never again 511

What do our institutions do?

draw the lines. line us up. count the lines. move the lines. never cross the lines.

encouragement is just a practice they use to build us up and make it easier to pick us apart.

when a professor tells you that you have that characteristic canadian women voice,

that uncertain, unstable, unsure voice.

she is just perpetuating a discourse of difference, of dependancy on male ontological technologies.

being more like them rather than being more like myself. fuck the cynical boy bashers.

fuck you. and fuck your opinions on the concern i have for being taken seriously.

Museum Manifesto 1

What is it about museums that make them so foreign to us.

travel in space to travel in time. chain of being time machines.

An encapsulated sector where things can be parcelled off in order to represent a compartmentalized reality; a bounded off space in which we can OBSERVE with a detached sense of ourselves.

But in our current state where identities and genres are stuffed down our throats at every other turn, how do we anymore see ourselves as detached, independent organisms when we are so enthralled and exhilarated by every beep flash and digital delineation that comes our way.

History isn't stagnant and compartmentalized. the world is hybridized and although there are some aspects of cultural quarantines (spiritual copyrights) we exist in a state of the hyperreal where everything is nothing and everything is something. Our contextualizations of these notions (in terms of museums) should reflect these fractures. pointing to our state of instability in a world where profit makes the difference; 'originality' speaks to conformity in all sense of these definitions.

eff.

ontologies of technology are driving me crazy. maybe i can get a new one in the pottery barn's african chic department.

boredom bourdieu

habitus habitus habitus

you cottage fucks

"...the panoramic perspective is linked to the exercise of political power precisely because of its ability to abstract universal meanings from the specifics of landscape. The panoramic point of view reflects an elevated social position; those with the ability to see the big picture are those who are given the power to control and alter social as well as physical landscapes..."

Michael E. Harkins (2000) Sacred Places, Scarred Spaces p.55

salami somalian sommelier

How do we balance the oncoming collapse and our incessant need to delve into convoluted extractions of visual culture. I'm not going to pretend I don't find anything interesting in the new art criticism and its multifaceted layers of self-gratification and eclecticism, but is it preservable? When a society breaks down and its imperial systems begin to deconstruct, objects become new sources of symbolic stimuli. The imperial (or capitalist) economy changed the classification and context of each and every object in the western world (by way of expropriation and assimilation); the 'art' object has become linked to a kind of status ascendancy. So when such a system breaks down, what do we do with all the abstract expressionists, colour field painters, minimalists, conceptual artists and new postmodernists (the second half of the 20th centuries modern 'progress' builders)? Do we bargain with art museum elitists (Marc Mayer...?) for local produce in lieu of pretentious public access fees? Probably not. May'be we can just look from the outside in like me and my dad used to do at the oversized glass display case that is the Museum of Anthropology.

Dear Derek Carlson: Please start a blog.

well...

it's happening all over again...

Anngjerd Rustand

Erratic

2010

image source: http://anngjerd.no/

Unstable and apprehensive, a suspended vortex.

This is kinda how I feel today.

Pretty insides.

Rebecca Stevenson, Bambarella, 2007

http://www.rebeccastevenson.net


Rebecca Stevenson's polyester resin and wax sculptures are suspended within critical ideas of art, craft, tradition and hybridization. I have an inherent need to make anything and everything about visual identity and I continually manifest intrinsic links to cultural production through these realizations. The use of wax and synthetic materials with the combination of traditional western forms and processes moves Stevenson's work into the realm of post-identity, into a physical hyperreal that proves a tactile existence. This is something craft pushes visual culture to realize, the importance of hybridity, the location of culture swerving in and out of determined boundaries, beyond 'post.' If we are academically situated in that overfed 'postmodern cloud' of intellectual obscurity, we need work that locates us as we are, as consumerists of the image. Because the work is so tactile -sensory response is actually stimulated through aesthetic choice- we are made aware of our visual bias and the work moves visual identity into a new state of 'seeing' or peripheral understanding. Stevenson's work points to the manipulation of tradition, the deconstruction of visual aesthetic and the contemplation of craft material. The sticky, the sappy, the waxen slippage between past present and future is our current western location. As dominion continues and neocolonialism creeps throughout our socially constructed boundaries; this hybridization takes on bizarre renditions of Bernini encrusted with mucusy flora, an opening up of our circumscribed perusal.

when will people get back into theory?

?

"The museum has become a storehouse of human values, a cultural bloodbank." -M.M.

