[-empyre-] Introducing Amanda McDonald Crowley and Jeannette
Ingberman
Jeanette Ingberman
jeanette at exitart.org
Thu Apr 24 22:15:21 EST 2008
Thank you for the invitation to post to this list and the opportunity
to address this international group of thinkers.
I would be particularly interested in learning and sharing how we can
present these ideas, works of art, the artists involved, in a physical
space like our galleries as well as alternative involvements to what I
see is an enormous public that is very interested and committed.
Exit Art is committing resources of time, space and funds to create a
major new initiative SEA (social environmental aesthetics) that will
address issues of the environment through exhibitions, performances,
panels and a permanent archive. SEA will assemble artists, activists,
scientists and scholars to address environmental issues through
presentations of visual art, performances, panels and lecture series
that will communicate international activities concerning
environmental and social activism. SEA will occupy a permanent space
in Exit Underground, a 3000 square-foot, multi-media performance, film
and exhibition venue underneath Exit Art’s main gallery space. The Sea
archive will be a permanent archive of information, images and videos
that will be a continuous source for upcoming exhibitions and projects.
It was so curious that although Amanda and I know each other and talk,
and our organizations Exit Art and Eyebeam are only blocks apart in
New York, we came up with similar ideas to investigate, the
presentations are different, but we didn't know it, till they were
well under way, so now we have begun talking and sharing and hopefully
in the future will work together on some projects. So much for
communication!
The first project of SEA just recently opened, EPA (environmental
performance actions) which is an exhibition, or maybe more accurately
an archive of information, surveying recent performance work from
around the world that addresses current environmental crises
consisting of videos, photographs, texts, related ephemera and a film
program documenting recent performances. For this opening project we
invited curator, Amy Lipton, and founder/co-curator Patricia Watts of
ecoartspace, a leading international environmental arts organization,
to collaborate with Exit Art. Ironically the impulse for the show was
the incredible action by the activist Julia Butterfly who lived in a
1000 year old redwood tree, to prevent it from being cut down. I won't
go into great detail about the show, that is on our website. But it is
very interesting to us that people stay for hours and read and watch
and ask us questions. All this work will become part of an 'archive'
at Exit Art that will be available to the public for research at Exit
Art and in the future an online database. FUture projects include The
End of Oil, Environmental Paintings, etc.
Amanda's question: In this last week of discussion around "wired
sustainability" I'd like to see us address how we feel about being
techno-evangelists who care about the environment. What does it mean
for us, as a community, to be ardent users and promoters of technology
while at the same time, trying to take care to have a low (eco)
footprint on the planet? is very much something we are also thinking
about. We recently acquired 2 acres of land in the rainforest of
Puerto Rico, El Yunque, and my partner, artist Papo Colo, wants to
establish an 'artists healing retreat' , not a residency, where you
come for one week to be healed. We are working with people to set up
an environment that will be 'off the grid', to give artists and others
the opportunity to be in this environment, we are still at the very
beginning stages of this.
As a cultural center, I hope to take some of the ideas we discuss here
and put into practice in our space. For me the ultimate goal is to get
this information to the public, however we do that.
Jeanette
_______________
Jeanette Ingberman
Co-Founder/Director
EXIT ART
475 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
212 966 7745 x11
http://www.exitart.org
On Apr 24, 2008, at 12:05 AM, amanda mcdonald crowley wrote:
> Hi all and thanks Renate and Tim for the opportunity to participate.
>
> In my brief intro, I mentioned that I am a lurker on a lot of media,
> technology and culture related lists, which have included [-empyre-]
> pretty much since its inception, so its kinda fun to be forced out
> of the closet in this way :) I have to admit that Christina McPhee
> also attempted this a while back with less success than you guys, so
> here we go...
>
> The timeliness of the invitation as it related to Eyebeam's Feedback
> exhibition was obviously the draw. It has been really inspiring to
> see this discussion kicked off by Renate and Tim in collaboration
> with Britta and Rebecca, who were exhibiting in the Feedback show,
> and to have included Stephanie Rothenberg, who with Jeff Crouse,
> presented their Invisible Threads project at Eyebeam this month.
>
> For Eyebeam, as we were developing the Feedback show, it was really
> important that we not do yet another eco-art exhibition. With
> Feedback we attempted to inspire both artists and their audiences to
> action. The show was curated by a research group that has been
> meeting at Eyebeam for about 20 months now. In fact Rebecca Bray
> was the facilitator of that group from the get-go. And Feedback was
> umbrella'd under the theme "Beyond Light Bulbs" developed by our
> sustainability research group -- the premise being that once we had
> changed our light-bulbs to carbon fluorescents what do we do next?
> Affecting policy change, not just personal action, was an aim of the
> show.
>
> But we also now have an emerging (un)sustainable research group at
> Eyebeam. The questions being posed there are around the
> (ir)relevance of thinking "green". Where is the punk work when we
> are all being so serious about the environmental issues that we are
> currently facing? Where is the discussion about the fact that energy
> exists aplenty, it is just poorly distributed? And in America, where
> we work from, how to we begin to dissect the *extreme* industry that
> is emerging around the green movement? Here, Green Consumerism (a
> shockingly apt oxymoron) is in the process of becoming a core
> industry.
>
> In this last week of discussion around "wired sustainability" I'd
> like to see us address how we feel about being techno-evangelists
> who care about the environment. What does it mean for us, as a
> community, to be ardent users and promoters of technology while at
> the same time, trying to take care to have a low (eco) footprint on
> the planet?
>
> So now I am going off to cook food -- all locally sourced -- and
> turn my computer off, for a while.
>
> Looking forward to connecting with you all, once I have eaten, to
> talk about projects that address these issues and to see if we can
> find a way to move forward after this discussion.
>
> Amanda
>
>
> --
> Amanda McDonald Crowley
> executive director
>
> EYEBEAM
> 540 W. 21st Street
> New York, NY 10011, USA
> T +1 - 212.937.6580 x223
> F +1 - 212.937.6582
> amc at eyebeam.org
> www.eyebeam.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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