Art Since 1980:

Chartingthe
Contemporary
Peter R. Kalb
Art Since 1980 charts the story of art TP 30608090
in contemporary global culture while hold
ing up a mirror to our society. With over 300
TT
pictures of painting, photography, sculpture,
installation, and performance and video art,
we are led on an illuminating journey via
the aaa BES who have 05aQ09
shaped art internationally.

The political and cultural transformations

of the early 1980s developed a new era of
accord between communist states and west-
ern-style economics. The art world has since
been reconceived to include communities -
across the planet as the issues of feminism
and racial politics came to the fore and the
internet was born, changing forever the
availability and distribution of visual mate-
rial. Today we see record-breaking sales of
contemporary art and a dramatic rise in the
number of students taking courses in the
visual and performing arts.

Kalb approaches art from multiple angles,

addressing issues of artistic production,
display, critical reception, and social
content. Alongside his analysis of specific
works of art, he also builds a framework for
readers to increase their knowledge and
enhance critical and theoretical thinking.

LAURENCE KING
ART SINCE1980:
Charting the
Contemporary
‘ILL HALL LIBRA
MEDWAY
 8060809

fiat oINCE 1980:

Charting the
Contemporary
Peter R. Kalb

erg “Syan
LAURENCE KING

Published in 2013 by To Jessica, with love.

Laurence King Publishing Ltd
361-373 City Road
London EC1V ILR
Tel: +44 20 7841 6900
Fax: +44 20 7841 6910
email: [email protected]
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Copyright © 2013 Laurence King Publishing Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN (hardback): 978 1 78067 326 4

ISBN (paperback): 978 1 78067 280 9

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

Commissioning editor: Kara Hattersley-Smith

Senior editor: Melissa Danny
Production manager: Simon Walsh
Picture researcher: Ida Riveros
Copy editor: Robert Shore
Interior design: Nick Newton
Cover design: Masumi Briozzo

Frontispiece image: Katharina Grosse, Cincy,

2006. Installation using spraypaint, styrofoam,
and soil at the Contemporary Arts Center,
Cincinnati, Ohio. Image courtesy BUREAU N.
Photo: Tony Walsh © Katharina Grosse and VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013/DACS 2013.

Credits and acknowledgments of material

borrowed from other sources and reproduced,
with permission, in this textbook appear on the
appropriate page within the text or on the credit
pages in the back of this book.

Printed in Hong Kong

Contents

Preface 8 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism

Acknowledgments 9 and the Return of Painting 65
“A New Spirit in Painting” 65
Introduction 10 The United States 68
The Beginnings of Contemporaneity and the Object of Its Julian Schnabel 68
Critique 10 Eric Fischl 69
Clement Greenberg: Objects of Concern 13 David Salle 70
Beginning the Contemporary 14 Jean-Michel Basquiat 72
Exhibitions and the Art Market 15 Italy 74
Narrative and Methods 17 Sandro Chia 75
Francesco Clemente 76
Germany 78
1 Discovering the Contemporary 18 Anselm Kiefer 80
New Movements and New Metaphors 19 Heftige Malerei (“Violent Painting”) 83
The Minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris 20 Jérg Immendorff and A.R. Penck 85
Neo-Concrete Art 22 Epilogue, Addenda, Errata 88
Process Art 23
Alternative Logics: Spiral Jetty and Conceptual Art 25
On the Social Meaning of Form 27
A Into the Streets 91
Joseph Beuys 28 The East Village and the Alternative Scene 92
Leon Golub 30 Keith Haring 94
Institutional Critique 30 David Wojnarowicz 96
African-American Critiques 33 Nan Goldin 98
AfriCOBRA 35 Martin Wong 100
Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party 37 Artin the Community 101
Feminist Statements 38 Group Material 101
The Role of Theory 38 David Hammons 103
Nancy Spero 39 Pepon Osorio 104
The Feminist Art Program 41 Krzysztof Wodiczko 106
Judy Chicago 41 John Ahearn and Tim Rollins and K.O.S. 107
Mary Kelly 42 From Marked Territory to the Mass Media 110
Martha Rosler 43 Gran Fury and ACT UP 111
Suzanne Lacy 44 David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco 112
Hannah Wilke 45
5 Commodities and Consumerism 116
Taking Pictures: Appropriation Market Forces 117
and Its Consequences 46 Jeff Koons 117
Haim Steinbach 119
Power on Display 47
Ashley Bickerton 120
Sherrie Levine 48
Mike Kelley 121
Richard Prince 50
Signs and Abstractions 124
Identity and the Gaze 52
Peter Halley 124
Cindy Sherman 52
Ross Bleckner and Sherrie Levine 127
Laura Mulvey and the Theoryofthe Gaze 54
General Idea 130
Silvia Kolbowski 56
Commodity and Form in Europe 132
Spaces of Action 57
John M. Armleder 132
Allan McCollum 57
Rosemarie Trockel 134
Louise Lawler 58 ©
Sylvie Fleury 136
Barbara Kruger 60
The Internationalism of Commodity Art 138
The Guerrilla Girls 62
Farhad Moshiri 138
Jenny Holzer 62
6 Memory and History 140 Wenda Gu and Xu Bing 210
Ai Weiwei 212
Memorializing War 140
Maya Lin 141
Zhang Huan 214
Ma Liuming 215
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 143
Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz 144 The Rising Art Market 216
Christian Boltanski 146
Rachel Whiteread 147 9 Engaging the Global Present 218
Shimon Attie 149 Cuban Experiments 219
Eleanor Antin 150 The “Volumen” Generation 219
African-American Histories 151 JOSE BEDIA 219
Whitfield Lovell 152 ELSOnE2 211
FLAVIO GARCIANDIA 221
Nari Ward 153
The Second Generation 222
Michael Ray Charles and Fred Wilson 154 KCHO 222
Kara Walker 155 IBRAHIM MIRANDA 225
RENE FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ 225
Kerry James Marshall 158 CARLOS GARAICOA 226
Art Histories and Civil Wars 159 Mapping the Global Present 227
Doris Salcedo 160 Shirin Neshat 228
William Kentridge 161 Shahzia Sikander 230
Walid Raad 164 Yinka Shonibare MBE 233
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba 166 Youth Culture as a Measure of Global Change? 235
Takashi Murakami 235
7 Culture, Body, Self 168 Yoshitomo Nara and Chiho Aoshima 237
Body as Form and Content 171 Cao Fei and the U-theque Collective 238
Ana Mendieta 171 Yang Fudong 240
Adrian Piper 172 Phil Collins 241
Tehching Hsieh 173 Rineke Dijkstra 244
Changing Strategies: Body as Social Medium 175 Imaging the Global Economy 245
ORLAN 175 Zoe Leonard 245
Marina Abramovié 177 Chen Chieh-jen 246
Too Close: Personal Lives and Artistic Practice 179 Nodes on the Global Network: Israel and Palestine 247
Tracey Emin 179 Emily Jacir 248
Sophie Calle 180 Yael Bartana 248
Kiki Smith 181
Embodying Abstraction 182 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives 250
Mona Hatoum 183 Relearning to Paint 251
Felix Gonzales-Torres 184 Amy Sillman 251
Janine Antoni 186 Cecily Brown 253
Gabriel Orozco 188 Franz Ackermann 254
Beyond the “I” 189 Odili Donald Odita 255
Teresa Margolles 189 Ingrid Calame 256
Santiago Sierra 191
Albert Oehlen 257
Space and Sculpture 260
Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art Jorge Pardo 260
in Russia and China 193 Katharina Grosse 262
Russia 193 Jessica Stockholder 264
Apartment Art: Ilya Kabakov 194 The Power of Fiction 265
Sots Art: Kosolapov, Komar and Melamid, and Bulatov 197 Matthew Ritchie 265
Photography and Performance: Moukhin, Kulik, Brener 200 Matthew Barney 267
China 204 Pierre Huyghe 269
“China/Avant-Garde” 204 Janet Cardiff 272
Wang Guangyi 205 Francesco Vezzoli 272
Zhang Xiaogang 207 Narrativity 2.0 275
Huang Yong Ping 209 Cory Arcangel 275
Ryan Trecartin 278

Contents
11 The Art of Contemporary Experience 280
The Experience of Experience 280
Olafur Eliasson 281
Ernesto Neto 283
Roni Horn 284
Mark Dion 287
Tom Sachs 289
Experience Observed 291
Thomas Hirschhorn 292
Hasan M. Elahi 294
Jill Magid 296
The Institute of Applied Autonomy 296
Trevor Paglen 298
Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics 299
Harun Farocki 299
Luc Tuymans 302
Silvia Kolbowski 303
Omer Fast 305
Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie 308

Endnotes 312
Select Bibliography 320
Picture Credits 326
Index 327

Contents
Preface

I grew up going to museums and galleries. My father taught them depends on viewers who are able to comprehend
painting in a small college in Ohio and art took us to Chicago specific details of both form and content. There are many
or New York and a couple of times to Europe. On a few mem- ways to introduce the variety of practices and subjects
orable occasions, contemporary art also brought exciting found in the contemporary art world. One can create cate-
people to us. I have a distinct childhood memory of watching gories according to place of origin, media, subject matter, or
Andy Warhol standing in front of a projected image of one chronology. Art Since 1980: Charting the Contemporary is funda-
of his famous portraits of Mao. Years later, in college, I real- mentally a chronological survey, but in the course of telling
ized that what I understood best about history or politics or the story of the transformation of the contemporary art
theory came to me from art. My biblical and historical educa- world it enlists all of these methodologies. This narrative doc-
tion was rooted in painting and sculpture. My growing under- uments regional productions, thematic concerns, and formal
standing of the transformations of the modern era came via developments as they made their imprint on the history
Romanticism, Realism, and Dada. Most important was the of art and it was written to be read from front to back. This
sense that art taught what it meant to be engaged with one’s story of the increased breadth and self-consciousness of the
life and times. This understanding, that creative manipula- contemporary art world is, I believe, compelling. However,
tion of materials and images had the power to convey the there are very good reasons to be skeptical of such narratives.
sense and nonsense of life, came first in front of Abstract Much of the art and theory discussed in the first third of this
Expressionist painting. Quickly, however, an admittedly book challenges the impulse to layer plot lines on the past
selfish impulse took me to the art of the 1960s and 1970s, and this warning must be taken seriously. Moreover, there
work created in my lifetime. As my art historical knowledge are clearly many themes that join the art that is separated by
and aesthetic taste caught up with my own moment, at some the temporal and geographical span of this story. In response
point in the 1980s, it was clear to me that the art of our own to this concern, I have attempted to weave thematic threads
age speaks to far more than our own lives. The art that fills in and out of the chronology. One can trace the relation-
the first chapters of this book transformed my thinking about ship of abstraction and representation across a wide variety
culture, self, and politics. Here are conceptual and formal of times and places, or compare the integration of mass
practices that invited the viewer into intellectual critiques culture into fine art in New York in the 1980s with similar
of power and injustice while lavishing him or her with the experiments in Cuba or Europe at the same time, or China
sensual power of everything from the oil paint with which in the 1990s, or Japan in the 2000s, to name a few examples.
I had grown familiar to media as diverse as lead, chrome, The urgency of creating politically effective art is addressed
video, bodies, and breath. Contemporary artists took me into across the scope of the book. Likewise, I have tried to high-
my own time but also far from my own place or experience; light traditions of feminist and activist art, as well as art ana-
their art forced me to consider how I related to the world. lyzing issues of class, warfare, and social injustice. While
This book was written to invite readers to the world of beauty one might come across these moments as the chronology of
and politics, and the discovery of self and others that is art at the book unfolds, one might also use the book to teach in a
the turn of the millennium. very different way, calling attention to various themes within
The art discussed here links societal shifts and the individ- the text. Finally, it must be said that Art Since 1980 does not
uals and communities who live through them. It represents a aspire to be an exhaustive study—there could be no such
cultural and intellectual history, written in many languages, history of contemporary art; instead it is an introduction to
materials, styles, and perspectives reaching from New York to many of the ideas and solutions that artists have pursued, and
London, Lagos, Havana, Beijing, and on around the globe. a series of examples of how one might engage with the art of
Artists’ power to reflect upon and affect the world around our time.
Acknowledgments

While working on the following text I have been the beneficiary of Collins, Hasan Elahi, Omer Fast, Paul Gladston, Joanne Huang
intellectual and economic largess from a variety of sources. Rep- Chi-Wen, Silvia Kolbowski, Sally Mann, Ibrahim Miranda, Rene Fran-
resentatives of all the artists discussed in this book were graciously cisco Rodriguez, Tom Sachs, and Shahzia Sikander. I will no doubt
forthcoming with information, insight, and images both in the be missing names, but a word of gratitude is owed to a number of
research and production stages of creating this book. Over the people for their willingness to confer about their personal histories
course of the last few years many artists and colleagues have shared as well as their scholarship. As I embarked on this project and at
ideas, corroborated or contradicted observations, and in several various points along the way, I received sustaining encouragement
cases opened their studios and archives to me, and for this I am and advice from Linda Nochlin and often returned to kernels of
immeasurably grateful. Often a quick email, that may even have practical wisdom from Nan Rosenthal and Bill Hood.
been quickly forgotten by the sender made a significant impact on As with any project, this one was supported by friends and inter-
the course of this book. Such is the nature of discussing art: a fleet- locutors, many of whom have been fellow travelers in the world of
ing impression and single facts merge with lifelong friendships and contemporary art for decades and who have sharpened my eye
days of debate to create a history. There is no doubt that I will leave and mind. Thanks to Claudia Bucher, Ilana Cepero, Anna Indych,
out the names of some of those who helped shaped this book. I hope Leslie Jones, Bill Kaizen, Karen Kurczynski, Justin Lieberman, Karen
they will forgive me. Overbey, Tricia Paik, Lizzy Pergam, Katherine Smith, Eugene Tan,
It is first to the students who have taken my various contemporary Greg Williams, and Andrew Witkin. And finally Joe Lin-Hill is owed
art history courses over the last decade or so that I owe my appre- a personal thank you for years of debating the aesthetics, ethics,
ciation. Working through the history of art with students at Mid- and economics of contemporary art from studios in Havana to long
dlebury College, The New School, Ursinus College, and for the last nights of wine and conversation in New York. This book is better for
seven years at my home institution of Brandeis University has been his influence.
both a challenge and pleasure. It is with these collaborators that Almost ten years ago Lee Greenfield, then of Laurence King Pub-
the need for this book was made clear and the form it has taken lishing came into my office and asked who I would like to see write a
was hammered out. The students in my seminars at Brandeis were book on contemporary art. I replied, “Besides me?” Since then Kara
especially helpful in offering their insight into how much contem- Hattersley-Smith and the team at Laurence King have been enthu-
porary art resonated with their lives. Several students including Sara Siastic, supportive, and patient as this project turned from proposal
Chun, Amanda Deibert, Amanda Di Santo, Daniella Gold, Emily to book. From the beginning Laurence King has been eager to push
Leifer, Rebecca Pollack, and Hannah Rothstein are owed individual the limits of what it meant to write a history of contemporary art and
acknowledgment for assisting with research and reading sections of encouraged me to let the variables of an as-yet-unwritten history—
manuscript drafts. rather than market expectations—determine the shape of this book.
As my courses became a laboratory for writing this book, several They have allowed for the considerable time necessary to adequately
institutions provided financial support essential for the necessary research work only just created, and encouraged a macroscopic view
travel and research. Middlebury and Ursinus College provided travel that challenges both thematic and chronological structures. As the
grants. I owe a great debt to Lisa Tremper Hanover who, as Director text has become the final book they have also been generous in pro-
of the Berman Museum ofArt at Ursinus College, provided funding viding a team of anonymous readers to which I am humbly grate-
for research in Cuba that proved critical to the course of this study. ful, as well as editors. Many thanks are owed to Michael Bird and
At Brandeis I have received generous funding through the Tomberg Robert Shore who at various points tore chapters apart for me, and
Research Fund, the Norman Faculty Research Grant, and the Center to Robert for providing the final editorial support. For leading the
for German and European Studies. Introductions to collections and book through the final stages I thank Melissa Danny and Ida Riveros.
artists were provided by the generosity of the Rose Museum of Art The ambitions for this project required participation not only of
under Director Michael Rush and the Rose Board of Overseers, on many individuals but also two publishing houses. Art Since 1980:
which I served under Chair Jonathan Lee from 2007 to 2009. Thanks Charting the Contemporary could not have been produced without
too, to Cynthia L. and Theodore S. Berenson for providing singular the partnership with Pearson and the support of Sarah Touborg. To
support of contemporary art history here at Brandeis. Finally at the Sarah and the readers she enlisted— Bill Anthes, David Hart, Sarah
university, I am pleased to be able to thank colleagues in my depart- Hollenberg, Ellen Hoobler, Monica McTighe, Doreen Maloney,
ment for their ongoing support and enthusiasm for this project, in Soraya Murray, and Alisa Swindell—thank you.
particular Charles McClendon, Nancy Scott, Graham Campbell, To my family, extended and immediate, who have supported me
Susan Lichtman, Jonathan Unglaub, Tory Fair, and Talinn Grigor, I am grateful. Thanks to Marty and Joan Kalb for starting me on this
as well as Aida Wong and Gannit Ankori who offered many insights journey and helping along the way and to Leah and David Roland
from their own specialties. Support from Joy Vlachos and Jennifer for their enthusiasm. Finally, a profound and most heartfelt debt of
Stern, the latter providing numerous visual and administrative gratitude is reserved for my wife, Jessica Roland, to whom this entire
resources, was invaluable. A particular acknowledgment goes to Joe effort is dedicated. Jessica has lived with this project for years and
Wardwell with whom I spent hours discussing art, often with large has read every word of the following text and many more besides.
groups of students in New York galleries, studios, and restaurants. Time and time again she provided emotional support, intellectual
Over the course of working on this book I have had the pleas- challenge, and common sense, all of which I desperately needed on
ure of many conversations with artists, galleries, and art historians, many occasions. With my children, Talia and Lev, Jessica has been
among them Janine Antoni, Shimon Attie, Andrea Bowers, Ingrid an anchor that helped me tread further into this project while main-
Calame, Chang Tsong-zung (Johnson), Chen Chieh-Jen, Phil taining my bearings in art and in life.
 Introduction

n the first decades of the twenty-first century, the ques- as an invitation to contribute to the conversation about the
tion “What is contemporary art?” has been posed with significance, character, and future of art.
surprising frequency, leading historians, theorists, and
critics to re-examine the character and consequences of
artistic production at the turn of the millennium. The ques-
The Beginnings of Contemporaneity
tion is really three questions: What is “the contemporary”? and the Object of Its Critique
What is “art”? And what constitutes the intersection between This history of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art
the two? Those asking the questions are highly invested in really begins after the protracted debates about Modernism
the answers; it is central not only to their professional lives, that fill accounts of post-World War II art. Art and criticism
but also to their own passions and politics as citizens of the in the immediate postwar decades offered challenges to the
contemporary world and advocates of art. We can all, as citi- paradigms of Modernism: its formalist pursuits, its priority
zens of the present, weigh in on the nature of the contem- on unifying narratives, and its construction as an avant-garde
porary and on the significant issues that matter in today’s removed from wider social concerns. Artists, along with the
world. However, defining contemporary art is neither strictly rest of the world, confronted not only the atrocities of Aus-
a matter of common sense nor is it exclusively philosophi- chwitz and Hiroshima, but also transformative events of a
cal: It refers to a body of objects accepted as art and labeled very different character that occurred in the wake of the
contemporary about which one can pose questions of iden- war, including the withdrawal of the British from India, the
tity, meaning, and consequences. Parsing why this work foundation of the State of Israel, and the establishment of
matters, to whom, and for how long presumes a familiarity the People’s Republic of China, followed by a surge of libera-
with art and artists that is not shared by all. This book does tion struggles and protest movements in the 1950s and 1960s.
not answer the question “What is contemporary art?” Rather, All these events undermined the certainties both of colonial
it is an introduction to a body of work that might set some power and of Modernist artistic judgments.
useful parameters and provide material for a debate on just As the world changed, historians and theorists, particularly
that issue. a group of French intellectuals including Michel Foucault,
Art Since 1980 introduces examples of painting, pho- Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-
tography, sculpture, installation, performance, and video Francois Lyotard, were reconceptualizing history and ideas
art that can be called upon to help us define both the con- about subjectivity to accord with the shifting ground of con-
temporary and art; it is a history that joins these two terms. temporary reality. Labeled Poststructuralists and Deconstruc-
The intellectual, political, cultural, and aesthetic history tionists, these writers described political and intellectual activity
of the turn from the twentieth into the twenty-first century as contingent on social actions rather than as historical inevi-
is expressed and imprinted upon “the art discussed in this tability. Thus, institutions from marriage to medicine as well
book. The story of art in contemporary global culture pro- as forms of governance and means of communication were
vides a record of our society and the processes of change described not as permanent structures around which people
through which we are living. While the book aims at inclusiy- could order their lives, but as conditional agreements that
ity, it is also structured in a way that suggests that the limits were continually being renegotiated and manipulated in the
of the text do not indicate limitations in its subject matter. process of being used. Lyotard summed up the state of think-
Every work that is discussed is intended to provide a model ing in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
for exploring art that is not directly addressed in the book. by contrasting modern disciplines and institutions, which
By providing examples of contemporary art from many legitimate themselves by appealing to a “grand narrative”
pt riists, cultures, and locations, I hope that this book serves such as “the emancipation of the rational or working subject
5) be
/
inradueton
 1
or the creation of wealth,”! with “Postmodern” ones that are Paris, but it was not until World War II that global politics
skeptical of such appeals. “Grand narratives” might include shifted eyes decisively away from France and onto a new art
the spread of Western civilization, the assertion of individual capital, New York City.
freedom, or the growth of democracy. Postmodern life exists Until the 1950s, New York had been merely one of the
as a nest ofintersecting pursuits that may or may not contrib- many artistic satellites orbiting Paris, with exhibitions such
ute to such grand narratives of official Western history and in as the Armory Show (1913) and the Society of Independent
either case cannot claim to be justified by them. Artists exhibition (1917), galleries such as Alfred Stieglitz’s
Lyotard concluded that efficiency was the sole remain- 291 (1905-17) and Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery (1915-
ing justification for our actions. As the protest, feminist, and 21), as well as the Museum of Modern Art (established 1929),
revolutionary movements of the postwar decades made clear, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (established 1939),
his dismantling of the authoritarian narratives of Modern- which became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1959),
ism was very much in keeping with the spirit of the times. and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century (1942-47),
But replacing the compromised truths of the past with the all providing important stages for the products of European
idea of simple efficiency satisfied few people. The resulting Modernism. But if, in these years, it was the French capital
challenge—of creating meaning and validity for our actions that conferred ultimate cultural validation on the work, New
without appealing to higher authorities, be they gods or gov- York was nonetheless beginning to function as an art capital
ernments—continues to motivate many artists and think- in its own right. Indeed, Picasso’s Cubism was embraced by
ers in the new millennium. Lyotard’s book represented a Stieglitz in New York in 1911 before Parisian galleries really
moment of what has been calied “Deconstruction,” but his began to take notice of it (fig. 0.1). In 1929, Stieglitz opened
observations also take note of what would become tools for his third gallery, calling it An American Place and choosing
construction. At the end of his introduction to The Postmodern to use it to foreground the work of U.S. artists in a show of
Condition, he writes: “Postmodern knowledge is not simply a
tool of the authorities [as modern knowledge was appearing
to be]; it refines our sensitivity to difference and reinforces
out ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”’ Artists and
thinkers in the subsequent period have striven to produce
such Postmodern knowledge, cultivate the ability to see the
unfamiliar, the alternative, and the Other, and enable them-
selves and others to exist in states that the foregoing Modern-
ist generation would have considered unacceptably unstable,
tenuous, and confusing.
Though the roots of Modernism as an_art-historical
movement can be traced back to the economic and colo-
nial expansion of the seventeenth century or even to the
Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century, the immediate
starting point for any historyof modern art is provided by
nineteenth-century Paris. By the 1860s, when the poet and
critic Charles Baudelaire proclaimed the greatness of the
painter Edouard Manet, and the 1870s, when the Impres-
sionists took their place at the head of the avant-garde, the
French capital was securely established as the capital of
modern art. The Postimpressionist flight from the urban
center only reconfirmed the importance of Paris, as Paul
Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin were faced
with making their reputations in the city even as they made
their homes elsewhere—it was still from Paris that their work
influenced artists all over Europe. Thus, the early twentieth-
century migrations from Spain to the Parisian stage by the
likes of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miré, and Salvador Dali were
merely later episodes in an already familiar story. Well into
the new century, the exhibitions, sales, collections, and
conversations that mattered most took place in the French
capital. On occasion, other cities—the Vienna of the Seces- 0.1 Pablo Picasso, Standing Female Nude, 1910. Charcoal on paper,
sionists or the Moscow of the Constructivists and Suprema- 19 x 12%" (48.3 x 31.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
tists, for instance—might momentarily draw attention from Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. Acc.n.: 49.70.34.

The Beginnings of Contemporaneity and the Object of Its Critique

confidence in the quality and importance of non-European and sorties binding the fate of art history to geopolitical vic-
Modernism. In the buildup to World War II, artists from tories and defeats—illuminates the imperialist conception
Europe feeling threatened by the rise of fascism began emi- of Modernism that would be critiqued in the second half of
grating to the U.S., joining the domestic flow of artists into the twentieth century. In the face of this apparently inexo-
New York to produce a vibrant art community that operated rable connection between modern art and political power,
increasingly independently of Europe. As the U.S. took on its practitioners and advocates, from Manet to the Abstract
the role of political superpower in the 1940s and 1950s, New Expressionists, took pains to define themselves in contrast to
York became the capital of the twentieth-century world and the politicians and businessmen. The conviction of the Dada
its art came to represent the cultural complement to its finan- artists in World War I Europe that their art was made “to
cial and political hegemony. remind the world that there are independent men, beyond
In 1958, as if to confirm this rise to power, the Museum war and nationalism, who live for other ideals,” demonstrated
of Modern Art mounted an exhibition to demonstrate what a powerful politics of negation.® Kazimir Malevich’s Suprema-
its chief curator of paintings, Alfred Barr, referred to as the tism, created in tandem with the Russian Revolution, demon-
“anxiety,” 6 “commitment,” and “dreadful Freedom” of postwar strated a parallel between avant-garde art and revolutionary
American painting.® Curated by Dorothy Miller, “The New politics. “I think [artistic] freedom can be attained only after
American Painting” (fig. 0.2) toured Europe as a celebra- our ideas about the organizations of solids has been com-
tion of U.S. Abstract Expressionism and as a cultural coun- pletely smashed,” Malevich proclaimed, echoing the senti-
terpart to the U.S.-sponsored campaign to rebuild postwar ments of those seeking to transform Russian society on a
Europe and challenge Soviet influence in the early years of more practical level.’ Art of the twentieth century, he wrote,
the Cold War. It had been argued since the late 1940s that “will become a new architecture: it will transfer [its] forms
Abstract Expressionism was proof of the depth of U.S. culture from the surface of the canvas to space.”* Whether nihilist
and “New American Painting,” in conjunction with several
”
or revolutionary, modern art was defined from the inside as
other exhibitions, was designed to demonstrate its signifi- a Campaign toward a world apart from the intellectually and
cance. In Berlin, Jackson Pollock’s art was interpreted as a aesthetically impoverished state of daily life.
“struggle with the elements, with society, [and] with fate.” In Negation continued as the dominant voice of modern
Basel, “the great reach of American painting” was seen to be art at mid-century. Mark Rothko explained: ‘that, though
striving for “the domination of space.”* It was responses like the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters had
this, echoed with even louder voices by U.S. critics, that led been strongly influenced by the Russian avant-garde, it was
art historian Irving Sandler to title his 1977 chronicle of the not for its political idealism. The new American painting, he
period simply The Triumph of American Painting.® asserted, was in fact aimed to escape the binds of the society,
The abbreviated history told here, with its repetition of the even a more perfect one. “The progression of a painter’s
nation-state and military models—its capitals, avant-gardes, work,” he wrote, was “toward the elimination of all obstacles ...

THE NEW AMERICAN PAINTING

as shown in ight european countries 1958-1959
Organized by The loternarional Progcan and shown wider the

auspices of Mhe International Council at ‘The Miseyinof Modern Art

Kunsthalle

Galleria Civics @Arre Moderna

MADRID Nacional de Ante Contemporgnes

WERLIN Mochsctuile fir Bildende Kinsve

AMSTERDAM Sucdeliyk Marseun

RUUSSELS Palau ites Boaux-Arts

PARIS Musée National d Ari Modeme

LONDON Fate Gallery

0.2 Installation view of the exhibition

"The New American Painting as
shown in eight European countries
1958-1959." The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, May 28
through September 8, 1959.

Introduction
 Clement Greenberg:
Objects of Concern
Before modernist negation became an obstacle to artists
such as Oldenburg in the 1960s, its was envisioned as a pro-
ductive force of almost unlimited capacity. Nowhere was the
historical urgency of modernism more forcefully argued
than in the writing of U.S. critic Clement Greenberg (1909-
94). Greenberg’s critical output from the 1930s through
the 1960s was the dominant expression of art theory in the
twentieth century, establishing the criteria against which
critics and artists would define their practices well into the
1970s. Describing the fate of culture in the 1930s, Greenberg
famously wrote: “A society, as it becomes less and less able, in
the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its
particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which
artists and writers must depend in large part for communi-
cation with their audience.”'* Western society, according to
Greenberg, had reached this point. In the context of 1930s
New York welcoming refugees from European fascism, it is
not surprising that he would recognize meaning itself to be
under siege. Greenberg continued: “All the verities informed
by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into ques-
tion and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the
0.3 Jean Fautrier, Head of aHostage #1, 1944. Oil and pigments on response of his audience to the symbols and references with
paper mounted on canvas, 25%6 x 21%" (64 x 54 cm). The National
which he works.” Though written in the face of the crises of
Museum of Art, Osaka. Courtesy Malingue S.A., Paris
the 1930s, this description suits the state of affairs during the
social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s and by the turn of the
millennium, the idea that truths are not absolute but instead
[including] memory [and] history.” In Europe, art critic depend on variables of culture and history would be taken
Michel Tapié, a strong advocate for the postwar avant-garde for granted by artists.
European painters including Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) and Greenberg, however, unlike late-twentieth-century histori-
Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) (fig. 0.3), explained that the ans assessed the crisis of meaning before him and found fault
Dada reaction to World War I was significant for its “total liq- with society. He objected not to the idea of inevitable forms
uidation of form” and corresponding obliteration of moral that would trouble the Poststructuralists, but to the manner
as well as aesthetic foundations.!? Post-World War II artists, in which Western civilization had destroyed them. Indeed,
Tapié asserted, had merely to repeat the Dada message. Greenberg’s primary contribution was to argue that Western
“(Without possible recourse to our personal ethic,” the con- artists, by basing their work on the materials with which it
temporary artist, he wrote, “pulverizes our domestic reflexes was being created, an approach called “formalism,” were
too long conditioned by the undiscussed routine of our able to produce new forms of reliable communication, reas-
habits.”'! Everything about life and culture as it was, Tapié sert an inevitable form of expression, and thereby advance
suggested, must be violently cast aside. civilization. Greenbergian formalism further asserted that
Artists and writers of the 1960s and 1970s would challenge true artists by conscience and necessity separated themselves
the aggressive disengagement of the modern artist. Recogniz- from middle-class society and isolated their art from society’s
ing that art history was not only following political history by weaknesses. Rejecting the appearances as well as the content
analogy, but was also actively engaged in the political life of of the fickle, petty, and destructive world of bourgeois life,
nations, demanded a change in perspective. Swedish-born the artist thus embraced abstraction. However, as Green-
US Pop artist Claes Oldenburg captured this new attitude berg notes, abstract art “cannot be arbitrary and accidental,
in 1961 when he said: “I am for an art that embroils itself but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or
with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.” As will original.” Daily life having been deemed unworthy, artists
be discussed in Chapter 1, and throughout the book, once were instructed to look instead to his or her materials. “The
artists, critics, and historians presented art as an integral excitement of their art,” he concluded,” lie[s] most of all in
and engaged part of society, narratives of resistance, excep- its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangements
tion, and difference became visible and alternative histories of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors etc.” Greenberg’s legacy
were written. rests on in his conviction that quality in art and the survival of

Clement Greenberg: Objects of Concern

culture was determined by the perceptivity with which artists
considered and revealed the properties of their materials.
In the final lines of his foundational essay “Avant-Garde
and Kitsch” (1939), Greenberg declared that “advances
in culture ... no less than advances in science and industry
corrode the very society” that make them possible. Thus an
art seeking independence from society holds the power to
change it. A decade after World War II, however, one can
perceive in Greenberg’s writing a shift as the social mission
of the artist is traded for increased attention on the indi-
vidual. In his 1955 “American-Type Painting,” written in
support of New York School painters such as Jackson Pollock
(1912-56) and Willem de Kooning (1904-97) (fig. 0.4),
Greenberg, characterized the artist as an isolated figure
struggling “to maintain the irreplaceability and renew the
vitality of art in the face of a society bent in principle on
rationalizing everything.”'* In the context of the 1950s Cold
War and curatorial efforts such as “New American Painting,”
however, the rugged individualism of such criticism took on
a rather doctrinaire tone. In fact, by the 1960s, The New York
Times could credit Greenberg with being largely responsi-
0.5 Jasper Johns, Drawer, 1957. Encaustic and assemblage on canvas,
ble for the success of U.S. art on the world stage. With such 30% x 30% x 2" (78 x 78 x 5 cm). The Rose Museum of Art.
power, statements such as “It seems to be the law of modern- GevirtzMnuchin Purchase Fund.

ism—thus one that applies to almost all art that remains

truly alive in our time—that the conventions not essen-
tial to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as
they are recognized” came to be read as proscriptions
and led to generations of artist and critics treating for
malism as a new faith.'!° Nonetheless, in many artists’
studios, from the late 1950s through the 1970s, formal-
ism was being questioned. As art historian Leo Stein-
berg wrote of responses to the painted numbers, letters,
symbols, and things of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) (fig. 0.5),
“Even those whose long-practiced art appreciation had
educated them to ignore a picture’s subject as irrelevant
to its quality talked and could talk about little else—
though they tried.”!° A “half-century of formalist indoc-
trination” was being brought to a close.'”

Johns’s and Oldenburg’s generation faced the problem

of deconstructing Modernism, breaking down its
assumptions about universal truths and necessary
forms. As a result of their efforts, artists beginning
their careers later, in the 1970s and after, were faced
with an abundance of alternative histories and conflict-
ing realities as the once-dominant narrative of progres-
sive or evolutionary Modernism was being swept aside.
Some of their work will be presented in the pages that
0.4 Willem De Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52. Oil on canvas, 6' 3%" x 58" follow, and the art history it tells extends around the
(192.7 x 147.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. globe. Looking critically at contemporary reality was as
478.1953. important to artists newly liberated from the restriction
of the Cultural Revolution in China hanging their work at
the “Stars Arts Exhibition” in Beijing in 1979 as it was for
appropriation artists testing the nature of representation in
media-saturated New York for the “Pictures” exhibition in
1977 or for the “Volumen” generation crafting a contempo-
rary identity for Cuban artists in Havana in 1981. Likewise,
once the forms of modern art appeared no longer inevitable
in Greenbergian terms, but ideological—to use Althusser’s
term referring to the role culture plays in reinforcing exist-
ing power relations—artists faced the question of what their
efforts to create with abstract form might mean. Numer-
ous so-called “neo” styles developed, the first being Neo-
Expressionism, which had a prehistory in Germany in the
1960s before being catapulted, controversially, to artworld
stardom at the German Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale
and at several New York galleries in 1980.
The late 1970s and early 1980s also provided a dramati-
cally changing political terrain. In addition to China initiat-
ing reforms that would turn it into an economic superpower
by the end of the century, the Middle East was asserting
itself, first as the linchpin in the oil crisis of the 1970s that
nearly crippled portions of the Western economy, and then
by reshuffling religious and nationalist priorities with the
Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. The societal effects of
these changes provide a foundation for a range of artistic
investigations at the turn of the millennium. Meanwhile, 0.6 Robert Rauschenberg, Thaw, 1958. Oil, printed paper, printed
both the U.K. under Margaret Thatcher (elected 1979) and reproductions, map, and fabric on canvas, 50% x 40"(127.6 x
the U.S. under Ronald Reagan (elected 1980) embraced poli- 101.6 cm). Whereabouts unknown.

cies that led to a reassertion of national power and a redistri-

bution of wealth that exacerbated the gap between the rich
and poor, especially in the U.S. The impact of Reagan-era 1973, the art world watched with a mixture of excitement
politics became a magnet for radical art in New York. Inde- and dismay as Robert and Ethel Scull sold highlights of their
pendent arts organizations such as Collaborative Projects collection of Pop art at Sotheby’s auction house for a seven-
(CoLab), founded in 1977, and Group Material, Fashion figure profit. Prior to the Scull sale, auction houses rarely
Moda, and ABC No Rio, founded in 1979, provided a plat- concerned themselves with the work of living artists, espe-
form for aggressive and innovative reinventions of realist cially young ones, because established values had not been
and political art in the 1980s, as well as a counterpoint to determined. Much of the Scull collection had been bought
the more financially driven galleries in the lower Manhattan directly from the artists for very little money in the first
SoHo district. years of their careers. Thaw (1958) by Robert Rauschenberg
(1925-2008) (fig. 0.6), which had been purchased by the
Sculls for $900 right after it was painted, sold for $85,000.
Exhibitions and the Art Market The sale thus established contemporary art as an investment
As artists and intellectuals were challenging the habits and item. The artists did not directly benefit from this financial
limits of the art world, the art market was being reinvented appreciation, but they did get a firsthand look at the future,
as well. While artists, theorists, and historians were contesting and ultimately saw the value of their work on the primary
the very models for global culture that had conferred victory market increase accordingly. The pace ofinflation has hardly
upon the new capital, the place of New York as the center of slowed in the twenty-first century. 200 One-Dollar Bills (1962)
the art world was—and to a degree still is—being vigorously (fig. 0.7) by Andy Warhol (1928-87), which was first seen at
asserted. In the 1970s, the primary market—where artworks auction in the 1986 Scull estate, when it realized $385,000,
are sold for the first time, usually through galleries, at rela- sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2009 for $43,762,500. U.S. Pop
tively fixed prices—and the secondary market—responsible art, which has a fascination with the commodity at its heart,
for the sale of art\that has previously been purchased, with has proved itself to be a reliable asset. Over the past decade,
values based on auction results—dovetailed dramatically the status of New York as the center of contemporary art may
for the first time, breathing life into the economic machine have been called into question, but its position as the capital
that continues to this day to generate wealth from art. In of the art market has remained stable.

Exhibitions and the Art Market

 0.7 Andy Warhol, 200 One-Dollar
Bills, 1962. Silkscreen ink and pencil
on canvas, 80% x 92%" (203.8 x
234.3 cm). Displayed during a
preview of Sotheby's Evening Sale of
Contemporary Art in New York City,
30 October 2009; sale November 11,
2009.

0.8 "Magiciens de la Terre" exhibition at

the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris,
1989. The poster on the side of the
building is The Casual Passer-by | met
at 11.09 a.m. Paris (1971) by Braco
Dimitrijevic (b. 1948), and hanging
above is Globe (1989) by Neil Dawson
(b. 1948).

The market responded to the growing interest in contem-

porary art by seeking out new styles in unexplored regions
of the art world and celebrating them, first with exhibitions,
then with sales. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the cycle
of biennials, largely invitational and international showcases
of contemporary art, grew exponentially. Cities including
Havana, Johannesburg, and Shanghai joined established
venues such as Venice and New York to host these tempo-
rary exhibitions of contemporary art, and the arts calendar
filled up with events attended by a cadre of curators, critics,
and collectors. The exposure provided by these exhibitions,
which often integrated local work with that of international
art stars, drew attention to the limits of museum program-
ming in the major Western museums. The first Havana Bien-
nial in 1984, founded as a gesture of unity among Third
World nations, proved a touchstone event, demonstrating
the depth of artistic production beyond the borders most
often surveyed by the art world. Parisian curator Jean-Hubert
Martin remarked in the mid-1980s that museums in Europe
and the U.S. seemed blind to 80 percent of the planet. His
response was “Magiciens de la Terre” (1989) (fig. 0.8), held
in several venues in Paris including the Centre Pompidou. As
a challenge to standard museum practice, Martin juxtaposed
installations and objects created by artists from all over the
world: Established artworld figures were displayed in the
company of Tibetan sand painters. By the turn of the mil-
lennium, international exhibitions with long histories such
as the Venice Biennale (founded in 1895) and Documenta in
Germany (1955), which both rose to prominence as venues
for asserting national identity and power, were handed
over to curators intent on turning them into platforms for
rethinking contemporary art, its display, and its audience.

Introduction
 In the twenty-first century, the biennial circuit has become class, race, or gender of the artist(s) will take priority, while in
intertwined with those of art fairs and auctions. The work of others technique, craft, and materials will have precedence.
artists shown on the former is often then bought and sold on Enlisting a variety of perspectives in this way is intended to
the latter. In 2007, the 52nd Venice Biennale, Documenta respond to the heterodox nature of contemporary artis-
12, and Sculpture Projekte Munster 07, three of the most tic production and to suggest the intellectual advantage of
prestigious international art exhibitions, collaborated with examining art, and sometimes a single artwork, from differ
the most prominent art fair, Art Basel, to promote what they ent positions. The text is intended to document and illustrate
called “Grand Tour 2007,” a package deal providing visitors a history of art within changing conditions of production
with travel to and accommodation at all four events. New and viewing.
art markets have opened at the turn of the millennium. Sig- The main narrative starts in the United States, widens its
nificant sales and collecting communities have developed all view first to include those cities that once constituted satel-
over the world, with particular concentration in the growing lite art centers, and then to consider contemporary art in a
sectors of Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. The established global context. As with any art-historical survey, there is far
auction houses have responded to this growth, achieving, more art left out than there is included. This is not intended
for example, significant sales of Russian contemporary art to be an exhaustive study; there is too much interesting
in Moscow, Middle Eastern contemporary art in Dubai, and art being made today for any book to address it all. Rather,
Asian and Southeast Asian contemporary art in Hong Kong. this survey is designed to raise enough issues of form,
In 2012 mainland China entered the global market with the content, and context to illuminate any work the reader might
joint venture initiative between state-owned Beijing GeHua encounter in exhibitions of contemporary art. I have chosen
Art Company and Sotheby’s. Those same auction houses are examples that reflect significant movements and themes
now also buying galleries, handling sales for living artists, in contemporary art and that, between them, can be seen
and sponsoring art fairs. Galleries, paying equal attention to constitute a history of the period. There will be readers
to the emerging economies, have been strategically opening who search the index in vain for a particular artist they love.
branches far from their traditional New York, London, or Great artists have been left out. There will be readers who
Berlin bases, and selectively importing international artists. puzzle at the attention devoted to one artist rather than
Meanwhile, configurations of dealers, curators, and collec- another. In selecting works for discussion, I have chosen to
tors outside the West connect art communities in Beijing, write primarily about art that students and museum visitors
Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, or Havana, Mexico can actually go and see, and it is here that the institutional
City, and Sao Paulo. forces of the art world are certainly at play in the choices I
This centrifugal movement has been complemented by have made. Art Since 1980 is a companion to the efforts
a centripetal impulse illustrated by the 2010 and 2011 BRIC of thousands of arts professionals around the world who
sales at the London auction house Phillips de Pury. “BRIC” do not make art but who live for it, spending their intel-
is a term used by economists and investors to designate the lectual, emotional, and economic lives putting it in front
four emergent markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. of audiences.
In contrast to the internationally based sales that mimic Each discussion of a particular piece of art in this book
the biennial circuit, the London BRIC sale reinvented the is intended to be taken as a more general model of how art
capital/periphery model, bringing the cultural products of can be examined, what questions can be asked, and what
far-flung and culturally diverse economic powers to a single kind of answers one might expect to glean. Every work
venue for exhibition and evaluation. Moreover, the list of lots opens into different, intersecting histories. For clarity’s
read like a checklist for a contemporary biennial. Though sake, many works are presented in the context with which
the metaphor of intersecting and changing networks reflects they are most often linked. As such, most of the contempo-
the organic and social aspects of contemporary art, earlier rary Chinese art here appears as part of a discussion of the
models have not entirely disappeared. Like artists and art history of art in China and its introduction to the world
historians, the art market has established its own network of stage in the early 1990s. Likewise, a number of African-
interests untethered by, but not indifferent to, the previous American artists rose to prominence in the same decade
artworld cartography. due not only to the quality of their work, but also to a more
general emerging interest in themes of identity and race
within the art world and culture at large. It is hoped that the
Narrative and Methods depth such work adds to the discussion of art and politics
Art Since 1980 is organized roughly chronologically and uses in China or race in the U.S. will not keep readers from asking
a number of strategies to discuss contemporary art. While what the same work also tells us about painting or experi-
the book presents a)historical narrative, it also addresses how ence, two of the themes taken up elsewhere in the text.
artworks are formally produced, critically received, theoreti- Each encounter with a work in this book is intended to invite
cally constructed, socially defined, and historically situated. the reader to engage, interrogate, and enjoy art that is not
In discussions of some works, issues of the biography, history, found here.

Narrative and Methods

 Discovering the Contemporary

1.1 James Rosenquist, F-11717, 1964-65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 10 x 86' (3.04 x 26.21 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange}. Acc. n.: 473.1996.aw.

/ n 1968, the MetropolitanMuseum of Art in New York Within a few years of Rosenquist’s Metropolitan Museum
displayed F111 (1964-65) by James Rosenquist (b. debut, all of the other institutions of high culture in New
© 1933) in the company of works by European masters York had begun to embrace contemporary art. Every promi-
of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centu- nent American Pop artist was given a major museum retro-
ries (fig. 1.1). The painting is a monumental expression spective, despite the fact that their careers were less than a
of U.S. Pop art, a full-scale image of an F-111 military air decade old. Paintings such as Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923-97)
craft overlaid with overlapping images drawn from U.S. Golf Ball (fig. 1.2), which in 1962 had inspired his dealer,
culture, mixing the innocuous—a girl getting her hair Leo Castelli, to exclaim enthusiastically, “Look at that
done, cake, spaghetti—with the destructive and hor picture! There is not an idea in it,” were being compared to
rific—a mushroom cloud and the plane itself. The impos- the work of David and Mondrian.” Not everyone was pleased.
ing size of the piece and its ominous juxtapositions were “Pop Art at the Met? Sire, this is no longer the revolution, it
intended by the artist to express the sense of fear he felt in is the Terror,” stated the critic Sidney Tillim, comparing the
the face of nuclear proliferation. He also created it to serve situation to the worst excesses of the French Revolution.*
as a rebuttal to those who thought that the threat of war Even if overstated, Tillim’s critique raised issues that remain
was a thing of the past and that contemporary Pop art “had contentious. If it was now museums, rather than churches
nothing to say.”! Here were the details of life as it was being or aristocrats, that determined the cultural value of art, he
lived presented in the billboard advertising style in which it argued, works such as F-J// reflected not true resistance
was being represented on the streets outside the museum. but instead the result of career-minded artists compromis-
The event marked a change in the perception of contem- ing with publicity-seeking museums. After the efforts of
porary art. The curators and directors of the Metropolitan modern artists from Courbet to Pollock to evade existing
Museum pronounced the work a commentary on the omni- power structures, Pop now appeared to be collaborating
presence of the military in American society and hung it with with them enthusiastically. Tillim and others felt that artists
such well-known images of politics and power as Jacques- had sacrificed the outsider position that, following the logic
Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787), Emanuel Gottlieb of Clement Greenberg, had permitted the Modernist avant-
Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), and Nicolas garde to challenge the status quo.
Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1633-34). By juxtaposing In truth, Tillim’s objections to Rosenquist’s inclusion in
Rosenquist’s work with classic history paintings, the museum the Met lay in large part in the Pop artist’s style. He disliked
invested Pop art with the gravity of history, history with the Rosenquist’s use of montage, which involved layering inde-
immediacy of Pop, and the Met itself with the cachet of pendent graphic elements and thus resisting the custom of
the contemporary. treating the painting as a unified whole. The broken rhythms

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

 of formalist distance upon which modernists had relied for
understanding the world. Critics increasingly pointed to a
correspondence between the formal properties of 1960s
art and the nature of the radically changing world that sur-
rounded them. In fact formalism, the commitment to prior-
itizing formal qualities of a work of art over its content, was
being transformed in these years into a means of discovering
content. Leo Steinberg described Rauschenberg’s work as “flat-
bed painting,” one of the lasting critical metaphors invented
in response to the art of the immediate post-World War II
period.” The collisions across the surface of Rosenquist’s
painting and the collection of materials on Rauschenberg’s
surfaces were being viewed as models for a new form of
realism, one that captured the relationships between people
and things in the world outside the studio. The lesson that
formal analysis could lead back into, rather than away from,
content, often with very specific social significance, would
be central to the creation and reception of late-twentieth-
century art.

1.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962. Oil on canvas, 32 x 32" (81.3 x
81.3 cm). Courtesy The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein New Movements and New Metaphors
Artists all over the world shared U.S. Pop artists’ interest in
creating new metaphors from the appearances and experi-
of advertising imagery and disruptive juxtapositions of scale ences of everyday life. The international artists’ group Fluxus
and color in /-J// can be read as a deliberate rejection of directed its attention to the artistic potential of the everyday.
the compositional devices of traditional painting. This style From the Latin term for “flow,” Fluxus was a loose grouping
also rebutted the expectation that art should make order out of progressive international artists who worked in diverse
of the world rather than repeat its chaos. Four years later, media. “Why does everything I see that’s beautiful like cups
in 1972, when Rosenquist was given a retrospective at the and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part
Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the discord of something fancier and bigger? Why can’t I just use it for
and disjunction of his paintings was interpreted as a metaphor its own sake?” asked Fluxus artist Dick Higgens.® In a similar
for contemporary experience.’ In effect, the contempo- spirit, Fluxus member Nam June Paik created Zen for Film
rary was perceived as those experiences, in art and life that (1964-65) (fig. 1.3), which consists of twenty-three minutes
were being dislodged from narratives either of progress or of leader—the blank strip at the beginning of a reel, used to

1.3 Nam June Paik, Zen for Film, 1964-65,

Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/
licensed by VAGA, NY. Courtesy the Nam June
Paik Estate.

New Movements ar
help threading in a projector—so that the viewer watches an The art of the 1970s, to which most of this chapter is devoted,
imageless movie made ofjust the physical film itself. Mean- was consistently critical of the status quo, and in a variety of
while, the Japanese collective Hi Red Center marked off a forms and methods provided the foundations for the critical
section of the Ginza financial district of Tokyo and, dressed perspectives discussed in the rest of this book.
as surgeons, began the absurd task of sterilizing it. Cleaning
Event (Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropol- The Minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris
itan Area) (1964) (fig. 1.4), announced with a sign reading While Pop artists looked to the image-bank of mass culture,
“Be Clean!” in English and “Soji-chu” (“Cleaning Now’) generating art by recycling reality, Minimalist artists sought a
in Japanese, used ordinary, even official-looking actions different means.to write a new art history. In 1965, Donald
in a real place to direct viewers’ attention toward larger Judd (1928-94), after arriving at what would be his mature
political events: in particular, the Japanese government’s style—variations on rectangular boxes presented alone or
attempt to brighten its image in advance of the forthcoming in groups with uniform parts repeated in serial progressions
summer Olympics. (fig. 1.5)—published “Specific Objects,” a manifesto for
While artists such as Rosenquist, Paik, and Hi Red Center this new art. Painting and sculpture had become, he wrote,
utilized the products of contemporary society, isolating and “containers” for ideas about art and so were constrained in
examining its component parts, other groups, specifically advance by unexamined preconceptions of the artist and
Minimalist and Process artists, carried out investigations into his or her audience.’ Before a traditional sculpture is made
the processes of art making and explored the properties of or viewed, it already had an identity that differentiated it in
new non-traditional art materials. Such artists represented particular ways from other things. By contrast, Judd argued,
an urgent desire to redefine the focus of art and the role artists of the 1960s wished to be free of such a priori assump-
of the artist. As the 1970s wore on, many artists came to tions and so avoided resemblance to sculptural traditions.
feel that Pop, Minimalist and Process art were only address- As these new works forged a new history of art they activated
ing part of the issue; these movements interrogated the the space around them in a very particular and even aggres-
nature of reality as it was, but left questions regarding how sive fashion, A “specific object,” he explained, did not sit
existing forms acquired meaning and how reality might be passively waiting to be observed; it interrupted the serenity
changed unanswered. Questions of meaning are philosophi- of the gallery or museum, eschewed the hieratical platform
cal, social, and political and the 1970s ended with artists of the pedestal, and claimed real space as its own. Like the
having begun to inflect their practice according to each of careening images in /-//J or the flatbed of Rauschenberg’s
these terms. Conceptual, feminist, and political artists of this combine, Judd was describing not only a contemporary
second postwar generation set out toward a wider examina- approach to art making but also a new metaphor for under
tion of the relationships between history, society, and art. standing contemporary life.

1.4 Hi Red Center, Hi Red

Center’s Cleaning Event
(Campaign to Promote
Cleanliness and Order in
the Metropolitan Area),
October 16, 1964.
Performance piece.
Photograph courtesy the
artist and sepiaEYE.

Chapter 1 Discover ing the Contemporary

1.5 Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968. Stainless steel, plexiglass, overall 33 x 67% x 48" (83.82 x 172.4
x 121.92 cm). From the exhibition “Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
5 September 1999 to 2 September 2001. Collection Walker Art Center.

Judd, himself, created objects where the dimensions, the beautiful, “Saturnian” even, lay references neither to earlier
character of the materials, and the relationships between artists nor even to images from popular culture, but rather to
the parts were all immediately self-evident. Anything sug- commercial suppliers: Bernstein Brothers, Tinsmiths; Allied
gested by one part of the work, must be born out by the Plastics; Rohn Haas Plexiglas; and Galvanox and Lavax fin-
whole. There were to be no mysteries to which the artist held ishes.? Judd trawled contemporary culture as eagerly as did
a secret key, or any unique point of view that would explain the Pop artists, suggested Smithson; hejust looked for differ-
the work. Likewise for works with multiple parts, any arrange- ent things.
ment must be made so that the viewer could independently Smithson’s review hints at the emotional, even mystical,
glean its logic; there were to be no complicated patterns, quality of Judd’s work. The boxes are often optically complex
symbolic arrangements, or random or intuitive composi- sculptures that convey unpredictable effects through their
tions. To borrow a quote from the Minimalist painter Frank knowable form. Robert Morris’s (b. 1931) work resists this
Stella, “what you see is what you see.”* Judd’s intention was visual pleasure and transcendental potential in favor of a
to disengage from the oppressive weight of history to present more physical brand of Minimalism. Morris’s work of the
something that could be known completely and experi- mid-1960s is characterized by boxes that are as simple as
enced directly. Yet even his abstract boxes could be seen as Judd’s, but they are made of wood and painted gray. The
connecting to life. In a 1965 exhibition review, fellow artist simplicity of the work and its lack of surface interest forces
Robert Smithson (1938-73) identified Judd’s sources— the viewer to pay less attention to the object itself and more
a rather traditional art-historical endeavor. Behind Judd’s to the relationship between it, the viewer, and the context—
abstractions, however, which Smithson found exquisitely usually a gallery, sometimes a stage. Morris’s sculptures

New Movements and New Metaphors

 1.6 Robert Morris, Green Gallery
Installation. Seven painted
plywood sculptures at the Green
Gallery, New York, 1964. Varying
dimensions. Courtesy Leo Castelli
Gallery, New York.

were closely related to his interest in dance, particu-

larly the choreography of Anna Halprin and Merce
Cunningham, who were both interested in generating
dance from ordinary movements. Installations such as
that at the Green Gallery in 1964 (fig. 1.6) produce
situations in which the viewer is made aware of his or
her physical presence in the environment. Morris’s
objects exert themselves in the room, forcing the visitor
to navigate through, under, and around the objects and
any other people in the space. Morris explained his
interests, noting that the “better new work takes rela-
tionships out of the work and makes them a function of
space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision. The object
is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.”!° This is
a Minimalism to be experienced, not merely observed.

Neo-Concrete Art
The Minimalists’ interest in geometric compositions
and the occupation of real space was shared by a variety
of artists. Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists, of whom Lygia
Clark (1920-88) and Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) were
chief representatives, offer a particularly dynamic
expression of these concerns. Moving beyond the iso-
lated interest in geometry that they felt had limited
the Concrete Art movement that preceded them, Neo-
Concrete artists studied the relationships between
materials, form (often but not exclusively geomet-
ric), and the environment. For Clark, geometry was a
1.7 Hélio Oiticica, B3 Bélide Box 3 “Africana,” 1963. Oil on wood,
means toward the creation of spaces and incidents that 235% x 9% x 11%" (59.9 x 23.8 x 30 cm). Image courtesy Projecto Hélio
inspired free movement and participation. Her early Oiticica.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

1.8 Hélio Oiticica,
Tropicalia, 1967.
Showing Penetrables
PN2 and PN3 as
installed at Centro de
Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio
de Janeiro in 1996.
Mixed media. Image
courtesy Projecto Hélio
Oiticica.

works, called Counter Reliefs and dating to the late 1950s, are geometry” and end with “an organic space” was realized by
quite modest: simple compositions built of panels of black, adopting details from the real spaces of Brazilian daily life
geometric shapes hung flat on the wall but layered so they and culture.!!
extend, like Judd’s “specific objects” a few years later, into the
space of the viewer. From the Counter Reliefs, Clark and soon Process Art
Oiticica pushed geometric forms into the rooms and even In his 1968 essay “Anti-Form,” Morris argued that the
the streets, assembling boxes and hinged assemblages (fig. problem with Minimalism was that, although it had pointed
1.7) that are intended to be handled by the viewer, who in so to the need to interrogate the assumptions that inform artis-
doing activates the object and the space around it. tic production and reception, and compelled artists to focus
In 1967, Oiticica created Tropicalia (fig. 1.8) in Rio directly on the specific properties of the object, much Mini-
de Janeiro (and in 1969 created similar installations in malist art ended up indifferent to its own material specificity.
London), in which viewers were invited into the art rather Morris’s own blocks, for instance, could have been made of
than asked to manipulate it with their hands as Clark had anything—there was nothing in the way he presented or even
done. His inspiration was the spaces of the favelas, the shaped his Green Gallery exhibition that responded directly
slums of Brazil, which exemplified the integration of aes- to the materials with which he had chosen to work. The
thetic form and social content. In the gallery, Oiticica con- piece hanging from the ceiling even seemed to defy its own
structed a series of small rooms, boxes opening up into materiality. Much had been learned about the relationships
each other and occasional interstitial spaces, some with with and beyond the work, but what about the object itself?
floors of sand or straw, and one set up like a small pond. In response, Morris and others began to look closely at their
The walls were adorned, and in places constructed, using materials to provide both the form and content of the work,
brightly colored and patterned fabrics. Tropical plants and letting the process of making rather than the finished object
birds populated the installation. The different spaces, all of take priority. Sculptor Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) described
which were open to the visitor, were inspired by different how these artists created what would be termed Process art:
features of the favelas. Exhibition-goers were invited to take “When I learned what the material could do, then I could
off their shoes and wade in the water, walk across the sand, control it, allowing it to do so much within the parameters
and lie in the straw. There were books to read and music to that were set up. So the material could and would dictate its
hear. In Tropicalia, the Neo-Concrete desire to “begin with own form, in essence.”!”

New Movements and New Metaphors

1.9 Lynda Benglis,
Quartered Meteor, 1969
(cast 1975). lead, 57% x
652 x 64%" (146.1 x
166.4 x 163.2 cm). Edition
of 3. Courtesy Cheim &
Read, New York

1.10 Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967. Felt, 12 x 6'(3.65 m x 1.11 Richard Serra, Prop, 1968. lead antimony, four plates, each
182.88 cm). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 48 x 48 x 1"(122 x 122 x 2.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
Collection of Ellen Johnson. Photo Rudy Burckhardt. New York. Gift of the Grinstein Family. Acc. num. 286.1986.a-d.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

 For Quartered Meteor (1969) (fig. 1.9), Benglis poured pig- (fig. 1.12), an enormous spiral constructed in Great Salt
mented polyurethane foam into the corner of a room. The Lake, Utah, from rock, earth, and salt crystals. As the artist
amorphous fluidity of the foam hardened into an object walked toward the still red water of the lake, he said that the
with both organic shape and a hard edge as it dried in mid- stability of the deserted mining operations that flanked the
cascade. Benglis then cast the form in lead for the work we water and the hot desert that surrounded everything seemed
see here. Morris cut, hung, and dropped pieces of felt to to give way to a spinning movement that inspired the winding
create works such as Untitled (1967) (fig. 1.10), in which form of the spiral that he eventually realized there. “No ideas,
gravity and the qualities of the fabric determined the compo- no concepts, no systems, no structures, no abstractions could
sition. Richard Serra (b. 1939) created a text piece (1962-68) hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence ...
consisting of a handwritten list of verbs that might serve as It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations,
instructions for Process art: “To roll/ to crease/ to fold/ ... and the lake remained rock still.”"! In Smithson’s film docu-
to crumple/ to shave/ to tear/ to chip/ to split/ to cut/ to menting the project, geological and historical time intersect
sever/...”!? The shock of Serra’s sculpture lay in his single- in the basements of natural-history museums, maps blowing
minded application of such actions to materials and _ his across the desert, and toy dinosaurs marching through diora-
commitment to letting the process define the product. Split- mas of the Paleolithic era. Footage of massive earth-moving
ting, cutting, suspending, or forcing lead, steel, rubber, and vehicles is spliced with scenes showing crystal growth, sun-
timber resulted in evocative, often poetic, even frightening spots, and Smithson’s editing table. The loss of dialectical
results, such as his sculptures in which massive sheets of metal distance between past and present, history and actuality,
are supported without fixings by gravity alone (fig. 1.11). enacted by Spiral Jetty would become an increasingly impor-
By deeply experimenting with a wide variety of materials, tant theme throughout the 1970s.
often foreign to the art museum, Process artists created work In 1972, two years after Spiral Jetty was completed, the
that could not be readily integrated into existing modes of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) and _psycho-
thinking about and displaying art. therapist Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-92) published Anzti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the most far-reaching
Alternative Logics: Spiral Jetty and Conceptual Art statement of the anti-dialectical trend. Deleuze and Guattari
One of the most radical Process art proposals was made by were interested in erotic desire and the unconscious as crea-
Robert Smithson during the creation of Spiral Jetty (1970) tive forces. They saw the key to understanding the psyche not

- Seeeted ere ee

1.12 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Black basalt, limestone rocks, earth, and salt crystals, length 1,500"
(457.2 m). Great Salt lake, Utah. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni, courtesy John Weber Gallery, New York.

New Movements and New Metaphors

 iF YOU WANT IT
py Chrisgiias frém John & Yoko

1.13 John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “War is Over! If You Want It,” 1969. Billboard, New York. Photo by Yoko Ono © Yoko Ono.

in decoding hidden meanings based on past events, in the at the end of her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” that
Freudian manner, but rather in asking questions about pro- “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”!®
duction: “The question posed by desire is not “What does Efforts to translate, define, and explain art, Sontag argued,
it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’”!? By putting the obscure and overlook its productive power. One can see a
emphasis on creation, Deleuze and Guattari saw opportuni- similar turning away from history and conventional logic to
ties to merge the arts, psychoanalysis, and social revolution. embrace the generative potential of sensuality, desire, and
Their sentiment is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s injunction action in the billboards announcing “War is Over! If You

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1.14 Sol leWitt, Variations of

Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974.
Wood sculptures with white paint
(122 pieces}, each piece 8"
(20.3 em) square. Framed
photographs and drawings (131
pieces], each piece 26 x 14"
(66 x 35.6 cm). Base 12 x 120
XING NS Oro SOAR SEK
548.6 cm). Courtesy the Saatchi
Gallery.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

Want It” (1969) created by John Lennon (1940-80) and Yoko gested that his show had wider implications. Audiences were
Ono (b. 1933) (fig. 1.13), and the couple’s Bed-Jn (1969), to understand that art was engaged with the outside world;
a repeated performance in which press and guests were the exhibition consequently included pieces that could be
invited to discuss politics with them as they lay in bed in their found in the woods and rivers around the Cornell campus.
hotel room. The artist and critic Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), who
Relinquishing history and logic, however, did not always created performances that drew both on the ritualistic
require that one lose oneself in the desert or the bedroom. process of Abstract Expressionism, as exemplified by Pollock,
As Smithson was moving earth in Utah, Sol LeWitt (1938- and on the materials and spaces of the real world, shared
2007) was composing texts on Conceptual art that initiated a Sharp’s expansive vision. Happenings, the name Kaprow gave
new form of secular mysticism. In his 1969 writing “Sentences to his performances, included any number of participants
on Conceptual Art,” he pronounced: “Conceptual artists are engaged in activities ranging from rearranging furniture in
mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions Push Pull (1963) and piling-up tires for Yard (1961), to more
that logic cannot reach.”'” That leap depended on following complex scenarios including building towers and bonfires,
a consistent “irrational” choice through to its completion.'® and spreading strawberry jam on a Volkswagen Beetle and
LeWitt’s conceptual processes, like those of Judd, are gen- licking it offin Household (1964). As he explained in his land-
erally quite simple: The point of the object is to communi- mark essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), artists
cate the operations that produced it. Variations of Incomplete had learned that if they wanted to evoke sensations from the
Open Cubes (1974) is an example (fig. 1.14). The title pro- real world, they need not imitate them in paint: If the artist
vides a description of the idea that has generated the work. wants to suggest something hot or sweet, a bonfire and jam
The minimum requirement for a visual description of an are more suitable materials. Kaprow went as far as assert-
open cube is three lines, one each along the axes of height, ing that the only significant art was that which rejected the
width, and depth. As the title does not specify how the vari- geometric, sanctioned spaces of the gallery. He claimed that
ations are to be presented, LeWitt produced two- and three- purportedly anti-aesthetic work, such as Process art, by situat-
dimensional renderings. On the floor are sculptures of every ing itself in galleries and museums, actually reinforced con-
possible combination, from the three three-piece models to ventional Western views of art, including the “conventional
the single eleven-piece one. Images of the open cubes are dualism of the stable versus the unstable, the closed versus
framed and hung on the wall. In the end, LeWitt depicted the open, the regular versus the organic, the ideal versus
the concept in three ways, through words, objects, and the real and so on.”*! For example, we may find interest in
images, thus diagramming both the geometrical concept and dropped felt, but it looks interestingly chaotic only in rela-
the threefold manner in which artists typically communicate tion to the square room in which it is installed. Worse than
their ideas. that, its value depends on the importance assigned to it by
LeWitt’s art would always include a physical component, the owners of that room. The concern with exploding con-
but this was not the case for every Conceptualist. Many uti- ventional binaries such as order/chaos became more urgent
lized text to suggest an idea that would become the work of as artists, especially feminist artists, moved away from formal
art as the viewer contemplated the words. Robert Barry’s (b. issues to address social ones.
1936) All the Things T Know But Am Not Now Thinking (1969), In a 1970 article on an exhibition of Minimalist, Process,
consisting of the title written across a white canvas, or Yoko Conceptual, and Earth art called “Spaces” at the Museum
Ono’s Breath Piece (1966), for which the artist circulated a of Modern Art, New York, the artist and critic Gregory
card among spectators with the word “Breathe” written on Battcock (1937-80) extended the line of critique presented
it, were such works, initiated by text and completed by the by Kaprow, proposing that it was one’s moral responsibility
viewer’s mind and body. to examine the context of contemporary art when interpret-
ing its content. “One characteristic of modern man and of his
On the Social Meaning of Form art is his new awareness of the repressive function of bounda-
At Cornell University in 1970, the artist, writer, and curator ries,” he announced. “There are sexual boundaries, famil-
Willoughby Sharp (1936-2008) presented an exhibition ial, administrative, governmental, geographical, and social
titled “Earth Art” that celebrated the examination and boundaries and they all diminish man’s desire for freedom
manipulation of over forty kinds of organic matter. Sharp and subsequently reduce the chances for authentic social
listed the materials used in alphabetical order, from “air, change.
99
Battcock identified certain forces that influenced
alcohol, ashes,” through “felt, fire, flares,” all the way to the way work was shown and viewed in “Spaces,” ? including
“twigs, twine, water and wax.”!? Sharp presented the actions the corporations that had funded the exhibition and indi-
to which the materials had been subjected in a similarly vidual works within it: General Electric, Kimberly-Clark, RCA,
ordered list, beginning with “bent, broken, curled” and and Sylvania to name a few. These “[i]ndustrial and research
ending with “spread and sprinkled.””? While clearly drawing giants, electronic and data-oriented companies,” wrote
on Morris’s notion of “Anti-Form” and the Abstract Expres- Battcock, “encouraged ... artists to incorporate their discoy-
sionist drip paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912-56), he sug- eries into art works. Instead of contributing to the church,

New Movements and New Metaphors

 1.15 Terry Fox,
Defoliation Piece,
1970. Four
black-and-white
photographs,
8 x 10"(20.32 x
25.4 cm) each.
Pertormance
documentation of “The
Eighties” exhibition,
17 March 1970, at
the Powerhouse
Gallery, University Art
Museum, University of
California, Berkeley.
© Estate of Terry Fox,
Kéln. Courtesy of
Marita Loosen-Fox.

they contributed to artists, and it all had the same effect. The (fig. 1.15), in which he set fire to a rectangular plot of
corporate conscience was appeased.”*? 23 His charge was not jasmine flowers outside the University Art Museum, Berkeley,
simply that MoMA provided industry with public-relations California. To get the garden to burn he used agent orange,
opportunities, but that certain artists were also masking the a defoliant then in daily use in the Vietnam War (1959-75).
nature of their corporate production. In contrast to the con- In this case, Fox was able to invest what resembled a piece
victions expressed by Process artists, “the properties of the of Minimalist and Earth art with poignant political content.
materials and inventions that are donated by the compa- Fox wrote of Defoliation Piece: “Everyone likes to watch fires. It
nies are not exploited for their unique and peculiar effects. made a beautiful roaring sound. But at a certain point people
Rather these properties are sublimated.”** To illustrate this realized what was going on—the landscape was being vio-
point, Battcock cited Robert Morris’s use of trees provided by lated ... Suddenly everyone was quiet. One woman cried for
”95
Kimberly-Clark which suggested that forest care, rather than twenty minutes.
paper-making, was the company’s business. He further noted
that one (unnamed) artist had solicited one of the Defense Joseph Beuys
Department’s largest suppliers for his materials, thus present- One of the loudest voices demanding that artists respond to
ing the public with arms dealers in the guise of art suppliers. the entirety of human experience rather than to exclusively
Such art concealed the social significance ofits materials and aesthetic questions was Joseph Beuys (1921-85), who left
the corporations that produced them. Fluxus in 1965 because, as he put it, “they held a mirror up
In contrast to the sublimated violence and whitewashed to people without indicating how to change things.””° Artists
history Battcock perceived at MoMA, the performances were obliged to participate, not simply to observe, he argued.
of Terry Fox (1943-2008) enacted real violence with his- His art was rooted in his experiences as a German air-force
torical consciousness. In A Sketch for Impacted Lead (1970), pilot in World War II and the personal crisis that he had
Fox attempted to create a small bar of lead by firing several subsequently undergone. In 1944, according to his account,
bullets at the same spot. Impacted Lead is a variation on a his airplane was shot down over the Crimea and he was left
theme explored in lead Process pieces by Richard Serra, but stranded in the snow. Discovered barely alive by a group of
by using a gun to reveal the properties of his material, Fox local people called Tatars, he was kept warm with felt blan-
bound the meaning of the piece to social issues relating to kets and animal fat, and tenderly nursed back to health.
firearms rather than formal ones concerning the inher- Although the truth of these experiences has never been con-
ent qualities of his materials. The performance was photo- firmed, when he finally started to make art again after the
graphed: We can see Fox at the gun shop and the shop owner war, Beuys drew heavily on the story, creating art from felt
holding the gun, before Fox takes aim at a target behind the and fat and casting himself in the role of healer, providing
counter. In the same year, Fox created Defoliation Piece (1970) for Europe the assistance he had received from the Tatars.

onremporary
 Beuys’s theory of art depended,
he famously announced, “on the fact
that every human being is an artist,”
a claim that celebrated the potential
for creativity in all human beings. He
explained that his audience must
be intellectually and politically alive,
since art produced through thought-
ful action required an equally engaged
response from its recipients. Although
Beuys is best known for his use of fat
and felt, the materials for which he
advocated most strongly were actu-
ally “Thinking Forms” and “Spoken
Forms,” which produce “Social Struc-
ture.”*? By “sculpting” with thought,
speech, and human relationships,
artists could reshape society and
history. This formulation suggested
a radical extension of the artist’s role
into a combination of activist, teacher,
sculptor, painter, performer, and poli-
tician. One manifestation of Beuys’s
“expanded concept of art” was the
Organization for Direct Democracy,
1.16 Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970. Edition of 100. Two lifesize felt suits which he founded in Dusseldorf in
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. 1970. The group advocated a united
Europe with a single electorate. In
place of representational legisla-
By the 1970s, Beuys had created an identity for himself tive bodies and political parties, the organization promoted
that was equal parts shaman (mystical healer), politician, and direct democracy as a means of governance that treated eve-
art professor. His mission was to develop forms of engage- ryone as fully active social beings. After the crises of fascism
ment with the world rather than to add more things to it. and the hubris of contemporary democracies, the Organi-
His work was intended to lead students from ideas to action; zation for Direct Democracy insisted that citizens be able to
any “art objects” as such were no more than by-products: “I represent themselves in the political arena. The Organiza-
am not a teacher who tells his students only to think. I say: tion also offered free education, to provide an informed and
Act; do something; I ask for a result. It may take different active electorate.
forms.”*’ In Beuys’s case, these included evocative non-art Beuys’s political activities were integral to his artistic
objects and alchemical combinations of fat and felt, sticks, production, providing a context in which the viewer was
stuffed animals, wires, toys, cars, bicycles, chalkboards, accorded agency and creative power, serving as a collabora-
and himself, dressed almost invariably in a hunting vest tor with the artist to generate significance for his sculptures,
and felt hat. As in Process art and Arte Povera (the Italian to turn the fragmentary objects he created into tools for the
movement based in Turin that made use of “poor” mate- creation and exchange of ideas. Beuys’s suits of felt, of which
rials from nature and industry, as opposed to traditional he made many, achieve artistic depth as a conceptual artwork
fine-art ones), these materials, which he selected on the that invites the viewer to re-imagine the relationship between
basis of their relative determinacy (including iron, tin, and contemporary urban society, as alluded to by the garment,
wood) or indeterminacy (fat, honey, gelatin, watercolor, and and the compassion and knowledge of the natural world
blood), communicate first through their physical proper- revealed to the artist through the felt of the more ancient
ties. Beuys’s materials quite often degrade before the view- Crimean communities. Although few artists would pursue all
er’s eyes, and evoke complex associations with organic and the implications of Beuys’s practice, his influence remains
geometric forms, ideas of creation and decomposition, and palpable today. The generation of German artists who dom-
biographical and biological elements. Beuys’s work, from inated the international scene in the 1980s and 1990s were
his suits and stacks of felt (fig. 1.16) to his performances almost all products of Beuys’s teachings, and his conviction
with live and dead animals, pointed to a dimension beyond that every human being is an artist continues to resonate
rational materialism. through artistic circles worldwide.
Leon Golub also argued, like Battcock, that disengaging one’s art from
Beuys’s Organization for Direct Democracy shared its dis- society through claims to artistic freedom allowed the human
trust of representation with much art of the 1960s, from and ecological costs of capitalism to remain hidden. Giving
Minimalism to Process. The clearly political and social nature expression to his anger with the regimes that controlled both
of Beuys’s Organization is useful for calling attention to current political events and art history, Golub showed how
the political connotations of this suspicion. Not everyone, art could resist by representing the human cost of political
however, had given up on representation. U.S. painter Leon choices and highlighting its own role in the mechanisms of
Golub (1922-2004) embraced representational painting as political control.
a means, he said, to “get at the real.”*? In Vietnam IT (1972)
(fig. 1.17), he cut away parts of the painting, inviting real
space into the carefully rendered images of contemporary Institutional Critique
warfare. Nailed to the wall like a tarpaulin, the image of “Institutional critique” is the name given to art designed
bodies in violent confrontation appears damaged by gashes to examine the conditions of its own existence, from the
that the eye falls into, moving through the skin of the canvas museums that show it to the groups of people that value it.
as though each cut were a wound or a fissure between the One of the most suggestive examples of such art appeared
realms of art and life. Golub’s work made reference to exist- in Sharp’s “Earth Art” exhibition at Cornell University. This
ing figurative traditions and mass-media imagery, including was a pile of dirt deposited by the German artist Hans Haacke
photographs from newspapers and popular military maga- (b. 1936) in the center of one of the galleries. The mound,
zines such as Soldier of Fortune. Bodies, often awkwardly posed titled Grass Grows (1969), was seeded and watered, and by
and imperfectly formed, act out scenes of military aggression the end of the exhibition had become a small grassy hill—an
and almost inhuman malaise. Soldiers pause between killing indoor landscape. To see the work through to its completion,
and smoking to look out at the viewer. Their expressions, sug- Haacke relied on what he called the “systems” that connected
gesting a range of emotions from self-satisfaction to sadistic his materials to their environment. The museum, with its staff
pleasure, seem to seek out the camera’s attention. As such, of curators, educators, administrators, and custodians, consti-
Golub insists that viewers consider their own act of observa- tuted the system that supported art. However, the particular
tion as well as the acts they observe. requirements of Grass Grows—water, light, consistent temper-
Some of the most striking works of the 1970s were texts ature, and fresh air—collided with those of display and secu-
and images presented in art magazines, particularly Artforum rity that museums are generally designed to meet. As curators
and Arts Magazine. In the U.S., Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on became gardeners, the contrast between cultural and natural
Contemporary Art” discussed above was published in the systems became apparent. Soon after Grass Grows, Haacke
British journal The Fox as well as the U.S. 0-9, and the German shifted his attention away from issues of nature and culture to
periodical Interfunktionen will be discussed in Chapter 3 for investigate increasingly complex social systems.
providing a similar platform for German conceptualism. Haacke’s most notorious investigation, Shapolsky et al.,
Golub took advantage of this medium, writing essays address- Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System,
ing the relationship between art and society, and criticizing as of May 1, 1971 (fig. 1.18), caused his scheduled 1971
the dissociation from real-world concerns that had generally Guggenheim Museum exhibition to be canceled. The piece
defined avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century. included publicly available information about poorly main-
Golub argued that claims for the freedom of art were in tained apartment buildings owned by Harry J. Shapolsky
fact a means to neutralize its revolutionary potential. He and his associates. When housed in their original archives,

1,17 Leon Golub, Vietnam II, 1972. Acrylic paint on linen, 11534" x 37' 9%2" (2.94 x 11.51 m). Presented by
the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of Ulrich and Harriet Meyer (Building the Tate Collection), 2012.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

 5 Rivington St.
Block 425 Lot 19
28 x 99! story welk-up old law tenement

Owned by West No. 2Realty Corp., 608 E 11 St., NYC

Contracts signed by Pearl Kleinber; apolsky) Pres. ('62)
Ernest Callipa
ee Alfred Fayer, Vicepresident('G1)
Primcipal Harry J. Shapolsky(according to Real Estate Som Kirseh
Directory of Hanhattan)
Acguired 10-29-1965 through foreclosure from Acquired 7
W446 Ave, C Realty Corp. et al, defendants 608 E 11
No mortgage(1971) contract:
4#ssessed land value $15 000.- , total $22 000.- (1971) Prin
Direct
No mort ¢ )
Assessed 1 d value $18 000.-— , total $28 000.- (1971)

1.18 Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971.
Showing three of 33 panels; 146 black and white photographs, 146 typewritten pages, 2 plans, 6 tables of transactions,
1 explanatory panel. La Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

the photographs and records Haacke assembled were seen that its status as a treasure box for valuable art objects had
only by the few lawyers who might look through them in the changed into being a flashpoint for the real-world social
course of their work. Presented on the wall of the museum, politics of real-estate speculation and tenants’ rights in New
however, they became public displays of economic injustice. York City. As Haacke said of the role of an artist whose prac-
As one writer explained, “At a gut level Haacke is asking this tice is informed by politics: “One’s responsibilities increase;
question: is there really any difference between the power however, this also gives the satisfaction of being taken as
of money to control the direction of art and the power a bit more than a court-jester, with the danger of not being
of money to keep rotten slums in existence?”*! By reach- forgiven.”*
ing out through the doors of the museum into the streets, Haacke was not alone in his concern with creating politi-
Haacke upset the Guggenheim, which suddenly found cally engaged art. For a 1974 show at the Claire Copley

Institutional Critique
1.19 Daniel Buren, Photo-souvenir: Within and Beyond the Frame, 1973. Detail, work in situ.
John Weber Gallery, New York. Image courtesy the Buren Studio.

