the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Feb
22
Allan Sekula in conversation with Monika Szewczyk
THIS AIN’T CHINA’ AND OTHER TRUE FICTIONS e-flux journal lecture series at Cooper Union
6:30 pm | Rose Auditorium
Allan Sekula’s 1974 photo-text work, This Ain’t China: A Photonovel, announces the artist’s early attention to China as a foil for Western paradigms of production – cultural and economic. The work combines a (meta)narrative text with staged photographs, shot in the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard (in a Maoist phase and channeling Bertoldt Brecht). It announces itself as an investigation into “the relative merits of truth and fiction in class struggle.” Sekula’s plot concerns the employees of a greasy spoon restaurant in San Diego (artist included), all musing about working and living conditions and plotting a strike; and this microcosm is implicated in a global imaginary transformed by the example of a different culture and production paradigm. Yet the counter-example, and its negation, remain elusive. In the subtle way it is evoked, China could be both the country at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and fine dinnerware (porcelain or “fine china”). Seeing the work in 2010 begs the question of how both these Chinas – as well as today’s People’s Republic, with its (ever enigmatic) embrace of capitalist manufacture and consumption with a communist face – continue to configure imaginaries of alternative production.
About Allan Sekula in conversation with Monika Szewczyk
Allan Sekula is an artist whose innovation of photographic practice and theory centers on the engagement of documentary and performative forms in a sustained critique of economic, social and cultural globalization. He has exhibited extensively in the context of large-scale international exhibitions, including documenta 11 and 12. In 2003, Performance Under Working Conditions, a major retrospective exhibition with publication on his work were organized by the Generali Foundation in Vienna. Currently a selection of works spanning the artist’s career, including early works and a new series, have been brought together in Polonia and Other Fables, which has toured to The Renaissance Society in Chicago; Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw; Museum Ludwig, Budapest and Belfast Exposed. The e-flux exhibition will be his first solo exhibition of Sekula’s work in New York City since 1987.
Monika Szewczyk is a writer, editor and some-time curator based in Berlin and Rotterdam, where she is head of publications at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art.