IN RESPONSE
The Arcades
The Arcades
Sunday, May 7, 2017
6:30 pm EST
6:30 pm EST
Columbia University Visual Arts MFA candidates and recent alumni presented new video, performance, and installation-based artworks in response to the exhibition The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin. The exhibition explored the ongoing relevance of Benjamin’s magnum opus The Arcades Project, a sprawling meditation on modern life and 19th-century Paris, through works of contemporary art representing the subjects of each of the book's thirty-six chapters.
Participating Artists:
Ivan Forde
Davey Hawkins
Cary Hulbert
Daria Irincheeva
Emily Kloppenburg
Leah Moskowitz
Ana Rivera
Rocio Olivares
Emily Shaffer
Jacqueline Silberbush
Sara Stern
Participating Artists:
Ivan Forde
Davey Hawkins
Cary Hulbert
Daria Irincheeva
Emily Kloppenburg
Leah Moskowitz
Ana Rivera
Rocio Olivares
Emily Shaffer
Jacqueline Silberbush
Sara Stern
Ivan Forde
1000 Elements
Performance
A live technopoetic video and sound performance staged as an open rehearsal between visual artist Ivan Forde and musician Sydney Reynolds. Reynolds, known professionally as Sydney^, is a New York-based record producer, singer-songwriter, and rapper.
Performance
A live technopoetic video and sound performance staged as an open rehearsal between visual artist Ivan Forde and musician Sydney Reynolds. Reynolds, known professionally as Sydney^, is a New York-based record producer, singer-songwriter, and rapper.
Davey Hawkins
Untitled
Installation
“And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
"O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"
Installation
“And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
"O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"
—From “The Swan” by Charles Baudelaire
Cary Hulbert
Futurities
Installation
An audio compilation of five personal fortunes, punctuated with three-minute intervals of silence. Each fortune initially sounds surprisingly specific, but then goes on to prophesize a complete generic techno-dystopian future.
Installation
An audio compilation of five personal fortunes, punctuated with three-minute intervals of silence. Each fortune initially sounds surprisingly specific, but then goes on to prophesize a complete generic techno-dystopian future.
Daria Irincheeva
Nos estan metiendo el pico en el ojo
Video
By including objects that reflect different eras and geographies, this video essay contrasts contemporary manifestations of neoliberal economic theory and art with archaeological artifacts from the Pre-Colombian Americas. The relationship between contemporary arcades, or shopping malls, and vitrines used for the presentation of various histories in conventional museology serves as the landscape upon which this visual investigation occurs.
Video
By including objects that reflect different eras and geographies, this video essay contrasts contemporary manifestations of neoliberal economic theory and art with archaeological artifacts from the Pre-Colombian Americas. The relationship between contemporary arcades, or shopping malls, and vitrines used for the presentation of various histories in conventional museology serves as the landscape upon which this visual investigation occurs.
Emily Kloppenburg
For Placement Only
Video
A montage of city imagery alternate between views of new architecture in Long Island City, Queens, and the projective; real estate renderings posted outside of these sites. The concrete certainty of real life blurs with the romanticized fiction of these fabricated city scenes. Confounding binaries of public and private, violence and safety, visibility and access, For Placement Only addresses the urgent rhythms of our shared municipality.
Video
A montage of city imagery alternate between views of new architecture in Long Island City, Queens, and the projective; real estate renderings posted outside of these sites. The concrete certainty of real life blurs with the romanticized fiction of these fabricated city scenes. Confounding binaries of public and private, violence and safety, visibility and access, For Placement Only addresses the urgent rhythms of our shared municipality.
Leah Moskowitz
“Convolutes not by”
Installation
A series of subtractive placard to be matched by Jewish Museum visitors with corresponding convolutes.
Installation
A series of subtractive placard to be matched by Jewish Museum visitors with corresponding convolutes.
Rocío Olivares
The Origin of Limits
Video
This audio-visual piece both insists upon and questions the notion of limits, as a precedent for the convoluted global relations in which we are immersed. Constructed by a narrative that incorporates sub-texts and different sources of information, this work includes texts in Spanish and English that reiterate the idea of limits and language hierarchies while acknowledging the colonial nature of both languages.
Video
This audio-visual piece both insists upon and questions the notion of limits, as a precedent for the convoluted global relations in which we are immersed. Constructed by a narrative that incorporates sub-texts and different sources of information, this work includes texts in Spanish and English that reiterate the idea of limits and language hierarchies while acknowledging the colonial nature of both languages.
Ana Rivera
Dog or Wolf: The dog, the knife, and the skull
Performance
Improvised musical performance not really about knowing how to play the guitar, but rather about how fragments and loops of sound collide and overlap in an additive process where the accumulation of layers eventually reaches a saturation point in the language.
Accompanying Publication
Publication Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Jerome in a Cave contemplates a floating Untitled by Donald Judd in a series of drawings formed from art historical references, introspective mumblings, and casual doodles. Associations and narratives are created as afterthoughts from the constellation of images.
Performance
Improvised musical performance not really about knowing how to play the guitar, but rather about how fragments and loops of sound collide and overlap in an additive process where the accumulation of layers eventually reaches a saturation point in the language.
Accompanying Publication
Publication Albrecht Dürer’s Saint Jerome in a Cave contemplates a floating Untitled by Donald Judd in a series of drawings formed from art historical references, introspective mumblings, and casual doodles. Associations and narratives are created as afterthoughts from the constellation of images.
Emily Ludwig Shaffer
Binder, Issue No. 2, May 2017
Installation
Binder is an ongoing project, each issue of which pairs an artist-made desk and chair with a single edition compilation of artist texts and writings. The only parameters for the texts are the length size, and requirement that they be original or adapted.
Acrylic, steel, and resin desk and chair by Kristin Walsh; Writing and texts by various artists
Installation
Binder is an ongoing project, each issue of which pairs an artist-made desk and chair with a single edition compilation of artist texts and writings. The only parameters for the texts are the length size, and requirement that they be original or adapted.
Acrylic, steel, and resin desk and chair by Kristin Walsh; Writing and texts by various artists
Jacqueline Silberbush
The Daily Convolutes
Installation
A nod to Walter Benjamin’s “collage techniques in literature,” this newspaper uses only images to piece together images only to piece together and offer a form of cultural criticism with which to approach the world around us. It looks in particular at the distinctive street life emerging from the complex and twisting politics of the last few years.
Installation
A nod to Walter Benjamin’s “collage techniques in literature,” this newspaper uses only images to piece together images only to piece together and offer a form of cultural criticism with which to approach the world around us. It looks in particular at the distinctive street life emerging from the complex and twisting politics of the last few years.
Sara Stern
Satan plays his favorite trick
Video
The atrium of Trump Tower New York is a privately owned public space, and is technically an arcade. The marble used throughout the interior is extremely similar to the marble Hitler used in his New Reich Chancellery in Berlin (Neue Reichskanzlei) and his Haus der Deutschen Kunst (now the Haus der Kunst) in Munich.
Video
The atrium of Trump Tower New York is a privately owned public space, and is technically an arcade. The marble used throughout the interior is extremely similar to the marble Hitler used in his New Reich Chancellery in Berlin (Neue Reichskanzlei) and his Haus der Deutschen Kunst (now the Haus der Kunst) in Munich.
Installation view of the exhibition The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, March 17 - August 6, 2017. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo: Will Ragozzino/SocialShutterbug.com; Event photography by Sara Wass.