Very happy to announce the publication of an article I co-wrote with Alise Upitis, “On the Research Paradigm in Contemporary Art: A Dialogue,” in Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research (U. M. Bauer, F. Dombois, C. Mareis, M. Schwab, eds.) by Walther Konig! It is being distributed by Pro qm, amongst other respectable bookshops.

GB: If artistic research and a host of similar terms have indeed become shorthand for artists, curators, funders, and critics alike, we need to ask what they indicate, and what possibilities and repercussions may follow. 

AU: Referring to artist’s research attends to the position of artist as agent in the production of her or his work through time. As an artist one must operate relative to societal norms but with the capacity to test, reconfigure, and on occasion overturn them. The unification of artist and artmaking, evidenced in the meanings of the term ‘artistic,’ is particularly problematic  given the current dominance, at least in the US, of one’s professional role being united with one’s identity. Nonetheless, it is important to note that in the Western context, at least since the Renaissance, art has been persistently limited by the figure of the artist.

GB: I’m invested in the ‘research’ part of the term ‘artistic research’ because it implies that artistic production is carried out in time, in relation to history and fields of expertise, and that this process entails the production of knowledge. It should be noted that the acknowledgement of production is a crucial element of the term ‘artistic research,’ because it designates the particular relationship of art production to capitalist production more generally.

IS IT A HYBRID ART PRACTICE, panel discussion with Gina Badger, Lise Beaudry and Reena Katz

at the Art Gallery of Windsor, co-presented by the University of Windsor’s School of Visual Arts (SoVA) as part of their Alone + Together speaker series

Thursday February 9, 2012 @ 7PM

Betty Wilkinson Room, AGW

Stay posted for more event description and a poster as we get closer to the date.

Here’s a little teaser:

Mugwort or dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) both remediate ecologically, but it’s also like they’re trying to give us their medicine. Those are both really good medicines for people who live in cities, which is where they grow, they are really incredible liver tonics, and bitters, which we really need because we eat so much crap, and fat and sugar, and they help us metabolize those things. And, just in general, people are really stressed out and angry, which is the mark of a hot liver. It seems like plants are responding to land disturbances and also to how they affect people. So it’s really good to notice what plants just pop up right outside your door and in your yard. We tend to think of ourselves as outside of ecology, and we’re not at all.

Extra special thanks to the profoundly insightful and generous Dori, to stellar guest editor and dear friend Sophie Le-Phat Ho, and to No More Potlucks heavyweights M-C MacPhee and Mél Hogan!

Tickets go on sale soon for the presentation of my new project, Mongrels, as part of the Issue Project Room’s curatorial offering, The Sonic Unconscious.

The Sonic Unconscious

Issue Project Room

232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor

Brooklyn NY

April 16-21 2011

Curated by Lawrence Kumpf

On November 7, I presented a new ‘slurp track,’ called GUST: THE SENSE OF TASTE, A RUSH OF WIND as part of the Fallen Fruit extravaganza LET THEM EAT LACMA at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The event’s organizers cast food as a metaphor for consumption and participation, inviting more than 50 artists to present work exploring institutional access in relation to the museum and its grounds. GUST, a 15 minute dialogue between two oyster slurpers, was broadcast over internet radio, equally accessible to audiences in the museum and far afield. Thanks to Jose Luis Blondet, the Fallen Fruit team, Mitchell Akiyama, and Malina Akau for helping me make this happen!

Opening Reception | May 27 5-8PM | The Kitchen

Rates of Accumulation is a sound-based research project that turns around the expanded ecological history of the Eastern oyster. For Undercurrents, it is presented as a four-channel sound installation, accompanied by a large-scale drawing and a video, and as an FM broadcast radiating from a temporary radio station inside the Little Red Lighthouse on the Hudson River.  With the charismatic figure of the oyster as a touchstone, Rates of Accumulation abstracts, translates and ultimately aims to recast moments in the ecological history of North America’s East Coast.
Oysters themselves are very quiet – you could almost say silent. Like the indescribable idea at the centre of a poststructuralist text, in Rates of Accumulation, the silence of oysters is surrounded by a swirling of related sounds. Composed of four discrete layers, the sound component in Rates of Accumulation fleshes out the political ecology of oysters in four times: deep geological time, indigenous time, colonial time, and “now” time. This oyster-soundscape is the combined effect of the ambient sounds of an oyster reef and its inhabitants, people slurping and shucking oysters, the sounding of a lighthouse bell and horn, the underwater sounds from sites related to the contemporary restoration, study, and harvesting of oysters in Massachusetts and New York.