Gallery in Los Angeles, artist “Michael Asher (b. 1943) demand that an artist’s practice be limited to such politically
removed the dividing wall between the exhibition space and conscious reflexivity, only that it be informed by it.
the offices behind it, revealing the commercial side of the French Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938), with
business. Meanwhile U.S. artist and philosopher Adrian Piper colleagues Olivier Mosset (b. 1944), Michel Parmentier (b.
(b. 1943) called on artists and audiences to consider political 1938), and Niele Toroni (b. 1937), used uniform painted
awareness as integral to all artistic practice. She called such marks and complex critical analysis to argue that even a
political awareness “meta-art” and defined it as “the activity Minimalist box communicated its meaning within a socially
of making explicit the thought processes, procedures, and defined discourse, which ultimately had more influence on
presuppositions of making whatever kind of art we make.”*® the nature of the art experience than properties such as color
Piper (see Chapter 7), like Haacke and others, did not or form. Buren’s work consisted exclusively of selectively

5 Cc .
ng the Contem porary
~]
placed alternating 3%-inch-wide bands of white and another keynote speaker, and curator, demonstrates the critical detail
color in, out of, and between spaces where art was dis- and historical nuance being presented by institutional cri-
played, including gallery walls and windows, art magazines, tique inside the museum. For Museum Highlights: A Gallery
and out in the streets. Art objects, Buren argued, take their Talk (1989), performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
place in the museum as signs of value based on economic, Fraser took on the identity of Jane Castleton, a professionally
political, and social factors as well as aesthetic and mystical attired college-educated young museum professional who
considerations. By eliminating the individuality of the image, provided docent tours of the museum. Her talk took in the
giving the viewer no form or content within the work to con- membership desk, where she recited passages from museum
template, attention is shifted to the context around it instead, statements about the importance of membership, and the
those external features that define certain objects as art. great hall, where she discussed the history of the Philadel-
In works such as Photo-souvenir: Within and Beyond the Frame phia Museum and its relation to other municipal services and
(fig. 1.19), Buren’s stripes drew attention to non-artistic civic institutions including local hospitals, prisons, libraries,
sources of value, much as Piper’s “meta-art” required. This and zoos. Her walk through the period rooms took visitors
installation inside, on, and outside the Weber Gallery in New from the display of eighteenth-century French work, where
York was set up in 1973 and then re-created for the gallery she quickly recited art-historical descriptions, to the men’s
in a new location in 1978 as Change of Scenery, thus pulling room, where she rehearsed early twentieth-century tracts on
the viewer’s eye and mind not only through the art gallery health. In the galleries she indicated highlights from the col-
and out into the street but also through time. Like Haacke, lections but, as she did in the bathroom, focused more on
Buren had trouble with the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, early-century descriptions of social types and urban issues
when he suspended a banner of stripes down the center of than art-historical texts.
the museum. Waving gently in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda, In the 1970s institutional critique was one expression of
Buren’s work implicated the space of the building in pro- the growing impulse among artists and critics in the labor,
cesses of cultural politics, connecting the museum to the anti-war, and minority rights and women’s rights movements
other contexts to which Buren’s stripes had previously drawn to make the connection between art and politics evident and
attention, to galleries that sell art and the neighborhoods instrumental. In the subsequent decades the lesson that the
that invest in it. Buren’s work was removed by the museum museum is connected to every other political and social insti-
authorities after just a day on the premise that it blocked tution had become standard fare, giving Fraser’s generation
views of other works—a somewhat perplexing argument con- the opportunity to move beyond needing to point to the fact
sidering that the sightlines are already obstructed by the spi- of complicity. Such a critical and comprehensive approach to
raling architecture of the museum. making art has been a continued means of maintaining the
In the 1970s, voices drawing attention to the connections connection between the often-sanctified rooms of the art
between art and politics were becoming increasingly forceful. museum and the spaces and issues that surround them.
In 1971, protesters marched in front of MoMA in New York
to urge Picasso to remove his painting Guernica from the city.
The artist had entrusted his 1937 memorial to the victims of African-American Critiques
fascism in Spain to the United States for safekeeping until a In the U.S., many African-American artists felt with par-
republican government was re-established in Spain and the ticular urgency the need for engagement with daily life
painting could be returned, which it was in 1981. However, on the streets as well as artistic experimentation in the
the protesters argued that the American bombing of civil- studio. By the late 1960s, artists such as Romare Bearden
ians during the war in Vietnam had rendered prominent U.S. (1911-88) and Benny Andrews (1930-2006) in New York
institutions such as MoMA inappropriate caretakers for a had already created a substantial body of work exploring
painting expressing the artist’s anger at similar actions by the intersections of abstraction and figuration in the context
Spanish fascists. of racially focused subject matter (fig. 1.20). Few venues
Institutional critique as practiced by Haacke, Buren, and existed for them to show their work, however, and there
others would be developed into a distinct genre in the sub- was a clear divide between black and white art worlds.
sequent decades. Artists discussed in later chapters including Mobilized by the disparity not only between black and
Group Material, Fred Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Santiago white artists, but between the level of racially conscious dis-
Sierra, and Alexander Brener have created object-, image-, course occurring every day in the streets and newspapers
and performance-based practices that point to the complex and the virtual silence on the same subject in museums,
ways in which cultural institutions participate in politics and artists of color, with Andrews in a leading position, fol-
how art can assume both complicit and resistant positions. lowed the model of grassroots activists and formed the
By the 1980s, museums were opening their doors to artists to Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) in 1969 in
perform what approximated to a form of public self-critique. direct response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibi-
The work of Andrea Fraser, in which the artist or a surro- tion “Harlem on My Mind.” Presented as a commemora-
gate steps into various institutional roles including docent, tion of the New York borough and its celebrated arts scene,

African-American Critiques
1.20 Romare Bearden, Tomorrow | Might Be Far Away, 1967. Collage of various papers with charcoal and graphite
on canvas, overall 46 x 56" (116.8 x 142.2 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Paul Mellon Fund.

it consisted exclusively of photographs of the neighborhood shows were being held at the Brooklyn Museum (1969) and
and showed no interest in Harlem artists themselves. Many the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1970); the time was thus
painters and sculptors who had been working in Harlem obviously ripe for the Whitney Museum to make a national
since the 1920s and 1930s lived just a short walk from the statement. When the “Survey of Black Art” opened in 1971,
museum, but were not included in the show. The BECC however, there was no guest curator and limited participa-
argued that, since the museum had no experts on black art tion by the African-American arts community. Major figures,
on its staff and had failed to enlist any such specialists to help including painter Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) and sculptor Melvin
curate the exhibition, the only thing “Harlem on My Mind” Edwards (b. 1939), publicly boycotted the show on the
revealed was institutionalized racism and a deep desire to grounds that it “negate[d] a coherent viewing and analysis
keep the existing Met power structure intact. Bearden’s of the creative content, context, influence, and general value
group Spiral took a less confrontational stance, but also criti- of the works of African American artists.”*4 Although the
cized the show’s exclusions. groundwork for representing non-majority art was beginning
The BECC made public its objections to the racism of to be laid, decades would pass before satisfactory exhibitions
current museum practices and entered into negotiations with would result.
the Met and other museums. Conversations with the Whitney New York might play the dominant role in the exhibi-
Museum of American Art in New York resulted in plans for tion, sale, and production of American art, and indeed in art
an African-American art exhibition to be produced with the activism, but it was not the only important center. Black arts
help of an African-American guest curator. Similar, if smaller, received steadily growing attention throughout the late 1960s

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

 the first of many expressions of local and
racial politics to be painted in U.S. cities
across the following decade. It responded
to sentiments such as those expressed
by Black Arts Movement writer Larry
Neal that the “political liberation of the
Black Man is directly tied to his cultural
liberation.”*°

AfriCOBRA
In 1968, Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004),
Jae Jarrell (b. 1935) and her husband,
Wadsworth Jarrell (b. 1929), and Gerald
Williams (b. 1926) brought together
other OBAC participants and like-minded
African-American artists to “transcend
the ‘I’ of the ‘me’ for the ‘us’ and ‘we’ in
order to create a basic philosophy which
would be the foundation of a visual Black
Arts movement.”*° This gathering resulted
in the formation of COBRA (Coalition
of Black Revolutionary Artists), which
took as its mission the need to address
the challenges facing the black commu-
nity at home in Chicago and nationally.
The group selected subject matter that it
would address collectively (the first such
theme was the black family) and outlined
aesthetic parameters for its output, such
as the use of figurative composition, the
inclusion of text, and the production of
low-price prints that could be made avail-
able to a wide audience.
In the process of inventing appropriate
means to match its message, the group’s
message changed. It remained commit-
ted to a “shared collective concept” and
a “black aesthetic,” but soon these con-
cerns led members to look beyond their
1.21 OBAC Visual Arts Workshop, Wall of Respect, 1967. original local, distinctly U.S., setting.*” In
Oil on brick, 30 x 60' (9.1-« 18.2 m). Chicago.
1969, COBRA thus became AfriCOBRA,
the African Commune of Bad Relevant
and 1970s across the U.S. By the end of the 1960s, the Organ- Artists. With this new name came a new audience, defined
ization for Black American Culture (OBAC) had sparked sig- not by where it lived but by its African heritage. Success-
nificant activity in Chicago. OBAC (pronounced “oba cee,” to ful work was still judged on its ability to convey “to its viewer
suggest the Yoruba word oba, or “ruler”), the primary organ a statement of truth, of action, of education, of conditions
of the Black Arts Movement, a national cultural organization and a state of being to our people.”** Those conditions
that promoted intellectual production by and about African- were clearly expressed in the assertion that “all Black people,
Americans, formed a visual-arts workshop to complement regardless of their land base, have the same problems,
its literary activities. The result was the 1967 Wall of Respect the control of their land and economics by Europeans or
(fig. 1.21), a mural depicting African-American luminar- Euro-Americans.”*? The combined themes of race, class,
ies selected by thejartists in a dialogue with residents of the and power produced imagery replete with the signs of the
city’s South Side neighborhood, where it was painted. Among Black Power movement, such as raised, clenched fists, para-
those represented were Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, military garb, afros, portraits of Malcolm X, and revolution-
Muhammad Ali, and Aretha Franklin. The wall was among ary texts.

Atrican-American Critiques
 1.22 Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary,
1971. Acrylic on canvas, 50% x 63%"
(128 x 161 cm). Collection of the
Brooklyn Museum, New York.
© Wadsworth Jarrell.

In Wadsworth Jarrell’s Revolutionary (1971) (fig. 1.22), case inspired a nationwide campaign for her exoneration;
a portrait of African-American activist Angela Davis, the in 1972, she was tried and acquitted. Wadsworth Jarrell’s use
subject’s body, clothing, and the space around her vibrate of the hero’s words to represent her body in Revolutionary
with words: “BLACK,” “BEAUTIFUL,” “REVOLUTION,” reflected a political reality as well as a formal artistic solution.
“RESIST,” and long lines of “B”s and “R’s. Her loose-fitting The impact of such politically volatile content was further
blouse with facsimile ammunition belt projecting off the amplified in Revolutionary by Jarrell’s explosive use of
canvas was based on Jae Jarrell’s “Revolutionary Suit,” which “Coolade Color” and “Shine,” terms employed in AfriCOBRA
integrated pan-African and paramilitary references in a skirt- texts to discuss the aesthetic qualities of their art. Jeff Don-
suit design with real bullets affixed to the top. In the painting aldson defined “Shine” as “a major quality, a major quality.
the fabric is covered with the words: “I have given my life to We want the things to shine, to have the rich luster of a just-
the struggle. If I have to lose my life in the struggle that is the washed fro, of spit shined shoes, of de-ashened elbows and
way it will have to be.” In 1971, after being accused of provid- knees and noses. The Shine who escaped the Titanic, the
ing weapons used in an ambush on a California courtroom ‘li'l light of mine,’ patent leather, Dixie Peach, Bar-BQ, fried
intended to free Black Panther organizer George Jackson, fish, cars, ad shineum!”*° “Shine” was not a word found in
Davis was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s art establishment-sanctioned texts about formalism or the
list of most-wanted criminals and went into hiding. Four history of the avant-garde. And that, of course, was the point:
people were killed in the ambush, including a judge. There It was a term coined by black-art theorists for exclusive use
was little evidence that Davis had been a participant and her in relation to black art. In her declaration about its history

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

and philosophy, AfriCOBRA artist Barbara Jones-Hogu (b. community that Newton described as highly visual, Douglas
1938) explained that the group’s art and theoretical stand- integrated graphic design, portraiture, caricature, text, and
point were the outcome of “rap[ping] about the hip aesthetic photography to demonstrate “the Correct Handling of the
things that a ‘negro’ group could do.”*! Like much feminist Revolution.”** Images in the newspaper revealed how the
work of the period, AfriCOBRA made clear that aesthetics conditions of daily life demanded social upheaval and how
were culturally specific. Even if they strove to praise AfriCO- black men, women, and children possessed the moral and
BRA art, white critics often felt shut out by it. As Donaldson physical strength to carry it out. By the early 1970s, the news-
noted, though he and his peers were of the same generation paper had a circulation of over 100,000 copies.
and trained by the same people as the Pop artists, their goals Douglas designed the format of the newspaper to maxi-
were very different. mize its visual impact, including detachable posters that
Celebration of the specific associative qualities of form showed black Americans suffering garbage-filled streets and
and color in a black context, however, did not exclude more police brutality, and that could be used to spread the Black
formalist discussions of art. The AfriCOBRA theory of repre- Panther message. In an image from April 1971 (fig. 1.23),
sentation is particularly striking. Rather than understanding this bullet-riddled photograph of a seventeen-year-old boy
representation as the reflection of an appearance or experi- who was shot by Oakland police gives evidence of the need
ence, AfriCOBRA style was presented as a resolution of com- for community control of the police. By the mid-1970s,
peting interests, “mimesis at mid-point” as it was dubbed for Douglas had introduced a more sensitive visual style which
the group’s third exhibition. The appearance of the world in used line drawings that were nuanced in detail and soft in
an AfriCOBRA work “marks the spot where the real and the effect. Like his earlier collage aesthetic, the drawings demon-
un-real, the objective and the non-objective, the plus and the strate another face of revolutionary representation and the
minus meet. A point exactly between absolute abstractions heterogeneity of both political art and black identity.
and absolute naturalism.”*? As in Photorealist work of the
period, abstraction was enlisted as a means to produce natu-
ralism. Chuck Close (b. 1940), the best-known Photorealist,
began painting by taking a photograph, plotting a grid across
it and a corresponding one across his canvas, then tran-
scribing the image by copying it square by square. In 1969,
his paintings closely resembled photographs; in the 1970s,
the process itself became his subject matter as much as the
actual appearance of his sitters. Though AfriCOBRA artists
were less methodical, they also conceived of the canvas as a
field of abstractions that coalesced to form clear images. As
mentioned above, several members of AfriCOBRA marked
a further contest between abstraction and representation
by including text, often imitating the cadence of spoken
words. In a painting such as Revolutionary, for instance, forms
combine to produce images at the very point where letters
and words join to deliver a message about the world.

Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

Across the country, in Oakland, California, institutional
critique of a very different sort could be found in the work
of Emory Douglas, creator of the media-sawvy style and ico-
nography of the Black Panther Party. Douglas’s training was
in commercial art at City College, San Francisco, in the late
1960s. While using his talents to promote the City College
Black Students’ Association, he met Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale, who were then developing the Black Panther
platform and strategy. Named minister of culture for the party,
Douglas created a public image for the Panthers that would
be imitated by liberation movements all over the world. The
pages of the Black Panther newspaper provided a gallery of
what Douglas called “revolutionary art,” that “enlightens the 1.23 Emory Douglas, The Black Panther, April 3, 1971.
party to continue its vigorous attack against the enemy, as Pen, ink, and collage on board, 17 x 11" (43.2 x 27.9 cm).
well as educate the masses of black people.”* Addressing a Courtesy the artist.

African-American Critiques
 at various times and in different places after World War
Il. Women artists inflected postwar movements including
In her 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Fluxus, Actionism, and Gutai with gender consciousness. In
Artists?” the art historian Linda Nochlin (b. 1931) concluded some cases the feminist politics were explicit. For example,
that the idea of “greatness” depended on a set of social prac- in 1969, VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), an artist associated
tices that by definition excluded women. The institutions with Austrian Actionism, whose participants experimented
that conferred value on a work of art or enabled a young with ritualistic performances, created Genital Panic. For this
artist to gain skills were all structured in such a way as to aggressively confrontational piece, the artist forced viewers
make it difficult for women to succeed. Educational opportu- to consider the discrepancy between the real and repre-
nities, the customs of workshops and studios, not to mention sented worlds of sexuality by entering a cinema wearing
the venues for patronage, exhibition, and sales, were all crotchless pants and standing directly in front of the seated
shaped to suit men. The few women who did “make it” were audience. Photographs taken later and titled Aktoonshose:
exceptions whose success often relied on help from a male Genitalpanitk (Action Pants: Genital Panic) showed the artist
guide. The route to change, Nochlin suggested, was not to wielding a machine gun. The gun makes explicit the con-
be more attentive to women within the existing system, but nection, asserted by EXPORT’s performance, between issues
to alter the art system and the structures of society altogether. of representation and issues of power. However, contrary to
Concern about gender difference in the production, rumors that have grown up since, EXPORT denies having
reception, and definition of art can be seen in work made this weapon with her on the occasion of the original per-
formance. Other works, such as Yoko Ono’s perfor-
mance Cut Piece (1964) (fig. 1.24) or film Fly (1970)
(fig. 1.25), demonstrate a more implicit feminist
politics through their embrace of the Fluxus interest
in simple acts: in this case, cutting clothes and watch-
ing a fly. As the viewer realizes that the object on
which these acts are being performed is a woman’s
body, revealed slowly as her clothes are cut away or
as the fly and the camera traverse the contours of her
body, the content becomes more pointed and politi-
cal. Throughout the 1970s, feminists would focus on
the interplay between the social and the individual,
and the represented and the real, to great effect.

The Role of Theory

By the 1970s, political and social criticism had
become as much a part of an artist’s practice as
painting or sculpting. This expansion of the art-
ist’s purview took place initially in the context of the
debates over Minimalism and Process art in texts such
as Morris’s “Anti-Form,” but was increasingly adopted
by artists concerned with clarifying the political
terrain that they considered relevant to an under
standing of their work. Turning to French Poststruc-
turalist theorists such as historians Michel Foucault
and Louis Althusser, linguists Roland Barthes and
Jacques Derrida, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,
as well as different elements of feminist and socialist
theory, artists and critics began a process of redefin-
ing artistic production as a significant strand of intel-
lectual and political history. As a theory of culture
and meaning, the earlier Structuralism had posited
that there were patterns within human societies and
psyches that could be isolated and shown to repeat
across history. The search for and creation of such
1.24 Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performance at Yamaichi Hall, Tokyo, 1964. unifying structures typified twentieth-century intel-
Courtesy of Yoko Ono lectual pursuits across the disciplines. The foremost
 1.25 Yoko Ono,
Fly, 1970. Film
still. Courtesy of
Yoko Ono.

Structuralist thinker was the anthropologist Claude Lévi- submission, while the “agents of exploitation and repression”
Strauss, whose analysis of kinship relations led to his articu- learned mastery.*® In Althusser’s view, individuals do not
lation of structures of familial and social relations that were choose their own path, as society is structured to preclude
seemingly repeated in communities across the spectrum options that might upset its balance. Culture plays a role
of contemporary and historical humanity. By the 1960s, here. For instance, contained in the notion that art is either
however, faith in the existence of such universal structures a form of pure, personal expression or equally pure, formal
and in our ability to correctly discern and define them had experimentation, two typical Modernist convictions, there is
faltered—hence the turn to Poststructuralist analyses. the assumption that art and society are separate. Such ideas
Drawing on their experience of the radicalism of the are part of an ISA that keeps the work of artists isolated from
1960s as well as on. political theory, European historians that of politicians. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-
and philosophers such as Foucault and Althusser examined century capitalist industrialism, such beliefs about the sepa-
the role of power in history. Foucault believed that categories ration of art and politics coincided with the disenfranchise-
organizing knowledge, from criminal codes to the methods ment of the working class. Activist artists in the 1960s used
and objects of historical study, functioned to maintain exist- the theories of Foucault, Althusser, and others to demon-
ing power relations; artistic greatness was one such category. strate the common cause of artists and the working class.
By identifying certain practices—technical virtuosity, for
instance—as the measure of artistic success, artists could Nancy Spero
be corraled to work in line with, rather than against, pre- As is evident in EXPORT’s and Ono’s work, feminist politics
vailing power structures. Althusser interpreted power in often encouraged new formal solutions. In the U.S., Nancy
Western society through his theory of the Ideological State Spero’s (1926-2009) creation of an explicitly feminist prac-
Apparatus (ISA), showing how the assumptions one made tice drew on her earlier oil-on-canvas works, which had
about society were largely. ideological products reflecting explored the intersections between figuration and abstrac-
the way society was organized. Social norms are thus not col- tion. By the late 1960s, Spero had turned to hand-printing
lective wisdom but ideological devices that enforce “subjuga- fragments of personal testimonies, news and police reports,
tion to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its practice.” poetry and roughly drawn female forms, which she applied
Whether one learned to be docile, as did most girls, or active, to single pages, scrolls, and eventually walls and ceilings.
as did most boys, depended on one’s position in society. In In this new working practice, Spero—like Leon Golub, to
addition, corresponding to feminist insights, Althusser’s whom she was married—addressed overtly political content.
analysis was explicitly Marxist: The labor force was taught She explained: “I decided to address the issues I was actively

Feminist Statements
involved in—women’s issues. I wanted to investigate the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history.”
more palpable realities of torture and pain.”*” After several Women’s textual insurgency required, Cixous argued, a new
years of research and production, Spero completed two relationship to the body one that resisted translating sensa-
series of works, Torture of Women (1974) and Notes in Time tion into the limiting structures of existing language. She
on Women (1979). For Torture of Women, she used blocks of implored women: “Write your self. Your body must be heard.
texts recording horrific abductions, tortures, and murders Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious
of women that she had culled from a variety of public and spring forth.”** Cixous’s writing, like Spero’s art, was based
personal sources. Spero then hand-printed the narratives in a political and sensual experience of the body. It aimed to
using a variety of typefaces, generating a formally inventive expose and destroy existing social orders and to envision a
combination of highly legible and emotionally and morally previously unimagined future.
excruciating content. In Notes in Time on Women (fig. 1.26), Spero enlisted women’s experiences to generate the
Spero used imagery from a range of historical periods and symbols with which to share sensations, emotions, and ideas
cultures to expose past and present violence against women. that up to that point had lacked access to language. Simulta-
She juxtaposed documentation of assaults on women with neously destructive and constructive, women’s art of this type
images of Greek and Aztec goddesses, fashion models, and crossed the formal boundaries between writing, painting,
athletic nudes. Words and bodies, letters, lines, and colors criticism, and theory. “Women’s writing,” Cixous asserted,
collide and caress each other in a rhythm that fluctuates from was a product of women who had been liberated from the
earthly to airborne, from graceful to damaged. example of history and as such could not truly be “theorized,
Spero’s desire to create a visual language for women’s enclosed, or encoded.” Throughout the 1970s Spero pro-
experience of and resistance to societal oppression was duced just such a language of unprecedented form and sub-
shared by and explored in the work of a number of intellec- versive content. In 1981, she completed The First Language,
tuals and activists. The French literary critic and philosopher the first of her large-scale print works without text. The piece
Hélene Cixous’s account of “women’s writing” in her 1975 consisted of images of women dancing, running, threaten-
manifesto “The Laugh of the Medusa” is a key text for inter- ing, contemplating, even roller-skating. After a decade of
preting Spero’s work. Here, Cixous explained that a woman explicitly feminist work, she had created a lexicon that, vari-
“must write her self, because this is the invention of a new ously using text and imagery separately or together, commu-
insurgent writing which ... will allow her to carry out the nicated in the realm of activist politics and feminist theory.

1.26 Nancy Spero, Notes in Time on

Women, 1979. Detail. Hand-printing,
gouache, and collage on paper;
24 panels, overall 20" x 210'
(50.8 cm x 64 m). Collection Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy
Galerie Lelong, New York.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

The Feminist Art Program
By the mid-1970s, U.S. feminist artists could be divided into
two groups loosely based on their attitudes toward three
issues: belief in a shared female artistic practice; relations
with the existing art world; and the balance between social
critique and personal expression. Opinion tended to divide
along regional lines, with feminists on the West Coast advanc-
ing a distinctive female style, a separatist approach to the art
world, and a personally expressive art, while their East Coast
counterparts by and large argued the reverse.
One major source of this dichotomy was the early and
lasting success of the Feminist Art Program (FAP), begun in
1970 by Judy Chicago (b. 1939) at California State University
Fresno, and then developed by Chicago and Miriam Schap-
iro (b. 1923) at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia,
beginning in 1972. The FAP was a response to its founders’
(and many other women’s) experience of sexism in the art
world. Women were making art in basements and bedrooms
after coming home from work, cooking meals, and caring for
husbands and children. Art schools, then as now, were full of
female students, but galleries and museums showed almost
no women’s art. The FAP’s mission was “to help women
restructure their personalities to be more consistent with
their desires to be artists and to help them build their art-
making out of their experiences as women.”*? The concept
of training women artists to value their experience and
to base communities and artistic identities upon it con-
trasted with the highly individualistic and competitive
approach of contemporary art schools. The FAP encom- 1.27, Womanhouse installation in Los Angeles featuring Robin Weltsch's
passed consciousness-raising sessions, performances, discus- Kitchen and Vicki Hodgetts's Eggs to Breasts (sponsored by the Feminist Art
sions, and opportunities to practice painting, sculpture, film, Program at CalArts}, 1972. Gelatin silver print, 9'/A6 x 7/6" (25.3 x
weaving, crafts, collage, assemblage, and installation. It devel- 20.2 cm). The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43.1.
oped a resource center containing a catalogue of images
and projects initiated by women artists across the U.S. (Don-
aldson had set up a similar archive of African-American arts danger. Though the piece, subtitled Eggs to Breasts, was attrib-
in Chicago.) To some—Judy Chicago in particular—the uted to Hodgetts, it was designed collaboratively, matching
images in the FAP database revealed a female aesthetic to personal inspiration to group vision.
match the circumstances of female artists. Integrating anatomy with architecture was a common motif
The most influential FAP production was Womanhouse: of the Womanhouse installations, as was the works’ ambivalent
Nurturant Kitchen (1971-72), a Hollywood mansion converted combination of sensual pleasure and social anxiety. Faith
into a stage, installation, workshop, and community space. Wilding’s (b. 1943) Crocheted Environment (1972) enveloped
Womanhouse was a showcase for the alternative processes and audiences in “womb-shelters,” while Sandy Orgel’s Linen
products created by self-identified “women artists,” and the Closet (1972) featured a nude female mannequin walking
rooms were turned into materialized fantasies and fantastic through shelves of sheets and towels and out into the room.”!
metamorphoses of their realities. In Womanhouse: Nurturant Womanhouse exemplified the type of alternative institution
Kitchen of 1972 (fig. 1.27), an installation designed for the that feminist practice could generate. Audience members
house by FAP participants Vicki Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch, walked out of the building exhilarated and often quite upset
and Susan Frazier, the walls, ceilings, windows, and appli- as a result of experiencing the sensations of confinement,
ances glowed with warm, enveloping shades of pink, while restriction, and liberation so dramatically visualized within.
eggs appeared to have migrated from the stovetop directly As such, Womanhouse politicized many of its visitors.
to the ceiling, where Hodgetts had sculpted dozens of them
hovering over thevisitors. As the eggs reached the edge of Judy Chicago
the ceiling and headed down the walls, they turned into Critic Anne-Marie Sauzeau (b. 1938) argued that the key to
breasts, capturing the sensuality many in the group asso- representing femininity did not lie in using images drawn
ciated with the kitchen, but also the sense of exposure and from reality to challenge stereotypes, since such a strategy

Feminist Statements
allowed the existing order to define the terms of refer- Mary Kelly
ence, “which means betraying the basic .. . OTHERNESS of In England, the work of the American-born artist Mary
women’s experience.””* Proposing a radical language of Kelly (b. 1941) represented a very different approach to
otherness, Sauzeau posited: “The actual creative project of making art about experience, arriving at emotion and poli-
[women] ... involves BETRAYING the expressive mechanisms tics through a highly conceptual and analytic practice. In her
of culture.”*? From 1974 to.1979, Judy Chicago worked with striking contemporary portrait of a mother and child, Post-
a team of women to create the monumental collaborative Partum Document (1973-79), Kelly combined psychoanalytic
work Dinner Party (fig. 1.28) as both a real and a metaphori- explanations of identity formation with records of the growth
cal attempt to bring women to the table and to wrest the of her own newborn son and her personal experience as a
expressive mechanisms of culture from the grip of men. The new mother. Kelly’s investigation drew on the work of Jacques
work consists of a triangular table with place settings for Lacan, who developed Freud’s ideas in wide-ranging intellec-
thirty-nine named female “guests of honor,” each with an tual contexts including linguistics and philosophy. She also
individually designed plate in the form of a symbolic vagina. observed the stages of child-rearing with methodical rigor,
The names of a further 999 women are painted on the tiled including such things as notes on her child’s linguistic devel-
floor around the table. Like Womanhouse before it, The Dinner opment, food intake, topics of conversation, drawing and
Party laid claim to the empowering capacity of artistic expres- writingg, and even his soiled diapers. In the image shown here
sion on behalfofwomen. It replaced the exclusively male cast (fig. 1.29), we see how Kelly combined different elements
of traditional “Last Supper” paintings—Jesus flanked by his from her analysis, insisting, for instance, that scientific obser
twelve disciples—with a celebration of vaginal power. Perhaps vation is literally sullied by the physicality of child-rearing.
this amounted to a “betrayal” of male-dominated (or phallo- As we read this and other sections of Post-Partum Document
centric) cultural forms—the controversy that the piece spurred we come to know Kelly as the artist/mother who is both
upon its initial exhibition and the reticence, until 2002, for any emotionally sensitive to the subtle changes in her son’s life
museum to take The Dinner Party into its collection suggests and intellectually brilliant in her careful analysis and selec-
that it was perceived as such. However, Chicago’s inadvertent tive accumulation of data. Although Chicago’s hijacking of
mirroring of the phallocentric hierarchical order, as repre- the expressive mechanisms of male-dominated culture also
sented by the provision of “places of honor” at the table, has continued to be reflected in feminist practice, Kelly’s more
been seen to undercut the work’s liberating quality.” distanced, analytical approach, with its concern for issues of

1.28 Judy Chicago, Dinner

Party, 1974-79. White tile
floor inscribed in gold with
999 women's names;
triangular table with painted
porcelain, sculpted porcelain
plates, and needlework, each
side 48" (14.6 m). The
Brooklyn Museum of Art,
New York.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

 and opening a gallery; AIR responded more directly
to practical problems facing working artists. As the
critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937), who had helped give a
voice to Minimalist and Process art in the 1960s and
to feminist art from the 1970s on, observed, women
artists who began to show their work in the 1970s
had often been artists for a long time. Because they
had had few professional opportunities after art
school, however, their careers had been shaped in
the absence of the artistic, personal, and professional
benefits that usually came with being part of the art
community. The agenda of groups such as AIR, WAR
(Women Artists in Revolt), and increasingly vocal
groups of curators and historians was to provide a
context for this work and to generate a dialogue
about it in feminist terms.
In a 1977 essay on feminist art in California,
Rosler argued that the most pressing issue for femi-
nist and other contemporary artists was to set their
MA, 2 TSPS.CERGAL, 3 TSPS. E66
work in a political context. She observed that art by
women was shown and discussed only in contexts
where the political challenge of the women’s move-
| 34 O25. Liauies
30 TSPS,. S$OINS
ment could be neutralized. In such circumstances,
said Rosler, feminist art could be presented as “val-
orizing, in the name of ‘women’s culture,’ [prac-
tices] developed under conditions oppressive to
women” and might “wind up serving repressive
te : . — . ——— ends.”®*” As critics of Process and Earth art noted in
1.29 Mary Kelly, PostPartum Document, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding
the late 1960s, and as the Black Emergency Cul-
Charts, 1974. Detail. Perspex unit, white card, diaper linings, plastic sheeting, tural Coalition found in the early 1970s, radical
paper, and ink; 1 of 31 units, each 137% x 11"(35.5 x 28 cm). Collection, art often needed partisan writers to help prevent
Art Gallery of Ontario. © Mary Kelly. it from being presented in ways that merely served
dealers, museums, and the status quo. Making art
psychoanalysis, identity, and representation, would prove to was up to the artists; making it dangerous required critics
be more in tune with the critical art of the 1980s. and historians.
Rosler’s conclusion cut two ways. Not only was “wider atten-
Martha Rosler tion to feminist theorizing” required, but also “new theory
Almost immediately upon its creation, Womanhouse became a needs new practice.”°* Her Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)
reference point by which feminists identified their own par- (fig. 1.30) illustrates one form of this new practice. The six-
ticular brands of feminism. To artist and critic Martha Rosler minute film features Rosler wearing an apron and standing at
(b. 1943), the FAP appeared to practice Abstract Expression- a kitchen counter as though she were on the set of an adver-
ism “by other means,” thus committing more to expressing tisement or cooking show. From this stage, Rosler presents
the self than transforming society.°? When asked in 1973 and demonstrates a series of kitchen utensils, beginning with
about their relationship to Womanhouse, members of AIR her apron and proceeding alphabetically through the rest
(Artists in Residence), the New York women artists’ coopera- of the items around her. She raises the objects, pronounces
tive gallery co-founded by Nancy Spero, either rejected the their names, and demonstrates their use, giving physical
comparison entirely or used it to draw distinctions between expression to the dominance that tools of the kitchen exert
the East and West Coast projects. Agnes Denes (b. 1931) over the woman who use them. As Rosler continues, the
noted that work produced in California reminded women of letters of the alphabet themselves make an appearance
their accomplishments and encouraged them to create art among these conventional kitchen instruments: When she
from their experiences. AIR, on the other hand, was “trying reaches “U,” “V,” and “W,” Rosler holds her arms up, knife
to get out, to go forward to do innovative art and art of any and fork in hand, to form the letters. She thus turns lan-
kind, not looking backwards to what we left.”°° While the guage into just one more object shaping and controlling
FAP was raising feminist consciousness and creating new lan- women’s daily activities and even their bodies. As the dem-
guages to express it, members of AIR were doing studio visits onstration progresses, however, the viewer becomes aware

Feminist Statements
 however, reveal an artist’s point of view and thus tend
to run counter to the expectations that most viewers
have for art. The work of West Coast artist Suzanne
Lacy (b. 1945) and East Coast-based Hannah Wilke
(1940-93) demonstrate different options for a critical
feminist representation.
Lacy’s integration of performance, installation,
and community outreach is on vivid display in works
such as Three Weeks in May (1977), which typifies
the practice she has continued to develop since the
1970s. Each day of the three-week project, Lacy went
to the central office of the Los Angeles Police Depart
ment to gather information about the number and
locations of rapes reported the previous day. In a
gallery space, she then assembled the police reports
in a systematic manner, repeating a format used in
1.30 Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975. Video, 6:09 minutes
work such as Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. A second public
Courtesy Mitchell-lnnes & Nash.
venue was created at City Hall, where Lacy presented
of an uneasy relationship between the tools and the woman. a large map of Los Angeles County with markers to indi-
Some objects—the hamburger press and juicer, for instance cate where each rape had taken place. Around each loca-
—reveal their expected kitchen functions. Others, however— tion was a ring of smaller notations signifying the number of
such as the knife, fork, and icepick—are presented like rapes that go unreported for every call made to the police.
weapons. These momentary glimpses of possible violent dis- These visual components were accompanied by demonstra-
ruption in the otherwise peaceful routine of a woman’s life tions, educational and political activities, and performances
are quite different from the cathartic expressions of Wom- including dramatic productions as well as rituals of cathar-
anhouse. There is no drama and no personal expression— sis and healing. The events added the emotive and personal
potential action is simply pointed to, before the rhythm of features of West Coast feminism to the analytical, intellectual
the alphabet resumes, and the presentation and the presenter quality typical of East Coast work. In 2012, Lacy reinvented
are both kept in order. Semiotics ofthe Kitchen points to the col- the piece as Three Weeks in January (fig. 1.31), again creating
lusion between language and sexism, but it also demonstrates a map of violence against women and facilitating a series of
resistance and humor. Often, Rosler turns very utilitarian public events. Lacy collaborated with Los Angeles organiza-
gestures, such as serving or stirring, into slapstick comedy, as tions including Code Pink and Peace over Violence, and
when she pretends to throw the con-
tents of a ladle or spoon off-camera.
Such humor lightens but also empha-
sizes the seriousness of the project. In
a spirit akin to the social protest move-
ments of the 1950s and 1960s, Rosler’s
film suggests that the first step toward
changing power relations is to make
them visible, while her threatening ges-
tures with sharp objects indicate the
urgency of the matter.

Suzanne Lacy
The challenge facing artists seeking
to reveal the political nature of daily
experience was that, as Beuys said in
relation to Fluxus, presenting reality
was not enough. Injustice is not always
self-evident; it must be labeled as well
as shown. Without visible and political
1.31 Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in January, 2012. Lacy and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
self-consciousness, art risks leaving the
at the opening press conference of this performance piece. Produced by Los Angeles Contemporary
viewer unsure how to interpret what Exhibitions for the Getty Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, January 2012.
he or she sees. Instructions and labels, Courtesy of the artist.

Chapter 1 Discovering the Contemporary

held press conferences, vigils, panels, and performances. display cases, and, most memorably, made out of gum and
The comparison with the epidemic of violence in the late applied like three-dimensional tattoos on the artist’s face,
1970s was significant: 2,387 sexual assaults were reported in neck, and torso. The vagina in these works is both star and
1977; in 2011, there were fewer than half that number, with a scar, a label for the socialized sexuality that empowers women
higher percentage of the crimes being reported. Lacy’s strat- as sexual beings and the brand that defines them as sex
egy of making art about political issues by utilizing means objects. Wilke’s sculptures explore the process of objectifica-
often associated with organizing and protest has been termed tion in an awkward yet alluring way. On the one hand, the
“public practice” and constitutes the focus of the graduate forms epitomize rejection: They are chewed up and spat out.
program that she now runs at Otis College of Art and Design On the other, they are produced by the action oflips, tongue,
in Los Angeles. Lacy’s program and projects such as Three fingers, and saliva, and so allude to physical intimacy. In pho-
Weeks in January demonstrate the continued urgency with tographs of the work, Wilke strikes fashion-model poses with
which contemporary artists are creating socially engaged art. the vaginal objects thus combining pop-culture and con-
ventional norms of beauty, which Wilke satisfies, with more
Hannah Wilke complex issues of objectification, repulsion, and desire, as
On the East Coast, Hannah Wilke used a mix of performance well as those of politics, feminism, and representation.
and sculpture to reflect social, personal, and aesthetic con- By the end of the 1970s, hotly contested questions of the
cerns. As described in 1975 by critic Cindy Nemser, Wilke’s social dimensions of artistic production and the politics of
work sounds as though it would be at home in Womanhouse: representation remained unresolved. The following chapters
“Hannah Wilke ... currently produces vaginal forms out of address the response to the appeal made by Rosler, Sauzeau
pastel-tinted latex, pink pigmented terra cotta, multi-colored and others for new art and new theory. Chapter 2 examines
lint, and grey-toned kneaded erasers.” Despite at first appropriation art, while Chapter 3 looks at the more visceral
appearing personal and emotive, however, these small sculp- productions of Neo-Expressionism. Although the debates
tures became more ambivalent when viewers were invited that had shaped art in the 1960s and 1970s continued into
to survey the large series, choose their favorite vagina, pay the following decade, their tenor changed. The activist poli-
for it, and take it home. The impact of the work rested on tics of the Vietnam years and the social movements that
its identity as a carefully sculpted form and an individually developed in their wake lost ground to the political and
priced commodity, a comment on the commercialization of social conservatism of the Reagan/Thatcher era. In addi-
art as much as the objectification of women. The feminism tion, a boom in the art market introduced the topic of price.
of Wilke’s work become more apparent in S.O.S. Starification Radicalism in contemporary art remained but, as will be dis-
Object Series (1974-82) (fig. 1.32), for which Wilke presented cussed, politics looked different in the 1980s than it had in
the vaginal forms in a variety of ways: presented in frames, the 1970s.

1.32 Hannah Wilke,

S.O.8. Starification
Object Series,
1974-82. Gelatin
silver prints with
chewing gum
sculptures, 40 x 581%
Ae @ileOwx<
WASIHO) 3 Swain

a 4 aelala
The Museum of
Modern Art, New
York. Courtesy Ronald qrorrerenane! —‘secnmeammeme

Feldman Fine Arts, BY

New York. E

Feminist Statements
 Taking Pictures:
Appropriation and Its Consequences

2.1 Jack Goldstein, Metro-

Goldwyn-Mayer, 1975. 16 mm
film, color, sound, 2'. Courtesy
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne
and the Estate of Jack Goldstein.

|ie
n 1977, a new style was announced in a show called “Pic- Essential to the development of appropriation was the pro-
| tures,” held at the alternative New York gallery Artists liferation of alternative spaces in New York in the late 1970s
| Space. This chapter examines the development of so-called and early 1980s that were willing to show potentially confus-
“appropriation art” from this late, 1970s exhibition through ing and abrasive art. Venues such as Artists Space sought to
the 1980s. Responding to the idea that the meaning of both create an environment in which intellectual and _political
art and self is generated through social discourse, appropria- concerns outweighed financial ones. The new movement was
tion art involved taking imagery from a variety of pre-existing also closely connected to a group of critics identified with
sources and “re-presenting” it as one’s own. Metro-Goldwyn- the art and theory journal October, but who also wrote for
Mayer (1975) (fig. 2.1), a two-minute film consisting of the the more widely read magazine Art in America and taught at
roaring MGM lon on a loop by “Pictures” participant Jack the increasingly prestigious Whitney Independent Studies
Goldstein (1945-2003), illustrates the blatant borrowing of Program. “Pictures” curator Douglas Crimp adapted his exhi-
imagery that typified appropriation art. Goldstein’s creative bition essay for publication in October in 1979. In addition
act consisted of selecting the short passage of film, editing it to providing fresh material for critical consideration within
into the repeating format, and exhibiting it in a new context. alternative spaces and the academy—“Pictures” traveled

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

to the Allen Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio, the Los for contemporary activist art. Even in the twenty-first century,
Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, and the University though appropriation has been adopted by mainstream
of Colorado, Boulder—appropriation also contributed to Hollywood moviemakers, the music business, and, inevitably,
the transformation of the commercial gallery world, begin- the advertising industry, artists of every ilk continue to renew
ning with the foundation of Metro Pictures gallery in 1980 its critical application.
by Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer, who had previously Appropriation is based on the insight that our sense of
worked at Castelli Gallery and Artists Space, respectively. The self and community is constructed from the barrage of
first show at Metro Pictures was devoted almost exclusively images that continually confronts us in the public sphere—
to appropriation artists, including Sherrie Levine and Cindy on television, in art, and in almost every other form of
Sherman, both of whom were discussed in Crimp’s 1979 essay social interaction. In this context, photography is particu-
(Sherman had been working at Artists Space in 1977 but was larly important, since it is the medium by which most mes-
not included in the original show), as well as Richard Prince. sages are conveyed in public. Appropriation artists such
Soon after, Louise Lawler also joined Metro Pictures. The as Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Silvia Kolbowski, and
gallery enabled this group of young New York artists to have Richard Prince were not trained as photographers, but none-
access to intellectual, critical, and commercial platforms, in theless used the camera to acquire source material from the
the process demonstrating not only the power of their work, image bank of contemporary society. The “amateur” quali-
but also the continuing role of New York as the linchpin in ties of their photographs, allowing flaws in the developing
the art world. and printing process and eschewing formally precise com-
Douglas Crimp, the curator of “Pictures,” chose the exhi- positions or technically polished final executions, laid bare
bition’s title in large part for its easy familiarity.' Free of the act of picture taking and, in theory, made the politics
specific art-historical associations, “pictures” is a common of picture making visible. Such concern with the process of
word, used to refer to all kinds of images, from paintings in a interpretation—with how we give pictures meaning—was
museum to illustrations in a children’s book. The “Pictures” claimed by numerous critics to be a characteristic of contem-
artists took images and stripped them of the contexts— porary art. Craig Owens, for example, thought that allegory
advertisements, movies, newspapers, art museums—that had had become the preferred artistic mode of the 1980s.’ Alle-
helped fix their original meaning. Reframed, these appropri- gory relies on the viewer’s ability to equate concrete visual
ated images could be analyzed as functional parts of various representations with more abstract meanings, such as a
different social systems much as one might take apart a cigarette-smoking cowboy with North American masculinity.
machine to investigate its operation and examine its constitu- Appropriation, like allegory, requires its audience to be alert
ent parts. to the duplicity of images. Even with a sympathetic audience,
Crimp, an art historian as well as a curator, defined the however, and especially with one unfamiliar with contempo-
practice of appropriation in opposition to formalist critic rary art, appropriation artists take on a twofold responsibility:
Michael Fried’s concept of “grace,”? which referred to the They must draw attention to the mechanisms of representa-
sort of spiritual experience that will be familiar to anyone tion and convey their own particular analysis of them.
who has stood wordlessly entranced in front of a work of art.
For Crimp, and indeed for Fried as well, the definition of art
in terms of “grace” had the effect of setting it apart from daily Power on Display
life. Since the late 1950s, however, many artists had objected The act of creating finished works by copying, despite having
to this separation of art and life; Crimp’s exhibition took up been introduced to the art world first by Marcel Duchamp
the argument again. The “Pictures” artists, and appropria- and then by Andy Warhol decades before, remained unsettling
tionists in general, he argued, perceived Modernist art and into the 1980s. Placing Levine’s Untitled (President
culture, due to its promise of transcendent experiences of 4) (1979) (see fig. 2.2) alongside Warhol’s 200 One-
the kind Fried had described, to have been responsible for Dollar Bills (1962) (see fig. 0.7) undoubtedly makes the
fostering a desire to turn away from the world. Appropria- latter appear comparatively artful and expressive, sud-
tion artists by contrast focused their attention on one aspect denly full of the signs of artistic transformation that
of daily life: the ubiquity of representation, whether in mass some critics back in the 1960s had argued were missing.
culture, as in Goldstein’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Richard Moreover, in contrast to the nearly encyclopedic accu-
Prince’s photographs of cigarette advertising, or in high mulation of imagery in the work of Warhol or Rauschen-
culture, as in the reproduction of Modernist artworks in berg, the appropriation artists’ archive was much more
the practices of Sherrie Levine. By prioritizing copies over pointed in what it included: Images of sex, power, gender
originals, appropriation artists directed the viewer’s eye stereotypes, and tokens of U.S. power predominated. A visitor
toward their source material, while simultaneously challeng- to the “Pictures” exhibition or to Metro Pictures gallery in
ing its authority. By the end of the 1980s, political action the early 1980s would have been struck by the political nature
groups such as ACT UP (see Chapter 4) and the Guerrilla of the art on view. Readers of commentaries on the work
Girls had made appropriation the dominant visual strategy likewise could have found many connections to the activist

Power on Display
art criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. As Silvia Kolbowski has of presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy. The pho-
pointed out, appropriation as an artistic strategy was inti- togenic charm of the models, the soothing prosperity of
mately bound to the political struggle for ethical and just rep- their settings, and the gentle authority of a magazine are
resentation, not merely in the art world but beyond it as well. thus reframed through the lens of political power. Levine’s
Appropriation was a means of taking control of the tools of Presidents illustrate the intimate connection between the con-
power and repurposing the means of representation that, in ventions of domestic life and the established forms of govern-
the age of mass media, are the primary means of consolidat- ance. In the Kennedy portrait, the idyllic image of a satisfied,
ing the ideology of the status quo. With this new movement, attractive white mother at home with her daughter encap-
the social criticism that had been so central to the art of the sulates the substance of early 1960s America, even as the
previous decade was finding a new voice. presidential profile delineates the boundaries of its space.
Such gender conventions—men of power and women in the
Sherrie Levine home—Levine’s work asserts, are not merely the unthink-
In 1978, the year after she had exhibited in “Pictures,” ing results of contemporary society, they are the deliberate
Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) began a series of untitled works means by which the status quo perpetuates itself. If the power
consisting of images of fashionable women and sentimen- of the iconic image of Kennedy as Cold War victor staring
tal mother-and-child groups cut to fit the silhouettes of U.S. down the communists is conveyed in the contour, it is stabi-
presidents (fig. 2.2). This series, in which the feminine lized, literally filled in, by the scene of female tranquility. The
spaces of the U.S. middle class are framed by the mascu- strength of the masculine public sphere is dependent on the
line face of American power, typifies early appropriation passivity of this feminine private space. In Crimp’s argument,
practice. Levine took her images of motherhood from the the image demonstrates how U.S. society is thus defined by
women’s magazines that shaped the idea of femininity for the relationship between two misleading myths of gender.* As
thousands of readers, and placed them within profile portraits if replaying the contest between contour and plane, between
line and color, Levine presents a deadlock of gender politics.
To breach this restrictive and reductive trap required a sys-
temic critique that further violated the boundary between art
and life; such an analysis is visible in Levine’s later work.
Following the presidents, Levine turned from mass-media
imagery to the archive of the museum, most famously by
photographing the photography of iconic modern photogra-
phers. Disposing of the silhouette, which allowed the viewer
to compare the image created by the contour and the one
captured within, Levine’s photographs of photographs, such
as After Walker Evans: 7 (1981) (fig. 2.3), align the frame of
the copy with that of the original. After Walker Evans: 7 is a
single image, appropriated in its entirety. The creative act of
selection and manipulation—gestures with which, thanks to
Pop and Conceptual art, we are already quite familiar—has
been reduced by half for the compositions are identical. After
Walker Evans: 7 is Levine’s photograph of Evans’s (1903-75)
classic 1936 photograph Farmhouse Hale County, Alabama (fig.
2.4), one of a series taken by Evans illustrating Southern
poverty during the Great Depression. The rephotographed
photograph appears much as an art historian might present
it during a lecture, not as evidence of Levine’s aesthetic skill
but as a piece of history, interesting both as a composition
and for the meanings it possessed at its creation and that it
has acquired since. Because it makes little sense to interro-
gate Levine’s formal skills (her primary creative acts were
selection and mechanical reproduction), After Walker Evans:
7 raises questions about the intention of the artist and the
meaning of the work, questions that critics of Levine’s gener-
ation felt had yet to be forcefully asked of Modernist art such
2.2 Sherrie Levine, Untitled (President
4), 1979. Collage on paper, as Evans’s.
24 x 18"(60.9 x 45.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In Evans’s photograph, we see the meticulously ordered
© Sherrie Levine. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. room which suggests the dignity ofits resident and constituted

“|
Chapter 2 Taking Pictures:
(
Appropriation and Its Consequences
2.3 Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 7, 1981. Gelatin silver print, 2.4 Walker Evans, Farmhouse Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Gelatin
56 x 37" (12.8 x 9.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. silver print. 7Ye x 6%6' (19.5 x 16.1 cm). The Library of Congress.
© Sherrie levine. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

the heart of the artist’s appeal to Northern liberals to help convey its message that Hale County citizens are deserving,
fund renewal projects across the rural South. In such works, Evans relies on his audience believing that his photograph
Evans demonstrated photography’s role in the pursuit of documents the room as he found it. Had the artist staged the
social justice, while remaining faithful to the abstract com- image, then the photograph would be politically suspect. So,
positions favored by other classic Modernist photogra- if Evans is following a given style and dependent on others
phers such as Alfred Stieglitz, (1864-1946) and Paul Strand to compose his subject for him, then what does his creative
(1890-1976). Walker Evans’s photograph was the result of act consist of exactly? Evans’s “originality” might be said to
an encounter between Depression-era poverty and twentieth- have been: seeing the house, framing the scene, and print-
century avant-garde aesthetics. Levine’s After Walker Evans: 7, ing the photograph—in other words, selection and presen-
however, is not imbedded in a pursuit of justice, or invested tation. In her copy, Levine presents modern art as a cultural
in proving photography to be high art; rather, its context is object that functions not as an isolated object of beauty, or
the early 1980s art world, and Levine shares with her “Pic- even as a heroic gesture of independent journalism, but as
tures” peers a commitment to challenging myths of original- an image produced within systems of aesthetic norms and
ity and conventions of artistic creation. As several writers of national politics.
the period, notably Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941), have pointed In a 1985 interview, Levine explained: “The pictures I
out, claims of originality have been tenuous throughout the make are really ghosts of ghosts ... When I started doing this
modern era, despite the faith many artists have placed in work, I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself.
them.° Evans’s original photograph is itself full of challenges I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there
to its own claims to originality and authenticity. The aesthetic are times when both pictures disappear and other times
success of the image—its carefully coordinated lines of furni- when they’re both manifest; that vibration is basically what
ture and wooden planks juxtaposed against the planes of the the work’s about for me—that space in the middle where
hanging cloth and corner of the room—depend on Evans there is no picture.”® As when the Belgian Surrealist René
following the example of contemporary norms of avant-garde Magritte (1898-1967) opened up a space between things and
art. In addition, the political success of the work rests on the names we give them in his 1929 image ofa pipe inscribed
the artist eschewing significant compositional invention: To “Ceci nest pas une pipe’ (“This is not a pipe”), Levine’s practice

Power on Display
highlighted the uncertainties that images attempt to conceal. of subjectivity and even originality that were free from the
“I’m trying not to be tyrannized by the original image,” she repressive taint of Modernist art.
continued. “What I’m really interested in is constructing my
relationship to the image.”’ Richard Prince
In the 1980s, Levine’s interest in craft and the evocative Appropriation was not always so highbrow or self-consciously
and personal character of her appropriative impulse were critical. Richard Prince’s (b. 1949) first appropriations
not immediately apparent, although they have become much were drawn from what he called “art-directed and over-
more evident since. At that time, she was typically praised determined” magazine images that conveyed the anonymous
for creating work with “only functional value for particular perfection of the commercial American Dream.'! Soon,
historical discourses,”* or for engaging in an “uncompro- however, he began. to mine more lowbrow and unpolished
mising rejection of all notions of self-expression, original- material from biker magazines, fanzines, and softcore por-
ity, or subjectivity.”? Looking back in 1993, Douglas Crimp nography. The result was an unsettling, if sometimes beau-
described what he felt had been his project in the 1980s; tiful, collection of stylized, though rarely stylish, images
one he felt he shared with Levine. He wrote that he had of objects, ranging from watches, cigarettes, and monster
wanted to “displace” the conventional subject of art, namely trucks, to bikinis, bikes, and heavy metal bands. Prince
the humanist artist expressing his convictions in the name described the appeal of popular culture as consisting of
of “universal mankind.” Instead: “I wanted to show that the “signs, signals, things that didn’t need to be explained.””
creating subject was a fiction necessary to modern esthetic Unlike the Dada or Pop gestures that raised pop culture to
understanding, and that what took its place in postmodern the status of fine art, or subjected high-art objects to the rep-
knowledge was the institution, if by institution we mean a dis- licating processes of technological reproduction, Prince’s
cursive system.”'’ Certainly, Levine and others appropriated work, like that of Jeff Koons (see Chapter 5), functions at
tactically, choosing source imagery that facilitated critiques of a more emotional level, appealing to the pleasure his audi-
existing notions of self-expression and contemporary struc- ence takes in visual material that lies outside the customary
tures of power. It is useful to remember, however, that the art taste range of the art-buying public. Prince’s art presents an
writing of the 1980s that addressed appropriation was (like archive of subcultural icons of beauty that constitute a por-
all art writing) itself a tactical endeavor, which played the trait of desire that would appear to have littlé to do with the
dual role of explicating art and challenging the rising pop- aesthetics and interests of most of Prince’s sophisticated
ularity and prices of Neo-Expressionism (see Chapter 3). In audience. His series of “joke” paintings—text pieces repro-
this context, Levine’s comments regarding the relationship ducing bad one-liners and sendups found in men’s maga-
between contemporary artists and Modernist art, and much zines—confirm his interest in giving viewers something that
of what appears to be the expressive dimension of appro- they don’t usually get in an art museum. If there is a critical
priationist work, can be read as attempts to find new forms agenda in Prince’s work, and unlike Levine’s it was not at all

2.5 Richard Prince, Untitled

(Cowboy), 1995. Ektacolor
photograph, 48 = 72"
(ZnO N8229% emi:
Courtesy Richard Prince
Studio.
clear to critics that there was one, it lies
in its implication that the desires of the
collecting class is on a continuum with
those who subscribe to the magazines
in which Prince finds his imagery.
Prince began his career in New York
cutting the editorials out of magazines
for Time-Life. What was left after the
text had been removed in this way were
seductive visual fragments of advertise-
ments—lips, eyes, hair, hands, watches,
pens, cigarettes, and carefully cropped
presentations of the men and women
who inhabit the world these objects
define. This material became the
source for Prince’s first experiments
in appropriation. The “Marlboro Man”
rides through many of his works of
the 1980s (fig. 2.5) and continues to
appear throughout his oeuvre. Cap-
tured in rich, often luminescent colors,
amplified through Prince’s rephoto-
graphing process, the cigarette-ad
cowboy excites as much visual pleasure
as he exudes macho allure. Prince’s
work celebrates the aesthetic tastes of
those usually excluded from high art,
such as commercial artists and lower 2.6 Richard Prince, Criminals and Celebrities, 1986. Photographic paper with 9 Ektacolor
middle-class white Americans. photographs, 86 x 48"(218.4 x 121.9 cm). Courtesy Richard Prince Studio.

Prince’s manner of re-presentation

reveals, like the variety of Levine’s
means, the degree to which appropriation, like any other the images show people hiding their faces with their hands
kind of mark making, was an aesthetic tool. Prince described (fig. 2.6). Though unfamiliar, and often alienating and aes-
his practice as “8-track photograph[y],” ” referring to a play- thetically unsatisfying, Prince’s gangs demonstrate artistic
back device popular in the 1970s before the invention of the choices—selection of subject matter; balancing formal con-
cassette recorder. The eight tracks consisted of: the original, nections between unlike forms; conceptual relationships
the rephotographed copy, the angled copy, the cropped copy, between similar forms—of the same kind as those made in
the focused copy, the out-of-focus copy, the black-and-white more traditional art.
copy, and the color copy.'® Most of Prince’s appropriation In his book Why I Go to the Movies Alone (1983), a collec-
work was produced using one or more of these procedures, tion of fictional vignettes, Prince discussed the function of
which allowed him to achieve a variety of formal effects. In photography, exploring the relationship between representa-
1984, he began making “gangs,” a term used by professional tion and desire. On the compulsion of one of his characters
photo labs for a single page of photographic paper printed to acquire photographs of a particular woman, the narra-
with a grid of nine or twelve images. Prince used this “gang” tor muses: “He had to have her on paper, a material with a
format to create groups of images and thus to curate his flat and seamless surface ... a place that had the chances of
appropriations. “I realized I could have a whole show on one looking real, but a place that didn’t have any specific chances
piece of paper,” he explained.’ Some of the resulting collec- of being real.”!° Here, photography indulges a desire for
tions were themed in terms of the things represented, such possession that cannot be had in real life. Complicating his
as Flames, Dragons, and Titles (1985-86), which depicts decora- account of what appears at first to be a simple pathology,
tions on the sides of trucks, or Live Free or Die (1986) featuring Prince explains that photography didn’t serve “uncritical
nine amateur photographs of girls on motorcycles submitted devotion,” but permitted an active rather than passive adora-
to biker magazines. Others show groups of related forms, tion. The “image did seem to have,” he writes, “a power he
as in Untitled (For Catherine Deneuve) (1987), which presents could willingly and easily contribute to.”'® One can engage
cascading waves, leaves, and women’s hair. Combinations of photographic images with a confidence that disappears when
the two include Criminals and Celebrities (1986), in which all encountering the real; in the end, Prince’s work itself leaves

Power on Display
the viewer desiring images of things more than the things following section), used appropriation to examine the char-
themselves. His appropriation enacts a revealing, sensual, acter of the Gaze. The stakes of interrogating how we look at,
perhaps even embarrassing balancing act between desire and as well as represent, the world lay not only in the possibility of
control. In a world of re-presentations of representations, developing a critical vision, but in opening up the possibili-
the original, like the woman Prince’s protagonist avoids in ties for new ways of seeing.
Why I Go to the Movies Alone, is displaced, leaving the viewer to
examine and indulge in the impulses that displaced it. Cindy Sherman
In another vignette in Why J Go to the Movies Alone, a man In 1977, Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) began making a series of
covets the toothbrush of another man. After deciding it photographs called Untitled Film Stills (fig. 2.7) that demon-
would be wrong to steal it, “He brushed his teeth with the strate the flexibility. of appropriation in engaging issues of
blasted fucker and spit the paste and blood right into the authority, identity, and gender. Sherman has described this
mirror.”!” The fictional immediacy of Prince’s writing here moment in her career, shortly after finishing graduate school
has little to do with the intellectual distinction between and moving to New York, as one characterized by insecurity
copies and sources made in theoretical statements about and a retreat from the art world into a studio full of costumes
appropriation art. The violence of the scene is directed at and props, where she would photograph herself posing in
an image, the mirror that, like Prince’s camera, appropri- scenes reminiscent of European and Hollywood movies of
ates its source with no need to transform it. In the previous the 1940s and 1950s. The images capture all the strength
narrative, Prince favored the image, but here we are treated and vulnerability conveyed by actresses such as Lauren
to a visceral experience of the real, thus highlighting the Bacall in scenes suggesting Sherman’s melancholic vision of
dialogue in Prince’s art between representation and reality, what it was like for a woman to grow up in America at this
analysis and desire, examination and evocation. This
dialectic, present in Levine’s attention to craft and the
emotive power of materials, was reflected in the criti-
cal reception of appropriation. For critics such as Craig
Owens (1950-90), the style held the power to shift art-
world priorities from money-making to politics and
theory. Others saw it as just one more modification of tra-
ditional, even Romantic, artistic practice.'*A few critics
struggled to synthesize these two, apparently mutually
exclusive propositions.'? Read as a demonstration of and
appeal to such an unstable interpretive lens, Prince’s
work straddles both critical and indulgent positions while
securely occupying neither.

identity and the Gaze

The analysis of the image world of high art and mass
culture initiated in works such as those of Levine or
Prince contributed to wider debates over culture and
politics in the 1980s. If, as Levine’s work so eloquently
argued, representation was an act of control and a state-
ment of power, what was the act of looking? Reception as
well as production of images was of critical importance,
and an issue to which appropriation was well suited.
Looking establishes relationships and creates meaning.
Who looks at what, at whom, in what contexts, and with
what consequences, were pressing concerns much dis-
cussed in the 1980s and 1990s under the label of “the
Gaze.” The Gaze constituted any act of looking that was
understood as having social and political implications.
Feminism and psychoanalysis provided the starting point
for understanding looking as a generative act both in
terms of enforcing cultural norms and shaping personal
2.7 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #35, 1979. Black-and-white
identity. Artists including Cindy Sherman and Silvia photograph, 10 x 8"(25.4 x 20.32 cm). Edition of 10. Courtesy of the artist
Kolbowski, as well as Barbara Kruger (discussed in the and Metro Pictures, New York.

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

time.*? Appropriating scenes from popular cinema, she felt,
would make it possible for a wide audience to “relate to [the
work] without having read a book about it first.”*! The results
brought a sense of playfulness and sentiment to contempo-
rary art, but also, as Sherman had intended, the critical lens
of contemporary theory.” This dualism animated Sherman’s
work and its reception through the 1980s and after.
Each of the Untitled Film Stills features a woman alone,
caught in the middle of an action or thought, like the star
of some vaguely remembered movie. These isolated instants
invite contemplation, but the black-and-white photographs’
format—8 by 10 inches, like a standard production still and
often grainy and imperfect quality challenge the viewer’s
impulse to dwell on a single image. Instead, we feel com-
pelled to move on, either in our imagination to the next
scene, or in the gallery to the next image, where we find the
same actress, Sherman herself, in a different movie. Sherman
moved on from the small black-and-white format to larger
color photographs in the mid-1980s but continued to mine
viewers’ collective memory for its visions of women.
Untitled #152 (1985) (fig. 2.8) shows her mimicking the
tropes of low-budget horror movies. As Levine did with her
Presidents, Sherman appropriated conventional scenes of
femininity and exposed their oppressive partiality: No single
mass-media image could ever satisfactorily express the nature
of a real person; neither could a catalogue of many identi-
ties add up to a single “true” portrait. In contrast to the con-
ventional expectation that self-portraits should reveal inner
truths, Sherman’s photographs present identity as continu-
ally shifting among readily available stereotypes. The ques-
tion “Who is Cindy Sherman?” is perpetually deferred, 2.8 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #152, 1985. Color photograph, 72% x
raising the further question of the work’s subject. Is it about 49%" (184.2 x 125.4 cm). Edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist and Metro
popular culture and the representation of gender, or is this a Pictures, New York.
form of Postmodern self-portrait after all?
Sherman’s practice seemed to eschew traditional ideas the copy, appropriation drew attention to this contradic-
about the artist as charismatic innovator. By the late 1970s, tion. Krauss concluded her essay with a reference to Sherrie
it was widely accepted in the art world that the idea of “crea- Levine, suggesting that appropriation, by disavowing the
tive genius” was an aggrandizement of art making that was contest between original and copy, provided a way out of the
complicit with oppressive features of Western society. In binary conflicts of Modernism (such as real vs. fake, high art
1981, art historian Rosalind Krauss published “The Original- vs. low art) and heralded a Postmodernism.”°
ity of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” in which Support for the importance of materialism over mystifi-
she argued that “modernism and the avant-garde are func- cation was found in the writings of the philosopher Walter
tions of what we could call the discourse of originality, and Benjamin, whose 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
that that discourse serves much wider interests.”** 723 For Krauss, Mechanical Reproduction” was cited in nearly every 1980s
Modernism and the avant-garde, like the compulsion to be critique of contemporary art for its brilliantly theorized argu-
original, depended on the “repression” of any challenge to ment that photography and mass reproduction had removed
the power of the individual genius, the copy chief among the mysterious and elitist “aura” from artworks. When more
them. Copying necessarily demonstrated a process by which people had access to the works that had been reserved
the resulting artwork was not the product of one mind alone. for the elite few, then the mysticism of cultural production
Krauss and others demonstrated that the myth of the artist would be lessened and its power to communicate would be
birthing his art assisted only by inspiration and intuition was enhanced. The corollary of this democratizing effect was that
contradicted by the many repeated ideas and forms found any cultivation of the aura in the age of mass media was a
in modern art; she used the many grids such as those found political act with dire consequences. As Benjamin explained,
in Cubist paintings (see fig. 0.1) or modernist architecture it was the fusion of aesthetics, politics, and mass media
in twentieth-century art to make her point.** By embracing that had propelled the fascists to power in the 1930s. Thus

Identity and the Gaze

contemporary culture must be self-consciously alert to the way the critical view of Sherman’s work has taken the side of
reproduction and representation function. In the conclusion Williamson and Lichtenstein and found that feminist analy-
of his “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin writes: sis must play a part in viewing Sherman’s photographs. It
“The illiterate of the future,’ it has been said, ‘will not be the should be noted, however, that Sherman has courted viewers
man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot who do not generally read art criticism and theory. Her
take a photograph.’ But must we not also count as illiterate work with fashion designers and Hollywood, as well as her
the photographer who cannot read his own pictures?”*? 26 Con- general reluctance to join the polemical debates about her
temporary means of image production require updated prac- work, have left a lot of room for interpretation. Sherman
tices of looking, a point seconded by appropriation. has said that she wants audiences to be able to engage with
Sherman’s imagery, so obviously derived from popular her work without reading about it, and it must be admitted
culture, seems to confirm her opposition to traditional that her work permits viewers to “know,” if not the real Cindy
notions of creativity. The formal elements of her photographs, Sherman, then at least a Cindy Sherman that feels real.
however, suggest a slightly different attitude. The apparent
imperfections of her technique and careful manipulations of Laura Mulvey and the Theory of the Gaze
props draw attention to the activity of art making and even, Like Levine and Prince, Sherman succeeded in reposition-
like a painterly brushstroke, to the hand of the artist. Some ing the familiar. While Levine placed her appropriations in
critics thus located her work in the history of avant-garde the context of art history and Prince organized his into sub-
portraiture, seeing its fragmentary, emphatically manipu- cultural gangs, Sherman’s impact lay in infiltrating the histo-
lated views of characters caught between self-expression and ries of film and self-portraiture. Here it is useful to examine
social conformity as offering a truthful presentation of the how film and spectatorship were theorized in the 1970s, in
contemporary self in society. Others universalized what they particular Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and
saw as Sherman’s portrayal of her personal experience. Peter Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey (b. 1941) used psychoanalysis to
Schjeldahl wrote in 1982 that her work was about “the uni- dissect the extent to which Hollywood film perpetuates tra-
versal state of daydream or reverie, the moments of harmless, ditional gender roles, not only in social relations but also in
necessary psychosis that are recurring mechanisms in any- identity development. Her essay, reprinted in the influential
one’s mental economy.”*’ This universalizing, expressionistic collection Art After Modernism (1984), provides an analysis of
interpretation was repeated on the occasion of Sherman’s cinematic storytelling that is relevant to Sherman’s work.
1987 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, where the exhibi- Mulvey argued that the pleasures offered by classic Holly-
tion catalogue referred to the artist as an “oracle ... a source wood films correspond to the description of identity forma-
of ambiguous messages that seem to tell us our nature and tion in Freudian psychology. The latter model crucially refers
our fate.”*® Arts magazine likewise published an account of only to the male; female identity is not theorized beyond its
the show as “an archeology of the self,” in which “Historic functionality in relation to the male, an imbalance Mulvey
layers of early psychology ... are being exposed and revealed also detected in popular films. Cinematic pleasure is primar-
not as dead but as still living states.” The review concluded: ily experienced in two ways: first, the enjoyment of watching;
“Sherman is discovering what it might be like to go crazy.”*° and, second, the relief provided by the narrative arc. These
Such responses to Sherman’s work bore out Judith William- two types of viewing correspond to Freud’s categories of the
son’s 1983 observation that “so tenacious is the wish for this scopophilic and the narcissistic.
set of psychic garments to turn out to be actual skin, that Scopophilic viewing (from the ancient Greek for “watch-
almost every time Sherman’s work is written about the issue ing” and “love”) displaces sensations of touch with those of
of Cindy Sherman ‘herself’ comes into it.”*? sight. The standard example is voyeurism and, though there
The praise of Sherman’s photography as traditionally is a difference between movie buffs and peeping toms, the
expressive did not go unchallenged. Art historian and critic prevalence of sex in popular entertainment suggests that it
Therese Lichtenstein declared that, rather than simply enlist- is one of degree rather than kind. The effect of the scopo-
ing popular culture to reveal truths, Sherman “demytholo- philic Gaze, as it came to be called, is to objectify the thing
gizes” her sources with the aim of addressing the fantasy of observed, transforming it from a subject in its own right into
“a unitary feminine essence.”*! To read Sherman as doing an object that is important only for the pleasure it provides
otherwise, even if the resulting feminine essence was the viewer. The viewer, it should be recalled, is consistently
complex, was nothing but an attempt to make a radical theorized by Freud and imagined by filmmakers as male. In
artist whose art challenged the status quo acceptable to film, the transformation effected by the Gaze occurs in the
the mainstream culture or, in Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s close-up, as the camera zooms in on the actress, turning her
phrase, “suitable for framing.”** The institutional claims on into a series of fragments—for example, a high-heeled shoe
radical art have always been forceful: As Allan McCollum’s and stockinged leg extended from car to street, or a cascade
1985 photo-essay “In the Collection Of ...” (see fig. 2.13) of hair falling over a shoulder. Just as Prince’s character in
argued, there was a long history of taming antagonistic art Why I Go to the Movies Alone enjoyed the security of possessing
in order to be able to present it in sites of power. In general, his beloved as an image rather than in the flesh, the close-up

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

permits the viewer to divorce himself from the whole person like Freudian psychology, places woman at the intersection
in favor of savoring the details. of male subjects’ power and vulnerability. Both modes of
To determine how scopophilic vision produces satisfac- representation depend on women to develop the identities
tion, Mulvey turned again to psychoanalysis. In Freud’s of men.
account of identity formation, there is a moment when the In Mulvey’s critique, classic cinema universalizes the
(male) child discovers that his mother, whom he had con- pleasures that Freudian psychoanalysis sees as specific to the
ceived of as an all-powerful extension of himself, is different development of male sexual identity. By relinquishing their
from him: She has no penis. Difference is registered visu- own subjectivity, women too can enjoy such films; unlike
ally; it is the child’s perception of absence that shocks him. their male counterparts, however, they are unable to step
Believing the penis to be a source of power or important in into the idealized role of the hero. Women can star in films
some not yet comprehensible way, the boy cannot accept that too, but only if their roles remain faithful to their male prec-
his mother does not possess one. The dismayed child looks edents. Two films from either end of the decade covered by
away in desperation, and his redirected gaze invests what- this chapter, Alien (1979) and Thelma and Louise (1990), both
ever it falls on—a leg, stocking, foot, shoe, or other domes- directed by Ridley Scott, demonstrate how classic film can
tic object—with the power to stave off his mounting anxiety. accommodate female actors. Sigourney Weaver in Alien (fig.
This object masks both the mother’s lack of a penis and the 2.9) provided audiences with an action heroine who was
fact of sexual difference (between child and mother). Thus as strong, if not as well paid, as the guys. In Thelma and
empowered, the ordinary object becomes the fetish. The Louise, Gina Davis and Susan Sarandon stepped out of sub-
mother, once a source of comfort but now a cause of fear, is urbia to take on the roles of outlaws Butch Cassidy and the
exchanged for an object that, while inscribed with the fact Sundance Kid. The movies were fun, the heroines were
of difference, exists to hide it. The classic film replays this tough, but they remained safely contained within the format
search for comfort, denying a full development of the female of classic Hollywood cinema. Mulvey was not interested in
character in favor of re-presenting her to the audience reversing conventional male and female roles in this way;
in fragments. instead, her goal was to find “the thrill that comes from
The second form of visual pleasure identified by Mulvey, leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending
which she termed narcissistic, involves the viewer sacrific- outworn or oppressive forms, of daring to break with normal
ing his subjectivity. Mulvey explained that our pleasure in
seeing a Hollywood story reach its conclusion derives from
a profound identification with its hero. This relates to the
mirror stage in psychoanalysis, in which the child recognizes
his appearance as an image in a mirror and invents an ideal-
ized self to inhabit it. Movie stars replicate this idealized self-
image. In the comfortable dark of the theater, we are invited
to do more than empathize with the figures on the screen.
We are not simply happy to see Cary Grant or Hugh Grant
get the girl, we take their conquest as our own. In this nar-
cissistic transfer, the viewer erases his subjectivity in order
to become, if only for a couple hours, the character in the
movie. The familiar sigh of relief as the hero overcomes
adversity thus becomes a form of self-congratulation.
These two devices, the close-up and narcissistic mirroring,
exist in a state of tension throughout the viewing of a film,
the one putting off or cutting short the pleasure the other
provides. It is the same dance of anticipation, disappoint-
ment, and compensation that defines Freudian identity for-
mation, in which the subject continually seeks, fails to find,
and struggles to reconstitute a unitary and coherent sense of
self in the world. In Freudian psychology and classic cinema,
women are objects of both scopophilic and narcissistic pleas-
ure. They are objects of desire for competing lovers, femmes
fatales obstructing the hero’s path, or helpless souls in need
of rescue. Fay Wray, Jessica Lange, and Naomi Watts exist
so that King Kong has to be defeated. In Star Wars, Princess
Leia’s raison d%tre is to convince Obi-Wan, inspire Luke, and 2.9 Sigourney Weaver in Alien, 1979. Film still.
compel Han Solo to save the Federation. Classic cinema, 20th Century Fox.

identity and the Gaze

pleasurable expectation in order to conceive a new language hands and feet, occasional texts, and, in one case, machin-
of desire.”*’ Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills inspire such a thrill ery in a textile factory. Evoking the gridded and serial pres-
and can be said to help initiate discussion of new forms of the entations of Minimalism and Conceptual art, the work
Gaze that exceed the binaries of Mulvey’s diagnosis of narra- confronts the viewer with sensuous masks of conventional
tive cinema. femininity proffering themselves to be consumed like the
In Sherman’s images, scopophilic and narcissistic pleas- cinematic close-ups deconstructed by Mulvey and Sherman.
ures are framed and frustrated. Like the close-up, the Untatled Punctuating the close-ups here are images of accessories and
Film Stills transform the actress into an object of the Gaze, objects—some not appropriated but photographed by the
providing satisfaction for viewers while they anticipate artist, suggesting that the entire collection might be merely
the next scene. An active being caught in mid-step or mid- fetishes diverting our attention from a glaring absence. In
thought becomes, for a moment, a passive object. By identi- this case, the absence is not the mother’s lack of a penis but
fying the women in the photograph with the woman behind Western culture’s lack of an adequate definition of the femi-
the camera, however, a Sherman photograph resists com- nine. The faces in Model Pleasure, shaped by the ideals of the
pletely transforming the female into fetish. Whether the mass media, provide the closest thing the modern West has
image seems to represent a working-class wife, B-movie to a definition of feminine identity. They convey both the
starlet, or girl-next-door, it also presents an artist dressed Freudian description of woman as “lacking,” and more con-
up for a camera she herself controls. Sherman’s work set temporary definitions of the feminine as a performance of
up a dialogue between the woman-artist as subject and the socially generated roles designed to preserve the patriarchal
woman-actor as object. Unlike the Freudian fetish, which status quo. The inclusion of the textile machine alludes to
protects the (male) subject from awareness of sexual differ- Marxist critiques of labor, both inviting economic analysis
ence, Sherman’s images draw attention to difference. The into the discussion and reminding the viewer of other theo-
artist herself juxtaposes the roles of model/actor/object and ries that have failed to adequately address the particularity of
artist/director/subject, layering the notion of the artist who women’s experience.
created the images with the multiplicity of feminine identi- Monumental Prop/portions (fig. 2.11), another series, this
ties to which they attest. time of images of shadows, was first published as a photo-
essay in the art journal Wedge. Each source photo of a shadow
Silvia Kolbowski has been cropped so as to include just a hint of the object
As the discussion of Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills indicates, by that cast it. In each case, that object is a female body, repre-
the 1980s identity was understood to be significantly shaped sented by a sliver of arm, shoulder, or leg. Like some uncanny
by representation: Freudian theory, pop culture, mass media, afterimage, the shadow looms over the fragment. Across
and fine art all provided important examples of this process. the final six pages of the essay, Kolbowski placed the words
By further dissecting and re-presenting the image of women “A SHADOW OF HER FORMED SELF,” underlining the
in the media, the Argentine-born, New York-based artist Silvia metaphorical reading of the work. The final page presents
Kolbowski (b. 1953) demonstrated how appropriation could a text in place of the shadow image. Over the word “self”
be used to examine and challenge the psychically formative is a description beginning: “She has been represented to
power of representation. Model Pleasure (1982-83) and Monu- death.” The text describes how the societal ideal presented
mental Prop/portions (1983) demonstrated Kolbowski’s strat- in Model Pleasures becomes a destructive product consumed
egy of appropriation, which includes selective copying from by women. Monumental Prop/portions clarifies the interaction
the mass media combined with imitations of commercial of fashion and fetish while insisting that the relationship is
styles to question the relationship between body, image, and socially constructed rather than biologically given.
feminine identity. In her explication of cinematic pleasure, Mulvey showed
Model Pleasure (fig. 2.10) is a series of compositions, how narcissistic identification compels the male to see
arrangements of photographs, most representing cropped himself in the image of the hero. Here, Kolbowski demon-
and framed images of women’s faces, wet with moistur- strated that women are left with only objects in place of role
izer, lip gloss, and eyeliner, and often suggesting narratives. models and must seek satisfaction by identifying with objec-
Additional images include still lifes of fruit, a dress, isolated tified, fragmented female figures. This process leaves only

2.10 Silvia Kolbowski, Model Pleasure |, 1982. 3 chromogenic and 7 gelatin silver prints, each 10 x 8"
(25.4 x 20.3 cm). Collection: Walker Art Center. Image courtesy the artist.

