An Aleatory History of the Stick

2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Michael Linares


After two years of research in close conversation with anthropologists and archaeologists, Linares eventually enrolled in classes to study archeology—specifically the history of material artifacts. He became obsessed with the origin of metaphor, and the stick as the Ur (earliest) object used by humans that led to the formation of meaning itself. This video, which accompanies the “Museum of the Stick,” is part of major work surveying material culture collected and presented by the artist through a complex narrative of associations and anthropological research. Here “aleatory” means not just random but subject to the complex and organic forces of chance. “As early as the Pliocene epoch, the stick as a specific, three-dimensional form has played a vital role in the technological, social, political, aesthetic, and religious development of humanity and some animal species. The chimpanzee’s tool that catches termites, the facial ornamentation of the Yanomami people, the Shulgi of Ur’s weaponry—as well as the toothpick, knitting needle, and vaulting-pole—all represent a minute slice of the myriad transfigurations that this form has undergone throughout history.”


Michael Linares (San Juan, Puerto Rico) asks critical questions about the most fundamental forms and concepts of art. His recent work has combined physical comedy with formal abstraction, scholarly research and quotidian material culture. Through staging conceptual acts, often as ruptures of artworld conventions, he slyly invites new ways of seeing what’s been in front of us all along.


Colors:



Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

Burt Bacharach, Legendary Composer Of Pop Songs, Dies At 94
© » HUFFINGTON POST

Bacharach had a run of top 10 hits from the 1950s into the 21st century....

Interventions by Sven Luetticken and Simon Sheikh
© » KADIST

Saturday, June 14, at 11am: In relation to the exhibition “Like an Attali Report, but different”, the curator, Cosmin Costinas has invited Sven Luetticken and Simon Sheikh...

Say No To Droogs: Teater Ekamatra’s “A Clockwork Orange”
© » ARTS EQUATOR

Say No To Droogs: Teater Ekamatra's "A Clockwork Orange" | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Monospectrum Photography October 5, 2019 By Faezah Zulkifli (1,020 words, 4-minute read) “ORANG_” The wordplay in Teater Ekamatra’s A Clockwork Orange is no accident...

All the best looks from Camp Flog Gnaw
© » I-D STRAIGHT UP

Photographing LA street style at Tyler, the Creator's Camp Flog Gnaw advertisement...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Michael Linares
© » KADIST

In this interview, Michael Linares talks about and from the “Museum of the Stick” a collection of objects with different uses that share the popular and ancient shape...

Defunct Mnemonics
© » KADIST

Peter Robinson

2012

Defunct Mnemonics (2012) plays off woodworking traditions found in indigenous art in order to create a body of formally minimal objects that are both beautiful in their restraint and profoundly moving in their associations with the totemic...

WTEIA3
© » KADIST

Daniel Boyd

2017

Daniel Boyd’s work WTEIA3 is part of a series of paintings that reference the stick charts used by indigenous communities on the Marshall Islands...

Untitled (Details from fictional realities)
© » KADIST

Matt Mullican

2018

Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation...