SESSION 4: CITY IN MOTION: Forced Entertainment, Tribute in Light and Burning Man.
APRIL 6TH, 2005 [6PM-8PM.]
Location: Gallatin Dean’s Conference Room, 715 Broadway, 6th Floor
Total Attendance: 22
Guest Artists: Julian LaVerdiere and Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment
Tim Etchells is an artist, director and writer best known for his work with
the Sheffield, UK-based performance ensemble Forced Entertainment. Formed in 1984, the group's projects span diverse media and contexts. Etchells himself has made works in text, photography, video, performance, installation,
exhibition and digital and broadcast media. He has also collaborated with a wide range of other artists, choreographers and writers including, Hugo Glendinning, Asta Groting, Franko B and Wendy Houston. Since the mid-80s
Etchells has developed a unique voice in writing for and about performance. His published work includes Certain Fragments (Routledge 1999), a collection of writings for and about contemporary performance as well as fiction
ranging from The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer), an indispensable guide for modern dreamers everywhere (Duckworths 2001) to Endland Stories, a brutal and comical collection of short fiction (Pulp Books, 1999). Recent performances from Forced Entertainment include "The Travels" and "Instructions for Forgetting", which blur the borders between performance, video and essay, the absurd theatrical black comedy "First Night" and the deconstructed ironic rock spectacle "Bloody Mess".
The Forced Entertainment website be found at
http://www.forcedentertainment.com.
Julian LaVerdiere was born in 1971 and raised in New York City. He earned a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and a MFA in sculpture from Yale University. He is a founding member of the production-design collective BigRoom LLC, which has received international acclaim for its innovative approach to commercial production design. In 1999, LaVerdiere had his first New York solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery. He has since had solo shows at No-Limits Gallery in Milan, Italy, Ever-Green Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland and the Lehman Maupin Gallery in New York, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. In 2000, his work was prominently featured in Greater New York, an exhibition at PS1-Moma, Long Island City, New York. In the same year, while developing Bioluminescent Beacon (a public art project with Creative Time), he was granted studio residencies at both the American Museum of Natural History and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Studio Program on the 91st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 2001 and 2002, LaVerdiere worked with fellow-artist Paul Myoda, three architects, Creative Time and the Municipal Arts Society to create Tribute in Light, the temporary light memorial to the victims of September 11th, 2001. This public artwork has subsequently been selected to become an annual addition to the WTC Memorial. In 2003, LaVerdiere had his first solo museum exhibitions at the Museums of Contemporary Art in Miami and Cleveland, and his work is included in the permanent collections of PS1-Moma, New York, MOCA, Miami, Museu Nacional de Historia Nattural, Portugal and the Library of Congress, DC, as well as a number of major private collections. LaVerdiere has received awards and grants for both individual and public art collaborations. In 2000, LaVerdiere and Creative Time received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Warhol Foundation grant for the Bioluminescent Beacon. In 2002, he received the first Annual Cooper Union Urban Visionaries Award. In 2003, he and his fellow Tribute in Light collaborators received the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Arts Society. In 2004, he received a NYC Percent for Art grant to make a piece for FDNY Engine Company #277, which is to be installed in 2006. Employing a pastiche of symbols, signs and themes from the past and the present, LaVerdiere draws attention to pivotal moments and events that serve as historic harbingers of coming change and paradigm shifts. LaVerdiere lives and works in New York City and is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Graduate Student Presentation by Rachel Bowditch.
Republic of the Imagination: Staging the Avant-Garde in the Black Rock Desert.
PowerPoint presentation of the Installation Art, Interactive Art and Performance of Burning Man.
Moderator: RoseLee Goldberg
Participants
NYU ProfessorsThemes:
Julian LaVerdiere, co-designer of Tribute of Light, the World Trade Center Memorial discusses the genesis of the project and his current work inspired by asymmetrical warfare and historical symbols and monuments of power, such as the light domes of Albert Speer and the Statue of Liberty and the ruins of civilization. He is exploring the idea of erasing historical space in order to rewrite a modern narrative.Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment
In Sheffield, North England- Forced Entertainment built a replica of the city with lights, a ghostly double of the city. Forced Entertainment works across a range of media, starting with theatre and performance, but going also into gallery and installation. By using text from many places, the work requires an active spectatorship. The work hopes to make connections between things that are not necessarily connected, focusing on the situation of theatre and the situation of performance. I.e. the expectations of viewers bring in to a room; how the watchers form a temporary community; what will take, what won’t …the social negotiations of meaning; live negotiations between performers, audience, viewer or spectator with visual art.
The project “Ground Plans for Paradise” involved one thousand buildings crudely made with windows made out of wood and glued together. The piece was a map and model of the city as space for reimaging yourself and your life. Another city project occurred on a bus, which toured around Sheffield for one week. The audience entered the bus, which was a guided tour of the city, containing no facts, but much misinformation, claiming the areas in personal ways and renaming of spaces in the city. Intervention of performance was to layer city with playful, poetic commentary. The piece played with possibility of fiction of text and how city could drag you in different directions.
Rachel Bowditch, Republic of the Imagination: Staging the Avant-Garde in the Black Rock Desert.
By analyzing the phenomenon of Burning Man through the lens of globalization as a political utopian performance, Burning Man is creating new paradigms for the direction of performance, installation art, technology, community and ritual in the twenty-first century. Burning Man is one of the most complex, highly sophisticated and imaginative alternative utopian societies at the turn of the century, creating an oasis apart from the vortex of capitalism and the commodity. The close examination of utopian models of real and imagined communities throughout history reveals the current social need to create alternative societies within the contemporary dominant culture of globalization. By analyzing Burning Man’s financial reports, their “gift economy” and civic volunteerism, we see a staged rehearsal of a consumer-free society as a political performance that proposes a new alternative way of living full of impossibility, contradictions and ambiguities. In 1986, founder Larry Harvey staged an impromptu therapeutic burning of a makeshift wooden man on Baker Beach in San Francisco. Over nineteen years Burning Man has evolved from a personal healing ritual into an ephemeral city of thirty-five thousand citizens. From this minute, personal performance spontaneously erupted one of the most significant and creatively radical utopian movements of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century.