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

 the viewer’s, to become an active partner in the social con-
struction of femininity. Monumental Prop/portions can be seen
as an invitation to walk away from the limiting social ideal of
femininity, to leave the past behind as Mulvey had advised.

Spaces of Action
Appropriation was used to create spaces for action as well
as voices of protest. Artists including Allan McCollum and
Louise Lawler used appropriation to demonstrate that the
spaces in which art was usually found were highly political
and often compromised, while the work of Barbara Kruger
and Jenny Holzer, and the 1980s collective the Guerrilla
Girls, pushed appropriation out of the usual spaces of art
and into the streets. These artists occupied non-art spaces
using media with which their new audiences were familiar,
but delivered a message for which they were not prepared.
Following the perception of performance artist Laurie
Anderson (b. 1947) that “language is a virus’—a message she
herself appropriated from author William S. Burroughs—
appropriation artists understood mass-media and commer
cial communications to be aggressive carriers of potentially
malignant messages.”
c Cc

Allan McCollum
2.11 Silvia Kolbowski, Monumental Prop/portions, 1983. Pamphlet #2 Allan McCollum’s (b. 1944) exhibitions and objects in the
included loose with Wedge, issues 3/4/5, edited by Phil Mariani and
early 1980s developed the ability of appropriation to raise
Brian Wallis, 1983 (New York). Exact dimensions of this print unknown
Magazine 12 pp, 8.5 x 8.5"(21.59 x 21.59 cm). Collection MACBA, questions about the relationship of art to power. His work
Centre d’Estudis i Documentacié. Image courtesy the artist also indicated how appropriation could be applied to more
than just the details of an image. McCollum’s oeuvre is based
on what he calls surrogates (fig. 2.12), cast and painted
shadows, but it is complicated by the role contemporary objects that, in the early 1980s, resembled a black frame
women play within it. “Placed between the producer of the enclosing a black image on a white matte ground. Deliber
pose and the consumer of the pose,” wrote Kolbowski, “she is ately lacking pictorial or sculptural interest, the surrogates
consumed by both.” Women end up being complicit;
they are “ “self-consumptive, self-consumed. Done in.
Finished. Only to be repeated in ... the mimicry of
[their] assumed pose.” Like Levine’s Presidents or
Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, the text of Monumental
Prop/portions draws attention to the fact that this idea
of femininity is defined from the outside, by society.
At the same time, by cropping out the source of the
shadow, Kolbowski gives viewers a glimpse of the pos-
sibility of resistance. With the source of the shadow
relegated to a fragment, the viewer has the oppor
tunity to imagine the body that cast it. Kolbowski’s
image depicts the uncanny spaces between the image
of femininity created by society, as presented in
Model Pleasure, and the inscription of that image on
women’s real bodies. It appropriates fashion pho-
tography from mass culture to create a space where
we cannot see the social ideal or its effect, where, to
2.12 Allan McCollum, Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates, 1982-84. Enamel on
use Levine’s words quoted above, “both pictures dis- cast Hydrostone. 40 panels ranging from 5 x 4%" (12.8 x 10.2 cm) to 20% x
appear” and we are left with a “vibration ... in the 164" (51.3 x 41.1 cm),-overall 64" x 9! 2"(162.5 x 279.4 cm). The Museum of
middle where there is no picture.” The next step is Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston

Spaces of Action
 photographic sources insure that the art
cannot be seen in detail. This is how artworks

IN THE COLLECTION OF...

appear in the news—visible only as small but
ever-present black rectangles, where it is the
generic presence of art, not its specific form
or content, that is judged important. The final
image in the essay presents McCollum’s own
work adorning places of power—in this case,
the walls of Chase Manhattan Bank, where art
is made to appear as an attribute of power with
no aesthetic detail at all.*° In the accompanying
text, McCollum defined modern art as essen-
tially an appropriation of value, important for
its status as a trophy rather than its visual quali-
ties. “Modern art has always sought,” McCollum
asserted, “to assume the status of whatever
The earliest prototype for
what we have come to call treasures it is able to supplant; its history is
the work of art must have
been the trophy, the spoil no more than the perpetual reenactment
of war—for even now, the
aura of the artwork is of this interminable cycle of preemption.”*°
always continuous with the
Blow of victory. McCollum’s appropriation consisted of excis-
ing these artworks or trophies from images
of power and re-presenting them stripped of
those unique and identifying details we tend to
celebrate when we use the word “art.”

Louise Lawler
Louise Lawler (b. 1947) also took the operation
of art and power as her subject, focusing on
practices of display. She photographed art in
galleries, museums, corporate offices, storage
rooms, and collectors’ homes. By capturing
arrangements of artworks in such settings,
she highlighted their owners’ appreciation of
2.13 Allan McCollum, In the Collection of ..., 1985. Cover of photo/text essay.
Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston. how good an Abstract Expressionist painting
might look in their dining room, or how Pop
art could add interest to a lobby. She photo-
graphed the juxtaposition of a Jackson Pollock
stood for a work of art and were exhibited (framed and painting and fine china in Pollock and Tureen (1984) (fig.
presented on the walls of a gallery, corporate office, or 2.14) and a Roy Lichtenstein and a Telex machine seen in
museum, and reproduced in art magazines) in a manner that the offices of the stockbrokerage Paine Webber in Arranged
appropriated conventional modes of displaying art. Since by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage, Cheryl Bishop, Paine Webber,
casting the first of the surrogates, McCollum has created New York (1982). The artist and critic Andrea Fraser, who has
them in a variety of shapes and materials, pointing to the herself critiqued the institutional use of art (see Chapter 1),
many different ways in which art is created and displayed. wrote: “For Lawler artistic production is always a collective
McCollum’s 1985 photo/text essay “In the Collection endeavor: it isn’t simply artists who produce esthetic significa-
OLR reveals the very specific and significant source from tion and value, but an often anonymous contingent of collec-
which he appropriated the black-field-on-a-white-ground-in- tors, viewers, museum, and gallery workers—and ultimately
a-black-frame format of the first surrogates—press photos the cultural apparatus in which these positions are deline-
documenting political power (fig. 2.13). McCollum’s essay ated.”*’ In 1984, Lawler collaborated with Allan McCollum
outlines the genesis of the “surrogate,” beginning from the on the gallery installation Jdeal Settings: For Presentation
works of art that are visible on the walls and desks seen in and Display (fig. 2.15), in which the props for commercial
official photographs of figures such as presidents Truman display—lights, pedestals, stands, and prices tags—were pre-
and Ford or bodies such as the Warren Commission, which sented as sculptures in their own right. The artists set out to
investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. The create a “gesture which tends to reflect upon the function of
composition, lighting, focus, and resolution of McCollum’s the art gallery as a presentational arena.”**

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

 2.14 Louise Lawler, Pollock
and Tureen, 1984.
Cibachrome, 16 x 20"
(40.6 x 50.8 cm). Edition of
5. Courtesy of the artist and
Metro Pictures, New York.

2.15 louise Lawler and Allan McCollum, Ideal Settings: For Presentation and Display, 1983-84. ca. 100 objects of wax and
shoe polish on cast, pigmented Hydrostone, each 9 x 9 x 2Y%4' (22.86 x 22.86 x 5.7 cm). Installation designed by McCollum
and Lawler, with theatrical lighting and sales price projected on wall, at the Diane Brown Gallery, New York, 1984. Courtesy of the
artists and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.

s of Action
 2.16 Barbara Kruger, Untitled
(We don’t need another hero),
1986. Photographic silkscreen/
vinyl. 109 x 210" (277 x
533 cm). © Barbara Kruger.
Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery,
New York.

other hero
¥ ae

td .
We don
=
® ;

Barbara Kruger between message and context, “We don’t need another hero”
In the mid-1980s in cities across the U.S. and Europe, bill- draws attention to the fact that our physical surroundings,
boards appeared presenting a closely cropped image of a like the media, actively generate meaning. Space, Deutsche
Caucasian girl aged around ten with ribbons in her braided explained, is an arena that we relate to either as passive
blonde hair and polka dots on her 1950s-style dress (fig. receivers or, as we turn critically from a Kruger to a real ad, as
2.16). The girl admiringly rests an index finger on the arm active interpreters.
of a figure who appears to be her little brother, posing with In most cases, Kruger raised awareness of social conditions
clenched jaw and flexed muscle. The picture mimics the at a general level. She described her work as existing in the
illustrative style of the Saturday Evening Post, and evokes what realm of “time passing, but seldom [of] particular events.”*!
the voters who elected then-president Ronald Reagan might Her work appropriated modes of communication designed
have called “Traditional American Values.” It resembles an to fill a soundbite or a fleeting glance, and used them to take
advertisement for soap or cereal, except that printed across a longer view of social change. In order to focus on more spe-
the image are the words: “We don’t need another hero.” The cific issues, Kruger readily lent her style, and sometimes her
image was the work of Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), who set it work, to direct-action political groups, thus practicing a form
up in billboard locations where messages about money and of secondhand production. She made or authorized posters,
power were regularly delivered. Kruger adopted the mode pamphlets, book covers, image-based “op-ed” pieces and
of address of advertising to challenge the status quo on its other forms of public relations for campaigns including the
own turf. The billboard next to hers might have been adver- prevention of domestic violence, women’s health issues, such
tising a new car or Cobra, the latest Sylvester Stallone movie, as abortion rights, and AIDS awareness. By donating her style
promoted with an image of a heavily armed and sunglasses- in these ways, Kruger was able, both in and beyond art gal-
wearing Stallone underneath the words: “Crime is a disease. leries, to engage in systematic social critique as well as more
Meet the cure.” With Stallone’s U.S. Vietnam War veteran detailed problem-solving.
character John Rambo dominating 1980s pop culture, and Examples of Kruger’s work inside art institutions include
the White House actively intervening in Latin America and her 1991 installation at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York
the Middle East, Kruger’s message was both apropos and out- (fig. 2.17). For this, Kruger covered the gallery walls, floor,
gunned. In the popular imagination, America still wanted and ceiling with disturbing texts and images document-
heroes whose main attribute was brawn.°? ing aggression and violence. A monumental photograph
Fighting public-relations battles, however, was not Kruger’s showing mirror images of a shouting head covered the wall
aim. Art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche argued that at one end of the gallery. Between the two screaming faces
Kruger’s work was significant for “Treat[ing] space as a rela- Kruger inserted a red field several feet across containing a
tionship and then enunciat[ing] the mechanisms within list of insults: “hebe kike yid hymie spic wop dago mex cunt
it.”# Just as Levine deconstructed the “neutrality” of the art gash snatch pussy spook sambo nigger bookie slant nip
museum, transforming a space of passive reception into one chink jap faggot homo fairy” repeated down the wall. Over
of active critique, and Sherman did the same for the movie the center of both image and list was placed the statement:
theater and Kolbowski for the media, Kruger appropriated “All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.”
the means of the advertiser to expose the politics of urban Other parts of the installation similarly assaulted the viewer
space. By creating disjunctions between work and text and with aggressive invocations as well as condemnations of

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

hate, encouraging people to contemplate injustices closer to outside the gallery. As this piece made clear, seeing injustice
their own lives. is easy, the responsibility for deciding what to do next is not.
Kruger’s earlier work used pronouns such as “you” In the 1980s, Kruger’s work was commonly interpreted as
and “we” to force the viewer into the role of either social critique. More recently, her non-art world references
accuser or accused, victim or perpetrator. Statements have given rise to a very different reading. In the catalogue
such as “Your comfort is my silence,” “You substantiate for a 1999 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary
our horror,” and “We are your circumstantial evidence” Art, Los Angeles, critic Gary Indiana announced that Kruger
left little safe space for the viewer. Using appropriated enlisted the methods of “commercial media since these are,
images of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, dental surgery, and in fact, more persuasive and more authentically gratifying
high fashion, these works proved moral and ethical mine- than a lot of contemporary ‘fine art.’”’* Indiana here iden-
fields. In comparison, the 1991 installation created tified persuasion and authenticity as the motivating forces
the potential for a communal viewing experience, but behind her art. The first of these terms aligns well with the
shifted the ethical considerations outside the gallery. political force and moral certitude of much appropriation:
Kruger’s walls created a community of victims. Once the Kruger had used the mass media’s powers of persuasion,
shock of the violence was absorbed, the work induced a she explained, to “remove [the image] from the seeming
general shaking of the head and acknowledgment that the natural position within the flow of dominant social direc-
world is a hard place. The discomfort occurred as viewers tives [and present it in] the realm of commentary.”* But
left and had to decide how they might now act in the world what of authenticity? Appropriation by its very nature seems

All violence
is the illustration of a pathetic,
\ “Stereotype,
Wit as

2.17 Barbara Kruger, Mary Boone Gallery

installation, New York, 1991. © Barbara
Kruger. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery,
New York.

Spaces of Action
to undermine the idea of authenticity, arguing in favor of slightly under 8 percent of the work displayed was by women.
notions of social construction and against belief in authentic Noticing how few people responded to the traditional picket-
or essential notions of self. Indiana’s essay suggests that, line demonstrations with which other feminist groups were
by the late 1990s, words such as “authenticity” and “faith” drawing attention to this significant underrepresentation,
could be reintroduced into discussions of art, taking it for the group adopted the strategy that had worked for Kruger:
granted that they were inevitably now being read with criti- They produced posters, books, and media events combining
cal awareness. It is a measure of the changing perceptions of the savvy of advertisers with the intellectual consciousness
art between 1979 and 1999 that appropriation could come of feminist art historians. The group maintained anonymity
to be viewed by the second of these dates as a means of cre- by wearing gorilla masks in public. In 1989, they produced a
ating art that was both evocative and analytical, emotional poster that featured:a classic nude by Ingres wearing a gorilla
and intellectual. mask and posed the question: “Do women have to be naked
Like Prince, Kruger began her career working for a to get into the Met. Museumpe” (fig. 2.18). Underneath were
magazine, as an art director for the women’s publication statistics showing that women represented less than 5 percent
Mademoiselle. By the 1990s, when magazines such as News- of the artists in the museum’s Modern Art collection, whereas
week and Harper’s Bazaar featured work actually by or at least they were the subject of 85 percent of its nudes. In 2005, the
inspired by Kruger, her art was appearing in the very places Guerrilla Girls noted that these percentages had still not sig-
from which she had appropriated its visual elements in the nificantly changed, although it is worth noting that this time
first place. The press used these images to address social and they made their announcement from within a major art insti-
political issues. In effect, Kruger’s persuasive and authen- tution, the Venice Biennale, where they had been invited to
tic presentation of contemporary life crafted from media show their work. Through the work of Kruger and groups
imagery permitted her to re-enter the mass media with an such as the Guerrilla Girls, appropriation came to be seen as
effective critical stance. Her stylish intrusions into the public an effective combination of politics, theory, aesthetics, and
arena provided a valuable model that was adopted by activist public address.
artists in a wide range of political spheres.
Jenny Holzer
The Guerrilla Girls While Kruger and others were adopting the tools of adver-
One political collective that became particularly adept at tisers and the popular press, the New York-based Concep-
appropriation-based art actions was the Guerrilla Girls. tualist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) avoided visual imagery and
The group formed in New York in 1985 in response to the looked toward more anonymous means of transmitting infor
unequal treatment of men and women in the art world. As mation, such as public-service announcements, aphorisms,
one of their earliest works declared: “Women in America D.LY. advertising, historical plaques, marquee announce-
earn only % of what men do. Women Artists earn only % of ments, and electronic billboards. Though Holzer produced
what men do.” In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1985 material for museum settings in the late 1970s and early
“International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” exhibition, 1980s, most audiences encountered her work either in

Do women have to be naked to

get into the Met. Museum?
Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern
Art sections are women, but 85%
of the nudes are female.

GUERRILLA GIRLS conscience oF rue artwort

2.18 Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, 1989.
Poster, 11 x 28" (27.9 x 71.1 cm). Private collection. Courtesy Guerrilla Girls.

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

 Bentan POWER SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE
AFTEIS
LIEN ATION TANCES
CAN PRODUCE ECCENTR.
C ICS OR REVOLUTIONARIES

ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE

ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL
DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS
EVERYONE'S WORK JS EQUALLY IMPORTANT
EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE DESERVE SPECIAL CONCESSIONS
FAITHFULNESS |S A SOCIAL NOT A BIOLOGICAL LAW
FREEDOM IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY
GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE
HUMANISM IS OBSOLETE
IDEALS ARE EVENTUALLY REPLACED ei
INHERITANCE MUST BE AROUSHED ariticte nae
KILLING IS UNAVOIDABLE BUT IS NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF
LABORIS A LIFE DESTROYING ACTIVITY
MONEY CREATES TASTE
MORALS ARE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE
MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT FIT TO RULE THEMSELVES
MOSTLY YOU SHOULD MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS
| MUCH WAS DECIDED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN
| MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE
PAIN CAN BE A VERY POSITIVE THING
CEOPts ARE NUTS IF THEY THINK THEY CONTROL THEIR LIVES
£OPLE WHO DON'T WORK WITH THEIR HANOS ARE PARASITES
PEOPLE WHO GO CRALY ARE TOO SENSITIVE
PEOPLE WON'T BEHAVE IF THEY HAVE NOTHING TOLOSE
PLAYING IT SAFE CAN CAUSE A LOT OF DAMAGE
PRIVATE OWNERSHIP 1S AN INVITATION TO DISASTER
ROMANTIC LOVE WAS INVENTED TO MANIPULATE WOMEN
SECFISHNESS 1S THE MOST BASIC MOTIVATION
‘
EPARATISM iS THE WAY IC BEG
SEX DIFFERENCES ARE HERETO STAY owas
R STARVATION IS NATURE'S WAY
STERILIZATION IS OFTEN JUSTIFIED
g STUPID PEOPLE SHOULON T BREED
TECHNOLOGY WILL MAKE OR BREAK US
we MILY IS LIVING ON BORROWED TIME
> BELONGS TO NO ONE
LAUGHABLE
IRRIGBLE AND EXCITING
FORA LIFE IS FAIR ENOUGH
ST BE THE MOST VALUABLE
RAVE
U HAVE FReet

2.19 Jenny Holzer, from Truisms (1977-79), 1977. Offset poster, 24 x 18" (61 x 45.7 cm)
Installation in New York, 1977. Courtesy Jenny Holzer Studio

the street or in art magazines—sites that suggested differ- the mid-1980s that it was part of her intention to integrate
ent interpretations. her political and artistic life. It is thus appropriate to read as
Between 1977 and 1979, Holzer created her Truisms series. much as one can into her statements and their relationship

This consisted of statements written by the artist, brief asser- with each other and their surroundings.” Like Kruger’s bill-
tions that, in their matter-of-fact manner, seemed to express boards, this was public art that engaged the space of the city
the obvious and universal but that often contained contro- to activate its citizens.
It is not only context that generates Holzer’s content.
versial content: “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SUR-
PRISE,” “AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE,” “MURDER HAS A When she began the Truisms, she had recently completed
SEXUAL SIDE.” The several hundred Truisms were alphabet- her art studies, during which she had been greatly impressed
ized and displayed in a range of formats, including posters, by her readings in cultural theory and criticism. The Truisms
signs, T-shirts, stickers, bags, buttons, and in various forms consisted of her distillation of an intellectually challenging

of public address. The image reproduced here (fig. 2.19) reading list into a format tailored to the attention span of an
shows the statements as they could have been encountered urban pedestrian. The method of the Truzsms, enlisting one

on the streets of the East Village, New York. Capturing a mode of address (slogan or soundbite) to express a form of

style of communication Holzer called “lower anonymous,” analysis (critical theory) alien to it, proved fruitful for Holzer

the statements appeared among ads for parties, concerts, or throughout the 1980s. Later series developed this method,

rallies, or posters advertising apartments or guitar players, incorporating snippets of personal narratives, common
or seeking lost animals.*t The effect of Holzer’s statements sense, and paranoia, as well as social, political, and art theory.
the early 1980s, for instance, emotional
is highly subjective and largely depends on context; they In Survival from

signify differently according to whether they are placed next and intellectual responses were elicited by inserting such
to a movie advertisement, a political poster, a broken tele- statements as “IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A
phone, or a community garden. In each case, however, the WAY TO BE VERY TENDER,” “THE BREAKDOWN COMES
WHEN YOU STOP CONTROLLING YOURSELF AND
viewer is directed to consider issues of inequity and violence
WANT THE RELEASE OF A BLOODBATH,” or “WITH ALL
that have real political consequences. Holzer explained in
THE HOLES IN YOU ALREADY THERE’S NO REASON TO “Subversive Signs” (1982), which identified one of the most
DEFINE THE OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT AS ALIEN” into striking features of both artists’ work as its: oppositional and
huge public spaces from city squares to sporting arenas. The linguistic character: “Indeed Kruger and Holzer are manip-
results are “alternative public service announcements” that ulators of signs more than makers of art objects—a shift in
suggest issuing authorities different than the customary ones practice that renders the viewer an active reader of mes-
of commerce and political power.*° sages more than a contemplator of the esthetic.” Drawing
The points of view that appear to underpin Holzer’s state- on Conceptual art of the 1970s, with its skepticism about
ments fluctuate widely. One statement might suggest the the aesthetic object, Foster found in Holzer’s work an art
sentiments of a left-wing revolutionary, another a fascist; one of political content unhampered by conservative form.
may evoke pathos, another disgust. Like Cindy Sherman’s Art is presented as effective not for what it represents but
work, but unlike the messages one generally encounters in for how it functions within the field of representation,
the public sphere, Holzer’s series are multivocal and impossi- just as Kruger’s photo-collages, critic Craig Owens argued,
ble to pin down. Again, as in Sherman’s work, such a shifting revealed the machinery of stereotypes and offered viewers
authorial position suggests that Holzer was more interested an opportunity to reject them.” Foster treats Holzer as a
in the movement between positions rather than in any single fellow traveler intent on demystifying contemporary culture.
statement—she appeared to be enacting another challenge Asserting that “few of us are able to accept the status of art
as a social sign entangled with other such signs,”°' Foster
5
to the traditional idea of the artist as someone who seeks for
and expresses truth, either about the self or about the world. presented the network of voices in Holzer’s Truisms as an
Her statements read like announcements from a_ peripa- embrace of the signifying power of the urban environment
tetic, Postmodern subject moving through varied identities, and the successful presentation of what we tend to experi-
wearing each like a costume that was useful for one situ- ence as a meaningless chaos as instead a chaos of meanings.
ation but that was to be discarded for the next. Her critical Conceptual artists of the 1970s had also defined art as an
reception is founded on the perception that she helped to entangled social sign. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. (see fig.
articulate what was new about Postmodern identity: namely, 1.18) had forcefully argued that what hangs in museums is
its flexibility and rejection of notions of authentic, essential, inescapably intertwined with what goes on outside them.
unitary, or fixed identities. Daniel Buren’s work (see fig. 1.19) further postulated that
Read aloud as convictions rather than caricatures, some there was no self-contained entity called “art” that existed
statements from the Survival series might be deemed pro- to be contaminated by a likewise self-contained society:
foundly troubling. However, the viewer who chooses to stop Art was part of the social and political networks in which it
and read has the opportunity to reflect not only on single was valued. As Hal Foster indicated, appropriation took its
statements, but also on the relationships between them. If we cue from works such as those of Haacke and Buren. Artists
take just those listed above, themes start to emerge. There is adopted appropriation to explore how the networks of
a repeated invocation of physical violence and the suggestion power spotlighted by their predecessors were perpetuated
of an intimacy between such violence and language. Physical through representation. In addition to exposing the mecha-
crisis seems to inspire textual expression, which in turn gen- nisms of power, appropriation artists also explored how
erates physical unease.” representation was complicit with that power. If artists were
By the twenty-first century most people who have not free to select their means of expression, what choices
encountered Holzer’s work have done so not in the street were open to them? The answers were not always optimis-
but in the very different public space of an art magazine, tic. Allan McCollum and Sherrie Levine cast a critical eye on
where it rubs shoulders with a particular form of cultural formal innovation, while Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer
debate and promotion. Like Levine’s, Holzer’s work has suggested that the history of art was no longer a privileged
been introduced with persuasive theoretical explanations source. Nevertheless, these artists adopted forms of expres-
that emphasized its critical operations over its expressive sion that fell clearly in the category of art. In the spaces of
power; it was said to subject the “ideology of ‘everyday life’” Silvia Kolbowski’s photo/text combinations, between the
to “formal and linguistic operations.”** In other words, layers of Levine’s copies, and in Cindy Sherman’s presenta-
Holzer, like Kruger, deconstructed the media, expos- tion of self as both object and subject, lay fertile ground for
ing its role as a tool of power. A formative critical essay on contemporary art. Like realists before them, appropriation
Holzer and Kruger (quoted earlier as forming part of artists succeeded in reorienting the way people looked at
the critical response to appropriation) was Hal Foster’s both life and art.

Chapter 2 Taking Pictures: Appropriation and Its Consequences

 Back to the Easel:
Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

etween 1980 and 1982, as appropriation was becom- Neo-Expressionism as nostalgic, elitist, and even fascistic,
ing a critical voice in New York, an international style while the fact that this return was greeted with high prices
that came to be labeled Neo-Expressionism emerged and also that its participants were mostly male reignited femi-
in a series of European exhibitions. Neo-Expressionist art nists’ critiques of the coincidence of patriarchal and capi-
was characterized by large-scale figurative oil-on-canvas talist forces in and beyond the art world. But others praised
paintings. After over a decade in which the trend in the the emergent movement as honest, ironic, or as a liberat-
art world had been away from painting in favor of Concep- ing application of the past to the present that reopened the
tual, performance, and installation practices, the return to possibilities of paint to a new generation of artists. These
painting came as something of a shock. To its supporters, competing attitudes to the “return to the easel” expressed
Neo-Expressionism marked a renewed commitment to the deep-rooted concerns about the direction of contempo-
psychological power of art and the pleasure of paint. To its rary art.

detractors, it demonstrated a willful ignorance of critical

developments of the 1960s and 1970s that had promised
to liberate art from the restrictions of the male-dominated “A New Spirit in Painting”
world of easel painting and elite commercial galleries. In 1981, a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in
The Neo-Expressionist label linked the work to the Expres- London heralded “A New Spirit in Painting,” as the show’s title
sionists, German artists who had expressed the anxiety of put it. The following year, members of the “New Spirit”
the early twentieth century through their aggressive and curatorial team Christos M. Joachimides and Norman
abstracted representations of modern life. The likes of Ernst Rosenthal offered a similar show, “Zeitgeist,” in Berlin,
Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) and Emil Nolde (1867-1956), while Achille Bonito Oliva created a series of related exhibi-
members of the Dresden- and Berlin-based Die Brucke tions in Italy and christened the new movement there the
group, and Viennese Secession leader Oskar Kokoschka Transavanguardia, or “Transavantgarde.” Neo-Expressionism
(1886-1980) mixed highly individualized styles with emo- quickly became a significant force in both the art market and
tional and often spiritual content. Neo-Expressionism also the museum world. There were high-profile New York gallery
evoked the painterly energy of the U.S. Abstract Expression- exhibitions of German artists Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz,
ists such as Willem de Kooning (1904-97) (see fig. 0.4) and Markus Lupertz, Rainer Fetting, Jorg Immendorff, and A.R.
Jackson Pollock (1912-56) or the European Informel artists Penck, as well as Italians Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia,
Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) and Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) (see and Enzo Cucchi, and Americans Julian Schnabel, David
fig. 0.3). It demonstrated that pictorial traditions widely pre- Salle, and Eric Fischl. The core male-dominated cast of
sumed extinguished by the late 1970s were still relevant to Neo-Expressionist artists, along with the movement’s selec-
the late twentieth century, and presented a formidable chal- tive internationalism, was quickly established. The common
lenge to those who saw the critical approaches examined themes in the major exhibitions suggest that many artists and
in Chapters 1 and 2 as the dominant tendencies in postwar intellectuals in the United States and Europe were searching
Western art. The controversy in the early 1980s about the for the kind of “international style” that the pluralism of the
moral and artistic value of American and European Neo- previous decade had failed to generate.
Expressionist painting recalls the heated polemical debates Unlike appropriation, which was promoted as a new
of the 1930s, when avant-garde art was associated with the approach being explored by a particular group of young
political resistance to fascism. Some critics did indeed reject artists, Neo-Expressionism was presented as the logical

“A New Spirit in Painting”

 3.1 Andy Warhol,
Muhammad Ali, 1977.
Synthetic polymer paint and
silkscreen ink on canvas,
AO x 40" (101.6 x
101.6 cm). Courtesy the
Andy Warhol Foundation.

outcome of art history. It was defined by blockbuster paint- one curator explained, “the contemporary significance of
ing shows and exhibition catalogues that constructed a the oldest form [of art]”'—an argument that dismissed chal-
genealogy for Neo-Expressionism that extended from lenges to painting made by some of the very artists included,
Cubism, through Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, notably Warhol and Richter. Warhol’s gestural portraits of
Art Informel, and Pop art, and into the 1980s. Picasso, de the mid-1970s such as Muhammad Ali (1977) (fig. 3.1) and
Kooning, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and even Andy Richter’s blurred images including Annunciation after Titian
Warhol were all represented in these histories, suggesting (1973) (fig. 3.2), both shown at “A New Spirit in Painting,”
the inevitability of the current trend and providing a pedi- could have been read as critical commentaries on paint-
gree for the younger artists. The shows set out to convey, as ing’s expressive language; Warhol for reducing the gestural
7 al 7 "Oq © =a) oa ~ : -

3.2 Gerhard Richter, Annunciation After Titian, 1973. Oil on canvas, 49% x 78%4"(125 x 200 cm).
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Courtesy Atelier Gerhard Richter.

ee | aa
Chapter back fo th 4] m Oo n @ Neo-Expressionism and the
| Return of Painting
brushstrokes to conventional markings as repeatable as in a painter’s life where civilization abandons him; he looks
the photographic image, and Richter for basing his evoca- at his brushes like a gorilla looking at a knife and fork, digs
tive blurred painting style on nothing more than an out- in with his hands, smashes the plate and makes a big mess.”
of-focus photograph. In neither case did the artist treat his Ricard then reversed the metaphor, transforming the paint-
painterly style as a conduit to personal expression, as Neo- ing rather than the painter into a beast locked away in the
Expressionists were said to do. Nonetheless, the assertive basement, exposed only to those with a taste for the mon-
presence of painting in both artists’ oeuvre, regardless of its strous side of artistic creation, whom he referred to as “goril-
content, served the return-to-painting agenda. The London laphiles.” Such hyperbole well captured the sensation that
“New Spirit” show was introduced with the bold claim: “The Schnabel’s work generated, with its hundreds of square feet
artists’ studios are full of paint pots again and an aban- of broken plates and oil paints. Less sanguine commentators
doned easel in an art school has become a rare sight ... In saw evidence that, after being diversified and critiqued since
the studios, in the cafes and bars, where artists or students the late 1950s, artistic practice was not being advanced at
gather you hear passionate debates and arguments about all, but was rather being returned to a traditional bohemian
painting.”? By the time “Zeitgeist,” a second celebration of setting that evoked the Parisian Left Bank garrets and artists’
New-Expressionism, opened in Berlin in 1982, the style of cafés of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. There was
Neo-Expressionism was said to provide proof that “Subjectiv- something familiar about this “New Spirit.”
ity, the Visionary, Myth, Suffering and Grace have all been Critics of the new painting were appalled at the apparent
rehabilitated.”’ It was such claims, with their hyperbolic victory of “high art public relations” over critical theory,’ and
restaging of Modernist tropes, that riled artists and critics at the willingness of curators to claim universalism for the
who had been struggling for the past few decades to revise work, despite the limited demographic of Neo-Expressionist
and reject the limits such priorities set for contemporary art. artists. The catalogue for “A New Spirit” declared the typical
Neo-Expressionism provoked a different style of commen- heroic young painter to be “engaged in a search for self-
tary than appropriation. Rather than dispassionately dissect- realization as an actor on a wider historical stage”;° it
ing the function of art, Neo-Expressionist criticism engaged failed to mention that the new international movement was
in poetic forays. In 1979, poet and art critic René Ricard being represented at the London exhibition by thirty-eight
reviewed the first showing by Julian Schnabel of his notori- white men, with negligible involvement from women or
ous oil, plaster, wax, encaustic, bondo, and plate paintings non-white artists. The monumental Running Man (fig. 3.3),
(see fig. 3.4) in the following terms: “There comes a point painted by Jonathan Borofsky (b. 1942) on the Berlin Wall

3.3 Jonathan Borofsky, on-site installation of Running Man at 2,541,898 as part of the “Zeitgeist” International Art
Exhibition, Berlin, Germany, 1982. © Jonathan Borofsky. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

“A New Spirit in Painting”

on the occasion of “Zeitgeist,” offers a representative embodi- Julian Schnabel
ment of the “New Spirit” actor: a white male fleeing the Julian Schnabel’s (b. 1951) plate paintings were nearly 8
modern tragedies created by the Western world (the Wall, feet high but would be dwarfed by his subsequent paintings
erected in 1961 and destroyed in 1989, divided democratic on tarpaulins and kabuki theater backdrops. His career fol-
West Berlin from communist East Berlin). With its generic lowed a similarly expansive course. In 1979, he showed twice
appearance and ID number instead of the traditional art- at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Within two years
ist’s signature, Running Man suggests an ambivalence toward he was represented by both Boone and Leo Castelli, and in
identity rather than a “search for self-realization.” In this 1986 he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery,
case as in most others, the relationship between Borofsky’s London, which subsequently toured through Europe and on
artistic concerns and the curatorial statements published to New York, San Francisco, and Houston, where Schnabel
alongside his work was unclear; crucially, it was the latter had begun his career. Schnabel’s experience was typical of
that were largely responsible for Neo-Expressionism’s the Neo-Expressionists who, like the Pop artists a generation
contentious quality. The promotion of Neo-Expressionism earlier, found themselves canonized before their careers were
perhaps made the movement seem more limited than it much more than ten years old.
actually was. A 7ft 6in by 10ft accumulation of broken plates, The Death
of Fashion (1978) (fig. 3.4) is typical of Schnabel’s early work
and characteristic of the hubris of U.S. Neo-Expressionism
The United States generally. Thick oil paint has been pushed over the frac-
Despite the critical controversies raised by Neo-Expressionism, tured surfaces, defining pictorial forms in one place while
in terms of content and scale the works were undeniably working against the image in others, diverting attention
striking. After a decade of art that had resisted and critiqued instead to the irregular shapes of the ceramic shards. The
the economics of culture, problematizing art’s relation- support for the picture consists of a central wood panel
ship to commerce and display, here were painters making extending several inches toward the viewer. It is flanked by
paintings that could be exhibited in spectacular shows two smaller, stepped-back wings, which fill out the painting’s
and then purchased. A major strand of the story of Neo- horizontal dimensions. Two central motifs—a torso in rose,
Expressionism in New York concerns the changing relation- madder, pink, and alizarin on a pedestal, and a tall slender
ships of art and society in 1980s. The financial crisis brought brown ovoid decorated with a gold cross balancing on a
on in the 1970s in large part by the oil crisis was being slight branch of green and yellow—hover against a field of
met by President Reagan’s supply-side economics rooted black, grays, and purple. Behind the torso, set back upon the
heavily in tax cuts, deregulation of government controls right wing, is an amorphous cone of pink and purple paint
over private industry, and reduced government support for that recalls the flesh tones of a nude by de Kooning or the
public service, excluding the military. Though the success eighteenth-century French painter Francois Boucher. The
of what came to be called “Reaganomics” has been debated, effect of impulsive sensuality that this mass of organic fleshy
from the perspective of the arts it indisputably reduced the paint evokes is, however, trivialized by the scattering of cheap
amount of funds available to non-profit arts organizations red and yellow plates with which it is filled. The title, The
and increased the spending power of wealthier U.S. citi- Death ofFashion, suggests both physical violence and superfici-
zens. The result was to change the balance of how money ality, denying the gravity of the image. This mix of aggression
entered the art world and where it was spent. With much and indifference, emotional investment and glib ambiguity,
less public funding to support experimental art, the gallery characterizes Schnabel’s work.
system, with its focus on sales, gained power as the ultimate The pedestals, torsos, and ovoid that figure prominently in
arbiter of success or failure. Compounding the issues was The Death of Fashion recur throughout Schnabel’s early works.
the fact that the financial picture continued to look bleak. The prominent torso in St. Sebastian Born 1951 (1979) creates
With less confidence in the stock market, art started to a link between the martyred saint and the artist, who was
seem like a good addition to one’s portfolio. By and large, born in 1951.’ The appearance of the self-referential torso
those looking to art as an investment were not seeking to in The Death of Fashion echoes Schnabel’s 1978 notebook
collect the more politicized and ‘ephemeral art discussed entry, “I want my life to be embedded in my work, crushed
in earlier chapters. Though by no means was all Neo- into my painting,”® which in turn seems to warrant Ricard’s
Expressionism socially conservative, its aesthetics none- image of bestial drama quoted above. In 1986, however,
theless appealed to traditional tastes formed by the histori- Schnabel’s tone changed. “Art is not about self-expression,”
cal canon of oil-on-canvas paintings, and, in contrast to so he wrote in a statement accompanying his Whitechapel retro-
much of the conceptual, earth, process, and performance spective.? He now asserted that “Neo-Expressionism doesn’t
art of the 1970s, it could be sold. Many of the artists who exist”—“the political climate was different [for the origi-
entered Neo-Expressionist circles in the early 1980s saw nal Expressionism], the concerns were different.”!° By the
their prices skyrocket and the art world around them mid-1980s, Schnabel seemed to want his eclectic imagery,
change dramatically. materials, and methods to be understood in relation to

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

3.4 Julian Schnabel, The Death of Fashion, 1978. Oil, plates, and bondo on wood,
90 x 120 x 13" (225 x 300 x 32.5 cm). Image courtesy of Julian Schnabel.

contemporary cultural politics that eschewed the Modern- Asher led a rigorously Conceptual program. Conventional
ist aim of creating universal truths from personal expression training in painting or drawing was subordinated at CalArts,
which had inspired early twentieth-century Expressionism. as Fischl said, to developing “a sense of knowing what we
Some viewers accepted that Neo-Expressionists, like appro- were doing, knowing what history was, knowing what strate-
priation artists, were skeptical of the idea of art as a conduit gies were, knowing that there was this great purpose behind
to universal truths, but others felt that this new painting was what we were doing.”!* This form of artistic self-awareness,
the vessel into which the artist might pour his or her heart coupled with a willingness to “educate yourself in public,”
and soul, to universalizing effect." led to the emergence of artists in a wide variety of media.'*
Fischl’s Conceptualist training is evident in his self-conscious
Eric Fischl detachment from his subject matter, as in his breakthrough
The education of the U.S. Neo-Expressionists was distin- paintings of the late 1970s. These narratives of suburban
guished by the degree to which many of them trained in con- puberty are fictions for which his own life served, in his words
ceptually oriented art programs. Schnabel, after finishing a as “an energy source,” but not a direct model.'* Preliminary
BFA at the University of Houston, enrolled in the Whitney studies consisted oflayers of drawings on transparent glassine
Independent Study Program, the same program that Jenny that could be arranged and rearranged until psychologically
Holzer and several Colab (see Chapter 4) members attended. intricate compositions emerged.
Eric Fisch] (b. 1948) and David Salle were both at California One such work, Bad Boy (1981) (fig. 3.5), began with a
Institute of the Arts, where artists and teachers such as John still life, whose visual and narrative clues Fischl then followed
Baldessari, Allan Kaprow, Douglas Huebler, and Michael until the scene was completed to his satisfaction. The artist

The United States

 Ne,

3.5 Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981. Oil on canvas, 66 x 96" (167.64 x 243.84 cm).
Image courtesy the Eric Fischl Studio.

noted how the stripes of light on the fruit implied a window David Salle
with blinds that then defined the setting as a room. Its initial Fischl’s increasingly readable narratives made him one of
occupants were a couple in bed, but this pair was then the least contentious of the Neo-Expressionists. David Salle
resolved into a single woman lying nude on her back rubbing (b. 1952) and Julian Schnabel, by contrast, invited contro-
her foot. The viewer is invited to gaze from the parted legs of versy with their invocation of conventional painting while,
the woman, up to her foot, and then back to her distracted in Salle’s case especially, attempting to empty its history
gaze. She is joined by a boy, perhaps her son, who stands in and content of significance. Whereas Schnabel, even as he
the foreground by the fruit bowl and stares. Here, the boy rejected the notion that his art was simply “self-expression,”
performs the action that earns him a reprimand and distin- did assure viewers that contemporary painting sought to
guishes his intrusion from the viewer’s: He slips his hand into convey a “psychological resonance,” Salle avowed that his art
the open slit of the woman’s purse.'? A notable rumination “participate[ed] in meaninglessness” and even pronounced
on the power of the Gaze (see Chapter 2), Bad Boy is also one it “dead.”!” Despite using imagery heavily loaded with refer-
of Fischl’s many pictures in which the status and meaning of ences to sex, art, and popular culture, he presented his work
the scene—reality or fantasy, seduction or warning?—remain as being about nothing.
ambiguous. The artist asserted that the alienation, insecurity, Like the appropriation artists, Salle’s practice was based
artificiality, and distance in his work expressed “the spiritual on manipulated existing imagery, layering materials drawn
dilemma” of U.S. suburban life.'® He was also willing to talk from softcore pornography (often his own photographs
about how his paintings related directly to his own family’s replicating the appearance of their pornographic sources),
experience of dealing with the life and death of his alcoholic geometric abstraction, amateurish line drawings and fashion
mother. While other artists spoke of culture and expression illustrations, cartoons, and copies of Modernist masterpieces.
in general if often political terms, or, like Schnabel, rejected Unlike Fischl, however, Salle frustrated critics by refusing to
the role of the self in their paintings altogether, Fischl acknowledge relationships between his fragmentary images,
opened up Neo-Expressionism to content found in the daily insisting: “There’s no narrative. There really is none.”'®
lives of the middle class. Rather than generating content, he aimed for “extreme

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

cancellation,” or the “draining away of recognition or of accusations of trafficking in pornography rather than, as he
meaning even as you look at it.”!% Salle’s desire to “divide claimed, examining its “mechanisms.”**
the meaning of the thing in the painting from the meaning Though Salle acknowledged that his images of women
of the thing in the world””’ has troubling consequences. lacked “the neutrality [viewers] believe other painted images
His painting Géricault’s Arm (1985) (fig. 3.6), for instance, have,” his work inspired critics to look closely at the conse-
includes two images of a woman’s body, underwear pulled quences of Neo-Expressionism’s non-neutrality.2* The most
down below her thighs, arms raised and lifting a cut-off thorough response was Mira Schor’s 1986 essay “Appropri-
T-shirt to just below her breasts. Her head is cut off by the ated Sexuality.” Methodically surveying Salle’s images of
frame in the first case and in the second covered by a copy unclothed women in contorted, subservient poses, often
of a study of severed limbs by the French artist Théodore pictured alongside weapons, vehicles, or other bodies,
Géricault (1791-1824). How were viewers to see such Schor analyzed the artist’s attempt to render such images
elements as meaningless, rather than as _ standard—if meaningless. She compared the anti-painting and anti-
diverse—signifiers of sexual submission and violence with a representational impulse of the CalArts program when
high-culture twist? Salle studied there to the critical engagement with painting
Salle’s attempt to free forms from their content follows and representation practiced in Judy Chicago and Miriam
logically from the work of Jasper Johns, an early and fre- Schapiro’s Feminist Arts Program (FAP) (see Chapter 1),
quently cited influence (see Introduction). The everyday which was based in Fresno, also in southern California. The
motifs in Johns’s work—drawers, coffee cans, flags, numbers, work of the FAP, in which Schor participated, demonstrated
paving slabs—were separated from their real-world func- how the relationship between imagery and meaning was inti-
tions and thus lost their customary significance. Salle’s mate, political, and informed by gender. This observation,
source material, however, was loaded with meaning that was she argued, was disregarded by Neo-Expressionism: “Salle’s
far more provocative than Johns’s. To deny that meaning lack of belief in the meaning of imagery [stands] in striking
appeared to many immoral, if not simply impossible. Unlike and significant contrast to much work by women artists.”*4
Johns or even Schnabel, Salle was not seeking to create alter- This was significant because the paintings’ critical success
native associations for familiar images.*! As a result, as his revealed the art world’s willingness to join with Salle in seeing
images saturated the art market in the early 1980s, he faced the “desecration of woman” as meaningless.”

3.6 David Salle,

Géricault’s Arm,
1985. Oil and
synthetic polymer paint
on canvas, 6' 5%" x
8' %" (197.8 »
244.5 cm). The
Museum of Modern
Art, New York.

The United States

 Schor was not the first critic to contrast the art education critics such as Owens, Crimp, and Hal Foster retorted that
of the 1970s with the art produced in the 1980s. In a 1982 such analyses of post-World War II art were inadequate and
review of work by CalArts graduates, Craig Owens declared merely symptomatic of the conservative tendency of Neo-
himself troubled by their turn away from Conceptualist tradi- Expressionism and its advocates.
tions. He argued that museums and galleries alienate artists
from their art, much as capitalism estranges workers from Jean-Michel Basquiat
their labor: The work of art is transformed from an object of The myth of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) claims that
personal and social significance into a commodity in which he sprung forth untrained from the city streets, tagging the
such qualities as originality, individuality, and national pride walls of New York with cryptic poetry, pictographs, and his
are packaged and circulated. Revealing how this ideological signature “SAMO©.” This story certainly fit the image of the
process occurred and whom it served had been one of the “modern primitive” snatched from the fantasies and fears of
key achievements of artists, theorists, and art historians of the the Western imagination. As such, the black, urban Basquiat
previous two decades. Neo-Expressionism’s apparent restora- appeared to provide a counterweight to the middle-class,
tion of traditional forms of art looked, to Owens and others, often Jewish (Schnabel, Salle, and Fischl are all Jewish), white
like a return to the mystification of Modernist painting and men who composed the New-Expressionist cadre. Coming
a capitulation on the part of art criticism with regard to its from a very different background, Basquiat demonstrated the
social function. relevance of the new painting to a broad audience. Writers
As Douglas Crimp, curator of the “Pictures” exhibition of different critical persuasions, both black and white, have
(see Chapter 2), wrote in 1981: “The rhetoric that accom- pronounced his art to be truthful, “orphic,” and even “fun-
panies this resurrection of painting is almost entirely reac- damentally black”; others, meanwhile, have subjected such
tionary: it reacts specifically against all those art practices of assertions to rigorous critical analyses.?’
the 1960s and 1970s that abandoned painting and worked Parts of the myth that grew up around Basquiat were true.
to reveal the ideological supports of painting as well as the He was essentially untrained—though his mother was an
: = = ate 2726 a
ideology that paintingg, in turn, supports. Defenders of amateur artist who encouraged his interest, and he had art
Neo-Expressionism such as Achille Bonito Oliva countered lessons and as a six-year-old even had junior membership at
that the avant-garde, with its fetishization of the new and its the Brooklyn Museum. A child of a middle-class family, he
notion of “progress,” had always functioned in concert with attended the alternative City As School high school, where
capitalist power. He concluded that the 1960s avant-garde he participated in Family Life Theater, a community theater
had merely proved that art was powerless in the face of poli- program. Though he dropped out and left home at eighteen,
tics and the economy. Rather than relegate the history of the living for a time on the streets, it is clear that the idea of art
1960s and 1970s to one of failure and complicity, however, as a worthy endeavor was instilled in him by his family and

3.7 Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grillo, 1984. Oil, acrylic, oilstick, photocopy collage, and nails on wood (in four
parts], 96 x 211% x 18" (243.8 x 537.2 x 45.7 cm). Stefan T. Edlis Collection, Chicago.

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

3.8 Jean-Michel Basquiat, Undiscovered
Genius (from Untitled: The Daros Suite of
Thirty-two Drawings), 1982-84. Acrylic,
charcoal, crayon, pastel, and pencil, 22%
x 30%" (57 x 76.5 cm). Daros Collection,
Switzerland.

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early education. But even if the myth of Basquiat as a naive and Salle’s work, to be about general concerns, or is there
painter and poor child of the streets wasn’t exactly true, his more specific content to be gleaned? Reading the text in
mixed heritage was real: He was the son of a Haitian-born Basquiat’s pictures certainly suggests specific concerns. In
father and Puerto Rican mother, and had spent three years in Grillo, there are references to sugar plantations, physical
Puerto Rico. When he became a fixture in the affluent world combat, and colonization. Moreover, pronounced with a
of the cultural elite, he brought with him a rare knowledge Spanish accent, as art historian and curator Kellie Jones sug-
of African art and African-American culture as well as of the gests, the title of the work is actually “griot,” a term meaning
history of postwar American painting. “poet and historian” in the West African oral tradition. Bas-
While Basquiat was one of the fixtures of the East Village quiat had used the word in earlier works including Gold Grot
scene, showing in “The Times Square Show” and at the Fun (1984) that featured a large iconic figure like those in Grillo.
Gallery (see Chapter 4), he was also one of the first artists In one drawing, Undiscovered Genius, from Untitled: The Daros
to make the move to the more business-oriented galleries in Suite of Thirty-two Drawings (1982-84) (fig. 3.8), the words
SoHo. On the streets, Basquiat spraypainted tags and text. In “Griot Bluesman” are provided as a label for a solitary figure
the gallery, he captured-the semiotic heterogeneity courted who faces forward out of a field of textual and symbolic ref-
by both appropriationist and Neo-Expressionist artists. erences to the roots of African-American culture. Likewise,
Various painterly languages appear across the surface of can- Jones points out, the nails hammered into Grillo allude to
vases such as his 1984 multipanel tour de force Grillo (fig. similar practices in African works, while the crown motif
3.7). Here we find expressive de Kooningesque flourishes recurs throughout Basquiat’s oeuvre as a self-referential
and linear scratchings that echo cave drawings or the paint- symbol. Text and iconography address cultural and personal
ings of Cy Twombly. Fields of color applied in broad brush- struggles in the wake of colonialism.
strokes balance expanses of white or black that evoke absence This agglomeration of styles, texts, images, and histories
and erasure. Nails punctuate the boundaries between panels, might constitute a personally pointed reflection on the multi-
while lists and notes that appear to catalogue thoughts, cultural identity of a young, black, middle-class Brooklynite
desires, research, history, aphorisms, and streams of con- of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent, but they also spoke
sciousness cover the surfaces like notes on a page or chalk on the broader language of Neo-Expressionism. Basquiat’s
a board. Typical of Basquiat’s imagery, Grillo favors schematic works were thus readily accessible to the collectors, dealers,
and often skeletal figures in which contour is asserted over and curators who promoted them into the rarefied spaces
form and color. Drawing that suggests a stuttering, halting, of Western culture. Basquiat chose his contacts well, moving
and aggressive figuration is are often countered with passages from East Village celebrities at the Fun Gallery to more
of wet-on-wet paint, or traced hands and stick figures that powerful brokers. Among his earliest supporters was René
evoke children’s art. Ricard, whose emotional pronouncements had announced
Interpretation of Basquiat’s oracular visions remains a the arrival of Julian Schnabel and whose understanding
bone of contention: Are they best understood, like Schnabel of the scene helped Basquiat launch his meteoric career.

The United States

 3.9 Jean-Michel
Basquiat and Andy
Warhol, Untitled,
1985. Synthetic
polymer paint on
canvas, 116% x
165%" (296.9 x
420.1 cm).
Courtesy the
Andy Warhol
Foundation.

In an early encounter, Ricard encouraged the young artist to progress. In this view, avant-garde art from early twentieth-
approach Andy Warhol with a society-page photographer and century Cubism and Expressionism through to postwar Mini-
offer to trade works—eraffiti for Pop, street for establishment, malism and Conceptual art fulfilled a historical function of
credibility for fame. The ploy worked and Warhol became leading society into an unknown and far better future. After
one of Basquiat’s most important supporters, even collaborat- the student revolts, free-speech movements, and anti-war
ing with him on a series of paintings in the mid-1980s. Such demonstrations that exploded across the West in 1968 and
episodes show Basquiat as a master strategist, possessing skill their subsequent frustration in the 1970s, however, things
and knowledge but also the drive to insert his art, name, and changed. Artists of the 1970s, Oliva claimed, started to reject
concerns into the history of American painting. Paintings the identification of art with progress, and instead began a
such as Grillo and especially Untitled (1985) (fig. 3.9), one of “process of de-ideologization, overcoming the euphoric
the collaborations with Warhol, reveal that his success was far idea of the creative experience as ... [the] coercion of the
more than a question of ego. Side by side with Warhol—argu- new.”*§
9)
No longer impelled to create new forms, artists were
ably the most influential artist since Jackson Pollock, if not instead compelled to reach back into art history to realize
Picasso—Basquiat injected themes of colonialism, African their visions.
history, and identity into the history of Pop art, the canon of The Transavantgarde dedicated itself to manipulating
Western art, and nearly every major art collection. existing styles, gleaning from past art to cultivate what Oliva
termed an “ideology of the traitor.”*? Oliva contended that
this tendency was based on an impulse first seen in sixteenth-
Italy century Italian Mannerism, which rejected authority, not
Achille Bonito Oliva’s critique of the avant-garde was part by implementing new rules, but by making “oblique and
of his definition of the Transavantgarde. The Italian critic tormented” use of the existing ones.*® Like Giorgio Vasari
and curator drew on the work of several theorists including (1511-74), the contemporary and admirer of Michelangelo
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari and Italy’s first art historian, Oliva located artistic greatness
(see Introduction and Chapter 1) in proposing an end to in “license,” Vasari’s term for individual creativity manifest
Modernism. The Modernist avant-garde adhered to the in knowing manipulations of style. The Transavantgarde
Enlightenment conception that history was progressive and rejected idealist dreams of inventing new forms in favor
that art contributed to, and was even able to direct, that of revisiting existing movements from Classical Greece to

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

1960s New York. Transavantgarde artists’ disinterested atti- words, theirs was an art with “more joy and more hope and
tude toward these diverse sources led to an art that Oliva more light.”*?
described as “the product of a network of recoveries and
renewals that shatter the proud and purist unity of a concur- Sandro Chia
rent vision of art and the world.”*! The relationship between Sandro Chia (b. 1946), as photographed in his studio with
art and modern life that had been the focus of the histori- his paintings—“physical proof of metaphysical existence,”
cal avant-garde, one in which each is distinct but in dialogue as he called them—and motorcycle, perfectly embodied the
with the other, was pronounced as being at an end. Art had Transavantgarde’s fusion of the macho and the mystical.*°
become “intensity” without direction.” In interviews, he seemed as eager to talk about his improv-
The Italian Transavantgarde included a group of young ing financial status as his art, which exemplified the eclectic
painters dominated by Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucci, pastiche advocated by Oliva. Chia’s figurative compositions
Sandro Chia, and Mimmo Paladino. Like their U.S. Neo- mingle Classical myths with personal references, and are
Expressionist counterparts, they developed figurative iconog- painted in a lush, painterly style. Water Bearer (1981) (fig.
raphy and produced almost no purely abstract work. Current 3.10) is typical of the Italian painters’ use of iconography.
events and history might appear briefly, but the emphasis was It presents a male figure in profile walking slowly across the
largely on illustrating personal narratives using pre-modern canvas with a fish that is larger than himself slung over his
stylistic references and a languid sensuality. In Clemente’s shoulder. The fish’s bright red tail curls gently between the

3.10 Sandro Chia, Water Bearer,

1981. Oil and pastel on canvas,
81% x 67" (206.5 x 170 cm).
Tate, London.

Italy
man’s steady, slow-moving feet. The image con-
founds the reference to Classical and Renais-
sance sources in the title by replacing the water
with the fish. This mixing of incongruous symbols
that resist interpretation and of styles that resist
history struck some viewers as a true expression
of the contemporary artist’s relationship to tra-
ditional painting and to meaning itself. “The oR sterh

conventions of iconography are bearable in our aah

ree
esaskK
me

era so long as the artist retains his privilege of eae

gaslasa!
eae
Ya
Sa
3

confounding them,” wrote one supporter, who LE

2A,
STG
h)
concluded that the meaning of Chia’s work lay in
“something about the ambiguity of any message.”*°
Some Transavantgarde paintings and statements,
however, were far from ambiguous. Describing
America, for instance, Chia declared that there
“man has more of a rapport with nature, and
nature is the big city,” where “a great struggle ... is vA

fought by the individual” independent of ideologi-

cal concerns.*° This assertion denied the key per-
inane
ceptions of much art of the 1960s and 1970s that
ideology pervades all parts of society, from foreign
policy to personal relations. Such disregard
for what had become a commonplace of cultural
analysis suggested that Chia’s readiness to associ-
ate his art with naive recitations of rugged Ameri-
can individualism did not so much confound
conventions as glorify Modernism’s expansion-
ist impulses.

Francesco Clemente
Oliva encouraged artists to strip historic styles
and familiar objects of their contexts. He also sug-
gested a radical relationship between history and
geography. The Transavantgarde, he explained,
3.11 Francesco Clemente, from the Francesco Clemente Pinxit series, 1981. Gouache
drew inspiration and motifs from a wide field in
on paper, 8% x 6" (22.2 x 15.2 cm]. © Francesco Clemente. Courtesy Mary Boone
terms not only of time but also of space. Francesco
Gallery, New York.
Clemente (b. 1952) provides a model of such
a Transavantgarde traveler. Resisting the politi-
cized discourse of art and society of the 1960s, he turned Clemente turned to Indian miniature paintings as a cul-
to a private examination of fine-art media including fresco, turally specific art form distanced from present-day Europe.
watercolors, gouache, tempera, and oil on canvas. By evoking The results can be seen in Francesco Clemente Pinxit (1980-—
historical periods through their associated techniques rather 81) (fig. 3.11), for which he collaborated with a workshop
than their characteristic appearances, Clemente avoided of Indian painters trained in the sixteenth-century Mughal
confining his work to stylistic mimicry or anachronistic ico- miniature tradition. For the twelve gouaches that make up
nography. Though he expressed nostalgia for Italy before the the work, members of the workshop executed the decorative
radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, his deepest affini- motifs that were their individual specialties. These envelop
ties were for the ancient Roman and earlier eras, before the Clemente’s human narrative within the elegant fields of
advent of the Catholic Church.*’ Moving that far back in time ornate geometries, detailed floral motifs, and abstracted
involved more than a revival of figurative art and ancient landscapes of traditional Indian art. Clemente’s use of local
media. For Clemente, it also entailed travel to India, which by styles and techniques to expand the historical resonance of
the late 1970s had become his second home. “The gods who his work continued when, in 1981, he established a third
left us thousands of years ago in Naples are still in India,” he studio and home, this time in New York. Like India and his
said, “so it’s like going home for me. In India I can feel what birthplace, Naples, he felt that New York preserved the spirit
it was like [in Italy] many years ago.”°* of the pre-Christian world: “Naples is Ancient Greece. New

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

York is third-century, B.C. Rome.” Though mapping the “romantic sensibility [which] can accept every facet of life”
history of the West in this way raises issues of cultural impe- or which “restores our belief in the authenticity and power of
rialism, it also exemplifies the eclectic connections that Oliva the unconscious.”*' His intention, it was argued, was “simply
and others saw as generative forces in contemporary art. the expression of raw moods with paint and canvas.”** Such
Clemente’s works, whether miniatures created in India, claims suggest that Clemente, like Chia, was appealing to the
oil paintings in New York, or frescos in Italy, share a fascina- heroic myths of Modernism.
tion with sensuality and the self. Bodies, often self-portraits, To some critics, Clemente’s work was no more than the
swim through fields of color, embracing and consuming one result of an aimless infatuation with sexual mystique or
another in what critic and curator Robert Storr described “empty formalism.” Others, however, felt that Clemente
as a “confusion of sexual preference and sexual function.””” had transcended decadence to traffic in the abject, a philo-
Arms, legs, fingers, tongues, even tails intertwine and enter sophical category being discussed in light of French feminist
bodies with a languid, dreamlike grace. Abbraccio (Embrace) thinker Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, written in 1980 and
(1983) (fig. 3.12) shows a profusion of bodies and body translated into English in 1982. Kristeva described the abject
parts that seem to multiply and even bloom as they caress as those things such as cadavers, waste, and disease that elicit
one another. Critics often responded with hyperbole, declar- revulsion at their apparent rejection of the forces of life and
ing Clemente a master or visionary, and celebrating his coherency in favor of processes of chaos, degradation, and
death. The abject repulses us, and yet,
Kristeva argues, it is also compelling for
the promise it offers to enlighten us about
the realms beyond the limits of our expe-
rience and understanding. Within abjec-
tion lie “dark revolts of being” that reveal
the human impulse to challenge life as
it is and to reach through its pain to dif-
ferent, possibly better, ways of living.“#
It was, perhaps, toward such a place that
Clemente’s work was striving, but it was
not at all clear. Edit DeAk, with some-
thing of the stylistic floridness of René
Ricard, celebrated Clemente’s facility for
transforming images “from one internal
venue to another, each ruminating with
its own enzyme of fermentation.” From
Robert Storr’s perspective, Clemente’s
work could be imagined as an extended
metaphor for processes of decay, fertili-
zation, and regeneration, particularly as
they intersect with human intimacy. The
resulting imagery is often quite beautiful,
but poses a challenge because, according
to Storr, Clemente has “no tangible social
vision,” thus making it difficult to deter-
mine where the work, or the artist, stands
in relation to such loaded content.*® As
was the case in the work of the U.S. Neo-
Expressionists, particularly David Salle,
Clemente presented potent imagery but
appeared ambivalent toward its poten-
tial meanings.
How viewers interpreted Clemente’s
work depended on their sense of history.
Those who agreed with Oliva’s Trans-
avantgarde vision of an end of history
3.12 Francesco Clemente, Abbraccio (Embrace), 1983. Pastel on paper, 26 x 19" saw Clemente’s images of polymorphous
(66 x 48.2 cm). © Francesco Clemente. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York. sexuality as a celebration of sensual

Italy
experience. Those for whom the work represented the conserv- Baselitz’s and Kiefer’s work not as a reckoning with history
ative trend in contemporary politics and culture were troubled but as symptoms of an obsession with the past and perhaps
by its ethical indifference, which they saw as characteristic of an attempt to relive it. Critics labeled the show fascist, impe-
Neo-Expressionism in general. Others again saw in Clemente rialist, and embarrassing. Baselitz’s contribution was particu-
and Neo-Expressionism a parallel to the “return to order” larly abrasive. His Model for a Sculpture (1980) (fig. 3.13) is a
spirit of European art immediately after World War I, in which massive male figure with legs painted onto the lower section
avant-garde artists from French Cubists to Italian Futurists of a block of linden wood and a torso roughly carved out
had briefly reverted to Classical representational styles of of the top part. The figure sat in the center of the pavilion
the kind later favored by 1930s fascist governments. Art his- and, bent at the hips as if rising from sleep, greeted visitors
torian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh forcefully articulated the with a Nazi salute. Baselitz’s aggressive style was branded neo-
argument that Neo-Expressionists opposed the revolution- fascist, while Kiefer’s mammoth prints and paintings of land-
ary impulses of the avant-gardes they revived in a widely cir- scapes and various German historical figures were described
culated essay, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression.” as “being in dangerous proximity to glorifying German
Buchloh, as editor of the German art journal Jnterfunk- megalomania.”?!
tionen in the 1970s, had challenged readers to re-evaluate Though it would take most of the 1980s for German critics
the legacy of fascism in Germany and was sharply critical of to become at least ambivalent about, rather than overtly
what he saw as the conservative and cynical use of history in hostile to, Baselitz’s and Kiefer’s projects, Americans began
Neo-Expressionist painting. His distrust of both the painters collecting early. In addition to Baselitz and Kiefer, their coun-
and their advocates lent particular passion to his unfavora- trymen A.R. Penck, Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf,
ble comparisons between the 1980s and the 1930s.*7 Once and Markus Lupertz, would all be represented by New York
again, social context was central to the interpretation of commercial galleries by the next biennale. Many Americans
these tendencies. saw their often awkward, visceral brushwork, violent land-
scapes, and luminous street scenes as honest confrontations
with history. Art historian and critic Donald Kuspit, the most
Germany vocal and consistent U.S. advocate of the German painters,
In 1980, the American gallerists who had just begun promot- claimed that they “lay to rest the ghosts ... of German style,
ing Schnabel and Salle as the new American painters discov- culture, and history so that the people can be authentically
ered the Neo-Expressionism that had been germinating in new.”°? Peter Schjeldahl saw a “reawaken [ing of] the glamour
Europe throughout the previous decade. Calvin Tompkins, of European pastness,” recast in the manner of Jackson
the art writer for The New Yorker who had chroni-
cled the career of Robert Rauschenberg and his
generation of U.S. artists, saw work by Georg
Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer in the German Pavil-
ion at the 39th Venice Biennale and announced
that the artworld dominance of New York was
over.*8 Both German artists had been working
since the 1960s, and their output bore clear
signs of historical consciousness and, to U.S.
viewers at least, gravity. German critics were
less enamored, however, reflecting a growing
desire within German academia and_ politics
to create a national identity that was independ-
ent from the country’s recent history of fascism.
By mid-decade, this would take the form of a
public call for the “normalization” of German
life and history, a process that would attempt
to draw a line between the Nazi past and the
“normal” present.’ By this stage, German Neo-
Expressionism had been integrated into the
narrative of normalization either as a Postmod-
ern rejection of history or as a means of resum-
ing pre-fascist art traditions that the Nazis had
silenced as degenerate.” At the time of the 1980
Venice Biennale, however, these arguments were 3.13 Georg Baselitz, Model for a Sculpture, 1980. lime wood and tempera, 70 x
not yet in place. Most German writers then saw 57% x 96" (178 x 147 x 244 cm). Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © 2012 Georg Baselitz.

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

3.14 Georg Baselitz, Eagle
in the Window, 1982. Oil
on canvas, 98% x 983%"
(250 x 250 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. Gift of The Jerry
and Emily Spiegel Family
Foundation, 2007. © 2012
Georg Baselitz

Pollock.** With the groundwork laid in the New York galler- mediated relationship between image, style, and content.
ies and museums in London and Berlin, it was as if European His contribution to “Zeitgeist,” Annunciation after Titian
culture—blackened by World War II and dismissed as the (1973) (see fig. 3.2), was just such a work. East German-born
art world shifted its capital to the U.S.—had suddenly been Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) meanwhile fused the abstract styles
restored to view. The ghosts and glamour that seemed appar- of the capitalist West with the Socialist Realism of the com-
ent to these U.S. eyes were less visible to many other critics. munist East in his expressionistic figure painting. In the
Moreover, despite being presented as a group, German 1960s, Baselitz was painting monumental images of the dis-
Neo-Expressionists were hardly a uniform or united group. torted bodies of German soldiers who had survived World
These artists held diverse opinions on issues of self, history, War II and the damaged land to which they had returned.
and style. Kiefer’s work in particular interrogated the psychic By the early 1970s, however, he was rendering the potency
weight of fascism and questioned the possibility or even desir- of his imagery, with its deformations and anxiety-ridden nar-
ability of becoming “authentically new.” ratives, absurd by painting his subjects upside down. Eagle
The roots of Neo-Expressionism in Germany go back to in the Window (1982) (fig. 3.14), with its screaming human
the early 1960s. In the decades after World War II, a number figure, ambiguous interior, and aggressive paint handling,
of artists in both West Germany, which was politically part appears to locate expressionist terror and painterly catharsis
of democratic capitalist Europe, and East Germany, which in an environment overseen by the authority of the German
lay within the Soviet bloc, attempted to resist the influence state (symbolized by the eagle). When upended, however,
of both American Abstract Expressionism and Soviet Social- the image becomes striking less for its narrative content than
ist Realism by re-examining expressionist traditions. East for its vigorous and bold color—exactly the effect Baselitz
German-trained but West German-based artist Gerhard desired. The artist’s position regarding the possible content
Richter (b. 1932) was painting from photographs, giving of the work, and modern German history more broadly, is
them a uniformly blurred appearance to make explicit the made highly ambiguous.
Anselm Kiefer interior Germany’s Spiritual Heroes (1973) and the landscape
In the early 1980s, much thinking about art making after The Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Battle ofthe Teutoburg Forest (1978)
World War II was colored by the philosopher Theodor (fig. 3.15), Kiefer indicated the actors meant to occupy
Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is these spaces: Handwritten names line the great hall and faces
barbaric.”°* Anselm Kiefer’s (b. 1945) work drew attention fill the woods. The lineage these names establish, however,
to this crisis, first by the simple fact of its existence but also is contaminated by association with the Third Reich. In
because it took pains to remind viewers of the potential bar- addition to national heroes such as philosophers Friedrich
barism of postwar culture. His works in the German Pavilion Schleiemacher and Johann Fichte, the list includes indi-
at Venice in 1980 came from a series of massive compositions viduals whose only contribution to German history was as
based on the empty interior of his studio and a forest clear- members of the Nazi party. The pavilion in Venice, designed
ing evoking the Teutoburg Forest, traditionally believed to as an expression of national pride, thus housed a genealogy
be the birthplace of the German nation. These spaces are of German consciousness, both worldly and spiritual, that ran
simple and cavernous—open rooms with torches illuminat- directly through the crimes of recent history. Though a few
ing exposed beams and boards, or shadowy wooded groves. critics were intrigued by the absences in Kiefer’s composi-
Dwarfed by the great interiors are icons suggesting self and tions and the alluring material qualities of his paint use, most
nation: An empty crib sits in one space, the sword of the German commentators saw only provocation and embarrass-
legendary hero Parsifal in another. In works such as the ment in its overt content.

3.15 Anselm Kiefer, Wege der Weltweisheit: die Hermannsschlacht (The Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Battle of the
Teutoburg Forest), 1978. Acrylic resin and shellac on woodcutting on paper, 133% x 161%" (340 x 410 cm).
Courtesy White Cube.
 take part in it, even if that history is brutal and one’s means
of participating in it are secondhand. Like much of Kiefer’s
work of the 1970s and early 1980s, the series was created “to
evoke the question from myself, Am I a fascist?”°° As art his-
torian Lisa Saltzman has commented, the German title for
the series is Besetzungen, a psychoanalytical term referring to
the psychic investment one makes in objects, particularly in
relation to loss or mourning. Viewed as examinations of psy-
chological rather than military “occupations,” Kiefer’s images
become a meditation on the role of power, specifically fascist
power, in the German psyche. Of the impulse to reject
the fascist past, Kiefer said: “You cannot answer so quickly.
Authority, competition, superiority ... these are facets of me
like everyone else.”*’ History and biography were to be inti-
mately joined throughout Kiefer’s career.
By the time his work reached the U.S., Kiefer had turned
his attention to the seductive power of Nazi architecture in
vast canvases showing emptied Nazi monuments and halls.
These demonstrated his impressive handling of illusionistic
spaces and painterly surfaces, which placed him, according
to some, in the same league as Picasso and Pollock. Andreas
Huyssen, a historian of the postwar transitions in European
and U.S. culture, argued that such formal accomplishments
increased the moral dilemma represented by Kiefer’s work,
which gave the viewer limited options for interpreting these
historically significant and terrible places. The choice these
paintings gave, Huyssen argued, was between ‘ “melancholy
fixations on the dreamlike ruins of fascism” and the seduc-
tive aesthetic experiences that ensnare the viewer in a trap of
3.16 Anselm Kiefer, Besetzungen (Occupations), 1969. Published in fascination and horror—a parallel to the way Kiefer’s elders
Interfunktionen #12, Kéln, 1975. Collage. Black-and-white photograph.
had been seduced by the promise of a German empire.
Courtesy White Cube.
Unlike the engagement of Occupations, these works seemed
to convey a nostalgia and estrangement that protected the
artist and viewer from history’s moral dilemmas. Kiefer’s
This was not the first time Kiefer had angered German viewer is trapped, nodding impotently at the awesome power
critics by pointedly integrating recent history and current of the spaces represented and the painterly means used to
national identity. In 1975, he had published Occupations represent them; his or her moral being is pushed aside. To
(fig. 3.16), a series of photographs taken six years earlier in resolve this crisis, the viewer must theoretically be aestheti-
Switzerland, France, and Italy. The images resemble tourist cally sensitive enough to respond to the painterly allure of
photos, with Kiefer posing in front of iconic locations such the image, while remaining morally vigilant enough to resist
as a coastline or the Roman Colosseum. Instead of smiling it. In practice, such conflicting reactions are nearly impossi-
for the camera, however, Kiefer gives a Nazi salute. Though ble to maintain as analysis spoils the seduction and emotion
defended as farcical representations of Nazi imperial aspi- undermines judgment.
rations, the images in Occupations also seemed to demon- Kiefer’s legacy, the artist asserted, will rest on “the way I
strate a deep ambivalence toward the fascist past and the handle the tension of German and Jew.”°? His engagement
contemporary self, and resulted in a boycott of the journal * with Jewish/gentile tensions, as distinct from German iden-
that published them.* Was Kiefer mocking Nazi ambition by tity, began in earnest after the 1980 Venice Biennale. In a
assigning this lone, rather unthreatening, middle-aged man series of the early 1980s, Kiefer began to occupy the empty
the task of securing the Reich? Was he accusing Germans pictorial spaces that had caused Huyssen to feel such ambiv-
of his generation of still harboring sympathies for the Nazi alence with evocations of the lost actors of the Holocaust,
legacy? As a German born in 1945, Kiefer’s life started in the both German and Jewish. Engaging the relationship between
aftermath of World War II; as an artist, in light of Adorno’s Jews and Germans came to be intimately related in Kiefer’s
assessment, he was incapable of anything but barbarism. thinking to questions of reunifying East and West Germany.
Occupations examines this predicament. Kiefer explained it There could be no real reunification, he argued, because
as a record of his belief that to understand history one must the destruction of the Jewish communities had irrevocably

Germany
changed Germany. The country might become one nation early 1980s, Kiefer turned to Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” to
again but it could no more reunify as the culture it had previ- create works that led beyond the anxiety of his images of vast
ously been than it could “normalize.” Handling the tension empty halls and landscapes in which Huyssen saw the perpet-
in art as in politics meant crafting an identity for postwar uation of melancholy. The poem contrasts two absent figures:
Germany that included self-conscious references to the Margarete, the lover of a German concentration-camp guard;
Holocaust and to the necessarily incomplete nature of con- and Shulamite, a Jewish woman incinerated in the crema-
temporary German identity. For Kiefer, the pursuit of such a torium. Their names are repeated throughout the poem
historically aware vision led him on a path through German and Kiefer uses them in his titles to refer the viewer back to
history to biblical and mystical themes toward what he Celan. The bodily presence of each woman is evoked in the
described in the later 1990s as a “global” or even “geological” poem by reference to her hair: golden for the living, ashen
history, evoked in monumental paintings heavy with earth, for the dead.
burnt wood, trees, tar and lead as well as paint. Kiefer followed Celan’s lead, avoiding figurative represen-
Despite his proclamation of the death of art, Theodor tation in favor of allusions and synecdoche (using a part of
Adorno discovered in the poetry of Paul Celan (1920-70), something to express the whole). To the monumental land-
a Jewish Romanian writer, an art that survived and he theo- scape of a barren field, for example, he applied straw, cut
rized the means for its continuation. In Adorno’s view, Celan from the fields and pasted onto the canvas in gentle contours
had created a way to “express unspeakable horror by being evoking the absent lover’s body. The dried yellow grasses
silent.”®' He refused to use art to replicate the experiences evoke the blonde German gentile who, due to an accident
that inspired it: Such a mimesis of experience was suitable for of birth, survived the war far from the brutality of the camps.
love poems, not for the moral abyss of the Holocaust. In the Margarete is a symbol of the German nation, estranged from

3.17 Anselm Kiefer, Dein goldenes Haar, Margarete (Your Golden Hair, Margarete), 1981. Oil, acrylic
emulsion, charcoal, and straw on burlap, 51%6 x 67" (130 x 170 cm). Courtesy White Cube.

Chapter
c= Selo}
3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Ex pressionism
YK a I ‘ = 1
and the Return of Painting
 3.18 Anselm
Kiefer, Sulamith
(Shulamite),
1983. Oil,
emulsion, woodcut,
shellac, acrylic,
and straw on
canvas. 114% x
145%" (290 x
370 cm). Courtesy
White Cube

its deeper identity and history due to the unfathomable paper darkly printed to look like wood. Five of six torches are
immediacy of Nazi cruelty. Her Jewish counterpart, Shulamite, similarly covered. The remaining torch burns at the far end
appeared first as a haunting echo of Margarete in Kiefer’s 1981 of the room, accompanying the candles and transforming
Your Golden Hair, Margarete (fig. 3.17). Echoing the straw are a space that had been built to honor the Nazi dead into
black arcs of paint, suggesting a dark-haired, living Shulamite.” a memorial for the murdered Jews. Shulamite indicts
In Your Golden Hair, Margarete—Midsummer Night (1981), the Germany for its history of fascism and anti-Semitism. The
field is now blackened by night and the golden hair is shad- spectator is not sure how to respond, swept into the vast illu-
owed by silver lines evoking the ashes of the dead woman’s sionistic space and enthralled by Kiefer’s typically inviting
burnt hair. German identity, represented in these images by surfaces. In Shulamite, an awareness of the absent lovers and
fragile isolated stalks in a devastated field, is haunted by the their experiences forces the viewer to consider the lives of
companion it has destroyed. Still eschewing figuration, Kiefer individuals as well as the course of history. Kiefer’s work of
placed his audience on a stage where they had to strug- the 1980s and since suggests paths through spiritual, psychic,
gle with morality, as in his earlier work, but this time in the and historical traditions that draw on the Hebrew Bible and
company of those who had had to face history as it occurred. the mysticism of various religions and cultures, proposing
Kiefer further explored the allure and cost of fascism that the way to a post-Holocaust sense of self passes through
in Shulamite (1983) (fig. 3.18), where he addressed the many cultures.

absent Jewish woman directly. The setting of the painting is

the Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers in the Hall Heftige Malerei (“Violent Painting”)
of Soldiers in Berlin, built for the Nazis by Wilhelm Kreis According to many German as well as non-German critics,
(1873-1955). The space is depicted as a cavern made of Kiefer’s empty, stagelike spaces allowed both artist and
methodically laid stones, with great arches spanning the hall viewer to enact a form of postwar mourning. Other German
and a niche at its end, into which Kiefer painted seven flames Neo-Expressionists, however, followed Baselitz’s lead
that appear to burn from a seven-branched candelabrum, and painted actors on their dramatic canvases. The work
representing the Menorah that stood in the Temple in Jeru- of a group of Berlin painters illustrates this representa-
salem. (Modern Jewish tradition has added two more candles tional approach. Shown first under the label Heftige Malerei
to the Menorah.) All six windows are shrouded with pieces of (“Violent Painting”), it includes such works as Helmut

Vermany
 Compared to Lupertz, the content of the Heftege Malerei
painters was rooted in enthusiasm for Dionysian excess.
They produced narrative and genre scenes that recalled
the Expressionism of the Die Brucke artist Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner and included visions of nightlife, artists’ studios,
landscapes, and fantasies of physical catharsis and destruc-
tion: Middendorf’s While Painting shows the artist crouching
before his easel like a lead singer holding a microphone and
equates acting out with making art. Though clearly commit-
ted to an explosive public display of the lives of young artists,
the group avoided political statements in favor of more
personal admissions such as Rainer Fetting’s (b. 1949) that
“deep down we are all would-be rock stars.” Heftige Malerei
painting left one unsure of the artists’ intention in employ-
ing the painterly heroics of modern Expressionism to evoke
nightlife and fantasy. Looking at Neo-Expressionism along-
side the Expressionism of Die Brucke, art historian Rosalyn
Deutsche argued that the later version lacked the specificity
that had made Kirchner’s paintings of modern urban life,
for instance, so searching.®’ By comparison, While Painting
seemed like adolescent play.
Others found such painterly theatrics liberating precisely
because of their difference from the work of the original

3.19 Helmut Middendort, While Painting, 1982. Acrylic on canvas,

13' 1" x 9' 10" (4 x 3 m). Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

Middendorf’s (b. 1953) While Painting (1982) (fig. 3.19).

