Jim Ovelmen

Export | San Fernando Valley/Beijing, part 2

EXPORT SERIES
Jim Ovelmen, 2009

Part I Export| San Fernando Valley/ Beijing
Part II Export| San Fernando Valley/ Pyongyang
Part III Export | TBA

Export is a series of video, installations, animations and performances that address the perceived export product from specific zones; locales; areas; places in world’s address.

Dissimilar thoughts:

Export San Fernando Valley and the adult entertainment industry presents a world of videos, adult toys, and products such as healing and longevity powders. The San Fernando Valley provides 90% of the world’s supply of sex toys. It is a planet storehouse for inconspicuous consumption worldwide.

The export of a locale, or the perception of the export is compared with product or cultural export on the other side of the world; in another inconspicuous way, may be directly related or may have a global influence on one another.

(1) Marti-Gras beaded necklaces that are mass distributed for flirtation or erotic I.O.U.s in New Orleans, are mass produced in only a few large factories in China, by armies of young women who have no idea what the beads are used for.
(2) The mass-mind control of North Korea artistically displayed in pageants and games at Pyongyang Stadium: It can be seen as a graphic influence on China’s 2008 Olympic Opening at Beijing as well, in (Bird Nest stadium)
(3) The form of the pole dancer, and strip club format can be seen area world influence and the erotic objectification of the female form in motion in hip hop music and videos that has reached almost every corner of the planet.
(4) Replicas and molds of actual porn star’s genitals are an immortalization of recreational sex born in the San Fernando Valley.
(5) Honey Lee, Korean model, actress, musician, is a product of the strict decorum of an idea Korean woman. An expert at modern posturing of magazine pages, as well as an expert at traditional Korean musical instruments. This raises the resemblance to the strict modeling of Chinese opera and the minimal implementation to create drama and the imagination of the inner-life of stage characters.
(6) The make-up pattern and decorum of the Geisha in Japanese culture and the costumed actress in the 17th century in Chinese Opera. (to Boy George, Ziggy Stardust, and Bjork)
(7) Las Vegas in the 1970’ s and 80’s: big animatronic Cowboy on Freemont Street.

Impossibility of simultaneous events

In Einstein’s famous relativity: “There are no instantaneous reactions in nature”
Simultaneous events in one frame of reference would not necessarily be simultaneous when viewed from a different frame…
A “stationary” person observing an event versus a person traveling near the speed of light would not perceive a hammer hitting a nail , and the nail going into the wood as simultaneous. Somewhat similar to sound and distance: when you see someone hammering a nail from far away, the sound is late, yet for the hammerer, it is instant. In the case of light, seeing an event, just replace distance with time (or speed)… and you get the idea.

(1) Simultaneities: what are the quadrillions of “events” big and small that interact; or are merely being observed? How many trillions of those events have overt or broader influence? How can more subtle influence be perceived if out of important sequence? What about events that affect all: wars, economic collapse, earthquakes, Michael Jackson ☺, and other disasters; how do these perturbations turn the minutiae of cultural consciousness? Peculiarities, penchants, speech, thought, idiosyncrasy, good and bad habits?
(2) What systems are inconspicuous anymore?
Developed countries have the Internet and our every self-indulgent move is recorded. We are much too aware of every-type of consumption in America.
What is inconspicuous? We can see how many hits, consumption, and exhaustive analysis of an uploaded YouTube video of our pet …instantaneously. But what is still hidden? There must be something that will not be revealed in our over-exposed private lives. Developing countries and emerging democracies have billions of people we know absolutely nothing about, and they know nothing about us. We are too busy with our local preoccupations, ironically inward in the face of global access. What are these inscrutable strings that still evasively connect us? Have we in common a strangely different yet parallel track with one another.

Haven Lin-Kirk

Seeking Comfort

John O'Brien

Portraiture and the like
curated by John O'Brien :
Jordan Biren, Daniel Brodo, Mery Lynn McCorkle, John O'Brien,
Cielo Pessione, Giorgio Pessione and Charlene Roth

Michael Wodkowski & Annette Wehrhahn

Justin Moore

Exotic Big Game Hunting

Tricia Lawless Murray

eros/thanatos
curated by tricia lawless murray:
marc adelman, stephanie allespach, victor cobo, anne colvin, catherine daly, amber fox, phyllis green, jason hanasik, evah hart, micol hebron, elise irving, zsolt kadar, Ali Kheradyar,
tricia lawless murray, leigh mccarthy, christopher picon,
nancy popp, jessica rosen, amy Sampson, david sotelo, felis stella, casey stroud and museum of viral memory,

e⋅ros
—noun
1. In psychoanalytic theory, the sum of all instincts for self-preservation.
2. sexual drive; libido.

than⋅a⋅tos
—noun
Psychoanalysis. (usually lowercase) the death instinct, esp. as expressed in violent aggression.

I have decided to curate a photography show that has the theme of eros/thanatos... ideas that i find interesting and that influence my work. The works included interpret the theme and are proof prints that are no larger than 8x10 inches that will be taped to the wall. Ideally the works will go into a box that can circulate to other venues and be presented in a similar manner.

The following is excerpted from http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.DeLauretis.html and provides an entry point into the theme beyond the definition of the terms eros/thanatos:

"It is not by chance, I suggest, that the hypothesis of a death drive (Todestrieb) was suggested to Freud around 1919 by the massive geopolitical trauma that hit Europe as the aftermath of the Great War. He postulated it to account for the symptoms of repetition compulsion he observed in patients suffering from war neuroses and described it as something beyond representation, something that pertains to the primary process alone and has no psychic representatives or, we might say, no translation. Coexisting with it in each organism, in continuous conflict, are the life drives that seek to preserve living substance and shape it into ever larger physical and social units, with all the costs and benefits attendant upon civilization. It has been argued that the late Freud’s hypothesis of a primal (self-)destructive drive reconfigures the dynamic landscape of the psyche and ascribes to the death drive the “radical tendency to unbind,” that is, the
disgregating, uncivilizing force that Freud had first associated with the sexual drive."

The quote comes from Teresa de Lauretis who delineates the relevance of Freud’s life and death drives in her recent book Freud’s Drives: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film. She suggests that these drives offer a model of contemporary subjectivity that enables “survival” through the “gnawing, dull pain of betrayal,” one that turns against the critical theory that she has participated in constructing. As a self-professed feminist, I too have come to terms with the dogma that once bound me and find in Freud’s drives, a (permeable) model that contains within itself the mechanism for its preservation and its unraveling or undoing, a process that is linked to eros/thanatos, which for me is the quintessential representation of desire.

Tricia Lawless Murray