Luis Camnitzer

Luis Camnitzer in conversation with Liam Gillick, and K8 Hardy, in conjunction with the launch of e-flux journal no. 71.

Wednesday, March 23, 7:30pm
e-flux
311 East Broadway, 3rd Floor,
New York, NY 10002

conversation between Luis Camnitzer, Liam Gillick, and K8 Hardy, prompted by Camnitzer’s text in e-flux journal no. 71, “The Cracked Ming Cup”:

“In 1963, the Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano went to China to interview the last emperor, Pu Yi. He and I were both working for Marcha, a Uruguayan weekly, at the time. Upon his return he commented about finding centuries-old Ming cups treated as useless garbage because they were cracked and had lost their functionality.

A decade or two later I came across a mechanical toy that had been used for an exercise in restoration. In good shape, the object was probably worth less than $100, but the labor invested in restoring it was worth well over ten times that much. The result was impressive.

I thought about how the relationship between value and labor might act as a filter for posterity. Both functionality and exchange-value affect legacy, determining what remains for future generations to encounter and what does not. Though a trivial insight, it hit me only then that the objects we use to understand different cultures are simply those that have been allowed to survive long enough to become symbols representing a set of relations we then define as culture.”

The conversation will be moderated by e-flux journal editor Stephen Squibb, and also celebrates the launch of the March issue of the journal.