Post-Internet: Ways of Looking

I’ll never forget sitting in a college English class on postmodernism in the fall of 2011, watching as the professor tried to explain the term to the class. After a few minutes, she hit upon an idea: She told us that for the first time, it seemed she was teaching a class that had been born so far into the postmodern era, that we took the tenants of it for granted. Because of this, we did not have difficulty understanding what postmodernism was, but rather why it was important enough to call attention to it at all.

The post-internet seems like one of those things that could, very quickly, become impossible to imagine a world without. Most of the images I have ever seen have probably been through the filter of a screen. Even my way of looking has been conditioned by this phenomenon. I look and I look and I look until my eyes ache and I can no longer clearly see the images and words on the screen, and then I look some more, squinting and searching for brightness.

The screen serves as a membrane, that separates object from image but still allows crossover between the two.  

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with different installation methods for my paintings and drawings. For example, instead of building large wooden cradle platforms for my paintings, which emphasize their object-status through their weight and size, I’ve been leaving the metal sheets without any kind of cradle and installing them flush against the wall. Installed in this way, the sharp, thin, metallic, shining paintings read as screens. I’ve never been particularly interested in making work through electronic or internet based means, but I am interested in pursuing this reference to the screen, and the reference to the ways of looking which have endemically developed as a result of the internet and the associated cell phone, tablet, and computer technologies.

Artist Statement 3

My work rests in the space between response to site and response to material. The elements explored in my work are therefore two-fold: How can the sensory experience of a site be transmuted into the sensory language of a painting? How do the material conditions of the painting—in the sparest sense, consisting of paint and surface—inform the nature of this transmutation?

Gesture is one of the key ways in which I mediate between site and painting. I begin work by visiting a site. I spend time there, and develop a relationship to that place, body to body. When I face a painting, I use gestures that mirror my actions at the site.

My paintings are often large, physically active surfaces that have a direct relationship to the size of my body. This scale allows me to work with and against the painting in a way that relates to my how I enter landscape, as another body in direct relationship to my body. Because gesture is important to my work, I have often been asked what my relationship is to abstract expressionist painters, and to the specific presentation of masculinity supplied by painters such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. I reject these contexts, just as I reject the question: What is the mark of the feminine within my work?

I ask: why must my work have this clear dichotomy? Why can I not locate my work within a different frame—within a frame that is painting, influenced by performance and sculpture, by paths taken by the body and the eye, rather than illusory roles?

I choose to locate my work in the context of painters such as Joan Mitchell or Magali Lara not because they are female, associated with feminist painting, and thus “the mark of the feminine,” but rather because I find the combination of painting and performative gesture and mark to be a generative means of working.

The physical condition of the paint and the manner in which it is added or erased from the surface has the power to both clarify and confuse a painting’s reading, often at the same time. I combine the practice of mark-making gesture discussed above with different paint processes in order to form each painting’s composition. Recently, I have begun working with a variety of surfaces, including birch panel, paint-grip metal sheeting, and polished stainless steel sheeting. The revelations, intrusions and reflections of these substrates into the painted surface serve to disrupt my own assumptions, such as the preeminence of image over object within a painting.

Generation in Negation

Refusal seems to fit into a liminal space in terms of its role in art. For example, if a collective refuses to participate in Manifesta because the host country’s government has taken actions the collective disagrees with, is that decision part of an artistic practice, or is it motivated by personal reasons within the members of the group? Are those two things separate, or must they inevitably form part of the same impulse?

The readings focused primarily on examples of artists refusing to participate in shows and biennials, often due to politically motivated reasons that tie into the cohesion of collective practice. Withdrawal from a biennial such as the Whitney Biennial works within the context of an institution not just by refusing to participate, but by even refusing to acknowledge the power-structure and expected social-structure paradigms within the context of the institution. Refusal is like the Whitney saying, you can’t withdraw, but the artist saying there’s no such thing as can’t because she rejects those power dynamics and social schema.

How does that refusal work outside of the context of the institution, and within the context of critique or the art historical canon? For example: refusal to acknowledge the “obsolescence” of a medium; refusal to participate in a popular practice or dialogue; refusal to accept the validity of certain approaches (such as when Isabelle Graw “vehemently [rejects] the claims that mark making by itself harbors any potential” during a 2010 conversation with Achim Hochdörfer). In these examples, refusal does not just include refusing to participate within a discrete context of social-power-structures, but refusal to participate within a much larger ongoing discussion—refusal even to participate in critical narrative.

