ON FILE

The Kitchen Archives

The Kitchen Archives holds an extensive collection of posters, ephemera, and historic audio and videotapes from events and performances spanning over the 50 years of its history. The development of The Kitchen's Finding Aid is currently in process and updated frequently. Please visit our ArchivesSpace to see more of our holdings. The Kitchen Archives is located in Brooklyn, New York and is open to visiting researchers by appointment.

The Kitchen ArchivesSpace

Spotlight: Exploring The Point of Intersection Between Race & Technology By Zinariya Ali

The point of intersection between race and technology has been the site for exploration by Kitchen collaborators for the past 20 years. This inquiry sustains relevancy over the years and manifests in many forms, influenced by the archive as well as BIPOC artists’ need for safe spaces to explore identity during times of political insecurity. Tracie Morris and Los Cybrids: *La Raza Techno-Crítica*’s work created in the same year (2003) explore the intersection between race and technology. Both Morris’s *Afrofuturistic* and Los Cybrids’s *Chicano, Chicana, Latino, Latina, Hispano, Hispana: TEch TV* examine the historical impact of technology on their respective communities. The works visually represent themes like surveillance, technology, modernization, futurism, and identity through performance and video art respectively. *Afrofuturistic* presents a genre-bending performance orchestrated by a Black woman envisioning the possibilities of the landscape of an Afrofuturist future, focusing on language and presentation. *TEch TV* is a video piece that mimics the format of a public program episode focusing on Latino advancements within technology and its interruption of the natural existence of humanity. Language and music intertwine in both videos, envisioning futuristic possibilities birthed from the merging of identity and technology. Dually, these inspire hope and provide an escape for people of color who are subjected to the harsh realities of technology’s real-world impact on their communities. This point of intersection resurfaces in The Kitchen’s 2022-23 L.A.B. Residency research project, *Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe*. This residency followed researchers and artists in their attempts to define what the Black Gooey Universe looks like, which encompasses an exploration of programming, technology, and identity. The gooey universe has manifested itself in The Kitchen’s past, before it became a fully fledged concept. The gooey universe transcends time to include all people of color. By Zinariya Ali, 2025 Kitchen Intern.

May 15 - May 24, 2003

Afrofuturistic:

Tracie Morris, Graham Haynes, Laurie Carlos, David Thomson, and Michelle Halsell

2000s Dance Literature Performance

Jan 1 - Jan 1, 2003

Los Cybrids La Raza Techno-Crítica:

René García, John Jota Leaños, Praba Pilar

Jan 1 - Jan 1, 2020

Foreword to "Instruments of the Black Gooey Universe: The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 L.A.B. Research Residency":

Daniella Brito, Allison Burstein

Spotlight: Christina Augustin on the Mimetic Theory of Desire in The Kitchen's Programmatic History

All desire is the result of imitation. The mimetic theory of desire, originated by French anthropologist René Girard, refers to human desire as a product of a mimetic process in which people imitate models who endow objects with value. Mimetic theory moves through a four-stage process of desire, conflict, scapegoating, and cover-up. This Archival Spotlight by 2024 Curatorial and Archive Intern Christina Augustin brings together three programs in The Kitchen’s archive by artists Lynda Bengalis, Stanton Kaye, Miranda July, and Karen Finley, who, through varying methods of performance, work to break down the social constructions of desire as proposed by mimetic theory. Lynda Benglis and Stanton Kaye explore the resounding violence of gender hierarchy in imitative desire through short film *The Amazing Bow Wow* (1976) when human Babu cuts off the tongue of talking hermaphroditic dog Bow Wow in an aim for the sole affections of companion Rexina. Live-movie *Swan Tool* (2001) by Miranda July tackles desire as an innately isolating social construction when protagonist Lisa Cobb becomes unable to decide whether she wants to live or die, buries herself in her backyard, and then continues to live and work, keeping up appearances. Through monologues on womb envy, and the oppressive nature of motherhood, Karen Finley’s *The Constant State of Desire* (1986) explores social desire by positioning male desirability as a prerequisite for womanhood. In examining, self-objectification, perceived male intrasexual competition, and forced seclusion through the lenses of the second and third wave feminist movements, these Kitchen artists situate mimetic desire as arbiter of a gendered violence in which there is no life or death.

