![Today at 2 p.m.: A Proposition by Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears
“After-after Tears” explores the political dimensions of institutional suicide through reconsideration of temporality, duration, and history. Reflecting on the platform’s recent death, Gabi Ngcobo (Center for Historical Reenactments [CHR] member and faculty at Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg), in collaboration with artist Kader Attia, will contemplate how staging an institutional suicide can not only be a form of refusal but also a means to desire a different existence, one that enables the platform to haunt obsolete systems and ideologies that continue to condition contemporary life. A two-part response will expand upon various logics underpinning creative acts of refusal. Khwezi Gule, Chief Curator at the Soweto Museums, will delve into the crisis of meaning around ritual, sacrifice, and transcendence in addition to notions of self and collective preservation. Sohrab Mohebbi, writer and Curatorial Assistant of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum, will consider measures of time in music that produce shared frames of reference in order to imagine ways institutions could also be synched to a different time signature.
For more information on the program, click here.
“Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears” is on view at the New Museum from May 22 – July 7, 2013.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7c4c171207f70925c20ac916739e4942/tumblr_mmwh65T4kz1r532pao1_500.jpg)
Today at 2 p.m.: A Proposition by Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears
“After-after Tears” explores the political dimensions of institutional suicide through reconsideration of temporality, duration, and history. Reflecting on the platform’s recent death, Gabi Ngcobo (Center for Historical Reenactments [CHR] member and faculty at Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg), in collaboration with artist Kader Attia, will contemplate how staging an institutional suicide can not only be a form of refusal but also a means to desire a different existence, one that enables the platform to haunt obsolete systems and ideologies that continue to condition contemporary life. A two-part response will expand upon various logics underpinning creative acts of refusal. Khwezi Gule, Chief Curator at the Soweto Museums, will delve into the crisis of meaning around ritual, sacrifice, and transcendence in addition to notions of self and collective preservation. Sohrab Mohebbi, writer and Curatorial Assistant of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum, will consider measures of time in music that produce shared frames of reference in order to imagine ways institutions could also be synched to a different time signature.
For more information on the program, click here.
“Center for Historical Reenactments: After-after Tears” is on view at the New Museum from May 22 – July 7, 2013.
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As part of a partnership with the New Museum’s Education Department, Elastic City is presenting Admission, a walk through “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” by dance artist Michelle Boulé and theater director Niegel Smith. They will lead museum-goers on a playful sixty-minute walk-through and address codes of museum engagement. All are welcome at 1 p.m. on Friday May 24. Please sign up for tickets here (limited capacity).
Elastic City offers participatory walks by artists throughout and outside of New York. Rather than fact-based tours, the walks may rely on sensory-based techniques, the creation of new folk rituals, and/or other artist-derived exercises to explore one’s self, the group, and a given space.
Photo: Caitlin Ruttle
On Saturday May 4 at the IDEAS CITY StreetFest, teens from the New Museum’s G:Class program, Chinatown YMCA, and University Settlement created a 250-square-foot mural at 273 Bowery with the help of Groundswell teaching artists. Check out an in-progress shot here!
To learn more about the IDEAS CITY Festival, click here.
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![’93 ’Til Infinity: Víctor Albarracín + Royal Trux
“’93 ’Til Infinity” asks artists, writers, and New Museum staff to describe their favorite records from 1993. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “NYC 1993,” this series looks back at the ways that music shaped the year, and considers how these records continue to inform culture. “’93 ’Til Infinity” will appear each Friday for the duration of the exhibition. To see past entries in this series, click HERE. For this installment, Víctor Albarracín writes about his encounter with Royal Trux.
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The first time I bought records from abroad was in 1989. With some effort, I managed to save money by writing papers and doing homework for my friends at school. The process of buying records by mail was expensive and slow from Colombia, but there was some magic to it. Through word of mouth, I would chase down someone with a copy of a catalogue or leaflet of new releases from the record labels I was interested in. I would photocopy the leaflet and mark (as clearly as possible) the items I wanted to buy, and then enclose the photocopy with the money in a piece of black cardboard before placing in an envelope (to keep post office employees from making out the contents). After sending the letter through regular Colombian mail (trusting that the money would reach its destination), I would wait four to six anxious months, until one day an envelope would arrive with the records or tapes ordered months before. Sometimes there would even be a gift EP and a small handwritten note from the label manager, thankfully acknowledging surprise upon receiving an order from remote Colombia. After that, there was the unavoidable responsibility of lending or copying the records and tapes for friends, who would, in turn, lend or copy their copies for others. This is how the music of bands like Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Bolt Thrower spread throughout Bogotá—all of them released by the label Earache, of which I was fan at the time and from which I had made that first mail purchase.
At the end of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s, there were a few well-defined scenes in Bogotá. The largest and most consolidated was that of the metalheads. They had been organizing concerts for some time, and circulated music by way of a judiciously run pirate market of recordings and fanzines. They even had a radio show specializing on the genre, broadcast weekly through Bogotá’s most popular youth radio station. The Colombian metal scene was so sophisticated and cosmopolitan that bands like Mayhem (from Norway) would quote Reencarnación and Parabellum (both from Medellín) as direct influences. There were also punks, typically found hustling wares on the street—such as patches, handmade wrist straps, and cassette compilations of music by Crass, Exploited, or bands from Spain. And a little later, there were skinhead groups, some Fascist and some anarchist, all quite difficult to distinguish from their antagonists but equally responsible for countless wrist fights as well as for setting the stage for the diffusion of ska and hardcore music.
In those days, it was impossible to be part of two or more of these communities simultaneously or, at least, to maintain contact and exchange music with them. They each operated like closed ghettos with well-defined social rituals and very sharp ideas about the music that should be listened to and the need to burn all other music. These communities were not only separated by their tastes and rituals but also by the areas of the city in which they were located and by the socioeconomic strata to which their members belonged.
It was hard for me to define myself as a metalhead in 1989. Given my universal interest in the music and diverse ideologies professed by the different youth crews that populated my surrounding neighborhoods (in the furthest southern reaches of Bogotá), I was never able to become a full participant in any of these crowds, and was generally treated with suspicion and a great deal of disrespect by my neighbors and acquaintances.
A year later, things would change when I discovered (on two unlabeled cassette tapes borrowed from someone) a few bands that I could not relate to any of the niches of the Bogotá underground. Tracing the lending history of these cassettes, I was able to find the original owner, and discovered that the bands were Bauhaus, Tuxedomoon, Chrome, and Fugazi. In order to get to this information, I had to be resourceful and not only travel to unfrequented parts of the city, but also come in contact with people who, and this is not easy in the context of Bogotá, belonged to a social class a couple of steps above mine. I realized that there was a clear separation between what passed for underground in the peripheral neighborhoods and this new scene that was taking shape in the middle-class neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were always more open and, as a result, more ambiguous. In spite of the intrinsic elitism that characterized this newly discovered scene, I began to feel comfortable there—visiting new friends and copying their records and Betamax videotapes filled with extremely long first-hand compilations of episodes of 120 Minutes.
And thus, I found my way to Jane’s Addiction, Pixies, The Residents, Radical Dance Faction, and Nirvana’s Bleach, which sounded like the inaugural call of a local “alternative” scene.
In 1991, a university radio station began to broadcast “La hora de la resistencia,” a weekly program that presented an eclectic range of music from different contexts and that opened up a new panorama for Bogotá. Each Tuesday at 6 p.m., I would listen to the show and record it on tape. In this way, I was able to listen to, among many others, Alternative TV, Boredoms, Beat Happening, SPK, Butthole Surfers, Throbbing Gristle, and especially Royal Trux. The show also made a point of diffusing the work of local bands and music projects that had begun to make a name for themselves. What would come to be called “the Bogotá sound” was taking shape in bars around the city: It was a mixture strongly marked by the boom of Mexican rock-fusion promoted by the label Culebra Records and by the excitement generated by Mano Negra’s visit to Colombia. To this mix, each band would add different elements ranging from funk to punk or ska to grunge.
As a consequence, feeling fairly uncomfortable with the pastiche produced by local bands, I tried to keep an eye on external points of reference, and these led me most often in the direction of a growing fascination with the gentler elements of the lo-fi invasion: Smog, Pavement, The Silver Jews, etc.
Although I now prefer the first entries in the Royal Trux catalogue (the self-titled first album and Twin Infinitives), at the time, these records scared me a little and I would wonder how you measured the quality of a band devoted to the production of an endless series of cacophonies, broken riffs, and abandoned attempts of rock. The out-of-phase solos, echoes, repetitions, and the renunciation of recognizable metric filled me with doubt, and yet, at the same time, with an uncomfortable curiosity that jeopardized the simple melodies of Pavement’s Westing (By Musket and Sextant). Royal Trux were unfit for pogoing or jumping around alone at home, for air guitar soloing or socializing in the indie bars that began to dot the Bogotá landscape. On the other hand, although listening to them was, for the most part, a solitary activity, these spaces of solitude were of a kind not easily romanticized.
This is why, upon the release of Cats & Dogs, which I was first able to listen to on a fourth- or maybe fifth-generation tape, I felt relief as I heard the opening chords of “Teeth,” perfectly compatible with what I was willing to acknowledge as a “rock” song. The song had rhythm, emotional shades, transitions, articulated solos, and verses. In it, and throughout the record, you could clearly hear that Neil Hagerty could play the guitar and that he had been playing a joke on us in past records (or so it seemed). But then, from the heart of this comfortably sad album, came questions about the reason for those earlier records and about the very idea of a rock band. Up until then, I had understood music as a technique through which an emotional component was transmitted in a clear way. And this emotional component should be expressible in a single word: “happiness,” “euphoria,” “desolation,” “anger,” and so forth. It was not simply a matter of demonstrating dominion over the instruments, but above all, of being able to transmit effective sentimental modulations.
But then I got to thinking that, for Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, maybe the point had not been to produce emotional modulations, but to present, openly and in a single place, the complete package of undifferentiated and contradictory drives, layer upon layer, like a constant emanation of magma. And this magma was being canalized in Cats & Dogs in a direction pointing towards the enormous business mound that alternative rock was becoming in 1993. They were now trying to prove themselves fit, to modulate the chaos, to approximate a band model closer to the Rolling Stones. In so many words, to make themselves attractive to a wider audience and then wait, pen in hand, for a contract offer from a big record label.
We all know that story…
1993 was a hard year, for them and for me.
Víctor Albarracín is an artist, writer, and teacher based in Bogotá. He was cofounder of the art space El Bodegón (2005–09), which hosted parties, concerts, and magazine launches as well as art exhibitions and artist talks. Albarracín’s essay “Antagonism and Failure,” which outlines the history of El Bodegón, was published in the 2012 New Museum publication, Art Spaces Directory.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a3a5d78e0bba4f4ebdaff09c5f5c3b8c/tumblr_mmlqg9ntYR1r532pao1_400.jpg)
’93 ’Til Infinity: Víctor Albarracín + Royal Trux
“’93 ’Til Infinity” asks artists, writers, and New Museum staff to describe their favorite records from 1993. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “NYC 1993,” this series looks back at the ways that music shaped the year, and considers how these records continue to inform culture. “’93 ’Til Infinity” will appear each Friday for the duration of the exhibition. To see past entries in this series, click HERE. For this installment, Víctor Albarracín writes about his encounter with Royal Trux.
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Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered in 1993. Now on view: “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.”
(Source: powerrangersvintage)
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Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America premiered in New York on May 4, 1993; it would later win a Pulitzer Prize. “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is now on view.
(Source: chakayoh)
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![Tomorrow is the IDEAS CITY StreetFest! Don’t miss the Museum of the American Prison and Civic Duty Initiative’s project Ask a Prisoner.
Organization: Museum of the American Prison and Civic Duty Initiative
Project Title: Ask a Prisoner
Ask A Prisoner enables StreetFest visitors to engage with civic-minded incarcerated individuals who are members of the Civic Duty Initiative (CDI) at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York. This project, which will launch on Saturday May 4, will be ongoing; documentation of the project will be on the Museum of the American Prison’s website, museumoftheamericanprison.org.
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When and where can we see your project?
Ask A Prisoner will be at the StreetFest on Saturday May 4 all day on Rivington Street, right by Freeman Alley between Chrystie Street and the Bowery.
What are you most excited about for the Festival?
CDI: We’re excited that we’re able to participate. Incarcerated people don’t normally have opportunities like this to engage with the broader public because we have serious communication barriers that limit the ways that we can interact with the outside. Everyone in prison has first-hand experience with social problems like poverty, violence, substance abuse, lack of opportunity, crime. We are excited to offer solutions to these problems that we think about and talk about all the time while serving our sentences and reflecting on our lives.
Why did you want to be a part of IDEAS CITY?
CDI: To topple the walls of separation between currently incarcerated persons and the larger society through a solutions-oriented forum. To end the stigma attached to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons. To start showing people that prisoners can be far more than the crimes for which they have been convicted.
How does the project address the theme of Untapped Capital?
Museum of the American Prison: Despite sensationalistic mainstream depictions of prisons and those who are sent to live in them, many prisoners care about the communities that they left behind and are committed to positively impacting the world. Ask A Prisoner addresses the theme of Untapped Capital by giving IDEAS CITY visitors the opportunity to learn about and from prisoners who are engaged in helping under-resourced neighborhoods that suffer from poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, substance abuse, illness, and so forth. Our idea for this project came from both the Civic Duty Initiative and the Museum of the American Prison’s belief that incarcerated people, if given the chance, could make valuable contributions to public discourse about the social problems that most prisoners know intimately.
Can you elaborate on past community projects that prisoners have initiated?
