Showing papers in "Art Journal in 2001"
175 citations
TL;DR: Lee et al. as mentioned in this paper present a critical account of Matta-Clark's work in the context of the art of the 1970s and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the right to the city, and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.
Abstract: Although highly regarded during his short life -- and honored by artists and architects today -- the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as \"building cuts.\" Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space. Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction -- suggest about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the 1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making -- that the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do these projects address the very writing of history, a history that imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of progress? In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s -- particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices -- and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the \"right to the city,\" and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.
36 citations
TL;DR: Catherine Opie as discussed by the authors is a social documentary photographer of international renown whose primary artistic concerns are community and identity, whether gender, sexual, or otherwise, who rose to prominence in the early 1990s with an extraordinary series of portraits of her close friends within the Los Angeles S-M community.
Abstract: Catherine Opie is a social documentary photographer of international renown whose primary artistic concerns are community and identity—gender, sexual, or otherwise. She rose to prominence in the early 1990s with an extraordinary series of portraits of her close friends within the Los Angeles S-M community. Her Being and Having series of 1991 consists of thirteen portraits of the artist's lesbian friends, donning theatrical moustaches, goatees, and “masculine” names, (Papa Bear, Wolf, and so on), while another series from that period, Portraits, offers up lushly colored, sympathetic images of her “marginalized” subjects—cross-dressers, tattooed dominatrixes, female-to-male transsexuals, drag kings, and other body manipulators.
25 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the digital and the global are deeply imbricated with the material and the local in the case of a global city, and that topographic representations of such a city fail to capture the fact that components of a city's topography may be spatializations of global power projects and/or may be located on global circuits, thereby destabilizing the meaning of the local or the sited.
Abstract: Examining a city or metropolitan region in terms of its built topography is, perhaps, increasingly inadequate in a global digital era. On the one hand, topography does not engage what are today the dominant accounts about globalization and digitalization, accounts which evict place and materiality and hence what we might call the topographic moment. Yet, as I will argue below, the digital and the global are deeply imbricated with the material and the local in the case of a global city. Topographic representations of such a city fail to capture the fact that components of a city's topography may be spatializations of global power projects and/or may be located on global circuits, thereby destabilizing the meaning of the local or the sited, and hence the topographic representation of such a city.1
19 citations
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TL;DR: The photographic self-portraits of Shirin Neshat in which she appears in the role of a “veiled” Muslim woman, often with a gun, and with parts of her body covered with written text invoke well-known media cliches of Oriental culture and their established, although not necessarily unambiguous, meaning as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Sign for the OrientThe photographic self-portraits of Shirin Neshat in which she appears in the role of a “veiled” Muslim woman, often with a gun, and with parts of her body covered with written text invoke well-known media cliches of Oriental culture and their established, although not necessarily unambiguous, meaning.1 In the Middle East, the image of a covered woman is one of the most ubiquitous signs for contemporary Islamic fundamentalist societies.
18 citations
TL;DR: Superflat is the brainchild of the Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, a concept that has spawned a book, a traveling exhibition, and even an art movement, according to one Los Angeles...
Abstract: “Superflat” is the brainchild of the Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, a concept that has spawned a book, a traveling exhibition, and even an art movement, according to one Los Angeles...
17 citations
TL;DR: In the early 2000s, in the midst of headlines about the stock market's temporary collapse and the mounting tensions between Cuba and the United States over the case of the child Elian Gonzalez, I find myself studying the obdurate resurfacing of the ever-accumulating past.
Abstract: After months of writing texts for specific books and catalogues, I have entered again a time and space of floating thoughts and feelings.I have been reading intensely, but incompletely—opening and closing book after book, then slowly returning to select a chapter, a short text, a paragraph, a phrase, a word—including Michel Foucault's “Of Other Spaces.” There he talks of the nineteenth century's “great obsession” with history, and the “ever-accumulating past,” as opposed to the present, which he describes as “an epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”But I stubbornly want to stay attentive to the ever-accumulating past in order to make (at least temporarily) some sort of sense of it.In April 2000, in the midst of headlines about the stock market's temporary collapse and the mounting tensions between Cuba and the United States over the case of the child Elian Gonzalez, I find myself studying the obdurate resurfacing of ...
