CSGS Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University » art

REVIEW: Performing (at) the Body’s Edge: “This Is Just Like Life”

Robert — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:59:50 +0000

Performing (at) the Body’s Edge: “This Is Just Like Life”
New York University, 15 November 2011

The fall CSGS calendar of evening events ended on an amazing note, with a conversation between Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider, hosted by CSGS and NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. Jackson and Schneider, whose books include The Melancholy of Anatomy (Jackson) and The Explicit Body in Performance (Schneider), had a lot to say to one another about bodies. They focused their discussion on Jackson’s work and, in particular, on her short story, “Skin.”

In 2003, Jackson put out an ad in Cabinet magazine, calling for participants in a “mortal work of art”: a 2,095-word story that required as many volunteers to provide a surface for her text. Jackson joked that “Skin” is “one of the more expensive books ever published, at $50 to $100 a word.” The story is “still at the printers,” as it is being published one word at a time on living human skin, in the form of tattoos on the bodies of volunteers. Jackson described “Skin” as a project that “blurs to the point of collapse the distinction between body and language,” so that the relationship between body and language “becomes one of identity,” not simply of likeness. With “Skin,” she posits: “if bodies are words, then words are bodies”—and indeed she refers to the participants in the story as “words.” Jackson described her work more generally as “an extension of an obsession with having a body at all,” and a “fascination with how weird it is that we think of the world in terms of ideas” or meanings, instead of materiality—“and yet, we are made of stuff.” Her work plays with the also-weird materiality of words and ideas through the “fantasy of total translatability in the world,” which offers the possibility that “meaning might not be as abstract and remote as it seems,” and so it might “engage with us on a physical level.”

Rebecca Schneider suggested that “the project underscores an always-already operation of language and embodiment: words are always tactile, but we don’t always take note.” She offered a beautifully playful riff on the “incredibly, fabulously material” project, describing the ways it “undoes” the meanings of literature and the “stuff” of books, reworking them in terms of intimacy, collectivity, and consent. In “Skin,” “circulation has to rethink itself,” and “binding holds differently,” as the words “may be bound together in some way, but that way has become immaterial, or affective”—the space between words, and between word and reader, can either be “no space at all,” as close as ink on skin, or reflect the “outrageous expansion” of the physical location of the words, dispersed across continents.

If the meaning of the word literature is “acquaintance with letters,” then Schneider understands Jackson’s aim to be “to unsettle the term acquaintance into something more viscous, porous and flexible”—and, certainly, Jackson has “made matters more interesting.” The participants become the words of the story, and so an acquaintance with these words is relational, as “the words have lives: walking to the grocery store, showering when dirty, turning over in bed.” While Jackson described the participants’ experience in the project, Schneider spoke to the ways Jackson’s “words” might be encountered out of context, if the reader is a person accessing the word on or as another’s body. “Look around,” Schneider said, “surely we have some words among us; or we are all perhaps words among themselves, making a part of a story with spaces between us, as between words, the spaces that separate skin from skin.”

Jackson didn’t read an excerpt from “Skin,” as she has specified that only the participants, or “words,” can read the whole story. She did read another story—also called “Skin”—which she described as “one of the myriad of stories that is not [her] story, but that [her] story could form on an auspicious day,” as it was written using only words from the original “Skin.” Her reading of this brief and haunting version of “Skin” was accompanied by a video of the story’s text, commissioned in 2011 by the Berkeley Art Museum.

The video was cut and pasted together from short video clips of 191 of Jackson’s “words” pronouncing themselves. “Who are we, anyway?… We don’t remember who we are but we are certain we are not dead,” she intoned, as bodies flashed across the screen behind her, echoing her words: “This is just like life.”

–Julia DeLeon

Julia DeLeon is a PhD student in Performance Studies at NYU.

Call for Submissions: 21 Peaceful Genders

djm489 — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:53:13 +0000

21 Peaceful Genders – No Boxes, No Bars, No Apologies

Edited by Doris J. Popovich and Jacqueline H. Boyd

Gender identity is an experience, not an assignment. If you are living this truth and can write about it, we want to hear from you. Together we can dispel myths, give hope to young people, educate peers, friends and family and provide an archive / mirror for our own complex gender expressions.

How do you live your peace while navigating the hetero-normative maze? 21 Peaceful Genders – No Boxes, No Bars, No Apologies embodies gender as a place of possibility. Help us cross-pollinate our species with hope. We welcome the edgy and artful, and treasure the peaceful resolution.

Submit original, unpublished Word or text file to www.info(at)21peacefulgenders.com.
1500 word max. Deadline 6/30/12. Paid in copies.

Visions Coinciding: An Elizabeth Bishop Centennial Conference

djm489 — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:39:33 +0000

Thursday and Friday, December 1 and 2

Co-organized by the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Poetry Society of America, with the support of the NYU Humanities Initiative.

Free and open to the public

Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
1 Washington Place

Thursday, 12/1

6-6:45 pm: Seeing Elizabeth Bishop, by Eric Karpeles

7-8:30 pm: Bishop in Brazil Screening & Discussion, by Helena Blaker, Brett Millier, Barbara Page, and Lloyd Schwartz, with Alice Quinn

Friday, 12/2

1-2:30 pm: Elizabeth Bishop and Modern Art, by William Benton and Peggy Samuels, with Lisa Goldfarb

3-4:30 pm: Editors’ Roundtable, by Joelle Biele, Saskia Hamilton, Lloyd Schwartz and Thomas Travisono, with Jonathan Galassi

5-6pm: Gallatin Poet/Poetry Teacher and Student Poetry Reading, by Emily Fragos, Scott Hightower, and students Jacqueline Allen, Emma Behnke, Stephanie Rodas and Luke Vargas

6:30-8 pm: Celebratory Poetry Reading, by Frank Bidart, John L. Koethe, Yusek Komunyakaa, Maureen McLane, Mark Strand and Jean Valentine

RSVP & questions: WP Coordinator Molly Kleiman, mollykleiman(at)nyu.edu

Performing (at) the Body’s Edge: Mortal Works

Robert — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:14:15 +0000

a conversation with Shelley Jackson and Rebecca Schneider

Read a review of this talk!

November 15, Tuesday
7 to 8:30 pm

Shelley Jackson, writer and artist

Rebecca Schneider, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University

The question of the body — the body as question – is a recurring motif in the work of multi-media artist Shelley Jackson. Whether she is spiritualizing anatomy in her short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, imagining an alternate universe in which conjoined twins (“twofers) are the avant-garde of identity politics (Half Life), or “publishing” a short story (“Skin”) composed entirely of tattoos inked one word at time on the bodies of 2095 participants, Jackson presses her audience to ask, where does my body begin and end? “Skin” is subtitled “A Mortal Work of Art.” But the relationship among body, art, and mortality cross-crosses her work. This issue — whether or how art preserves the body, and with what de- and re-composing effects — is at the center as well of scholarly investigations by performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider, whose publications include the books The Explicit Body in Performance and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Join us for an exciting evening of conversation between Jackson and Schneider at the body’s edge.

Department of Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, Room 612
between Waverly and Washington Places

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible.

For more information, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) and the Department of Performance Studies.

Image courtesy of Shelley Jackson.

The Reality Shows: a conversation with Karen Finley

Robert — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:15:53 +0000

THE REALITY SHOWS

a conversation with Karen Finley

April 6, Wednesday
6:30 to 8 pm

READ THE REVIEW! Reclaiming Hysteria in The Reality Shows: A Conversation with Karen Finley and Ann Pellegrini

Karen Finley, Art and Public Policy, NYU

Ann Pellegrini, Performance Studies & Religious Studies, NYU

The Reality Shows collects a decade’s worth of performance pieces by internationally renowned artist and cultural provocateur Karen Finley. One of the hallmarks of Finley’s work—and nowhere more urgently showcased than in this new collection—is the way she uses multiple aesthetic forms in order to disturb settled emotional and political responses to both individual and collective trauma. To mark the publication of The Reality Shows, Finley sits down for a wide-ranging conversation with performance studies scholar Ann Pellegrini to discuss ongoing currents in Finley’s artistic practice and the work of performance art in an age of virtual reality.

Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, Room 612
between Waverly and Washington Places

Karen Finley’s raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has appeared and exhibited her visual art, performances, and plays internationally. The author of many books, including A Different Kind of Intimacy, George & Martha, and Shock Treatment, she is a professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Art and Public Policy, Department of Performance Studies and Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; and by The Feminist Press .

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible. If you need accommodations, please let us know as soon as possible.

Seating is limited and on a first-come basis. No RSVPs.

For more information, please call 212-992-9540 or email csgs(at)nyu.edu.

Camp Aesthetics & Desi Visual Culture: Brown Bag Lunch Talk

Robert — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:12:02 +0000

CAMP AESTHETICS AND DESI VISUAL CULTURE

A Brown Bag Lunch Talk with Alpesh Patel

November 22, Monday
12:30 to 1:45 pm

Alpesh Patel, CSGS Visiting Scholar and Independent Art Historian/Cultural Arts Producer

In the Western art world, a curious alliance has formed between those that are sympathetic to identity politics and those that have always been suspect of aesthetic judgment being tied to any notion of identity: both groups agree that we are in a post-identity era. The former does so purportedly to distinguish between different waves of artistic production concerned with primarily racial, gendered, and sexual difference, but seems to fall back on conceptualizing identity as positional or fixed; while the latter suggests that we are post or over identity, but only to return artistic value back to a dis-embodied art object. Drawing on camp theoretical models and their connections with theories of aesthetics, phenomenology, and identity construction (colonial, gender, and queer) and honing in on an exploration of Desi (the Hindi word meaning “from my country”) as affective and visual knowledge, this talk examines a series of contemporary artworks that suggest much more complex understandings of difference as multi-sensorial, spatial, and temporal configurations between and within subjects.

41-51 East 11th Street, Room 741
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets)

Part of the Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series — bring your own lunch and we’ll provide beverages and dessert!

Image: detail of artist Rina Banerjee’s 2003 mixed media installation, Take Me, Take Me, Take Me . . . to the Palace of Love. Installed in Peabody Essex Museum, Essex, MA.

REVIEW: “Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work

Robert — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:56:03 +0000

“Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work
New York University, 7 October 2010

A capacity crowd, their bodies packed against each other in the Studio at the Department of Performance Studies, came out on October 7th for a symposium on the work and legacy of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta on the 25th anniversary of her death. The symposium was a culminating event of a two-month exhibition held at Fales Library and Special Collections, which was curated by Richard Move (PhD candidate in Performance Studies). Fales was also co-sponsor of the October 7th symposium along with the Department of Performance Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of English, the Grey Art Gallery, the Hemispheric Institute, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

An homage to her legacy through the presentation of photos, film, scholarly presentations, as well as personal reminiscences, the event revisited Mendieta’s “iconoclastic earth, body, performance, and site-specific and visual art works,” explored the breadth of her influence in the world of feminist and multidisciplinary art, and revisited her controversial death. Mendieta died in September 1985; she fell or was thrown from her 34th floor apartment, on Broadway and Waverly Place. In a haunting irony, the chair’s office in the Department of Performance Studies directly overlook the rooftop of the deli where Mendieta’s body landed. Her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was charged and acquitted in her death–an acquittal several participants in the symposium frankly called an “injustice.” The symposium looked both backward–to the influences on Mendieta’s work, her contemporaries, and the protests after Andre’s acquittal–and forward, with participants addressing the ongoing relevance of her body of work as well as the nature and complexity of its reimagination and revisitation by artists and scholars today.

