Allan Kaprow 18 Happenings in six parts [re-doing]Saturday November 10th, 2007 at 4pmBrooklyn New York, Deitch StudiosPerforma 2007Jessica Higgins
photos: Geoffrey Hendricks
Red, Green, Yellow re-do PoemHannah mentioned afterwards that Allan had finally given permission to redo these happenings before passing away. Geoff Hendricks recalled the 1958 original.
The apple panel appears as shrine, precision and messiness recalling Allan’s reproduced structure of Mondrian, master of Shapiro graduate studies…
Innovation and rebellion…. StructuralObtuse voices of the 60’s
It’s never the same as I keep referring to my Red, Green, Yellow ticket hand written with directions, seeing through to the other rooms as others refer to their own tickets, familiar and unfamiliar faces. We have our directions.
Grid like motions, music and poetry a site loosely and concisely containing translucent squares, and windows on the ceiling
Walking squares, 3 performers read
Through translucent plastic 2 red scrolls, 2 green scrolls . . . writing ‘the any for hop’ ‘just a this’
Painting on translucent canvas both sides simultaneously . . . room six Cartesian slide projections
Geoff’s voice transports us as Allan is reflected back to me
Young Native Americans
On Contemporary Artmaking and Organization
correspondent: artist organizer Nayana
There is a generation of native Americans who feel there is something missing. Something they can’t quite figure out. Something just feels off, lacking. These young native Americans are part of the second generation of native Americans who are so far separated from a cultural identity that it feels as though something was physically taken from them. But these people never actually had anything taken from them, they grew up in the same America as any other citizen and experienced much the same life style. Still something always feels a bit off for them. Unintentionally following in the footsteps of their ancestors these people are finding ways to express this feeling through art in many different media.
I found myself part of that generation with the same feelings of something missing, something just a bit off. My family is of the Ojibwe / Potwatami band known as the Wikwemikong first nation located in southern Ontario. My generation was the second in my family to be completely removed from the reservation life style, and from all knowledge and inkling of identity. I expressed these feelings through art creating a body of work which spoke directly about that subject, the feeling of being out of place everywhere.
Through the internet I met others like myself each with their own stories of how their family lost all knowledge or recognition of their ancestry. The two artists who I spoke most with were Bunky Echo-Hawk ( http://www.bunkyechohawk.com ) of Colorado a member of the Pawnee/Yakama Nation. And Dan Loudfoot ( http://www.danloudfoot.com ) of Brooklyn NY a member of the Mashantucket Pequot Nation. “Growing up in a non-Indian world, I was constantly faced with the responsibility of defining my identity as a Pawnee/Yakama Indian. We were not always away from home. We often traveled home for ceremonies and family reunions. I was always fascinated by the duality of the two worlds, and the juxtaposition of culture and identity. This is where my art has originated from: The pursuit of a true identity, and the need to share this identity with the world.” – Bunky Echo-Hawk
“Having yet to be recognized by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe Loudfoot’s work is fueled by the exclusion he has experienced from his own people. This isolation is portrayed through the paintings by his reflection on Native Americans. Today he is concerned with examining the impact of colonization and what labels and imagery contemporary society associates with Native Americans. Loudfoot warps early Native American iconography and contrasts it beside mascots and ads. Repetition is a key element in the work relating to commercialism and the in your face billboards exploring the irony of the images being used.”– Dan Loudfoot
After spending a while corresponding we decided it would be easier to start a group for discussions. Progressive Native Art is what came out of it. We soon turned our conversations about our experiences in this generation to those about art and specifically the art we had independently created on the same subject. We soon came up with the idea of a group show on the subject. This decision came after discussing our mutual difficulty in finding a space to show that work. It did not fit with the works of any other artists and many galleries were hesitant to give solo exhibitions to a theme such as ours.
We began by planning, all the small details of what we wanted, to have the show travel from location to location. The idea of which would be that each of us would be responsible for setting up a show in our area. To start this all off we wanted to have a show in NYC. Dan was in the process of moving there for school and I have a close enough proximity that I could help him with it. Bunky would come out for the event but could not make it for the setting up etc. The concept behind having it in the city would be to present the ideas in the show to an audience who would perhaps not be accustomed to art related to native American life.
The majority of venues showcasing work by native artists is in the southwest and because of this we felt the best location for this show would be the opposite of the norm. Our plan was to have the show in 2007 and then use any momentum we had from that to have the show move to two other locations possibly more depending on how many other artists we chose to involve in the project. We would spend the year in the mean time finding the venue, choosing a few more artists and promoting the event as much as possible. We wanted to get as much press for it as we could in order to aid our ability to have the exhibition travel.
During this time Bunky had back to back shows booked and was fortunate to be featured in Native People Magazine. Dan graduated from school in Boston and moved to NYC for more education. I found myself with a busy show schedule with my other bodies of work and planning the event became less and less convenient. We went from communicating daily with an urgent excited feeling of anticipation to communicating weekly, and then monthly. Each of us with the best of intentions.
We were able to gain the attention of a woman in the city who had a large venue which she often held private art exhibitions in. She was interested in our event and all we needed to do was sit down with her and decide on a date. Internet communication is not always the best means of getting things accomplished and we soon lost our momentum. We would communicate every couple of months with an email, a quick “how’s it going” and “we should get this back up again” but life has a way of running away with itself if you let it. Soon it was 2007 and we hadn’t done the promotion we had intended. We met via our internet group at that time and decided we would get back into it once our schedules had slowed down again which would not be until after the following new year.
Just a couple weeks ago I received a message “how have you been? Hope you are well, we should do that project we were talking about” In the mean time we had our own exhibitions of the work on the subject, our previous inability to find venues had become an over abundance but there was never enough time. Now we are left with this idea, bodies of work and the same feeling we always had, only now it was different. It was a feeling of something missing, but there seemed to be a purpose to it. We felt connected by our dys-connection and busy in our fully assimilated American lives.
We have spoken recently and would still like to do this exhibition, but now it is less about getting our own voices heard and more about getting the work and the idea out there. If this is in fact an entire generation of native Americans removed from their cultural identity then there must be others, more native Americans who are expressing this experience through art, and what an exhibition that could be.
Now we are communicating as much as we can and considering taking on more members and finding the right venue with the right audience. This exhibition would be as much about the audience who sees it as about the artists who created the work.
In addition to this project I have been a founding member of NAM, “new art movement” which was based on the same structure of this event, artists coming together and collaborating for a group traveling show. This was non-culturally specific however under the idea of having artists who could not find a venue coming together to make their own way. NAM is still in communication and plans to have a show in 2008 at a location yet to be announced.
Along with two projects under the same concept other artist organized projects I have been involved with are USED records, an independent record company, Skeleton Crew Theater, an independent theatrical production with hand built sets and animatronic characters and most recently as director and curator to d.Art Gallery, an artist run gallery not to be confused with an artist co-op. All of these have distracted me from this project. Dan and Bunky have just as many things going on for both of them. Organizing anything over the internet is difficult, but we plan to keep pursuing it until we are able to hold the event we originally envisioned.
Natalie Moore at artMovingProjects
166 North 12th Street Brooklyn NY 11211
(Link) http://www.artMovingProjects.com
correspondent: NY artist, Erika Knerr
Mirage
Natalie Moore’s second one person show at ArtMovingProjects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, titled “Mirage” is an graceful installation that rests between sculpture, painting and poetry. Layed out with a small map for viewers, of 12 individual pieces created from stainless steel wire mesh, with somewhat unrelated titles like Pompeii, Apricot, Lochness and Fire, the first impression is that the objects function together as a topography seemlessly inter-related. There is a casuallness to the way the forms are bent and molded into shape almost like a crumbled and discarded piece of paper, yet the thoughtful and alluring color is so over the edge elegant it creates an exquisite paradox.
Ms. Moore speaks of working with the idea of perception. The notion that we percieve things differently at different times. If we look at something one way it seems fixed, then suddenly we approach it from another angle and it becomes very different. Countless examples of this scenario occur in everyday life from thought patterns to political rhetoric, to just what we are seeing in and through the objects in this miraged perspective set up by Natalie Moore. Solid and opaque on one side, transparent and shear on the other, as you move around the room, moiré patterns, creating another level of drawing on the landscape are fleeting. You catch a glimpse of it and then it’s gone. She attempts to create an image that goes in and out of visibility, like a mirage in the desert. The physical objects are smaller than human size and a curiously familiar scale and proportion that refer to large heavy rocks, yet are clearly light weight and fragile in reality, continuing the play on what is real and true and what is imagined, fantasy and false. Moore invited writer Melanie Neilson Junceau to write the statement for the exhibition that unconventionally functions as press release and only text accompanying the show. The poetic prose piece is titled, ” Mirage: Morning Before the Fact,” and is a dreamy revelation of associations to “Mirage.”
Ms. Moore’s first show at artMovingProjects in 1998 was the inaugural exhibition for this artist-run space by Aron Namenwirth. Moore at that time had come out of running another artist initiated space called “Sauce” from 1992-95, with a small group of other artists, also in Williamsburg. It was one of the four original artist-run spaces featured in the show “OTHER ROOMS” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1995. Another was the senior artist organized venue Four Wall’s which before moving to Mike Balou’s garage space in Brooklyn in 1991, was founded by Adam Simon in Hoboken in 1984. The other two are the now long running Williamsburg haunts Perogi 2000 and the non-profit Momenta Art which emerged consecutively in 1994 and 1995. Like Momenta, artMovingProjects is going non-profit.
“Mirage” is a new direction for Natalie Moore’s work which came as a surprise to some who know her as a digital media aficionado and professor. With the galleries often emphasis on new media art, this hands-on formal/informal approach is unexpected, but also a natural evolution from the physically conceptual installations of electrical, cable and/or computer wire that was embedded directly into the plaster walls of the spaces she was working as site specific installations. This work presented the idea of a room or house having a life of it’s own; it’s insides breaking out of the walls. The wires being the veins and hair of the space, pushing out of the walls and making the room itself come alive. Here she worked with combining mediums as well, working between drawing, sculpture and architecture. I look forward to where she goes from here and the role that intermedia might play.
The show is up through sunday, November 18th, 2007. – Erika Knerr
Natalie Moore at artMovingProjects
