Category: Anna Ayeroff

PRESS RELEASE: With Everything but the Monkey Head Iteration II

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With Everything but the Monkey Head:
Theorizing Art’s Untheorizable Practices

Iteration II: Anna Ayeroff (May 24 – June 12)
Finissage: Saturday, June 11, 2016, 6 – 8 pm

 

The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) is pleased to announce the launch of With Everything but the Monkey Head: Theorizing Art’s Untheorizable Practices, a major project centered on the burgeoning field of studio-based research in the visual arts. This project will be a long-term collaboration with a host of diverse participants including nine researchers who have participated in some sort of visual research at the ICI during the last 5 years; a set of specially selected interlocutors whose questions will help construct and strengthen the ideas central to each researcher’s project; and the curious spectators who have always enriched ICI projects with their thoughtful discussion and debate during public exchanges.

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The second iteration of the project will feature Anna Ayeroff, a 2014 participant in the ICI’s Visualist-in-Residence (VIR) project. Ayeroff returns to the ICI for a three-week residency during which time she’ll share her thoughts about her own research practices while collaborating with the ICI to build a treatise on the organization’s own visual research endeavors. Her stay will culminate in a finissage on June 11, 2016 during which time she’ll share her ideas with the public.

The term studio-based research, also called practice-based research, research in the visual arts, and at times, visual research, as it has been known at the ICI, has quickly become a catch-all term used to describe many contemporary art practices, some but not all of which are anchored by the ‘new materialism.’ Many of those who advocate for this designation believe the imaginative and intellectual work undertaken by almost all artists is a form of research that can be equated with work (and research) in other disciplines. Other supporters of studio-based research feel that be it an interpretation, a critique, or an art object, the work produced under this banner must result in ‘new knowledge,’ thereby equating the work of artists who achieve this goal with a somewhat antiquated model of the research scientist.

A small, provocative group of thinkers have rejected both these models pointing to their self-serving role in the service of an ‘academy’ that seeks to grow both the number of PhD programs in studio art and the bills in their pockets under the studio-based research banner. These provocateurs have pushed for a theory of art-based research that better reflects what is actually being done in some (but not all) artists’ studios. They have challenged the art world to seek a theory (not the theory) that is focused more on processes than outcomes and that has no a priori “image” to which it aspires. With Everything but the Monkey Head answers their clarion call. With this project, the ICI does not aspire to build a theory of studio-based research as its practiced right now but to consider what theory’s potential for transformation might be in response to the issues studio-based research brings to the table.

The most challenging of these issues is one that underlies the entire project. That is, that any theory about ‘art as research’ is, by definition, untheorizable since, as James Elkins points out, ‘thinking through the visual,’ is a type of inquiry that is outside language. How do we, then, theorize something that is untheorizable? The ICI believes the artist researchers at the center of this burgeoning field might have an advantage in this regard. Art is thought, not theory and most visual researchers resist those aspects of their process that hinge on language; they postpone theory, judgments, opinions, and conclusions, often delaying their consideration indefinitely but certainly while they work in the studio. It is to these researchers that the ICI has turned asking them to participate in a form of inquiry based on their own visual inquiry in a manner that links back to the original meaning of ‘research’ – to circle around and around. The ICI will encourage the researchers of With Everything but the Monkey Head to circle around a theory of studio-based research created in the studio with and through the slips, stutters and spasms of their agrammatical processes.

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For the second iteration, Anna Ayeroff, enacts her research in a nomadic studio, aided by a set of photographic processes whose force lies in action and engagement rather than capture and production. For Ayeroff, whose 2014 Visualist-in-Residence project at the ICI, On Moving Mountains, was centered on an exploration of film’s place in imagined worlds, the researcher and the photographic document do not stand apart but are constantly in a mutual state of flux. Here, the photographic operates in relation to rather than in production of the places she visits. In this practice-based research model, the photograph is not simply a tool used to document research but is active, embodied, and performative within a changing space that is research – research that is capable of rupturing our way of seeing and thinking.

