Immigration and Domination, Landscape: For the Birds

How Soon is Now is currently showing at The Vancouver Art Gallery, featuring contemporary works of over thirty artists from British Columbia. Each piece is from local artists, but the ideas behind them are not limited to local issues. Many of these artists have displayed the effect of the globalized world within their local artworks.

Abbas Akhavan

Abbas Akhavan was born in Tehran Iran, but has been living in Canada for thirteen years, currently residing in Vancouver. His work entitled “Landscape: For the Birds” is an intriguing piece that explores the issues of immigration. There is nothing installed, instead the viewer is directed to the gallery window where they are instructed to listen to the starlings outside. As Vancouverites we may hear these starlings everyday but probably know very little about their history. Starlings are originally from Asia and Europe but sometime in the 19th century they were introduced to Canada and began to take over. Starting off with only ninety birds, their numbers are currently at 200 million. Starlings can easily adapt to urban life and nest anywhere. They are a particularly aggressive species of bird that are known for pushing other birds out of their nests. This fierce competitive nature usually results in them taking over from the once dominant local bird species.

By pointing to the viewer in the direction of these starlings, Akhavan is conjointly pointing out Canada’s own history of immigration. During the gold rush of 1890 people emigrated from Europe and Asia in vast numbers. These newcomers quickly built homes and drove out the native tribes. Comparable to starlings, these immigrants quickly took over and became the dominant ones.

Click here to hear 

European Starling sound

“Landscape: For the birds” has successfully taken the global issue of immigration (of people and of birds) into a very localized area of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It shows how even a work that involves listening outside a window in Vancouver can point to worldwide issues.

by Kathryn Schmidt

 

 

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Temporality and Fragility in Kristi Malakoff’s “Skull”

One of Kristi Malakoff’s current pieces at the Vancouver Art Gallery, entitled “Skull” brings together two opposing feelings, that of life and death, and through looking at celebratory ideas of death Malakoff is also bringing together the global with the local. The piece covers a large white wall in the gallery, and at closer look one is able to see the fine craftsmanship that Malakoff has put into this work. A labour intensive piece the work consists of over 12000 cut out paper flowers, mounted on the wall to form the design of a skull. Fifty different types of flowers are displayed, and have all been photographed by Malakoff, and then cut out one by one, and reassembled in the gallery space. The work speaks of death and beauty, both through the initial design; flowers into a skull, as well as the fact that the piece itself is so delicate, and ultimately will be destroyed once the exhibition is over. Life is fleeting, just as this project in fleeting, in the temporality of it, the bright colours and impressive detail will all be taken down, therefore the work must be celebrated while it is still here.

“Skull” by Kristi Malakoff

Also in terms of celebration this work brings up ideas around celebrations of death, such as The Day of the Dead, in Mexican culture. This is where Malakoff’s work leaves the local space of the Vancouver Art Gallery and becomes a global piece of work, that cross-culturally can be talked about, and understand in the same, yet different ways as well. Celebrations of death are something that happens across cultures, not just in Mexico, similar celebrations occur in Spain, and the Philippines. In this way this large skull allows viewers to think about death, and how it is celebrated in their own culture compared to other cultures. Malakoff uses a beautiful design to show off the beauty in life, and juxtaposes this with an image that is understood globally to be one of death or destruction, in this way she is speaking to a larger audience, and making her point more globally understood, instead of only understood for the space of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
A common theme of fragility and temporality occurs throughout Malakoff’s pieces, and she is able to use a theme such as this to provoke cross-cultural discussion around her work, as well as aesthetically, the fragility of her work can be appreciated for both its beauty as well as the hard work that evidently went into it. A large-scale piece such as this screams to be talked about, and that is exactly what “Skull” achieves, discussion around the beauty of the work as well as discussion around the larger themes the work represents.

Kristi Malakoff’s "Star" and "Target" (both on the floor)

 

Two other Kristi Malakoff pieces are currently being displayed at the Vancouver Art Gallery now, both her piece “Target” which is made of layers and layers of crate paper, as well as “Star” which has been constructed with actors tape in the shape of a star on the gallery floor, can also be seen in the “How Soon Is Now” exhibit, running until May 3rd, 2009.

By Heather Palmer

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Busting through Globalization: A Look at Adbusters One Flag competition

Adbusters, a not-for-profit organization, describes itself as “a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.” With the want to change a capitalist driven world, this British Columbian based company has worked since 1988 to change the way we think about consumerism, and the impacts we make on our world.

