I would begin with a kind of history of where I came from, the situations that I worked in and the people that I worked with.
I was born in 1940, at the beginning of the Second World War, in Plymouth, Devon, in England which was very heavily bombed. Curiously my earliest experiences were of that war situation and bombing. It did make some kind of difference to the way that I experienced things. This early part of my life I definitely have dreams about. I was not a good scholar. I was only really interested in art and rugby – a curious combination –, biology and physics. And like a lot of people who weren't interested in school I decided I'd become an artist. I went in art school in Plymouth, which is a very provincial art school and traditional, but not excessively traditional. I studied painting, drawing, life drawing, graphic design and 3D sculpture. I even did some ceramics. So I did very broad initial education in art. I think I was talented visually. The other thing that was very important at the time was that I liked jazz music. The biggest influence on my thinking is jazz. I played guitar reasonably well – rhythm guitar and banjo. I was background in jazz bands. That was a major part of my early period of being an art student.
I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to the Slade School in London, which is one of the three most desirable schools in England. So I moved from Plymouth to London at 21 and got married at the same time and soon had a son. London was a very different kind of thing: I really felt like I was someone up from the country, someone who'd come from the provinces. And you hit this very sophisticated different kind of world. I had to do it because I used to call Plymouth a "culture-free zone", a place where there was no background of culture. And along with a number of my other colleagues of the art school we all went to London as soon as we could. In London I concentrated on painting. I continued a little bit to play jazz.
This is an early painting that I did, probably in 1963-64. I was actually very interested in kind of systems. I said I liked physics and biology. I actually got my education after I left school. I read a lot and I did keep up with developments in cybernetics, communication and information theory, genetics… I got interested in some of those things that were going on in science and the sort of thinking that was involved in them. Though I wasn't illustrating that in my painting, I got interested in the concepts that were coming out of some scientific things and some scientific way of thinking.
The next thing is a transition between painting and film. 1960s, late 60s – early 70s was a time that people talk about "Swinging London". But really what was going on in the arts in general was a sense that the boundaries were disappearing; that the ideal of the canvas and the frame, and all sorts of things were shifting about what was acceptable in all the art forms. And London was very lively about it at that time. I started to make paintings, or what might be better called assemblages. This is again from about 1964.
I can't say I was uninfluenced – I was very taken with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and I was interested particularly in improvised music performance and experimenting the sound. I was reading McLuhan. And I started to make paintings that became surfaces in front of which something happened. So they weren't pictures that you'd look through (although a lot is going on that black surface: there are objects that are being painted into the surface) but the main thing was that I was hanging things in front of it with clips and strings, attaching things from in front of the painting. When I exhibited this at the Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane first I would change the attachments each time I went in. I even might sit in a chair and attach myself to the picture so it was constantly changing.
And the other thing was that I started to record or replay sound. This is aluminium foil here (points to Assemblage image) and there's a microphone in front, which goes down to an amplifier. So the vibration of people going by is recorded through the microphone and out through the amplifier. And this is a transistor radio, which is a kind of random station. And the influence is again clearly the sort of things that were coming out from John Cage although I actually didn't know much about Cage at the time. I was then also working with an improvisation music group called AMM. They were the group that did almost all of the advanced music at the time in London and I was doing some things with them, including some light presentations. I was recording them and playing there, recording back into the performance and changing the speeds, and all sorts of things like that. So the painting then in a way began not to be a painting; it began to be something that took me away from the surface.
This is a recent exhibition at the Camden Art Centre. This is a second piece from the same period. In front of the paintings I often had this flashing light bulb and this one is attached here to a sort of still life.
But it could be something else. I exhibited it two or three times recently: each of them had had some kind of still life but if I showed it again tomorrow it might have a different thing. I exhibited this as an installation with the first 16mm film (I did some 8mm work), which was called Castle 1. I told people this morning that one of the things I did when I was first teaching at Saint Martins, I would pick up material from the garbage cans in Soho, which were bits of film. And I made the first film primarily by cutting and repeating segments from the films, which I found. I interspersed that with images of the flashing light bulb and when I presented it I always had a light bulb coming in front of the screen which also flashed on and off. I had a machine that I made for making it flash but also sometimes did it by hand. You can imagine the effect of that was to bleach out the screen and to illuminate the audience.
The sorts of things that I was thinking about at that time were Brecht and alienation devices. Particularly all the discussions I was having with other film related artists at the time were about shifting the centre of meaning from the artwork to the spectator. It was a kind of political idea that somehow or other was undemanding the artist and making the spectator aware of themselves and of their life in relationship to the work. The work was for them to make a construction of meaning of rather than to absorb the meaning put in there by the artist.
The other thing was that it was Anti-cinema. I'd seen pretty much all of the advanced cinema of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Chris Marker… all of the things which were advanced cinema at that period, in London, as a student. But I knew that I didn't want to make films like that. I felt that all those films were basically very illusionistic and 19th century. I didn't think that they gave me the same sense of the present that I was getting from advanced artists like Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, from musicians like Ornette Coleman, John Cage, from literature like Kafka, from theatre like Beckett. This seemed to me to belong to the time that I was working in. Even the advanced films seemed to me to be constructed like 19th century novels, and that's a bit too complicated. So the flashing light bulb was part of that. The Anti-cinema was a big attack on the audience. It was very Dadaistic, punk attack on the audience. But I realized fairly soon it wasn't just an attack on the audience but it was also an attack on my own sensibility. I was trying to crack open my own preconceptions about cinema. I was doing it in public but I would probably never want to put audiences through that experience now, although in recent years lots of people have asked to see this work and it's been quite "popular".
This is the installation. The film is on here. This is a little clip. So you can see it wasn't a pleasant experience, not even for me (shows clip of Castle 1 presentation).
But curiously it was very important for me. It kind of cleared the ground. The reference here to Castle 1 is a kind of attempt to make a parallel with the sort of paranoia that you have with Kafka, which influenced me a great deal at that time.
The next important thing was that from making that film in 16mm and having being the painter and making music, I became very aware that film was a very alienating process. The film print had to be done in a laboratory and I wasn't happy with that: I felt that was very different from the hands-on experience that I had with painting and I wanted to reproduce that. And there were only two or three people in London making what you might call experimental film, but there was no scene. I talked to my friend David Curtis about it: we talked about how we might improve the capability for people to make film, open it out. Cost was a really important part of this. The film stock was horribly expensive; the cameras were expensive or difficult to hire; the laboratories were ridiculously expensive. So filmmaking was very difficult and expensive business. He and I had this idea that we would set up a filmmakers' workshop. As a beginning for this I tried to make some filmmaking equipment. I came in as a complete primitive; I didn't know anything. I built a film-printing machine from an old projector. This is the diagram of it. This is the equivalent of the negative in photography. It comes through the film projector gate bi-packed with the unexposed print stock and it comes down. The lamp here shines through the negative and makes a print onto the print stock. It worked and I made all the five or six first films, except for Castle 1, on this equipment.
The other thing, which I did at the same time, was a developing machine. A 16mm film for ten minutes is about 100 meters. If you try developing a 100 meters of film and then putting it through the fix, washing it and then drying it – it's impossible. So I built this machine, which would do it continuously.
Having exposed the print, the print comes off here and goes through a developing tank four times. This is all made from plywood and plastic bucket and the spindles are all plastic drainpipes. It's extremely primitive. It goes through development, fix and then two wash tanks to get rid of the fix. Then the problem is drying it. It's very slow. So I put in this box, again made of plywood, and I put a hair dryer in here. So as the film came through, the hair dryer dried it. Amazingly it worked! But what was obvious was that it could not be the basis of a filmmakers' workshop. It was too unreliable, complicated, and slow.
I was involved then with the London Filmmakers' Cooperative, which was a distribution organisation at that time in London based on the New York Coop. I met up with a financier from New York who had brought the Living Theatre to London. We talked about this idea of a filmmakers' workshop and he said "How much money do you need to do it?" - I said about 3000 pounds. He said ok. I finished up with an envelope with 3000 pounds, went to a laboratory and bought a professional printing machine, which they no longer wanted, and an old army developing machine. And we installed that at the London Filmmakers' Cooperative. Almost all of the London experimental films from that period for at least four or five years were produced at the London Filmmakers' Cooperative with that equipment.