Each iteration of With Everything but the Monkey Head will be accompanied with a unique laboratory workbook created by the researcher over the course of their short residency. Part journal, workbook, recipe book, and itinerary, this chronicle will provide a snapshot of the project at each stage of its unfolding. In addition, each researcher will also contribute to the project’s catalog, which is being produced to emulate late 19th century ‘sample’ books used by traveling salesmen. These books offered the best parts of the finished book while under its cover snippets of alternate bindings, long lists of illustrations, complete indices, and ‘notes to readers’ on loosely inserted pieces of yellow paper pointed to the uncharted territories of thought the book might occupy. The catalog for With Everything but the Monkey Head, like the books whose form it borrows, lends itself to an idea that is still unfolding.

All parts of the project can be followed on the ICI’s website. The construction of the lab books and the catalog will be charted on ISSUU where finished publications will be offered to the public through the print on demand service of ICI Press.

A PDF version of the press release for this iteration of the projects can be downloaded here.

ICI Friends, Pam Posey and Anna Ayeroff, in Exhibition

ICI-BLOGfreeways-wFreeway Studies #2:
Inside the Quad

Ben Maltz Gallery
April 12 – July 27, 2014.
Opening reception,
Saturday, April 12, 4-6pm
(free to the public).

“Freeway Studies #2: Inside the Quad features the work of 34 contemporary artists whose studios are located within the borders of the I-405, 110, 10, and 105 freeways in Los Angeles.”

Visualist-in-Residence Project

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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. 

Froebel Star Folding

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

 

 

Associate Anna Ayeroff in Exhibition

ICI associate Anna Ayeroff work was included in a recent exhibition titled Myths of Progress: Utopic Dreams/Dystopic Realities. Her work included a multi-media installation that explores her family’s personal history in Clarion, Utah—a Jewish farming colony that was originally envisioned as a utopian community. The show ran from February 16 – March 31, 2012 at the Kala Gallery in Berkeley, California and included nine artists.

100/10∆1 Interview, Whitehot Magazine

whitehot | Interview with Anna Ayeroff



Installation view of “Clarion Calls”, including from left to right:
“A Brief History: Clarion, Utah”, Slideshow, 80 35mm slides in slide carousel, “If I could live here, I would”, Mylar and Thread
“I built a shanty and I lived there for three years”, Hand-cut chromogenic print and Mylar
Courtesy, ICI and the artists

 

Anna Ayeroff and Alex Harvey: 100/10Δ1
Institute of Cultural Inquiry
1512 South Robertson Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90035
Through 17 June 2011

A. Moret speaks with Los Angeles based artist Anna Ayeroff about her recent exhibition Clarion Calls at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

A. Moret: Your exhibition is the first in the 100/10 series at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) represented with the title 100/10Δ1. As the assistant director of the ICI, could you speak to the inspiration behind the project and its intended impact?

Anna Ayeroff: The 100/10 (100 days/10 visions) project is meant to both reveal and enact the creative process. For 100 days, 10 visual researchers – artists, writers or visual thinkers – will work in our “laboratory” space, interacting with and investigating the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett and the 2,500+ volume library. The 10 visual researchers are asked to play with ideas, blending contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI archive. In exposing the process and creating a dialogue about it, the project becomes more about ideas and less about objects. The goal is to inspire discussion and creation and to get away from the show and tell nature of a traditional display.

Moret: A key component of 100/10 is the dialogue between the artist and the curator to create something outside of “show and tell.” For this exhibit you and curator Alex Harvey participated in a dialogue about your own work and the ICI archive. While I was perusing the Library two books in particular stood out, The Elements of Color and The Interaction of Color. In addition the curated selection of books there is a mesmerizing assortment of ephemera, of visual culture under a sheet of glass that didn’t possess a deliberate rhyme or reason but read like a visual tapestry. I recall a portrait of Michele Foucault, Earth particles, and vintage advertisements.

Ayeroff: Alex and I initially connected over the book I was reading when we met, a book that had been loaned to me by Lise Patt (the ICI Director) from the ICI library – The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. Alex and I began speaking about belief, the desert and the structure of Chatwin’s history. The various objects on display in the library reflect the ideas we were working with. Each object was pulled because of a specific relationship – some because of their relationship to utopias, or the forms of utopia, or because they came into existence at the same time as Clarion.