The Heftige Malerei were described as countering the
“political-ideological” trends of Conceptual traditions with a
“self-thematization of personal existence.” Although critics
noted that defining painting in this way as the materialization
of Romantic introspection was itself ideological, there was an
undeniable interest in oil on canvas and the artists’ experi-
ence of daily life.
The Berlin group which included Rainer Fetting, Helmut
Middendorf, and Berndt Zimmer (b. 1948) drew on the
legacy of Baselitz, who had strong ties with the city, and the
rhetoric of Markus Lupertz (b. 1941). Lipertz’s series of
German Motifs, begun in the 1970s, included monumental
images such as Black-Red-Gold I—dithyrambic (1974) (fig.
3.20), which confront the viewer with Nazi relics and military
machinery. In his work and statements, Liipertz consistently
enlisted the Dionysian rhetoric of the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, together with nationalistic claims for German
» 66
painting, which he characterized genius,” and
as “violent,
“apolitical.” As his imagery moved between agglomerations
of weapons and Nazi paraphernalia in his German Motifs to
3.20 Markus liipertz, Schwarz-RotGold |—dithyrambisch (Black-Red-
other works representing imperfect, rather contemporary-
Gold |—dithyrambic), 1974. Distemper on canvas, 102% x 7834"
looking figures in Classical poses, his insistence on political (260 x 200 cm). Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner Markisch Wilmersdorf,
disinterest was tested. Cologne & New York.

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

German Expressionists. Donald Kuspit claimed
that the “buried alive situation” of a walled and
surrounded West Berlin led to the flowering of
a “mannerist sense of fluidity—a loose artificial
freedom” in the Heftige Malerei artists. Neo-
Expressionism in the 1980s was thus sincere in
the degree that it differed from the sincerity of
the 1910s. The paintings approached contem-
porary German life with the rawness of a punk
band. Each painter used limited basic varia-
tions of fluid paint, bold colors, quick strokes,
and simple figurative groupings. The paintings
stuck to a format that encouraged clarity and
power. Simple compositions, whether in Neo-
Expressionist art or punk music, could carry chal-
lenging content. After all, it was punk icons the
Ramones who sang about President Ronald Rea-
gan’s 1985 trip to the German military cemetery
at Bitburg, which included graves of SS troops.*?
In the similarly rhythmic, pounding composi-
tions of the Neo-Expressionist painters, Berlin
audiences could recognize specific settings such
as nightclubs the New York Anvil and SO36, and
with them the alternative identities that such
locations fostered. The art of the Heftige Malerei
was problematic not, as in Kiefer’s art, because of
its evocative and political ambiguity, but because
of the way it combined Modernist styles with con-
temporary content, emotive outbursts with refer-
ences to popular and youth culture.

Jérg Immendorff and A.R. Penck

3.21 Sigmar Polke, Hochsitz (Watchtower), 1984. Synthetic polymer paints and dry
Kiefer’s shifting position contrasts not only with
pigment on fabric, 9’ 10" x 7' 44" (300 x 224.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
the “apolitical” violence of Lupertz and the rock- in vy
star excitement of Heftige Malerei, but also with
other German Neo-Expressionist painters such
as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), whose he was using a distinctive style based on theatrical artifice to
work in the 1960s challenged the hegemony of American address the politics of reunification, the movement to end
Pop art by adopting its mass-media source material to address the division of postwar Germany into communist German
the German political situation. In the 1970s and 1980s, both Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the capitalist
artists expanded their projects. Richter pursued his dialogue Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). His training
with photography, while Polke continue to challenge Mod- with Joseph Beuys (see Chapter 1) contributed to his sense
ernist claims to universalism and formalist purity by explor- of the need for active political involvement (at one point he
ing scores of different styles from appropriation to Abstract even briefly set aside his studio practice to run for a position
Expressionism in media ranging from bedlinen to meteor- on Dusseldorf city council). More important in the devel-
ites. Paintings such as Watchtower (1984) (fig. 3.21) showed opment of his aesthetic solutions, however, was his training
a Stylistic inconsistency that undermined both the Modernist with stage designer Teo Otto (1904-68). In 1977, he began
faith in artists’ 7 6 “signature styles” and the Neo-Expressionist his breakthrough series Café Deutschland. These works, which
desire to enlist them for new purposes. In addition, in this combine expressive representation, portraiture (often of the
work and others, Polke developed his critique of style while artist himself), and symbolism, exemplify Immendorff’s par-
raising the specter of the fascist past. Meanwhile, Jorg ticular brand of Neo-Expressionism.
Immendorff (1945-2007) took a different path toward his- In the foreground of his 1978 canvas Café Deutschland I
torical reckoning and political action, dispensing with the (fig. 3.22), Immendorff painted himself extending his
selfconsciousness of Richter and Polke’s dialogue with Mod- hand in friendship through a section of masonry wall toward
ernism and avoiding Kiefer’s monumentalism. By the 1980s, a figure identifiable from his painted reflection as the

Germany
3.22 Jérg Immendorff, Café Deutschland I, 1977. Oil on canvas, 111 x 130" (282 x 330 cm).
Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner Markisch Wilmersdorf, Cologne & New York

contemporary East German painter A.R. Penck (b. 1939). between a provocatively posed female and small stick figures,
Immendorff had met Penck (an alias for Ralf Winkler) in one carrying a sign reading “A=A,” another a book and a
1976. The two men were equally concerned with resolving cross, and several wielding clubs. These characters variously
the political challenges facing Germany. Their dialogue on symbolize sex, education, religion, and violence. Meanwhile a
this question was the impetus for, and one of the subjects of, monster looms over the man, and an eye appears on his hand,
the Café Deutschland paintings. Since the 1960s, Penck had symbolizing for the artist different forms of the unknown
addressed the difficulty of painting a critical account of life and unknowable. Though an eagle evoking Germany flies
in East Germany. His solution involved a type of painterly, into the scene at the upper left, What Is Gravitation? IIlargely
expressive hieroglyphics that compressed contemporary approaches questions of dislocation and alienation without
life into pictographic stick figures analogous to Borofsky’s explicit political references. In his Café Deutschland imagery,
anonymous men (see fig. 3.3). Such pictures, he asserted, Immendorff by contrast aimed to be politically specific. In
were “essential criteria for determining the condition of the the middle of Café Deutschland I, he painted the leaders of the
system,” a system that for Penck, after his emigration to two Germanies, Erich Honecker (East) and Helmut Schmidt
Kerpen, near Cologne, in 1980, included both East and West (West), inscribing a Penck-like glyph on the German flag,
Germany.” What Is Gravitation? IIT (1984) (fig. 3.23) revolves while a woman with a tray circulates around the bar with tools
around the flight of a man, shown as a stick figure walking rather than cocktails. In the Café Deutschland series, Immen-
among planets and stars. On his journey, the man navigates dorff discovered how to respond to the challenge he laid

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism eye prthe erosReturn

and of Painting
 3.23 A.R. Penck, Was ist
Gravitation? (What Is
Gravitation?) Ill, 1984. Acrylic on
canvas, 984% x 137%" (250 x
350 cm). Courtesy Galerie
Michael Werner Markisch
Wilmersdorf, Cologne & New
York

down to other European artists: “Make the themes of your manner of composition. It recalls the interwar Neue Sachlich-
works everyday problems, injustice, the threat of war between keit (“New Objectivity”) German painters, such as Georg
the two Imperial powers, [and] political violence.” Grosz (1893-1959), Otto Dix (1891-1969), and Max Beckmann
Put Germany in Order (1983) (fig. 3.24) is part of Immen- (1894-1950), and the morality tales of the eighteenth-
dorff’s extended allegory of the struggle for German unifica- century British painter William Hogarth (1697-1764), whose
tion, which includes the Café Deutschland series and most of Rake’s Progress series Immendorff would reinterpret in the
his other work of the period, and is typical of his theatrical 1990s. The setting for Put Germany in Order is a bar glowing

3.24 Jérg Immendorff, Deutschland in Ordnung bringen (Put Germany In Order), 1983. Oil on canvas in two
parts, 98% x 196" (250 x 498 cm). © The Estate of Jorg Immendorff. Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner Markisch
Wilmersdorf, Cologne & New York.

German y
with electric neon blues and fiery reds. The stultifying atmos- have disagreed about how one might make sense of the rela-
phere is punctuated by the green hair of a woman wearing tionship between Kippenberger’s many activities. Artists
a transparent pink dress, and the gold and orange of what including Jutta Koether and Stephen Prina celebrated the
look like steaming piles of shit beside the bar stools. In the sense of perpetual circulation and the aesthetic and intel-
lounge that fills the center of the scene, German eagles fly lectual anti-essentialism of Kippenberger’s oeuvre. Sculp-
in from stage left as men read newspapers; one man looks tor, painter, and performance artist Mike Kelley identified
up from his copy of the Soviet publication Pravda. In the conflicting qualities of transgression and respect within the
back, animals and people, at least one of whom is naked, are work, while in.their interpretations of Kippenberger’s output
caught in suspended animation. The chaos is watched over critics and curators have proposed guiding themes including
by an ice swastika, the East German symbol for the West, inversion, negation, hybridization, connection to the world,
and an ice hammer and sickle, the corresponding icon for play, and satire. In contrast to the contentious polarization of
the East. the period, Kippenberger’s work seemed to embrace all sides
In the shadow of authoritarian power and hedonistic at once.
chaos, three images of the artist can be seen, all bearing In an extensive, often-reprinted interview with Koether,
Immendorff’s signature closely shaven head. Each figure Kippenberger described his exhibitions as running gags,
wears a pendant of the Brandenburg Gate around his neck each one building on previous ones, telling similar stories
and works diligently to fix an icy star marked with a scar in the way that a comedian might repeat and develop a
resembling this landmark that marks the border between joke, adapting it slightly for new audiences or incorporat-
East and West Berlin. These stars acquire significance ing new elements into it based on her or his experiences
as icons of German identity through their repetition in since the last telling. The works of art, like jokes, are inte-
Immendorff’s work. Other repeated motifs include the grated into larger narratives, some of which are elaborated
doglike figure at the bar, who appears as the protagonist of in a particular exhibition, some of which are not. Unlike
three 1983 paintings called The Collector, and the spoon- Neo-Expressionists such as Immendorff, Baselitz, and
wielding figure at the upper left. Objects and figures are Middendorf, whose work tells a story, or Kiefer, Schnabel,
all joined together in a theatrical appeal to rise above the and Salle, who provide objects and space for the viewer to
current unseemly and immoral contest between East and create their own, Kippenberger presents pieces of stories
West. The triple figure of the artist suggests that the politi- from the world beyond the painting. The viewer may or
cal work is hard going. By 2000, however, with the Berlin may not recognize the allusions or get the joke. A paint
Wall down and the two Germanys unified, Immendorff could ing such as Self-Portrait (1982) (fig. 3.25), with its dramatic
claim: “I am the sole painter in art history who has worked on presentation of cartoon martini glasses and musical notes
a utopia (reunification) which then became concrete.” orbiting Kippenberger’s bandaged head, teases the viewer
with hints of the artist’s misadventures. The charisma of
the work’s subject, even when battered after a hard night of
Epilogue, Addenda, Errata drinking, as well as Kippenberger’s vigorous style, contrasting
While the story told in these opening chapters of paint- rough impasto on the figure’s bandaged face with icons flatly
ers and appropriators is accurate, it is also deceptive. As applied across the work’s surface, invite the viewer to spend
U.S. Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd wrote: “The history time with the painting. Some viewers might have remem-
of art and art’s condition at any time are pretty messy. They bered the image from a photograph used as the invitation
should stay that way.””* In Germany in the 1980s, while the to the artist’s 1981 exhibition “Dialogue with the Young” the
Heftige Malere: played at being rock stars and Kiefer, Baselitz, previous year. Others may even have heard details about the
and Immendorff waged campaigns against history, others— events that left Kippenberger bandaged. Most will respond to
notably Martin Kippenberger (1953-97)—rejected the the many easily legible symbols painted on the work and to
primacy of painting, self, or history. Kippenberger put quo- the painter’s willingness to show himself in such an unflatter-
tation marks around his status as an artist, described his ing light. But we also know there are things we are not being
primary activity as enabling others, and expressed a desire told. The work is both confessional and withholding, repre-
to be remembered for generating a good mood. To this sentational and abstract, iconic and psychological.
end, he expended as much energy on managing the night- If the comedy of the running gag and the charisma of the
club SO36, on running his workshop/distribution center/ comedian are Kippenberger’s means for creating a good
exhibition venue Kippenberger Bureau, and on drinking, as mood for the willing, his technical facility, Koether argues,
he did on making art objects. His studio practice was corre- is a trap for critics bristling at the apparent self-indulgence
spondingly eclectic, combining appropriative, painterly, per- of his subject matter. Praise of his painterly invention on
formative, and Conceptual approaches. He assembled other an otherwise skeptical viewer’s part is, she says, tantamount
artists’ work, published books, took photographs, painted, to announcing: “This picture ... is quite acceptable in both
sculpted, enlisted others to paint and sculpt for him, and its form and content and even in its execution Pemeiovt, sue I
made himself the center of an ever-growing spectacle. Critics get involved with it I'll get carried away from the individual

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

3.25 Martin Kippenberger, SelFPortrait, 1982. Oil on canvas, 667%" x 667%" (170 x 170 cm).
© The Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

object into a deluge of Kippenberger’s scandalous or created by it, “stay normal and quite open and try to get
exhausting or otherwise threatening activities.” Prina, involved.” “[{I]n medical terminology,” she continues, “allow
embracing the deluge, clarifies what happens if we keep group dynamic [which] includes speaking, showing
looking: “I cannot escape the suspicion that I have been and drinking.””® Prioritizing the world beyond the frame
trapped in an elaborate plot [that has been begun but is] is a theme addressed in the critical and conceptual tradi-
nowhere near complete.”” Self-Portrait is an opening into tions that supported appropriation; the personal dimen-
activities and relationships that extend from the studio out sion, however, is akin to the spirit of Neo-Expressionism.
into the streets and that involve a cast of initiates and stran- Kippenberger’s antipathy toward gravity pushes him away
gers. The)most productive approach to Kippenberger’s work, from either camp and makes it clear that taking sides is either
Koether writes, is to accept the “embarrassment” inevitably impossible or beside the point.
 3.26 Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1988.
Oil on canvas, 942 x 78%" (240 x 200 cm).
© The Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie
Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Categories and positions in Kippenberger’s art are only tongue in cheek and his own identity in quotation marks. In
temporary and contingent; his art is more of an aesthetic Untitled (1988) (fig. 3.26), Kippenberger paints a portrait
and intellectual flow. In many cases, Kippenberger repre- of himself in the role of Picasso by mimicking a famous pho-
sented the idea of art-as-contingent-network quite literally. tograph of the Spanish master in a bathing suit. The large
His first paintings, done in Florence, Italy, in the late 1970s, garment clings unflatteringly to Kippenberger’s belly and
were based on photographic snapshots taken during his thighs as he awkwardly maneuvers a sculpture adorned with
daily wanderings. Throughout his career he would draw the icon, a hammer, sun, and breasts in a spider web that can
on hotel stationery, creating an archive of visually disparate be found throughout the artist’s oeuvre including several of
images that registered his fleeting thoughts and mapped the Metro-Net stations. Viewers are presented with a compari-
his peripatetic lifestyle. Kippenberger’s circulatory system, son of the two as aging men as well as artists, a comparison
to use one of Koether’s metaphors for his art, is dramati- that is closer to deliberate humiliation on Kippenberger’s
cally and humorously illustrated. by his Metro-Net, a global part than hubris. As he declared: “I’m not a ‘real’ painter,
subway system with stations in Greece, Canada, and Germany. nor a ‘real’ sculptor, I only look at all that from the outside
Metro-Net was necessarily conceptual, suggesting a commu- and sometimes try my hand at it, trying to add my own par-
nity of travelers imagining themselves on a global commute. ticular spice.”””
Kippenberger’s fellow travelers were many, and he also inte- Kippenberger died of cancer at the age of forty-four,
grated other artists’ work and ideas into his art through his leaving a body of work containing visions of art, self, and
generously acknowledged use of assistants and by collecting history that in fragments seems to accord with much of the
and curating. He complemented the network of his travels art discussed in this and the previous chapter, but that in its
and friends with allusions to art-historical lineages, identify- totality reminds us how problematic it is to imagine the past
ing himself through his actions and portraiture with Joseph as possessing a coherent Zeitgeist that can be captured and
Beuys, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso, in each case with explained in a single, unified narrative.

Chapter 3 Back to the Easel: Neo-Expressionism and the Return of Painting

 Into the Streets

n 1982, the seventh edition of Documenta, the highly

influential twice-a-decade exhibition of international con-
temporary art held in Kassel, West Germany, found its tran-
quility interrupted by a concession stand installed outside the
“official” exhibition space (fig. 4.1). This guerrilla exhibi-
tion was selling buttons, T-shirts, and low-priced souvenirs.
A banner announced: “Great Art for Low Prices.” The stall
was an ad hoc exhibition space for Fashion Moda, an alter-
native art gallery based in the South Bronx, New York, and
full of work by members of Collaborative Projects (Colab),
a politically engaged group of artists based in New York.!
Fashion Moda was created by Stefan Eins in 1979 to support
art outside the art establishment. Its name, made up of the
English word “fashion” and its Spanish equivalent, captured
the gallery’s multicultural context of the Bronx, while the art
it promoted represented the intersection of graffiti, painting,
fashion, and music (fig. 4.2). The gallery was one of many
alternative spaces responding to new artistic practices that
treated the streets as well as galleries as important venues
exhibiting art. Fashion Moda had not been invited to partici-
pate in Documenta, a curated exhibition, but Jenny Holzer,
one of the invited artists, co-produced the Fashion Moda

4.1 Fashion Moda, Concession stall at

Documenta 7, 1982. Kassel, West Germany.

4.2 Fashion Moda, gallery exterior, 1980Qs.

Mural by Crash. South Bronx, New York.

Into the Streets

event as her contribution. Holzer’s Truisms (see fig. 2.19) pennants that enveloped the event in his own critical project
appeared on T-shirts at the stall. This intrusion exemplifies while also giving it the flavor of a carnival or car dealership.
the exuberant and often strongly politicized—early 1980s Once inside, meditative experiences were upset by the pres-
alternative art scene that thumbed its nose at the exclusiv- ence of the appropriation art of Sherrie Levine and Barbara
ity of high culture. Often allied with political causes includ- Kruger (see Chapter 2), several Café Deutschland paintings by
ing AIDS activism, economic justice, and citizenship issues, Jorg Immendorff (see Chapter 3), and a Hans Haacke instal-
galleries, outdoor public spaces, and eventually museums lation dissecting the business activities of German art patron
became stages for political debate. The location of the Peter Ludwig. Haacke’s infamous Shapolsky et al. (see fig.
Fashion Moda concession at the edges of Documenta, enjoy- 1.18) was even featured in the exhibition catalogue. Fuchs’s
ing at least the tacit support of the curatorial staff, conveys comments notwithstanding, this was not “A New Spirit in
the desire of its creators to confront artworld institutions on Painting,” Part II, but instead demonstrated that aesthetic,
their own territory, as well as from terrain less accustomed to political, and theoretical critiques of art and power were
the display of art.” beginning to infiltrate the very spaces they attacked. It is to
The work inside Documenta 7 was also symptomatic of this process of infiltration—by which art traveled from alter-
its cultural moment. Many in the art press castigated Rudi native spaces and the streets themselves into the machinery
Fuchs, the chief curator, for creating a Romantic cloud of high culture and mass media—that this chapter turns.
around the exhibition. Fuchs’s proposal that Documenta
7 be subtitled “In which our heroes after a long and strenu-
ous voyage through sinister valleys and dark forests finally
arrive in the English Garden, and at the gate of a splendid
palace” captures his poetic sensibility, but the exhibition itself The emergence of appropriation and Neo-Expressionism
was rife with art that complicated such fairytales. Around the together in New York in the early 1980s revealed the city’s
Fashion Moda concession and the exterior of Documenta 7, two very different functions within the art world: The former,
the Conceptualist Daniel Buren (see Chapter 1) hung striped shaped by critics, demonstrated it to be a hothouse for
intellectual discourse and political critique; the latter, rooted Moda and Colab’s own ABC No Rio, established in 1979 in
in the entrepreneurial insight and energy of a new genera- the Lower East Side, but also federal and state arts funding,
tion of gallerists, proved its importance as an engine turning not to mention the permission of the occupied site’s land-
contemporary art into an economically valuable and cultur- lord. This time, building on the experience of the short-lived
ally visible product. While denizens of the art world took “Real Estate Show,” its infiltration into the non-art world was
up positions around these two, often conflicting identi- fully sanctioned.
ties, artists of the kind who were showing at Fashion Moda The new environs brought significant challenges. An
or attending Colab meetings sought refuge in a third art examination of rape in a standard gallery context might
world, one dominated by the everyday concerns of urban look like a carefully judged exposure of brutality. Shown in
life and the invention of aesthetics that responded to them. a non-conventional space next door to a peepshow or an
Though it would be quickly subsumed by intellectual and adult-movie house, however, collages made of pornographic
economic concerns, this alternative scene—split between the sources and performances enacting edgy sexual activities
East Village and the South Bronx—was home to an almost such as were featured at “The Times Square Show” threat-
anarchic energy that in its zeal to redefine artistic practice ened to read as fantasy. A similar ambiguity was true of the
would find sympathetic audiences and fellow travelers in multiple images of violence that filled the Colab show. On
other movements. 42nd Street, then as now in its more Hollywoodified form,
By the time its artists were hawking their wares at Docu- images of gun-toting young men teeter toward a glorification
menta 7, Colab, formed in 1977, already had several con- of violence rather than social critique. As had been noted
troversial art interventions to its name. Two years before, in before, not least by Joseph Beuys, a critical art practice needs
the summer of 1980, the group had occupied a dilapidated to do more than merely reflect reality. If the fact that “The
building in Times Square in New York for what one news- Times Square Show” resonated with its environment proved
paper called the “first radical art show of the 1980s” (fig. that contemporary art was suited to being displayed in spaces
4.3). Earlier the same year, members had entered a vacant, other than white-walled galleries, fitting in too well in such
city-owned building in Lower Manhattan and presented surroundings suggested that it might not be art at all. This
“The Real Estate Show,” which featured art addressing the was one of the new challenges facing artists whose aim was to
political causes and consequences of the housing shortage. articulate political and social options not sanctioned by nor-
It was shut down after a day. By way of contrast, the summer mative society and whose venues lay outside the established
project, called “The Times Square Show,” aimed at offer- art world.
ing a less pointed analysis of metropolitan society, with the The collective actions of Colab and Fashion Moda repre-
atmosphere tending toward the carnivalesque rather than sent the outer reaches of what was emerging as a third tier in
the directly political. The run-down four-story structure on the New York art market. By the mid-1980s, a new group of
4lst Street occupied by the group became home to graffiti, eclectic galleries were competing with those on 57th Street,
murals, sculpted rats and printed weapons, slogans, space- the historic center of art dealing in New York, or the blue-
ships, and mounds of debris that evoked 1960s assemblage chip spaces of SoHo, which in the 1960s had been first an
art, the tenement housing of the destitute, and the adult outpost of radical art but by the 1980s had developed into the
theaters and sex shops that then filled Times Square. Colab economic heart of the art world. The new scene was rooted
artists including Holzer, John Ahearn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, in the East Village, a neighborhood of Manhattan that had
Byron Kim, Tom Otterness, Kenny Scharf, and Kiki Smith yet to be gentrified by developers. The area provided low
took turns as barkers outside the building and blasted punk rents and a haven for artists in search of a supportive space
music from the windows to project the energy of their art for their deliberately unrefined agitational work. The social
into the street. As at Documenta, bargain-basement slogans issues being addressed were serious, but pleasure was also
encouraged passers-by to come in and shop: “Four jam- an important part of the scene. Art was made for display in
packed floors!! More than you bargained for.” The appeal of nightclubs as much as galleries, and the openings were leg-
the artists’ brand of updated realism was not lost on critics, endary for their duration, decibel level, and consumption
who celebrated the impulse to hold a mirror up to the city of controlled substances. Clubs like the Palladium turned
in this way. As one reviewer declared: “The hordes of half- private rooms over to artists such as Keith Haring and Kenny
wild, half-crazed, and fully degenerate individuals who keep Scharf to use for exhibitions and installations. The boom
pouring out of the 42nd street subway had occasion to check started with the opening of a core group of spaces includ-
out a whole building full of art that was just as raw, raucous, ing Fun Gallery in 1981, Nature Morte, Civilian Warfare,
trashy, and perhaps even as exciting as some of the [neigh- Gracie Mansion (named for its owner, who took her name
borhood’s] more notorious attractions.”° from the residence provided for the mayor of New York),
Colab supplemented its lowbrow theatrics with references and Exit Art in 1982, and International with Monument in
to cutting-edge art of the previous decades, from Picasso to 1984. By the end of the latter year, there were over seventy-
Fluxus. In addition, “The Times Square Show” had finan- five galleries in the area. Feeding off what turned out to be
cial support not only from alternative spaces such as Fashion an economic bubble, the East Village was a microcosm of the

The East Village and the Alternative Scene

cultural economy and prime stomping ground for artists and of artistic independence. Nonetheless, critics were anxious
collectors alike. As Carlo McCormick, an East Village critic about the role artists were playing in raising neighborhood
and collaborator, noted as early 1984, the scene, as distinct property values, and though few were ready to lay the blame
from some of its productions, was never intended to subvert for gentrification on artists, many were troubled by steadily
the business of culture. Rather, it was “right at the cutting rising rents and corresponding demographic changes. Living
edge cannily transform[ing] inspiration to commodity without electricity as an artistic statement was entirely differ-
and willfully avoid[ing] the hypocrisy of denying its materi- ent than having one’s electricity cut off for non-payment of
alistic value.”* In the journal Art in America in the same year, bills as a result of inescapable poverty.
McCormick and painter/critic/editor Walter Robinson more
bluntly asserted: “The East Village scene, incidentally, suits Keith Haring
the Reaganite zeitgeist remarkably well.”? By the end of the One of the most celebrated artists to come out of the East
decade, most of the more successful artists had found more Village scene was Keith Haring (1958-90). His work could
business-sawvy dealers in SoHo and the few genuinely profit- be seen in the subways of New York by the late 1970s, in
able galleries had relocated there as well. The scene thus Lower Manhattan nightclubs and galleries by the early
vanished, leaving only a few holdouts, including ABC No Rio, 1980s, in museum exhibitions around the world after the
Exit Art, and The New Museum, all of which had established mid-1980s, and at his own store, the Pop Shop, from 1986
enduring connections with the neighborhood, reputations in to 2005. In the second decade of the twenty-first century,
the art world, and, coincidentally perhaps, were positioned Haring’s work maintains a vivid presence at auction and
some distance from the center of East Village activities at on the Internet, as well as in museums and galleries. He
their height. worked on campaigns for causes including AIDS research,
The sense that East Village art might be complicit with the famine relief, and drug awareness, but it is his subway
system it purported to resist and indifferent to the company drawings, often whimsical and fantastical in nature, that
it kept riled critics and many artists. In the context of art- most concretely demonstrate his interest in the social
world pressures to produce refined work for the Minimal- context of his work. Arriving in New York in the late 1970s,
ist- and Pop-inspired blue-chip galleries, accumulations of Haring began to explore the city’s art world and its social
color and kitsch such as Rhonda Zwillinger’s (b. 1950) Post- life. At the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, he met
Minimal Glitz (1985) (fig. 4.4) or the confounding efforts of Kenny Scharf (b. 1958) and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of
David McDermott (b. 1952) and Peter MacGough (b. 1958) whom shared Haring’s commitment to the blurred bounda-
to live as Victorians with corresponding technology (e.g., no ries separating art and entertainment. Haring collaborated
electricity) were cathartic and even liberating celebrations with graffiti artists as well as with art-school peers, at times

4.4 Rhonda Zwillinger,

Post-Minimal Glitz,
1985. Oneroom view
of two-room installation.
Oil paint, glass beads,
found furniture,
drawings/colored
pencils, painted walls
with antique stencils,
silicon caulking, and
leopard fabric.
Installation at Gracie
Mansion Gallery, New
York City. Courtesy the
artist.

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

4.5 Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, AOne, Daze, [A2, Mural, 1983. Houston Street mural, New York. Photograph
by Tseng Kwong Chi. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. New York

all together on a single work (fig. 4.5). While his above- Both bodies of work were socially/ engaged,
ore
graphically/
5

ground career included tagging, curating, and exhibiting concise, and highly expressive.
in East Village and SoHo galleries, underground he was The subway/ drawings
fo)
were a wayy of takingfo) possession of
making chalk drawings on the black paper used to cover public space and becoming involved in the everyday activities
expired advertising posters in subway stations (fig. 4.6). of ordinary people. Haring began by defacing advertisements

4.6 Keith Haring, Untitled Subway

Drawing, 1983. New York subway.
© Keith Haring Foundation. Photograph by
Tseng Kwong Chi. © 1983 Muna Tseng
Dance Projects, Inc. New York.

I
The East Village and the Alternative Scene &
 Lon! Zs

/
NI A

4
y
a
2) &»

~y
we

zz)
Pybs
WAtg

4.7 Keith Haring, Untitled, 1983. Vinyl ink on vinyl tarp, 180 x 276" (457.2 x 701 cm).
© Keith Haring Foundation. Used by permission.

to draw attention to stereotypes and sexism in media images. provided a significant show of resistance to the homophobia
Soon, however, he shifted to the more playful chalk-drawn then dominating public responses to AIDS. In the face of
visions that would be part of his oeuvre until his AIDS-related accusations that the disease was God’s punishment for homo-
death in 1990. Haring’s acts of petty vandalism created a sexuality, Haring’s art bubbled over with life-affirming exu-
sense of community among his fans, who became connois- berance, even while it addressed sometimes painful content.
seurs of his growing legions of dancing figures, flying saucers,
and radiant children. As Haring became aware of the pleas- David Wojnarowicz
ure and sense of connection his work provided, he circulated The work of David Wojnarowicz (1954-92)—often seen
pins of a “radiant child” figure that became so popular he in the same spaces, even on the same streets as Haring’s—
was once mugged for them despite the fact that he was giving expresses a very different attitude toward art and life in the
them away for free. The pins led to the establishment of 1980s. Wojnarowicz created drawings, paintings, graffiti,
the Pop Shop, a commercial venture of international scope illustrations, constructions, writings, films, and photographs
which generated income for Haring as well as for a founda- that responded to the perceptions and dreams of those
tion that continues to support a variety of causes worldwide. cast aside by mainstream society for their differences—in
The attention Haring’s work received in the subway was his case, for being gay. His work is characterized by a relent-
paired with growing artworld acclaim. On the streets and on less drive to challenge what he calls the “preinvented reality”
gallery walls, Haring demonstrated his ability to cover huge of the conservative, suppressive biases of the status quo and
surfaces with intricate patterns and exuberant references to to facilitate the creation, by himself and all of us, of spaces,
sex and death, pleasure and play (fig. 4.7). His irrepress- visions, and artistic languages of our own making. “Bottom
ible style and the immediacy of his imagery lent themselves line,” he declared in his memoirs, “every gesture carries
to easy commodification, a fact that colored his critical a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity; bottom
reception, but also permitted social issues, such as AIDS and line we have to find our own forms of gesture and com-
homosexuality, to enter the public discourse as never before. munication.”° Harking back to the eclectic chaos of early
As an openly gay artist, Haring’s frank integration of homo- Colab and even further to Dada artists such as Hannah
sexual content in his art and his vocal advocacy of gay rights Hoch (1889-1978) and John Heartfield (1891-1968), who

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

 rms for
4.8 David
jowilzer
ining to Wojnarowicz,
Untitled from Sex
Series (For Marion
Scemama),
1988-89. Gelatin
silver print, 37 x
34%" (93.98 x
88.26 cm)
Courtesy of the
Estate of David
Wojnarowicz and
i dete a a Oi
P.P.O.W. Gallery,
New York.

manipulated images of technology to critique modernity, we connect the components of his imagery to each other and
Wojnarowicz culled source material from newspapers, maps, the outside world we create stories in which their themes of
science books, shop windows, and his own previous crea- gay existence, poverty, neglect, and death become laced with
tions. His oeuvre looks as though it might be the output of poetry, color, advertising imagery, and ideas from art history.
several different artists, expressing in its diversity the variety The Sex Series, like all of Wojnarowicz’s work, acts as a simple
within any one person. Unlike most of his peers in the New and often visceral reminder that contemporary American life
York art world of the 1980s, whose styles were often complex is more complex than the mass media and the political myth-
but obviously coherent, Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre rejects a makers would have us believe.
uniform appearance, looking instead like the product of Like many of the artists discussed in this chapter,
a diverse community in search of many different means of Wojnarowicz produced opportunities to imagine societies
expressing itself. not yet regulated by the usual divisions of “us and them.” His
Wojnarowicz’s career as a visual artist extended from the own biography is a record of the violence enacted across such
late 1970s until his death from AIDS-related complications boundaries. He fled an abusive home, ending up in often
in 1992. During this time he produced hundreds of images violent, even life-threatening, situations on the streets of New
that forced the conventional symbols of American power and York. Such brutal experiences inform but do not constitute
progress, such as gears, locomotives, cowboys, space travel, the limits of his work. A particularly clear and emotionally
maps, and money, into intimate proximity with the uncer- effective combination of the personal and the political can be
tainties they were designed to overcome. In his Sex Senes (fig. seen in Untitled (One Day This Kid) (1990) (fig. 4.9), created
4.8), trains, an icon of industry, and military planes, a symbol as an element of a installation. A simple juxtaposition of
of war, rush through landscapes punctuated by riot police, image and text, it features a black-and-white portrait of the
blood cells, money, reports of gay-bashing, stories of love, artist as a child surrounded by phrases describing a startling
and images of homosexual sex. Each fragment Wojnarowicz coming-of-age story delivered in rather matter-of-fact tones.
inserts into his compositions hints at larger worlds of terror, On the left a rhythmic series of statements begins the narra-
pathos, and sometimes joy, and each provides a counter- tive: “One day this kid will get larger.” The text then describes
weight to the myths of a homogeneous American empire. As the discovery of sexuality—“One day this kid will come to

The East Village and the Alternative Scene

 A.9 David Wojnarowicz,
One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will ty and information will compell him to commit sui- Untitled (One Day this Kid),
come to know something that causes a sensation cide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered 1990. Photostat, 30% x 41"
equivalent to the separation of the earth from or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one (78.1 x 104.14 cm). Whitney
its axis. One day this kid will reach a point day this kid will talk. When he begins to Museum of American Art,
where he senses a division that isn't talk, men who develop a fear of this
New York. Estate of David
mathematical. One day this kid will kid will attempt to silence him with
Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W.
feel something stir in his heart and strangling, fists, prison, suffocation,
throat and mouth. One day this kid will rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, Gallery, New York.
find something in his mind and body guns, laws, menace, roving gangs,
and soul that makes him hungry. One bottles, knives, religion, decapitation,
day this kid will do something that and immolation by fire. Doctors will pro-
causes men who wear the uniforms of nounce this kid curable as if his brain
priests and rabbis, men who inhabit cer- & were a virus. This kid will lose his consti-
tain stone buildings, to call for his death. & tutional rights against the government's in-
One day politicians will enact legislation vasion of his privacy. This kid will be
against this kid. One day families will faced with electro-shock, drugs, and con-
give false information to their chil- ditioning therapies in laboratories
dren and each child will pass tended by psychologists and re-
that information down gen- search scientists. He will be
erationally to their families subject to loss of home, civ-
and that information will be il rights, jobs, and all con-
designed to make exis- ™ ceivable freedoms. All this
tence intolerable for this £, will begin to happen in one
kid. One day this kid will or two years when he dis-
begin to experience all ., covers he desires to place
this activity in his envi- mq his naked body on the na-
ronment and that activi- ked body of another boy.
Folens 1%o /91

know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the
separation of the earth from its axis;” and then the public control room.”’ The importance of such exposure lay not so
control over such sensations—“One day politicians will enact much in the display of the work as in the display of the reac-
legislation against this kid.” The statements on the right- tions of those who saw it. Gestures become communication
hand side of the portrait become increasingly violent and in public. Taking action demanded engagement with the
the repetition of “One day” stops. “When he begins to talk, public and, although, unlike Haring or Colab, Wojnarowicz
men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him did not give this process the popular appeal or a party
with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape ... he will be atmosphere, he too presented the viewer with an oppor-
subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable tunity to see and imagine a different world. Reflecting on
freedoms.” Then the story ends simply: “All this will begin to Wojnarowicz’s impact, John Carlin, art critic throughout the
happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to 1980s for the downtown Paper Magazine, wrote: “David was
place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.” The not just an artist ... He was a visionary whose work was deeply
nature of being cast aside is clarified in this work to be not rooted in our collective daily lives yet constantly linked the
merely a matter of biography or personality, but of the sub- everyday to some greater, unknowable force.”®
jection of both to socially sanctioned hatred. The stakes for
creating new spaces and languages are high. Nan Goldin
A final defining element of Wojnarowicz’s art is the artist’s In the summer of 1980, Nan Goldin (b. 1953), on the advice
demand that it be made public. Alternative visions of reality of her friend Kiki Smith (b. 1954), contributed a collection
had been kept private too long. As an artist, he felt he could of slides to “The Times Square Show.” She had began taking
raise an issue Or express passions and ideas, but it remained photographs as a teenager and later, while living in Boston
for an audience to use what they found in the art to trans- and studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
form social reality. This did not mean that every work had to started using the medium to document subcultures within
be shown on a bus or a billboard; rather, Wojnarowicz con- the city. The images she took of transvestites she befriended
sidered his oeuvre a valuable piece in the creation of a new in Boston established an informal and intimate snapshot-
history of, and new spirit for, the United States. “Bottom line, approach to photography that she would continue to pursue
emotionally, even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture in the late 1970s when she moved to New York. The slides she
to mark a person’s response to the epidemic [of AIDS] showed at “The Times Square Show” offer a scattered record
means whole worlds to me if it is hung in public ... You can of the people she knew and the places in which she lived. She
never depend on the mass media to reflect us or our needs photographed herself, her home, where she went at night,
or our states of mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we her friends, and what they all did. David Wojnarowicz and

0B! Chapter 4 Into the Streets

Colab organizer Maggie Smith were particularly struck and alone in their rooms; then women are shown together
drew Goldin’s attention to the political nature of the themes and men are shown together. Battered women are shown
explored in her photographs: It was at this time that Goldin and women who have been abused, who have been sub-
began to draw out narratives within the material, transform- jected to violence. Some men are shown as violent. And
ing the collection into a slide show called The Ballad ofSexual the condition of violence is explored through things
Dependency that Goldin would continue to develop until 1994. such as guns and dogs. The images of women are fol-
The lives she recorded throughout the 1980s and 1990s, lowed by images of prostitution, brides, and mothers,
with often shocking intimacy, were defined by meager so there is a sequence of the mother, the whore, the
resources, drug and alcohol abuse, and destructive relation- bride, the sexual woman, and introspective woman ...
ships. The immediacy of images such as Rise ©& Monty on the The drag queens are shown as a third sex, not as men
Lounge Chair, NYC (1988) (fig. 4.10) captures Goldin’s snap- dressed as women. They are shown in a world of their
shot style, as well as the almost surgical skill with which she own, in their clubs, in their jobs, on the street, in their
isolates emotionally gripping moments. We see Goldin and home lives, and in their relationships with lovers ... It
her friends lounging at the beach, drunk in bed, making continues with couples. There are couples together
love, beautiful, beaten, ecstatic, and miserable. An accom- and couples in bed having sex, followed by images of
panying soundtrack featuring the likes of Maria Callas, empty rooms, empty beds, and graves ... In spite of it
Screamin’
Jay Hawkins, Dean Martin, Yoko Ono, and Dionne all, people have a need to couple. Even when they’re
Warwick helps to focus the narrative of the slideshow. Goldin being destroyed, they’re still coupling. The ballad of
refers to The Ballad as her Leaves of Grass, an apt comparison, sexual dependency starts and ends with this premise,
not just because of Walt Whitman’s own expansive editing but in between there is the question as to why there is
process, but also because we come to know Goldin, as we do this need to couple and why it is so difficult.®
Whitman, less through self-descriptions than through the
In the context of the early 1980s, whether we compare it with
experiences and obsessions recorded in their work.
“The Times Square Show,” the “Pictures” artists (see Chapter
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was published in book form
2), or the Neo-Expressionists (see Chapter 3), The Ballad of
in 1986. Goldin described the scope of the work, with its
Sexual Dependency seems exceedingly, almost overwhelmingly,
nearly seven hundred images,
5
as well as its unifying
y, fo)
themes:
personal. We come to know Goldin and her milieu almost
The photographs show people in terms of their images too well. As its context changed to include the body and iden-
of themselves, their conditioning, their gender identifi- tity art of the 1990s, however, The Ballad changed in meaning
cation, and their relationships to each other. The women, too, appearing to open out to tell us about society and com-
then the men, are shown first outside in the world, then munity more generally.

4.10 Nan Goldin,

Rise & Monty on the
lounge chair, NYC,
1988. Cibachrome,
30 x 40" (76.2 x
101.6 cm). George
Eastman House
Still Photograph
Archive. © Nan
Goldin, courtesy
Matthew Marks
Gallery.

The East Vil age and the Alternative Scene

Martin Wong “paintings for the deaf.” It was at the show’s opening that he
The work of Martin Wong (1946-99) further demonstrates met Pinero. Shortly after, the poet initiated a collaboration,
the degree to which the East Village provided a destination suggesting Wong make a painting of a playground where a
for artists whose concerns and means of expression exceeded protégé of his had just finished a large graffiti mural. Wong
the Neo-Expressionist-cum-Pop stylistics and casual hedon- agreed and the result was their first collaboration, Attorney
ism that dominated the U.S. art scene in the early 1980s. Like Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Pinero)
Wojnarowicz and Goldin, Wong produced art that reflects (1982-84) (fig. 4.11). As the title indicates, the painting had
lives shaped but not defined by the official visions of American evolved from Pinero’s initial conception into a portrait of the
life. He arrived in New York in 1978, having been raised on poet in the form of an urban landscape and a painted poem.
the West Coast and taken a degree in ceramics before becom- Pinero brought Wong the poem while he was painting and
ing involved with San Francisco-based performance groups. requested that it be included in the image. This established
In New York, Wong painted and became a fixture in the East a pattern for collaboration between the two artists: Pinero
Village, orienting his life and career around the Puerto Rican would contribute a text and Wong would use it in a painting.
art scene shaped by Miguel Pinero (1946-88), the leading In Attorney Street, Wong transcribed the poem in the gray sky
figure of the Nuyorican poetry movement since the 1970s. above the tenements that surround the playground. Below,
Nuyorican was a self-conscious combination of the language floating on the surface of the painting itself and partially
and culture of Puerto Rico and New York: Its participants obscuring the scene, Wong “signs” lines Pinero had recently
insisted that the roots of their art and identity were spread spoken in a controversial film, Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981).
out amongst the buildings and streets of the neighborhood. This signed text is then translated below in a trompe-l’oeil
Puerto Rico was an important reference and a source of plaque, itself placed on a trompe-l’oeil wooden frame. The
inspiration, but New York was home. Nuyorican poetry and script reads: “It’s the real deal Neal I’m going to rock your
Wong’s painting drew on and reflected the wide range oflan- world make your planets twirl, ain’t no wack attack,” and
guages and cultures present in the city. echoes the bravado of Pinero’s autobiographical poem. This
Wong’s first opportunity to show in New York was at ABC doubling of lines written by and for Pinero, like the combi-
No Rio in the gallery’s “Crime Show” in 1982. He contrib- nation of confessional and conventional language employed
uted several pieces that took sensational quotations such as in the poem itself, is repeated in Wong’s framing device.
“Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder” The entire scene appears doubly framed, once in a painted
from tabloid newspapers and translated them into schematic edge of bricks that surrounds the canvas, and again by the
renderings of hands signing the words, which he called illusionistically painted wood on the frame itself. In this and

4.11 Martin Wong, Attorney

Street (Handball Court with
Autobiographical Poem by
Piftero), 1982-84. Oil on
canvas, 35% x 48" (90.2 x
121.9 cm). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
Courtesy of the Estate of
Martin Wong and P.P.O.W.
Gallery, New York.
other Wong paintings, scenes of daily life in the Lower East
Side become settings for the transcription of words from the
neighborhood, both spoken and written. Wong’s painting is a
meditation on language and representation as well as a testi-
mony to the self-conscious translation of art and culture.

Art in the Community

Goldin’s and Wong’s images of community were one form
in which life on the streets appeared on gallery walls. Com-
munity engagement, however, took a variety of forms, many
of which did not look or function like traditional art at all.
In the case of Group Material, the art consisted of curating
exhibits of what people in their working-class Latino neigh-
borhood considered art, or publishing information about
the history of AIDS. Group Material member Tim Rollins
also adopted the strategy of creating institutional structures
to address marginal communities. Rollins worked outside
the art world, using his job as an art teacher in the public
schools to create a collaborative project with his students.
Called Tim Rollins and the Kids Of Survival, the group trans-
formed the educational experience of its kids and thanks to
Rollins’s artworld experience put its art, with references to
both middle-school curriculum and urban life, in front of a
national and soon international audience. Between reshap-
ing the art world and infiltrating the public sector there
existed a range of options for artists eager to address the poli- 4.12 Group Material, The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango), 1981.
tics of daily life with everyday citizens. Sculptors and perfor- Exhibition view from Group Material’s exhibition space on East 13th Street,
mance and multi-media artists took to the streets, creating New York. Courtesy Group Material.
works such as those of David Hammons and Pepon Osorio
that drew on the aesthetics and iconography of local commu-
Group Material was founded as a constructive response
nities in order to make publicly accessible installations and
to the unsatisfactory ways in which art has been con-
monuments. Joining the institutional critique implied in the
ceived, produced, distributed, and taught in American
alternative practices of every artist discussed in this section
society ... Group Material researches work from artists,
with an interest in photography, architecture, and engineer-
non-artists, the media, the streets. Our approach is ori-
ing, Krzysztof Wodiczko solicited homeless New Yorkers to
ented toward both people not well acquainted with the
help him create a proposal for multi-use vehicles for living on
specialized languages of fine art and an audience that
the streets. Simultaneously Wodiczko developed a projection
has a long-standing interest in questions of art theory
system with which he covered public monuments with images
and practice. In our exhibitions, Group Material reveals
of poverty and war. By the 1990s, artists had introduced a
the multiplicity of meanings that surround any vital
wide range of models for creating art that was embedded in
social issue. Our project is clear. We invite everyone to
the social lives of its viewers as well as the political ideals of
question the entire culture we have taken for granted.'°
its creators.
Unlike the East Village scene and alternative spaces more
Group Material generally, Group Material rarely produced objects and scru-
In 1979, a dozen or so artists opened a storefront on East pulously avoided using its activities to advance individual
13th Street. Like the other galleries coming to populate the members’ careers. It aimed to be more of a community
East Village, Group Material, as both the group and the space center than an art gallery. This contrast in focus between self
were called, identified the neighborhood as hospitable to and community can be seen in Group Material’s approach
artists seeking to base their activities on the day-to-day life of to curating when compared to events such as “The Times
the city, rather than on the ins and outs of the art market. Square Show.”
It also viewed the community not as subject matter but as The most celebrated exhibition held in the 13th Street
collaborators. The stalwarts of the group, Doug Ashford space was 1981’s “The People’s Choice,” or “Arroz con
(b. 1958), Julie Ault (b. 1957), Tim Rollins (b. 1955), and Mango” (a Cuban expression meaning “What a Mess”) as it
Mundy McLaughlin (b. 1958), explained their mission: came to be subtitled (fig. 4.12). Taking inspiration from the

Art in the Community

Dada and Fluxus traditions of making art out of the everyday, moving into the 13th Street location, group members had
the group sent a letter to their new neighbors, asking them to found themselves attending more to the logistics of running
donate something that was displayed in their own home for a gallery than to social concerns.'! As a consequence, they
use in an exhibition. In this way Group Material transferred gave up the lease and abandoned the space. Ashford claimed
the power of curatorial selection from the artists to the audi- that what Group Material had always done differently from
ence. Honoring the death of the author with a celebration other groups was to attend to issues of context. Now that
of the viewer, of course, was not new. Roland Barthes had they had no physical space to manage, its members turned
theorized this shift from basing a work’s meaning in the art- to other contexts, including uptown museums, buses and
ist’s intentions to finding it primarily in the experience of subways, and even Midwestern colleges. In 1987, with the
the viewer at least as early as his 1968 essay “The Death of the group now consisting of Ashford, Ault, and Felix Gonzalez-
Author,” and his thoughts would exert a growing influence Torres (1957-96), it launched a two-year project consisting of
on the art world. These newly empowered viewers tended to exhibitions, lectures, meetings, and publications investigat-
be demographically similar to the audiences that had always ing the state of contemporary society in the United States.
looked at modern art, however, and the objects they inter- Called Democracy, the event was housed and sponsored by
preted usually looked familiar as well. Handing over the the Dia Foundation, a private arts organization in Manhat-
selection process as did Group Material resulted in an exhi- tan created to provide long-term support to artists working in
bition that looked very different, though not entirely alien. the Minimalist tradition. In the late 1980s, Dia was expanding
Paintings, mostly amateur, and photographs, predominately its identity and Democracy fit this-agenda well. Ashford, Ault,
portraits, hung near less conventional ornaments such as and Gonzalez-Torres used the platform to address political
a collections of PEZ candy dispensers and toy animals. As issues and, just as importantly, to stretch notions about what
Doug Ashford pointed out, Group Material’s projects were constituted art as a category of objects and practices. Democ-
not appeals to replace one category of object with another. racy was a startling example of their ability to manipulate a
Instead, they proposed that the various components of art— variety of forms, from theoretical lectures on topics such as
intellectual and emotional, political and aesthetic, avant- race and representation, to public hearings addressing con-
garde and kitsch—existed simultaneously and together could cerns such as AIDS and education, to objects ranging from
be oriented toward asserting the rights, identities, and agency abstract canvases to pamphlets. Communication was the
of individuals. Such a conviction, Group Material claimed, basic material of Democracy. Though critics complained that
had a long history, extending back to the Realist movements the high-culture venue limited the efficacy of the project by
of the nineteenth century. insuring its audience was predominately artworld cogno-
After Group Material presented “The People’s Choice scenti, choosing to speak about politics in an art gallery such
(Arroz con Mango),” it spent only a few more months on East as Dia transformed an established and well-heeled cultural
13th Street. Unlike Colab, it had never intended to create a institution into a political one.
long-term alternative gallery space. Its mission was to “direct If Democracy transformed a classic white-walled gallery into
. our energies to the demands of the social conditions as something that looked more like a series of counseling rooms,
opposed to the demands of the art market,” yet soon after or even government offices, other projects undertaken by the

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‘on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Roghits
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1990. Courtesy Group Material.

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

artists fit more comfortably in their environments. In 1983, was titled Spade with Chains (1973). Objects, however, would
Group Material bought advertising space in the subways and, soon appear as tangential to Hammons’s art. Rejecting the
like Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer, enlisted the media of conventions of art and eliminating elements such as frames
capitalism to circulate messages and materials that were and labels, Hammons threatened to eliminate the art object
not for sale. For this project, it invited 103 artists to design altogether: His work has included acts such as kicking a trash-
posters for display in the subway system, thereby creating a can through the city, selling snowballs, and exhibiting a vast,
project that was fragmented, dispersed, and the product of empty, and darkened gallery. This condition of artlessness
different personalities. The work thus mirrored contempo- corresponds to the artist’s disdain for the way society attrib-
rary ideas about the fragmentation and heterogeneity of utes value to art objects. Hammons has explained that the art
identity. In December 1990, Group Material created another is the process; once there is a finished work, “it becomes a
fragmentary event, this time a single object, the AIDS Time- political object, it’s not even art anymore.”!”
line, which was taken apart and presented in extracts in dif- In Higher Goals (1986) (fig. 4.14), Hammons pro-
ferent places (fig. 4.13). Unlike a conventional timeline duced what has become an iconic public work addressing
that condenses information for easy consumption, the A/DS African-American culture, African aesthetics, and Ameri-
Timeline was published in sections in different art journals. can economic politics. The work consists of telephone poles
Short spreads presenting incidents in the history of the epi- decorated with bottle caps applied in geometric patterns
demic appeared in a variety of art journals including Art in reminiscent of African beadwork and textiles. At the top,
America, Artforum, Arts magazine, October, and Parkett. Each raised 40 feet from the ground, are backboards and basket-
portion was full of details, but, due to Group Material’s deci- ball hoops. Open to the sky and produced out of doors in
sion not to publish the entire timeline in a single
journal, necessarily partial, as if to remind the
reader of the partiality of all mass media. With the
AIDS Timeline, Group Material used art and the
art industry to write a history of something that
had been obscured by the mass media. Moreover,
reconstructing these fragments of history leads
into a story of politics and disease rather than
the one of aesthetics generally expected in such
a context.

David Hammons
David Hammons (b. 1943) was born in Spring-
field, Illinois, and educated in Los Angeles,
where he sought out fellow African-American
artist Charles White (1918-79), a veteran of
the Harlem Renaissance. The latter’s commit-
ment to addressing African-American issues in
the context of national discussions of race and
economics, as well as his dedication to printmak-
ing, impressed Hammons. Some of the most
dramatic early pieces by Hammons were experi-
mental prints made using his body as a stamp. He
covered parts of himself in oils and then pressed
them onto the paper, imprinting a crushed like-
ness of himself on the page. Additional elements
from flags to weapons were similarly applied to
the image, and these oil impressions were then
dusted with ground pigment to produce a final
image. Many of the prints evoke political oppres-
sion and were used in civil-rights activities in the
1970s. Hammons also began to explore sculp-
ture, making use of materials with metaphorical,
biographical, and linguistic relationships to the 4.14 David Hammons, Higher Goals, 1986. Poles, basketball hoops, and bottle
history and current reality of African-American caps, height 40' (12.2 m}). Shown installed in Brooklyn, New York, 1986.
life: A shovel blade with chain link, for instance, Courtesy Jack Tilton Gallery.

Art in the Community

the very spaces the work would occupy, Higher Goals embod- mimicked the accumulation and decoration he felt defined
ies a boundless spiritual quality Hammons finds outside the the Puerto Rican immigrant aesthetic. La Bicycleta (1985)
studio. The artist, an athlete and serious sports fan, identifies (fig. 4.15), one of Osorio’s first assemblages, exhibits char-
the grace and invention required of athletes as being akin to acteristic qualities of humor and poignancy. The piece was
those required in other disciplines such as jazz, dance, and created as part of a set for a performance by Merian Soto (b.
art. Likewise, the history of basketball as a sport adopted and 1954) called Cocinado (Cooking) about the evolution of Puerto
reinvented by the African-American community conveys the Rican traditions. Osorio’s objects brought features of Puerto
culturally specific nature of Hammons’s practice. The work Rican homes into the realm of art, exaggerating and under
is also anti-basketball—a critique of the cult of the sport that lining certain practices and tastes. Palm trees dot the mud
feeds African-American men with a fantasy of success that is flaps, evoking an island breeze on a city street as one ima-
rarely achieved and only at significant cost to the wider edu- gines the bike coursing through Lower Manhattan, plastic
cation of the community. A 1985 incarnation of the piece branches bending in the wind. His sculptures of the 1980s
stood on the corner of 125th and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, often displayed a similar working process to that evident in
where Malcolm X had given speeches, and in many ways the La Bicycleta. simple domestic objects covered with hundreds
sculpture echoes the activist’s concerns with its multivocal of decorative elements including plastic flowers, jewelry,
references to Africa and America, past and present, personal dolls, party favors, decals, glitter, plastic trees, toy animals,
and public, the capacity for greatness and warnings about and all types of kitsch materials. In aesthetic terms, the work
risk. Higher Goals conveys the sublime quality of a well-placed reflects the impulse Osorio found in the Puerto Rican com-
jump shot, the audacity of racial pride, and an exhortation to munity of “creating an abundance that is not there,” masking
young men to strive for a future more accessible than a jump the effects of poverty in large part forced on the commu-
shot at a 40-foot-high hoop. nity by economic inequities in the U.S. with an overload
of inexpensive objects.'* As such, in Osorio’s hands vernacu-
Pepon Osorio lar aesthetics reveal economic and psychological realities. His
Pepon Osorio (b. 1955) also stepped outside the gallery content, however, like the decoration of La Bicycleta that even
system both to make art and exhibit it. Osorio trained and extends down to the pedals, exceeds such insular dialogues.
practiced as a social worker for the children’s services La Bicycleta—as an object of, if not actually in, motion—
division of the City of New York after his arrival there from was intended to evoke migration from the Caribbean to
his native Puerto Rico in the mid-1970s. As he became part of New York, while as a specific object it recalls the decorated
the Nuyorican community in the mid-1980s, Osorio created bikes used by Puerto Rican tradesmen he remembered
sculptures and installations that reflected upon his circum- from his childhood. The sculpture thus serves as a general
stances. He focused his attention on issues that concerned metaphor of a communal experience and as a specific
the local community and embraced a studio practice that emblem of personal memory. Critic and artist Coco Fusco

4.15 Pepon Osorio,

La Bicycleta, 1985.
Mixed media, 39 x 24 x
60" (99.06 x 60.96 x
152.4 cm). Courtesy
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
New York.

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

 ——
—-
te
-—
>
-—
-_>
-
a eo oe
4.16 Pepdn Osorio, No Crying in the Barbershop, 1994. Installation in a barbershop in Hartford, Connecticut.
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

has seen this deliberate and multivalent use of kitsch as an his Latino community. His next project after the biennial
act of resistance, parodying the outsider’s view of Puerto was No Crying in the Barbershop (1994), an installation com-
Rican aesthetics as quaint folklore and demonstrating missioned by the Hartford, Connecticut public arts organi-
instead that a critical artistic practice can be rooted in the zation Real Art Ways (fig. 4.16). For the piece, Osorio
Nuyorican home. occupied an abandoned barbershop in a Latino neighbor-
Audiences from outside the Puerto Rican community, in hood in Hartford and filled it—overfilled it in his character-
New York and beyond, have consistently responded positively istic manner—with materials relating to the upbringing of
to Osorio’s work. He was given a prominent position in the Latino men. On every surface Osorio displayed signs of the
1993 Whitney Biennial, is regularly reviewed in the main- growing male, posters of heroes, and portraits of loved ones.
stream art press, and was awarded the MacArthur “genius” A mural depicting intertwined roses and bullets dominated
grant, a $500,000 prize for his contribution to contemporary one wall, asserting the presence of death in male-identity for-
art. Nonetheless, Osorio has insisted that the potential for mation. Chairs were decorated with all sorts of objects base-
his work to transcend its local roots must not overwhelm its balls, Puerto Rican flags, baseball caps, hair-picks—all giving
power to respond to the particularity of its sources in local substance to stereotypes of Latino machismo. But, as Osorio
cultures. To this end he creates very literally from within pointed out, male identity is not the sum total of the stereo-
the community. The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993), types that form around it. Attitudes and emotions typically
Osorio’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial, is an over- labeled feminine are also part of male life and signs of these
loaded domestic setting cordoned off with police tape which were also present in the barbershop. Visible on the chairs
reveals, through broken glass and overturned objects, that were lace doilies, plastic flowers, garlands, and dolls, and the
a crime has been committed at the museum. It brought, walls—bearing photos of baseball players, musicians, and
Osorio said, a piece of “the south Bronx to Madison ave.” father-figures—were painted pink. The most striking feature
After the exhibition, however, he decided he no longer of the installation was the sound and sight, on small video
wanted to show his work first in museums; he felt the need monitors set in the headrests of each of the five red-velvet
to orient his exhibition practice, like his studio practice, to chairs, of men crying. At the heart of this male world there

Art in the Community

was sensitivity and emotion; in the midst of all this machismo reveal their details much as the realist painters and muck-
was cathartic weeping. Since No Crying at the Barbershop, raking documentary photographers did at the turn of the
Osorio has presented work in storefronts, private homes, as last century. By the late twentieth century it was no longer
well as in museums and galleries all over the world. sufficient to present viewers with the face of poverty, so
Wodiczko has come up with a variety of strategies for depict-
Krzysztof Wodiczko ing the character and systemic presence of poverty and
One of the exciting possibilities offered by the kind of work violence in contemporary life.
discussed in this chapter is that it proposed that art did not Wodiczko’s vehicles were begun and developed in con-
require a specially designated space; it could be a process, junction with the homeless people who were to use them.
a conversation that functioned in relation to an audience Essentially an elaborate and enlarged shopping cart, they
and an environment outside the confines of a gallery or provided their users with storage space, shelter, and mobil-
museum. Polish-born multi-media artist Krzysztof Wodiczko ity (fig. 4.17). They did not resemble houses or apart-
(b. 1943) developed objects and imagery that display the ments, as though the needs of the homeless were those of
unspoken mechanisms of urban life in the public spaces the middle class in miniature. Neither were the vehicles
of the city. In the mid-1980s, after having emigrated first to the result of romantic visions of the homeless as wander-
Canada and then to the U.S., he began to produce a series ers unbound by the tether of material possession. Rather,
of prototypes for vehicles designed with and for the home- Wodiczko and his collaborators designed a series of proto-
less and to develop what has become his signature medium: types that articulate the sometimes startling relationship
large-scale images projected onto public monuments and between the needs of the homeless and those of the housed
city buildings. In both cases, Wodiczko makes visible facts of as revealed by Wodiczko’s project. Both have possessions to
contemporary society such as poverty and war that are cus- protect as well as health and security issues to consider. The
tomarily pushed aside. If, as the artist argues, such social ills vehicles and discussions about them exposed dramatic and
are a necessary part of a society such as ours, oriented toward morally unacceptable obstructions for the homeless. One
economic competition, then it falls to the political artist to interviewee noted his need to organize and safeguard the

4.17 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle Project with David Lurie, 1988-89. Aluminum and mixed media.
Dimensions variable. Variant 3 of 4 pictured at Trump Tower, New York. © Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

 either side of the otherwise empty northern
side of the monument (fig. 4.18). Joining
the two was a third projection of a chain and
padlock which conveyed the sense that as 1985
turned into 1986 (the projection lasted from
11:30 p.m. on December 31, 1985 to 00:30
a.m. on January 1, 1986) the futures of the two
superpowers were inextricably bound together.
Clearly the political message is dependent on a
general knowledge of the relationship between
the nations in what turned out to be the twi-
light of the Cold War. The work itself relies on
the relationship between the images and their
ground, the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial
Arch, which was built to commemorate the vic-
torious return of the Union troops after the
Civil War. The arch is set apart from the sur
rounding city by a very busy circle of traffic, but
it has a history that Wodiczko found significant.
While the decorated south side of the monu-
ment proclaims victory in a burst of Neoclassical
figures, inside the arch, two realistically ren-
dered figures, President Lincoln and General
Grant, look toward an unknown future. The two
leaders appear calm, pensive, even exhausted as
they face the work of recovery, a future that the
sculptors, even many years later, in 1889, when
the arch was commissioned, did not try to repre-
sent. Wodiczko noted in particular the sensitiv-
ity of the horses ridden by Lincoln and Grant,
created by the American Realist artist Thomas
Eakins (1844-1916). They are not the heroic
chargers of the sort that usually proclaim victory;
they look real. Once appropriated into the pro-
jection, the arch itself adds histories that deepen
4.18 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Projection Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, Grand Army the relationship between the insecurity and fear
Plaza, 1985-86. Public projection at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, Brooklyn, of the Cold War period and the cost of wars past.
New York. © Krzysztof Wodiczko. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. At midnight, fireworks lit up the sky, giving an
explosive accent to the military images from past
and present. As the New Year celebrations then
cans and bottles he recycled for money. He also expressed dimmed, the projection was turned off, leaving its future
concern that the vehicles should permit visibility and a ready existence and interpretation entirely dependent on those
exit so as to reduce the risk of being attacked or crushed who had seen it for themselves or heard about it from others.
in a garbage truck. Wodiczko’s vehicles embody such con- The work thus passed into the care of its audience.
cerns, but do not solve, and clearly cannot solve, all of them:
Art cannot stop aggravated assault on a homeless person, John Ahearn and Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
nor can it fix the problem that part of the population lives The difficulty of producing socially engaged public art in
in fear of actually being thrown into a garbage truck. This is the 1980s is conveyed in compelling terms by the experi-
part of Wodiczko’s point. The homeless vehicles represented ence and work of John Ahearn (b. 1951). In the later 1970s,
an effort to make issues and people who are otherwise over- Ahearn began working on sculptural murals in the Bronx.
looked momentarily visible. His medium was plaster casts taken from living subjects; he
Wodizcko’s projections are equally responsive to their had begun his practice with Colab, making portraits of his
political and social context. At the Soldiers and Sailors friends in the East Village. After the opening of Fashion
Memorial Arch, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, Wodiczko Moda, where he met Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960), he insinu-
projected two images of missiles, one U.S., one Soviet, onto ated himself into the community in the South Bronx, to

Art in the Community

which, encouraged by Torres, he would soon move and about the community and assisting in the creation of objects
where he continued to live and work. Outside the familiar that were significant to them as well as to the artist. The
community of the East Village and without a studio, Ahearn casting process was difficult, requiring the subject to remain
set up an ad hoc space to make art on the sidewalk near his still and breathe through straws while his or her entire face
new home. He reached out to the neighborhood, inviting was covered with plaster. The sitters received a copy of the
kids and adults to join the project, which had what he has resulting sculpture. Briefly, Ahearn recounts, between 1979
described as often approximating a summer-camp atmos- and 1983, there was a convergence of the needs and expec-
phere. Though the spirit was light-hearted, the stakes were tations of the neighborhood, himself, and the art world. Art
high for all involved. Ahearn’s appearance—first as a visitor, could provide representation for a community that found
then as a resident—was greeted with a curiosity not unlike an ally in the artist. Uptown, well past the blue-chip galleries
that accorded to Group Material down on 13th Street, but and collectors’ homes, it seemed, was suddenly the center of
also with a degree of hostility. Whites had left the Bronx for the art world. Ahearn was not the only one to feel this way.
the suburbs years ago, and the borough now largely appeared Fashion Moda thrived and the neighborhood was the subject
in the public imagination through
the lens of tabloid headlines such as
those illustrated in Martin Wong’s
paintings and in movies such as Fort
Apache: The Bronx (1981), which was
shut down in New York and had its
release delayed across the East Coast
by the Bronx-based “Committee
Against Fort Apache.” This commu-
nity action group objected to what it
saw as its dehumanizing representa-
tions of Puerto Ricans and its legiti-
mization of violence in the narrative
of the film itself and by extension on
the streets. As one of Ahearn’s neigh-
bors who would become a close friend
and model for several works reported,
everyone felt that whites would return
to the Bronx only when they thought
they could change the area to suit
themselves. The perception that art-
making of the sort Ahearn was engag-
ing in was the first step in a process
of gentrification—a concern being
theorized at the time in critiques of
the East Village scene, where artistic
success had led to rising rents—under-
lay the suspicion directed toward the
white artist. Consequently, even as
Ahearn was welcomed into the neigh-
borhood, in no small part due to the
generosity of Torres and his family in
whose building he lived, his home was
broken into and some of his installa-
tions were vandalized.
Ahearn cast his lifelike sculptures
in poses surprising for their snapshot-
like immediacy and painted with great
emotional sensitivity. Once they began
to be seen, people quickly volunteered
4.19 John Ahearn, Homage to the People of the South Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly Street 1:
to be Ahearn’s subjects and readily Freida, Jevette, Towana, Stacey, 1981-82. Cast fiberglass, oil, and cable, each figure 54 x
became collaborators, teaching him 54 x 12" (137 x 137 x 30.5 cm). Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

4.20 Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Amerika VIII, 1986-87. Watercolor, charcoal, synthetic polymer paint, and pencil on
bookpages on linen, 5' 94" x 14'{175.6 x 426.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jerry |. Speyer Fund and
Robert and Meryl Meltzer Fund. Acc. n.: 30.1988. Courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

of Wild Style (1982), the instantly iconic film directed by the K.O.S. motifs is the horns in the series of works based
Ahearn’s twin brother, Charlie (b. 1951), which told of the on Franz Kafka’s Amerika (fig. 4.20). The group’s fantasti-
birth of hip-hop and the entrance of graffiti into the art world. cal instruments echo the motif that in Kafka’s text had trum-
Ahearn’s work Homage to the People of the South Bronx: Double peted a highly critical representation of American society,
Dutch at Kelly Street 1: Freida, Jevette, Towana, Stacey, 1981-82 while the gold that forms them in the painting conveys the
(fig. 4.19), a multifigure composition showing Harlem girls value of critique and more specifically the importance of
jumping ropes, and installed beside a vacant lot high on one the children’s own voices. Rollins and K.O.S. succeeded in
of the models’ apartment building, was a high point of the gaining gallery representation—Amerika was shown in 1985
period. Drawing their eyes up over the vacant spaces of urban in SoHo alongside pieces by Jenny Holzer and Leon Golub,
blight to an image filled with vibrant, promising life provided among others—and their work was displayed in mural format
viewers with a sense of empowerment. The figures floating on New York buildings. Sales of their work were used to
several stories above the ground also have a certain uncanny create scholarship funds for the participants. Such material
quality. Cast from the front only, they appear slightly com- benefits were not the only measure of their success, either.
pressed into the wall, and their postures are contorted due to Reflecting on the experience, Rollins asserted that K.O.S.
the difficulty of jumping two ropes at once as part of a game “changed the fiber, the psychological fiber of the kids and
called Double Dutch. Their activity playfully provides a met- what they think is possible. Not only that, but this belief in
aphor for the girls’ graceful navigation of the difficulties of what is possible spreads to the parents and to the community
urban life. as a whole.”"
Further north, in a public school in the South Bronx, Unlike Rollins, who guided his students to an aesthetic
Tim Rollins of Group Material was focusing his energies on consistent with contemporary art world interest in appro-
a public-school art program he called Kids of Survival or priation and abstraction, Ahearn’s success depended on his
K.O.S., which took books from the middle-school English ability to present his South Bronx neighbors with an image
curriculum and used them as both figurative and literal back- of the community they found empowering. After the
ground for a series of collaborative paintings. The earliest moment of good faith in the early 1980s, the right of an
pieces expressed an almost arrogantly vandalistic, rebellious artist, particularly a white male artist such as Ahearn, to
spirit, as pages from George Orwell’s 1984 were pasted to the represent a community that was racially different from
canvas and covered with the kids’ interpretations of life in him and that enjoyed fewer economic opportunities than
the South Bronx, complete with references to crime, death, him was challenged with increasing urgency. By the late
graffiti, and pop culture. The K.O.S. project was about bring- 1980s, the conditions that had permitted Ahearn’s success
ing life and art together, relating the South Bronx to classic had changed. The oil crisis of the 1970s which struck all
works of literature. As a group, Rollins and his collaborators households across the U.S. was followed by a recession that
would develop an aesthetic consisting of elegant abstracted created an unequal pattern of financial distress. Economic
symbols that related to literature and life, sometimes directly, policies transformed the financial landscape, leaving the
sometimes at a poetic remove. One of the most striking of underrepresented and underemployed communities such

Art in the Community

 as those in the South Bronx with fewer and fewer
resources. Freeing up the spending power of wealthy
individuals and corporations in the hope that they
would pump money into the economy and create jobs
further down the social ladder failed to reduce poverty
and exacerbated the gap between rich and poor. With
diminishing state and Federal funds being made
available, there was increasing competition for what
resources remained.
In this fragile and often desperate situation, people
from already marginalized populations including gay
men, intravenous drug users, and sex workers started
dying of a mysterious illness. AIDS tested public policy
to breaking point, witnessed by the fact that it would
not be until over forty thousand people had died of
AIDS-related conditions that President Reagan pub-
licly uttered the word, and even then he did so only to
assert that the government would remain silent with
regard to sex education, a measure that could help
slow the spread of the disease. The horror and mystery
of the disease, the limited funds made available
for health care in general, and the fact that it was, for
the moment, focused on communities outside the per-
ceived mainstream of U.S. culture heightened feelings
further. Art that expressed discontent at the state of 4.21 John Ahearn, Raymond and Toby, 1986. Oil on fiberglass, 47 x 43 x 39"
public life or clearly articulated a position from what (119.38 x 109.22 x 99.06 cm). Collection of The Montclair Art Museum. Image
were seen as the social margins became a magnet for courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.
controversy in what came to be known as the “Culture
Wars.” The fact that even a fractional amount of public outside world. The image of Raymond Garcia and his pit bull
money was spent on art at all, and an even smaller amount terrier Toby proved particularly contentious. To Garcia, the
might support such oppositional voices, became a hot-button work successfully captured the essence of daily life. Beyond
issue for conservatives. At the same time, much of the sense the immediate community, however, the image ofa Latino in
of community that had joined different groups in the previ- hip-hop garb crouched down over his pit bull—a notoriously
ous decades was slipping away. aggressive animal—suggested an extra in an urban crime
With the stakes thus heightened, debates over who had movie (fig. 4.21). Though taken from life, Ahearn’s subject
the right to represent whom became increasingly common matter, chosen for a monument erected in the shadow of a
in the U.S., and in Ahearn’s case the loudest challenge came police station, seemed unsuitable for a public that extended
from outside the immediate community. In 1986, Ahearn was well beyond the immediate neighborhood and the art world.
commissioned to make a multifigure monument to adorn Though Ahearn acknowledged that the site transformed the
a police station in the Bronx. The body that invited him to effect of his artistic choices it was as much the changes in how
create the work contained representatives of the Police audiences were treating race and representation in the later
Department, the City, the Bronx Museum of Art, and the 1980s that made the project so controversial.
community in which the work was to be installed. Ahearn
designed and executed three statues from casts of people he
had worked with before. The results, however—three life-
From Marked Territory
size bronze polychrome statues showing local residents in to the Mass Media
everyday clothes and comfortable poses—presented a vision During the 1980s, the mass media, like the street, were per
of the Bronx that for many viewers conformed too easily ceived as more than just a source for content, an object
to stereotypes. Advocacy groups mobilized to protest the of critique, or a place to discover new forms; they were
sculpture and five days after it was installed, Ahearn, antici- also a staging ground as significant as any museum. This
pating that the controversy would only get more heated, chapter will end with a discussion of artists from the 1980s
hired a team to remove the work to a warehouse. It proved who further destabilized the coherence of the art world’s
impossible, in 1989, to translate Ahearn’s modestly scaled center by moving their practice into the spaces of the mass
relief sculptures, shown within the neighborhood, into more media and thus into the realm of national and interna-
monumental public sculptures that could be presented to the tional discourse.

110] Chapter 4 Into the Streets

Gran Fury and ACT UP entrance on Broadway (fig. 4.22). Like the billboards of
Group Material’s A/DS Timeline, discussed above, reflected Barbara Kruger (see fig. 2.16) or John Lennon and Yoko
the growing politicization of factions within the cultural press Ono (see fig. 1.13), the window became a point of intersec-
and the increasing success of AIDS activists in coopting the tion between popular culture and fine art. It was now sur-
mass media. The most prominent activist group was ACT UP mounted by a pink triangle and the words “Silence=Death”
(AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). Angry at what appeared in neon lights, like a commercial sign. Appropriating com-
to be an official sanctioning of public ignorance and accept- mercial language for political ends became the hallmark of
ance of the deaths of thousands of people with HIV, ACT the artists involved. The name Gran Fury, borrowed from the
UP mobilized a network of locally based activists. Learning type of American car used by the New York Police Depart-
from the anti-war and free-speech movements of the 1960s ment, indicates the group’s characteristic mixing of popular
and 1970s, it kept a keen eye on opportunities to use the culture and political outrage. Its other projects included
mass media. Early actions of the group included marches on replacing copies of The New York Times in coin-operated dis-
political and economic targets that were designed to create pensers with The New York Crimes—which looked like the
imagery as well as to convey a message. Die-ins, in which pro- Times but was full of news relating to the AIDS crisis. In
testors obstructed thoroughfares by lying on the ground as 1989, Gran Fury took its politics to the streets with media
if dead, and other forms of passive resistance in the face of sawvy and a sense of joy in Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indif-
police hostility generated dramatic and hauntingly familiar ference Do (1989), which involved reworking an influential
images for the evening news and The New York Times. Benetton ad campaign. Featuring the heads of young, attrac-
In 1987, a spin-off group, Gran Fury, produced what has tive, racially diverse couples wearing the company’s clothes,
become the most recognizable icon of the movement. The the Benetton ads suggested in some degree that diversity
opportunity came in the form of an invitation when William rather than clothing was the product it offered for sale. For
Olander (1950-89), a curator at the New Museum, New its version, Gran Fury made a few alterations. Youths were
York, invited it to make use of the window by the museum paired off—two men, two women, and a man and a woman

4.22 Gran Fury, Let The Record Show, 1987. Installation at the New Museum, New York.
 «serpent te CTCL, -TLR

ca memmoreneen et SINGING

YOESN'T

in hc

4.23 Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, 1989. Bus poster, New York.

(fig. 4.23). Above the couples appeared the text: “Kissing David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco
Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” Carried on the Though the activist work discussed thus far has been located
sides of buses, the ads infiltrated the public space and con- primarily in New York, activist art was by no means so geo-
fronted viewers when they were, in Gran Fury’s words, graphically circumscribed. Three artists from San Diego,
“less defensive.” The intention was to “Bring a whole new David Avalos (b. 1947), Louis Hock (b. 1948), and Elizabeth
vocabulary—a whole new way of looking—to bear on the Sisco (b. 1954), became adept at using the mass media as
AIDS health crisis ... We want people to question what is a site for their work. Avalos was a longtime Chicano rights
out there.”!® activist, educator, and artist, as well as a founder of the
Meanwhile, ACT UP continued to expand the vocabu- Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronteriza (BAW/
lary of its actions. On one occasion it interrupted trading at TAF), in which Hock, a filmmaker, also participated. Sisco
the New York Stock Exchange by throwing fake money from was a photographer, filmmaker, and activist. Their collabo-
the observation deck to which its members had chained rations, like those of Group Material and Gran Fury, chal-
themselves. In the streets, the demonstrations grew larger lenged the myths of the isolated and individual artist, but,
and tended to end in sit-ins that culminated in mass arrests unlike them, Avalos, Hock, and Sisco did not assert a group
and the spectacle of police lifting the limp bodies of passive identity. Maintaining a macroscopic view of political and
resisters, all of which made for great footage on the evening economic systems became increasingly difficult as identity
news. Reflecting on a poster campaign presented at the 1990 issues came to the fore in the 1990s and clarity about author
Venice Biennale, Gran Fury member John Lindell (b. 1956) ship rather than self-effacement seemed most appropriate.
explained that its work only became art when it was the Because they worked in San Diego and often examined the
subject of press coverage: “It seems that artists can manipu- political and economic disenfranchisement of Latino popu-
late the baggage around the project as the real site ... the lations in the region around the U.S./Mexican border, it
physical project is just a blasting-off point.”!® With words such was assumed that they aimed to empower or represent that
as this, Gran Fury shifted the site for art not only out of doors particular community. But Avalos asserted that they did “not
and away from the museum, but into the mechanisms of profess nor attempt to ‘empower’ anyone, but instead [tried]
information dispersal and retrieval. to reveal public policies that [were] implemented without

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

public debate.”!” Identifying themselves as individuals—and appropriation art, Avalos, Hock, and Sisco directed viewers’
from different cultures—helped to establish that their work attention to what makes the city work: Dark-skinned hands
was based on political allegiances, not personal identity. Like wash dishes, provide maid service, and, in the center of
Wodiczko, their subject was not victims in need of assistance, the image, are handcuffed and pulled aside by a police
but a system in need of transformation. Their aim had less officer. Across the image is the title “Welcome to Amer-
to do with responding to existing communities than making ica’s Finest Tourist Plantation.” The text drew the con-
it possible for individuals to form new communities. When nection between the image of San Diego promoted by its
they succeeded, it was in ways that had more to do with the tourism board—“America’s Finest City’—and the reduc-
future than the present. “We deal with the possibilities of tion of its non-white population to a workforce with few
communities,’ ’ Avalos explained; “working as artists, within a resources or rights. Since San Diego was hosting Superbowl
community context, we create models.”!® This conviction— XXII that year, the increased media presence in the city
that art can be a conceptual stepping stone by which a viewer gave extra publicity to the event and, like the bus routes
can imagine social change—was shared in numerous com- that carried the work through the city, transported the
munities. Via the mass media, the art world, academia, and issues it raised into a national and even international dis-
community outreach, Avalos, Hock, and Sisco elaborated a cussion of the economic factors underlying U.S. leisure.
history of art that was committed to social, artistic, and criti- Avalos has cited courses at the University of California,
cal engagement with the structures of contemporary society. San Diego on art, Russian film, and propaganda, specifi-
Two works that explore the politics of the U.S./Mexican cally one taught by Martha Rosler (see fig. 1.30), as forma-
border territory are Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Planta- tive influences, and it is possible to see in the sensitivity here
tion (fig. 4.24), a 1988 bus ad campaign, and Arte Reembolso/ to image/image and text/image juxtapositions an echo of
Art Rebate (1993) (see fig. 4.26), a performance involving Rosler’s practice as well as that of the Soviet filmmakers.
giving $10 bills to undocumented Latin American labor- The style of Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation
ers. The first introduced a small event, in the form of a bus relates it to the political work of appropriation-based artists
ad, into the urban fabric of San Diego. Enlisting the style of and distinguishes it from the prevailing tenor of what was

N DIEGO TRANSIT

Dt, Aa. A.d_ A, A Pena

4 CORNER SWINGS
ee aN e

SARI OOP

4.24 Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos, Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation, January 1988.
Commercially screened photomontage, 21 x 72" (53.34 x 182.88 cm). One of 100 posters on San Diego Metropolitan
Transit buses throughout San Diego County. Courtesy of the artists.

From Marked 1Territory to the Mass Medic

4.25 Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 911: A House Gone Wrong, 1987. Mixed media. La Jolla
Museum of Contemporary Arts, San Diego, April 3-June 28, 1987. Installation artists: David Avalos, Michael Schnorr,
Robert Sanchez, Victor Ochoa with SaraJo Berman, Eriberto Oriol, and Ignacio Enloe. Courtesy the artists.

being called “Border Arts” in San Diego, the best-known economy of the U.S./Mexican border territory. Avalos,
example of which was BAW/TAF’s installation 911: A House Hock, and Sisco argued that the reverse process occurred
Gone Wrong (1987) (fig. 4.25). Here, the artists combined all the time as undocumented workers spent money, paid
stagecraft and sculpture, creating a world turned upside sales taxes, and provided labor for the national economy
down, with a lawnmower cutting an Astroturf yard on the without receiving the benefits that the same contributions
ceiling and a soundtrack of news bulletins about crises on would earn an officially recognized citizen. In response, they
the border or farther south punctuated by a busy signal turned $4,500 of a $5,000 grant they had won to participate
from an unanswered 911 call. Beyond this front space, with in an exhibition, “La Frontera/The Border,” produced by the
its U.S. identity, complete with well-manicured lawn, was a Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contempo-
shelter like those visible on the Mexican side of the border rary Art, San Diego, into new $10 bills, recorded their serial
that was full of newspaper articles and editorials relating to numbers, and distributed them to undocumented workers as
life and law at the border. The installation evoked the tension “rebates” of a portion of the tax dollars that they had paid.
and chaos of binational relations in San Diego in a dra- The payment was accompanied with a signed document
matic and enveloping form, using surreal and expressionis- stating: “This ten dollar bill is part of an art project that
tic means. ‘ intends to return tax dollars to taxpayers, particularly undoc-
In 1993, Avalos, Hock, and Sisco furthered their engage- umented taxpayers. The Arte Reembolso acknowledges your
ment with public policy by intervening directly in the role as a vital player in an economic community indifferent
economy and the news media. With Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate to national borders.” To the recipients, the rebate expressed
(fig. 4.26), they responded again to the symbiosis between gratitude, while to U.S. citizens it was a reminder that their
what they were now calling undocumented taxpayers and the social services were paid for in part by the labor of those
U.S. economy, and in doing so stepped even further from denied citizenship.'®
the expected visual language of contemporary art. The piece As important as making such statements, however, was
involved the transfer of money from the official economy the fact that as an artwork, the Reembolso engaged a wide
of governmentsupported organizations to the unofficial range of the population. The most obvious participants

Chapter 4 Into the Streets

 “This ten doifar bill is part of an art projec =
that intends to return tax dollars to taxpayers,
particularily “undocumented taxpayers.”
The art rebate acknowledges your role as a
vital player in an economic community
indifferent to national borders.

+ The economic growth of California and more in social services than they give in
the Southwestern U. S. could never have combined local, state and federal taxes.
happened without the labor of undocu-
+ Not only are the crucial economic contribu-
mented workers.
tions of the undocumented overlookedor
+ Historically,
the U.S. govern- SEMBOLS, denied, these workers payfeder-
ment, business and society nod al income tax, social secur-
have been willing to look rs e ity, State income tax, DMV
the other way as long as s fees, sales tax and more.

feyavenioring tem
labor
PED © undocumented wrkesa undocumented taxpayers.
+ You pay taxes when you eat a taco at
+ Today, in a wrecked economy, the so-
“berto’s, shop for socks at K-Mart, buy
called “illegal alien” is once again blamed
toilet paper, hand soap or razor blades at
for the social problems of the region and 4
edaxa drain onthe soniy: fa Lucky or fill up your tank at Thrifty Gas.
x JUL 30-W83
fact, there is nocredible statistical + Regardless
of your immigration status,
evidence that undocumented workers take if you shop you pay taxes. Period.

“Art Rebate” isa project byElizabeth Sisco. Louis Hock and David Avalos. Itispart ofthe “La Frontera/The Border” exhibition co-
sponsored bythe Centro Cultural delzRaza and the Museum of Contemporary Ar, San Diego, and made possible, inpart,through the
generous support ofthe National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, The Rockefeller Foundation, the City of San Diego
‘Commission for Arts and Culnure, and the Califomia Arts Council

Undocumented gerry

4.26 Elizabeth Sisco, louis Hock, and David Avalos, Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate, July-September 1993. Street performance/
media event: ten-dollar bills signed by each artist, receipts signed by rebate recipients, English/Spanish language flyers,
envelopes. Performed on street corners, highways, and migrant camps throughout San Diego County. Courtesy the artists.

were the artists, the arts institutions, and the individuals la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
who received the $10 rebates. Beyond the exhibition or the were punished by having the portion of their grant that had
action itself, TV news coverage and print journalism turned been used for Arte Reembolso taken back.
the semi-private exchange into a public debate. The ensuing Avalos, Hock, and Sisco’s work created what Hock has
discussions were extended through local Spanish- and described as a “conceptual social space.””? The work mixed
English-language media outlets, often at the invitation pragmatism and utopianism in a way that has facilitated its
of the artists, to penetrate even the national political dis- continuing relevance and development. Pushing beyond
course. Mass-media attention was not mere publicity. As the the confines of the traditional frame of the artwork and out
grant money provided the raw material rather than finan- into the wider public discourse has given these projects an
cial support for the project, television and radio were also afterlife. Even our discussions of the work today extend and
the artists’ media. With their 1988 bus-ad campaign, Avalos, expand the work, just as the initial debates in San Diego in
Hock, and Sisco had influenced the discourse surround- 1988 or 1993 did. To talk about works such as Arte Reembolso
ing the border economy by placing an image in the city and or Group Material’s Democracy is to contribute to their con-
watching the response it drew. America’s Finest Tourist Planta- tinuing growth, and since the issues they raised—citizenship
tion was, at root, a work of representation; Arte Reembolso was and economic parity, the AIDS crisis, colonialism and post-
not. Since the artists had received funding from the National colonial relations, homelessness, education, and more—
Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a Federal agency, the Reem- are still with us, these works of the 1980s and early 1990s
bolso was exactly, and not merely symbolically, what it pur- continue to be relevant in the 2010s. Discussed in the first
ported to be—the return of tax dollars to taxpayers. In this decade of the twenty-first century, at a point in history when,
way, the artists acted directly in the political economy, effec- in the U.S. at least, issues such as immigration and citizenship
tively redistributing money from the national coffers. Every- have been folded into discussions of terrorism and national
one who paid Federal taxes thus participated in some degree. security, and when the AIDS crisis has been pushed further
Under pressure from forces both in and beyond government, from the national agenda even as it devastates populations
ready to use any excuse to cut public funding to the arts, the and regions of the non-Western world, this body of work can
NEA reacted with great displeasure. The Centro Cultural de continue to function just as it did when it was first created.

From Marked Territory to the Mass Media

 Commodities and Consumerism

t first glance, the 1985 season in the East Village (see Steinbach, and also European sculptors such as John M.
Chapter 4) looked pretty familiar. Though there Armleder from Switzerland and Rosemarie Trockel from
was a sense that a peak had been reached, new gal- Germany, appropriated commodities, fabricated replicas of
leries were still opening and collectors were primed to move consumer goods, and copied logos, choosing their sources
in and invest. One of the newer spaces, International with for their social connotations and formal qualities. Unlike
Monument, stood out from the D.LY. celebrations and alter- the appropriation artists, with whom they share aspects of
native sincerity of its neighbors. Here was a polished gallery their practice, but very much like both movements’ Pop art
that looked like the franchise of a smart SoHo establish- predecessors, commodity artists drew criticism about their
ment. It showed art that reflected its professionalism in what intentions: It was impossible to tell if the art was intended
appeared to be knowing references to art history and critical as Marxist critique or capitalist praise of its subject matter.
theory and a knowing attitude toward the market. Sculptor Viewers did not know how to respond to a display of vacuum
Jeff Koons and painter Peter Halley, who were both given cleaners, a stainless-steel whiskey decanter, or fire tools. The
solo shows there in 1985, along with Ashley Bickerton and artists’ statements rarely clarified things. In Steinbach’s view,
gallery co-founder Meyer Vaisman, recast Minimalist and there had appeared a “renewed interest in ... taking pleasure
Pop aesthetics into what was quickly dubbed commodity art in objects and commodities” and a “stronger sense of being
and Neo-Geo (neo-geometric). Rejecting the photo-based complicit with the production of desire than being posi-
intellectualism of appropriation, the cathartic expressivity of tioned somewhere outside of it.”! Such insider status led to a
Neo-Expressionism, and the ad hoc populism of installation, pervasive ambiguity within commodity art and its reception.
this new brand of contemporary art looked, like the gallery In Europe, Armleder, whose work consisted of arranging fur-
that promoted it, self-consciously polished. Koons, Halley, niture and composing with store-bought fixtures and other
and company referenced consumer culture and modern people’s art, was content to label his assemblages “pudding”
art by featuring brand-new consumer goods, logos, and and his subject matter “jello-culture.”* In New York, Jeff
geometric compositions that clearly quoted Modernist prec- Koons laid claim to social critique but couched his politics in
edents (see fig. 5.1). Rather than copying or paying homage pleasure, explaining that art that was not directed at society
to the earlier styles, however, these new works purported to was “like sex without love.”® This was not the expected lan-
be “simulations” in the spirit of the newly fashionable theo- guage of social critique and failed to appease critics who
ries of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Sorting out the saw signs of complicity in the rising prices and profiles of
relationship between Neo-Geo theory and practice would contemporary artists. Within a year, the four artists from
take some time for contemporary, onlookers, and will occupy International with Monument had been picked up by the
a central place in this discussion. legendary gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, formerly Andy War-
“Commodities” is the name for goods in a capitalist system hol’s dealer, and Neo-Geo grew to include Sherrie Levine
that we buy and sell, not only for the functions they fulfill, and Ross Bleckner. The financial success of the work was
but also for the intangible satisfactions relating to status or accompanied by a critical furor inflated, like the debates over
sentiment that they provide. A car or a watch, for instance, Neo-Expressionism, by claims of conspiracy, bad faith, and
is designed so that its form fits its function, but, as we know, ignorance. The issue, however, was more complex than such
there are far more reasons than transportation and time- a response allowed. Artists faced the challenge of balancing
keeping to buy either. Commodity artists such as Koons, critique of the art world with their desire to participate in it,
but also those beyond the International With Monument a feat that, as Trockel acknowledged to her dealer and friend
stable including Israeli-born New York-based sculptor Haim Monika Spruth, was perhaps impossible.*

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

 time before the degree to which commodity artists were con-
Market Forces
cerned with production became clear, and likewise decades
By the fall of 1985 those who frequented New York art gal- before any consensus could be reached on the creative power
leries could be expected to understand that an appropriated of consumption. In the meantime collectors and museums
image was, among other things, an invitation to contemplate included commodity art, like Neo-Expressionism, in their
the power of representation and the ubiquity of images in collections, adding to the urgency and anxiety felt in its criti-
the fabric and function of contemporary society. Galleries cal reception.
and museums are, after all, places to look and think about
what one sees; they are also, however, sites of commercial Jeff Koons
exchange and places to safeguard valuables. It is these latter The most dramatic and controversial of the commod-
functions that seemed to come alive when viewers found ity artists was Jeff Koons (b. 1955), who had studied at
themselves standing before handsomely displayed merchan- the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with Ed Paschke
dise or finely fabricated liquor bottles. Even after decades of (1939-2004). Though Paschke’s subject matter, as seen
seeing artists rely on found objects, re-presented commodi- in Mid American (1969) (fig. 5.1), tended to be drawn
ties created a great deal of anxiety. The issue rested on ambiv- from the gritty underbelly of urban entertainments, his
alence in the new work with regard to its politic message. On embrace of lowbrow pleasures and high-keyed color and
the one hand one might assume that a social critique was corresponding delight in artifice and masquerade can
intended by the equation such art implied between shopping be seen in Koons’s work. Upon arriving in New York in
for luxury goods and collecting art. Andy Warhol had set 1977, Koons became a commodities broker on Wall Street
the tone for such a reading by celebrating his use of copies and a remarkably successful membership sales associ-
as a means of simplifying the creative process and making it ate for the Museum of Modern Art. His artistic career
possible for everyone to own art thus setting the democratic would likewise join the worlds of capital and culture. In
promise of mechanization against the uniformity industri- the spring of 1980, Koons lavished a new kind of atten-
alized society forces upon human experience. How to read tion on commodities in the Broadway window of the
the 1980s generation of re-purposed commodities and care- New Museum. of Art in SoHo, where he presented several
fully copied consumer goods, on the other hand, was not so brand-new vacuum cleaners smartly displayed in Plexiglas
clear. Unlike Warhol, commodity artists such as Koon and boxes illuminated by self-contained fluorescent lighting.
Steinbach emphasized the acts of buying and accumulating The arrangement looked like a cleaning supply store as
goods, rather than the acts of manufacture. It would take conceived by a Minimalist sculptor. Koons called the show

5.1 Ed Paschke, Mid

American, 1969. Oil
on canvas, 45 x 60"
(114.3 x 152.4 cm).
Att Institute Chicago.
Courtesy of the Ed
Paschke Foundation.

Market Forces
 nineteenth century through Duchamp’s readymades to
Pop art in the 1960s. In the museum, however, artists were
by definition in charge, but out on Broadway, facing the
man or woman on the street, they had to cater to the pub-
lic’s needs and desires like any other salesperson. Koons rel-
ished this position—he declared himself eager to claim “the
responsibility of manipulation and seduction” shouldered by
the entertainment and advertising industries.’ Like a good
advertisement, a well-designed object, or a compelling work
of art, Koons’s sculpture strove to create and then meet con-
sumer demand.
Koons’s early work stuck closely to Pop and Minimal-
ist precedents. The arrangements of upright household
vacuums and heavy-duty shop vacuums in “The New,”
including New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker (1981) (fig. 5.2),
are formally akin to Minimalist artist Donald Judd’s boxes
(see fig. 1.5). Koons, however, attempted to pack more tra-
ditional content into his objects. Caught in a suspended
state of immaculate newness, the vacuum cleaners in their
sealed boxes were intended to be expressions of confine-
§ ment, purity, life and death, and even nods to art history. In
the artist’s statements, the vacuums are anthropomorphic
“breathing machines” that explore issues of personality, self-
hood, and the “psychological state tied to ... immortality.”®
Koons even compared the vacuum to the Virgin Mary, in
the process perhaps testing his audience’s credulity, but also
drawing on precedents such as Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn
(1962) to invoke the emotional and even spiritual power of
popular culture.
In the mid-1980s, Koons stopped using “real” merchan-
dise and started copying collectibles, both high- and lowbrow,
employing materials traditionally associated with design and
the decorative arts. To make the work, Koons hired the best
craftspeople and technicians he could find, his own skills as
a maker being judged inadequate. For Jim Beam—J.B. Turner
Train (1986) (fig. 5.3), for instance, he had a collectible
whiskey decanter emptied of its contents, cast, and then sent
back to the Jim Beam distillery to be refilled and sealed with
the authenticating label. As with the earlier pristine vacuum
cleaners, the sanctity of the object’s interior is preserved and
used to convey an allusion to perfection and potential.
Just as Koons had earlier invested bought goods with
5.2 Jeff Koons, New Shelton Wet/Dry Tripledecker, 1981. Three vacuum
cleaners, acrylic, fluorescent lights. 124% x 28 x 28"(316.2 x 71.1 x spiritual content, so he now presented these new copied
7\.1 cm). Des Moines Art Center. © Jetf Koons. objects as political and even moral creations. A stainless-
steel statuette of Louis XIV (made in the same year) or a
whiskey decanter, such as in Jim Beam—J.B. Turner Train,
“The New” in celebration of the pleasures stimulated and could, Koons felt, provide an antidote to the crippling weak-
satisfied by novelty. As one stepped back from the New ness, moral vacuity, and political cynicism he saw in con-
Museum window, the sculptures blended into the merchan- temporary art. Koons’s logic worked like this: Kings and
dise displayed in the windows of the surrounding stores: kitsch occupied opposite ends of the spectrum in Western
Art and commerce looked the same. Viewers had long been culture, and casting them in highly polished reflective steel
able to stand inside a museum and celebrate the equation replicated the luxuriance of the former’s fine silver while
of art and life or mourn the degradation of art into com- catering to the lower budget associated with the latter. By
merce, a discussion with a long history extending from the responding to the aesthetic and acquisitive impulses of
integration of popular imagery into Realist painting in the consumers at different ends of the market, Koons claimed

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

5.3 Jeff Koons, Jim Beam—J.B. Turner Train, 1986. Stainless steel, bourbon.
11 x 114 x 6%" (27.9 x 289.6 x 16.5 cm). © Jeff Koons.

his work exhibited a form of power sharing that he described Haim Steinbach
as democratic. Whether this egalitarian impulse could be While Koons experimented with techniques of appropria-
actualized through his art, especially as it became a high- tion, Israeli-born, U.S.-educated and -based artist Haim
priced luxury good in its own right, is a question. What is Steinbach (b. 1944) refined his method of re-presenting mer-
clear is that the work functioned by creating a relationship chandise. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Steinbach was
between the middle-class desire for upward mobility and the working in New York, creating room-sized installations con-
reality that most of the middle class, itself losing its economic sisting of what looked like the combined contents of apart-
security in the 1980s, could be satisfied with imitations. ments, fabric shops, and grocery stores. His aesthetic was
Rather than critique either the circumstances that contrib- defined by the same vigorous and chaotic energy that shaped
uted to this situation or bemoan the bad taste it begat, Koons East Village productions of the period, and garnered atten-
celebrated the existence of desire and the ability for objects tion in exhibitions at Artists Space downtown and Fashion
to satisfy it. Moda uptown. Along the walls of the installations, he hung
Jim Beam—J.B. Turner Train was one of several stainless- display shelves: sometimes rather baroque assemblages,
steel sculptures featured in Koons’s second solo show at sometimes just boards on brackets. These supported all
International with Monument, “Luxury and Degradation.” manner of goods, from tabloid newspapers to teapots and
On the walls of the gallery, the artist displayed billboard- shampoo to sailboats. The shelves would soon become the
sized appropriations of liquor advertisements. Translucent focus of Steinbach’s practice. In the mid-1980s, like the cadre
cascades of caramel-colored alcohol poured past the steel at International with Monument, Steinbach eliminated his
objects. These luxuriant flows enhanced the allure of the pol- references to East Village chaos in favor of more subdued
ished steel, permitting glimpses of an intoxicating interior to and well-ordered style.
shimmer across the reflective exterior. If there was any ques- By 1984, Steinbach’s shelves supported primarily new
tion that this optical scintillation was meant to engage a phys- objects—lava lamps, kitchen pots, souvenir mugs, Halloween
ical response, Koons set the matter straight. “The surface of masks—unwrapped and arranged like colors on a canvas.
my stainless steel pieces is pure sex and gives an object both a The shelves themselves were uniformly shaped wedges, at
masculine and feminine side: the weight of the steel engages times nested, laminated most often in single colors but occa-
with the femininity of the reflective surfaces.”’ Surrounded sionally with patterns, and even chrome-finished. The effect
by the images, generated from the original negatives used was that of an abstract painting as much as that of arepresen-
by the advertising companies but printed on canvas instead tational sculpture. ultra red (1986) is one of a series of studies
of paper and using a more oil-rich ink, sex and surface in red that juxtapose towers of pots against rows of clocks
make contact. The centrality and power of such a heroic and clusters of lamps. In supremely black (1985) (fig. 5.4), the
vision of heterosexual sex repurposed from its role selling reflective onyx glaze of two ceramic water pitchers highlights
commodities and reproducing the capitalist status quo was the black text on three red boxes of soap detergent. wntitled
cause for critical alarm. The ambivalence of the work became (walking canes, fireplace sets) #2 (1987) presents a more con-
acutely problematic as Koons’s output reached higher and trolled palette of silvers and grays as canes and tools weave
higher prices, for, despite the conviction that commodity a surprisingly complex pattern offset by the room’s colors
artists could draw attention to and even reorient our desires, reflected in the chrome-covered shelf. In works such as these,
the art market seemed to indicate that it was business as Steinbach produces aesthetic pleasure with means shaped by
usual. The line between commodity art and art as commodity the supply and demand of the marketplace as much as by his
was being stretched thin. art-school training.

Market Forces
 ), CLEANS 1, CLEANS
2, SOFTENS 2, GOFTENS
9, CONTROLS STATIC i 4, CONTROLS STATIC.
¥

5.4 Haim Steinbach, supremely black, 1985. Plastic-laminated wood shelf; ceramic pitchers; cardboard detergent
boxes, 29 x 66 x 13"(73.7 x 167.6 x 33 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

Steinbach supplemented his aesthetic refinement with a

conviction that “all surfaces are social surfaces.”* In common
with all shoppers, he began with the undifferentiated
mass of consumer products arranged on store shelves and
transformed a selection of products into something of his
own—possessions. Unlike products, possessions, Steinbach
explained, “take on different characters, moving in an out
of concreteness, mystery, fantasy, the troubling, the reassur-
ing.”’ The various connotations created by juxtaposing such
evocative objects make up Steinbach’s subject matte r. With SAMSUNG
Nexzeer

a poetic sensibility attuned to the connotative and aesthetic

potential of things you can buy in a store, Steinbach com- Once= HIP
posed, in his words, a “map of human beliefs, necessities, and Thitten Wikson
exploration.”!° Gitene plus Gel

Marlhora
Ashley Bickerton
Calas
After graduating from CalArts in 1982, Ashley Bickerton
(b. 1959) moved east to New York to create his own brand
fe
US Sprint
of commodity art. Rather than manipulate objects, Bickerton
composed with logos. His works look like well-protected
packages labeled with icons arranged like stickers on a suit-
case. Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) (1987-88) (fig.
5.5), for instance, looks like a box that has been custom-
designed to hold lab equipment, firearms, or musical
instruments. It has a rubber tarp rolled below it, seemingly
providing additional protection, and is mounted on the
wall with substantial metal brackets. At the top Bickerton’s
logos title the work, announcing it to be a self-portrait, and
at the bottom act as a kind of artist’s signature. Bickerton
chose the rather anonymous female name of “Susie” to
contrast with the authoritative signatures of modern paint- 5.5 Ashley Bickerton, Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles), 1987-88.
Synthetic polymer paint, bronze powder and lacquer on wood, anodized
ing, the “Picassos” and “Pollocks” that adorn great art. In
aluminum, rubber, plastic, formica, leather, chrome-plated, steel and
Bickerton’s work, however, critique goes hand in hand with canvas, 89% x 68% x 15%" (227.1 x 174.5 x 40 cm). Collection of
complicity: Running up and down the edges of the box and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann
clearly branding the work is the real artist’s own signature Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong.

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

stylized into a recognizable and repeatable logo. The title others exploring its underside. By the 1990s, LA-based artist
of Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) heightens its ambiva- Mike Kelley (1954-2012) had produced a body of work that
lent stance toward issues of genius by inviting comparison to arrived, he felt, at a compromise between the mode of the
the French town of Arles’s most tormented self-portraitist, commodity artists sculpting out of consumer goods and the
Vincent van Gogh. However, Bickerton evades any kind of East Village or Colab crowd creating installations out of eve-
artistic contest by avoiding all pictorial references. Brand ryday waste (see Chapter 4). His paintings and sculptures
names are all that he uses to convey the content of the work; such as The Wages of Sin and More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be
they function like artifacts. The names “Renault” and “Marl- Repaid (1987) (fig. 5.6), made of stitched-together and care-
boro” suggest a drive through southern France, cigarette fully arranged discarded stuffed animals, became instantly
in hand, while “The Village Voice,” “Citibank,” and “Con iconic. All told, he appropriated, purchased, re-presented,
Edison” suggest the home Susie left behind in the U.S., “Gil- enlarged, copied, and arranged—all proven strategies of the
lette Atra Plus” hints at a male companion, while “Surfer appropriation and commodity artists. He also painted, per-
Magazine” and “Body Glove” detail the couple’s interests. formed, collaborated, vandalized, scrawled, and narrated—
The artist and his subject are nothing more than the sum devices common to the assemblage installation artists and
total of what can be communicated by a brand name. even the Neo-Expressionists. His training, first at a conven-
tional painterly art school and then at the conceptually ori-
Mike Kelley ented CalArts in the late 1970s, suggests a pattern to Kelley’s
While Koons and company explored the gratifying surfaces eclecticism. His performances, installations, films, videos,
and indulgent associations of the commodity, there were music, cartoons, prose, and criticism, however, demonstrate a

5.6 Mike Kelley, The Wages of Sin and More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, 1987. Stuffed fabric toys
and afghans on canvas with dried corn; wax candles on wood and metal base, 90 x 119% x 5" (228.6 x
302.9 x 12.7 cm) overall plus candles and base. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds
from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 89.13a-e. © Kelley Studio Inc. /Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Market Forces
 thought process that goes beyond a simple dialectic between of art—sensuality becomes decoration, masquerade permits
painting and Conceptualism, or between Jeff Koons and revelation, and perception breeds comfort. Adolescence
Colab. By the late 1980s, he had directed his attention to, in Kelley’s work appears as the time when the laws of culture
among other topics, the coincidence of art and crime, mys- and selfhood are struggled with and rejected, but also
ticism, pleasure, power, affection, abasement, and the body. internalized. Embracing adolescence is also polemical for
Over the next two and a half decades, Kelley would pay par- Kelley: Making art about teenagers, he feels, constitutes an
ticular attention to the processes and consequences of sociali- art-historical rejection of what he sees as the Modernist ide-
zation and adolescence. alization of childhood and the Postmodern hyperanalytic
The 1989 statement used to introduce his second volume preoccupation with adulthood.'?
of collected writings, Minor Histories (2004), illustrates the It is perhaps not surprising in the context of identity and
ease with which Kelley moved through narratives of adoles- body art of the 1980s and early 1990s that Kelley’s work would
cent pathos to psychoanalytical speculation, cultural inter- be read as confessional. Yet intimacy and self-exposure were
pretation, and aesthetic appreciation, with even a nod to processes and subject matter for Kelley, not a means of access
contemporary theoretical interests of center and periphery, to the artist’s psyche. Kelley intended the hyperbolic style of
masquerade, and the body: his writing, like the absence of personal touch in his stuffed
animals and explicitly neutral drawing style, to evade asso-
Wallflowers ... those shy ones! Oh! Cling! Cling thee to
ciations between the work and his personal life. Eventually
the furthermost borders—the hinterlands. Sublimate,
Kelley would stop resisting and embrace his viewers’ impulse
oh sublimate thy libidinal impulses into decorative
to seek answers in biography. He did not, however, make con-
organic motifs ornamental hair growths, aestheti-
fessional art, but instead mixed seemingly autobiographical
cally placed tattoos. Beauty-mark thyself!
details—“much of it is blatant lies’—with the material culture
Yes. The meeting of eyes. Lightning flashes. The
of youth, including yearbooks, newspapers, textbooks, poster
intertwining sight lines—follow them. Yes. Glinting orbs.
advertisements, children’s art, comic books, pornography,
Gazes fixed, positioned, and mapped, uh huh. Place
programs and photographs from amateur theater clubs,
thyself in Polar Zones of separation. But wait! Tight
churches, universities, alumni clubs, and student unions, and
wooden mind, chopped off from the body trunk. Oh!
testimonials of all sorts, ranging from diaristic to therapeu-
Yes! Yes! Fold the fruit away from the hard seed. Slough
tic in tone.'* The result is an oeuvre overloaded with subject
off thy mortal tarp and reveal thyself ... im glory ...
matter. In a 1991 installation he even included monumental
Oh!Oh!Oh! ... the essential form lies beneath ... timeless.
crystalline room deodorizers as if to ward off the unpleasant
Floating, we are in the free area designated
odor of excess.
“endless periphery.” 11
Kelley’s embrace and fabrication of autobiography cul-
In this short passage, Kelley performs his conviction that minated in “Toward a Utopian Arts Complex” at Metro Pic-
the emotions of the reticent U.S. teenager and his or her tures Gallery in New York in 1995. The centerpiece of the
response to society coincide with the hermeneutic strategies exhibition was Educational Complex (fig. 5.7), a cityscape

5.7 Mike Kelley,

Educational Complex,
1995. Installation at
Metro Pictures Gallery,
New York, 1995.
Synthetic polymer, latex,
foam core, fiberglass,
and wood, 57% x
192% 6 x 96%" (146.7
x 488.2 x 244.2 cm).
Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York:
purchase with funds from
the Contemporary
Painting and Sculpture
Committee 96.50.
© Kelley Studio Inc./
Mike Kelley Foundation
for the Arts.

ae Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

representing Kelley’s induction into society. His childhood debate. For at this point, the whole drama of the law and
home is there, as is his local church, Catholic elementary the system of justice merges with the territory of aesthetics.
school, public high school, college, and graduate schools. The implication is that life at its most ‘real,’ where it inter-
These buildings are modeled on Kelley’s memories. Most are sects with the agencies of power, with that which controls
therefore only half-constructed and passages within are often you, also lies in the domain of art, of that which is created
hidden from view, blocked like the memories of a repressed or fictional.”'* In RMS as in narrative art, storytelling regard-
trauma. The resulting work has the appearance of an archi- less of its relationship to actual events was ascribed the power
tectural model made with insufficient information to actu- to create meaningful relationships between the individual
alize the structures. This is institutional critique made with and the world. In the “Toward a Utopian Arts Complex”
tongue in cheek. show, the viewer could turn from the lacunae in Educational
Kelley’s turn to autobiography and its lapses coincided Complex to the walls of the gallery and read of horrors that
with a fascination in the U.S. with Repressed Memory Syn- truly warranted repression. Oversized clippings from newspa-
drome (RMS). Practitioners of RMS therapy argued that the pers published in cities where Kelley had lived or exhibited
sources of many mental illnesses lay in traumatic events that reported gruesome cases of violent and at times preposterous
had been forgotten through a defensive coping mechanism. assaults. As a whole, “Toward a Utopian Arts Complex” pro-
As with Freudian repressions, the lost memories plague the vided a map of the traumatic passage from mythic childhood
individual until they are exposed and discussed. RMS prom- innocence into the damaged world of adult life. All that was
ised concrete causes for a host of mental-health issues and missing were the actual memories.
quickly became popular, not only as a treatment but as a In 2000, Kelley stepped up his practice of fabricating
form of entertainment on talk shows and in the mass media. memories with the first part of the projected 365-part Extra-
Critics charged that recovered memories—most often involv- curricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, in which anonymous
ing scenes of childhood sexual abuse—were fictions created high-school activities became the catalyst for fantastic explo-
under the sway of eager therapists, television producers, and rations of those moments that stood out in adolescence.
lawyers. The stories repeated by vulnerable individuals trying Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (2000) is a
to account for the pain in their lives often became grounds black-and-white film of a domestic scene based on a single
for legal action. Though some people did manage to clarify yearbook photo of two boys in what looks like a coldwater
painful events in their lives through the technique, the pres- flat in an unnamed city. Five years later Kelley presented
sure placed on memory often led to the generation of fic- Day Is Done: Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions
tionalized autobiographies—which had real consequences. #2-32 (2004-05) (fig. 5.8), with elaborate sculptural and
Kelley explained: “this is where I become interested in the video installations that fuse reinventions of religious rituals,

5.8 Mike Kelley, Shy Satanist

(Extracurricular Activity
Projective Reconstruction
#19), 2004-05. From the
project Day is Done. Mixed
media with video projection
and photograph(s), 86 x 112
x 116° (218.44 x 284.48 x
294.64 cm). Exhibited at
Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea
(London) in 2005. © Kelley
Studio Inc. /Mike Kelley
Foundation for the Arts.
Courtesy of the foundation and
Gagosian Gallery.
vampiric rites, and high-school musicals. As in the first commodity artists treated the things and labels in their art as
Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction, the produc- placeholders for desire—for luxury, class mobility, adventure,
tion of Day Is Done began in yearbooks and school publica- satisfaction, and meaning. Both Neo-Geo and commodity art
tions. For the ensemble of numbers 2-32, Kelley wrote lyrics relished the instability of the individual components of their
and music for short theater productions that elaborated or artistic vocabulary—of geometric shapes or found objects—
explained the photographs. He then enlisted dozens of per- and put great faith in viewers’ inclinations, perhaps even
formers to step into the roles with all the heart and hyper- against their will, to treat the things and forms in the art as
bole of stereotypical high-school actors, but with the skills of referents to complex contemporary and historical meanings.
professionals. The gallery is darkened and the viewer moves
from station to station amid the cacophony of competing Peter Halley
musical and theatrical performances. A photograph of two Peter Halley (b. 1953) would be the most visible and vocal
boys dressed as nineteenth-century dandies inspires a nar- member of the International with Monument group in its
rative of a young man’s realization of his homosexual iden- first years, and it was he who provided the initial theoretical
tity. Another photograph, this time of two boys awkwardly foundations of Neo-Geo. Halley began writing reviews and
dressed as Nazis, is transformed into an uncanny conflation criticism before attaining prominence as an artist. The recep-
of hip-hop in the spirit of Sir Mix-a-Lot, Baby Got Back and tion of his art and that of his peers was strongly influenced
the musical theater of Cabaret. In Day Is Done, the blockages by his reflections on the writings of Michel Foucault, Jean
that kept us out of the corridors of Educational Complex are Baudrillard, and Robert Smithson, and on a variety of histori-
cleared, and the repression, imaginary and real, that fueled cal and contemporary art. His paintings, however, were not
RMS trauma is unleashed. We see the fictionalized memories, simply illustrations for his theoretical texts. In many cases,
heroic and traumatic, artificial, absurd, and strangely poign- their characteristic forms appeared on canvas years before
ant, played out to their utmost; the yearbook source photos being discussed in his writings. Both image and text were
are there to verify the truth of it all. The combinations of thus part of an intellectual and aesthetic investigation that
veracity and artifice, confidence and doubt, and accuracy and drew on theory, experience, and observation, and that moved
irrelevance that define adolescent productivity characterize between diverse and at times contradictory positions.
the power and pleasure of Day Is Done. His work, exemplified by Two Cells with Circulating Conduit
(1985) (fig. 5.9), consisted of squares, rectangles, and
bars that he called “cells” and “conduits” to draw attention
Signs and Abstractions to their technological and social as well as aesthetic roots.
While the commodity artists embraced the world of brands Here, in the form of electrical circuitry, urban grids, and cell
and goods as the tools for representing contemporary blocks, were symbols of the networks of communication and
culture and the relationships that define it, a number of power in contemporary society. Halley’s compositions also
painters took up the iconic styles of Modernist geomet- refer to the history of geometric abstraction from the early
ric abstraction with similar zeal. Peter Halley and a group twentieth-century Modernists to the more recent Minimal-
of artists who came to be called Neo-Geo appeared to take ists. To viewers versed in the history of modern art, a painting
up the Minimalist mantle in much the same spirit as Koons composed of several squares conjured Suprematist compo-
and company appeared to be writing a sequel to Pop art sitions by Russian revolutionary painter Kazimir Malevich
and Dada. Unlike the Neo-Expressionist embrace of his- (1878-1935), for whom the geometric shape unlocked from
torical styles, which appeared either to assert the emotional traditional rules of composition was a key to imagining the
depth and philosophical urgency of gestural paintings, as if modern citizen free of existing power structures. The same
they could still function as they had in the Expressionist or compositions also evoke the grids of Piet Mondrian (1872-
Abstract Expressionist movements, or—to the contrary— 1944) and his conviction that the proper placement of hori-
pronounce them dead, empty gestures devoid of content, zontal and vertical lines and blocks of primary colors allowed
Neo-Geo was acutely concerned with style as an ambigu- artist and viewer to reach an intellectually and spiritually
ous bearer of meaning. Like commodity artists, Neo-Geo productive life. Halley’s abstraction also had sources in the
practitioners held to the assumption that meaning in their architecture of the International Style, which appealed to
work relied first and foremost on the socially determined the grid as a means of capturing in glass and steel, stone and
significance of its contents. Formal and phenomenological space, structures most able to respond to modern needs for
qualities were still important, as demonstrated by Halley’s living, as well as in the phenomenological clarity of Minimal-
centralized compositions and embrace of artificial Day-Glo ist sculptor Donald Judd’s box forms (see fig. 1.5), used to
paints or by Sherrie Levine’s turn to the unusual and histori- elicit sensations outside the confines of either art history or
cal medium of casein. Surface and composition, however, social life. In reminding viewers of the range of uses to which
were secondary to consideration of the work of art as a field artists have enlisted geometry, Halley makes the argument
of signification in which styles provided a record of past that forms, like commodities, do not have a single, essential
attempts to order society, the body, and the cosmos, much as significance, but rather take on different meanings through

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

5.9 Peter Halley, Two Cells with Circulating Conduit, 1985. Acrylic, Day-Glo acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas,
63 x 108" (160.02 x 274.32 cm). Courtesy the artist

use and context. These meanings constitute the history of the schools, hospitals, streets, and prisons to devices for organ-
style, and become material for the contemporary artist. izing time and information including clocks, charts, graphs,
Halley grew up in New York in a left-wing, intellectual and calendars. Halley’s geometry was thus invested with
family, went to Yale, and after college moved to New Orleans. direct social meaning.
There, he began thinking about Modernism as a language In Discipline and Punish (1975), a touchstone text for the
one could interpret and analyze. He also began looking period, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham’s
to the ubiquitous U.S.urban sprawl for inspiration. Upon Panopticon, a design for a prison, to address the role of
returning to New York in 1980, he started painting geo- vision in the distribution of power in modern society. In
metric environments with Roll-a-Tex and Day-Glo paints, 1785, Bentham conceived of a facility that would make it
materials from the construction industry. His garish yet possible to incarcerate a maximum number of inmates with
deliberately composed images parodied the idealist aspira- a minimum number of guards. He did so by replacing force
tions of Modernist geometric art by combining allusions to with a new configuration and use of architectural space.
the idealized patterns of modern urbanism, architecture, The Panopticon consisted of a guard tower surrounded by
and art, as well as to the realized appearances of middle-class a multistory ring of uniform cells; the central tower was illu-
real estate developments and cheap hotels. The geomet- minated from within in such a way that the guards could see
ric compositions and textured surfaces also had personal the inmates without themselves being seen. In this way the
sources in the appearance of the artist’s own apartment and burden of control shifted from the guard, who previously
unshaven face. Soon after returning to New York, Halley had to seek out infractions, to the inmate who, knowing
joined a theory and cultural criticism reading group where he is never out of view, now becomes the agent of his own
he read Foucault and discovered “in the square a prison, punishment. Bentham’s design enlisted the psychology of
behind the mythologies of contemporary society a veiled the scrutinized subject as the primary means of maintain-
network of cells and conduits.”'® Halley’s thinking, which ing order. Under threat of being seen, the prisoner guards
had begun as an intuitive reflection on modern art and himself. The Panopticon, Foucault suggested, made explicit
his surroundings in New Orleans, was now becoming inte- a key organizing principle of the workplace,
or school,
grated into a topology of power relations that extended, as hospital: Behavior is better controlled through isolation
Foucault described it, from the buildings and operations of and the fear of being observed than by force or the bodily

Signs and Abstractions

presence of authority. This new model of control took There is a painful conundrum in Baudrillard’s short history
specific forms, all based on the repetition of geometrically of the image; by its end, it is no longer possible to represent
defined units. Halley’s interest as a painter and art critic led the path by which it has come to pass. A society of the simula-
him to connect the appeal of geometric abstraction in Mod- crum has lost the ability to represent itself. It is this idea that
ernist art to patterns of modern social organization described Halley found central.to his work and the work of Neo-Geo
by Foucault, including the design of factories, the ordered artists generally.
division of time asserted through calendars and clocks, and In addition to the writings of Foucault, Baudrillard’s
even divisions of knowledge into disciplines as well as the sense of history and society builds on the thinking of
geometry of Bentham’s prison. Halley’s writing and paintings another French theorist, Guy Debord, especially his book
offer a bleak recognition of the degree to which the Modern- Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord had examined the
ist faith in abstract form, specifically geometry, might serve as shift from the industrial production- and distribution-based
a smokescreen for the ordering of modern capitalist society. society of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to
Halley soon expanded his analysis into the theoretical ter- the post-industrial service and information economy of
ritory of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra. In his 1984 essay “The the late twentieth century. The main product of this new
Crisis in Geometry,” Halley argued that while the writings of society, he suggested, was the spectacle, an image that,
Foucault were critical to understanding geometric art of the like a commodity or a dream, intervenes between our
1970s, Baudrillard’s ideas were essential to interpretation of senses and the world we perceive. People had become
the art of the 1980s. It had been Baudrillard, in fact, who in an audience waiting for a spectacle to observe rather
the late 1970s explained why it was necessary to think seri- than individuals creating a life to lead. “Everything that
ously about Foucault—and then move on. Foucault’s writing, was directly lived has moved away into a_representa-
in common with many of the theoretical reevaluations of tion,” he wrote on the first page of Society of the Spectacle."
culture, economy, psychology, and language since the late Representations, he elaborated, splinter off from any
1960s, rejected the existence of essential truths that could be relation to reality and form their own realm of the non-
discovered and promoted by the historian. History and lan- real, which unifies late capitalist society under what he
guage, he argued, must be understood as a series of tactical describes as the “spectral” power of the spectacle. This
agreements dependent on the needs and creativity of the his- corresponds to the second phase of Baudrillard’s history
torian. This perspective was called “Poststructuralist” because of the image and introduces the possibility of the third.
it rejected stable forms of history or knowledge. Baudrillard Foucault’s and Debord’s theories depicting Western
embraced Foucault’s arguments; however, he also sensed society as one of representations created a foundation for
that they remained wedded to authority and an idea of truth, theorizing the simulacra, a society-as-image with no repre-
albeit in a more liberating way. Beginning with the treatise sentational relationship to anything at all. If Foucault’s dis-
“Forget Foucault” (1977), Baudrillard forced Poststructur- cursive histories still contained, according to Baudrillard,
alist analysis to its logical conclusion. Even contingent and a lingering sense of Enlightenment truth, the spectacle,
shifting histories, he argued, lay claim to a certain truth- as Debord himself noted, still possessed the residue of the
value. In order to rid Foucault’s critique of its residual faith directly lived or the real. With his simulacra, Baudrillard
in this idea of truth, Baudrillard theorized a construction pushed past Debord’s image-world full of representations.
of the world that was distanced not only from the truth, but Simulacra dispense entirely with truth and representation
from reality as well. He called it “the simulacra.” by rendering the real not lost, dead, or absent, but quite
Baudrillard presumed that our experience of the world simply irrelevant. Unlike a copy, which validates the author
was so mediated that we had lost all contact with anything ity of the original through imitation, and unlike an appro-
even approximating a conventional idea of “reality.” In his priation, which recontextualizes and thus conceptually
1983 essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard pro- transforms the original, simulation puts to rest the competi-
vided a short history, an art history, which explained that tion between itself and any conception of the real. The simu-
images had once been representations of real things, but that lacrum validates nothing beyond itself. As Baudrillard wrote,
all that had now changed. In a society of simulacra, images “It is the generation by models of a real without origin or
ceased to refer to something else, something real, and took reality, a hyperreal.”!®
on a significance all their own—references without referents, Halley follows Baudrillard’s lead in examining the conflict
together making up a kind of hyperreality. Baudrillard writes: between reality and representation in contemporary life. His
painting and writing treat the simulacra as the limit point
These would be the successive phases of the image.
against which he charts his own history of the image. His The
It is the reflection ofa basic reality.
Place (1992) (fig. 5.10) is a case in point, its cells and con-
It masks and perverts a basic reality.
duits referring both to the real—that is, Halley’s observation
It masks the absence ofa basic reality.
of life in the city—and to his theoretical readings of Foucault
It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own
and Baudrillard. Emphasizing this multiplicity is Halley’s
pure simulacrum.!®
choice of title, which alludes to the way Andy Warhol referred

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

 5.10 Peter Halley, The
Place, 1992 Acrylic,
Day-Glo acrylic, and
Roll-a-Tex on canvas,
O52 x 86) (242.57
x 218.44 cm). Tate
Modern, London. Lent
from Mottahedan
Projects, Dubai. On
long-term loan since
2000

to hospital, a word he would not say out loud. Thus Warhol, art that juxtaposed conflicting propositions rather than telling
the artist known for holding a mirror up to contemporary us its conclusions, and thus mimicked life with its constant
culture, also reminds us of the power of naming and of the barrage of often irreconcilable oppositions. As fellow painter
important distance between the representation, “the place,” Ross Bleckner described it, painting was “an investigatory
and the reality, the hospital. tool, a language to think thought and not just to locate it.”!
Halley’s work, both written and painted, can be seen as
including all the stages of Baudrillard’s history of the image. Ross Bleckner and Sherrie Levine
As such, it constitutes a library of often conflicting ideas Ross Bleckner (b. 1949) and Sherrie Levine (see Chapter
about art and culture. For some, this indicated a lack of dis- 2) also saw painting as a means to reckon with the compro-
cipline and a streak of opportunism in the artist. Others were mised and compelling history of Modernism. Bleckner bor-
more generous in their assessments. The curator/writer rowed heavily from Op Art, a movement of the 1960s that
team of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, responsible for had experimented with graphic patterning to create optically
a number of East Village events, zeroed in on this abrasive surprising and often emotionally wrenching effects. In Departure
conjunction of incompatible positions as a source of strength (1986) (fig. 5.11), he combined a trancelike rhythm ofstripes
in Neo-Geo. In their eyes, presenting the viewer with prob- with a sensual application of paint. As the eye moves across
lems, irregularities, and confusion meant making art that was the pattern, it is stalled by dissolving passages of paint, as
instrumental and active, not instructive or directive. Here was though the clean lines and optical pleasure of Op Art are
 being interrupted by the tactility of Neo-
Expressionism. These disruptions invite the
viewer to explore the depths, both visual and
metaphorical, of the painting. On its surface
and through its suggestive title, Departure
transforms a repetitive pattern copied from
the past into a dirge for personal loss that
casts a pall over the optical pleasure created
by Bleckner’s paint. Bleckner further devel-
oped this theme of mourning through the
floral border he painted onto Departure, and
elsewhere in imagery he created based on
urns and blood cells.
Sherrie Levine combined appropria-
tion and painting differently. In her photo-
graphs, she had challenged presumptions
about authorship (see fig. 2.3). Now, through
her watercolor copies of reproductions of
artworks, she critiqued other claims made
for Modernism. Her target was what she
called the “false promise” that art could and
should reconcile oppositions of matter and
spirit, content and form, desire and reality.”°
Among Levine’s paintings are copies of Egon
Schiele’s Expressionism, Piet Mondrian’s De
Stijl, Joan Mir6’s Surrealism (fig. 5.12),
and Fernand Léger’s mechanical Modern-
ism, chosen because they represent radically
different combinations of such oppositions,
each suggesting not resolution but eruptions
of anxiety, energy, and desire in modern
life. As with Levine’s appropriation art, a
5.11 Ross Bleckner, Departure, 1986. Oil on canvas, 108 x 84" (274.3 x 213.4 cm).
© Ross Bleckner. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York. comparison to) Duchatip soa
eclectic objects that Duchamp presented as
readymades—a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a

5.12 Sherrie Levine, After Joan Mird, 1985. Three watercolors on paper, each 14 x 11"(35.6 x 27.9 cm).
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of Councilman Joel Wachs and the artist in memory of
Joe Bishop 86.6.1-.3. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

 5.13 Sherrie Levine, Lead Chevron: Il,
1988. Casein on lead, 20 x 20"
(S50 x 50 cm). © Sherrie Levine.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery,
New York.

urinal, for example—were chosen not for their unique prop- poignancy and personal expressivity of the handmade in her
erties, but as demonstrations of the creative act of the artist. paintings. These handmade copies of machine-made repre-
As appropriation, Levine’s copies make a similar statement, sentations of handmade objects are invested with a sense of
reflecting on how creative acts of others can be diminished craft and the connotations created by human contact. As if
as they become history. The particularity of her subjects— to focus our attention on the act of making, in the mid-1980s
Miro’s biomorphic, highly personal, and often whimsical Levine created a second series that emphasized her choice of
Surrealism or Mondrian’s abstract universality—is sacrificed materials. With her series of works alluding to geometric
in favor of their general status as “works of art.” Differences abstraction, including Lead Chevron: II (1988) (fig. 5.13),
are glossed over and antagonisms are quieted by the urge Levine reduces her compositional activity to copying the
to convey a cohesion in the Western artistic tradition’s most mundane patterns of chess and backgammon boards. But
recent chapter. Levine’s appropriation shows modern art her medium is highly unusual: Casein, a milk-based paint
reduced to little more than a series of illustrations and the with a history extending back to ancient Egypt and conveying
great variety of contradictions these works engaged—the an organic quality, is applied to lead, which provides the work
irreconcilable forces of desire and reality in Mir6o’s work or with a sensual and surprising presence. Levine thus brings
the universal and the particular in Mondrian’s, for instance— together geometric abstraction and games, sensuality and
have been reconciled, not in the active or confrontational criticality, history and contemporaneity.
synthesis that the artists strove after, but in the stasis of canon- Halley’s work inspired ire because its appeal to Baudrillard’s
ized history. theory of the simulacra seemed to insulate it from real-world
Levine’s paintings themselves, however, do resist being problems, while its sensually provocative surfaces and its
reduced to illustrations of a theoretical or political point by creator’s blue-chip gallery representation connected it to
introducing the very element that Duchamp had excised real-world pleasures. Levine’s art struck a different chord.
from his readymade and that textbook reproductions can- With the introduction of each new medium and material
not replicate—the artist’s touch. In a poetic twist, confoun- to her oeuvre, first watercolor, then casein, lead, wood, and
ding in the context of appropriation, Levine replaced the gold, she embraced more nuanced and esoteric aspects of
equivocating gaze of the photographer with the subtle painting. If Halley’s use of Day-Glo and Roll-a-Tex resisted

Signs and Abstractions

the transcendence of his abstractions, Levine sought out a General Idea’s Colour Bar Lounge, the set for the group’s 1979
sublime and “auratic presence” in her new work.?! Bleckner video Test Tube, and order a cocktail mixed to relieve “abstract
did a similar thing, investing what he deemed the “dead” repressionism.” Or you could wave a flag featuring three
style of Op Art with spiritual content, mystical light, and a brightly colored intersecting ziggurats and advocate turning
mysterious aura to match that of the turn-of-the-century Sym- the icons of power on their heads. General Idea’s humor was
bolists.*? Such emotive content, especially in the light of criti- rooted in the perception, shared by Neo-Geo artists, that the
cal challenges to Neo-Expressionism, drew sharp responses. creative work of the 1980s would involve manipulating pre-
In such a context, hearing an artist speak of “trying to col- existing symbols and integrating them into new critical con-
lapse the utopian and dystopian aspects of high modernism” texts. Clive Robertson, a performance artist, curator, and
could be harrowing.* If art was a conceptual exercise, or a critic based in Toronto, described the group’s art as subject-
game as Untitled (Lead Chevron I) suggested, then Neo-Geo ing the everyday to a “logic of ... ambiguity.”*4 Borrowing its
provided a safe space to examine the collisions of thought prose style, Robertson explained that General Idea created “a
and action; if, on the other hand, art was wholly complicit dense metaphorest cultivated for the production of sawn-off
with power, as Levine’s After Walker Evans: 7 (see fig. 2.3) sug- definitions which are ritualistically burnt to provide optimum
gested, then the art making had direct consequences in the smoke screen cover.”* Using a cocktail of appropriated bits
realm oflife. of high, mass, and sub-cultures, General Idea undermined
mainstream values and conventional expectations about the
General Idea relationship between art and society.
Though the techniques of Neo-Geo were thrust into the General Idea’s origin story reads like a page out of Andy
spotlight from the East Village and SoHo, they were actu- Warhol’s philosophy. Reflecting on its collective journey, the
ally being practiced across a much broader field. By the late group mused, “we wanted to be artists and we knew that if
1970s, the Canadian artist group General Idea, consisting we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists
of A.A. Bronson (b. 1946), Felix Partz (1945-94), and Jorge and we would be.”*° Making no reference to French theory
Zontal (1944-94), had polished a strategy of mimicking, or leftist politics, General Idea asserted that the key to artistic
appropriating, and transforming advertising, journalism, art authority lay in style. “We knew Glamour was not an object,
criticism, architecture, exhibitions, spectacles, camp, fine not an action, not an idea. We knew Glamour never emerged
art, satire, and education. In a variety of works including per- from the ‘nature’ of things ... We knew Glamour was artificial.
formances, parties, sculptures, installations, images, books, We knew that in order to be glamorous we had to become
videos, and seventeen years of FILE Megazine (1972-89), a plagiarists, intellectual parasites.”*” Armed with the skills
send-up of LIFE magazine, General Idea made art containing of the spy and the copyist, General Idea created a “super-
a high dose of sex, comedy, and politics. Tired of the rules abundance of significant forms and gestures.”** At its most
and constraints of society, one could sidle up to the bar in refined, the group’s art resembled the careful presentation

5.14 General Idea, Boutique from

the Miss General Idea 1984
Pavilion, 1980. Installation,
counter in the shape of a dollar
sign, constructed of galvanized
metal and Plexiglas, containing
various multiples, prints, posters
and publications, 60% x 131% x
102%" (153 x 335 x 260 cm).
Collection General Idea, Toronto/
New York.

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

5.15 General Idea, AIDS, 1989.
Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72"
(183 x 183 cm). (GI 155).
Private collection. Courtesy BFAS
Blondeau Fine Art Services,
Geneva.

of geometric signs and styles of Halley or Levine, but refine- Baudrillard. The viewer of the Miss General Idea 1984 Pavilion,
ment was not General Idea’s point. Modernist geometry was on the other hand, must find satisfaction in the deferral of
only one of many symbolic forms the group transformed in any such clarifying theoretical positions. The point of Miss
its art. Its most famous concoction was the Miss General Idea General Idea, the group explained, was to provide a “framing
1984 Pavilion (ca. 1970-ca. 1986), a fragmentary simulation device for arresting attention without throwing away the
of a nonexistent beauty pageant accompanied in several key’; our attention is captured, but is also free and encour-
incarnations by an actual gift shop, the Boutique from the Miss aged to roam.*® General Idea cast this quest for continu-
General Idea 1984 Pavilion (1980) (fig. 5.14). With Miss General ally shifting content in an altogether pleasurable context of
Idea, the group created an elaborate three-dimensional disco lights, dancing, sex, and fashion, suggesting that the
fiction that struck a delicate balance between describing coincidence of pleasure and indeterminacy is at the heart of
the condition of consumer desire, serving it, and mocking the project.
it, with the viewer invited to feel a confusing mixture of self- In the mid-1980s, General Idea joined International
consciousness, self-critique, and self-indulgence. with Monument, which soon after regrouped with modi-
In 1980, General Idea staged the simulated destruction by fied personnel in SoHo under the name Koury-Wingate. At
fire of the Miss General Idea 1984 Pavilion and began exhibit- this time, the character and content of General Idea’s work
ing artifacts from this nonexistent place as the Miss General changed significantly. In 1987, in response to the AIDS crisis,
Idea 1984 Armoury. Individual pieces included the Mar-Bells, the group executed the first of many presentations of the
marble barbells with which the artists “worked on problem letters “A,” “I,” “D,” and “S” in imitation of Robert Indiana’s
areas and built up those flabby clichés into three-dimensional (b. 1928) famous LOVE design (1989) (fig. 5.15). Indiana’s
insights,” or the Seats of Power, where they sat and relaxed.*® work had both refined compositional clarity and pop-culture
Unlike much Neo-Geo work, General Idea’s faux-relics references. For General Idea, it was even more important
frustrate one’s search for clues. Confronted with a Halley, that Indiana’s LOVE icon was already part of mass culture
the viewer can find answers in the writings of Foucault or through its adoption in numerous advertising campaigns.

Signs and Abstractions

 5.16 General Idea
One Day of AZT ,
1991, and One
Year of AZT, 1991.
Installation, 5 parts,
fiberglass and enamel,
each 33% x 84 x
33a: (85 se2Gree<
85 cm), and 1,825
vacuum-formed styrene
with vinyl, each 5 x
12% x Dav 27x
31.7 X 6: 3emItGSl
003). Installation view,
General Idea’s “Fin de
siecle,” The Power
Plant, Toronto, 1993.
Both works from
Collection General
Idea, Toronto/ New
York.

General Idea described its brand of appropriation as “viral,” AZT contrasts the hopeful optimism of most Pop-inspired
meaning that it served to hook the group into the networks work with echoes of the “Silence=Death” icon of Gran Fury
of distribution and recognition to which the source material (see Chapter 4). The AZT installation also demonstrates
was already connected. The already coopted LOVE image General Idea’s interest in cultivating viral relationships with
was thus ideal in permitting General Idea access to pre- different types of hosts. Recognizing the museum as another
existing cultural and commercial arenas. Ata moment when form of mass media, much as Barbara Kruger had in the late
AIDS was a public-health crisis but was not being discussed in 1980s (see Chapter 2), works such as the AZT pieces latch
constructive terms by national governments, General Idea’s onto the language of fine art to take the discussion of health-
image could be seen in museums and galleries, on buses and care and politics to a wider audience.
in subways, on television news programs, at demonstrations,
and in public-health campaigns across the globe.
In the early 1990s, General Idea created a series of
Commodity and Form in Europe
Minimalist-inspired sculptures and wall reliefs—such as One European artists shared concerns over the intersection
Day of AZT (1991) and One Year of AZT (1991) (fig. 5.16)— of capitalism and modern art, and of the commodity and
about the treatments being developed for AIDS. AZT was style, with their North American counterparts. As discussed
(and is) the most widely discussed and distributed treat- in Chapter 3, the coordinated presence in the decades
ment for AIDS-related symptoms. In 1991, the treatment after World War II of U.S. money and U.S. art inspired an
involved taking five pills a day at regular intervals and was urgent critique of aesthetics and art among many European
very expensive. The combined installation of One Day and artists and intellectuals. By the 1990s, nationalism had, to
One Year of AZT presents a single day’s dosage in the form of a great extent, faded from the picture, but the interest in
outsize pills, larger than a human body, resting in a narrow the aesthetic and social power of brands, logos, and goods
corridor, and then, climbing up the walls in an ordered remained strong.
grid, 1,825 smaller pills—the equivalent of one year’s pre-
scription. Not only does the work resemble the modular John M. Armleder
sculpture and reductive painting of Minimalism, it also The Europeans most often linked to U.S. commodity con-
evokes the regulating devices central to Foucault’s histories cerns are the Fluxus-inspired mixed-media artist John M.
and Halley’s imagery. As AZT is not a cure, the treatment Armleder (b. 1948) from Switzerland and the more politi-
described in General Idea’s works ends in death. One Year of cally oriented German artist Rosemarie Trockel. Armleder

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

shares with the U.S. artists what he has described as a readi- appearance of the familiar re-presented, and offer aesthetic
ness to treat Modernism as a set of effects to be manipulated pleasures that both repeat and slightly modify those already
by collection, assemblage, and transformation. His work has inherent in their component parts.
been acutely attuned to the power and potential of using Ne dites pas non! is a variation on a larger body of work that
commodities to aesthetic and hermeneutic ends since the Armleder calls “furniture sculpture,” begun in 1979. These
1970s and he has even included curating, perhaps the ulti- works are composed of carefully placed chairs, couches,
mate appropriative art, in his toolbox. benches, bar stools, dressers, carpets, lamps, and occasion-
Armleder began his career creating almost invisible inter- ally non-furniture items such as musical instruments or paint-
ventions into everyday spaces—repainting walls the color ings by Armleder and others. Untitled Furniture Sculpture 144
they already were and rearranging waste paper in trash (1986-87) (fig. 5.18), with its centrally presented canvas
baskets. Composing by arranging the things that already hung low between two cymbals liberated from their drum
circulate in our daily lives remained the foundation of kits, displays the characteristically rigid structure of the
Armleder’s practice and led to a slightly broader range of series. The piece has a limited color palette of white, green,
sources than is found in U.S. Neo-Geo. Typical of his work chrome, and brass. Deep green dots gridded across the white
is Ne dites pas non! (Don't say no!) (1986/2007) (fig. 5.17), canvas provide ordered counterparts to the cantilevered
a recurring collaboration between the artist and various arms and potential crash of the cymbals. Like most of the fur-
museums. For this piece, Armleder instructs curators to niture pieces, it possesses a strong sense of balance which in
buy furniture and display it with art from their collection. this case counters the threatening anxiety that the cymbals
He provides a general guide for the kind of furniture or art might be struck by a visitor thus knocking the composition
that should be selected, but puts the museum professionals askew. The meaning of the work is likewise open to flux. For
in charge of actually obtaining the materials and compos- some viewers, it will evoke art history—Op Art or Dada for
ing the installation. Curators thus become collaborators and instance—for others the allusion to sound, accident, and
fabricators, making decisions that affect the appearance and rock-and-roll may dominate. For the artist, all interpretations
content of the work. The results share with Neo-Geo the are equally acceptable.

5.17 John M. Armleder, Ne dites pas non! (Don’t say no!), 1986/2007. Selection of artworks from the permanent
collection of The Rose Art Museum and furniture. Installation view at The Rose Art Museum, Waltham. Courtesy of the artist.

Commodity and Form in Europe

 in a context that is itself variable enough to gen-
erate multiple connotations for it. Reflecting on
meaning in his work, Armleder said: “Materials
work. They have a range of visual, acoustic, sym-
bolic, decorative, associative, allegorical, and other
programs that will snare various understandings for
each and every user. And this will change depend-
ing on whether the visitors are alone, or with their
kids, or after a good or terrible lunch, a rainy day,
tax season, or an unhappy election outcome.”*!
Artist, object, audience, and atmosphere all con-
tribute to the meaning of Armleder’s art.

Rosemarie Trockel
In Cologne in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Rose-
marie Trockel (b. 1952) began crafting work that
mixed expression and analysis and took aim at
the nexus of art and the economy, with a particu-
lar focus on issues of gender and power. During
this period, she observed what she described as the
“mutual slaughter” of oneupmanship between the
Mulheimer Freiheit, a Neo-Expressionist group that
infused the painterly impulse of the Heftige Malerei
with a sense of Dada nihilism, and the circle of
self-consciously heterodox and stylistically incon-
sistent painters and sculptors around Martin Kip-
penberger (see Chapter 3).°? The energy of the
social life associated with these circles was invig-
orating, yet overwhelmingly male-dominated. It
was in this environment, in 1983, that Monika
Spruth opened a new gallery with a heterodox
5.18 John M. Armleder, Untitled Furniture Sculpture 144, 1986-87. Acrylic on feminist agenda, showing, publishing, and _pro-
canvas and two cymbals. Painting 118 x 78%" (300 x 200 cm); overall 118 x moting many women artists including Trockel and
118 x 59" (300 x 300 x 150 cm). Courtesy Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Zurich. significant U.S. figures including Jenny Holzer,
Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman
Though they denied the charge, the U.S. Neo-Geo artists (see Chapter 2). Spruth’s activities, including publishing a
were accused of making art about contemporary life that dis- journal, Eau de Cologne, significantly expanded the German
played neither judgment nor discrimination. Armleder, by art world. Trockel occupied a central place in this commu-
accepting all interpretations as equal, describing his work as nity and her work engaged the concerns of U.S. artists while
devoid of critique or even analysis, and invoking “pudding” being rooted in the specific history of Cologne.
as the most appropriate metaphor for it, seemed to aspire Untitled (1985) (fig. 5.19) illustrates Trockel’s complex
to just such a nonjudgmental art. Nevertheless, certain very exploration of issues surrounding Modernist form, corporate
general hermeneutic guidelines do appear as one steps back capitalism, gender, and German history. As an image, it has
from the aesthetic and emotional pleasures of Armleder’s three elements: 1) a symmetrical juxtaposition of two adja-
“pudding” to contemplate his carefully choreographed cent vertical rectangles, one red and one white; 2) a grid
exhibitions. For instance, the 2006 Ne dites pas non! was inte- pattern; and 3) two commercial logos, white Woolmarks on
grated into an installation that included imitation second- the left side, red Playboy Bunnies on the right. The grid of
generation Abstract Expressionist paintings hung on walls Untitled joins geometric abstraction—one of the foundations
covered with stenciled rats, brains, and jellyfish near works of Modernist art—to branding, the signature of Western
by other artists that themselves looked down on examples of capitalism. Trockel explained that her interest in patterns
Armleder’s furniture sculptures and arrangements of flowers, such as the grid derived from the fact that they function as
mirror balls, bricks, books, lights, and plastic Christmas trees. a “model to be copied.”** Patterns, like models, are a means
Such heterogeneous concoctions clarify Armleder’s open- to an end: An architectural model projects what a building
ended approach to meaning. It is not just that single works will look like, a pattern book guides the sewing of a dress.
have changing meanings, but that every work is embedded Trockel’s pattern of logos raises questions about what her

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

 5.19 Rosemarie Trockel,
Untitled, 1985.
Wool, two parts, total
7834 x 12574" (200 x
320 cm). Courtesy
Sprith Magers, Berlin/
London.

model represents and what is being proposed through its that postwar propaganda encouraged; however, it also sug-
execution. The geometry and brands of Untitled allude vari- gests the masks worn in the terrorist attacks that occurred
ously to categories of purity, beauty, and value, creating, in with alarming frequency in the 1970s. Trockel thereby
essence, a map of identity formation in which our values are transforms patriotic domesticity and conventional ideas
guided by the combined forces of Modernist art, corporate about gender into the masked face of anti-social violence,
power, and stereotypes of sex and gender. all the while knitting the defining shapes of Modernism
Untitled is an object as well as an image. As a blanket and the logos of capitalism into the substance of her art.
of knit wool, it connects to specifically German content. Moreover, the knit works are not handmade—they were
After World War HU, German women were encouraged produced to the artist’s specifications on mechanical looms.
to reclaim the conventional roles of mother, wife, and The sense of handiwork is thus entirely simulated, or rep-
homemaker as a means of rebuilding the German nation, resented, with the knit wool being linked to the production
much as women in the U.S. were encouraged to step back line rather than the living room. These paths, from passive
out of the workforce to make room for returning Gls. In domesticity to violent revolt, and from home to industrial-
Germany, wool was-associated with this nationalist agenda ized workplace, were exactly those traversed by women at
as a modest and useful material. Trockel’s knit pieces mid-century. Trockel described her process as taking the
refer specifically to this history, but they also challenge it. “material out of the [the context of women’s work] and
Balaclava (1986) (fig. 5.20) connotes the handmade care rework[ing] it in a neutral process of production.” The

5.20 Rosemarie Trockel, Balaclava, 1986. Wool on styropor and metal shelf, ca. 13% x 51V%e x 77"
(35 x 130 x 20 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy Spriith Magers, Berlin/London.

Commodity and Form in Europe

results reveal the wool to be a site of the interaction between Sylvie Fleury
ideas about craft, modernity, gender, history, nationality, By the 1990s, after the very visible interventions of Sherman,
economy, violence, and crime. Holzer, and Kruger, it became increasingly viable for women
Within her exploration of women and the history of pro- to create art and critique society from within the market
duction in postwar Germany, Trockel also hinted at the psy- economy. Nowhere was this more dynamically confirmed
chology and power of consumption. In their most common than in the shopping bags and high-fashion appropriations
incarnation, Trockel’s balaclavas appear supported from of Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961). Fleury established her
within, like hooded mannequins in a boutique window, reputation with her arrangements of shopping bags, their
thus merging the force of fashion with the fear of terror- contents intact and often accompanied by furniture, floor
ism. The viewer is subjected to both. At their first display, in coverings, shoes, and fashion magazines. In C'est la vie! (That's
1986 at the Monika Spruth Gallery, however, they were pre- life!) (1990), a gold Estée Lauder cosmetics bag anchors a
sented in boxes, wrapped delicately in tissue paper like lin- closely arranged group of seven shopping bags in garish
gerie. Resting like luxury goods to be purchased rather than tones of of red, yellow, pink, blue, and orange. Other pieces
activated like fragments of the body, they accentuated the present more earthbound palettes, or more upscale prod-
sensuality of purchase and possession, seducing rather ucts, as evidenced in the refined Brave (1994) (fig. 5.21), a
than accosting the viewer. Cologne-based artist and critic composition of nuanced whites accented with the pink and
Jutta Koether reported that the effect was an explosive mix almond tones of select fashion plates and a blond wood chair.
of irritation and longing as the viewer was made aware of While the care taken in constructing palette and composi-
her role in perpetuating social forces and of her power tion reveals Fleury’s formal concerns, the logos and contents
to resist them. Trockel’s work, like Spruth’s gallery, engaged of the bags point to the economic and social content of the
the art world while challenging the ideological power by work. In Brave, her consumption-based practice reinvents
which it functioned. Trockel remarked in Eau de Cologne that portraiture as something like a product-enhanced version
an exciting moment was approaching—when the impact of Bickerton’s logo-based work. The label-title establishes
of women participating in the art world would actually the tone for the emotional content of the sculpture and
change it. *° the character of its heroine. Brave, the name of the label of

5.21 Sylvie Fleury, Brave, 1994. Chair, magazine, shoes, and shopping bags, dimensions variable.
Courtesy Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

5.22 Sylvie Fleury, Formula One Dress, 1998. Hand-tailored dress with original Formula One fabric, original
Formula One logos, two-way zipper, and printed lining, manufactured by Hugo Boss. Edition of 100 dresses,
58 x 28%" (147.3 x 72.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuer.

British-born, Australia-based fashion designer Wayne Cooper, or Kruger’s Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero) (see figs. 2.11
also establishes the terrain in which courage is needed, the and 2.16), for instance—Fleury’s shopping pieces are con-
world of high fashion in Sydney. Fleury presents the required founding. They seem to embrace the mass-media imagery
equipment: Dahto heels—perhaps custom-made, a specialty and consumer lifestyle that feminists had demonstrated were
of the Australian designer—and Chanel scents. Copies of Elle so debilitating. Kormula One Dress (1998) (fig. 5.22), created
and Australian Style serve as guidebooks to the local flora and with fashion house Hugo Boss, goes even further, wrapping
fauna. Here are the relics of a high-fashion equivalent of a the wearer in corporate logos, actualizing through the signs
trip through the outback. This focus distinguishes Fleury’s of sponsorship the equation of women with sports cars as
practice from that of peers such as Steinbach and Armleder objects of masculine desire. Jutta Koether, writing in 2000,
even more than her choice of materials. Dealings with Arm- reflected on her initial skepticism regarding Fleury’s work,
leder are well documented. In 1990, he and fellow Swiss explaining that at the beginning of the previous decade
artist Olivier Mosset (b. 1944) invited Fleury to join their two- there had been no reason to think that “declaring [oneself]
person show. For a time afterwards, Armleder enlisted her to the product of one culture industry or another or outing
share responsibility for his work, much as he had done with [oneself] as a construct” was at all progressive.*” Though an
curators in Ne dites pas non! In need of suggestions for paint investigation of consumption might be sanctioned, equat-
color, he turned to Fleury, who proposed the shades of new ing it with liberation was trite at best. With time, however,
lines of eye shadow. When she returned to the same solution Koether found in Fleury’s work a “call to rethink one’s own
the next time he asked, it became clear that, unlike Arm- part in the game” of culture and capitalism, and not simply
leder, Fleury had a system and focused interests: Armleder a celebration of the privileges of membership.** Taken as
declined her suggestion the second time. such, Brave and Formula One Dress, like Sherman’s photo-
In the context of most of the feminist work discussed in graphs (see Chapter 2), upset the binary opposition between
earlier chapters—Silvia Kolbowski’s Monumental Prop/portions the acting subject who rebels against the dominant culture

Commodity and Form in Europe

and a passive object who simply accepts it. Fleury’s work in Japan (see Chapter 9), and Farhad Moshiri in Iran—have
turns to consumption as a means to challenge the polarity of been based in large part on the intersection of commodity
passive consumer and active producer. Shopping, both selec- and culture.
tive and excessive, becomes a creative process capable of gen-
erating content and effects similar to drawing or painting. Farhad Moshiri
The case of Farhad Moshiri (b. 1963) is instructive for seeing
commodity art not as an exported U.S. style, but rather as a
Commodity Art strategy relevant to diverse artists at various times and in dif
Jeff Koons’s transformation of even the cheapest con- ferent geographical locations. Moshiri plays on the same
sumer goods—balloon dogs and inflatable bunnies—into conjunction of fine-art aspiration and kitsch taste among
multimillion-dollar collectors’ items was the kind of alchemy wealthy Middle Eastern art buyers of the new millennium
that made up the American Dream. Almost immediately, his that Koons had celebrated in regard to the Western collec-
works became icons of consumerist U.S. culture, celebra- tors of the 1980s. Critical responses to his work, including
tions, as was written in 1988, of “the apotheosis of corporate accusations of “amputating his Iranian heart and replac[ing]
culture.”*’ Discovering his work displayed on the rooftop of it with a cash register” in exchange for a career making
the Metropolitan Museum of Art or in the Hall of Mirrors “toys for the anaesthetized new rich,” even replicate the
at Versailles (fig. 5.23) in the early twenty-first century bile that had met commodity artists.*? Moshiri was born in
seemed to confirm that Koons had struck upon the house Shiraz, Iran, but was sent to boarding school outside Los
style of a U.S.-sponsored global capitalism. The accuracy of Angeles when the Western-leaning Shah was overturned
this perception has to be measured against the utility of the by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. He spent three years at
commodity for non-Western artists. In fact, the most spec- CalArts and moved back to Iran in the 1990s. Citing Koons,
tacular careers in the twenty-first-century art world—those Bickerton, and the Neo-Geo painters as influences, Moshiri
of Ai Weiwei in China (see Chapter 8), Takashi Murakami nonetheless struck a different balance between new money
and high art as he took the pulse of the
rising Middle Eastern collecting class.
Works such as Cradle of Happiness (2004)
(fig. 5.24), a gilded Louis XIV-style
bedroom set with gold mattress and seat
cushions comfortably supporting gilded
CD and cassette players, celebrate the
objects desired and acquired by suc-
cessful Iranian families. Like Koons,
Moshiri invites his audience to revel in
the things that their culture covets; if that
means glorifying imitations of European
antiques or Japanese audio equipment,
then so be it. In addition to conspicu-
ously adding value to the objects the artist
feels best represent Iranian taste, literally
spraying them with gold, Cradle of Hap-
piness offers an experience akin to Sylvie
Fleury’s consumer forensics, in which we
learn about the psyche of the shopper by
examining what she brings home. Cel-
ebration of the state of contemporary
taste takes a slightly critical turn in what
has become another of Moshiri’s signa-
ture styles, evidenced by the Swarovski
crystal and sequin on canvas Eshgh (Love)
(2007) (fig. 5.25). Of this work, Moshiri
explained: “An artificial make-believe life-
style fascinates me. I use fake diamonds
5.23 Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994-2000. Shown at the “Jeff Koons Versailles”
exhibition at the Chateau de Versailles, October 9, 2008-April 1, 2009. Mirror-polished in paintings, and that’s ... related to the
stainless steel with transparent color coating, 121 x 143 x 45" (307.3 x 363.2 x 114.3 cm). fact that some people want to believe
©
Jeff Koons. that they’re real diamonds. Art is about

Chapter 5 Commodities and Consumerism

5.24 Farhad Moshiri, Cradle of Happiness, 2004.
Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line.

illusion. It’s a manufactured idea in

order to reach a certain illusion and
expression.”*!
With Eshgh, Moshiri jumped into the
make-believe lifestyle being cultivated in
the oil-rich nations of the Middle East.
In March 2008, the painting sold for
just over $1 million at-auction in Dubai,
making Moshiri the first Middle Eastern
artist to have a work top the million-
dollar mark. As artists around the globe
have demonstrated, discussing capital-
ism—whether as a Western ideology or
an international investment—is facili-
tated by an appropriative embrace of the
commodity.

5.25 Farhad Moshiri, Eshgh (Love), 2007. Acrylic, Swarovski crystals, and glitter on canvas on
board, 61 x 69%" (155 x 176 cm). Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line.