Little Dog for Roger (1967) (Shows extract) was made using the equipment that I produced but it was also done in some simpler ways by direct printing under glass and then putting the sequences together. The material is an old 9.5mm medium that was an early home movie medium. My father shot this when I was a child. I discovered this fragment in their basement and put it back together in a way. At the time, what I was thinking about was the medium. I was interested in drawing attention to the materiality of the medium: its substance, the scratches and the sprockets. I didn't think very much about the sentimentality of the content. Now I think much more on the symbolic aspect of it. And it was on a double projection. A lot of the work that I did at the very early stage worked with double projection which I liked the comparative aspect. In this film one projection runs at 16 f/s and the other at 24 f/s.
This is documentation from a TV documentary that they did about my work some while ago.
The next important bit of my experience as an artist was starting to do some performance works. Three kinds: one was shadow performances where I would make a performance between the projector and the screen; another kind was to have loops in film projectors, move the projectors and superimpose them on each other and make a pattern with them in a live performance; and the third kind was to set up loop film installations, more sculptural so that they might be working on four different walls – as sculpture pieces, not as film pieces.
This is a short combined documentation of a work called Horror Film 1. (Shows extract) I started doing this in 1971 and I've been doing it ever since. I did it recently in New York. This is a documentation made from a number of different performances. At the back of the space are three 16mm projectors with loops. The loops are extremely simple with slow changing colour. The middle projector projects large and the two outer projectors project over the top of each other into a screen in the middle. I make a performance, which begins touching the screen and exploring the screen surface. I gradually come back until I get back to the projector itself and I'm then making shadow actions. It's quite visually complex but the material for it is very simple. I was always interested in something that is kind of magic, but a magic where nobody is puzzled about how it's done.
I was asked to talk about a group called Filmaktion. At this point it was very unusual to be taking films into the art galleries. This crossover between film, performance, installation and the art gallery was not a common thing. They tried to sell films and videos through art galleries but as commercial artworks. So it was a fairly radical thing to do. We did an exhibition at a gallery in London – we as a group which came to be called Filmaktion. We improvised for a couple of weeks and did a number of loop film performances and all sorts of things. That group of people which at that time was myself, William Rabin, Gill Eatherley and Annabel Nicolson, we then did an exhibition in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool which was actually called Filmaktion. It was an attempt to get an idea of film as something that happened in a live performance environment. We were present all the time, constantly changing things and we also did children workshops – had them painting on the film and all sorts of things like that. It was a much more engaged thing. That group pretty much stayed together. Some other people were involved with the Filmaktion exhibition in Liverpool but really the group were those four people. We were closely together.
This is a piece by me called After Manet (1975). (Shows extract) It's based on Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. I was interested in those art links. We shot on a whole day with four cameras in a field with a picnic. Each of the cameras was related to one of the performers. The people who ran the cameras were also the performers. The only people there were the four people and each had a camera. If they were in the shot, they were not running the camera. The camera started in fixed position but gradually the camera moved around. It's a very complicated piece, about an hour long. It's projected then on four 16mm projectors. There are shifts in the synchronization because they were unsynchronized cameras. But I corrected that by the speed of the projectors. And in the video, which I've got here, I did it by slowing things down. But I don't want them to stay in complete synchronization.
This is documentation. It's not the actual performance. This was the first exhibition at a gallery house. You can see the sort of setup. We were all interested in multi-screen and performances.
This is another piece that we did together. This is a 3D shadow play. That's the projection screen and the audience is there. They all have 3D spectacles. The back is a green and a red light and as you move around in the space it casts the red-green shadow. With the 3D spectacles the three-dimensional effect is very strong. It's very powerful visually. It's a kind of Grand Guignol piece. I stole the idea from an old musical theatre piece where they often did the shadow play but in one occasion they finished the variety show with this 3D shadow thing. I thought it was a really a nice thing to do.
This is a work by Gill Eatherley. (Shows extract of Gill Eatherly, Hand Grenade 1973) We worked together – we weren't in a way collaborating. I did the camera work for this. We shot it in a dark room on black and white with a frame-by-frame camera. Gill was moving flash light bulbs around in various ways, which we then superimposed and coloured at the Filmmakers' Cooperative with the colour printer, and then projected three screens.
That was a very poor representation of a work called Two Minutes Forty Five Seconds (1972) (by William Raban (Shows extract). It was a piece that he did over a number of night's performances with a camera that had a sound recording and a film. Then he would develop that film over night and then project it again onto the screen and then do the performance again each time. It was a kind of video piece done with film.
This is another piece by William Raban called Diagonal (1973) (Shows extract). which I like very much. In a lot of the work the empty screen of one sort or another or the coloured screen became the subject. It was about the reality of the screen. Line Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall comes from the same era. When the space of the projection becomes as important as the image on the screen. It was also taking the screen as point zero. It was a complete break with the idea of the content of a work existed in the image behind the screen. All photographic aspects of cinema… in a way … content exists behind the screen. There's an argument that I make a lot: the narrative is an equivalent to that, where the action takes place before the event; the action is also behind the screen. This was against the visual illusion of perspective space, but also against the time illusion of the narrative.
This work is a piece by Annabel Nicolson (Shows Still of Reel Time(1973) Her work is very difficult to see. She's not well and very disinclined to do things in public at the moment. This is a beautiful piece where she had a loop of film, which went around a room into a sewing machine with a needle. The film was coming through the sewing machine and going out to the projector. The projector was showing the effect of the sewing machine and you saw her making the sewing film until it broke. It's called Real Time.
The Filmaktion work was the subject of a Tate Modern show recently and we all reproduced a number of these pieces. All these works come from 1972-1973-1974, that sort of period. This is a piece where I move the projectors during the performance, (Shows documentation clip of Threshold (1972) so they change configuration and superimpose on each other. They can go vertically, horizontally, sometimes projecting up into a corner depending on the space. This is an early time laps. It's a video representation of a moving projector piece that I originally did with film.
This is a complete work, 8 minutes long. It's the work that has the soundtrack by Brian Eno. It was the first 16mm colour film that I made when we setup the proper professional printer at the Film Coop. It was based on a piece of 8mm of a horse being exercised that I shot in a village called Berlin, north of Hamburg in Germany. Then I refilmed it on 16mm and then kept transforming it – it's completely improvised as it goes along, and then the final sequence is from an old film of horses being led from a burning barn that I'm told is by Edison. It was one of the bits and found material that I had. This is Berlin Horse (1970). (Shows complete double screen work).
Now I'm going to show some complete works. This first piece is called Even the Cyclops Pays the Ferryman (1998) and it's a kind of requiem for the death of my father who was the Cyclops – he lost an eye after the war, he was dismantling an army refrigerator that had ammoniac and the ammoniac went in his face and he lost an eye. It made absolutely no difference to him at all. He was essentialist, lived life to the full, burnt the candles at both ends and did the middle as well, completely nonreligious, drank a lot, smoked a lot and drove a car twice the speed he should go, with one eye. I liked him a lot. So I made this work as a kind of requiem, but a nonreligious one, because I'm a complete atheist. But it is about that kind of death ritual and the idea of decomposition, in a physical sense. It's for me a symbolic type of piece.
Two of the works have quite a lot of digital work (the last one you've seen and The Portrait of Dennis Oppenheim, DENISINED, 2006). I did a lot of digital work in the sound. The other works are straight from the camera and edited. A lot of the work including Cyclops is really mixed methods, mostly analog actually.
Question: In Horror Film, was the sound recorded before?
MLG: I pre-recorded it. At the beginning I listen to it and get the rhythm of it, and then it's very physical: I put my breathing in relationship… It's quite nice because I'm performing with the sound. And I'm not sure my breathing would be even enough.
Question: Can you tell us more about your creative process?
MLG: Sleeping and avoiding it as much as I can! It's very continuous really. A lot of the works are worked on a lot. A lot is done at the editing, with the computer editing. Some things begin… it comes to me to do it. I don't chase the idea. Child on the Beach (Critical Moment 1) (2004), for example: there wasn't originally a connection between shooting that and Piaget, the psychologist. I was fascinated by what the child was doing – dropping something, looking for it, simply that, but shot over the child's shoulder. You don't see his face. He happens to be my grandson, but that's not important. It's not in that way sentimental at all: I was just fascinated by this thing. I connected that up. I was very influenced by the thinking of Jean Piaget. He did an extremely close observation of his own children growing up, and when my children were growing up I was also reading the Piaget – it's called The construction of reality in the child (New York: Basic Books, 1954) [La construction du réel chez l'enfant (1950), also translated as The Child's Construction of Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955)].