At what point, then, is the negation of refusal generative? The Dadaists refused to go to war when many of them dodged the World War I draft or deserted; they rejected painting and other art forms traditionally associated with nationalistic propaganda; they even refused to follow reason in their work. These refusals generated art through the resulting chaos, through the new means they needed to find to make work.  Similarly, female painters such as Elizabeth Murray heard 1970s New York critics say that painting was dead; Murray’s reaction was to refuse this analysis and to paint anyway. In both of these cases, refusal of critical or material narrative combines with political and artistic refusal to form something generative.

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage, image courtesy of Wikipedia

Elizabeth Murray, Children Meeting, 1978, oil on canvas, image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art

Image-Object-Thing: Idea-Idea-Idea

In his essay “Painting as Apparatus: Twelve Theses,” Helmut Draxler suggests that painting exists in tension between image and art. In a way, then, could the following 1:1 correspondence then be set up?

Image-Object-Thing : Image-Painting-Art.

According to Draxler, there is a key difference between an image and a painting—a painting exists as something more than just the image upon the surface, and something less than art. It exists as something rooted in its materiality as an object. Draxler posits that a painting exists between the pull of image and of art, implying that image and art are two separate qualities; a painting therefore exists as an object, oscillating between an image and a piece of art, but only always as an object. The same holds true for other media—why else would a Polaroid photo hold such power in its material identity?

And yet I think there is something missing in this analysis, perhaps a transformative agent that allows for movement and slippage amongst these three categories—namely, the idea.

In his Philosophy Bites lecture on 17^th century philosopher George Berkeley, Tom Stoneham explains that, for Berkeley, an idea is an object of sensorial experience. Because of this, he uses the terms idea, object, and thing all interchangeably. Every object is a thing as well as an idea, and the qualities that comprise those objects/things/ideas and parse them into discrete objects—chairs, lamps, apples—are derived from the senses (qualities include color, shape, texture, taste, etc.). Paintings, photographs, and sculptures also derive their discrete identities from these experienced qualities.

Perhaps an obvious example to discuss would be Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, an installation consisting of a chair, a picture of a chair, and the word chair alongside its dictionary definition. This piece unifies the Idea-Object-Thing relationship; as well as the Image-Object-Idea relationship; the Image-Object-Thing; the Image-Painting-Art; the Idea-Idea-Idea. 

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965, image courtesy of Museum of Modern Art

I’ve heard this piece referred to in art history classes as conceptual art. (Conceptual, defined as of, relating to, or based on mental concepts). During the first class of the semester, we discussed the conceptual turn, and the production of art through language and ideas rather than through physical objects. I would argue that the two are not so different after all.

Moving Sites: Labor and Capital

Just as in the fist class discussion which we had on critique and discourse, in which we discussed the question of where the site of artistic production resides, any discussion of labor also immediately asks where the question of labor production resides, and invariably questions what kind of labor produces commodities/capital.

In his essay, “Manufactum on Canvas: On the Widespread Success of Figurative Painting,” Niklas Maak dismissively describes the ways in which a certain type of painting—figurative paintings appealing to the neo-bourgeoisie—have become commoditized. However, it is clear from his tone that he thinks this commoditization is an empty one, because the paintings simply lack value.

I find this analysis interesting in the context of a conversation I had with Marie Lorenz last week during my studio visit with her.  While discussing my paintings, I explained that although one of my large panels might have taken 30 hours of labor, only 3 hours of that labor was actually painting. The rest was in construction. Immediately the conversation turned to discussing the allocation of labor, and what it might mean for a painting’s site of labor to be dislocated in this manner.

Given my conversation with Marie Lorenz, and the essay by Maak, I am interested in what it means to shift the site of labor in a painting from the act of painting to a different sort of production—although I am highly cynical of Maak’s easy dismissal of the entire medium. If the site of labor shifts, does that shift the site of commoditization, and therefore the site of capital production?

Another way to approach this question of labor and capital is to look at the example of the self-taught artist Frank Jones. Frank Jones was an African-American artist imprisoned for murder in Texas until his death in prison in 1969 (he maintained his innocence for the rest of his life). While imprisoned, Jones began making red and blue drawings with material scraps left in the prison office in which he worked. Eventually, his drawings began to attract attention both within and outside of the prison; he had gallery representation and his work sold well, and continues to do so now. However, because he was imprisoned, Jones did not actually reap the benefits of his labor.

