Park McArthur and Jason Hirata, Resident Artist Lecture 2023

Jason Hirata and Park McArthur present a lecture together talking about their interdisciplinary and writing practices. They begin the lecture by exploring a longstanding theme in their work, examining the relationship between looking at the normal and the banal. The artists talk about how this looking weaves throughout their day to day life. Hirata and McArthur also speak about the presence of artist foundations and estates, especially the ways in which they preserve art work, advocate for art work, and are primarily structured around a solo artist practice. Hirata and McArthur discuss how the estate or foundation model can help create a more social view of art history, so that practices that were once deeply entangled or imbedded within one another as art can be better understood historically or preserved moving forward. McArthur then speaks about printmaking, and how it taught her to see the ways in which artists were making their work together due to the materiality and techniques of printmaking, which exceed one person’s capacity. The lecture then shifts to Hirata who talks about his work as a videographer, working as an editor, producer, and sound designer with other artists who also have wide interdisciplinary practices. The conversation moves back to McArthur who speaks about disability, and how it is something to be proven to an outward arbiter, whether that’s social security, or accommodation, or access in an institutional setting. This has made McArthur realize that there are intractable ways in which art is circulated that can be fetishistic, and how artists can push back against this by through shared practice and methodology.