Ashes to Ashes | 2011
Materials: One incinerated copy of The American Heritage Dictionary: Fourth Edition (21st Century Reference) contained in a mason jar.
Ashes to Ashes was produced for “The Art of the Book” exhibition at Mitchell Gallery, St. John’s College. Instructions were given for the curator to spread the ashes on a nearby garden immediately following the exhibition.
May we never forget (who we work for)
2010
Press Release – Hylton Performing Arts Center
LOCKHEED MARTIN PROVIDES $250,000 TOWARD NEW COMMUNITY PERFORMING ARTS CENTER AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY’S PRINCE WILLIAM CAMPUS
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
“MANASSAS, VA, March 27, 2007 — Lockheed Martin recently pledged $250,000 toward the future Community Performing Arts Center that will be built on George Mason University’s Prince William County campus in Manassas, VA.
The Center, a partnership between Prince William County, the city of Manassas and George Mason University, will create the region’s first state-of-the-art performing arts center, housing an 1,100-seat four-story rehearsal and performance space, two other smaller performance venues, and facilities to support the arts both at the university and in the surrounding community. Under the terms of their pledge, Lockheed Martin will provide the university $250,000 in permanent endowment funds to support the Center over five years. Construction of the Center will begin this summer with an anticipated opening in the fall of 2009.
Denise Saiki, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Manassas-based business recently presented the company’s first pledge payment to Dr. Alan G. Merten, president of George Mason University at the university’s Prince William campus in Manassas, VA.
“We are delighted to make this contribution to the Community Performing Arts Center,” said Saiki. “This will allow us to help local high school performing arts education programs and local performing arts organizations use the center for their community programs for many years to come.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Lockheed Martin as a founding partner of the Community Performing Arts Center,” said Bill Reeder, Dean, George Mason University College of Visual and Performing Arts. “Lockheed Martin’s leadership gift will make it possible for the Center to design exciting and innovative programs for schools and families to explore the connections between the arts and science.”
The mission of the new Community Performance Arts Center is to provide world class performance facilities for both well-established, high-quality, regional art groups and the many community-based groups that provide opportunities for residents to actively participate in the arts, as well as, arts-related educational opportunities for area schools.
Headquartered in Bethesda, MD, Lockheed Martin employs about 140,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.”
agriART is an exhibition brings together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption. The exhibition features projects that represent where we are and what we can do to (re)create sustainable relationships with our sources of nourishment and the communities in which we live.
April 21 – May 15, 2009
Fine Arts Gallery. George Mason University
Public Reception – April 21, 5:00 – 7:00
Featuring: Fritz Haeg, Beehive Design Collective, Nance Klehm, Ted Purves & Susanne Cockrell, Critical Art Ensemble & Beatriz Da Costa & Claire Pentecost, Center for Urban Pedagogy with Amanda Matles, Deena Capparelli & Moisture, Lisa Tucker, Philip H. Howard, Amy Franceschini
With essays by: Claire Pentecost & Ron Graziani
Curated by: Mark Cooley & Ryan Griffis
E pluribus unum
2004 – 2008
online version
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” – Noam Chomsky
“In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal, cited the ‘Yamashita’ case as grounds for indicting (General) Westmoreland. Following the war, a US Army Commission had sentenced Japanese General Tomayuki Yamashita to be hung for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines. The Commission held that as the senior commander, Yamashita was responsible for not stopping the atrocities. The same ruling could of course apply to General Powell and General Schwarzkopf. Yamashita, in his defense, presented considerable evidence that he had lacked the communications to adequately control his troops; yet he was still hung. Taylor pointed out that with helicopters and modern communications, Westmoreland and his commanders didn’t have this problem.” – Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum, Common Courage Press, 2000.
The installation consists of reproductions of post-WWII presidential photographic portraits accompanied by faux engraved plaques listing, in abridged form, 60 years of presidential foreign policy accomplishments. Flagrant violations of international laws are par for the course. Efforts to build empire have always been marked by murder celebrated fanatically as “just and righteous,” and yet we have something that we call “International Law,” including the Charter of the United Nations, Nuremberg Principles, Geneva Conventions, Genocide convention, and many others. In the interest of law, accompanied with the facts of 60 years of US foreign policy, and while using the case of General Tomayuki Yamashita as precedence, we can speculate on how our presidents may have faired if accused of war crimes before an impartial jury.
http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exit_archive/history/2004.html
untitled | 2008
Materials: Lunchbox painted white and fitted with window, Puzzle painted white.
