THE BANFF INDEX
THE BANFF INDEX
(Published in Mix Magazine, Spring, 1999.)
The Long March: Trot, Trot, Mao, Meow
The Media and Visual Arts department of the Banff Centre for the Arts
offers two annual juried residencies. The theme of the fall 1998 session
was socially engaged art practices re-defined for the 90s.
The Banff Index
Length, in weeks, of media and visual arts residency entitled The Long
March: Trot, Trot, Mao, Meow held October-December, 1998: 10
Number of participants: 45
Participants from Canada: 14; from the US: 13; from Argentina: 3; from
Slovenia: 2; from Austria: 5; Mexico: 1; Israel: 1; Ukraine: 1; France: 1;
England 1; Spain 1; Australia 1; China via Germany: 1
Number of resident curators: 3
Aggregate number of billiard-hours: 356; X-Files computer game hours: 20
Number of annual visual arts residencies at the Banff Centre prior to
funding cuts: 5
Number of hours spent by British artist Nick Brierley scraping the
industrial paint off his studio floor to create a pile of chips for his
installation: 60
Weight of 1,000-year-old silt scraped by Brierley from the banks of the Bow
River, in kilograms: 20
Number of bears sighted: 1 (Ginger, a pregnant single mother, tranquilized
and released into the “wilderness” by park officials)
Length of excerpt depicting oral sex from the movie Deep Throat, translated
into ASCII text by Slovenian Web artist Vuk, in minutes: 3
Number of turbans used to create a mandala in honour of his uncle’s life by
artist Sanjit Sethi and his father: 44
Actual art objects produced in the last six years by WochenKlausur, the
Austrian “social intervention” art collective of whom Banff resident
Katharina Lenz is a member: 0
Number of mobile health-care units for homeless people in Vienna initiated
by WochenKlausur and still in operation five years later: 1
Number of long-term relationships still intact after the 10-week residency: 4
Percentage of leaders of federal political parties in Switzerland who
complied with WochenKlausur’s request that they spend five hours in a boat
on Lake Constance talking to drug users, mothers of drug users, and people
providing social services to drug users: 100
Number of reported incidents of elk charging local residents: 60
Number of installations by elk in Walter Phillips Gallery: 0
Length of video What’s Left? (made during the residency by Vancouver
filmmaker Penelope Buitenhaus, on the premise that people interviewed
randomly in the street actually have thoughtful analyses about corporate
globalization), in minutes: 16
Number of woods in L.A. artist Edgar Arseneaux’s drawing, Two Woods and a
Forest: 3
Percentage of residents who contributed to an artist’s book created by
Arseneaux on the theme of “Childhood Misconceptions”: 100
Percentage of residents who contribute to a Web site created by Austrian
artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, addressing the question “But is it
politics?”: 40
Number of days it took in a residency about art and political practice for
cliques to form around elitist art practices: 4
Amount of money raised by residents at a fundraising auction for hurricane
relief in Nicaragua: $3,000
Number of artists performing The Waterplay, an improvised aquatic ballet,
choreographed by Montreal filmmaker Peter Wintonick, in the swimming pool,
at the fundraiser for
Nicaragua: 8
Number of signatures on a petition circulated at the auction by the Banff
Anglican Church demanding the World Bank forgive the debt of the poorest
countries in the world: 40
Acts of political resistance during the residency (some artists objected to
a series of panels proposed by the administration and demanded instead a
series of discussions in two streams: “Critical Practices: Social
Intervention Art, Community Art, Globalization,” and “Radical Aesthetics:
From Benjamin to S/M to Cyber Prostheses”: 1
Degree of resolution or agreement among participants in any single
discussion group, of which two were held each week: statistically
insignificant
Size of tennis court installed in the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art by
Margarita Paksa, subject of the Web site she created during the residency,
in metres: 23.8 x 8.2
Number of possible positions viewers could take in order for the artist to
raise the issue of “post-binomialism” in this installation: 2 (winners,
losers)
Number of days spent in solitary confinement by Paksa in 1968 as a result
of protests against an awards ceremony at Argentina’s Museo Nacional de
Bellas Artes, which claimed the right to alter award-winners’ work: 10
Approximate number of individual pieces of elk feces collected by Ukrainian
artist Oksana (she wore rubber gloves), used to “write” words in the snow
by participants in her installation: 500
Collective weight gain over 10 weeks of all 45 residents, expressed as a
percentage: 4
Collective weight loss, expressed as a percentage: 4
Number of multinational corporations players attempt to blast in
“Mergeroids,” the online game developed by San Francisco graphic artist
Lina Hoshino and programmer Derek Chung (“Global Arcade: The Virtual
Empowerment Center ”
Number of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) players must catch in Lina and
Derek’s game “Maria Sisters,” in which an immigrant worker from Latin
America, working in Silicon Valley, must defy her bosses to establish
safety standards in the workplace: 6
Number of gourmet meals cooked by New York artists Julia Meltzer and David
Thorne, served on Friday nights to residents in the studio of Israeli
artist Nurit Melamed: 6
Number of these meals which over a period of several hours turned into
hilarious drunken debauches: 6
Number of publications of gay pornography brought to Banff by Toronto
artist Johannes Zits, for purposes of research: 44
Number of men enjoying each other, painted by Johannes Zits on a wall onto
which a scanned and enlarged photo of an interior from a magazine
advertisement was projected: 2
Number of paper plates coated in a mixture of fungus and mould, grown in
her studio by Vancouver artist Haruko Okano, for her collaborative
installation/performance with Calgary poet Fred Wah entitled High
(bridi)Tea: 26
Number of slices of white bread with “contaminated” words stencilled in
mould: 26
Number of “jingles” written by Wah and placed beside each plate: 26
Number of cups of tea served by Okano dressed as a Chinese waiter, to 26
people seated around the table, as Wah read his poems about growing up in
his father’s Chinese diner in Saskatchewan: 26
Number of months WochenKlausur will spend representing Austria at this
year’s Venice Biennale, doing an intervention about democracy: 3
Number of megabytes used building her computer game “The Babes in the
Woods” by the author of this index while at Banff: 90
Altered states experienced during ingestion of legal and illegal
substances, quotidian walks up Tunnel Mountain, trekking the Stanley
Glacier, and soaking in the Banff Hot Springs: immeasurable by definition
Number of rotations during The Long March of the revolving door in
Heartbreak Hotel: 13
Number of rumoured marriages to take place after the residency: 1
Number of rumoured pregnancies: 0
Degree of expansion of artistic, personal, political boundaries of the 45
participants: go figure.
Number of contacts, friendships, love affairs, collaborations continuing,
on and off the Web, after The Long March: anyone’s guess