About Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great ‘antiphilosophers’ (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L’Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Unlike many of those schooled in the anti-humanist principles of Louis Pierre Althusser and Jacques Lacan , Alain Badiou has never been tempted to celebrate the apparent end of philosophy, to question the possibility of metaphysics, or to qualify the classical attributes of truth: rigor, clarity, and eternity.

As Alain Badiou explains in detail in his major work to date L’Etre et l’événement (1988), truths are militant processes which, beginning from a specific time and place within a situation, pursue the step-by-step transformation of that situation in line with new forms of broadly egalitarian principles. Only a pure commitment, one detached from any psychological, social, or ‘objective’ mediation, can qualify as the adequate vehicle for a truth, but reciprocally, only a properly universal truth qualifies as worthy of such a commitment. Only a truth can ‘induce’ the subject of a genuine commitment.

Badiou’s most general goal can be described, then, as the effort to expose and make sense of the potential for profound, transformative innovation in any situation. Every such innovation can only begin with some sort of exceptional (though invariably ephemeral) break with the status quo, an ‘event’. An event can occur at any time but not in just any place; an event will generally be located close to the edge of whatever qualifies as ‘void’ or indistinguishable in the situation, i.e. in that part of the situation where for literally fundamental reasons the prevailing forms of discernment and recognition cease to have any significant purchase. A truth then expands out of this ‘evental site’ (site événementiel) insofar as it elicits the militant conviction of certain individuals who develop the revolutionary implications of the event, and by doing so constitute themselves as the subjects of its truth. A subject is thus anyone carried by his or her fidelity to the consequences, as rigorous as they are haphazard, of an event, while a truth is nothing other than the cumulative collection of such post-evental consequences. The laborious, case-by-case application of these consequences will then serve to transform the entire way the situation organizes and represents itself, in keeping with the implications of the event.

An ordinary individual, or ’some-one,’ only becomes a genuine subject insofar as he or she is caught up in a materially transformative procedure of this kind. By the same token (for reasons sketched in Badiou’s most accessible short work, L’Ethique (1993), subjects only remain subjects insofar as their fidelity is in turn equipped to resist the various sorts of corruption it must inevitably face: fatigue, confusion, and dogmatism. For example, those mobilized by the civil rights, feminist, or anti-colonial movements remain true subjects insofar as these movements, initially sparked by certain events affecting particular groups of people in particular situations, call for the transformation of the situation as a whole in terms that can be directly and universally affirmed by its every inhabitant. But should such a movement seek simply the promotion of a particular group for its own sake, then its partisans act only as the proponents of an interest in competition with other interests. The identification of suffering victims is not by itself the sufficient basis, Alain Badiou insists, for a genuine political movement. Like all truths, politics must proceed in a sphere of rigorous universality, on the basis of statements that literally anyone could make or affirm.

This does not mean, however, that truth operates in the domain of consensus or communication. Every genuinely universal principle has its origin in an active and precisely situated taking of sides; every true affirmation of the universal interest begins as divisive. There is no philosopher more opposed to the ‘ethical’ coordination of opinions or differences than Badiou.

Alain Badiou distinguishes four general fields of truth, or four domains of subjectivation (which in turn operate as the four generic ‘conditions’ of philosophy itself): politics, science, art and love. These are the only four fields in which a pure subjective commitment is possible, i.e. one indifferent to procedures of interpretation, representation, or verification. Alain Badiou provides his most concise overview of the generic procedures in his Manifeste pour la philosophie (1989). True politics is a matter of collective mobilization guided by a ‘general will’ in something like Rousseau’s sense, and not the business of bureaucratic administration or the socialized negotiation of interests. Within the limits of the private sphere, genuine love begins in the wake of an unpredictable encounter that escapes the conventional representation of sexual roles, continues as a fidelity to the consequences of that encounter, and is sustained through an unrepresentable exposure to what Lacan famously described as the ‘impossibility of a sexual relationship’. True art and true science proceed in somewhat the same way, through a searching experimental fidelity to a line of inquiry opened up by a new discovery or break with tradition. Mathematics is then the most ‘truthful’ component of science simply because, thanks to its axiomatic foundation in the basic postulates of set theory, it is the most securely abstracted from any natural or objective mediation.

