Category: Antoinette LaFarge

ICI Associate publishes new book

ICI Associate, Antoinette LaFarge, has written a new book on designer, Louise Brigham which will be released on December 16, 2019 (eBook release January 13, 2020). For presale orders and more information, please visit Palgrave.com.

From the Publisher:

During the Progressive Era, a time when the field of design was dominated almost entirely by men, a largely forgotten activist and teacher named Louise Brigham became a pioneer of sustainable furniture design. With her ingenious system for building inexpensive but sturdy “box furniture” out of recycled materials, she aimed to bring good design to the urban working class. As Antoinette LaFarge shows,Brigham forged a singular career for herself that embraced working in the American and European settlement movements, publishing a book of box furniture designs, running carpentry workshops in New York, and founding a company that offered some of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture in the United States. Her work was a resounding critique of capitalism’s waste and an assertion of new values in design—values that stand at the heart of today’s open and green design movements.

A Forger’s Life at the ICI

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Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life (DoppelHouse Press) is the gripping true story of the author’s father deemed “worthy of the best spy novels” (TED.com) and featured in the short documentary The Forger produced by The New York Times. The book traces Adolfo Kaminsky’s perilous double-life as a teenage forger for the French Resistance in World War II and, afterward, for numerous clandestine organizations. Adolfo Kaminsky helped save lives of people persecuted for their race, religion or beliefs for over 30 years, making documents to protect revolutionaries in Latin America, anti-colonial activists in Algeria and protesters in the May ’68 student rebellion. Because Adolfo Kaminsky worked professionally as a photographer, he was able to hide his forgery practice, and the book includes photos of his labs as well as artistic images from ‘40s–‘50s Paris.

On December 9, 2016 in the ICI Library, Sarah Kaminsky will read from the book and discuss art and forgery in a conversation led by Antoinette LaFarge and Lise Patt. The event begins at 6 pm with the conversation starting promptly at 6:30 pm. A book signing will immediately follow the discussion.

Please rsvp to the Institute at info@culturalinquiry.org.

Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life is published by Doppelhouse Press. Please join us and show your support for this exciting new publisher based in Los Angeles, a city traditionally rich with talented writers and woefully poor when it comes to publishing houses.

PRESS RELEASE: With Everything but the Monkey Head Iteration III

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

Iteration III: Antoinette LaFarge (June 20 – July 9)
Finissage: Saturday, July 9, 2016, 6 – 8 pm

The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) is pleased to announce the continuation 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 is 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.

The third iteration of the project will feature Antoinette LaFarge, a 2011 participant in the ICI’s 100/10/10 project (100 days/10 curators/10 artists). LaFarge 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 July 9, 2016 during which time she’ll share her ideas with the public.

Studio-based research, also known as practice-based research, research in the visual arts, and at times, visual research, as it has been called 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 ‘laboratory work’ 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 postpone theory, judgments, opinions, and conclusions about their own art, often delaying these considerations indefinitely but certainly while they work in the studio. It is to these researchers that the ICI has turned asking them to participate while they are actively engaged in 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 potential theory of studio-based research as it might exist in the studio through the slips, stutters and spasms of each researcher’s agrammatical process.

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This time around, the roles of happenstance, coincidence and serendipitous tangents within the research process take center stage as Antoinette LaFarge engages with the newly realized (yet wholly) unconscious influence of the letter ‘W’ throughout her practice as an artist, writer, and scholar. For LaFarge, whose 2011 Wikipedia-based project at the ICI was focused on Louise Brigham, a forgotten 20th century furniture designer who the researcher stumbled upon in a 100 year-old magazine in the ICI Ephemera collection, visual research breeds unexpected avenues of knowledge production. During this short residency she will conjure new ways of researching, writing, and building a virtual knowledge space into existence.

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 Associates in Performance

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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 Associates in Collaboration

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4 Hands ( A Suite) #1,
mixed media on paper 22 x 30 inches

Associates Antoinette LaFarge and Christel Dillbohner recently met at the Berkeley chapter of the ICI for an intensive residency called Seeing thru – Durchblicke schaffen.

They split their field research into two halves:

The first half explored possibilities for creating a modular system to generate figures and backgrounds without repetitive drawing. Using ink, paint, and acetate, they developed a variant on cell animation techniques.

The second half was a Gemeinschaftsbilder (collaborative drawing) workshop, during which they created four finished works on paper, one of which is shown here.

Searching for Sebald (Artist Edition)

The Limited Artist edition is an edition of 75 with 25 artist proofs. Suitcases are available as a premium to members and supporters who contribute to the Institute in the amount of $1,000 USD.

Each suitcase is a unique object with a name drawn from one of the many fictional or fictionalized historical figures in Sebald’s prose fictions. The valise houses a hardcover edition of Searching for Sebald along with 20 originals works of art by 20 artists or visual researchers. To purchase a suitcase or to see what suitcase ‘names’ are still available, please visit the ICI Gift Shop.

