Technique of the Self, 2017

” Technique of the Self ”

(INSTALLATION)

paper, wood

7 in x 8 in 

2017

In this series, I take the paper edited from my art research – letters, photocopies, writing, drawings, etc, and mash them together with water into paper mache objects. This is a way of editing- destroying and constructing art objects in the context of Michel Foucault ‘s writing on Greek care of the self, part of a process of self inquiry and self examination, whereby we edit our work, towards learning more about the Self. When we create writing or art, we are editing as part of the creative process. So rather than simply throw out my edited documents- i.e. writing, I have turned these edited writings into an “art object”, a sculpture. In many ways, these are “artifacts” as residue of my art production.

The Sentence, 2005 – Present

“Sentence”

(ART INTERVENTION/ INSTALLATION)

Various Materials –  white sesame seeds, bread, plastic c.d. covers, flour, water 

Various Sizes  – 4 feet /8 feet ( height) to 8 feet / 20 feet ( Length)

Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Montreal, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Deventer, Enschede.

2001 – present

A series of text installations / art interventions in public space exploring a visceral and monumental experience of language and words. I would go for a walk in public space in a city, and find a space or area, which seemed interesting to write a word on the ground. This intervention was often during the day, in public, and while writing the word I would feel a sense of “social revolutionary act”. Sometimes, a person would come up to me and ask questions, and I would discuss art, language, public space, or media. The fact that these written words are temporary are an important link to Buddhism, and to how many things in public space are temporary or transitory, such as advertising, nature, businesses closing and opening, architecture, urban landscaping, and urban planning changing the city scape. When choosing a word to write, I randomly select a word ( and space), making this overall ” Sentence” random, in flux, evolving, like Surrealism’s automatic writing.

Rodin

Published Art Proposal ( Installation) 2010

( ART ACTION / ART INTERVENTION / RECONTEXTUALIZATION / REFRAMING )

Rodin

A proposal for the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Published in the art journal,  Mobile Album International , 2010
Kerry Rae, modeling as Rodin’s ‘Female Thinker’

In this gallery room, of the Alte Nationalgalerie, are impressionist paintings and Renaissance sculptures that evoke my response to add a contemporary element to counter and contribute to this waterfall of beauty. Across from the Rodin sculpture ( which was not life size), I would place a similar podium, and invite female models posing nude, exactly like the Rodin Thinker; thus, there would be two thinkers across from each other- one male and one female. Over a three month period, the art action would invite different females to pose naked thinking, starting with life drawing models from the community/art schools, then female art students, then the females from the public, then female actresses in Europe and Internationally, then feminists artists, then international female politicians, then female Royalty.

A second intervention, from my internet research, would be to find the world’s largest Museum room and have every Rodin Thinker sculpture made, moved into this one room and in a second room the photographs of all the places emptied from the Rodin Thinker sculpture. And propose, after the exhibition, that every Rodin Thinker sculpture be melted down,( except the first original statue moved back to France,) into one extremely large Thinker to be placed in the Sahara Desert.

___________________________________________________________________________

Rodin constructs a site of rethinking and re-seeing our Museum experience-  one that can become a ‘happening’ in the Museum/institutional space. Also, it is to link the history of art- painting and sculpture, with a present contemporary art- performance, to discover the relations and dialectics between the two. Third, this work, creates or develops a moment where the viewer, becomes an artist, and active- how to rearticulate the passiveness of seeing into social engagement. Fourth, it is to try and understand the act of thinking.

Rodin’s sculpture is a very fascinating work. As I sat in the gallery room, many people would walk around the Thinker, and stare, and think look, at this man, a naked man, thinking.I love thinking. This act is fundamentally human. Our cognitive process is as much humans as our bodies. I think of , “I think, therefore I am”. Yet, also, ” I think, therefore I am free”. Thinking is a key to creating anything. And thinking is an act of freedom. Especially in art. And particularly in Western Democracies from the early 20th century- an art challenging our discourse, ideas, social norms, social structures, by recontextualizing things and ideas.

However, perhaps, Rodin’s thinker is not thinking; it just looks like he is; he is just in the pose of thinking, or in the pose of being  in the moment – being.

To think and be naked, are two natural human conditions and aspects. To be naked is a truth in itself. To think is to seek a or the truth. To be naked is to be true to our simple nature, literally and metaphorically. We can not hide when we are naked. As such, the parallels between thinking and nakedness link in providing a basic rubric of dialectic to engage with our Cultural and Social selves in terms of origin or the nascent philosophical self in relations with others. To be naked or nude is a social precept or axiom.