            In a time where we are “faced with some of the most daunting global challenges in human history, ” (Adbusters.org) Adbusters is running its “One Flag Competition,” to find a flag that is representative of all cultures, all communities, and ultimately of the world as a global community. From over 1000 entries, the competition has been narrowed down to 32 flags, to vote from. Out of these 32 flags a common theme of unity, and globalization arises. Looking at just one of these flags, one can see how a piece of art can represent a host of ideas, and in turn make a stand for a world in which we are able to work together.

Flag Of Pop World by Andy Shawber

            Flag of the Pop World, a piece by Andy Shawber of Seattle, Washington, is representative of how “our national identities are increasingly becoming abstract,” because of the increase of globalization. We continue to live together in this world, the colours we create, being side by side in his flag.  This piece uses a range of colours across the spectrum, which “depicts the blend of national colors as kitschy and banal” (Shawber). By using all those colours that are seen in flags around the world and mashing them all together, to create something new, Shawber is able to disassociate these colours with what they originally have represented and instead create a new flag that shows the break down of each individual country to form a new global community.

            The idea of finding one flag that is able to represent the world coming together to survive, as a single nation seems to be an unattainable ideal. Yet when one takes a look at the rate of globalization, and the already increasing coming together, in this world, a flag to represent, and support the idea of working together as one, is changing. A flag such as the ones represented in this competition, shows an awareness of what is going on around us, and shows that we are not only living as individuals, but are a part of something bigger around us, something that is subject to change and always subject to improvement. A contest such as this brings awareness to a larger group of people, using art to create change and consciousness of what is going on in the world around us.

            This work as a piece of global art shows how expression through art, literature, etc… is able to create representational ideas, that can bring forth ideas with just one look. This contest is able to use the created images to bring up ideas of globalization with just one look at each flag.

By Heather Palmer

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus III

Dualism, monism and multiplicities

Gilles Deleuze

Lecture Vincennes – March 26th, 1973

Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance

In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault said some profound things about statements [énoncés] that concern several domains at once, even if not at the same time. I take two very vague examples. There is a moment in the Greek City when statements of a new type emerge, and these statements of a new type emerge within assignable temporal arrangements, in several domains. They can be statements concerning love, concerning marriage, concerning war, yet we feel that there is a kind of kinship or community among these statements. We have seen certain thinkers try to give explanations of how statements emerge in diverse domains that have this kind of kinship. In Greece, for example, during the “hoplite” reform, new types of statements concerning war and strategy emerge, but also new statements concerning marriage and politics. All this, it has been said, cannot be unrelated. There are some people who immediately say, for example, that there is a system of analogies or a system of homologies, and that perhaps all these statements refer to a common structure. They are called: structuralists. Others will say that these productions of statements depend on a certain domain which is determinative in relation to the others. Such people, for example, we will call: Marxists.

Perhaps it would be better to look for something else.

There’s a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient China [by Robert H. van Gulik (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961)]. This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements. That’s curious. I ask myself: OK, how can we extract ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences, analogies, and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants. I indeed see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused . . . . It’s perfect. It would consist in saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as if a social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine. We would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would mark its absence of qualification, so that everything will be clear. We could call it — at the same time, this abstract machine, at a given moment, will break with the abstract machine of the preceding epochs — in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge [à la pointe], thus it would receive the name machinic point [pointe machinique]. It would be the machinic point of a group or a given collectivity; it would indicate, within a group and at a given moment, the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation. This is somewhat abstract at the moment, it’s like algebra. It’s this abstract machine which, in conditions that will have to be determined, it’s this machinic point of deterritorialization that is reterritorialized in this or that machine, or in this or that military machine, amorous machine, productive of new statements. This is a possible hypothesis. I have the impression that there are things in Leroi-Gourhan we could use here, we would have to see how that works. This machinic point would indicate a kind of speed of deterritorialization. There are systems of indices under which reterritorializations are made in qualified machines, war machines, machines of love, machines of marriage….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus IV

Lecture Vincennes – January 14th, 1974

Gilles Deleuze

I must pass by a kind of terminological detour. This detour consists in recalling a certain terminology. We find that, in the whole current of the Middle Ages up to and including the seventeenth century, a certain problem is posed concerning the nature of being. And this problem concerning the nature of being adopted some very precise notions: equivocity, analogy, univocity.

At first sight these terms appear dead to us. They make up part of the great discussions of Scholasticism, but the great metaphysical disputes always hide something else: people are never burned or tortured over ideological questions, even less over metaphysical ones. I would like for us to try to feel what was very concretely in question in these stories which were presented under an abstract form: is being equivocal, is it analogical, is it univocal? And after all, this is not because today, except among the seminarians, we have abandoned these terms, not because we do not continue to think in them and through them. I would like to content myself with very simple definitions.

There are people who said: being is equivocal. They argued, they burned one another for things like that. But “being is equivocal” meant a precise thing: being is said in several senses. That means: being is said in several senses of that of which it is said. That is to say that the implication [sous-entendu] of the proposition was already: being is said of something. I’m not even interested in knowing if it’s an ontological problem; it’s a problem of utterances [ÈnoncÈs] as well. Being is stated [s'Ènonce] in several senses of that of which it is stated. Concretely, what does that mean? One assumes that a table is not in the same manner as an animal and that an animal is not in the same manner as a man; that a man is not in the same manner as God. Therefore there are several senses of being….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus II

Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza   

Gilles Deleuze

 

Lecture Vincennes –  November 16th, 1971

What is it that moves over the body of a society? It is always flows, and a person is always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows.

If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure])….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus I

The nature of flows

Gilles Deleuze

Lecture Vincennes – December 14th, 1971

I would like to pursue the problem of the economy of flows; last time, someone wanted a more precise definition of flows, more precise, that is, than something which flows upon the socius. What I call the socius is not society, but rather a particular social instance which plays the role of a full body. Every society presents itself as a socius or full body upon which all kinds of flows flow and are interrupted, and the social investment of desire is this basic operation of the break-flow to which we can easily give the name of schizz. It is not yet important for us to have a real definition of flows, but it is important, as a starting point, to have a nominal definition and this nominal definition must provide us with an initial system of concepts. As a point of departure for our search for a nominal definition of flows, I’ll take a recent study by a specialist in the flows of political economy: “Flows and stocks,” by Daniel ENTIER. Stocks and flows are two primary notions in modern political economy, remarked upon by Keynes, such that we find in Keynesian economy the first great theory of flows in his “General theory of employment, interest and money.” Entier informs us that, “from the economic point of view, we can call flows the values of the quantities of goods and services or money that are transmitted from one pole to another”; the first concept to be placed in relation with that of flows is that of pole: a flow, inasmuch as it flows on the socius, enters by one pole and exits by another. At our last session, we had tried to show that flows implicated codes, in the sense that a flow could be called economic insofar as something passed, and where something else blocked it and made it pass; the example given was that of the rules of alliance in so-called primitive societies, where taboos represent a blockage of the flow of possible marriages; the first permitted marriages, i.e. the first permitted incests, called preferential unions, which are, in fact, hardly ever realized, represent something like the first modes of passage: something passes, something is blocked (this blockage taking the form of incest taboos), something passes, the preferential unions, something blocks it and makes it pass, for example the maternal [utérine] uncle….

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Fast Food Change: Supersize Me

Writer and director Morgan Spurlock documented the effects of a nation’s love of fast food, and what the consequences to something like this would be, in his 2004 smash-hit documentary Supersize Me. Although this movie was released five years ago, one is able to see the global impact it made, as well as the continuing effects of North America’s fast food eating epidemic. Throughout the film consumers will compare the size of McDonalds meals in the USA compared to the size of meals in say France, or some other part of Europe, only to prove that they would not only consume the food in America as the European chains seem to taste better, but as well because of the amount of food given in America.

 

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock in Supersize Me (2004)

The sizes of fast food meals have increased, and through the eyes of Morgan Spurlock the viewers see how his thirty-day fast food binge can go horribly wrong. A documentary such as this speaks to a host of people and uses a concept that is understood globally (that of obesity, and fast food chains) and displays it using the medium of film to cross culturally spread the word. By using America as its base for criticism it shows other countries both where they can go as far as obesity and over eating in their own country, as well as shows exactly what an over consumption of fatty foods can do to you.

The effects Supersize Me has made on chains of McDonalds restaurants is clear, although McDonalds does not admit to any affect this film had on their corporation, they have still changed their menu slightly to cater to a healthier lifestyle. Kids meals with apple slices and juice options, as well as salads, and wraps on their main menu. This documentary was meant for global viewing, and it has changed the ways in which fast food chains run their business, it was successful in both showing a global epidemic and well as fostering change. 

Heather Palmer 

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Alighiero Boetti: Political Map of the World (1971-1989)

Alighiero Boetti, born in Italy in 1940, was part of the Arte Povera movement that began in 1967.  This movement favoured traditionally ‘low’ forms of art like craft, design, embroidery and printing as a way to reject ‘high’ art.  In addition to this, Boetti was interested in different cultures, systems of classification, geography, order, chance and collaboration. 