The Internationalism of Comme

 Memory and History

s they have done for millennia, artists continue civil war in Lebanon, and the Vietnam War from the perspec-
to provide means by which the public reflects tive of the Vietnamese. These histories are not so securely
upon its history and creates a collective memory. established or in some cases even known. Through the art in
In the latter part of the twentieth century, artists took up the second portion of the chapter, the nature of history and
questions of history with the critical debates of the previ- the politics that determine the way it is written come into
ous decades in their minds. Criticisms expressed in the sharper focus, while the status of the facts that comprise it
writings of Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, become less and less clear. In its commitment to the past and
among others, that challenged the idea of history as a its consequences, this work resonates with that of the artists
linear progression of master narratives and conveyed a who dealt with World War II, and it provides provisional
skepticism toward authority, had become integrated into answers as to what constitutes history or an art based upon it
artists’ working practices. Thus as a new generation stepped when facts, lives, records, images, and voices are often silent,
into the role of providing public memorials or more private missing, or lost.
historical investigations, they were expected and prepared
to invent new forms of art to do so. The works discussed in
this chapter range in medium from granite monuments to Memorializing War
found clothing, cut paper, and video. The subject matter In the early 1980s, with the Vietnam War less that a decade
they address, in addition to “History” itself, will be taken in the past and its legacy still far from certain, a group of vet-
largely from the history of the West and attempts to reckon erans enlisted the support of several U.S. Congressmen and
with the traumas of World War II and the Vietnam War. Just others to build a memorial to the soldiers who had fought in
as these events inspired a re-evaluation of the role of art the war. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the conflict had
and politics for earlier generations (see Chapter 1), they divided the U.S. public, giving rise to a significant resistance
also continued to haunt artists well into the 1980s and movement. The nightly news put footage of the fighting into
1990s. In this second moment of reflection, beginning with people’s homes while reporters documented news of civil-
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (see fig. 6.1), it will be ian massacres, chemical warfare, and increasing U.S. losses.
the historical, psychological, and political dimensions of The moral cost of the war came to appear a more serious
surviving trauma and rebuilding societies that will dominate threat to national security than a Communist Vietnam and
the concerns of contemporary art about history. In every the political pressure as the death count rose to nearly 60,000
case, the artists have rejected the traditional aim of his- U.S. and around 3 million Vietnamese deaths at the war’s
torical monuments—to assert essential identities for the end became unsustainable. The polarizing nature of the
victors or victims—and focused instead on the historical war meant that returning G.I.s were confronted with anti-
event as a confluence of different individuals, communities, war sentiment that often manifested itself in resentment and
and histories. disgust directed at them—an experience very different from
The first part of the chapter introduces Lin’s memorial the heroes’ return that had greeted veterans of previous U.S.
and discusses a body of work dealing with the Holocaust. wars. Not only did any memorial have the grave responsibil-
In this case, the historical record is, by and large, accepted, ity of paying homage to the soldiers who died and those who
leaving artists to grapple with its consequences and questions returned home often to years of personal struggle, it was also
of how it should be publicly engaged. In the second part of called upon to contribute to the no less challenging task of
the chapter, the discussion turns to art about the African- repairing the national fabric and allowing those who had
American experience, the covert wars in Latin America, the fought in the war to find common ground with those who

Chapter 6 Memory and History

had campaigned against it. Personally aware of the divisive contemplation. In the process, it has also transformed public
nature of responses to the war, during and since, the Vietnam art across the globe, continuing to be the touchstone for
Veterans Memorial Fund, as the organizing group came to be memorial art in the new century. Lin’s example demonstrates
called, held a design competition and specified that submis- the commitment made by artists to address the legacy of
sions should be contemplative and make no political state- modern history using the means of contemporary art.
ments. The results made it clear that the understanding of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, finished so soon after the
public and national art was at a turning point. The memorial end of the war it commemorates, combines three features
that was handed over to the care of the National Park Service familiar in art since the 1960s. First, there is the recession cut
in 1984 was a testament to the successful resolution of artistic into the earth, a gesture that evokes the dramatic outdoor
and political issues regarding the history of the war, and con- monuments of the Land Art movement. This cut is faced with
firmation of a new relationship between contemporary art polished granite and recalls classic Minimalist art. On the
and its audiences. stone surface are the names of the dead U.S. servicemen and
-women listed on a timeline according to the date of their
Maya Lin deaths, beginning in 1956 and ending in 1975, which refer-
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memoral (1984) (fig. 6.1), ences a tradition in Conceptual art of using graphs, lists, and
in Washington, D.C., is a black chevron of polished black other arrangements. In effect, Lin chose to reckon with the
granite sunk into the earth upon which the names of all the war by making use of artistic forms that had emerged while it
U.S. citizens killed in Vietnam have been carved. Drawing was being waged. But she also complicated this art-historical
on Minimalism and Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, model by incorporating aesthetic features that had been
landscape architect and sculptor Lin (b. 1959) rejected the suppressed by those same movements—namely, theatrical-
heroic statues of idealized men and women that had tra- ity and representation, the very qualities that guaranteed the
ditionally been used to memorialize the past when she sub- Neo-Expressionists such a dramatic entrée into the art world
mitted her design proposal for the competition. Despite the at the same time (see Chapter 3). As visitors walk along the
apparent coldness of its means—its formal abstraction and pathway that follows the wall down into the earth and then
dependence on the written word—Lin’s monument has over- back up to the level of the surrounding parkland, the pol-
come initial skepticism and controversy to serve as a highly ished stone reflects their bodies and faces so that their forms
successful invitation to emotional catharsis and intellectual flicker over the names of the dead (fig. 6.2). Such dramatic

6.1 Maya lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1984. Black granite, two walls each 246' (75 m) long,
rising to an apex of 10’ 1" (3 m). Washington, D.C.

Memorializing War
 6.2 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, 1984. Detail.

pictorial effects heighten the emotional impact of the memo- as consistent with the U.S. experience. Soldiers returned
rial but they remain tightly controlled, so that overall the wall from Vietnam to a harsh reality with none of the adoration
balances somber gravitas with emotional release. or postwar prosperity that had awaited those returning from
As one approaches the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, simple World War II. Resisting the temptation to create a fantasy to
geometric forms, smooth surfaces, sharp cuts into cold black compensate for that reality, Lin instead designed an experi-
stone, and the accumulation and sculpting of the earth invite ence oriented toward the emotional needs of the survivors.
one into a poetic realm. The names themselves, incisions in The committee that awarded Lin the commission pro-
the skin of the rock, evoke wounds—mortal ones in the case nounced the work “very much a memorial of our own times,
of the deceased, emotional and psychological ones for the one that could not have been achieved in another time and
living. The way the black stone descends into the earth calls place.” Indeed, it was almost not built at all owing to the con-
to mind a gravestone. When the visitor is ready, the walkway troversy it stirred up as a result of a perceived ambivalence of
leads him or her from the realm of reflection and memory the work toward the war. Lin had rejected the idea of using
back up into the light of day. It is essential to the process of heroic figures such as those presented in the Abraham Lincoln
mourning not only that survivors of the conflict or other Memorial or triumphal abstractions of the kind found in the
visitors have the space to imagine the dead as present, but Washington Monument. Without such familiar references to
also that the living arrive at a psychic place where the dead anchor the meaning of the work, many people found Lin’s
remain apart from daily life. In response to Anselm Kiefer’s proposal illegible and its point of view impossible to deter-
paintings about the Holocaust (see Chapter 3), Andreas mine. To others, it was simply an affront, an insinuation that
Huyssen had worried that the mourning viewers would be so the U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam were not worthy of being
overwhelmed that they would be lost in melancholy, unable honored in the traditional fashion. An alternative monu-
to come to terms with their loss and so become incapable ment, Three Soldiers (1982-84) (fig. 6.3) by Frederick Hart
of returning to living fully in the present. Lin’s memorial (1943-99), a bronze figurative group representing three
responds to this need exquisitely with the hopeful spiritual patrolling soldiers of different races which had come third in
ascension of the pathway. In addition, as one looks back to the original design competition, was thus installed nearby—
the wall from a short distance, the list of names that had though not, as its sponsors desired, at the apex of Lin’s work.
only moments before appeared so poetic now looks almost Despite this controversy, Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial
mundane. It is this affectless efficiency that had made such has won almost universal praise for the way it navigates the
lists interesting to Conceptualists seeking to reduce their political and emotional challenge of memorializing a war
art to a bare presentation of facts. The forthright presenta- that was resisted and resented by much of the country at the
tion of the casualties of war in the form of such a “timeline” time it was being fought. The National Parks Service which
may appear abrupt, but much of the success of the memo- oversees the memorial now presents the work with accom-
rial rests on such frank simplicity. The memorial strikes one panying texts, including a statement from an artist who had
6.3 Frederick Hart, The Three Soldiers, 1982-84. Bronze sculpture with black Indian granite base, (sculpture
only) 96 x 60 x 36"(243.8 x 152.4 x 91.4 cm). Washington, D.C.

initially strongly objected to Lin’s design, saying that with its The success of Lin’s memorial virtually codified her
actualization the wall “became a bridge.” Perhaps the fact expressive Minimalism as the new official style for public
that Lin was young—only sixteen at the end of the war— art about national history. The United States Holocaust
made her better attuned to the needs of those seeking new Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., opened in 1993
means to write history. Her memorial demonstrated that the and included commissions by four artists long practiced in
formal and conceptual features of contemporary art, previ- Minimalist traditions: Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), Joel Shapiro
ously perceived to be comprehensible only to a small com- (b. 1941), Richard Serra (b. 1939), and Ellsworth Kelly
munity, could be not only legible, but also emotionally and (b. 1923). All four contributed work that fit well within the
intellectually meaningful to an audience drawn from all oeuvres that they had been creating since the 1960s, but that
walks of life. Public art could be an invitation to seek the sig- now, due to the experience of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
nificance of the past together. was also seen to be attuned to contemporary history.
As a young artist in Paris, Kelly was one of the first U.S.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum painters to create Minimalist canvases by refining a severely
Theodor Adorno’s claim that there could be no art after Aus- reductive abstract vocabulary. His contribution to the museum
chwitz hung over all attempts in the second half of the twen- was the two-part, all-white Memorial (1993) (fig. 6.4), con-
tieth century to examine trauma through art. As discussed in sisting of a 27-foot-wide panel in the shape of an attenuated
Chapter 3, however, his assertion was by no means absolute. fan and three large vertical rectangles. The two parts—white
Adorno himself discovered in the post-Holocaust poetry of panels that hang against the white walls of the museum—
Paul Celan a response to his own anxiety over the place of exude a graceful counterpoint of steady rhythm and expand-
art in the postwar world. Artists have not turned their backs ing harmony. Uniformly monochrome, Memorial nearly fades
on history or the challenges it poses. Those discussed below into the background of the museum,
evoking the fleeting
revisited the genocide and fascism that Adorno addressed and fragile nature of the human spirit as it ascends above
and began to create a formal vocabulary, one sharing much the material world. But it is the context that really deter-
with Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with which to engage it. mines the content of Memorial. By reason of its being in the

KA _.
Memo
 6.4 Ellsworth Kelly,
Memorial, 1993.
Enamel on wood and
composite in four parts.
Top image: 114 x 330
x 2" (289.6 x 838.2
x 5.1 cm). lower
image: each of three
panels 108 x ~
SIVA S x
162. 65<Sellmenns
United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum,
Washington, D.C.,
artist commission and
gift of Ruth and Albert
Abramson and Family,
1993. © Ellsworth
Kelly.

Holocaust Museum, Memorial automatically becomes a work The Gerzes, intent on responding to the local population
about the Holocaust. Both the museum and the artist rely and to drawing attention to the varied audience for such a
on the audience’s understanding, thanks in large part to the monument, placed a large placard bearing text in German,
Vietnam Veterans Memorial nearby, that evocative geometries Turkish, English, French, Hebrew, and Arabic next to the
such as Kelly’s can be a means to address weighty content. column. The languages indicated both the range of com-
munities likely to visit the site and those others the artists
Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz felt were essential participants in the discussion. The text
In Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg, Germany, Jochen Gerz explained what the monument was and how it was intended
(b. 1940) and Esther Shalev-Gerz (b. 1948) turned to Minimal- to function. It read:
ist, Conceptual, and performance traditions to create their
We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the
Monument Against Fascism (1986) (fig. 6.5). At its dedica-
town, to add their names here next to ours. In doing
tion on October 10, 1986, this hollow yet massive, 7-ton,
so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more
39-foot x 3-foot x 3-foot column of lead-plated steel stood on
and more names cover this 12-meter-tall lead column,
a raised terrace overlooking a small square near the local
it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day,
train station. Harburg is a town of working-class Germans
it will have disappeared completely and the site of the
and Turkish immigrants, the latter having begun arriving
Harburg monument against fascism will be empty.
there after World War II to work on U.S.-sponsored projects.

Chapter 6 Memory and History

 In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up community to proclaim such vigilance; if it were signed,
against injustice. the monument would pass from the somber form of a dark
obelisk to the invisibility of an oath. The degree of audience
The metal column was inscribed by the artists and accom-
participation that the Gerzes intended for the Monument
panied by a stylus with which visitors were invited to carve
Against Fascism was new for a public monument. Those who
their signatures in the soft lead of the monument. The list
come to pay their respects at Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial
of names was to form a community united by a pledge of
fleetingly transform the appearance of the stone by casting
vigilance in the continued struggle against fascism. Entirely
their reflections and leaving flowers and gifts. The visitors
covered with writing, it was finally completely buried seven
to the Monument Against Fascism, on the other hand, had the
years later, on November 10, 1993, and a new plaque describ-
opportunity to alter the appearance of the column perma-
ing the monument and the event was then put up at the site.
nently and, indeed, determine whether it could be seen at all.
Upon disappearing into the ground, the Monument Against
However, when the monument was turned over to the
Fascism began a new life. According to the artists, the monu-
community in the fall of 1986, something happened that
ment can be said to “work” if it successfully sacrifices the per-
surprised the artists and revealed the complex relationship
manence of a statue and commutes its memorial function
of the citizens of Harburg to German national history. Sig-
to “where it belongs—that is, within the people for whom it
natures left during the day were vandalized at night. Under
was created.”? For them, inviting the community to sign the
cover of darkness, people cut into the surface of the work,
column was a gesture that transferred responsibility for the
attempting to obliterate the messages of peace and solidar-
work and its purpose from the city and state bureaucrats who
ity, and often replacing them with messages of hate. Swasti-
commissioned it and the artists who created it to the ordi-
kas appeared on the monument, and someone even fired
nary people who live with it. If the column had remained
a bullet into it. Rather than a simple and orderly pledge of
unsigned, it would not have been buried and would have
peace, the monument became a layered web of graffiti that
remained visible as a reminder of the unwillingness of the
gave form to a truly ambivalent response to history and
memory. While it remained visible, the monument was an
active element of city life. Jochen Gerz commented: “The
filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-
meaning signatures. The inscriptions, a conglomerate of
approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint
of our city applied to the column.”* The standing monument
was an index of the best and worst in humanity and a testa-
ment to the fragility of our civilization. It was also a physical
reminder of the violence to which many Europeans had suc-
cumbed in the 1930s and against which all nations needed to
be vigilant in the 1990s.
Gerz began his career in Paris in the late 1960s as a poet,
often using the streets to display his writing. One of the
statements with which he plastered walls, streets, and public
sculptures was “Art Corrupts.” In the context of memori-
als, it was argued that art corrupted by seducing society
into thinking that public sculpture could serve as public
memory; in this way public art allowed individuals to forget.
Contemporary life and its history required new means of
engaging the public if art was to do more than corrupt.
The Monument Against Fascism, by being first an object and
then an absence, challenged the conventional memorial
by becoming, in Gerz’s words, a “site of social dialogue.”*
The French philosopher Jacques Ranciére (b. 1940) cites
the Monument Against Fascism as evidence against the argu-
ment that art was impotent in the face of horrors such as
the Holocaust. Art, Ranciére argues, draws attention to
our capacity for experiencing and understanding new and
unfamiliar sensations and enlists them to help change
ourselves and the world. He begins his book The Politics of
6.5 Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Monument Against Fascism,
1986. Galvanized steel with a lead coating, 39’ x 39%" x 3956" Aesthetics (2006) by asserting the role of the senses in discoy-
{12 x 1 x 1 m). Hamburg, Germany. Courtesy Gerz Studio. ering the common features shared by things in the world

Memorializing War
and also those qualities that are exclusive to individual enti- a war that he did not directly experience. In his early work,
ties. This ability to comprehend and navigate relationships Boltanski trawled his memory for traces of his childhood.
based on similarities and differences is essential to the politi- Finding little, he fabricated a past for himself complete
cal tasks of building coalitions and negotiating conflicts. Ade- with physical evidence: photographs, handmade replicas of
quately engaging with society, whether through communities toys and household objects, and descriptions of events and
and individuals or via ideologies and objects, requires con- people. Boltanski’s homemade relics, which he presented
stantly testing our capacity to perceive and comprehend our in books and archives, evoke a European childhood at the
surroundings: It is here, Ranciere explains, that art is essen- birth of the postwar age. In May 1969, Boltanski produced
tial. Art, as a way “of doing and making that intervene[s] in Research and Presentation of All That Remains from My Childhood
the general distribution of the ways of doing and making,” 1944-1950, a slim volume of photocopied photographs and
holds the promise of change by providing opportunities to descriptions. Like all of his generation, his relationship to the
challenge and expand our ability to sense the world and to events that had shaped the second half of the century was, in
learn from our perceptions.’ The inhumanity of societies in common with the copies in the book, secondhand. Research
World War II was a painful challenge to art, but, Ranciére and Presentation was, however, a misrepresentation: Most of
insists, it was not the end of art. Writing in opposition to the images did not document the artist’s own life but that of
Adorno’s famous claim, Ranciere argues that horror “does his nephew. Thus Boltanski’s book, like most of the work that
not forbid images ... rather, it obliges [artists] to move and would follow, was not a reconstructed memory, but rather a
to explore new possibilities.”°
6
This process assumes not only meditation on the lacunae in personal and cultural histories
that artists will work in new ways, but that images themselves and how we fill them.
will signify differently after a crisis; that words, objects, and Autel Chases (1988) (fig. 6.6) is an example of what has
images will carry associations that did not exist before. These become Boltanski’s signature practice of appropriating and
new associations are part of the material with which artists slightly altering found photographs to create diverse, often
can work. As is evident throughout this chapter, the mean- site-specific installations. He often reuses groups of photo-
ings that accrue around images and objects in the wake of graphs, returning many times, for instance, to a collection
catastrophic events are of special interest to artists examining of portraits of French college students in Dijon. In 1987, he
the character and consequences of the past. started using a new source image, a group photo of the 1931]
graduating class of a private Jewish high school, the Chajes
Christian Boltanski School in Vienna (called Lycée Chases in Boltanski’s work).
Of Jewish descent on his father’s side and born in Paris The fate of the students is not certain, though it is likely the
in early September 1944, just weeks after the city had been Nazis murdered most of them. Boltanski rephotographed
liberated from the Nazis, Christian Boltanski was shaped by the rather prosaic yearbook, cropping the images and

6.6 Christian Boltanski, Autel

Chases, 1988. Nine black and
white photographs, 25 tin biscuit
boxes, 9 lamps. Courtesy of the
artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York/Paris.

Chapter 6 Memory and History

6.7 Christian Boltanski, Canada, 1988. Clothing and lamps. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery,
New York/Paris.

enlarging them to create blurred approximations of the to the Nazi warehouses that held confiscated Jewish possessions
individual faces shown in the original. In his installations, —transformed perceptions of his art. The Holocaust, previ-
constructed using rusted biscuit tins, desk lamps, inexpen- ously the “displaced and hidden” subject of his work, was
sive frames, and extension cords, Boltanski transformed brought into the light; everything he created was now seen
this familiar picture of middle-class childhood into one through that lens.’ Boltanski’s attitude toward history,
showing the ghosts of European Jewry. Stepping into Autel however, remained as ambivalent as his thoughts on memory.
Chases is like walking into a holy space and standing before To answer questions such as who is being memorialized in his
an altar (the meaning of the French word qautel in the title). art and to what end, one can turn to a large archive of work
Accompanying Boltanski’s allusions to death and mourn- and interviews, which inevitably leads to Jewish life in prewar
ing, however, is a conundrum created by the photographs at Europe. But the exact connections between the artist and
the center of his work. The artist blurred the faces, cropped this source material are always as much a product of chance
them to exclude any identifying details, and even changed as of intention. Autel Chases, like nearly all of Boltanski’s
the spelling of the school’s name. He also deliberately used oeuvre, invites the viewer to clarify the ambiguities of rusting
too little emulsion so that the images lack the even surface, tins and obfuscated portraits by drawing on his or her own
rich tones, and clarity that usually characterize silver gelatin memories and knowledge. These blurred faces are meaning-
prints. As a result, the images are incomplete, obscured by an ful in myriad ways, depending less on the artist’s biography
imperfect printing process as well as by being enlarged past than on that of the viewers whose memories provide features
the point of clarity. Like memory, Boltanski’s art distorts that and futures for these fading images.
which it calls to our attention.
Boltanski’s work of the late 1980s—including his Lycée Rachel Whiteread
Chases work, a similar series based on a 1939 photograph ofa The rejection of figurative monuments in the wake of Maya
Jewish Purim celebration, and an installation of secondhand Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial implied that representational
clothing titled Canada (1988) (fig. 6.7) after the name given art might be less well suited to issues of war and injustice

Memorializing War
than had previously been thought. Boltanski’s work revolved many artists embraced abstraction as the most effective
around the presumption that representation was compro- means to reckon with historical trauma. British sculptor
mised: His displays of failed attempts at depicting the past Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963) produced two monuments,
were enormously successful at addressing the relationship House (1993) (fig. 6.8) and The Holocaust Memorial, Vienna,
between the present and wartime past. As the United States Austria, begun in 1995 and executed in 2000 (fig. 6.9), that
Holocaust Memorial Museum commissions demonstrate, provide another reflection on the relationship between rep-
resentation, abstraction, and history. Like all of Whiteread’s
oeuvre, the latter makes use of inventive forms of casting to
capture the profound strangeness of domestic objects and
spaces. In this case, she cast the form of a private library and
presented it as a monolithic cube finished with a decorative
trim in a Viennese square. The book-filled shelves have been
turned inside out, so that the books’ spines face the walls; the
room itself has been transformed from a warm domestic envi-
ronment into an impenetrable mass. The memorial evokes
nothing so much as a white tomb and is dedicated to the
65,000 Austrian Jews killed in the Holocaust. Around its base
are carved the names of the Nazi concentration camps where
they were murdered.
Whiteread had been invited to submit a proposal for
the Viennese memorial in large part owing to her proven
adroitness at giving form to absence and loss, demonstrated
most spectacularly in her 1993 London piece House. House
was created by spraying concrete onto the interior walls of
a condemned building. When the house itself was subse-
quently removed, what remained where it had once stood
was Whiteread’s monumental rendering of the space for-
merly inhabited by a typical London family. The massive
form of House produced a poignant contrast to the empty
spaces of the vacant lots around it. The house itself had been
in a working-class neighborhood of London that was being
demolished and reshaped by real-estate developers. By the
time of its completion, House stood alone, the last uncleared
6.8 Rachel Whiteread, House,
1993. Grove Road, East London.
Concrete, full size cast.
Commissioned and produced by
Artangel. Courtesy of the artist,
Luhring Augustine, New York, and
Gagosian Gallery.

6.9 Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust

Memorial, 1995-2000.
Judenplatz, Vienna. Concrete,
153% x 296% x 416%" (390 x
752 x 1058 cm). Courtesy of the
artist, Luhring Augustine, New
York, and Gagosian Gallery.

Chapter 6 Memory and History

plot of land in the path of gentrification. The metaphor of Shimon Attie
transforming the domestic spaces of the working class into As the Monument Against Fascism was slowly sinking into the
intractable concrete blocks standing in the way of capital- ground in Harburg, a young U.S. photographer, Shimon
ist investors resonated with activists seeking to change the Attie (b. 1957), arrived in Berlin in search of pictures of
current trends in urban development. Jewish life there before World War II. After hunting through
For the Austrian memorial, Whiteread struck a balance archives, he selected a group of images, rephotographed
between presence and absence that responded to the differ- them, and projected them, briefly, onto the buildings and
ent families and histories being recognized in Vienna. Whi- streets that they depicted. The results, themselves photo-
teread typically casts found objects in such a way that the graphed by Attie in works such Almstadtstrasse 43, Berlin
resulting sculpture takes the shape of the negative space in (1993) (fig. 6.10), constitute a body of work called The
and around the object. In the Holocaust Memorial, the nega- Writing on the Wall. The projections were made in Sheunenvi-
tive space of the room is cast in this way, but the books are ertal, a once-vibrant Jewish neighborhood that was never fully
cast as positive forms. The visitor to the memorial thus con- rebuilt after the war. When Attie arrived in Berlin, Sheunen-
fronts both the contents of the library and the space in which viertal was starting to be gentrified, although the state of
they were read as solid material. As in House, however, the decay recorded in his photographs reveals that the current
architecture that would have supported and protected the residents had benefitted little from German economic
room in reality is evoked, but not reproduced. Whiteread’s growth, either in the immediate postwar years of expansion
sculpture approaches the very edge of the walls and ceilings, or in the boom after Unification in 1990. The Writing on the
touches them, but then stops, leaving gaps where the struc- Wall bears witness to the destruction of the war and years of
tural supports should be. The missing architecture is most disregard afterward.
dramatically evoked at the edges of the books. Each volume During the few hours in which Attie projected his photo-
is bonded to its neighbor and to the block of the room, but is graphs, it was once again possible to see Jews walking along
suspended with no shelf beneath it—the books thus exist as the streets dressed for temple or for work. They could again
unlikely objects whose means of support have been denied, be seen in the windows of what had been their homes and
whose substance has been changed, yet whose shapes remain. stores. One man looks over the display at a Hebrew book-
With a graceful coincidence of representation and Minimal- store while around the corner a proprietor looks out from
ist form, Whiteread’s room makes reference to the Jews as the Biograph Theater. Attie’s carefully crafted photographs
“People of the Book” and their fate when the European com- of the projections accent the juxtaposition of this vibrant
munities they had called their own turned against them. past with the decaying present. As public works of art, Attie’s

6.10 Shimon Attie,

Almstadtstrasse 43, Berlin, 1993.
Ektacolor photograph. The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Courtesy of the artist and Jack
Shainman Gallery, New York.

Memorializing War
projects were short performances with their own audi- a premise from which to explore possibilities for creativity,
ences whose reactions were at times quite volatile. Several agency, and identity across time, as well as to investigate the
residents of the now non-Jewish neighborhood, including parameters of female selfhood. It is the resulting proximity
the owner of Almstadtstrasse 43, were distraught at Attie’s to the past, and Antin’s viewers’ ability to imagine themselves
intervention. They felt it accused them of either profiting into other ages and other bodies, that drives her work.
from the Nazi murders or of being Jewish—both, it turned In the early 1990s, Antin began to work on themes drawn
out, were regarded as serious charges. The Writing on the from the early twentieth-century history of Eastern European
Wall, like the Gerzes’ monument and Whiteread’s Holo- Jewry. The first fruit of this was Man Without a World (1991)
caust Memorial, which was protested by nearly 2,000 people (fig. 6.11), a film written and directed by another of her
before its opening, raised the specter of fascism even as it characters, Yygeny Antinoy, a Yiddish-speaking Russian direc-
evoked a tragic sense of loss. As an artful display of the pre- tor from the 1920s. The film is particularly significant in Anti-
Nazi past, produced with great care and formal precision, nov’s career. His previous work, The Last Night of Rasputin,
The Writing on the Wall offered testimony against Nazi crimes supposedly made in 1924 (it was actually produced by Antin
and a memorial to the Jewish dead. Balancing nostalgia and in 1989), had been about the fall of the Romanovs and the
reflection, it also illuminated contemporary attitudes that politics of the Russian Revolution. Announcements for it had
remained troublingly similar to those of the 1930s. declared: “In the dark night of Tsarism, the flame of ideal-
ism burnt in the ardent hearts of three friends from the pro-
Eleanor Antin ductive classes—a worker, a student, and a ballerina.”’ The
Feminist filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist dancer was played by one Eleanora Antinova. Man Without a
Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) addressed history by creating work World stepped away from Russian political history to examine
in which, as she described it, “time collapses” and “layers of Jewish experience, but did so under the influence of the
life flow simultaneously into a mesh of memory and dream.”® U.S. Jewish taste for romantic stories of shtetl life. Antin
The U.S. artist achieved an organic flow through time and thus here examined the impulse to explore the past not as
consciousness by mixing archival research and theater. She memory but as nostalgia, though, as she explains in the
began working with the idea of historical fiction in the 1970s, preface to the published screenplay of Man Without a World,
creating characters such as the King of Solano Beach, an Antinov couldn’t refrain from including revolutionary poli-
erudite bum from another age who made his rounds through tics in his film, thereby, she felt, spoiling its prospects in the
this southern California town interacting with his sub- U.S. market. Though Antinov undertook his foray into Jewish
jects and overseeing his domain. Other characters include history in large part for financial reasons, Antin’s commit-
Eleanor Nightingale, a nurse in the Crimean War (1853-56), ment to Jewish themes arose from her changing relationship
and Eleanora Antinova, a black ballerina who danced for with her aging mother. With Vilna Nights (1993) (fig. 6.12),
the impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) in the Ballets she set aside the fictive lens of Antinov and began to explore
Russes. In these early creations the historical setting provided the past through her mother’s memories.

6.11 Eleanor Antin, Man

Without a World, 1991. Film
still. Courtesy Ronald Feldman
Fine Arts, New York.

fart
Chapter~ 6Z Sere
Memory and sd fe)History
2 |e =
6.12 Eleanor Antin, Vilna Nights, 1993. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable.
The Jewish Museum, New York. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Vilna Nights, a fabricated recollection of life in the Lithu- steadily at his sewing machine, and a magical challah, a tra-
anian capital before World War II, is an installation featuring ditional braided bread, and a menorah dance through the
a stage set showing the postwar ruins of the Jewish ghetto in air. Each scene suggests a memory from a life almost forgot-
Vilna on which are projected short films of life before the ten. Antin has said that Vilna Nights was partly an attempt to
war. The work is somewhat exceptional among Antin’s his- create a memory for her increasingly forgetful mother. The
torical pieces in not focusing on a main character. Instead, fragments proved sufficient to jog the memories of others.
Antin offers the viewer the chance to wander “through a One reviewer described overhearing a couple identify the
history made up of [my mother’s] romantic, probably embel- precise Vilna street that Antin had re-created, when, in fact,
lished stories.”'” Antin’s mother was in her late eighties and there was no direct visual or topographic source for the work.
nineties and suffering from periods of memory loss when she Images, fragments of stories, sculpted sets, and the invitation
recounted her life to her daughter. The stories, enhanced to step outside daily life led viewers to accept Antin’s art as an
by research, provided the material from which Antin fabri- amalgam of prewar Eastern Europe as it actually existed and
cated narratives that convey the temper of the period. Just as as it is now remembered and imagined by the audience.
shtetl life was a site of collective nostalgia for Antinov’s hypo-
thetical U.S. viewer, Vilna in Vilna Nights is a screen not only
in a literal sense for Antin’s projections but also in a meta- African-American Histories
phoric and psychological sense for Antin’s audience. Both The global reach of World War II and its shocking revela-
the sculpted space and the acted scenes stand in for survi- tion that European civilization was hopelessly weak in the
vors’ memories and visitors’ fantasies. Unlike the other work face of its own genocidal compulsion have made it a critical
discussed in this chapter, Vilna Nights invites us to leave the reference for examining the relationship of art and trauma
present behind. The viewer steps in and is surrounded by the in the twentieth century. Art about the war and its aftermath
fictionalized past. He or she looks in doorways, leans through can also be understood as symptomatic of how late-twentieth-
windows, and peers down alleys into a lost world. Two Jewish century artists engaged with the past more generally. The
children share bread, a woman burns letters, a tailor works complexity with which history was being interrogated, and

jee r Tipe Han a Ea

Atrican-American Histories
its effects being considered, can be seen in the
paintings, sculptures, and installations by a
number of artists making work about different
aspects of the African-American experience.
Informed by personal experience, histori-
cal research, political will and imagination, a
number of young African-American artists chal-
lenged existing models for interrogating racial
politics in the historical past and contempo-
rary present. Their work drew on practices as
diverse as appropriation, portrait photography,
silhouette making, installation, and painting.
In many cases the histories being told were
not common knowledge and demanded sig-
nificant research on the part of the artists—
and, afterward, soul-searching on the part of
the audiences.

Whitfield Lovell
U.S. painter, sculptor, printmaker, and instal-
lation artist Whitfield Lovell (b. 1959) began
what became a personal and _ historically
searching body of work with the following
premise: ‘What were [black] people doing
and who were they, between the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation to the Civil Rights Move-
ment? Were they walking around barefooted
and scrubbing clothes for white people? Or
were they going about the business and the
necessities of living their lives? ... Were they
sitting around talking about how oppressed 6.13 Whitfield Lovell, Whispers from the Walls, 1999. Installation view. Charcoal on
they were? No. They were living their lives. wood with found objects. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York.
They were eating, breathing, cooking, having
sex, reading, writing, and occasionally going
to get their photos taken.”'' These photos became the key inventive while remaining faithful to the history they represent.
to Lovell’s art. After a period of experimenting with expres- Lovell’s style and content started to come together in a
sive styles of painting, drawing, and printmaking, as well as rather unlikely place, an Italian villa in the countryside near
learning from sources as diverse as Italian Renaissance art, Milan. In 1993, he was granted a residency at the Villa Val
African textiles, and Neo-Expressionist figuration, Lovell Lemme in Capriatta d’Orba, once the home of a slave trader
turned to photography for inspiration. Lovell’s father had active into the early twentieth century. Fantasies of African
been an accomplished amateur photographer, and watch- tribal society were painted around the estate. Living among
ing images—portraits primarily—appear almost magically the spoils of the slave trade, Lovell felt compelled “to leave
in the chemical baths of the darkroom at home in Harlem some dignified image of Black people in that space.”'* So he
had been a formative experience for the young Lovell. He added his own pictures to the walls. He drew self-portraits,
began collecting photographs of his family as well as amass- hands, and Yoruba figurines, thus challenging the depictions
ing portraits of anonymous African-Americans from the that permeated the villa with signs of African and African-
1870s through to the 1950s. In addition to becoming a means American agency and identity. The experience in Italy led to
of connecting to family and community, photography also other site-specific installations throughout the southern U.S.
suggested formal solutions for Lovell’s practice as a painter and one in Cuba. Lovell has served as visiting artist/historian
and sculptor. The photographic portraits led him to wall across the U.S. and abroad, raising awareness of forgotten
paintings and then to full-scale installations built from found events and people while experimenting with visual means to
lumber, doors, windows, frames, furniture, pictures, clothes, integrate subject matter from the past into the experience of
and personal effects. These works might be as small as the present.
windowboxes or, in the case of Whispers from the Walls (1999) In 1999, he completed Whispers from the Walls, a tour de
(fig. 6.13), as large as a house; like Antin’s work, they are force that includes a small home furnished with objects from

Chapter 6 Memory and History

the 1920s and 1930s. An old turntable in the installation parts anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and _ thera-
plays barely audible conversations that give voices to por- pists, such artists-in-residence had to learn to select what was
traits painted directly onto the walls of the house. Lovell needed to realize their artistic visions from the vast amounts
portrays the residents in sparse and sensitively rendered of personal narratives, local histories, and material culture
black line drawings based on photographs in his collec- they gathered on site. Making art about history at the end of
tion. They rise out of and seep back into the surfaces of the twentieth century, they discovered, demanded a special
the walls, asserting presence and loss with equal strength. and new kind of creative practice.
Like the images Attie projected onto the streets of Berlin, Nari Ward’s (b. 1963) Rites of Way (2000) (fig. 6.14) is a
Loyell’s portraits both confidently claim the space and offer complex response to the challenge of creating historically
melancholic elegies to lost communities. Whispers from the oriented work as a visiting artist. Produced during a resi-
Walls traveled across the United States, not only stopping dency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
at the predictable art spaces on the east and west coasts it combined community outreach and research with formal
but also at venues in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, and and conceptual experimentation. For the project, Ward,
Kansas, thereby connecting Lovell’s poetic and assertive who was born in St. Andrews, Jamaica, set out to learn about
vision of African-American history with the landscape in the community into which he had been invited. Using the
which some ofits most dramatic episodes had occurred. museum as a platform, he set up a series of workshops and
invited visitors to tell him their thoughts and stories about
Nari Ward home. By the end of six months, he had discussed the subject
The type of project in which a host institution invites artists to with college students, Hmong immigrants from southern
create work about its environs became increasingly popular China, homeless teenagers, and African-American senior Citi-
in the 1990s. Artists who accepted these invitations faced zens, among others. To the stories provided by those living
technical challenges related to working in unfamiliar places in the city, Ward added what he was learning from his own
and often in non-traditional media, as well as the difficulties research about several neighborhoods that had disappeared
inherent in carrying out community-based research. Equal from the Minneapolis and Saint Paul landscape. The first and

‘attyi,*
‘Hm me
!
ia ue
til

6.14 Nari Ward, Rites of Way, 2000. Installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Courtesy, the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong.

African-American Histories
 largest of these lost communities was Rondo, a center of the
African-American community in St. Paul until it was largely
demolished in the 1950s to expand the highway system. The
second and third neighborhoods had been more fleeting in
their appearances—clusters of ice houses built by fishermen
on the frozen lakes of the region and equally transient ice
palaces designed by architects in the 1930s and 1940s. Ward’s
installation joined the feelings of those making their homes
in the present with a local history of urban change.
Rites of Way alluded in its title to the dispossession that
occurred in Rondo when the city asserted municipal rights
of way in order to reshape the Twin Cities metropolis. Ward’s
use of the punning word “rites” in the title invokes the rituals
in which we engage to establish ideas of individuality and
community, and to turn new places into “home.” For the
installation he constructed a cluster of small shelters evoking
the temporary ice fishing huts, but raised them up on stilts,
creating a floating village that rested briefly in the sky rather
than on ice. The arrangement of the huts was based on the
plans for an ice palace designed by African-American archi-
tect Clarence Wigington (1883-1967). Hanging from the
huts were mementos contributed by the workshop partici-
pants to evoke their feelings about home. Before includ-
ing them in the sculpture, however, Ward had mailed these
domestic objects to long-vanished addresses in Rondo.
6.15 Michael Ray Charles, (Liberty Brothers
These “home” objects were returned undelivered by the
Permanent Daily Circus) Blue Period, 1995. Acrylic
post office and thus reached the work via a journey of their latex, oil wash, and stain, copper.on paper, 60% x
own. Together, the three parts of the installation—the 36%" (154 x 93 cm). Courtesy of the artist and the
huts, their arrangement, and their decoration—each cor- Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.
responding to communities from St. Paul past and present,
contribute to a symbolic unity across time. Clearly indebted
to Conceptual works from the 1960s and community work
such as OBAC’s Wail of Respect or the Feminist Art Program’s
Womanhouse (see Chapter 1) of the 1960s and 1970s, Rites of
Way addressed the multiple local histories and communities
that Ward encountered during his Minneapolis residency in
eclectic terms specifically connected to them.

Michael Ray Charles and Fred Wilson

Lovell’s Whispers from the Walls and Ward’s Rites of Way came
on the heels of a highly contentious national discussion
about representation and race in U.S. contemporary art.
The controversy was sparked by a body of work by young
African-American artists who appropriated the caricatures
of African-Americans common in nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century U.S. popular culture. Michael Ray Charles
(b. 1967), for instance, took minstrel shows and lawn jockeys
as models for paintings. The results, including (Liberty Broth-
ers Permanent Daily Circus) Blue Period (1995) (fig. 6.15),
call attention to the tenacity of racist attitudes that define
African-American success in terms of entertainment value,
whether on the stage or the basketball court. As with Fred
Wilson’s (b. 1954) appropriations andjuxtapositions of racist 6.16 Fred Wilson, Funny, 1995. Painted plaster and ceramic, cofeand
memorabilia such as Funny (1995) (fig. 6.16), the work metal 14 x 7V2 x 6%" (35.6 x 19 x 16.5 cm). Photograph by Kerry Ryan
reveals the degree to which racism permeates U.S. society. McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Gallery.

154) Chapter 6 Memory and History

6.17 Fred Wilson, Cabinet Making 1820-1960 from Mining the Museum, an installation by Fred Wilson, The Contemporary Museum,
and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 1992-93. Whipping post, two armchairs dated ca. 1855 and ca.1896, and two side chairs
dated ca. 1820-40 and ca. 1840-60. Photography courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. © Fred Wilson, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Wilson made clear his historical interest in material installations such as Gone: An Historical Romance of the Civil
culture in his groundbreaking intervention Mining the War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young
Museum (1992). For this piece, Wilson, at the invitation of Negress and Her Heart (1994) (fig. 6.18) featured scenes
the Maryland Historical Society, re-curated its galleries, jux- of life and love, creation and destruction, abasement and
taposing objects from different installations and display- aggression in the slave-era South. Across a 50-foot wall,
ing unsettling items long since consigned to storage. Under Walker applied life-sized silhouettes of a motley group of
headings that mimic conventional museological categories antebellum whites, blacks, masters, mistresses, slaves, chil-
such as “Metalwork 1793-1880” and “Cabinet Making 1820- dren, and animals arranged in contorted narratives of com-
1960” (fig. 6.17), Wilson brought together objects generally mingling and catharsis that teeter on the edge of a moral
treated as unrelated. Candlesticks were displayed with shack- and psychological abyss. There are no heroes and there are
les, domestic furniture with a whipping post, raising uncom- also no innocent victims as Gone—and the murals, drawings,
fortable yet accurate historical connections between the installations, and films that have followed it—gives form
violence of slavery and the economic growth of the nation. to the distressing historical, emotional, and psychological
entanglements that have grown up between white and black
Kara Walker Americans since slavery.
Though both Charles and Wilson raised the ire of critics When she was thirteen, Walker’s family moved from a
who were concerned that their work was too offensive to be comfortable, racially mixed community in California to one
effective, their intentions were at least understood with rela- in Atlanta permeated, she felt, by racism. Hurt and perplexed
tive clarity. This was not the case with Kara Walker (b. 1969), by the change in her environment, Walker described how,
whose hand-cut silhouettes repeat the exaggerated thick in order of comprehend and survive the racism of her daily
lips and prominent brows and buttocks that are the staple life, she needed to create a place where she could experi-
of racist representations of African-Americans. Room-sized ment with the roles created for her as a black woman in white

African-American Histories
6.18 Kara Walker, Gone: An Historical Romance of the Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One
Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994. Detail. Cut paper on wall, ca. 180" x 50' (396.2 cm x 15.24 m). Installed at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2012 Kara Walker/Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

society. In her life she assertively resisted stereotypes of all take. Like photography, the silhouette appears to transform
kinds, first rejecting the introspective and painterly tradition an object into an image without the intrusion of the artist’s
in which she was trained and then standing up and speaking hand. Shadow, not skill or interpretation, creates a silhou-
out as an African-American woman artist. In her art, however, ette. Attie and Lovell used this so-called “indexical” quality
she courted and embellished stereotypes. Like Charles and of found photographs to clarify the historical content and
Wilson, Walker made art about race and racism, but, unlike heighten the emotional power of their work. But Walker
them, she felt that appropriating evidence of racism was turned this effect against itself by juxtaposing the truth-value
not enough. To truly understand her subject, she said: “I claimed by her medium with the hyperbole of her narratives.
had to actually reinvent or make up my own racist situation No cast shadow shaped Walker’s silhouettes, her subjects take
... In order to have a real connection with my history, I had their forms from the history of racist visual culture filtered
to be somebody’s slave.”!* Like Anselm Kiefer (see Chapter through the artist’s imagination.
3), though in a very different context, Walker attempted to Walker’s work suggests quite dramatically that this history
step into the past to investigate its moral confusion on its own of representation has become bonded to the identity of the
terms. Both artists acted out of a dissatisfaction with what individuals it represents. Racism in this case is not simply a
they perceived as the false clarity with which their contempo- distorting lens that could be removed through education
raries condemned, glorified, or ignored the past, and both or enlightenment to leave the true image visible. Walker’s
would be accused of immorality as a result. vision contrasts with the character of blackness suggested by
After graduating from art school, Walker turned from Charles’s (Liberty Brothers Permanent Daily Circus) Blue Period,
painting to the silhouette, a traditional medium that evokes for instance, which presents the African-American subject
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic environments. divided between an interior “true” self and the exterior
Silhouette making was a modest pre-photographic means costume he is forced to wear. In Walker’s art, the legacy of
for recording likenesses that was practiced by men and racism in the U.S. has changed the very bodies of the people
women, whites and blacks alike. In the 1970s, artists con- affected by it. This was a message, as one might expect, that
cerned with gender equality and racial justice often turned many found difficult to hear.
to such craft traditions to valorize those artisans who had The controversy over Walker’s work exploded in 1997.
traditionally practiced them—a much more diverse group That year she had a traveling solo show organized by the
than “fine artists,” who were almost exclusively male. Though Renaissance Society in Chicago, further exhibitions at the
Walker’s medium might suggest empowerment, her scenes San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Huntington
of degradation refuse to provide any emotional uplift. In Beach Arts Center, California, and was awarded the John D.
fact, the qualities of Walker’s medium tighten the connec- and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award, often called
tion between the actors she represents and the actions they the “genius grant.” The Chicago show presented her most

Chapter 6 Memory and History

comprehensive artistic statement to date, and was accom- of a Nation, or the hyperbolic stereotyping in blaxploitation
panied by an intricately produced catalogue declaring her films—all sources openly cited by Walker. The attention she
intention to address a wide swath of U.S. history. The book now received catalyzed a segment of the African-American
began with an installation shot featuring PRESENTING arts community already troubled by her art into castigating
NEGRO SCENES DRAWN UPON MY PASSAGE THROUGH her work as “bestial fantasies about blacks created by white
THE SOUTH AND RECONFIGURED FOR THE BENEFIT supremacy and racism, for the amusement and investment
OF ENLIGHTENED AUDIENCES WHEREVER SUCH of the white art establishment.”'* When a call to censor her
MAY BE FOUND, BY MYSELF, MISSUS K.E.B. WALKER, went out from a number of prominent artists, Walker and
COLORED (1997) (fig. 6.19). Above one vignette a floating her advocates responded with the expected appeals to free
female Gabriel figure, trumpet held between her legs, blos- speech. Even more significantly, however, writers including
soms as her boot soles, skirt, breasts, hair, and fingers fan renowned literary and historical scholar Henry Louis Gates
out around her. The spectator is then led by Walker’s grace- Jr. and the artist herself theorized the work as a proactive
ful lines and fluid compositions to view slaves’ quarters and engagement with history and racism that took hold of the
plantation grounds where figures dance, bathe, play, copu- means used to perpetuate subjugation and hate. Walker’s art,
late, defecate, and vomit. “Now Reader prepare for Scenes they said, was defined by aberrance and invention that took
of a more dusky nature,” the book announces on page two, her bilious sources to expressive, even humorous extremes
before, with a personal ad—‘“SBF, 23, painter, seeks tall, affec- in order to pose questions about the reality of slavery and its
tionate bastard, 30s, for coffee and paranoia” the reader is aftermath.
invited inside. The book is a layered collection of reproduc- As art historian and curator Robert Hobbs wrote of
tions of slavery-era prints, Walker’s notes and sketches, cut- Walker’s art, “It presents black as a destabilized term whose
tings from advertisements for 1970s blaxploitation films, and meaning ricochets back and forth among a number of varia-
pornography. Many of the pages are translucent, permitting bles”—some innocent and compelling, others horrifying and
the texts and images to be glimpsed across and through one repugnant.’ Identity and selfhood, African-American or oth-
another. By the end of 1997, it was clear that Walker’s vision erwise, are defined in Walker’s work by a perpetual mutation
ofa turbulent and compromised history extended right up to that draws on all manner of historical references and psychic
the present. possibilities. Her imagery bombards its audience with, in
To its critics, Walker’s use of racist visual culture was doing her own words, “contradictory desires and interpretations”
nothing more than circulating the lowest forms of racism that may “seduce” or “outrage” and often do both at the
at the highest levels of culture. Her imagery was decried for same time.'® Being caught between irreconcilable extremes
celebrating the whitewash of history popularized by roman- is, for Walker, part of the realism of the work. Walker’s work
tic fictions of the slave-era South such as Gone with the Wind, is upsetting to herself as well as her viewers for the way in
the racist iconography of texts such as The Clansman, source which it gives form to the moral distortions that the history of
of D.W. Griffith’s heroic portrait of the Ku Klux Klan in Barth slavery brought to U.S. culture.

6.19 Kara Walker, PRESENTING

NEGRO SCENES DRAWN
UPON MY PASSAGE THROUGH
THE SOUTH AND
RECONFIGURED FOR THE
BENEFIT OF ENLIGHTENED
AUDIENCES WHEREVER SUCH
MAY BE FOUND, BY MYSELF,
MISSUS K.E.B. WALKER,
COLORED, 1997. Detail. Cut
paper on wall, cut paper on paper,
Can (AAU 55: (So. 8iemiex
47.24 m). Installed at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
© 2012 Kara Walker/Image
courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.,
New York.

African-American Histories
Kerry James Marshall looks toward the viewer and the path before him as he holds
In 1995, Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) his girlfriend’s hand. She extends her other arm behind him,
completed a series of paintings he called The Garden Project. revealing the tips of her fingers gently resting on his belt in
In a palette of springtime hues, Marshall painted scenes of a gesture that embraces and guides her companion. Around
life in Altgeld, Stateway, Wentworth, and Nickerson Gardens, them, Marshall has created a complex setting that in its spe-
public housing projects in Chicago and Los Angeles, includ- cific details and stylistic variety matches the psychological
ing the one in which Marshall himself had grown up. realism of the figures.
Marshall’s flourishes of Neo-Expressionist brushwork hit the While The Garden Project provides insight into life as it is
surface of the canvas with a force that evokes the violence actually lived rather than perpetuating stereotypes, Marshall’s
of life in the projects and the theatrics of the local evening work is not strictly realist. Like Kara Walker, Marshall
news. The tragedy that the housing projects cultivated some uses indicators of race as symbols. At the Otis Art Institute
of the worst crime in the country was commonly acknowl- in Los Angeles, Marshall studied with Charles White, a lead-
edged in public discussions of poverty in the United States. ing African-American painter rooted in the political and
Marshall’s painting style, however, also displays an ebullient figurative traditions of the 1930s and 1940s. White’s styl-
energy and sense of potential that are rarely part of discus- ized black Everyman served as a model for Marshall, whose
sions of race and poverty in the U.S. Marshall depicts scenes figures, he explains, “are literally and rhetorically black in
of life in the projects with a sensitivity to their character that the same way that we describe ourselves as black people
is unusual in the typically polarizing accounts of such places. in America; we use that extreme position to designate our
The young couple who walk hand in hand through Went- selves in contrast to a white power structure of the country
worth Gardens. in Better Homes, Better Gardens (1994) (fig. or the white mainstream.”'? Marshall conveys the dichotomy
6.20) are individualized and appear to represent real people implied by this statement—that African-Americans project a
navigating the complexities of life. The young black man self-image that functions first and foremost in relation to the

6.20 Kerry James Marshall, Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994. Acrylic and collage, 100 x 144"
(254 x 365.76 cm). Denver Art Museum. Image courtesy of Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City, CA
 6.21 Kerry James Marshall, Lost Boys:
AKA Black Sonny, 1993. Acrylic,
ZIEX 25 (00). 9010825 em}
Private collection. Image courtesy
of Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver
City, CA

ah

dominant culture rather than the self—in a second series, Otis for a college degree and then out into the wider world,
Lost Boys. Responding to the incarceration of his youngest where Marshall set out to make art for the museum that
brother, Marshall created a series of portraits that elide the could serve as an example to others in the black commu-
fantasy in Peter Pan of the Lost Boys who never grow up to nity. “I wanted to find a way to make sure that when young
be adults with the plight of African-American men, so often black kids went to the museum, that they didn’t just have
kept from a meaningful adulthood by the inequities in U.S. to be inspired by the work of European artists but could
society. Marshall was painting from personal experience and also be inspired by the work of a black painter and by work
political outrage. In order to provide his own “Lost Boys” that didn’t have to be segregated into a black section of the
with individual personalities and simultaneously address a museum, like there must be something a little deficient or
social crisis in more generalized terms, Marshall depicted his something about it.”'* In 2007, curators Roger M. Buergel
subjects with the features of real people but using a nearly and Ruth Noack included a mini-retrospective of Marshall’s
impenetrable black palette that reveals its nuances slowly. work in Documenta 12 that explicitly integrated it into Euro-
The character of the portraits as renderings of actual people pean art history. In addition to providing a socially conscious
only emerges from the symbolic black forms upon close lens through which to think about the exhibition that sur-
inspection. Aesthetically and emotionally, the deep blacks of rounded it, Marshall’s work carried on a direct dialogue with
the flesh tones of the Lost Boys, the painterly variety of their the art of the Old Masters: At Wilhelmshohe Castle, one of
backgrounds, and their individualized modeling provide Documenta’s venues in Kassel, the Lost Boys were hung in the
critical social content and invite the viewer to personalize baroque galleries near paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt.
Marshall’s politics.
Conceptually and politically, portraits such as Lost Boys:
AKA Black Sonny (1993) (fig. 6.21) represent people and Art Histories and Civil Wars
issues usually excluded from the canon of art history. Such By the end of the twentieth century, even if the results proved
works, Marshall has argued, prove that with the simple mate- controversial, artists were being asked publicly to engage
rials of paint and canvas one individual can make a statement the histories of World War II, Vietnam, and slavery. These
and so help transform national culture and art history itself. events were being written about and debated elsewhere at
His own, path took him from the projects in Los Angeles to the same time. The artists discussed in this final section also

Art Histories and Civil Wars

invented forms to address the trauma of the past, but the his- an end to the diplomatic engagement that had secured the
tories they speak about, and live with, had not been written ceasefire the previous year. The Colombian military now
at the time of their interventions—and, in some cases, have quickly moved south to Cali where it suspected, correctly,
still not been formulated. The covert wars in Latin America, that the M-19 had been recruiting. Starting in 1985 and con-
in particular the conflict in Colombia discussed below, were tinuing through the 1990s, violent conflict based on politics, |
defined by the secrecy in which they were waged. The dead and in some cases the drug trade, escalated between the gov-
were not necessarily combatants while their assailants might ernment and rebel forces.
be soldiers, police, criminals, or revolutionaries. Where The fighting at the Palace of Justice was traumatic for the
very little of the past is recorded properly, reckoning with nation and left Salcedo with visceral memories of buildings
history becomes particularly challenging. A number of Leb- burning and people dying. She has said that in response to
anese artists and thinkers, reflecting on their experience of the attack and the brutality of its suppression she “began to
the constantly shifting psychological, political, even carto- conceive of works based on nothing, in the sense of having
graphic terrain of Beirut during its extended period of civil nothing and of there being nothing.”'? In retrospect, the
war, have raised the question of whether the violations such incident stands out for its visibility since, by 1986, one of the
conflicts enact upon participants’ memories render them most common and disturbing acts of violence experienced
un-recountable, The possible impossibility of writing history in Colombia was passing unseen: People would be taken
is a problem that is relevant to many of the instances of war, from their homes or from the streets and never seen again.
dislocation, and trauma occurring in the wake of globaliza- The disappearances were generally attributed to govern-
tion. A final return to the history of the war in Vietnam serves ment forces seeking to silence and terrorize the populace. It
as a reminder to Western viewers that it too was a civil war has been estimated that nearly 20,000 people simply “disap-
with consequences that exceeded the military conflict, and as peared” in the decade after the Palace of Justice attack. This
such shares many of the ambiguities present in the Colom- form of violence, repeated in military dictatorships through-
bian and Lebanese experiences. out Latin America, produces a particular kind of devasta-
tion that denies those left behind any resolution: There is no
Doris Salcedo body, no proof of death, and no answers. _
In the summer of 1985, sculptor Doris Salcedo (b, 1958) Beginning in the 1990s, Salcedo used her work to respond
returned home to Bogota, Colombia after finishing graduate to this specific form of loss. Her challenge as an artist was to
school in New York City. That November, she witnessed the give form to absence or, in her own words, to “make a mate-
siege of the Palace of Justice by the insurgent M-19 militia, rial object from nothing” that would correspond to the his-
an event that transformed the political history of Colombia. torical specificity of her subject.2” Maya Lin had done this
The largely middle-class militants did not have a long history by mixing the evocative, abstract qualities of Minimalism
of carrying out guerrilla assaults, but were savvy about the with the very precise and human facts of the Vietnam War
power of the media, The capture of the Supreme Court was in the timeline of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (see figs.
planned to provide an effective piece of political theater cul- 6.1-6.3). Salcedo started by collecting refuse from the streets
minating in the trial of President Belisario Betancur for vio- of Bogota, striving to create a connection between the dis-
lating a L984 ceasefire agreement he had negotiated with a carded materials and the experience of loss. To link her
collection of rebel groups, some of whom had been fight- art more clearly to the recent political history of Colombia,
ing the state for the past three decades. The government Salcedo then began interviewing families of the disappeared.
responded to the siege with overwhelming force, however, The people left behind were primarily women, and Salcedo
killing nearly all the rebels in a two-day battle that marked spent significant amounts of time with them, gathering

6.22 Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios, 1992-93. Detail. Wall installation with sheetrock, wood, shoes, animal fiber, and surgical thread in ten niches with 11
animaltiber boxes sewn with surgical thread, Collection of The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Chapter 6 Memory and History

stories until she felt that she had internalized the narratives. William Kentridge
Murder was not witnessed, death was never certain—what Doris Salcedo’s insights into trauma began in and return to
had definitely changed, however, was “home.” It was here, silence. Atrabiliarios came into being as the artist asked what
in ordinary people’s living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, remains in the wake of acts of violence that have no witnesses
that loss was most clearly and painfully evident, and it was and that often leave no means of verification at all. With a
in these homes that Salcedo sat and spoke with those who similar concern for representing the invisible scars of injus-
remained. To translate the intensity of her subjects’ experi- tice, South African artist William Kentridge creates drawings
ences, Salcedo collected materials that appeared to contain and animated films that plumb the political history and psy-
traces of the disappeared—shoes, chairs, beds, armoires, chological depths of his own country. As a child of middle-
clothing, doors—with which she could build. From the late class Jewish lawyers who defended victims of apartheid,
1980s through to the new millennium, Salcedo has created Kentridge had an unusual South African childhood. He
an extensive oeuvre based upon reconfiguring domestic experienced the privilege of being white under the apartheid
objects in light of the lives they touched system, which granted rights and power to South Africans
The first work to draw on the interviews was Atrabiliarios of European descent, but at the same time he was also pro-
(1992-93) (fig. 6.22), an installation consisting of small foundly aware of the unethical foundation of his status. Most
niches covered with animal hide and containing shoes. The of his white peers lived separately from both black South
hides were translucent and stitched to the gallery walls with Africans and critiques of apartheid. For them, as the artist
surgical thread. It took time to make out the forms behind points out, the “illogicalities” and “evils” of their society were
them, so viewers were forced to get close enough to sense, “naturalized” when they were children.”* For Kentridge, by
even smell, the uncomfortable alliance of the medical and contrast, ordinary activities such as going to whites-only swim-
animal realms in the materials used. Salcedo explained that ming pools, movies, or schools were both normalized and at
selecting shoes as the content of the work felt like a choice the same time recognized for the offenses that they were. His
that had been made for her by the history of the area. When art can be seen as a representation and reflection upon the
common graves were discovered, families would often con- effect of such contradictory experiences. Even as he has often
front bodies that were no longer recognizable and accompa- turned his attention to topics outside the history of South
nying shoes were one means of identifying corpses. Almost Africa, Kentridge has continued to examine the philosophi-
hidden between the veils of animal skin in Salcedo’s work, cal and emotional dimensions of the human quest for moral
the shoes evoke the painful closure for the survivors who and ethical equilibrium.
finally received confirmation of the fate of the disappeared In the late 1980s, Kentridge created a form of animated
by their recovery. film that replaced the thousands of individual drawings
The shoes in Salcedo’s work, however, are all women’s that make up traditional animations with frame-by-frame
shoes, so drawing attention to the fate of women who van- documentations of the creation and modification of a few
ished but also alluding to the women who were left behind— charcoal drawings. On a single page, lines are rendered
Colombian widows’ groups have been the most vocal in and erased, landscapes appear and are populated, charac-
seeking justice for the dead. The title Atrabiliarios means ters enter and act, and objects are formed and transformed.
“defiant,” thus evoking resistance to the psychological and The first of the films, Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City After Paris
political paralysis created by fear and violence. Like all of (1989), introduced the city that serves as the primary setting
the work discussed in this chapter, Salcedo’s art is about the and subject of a series of nine short films; the last, Tide Table,
experience of enduring history, as well as addressing the was completed in 2003. The films’ two protagonists—an
events themselves. It alludes to the dead, but is directed to industrialist, Soho Eckstein, always presented dressed in a
the community of survivors. Salcedo’s work tells us of the suit, and an artist, Felix Teitelbaum, shown naked—enable
struggle with the material world that remains after one’s Kentridge to address a spectrum of experiences that intersect
emotional world has been devastated. After people disappear, with his own. Initially it was Felix who was conceived as and
things often take on the status of relics of lost companions. In appeared to be the artist’s alter ego, expressing the sensibility
a 1999 interview Salcedo asserted, “My works are not memo- of a white South African pained by the injustice of apartheid
rials, they are not about remembering. I am not interested and eager for, if also anxious about, change. As the series
in telling stories; when you deal with violence words are no continued, however, Kentridge found that the conflicted and
longer possible. These sculptures are empty, there is nothing poignant condition of his identity and that of much of the
there but silence: the silence of the victim, the silence of rest of the nation was also represented by Soho, a business-
death, the silence of the artist and of the viewer.”*! Salcedo’s man who was invested in the political and economic reali-
work is both about and a means of coping with a violated ties of apartheid even if not necessarily in the ideologies that
world; it does not replace the devastation wrought by history upheld it.
with hope or heroes any more than do Walker’s scenes or During the 1970s and 1980s, Kentridge had produced
Lin’s wall. Instead, Atrabiliarios provides an opportunity to agit-prop theater and political prints that treated art as a
reflect on surviving the world as it has become. means to intervene in politics. With his turn to animation,

Art Histories and Civil Wars

6.23 William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. Video stills. Whole film 8 minutes, 43 seconds.
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

however, his work started to become “more a reflection on his walls, Felix renders the recognizable terrain of Johan-
the political world, in terms of the way it affects us person- nesburg and through them even appears to travel back from
ally, than an attempt to become part of it,” he recounted.* his exile. His drawings drift on a wind that blows through his
The plots of his films take us into the daily lives of the two room and out onto the South African landscape. In one par-
men. Soho struggles with the urgent economic, emotional, ticularly moving segment, a scene that Kentridge had con-
and political difficulties of running his business, while Felix ceived before he determined the plot of the film, Felix looks
lives the more distanced existence of an observer, only occa- into the mirror that hangs above a small sink in the room and
sionally submitting to moments of passion, including a love sees Nandi, a black South African surveyor, in place of his
affair with Soho’s wife. In Felix in Exile (1994) (fig. 6.23), the own reflection. Nandi measures and imagines new spaces for
naked artist is shown in a one-room flat that evokes a Paris- the city as we see massacred victims of the suppressed anti-
ian garret. In the drawings that fill his notebooks and cover apartheid uprisings through her eyes. Nandi’s body, too, falls
like the others. Back in Felix’s apartment, water fills the sink
and spills out into the room. Felix stands in the rising water
as the walls around him vanish, the artist finding himself half-
submerged in a pond in the desolate terrain where Nandi
had died. Felix in Exile was completed just before the first fully
democratic election in South Africa in 1994, at a moment
when apartheid had been abolished but the next chapter of
the nation’s history had yet to be written.
Stereoscope (1999) (fig. 6.24) was produced after the 1994
election of Nelson Mandela as president and the 1995 estab-
lishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
sought to openly address the crimes of apartheid. In the film,
Kentridge focuses on Soho in an effort to articulate the rela-
tionship between a white protagonist who stood to gain from
the previous social order and the political transformation of
the black population of South Africa. Unlike the exiled Felix,
Soho occupies the actual space of Johannesburg,e@, but he is
distanced from the city by the walls of his factory and his own
anxieties. He witnesses riots in the streets and his factory is
bombed. The world of Johannesburg is transformed around
him as he watches bodies and objects appear on the pages of
his balance sheet, in the factory, and on the city streets. At
several moments in the film, Kentridge divides the page on
which he is drawing in two, repeating the same scenes as if
they were to be examined in a stereoscope, a nineteenth-
century viewing device that created from two identical photo-
graphs the illusion of a three-dimensional image. More than
a nod to obsolescent technology, Kentridge’s duplication—
always imperfect and sometimes dramatically so—becomes
a means of examining divided identities. “Mine is a desper-
ate sort of naturalism,” he has explained. “I question the cost
and pain engendered by self-multiplicity ... There’s a kind
of madness that arises from living in two worlds ... Somehow
the state is not so terrible or strange when it’s named, fixed
through its representation.”* In the final scene of Stereoscope,
it is Soho who stands alone in his room as blue water pours
forth, cascading from his pockets as it had from the sink in
Felix in Exile, leaving him standing head down, with water up
6.24 William Kentridge, Stereoscope, 1999. Video stills. Whole film 8
to the knees of his striped suit.
minutes, 22 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery,
By the completion of Stereoscope, Kentridge’s strategies New York/Paris.
for making art about South Africa were being interpreted
as analogous to the aims of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. The transfer of power from the apartheid discussion of the complexity of Kentridge’s presentation
state to the South African democracy was inspiring and the of South African identity and history: “...that a struggle of
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, through which the stark, but stabilizing, antagonisms ultimately resolved itself
nation sought to respond to its violent history with public through the rationalization of political reconciliation fore-
reflection, appeared to provide an unprecedented means to closed the clarity of any definitive catharsis. As the South
avoid the purges and silences that plagued other twentieth- African academic and writer Njabulo Ndebele has put it,
century attempts to transcend moments of social conflict. what the liberation struggle was denied was ‘the ultimate
South Africa’s success was duly celebrated. However, treat- experience, the witnessing of the enemy’s resounding
ing the airing of grievances as an end in itself had the unin- defeat’. “The Bastille’, as he says, ‘was not stormed.’”” Ken-
tended consequence of guilt being pronounced in the tridge was able to give aesthetic expression to this lack of
absence of any corresponding mechanism to inflict punish- clarity. Soho’s tears, transposed from his body to his cloth-
ments or bring about redemption. Art historians Jessica ing, transform the catharsis of weeping into the more ambig-
Dubow and Ruth Rosengarten summarized the issue in their uous spectacle of being drenched in a scene that has been

Art Histories and Civil Wars

interpreted as representing both absolution and abjection. Notebook Volume 72 (1996-2003) (fig. 6.25) typifies
As with an antique stereoscope, Kentridge’s manner of rep- the conundrums created by the Atlas Group. The work con-
resentation relies on viewing the same thing twice: The char- sists of notebook pages on which historian Fad] Fakhouri
acters of Soho and Felix taken together provide a window recorded the gambling activities of himself and a group of
into the complex and often conflictual emotional reality that Lebanese intellectuals. Each page features a photo-finish of
follows crisis. a horse race with notes detailing the bets made, the individu-
als present and their personalities, and the result of the race.
Walid Raad The historians, however, were not betting on the outcome of
Lebanese Conceptual artist Walid Raad (b. 1967) has the horse race ‘but on the amount of time between the end
focused his work on a history that has generally evaded of the race and the moment the photographer was able to
understanding in hopes of answering one question: “How document the winner’s victory. A complex calculation based
does one write the history of ‘the Lebanese Civil War?’” on the speed of the horse and its distance from the finish
Raad and the collaborative Atlas Group “locate, preserve, line as indicated in the published photograph determined
study and produce audio, visual, literary, and other artifacts the winning historian. The images were always fractions of a
that shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon.”?° second early or late so that the representation of the victory
Their media include photographs, books, lectures, models, never coincided with the event itself. This discrepancy
archives, and documents “constituted by various individuals, between the recording of history and the experience of it was
groups, discourses, events, situations, and more impor- of acute interest to the historians and to Raad.
tantly by modes of experiences” produced by the A second twist to Missing Lebanese Wars and all of the Atlas
civil war in Lebanon (1975-91).?7 How we are to Group’s work involves the method by which the informa-
evaluate these pieces of evidence is a nagging ques- tion was collected and the authorship of the final document.
tion posed by Raad’s art. Missing Lebanese Wars— The Atlas Group’s mission statement gives its founding date

Description of the Winning Historian:

He is not merely miserable. He is brilliant at it.
There seems no event, no matter how trivial that
does not arouse him to a frenzy of self-mortification

meSbSCKCCCCENES

ier |

Historians' Initials and Bets:

1.KS -717
2.MM +830 Winning Historian / Time:
3. FF +729
PH - 222
4.PH -222
5.HG +311
6.RO +001
7.AB -921
8. SK -112

Race Distance:
1000 m.
Distance Between Horse
Winning Time: and Finish Line:
1:10 rey 6.25 The Atlas Group
in collaboration with
Average Speed:
Walid Raad, Missing
50.5 km/hr.
lebanese Wars—
Notebook Volume 72,
1996-2003. Detail.
Framed digital color
prints. 21 plates; each
13% x 10%" (35.2 x
26 cm). Private
collection. Courtesy
Anthony Reynolds
Gallery, London.

Chapter 6 Memory and History

 Se) GS aa aa ae

MG tpt) ame wee

‘ ‘ , wig

6.26 The Atlas Group in collaboration with Walid Raad, My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair, 2000-03.
Detail showing front and back of one photograph. Digital prints. 100 plates; each 10 x 1376: (25,5) < 35,5" em}
Private collection. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

as 1999, whereas its website says 1989 and Raad has given a unstable even the most basic narratives of war and peace,
date as early as 1967. This is the first indication that history alliance and conflict, had become. Sadek concluded that all
and facts in Raad’s work do not follow ordinary logic. Col- communication had taken on the status of “rumor,” which
laborators on the project include architect Tony Chakar, he defined as language in a state of “unchecked textual
journalist and poet Bilal Khbeiz, artist Maha Traboulsi, promiscuity,” unleashed from customary or official rela-
and co-founder Zainab Fakhouri. Writer Jalal Toufic, artist tionships to meaning.*? This condition has consequences
Waled Sadek, and historian Fadl Fakhouri are repeatedly ref- for post-conflict regions around the globe. “Such demands
erenced by Raad and the group. Fakhouri, who has served as invite art[ists] ... to reconsider the conditions which govern
source and subject in several Atlas Group works, is—like his and even promote an art practice based on the politics of
widow, Zainab Fakhouri, and Maha Traboulsi—fictional. One protest.”°? Raad’s exploration into writing a history of the
piece of work might be credited to the Atlas Group, another Lebanese civil war is such a practice.
to Raad in collaboration with the Atlas Group, a third to My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair (2000-03) (fig. 6.26)
the Atlas Group/Walid Raad. The instability of authorship takes car bombs as an entry point into Lebanese history. Car
suggested by such changing attributions—made to both bombs transform the everyday into a threat to life. In the civil
real people and fictional characters—reflects the illusory war, they altered the relationship of the Lebanese to their city
nature of the history of war and its effect on those who live and came to symbolize the conflict. After its repeated use in
through it. Lebanon and the concurrent violence in Northern Ireland,
In an essay addressing the peculiar conditions of com- the car bomb came to define the character of urban warfare
munication in contemporary Beirut, Waled Sadek asserted in the 1970s and 1980s. My Neck started with straightforward
that “the floating sign” had become the “condition and ... documentary research. Raad, with Chakar and Khbeiz, inves-
prerequisite for any consequent critical activity.”*® History tigated a single car bomb detonated on January 21, 1986 in
had rendered the relationship of the sign to its referent, the Furn Ech Chuback district of East Beirut. After assem-
between word and meaning, one of continual and irregular bling considerable information, they expanded the project to
flux. Beirut’s civil war was defined by diverse internal alli- include images and accounts of other car bombings. Unlike
ances that manipulated, and were manipulated by, a range Missing Lebanese Wars, My Neck is based on period photo-
of external forces. The treaties at the close of the war—the graphs of the conflict, several of which were taken by George
Taif Agreement in 1989, its amendment in 1990, and the Semerdjian, who was active in the region until his death by
general amnesty of 1991—ended the fighting but estab- sniper fire in 1989. All the photographs reproduced in the
lished only a fragile alliance among religious groups and work document engines thrown from exploded cars. Though
militias which faced considerable pressure from Israel, the there is often evidence of damage, the expected spectacle of
United States, Syria, and other Arab nations. Raad explained wounded civilians, craters in the streets, broken glass, chaos,
in an extended interview with Silvia Kolbowski (see Chapter and death is absent here. Raad introduces My Neck with a text
2) that during the Israeli incursion in 2006 the central gov- that claims it was a matter of pride among wartime photog-
ernment was unable to deliver basic services and the popu- raphers to be the first to find and photograph the ejected
lace returned to civil-war allegiances and expectations. The engine, the only part of the car to remain intact. These
ease with which postwar understandings were replaced by images are the result of journalists leaving the scene of
wartime relationships, even at a moment when one might destruction to investigate a site related to but removed from
have expected heightened nationalism, demonstrated how the actuality of the violence.

Art Histories and Civil Wars

 In Berlin in 2004, Raad presented the imagery from My amnesia encountered in postwar Lebanon, and which is
Neck alongside a film of contemporary Beirut.*' Though exemplified by the unjust and scandalous general amnesty
the footage showed the center of the city in the middle of law ... writers and filmmakers should have devised affirma-
the day, the streets appear empty. When asked about this tive scenarios and strategies either to remember or not to
absence, Raad responded that he did not understand: There remember.”*® Toufic is not alone in seeing artists as having
had been many people there when he made the video—they an important role to play in this process. Anselm Kiefer’s
had mysteriously disappeared from the final film. The viewer and Kara Walker’s very different efforts to step into the
had two choices: to believe that the wars altered the reality shoes of the aggressor, the Gerzes’ invitations to community
of Beirut such that this unfathomable disappearance actu- dialogue, and Doris Salcedo’s exploration of silence all
ally occurred, or to believe that Raad was lying, an act that propose means of facilitating acts of mourning; Raad’s
by extension cast suspicion on the veracity of other aspects attention to the actual, possible, and definitely fictional
of the work. In Raad’s words, the Atlas Group strives to past illustrates another. André Lepecki, one of Raad’s most
“approach facts not in their crude facticity but through the insightful commentators, argues that the Atlas Group pro-
complicated mediations by which they acquire their immedi- vides the means for “active remembering” by facilitating
acy.”°? Facts, as Raad points out, come in all sorts of different “imaginative actualization of an event’s nameless multiplici-
categories, including aesthetic, emotional, political, material, ties.”*’ The plurality of Raad’s solutions threatens the stability
and psychological, and in a post-crisis region like Beirut do of any single response to his art or its subject matter. Hysteri-
not follow any simple logic. cal documents such as My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair con-
Raad fashions his facts from what he calls “hysterical docu- stitute primary sources from which to begin a history written
ments.”*’ Hysteria is a psychological condition, discussed after crisis.
at length by Sigmund Freud, in which the individual gener-
ates fantasies regarding the world and reacts to them as if Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
they were real. The world of the hysteric coincides with actu- The final image in this chapter returns us to the history of
ality but is not guided by its logic or limits. For the hysteric Vietnam, but this time as seen from a Vietnamese perspec-
subject, as for Raad’s audience, distinguishing between fact tive. The work in question, Memorial Project, Nha Trang,
and fiction is difficult, if not impossible, and may even be Vietnam: “Towards the Complex—for the Courageous, the Curious
destructive. In a remarkable exchange between Kolbowski and the Cowards” (2001) (fig. 6.27) by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
and Raad recorded during his evacuation from Beirut in (b. 1968), is a thirteen-minute film showing bicycle taxis,
the course of the 2006 Israeli attacks, Kolbowski cites the fol- called “cyclos,” being ridden on the floor of the ocean in the
lowing lines from historian and theorist of psychoanalysis waters off Nha Trang, Vietnam. The cyclos are maneuvered
Jacqueline Rose: “Paranoid impulses don’t just project onto by local fisherman who dive down to the vehicles, pedal
reality as delusion; they affect reality and become a com- and push them along the sand, and then come back up to
ponent of it. At which point, to deny the real danger, even the surface to draw breath before returning below. The film
though you may have created it, would be as pathological as follows the divers as they descend to the cyclos, which are
to imagine, falsely, that danger is there.”*! Rose’s concerns clearly out of place immersed in the blue water, and exert
here are with the destructive paranoia that produces wars, considerable energy maneuvering them around coral and
but her warning extends to those trying to reckon with the rocks. Most of the video is shot underwater, but there are
consequences of such violence. Facts exist independently of moments when we see the ocean surface, broken by the
their relationship to reality. In the context of the psyche, they men’s heads as they come up for air.
move in and out of delusions; in that of the Atlas Group, they In Vietnamese cities like Ho Chi Minh City (formerly
occupy spaces of reality, fiction, history, memory, art, imagi- Saigon), where Nguyen-Hatsushiba moved in 1996, cyclos
nation, materiality, emotion, and desire. were once a ubiquitous form of transportation, and they
In the same conversation, Raad quotes Lebanese theorist appear in a number of his works. Many of their drivers had
and video artist Jalal Toufic’s thoughts on the character of been on very different career paths before the Vietnam War.
post-crisis regions. Toufic discusses Beirut, Hiroshima, and Afterward they found themselves without resources and so
Auschwitz in Undying Love or Love Dies (2002) and describes took up this form of comparatively humble labor. By 2001,
them as sites that “invoke an act of remembrance but [in cyclos had been banned from much of the city due to traffic
which] ... concrete acts of memory become impossible.” To congestion, leaving their operators again at a crossroads.
remember requires coherent connections between the past In response, Nguyen-Hatsushiba designed a small museum
and the present, and those disappear during states of crisis. dedicated to bicycle taxis and has even designed cyclos.
There are no formulas for mending the links required to Transferring these vehicles from the street to the ocean floor
mourn, but it is clear that citizens of post-crisis regions need dramatizes the difficulty of the work while emphasizing its
to have access to the events that are to be overcome: If society beauty and pathos—qualities perfectly captured in Memorial
is not providing it, then artists must. Toufic writes in Unde- Project. This new setting for the cyclos also connects them to
serving Lebanon (2007): “Against the prevalent post-traumatic the history of Vietnam and the sea, both of which have been

Chapter 6 Memory and History

 6.27 Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba,
Memorial Project, Nha Trang,
Vietnam: “Towards the
Complex —For the Courageous,
the Curious and the Cowards,”
2001. Film, 13 minutes, looped.
Single-channel projection on DVD
with two unique sculptures:
History-Xich Lo Cyclo sculpture
59% x 86% x 39%" (150 x
219.9 x 99.9 cm); unique
ReflectXich Lo Cyclo sculpture 48
x 100837" (W21O x 2O9.24 x
93.98 cm). Unique dimensions
variable. Edition of 10. Courtesy
the artist and Lehmann Maupin
Gallery, New York and Hong
Kong.

shaped by the war and its aftermath. On the one hand, there implied final perfect state, had been one of the grand narra-
are parts of the coast that still have mines left from the time tives that the French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard witnessed
of the U.S. blockade—Nguyen-Hatsushiba admitted to being being dismantled in the late 1970s. How to engage the past
concerned about the risk of encountering them while shoot- without reinforcing the power of those narratives, and how to
ing the film. More important for Memorial Project is the con- reject the form those histories took but still address the past
nection between the cyclo drivers and the approximately they strove to explain, were serious challenges to contempo-
2 million Vietnamese boat people who, fearing persecution rary artists. James Rosenquist, OBAC, and Judy Chicago, all
or poverty, fled the country between the end of the war in discussed in Chapter 1, provide examples of how contem-
1975 and the mid-1990s. These refugees set sail on treach- porary artists might engage history even as that history was
erous waters in vessels ill-equipped for the trip. Many, even being deconstructed around them. Each sought to include
thousands, died in the effort. more in the historical record than they felt was currently
Neguyen-Hatsushiba was born in his mother’s native there. James Rosenquist, in his /-J1/ (see fig. 1.1), linked
Japan. After the war, his family moved briefly to Vietnam, his the militarism of the mid-1960s with the horrors of World
father’s homeland, but decided they could not stay: Nguyen- War II by juxtaposing images of the atomic mushroom cloud,
Hatsushiba left with his father for the U.S., while his mother a young girl, and the titular fighter bomber, flown for the
and sister went to Japan. After graduating from art school, first time in late 1964 while he was working on the painting.
Nguyen-Hatsushiba moved back to Vietnam on his own. OBAC filled the Wall of Respect (see fig. 1.21) with heroes,
Looking at Vietnamese history from the position of a return- both dead and living, who were being left out of the history
ing émigré, he saw those people who left and those who lessons taught at school, and Judy Chicago invited women to
stayed as complementary, each living lives transformed by the table of history (see fig. 1.28). As the turn of the millen-
the political changes wrought by the war. Bringing the activ- nium approached, artists who had been raised with history
ity of the riders into the space of the boat people dramatized deconstructed turned back to its narratives to create net-
the struggle of postwar Vietnam, but also brought together works of intersecting stories. Such histories are conveyed in
these two groups of people, commemorating two differ the faces of surviving Vietnam War veterans reflecting off the
ent means of surviving the calamities of Vietnamese history. names of the dead; they are written in the signatures of those
Memorial Project uses performance, sculpture, painting, video, committing themselves against fascism and in the defacing
and music to recount and reflect upon histories that have graffiti of those unready to join them; and they are spoken
brought us to the present. through the silence of cast-off clothing from Colombia or the
History, written as a teleological progression showing suc- waters off the shores of Vietnam. The art built of these stories
cessive victories of civilization leading toward a deferred but tells of histories and speaks of History.

