Dean of CalArts School of Critical Studies Amanda Beech has been chosen to exhibit at EVA International 2014, Ireland’s biennial. Beech’s video and architectural installation Final Machine, which has shown in the UK and Norway, is among 56 works selected from more than 2,000 proposals representing 96 countries.
In this iteration, EVA’s 36th, the biennial contemplates recent unrest happening all over the world and how an individual weathers these agitations. Titled Agitationism, the show embodies the process of “working through agitations, with the aim of seeking adaptation to a logic situated somewhere else beyond the entrapment between past, present, and future—three tenses that overlap in the contemporary moment, creating a kind of palimpsest of half-undone histories, half-imagined futures and a present of phantasms as a consequence.”
Beech’s Final Machine speaks to the theme of the biennial. The work features three screens, each depicting a landscape from the Dominican Republic, Mojave Desert and Miami. A voice-over recites passages from a CIA recruitment talk, a script of Miami Vice and philosopher Louis Althusser’s lectures, The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, which attempted to envision a politics free from ideological forms of power.
More from Beech’s notes:
The work examines a mode of representation that is manifest across three storylines and drives the question as to how we can avoid a spontaneous philosophy of art. The spontaneous philosophy of art is best described as our unswerving faith in specific modes of critique that have now become our bad habit. The work interrogates how it is possible to produce art that can be free from such habits, from tradition and how it is possible to engage art as a site of realism. In this, the work tells the story of how one might escape from this circle of this image-faith dynamic.
Above is a slideshow of the installation of Final Machine. EVA International runs from April 12 through July 6 in Limerick, Ireland.