was a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It was led by a desire to support artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art. This website serves as an archive of Yale Union’s programming from 2011 through 2021.

Yale Union acknowledges that it occupies the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Chinook, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples.

BENJAMIN THOREL

EV

Les Vacances de Monsieur Castillo
A Lecture
Monday, March 5, 7pm
Free

We think influence is a strong and evocative drink. We know some people fear it, but we’re an eager embracer of models and anti-models, both. One of our models, however abstractly or remotely, is castillo/corrales, a 600 square foot gallery in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. So what specifically can we learn from a tiny French-thing like castillo/corrales? Well, let’s start with metabolism (rate of production) and a house-voice that neither necessitates a decoder ring nor inversely patronizes the art or artist with goopy baby-talk.

We’ve learned volumes from watching them, but we’re not going to match them at doing castillo/corrales shows, and even if we could, what would be the point? So we’re not worried about following in their footsteps, or appearing to, because our work is never going to look like theirs. It’s about extrapolating a lesson, or having an idea of our own sparked by some idea we’ve encountered there, and then putting those things to work in a wholly other context, the means to different ends of our own devising. We love the idea of shaping our nest from bits pinched from all over the place. Who doesn’t work this way? Whose ideas are so significant they forget outside phrasing?  Aren’t we all a little fooly about the false significance of the Ego?

It seems by necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. And what do you know, recent Neurological data shows that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched.  So, if we cut-and-paste ourselves and our history, might we not forgive it of our artworks and our institutions?

Jacques Tati, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, 1953