Art Histories and Civil Wars 167

 n the U.S., the late 1980s and early 1990s wit-
nessed an intense backlash against the liberal-
| ism and particularly the feminism articulated
in the previous decades. Having finally been
obliged to acknowledge the specter of AIDS
and the growing visibility of marginal commu-
nities, conservative forces initiated what have
become known as the “Culture Wars” against
contemporary art as a means to express frustra-
tion with society. Antagonists met in dramatic
fashion on the occasion of a 1988 retrospective
of U.S. photographer Robert Mapplethorpe
(1946-89), “The Perfect Moment,” curated by
Janet Kardon, the director of the Institute of
Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. The exhibi-
tion presented the full scope of Mapplethorpe’s
work, including still lifes, formal and informal
portraiture, erotica, and even some collages and
abstractions. It toured between 1988 and 1990,
and was thus on view when the artist died of an
AIDS-related condition in 1989, so becoming
a magnet for Culture Wars combatants. “The
Perfect Moment” drew particular fire for includ-
ing a group of photographs depicting—in excep-
tionally controlled compositions, exquisitely 7.1 Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry and Bobby Kissing, 1979. 13% x 13%" (384.5 x
34.5 cm). © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy Art + Commerce.
printed with remarkable tonal range—subjects
in sexually provocative and, in several cases,
sadomasochistic poses. Despite the potentially
upsetting imagery in some of his photographs, Mapple- exhibition also included Mapplethorpe’s portraits of chil-
thorpe’s sensitivity to the artist-photographer’s traditional dren in casual, informal poses and not always fully dressed
tasks of demonstrating aesthetic invention and revealing further charged the controversy. Three weeks before its
his subject’s personality makes it clear that his intention is scheduled opening at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washing-
not simply to shock. Images such as Larry and Bobby Kissing ton, D.C., museum officials succumbed to pressure and
(1979) (fig. 7.1) represent beauty, desire, and sexuality backed out of participation in the tour. When the show then
outside mainstream heterosexual society, and Mapplethorpe’s reached Cincinnati the city brought its host institution, the
graceful command of classical compositional techniques Contemporary Arts Center, to court on charges of violating
and his seductive tonal palette invite viewers to lavish atten- state obscenity laws. The museum was found not guilty, but
tion on bodies sometimes—though hardly as often as not before the exhibition had been transformed into the
critics claimed—engaged in taboo sexual behavior. That the largest censorship scandal of the decade, thereby confirming

Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

 7.2 Andres Serrano, Gun Murder
(The Morgue), 1992. Cibachrome
and plexiglass, 50 x 60" (127 x
152.4 cm). Courtesy Yvon
Lambert, Paris

the vibrancy—but also the tenuous position—of contemporary This contentious atmosphere of the 1990s politicized all
art in U.S. public life. art about the body. Some artists, such as Serrano, used the
Another photographer to draw fire during the early 1990s controversy to play the role of provocateur. Others, includ-
was Andres Serrano (b. 1950). Though his photographs ing photographer Sally Mann (b. 1951), whose exquisitely
lack the political engagement that informs Mapplethorpe’s rendered prints from an 8 x 10 inch-view camera of her
work, his manipulations of bodies and bodily fluids are children came under fire for what critics claimed was their
seductive in their beauty and almost intuitively provocative undue attention to their subjects’ sexuality and sensuality,
in their subject matter. Serrano’s work of the late 1980s and felt that politicians and even art critics were distorting their
early 1990s included photographs of blood, milk, ejaculate, work almost beyond recognition. Though the debates over
and urine. His most controversial works combined these censorship and NEA funding tended to revolve around issues
fluids with religious objects including a crucifix—the much- of free speech, individual rights, and public responsibilities,
attacked Piss Christ (1987)—and a statue of the Virgin Mary, the inclusion of Mann’s work in the controversy reveals that
but his imagery of real bodies was no less controversial. its deeper roots lay in a struggle to define the character of
Among Serrano’s subjects were Ku Klux Klan members and, U.S. society. At issue in a photograph such as New Mothers
in a 1992 series called The Morgue, dead bodies (fig. 7.2). (1989) (fig. 7.3), presented family album-style in the art-
To critics, such work were emblematic of how far artists had ist’s book titled Immediate Family (1992) and featured in an
drifted from mainstream culture. Debates about contempo- exhibition of the same year, was whether viewers recognized
rary art in newspapers, museums, academia, talk shows, and themselves and their own family in the image. Unusual in
even in the U.S. Congress and Canadian parliament were her ability to capture the liminal moments in which child-
punctuated by demands for reduced public funding for such hood and adulthood merge, and able to show her children
artists, accusations of censorship, and political grandstand- as fully active agents in their lives, Mann struck a nerve
ing. In the early 1990s, Mapplethorpe and Serrano were among viewers trying to keep up nostalgic fictions of Ameri-
used by conservative politicians in the U.S. to pressure the can family life and conservative myths about childhood. The
National Endowment for the Arts to severely cut financial photographs in Jmmediate Family originated with Mann’s chil-
support and limit what artists could do with grant money. In dren. It was her daughters who chose the props and the poses
a 2011 epilogue to the Culture Wars controversies, French in New Mothers—Mann merely asked them to hold still for
Catholic protestors and ultra-right-wing Front National poli- the camera. As the photographer herself has said, these are
ticians, objecting to what they felt was the blasphemy of Ser- scenes that loving parents witness as their growing children
rano’s Piss Christ, called for its removal from an exhibition imagine themselves in adult society: This is play as it occurs,
at the renowned Yvon Lambert gallery in Avignon, France. not as politicians might like to imagine it. Mann has contin-
When the gallery refused to oblige, several individuals ued to interrogate constructions of U.S. identity, turning
attacked the work with a hammer and a sharp object that wit- from the family to the landscape, photographing often unre-
nesses reported was an icepick. markable features—a tree scarred by a knife cut, overhanging

Culture, Body, Self 169

 7.3 Sally Mann, New Mothers from the
Immediate Family series, 1989. Gelatin
silver print. © Sally Mann. Courtesy
Gagosian Gallery.

vines, tangled roots——-to convey a sense of the character or Africa (1995), Kwangju, Korea (1995), and Shanghai, China
history of a place (fig. 7.4). Nationalism is no more the limit (1996), all of which joined the pioneering Havana Biennial
of these photographs than documentation was the justifica- (1984) to provide audiences with the opportunity to con-
tion for Immediate Family, both join in a national conversation sider the relationship between self and society in a variety of
about the role of art in crafting a sense of individual and col- international contexts. The Venice Biennale of 1993 featured
lective identity. identity art from artists and cultures across the globe.
In the face of steady attacks by conservative critics express- This chapter presents a wide variety of work that asks
ing the anxiety of mainstream culture toward difference, who the “I” is at the intersection of social forces and layered
artists began to draw attention to their outsider
identity as a source of inspiration and power.
Curators, in turn, began exploring what consti-
tuted the individual. New York hosted exhibi-
tions of art that variously examined contemporary
African-American, Latino, Asian-American, female,
and Jewish culture. The Whitney Museum of
American Art turned to the identity politics of
selfhood as its biennial theme in 1993 and the
next year presented “Black Male,” a survey of
work by artists of all backgrounds that exam-
ined the representation of black men in a white-
dominated society. In their focus on ethnicity
and identity, the New York exhibitions were rep-
resentative of global trends. In 1989, the Hayward
Gallery in London opened “The Other Story:
Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain,” curated by
artist Rasheed Araeen, asserting the art-historical
importance of various non-white art communi-
ties in the U.K. The 1990s witnessed a growing
number of international exhibitions, including
the Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993) and biennials 7.4 Sally Mann, Untitled (#30) trom the Deep South series, 1998. Gelatin silver print,
in Jerusalem, Israel (1994), Johannesburg, South © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
histories at the end of the twentieth century, and turns to are all conflated in the body of the artist. All of these femi-
the body to find an answer. At the end of the chapter, several nist works used the body to insist on the fact that in contem-
examples of art that resist ready identification of body with porary society women occupied such varied positions. By the
self will be discussed. For these artists, body and self are sig- 1980s, the body had been demonstrated to be as flexible and
nificant due to their alienation from one another. potent an artistic medium as any other, and uniquely suited
to certain kinds of artistic expression.
In the 1980s, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, and Tehching
Body as Form and Content Hsieh created a new chapter in the history of body art.
Body art took form as an independent genre in the 1960s Though from very different backgrounds, all three artists
and 1970s as artists interested in creating work between the drew on traditions of Minimalism, Process, and performance
disciplines of theater, dance, and sculpture turned to their art as they established their reputations in the New York art
own bodies as a medium. These experiments, referred to world. The individual character or life experience of the per-
generally as performance art, adopted narrative, ritual, or forming body had made little difference in earlier body art. It
formal structures as the human body was treated as both was Joseph Beuys the healer and critic who was on stage, not
object and subject. Artists discussed in earlier chapters rep- Beuys the individual. Even in the feminist work of the 1970s
resent moments in this history of body-oriented perfor- the body tended to be used to address experiences shared by
mance from different traditions in the U.S. and Europe. many people or political positions. Counting on audiences’
Movements outside the West, including Neo-Concrete art in awareness of the formal, political, and spiritual content
Brazil and Gutai in Japan (see Chapter 1), reveal the inter addressed in earlier body art, Mendieta, Piper, Hsieh, and
national scope of the turn to the body as a means to gener- artists that followed directed their bodies and those of their
ate form and content in contemporary art. Much of the work viewers to objects and experiences that raised questions that
of the 1970s was informed by a feminist concern for how the intertwined personal and social identities.
body was contained and controlled by society. In some cases,
including Womanhouse (see fig. 1.27) and Suzanne Lacy’s Ana Mendieta
Three Weeks in May, the body was represented, serving as sig- For her first solo show, held in November 1979 at the AIR
nificant content. In others, including Yoko Ono’s Fly (see fig. Gallery in New York, Cuban-born sculptor Ana Mendieta
1.25), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (see fig. 1.30), (1948-85) presented photographs of small earthworks that
and Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. (see fig. 1.32), the body itself was were roughly the size and shape of her own body. The images,
the medium. Interior Scroll (1975) by Carolee Schneeman (b. called Silueta (Silhouettes) (fig. 7.5), document performances
1939) was a touchstone performance piece in this respect: done in Mexico, the U.S., and Cuba between 1973 and 1981
The artist stood naked before the audience, first painting, in which Mendieta lay down on the ground and drew the
then removing a text that had been rolled and inserted into earth up around her body. She then rose and embellished
her vagina, and finally reading that text aloud. The positions the cavity created in this way. In one action, for instance,
of creative actor, experiencing subject, and object on display she poured gunpowder into the form and ignited it. In her

an .

ae

7.5 Ana Mendieta, Untitled from the

Silveta (Silhouette) series, 1977.
Color photograph, 10 x 8" (25.4 x
20.3 cm}. © The Estate of Ana -
Mendieta Collection. Courtesy Galerie
Lelong, New York.

Body as Form and Content

7.6 DUPP, Going
After a Trace:
To Meet Ana
Mendieta’s Cave
Sculpture, 1997
Film. Courtesy
Galeria DUPP.

toich@hnge it

studio, she created related performances in which her body and the Esculturas Rupestres provided the spiritual and per-
remained physically at the heart of the work, surrounded, sonal homecoming she had desired. The earth in Cuba, she
covered, embraced, and constrained by various materials. explained, spoke to her; outside the island of her birth, the
She made short films of several of these performances. The land was silent.
work displays a strong sense of ritual, rooted in Mendieta’s During the early 1980s, Mendieta acted as a conduit
deep affiliation to the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria. In between U.S. and Cuban artists. In January 1981, she toured
Miami, one of her sculptures was even integrated into a local Cuba with a group of artists and critics including Suzanne
Santeria ritual. Lacy, Martha Rosler, and Lucy Lippard. They saw “Volumen
According to Mendieta, her art was intimately related to I” and met many of the artists featured, including José Bedia,
the circumstances of her emigration from Cuba at age thir Elso, and Flavio Garciandia (see Chapter 9).° In the after
teen. She and her sister had been part of “Operation Peter math of her early death in 1985, Mendieta’s art has contin-
Pan” (1960-62), a U.S.-sponsored evacuation of nearly ued to be important for artists in search of connections
14,000 children between the ages of five and eighteen from between self, spirit, nature, and nation, especially those with
Cuba. Though her family was eventually reunited in the connections to Cuba. In 1997, René Francisco and DUPP
U.S., it took five years for her mother and brother to join (see Chapter 9) set off into the Jaruco State Park to find the
the sisters, and it was eighteen years before she again saw her Esculturas Rupestres. The carved silhouettes were still visible
father, who had been imprisoned as a counterrevolution- despite having lain unprotected for nearly two decades. The
ary. The disruption of being sent from Cuba to orphanages group’s contact with the relics of Mendieta’s trip were cap-
in the Midwest was profound. Even as an adult, Mendieta tured in a video, Going After a Trace: To Meet Ana Mendieta’s
said, she was “overwhelmed by the feeling of having been Cave Sculpture (1997) (fig. 7.6), which contrasts the com-
cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish munal aspect of the search with the private and individual
the bonds that unite me to the universe.”! In the summer of nature of Mendieta’s art. DUPP dedicated all of its work that
1981, supported by grants from the National Endowment year to the art and memory of Mendieta.
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and armed
with an invitation from Cuban -officials, she traveled to the Adrian Piper
Jaruco State Park outside Havana to create a variation on the Adrian Piper (b. 1948), whose writing on “meta-art” (see
Silueta. This piece, Esculturas Rupestres (Cave Sculpture) (1981), Chapter 1) challenged the presumed relationship between
a figurative group embellishing the negative space created artist, artwork, and viewer in the 1970s, created a body of art
by the body, integrated pre-Hispanic goddess imagery exploring the very personal ramifications of “making explicit
and the landscape of Cuba with the dominant motif of the the thought processes, procedures, and presuppositions” that
Silueta series. Discussing the relationship between her body, go into making art.? In 1970, she created the Catalyses, per-
the earth, and her art, Mendieta explained to performance formances that express the effect of difference in Western
artist Linda Montano, “I was trying to find a place in the culture. Catalysis is a scientific term meaning the accelera-
earth and trying to define myself.”? The return to Cuba tion of a chemical process brought about by an agent, or

Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

catalyst. For Catalysis IV (fig. 7.7), Piper soaked her clothes in irregular, drawn-out, and surprising, even if predictable,
in vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod-liver oil for a week and then ways. In response, she created characters and portraits of
rode the subway during rush hour; for another, she traveled herself that exaggerated the visibility of her racial difference.
in the Empire State Building elevator dressed in a business Like a catalyst, the image accelerated the process by which
suit but with a red bath towel pushed deep into her mouth. her difference was recognized and reacted against. Piper’s
Having thus created a very intrusive metaphor for difference most seamless and provocative integration of art, experience,
and become a catalyst for the expected reactions of disgust, and analysis is her “calling cards,” short texts on small cards
Piper tried to make eye contact, asked passers-by small that she presented to people as appropriate circumstances
questions, and muttered loudly. Her ability to break through arose. The cards read:
the barrier created by her difference was insufficient to the
Dear Friend,
task, her efforts far too ambiguous to be greeted with posi-
tive responses. Though in effect conveying the social effect of I am black.
difference by metaphorically representing the isolation of I am sure you did not realize this when you made/
being black and female in the United States, the Catalyses laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past,
were, as she explained, about recognizing the boundaries I have attempted to alert white people to my racial iden-
of the self, becoming aware of the effect of one’s difference tity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes
on others. The Catalyses, like much of her subsequent work, them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially
were about the challenge of acting from within a position inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that
of difference, as well as reflecting the character of society white people do not make these remarks, even when
more generally. they believe there are no black people present, and to
Afterward, Piper shifted away from metaphors to empha- distribute this card when they do.
size issues of race and gender more explicitly. She has I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you,
recounted how, as a light-sskinned African-American, she just as Iam sure you regret the discomfort your racism
often suffered racism while those around her—sometimes is causing me.
those perpetuating it—failed to perceiving her as its object.
Thus, unlike those for whom their racial status is immedi- As she had advocated in her appeal for “meta-art,” this work
ately visible, the impact of difference on Piper’s life was felt directed attention to the context, in this case racism, that
conditioned her career as an artist and our response to it
as an audience. Through the cards, Piper transformed her
experience and her analysis of it into a catalyst for a new
experience, this time to be shared first, and with difficulty,
with those who occasioned the need to present the card, and
then later with the audience who learned of the work. The
cards are displayed in museums and are given away freely so
that viewers can take and use them when necessary.

Tehching Hsieh
In the fall of 1979, as Mendieta was preparing her exhibition
at AIR, Tehching Hsieh had just completed the first of five
year-long performances. The previous September he had cir-
culated the following statement around New York (fig. 7.8):

I, SAM HSIEH, plan to do a one-year performance piece,

to begin on September 30, 1978. I shall seal myselfin my
studio, in solitary confinement inside a cell-room meas-
uring 11'6" x 9' x 8’. I shall NOT converse, read, write,
listen to the radio or watch television, until I unseal
myself on September 29, 1979. I shall have food every
day. My friend, Cheng Wei Kuong, will facilitate this
piece by taking charge of my food, clothing, and refuse.

Hsieh (b. 1950) had been living in the U.S. illegally since
1974, when he had left his native Taiwan to come and live
7.7 Adrion Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970. Performance documentation
notebook: 2 silver gelatin prints and typescript, 5 x 5" and 9% x 11%", in what he felt was the center of the art world. His status as
(12.7 x 12.7 cm and 24.1 x 29.2 cm). Private collection, U.S. an illegal alien and his limited English, however, left him

Body as Form and Content

 7.8 Tehching Hsieh, One Year
Performance Cage Piece,
September 30, 1978-
September 29, 1979. Tehching
Hsieh, One Year Performance
1978-1979 life Image © 1979
Tehching Hsieh. Courtesy the
artist and Sean Kelly Gallery,
New York.

profoundly alienated, depressed, and scared. “For me, life but were studiously anti-social. Forces external to artist, the
was a prison: not in a political sense, but in the isolation of authorities from which Hsieh was hiding,g, the friend who
being. Passing time and presenting the thinking process was keeping him alive, the ordered schedules of society, and
is the concept of this piece,” he recollected. The 1978-79 the harsh confines of the city itself, provided the structure
performance, documented and reported on, was a means of of the work, at the center of which was the individual, stoic
giving form to this feeling. and surviving.
After One Year Performance (Cage Piece), with its focus In One Year Performance (Rope Piece) (fig. 7.9), by contrast,
on experience measured only in the rhythms of the body Hsieh put a relationship at the center of the performance.
and the pattern of meals consumed, Hsieh
forced himself to be aware of living within the
regimen of a smaller unit of time, the hour.
For one year, starting on April 11, 1980, Hsieh
punched a time clock in his studio every hour.
Each time he clocked in, he filmed himself
using a single frame of 16mm film. At the end
of the year he had a short movie document-
ing his changing appearance over the course
of the 8,627 times he had punched the clock.
He also scrupulously documented the cause
of each of the 133 missed punches—there are
8,760 hours in a year—most being the result
of oversleeping.
After these two works about confinement
and regimentation, Hsieh created a work that
had boundaries as big as the city. Starting
on September 26, 1981, he spent an entire
year, with one brief exception, outdoors in
New York City. He avoided all interior spaces,
including buses, trains, and even restrooms.
7.9 Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, One Year Performance (Rope Piece), July 4,
He documented the year in photographs
1983-July 4, 1984. Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Art/Life One Year Performance
and maps of his wanderings. These first per- 1983-1984 life Image © 1984 Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano. Courtesy the artists and
formances were rigorously framed by society Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
The project was announced with the following statement using her body as the unit of measurement. ORLAN’s survey-
signed by Hsieh and fellow performance artist Linda ing involved lying on the ground and then crawling forward
Montano: “We will stay together for one year and never be to repeat the gesture until she had supplicated herself across
alone. We will be in the same room at the same time, when the whole length of the street or monument in question. In
we are inside. We will be tied together at the waist with an both series, the artist’s body substituted for more traditional
eight-foot rope. We will never touch each other during the tools—marble or oil paint in the first, surveying equipment
year.”® Montano had done a three-day piece in 1973 in which in the second—to visualize the argument that women’s role
she was handcuffed to artist and curator Tom Marioni. In in the history of art and architecture has been that of either
Rope Piece, Montano said she honed the “survival skills” and represented object or invisible subject.
“emotional conditioning” that contemporary life sought to In 1971, she rechristened herself Saint-ORLAN, a new
destroy. For Hsieh, the project was less tactical. On the one saint whose identity was split according to the misogynis-
hand, like Cage Piece, it was a metaphor: “I got the idea for tic reduction of women into the two antithetical identities
this piece because there are problems about communica- of virgin and whore. SainttORLAN was both and neither.
tion with people. I feel this is always my struggle. I wanted For The Artist’s Kiss (1977), ORLAN stood behind a cutout
to do one piece about human beings and their struggle in of a nude female torso and sold kisses to collectors at the
life with each other. I find being tied together is a very clear French art fair FIAC. Offering a taste of her body for pur-
idea, because I feel that to survive we’re all tied up ... So we chase was a commentary on the fusion of sex and money in
become each other’s cage ... so this piece to me is a symbol the culture at large, and more specifically on the conflation
of life and human struggle.” In his explanation, the meta- of female artists with their bodies in the art market. Instead
phor of the rope serves to express the condition of humanity of buying kisses, participants in the performance could opt
while also reflecting his personal experience. There was also to donate their money to an icon of Saint-ORLAN’s other
a very literal aspect for Hsieh. All of his work was “a mirror persona, the virginal female, and then light a candle at her
showing ... my weaknesses, my limitations, my potentials.” feet. They invariably favored the sensual option over the
Hsieh’s shocking feats of endurance and tightly focused spiritual one.
performances established restricted situations that exposed After over a decade spent embellishing the personalities
aspects of his personality that were otherwise hidden. of Saint-ORLAN, the artist began work on one of the most
controversial pieces of body art ever produced, the surgi-
cal remodeling of her own body. The Reincarnation of Saint-
Changing Strategies: ORLAN (1990-93) involved a series of nine operations
Body as Social Medium that reshaped ORLAN’s face and body according to ideal
In the 1970s, ORLAN in France and Marina Abramovi¢ in types from the history of Western art: Botticelli’s Venus,
Yugoslavia created art that, like that of their peers across Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Boucher’s Europa, a School of Fon-
Europe and the U.S., explored the body as a medium and tainebleau Diana, and Gérome’s Psyche. Each surgical inter-
used it to contemplate social conventions. Like the artists dis- vention was transformed into a performance and included
cussed thus far, even as the performative element of the work the artist delivering monologues before and during the
focused attention on the artist’s body, the content of the work operation; the artist and the surgeons were often outfit-
remained general. As with Piper or Hsieh’s work, viewers dis- ted by couture designers such as Paco Rabanne and Issey
covered much about the world in which the artists lived but Miyake. Objects from the procedures including tools, cos-
only by inference did they learn about the individual per- tumes, and even bits of removed flesh were saved and sold.
sonality of the artist. At the end of the 1980s, however, both The events were presented to gallery audiences in grue-
ORLAN and Abramovic¢ introduced new ideas about the rela- some detail through videos and photographs that showed
tionship between body and self that raised the importance the artist’s cut and bruised body during the surgery and her
of individual experience and even autobiographical detail subsequent recovery. Indeed, the seventh operation was
within the work, thus setting the stage for the next genera- broadcast live to fifteen galleries, museums, and art centers
tion of body artists who embraced personal narrative as well around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris,
as physical experience. the McLuhan Center in Toronto, and the Sandra Gering
Gallery in New York. Audiences could ask questions of the
ORLAN artist by fax, video or webcam, and she responded as best
Early in her career, ORLAN (b. 1947) created what she she could.
called “body sculptures,” in which she photographed herself Critics have made use of the extreme nature of ORLAN’s
mimicking poses from canonical works of Western art such actions to discuss the violent way culture is often imprinted
as the Grand Odalisque by French Neo-Classical painter Jean- on the female body and to debate the role of pain, lan-
Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). In another group guage, and theory in the construction of beauty and gender.
of works called MesuRages (1972-83), she measured streets The brutal reality of the surgery casts a pall over the glib
named after famous French men or sites such as the Vatican manner in which Western society talks about getting nips and

Changing Strategies: Body as Social Medium

tucks to preserve one’s youth. The artist, however, did not
present the work as a critique of the superficiality of
Western society. Rather, ORLAN argued that we have failed
to explore the possibilities of plastic surgery with sufficient
creativity or ambition. In an introductory text read before
the seventh procedure, Omnipresence (1993) (fig. 7.10), she
explained: “I never have the skin of what I am ... I thought
that in our time we have begun to have the means of
closing this gap [between appearance and identity]; in
particular with the help of surgery that it was thus
becoming possible to match up the internal image with
the external one.”” ORLAN’s project was a demonstration
of individual agency that reconciled the inner and outer
facets of the human being, drawing on the technology of
modern medicine and the image bank of fine art to resolve
the disparity between self and body, between how we feel
ourselves to be and how we and others interpret our exter-
nal appearance.
The duality of ORLAN’s work, its allusions to the sub-
mission of individuality to impossible ideals of beauty on
the one hand and to women’s ability to take hold of shape-

7.11 ORLAN, African SelfHybridization: Hal-White Half-Black,

Mbangu mask with face of European-St.Etienne woman in rollers, 2002.
Printed on photographic paper, 49% x 61%" (125 x 156cm).
Courtesy the artist.

changing technologies on the other, is evident in how she

discusses the art that has guided her self-re-creation. The
models she chose are ideal types that have exerted pres-
sure on women for centuries, but they are also characters
with personality traits and powers that ORLAN wanted to
claim for herself. The goddesses Venus and Diana are incor-
porated into her face and figure to impart power; Leon-
ardo’s Mona Lisa is adopted for its associations, according
to ORLAN, with both the mysterious female sitter and her
brilliant male portraitist. By the end of the century, ORLAN
was enlisting the power of digital photography to trans-
form her representation (rather than her actual body) into
a mélange of non-Western and Western identities. African
SelfHybridization: Half-White Half-Black, Mbangu mask with
face of European-St. Etienne woman in rollers (2002) (fig. 7.11)
captures the face of the artist midway between African tribal
and French middle-class cultures. ORLAN’s Self-Hybrids intro-
duce a new element to her discussion of body and identity.
No longer confined to the image bank of Western fine art,
ORLAN submits her European body to transformations
influenced by the wider spectrum of world culture, suggest-
7.10 ORLAN, Omnipresence, 1993. Cibachrome in Diasec mount, ing that the self cannot be expressed exclusively in the terms
647% x 43%" (125 x 110 cm). Surgery-performance, New York of the particular culture, race, or tradition into which it
Courtesy the artist was born.

Gil rey oe oan Bl! . 2 cele

Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Selt
Marina Abramovic 250 grams of gold, and sat still and silent for hours on end.
In 1975, at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, Yugo- Meditation as well as endurance became the central aspect of
slavia, a woman lay on the floor with her head tipped back the work, thus layering the physical component of the
and screamed until she lost her voice. The performer of earlier performances with a spiritual one. Body, mind,
the piece, Freeing the Voice (1975), was Marina Abramovi¢ and spirit were now integrated into the closed system of
(b. 1946). The same year she performed Art Must Be Beauti- the performance.
ful, which involved her repeating the title of the work while Abramovic and Ulay ended their relationship in 1988.
brushing her hair violently with a metal brush. Abramovi¢ That year, they performed their final collaboration, The
had previously participated in the Actionist events of Vien- Lovers—The Great Wall Walk (fig. 7.12), for which each artist
nese performance artist Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938). Though walked half the length of the Great Wall of China, approxi-
she had since turned away from such collective rituals, she mately 1250 miles, she beginning from the Gulf of Pohai in
remained committed to using the body to address the human the Yellow Sea and he from the Gobi Desert in Kunan prov-
condition. In her works of the mid-1970s, endurance and ince. Their meeting in the middle was to have been cele-
pain were used to dramatize the position of the individual in brated by a wedding, but, their relationship having suffered
society. Spectacles such as a woman screaming until her voice in the preceding years, it ended instead with a goodbye.
fails or grooming until she bleeds constitute painful meta- Abramovic has described her persona in the early perfor-
phors for experiences outside the gallery. mances as “very tough, very male, a going-forward-no-matter-
On November 30, 1975, her birthday, Abramovic met what performance attitude.”* The works she created with
fellow performance artist Ulay (b. 1943), who was himself Ulay succeeded in revealing some aspects of her personality;
celebrating a birthday. For the next fourteen years, the two however, after The Great Wall Walk, she found herself strug-
collaborated and lived together, creating works that explored gling with the residue of an emotionally wrenching experi-
the physical limits of the body and the psychological tension ence, suddenly aware of large parts of her personality that
produced when those limits were approached. They often had previously remained untouched and untapped by her
made art that addressed relationships and connections art: Her work gave her no obvious way to express anything
between individuals but they never integrated their own biog- but a fraction of her sense of self. In this situation, she turned
raphies into the work. Only the barest indications of person- again to her body, but now surrounded it with narratives that
ality were allowed; even gender was de-emphasized through had been excluded from her earlier work.
androgynous costumes or deliberately asexual
actions. Abramovic and Ulay referred to their
medium as the “hermaphroditic body.” Inter-
ruption in Space (1977), a typical collaboration
of the period, consisted of a temporary wall.
This was constructed in the middle of a gallery
that the two artists walked and then ran across
as if they didn’t even see the obstruction. Each
time they attempted to cross the room, she
from one side, he from the other, they col-
lided with the wall until they were no longer
able to continue. In an unsettlingly blunt
fashion, the performers displayed the limits of
the body. The same year also saw Breathing In,
Breathing Out, a fifteen-minute performance
piece that reconfigured their two bodies into
a single organism. With their noses pinched
closed, the performers pressed their mouths
together and inhaled each other’s breath, cre-
ating a closed system with human features,
but altered contours and a necessarily brief
lifespan. In the early 1980s, the couple began
their longest series of performances, Nightsea
Crossing (1981-87), which integrated medita-
tion into their work. For these pieces, the artists
faced each other across a table, often accom- 7.12 Marina Abramovié and Ulay, The Lovers—The Great Wall Walk, 1988.
panied by significant objects, including a dia- Performance piece walking the Great Wall of China. Courtesy The Marina Abramovié
mondback python, Aboriginal boomerang, and Archives and Lisson Gallery, London.

Changing Strategies: Body as Social Medium

 7.13 Marina Abramovié and Michael
Laub, The Biography Remix (Snakes),
2004. First performance 1993.
Romaeuropa Festival, Teatro Palladium,
Rome, ltaly. Courtesy The Marina
Abramovié Archives and Lisson Gallery,
London.

By 1993, Abramovic had created the structure of an ever-

changing performance called The Biography (fig. 7.13),
which theatrically integrated elements from her personal,
artistic, and emotional life. No longer refusing autobiogra-
phy, Abramovic used her body as a means to reflect upon and
produce an image of her self that offered more legible details
than her earlier work. In an interview in 1999 she explained:
“Now I need glamour. I need something to love. I need to
see all these other parts of me which I had absolutely never
allowed to exist. [ had been ashamed of this part of me and
let them /sic] go. Then I created The Biography, in which I
staged my life and played both sides, the tough one and the
contradictory one, and when I exposed my shame, this was
the biggest liberation I had in my life.” Using video, photog-
raphy, and live performance, The Biography integrated frag-
ments of Abramovic’s endurance pieces with these personal
and fictive narratives. This willingness to draw on the physi-
cality of the body as well as on the particularity of her person-
ality, often with an appeal to the transcendence of spirituality,
characterizes Abramovic’s work of the 1990s and since. 7.14 Marina Abramovié, Shoes for Departure, 1991. Amethyst
As she re-evaluated the content of her art, Abramovic also sculptures. Galerie Enrico Navara, Paris. Courtesy The Marina Abramovié
created new ways to activate the viewer’s experience through Archives and Lisson Gallery, London.

what she calls “transitory objects”: furniture, clothes, even

choreographed events that stimulate the body as well as explains that the viewer’s physical contact with the crystal and
the eyes and mind. One of the transitory objects Abramovic an object defined as art is important, but that the experience
considers particularly successful is Shoes for Departure (1991) is above all else one of entering into a meditative state of con-
(fig. 7.14), a series of sculptures created in the early 1990s sciousness. The fresh awareness of the body brought about by
that feature one to several pairs of 150-pound crystal shoes. putting on the precious, heavy shoes is intended to lead the
Encountering these shoes in a gallery or museum, you are participant to a new experience of the body and the mind in
instructed to take off your own shoes and socks, put your the world. In addition to using many different kinds of crystal
feet into the sculpture, close your eyes, and depart. Physi- in the transitory objects, she incorporates hair, copper, iron,
cal motion is impossible due to the weight and shape of the clay, and obsidian mirrors to produce experiences rooted in
shoe, so departure becomes a matter of the mind. Abramovié the material world but stretching toward something else.
 Tracey Emin
Too Close:
Art about human experience often directs attention to
Personal Lives and Artistic Practice our emotional lives. The collages and paintings of David
Of the five artists discussed above, those who continued Wojnarowicz (see Chapter 4), the performance of Marina
making art beyond their early careers, Piper, ORLAN, and Abramovic, and the photography of Sally Mann challenge
Abramovic, all developed strategies for creating intimate viewers to think hard about how, whom, and under what con-
and directly personal works. Piper’s calling cards, ORLAN’s ditions we love. British artist Tracey Emin (b. 1963) exploded
surgeries, and Abramovié’s The Biography all place the artist onto the international art scene in the 1990s. Her work, most
in an exposed position, revealing details of their lives that often based on personal diaristic material, reveals the events
far exceed what audiences are generally shown. Not every and entanglements of her emotional life. Everyone I Have Ever
mature work of these artists is so revealing, of course, but the Slept With 1963-95 (1995) is a tent appliquéd with the names
use of biography as well as bodies to raise issues of identity of everyone with whom the artist had slept. Though the title
and society is an important legacy of all three. The feminist suggests the promiscuity of a tell-all, a comparison of the
injunction that the personal is the political, as well as the aes- names and dates on the list with the artist’s biography reveals
thetic intuitions of performance and Conceptual traditions how literally the artist imagined this project—‘slept with” in
of the 1960s and 1970s, are amply displayed here. By the this case is not always a euphemism for “had sex with.” The
1990s, the drama of the Culture Wars and the surprise of wit- list therefore refers to moments throughout the artist’s life,
nessing duress as an artistic strategy was fading, leaving artists knitting together the innocence of infancy and early child-
with a profound awareness of the body and biography as hood with the complicated and at times painful entangle-
sensitive and productive artistic media. Learning to control ments of adolescence and adulthood.
an audience’s interpretations was a challenge, but not to Though Emin’s gestures often seem calculated to cause
the point where it prevented the artist’s body having an maximum scandal—for instance, submitting an installation
increasing presence in contemporary practice. In the U.S., designed around her own bed for the Turner Prize compe-
a number of artists integrated their and others’ bodies into tition or showing up drunk on live TV after failing to win
two- and three-dimensional works that alluded to the recent it—the drama is the result of her displaying the raw emotion
history of art as well as to personal and political events of the expected of an artist in a manner and setting considered ill-
present. This impulse to maintain the body as one among suited. Emin has simply resisted confining her expressions to
other available materials was shared by artists from many dif- the limits of a painting or sculpture. As if to tease the viewer
ferent locales, several of which—the Middle East, Europe, with a possible, but uncertain, window into her motivations,
and Central America—will be discussed here, while the use Emin spells out the impulses behind so many of our actions,
of the body in work by Cuban, Chinese, and Russian artists both noble and otherwise, in text pieces such as Just Love Me
will be addressed in subsequent chapters. (1998) (fig. 7.15), or You Should Have Loved Me (2008). In

7.15 Tracy Emin, Just Love Me, 1998. Neon tubes, 14% x 45 x 212"
(38 x 1 14.4 x 6.5 cm). © the artist, courtesy White Cube.
}

Too Close: Personal Lives and Artistic Practice

 the case of these signs, emotional content takes the form
of an advertisement or a piece of Conceptual art. By 2001,
Emin could count on viewers’ appreciation of the elision of
art and commerce that artists from Andy Warhol to Barbara
Kruger had traded on in their neon signs and billboards.
The potency of Emin’s text pieces lies, however, in her
substitution of a nearly abject, exposed emotionalism for
Nauman’s or Kruger’s comedy or political theory. There is
no joke here, no theoretical or political argument. Just Love
Me reads more as an embarrassing outburst than a knowing
aside, and as such brings to the surface the emotional fury
and desperation that is often harnessed for art, but rarely so
blatantly exposed.

Sophie Calle
7.16 Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard, No Sex Last Night (Double
Though adopting a very different tone than Emin, French Blind), 1992. 35mm film in French and English with English subtitles, 76
Conceptualist Sophie Calle (b. 1953) has used her personal minutes. Courtesy of Sophie Calle/Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
life as the premise for works that examine the pain and con-
fusion of, but also the relationships and communities that intellectual and artistic outlets, replacing conversation and
evolve from, the failures of love. The film No Sex Last Night sex. When Calle says, as she does many times, “no sex again
(Double Blind) (1992) (fig. 7.16) documents Calle’s poignant last night,” she both narrates the events and voices her
and often painful interactions with her co-filmmaker, Greg feelings of loneliness. Speech, like the film itself, becomes
Shephard, as they drive across the United States. The car simultaneously analytic and performative as Double Blind/No
breaks down repeatedly, the couple meet strangers,
they reveal personal insights, and they get married
in Las Vegas. Calle and Shephard film each other
and record private narratives of the trip. Shephard
records his admiration for Calle’s art and her ability
to reinvent herself continually for the work. He is
clearly seduced by Calle’s chameleonlike abilities
and her confidence, though equally he is nearly
crushed by a feeling that he is being manipulated.
The reasons for Calle’s attraction to Shephard are less
clear. He had failed to show up for their first date, a
meeting at Orly Airport in Paris, and then waited an
entire year to contact her again. This, Calle says, was
exactly the right way to talk to her. In the less dra-
matic, day-to-day relationship that the film presents,
Shephard proves unable to re-create the appeal of his
first impression.
Despite the marriage at the end, Double Blind/No
Sex Last Night is not a romance. The film contrasts
the artists’ reserves of self-awareness and profound
emotional investments with their surprising lack of
knowledge about each other. There is a grueling,
almost brutal quality to the film.as their relationship
shows every sign of failing. Calle makes clear from
the outset that the film itself was functional, serving
to extend the relationship she felt sure would other-
wise have ended earlier. Conversations between Calle
and Shephard prove difficult and rare, and even
the simplest acts of decision making are often tor
7.17 Sophie Calle, Take Care of Yourself, 2007. Top: exhibition view from French
turous to watch. The elements of filmmaking, how
Pavilion, 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (June 10-—November 19 1
and what each artist films, and the private thoughts 2007). Bottom: exhibition view from Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (April 9-
each records, become their emotional as well as June 6, 2009). Courtesy of Sophie Calle/Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

180 | Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

Sex Last Night is revealed to be both about the experience of her sister took a three-month Emergency Medical Technician
love and a means of representing it. training course. After the course, her art underwent a shift
For the more recent Take Care of Yourself (2007) (fig. and started to revolve around the organs and systems within
7.17), Calle circulated copies of a breakup email she had the body.
received to 107 women, including doctors, actors, artists, Like many of her peers, Smith discussed her work in
musicians, intellectuals, and a clown. Like Double Blind/No Sex Foucauldian terms, emphasizing the changing meaning of
Last Night, Take Care of Yourself is functional as well as repre- the body and its parts within society. The heart, she noted,
sentational. Its title comes from the closing line of the email, is essential in expressions of romantic sentiment, and is also
and it is exactly what Calle does in the work. The artist had integrated into religion, particularly in the Catholic tradition
a great deal to say about Greg Shephard in the earlier work, in which Smith was raised. Like all organs, it also has a posi-
but here she assigns the task of analyzing her new lover (he tion in medical discourse. Smith credited Nancy Spero (see
remains unnamed in the piece) to others. In the installa- Chapter |) with impressing upon her the idea that the body
tion, which Calle created as the French representative at the functions as a language. Much as Spero had recontextualized
2007 Venice Biennale, she displays a copy of the letter along- individual figures, Smith isolated organs, separating them
side video testimony, photographs, and numerous written from their expected context, thus encouraging the viewer
analyses by her female correspondents dissecting the email to reimagine the meaning of the heart, stomach, or brain.
and speculating on its content, meaning, and ramifications. A bronze reproductive system evokes not only the intrac-
A handwriting analyst examines the letter, psychoanalysts table nature of gender in Western culture, but also demon-
elaborate on the insecurities of the writer, and friends and strates the uncanny results of turning fragile yet generative
acquaintances offer Calle supportive readings of the failures organs into a strong yet sterile form. Likewise, in the midst
of this ex-lover. Calle filmed the thoughts and reactions of of the AIDS epidemic, when bodily fluids were identified as
most of the women and presented the results on banks of potentially lethal, the oversized lead-crystal sperm of Unti-
monitors. The letter is acted out and sung. Insights and per- tled (1989-90) (fig. 7.18) staked out an ambiguous middle
formances, jokes and compassion, flow forth from the televi- ground between plague and pleasure. These sculptures take
sion screens, transforming the subject of the work from the seriously the transformation of the human body in the late
email itself, which quickly becomes familiar, to the continu- 1980s and early 1990s into a site of fear without sacrificing its
ally changing style and substance of its interpretations. As a fragility and elegance.
final gesture, Calle advertised for a curator to take the mate-

var
rial she had assembled and organize it into an exhibition.
Daniel Buren (see Chapter 1) was chosen from among the
applicants, thus reinforcing the Conceptualist lineage of
Calle’s engagement with emotional content.

Kiki Smith
Reflecting on the changes evident in art during her career,
Marina Abramovic noted that, by the 1990s, to make body
art one needed to look beyond the body. Indeed, sculp-
tors, photographers, and video artists as well as performers
had developed eclectic means of exploring the intersection
of self, body, and society without necessarily putting a body
on display. Despite the overtly revealing, even confessional
effect of Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 and
Calle’s Take Care of Yourself; the embroidered tent and rows
upon rows of letters and talking heads are formally reserved
and even modest. Kiki Smith (b. 1954), a member of Colab,
showed her first piece of body art, a bedsheet printed with
body parts, at “The Times Square Show” in 1980 (see Chapter
4). Two years later, similarly printed scarves appeared in
the Fashion Moda concession at Documenta 7 in Kassel,
Germany. After her initial interest in corporeal fragments
and surfaces, Smith turned to the body’s interior, a change
evident in a small)work called Kiki Smith, 1983 (1983), a
blood sample on a microscopic slide. The body, she felt, had 7.18 Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1989-90. Glass and rubber, 3 x 108 x 108"
been taken over by social forces such as religion and medi- (7.6 x 274.3 x 274.3 cm). © Kiki Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery.
cine, and art was a means of taking it back. In 1985, she and Photograph courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery.

Too Close: Personal Lives and Artistic Practice

 7.19 Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1990.
Beeswax and microcrystalline wax
figures on metal stands. Height of
female figure 73¥" (186.7 cm);
height of male figure 76'/e"
(195.4 cm). Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York. © Kiki
Smith, courtesy Pace Gallery.
Photograph courtesy the artist and
Pace Gallery.

Smith was attracted to the body in part because it is univer- of these new combinations took the form of women from the
sally understood—we all have bodies—and yet remains abso- Judeo-Christian religious tradition, including Lilith, Eve, the
lutely unique: The body is thus the site of both our common Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene. One such work was titled
humanity and our absolute individuation. Smith’s first use of Lucy, after the name given to the 3-million-year-old skele-
the full figure in her work was in Untitled (1990) (fig. 7.19), ton of a hominid discovered in 1972. Smith thus made the
a pair of bodies—one male, one female—sculpted in wax human body a key to exploring not only contemporary life,
and suspended on metal armatures by their underarms a few but history and even prehistory as well.
feet above the ground. The bodies are nude and their
heads hang down as if sapped of strength. The female
appears to leak milk from her breasts. In the shadow of the Embodying Abstraction
male’s flaccid penis, ejaculate drips down his leg. The work Not all art that addressed the self and society so clearly uti-
conveys the human qualities of physicality and fertility, yet, lized the body as a subject or medium. Many artists continued
Smith notes, “her milk nurtures nothing, his seed seeds to find the aesthetics of postwar abstraction, from Abstract
nothing. So it was about being thwarted—having life inside Expressionism to Minimalism and Process art compelling.
you, but the life isn’t going anywhere, it’s just falling down.”!® Like the art discussed thus far, however, the work of Mona
This is a depiction of the body losing control and becoming Hatoum, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Janine Antoni, and Gabriel
“uncontainable,” a word Smith uses to describe all of her Orozco represented a widespread commitment to political
body art. and social content even as it took highly aesthetized form. As
Smith’s interest in the expressive power of the figure led indicated in the discussions of Gregory Battcock, Terry Fox,
her to make increasingly personal work. She even created and Joseph Beuys in Chapter 1, there were critics and artists
self-portraits, reaching the end of a journey that had begun for whom, as early as 1970, the practices of Minimalism and
with the broken bodies on bedsheets: “In 1979 I started Process art were understood to have political and philosophi-
making pictures of the body from Gray’s Anatomy, micro- cal significance; by the 1990s, there was a ready audience
scopic images ... Slowly, I went from these images to organs, with whom one did not have to argue the point. Critics in
then to systems, and then at one point, I started thinking of and out of the art world generated a variety of political inter-
skin as a system, and then I moved from the outside of the pretations of this new brand of abstraction. Hatoum’s art,
body to making figures. Now I am moving back and forth for example, was embraced as a profound expression of the
through the skin, going from internal portraiture to making experience of political exile and Gonzalez-Torres’s work was
new combinations of internal and external figures.”!! Several championed as an assertion of the complexity of homosexual

182 | Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

identity in an age of AIDS. This embodied abstraction intro- herself again. As she did so, excerpts from news broadcasts in
duced new discussions of the self, the body, and power to art English, French, and Arabic, along with revolutionary songs,
audiences with work that combined formalist and activist blasted out from some speakers. The following year Hatoum
traditions, demonstrating that the division between the two, wrote, “As a Palestinian woman this work was my first attempt
never so clearly defined, was no longer respected. at making a statement about a persistent struggle to survive
in a continuous state of siege.”'!*
Mona Hatoum Hatoum’s focus on the body was informed by the history
The work of Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) charts a particular of her family, her experience as a foreigner in the U.K., and
engagement with the body and Minimalism that gives form also by her interest in recent art. As a student at the Slade
to some of the complex intersections of self and space, and School in London, Hatoum had been impressed by Minimal-
identity and globalism, at the end of the century. In the ism, as well as by the politics of feminism. She was troubled,
1980s, Hatoum—a Beirut-born, London-based, Palestinian however, by what she considered the “disembodied” quality
performance artist and sculptor with a British passport— of art-making going on around her, and the formalist debate
chose to focus her work on the notion of the body as a threat- that defined it it.’ Under Siege addressed the body in two ways:
ened entity, confined and controlled by power structures. as an active presence and as an image. Hatoum’s struggle
She had been stranded in London in 1975, unable to return against the mud inside the transparent structure seemed to
home due to the civil war in Lebanon. This exile echoed the act out in abstract form the plight of Palestinians struggling
original exile of her parents from Palestine and their reloca- against clearly visible obstacles, such as the Israeli occupying
tion to Beirut by the British in 1948 following the creation forces, or less immediately tangible barriers, such as politi-
of Israel. Denied citizenship by the Lebanese, her family was cal, social, and economic restrictions. As an image, Under
granted British passports, thus multiplying the fragmented Siege could evoke Hatoum’s feeling of invisibility as an Arab
nature of their identity: Their citizenship, nationality, and woman in the West. Hatoum overlays and mixes together this
place of residence were all different. After she relocated to complex set of meanings in the work just as they are blended
London, Hatoum’s alienation was compounded by a feeling in life.
of powerlessness and invisibility as an Arab woman in the Hatoum quickly became frustrated that critics interpreted
U.K. The performance she created to make sense of her situ- her art exclusively in terms of her identity and a rather fixed
ation was Under Siege (1982), where the artist was immersed in idea of exile. In response, she shifted the focus away from her
a transparent plastic, square-bodied structure, approximately own body. The work that heralded this change was The Light
8 feet tall and 4 x 4 feet at its base, and filled with brown at the End (1989) (fig. 7.20), a simple square consisting of
clay slip. For seven hours she lashed out at the wet earth, six red cords strung vertically in a black frame and mounted
attempting to stand, slipping and falling, and trying to right in the corner of a red room. The work is lit from above, but

7.20 Mona Hatoum, The Lightat

the End, 1989. Angle iran frame
and six electric heating elements,
O57 x ©3'N6 * 11/e (166 x
162.4 x 5 cm). Courtesy White
Cube.
also emits a glowing red light that brings to mind the Mini- ally a video projection created with an endoscopic camera
malist light works of Dan Flavin (1933-96). Hatoum’s elegant moving over and inside Hatoum’s body. Viewers thus look
installation accrues threatening allusions through its resem- down into the orifices and through the passages of the artist’s
blance to a barred doorway and its dramatic color palette. body. The sound of her heartbeat fills the chamber while the
The work, however, is not only an image or an object but also heat and smell of the viewers fill the small room. The work’s
an experience. The red lights at the end of this tunnel are title, which translates as “Foreign Body,” can be interpreted
heating elements that, according to the artist, are capable of in a variety of ways—for instance, as referring to Hatoum as a
burning through flesh. Standing near the object, the proxim- foreigner or to the camera as a foreign body. Standing inside
ity of possible pain overcomes one’s compulsion to analyze— the work, however, one is overwhelmed by the sheer foreign-
the viewer stops thinking about art history or geometry, and ness of the body itself. Like Kiki Smith’s sculpted organs, this
instead reflects on incarceration and the fear of exposure to body seems to have little to do with what we think we know of
the elements. The Light at the Endand a series of related instal- our own physical being.
lations take up ideas inherent in Minimalism in quite differ- Hatoum’s work expresses her sense of “inbetweenness,”
ent ways than Under Siege. Any metaphors drawn from the the state of perpetual passage in which there is no home to
work are here generated by the sensations of the viewer, not return to and no being at home in the place where one is cur-
the actions or appearance of the artist. rently living.'* Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, author
Hatoum did not leave her engagement with the body of a groundbreaking text on Western perceptions of the
completely behind, however. In Corps étranger (Foreign body) East, Orientalism (1978), wrote that her work is “like a refu-
(1994) (fig. 7.21), she paired an image of her own physical gee’s world, which is full of grotesque structures that bespeak
being with the viewer’s corporeal experience. As with Under excess as well as paucity ... [it] travest[ies] the idea ofa single
Siege and The Light at the End, this piece is structured like a homeland,” and expresses the nature of contemporary Pal-
Minimalist form a cylindrical room, with two slits through estinian existence.'? Part of Hatoum’s success at refuting sin-
which to enter and exit. Once inside, viewers stand with their gularity rests on this change of focus in the late 1980s from
backs pressed against the wall and their feet at the edge of works centered on her own body to situations that affect the
what looks like a precipice over an ever-changing chasm of viewer’s body.
human tissue and hair. This abstract organic abyss is actu-
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96), the Cuban-born, New
York-based sculptor whose work as a member of the collec-
tive Group Material was aimed at changing the world (see
Chapter 4), took a personal, poetic, exploratory turn in his
solo work. Unlike Kiki Smith, whose work with Colab appears
indistinguishable from the work she showed alone, Gonzalez-
Torres seems to have experienced collective and individual
practice in very different ways. Alone, he began integrat-
ing the presence of the body into abstract works that refer
to the histories of Minimalist, Process, and Conceptual art.
Like Hatoum, his practice began as an exploration of the
styles of the 1960s and 1970s and took a specific interest in
the sensations of the viewer. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA)
(1991) (fig. 7.22) is an exemplary piece. The sculpture,
a pile of candy possessing an “ideal weight,” the wall label
explains, of 175 pounds, looks like a rather light-hearted take
on Process or Earth art. The fact that the audience is invited
to take a piece of candy adds a participatory dimension and
casts a sensual light on the work. Moreover, Gonzalez-Torres
titles almost every one of his works "Untitled" to encourage
the viewer to make personal associations and interpreta-
tions as they interact with the work. The parenthetical sub-
title, however, indicates that the artist had some thoughts
about the meaning of the work as well. Ross, one learns, was

7.21 Mona Hatoum, Corps étranger (Foreign body), 1994. Video

the artist’s lover and in 1991 was dying of an AIDS-related
installation with cylindrical wooden structure, video projector, video player, condition; 175 pounds was Ross’s weight when healthy.
amplifier and four speakers, 137'%6 x 118% x 118%" (350 x 300 x This knowledge complicates the playful gift of the candy,
300 cm). Centre Pompidou. Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris. suggesting a twofold transubstantiation of Ross’s body,

a
Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self
7.22 Felix Gonzalez Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), 1991. Candies individually wrapped in multicolored cellophane,
endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight 175 Ibs (79 kg). © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.
Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New ‘ork.

first into the candy and then into the viewer’s own body. owners with rights and responsibilities in regards to the work.
Gonzalez-Torres explained: “I’m giving you this sugary thing; In the case of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), each time the
you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s work is installed the owner may choose the configuration in
body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many which the work is assembled, and whether or not to replenish
other people’s bodies. It’s very hot. For just a few seconds, the candy to maintain its “ideal weight.” The consequences
I have put something sweet in someone’s mouth and that is of the contract for our understanding of the absent body
very sexy.”'® Whereas Group Material directed our attention are profound: The object of love that could not be saved in
to politics in the museum, Gonzalez-Torres here points to the life can be perpetuated forever in art, or lost, depending on
sensual and contemplative potential of art. the choices of the owner. Gonzalez-Torres, however, does
Gonzalez-Torres designed candy pieces like “Untitled” (Por- not discuss this tactic in emotive terms. In a return to the
trait of Ross in LA) in different shapes and sizes, and using dif- type of discussions initiated by Group Material, he spoke of
ferent candies. These pieces were the artist’s way of working the legal arrangements in political terms. In a conversation
through his struggle with the disease that would take his lover with veteran Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945), he
and then himself. Gonzalez-Torres explained: “In a way this declared: “At this point I do not want to be outside the struc-
‘letting go’ of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a ture of power, I do not want to be the opposition, the alterna-
monolithic sculpture, in favor of a disappearing, chang- tive. Alternative to what: To power? No. I want to have power
ing, unstable, and fragile form was an attempt on my part to ... Lwant to be like a virus that belongs to the institution.”!®
rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in Through his Certificates, as much as much as through the
front of my eyes.”!” As viewers, we leave the artwork with the works themselves, Gonzalez-Torres presented himself as a
taste of it in our mouths. We may then wonder at the experi- contagion of difference within the institutions of culture.
ence afterward, and perhaps mention it to a friend or family By the mid-1990s, museums were increasingly open to
member. In this way, the artwork extends from the museum displaying symbols of difference. The success of Gonzalez-
into the hands, mouths, bodies, and minds of those who Torres’s viral occupation of the institution was confirmed
encounter it, and beyond into the wider community. by the prominent role he played in late-century art theo-
Despite its disappearing form, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross rizing and by the selection of his work to represent the
mm LA) is surprisingly permanent. And despite the self- United States posthumously at the 52nd Venice Biennale in
destructive quality of\Gonzalez-Torres’s sculptures, his work is 2007. By that date, his work had come to represent a shift
designed to survive even as it disappears. In another echo of from self-interest to sociability that was the central compo-
the 1960s, this time of Conceptual art, Gonzalez-Torres devel- nent of French theorist, critic, and curator Nicolas Bour-
oped Certificates of Authenticity and Ownership entrusting riaud’s concept of “relational aesthetics.” Bourriaud featured

Embodying Abstraction
Gonzalez-Torres prominently in his extended argument, it, Antoni submerged her hair in dye and then painted the
developed in his book Relational Aesthetics (1997), that impor- floor using her hair. In their gestural expressive marks and
tant contemporary art created situations for the viewer that all-over abstract compositions, both works pay homage to
approximated forms of sociability that were being pushed out postwar Abstract Expressionist painting while the materi-
of daily life. Though the particulars of a work like “Untitled” als and means of creation allude to critical examinations of
(Portrait of Ross in LA) remain important, what mattered most domestic labor and body image in feminist art of the 1970s.!9
to Bourriaud were the interactions initiated by the piece Antoni’s work creates a clear distance between the art object
and carried to fruition by the viewer. New York-, Berlin-, and and the body. The marks are indexical traces of the body, but
Chang Mai, Thailand-based Rirkrit Tiravanija’s (b. 1961) they resist identification as such, thus encouraging the viewer
transformation of gallery spaces into ad hoc kitchens in which to find meaning beyond the specificity of the artist’s body.
he cooked and served his audience Thai curry are the most The complexity of Antoni’s combination of body politics
complete example of relational aesthetics. Looking at “Unti- and Modernist form is evident in Gnaw (1992) (fig. 7.24), a
tled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), one can see that the balance that two-part installation featuring two 600-pound cubes, one of
Gonzalez-Torres struck between exploring personal content chocolate, the other lard, and a room titled Lipstick/Phenyl-
and pointing to the social context was tipped in favor of ethylamine Boutique featuring mirrored vitrines, glass shelves,
the latter by Bourriaud’s emphasis on the shifting nature of and a display of lipstick and chocolate. The cubes are a vari-
the audience rather than on the biography of the artist. An ation on a Minimalist trope. However, a close look at Gnaw
oeuvre that had begun deeply invested in society in its par- reveals that the body, repressed in Minimalism, has returned
ticulars with Group Material and that had then made use of here: At the corners of the chocolate cube are teeth marks.
the metaphors of art history to link the personal to the social The cube of fat, deteriorating at the edges, has also been
was now being understood as itself a metaphor for intercon- chewed. Like the Neo-Geo works that layered the sublime
nectedness in a global society. perfection of Minimalist geometry with social significance
(see Chapter 5), Antoni’s chocolate and fat cubes speak
Janine Antoni of desire, excess, and fragility as well as 1960s abstraction.
At first glance, the early works of Janine Antoni (b. 1964) Antoni cast the two forms and then spent months gnawing
look like updated versions of Expressionist painting, Mini- and biting at the blocks and spitting bits aside. After carving
malist sculpture, and Process art. But what may initially the blocks with her teeth in this way, Antoni reconstituted the
appear to be appropriated Modernist styles are in fact some- discarded lard as lipstick and the chocolate as heart-shaped
thing more. Antoni created Butterfly Kisses (1993) (fig. candy boxes, displayed in the Lipstick/Phenylethylamine Bou-
7.23) with short delicate brush marks made by blinking taque. Phenylethylamine is the chemical in cacao beans that
her mascara-covered eyelashes against the page. Loving Care contributes to the pleasure we take from eating chocolate.
(1992) is a gestural abstraction on a gallery floor; to create With this boutique, Antoni gives the results of her corporeal

7.23 Janine Antoni,

Butterfly Kisses, 1993.
Cover Girl Thick Lash
mascara, 1,124 winks per
eye. Diptych, each 22% x
Nh, 15° (56.19 x SG lKennik
Lire.
7 ©Acar - The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Courtesy of the
artist and Luhring Augustine,
New York.

Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

7.24 Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992. Installation shot. 600 Ibs (272 kg) of chocolate gnawed by the artist (24 x 24 x 24": 60.96 x 60.96 x 60.96 cm):
and the same weight and size of lard, also gnawed by the artist. In the background, Lipstick/Phenylethylamine Boutique comprising 45 heartshaped
packages for chocolate made from chewed chocolate removed from the chocolate cube and 150 lipsticks made with pigment, beeswax and chewed lard
removed from the lard cube. The Museum of Contemporary Art, los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

engagement with Minimalist form an enticing veneer of con- Antoni’s interest in the body as a social signifier came
sumer culture. from experience. Born and raised in the Bahamas, when
Butterfly Kisses, Loving Care, and Gnaw speak of obsession, she moved to the United States she realized that people
compulsion, and even masochism by engaging processes misconstrued her body language. The simple act of moving
that mimic the symptoms of psychological disorders. Butter- among crowds in a new city exposed the culturally deter-
Jly Kisses, for instance, enacts a painful repetition-compulsion mined nature of the human body. In order to use this insight
of the kind that might be brought on by the insecurities without focusing on the individual, Antoni sought out materi-
preyed upon by the cosmetics companies that provided als that might convey the trace of the body without evoking
Antoni’s materials here. The work represents, but is not, the traditions of self-expression, as abstract painting, mod-
symptomatic behavior. Antoni did apply mascara and blink eling in clay, or traditional performance would. In addition
against the page over a thousand times, but she meas- to hair dye, mascara, lard, and chocolate, Antoni used soap,
ured out the process over weeks. Likewise, Gnaw orients a plaster drywall, rawhide, wool, and recordings of her rapid
complex array of references—art history, economics, self- eye movements while dreaming. Faced with the traces of an
image, desire, and repulsion—around the actions of the art- absent body, the viewer is left with processes and objects that
ist’s body. Unlike similarly structured works, however, such take satiric jabs at Minimalism and consumer culture. Not all
as ORLAN’s surgeries or Abramovic’s The Biography, Gnaw of her work excludes the autobiographical investigation, but
does not make the artist’s body available to the viewer. Antoni throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, Antoni
carefully designs indexical traces that allude to the body enlisted the body and a phenomenal range of materials to
that is not there and in the process generates content that draw attention to the social and psychological forces that sur-
exceeds the autobiographical. round the self.

Embodying Abstraction 187

Gabriel Orozco
Sculptor, painter, and photographer Gabriel Orozco
(b. 1962) also creates work based on traces of the
body. Sometimes his art captures the index of our
presence on the world—bicycle tracks on pavement
or dents in a deflated soccer ball; in other cases he
creates his own marks by arranging or altering found
objects. While his work prioritizes the human body
as the means to draw attention to the world around
it, he often leaves the specifics of that body undeter-
mined. As he explained: “In my work, I wanted to
leave the mark of the human body, the mark of my
own body, but I wasn’t interested in affirming a par-
ticular race, gender, creed, or anything like that.
I wanted to leave that space open, to be occupied
by that someone else who is looking at my work.””?
His photographic diptych My Hands Are My Heart
(1991) (fig. 7.25) presents the bare arms and torso
of a man, first squeezing clay in his hands and then
opening them to reveal a heart-sized object. The
impression of the man’s hands on the soft surface of
the clay expresses a protective generosity lavished on
the fragile material, the heart it represents, and the
individual for whom it is a metaphor.
Orozco has created and discovered diverse sur-
rogates for the body and poetic visions of its passage
through the world. Another variation on Minimal-
ist form, Yielding Stone (1992) (fig. 7.26) is a gray
ball, approximately 16 inches in diameter, slightly
misshapen, and marred by bits of debris stuck in its
surface. Orozco created the work by rolling a mass of 7.25 Gabriel Orozco, My Hands Are My Heart, 1991. Silver dye bleach print,
Plasticine equal to his own weight through the streets. OV x 12%" (23.1 x 31.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman
As it encountered obstacles, it changed shape and Gallery, New York/Paris.

7.26 Gabriel Orozco, Yielding

Stone, 1992. Plasticine, 14 x 17
BMWA [RSOY NS ASD See ARGVDD veipallt
Walker Art Center. Courtesy of the
artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York/Paris.

Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

so a record of its experience became etched into its surface. the lyric attitude that runs through the art discussed thus far
Plasticine is a common material in a sculptor’s studio. It is in Chapter 7. Both address how the meaning of the human
strong but malleable and so is almost exclusively used to gen- body has become wholly dependent on its circulation within
erate forms that are quickly cast in a more durable medium. the economies of global capitalism.
Orozco by contrast has embraced it as “a material in a state of
constant mutability, every time that it is touched it changes.”*! Teresa Margolles
Plasticine is just one of the many materials that serve Margolles (b. 1963), who trained in forensic medicine as well
Orozco’s phenomenological and metaphorical expressions as art, describes her work as an examination of the “socio-
of the body in its environment: Motorbikes, cars, breath, gro- cultural implications” of the human corpse.” Her explora-
ceries, water, wood, and many other objects record the traces tion of the body began in earnest in 1990, when she, Arturo
made and impressions felt by the body. Angulo Gallardo, Juan Luis Garcia Zavaleta, and Carlos
Yielding Stone can also be seen as a metaphor for Orozco’s Lopez Orozco formed SEMEFO, an artist group named
life and artistic practice. Born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, after the acronym for the Mexico City morgue, Servicio
residing in various cities in different countries, and creat- Médico Forense. In addition to acting as a performance
ing work and curating exhibitions in many more besides, group and a heavy metal band, the artists made objects and
Orozco has had a career defined by his near-constant move- installations from materials collected at the morgue. In
ment through the world. He has no studio and rarely brings one installation they displayed the tattoos cut from murder
materials from one place to another, preferring to make art victims who had either remained unidentified or came from
with the world as he finds it. As with My Hands Are My Heart, families too poor to pay for their burial. After medical exami-
the results of his artistic wanderings are at once intimate nation, the bodies had been treated as medical waste by the
and open-ended, telling the viewer about the kind of world state. Margolles collected cremated bones and salvaged bits
he sees and his relation to it, but providing few details about of hair and blood-stained clothing, as well as the linens and
his personal life. Art historian Margaret Iversen has argued water used to clean the bodies. At times she even made use
that Orozco’s work involves creating objects that redirect of body parts. As the Mexican government foundered in the
the viewer’s pursuit of meaning away from the art object and 1990s, violent crime in Mexico City exploded. Margolles’s art
toward its context. In Iversen’s view, a work such as Yielding made the quotidian presence of death in Mexican life gro-
Stone reverses the expectation that art provides the meaning, tesquely visible.
order, and logic that are otherwise missing from the world. Early in her career, Margolles traveled to Europe, where
Instead, like the clay that reveals the shape of the clasped she discovered the work of Joseph Beuys. The apparent
hands in My Hands Are My Heart, Yielding Stone is a signifi- hubris of working with materials such as fat, sticks, and felt,
cant absence, inviting the viewer to look to the world that and of speaking for all humanity made a profound impres-
shaped it for meaning. The redirection Iversen describes is sion on Margolles. In 2000, while exploring ways to create
more than a subterfuge, it is a complex metaphor for self and work that responded to the “collective pain” of humanity,
society that captures the intuition of all the artists discussed she turned to the bullfight not only as a metaphor but as an
in this chapter: The body and the self are defined by their event.”* She was particularly struck by how it was not simply
malleability, not by a core identity, and we must attend to the about victory over the animal and the threat it represented,
forces that act upon them. but also about marking the body of the defeated. In the act
of forcing the bull to succumb, its body was punctured and
disfigured. At the morgue, Margolles came across a male
Beyond the “I” corpse, a casualty of the drug wars. It was adorned with
It has been a presumption of all the work discussed in this tattoos and had several piercings, including one in its tongue.
chapter that there is an “I” who experiences his or her She described the encounter: “I found a boy in the morgue,
body: a self that is affected by and accessed through the a murder victim who was marked in exactly the same way
experience of the body. The last two artists to be discussed as a defeated bull ... I had to go talk to the family, but they
here, Teresa Margolles and Santiago Sierra, both based in helped me because we understood each other. I work with
Mexico City, shocked audiences in the late 1990s and early emotion, not reason. So the piece is the tongue itself. It has
2000s with work that reminded viewers that the body often an initial impact of shock, but what’s important is that after
has more to do with politics and economics than selfhood. death the tongue keeps talking.” Margolles provided a
Sierra paid unemployed men to tattoo their bodies, Mar- funeral for the boy, but his tongue has since traveled beyond
golles taxidermied parts of human cadavers. Living or dead, Mexico City to art exhibitions, mounted on a rod and a
the body in both artists’ work has political, economic, and plinth. It sits like a specimen, separated from the individual
cultural value, but is not a conduit to self-understanding or who once used it and even from any form that suggests a
transcendence. Margolles, born in Culiacan, a Mexican city body. The finality of its alienation from the person for whom
troubled by the drug trade, and Sierra, a Spanish sculptor it once spoke diverts our attention from any relationship
who moved to Mexico City early in his career, share little of between the body and the self to the forces that have made

Beyond the “I” 1189

 7.27 Teresa Margolles, En el Aire (In the Air), 2003. Bubbles made using
morgue water used during autopsy procedures. Exhibition view at “Muerte
sin Fin,” Museum flr Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2004.
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.

it possible for us to stand in a museum and contemplate a

severed human tongue.
In considering the morgue as a source of art materials,
Margolles has not only looked at corpses. She also directs
our attention\to the rituals that even the destitute and
anonymous dead are still granted. All bodies at the morgue,
like the dead in cultures all over the world and throughout
history, are cleaned, and Margolles has made a variety of
works with the water used to wash the cadavers. She cleans
the water and then uses it to fill rooms with mist, bubbles,
or condensation. Visitors to the installation Jn the Air (2003)
(fig. 7.27) watch the gallery fill with bubbles made from the
water and feel the liquid as it bursts on their skin. They even
breathe in the water, thus facilitating a most intimate rela-
tionship with the bodies and lives of the dead. In a formal
inversion of such immaterial works, Margolles has also
used the morgue water to mix concrete that is then shaped
into sculptures. In 2006, at the Jardin Botanico Culiacan in
the city where she was born, Margolles fabricated a suite of
benches, shaped like chaise longues. Four years later, she
created six more benches for the public space around the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (fig. 7.28). For this
incarnation of the piece, Margolles made it clear that the
water used in the works had cleaned the bodies of men killed

7.28 Teresa Margolles, Untitled, 2010. Concrete and morgue water used during autopsy procedures.
Shown installed at los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist and Y Gallery, New York.
in drug-related violence. Thus the restful function of the
sculpture/furniture, essential to the project as she had con-
ceived it in Mexico, was overlaid with the politics of the drug
trade that embroils Southern California and Latin America.

Santiago Sierra
Santiago Sierra’s (b. 1966) earliest work in Mexico City
seems to have more to do with art history than the body
or the political economy. In Fardo de 1000 x 400 x 250 cm
(1000 x 400 x 250 cm Bundle) (1997) he strapped vast quan-
tities of urban refuse to the outside of a gallery, suspend-
ing it above the sidewalk until complaints were raised. The
emphasis on process, both gravitational and social, relates
the work to Process and Conceptual art by sculptors such
as Robert Smithson and Hans Haacke (see Chapter 1),
while hanging garbage in public responds to more contem-
porary interests in abjection and waste. From work such
as Fardo, Sierra focused his attention more clearly on social
processes, passing over formal references in his work to
concentrate on problems of poverty and the treatment of
impoverished laborers in Mexico. In a seminal essay on con-
temporary Mexican art, performance artist and critic Coco
Fusco praised Sierra and Margolles for turning away from
aesthetics that made their work immediately legible to the
international art community in favor of contextual specificity.
As a result, Mexico City, Fusco declared, was now fostering art
that risked incomprehension on the global stage in order to
respond directly to its local environment.” Sierra’s turn from
form to labor was, to Fusco, evidence of this choice.
To put issues relating to wage labor in Mexico on view,
Sierra hired people to work for him. He took apart his sink 7.29 Santiago Sierra, Line of 30 cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person,
1998. Performance at 51 Regina Street, Mexico City, May 1998
and paid someone to put it back together. A few months
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin.
later, he created Line of 30cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person
(1998) (fig. 7.29). For this, Sierra found a person who had
no tattoos or any plan to get one but who needed money. Sierra’s display of people compelled by poverty to submit
He then paid him $50 to have a vertical line tattooed on their bodies to his art has been viewed as a radical means of
his back. Rather than conveying insights into personality, representing the desperation created by capitalism. Bodies
Sierra’s manipulations of the human form tell us about the are treated by the individuals to whom they belong as nothing
social status of the person and the economic difficulties of more than a means to make money, and by the artist as a
his or her community. In Old Havana, Cuba, Sierra paid six means to make a point—and, to skeptics, a career. Fusco notes
unemployed men to stand side by side and have a 250-cm that, in Mexico City, Sierra’s critique appears quite pointed,
line tattooed across their backs; in Salamanca, Spain, he paid focusing as it does “on economic exploitation, in which many
four heroin-addicted prostitutes to have a 160-cm line tat- educated Mexicans participate through their employment of
tooed across theirs. The Cubans were paid $30, the Spaniards servants and day laborers, rather than the political corrup-
with a shot of heroin. In each case the remuneration cor- tion, from which most Mexicans can distinguish themselves.””°
responded to an amount that was extravagant in its imme- That Sierra’s art was so site-specific—that is, that it was tied
diate geographic context but insufficient in the terms of to the conditions of the working class in Mexico City or Old
Sierra’s Western art audience. The sum of $30, for instance, Havana—led Fusco to question whether travel would destroy
may seem paltry to a viewer in New York who has paid the efficacy of his critique. Such concern over contextually
$20 for museum admission to see photographs document- specific work continues to be relevant for many twenty-first-
ing the work, but in Cuba it was nearly the equivalent of a century artists. In April 2000, in Mexico City, Sierra hired
doctor’s monthly salary. Not only do these works put need five of the thousands of day laborers who look for work every
on display, they also reveal the discrepancy in quality of life morning. He directed them to a gallery which had had one
and value of labor between the audiences and subjects of of its walls pulled away. Four of the men were instructed to
Sierra’s work. support the now freestanding wall at an angle of 60 degrees

Beyond the “”
for four hours a day across a period of five days. The fifth man
was responsible for making sure the angle remained exact. For
the week, each man earned 700 pesos, about U.S.$65, which
is approximately what they would have expected to be paid
if they had been hired by anyone else. The workers were put
on view as they exerted effort for money, but with no logical
or productive end. The clarity with which labor and its value
were displayed attracted German curator Klaus Biesenbach,
who invited Sierra to re-create the piece, The Wall of a Gallery
Pulled Out, Inclined 60 Degrees from the Ground and Sustained by 5
People (2000) (fig. 7.30), in Berlin.
Performing The Wall of a Gallery Pulled Out in another loca-
tion would have been simple enough. There are day labor-
ers in every city and the Berlin Kunste-Werke gallery, unlike
many of Sierra’s Mexican and Latin American venues, had
plenty of money to pay them. However, the Mexico City
piece, by displaying the bodies of underemployed laborers
in an expensive shopping district, responded to the specific
economic and political concerns of Mexico City. Berlin was a
very different context and demanded a different work. Sierra
arrived in the city already familiar with Germany thanks to
the time he had spent in Hamburg as a student in the late
1980s and early 1990s. In 2000, he concluded, the bodies
most compromised by economic conditions in Berlin were
Chechen immigrants fleeing war and civil unrest in Russia
and emigrating to Germany in increasing numbers. Once
in their new country, they were classed as illegal aliens:
Hiring them was against the law, punishable by a fine for the
employer and deportation for the worker. For the Kunst-
Werke gallery, then, Sierra produced Workers Who Cannot Be
Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes (2000), in 7.30 Santiago Sierra, The Wall of aGallery Pulled Out, Inclined 60
which unidentified Chechen refugees were given money in Degrees from the Ground and Sustained by 5 People, 2000. Galeria
exchange for hiding themselves in cardboard boxes for a Acceso A, Mexico City, April 2000. Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin.

specified period. Sierra described the resulting work as a col-

laboration between himself and the museum that addressed political and moral assumptions that are contextually deter-
the specific economic and political situation in Berlin by mined. The bodies under observation here are so comprehen-
enveloping the bodies, stripped of all signs of individuality, of sively commandeered by politics and economics as to become
those at the bottom of the capitalist ladder, victims of poverty ill-suited to addressing issues of the self. It is the alienation of
and politics. the body from the self that is therefore at issue. While most
Sierra and Margolles bring us to a point at which the con- of the work discussed in this chapter enlists the body to delve
nection between body and self is not so much severed as deeper into nuances of the self, Margolles and Sierra leave
rendered a point of debate. Both artists make it clear that us considering the ramifications of presuming a connection
the connection between the self and body is dependent on between self and body in societies that devalue both.

