Anhoek-Marfa '09: When the Object is a Cannibal

Another excerpt from the daily course readings:
"I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal."

I will become a bit more streamlined here, as we are coming very close to the time of departure and I feel that much remains to be done to prepare.

Please know that we are being extremely flexible in our notions of Cannibal. Primarily, this class will be focusing on the devouring nature of colonialism and/or the aggressor and the objects it takes down with it. It will rise out of this position, to also figure in on the devoured's appetite reconstructed and active.

READING
The Manifesto Antropofago (1928)

A Politics of Tears: The Museum of Useless Efforts, Marfa, TX
Mary Walling Blackburn

WATCHING

Cannibal Girls Trailer (1973)
The Prelude The Gardenpath by Tracey Rose (2003)

LOOKING:

Bas Jan Ader THE ARTIST AS CONSUMER OF EXTREME COMFORT, 1968/2003

LISTENING: Please listen to the animal grunts on the audio track of Michelle Larcher de Brito playing tennis

Photograph by Julia Sherman
Painting on display at the US Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas

Anhoek-Marfa '09: Assigned Reading for the Chinati Fiedltrip

(An excerpt from the syllabus: the reading prompt for this field trip)

The below selections should encourage you to consider how the works at the Chinati Foundation continue to both survive and be extended into contemporary practice. The Hannah Wilke film and the Ana Mendieta works are intended to point towards the practices that existed next to Oldenberg and Andre at a certain moment. What happens when Mendieta and Wilke become part of the conversation about American Minimalism in the 1970's? What if we imagine them at Chinati? ( ed-What is we imagine Dia funding Nancy Holt to buy the ruins of a catskill resort, dedicated to her best pal artists, who just happen to be the best artists making Land Art at the time. Almost all of them are women. Her husband is included.)

READING: Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question)

Author(s): Boris Arvatov and Christina Kiaer
Source: October, Vol. 81 (Summer, 1997)

SEE (don't read):

Wilke's Rosebud (1976) (a beautiful example of minimalism and feminism dovetailing)

Singh, Freeman, and Lowe initially constructed Hello Meth Lab in the Sun (2007) for Ballroom Marfa.Think about it in relationship to the Ilya Kabakov's School No. 6 (1993) at Chinati


21 ANTHROPOMETRIC MODULES MADE FROM HUMAN FAECES BY THE PEOPLE OF SULABH INTERNATIONAL, INDIA (2007) Sierra references Judd's boxes and addends.


WATCH:
Ana Mendieta's graceful slide and the blood remain. Trauma is reduced to a brief gesture.
Mendieta was the wife of Carl Andre, whose work poems 1958-1972 is on display

AND

glance at the Puerto Rican Light (for Dan Flavin) again.

Allora and Calzadilla's 'tribute' to Flavin consists of a fluorescent tube powered by a generator that was charged in Puerto Rico and transported to New York City. When the generator runs out of juice the tube goes dark and stays dark. Puerto Rico, as an unincorporated territory of the United States it is subject to US jurisdiction and sovereignty but its citizens are not protected by the US constitution. They are at the whim of the US in regards to the allocation of resources and suffrage. For Dan.

Photograph by Julia Sherman

Anhoek-Marfa '09: 5 tours and a Fieldtrip

Our class visited the Chinati Foundation on Friday, June 5th, 2009. One student opted out half through the tour. She said something to the effect that she had her fill. Fill of what? There are a number of answers.

Some people in town asked: 'why even bring the class to Chinati?' There reasons were extremely personal. One woman explained herself: "Donald Judd was very rude to locals. He would not greet us on the street. Just walked on by." (Here street pleasantries are the norm.) Another woman felt protective of Chinati. It was a site of pilgrimage for her (vulnerable, sacred and beautiful) and she was afraid that the critical lens of our classroom would unnecessarily disrupt the space. Another claimed that it was the 'least interesting thing in the area. What about the border?' So many objections before we even crossed the threshold.

I had written about the racial ecology and the institutions that bound it for Afterall a year before in an article entitled "A Politic of Tears: The Museum of Useless Efforts. Marfa, TX." It seemed negligent to gather students here and not visit a site that clearly impacts the town, region, and arguably, has shaped contemporary art production. It seemed they needed to suss out for themselves the dimensions of what Chinati communicated and what it concealed in regards to the object, the viewer, the conservator, the curator, the janitor...and additionally: the legions of ghosts, ranging from the prisoners of war kept here during WWII to the senior citizens briefly housed here, from the stationed chemical brigade to the international artists in residents sequestered on the grounds, from the original troops brought to mediate Pancho Villa's border crossings to the locals who can see Chinati and have never been inside.

The students went inside. They went into the sheds which featured Donald Judd's boxes. There they seemed to be eking out the ruptures in what one student deemed 'the master narrative': One student was preoccupied with a dead spider, another took a photograph of a rubber bin left to collect leaking rain water. Yet, by the end of the course, two students had structured their final project around this visit to Chinati. As young artists, they would not hesitate to make space for themselves within a site that seemed already so bound to a specific demographic and time. Megan focused on the transfer of ownership: how could this be hers instead of theirs? Julia focused on a perversion of the tour: how could the existing narrative include her?

If we had more time in Marfa, I would have liked to have gone on five different tours throughout the duration of our class, each led by a different student, each time the work falling apart and recollecting itself again and again. It has those capabilities.

Photograph by Julia Sherman

Anhoek-Marfa '09: Digging Holes and Being Housed

Photographs by Julia Sherman

While in Marfa, the students were housed in a collection of restored air streams parked at El Cosmico, a hotel of sorts lodged between open road and the Border Patrol Headquarters. Liz Lambert, owner of El Cosmico, was on board with the experimental nature of Anhoek, and graciously offered to allow the students barter labor towards boarding costs.

They dug holes and planted trees.

After these morning chores at El Cosmico, students tended Sandra Harper's garden in exchange for vegetables they prepared together at night, perhaps in El Cosmico's outdoor kitchen.

I lived in a small house on the other side of the Border Patrol Headquarters and across from the obsolete Fort D.A. Russell. I left the students to themselves for the evenings. Students and teachers require a space where the performance of pupil and pedagogue is dispelled. In other words, if one person is in charge of ordering others' days, there must be a release from that system, no matter how dedicated to student-directed learning. Does this position miss out on a pedagogy forged in a shared teacher-student consumption of whiskey, bonfires, and slow dancing? This formula is workable in say a David Lee Roth sort of way. But if I was interested in a pedagogy based on the sense one might have of a musician, today I'll choose Karen Dalton, native american 60's folk singer. The Karen Dalton Method, if we just read the names of her slender discography at face value, would herald slowness (In My Own Time, 1971) and disloyalty to ideology (It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going To Love You the Best, 1969). It is hard to tell who's going to love you the best, author or sweetheart.

From where I slept, wrote and read, I could hear the Border Patrol's outside PA system broadcasting directives to BP who had left the building but hadn't yet hit the parking lot. The students were awash in these very same sounds: a specific set of directions, heard but not followed.

Nocturnal Field Trip to the Marfa Lights

In Marfa, Dan Flavin's light sculptures are prominently displayed in a number of buildings at the Chinati Foundation. In NYC, Allora and Calzadilla displayed its recontextualized primo in the form of" Puert Rican Light (for Dan Flavin)".

In Marfa, summer nights possess what feels to be an excess of light because the prairies/ranch lands retain the day's glow and foremost, are situated at the Western edge of a time zone. The Marfa Lights, a natural phenomenon, sometimes gather in the darkness, forming erratic patterns in a range of tones and intensities. A viewing center, designed by a Marfa high school class, suggests a reliable vantage point. But it is too bright now- lit up by the lamps in the restrooms- and some describe the benefits of the former empty dirt lot and its darkness.

The county next to us is the darkest county in the lower 48. The night sky glows brighter, there.

Light as a form that transgresses/embodies/ touches upon the spiritual, terrestrial, aesthetic, and monetary coalesce at our site.

Is their another reading we are missing out on? Is there another kind of flame in Marfa with another use and function- something that falls outside of the natural and cultural spectacles embodied in Flavin's lights and Marfa's lights? Is it just lovely or is there complications in its illumination? What light is missing? What is the sound of light? Is that a form to posses as well? Who pays for all of this light all of the time?


photograph by Julia Sherman (AH-Marfa,'09)