by Jennifer Doyle
the Guardian — Comment is free

The team was reassembled in late November for a two-month training camp in Margao, Goa, home of one of India’s few artificial-turf fields.

While the men’s national team arrived by plane and stayed in five-star accommodations for its camp, the women’s team — a mixture of veteran and new players — traveled by train for as many as five days and was packed three to a room in a dormitory. The women had no training uniforms when they arrived and did their own laundry.

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Images point to what is in the world; that is the problem with representation. I think that is why there has been so much activity around abstraction — it offers one possible way around the problem of pictures. I am looking for a way out of the problems of representation but I am not satisfied to leave the world of representation all together. I am somehow looking to stay in the world of depictive images by simply asking for more from them through developing a different system, idea or model of how they might function.
—Shannon Ebner

via

LACE is pleased to present I Feel Different, a multi-media group exhibition organized by guest curator Jennifer Doyle. Participating artists: Nao Bustamante, James Luna, Lezley Saar, David Wojnarowicz, Monica Duncan, Lara Odell, Susan Silton, and Niña Yhared (1814).

This provocative project explores both the experience of feeling different from others and the transformational power of art to make one feel differently. Most of the time, we attend museums and galleries with our social armor “up” — approaching art with sophistication, irony, and even a degree of cynicism. This exhibit gathers together artists working in the unusual registers of the sentimental and the sincere — testing the limits of what kinds of emotional expression are possible within art. In doing so, they ask us if tears register as “real” in art (and what happens when they do), what happens when we are asked to take on an artist’s outrage, depression, or pleasure as our own, or how much can an artist can really change how we feel (and if this what we want from them). The show acknowledges that contemporary art is powerfully defined by the relationship between art and the spectator, and asserts that emotion plays a major part in this story.

I Feel Different opens with an evening of moody performance — a reading by Raquel Gutierrez (the text of which is available on the exhibition’s website), and live performances by LACE resident artist Niña Yhared (1814) and James Luna. Niña Yhared will also be performing a special cabaret at Wildness on Oct 13, 2009 (2700 West 7th St., LA 90057).

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
6522 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Wednesday–Sunday, noon–6pm
Friday, noon–9pm

Can’t Rape the Willing

2 May — 14 June 2009

In 1973, Ana Mendieta invited unsuspecting visitors to her apartment. Without having been warned, they witnessed a horrific (albeit confusing) scene: Mendieta was bent over and tied to a table with her underwear at her ankles, blood stains on her legs and broken dishes all over the floor. Protesting the recent attacks against women that were occurring on campus at the University of Iowa, Mendieta’s performance Rape Piece is a poignant reminder that the distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, remain somewhat unclear.

Using this performance as a point of departure, the group exhibition Can’t Rape the Willing not only poses some of the same questions that Mendieta considered but, more deliberately, it diverts by exposing what happens behind closed doors between consenting adults. By challenging rampant taboos about sexual fantasies, intimacy and deviant behavior, the artists in the exhibition are invited to delve into unrestrained—and unapologetic—perverse territory.

Theo Adams
Arlen Austin
Andres Bedoya
Cara Benedetto
Michael Bilsborough
Brendan Carney
Azul Ceballos
Tara DeLong
Chloe Dzubilo
Juan Pablo Echeverri
Kathryn Garcia
Danielle Levitt
Richard Lidinsky
Megan Lindeman
Lovett/Codagnone
Quinn Luke
Hector Madera Gonzalez
Nadja Verena Marcin
Elizabeth Neel
Marc Robinson
Julika Rudelius
Georgia Sagri
Dean Sameshima
Michael Sharkey
Dena Yago

For more information, contact Sarvia Jasso or Kathryn Garcia. After May 2nd, open by appointment only.

suddenly was born of German urban planner Thomas Sieverts’s observation that “the shaping of the landscape where we live can no longer be achieved by the traditional resources of town planning, urban design, and architecture. New ways must be explored, which are as yet unclear.”

In response to Sieverts’s observation, the exhibition—which is global in its scope and reach–seeks to imagine the possibilities of spaces and experiences that have an indigenous history (the parking lot, for instance), but that exist beyond historical definitions of city and countryside, and conventional material cycles of development and disuse. Through a myriad of representations, texts, and activities that offer far reaching symbolic and strategic alternatives to capitalism’s functionalist agendas, the artists and writers in this expansive global project are re-imagining the landscape where we live now as an independent identity to be reshaped in the hands and minds of its occupants.

suddenly includes a range of projects and media such as painting, photography, and video, and also includes community-based activities such as communal dinners, spontaneous public lectures, and a city-wide poster initiative. The exhibition will evolve as it tours the world through 2012.

The Pomona College Museum of Art iteration of suddenly includes the following artists: photographer Marc Joseph Berg, New York; photographer Zoe Crosher, Los Angeles; filmmaker Michael Damm, Oakland; painter Molly Dilworth, Brooklyn; architect, landscape designer, and social practice artist Fritz Haeg, Los Angeles; sculptor and glass artist Elias Hansen, Tacoma; social practice artist Michael Hebb, Seattle; sculptor and photographer Frank Heath, Brooklyn; conceptual artists Hadley+Maxwell, Berlin; new media artist Michael McManus, Portland; social practice artist Mike Merrill, Portland; the collective Mostlandian Citizens Lady O and Junior Ambassador, Portland; photographer Shawn Records, Portland; painter Storm Tharp, Portland; and sculptor and author Oscar Tuazon, Paris.

suddenly comprises a set of exhibitions curated by Stephanie Snyder, director of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, with an annotated reader edited by author Matthew Stadler, and a series of public events that attempt to re-imagine cityscapes with contemporary art, literature, and the conversations they spark. For more extensive project information, including event listings, audio recordings, and to order project publications, visit: www.suddenly.org.

