Thurs. Jan. 12, 10:00 pm, Ché Cafe, free
John & Tovah Olson (Dead Machines)
Directions to the Ché Cafe

Based in Yppsilanti, Michigan, Dead Machines (John and Tovah Olson) use rewired electronics, homemade reed instruments, and metal percussion to create hazy post-psychedelic landscapes. John (of Wolf Eyes, Violent Ramp and Universal Indians) and Tovah (of Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice and Golden Calves Money Band), formed the group in 2003. They released limited CDs and tapes (some though John's label American Tapes (http://www.geocities.com/americantapes) before Ecstatic Peace released the vinyl-only Human Brain Wasting Syndrome in 2004. Their first widely available release Futures, was put out by Troubleman in 2005. In addition to far out music, John and Tovah make paintings, clothes and sculpture.

"With John Olson clad in vintage Easy Rider garb and both he and wife Tovah sporting dark sunglasses, the duo of Dead Machines invoked images of Suicide and Factory-era Velvet underground as they took the stage for their set. Both were visibly amped up, imbuing their deep, dark drones with a fist pumping rock mentality. The two cycled through numerous instruments, with Olson favoring what looked to be a home-made guitar constructed from a two-by-four and O'Rourke working a gong, some electronics, and the spare wind instrument. The two created a head trip for the masses, and their image (whether it was intentional or just a by product of my own addled mind) complemented the heavily psychedelic underpinnings of their music, a black clad rumbling drone that was as affecting as a couple of hits of LSD. But it wasn't all menace, however, as the husband and wife duo shared a loving and tender embrace before departing from the stage." (Dusted Magazine)

Thurs. Jan. 19, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Fritz Haeg: Lab, Studio & Salon

Fritz Haeg will present work from three parallel practices: the art and design projects of Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings & gatherings of Sundown Salon and the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab.

Fritz Haeg was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1969. He studied architecture at the Istituto Universitario di Archietettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his B.Arch in 1992. He has been a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York, U.S.C. School of Architecture and Art Center College of Design. Since establishing fritz haeg studio in 1995 in New York City and later moving the practice to Los Angeles in 1999, a wide range of his architectural, landscape and design projects have been realized.

Sat. Jan. 21, 7:00 pm, Sherwood Auditorium, MCASD La Jolla
2006 UCSD/MCASD Russell Lecture
$5 Admission; Free to MCASD Members; UCSD students, faculty and staff
Nancy Rubins


Since 1980, MCASD and the University of California, San Diego have partnered to bring contemporary artists to our city through the Russell Lecture program. The Russell Foundation, benefactor of this lecture program, was established to “foster the appreciation and study of the modern visual arts and creativity of young artists”. The Russell Lecture continues to reflect Elizabeth (Betty) Russell’s long-time support of and involvement with both the Museum and University.

This year’s Russell Lecturer is Nancy Rubins, whose seemingly gravity-defying sculpture has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions throughout the world. Her works typically center on a strangely poetic amalgam of miscellaneous airplane scraps precariously welded and strung together with high-tension wire. Rubins has garnered an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, in 2003 among several other honors including three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Rubins will speak on her art as well as the recently commissioned site-specific work made of nautical detritus to be installed at MCASD La Jolla.

Thurs. Jan 26, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Hirsch Perlman

“In his series, Two More Affect Studies, Hirsch Perlman chronicled daily his three-year retreat into his Los Angeles studio where he created a world of figures and giant heads out of packing materials and cardboard boxes. This “tragic-comic” series of photographs is situated within a narrow conceptual framework. As the series progresses the solitary cardboard figures turn into an animated cast of characters that Perlman poses as solitary, relaxing quiet-types or as innocuous, suspicious groups. The limited set of materials suggests as much about Perlman’s intentions as it does about the act of art making. It is clear that although Perlman never meant for his initial playful act of creating a figure to turn into an on-going and obsessive study into the process of “making art” he has come to full grips with his recent project and embraced it with the wit and self-reflexiveness for which he is well known.

Perlman has gained international acclaim for his art including a solo project show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inclusion in the Venice and Whitney Biennales and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria.

