New Blog

I have a new blog and website. So I probably won't be using this one anymore. It is www.shelbyrichardson.com!

BUUUUUUUUUBYEEEEEEE

north american freedom

It is the ability to conform to commodity. The freedom to choose how you will articulate your life through consumer representation. How you fit into an advertised taxonomy reflects your freedom, your value, your monetary interest in reality.

Is this the driving force for the art object or is it the underpinning structure of collecting? The collector creates the s/he persona through the collected object. The supposed universality in art is clearly articulated through the wealthy collector. Not that of the visual but of the imagined creation of a representational whole. Choice of value is determined in relation to an imagined social significance. Choice bears the illusion of a false democracy, subverting its totalizing and suffocating nature.

so anthropology.

So i am half way through my current MA in anthropology. and i guess it's not half bad. i went into this thing thinking all anthropologists are just assholes. and i suppose i was about half right.

there are those jerks who think only born anthropologists can be anthropologists. but what about born again anthropologists? i mean art is material culture isn't it, so why is it such a fucking foreign concept to people? and aren't foreign concepts what's happening? isn't that what we're all in to? god forbid you talk about something made after 1902... (that doesn't fit into the 'non-linear' linear narrative) the inalienability of objects isn't just about what we are constantly shoving in tiny boxes with tiny labels with tiny ideas circulating all over the place. (or are they big ugly ideas?)

we need to position ourselves in-between things. how else are we going to get anywhere? if we are constantly redrawing the disciplinary lines we aren't going to get anywhere and your going to continually have artists saying anthropologists are all assholes and all anthropologists saying artists are postmodern crazies. but you know i guess that's what university is about right? pay money to learn to fit in this tiny box that doesn't teach you anything about participating in real life and teaches you to unlearn the fact that theory doesn't really make a fucking difference.

too bad theory is so awesome.

anyways, anthropologists aren't all assholes...

Salish Wool Dog

Paul Kane

Detail: A Woman weaving a blanket

1848-1856

What happened to you little buddy?

We put gates around the wrong things.

Opening what wasn't meant to be opened.

Imperial taxonomies and the 'magic circle'

"Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. Naturally his existence is tied to many other things as well: to a very mysterious relationship to ownership...also, to a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value- that is, their usefulness, but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock, of his property."

Walter Benjamin p.13

"Only in extinction is the collector comprehended."

Hegel p.15

qtd. in Kiendl, Anthony. "Toward a New Understanding of Collecting." in Obsessions, Compulsions, Collections

oh yeah

mary anne barkhouse is pretty awesome.

image from: http://www.medicinehatmedia.com/2009/02/mary-anne-barkhouse-boreal-baroque-tonight/

reciprocity

this blog is mainly for me to complain about institutional practice and converse about art and criticism i believe to be valuable to the greater conversations of local bc and canadian culture (if those 'things' really exist).

however, sometimes components of current anthropological and art theory cross over into the personal realm and i think it is helpful to comment on these things.

reciprocal relationships are such processes. i'm not a sociologists nor have i gone to school for anything related to practical reality but i think we can think about our personal relationships in correlation with larger relationships between peoples and cultures. in the last year i entered into a relationship with someone who made me recognize the importance of facilitating talents and how the level of intellectual interaction between partners bolsters and encourages this kind of practice. we have both made (if i can speak on behalf of both) significant changes to our lifestyles in the last year and have become more productive in terms of our expressive necessities.

bringing this back to museums and art i can see a connection between this kind of relationship and the more general relationship between museums, contemporary art and first nations communities. if museums take time to act reciprocally with contemporary first nations artists their institutions will move in more positive directions of collaboration. this puts people on an equal playing field where differing perspectives reflect off each other and provide both positions with increased opportunities and possibilities. most museums still neglect to look at differing perspectives on an equilibrial level, constantly privileging the institutional perspective. this is most visible through exhibition practice and the constant confusion surrounding where contemporary art has to go and how to make room for it. over and over again these expressions of ontological thinking are separated from the 'artifacts' of everyday life, however if some museums took the time to look reciprocally at different perspectives on artistic production they would possibly realize that these boundaries don't necessarily exist.

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...