Caroline Woolard: Information, Visibility, Collaboration and Labor as Empowerment.

            Caroline Woolard’s practice is one that is engaged with active social modeling, manifest through shared information. The focus of this modeling is activated within labor-based economies. For example, her sculpture “Barricade into Bed” is a sculpture, which she made herself, but is also activated through the open sourcing of her sculpture’s plans. Anyone is offered the opportunity to collaborate with her by altering her plans and sharing those through an open source. In her talk, she emphasizes that her work seeks to avoid discrete objects. “Barricade to Bed” embodies this principle in its open sourcing. Open sourcing can be considered part of the work’s material, one that is time based, ongoing and unpredictable. Through open sourcing all alterations of this sculpture exist as shared information, generating an alternative material and social archive. Her work is not activated through the object itself, but through its connection to other people. Woolard does not assume the role of final authority on her work. She assumes her sculpture as a proposal rather than an end in itself, a means for conversation, experience and shared labor. As a model, this work offers the possibility of a kind of micro economy that revolves around a product, and includes the product’s users as contributors, equal and empowered authorities.

            Visualization of social relationships plays a crucial role in her economic models. In “Barricade to Bed” this visualization occurs though her plans, connections are made and seen through visiting and revisiting her sculpture, its subsequent alterations, and alterations of those alterations. However, other models she proposes and enacts are visualized with the info graphic. In her work with Feral labor, an artist who refuses to travel, instead opting to be paid with a travel-fee equivalent and sending her work through artists whose itineraries intersect with its final destination. The path of travel, in her talk, is visualized through an info graphic, showing an erratic, indirect travel route. “Seeing” plays a role in her work with “Milk not Jails” as well. She does not, in this case, provide a graphic visualization. Her involvement with this organization is rooted in a desire to “see” or acknowledge subtle economic relationships (that between the prison system and dairy farms).

            Woolard's work is manifest as alternative propositions to established economies. Her interest is in what she calls “solidarity economies”. The processes and forms of these economies, which potentially include all participants, seek to empower and engage, rather than separate and obscure. In choosing “Milk not Jails” as a contributor, she consciously chose a group of people who are enacting an alternative to an established, visible economic relationship; empowering farmers and the formerly incarcerated. Feral labor operates outside of an established economic model as well, giving the artist and her contacts active decision-making power and capital through alternative process. “Bed and Barricade” operates in opposition to the passive experience of purchasing a product that someone else has made and has final authority over. It does this through the sharing of information and works to activate her question, “If experience is a criterion of knowledge, then who will I become while making art and learning about labor?”

            

Implicit Associations

“Implicit associations are often at odds with our conscious attitudes and beliefs. This does not mean that one is more accurate than the other. Rather, it suggests that we can have two unique evaluations of the same concept -- one conscious and the other unconscious.”

This text is from the website understandingprejudice.org. The website hosts the Implicit Association Test (IAT) which Google is currently using in lectures to expose its employees to unconscious attitudes that could affect decision-making in the workplace. Google’s case involves gender discrimination in hiring, but I decided to take the test for Racism after reading about it in the New York Times. My results showed that I’m among the 12% of people who have “little to no automatic preference between either European Americans or African Americans”. I was disturbed by another statistic that 46% of the over one million people who have taken this test fall into the category of “automatic preference for white people.” 

The circumstances of the Yams Collective’s rejection of the ‘institutional white supremacy’ of the Whitney begs the question, should our art institutions take a page from Google’s HR manual when it comes to race? Should curators add the IAT to their ‘curriculum?’ The Whitney’s micro-aggressions reported in the Ben Davis interview with two members of Yams – leaving off wall tags; not screening the film until the final two weeks of the show – could be perceived as passive aggressive, an honest mistake, or the aggregate of a deep, unconscious bias. The surface of the art world is changing – black artists have institutional support and market power – leading to the feeling that the playing field is leveling, moving toward the post-racial. However, until we can tackle the unconscious biases within institutions, post-racial equality will remain a fantasy.

