SEEK-ART

Lodge 441

SEEK-ART presents:

Molly Dilworth

Lodge 441/Long Island City
25-25 Borden Ave

Long Island City, NY 11101

Attached is the Press Release

Lodge 441 is inspired by histories, which are not readily seen. In its physical form, the composition acts both as a cartographic marker and as a signifier of the historical past. Documented online, the replications of the work exist as the work itself; as something more than a digital print of a painting.

The work conveys historical information through its medium, placement, and creation, it extends this landscape through an Internet presence that provides both a presentation platform and a databank of recorded instantiations. Simultaneously, the installation / composition reuses histories and supports sustainability by re-purposing material and including mediums that increase the efficiency of the building envelope.

The inconspicuous nature of this monumental composition can be likened to the availability of information in the modern age; intangible and yet universally accessible. Far from serving as an ersatz form of contact, the online documentation of the composition through the satellite imaging of Google Earth is the optimal method of experiencing it.  Here, it is the act of documentation that prompts engagement with the viewer. Alternatively, the project may also be experienced in person by appointment and from an aerial perspective, via helicopter or from an adjacent building.

Lodge 441 is a question as to the nature of history, information, truth, and a contribution to the ongoing dialogue about painting, production and reproduction.

For more information of the Lodge 441 or the Artist, Molly Dilworth

Lodge 441/Long Island City
25-25 Borden Ave
Long Island City, NY 11101

The project is named Lodge 441 after the first African American Mason Lodge in the US, which was instrumental to the Underground Railroad and a network of master builder societies across the country.

The painting for the roof of SEEK-ART in Long Island City is made with reclaimed house paint mixed with a ceramic additive to improve the efficiency of the building envelope. The composition is based on quilt patterns used for hidden-in-plain-sight communication in the Underground Railroad. These patterns are a combination of American, African and Masonic symbols.

Lodge 441/Long Island City rooftop painting is one in a series of sites marking the history and legacy of the various African American burial sites in New York City in connection with the Underground Railroad and the history of African American Mason Lodges, Quaker safe houses and other partners in the revolutionary social changes of the movement against slavery.

The first painting in the series was made for the New Museum’s Festival of New Ideas (May 2011) in the courtyard of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral School Courtyard. Another intervention will occur for the Art & Law Residency exhibition at The Sculpture Center in December 2011.

http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/2010-interview-with-joe-diebes/2165

Interview with Joe Diebes

Joe Diebes’ show, CHRONOLOGY at Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery fuses his background as a composer with a unique conceptual approach to video and works on paper. In the video installation, Scherzo, short film clips of a virtuoso cellist are edited by a computer in real time to produce a frenetic and infinitely suspended musical climax. Also in the exhibition are several works that use music notation as a metaphor for living in a perpetual present. Curator and producer, Michele Thursz talks with Diebes about this body of work.

Michele Thursz: Let’s begin with the work one to one which shows a video of your hand tracing a musical score in time with the recording, as well as the drawings that resulted from this process. When looking at the tracings as handwriting or glyphs, your action of transcribing becomes your mark. And that’s very interesting in relation to other practices, such as graffiti, where this glyph is given a personal voice through a long trajectory of styles.

Joe Diebes: I hadn’t thought of the relation to graffiti, but I’m definitely appropriating or really, liquidating, musical symbols for my own ends. Since I’m tracing the notes way too fast to actually end up with something legible, all that’s left is my style. But the thing is, I’m just doing a process and I don’t actually have time to think about how the lines will come out, so the style isn’t an expression of anything conscious.

Thursz: In the history of drawing, the beauty of drawing is translated through the weight of the body on the line or an immediate response of a gesture. So in this gesture is your presence?

Diebes: Yes, though it’s the residue of a mechanized gesture, so it’s more the presence of a body under duress rather than my personal expression. It’s really the errors that are important. I’m only organic insofar as I’m veering off the score – otherwise I’d be a music recording and writing machine.

Thursz: I’m glad we’ve touched on error. It’s more like nature itself. It’s almost like replication of the thing that happens before conversation.

Diebes: Yeah, like that’s what we do a lot of talking about – to get back to that thing that happened before we started talking. And I think art is a lot closer to that pre-verbal state.

