
James Buckhouse: Serg Riva
On View Through May 31, 2010
http://netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Serg Riva, author of a blog chronicling his privileged yet insecure life as an haute couture swimwear designer, is a fictional persona and art project of Bay Area artist James Buckhouse. You can enjoy the project at the level of a witty send-up of the contemporary fashion world, but there is more going on here. Riva belongs to a long line of artistic noms de plume, from Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy to the 1990s Internet art persona Mouchette. Mouchette demonstrated how authorship and identity are constructed amid the endless masquerade ball of the Internet, and Buckhouse takes us further by unpacking social class and psychological elements of that pastiche. Riva is an aspirational character through which Buckhouse explores how identity is constructed in the slippery class environment of the twenty-first century, where “high” and “low” cultures continue their decades-long slow-motion collision, exemplified today by the couture fashion reality TV show.
Link:
http://netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu
Richard Rinehart is the Director of the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University. Previous to holding his position at Bucknell, Richard was the Digital Media Director and Adjunct Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Richard has taught digital art studio and theory at UC Berkeley in the Center for New Media and Art Practice departments. He has also been visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and JFK University. Richard sits on the Executive Committee of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media and has served on the Board of Directors for New Langton Arts in San Francisco. Richard manages research projects in the area of digital culture, including the NEA-funded project, 'Archiving the Avant Garde', a national consortium of museums and artists distilling the essence of digital art in order to document and preserve it. Richard is a new media artist whose art works, papers, projects, and more can be found at http://www.coyoteyip.com
marc garrett