Proteus Gowanus » presentation

Utopian Strategies:

Diane — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:38:11 +0000

Artists Anticipate Their Audiences

Saturday, March 26 at 7 pm

Artists are increasingly engaged in dialogues about how artworks, performances, interventions, and events relate to their audiences and how their audiences interact with their work.

In this intimate conversation with Janine Antoni, Ernesto Pujol, and Paul Ramirez Jonas, all of whom engage the public sphere in different and unique ways, writer and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts Carol Becker will ask these artists to discuss their practice—what influences their endeavors, what is their thinking before they begin to make the work, what do they imagine their audiences will experience as they participate, where does the work end, and what micro-utopian moments do they hope to spark in the intentional and unintentional communities the work creates?

$5 admission
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Carol Becker is a Professor and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia. She is the author of several books. Her latest is Thinking in Place: Art, Action and Cultural Production.

Janine Antoni is a visual artist whose artwork engages the viewer on a profoundly physical level often using her own body in relationship to extreme process and unusual materials.
She engages the body as it is culturally defined, often in terms of gender and identity.

Paul Ramirez Jonas is a contemporary artist whose work currently explores the potential between artist, artwork and public. Except for a 3 year hiatus, he has always worked within sight of the Gowanus canal.

Ernesto Pujol works as a site-specific performance artist and social choreographer. Pujol is interested in taking durational group performances as public art to culturally underserved communities, particularly in the Midwest and the West, creating portraits of peoples, places, and their issues. The artist is teaching at Parsons The New School this spring. He is the founder and director of The Field School Project and the UteHaus performance interdisciplinary group.

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What Happened

Paradise and Destiny:

Diane — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:02:23 +0000

The Fate of Four Georgian Modern Artists

Thursday, March 10 at 7 pm

Artist Vladimir (Lado) Pochkhua will show rare images of Georgian art from his collection of slides, and discuss the Republic of Georgia’s utopian moment of freedom from May 1918 to February 1921 before the country was annexed by the Soviet Union.

A geographical paradise located in the Caucasus Mountains,Georgia is believed to be the land from which Jason stole the Golden Fleece. The country’s brief independence allowed the nation to formulate a modern Georgian self-image. By 1918, there were many creative unions, and an opportunity to bring together artists, writers, and poets; by 1921 Georgian artists were living in Europe as an active part of the international modern art scene. Then destiny stepped in.

This talk will present four Georgian artists, combining a discussion of visual movements rarely seen, and the linkages between politics and art in the 20th century Soviet Union.

$5 admission
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Vladimir Pochkhua was born in Sukhumi, Georgia in 1970. He graduated from the Sukhumi College of Art in 1994 and the Tbilisi Academy of Art in 2001. He has had personal exhibitions in TMS Gallery and Old Gallery in Tbilisi, and has participated in major group exhibitions, including in the Georgian Embassy in London, UNESCO in Paris, and in the Tbilisi History Museum (Carvasla) and the National Gallery of Art. He has participated in art projects in Russia, Azerbaijan, and Hungary. He currently resides in New York.

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What Happened

Cyborg Paradise

Diane — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:42:04 +0000

Monday, February 25 at 8pm

Cyborg Paradise, a talk with designer-theorist Tom Klinkowstein will explore a future that seems like a utopian paradise for some and for others, sounds more like hell: the cyborgization of humankind. Tom asks, “When we forget our smartphone we feel less smart, giving rise to the question: Has the once speculative fusion of man and machine already happened?”

Tom Klinkowstein’s diagrammatic narrative, “A Day In The Life Of A Networked Designer’s Smart Things Or A Day In A Designer’s Networked Smart Things, 2030” is currently on exhibit in Paradise 2. In his lecture, he will guide the audience through his nine-foot long diagram (it takes an hour and forty minutes to read through), exploring the prospects for the realization of that cyborg “paradise” known as “The Singularity”, when mankind and computerkind merge to create a new superbeing. Do we look forward to the day when blood cell-sized super computers implanted in the brain offer eternal life? Tom does and thinks it could occur within this century! His presentation, illustrated with a fascinatingly eclectic slide show, will be followed by discussion with the audience and more wine and socializing into the night.

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Tom Klinkowstein, President of Media A, has spoken to over 100 business, design and educational groups, including the World Summit on the Information Society conference sponsored by the United Nations, the Doors of Perception design conference in Amsterdam and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. Mr. Klinkowstein is a Professor at Hofstra University, an Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute, and formerly taught at the Hogeschool West-Brabant (West Brabant Art and Design College), in The Netherlands. His work has been exhibited at the AIGA gallery in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Venice Biennale in Italy and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, among others.

No Longer in Paradise: Co-creating Freedom

Diane — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:26:54 +0000

Friday, January 21 at 8pm

Writer, theorist, and media artist Svetlana Boym, argues in her most recent book, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea that since “Fortunately, paradise has already been lost”, the time has come to co-create freedom in this world. Boym, Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, will speak and show slides at Proteus Gowanus, exploring the idea and experience of freedom in politics and arts across cultures suggesting that our attempts to imagine freedom should be more adventurous, occupying the space not only of “what is” but also “what if.”

Boym proposes a new vocabulary for the experience of freedom, conceived as co-creation in the public world and as an adventure in judging, acting and thinking that is open to paradigm shifts as well as change of hearts and minds. Boym’s central questions point to the paradoxes of freedom: What, if anything, must we be certain of in order to tolerate the measure of uncertainty in our contemporary existence? How much common ground or shared trust is needed to allow for the uncommon experiences of freedom? Can they be transported across national borders?

Boym will also show slides of her own work as an artist and open the floor to general discussion following her presentation.

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Svetlana Boym, writer, theorist and media artist, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard. Native of St. Petersburg, Russia, she now lives and works in Boston, USA. Boym is the author of several books including The Future of Nostalgia (2001); Ninochka: a Novel, (2003), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (with photographer Adam Bartos) and Death in Quotation Marks (1991). In her work she explores the relationship between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, homesickness and sickness of home.