In the end, every truth is ‘founded’ only on the fundamental ‘inconsistency’ that Alain Badiou discerns as the exclusive and insubstantial stuff of pure being qua being — the generic being of all that is simply insofar as it is, but that is only exceptionally accessible, through the rare commitment of those who become subjects in the wake of its evental exposure.

*Biography as posted on the European Graduate School EGS

On April 10, 2007, the haudenschildGarage collaborated with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD to present a Garage Talk with Walid Raad on his project, The Atlas Group.

The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive, was a mixed-media presentation of The Atlas Group’s archival material. The Atlas Group was a project undertaken by Raad between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon. In his presentations Raad uses photographic slides, notebook pages, and videotape excerpts as historical artifacts attributed to various sources or characters such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a leading historian of Lebanese history, or Souheil Bachar, an ex-hostage. The findings and claims of these figures are inspired by actual circumstances and objects such as the role of the car bomb in the Lebanese wars, existing captivity narratives, and horse-racing photographs.

About Walid Raad

Walid Raad works with video, photography, and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon. (We Decided To Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way.), a series of 15 large-scale photographs, specifically recalls the Israeli Army’s invasion and siege of Beirut in 1982. That summer Raad, an intrepid 15-year-old with a telephoto lens, took photographs of near and distant military activity in West Beirut from his home in the eastern sector. Recently reprinting the pictures from the original, now degraded negatives, he discovered that the images’ unusual discoloration, creases, and holes offered a disturbing but realistic representation of a broken world rendered flat by the series of catastrophes that had befallen it. Highly regarded for his project The Atlas Group, Raad grapples with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.

Click here to visit the Atlas Group’s website

Slavoj Zizek

On November 15, 2006 the haudenschildGarage held a FUEL4TALK for the Slovenian sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek, invited by the Visual Arts Department of UCSD. This event followed Zizek’s lecture, Politics Between Fear and Terror, at UCSD.

Click here for more information about his lecture.

About Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek is a senior researcher, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and visiting professor at American universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research New York, University of Michigan). Ph.D.(Philosophy, Ljubljana; Psychoanalysis, University of Paris). A cultural critic and philosopher who is internationally known for his use of Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture and is admired as a true “manic excessive”. Author of The Invisible Reminder; The Sublime Object of Ideology; The Metastases of Enjoyment; Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture; The Plague of Fantasies; The Ticklish Subject.–> Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed “cultural studies” (though he would despise the characterization). He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French “liberator” of Freud, Zizek’s Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years.

Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The production of cultural difference is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream — a dream that recalls perhaps Orwell’s 1984 or even Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom — the flip side of this is film noir. Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the Real. The Real only exists as a fragment, fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates of the hegemonic. The hegemony — the prevailing set of coordinates — always seeks to “take over” the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated Real must be periodically purged.

On June 11, 2006 the haudenschildGarage collaborated with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD, inSite and Casa Familiar to present the Political Equator I Conferences: Urbanities of Labor and Surveillance. This three-day, trans-border public event took place in San Diego and Tijuana from June 9 – 11 2006.

Cao Fei and Pi Li presented at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. The moderators were Norman Bryson and Paul Pickowicz. Other participants included Eyal Weizman, Andrew Ross, Teddy Cruz, Steve Fagin, Vicky Funari, Sergio de la Torre, and Roberto Tejada.

Cao Fei’s film Whose Utopia? had its world premiere at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. Her film with Ou Ning, The San Yuan Yi Project, was also screened at the haudenschildGarage.

For Whose Utopia?, Cao Fei spent six months at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta in China. Located in Guangdong Province, the Pearl River Delta has led the massive boom in China’s economy since the late 1970s. From 1980 to 2001 the region’s gross domestic product grew from eight billion USD to just over one hundred billion USD. A major manufacturing base for everyday products for Chinese and foreign markets, the region has drawn workers from throughout China in search of economic opportunities and a better life.

According to Cao, “most of the workers left their hometowns in pursuit of their ideal and dream in the Pearl River Delta area.” In the piece she focuses “on the innermost feelings of every individual in this globalized production chain, this giant and complex system of business, placing them at the center of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value which is often neglected during the process of creating huge business value.”

About the Participants

Cao Fei

Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou, China in 1978. She earned a BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou, China (2001). Cao Fei’s work reflects the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her video installations and new media works explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Applying strategies of sampling, role play, and documentary filmmaking to capture individuals’ longings and the ways in which they imagine themselves—as hip-hop musicians, costumed characters, or digitized alter egos—Cao Fei reveals the discrepancy between reality and dream, and the discontent and disillusionment of China’s younger generation. Depictions of Chinese architecture and landscape abound in scenes of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development, in images that echo traditional Chinese painting, and in the design of her own virtual utopia, RMB City. Fascinated by the world of Second Life, Cao Fei has created several works in which she is both participant and observer through her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist. Cao Fei’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2007); Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (2006); and Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006). She has participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); Yokohama Triennial (2008); and Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice Biennials (2007). Her work has appeared at the New Museum, New York (2008); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); and Asia Society, New York (2006). Cao Fei lives and works in Beijing. Click here to visit Cao Fei’s website.

Whose Utopia?

Whose Utopia? was produced as part of the Siemen’s Art Program, ‘What are they doing here?’, in which artists were invited to make work as part of a residency in a factory. Cao Fei chose the Osram lighting factory located in Foshan, near her home in southern China. Whose Utopia? documents the conditions faced by an increasing number of workers, as factories like Osram move their production to China, further integrating the country into the global economy. The repetitive work is contrasted with dreamlike episodes in which the workers act out their private dreams. The work is lyrical in its portrayal of subjective dreams within a working context, and of individual subjectivity in a rapidly mechanized world, in which individuality has traditionally been subordinate to class or other abstract and generic groupings.

Pi Li

Pi Li, born in 1974, has constantly changed his career direction in recent years. He was once the Art Director for the Chinese Contemporary Art Award sponsored by Uli Sigg. He also showed up in the Cannes International Film Festival as the producer of the Chinese movie Shanghai Dream. After over one year of operation, the U Studio (now named Boers-Li Gallery), founded in 2005 with curator Waling Boers, has also changed its direction. Now Pi Li decides to develop whole-heartedly the studio into a commercial gallery, and he has opened up a 100-square-meter affiliated exhibition area beside the main hall to promote the experimental solo exhibitions. The once mixed-orientated U Studio finally begins to transform into a professional gallery.

The gallery represents a selective group of internationally operating artists. The gallery program is not media-specific, and includes installation, sculpture, painting, works on paper, audio work, photography, video, film, performance, and digital art. Each year, approximately six major solo exhibitions are organized, along with an irregular number of smaller solo and group exhibitions. Boers-Li emphasizes its support for the production of new and experimental work, utilizing its unique position both at home and abroad to open new pathways for artistic development. The program focuses on new developments in international art, as well as on the changing contemporary positions of established or older-generation artists. In addition, Boers-Li participates in a selection of both Chinese and international art fairs. The program also includes the publication of catalogs, both to accompany major solo exhibitions and to offer retrospectives on our artists. Click here to visit Boers-Li Gallery’s website.

Political Equator

Tracing an imaginary line along the US / México Border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for “The Pentagon’s New Map,” in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and … chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.

Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US-Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow along with the embattled frontier of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad (or free) Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as they Pearl River Delta rapidly ascends to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

These are only a few of the critical thresholds of a world in which the politics of destiny and labor are transforming not only the sites of conflict but also the centers of production and consumption, while unprecedented socio-cultural demographics rearrange flows of information and capital. The dramatic images emerging from the political equator are intensified by the current political climate in which terrorism and its opposite, fear, set the stage for the current confrontations over immigration policy and the regulation of borders worldwide. The result is an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion which casts these geographies of conflicts as anticipatory scenarios of the 21st century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground where control and transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meets.

On March 3, 2006 the haudenschildGarage presented the panel Alternative Universes in collaboration with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD. Alternative Universes took place at Estación Tijuana (Tijuana, Mexico) a space founded and run by Tijuana based artist Marcos Ramirez ERRE. A presentation at Lui Velazquez followed the panel.

Participants included Renoud Proch Founder and co-director of ART2102, Los Angeles; Nate Harrison Founder and co-director of ESL (Esthetics as a Second Language), Los Angeles; Mario Ybarra Jr. Founder and co-director of Slanguage, Wilmington; Sergio de la Torre Founder and co-director of Lui Velazquez, Tijuana. The moderator was C. Ondine Chavoya Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Williams College.

Conceptualized by Rita Gonzalez (Assistant Curator, LACMA) and Bill Kelley Jr. (Independent curator and PhD candidate, UCSD Visual Arts), they wrote:

Four innovative and independent art spaces were invited to discuss their work and their practice. Each of these alternative universes treats the white cube space in different ways, engaging their communities and mapping themselves in their urban setting while pointing to the educational institutions and relationships from which many are formed. Some act as wedges in the cultural matrix, some fill the gaps while others behave more parasitically on the city and its institutions. “Alternative Universes”  also provided a forum to discuss the ways artists and curators are working together to reinvigorate the counter-tradition of the alternative art space. We also hoped to address how spaces developed on the edges or in the barrios of major cosmopolitan spaces are specifically addressing issues such as marginalization, gentrification, and cultural tourism.

About the Alternative Spaces

ART2102, organized by Erlea Maneros, Renoud Proch, and Ronni Kimm is based in East Los Angeles. ART2102 acts as an option for research and exhibition practices unsuited for traditional institutional engagement. Click here to visit their website.

ESL (Esthetics as a Second Language) organized by Nate Harrison, Hugo Hopping, and Mario Garcia Torres brings together an interest in collaboration and a one night only exhibition project in Los Angeles. Click here to visit their website.

Lui Velazquez, organized by Shannon Spanhake, Camilo Ontiveros, and Sergio de la Torre in Tijuana, is an emerging residency program that brings together visiting scholars and writers for research based projects and presentations. Click here to visit their website.

Slanguage is organized by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz and is invested in community projects such as art classes for school kids and participating in the cultural space of Wilmington, the city adjacent to the largest port in the country. Click here to visit their website.

Click here for more information on the conference.

About Tropicola

Tropicola is a feature length film shot in Havana at the height of the Special Period,1996-97. A provocative glimpse of life in contemporary Cuba, this playful movie with an excellent TIMBA soundtrack captures the color and rhythm of this vibrant nation while intelligently examining the problems facing Cuba during its current economic restructuring. From young Cuban women running off with tourists, to black market moneymaking schemes, Tropicola stresses the spirit, humor, tenacity and resourcefulness of the Cuban people as they bravely face their changing reality. The piece combines fictional, documentary and performance-based strategies to give a complex and percussive feel for Havana at a very “special” moment in time.

About Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

About Ariana Hernandez-Reguant

Hernandez-Reguant is a former resident of Cuba. A professor at UCSD, she teaches courses related to contemporary Cuba, such as the cinema of the Cuban revolution, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and revolutionary cultural politics, to globalization and late socialism and to ethnographic approaches to cultural and media production, cultural circulation, and politics of culture with a focus on Latin America. Her expertise includes anthropology and cultural studies, the music business, and socialism. She is also interested in Latin American societies, with emphasis on Cuban politics, culture and their relationship with the United States. Hernandez-Reguant has many publications on topics such as popular culture, mass media and cultural policy in revolutionary Cuba, arts, politics, commerce, value and subjectivity in late socialism, the Marxist theory and cultural production/circulation, as well as Latin American cultural studie

FRIDAY, DEC. 9

6:00 pm: OPENING AT THE haudenschildGarage
6:30 pm: FILM SCREENING OF STEVE FAGIN’S FILM “TROPICOLA”
Q&A SESSION WITH STEVE FAGIN
8:30 pm: DINNER FOR PARTICIPANTS

SATURDAY, DEC. 10

9:00-11:45. PANEL 1: COMMODITY CULTURE

Esther Whitfield (Comparative Literature, Brown University). Truths and Fictions. The Economics of Writing, 1994-1999
Cristina Venegas (Film Studies, UC-Santa Barbara). Filmmaking with Extranjeros
Ariana Hernandez-Reguant (Communication, UCSD). Revolutionary Dissonances: On Radio Taino.
Ivor Miller (Africana Studies, Columbia College). Abakuá Rhythms for Sale..
Kevin Delgado (Music, SDSU). Santeria as Spiritual Capital.
Discussant:
Dick Hebdige (Film Studies, UC-Santa Barbara)

12:45-3:30. PANEL 2: CITIZENSHIP AND SUBJECTIVITY

Laurie Frederik (Anthropology, U Chicago). La Batalla for Cuban Identity: Option Zero Theater.
Lillian Manzor (Literature, U. Miami). Theater in Two Shores.
Marc D. Perry (Anthropology and African American Studies, U Illinois). Hip Hop and the Making of New Black Critical Difference
Lisa Maya Knauer (American Studies, U Mass, Darmouth). HAV/NY: Rumba, translocality and publics
Denise Blum (Education, CSU-Fresno). Schooling Cuban Pioneers in the ideals of Che: New meanings.
Discussant:
Emilio Bejel (Spanish, UC-Davis)

3:45-5:30. PANEL 3: ALL THAT DANCE! TWO VIDEOPRESENTATIONS.

Berta Jottar (Latino Studies, Williams Col). Rumbeando with the Iremes. Central Park Rumba.
Jennifer Paz (QBA Media). I am Cuban, I am Popular The Musical Politics of David Calzado and the Charanga Habanera.

SUNDAY, DEC. 11

8:30-11:00. PANEL 4. CONTEXTS OF EXPRESSION

Antonio Eligio Fernandez “Tonel” (Spanish, U Texas, Austin). Dialogues on Pedro Alvarez
Ernesto Menéndez (Romance Languages, Duke U). Cold stridency: Kitsch appropriations in Cuban art of the 1990s.
Jacqueline Loss (Comparative Literature, U Connecticut). Wandering in Russian
Ana Maria Dopico (Comparative Literature, NYU). Dentro de la Fotografia, Todo: Politics and the Imaginary of Photography in the Special Period.
Discussant:
Betti-Sue Hertz (SD Museum of Art)

11:00-12:15. ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION AND CLOSING REMARKS Can We Speak of a Late Socialism a la Cubana?

The organizers were Steve Fagin, Yoshua Okon, Roberto Tejada and Rubén Ortiz-Torres.  Participants included Gerardo Estrada (UNAM & former Minister of Fine Arts, Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Medina (Art Critic & Curator, Tate London), Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Artist), Yoshua Okon (Artist), Monica Manzutto (Co-Director, Kurimanzutto Gallery), and Carmen Cuenca (Co-Director, inSite).

“The 1990s in Mexico City were a period of tremendous political upheaval and incredible cultural energy. The art that grew out of that was socially interactive. Today, that art is internationally recognized. But does that mean it might lose its living spirit? The goal of this conference is to take a breath before the art has become ‘official, important art.’ We want to recapture its undergroundedness, its funkiness – and its politics.

Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are “we” willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world’s list of usual suspects: “If it’s Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)” With “Before the Paint’s Dry,” we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-”Fondesa” cafes, alternate spaces, “bad music,” and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.  Mexico City, circa 1990s: The art scene was blooming and bleeding-edge – and as complex and messy as those adjectives imply. Before the story is sanitized and boiled down to a simple chapter in an art-history tome, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego is convening some of the scene’s leading participants to argue alternative accounts.” – Steve Fagin

About the Participants

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian who lives and works in Mexico City. PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, UK. Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of Mexico and Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery in London. He is also a member of Teratoma, a group of curators, critics and anthropologists based in Mexico City. He has just curated the Francis Alÿs exhibition Walking Distance from The Studio at the Colegio de San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City and is currently preparing an exhibition of British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith titled Ciudad Espiral/Spiral City. Among his recent publications is When Faith Moves Mountains, coauthored with artist Francis Alÿs, documenting the action produced in Lima in 2002, released by Turner in Madrid.

Gerardo Estrada

Dr. Estrada is Coordinator of Cultural Diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also a full-time Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM and President of its Association of Graduate Students since 1991. His career has provided him with a vast experience in the cultural sector. Since the beginning, he has occupied important positions such as Director of the House of Mexico in Paris, Director General of the Mexican Radio Institute, Cultural Attaché of the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. From 1992 to 2000 he was Director General of the National Institute of Fine Arts, a position which he held for 8 years, and before assuming his current position at the UNAM, he was Director General of Cultural Affairs of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003. Estrada received his BA degree in Sociology from the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM in Mexico City. From the École d’Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales of the University of Paris he later received his MA and PhD degrees in Sociology.

Monica Manzutto

Manzutto is the co-director and co-owner of the internationally influential Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City.

Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the author of many books that include, most recently, “National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment” (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and “Celia Alvarez Muñoz” (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has served also as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs, among them “Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide” (New York: Aperture, 1996); and “Mexico/New York, Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans” (New York: DAP, 2003). Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. He lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México. Tejada is, as well, the author of several poetry collections, including “Mirrors for Gold” (Krupskaya, 2006) and “Exposition Park” (Wesleyan University Press, 2010); he founded and continues to co-edit the journal “Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas”. Tejada’s research and teaching methods interrogate modern and contemporary image environments from an interdisciplinary viewpoint: a critical art history whose visual knowledge can locate objects and actors in the global-culture context. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); and at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today’s leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media — extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres’s work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

Yoshua Okon

Yoshua Okon, artist and founding co-director of La Panaderia which was a key arts crossroads space in Mexico City. Since the late 1990s Mexican artist Yoshua Okon has been developing his own variation on these themes. Okon considers himself a performance artist, even though most of his work takes the form of videos that document invented scenarios set up in collaboration with invited participants. Among his best-known projects is Orillese a la Orilla (1999–2000 – the title, a command meaning ‘move to the curb’, is a grammatically incorrect phrase that, to the local ear, suggests both poor education and low social status), in which Okon asked Mexico City policemen to act out the threatening techniques they employ in everyday life.

About the Participants

Betti-Sue Hertz

Betti-Sue Hertz is the Director of Visual Art at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and served as the curator of contemporary art at San Diego Museum of Art from 2000-2008. Prior, she was the director of Longwood Arts Project, Bronx, New York 1992-1998. Her recent major exhibitions and catalogues at SDMA include Eleanor Antin (2008); Animated Painting (2007); Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gorson Matta-Clark (2006); Past in Reverse: Contemporary art of East Asia (2004); She was adjunct curator of Contemporary Links, a series in which contemporary artists respond to works in SDMA’s collection.

