EXHIBITION:090306/Marseille/Statement-Long

EXHIBITION:090306/Marseille/Statement-Long

Pedro Lasch
Intellectual Statement
01.13.09

Overview

As an artist and academic who believes cultural work to be an aesthetic, social, intellectual, and political endeavor, I rely on multiple research methodologies and varied forms of artistic production. My interdisciplinary productions primarily contribute to the fields of international contemporary art, visual studies, post-colonial theory, and Latino/a studies.
While I do publish texts in professional journals and participate in public lectures and conferences like other academics, the largest part of my labor consists of translating research, theory, and raw experience into aesthetic form. The wide range of visual media this non-textual work takes comes from my grounding in the young traditions of conceptual art and institutional critique. Not bound by a single medium, and opposing narrow technical limitations on the potential of art to produce knowledge and transform life, my research consists of artworks in new media including video, installation, performance, public interventions, experimental exchanges, and alternative social networks and platforms, as well as works in conventional media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. My works circulate through Luxe Gallery, which represents me in New York, solo and group exhibitions in both mainstream and alternative institutions internationally, as well as academic conferences, research universities, and specialized art schools.

Many of my interdisciplinary visual productions venture beyond the specific goals and criteria of aesthetic practice and art theory. This work, still not bound to the text, engages the new academic fields of visual studies and new media theory by defining visuality in praxis through collaborations with governmental and non-governmental institutions, especially around questions of migration and indigeneity. My work bridges theories of coloniality, class, gender, and globalization with grassroots activism and education. More established academic disciplines and methodologies also inform these extra-artistic projects, the most relevant being anthropology, cultural studies, semiotics, history and philosophy of science, sociology, and experimental theater.

Ultimately, I am dedicated to experimental pedagogy and cultural production, in which the artist is a public intellectual who stretches conventions through play and is also committed to rigorous scholarship. The regular appearance of my work in specialized journals and the popular press, as well as my ongoing participation at public lectures and workshops in a wide range of venues, therefore should be seen as part of a larger intellectual project. As a whole, my research weaves together textual and visual media, as well as theory and practice, and strives to bring down or at the very least circumvent the walls of the museum and the university.

Development
[#1] My work is often created in series where repetitive gestures give way, over time and upon closer inspection, to an aesthetics and politics of radical difference. Directly related to what Michel de Certeau calls the ‘practices of everyday life,’ and very influenced by artist Daniel Buren, I have termed and theorized the cyclical structure of my interventions as ‘temporal rearrangements,’ ‘non-habitual habits,’ ‘open routines,’ or ‘routine-breaking routines.’ From March to July, 2006, one of these terms and my related theories became the intellectual framework for my most important artistic, intellectual, and social production thus far: my solo exhibition at The Queens Museum of Art in New York entitled ‘Pedro Lasch / Open Routines: Four projects 1999 – 2006.’
http://www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/lasch.html

The show helped cement multiple art initiatives I had co-founded and directed in New York and Mexico to bridge the concerns and interests of immigrants and indigenous groups with the state of international politics. Spanning an eight-year period, the four ‘series’ constituting the exhibition also generated engaging ways to link contemporary art to the Latino community located within the Museum’s immediate neighborhood. Three of the four projects involved direct exchanges and collaborations with various communities in Queens. Many of the social relations I established through my exhibition are still maintained to this date by the Museum and members of the and have in some cases become the basis of regular programming. Most of the pieces in my show referred directly to the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, reflecting on cross-class and cosmopolitan perspectives. The opening reception had an attendance of almost 3,000 people of all walks of life, and during its four months duration the show attracted many thousands more visitors, as well as positive reviews in prestigious specialized journals such as Art Forum, and Art Nexus, as well as popular ones like The New York Times.

[#2] I would consider my second most ambitious and successful production to be one that could not be closer to home. Black Mirror/Espejo Negro is the common title and concept for three large scale projects in different media: an ephemeral installation at the Nasher Museum of Art with five corresponding archival photographic suites, an installation at Luxe Gallery in New York, and a concluding book project.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/individual/blackmirror.html

The five archival suites of large-scale c-prints produced for Black Mirror are all based on the grand, yet ephemeral installation at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina (May 22, 2008 through Jan. 18, 2009). Commissioned by the museum to accompany its blockbuster exhibitions El Greco to Velazquez (2008) and Escultura Social: Contemporary Art from Mexico City (2009) the installation incorporated sixteen pre-Columbian figures from the museum’s permanent collection, placing them in front of black reflective panels through which images of Spanish old master paintings were just visible. Museum visitors also saw their own faces reflected on the same glass panels. The photographic suites capture different processes and experiences at play in the Nasher installation, and also provide the foundation for the third the book of the same. Forthcoming in Fall 2009 and co-produced by The Franklin Humanities Institute (Durham), Luxe Gallery (NY), and The Joan Mitchell Foundation (NY), the book will include high quality images, writings by the artist, as well as critical essays by renowned art critics and social theorists Walter Mignolo, Peter Sigal, Arnaud Maillet, and Jennifer Gonzalez. Last but not least, the New York component of the project consisted of a site-specific installation created for Luxe Gallery’s storefront windows. Facing Stanton Street, black mirrors with almost invisible images confronted passersby on an everyday basis, even as the gallery was closed. Gallery viewers and pedestrians saw their faces reflected in ghostly figures and imaginary buildings gradually appearing from under the glass. Reflections of the interior and exterior architecture of the actual surroundings also became part of these fleeting pictures. Post-colonial theory and aesthetics, ongoing immigration debates, and current ideas around latinidad framed this public visual dialogue in the intensely cosmopolitan context of New York City and the specific tensions between Loisaida and the Lower East Side.

[#3] Materially and philosophically, the above project would have been unimaginable without the many years of experimentation and thought devoted to mirrors and social structures in my still ongoing Naturalizations Series.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/series/naturalizations.html

Begun in 2002, this series is based on the production and distribution of a set of masks, which are used in specific social situations. The masks are rectangular mirrors with slits in the eye and mouth areas, and elastic suspenders, which enable the users to move around freely while wearing them. The initial perception created by these masks is one of spatial and psychological confusion. Subjects are reversed if only one person is wearing the mask. If several people wear them and look at each other, their faces disappear and transform into an endless set of reflections of other mirrors, other faces, environments, and objects. Landscape and subject are one and many. Subjects are inseparable from each other, their bodies dismembered by rectangular planes departing and arriving through reflected gazes. Light breaks and travels on these masks with unpredictable speed and variety. Space and movement become counter-intuitive. The masks force us to adapt to a new physical reality, one which denies what has become “natural.” The substitution of the facial marker of individuality for a sign of constant change and reflection results in the erasure of one kind of subjectivity, only to formulate a new set of social conditions. The hierarchical address of the observer, the photographer, and the interviewer is turned upon itself. The space behind the camera is made visible. A dancing group wearing the masks decides to perform for its own pleasure, or for the reflection of their audience. The daily balance between extroverted and introverted actions becomes a tangible visual rhythm. The mask is the new stage, framed by the theater of the everyday. The temporary opening of these spatial constructions where viewers and authors are free to switch places, may also reflect on the merit of collective efforts and the fallacy of ontology. The process and title of the series “Naturalizations” also invites to constantly question “the natural” and those institutions - religious, mythological or governmental, which claim not only to know what is “natural,” but are even ready to issue their own stamps of “naturalization.” Individual works within the series include La Danza de los Espejos (The Dance of Mirrors), 2003; Media Defacements (Mediaciones Sin Rostro), 2004; The Mechanism of Facial Expression / Homage to Duchenne de Bolougne (El Mecanismo de la Expresión / Homenaje a Duchenne de Bolougne), 2005; Point-Counterpoint-Fusion / Homage to Daniel Buren (Punto-Contrapunto-Fusion / Homenaje a Daniel Buren), 2005/06; El Libro de los Espejos y el Manual de Instrucciones (The Book of Mirrors & The Users’ Manual), 2002-ongoing; Enunciados sobre la Máscara (Statements on the Mask), 2005-ongoing; The Execution of Maximiliano, Parts 1 & 2 (La Ejecución de Maximiliano, 1a y 2a Parte), 2006; What Are We Before We Are Naturalized? Experimental Kit & regular workshops, 2002-ongoing; and What Are We Before We Are Naturalized? A Journal of Non-Linear Activity, 2002-ongoing. This is the most socially active of my projects. Since I started working on it in 2002, I have shared the experience described above with thousands of people on an intimate basis. Users have belonged to art publics, immigrant organizations, psychoanalitic and other professional associations, as well as groups of all kinds and ages. Geographically and culturally, the work has been shown and experimented with in the US, Mexico, Peru, Denmark, UK, Germany, Croatia, Lithuania, Singapur, and South Korea, among others.

