at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry
Searching for Sebald – Reader’s Edition
The Reader’s Edition includes a softcover trade edition of Searching for Sebald with a free-standing print of Christel Dillbohner’s project for Searching for Sebald. Book and poster are housed in a silver cardboard sleeve.
Purchase the Reader’s Edition of Searching for Sebald at our gift shop.
Saturday, January 11th, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Stearns Champions Park Social Hall
4520 23rd St.
Long Beach, CA 90815
Metro and the City of Long Beach will hold a free poster signing event for artist Christine Nguyen on Saturday, Jan. 11 at Stearns Champions Park Social Hall. Nguyen was commissioned by Metro to create the artwork for the Through the Eyes of Artists poster series. The program commissions local artists to create original artworks that express the uniqueness of Los Angeles County neighborhoods as a way of encouraging people to take Metro and explore destinations served by the agency.
“The poster [which is currently on display inside buses and trains throughout the Metro system] shows the diversity of local ecologies while evoking the beauty of Long Beach in a playful, fantastical, underwater cosmic dreamscape,” says Nguyen. Nguyen, who is also a musician, also will be performing with fellow musicians Michael Wysong and Whalesound during this event.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. –Yogi Berra
The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) presents the Ephemera(l) Institution, a public presentation of Martin Gantman’s practice-based research at the ICI through its Visualist-in-Residence Project. The findings of his “archeological” undertaking will be presented at a public event at the Institute on January 11, 2014 from 7 – 9 pm. The evening will include an artist action in the ICI garden at 8 pm: the permanent interment of Matchboxes-in-another box: testimony, a work completed during his residency. Transformations to physical elements of the Institute that have materialized as a result of Gantman’s tenure will also be on display.
According to Gantman, a long-time Associate of the organization, the ICI is unique in how it co-opts cultural artifacts for use as foils to pierce the veil that constrains contemporary thought. He asks how the method of the Institute contributes to such results? And in the long term, how does the Institute frame itself so that its contributions, and in particular its singular methods, contribute to the production of knowledge after its demise?
Martin Gantman is a Los Angeles based artist and writer who has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. In 2012, he chaired a panel session entitled: Tracking the Movement of Investigatory Art at the College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles. In trying to address these issues, Gantman brings his interest in investigatory art to service during his residency. Digging into the Institute’s distinct approach to its organizational construct, language, and activities, he has fashioned a commentary on the Institute’s practices and devices. What does it mean to have an Ephemera Kabinett, which has the potential to contain evidence of almost anything? And how is it mobilized in the effort to produce knowledge? These are questions that Gantman has attempted to answer.
Martin Gantman’s VIR workspace and the materials associated with his residency will remain on display (by appointment only) until January 31, 2014. For appointments or questions regarding the Visualist-in-Residence project or other ICI events, please contact info@culturalinquiry.org
Due to space limitations, VIR applications for 2016 are currently not being accepted. This project may resume in 2017.
The VIR residency offers local artists, art theorists, writers, and other culture producers an environment that is oriented towards knowledge production through its well-equipped study and production facilities. Resources include a 3,000-volume library; an Ephemera Kabinett that contains cultural residue from the last 100 years; a collection of arcane visual tools or their handbooks (sometimes both); and a unique physical site with its own collection of phantom histories and secrets.
We are looking for adventurous ‘visualists’ to help us ‘theorize the materials’ or ‘materialize the theories’ of the various processes of knowledge production that are ‘visually orchestrated.’ These are activities that interrogate and extend current conceptions of ‘studio-based research’ as they are being extolled in the academy.
Some of the features of the Residency include:
• The VIR laboratory is available for residencies lasting between 1-4 weeks. We can only offer a work space at this time (no live-in) but access is 24/7 to accommodate residents who have a ‘day job’ or other demands on their time during ICI’s normal business hours.
• At the very least, each resident will arrive with a single question to jump-start her or his visual research but, more often, the resident arrives with a project already underway that will benefit from an investigatory period at the ICI.
• The Institute will provide limited manpower and, at time, financial assistance. We will also facilitate partnerships with a roster of highly skilled ICI Associates and supporters to enrich the VIR residency experience.
•The VIR quarters will be open to the public as part of regularly scheduled ICI tours at least one Saturday per month (depending on the concurrent ICI project) and/or by appointment.
• The Resident will interact with the ICI staff and/or Associates on a regular basis to discuss the Resident’s work, either through meetings or online interactions,
• At the end of the residency, the VIR will be encouraged to summarize their research processes and findings during some type of recorded discussion with ICI staff and/or associates. This exchange might include an interview, a non-verbal demonstration, an exchange on social media, or some other recorded form based on the scope and range of the residency.
