Teachers College Archive

I visited the underground labyrinths of the Teachers College archive today. It is a brilliant place of peeling walls, damp smells, dim lights and rooms full of texts, objects, paintings, video's, photographs and buckets to catch the drips. This is a piece of work from the Zeigfeld collection which was compiled in the 1950's of children's paintings from around the worid mostly in their early teens. This one is by a girl of about 14 done in the early 1950's. Dr Edwin Zeigfeld (1905-1983) was the creator of the arts and education programme at TC.

Soho

This is a painting by Cecily Brown. She is showing at Deitch Projects 76 Grand Street in Soho. The exhibition is called The Garden Party and It had some great work in it. The curation of the show was interesting in that it had a baroque feel with paintings placed on a wallpapered installation and a mixture of sculpural objects and photographs. There was a selection of Vanessa Beecroft photographs of naked young women in high heels in garden settings. I find her work fetishistic and degrading and wonder why she has such an appeal in the art world?

I also went to see a film called Tsotsi on the recommendation of some of the students at the Truce school in Harlem. It is set in the black townships in South Africa. It is a violent film about redemption and its complexities. The central performance of the young man who played Tsotsi was powerful and moving.

Art and the New Biology of Mind

On Friday I went to the conference that Eric Kandel was promoting at his book launch. It was held in the Teatro of the Italian Academy at Columbia University. The building was fairly plush, marble staircases, guilt decorative ceilings and red velvet drapes. It promised to be a really exciting day with an exceptionaly impresive line up of speakers from the worlds of science, philosophy and art. Marina Ambramovic, Laurie Anderson, Richard Axel, George Condo, Antonio Damasio, Arthur C. Danto, Lynn Davis, Raymond Dolan, David Freedberg,Vittorio Gallese, April Gornick, Robert Irwin, Neil Jenny, Eric Kandel, Dani Karavan, Calvin Klein, Joseph LeDoux, Margaret Livingstone, Richard Meier, VS.Ramachandran, David Salle, John Snyder, Philip Taaffe, Terry Winters, Semir Zeki.
It was set up so that the scientists gave papers on two themes 1. Emotion and Consciousness and 2. Vision and Aesthetics and a panel of artists were asked to respond to these papers. There were some brilliant papers but it seemed a missed opportunity to really engage with the artists themselves. There was also a certain naivity on the part of the scientists about the nature of art. Many of them were still working to a fairly outmoded and Romantic notion of art as the visualisation of feeling and empathy. As Marina Ambramovic remarked there is far more to contemporary art than these issues, which were related in the examples given, to dead male artists paintings. Arthur Danto also raised the point that there was no discussion of meaning or meaning creation either. If the organisers had asked artists to give papers as well as scientists this may well have been a more fruitful interchange.

Natalia Almada

I sat in on another class yesterday evening run by Professor Olga Hubard. She had invited the filmaker Natalia Almada to show extracts from her films and to speak about them and answer questions. The films were extraordinary. The one she showed in detail was AL OTRO LADO (To The Other Side) "An aspiring corrido composer from the drug capital of Mexico, faces two choices to better his life: to traffic drugs or to cross the border illegally into the United States. From Sinaloa, Mexico, to the streets of Central and East L.A, Al Otro Lado, explores the world of drug smuggling,illegal immigration and the corrido music that chronicles it all."
What was fascinating about the film was the way the film maker engaged with her subjects through their own stories which allowed for an openness and honesty in relation to the painful lives and choices the people from this incredibly economically poor community had to make.

Rebecca Greathead

This is a piece of work produced by a current first year student on the MA Art, Design and Education at Norwich School of Art and Design. The work is titled "prime-evil skin" 2mx2m patchwork cotton fabric and wadding

My workspace

Whilst I have been here I have been attending classes run by the faculty of Art And Art and Design Education and have discovered some great books. I am finding some of the philosophy texts interesting. Currently I am reading Arthur C. Danto's The Abuse of Beauty -Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003) a really good read, which is unusual in philosophy. Also Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim (1980) which I am finding more tricky. I find his writing style very convoluted and hard work.

Signs of Spring

To walk from Broadway to the Whitney I took a route through central park. On this day the weather took a turn for the better...it has been bitterly cold with freezing winds and snow. Everyone seemed to be in the park eating ice creams and breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Whitney Biennial 2006:Day for Night

Went to the Whitney Museum of American Art to see this survey of contemporary art. The exhibition had elements of all the media represented. -painting, film works, installation,video. There seemed to be various themes to the selected work:
a lot of nostalgia- use of old technology -issues of authenticity, identity politics, theoretical work and political work. It was curated a bit like fairground sideshows which was fine for the film pieces but left the paintings a bit stranded with people pushing against them to get into the installations. Going to these big shows at the weekend is a mistake - they are much too busy but interesting to see what is going on in the contemporary scene. There was a huge selection of artists amongst them Robert Grober,Pierre Huyghe, Josephine Meckseper and Marilyn Minter.

