GLOBAL / NATIONAL - The Order of Chaos

March 13 - May 1, 2010

Opening Saturday, March 13, 7-10pm

To listen to a podcast of A Conversation with Hua Hsu and Arthur Jafa, please subscribe to the podcast directly in iTunes. (Please click once. It may take a few seconds to open iTunes.)

EXHIBITION // ARTISTS // ESSAY // POSTER // EVENTS // SUPPORT

GLOBAL / NATIONAL - The Order of Chaos is an exhibition that “addresses the anxieties of economics, environmental tragedies, and societies of control that define the chaos of globalization. It explores these social issues in an aesthetic way to demystify the notion of art only as an ornamental production. This vision includes images from abstraction to figuration, from direct messages to esoteric thoughts,” explains Co-Founder/Artistic Director Papo Colo. The exhibition investigates how local artists from a variety of backgrounds are placed in relation to the rest of the world. Seen through a global lens, this exhibition explores the multiple cultures that populate our general culture and how the local and national are inextricably linked to the global.

This exhibition examines the tensions of uncontrollable forces that are dislocating our society to redefine a new civilization. The artworks reflect how the national contains global concerns, searching inside our culture to project our global position. This exhibition tells the story of those concerns and new ways in which we can order the chaos.

Conceived by Papo Colo. Curated by Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo.

ARTISTS

John Ahearn, Tina Barney, Jimmie Durham, Nicky Enright, Rico Gatson, Kate Gilmore, Guerra de la Paz, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, Saeri Kiritani, Tseng Kwong Chi, Robin Lasser, Rebecca Loyche, Miguel Luciano, Jonathan Matas, Mary Mattingly, Eve Mosher, Chris Sollars, Jade Townsend, Jason Villegas, Bernard Williams, Martin Wong, O Zhang, François Ziliff

ESSAY

GLOBAL NATIONAL The Order of Chaos

NACIONAL GLOBAL Orden del Caos

GLOBAL NACIONAL A Ordem do Caos

GLOBAL / NATIONAL - The Order of Chaos is an exhibition about the uncontrollable forces that are dislocating our society to redefine a new civilization. Economic crises, environmental tragedies, and societies of control breed the chaos of globalization. This exhibition examines this chaos in work of multiple mediums, produced by artists who live and work in the USA and who have local and international backgrounds. The show tells the story of how we simultaneously view ourselves from a national and global perspective. Its purpose is to present chaos in order to offer a vision of a utopian future. To reach the global, you need to express the national. Universal thoughts still derive from national characteristics.

Today art is crossing national boundaries and mixing alien signs to local idioms creating a hybrid world. These works demonstrate these new creative breeds and affinities.

Art has outgrown visions of selfishness as expression and now needs a more conscious level of invention concerning a collective existence. These artworks explore social issues through aesthetics to demystify the notion of art as only ornamental production. Global / National includes images from abstraction to figuration, from direct messages to esoteric thought. Its essence is a journey among multimedia stories that gives us a general view of today’s state of affairs. Artistic questions of beauty and content are central to these topics and each piece in this exhibition references these issues, literally or metaphorically.

National

The reality of nations is their mutual dependency.

Every country has taken ideas from another.

Intercultural relations have always been active since the beginning of civilizations. The authenticity of multiculturalism is not a fashion. It is a fact that is more obvious now with the advance of technology, commercial dependency, and immigration. Culture travels and influences. The modern nation-state—a relatively new concept—is in a state of chaos and will evolve into something that we don’t know … yet.

The barrier of language becomes a passageway. In the future, multilingual nations will be the norm. The Americas will have three official languages—English, Spanish, and Portuguese—and will be unified as a super continent.

We speak Spanish, English and Portuguese.

Se habla Español, Ingles y Portugese.

Falamos espanhol, inglês e portuguese.

Environment

It seems to me that in this era of intensifying environmental challenges swelling with climate events, we are in a sinking boat on a planet that will be floating in water very soon.

An interdependent form of living with limited resources has to be developed in order to resolve the dilemma between overpopulation and the survival of the species.

Science and spirituality seem like our only salvation to evolve into a new kind of civilization. The cost will be losing half of humanity and the other half will have to adapt to what is left of the environment. Art is a critical showcase to let us know what changes are possible and to show how the artist’s mind builds descriptions of those signals. What artists do is to create thoughts that become metaphors in images and objects. And produce paradoxes. The beginning is the end, lies are truths, life is always a dream, nations are fictions, and races are shades of skin.

Motherland, Fatherland are primitive human states that we will overcome. God? This question always tries to destroy and rebuild us because God is in our own image and divine ego.

This planet has self-destructed to reconstruct itself several times over billions of years.

Why is now any different?

To collect art is to consume people in an act of cultural cannibalism.

Colecionar arte es consumir gente en un acto de canibalismo cultural.

Colecionar arte é cosumir pessoas en um ato de canibalismo cultural.

Historia del Arte

The economic crisis is a result of the competition for the controlling power of money by a few men around the world. Art is one of the luxuries for which these persons compete for the good of their national pride and the fulfillment of their big egos.

Art is an expression of national cultures, which have become an entertainment business and a profiteering game for the artlords of our time, substituting the aristocracy and the church of the past.

This information is as relevant to art today as before.

This is not a political commentary, but a historical one. Art becomes history and vice-versa.

Espíritu Santo

Multinational companies are the engine of globalization and transnational art.

It is the chess game of their virtues and viruses, a reflection of their ingenuity and know-how. Cities compete for credibility and cultural tourism. Promotion of their cultural clout is an asset for money and prestige. Advertising and art is currency. Artists are their wild cards; art dealers are their playmates; and critics, with some exceptions, are the staff of the artlords, the players. Everyone has a role in this theater of fetishism. We all gain in this ghost industry of images that represent our collective and individual narcissism. Art always wins because it is the deconstruction of our bodies and the elevation of our souls.

The passage of time is the history of crisis.

This exhibition tells the story of national confusion and how we can order the chaos.

Esta muestra cuenta la historia del la confucion y de como podemos organizar lo caotico.

Essa exibição conta a História da Confusão e de como podemos organizar o caos.

But chaos is rapture, mutilation, corruption, and change. Crisis then is evolution.

It is appalling that corruption in art is in fashion, but corruption is the fashion of art. The statement of the readymade is that art is corrupt by its nature.

It corrupts the style and manner of the art that came before.

(14th century. < Latin corruptus, past participle of corrumpere "break completely” rumpere "to break)

Corruption is the natural way of evolving, using it in a selfish way for personal gains is a crime. The XX century was marked by this kind of art philosophy, introduced by its pope M Duchamp. Nowadays this philosophy is a rambling discourse of some of the famous art warts in the business of investment.

In linguistics, the definition of corruption is a word or phrase that has been altered from its original form. Doesn’t that definition apply to the readymade and to outsourcing? It is transformation by displacement. This notion is one of the many meanings of art. The people who run the industries responsible for the state of our planet have become masters of this kind of alteration, giving new meaning to their interests, and elevating joblessness to a status quo. The world economy is in trouble and we have to resolve this situation from the national point of view, collectively and soon.

Nations are dying. Continents will be unified. The banker culture will refine its repression. The marginal population will grow into an explosion. And there we are with more time to worry about vanity, investment, and decoration.

These words are art because they explain the reasons for the art seen in this exhibition.

Art is not only a monetary investment, it is a necessity of our intellect; art is not only an emotion in a beautiful or ugly image, but in a state of reason.

Art is a medium to create the many modifications humans have to accomplish.

Artists are the critics and supporters of their eras, and this XXI century is the one we have to endure, the many and unique challenges of the phenomenon of our planet.

Chaos is the payback…for arrogance.

Glory is never there…because it is in other places.

So where are we going, with this disappearing wonder, wearing down into a moment of confusion?

Looking for the collective solitude of patriotism.

What are nations if not walls that become a labyrinth?

The Egyptians, Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Greeks, and Romans did it. History repeats itself.

When we kill God and Countries only Art will live to tell the tale.

Quando matarmos a Deus e aos países só a arte contará nossa história.

Cuando matemos a Dios y a los Paises solo el Arte contará nuestra historia.

Papo Colo

New York 2010

POSTER

EVENTS

A Conversation with Hua Hsu and Arthur Jafa

*Due to a scheduling conflict, Greg Tate will not be speaking.

Wed, March 31, 7pm – 9pm

Exit Underground

Writer and professor of English Hua Hsu and cultural critic and artist Arthur Jafa will talk about their views on art, commerce, race and globalization. Using the work in Global / National -- The Order of Chaos as jumping off points, the speakers will engage in a free-wheeling discussion about the state of American culture at a time when the “local” is being threatened by globalization. $5 suggested donation. Cash bar.

Hua Hsu teaches in the English Department at Vassar College (on leave 2009-10 at Harvard University). His work has appeared in The Atlantic (for whom he blogs), The New York Times, Bookforum, Slate, The Village Voice,The Boston Globe Ideas section and The Wire (for whom he writes a bi-monthly column). He was also on the editorial board for the New Literary History of America.

Arthur Jafa is a cultural critic/worker, visual artist and an African diasporic intellectual. His infrequently published thinking around questions of Black cultural politics, Black cultural nationalism, and film is visionary. He currently lives and works in New York, NY. Jafa studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His work has been exhibited in Social Formal, Westfälischer Kunstveren, Münster, Germany (2002); Bitstreams, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2001); 2000 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Media City, Seoul, Korea (2000); Black Box, CCAC Institute, Oakland, CA (2000); and Artists Space, New York, NY (1999).

To listen to an audio podcast of this talk, subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes. (Please click once. It may take a few seconds to open iTunes.)

World Cuisine with Nirmala Narine

A tastings from four continents straight from her kitchen.

Wednesday, April 14, 7-9pm

$30 Strongly Suggested Donation.

An evening with Nirmala Narine, internationally-recognized chef, owner of Nirmala's Kitchen, and author of In Nirmala's Kitchen: Everyday World Cuisine. Learn more about Nirmala HERE.

Experience every day world cuisine, gathered off the beaten path from friendly locals, street food vendors and exotic markets. Nirmala Narine has spent the last ten years traveling the world in search of recipes and home menus from countries as diverse as Guyana, Mexico, Peru, Israel, India, Tibet, Vietnam and New Zealand (among many others!)

For this event, concurrent with the exhibition Global / National, Nirmala will lead you through her global journey by discussing the relationships between culture and food, showing personal travel documentation, and providing tastings from four continents straight from her kitchen. A full menu is TBA. Cash bar.

SUPPORT

This exhibition is supported by Catharine and Jeffrey Soros.

Public programs supported by the New York Council for the Humanities.