Pensamiento y debate

Action Behind The Margins

Joan Jonas Songdelay
Joan Jonas, Songdelay, 1973
16 mm film, 18'35".
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

Type of activity: Seminar and Film Program
Dates: June 9-24, 2010
Place: Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Time: 19 h
Seating capacity: 140 seats
Entrance: Free.
Access: C / Santa Isabel 52

At a time of intensive de-industrialization and the move toward an information-based economy in New York City, artists and others found their own new ways of using the city. As this lecture and film series will amply demonstrate, the period from the 1970s forward has seen a great ferment of creative use of abandoned and peripherial spaces, especially in Lower Manhattan at the same time that the area was becomming a center of the commercial art world. Discussions of photographic projects and performances, together with films and videos will make apparent a very different city from the official one, a city where public and private spheres intermingle and where marginal subjects assert their right to the city.





Program

Nelson Sullivan, Drag Queens in Times Square
Nelson Sullivan, Drag Queens in Times Square, 1986

June 9. Mixed Use, Manhattan.

Talk between Douglas Crimp and Lynne Cooke, exhibition curators.

Mixed Use, Manhattan, uso mixto is an exhibition about the uses and pictures made of New York City beginning with the intensive period of de-industrialization and neglect in the 1970s and continuing with recent works by artists who, aware of their predecessors’ practices from that earlier moment, continue to find aesthetic potential in the city. The show will center upon several important photographic series: Peter Hujar’s nighttime photographs taken in 1976 on the West Side of Manhattan; David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series from the late 1970s, and, more recently, several of Zoe Leonard’s photographic projects from the late 1990s forward. Other photographic series, video-installations, and films amplify these core works and attest to the vitality of their legacy, as artists continue to engage with New York in ways that suggest how urban space may be made truly public.

June 10. Art and the Silence of the City

Talk between Rosalyn Deutsche and Johanna Burton.

Art historians have long theorized art’s relationship to cities. Generally, they discuss art in the city—that is, public art—or art that takes the city as subject matter. As its title suggests, Manhattan, uso mixto, proposes a different relationship: the artists it shows use New York. But what does it mean to use a city? Drawing on urban theory, this talk asks whether the art in Manhattan, uso mixto engages not simply in diverse uses of space but in a practice of use that resists the domination of space by the state and private enterprise.

June 11. History, Memory and Space.

Talk between Matthew Buckingham and Juan Antonio Suárez.

This session explores the work of American artist Matthew Buckingham (1963) through a dialogue with the artist himself. The conversation pays attention to the formal features and exhibition of his work, as well as some of the main themes underpinning its production: the reading of space through history and history through space, the contrast between official history and subaltern, buried micro-histories, as well as the material embodiment of collective memory.

June 16. Screening: New York City Fragments.

  • James Nares. Ramp, 1976, 16mm., 4’45’’. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, Nueva York.
  • James Nares. Twister, 1976, 16mm., 2’. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, Nueva York.
  • Gordon Matta-Clark. Day’s End, 1975, Super 8*, 23’10’’. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection, Madrid.
  • Chantal Akerman. News from Home, 1976, 16mm.*, 85’. Courtesy of Paradise Films, Brussels.
  

Rudolph Burckhardt. Sodom and Gomorrah, New York 10036
Burckhardt. Sodom and Gomorrah, New York 10036, 1976

June 17. Occupations and evictions: Manhattan in Experimental Film and Video, From the 1960s Onward.

Juan Antonio Suárez

This intervention takes us on a historical and theoretical journey through the different ways in which experimental film and video after the 1970s portrayed and intervened in the urban landscape of Manhattan. First, the intervention contrasts this approach to the city with that of the so-called urban symphonies in the 1920s and 30s. Whereas the latter sought to capture urban modernity in its totality, experimental film replaced visualizing the city with tactile activation and interventions in public space. In the past few decades, urban space is no longer seen as a geometric extension or a field of vision, but a medium to be occupied where resistance, transitions and actions are distributed, which often seek to counteract the most oppressive and homogenizing inertias of contemporary times.

June 18. Screenings: New York City Portraits.