The Yams collective and others refer to Joe Scanlan’s fabricated black female persona Donelle Wolford as ‘the severe conceptual rape of black female bodies.’ The Yams’ critique extends further in this passage:

Everyone has the right to expression because of our freedom of speech; whatever they want to do, however they want to say it. But with all that, there’s responsibility to be an intelligent individual, and as an individual who is an artist, to think about how your work influences people. And to have a mediocre approach to “questioning authorship,” and meanwhile exploiting a group of people and not having a sensitivity about that, makes us ask: What are you trying to say?

Coco Fusco speaks to the meta-performance as another manifestation of unconscious beliefs incubated within the academic context. Fusco writes, “rather than seeing Scanlan’s work as a crude exercise in exploitation, we might conceive of it as a castration fantasy about white male erasure.” Is the origin of this work the imaginary instability of white male hegemony? Whatever the origins and implications of Donelle Wolford, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, Ferguson, A Subtlety, etc., we can see that for a problem so close to the surface (the epidermis), trauma and prejudice are systemically present albeit buried by conceptual inquiry, good intentions and post-racial rhetoric. Are the racially charged events of today the beginning of the excavation? 

er(RACE)

Blog Post 4

race

            Whenever I signed the acceptance letter, there was a running horse on the letterhead. It claimed to be a wild horse, the American Southwest, but when I think back I suspect that it might be a track horse.

It seems like the people who survive best here are the ones who win a on a horse. The fact that any given resident is on a hot streak is evident by the way they drive. I cannot afford to test my luck, so I come to a full stop. Slowing, but not stopping, they sneer. Everyone is blonde. The cars are blonde, the horses are blonde, the sky is blonde from the lights, which are always on, rainbow-roll into a muddy lilac.

With my hands deep in my caramel coat, I walk though the vaguely upper-class neighborhood across the major intersection and from mine think about the yard that won “yard of the month” back in September. It is full of wispy yellow grass clumps and ornamental wheat along the perimeter of a bright lawn with a crew cut. I fantasize as I walk (the car would not start) to the grocery store for soup, just like Andy Warhol.

I pretend to be the judge of the yard contest, saying to my fellow judges, “Boy, you know, I don’t know what it is, but I shore do like those plants that look like a blonde woman’s hair. We shore have made the right call this month!”

The thought about blonde hair being beautiful depresses me, and besides, I am afraid of making eye contact with any of the people walking large or small fluffy dogs with glossy fur, so I look down and focus on the clip of my march, and pull my coat tighter. My relationship with The Coat verges on romantic as I learn to trust it not to discolor in the rain, and to protect my body from the wind effectively, somewhat miraculously, as it has no lining.

I think was actually made to be worn, for long walks to cold subway stops, between design studios and bars, in winter weather, and still look clean and confident. I feel vaguely proud to present it to the woman at the coat check of the museum, although I cannot afford to park in the appointed lot, instead choosing to park for three dollars at a parking meter 4 blocks away.

When I do this, I am pretending that we both know about what it is like to be in a more diverse city, where talented people work hard and honestly into deserving positions. During this interaction, I am suspending my disbelief that the sacred art space of the museum does not also operate on luck.

I am making every effort to allow myself, and maybe the coat check attendant, a chance to acknowledge that there is another culture, with different values, that appreciates different things, and relates to those things with a different mindset. Part of what is shared by us, in a museum full of white people looking at the refuse of another cultures is not really our shared race, but our access to a sub-culture and a insight that is only available to those who inhabit a colonized body, who despite best efforts, are not ever quite part of the ruling socio-economic clat.

I tell a friend of mine (a sort of dealer, whose family bred racing horses and racing dogs. A house full of  Kentucky Derby glasses with the great grandchildren of their own horses printed on them) “500 words on race,” and he laughs. Who can say anything decisive about Race in 500 words? “Put down 50 for me” “What’s the name of your dog?” “Whichever one looks hungriest.”

