OPEN CALL/CFP: FOLK ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE RESIDENCIES

reposted from the Philadelphia Folklore Project -
OPEN CALL: FOLK ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE RESIDENCIES
Show and share your work in our gallery

The Philadelphia Folklore Project announces new exhibition opportunities for people working in local communities and addressing social change. (For a pdf of this page, click here.)

If you are directly creating folk and traditional arts or doing documentary work about local grassroots community experiences and expressions, we invite you to apply. Propose a project that can have meaningful impact, both for you and more widely. Residencies offer stipends of $1,000 - $3,000 as well as an exhibition in our gallery between September 2011 and August 2012.

Who: We invite proposals from Philadelphia-area residents who work in community artistic traditions/folk arts or who conduct grassroots or ethnographic documentation. By folk arts, we mean community-based arts: traditions rooted in shared and evolving heritage or experiences. We see folk arts as collective traditions: arts that represent more than an individual vision.

What: Projects that can be done for $3,000 or less, and installed over 1-3 months at PFP are possible. In addition to the stipend and space*, we provide a public opening reception, publicity and interpretive materials, and technical assistance as needed. PFP staff will support exhibition planning and production, develop publicity and interpretive materials, and support community outreach and public programs. Artists chosen for residencies are asked to present at least one public event sharing or talking about their cultural or documentary work and the issues it addresses, and to participate in several meetings with PFP staff and other residents. We expect to support up to 5 different projects.

When: Application deadline, July 1, 2011. Residency projects will be on display for 1-3 months between September 2011 and August 2012. (Exhibition durations will vary depending on proposed projects).

Where: Exhibitions will be installed at PFP, 735 S. 50th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19143

Why this program? People working in folk and traditional arts create meaningful alternatives for their communities, but lack many kinds of resources to sustain their practice. We value folk arts: the spaces they claim, the relationships they embody, and the possibilities they offer. We invite you to bring your arts and concerns into our gallery, and to consider how our space and support can help you take next steps in work that matters.



Read more about the CFP here.

NYC History: Greenwood Cemetery

Well, now that Hatred is buried, we can move forward as a planet, right?

Recently I visited Greenwood Cemetery for the first time, which is mildly embarrassing given that I've lived 20 blocks away from this historic landmark for 2 years now. Perhaps I felt that cemeteries are morbid (or a site of abjectourism, perhaps?), but I'm glad I got over my hangup!

Greenwood Cemetery was founded in 1838, and spans 478 acres of hilly, once-rural Brooklyn. Famous folks are buried here, from Bill the Butcher (see: Gangs of New York), Louis Comfort Tiffany, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, and Susan Smith McKinney-Stewards, New York's first black woman doctor.





Greenwood is absolutely beautiful, and relaxing.





And the lovely Greenwood Chapel:



I highly recommend taking a walk through Greenwood during the summer. It's a calming throwback to Old New York, and one of the few places in America with substantive and lengthy history.

Displaying the (Australian) Nation: Looking at Representation at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Recently I had the good fortune to be in Melbourne, Australia, and I visited the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). The NGV is vaguely akin to the Smithsonian, and so there are several branches, including the Ian Potter Center that includes some very interesting work.


The entryway to the main NGV Galleries (free, by the way) is beautiful, covered in a falling water installation.


In these galleries, a few works in particular caught my attention.
Marjetica Potrc is an artist and architect from Ljubljana. Her work Urban, 2001, is a series of photographs of urban spaces and buildings.



Potrc complicates easy narratives around these images of urban life, both cluttered (slums) and glamorous or sleek (skyscrapers) by layering text around and through them that tells fragments of stories. Information panels tell the viewer, "Each depictions of the city considers community, a sense of place and belonging, and conversely, detachment and alienation." I found Potrc's work thought-provoking, and an interesting juxtaposition of her artistic and architectural talents.



I also enjoyed
Yayoi Kusama's installation of Tender are the stairs to Heaven (2004). Something about the ladder streaming upwards and the slowly melting colors was tremendously relaxing and meditative.

Nearby, another branch of the NGV, is the Ian Potter Centre.


This branch contains the Qantas-funded Aboriginal Art Galleries, which include both traditional/historical works as well as contemporary art.


The galleries are spacious and airy, and look like this:




Traditional decorative weaving is also included.


Wall text from artists remind visitors that painting is a political and agentive act, and that the history of Aboriginal painting in Australia has been laden with difficulty, tension and struggle. As scholar Fred Myers relates, Aboriginal artists were often taken advantage of by gallerists and dealers as their work came to represent the Australian nation, a nation which did not necessarily acknowledge rights to these same peoples.



Some of the text panels read like the works on display are purely artistic, with no additional or interpretive information presented, whereas others include part of the artist's story, which helps the works to be seen as cultural artifacts (rather than as purely art works). It is also critical to clarify that providing descriptions that help the viewer decipher these works can be read in two ways: first, that as Bourdieu tells us, all art is read and understood by decoding certain symbols and its legibility, that is, that its meaning is encoded and understood by those who know the key and find it legible and so providing this type of key and description helps build this lexicon in the viewers, which they can then carry to interpret other works; alternatively, providing such a key can come across as condescending or as acknowledging these works' location outside the historic Western art canon.