14 citations
TL;DR: The U.S. imagination in particular has constructed an image of Cuba as a land of the mulatta, of mambo, of the sea, where, according to the critic Gerardo Mosquera, artists grow as plentifully as wild grass as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The blockade mentality, the result of a political and economic reality, has fostered a lack of communication between the United States and Cuba since 1959, which in turn has contributed to the mythologization of each in the eyes of the other. Myths about Cuba have been created by both the left and the right in the United States, as well as by some of the Cuban community in exile. The U.S. imagination in particular has constructed an image of Cuba as a land of the mulatta, of mambo, of the sea, where, according to the critic Gerardo Mosquera, artists grow as plentifully as wild grass. In fact, since the 1980s, Cuban artists have become an increasingly visible presence in the international art world. One of the major factors in this increased visibility is the Havana Biennial, which was established in 1984—after the Sao Paulo Biennial, the most important international art biennial in the Western Hemisphere.
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors examine the connections between diaspora -the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of a nation or group of people from one homeland to another - and its representations in visual culture.
Abstract: This is the first book to examine the connections between diaspora - the movement, whether forced or voluntary, of a nation or group of people from one homeland to another - and its representations in visual culture. Two foundational articles by Stuart Hall and the painter R.B. Kitaj provide points of departure for an exploration of the meanings of diaspora for cultural identity and artistic practice. A distinguished group of contributors, who include Alan Sinfield, Irit Rogoff, and Eunice Lipton, address the rich complexity of diasporic cultures and art, but with a focus on the visual culture of the Jewish and African diasporas. Individual articles address the Jewish diaspora and visual culture from the 19th century to the present, and work by African American and Afro-Brazilian artists.
12 citations
TL;DR: The situation of whiteness is that of a body historicized and racialized to the point where its material particularity is obscured as discussed by the authors, and otherness is violently suppressed in order to promote the idea of a universal figure of disembodied, metaphysical transcendence.
Abstract: Unquestioned, whiteness provides the models by which the Western subject judges culture. As the norm, whiteness passes unremarked, perpetuating the canonical conventions and traditions that sustain its privilege;1 whiteness is assumed, while only otherness is pronounced.2 Any study of whiteness, therefore, has to consider the role it plays as the universalist measure against which all other identities become particular—made too particular to be applied universally. Although woven into the very fabric of Western culture, it is a discourse that makes bodies matter and that gives matter meaning.3 The situation of whiteness is that of a body historicized and racialized to the point where its material particularity is obscured. Otherness is violently suppressed in order to promote the idea of a universal figure of disembodied, metaphysical transcendence.4
11 citations
TL;DR: The paradigms and methods of accommodating black South African artists' works have changed over the past fifteen years in accordance with prevailing art theoretical discourses and with imperatives fueled by current political ideologies.
Abstract: As a result of South Africa's historical legacy, vast aesthetic, technical, and conceptual discrepancies have tended to differentiate the works of many self-taught black artists from academically trained and internationally connected whites. Given these incongruities—which persist with the exception of a small elite of internationally recognized black artists—art historians and curators have been challenged to develop conceptual models that succeed in resolving differences or bridging gaps. This challenge has become more acute since the late 1980s, when a growing number of black artists were “discovered” and their works were “elevated” from the lower ranks of craft and folk art to “fine” or “high” art, a category previously reserved largely for white artists. The paradigms and methods of accommodating black South African artists' works have changed over the past fifteen years in accordance with prevailing art theoretical discourses and with imperatives fueled by current political ideologies. Both of these...
TL;DR: Rogoff et al. as discussed by the authors consider the starting point of a project as a position of being "without", which is not a form of negation of existing subjects and methods, nor a formof lack.
Abstract: Rogoff: One of the things our work has in common is that its inception as a project isn't organized around an existent subject or an existent methodology. Therefore, it seems possible to think about its starting point as a position of being “without,” which is not a form of negation of existing subjects and methods, nor a form of lack. “Without” is an interesting formulation because it isn't turning your back on, or denying, what you had at your disposal previously. It assumes that you had a model, to begin with.
TL;DR: Nikki S. Lee, a Korean-born artist who lives in New York, has made it her project to infiltrate and mimic the subcultures of American life.