Also true to, yet even more focused on the topic of cosmopolitanism and current debates around globalization are the following two series. [#6] LATINO/A AMERICA (begun 2003) is a conceptual series that consists of the presentation and distribution of a new map of the American continent, and the development of public art forms that are dispersed in everyday social spaces and exchanges.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/series/latinoamerica.html

While it may be seen as a monument to the epics of migration, its goal is also to critically reflect on the form and function of conventional monuments. The words “Latino/a” and “America” acquire different meanings depending on the context, and reflect on the deep impact of popular shifts in our culture. The common tie between all of the different versions is the sharing of a new “Latinidad” that extends globally, and is redefining the English speaking world. We are changing what “America” means, and what it means to be “American.”

[#5] The Tianguis Transnacional Series, on the other hand, is defined by a steady exploration of the aesthetic, social, and political manifestations of informal trade.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/series/tianguis.html

It pays particular attention to the informal economy’s social networks as they exist in the current context of globalization, and its related history of colonialism. The word Transnacional may be seen as a simple yet significant Spanish intervention in the globally recognizable Transnational. Drawing on the transformative power of the Spanish speaking immigrant population on the U.S., this one letter difference points at dramatically divergent experiences of globalization that are created by a “free” flow of goods and capital on the one hand, and a violent regulation of population flows on the other. The word Tianguis is more obscure. It is a Nahuatl (Mexican Indigenous language) word that has survived five hundred years of colonization, and in the process has undergone very meaningful transformations. Used in pre-Hispanic times by the inhabitants of the Aztec empire, this word simply meant ‘market’ or the equivalent of our contemporary ‘shopping mall’. In contemporary Mexican Spanish, however, tianguis has become a prominent synonym of informal trade, illicit street stands, and the so-called black (or grey) market. The hegemonic Aztec “mall” has been thrown onto the street by the Spanish colony. The Indigenous street keeps fighting back, though, refusing to forget the meaning of the word, and insisting on the daily practice of a tianguis that threatens the very foundations of social and economic control, colonial urbanism and its State taxation system. Undocumented immigrants are criminalized in the U.S. just as informal tradespeople are criminalized in Mexico. These geographically dispersed populations are literally related by family bonds, social class, and ethnic background. Tianguis Transnacional is an homage to them, built in the immediate sites of their labor and daily cultural production. This series includes the following projects Prototipos para estructuras callejeras informales (Prototypes for informal street structures), 2004, late development stage; Sonido Tianguis Transnacional, multi-media collaborations with various dj networks (Chapters 1-3 Completed: New York 2006, Mexico City 2007, NC Triangle 2008) and Museo Grafitero (Graffiti Museum), 2004, early development stage. This series also has led to a new set of philosophical and theoretical formulations around what I have termed ‘migrant indigeneity’ and ‘indigenous migrancy’ two concepts which I am convinced will take ever more importance in my work.