 


Installation view of “Clarion Calls”, including from left to right:
“desires are already memories”, Hand-cut chromogenic print and Mylar
02272010-03022010, Super 8 films transferred to video
Courtesy, ICI and the artists

Moret: Clarion is a physical destination as a farm colony in Utah, but it also represents a state of being. What is the history that surrounds the location?

Ayeroff: The story goes that my family immigrated from Vilnius or Riga or another major city in the Russian empire around 1900.

Moret: And you are connected to Clarion though your great grandfather?

Ayeroff: I’ve been told that Nathan was a Buddhist – a member of the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party. My research lead me to statements made by Nathan declaring that he was indeed a founding member of Clarion.

Moret: What has your families’ reaction when you first expressed a desire to pursue the subject matter? How do they feel about the exhibition?

Ayeroff: The two generations of family that had lived in Clarion had died years before I began this work. However, the sons and daughters of the Ayeroff brothers and sisters born in Clarion were ready and willing to contribute. Everyone has his own story.

My father and I share this history. The work really belongs to him. He came with me on my second trip to Clarion. It was the first time he had ever been. A lot shifted on that trip. There was a lot of snow, a lot of quiet, a lot of just him and me. A lot of beauty. Expanse does that – it sets us city dwellers in our place.

Moret: Describe the process of culling archival photographs, maps, and information about Clarion.

Ayeroff: The University of Utah Library has a collection called the Jewish Oral History Project. It includes interviews conducted in the 1970s about Jewish life in Utah. Included in this collection is an interview with Nathan. I called the library, located the person who managed that collection and asked her to send me a copy of the transcript. A man in Salt Lake City published a book about Clarion in the mid ‘80s. The book contains a good mix of factual and anecdotal history. I spoke to family members, all a generation or two away from the Clarion colonists, collecting their stories.


Arrive with a wall from 02272010-03022010, still from Super 8 film
Courtesy, ICI and the artists

 

Moret: I’m curious what prompted Clarion as a subject for your work.

Ayeroff: After I returned from Clarion the first time, I sat down to read a strange reprint of the original text of “Moving the Mountain” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I had happened upon this book having loved a few of her other works. All I knew was that it was a feminist utopian novel, which was more than enough to spark my interest. I opened to the title page and noticed the publication year – 1911, the same year Clarion was founded. The coincidence was too lovely. It marked the beginning of my understanding of Clarion as a utopia. After “Moving the Mountain,” I began reading the few published works about the colony that I could find. Simultaneously, I was reading Thomas More’s “Utopia,” Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces,” Italo Calvino, Charles Fourier,” Calvino on Fourier.” I wanted to understand the utopian impulses my great-grandfather had inadvertently passed down to me.

Moret: When did you travel to Clarion for the first time?

Anna Ayeroff: The first time I ended up in Clarion was in 2008. My sister and I were driving from New York to Los Angeles. I had heard a bit about Clarion from family anecdotes. I knew I wanted to see the site where my grandfather was born and I knew that I wanted to take a souvenir from the site. I did not know that the approach of a pickup truck would spook us, sending us running back to the car, just at the moment I was picking up one of the bricks from the ruins. I ended up coming home with a brick in hand. Holding that brick – that was when the Clarion Calls project began. I spent the next two years researching, experimenting, reading, folding, writing, unfolding, printing, drawing – making images, making stories.

Moret: Did you return?

Ayeroff: In 2010, I returned to Clarion with more of a plan, although happenstance and whim had their influences as well.

Moret: You employ several mediums in your show- slides, super 8 film (transferred to video), photographs, and a sculpture. Super 8 film footage [transferred to video] of a road trip plays simultaneously on a wall opposite the slide projection. There’s a portion of the film where you appear holding a makeshift white flag, standing on top of a concrete platform. It’s a wonderful moment because it creates a bridge between the past and present and the land becomes the connective tissue between you and your great-grandfather. Do you know what function the platform served? Did you leave the flag there?

