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Tuesday
Dec022008

Johanna Linsley

Remember the above name: Linsley (the woman in blue in the picture below) writes on her website that:

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Expressed primarily in performance, my practice is broadly concerned with situations and locations wherein organized and emotional systems engage. I’m currently thinking about: classrooms; offices; utopian social experiments; public transportation; shopping, generally; cities, generally; the movement of capital in New York in the 21st century, specifically; violence; the documentary form; and furniture design. Formally, I’m drawn to structured environments that give way to intuitive and/or associative processes; Oulipo and DIY bricolage both inform my thinking.

Documentation of many of her works can be found on her website under the categories works and collaborations.

One of my favorites Union Docs is one such collaborative project. It is a project that excites me and a project that I believe inhabits and exhibits a sustainable, viable, and politically intelligent position, that is both necessary and clearly within reach. 

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Without funding Johanna helped to turn her own home, a home that she shared with some flat mates, into Union Docs, a project she describes as:
[...] A 501 (c) 3 non-profit documentary arts collaborative and presentation space. Currently, our primary program is The Documentary Bodega Series, featuring new and challenging documentary film and audio works every Sunday evening in our Brooklyn screening room. The series is produced by the Resident Curators of UDRP, the UnionDocs Residency Program for Documentary & Media Studies. We also produce a podcast and blog, featuring short media pieces inspired by discussions at the Documentary Bodega and beyond.

If anyone is heading to New York I recommend checking it out.

Having been in England for a year, undertaking a PhD at Queen Mary, her newest news is a blog, where you can read her compelling future thought chatter on Pit Bulls, Sinclair, and the inverted parallels of an ethically just rhetorical/art practice.

Finally, in Linsley we have an artist who shows that collaborative art, performance based practice, and indeed their fine documentation in a digital medium, can investigate and cross challenging conceptual and political ground, in ways that truly exceed the gimmick, the parodic, and the exotic gestural positions that some performance art can slide disappointingly into. Here Linsley shows there is thought making performance making thought.

Like I said remember the name.

Reader Comments (1)

[...] at the truly wonderful Openned has some (slightly embarrassingly) nice things to say about me here. Thanks [...]

Wednesday, December 3, 2008 | Unregistered Commenterjhlinsley » Blog Archive

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