Who's values?

mmmm... sounds a little supremacist?

the others

'The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained - ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other."

-Marshall McCluan The Medium is the Message

although our environment 'compels commitment and participation' i don't exactly feel that this participation is encouraged by our institutions in minority groups. this paragraph here seems to encourage that Canadian sense of multiculturalism that ghettoizes and essentializes the hybrid state of our current society. As the electrical age has moved into the technological and now the hyperreal, the myths fabricated by imperialism continue to threaten our understanding of cultures that have been positioned in which to be 'othered.' what we know about 'these' cultures is filtered through a western understanding of academia and eurocentric cerebral pollution. Our museums, schools and electric media often deliver a disneyified description of such cultures, bypassing subjugation and genocide. and what about the idea of being 'othered'? how do we balance that? is it better to separate or integrate? i guess that depends on the kind of integration. integration into to the 'Canadian' society is based in imperialism and is just a form of assimilation. it is the Canadian society that needs to be deconstructed and repositioned in order to reflect and promote the various and distinct values of the many diverse indigenous communities that make up this continent.

we ARE wild?

Hi.

I curated a show that is opening tomorrow. it features recent photo graduates and their work concerning our detachment and developing manipulation of the wilderness.

http://www.xpace.info/exhibition_current

For all those who believe polyvinyl chloride and the great outdoors were meant to be...

So...

Are first worlders anti-children or anti-polar bears

i heart the pinky show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHGaH-7wq6M

My New Favorite

Micah Lidberg: The Migration

Angry Cloud -detail

thanks kristi!

today

i have no idea what's going on.

waxen jargon

maybe it's time to forget 'postmodernism.' maybe people need to get over the white designed train wreck they call the individual. the individual is just the modern subject broken apart and put back together using tabloid cut outs and electrical tape. i understand the need for the subjective perspective, but an emphasis on the postmodern leaves the margins continually reduced and expropriated. museums and galleries continue to include rather than integrate. this forms the basis of their mandate. embracing instead of restructuring. these institutions maintain the white standard. decontextualize. recontextualize. monopolize. pursuing the interests of their corporate do-gooders. we need hybridization. not just in the object, but in the framing space. without the frame the object is invisible. this is pretentious but fuck it.

dear blog,

i think the blow jobs are getting better.

holy.

done school. need a life.

we're moving

life loves: 122 days

Summer 'to do' list:

Aesthetic Theory: Theodor Adorno

Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon

The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths: Rosalind Krauss

Critique of Judgment: Immanuel Kant

The New Imperialism: David Harvey

The Question of Palestine: Edward Said

seeing, seeing, seeing, sewn.

Moperialism

I hate researching 'Modern' artists because every other word in every text is Marxism followed by progress. Get the fuck over it, progress is a negation of the everyday and our primordial selves.

circle circle circle circle circle circle circle

AK

I had a dream and you were in it. licking your lips and frowning your brow.

the coffee sits on the table. caffeinated ripples of trepidation. i will watch you slow me down.

a fish is easier to confuse and influence, while the archer pins her down. a distorted glass blocks her vision, imposed from the outside in.

I lose myself in your illusion. I lose my ability to stop and swallow.

Anselm Kiefer: Die Frauen der Antike

Image from: artnet.com

Die Frauen der Antike ('The Women of Antiquity') 1999-2000.
Oil, shellac, emulsion, sand, ash and pastel on paper mounted on linen canvas, 280.5 x 190.5 cm, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London.

Birthday wants* list

There is a book in my school library called A Stó:lō-Coast Salish Historical Atlas. Apparently there is ‘no room’ for this atlas among the plethora of 'world' and 'Canadian' Atlases listed throughout the aisles. So, it is regulated to a hidden bookcase at the end -completely invisible to any student looking for an alternative perspective of Canadian (geo) graphy and geopolitics. Historical experience is expressed through multiple viewpoints that are often conflicted -one side frequently being degenerated and censored by the dominant enforced society. Western institutions neglect these historical interpretations and Coast Salish artistic practice is repeatedly seen as 'second rate' to the art production of northern indigenous communities (Olympics anyone?). This book is integral to the representation of Coast Salish and Stó:lō perspectives on historical experience and knowledge. It shouldn't be assigned to a dusty corner, segregated from so called 'legitimate' articulations of place and territory; especially when it is just as -or more correctly more so- appropriate to interpretations of land use and cartography.