It's all about how children develop a concept of their space and environment from the way, which they engage with it. It's not behaviourist but it isn't psychoanalytic either. For example, the idea that an object has continuity, for a child, when they see the object, it's there, when they don't see it, it doesn't exist. Children can be very disturbed when something disappears because as far as they're concerned it's gone forever. Then they gradually learn to connect something, which is gone out of sight. That thing of how we physically structure our environment… Vision is only a part of it. A blind child can still develop a concept of their environment. So vision is not the crucial thing. Huge emotional energy goes into forming those relationships, and that psychological energy is stored in the relationship and it gets released if that relationship gets stretched like on magic. The illusionist magician, you know that he hasn't taken the coin out of your ear, but there's something to do with the pleasure of continuity and discontinuity. I didn't begin making that from that position, but all the thoughts about that... I didn't think of making a movie when I shot it. I shoot things all the time – and this time it was with a camera, but for twenty years now I've almost always had a video camera with me. And it's only after I've shot it that I think there's something there interesting. That piece doesn't sustain longer than a minute. You can actually do a work that's only a minute long.
Absinthe (2010) is similar. I made a film about Kafka's house in Prague (For the Benefit of Mr K,1995). I was in Prague recently to do a show and I thought I'm going to make a high-definition version of the same thing. When I got there, it became so commercialized that I'm not interested anymore. I found this funny little café, strolled in, sat down and looked at the menu. As I was drinking wine I saw also that they were selling absinthe - and I thought absinthe was illegal. If you're interested in art history, absinthe has been an important thing in art history (Picasso, Van Gogh, Degas…). Absinthe was an art idea. I'd never had absinthe and asked the owner of the café for absinthe. When he brought it, I said I've no idea how to drink this… he showed me and I videoed it.
Exhibiting artists' films, video art and moving image in French- speaking Switzerland (HES-SO, ECAL research project).
The aims of the research project "Exhibited Cinema" are twofold. First, based on archival research, it seeks to identify the status of film and of the moving image in the field of contemporary art in French-speaking Switzerland; second, it aims at assessing the influence of exhibition contexts on a multiplicity of film practices (on their temporal aspects, the multiplication of surfaces of projection, the reception by a mobile spectator) through workshops conducted by filmmakers and visual artists and conferences by curators and moving image practitioners.


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Univ of Pittsburgh Concerns Go National
The University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's alert continues to attract media interest. CNN's Larry King Live has scheduled a new show on "Cell Phone Dangers" for tomorrow (Tuesday) night. (The last one was on May 27.) Sources at CNN told us that the guest list now includes: Keith Black, a neurosurgeon at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, Devra Davis of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, Paul Song, a radiation oncologist in Los Angeles and Ted Schwartz, a brain surgeon at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. The line-up may change before air time. Black, Gupta and Schwartz were also on the May 27 show.
Ronald Herberman,
Devra Davis,
University of Pittsburgh,
Keith Black,
Ted Schwartz,
Sanjay Gupta,
Otis Brawley,
Return to Main Article Archive

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Can you believe that at the end of my quest to feed my family of 5 off of a single 6-pound roast as the main source of protein for 7 days, I had enough left over to fill a quart-sized freezer bag? We spent Day 7 of our quest actually finishing up leftover enchiladas, and thus ended a weeklong feast of roast beef based dishes.
I hear they have chicken on sale, but if I feed my family 7 days of the same meat again, I think they'll all revolt.
Hope you've enjoyed following along, and do let me know if you try any of the recipes.


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Green Mountain Transit and the Essex Senior Bus
Green Mountain Transit
The Green Mountain Transit (GMT) was chartered in 1973 by the Vermont General Assembly after the private bus operator went out of business. GMT serves the communities of Burlington, Essex, South Burlington, Shelburne, Williston, Winooski, Milton, Hinesburg, and a portion of Colchester. LINK Express routes serve Montpelier, Middlebury, and St. Albans commuters. GMT is considered a municipality and is the first and only transit authority in the State of Vermont.
In Chittenden County, GMT offers fixed routes, local commuter routes, LINK Express routes, and ADA paratransit services. GMT also provides shuttles from senior housing complexes to local supermarkets and neighborhood specials for student transportation to Burlington schools. Outside of Chittenden County, in Washington, Lamoille, Franklin, and Grand Isle Counties, GMT provides a variety of public transportation services including local routes, commuter routes, demand response medical shuttles, and service to elders and persons with disabilities.
Green Mountain Transit - Local and County Bus Schedules and information may be viewed at this link. (click here)
Essex Senior Bus
The Essex Senior Bus is for residents (Essex & Essex Junction) 60 and older, free for any appointments within Essex. The bus is equipped with a wheelchair lift.
The Senior Bus operates Monday through Friday, and Sunday morning.
Please call 802-878-6940 between 9:00 a.m. & 11:45 a.m. to set up a ride. Call 24 hours in advance to reserve appointment times.
Essex is Accessible:
Auto or Bus: Interstate 89, 91, and 93 link Essex to Montreal, Boston, and New Hampshire. Highway 7 and Interstate 87 provide direct access to New York City. Vermont Transit provides extensive bus routes throughout the northeast.
Air: Essex is located within five miles of the Burlington International Airport which is served by seven commercial airlines with more than 60 daily flights. Over 500,000 passengers pass through yearly making it the third busiest international airport in New England. The airport is a U.S. Customs Port of Entry for airplanes entering the U.S. from abroad and is also an approved foreign trade zone.
Rail: Daily freight and passenger service is provided by Central Vermont Railroad, Vermont Railway, and Amtrak. A station is conveniently located in Essex.
Ferry: Three Lake Champlain ports offer ferry service which carries autos and passengers between Vermont and New York.
Green Mountain Transit & Essex Senior Bus


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A Unique Boutique for Charter Yacht Shopping
Over the four days of June 17-20 Newport Shipyard buzzed with activity as it catered to charter yacht brokers, agents and other industry professionals attending the year's Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport. Owned and operated by the Shipyard, the show exclusively showcases private luxury yachts for charter and offers attendees a chance to interact directly with yacht captains and crews and catch up on marine industry progress, changes and innovations through informational gatherings, including the American Yacht Charter Association seminars, and access to on-site vendors that are marine manufacturers, suppliers and show sponsors.
Crew Competitions Serve Up Sustainable Luxury and Plenty of Fun
One of the special highlights of every year's Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport is the Chef's Competition, which is held under the Show Tent where all attending brokers, managers and other charter industry professionals can enjoy a break from business and gain further insight into the personalities of those who normally spend their days lavishing attention on charter guests. This year's show, which ran from Monday, June 17 through Thursday, June 20 hosted 24 world-class yachts: nineteen motor yachts and five sailing vessels, half of which were more than 100 feet in length and all of which were docked within easy walking distance of each other at the mega yacht-friendly Newport Shipyard, which also owns and operates the event.
Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport
For charter yacht brokers, lots of homework goes into finding the perfect match for clients who wish to book a week's vacation or extended trip on a luxury yacht. Working to their advantage is the Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport, staged annually by Newport Shipyard in Newport, R.I. Scheduled this year for June 17-20, the show provides brokers with one-stop shopping for unique charter opportunities in New England, and it allows attendees, including agents (who represent the yacht rather than the charterer) and other industry professionals, to network and absorb as much knowledge as possible about their ever-evolving marketplace.
2019 AYCA Seminar Speakers Announced for Newport Charter Yacht Show
UPDATE: Click here for full seminar information, speaker line-up & registration.
The American Yacht Charter Association (AYCA) announced today confirmed guest speakers for the daily show breakfasts and their annual AYCA Seminar Series & Breakfast which will be held during the Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport. AYCA will host one speaker each morning during the Belle's Daily Breakfast on June 18 and 19 and a panel discussion and series of speakers on Thursday, June 20 under the main show tent.
Twenty Yachts Registered to Date for Newport Charter Yacht Show Presented by Helly Hansen Newport!
The Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport now has 20 yachts registered for the show with several more expected to enter in the next 6-8 weeks.
Dates for the four-day event, which welcomes registered and credentialed industry professionals who represent clients interested in chartering a luxury yacht in New England, are June 17-20, 2019. The Newport Charter Yacht Show is the only one of its kind in the U.S. and will feature an exquisite collection of world-class yachts for charter.
The Charter Show is offering a $50 discount through the end of April for all charter brokers who are members of AYCA, CYBA, IYBA or MYBA.