Ayeroff: It was the foundation of a building, probably one of the homes. The wall came home with me. I’ve called the action in that film Arrive with a wall. There are images from it also included in the slideshow. The flag is actually not a flag at all. It is a brick wall. The wall had to fold up and fit in my car. The wall was flimsy. It just blew in the wind. But I tried my hardest to keep the wall standing.

Moret: What did you encounter when you arrived?

Ayeroff: Clarion is a ghost town. You see mountains and expanse. You see tall weeds. In winter, you see unmarked snow. You hear cows from the dairy down the road. But it is nearly impossible to locate any site.

Moret: Were there any existing structures?

Ayeroff: All that remains are a few foundations from the buildings. Perhaps one was the school that they worked so hard to build for their children. Supposedly the ruins of the fallen cistern are still there somewhere far from the dirt road, although I have yet to find them.

Moret: There is an overwhelming sense in the show of hope and optimism. While Clarion failed as a sustainable colony unable to provide resources or adequate shelter for its inhabitants, it succeeded because of its undying effort to exist in the first place. The message of the founders of Clarion resonates within contemporary hearts and minds- the notion of making something out of nothing, emitting optimism when the odds are against you.

Moret: Throughout your great grandfather’s narrative there is mention that Clarion was a Utopia. What is your definition of utopia?

Ayeroff: Utopia is by definition both good place and non-place. The word was formed by Thomas More from the Greek roots ou meaning “not,” or homophonically eu meaning “good”, and topos, which means “place”. Utopia is a paradox by definition. This paradox does not keep a utopian from trying for utopia. A utopian is stubborn and he rarely knows he is one. As one who inherited the utopian gene, I believe that knowing as much as I can about failed utopias will allow me to solve the problem presented in this paradox.

Moret: How do you think it may be different from your great-grandfather’s vision?

Ayeroff: I don’t think that Nathan had a concept of utopia. What he was doing was just his reality – making a better life. Either his optimism or his ego got the best of him, got the best of all of them – they thought the colony would succeed, that’s all they could think.

Moret: A Mylar sculpture titled If I Could Live Here, I would is positioned as though it is coming through the window near the room’s ceiling. What does the shape represent?

Ayeroff: If I Could Live Here, I Would, is based on the form of a cosmic dust particle.

Moret: What about the form of the dust particle resonates with you?

Ayeroff: If I Could Live Here, I Would is my utopia. I knew that if I were going to make a utopia it would need to follow the good place/non-place paradox in order for it to exist. Calvino calls for “a utopia of fine dust.” I call for a utopia of fine dust so infinitely small and distant that my eyes will never see it. A cosmic dust particle seemed a place as close to a non-place as possible. The word cosmos coming from the Greek word kosmos meaning “order” but also “ornament” or “decoration”, a cosmic dust particle is ordered like a city, beautifully perfect in form and infinitely small in existence.

Moret: The Mylar is stitched, correct?

Ayeroff: Yes, each piece of the reflective Mylar is folded and hand sewn into clusters that are then sewn together into the large form.

Moret: Just as your great grandfather and the folks of Clarion did two generations ago, you constructed your utopia with our own two hands.

Ayeroff: Labor is a meditation on the future.

Moret: I’m curious what inspired you to incorporate a scientific practice in your work. Do you feel that you work is commenting on the role that science plays in art?

Ayeroff: Number has always held a strong spiritual significance for me. Number is what we use to order the world. Numbers are a cosmos, an ordered system. While I was looking for cosmic dust particles, I found a mathematician, Georg Cantor, who developed set theory, examining the actuality of infinity. The Cantor ternary set is a basic fractal pattern – a line segment divided into three parts, the center segment removed and this pattern repeated to the remaining line segments infinitely. The initiator and the first three iterations of this pattern are cut away in the first of the c-prints. The second c-print is based on the 2-dimensional square version of this set, called the Sierpinski carpet which (synchronistically) when created in multiple dimensions is called Cantor dust. The third c-print is cut in the fractal pattern called the Sierpinksi triangle.

