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Art & Culture

For What and For Whom?

I’m pleased to have a new essay, “For What and For Whom?“, included in the latest issue of Vague Terrain, guest edited by the fine folks at CONT3XT.NET. There’s ample information about the issue below. Though I haven’t finished reading each of the essays I am already impressed with the issues being tackled and the interesting perspectives being presented. I imagine that I’ll write more about the topic I wrote about on this blog (and will cross-post that to Curating.info) since I think there are points in my essay that I want to explore further. Happy reading!

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CUREDITING is a curatorial/editorial project which starts from Walter Benjamin’s point of view of translation formulated in the essay “The Task of the Translator” in the early 1920s. Relating the so-called original and its translation by using the metaphor of a tangent which touches the circle in one single point only to follow thereafter its own way, the goal of the present project by CONT3XT.NET – kindly hosted and co-curated by the online journal Vague Terrain – is to access what can be understood as translational work within the context of Internet-based Art and its curation. Artistic creation and the processes of its re-formulation within different presentational contexts are brought together under the label CUREDITING, a hybrid between the two concepts of “curating” and “editing”.

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Art & Culture

Locked up

What if life was just a few square feet, and seemingly endless time, and limited interaction with others?
What do lions in zoos think about?
What happens when society thinks you don’t belong in it according to the moral code of the hour?

I’ve never known anyone personally who spent time in prison, but the notion of separating people from the general populace as a kind of penance fascinates me. The shifting concepts of legality, morality, and appropriate punishment result in very concrete and stark consequences for individual human beings. These individuals, in most cases, are then expected to rejoin the regular population and function, somehow.

I thought I’d bring two things that I’ve read recently on the subject together, because I think they’re worth reflecting on. An article by Ariel Leve in the Times goes into deep and finely wrought detail about the “Pink Mile”, or Death Row for women in a prison in America. From the perspective of a guard:

For the rest of her shift she often listens to inmates screaming that they’ll kill themselves, sometimes cutting and scratching their arms, wetting the bed. From the time she enters until the time she leaves there is no lull.

It surprised her that the capital cases aren’t more edgy. Charlie pod has 24 cells, most with two women in each. The women who have been sentenced to die have a cell each. They watch the other inmates come and go after their sentences are done, peering out their door every day, knowing they are never going to leave.

Schaefer has considered what this must be like. “I would not want to spend the rest of my life looking out that little window knowing that when they come to get me to be executed, that will be the last view outside that I ever see. But I have never seen one of them break down.” Her voice is neutral. It is not admiration, but wonderment. “They know what their future holds. I never ask them things because I have to be indifferent. I can’t get emotionally or personally involved because I have a job to do.”

I also recently re-read One Day in The Life of Ivan Desnisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Set in a 1950s Soviet labour camp, the spare prose outlines a single day in the life of one prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. As in the snippet of Leve’s article above, this story powerfully conveys the way humanity has fallen away, the way that humans can so quickly cease to relate to each other, or feel that they must not relate as humans for their own survival or advancement. Shukhov sees an administrator at the camp’s sick bay:

“There you are — neither one thing nor the other. Thirty-seven point two. If it was thirty-eight, nobody would argue. I can’t let you off, but you can stay if you feel like risking it. The doctor will look you over and let you off if he thinks you’re ill, but if he reckons you’re fit, you’ll be in the hole for malingering. I’d go to work if I were you.”

Shukhov rammed on his hat and left without a word or a nod.

Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?

A great question, with no answer.

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Art & Culture

Call To Action

I hereby interrupt my long blogular silence to join the chorus of concerned Canadians who are raising their voices against the Conservative government’s recent cuts to culture.

What’s truly dispiriting is reading the comments on the slew of news articles that have appeared. Small but determined groups of commenters slag off artists in the most vicious way, and dismiss solid evidence that culture spending generates income for Canada and enriches lives. It is also shocking, when navigating through the morass, to witness a near-total disbelief in these tried and tested systems of cultural support that often work as a hand up, not a hand out. (Need stats to support these opinions of mine? Go here and here.) Sage commenters have pointed out that if the Harper government were really interested in fiscal responsibility they would find other, far more significant and costly “boondoggles” to hack away at.

What can be done? As always, it is fine and good to be concerned but unless action is taken, the slash and burn will continue unabated. Guess what — surprise! — it’s not about fiscal responsibility, it’s all about appealing to voters. So get out those pencils and start writing passionate, personal letters to your MP. There are full details on how to do this and further background information at the Council for Canadians website, and additional insightful commentary from John Sobol at his blog.

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Art & Culture Featured

Two published items

On Curating

I was honoured to be a contributor to a new online publication, On Curating, an independent international web-journal focusing on questions around curatorial practice and theory, published by Dorothee Richter. For the inaugural issue, the editors asked thirty-one curators a series of questions around what topics in curating they would most like to see discussed, about key resources online, and about exhibitions and peers that have influenced them.

I’m also very pleased to be included in Decentre, the latest book to be released by YYZ Books. “decentre is a book about artist-run culture that hopes to describe the breadth and quality of artist-initiated programs, projects and events, the issues we face in this milieu and how effectively we deal with them, that aims to both celebrate artist-run culture and demonstrate the vital role artist-initiated activity plays in the larger cultural scene.” I wrote about the future of artist-run culture as it relates to digital media and audience development.

I know these “what MK has been doing elsewhere” posts are not the most interesting… but at the very least, they keep everyone up to date! Hopefully I’ll post another opinion piece soon.