 

 

 

Curators: Lise Patt, Christel Dillbohner and Anna Ayeroff
Assistant curator: Lily Siegel
Project desgin:Lise Patt and Anna Ayeroff
Publisher: Institute of Cultural Inquiry
ISBN: 978-1-889917-13-9

 

Artist Contributors

  • Thomas Becker (Switzerland)
  • Suvan Geer (U.S.)
  • Antoinette LaFarge (U.S.)
  • Christel Dillbohner (U.S./Germany)
  • Deborah Paulsen (U.S.)
  • Terri Valli Trotter (U.S.)
  • Tris Vonna-Michell (Germany/U.K.)
  • Jo Todd (U.S.)
  • Melinda Smith Altshuler (U.S.)
  • Jeremy Millar (U.K.)
  • Tim Wright (U.K.)
  • Daniel Lash (U.S.)
  • Anne Flannery (U.S.)
  • ICI Research Team (U.S./U.K./Germany)
  • Pablo Helguera (U.S./Mexico)
  • Yolande Macias McKay (U.S.)
  • Chris Rochelle (U.S.)
  • Skuta (U.S./Iceland)
  • Axel Forrester (U.S./U.K.)
  • Sande Sisneros (U.S.)
  • Danny Redfern (U.S.)

 

 

100/10∆2 Press Release

100/10∆2: Antoinette LaFarge with Ruth Coppens: “Evidence of Evidence”

March 7-25, 2011
Hours: Thurs. – Sat.  12- 5 pm; by reservation via website

Reception: March 20th, 2-5 pm; Reading 3 pm. 
LaFarge reads selections from her research.
Free to the public; suggested $5 donation

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

 

For “Evidence of Evidence,” curators Antoinette LaFarge and Ruth Coppens probe the relationships between evidence, information and the archive as they unearth lost connections within the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s large body of eclectic holdings. Although researchers typically proceed with some idea of what they want to find out—a hypothesis to ask, a theory to test—LaFarge and Coppens have left it to the ICI archive to offer them a prompt. The nature of archival materials is to be presumptively evidential: but of what? “How do we walk the long road between origins and conclusions,” LaFarge asks, “to what extent do we derail ourselves and our successors by what we ourselves create and leave behind?” Documenting the process of excavation and its results, LaFarge and Coppens seize upon this residue to stir the archive’s memories, forge missing links and remember forgotten relationships.  The 100/10∆2 catalog, housing Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World, may be purchased in the ICI gift shop or through the ICI website. 

Antoinette LaFarge is an artist-writer engaged with mapping the terrain where deception, actuality, and enactment come into conflict with notions of authenticity and authority. Her areas of activity include mixed-reality performance, interactive installation, avatar improvisation, and fictive art. Recent projects include WISP (World-Integrated Social Proxy) (2010), Hangmen Also Die (2010), World of World (2009), and Playing the Rapture (2008-09). In the 1990s she founded one of the first net-based performance troupes, the Plaintext Players. She has co-curated two groundbreaking exhibitions on computer games and art: “SHIFT-CTRL” in 2000 and “ALT+CTRL” in 2003, both at UC Irvine, where she is Professor of Digital Media in the Studio Art department. Her projects website is www.forger.com, and her blog is www.artisallwehave.com.

Ruth Coppens is a writer of historically inflected fiction and poetry. Of Flemish descent, she grew up in Brussels and London before moving to the United States, where she now lives. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Liège in 2008 and then worked as a research asssistant for Veilinghuis Bernaerts (Antwerp) and Le Claire Kunsthandel (Hamburg). She has published her work in Versal, Thema, Palooka, and elsewhere and is presently working on a book of short writings, Meander.

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“Evidence of Evidence” is the second iteration of its ambitious project 100/10 (100 days/10 visions). Beginning January 31, 2011 and running for 100 consecutive days, the ICI site and its archives will undergo a multitude of interpretations. ICI has invited 10 visual researchers to set into play ideas that blend contemporary visual practices with aspects of the ICI Earth Cabinet, Ephemera Kabinett, and a 2,500+ volume library inside the eclectic and historically layered ICI space. With just two weeks to conceive of their vision, each curator will conceptualize a new trajectory through the ICI’s corpus, transforming the ICI display by the end of their residency.

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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 ICI sponsors displays, symposia, workshops, performances and provides numerous opportunities for both the artist fabricator and the curious spectator of visual culture. The non-profit organization also maintains an active publishing program, releasing the critically acclaimed Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald in 2007. 100/10 is the first project conceptualized within the 2011-12 ICI study theme of Phantom Worlds.

Purchase catalog for 100/10∆2.
Read more about the complete 100/10 project.