2014 Annual FLASC Symposium
2014 Annual FLASC Symposium Moca @ The Crossroads
What happens when politics of class and culture collide?
Saturday, June 14, 2014 | 4 - 8 pm
MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, NORTH MIAMI
770 NE 125 Street, North Miami, FL 33161
While communities across the United States are becoming more diverse, more globally connected and less territorialized, artistic institutions that are entrenched in frozen concepts of representation, interpretation, communication, programming and access; not only have less relevance within their communities, but find themselves in conflict with the very people for whom they were created.
Join some of the nations leading art scholars as they present the latest information and ideas and delve into the salient questions:
What role can artists and art institutions play with residents who live in an
increasingly globalized and continually de-territorialized world?
How can artists and art institutions organize sociopolitical and cultural
dis/order with this globalized existence?
SPEAKERS
Houston Baker
Distinguished Professor, Vanderbilt University
Jessy Benjamin
Kennesaw State University
Linda Carty
Syracuse University
William Cordova
Artist, Yale University
Margo Natalie Crawford
Cornell University
Carole Boyce Davies
Cornell University
Jose Gutierrez
Miami Triennial
Redell Hearn
John Hopkins University
Pete Wayne Lewis
University of Massachusetts
Satya Mohanty
Cornell University
Nkiru Nzegwu
New York State University at Binghamton
Alfredo Triff
Miami Dade College/University of Miami
For more information, please call 305.893.6511 x 12110
On Wednesday, July 10th, the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles will launch a new webseries called CRIME: The Animated Series through its new contemporary art video initiative MOCA.tv. The series was created by Sam Chou of Toronto’s Style5 and author/filmmaker Alix Lambert, whose book CRIME
inspired the series.
Each of CRIME’s six parts will be produced by a different animator/designer and feature interviews with law enforcement, criminals and the victims of crime. The episodes shine a light on the “dark, compelling, heartbreaking, and yes—sometimes funny” subject of crime and how it affects society.
The screening, which is FREE, starts at 8pm (doors open at 7) at MOCA (250 South Grand Avenue, LA, CA 90012), and will be followed by a panel discussion with Sam Chou, Alix Lambert, bank robber-turned-author Joe Loya, sociologist Althea Wasow and true crime writer Jimmy Wu. See the Facebook invite or RSVP at [email protected].
On Thursday, May 30th, the Museum of of Contemporary Art in downtown LA will present a screening of Aboveground Animation featuring new commissions by Kathleen Daniel, Barry Doupe, Erin Dunn, Casey Jane Ellison, Lauren Gregory, Jacolby Satterwhite, Katie Torn, and the premiere of a video work by Ben Jones (Paper Rad, The Problem Solverz). The screening will be followed by a conversation with Aboveground Animation curator Casey Jane Ellison and Ben Jones, moderated by MOCAtv creative director Emma Reeves.
The screening will take place at MOCA Grand Avenue’s Ahmanson Auditorium (250 South Grand Avenue, LA, CA 90012). Doors open at 7pm, screening at 8pm. RSVP at [email protected].
“Art in the Streets,” the first major museum survey of street art and graffiti, opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and I highly recommend it. It ranks among the most fun art exhibits I’ve ever attended, and features lots of eye candy in the form of large-scale installations that at times can feel more like an amusement park than a museum. As a first-of-its-kind exhibition, it’s also guaranteed to spark plenty of vigorous debate about what was chosen for inclusion and what wasn’t, not to mention all the controversy it’s already generated from the Blu mural debacle to irrational police fury.
Though minimal, animated works do have a presence in the show. A sequence of animation drawings from the opening of the influential early-1980s documentary Wild Style is displayed in one area. The sequence (watch it HERE) was designed by Charlie Ahearn, who directed the film, and graffiti writer Zephyr. In the “Battle Station”, a fantastic recreation of the Tribeca loft of the late Rammellzee, a mograph music video called “Alpha’s Bet” is screened on a television. The video, posted below, was directed by Celia Bullwinkel in 2002. (Disclosure: I am a personal friend of Celia and attended the show with her.)
Graffiti/street art has a complicated relationship with animation, which is a thread that the curators of the exhibit never explore. While the show features a handful of artists, like the aforementioned Rammellzee, who have the ability to express personal ideas beyond the confines of referential pop culture, many of the artists from Kenny Scharf to Banksy to the anonymous graffiti writers who painted on the sides of subway cars have relied on animated characters as their lingua franca for communicating with the general public. These cartoon characters, to my surprise, are rarely used to make any statement or to subvert the original intentions of the characters, a la Wally Wood’s infamous Disney “orgy” drawing. For graffiti and street artists, the act of recreating popular cartoon iconography is considered an accomplishment in and of itself.
If one looks only at the art displayed in the show, the conclusion could be drawn that things are beginning to change. More recent artists, like the Brazilian twins Os Gêmeos, have dispensed with drawing pre-existing animated characters and are creating libraries of new cartoon characters drawn in their personal styles. Like any vital art form, street art is evolving, and the evolution points in a positive direction that emphasizes personal creativity.
Below are a few of the cartoon references I saw in the show.
Will you take the Mickey or Woody train?
Kenny Scharf began doing Hanna-Barbera tributes in 1981, long before anybody else considered celebrating Hanna-Barbera’s cruddiness.
Only in the world of graffiti could Hanna-Barbera and DePatie-Freleng characters co-exist.
