Camel Collective (Anthony Graves & Carla Herrera-Prats)

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What is my work about?

Camel Collective’s (Anthony Graves & Carla Herrera-Prats) ongoing interests are centered around representations of labor and pedagogy and the institutional relationships between artists and other forms of creative production. Our work involves archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies associated with painting and photography, to explore and narrate ways in which the individual and the collective overlap and destabilize one another. Many of the tactics we employ can be correlated with the strategies of portraiture of the neue sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) period, and the use of “social types” as a means of describing social relations, ideologies, and the forms and tempos of life for the precarious and aspirational subject of contemporary neoliberalism.

 

Artist Statement

Camel Collective is the name under which Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats have worked since 2005. Our methods involve archival research, dramaturgy, printmaking, painting, and photography, while our subject matter focuses on the problematics of labor, pedagogy, theater, and collaboration. Because we develop our works through lengthy research, our projects often unfold over long periods of time at a rate of roughly one-to -two projects per year.

Many of our works deal with the representation of labor or “social types” as a means of describing broader social relations, ideologies, and the forms and tempos of life of the precarious and aspirational subject of late-Capitalism. Our interest isn’t in specific people, but the subject positions they come to occupy and are occupied by. This subject matter appears all the more critical to us now that distinctions between work and leisure have largely collapsed under the relentless demand to demonstrate one’s infinite adaptability and “readiness to perform.” By adopting the tropes of theatrical performance (script, actor, set, lighting) our work internalizes the dialogic nature of collaborative work and generates a space of visibility and artifice. We use this artifice to show how everyday reality is itself a constructed artifice, and is thus capable of revision.

We find that our works often provoke a choice between two modes of reception for an audience/viewer—one, in terms of the event, or of sensory experience; and another in terms of the usefulness of the information presented. This distinction is crucial to our project, “The Second World Congress of Free Artists,” and the related video, “Opening Address.” This self-conscious split of receptive modes can also be thought of in terms of the difference between performative and constative utterances. The performative speech act is neither true nor false, it gets something done. It issues a curse, an oath, or names something or someone into being. The constative refers to how things are, to states of affairs, i.e. to descriptive discourse. In the broadest sense, we play with these two modes of address, and the differences and boundaries between them. We use and sustain the differences between doing and saying, inventing and describing.

Our long-term project, “The Second World Congress of Free Artists,” experiments with the topics of artistic pedagogy, alternative forms of education, the professionalization of artists, and the stakes of teaching and learning under increasingly untenable privatized conditions. The project brings to light disjunctions between the cloud of art discourse and the material politics of institutional privatization and discursive/methodological standardization. As a response to this scenario, we reassess, satirize, and present performances that affirm both the autonomy of art (a valuable tool in speculating on social alternatives) and counter-institutional pedagogical practice, which, as art, “cannot exist outside of its application in the world.” Using the iterative nature of theater, we continue to reinterpret the congress in various contexts and in various forms.

The video “Opening Address” demonstrates the historically recursive logic of our efforts to point out traces of former histories that bring the present into sharper focus. The constellation in “Opening Address” includes Straub- Huillet’s 1977, “Toute révolution est un coup de dés,” which itself is responding to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, “Un coup de dés.” The voiceover refers to the opening address given by Danish artist, Asger Jorn, to the First World Congress of Free Artists, in 1956, and places it (and us) in the present context of student-led antiausterity protests. This constellation of historical signifiers is a way to commemorate past emancipatory projects, and potentially re-invigorate the present with their spirit.

“Creative” or “intellectual” labor is a perennial subject for us. Artists in particular, but also intellectuals, theater workers, striking factory workers (i.e. workers-not-working), all share the generally perceived, nonproductive status of “lilies of the field.” They/We are generally perceived as “free,” while also being the most vulnerable to the effects of financial crises. Economically speaking, artists and intellectual laborers, the “lilies of the field,” are also canaries in a coal mine. We focus our work on these economically precarious figures through a kind of materialist and mediumistic experimentation with forms that range from videos, photo-plays, and painted archives and installations, to theatrical productions, and screenplays.

Painting, particularly abstraction, might seem at odds with research-based and often site-specific projects, but our choice to use painting has served to subvert the appearance of mastery (i.e. over a particular history or site) associated with documentary photography and archival research. Painting destabilizes the appearance of veracity in the photo-document, and proposes an alternate relation to history—a relationship to historical fact that is personal, contingent, and contestable. In “Una obra para dos pinturas (A Play for Two Paintings)” we were careful not to glibly appropriate the local history and context of Puerto Rico as a site-specific work and instead approached a local historian, enlisting his collaboration in the production of a work related to the local history, but also very much of the present situation there.

