1. Could you briefly tell me about yourself and your current role in the arts?
I am a media and visual artist based in the central coast of California and San Francisco. I work in drawing, photomontage, video, and online multimedia, often with themes around remote landscapes, energy production, and the human-biological trace. "Tesserae of Venus" imagines a carbon-saturated future-- as if Venus is arriving on Earth-- debuted at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, last fall (2009). Upcoming video screenings include "Seven After Eleven," http://vimeo.com/5243681 --a short film about Ground Zero, for Directors Lounge, Berlin, this month http://berlinlounge.tumblr.com/tagged/18th%20Feb%202010. BOMB Magazine has published a new interview by Melissa Potter with me on its BOMBlog, concerning "Tesserae of Venus"-- last October, archived here http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5307
2. How many other College Art Association conferences have you attended? Just a few-- last year in Los Angeles and way back in 2001 in Chicago.
What do you find the most exciting or different about this year’s conference?
Mainly it's the chance to work with some lovely people on the panel for the Queer Caucus for Art-- Robert Summers and Virginia Solomon. We have common obsessions, they in more scholarly, textual ways, me in more editorial and visual/media-ways. We explore participatory practice histories from Kaprow to transfeminism in the works of artists and writers who may push against the ‘heteronormativity’ implied in ‘relational aesthetics’. We pursue queer theory’s most notable modes of thought-- especially, how identities self construct through embodiment and performance, and, how a ‘queer’ critique of social relations and aesthetic production can extend beyond performance of gender.
3. Which panel or workshop are you participating in?
“How is ‘Queer’ Art Relational?” is the panel title.
Can you give me a summary of the panel?
It is a panel on queer theory and relational aesthetics. Robert asked me to participate last summer in the panel, and this dovetailed perfectly with an online conversation I had already been wanting to curate for the listserv -empyre-, last year. Relational aesthetics, as it has played out since Nicholas Bourriaud introduced this meme back in the mid nineties in Europe, neglected work that 'queerly' related artists like General Idea whose work engaged the public and participatory realm in lots of edgy ways, not nearly so comfortably as ‘relational aesthetics’ . I wanted to ask artists and writers to come together around this question of 'queer relational'. Luckily, Virginia Solomon agreed to be one of my guests on -empyre- , since she is currently writing on General Idea. http://www.aabronson.com/art/gi.org/ '"Queer Relational" is a hypertext conversation (July 2009) on the Sydney-based -empyre- list.serv (http://subtle.net/empyre including artists and theorists Virginia Solomon, Micha Cardenas, Tara Mateik, Judith Rodenbeck, Marc Leger, Robert Summers, David Chirot and others, Its content fits in with this panel’s concerns.
I've made a short video about the -empyre- conversation-- to give you a flavor of the kinds of things we talked about in "Queer Relational" -- this video will show during the panel on Thursday February 11. The images in this video come from my artist-curatorial project, "Pharmakon Library" and feature the work of Parker Tilghman, Naeem Mohaiemen, Ian Giles, Caitlin Berrigan, and MANIK, while the text is a collage of quotes from the conversation on -empyre-. You can access it at http://vimeo.com/9371326
Reading and listening around queer theory helps me to conceptualize and frame some of my practice in marginal landscapes and solo performance in remote places-- as ‘bastard’ or ‘kairotic’ spaces. I make a kind of abstraction within a documentary-related, empirical practice. The indexical approach of most documentary work is far from the formalist gesture. Bridging the gap between these two modes of working--is a queer strategy,
For CAA, “How is ‘Queer’ Art Relational?” includes the following presentations;
"Forget Bourriaud": Queer Relationally and/as a Queer Aesthetics of Existence
Robert Summers, Otis College of Art
On Queer Art, Minimal Form, and Relationality
Joe Madura, Emory University
Queer Relational: A Conversation from Empyre-Soft-Skinned Space
Christina McPhee, naxsmash group productions and University of California, Santa Cruz
