This Fall, I had the strange idea to structure an art appreciation class around an exhibition I am curating. A Fly in the Array was organized as part of the Wrong Biennial @thewrong.biennale, and focuses on artists’ idiosyncratic systems for ordering the world — acts of resistance against the rise of techno-authoritarianism for which AI agents are the seductive, slippery sentinels.
This semester, students have studied each exhibition artist in turn in thematic chapters. The first chapter was “An Eye to the Ground”, which focused on artists using direct observation of their surroundings to make sense of their urban environments.
The first artist we covered is my friend Nobutaka Aozaki, who kindly shared his work, Lucky Competitive Cats for the exhibition.
Nobu constructs these touchingly human portraits of his community through his incisive observations, a deep sense of empathy, and collection of environmental castoffs.
In response to Nobu’s work, students were asked to make their own personal archives, documenting some quotidian detail of their daily routines that could dramatize the passage of time, and create a kind of ad hoc portrait of their domestic or urban environment.
Pictured: Lucky Competitive Cats (Gold 7″ 2016_A) , 14x15x9inches / 35.6×38.1×22.9cm, 2016
Grocery Portraits #1 (Classon Ave & Willoughby St, Brooklyn, NY), 2019
Student works
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