If one follows Maak’s opinion, then Jones’s drawings collected capital because of their inherently commoditized nature as figurative drawings—and the site of labor is irrelevant. However, I propose that there is something more to the drawings. The site of the labor is not just in the locus of colored pencil upon paper, but also in the context of the prison, both in his own life and within the imagery he used. The site of the labor therefore was one of the essential elements in the work which accrued capital to his drawings. 

Image courtesy of Carl Hammer Gallery. 

Frank Jones, Untitled, 1964-69,  colored pencil on paper

Race, Paintings, and Narrative

One of the topics I’ve been reading a lot about lately has been the history of painting between the end of abstract expressionism and the revival of painting in the 1980s—a history largely ignored within the narrative of art history. Much of the counter-narrative around painting discusses the space this critical gap left for painters who were not white males to fill—especially for women. The attention drawn to women painters has made me aware of whom attention is not drawn toward—in both our discussions in class and in the articles I have read.

Howardena Pindell is a black female painter who was involved in efforts to raise awareness and gather resources for female artists working in New York City in the 1960s and 70s; however, she criticized her white peers for discounting the impact racism also played in holding artists back. Pindell argues that it is not enough to draw attention to one kind of problem—such as the difficulty women face in the male-dominated art world—but rather that if something else is also problematic, such as race, it must also be attended to.

The readings and discussions on race within the context of our seminar class primarily focused on the black/white dichotomy—given the breadth of the topic of race, this particularly surprised me. Although it draws attention to an aspect of race, it ignores legions of others. Weirdly, our conversation on race perpetuated the historical narrative of race in America by focusing almost solely on black/white dynamics while spending significantly less time discussing other kinds of race identities and relations within the context of art in the same way that the art historical narrative perpetuates an attitude that painting simply did not viably exist in the 70s.

It seems to me that Pindell’s point elides with Walter Benjamin’s in his essay Constellations in Time, regarding historicity and historical narrative—when something about the established narrative sticks out, or does not quite fit, then that is a moment within the narrative that should be troubled, and may reveal elements that have been omitted. In this vein, the simple dichotomy of man/woman, black/white feels troubling—conditions of race, gender, and sexuality do not exist in a vacuum.

Obviously, not all discussions can touch on all things, and certainly not all work. But in the spirit of troubling things, it would be useful to consider Adrian Piper’s performance work, Mythic Being, in which she performs as a racially and sexually ambiguous person, and documents both herself and the reactions of those around her. 

 

Images courtesy of Adrian Piper and Thomas Erben Gallery.

Curatorial practice: Curating ephemeral work

One of the questions I asked Dan Byers during his class visit was whether there is difficulty in curating ephemeral works such as performance, participatory events, and social practice. I'm interested in this question in relation to some of my own work and trying to figure out how to show that work outside of school as well as how to maintain a "sustainable" practice.

I read an article on Hyperallergic which explores the question of curating performance:

How to Curate Performance Art, and Other Problems (by Jen Ortiz)
http://hyperallergic.com/62007/how-to-curate-performance-art-and-other-problems/

The article discusses the complexity of curating, showing, and funding performance in galleries and alternative spaces as well as museums. Two main concerns are cited from curators. The first problem is the question of labor in visual art institutions. Are the artists being paid, fed, and given a place to rest? Otherwise, what means do they have to travel to and perform in that space? The second problem is, what exactly is a collector acquiring if he or she buys a performance? Is it the score, choreography, documentation, or rights to re-perform it? This question ties back into the first: how can the artists be funded to give the performance if the work is difficult to sell or convince others to invest in? This all ties into our later discussions about labor and capital.

Another interesting article I read:

How to frame ephemeral art: curating before and after the Web 2.0 (by Elena Giulia Rossi)
http://www.ny-magazine.org/PDF/06.05.EN_How_to_frame_ephemeral_art.pdf

This article focuses more on net art and new media. What is their context within museums and how can they best be exhibited? Because of the rapidly-changing nature of technologically involved work, what does net art and new media become once within a museum? How do these genres continue to evolve outside of the static nature of the museum?

It also brings out an important different between galleries and museums: galleries are concerned with putting art on the market and museums are concerned with display and preservation. Once a work enters a museum, it becomes "historicized":

"Museums, even the most contemporary ones, are the last place where artworks arrive in the art system. It is a natural consequence that any work that enters the museum's doors in any form becomes historicized by the mere fact of inhabiting that 'sacred' space."

