6PM @ the Art Gallery
Curatorial Walk-through w/ James MacDevitt
inSCRIPTion … text … image … action …
Exhibition Dates: November 8, 2010 - December 9, 2010
Opening Reception: Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 3-7 PM
“One says ‘language’ for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say ‘writing’ for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus, we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice.” - Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
“This performative mode returns with a difference – no longer the unique live performance, it reemerges as marked by the properties of reproductive media, as structurally subject to inscription, iteration, and repetition.” - Liz Kotz, Words To Be Looked At
The current ubiquity of transmediated and telepresential dialogues, most notably via the casual and partially-inscriptive technologies of computer-aided chat programs and cellphone text messaging, certainly complicates the age-old distinction between written and oral communication, and between langue and parole. In part, this conceptual convergence is predicated on the collapsing of linguistic signifiers into the immanent patterns of (un)becomings inherent to computational code. In such an (intra-)active environment, the living fluidity of dialogue is often actualized by digits (a technophenomenological fusion of finger movement and binary language) and the lifeless permanence of inscription can manifest as a dynamic system of inSCRIPTion.
Reveling in the physical and conceptual opacity of words, the fourteen contemporary artists participating in inSCRIPTion at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, in aiming for a field of matrixial encounters, produce materialized event-scores that hover somewhere between notation and realization and which play games with language through transplantation into various deviant contexts. Some of the diverse multi-media works in the exhibition demand that the artist and/or viewer perform an action, while others emphasize the creative and performative act of reading itself. Still others contain moving, as opposed to static, text and/or process found language through a scripted algorithm. The end results of these (re)visualized schemas include readymade actions, speaking objects, and literal semiotic machines that nevertheless remain discursively framed, which is not to say trapped, by the (nationalist, racial, gendered, and sexed) political/philosophical structures in which they are embedded.
Participating Artists: Lisa Anne Auerbach, John Divola, Jonmarc Edwards, Mark Steven Greenfield, Jim Jenkins, Sherry Karver, Jason Manley, Katja Mater, Anna Mayer, Owen Mundy, Christina Ondrus, Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Cody Trepte, and Penny Young
Related Events
Demonstration
WORDS DOING THINGS w/ Jim Jenkins
November 9, 2010 @ the Art Gallery Courtyard & Campus Quad
In conjunction with the opening reception, Jim Jenkins will fire up his kinetic sculpture NO. Join the parade as it steps and wheels its way across campus, asking questions (NO?) and making statements (NO!).
Lectures
DOING THINGS WITH WORDS w/ James MacDevitt & Cody Trepte
November 15, 2010
7PM @ FA43
Artist Talk w/ Cody Trepte
Performance
WORD THE WORD, Part II: Succuthis w/ Anna Mayer & Cerritos College Student Participants
November 30, 2010 (2PM) @ the Art Gallery
As part of Anna Mayer's ongoing series, WORD THE WORD, Cerritos College students will perform portions of the Surrealists' round-table discussions about sexuality. Reenacting the mostly-male 1928 conversations word for word using self-published transcripts, the group will collectively animate the voices of others in a contemporary investigation of how bodies arouse language. Participants will be determined prior to the event; observers are welcome.
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