 


Installation view of Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff’s work in ICI Laboratory
Courtesy, ICI and the artists

 

Moret: The Mylar is also injected in three color C-prints. Exacting shapes employed of rectangle, square, and triangle. The photographs share a common subject- the foundation that you stand on in the film. The photographs are taken at varying distances and degrees. Does the triad suggest past, present, and future? How did you determine the perspective from which you would photograph the landscape?

Ayeroff: The number three indeed holds a strong relationship to past, present and future time but moreover, for me, it signifies the arc of a story – beginning, middle, end. Three is the perfect number. It is the sum of its parts. It holds great significance in many mystical practices. The body of work that I have worked on since the completion of this version of Clarion Calls is actually based around the triangle and the number three’s significance in spiritual and ritual practices and beliefs. In the instance of these three hand-cut C-prints each photograph moves you closer in space to the ruins. The first, I built a shanty and I lived there for three years, is a long shot of the foundation within its landscape. The most photographic information is visible in this piece; the least amount of information is cut away. In the second piece, by returning to the desert he discovers himself, more of the ruins are visible but more information is removed. The third, by returning to the desert he discovers himself, the photograph is shot so close that the ruins’ textures are visible yet in the cutting more information is removed than is present. This play between information present and information removed is like the passing of history down over generations. As it moves through space and time, specific information becomes clearer, more visible but simultaneously the gaps get larger. For me, all that was left to do was fill the holes with hope – the Mylar of my utopia restored some of that unyielding optimism to the ruins.

Moret: The Project Room has found images that may have once appeared in an elementary science classroom, illustrating the Dust Particle tacked to the wall.

Anna Ayeroff: The prints are made from scans of a filmstrip found at the ICI. While looking through the archive we happened upon (with great excitement) a filmstrip that spoke about cosmic dust.

Moret: There is also a telescope with an incision made at the end that reveals a small screen of the exhibition space in elapsed time.

Ayeroff: The telescope belongs to the ICI archive, the hole included. It is a glimpse at the passing of time, the changing of light, a hidden, momentary step into another dimension.

Moret: There is an inextricable link between the Project Room and the Exhibition Space, turning the ICI space into one of interpretation, a living, breathing organism where work is created and displayed.

Anna Ayeroff: The ICI is a world of its own. With this installation, we’ve simply blended a few worlds – the ICI, Clarion and our own cosmic utopia.

Moret: What are your hopes for the remaining visions in the series?

Ayeroff: I hope the next curators locate things in the archive I’ve never seen, or help me to see things I’ve seen everyday in a different way. I look forward to seeing the interaction with the public – more visits, more dialogue. Mostly though I look forward to watching other thinkers at play.

 
 
Seeing through, video in telescope found in the ICI archive
Courtesy, ICI and the artists


A native Angelino, Moret spends her days wandering art spaces and writing in Moleskine notebooks.  Her work has appeared in such publications as Art Works, ArtWeek, Art Ltd., Artillery, Art Scene, Flaunt, Flavorpill, For Your Art, THE, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. She also created her own magazine “One Mile Radius” with photographer Garet Field Sells that explores the effects that the urban environ of Los Angeles has on artists and their work.  To learn more visit www.byamoret.com

 

 

 

100/10∆1 Froebel Star Folding Workshop and “Listening”

please join us for a

FROEBEL STAR FOLDING WORKSHOP

&

LISTENING

with Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff

Saturday, February 26, 2011; 2-5pm

in the library

the Institute of Cultural Inquiry

reservations required

The Froebel star was designed by Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782-1852), the German educator who developed the concept of ‘kindergarten’ and the Froebel gifts and occupations which inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. As a child, the future architect played with Froebel blocks, “with the cube, the sphere and the triangle,” all of which remained “in his fingers” as he began to design his famous buildings. Fröbel’s building forms and movement games were also forerunners of abstract art, as well as a source of inspiration to the Bauhaus movement.
The star, made from folded strips of papers, is one of Froebel’s “occupations, “ used to help children recognize and appreciate the common patterns and forms found in nature. At the ICI, the act of folding a Froebel star becomes a cipher for creating a unique chronicle of our times. Please join us and help us write (and fold) a history of our world that is “hidden in plain sight.”
While folding, workshop participants will hear an unfolding of the history of failed utopian colony, Clarion, Utah. LISTENING with Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff is a collaboration based on Ayeroff’s installation “Clarion Calls,” on view as part of the first iteration of the ICI’s 100/10 project (100/10∆1: Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff).
Materials will be provided but we encourage you to bring unusual papers to the workshop. This workshop qualifies for researcher membership.

