Papers by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
Taking Up Positions attempts to resolve, or propose possible solutions to, a range of questions c... more Taking Up Positions attempts to resolve, or propose possible solutions to, a range of questions common to time-based and participatory art practices concerning exhibition making, power, authorship and definitions, as well as their implications within a contemporary politics of protestation and image creation. This work is based on two distinct workshops which were facilitated leading up to this exhibition. These workshops were experiments in the embodiment of theory. Axis of Agency involved trained dancers exploring a theory of political agency mapped onto the floor in a Cartesian graph. This graph functioned dually as a visual guide to a theory and as a piece of choreography. The Contingent Sculpture Workshop was a series of workshops held over several months which engaged a material practice of student activism through the lens of artistic theory. They considered how protest creates images and what artists can contribute to a theorization of that process
Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Vol. 2, Number 3, pp. 411–426, 2021
In 1952, having been barred from crossing into Canada by the US government, the internationally r... more In 1952, having been barred from crossing into Canada by the US government, the internationally renowned singer and activist Paul Robeson staged a concert directly on the border, performing to tens of thousands of people from both nations. Robeson’s voice transgressed national boundaries where his body could not, and in doing so he enacted a prefigurative moment of the border’s dissolution. This paper considers the possibility of border abolition through an engagement with Robeson’s political artistry and his diverse modes of media activism. Recent border scholarship has reoriented its study of the border as a strictly material site, approaching it instead as a system of interrelated social processes that work to determine people’s legal and social status. Thus, rather than looking at the Canada–US border as something fixed in space and time, its historical formation can be seen as a contingent process, one with a multitude of related effects on other political and social histories, including resistance to settler-colonialism and the abolition of the slave trade. With his concerts at the border, Robeson produced a phenomenological experience of border crossing for his transnational audience, leaving us with a powerful precedent from which we can now imagine borders otherwise.
[https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/2/3/411/118502/Performing-AbolitionPaul-Robeson-in-the-Canadian]
Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, 2018
This essay reviews Steve Waters’ Temple, a play about 2011’s Occupy protests outside of St. Paul’... more This essay reviews Steve Waters’ Temple, a play about 2011’s Occupy protests outside of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the internal deliberations of the Church in response to their unprecedented closure. Temple’s first American performance took place in February of 2017 within blocks of ongoing protests in Berkeley that emerged as battles over the historical and contemporary meaning of “Free Speech.” Using concepts developed through Sound Studies, we consider how a sonic analysis of the play can shed light on the relationship of free speech to institutions, protest and power. This insight then problematizes the ways in which “Free Speech” is currently deployed, by both the Alt-Right and the University of California in Berkeley. We explore in particular R. Murray Schafer’s notion of “Sacred Noise,” that sound which cannot be censured by virtue of its sovereign claim to space, suggesting that the profane noise of protests by the marginalized and oppressed disrupts the given certainty of institutional and institutionalized power. In this sense we contend that the battle for Free Speech is in fact a battle for the power or authority to speak, and cannot be separated from the larger social forces that determine what is considered noise and who makes it.
Unit/Pitt Projects, 2016
Future Concrete begins with a re-assessment, a looking back, to determine what is important about... more Future Concrete begins with a re-assessment, a looking back, to determine what is important about Concrete Poetry now. What good is it to us? What insight does it offer? What demands does it make? What possibilities were left unexplored? Instead of continuing to be told what concrete poetry was, let’s ask what concrete poetry will be. This essay offers a brief history of concrete poetry and an inquiry into its possible relevance to the present day. It was published as an introduction to a 2016 anthology featuring several contemporary poets from the US and Canada who were asked to produce work addressing the question of what a futurist concrete poetics might look like. Several of the works were included in an exhibition also called "Future Concrete: Poetics After this" (Unit/Pitt, Vancouver, CAN; 2016) curated by Gabriel Saloman.
Unit/Pitt Projects, 2016
Art & Parenthood considers the social, material and aesthetic relationship that parenthood has to... more Art & Parenthood considers the social, material and aesthetic relationship that parenthood has to art-making. In spite of the enormous effect it has on a person’s life, in particular for those who bring a pregnancy to term, parenthood and child raising is often made invisible within the art world. This unique relationship has an overpowering and transformative influence, positively and negatively, on the act of creation and the material conditions of art-making for parents. This text was produced and distributed on the occasion of the exhibition "Art & Parenthood" (Unit/Pitt, Vancouver, CAN; 2016). This exhibition was an attempt to produce a platform for articulating these experiences, exhibiting art made about – or in the context of – parenting, and challenging the exclusions that separate children from contemporary art.
Journal of Aesthetics & Politics, 2014
This paper offers a critical history of the self-proclaimed "Art Strike" as a political tactic, a... more This paper offers a critical history of the self-proclaimed "Art Strike" as a political tactic, artistic performance, social practice, and philosophical exercise. Artists discussed include Robert Morris, Lee Lozano, Gustav Metzger, Goran Djordjevic, Stewart Home, and Claire Fontaine. Surveys a history of artists going on strike and their shifting political, and artistic, orientations.
BREACH Magazine, 2015
BREACH ISSUE 3 (DECEMBER 2015): ANTI-INSTITUTIONAL REHEARSAL
In this paper I consider various artistic and protest derived practices that reorient/disorient p... more In this paper I consider various artistic and protest derived practices that reorient/disorient public space through temporary enclosures, partitions and barricades - as well as openings - and develops a critical theory of sculpture that applies both tactical and aesthetic principles to these practices. Accompanied by "the Axis of Agency", a Cartesian graph that functioned both as a visual representation of a theory and as a piece of choreography.
Reviews by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
RadioDoc Review 7(1), 2021
In the wake of 2020's unprecedented protests for racial justice, electroacoustic composer Yvett... more In the wake of 2020's unprecedented protests for racial justice, electroacoustic composer Yvette Janine Jackson released Freedom, a collection of two experimental radio operas exploring the Middle Passage and its wake. Inspired in part by the mid-century radio plays produced by Richard Durham, Johnson’s work offers a counterpoint to his affirming narratives of Black achievement and contributions to American history. By contrast, Jackson explores the hidden and murky depths of Black freedom struggles, collapsing the past and the present into melancholic and mysterious compositions that push the limits of genre.
Conference Presentations by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
In the spring of 2018, the Canadian artist team of Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller install... more In the spring of 2018, the Canadian artist team of Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller installed their award winning sound artwork, FOREST (for a thousand years…), in an experimental forest on the campus of UC Santa Cruz. This ambisonic artwork, whose 30 speakers produce a totally immersive aural environment, reproduce a series of sonic phenomena depicting human activity in a forest over the passage of time. Originally exhibited in Kassel, Germany as a part of documenta 13, the recordings themselves were produced in the Salish Sea and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. In this presentation, I interrogate what this artwork’s anthropocentrism and its schizophonic displacements reveal about a Western relationship to the forest, its connection to colonialism, and its consequences in regards to the Anthropocene. I draw upon, and critique, foundational sound ecologists R. Murray Schafer and Bernie Krauss, and their theories of the soundscape, through a critical analysis of Canadian landscape painting, a surveying of current discourse around Indigenous ontologies, and recent developments in scientific research on tree sociality. I make an argument for the social, ecological and ontological necessity of listening to arboreal subjects, the forest-for-itself, and rejecting the assumption that a forest without people could or should exist. I contend that forests cannot be imagined as "worlds without us", but rather must be understood as cultural landscapes and hemerobic spaces of entanglement.
Talks by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
In 1952 the legendary singer, actor and orator Paul Robeson stood upon a stage at the Canadian-US... more In 1952 the legendary singer, actor and orator Paul Robeson stood upon a stage at the Canadian-US border and performed for thousands of fans from both countries gathered together in Peace Arch Park. Barred from leaving the United States as punishment for his outspoken anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-war politics, Robeson’s voice transgressed the border where his body could not. With this concert, Robeson marked the borderscape as a distinct site of black geography: the crossroads, an intersection of the borderline, the color- line and the path to freedom. Cast from the absolute height of celebrity, Robeson was blacklisted for his refusal to accommodate the tide of anti-Communism, or be silent in the face of American racism. From halls filled with multi-racial audiences in Jim Crow America, to telephone concerts for English laborers, to loudspeakers directed at the front-lines of the Spanish Civil War, Robeson used any medium at his disposal to sing out his message of peace and international solidarity. In this talk, I tell the story of Robeson’s internationalisms —
Red, Black and Blue — and how he wielded his voice as a sonic weapon in the service of a utopian humanistic vision.
MFA Thesis by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
Taking Up Positions attempts to resolve, or propose possible solutions to, a range of questions c... more Taking Up Positions attempts to resolve, or propose possible solutions to, a range of questions common to time-based and participatory art practices concerning exhibition making, power, authorship and definitions, as well as their implications within a contemporary politics of protestation and image creation. This work is based on two distinct workshops which were facilitated leading up to this exhibition. These workshops were experiments in the embodiment of theory. Axis of Agency involved trained dancers exploring a theory of political agency mapped onto the floor in a Cartesian graph. This graph functioned dually as a visual guide to a theory and as a piece of choreography. The Contingent Sculpture Workshop was a series of workshops held over several months which engaged a material practice of student activism through the lens of artistic theory. They considered how protest creates images and what artists can contribute to a theorization of that process.
(Thesis) M.F.A.
Simon Fraser University
Communication, Art & Technology: School for the Contemporary Arts
Supervisor: Sabine Bitter
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Papers by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
[https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/2/3/411/118502/Performing-AbolitionPaul-Robeson-in-the-Canadian]
Reviews by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
Conference Presentations by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
Talks by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
Red, Black and Blue — and how he wielded his voice as a sonic weapon in the service of a utopian humanistic vision.
MFA Thesis by Gabriel Saloman Mindel
(Thesis) M.F.A.
Simon Fraser University
Communication, Art & Technology: School for the Contemporary Arts
Supervisor: Sabine Bitter
[https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article/2/3/411/118502/Performing-AbolitionPaul-Robeson-in-the-Canadian]
Red, Black and Blue — and how he wielded his voice as a sonic weapon in the service of a utopian humanistic vision.
(Thesis) M.F.A.
Simon Fraser University
Communication, Art & Technology: School for the Contemporary Arts
Supervisor: Sabine Bitter