Rossi argues that museums should have a role in keeping track of contemporary art as well as preserving it, becoming a space that evolves as much as the work being created outside of it.

The Whitney Museum maintains an online gallery space for net art and new media, Artport. It's fun to browse:
http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/Artport

From "Screening Circle" by Andy Deck, through Artport

Labor: Guggenheim & G.U.L.F.

Flyer promoting G.U.L.F. protest of the Saadiyat Island worker conditions

Since February the group known as G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction) has engaged in an aggressive campaign against the worker conditions in relation to the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and a sister NYU campus. G.U.L.F.'s intentions lie in raising awareness about the exploitation of labor connected to the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Numerous protests have taken place inside of the Guggenheim NY and are directly pointed at the Guggenheim's trustees, calling them to address the labor crisis in Abu Dhabi. The protests address the aggressive recruitment methods enacted by contracting companies, wage theft, substandard housing, and deportation as punishment for protesting against labor violations. 

G.U.L.F. has staged a handful of protests that took place at the Guggenheim throughout the year 2014 and are continuing to pursue the Guggenheim board of trustees to take action on improving the conditions for workers on Saaddiyat Island. During the Futurist exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, which closed September 1, groups of protesters operating under the G.U.L.F. initiative staged an intervention that consisted of protesters attaching art works, designed by Noah Fischer, that spoke to the crisis in Abu Dhabi while adopting the Futurist aesthetic. Within 5 minutes the museum guard staff had confiscated the protest materials and had shut down the intervention. Though brief, this interaction between guard staff and protester revealed pertinent information to the G.U.L.F. cause: the museum guard staff were not receiving fair compensation for their work.  

When asked about the workers wages Richard Armstrong, Guggenheim Foundation executive director, stated that the Guggenheim guard staff receives their $10/hr wages from an independent company and therefore the Guggenheim could not be held responsible for the pay conditions of the employed guard staff. Allowing for the Guggenheim to shirk off responsibilities and opening up the door for worker exploitation, the implementation of a third party contractor is common among large institutional operations. Treated in a similar fashion, an independent company is maintaining the labor force and simultaneously monitoring the progress of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi construction site. 

Post-Internet: debates of image-agency

            Both our classes’ assigned readings and discussions, in regard to Post-Internet, orbit around a polemics of image-agency. One half of this polemics, posited in Vierkant’s essay, “The Image Object Post-Internet”, is that the Post-Internet epoch is one that offers a liberating, impersonal, democratic handling of images and objects. He writes, “ For objects after the Internet there can be no ‘original copy.’ Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both its materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies.” In his argument, the object without original becomes the great equalizer. A traditional hierarchy of value fixed on originality is broken down. Vierkant continues, “…Culture after the Internet offers a radically different paradigm which our ‘They’ idiom does not allow for. This is not to say that we have entered a fully utopian age of endless possibilities but simply to claim that culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-creation tools used by mass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those images, and gain free access to the majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning.”

            However, artist Hito Steyerl is less optimistic about the liberating potential of image circulation within the Post-Internet epoch. Steyerl’s interview goes into great depth explaining ways in which Internet technology manufacture images in ways that only give impressions of agency, choice, taste, preference, etc. “…The technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data.” Steyerl offers a complex counterpoint to Vierkant. Vierkant’s more populist understanding of Post-Internet becomes clouded, knowing that some of the image creation technology being used has its own kind of agency over the images its user makes. Stereyl continues, “The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see.” In addition to her outlining of the workings of specific software, she describes ways in which the State continues to maintain control over the use of Internet technology, what she describes as, “the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.”

POSTINTERNETS

Blog post 10

 post-internet and the meta-self

"As I read, I pretend that I could be Richard Prince.

Being more specific. Specifically, I am not naively satisfied with wishing that I were Richard Prince, or play acting to myself that I am Richard Prince. Those things are a lazy teenager’s hero worship. Mine’s richer.

What I am imagining is being written about the way that Richard Prince is written about.

An Example:

In late 2014 Isabe//a Bur/den was interviewed, by the new-media critic Fred Frederikson, for The Bruce LaBruce High Quality Foundation. Their discussion, which was subsequently published by HighQuality.club, began on a retrospective note:

            Fred Fred:  Lets talk about the late 2000s.

            Isabe//a Burden:  I didn’t like the work that I did five or so years ago.

           

            FF:  What did you do with it?

