Off-Road: Historic Synagogues in New Haven

Sites: the expanded label & locative media based cultural tourism

2010-07-14T08:47:00.007-04:00

For this installation, I looked at the label as a site for intervention. I expanded the "label" to fill one entire wall, displayed as a grid of text nailed to the white gallery wall. Inspired by my subject matter and the historic Protestant churches on the private New Haven "Commons", it was for me an allusion to Martin Luther's decision to nail his manifesto to the church door.

People loved this label and I wondered how many would have read this history were it presented in a different context?

My installation included two videos running in a loop. One was a GPS video tour that was installed on a monitor and could be watched while on a Schwinn Exercise Bike installed in the gallery. Postwar abstraction for me includes relating Urban Renewal to the 1965 introduction of the first in-home exercise bikes designed to help you work hard, go no where, and see no one.

My video project asks: how can the new possibilities of GPS-based cultural tourism be used critically by artists? My project is a prototype for historically grounded, artist-driven conversations about, in this case, religious tolerance in America.

Since the 1990s, we have been at a turning point in how to talk about location, just as we were more than a century ago talking about time.

Locative media is a new technology of the self.

Locative media can become nothing more than the "stop and pop" digital cemetery of the twenty-first century. Or it can envision a new theater mediating the possibility of history and place.

Studio Austin Alchemy

2010-07-14T03:30:00.001-04:00

Studio Austin Alchemy

In a changing knowledge economy, Nancy Austin established Studio Austin Alchemy in 2008 to collaborate on experimental art projects that bridge place-based historical scholarship, an expanded notion of cultural tourism as an opportunity for public discourse, site-specific installations, and the critical exploration of new location-based applications and technology.

Her first intervention was a collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Caroline Woolard for the juried show, Cryptic Providence. Footnotes (2008) was a site-specific tea-party installation, performing the entwined and buried histories of America’s first public sculpture critic and the founder of RISD, Helen Rowe Metcalf. Austin exhibited an iteration of this project at the RISD, Museum of Art in 2009.

As Malraux came up with his idea of a museum without walls, so must scholars today continually reimagine where they can critically engage new publics. Austin’s second intervention began last winter with Off-Road (2009-present). Her installation on historic synagogues, urban renewal, and religious tolerance in America was on view December 2009 through January 2010 in New Haven, CT as part of a group exhibition organized by Cynthia Beth Rubin. Austin has applied for a grant to bring this project more fully into the public domain.

From 2010 on, all of Nancy Austin’s scholarship will be communicated across a range of knowledge platforms, exploring how and where scholarship and new media can partner. Studio Austin Alchemy is a contemporary intervention in scholarship, art, and public history activism.

The Expanded Label as a Site

2010-07-13T22:28:00.000-04:00

"Where" in the Landscape

2010-07-12T09:11:00.000-04:00

Public Memory: 3 churches on the green & vanished synagogues

2010-07-11T09:15:00.001-04:00

Scene at the Opening Sunday

2009-12-07T19:16:00.000-05:00

You're Invited: Opening Sunday Dec 6th Noon-5pm

2009-12-04T10:27:00.001-05:00

Opening: The John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art

51 Trumbull Street, New Haven CT

203-624-8055

Directions from RI: Take 95S to New Haven. Exit on I-91N and take exit #3 for Trumbull St. At end of exit ramp, go straight on Trumbull St toward Yale. The gallery is up about a block and a half on your right, after Orange and Lincoln but before Whitney.

From NYC: Take MetroNorth from Grand Central to New Haven.

Exhibition Press & Reviews

2009-12-04T10:00:00.001-05:00

Allison Hoffman, "Memory Blocks" Tablet Magazine (4 Dec. 2009).

Installation Shots

2009-12-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

Video - Historic Synagogues of New Haven: The First Century, 1856-1956

2009-12-03T22:00:00.001-05:00

This video can be previewed on my AustinAlchemy.com website here.

Cultural Heritage Artists Project Exhibition Catalogue (CHAP No. 1)

2009-12-03T21:30:00.004-05:00

The exhibition catalogue is available for preview and purchase here.