CDI: There are many prisoner-led groups throughout the country that are engaged in community projects. The Sullivan Correctional Facility–based Civic Duty Initiative (of which we are all a part) has initiated the following community projects:
• We created the first ever gun buyback program, which was later duplicated at Orleans Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
• We led three book drives for faith-based organizations.
• We raised $350 for an arts program run by the Brooklyn-based organization Children of Promise. To put this amount of money in context, prisoners earn, on average, $1 for a day’s worth of work.
What is the change you would like to see in New York City?
CDI: To drastically reduce gun violence with help/input from incarcerated people who understand this issue from personal experience.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/e17037d136365b2832415a844d1f6d1a/tumblr_mm6sybA6961r532pao1_500.jpg)
Tomorrow is the IDEAS CITY StreetFest! Don’t miss the Museum of the American Prison and Civic Duty Initiative’s project Ask a Prisoner.
Organization: Museum of the American Prison and Civic Duty Initiative
Project Title: Ask a Prisoner
Ask A Prisoner enables StreetFest visitors to engage with civic-minded incarcerated individuals who are members of the Civic Duty Initiative (CDI) at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York. This project, which will launch on Saturday May 4, will be ongoing; documentation of the project will be on the Museum of the American Prison’s website, museumoftheamericanprison.org.
![For the IDEAS CITY Festival, Bike Mind will present The Great Untapped Bike Fun Park. Power up your cell phone or blend a smoothie by biking!
IDEAS CITY, a biennial Festival in New York City from May 1 – May 4, explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. This year’s theme is Untapped Capital, with participants focused on resources that are under-recognized or underutilized in our cities. Learn more at www.ideas-city.org.
Organization: Bike Mind
Name: David Aronson
Project Title: The Great Untapped Bike Fun Park
We are making a bike-powered carnival game, similar to the popular “high striker” game. Test your strength and see just how much power your legs can produce. Can you charge a cell phone? Power a TV? How about a blender?
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When and where can we see your project?
The Great Untapped Bike Fun Park will be on view in Sara D. Roosevelt Park during StreetFest, which is happening on Saturday May 4 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
What are you doing to prepare for the Festival?
This is the first time we have exhibited the project. I’m going to weld abandoned bike frames together using electricity generated through stationary biking. Then there’s the power electronics and Arduino programming. We need to measure current and voltage coming out of the bike, and use logic to make it into a game.
What are you most excited about for the Festival?
I’m excited to be a part of something which strives to improve life on our planet.
Why did you want to be a part of IDEAS CITY?
I really just wanted to get out and do something fun with my skills. As a programmer, so much of my work has me sitting in front of a screen making things which ultimately just keep others in front of their screens. That’s not the world I want to live in. Don’t get me wrong, I love the abstract thinking that goes into programming. But I also want to participate in the real, physical, multidimensional world.
How does your project address the theme of Untapped Capital?
I’m connecting people’s need to exercise with the desire for clean electricity. The Untapped Capital that I am tapping into is the excess calories in our own bodies.
What is your favorite place in the city?
The route between my home in the Lower East Side and my studio in Red Hook.
Where would we find you outside of work?
Probably shuttling my daughters around to their many classes and activities.
What is the change you would most like to see in New York City?
The bike lanes are a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough. Deliveries should be limited to early morning hours. Certain avenues and cross streets need to have pedestrian access only. I would love to take my kids biking through the streets, but they’re just not safe enough yet.
What is your favorite bike route in New York City?
Go down through East River Park to the Manhattan Bridge. Go over the bridge and ride along the water to Red Hook. Ride through Sunset Park and take the Belt Bikeway out to Coney Island. Then keep going to Flatbush. Hang a right to Rockaway. Ride along the beach to the next bridge.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/84ed1bf18dedc3f716dade7ce14358f5/tumblr_mm6qmhHiC81r532pao1_500.jpg)
For the IDEAS CITY Festival, Bike Mind will present The Great Untapped Bike Fun Park. Power up your cell phone or blend a smoothie by biking!
IDEAS CITY, a biennial Festival in New York City from May 1 – May 4, explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. This year’s theme is Untapped Capital, with participants focused on resources that are under-recognized or underutilized in our cities. Learn more at www.ideas-city.org.
Organization: Bike Mind
Name: David Aronson
Project Title: The Great Untapped Bike Fun Park
We are making a bike-powered carnival game, similar to the popular “high striker” game. Test your strength and see just how much power your legs can produce. Can you charge a cell phone? Power a TV? How about a blender?
The 2013 IDEAS CITY Festival starts today! Follow @IDEASCITY on Twitter for updates, and visit ideas-city.org to plan your visit to the Conference, Workshops, StreetFest, and one hundred independent Projects throughout downtown NYC.