Just a lil update.

Well, August is almost over and I feel like it just started. I have been super busy, so I thought I would take some time to catch you up and share some thoughts (this one is kinda long, so go get a warm-up on your coffee).

Since my return to Santiago I have been in contact with BLOC/Tutorías de Arte, which is an artists' space and educational residency - a really new thing here in Santiago. I would write more, but I am writing an article about them for I Love Chile (another new connection), an all English news and media source, and I want to save all the juicy details for my article (of course I am supposed to be finishing that up right now - perhaps I am using the blog post to get the juices flowing ... or to procrastinate - what would you wager?). The artists at BLOC have been really fantastic in talking with me and also in sharing their space with me. On the 15th I did a workshop there. It wasn't a personal workshop, it was part of my collaboration with AREA Chicago on their project Notes for a People's Atlas (the link is to the Chicago version).

The project is simple: AREA Chicago furnishes blank maps, basic outlines, of the city and the inhabitants fill it in. What can they fill it with? Anything. The idea is to get the people to make their city their own, to say that what is important to them (restaurants, places they walk their dog, sites of demonstrations, public sculpture...) are important for everyone to know - and then share those experiences, histories, and stories. When confronted with the blank map, most people just starred and asked for examples. This was great because we could show other maps that had been done - already starting to show other people's experiences of the city. Between the workshop at BLOC and smaller workshops done by volunteers with VE-global (a Santiago-based American NGO who I have been in contact with since April), about thirty maps, so far, have been made for Notes for a People's Atlas of Santiago, aka Notas para un Atlas por la Gente de Santiago. We should make more, Santiago !!! Thanks again, BLOC.


BLOC has also been a bit inspiring. They (and Die Ecke Gallery) hosted three Australian artists and one Aussie curator for 2 weeks. The ladies came to make work for an exhibition: Risk Potential - and then, of course, to have the exhibition; and they also presented their work (both past work and the work they made specifically for the show) last Monday at BLOC. It was a very thoughtful talk. The artists brought us through their process, allowing us to see the visualization of their thoughts, how they negotiate parameters and form for their work, and the place of "drawing" in their work. I have been trying to figure out exactly why I post these images from Fotolandia. Bridie Lunney, one of the invited artists, showed some photos as sketches - instead of the drawings and/or mark making that the other two artists shared. Now, I know I use video as a form of sketching, but I had never been aware that I too use photography as a form of sketching. I know, seems obvious, right? I guess sometimes you can be blinded by concentration of your own process. So, this talk was a big "Ah Ha!" moment for me, which are always delightful. But again, like I said above, I don't want to give too much away because this is all supposed to be a part of that article ...

I Love Chile. The media hub. I came upon it quite randomly - chatting with a former colleague on gmail. He had met the owner in a bar (one of those gringo bars that I don't ever go to because I am scared of my gringo-ness), and he was looking for contributors. At the time when I was chatting with my friend, I was looking for interesting things to do (that earn money, though I currently write pro bono). So I contacted him and met him the following day. He said that what he wants are people that are "excited about writing". That's me! I want to make some of the not-so-apparent things of Santiago to be a bit more inviting to us Anglophones. So I am going to write about all things artsy. Of course, like most of my projects, I start out with really great hopes, then I loose steam, only to find the momentum again, but at normal speed. That's where I am now: normal speed. I have only written one article (tragic, really) so far, but if I can crank out this one about BLOC - that will be two! And this week there should be lots of openings ...

Additionally, I have been weeding through the footage and photos from the bi-cultural project (we really need to find, if even, a working-title for this thing). I knew that we didn't have much - which has to do with the ambitiousness of the project and the time constraints for such an ambitious project. In other words, it was bad planning on our part, but that doesn't matter since it wasn't obligatory to finish the project during the residency. We have several hours of footage, but it really wasn't until the last meeting - maybe the second to last - where we got mostly usable footage. It all has to deal with building rapport, right? I really have to commend our participants for letting us into their personal lives. Now that I am watching the footage, even from the first meeting, it is very personal and intimate. I am excited about what the final product may be, but I do see that as being some time away.

More? Really? Yep. The video sketch below (that I posted the other day) is tied to an old project, one that I started a very long time ago, one that is very personal. It has taken some time for me to be more objective with the work/topic, so that I can make work rather than (just) therapy. Personal themes in my work come and go. Of course it is always personal, but not always directly related to personal events. Some of my first self-portraits were this: personal, self-reflective, raw. (Next time I'm back in Charlotte I will have to scan those and add them to the still in-process archive.) While these self-portraits were not about these events for the new piece (yes, I am being deliberately vague), there are ties. I wanted the same "raw-ness", but I don't want the work to be self-reflective. Instead I am looking to find points in the "story" that have a universal relationship, that while you may never have experienced these same specific events, you can relate them to your own personal events - empathy, basically. Perhaps that is what I am always looking for with my work, or what we are all looking for... Anyhow, I am once again tackling this project (I have a feeling that it will be a body of work rather than one or two pieces) - wish me luck! I'm looking at some of Sadie Benning's diary work, any other suggestions?

There is more going on, but that should tide you over for now. and yes, I promise to send a link to the article about BLOC and once I get a blog (for documentation) of Notas, I will also send a link.

a Sketch, a thought, something I am following

in FotoLandia ...

While continuing my study of lines and spaces,

I found some squares in fields today.

Just some ideas.

There will be time to edit later.

Lines n Spaces

Looking and Finding

I know, it's a vague title for a post. I am feeling vague.

Retreiving Humanity TONIGHT!!

Hi and sorry for the late post. I was internet-less for 2 whole days!!! I know, I myself was frightened for my well-being as well.

