| Inke Arns on Sun, 2 Jun 96 13:50 MDT |
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| nettime: TRANSNACIONALA / Irwin / NSK |
Received by [email protected] (May 1996)
contact: [email protected]
TRANSNACIONALA
A Journey from the East to the West initiated by Irwin
Irwin and Eda Cufer, together with some guests artists and curators from the
USA and Russia (Alexander Brener, Goran -or-evia, Vadim Fishkin, Mary Jane
Jacob,
Mark Pauline, Yuri Liederman, Viktor Misiano), will in July 1996 make a
one-month journey from Atlanta to the West Coast of the United States in two
equipped vans.
In the course of this journey they will organize about five events in
different parts of the USA (Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle). The Transnacionala project will focus on communication among
entities from different cultural, social and political backgrounds. These
events will be in the form of one- or two-day shows, discussions, lectures,
screenings, etc., at various locations:, private houses, galleries, parking
lofts... The topics of the discussions will be prepared in advance.
During the trip reports including the most important parts of the events and
discussions will be sent through a computer link to the location of the
"Conversations" project in Atlanta and video letters will also be sent to
"Manifesta" in Rotterdam.
You can follow the journey on: http://www.heck.com/nsk.html (from June 15)
First letter
by Eda Cufer
The TRANSNATIONALA project will take place in the form of a journey. A group
of artists from the United States of America, Russia and Slovenia will
spend a month travelling together across the USA, making stops at five
American cities (Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle) in
which various artistic events (artistic actions, lectures, discussions,
presentations) will be organized in collaboration with the artistic
communities of each city.
The initiative for the project came from the Slovenian IRWIN/NSK artistic
collective (its conceptual framework and current fields of research will be
presented in a booklet available at the time of the journey). It is closely
connected with their experiences in a previous artistic event -- the APT
ART (Apartment Art) project, which took place in May and June of 1992 in
Moscow. This project was organized by a group of Russian artists, curators,
and intellectuals in order to reflect and re-evaluate the social model of
their artistic practices -- which in the time of Soviet ideological
repression were hidden behind the walls of private apartments but which,
with the beginning of perestroika, gained international recognition and
large public attention overnight. The IRWIN/NSK collective participated in
this project with an event called the NSK EMBASSY MOSCOW, which took place
in a private apartment. Some of the content and results of their one-month
of living, exhibiting, performing, and organizaing lectures and discussions
in Moscow are documented in the NSK EMBASSY MOSCOW edition subtitled How the
East sees the East. The most important results of this project, however, are
the continuity of personal relations, artistic interactions and the
continuing mutual support in developing specific individual/collective
social models of art production and a system of values in the context of
changing Eastern societies.
A wider aim of TRANSNATIONALA is therefore to research the potential models
of interaction among different artistic communities by travelling with some
American artists and visiting various American art communities.
Of course, one cannot avoid the simple macropolitical contextualisation and
interpretation of the TRANSNATIONALA project as a meeting and confrontation
of the two myths (the USA and Russia) of our recent history, in which
Slovenia plays the role of a m or, hardly known actor in the westernmost
part of the Eastern territory on the planetary geostrategic map. Such a
superficial view conceals many difficulties of communication among
individuals from different and distant cultural and political spheres. As
our perceptions of distant worlds are marked by many culturally and
politically produced presumptions and limitations, the objectives of the
TRANSNATIONALA project should be developed and analyzed step by step. A
very practical aspect of communication difficulties is that, regardless of
an individual's efforts to surpass national contexts and notions in his or
her artistic or humanistic practice, he or she will still have to use
national notions and signs to inform others from different national or
cultural spheres who he/she is, where he/she is coming from and which
cultural and political reality has defined his/her work through his/her
corporal existence in a certain territory on the earth. Inside national
borders we act as individuals or groups with individual character. We are in
a critical, analytical if not subversive, relation to society and state
politics -- we represent and defend our individual borders. When we
represent our works abroad, however, we automatically identify ourselves in
universally understandable categories -- we represent our national and state
borders. This gap in decontextualisation which annihilates the corporeality
of social experiences as a real background of any universal art or
intellectual work is highly abused today by the structure of the existing
art and intellectual systems and markets as well as by the institutional
distribution of universal values.
