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Weekly Updates46th annual SPE Conference
Dallas
March 26-29, 2009
The 46th annual Society for Photographic Education (SPE) conference took place at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Dallas, and while attendance may have seemed a bit thin, enthusiasm was high. Events began on a positive note with John Pfahl receiving a much-deserved Honored Educator award, reminding us of the relevance of this yearly gathering. The entire conference was well organized and augmented by an impressive portfolio walkthrough, a lively tradeshow. and an enjoyable gallery hop in Dallas's design district.
No amount of alcohol from the busy hotel bar would have alleviated James Howard Kunstler's sobering keynote presentation. Indeed the theme of this year's conference--"Sprawl," appropriately set in the DFW metroplex--provided the perfect backdrop for Kunstler's critique of just about every facet of life we are used to, and that, according to him, are soon to be gone. After Kunstler's indictment of a culture that "wasted its post-war wealth on an unsustainable infrastructure," it was going to be difficult to get motivated for the rest of the weekend about the latest improvements in Adobe CS4 or new theories in conceptual photography. His message, however, seemed to be that we were going to figure it out, because we have to.
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I have to admit that while the conference had many good talks on urban development and critiques of sprawl, I found myself looking for those that spun out of the expected approach to this theme, I eluded the two talks on Phoenix, Arizona (maybe because Kunstler predicts the city will soon become dust and blow away). But while I felt guilty for avoiding the literal. I did see some impressive offshoots. Featured speaker Steve Dietz introduced the "Hertzian City"--the electronic networks and coded transmissions that invisibly document and surround everyday activities. Dietz, founding director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, presented projects from the Zero One San Jose Biennial, a "global festival of art on the edge," and showed impressive evidence of new media sprawl.
"Weird Science: The Spectrum of Vision/The Science of Photography" centered around a class that Aspen Mays and Annie Laurie Erickson conduct at the Art Institute of Chicago. Questioning the investigatory nature of photography and the "intentional misunderstanding of science," some projects created in this class include random photography under one's bed and creating a device that mimics impressions left on the human retina. When they showed a video of their class on a field trip to a particle accelerator plant that was rumored to be creating tiny black holes, the conversation became fertile with interdisciplinary curiosity, opening up the medium of photography to its own history in conjunction with or in opposition to science. It was clear that students go through this course charged with the possibilities of their medium.
Marni Shindelman and Nate Larson took this one step further with one of the best presentations of the conference, "Witness: A Psychic Collaboration." Citing an investigation of extra-sensory perception that was sponsored by the United States government in the 1980s, they examined the "Stargate Project" and create images and writings as a result of their own experimentation with its methods. What happened was again a playful interaction with pseudo-science, photography, and art. Whether the collaboration failed in its psychic attempts was not the point; rather, the resulting material Larson presented was unpretentious and hilarious. After an initial evaluation of some of their remote viewing experiments (that were sometimes congruent, other times unclear), Shindelman later re-paired some of the objects and images from a curatorial perspective, and the result was fascinating. For those of us who enjoy serendipitous association, it was reassuring to see how simple curiosity can evolve into a thoughtful collaboration and tear through the standard limitations of photography and academia.
On the final day of the conference (being a few blocks away from the location of JFK's assassination and setting the obvious pretext) artist Karen Finley took the stage to perform as both Jackie Kennedy and Jackie "O" (with her hairpiece split between the Kennedy and Onassis styles). Honestly, this was a strange way to spend a Sunday morning--but there were two points that resonated with me after Finley's fidgety and somewhat awkward presentation. One: photographs are the way we understand the world. Period. They mummify the past but in a way keep it alive like an animated corpse. Two: there is a correlation between Jackie's obsessive shopping after the trauma of her husband's assassination and the "call to malls" we experienced after the trauma of 9/11. There is something unsettling about this, not only in that it seems to ring in the repeating of the past, but falsely bolsters consumer culture as the remedy for the collective traumas of our nation.
Finley's persona as Jackie summed up that we are a culture confronting not just a crisis of suburban sprawl--but a mass psychological shift, both in our literal development of the landscape and the "Hertzian-city" scape. I left Finley's talk feeling a bit uneasy about the future of things in general, but left the conference with the knowledge that SPE is not afraid to confront our complex issues directly, even if it strays from the textbook. Perhaps in the future SPE conferences will not be like they are today with all of us flying and driving in from vast distances to meet at a classy metropolitan hotel for a weekend--but at least SPE dealt us fair warning.
JOHN AASP is an artist, curator at Rockport Center for the Arts in Rockport, Texas, and co-director of the Rockport Film Festival.
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