Here is the poster and e-vite:

Artist's Statement & Bio

2009-12-03T21:00:00.003-05:00

Off-Road: The GPS Guide to Cultural Tourism in New Haven’s Yale Hospital, Oak Street Connector and Historic Orchard Street Synagogue Area (2009)

Nancy Austin

Artist Statement:
How can the expanding field of cultural tourism be used by contemporary artists to initiate historically grounded conversations about, for example, religious tolerance in America? My project is a prototype for artist-driven content circulated via new cultural tourism sites. My first video is about documentation and facts. “Historic Synagogues of New Haven: The First Century, 1856-1956” is a looping video showing every known exterior, street-level view of New Haven’s historic synagogues. To date, I have only found about 50 surviving (mostly photographic) views recording the existence of these twenty synagogues representing a century of Jewish religious architecture in New Haven. How can it be that not only the synagogues themselves are gone, but also the visual record of their history is lost as well? My second video is a prototype for a different kind of cultural tourism experience. It contextualizes the Orchard St Shul as the lone-surviving synagogue of the still-controversial urban renewal efforts of the 1950s and 1960s and the semi-aborted Oak St. Highway Connector. This was a massive demolition project that demolished three other synagogues right away, dispersed the strong Jewish presence that supported the shops and other synagogues in the area, and transformed the surrounding neighborhood fabric forever. This devastation can be documented literally, and also more conceptually. In my video tour, I am both using and subverting a popular GPS drawing application for personal GPS travel diaries. Thus, if my first video is about the politics of archival photo documentation as the foundation for historical memory, then my second video should be seen as a cautionary tale about detached storytelling. For this exhibition installation, at a suitable distance from my altar of video screens, I have created a surrogate experience for the viewer to hop on an exercise bike and become, for the moment, a cultural tourist generating GPS data – shadows of facts as though we are all back in Plato’s cave. This is the dialectic and dialogue, and there is no quick answer to the question: “what do you know when you know a fact?”

Bio:
Nancy Austin is an interdisciplinary design historian and artist who has taught at Yale, RISD, and WPI. She is an expert on the sites and circulation of culture in the modern period, and the history of the museum from the Renaissance to Museum 3.0. Her studio, Austin Alchemy – writing, research, design, partners on art-driven projects that bridge historical scholarship, an expanded notion of cultural tourism as an opportunity for public discourse, site-specific installations, and the critical exploration of new locative media.

Cultural Tourism & Alternative Histories

2009-12-03T20:45:00.006-05:00

Since the late 1980s, the National Endowment for the Arts has been funding Cultural Tourism. Current NEA initiatives include Challenge America and Share Your Heritage. As artists continue to explore non-museum venues for site-specific work that can engage various communities, I would suggest that Cultural Tourism is a local, hybrid, sustainable space that should be imaginatively explored. Already, this more pluralistic view of what counts as "Cultural Tourism" has given birth to alternative approaches to telling local stories, or what counts as a history. Links to these initiatives will be posted here.
Gozaic - connecting through places that matter
Cultural Heritage Tourism

[July 2010: ... under construction]

NCAC Censorship Charge

2009-12-03T20:30:00.026-05:00

Includes Jan-Feb 2011 updates.
Re: NCAC special session at CAA with Svetlana Mintcheva and Richard Kamler entitled, "Policing the Sacred: Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Faith. Chaired by Eleanor Heartney.

The Cultural Heritage Artists Project of the Orchard Street Shul was a site-specific group exhibition organized by over 30 artists volunteering their time and effort and working together from the spring of 2009 until January 2010.

The call for participation read: "The project is not a simple exhibition of existing work; you must make new work responding to the environment, history, or architecture of the Orchard Street Shul [the struggling, oldest surviving synagogue in New Haven.] ... Artists are expected to visit the Orchard Street Shul to experience the presence of the site and neighborhood...

(If you are accepted) you will have several months to complete your contribution to the project .... In keeping with the intention of celebrating heritage and cultural diversity, we ask that all work produced for this project maintain respect for the synagogue as the spiritual home of an ongoing segment of New Haven's Jewish Community, and as the legacy of past generations."

In the fall of 2009, the Artistic Committee, of which I was a member, was accused of censorship in a complaint brought by Joyce Burstein and Richard Kamler. In a troubling rush to judgement, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) issued a Press Release condemning the Artistic Committee and the CHAP exhibition, and posted it to their website. CHAP was given no opportunity to respond to the charges made by Burstein and Kamler, and to this day, has been denied access to the complaint, a hearing to present internal emails and other evidence, or any semblance of due process. The NCAC refuses to document or amend their claims that, for example: "The organizers demanded the removal or modification of the tablecloth, even after being repeatedly assured that religious scholars agreed that the installation did not violate any religious taboo. Their concern, as they explained to NCAC, was that the piece 'might offend somebody'."

