When The Caged Fire Talks, Does It Cage Us?

In contrast to the prehistoric discovery of fire as a tool for the creation of leisure time and the opportunity to build culture, contemporary television turns the tables by adapting us to someone else’s idea of what culture is supposed to be. Franklin Street Works’ latest media exhibit, Your Content Will Return Shortly, dissects this seductive and ubiquitous tie between viewer and TV from the perspectives of commerce, technological perception and development, as well as the overall psychological sculpting of society.

“This show was inspired by a desire to connect my own research on historic video exhibitions and readings in media theory—including texts by David Joselit and Marshall McLuhan,” explains Terri C. Smith, the exhibition’s curator, “with observations of our own contemporary relationships with ‘television,’ which for many is streamed at will via a laptop, bypassing the TV set altogether.”

Preceding the 5:30-7 pm artists’ tour and café discussion this evening with Siebren Versteeg and Jeff Ostergrem (both of Brooklyn) and New Haven-based Catherine Ross, Franklin Street Works has arranged with the University of Connecticut to present its second ekphrastic poetry reading beginning at noon, courtesy of Pamela Brown and students from her UConn writing class, whom, as post-VHS/CRT-era  adopters of the latest iteration of technology, like live streaming video, iphones and Blueray DVDs, will offer generation-specific interpretations of the works on display.

Catherine Ross, IFO, 2006, video still, courtesy the artist

Among the eleven artists participating in Your Content, Jeff Ostergren contributed Stimulus,  a timely two-channel video display that uses the details of pharmaceutical ads to demonstrate how, with sirenic finesse, TV delivers viewers to advertisers as a captive audience, while pretending to primarily serve their entertainment and information needs. Sports coverage and sitcoms aside, “commercials ARE the content,” Jeff reminds, as “the programming they surround are sublimated by the lurking capital that funds them, that relates to the content that is geared towards a… focus group-determined viewer.”

Emily Roz, Presidents, 2006, 20 Polaroid prints, courtesy the artist

How TV gets us to compartmentalize elements of current events and fiction with equal rigidity is demonstrated in Emily Roz’s Death by Mel, wherein Polaroid photos of TV images from various films featuring Gibson in the role of a killer are displayed side-by-side, removed from their individual contexts. A complementary sequence of cinematic presidents drives the point home with disturbing impact that, despite the fact most viewers would have more familiarity in their lives with the latter encounter (as mediated via TV news) than the former, the vital distinction between the entertainment industry's interpretation of 'real-life', as opposed to 'realistic' no longer matters: Each piece “brings to mind an entire genre… and (encourages viewers to) accept certain pretexts without question.”

Made possible in part through the support of the Community Arts Partnership Program awarded to Franklin Street Works by the City of Stamford and a two-year grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Your Content Will Return Shortly opened on January 24 and is on display through Sunday, March 24. In addition to Jeff Ostergren’s and Emily Roz’s pieces, the program features the work of Christopher DeLaurenti, Eric Gottesman, Jonathan Horowitz, Sophy Naess, Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, Catherine Ross, Carmelle Safdie, and Siebren Versteeg.

Situated in an old row house near the UConn campus, Franklin Street Works is less than one hour from New York City via Metro North and about one mile (a 15 minute walk) from the Stamford train station. On-street parking is available on Franklin Street (metered until 6 pm except on Sunday), and paid parking is available nearby in a lot on Franklin Street and in the Summer Street Garage (100 Summer Street), behind Target.

When:

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Noon-1:15 PM, UConn Poetry Reading

5:30-7 PM, Artists’ Walk-Through & Café Discussion

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org

___

Additional Information:

Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, Atlas (2010)

David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, The MIT Press (2010)

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore & Shepard Fairey, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Gingko Press (2005)

Marshall McLuhan & Lewis P. Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The MIT Press (1994)

Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: the Politics of Entertainment, St. Martin's Press (1992)

Setting Fire To The White Picket Fences Of An Imaginary Nation

Raised in Darien, CT, Susan Cossette-Eng, tonight’s featured Open Mic poet, writes frequently in rebellious defense of genuine relationships, love and the sanctity of just plain individual humanity (especially relating to women) against the Plasticville artifice and faux freedom of the American suburban ideal that keeps us from effective engagement with the larger world.

Here is a sample from last October:

A scene from Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives 

(1975), shot in Darien’s Goodwives’ Shopping Center

unhinged

Unhinged, unglued,
unspeakable

this is nothing new–

These doors wide open,
window screens torn
white picket fence, now kindling–

My new normal is born.

Unusual,
Unreal,
Unstoppable

The train on its tracks–

tilt-shifted photo of an actual tract housing develop-
ment betrays the toy-like unreality of suburban life 

Racing toward nothing,
an unnamed station
in an imaginary nation

There’s no turning back.

Such sparse eloquence is currently being collected in Life: Version 2.1, a forthcoming chapbook and can also be enjoyed at “MusePalace”, Susan’s blog of her latest poetry, ruminations and links to the writing of others addressing consonant themes, like Denise Duhamel’s “Kinky”  (a piece that translates the stylized imagery of the iconic Barbie and Ken dolls into the realm of flesh-and-blood eroticism) and the ouvre of James Scully, the acclaimed poet with whom she studied (along with Marilyn Nelson Wamiek).

book accessory for 1965 Slumber Party Barbie

A graduate with an M.A. in English from UConn-Storrs, Susan is a two-time recipient of the university’s Wallace Stevens Prize for Poetry and has also done post-graduate work at the City University of New York Graduate Center.   

Find out more about Susan at AuthorsDen.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Down Center), beginning at 7:15 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248

Though dated, the following music video to Rush’s “Subdivisions” expresses the suffocating alienation still peculiar to growing up in today’s built-up “apocalypse”:

_____
Of related interest:

Books

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz (Basic Books, 2000)

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck (North Point Press, 2010) 

Class:a Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell (Touchstone, 1994)

The Fifties: a Women’s Oral History, Brett Harvey (HarperCollins, 1993)

Too Much Magic: WishfulThinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012)

Online

“Is Barbie Based On a German Sex Doll?”, Adja’s Blog, June 2011

"'Don't eat!': Controversial 1965 Slumber PartyBarbie came with scales permanently set to just 110lbs and 1a diet book tellingher not to eat", Martha De Lacey, Daily Mail, November 2012