The evening began with Richard Move’s explanation that the exhibition and symposium’s title–”Where is Ana Mendieta?”–was borrowed from The Women’s Action Coalition’s protest outside the Guggenheim Museum Soho’s opening in 1992. At that action, WAC held up a banner that read “Carl Andre is in the Guggenheim. Where is Ana Mendieta? Donde está Ana Mendieta?” Move then “channeled the affective force” of Mendieta’s work with his fifteen-minute film, BloodWork-The Ana Mendieta Story (2009). BloodWork is a cinematic tribute to Mendieta’s work, imaginatively recreating some of Mendieta’s signature pieces, including Rastros Corporales (Body Tracks) and variations of the Untitled (Silueta Series). The film does not aim at exactitude so much as a kind of affective approximation. These creative reimaginations were intercut by interviews with Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, B. Ruby Rich, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lisa Paul Strietfield. In the words of Carolee Shneemann, who was friends with Mendieta, BloodWork is a “true and deep homage [that] clarifies so many deep threads Ana opened, then tangled again.” Significantly, the film and interviewees did not shy from addressing the ongoing controversy over the circumstances of Mendieta’s death.

Kat Griefen, Director of the A.I.R. Gallery responsible for Mendieta’s archive, discussed Mendieta’s 1977-1982 residence. Although much of Mendieta’s work is “practically unsellable,” Griefen explained, A.I.R. was the home of the artist’s first solo exhibit. Mendieta felt the gallery was a great vehicle for her work, but also came to believe it was not as politically motivated as Mendieta would have liked. Griefen also asked what it means, in terms of dislocation, a prevalent theme in Mendieta’s oeuvre, that the artist’s name was constantly misspelled in A.I.R.’s literature, especially considering Mendieta’s active role in the artist-run gallery.

Exploring Mendieta’s affinity with Cuban-American singer La Lupe, Genevieve Hyacinthe, assistant professor of Art History at Purchase College, investigated the influence of Santeria on Mendiata’s work. Arguing that Mendieta referenced elements of Santeria to align herself with the disenfranchised, Hyacinthe explained that the artist, aware of how her color and position could delegitimate her, “abjected” her own body in order to assault her whiteness and its socially afforded privileges.

Multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann juxtaposed slides from her own work and Mendieta’s, commenting on their remarkable coincidence and correspondence. Schneemann explained how their work “[submitted] to the sensory psychic realm” through a commitment to the saturation of the body in natural materials, for “the body moves and is sustained by saturation.” As feminist artists navigating a male-centered artworld, Schneemann and Mendieta both confronted the “dangers of depicting the sensuous female body” and found ways to identify with the “vital energies of nature” while presenting the body as neither essentialist nor abject.

José Esteban Muñoz, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, asked what Mendieta’s loss signifies and argued that the “sense we make or take from her work cannot be reduced to her biography.” Drawing from his forthcoming book Feeling Brown, Muñoz discussed the effects of Mendieta’s displacement from Cuba and how that sense of loss permeated her work, “a kind of loss that feels like the charred remains of a pandemic.” Muñoz described the affective tone of her work as a contagious “sense of brownness” that “radiatesŠas a thing that is not politics, but not not politics.”

Diana Taylor, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, concluded the evening by asking, “What is reperformance?” Explaining that reperformance maintains “an eye towards fidelity” as opposed to originality, Taylor compares the intentions of Marina Abromovich’s recent retrospective at the MOMA and the recreations in Move’s BloodWork. While the Abromovich’s retrospective reveals an intention “to keep the original work alive,” BloodWork, Taylor suggests, acts more like a “project about memory,” more a vindication of Mendieta than a preservation of the work itself. Pointing to the “strong sense of if-ness” to the recreations, Taylor suggests that the “‘re’ is the ‘re’ of the reappearance of the violently disappeared Mendieta; ‘re’ as in the reassertion of her work; and ‘re’ as in remains, work that remains to be done.”

–Krista Miranda

Krista Miranda is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and the Book Reviews Editor for Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her prior graduate work includes an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Writing and Publishing.

Where is Ana Mendieta? 25 Years Later: An Exhibition and Symposium

Robert — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:29:35 +0000

WHERE IS ANA MENDIETA?
¿DÓNDE ESTA ANA MENDIETA?

