Ryder Richards

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Piotr Chizinski: Socio-Academic Judo

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Piotr Chizinski : “Socio-academic Judo”

Piotr Chizinski is the epitome of C.P. Snow’s “Third Culture.” Posited as the empirical intellect bridging the humanities and sciences, the “Third Culture” resists academic specificity to more fully navigate cultural inquiry within a real world context.

Engaged in social interaction through art, Chizinski draws from several fields of study to continually explore the ineffable socio-economic worth of individuals. Utilizing the cumbersome methodology of academia against itself, the work logically disrupts current assumptions by accentuating the disparity between past and present “truths.” Chizinski, comfortably employing symbolic low-class motifs, issues a reflexive warning against marginalization while cleverly dispelling trust in academic fortitude.

Chizinski’s most recent work is based on troubling “scientific” texts justifying the sterilization of over 60,000 Americans in the early 1900’s Eugenics movement. His pieceCentre for Calculation distills Eugenics into an interactive, sickening experience. Within the piece, one may choose to take a complicated “Breeding Exam” developed from the original 1914 exam, which determines one’s aptitude as breeding stock. The result often delivered is the dry determination: “you are unfit for breeding.”

Subversive irony abounds as the test, technically adept, is projected from inside a cast, white trashcan (i.e.: white trash). Utilizing high art’s propensities, Chizinski compounds the distinction between rhetoric, object and content, insinuating art’s inbred vernacular by allowing the pedestal–as debris collector–to issue forth scathing historical and personal allegations. Like many of Chizinski’s works, Centre for Calculation poses as unpretentious low-culture, casually providing access irrelevant of cultural pedigree. However, the content engenders a blatant challenge against class prejudice and intelligence, provoking frustrated empathy as the verdict issued, from the trash, renders one’s genetic legacy obsolete.

Chizinski’s work, similar to Anslem Keifer’s national mythology fueled paintings that forced contemplation and apology for past atrocities, demands acknowledgment and reconsideration of America’s continued pathology: science as salvation with the resulting reduction of humanity.

[ written by Ryder Richards for publication in Cornell Graduate exhibition catalog at DUMBO Art Center, May 2011. ]

Sources: 
Piotr Chizinski, artist, 2010-11
“Eugenics and the Nazis — the California connection” Edwin Black, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, November 9, 2003.
“The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution” John Brockman, 1995.
influenced by Charles Percy Snow’s 1959 work “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”
“Anselm Kiefer: The Psychology of ‘After the Catastrophe’,” Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, 1996.

Monument to a Quarter Million Dreams

art, projects

Monument to a Quarter Million Dreams
Collaboration by Ian F. Thomas (Slippery Rock, PA) and Ryder Richards (Dallas, TX)

NCECA 2012 Invitational: Push Play
Curator: Linda Ganstrom, Director of NCECA Exhibitions
Bellevue Museum, Seattle, WA

STATEMENT: Play is a product of investigation and the willingness to take risks. As individuals progress the concept has a tendency to become alien and a re-introduction is required. In an effort to entangle adult concerns with a level of play, Ian F. Thomas and Ryder Richards have begun collaborating. Utilizing techniques from independent studio practices the artists offer objects and concepts considering risk as reward, studio practice as a practical form of play.

“Monument to a quarter million dreams” seeks to memorialize the passing of the NASA Space Shuttle program through recognizing the role it played in generational development. Utilizing model-making technology and construction methods, Thomas and Richards recall the early knowledge of converting child fantasy into physical object. As such, the piece takes on a form of construction aligned with the notion of play, yet approached seriously with mathematical acumen. Applying a ceramic coating to the model it reflects a childlike sensibility, mimicking the ceramic tiles on a space shuttle which diffuse heat during re-entry. As such, the work fuses technical innovation and artistic prowess with an ideology and passion learned in youth and reinvigorated.

Without the NASA program offering the chance of exploration for future generations the work stands as miniature memorial to the power of possibility—the power of play.

~ Ryder Richards and Ian F. Thomas, 2011

Presently Bored

art

“Presently bored: a gift from the vita contemplativa to the vita activa” 2011,
infinitely looping video

Video/film, by it’s nature, projects light from the past into the present. It also (typically) requires the viewer to be static, passive, and time bound.

Considering modernity as a time of action glorified over considered contemplation, the present has ushered in passive acceptance. In our desire to move forward at a rapid pace seldom do we consider time or ideas on a larger scale, and as such, modern contemplation has become a stunted “repetitive gesture [that] does not lead to any result.”1

In allowing light from the past to play as a film in the present, the piece offers an abstracted, appropriated version of perceptual art, packaging and looping the existential experience into a static, transferable, and portable vision. As modern and post-modern art has engaged the previously spiritual domains of religion—offering it’s own versions of transcendence through “weak signs”2— Presently Bored satirically and seriously offers mediation from the frenetic activities of our modern life. As both “art” and “film” it achieves a culturally permissible loop-hole allowing silent, dedicated contemplation on any number of issues as both contemplative and active time.

For examples of what one may contemplate with this gifted time from the past:
1. the contiguous scope of time as localized individuality,
2. the quandary of accepting the past as the current present,
3. how a rectangle of light on the wall is the same shape as a painting, so maybe it is a painting. And, if that’s true then why go to the Rothko Chapel when I can watch it on my iPad?
4. we are all going to die, (but not right now, probably later)
5. how to naturally access a primal, perceptual euphoria previously reserved for religious or drug-induced trances.

~Ryder

1. Boris Groys, “Going Public” Sternberg Press 2010, pg 99
2. Giorgio Agamben “The Time That Remains “

The 9 minute time length references Douglas Davis’s performance in the 1977 Documenta “The Last 9 Minutes,” and is a few seconds shy of a double feature of John Cage’s  “4’33”.

stupid dumb site crashed

Uncategorized

ugh. On Dec 20th, after trying to update my platform I lost all my content.

so, I am rebuilding the whole thing. better, faster, stronger, more productive, not drinking too much, still cries at a good film, calm, fitter, healthier, like a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Only took one afternoon to rebuild the format. Looks like I now have most of the content re-uploaded. Definitely a lesson in backing up your site.

Art 2021

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