Curator Pat Elifritz developed this proposal during the Summer 2013 Curatorial Intensive in New York.
1971 is a curatorial research project that centers on historical economic milestones of its eponymous year as a frame for developing an open series of exhibitions and writing on contemporary art. This project distills consistencies between the backdrops against which cultural producers operate, the strategies they utilize, and emergent economic realities of 1971. These include, among others, deregulation, privatization, speculation, and the financialization of nearly every corner of contemporary life.
Each project focuses on one development in 1971, using the particular date as its title. Past and potential projects include August 15, 1971 (convertibility of the United States dollar to gold is suspended), April 29, 1971 (U.S. owned zinc mines are nationalized in Bolivia), January 15, 1971 (the Aswan High Dam is completed in Egypt), June 14, 1971 (oil production begins in the North Sea), and July 17, 1971 (U.S. owned copper mines are nationalized in Chile), among others.
Emphasis has been placed on developments in processes of material extraction and natural resource cultivation—gold, oil, copper, zinc, water—their wider social or cultural reverberations, and how they resonate within processes of exchange, circulation, and dissemination. These discrete historical moments serve as trajectories into broad areas of research caught between the material and immaterial: copper and its significance as a major raw material for telecommunications, information technology, and networking; mineral extraction and its relationship with pharmaceutical industries and intellectual property; gold and oil mining and their role in regulating the global economy; and so on.
In this way, 1971 is more akin to a research process or methodology, less a finite project in and of itself. The process yields an ongoing series of exhibitions and essays, each diverse in their content and scope, varied in their media and format, with a common denominator in this particular historical moment. The framework isolates the conditions under which contemporary artists work and posits the genesis of these realities as residing, to an extent, in the economic developments of 1971.
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To learn more about this proposal please email Pat Elifritz at patelifritz@gmail.com. To learn more about the Curatorial Intensive email info@curatorsintl.org.