Indeed, there is a similar lack of transparency in the upcoming national College Art Association (CAA) panel where Richard Kamler will be speaking about "Policing the Sacred". Unlike almost every other CAA panel that is put together through an open call for participation, this one was "grandfathered in" privately as an NCAC-sponsored panel. No one from CHAP was notified about this panel, or asked to be a balancing respondent.

Censorship is a serious issue, and the CHAP-Shul exhibition did not engage in censorship.

Richard Kamler, was not commissioned to make work for an art exhibition, but applied to and was accepted into the CHAP project on the Shul. The San Francisco-based artist made one New Haven site visit in the spring, and did not follow through on the community engagement necessary to realize his planned dialogues between the mostly elderly members of the Shul and their Muslim neighbors. His proposal to exhibit a tablecloth of cut and interwoven strips of the Torah and Koran was met with a range of responses within CHAP. One Catholic artist did ask Kamler why, in light of the call for participation that "all work produced for this project maintain respect for the synagogue as the spiritual home of an ongoing segment of New Haven's Jewish Community" -- why would he try to "offend the very community we are trying to bring together." The range of opinion was broad, and we engaged in dialogue for over a month. Trying to communicate with Kamler was difficult, and his dismissive, paternalistic attitude did not help. As for the question of sacrilege raised by observant participating Orthodox Jewish artists and members of the Shul, Richard Kamler offered this at the end of a November 14, 2009 email: "and for all your info. The Qua'rn is not THE Qua'rn unless 50% is in Arabic. My copy is 33% Arabic, 33% transliteration and 33% English."

Finally, in a self-serving move as this train wreck moved towards only lose/lose options, Joyce Burstein sent out repeated calls for all of the CHAP artists to abandon the main organizer, and move the exhibition over to one she would run. Not one artist took her up on this. But clearly she got the ear (behind closed doors) of the NCAC. To the best of my knowledge, Richard Kamler has not exhibited his work and planned Community Conversation among his own religious neighbors, or in a purely secular art exhibition, as I believe he said he would.

Richard Kamler's appointment to a CAA panel on censorship is a ripe case study in hegemony today. Compare the partisan NCAC defense of Kamler against CHAP and the NCAC kid-glove approach to power player Jeffrey Deitch, at LA-MOCA in Dec. 2010. How to dialogue in the age of Shock and Awe.

From the Independent Post:

POSTED BY: NANCY AUSTIN | NOVEMBER 26, 2009 1:03 AM
Perhaps censorship is the new scarlet letter? I would have hoped that a National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) press release wouldn’t have been quite so loose with the truth. Or condemn so flippantly.

From the beginning, the Orchard St. Shul Cultural Heritage Artists Project was defined as a site-specific project. For his required site visit, Richard Kamler, a famous artist, popped in from San Francisco last spring for a quick stop at the New Haven site, and never followed through on developing more than a generic piece dealing with Jews and Muslims everywhere or anywhere. All of the more than thirty other artists from all over the country spent months learning about and engaging with the history of this sole surviving urban synagogue in New Haven, in a state that did not legally grant religious freedom to Jews until 1843. Of course Kamler’s idea of a community dialogue between the Orchard Street Shul and the mosque “right around the corner” is great. But then Richard Kamler would have had to follow through and make contact with these two communities. It would have required face time and engagement so that his proposed conversation, if he could have negotiated it, would have been more than a self-serving spectacle with the respective congregations functioning as something more than props in his performance. Kamler simply did not do the legwork to realize the possibilities he laid out for his piece.

But Kamler has been very strategic in out-sourcing this work to two groups. First, the CHAP committee of mostly women artists, volunteering hundreds of hours to prototype a new model of site-specific, historically-engaged art installations in a hybrid space that is part art world, part public history activism, part conservative religious community memorial. And secondly, now the media is completing his work for him.

I admired the book “Censoring Culture”, by the NCAC’s Svetlana Mintcheva and Robert Atkins, and appreciated the thoughtful questioning there on the gray zones of censorship, on the power of hegemony, and on self-censorship. What does the very air we breathe allow or discourage? Every project will have a boundary, and contemporary art will be hindered if every artist-run group exhibition has to worry now that some man is going to sit at the boundary and do his work by pulling out the censorship card. These are important times with much to be done. In this instance I believe the NCAC itself has become hegemonic and missed the point of this whole experimental exhibition, done on a shoestring by real people who tried in every way to find a win/win solution. Perhaps it would be relevant to put on record Richard Kamler’s verbatim email responses to the various women in the committee attempting dialogue, and start to put some flesh on the reductive claims the NCAC makes that the organizers “censored” Kamler’s work out of a “fear of offending”.