Oct 18 - Oct 20, 1976

The Amazing Bow-Wow:

Lynda Benglis, Stanton Kaye

Dec 5 - Dec 5, 2001

The Swan Tool:

Miranda July

Dec 3 - Dec 6, 1986

The Constant State of Desire :

Karen Finley

Spotlight: Apocalyptic Symphony: Violence Done To and By Machines

This Archival Spotlight by 2023-24 Curatorial and Archive Intern Olivia McKayla Ross reflects on programs in The Kitchen’s archive where artists utilize their practice to make sense of technologies of war and asymmetrical power. The timeline of America’s technological advancement is the timeline of our military history—from the ARPANET of the early '70s to modern GPS navigation, to even everyday items like superglue and saxophones. We are “saved” in a “wireless cloud” whose terms of use we do not read, and technological violence, which is real, becomes abstracted. With giant construction machines and pyrotechnics, the Bay Area-based Survival Research Laboratories’ 1988 performance of *The Misfortunes of Desire* (Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having) in Shea Stadium walloped it’s audience with a robot battle with a violent scale Americans usually only see on the news. Lea Bertucci’s *Mass of Dissolution* (2019) utilized percussionists for beats resembling helicopter wings, marching soldiers, drum corps fragments, and the sounds of industrial equipment towards a prayer against the empty savagery of military-industrial power. As part of *Artists Call*, a nationwide mobilization of artists and intellectuals organizing out of New York City in 1984, The Kitchen platformed Central American documentary art and anti-propaganda, such as Agrarian Reform TV (from Nicaragua), Guatemalan Personal Testimonies, Sandinista TV and more, citing "If we can simply witness the destruction of another culture, we are sacrificing our own right to make culture." Lastly, sound art pioneer Christina Kubisch’s work *New York Electrical Walk*, loaned to the Kitchen as part of a 2006 sound art exhibition *Invisible Geographies*, turned the quiet flow of electromagnetic power into sonics through transduction, revealing a massive surveillance infrastructure that sits on top of the city. These Kitchen artists refuse the magician’s act by reintroducing audiences to the invisiblized technologies of cameras, sound systems, and robotics, disrupting abstraction by foregrounding the martial context these technologies are used to support––the martial context we live, work, and play inside of.

Jan 24 - Jan 19, 2019

Mass of Dissolution:

Lea Bertucci

May 17 - May 17, 1988

The Misfortunes of Desire (Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having):

Survival Research Laboratories

Jan 17 - Jan 28, 1984

Artists Call Against US Intervention In Central America:

Artists Call

Sep 9 - Oct 14, 2006

Invisible Geographies: New Sound Art from Germany:

Christina Kubisch, Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, Jens Brand, Stefan Rummel

Spotlight: Staging the “Objecthood”: Dean Moss at The Kitchen

Dean Moss’s presence as both performer and dance curator (1999-2004) at The Kitchen has made him a sustained collaborator within the organization’s community. This duality between artist and curator prompted Moss to push the limits of dance and choreography in an experimental and interdisciplinary vision and space. This Archival Spotlight by 2023-24 Archival and Curatorial Intern Emiko Inoue brings together three programs co-directed and performed by Moss at The Kitchen, varying in contents and themes, that each interrogate and demonstrate the elements of “objecthood.” *figures on a field* (2005) is a program co-directed by Moss and visual artist Laylah Ali that questions how racial stereotypes on behaviors can be critiqued by restaging gestures and moves in a deviated setting far from social norms. Here, Moss introduces a museum docent figure who subjectively interprets the performers gestures and moves, and in doing so, forces the viewers to be conscious of their experience as the audience of an audience. Such repetition delegates and degrades the assumed authority of witnessing the performance. *Nameless Forest* (2011) is another collaborative work by Moss with Korean sculptor Sungmyung Chun that interrogates the figuration of a community through the individual and the collective’s participation in ritual rites. This program furtherly foregrounds the identity of an audience: the audience’s participation is taken inside the stage, either to be part of the performance or to be asked to answer questions by performers. By using the historical persona of the 19th century white abolitionist John Brown, *johnbrown* (2014) is one of Moss’s crucial performances which experimentally actualizes the racial issues into the present era. johnbrown is a work that creatively reimagines the narrative history of race––for instance, by projecting a video of an imaginative dialogue between John Brown and Fredrick Douglass. At one point, these visionary creations are disrupted by a distinct character, who mimics a contemporary singer that talks to the audience. All of these programs construct “objecthood” in a unique way, which coincides with the ripening moment in the early to mid 2000s when dance performances became frequently presented at museums and collecting institutions. In contrast to these tendencies, Moss’s programs at The Kitchen are concerned with how the authority to objectively view a performance can be critiqued, and how a non-museum, alternative space allows room to redefine “objecthood” in the context of performance.