One of the reasons for the journey across the United States is also liked
with the need to analyze and demysticize our culturally-produced
preconceptions of America. From the Eastern (or perhaps any other) point of
view American culture represents the center of the world power structure and
the dominant culture of Western civilisation, which has been and still is
the crucial identification point for the East. Living with the myth of the
West, we in the East probably have many distorted perceptions of the real
rhythms, colors and qualities of life in the "center". For us, this journey
therefore represents an opportunity to gain a more subjective experience of
American culture. And finally, America is a large urban territory with great
intersocial complexity corresponding to the universal complexity of the
world as a whole. And this is perhaps our main reason for meeting and
confronting American art communities: to learn about their own reflections
and experiences of their inner complexity and to exchange views on the
particular and global complexities of today's world -- from the point of
view of defined artistic and intellectual positions, of course.
We believe that a journey with one-month direct, intimate communication
among individuals and groups from three different cultural spheres --
without any central intermediation of state institutions (galleries,
museums, festivals, universities) -- is a
convenient model for researching and analyzing the common symptoms that
define the experience of critical individual and group positions (however
different they might look when observing concrete artefacts or discourses)
in relation to their particular societies and society as a whole.
Eda Cufer
Time Table
ATLANTA
location: "The Castle"
Mary Jane Jacob and Arts Festival of Atlanta
(a 19 century house near AT&T and High Museum of Atlanta)
June 28 opening of the Irwin exhibition
ATLANTA
June 30 / July 2
Location: "The Castle"
Introduction of the participants of TRANSCENTRALA, Introduction of the
project, discussions, lectures, screenings
Contact address:
Arts Festival of Atlanta (att. Mary Jane Jacob)
140 First Plaza Atlanta GA 30309 phone 404 885 1125 fax: 404 876 1791
Journey to Richmond (Virginia)
July 3 / July 4
Through :
Charlotte
Raleigh
On the way private and public conversations
RICHMOND
July 5 / July 6
Location: An old plantation from the end of 17 century
Host: Catherine Gates (Gates of Heck's)
discussions, lectures, screenings, party
Contact address:
Katharine Gates Gates of Heck, Inc. P.O. Box 15296
Richmond, VA 23227 USA
Voice/fax: (804) 266-9422
Internet: [email protected]
Web Page: http://www.infi.net/~heck
Journey to Chicago (Illinois)
July 7 / July 8
Through :
Charleston
Cincinnati
Indianapolis
On the way private and public conversations
CHICAGO
July 9 / July 10
Location: Different locations in the City
Host: Randy Alexander and Mary Jane Jacob
discussions, lectures, screenings
[email protected]
Journey to San Francisco:
July 11 / July 22
Through:
Kansas City
Topeka
Liberal
Albuquerque
Flag Staff
Las Vegas
Reno
SAN FRANCISCO
July 22 / July 23
Location: location suggested by SRL (or some RW park)
Host: open
discussions, lectures, screenings
[email protected]
Journey to Seattle
July 24 / July 25
Through:
Crescent City
Portland
contact address:
SEATTLE
July 26 / July 28
Location: Rented private house
Host: Charles Craft, Larry Reed, Robin Held, COCA and other cultural
institutions from the City
discussions, lectures, screenings, reception
contact adress:
Charles Kraft:
phone: +1 206 860 51 93
[email protected]
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Inke Arns * Pestalozzistr. 5 * D-10625 Berlin * Germany
Tel / Fax + 49 - 30 - 313 66 78 * [email protected]
upcoming (Nov.):
discord. sabotage of realities. <http://www.is.in-berlin.de/~inke/discord>
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