Full text of this article available here: “PLAYBOR” ON THE INTERNET

Houston stands larger than the Texas plains in the national imagination with its big oil, big energy, big medicine, NASA, cutting-edge technology, and a penchant for plastic surgery. But Houston—the third largest, fastest-growing city in the United States—offers something more: a vibrant and diverse arts community. Although many might think it unimaginable to launch a new film festival during a crushing recession, it seems perfectly logical in economically robust Houston. Elegantly curated by Richard Herskowitz, former director of the Virginia Film Festival, the Houston Cinema Arts Festival unspooled more than forty films and events, cross-fertilizing the arts and cinema.

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Despite these financially strained times, British cinemas are reporting record attendance and box office revenue. When the London Film Festival wrapped for 2009, organizers claimed that attendance this year was higher than last year—124,000 compared to 115,000. Falling incomes ruled out foreign holidays and expensive entertainment for some, leaving many grateful for the simple pleasures of film. While Woody Allen’s subject, a depressed housewife, in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) seeks an escape from the brutalities of life in cinematic fantasies, today’s beleaguered worker finds similar escape from economic hardship through film. Yet, this year’s festival films suggest that cinema is not merely fantastical entertainment. Even when it seems so, like in Wes Anderson’s playful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), the film’s stop-motion animation signals a welcome change from the ubiquity of CGI in contemporary film and celebrates film’s technological history.

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Where else but at MIX could one see so much heady formal innovation, sexual themes, and gender play, and meet bona fide pornographers, social activists, and seasoned filmmakers? MIX, the love child of writer Sarah Schulman and experimental filmmaker Jim Hubbard, has become an important event on New York’s annual arts calendar with its focus on installation and performance. In its twenty-second year, the festival continues to serve as a bridge between queer communities and art scenes, as evident in its most recent edition.

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The biannual exploration of contemporary photography known as Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, while slightly scaled down for this eleventh edition, remains an example of strong curatorial focus and international exhibition possibilities. Curator Gaëlle Morel organized twenty-four individual exhibitions and “public space interventions” of artwork from thirteen countries including Canada, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and the United States. This year’s theme was “The Spaces of the Image,” and work explored the issues of scenography, mechanisms and staging in contemporary photography, and more.

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For over a dozen years, Caroline Koebel has explored the poetics and politics of the body in pain and pleasure, scattering lines of flight from coast to coast in American experimental film culture. Programmer and critic, filmmaker and organizer, book publisher and digital director, Koebel’s energy springs from an unwavering commitment to women in avant-garde film history and she extends her gaze into contemporary digital manifestations of creative social critique. The diversity of her pursuits frustrate any attempt at containment—bursting genres, formats, and job descriptions. Koebel has videotaped more than three-hundred participants conceiving fantasy offspring in “I Want to Have your Baby” (2003–05) and has co-authored Schablone Berlin (2005), an illustrated book about stencil and graffiti art on the streets of Berlin. She has also organized a weekly forum on torture, written catalog essays on the films of Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer and drawn from the vaults at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Canyon Cinema to program experimental 16mm shorts by women, while managing to pursue her own distinctive style of film and video. Although “I Want to Have Your Baby,” about which she wrote a statement for the Millennium Film Journal (Issue 51, Spring/Summer 2009), harnesses the power of a collective imaginary both political and erotic, her essay on Jasmila Zbanic’s film Grbavica: Land of My Dreams (2005) in the online journal Jump Cut (Issue 51, Spring 2009), expresses a deep and unwavering identification with the lived experiences of women survivors of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Koebel’s films and videos constitute a particular expression of her acute awareness of the extent to which an individual aesthetic depends upon social circumstance. This conversation took place via email in April and May of 2009.

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[Ed. note: This is the second part of a two-part essay.]

Since the 1990s, neo-avant-garde representations have strongly re-emerged in the political arena. In the 1920s, artistic groups became politicized and supported the revolutions of their times via aesthetic means. Conversely, the 1990s political movements emphatically adopted aesthetic tactics, borrowing from the “classical avant-garde” to make them a central distinguishing feature. This not only applies to democratization movements in eastern Europe such as the anti-Miloševic movement in Serbia, which consciously inscribed itself in such an avant-garde tradition, but also to the contemporary queer movement and branches of the alter-globalization movements, such as the culture jam movement or the Italian Tute Bianche.32 The 1960s was in this respect a transformative period in which artistic and political movements were somehow still distinct, even as art movements such as Expanded Cinema, New Objectivity, actionism, and body art were already closely intertwined with political protest. These movements can thus be seen as indicators for the increased adoption of aesthetic styles, as well as aesthetic provocation and the spectacular as an effective means for political mobilization and artistic manifestations of protest.

