The Night of the Dinner Party provides a meditation on art criticism and aesthetics in the context of current world events, namely the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the bellicose threats directed at Iran. I also wanted to explore the concept of the defiantly crude artwork. Holly Willis describes this tactic: "Made on low-end equipment with very little money, these projects celebrate the qualities on the negative side of a bipolar schema used to rank the quality, and by extension, the value, of an [artwork] by purposefully refusing to strive toward a certain aesthetic standard. Instead of achieving a kind of 'fullness' or saturation in terms of a mainstream notion of production value, there is a striving for the opposite, for either a kind of depletion and emptying out of these values or for a proliferation or intensification of these values in such a way that they are ultimately undermined."*

These photographs of The Night of the Dinner Party were taken at the Santa Fe Art Institute Open Studios in October 2008. I wanted the stark coloring and texture of the photos -- with the artist/me presenting the work -- emphasize the low-tech quality of the piece. The photos were taken by Michelle Laflamme-Childs (SFAI). The text is appropriated from the September 2007 issue of Modern Painters (London).

* From Holly Willis, "At Hand: The Tactics of Feminist Media Practice," Striking Distance