among friends

You can tell all this Harrell Fletcher and relational aesthetics stuff is really getting to me, because I’m starting to do it in “real life.” Read the rest of this entry »

Today I took a trip to the nice bathroom by the periodicals room in Magill, and I found this weird flier. The question on this sheet of paper reads: “If you were to make a peanut butter sandwich, what else would you put on it? Be bold.” The responses (honey, AIDS, your mom’s chest hair among them) interest me less than the question. Who’s asking? Are we asked to write about a sandwich we would really eat? Or is the question just a clever vandalism opportunity that allows us to scrawl “semen” on a wall? And will we receive sandwiches for our participation?

Read the rest of this entry »

…is by Bryn Mawr sophomore Dena Kronfeld, who is organizing a mix CD exchange between Bryn Mawr and Haverford students. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, a YouTube member named MadV uploaded a short video in which he held his hand up to the camera, showing what he’d written on his palm: “One World”; he then urged viewers to respond. Read the rest of this entry »

Taking pretty direct cues from Harrell’s ideas of locality and expanding student perceptions of community, I’ve been thinking a lot about these Other Communities at Haverford: college staff and faculty members, and lately Suburban Square.

At Suburban Square there’s a Farmers’ Market right next to Trader Joe’s that seems to simultaneously legitimize and expose these absurd suburban elite grocery stores. If you buy into their branding they seem redundant, but their basic products are radically different. Trader Joe’s, it’s natural it’s organic it’s frozen and it’s really cheap. I’m talking about packaged vs unpackaged food, they’re not the same at all.

There’s something about the uniforms even: Trader Joe’s has those awkward Hawaiian shirts and then there’s the Pennsylvania Dutch next door. The product is already the gimmick, it’s weird they need to sell it on top of selling it.

Just a little

wait for it

wait

wait

food for thought.

In the spirit of Harrell Fletcher‘s and Miranda July‘s website/book/ongoing interactive project Learning To Love You More, I present three different responses to assignment number two of a list of eight possible assignments given to the among friends interns by James Weissinger, the Associate Director of Haverford’s John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center:

2. Give a brief description of a previous work by one of the artists; then try to re-imagine how it would look/would have looked if it had been undertaken at Haverford. Where on campus would it have been staged? Who would have participated? What changes would have had to have been made?

1. In 1998, Harrell collaborated with Jon Rubin and Anthony Powers on an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute‘s McBean Project Space called “Anthony.” The exhibition featured drawings, photographs, videos, sculptures, etc., about Powers, who was a student at the Art Institute, and his interests, which included heavy metal, wrestling, and dogs.

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In June 2005, while in Vietnam, Harrell Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The experience so affected him that he returned several times, eventually photographing every image and caption in the museum. These photographs became “The American War,” Fletcher’s ad-hoc re-presentation of the museum material he had encountered in Vietnam.

As a reproduction of another exhibition, “The American War” raises issues of originality, of context, and of cultural exchange. In a conversation with artist Michael Rakowitz, Fletcher described the work as an example of the “bootlegging” he encountered in Vietnam:

Outside of the War Remnants Museum … people [were] lined up selling stacks of bootlegged books on the Vietnam War. … The books [were] about the Vietnam War, but they were written by Western writers and were originally distributed in Western countries. … The other thing that I found really fascinating was that many of the images in the museum itself were copied from American magazines and newspapers. They just took publications like Life and the Chicago Sun-Times, re-photographed the images in them, enlarged and framed them, and then hung them along with original images taken by Vietnamese war photographers.

Thus, in the spirit of “The American War,” although admittedly without the political weight, I re-present three images from Peter Tonningsen‘s “Flotsam and Jetsam,” which I encountered in the Oakland airport yesterday (only three images are on display in the airport; these, along with seventeen others, are available on his website): Read the rest of this entry »

My name is Sam Kaplan. I’m interning for Harrell Fletcher, along with Duncan Cooper.

This video has been on my mind the past day or two, for a variety of reasons:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/746cC5C-eqg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

First of all, great song. But more importantly, I’m intrigued by its use of photographs, especially with regard to the title of this blog/symposium/thing: “among friends.” Read the rest of this entry »