Higher Learning In Service To Higher Consciousness

As the plight of college students beset with debt exceeds even that of credit card holders and tech mogul Peter Thiel is actually paying future entrepreneurs to quit school, altogether, the latest of seven public programs comprising “Love Action Art Lounge”, the current show at Stamford’s Franklin Street Works, presents a novel, individualized take on academia and what it could offer when liberated from convention. 

Faculty member/poet Ana Božičević (Stars of the Night Commute Commute [Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009], Lambda Award-winner Rise In the Fall [Birds LLC, 2013]), and artists-in-residence Nina Behrle and Jesse Chun of the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, will lead B-YOU/BUILD YOUR OWN UNIVERSITY, a workshop and

primer on how to create your own institution of higher learning this weekend (subversively enough, just down the street from the UConn-Stamford campus!).

Considering the standard pedagogical process in view of developing a methodology for grassroots learning, Ana, Jesse (an

interdisciplinary/international artist who studies the linguistic and cultural mechanics of belonging) and Nina (whose own ouvre spans sculpture, prop design, and comedy) will encourage participants to balance what they can teach with what they want to know from art, as well as determine what administrative and curricular policies can best support the creative pursuit. 

 

The Bruce High Quality Foundation University, named after two Bruces who formed the free, educational 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2009 while studying art at Cooper Union “guard their anonymity fiercely,” according to The New York Times’ Roberta Smith, forming the collective with other students, “when Hans Haacke, one of the fathers of institutional critique, was still teaching there.”

This program is free and open to the public. 

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

When:

Saturday, March 25, 2017

4-6 pm

Contact/RSVP:

Terri C. Smith

Creative Director

Franklin Street Works

203-253-0404

terri@franklinstreetworks.org

The "Socially-Acceptable Insanity" Of Being In Love... With Someone Else's Idea Of It

Richard Duffee

In the first of two provocative area presentations this week in response to Valentine’s Day, Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name? will plumb the Crusades, church/state relations, Islamic poetry, women's rights and other topics when Richard Duffee shares his research and conclusions at Curly’s tomorrow night at 7:30 regarding the origins of the wildly impossible conception of romantic love, incorporated as part of modern industrial life.

A PoemAlley fixture, egalitarian analyst of social power and author (The Slow News of Need, available from the “Collections and Anthologies” section below), Richard elaborates: “The shocking thing about Western love poetry is that the tradition does not assume one needs to know anything about the recipient of one's affections in order for one's claims to love to be credible. It's difficult to realize how weird this is because it's a feature of the cultural landscape that's been around for 900 years.” 

Because the output of Medieval troubadours and trobairitz (female troubadours) reflected their own romantic conceptions, as opposed to actual people, this helped set the stage, along with numerous intertwined social influences, for the senhalic, or fill-in-the-blank, adaptability of, well, affected affections as purveyed by today’s “sentiment-industrial complex” of greeting cards, candy, door-stopper-grade bridal magazines and wedding planning consultancies.

As for Tinsletown’s generous contributions, Spike Jonze’s Her (Warner Bros./Annapurna Pictures, 2013) makes a strikingly insightful break from this cheapening fixation in its portrayal of an emotionally hollowed-out divorcee’s romance with a self-learning computer program, set against a day-after-tomorrow Los Angeles which is, appropriately, Hallmark Card-cozy, while stringent in its devotion to socially-received (as opposed to individual) relational expectations:

Ingrid Burrington

Also surveying the urban crossroads of devotion and the digital, New York artist Ingrid Burrington’s pre-Valentine’s Day talk Connection Over Missed Connections at Franklin Street Works will scrutinize romantic longing across various cities as mapped out through a leading Franklin Street Works online classifieds hub. “Analysis of Craigslist Missed Connections postings and communities,” notes Ingrid of her show Taxonomy of Missed Connections, “offers a glimpse into the loneliness and sexual tension that serve as the linchpin of any thriving metropolitan environment.”

Part of FSW’s Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art exhibition, Taxonomy of Missed Connections is also a component of Ingrid’s Center for Missed Connections project and its mission to encourage a collective embrace of loneliness, both poetic and banal, within public spaces.

Find out more about Ingrid at her website, lifewinning.com. A free exhibition, Neuromast is curated by Taliesen Gilkes-Bower and FSW Creative Director Terri C Smith and will be on view through March 9.

When:

Thursday, February 13, 2014

6:30-8:00 PM

Joaquin Phoenix in "Her"

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

(Light snacks and a signature holiday drink to be served)

Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org