            IB:  I think everything has been, you know, destroyed.

            FF:  Wow, All of it?

            IB:  I would say five hundred things.

            FF:  How did you destroy them?

            IB:  Just ripped them up.

            FF:  And put them in garbage bags?

IB:  Yes. Except the some of the best negs, I just put the prints in garbage bags. It had come down to the fact that, well, if you don't like your own pictures and you like someone else's picture better, well, take their picture.

FF:  What about the negatives you kept?

IB:  The way I think, those as belong to someone else too. Someone who's images seem a lot like mine, who is interested in some of the same things, but definitely isn’t me.

What the artist describes here is an intense disavowal, one that resulted in the 'complete' destruction of her earlier work. By the time of the interview, Isabe//a had become utterly identified with the practice of slacker art and appropriation, as indicated by her comment "if you don't like your own pictures, and you like someone else's better, take theirs."

In fact, the interview was published alongside an explored the meanings behind the new rephotographed images she had begun to produce around 2014. Note, however, by her own account the disavowal of authorship is affected through two linked moves: by borrowing images of others, and by destroying her own. Though she describes a scene of wholesale destruction, there is a subtle interruption in her account: "I think everything has been, you know, destroyed."

Might that telltale "you know," which signals a pause or hesitation, suggest some ambivalence on her part – some regret that she had destroyed such a large body of works? Or might it mark her recognition that this act of erasure may not have been quite so complete as she describes?

Isabe//a's later work bears evidence of this sort of hesitation. In the year since that interview she has repeatedly seen fit to return to the works she made prior to her move to appropriation, either by reconsidering the historical moment in which they were made or even, at times, incorporating them into her current pieces.

Although all of the images in the two adjacent articles are recent, credited and dated in 2013, indicating that they were all executed after the destruction of her portfolio and name subsequent change of names.

Nevertheless, both the front and back cover of the publication feature a image of a young 'IsabellaR' (as she was called then) from 2007, her seventeenth year, smoking a hand-rolled joint in elevator of the State Street high-rise dorms, which were donated to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, by Hugh Heffner’s estate, and had once served as the apartments for the Mid-western-based Bunnies.

But the cover image is not just a photograph; it is in fact a rephotographed image of a print made by a fellow student, San Francisco based photographer Ali Arnold, at the time published in the web-based contemporary photography magazine THE FREAKING WEEKEND (now defunct).

In the process of rephotographing, two elements were laid on top of the physical print: an empty orange packet of rolling papers and a fake cigarette made of a holly tree dowel. The addition of these elements, along with the handwritten heart-heart-heart/666 significantly modifies the meaning of the image by identifying it with a historical moment. In effect, Isabe//a used the strategy of rephotography (with which her work has come to be identified) to retrospectively revise her self-image at an earlier moment in her career."

Les Statues Meurent Aussi - A Multi-Stable Image of Animism

“An object dies when the living glance placed upon it disappears.”

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die)(1953)is a film essay by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais featured in the exhibition Animism at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt of 2012, curated by Anselm Franke. Marker and Resnais explore the shifted identity of ‘Tribal Art’ from Africa once it is removed from its context- spiritual, cultural, geographic – and placed in the mausoleum of the museum. It also charts the trajectory of African artifacts to their new origin as products created for (and by) the colonial gaze.

Statues Also Die is an early example of Marker’s use of montage that would come to characterize his filmmaking in later works such as La Jetee and Sans Soleil.  The first two-thirds of the film mainly alternate between still footage of mask, sculptures, etc. in dramatic chiaroscuro and slow panning across the surfaces of various African objects. The drifting, meditative transitions contrast with quick jump cuts, moving in concert with the score and non-diagetic narration. These scenes serve to fix the viewer’s gaze for prescribed durations, providing an alternative way of seeing through the animation of objects provided by film. With this apparatus in mind, in the final third of the film Marker and Resnais bring the colonial critique to full tilt. After twenty minutes of conditioned observation, the viewer is confronted with images of the colonial landscape, populated by European influence in both the shaping of culture and the production of objects for western consumption, perverting the integrity of both. “Black Art becomes a dead language and that which is born over its death is the jargon of decadence.”  The location of the film then shifts from Africa back to the west by way of an elegant equivalence – footage of a camel race cuts to an Olympic hurdling competition. “We pay the blacks to give us the comedy of their joy and their fervor. In this way, by the side of the black slave, appears a second figure, the black puppet. His strength serves us, his prowess amuses us, on this side he serves us as well. Nations which are endowed with racist traditions find it all the more natural to trust to men of color the concern for the nation’s Olympic games. But a moving black is still black art.” Footage of the Harlem Globe Trotters moves to a woven montage of boxing, street demonstrations and jazz drumming. The film closes by coming full circle to an exhibition of African masks. “…there is no rupture between black civilization and ours. The faces of black art fell off from the same human face, like the serpent’s skin.”