Produced for ‘HOME’ – Art Fete for the relief of victims of Sichuan earthquake, Hong Kong – 2008
Launch project: (Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment
(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment is a collective experiment in database video and random access narrative. The installation is the work of many artists, each responsible for thirty seconds of video attempting to engage with paradoxes of digital culture and 21st. century communications. The installation consists of a database containing the media contributions of each artist. A computer randomly retrieves video and audio and juxtaposes the media fragments in ten-second intervals on three projected screens and three stereo output systems. The process provides an endlessly randomized deconstruction and reconstruction of narrative and associative imagery in which meaning simultaneously forms and dissolves and the usual stabilities of conventional video are put in flux.
Project concept: Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress
Project architecture: Mark Cooley
Participating Artists:
Jacqueline Aceto, Jenifer Ashcroft, George Baker, Brigitte Balla, Sean Blackford, Said Boissiere, Bridget Borley, Juan Botero, Tara Bowen, Lindsey Burnett, Nicholas Carson, Luis Cavero, Robert Cowling, Brian Dang, Daniel Dean, Jessica Engel, Jennifer Fairfax, Jennifer Farris, Emmanuel Freeman, Jessica Gibson, Lance Gunther, Tyler Harris, Moises Herrera, Franklin Hwang, Maurice James, Andrew Ke, Arthur King, Julie Koziski, Peter Lawrence, Chongha Lee, Andrew Meinecke, Michael Merrill, Aaron Miller, Eli Mintzer, Julia Moscato, Nichole Mosher, Sarah Newdorf, Brent Nieder, Kelvin Olayinka, Adrian Peters, Jose Ruiz, Sorphea Sam, Michael Sargent, Nelly Sarkissian, Paul Sauter, Christina Schnittker, Matthew Searle, Alex Straub, Aisha Syed, Mohamed Talaat, Eric Tsai, Sean Watkins, Nestor Zerpa, Yerden Zikibayev
Dear Internet
2007
project documentation
by Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress.
Connection, dislocation, fear, communication, fragmentation, collectivity, intimacy, disembodiment are all possible and often simultaneously present in our attempts to interact with others online and off. Dear Internet is an experiment in collective publishing that attempts to investigate how networked technologies become platforms for the paradoxes of social relations in digital culture.
Dear Internet began in 2006 as a kind of inversion of the security and authoring conventions of blogs and blogging. Dear Internet was set up as an unmediated publishing platform where users were urged to address the Internet directly and indulge in their deepest thoughts, feelings and fantasies with the abandonment, comfort and protection that only online anonymity can provide. Initially, letters rendered some interesting aspects of the complex relationships, or lack thereof, we have with the humans of the world. Sadly, but perhaps fittingly, contributions waned and the automated publishing platform gave way to spam. The blog is now an archive of spam email and seems to be establishing a “purely” networked identity – blissfully free from the messy and complex emotive states of humanity.
2009 update: blogger detected and removed the Dear Internet blog for violating blogger’s terms of service agreement.
The first wave of human contributions to Dear Internet were presented at MAP in 2007. Installation Notes:
untitled ’83 | 2005
materials: digital prints, declassified documents
size: 5 – 8.5″ X 11″ pieces / total size 8.5″H X 55″L
White Flag | 2005
produced for Unfurled Estonia, curated by Pond
Unfurled Exhibition Catalog
Sirp (August 5, 2005)
Posttimes (August 5, 2005)
Terri Cohn. ‘Unfurled.’ /ArtWeek /(7/04)
White Flag is a U.S. flag spray-painted white. Depending on the cultural context a white flag may have various meanings. In the United States the predominant understanding is that a white flag signifies a surrendering – or at least a devious/heroic plan to ensnare the enemy in a deadly bluff. This White Flag is not a celebration of modernist values, or an example of witty iconic pop art. This is one flag become another. Disclaimer: White Flag will fade and crack while exposed to natural and human elements during exterior exhibition thereby, beginning a transformation back to the U.S. flag.
“A U.S. flag painted white, Mark Cooley’s White Flag plays on various cultural resonations. In the United States white flags signify a surrendering – but exposed to natural elements (sun, wind, rain, etc.), White Flag will crack and fade, eventually returning the artwork to its originary incarnation as a piece of cloth. We are left with an open ended question about the evanescent nature of art and the axiomatic character of symbols in the political imaginary. White Flag also alludes to various monochromatic paintings in 20th century Western art (Rodchenko, Robert Ryman, Malevich, Yves Klein, Rothko) that position themselves as the death of painting, a non-painting painting, a blank slate to which we impute meaning. In Cooley’s piece, an actual flag underlies the layers of paint – as if to expose the political and social underpinnings of a Modernist ‘neutral field’.” Press Release, Written by Marisa Jahn
