Artists Unite Issue

Artist Peter Walsh is a writing fellow for Performa ‘09. He just let me know about the project Scoring Performa, which has a number of writers, well, scoring the annual performance art festival. The resulting document is a wide variety of takes on what the assessment of art can be: critique, summary, reaction, etc.

From Peter’s own post (an excerpt):

“Some Notes on Liveness: Part One”

By PETER WALSH

I’m addicted to the privilege of “being there.” In a society where the eyewitness testimony of one person can put another person behind bars – or set them free, it’s hard not to be. We honor the power of the witness. As a sensing person, my being shaped by a constant bodily flow of information, I prefer, for example, a well-made meal to simple calories. I also prefer theater to cinema, a big movie premiere to stuttering YouTube videos, the passion of a lover to the secondhand “sexiness” of pop culture….

Washington Heights artist Hector Canonge’s work Tabula Lunar was the subject of the second in a series of projected exhibitions staged by Artists Unite in 2009. Canonge’s work serves as a public intervention and was a perfect match with the Projection Show series attempt to bring the experience of art directly to the public rather than through the venue of gallery or other specialized location.
Canonge worked with a custom video mixer to combine his collected footage of things “lunar,” including animation, classic film, and stills with live images of people in the street. The work effectively places the public into the artwork. From Canonge’s artists statement:

Public Intervention Projection explores the universal fascination of people with the moon while evoking mythical, romantic, fantastic, and obscure attributes of the celestial body. TABULA LUNAR is an ephemeral surface on which people’s street presence is incorporated into visuals of and narratives about the lunar landscape appropriated from popular cinematic culture. Poetic and intrusive, familiar yet out of this world, intimate yet made into a public collaborative performance, the project prompts a possible dialogue of our connection to the night sky and what can be seen of it in an urban setting.

More information about the artist can be found at www.hectorcanonge.net.

More photos from the event are available at http://artistsunite.ning.com/photo/albums/tabula-lunar.

Watch for the next in the Projection Show series in late November/early December.

Creative Venues/Projection Show is made possible in part with public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities and the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, both supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Artists Unite LIVE! is funded in part by a discretionary grant from Councilmember Robert Jackson. Artists Unite receives support from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone.