Watch this space
As part of the Big Ideas in Art & Culture Lecture Series on Friday night, a brilliantly articulated trans-disciplinary art collective called Postcommodity presented in downtown Guelph.
The night happened in association with Musagetes, the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA), and Postcommodity; the quartet from Southwestern United States, comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (Xicano), Kade L. Twist (Cherokee), Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee) and fourth member, absent, Raven Chacon (Navajo).
Postcommodity’s multi-media work incorporates video, visual and sound, and is informed by an insatiable re-imaging of post-consumer aspects that expose specific cultural aesthetics of the binary between Natives and the “West.” By revealing a psychopathology of colonization, the artists were able to establish a visual binary between political sovereignty of the colonizers and the subjugated.
Situated within a North-American context, this unique post-modern multi-media lecture was a combination of cultural perspectives, accompanied by a slideshow that displayed several visual highlights of their exhibits worldwide. Their work showcases a thematic trans-disciplinary intersection of both post-colonial theory and criticism that resulted in showing how people create and understand a sense of place.
An example of this was shown in their first slide, called Do You Remember When? Pictured was the floor in a museum, and in the middle, a rectangle the size of an average kitchen table was cut out of the floor revealing fresh dirt. From the artists’ perspective, there is no escape from using the land. Thus, suspended above, is a microphone dangling from the ceiling, listening to the Earth – if only the Earth could speak.
For Postcommodity, the rhetorical practice of going to sites is deliberate in creating interventions that lead to complexities and confusion. Valorizing spaces that stimulate a sense of hybridity and ambiguity for the viewer actuates the nuanced discourse of post-colonialism. This begs the question: What assumptions do we share with each other?
One concern Postcommodity has is the adverse affects of cultural tourism, where they struggle with trying to avoid using Native art as “natural history.” In another exhibit, called Mother Teacher Destroyer, the artists displayed how the social conservatism of the Christianization of shame, which has imposed sex values into the Native culture. With having Western thought as a reference to critique, the artists illustrated how “native women are cultural saviours.”
A popular artistic tool employed by Postcommodity is the use of diorama. This theatrical device was employed in another piece called Radiophonic Territory. This lit-up confessional booth, first displayed at Nuit Blanche, worked as a “transducer” for the all-night festival. The use of a three-dimensional interactive mobile device was broadcast over a FM radio station to communicate a person’s candid truth and reconciliation. This curatorial “bureaucratic construct” is not only a diffusion of knowledge, but also reveals a particular insight into the connection of people and the kinds of communities that can be built with art.
In a series of community-drive events located at the border between Mexico and the United States, Postcommodity created a fence of large vinyl “scare eye” balloons. The Orwellian Repellent Eye (2011) of black, red and yellow concentric circles works as a “semiotic vehicle” based on an ancient Cherokee symbol. The installation of the predatory eye is also a counter-narrative to the obsolescence often associated with American products. By creating a dialogical framework, the double consciousness of the Repellent Eye is symbiographical. Thus, in critiquing the institutional narratives of Western culture, the piece also finds inspiration in the victims of a post-consumerist world.
Fans will look forward to Postcommodity’s forthcoming conceptual installation called Repellent Fence (2014). This long-term project will be built along a two-mile stretch of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s homeland, currently divided by the Mexican and American border. Sandwiched in the ephemeral moment of the radical immigration discourse, the Repellent Fence reveals the border acting as an imaginary construct theatre.
The intention of this art is to re-build a narrative on the trans-border knowledge of the Mexican publics movement of people, capital, cultures and ideologies. The artists will highlight how the media perpetuates the immigration madness by experiencing the anxiety of an occupied militarized space.