NYAB Event - Lisi Raskin “Recuperative Tactics”

Lisi Raskin “Recuperative Tactics”

Art in General

This event has ended.

“The space of a tactic is the space of the other…. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.1”

Art in General presents Recuperative Tactics, a New Commission by Lisi Raskin, from April 19 – May 31, 2014 in Art in General’s sixth floor gallery. A large-scale, site-specific environment, Recuperative Tactics leaves behind the Cold War narrative that has pervaded Raskin’s practice to tackle the geography of the forgotten.

Recuperative Tactics is an immersive installation reconstructing Raskin’s 2013 experience of traveling in Afghanistan, made possible through a Creative Time Global Residency Grant and the generous support of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. By building on the physical remnants of previous works, leftover materials, and discarded objects, Recuperative Tactics suggests histories compounded into new form. Suturing found materials into an architectural palimpsest, Raskin transforms the gallery into the site of an attempted reconstruction of memory, riddled with the complicated cyphers of an outsider’s account of the vestiges of war. Employing abstraction and alteration to fashion an environment whose method of production is visible, Raskin’s methodology reveals itself as a means of communication.

While the installation’s title suggests making amends as a means of moving forward, recuperation is also a calculated political maneuver “by which those who control the spectacular culture co-opt all revolutionary ideas by publicizing a neutralized version of them, literally turning oppositional tactics into ideology.2” Raskin plays with the duality of recuperation, subverting the US government’s grand narrative about Afghanistan by threading and folding it into one of infinite narratives. This exhaustive and open-ended approach is a tactic to reconcile the enormity of a place in continued conflict, and a means to acknowledge the multiplicity of viewpoints at play in any given story. Raskin’s tactics, what Michel de Certeau calls “calculated actions determined by the absence of a proper locus,” highlight the gaps in the hegemonic narrative, the cracks through which entire experiences are fated to disappear.

Concurrent with her show at Art in General, Raskin will have a solo exhibition of new paintings at Churner and Churner. The abstract paintings, made from earlier artworks and ranging in size from a few inches to a few feet square, present a counterpoint to her large-scale installation, while continuing to engage questions raised by her trip to Afghanistan. The exhibition runs from April 17 through May 31, 2015.