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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Tongues in Quarantine
By Sebastian Lipstein
At the information desk of Hyde Park Branch Library, Yago Cura plies his trade as a city librarian, providing access and information to Hyde Park community members. He is also the sole proprietor of HINCHAS Press, a local publishing house that seeks to publish meaningful and thought-provoking literature and poetry that is Latin America-centric. Their website sells original books, zines and artwork. Born in Brooklyn, Cura taught high school English in the Bronx. Although he is of Argentinean descent, he still hopes to bring Latinx and minority-owned publishing companies the recognition and space in the publishing industry “they have earned.” “There is a great Village Voice article from 1995 saying 90% of publishers are white,” Cura said. “We are hoping to change that and tell our stories.” Hinchas de Poesia Press (aka HINCHAS Press) previously released “Inspiring Library Stories: Tales of Kindness, Connection, and Community Impact,” as well as “X LA Poets,” a collection of contemporary poetry from 10 Los Angeles women. The latter is edited by Linda Ravenswood, a seventhgeneration California school teacher and founder of The Los Angeles Press. Ravenswood is also a teacher for the esteemed 24th Street Theatre Company and was a shortlist candidate for the 2017 Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. Ravenswood and Cura are two of four editors (Adolfo Guzman-Lopez and Darren de Leon being the others) on HINCHAS’ newest release “Tlacuilx: Tongues in Quarantine.” The book is a collection of poetry composed by Project 1521, a group of 10 Southern California writers, scholars and an artist to reflect on the 500 years since the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and produce literary and visual works of resistance towards colonialism, family separatism and oppression. Project 1521, which features Cura and Ravenswood, was started by LA native artist Sandy Rodriguez and NPR journalist/poet Adolfo-Guzman Lopez. Rodriguez’s work is especially unique and revered because she uses indigenous, pre-Colombian methods and materials to make her paper, amate, and her pigments. She has been featured by the LA Times and her work is slated to appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Huntington Library, Denver Art Museum, and others in the coming months. Among other poets and writers, Project 1521 also features Diane Magaloni, director of the Art of the Ancient Americas at the LACMA and former “Tlacuilx: Tongues in Quarantine” is the first book by Project 1521, a group of Southern California writers, scholars and an artist that honors people who have endured family separations, colonialism and institutional violence through cultural affirmation and various forms of resistance. director of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico. Since 2018, the group of 10 diverse people meet quarterly in Rodriguez’s Mar Vista studio to discuss her current works and methods used in painting those images. “Tlacuilx: Tongues in Quarantine” features poetry from the group exploring how life has changed over the last 500 years since Hernan Cortes and Spain conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521 amidst the most fatal pandemic in Mexican history. The poets discuss immigration, the environment and natural resources, and colonialism, as well as Aztec life and the tlacuilo (the Aztec painter-scribes). The poetry is expansive and exposes the reader to concepts like Nahuatl, tlacuilo, the Florentine Codex, Tenochtitlan and Manifest Destiny. The work is an act of resistance against oppression and serves to teach us about Aztec life and the Americas before European expansion. The literature encourages one to contemplate topics such as why they included a Tongva People Acknowledgement and learn our history and expand our consciousness. Cura believes that “the production of Tlacuilx, and the collaborative work that was essential to its genesis closely echoes the work of the tlacuilx as they worked on the 12-volume book they were making for Bernardo de Sahagun and the Historia General de Nueva Espana.” The 12-volume book, known as the Florentine Codex, served as a guide and history to the Aztec people of the conquering Spaniards. The tlacuilos were Aztec artist scribes who were forced to complete the Florentine Codex for Spain under harsh conditions amidst a pandemic. For those interested in Project 1521, they also have a 1521 Podcast. It features conversations, original poetry and interviews with the members of Project 1521. They have raised nearly $3,000 from the podcast that has gone towards the publication of the book.
