At 09:00 AM on Sunday June 23, 2002, the 12-person Peruvian brass band, Banda de Santa Cecilia, began playing solemn subdued rhythms in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in midtown Manhattan, signaling the start of Francis Alÿs’s The Modern Procession. The band was accompanied by several dogs,…
“Consider what is at stake in our world today, registered in the basic fact that the anthropocene coincides with electracy. We notice immediately that prayer and engineering do not suffice, and no one doubts they are trying. We desire effective change but are not able, we cannot despite our will and knowledge. Here…
In French, femme fatale means a “fatal” or “disastrous” woman. She is often one who attempts to attract or snare men. The definition of femme fatale from the Merriam Webster Dictionary is either/both a seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations and/or a woman who attracts the male by…
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here. The museum as a public space What is the public in a contemporary context? How is this idea of the public constructed historically and how can we analyze it from its perspective of its geopolitics?…
The following is the first of a two-part series. If we lose public and semipublic space, we lose everything. Artists give up their authorship when necessary, and it is the same for institutions. We need to find ways to get out of the art context, especially during historical moments like…
In Jonathan Parker’s movie Untitled (2009) we find an insightful (and also cynical) description of some of the major features of the contemporary art world. One of the main characters, Josh (Eion Bailey), is a successful commercial painter who is nicely positioned within the contemporary art market. Josh…
The following is the last of a three-part series. The first installment can be found here, the second here. Although Mercante tracks gender differences, when visitors are foreign, education level, and occasionally social class, he does not address ethnicity among members. This makes his work difficult to comment on from the…
The following is the second of a three-part series. The first installment can be found here. An economic approach that more astutely tracks what’s at stake in emergent ayahuasca religions might combine Luis León’s idea of ‘religious poetics’ with anthropologist, Michael Taussig’s ficto-criticism of Latin American economies. I cite these…
The following is the first of a three-part series. The second part can be found here. In this essay I am going to explore New Religious Movements (NRMs) emergent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that use entheogens or psychedelic substances as sacrament. This means that the use of mind-altering substances…
The following is the second installment of a two-part series. The first part can be found here. There are two common methods of writing about this experience. One describes the experience and brings it into the realm of representation. The other explains how the experience was created through a process…