Abstract: Nikki S. Lee, a Korean-born artist who lives in New York, has made it her project to infiltrate and mimic the subcultures of American life. For weeks or even months she immerses herself in a community or cultural milieu—lesbians, drag queens, Ohio trailer-park dwellers, skateboarders, senior citizens, Hispanic or Japanese street kids—meticulously adopting its codes of dress and behavior and its living habits. Throughout a self-defined residency in which she lives and interacts with these people, Lee has herself photographed—by a friend who accompanies her, by a member of her adopted social group, or even by a passing stranger to whom she hands her point-and-shoot camera. The photographs documenting Lee's effort to blend into these communities at first appear to be crude snapshots, replete with date stamp and flash-triggered red eye. Closer scrutiny reveals their visual and intellectual sophistication, their raw, uncanny ability to represent the complexity and fluidity of human identity.
TL;DR: Ben Shahn's New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene Ben Shahn and Postwar American Art: Shared Visions Allegory in the Work of BenShahn Color Plates Catalogue of the Exhibition Chronology Selected Bibliography Index of Names as discussed by the authors
Abstract: Lenders to the Exhibition Ben Shahn's New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene Ben Shahn and Postwar American Art: Shared Visions Allegory in the Work of Ben Shahn Color Plates Catalogue of the Exhibition Chronology Selected Bibliography Index of Names
TL;DR: The human body/mind complex can be seen as a complicated machine capable of extension into the world through vision as mentioned in this paper, as described by Offray de la Mettrie in his 1748 book L'homme machine.
Abstract: Whether overtly or not, all visual culture plumbs the complex and profound intersections among visuality, embodiment, and the logics of mechanical, industrial, or cybernetic systems. By making and interpreting visual culture, visual theorists (artists, art critics, and art historians) explore aspects of the human body/mind complex as a “complicated machine” capable of extension into the world through vision (per Julien Offray de la Mettrie in his 1748 book L'homme machine).
TL;DR: Pepon Osorio's knick-knack-encrusted objects and installations represent a visually potent engagement with Puerto Rican popular culture on the mainland and, more specifically, are the products of the artist's own experiences living and working in the barrios of New York City.
Abstract: Pepon Osorio's knick-knack-encrusted objects and installations represent a visually potent engagement with Puerto Rican popular culture on the mainland and, more specifically, are the products of the artist's own experiences living and working in the barrios of New York City. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Osorio moved to New York in 1975 at the age of twenty. For the past fifteen years, he has been creating artwork marked by his signature style, a visual overload of tchotchkas, plastic toys, Puerto Rican flags, tourist and religious kitsch items, and products “made in Korea.” His adoption of this kitsch aesthetic has prompted one critic to call his work “plastic heaven”1 and one curator to title his 1991 retrospective at El Museo del Barrio in New York, “con to' los hierros”—a Puerto Rican expression loosely translated as “giving it all you've got.” Disrupting normative distinctions of taste and high art, Osorio uses kitsch to engage with the complicated formation of lower- and middle-class Puerto Rican ...
TL;DR: In the Projects Series at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York as mentioned in this paper, a single drop of water cascaded down a vast, white wall.
Abstract: In 1997 I saw an early manifestation of Ann Hamilton's tearing wall, in the Projects Series at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. The simplicity of this minimalist gesture—a tiny, single drop of water snaking its way down a vast, white wall—belied an elaborate technical apparatus just beneath the surface. Almost unnoticed by passers-by, this weeping wall imbued the space with an elegiac quality. It seemed a subtle testimony to a loss unacknowledged by the indifference of its architectural support. The disjunction between what was visible and what was hidden, between this poetic gesture and its technological manufacture, augured a shift in Hamilton's work from an emphasis on material excess to a concern with haunting presences that are barely detectable, and yet somehow persistent.
TL;DR: The authors found that more often than not, multiculturalism entered museums through their education departments, which in large museums, responded to mainstream audiences, which often perceive it as a hermetic language and to engage people of color from previously untapped working-class communities and recent immigrant populations.
Abstract: Responses mainstream audiences, which often perceive it as a hermetic language, and to engage people of color from previously untapped working-class communities and recent immigrant populations. Throughout the 198os and 199os, museum education departments began to address America's changing demographics long before curatorial departments did. Thus, more often than not, multiculturalism entered museums through their education departments, which in large
TL;DR: Within the discipline of art history, attention currently is paid to investigating the genealogy of whiteness and its effects on visual production, although the profession does not yet reflect the diversity of the population at large as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Within the discipline of art history, attention currently is paid to investigating the genealogy of whiteness and its effects on visual production, although the profession does not yet reflect the diversity of the population at large. This discrepancy raises questions about the roles of racialized identity in conventional art-, art-historical, and museological practice. Who appears on which side of the canvas, the desk, and the display case are ethical issues with profound consequences. Whiteness is both specific and ill-defined. It is the norm embedded in the institutions of government, law, the museum, and the university. It is never mentioned, but is presumed to be the baseline, articulated through an amorphous blend of social mechanisms, including the exercise of exclusions and attempts at ethnic blurring. These cultural processes have been present in the creation of visual representation in the United States since its founding, beginning with colonial portraiture.