In Animism: Notes on an Exhibition, Anselm Franke asserts, “[…]Treat animism not as a matter of belief, but rather as a boundary-making practice. […]Animism was always imagined in terms of the absence of those distinctions on which modernity rests.” The final scene of Statues Also Die evokes this definition of animism when the narrator states that all art is shed from the same source. The film also posits that statues die when they are classified and catalogued in the history of art “where the most mysterious relationships are established.” Greece, Japan, and India can all be found in the form and visage of ancient African artifacts. This visual ‘un-mapping’ of objects within the institution functions as life after the death inflicted by the museum – the ‘phantasy [sic] of re-animation’.

                  Franke’s Notes underscore and expand on many of the aims of Resnais and Marker, hence the inclusion of Statues Also Die in the exhibition. Note the mise-en-abyme of this film in the context of the museum as a catalogue within a catalogue. The colonial implications of both the film and the exhibition itself should be expanded upon as well. Further correlations are to be found between the film, Animism: Notes, while bringing Kader Attia’s The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures installation (2012) into the fray. Thus more will be written on the matter of the object, the museum, and the repositioning of the colonial imaginary through Franke’s multi-stable frame of animism. What I'm saying is, this will likely continue as the topic of my final paper. 

-Andy 

The act of refusal, in the context of art making and the exhibition are not new topics within the history of political and aesthetic critique in the art world. For example, in the early 1930s, Marcel Duchamp quit making art in an effort to pursue a profession of chess playing, which he likened to being as much, if not more of an art form than something like painting. Duchamp, it was discovered, had continued to make work in secret, until the end of his career. Lee Lozano is also famous for an act of refusal—her Drop Out Piece, in which she paradoxically conducted a performance for the remainder of her life: not making art. However, the refusal we have been reading about and discussing in class takes on a different form of critique. Artists in question are not ending their professional lives as artists, are not rejecting art making, but rather rejecting participation in exhibitions within sites that display explicit opposition to said artists’ political ideologies. The temporalities of these acts as well as what might be at stake for both artist and institution are distinct from older models. While the earlier models are perhaps less explicitly political and more philosophical, and are considered works in themselves, the later might be considered explicitly political and ethical in nature.

            The contemporary forms we see are not unfamiliar ones—that of the group petition/boycott, as seen at both Manifesta and the exhibition Living as Form. The artists in question are using a power-in-numbers mentality, one that has effectively generated dialogue surrounding the politics and ethics of specific political spaces: in this case Russia and Israel. A number of artists involved in both exhibitions chose to retract participation in their respective exhibitions in order to protest unethical human rights policies. Joanna Warsza points out some problems with these forms in her interview with Nato Thompson, “…we should ask some questions: What is the nature of this boycott—not going to Russia because of the anti-LGBT laws? What do you achieve exactly when you click the “I am not going” button? Do you think you are supporting the LGBTQ organizations here? Or do you rather care about raising awareness? If so, what do you accomplish through isolation?” In response to her own question, she answers, “Boycotts make institutions more sensitive, more vulnerable and more apt to change… So I would consider the boycotts as a form of mobilization, not a form of quitting.”

            In these later models of refusal one can see that art making itself is not in question, rather, the conditions/context of exhibiting art, art’s relationship to the institution and the state. I tend to agree with Warsza’s argument concerning the effectiveness of the Manifesta boycott. When it comes to having an actual effect on the citizens of a country with questionable ethics, it seems that the participation of subversive works has much more potential for radicality, generation of social change, and potential meaning for the audience. The gesture of boycott problematically refuses engagement with an audience (those who would have potentially less privilege to disengage than the artists in question), instead reacts a more impersonal, institutional apparatus.

