Hi Robbin,
In the past eleven years I have "lived" here in NYC, find it much easier to
do work outside the insitutiton when I am located outside of NYC. New York
embraces the residue of that which enables me to make other works in other
places.
I taught some hybrid courses at NYU from 1988-1992 in
installation/performance/sculpture (that's another story about
institutional red tape). This work was less about institutional critique
and more about direct action. The students I worked with created
interventions designed to exist outside the realm of institutional spaces.
We made works all over the city, and outside of the city entirely, in the
land, in our kitchens, in the operating room, in zines, in rental cars
(yes, really!, and a Lincoln Towncar at that!) in churches (I had two
students who fell in love in one of my classes, an artist who was a
catholic priest and a post-pentacostal christian who talked in tongues.
The priest left the church and the pentecostal realized he wasn't really
possessed by the devil, but was an artist instead.) Subsequent itinerant
teaching gigs took me to RISD, MIT, the Cooper Union, the Maryland
Institute (where we worked for a term in an abandoned brewery in
Baltimore), the University of Nevada at fabulous Las Vegas (where we would
critique casino interiors as grandiose installations with budgets of
millions. We went to psychic readers (lots of 'em in LV) as group
performances. I had one student who was a blackjack dealer for eight years
who had been in jail three times who did these performances in casinos
where he would cash his paycheck, give us all his money, let us gamble with
it until we only had a dollar left, then win it all back from that dollar.
Early in this discussion Morgan described Las Vegas as " the most placeless
place I have ever experienced". Someone, in print no less, called Soho "a
carnival with a casino attached" I kinda liked that. Las Vegas, for me, is
truly the epicenter of the end of the world and the city of the next
millenium simultaneously. It is that placeless place that is the image of
"america": the abundance and loss, an artificial oasis in the desert
founded by gangsters transformed into the largest theme park in the Western
world. The lobby of the Mirage Hotel (the one with the fake volcano that
erupts every hour on the hour to the sound of monkey calls and the smell of
pina-colada) is a constructed tropical rain-forest, made of real living
plants (bromeliads, orchids, other air-plants), real preserved plants (palm
trees which were once living but are now shot thru the vieins with some
sort of formaldehyde-polyester-resin stuff,) and fake plants, made of
plastic, silk and other materials. Hard to distinguish the boundaries
between. It is all so horrifying and wonderful at the same time.)
Several years prior to moving to NY, I founded an arts organization in New
Mexico, ART/MEDIA, which commissioned artists to create works in the mass
media: sound works on the radio, inserts in newspapers and magazines,
billboards, sixty-second long artist videos on TV, along with the usual
performance/lecture/exhibition series. Lots of local artists as well as
"big names" like Hans Haacke and the very busy Jenny Holzer were
participants in these interventions. So I'm somewhat familiar with "old
media" interventions but am a total newcomer to "new media" interventions.
I wanna learn.
I think intervention has to do with slipping through holes in the system,
appearing between reference points of time or events.
Eve
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