• In addition to ‘documenting’ their residency on the ICI’s website, the Resident will also be asked to create a material trace of their tenure to be placed in a special box that will become a part of the ICI repository.
VIR Residents have included:
Julene Paul, Spring 2012
Jared Neilsen, Summer 2012
Greg Cohen, Winter 2012-13
Christel Dillbohner, Spring 2013
Martin Gantman, Winter 2013
Maya Gurantz, Summer 2014
Anna Ayeroff, Summer-Fall 2014
Jaime Knight, Fall 2014
Amy Kaczur, Spring 2015
Christopher Handran, Summer 2015
Find more information about the VIR Project at http://www.culturalinquiry.org/blog/activities/2014-visualist-in-residence-project
or email us at info@culturalinquiry.org
On Sunday, December 1, 2013, in recognition of World AIDS Day, the ICI linked to a project by fierce pussy for Visual AIDS. ”
For the Record mourns the loss of friends, family, lovers, artists and activists during the AIDS crisis and engages in a dialogue about the erasure of personal and collective memories from the historical record through this loss. Through poignant and powerful variations of the phrase “If he/she/they were alive today…,” fierce pussy explores the daily aspects of living, not only with HIV/AIDS but as a person in the world, and asks viewers to extract their own memories to consider our personal and social relationship to the AIDS crisis in the present.”
Posted here are four broadsides created by fierce pussy for distribution in all places and spaces where the AIDS pandemic runs the risk of slipping from memory.
The broadsides can be downloaded here:
ICI Associate, Christel Dillbohner, will be presenting A matter of time and motion – Objects – Painting – Photography –, a site specific installation at kampstogether in Köln from November 10-20, 2013. (Opening reception, November 9th)
ICI Associate Deborah Paulsen in exhibition, Glorious California: The Lay of Its Land, November 2 – December 21, 2013 at La Galeria Gitana.
ICI Associates, Antoinette LaFarge and Robert Allen, will be performing in Far-Flung follows function October 10th, 11th and 12th at the Experimental Media Performance Lab, Claire Trevor School for the Arts, UC Irvine
“Far-Flung follows function is an original performance work that turns a physical space into a crashing computer whose population of finders, daemons, mice, and the like struggle to avert catastrophe. The environment in which they carry out their labors is ruled by shifting weather and time of day data from live internet feeds. Thirty cities around the world take turns choreographing the lights, projections, sound, and performers themselves. As the piece unfolds, typical computer user actions such as mouse management are transformed into playful and sometimes absurd movements, triggering cascades of accidents, errors, and crossed signals. Welcome to the commedia of the motherboard.”
ICI friend, Pablo Helguerra’s Librería ‘Donceles’ is on view at Kent Fine Art LLC, New York.
“Pablo Helguera’s Librería Donceles is an itinerant bookstore of ten thousand used books, in Spanish, of virtually every subject—literature, poetry, art, history, science, medicine, anthropology, economics, and politics, as well as children’s books [that] will literally be the only Spanish-language used-book store in the city.”
“To create Librería Donceles, Helguera assembled donations of books from individuals and groups in Mexico City and elsewhere, offering his artwork in exchange for boxes of books and producing an Ex Libris for each donor that acknowledges the particular provenance of every volume. Librería Donceles—whose title is inspired by the old bookstores that line Donceles Street in Mexico City’s historic center—will foster the open-ended and unhurried environment that draws people to used-book stores, where customers enter without a particular title in mind and instead roam the shelves with the hope of spontaneously discovering a book that beckons them.” Visitors to the Librería Donceles—Spanish-speakers and non-Spanish-speakers alike—will be welcomed in this spirit and invited to a brief consultation with the artist or an associate. Once their interests and “bibliological profile” (as Helguera has described it) have been assessed, they will be given suggestions on where to look. But visitors ultimately make their own choices. Only one book per customer will be allowed, in exchange for a pay-what-you-wish donation. Proceeds from these transactions will be donated in turn to local Spanish reading programs for immigrant communities.”
“By rendering visibility to the Spanish language in an American city, Librería Donceles affirms the importance of the cultural dimension of the language and raises questions about how Spanish might be reconnected to its diaspora, as well as integrated into the broader cultural life of New York. For Helguera, the idea of the “double removal” of a book, indeed of any object, is an important one, with both personal and historical resonances. Conjuring the spirit of L.P. Hartley when he wrote “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” the books of Libreria Donceles are messengers from other times, places, and lives. With their public and private histories, the books await new lives, new meanings, as they pass on to new owners.”
Exhibition runs from September 12 – November 8, 2013