Race: John Ahearn and the South Bronx

After the controversy surrounding the 1979 commission of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc the National Endowment of the Arts sought out artist John Ahearn for their next public arts commission to be placed on the corner of Jerome Avenue and 169^th Street. Ahearn was a symbol of communal integration for how he positioned himself in the community of the South Bronx in a structural way both as a white male resident and artist. Consequently, the NEA perceived the artist’s involvement in the community as an antithesis to Serra’s abrasive approach to public art. Ahearn’s work consists of painted bronze cast busts and full figure renditions of members in the South Bronx that are displayed in galleries andmuseums, community members’ homes, or site specific locations. He portrays the average citizen in attempts to question the conventions and glorification of the subject in traditional portraiture.

Raymond and Toby

1989

The sculpture pictured above titled Raymond and Toby was one of the three works produced for the South Bronx commission and was placed in an abandoned lot on the corner of Jerome Avenue and 169^th Street facing the 44^th Precinct NYPD. The subject matter of this work informed by Ahearns involvement in the community and the relationships he had made with certain community members. He felt that literal representations of community members, how he saw them, were honest and truthful representations of the South Bronx community. Initially the sculpture was to be on the same lot as the 44^th Precinct NYPD but Ahearn felt that placement would associate his interpretation of the South Bronx with the police presence in the community. Consequently, he placed the sculpture across the street from the police department but directed the gaze of the figure towards the police department. With the installation of this work complications arose between the artist, members of the community, and the police department.

The decision to face the piece Raymond and Toby towards the 44th precinct NYPD office was read as a confrontational gesture towards by the officers and many South Bronx residents felt that they were represented incorrectly. The placement of Raymond and Toby was a gesture that had the potential to instigate conflict between local authorities and a community that already held negative connotations with regards to racial stereotypes and complications with local authorities. In fact, the residents felt that despite Ahearn’s excellent reputation in the community he would never be able to understand the African American community experience. It was also argued that the subject of these works, real living South Bronx residents, promoted a type of image that could be perceived as a negative stereotype by people who live outside of the South Bronx. The work was removed within a week of installation due to protests made by South Bronx residents and community members. Initially Ahearn's intentions were ethically correct, but, to the dismay of the project, was unaware of how this site specific project denied community members agency over how they were being represented.

Joe Scanlan and Donelle Woolford

Similar to them previous articles I have posted I will address Joe Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford project as honestly as possible and interpret the articles written about him to the best of my ability.  With that said  “Scanlan’s” Donelle Woolford project piqued my interest due to two reasons. The artist is a fabricated black woman who was fabricated by a white male. Being that I am a black female artist my initial reaction regarding the project was curiosity. Why would this individual purposely take on this specific role (Black female artist)? What is the goal of the project? Race and gender is a rather sensitive issue. Scanlan’s project embodies and amplifies all the problematic elements that surround both. Most notably, it reveals a lot of the problems in the art world. Admittedly, I found it unsettling that the Whitney Biennial accepted this piece. Curiosity began to evolve to questioning the integrity of the individuals who gave the okay to exhibit Scanlan’s work. Was this a poorly executed stunt to get more than a few head turns from the public? Why exhibit what is essentially a puppet and not the real thing? 

