Education and Community Programs

As I re-read key passages from THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF
QUEEN LOANA, I’m struck by the bigness and the
boldness of what essentially amounts to a literary
self-portrait.

I’m struck, too, by the somewhat surprising
accessibility of the novel and the emotional core of
the protagonist it so eloquently documents.

(I guess I’m easily frightened by vaguely defined
arenas of academia like “semiotics,” and because
Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, feared the worst: a
nightmare jumble of obscure symbols understandable
only to a select few, anti-social intellectuals
cloistered amidst ancient Latin texts in the
smoke-filled faculty clubs of European universities.)

Surprise! This novel, though certainly not Lit Lite,
proves to be a relatively breezy and thoroughly
engrossing read.

I couldn’t help but compare it, in my annoyingly
English major manner, to two recent and culturally
analogous events:

1) Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan bio on PBS

2) The Chuck Close show at the Walker.

The Dylan bio hammered home the point of Dylan’s
continual struggle with self-identity and his endless
efforts to reinvent himself both as a musician and a
public persona (performer), sometimes purposefully
blurring the line between fact and fiction.

Likewise, the Chuck Close show highlighted the
artist’s continual return to earlier images of
himself, and his continued efforts to manipulate and
reassemble those images.

“I cannot let myself go, I want to know who I am. One
thing is certain. The memories that surfaced at the
beginning of what I believe to be my coma are obscure,
foggy, and arranged in patchwork fashion with breaks,
uncertainties, missing pieces… that is how we do it
in normal life, too: we could suppose we have been
deceived by some evil genius, but in order to be able
to move forward we behave as if everything we see is
real.”
p. 419
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco

(NOTE: The Artist’s Bookshelf starts Thursday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m.)

Hans Haacke
Condensation Cube 1963
Museu d’Art Contemporaini, Barcelona, Spain. Gift of the National Comittee and Board of Trustees Whitney Museum of American Art. © DACS 2005

Can’t make it to London for the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970? Not to worry. You are a citizen of the global village and have the power to appear wherever there is an online forum, a camera and a recording device. So, set your universal timing device for Friday, September 16, 2005, 2:30 Central Standard Time and switch your brain to upload mode because this three-day behemoth of a symposium will include Donna De Salvo (curator of Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970), Alexander Alberro, Sabeth Buchmann, Diederich Diederichsen, Braco Dimitrijevic, Briony Fer, Hans Haacke, Margaret Iversen, Peter Osborne and Anne Rorimer discussing how experimental art in the 1960s and 70s responded to the social, political and technological conditions of the time. I’m getting woozy just thinking about all that erudition in one room. I suppose no one has ever accused the Tate Modern of being small-minded… it would be unthinkable.

Ten community cultural organizations and the institutions with which they maintained contact over one year from "Irrational" Organizations: Culture and Community Change by Mark J. Stern

Sometimes, it feels like I’m preaching to the choir when I talk talk to arts administrators, arts teachers and socially conscious programmers about the social potential of the artist and cultural programs. And I find myself thinking, “How do we get this message to those in leadership positions who don’t know how important the arts are?” I know that the arts are not just icing on the cake of industry and retail; I know that community-based arts organizations can have powerfully positive effects on their communities; I know that regional economies are effected by the presence of individual working artists; I know that artists often pioneer inner city redevelopment only to be pushed out once they have stabilized a depressed community. But, do the policy makers, city and county leaders, politicians and international policy wonks know how integral the arts are to communities? I doubt it. Otherwise, artists would have an honored place at the table.

Not content to wait around for an invitation to participate, Artist Richard Kamler has created SEEING PEACE - a multi-pronged initiative designed to create a presence for artists at the UN. Seeing Peace is an exhibition, a collective action, an assembly and a conceptual artistic intervention. I don’t know if it will achieve the status of “great art” or if it will pass muster as a “work of genius.” I do know that these process based interventions are popping up all over the artistic landscape and, I believe, point to a growing interest among artist in not only designing products, installations and works of art, but in creating what I like to call “aesthetic interventions.” So, three cheers in particular for SEEING PEACE and for works of art that blur the boundaries between object, process and concept so intensly that it’s engenendered a relatively new critical methodology (French in origin, of course) called Relational Esthetics. Let’s hope this critical methodology provides some insight and not just another layer of inpenetrable art-geek talk.

Almost Random Links:

Richard Kamler’s SEEING PEACE project

Social Impact of the Arts Project - University of Pennsylvania

Rirkrit Tiravanija : The Land by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Community, Culture and Globalization

Public Relations - Nicolas Bourriaud - Interview ArtForum, April, 2001 by Bennett Simpson

The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art

Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

InSite 05 - contemporary art project based in the bi-national region of San Diego-Tijuana
Artistic Director: Osvaldo Sanchez