Doryun Chong

Walker Art Center associate curator Doryun Chong has been appointed Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art effective June 2009. Before joining the Walker, Chong worked in the curatorial department of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and organized/curated projects for the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2001) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2003). He studied history of art at the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated in 1997 magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with a Departmental Citation. He also did graduate work in history of art at Berkeley from 1997 to 2003. During his tenure at the Walker he has served on a number of panels and juries, including the Alpert Award in the Arts, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the William H. Johnson Prize, and has lectured widely in such cities as San Francisco, Washington, DC, Vancouver, Barcelona, Seoul, and Tokyo. Chong is a contributing editor to the journal ArtAsiaPacific and was a co-curator of the 2006 Busan Biennale in Busan, South Korea.

Eungie Joo

Eungie Joo has been appointed curator of the New Museum New York’s Generational Triennial, starting in Spring 2012. Joo has been the curator of public programmes and education at the Museum since 2007, and has also served as commissioner for the Korean Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. During her career she has worked closely with international artists from the Americas, Asia, and Europe, focusing on new commissions. Before the position at the New Museum, Joo had been Director and Curator at REDCAT in Los Angeles, from 2003 to 2007.

Kuiyi Shen

Kuiyi Shen is Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Deigo, whose teaching and writing has focus on Chinese and Japanese art with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Chinese art and Sino-Japanese art exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He received a BA in fine arts from the Shanghai Normal University and an MA and PhD in art history from the Ohio State University. Prior to his 1989 relocation to the United States, Kuiyi Shen served as the director of the art book department at the Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. Shen taught at Ohio University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Rice University, and University of Oregon before joining the UCSD faculty. Shen is the author and co-author of many books and exhibition catalogues on modern and contemporary Chinese art, including A Century in Crisis: Tradition and Modernity in the Art of Twentieth Century China (1998); Between the Thunder and the Rain: Chinese Paintings from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution (2000); Word and Meaning: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists (2000); Chongqing Chilis (2003); Zhou Brothers—Thirty Years of Collaboration (2004); Chinese Painting on the Eve of the Communist Revolution: Chang Shu-chi and his Collection (2006), The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection (2006), Reboot: The Third Chengdu Biennale (2007), and the forthcoming Arts of Modern China, Social Networks in Republican Shanghai, Literature in Line, and The Challenge of Modernity: Chinese Painting of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.

Lesley Stern

Lesley Stern is a professor at the University of California, San Diego and is the author of The Scorsese Connection (The British Film Institute and Indiana University Press, 1995) and The Smoking Book (The University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Her work moves between a number of disciplinary locations, and spans both theory and production. Although her reputation was established in the fields of film theory and history she is also known for her fiction writing and her video productions. Stern was born and raised in Zimbabwe, and spent many years in Australia before moving to UCSD in 2000. She has an Honors degree from London University (in English Language and Literature) and a Ph.D. from Sydney University (in film). She has taught in a number of countries, including Zimbabwe (at the University of Zimbabwe), the United Kingdom (Glasgow University), Australia (La Trobe and Murdoch Universities and The University of New South Wales) and the United States (UC Irvine). She has published extensively in the areas of film, performance, photography, cultural history and feminism, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Screen, M/F, Camera Obscura, Film Reader, Image Forum (in Japanese), Trafic (in French), Emergences, Critical Inquiry. A recipient of many awards and grants, Stern has recently been a Getty Scholar for the year of the Passions in 1998, and a Visiting Fellow at the Getty Research Institute for a seminar on Gesture in 1999. Stern’s current projects include a further work of ficto-criticism revolving around cinematic memory; a book-length study of Township Theater in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – where traditional arts (music, dance, story telling) are combined with more contemporary dramatic modes and with kung fu (a short video has been produced out of this project, and a longer film is in production); and a book on cinematic remakes.

