Education and Community Programs

When the Local IS Global (and vice versa)

The collaboration between Public Programs and the Film/Video department on the film program Global Lens won a blue ribbon last night at the screening of Kabala by Assane Kouyate. This is how it works: the Film/Video curates the series (or, in the case of Global Lens, the selections are made by the Global Film Initiative) and I help to find local professors, critics, or community members to introduce the screenings. Pretty simple, right? I go through my rolodex, fire off some emails, and end up with professors from area colleges with extremely long job titles to come and contextualize our screenings of world cinema.

Well, last night we got extra lucky. Thanks to a tip from a well-connected colleague in our PR department, we were graced with the insights and warmth of Cherif Keita, a professor of French and Francophone Literature of Africa and the Caribbean and Director of French and Francophone Studies at Carleton College. (see what I mean about the titles?) Turns out that Keita has not only 1. met the filmmaker, 2. visited the EXACT village where the film was made, 3. travels there quite often, actually, BUT ALSO, 4. his family name, Keita, was the name of half the main characters in the film. In about 10 minutes he stood on stage and gave us a 750 year history of the region of Mali that the film depicts and explained the connections and feuds between different family clans and how they play out today. After hearing all of this I was able to watch the film with a much deeper understanding of the characters and their actions.

After the screening a bunch of professors with equally long titles stayed for the Q & A and continued to ask well-informed and interesting questions. I left having learned a whole lot about Mali, and feeling proud of Minnesota for having the whole world in our back yard.

PS: Global Lens continues with three more screenings. Check it out.

Chuck, Bob and Umberto

As I re-read key passages from THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF
QUEEN LOANA, I’m struck by the bigness and the
boldness of what essentially amounts to a literary
self-portrait.

I’m struck, too, by the somewhat surprising
accessibility of the novel and the emotional core of
the protagonist it so eloquently documents.

(I guess I’m easily frightened by vaguely defined
arenas of academia like “semiotics,�?and because
Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, feared the worst: a
nightmare jumble of obscure symbols understandable
only to a select few, anti-social intellectuals
cloistered amidst ancient Latin texts in the
smoke-filled faculty clubs of European universities.)

Surprise! This novel, though certainly not Lit Lite,
proves to be a relatively breezy and thoroughly
engrossing read.

I couldn’t help but compare it, in my annoyingly
English major manner, to two recent and culturally
analogous events:

1) Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan bio on PBS

2) The Chuck Close show at the Walker.

The Dylan bio hammered home the point of Dylan’s
continual struggle with self-identity and his endless
efforts to reinvent himself both as a musician and a
public persona (performer), sometimes purposefully
blurring the line between fact and fiction.

Likewise, the Chuck Close show highlighted the
artist’s continual return to earlier images of
himself, and his continued efforts to manipulate and
reassemble those images.

“I cannot let myself go, I want to know who I am. One
thing is certain. The memories that surfaced at the
beginning of what I believe to be my coma are obscure,
foggy, and arranged in patchwork fashion with breaks,
uncertainties, missing pieces�?that is how we do it
in normal life, too: we could suppose we have been
deceived by some evil genius, but in order to be able
to move forward we behave as if everything we see is
real.�?BR>p. 419
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco

(NOTE: The Artist’s Bookshelf starts Thursday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m.)

Meth and sex…and, oh yeah, fires and tornados.

There was some good ol' fashioned Civic Engagement going on at the Walker last night. We hosted the community forum "Meth, Sex & Men: Our New Challenge," organized by the Red Door Clinic, the Minnesota AIDS Project, the Aliveness Project, Pillsbury United Communities, and PrideAlive among many other hardworking and worthy organizations.

The panel and subsequent forum set out to raise awareness and strategize solutions for the growing challenge of, and connection between, crystal methamphetamine use and HIV infection among gay and bisexual men. Panelists included Johnny Hess, LADC, Program Director of the Sobriety Village Project; Harold Martin, MD, MPH, Infectious Disease Specialist; Gary Schiff, Minneapolis 9th Ward Council Member; Charles Tamble, HIM Program at the Red Door Clinic; Richard Terzick, MA, Program Director of Alternatives Treatment Center; and three community members in recovery.

One of the critical roles in the Walker model of Civic Engagement is that of a Container: being a safe place for unsafe ideas. I admit that I was a little worried about if people would come, and that was probably due to my own ignorance about the issue. A significant and worrying trend of HIV infection among gay and bi meth users? In the Twin Cities? I had no idea. But as the event got under way I thought, This is a successful container! The audience - members from the various sponsoring organizations, members of the GLBT and allied communities, family supporters, recovering and current users -was proof positive that this issue is pertinent and people are ready to get involved. They just need a space (read: Container) to get it started. Engage, people! Engage!

However, not to be outdone, we had other events going on at the Walker yesterday that I would normally only see in a legal contract under the heading: "Acts of God." 1) A fire evacuation broke the mid-afternoon boredom so that my co-workers and I all spilled out onto the streets and into the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden to chat with visitors as the fire engines roared by on Hennepin. No damage, though. We're all okay. 2) Ten minutes into the Meth Forum (before panelist introductions were even finished!) the alarms go off again. As all 142 forum participants shuffled down to the storm shelter, absorbing the announcement of a National Weather Service tornado warning, I thought: No, way! Twice in one day! But it was fun to see Visitor Services and Building Operations leap into action, and I'm happy to report that after a brief respite in the parking garage, we all returned to civically engaging. Go, Team.

LINKS:

Check out more on Civic Engagement here and here.

Gay Men's Health Crisis
Life or Meth
Crystal Meth Anonymous
Pride Institute
Alternatives

Making the Conceptual Actual: Robert Smithson’s “Floating Island�?Comes to Life

STUDY FOR FLOATING ISLAND TO TRAVEL AROUND MANHATTAN ISLAND, 1970. pencil on paper. 19�?x 24�?BR>Collection of Joseph E, Seagram & Sons, Inc.

Thirty-five years after it was first conceptualized, artist Robert Smithson’s “Floating Island To Travel Around Manhattan Island�?is being brought to life in conjunction with the Whitney’s Smithson Retrospective. Never realized during the artist’s lifetime, Floating Island is a 30-x-90-foot barge landscaped with earth, rocks, and native trees and shrubs, towed by a tugboat around the island of Manhattan. “It’s a very charismatic project because everyone can relate to an island, we live and work on one,�?/A> said Diane Shamash, executive director of Minetta Brook, the arts organization that launched the “Floating Island�?with the Whitney Museum, which is holding a Smithson retrospective through Oct. 25. “Floating Island�?will do just that, from Saturday, September 17, 2005 til Sunday, September 25, 2005 from 8 am to 8 pm. What this all had to do with Walker education and community programs…I’m not sure. Anyway, if you’re in New York and you catch a glimpse of something weird being towed about in the Hudson or the East River…Remember Duder, its ART.

The Whitney’s site about the project

New York Times op/ed piece from September 17

Sculpture From the Earth, but Never Limited by It - Michael Kimmelman review in the NYT

Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 - The Webcast

Hans Haacke
Condensation Cube 1963
Museu d’Art Contemporaini, Barcelona, Spain. Gift of the National Comittee and Board of Trustees Whitney Museum of American Art. © DACS 2005

Can’t make it to London for the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970? Not to worry. You are a citizen of the global village and have the power to appear wherever there is an online forum, a camera and a recording device. So, set your universal timing device for Friday, September 16, 2005, 2:30 Central Standard Time and switch your brain to upload mode because this three-day behemoth of a symposium will include Donna De Salvo (curator of Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970), Alexander Alberro, Sabeth Buchmann, Diederich Diederichsen, Braco Dimitrijevic, Briony Fer, Hans Haacke, Margaret Iversen, Peter Osborne and Anne Rorimer discussing how experimental art in the 1960s and 70s responded to the social, political and technological conditions of the time. I’m getting woozy just thinking about all that erudition in one room. I suppose no one has ever accused the Tate Modern of being small-minded�?it would be unthinkable.

Mapping the Interstitial: InSite 05

HOWARD LIPIN / Union-Tribune
In contrast to the rigid U.S. border fence (far left), inSITE’s new public park, west of the bullring at Playas de Tijuana, uses circles and curves to bring people together at the beach.

“What must be mapped as a new international space of discontinuous historical realities is, in fact, the problem of signifying the interstitial passages and processes of cultural difference that are inscribed in the ‘in-between,’�?/I>
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture