[-empyre-] abstraction an multiple possiibilities

Sat Apr 27 00:27:08 AEST 2019

Just wanted to share my story about Carolee Schneeman, as I have been so moved by what others have presented:

When I was an undergraduate student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, many years ago, in the mid 1990s, somebody managed to organize a visit from Carolee Schneeman.  It’s hard to describe the wave of excitement that rippled through the art scene in that little city by the sea.  This was the mother of performance art!  For us it was like Lady Gaga and Beyonce and Glen Close and Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid’s Tale were all converging into one great, stern being, and she was descending upon us. And we would array ourselves before her like gems on velvet.  We hoped.  We hoped we would shine like that. I hoped, fiercely.

She spoke twice, first at the Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery and then again in the big auditorium at my school.  I went to both talks.  This was a person I had patterned myself after—strong, with a reputation for spotlight-seeking, and best of all, a way to achieve sanction for seeking that light.  It was what I wanted too.  I was so resentful then of the way that the spotlight was ceded to boys without question, while as a girl I felt accused of neediness for wanting the same thing.  There was something ugly, appetite-riddled, when a girl wanted the spotlight.  For boys it wasn’t even a thing, the wanting.  They just strode in.

But there was Schneeman, earning it.  Refusing to shirk the mantle, to shy or shimmy out of it.  Refusing to be coy about her place there.  Demanding and rigourous and militant and blazing glory!  In my hometown!

Not only that, she also liked cats.  I myself was cat-mad.

My practice then was telling lies persuasively.  I told one about the curator from a local gallery getting a long shard of wood lodged in her eye and having to leave it there because to remove it would damage the eye further, so attending openings with the spear jutting out, surrounded by a donut-bandage.  Another one was about attending a fancy cat show at the civic center.  I had photographs.  They came from a book I had of cat breeds.  I’d rephotographed them on the copy stand at school.

When Schneeman spoke at the gallery, I approached her afterwards and told an incredibly improbable tale about my cat, Turbine, finding an injured baby bird at the base of a tree across the street from my house and bringing it to me in her mouth unharmed.  She carried it, I told her, like a little egg.  Schneeman seemed at first skeptical, but then delighted.  She allowed herself to be carried away by the image of this white cat gleaming in the light, carrying a bird in its mouth like an egg.

When she spoke at the auditorium at my school, she spotted me in the crowd and after her talk she called me up to the mic.  She asked me to tell the assembled students and faculty about my cat, the bird.  She reminded me to tell the part about the egg.

I felt like I’d been knighted.  I felt seen.  I felt the heat of the spotlight on my shoulders, and god, it felt great.

I wouldn’t be the artist I am if it weren’t for that visit.  She was an idol and she showed me kindness.  She knew I was lying, this scrappy, star-struck art-school girl with a story, but she gave me what I hungered for.  She put me before an audience.  It was an act of sheer generosity.  She could have shut me down.  She could have been indifferent.  But she saw my appetite and thought “That’s good,  She should be hungry.  She should be hungry and she should get dinner.”  She nourished me.

Such a tiny moment, but with such a great effect for me.  How many times did she do this?  How many of us are there, I wonder, fed from her hand like this?

If people are interested in taking a look at what I do, this is my most recent work, finished just last month.

It’s called You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born.

https://vimeo.com/311950513

password: lenore

Emily Vey Duke
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Associate Professor | Department of Transmedia | Syracuse University
________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Rachel Fein-Smolinski <rfeinsmo at syr.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2019 6:38:51 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] abstraction an multiple possiibilities

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
First of all, I want to thank Renate for the invite to participate in this discussion. I am humbled to be privy to such thoughtful dialogue that intersects with the work that I make.

As an artist raised in Buffalo, NY, Renate’s earlier mention of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Squeaky Wheel moved me. I was raised going to openings at Hallwalls, processing super 8 in the basement of Squeaky Wheel as a 13 year old intern, and spending summers through the New York State Summer School of the Arts at Ithaca College learning from Ghen Dennis, and Tania Palacios. I moved to San Francisco to go to art school when I was 17, and then back East to Syracuse, NY for graduate school in the Transmedia Dept. at Syracuse University where I now teach.

I make installations that include videos, photographs, and objects about courage and pain using bio-medical imagery. I integrate appropriated materials from hospital archives into my work, and use the sci-fi format to explore pain, sex, power, and neuroses through the lens of science.

I have been thinking about being queer, and femme, and sick in the context of this conversation. I have a lot of thoughts that I want to expand upon about influence, but for now I want to say that I’m thankful for the link to Barbra Hammer’s performance/lecture at the Whitney The Art of Dying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMeoAx9dZkI, and last Sunday, I sat in a library, with the intention of doing some work with her voice playing in the background. I ended up raptly watching the lecture twice through and openly weeping. How vital it is to feel validated by the affective presence of others. The privilege of the intimacy of the public utterance of the phrase “I love you with all my heart.” This stunning metaphorical organ.

I have been remiss in writing as I have been preparing an installation for a group show honoring the recipients of a Wynn Newhouse Award for artists who have disabilities: https://www.wnewhouseawards.com/Pages/Awards.html

The works of the other five recipients feel particularly relevant to the use of the body within the history of feminist interventions on public understandings of subjective experiences.

I also wanted to share my most recent video Referred Pain: https://vimeo.com/323993856, shown as part of the Video in America exhibition at The Everson, another CNY institution Renate mentioned: https://www.everson.org/explore/current-exhibitions/archives-video-america

I look forward to talking more about my relationship to the work of these four incredible artists.

_____________________________

Rachel Fein-Smolinski
Digital Services Coordinator
Light Work

316 Waverly Avenue, Syracuse, NY 13244
lightwork.org

________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2019 8:43:51 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] abstraction an multiple possiibilities

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
For those of you who happen to be in the Central New York area today, I invite you to join us today, Thursday, at 4:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Hall for an event to pay homage to the late filmmaker Agnès Varda. A free screening of Varda's La Pointe courte will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring Laurent Dubreuil, Claire Ménard, Tim Murray, and Marie-Claire Vallois.

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853

On 4/17/19, 12:59 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
    Interesting video featuring Barbara Hammer on Art Forum

    https://www.artforum.com/video/excerpts-from-an-interview-with-barbara-hammer-71388

    Living within abstraction and multiple possibilities.

    Renate Ferro
    Visiting Associate Professor
    Director of Undergraduate Studies
    Department of Art
    Tjaden Hall 306
    rferro at cornell.edu

    _______________________________________________
    empyre forum
    empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
    http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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