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SHIFTER15 : WILL |
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Editors: Sreshta Rit Premnath, Abhishek Hazra ‘Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the “will to existence”: that will does not exist… Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life – thus I teach you – but will to power.’ When Will shot Joan he did not mean to. He wanted to shoot the apple balanced on her head. The cactus wine may have put the gun in his hand. The spirit may have provided the reckless confidence. And in the spirit of its will he pointed his gun and squeezed the trigger. It may have been at the moment he squeezed the trigger, or perhaps a split second before, that the world had already begun to rip. Space and time had torn the future into an infinite set of possibilities. The set could be divided into two subsets: He would miss Joan / He would not. But the will of the spirit produced a second pair of possibilities that would not matter in the least – He would hit the apple/ He would not. If Will was not himself when he constituted this new reality, one without Joan, then who was responsible? Who’s will acted upon reality? His finger’s? The gun’s? The wine’s? Yet, we must not confuse will with intention – maybe this assumption of a causality itself is a mistake. What is known is that it happened. If will is a potentiality – a vector that opens possibility and cleaves reality – does it precede choice? Are personal wills constituted by hegemonic ideologies (producing pre-inscribed realities), or rather is an individual’s will that space of agency which allows for an opening and aggregates with other individual wills to produce the transformation of the social? There is a story about a revolutionary who was tortured to reveal the location of a comrade. He lied and gave his interrogators the wrong coordinates. But, when his interrogators arrived there, they found his friend. Is reality willed into existence? Participants: Avi Alpert is currently a Ph.D. student in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where he researches the development of Zen in the Americas and its impact on the arts. He is currently a contributing writer for Machete, a Philadelphia based art-zine. His artistic collaborations have appeared at PS 122, exhibition, X Space, and in several forthcoming publications. A Paper Bag over the Moon is his first novel, currently a work in progress. Diana Artus is a Berlin based artist and writer working with photography, installation and found footage material. After studying in Leipzig, Paris, Amsterdam and Barcelona she received a Magister Artium Degree in German Literature and Language from the University of Leipzig in 2000 and a diploma in visual art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig in 2007. She participated in international shows and projects and spent 6 months as an artist in residence at ISCP New York in 2008. Lindsay Benedict was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She received a BA from Williams College, an MFA from UC Berkeley and was a recent studio fellow the Whitney Independent Study Program. Benedict has recently shown at Bose Pacia and PS 122 in Manhattan, in the Movement Research 2009 Spring Festival, the Berkeley Art Museum, and in the Emergency Biennial; she has screened at the Detroit Museum of New Art (MONA), New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA. Daniel Blochwitz was born 1973 in (East) Germany, came to the US in 1995, where he received a BFA (Eastern Kentucky University, 1999) and MFA (University of Florida, 2003) degree in photography, before attending the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2003-04). He has shown widely in the United States and internationally. Blochwitz lives and works in New York. Brandstifter (Firestarter) is an interdisciplinary Artist and Networker from Germany, currently the Residency Unlimited/ Balmoral Resident Artist at Flux Factory, New York, NY. Steven Brower lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had numerous solo and group shows all over the world including New York, Italy, China and the Netherlands. His current projects include the “Brower Propulsion Laboratory,” the world’s smallest and most I’ll-equipped aerospace company. Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch‘s book 10 Walks/2 Talks is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Their work can be found in 1913, Denver Quarterly, LIT and Paper Monument. In 2008 they co-edited Interdisciplinary Transcriptions: a 1036-page anthology of poets, critics, anthropologists and visual artists. Jon lives in New York City, where he’s completing his Ph.D. for SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program. Andy just moved to Wyoming, where he’s an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming’s MFA Program. Mark Cunningham has four chapbooks out, all on-line: Second Story and nightlightnight (with photographs by Mel Nichols), both from Right Hand Pointing; 10 specimens from Gold Wake Press; and Nachträglichkeit from Beard of Bees. He also has three books out: Body Language from Tarpaulin Sky Press, 80 Beetles from Otoliths, and 71 Leaves, an ebook from BlazeVox. Chris Curreri is a Canadian artist who works predominantly with film and photography. His photo-based practice takes the form of looping film projections and photographic suites. He holds a BFA from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Recent exhibitions include: “Handle” at Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, Ontario; and “Perceptions and their Arousal” at Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston, Ontario. Recent film screenings include: Image Forum Festival, Japan; Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata, Argentina; and the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada. Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog and coedits ON Contemporary Practice, a journal for writing about the practices of one’s contemporaries. He will be curating the SEGUE reading series this winter, and is the sporadic curator of PEACE events series. His poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared most recently in The Brooklyn Rail, Fanzine, PAJ: art + performance, Museo, BOMBsite, Wheelhouse Press, and Vigilance Society. Current projects include a collection of criticism, Critical Objects 2005-2010, a book of poems addressing land expropriation and cultural politics, The Hole, and a book of essays concerned with cultural translation after disaster. He teaches at Bard College, Baruch College, and School of Visual Arts, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo. Nathan Haenlein was born in Michigan and now lives and works in Northern California. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. Haenlein’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and most recently he has had solo shows in Marfa, TX, Washington D.C., and Cleveland, OH. His work is in the public collection of the Center for Visual Arts, Toledo, OH; Kalkograsski Ateijie Butkovic, Rijeka, Croatia; the Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA; the National Palace of Art, Minsk, Belarus; the Tama Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; as well as many others. Haenlein’s current body of work explores relationships between place and economy. Additionally he questions the concepts of patience, the digital age, and repetition. Abhishek Hazra is a visual artist based in Bangalore. His work explores the intersections between technology and culture through animated shorts and performance pieces that often integrate textual fragments drawn from real and fictional scenarios. He is also interested in the social history of scientific practices in colonial India. Nina Höchtl was born in Austria lives in between Vienna, Mexico City and currently London. She studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Presently, she is a doctoral candidate in Art by Practice at Goldsmiths College, London (GB). Her projects deal with identity, language and communication and employ different media. Most recently, she has exhibited Tales of Protest. A necessity., CZKd, Belgrade (SER); Print Matters, CHAUVEL CINEMA, Sydney (AU); moved, mutated and disturbed identities, Casino Luxemburg (LU), 2009; Too Early for Vacation, OPEN/INVITED e v +a, 2008, Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick (IR) (Curator: Hou Hanru). John Houck works with photography and sculpture to explore the tension of the social and the constructed environment. John received his MFA from UCLA and is currently a studio fellow at The Whitney Independent Study Program. Prior to moving to Brooklyn, he was an adjunct professor at UCLA and SCIArc in the architecture department. Devin Kenny is a recent graduate of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a participant of the Skowhegan Residency. His work is concerned with the space between discourse and celebration and the critical analysis and reinterpretation of pop cultural and youth subcultural artifacts. As an artist, he has collaborated with the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the Myrtle Institute for Social Research and Lumpen. He’s engaged in flippin’ the script. Richard Kostelanetz & Nick Eve Matt McAlpin is a doctoral candidate in the English department at SUNY Stony Brook. His whole life, the big Other has been telling him to be the Master and a philosopher, but he has come to realize that he’s a sophist and a pervert. Sreshta Rit Premnath is an artist based in New York City. He has an MFA from Bard College, was a Whitney Independent Study Program fellow in 2008 and attended Skowhegan in 2009. He has shown his work and curated shows at galleries including SKE (Bangalore), Bose Pacia (NYC), Thomas Erben (NYC) and Rotunda (NYC). He will show a solo project in the Art Statements section of Art Basel in 2010. His work has been reviewed in Flash Art, New York Times and Art Forum.com. He founded Shifter Magazine in 2004. Originally trained as a potter’s apprentice, Jean-Marc Superville-Sovak has become an amateur collector of discarded and deformed waste brick found along the Hudson River. When he is not trying to build ruinous structures with them, he occasionally gives tours of NYC housing developments, identifying the features of the Hudson Valley bricks they were built with. Superville-Sovak graduated in 2007 from the Film/Video MFA program at Bard College. He has been the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Travel Grant to Media Artists and his drawings are currently on view at The Drawing Center Viewing Program. Julie Tolentino Wood creates intimate movement-based installations involving solo, time-based performances, sculptural endurance events and audio soundscapes. She has worked and toured internationally with David Rousseve/REALITY Dance Theater, Ron Athey, Ibrahim Quarishi, Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, Margarita Guergue, Amy Pivar, Ori Flomin and others. She has collaborated on video works with Rob Roth and Abigail Severance. Her recent live works include: CRY OF LOVE-A Labyrinth; THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME-The Archive Project; and A TRUE STORY ABOUT TWO PEOPLE (a 24-hour performance). |
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