Mami Kataoka

Mami Kataoka is currently the senior curator at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and is the international curator at Hayward Gallery, London, where earlier in 2009 she presented the exhibition Laughing in a Foreign Language, exploring the role of humor in contemporary art practice worldwide. She has co-curated the exhibitions Tokyo-Berlin / Berlin-Tokyo (2006) in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; New Territories (2005) at ARCO Madrid. From 1997-2002 she was chief curator at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. In 2001 she co-curated “My Home is Yours / Your Home is Mine” with Hou Hanru and Jerome Sans. In 2002 she worked with the Barbican Art Gallery in London to produce “JAM: Tokyo-London” which included the work of over forty artists, fashion and graphic designers, photographers, musicians, and performers. In the same year Kataoka was one of nine curators to develop the exhibition “Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art“. She was also the selector, with Hou Hanru, of the Asian galleries that participated in the 2004 ARCO held in Madrid. More recently she has worked on projects with artists: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Santiago Cucullu, Ozawa Tsuyoshi and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba.

Norman Bryson

Prior to joining the University of California, San Diego in 2003, Norman Bryson taught at Cambridge, Rochester, Harvard, and London Universities. At King’s College, Cambridge, he was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English. At the University of Rochester he was the first Director of the newly formed PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies. He was professor of art history at Harvard from 1990 to 1998, when he moved to London to direct the PhD program in Visual and Theoretical Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. He is currently Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in the areas of eighteenth-century art history, critical theory, and contemporary art. Over the past five years, contemporary art has been at the forefront of his writing, complemented by teaching in fine art schools (rather than art history departments) including Goldsmiths College, London, the Jan van Eyck Academy at Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Bryson current research and teaching focus on modern art and visual culture in the West, China and Japan, on photography, and on the philosophy of visual representation.

Yukie Kamiya

Currently Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Yukie Kamiya studied Art History at Waseda University in Tokyo and completed the De Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. She has curated exhibitions in Asia, Europe, the United States and South America, including Adaptive Behavior at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Under Construction: New Dimension of Asian Art at the Japan Foundation Forum and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Fantasia at Space IMA in Seoul and the Far East Modern Art Center in Beijing, and Space-Jack! at the Yokohama Museum of Art. She has also written for catalogues and periodicals including Afterall, Art Asia Pacific, Asahi Newspaper, Bijutsu Techo and Wolgan Misool.

On November 4, 2004 the haudenschildGarage presented a Garage Talk with Eleanor and David Antin in collaboration with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD as a celebration of the more than thirty years of artistic creativity the Antins have given to the San Diego art community. The moderators were Adriene Jenik and Roberto Tejada. This talk was organized by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin.

About the Antins

Eleanor Antin

Eleanor Antin was born in New York City in 1935. An influential performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist, Antin delves into history—whether of ancient Rome, the Crimean War, the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, or her own Jewish heritage and Yiddish culture—as a way to explore the present. Antin is a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves. Her most famous persona is that of Eleanora Antinova, the tragically overlooked black ballerina of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Appearing as Antinova in scripted and non-scripted performances for over a decade, Antin has blurred the distinction between her identity and that of her character. In the process, she has created a rich body of work detailing the multiple facets of her beloved Antinova, including a fictitious memoir and numerous films, photographs, installations, performances, and drawings. In her 2001 series “The Last Days of Pompeii,” Antin lingers behind the camera to stage the final, catastrophic days of Pompeii in the affluent hills of La Jolla, California. In “The Golden Death” from this series, the imagined citizens of Pompeii drown in the excess of their own wealth—an ironic parable of American culture in the throes of over-consumption. Eleanor Antin received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and a Media Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 1998. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including an award-winning retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1999. Antin is a highly respected artist and teacher, and has been a professor at the University of California, San Diego since 1975. She lives with her husband and son in Southern California.

David Antin

David Antin (born in New York City, February 1, 1932) is a United States poet and critic. In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising “talk poems” at readings and exhibitions. In the late 1960s Antin moved with his wife, the writer and performance artist Eleanor Antin, to Southern California to take up a post at the University of California, San Diego, in the newly formed and experimental Visual Arts Department. He served for a time as gallery director and much longer as a professor there. In the early 1970s, his influence on a nascent group of conceptual photographers among the graduate students there was powerful. He has a fellowship in the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. He also received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. Antin lives in San Diego with his wife.