Truce

I paid a visit to a remarkable school yesterday. It was run by Laura Vural who has spent 20 years of her life initiating and developing the program. It is a media art centre which helps support children and young adults in Harlem who are failing at school. It provides them with a safe and supportive environment to develop their creative and academic qualifications. The art work is produced to professional standards and the academic standards enable the children to go onto college. The students produce an award-winning cable television program that appears on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. They produce their own publication and have had national recognition for the video's they produce. It is run by artists. The policy of the school is that everyone is paid for their work, staff and students alike. The feeling of the place was extraordinary with children confident in themselves and the work they produce. It was a real privilege to see such commitment to a brilliant project.

Institutional Memory

This is an image of Teachers College in Manhattan. It is from the Teachers College library archive http://www.tc-library.org/ It has set me thinking how I might engage with issues of Institutional Memory through the archives in a piece of creative work...

Kara Walker

I went to see Kara Walker's new work at Sikkema Jenkins & Co on 530West 22nd Street. She uses 19th century cut out silhouettes sometimes placed directly onto a wall as a tableau. This new work was an annimation based on the history of slave trade in America. The work is complex as it uses a combination of steriotypical imagery, invented forms and explicit sexual references. It at once playful and painful,critical and aesthetic. Extraordinary work.

Columbia University

I have been here nearly two weeks. There has been so much to take in, not only just the City of New York, but the incredible place of the university itself. I have been made really welcome by the staff of Teachers College and have been invited to participate in lecturers, presentations and conferences. The academic community here is incredibly vibrant and open and I have been involved in sitting in on classes with very distinguished people. I sat in on an aesthetics class by the philosopher Maxine Greene who is the founder and director of the Centre for Social Imagination at Teachers College. She is also a beautiful writer and speaker. I am reading, amongst other things, The Dialectic of Freedom by her.

I went to a lecture last night by the nobel prizewinner Eric Kandel who has just published a book called In Search Of Memory. Oliver Sacks has written an introduction to his work "Eric Kandel explains the revolutionary landmarks of modern biology and illuminates how behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of the mind...Scientists are now positioned to provide meaningful and nuanced insights into mental functioning-from perception, thought, emotion,and memory to schizophrenia, depression,and age-related memory loss."

What is really exciting about this is the comming together of disciplines, and in terms of my own research, its relationship to art. He also came across as a generous wonderfully articulate and humourous speaker.

Transformative experience

Hello Kaavous,
I am sure you are right about distance affecting memory. Why you remember some things must be related to the altered circumstances you find yourself in. Being in such a multi-cultural environment as New York keeps taking me back to when I lived in Singapore as a child especially in relation to the Chineese community here... the faces, the food, the snatches of conversation and the dialects...

I was wondering what transformative experiences you had in relation to architecture -if that is not too personal a question?

Ways of Knowing

On Friday March 3 2006 I attended a conference at Teachers College, Columbia called Ways of Knowing and was very interested in a paper given by the artist/philosopher Richard Jochum. His paper was called dis-positiv which he described thus:
"dis-positiv puts philosophers and critics on display thereby inverting the traditional realm of art and its critics. By physically changing the discourse the project challanges the audience to look at some of the less obvious ways in which art is shaped."
He does this by actually displaying well known critics, philosphers of art or gallerists in transparent enclosures in galleries. The audience then views the critics etc. as the work under scrutiny. I liked this inversion. It challenges, amongst other things, the conventional relationship of theory to practice in that it is always the artist/artwork that get scruitinized through the lense of theory and not the other way around.

Lia Cook Jacquard Weave

Lia Cook : Presence/Absence: Gather, 1998 48"x48" cotton,rayon,woven.

Lia Cook & Shirazeh Houshiary

On Saturday March 4th I went to hear Lia Cook talk about her work at the nancy margolis gallery on 523 West 25th St NY. She is a weaver who uses photographic imagery in her work and exlores ideas around memory/touch. She also uses jacquard weaving and I was very interested in the parallels between her work and some of the issues as I was looking at surrounding cultural /personal memory in the Jacquard piece I did for Huddersfield Art Gallery.

I also went to see some more work by Shirazeh Houshiary at Lehmann Maupin Gallery after seeing her painting at MoMA the week before. I have only seen her figurative sculptures and was fascinated by the developments she is making into painting and annimation. Her calligraphic marks both evoke and challenge a minimalist aesthetic.