performances by James Yeary, Nico Vassilakis, and a Gaburo Ensemble from Olympia (performing Lingua II: Maledetto; performers include David Wolach, Arun Chandra, and Elizabeth Williamson)
The show features works by
Bethany Ides (NY)
Urban Subjects: Jeff Derksen, Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber (Vancouver)
Donato Mancini (Vancouver)
Nico Vassilakis (Seattle)
Alicia Cohen, Sam Lohmann, Jaye Harris, Donald Dunbar, John Hall, Susan Rankin, Rodney Koeneke, Endi Bogue Hartigan,
Lisa Radon, Linda Austin, Tim DuRoche, Pat Hartigan, Mere Blankenship, Joseph Mains, Jamalieh Haley, Drew Swenhaugen, David Weinberg, Christopher Luna, Paul Maziar, Jacqueline Motzer, David Weinberg
January 14th: 4-9pmSwitchyard Studios109 SE Salmon StJanuary 15th: 2-7pmgalleryHOMELAND2505 Southeast 11th AvenueJanuary 16th: 2-7pmYU800 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR 97214(entrance on SE 10th Avenue at SE Morrison Street)
SHIFTER 16
PLURIPOTENTIAL
Book Launch at Printed Matter, 195 10th Avenue, New York, NY
Saturday, April 24th, 5 - 7 pm
Editors:
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Warren Neidich
Contributors:
Éric Alliez
Bernard Andrieu
Eric Anglès
Kader Attia
Elena Bajo
Lindsay Benedict
Nicholas Chase
Seth Cluett
Zoe Crosher
Krysten Cunningham
Yevgeniy Fiks
Dan Levenson
Antje Majewski
T. Kelly Mason
Michele Masucci
Daniel Miller
Seth Nehil
Warren Neidich
Susanne Neubauer
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Chloe Piene
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Linda Quinlan
Patricia Reed
Silva Reichwein
Barry Schwabsky
Gemma Sharpe
Amy Sillman
Francesco Spampinato
Tyler Stallings
Laura Stein
Clarissa Tossin
Brindalyn Webster
Lee Welch
Olav Westphalen
James Yeary
We present scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more for Shifter’s 16th issue entitled “Pluripotential”.
Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.
The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh*. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, "the child [...], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning."**
These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”*** Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public “we.” Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.
This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including "detournement" and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore "Pluripotential".
Footnotes:
*"The Merleau-Ponty Reader", Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ted Toadvine, Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern University Press, 2007; Pg. 405
**"Potentialities", Giorgio Agameben, Standford University Press, 1999; Pg. 179
***"The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible", Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2006; Pg. 12
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Shifter (www.shifter-magazine.com) is a topical magazine that was founded in 2004 by Sreshta Premnath. Premnath continues to edit the magazine in collaboration with guest editors. Copies of the magazine are held in the MoMA artist book collection as well as Printed Matter.
Finding the internet to be the only inter-continental “commons” not policed by immigration policy, Shifter began as an online magazine. It was conceived as a topical magazine in which ideas could be approached from different directions and disciplines. It attempts to create a platform where individuals engaged in various fields including visual art, experimental writing, cultural theory, philosophy and the sciences can view their work in relation to each other without hierarchy. The online magazine has always been free, once again to circumvent the inequities of the global capitalist marketplace.
For Roman Jakobson, a “shifter” is a term whose meaning cannot be determined without referring to the message that is being communicated between a sender and a receiver. For example the pronouns “I” and “you”, as well as words like “here” and “now”, and the tenses, can only be understood by reference to the context in which they are uttered.
As this suggests, Shifter’s topics have often focussed on issues of subjectivity and rupture in language, and contributions reveal an equal emphasis on visual and textual strategies. This is a project open to change and failure and does not depend on revenue. Each issue creates a community of artists and writers who may not have seen their work contextualized together, and in this way hopes to open a dialogue amongst them.
When the madwomen come dancing out of the tree above
last nights dinner wine jumps back and covers the floor
with unbearable rants of bottom man fish oracles that you
My dinner will die laughing from ingesting these brightest
statements coming across universal and universes which areThe last line the morphing chorus
beyond even your wide minded brothers and sisters in our
loving state of compress.
If you think this matters. That matters.
Jim hints at an interest in vispo, as I mentioned in an ancient post, as
Matter matter matter matter. Not
the participants and commanders who seem to spend
countless hours scouring all letters in both known and
unknown alphabets just trying to find something to say.
Like any of this matter. Matters.
"looking back for anything
not burning
Sand's writing also traces & accompanies historical document. Set in typewriter's Courier interwoven w/ & often overlapping with photographic collage, the text, the "Courier", echoes in transcription, & then fades, as in the type printed over "INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY".In Feb. 2009 Obama eased the twenty-year ban on images of soldier's bodies returning home from war ( hard light, clear edges ). Now each family gets to decide whether..."
