| Dates: | born 1951
| | Biography: | 1951 Born in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Lives and works in Los Angeles
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1999 Fish Story, Henry Art Gallery,
Seattle
1998 Palais dex Beaux Arts, Brussels
1998 Galerie Michel Rein, Tours
1996-98 University Galleries, Illinois
State University, Normal, Illinois (and
toured)
1995 Witte de With Center for
Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (and
toured)
1991 Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver
1984 Folkwang Museum, Essen
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1997 Insite 97, San Diego/Tijuana,
Centro Cultural Tijuana, Tijuana
1996 Face a l'Histoire, Centre
Pompidou, Paris
1993 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York
1984 Art and Ideology, New Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York
1980 Martha Rosier and Allan Sekula,
Anne Leonowens Gallery,
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
Halifax
FURTHER READING
Camera Austria symposium issue on
Fish Story 59/60 (1997)
Sekula, A. Fish Story, Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
and Richter Verlag, Dusseldorf 1995
Sekula, A. Geography Lesson: Canadian
Notes, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver
and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1997
Sekula, A. Allan Sekula: Dead Letter
Office, Rotterdam: Nederlands Foto
Instituut, 1997
(English and French translations:
Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts, 1998)
Sekula, A. Photography Against the
Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-
1983,
Nova Scotia Series vol. 16: Source
Materials of the Contemporary Arts, ed.
Buchloh and Wilkie,
Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, Halifax 1984 | | | Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | | Date of source: | 1999 |
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| | Personal Profile: | Artist's Statement:
Freeway to China (Version Two; For
Liverpool) 1998-99
Here's the idea this time. Trace a line of
dockers' solidarity across the Pacific,
from Freemantle and Sydney to Los
Angeles. Set that line against the
heavier line of transnational corporate
intrigue, the line that seeks to strangle
and divide and endlessly cheapen the
cost of labour, the line that respects only
the degradation of the 'bottom line'.
Reverse the direction of the poet Charles
Olson's reading of Herman Melville's
modernism: Melville's line traces the
American frontier's outward extension
across the Pacific; his foreknowledge, in
1850, of the 'Pacific as sweatshop'.
Trace the thin line of resistance further in
reverse, crossing America and the
Atlantic to Liverpool: great city of
working-class toil, departure and refusal.
The Liverpool dockworkers and their
wives and families insist that theirs has
been a very modern struggle, refuting the
smug neo-liberal dismissal of dock
labour as a throwback to an earlier
mercantile age.
Postmodernists, who fantasise a world
of purely electronic and instanta¬neous
contacts, blind to the slow movement of
heavy and necessary things, may indeed
find this insistence on mere modernity
quaint. But against the pernicious
idealist abstraction termed 'globalism',
dockers enact an interna¬tional
solidarity based on intricate physical,
intellectual, and above all social
relationships geared to the flow of
material goods.
The dockers' line of contact extends
outward from what is immediately at
hand, to be lifted or stowed, and crosses
the horizon, to another space with
similar immediacies. To sustain this
solidarity, based on work, when work
has been cravenly stolen away, is all the
more admirable, sustaining hope for a
future distinct from that imagined by the
engineers of a new world of wealth
without workers.
| | Personal Profile Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | Personal Profile Source Date: | 1999 | | Gender: | male | | Type: | person |
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