I was invited to collaborate with Parallel Flux on their Retrieving Humanity interactive performance and installation in Santa Fe, New Mexico TONIGHT! Many of you perhaps don't live in Santa Fe and won't have the opportunity to go, but I am sure that Parallel Flux will be documenting like crazy.

Retrieving Humanity will address the difference between viewing culture from the outside or engaging with it as a participant. The audience will be encouraged to explore these differing attitudes and test the traditional boundary between audience and performer by becoming a participant. Santa Fe Complex will be transformed into an immersive space with a promenade of six kiosks, each with unique video and audio from around the world. At the end of the promenade will be a large screen displaying a mix of this visual information.

As participants approach each kiosk they witness various live scenes from around the world: from my living room we will be transmitting an Once (which is a dinner, of sorts). The other participants are as follows:

Ipoh, Malaysia – Kamal Sabran

Brisbane, Australia – Rozina Suliman with LALITCS

Seoul, South Korea – Bo Kyung Suh

Lagos, Nigeria – Emeka Ogboh

Bern, Switzerland – Michael Spahr

Should make for an exciting event.

Please stay tuned for more updates about this exhibition and other things of the like.

My how easy it is to forget how great museums are ...

I've been spending a lot time at the Centre Pompidou. I keep trying to "finish" the permanent collection, but have yet to do so. I think I have spent a total of 10 hours there, which is epic for me (my attention span at museums is getting better). So, all those art history lectures start swirling around in my brain again. Without being burdened by essays, or god forbid a quiz, I can concentrate on the work and reflect on its influence in my work - funny how that is;).

Pierre Restany. That's it, that's all I can to say. But I do want to post an article that was printed in Artforum International Magazine in 2003 upon his death. This is a reminder to me, and also I will be able to call upon this article when I please.

Object lessons: Nicolas Bourriaud on Pierre Restany - Passages - Critical Essay

"PIERRE RESTANY? A MYTH." That was Andy Warhol's laudatory reply when asked his opinion of the inventor of Nouveau Realisme, who died in Paris in May. Restany was much more than a curator or a critic as we understand the terms today: He was at once a champion of artists and an entrepreneur of concepts, which he defended with all the power of his conviction. He is mostly remembered for founding the movement, with Yves Klein, Christo, and Jean Tinguely, in the late '50s. Less known is his more recent and discreet engagement with a new generation of largely European artists--from Pierre Huyghe to Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno to Olafur Eliasson--in whom he recognized the legacy of his theories on "technological humanism," ecology, and the appropriation of the sociological real. At the end of his life, Restany surprised young, informed curators and critics with his geo-strategic analyses of art, particularly its globalization, a theme he had mastered through his incessant travels to the four corners of the earth.

His legacy? The conceptual tools Restany forged in the late '50s are still effective today in approaching the art of our time. In his 1960 essay "Le Nouveau realisme," he wrote: "The allure of an object, of the household rubbish or the scraps of the dining-room, of the unleashing of mechanical susceptibility, of the diffusion of the sensibility beyond the limits of its perception [represents] the common good of all human activity." Farther down, he defines these practices: Ours, he writes, is "the great republic of our social exchanges, of our commerce in society." Thus my interest in Restany, and his interest in me, when I began to think about relational aesthetics almost a decade ago: In my theories, he saw above all and not incorrectly--extensions of his own reflections on art and communication. The concept of relations allowed him to bring his globalizing and planetary vision of art, expressed more in lectures and roundtable discussions than in print, back into the public eye.

But the name Pierre Restany will remain linked to a now commonplace idea that was so explosive in the late '50s: "the expressive autonomy of the real." It was a coup de force: to start from the readymade in order to establish a vocabulary, to think of the history of art in terms of use. Nouveau Realisme was Dadaism considered as a tool. At a time when one spoke of "neo Dada" in reference to Johns, Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain, Restany asserted that the new art would be situated "forty degrees above the Dada zero." In other words, Dada could now serve as a basis for a new vocabulary, well beyond any sort of revival. To Restany, art represented a "cleansing of vision"--that is, not a set of more or less well-made objects but an optical device that allowed us to look at the new world surrounding us, whether that meant supermarkets or streets. The European artists then associated with Nouveau Realisme went a bit further than their more aestheticizing American counterparts. Cesar, who left the composition of his works to a machine, was more radical than Chamberlain, who "arranged" forms. That is what the "New Realists" exhibition in 1962 at Sidney Janis Gallery was intended to prove, by comparing the European and American new waves; but the show was a misfire. (Restany would later say that his vision had been watered down by the dealer.) All-powerful in European critical circles but unable to forge good alliances in America, Restany lost his war against New York.

Throughout his life, Restany developed an ethical project summed up rather well by the term "technological humanism." He contributed to the Prague Spring by ensuring the flow of French correspondence to Czech art magazines, protested the Brazilian military by resigning from his post as a curator of the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1967, and published Le Petit Livre rouge de la revolution picturale (The Little Red Book of Pictorial Revolution) in 1968. Above all, he was the author in 1978 of the "Manifeste du Rio Negro" (Rio Negro Manifesto), which inaugurated the artistic debate on marginal cultures and on ecology in art. From then on, Restany's career was marked by his shift to the so-called periphery. He spent more time in countries like Argentina and South Korea (where he organized a large contemporary art exhibition in 1988) more frequently than the United States, Germany, or even France, where he only recently received institutional recognition. But if that recognition was slow in coming, the future should be one in which Restany's legacy is shown to be much richer than we believed. Let's bring his books back into print and make a date for later this century--a century sure to be more Restanian than the one before.

Nicolas Bourriaud is codirector of Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group