Where Art Might Happen

PUBLICATION
Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts, 2021

Philipp Kaiser, Christina Vegh,
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany

The publication Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts, accompanies the exhibition of the same name presented at the Kestner Gesellschaft during 2019. The structure of this publication is astutely highlighted by the chapters Where Art Might Happen, an overview of the exhibition including 42 artists, as well as essays + oral histories in the following chapters Institutional History, Fluxus, Feminist Art Program and Conceptualisms.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond, 2019

Karen van den Berg, Cara M. Jordan, Philipp Kleinmichel (Eds.)

Texts by Karen van den Berg, Mary Jane Jacob, Cara M. Jordan, Grant Kester, Philipp Kleinmichel, Kuda Production, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Marina Naprushkina, Dan Peterman, Rainer Rappmann, Pedro Reyes, John Roberts, Gregory Sholette, Caroline Tisdall, Anton Vidokle, Caroline Woolard

One of the most significant shifts in contemporary art during the past two decades concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
Art Reminds Us: We Are Implicated in Each Other’s Lives, 2018

One of the things recent events at the Mexico/US border have shown us is the power of documentation: audio, video, and photos that indelibly show the human impact of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. While the viral response to news of separated families and children held in “tender age facilities” underscores the power of such practices, it also raises questions for those of us in the art world: What can art do that journalism can’t? If documentation can stop us in our tracks, is it art’s job to help us move beyond that, to process what we encounter in the media? Four artists weigh in: Natalia Almada, Jackie Amézquita, Dorit Cypis, and Ifrah Mansour.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
The Space of Conflict: Aesthetic Lessons for Mediators, 2016

Published in Handbook in Mediation, editor Alexia Georgakopoulos, Routledge Press, 2017


The Space of Conflict: Aesthetic Lessons for Mediators frames lessons on recognizing the knots of chronic conflict through considering the spatial nuances of human identity and social relations. As an artist and mediator I use the double lens of aesthetics and mediation to explore identity as psychic spaces within bodies and politicized spaces surrounding bodies that mirror, inform and extend each other. If we miss this reflexive relationship between internal and external spaces, we miss a large part of the story of human identity differences and what fuels conflict between and within people. My artist practice has always explored identity and social relations through aesthetic genres of performance, photography and social sculpture. I became a mediator to extend out from the...

Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
Performing Empathy: What the Arts Can Offer Conflict Resolution, 2014

Empathy, Art and Mediation

Differences between people can be incomprehensible, fueling mistrust that can deter us from engagement. Recognizing and negotiating personal and cultural differences is dependent on developing empathy for oneself and between people. Empathy is more than feeling for another; empathy requires us to reach deep within ourselves and recognize our own inner responses so we can then better recognize another person’s response.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
History Lesson (an arrangement), 2011

In Tribute to Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz, I am so happy to be in relations with you once again. It has been quite some time since we last met, Los Angeles, the summer of 1984 I believe. The Olympic Games, against the LA backdrop pretense of urban harmony, had inhaled the city. Downtown, hundred of homeless people were given one-way bus tickets to Arizona, “cleansing” the streets of a hyper visuality of basic human life needs.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
Los Angeles: A Zone Beyond Time, 2010

Relocating to Southern California in 1975 was an adjustment to Pacific Standard Time and to the persistence of shifting sands. That’s the year I landed in Los Angeles, specifically at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), after a half-year residency in New York’s Soho, across the street from the art bookstore Jaap Reitman, and five years studying in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
Foreign Exchanges: You who look may not see, 2008

“May I help you?” “No thank you. Just looking”.

To look is to scan, taking in selectively without commitment, to consume, gliding over endless surfaces, to shop, desiring, inhaling without exhaling, to project without reflection. To see, is an intimate act, recognizing that the one outside of oneself is different and at the same time very like oneself. To witness this simultaneous sameness and difference of “you” requires a commitment from me of extra-ordinary proportions.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
flip, flop, foul and reconciliation: which beautiful game?
EAST OF BORNEO | July 2014

Rook Campbell and Dorit Cypis are colleagues, a professor of sport diplomacy and an artist and mediator. They engage on “Fútbol: The Beautiful Game,” an art exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art curated by Franklin Sirmans.
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
A Brave New World (remix), 2011

Ghostly reflections of Hieronymus Bosch...Dante’s Inferno...Dawn of the Dead... interchangeably drifted through my mind when I first entered the tent city of Occupy Los Angeles, late October, 2011. The terrain of people was bare, raw, gritty, and utterly public. I’m an artist and a mediator. I chose to show up on site frequently over the next month offering engagement and conflict transformation skills to support their capacity to perform expressions of public outcry at our culture’s out of control social inequity. These are my reflections...
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
Conflict, Mourning and Aesthetics, 2008

(what happens when history does not pass?)

Conflict, informed by a complexion of personal subjectivities and cultural forces, exists within and between people. Where there is difference there will be conflict and as human difference is inevitable, so is conflict. The question is, what tools are available towards questioning, examination, reformation and transformation?
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
The Spirit of Proximity, 2008

Journal for Art and Protest

What is the lifespan of the spirit of revolution? I always wondered about this question ...even as very young child. I remember my father, a textile engineer, traveling every year to Central America from Israel, and then from Montreal, and returning home, it seemed to me, with stories of either recurring natural disaster or revolution. My juvenile mind couldn’t comprehend, but I did wonder: why another revolution in the same place, when there had been one only a few years before?
Posted By :
Comment :Off

PUBLICATION
Between the Conceptual and the Vibrational, 2003

Dorit Cypis speaking with Simone Forti

Simone Forti today, is the same woman I met many years ago, and so much more. Her work in dance, from the 1950's to today, 2004, spans the aesthetic movements of expressionism and minimalism and has branched much further into a mature hybrid of both, embracing a deep humanism of extraordinary focus to the details of life and death, which surrounds us daily.
Posted By :
Comment :Off