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Full text of this article available here: EXILE AND BECOMING

The city of Tehran has been a hotbed of political unrest in the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection last June. As the world watched, Iranians took to the streets in peaceful protest and their government turned on them, sometimes brutally. For the eight Tehrani artists and one Iranian American in “One Day: A Collective Narrative of Tehran,” the challenge was to create an exhibition that could address fresh psychological wounds without letting politics dominate.

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Art is so important, because it creates a communicative bridge.1

In my urban education class at the University of Pennsylvania, my students and I have been reading about the merits and challenges of collaborative learning. Once a week, we work with Parkway Northwest High School seniors who are researching and writing a year-long thesis project. Our goal is to forge a true collaborative partnership. We often question the feasibility of such a project, given the socio-economic, educational, and cultural disparity between urban high school and college students. These ideas were foremost in my mind while viewing the Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) retrospective exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia.

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How public intervention functions as art and how art functions as public intervention has been a primary concern of Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. In the 1980s he became known for his large-scale outdoor works in which composited images were projected onto public buildings. The projections fused with the architecture to create stark juxtapositions. These works questioned authority and often included images challenging power and war. At the same time, he was creating works that illuminated buildings in popular urban areas. For example, Wodiczko entered into discussions with the homeless population of cities he visited or lived in, including New York. These discussions led to his “Vehicles for the Homeless” (1988), a group of functional sculptures that reimagine the shopping cart. Wodiczko’s “Vehicles” aimed to provide easy mobility and more storage, as well as security and protection to aid the homeless in the collection and transportation of their possessions. Interaction with the public, at times including the homeless or recent immigrants, brings a human dimension to Wodiczko’s technological works.

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One of the great pleasures of being a photographer is going places and meeting people. Having a camera is a license to peer beneath and make pictures that—through nuance, juxtaposition, lighting, and gesture—reveal ideas and issues unnoticed by the casual observer. When the subjects are marginal or ostracized, this action can become political; if they are mainstream, the photographer must delve deeper into issues that often go unquestioned. The subjects of photographer Susan Anderson’s “High Glitz,” for instance, are child beauty pageant contestants, illustrating the convergence of two worlds. The child pageant industry is extreme, aimed at grooming young girls to be trophy wives at best and sex workers at worst. On the other hand, the participants are often mainstream Americans, predominantly white southerners who espouse outdated values of beauty and female gender roles in an extremely competitive arena.

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The digital revolution in photography has coincided with a resurgence of interest in nineteenth-century photographic processes. As the technology moves forward and looks back, there is no longer a clear standard for how a photographic print should look. Even silver gelatin—the standard for black-and-white printing for most of the twentieth century—will soon be an “alternative” process. In a postmodern twist befitting an era of technological revolutions, art photographers now can choose which moment in the history of their medium they will inhabit. Of course, there are commercial factors to consider. Just ten years ago, curators were unsure whether inkjet prints, the closest we have come to a new standard, belonged in museums. Now these are ubiquitous but seldom command the prices of handmade prints, even as pigment inks boast permanence standards rivaling traditional darkroom processes. The gallery world rewards rarity, and art photographers have gone further and further to secure it.

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In an odd, almost awkwardly choreographed way, the camera and railroad shared a dance across time. Not the identical steps of a perfect partnership, but something more modern and uninhibited. As the railroad’s infrastructure grew in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, more and more trains trekked their way across the country, spewing jets of blackened smoke like mobile replicas of the factory chimneys back East. Tracks crisscrossed the country like fine ribbon-like roads. Two years after the Civil War, Alexander Gardner was hired by the Union Pacific Railroad to document the march westward. In hindsight, the so-called “Golden Spike” that linked the transcontinental railroad was the first concentrated industrial blow from which the earth has never fully recovered. The camera, as a benign accomplice, traveled along as the car and airplane supplanted the railroad. Yet, this phenomenon is not about how we traveled, but instead, where we ended up, the places we settled into, how we changed them, and how they changed us.

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