From The Influencers festival, our last guest is Trevor Paglen.
In a review in the New York Times, Trevor Paglen was defined as “a geographer by training, a conspiracy theorist by instinct and an investigative reporter by avocation.” His most recent projects are up-close investigations of state secrets, the Californian prison system and practices of “extraordinary rendition” (i.e., the transport of terrorist suspects in post-9/11 US government lingo) used by the CIA in the last few years via secret flights and ghost airline companies. His work blurs the boundary between social science and contemporary art by aiming to create unexpected–and meticulously documented–ways of visualizing the anomalous practices of the authorities as well as weird military subcultures.
While adaptation is a common practice in popular culture—familiar to moviegoers and booklovers who debate endlessly whether the film version is superior to the novel—it is perhaps less well known as a practice in contemporary art. The exhibition Adapation at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art looks at the use of this strategy in the recent work of Catherine Sullivan (Season 4), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), Guy Ben-Ner, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. These artists have transformed source material to make their own adapted works of art, re-envisioning classic literature, painting, film, ballet, and even email as new video installations.
Adaptation is a tightly focused exhibition: each of the four artists is represented by one or two significant video installations. Arturo Herrera’s first-ever video installation, Les Noces (The Wedding, 2007; see http://adaptation.uchicago.edu/artists/herrera/ for a clip), enjoys its US premiere in this show, and is an animated adaptation of the ballet of the same name by Igor Stravinsky. Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need (2007; see http://adaptation.uchicago.edu/artists/sullivan/), builds from a notorious and ubiquitous type of mass e-mail scam, as well as a smaller-scale new work developed in collaboration with students from the University of Chicago.
Read more about each artist and their work and view video clips on the exhibition’s extensive website, http://adaptation.uchicago.edu.
Laurie Anderson, Art:21 Season 1 artist, will be conducting a follow-up spring tour for her project Homeland, which traveled throughout Europe last summer. The tour will begin on April 4th and will continue into June with her final confirmed date at the Spoleto USA festival in Charleston, South Carolina. The tour will visit several international venues, including stops in Moscow, London, and Spain, as well as domestic cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Boston.
The Homeland tour will follow the artist’s latest projects, including Night Life, a new book of drawings released in March of 2007, and the re-release of Big Science with exclusive bonus material by nonesuch records in July of 2007.