  • Mel Bochner y Robert Moskowitz. New York Windows. 1966, 16mm.*, 12’. Courtesy of the artist.
  • Ken Jacobs. Window. 1964, 16mm., 12’. Courtesy of Lux, London.
  • Rudolph Burckhardt. Square Times. 1967, 16mm., 6’30’’. Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Nueva York.
  • Rudolph Burckhardt. Sodom and Gomorrah, New York 10036, 1976, 16mm., 6’25’’. Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Nueva York.
  • Rudolph Burckhardt. Default Averted, 1975, 16mm., 20’. Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Nueva York.
  • Peter Hutton. New York Portrait. Chapter I, 1978-79, 16mm., 16’. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema, San Francisco.
  • Peter Hutton. New York Portrait. Chapter II, 1980-81, 16mm., 16’. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema, San Francisco.
  • Peter Hutton. New York Portrait. Chapter III, 1990, 16mm., 15’. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema, San Francisco.
  • Zoe Leonard, con asistencia de Nancy Brooks Brody. East River Park, 1991, Súper 8*, 6’53’’. Courtesy of the artist.

June 23. The Spatial Aesthetics of Urban Renewal.

Ann Reynolds

Urban renewal creates opportunities for performance, film, and video in New York and, at the same time, it can just as quickly destroy them. The city and these opportunities are equally unstable, impermanent, and open to dematerialization at any given moment. Films such as Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape or Joan Jonas’ Songdelay manifest a particular kind of spatial aesthetics by exploiting art’s tenuous existence within New York’s transitional sites. Such operations within the temporary and precarious interstices created by urban renewal offer a set of spatial images and spatial memories that, paradoxically, have become part of a collective memory of New York, even though very few people directly experienced the spaces they depict.

June 24. Screenings: New York City Performances.

  • Jack Smith. Scotch Tape, 1962, 16mm., 3’. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema, San Francisco.
  • Ken Jacobs. The Whirled, 1963, 16mm., 19’. Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Nueva York.
  • Vivienne Dick. She Had Her Gun All Ready, 1978, Super 8**, 28’. Courtesy of Lux, Londres.
  • Abigail Child. Mutiny, 1983, 16mm., 9’30’’. Courtesy of Lux, Londres.
  • Rudolph Burckhardt. Central Park in the Dark, 1985, 16mm., 8’. Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Nueva York.
  • Gordon Matta-Clark. Clockshower, 1973, 16mm.*, 13’50’’. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection, Madrid.
  • Joan Jonas. Songdelay, 1973, 16mm.*, 18’35’’. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection, Madrid.
  • Babette Mangolte. Calico Mingling (Lucinda Childs), 1973, 16mm.*, 9’50’’. Courtesy of the artist and of Broadway 1602 Gallery, New York.
  • Charles Atlas. From an Island Summ.er, 1983-84, vídeo*, 13’04’’. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
  • Nelson Sullivan. Drag Queens Take Over Times Square, vídeo-8*, 7’. Courtesy of the artist.
  • Charles Atlas. Mrs. Peanut Visits New York, 1999, vídeo*, 6’ 5’’. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
* Screening format: Dvd
** Screening format: 16mm.

Participants

  • Matthew Buckingham. Artist, he exhibited Time Proxies at Museo Reina Sofía in 2009.
    • Johanna Burton. Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Burton is the editor of "Cindy Sherman" (MIT Press, 2006).
  • Lynne Cooke. Deputy Director of Museo Reina Sofía and curator of the exhibition.
  • Douglas Crimp. Professor of Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Exhibition curator, author of "Posiciones críticas: ensayos sobre las políticas de arte y la identidad" (Akal, 2005).
  • Rosalyn Deutsche. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Feminist Theory and Urban Theory at Barnard College, University of Columbia. Author of "Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics" (MIT Press, 1998).
  • Ann Reynolds. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Feminist Theory at the University of Texas-Austin. Author of "Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere" (MIT Press, 2003).
  • Juan Suárez. Professor of American Literature at the University of Murcia. Author of "The Puerto Rican Lower East Side and the Queer Underground" (Grey Room, 32, 2008).