For the installation, each of the four tracks is installed at a different level in a fire escape stairwell, the movement up through the layers of sound echoing the ascent to the apex of the Little Red Lighthouse. The sound installation is accompanied by video footage shot from inside the lighthouse itself and a drawing whose layering of materials references both the action by which oysters build their shells and the accumulations of individual oysters that constitute the architecture of oyster reefs. The broadcast emanating from the lighthouse simultaneously grounds and disperses the accumulated sounds, relations, and places of the project. As such, Rates of Accumulation loops back to the historically and geographically contested environment so crucial to its development: the brackish, densely inhabited estuaries of the East Coast.

http://whitney.org/Research/ISP/CuratorialProgram/2010Exhibition
http://whitney.org/Events/Undercurrents

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Partially funded by the MIT Council for the Arts. Thanks to Alexis Bhagat, Brad Simpson, Chris Clepper, J.T.  Boehm (the River Project), Pete Malinowski (New York Harbor School), Marieke Rosenbaum, Meg Rotzel and Madeleine Claire Elish for technical assistance; and to Rodney Rountree (Marine Ecology and Technology Applications), the River Project, and The Free Sound Project (users Benboncan, Stevebob69, and kathol) for providing sounds. Many thanks to my thesis readers: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Gediminas Urbonas, Christine Walley, and Hanna Rose Shell.

Drawing produced in collaboration with Sarah Dobbins.

fifteen times sixty (sundial)

please listen with headphones!

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Massachusetts Bay, on WMBR Cambridge 88.1 FM

(Aired Fridays 8-8:15PM Eastern time, October 2009-March 2010 followed by Brad Simpson’s Response:)

Fifteen times sixty. Site, broadcast, return.

This project, like most, comes out of desire.  A desire to count out, perform, experience, and communicate time in different cyclical scales, so that experiences in the present tense can be brought into new relationships with historical time.  In response to this desire, audio recordings of Squantum Point Park are timed and paced according to certain regular rhythms, bringing them into and out of synch with other rhythms around them.  Every Tuesday at 14h00 Eastern time, in accordance with a somewhat regulated version of the time it takes for the earth to complete one axial rotation, I begin a fifteen minute recording on the beach. For example, on Tuesday October 6, it was high tide at 13h05, so my recording coincided with high and receding waters.  Since high tide comes in an hour later each day, the weekly recordings coincide with high tides one week and low tides the next, never quite in synch with roughly twelve hour and ten minute cycles.  As the weeks roll on, lush Indian summer turns rustling fall turns brittle winter, and each Tuesday, I am there.

At the top of the hour, I face the beach grass, standing at the water’s edge.  I press record, and begin a slow counterclockwise rotation towards the water.  The stereo microphone picks up a 120 degree sonic picture, sweeping 360 degrees as I slowly rotate, a full circle for each minute.  Fifteen full rotations, sixty seconds times fifteen minutes.  Following the water as it creeps away from the beach grass.  The microphone held inches from the water as I face the bay, up in the air as I face the beach.

Counted in imperfectly regular baby steps, crunching on the rocks as I go, minute gradations of a planetary and solar time scale confront the long, rolling count of the moon’s magnetic pull on the Atlantic ocean.   This is my present, slipping away from me in a plethora of different scales. Then broadcast on the frequency of 88.1FM, three days and a few hours later, as far as the antenna in Cambridge will send it.  If those radio waves could escape the atmosphere, they would go on forever.

Sink into the present of a place, in all its sensual specificity and historical abstraction.  This information is not precise in a quotidian sense, but experiential, embodied.  How can it help to cast light upon the politics of the past?

Squantum is an Algonquin word, translated literally into English as a heap or pile of rocks.  Strange as they are to me now, there are people to whom I must answer with my presence here on these occupied territories – strange pale and dark skinned people who long ago made each other others. Now all dead, my ancestors sailed across unimaginable distances to arrive here. They met people on the beach, and by a fateful mixture of design and coincidence, incited a long and brutal war with them. Through all that followed, the name of this place has stayed the same. First flights took off of the peninsula in 1911, and shortly thereafter runways were paved to make a Naval Air Station. During the First World War it was used as a site for the manufacture of Navy Destroyers, and became an air strip again after the war.  In 1953, the last small planes taxied across its narrow asphalt runway, gained speed, and parted ways with the earth.  Since then it’s been naturalized and domesticated as a bird sanctuary, with a granite sculpture at its point and some historical plaques along the overgrown runway.

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