Continuing Education Blog

SVA alumnus Ei Arakawa is featured in T Magazine, where he discusses his project for Greater New York 2010 at PS1, in which he reclaims a conference room as an office and studio to make a book (one funded by a different institution).

Ei Arakawa (upper right), others (Photo by Alec Holst)

What just happened? was the dominant thought as dumbstruck art kids shuffled out of a second-floor gallery at PS1.  To hear the varied accounts is like watching Rashomon.  Everyone saw the same events unfold, but every version is different.

As part of the new Saturday Sessions initiative at PS1, curators Sarvia Jasso and Andres Bedoya brought their Brooklyn is Burning faction to Queens.  After performance artist Georgia Sagri completed her self-hijacking fugue, most viewers were shocked when the next performer, Ann Liv Young, took the stage and verbally trashed Georgia’s romp.  Then it gets blurry (and messy).

Ann Liv Young urinated into a tray, Georgia left and then returned with middle fingers ablazing, both taunted each other, and then Ann Liv Young began masturbating on the floor, flopping and grinding her pelvis toward Georgia, her bare flesh flapping against Christian Marclay’s matrix of vinyl records.

Ann Liv Young, censored by me (Photo: David Shapiro/MUSEO)

Not sure what happened to Georgia after that, because most (wide) eyes were on Ann, who now appeared to be bleeding downstairs and staggering around with the tray of urine, only to spill a little and then dump it over herself like a Gatorade tank on Coach Paterno.  And now the lights are out.  “Is this real?” some wondered aloud.  “Is it part of the show?” “Maybe it’s like a Martin Creed sort of thing.”  No wonder the NY Times said of Ann Liv Young, “For the viewer it can be hard to tell if the show is unraveling or if Young’s behavior is the show itself.”

Who made the call to cut the power?  Many people blame the PS1 staff for silencing a daring performance.  That would be especially confusing if it came down from new Director Klaus Biesenbach.  The champion of the edgy and provocative Marina Abramovic wouldn’t be easily shocked; Ann Liv Young has nothing he hasn’t seen before, right?

(l-r) Ulay, some guy, Marina Abramovic; Marina Abramovic

After all, who can forget “the Vault,” which was the subterranean sex dungeon component of Klaus’ 2006 survey at PS1, Into Me/Out of Me?  How about the sensational Pipilotti Rist supervideo he brought to MoMA, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)?  Rist’s psyche-sanguine content was risky (risty?) business, too – and one of the absolute coolest undertakings we’ve ever seen at the new MoMA.  He also brought us the mesmerizing Douglas Gordon: Timeline and at PS1, Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Hot!

That Marina photo reminds me of Man Ray's "Le Violin D'Ingres"

But then PS1 has compromised unusual projects for specious reasons.  One example comes from a few years ago, when PS1 support staff removed part of an installation by Jesse Bercowetz & Matt Bua: a dead chicken suspended from a window.

Artist and Brooklyn is Burning participant Julia Oldham might be the first to have blogged about the event.  We chatted about it over email and I spoke for the steady stream of dejected viewers upset about a repressive gesture that looked reactionary and hypocritical.  But don’t listen to me; I was just riled up after watching Keith Olbermann all day to help with my merciless winter depression.

Even if Klaus issued the cut-off directive, it might be unfair to wolf-cry censorship.  Censorship entails a greater degree of deliberation for the purpose of personal or political gain. If an aggressive performer is bleeding, flinging urine, and staggering around, maybe a prudent adult should hit the Panic Button.  Intervening into the escalating altercation might have prevented a catfight or worse.  Or maybe PS1 thought Ann Liv Young’s performance spilled over into uncooth hysteria, and censorship doesn’t apply, since antics aren’t really content.  Maybe Admiral Klaus ruled that Ann had jumped the shark when the mad clam bared its teeth.

nom nom nom meow

More Ann Liv Young (link NSFW)

UPDATE 1: From BiB co-curator Sarvia Jasso:
As one of the curators of BiB, I would like to take this opportunity to express my opinion about the event at PS1. Despite the fact that BiB is a collaborative project, my fellow curator Andres Bedoya and I have respectfully diverging opinions that have not necessarily been fully reflected in any of the statements posted thusfar.

While I do not claim to know the reason the museum turned the lights off, I can say that the perceived animosity and escalating verbal and gestural attacks in the room from one artist to another were absolutely antithetical to my understanding of what BiB represents. The situation ultimately compromised the participation of the other artists involved, causing the last artist to perform in the dark. Despite the unforeseen and unfortunate outcome, I remain committed to a completely open format for expression. I think the framework (content and context) for any ensuing discussions should take into account the complexities of experiencing a live performance within an institution, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the impetus for removing power during the event originated in an attempt at censoring the performers.

A claim of censorship could easily develop into a self-serving mythology with its own inertia, which could then quickly become detached from the event itself. I think we need to be very clear that no one was asked to leave and all of the planned performances occurred during the course of the event.
From a curatorial point of view, a broad range of performances is vital to the program, but the underlying message always stays the same—BiB is forging a community that respects and celebrates diversity in all its complexities. Anybody who has ever attended a BiB event can attest to the fact that we try to create a positive environment in which to present work that can be challenging and, at times, difficult to digest.