Relational Aesthetics, Activist Public Art, and Queer Desi Futures
Alpesh Kantilal Patel, independent scholar
All Tomorrow's Parties: Queer Aesthetics and Cultural Politics
Virginia Solomon, University of Southern California
4. How does your panel’s topic apply to college art students and the greater art community?
We wanted to set up a forum, to instigate a space of neplanta, or bridging, to borrow the expression of Gloria Anzaldua in "This Bridge We Call Home." In the conversation, “Queer Relational” on -empyre-, two remarkable artists offered testimony to their social activist and political art-- Tara Mateik and Micha Cardenas. Queer representations of violence in, for example, Jean Genet, instigated a complex discussion around violence, complicity and fetish in a time of war and the repression of speech, thanks the poet David Chirot. One of the scholars, Judith Rodenbeck, has some very pithy things to say about Relational Aesthetics in the nineties and how it fails to account for the many strands of participatory arts in America since the sixties including the practices of task-built dance and the 'score' (as in Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown).
You can find the hypertext of the conversation here online at https://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2009-July/thread.html
and the text (as a linear document) is here
The tension in all writing and speech is a kind of bridge between at least two unstable conditions, one/the nature of words as representations of real and two/the nature of words as constructions of real. Queerness, for me involves the exhilaration and hope in the ex-tensions between these.
5. Why is it important for students to attend College Art Association?
It intensifies your art process inside your mind -- what is not yet in any kind of production.
6. What advice would you give college students who are thinking about a career in the arts similar to yours?
Breathe. Draw. Take note. Gloria Anzaldua teaches us that the neplantera is a facilitator between worlds. It seems to me that now more than ever, artists and cultural producers are engaged in that very role.
7. Where do you see art going in 2010?
Right straight to Venus :-)
8. What are some of the concerns you have as an artist living and working in this economic crisis?
To keep focus and calm within production whenever it's tempting to panic.
9. What projects are you currently working on?
Ocean observations on the California coast and (next year) in coastal Brittany, where I am planning an interactive cinema project on the 'maree verte' or green algae sea, with the Architecture/Landscape/Milieux Lab at Paris -La Villette.
10. Do you currently have any of your work on display? If so, where?
Upcoming video screenings include "Seven After Eleven," a short film about Ground Zero, for Directors Lounge, Berlin, this month http://berlinlounge.tumblr.com/tagged/18th%20Feb%202010.
You can also check out the work online or visit Silverman Gallery in San Francisco: http://silverman-gallery.com/artist/seriesview/1615/355 .
My new project, Tesserae of Venus, is documented here: http://www.christinamcphee.net/tesserae/index.html Videos here http://vimeo.com/channels/tesseraeofvenus
New critical writing about my interactive cinema work, "La Conchita mon amour" appears with British film scholar Sharon Lin Tay's new book, "Women on the Edge : Twelve Political Film Practices", just now out with Macmillan (2009) http://us.macmillan.com/womenontheedgetwelvepoliticalfilmpractices
The interactive project is on Turbulence at
http://www.turbulence.org/studios/mcphee/index.html
Posted by Morehshin Allahyari, MFA Candidate from the Interdisciplinary Arts Department
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This blog has been great so far. But please interview a few more art historians and cover more art history sessions -- thanks!
Posted by: at February 12, 2010 11:14 AMAs the only sounding art historian on the blog, I would like to say I'm trying my best! Art history blogs take a little bit more reflection and time. Even the discussants on the panels get the essays weeks in advance to read, review and respond. I'll get some up soon.
Posted by: Tempestt Hazel at February 12, 2010 6:35 PMThis Queer Relational panel is, in many ways, concerned with an art historical topic, and almost panel members, including the organizers Virginia Solomon and Robert Summers, are art historians. I guess the blog could still interview them both-they are very interesting thinkers and writers. The panel is involved in an innovative critical methodology concerning how queer theory may be brought to bear significant analysis of a major trend in contemporary art beginning in the nineties, called "Relational Aesthetics." The panel engaged with important art movements in the recent (35 year) past from the point of view of queer theory. See text above for more insight and links.
Posted by: Christina McPhee at February 16, 2010 1:50 PM