25 Years Later: An Exhibition and Symposium

READ THE REVIEW! “Where is Ana Mendieta?”: A Revisitation of the Artist’s Life and Work

For more information, click here.

Non-NYU affiliates please RSVP to PSLectures@gmail.com

September 8, 2010 marks 25 years since artist Ana Mendieta’s fatal fall, naked, from the window of the 34th floor apartment she shared with her husband of just eight months, the renowned sculptor, Carl Andre. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts directly overlooks the rooftop of the Delion delicatessen, the site of her violent end. And, the Fales Collection at NYU contains the A.I.R. Gallery archive, with a significant number of Mendieta’s original works. Mendieta’s haunting proximity and continually felt presence at NYU make it the most appropriate locale for this Exhibition and Symposium. And, after 25 years, it is time to ask this question once again, ‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’*

The Exhibition and Symposium will reveal vital aspects of Mendieta’s iconoclastic earth, body, performance, site-specific and visual art works, while addressing her influences, legacy, and the era of Feminist Art from which she emerged. This will be the first Exhibit and Symposium to explicitly address the debate surrounding her tragic death and what many believe to be Carle Andre’s unjust acquittal of her murder. ‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’ examines both this important, influential artist and the lingering memory and controversy surrounding her tragic death.

Symposium

October 7, Thursday
7 to 9 pm

Panelists include:

Kat Griefen, Director of the A.I.R. Gallery
Genevieve Hyacinthe, Professor of Contemporary, African/Afro-Atlantic Art History at Purchase College (SUNY)
José Esteban Muñoz, Chair, Associate Professor, Performance Studies at NYU
Carolee Schneemann, Multidisciplinary Artist, Author, Mendieta’s friend and ‘aesthetic sister’
Diana Taylor, University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU and Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

Exhibition

August 1 to October 8
Fales Library, 70 Washington Square South

The Fales Collection exhibit includes the original works of Mendieta, most of which were not exhibited in her lifetime, related personal effects and the film BloodWork: The Ana Mendieta Story by Richard Move.

Sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and the Fales Library and Special Collections, with the collaborative co-sponsorship of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the English Department, Grey Art Gallery, and CSGS at NYU; and by Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

Image: Ana Mendieta, Tree of Life, 1976, courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery Archives

Barbara Hammer – MoMA Retrospective

djm489 — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:36:58 +0000

Barbara Hammer MoMA Retrospective

9/15/10-10/13/10

MoMA CELEBRATES BARBARA HAMMER, WITH A MONTH-LONG RETROSPECTIVE OF THE PROLIFIC ARTIST’S EXTENSIVE BODY OF WORK

Exhibition Includes the World Premiere of Hammer’s Newest Film, Generations, as well as Her Groundbreaking Experimental Short Films and Documentaries

Barbara Hammer from September 15-October 13, 2010 at  The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

NEW YORK, August 13, 2010— A retrospective of works by experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (American, b. 1939) spanning from 1968 to today, including the world premiere of her new film Generations (2010), made in collaboration with Gina Carducci, will be shown at The Museum of Modern Art from September 15 through October 13, 2010. Hammer is renowned for creating the earliest and most extensive body of avant-garde films on lesbian life and sexuality, including Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). Barbara Hammer is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Full Press Release and Schedule:

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1107

How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20

Robert — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:25:50 +0000

How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20: Panel I

Wednesday, September 15, 2010
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street

free

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today.

Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years.

Panel Discussion I

Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship

Have arts organizations modified their programming in the aftermath of the culture wars? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the commercial market relate to the issue of decency and community standards? What is the future of government funding for arts institutions and individual artists?

The panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause and culture wars over arts funding in general have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. A number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit – or are prepared to forfeit – government funding. Panelists include founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, leaders of art projects that have been supported by the NEA, and key figures in public art funding.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

Participants:

Beka Economopoulos, Founder of Not an Alternative and No-Space Gallery
Bill Ivey, Former Chair of the NEA (1998-2001)
Magdalena Sawon, Owner and Director of Postmasters Gallery
Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at Creative Time
Martha Wilson, Founding Director of Franklin Furnace