100/10∆1 Press Release

100/10∆1: Alex Harvey and Anna Ayeroff at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI)

January 31 – March 3, 2011
Hours: Thurs. – Sat.  12- 5 pm; by reservation via website

Reception: February 5th, 7-9 pm
Free to the public; suggested $5 donation

LOCATION:
1512 S. Robertson Blvd. , Los Angeles, CA 90035
(two blocks south of Pico); street parking available

 

[It’s wonderful] when you’re out there in the field and you’re first encountering marvelously strange natural adaptation. At first all you’ve got is a few disconnected pieces of raw observation, the sheerest glimpses, but you let your mind go, fantasizing the possible connections, projecting the most fanciful life cycles…later on, sure, you have to batten things down, contrive more rigorous hypotheses and the experiments through which to check them out, everything all clean and careful. But that first take — those first fantasies, those are the best.

– Tom Eisner –

As Tom Eisner the preeminent biologist and professor emeritus at Cornell hints in the above quotation, the scientist’s response to a “few disconnected pieces of raw observations” might be hard to distinguish from the preliminary work of the artist. At the same time, common wisdom tells us that this shared path quickly diverges when the “possible connections” that continue to flourish and find form in an artist’s artwork are batten down in science and subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific method. That is, until recently. In the last decade, especially with the advent of research-based studio art practices, the distinction between knowledge production in art and science has quickly eroded. Not only does the contemporary artist often borrow from the methodologies of science, but by integrating heretofore private and hidden research processes into the final artwork, the artist (sometimes unwittingly) exposes the extent to which the current art world, much like its ‘science world’ counterpart, rewards an institutionally sanctioned and legitimized knowledge.

Since its inception in 1991, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry has brought focus to the similarities and has questioned the accepted distinctions between the research processes of the arts and sciences. In this spirit, the ICI is pleased to announce the launch of an ambitious project: 100/10 (100 days/10 visions), which highlights the cross-disciplinary (or un-disciplinary) nature of knowledge production. Beginning January 31, 2011 and running for 100 consecutive (business) days, the ICI site and its archives will undergo a multitude of interpretations. Ten visual researchers—artists, writers, scientists, and other visual thinkers—will “play” with ideas that blend contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett, and a 2,500+ volume library along with the ‘small display spaces’ of the eclectic and historically layered ICI space. To facilitate this project and to increase the possibilities for inversion and trickster curatorial strategies, the ICI site has been reconfigured to include many of the “institutional” forms the organization has often railed against. Visitors will find a “white box gallery,” a dedicated and well-stocked gift shop, and a clearly labeled library. At the same time, visitors will still find the unique, non-traditional features of the ICI laboratory– a time clock (with its adjacent punch cards) that clicks off the time of another (unidentifiable) time zone, a turning carrier for fractured postcards and other ephemera that operate somewhere between clues and evidence, a tattered Ephemera Kabinett with its ambiguously labeled drawers and constantly changing content and the many nooks and crannies that hide ICI treasures in plain sight/site. As a counterpart to our new “clean-space” gallery, we have also created a studio that will become the “messy-space” laboratory for our curators to configure their unique trajectories within the ICI body. Modeled on the transparent workspaces of 19th century natural history museums, visitors to the ICI will be able to glimpse research “in process.”