In culture and in art, to celebrate the beauty of thinking and the naked self, is an affirmation of humanness which is a vehicle towards self emancipation and knowledge of the self in and outside of the social body.

photograph by Nietzsche Drager,2010

Untitled Artist Files, 2011

Group Exhibition: Contemporary Histories- Intersecting Pasts and Futures, AHVA Library Gallery (University of British Columbia) Canada, Curator: Mo Salemy, 2011

Untitled Artist Files,  2011
Magazine pages, Files, File Holders, Table, Chair, Wood Shelves

“Untitled Artist Files”

File Folders, Plastic File Folder Holders, Table, Chair

(INSTALLATION)

Untitled Artist Files is an installation of four parts. First, 3 mounted artist files from the SFU library- Lawrence Wiener, Ian Wallace, N.E. Thing Co., mounted on the wall, with a wall shelf displaying a 1960s U.K. alternative newspaper- The International Times. Second, a desk and chair, taken from various places from the U.B.C. campus, with three plastic file holders on the table, holding numerous files – Immanuel’s personal files, standard letter size , 9” X 11.5”) collected from December 2007- 2010 from Immanuel’s art and business practice, in which Immanuel randomly inserted into each file,  one cut-out-page from 7 Vanguard magazines, ( Feb 1981; Sep 1984; May 1981; Nov 1984; Nov 1981; Oct 1985; Dec 1981; Dec 1985; Feb 1982; Feb 1986; May 1982; Dec 1987; Apr 1983, Sum 1983; May 1984) entirely dismantled.

 Untitled Artist Files, abstracts the linear structure of narratives, in a literal way, to articulate a sense of chaos in the consumption of knowledge, information, ideas.

DADA CAFE, Benniale, 2010

Dada Cafe, 2010
Chairs, Table, Chessboard, Chess book, Oranges, String, Paper, Wood, Microphone,  Electric Amp, T.V., Astro Turf, Blanket, Photograph, T- Shirts, Video, Lemonade Stand, lights, frame

(ART INTERVENTION/ ART ACTION / INSTALLATION/ PUBLIC ART)

DADA CAFE , an installation recontextualizing / reframing 1920’s Surrealism/Dadaism, in KAAP 2010 Biennale, an exhibition of 10 International Artists whom exhibited/ installed art in a 13th Century Dutch military Fort – Ruigenhoek, Utrecht, Holland, for an audience of children, ages 3- 12, incorporated  five ‘stations’ in 3 vaulted brick rooms in the fort: Station 1 “DADA Chess”. Surrealist Chess Board, a chessboard with an 18th Century Dutch/German chess instruction book. Station 2 “Lemonade Stand”, serving lemonade for 25 cents – the lemonade cups had small holes in the bottom ( Younger children were partially confused by the cups leaking , yet older children told them to plug the hole with their fingers like a Dutch dike) Station 3 ” Poetry Reading Room. a microphone and amp, where the participants could read from “Rock song lyrics ” ( 1960s- 1990s ), in Dutch and English, hanging from strings and detachable. Small square black wood seats painted with abstract expressions in hand written text for participants to sit in the room. Station 4 ” Library of Mailed Objects”– eight objects on plinthes in small alcoves, mailed from Canada by Kevin Immanuel to Utrecht, STORM, 1) Vancouver Telephone book 2009 2) Immanuel’s left Nike running shoe 3) A half consumed bottle of blue Gatorade 4) 30-45 collectable comic/t.v series cards ( 1960-80s) 5) Five issues of the 1960′s revolutionary Paris magazine – L’Enrage 6) one dutch train ticket 7) one nail, 8)pepper shaker. Immanuel mailed 25 posters taken from the cafe’s bulletin board at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, to be installed behind the objects. Station 5. “Igloo Theater”, a movie/film room- a carpeted floor, a large television, a very large blanket over the television and 6 meters in front of the T.V. permitting the audience to watch the movie from under the blanket. The 30min film composed by Immanuel mixed short excerpts from black and white Surrealist films ( 1930′s-1940′s) with short scenes from, Alice in Wonderland movie, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, X-men advertising, Silver Surfer film, the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine, and Lady Gaga/DADA CAFE photo ( installation logo)- designed by Kevin Immanuel and Gouke Hilte ( STORM, publicist); permission from Universal Records, Lady Gaga, Holland. Further interventions included a large framed photo of Andre Breton wearing sunglasses hovering in a room, and two volunteer Hosts- Dutch teen youth, assisting in the installation, wearing t- shirts prints; one, with a Theo Van Doesburg painting – Dutch Dadaist, and another with a Man Ray photograph- French Surrealist. ‘DADA CAFE” text written in sliced oranges above the arch in the main room.

Dada Cafe recontextualizes, represents, adapts and morphs Modern Avant Garde 20th Century Surrealist/DADA art by using 1960’s American Conceptual Art Practices, architectual and aesthetic design, and Continental Philosophy- Deconstruction ( Derrida and Foucault)  creating a stage.

Conversations on a Free Democracy, 2009

( ART ACTION / ART INTERVENTION / PERFORMANCE / RECONTEXTUALIZATION/ VIDEO ART )

Conversations on a Free Democracy

filmed by Sander van Wettum, 2009  + photographed by Nietzsche Drager

55 min video
Group Exhibition: Prognosis for the Future/ Prognose voor de Toekomst
Gallery ST. Havenkwartier, Deventer, Holland
Curator: Harm van der Wal (NL)
2010

Conversations on a Free Democracy is a video work filmed in the A.K.I Art Academy (Universitie Twente, Enschede, Holland) Immanuel randomly selected and invited two Dutch female life- drawing models to answer, in the moment, 7 to 10 questions on Dutch politics, cutlure, sexuality, gender, and identity. Filmed by Dutch contemporary photographer- Sander van Wettum, the work in an institutional context develops dialectics on Marxist class, immigration, identity, nationalism, personal and political, individuality, power, voice, agency, history.

In terms of sexuality, I was looking at notions various ideas of nudity/sexuality. To  be naked is theoretically vulnerable, but it is also natural, and a power- socio-politically, culturally, economically. Probably Ancient cultures had different views or experiences of the naked body than we do in Modern Democratic societies. For Western Culture, now, we generally work in similtudes of contradictory paradoxes, like we hide our bodies with clothes in public spaces, we shame our bodies with religious precepts, we glorify them as temples of aesthetics in Media, we critique them in social circles and social media, we use our nakedness to manipulate and inform and seduce and share with others, etc ., so we have a diverse lexicon of methodologies and approaches to our bodies and sexuality and nakedness, corelating and dividing the individual and social perception, when necessary for agency and power. Culturally mediated images of self and sexuality, produces an odd/unique/conflicted relationship between our individual perceptions and the social perceptions of the self and the perceiving self’s role in controlling, defining, presenting  articulating, expressing, delegating, negotiating,describing, selling, distributing, rebelling, creating, escaping, fearing, doubting, leveraging, managing,   individual sexuality in the Social Body. It is part of our contemporary collective identity, that these perceptions are resistant to clarification and functioning by convolution and myth.

________________________________________________________________________________

Sander van Wettum
http://www.sandervanwettum.com/

Ancients and Moderns

“Ancients and Moderns”

(INSTALLATION ART)

Ten 5 in x 7 in paper, pen, leafs, candles, incense, dirt, sticks, food

Deep Cove, Canada

2006

When the Dali Lama visited Vancouver, I hiked into the forest and wrote on paper cards and arranged them in an installation. Adding candles and incense to the installation created a ritual type ceremony celebrating the Dali Lama, his visit, and Buddhism. This installation was both conceptual art and religious type of ceremony. There was no intended audience, however, other hikers may have seen this work, which was temporary and site specific. This art intervention is a public art installation exploring Nature, art, communication, language, ancient civilizations, history, culture, and objects.

Silver Surfer, 1995

“Silver Surfer”

( ART INSTALLATION/ RECONTEXTUALIZATION/ ART INTERVENTION)

Acrylic on canvas, 6 feet x 8 feet, installed in Concordia Student Union Offices , Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Jan 1995

INSTALLATION / ART ACTION / ART INTERVENTION / RECONTEXTUALIZATION , Silver Surfer, 1995 ( Concordia University, Concordia Student Union )

Leading up to the student Tuition Increase protest 1995 Montreal, I painted a 8′ x 6′ canvas  painting depicting the Silver Surfer with the names of five Canadian Universities written on his body: U of Toronto, Mcgill, Concordia, York Univeristy, U.B.C . Donating the painting to the Concordia Student Union to support their organizing an upcoming “political protest”, which was a political resistance to the unreasonable tuition fees for Post Secondary Education, whereby many students were suggesting Education is a fundamental Human Right, and not privilege, whereby many Quebec students suggested University Education should be Universally Free ( or more accessible), ie. the Sorbone ( France) model of Education. I agreed. Canada should have free post- secondary education. I also donated a second painting, acrylic on canvas, 8′ x 6′, depicting four naked students- two male and one female, being hung- ie executed, with slogans on the painting, ” Education is right” and “Starving Knowledge”. This painting was displayed in the lobby of Concordia before the protest march as students gathered.

The response to the Silver Surfer painting installation in the Student Union office was diverse. Some students in the offices, stated, to paraphrase, ” they loved the  Silver Surfer painting, it “motivated them “, others said “it was almost too bright and too colourful, therefore making it difficult to work.” They had to move the painting out of the offices and place it in the hall, because it was becoming difficult for people to focus or do work. At the conclusion of the March and the student year, in a short conversation with the President of the Student Union, she thanked me for donating the two paintings. She said, to paraphrase, ” Thanks for making our cause ( protesting student tuition increases ) colourful”. At first, I thought making a political protest more colourful was a bit “superficial”. Did I just make the political resistance/voice/expression, … more pretty? Did I make it less serious and more fun?… like entertainment, like Mass Culture- television, or maybe sports colour commentary? Was making “conventional politics” more colourful and palatable, a necessary dialectic? Did Goya and Picasso political paintings like Guernica make politics more “colourful” too?  However, in deeper thought, I realized, political actions, can be or sometimes need to be colourful to be engaging. That maybe people need, in polemics, some colourful.  That colour can be discursive. That beauty can be political. That aesthetics can be colourful. Perhaps, Monet, is a political revolutionary also. While also being simply beautiful. In some Postmodern circles, they say ” The personal is political”. I suggest the personal is political only if you make it political, otherwise it’s just personal”. Maybe too, ” Beauty is political”. However, also, one can say, “Beauty or aesthetics is political, only if you make it political, otherwise it’s just beauty”. Ultimately, whether political, or colourful, or beauty, there is dialectics. And there is learning. And there is experience. And exchange. And engagement. Which is both understood and not.

_________________________________________________________

In Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1995, the Provincial Government, wished to increase student tuition fees by a large amount. Many of the Universities, Colleges, and Cejeps, united, French and English students, fighting for a “fair chance to a have prosperous future, and a post-education cost that was reasonable”, and challenged the government’s position of a educational system for the wealthy or competing intelligencia via scholarships and bursaries- an elite way to decides who succeeds or permitted opportunity. Concordia University led the way in organizing this large student march happening at the end of the student year in May. Collectively, Concordia University, Mcgill University, Dawson College‎, École de technologie supérieure‎, Université de Montréal‎, Université du Québec à Montréal‎, Cégep André-Laurendeau, Cégep de Saint-Laurent, Cégep du Vieux Montréal, Cégep Marie-Victorin, Collège Ahuntsic, Collège de Bois-de-Boulogne, Collège de Maisonneuve, Collège de Rosemont, and many others marched in the streets in protests, including letter writing campaigns, etc. The march took place on (        ) with 20,000 + students.

Then, in 2012, all the Montreal Universities had to fight again against tuition increases. It lead to months of street marches and protests. And eventually the students forced the Premier Jean Charest, the Quebec Premier, to resign, and stop the tuition increases, finally.

“The 2012 Quebec student protests were a series of student demonstrations led by student unions such as the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec and their supporters against a proposal by the Quebec Cabinet, headed by Liberal Premier Jean Charest, to raise university tuition from $2,168 to $3,793 between 2012 and 2018.[2] As part of the protest movement, a series of widespread student strikes were organized. An estimated one-third of students agreed with the boycott,[citation needed] with the rest completing their courses.[3]Left-wing groups endorsed the student protests, which evolved into generalized demonstrations against the provincial government. Opposition parties (Parti Québécois, Québec solidaire, Option nationale), workers unions (Confédération des syndicats nationaux, Canadian Union of Public Employees) and many “fringe” groups have demonstrated alongside the students in April and May 2012.[4]On May 18, the Government passed Bill 78, an emergency law to manage how protesters conduct their demonstrations and ensure students who wanted to attend classes would not be barred from entering schools which led to further protests.In the Fall of 2012, with a new school term beginning, student participation in the strikes and demonstrations dwindled. The leftist, Quebec nationalist Parti Quebecois was later elected as minority government and halted any tuition increases in line with a campaign promise.[5]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests)In 2012, the Charest government faced major challenges when students protested and went on strike by boycotting classes to protest planned tuition increases. After this continued for several months, the government passed Bill 78 to impose restrictions on protests; this caused controversy, with the Barreau du Québec among others expressing concern about possible infringement of constitutional rights. ”