Thursz: That’s a very elusive subject. Possibly in the instance of error is where a lot of things happen, especially in the automatic process of these pieces; a process that expresses the “natural” as a non-biased conversation with the medium, subject and public.

Diebes: I like that you bring up nature. By most accounts the elements in my work are very un-natural: video, computers, referencing the “high culture” of classical music, and even the artifice of presenting objects in an art gallery. But there’s something about how these processes actually play out that’s very connected to nature. I discovered this first in the piece called anachronism 1, where I copied and then erased each page of a Bach score on the same piece of paper, resulting in a worn out and torn up manuscript pad. What struck me was how much it looks like the result of a natural erosion process, like a landscape or a topographical map. In the end my repetitive machine-like activity operates like water or wind on rock.

Thursz: Is technology trying to mimic nature without understanding what nature is yet?

Diebes: I think it’s all a matter of viewpoints. Technologists look at nature as mechanistic and the brain as some kind of computer. It can go the other way too, looking at machines in organic terms – like that technology has a certain life and evolution of its own. I tend to think that our concepts of nature and technology, especially these days, are not that distinct. That’s why in my work I like to have humans doing machine-like activities, to get at this messy crossroads of the organic and the algorithmic. That’s a lot of the reason why I chose classical music as the starting point for this work; I feel there’s something very technological at the root of it. The musical instrument as a constructed extension of the hand can be thought of in cyborg terms.

Video still from Scherzo, 2010
HD video installation edited in real time by a computer, infinite duration
Courtesy of the artist and Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery

Thursz: Let’s talk about Scherzo and virtuosity in relationship to this concept of systems, and how it engages with the emotions or an ecstatic / trance state.

Diebes: Much of what the virtuoso desires are the machine traits of speed, precision, and endurance, so Scherzo was about taking this desire all the way by fusing the virtuoso with a machine. I worked with one of the best cellists around, Rubin Kodheli, and filmed him as he played small fragments I composed at maximum speed. I then made a computer program that takes this to a whole other level by endlessly recombining these fragments in different ways to create a relentless rapid-fire montage. My hope was to suspend Rubin in an ecstatic present. That’s an exciting but dubious tension for me – achieving an ecstatic experience through machines. In the 90s I made a lot of electronic music, and I was always fascinated with how you can generate these sort of trance states or go into the libidinal unknown. Machine music can be more seductive, in a certain way, than live music can be, because it’s just so engineered. You can find a thing that tweaks the body, let’s say a certain pulsating rhythm at a specific speed, and really dial it in. It’s almost like designer drugs, it’s a designer experience anyway…

Thursz: When installing a generative video object in a gallery can you talk about giving the audience options to engage the work in different ways? Naturally the public thinks of video as a narrative with a beginning and end. Why did you choose this endless option in relationship to what we have talked about?

Diebes: The fact that Scherzo never repeats is essential to its concept. It’s about focusing on the moment of musical climax, which is usually the anchor for a time structure that has a beginning, middle, and end. I was interested in taking that moment and infinitely extending it. All instant gratification all the time. As for the viewer/listener, it’s important that they can stay in the climax as long as they want, and there’s a huge range. I find that people stay anywhere between ten seconds and thirty minutes before their tolerance gives out. But what everyone’s experience has in common is that eventually they have to leave without the satisfaction of the film coming to a conclusion, so the difference between the viewer’s organic timeframe and the machine’s algorithmic timeframe makes itself felt. Usually people have reached a point of fatigue or exhaustion when they leave, and this draining is also an important part of the work.

Thursz: You work with a lot of different mediums: history as medium, different languages such as music or computer code as medium, paper, pencil, and video. How do all these mediums relate to process in this exhibition, a process that is reforming information into an experience which is very natural?

Diebes: If I try to identify my medium, I think it’s the algorithm. Sometimes this involves actually programming a computer, which I did in Scherzo, and sometimes I set up a situation where I subject my bodily activity to a strict set of rules. All the works on paper in this show are just simple algorithms basically. Like: copy page one from someone else’s music, erase that page, copy page two, erase that page and so on. In all these processes I’m looking for a balance between between control and raw life doing its thing. That’s what the algorithm is really about. There’s a basic idea in our culture that in order to move forward, you have to constantly be controlling uncertainty. Counter to that idea, I think I’m embracing uncertainty in this work, and using the algorithm to generate more of it rather than clean it up. It’s interesting that you talk about the reforming of information. The technological spirit in us is always trying to produce information – to sculpt something out of the noise or chaos of nature into something very precise and controlled that we can use. The main project of this work has to do with de-forming information, allowing codes and imposed orders to drip away and dissolve back into what I guess we could call a natural state: what exists before things get informed.