TL;DR: Ligon and Firstenberg as discussed by the authors discuss the non-linear relationship of language to image, as well as the negotiation of abstraction and figuration in the artist's larger practice, and discuss a new series of work will be shown at D'Amelio Terras in New York in spring 2001.
Abstract: Since a major exhibition of his work of the 1990s at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in 1998, Glenn Ligon has produced new paintings, works on paper, and wall drawings for numerous exhibitions. Coloring: New Work by Glenn Ligon, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from October 22, 2000, to March 11, 2001, featured images from black-themed coloring books of the 1970s silkscreened onto large canvases. Glenn Ligon: Stranger, on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem from January 31 to April 8, 2001, included eight of the artist's coal-dust paintings, which incorporate text from James Baldwin's 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village.” A new series of work will be shown at D'Amelio Terras in New York in spring 2001. In this interview, Ligon and Firstenberg discuss the nondialectical relationship of language to image, as well as the negotiation of abstraction and figuration in the artist's larger practice.
TL;DR: In this article, a small group of writers, curators, and artists whose work considers the expression of individual, collective, and speculative experiences in contemporary art were asked to reflect on the junction of the "black subject" and technology.
Abstract: The advent of electronic media and the information age has had a profound impact on social interaction and cultural identity. We have all found our notions of consciousness, our perceptions of reality, and our daily lives altered and reconstituted by this technological change. Electronic technology, especially digital, seems to have pierced the protective bubble of fixed racial and ethnic identity by making it easy for us to create physically detached screen personas that transcend social realities. Yet in spite of the current cultural climate, which we like to believe has released us from the constraints of identity, the mechanisms of exclusion still persist. I invited a small group of writers, curators, and artists whose work considers the expression of individual, collective, and speculative experiences in contemporary art to reflect on the junction of the “black subject” and technology.
TL;DR: Ali's work explores the tragic lives of the Greenheads, her hypercephalic, thin-limbed, brown-skinned creations as mentioned in this paper, which reflect the contradictions of the human condition.
Abstract: The cultural theorist and novelist Albert Murray once remarked that the mandate of the black intellectual was to provide “technology” to the black community.2 By technology, Murray didn't mean mechanics, new media, or the Internet. Rather, he defined it as those novel analytic approaches he believed necessary to understanding black life “on a higher level of abstraction.”3 For Murray, this process was one of distillation and complication. He advocated theories of African American existence that, like a blueprint, would be sufficiently robust to reveal the larger patterns of society and do justice to its intricacies and complexities. By Murray's definition, the artist Laylah Ali is a technologist of the highest order. In spite of their striking clarity, her gouache images reflect the contradictions of the human condition.Ali's work explores the tragic lives of the Greenheads, her hypercephalic, thin-limbed, brown-skinned creations. Using a limited palette, she composes provocative visual fields noticeably ...
TL;DR: Ghada Amer's elaborately embroidered paintings, sculptures, and installations add discomfiting overtones to the needlework that has played an important role in feminist art for the past thirty years as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Ghada Amer's elaborately embroidered paintings, sculptures, and installations add discomfiting overtones to the needlework that has played an important role in feminist art for the past thirty years. Her works forge uneasy alliances among feminist, Islamic, and postcolonial ideologies, yielding hybrids that settle in no one place, culture, or political position. For example, viewers of Amer's Private Room (1999) encounter hanging garment bags made of richly colored satin and embroidered with extensive texts culled from the Qur'an. By presenting the holy Arabic words in French translation, Amer creates a double obstacle that blocks English-speakers' access to the original meanings.
TL;DR: The group Dumb Type as discussed by the authors examines the politics of globalization and high technology and their social effects on Japanese society by critically examining the issues relating to the environment and quality of life in their work.