Hirsch Perlman, Apparatum Armorum Ineptum #10

Thurs. Feb. 16, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Joel Slayton

Joel Slayton is an internationally recognized artist, writer and theoretician. He is Professor of Digital Media Art at San Jose State University where he serves as Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media. CADRE is one of the oldest academic centers in the USA dedicated to the exploration of digital forms of art. Professor Slayton is the Executive Editor of SWITCH, the on-line journal of critical and theoretical discourse. Joel Slayton is the founder and President of C5, a Silicon Valley start-up specializing in theoretical models, analysis and tactical implementations of information technology. C5 is both a corporation and artwork. Professor Slayton is on the Board of Directors of LEONARDO/ISAST and is Chair of the Leonardo/MIT Press Book Series Committee. He is also on the Board of Directors of Ground Zero, an incubator for art and technology enterprise involving Silicon Valley industry.

C5, Analogous Landscape, installation view San Francisco Camerawork, 2005

Sun. Feb. 19, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
In collaboration with the Ché Cafe
Paper Rad

Structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that myths are best interpreted and understood through other myths. The artist collective Paper Rad adopts a similar approach to pop culture, synthesizing material from television, video games and advertising, and letting these fragments contextualize and cross-reference each other. Day-glow colors, bit-mapped graphics, puffy cartoons and psychedelic patterns combine to create an optical and information overload, exemplified by the group’s website: www.paperrad.org. Here, a pulsating interface offers a selection of scrolling comics, flash animations, and “illustrated songs.”

Paper Rad’s installations scale walls and fill rooms with an iconography that brings together fluorescent pigs, dancing mummies, eastern gurus, alien ravers, Masonic pyramids, neon athletic wear, bright-haired trolls, Gumby slippers, Atari graphics, inter-species totems, sheets of LSD inspired by country décor and the fort you always wanted to build in your bedroom.

As member Jacob Ciocci writes, “In the 70s and 80s cartoons and consumer electronics were bigger and trashier than ever and freaked kids out... Now these kids are getting older and are freaking everybody else out by using this same throw-away trash.”

Paper Rad members Benjamin Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci, have been producing visual art, music, videos, photography, comics, clothes and writing since 2000.

Thurs. Feb. 23, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Mark Hansen

Mark Hansen is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University where he teaches courses in media studies and cultural theory. He is author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004), and Bodies in Code (Routledge, forthcoming), as well as numerous essays on cultural theory, contemporary literature, and media. His most recent publication is "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life," which appeared in Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004). He is co-editor (with Taylor Carman) of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty and (with W.J. T. Mitchell) of Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago, forthcoming). He is currently at work on Becoming-Human, an ethics of the posthuman, and Fiction After Television, a study of the novel in the age of digital convergence.

Fri. Feb. 24, 12:00 pm, VAF Seminar Room
Michael Bell

Architect Michael Bell is an associate professor at Columbia University, where he is co-director of the Core Design Studios and Coordinator of the school's Housing Studios. Michael Bell Architecture specializes in housing and urban redevelopment where housing is a key component. In 2001 Bell lead a team of architects who provided research, planning and design for 1800 units of housing on a 100-acre parcel of oceanfront land owned by the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Bell also founded "16 Houses," a housing research and design program in Houston, for the Fifth Ward Redevelopment Corporation. Projects by Bell have received four Progressive Architecture Design Awards and Citations, and have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The Yale School of Architecture, The Architectural League of New York, The University Art Museum, Berkeley and at Archi-Lab. Work is also included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bell is the author of 16 Houses: Designing the Public's Private House and Space Replaces Us (both, the Monacelli Press, 2003). He is also the editor of Slow Space with Sze Tsung Leong. Michael Bell has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Rice University, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Michael Bell Architecture, Binocular House, Ghent, New York

Wed. Mar. 1, 3:30 pm, CalIT2 Auditorium (directions)
In Collaboration with the UCSD Communications Department
Carlos Trilnick: Essays on the Image

Carlos Trilnick will be screening some of his recent work on the representation of social protest in Argentina. including an important activist project where he had people wear wireless networked head-mounted video cameras during a major historic protest in Buenos Air which involved police killing of a protester. In this online work, footage from these cameras is juxtaposed with images of the protests presented on major news networks. He will also discuss community-based projects he is involved with in collaboration with university students and youth producers, including a multi-year digital media project on Don Quixote, the Talmud, and cultural identity issues with students in a poor Jewish neighborhood.

Carlos Trilnick is one of the founding members of the independent/activist video movement in South America and is a senior professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Development at the University of Buenos Aires where he teaches in the faculty of Audio-visual Design, and the Programs of Image and Sound Design and Expressive Media. He is also co-director of the Media Laboratory at the Talpiot Institute of Buenos Aires (a primary and secondary school), and coordinator of the Audio/Visual media program “Vale la Pena” which curates programs of a broad range of contemporary work that engages social issues across the arts.Trilnick began artistic career as a photographer in the 1970s and produced his first video in 1980. His recent work has includes digital media installations and online projects, and he has played a formative role in presenting the works of others in this emerging field. His works have been exhibited extensively and he is widely recognized within the international film and media community.

Since 1980 Trilnick has produced an important body of photography, video, installation and digital art which has been exhibited internationally in museums, biennials and art galleries, including among others: Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement, Geneve, Suiza, Museo da Imagem e du Son (Sao Paulo), VIPER Int Film-und Videotage (Suiza), MEIAC (Badajoz), Museo de Arte Moderno (Bogotá), European Media Arts Festival (Osnabruck), Video Data Bank (Chicago), CICV (Monbeliard), American Film Istitute (USA), Museum of Modern Arts, Haifa, Israel, Medien Operativen (Berlín), LA Freewaves. (Los Angeles), Instants Video (Francia), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), The Museum of Modern Arts (NewYork), Bienal del Mercosur (Porto Alegre), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), París-Berlín Interventions en espace public, Bienal de Video y Artes Electrónicas (Chile), XI Festival Internacional de Arte Ele ctrónica (San Pablo), VIPER Int Film-und Videotage (Suiza) y ARCO (Madrid).

His documentaries include "Subte Línea D" (1983), "Alfredo Hlito obra pictórica" (Alfredo Hlito pictorial work) (1987) and "Ennio Iomi, no perder la memoria" (1993), as well as more experimental video works such as "Five seconds" (1982), "Nostalgias del presente" (Present-day nostalgias) (1991) and "Una tarde" (One afternoon) (2000).

Thurs. Mar. 2, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Cosponsored by the UCSD Department of Literature
A.L. Steiner

A.L. Steiner's photographic and video work is exhibited and published internationally and featured in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The work synthesizes the neurosis of the photographic snapshot format, its immature immediacy, in the guise of entertaining, and commenting on, the masses. Steiner lives in New York City, is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, is co-editor of Ridykeulous and teaches at The School of Visual Arts in NYC.

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (Caden with trees), 2001

Fri. Mar. 3, 7:30 pm, Estación Tijuana (directions)
Alternative Universes

Panelists: Erlea Maneros, Nate Harrison, Mario Ybarra Jr., Sergio de la Torre

Moderator: C. Ondine Chavoya, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Williams College.

Four innovative and independent art spaces will discuss their work and their practice. Each of these alternative universes treats the white cube space in different ways, engaging their communities and mapping themselves in their urban setting while pointing to the educational institutions and relationships from which many are formed. Some act as wedges in the cultural matrix, some fill the gaps while others behave more parasitically on the city and its institutions. “Alternative Universes” will also provide a forum to discuss the ways artists and curators are working together to reinvigorate the counter-tradition of the alternative art space. We also hope to address how spaces developed on the edges or in the barrios of major cosmopolitan spaces are specifically addressing issues such as marginalization, gentrification, and cultural tourism.

ART2102, organized by Erlea Maneros, Renoud Proch, and Ronni Kimm is based in East Los Angeles. ART2102 acts as an option for research and exhibition practices unsuited for traditional institutional engagement.

ESL (Esthetics as a Second Language) organized by Nate Harrison, Hugo Hopping, and Mario Garcia Torres brings together an interest in collaboration and a one night only exhibition project in Los Angeles.

Slanguage is organized by and Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz and is invested in community projects such as art classes for school kids and participating in the cultural space of Wilmington, the city adjacent to the largest port in the country.

Lui Velazquez, organized by Shannon Spanhake, Camilo Ontiveros, and Sergio de la Torre in Tijuana, is an emerging residency program that brings together visiting scholars and writers for research based projects and presentations.

Organizers:
Rita Gonzalez: Assistant Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Adjunct Curator, Orange County Museum of Art
Bill Kelley Jr.: Independent curator and PhD student, UCSD Visual Arts

NOTE: NEW LOCATION

Mon. Mar. 13, 7:00 pm, Calit2 Auditorium (map and directions to Calit2)
Marina Abramovic: Performing Body

Marina Abramovic, born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Abramovic has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Abramovic?s concern with creating works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life like lying, sitting, dreaming, and thinking; in effect the manifestation of a unique mental state. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden, Abramovic created some of the most historic early performance pieces and is the only one still making important durational works. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her extraordinary video installation/performance piece Balkan Baroque and in 2003 received the Bessie for The House with the Ocean View. Abramovic has just completed a series of performances called "Seven Easy Pieces" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her work is included in many major public collections worldwide.

Lecture Details:
Performing Body is a personal account of the development of performance art, incorporating historical references and based thematically under subheadings relating to the body itself; 'Body Limits', Body Drama' , starting from 'head' and ending at the 'toes.'

Marina Abramovic, Sea Calming #1, 2006, Phuket
Photo: Paolo Canevari, permission: Ministry of Culture, Thailand

Fri. Mar. 17, 12:00 pm, VAF Seminar Room
Anuradha Mathur

Anuradha Mathur is assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad, in 1986 and after practicing for several years as an architect, received her M.L.A. from Penn in 1991. Mathur is co-author of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001). Her design firm Mathur/da Cunha received the Young Architects award for 2000 by the Architectural League of New York. Mathur's awarded projects are part of a publication by Princeton Architectural Press and the Architectural League titled, Second Nature.

Mathur’s work is directed toward design and the representation of landscapes as shifting and dynamic. Mathur is currently investigating the landscape of the Deccan Plateau in South India, providing the basis for an innovative design strategy for the city of Bangalore. Mathur and Dillip da Cunha along with Tom Leaders were one of the 6 teams invited to compete in the Fresh Kills competitions.

Thurs. Mar. 30, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Andrea Fraser

To mark the release of Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (MIT Press, 2005), legendary New York performance artist Andrea Fraser presents her incisive, provocative work in this artist's talk and screening. Fraser's practice, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his preface to Museum Highlights, is able to 'trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.' It often does this by occupying the social role it sets out to critique – as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum guide and describes the toilet in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings; or in Untitled (2003), for which her gallery arranged a commission for her to have sex with a collector. Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks – institutional critique, performance, feminism and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology – but her clever approach to cultural resistance raises the bar for each.

Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights, A Gallery Talk, 1989, performance Philadelphia Museum of Art

Wed. Apr. 5 (Time and Location TBA)
Manny Farber and All That Jazz, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Soloist

Information forthcoming, please check back soon

Manny Farber, My Budd

Thurs. Apr. 6, Afternoon talk, 3:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Paul Chan

Paul Chan's peculiar blend of the literary and the political, the age-old and the cutting-edge, the religious and the erotic has been everywhere lately, from Pittsburgh (the Carnegie International) to Brazil (Utopia Station, curated by Molly Nesbit, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Hans Ulrich Obrist) with multiple sightings in New York and Europe. Still, in some ways he remains hidden: he doesn't allow himself to be photographed, because he values his privacy and his rights as a committed political activist in a nation hostile to dissent. Chan's dual identity as artist and activist —he aims to keep the two poles separate so as to, in his words, "keep his allegiances clear"—is just one example of the resolution of opposites that characterizes his life and work. Chan is Hong Kong born and Nebraska bred, and his work is predicated on the idea that space for something new can be created by juxtaposing opposites: his drawings and doublesided video projections evince an equal pull to Adorno and to über-outsider Henry Darger, to the Bible and to Sade, to Beckett and to hip-hop, and while Chan remains faithful to old-fashioned charcoal drawing, he enjoys a simultaneous love affair with digital rendering and manipulation. (Bomb Magazine)

Paul Chan, My Birds…trash…the future, 2004

Fri. Apr. 7, 12:00 pm, VAF Seminar Room
Julie Eizenberg

Architect Julie Eizenberg is founder of the Santa Monica-based firm, Koning Eizenberg, known for its imaginative, site-specific and people-oriented approach to the design of buildings and places of everyday living. The firm’s fresh, contemporary aesthetic brings design excellence to a wide range of building types, from housing to community centers, schools to hotels, recreational facilities to retail, work places to museums. The breadth of this experience translates into an ability to generate creative solutions for unique situations with budgets that conventionally sustain only generic solutions.

The firm is often selected to work on projects that require creative thinking to tackle complex issues of programming, site use and contextual fit, and it has achieved international recognition for its ground-breaking work in housing and community-based projects. This reputation has been confirmed through numerous design awards – including national, state and local AIA awards – for residential, commercial and institutional work, as well as in winning designs for national competitions. The firm’s long-standing commitment to sustainable design is embodied in Koning Eizenberg’s own award-winning solar-powered office building.

Established in 1981 by Julie Eizenberg, AIA, and Hendrik Koning, FAIA, FRAIA, the Koning Eizenberg comprises a team of 22 architects, designers and administrative staff, including LEED-accredited professionals. The office’s collaborative culture, where principals remain involved throughout design, documentation and construction, delivers architecture that fuses the pragmatic with design innovation to produce buildings valued by both clients and users for their aesthetic richness and ease of use.

Koning Eizenberg, Herb Alpert Educational Village

Thurs. Apr. 27, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Cosponsored by California Cultures in Comparative Perspective
B+

For the last 15 years, Los Angeles based photographer and filmmaker B+ (aka Brian Cross) documented the LA underground music scene and has been heavily involved in its development. In 1990 he went to Los Angeles to study photography at the California Institute of the Arts. While at CalArts he began work on a project entitled It's Not about a Salary: Rap Race and Resistance which was subsequently published by Verso Books in 1993.

Since the publication of the book B+ has continued to work in the L.A. hip-hop community. His first album cover work was for the Freestyle Fellowship (Inner City Griots). Since then he has completed an estimated one hundred more for artists from Mos Def, RZA, Cappadonna, Q-Tip, Eazy E, Los Super Seven, Long Beach Dub All-Stars, Ozomatli, Jurrassic 5, Dilated Peoples, DJ Shadow, Company Flow, Blackalicious, Money Mark, David Axelrod, South Central Cartel, Warren G, Yusef Lateef and Yesterday's New Quintet. He was the photo editor of Larry Flint's ill-fated yet highly influential Rappages magazine from 1993-1997.

In 1995 His video for DJ Shadows 'Midnight in a Perfect World' brought Brian's talent to a worldwide audience, the video is sequenced perfectly with DJ Shadows melancholic masterpiece - Earl Palmer (session drummer for the likes of Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Duane Eddy, Frank Sinatra, the Monkees, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Otis, Neil Young and Elvis Costello) featured in the video and it inspired Brian to come up with the idea of putting 4 session drummers from 30 years ago together in a room with a group of deejays who are on top of their game and were familiar with the drummers work through drum samples featured on HipHop tracks thus the idea for Keep In Time came about.

Thurs. May 18, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Jay Koh

Singapore-born artist and cultural activist Jay Koh is currently based in South East Asia where he manages an art and cultural resource development centre (NICA – Networking + Initiatives for Culture and the Arts) in Yangon to facilitate social and “other” changes through art and cultural activities. He is working to set up new spaces in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore to investigate “engaged” cultural and art activities in today’s urban and global cities. The concepts of his practice are grounded in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the New French Theory of Foucault and Derrida with references to Intercultural studies.

Jay is prolific in initiating and managing international projects, especially in intercultural work. He has initiated and established networks for artists' exchanges between Asia and Europe, including founding the network International Forum for Intermedia Art (IFIMA) in 1995.

Since 2001, he has been collaborating with Malaysian-born artist Chu Yuan in most of his activities. Together, they take on multifaceted roles in order to negotiate with social-political structures on site and conceives of appropriate actions in response to each site. These actions can range from curating and organizing exhibitions, seminars, workshops and learning programs; community capacity-building, advocacy, writing, publishing, to other necessary activities. NICA in Yangon is IFIMA's longest running project initiated from research started in 1997.

Koh lectures and writes on the concepts of Engaged Art and Critical Art Process.His wide associations and experience have earned him positions as adviser to O+I (Organisation and Imagination), London, formerly known as APG (Artist Placement Group), the League of Khmer Artists in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and The Ayeyarwaddy Artists Assembly in Myanmar. Jay’s recent Artist-in-Residencies include those with IASPIS, Sweden (based at Umea University) and HIAP, Helsinki.

Art Class organized by Networking + Initiatives for Culture and the Arts

Thurs. June 1, 7:00 pm, VAF Performance Space
Cosponsored by the UCSD Department of Literature
Joan Copjec

A professor of English, comparative literature, and media study, Joan Copjec is also director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo. Her research concerns the status of sexual difference as a primary (or ontological) rather than a secondary (or ontic) category. Copjec believes that psychoanalysis, as inheritor of German Idealism, provides the only real theory of this category, as she has stated in her books, including the most recent, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2002).

Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, 2004, MIT Press

Directions to the Visual Arts Facility Performance Space

Visual Arts Department website: http://visarts.ucsd.edu