With little time for curators to conceive of their vision (approx. two weeks), few of the display iterations (wherein “display” is conceived within the broadest definition to include catalogs, performances, screenings and tactical events) will be landing sites for well-thought out projects. We anticipate displays that bring together what Joseph Beuy’s called “nips at the heel” – ideas that, like a dog that wants to go outside to play, nag you until you can no longer ignore their urgency. Whether it is a recurring color, a series of linked words or sounds, synchronic events or random visions—these “nips” that might be spurred on or disrupted by the curator’s interaction with the ICI and its archive, will come together—as a new form, as an excavation, or maybe nothing more than an interpretation—and change the ongoing display. Each of the ten iterations will evolve along with and through the ideas from which they take their shape. As such, the displays will not merely represent but will enact the creative process. 100/10 is a spontaneous, malleable and constantly evolving ICI project that reflects the nature of ideas right at the moment they come into play.

For the premier iteration of this ten-part project, 100/10∆1, the ICI has invited and collaborated with curator Alex Harvey to bring a number of rich and complex ideas to the “table.” At the center of his vision is Anna Ayeroff’s installation, Clarion Calls, a research-based exploration that draws parallels between utopias and history- both of which are rooted in the paradox of being a ‘better’ and ‘non-existent’ place. The display includes prints, sculpture, film and an 80-slide slideshow from which we are given a fragmentary story about a failed Jewish colony with a resident who shares the artist’s last name. Does the personal story and its nostalgic retreat underpin all studies of history and its documents? Harvey throws light on the single question that continually haunts the ICI archive. Ayeroff’s answer comes in the form of a large Mylar sculpture that invades the ICI space through an open window. The artist employs the form of a cosmic dust particle to build her own utopian place, integrating her abstract drawings and sculpture into the visual history of Clarion. By utilizing the fractal patterns of this celestial form, the artist revitalizes her photographs of a ruined past. If the call of family apocrypha initially brought Ayeroff to Clarion, Utah (study documents from that Interpretive Field Project are included in the ICI display) her laborious and repetitive re-mappings create a clarion call to the infinite “better world” possibilities that once drove the builders of these ruins.

Harvey’s display illuminates the struggle between form and content that “troubles” any archive – be it a collection of stories, a chest of documents or an assortment of shapes we imagine might build a “perfect world.” A series of displays throughout the library and in other ICI “small spaces,” will engage visitors with Harvey’s complex and multi-layered ideas. Also on display is a print portfolio that includes lithographs by Ayeroff including prints made from filmstrips found in the ICI Ephemera Kabinett.

A unique catalog will accompany this show. Modeled on the New Museum’s catalog for its 2008 landmark exhibition After Nature, the document exists as a dustcover wrapped around a slightly used book of the curator’s choosing with images from the display scattered through its pages. For 100/10∆1, the book is Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. The catalog can be purchased through the ICI gift shop or online through the ICI website.

Visits to the ICI space are by reservation. A $5 fee is suggested but not required. Additional participants to the 100/10 project will be announced as they are selected.

100/10∆1 is the first project to be conceptualized within the ICI 2011-12 study theme of PHANTOM WORLDS—real and imagined worlds that double, mirror and reflect our own.

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Since 1991, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) has explored the role of visuality in imagining, perpetrating and perpetuating the intangible and ever-changing phenomena known as “culture.” The projects and activities of the ICI are concentrated in four main areas: Field work and Data Acquisition; Research and Analysis; Creative Manipulation and Production; Public Presentation and Publication. Favoring the messy toolbox over the latest tool, creative tinkering over the execution of a pre-made plan, the stories and lessons gleaned from the remains of material culture over strict adherence to du jour theory, the ICI offers artists and other culture producers an environment for collaborative, long-term projects with methods that rely not just on innovation but on excavation and renovation as well. Adopting the maxim: projects not programs, The ICI follows the timetable of ideas; it speaks only when it has something to say.

The ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. A newly instituted Residency Program offers a local artist or writer the opportunity to collaborate with the ICI to develop their work within the thematic focus of the organization. The ICI also maintains an active publishing program through ICI Press. The critically acclaimed Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald was released in 2007 and Barthes’ Tear, a meditation on the enduring influence of Roland’s Barthes’ Camera Lucida on contemporary theory is currently in production.

Purchase catalog for 100/10∆1.
Read more about the complete 100/10 project.