Uzi Parnes,
Carmelita Tropicana, and Ela Troyano
RECYCLING ATLANTIS
A live exhibition
celebrating the radical philosophies of Jack Smith
80WSE Gallery is pleased to
present RECYCLING ATLANTIS, a live exhibition by Uzi Parnes,
Carmelita Tropicana, and Ela Troyano in celebration of the artist, philosopher
and educator Jack Smith. The exhibition will be on view November 12th, 13th & 14th
from 5:00pm - 9:00pm.
Uzi
Parnes, Carmelita Tropicana and Ela Troyano have been collaborating on film and
performance since the early 1980’s when they first met legendary filmmaker Jack
Smith. Twenty-five years after his death from AIDS in 1989, RECYCLING
ATLANTIS celebrates Smith’s radical philosophies about the role of art
in society through an interactive exhibition project, produced live in collaboration
with 80WSE Director Jonathan Berger and NYU students and faculty over the
course of three evenings.
Some
time around 1978 Jack Smith penned a manifesto in which he outlined a utopian
futuristic urban environment, centering around a series of proposed social
programs and articulated in the form of an unrealized film, which employed
numerous Hollywood movie stars in service roles for Smith’s new progressive
world. The manifesto as a whole is emblematic of the entirety of Smith’s
creative practice and philosophical approach, where the boundary between art
and life was non-existent and the act of creation became the literal
construction of a new reality.
Among the proposals in Smith’s manifesto were a “free paradise abandoned
objects in the center of the city near where the community movie sets would
also be.” These two projects highlight integral practices that remain a
constant throughout Smith’s work: the fantastical transformation and
repurposing of discarded materials and trash for both his home and film sets,
often one and the same, and the discovery and employment of unknown and
unwanted performers as “superstars” for his films, a concept that he pioneered ahead of his contemporary Andy
Warhol.
RECYCLING ATLANTIS centers around Parnes,
Tropicana, and Troyano’s revisiting of Smith’s manifesto and their subsequent
interest in interpreting and realizing his proposed “free paradise of abandoned
objects” and “community movie set” within the space and time of an exhibition.
In 80WSE’s front gallery space, visitors will be able to take or leave their
own objects to recycle, growing and shrinking a large and varied mound of items
in the center of the room, while an accompanying audio recording of Tropicana’s
performance Cry a la Jack chronicles
one of Smith’s legendary performances hinging on his powerful transformation of
a common toilet plunger. A second
gallery presents four simultaneous slideshows of performance and portrait
photographs created between 1981 and 1989 through an ongoing collaboration between
Smith and Parnes, most notably a series of images shown publically in NYC for
the first time documenting Smith’s play I
Was A Male Yvonne DeCarlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground, with
accompanying audio from the performance, shot over the course of three nights
in 1982.
80WSE’s
remaining three conjoined gallery spaces will serve as the site for a live
film, existing in a permanent state of development, in which the boundaries
between design, production, and presentation are dissolved, much as in Troyano’s
first film Bubble People, which
featured Jack Smith and was shot at Parnes’ loft performance space “Performances
Staged” in 1982. One production area will serve as the setting for an ongoing
improvised film shoot, featuring Tropicana as “Yolanda La Pinguina,” (one of
Smith’s recurring characters), using Smith’s philosophical texts as a script,
NYU students and visitors as performers, and “abandoned objects” as props. In a
second area, Parnes and Troyano will establish a working editing studio where they
will merge footage spanning three decades, making selections from their
collaborations with Smith and Tropicana on film, video, photo, and theater
works. Through live mixing, layering, and altering these historical materials
the artists will generate a new composite ongoing and ever-changing film. A
third area will serve as a cinema continuously screening live feed footage from
both Parnes and Troyano’s studio as well as the active “community movie set”.
The
format of the exhibition seeks to reflect the critique of arts culture with
which Smith was concerned for the entirety of his career, as well as the
holistic approach to art making that he chose to pursue as a result of these
concerns, one where he considered every part of the creative process, from
thought to distribution, as an essential contributing artistic gesture towards
achieving the total work. Through their open collaborative re-invention of
materials from the recent and distant past, in the space and time of the present,
Parnes, Tropicana, and Troyano focus RECYCLING
ATLANTIS on the continued and increasing relevance of a question which
opens Smith’s 1978 manifesto: “Could art be useful?”
Uzi
Parnes is a New York based filmmaker, photographer, curator, and actor.
Presentations of his work have been shown internationally, most recently in a
career survey at The Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art (Berlin, 2012).
His dissertation, Pop Performance: Four
Seminal Influences, was published in 1988 and has become an influential
reference for scholarship around Jack Smith’s work. Parnes was founder and
co-director with Ela Troyano of legendary 1980's performance club “Chandalier.”
Carmelita
Tropicana is an Obie award winning performance artist and writer. Her work has
been presented by INTAR Theatre (NYC), Performance Space 122 (NYC), Institute
of Contemporary Art (London), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo (Sevilla),
El Museo del Barrio (NYC), and Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). I, Carmelita Tropicana – Performing Between Cultures, a book
surveying her work, was published in 2000.
Ela
Troyano is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, born in Cuba and based in NYC. Most
recently, Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana were commissioned by Performance
Space 122 to create the performance Post
Plastica, which was presented at El Museo del Barrio in 2012. In 2010 she
and Uzi Parnes were invited by the Berlin Film Festival to present The Silence of Marcel Duchamp, a
collaborative live cinema performance. Troyano’s work has been supported
through numerous fellowships including Creative Capital, Ford Foundation,
Rockefeller Foundation, and Sundance Lab.
Concurrently
with RECYCLING ATLANTIS, Uzi Parnes’s
installation of photographs, BASRA ON
FIRST AVENUE: Jack Smith’s Last Apartment, will
be on view from October
29, 2014 - January 26, 2015 at 80WSE Gallery’s satellite space, a series of five
street-level windows located at the corner of Broadway and East 10th
Street. The installation is on view 24 hours a day.
80WSE
Gallery is located at 80 Washington Square East, between West 4th
Street and Washington Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 10:30AM-6PM. Admission
is free and open to the public. For more information about the exhibition,
please contact the gallery at 212-998-5751 or email 80wsefrontdesk@nyu.edu.
Special
thanks to Gladstone Gallery and Fales Library. RECYCLING ATLANTIS is made possible through the generous support of
Materials for the Arts.
