Art and Commitment

Where:

West Bank Arts Quarter
U of M: Twin Cites

Locations include: Rarig Center, Regis Center for Art, and the Barbara Barker Center for Dance

Free and open to the public

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Bob Holman, and David White

Date: Saturday December 04
Time: 4:30 - 6:30
Place: Regis Center for Art - Influx Auditorium

See bio on: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Bob Holman, or David White

Introduction: Lynn Lukkas, Associate Professor of Art, University of Minnesota

"El Espectáculo de la Realidad/Reality Show (and Tell):
A Poetic Encounter between Loco and Lunatíco"

Synopsis:
This is surely not your mama's symposium anymore: today, we present a steel cage battle of language and wits - no holds barred - between champions of the shifting sands and rising tides of 21st century world-think. On our left, the poet laureate of the underground United States of Poetry, slam-master extraordinary, honorary Nuyorican, and overall forensic neo-linguist of endangered lingos worldwide, Mr. Gringo-at-Large.

Also on our left (you expected the right maybe?) is the notorious Mad Mex, a High-Tech Aztec astride the New World Border, a Spanglish alchemist of the North-South divide. He is often mistaken, correctly, for either/both a mariachi/desperado and Questionably Legal Mexican/Namelessly Dreaded, Apparently Islamist (and thus predictably body-searched as a Known Tali-Vato in airports throughout El Mundo de Coca Cola).

Whatever their impeccable intellectual qualifications - and they are ludicrously many - Bob Holman and Guillermo Gómez-PeÑa come together here as Loco and Lunatíco. In the classic Socratic manner of a Coney Island hotdog eating competition, they will slice and dice the realpolitik of artistic praxis, practice and engagement in our global communities, season with ideological salsa, and then contemplate the global bones before them.

The man in the middle of this panel-performance-pandemonium, avoiding the flying chairs and seeking a clear way out of our present-day turmoil, is David R. White, contemporary dance enabler and artist co-dependent, inventor of cultural human intelligence networks that have subversively revolutionized the national and international cultural food chain. He freely admits that his only paradigms/sources for such alleged achievements have been the French Resistance, Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49", the film writings of Andre Bazin, and the dueling structualisms of Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. Collateral damage will be provided by moshing audience participants.

Biography on Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Born: Mexico City, Mexico

Lives: San Francisco, CA, USA

Interdisciplinary performance artist and writer

Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña resides in San Francisco, where he is artistic director of Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he came to the United States in 1978. His pioneering work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies. A MacArthur fellow and American Book Award recipient, he is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Mexico, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). He has recently produced an artist-made DVD featuring performance and video art of his own work and the work of over 30 of his international collaborators. Designed for screenings, video installations, intelligent TV and as a pedagogic tool, DVD vol 1, "Ethno-Techno: Los Video Graffitis," is available through La Pocha Nostra.

Selected recent career highlights:
Exhibitions

Fellowships

Education:
To Be Announced

Curriculum Vita (download .pdf)
Bibliography (download .pdf)

http://www.pochanostra.com/

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Biography on Bob Holman

Born: TBA

Lives: New York, N.Y

Poet and Educator

Recently dubbed a member of the "Poetry Pantheon" by the New York Times Magazine and featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, Holman has previously been crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" (New York Daily News), "Poetry Czar" (Village Voice), "Dean of the Scene" (Seventeen), and "this generation’s Ezra Pound," (San Francisco’s Poetry Flash).

From Slam to hip hop, from performance poetry to spoken word, Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry in our culture. The series he produced for PBS, the United States of Poetry, features over sixty poets including Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Reed and former President Jimmy Carter, as well as rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign Language poets, and Slammers. USOP lives on as an anthology from Harry Abrams Publishers (in its second printing), a home video from KQED, and soundtrack CD from Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman co-founded. He has appeared widely on TV: "Nightline," "Good Morning America," "ABC News Magazine," MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged," and "The Charlie Rose Show," among others. The NEA has announced major preproduction support for his new poetry media project, the World of Poetry (worldofpoetry.org), the world’s first digital poetry anthology.

