Universal Dissolvent: Fragments from the Southern California Megalopolis
Dates:
Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:00 - Fri Apr 10, 2015
Location:
San Diego,
California
United States of America
United States of America
Curated by SDAI Curator-in-Residence Alex Young, Universal Dissolvent is an exhibition and in-progress archive showcasing artists whose work confronts the challenges of the Southern California megalopolis and address the spatial, historical, and social conditions of the region and its geopolitical 'centers': Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana.
The individuals, collaboratives, and collectives within employ multiple disciplines and critical approaches toward a diverse set of concerns into the past, present, and future shaping of the urban totality of Southern California. The exhibition is comprised of projects spanning over 20 years, including new and rarely seen works, providing insight into a breadth of critical regional practice from recent history.
Examining the urban geography of Southern California--its environment, its political and spatial organization, and its position within broader collective consciousness--the exhibition seeks to probe the specificity of the region, its reputed exceptionalism, and its argued place as the paradigmatic American metropolis for the 20th and 21st centuries. The apparent product of an impossible practice--like alchemy or utopia--Southern California, through the intervention of waves of enterprising inhabitants (boosters, engineers, real estate schemers, and dreamers of edenic abundance), has in the course of little over a century transformed from a semi-arid desert environment and a few sun-blasted frontier towns into the home of the world's largest bi-national conurbation, the nation's second largest city, the continent's fourth largest megapolitan population, its busiest shipping port, and a dominant global force within everything from popular culture and consumer products to engineering, urban planning, and intellectual discourse.
The exhibition's title, Universal Dissolvent, refers to the mythic substance of the same name once sought by alchemists as the elixir of life, a facilitating agent of transformation, and moreover a substance to dissolve all substances. Vernacularly, it denotes something much simpler, more tangible, appreciably vitalizing, namely: water. Invoking the conquest of the arid American southwest and the extension of mass habitability to the spoils of Manifest Destiny through grandiose feats of engineering in irrigation and infrastructure; Universal Dissolvent attempts to address the challenges of the region's growth and asks: What is to be made of Southern California? Further, how can we address Southern California's dissolutions: of the natural environment, of the city, of the public, of distance, and of the universals of imperial modernism and global post-modernism? Universal Dissolvent looks to situated practice and critical regionalisms to question the possibilities of sustainable, specific, local, civic, cultural, renewable, edaphic, geologic, and geographic within a region synonymous with the anti-urban, ecological disaster, militarized space, simulacral eden, boosterism, economic collapse, and longstanding wars on labor, poverty, and immigration.
Artists in the exhibition include: Monica Arreola, Natalie Bookchin, Louis Hock, Janet Koenig & Gregory Sholette, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Charles G. Miller, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colonia Libertad, Owen Mundy, Gabriela Torres Olivares & Omar Pimienta, Bob Paris, The Periscope Project, Nils Schirrmacher, and SPURSE.
san diego art institute
1439 el prado
san diego, CA 92101
Tuesday - Saturday 10am to 4pm
Sunday 12 noon to 4pm
Closed Mondays and major holidays
“UNIVERSAL DISSOLVENT” will run March 6 until April 10, 2015, with an opening reception on March 13, 6:00-8:00pm at SDAI.
The individuals, collaboratives, and collectives within employ multiple disciplines and critical approaches toward a diverse set of concerns into the past, present, and future shaping of the urban totality of Southern California. The exhibition is comprised of projects spanning over 20 years, including new and rarely seen works, providing insight into a breadth of critical regional practice from recent history.
Examining the urban geography of Southern California--its environment, its political and spatial organization, and its position within broader collective consciousness--the exhibition seeks to probe the specificity of the region, its reputed exceptionalism, and its argued place as the paradigmatic American metropolis for the 20th and 21st centuries. The apparent product of an impossible practice--like alchemy or utopia--Southern California, through the intervention of waves of enterprising inhabitants (boosters, engineers, real estate schemers, and dreamers of edenic abundance), has in the course of little over a century transformed from a semi-arid desert environment and a few sun-blasted frontier towns into the home of the world's largest bi-national conurbation, the nation's second largest city, the continent's fourth largest megapolitan population, its busiest shipping port, and a dominant global force within everything from popular culture and consumer products to engineering, urban planning, and intellectual discourse.
The exhibition's title, Universal Dissolvent, refers to the mythic substance of the same name once sought by alchemists as the elixir of life, a facilitating agent of transformation, and moreover a substance to dissolve all substances. Vernacularly, it denotes something much simpler, more tangible, appreciably vitalizing, namely: water. Invoking the conquest of the arid American southwest and the extension of mass habitability to the spoils of Manifest Destiny through grandiose feats of engineering in irrigation and infrastructure; Universal Dissolvent attempts to address the challenges of the region's growth and asks: What is to be made of Southern California? Further, how can we address Southern California's dissolutions: of the natural environment, of the city, of the public, of distance, and of the universals of imperial modernism and global post-modernism? Universal Dissolvent looks to situated practice and critical regionalisms to question the possibilities of sustainable, specific, local, civic, cultural, renewable, edaphic, geologic, and geographic within a region synonymous with the anti-urban, ecological disaster, militarized space, simulacral eden, boosterism, economic collapse, and longstanding wars on labor, poverty, and immigration.