The X Sao Paulo Biennial - A Precedent for Contemporary Refusal

The international boycott of the 10th Biennial de Sao Paolo of 1969 is a precedent for the international call for refusal witnessed recently in artists’ responses to the Biennale of Sydney, Creative Time’s Living as Form exhibition at Technion University, the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and Manifesta 10. In December of 1968, one year prior to the biennial, Brazil’s military regime officially instituted broad measures of censorship and repression in the passing of Ato Institucional #5 (Institutional Act #5) which came to be known as the AI-5. This brutal dictate institutionalized torture and arrest as a means to suppress civil unrest. Several instances of censorship of the visual arts and widespread arrests of artists and intellectuals, both leading up to AI-5 and reaching a critical capacity after its passing, contributed to the oppressive atmosphere permeating Brazilian culture in the years preceding the 10th Biennial.

                  The international call for withdrawal from the Biennial started with the French delegation in the summer of ’69. The boycott was framed as withdrawal in solidarity with Brazilian artists and intellectuals, while increasing international awareness of the political situation. Following France, delegations from Holland, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Italy, Mexico and Spain joined the boycott against the Brazilian regime. The US eventually withdrew despite efforts by the delegation’s organizer Gyorgy Kepes to ‘keep lines of communication open’ with the oppressed country. Using participation as a different sort of protest, Kepes is quoted as referring to an old Chinese saying: “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”

                  From its inauguration in 1951 the Biennial de Sao Paulo provided Brazil a window into international artistic currents. The exhibition first introduced Concretism to Brazil, which became a hallmark of modernism in Sao Paulo. Later, artists such as Andy Warhol and his Pop contemporaries entered the Brazilian artistic imaginary via the Biennial. A fundamental question arises regarding the boycott: would critical response to the political situation in Brazil have been more pointed through direct, strategic participation in the exhibition? As Claudia Calirman states in Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, “Despite all the controversy around the withdrawals [which received much more media coverage internationally than within Brazil] from the event, the most damaging consequence of the boycott was to make the biennial an unsubstantial artistic exhibition.”

The question of “engagement or disengagement” can be seen recently in the controversy surrounding Manifesta 10. Curator Joanna Warsza - in response to petition and repeated calls to change the venue from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg after the passing of “gay propaganda” laws, along with the military invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea - issued this statement:

As much as we of course clearly and without doubt oppose the Russian military intervention in Crimea and the position of the Russian government, we also oppose the tone of westocentric superiority…. The projects will obviously not represent the position of the Russian government. I believe that as long as we can work in the complex manner and in the context-responsive way, as long as we—curator, artists, team—are not exposed to the self-censorship, not being intimidated or restricted, we will do so.”

Starting with the “Boycott Biennial” of 1969, international artists chose to lend their works to smaller independent exhibitions throughout the exhibition to mitigate the effects of the debased biennial. In 1978, after the release of political prisoners and the lifting of AI-5 the boycott was lifted. Still the fundamental principles and questions of boycott, withdrawal, refusal or pointed participation will remain as long as social injustice persists in the world.

Artist Statement

My work investigates how our experiences with nature are mediated and reintroduced into contemporary life/interiors in artificial and inauthentic forms. I am particularly interested in spaces that employ architecture, technology, and other indoor fixtures to provide softened experiences with signifiers of the natural i.e. manicured plant life, a picturesque landscape scene, or the sound of falling water.

I combine image-making and sculptural methods to produce systems that work to build and present images of seemingly real and familiar landscapes. Multiple elements including armatures, scale models, projections of skies and sunsets, and cameras work to produce videos of quaint nature scenes. The put-togetherness of the sculptural systems characterizes these romantic depictions of nature as a construct of artifice. Video components of these sculptures are presented at a separate location on a computer monitor or TV screen. These works investigate the space between a physical site and virtual site, while questioning the credibility of both.

Recently my practice concerns the role of the nature-spectacle in places of work and commerce. Research for this work includes long visits to the NorthPark Mall in Dallas, TX. In this space, I observe and document examples of architecture producing abstractions of nature, how the natural has been translated into spectacle, and how brief interactions shape the experiences of consumers. A large fountain, emanating waterfall-like noises throughout the cavernous interior, can be observed functioning as indoor quasi-geyser/watering hole where shoppers congregate to passively engage with the natural simulation. A crystal clear pond exists as a habitat for ducks and turtles amidst jewelry stores and high fashion boutiques. Within this space, has nature become an extension of commerce? Do these spectacles of the natural prolong the amount of time a consumer will spend inside?

The many forms nature will take in a man-made space have always held my interests. Observing how interactions with these abstractions of nature continue to shape perceived notions of the natural is what drives my practice.