Chicken Soup Is Not Good for Your Soul
Artist returns to Culver City with unique video installation series
By Bridgette M. Redman
While there are books that tell you chicken soup is good for the soul, Sam Tufnell argues the point. The New York artist who was born in Los Angeles and spent his teen years there recently showcased his iconic video installation series, “Chicken Soup Is Not Good for Your Soul” in the IV Gallery’s booth at Spring/Break Art Show in Culver City. The installation got its debut at Spring/ Break in New York City late last year. The work is a video installation that features a continuous loop of his chicken soup sculptures disintegrating under high heat. Yes, chicken soup sculptures. It’s a shift for the artist who said that in the fine arts world, he’s very much identified as a sculptor and a mold maker, someone who did a lot of metal working. “I was doing all these steel roses and everything was kind of romantic,” Tufnell said. “I wanted to be able to reproduce faster, so that was the idea with the mold-making.” He explained that in his 20s he was doing romantic work, in his 30s he was trying to produce art on a factory level, and now he is going for something different, something that doesn’t have the permanence of his previous work. “What I’ve enjoyed the most about sculpture in particular is that there are a lot of mediums and different techniques, they’re all quite endless really,” Tufnell said. Which is what now brings him to the chicken soup work along with other food and biodegradable stuffs. “In part, it was a little pact of a joke I made with myself when I was first in art school,” Tufnell said. “As I go further along, eventually I would go backward and begin playing with food again. I wanted to do something a bit more complicated, so I sort of settled on chicken soup. I originally wanted to do a Warhol sort of Campbells with all 32 of the soups, but I realized, no, that’s going to take me a long time. I ended up zeroing in on the chicken soup idea as it had the most cultural reference.” He pointed out that people, especially in the Western world, have a deep relationship to chicken soup and it holds a lot of different meanings to them. Those who have seen his work said he is exploding the chicken soup mystique that Americans have. His work references conflicting aspects of consumerism, climate change, capitalism and the art market. The soupy sculptures are made into the forms of such things as skulls, fruit, the Mona Lisa and letters/slogans. He uses molds to sculpt the objects from actual chicken soup and Artist Sam Tufnell recently showcased the newest variations to his iconic video installation series, “Chicken Soul Is Not Good for Your Soul,” in the IV Gallery’s booth at Spring/Break Art Show in Culver City.
then takes pictures of them as they disintegrate. He digitally edits the photos into a video stream in a technique similar to Claymation. Tufnell said of all the different foodstuffs he’s worked with, chicken soup has been the most difficult. “It’s one of the more unforgiving mediums,” Tufnell said. “In part, because it is oily, which made it a bit harder to congeal and it could get slimy. It was also a weird material in that it is kind of opaque so a lot of stuff just didn’t read well. I cast something in a shape that I thought would look cool and it just looked like a block of unrecognizable dog food.” Tufnell’s process involved picking a mold, filling it with soup and then freezing it. He put out fold-up cubes that people use to take pictures of jewelry — a riff on advertising. He put the frozen sculpture into the cube and heated the room up. He duct-taped heat guns onto stands and set up theater lights so that the sculptures melted. He took pictures over a six- to eight-hour period as the soup disintegrated. He then took all the stills to the computer to create a time-lapse video for the installation. “The whole thing has been a huge leap from the usual manual labor of welding and molding,” Tufnell said. “It’s been a good way of combining mediums and using them really for what they should be used for. I said to someone recently that I’m not really sure if I’m making art anymore or documentaries of food. I don’t know. It gets a little tricky.” Tufnell hopes that in his exhibitions and sales of this work that viewers will be able to see what he is trying to do and be interested in the reasons behind it. “I am trying desperately to push the field forward and try new things, no matter how ridiculous making a film out of chicken soup can be,” Tufnell said. “At the very least, you are opening new possibilities.” He wants to see art work progress in a direction where artists are no longer dealing with static things, where it has a life span in which the viewer can see
things come together and come apart as opposed to lasting for centuries in a museum. Tufnell is enthusiastic about moving into the NFT world. He said there have been many things that he made in his studio that could never be sold because they were unstable or simply did not end up the way he wanted them to be. With NFT, he will be able to sell some of this work as digital art. NFT is something he said oddly coincides with his vision. “No one is really seeing it this way,” Tufnell said. “When I see the NFT, I don’t think of digital art as a lot of performance artists and video artists do. I really look at it as this time-based medium, kind of a thing to make art out of time on a grand scale.” Tufnell believes that sculptors need to do something to grow a bit or they are going to be stuck doing the same thing forever. Seeing himself as a sculptor and documentarian, he thinks NFTs are an exciting new direction. It’s encouraged him to continue to evolve and change his work. “I’ve been trying to work on more complicated things where I’ve been using air compressors and liquids,” Tufnell said. “It’s going to get wackier.”
Sam Tufnell
samtufnell.com Tufnell has used his prior experience as a mold maker and caster to create various compositions of phrases and ordinary subject matter all entirely rendered in chicken soup, which he then photographs as it disintegrates and digitally edits into a video stream similar to the way traditional Claymation was originally performed.
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