Friday Night -- 2.20.04 -- Peter Lasch (1998-2004) -- Artist Talk

Contents:
1. About this Friday Night
2. About Peter Lasch
3. About his work
4. About next Monday Night
Action Arts --- addressing the Republican National Convention (RNC)
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1. About this Friday

What: Artist talk / discussion / presentation
When: 7:00pm, Friday February 20th, 2004
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 5th Floor
Who: All are invited

While some of you may know Peter Lasch as an organizer of 16 Beaver Group,
Nomads&Residents, or the Mexican immigrants‚ group Asociación Tepeyac, it
is very unlikely that you will have seen any of the work he will discuss
on Friday. His slide talk will concentrate on a selection of works
produced between 1998 and 2004. The pieces will be discussed in their
relationship to:
- the merits of temporal rearrangements
- social structures such as games, pedagogical environments, language, and
everyday habits
- politically and socially engaged art in the context of an increasingly
eroding institutional support for this type of practice
- the function of public space, the monument, and the anti-monument
- the tensions between religious and secular nationalism
- perceptual shifts and the culture of migration

The talk will last 30 or 40 minutes, and will be followed by a discussion
with the artist.

Hope you can make it!

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2. About Peter Lasch

Peter Lasch was born and raised in Mexico City, and moved to New York City
in 1994. He currently shares his time between New York City, as director
(also founder) of Asociación Tepeyac‚s experimental arts program "Art,
Story-Telling, and the Five Senses" (El arte, el cuento y los cinco
sentidos), and Durham, North Carolina, where he serves as fulltime
professor of visual arts at Duke University.

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3. About his work

Peter Lasch sees his work as a consecutive set of acts and ideas, which
complement and interrupt the flow of the everyday, a chain of
routine-breaking routines. His role as an artist, educator, activist,
cultural organizer, and producer need to be understood as a cohesive
whole, which develops within specific social situations and exists mostly
outside of the conventional art context. His presentations in museum and
gallery settings represent only a part of his overall production. A
preoccupation with the theory and practice of socially engaged art, which
is rooted in daily exchanges, has led him to the formulation of an
aesthetics based on public interventions, social interactions, games, and
temporal rearrangements.

The range of his projects encompasses anti-monuments (Memorial 2006;
LATINO/A AMERICA, 2003; A Sculptural Proposal for the Zócalo, Mexico City,
1999, Interpolation, 1999), language games (Formal Conversation and Chance
Debate, 2000-2003; Brain Review, 2002; A Systematic Reading of Some Poems
by Bertolt Brecht, 1999; Eight Visual Dialogues, 1999), artist's books
(Crumbs: Drawing on a Limited View of New York City's Cultural Wealth,
2000), radio works (Radiopolyphony, 2003; Border Report /Aguilas Eagles,
2001; Frequency Response, 2000), monthly lunch events (16Beaver Lunchtime,
2002-2003), experimental workshops and activities (Naturalizations, 2003;
How to Know, 2003; Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses, 1999-2003,
Come Paint the White House!!!, 2000, First International Lunchtime Summit,
2003), as well as the regular participation in the organization of various
social networks (Nomads&Residents, 2001-2003; 16Beaver Group, 2000-2003,
Mexicanos Unidos de Queens, 1999-2003, Asociación Tepeyac de New York,
1999-2003).

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4. Monday Night 02-23-04 -- Action Arts --- addressing the Republican
National Convention (RNC)

On Monday February 23rd Action Arts, an artist collective working as
part of the noRNC Arts in Action Working Group, will be facilitating a
presentation of some of the artist‚s that are preparing works for the
RNC. The presentation will be hosted at 16 Beaver , the address of a
space initiated/run by artists to create and maintain an ongoing
platform for the presentation, production, and discussion of a variety
of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects.

The presentation will be the first in a series of presentations that
Action Arts will be facilitating from now until the RNC as part of an
outreach project meant to encourage a dialogue between artist‚s
organizations and the movement of creative resistance that is quickly
growing as a force that is defined in it‚s opposition to the RNC.

The evening will function as a space for artists to present their
projects and encourage others to join in the movement. It will also be a
space where interested public and media will be encouraged to come to
gain an understanding of the power of creative energy that characterizes
the noRNC arts movement.

Artists, artists organizations, artworks that are to be showcased as part
of the February 23rd presentation include:

WW3 Arts in Action
http://ww3artsinaction.org

Billionaires for Bush
http://www.billionairesforbush.com

and more --- details to follow in the monday night email

stay tuned.