Video still from one to one (Third Suite), 2010.
Black and white video with sound, duration: 13′45″
Courtesy of the artist and Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery

Michele Thursz is an independent curator and consultant. Her current actıons are under the umbrella of Post Media Network; Post Media is a term and action demonstrating the continuous evolution of uses of media and its effect on artists practice, and culture-at-large. Post Media Network acts as a source for creative industrıes, cultural institutions, collections and art and design advisors internationally.

Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975.

http://www.ubu.com/film/mccarthy_black.html

Robert Rauschenberg describes the process of creating Automobile Tire Print (1953) with John Cage.

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/23

aluminium painting Aaron Young

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRAjNEBF0Ic&feature=related

History of the letter: Graffiti

“I live on this street, FUCK with me!” artistic terrorism? Nahhhhh! Just the origins of graffiti, The TAG identifies. The styles are ripe and ready to flow. The letters, the icons, the action represent the person, place and situation, person, writer, place, both physically and emotionally, situation, a crew style and possible purpose. This rings as true today as it did 40 years ago.

I start this story from, Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street, Brooklyn. This neighborhood is both residential and commercial, Bedford Stuyvesant bordering Crown Heights; both loaded with histories, of affluence, poverty, conflict and thrive with the deep roots of urban expression, music and art.

In the 70’s, when I was growing up, the neighborhood was alive with deejay’s, mc’s, dance troops, graffiti writers, poets, street games, crime and neighborhood committees, whose main charge was keeping our block a safe place for kids to develop a skill set rooted in heritage and  protocol. Theses streets gave us a means to understand diversity, sometimes by unnecessary hard knocks, but the love for life was, and is, prevalent. Here visual art, music, and sport upheld integrity in the face of oppression, whether based in economics or racial stereotyping. 

Today, as I walk to the A train, I see the neighbors, shop keepers, sky, trees, old and new architecture, flyers and local and national advertisements. Then, I see tags, throw ups, Ups.  I look up and there is another piece altering the sky line, xxtreme UP!, heavily dripped mailboxes, and I hear the deep beats;  African, Latin, Caribbean, Soul, Rap (west, east, southern), Pop, Hip-Hop seeping out of every crevice, doorway, car, and live music venue, weaving a real-time soundscape. My imagination unites the images and sounds into a rich tapestry and I conjure up the relationship between past and present.

As a cultural producer I often leave NYC still I see graffiti; on barns, rocks and even in multi-user video games, on the streets of London, Istanbul, Mumbai, Paris. Graffiti is present along with its longtime companions music, sport and fashion  – straight from the hip these pieces of a simmering current  –NYC, or regional USA – hip hop culture  has saturated the world. Global Heart Me! Graffiti falls under the umbrella of hip hop culture as a practice that denotes an entire subculture, a loaded statement perhaps, yet this connotes the “XXX large” importance of Hip-Hop that created a global cultural crossroads while still upholding its American flavor.  This meta-culture has created a mega industry. Yet the underlying thread of the culture affiliates with a rebel action, even while used for mass media. Intertwined with fine art, music, as social tool, the culture redefines its social signature with a singular as well as communal voice.

In thinking about the effect of the Hip Hop culture I have defined history as an accounting of an action or actions, blurred by the objective of the one writing it. This is not to say that this commentary is not true, but it is more a part of a conversation that most were not present to take a part in.  I am not an historian, but I am vested in the Arts, and believe Art is Art is Art. 

I don’t believe in validation of the arts through an historical analysis. I believe in never undermining the interest of the artist, this opens up too many possibilities, clearly seen in the  concepts of graffiti misplacement as street art and the question, “Is hip hop culture a readymade?”, a process that involved the least amount of interaction between artist and art.  The blurring occurred when graffiti was taken off the streets into the gallery, and visa versa art placed on the street using the action of graffiti in process – here the art of graffiti was lost, the style represented. I would like to say graffiti was never in the gallery. Though today we see artists using graffiti aesthetics, and hip hop culture incorporated into a practice, as a medium to explore symbolism and relationships to previous eras and movements like the Italian Renaissance, Abstract Expressionism.