UPDATE 2: From PS1:
The decision by the Director of PS1 to curtail the performances near the end of Saturday Sessions was made to safeguard the audience, performers, and PS1 staff from an escalating and potentially volatile situation. The performers’ actions were not previously discussed with or planned by PS1.

The Roni Horn Nebula! Iceland, the crossroads of culture!

"Roni Horn Nebula," 2010 by Michael Bilsborough

So many connections. Icelandic band Sigur Rós called in old friend (flame?) Ryan McGinley to do their album cover art when other Icelander Olafur Eliasson didn’t come through. Both artists had shows at PS1.

Sigur Rós album cover by Ryan McGinley

Ryan had a show at the Whitney, just like the equally handsome Roni Horn, who called her show “aka,” quite close to “Takka Takka,” an older album by the aforementioned band. One H and two O’s in “Roni Horn,” who takes photos of H2O, a material familiar to Eliasson. There’s even room for Björk.

I’m curating a show about videos that trick out movies into trippy abstraction.  Not just visual abstraction, but also sound, space, and time.  More synesthetic and metaphysical.  Included are :

Silver (2006) by Takeshi Murata,

Repeating the End (2007) by Les Leveque 

left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right (1999) by Douglas Gordon, which mirrors Preminger’s Whirlpool with itself, flickering frame by frame from one screen to the other.  Like a strobe light, it’s more arresting than Gordon’s more famous 24 Hour Psycho.

My video show wouldn’t be in a gallery, but an abandoned mansion or hotel in the country.  It would open only after sunset, because those creepy videos should screen in the dark.  The biggest room is reserved for and dedicated to Perpetual Zooz (2005-6) by Michael Joaquin Grey.  

Michael Joaquin Grey's Perpetual Zooz at PS1

Now screening with gut-rattling stereo bass at PS1, the video uses The Wizard of Oz as its material.  In a rectangle nestled within the surrounding rectangular projection, the movie “screen” tumbles in 3-dimensional space, contorting into elliptical trapezoids.  One facet bears the movie playing forward from the beginning, while the opposite plays backward from the end.  Their junction is the scene in which Dorothy opens her door to the world of color.  

That reflexive relation is where Douglas Gordon might stop.  But MJG adds another  “dimension” by voluminizing the images through custom software (designed with R. Luke DuBois) that maps the images into extreme shaded relief.  Throbbing in three-D, Dorothy’s face swells and morphs into the grotesque inflated visage of the Marshmallow Man, and then into the Sierra Nevadas.  

Meanwhile, the dynamic digital elevation stalagmites/tites jump with each thump of the stereo sound, a recording of two simultaneous heart beats pumping in and out of phase: those of the artist and his mother.  When the phasing lines up and the hearts beat in unison, the th-thump goes THUD, a reciprocal canceling out, like the black holes we make while jumping with a sibling on a big trampoline.

Burst Mode

Artist : mother :: black & white : color :: film : digital video :: staying young : growing old

Perpetual Zooz is the climax of an exhibition that reads like a rebus or flowchart about creation, human reproduction, object relations, language development, identity, and adaptation.  

One wall displays an astounding cross-pollination of objects: along a parabola from left to right, we see schematics of heterosexual mating, two vinyl stickers before-and-aftering the inevitable union of a pair of red blocks, a stereolithographic sculpture of those blocks, and finally an inkjet print of a baby playing the two red blocks.  It’s a narrative arc that blends Aristophanes, Joseph Kosuth, Thomas Edison, and Fisher Price.   

This friendly guard helped me with Northern Romantic Citrus

Northern Romantic Citrus is a “computational drawing” that very gradually develops from its origin in a readymade landscape painting reproduced digitally. Watch closely enough and you’ll spot one colossal orange after another “growing” on the central tree.  (Decades ago, this clever substitution would have saved Guernica from the malodorous mitts of Tony Shafrazi.) 

Timelapsed

The oranges we track take us back to the navel-gazing baby in an inkjet sequence demonstrating how we learn by distinguishing things from us and vice-versa, how that helps us perceive order, and how that itself  is part of a larger order that we measure through science.  

“Far from the body being first for us and revealing things to us, it is the instrumental-things which in their original appearance indicate our body to us,” says Sartre.  

The spinning baby is the progeny of two diagrams above it that connect a woman’s body with the orbits of the moon, a cosmological frequency with a range vast enough to contain both scientific enlightenment and mythological necessity, with the comfort of two peas in a pod.

In fact, Spiritual proposals find room in this cerebral show.  Michael Joaquin Grey decorates the red blocks stickers with mandalas, while naming the stereolithographed blocks Gametes.  The slow pace and low position of Northern Romantic Citrus together suggest that you should kneel down and silently concentrate for several minutes.  If that doesn’t help you find meditation, then the larger video will help meditation find you.

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough