Mathew Pokoik - news

The Mt Tremper Arts Party is this Sunday night, which will include the opening reception of the Interactive Landscape along with a dance and physical theater performance and DJ. It looks like we’ll have as many as 30 presenting artists across the mediums, I’m quite happy at how it has shaped up. I’ll be posting more related materials as they become available, curators statement, video from the Q&A, and party snap-shots. Hope to see you this weekend!

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group ©Mathew Pokoik

Over the past weekend Mt Tremper Arts hosted Jonah Bokaer and dance company for a short residency and work-in-progress showing of The Invention of Minus One. It was quite a treat to have them here, apart from the fact that they are all current or past members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and some of the best technical modern dancers in the world today, they were a pleasure to talk to. Jonah is making challenging and fascinating work, both my conversations with the company and Jonah’s work will be bumping around my head for some time to come.

Holley Farmer and Rashaun Mitchell in work-in-progress The Invention of Minus One at the MTA studio ©Mathew Pokoik

Additionally Jonah’s work is close to my heart for a number of reasons:

-His work explores themes of modern media in a variety of ways, media of media and signs of signs, dancers photographing dancers with instant polaroid cameras and dancing with cameras on tripods - creating layers of the human, the digital, and media based imagery/movement. Anyone familiar with my work The Global City will understand my affinity for this type of movement based art. What I find interesting about Jonah’s work is his movement vocabulary clearly shows a strong influence of Cunningham, yet he is able to push the medium forward through the introduction of stronger subject matter than the old master would use.

-It is clear that he is looking and thinking about a variety of artistic mediums and having a dialogue with past and current artistic work. Duchamp is a clear influence as can be seen in past work such as NUDEDESENDANCE or Octave, of course Duchamp’s legacy was taken up in movement based art by Cunningham, and it’s logical Jonah would continue that legacy.

-He runs an arts center Chez Bushwick, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is a strong advocate and activist for the arts by supporting new experimental work, artist curated events, arts community dialogue, and Chez Bushwick provides the lowest priced rehearsal space available in NYC!

A Group Photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik as part of the Mt Tremper Arts Party
Open 9/2-10/14 by appointment, see the MTA website for info.

Black Canyon, looking below near Camp 8, Colorado River, Arizona, 1871 ©Timothy O’Sullivan

Maiden of the Mist ©Ian Baguskas

Fishing Hole ©Mark Wyse

Yosemite ©Stephen Shore

Stockholm, WI, August 2005 (Girl with cellular phone ©Christian Patterson

C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival, Poolesville, MD, 2006 ©Susana Raab

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

Golf Course Under Construction ©Emmet Gowin

Surfer ©Mark Wyse

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

©Amy Stein

©Amy Stein

Stray Dog ©Daido Moriyama

Crash ©Matthew Porter

Work by John Daido Loori coming soon.

Aaron Diskin prefers that his work not be posted on the internet.

Check back soon for a curators statement and a video from the Q&A!

It was recently suggested to me to look up the work of the French post-modernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and I have begun to work through one of his earlier works The Consumer Society. I am quite taken with his work; already after only a brief introduction, I’m finding it to be a remarkable analysis of the state of our global culture. As more and more of my time is spent involved in communication through my laptop this opening passage gave me pause for reflection:

There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather – on a rising statistical curve – with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages. (p.25)

I’m imagining a soundtrack to this passage along the lines of “the age of Aquarius” morphed into “the age of Affluence”, a hallucinogenic journey through the idealization of the 60’s morphing into our modern object / consumption / sign based culture. I’m finding in Baudrillard many of the themes that have possessed me to travel around the world investigating signs of signs of signs, the loss of the authentic, the increasing homogeneous global village. Our modern media based relationship to the center or rather an illusion of centrality, an illusion of the real, an attempt at a modern day object/sign based Utopia, which is after all a “no-place”. I almost fell of my seat after reading the following passage, it was like finding a long lost brother:

What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [le vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality with the dizzying whirl, for the heart of the Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, the ‘Heart’ which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security.
So we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at images of the world, who can distinguish this brief irruption of reality from the profound pleasure of not being there? The image, the sign, the message – all these things we ‘consume’ – represent our tranquility consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion of the real (even where the allusion is violent) than compromised by it.
The content of the messages, the signifieds of the sign are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but offer for our consumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real. It is here that we can define the praxis of consumption. The consumer’s relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility – nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity.

I’ll leave you with the following image from ‘the global city’ dealing with an image of images in the making, being transmitted out to the nether regions of our mass communications system:

Mathew Pokoik, NASDAQ Studio, Times Square, NY