History

ANNOUNCING A GIVEAWAY OF THE SUMMER QUEEN:I have 6 signed copies of THE SUMMER QUEEN to give away. 2 for the UK, 2 for the rest of the world and 2 for the USA.To enter, just e-mail me at elizabethchadwick@live.co.uk and most importantly say which draw you want to enter. UK, Rest of World or USA. Although publication day is Thursday 20th, I'll leave it open for entries until midnight Sunday 23rd and announce the winners on Monday 24th once I've got the DH to choose the winners out of the helmet again!

Ca. 1863. "Unidentified soldier in Union uniform with forage cap carrying a bone handle knife in breast pocket." Sixth-plate tintype, hand-colored. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, Library of Congress. View full size.

MoMA Studio: Exchange Café furniture by Caroline Woolard. Photo by Ryan Tempro When I was asked to propose a new learning format to MoMA, I suggested a café because I wanted to create a social space where meaning is made in dialogue, where objects can be touched, and where visceral knowledge is honored. Exchange Café is a social space dedicated to exchange, from unconventional encounters to barter and reciprocal economies. What follows is an explanation of some principles of the café, and the ways in which these principles could be extended toward a more engaging visitor experience at MoMA. Tychist Baker and Lauren Melodia of Milk Not Jails. Photo courtesy of Milk Not Jails 1. Waitstaff as Educators At MoMA Studio: Exchange Café, visitors are greeted by waitstaff with direct experience working in, with, and for solidarity economies. Educators are waitstaff with lifelong commitments to the topics at hand—Exchange Café waitstaff Lauren Melodia and Tychist Baker are organizers for Milk Not Jails; Kenneth Edusei is an organizer for participatory budgeting in Brooklyn; and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Forest Purnell, and Carla Aspenberg are artists engaged in practices of reciprocity. Education happens in lived experience, through dialogue that connects artworks to activism and community organizing. Imagine that every time you walked into MoMA, you could elect to speak to a community organizer about the relationship between real-time organizing and the issues at stake in the artworks on view. Imagine if the interns, fabricators, and artists who made work could be hired as stewards for the work while it was on view, talking to the public about the construction, materials, and dialogue surrounding the work itself. 2. Education through Dialogue “Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning—not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.” – David Bohm, “Dialogue: A Proposal” Exchange Café takes the social format of a café, taking the embodied roles and rules of a café as a space for learning. Greeted by waitstaff with direct experience in the topics at hand, visitors are led to consider artworks that focus on one-to-one agreements, artists who facilitate engagement in short-term encounters or long-term relationships of reciprocity. On the Exchange Café wall, the Exchange Archive acts as an emergent publication about one-on-one engagement, inviting contributions from the public. From artists who facilitate unconventional dialogue to artists who consider the barter of goods and services (the labor of producing a project) as integral to the meaning of the work, the Exchange Archive makes legible a desire for one-on-one interaction in MoMA’s collection and beyond. For example, Huong Ngo, Or Zubalsky, and George Monteleone’s ongoing project, the Dream Machine, asks anyone to “call the dream machine (1-877-877-5602) and leave a voice recording of your dream. It calls you back in about 15 minutes and plays a random dream from its memory.” Impossible to experience without a contribution, this project represents a network of anonymous reciprocity. Online, TheExchangeArchive.com (made by the MultiAgency Collective and myself) shows connections between projects, artists, and ideas, revealing the ways in which artworks emerge in dialogue between people, not in solitary isolation. As we state: Artists do not create work in a vacuum. Artists work in a dialogue with other people, so the Exchange Archive supports further artistic dialogue by showing the inspirations that flow between projects. As a research database for projects about exchange, the online archive serves as a foo

Circa 1905. "Calumet and Hecla smelters, Lake Linden, Michigan." Starting point for the web of copper telephone and streetcar wires seen in so many of the other Detroit Publishing images. Panorama of two 8x10 glass plates. View full size.

As GeoCurrents has noted in several previous posts, leading scientific journals and influential media outlets often favor research in linguistics that makes strong claims that resonate with the general public. A recent paper by anthropologist Caleb Everett published in PLOS ONE, “Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives”, claims “that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form”, based on a study of ejective sounds.This post is from GeoCurrents

June 1937. "Child of Texas migrant family who follow the cotton crop from Corpus Christi to the Panhandle." Photo by Dorothea Lange. View full size.

