It's all about borrowing, repurposing, and mashing up this week beginning with The Festival of Appropriation, presented by mnartists.org and hosted by The Soap Factory through November 30.
Billy by John Grider
"Billy" by John Grider, one of the artists featured in the FOA through November 30.
"Billy" by John Grider, one of the artists featured in the FOA through November 30.
Jerome Bel and Pichet Klunchun
Photo of Jerome Bel and Pichet Klunchun, courtesy of Jerome Bel and the Walker Art Center
Photo of Jerome Bel and Pichet Klunchun, courtesy of Jerome Bel and the Walker Art Center
Some Assembly Required
Some Assembly Required: this week with video mashup artists Emergency Broadcast Network
Some Assembly Required: this week with video mashup artists Emergency Broadcast Network
No human endeavor, art included, springs pristine from a vacuum. Instead, artistic expression is tethered to the mediated world in which the artist steeps. Art reacts to that context in ways that may be ingenious and even novel, but rarely is anyone's artistic work wholly unmoored from the surrounding culture. This week's featured artists gleefully embrace this conundrum, fusing the newly made with the borrowed, and mashing the whole thing up to make something all their own.
Festival of Appropriation co-curator, Jon Nelson, starts us off with an overview of appropriation art and lifts the curatorial curtain on this year's exhibition celebrating the talents of mnartists.org's appropriation artists in every discipline here. And be sure to check out the rest of the new issue of access+ENGAGE: in addition to Jon Nelson's essay and the FOA collection of artwork, you'll find a handpicked sampling of arts events, artist opportunities, and much more.
Dance critic Lightsey Darst attended the collaborative dance-cum-cultural exchange project by Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun, "Pichet Klunchun and myself", and she reflects on the unusual performance, which borrows equally from both Western contemporary dance forms and Thai classical dance (Khon). She offers valuable insights on the sometimes insular cultural assumptions which, at once, bind the audience, artist, and traditional art forms together while excluding those on the outside. Read her essay here.
Next, we're featuring Tom Allen, a nationally acclaimed photographer whose work has graced glossy magazines and gallery walls alike. Allen cuts up mid-century pulp novels to create mini-vignettes that capture both the brassy appeal and underbelly of the American Dream.
The fresh installment of Some Assembly Required, a weekly podcast and radio show devoted to multimedia artists who appropriate sound from their media environment, features the hugely influential video collage group, Emergency Broadcast Network - including a phone interview with one of the the band's founders, Gardner Post.
But wait, there's more: catch the latest What Light winning poem, Creation Story by Vanessa Ramos; read a profile of the latest MAEP featured artist at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Ta-Coumba Aiken, and check in on the website later this week for a new Radio mnartists interview with Aamera Siddiqui and Suzy Messerole, founders of the newly formed Exposed Brick Theatre.