To conclude, I would ask that the NCAC document the statement in their press release of November 20, 2009 that the organizers were “repeatedly assured that religious scholars agreed that the installation did not violate any religious taboos.” I have been on the inside of this debate, and nothing could be further from the truth. Please document your claim. It is worrisome to see an organization like the NCAC rush to judgment in defense of Richard Kamler, and in the process massage this situation into a simplistic sound byte, “proven” with half-truths or outright false statements.

Finally, it is alarming to hear NCAC suggest that if the “committee wanted to reduce the possibility of disagreement and ambiguity, perhaps it should have simply organized a show of archival photographs rather than an art exhibition.” Does NCAC really have such a simplistic view of how historical evidence gets meaning? We can start that dialogue with a look at Eroll Morris’s recent documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure”, about the meaning of the archival photographs at Abu Ghraib.

I stand by this upcoming exhibition at the John Slade Ely House for Contemporary Art in New Haven.

Nancy Austin, PhD
Participating Artist

From the Register Posts:

Richard Kamler wrote on Nov 30, 2009 12:57 PM:
" Curious, but also understandable, that Ms.Rubin, while not an artist and showing little understading [sic] of art processes, missed the point of "right around the corner-the common ground" of honoring, challenging and offering opportunities to the local communities to engage in serious dialogues..something that was the intention of my piece before it was censored. "

Nancy Austin wrote on Nov 30, 2009 4:22 PM:

" Over 30 artists managed to work together to realize this upcoming exhibition and companion catalogue. It is unfortunate that Richard Kamler cannot be more respectful of the woman organizing this. Cynthia Rubin is an accomplished artist with a thirty-year exhibition record. http://www.cbrubin.net/rubin_cv2009w.pdf

Everyone else in this group exhibition managed to put aside their “it’s all about me” ego and follow through on good intentions to finish their own work. This conflict is about ego, not censorship.

Why have there been so few women artists in the record? In part, because men have been allowed to deny that women artists are right here. "

The National Coalition Against Censorship

Censorship of a Work Involving the Koran and the Torah Guts New Haven Art Exhibition

"Art by its very nature is open to multiple interpretations, and therefore even the most seemingly innocuous material may generate controversy," Mintcheva said. "If the Orchard Street Shul Cultural Heritage Artists Project committee wanted to reduce the possibility of disagreement and ambiguity, perhaps it should have simply organized a show of archival photographs rather than an art exhibition."

http://austinoffroad.blogspot.com/2009/12/artists-statement-bio.html

http://austinoffroad.blogspot.com/2010/07/public-memory-3-churches-on-green.html

http://austinoffroad.blogspot.com/2010/07/off-road-historic-synagogues-in-new.html

The New Haven Independent (November 24, 2009 and comments)

The New Haven Register (November 25, 2009 and comments)

Feb. 1 2011 update from Rome:
At 7am EST on Monday Jan 31st, I sent an email to College Art Association (CAA) requesting that the NCAC panel be taped. I have chaired and participated in CAA panels in the past and this is not an unusual request. In the late afternoon, at 4:18pm, I heard back from CAA that my request was denied. This email exchange is posted below for the record.

Meanwhile. In the interim. During the day. At 4pm, Svetlana Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) posted a new blog entry on the NCAC website about the upcoming CAA panel, introducing some new language to use in this discussion. I am sorry I cannot attend, or hear a tape recording - a simple enough request in this day and age.

In her blog post from Jan 31st, Mintcheva continues to prefer the gentle word "interwoven" to describe Richard Kamler's proposed piece for the CHAP-Shul project that included a tablecloth made from sliced pages of the Torah and Koran and illustrated here. If Kamler's goal was to engage in community conversations, then a good place to start would have been for Kamler to take the lead and begin a constructive dialogue with artists from the synagogue participating in our collective Cultural Heritage Artists Project. Kamler could have engaged with other members of our collective directly, and addressed their reality that a special "waste" basket is kept next to the photocopy machine so that unused xerox copies of the Torah could be given a proper religious burial. Instead, Kamler found it easier and tactical to accuse the group of censorship. The social construction of the modern (male) artist who defiantly chooses not to be part of a collective attempt (by mostly women) to break new ground is the topic at hand. Not an inflammatory charge of censorship by the NCAC, an American institution that appears to operate with no checks and balances in place to reign in its condemning power. Isn't it time for someone to watch the watchdog?

