Movie : Style Wars

Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets – Yi Fu Tuan

Graffiti and Street Art – Anna Waclawek

Camille Henrot : Cities of Ys

© Camille Henrot, Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris

Camille Henrot: Cities of Ys is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art. Major support for the exhibition is provided by the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art and Consulate General of France in New Orleans. Additional support for the exhibition is provided by Charles L. Whited, Jr., The Degas House and Abet Laminati.

Henrot often uses a constellation of images from both academic and popular sources to connect origin myths with contemporary culture. In her installation at The New Orleans Museum of Art she will draw a parallel between the legendary, submerged city of Ys in Brittany, France (where her family is from), and the disappearing wetlands occupied by the Houma Indians, a tribe located in Louisiana that historically speaks Houma French, a combination of seventeenth-century French and ancestral Houma, a West Muskogean language.

For her exhibition, Cities of Ys, Henrot will create a combination of video and sculptural works that explore the fluidity of legends and cultures. Henrot was attracted to the Houma Indians both for their connection to her native language and for the tribe’s resistance to the homogenization and institutionalization of their culture. Today, the Houma tribe is seeking to become a federally recognized tribe by the United States government, along with many other Native American tribes. However, part of their struggle is to prove their Native American status, which is complicated by the fact the land where the Houma people reside is scattered by waterways (complicating the demarcation of “native lands”). Additionally, through the past centuries they were a peaceful tribe and did not go to war with the United States army or its colonists. As a result, the tribe does not have any past treaties with the U.S. government. Henrot’s project is in part a critique of the process of how culture is evaluated, particularly by members outside of a community.

Seeking to tie together two cultures, the Houma, and her own, Henrot recalls a legend told by her grandmother, a storyteller from Brittany, France. Brittany was an isolated coastal region of France that has maintained their culture through oral histories and storytelling. According to this legend, titled “City of Ys,” Ys was a luxurious coastal city protected by a seawall. In some iterations of the story, Princess Dahut of Ys, convinced by a foreign knight, stole the key to the floodgate from her father, King Gradlon. As a result of her transgression, the floodwalls collapsed and Ys was submerged underwater. However, the legend adds that the city continues to exist under the waves.

While the history of the Houma tribe and the Brittany legend of the City of Ys have vastly different origins, they both reflect how the fluidity of oral cultures allows them to survive, thus challenging our understanding of culture as a static and immutable phenomenon. Nicholas Faraclas, a linguistics scholar on the Houma, wrote that like other ethno-linguistic groups, the Houma tribe are a community in which “contact between groups with different languages and cultures is the norm, rather than the exception, and in many cases integrated formally into traditional marriage, trading, and ceremonial patterns.”

Through Cities of Ys, Henrot critically examines how our digital and globalized era challenges traditional notions of identity. It is her hope that by approaching cultures through their partial connections rather than their differences, we may increase our sense of global empathy. Henrot’s prints, sculptures, and videos tie together flooding myths, the aqueous and shifting coastlines of Louisiana, the webs of pipelines in Terrebonne Parish, and the continuing use of French words in the English language.

Resource : http://www.camillehenrot.fr/en/work/75/cities-of-ys

Vocab of the day : Culture Shock

Photo Credits : http://blockbusteranthropology.blogspot.com/2012/12/spaghetti-syrup-and-escalators.html

Cul·ture shock

noun

     the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes.

 

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Nada talked about the four stages of culture shock in the CEP Fall 2014 Orientation!

  1st stage : Honeymoon (positive/ curiosity…)

  2nd stage : Shocking (negative/ homesick…)

  3rd stage : Acceptance

  4th stage : Reversed Culture Shock (When you go back to your hometown!)

 

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Related vocabularies

  striking

Lorna Simpson’s Artist Statement

Guarded Condition, 1989. Photo Credits : Lorna Simpson Studio

Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. When Simpson emerged from the graduate program at San Diego in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. Feeling a strong need to re-examine and re-define photographic practice for contemporary relevance, Simpson was producing work that engaged the conceptual vocabulary of the time by creating exquisitely crafted documents that are as clean and spare as the closed, cyclic systems of meaning they produce. Her initial body of work alone helped to incite a significant shift in the view of the photographic art’s transience and malleability.

Lorna Simpson first became well-known in the mid-1980s for her large-scale photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory. With the African-American woman as a visual point of departure, Simpson uses the figure to examine the ways in which gender and culture shape the interactions, relationships and experiences of our lives in contemporary multi-racial America. In the mid- 1990s, she began creating large multi-panel photographs printed on felt that depict the sites of public – yet unseen – sexual encounters. More recently, she has turned to moving images – in film and video works such as Call Waiting, Simpson presents individuals engaged in intimate and enigmatic yet elliptical conversations that elude easy interpretation but seem to address the mysteries of both identity and desire. Over the past five years, her work includes drawings based on the characters in a recent video work constructed from found film footage. As a collection, these portraits become studies on the construction of identity achieved through the subtle interplay of lines and accents of color. Most recently, she began a project involving an archive of photographs from the 1950s, which she has been adding to by creating her own replicas of these images, posing herself to mimic the originals.

 

Resource: Lorna Simpson Studio

Spencer Tunick’s Artist Statement

Spencer Tunick, Montréal 2. Photo Credits : Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Spencer Tunick stages scenes in which the battle of nature against culture is played out against various backdrops, from civic center to desert sandstorm, man and woman are returned to a preindustrial, pre-everything state of existence.  Tunick has traveled the globe to create these still and video images of multiple nude figures in public settings. Organizing groups from a handful of participants to tens of thousands, all volunteers, is often logistically daunting; the subsequent images transcend ordinary categories and meld sculpture and performance in a new genre.

Spencer Tunick’s body of work explores and expands the social, political and legal issues surrounding art in the public sphere. Since 1992, Tunick has been arrested five times while attempting to work outdoors in New York City. Soon after his fifth arrest in Times Square in 1999, determined to create his work on the streets of New York, the artist filed a Federal Civil Rights Law Suit against the city to protect himself and his participants from future arrests. In May 2000, the Second U.S. District Court sided with Tunick, recognizing that his work was protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. On June 3 of the same year, in response to the city’s final appeal made to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the court at large, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled in favor of Tunick by remanding the case, allowing the lower court decision to stand and the artist to freely organize his work on New York City streets. Four months later, Tunick applied for his first New York City permit after winning the case, and was denied.  

In order to make his work without the threat of arrest the artist took his work abroad. He has not undertaken a group installation on the streets of New York in over ten years. 

Tunick’s most notable works have been commissioned by Art Basel, Switzerland (1999), Institut Cultura, Barcelona (2003), XXV Biennial de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002), The Saatchi Gallery(2003), MOCA Cleveland (2004), Vienna Kunsthalle (2008), among others.

Jeff Koons: Amore

Jeff Koons, Amore, 1988. Porcelain; 32 × 20 × 20 in. (81.3 × 50.8 × 50.8 cm). Lehmann-Art Ltd. © Jeff Koons

 

Amore, 1988

Porcelain

This porcelain sculpture depicts a Cabbage Patch Kid dressed in a bear costume to which Koons has added a heart sticker, a pot of jam, and other decorative elements. Such dolls were popular in the 1980s among children and adult collectors but in Koons’s hands the soft and loveable plush toy becomes a cold and hard statue. “Everything here is a metaphor for the viewer’s guilt and shame,” he commented. “Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there’s one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is- absolute perfection. Banality was the embracement of that.”

 

Resource : Whitney Museum of American Art