Ryan Wong’s  “I am Joe Scanlan” article not only reveals his identity and true intentions of the Scanlan/Woolford project but he unveils something much more thought provoking.  Earlier I mentioned how Donelle Woolford’s existence evoke issues of race and gender with in the art world. From my personal perspective and experience I have observed the lack of minorities who take on a professional role with in fine art institutions. Specifically institutions on the collegiate level, gallery, or museum. Black women from what I have seen are a rarity. Containing a “diverse” group of artists in an exhibition conjures up the question what is diverse?  YAMS Collective artist Andre Springer  stated “Not just, ‘We Need two black people, we need an Asian. We need some queer people.’ We want to see people actually genuinely appreciate aesthetic of the diversity that is America, and propel that in the art world”  in the Ben Davis’s “The Yams, on Whitney and the Supremacy” article. I agree with his statement. The presence of minorities in a majority filled occupation is very minimal. Donelle Woolfords being exposes Whitney Biennial ( and various other museums/galleries) cookie cuter solution to representing a diverse group of artists. In retrospect Wong’s  Donelle Woolford project produced a much need discourse about race, gender, representation, social status and many more topics with in the art world. I am not so naive to blame these on going issues on “the whiteman” or “white folks”. There are many other factors involved regarding minorities and the many issues in the art world, but I am not so naive to totally disregard it either. Being aware of what is and what isn’t and being able to distinguish between the two is most important in my opinion. 

Anansi Knowbody – Artist Statement

Duality/ polarity, opposite ends of extremes. My artwork makes critical analysis of social, political and cultural issues through the lens of various perspectives; that is… my various perspectives, those that I’ve contemplated. In my overstanding all things are connected and everything is utterly absurd. We exist in a paradox. There is no absolute wrong nor is there to be found a perfect right. 

I try to illustrate and make comparisons of these dualities and absurdities by highlighting the hetero black male experience juxtaposed with racial myths, stereotypes, re-contextualized racist imagery, indigenous mysticism, and ethnic pseudo science.  

Through the use of moving image, both found footage and things I’ve shot myself, I try to reproduce events or capture those events that occur in the world around us.  My work is strongly influenced by Italian neo realism in the manner of Vittorio De Sica's 1948 film Ladri di biciclette, also known as The Bicycle Thief. I work with untrained talent, people that I’ve known personally and locations that I’ve actually transverse to convey this message in an effort to draw connections and make associations, between the accepted and unaccepted regularly occurring absurdity of existence. 

In my work I take on the role of patriarch. It is male-centric yet foregoes misogyny. It is my effort to motivate, encourage and inspire the black male conscious specifically, both directly and subversively.  It is an attempt to re-contextualize previously conceived and wholly accepted notions (those impressed upon us, and those we adopted for ourselves) of what it means to be a “strong black man”.

Although rooted in screen-based media my work has evolved to include sculpture, and immersive spaces to function as conceptual critique of the state and society at large. In retrospect I’ve come to realize my own modus operandi of analyzing hegemonic ideological power structures, methods and reasons of dissemination, psychological warfare, and social stratifications, in an effort to learn how they work to create, support, and sustain one another. 

Re: Seminar discussion of Curatorial Practice

Here is a link to an article in the Chicago Reader about "David Bowie Is", a show that just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. We discussed this exhibition; its curation and potential for the MCA, its audience and contemporary artists.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/david-bowie-is-museum-of-contemporary-art-mca-david-jones/Content?oid=15073522

            “Hidden After Offending, Mural at a State Office Is Back, for Peeks Only,” reads the headline of a February 2013 article, written by Jessie McKinley for the New York Times. The article describes the unveiling of mural in New York’s State Education Building. The mural, however, is not new. The mural was commissioned in the 1870s and is titled, “The Genius of America”. McKinley’s description of the mural follows, “a sprawling 30-foot-long fantasy… whose depictions include angels, babies and women in togas; Gen. George Washington and a god of war; and what seems to be a group of colonial zombies rising from the grave. Amid that symbolic swirl, in the lower right corner, is a striking and some say unsettling image: a slave in loincloth being held under the arms by a well-dressed white man.”

            In 2000, due to complaints from department staff members that the mural was offensive, it was covered up with nothing less than an emerald green curtain. Still, some are unsure whether or not the slave was depicted as being liberated or subjugated by his white counterpart. However in 2012, the department’s commissioner decided that it was time to pull it back, for a single hour, once a month. The controversy surrounding this image indicates a complex relationship to imaging and remembering the history of race relations in America, in this case between White European and Black African Americans. In support of the mural’s re-unveiling, Wade S. Norwood, a member of the state board of regents, was quoted in the article, “I see it to be dated and stilted, but that was the stylistic portrayal of many of the figures in that painting… And that’s an important thing for the New York State Education Department to teach.”

