writing

As an artist-cum-mad-scientist and avid recycling nerd, folks often come to me for answers to their frustration and confusion about plastics. If I recycle them, do they end up in landfills anyway? Does it take more energy? How do I navigate my local system? Why is it all so complicated?

Let’s get nerdy, shall we?

An artist’s aesthetic, as William Kentridge once noted, often comes into existence by way of that which has been let in out of necessity. An artist’s cosmology, however, is built. Think Henry Darger’s (1)Vivian Girls, or Trenton Doyle Hancock’s “Mounds” and “Vegans.” Cosmologies produce an aesthetic, not the other way around.

Welcome to the Bad at Art Forum! A monthly post from your (non)local artist-cum-mad-scientist, Keeley Haftner.

It’s December. The time of year when all the ‘Best Ofs’ and just-in-time-for-Christmas reviews spill out from the internet, beckoning you to consider your engagement with the year just passed. In January of this year, I was invited to “write something” about Institutional Garbage, a book published by The Green Lantern Press and edited by Lara Schoorl in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title. Like the residue that is the content in the book itself, my review got buried in the rubble of other demands. So as I (finally) sit down to write, three things are at the top of my mind:

An artist’s take on the Venice Biennale, as experienced during Venice’s highest floods in 50 years

I found myself a viewer of the Venice Biennale during this year’s epic flood. How does art premised around current political and environmental crises change when experienced in the middle of a declared state of ecological emergency? And does this foretell a new normal to come?

Keeley Haftner: Over the years you’ve inhabited the role of an artist, a critic, a teacher, a librarian, and a civic activist. Let’s begin in the early part of your art career back in the 1970s. That was when you began your twenty-year stint at the then internationally renowned Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which was also when the school was very much in its stride. At that time, Garry Neill Kennedy was at the helm and engaging a pretty impressive roster of visiting artists through The Press and the lithography workshop. Can you talk about your experience there?

KH: Looking at your research in a broader perspective, it seems you have always had a fairly interdisciplinary approach to writing. You began early on with focus on the intersection of what you’ve called “The Four As”: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. It seems to me that this sort of intersectionality is very critical in our twenty-first century, and one would hope that more researchers understand the importance of disciplinary overlap. As someone who has been thinking about this for a long time, have you seen a shift toward interdisciplinary thought since embarking on this research, or do you see academic research as remaining quite siloed on the whole?

TI: Yes and no. The negative part of the answer is with anthropology, in that the last people to show any interest in what I’ve been doing, by and large, are my anthropological colleagues…

Keeley Haftner: Let’s start broader and then go to specifics. In general, your overall project seems to be about defying categorization –for example, you’ve taken an interest in the work of Wendell Castle who muddies design, furniture, sculpture, craft, and you’re the department head of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute but specialize in the study of graphic and typographic design as also seen through art historic and philosophic lenses. Is defying categories important to you?