual effects team. Then he oversees a grueling postproduction process in which each element of the shoot is digitized, scrutinized, and perfected down to the pixel. In essence, he captures an entire f/x film in one frame." - Wired Magazine

White's photographs reference sci-fi, porn, sesame street, and 1970's interior design, and are often centered around interactions between puppets and human beings. Te series "Understanding Joshua" explores male self-image and self-loathing through a humanoid puppet described by White as "complete fragility manifest in a body."

After earning his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, he went on to Art Center College of Design in Pasedena where he received his MFA in 1998. White's photographs have been published in "Artforum", "The New York Times", and "Time Out" London and New York, to name a few. He is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York and currently teachesat the University of Southern California.

Tuesday, April 5 - Thursday April 7 (times T.B.A.)
Institute of the Americas

THE EMBODIED CITY
Discussion between Eyal Weizman, Adriano Pedrosa and Keller Easterling
Moderated by Constance Penley

In collaboration with InSite_05

The Embodied City will probe strategies to unveil the lived dimensions of urban configurations and the dynamics that shape them. Mining layers of representation and delving into strata of history, panelists will consider ways to discern and describe the shifting flows that confound stable structure and static map alike.
 
In his compelling notion of “the vertical city,” Eyal Weizman proposes that two-dimensional maps and plans are inadequate to delineate the workings of the built world.  Viewed in these terms, the fraught dynamics of the West Bank and Gaza can only be understood in their layered dimensions:  “A new way of imagining territory was developed for the West Bank.  The region was no longer seen as a two-dimensional surface of a single territory, but as a large ‘hollow’ three-dimensional surface, within which the West Bank could be physically partitioned into two separate but overlapping national geographies.  Within this volume separate security corridors, infrastructure, over-ground bridges and underground tunnels are woven into an Escher-like space.”1  In the nuanced specificity of his provocative elucidation of the barrier underway to demark Israeli and Palestinian territories, Weizman ponders the deployment of planning as a strategy of power.  In Weizman’s reading, the barrier materializes a complex boundary that has been under construction for decades—through military maneuvers; urban operations, in purposeful patterns of settlement and willful apportionments of infrastructure; through stratified networks of roads and bridges; in the directing and deflecting of water; and in the control of vantage points, whether mountaintops or airspace.
 
In the inSite_05 exhibition FarSites: Urban crisis and domestic symptoms in recent contemporary art, Adriano Pedrosa examines “those moments or loci where the grid and the system fails or falls short—a micro evidence or fragment that nevertheless remains relevant as an emblem or symptom.”2  Pedrosa and a team of curators have searched out glitches and breakdowns in urban infrastructures in particular cities of the Americas:  the blackouts of 1965, 1977 and 2003 in New York City; the economic collapse of December 2001 in Buenos Aires. The projects probe the interplay of rational modernist schemes—manifested in the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing project in Mexico City; the tunnels, bridges, and viaducts of Sao Paulo; and the Avenida Libertador in Caracas, for instance—and the unruly processes of habitation that overflow and register across their grids.
 
Keller Easterling has probed the “protocols” that drive the unfolding forms of the constructed environment.  In Organization Space:  Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America, Easterling traces the momentous import of specific political, economic and administrative decisions and directives in propelling architectural form and urban and suburban planning.  In the forthcoming Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, Easterling focuses on six stories of “spatial products” and the ways in which they elude regulatory jurisdication:  “regimes of non-national sovereignty” that “move around the world like weather fronts.”  These include, as Easterling lays it out, “cruise ship tourism in North Korea, high-tech agricultural formations in Spain that have re-ignited labor wars and piracy in the Mediterrranean, hyperbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities, automated global ports, microwave urbanism in South Asian IT enclaves, and a global industry of building demolition that informs urban warfare.”3
 
If Weizman has, in his vertical mapping, probed architecture and planning as both agent and manifestation of political agendas, and Pedrosa has delved into the insurgent drives that transcend systems of order, then Easterling exposes ways that local protocols and global loopholes forge the built future.  In the unnoticed evidence of the infrastructure, all three detect signs of the social meanings of place and plan.

Tuesday, April 12, 7:00 pm
Sherwood Auditorium of the MCASD La Jolla

JOSEPH KOSUTH

The Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego have selected conceptual art pioneer Joseph Kosuth as the featured guest of the 2005 UCSD/MCASD Russell Lecture.

Kosuth will give a public talk on his life and his art April 12, at 7 p.m., in the Sherwood Auditorium of MCASD La Jolla, 700 Prospect St. Admission is free. A reception begins at 6 p.m.

Internationally renowned for his language-based works, conceptual artist Kosuth first began exploring the relation of language to art in the 1960s. His decades-long inquiry has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia. His pieces have been included in five Documenta and four Venice Biennale exhibitions, and he has received numerous awards, including the Brandeis Award, Frederick Weisman Award and Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettre. Currently a professor at the Kunstakademie Munich and Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice, Kosuth was also represented on a postage stamp issued by the French government.

The Russell Lecture, a partnership program of UCSD and MCASD, has been bringing contemporary artists to San Diego since 1980. Past lecturers have included Doug Aitken, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Komar & Melamid, and John Baldessari. Supported by the Elizabeth W. Russell Foundation, the program "fosters the appreciation and study of the modern visual arts and the creativity of artists." A longtime supporter of both the museum and the university, Russell was MCASD's first docent and established an endowment fund to acquire works for the museum's permanent collection.

For directions to MCASD La Jolla, call (858) 454-3541, Ext. 151 or visit http://www.mcasd.org

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Saws, 1965

Thursday, April 14, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space

CORY ARCANGEL

Cory Arcangel works with early computers and video game systems. He is best known for his Nintendo game cartridge hacks, and his subversive reworking of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and '80s, such as the Commodore 64 and Atari 800. Arcangel often works with art collective/record label Beige, a loosely defined ensemble of artists and programmers who work collaboratively in digital media. Beige, with members in New York City and Chicago, has produced videos, Web projects, and albums of electronic music, as well as modified Nintendo video game cartridges. Beige members include Arcangel, Paul Davis, Joe Buckman and Joseph Bonn.

Cory Arcangel was born in 1978. He received a B.M. from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He has received grants from Turbulence and Harvestworks. Arcangel has performed and exhibited his work at various institutions and festivals, including the American Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, Queens; the Whitney Museum of American Art's artport website; Anthology Film Archives, New York; the New York Video Festival; Eyebeam, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the 2004 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Arcangel lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Wednesday, April 20, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space

THE YES MEN

In 1999, just before the big protests in Seattle, Mike and Andy set up a parody of the WTO website at the domain GATT.org. Some people mistook it for the real thing and wrote in with questions about all sorts of trade matters. Finally, Mike and Andy found themselves invited to conferences to speak as the organization they opposed. They scrounged up their savings, bought plane tickets, and went.

As the World Trade Organization, Andy and Mike delivered shocking satires of WTO policy to audiences of so-called “experts.” At an international trade law conference in Salzburg, Austria, they (i.e. the WTO) proposed a free-market solution to democracy: auctioning votes to the highest bidder. On the TV program CNBC Marketwrap Europe, the WTO announced that might equalled right, that a privatized education market would help replace Abbie Hoffman with Milton Friedman, and that there ought to be a market in human rights abuses. At a textiles conference in Tampere, Finland the WTO unveiled a 3-foot phallus for administering electric shocks to sweatshop employees. At a university in Plattsburgh, New York the WTO proposed that to solve global hunger, the poor should have to eat hamburgers—and then recycle them up to ten times. And at an accounting conference in Sydney, Australia, the WTO announced that in light of all its mistakes, it would shut itself down, refounding as an organization whose goals were not to help corporations, but rather to help the poor and the environment.

Identity Theft:
Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands.

Identity Correction:
Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

The Yes Men:
The Yes Men have impersonated some of the world's most powerful criminals at conferences, on the web, and on television, in order to correct their identities.

for more info: www.theyesmen.org

Thursday, May 12, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space

LARI PITTMAN

Los Angeles-based artist Lari Pittman is one of the most significant painters working today. Drawing imagery from sources as diverse as pop-culture, design, cartoons and Catholicism, Pitman creates densely layered narratives addressing issues of identity and society.

Pittman received his formal art education at CalArts in the 1970s, a time when painting was considered dead (or at least deeply discredited) in relation to conceptual forms of art making. Pittman therefore began his career with a notion of impure painting, involving pastiche and quotation, hybrid forms and appropriated images. Against layers of competing visual languages, recognizable elements jostle for attention in his pictures. Decorative excess--in line, in detail, in compositional energy--is his primary strategy for suggesting multiple narratives simultaneously. Ultimately, the most distinctive feature of Lari Pittman's work is its impetus to convey content, recounting personal stories or exploring grand and epic themes--from gender and sexuality to the cycle of life. His powerful art pits ebullience, beauty, and pleasure against the inevitability of death. Pittman is a professor of Fine Arts at UCLA. He is represented by Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York and Regen Projects in Los Angeles.