Abstract: When I think about Japan, a welter of disconnected images of space and time crowd my mind: modern cramped apartment buildings, ancient wide-roomed castles, fast efficient trains jammed with commuters, serene unadorned Shinto shrines, wide-eyed cartoon characters on television, timeless Buddhist temples filled with incense, omnipresent vending machines, and spare dry landscape kare sansui gardens. Japan's technological, industrial, and economic achievements have been remarkable during the second half of the twentieth century. However, the darker side of its success story has begun to demand attention. Issues relating to the environment and quality of life can no longer be ignored. The internationally acclaimed Japanese performance art group Dumb Type addresses these issues in their work by critically examining the politics of globalization and high technology and their social effects on Japanese society.
TL;DR: There is a growing national trend to invite visual artists to participate in what I call open-process museum-based residencies as mentioned in this paper, where the educational goals of many of these new residencies are to translate contemporary art for mainstream audiences, which often perceive it as a hermetic language, and to engage people of color from previously untapped working-class communities and recent immigrant populations.
Abstract: There is a growing national trend to invite visual artists to participate in what I call open-process museum-based residencies. The challenging educational goals of many of these new residencies are to translate contemporary art for mainstream audiences, which often perceive it as a hermetic language, and to engage people of color from previously untapped working-class communities and recent immigrant populations.
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TL;DR: Early in 1997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic: this was part of an earlier project called Dead Letter Office, a title owed obliquely to Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Early in 1997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic: this was part of an earlier project called Dead Letter Office, a title owed obliquely to Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby's mysterious refusal to work may have begun with his job as a post office clerk sorting undeliverable mail. Re-reading the story, I suddenly imagined that it was difficult and even spiritually challenging to send a letter the short distance from Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywood movie-making had crossed the line.
TL;DR: In her "Cyborg Manifesto" as discussed by the authors, Donna Haraway sees the conflation of body and technology as constitutive of the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism in which technologies of communication and biotechnologies articulate the polymorphous recrafting of bodies.
Abstract: In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” initially published in 1985, Donna Haraway sees the conflation of body and technology as constitutive of the cyborg—a hybrid of machine and organism in which technologies of communication and biotechnologies articulate the polymorphous recrafting of bodies.1 The productivity of Haraway's theory lies in its postulation that the cyborg, as a creature without origins that forms itself through the confusion of boundaries (between the human and the animal, the natural and the artificial, the body and mind), is a fiction that nevertheless maps “our social and corporeal reality” and allows us to imagine beneficial couplings which undo identity in terms of mutability.2 This proposition is concomitant with Judith Butler's postulation of corporeality as performativity, an act of imitation, identification, or melancholic subjection to social norms which is always a reenactment of norms.
TL;DR: Contemporary Returns to Conceptual Art as discussed by the authors was a discussion with three artists who have made "Conceptual art" of the 1960s and 1970s both subject matter and point of departure of their current work.
Abstract: There are several paths through which I came to organize “Contemporary Returns to Conceptual Art,” a public panel that took place at New York University on November 8, 2000. At the most descriptive level, “Contemporary Returns” was announced as a discussion with three artists who have made “Conceptual art” of the 1960s and 1970s both subject matter and point of departure of their current work. While acknowledging aesthetic, discursive, and political debts to “historical” Conceptual art, Renee Green, Silvia Kolbowski, and Stephen Prina have reworked the Conceptual art canon so as to extend pertinent debates in terms of the historical legacy of Conceptual art and contemporary art production.
TL;DR: The authors pointed out that all things in this society, including history, pedagogy, and the pursuit of knowledge, must struggle under the asphyxiating sludge of race, which is the legacy of the myth of whiteness.
Abstract: It is a great tragedy that all things in this society, including history, pedagogy, and the pursuit of knowledge, must struggle under the asphyxiating sludge of race, which is the legacy of the myth of whiteness. I grew up in a different society where color has no meaning outside the painter's palette, and my early training was such that I developed a healthy admiration for the work of artists as varied as Francisco de Goya, Gustave Courbet, Kathe Kollwitz, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, and Ben Shahn, without consciousness of their color.3 I also had considerable exposure to a history of world art without prejudice toward the contributions ofmy own culture to that heritage. I knew one language of art history; a race coding of that language would have appeared ludicrous.However, having since taught in the academy on three continents, I must testify to the cogency of the issues that you raise. A cursory look at the curricula of art history programs across the United States quickly reveals a methodical blin...