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charest )

Our F**Kin Future for Sale, 1995

” Our F**Kin Future for Sale”

( PUBLIC ART/ ART INSTALLATION / ART INTERVENTION/ ART ACTION/ PERFORMANCE ART)

“LINK” Concordia Student Newspapers, 12 in x 10 in, Installed on wall 12′ high x 46′ long, Cafe, Sir George Campus, building,1995

( Front Page : a photo of a student who made a sign ” For Sale : Our Fuck’n Future” )

1995

With the permission of the Cafe manager, I installed approximately160 pages of the front page of the Concordia Student newspaper- The LINK, on a cafe wall in the Student Union Building cafe. The Link’s front page was a Student? wearing a FOR SALE sign where it was written, “Our F**K’n Future” for sale. The article, to paraphrase, discusses how this student was displeased with the “elitist expensive education system” in Canada which was actually raising tuition fees, when Corporations and the Rich have been increasing in their wealth, essentially at the expense of everyday people. I thought it was interesting and provocative that this student looked like an “everyday joe” studying to be potential MBA business like person, or banker or career politician, because such conservative people are essentially responsible for this “exploitative capitalist economy” which have made Canada an economic oppressive cheque to cheque living existence (2017) for many, and an exclusionary overpriced gentrified techno-fascist society- i.e. a typical Western Democracy in the 21st century that mostly services the wealthy, the economically powerful, with tax breaks, with corporate stores, with elite restaurants, with Condo Towers, with anti middle class policies. I wished to share his political message further with the Student Body, for the upcoming Student Protest Tuition Fee Increase March, May 1995. Installing at approximately 2 pm, in March/April, I spent about 2 hours taping the newspaper with green painting tape on the wall. The tape did not entirely hold the paper to the wall for long. Thus, my installation became a type of unplanned performance- i.e. taping up sections of slowing falling off the wall newspapers, to then retape, to then fall off the wall, then to retape. The cafe customers were the indirect audience. Around 5pm the Cafe Manager showed up, we met for the first time, and he saw my installation for the first time.  To paraphrase, his first words to me were…. “The Link, …I hate the Link!!!”. My reaction and first words, to paraphrase, “Oh.” I immediately took down the installation. The work was complete.

_________________________________________________

I see this installation as reframing the original image- front page of a newspaper, in a new context- cafe. This work was to motivate the student body towards greater “conventional political” involvement and protest and dialectics. Mediated communication, particularly hard copy print, is a potential vehicle to share, expand, re-engage, diversify, the original text or image or idea, sometimes morphing these in the re-representation. My intervention was reproducing the message of protest. In this, I was thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, which needs to include the extension of the machine image by human intervention to further the act of reproducing or representing, by personal intervention: we can view this “human furthering” as economic, as the social, as agency, as intention, as dialectics, as reframing, as recontextualizing, and as ‘personal intervention’ or ‘ personal thought’, reconstructing the machine.

Joseph Beuys Bus Stop, 1991

Joseph Beuys Bus Stop

( INSTALLATION / PUBLIC ART)

Masking Tape, Bus Stop Shelter

Vancouver, Canada

1991

I wrote the word ” Joseph Beuys” with white masking tape on a bus stop in Vancouver. This art intervention created a conversation between graffiti, advertising, conceptual art, books, internet, and all realms of language and text, in terms of communication. I am disrupting advertising communication in public space, creating dissonance with poetry. Poetry activates imagination in an abstract way, outside the frame of understanding and reason. In many ways, the word ” Joseph Beuys ” is a nonsequitur, disrupting public space, for a temporary moment, as the tape was removed the next day. This work explores public space, art, communication, language, art history, culture, advertising, and urban planning.

German Expressionist Painting in the Forest, 1989

German Expressionist Painting in the Forest

(INSTALLATION / PUBLIC ART)

Acrylic on canvas

4′ x 5′, string, trees

Spanish Banks, Vancouver, Canada

1989

I installed a 5′ x 4′ Surrealist Neo German Expressionist painting between two trees using string at 1:35 am in a forest at Spanish Banks Beach, Vancouver, Canada. I left the painting.  The next day visiting the site, the painting was removed.

_________________________________________________________This intervention, in its obvious sense, was to create an experience of difference for possible viewers, also a disruption of nature, a demarcation, a recontextualization of gallery/art relations, an informal way of speaking out, a defining of a trans-space in public space, and opening of the lexicon of socio-political artistic agency of an individual in the Social Body. This work explores public space, communication, art intervention, urbanization, and difference.