Panel discussions of a mask
Apr. 1st, 2006 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Well, today is April 1st, the carnevalesque day on which straights, squares, plastics and normals play tricks on each other by telling tall tales. But what if you're a freak whose job involves being paid to lie every single day in an art museum? In that case, lying and leg-pulling on April 1st would be senseless. For an Unreliable Tour Guide, the extraordinary thing to do on April 1st would be to tell the truth.So today we tell the truth about our lies... and tell the truth about "the lie that tells the truth", Picasso's famous description of art itself. At 6.15pm this evening the Whitney Museum hosts a round-table conversation. I'll be participating as Momus, making "confessions of a mask" alongside other unreal and unreliable "people" like Reena Spaulings (who, as I understand it, is a fictional character animated by a collective, so I'm curious to see who her "representative on Earth" will be) and Toni Burlap (who I'm told will appear tonight in the form of two separate humans, one male, one female).
This talk would normally cost $8 to attend, but twenty lucky Click Opera readers can get in free by saying the magic phrase "Afghanistan Bananastan" at the door.
Fugitives, Objects, Practices, Communities
Saturday April 1st, 6.15pm
Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street; New York, NY 10021
This evening's three conversations take up the twilight character of "Day for Night", the sense of artists working, as Biennial curator Philippe Vergne has described, "in a space between day and night, between the history of forms and the forms of history... [where] many things are called into question or obscured."
One: Momus, Gedi Sibony, and Jordan Wolfson
Two: Carolina Caycedo, Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright, and Zoe Strauss
Three: Jutta Koether and Reena Spaulings
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
heterotopia
Date: 2006-04-01 04:33 pm (UTC)The concept of the heterotopia is a useful framework for talking about a meeting of avatars though, or a museum itself. Foucault characterized a heterotopia as a space that has “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.” In other words, a heterotopia is separate from the outside world, yet mirrors it in terms of meaning if not in terms of form. Like a mirror, the meaning can be inverted or distorted somehow, but is still directly informed by what exists outside of the heterotopia. This could explain why architecture is such an important part of museums, and why most of them aren't just warehouses for artwork- a building replicates many of the functions of the world as a whole on a smaller and more limited scale. A mask itself could be considered a heterotopia, a depository of meanings specifically designed by its user that reflects and riffs on the user himself.
Foucault goes on to write that “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” This speaks even more strongly to the way a gallery must negotiate overlapping narratives such as work/ play, the quotidian/ the exotically technical that exist simultaneously through different pieces of art. I'd like to be able to see the discussion.
Re: heterotopia
Date: 2006-04-01 05:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-01 05:44 pm (UTC)I think everyone should come as Momus.
my hand is my mask//unreliable blather
Date: 2006-04-01 06:27 pm (UTC)::dance dance dance
dance dance dance::
::cha xha cha::
have a lovely time on your panel!!!!
mischa
Re: my hand is my mask//unreliable blather
Date: 2006-04-01 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-01 07:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-01 08:25 pm (UTC)Speaking of obfuscation, here is a brand new interview with Scott Walker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpwhMiFNPcI&search=scott%20walker
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:18 am (UTC)You know, some artists are present in my work, traces of their DNA are in a record or a song. And Walker is present on "Ocky Milk", definitely. He's one of the people without which certain songs (I'm thinking of one called "Pleasantness" in particular) couldn't exist. He's there in the genre I called, while I was recording the record, Absurdist Torch (http://imomus.livejournal.com/158086.html). I mean, that's really his genre, and David Sylvian's. Or should we call it "Abstract Torch"?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 09:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-01 08:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:00 am (UTC)patchy
Date: 2006-04-01 10:30 pm (UTC)from fellow ID Damian O'Sullivan: http://www.damianosullivan.com/
Re: patchy
Date: 2006-04-02 05:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 12:41 am (UTC)matthew barney
Date: 2006-04-02 04:32 am (UTC)where is drawing restraint 9 screening tomarrow?
thanks.
=aaron
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:34 am (UTC)Panel Discussion
Date: 2006-04-02 06:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:51 pm (UTC)Makes me melt!