Documentation of our ongoing project A NEW AMERICAN DREAM (2014-) featuring an excerpt of Amelia Rina's critical essay "An Old American problem" published on September 15, 2015 on Art Practical.
Documentation of our ongoing project A NEW AMERICAN DREAM (2014-) featuring an excerpt of Amelia Rina's critical essay "An Old American problem" published on September 15, 2015 on Art Practical.
The book A New American Dream is available from CONCRETE PRESS
colleo.org
concrete-press.org
The book A New American Dream is available from CONCRETE PRESS.
A NEW AMERICAN DREAM
Photographs by COLL.EO
Essay by Alexandra Fine
Interview with The Famous Curator
Limited Edition Book published by CONCRETE PRESS, 2014
CONCRETE-PRESS.org
COLLEO.org
Excerpt from "FRAMED" by Alexadra Fine:
"Framed as a comment on American Dream rhetoric and questioning its value for real everyday conditions of living, A New American Dream depicts real San Francisco street scenes – the bearded homeless man pushing a shopping cart, the African American woman begging for money, or the young twenty-something start-up employee rushing to work with coffee in hand.
As “documentation” of the “real” framed as artwork, the viewer is forced to confront questions surrounding a politics of visibility in which the maker acts like the camera that shows a veritable and objective reality, rather than one informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and a privileging of instated social hierarchies. What are the politics of “giving visibility” to another?
This project forces one to ask after this tenuous relation, as there may be a problematic tendency in some documentary work and “social art” to privilege the “giver” (i.e. artist or scholar) and their “feeling good” for illuminating an overlooked or invisibilized social ill. I wonder if the question then becomes if acknowledging positionality merely acts as an excuse for artists or scholars to exploit minorities or abject individuals or groups. Can the academy teach “social practice” from within the institution in a way that erases hierarchies of privilege?
The use of Google street view technology within this project is crucial to a questioning of the politics of visibility as its pervasiveness, transmits specific cultural meaning that cannot be divorced from the content of the images. The “newness” of this New American Dream project is directly linked to technological advancements in visualization technologies. This newness results from our newfound ability to recreate, while reimagining, social life from within virtual space.
Technological artworks provide an interesting point of entry to this conversation as the technological medium itself is intended to be accessible to the “masses,” yet, in actuality, is only readily available to those with certain economic and educational privileges, while also being an industry dominated by the heteronormative white, educated, and financially stable individual."