HELLY HANSEN NEWPORT TO BE PRESENTING PARTNER OF 2019 NEWPORT CHARTER YACHT SHOW AT NEWPORT SHIPYARD
Newport Shipyard is proud to announce that Helly Hansen Newport, the oldest Helly Hansen licensed store in North America, owned by Jay Lasky, has signed on for the fourth straight year as the presenting partner of the 2019 Newport Charter Yacht Show. Held each June at Newport Shipyard, the Newport Charter Yacht Show will feature an impressive lineup of power yachts and sailing vessels available for private charter. The 2019 show, slated to be held June 17-20, will offer yacht charter brokers and industry professionals from around the world the opportunity to preview participating charter yachts headed to New England for the season.
Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport: Where Business Meets Pleasure
From June 18-21, the Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newportprovided a four-day window of opportunity for brokers, managers and other industry professionals to acquaint themselves with 24 luxury yachts available for summer charter in the New England area. As well, it gave attendees a chance to network, share information and socialize on the docks and at seminars and special events, mixing business with a good amount of pleasure.
"Everyone is 'on' and friendly here, like they've known you forever," said Maggie Vale, a local broker with Churchill Yacht Partners who attended the show. "It's the New England way, and with the sunny weather we've had, you can't say anything bad about Newport."
There was no shortage of crew enthusiasm at this year's Newport Charter Yacht Show presented by Helly Hansen Newport (Monday, June 18 through Thursday June 21), especially at the show's five competitions designed specifically for showing off the talent, determination and creativity of chefs, captains, deck hands, stewards and stewardesses. In cheering on the crew contestants, brokers, managers and other charter industry professionals who attended the show enjoyed a break from business and gained further insight into the personalities of those who normally spend their days lavishing attention on charter guests.
Of the 24 charter yachts registered for the show, 18 were new to the event and 13 measured in at 100 feet and longer. Over 45 crew from 15 boats participated in the competitions. The Newport Charter Yacht Show was staged at the mega-yacht friendly Newport Shipyard, which also owns and operates the event.


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Paul Amenta & Ted Lott in Conversation with Kevin Buist
Posted on Published November 13, 2019 November 13, 2019 by Jaenell Woods
Critical Infrastructure by Paul Amenta & Ted Lott. Bryan Esler Photo.
Paul Amenta & Ted Lott present Critical Infrastructure, in collaboration with DisArt. The installation creates an environment that addresses issues of accessibility in both form and function. The project reimagines the site by temporarily transforming a private space into a fully accessible public space, through a series of ramps and landings which welcome visitors and a wide variety of performances and interventions by other artists.
This interview, which took place at the ArtPrize Hub in Grand Rapids, MI on June 7, 2019, has been edited for length and clarity. It's part of the Project 1 Exhibition Catalogue, now available to purchase.
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So what are you making for Project 1?
We're creating an accessible pavilion of sorts. It's a bit of a theater. It's a music venue. It's a gathering space. It's a bar. In many ways it's like a nightclub masquerading as an art pavilion.
We're creating a frame for other collaborators to be able to express themselves. The hope is that we can create a frame that transcends a little bit of the sticks and the metal that we're putting together, and to have it become a place where people have a great time. That's the alchemy that we're trying to work with right now: between us, and pieces of wood, and our collaborators.
Ted Lott (left) and Paul Amenta (right). Bryan Esler Photo.
Who are some of those collaborators?
They're primarily local artists, performers, and musicians. Certainly we'll be working with people that we've worked with in the past so you'll recognize some of the folks. There's also going to be a drag show[1] that DisArt's going to be producing that's going to be a pretty exciting project.
You know one of the places that we're hoping to transcend the construction of this is the idea of taking accessibility beyond just the basic math of the situation, and instead making it a welcoming space for everybody to enjoy performances and expression.
Tell me more about DisArt.
They're collaborators on this project. We started talking to them and meeting with them prior to any design of the space. In some of our earlier projects that we worked on with them, their role was retrofitted onto the thing, so this time we really thought it was important to have them be part of the conversation from the inception. They're collaborators not only in terms of design but they're also heavily involved in the programming. They're also creating what we're calling this access infrastructure, with standards of accessibility that are not just physical. A large part of previous projects were about the physical accessibility of a site. Certainly that will be there… but they're moving into this other territory of closed captioning, of live performances and things that are pushing that dialogue forward. That's really important.
The Grand Rapids Ballet performs at Critical Infrastructure during Voices, programmed by DisArt. Kallie Spidahl Photo.
How did that collaboration with DisArt begin?
The relationship with DisArt began with a class that I was asked to teach at a college. A colleague of mine reached out and said, "Hey I'd like you to consider teaching this class about disability and art." And I basically said, "I think you've got the wrong guy." She kept pushing and said I had to meet someone named Chris Smit.[2] So Chris came and helped us navigate that space and we just became really good friends. We ended up working on a project with him for the first DisArt festival in 2015 and ever since then we've worked together. In the beginning it was about he and Jill Vyn coming out evaluating installations and exhibitions we were creating. His team was really great to work with, coming up with creative solutions.
Paul, as you look at the trajectory of your work stretching back a decade or more, how do you link ideas of sculpture and architecture?
I sort of look at myself as a fake architect really. You know—
I look at myself as a fake artist. [both laugh]
Early rendering of Critical Infrastructure by Lott3Metz Architecture.
Yeah, perfect. That's why we get along so well. I know enough to be dangerous, basically. Initially it was more about space than architecture. How do you think about space and how does the object, which early on I was calling a performative object, how does that sit in a space with people in and around it? How does it get used? Back in grad school, as part of my thesis project, I was making bars, essentially, and I would co-opt the gallery opening reception. My job at the gallery at the time was to not only hang the show and do all the preparatory work, it was also to prepare for the reception and clean up afterwards. One of my jobs was I had to pour out all the drinks into a big thing, and it's New York, so I take it down this really narrow staircase to the restroom and it was always a disaster. So I decided to create sculptures that people could pour their drinks into and it helped finish the piece. I would often describe myself as sort of a minimalist even though I really didn't want to be a minimalist. I didn't know how to do anything else so I would create these super minimalist pieces that the audience could sort of f*** up by pouring their drinks into it.
You were a fake bartender too.
I'm also a fake bartender. Yeah totally. [laughs]
I WAS THINKING LESS ABOUT SCULPTURE AND MORE ABOUT HOW TO ENGAGE AN AUDIENCE IN A SPACE.
Even though I'm not a performance artist, and I'm certainly not an architect, I was really interested in that engagement aspect. And then when I got involved in doing the SiTE:LAB projects, which was initiated by a project called ACTIVESITE back in 2006, it was about engaging spaces with site specific installations and engaging that space in an interesting way.
That's how we think about buildings in the city in our architectural practice: exactly the way that he's describing thinking about the reception space or the space around the sculpture. Ultimately, when we're putting something up, we have to think about how people on the street are going to interact with it and what their experience is going to be. We're going to do the best we can for the folks we're working for, and then there's a moment where we just have to step back and accept the results.
Ristu Katsumata performs at Critical Infrastructure. Kallie Spidahl Photo.
It seems there's a common thread of thinking about how you can create environments that create meaning for people even if they're not coming at it head on. Does that make sense? Even if people aren't saying "Ok, I'm looking at an artwork…" That's the thing with the reception, you never quite know if people are even talking about the work. It's an interesting space to claim.
One of the hard lessons of my graduate school was the idea that nobody cares about the big ideas in your building. You can have lofty ideas; you can have complex ideas; you can have mathematical ideas—but nobody really cares, right? The issues are how they experience it, how they use it, and how they feel about it. We don't own it anymore. Once you're finished with it everybody else owns it and establishes its value. We've actually been talking about that a lot lately as part of this work.
There's a certain way of working that you had set up with SiTE:LAB. How does that way of working either extend into this project or not? What's remaining similar, what's shifting and what's new?
This particular project [Critical Infrastructure] grew out of a proposal we were developing for a Bloomberg grant about a year ago. We were looking at a site in an area of town that we're not from and started to ask the question of how you go into a neighborhood that you're not a part of and create something for a community and what does that look like and—
And what does that mean?
And what does it mean, right. And should we even be doing it? So as the proposal started to develop it became very clear that what we were hoping to accomplish with it was to essentially create an infrastructure, a platform of sorts, for the community to then take over. Build a thing, get it started, and then walk away and say now it's yours and do it with it what you want. Add on to it, tear down whatever. That led into this project where we're creating a platform that we're going to hand over to everybody else—the performers, the audience, the community— and the project is successful based on their participation at the site. We're building out the space, this accessible space, and we're asking people to come in and use it and abuse it however they wish.
Bryan Esler Photo.
But this is quite an evolution in Paul's career as a fake architect… [Paul laughs] you know because he's talking about what I do all the time as an architect, right? This idea that we're going to do the best we can for the folks we're working for and then there's a moment where we're just gonna have to step back and accept the results.