Lari Pittman, Untitled #2, 2003, matte oil, aerosol lacquer & cel-vinyl on canvas over wood panel, 76 x 102 in (193.0 x 259.1 cm)

Friday, May 13
Suess Room, Geisel Library, UCSD

MEXICO CITY IN THE 1990s: THE PAINT'S NOT DRY


 
PROVOCATION
Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are "we" willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world's list of usual suspects: "If it's Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)" With "Before the Paint's Dry," we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-"Fondesa" cafes, alternate spaces, "bad music," and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.

9:30 - 11:00 am
Cityscapes: Tráfico adentro del periférico
A complexity of factors in Mexico's capital---a radical urban laboratory in and of itself---gave way to patterns and relationships that were mobilized between makers, nascent institutions, the information media, and the public.

Presenters:
Rogelio Villarreal  | Writer and Cultural Critic
Federico Navarrete | Cultural Historian of Contemporary Mexico City
Moderator:Steve Fagin | UCSD
Respondent: Cuauhtémoc Medina | on Mexico City and its cultural circulations

11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
From the Outside In, or Code-Switching
The relation of Mexico City (as a self-imagined center) to its perceived periphery has been reframed in the last two decades. During this time, artists from Mexico City have established fruitful links with practices in the United States, especially in the border region of Tijuana-San Diego-and public art projects like InSite-in the cities of Los Angeles, New York, and beyond.

Presenters:
Carmen Cuenca | Co-Director, InSite
Rubén Ortiz-Torres | Artist (LA)
Thomas Glassford | Artist Texas/ Mexico City
Mariana Botey | Artist/Critic  London/Los Angeles/Mexico City

Lunch 12:30 - 2:00 pm

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Let's Get Outta This Place: New Spaces and Somewhere Else To Go
A diagram of vigorous initiatives can be drawn between the consecutive founding of artist-run spaces and independent artist-critic collectives, not to mention clubs and cafes, in practices that can now be viewed from the perspective of informal institutional histories.

Presenters:
Yoshua Okón | Artist, Founding Co-Director, La Panadería
Eduardo Abaroa | Artist,Temístocles, Director
Moderator: Itala Schmelt | Cultural Critic, Director Museo Siqueiros

3:30 pm - 5:00 p.m.
De arcilla a ladrillos (Making History?)
In tandem with the corresponding print culture of art journals, literary publications, and 'zines, as well as with joint venues for the performing arts, all these projects successfully mediated in those debates that sought to address issues regarding local art production and its link to the international art scene.

Presenters:
Juan García Oteyza | Turner Books
Betti-Sue Herz | San Diego Museum of Art
Monica Manzutto | Kurimanzutto Gallery
Moderator:Roberto Tejada | UCSD
Closing Remarks: Gerardo Estrada | Director, Coordinación Cultural, UNAM

5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. -- Open Forum

6:00 p.m. -- Reception

Friday, May 20, 4:00 pm
VAF Seminar Room Co-sponsored by the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS)

ALEX ALBERRO | "History and Performance in Recent Video Art"

Alexander Alberro, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Florida, is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (The MIT Press, 2003). His essays have appeared in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues. He has also edited and co-edited a number volumes, including Two-Way Mirror Power: Dan Graham's Writings on Art (The MIT Press, 1999), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (The MIT Press, 2000), and Recording Conceptual Art (University of California Press, 2001).

Saturday, May 21, 10:30 - 5:00 pm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Bing Auditorium

INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AND AFTER
Symposium organized by the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS)

Institutional Critique and After is an internationally focused program exploring the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke. A key aim of Institutional Critique was the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries. The movement was redeveloped in the 1980s and after by Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson and others who engaged in more interactive and performative interventions; and has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization.
 
The program will include three panel presentations featuring noted artists, scholars and museum professionals. Beginning with two notable younger scholars who will comment on the geographies and cultural implications of the IC movement, the event will also debate the role of curators and exhibition practices--within the "institution" as well as independent, and examine some of the larger social and political questions raised by the movement and its aftermath.
 
Discussion will range across histories, theories, diverse locations and different kinds of institutional and alternative space. It will touch on traditional forms of art, but also on installations, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Its central questions will turn on the critical potential of art (and institutions) and whether-and if so how-they can stimulate social or political change.
 
SESSION I: GEOGRAPHIES AND DIMENSIONS OF INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
10:30 am to 12:00 pm
Alex Alberro and Isabelle Graw
Allan Sekula, moderator
 
SESSION II: INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE, INSIDE OUT
1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Christiane Paul, Lauri Firstenberg, and Jens Hoffmann
Lynn Zelevansky, moderator
 
SESSION III: INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE, AFTERMATH
3:30 pm to 5:00 pm
Ricardo Dominguez and Andrea Fraser
Renée Green, moderator
 
The event is free and no reservations are required.
For additional information, visit www.lacma.org or call 323-857-6512

Thursday, May 26, 7:00 pm
VAF Performance Space

JIM SHAW

Since the mid-1980s, Jim Shaw has produced several series of works that are influenced by popular or lowbrow sources such as album covers, pulp fiction jackets, and thrift store paintings. In My Mirage, produced between 1986 and 1991, Shaw examined and exposed his adolescence by presenting the experiences of an alter ego, Billy, with approximately 170 works in an array of perfectly executed, youth culture styles from trippy surrealism to underground comics. In 1990, he organized an exhibition of his collection of thrift store paintings, which traveled around the United States and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. In his "disaster drawings" (1991Ü92), Shaw copied newspaper images of American tragedies such as the explosion of the atom bomb in painstaking (and absurdly futile) detail. He has referred to and emulated the embarrassing vernacular visual culture of late twentieth-century America in work that is imbued with a sense of poignant hopelessness.

In 1993, Shaw began to depict his dreams in pencil drawings that now number approximately five hundred. On identical 12- by 9-inch sheets, each drawing is divided into sections, which sometimes overlap as in a comic strip. The complexity of the drawings varies from the basic to the highly elaborate and sometimes includes styles appropriated from other cartoons. Accompanying each work is a text, on the bottom or on the back of the page, in which Shaw recounts the action. The dreams range from the ordinary to the fantastic but, in this perhaps most personal work, Shaw's voice remains uninflected and unrevealing.

Jim Shaw, Dream Drawings, Dream Objects

VISITING ARTISTS LECTURE SERIES FALL 2004

Monday, October 25, 7pm
VAF Performance Space

SIMPARCH
with special appearance by Allora & Calzadilla

Since 1996, the artist collaborative SIMPARCH has created large-scale interactive artworks that operate on the borders of architecture, design and popular culture. Recent projects include Free Basin (2000), a fully functional plywood skatebowl conceived as “both a large sculpture and a forum for the expressive movement of the skateboarders,” and Clean Livin’ (2003) a sustainable live/work facility for artists and researchers at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Wendover, Utah. As their contribution to the 2004 Whitney Biennial, SIMPARCH designed and built El Tubo Completo, a cylindrically shaped social/exhibition space.

The work of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla ranges from drawing, photography and sculpture to activist interventions and the creation of new communication platforms. Their practice includes creating rubber-soled shoes worn by demonstrators at a US military base in Puerto Rico (Land Mark (footprints), 2001), installing illuminated signs on building rooftops located near airports (Signs Facing the Sky, 2004), and placing enormous pieces of chalk in public plazas (Chalk, 1998-2002). Their work has been shown at Tate Modern, the Wexner Center, and the Walker Art Center.

Both SIMPARCH and Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla will be creating new works for InSite 2005 (Tijuana and San Diego).

Thursday, November 18, 7 pm
VAF Performance Space

LIKENESSES THAT LIE: PUBLIC FICTIONS
Kellie Jones, Javier Téllez, and Aernout Mik

This discussion between art historian Kellie Jones and contemporary artists Javier Téllez and Aernout Mik will probe the ways that social configurations display ideologies and enact mediated fictions of public life. The conversation will delve into the ways that likenesses—like diagnoses—exert force, in the forging and feigning of social agendas and public perceptions.

Kellie Jones is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. Her writing and curatorial projects have focused on art of the African Diaspora and contemporary Latin American art. Recent publications include: “(Un)Seen and Overheard: Pictures by Lorna Simpson,” in Lorna Simpson (2002), and “AKA SAARTJIE, The ‘Hottentot Venus’ in Context” in Venus 2000: Baartman and Beyond (2003).

Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez has been exploring the constructed norms of sociality through a series of projects set in psychiatric hospitals, shantytowns and other marginalized sites. His works have been shown at the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil (Mexico City), White Box (NY) and at the Sydney and Venice Biennials.

Aernout Mik’s meticulously staged videotapes explore social codes and patterns of human behavior, revealing the displacement of civic dialogue by media messages. His work has been exhibited at the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), The Project (NY), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and at the 2003 Israel and Istanbul Biennials.