120 Essex St. between Delancey and Rivington.
(Inside the Essex St. Food Market at the South end of the building)

Opening Saturday, May 11th. 4:00pm-6:00pm.
Open daily thereafter, Monday through Saturday 12:00 noon to 5:30pm. Closed Sundays.
On view until June 22nd.

Shift statement:

The Essex Street Market, which houses CUCHIFRITOS, plays an important role in the history of New York City's pushcart peddlers, a culturally diverse group of migrant vendors dating back to the early 19th century. In the course of the 1939 World's Fair, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia outlawed the pushcarts, and transplanted the city's open-air markets into new indoor self-contained market structures. Not only did this signal an attempt to homogenize a large cultural and ethnic mix, it also meant a new centralized form of corporate commodity exchange - in other words, it was a method for regulating, policing, and controlling the burgeoning multi-ethnic immigrant population (part of a larger program of Americanization). Under this system, the individual became subjugated to a new mode of domination, yet at the same time, new possibilities for wider cultural exchange were created. (Today, e.g., the renovation of the Essex Market might offer new possibilities for community revitalization.) Presently, corporations could be seen as engaged in a further elaboration of this process, yet now exercised in a global environment.

The artists in SHIFT address various aspects of the recent trend towards a global society. Each considers how different currencies of private exchange (such as land, identity, and language) operate in the context of a larger global economy; and calls into question the changing individual conditions resulting from this SHIFT.

Rainer Ganahl 4 Weeks, 5 Days a Week, 6 Hours a Day - Basic Korean (1997), originally part of a three year study, consists of a TV monitor with VCR playing a video of the artist studying the Korean language, accompanied by 120 hours of VHS tapes piled beside the TV. Turning the study of a foreign language into an art practice is an ongoing project of Ganahl's. The work represents a critical reflection upon language and the ways in which it functions. Learning a foreign language is a tool for understanding another speech area, along with its social, historical, political and economic connotations. Ganahl's critique suggests that language functions as both capital and currency. Its study offers the possibility of identity play, an extension of one's subjective view of - or place in - the world. According to Ganahl: "The learning of languages as an art practice is a minimal, symbolic intervention into a socio-cultural game that is over-determined by both socio-economic as well as politico-ideological problems."

Hannes Priesch Set of 11 Maps (1996-99). On display is a selection from the artist's work, Set of 11 Maps, originally consisting of eleven pairs of pants. Appearing as if containing an actual body, each pair of stylistically dissimilar trousers takes on a particular pose - as placeholders for different personalities. Male voices can be heard from loudspeakers that are buried in the pants; the voices claim possession or ownership: e.g., "This is my house", "This is my wife," "This is my country," "This is my occupation," "This is my action." The voices arbitrarily occupy the trouser forms, inviting us to reflect on how identity is accomplished through language - identity as defined by the utterance of a particular syntactical form: the possessive. The word "maps" in the title refers literally to the acquisition and demarcation of land; but, as well, addresses the assimilation and appropriation of some one or some place as one's own.

Stephan Pascher Gold Mine (2002) is a diptych of photographs taken in snapshot style with a 35mm camera, in the Mohave Desert, on land bordering the Joshua Tree National Park. In one image, the word "Gold" appears; and in the other, the word "Mine" - both written into the landscape with stones found on site. The photographs are taken from more or less the same perspective, yet from slightly different angles, enacting a formal shift within the image. Gold Mine refers to the history of gold mining in the region in the 19th Century. Gold mining, and the homesteading that was contemporaneous with it, was a key factor in the settling of the American West, the appropriation of territories. In the word play "Gold/Mine," "Gold" signifies its function as a standard for international monetary exchange. "Gold" also refers to the value of land as property. The word "Mine," is a play on its multiple meanings: the possessive pronoun, the actual place one finds gold, as well as the verb "to mine." Gold Mine addresses the shifting value of land itself. Pascher states, "'gold mine' is the common way to say, 'making lots of money.'"

-Berit Fischer 2002.

CUCHIFRITOS is a project of the Artists Alliance, Inc.