Anonymous photographic contributions. Open call; Accountants, Anthropologists, Astronomers, Architects, Artists, Biochemists, Biologists, Businesspeople… anonymous.usc@gmail.com.

Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery
Monday–Thursday 9am–7pm
Friday 9am–4:30pm
http://roski.usc.edu

“IN SEPTEMBER 2007, Charlotte Cotton, the head of the Photography Department at LACMA, commissioned me for a book. She didn’t offer any specific parameters—it could be anything.

I approached Dexter Sinister [design collaborators David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey] about working with me on the project. I was excited about their method of working as designers—it was expansive, not simply about the organization of language. What they do is not always so easy to define, and I was intrigued by their idea of “design as thinking,” as I have come to think of photography in similar terms. We began with simple questions: Why does this book need to exist? What format should it take? How can its format be a reflection of the ideas that compose whatever it is that we end up making? Let’s just say that very little was taken for granted.

We had some meetings and loose conversations starting two years ago. I went into the project with more ideas about what I didn’t want for the book: I didn’t want something that would simply showcase work of mine that had already had a certain amount of exposure; I wanted the book to be more of an open-ended reading of the work. Monographs are great, but I didn’t want something that straightforward.

We met in July of last year and sat around a Los Angeles studio for five days. We bought a roll of fax paper and brought books to the studio that we thought were related to previous conversations we had had over the course of the year, and we just began reading and talking, cutting things out, making photocopies, and taping materials onto the paper—assembling a scroll from the various source materials. Out of this came something like the “guts” of the book. At the end of the day, we would go through the scroll trying to articulate the reasons we had selected certain images, passages, quotes, and diagrams. To my surprise, I ended up with a renewed faith in the images themselves and eventually did away with all the clipped language. My hope was that the ideas that had initially compelled us were embedded in the images—it was just a matter of finding a way to present the material so it would reflect these ideas.

Later that summer, in August, while looking around the photo section of Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, I found these amazing practical-photography textbooks that directly related to diagrams I had selected from Ansel Adams’s books and placed on the scroll back in July. Also, Stuart had shown me this beautiful old style manual that got me thinking further about the systems we use for organizing and understanding the arrangement of language and photographic imagery. So by the time I hit Powell’s, although the idea was still vague, I was very curious about looking through these old books with illustrational diagrams and how they might function within a system of hieroglyphics. The book includes a number of these diagrams juxtaposed with my own photographic work. (I didn’t make any new work expressly for the book.) And once I got back to Los Angeles, I would spend hours roaming the various libraries at USC looking through books for diagrams on optics, handwriting analysis, Indian sign language, hypergraphics, optical illusions, and cartography, not to mention all of the diagrams that did not survive the rather rigorous editing process!

I guess the last thing I’ll say here is a bit about the persistent use of the asterisk. It is one of several recurring motifs in the book, but it is probably the most prominent. The origin of this particular asterisk is from an essay by David called “This Stands as a Sketch for the Future,” which he produced as part of a one-year project as a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. The essay traces the legacy of the graphic designer Muriel Cooper. Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, and she is the person who designed the brilliant MIT Press logo and the Bauhaus book, among other things, of course. She was also a visionary educator, and while at MIT she cofounded the Visible Language Workshop in 1975, which was a teaching and production facility in the School of Architecture. Within David’s essay there is a reproduction of a poster for an MIT fellow’s traveling exhibition, and the asterisk is the graphic symbol that is featured in the poster’s design. You could easily say that I have become obsessed with this graphic symbol, not only because of the beauty of its form but also because it is the symbol for elsewhere. It literally redirects you, and as a reader it continually repositions or reorients you. You could say that Muriel Cooper is the patron saint of this book.

— As told to David Velasco for Artforum

via South Willard

7 March, 1pm
Architect, writer, and curator Markus Miessen (Berlin), and artists Amy Zion and Kristina Lee Podesva (Vancouver) will discuss architecture as political practice and the nightmare of participation. Miessen’s talk is supported through the Emily Carr University Student Symposium.

14 March, 1pm
Following up on a keynote address by critic/curator Tirdad Zolghadr, we are pleased to screen the film A Crime Against Art (Hila Peleg, 2007). Based on a trial staged at ARCO, Madrid, the film casts Zolghadr and Anton Vidokle as the defendants in a mock trial on a number of polemical issues in the world of contemporary art. This screening is presented with generosity from e-flux, New York.

21 March, 1pm
Curators Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker (Vancouver/Munich) and Jordan Strom (Vancouver) will discuss Birnie-Danzker’s curatorial experiences in Vancouver in the seventies and eighties, and, more recently, in Europe and Asia.

28 March, 1pm
For our final event, join us for an open discussion with critic Sven Lutticken (Utrecht). Appearing via Skype, Lutticken will discuss ways of navigating critical judgment within the spaces of contemporary art writing. Space is expected to be limited, so please arrive early.

Fillip
305 Cambie Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
V6E 2N4 Canada
604.781.4417

Fillip is distributed in North America by Textfield or contact your local bookshop.