The empirical nature of our research methods link us to an intellectual tradition of critical inquiry and social theory. In our work, we aim to highlight the contradictory social formations we experience as artists and hold them in mutually illuminating proximity. For example, we do not see the subjective nature of abstract painting and the objective form of the photo-document as mutually exclusive stylistic options, but rather as compelling evidence of the objective nature of abstraction and the subjective nature the archive. This is most apparent in how we formalize our research in “A Facility Based on Change” and “Una obra para dos pinturas.” These are the kinds of conceptual inversions that fascinate and motivate us. This impulse not to reconcile opposites comes from our desire to not occupy or defend an identity, but rather to make visible and understand the frictions and conflicts we encounter in our lives.

 

CV

Education

Anthony Graves

2009 MFA Painting, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

2005 Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY

2003 BFA School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

 

Carla Herrera-Prats

2005 Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY

2003 MFA Photography, CalArts, Valencia, CA

2000 BFA “La Esmeralda,” Centro Nacional de las Artes, Ciudad de México

 

Professional Experience

Anthony Graves
2013–present: Visiting Faculty, Graduate Studies, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

2011–present: Visiting Faculty, SOMA Summer Program, México DF

2012: Visiting Part-Time Faculty, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

2009–10: Visiting Lecturer, Dept. of Art, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Ithaca, NY

 

Carla Herrera-Prats
2010–present: Director of Programs, SOMA Summer, México DF

2011–2013: Director of Graduate Studies, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

2009: Visiting Artist, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpellier, VT

2009: Visiting Artist, Cooper Union, New York, NY

2008–2009: Full-time Professor, Photography Dept., California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

2006–2007: Visiting Artist, Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, VES, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

2005–2008: Full-time Professor, Photography Dept., School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

 

Exhibition history, Camel Collective

2014
Opening Address, at the Agency for Unrealized Projects (AUP), Summer Mondays at e-flux, New York

The Third Idiom in Deviance Credits, Bard CCS, Bard College; and Hessel Museum, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY

The Collective Show, Museo Universitario El Chopo, UNAM, Mexico City

2013
El Segundo Congreso de Artistas Libres, Casa del Lago, Mexico City, Mexico

Post-cataclysm, Vera & Melchor, New York

Collective Show, Neter, Mexico City

2012
The Hive, Trienal Poly/Grafica, El Arsenal, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Lo Carnavalesco!, Torre Mayor, Mexico City

2011
Little Movements: Self-Practice in Contemporary Art, OCAT Shenzhen, China

The Workers, MassMoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts

Signs on the Road, Winkleman Gallery, organized by workroom g, New York

Hmmm…, Mikhail Zakin Gallery, Demarest, New Jersey

2010
En Cada Instante, Ruptura, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City, Mexico

Collective Show, Participant, New York Collective Show, Participant Inc., New York

You should have been here an hour ago, Kunstverein, NY, New York

Modifications, Aarhus Kunstbyging, Aarhus Alternative Histories, Exit Art, New York

Howls for Bologna, Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen

2009
ABCyz, Kunstverein NY, Silvershed, New York

2008
It’s Not Easy, Exit Art, NY

The Audacity of Desperation, PS 122, NY

2006
Symposium on Paper, LMCC, Swing Space, New York

When Artists Say We, Art in General, New York

 

Events, performances, & lectures, Camel Collective

2013
Performance: The Second World Congress of Free Artists: A Play in Three Acts, ICI, New York

2012
Lecture: Beyond Montserrat, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA

Lecture: Collective Practice, Museum of Fine Arts Boston

2010
Lecture: Collectivity and Self Organizing, Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Malmö

Lecture: Howls for Bologna, performance, screening and discussion, Royal Academy Copenhagen

Artist talk: Aarhus Art Academy, Aarhus

2006
Screening: Cities, Labor, and Culture: Present Crises, Past Documents, LMCC, Swing Space, New York

 

Awards & Residencies, Camel Collective
2014
Fundación / Colección Jumex award, Mexico DF, MX

2013
Fieldwork, Marfa, Texas

2012
Statens Kunstrad, Danish Arts Council project grant, Copenhagen, DK

2010
Danish International Visual Artist Residency, Copenhagen, DK

2005-6
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Swing Space Program, New York

Publications

“Kiev Posture,” Revista Cartucho no. 9, Mexico City, 2014

“The Last Man in Europe,” in Happy New Year Dear, 1977, ed. Tina Helen, Denmark, 2013

The Second World Congress of Free Artists: A Play in Three Acts, ed. Camel Collective, (Aarhus Kunsthal, Aarhus Denmark), 2013

“Talk at Ten interview,” by Kate Yoland, Marfa Public Radio 93.5, 2013

“Discursos suspendidos…,” by Graciela E. Kasep, La Tempestad No. 87, 2013

“Artist Spotlight on Anthony Graves of Camel Collective,” by Kathryn Amato, MASSMoCA Blog, May 2011.

“Industry Standard,” by Carol Yinghua Lu, Frieze, Issue 137, March 2011.

“En cada instante, ruptura,” Sala de Arte Público Siquieros, Dec. 2010.

c-m-l.org: an online quarterly journal and archive of art and social practice, 2007–2010

“NY Galleries Demand Immediate Release,” Arts & Leisure, Art in General, NY, 2006

Opening Address (5-min. excerpt), 2011/14