Alighiero e Boetti. (Italian, 1940-1994). Map of the World. 1989. Embroidery on fabric, 46 1/4" x 7' 3 3/4" x 2" (117.5 x 227.7 x 5.1 cm). Scott Burton Fund. © 2009 Estate of Alighiero Boetti

These interests are brought to the forefront in his series, “Political Map of the World.”  In 1971, Boetti took his designs for a map of the world to artisans in Afghanistan. Boetti handed over creative control to the artisans and acknowledged their partnership by surrounding the map with Italian and Farsi writing. The artisans worked in fabric and used each country’s flag to represent it on the map.  Each country is put on an equal plane because they are all represented in the same way. Boetti wanted to focus on each territory as a unified whole and did not want to show the smaller divisions within each country, not even acknowledging national identity. 

But what makes this work truly global is that it evolved as the world did. Every time the geography of a country changed, a new version of the map had to be created. Looking at each map allows the viewer to see where the world was politically at the moment in time when the map was made.  Showing, for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the division of the Soviet Union. It lets the viewer see how countries worldwide dealt with the concepts of power and territory. 

By taking his ideas to people in another country, representing each country as a whole in the same way, and by making new versions according to global changes, Boetti’s “Political Map of the World” is certainly a global work of art. 

Kathryn Schmidt

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“Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space,” by Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis & Sean Cubitt

Abstract: This article maps and investigates the potential for large electronic screens to contribute to the formation of new modes of civic agency in public space. It examines the ‘Public Space Broadcasting’ project in the UK as an alternative to the predominantly commercial orientation of publicly sited screens.

Introduction: Contemporary public space is increasingly constructed through the articulation of physical and electronic spaces. Since the 1980s, the roll-out of digital networks, the proliferation of mobile phones and the installation of large electronic screens in urban centres has created novel forms of mediated interaction within the public sphere. The emergence of this shift reverses the previous dominant trajectory in which broadcast media such as radio and television ‘privatized’ the public sphere by relocating key processes of civic engagement from public to domestic space (McQuire 2006). It also represents a further stage in the redefinition of cultural institutions such as art galleries and museums, as their content migrates from enclosed sites with defined audiences into the public domain at large (McQuire and Papastergiadis 2005; Papastergiadis 2006). While there are distinct regional and national inflections to these developments, the general trajectory is manifestly global. Large public screens have rapidly become a symbol of contemporary urban…

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Cosmetic Cyborgery

This advertisement for a cosmetic surgery company located in New York, conducted in a Slavic language and using entirely digitized images, is ripe with themes of intermediality and interculturality.  Specifically, I will speak about how the electronic media used to create the ad (computer generation) and to distribute the ad (the internet) acts as a metanarrative concerning the impact of electronic media on the body and embodiment. 

In the words of Vivian Sobchack in her book Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture (University of California Press, 2004), “the electronic tends to marginalize and trivialize the human body,” while the current obsession with cosmetic surgery and  extreme physical fitness in the age of electronic media shows a desire to change and reconstitute the body as something less vulnerable, less mortal. In the true nature of the cyborg, this advertisement alienates us from our own bodies, by refusing to allow the viewer to identify with anything at all in-the-flesh. Thus, the viewer is asked to identify with a computer-generated version of herself (targeted at women, this ad presents a normative – read white, young, middle-to-upper class – version of woman, an every-woman). This ad exemplifies the proliferation of body-alteration through such methods as cosmetic surgery, a rise in the cyborgification of our selves, and the way in which such an altered body can “interface with the electronic network and maintain a significant – if altered – material presence in the digitized lifeworld of the subject” (Sobchack).

Claire Sanford

Beyond the rear view mirror

The pervasiveness of screens in our public and private lives permeates many different areas which had never before had uses for screens or the subjects viewed on the screens.  For example, in the GMC Acura and many new model vehicles, there is a feature to assist with backing up and parallel parking. This feature consists of a small screen in the dash of the car, which displays the image taken in real time from a wide angle camera attached to the back of the vehicle whenever it is put in reverse. There is even a device that can measure distances to the back of your vehicle, and display a warning sign when you become too close. Using this feature, you can see everything behind you without ever doing a shoulder check, or even turning your head.  The desired effect of this device is to aid in the ease of backing up and parking, and to ensure your safety and the safety of other people and objects in range of your vehicle.  

 

This small screen, however, acts to draw all focus and attention of the operator inside the vehicle. It draws drivers and passengers into a private, boxed-in environment where there is no longer a need to interact with the outside world; the external is mediated internally. While adding ease to an element of driving, this screen also alienates the individual divers from each other and from the external environment, even though driving occurs in a public space and requires an acute awareness of external factors. 

Claire Sanford