One of the many fall-outs from his use of the inflammatory censorship card is that so much discussion and energy continues to be diverted to talking all about "Kamler", and not about the serious issue of how well-meaning urban planners, sure they were right, demolished the New Haven neighborhood that had once been home to a dozen synagogues, only one of which survives today. This story of power from above enacted on a neighborhood was one of the driving forces for the CHAP-Shul project. When does this conversation get the attention it deserves? For more information on some of the issues that originally drove the CHAP-Shul project, see the links here: http://culturalheritageartistsproject.org/links.html

And here: http://culture-challenge.blogspot.com/p/what-ncac-told-public.html

On Jan 31st at 7am I wrote to CAA with this request:

Please tape the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) panel on "Policing the Sacred" that CAA is sponsoring at the upcoming CAA centennial conference. The panel is scheduled for Wednesday February 9 from 12:30-2pm in Sutton Parlor Center, 2nd floor of the NY Hilton.

I am concerned that this CAA sponsored panel may be providing another national platform for the NCAC and Richard Kamler to continue their libelous attack on the 2009/10 CHAP-Shul exhibition. Since 2009, the NCAC has consistently refused to provide CHAP with access to the original complaint or the right to present a defense at a "trial". As a long standing CAA member, I take issue with the way this NCAC panel of speakers was grandfathered in to the CAA conference, denying an equal access opportunity for any member of the Cultural Heritage Artists Project (CHAP) to be a respondent.

I am on a research trip at the American Academy in Rome, and cannot attend CAA this year. But, I intend to continue to track the NCAC's rush to judgement in defense of Richard Kamler, and NCAC's refusal to dialogue with any of the dozens of other CHAP-Shul project participating artists. Clearly, this will make an important case study of how hegemony is working in the art world c.2010, and thus, this upcoming panel deserves careful documentation. This is especially true since CAA is offering its imprimatur for this NCAC session that was not the result of an open call.

I am dismayed that CAA has chosen to sponsor this NCAC panel, where Richard Kamler will be offered a national platform and CHAP will likely continue to be publicly accused, misrepresented, and condemned with no due process. Please tape this session so that we may accurately respond to what is said.

Please see my blog documenting the original NCAC rush to judgement:

Nancy Austin, CHAP project blog, Off-Road : http://austinoffroad.blogspot.com/2009/12/ncac-censorship-charge.html

I would appreciate you forwarding this email to the Session Chair, Eleanor Heartney.

Thank you.

At 4:18pm I received this response, in big bold letters:

Dear Dr. Austin:

Thank you for contacting me about this matter. I must deny your request and point out the following:

1) CAA does not involve itself in the content of panels that are presented by recognized affiliated societies and allied organizations;

2) these groups are themselves responsible for the content of the panels and the selection of speakers;

3) CAA does not endorse the content of these panels;

4) the panel chair and all the participants must agree to have a session recorded;

5) attendance at these panels is open to the public and free.

Sincerely,

Emmanuel Lemakis

Director of Programs

College Art Association

275 Seventh Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10001

Tel. 212 691-1051

Fax 212 627-2381

www.collegeart.org

Note: When the CAA session I chaired years ago was taped, CAA made the request on behalf of a CAA member, and I consented. It is hard to understand how I, personally, could get the permission of the NCAC panel Chair and all the various speakers. CHAP members did request Eleanor Heartney's email address from CAA and were denied.

Feb 1, 2011 continued:
It is time to demand transparency from the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) if it is to carry the banner of democratic free speech. Please release the original censorship complaint and relevant companion documents. Clarify how many closed-door meetings were had with whom. CHAP has nothing to hide and can document each attempt made to engage Joyce Burstein, Richard Kamler and Svetlana Mintcheva of NCAC, and now CAA, in dialogue. Where is the Wikileaks on closed door proceedings of the complaining artists, CAA, and NCAC?

The original, detailed, CHAP rebuttal to the NCAC Press Release can be found here and here.

The National Coalition Against Censorship's Annual Report with Richard Kamler's "Right Around the Corner" on the cover is here.