I was really taken by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrala's A bushtucker's story, below.

And a closeup:

I just thought this painting was stunning in its complexity, delicate colors, and careful details. It reminded me of Monet's gardens at Giverny, if seen through a Seurrat-ian eye.

Other paintings were depicted very clearly as cultural artifacts that allowed the visitor a view into Aboriginal culture and beliefs around certain social practices or understandings, as this painting, Mimih spirit and human reproduction.


Another work I found compelling was Ruby Tjangawa Williamson's Puli murpu (Mountain range). Wall text assists the viewer in deciphering the image.




In the contemporary art section, I was completely mesmerized by Samantha Hobson's Bust 'im up, 2000, seen below in details. I have also included the wall panel, so readers can see that Hobson's geographic and tribal affiliation. The galleries are clearly attempting to promote seeing these artists as individuals, with distinct cultural, geographic, and social backgrounds.





And finally, Mirdidingkingathi Jurwunda Sally Gabori's 2008 work, Ninjiki, is absolutely incredible. If I could cover a wall with this painting, and another with Lee Krasner's Gaea, 1966...



Overall, the NGV is making strides to promote varied and nuanced interpretations of works by Aboriginal artists, which is positive and should be encouraged and valued (not all museums are so nuanced in their thinking and representation of native peoples). However, when I went to the gift shop to look for postcards of the works I had fallen in love with (those above!), I was saddened to find that the only postcards available were from the "main" galleries, and there were no postcards of works in the Aboriginal galleries for sale. Thus it seems that wall panels and display aside, the NGV and its gift shop are still rooted in a normative and normalizing view of what constitutes "art."

Stuart Hall on Hegemony

"Hegemony...is never completed. It is always trying to enclose more differences within itself. Not within itself. It doesn't want the differences to look exactly like it. But it wants the projects of its individual and smaller identities to be only possible if the larger one becomes possible. That is how Thatcherism locates smaller identities within itself. You want to have the traditional family? You cannot do it for yourself because it depends on larger political and economic things. If you want to do that, you must come inside my larger project. You must identify yourself with the larger things inside my project. That is how you become part of history. You become a little cog in the larger part of history.
Now that is a different game from saying, "I want everybody to be exactly a replica of me." It is a more complicated game. But there is a moment when it always declares itself to be universal and closed, and that is the moment of naturalization. That's the moment when it wants its boundaries to be coterminous with the truth, with the reality of history. And that is always the moment which, I think, escapes it. That's my hope. Something had better be escaping it."

from "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethniticies"

Catalina Perra: Stitching Together Reality by Jailee Rychen

Today's guest post is written by Jailee Rychen.

Catalina Parra, Coming your way, 1991

The method of stitching that appears in the collage works of Chilean artist Catalina Parra has been a defining element of her creative process since early in her artistic career. Her collage work is made from cut up newspapers, rearranged and reconstructed through the application of red stitches. She adopted the practice of stitching after learning of an old Araucanian myth that tells the story of a tribe that would sew shut all of the orifices of a creature so that evil spirits could not escape. The creature is referred to as the imbunche and its ideological significance manifests itself throughout Parra’s work. Stemming from this tale, stitching has become a metaphor for grotesque manipulation, suppression and censorship. On the other hand, the artist also describes the act of sewing in terms of its relationship with feminine handiwork. The stitches can be seen as representations of the process of mending or restoring that which has been torn or destroyed. Stitching is not only just an act of restoration but also is an act of creation: stitching together parts in order to form a whole. Parra states that often women possess a natural tendency to fix or restore things in order to form a new, more beautiful reality. The use of stitching in her work is, therefore, simultaneously violent and generative. It is a method of reinvention that questions the reality that we are given on a daily basis through authoritative methods of communication, represented in her pieces by the newspaper.

The use of the stitch is an example of Parra’s own language of political critique, one that is not based on literal depictions or obvious imagery but delicately and ambiguously implied in her work. While she was living in Germany she was very impressed and influenced by the work of John Heartfield whose political collages of photographic images portrayed a strong anti-fascist message during the time of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. She says her work as has been informed by the sensibility found in Heartfield’s work but her experience as an artist living and working in various countries around the globe, under various political conditions, has inevitably led to the development of a different language of critique. While working in Chile during the dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet, Parra learned that through the subtle use of materials and juxtapositions she could produce work in a language that served as camouflage; her strong oppositional message about the Pinochet regime, encoded within the materials she used, was not detected by government authorities. “In order to speak of the pain and suffering caused by the silencing of democracy, the artist invented a language of double meaning, an esoteric language that unsuspicious drew upon the theme of the myth of the imbunche.”(1) Her work created a new space, a new reality where she was free to express her feelings of sorrow and defiance towards the harsh political reality that her home country was facing. At a time when artists, writers and intellectuals were all being thrown in prison for their rebellious stance against the dictatorship, Parra’s work was being openly exhibited in Chile. Proof that she was successful in stitching together a new space of contestation when one could not be found elsewhere.

Catalina Parra, It's Indisputable, 1992

In Parra’s newspaper collages, she does not directly state a particular position nor does she explicitly provide an obvious message; she delicately alters text so that the meaning is only slightly skewed. She cuts and inserts other images. In many cases, she removes the product being advertised in order to widen the viewer’s scope of interpretation. Parra’s method of double meaning referred to above effectively exposes a similar method of hidden meaning that is employed within the original newspaper material that she utilizes in her collages. Parra exposes the hypocritical and ironic messages of headlines such as “The Human Touch, the Financial Edge” and “It’s Undisputable.” What she does is dissect and re-contextualize them in a manner that challenges the original, underlying meaning behind them. In order to expose the hidden messages of the media that she uses, Parra employs similarly ambiguous and carefully meditated artistic language. Therefore, from a certain perspective, the artist builds her critique by emulating the methods of the media that is the subject of her critique.

Creating work that mimics the language of the object being critiqued echoes the theoretical ideas of Guy Debord. Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle is in fact related to Parra’s vision of our modern lives within a capitalist and consumer-obsessed society. Debord’s concept of spectacular society is defined as a society that is so highly dominated by images that it is no longer able to identify true reality from the reality superficially produced by the media. Debord describes the spectacle, as “both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality.”(2) Debord, like Parra in her collages, stresses that to analyze and challenge the spectacle we are required to utilize the language of the spectacle itself.

It seems evident that both Parra and Debord share the perspective that we cannot find a space outside of the dominant and omnipresent mode of communication from which to stage a revolt; such a space does not exist. The revolt, then, must come from within. From Parra’s collage work she suggests that if we can subvert the reality that we are supposed to accept as real, if we can learn to question and critique the flow of information, images and language that we receive, we may then be able to begin to construct or stitch together a new, more aware and conscious reality; one that is perhaps more beautiful.

1. Julia P. Herzberg, Catalina Parra in Retrospect: Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York, February 6-April 4, 1992, Bronx, N.Y.: The Gallery, 1991, 13.
2. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994, 7.

Jailee Rychen is a recent graduate of NYU's Museum Studies graduate program, and a New York-based independent curator and art professional. Her collected writings for TheExaminer.com can be found here.

Pamela Tinnen on Abjectourism

Today's post is written by Pamela Tinnen, whose research explores tourism, voyeurism, death and the body.

“The almost fashionable success of anatomy cannot be attributed solely to scientific curiosity. It is not hard to understand; it corresponds to an attraction to certain ill-defined things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain”
- Philipe Ariés

People are fascinated by images of death. What happens when the deceased body becomes transformed into a commonplace voyeuristic experience? Corpses are already available for touristic consumption in a variety of contexts. Mummies from ancient Egypt, archaeological or anthropological collections of skeletons, and holy relics such as the embalmed corpses of saints are several examples of institutionalized human remains where the general public is welcome to engage with the physical presence of death. Sites that house dead human bodies and body parts advance questions regarding the propriety of displaying corpses as museum objects, but more importantly, they reflect a societal compulsion to witness reflections of death.

Often in sites of so-termed Dark Tourism, aspects of the death experience are qualified through an individual confrontation with a private thanatological experience. When I visit, for example, Ground Zero, Auschwitz, or the Vietnam Memorial, I become aware of the fleeting nature of life, feel sympathy, and, as a result, experience a heightened sense of my own mortality. I become aware of the death subject by situating it within a time and place wherein the death itself is an abstraction of the non-present dead subject(s). Confronting the implication of death, the viewing subject likely identifies with the death subject and feelings of emotional and physical empathy occur. However, this is distinct/ (different) from sites that host physical displays of the dead human body. Indeed, although the abstract concept of ‘death’ is often conflated with the objects that represent it—cadaver, corpse, specimen, remains, carcass, bones, skeleton, mummy, etc.—‘death’ is not the dead body. When the viewing subject confronts a physical (often anonymous) human specimen, s/he encounters a dead object, rather than a death experience. Concepts of mortality are also called into question, but, more precisely, we confront the limitations of our physical bodies.

Public fascination with displays of the dead and the dying human body is a complicated phenomenon not easily attributed to one specific motivator. Perhaps galvanized by scientific, forensic, intellectual, religious or emotional curiosity, the general public will often engage in practices of tourism that condone and produce demand for displays of the dead. By inquiring into the history and trajectory of public dissection, professional and popular anatomical museums, and contemporary exhibitions like Body Worlds, I attempt to distinguish that the impetus which drives the touristic consumption of death-objects (corpses) is separate from that which drives scholarship of Dark Tourism, and therefore concedes demand for a new field of museum studies research which focuses specifically on tourism for physical human remains.

Concentrating on the development of the field’s audience and objects, I begin with a synopsis of the historic relationship that Western society has held with the touristic consumption of the death-object. Following this survey, I speculate on the degrees and experiential elements of death-object tourism, which I have named Abjectourism, that situate it as a unique and largely unconsidered form of lurid tourism.

For more on Tinnen and her work, please visit her website here.

Image above is a Damien Hirst installation.