The Artifact.

The artifact as a subject has been a recent topic in my work. My interest in the artifact initially came from a personal involvement with performance art that started about four years ago. While I was in college there was a general re-visiting of the second wave feminist movement and as a result I was looking at artists who dealt with taboo subjects in the 1960’s and 70’s. I experimented with performance partially to understand how it worked as a political apparatus and also because I wanted to find out which taboo subjects existed in the art world at the time. I arrived at some conclusions, most of which are inconsequential to what I am doing right now but while I was exploring these subjects I momentarily abandoned painting to focus on performance. Eventually, I began to think of such things as Carolee Schneeman’s Internal Scroll and Eve Klein’s Anthropométries, objects that function as recordings of time-based significant actions or performance artifacts.

Formal Modification, Cosmetic Layer.

I have a new show coming up, and while curating, it’s been good to reevaluate things that I had done in the past, and to compare them to the recent work made in Korea. What is surprising are not the differences, but the similarities between now and before, and in realizing this I have become aware of a habit that I’m starting to consider very essential to my modus operandi. Maybe I had tried to describe it before but had failed, but here is another attempt.

Culture is Exclusive.

Is culture like a collective curatorial project? Cornel West defines culture in Prophetic Reflections, p. 137, as "values and attitudes that are embodied or expressed in texts, artifacts, or performances, sustained by communities over time, preserving various identities of unique individuals within those communities." It's interesting to think about how much of this process is constructed subconsciously and how much of it is schemed. Any culture that may be described by a word plus the morpheme '-ness' is inherently talking about purity. Considering the history of purity in relationship to the human race, it's hard to live without paranoia.

Cultural Heritage, Authority, and Immigration.

I’ve been up to catching up with my reading. I’ve been taking up nineteenth century classics that I never got to read when I was in high school. I’ve been busy painting and listening to audio books in the process, so that when I look at my paintings they remind me of stories. I have been thinking about the meaning of the term cultural heritage and how it applies to migrant people. Are those English and North American classics that I've been reading part of my "cultural heritage"? Am I responsible for them and do I have the right to claim them as part of my background?

To the common citizen cultural background is taken for granted, but to the immigrant, cultural background becomes a responsibility and a construct. The common citizen is fed literature, art, and language automatically and systematically from his native environment all of his life. The immigrant brings a personalized idea of what his cultural background is and adjusts it to his new surrounding in an attempt to comply with new political expectations. Part of this process of integration requires an understanding of the new environment: Language is a good example for without a basic understanding of a local language an immigrant will always be marginalized by default. Other idiosyncrasies and knowledge modified during this process are taste, mannerisms, and vocabulary. All of these plus the tangible artifacts left by past generations are considered a culture's heritage.

Statement For The Gold of Your Horizons.

My current project consists in the partial obliteration of objects that are fundamental to the construction of a cultural identity. Examples of these are memorabilia, cultural or religious figures (including mythological, folkloric, historical, or artistic icons) and prehistoric or ancient artifacts that aid in the invention of an ancestral past.

How important are these objects (or subjects) in the long run? How easy or how difficult is it to forget them? The poporo, a Muisca statuette, the Tahíno words in my vocabulary: patata, tiburón, maíz, bohío; and the Arabic ones: algarroba, aceite, limón, arroz. Do we remember the functions of these tokens accurately or do we construct them? Do we modify them to fit our ideologies or even our tastes? Am I entitled to my mother’s memories? Do I inherit my past or do I reinvent it? How does collective memory function? These are questions that I ask myself constantly.

English Lit.

I recently got one of those forwarded messages from a friend. The ones that you are supposed to read, modify and forward to other people. Except this was not really a message but a facebook note in which I was tagged. It was about a list of 100 books made by BBC. The broadcaster supposedly alleged most people only have read an average of 6 of the books included. I was supposed to go through the list, bold the books I have read in their entirety and italicize the ones I only started reading but did not finish, or read only an excerpt. Then I was to create my own note with the list and tag the friend who sent me the message along with other “book nerds” explaining the process so that it could all be publicized and compared.

When I received the note I immediately felt ashamed because I already knew that I was about to confront one of my biggest insecurities – my literary command, and that I was thrown into a game that I could not win. It is not that I consider myself stupid or incapable of playing this game and in fact, if what BBC says about this list is correct then I am above the level of the average reader (at least in England), but I still feel panicky when I see myself forced to discuss this topic in public.

I will not make my own note for my Facebook acquaintances to see and I will not tag anyone in it, but if I did, this is what it would look like:

Évita from ET AL., ETC.

This is really lazy but I'm going to redirect to another post from another blog that is not mine. But basically Évita talks about the things she makes.