In history it is necessary to define movements and where they cross over one another, but more importantly we must not cross out the importance of the intent. Protocols of graffiti artists both expose the style of the individual that recalls their history, but also follows the craft of the letter that is associated with the region from which the writer is aligned and the rules that cross these regional barriers; east coast, west coast, neighborhoods, peoples, crews. Graffiti crews set forth as a collective, generally a result of a cultural subset inhibited by society. Using their inability to be heard as a people, crews write letters on walls, as a voice.  These tags and monumental variations are words from the pages of their story, our story, icons from past and present that follow the path of the identity of writers as “we”, the artist and the viewer in a collective urban epic.

Hip Hop, the writings and the sounds, travels through the veins of the world as a communal voice of artists, industries, and cultures. Likened to pop practice, Hip Hop culture raises the ante of the Pop aesthetic by creating works that reflect a communal experience allowing for voice, vision, capital, and upholds the definition of modernity, always in the present.

In the memory of Rammellzee, A culture is done; we lived it you and me, give…

Michele Thursz, NYC 2010

we produced series of cultural situations under the moniker r(t) with DD172 ,  We have rotated works in the exe suites, artists included are Michael Anderson, Carlo Zanni, Jeremy Willis, Dnasb, Kendall Carter, and Jeroen Jongeleen.  Joy Ride with BFF,Kinetic with major installation of Serkan Ozkaya and  the current exhibition Art is.….., DIY organized by Derrick Adams and Wardell Milan. Burma  Film screening, Captured a film about Clayton Patterson take on the LES  in the 80’s.  Upcoming exhibition includes 11-4-08  screening at Licoln Center and installation at DD172. 

Alaina Simone and Michele Thursz are independent cultural advisors and producers.

I am working on a new site (  physical and virtual) for Bulletin Board Cafes, and writing a few stories.. one factual and one fiction with facts, smiles! Just returned from elsewhere collaborative, where I have initiated the concept for r(t) profiles as an archive, collection and source.. coming soon!!

r(t) is a trademark that incoporates all my actions including and not limitied to collaboration, production and branding of merchendise.

 Looking forward to continuing this conversation.

I am remembering some great website design collaborations with Alon Zouaretz and some fine exhibitions if I do say so myself..

Democracy is Fun?
organized with defne Ayas

http://michelethursz.com/democracyisfun/

Public .exe
Organized with Anne Ellegood and Defne Ayas

http://www.exitart.org/public.exe/

Art – Actually
Organized with Fatos Ustek

http://dawebsiteb4dawebsite.com/art-actually/main.swf

This looks VERY exciting! The action, concept , space and best of all the cross sections of artists. MY GOODNESS when I read the press release I felt like I was flipping through a personal photo album of artists that I have exhibited, ole’  school mates and childhood friends! Hope it’s everything I am imagining! More power to the organizers of “Never Can Say Goodbye” and the organization NO LONGER EMPTY!

Here we go loop ti loop, here we go loop di la..

dNASAb presents “dataclysmic”, a solo project b Frederieke Taylor Gallery

What happens when man made technologies are thrown back to nature?

dNASAb has created an  ecosystem akin to a new production model, set  for production, creating a new form  that can be read as documentation or new body of work.  This practice is exposed in the exhibition, dataclysmic, Frederieke Taylor Gallery.

Exhibited are two sculptures and a new photograph series. The sculptures are abstractions of modernity, every surface is charged with information, color, light, and moving image. These works are ornate by definition.  The photograph series shares with the public a performance/ action, an exchange that creates possibilities of an alternative plane  for information to live.  DNASb confronts nature with his multidimensional sculptural interface, composed of waterproof L.E.D’s, fiber optics and other materials, by placing the sculpture between the surf and the shore.  An organic relationship occurred where the boundaries between hardware, visual information, and elements of nature merge in unison. The action and the dialog were documented in the middle of the night using a long exposure magnifying the union and confrontation of nature’s elements.

Cyclical

dNASAb:  http://www.tc43.com/2006/MAINandtoolbarFRAMESET.htm

“dataclysmic”, Frederieke Taylor Gallery 535 West 22nd street,NYC