Mixed Messages

Hello group, below is the curatorial statement for my project. Your comments are greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Mixed Messages – Reimagining Television 1969-1990

Mixed Messages is a historical overview of artist videos made specifically for broadcast television or works which consciously reflect the context and structure of televisual culture. With the increasing use of video technology in contemporary art in the 1960s, many artists were eager to embrace the notion of art that could be seen on television. Television, as the dominant medium of the era, was seen as a potential—and potentially subversive—tool for expanding the reach of contemporary art to unsuspecting viewers. Despite television’s image as the corporate-controlled, out-of-touch parent to the nascent rule-breaking video art generation, a considerable amount of innovative and challenging work was created for television—this, during the very time when the medium was reaching its widest audience. Collecting a wide range of works created for television, as well as works that comment on the medium and/or recreate the experience of watching TV, Mixed Messages situates all of the above within the familiar broadcast format. Television commercials, music videos and episodic short form videos are all presented as an idealized alternative to commercial television.

Includes works by:
Peter Greenaway
Chip Lord
Bill Viola
Nam June Paik
Alan Kaprow
Ilene Segalove
Chris Burden
Tom Sherman
Robert Longo
Aldo Tambellini
Robert Breer
Connie Coleman & Alan Powell
MICA TV w/ Dike Blair & Dan Graham
Dara Birnbaum
Joan Jonas
Charles Atlas
Joseph Beuys
Tony Oursler
William Wegman

Kick in the Eye

Hi all - I am very sorry to have missed the last session. I wanted to provide a little here about how my progress is coming thinking about the show. I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions you have very much.

Kick in the Eye

Graham Durward (New York)
Nicole Eisenman (New York)
Alexandra Gorczynski (Philadelphia)
Wynne Greenwood (Seattle)
Stephen Irwin (Louisville, KY)
Paul Lee (Brooklyn)
Lovett/Codagnone (New York)
Matthew Savitsky (Philadelphia)
Marc Swanson (Brooklyn)
Scott Treleaven (Paris)
Nicola Tyson (New York)

Kick in the Eye is a group exhibition of recent painting, sculpture, installation, and video that highlights fractured ways of looking and being seen. Through sideways glances, mis-identification, and quiet confrontation, these artists create queer portraits, in a broad sense, that call into question what we might think we know about processes of identification. What might be activated in a viewer through deliberate masking, hiding, coding, covering, or obfuscating? Instead of facilitating a bourgeois consumption of an "other," these works function as broken mirrors that deny easy absorption of difference. The artists use strategies of role play, theatricality, defiance and abstraction to prompt important questions about looking and being seen.

This slippery back-and-forth of identification finds touchstones in gay culture and history: role-playing, cruising, the crisis of the body with AIDS, hidden touches, and conscious obliteration of ego. More importantly, though, these works represent a very current trend of thinking about how to look at queer bodies in an age of hyper-representation and supposed celebration of difference.

A Climate of Unease for Artists in Syria

A recent article in the New York Times that made me think more about some of the issues brought up in the first series of workshops:

Read the article.

Independent Thinking

Over the past few months at ICI we've been having a series of internal conversations about what it means to be an independent curator. These conversations have acknowledged that the term is shifting meaning today, both in relation to the material dependencies of the freelance curator on art world infrastructures as well as the innovative practices and groundbreaking exhibitions deriving from curators in institutions. Our unofficial motto for 2010 has become "independent thinking," which encourages the the notion of the independent curator as a fluid position that can be located within and across different institutions and contexts.

Independent curator Nat Muller is remarkable for her ability to intelligently and creatively frame contested terrains of art, politics, and media in her exhibitions. Through a nuanced understanding of the deep complexities, even antinomies, in displaying contemporary work from the Middle East/North Africa in Europe and resisting the hegemonic, narrativizing gaze so prevalent in the Western interpretation of such work, she has produced dynamic exhibitions that challenge dominant readings of art from that region. Her curatorial strategies, which she has developed over a number of years, range from being sensitive to how work travels both logistically and conceptually from one context to another; discussing work in specifics and narrowing projects in terms of strategy, language, and scope; and perhaps most saliently, determining the necessity of working around official mandates- going so far as to produce new artistic identities- to curate an exhibition, or understanding when to pull out of curating an exhibition altogether.

I hope Nat's discussion gave much food for thought about how to work with and around official expectations to create spaces for more complex understandings of art (and culture and politics) for the viewer. Her seminar spurred many questions for me about how to creatively address and work around the expectations and constraints of funding infrastructures and institutional mandates. How can Nat's methodology as an independent curator, particularly her definitions of elasticity and resistance, be thought about in relation to your own practice? How can we start thinking about ways to negotiate sanctioned meaning through exhibitions- taking into account artistic intent and the knowledge base of our audiences? Or is there something else you took away from Nat's seminar that you'd like to discuss here?