Monday, October 01, 2012

Orozco multiplies

You remember the New School's Orozco murals? They've been provoking and inspiring people for over eighty years. Two years ago a number of courses in the Parsons School of Design put together the exhibition "Re-Imagining Orozco," one of whose highlights was this animation: (Make sure to click the little exploded X at lower right for fullscreen.)

I just love it, especially the scenes where the "Table of Universal Brotherhood" is unseated and reseated, proliferated and exploded. Indeed I think this so wonderful that I wanted to introduce some of Lang's first year students to it, so with curators and Parsons faculty I'm staging a kind of mini-revival, a week from today. We'll start in the Orozco Room itself, then produce poetry and images which we'll take downstairs to the Lang Cafe and perform - and the performance itself will be filmed and added to the New School Art Collection. Cool!
But there's more. It turns out that at this very moment, a group of Fine Arts students at Parsons have staged their own intervention - as much an occupation of Orozco as an homage. Inspired by feminist and queer theory they noticed not only that the "Table of Universal Brotherhood" is all men, but that it has no open places. In response they've come up with a mural of their own, still evolving, and an oversize table, open to any and all to use any way they please. Check it out in the Aaronson Gallery thru this Saturday!