Occidentalism.us

Since 2017, alexandre ali reza dorriz has been conducting fieldwork and research in Kern County within the Central Valley of California, a contested and politicized site shaped by industrial agriculture, water diversion, water banking, and the privatization of public aquifers, interlinked with the global political sanctioning of Iranian goods. As part of the body of work, dorriz explores the provenance, museum holdings, and financial contributions of Lynda and Stewart Resnick (POM Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios, Teleflora, FIJI Water) by placing them in vacillating histories entangled in and between early modern Orientalist expansions and French colonial reincarnates. The body of work narrates the Los Angeles County Museum’s (LACMA) 2010 Inaugural Exhibition for the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Pavilion, Eye for the Sensual : Selections from the Resnick Collection, reflected through Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics and the mechanics of atmospheric refraction, a mirage, or apparitions of water when there is none, navigating the question of representation in the institution at the prospects of droughts, floods, and the privatization of water banks.

Artforum Critics’ Pick by Kavior Moon

On View August 1 - September 7, 2019

In the living room of Lynda and Stewart Resnick’s (POM Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios, Teleflora, FIJI Water) Beverly Hills home stands a seven-foot statue of Vincenzo Vela’s The Last Days of Napoleon I, a white marble monument of Napoleon clenching his hands over what looks like a blank white map.* Following President Jimmy Carter’s instated embargo on Iranian goods in 1979, the Resnicks purchased acres of land in California’s Central Valley from Mobil Oil and Texaco throughout the 1980s. Before the sanctions, Iran had maintained the global market share on pistachios. dorriz traces the Resnicks’ financial contributions to both politicians and organizations whose continued involvement in sanctioning Iranian goods led to The Wonderful Company’s global market share on pistachios today.

Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics is the lens through which dorriz examines the Resnick’s farming practices, provenance, museum holdings, and financial contributions. From the perspective of early modern French Orientalist expansions, dorriz reflects on the representation of mirages—illusions of water—as a way to elucidate upon Edward Said’s theory of Imagined Geographies.* Through fieldwork and site visits, he imagines the territorialization of mirages at the prospects of droughts, floods, and the privatization of water banks. During the month of Sha’ban, the final lunar month before the beginning of the fast and historically dedicated to Bedouins’ search for water (April 5 - May 5, 2019, Gregorian), dorriz has collected, indexed, and tested nearly eighteen liters of potable water from the water fountains of Los Angeles arts, science, and academic institutions to which the Resnicks donate.

Fountain is an installation that considers histories and narratives that vacillate between and collapse into interchangeable lens and optical-based systems. The inverted Shah Qajar tent in which the water fountain sits is made to the approximate average dimensions of the five versions of J.L. David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, in which optics are interpreted through historical painting.** The tent interrogates the history of French colonialism through the advent of the daguerreotype, which French Orientalist photographers would introduce into the Iranian royal court. The cyanotypes exposed within the inverted tent are defined by the location of their exposure. Exposed in front of the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA is a painting of the ship with which Napoleon led his campaign into Egypt, L’Orient, that set sail with scientists, artists, and academics on May 19, 1798.

***This body of work is developed through alexandre ali reza dorriz’s ongoing body of research in breeding sikworks to model localized economies, investigating memory seriations in fiber, and interpreting silk protein as a time-based, photographic medium in an ongoing studio installation entitled Economies of Small, or the Location of Capital.

Fountain at Visitor Welcome Center

On View May 18 - June 22, 2019

Consciousness is Code in the Occidental Vacuum is part of an ongoing investigation of fiber and its relations to time, memory, and optics through museology and dramaturgy practices. dorriz works with the historical discovery of synthetic and semi-synthetic fibers, and their respective chemical and organic compositions and applications in order to interpret various fibers through rhetorical lens and optical-based systems. By looking at the properties of silkworm fiber as raw protein, dorriz interprets the accumulation of woven amyloid fibrils in the brain which are known to cause Alzheimer’s disease through the accidental discovery of rayon (“artificial silk”) by a French chemist’s work in a darkroom. There, there remain chemical congruences in French chemical company DuPont’s (Dow Chemical) first patents for nylon (PA-66) and the company’s concurrent development of Panchromatic Negative Film cellulose (nitrocellulose) and non-cellulosic bases and emulsions. Using new cuneiforms to interpret optical memory through these empirical findings, dorriz works with optical agents, chemicals such as film developers and fixers and a noxious plant, Syrian rue (esfand), historically used to ward off evil eyes in family homes, as well as producing the dyes for carpets responsible for hallucinations occurring in weaving circles, which has led to the expression, ‘magic carpet.’

During the three day installation, dorriz triangulates these rhetorical fiber exercises through dialogical and dramaturgical interpretations of a 1975 Richard Tuttle exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art. While Tuttle’s postminimal bodies of work would lead to strong negative reviews of the exhibition and question Tucker’s curatorial expertise by critics, dorriz looks to Tuttle’s fiber work, “Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself” (1973) presented in Tuttle’s first of three rotating installations for the exhibition, as a retrocausal lens into the events following the exhibition. Tom Armstrong, then museum director of the Whitney, would seem to be coerced by critics, boardmembers, and trustees into the wrongful termination of Marcia Tucker’s employment following the Tuttle exhibition; where, Tucker would subsequently found The New Museum in 1977.

1. Blanc, Paul David. Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2016.
2. “Our History | DuPont.” DuPont. DuPont, n.d. https://www.dupont.com/about/our-history.html.
3. Whitney firing, 1976 + Corres.; Marcia Tucker Papers; Getty Research Institute Special Collections; (Box 3, File 20; 1976)

“Consciousness is Code in the Occidental Vacuum” at Human Resources Los Angeles

On View October 11 - October 13, 2019