Holman's latest collection of poems, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, was published in 2003 by Art of This Century/Pace Editions, and was launched at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum during the Venice Biennale. The book consists of twenty daguerreotypes by Chuck Close and twenty praise poems by Holman, one for each of the artists Close photographed. Tin Fish published his translations (from Chinese, with the author) of Zhang Er’s Carved Water, also in 1993. His selected works, The Collect Call of the Wild, from Henry Holt, was proclaimed "the first poetic drop-kick into the new millennium" by Next magazine and "Impressive (to say the least)" by Robert Creeley. He co-edited Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (also from Holt), winner of the American Book Award, after having helped reopen the Cafe in 1989 and where he ran the infamous Poetry Slams through 1996. Holman’s first CD, In With The Out Crowd, was produced by needle-drop wizard Hal Willner. Backed by Chris Spedding, Wayne Kramer, and Bobby Neuwirth, the album moves from rock to country to ballad, shot through with urgent humor and what can only be called "poetry." Lou Reed says it is "an astonishing achievement."

Selected recent career highlights:

Books written/edited by

Anthologies (Selected List)

Awards (Selected List)

Education:
Columbia College, AB, English, 1970. (Studied with Kenneth Koch, Eric Bentley, Michael Goldman, Michael Wood.)
St. Marks Poetry Project, 1974-78. (Studied with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer)

Curriculum Vitae (download .pdf)

http://www.bobholman.com/

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Biography on David White

Born: TBA

Lives: Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

Cultural Producer,
and former Executive Director and Producer Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), N.Y., N.Y.

A former dancer and filmmaker, White assumed the leadership of DTW from founders Jeff Duncan and Art Bauman. White has come to be known as one of the country's most influential and innovative producers, arts administrators, and cultural community-builders - and DTW as a model, revolutionary artist-centered institution – identifying, nurturing and commissioning some of the most significant contemporary artists of our time, including, among countless others: Bill Irwin, Donald Byrd, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Marshall, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, Eiko and Koma, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Bebe Miller, Merián Soto and Pepón Osorio, Marta Renzi, Doug Elkins, Donna Uchizono, Tere O'Connor, Guillermo Gómez-PeÑa, John Jasperse, Pat Graney, puppeteers Janie Geiser, Bruce G. Schwartz and Paul Zaloom, Belgium's Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Germany's Felix Ruchert, Cuba's Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Zimbabwe's Thomas Mapfumo and Blacks Unlimited, and the French hip-hop ensemble Kafïg. He also introduced to New York such Minnesota born-and-bred artists as Ralph Lemon, Maria Cheng, Linda Shapiro, Patrick Scully, Chris Aiken, Wendy Morris, Joe Chvala, Shaun McConnelaug, Wil Swanson and Morgan Thorsen. In doing so, he has co-produced and co-presented artists with numerous partners throughout the United States and abroad, including the Walker Art Center (MN), the Maison de la Danse (Lyon, France), Miami Dade Community College (FL), the Spoleto Festival USA (SC), On the Boards (WA), the Flynn Theater (VT) and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (MA), just to name a few.

Beginning in 1984, White conceived, designed and served as Executive Director for the ground-breaking National Performance Network, which provided (and continues to provide) real financial support to progressive alternative cultural centers and artists in some 40 U.S. cities. And the Suitcase Fund, a wide-ranging international counterpart, both of which have been acclaimed as visionary, paradigm-shifting support structures which have seeded sustained practical collaborations among organizations, artists and communities across geographic, cultural, racial and economic barriers.

Selected Recent productions Highlights:

Education:
2002 - Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
Sage Cowles Fellow at the University of Minnesota
1970 - BA Wesleyan University, Middletown Connecticut
1966-1970 - Studied at the Institut Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne/Université de Paris.

Curriculum Vitae (download .pdf)

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