Artists in the exhibition include: Monica Arreola, Natalie Bookchin, Louis Hock, Janet Koenig & Gregory Sholette, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Charles G. Miller, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colonia Libertad, Owen Mundy, Gabriela Torres Olivares & Omar Pimienta, Bob Paris, The Periscope Project, Nils Schirrmacher, and SPURSE.
san diego art institute
1439 el prado
san diego, CA 92101
Tuesday - Saturday 10am to 4pm
Sunday 12 noon to 4pm
Closed Mondays and major holidays
“UNIVERSAL DISSOLVENT” will run March 6 until April 10, 2015, with an opening reception on March 13, 6:00-8:00pm at SDAI.
Call for Entries - Drain Magazine: ATHLETICISM
Deadline:
Fri Jan 30, 2015 00:00
The word ‘athletic’ derives from the Greek, athlēō (‘compete for a prize’). In this schema, the ‘prize’ is the thing competed for, but this can be defined in many ways: as a gift, a kiss, a drop of blood, or a ribbon. We are often told that the prize is not important but participation is. The athlete models subjectivity, the body, desire, social relations, matter and chance in order to achieve a measure of success, recognition, mastery, the deferral of death and emptiness, a place in history, an apotheosis of self-love, among other things.
How can artworks, essays, thought experiments, interventions, social events and encounters allow us to critically analyze and even undo the habitual idioms, rules and expectations surrounding athleticism as a measure or even as an outcome? Is it possible to create a differently dispersed athleticism that shows us what a body can do, what a care of the body can mean, or indeed, arranges new relations between bodies in order to attain a hitherto unimaginable prize?
In what ways can we think through/work away from/deconstruct the fascistic tendencies of the ‘competitive spirit’ in order to arrange new rhythms and durations, participative networks and subjectivities? Can athleticism be situated within a more radical play of performances and acts that involve unanticipated outcomes and risks? Put in another way, how can a radical undoing of the telos of the athlete lead us to redefine what is worth struggling for?
What are the parallel roles of endurance, discipline, failure in sports and cultural production?
How do artists explore the making, breaking and rearranging of rules, strategies, structures and histories of these visual, spatial, temporal and embodied games?
Submission deadline: January 30, 2015
For further details and to submit please visit the link below:
How can artworks, essays, thought experiments, interventions, social events and encounters allow us to critically analyze and even undo the habitual idioms, rules and expectations surrounding athleticism as a measure or even as an outcome? Is it possible to create a differently dispersed athleticism that shows us what a body can do, what a care of the body can mean, or indeed, arranges new relations between bodies in order to attain a hitherto unimaginable prize?
In what ways can we think through/work away from/deconstruct the fascistic tendencies of the ‘competitive spirit’ in order to arrange new rhythms and durations, participative networks and subjectivities? Can athleticism be situated within a more radical play of performances and acts that involve unanticipated outcomes and risks? Put in another way, how can a radical undoing of the telos of the athlete lead us to redefine what is worth struggling for?
What are the parallel roles of endurance, discipline, failure in sports and cultural production?
How do artists explore the making, breaking and rearranging of rules, strategies, structures and histories of these visual, spatial, temporal and embodied games?
Submission deadline: January 30, 2015
For further details and to submit please visit the link below:
DRAIN journal of contemporary art and culture - Psychogeography
Deadline:
Tue Apr 15, 2008 00:00
Psychogeography
In 1955, Guy Debord described psychogeography as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Debord’s psychogeographical map The Naked City (1957) challenged traditional ideas of mapping relating to scale, location, and fixity, and drew on the work of urban social geographer Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe’s concept of the city as a conglomeration of distinct quarters, each with its own special function, class divisions, and “physiognomy,” which linked the idea of the urban plan to the body. An important strategy of the pyschogeographical was the dérive, “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”.
The ‘psychogeographical’ has had a pervasive if somewhat amorphous role in contemporary art and culture. As a creative, social and political tactic, wandering through psychogeographic spaces is pertinent to a diverse range of practices including the use of GPS systems, Internet art, photography as well as sound and performance art.
This issue of Drain attempts to gather a series of essays, artworks and creative writings that reflect on the current state of psychogeography. How have contemporary artists, writers and thinkers interpreted, or been influenced by, the legacy of psychogeography?
Abstract deadline: April 15th, 2008
Submission deadline: June 1, 2008
Launch: August 1, 2008
Please send written submissions to: Celina@drainmag.com
For all art projects, contact: Celina@drainmag.com, Avantika@drainmag.com
In 1955, Guy Debord described psychogeography as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Debord’s psychogeographical map The Naked City (1957) challenged traditional ideas of mapping relating to scale, location, and fixity, and drew on the work of urban social geographer Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe’s concept of the city as a conglomeration of distinct quarters, each with its own special function, class divisions, and “physiognomy,” which linked the idea of the urban plan to the body. An important strategy of the pyschogeographical was the dérive, “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”.
The ‘psychogeographical’ has had a pervasive if somewhat amorphous role in contemporary art and culture. As a creative, social and political tactic, wandering through psychogeographic spaces is pertinent to a diverse range of practices including the use of GPS systems, Internet art, photography as well as sound and performance art.
This issue of Drain attempts to gather a series of essays, artworks and creative writings that reflect on the current state of psychogeography. How have contemporary artists, writers and thinkers interpreted, or been influenced by, the legacy of psychogeography?
Abstract deadline: April 15th, 2008
Submission deadline: June 1, 2008
Launch: August 1, 2008
Please send written submissions to: Celina@drainmag.com
For all art projects, contact: Celina@drainmag.com, Avantika@drainmag.com
