#Emily Pethick

[antronaut]

The Artist As Producer, Quarry, Thread, Director, Writer, Orchestrator, Ethnographer, Choreographer, Poet, Archivist, Forger, Curator, and Many Other Things First.

[jobinterviewghost]

Another brilliant career

Kathleen Ussher (1891–1983), illustrator, writer, public servant

Kathleen Ussher’s story of reinvention stretches across much of the twentieth century. She was, at various times, an illustrator, author, civil servant, hospital orderly and Hollywood journalist. Her career took her into literary and cultural circles, connecting her to a generation of successful Australian women, some of whom became prominent historical figures. Most, though, including Ussher herself, have largely disappeared from the historical record.

Florence Emily Kathleen Ussher was born on 19 August 1891 at New Farm in Brisbane. She came from an adventurous family: her father, Captain James Ussher, was a Torres Strait pilot, helping navigate ships through the reefs, and her mother, Florence Eleanor Ussher, escaped the Great Flood of 1893 with Kathleen in one arm and Kathleen’s older sister, Lorna, in the other. The family left Brisbane not long after the flood, and Kathleen was raised primarily in Sydney.

There, from 1901 to 1907, she attended Shirley, a demonstration and training school for girls. Founded by Margaret Hodge and Harriet Newcomb, it aimed to “give the pupils an education which shall develop individual power.” Kathleen epitomised those goals, excelling in French, captaining the swimming team, and becoming school librarian. After Kathleen’s father died unexpectedly on Thursday Island in 1904, Florence Ussher supported her daughters’ careers unconditionally, encouraging them to pursue the interests that would later take them across the world.

After leaving school, Kathleen briefly joined the public service as a shorthand writer and typist, while continuing to attend drawing classes at night. During this period, her mother and sister moved to Leipzig, Germany, for Lorna to attend the Royal Conservatory of Music. Kathleen joined them in 1912, briefly studying at the city’s Royal Academy of Book Illustration before leaving for London in 1913 to pursue art at Goldsmiths College.

In 1914, she joined Hodge — the former head of Shirley — and Dorothy Pethick on their lecture tour to North America, where they served as unofficial representatives for the Australian women’s suffrage movement. After their arrival in New York in late March, she acted as secretary and press correspondent for Hodge as they visited New York, Chicago and Toronto. Following the tour, she began studying book illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago.

As the first world war continued, Ussher paused her studies and, in May 1915, left for London, where she became embedded in the war effort. During the day she worked with the Royal Australian Navy as a secretary, organising the paperwork for the construction of the HMAS Adelaide; in the evenings she volunteered with the Women’s Reserve Ambulance; on weekends she worked in munitions factories. “Kath’s patriotism,” wrote her friend Miles Franklin, “leads her to go and make munitions on Sundays for a most unpatriotically low wage after working all the week doing a man’s work, for which she is also paid less than a man and jealously kept from expansion.”

In mid 1917 Ussher joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals alongside Franklin and another friend, Nell Malone (also profiled in this collection). The enduring friendship between these three women is chronicled in Ross Davies’s book Three Brilliant Careers (2015). Ussher and Malone both served with the Girton and Newnham Unit — named after two women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge — of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Salonika. Ishobel Ross, another of the Scottish Women, described Salonika as “a most exciting place,” crowded with white houses with Venetian shutters, small stalls spilling out into the streets, and soldiers of every nationality. With their grey uniforms, Scottish Women became affectionately known to their patients as “little grey partridges.” New arrivals soon shortened their skirts to move through the wards. Staff were to call one another by their surnames, although an exception was made for Ethel Hore.

One of Kathleen Ussher’s illustrations — captioned “When the Navy withdrew to a dry place at sea” — from “War Wanderings of an Aussie Girl,” a chronicle of her adventures published in Aussie magazine in February 1921. Australian War Memorial

In 1918, after finishing her term with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Ussher applied to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service, popularly known as the Wrens. She accepted an offer of a transfer to Gibraltar, making her one of the first Wrens to be sent on active service. This reflected something of a family tradition: in addition to her father being a sea captain, her great-great-uncle, Admiral Sir Thomas Ussher, had escorted Napoleon to the island of Elba.

Following her return to Australia, Ussher served as secretary of the Ex-Service Women’s Club while continuing to pursue her interest in art. In 1921, she designed a postcard for the Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers promoting a proposed memorial drinking fountain at the wharf gates at Woolloomooloo. That same year, she also took part in an exhibition of “cabinet pictures and craftwork” organised by the Society of Women Painters, alongside Australian female artists including Hilda Rix Nicholas, Hedley Parsons and Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge. In 1925, she provided the illustrations for Gum-trees, a collection of seven Australian songs.

Ussher’s attention returned to North America, and she joined her mother and sister in Southern California, where she reinvented herself again, working as a Hollywood journalist with a regular byline in the Sydney Mail. Although her column, “Behind the Silver Sheet,” became widely known after she interviewed the popular American actor Mary Pickford, Ussher focused mainly on the rising careers of Australians in Hollywood. She kept her readers in Sydney informed about the activities of then-familiar actors like Louise Lovely, Mae Busch and Snowy Baker. She continued to interview screen stars throughout the decade, but broadened her scope to include Australian novelists and other subjects after she moved to London sometime before 1930. This expansion included a 1931 profile of Henry Handel Richardson — the pen name of Ethel Florence Richardson — which sparked an enduring literary friendship between the women.

Alongside her journalistic career, Ussher began to publish her own books. These included The Cities of Australia, her contribution to “The Outward Bound Library,” in 1928, and Hail Victoria!, a centenary retrospective, in 1934. Both were well received, although a critic did suggest that “possibly her enthusiasms have led her to place our cities on a rather higher plane than is entirely just.”

The latter stages of Ussher’s life are less clear. Following the second world war, she worked in London in the reference library of the Central Office of Information, the successor to the Ministry of Information. She was then appointed to the organisation planning the Festival of Britain, the national exhibition and fair that extended across the United Kingdom in 1951. She remained in England for the rest of her life.

Kathleen Ussher died in England in 1983, aged ninety-two, after a life spent promoting Australian interests around the world and supporting others, particularly other Australian women. Her varied career is best described in her own words, describing her wartime service in London: “Well, you felt like you were doing your bit. That is all there was to it.” •

Further reading

Three Brilliant Careers, by Ross Davies, Boolarong Press, 2015

Her Brilliant Career: The Life of Stella Miles Franklin, by Jill Roe, HarperCollins, 2008

A History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, by Eva Shaw McLaren, Hodder and Stoughton, 1919

The post Another brilliant career appeared first on Inside Story.

[worldfoodbooks]

BACK IN THE BOOKSHOP: STEPHEN WILLATS - CONTROL - WORK 1962-1969 This is the first survey of work by Stephen Willats from the sixties. Willats (born and lives in London) was introduced to art as a teenage gallery assistant in 1958 and by 1962 was producing advanced artwork. He embraced the transdiscipli­n­arity of the time, juggling the roles of social scientist, engineer, designer and artist, and developed an art about social interaction, using models derived from cybernetics, the hybrid post-war science of communication. As well as the clothing and furniture made in 1965 when he briefly described himself as a ‘conceptual designer’, Willats’ earliest sculptural series of ‘Manual Variables’ is haptic and interactive. These will be shown alongside early issues of Control, the still-operating magazine he founded in the same period. Its title is a provocation, invoking the cybernetic idea that people can take control of their environments, thereby deflecting the controls of a dominant hierarchy. In 1968 Willats made an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in which he presented constructions involving movement and light – some wall-mounted, others large-scale environments – that were informed by his interest in contemporary theories: about probability and prediction, behavioural science, subliminal advertising, and colour in relation to motivation and learning. The display of these at Raven Row will be based on the darkened maze in which they were installed at Oxford, where they were proposed as experimental stimuli for ‘states of consciousness’. Willats’ works on paper from this period elegantly combine cybernetic modelling, architectural graphics and constructivist geometries, and are consistent with his practice of today. However, he abandoned his dynamic constructions at the end of the sixties in pursuit of an art of social interaction beyond gallery and art object, for which he became well-known. This exhibition reconvenes this earlier work for the first time. With texts by Antony Hudek, Emily Pethick, Christabel Stewart and Andrew Wilson. Available via our website and in the bookshop. #worldfoodbooks #stephenwillats #control #ravenrow (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[syafiatudina]

What to Unlearn from Art Organization (2018)

Essay for Annette Krauss’s work in Shapes of Knowledge exhibition publication for Monash University Museum of Art

Part 1: The Double Binds of Cleaning, from Collective Empowerment to a Form of Mobilised Labour 

I would like to start this text by recalling a conversation that I had with friends and colleagues – including Antariksa, Brigitta Isabella and Ferdiansyah Thajib (KUNCI, Yogyakarta), Binna Choi (Casco Art Institute, Utrecht) and Emily Pethick (then director of The Showroom, London) – at a public event in January 2015 at KUNCI’s office. The conversation was transcribed into a text entitled ‘Toilet Tissue and Other Formless Organisational Matters’. In this conversation, we were talking about the organisational practices of different institutions and their relations to common struggles, such as the fights against capitalism, patriarchy, normativeness and inequality, or the struggle for commons. As goofy as the title might seem, it came from my complaint about how often I had to buy toilet paper for the KUNCI office and how I wish I could have done more ‘productive’ work instead of buying toilet paper. 

This event was announced publicly with the title ‘Curating Organisations (Without) Form’. For the announcement, we used an image of the Casco team emptying few buckets of dirty water in front of Casco office, as part of a collective exercise which the Casco team did with Annette Krauss as part of the project Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation). Later I would learn that this collective cleaning exercise is aiming to unlearn organisational practices, so that participants can see how reproductive labour is undervalued and the inequalities in the division of labour – including how reproductive labour is always the last priority in an institutional setting.

However, when I first saw this image my memory turned to my elementary school days. I went to an elementary public school in West Java, Indonesia. The total number of students, from first to sixth grade, was five hundred, yet the school had only nine classes, so we had to take turns in using the classroom by splitting the school into morning and afternoon classes. The morning classes were for first, second, and sixth graders, while the afternoon classes were for third, fourth, and fifth graders. It was the responsibility for the morning classes, especially the sixth graders, to clean the classrooms before school started. The teacher would always remind us that it was our duty as students to take care of the school, as much as we would take care our own houses. It was our shared responsibility to take care our house: the school. Another reason was that because the school could only employ one person as the school caretaker, we should help him as well.

In my assigned day to clean, I would come to the school early with two of my friends. We would clean our class before the lessons started. Sometimes I brought cleaning products from home to clean the class. After mopping the floor, we would throw the remaining dirty water in front of our classroom. The reason was because my school had an odd plumbing system. The school building was in a shape of a square with classrooms facing of each other, a garden in the centre and a gutter surrounding it. The dirty water from class-cleaning sessions would be disposed of in the gutter. Since the gutter was located in the centre of the building, everyone could see when someone had disposed of the dirty water.

Ever since I graduated from this elementary school, I have never done any cleaning task in school. I continued my study from middle to high school in a private Catholic education institution. This school was more expensive than my elementary school, and employed more than twenty workers to clean around thirty classes. The student’s task was only to study and to be polite with the school workers. 

The maintenance of the school is the job of the workers, not the students. Without being aware of it, at that moment I entered an institutional setting where the division of labour was firmly implemented. Work is not only a definition of what we have done but becomes how we identify ourselves and each other. The social identification based on work even goes further – to spatial arrangements. The students could be easily seen everywhere around the school buildings, while the cleaners had their own areas. The cleaners tried to make themselves invisible. No one saw the cleaners while they were emptying the buckets of dirty water. Cleaning is work that is kept out of public eye.

Cleaning is part of the unlearning exercise which was developed by Annette Krauss and the team at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, a mid-scale contemporary art organisation in Utrecht, The Netherlands, for the project Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation). The project comes from the shared pursuit to unlearn institutional habits through an investigation into the schemes of productivity that drive art organisations.

As part of the exercise, every Monday the Casco team members clean the office together. From their reflection upon this exercise, the team felt the power of cleaning together as collective effort. It was important to do cleaning together, instead of delegating this labour to interns or outsourced labourers, as a way to study reproductive labour in an art institution setting.

In comparison, in my elementary school experience, cleaning was framed as part of the student responsibility partly because the school decided to employ only one person as the cleaner for the whole building. The student’s collective effort was mobilised and used by the school to avoid spending funds on an additional cleaner’s salary. To clean the school together was also framed as an exercise of gotong royong, a form of mobilising labour through discourse and collective work. Gotong royong, which can be translated as ‘mutual assistance’, was and still is being promoted as part of Indonesia’s identity. It takes many forms, from collective kitchens to self-organised processes of building houses, although, as anthropologist John R. Bowen has mentioned, in certain forms of gotong royong, the mutual assistance of members of the community can start to feel like unpaid labour. For example, the repairing of a drainage system in a neighbourhood could appear as ‘assistance’ but begins to resemble corvée when it is commandeered by a local official for the construction of a district road. 

A few years ago, on a main road in Jogja, I saw a public-service billboard announcing: ‘Mari gotong royong membayar pajak untuk Indonesia’ (‘Let’s gotong royong in paying tax for Indonesia’). There is no mutual assistance in paying tax. The message was to bring people together to pay tax without using commanding words.

In Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation) the cleaning exercise is a form of study about how collectively we can empower each other by doing reproductive labour together. The definition of study that I would like to emphasise is an important concept in this project – study as something we do with others in order to escape while finding commonalities. Collective cleaning as study means that it is being done together as the participants look for connections with each other while taking refuge from the measuring of productivity in the workplace. This conception of study has resonance with what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) describe as ‘fugitive planning’– study as something you do with others while being fugitive from the dominant values. 

Meanwhile, collective cleaning, along with other forms of communal reproductive work, can serve the purpose that it resists and become a means for control instead of empowerment. This is what happened with gotong royong in the Indonesian context. The mobilisation of gotong royong or any form of mutual assistance has become part of the way governing bodies establish harmony within the society to enable the power and control of the state. 

Harmony and governance have a specific entanglement in the Indonesia context, related to the writings of early nationalist thinkers of Javanese cultural background. An Indonesia nationalist thinker, Soetomo (1888–1938), for example, wrote about the ‘gamelan society’, in which

… rakyat beruntung jika mereka bekerja sama secara serasi dalam memainkan gamelan, di mana bukan hanya mereka yang bersangkutan yang mesti tahu bagaimana memainkan dan menjadi mahir dalam suatu alat musik, mereka juga mesti manut (mengikuti) peraturan-peraturan dan menaati hukum.

 … the society is fortunate if they work together in harmony in playing gamelan, when those who hold the instrument also know how to play it and become good at it, yet they also need to obey the rules and law.

This is one of the double-binds in collective reproductive work. While it offers a form of being and doing together that has been undervalued by the dominant capitalist logic through attribution of work according to gender, race, class, physical abilities and more, collectivity in all forms of work, both productive and reproductive, can also be mobilised and utilised to enable control by a specific group in power: state, employers or others. The double-bind could and will never be resolved, since we are living in a multiple condition full of contradictions. Yet what we can do is play the double-bind by composing different modes of governing ourselves that remain critical about what is considered ‘work’.

Part 2: New Modes of Governing Ourselves

I am part of KUNCI, as a member. Oftentimes I introduce myself as someone who works in KUNCI, although I do not define KUNCI as merely my workplace. It is also something else.

KUNCI was established in 1999, a year after the end of New Order era in Indonesia (the Soeharto era). Nuraini Juliastuti and Antariksa co-founded KUNCI in the spirit of producing critical knowledge through different platforms and activities. Both of them were involved in the student and civic movements which had succeeded in overthrowing Soeharto from his thirty-two years of dictatorship in 1998. 

After 1998, other ‘alternative spaces’ emerged alongside with KUNCI, including ruangrupa (Jakarta, 2000), Forum Lenteng (Jakarta, 2003), Ruang MES 56 (Jogjakarta, 2002). ‘Alternative space’ is a particularly well-known phrase within the environment of art and cultural organisations in Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta. Alternative spaces have been playing key roles in different cultural practices. Now, citizen initiatives in the cultural field suggested by ‘alternative space’ also flourish in other locations such as Surabaya, Jatiwangi, Aceh and Makassar, using new methodologies for cultural activities based on the communities in which they are located. 

None of these spaces started in a formal institutional setting such as an office, museum, or gallery, but rather in home settings – either a shared house or a member’s house. KUNCI, including the library, moved from one member’s dormitory room to the living room of another member, to a publisher’s garage, to a shared house with Ruang MES 56, until finally it was able to rent a house in 2011.

When I started to come to KUNCI regularly, I didn’t consider it as part of my work. I was a volunteer for the library. My task was to open and close the library according to its public hours. There was no payment for my work. My ‘salary’ was to use the internet freely. As I was (and still am) an avid internet browser, this ‘salary’ was decent enough. After hanging around for some time, I started to come to the KUNCI library more often, even outside its public hours. I read, discussed, ate, cooked, and sometimes also slept in the library. KUNCI was slowly becoming my second home. Later on, my relationship with KUNCI was formalised when I received my first salary in 2010. Since then I have been working at KUNCI, yet I feel also at home there.

Ade Darmawan, co-founder of ruangrupa, has mentioned the domesticity of alternative spaces in Indonesia because of their house settings and the friendship networks. Although in early 2000 many art and other organisations started registering themselves legally and used the prescribed organisational structures – director, manager, accountant and board as required by the government to enable them to receive financial support from international funding agencies – within these formal bodies, the spirit of friendship and informality still exists.

KUNCI is still in a state in between. It was started as circle of friends. Then as we expanded our activities and they became larger and longer, we also got grants and funding that required us to be more formally accountable. So then we employed a director, a program manager, a finance person, and so on. But with this division of work, we also became more professionalised, with more specified functions for each person, so they do only the work that is assigned to them. The caring of the space became work for the cleaner, librarian and intern. Then, in 2013, we decided to get rid of the formal structure and make (almost) everyone a member of KUNCI. So today everyone is a co-director and everyone is a member. And it’s still a challenge to practice this form. Today we consist of nine members.

In the shared spirit of Site of Unlearning, by constantly challenging the way we work in our organisation we are trying to be more aware of the work of knowledge production and the kind of work that enables this knowledge production to take place. The kind of work which involves cleaning, buying toilet paper, listening to complaints, giving encouraging words. It is a work which serve life, not commodity production. It is a reproductive work, which also a terrain for political struggle. As activist and scholar Silvia Federici wrote, ‘On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of worker, and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreation, and thus to redefine the private sphere as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anti-capitalist struggle.’

 By trying not to outsource this reproductive work to other women, interns and assistants, and by dividing the responsibilities equally among members (or friends), we become aware that we are indebted to each other for the work we’ve done. Defining (alternative) ways of organising and of becoming institutionalised is an important cultural project, which can serve as a site for knowledge production that is grounded in the political struggle.

Part 3: Exercising as the Refusal to Work

Annette Krauss and the team at Casco have been developing different exercises in order to unlearn institutional habits. Cleaning is only one part of the whole set of exercises. The other exercises are related to meeting, reading, care network, property, wage and well-being, authorship, time, passions and obstacles.

The ‘unlearning exercises’ take various amounts of time. For example, the ‘Off-Balancing Chairs’ exercise lasts according to how long the meeting participants can hold their positions in a set of wobbly chairs to unlearn meeting habits. The ‘Time Diary’ exercise requires everyone to record their day for a limited period of time – from a few days to weeks. Besides doing these exercises, the participants also need to work as usual, from replying to emails, writing and editing, to organising events. I wonder if doing these exercises adds more work to the already existing work for the team at Casco. Why would they do all of these exercises? Would it be more useful for team at Casco to spend time in writing text about reproductive works rather than cleaning?

I would argue that the strength of these exercises lies on how they successfully suspend the team members at Casco from their ‘real’ work. It creates ruptures in organisational work and this relates to the struggle against work. It is also a form of escaping while finding different connections. As feminist scholar Kathi Weeks puts it, the problem with work is that it dominates our lives and it shapes the way we connect with each other. Work become the source of our social identification, both in and out of workplace. We even introduce ourselves by name and profession.

The Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) is a space to identify the self and each other outside of work categories within an institutional setting. We are not valuing each other based on what the other is being paid to do, but on what is possibly coming out of our different forms of togetherness. It is a form of alternative world-building through collective practices, one exercise at a time.

References

Open Engagement,  In Conversation: Pittsburgh 2015 – Place and Revolution, http://openengagement.info/curating-organisations-without-form/.

John R. Bowen, ‘On the Political Construction of Tradition: Gotong Royong in Indonesia,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, May 1986, p.548.

Savitri Prastiti Scherer, Keselarasan dan Kejanggalan, translation from ‘Harmony and Dissonance; Early Nationalist Thought in Java’, MA thesis, Cornell University, 1975, Sinar Harapan, Jakarta, 1985, p.241.

Silvia Federici, ‘The reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the unfinished feminist revolution’, 2009, paper for seminar The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/silvia-federici-the-reproduction-of-labour-power-in-the-global-economy-marxist-theory-and-the-unfinished-feminist-revolution/.

Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Works: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011.

[bookolica]

Cuentos violetas

“Por un mundo donde seamos socialmente iguales, humanamente diferentes y totalmente libres”.  Rosa Luxemburgo

Con estas palabras de Rosa Luxemburgo da comienzo este artículo sobre la importancia de la libertad como valor en la educación infantil: qué tienen que sentir los niños y niñas a la hora de leer un cuento, elegir un color, elegir un juguete. Con la lectura formamos a nuestros pequeños, y qué mejor forma de hacerlo que abogando por la igualdad de género.

Esta igualdad de género la recordamos cada 8 de marzo en el Día Internacional de la Mujer. Día en que las mujeres pedimos la igualdad en pie con respecto a los hombres; día en el que recordamos a las compañeras que lucharon y se quedaron en el camino.

El violeta es el color del feminismo. Hay diversas explicaciones para la asociación de este color a la lucha de las mujeres. En el siglo XIX, la activista inglesa Emmeline Pethick explicaba que el color violeta, el color de los soberanos, simboliza el color de la sangre real de cada luchadora por el derecho al voto, y simboliza su libertad y dignidad.

Hay una teoría, más poética, que tiene que ver con los hechos sucedidos en 1908, en la fábrica de Nueva York de la empresa Cotton. Las trabajadoras se pusieron en huelga y el dueño de la fábrica le prendió fuego provocando la muerte de 129 mujeres. Hay quien dice que las telas que tenían entre las manos eran de color violeta. Hay quien dice también que el humo de la fábrica era de este color.

La explicación más sencilla es que el feminismo es igualdad: si cogemos el color azul, que popularmente representa a los hombres, y lo mezclamos con el color rosa, más asociado a las mujeres, obtendremos el color violeta. Y de eso se trata: mezclarnos en igualdad para crear grandes cosas juntos.

Leer es fecundar el tiempo y a la vez formarnos como personas. Leer es un proceso complejo porque pone de manifiesto la experiencia y conocimientos previos del lector. Por este motivo debemos fomentar aquellas obras donde la igualdad de género esté muy presente, para conseguir niños y niñas valientes, fuertes y, sobre todo, ¡libres!

En este artículo recogemos algunas recomendaciones de lecturas infantiles y juveniles en pro de la igualdad de género:

L’Adroite princesse ou les aventures de Finette

En el siglo XVIII, la autora francesa Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, sobrina del mismísimo Perrault, creó la historia de L’adroite princesse ou les aventures de Finette. La protagonista de este cuento es una princesa que cabalga a caballo (algo impensable en aquella época), se disfraza de hombre y vive numerosas aventuras; e incluso llega a luchar con espadas (lo cual estaba prohibido para las mujeres en aquel siglo). Este es sin duda el primer ejemplo de cuento por la igualdad de género y es también la primera historia en la que se rompe el cliché de princesa de cuentos de hadas.

En 1959, la escritora sueca Astrid Lindgren da vida a Pipi Calzaslargas. Pipi es una niña de apariencia rebelde pero, realmente, Pipi es una niña fuerte, independiente, libre y amante de los animales. Todos hemos querido ser como Pipi cuando éramos pequeños.

A Gloria Fuertes, gran autora universal de la literatura infantil, debemos agradecerle su poesía, su humor siempre a favor de la mirada cómplice de los niños, sin importar el sexo. Su Cangura para todo, Coleta la Poeta y Poemas de la Oca Loca son imprescindibles para que nuestros peques lo pasen en grande.

La hawaiana Emily Hughes nos robó el corazón con Salvaje, la historia de una niña que vive en la naturaleza en armonía y es arrebatada de ella por un psiquiatra que quiere educarla y civilizarla. Salvaje es el canto a la libertad, a la tolerancia, a la naturaleza, y a la convivencia.

El escritor estadounidense Eric Carle, con Don caballito de Mar, nos enseña la diversidad que hay en la naturaleza y como los machos de algunas especies, como el caballito de mar y el tiburón, son los encargados de cuidar a sus crías. Los seres humanos formamos parte de esta naturaleza, aunque en la actualidad la mayor parte del cuidado de los niños recae sobre las madres.

El valor de la diversidad y la diferencia podemos encontrarlo en la obra de Olga de Dios, Monstruo Rosa. La diversidad es un elemento enriquecedor de nuestra sociedad y gracias a Olga nuestros peques se harán eco de ellos.

María Isabel Sánchez Vergara y Ana Albero, de la mano de Alba Editorial, han creado la colección Pequeña y Grande, donde podemos encontrar las biografías de grandes mujeres que alcanzaron su meta, pese a los obstáculos que la sociedad sexista ponía en su camino. El arte de Frida Kahlo, la música de Ella Fitzgerald, las novelas de Agatha Christie, la ciencia de Marie Curie, los diseños revolucionarios de Coco Chanel, la experiencia como aviadora de Amelia Earhart, el estudio de Dian Fossey y la encantadora Audrey Hepburn son algunos ejemplos de mujeres que forman esta imprescindible colección.

Para las niñas rebeldes que quieran leer sobre referentes con los que identificarse, y los niños rebeldes que quieran inspirarse en grandes mujeres, tenemos Cuentos de buenas noches para niñas rebeldes de Elena Favilli y Francesca Cavalo.

Las personas no estamos hechas para encajar en estereotipos, por ello Orejas de Mariposa, de Luisa Aguilar, debe convertirse en un cuento que todos los niños deben leer.

“La igualdad es una necesidad vital del alma humana. La misma cantidad de respeto y de atención se debe a todo ser humano, porque el respeto no tiene grados”. Estas palabras de Simone Weil, filósofa francesa fallecida en 1943, cierran este recorrido. Los cuentos marcan el alma de quien los lee, fomentan, estrechan lazos. Por ese motivo es necesario crear lazos de igualdad en los más pequeños para una sociedad superior en el día de mañana.

Bibliografía

Cañamares, C. (2004): “Algunos roles sexistas en los álbumes ilustrados infantiles: ¿un nuevo sexismo?”. En S. Yubero; E. Larrañaga: P.C. Cerrillo. Valores y lectura: estudios multidisciplinares. Cuenca: Ed.Univ.de Castilla-La Mancha, 147-171.

Colomer, Teresa. “A favor de las niñas. El sexismo en la literatura infantil”. En CLIJ, 57 (1994) 7-24.

Colomer, T (1998). La formación del lector literario. Madrid: FGSR.

Colomer, T; Olid, I . “Princesas con tatuajes: La nueva cara del sexismo en la ficción juvenil”. En Textos de Didáctica de la Lengua y de la Literatura, 51 (2000): 55-67.

Garate Larrea, M. (1994). La comprensión de los cuentos en los niños. Madrid: Siglo XXI.

García Padrino, J. (1992). Libros y literatura para niños en la España contemporánea. Madrid: FGSR-Pirámide.

Turin, A. (1995). Los cuentos siguen contando. Madrid: Horas y Horas.

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[veronicavalentini]

BAR module February 5th-9th

The program consist in seminars by Emily Pethick (The Showroom director, London) and Susan Gibb (curator of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam) on the processual and performative development of the institutions they direct; as well as a workshop on ethics and legality held by Nuria Güell (artist, Barcelona); and the unmissable My studio visit.The city as studio with Aimar Pérez Galí (dancer, artist and researcher, Barcelona).

[excelenciasbarbaras-blog]

Excelencias Bárbaras

Es una zona de conocimiento inestable [1]. Es una contradicción habitable. Se buscan formas de excelencia investigadora en arte y diseño, más allá de la academia. Excelencias que son bárbaras, en su doble acepción. Bárbaras por foráneas, extrañas o toscas. Pero también por llamativas, magníficas y asombrosas. Es una pregunta acerca de las formas de rigor en la investigación creativa, que se mueve entre el ritual y la disciplina, entre el experimento y la experiencia, entre lo singular y lo estandarizado.

1 La noción de “conocimiento inestable” es esbozada por la curadora Emily Pethick.

Es un conocimiento que contiene diferentes puntos de vista y zonas de conflicto, en palabras de Pethick un conocimiento que “did not rest with a singular viewpoint, but contained many differing, and often conflictual, perspectives” (Pethick, 2009).

Pethick, E. (2009). Interview with Emily Pethick. On the institution as a site for artistic   collaboration and production. In Ericson, M., Frostner, M., Keys, Z., Teleman, S.,Williamsson, J. (Eds.), The Reader: Iaspis forum on design and critical practice (295-313). Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Barbarian excellences

It is a sphere of unstable knowledge[1]. It is a contradiction fit to live in. Excellence in research on art and design is sought beyond academy. These excellences are barbarian in a double meaning: foreign, strange or brutal, but also magnificent, astonishing and remarkable. This is a question about rigorous forms in creative research; a question that shifts between the ritual and the discipline, between the experiment and the experience, between singular and standardized forms.

1 The curator Emily Pethick outlines the notion of  “unstable knowledge “. It is a form of knowledge made of different points of view and conflict zones. In Pethick’s words, it is a knowledge that  “did not rest with a singular viewpoint, but contained many differing, and often conflictual, perspectives “ (Pethick, 2009).

Pethick, E. (2009). Interview with Emily Pethick. On the institution as a site for artistic collaboration and production. In Ericson, M., Frostner, M., Keys, Z., Teleman, S.,Williamsson, J. (Eds.), The Reader: Iaspis forum on design and critical practice (295-313). Berlin: Sternberg Press.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Refreshingly Diverse Shortlist for the 2017 Turner Prize

Lubaina Himid, “Naming the Money” (2004), installation view in Navigation Charts at Spike Island, Bristol (2017) (photo by Stuart Whipps; courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, and National Museums, Liverpool)

The shortlist of nominees has been released for the 2017 Turner Prize, the prestigious award’s first edition since a preexisting ban on artists over 50 was lifted. The four nominees are the Germany-born conceptual artist Andrea Büttner, the British moving image artist Rosalind Nashashibi, the British painter Hurvin Anderson, and the Tanzania-born painter and sculptor Lubaina Himid. The latter two, aged 52 and 62, respectively, would not have been eligible last year.

Three of the nominees are women, two are people of color, and two (Anderson and Himid) are known primarily for painting — a medium historically disadvantaged in the Turner Prize competition. As Adrian Searle wrote in the Guardian, the shortlist suggests a pointed rebuke to the reactionary and isolationist thinking of Brexit-era Britain. All of the nominees have roots beyond the UK: Anderson was born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents; Büttner, a German citizen, was born in Stuttgart and now splits her time between London and Frankfurt; Himid was born in Zanzibar and is a professor at University of Central Lancashire; and Nashashibi was born in Croydon to a Palestinian father and Irish mother.

Hurvin Anderson, “Is it OK to be black?” (2016), oil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm (courtesy the artist)

Three of the nominees — Anderson, Büttner, and Himid — hold degrees from the Royal College of Art, while Nashashibi received her MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. Anderson, whose color-saturated, figurative paintings are just as likely to directly reference his Afro-Caribbean background as they are to show quiet interiors and verdant pastoral scenes, has had recent solo shows at Michael Werner Gallery in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Büttner, whose conceptual practice often incorporates collaboration and spans printmaking, painting, installation, and film, recently had solo shows at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center; she also won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women for 2009–11. Himid, whose popping paintings and sculptures tend to depict black figures in portraits or enigmatic scenes, just had solo shows at Spike Island in Bristol and Modern Art Oxford. Nashashibi, the youngest of this year’s nominees at 43, is primarily known for moving-image works that incorporate animation and film shot in locales as diverse as Gaza and Guatemala. In the past two years she’s had solo shows at New York’s Murray Guy gallery, the University Art Gallery at University of California, Irvine, and the Imperial War Museum in London.

Still from Rosalind Nashashibi, “Electrical Gaza” (2015) (courtesy the artist)

Works by all four artists will go on view at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull — the UK’s “city of culture” for 2017 — on September 26. The winner of the prize will be named in a ceremony on December 5 and receive £25,000 (~$32,000). The jury for this year’s award consists of Frieze co-editor Dan Fox, art critic Martin Herbert, Mason Leaver-Yap of the Walker Art Center and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Showroom Director Emily Pethick, with Tate Britain Director Alex Farquharson serving as jury chair. According to a bookie cited by the Guardian, Himid is far and away the favorite to win, with 6/4 odds.

Installation view of Andrea Büttner’s “Beggar” and “Beggar” (both 2015), woodcuts, at the Walker Art Center (photo by Sheila Regan/Hyperallergic)

The 2017 Turner Prize exhibition runs September 26, 2017–January 7, 2018, at the Ferens Art Gallery (Queen Victoria Square, Hull, UK).

The post The Refreshingly Diverse Shortlist for the 2017 Turner Prize appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[juhavantzelfde]

When I was appointed, the mission for The Showroom was centered on commissioning new work from artists whose practice is ready to make the transition from grassroots innovation to a more established context. I initially proposed to the board that we slightly shifted this towards a focus on ‘emerging practices and ideas,’ rather than ‘emerging artists,’ so that we could broaden the remit and work with artists whose practices make sense within the programme, who might not necessarily be at the beginning of their careers. For example Ricardo Basbaum is not an emerging artist, but he is working with methods and ideas that make sense to pursue within our Communal Knowledge programme. Sometimes, particularly in the CK programme, it’s about learning from an artist through working with them, and with these projects it can also be about bringing them into contact with younger artists. We rewrote our mission again recently, and we also wrote a list of values, which is not public, but is more for internal use.

Andrea Phillips – interview with Emily Pethick — How to work together

[sound-art-text]

Signal:Noise II

Friday 20 – Saturday 21 January 2012

Friday 20 January, 7-9pm

Aesthetics, Feedback and the Agency of Things

Presentations by Luciana Parisi and Florian Cramer

Moderator: Robert Jackson

Saturday 21 January, 11-7pm

Participation and Feedback

11.00 Presentation by Suzanne Treister

11.45 Presentation by Axel John Wieder

Responses from Marina Vishmidt and Emily Pethick

13.30 Reading by Ricardo Basbaum

14.30 A selection of Jef Cornelis' 'Ijsbrekers' introduced by Koen Brams

16.00 Feedback session with the organisers and speakers 

17.00 Screenings of found footage of RD Laing and Anja Kirschner and David Panos's 'Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances' (2011) 

18.00 Performance by Mattin

Dan Graham's Past Future Split Attention (1972) will be presented in the space throughout the event.

Introduction

Building on the success of Signal:Noise I in January 2011, the second iteration of Signal:Noise is produced in collaboration with Mute and Queen Mary School of Business and Management. 

Signal:Noise II will look into feedback as a form of agency.

Feedback can be seen as an operational mode that overrides distinctions between form and content. Cybernetic ideas of self-regulation – whether in the workplace or within processes of government – have often involved harnessing the means of autonomy in order to increase control. This has proceeded by and large through techniques of participation and feedback. 

But these same techniques and forms are also key to certain progressive social and aesthetic projects – from anti-psychiatry and radical pedagogy, to post-humanist philosophy and aesthetics. Troubling issues of agency, intention and consciousness, they have been used to produce new relations of power, truth and aesthetics.

From the schematising of these processes in art, design and urban planning, to the constant relay between emancipation and control in the social logic of participation, feedback will act as a prism for reading history and our present through presentations, screenings, performances and workshops in distributed and militant pedagogy.

More information, including speaker abstracts and biographies, will be available here and on Mute’s website (www.metamute.org) in early January 2012.

Signal:Noise II is supported by LCACE, Queen Mary School of Business and Management, Arts Council England, members of The Showroom’s Supporters Scheme and Outset as The Showroom's 2012 Production Partner. Special thanks to Lisson Gallery for support in kind for the event. 

About Signal:Noise

Signal:Noise is an experimental cross-disciplinary research project that aims to explore the influence of cybernetics and information theory on contemporary cultural life by testing out its central idiom, ‘feedback’, through debates, performances, and events. 

Through the application of mechanical and scientific models for the understanding of social and political life, cybernetic theory – in particular notions of feedback – informed the development of many early conceptual and participatory artistic practices in the 1960s/70s, yet its influence is still under-recognized. Signal:Noise aims to bring together people who are working with these ideas in the fields of art, design, architecture and theory in order to re-open discussion around this discourse, looking at how it has informed cultural, social and political life, in the past and present.

Signal:Noise was originated by Steve Rushton, Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), Marina Vishmidt, Rod Dickinson and Emily Pethick, and the first event at The Showroom takes place in January 2011.

Programme Notes

Luciana Parisi’s talk on ‘The speculative reason of algorithmic objects’ will discuss how algorithms have become actual objects that prehend external data and in doing so, determine computational spatio-temporality. Algorithms therefore are not simply executors of programs, but are prehensive agencies that evaluate data and create space-time. Algorithms use feedback systems of control to change over time. These prehensive agencies have come to subtend a neoliberal order of aesthetics corresponding to the topological surfaces at the core of digital architecture.

Luciana Parisi is the Convenor of the MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research draws on information theories and the life sciences (from cybernetics to computation, from evolutionary to complexity theories) to examine the significance of digital technologies and biotechnologies for a cybernetic understanding of culture. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). Most recently, she has completed a monograph Contagious Architecture with MIT Press (forthcoming).

Florian Cramer is a researcher and theorist based in the Netherlands

Robert Jackson is an MPhil/PhD student at Plymouth University, an artist and software developer based in the UK. Currently entitled 'Algorithm and Contingency', his thesis entangles Computational Algorithmic Artworks and Art Formalism together with Speculative Realist Philosophy, to identify an occluded history of computational art that privileges recursive configurable units of necessity rather than networked systems of contingency. Robert is an editor of the independent journal Speculations: a graduate student-run, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to speculative realist philosophy and an associate editor of the O-Zone Journal (both supported by Punctum Books). He blogs regularly at http://www.robertjackson.info/index 

Suzanne Treister is a London based artist and will present five diagrams from her project 'HEXEN 2.0'. These diagrams chart, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of diverse scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and mass intelligence gathering, and the implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. 'HEXEN 2.0' specifically investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences (1946-1953), whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The project simultaneously looks at critics of technological society such as Theodore Kaczynski/The Unabomber, the claims of Anarcho-Primitivism and Post Leftism, Technogaianism and Transhumanism and traces precursory ideas of Thoreau, Heidegger, Adorno and others in relation to visions of utopic/dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film. 

Axel J. Wieder’s presentation on Social Diagrams will focus on the late 1960s when architects and planners made increasing efforts to develop methodologies for a scientifically improved design process. Informed by early cybernetics and information theory, the role of the designer and the future user of buildings and cities became the subject of critical self-reflection. The talk will discuss a series of projects, such as an early example of interactive television and different planning games, in relation to their potential for broader participation, but also new forms of social control.

Axel J. Wieder is a curator and writer living in Berlin. 2007-2010 he was the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and 2010 a visiting curator at Ludlow 38, Goethe-Institut New York. In 1999, he co-founded together with Katja Reichard and Jesko Fezer the bookshop Pro qm, which also serves as an experimental platform for events and presentations in art and urbanism. For the 3rd Berlin Biennale 2004, he organized a thematic section about the urban development in Berlin after the fall of the wall (together with Jesko Fezer). 2004-2005 he was project manager for the exhibition project "Now and ten years ago" for KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and 2004 a research fellow at the Peabody-Essex-Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He is lecturing and publishing widely. Most recent publication: Casco Issues XII: Generous Structures (eds, together with Binna Choi), Berlin 2011.

Marina Vishmidt is a writer based in London.

Emily Pethick is director of The Showroom.

Ricardo Basbaum lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He is an

artist, a professor, a curator and a critic, investigating art as an intermediating device and platform for the articulation between sensorial experience, sociability and language. Since the late 1980s, he has been nurturing a vocabulary specific to his work, applying it in a unique way to each institution. He is the author of Além da pureza visual (2007) and contributed to Materialität der Diagramme - Kunst und Theorie (edited by Susane Leeb, 2012, b books). Currently exhibiting new projects at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte). Had work was included in the 7a Bienal do Mercosul (2009) and documenta 12 (2007), among other events. Works at the Instituto de Artes, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. An athology of his diagrams will be presented at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo, Spain, in 2013.

Jef Cornelis worked as executor, director and scriptwriter for the VRT, the Dutch-language Belgian public broadcasting corporation, from 1963 until 1998. Over those 35 years Cornelis accomplished an impressive body of work. It comprises over 200 titles and is generally considered as groundbreaking, artistically and cultural-historically. In 1983 and 1984 Cornelis and his colleagues of the newly erected Art Issues Service of the then BRT realised the monthly TV programme IJsbreker, of which a total of 22 episodes were produced. Each episode of IJsbreker featured a cultural topic, in the widest sense of the word, ranging from 'culture in the papers' to 'computer art, from 'fashion' to 'tattoos'. IJsbreker was a live programme, with speakers on different locations. Various locations were connected with each other and the studio. Communication – or the lack of it – could only be accomplished using countless cameras and TV monitors.

Koen Brams studied psychology at the Catholic University in Leuven (BE). He is the former director of the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), and former editor of the Dutch-language journal of art theory, De Witte Raaf. He was the initiator and editor of The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists (Amsterdam, Nijgh & van Ditmar; Frankfurt, Eichhorn Verlag, 2002; Zürich, JRP Ringier, 2010). Together with Dirk Pültau he conducts a research project about Belgian art since 1945, of which the project about Belgian television maker Jef Cornelis forms an integral part (see: http://jefcornelis.janvaneyck.nl/). Recent publications: The clandestine in the work of Jef Cornelis (together with Dirk Pültau), Argos, De Witte Raaf, Jan van Eyck Academie, Marcelum Boxtareos, 2010; Matt Mullican: Im Gespräch/Conversations (together with Dirk Pültau), DuMont, Köln, 2011.

Stefano Harney joined Queen Mary, University of London, in September 2006. He is an expert on business ethics, corporate governance, and responsible management education, and a frequent commentator in the media on banking regulation and ethics.He is founder of Finance Watch, a research NGO dedicated to banking reform, and he is current Chair of the European Business Ethics Network (UK). Stefano Harney's new book, Business World (Routledge, forthcoming) focuses on the borderless business school and the rise of extreme neo-liberalism. His last book, State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Duke, 2002) was a phenomenology of labour in the state aiming to rethink the contemporary state-form. He is part of the editorial collectives at the journals Social Text and Lateral. His first book was a study of postcolonial Trinidad. He is also co-founder of the NGO Clinic, a pro bono organisational development and change service for not-for-profits.

Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ living truthfully under imaginary circumstances is a two-channel video that explores the acting exercises developed by Sanford Meisner. Meisner's techniques paradoxically deploy an unnatural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback to stimulate 'authentic' emotion and spontaneity in performance. Analytic yet hypnotic it interrogates the meaning of 'emotional truthfulness' in post-modern naturalism and dominant assumptions about the nature of human behavior.

Mattin is an artist who works with noise and improvisation, often in collaboration with others. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ''freedom'' and the constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre. Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship.He has produced records, performs internationally and runs two labels: w.m.o/r and Free Software Series and the chaotic net-label desetxea. Together with Anthony Iles, Mattin was editor of the book Noise & Capitalism (2009). Taumaturgia and CAC Brétigny are about to publish Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting most of Mattin's writings plus reviews by other people of performances and concerts that he has been involved in. For Signal:Noise II Mattin will produce: A collective evacuation of the voice in an assembly line of liberation while addressing the sound of indifference.

Dan Graham's Past Future Split Attention (1972) documents a performance, at London's Lisson Gallery, that demonstrates Graham's project of psychologically restructuring space and time. Graham writes, "Two people who know each other are in the same space. While one predicts continuously the other person's behavior, the other person recounts (by memory) the other's past behavior. Both performers are in the present, so knowledge of the past is needed to continuously deduce future behavior (in terms of causal relation). For one to see the other in terms of the present (attention), there is a mirror reflection or closed figure-eight feedback/feedahead loop of past/future. One person's behavior reciprocally reflects/depends upon the other's, so that each one's information is seen as a reflection of the effect that their own just-past behavior has had in reversed tense, as perceived from the other's view of himself."

[worldfoodbooks]

BACK IN THE BOOKSHOP: STEPHEN WILLATS - CONTROL - WORK 1962-1969 This is the first survey of work by Stephen Willats from the sixties. Willats (born and lives in London) was introduced to art as a teenage gallery assistant in 1958 and by 1962 was producing advanced artwork. He embraced the transdiscipli­n­arity of the time, juggling the roles of social scientist, engineer, designer and artist, and developed an art about social interaction, using models derived from cybernetics, the hybrid post-war science of communication. As well as the clothing and furniture made in 1965 when he briefly described himself as a ‘conceptual designer’, Willats’ earliest sculptural series of ‘Manual Variables’ is haptic and interactive. These will be shown alongside early issues of Control, the still-operating magazine he founded in the same period. Its title is a provocation, invoking the cybernetic idea that people can take control of their environments, thereby deflecting the controls of a dominant hierarchy. In 1968 Willats made an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in which he presented constructions involving movement and light – some wall-mounted, others large-scale environments – that were informed by his interest in contemporary theories: about probability and prediction, behavioural science, subliminal advertising, and colour in relation to motivation and learning. The display of these at Raven Row will be based on the darkened maze in which they were installed at Oxford, where they were proposed as experimental stimuli for ‘states of consciousness’. Willats’ works on paper from this period elegantly combine cybernetic modelling, architectural graphics and constructivist geometries, and are consistent with his practice of today. However, he abandoned his dynamic constructions at the end of the sixties in pursuit of an art of social interaction beyond gallery and art object, for which he became well-known. This exhibition reconvenes this earlier work for the first time. With texts by Antony Hudek, Emily Pethick, Christabel Stewart and Andrew Wilson. Available via our website and in the bookshop. #worldfoodbooks #stephenwillats #control #ravenrow (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[excelenciasbarbaras-blog]

Excelencias Bárbaras

Es una zona de conocimiento inestable [1]. Es una contradicción habitable. Se buscan formas de excelencia investigadora en arte y diseño, más allá de la academia. Excelencias que son bárbaras, en su doble acepción. Bárbaras por foráneas, extrañas o toscas. Pero también por llamativas, magníficas y asombrosas. Es una pregunta acerca de las formas de rigor en la investigación creativa, que se mueve entre el ritual y la disciplina, entre el experimento y la experiencia, entre lo singular y lo estandarizado.

1 La noción de “conocimiento inestable” es esbozada por la curadora Emily Pethick.

Es un conocimiento que contiene diferentes puntos de vista y zonas de conflicto, en palabras de Pethick un conocimiento que “did not rest with a singular viewpoint, but contained many differing, and often conflictual, perspectives” (Pethick, 2009).

Pethick, E. (2009). Interview with Emily Pethick. On the institution as a site for artistic   collaboration and production. In Ericson, M., Frostner, M., Keys, Z., Teleman, S.,Williamsson, J. (Eds.), The Reader: Iaspis forum on design and critical practice (295-313). Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Barbarian excellences

It is a sphere of unstable knowledge[1]. It is a contradiction fit to live in. Excellence in research on art and design is sought beyond academy. These excellences are barbarian in a double meaning: foreign, strange or brutal, but also magnificent, astonishing and remarkable. This is a question about rigorous forms in creative research; a question that shifts between the ritual and the discipline, between the experiment and the experience, between singular and standardized forms.

1 The curator Emily Pethick outlines the notion of  “unstable knowledge “. It is a form of knowledge made of different points of view and conflict zones. In Pethick’s words, it is a knowledge that  “did not rest with a singular viewpoint, but contained many differing, and often conflictual, perspectives “ (Pethick, 2009).

Pethick, E. (2009). Interview with Emily Pethick. On the institution as a site for artistic collaboration and production. In Ericson, M., Frostner, M., Keys, Z., Teleman, S.,Williamsson, J. (Eds.), The Reader: Iaspis forum on design and critical practice (295-313). Berlin: Sternberg Press.

[worldfoodbooks]

BACK IN THE BOOKSHOP: STEPHEN WILLATS - CONTROL - WORK 1962-1969 This is the first survey of work by Stephen Willats from the sixties. Willats (born and lives in London) was introduced to art as a teenage gallery assistant in 1958 and by 1962 was producing advanced artwork. He embraced the transdiscipli­n­arity of the time, juggling the roles of social scientist, engineer, designer and artist, and developed an art about social interaction, using models derived from cybernetics, the hybrid post-war science of communication. As well as the clothing and furniture made in 1965 when he briefly described himself as a ‘conceptual designer’, Willats’ earliest sculptural series of ‘Manual Variables’ is haptic and interactive. These will be shown alongside early issues of Control, the still-operating magazine he founded in the same period. Its title is a provocation, invoking the cybernetic idea that people can take control of their environments, thereby deflecting the controls of a dominant hierarchy. In 1968 Willats made an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in which he presented constructions involving movement and light – some wall-mounted, others large-scale environments – that were informed by his interest in contemporary theories: about probability and prediction, behavioural science, subliminal advertising, and colour in relation to motivation and learning. The display of these at Raven Row will be based on the darkened maze in which they were installed at Oxford, where they were proposed as experimental stimuli for ‘states of consciousness’. Willats’ works on paper from this period elegantly combine cybernetic modelling, architectural graphics and constructivist geometries, and are consistent with his practice of today. However, he abandoned his dynamic constructions at the end of the sixties in pursuit of an art of social interaction beyond gallery and art object, for which he became well-known. This exhibition reconvenes this earlier work for the first time. With texts by Antony Hudek, Emily Pethick, Christabel Stewart and Andrew Wilson. Available via our website and in the bookshop. #worldfoodbooks #stephenwillats #control #ravenrow (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)