The Skirball center was filled with people attempting to get their badges and a good seat. Pablo Helguera started us off with a song and a few games, then Marth Rosler took the floor.
Marth Rosler is a political female artist who has been working since the late 60's and is still working today. She has a show going up at Moma in a few weeks which she spoke briefly about: Garage Sale MOMA
Her name is the one that pops up on every other piece about political artwork. Many people know her for her work Semiotics in the Kitchen (here is the video.) I was first introduced to her work through her collages.
... eh to quote from creative time:
"Although Martha Rosler suggests that “all artists want to change the world,” her oeuvre is distinguished for its exceptional commitment to this elusive goal, particularly with regard to feminism. As a native of Brooklyn, New York, much of Rosler’s work—which includes video, installation, photo-collage and performance—engages urban space. Rosler is perhaps most well known for her works exploring feminist issues."
One thing that she said that I've been thinking about is "what is the social value of art and its social investigations."
Each of the presenters had some very interesting things to say, and seem to be doing some pretty amazing things. Of course, Suzanne Lacy was wonderful and inspiring -- the pairing of Suzanne and Jodie Evans worked really well. They spoke about violence women and individually the work Suzanne has done and Jodie has done through Code Pink.
Tom Finklepearl spoke from the Queens Museum and gave a similar lecture to the one he gave at Temple-- just a lot shorter. There was mention of Fluxus- Yoko Ono, Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe, Santiago Sierra, and Tania Bruguera. He then quoted Tania saying that it is time to return Duchamps urinal to the bathroom. This followed by a talk about the usefulness of art and its function in society.
For those of you who don't know about Tania's piece that is going on right now, through the Queens Museum, :"Immigrant Movement International (IM International) is a five-year project initiated by artist Tania Bruguera. Its mission is to help define the immigrant as a unique, new global citizen in a post-national world and to test the concept of arte útil or “useful art”, in which artists actively implement the merger of art into society’s urgent social, political and scientific issues.
After Tom we had Fernando García-Dory who was the prize winner for The Leonore Annenberg Prize For Art and Social Change and Slavoj Žižek, the other key note speaker.
I am sure there are much better summaries of the experience on numerous blogs. From a personal point of view, I want to say that it was a great experience to be in one place with all of these amazing influential artists and thinkers. I got to speak with a few of them during the lunch that conflict kitchen put together. The lunch itself was great, half of us were South Korea and the other half North Korea. The food menu was designed so that we each got different dishes for our country and then could share them "across the border." I sat across from the woman from the presenter for Taring Padi.
We shared food and spoke about her activist artwork and then she showed me this incredible book that Taring Padi put together that encompass many of their prints and pieces.
The second day was full of discussions with specific artists and creative time facilitators. The first session I went to was Suzanne Lacy's and Jodie Evan's "Elephant in the room." We spoke about the importance of context and understanding yourself and why you are going into a community. In both this session and my next one we spoke about honesty being extremely important. The second session was led by Fernando Garcia-Dory and it was very intimate, about ten people were there. I'm glancing at my notes from the session and I have the term "horizontal social relationships"-- what does this mean? I also have scribblings about the relationship between urban environments and rural environments. The different roles an artist can play in those two places.
The last session I went to was about the "Art User" and paticipatory works, led by Pablo Helguera. He posed three questions to us before we broke into groups:
What does it mean to have the producer disappear?
Can we create a way of art making that allows every to have a stake in it?
Is everyone an artist/ art user?
My group ended up discussing a totally different question but we had some interesting dialogue about the role of art in society, and how different cultures view the art producer in a different light than we do.
The summit ended with that last conversation and then a few friends and I went to grab food on the lower east side. We continued to babble about our role as artists and how we engage community, who those communities are, how we validate our work, how we research, how we make the day-to- day happen, whether we were being honest, how much we are going to let aesthetic dictate our work...
I'll just say, that it was kind of amazing to be in a place with so many critical thinkers who want to reach out into the world and change peoples lives.
http://creativetime.org/summit/
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