4 JUNE – 25 JULY 2010

Closing & Live Music Performance: Saturday, 24 July at 8pm

Opening reception: Friday, 4 June, from 6:00pm / Live Music Performance at 9pm

The Deaths of Hamilton Fish is a musical project that weaves together real and fictional characters into a murder mystery that's set in New York during the 1930’s. The story will be told through film, music and artifacts in the form of an installation in the gallery. The story and songs are written and performed by Rachel Mason.

The Deaths of Hamilton Fish project is based on a single historic coincidence. The research for the project has been ongoing since 2005. When Mason was researching a newspaper story on the date of Albert Fish’s electrocution at Sing Sing prison, she discovered an article about another Fish's death in the same newspaper.

The story was written based on the lives of two men who died on the same day. They were opposites in every imaginable way, but had one thing in common; they shared the same name, Hamilton Fish. One was the serial killer Albert Hamilton Fish, the other, Hamilton Fish II, son of the Governor of New York State, whose political family extends back to the founding fathers of America. In this fictional depiction of events and personages, Hamilton Fish II searches personal salvation by attempting to find his murderous doppelganger.

The film was shot at, and near locations where the real events occurred, such as an abandoned house in Sleepy Hollow, NY, the haunted Untermeyer park, and the burial grounds and church of the Hamilton Fish family.

Cast: Dmitriy Ivolgin, Jeff Lunger, Rachel Mason, Adrienne Sneed

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Rachel Mason is a songwriter, performer and sculptor. Trained as a sculptor at Yale, her work finds autobiographical ties to history as she inserts herself into the minds of characters in sculpture and video. Mason has created guerrilla performances ranging from a music performance on a window ledge facing Broadway in which she descended into the arms of police officers, to a rock opera with 30 dancers at the Park Avenue Armory. She has recorded five full-length albums, and is included on a compilation of music with Devendra Banhardt, Josephine Foster, Diane Cluck and Kath Bloom. Mason performs solo, with collaborators and at times backed by a full band, alternating between costume changes. Dubbed “Marvelously Strange” by Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice, Mason is a singer and multi-instrumentalist playing drums, guitar, piano and accordion. Mason's sculptures and music have been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Flash Art, Art News, and Artforum. Mason's work has been shown at the James Gallery at CUNY, University Art Museum in Buffalo, Sculpture Center, Hessel Museum of Art at Bard, Circus Gallery, and she has performed at venues including the Kunsthalle Zurich, The Park Avenue Armory, Tonic, Art in General, La Mama, Galapagos, Dixon Place, The Slipper Room, and The Empac Center for Performance in Troy.

Friday, 30 July, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

At the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania
118 South 36th Street Philadelphia, PA

This Machete group meeting will be held  at ICA as a part of Summer Studio with Anthony Campuzano.

In an era in which the critical condemnation of consumer culture has become a trite commonplace and institutional critique has become part of the institution, it might seem that political art is destined to repeat rote strategies whose failure is inscribed in their very logic. Have we finally arrived at a point at which political art can only revel in its own impotence? Are spectators simply indifferent “zero-points of visibility” who take in the institution and its critique without recognizing any real distinction, who digest the culture industry as comfortably and quiescently as the artistic attempts to criticize the culture industry? Or is there still a pedagogy of art, a paideia of spectators, and possibilities for taking aesthetics outside of the vicious circle between institution and critique, complacent consumerism and the rejection of the spectacle? These and related issues will be presented and debated in the next Machete Group meeting through the use of three pioneering texts by Jacques Rancière, Andrea Fraser and Claire Bishop.

Readings:

Download Jacques Ranciere_Emancipated Spectator1

Download Jacques Ranciere_Emancipated Spectator2

Download Claire Bishop_Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

Download Andrea Fraser_From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique

ABOUT THE MACHETE GROUP
The Machete Group organizes workshops, mini-seminars, reading groups, screenings and other events open to the public that have as their general focus the intersection between artistic practice and its theoretical articulation. The guiding proposition of the Machete Group is the claim that practice without theory is empty and theory without practice is blind. The goal of the center is to engender a rigorous and open atmosphere outside a strictly academic context that encourages autodidacticism, a willingness to question all forms of mastery and specialization, and the desire to think critically about artistic practice in an historically, socially and politically astute manner.

Monthly workshops run by Alexi Kukuljevic and Gabriel Rockhill with invited artists and intellectuals organized around select writings and works of art.

Thursday, 22 July, 2010 9pm

LIKE THAT WOULD EVER HAPPEN #2:
A Film Series Presented by Hiding Place and Marginal Utility

GERTRUDE VS. MABUSE
AMJ Crawford and Danny Snelson (ex libris)
playing in Gertrude Stein Video Organ vs. The Dark Cloud of Dr. Mabuse

Read more »

Download Machete July 2010 (PDF)

ETIENNE DOLET, Securitarianism and the “Immigration Problem” / AVI ALPERT, Ludwig Fischer Review / MIKE VASS, In Praise of Vain Gestures – Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp

Alpert: Ludwig Fischer Review

Vass: In Praise of Vain Gestures – Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp

The Machete Group is an international consortium of artists and intellectuals based at Marginal Utility Gallery in Philadelphia. The Group runs the magazine Machete, offers seminars on current issues in the arts, and is invested in developing new collective forms of artistic and intellectual practice. Its members include Avi Alpert, David Dempewolf, Etienne Dolet, Ludwig Fischer, Alexi Kukuljevic, Holly Martins, Gabriel Rockhill, Theodore Tucker, and Yuka Yokoyama.