The 2012 Kochi-Muziris Biennale Having never visited a biennial—a fancy name for a recurring exhibition that explores the state of contemporary art—I had always been curious about this art-world phenomenon that has populated almost every nook and cranny of the globe since the first Venice Biennale in 1895. So a press release announcing India’s first biennial, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, caught my eye. What, I wondered, had brought this biennial into being? MoMA’s 12-Month Internship Program enabled me to turn my musings into a travel itinerary. I was bound for Kochi, a coastal city in Kerala, and then to Mumbai, where I hoped to deepen my understanding of India’s contemporary art scene. Amar Kanwar. The Sovereign Forest. 2010–ongoing. Multiple mediums. Installation view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, December 12, 2012–March 17, 2013 Before embarking on my art adventure, I had doubted whether Kochi’s Biennale could fulfill the ambitions of its curators, Kerala-born artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, who proposed to “rewrite history” through Kochi—intending the Biennale itself to serve as a tool for opening “a new discourse…a new, hitherto unknown language of narration.” But my doubts dissipated soon after I arrived in Kochi. Unlike conventional exhibitions, biennials spread throughout their host location, becoming as much about that place as about the art exhibited there. And as places go, Kochi is rather special. The center of India’s spice trade from the 14th century onwards, today Kochi is a heady mix of Chinese fishing nets, industrial tankers, synagogues, mosques, and churches. Add to this Kerala’s socialist backdrop and educated population—Kerala boasts India’s highest literacy rate—and you have a highly switched-on exhibition context. In order to activate that context, the curators handpicked 94 artists from 23 countries to respond to Kochi. Among the many thought-provoking results, I was particularly impressed by two works that really brought Kochi’s charged situation to life. Combining rural film footage and native rice grains with hand-bound books filled with names and suicide dates, Amar Kanwar’s installation The Sovereign Forest (2010–ongoing) documents the plight of India’s farmers in the face of corporate land-grabbing. As my own reaction to the work moved from visual to emotional, I thought how relevant its core issues—possession and exploitation—were to the exhibition site itself; Aspinwall House, a warehouse complex that had never before been open to the public, was owned by an English trading company during the British Raj. Sheela Gowda. Stopover. 2012. Grinding stones. Installation view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, December 12, 2012–March 17, 2013 Sheela Gowda’s Stopover (2012) consisted of 170 grinding stones—an Indian kitchen essential before electrical appliances—trailed across a disused Aspinwall House storeroom and onto a crumbling jetty. As I picked my way across this object graveyard, I noticed how calm the surrounding waters, once so frenzied with trade, are today. The stones’ gathering seemed to parallel the Biennale’s resuscitation of Kochi, a place whose use value isn’t quite what it once was. Presented in different contexts, both the stones and Kochi, I hoped, could take on new meanings—and new life. On my last day in Kochi, I met with co-curator Riyas Komu to discuss all things biennial. During our conversation, I was struck by his explanation of India’s need to hold this exhibition, specifically in Kochi. “Here,” he told me, “we are the museum.” It wasn’t until I arrived in Mumbai that this began to make sense. Though Mumbai houses several museums, their missions are heritage-driven, and none is exclusively dedicated to cutting-edge international art. This has forced other players in Mumbai’s art world to evolve in unusual ways. Commercial galleries behave like nonprofit spaces, exhibiting daring programming. During my visit, Gallery M

Its hard to believe that this Thursday marks the fourth anniversary of the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. While the museum goes from strength to strength however, during this time, there has been little real progress with the issue of the Parthenon Marbles. The museum was originally built to house the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum – and to remove the arguments that Greece had nowhere to house the sculptures. However, since the opening, the financial turmoil that has engulfed the country has meant that there has been little progress in moving the issue forward at all. While the country has many very important issues to focus on, it is a shame that this museum (which is in many ways, a game changer in the case & Greece’s strongest argument) has not been used to full effect. At the moment it is still new – so now is the time when the argument is strongest, otherwise it eventually just becomes accepted as part of the status quo of the situation. Hopefully big things will happen before the next anniversary celebration comes around… From: Euronews Acropolis Museum fourth birthday 17/06 12:57 CET On Thursday 20 June 2013, the Acropolis Museum celebrates its fourth birthday. The exhibition areas will remain open from 8 a.m. until 12 midnight. The restaurant will be open during the same hours. On this occasion, admission will be reduced (3 euros) for all visitors. Visitors will have the opportunity to discover, together with Museum Archaeologist – Hosts, untold stories of the surviving blocks of the frieze, with the aid of 3D presentations on special screens installed in the Parthenon Gallery. At 21:00 the Athens Municipality Philharmonic Orchestra will present a musical concert in the Museum’s entrance courtyard with famous melodies of the world band repertoire. In addition, the Museum will commence the exclusive production of copies of two exhibits, the head of Poseidon and the head of Artemis from the east frieze of the Parthenon, available in the Museum Shops.

business end–the effective end of a tool or weapon.  1878.   This is essentially American.  The reference is to a tack, but I expect the way we use it today–as in the business end of a gun or a knife–was used as well.

The tombstone of Lucius Valerius Geminus, veteran of the Legio II Augusta, one of the elite legions that first invaded Britain in 43 A.D. under the Emperor Claudius, the legion which defeated Boudica and built Hadrian’s wall, is going on public display at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock for the first time since its discovery in 2003. The tombstone was found in the foundations of the town wall near the west gate of Alchester, a Roman town two miles south of the modern Oxfordshire town of Bicester. The stone had been broken into 20 pieces and reused for rubble in the foundations of the stone wall which we know from coin evidence was built after 260 A.D. and before the abandonment of the town in the 5th century. The town was preceded by a Roman military base the construction of which, thanks to dendrochronological analysis of two wooden gateposts found at the front gate preserved by waterlogged ground, we can date incredibly precisely to between October of 44 A.D. and March of 45 A.D. What makes this tombstone such a significant find is the biographical detail in the inscription describing a soldier who most likely participated in the initial conquest of Britain and then settled in the province after his retirement. It’s the only personal biography we have of anyone living in Oxfordshire before the Middle Ages, and the first for an individual veteran in the entire province of Britannia. Here is the text of the inscription: Dis. Manibus/ L(ucius) Val(erius) L(uci filius) Pol(lia tribu) Gemi/nus For(o) Germ(anorum)/ vet(eranus) Leg(ionis) [I]I Aug(ustae)/ an(norum) L. h(ic) s(itus) e(st)/ he(res) c(uravit)/ e(x) t(estamento) “To the souls of the departed: Lucius Valerius Geminus, the son of Lucius, of the Pollia voting tribe, from Forum Germanorum, veteran of the Second Augustan Legion, aged 50(?), lies here. His heir had this set up in accordance with his will.” Forum Germanorum was a one-horse town in north-west Italy at the base of the Alps in what is today the Piemonte region. It was once part of the province of Gallia Cisalpina (Gaul on this side of the Alps) but had been granted Latin Rights in 89 B.C. under a law promoted by (and maybe even written by) Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, father of the triumvir Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Lucius Valerius’s epitaph was inscribed 70 or so years later and his membership in the Pollia voting tribe still ranked a mention. Since we know that he had to have died before the garrison left Alchester around 60 A.D., his approximate age at death (50), the general age of army recruits (17-25) and the standard term of service for a legionary (25-30 years), we can deduce he joined the legions during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 A.D.). The base of the Second Augustan Legion at that time was Strasbourg from which he may have participated in Caligula’s quasi campaign (he just executed a bunch of his own people and moved around, really) in Germany from 39-40 A.D. Less than two years later, the future emperor Vespasian became commander of Legio II Augusta and it was he who brought it from Strasbourg to Britain in 43 A.D. It’s unlikely that Lucius Valerius died away from home and was buried on the spot. As noted in the inscription, the gravestone was inscribed and installed according to the explicit instructions in his will. Obviously he felt no need to be interred back home in Forum Germanorum — he’d probably been gone decades by then — because it wasn’t at all unheard of for soldiers on expedition to be returned home for burial even over great distances but he chose to rest eternally in British soil. No accompanying burial was found during the 2003 excavation of the Alchester walls. This makes sense because he would have been buried outside of the city, probably along a road. What seems most likely to have happened is a couple of hundred years after his death and burial, Lucius’ gravestone was broken up and moved by cart to the con