But you still have a responsibility of framing the activity. Framing that will enable certain activities and maybe discourage or lead people away from other activities. So what are you trying to encourage and enable in the form of the space?
One of the things that we talked about immediately as a response to this specific site was how do we provide not just multiple vantage points but multiple performance points, multiple access points, multiple user points for varying things. We are anticipating that at one moment somebody is a spectator, and then maybe fifteen minutes later they're a performer. If you look at the rendering of what we're creating and you think that you see a thing that's a stage, well that may be a stage but it may be a vantage point from a different perspective. Those are some of the ideas that have been carried forward from previous work that were happenstance previously, and we're trying to be much more purposeful about the performance aspect this time. We're trying to provide options and provide a landscape for that to happen. And that also goes back to the ideas that DisArt is bringing to the table about people being able to appreciate the work in different ways and making them able to do that. We're trying to do that mostly by means of abstraction, or by pulling things away to allow those different things to happen.
Talk to me more about the selection of this site. Where is this thing being built and why is it important that it ended up there?
ArtPrize staff photo.
It was a very organic discussion. We always have sites in the back of our heads, with things that we'd like to do at them. I had just been through the Tanglefoot building recently with the new owner, talking to him about some of his goals for the building, and I remembered this back courtyard that exists at Tanglefoot. It really provides a good base for us to be able to work.
Another key factor in making some of the final decisions was the history of the building: not so much that it was a manufacturing facility but that it has this really rich creative history. It's been artists' studios for three decades. We know many of the people that occupy the studios and with the focus on highlighting local artists as part of this project, it became really crucial that we highlight that cultural history that's embedded in the building.
I want to circle back to something that you said earlier about making sculpture but also making space, and the question of how it gets used. This is not a question that people ask traditionally about an artwork. Some definitions of art would even go so far as to say that art is something you do not use, it's something you behold. Tell me more about that. Why are you interested in making artwork with this extra layer of interaction? How does it get used? And why is that important to you?
I'm going to bring up a very specific artwork that I engaged with very early when I was in grad school at The School of Visual Arts in New York. Rirkrit Tiravanija did a project at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in which he created a full scale replica of his apartment in the gallery. That was remarkable in and of itself, but the really amazing thing was he convinced Gavin Brown to keep the gallery open 24/7. Anybody could come in at any time and they could do whatever they wanted in the space; they could occupy it There was a functioning refrigerator; you could order take out and put it in the refrigerator; you could come and play chess with your buddy; you could hang out and just drink; people slept there; people had other experiences there [both laugh]. I thought it was a brilliant co-opting of a private gallery space. He turned a private gallery space into a public space. I mean in a way the outcome of that project—the place was a disaster at the end [Ted laughs] just the graffiti everywhere and s*** everywhere, it stunk—but the idea of the artists tweaking the system a little bit, manipulating and co-opting that space: I thought was just brilliant. That's what I was trying to do with my work to a lesser degree. I was trying to co-opt the gallery opening. There was always something to me that felt like… that you can't quite get at with just looking at a piece. I'm really fascinated with that idea of giving up control. SiTE:LAB did a project[3] at the Morton House where I collaborated with Eric Kuhn and Premier Skateboarding.[4] We created this indoor skate park and we painted it pristine white on purpose because we wanted all those beautiful scuff marks to show up. In the beginning when I first started doing this it was hard. But as you do these things, those marks become way more interesting than the perfect cube or whatever.
It's funny you would say that because one of our jokes about designing buildings in the city is that we know it's successful if we see skaters on it. That's how we gauge whether our urban work is successful: do kids want to like grind on it? The skaters have put their own meaning on that work. That's when stuff gets rich; that's when stuff gets meaningful.
You mentioned including the audience, that the work isn't complete until the audience adds to it.
The idea of process art in this, to me, is very rich and important as we navigate this. We're working with municipalities; we're working with stakeholders; we're working with people who've been there before and have their meaning already—in the place that we're about to do something new on. And how do we respect that? How do we deal with it in a meaningful way, in an appropriate way? I mean those are all part of the process.
And how do you welcome them to participate? That piece of it is crucial.
[1] London-based Drag Syndrome was scheduled to make their US debut at Critical Infrastructure on the opening day of Project 1, September 7, 2019. Invited by DisArt, Drag Syndrome features celebrated artists with Down syndrome performing in drag. Shortly after the performance was announced, the owner of the Tanglefoot building revoked permission for Drag Syndrome to perform, forcing DisArt to find an alternate venue for the show.
[2] Chris Smit and Jill Vyn are the founders and co-directors of DisArt, a disability arts and culture organization that believes expressions of a Disability cultural identity can transform society from awareness to understanding to belonging, creating a community that enjoys the full and equitable participation of all Disabled people.
[3] The installation was titled SKaTE:LAB and was produced on the occasion of ArtPrize 2014.
[4] Premier is a Grand Rapids skate shop.
« Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in Conversation with Kevin Buist
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in Conversation with Kevin Buist
Posted on Published October 29, 2019 October 29, 2019 by Jaenell Woods
Voice Bridge by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Photo: Bryan Esler Photo
This conversation — which took place at the Herman Miller Flagship on April 30, 2019 in New York, NY — is part of the Project 1 Catalogue. Edited for length and clarity.
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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer develops interactive installations that live at the intersection of architecture and performance art. His large-scale interactive works have been commissioned for exhibitions and events around the world. Voice Bridge is a new site-specific piece for Project 1 featuring a sound system and 400+ lights that traverse Grand Rapids' iconic Blue Bridge.
Start by telling me what you're making for Project 1.
RLH
I am working on a new project called Voice Bridge. The project is going to be an intervention on the pedestrian Blue Bridge in Grand Rapids, a large scale interactive light and sound piece. It's basically a treatment of LED light fixtures that are very columnated, very focused, which make an illuminated pedestrian walkthrough where the lights glimmer. This glimmer is not random. The glimmer is actually responding to the intensities, the frequency, and the volume of the messages people record on an intercom. So the project basically asks participants to come in and leave their thoughts into a system that then visualizes this voice in conjunction with the past 400 participants. So for everyone who leaves a message, their messages gets added to this archive, this kind of urban manifestation of these voices. As you cross the bridge, you hear the voices of the participants over time. As new recordings get generated, previous ones get pushed one position further along the bridge until they disappear. The whole project is a bit of a memento mori, like a little reminder that these recordings are only taking place for a little while. Ultimately, it is a project that is out of control: nobody's telling you what to say or what not to say. It is based on a lot of different experiences that my studio and I have been developing over the past twenty years on how to activate a public site with crowdsourced content.
Back up a little bit and tell me about your practice overall, what you've been doing the past couple decades. What draws you to participatory artwork? That's a thread that runs through a lot of what you do.
I started as an artist working solely in public art. My contribution—or my obsession —has always been the idea of creating platforms for self-representation, where people take over a public space. I want to make a contribution to a situation that is basically happening everywhere: globalization and capitalism are resulting in homogenization. So today, in every city, new buildings in Grand Rapids or Mexico City or Singapore are bound to be very similar to each other because buildings are no longer representing citizens. They're representing the solution that architects, planners, and developers find optimum to create a living or working environment— so there's an enormous homogeneity. Churchill said, "We build buildings, and they build us." But that's no longer the case. Now these buildings represent the capital.
ARTISTS CAN INTERRUPT THIS HOMOGENIZING GLOBALIZED VISION OF WHAT THE CITY IS SUPPOSED TO BE.
Interactivity is a way to turn the tables a little bit on those kinds of established power narratives. It's a way to create an interruption in those patterns. When you look at public space, there's not just homogenization that is at stake. There are other problems, like the corporate takeover of a public space like a shopping mall, which has a code of conduct and it has all of these different technologies and architectures to ensure that this is a consumer-dedicated space. As someone that believes that art should underline a more critical aspect of being a citizen, I want art to create the space that interrupts that and allows people to speak freely. I've worked a lot with voice, and I'm fascinated by freedom of speech—that more and more is disappearing. Many countries have, for example, now passed gag laws where you cannot criticize politicians. This is the beginning of some very dire outcomes, I believe. It hasn't happened yet in the U.S. but we're getting close and we must stop it. We must allow for people to be able to express themselves freely.
Interactivity is also a way to create intimacy, and a way for people to relate to their city, to their buildings, and to each other. It's an activity other than shopping to occupy space.
You reminded me of something, yesterday I visited The Vessel. The new Thomas Heatherwick sculpture that resembles a huge basket made of staircases, it's several stories tall, and it sits in the center of Hudson Yards, a development with a luxury shopping mall. They had rules posted on a sign, but they didn't call them rules, they called them "vital behaviors."
Vital behaviors.
Vital behaviors. And I was like what's a "vital behavior?" I read it and I thought, oh, this is just a list of rules. They're things like don't spit off the top, etc. But that's a perfect example of a corporate public space, as you were saying.
I think Vital Behaviors is a great title for a show, you know. [Both laugh] I may steal that from you, it's very good.
An early rendering of Voice Bridge.
I think that even at a time when we are seeing, for example, monumental interventions such as The Vessel in NYC, there is a blingy total message, it seems to say, "This is big and you are small, this costs a lot of money." I think interactivity and specifically ephemeral public art, pieces that come and go, are instead exactly unmonumental. It does not send a message of intimidation. The message, instead, is of intimacy, it's of relationships and I think that's what makes it powerful— aesthetically, practically, politically.
There is a work that I've always been fascinated with by the artists Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz called The Monument Against Fascism (1986).[1] They were invited to do a memorial for the Holocaust in Hamburg. It consisted of an enormous phallic, black monolith, that protruded from the plaza in Hamburg. And people scribbled and graffitied it and over time it was designed to descend into the ground. And if you visit the memorial now you just see the footprint of the monolith which is now underground. There's only a plaque that tells you what happened there. I've always thought the disappearance of that monument is a gesture that really allows us to scale up the dread of the Holocaust, you know, because how do you represent that? You represent that with disappearance. I thought that was so elegant. So my work is really about not creating a permanent statement but rather about an anti-monumental approach, something that's unstable, something that's ephemeral, people understand it as a performance, there's an artificiality to the whole thing that I really embrace.
Part of the design of Voice Bridge includes an element that both records voices and forgets, or deletes them. Talk about the importance of that.
Photos of Blue Bridge Amplified by Teddylogan Creatives
We live in a society of metrics where everything is measured and analyzed and classified. I'm complicit with that society; I mean my artworks basically observe people, listen to them, feel them, and then react to the presence of people. It's very important that you think about that collection. So you're collecting, you're detecting, you're recording. In my case it's not about the amassing of an archive that then can be studied or used, —new recordings erase older ones. So we underline that fleeting moment where your voice will disappear, and how interesting it can be to listen to your voice in relation to the voices of others.
In projects such as this one, platforms where people can participate freely, if somebody says, "Will you marry me," and the partner says "yes", all of a sudden this recording has an enormous personal interest. Or maybe a participant starts beat-boxing, and then someone else sings over the beat-boxing and now they've created something else altogether. These creations are all part of being present in the space. It's not about
memorializing those interactions. The disappearance is fundamental because it's a reminder that this collection is taking place, and that it can be critical and poetic, and that it should not remain. This is all about being in the now.
Unlike some other works in Project 1, you came to me with the idea for the location to do this installation. Why did you select the Blue Bridge as the location of Voice Bridge?
When we first started studying Grand Rapids, and especially in the context of the theme of Project 1—the idea of borders, of lines, of connections, pedestrian walking, of how to reconnect the citizen with their city—it seemed obvious to me that the bridge is one of the most salient infrastructures for that to happen. It connects two parts of the city, it's pedestrian only, which is something that I think is already very majestic, when people feel an ownership of a place, they're not concerned that someone's going to run them over. It also has this idea of flow, the bridge not only connects but when you're on it, you're overlooking and hearing the flowing water of the Grand River. Streaming water is the metaphor of life itself, it's the metaphor of dialogue, it's the metaphor of time passing. It's a perfect place to do this kind of project because it already has a message. The site is a civic infrastructure, nobody's bringing you there because you can buy some stuff. I think that civic infrastructure's fundamental, because—being a democratic socialist— I believe in the commons. Taxes are at work to provide tangible outcomes, that are required to create civility and to create a sense of public space.
I learned in the documentary film about you, Megalodemocrat: The Public Art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, that your parents owned nightclubs in Mexico City. Can you talk about that a little bit?
They were also pioneers in drag shows. In a time where Mexico was very homophobic, they were doing some quite pioneering work. I grew up around these artists and singers, and sort of cabaret style nightclubs and of course, this affected my practice.
I THINK THAT AN ARTWORK NEEDS TO BE LIKE A GOOD CLUB: YOU HAVE TO PREPARE THE LIGHTS, YOU HAVE TO GET GOOD MUSIC, THE DRINKS, THE AMBIENCE—
and I think with art it's the same. But it is the people that really create the party. An artwork that exists outside of criticism, that exists outside of people viewing it and activating it intellectually, or aesthetically, or politically, is an artwork that is dead. As artists, we need to create a context that will invite the public to participate, and I think that's really coming from that club culture. Marcel Duchamp said that, "an artist is a creator of context," and I think that's the case, too.
You don't work alone; you've got a sizable team. Tell me about the importance of the collaborative nature of your work and how you think about running your studio.
Oftentimes in the visual arts, we are still in this 19th Century romantic idea of the artist as this talented, inspired person in front of a canvas all by himself and that's of course not true. At least not of many of the artists that I admire.
Photo: Bryan Esler
My job is to be interstitial and connect these different media that my collaborators bring, and I wear that with pride. Some people might say, well, "Where is the hand of the artist?" Well if you're looking for the hand of the artist in my work, you're looking for the wrong thing. This is not the kind of work I do.
Working in teams is also interesting because I think one of the aspects that nobody's really talking about is the management of those teams. It is my job to look for ways for the team to maintain a sustainable practice and that means being able to pay people well and have perks and job security. I try to practice what I preach, and create a platform that is fair, that is just. For example my team has gender parity: it's 50/50 from management all the way to programming and I'm proud of that because I think that we need to be more representative of what society actually is. I'm Mexican-Canadian and our team includes fifteen people from eight countries. Half of us are scientists or engineers or programmers, and the other half are artists or designers or composers. And so it makes for a really privileged brew of people to work with, and I'm so thankful for that.
[1] Monument Against Fascism descended slowly over seven years. Visitors were invited to scratch their names into the lead surface as a commitment to remain vigilant against the return of fascism. Once it fully descended into the ground a plaque was added that read, "In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice."
« Crossing Lines and Connecting Community Paul Amenta & Ted Lott in Conversation with Kevin Buist »
Crossing Lines and Connecting Community
By: Mia Wallace
The Oxford Dictionary defines belonging – /bəˈlôNGiNG/ verb – as to "be a member or part of a particular group, organization, or class." As humans, we belong to many different things and places. I have Irish heritage; I am an alumnus of Michigan State University; I am a graphic design student at Kendall College of Art and Design; I am a resident of Grand Rapids. Belonging is a common human experience that most of us need to survive. It goes beyond just being a part of a community but actually feeling like you deserve and are connected to that community. From the things I listed above, I am a part of all those various communities, but I only feel like I belong to a select few.
Before starting this internship, my sense of belonging in Grand Rapids was non-existent. I was in a new city with hundreds of different things to do and explore and become involved with, but I didn't have a place to start. It was a very isolating time where I was within the community of Grand Rapids, but I didn't feel like I belonged here.
This all began to change when I started as the Learning and Engagement Intern for Project 1 by ArtPrize. Assisting with art education events, programs, community engagement and volunteer recruitment, I slowly began to feel more and more comfortable and connected to this new city. Every event we worked at MLK Park and Rosa Parks Circle brought me closer to the Grand Rapids community.
Every kid who thanked me for helping them with an art project and every volunteer that I got to know made me feel less like a visitor. All my co-workers and mentors who went out of their way to get to know me and make me spreadsheets of the best places in town made me feel welcomed and excited to be here.
The moment really felt like Grand Rapids was my new home was during the opening day of Project 1, when I got to see all the hard work and time everyone at ArtPrize put into this, including my own, come to fruition and see the community respond so positively to what we made together for Grand Rapids. It was the moment where I felt like I broke down these personal boundaries holding me back from connecting with my new city and crossing the line from out-of-towner to resident to valuable member of the community.
My decision to go back to school and move to Grand Rapids coincided with the production and launch of ArtPrize's newest venture, Project 1. During an extremely transitional period of my life where I was crossing lines and barriers in my own personal and professional life, the five Project 1 artists were exploring the idea of belonging, crossing lines and connecting community into their artwork. During a time of so much transition, confusion and loneliness in my life, it was comforting to know that I was surrounded by and contributing to connecting the community to art that focused on a sense of belonging and pushing boundaries. Project 1 helped me connect and value the history, culture and community of my new home and feel like I didn't just reside within the Grand Rapids city limits, but that I belonged here too.
« Olalekan Jeyifous in Conversation with Kevin Buist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in Conversation with Kevin Buist »
Olalekan Jeyifous in Conversation with Kevin Buist
This conversation — which took place at Olalekan Jeyifous' studio on May 01, 2019 in Brooklyn, NY — is part of the Project 1 Catalogue. Edited for length and clarity.
Olalekan Jeyifous is a Nigerian born, Brooklyn-based artist and architect. His work in public art, installation, drawing, collage, and design explores the past and potential futures of urban environments. For Project 1, Jeyifous presents a monumental sculpture titled The Boom and the Bust, referencing the historic and contemporary challenges of housing discrimination and the inequities of urban life.
What are you creating for Project 1?
I'm making a steel and wood sculpture that's about 25 feet in height. The sculpture is looking at the discrepancy in urban development, the idea that while there's an enormous amount of development occurring in the downtown area, there's certain marginalized groups—Blacks and Hispanics in particular—that don't have the same access to it. The sculpture creates a visual juxtaposition. It is this large, almost triumphant, quasi-brutalist, modernist-looking sculpture, a bit of an abstracted building, a large tower. It's segmented, or bifurcated, and in the center, it's abruptly disrupted by a steel grid with a bunch of much smaller scale models of homes. This speaks to how housing is being bought out by a lot of out-of-state investors that are driving up prices, making it difficult for a certain segment of the population to gain access to housing. Even though if you just look at the statistics, development in Grand Rapids seems to be going very well.
Tell me more about your background and your training. How did you arrive at creating public art in such a large scale?
I was trained as an architect at Cornell University, and then transitioned into visual art fairly early. When I graduated I didn't go to work for a traditional architectural practice.
Olalekan Jeyifous, The Boom and the Bust, 2019. Bryan Esler Photo.
Instead, I went to work for a multi-disciplinary design firm called D-Box. They did a lot of really interesting things, like speculative set design, and I was creating computer-generated imagery (CGI) backgrounds. I was given an enormous amount of freedom to conceive of stage sets for these scenes. After four years of working for this firm, I was invited to participate in an exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It was called Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor. Fifteen artists and architects were invited to reflect on Harlem and its evolution. Being part of this exhibit was an incredible experience. But it was a conflict getting a taste of this incredible freedom and opportunity to really create the ideas of my mind but also having to work, so I quit that job to pursue art full time. Having an architectural background is interesting because architecture—as kind of public imaginary—is supposed to solve problems, but a lot of the work I do is more about generating discourse and inquiry around particular issues.
The work you're creating for Project 1 has an echo of your earlier set designs.
Olalekan Jeyifous, Crown Ether, 2017.
I think so, and that's an important aspect of public art. In an earlier public artwork, before Project 1, I got this Coachella commission that had interactive elements: a three-tiered plinth where festival-goers could sit, and large, branching, tree-like columns they could lean against. Public art appeals to me because there's a high visibility for the artwork and a lower visibility for myself as an artist. It's not like walking into a white-box gallery that proclaims, "this is my show." Public art really allows me to center the art first, and put it in front of a larger public audience.
Where do you look for inspiration? What do you look at; who are you reading?
My inspiration comes from everything that I am interested in. A lot of my work is inspired by science fiction. I would say even this work for Project 1, with this larger piece incepted by smaller pieces, can be approached through a sci-fi lens. Science fiction takes contemporary issues and exacerbates them or resolves them but in a very tenuous way. That's what I'm interested in doing in a lot of my work. I look socio-political or mytho-cultural ideas, utopian or dystopian ideas, and project them into the future.
There's a book that really inspired a lot of my recent work by China Miéville called The City & The City. It's about two cities that literally occupy the exact same space in fictional Eastern European twin city-states. People are not allowed to engage or interact with the other city and the other city's inhabitants at all without going through this bureaucratic process of officially crossing the border into that other city. Once you're in that other city you can't interact with individuals from the city you just left, but they occupy literally the exact same space. They're walking back and forth on the same sidewalks; they're going into the same shops. They're differentiated by very subtle differences: body language, clothing, language, their inflections, the way they move. It's such a fascinating concept that describes how from a very young age, children are conditioned to recognize inhabitants of the other city and to follow this pattern.
It makes me think a lot about my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Crown Heights. I see the same thing as that sci-fi story happening between a lot of the new arrivals to this community and the longtime residents. Unless they're going to the same bodega, and one opens the door for the other, there's very limited interaction between them. You can see walking up and down the streets literally two different sorts of inhabitants occupying the same space.
That led me to think about ideas of community, gentrification, and evolution of neighborhoods, but also the idea of the way neighborhoods are developed, their ownership, and who they're for.
Let's talk about Lagos, Nigeria. This is a city that looms large for you, right?
I was born in Nigeria, but I'm not from Lagos. I was actually born in Ibadan, hours away from Lagos, and then moved to Ife, a neighboring city of Ibadan, when I was young. When I returned to Nigeria after many years, I went to Lagos. It's almost like I haven't quite been all the way home yet. I'm just fascinated with huge megacities. For me, Lagos—being born in Nigeria, and from Nigeria—is the perfect place to really think about cities. The 20 plus years away helped create a detachment that is potentially an advantage for the freedom of creating certain types of work, but also induces certain blind spots because I'm not from there. Within that context, I created a project called Shanty Megastructures about Lagos.
Olalekan Jeyifous, Shanty Megastructures, 2015.
A lot of urban development in Nigeria is massive, and it doesn't really focus on marginalized communities. In Lagos, some 65% of the urban inhabitants reside in informal settlements. These communities are at best ignored, but at worst they're bulldozed and actively destroyed. So I wanted to create these colossal developments that reflected the building typologies and the language of informal settlements. It became a very interesting conversation about, "Is this utopian architecture?," "Is this dystopian architecture?" And so when I presented the work in Nigeria, I gave a lecture to architecture students at the University of Lagos. After I presented the work it was kind of eviscerated by one of the students, it was called, "ruin porn for Western media," There was a round of applause, but then another student stood up and said, "You know, we have to challenge our ideas of why this is 'ruin porn' to you. This looks like very interesting architecture that makes use of local materials and that grows organically, that is community-minded, that focuses on sustainability and natural resources."
In a place like Lagos, there are so many contradictions and juxtapositions. There's all this development, and there's a lot of wealth, but then there's a lot of poverty. There's a lot of infrastructure, but then there are also a lot of disruptions to the infrastructure. There's a major economy and investment, but simultaneously there's a huge informal economy that occurs simultaneously.
FOR ME IT WAS REALLY ABOUT GENERATING THAT DISCOURSE AROUND LARGE-SCALE URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND WHO IT'S FOR.
Yeah. I want to circle back to something you said a minute ago about visibility… When there are narratives formed around cities, who are the characters in those narratives, and who's visible? And when we imagine futures, who do we imagine them for? It seems we have a responsibility to imagine who belongs in a city, and how the built environment can play that out for good or for ill.
That idea of belonging all comes back to who's telling the story. And that's why there's a large push for voices that you don't normally hear from. There's an incredible amount that those voices can contribute to the realm of creativity and art and history and more. It's been proven that those voices are compelling and interesting. For the longest time Hollywood, for example, wouldn't invest in certain kinds of movies because they didn't believe they would draw audiences, and now that's being disproved. You can see a direct response to a film that features an all-Black cast but still does ridiculous numbers. That idea can expand into urban planning and city policy. The voices of particular communities have an enormous amount to contribute that benefits everyone, whether you look like this individual or not. You don't lose anything by adding voices to the conversation; you literally only gain by adding voices. There's an idea that one space becomes diminished as another voice gains, but that's actually not what happens. Instead, you get an enormous amount of stories and perspectives to choose from and to consider.
How does the design of space, cities, and buildings affect who feels like they belong in a given space?
People don't understand that everything is designed. A stop sign literally does not have to have eight sides; someone made a very clear decision to create a graphic standard that we all accept. On a larger scale, it's design decisions that put a particular highway system through a poor neighborhood. Only when it's that broad and impactful when it's clear that the powers that be are putting something through a certain community space that they wouldn't put through another community space does it become apparent that we should have a say in the way cities are designed. ■
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Heather Hart in Conversation with Kevin Buist
Heather Hart's, The Oracle of the Soulmates, 2019.
Bryan Esler Photo
This conversation — which took place t the ArtPrize Hub in Grand Rapids, MI on May 17, 2019 — is part of the Project 1 Catalogue. Edited for length and clarity.
Order the Project 1 Catalogue
Heather Hart is an inter-disciplinary artist exploring the power in thresholds, questioning dominant narratives, and creating alternatives through viewer activation. Her submerged rooftops, complete with shingles and dormer windows, encourage visitors to climb on top and inside and contemplate regional oral histories, as well as serve as a stage for performance. The Oracle of the Soulmates features twin rooftop sculptures at separate locations.
What are you making for Project 1?
I am making two participatory, roof-shaped sculptures called The Oracle of the Soulmates.
Tell me more about the term oracle. That's a very ancient term and an ancient idea, obviously. It also refers to oration and storytelling. How does that relate to these sculptures?
You learn about oracles through oral history. It's passed down from person to person. There's not a map to an oracle that you can just learn about in class. But there are also people or objects or sites that give you guidance and insight to yourself, to truths.
I WANT PEOPLE TO BE PHYSICALLY ENGAGED AT A DIFFERENT LEVEL AND THEN THINK OF THEIR POSITION IN THE WORLD IN DIFFERENT WAYS.
So the oracle is basically a metaphor for the kind of self-discovery or self-awareness gained through the work.
I want to slow people down and get them to look at things that are around them every day. So I use utilitarian building materials to create these sculptures. It is an everyday object pulled into a different context.
What is the significance of doing two?
Heather Hart, The Oracle of the Soulmates, 2019.
I was thinking about the opportunity of making a diptych of the Oracle rooftops and how context shifts the content of the work. Whenever I make an object in one place, it changes if I put it someplace else. It changes because of the environment, because of the people around it, because of the history and the context of that space that it's in. I thought it'd be really interesting to have these sisters—these twins—in different parts of the city. It's a metaphor for these sisters that grew up in the same space. They're built out of the same materials and have the same form, but they have completely different lives, in a way. It asks the visitor to explore why that happens. The objects being the same in different spaces—one downtown and one at MLK Park—will take on different content.
Every place that I go, I understand a little more about humanity and understand a little bit more about each of the cities that I land in. But the roof has remained the same everywhere I go, with the same form, because it's a metaphor for me. Whether it belongs or doesn't belong depends on the dynamics in those spaces. So the process of having conversations with people and seeing who's inspired to activate it, about digging into local archives or researching histories and finding what the intersection is between my narrative and the space is super important for me. That is why I leave the interactive heart of each of the Oracles to the end of the process because I really want to have that be influenced by my own experience. Whether consciously or subconsciously, I've grown into a practice that requires a lot of people, a lot of hands, and a lot of communication. It's all a process and it's all communication and it's all that big question mark that I think makes a studio practice really exciting.
So what draws you to making participatory work?
When I was an undergrad and trying to find my language in sculpture, I was really frustrated at how dismissive viewers could be to things like painting. They would view something and think they understood it right away and moved on right away. And so I was enticed to make something that demanded more of them, asked them to be more responsible in the viewing process.
So The Oracle of the Soulmates will host performances and other activities on these rooftops. How do you determine when to cede control to the creative activity of others and when do you feel the need to kind of hem in what is happening in that space?
I have my own initial concept of it being site-specific in my intersection in that site. But then the visitors come and activate it and bring their own concepts. I like to have conversations in the beginning and talk with people.
I want the rooftop to host activations that don't just treat it like a stage. I want the rooftop to be a player in the activation. So if it's a dance performance then perhaps they don't just use the top surface but maybe they go underneath or around or maybe the concepts involve this rooftop in some way. If it's a violinist maybe they pick a part of the roof that's really precarious or inspiring to them or maybe they walk in different places, or maybe they have a performance in different corners of the roof or underneath. Maybe the audience sits on the roof and the performers in the grass. The site-specific heart of the Oracle, that exists underneath each roof, will also inspire the concept of both and therefore the activation themes.
Lady Ace Boogie performing on Heather Hart's The Oracle of the Soulmates for opening day of Project 1: Crossed Lines. September 7, 2019.
You've spoken in the past about your rooftop sculptures, and the performances they host, as "claiming space." Tell me more about that.
The idea of claiming space comes up a lot for me. I think about that space of power that happens at thresholds. The roof is an in-between space, literally between the inside and outside, between public and private. If someone climbs onto one of those, they're claiming that space, with a perspective shift on the world. And what, prospectively, would be happening at its twin rooftop, at the same time in this different context?
You know, as American Black people, we are kind of bequeathed the trauma that began when people were stolen from their homes and brought to this country. There was no space of our own to claim. The only territory that we were able to keep with us through generations was psychological space: oral histories and oral tradition. I'm thinking a lot about the audacity of claiming space. That's not something we're traditionally taught as Black people, to audaciously claim space, to think in terms of large-scale sculpture and mark your territory and shout your power from that space.
I think about the white male sculpture in that kind of audacity too and how few Black sculptors are making monumental works. You know, when I'm giving a lecture there's inevitable a student or somebody who asks me if I made every-thing myself. I answer that by asking them if they would have the same question for someone like Richard Serra or Mark di Suvero, and why? The expectation and the power that comes in such monumental form of art is something I want to tease out.
You talked about claiming space and thinking about this idea of Blackness. How do you think about those ideas in relation to architecture and the built environment?
Architecture has such a huge impact on how we move through space, how a city is built, and it impacts equity and access. In my practice, I think about how people move through the architecture that I build in relation to one another, in relation to someone who's not accessing it, in relation to the ground or the sky. They have free rein in that space and time to be the author of the narrative themselves. Thoughts about Blackness and architecture and power are swirling through my head a lot. I think about my great grandfather, who moved north ten years before the Great Migration and built his own house. I think about how that kind of skill really didn't get passed down through the generations. My dad learned from his friends how to build when he was younger and I learned from him. Carpentry is an oral history. So I think about these oral traditions. I learn something and it transforms every time I build things because I build with different teams and they have their own oral histories. Names for things change, concepts and efficiency changes, access to materials change. It's interesting thinking about how I am in all of these different spaces: as a woman, as a biracial Black woman, and how am I claiming my space through the process.
Is the idea of home something you think much about with these works? The size and structure of these roofs call to mind single-family homes. Is that something you're thinking about?
Absolutely. The roof literally was inspired by the home I grew up in and also the house that my great-grandfather built. The Oracles are the size of a house. I like to have people bring their frames of reference. I'm thinking about housing and the stability of having a home in today's economy and society. It's obviously referring to a home just in the form, but it's also an attic that is disjointed from the actual home. The attic is where you keep your things that you want to keep secret, the things that you want to throw away but not really yet. It's the things that horror movies are made of. Attics are where slaves were hidden by Quakers and people on the Underground Railroad. It's a threshold space, where people are about to have power in their lives or hold memories where they used to have power in their lives. I think about the idea of these small details with this big monument, all centering on home. Whether we're thinking about thresholds or home or oral histories or building or access and equity, they're all existing side by side. ■
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The U.S. Department of Labor ("DOL") has issued a final rule, which takes effect on January 15th, clarifying what types of payment and employee benefits or "perks" must be included or may be omitted when calculating an employee's regular pay rate for the purpose of paying overtime.
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the flexible part of a whip; the section of cord or the like forming the extremity of a whip.
a swift stroke or blow, with a whip or the like, given as a punishment: He received 20 lashes.
something that goads or pains in a manner compared to that of a whip: the lash of his sharp tongue.
a swift dashing or sweeping movement, as of an animal's tail; switch.
a violent beating or impact, as of waves or rain, against something.
Also calleda cord or a series of cords for lifting the warp in weaving a figured fabric.
to strike or beat, as with a whip or something similarly slender and flexible.
to beat violently or sharply against: The rain lashed the trees.
to drive by or as if by strokes of a whip: He lashed them on to greater effort.
to attack, scold, or punish severely with words: She lashed the students with harsh criticism.
to dash, fling, or switch suddenly and swiftly: The crocodile lashed its tail.
to strike vigorously at someone or something, as with a weapon or whip (often fol. by out): He lashed wildly at his attackers.
to attack or reprove someone with harsh words (often fol. by out): to lash out at injustice.
to move suddenly and swiftly; rush, dash, or flash: The coiled snake lashed suddenly.
to spend money lavishly or foolishly (usually fol. by out).
to bind or fasten with a rope, cord, or the like.
an ocean-going vessel equipped with special cranes and holds for lifting and stowing cargo-carrying barges that can be sailed up inland waterways or into port facilities from offshore.