"The Genius of America"by Adolphe Yvon

            Present in Norwood’s quote, and Commissioner John B. King’s decision to re-unveil, is the tension between a sense of obligation to remembering the seriousness and violence of race relations in America, and a desire to erase that history.

            Kara Walker’s installation, Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, typifies the difficulties of publicly re-displaying (and in Walker’s case re-appropriating) images of objectified, exaggerated, stereotyped, black bodies. Many viewers were hopelessly unaware of their (re)enacting power dynamics similar to those interpreted as offensive in “The Genius of America”. In other words, an encounter with re-presented, trauma-laden, charged images of black bodies made visible a contemporary, lingering crisis in the way said bodies are interpreted, touched, and seen.

Initially I thought that King’s modest re-introduction of “The Genius of America” was far too modest, that lingering and problematic collective trauma should be handled more aggressively. And why does he set up its audience to be voyeurs? Remember? “For Peeks Only” reads our headline. I imagined the mural’s viewing schedule being flipped so that the mural would be hidden for only one hour, of one day of each month. I wanted this despite my opinion that the mural is not as emotionally or psychologically manipulative, as loaded, as Walker’s work. I do wonder which is more productive, and I must give Walker the benefit of the doubt. In Walker’s work, the art becomes its reactions to it. It is revealing. In Subtlety, she pulls back a curtain, holds it back, and makes us look at something truly unsettling present in contemporary America’s collective power relationship to black bodies. Walker’s work succeeds in activating latent racism, whereas King’s curtain attempts to control it.

Link: on the subject of Race.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/nyregion/new-york-uncovers-offending-mural-for-brief-public-views.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

ARTSTSTMENT

 Blog Post 3

Artist Statement

(There are fewer words left now and there is repetition.

Some repetition and some change, some repeats… (a new economy of meaning?)

Maybe in a year, you (your brain), reread some notes, or remembered something that they said about your work (you), in a critique.

And then you think about, well, everything.

Everything that's ever been said, or read (that I've heard, and resaid).

You repeat everything, so that, until it's clear, and clear completely, now and forever. We learn by repetition.

I say it out-loud about optimism and absence (since the potential in absence is real).

I’ve tried, and you can cover things in so much enamel to make permanent the object,

to show the potential which an absence has (the absence’s potential to be permanent).

The potential is there, and by preserving it you show it forever? (Was it upspeak?)

To talk about the thing (and stand in a circle, too, yeah, that’s good, that totally helps) and how “…this is all happening in the midst of a time that's fully challenging.”

“But what about the fact that the challenges give the plan a point?”

(Also its kind of maybe darker and meaner than before, I think you can tell because the title's colder.))

That’s how it goes, some of the times. Other of times, I think if I could just set some precedence, everyone will maybe be more inclined to let me slip from this grasp of darkness. Or whatever, whatever, because that’s how the team talks, says the same thing.

How alone I feel. It even makes my work feel alone, and it is in the studio, surrounded by people, but far away.

And the distance between (my different selves) makes the difference, and my friends can’t pull me by my hand, to pull me out, so they will just try to support and bolster my practice, with a hope, a huge hope, that I will get the safety I want in my work soon.

They know they can’t save me (wait, they can’t? I think they can). I don’t know if it can save everyone, but the work is taking me with them.

Because I need it, and they need it. We, you and I, we need it, and this world that work exists in needs it.  Even this world (not the small dark world, but the bigger social context), even with less room, has space for it, and that’s a really important space (to me).

I gave the assignment “What you want to make, think about it and make it now.”

“But, no one is ready to make it” (Fuck you, I’m ready all the time) I said,

“In 24 hours (or 48), this time tomorrow, it will either be about to happen, happening, or over (probably over).”