Anthony Discenza
Community Engagement Updates
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Healthy Initiatives Edition,
Mistakes May Have Been Made Edition 8,
Where Have I Been All Your Life Edition,
from the series “Community Engagement Updates”
printed text on paper
8.5” x 11”
Anthony Discenza’s work is often hidden in plain sight. The artist has taken over outdoor advertising spaces like billboards as well as space associated with civic control like the street signs he designed for Palo Alto, Questions About Your City. These text-based works are open-ended rather than declarative, drawing attention to the contradictions and possibilities of public spheres sited in architectural, civic, or virtual spaces. For Tinworks Art 2020, Discenza has created a set of three texts that will be dispersed around Bozeman. Rather than drawing attention to themselves, they are designed to blend in, and thus to create unexpected encounters between the viewer and the text. These “Community Engagement Updates” are taken with minimal alteration from the recently leaked transcript of Mark Zuckerberg's internal meeting with Facebook employees regarding the decision to leave up one of Trump's inflammatory tweets, which created widespread dissension within the company.
“Zuckerberg's language is deeply intriguing to me because of its strange opacity and the way it never seems to address anything directly. Extracted from its context, its dissociative qualities become more ambiguous and ridiculous, but also more ominous. It felt especially relevant in the current moment, not only for its timeliness but in the way Zuckerberg's non-position feels representative of a larger dysfunction in the US.It also seemed interesting to return the language of the head of one of the most powerful entities in the world (Facebook currently has more than 2 and half billion followers) back into the context of a community bulletin board, which is of course what the earliest version of Facebook essentially functioned as.”
A commissioned project for the city of Palo Alto, Questions About Your City presented a series of questions loosely adapted from English-as-a-second-language conversation materials. Orbiting around narratives of civic participation and progress, the texts were presented in the form of 20 street signs distributed throughout downtown Palo Alto for one year.
As part of Good Things Take Time, a multi-city collaboration between The Thing Quarterly and Levi's, artists were commissioned to create public projects in five target cities. Inspired in part by Padgett Powell's experimental novel The Interrogative Mood, the Travel Advisories were a series of eight posters that mimicked the format of MTA notices, each featuring a set of questions loosely adapted from crisis counseling narratives. The posters were installed in the Delancey Street Subway Station in NY for one month in the summer of 2013.
ABOUT ANTHONY DISCENZA
Anthony Discenza received his Master’s degree in Film and Video from California College of the Arts and his Bachelors in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. His work is directed by a preoccupation with interrupting the flow of information in various formats. While his work has often been video-based, it has also taken the form of other mediums such as text, imagery, and computer generated sound.
Discenza’s work has been presented widely around the United States and globally, including with the San Francisco Arts Commission, the United Nations Pavilion in Shanghai, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty Center and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. His work has garnered critical acclaim in Artforum, Artweek, and ArtReview, among other publications.
In 2012, he received the Alumni New Works Award from Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California. Most recently, Discenza’s work was featured in group shows at Queen’s Nails and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco; The University of Michigan Museum of Art; and Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2014, Discenza completed a commission for the City of Palo Alto, as well as for SFAC’s Art City project—aimed to raise funds and awareness for an ambitious takeover of advertisement space throughout San Francisco. Discenza lives and works in Massachusetts and had his first exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery in 2004.
Website: http://anthonydiscenza.info
@yourethinkingofabrickwall