[#4] Enormously important to my development as an artist and intellectual, and culturally more and more significant as years go by, is my public art project called Una Propuesta Escultórica para el Zócalo (A Sculptural Proposal for the Zócalo), 1999/2004.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/individual/unapropuesta.html

Adjacent to the Zócalo, Mexico’s most important public square, is the country’s central Cathedral, designated a world heritage site by UNESCO. After being threatened for hundreds of years by earthquakes and uneven sinking, an extensive restoration begun in 1989 saved the building from collapse. Throughout its nine year restoration, a mammoth green scaffold buttressed the interior, being readjusted every fifteen days along with the Cathedral’s warped foundation. When the restoration was complete, I realized that the metal scaffold would be disassembled. I teasingly proposed to Mexico City’s Commission of Art for Public Spaces (CAEP) that they reassemble the 300-ton structure as a temporary exhibition on the Zócalo, just as it had been in the cathedral. The CAEP enthusiastically accepted the proposal and recommended it to the government of Mexico City. One year and numerous negotiations later the project died due to lack of political initiative, caught by the aftermath chasm from the landmark elections of 1998 (Mexico City) and 2000 (national) where after seven decades of one party system, Mexico was left with a right wing Federal government, and a left wing Mexico City government . The installation created several years later follows the evolution of a project that began with the concept of an open square and an ephemeral monument of absurd dimensions. Scheduled for a show in France as part of my solo exhibition there at Galerie of Marseille, this project has been shown in various countries, and has been the subject of multiple publications in Spanish, and English.

After the failure of monumental intentions in A Sculptural Proposal for the Zócalo, I felt the need to devote years of work to a very different form of public art, one that would consist of very small yet stubborn gestures. So poor were these in nature, that they would disappear almost entirely from any conscious perception by their audience. Works from those years would eventually lead to my theory and practice of ‘open routines,’ but only after many lost hours of anonymous and unrecognized labor.

[#10] Crumbs: Drawing on a Limited View of New York City’s Cultural Wealth (2000) seems most notable from this period, especially as it is shown with growing frequency in exhibition venues contradicting the project’s original modesty.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/individual/crumbs.html

In the year 2000, I found my work to be in a stage of development beyond even the better known ‘post-studio art.’ I came to call it ‘post-apartment art.’ The ever-growing price of rent and the cutthroat competition for artists’ jobs and opportunities in New York City meant that I was able to spend little time and money on elaborate art production. Instead, I had fully embraced the practice of talking about art projects I had never made or would promise to make at some point in the future. Verbal conceptualism and performance art spread into everyday activities offered themselves as the ultimate poor man’s solution to the city’s inhospitable art institutions and inflated real estate market. Most of these ‘fictional art’ conversations were staged in semi-public spaces, such as cafeterias, and soon I realized that these spaces had become the ‘studio’ I could not afford. At the same time, I routinely listened to the litany of art institutions recited at parties by colleagues. So I bought myself a disposable camera and devised a master plan that allowed me to say that my work had been shown at every major art institution in New York. Whenever I had a little extra time and cash, I walked into a museum cafeteria and purchased a coffee and a cookie. I drank the coffee, ate most of the cookie, and broke any remaining crumbs with my long distance telephone card until I could draw simple line patterns on the table. I photographed the resulting drawing and cleaned the crumbs from the table. I repeated this exact procedure twelve times with different visual results at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (West and South Wings), the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, DIA Center for the Arts, the Bronx Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art (East and South Wings), and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design. Grand gestures of earlier land art and insitutional critique appeared and disappeared on the table in new and reduced pathetic forms. These actions also functioned as humorous yet critical documentary markers of the growing phenomenon of museum cafeterias and gift shops, while pointing to the meager resources dedicated to artists by these very institutions. The project was ephemeral and took me several weeks to execute. Fellow museum visitors and museum staff invariably observed the process with confusion, especially as I was breaking the crumbs with my card and spreading thin lines of them across the table. Some even approached me and initiated conversations. The c-prints from the final edition were only produced after I was able to find steady employent in the academy (2005). The original edition from 2000 existed only as a set of five small format, low budget artist books that included all photographs. These booklets were handed out to five friends in gratitude for many prolific verbal art exchanges.

Also originating in this period of harsh living conditions, unlimited generosity, and the sadness of repressed ambition are crucial years of early collaborative experimentation. After almost a decade of stubborn collective practice, however, many of the collaborative frameworks I have helped build with patient dedication and extremely few resources have bloomed into something altogether different, reaching unexpected maturity and creating many of my most meaningful friendships, projects, exchanges, and ideas I will ever be a part of. I am here speaking of my ongoing collaborations with 16 Beaver Group in New York, as well as various immigrant organizations in New York [#7] Between 2000 and 2008, along with artists Rene Gabri, Ayreen Anastas, John Menick, Paige Sarlin, Jesal Kapadia, Benj Geerdes, Martin Lucas and Yates McKee, as well as a wider network of collaborators I have produced and organized hundreds of events in New York and over a dozen international projects around the world (see: http://www.16beavergroup.org/). These include exhibitions and work for Gwangju Biennial, Mass Moca, Whitney Museum of American Art (CUNY Graduate Center), MIT, the Royal College of Art (UK), and October magazine, among others. But the early collaborative years also produced a steady set of habits continously blending pedagogy and self-education with cultural practice and political activity.

[#8] Between 1999 and 2004 I became the founder, director, and instructor of the bilingual (Spanish-English) experimental workshop Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses, a collaboration with the immigrant organizations Asociación Tepeyac de New York & Mexicanos Unidos de Queens, New York. It was this context that allowed me to create my first set of truly significant social artworks, as well as the theories that would eventually take me to a productive involvement in the academy, the culture industry, and the world of public and international policy. It was also in this context that I received my first set of grants (Dedalus Foundation) and institutional recognition (NGOs and non-profits). Last, but not least, it was here that I learned to collectively construct more just and playful social structures than the rigid ones of the classist Mexican system or the still too homogeneous and snobbish Manhattan art world.

The immediate future of my research will focus on finishing a major painting project already seven years in the making, especially after this project has been nourished through my participation as a Fellow at Duke Univrsity’s Franklin Humanities Institute’s 2007-8 Recycle Seminar. [#11] WTC Memorial is a cycle of twelve oil paintings critically commemorating the September 11 attacks. The paintings correspond to twelve cities around the world.
http://www.duke.edu/~plasch/individual/memorial.html

Half of them are contested territories or relevant sites for international affairs between 2001, when the piece was initiated, and 2011, when it will be concluded for the 10 year anniversary of the tragic event. The other half corresponds to cities where the Twin Towers have been recreated by light beams to commemorate September 11. Originally designed for the New York context by artist Julian Lavediere, these upward projections are reminiscent of Nazi architect Albert Speer’s light palace work from the early 1940s. Conceptually, the work is based on the premise of rebuilding the WTC Towers identically in all these sites as a permanent international memorial. The aesthetics and history of abstraction, colonial painting, tourism, and military visual technology also play a significant role, as each painting has entirely different stylistic, iconographic, and technical characteristics that bring the viewer to these issues in a material form. Cities in progress: 1. Kabul, Afghanistan (near completion), 2. Budapest, Hungary (near completion), 3.Baghdad, Iraq (near completion), 4. Paris, France (near completion), 5.Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (half way), 6.Liverpool, England (begun), 7.Darfur Region Refugee Camps, Sudan (begun), 8.Montevideo, Uruguay (begun), 9-12.to be determined: Current candidates are Teheran, Caracas, New Orleans, Ramallah or Gaza City.

Teaching
My shift of focus to an aesthetics of the social sphere has led me to face problems of culture and perception outside of the possibilities of a single medium. It also requires a regular commitment to the actual formation of social environments through which the work may come to light. It is therefore not by chance that, throughout my life, I have led a large range of regular workshops, social events, and art classes. Their locations and participants have been as varied as a social workers’ association in Mexico City (1996), children, men, and women from various Mayan rural towns of the southern states of Chiapas and Quintana Roo (1999), Latino/a children and youth in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx (2000-2005), a group of Latino/a women who have suffered through domestic violence (2003), and students who take my classes through the current teaching position I hold at Duke University (2002-present).