Chapter 7 Culture, Body, Self

 Eastward Expansion:
Contemporary Art in Russia and China

y the mid-1980s, the world was getting a glimpse of a Russia

post-Cold War future. One could look at the reform In the 1980s, the Cold War was ending, and with it the era
policies of the Soviet Union and the increasing invest- defined by U.S.-Soviet antagonism and the threat of bilat-
ment and privatization opportunities in China and see the eral nuclear war drew to a close. The anxiety of Mutually
beginnings of a world that was less and less structured around Assured Destruction was giving way to the uncertainties of a
the binaries of East and West, Communist and capitalist. new world order of unchecked capitalism. In 1985, under its
By the end of the decade, the Berlin Wall had come down, new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist
the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, and what has Party of the Soviet Union initiated a set of economic reforms
become known as the “global era” had begun. The defining aimed at rebuilding the U.S.S.R.’s long-neglected infrastruc-
feature of this new era was that the political divisions that ture. Cultural reforms, including increased freedom for the
had served as an obstacle to the global spread of capitalist press and culture more broadly, followed. Gorbachev hoped
investment and consumerism had, by and large, disappeared. a more open society empowered by the policies of perestroika
There would now be McDonald’s franchises in Moscow and (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“openness”) would produce
U.S. corporations in Beijing, and there would also be Rus- a more efficient government. The effects were exhilarating.
sian oil powering U.S. cars and Chinese labor manufacturing Newspapers began to investigate all aspects of Soviet society,
consumer goods for the whole world. With this increasingly revealing individual accomplishments and exposing corrup-
fluid exchange of money, goods, and labor came cultural tion. Laying bare the workings of the government, however,
contacts that would have an equally profound impact on turned out to be politically costly. Gorbachev had opened
the art world. Artists were embroiled in these economic and Pandora’s box—with unforeseen consequences for the U.S.S.R.
political changes, often serving as witnesses to the profound and the rest of the world.
social shifts at the end of the century as well as to the trans- Both inside and beyond the Soviet borders, the political
formation of the very shape and meaning of their art. Dissi- terrain changed dramatically. Now lacking both the eco-
dent artists in the former Soviet Union who had previously nomic resources and the military resolve it had once pos-
exhibited their work only for an audience of close friends dis- sessed, Moscow was no longer able to support or control its
covered that it was interpreted very differently in the context former allies. Cuba was struck particularly hard when the
of an international exhibition. Likewise, a painting or sculp- Soviet subsidies on which it had relied for decades stopped
ture shown to an art-starved audience under the watchful in the late 1980s: The island went into economic freefall.
eyes of the authorities in Beijing held very different power Despite the crisis, it remained committed to Communism. In
when it was transported to a museum in Paris or a gallery in this, it would be exceptional among Soviet satellite states. In
New York. Beginning with a discussion of the transformation Poland, the Solidarity movement led a successful challenge
of Russian and Chinese art during the fall of the U.S.S.R. against the Communist government while other East Euro-
and the strategic Westernization of the Chinese economy, pean nations began to assert their independence from the
Chapter 8 introduces a series of artists who have reflected Soviet Union. Individual Soviet republics began to call for
upon the events and issues that have become the history of independence. With the threat of dissolution looming, Gor-
our global present. The next chapter will continue the discus- bachev created and assumed the post of president, hoping
sion of artists from around the world who have reacted to glo- in this way to circumvent challenges both from those inside
balization and its effects. the Communist Party seeking to roll back reforms and from

Russia
nationalists seeking to disband the Soviet Union entirely. The from the Moscow Art School and the V.A. Surikov Art
move did not work and in August 1991 Gorbachev resigned. Academy—Moscow schools that taught artists to paint images
By the end of the year the U.S.S.R. had collapsed. showing national accomplishments in the state-sanctioned
Perestroika and glasnost had a profound effect on the arts, style—and began an official career as a children’s book
transforming an active but previously sequestered Soviet illustrator. Kabakov has described the academies as places
avant-garde into players in the international art market. Art where students and professors treated education as a chore,
in the post-World War H Soviet Union had been character- deadening to creativity but necessary for employment. As
ized by a division between state-sponsored “official” art a student, he and a group of young artists including Erik
(Socialist Realism) and privately produced and exhibited Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, Ivan Chuikov, and Mikhail Mezhani-
“unofficial” art (often known as “apartment art,” because it nov provided their own unofficial education to supple-
was largely displayed in private apartments). In many cases ment what the state was willing to give them. In addition to
the artists making these works, official and unofficial, were teaching themselves what they could about philosophy,
the same. Unofficial art was created in moments of free time poetry, and art, they discovered role models in a group of
and shown only to small groups of friends who simultane- Modernist recluses, including Robert Falk (1886-1958),
ously acted as audience, critics, and collaborators. Through- Vladimir Favorsky (1886-1964), and Artur Fonvizin (1882-
out Moscow—the center for unofficial culture in these 1973), whose work fell out of favor as the propaganda needs
years—these groups supported a loose network of varied of the Soviet government came to determine the success of
artistic activities. When the latter entered the Western market Russian artists. Falk in particular, who had continued to paint
in the late 1980s, however, two styles came to
the fore. The first was a conceptually based
installation practice most widely seen in the
works of Ilya Kabakov. The second was Sots
Art, an appropriation-based painterly prac-
tice drawing on Socialist Realism, propa-
ganda arts, Western Pop art, and advertising.
Sots Art was introduced to the West through
the work of the partnership of Vitaly Komar
and Aleksandr Melamid, as well as by painters
Alexander Kosolapov and Erik Bulatoy.
In August 1988, the London-based auction
house Sotheby’s held a sale of contemporary
Soviet Art in Moscow, placing the hitherto-
insular artistic community firmly on the
international stage. Sotheby’s involvement
accelerated the flow of collectors to the
former Soviet Union and quickly imposed
a hierarchy on the Russian artistic commu-
nity based on Western prestige. The artists
themselves began to travel abroad, many of
them emigrating and starting to create work
that responded to their new lives away from
the former U.S.S.R. Though the excitement
about and investment in Soviet art would
lessen as the market discovered other Com-
munist avant-gardes in Cuba and China, the
Soviet and post-Soviet experience set the
pattern for the integration of local art from
around the world into the global market
of the late-twentieth and _ early-twenty-
first centuries.

Apartment Art: Ilya Kabakov

8.1 Ilya Kabakov, The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1985-89. Installation
Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933) was the first of the
from Ten Characters series. Six poster panels with collage, furniture, clothing, catapult,
unofficial Soviet artists to attain interna- household objects, wooden plank, scroll-type painting, two pages of Soviet paper, diorama.
tional prestige. He graduated in the 1950s Room dimensions 8' x 7' 11" x 12' 3"(2.44 x 2.41 x 3.7 m). Courtesy Centre Pompidou.

Ch hapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

Postimpressionist-inspired still lifes, landscapes, and figure transformation seemed to run counter to Kabakov’s entire
studies, appeared radical in his disregard for state-sanctioned artistic project. He had opposed such distinctions in favor of
art. His commitment to being irrelevant to a system that had “non-art” which rejected the obligation either to reflect or
rejected him proved inspirational. Kabakov and his peers to reject reality. His work was to be « “an action in life itself,”
concluded that their work should be equally removed from “formless” and “inseparable from life.”? The experience
anything approaching Soviet definitions of art: Their art of watching his installations ossify into art might therefore
would be “non-art.” have proven traumatic, but instead his success in New York
Kabakov’s earliest unofficial activities included creat- demonstrated the flexibility and even the universality of Jen
ing albums of drawings and paintings that mingle the Characters. Kabakoy would henceforth develop this open
minutiae of daily life with the fantasies of imagined Mus- quality in his work, letting the Soviet elements recede
covites. The collision of fantasy and mundane reality in his and new ones, often specific to the new contexts, come to
work was rooted in life in the shared apartments of Soviet- the fore.
era Moscow, which by the mid-1980s had also become the In the Soviet context, The Man Who Flew into His Picture
locus of privately hosted exhibitions. “[A] person living in a (sketch fig. 8.2), another of the Zen Characters, which shows
Russian communal apartment,” Kabakov later commented, the supernatural absorption of a man into his art, might be
“is charred, burned from all sides in this social communal interpreted as a melancholic reflection on a figure like Falk,
body, and he dreams not only of a social project where we isolated and consumed by his painting. When Kabakov met
will all be happy, but he also dreams of having his own indi- Falk, the older artist was almost entirely dependent on his
vidual project where he will build something for himself.” wife and his paintings to be able to communicate with his
This interest in the individual as dreamer and actor would guests. In the installation, Kabakov’s Man takes refuge in his
become the foundation for the complex installations that art to such a degree that he is physically transported into his
define Kabakov’s mature work. painting. The room is small and divided diagonally by a wall
In 1988, Kabakov came to New York to present Ten Charac- supporting a large white panel. In front of this panel—the
ters (1985-88), a series of single-room installations detailing picture mentioned in the title—sits an unoccupied wooden
the lives and dreams of “The Man Who Collected the Opin- library chair, behind which documents labeled “communi-
ions of Others,” “The Man Who Flew into Space from His cation” and “voices” hang in frames or are filed on shelves.
Apartment,” “The Collector,” “The Composer,” and six other In these accompanying texts Kabakoy tells us how the Man
characters. Kabakov had begun work on the project in the stared at the white canvas until he finally drew a very small
early 1970s, and by the 1980s had constructed entire scenar- figure on it. As the Man then stared at the drawing—a self-
ios in his own apartment. The Man Who Flew into Space from His portrait visible in the installation—he became the image and
Apartment (fig. 8.1) centers on a homemade spring-released traveled through the field of white into “infinite” and “blind-
contraption which has seemingly propelled its creator out of ing” depth. The unification of the man and his art, however,
his bedroom and up into space. When installed in Moscow, is matched by his alienation from it. Kabakov explains: “At
Kabakov’s scene spoke to the lives of the
many Russians seeking to carve a portal to
another existence out of their few moments
of private time and tiny amounts of personal
space. In that context, the work offered a
poignant commentary on the personal cost
of Soviet utopianism. Taking Ten Characters
out of Russia changed the work, however.
On the one hand, the series could now be
presented together, imitating the communal
apartments of Moscow rather than actually
occupying one. More significantly, in New
York, the sense of intimacy that had been so
evident when the work was viewed in Kaba-
kov’s home was lost. Seen in Moscow, the
boundary between art and life was blurred;
living space and sculpture merged into
one another. Framed by a New York gallery,
however, Ten Characters was Art. The ques-
tion now became whether it was representa- 8.2 Ilya Kabakov, The Man who Flew into His Picture, 1988. Watercolor, lead pencil,
tional or allegorical, both artistic means that ballpoint pen on paper, 10% x 11%" (25.5 x 28.6 cm). Collection of the artist.
create distance between art and life. Such a Courtesy the artist.

Russia
 medical advice rather than friendship or fame
will help the Man. There were other changes,
too. Though the five basic elements outlined
in Kabakov’s 1988 design for the Ten Charac-
ters installation remained, there was an addi-
tional one in the new installation: With no wall
to hang from, the texts now rested on a table
that, with accompanying chairs, belonged
to a family who had occupied Freud’s home
after the Nazis forced him to leave Vienna in
1938. Kabakoy thereby transformed The Man
Who Flew into His Picture from a meditation on
the plight of artists in Soviet Russia into an
essay about the relationship of the individual
to major developments in modern European
intellectual and political history.
Ten Characters demonstrates Kabakov’s
agility in orchestrating multiple layered nar-
ratives and his sensitivity to their changing
connotations. Such concerns fit well with the
increasing skepticism toward master narratives
and unified truths expressed in the Postmod-
ern theorizing of the likes of Michel Foucault,
Laura Mulvey, and Jean Baudrillard (see Chap-
ters 1, 2, and 5). As Soviet work of the 1980s
was exhibited in the West late in that decade
and into the early 1990s, its attention to modes
of expression and means of representation,
to style as much as if not more than content,
drew comparison to appropriation art and
the Western criticism that supported it.* As
Kabakov explained in 1995, several strands
of unofficial art in the Soviet Union rebelled
8.3 Ilya Kabakov, The Man who Flew into His Picture, 1989. Mixed media. Installation at
against the univocal authority of Soviet official
the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, 1989.
culture, but not all of them would appear valu-
able to the West. Kabakov’s art and the Sots Art
the same time that he is moving with all his soul and is follow- discussed below manipulated and broke apart the stories and
ing the departing figure, in a strange way understanding that styles of Soviet history and culture to create an art rooted in
he is also going there himself, the other half of his conscious- the experience of daily life. Such strategies of appropriation
ness clearly realizes that he is sitting completely immobile in and manipulation were clearly consistent with forms of con-
his lonely room, sitting alone in front of an enormous, poorly temporary European and U.S. art and art theory.
painted white board.”®
In 1989, Kabakov re-created The Man Who Flew into His Sots Art: Kosolapov, Komar and Melamid, and Bulatov
Picture for the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna (fig. 8.3), While Kabakov rejected official art to create non-art, Sots
changing the work to fit its new context. Instead of recon- artists, including his friend and fellow illustrator Erik Bulatoy,
structing the room, as he had done in New York, Kabakov challenged official art from within. Sots Art, a name invented
made Freud’s apartment—the location of the museum—the by Komar and Melamid from the elements of “Socialist Pop
setting. As the context of the work changed from a Soviet Art,” was based on the bold graphic style of state propaganda
communal apartment to the birthplace of modern psycho- and the heroic figuration of Socialist Realism, the official
analysis, different aspects of the piece took center stage. In Soviet painting style. The latter accented clear compositions
the last paragraphs of the Man’s story, he pleads for a witness that foregrounded assertive human actors in readily under-
to his journeys into the picture. A silent companion, he stood narratives that conformed to the political content
believes, will help him stay sane. In Russia, that guest might promoted by the government. Every country had its own
be a fellow artist, in New York an art critic or collector, but form of nationalist realism, rooted in the styles of the 1930s,
at the Freud Museum one imagines a psychoanalyst. Here though the degree to which national leaders were lionized

196) Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

by the style was far greater in the Communist East than the and modern was a familiar device in Socialist Realism, used
capitalist West. Nonetheless, Three Soldiers (1982-84) by Fred- to imbue the events of the present with the glamorous
erick Hart, erected in tandem with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veter- aura of history. In Kosolapov’s image, however, the flow
ans Memorial (see figs. 6.1-6.3), provides a populist Western of time is disrupted. The age of the ancients has come to
counterpart to the Communist Socialist Realism so objection- an end and been replaced by that of the Communists, but
able to the Soviet avant-garde. they too have fallen and the cherubs have returned from
Sots paintings such as Alexander Kosolapov’s (b. 1943) a mythical past to muse over the ruins of modernity. All of
Manifesto (1983) (fig. 8.4) neutralized the power of offi- history has turned to rubble in this arcadia, and past and
cial imagery by separating the icons of Soviet power from present, utopia and reality, have been folded over one
their ideological functions, creating a distance between another. Margarita Tupitsyn, curator of several U.S. exhi-
artistic form and its state-sanctioned meanings. In Sots Art, bitions of Sots Art in the 1980s, noted: “Its critical impor-
the appearance of heroic figures such as Marx and Lenin tance lay in the fact that the Sots artists proposed to view
or monumental Soviet landscapes ceased to convey mes- Socialist Realism not as mere kitsch or as simply a vehicle
sages about national stability and power. In Manifesto, a for bureaucratic manipulation and state propaganda, but
colossal bust of Lenin depicted in rich tones of red with as a rich field of stereotypes and myths which they could
black shadows rests on a plinth next to a toppled Classi- transform into a new contemporary language, one able
cal column. In the foreground, three cherubs relax among to deconstruct official myths on their own terms.”° Kosolapov
flowers and curiously examine a piece of newsprint with assembled the symbols of Soviet ideology, the style of Soviet
the words “The Manifesto”across its top. Mixing ancient propaganda, and the narratives of Neo-Classical art in such a

8.4 Alexander Kosolapov,

Manifesto, 1983. Oil on
canvas, 76 x 72" (193 x
182.8 cm). Image
courtesy the artist.

Russia
way that the past envelops the future that Communism prom- Melamid (b. 1945), the instigators of the movement in 1970s
ised. In this way, Manifesto not only challenges the promise Moscow, became its stars in exile in the 1980s. Their images
of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, but all later Mod- presented Western audiences with visions of the Soviet exper-
ernist proclamations that history is an inevitable progressive iment that were full of humor, irony, longing, and tragedy,
march toward a utopian future. bound up in elaborately crafted allegorical narratives, and
Kosolapov painted Manifesto in New York. By the 1980s, painted in their variation on the official Socialist Realist style.
few of the Sots artists remained in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982-83) (fig. 8.5) recasts
authorities as well as art historians recognized their manip- the Neo-Classical topos of the birth of painting in which a
ulations of the language of power as political critique and maiden traces the shadow of her sleeping lover on the wall.
made it difficult for such unofficial artists to show their work, Komar and Melamid’s version takes place in richly appointed
leaving this new avant-garde with only the apartments of chambers where the muse of Socialist Realism traces the sil-
their friends as exhibition spaces. Moreover, Soviet officials houette of an alert and carefully posed Joseph Stalin. In the
threatened the more outspoken artists with deportation and U.S.S.R., the painting argues, Socialist Realism was only ever
destroyed their art. The government did, however, permit about expressing Soviet power, not socialist reality.
many artists to obtain exit visas. Emigrating first to Israel The most prominent of the artists to stay in Moscow was
and then to the U.S., Vitaly Komar (b. 1943) and Aleksandr Erik Bulatovy (b. 1933). His Danger (1972-73), a sly juxta-
position of “danger” signs and a bucolic scene
painted in a Socialist Realist style, conveys a
sense of urgency by disrupting an image of a
peaceful picnic with threatening text and by
refusing to indicate either the source of the
danger or the steps we might take to nullify
it. Are the picnicking pair under threat, or
are they the threat itself? In either case, a
scene that should evoke calm has been turned
upside down. In the later: Perestroika (1989)
(fig. 8.6), Bulatov again combined represen-
tational imagery and text to unsettling effect,
transforming the word perestroika (which, as
stated above, means literally “restructuring”)
into a great pyramid, silhouetted against a
dramatic sky. Strong male hands hold the
central letters aloft and lock them together
to produce the shape of a hammer and sickle,
the Communist symbol used on the flag of
the Soviet Union. The word is made monu-
mental—but what this means is pointedly
unclear. One can see in the stylization of the
text and its integration with the classic symbol
of Soviet power a linking of the reformed
present with the unreformed past. This con-
nection could be read as a critique, suggest-
ing that Gorbachev’s reforms were simply
more of the same: Such a message, dispel-
ling claims of Soviet progress, would be in
keeping with other Sots works such as Mani-
Jesto. However, in 1989, many members of

8.5 Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, Origin of

Socialist Realism, 1982-83. Oil on canvas, 72 x 48"
(182.88 x 121.92 cm). Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine
Arts, New York
a aremaate work. Pop art, a style that symbolized
capitalist society just as Socialist Realism
stood for Soviet power, took on special
importance. In the 1980s, Kosolapoy
developed a series of images that juxta-
pose icons and logos of East and West.
On the left-hand side of Symbols of the
Century (1982) (fig. 8.7) is the head of
Lenin, familiar from Communist propa-
ganda, shown facing a Coca-Cola logo
that floats on the right. Below the logo
is the catchphrase associated with the
drink, “It’s the real thing,” and below
that the name “Lenin.” Beyond the joke
of a Marxist revolutionary selling Coke,
Symbols of the Century is a poignant expres-
sion of the degree to which the ideal-
ism of Communism is underwritten by
the reality of capitalism. But, the paint-
ing also suggests that the reality of free-
market capitalism is not so different from
that of state-controlled Communist econ-
omies; one’s options are limited to the
choices provided by those in power. The
i | artist’s intentions for the work, however,
were at least as much autobiographical as
8.6 Erik Bulatov, Perestroika, 1989. Oil on canvas, 105% x 1077" (269 «x 274 cm). they were critical. He explained: “When
© Erik Bulatov. Courtesy Galerie Piéce Unique, Paris. I was a little boy, the first exhibition of
American industry was held in Moscow.
the Communist Party were looking to perestroika as a means Every visitor to the exhibition was served Coke or Pepsi,
of guiding the nation into a brighter, better future. In this symbols of the American Paradise for every Soviet person.”°
case, a connection to the heroic Communist past would be When he immigrated to the U.S., however, Kosolapov discov-
a symbol of fidelity to Soviet ideals. Bulatov’s Perestrovzka thus ered that “Coca Cola was really only a sweet beverage, some-
uses the materials of “official” Soviet culture to reach ambigu- time, though not often, pleasant to drink.” This realization
ous conclusions. that in daily experience the symbol of paradise was, at best,
As they became more immersed in Western capitalism, rather mundane paralleled his earlier disappointment about
Russian artists incorporated Western icons into Sots-style the reality of “the ‘paradise’ that operated under the sign of

ofa

8.7 Alexander Kosolapov, Symbols ofthe

Century, 1982. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x
40" (182.88 x 101.6 cm). Image courtesy
the artist. seit

Russia
Lenin.” The work, taking the images of Lenin and Coca-Cola however, is not Moukhin’s only story. With other members
as a concise means to represent the adversaries at the end of of what was called the Immediate Photography group, he
the Cold War, also uses icons and logos to write the autobi- sought to investigate the nature of photography and to chal-
ography of the artist in a fashion not dissimilar to the brand- lenge the assumption that there was a necessary and singu-
conscious compositions of commodity artists such as Ashley lar connection between image and meaning. As a series, Last
Bickerton and Sylvie Fleury (see Chapter 5). The pervasive Soviet Monumental Art represents a critique of the official art
influence of capitalism rendered the commodity a form of that filled the streets of Moscow and matches in its decon-
artistic communication that was relevant all over the world. structive urge the Sots artists’ challenge to Socialist Realism.
The photographer also took aim at avant-garde traditions,
Photography and Performance: Moukhin, Kulik, Brener specifically the Constructivist photography of Alexander
As the Communist world underwent a metamorphosis, pho- Rodchenko (1891-1956). The Russian Constructivists formed
tography and performance art came to play new roles within the heart of the early Soviet avant-garde. They developed
it. Photography had been used throughout the Soviet era compositional strategies for photography, painting, and
to forward party politics. Now, photographers attempted sculpture based on the plans and structures of Modernist
to disentangle their medium of choice from this history. Of architects and engineers. As the Russian Revolution con-
course, painters and sculptors faced a similar challenge, but solidated itself into the Soviet state, Rodchenko and others
the greater truth claims associated with photography (“the oriented their Constructivist style to support the growing
camera never lies”) complicated the issue for photographers. Communist society and renamed their movement Produc-
Unofficial painters had condemned Socialist Realism for tivism, producing art in tandem with what they believed
being ideologically complicit with Soviet power, but it was to be the most advanced technologies and most evolved
the particular style, not painting itself, that was critiqued. political science. It was this ideological turn that came to
For photographers, the situation was more extreme: It was concern contemporary artists such as Moukhin. Rather than
their medium, rather than any particular style, that had been being praised as an artist who applied cutting-edge art to
crucial to state power. revolutionary politics, Rodchenko is held accountable here
During the period of the Soviet collapse and the rise of for using Modernist forms to promote Stalinist policies.’
an independent Russia, Igor Moukhin (b. 1961) created the Last Soviet Monumental Art features a collection of oblique-
series Last Soviet Monumental Art (1992) (fig. 8.8), which angled and fractured compositions that mimic Rodchenko’s
presents fragmented views of public monuments erected style. Moscow critic and curator Yekaterina Dyogot has noted
to celebrate the strength of Soviet society. Paint peels from that Moukhin enlisted the abstractions the earlier photogra-
the torsos of agile youths, patinas crack, and sculpted bodies pher discovered in the radio towers, athletes, and engineer-
collapse under the weight of neglect. Moukhin’s photo- ing projects of Soviet society to document its demise. In
graphs can be readily interpreted as companion pieces to Moukhin’s photographs, the Socialist Realist style of the
Kosolapov’s Manifesto. The demise of the Soviet empire, decaying monuments no longer communicates state power,

8.8 Igor Moukhin,

“Footballers," from Last Soviet
Monumental Art, 1992. Black
and white photograph,
Zheleznovodsk, Russia. Image
courtesy the artist.

Chapter 8 Eastward Expan in ion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

and the Constructivist Modernism of Rodchenko
no longer conveys progress. Deconstructing
both the avant-garde and official state art in the
same image, Moukhin produces an uncomfort-
able equation in which meaning and style are
joined by politics alone.
The Russian art market flourished between
the Sotheby’s sale in 1988 and the first years of
the post-Soviet era. A number of new Musco-
vite galleries opened, selling Russian art not
only to Westerners, but also to individual and
corporate Russian collectors who were also
investing in Western work. By 1993, however,
with the nation undergoing a series of political
and financial crises, the market had flattened
out. In 1994, President Boris Yeltsin dissolved
parliament and curtailed free speech. Mean-
while, oil companies and organized crime bosses
accumulated vast fortunes: It became clear that
Westernization was not an antidote to corrup-
tion. The generation of artists now coming of
age confronted the uncertain domestic political
situation, but also looked abroad with a far more
comprehensive understanding of the West than
their predecessors. If Moukhin’s photographs
exhibit a contemplative analysis of the history
of Russian art and the status of Russian society,
the performance art of Oleg Kulik (b. 1961) and 8.9 Oleg Kulik, Dog House, 1996. Performance at the "Interpol" exhibition, Center for
Alexander Brener (b. 1957) reveals a more bel- Contemporary Art and Architecture, Stockholm. Courtesy Regina Gallery.
ligerent side of 1990s Russian art.
Performance art was popular among Russian
artists in the 1990s because it permitted expressions of a campaign for the presidency of the U.S.S.R. falls into this
kind that seemed to match the extremity of their situa- latter category. Taking advantage of a relaxation of censor-
tion while resisting the Western market—because there was ship, Mironenko posted campaign posters for himself, boldly
no end product to sell—that had so rapidly consumed the brandishing the slogan “Bastards! What Have They Turned
”
work of the earlier generation. The history of unofficial art This Country Into!” Kulik and Brener’s brand of perfor-
in Moscow also included several precedents for this turn to mance adopts this more abrasive attitude.
performance including the work of the Collective Actions Oleg Kulik became infamous in the second half of the
group. Active from the mid-1970s and recently represent- 1990s for being walked as a dog around Moscow and other,
ing Russia at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, this group cities by his wife and “keeper,” Mila Bredikhina. He often pre-
staged events for audiences of collaborators and friends sented himself chained or caged in galleries and museums,
in a spirit similar to the exhibitions of apartment art occur and on more than one occasion defended himself against
ring at the same time. For one such performance, Appear- visitors who came too close (fig. 8.9). Kulik’s first canine per-
ance (1976), Collective Actions invited an audience to come formances featured the artist lunging and barking, express-
at a given time to a field, where they were given a certificate ing the violence and corruption that was coming to dominate
acknowledging their attendance. For Gazing at the Water- Russian society. His performances presented Russian life as
fall (1981), a group was brought-to a snowy field where being in a state of decay, reinforcing the sense of desperation
a performer ran about before finally coming to a stand- felt by many Russians, but also mimicking how the country
still. The path of the running man formed the image of a appeared in the eyes of the West. “When Independent Russia
fifteenth-century Chinese painting for which the event was became open, Western illusions about it disappeared—
named. Such poetic and humorous, if somewhat oblique, we became a malign[ed], loveless creature, like a mad
assertions of artists’ and audiences’ rights to meet where dog,” Kulik explained.’ Rather than simply ignoring such
they liked and to define art as they chose were accompa- chauvinism, Kulik embraced the stereotype. Though the
nied by other Moscow performances of a more explicitly sensationalism of .his performances conveys the hyperbolic
political nature. Sergei Mironenko’s (b. 1959) 1988 satiric and anxious character of post-1991 Russia, the descent to
the status of a canine was a path Kulik found
relevant to all of society.’ “For me, human
stopped being associated with the notions ‘alive,’
‘feeling,’ and ‘understanding’ and started to be
associated with the notions ‘artificial’ and ‘dan-
gerous,” he wrote.'? The animal world, he felt,
offered the opportunity to experience the world
more directly: He became a dog in order to
communicate from the position of an authentic
animal rather than an artificial human.
Western audiences were able to view Kulik’s
dog as well as Alexander Brener’s confronta-
tional style of performance in a controversial
exhibition, “Interpol,” held at the Center of
Contemporary Art, Stockholm, in 1996. The
show was conceived as providing an opportunity
for artistic collaborations between East and West
European artists who might initiate a dialogue
about international culture in a post-Communist
age. Though accounts differ, it is clear that these
collaborations failed to materialize and that, as
guests arrived for the opening, “Interpol” was
indistinguishable from any other international
survey exhibition in which invited artists depos-
ited works already completed elsewhere or were
assigned spaces in which to create their discrete
contributions. Kulik had arrived as a dog and
found himself in a highly compromised posi-
tion. His art was based on its distance from the
conventional means of creating and presenting
art, but here he was trapped in a conventional
exhibit, isolated and displayed for the edifica-
tion and entertainment of the viewer. Possessing
the artist’s desire to communicate, but limited
to a dog’s means of communication, Kulik
became what any neglected and confined animal 8.10 Wenda Gu, united nations—sweden & russia monument: interpol, 1996.
becomes: desperate and violent. Like Kabakov’s Site-specific installation showing damage done by Alexander Brener, 1996, at the
protagonist in The Man Who Flew into His Picture, “Interpol” exhibition, Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture, Stockholm. Swedish
both slipping away and self-aware, Kulik recog-
hair tunnel measuring 84' (25.6 m), a rocket from the Swedish royal airforce, and the
European Community flag. Image courtesy the artist.
nized what was happening and tried to stop it.
He put up signs in his space to warn visitors of
the danger. When one ignored the sign to get a closer look, meant destroying them as they had originally been conceived
Kulik bit him. The artist was arrested and the intruding and executed. Brener decided to make this fact explicit. He
visitor was taken to hospital. singled out Wenda Gu’s united nations—sweden © russia mon-
Kulik and Brener had voiced concern in the weeks and ument: interpol (1996) (fig. 8.10), a large corridor made of
months before “Interpol” opened that the exhibition was human hair. After playing a solo on a drum kit he had set up
failing to develop its announced collaborative structure. in the galleries, Brener attacked Gu’s piece, tearing it from its
Brener characterized the turn of events as a dangerous shift tethers on the ceiling and reducing it to formless heaps. The
from artistic process to art objects: This change appeared to work was part of a larger project for which Gu was collecting
echo the transformation of the unofficial Soviet artists in the hair from across the planet and weaving it into symbols such
late 1980s from dissidents into producers of luxury goods as flags, iconic images, and calligraphic texts written in his
for the Western market. At the show’s opening, therefore, own meaningless alphabet. The “Interpol” installation was
Brener decided to force the idea of process back into the one of the first showings for the work. Gu sees the project as
exhibition. Collaborating in the other artists’ projects at a whole, titled wnited nations (see also fig. 8.19), as “a great
this point, after the works had been completed, necessarily ‘utopia’ of the unification of mankind [that] probably can

Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion Contemporary Art in Russia and China

never exist in our reality but it is going to be fully realized Deitch Projects for two weeks. The gallery filled with a musky
in the art world.”'! wnited nations—sweden © russia monument: odor, more animal than human, and at least one person was
interpol was featured prominently at “Interpol,” apparently bitten. The artist reported that the performance led him
confirming the Russians’ concern that actual collaboration from the violence and frustration he had felt and shown in
had given way to representations ofit. Though inclusive, Gu’s Stockholm to a sense of cathartic freedom and openness. In
work is hierarchical: The artist controls the conception and 1974, Beuys had achieved an understanding with a danger-
the execution. Brener’s act rejected such autocratic visions ous wild animal; almost a quarter of a century later, Kulik
and destroyed the piece in solidarity with the original inten- reached peace with the animal of his own making.
tions of “Interpol” that artists should create new models of Via his performances as a dog and other animals as well
art making that diverged from those already established and as photographic and film works, Kulik imagines multiple
authorized by the West. Though Gu expressed some under- integrations of the human and the animal under the banner
standing of the action in the days following the event, he, like of “Zoocentrism.” In political terms, Zoocentrism promotes
most of the European participants in the exhibition, voiced population control and equality of rights between people
strong objections to the way Brener chose to make his point. and animals. While / Bite America represents a more violent
The problem that had come to a head in Stockholm side of this exploration, much of Kulik’s work seeks more
related to diverging visions of the role and place of contem- gentle intimacy. In Gobi Test (2004) (fig. 8.11), a video about
porary art—whether it was a process with social, intellectual, life in Mongolia, Kulik presents a society in “symbiosis” with
and emotional consequences or a product aimed at a market. nature.'* The film turns on the relationship between human
Brener’s and Kulik’s performances represent a significant beings and nature—sometimes showing magnificent animals,
change in strategy for Russian artists seeking to challenge horses, or oxen, at others detailing the efficient slaughter of
the status quo. “Soft subversion, a heritage inherited from
the 1980s, is no longer adequate, and the hidden undermin-
ing of the political context of the enemy is obsolete,” Brener
wrote with fellow artist Barbara Schurz (b. 1973). “‘War is
necessary!’ was our answer to the question ‘What to do?’”!*
In place of Sots artists’ stylistic infiltration or Kabakov’s
allegorical and site-specific narratives, Brener and the Aus-
trian Schurz advocated an ever-changing strategic assault.
Their war would be waged across the post-Communist East as
well as in the West. Six months after the opening of “Inter-
pol,” Brener was arrested in Amsterdam for spraypainting
a green dollar sign on a canvas by the Russian avant-garde
painter Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935). Even once-radical art
such as Malevich’s was now part of an economic and political
network that Brener and others were struggling to expose.
Sometimes, Brener and Schurz argued, leaflets and dem-
onstrations are what is required of a political artist; at other
times, art demands that you bark and bite like a hungry dog,
deface famous paintings, heckle academics, spit on art critics,
and even drop your pants and defecate—all actions that were
carried out by Russian performance artists in the 1990s.
In addition to challenging received notions of art, Oleg
Kulik engaged in a more traditional quest to explore what
makes us human. Three years after “Interpol,” he traveled to
Deitch Projects in New York to create a variation on the most
famous artistic dialogue between the animal and human
worlds of the twentieth century, Joseph Beuys’s J Like America
and America Likes Me. In 1974, Beuys had locked himself and
a coyote in the René Block Gallery in New York for three days
to enact a reconciliation between the violent and humane
aspects of U.S. society. By so doing, Beuys sought to heal
the self-inflicted wounds of civilization, a task Kulik set for
himself as well. Kulik’s dog project was begun as a means of
giving form to the anxiety of Russian life. For / Bite America 8.11 Oleg Kulik, The Gobi Test, 2004. Film, 31 minutes. Courtesy Regina
and America Bites Me (1997), Kulik locked himself in a cage in Gallery.

Russia |203 |
 a goat—with neither animal nor human declared superior. on October | for a peaceful protest against the closure and
Gobi Test is a plea for balance. Kulik explains: “‘Civilised charged that the police had violated civil rights guaranteed
man’ cannot survive in Mongolia. No way. Any kind of busi- in the constitution. The show was not reopened but, in 1980,
ness is possible here only if it does not destroy the natural twelve of the participating artists formed the Stars Painters
balance.”!* Experiencing life in Mongolia impressed upon Society and were granted an officially sanctioned exhibition
Kulik the depth of Western ignorance and hubris in its at the China Art Gallery.!°
dealings with the natural world. Far more than the dangers As the “Stars Art Exhibition” demonstrated, the process
of Westernization to the Moscow art world, Kulik’s work of warming to the West and opening Chinese public culture
conveys the profound need for a balance between humanity up to increased dissent and debate was not a smooth one. In
and nature. 1982, fearful of excessive Westernization, the state initiated
the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, targeting “individu-
“art for art’s sake,” and “abstraction. >IT Pressure to
6
alism,”
China temper the politics of their work compelled the Stars Painters
Though confronting very different economic realities, Society to disband and nine of the original twelve members
Chinese artists in the last decades of the twentieth century to leave China.!* Despite the campaign, artists were still able
faced aesthetic and political issues similar to those encoun- to expand their knowledge of traditional Chinese arts as well
tered by the Russians. As in Soviet Russia, the visual arts had as Western Modernism through exhibitions, publications,
been shaped by politically determined art education and and even experimental programming in the educational
careers exclusively devoted to the production of official art system. Though there continued to be few opportunities to
and propaganda. During the Cultural Revolution (1966- exhibit, let alone to sell, unofficial art, there grew up a com-
76), art schools rejected traditional Chinese arts in favor of munity of like-minded artists and intellectuals as well as a
Socialist Realism for its connections to the wider Communist supportive network of writers within the state-sanctioned
world. Graduates produced innumerable portraits of Com- publishing industry. The Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign
munist leaders, especially Mao Zedong, while those trained was ended in 1984 and the following year Chinese open-
in modern calligraphy and printmaking turned out bill- ness to Western art culminated in the highly influential 1985
boards, murals, and posters announcing the policies—and exhibition of work by Robert Rauschenberg at the China Art
the enemies—of the state. When Mao died, the programs Gallery of Art, Beijing.!®
of the Cultural Revolution were quickly modified, with the During the 1980s, Chinese artists negotiated a variety of
state warming to Western capitalist markets and in some stylistic and political influences, both domestic and interna-
degree relaxing its control of culture. The few artists who tional. There were a number of important collectives and
had been experimenting with abstract and individual styles movements, including: New or Rustic Realism, which repre-
in private were suddenly able to discuss and even show their sented common subjects in an almost Photorealistic manner;
work, while many artists and intellectuals criticized during Current of Life, a movement based in Western China which
the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated. While not open harnessed the expressive gestural abstraction of traditional
to all forms of dissent, the government under the leadership Chinese ink painting and the spirit of rural and naive arts to
of Deng Xiaoping permitted a far greater amount of free create emotive and representational imagery; and Rationalist
speech than ever before. This new state of affairs as well as Painting, a more conceptual and analytic approach to repre-
its limits was put on display in September 1979 in a park just sentation shared by a number of east Chinese artists’ groups.
outside the China Art Gallery, now the National Art Museum The vibrancy of these movements, particularly the various
of China in Beijing. Sharing the enthusiasm and urgency of collectives that fell within Current of Life and Rationalist
the moment, a group of twenty-three art students and teach- Painting, contributed to what has been called the ’85 New
ers set up the “Stars Art Exhibition” to display their efforts to Wave Movement. Several conceptually based movements also
represent and critique contemporary reality. The announce- formed in the 1980s, including the Dada- and Zen-inspired
ment for the show, written by one of its organizers Huang excursions into art and chance of Xiamen Dada and the text-
Rui (b. 1952), declared: “We have used our own eyes to know based work of artists including Wenda Gu and Xu Bing.” By
the world, and our own brushes and awls to join in it.”!° The the close of the decade, performance-based work, particu-
artists were outspoken in their rejection of existing state ide- larly from artists working in Beijing, was also reaching criti-
ology and their desire to participate in building a new China. cal mass.
Art displayed in the show included abstract and representa-
tional work, sculpture, and oil and ink painting. Opening “China/Avant-Garde”
on September 27, the “Stars” organizers intended to honor As the restrictions of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign
the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s were relaxed, a number of artists, critics, and curators rec-
Republic of China, celebrated on October 1, 1979. On the ognized the need to exhibit the new Chinese art publicly.
morning of the 29th, however, police confiscated the art and As early as 1985, Wang Guangyi (b. 1957) and Shu Qun
shut down the exhibition. Artists and supporters gathered (b. 1958), members of the Northern Arts Group, organized

204] Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

the “Zhuhai Conference,” a symposium that featured as its public for eight days. The two closures were quite dramatic.
highlight a slide show of work by artists and collectives from In the first case, artist Xiao Lu (b. 1962) brought a gun into
all over China. The experience of viewing such a great variety the museum and fired two shots at the installation that she
of contemporary work proved compelling. Gao Minglu and and Tang Song (b. 1960) had made. This violent and surpris-
a team of curators and critics that would come to include ing gesture took place just hours after the opening, without
Li Xianting and Hou Hanru among others set about creat- the prior knowledge of the curators or the authorities. Offi-
ing what in 1989 became the controversial “China/Avant- cials closed the exhibition and took Xiao and Tang into
Garde” exhibition at the China Art Gallery, Beijing. The custody. Under the pretext of a spring holiday, the gallery
result of three years of preparation and the participation of stayed closed for five days. Upon its reopening, the authori-
numerous Chinese arts organizations and over 150 individual ties received an anonymous letter claiming that a bomb
artists from all over China, the show introduced Beijing audi- would go off in the museum if the show was not closed again.
ences to artists who have since become major figures in the For two more days the doors were shut. It is not known who
contemporary art world. Paintings by Current of Life painter sent the threat, but the combination of violent gestures and
Zhang Xiaogang could be compared to those of northern the readiness of officials to shut the exhibition down turned
Rationalist painter Wang Guangyi. Xu Bing’s monumental “China/ Avant-Garde” into the swansong of the ’85 New Wave
Book from the Sky (1987) was shown, as was work by Wenda Movement. In retrospect, this suppression of contemporary
Gu and Xiamen Dada’s Huang Yong Ping. The energy and art foreshadowed the silencing of the democracy movement
spirit of innovation of Chinese art in the post-Cultural Revo- in Tiananmen Square four months later and the beginning
lution years were amply on view, as was national pride. In the of a period of tightened restrictions on artistic opportunities
catalogue, Gao describes contemporary China as “a country in China.
opening its door to the world” and presenting its art as the
site of “conflicts between the beautiful and the ugly, the new Wang Guangyi
and the old, the true and the false, and the [confrontation “China/Avant-Garde” captured the vibrancy of the 1980s
of] existing complicated values.”?' Contemporary Chinese Chinese art scene and also presented many artists at a
artists and their supporters were bidding farewell, he con- turning point in their careers. Wang Guangyi (b. 1956),
cluded, “to the ideas of art meant to [please] human sense one of the most internationally recognized of the ’85 New
organs alone or instruct people with dogmas.”** 29 Just as they Wave Movement, is a case in point. Wang was represented
had in the “Stars Art Exhibition,” contemporary artists in the Beijing show by examples of his work with the North-
were presented as leading an engaged populace in a demo- ern Arts Group, which he had co-founded with Shu Qun
cratic China. in 1984 in Harbin after rejecting the art-school education
China was, perhaps, not quite ready for Gao’s vision of he had received during the Cultural Revolution. Wang’s
Chinese art. The sponsors of the exhibition were fined and it work captured the Rationalist aesthetic with its characteris-
was shut down twice, so that in the end it was only open to the tically flat, clearly delineated compositions painted with a

8.12 Wang Guangyi, Frozen

North Pole no.28, 1985.
Oil on canvas, 39% x 59"
(100 x 150 cm). Artist collection.
Courtesy Wang Guangyi Studio. sido ull
highly reduced palette. Works such as Frozen North Pole no. 28 images are repeated from left to right and what appear to be
(1985) (fig. 8.12), one of a series represented in “China/ clouds in the background shift position. Wang overlaid the
Avant-Garde,” were intended to provide an analysis of daily faces with a grid as though the painting was being marked
life stripped down to its bare essentials by strong, disciplined up to be enlarged, as was the practice when creating the
individuals. The Northern Arts Group was a collection of mural-sized portraits that dominated Chinese public spaces.
artists and intellectuals who were interested in the intersec- Wang has explained that the grid was a means to scale the
tion of art with philosophy, literature, and society, and who symbol of Mao down to that of “normal person.”** By paint-
believed that reductive abstractions such as Wang’s scenes ing the image of Mao with the grid still visible, Wang was
could move the viewer beyond the material world to access attempting to reverse the propagandizing process and thus
the sublime character of the region. It was in this milieu restore Mao’s humanity. Despite the artist’s intention being
that Wang began to conceive of his style as “an objective to disrupt the mystifying power of the image, rather than to
attitude toward past cultural facts.”** Soon after painting disrespect the man himself, audiences were shocked. Wang’s
the Northern scenes, Wang applied his Rationalist lens and Mao paintings were among the most controversial shown in
abstract style to iconic examples of past Western art, as if “China/Avant-Garde.” In fact Wang changed the letters to
seeking through his analysis of them to discover an essence AC because censors thought AO was a disrespectful reference
that might equate to the sublime character of the North. to a current pop song.
The lesson of these “Post-Classical” paintings, Rationalist The pressures created by the censorship of the exhibi-
variations on works including the Death of Marat (1793) by tion led to the dissolution of the Northern Arts Group.
Jacques-Louis David and The Return of the Prodigal Son (ca. Wang reacted by becoming more assertive. Paintings such
1666-68) by Rembrandt, was that it was in history, even more as Great Criticism—Coca-Cola (1990-93) (fig. 8.14), from
than in geography, that one finds the source of one’s per- his Great Criticism series, begun in 1990 and continuing into
sonal and artistic identity. the twenty-first century, join the visual language of Chinese
In 1988, Wang turned away from imaginary landscapes political propaganda with that of U.S. advertising. In this
and Western masterpieces to examine the image bank of work, labeled “Political Pop,” stalwart workers appropri-
contemporary Chinese history. Mao Zedong—AO (1988) ated from Mao-era imagery raise fists, tools, and eyes toward
(fig. 8.13), one of a series of portraits of the Chinese leader, the logos of Marlboro cigarettes or Goca-Cola. Wang’s
exemplifies Wang’s Rationalist approach to contemporary imagery can be read as: depicting Communism branded by
Chinese history. The painting consists of three black-and- corporate sponsors and capitalism, and exalted by the
white portraits of Mao copied in oil from an official state por- masses. Capitalist advertising and Communist propaganda
trait and placed side by side. The faces lighten slightly as the appear as two sides of the same coin, each subverting the

8.13 Wang Guangyi, Mao Zedong—AO, 1988. Oil on canvas, 141% x 47%" (360 x 120 cm), triptych.
Created in Zhuhai, China. American private collection. Courtesy Wang Guangyi Studio.

Pee Q ; 2
Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China
 8.14 Wang Guangyi,
Great Criticism—
Coca-Cola, 1990-93.
Oil on canvas,
7854 x 78%" (200 x
200 cm). Created in
Wuhan, China.
American private
collection. Courtesy
Wang Guangyi Studio.

1213 700665

Se
@ 7¢S.70c%

965965

individual in favorof the few in power. Despite such an Zhang Xiaogang

apparently controversial equation of Communism with cap- Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), who formed the Southwest Arts
italism, it is central to the complexity of Wang’s art that by Group, one of the Current of Life collectives, has described
the 1990s the idea that the two systems were mutually exclu- the 1980s as the moment when he was able to “armor up”
sive existed only in the realm of propaganda. Relationships with Modernism.” For Zhang, with the relative flood of
between the products and ideologies of East and West had information about the West that followed the end of the Cul-
been developing for decades. The China of Deng Xiaoping, tural Revolution, there came the romantic and mystical idea
who dominated Chinese politics from 1976 until he stepped of living as a bohemian artist that contrasted with the more
out of political life in 1992, was based on the compatibility ascetic attitude of the Northern Arts Group. By the mid-
of these supposedly antagonistic political systems. Deng initi- 1980s, Zhang had begun teaching at the Sichuan Academy
ated liberalization in the late 1970s, formalizing a more open and taking an interest in Western Expressionism and Surre-
relationship with the West, meeting with President Carter alism. He was also deeply involved with Eastern traditions of
in 1979, negotiating from 1982 to 1984 the return of Hong Buddhism and ancient Chinese painting and mysticism. His
Kong from Britain (to take place in 1997), and transform- contribution to “China/Avant-Garde,” Forever Lasting Love
ing features of the Chinese economy by selectively adapting (1988) (fig. 8.15), represents the culmination of his inter-
Western models. Political Pop enlisted the languages of Com- est in combining these cross-cultural aesthetic and religious
munist and capitalist propaganda to point to the similarities references." The painting is a large triptych, integrating
between East and West that had become central tenets of figural groups that are rich in symbolic allusions to Western
post-Maoist policies. and Eastern traditions. Different family groups populate the
}
J

China
8.15 Zhang Xiaogang, Forever Lasting Love, 1988. Oil on canvas, 51%6 x 39%" (130 x 100 cm).
© Zhang Xiaogang, courtesy of Zhang Xiaogang Studio.

canvases, meditating and contemplating in a barren land- the Sichuan region was known, yet they are also informed by
scape populated only with an occasional animal, bonelike the work of modern Western artists such as Van Gogh and
tree, and—in the central panel—what appear to be three Picasso who looked to rural communities for access to spir-
graves. The narrative is not logical or linear, there is no itual truths. After 1989, the synthesis represented by Forever
beginning or end, but rather the scenes evoke thoughts of Lasting Love ceased being of such interest to Zhang as he
life and death, parenthood, love, discomfort, and isolation. sought ways to connect his painting more directly to his lived
The bodies have the awkward flat quality of folk art for which experience rather than to his mystical intuitions.

8.16 Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline:

Big Family No. 9 (red baby),
1996. Oil on canvas, 59 x
7A'/e' (150 x 190 cm). Asiart
Archive. © Zhang Xiaogang,
courtesy of Zhang Xiaogang
Studio.

Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

 In the early 1990s, Zhang traveled to Germany and France. Painting” and “A Concise History of Modern Painting” in a
This European trip proved transformative. Though he Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987) (fig. 8.17), two art-
had learned about Western art in China, the experience of history books, written by Wang Bomin and Herbert Read
seeing so much of it in person created a personal crisis for respectively, reduced to a small pile of pulp, at “China/
him. Facing a political landscape transformed by the June Avant-Garde,” Huang accepted an invitation to exhibit in
4, 1989 events at Tiananmen Square and the aesthetic rev- Jean-Hubert Martin’s “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition in
elation he had had in Europe, Zhang was left to search for Paris (see Introduction and Chapter 9). “Magiciens” was a
ways to make art that was true to himself as a contemporary groundbreaking 1989 exhibition that sought to present con-
Chinese citizen. For all of 1992, he did not paint. When he temporary work by artists from all over the globe. Huang’s
began to work again he started in a very different direction Dada-inspired gesture of comically cleansing art history while
from Forever Lasting Love. Still interested in the poetic and metaphorically representing the commingling of cultures
allusive quality of his 1980s work, he now developed several shared common cause with Martin’s efforts. In Paris, Huang
portrait-based series in which the paint begins to look more created a room-sized installation of reptilian forms built from
and more like muted scrims of translucent color and where machine-washed books, photographs, and newspapers and
the faces are rendered with a slightly blurred effect. The symbolizing longevity. After the show he relocated to the city.
soft, even tender, painted surface of the canvas is interrupted Huang began his career interrogating art-making pro-
with occasional passages marked by brighter colors and a cesses. For instance, as a student he had accepted convyen-
sharper focus. In a reversal of his practice in Forever Lasting tional themes such as the lives of Chinese factory workers,
Love, Zhang now resisted the mixing of Western with local but rejected the practice of using oil paints to elevate
traditions that he felt had become the lingua franca of con- such populist content. Instead he used spraypaint to create
temporary international art. Instead he focused on family images of labor, employing industrial materials to match his
portrait photography from previous decades. The Blood-
lines series—from which Bloodline: Big Family No. 9 (red baby)
(1996) (fig. 8.16) is taken—began with posed photographs
dating from the Cultural Revolution. Shortly after starting
the series, however, Zhang decided to base the paintings
more loosely on source photographs. He therefore began
inventing his own groupings, individual characters, and
the relationships between them. The men tend to be intel-
lectuals and the women variations on the artist’s mother. He
painted the children at approximately the age he himself
had been at the start of the Cultural Revolution; the girls
are often inspired by his daughter.?’ Zhang sometimes
paints the eyes slightly crossed or directed off into the dis-
tance, disrupting the cohesion of the group portrait. Cutting
through the slightly out-of-focus heads of Bloodlines are red
lines asserting the familial relationships between the char-
acters and insisting on connections that the isolating gazes
and soft focus suggest have been forgotten. History infuses
the paintings, connecting contemporary viewers to a child-
hood in the Mao era. Politics hovers like a ghost, casting a
pervasive melancholy over the atmosphere and attitude of
the paintings. In place of the analysis and critique demanded
by work such as Wang Guangyi’s, Zhang’s appeals are first
and foremost to memory—partial and perhaps failing, but
present nonetheless.

Huang Yong Ping

“China/Avant-Garde” was accompanied by a_ bilingual
(English/Chinese) catalogue, thereby revealing the cura-
tors’ interest in promoting Chinese art internationally. In
the event, the exhibition provided a number of participants
8.17 Huang Yong Ping, "A History of Chinese Painting" and "A Concise
with a stepping stone to successful careers outside China. History of Modern Painting" in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes,
One example is the Xiamen Dada artist Huang Yong Ping 1987. Chinese tea box, paper pulp, and glass, 30% x 19 x 27%" (76.8
(b. 1954). Shortly after he displayed “A History of Chinese x 48.3 x 69.9 cm). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis © Huang Yong Ping.

China
 8.18 Huang Yong Ping, House of
Oracles, 1992. Tent and related
objects of metal, cloth, water,
wood, brass, and papier-maché,
overall installation 10% x 15% x
15%! (3.2 x 4.8 x 4.8 m).
Collection of the Fondation Cartier,
France © Huang Yong Ping.

industrial subject matter. He also became interested in Dada, production of objects. House of Oracles is based on the tools
reading Marcel Duchamp and collecting copies of Dada texts Huang uses in his studio practice, but, built at the scale of
which he shared with like-minded friends and colleagues. an industrial machine, it suggests collective rather than soli-
In a 1986 statement explaining Xiamen Dada, Huang clari- tary creation. Such reimaginings of the artistic process are
fied the philosophical and historical significance of his inter- deeply concordant with Gao’s claims that the ’85 New Wave
ests. “Chan is Dada, Dada is Chan. Postmodernism is the Movement was oriented toward the people. Rather than
modern renaissance of Chan Buddhism,” he wrote.*® While turn the Dada/Chan into a private affair, Huang’s claim
other artists, particularly
John Cage (1912-92), whom Huang that artworks have become participatory events parallels the
singled out, have drawn connections between Eastern mysti- agitation for increased democracy as advocated by the Stars
cism and Western Dada, Huang noted that such comparisons Painters Society.
have particular relevance in the Chinese context. His essay
cites Duchamp, Beuys, and Rauschenberg among others as Wenda Gu and Xu Bing
important because, like Buddhism, they dismantled hier- The conjunction of Conceptualist strategies and Chinese tra-
archies in order to incorporate the everyday, the audience, ditions can also be seen in the works of Wenda Gu (b. 1955)
and meaninglessness into the practice of art making. Great and Xu Bing (b. 1955), who both engage the political and
art, Huang writes, “stops being about an individual’s accu- expressive power of the written word. Calligraphy plays a
mulation of masterpieces; it is now about the participation central role in Chinese art history and was enlisted by the
. of the public.” Huang’s expression of this democratic Communist state to accompany and often substitute for
spirit can be seen in his machines—discs that revolve based official imagery. Banners and posters dominated by what
on chance operations, creating data that then dictates the is called “big character” calligraphy were used to report
production of abstract paintings. Built on a massive scale governmental accomplishments and to denounce _ politi-
and assembled into the House of Oracles (1989-92) (fig. cal enemies. Gu and Xu were both well versed in traditional
8.18), the machines become the source of sculptural expres- arts, and during their training had used their skills to create
sions of the artist’s desire to relinquish control over the propaganda of this kind. Both artists went on to create their

Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

8.19 Wenda Gu, united
nations—china monument:
temple of heaven, 1998.
Site-specific installation
commissioned by San
Francisco Museum of Modern
Art & Asia Society New York,
Wenda Gu studios, Shanghai
& New York, 1997-98.
Temple of pseudo-English,
Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic
made of human hair curtains
collected from all over the
world; 12 Ming-style TV chairs,
2 Ming-style tables, 13 x
POrGon (3.96% 6.]) x
15.86 m). Permanent
collection of the Hong Kong
Museum of Art, China.
Courtesy the artist.

first mature work out of invented letters, thus appropriat- Art, combines Gu’s invented variations of Chinese, English,
ing the authority of calligraphy while destroying its ability to Hindi, and Arabic. By eliminating the specific meaning of
carry “official” meaning. language, Gu enlists the long tradition in China of valuing
Gu’s earliest invented characters appeared in large instal- the emotive quality of calligraphy and applies the abstract
lations and evocative landscape paintings. He received tra- communicative power of language to the utopian project of
ditional training in calligraphy and ink painting from a bringing together the peoples of the world.
master at the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou While Wenda Gu crafted his invented characters in lumi-
and supplemented his formal education by privately learn- nescent curtains of human hair, Xu Bing printed books. His
ing about various Western styles. This artistic education magnum opus is Book from the Sky (1987-91) (fig. 8.20), an
supplemented his experience in the Red Guard writing installation comprising four books, three scrolls, and several
“big character posters.” This political task, Gu explained, individual pages, all printed with characters that have no
impressed him for the passion and invention with which meaning. Xu started the project writing in his own hand, but
his colleagues carried it out. Most of the poster writers were soon settled on movable type as a way to connect his work to
ordinary young people and laborers who brought their historic traditions of printmaking as well as to more modern
fervent belief in Marxism, rather than any formal artistic newspaper production. He invented over a thousand char-
training, to their calligraphy. The results, Gu said, “had their acters, all studiously modeled on a Song Dynasty style of
own identity and creativity,” and constituted “the new form calligraphy. The characters looked so much like actual
of Chinese words.”°° In his art, Gu drew on this idea of cre- writing that when Book from the Sky was first exhibited viewers
ating new words as well as traditional calligraphic styles spent hours looking for actual words, to be rewarded only
and history. To create his first mature work he fragmented, very rarely when they stumbled on an obscure word that Xu
inverted, abstracted, and otherwise distorted traditional had unintentionally reinvented. Xu described the effect of
calligraphic forms, appealing to but ultimately frustrat- courting and obstructing comprehension as connected to
ing the viewer’s desire for meaning. Gu started to convey Zen Buddhism, but the result for audiences when the work
the content of his fictitious language through the materi- was shown in Beijing at “China/Avant-Garde” was more frus-
als with which he wrote, most famously in his sculptures tration and bewilderment than transcendence. The artist’s
made of human hair (see also fig. 8.10). In his series of skill was on view, as was his enormous time commitment,
installations, titled wnited nations, for which he used hair from but what this book was and why it existed remained obscure.
all over the world in a symbolic expression of the compat- The confusion was only further aggravated by the title under
ibility of all peoples, Gu integrated pseudo-versions of dif- which Xu first exhibited the piece, The Mirror of the World—
ferent languages. united nations—china monument: temple of An Analyzed Reflection of the End ofThis Century, suggesting that
heaven (1998) (fig. 8.19), created for an exhibition in New this was some kind of realist project presenting a true image
York and now in the collection of the Hong Kong Museum of of the world.*!

China
8.20 Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987-1991. Handprinted books, ceiling and wall scrolls printed from wood
letterpress type using false Chinese characters, dimensions variable. Installation view, “Crossings,” National Gallery
of Canada, Ottawa, 1998. Courtesy Xu Bing Studio.

Installed with the scrolls hanging from the ceiling, the and photographed his daily life, which included visits from
printed sheets of Book from the Sky billowed above the audi- Chinese artists whom he graciously hosted and trips to New
ence. Visitors strained to make out the writing, as though York artworld events. More than anything, however, he was
reading clouds. Rendering the printed word senseless was seeing art. While his compatriots in China were reading and
profoundly disturbing to both ordinary spectators and goy- debating about Western art newly available to them in books,
ernment officials. When the government closed “China/ Ai was able to experience directly nearly every gallery show in
Avant-Garde,” Xu’s work was singled out for official censure: the city. He saw the early appropriation, Neo-Expressionist,
Book from the Sky was said to devote too much time and energy and commodity art exhibitions, and was in New York for
to meaninglessness, and was held up as evidence that young the rise and fall of the East Village scene. Duchamp, Andy
Chinese artists were rootless at best, and pandering to Warhol, and Jeff Koons became liberating influences, con-
Western collectors at worst. In the tense atmosphere after the vincing him that making objects was secondary to creating a
suppression at Tiananmen Square, the official attack on Xu’s lifestyle, a discovery that would prove increasingly incendiary
work sent out a message that there were lines that an artist for Ai. When he arrived in New York, he also met Tehching
should not cross. Xu left China in the summer of 1990 and Hsieh (see Chapter 7), with whom he became close and to
resettled in New York. whom he introduced Xu in the early 1990s.
In 1993, Ai returned to China to see his ailing father
Ai Weiwei and decided to stay. He now found himself in a Beijing art
When Xu Bing moved to New York he met fellow expatriate world still shaken by the events of the late 1980s and once
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), who in 1981 had been the first of the again deprived of information, not only from the West but
Stars Painters Society group to leave China. Ai lived in the also about different art directions within China. As if con-
East Village where he created a modest body of sculpture tinuing to play the role of host, Ai set about sharing with

Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

8.21 Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han-Dynasty Urn, 1995. Three black-and-white prints, each 584 x 47%"
(148 x 121 cm). © Ai Weiwei.

his new community his knowledge of the art and artists he act for Ai. Though rarely breaking things, he has variously
had discovered in the U.S., as well as of the Chinese artists dipped prehistoric pottery in industrial paint, cut apart and
whom he had met abroad. He published three contempo- creatively reassembled Ming and Qing furniture, as in Table
rary art-history books featuring interviews with Chinese artists with Three Legs (2009) (fig. 8.22), and built installations
and illustrated articles about artists from abroad, including out of the towns and temples that have been lost thanks to
Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons. The volumes, known as the the rapid industrialization and urbanization of contempo-
Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Gray rary China. Pieces such as Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola
Cover Book (1997), represent a renewed dialogue
among Chinese artists about global contempo-
rary art. The Black Cover Book, which included an
interview with Tehching Hsieh, was co-produced
by Feng Boyi and Xu Bing, the latter providing
materials from New York.
Ai’s practice in China began to emulate the
Dada, Pop, and commodity art he had admired
in New York, though incorporating content and
materials specific to China. His most notorious
early work is the triptych Dropping a Han-Dynasty
Urn (1995) (fig. 8.21), which documents the
artist letting a 2,000-year-old vessel fall to the
ground. Ai’s gesture is a curious combination
of Dadaesque nihilism and a rather straightfor-
ward form of realism that points to the indiffer-
ence to anything but the present that seemed
to characterize contemporary life in China.
Despite the context of the pervasive destruc-
tion of the Chinese past seen in the razing of
historical buildings in Beijing and other cities,
controversial public works projects such as the
Three Gorges Dam flooding huge areas of the
south, and the Mao-era rejection of the “Four
Olds’—old ideas, old culture, old customs,
and old habits—Ai’s willful shattering of an
ancient artifact remains shocking. The calculated 8.22 Ai Weiwei, Table with Three Legs, 2009. Table, late Ming or early Qing Dynasty
transformation of historical objects, bordering (1368-1911). Wood, 48%6 x 48%6 x 48%6' (123 x 123 x 123 cm).
on vandalism, has become a signature artistic © Ai Weiwei.

China
Logo (1994), for which Ai carved and painted the Coca-Cola to the body as his medium, explaining, “The body is the
logo on an ancient vessel, suggest that there is an economic only direct way through which I come to know society
motive and corporate agent that we can blame for the oblit- and society comes to know me.” From 1994 until he
eration of history. Ai has been outspoken in saying that the moved to the United States in 1998, Zhang created an
forces of capital, as they are currently being harnessed by the oeuvre of performances that use the body—always his own,
Chinese state, are causing great harm. sometimes other people’s as well—to draw attention to the
often confrontational relationship between human beings
Zhang Huan and the world. The pieces are variously painful, terrify-
The swift official response to Xiao Lu’s gunshots at ing, and funny. Using his body as “proof of identity,”
“China/Avant-Garde” and the subsequent tightened restric- Zhang said he immediately related to the work of Tehching
tions placed on the Chinese art world made clear that Hsieh and Marina Abramovic when he learned about it in
confrontational tactics would no longer be tolerated. Per- lee EROS
formance artists by and large retreated to more protected Though his very first performance had a confrontational
venues and more private acts. The performance-based style, Zhang quickly adopted an experiential, endurance-
work of Beijing artists Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming dem- based practice. He also chose to create his art in and around
onstrated the fertility of this approach in the 1990s. Zhang his home in the squalid neighborhood of Dashan Village,
Huan (b. 1965), born in Anyang, was trained in Su, or Chaoyang, in eastern Beijing. Choosing to live and work in
Soviet-style paintingg, and came to Beijing to pursue graduate this location represented a deliberate anti-establishment
study. Within two years he had ceased painting and turned gesture that placed Zhang in opposition to the established
artist neighborhood of Yuanmingyuan in western Beijing.
To further emphasize its bohemian credentials, Zhang chris-
tened his neighborhood the “East Village” after learning
about the East Village in New York from Ai Weiwei. Zhang’s
East Village performances fall into two general categories:
those that focus attention on the artist’s body and tend
toward what Zhang called “self-torture”; amd those that point
outward to the environment, often evolving around a central
image of the landscape. In 12 Square Meters (1994) (fig.
8.23), an early solo work, Zhang covered his body in fish
sauce and honey and sat for an hour in 100-degree heat in
the middle of a badly neglected public restroom. The stench
of ammonia and waste from the bathroom plus the fish odor
emanating from Zhang was so pungent that photographer
Rong Rong, who documented much of the East Village art
scene, had to wrap his face in rags. Zhang recounted his
sensations:

I just felt that everything began to vanish from my sight.

Life seemed to be leaving me far in the distance. I had
no concrete thought except that my mind was com-
pletely empty. I could only feel my body, more and
more flies landing and crawling over my nose, eyes,
lips, ears, forehead, every part of me. I could feel them
eating the liquid on my body. Some were stuck but did
not stop eating ... The very concept of life was then for
me the simple experience ofthe body.**

In 12 Square Meters, Zhang deliberately heightened the sen-

sations felt by anyone who has recoiled from the heat and
stench of a poorly kept public toilet. By taking the mate-
rial at hand and choreographing it into a performance, he
transformed a daily event into a “quest to discover how we
relate to the environment we exist in.”*° After enduring sixty
Lye tar
ae NS minutes in the bathroom, Zhang rose and walked slowly to
8.23 Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters, 1994. Performance, Beijing, a pond not far away. In the film of the event, the image of
China. Courtesy of Zhang Huan Studio. his naked fly-covered body descending gracefully into the

Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

 8.24 Zhang Huan,
To Raise the Level
of a Fish Pond,
1997.
Performance,
Beijing, China.
Courtesy of Zhang
Huan Studio.

pool is cathartic. The unpleasant sight of the flies floating Ma Liuming

on the water and the fact that Zhang’s head does not re- Like Zhang, Ma Liuming (b. 1969) trained as a conven-
emerge at the end of the film suggest, however, that bathing tional oil painter. Ma completed his initial training at Hubei
in the water is not necessarily an antidote to sitting in the Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan in 1991 before leaving for
latrine. In fact, the pond was heavily polluted, offering some- Beijing and settling in the East Village in 1993. A visit to his
thing less than the cleansing experience Zhang’s perfor- Beijing studio by the London-based duo Gilbert and George,
mance implies. who had been among the most significant British perfor-
On August 15, 1997, he created his landscape perfor- mance artists in the 1960s and who continued to create new
mance To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond (fig. 8.24). This took work—primarily photography based on images of their own
place at a small manmade fishpond and involved forty-six bodies—inspired Ma to take performance seriously. Both Ma
migrant laborers, a child, and Zhang walking into the water. and Zhang, with whom he sometimes collaborated, identified
For the piece, the artist turned to men who, like himself, had the body as the most important factor shaping their experi-
come to the city and found almost no means of making a ence of the world. But where Zhang described how, when
living there. He had them encircle the pond and on a signal he was growing up, physical force seemed to be the only way
walk slowly into the water before turning to face forward as he could communicate, Ma said that he found his body con-
Zhang himself walked into the pond with a young boy on his fused those around him. In fact, other people’s presumptions
shoulders. 12 Square Meters was composed of three elements: about his body kept intruding into his life. He repeatedly had
the artist’s body, the city as represented by the toilet, and to field questions about his gender—even friends would grow
the pond. In To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond, these three ele- curious about whether he was hiding something from them.
ments are again present, though here the city is represented This confusion about who he was and his own curiosity led
not by a failed piece of urban infrastructure but by struggling him to ask broader questions about masculinity, femininity,
people. As one looks at each face and watches each person and gender ambiguity.
move, it becomes evident that there is individuality within In 1993, Ma created an alter ego, Fen Ma Liuming, and
this community. Each person’s identity is articulated in rela- turned these questions into art. In China, Liuming is a typical
tion to his body, the bodies of other people, and nature— male name and “Fen” is a common element in women’s
which, in this case, is also a product of humanity. In 1998, names. Together Fen Ma Liuming signaled the transgender
the photograph shown here of To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond subject matter of the performance. Ma hired a professional
was featured prominently in the exhibition “Inside Out: New stylist to make him up so that his face looked as much like
Chinese Art.” Zhang followed the show to New York and a woman’s as possible, thus joining male and female in his
moved there. own form as well as his name. Ma also pointed out that, in

China
 8.25 Ma Liuming, Ma
Liuming Walking the
Great Wall, 1998.
Gelatin silver print, 47%
OMAN PI? X
184.1 cm). Courtesy Xin
Dong Cheng Gallery.

addition to meaning “fragrance” and being a female name, communities. However, unlike the implosion taking place in
fen, a homophone for Fen, means “separation.” Thus Ma’s the former Soviet Union, China’s mechanisms for incorpo-
name incorporates ideas about gender differentiation even rating ideas from the outside, though imprecise and incon-
as his persona and performances convey connections. In his sistent, were porous enough to maintain a relatively steady
new persona, Ma created photographs and performances production of art and a comparably stable art community.
presenting Fen Ma Liuming in both male and female dress, Many artists left the country, but many stayed, and others,
though most often naked, and in a variety of contexts, includ- including Zhang Niaogang and Ai Weiwei, traveled away and
ing a marriage ceremony, walking the Great Wall of China then returned, In the early twenty-first century Xu Bing and
(fig. 8.25), and posing for photographs with spectators. In Zhang Huan were both working in China, Xu also serving
the performances, the gender clues created by cosmetics as a vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in
might be echoed or undermined by his clothes and activi- Beijing. Despite inconsistent and often oppressive govern-
ties, but in either case are complicated by the evidence of his ment actions, China was never without an artistic and intel-
naked body with its male genitalia and feminine physique. In lectual community able to knit together memories of past
the public portrait performances, Ma presents himself as an works to inform the production of new ones.
object, in some cases even drugged, while participants walk What was not present in China until the late 1990s,
up to him, strike a pose, and have their photograph taken at least to any meaningful degree, was an art market,
with him. The results range from humiliating to romantic— domestic or international. Individual collectors did occa-
some people even undress in solidarity with the nude artist. sionally surface. Much of the work in the “China/Avant-
In performances such as these, Ma initiated a set of chang- Garde” exhibition was sold to an unnamed and now
ing relationships by making his body the focus of actions that apparently missing Chinese collector, and a few Western
others performed. He ceased performing as Fen Ma in 2003. collectors, notably Uli Sigg and Guy Ullens, were collect-
ing in the 1980s, but there was no system in place to facili-
The Rising Art Market : tate or promote investment in contemporary Chinese
As is evident from the examples cited above, Chinese artists art.’ In 1989, the Hong Kong-based Hanart TZ Gallery,
responded in very different ways to the political changes and under the direction of Johnson Chang (Chang Tsong-
opportunities they encountered at the end of the Cold War. zung), presented “The Stars: Ten Years,” a retrospective
The “Stars” artists’ assertion of their right to experiment of the “Stars” artists, and in 1993, Chang, with Li Nianting,
with form and content was amply exploited by the artists curated “China’s New Art, Post-1989.” Initiated by the gallery,
who followed them—but there were costs. Periodic repres- both shows then traveled, the latter in abbreviated form to
sive acts, including the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of venues in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. International inter
the early 1980s and the 1989 crackdown, curtailed the kind est in Chinese art thus grew, and national representatives
of public communication and experimentation that foster art were included in international biennials starting in 1993 in

Chapter 8 Eastward Expansion: Contemporary Art in Russia and China

Venice. Individual expatriate Chinese
artists also began to attract attention
and higher prices. In 2004, Sotheby’s
finally negotiated a sale inside China,
in Hong Kong, comparable to the 1988
Moscow sale. China itself was slow to rec-
ognize the importance of supporting its
artists. Only as late as 1996, with the first
Shanghai Biennial, was there a concerted
Chinese attempt to recognize the value
being generated by its art community. For
the first two incarnations of the Shanghai
event, its curators focused on Chinese
artists only. Then, in 2000, they opened
the exhibition up to the rest of the world,
effectively transforming what had been
a local platform into an international
forum like the biennials held in the West.
To critics, the change was an example of
the government’s cynical use of the arts
to soften its international image in the
face of its unpopular policies relating to 8.26 Sun Yuan, Solitary Animal, 2000. Dog skeleton in barium chloride solution, 15% x 215% x

other things such as currency control and 59%!"

zi (40 x 55 » 150 cm). Exhibited at "Fuck Off!,” Donglang Art Gallery, Shanghai, China
Courtesy the artist
human rights. For artists, the message
was sent out that Western taste would be
setting the agenda. Art critic Wang Nanming, notoriously (b. 1966)—a horse, its hide blown up to the point where it
critical of Chinese artists working abroad, summed up the began to suggest the form of a ball—and Solitary Animal
issue in the title of his critique: “The Shanghai Art Museum (2000) (fig. 8.26)—a dog’s skeleton enclosed in a vitrine
Should Not Become a Market Stall in China for Western purported to be filled with poisonous gas—by Beijing sculp-
Hegemony.” tor Sun Yuan (b. 1974), amply demonstrated that the artists
The most dramatic response to the Shanghai Biennial’s were taking seriously the Chinese name of the show: “An
decision was Ai Weiwei and curator and critic Feng Boyi’s Uncooperative Approach.” Ai continued, well beyond the
concurrent exhibition of challenging Chinese contemporary 2000 event, to be an outspoken critic of the Chinese gov-
art, bluntly titled “Fuck Off!” The accompanying catalogue ernment, shifting his concern from the cultural politics
begins with two of Ai’s Perspective photographs in which the challenged in “An Uncooperative Approach” to address a
artist photographed his outstretched hand with his middle spectrum of national and international issues. In the subse-
finger raised at various monuments, as if making perspecti- quent decade he appeared to spend as much energy on pub-
val measurements for a drawing. Ai gestures first toward the lishing his opinions on the Internet as on making objects;
White House in Washington, D.C. (Perspective, 1995), and by 2010, his Twitter account had 48,000 followers who
then toward Tiananmen Square in Beijing (Perspective, 1996). could read up to 100 messages a day. “For the first time in
The exhibition opened at the Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai over 1,000 years, Chinese people can exercise their personal
during the opening festivities of the 2000 biennial; thanks freedom of expression,” Ai explained. In March 2010, in
to its English title, it generated plenty of press attention, what appeared to be a fresh wave of attacks on free speech in
as intended. The curators’ statement explained that the China, officials arrested Ai, his studio was demolished, and all
exhibition “emphasizes the independent and critical stance his means of communication were shut down. After an 81-day
that is basic to art existence ... It tries to provoke artists’ detention, Ai was released and soon after fined 15 million
responsibility and self discipline, [and] search for the way yuan (2.5 million dollars) for tax evasion. As in 1979, when
in which art lives as ‘wildlife.’”"*” Though the catalogue the “Stars Art Exhibition” was closed, there was an outcry—
included much work that was not displayed in the show, but this time, after over two decades of growing integration
including a number of pieces that made use of human and of China with the international art world, many of the voices
animal corpses, the exhibited work, including Inflated—A calling for the expansion of free speech and the release of
Horse (2000) by Beijing painter and sculptor Yang Maoyuan the artist came from outside the country.

China
 Engaging the Global Present

y the 1990s, it had become clear that grappling with biennial and triennial exhibitions held in cities all over the
contemporary life required communicating along the world. Thus an artist working on one aspect of globalization
global networks that define it. While artists as different can count on his or her work being shown alongside that
as Mona Hatoum and Wang Guangyi made art rooted in the of an artist from another part of the world examining a dif-
contact and conflict between cultures and nations, exhibition ferent one. There are challenges, however, especially as the
practice also demonstrated that the contemporary art world biennial system has come to mimic the flow of global capital,
was changing. In this respect, the 1989 exhibition, “Magiciens in some cases quite directly. At the turn of the millennium
de la Terre,” curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre one could see emerging a repetition of the pattern demon-
Pompidou and the Grand Halle at the Parc de la Villette, strated in the 1950s promotion of Abstract Expressionism
Paris was a signal event, revealing much about the urgency (see Introduction) whereby culture followed in the footsteps
and challenge of rewriting the map of contemporary art. of economic and political power. Now, however, artists and
Martin had taken seriously critiques that Western curators curators working within the contemporary network have an
consistently relegated non-Western art to anonymous source awareness about the intersections between art, economy,
material for Western masters. He further conceded that, with and politics that only began to be explored in the 1960s. The
regard to contemporary art, European and U.S. museums reshaped art world, like the specific examples of art discussed
effectively excluded the creative efforts of 80 percent of in this chapter, has the potential to provide artists and audi-
the world. “Magiciens de la Terre” was thus designed to be ences with a map of contemporary life that includes an analy-
a “planetary” exhibition, including living artists from all sis of the power that has gone into making it.
over the globe. Visitors were confronted with an incred- Chapter 9 will address the expanded vision of the art
ibly wide range of objects and practices providing irrefuta- world from a variety of perspectives beginning with a selec-
ble evidence that global artistic production far exceeded tion of art and events from Cuba that articulate individ-
the contents of contemporary Western art auctions. To its ual and communal identities within competing personal,
detriment, however, “Magiciens” placed undue emphasis national, and international frameworks. Cuban art has a
on authorship, exoticism, and mysticism, the very features long history of reflecting cultures from across the spectrum
that so much contemporary theory, art criticism, and art in of political power, including those of the indigenous popu-
the West had been challenging for decades. Despite intend- lations of the Caribbean, European colonial powers, and
ing otherwise, many of the stereotypical binaries of West and forced slave-trade migrations. After the revolution in 1959,
non-West were reinforced: For instance, viewers were met at the nation became a nexus of Cold War tension as well. For
the door by a Kruger text piece asking “Who are the Magi- Cuban artists, Western artistic movements including Abstract
cians of the Earth?” and entered to find the answer in the Expressionism and Pop art, as well as Afro-Cuban and Latin
form of Tibetan and Yuendumu sand paintings on the floor. American influences, were readily consumed alongside
Authority, intellect, and technology appeared still to be the socialist politics. Artists showing in Havana have been con-
preserve of the West, while community, environment, and sistently in dialogue with the capitalist West, the Communist
spirit were the priorities of the non-Western arts. Such fail- East, and the developing world in Latin America and Africa.
ures notwithstanding, the show marked a significant step in In the 1980s, as Cuba struggled to survive the Soviet collapse,
the direction of acknowledging the biases of Western curat- it stepped up to lead the postcolonial world through the ini-
ing and opening up the field to the global character of con- tiation of the Havana Biennial. Started in 1984, the biennial
temporary art. asserted the strength of art outside the U.S. and European
In the decades following “Magiciens,” the art world has umbrella. As the climate continued to change after the fall
taken on global dimensions, developing around a network of of the Soviet Union, Cuban artists faced another chapter in

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

their history of navigating the global pressures of politics The “Volumen” Generation
and art. After introducing themes in contemporary Cuban The first fruits of the relaxation of art policies went on
art, Chapter 9 will examine a variety of different perspec- display in January 1981 at a small exhibition in Havana
tives and approaches from other nodes on the network of called “Volumen I.” Three of the eleven participating artists,
contemporary art. The artworks included here range from José Bedia, Flavio Garciandia, and Rubén Torres Llorca,
interpretations of the Indian miniature tradition and Japa- were products of the first ISA intake. The show was eclectic,
nese animation to documentary imagery of street life in including work in abstract, realist, Minimalist, performance,
southern China, home-building in Israel, and the global and expressionist styles. Over 8,000 people came to see it in
shipping industry. This work treats the fact of globalization only two weeks. In retrospect, it marked the beginning of a
through individual case studies, sometimes localized in a renaissance in Cuban art and introduced several modes that
single city, at other times identified through an industry or have since become popular, in particular an assemblage-
cultural phenomenon. based sculptural practice rooted in Afro-Cuban religious
practices, a Conceptual investigation of the visual culture of
contemporary Cuban life, and an interest in performance.
Cuban Experiments
Cuban art has been cultivating relationships with the outside JOSE BEDIA José Bedia (b. 1959) set the tone for the 1980s
world—whether the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union, Latin generation with large-scale installations rooted in Afro-
America, or Africa—since the revolution in the late 1950s. Cuban spirituality and directed to international as well as
Much more than their counterparts in Eastern Europe or local audiences. Bedia was among the first Cuban artists of
China, Cuban artists have been consistently well informed his generation to have an impact on the international art
about the international avant-garde and eager to enlist its world in the 1980s. His paintings and installations featured
radicalism for the utopian aims of the revolution. In the prominently at “Magiciens de la Terre” and, throughout
1960s, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art were used to the international art world, engaged signs of pre-modern
address issues relating to social and individual identity in cultures, postmodern aesthetics, and contemporary geo-
Cuba. The various Caribbean, Latin American, and African politics in an exceptional way. Bedia’s art drew on his own
traditions found in Cuba were promoted and examined by experience of the Palo Monte Mayombe faith. When he
artists who, like contemporary politicians, were seeking to was initiated into it in 1983, he has explained, his art went
demonstrate the breadth and depth of Cuban society. In the from being distanced and representational to becoming
early 1970s, Cuba strengthened its ties to the Soviet Union fully integrated with his life. His 1994 installation at the
and the arts endured their “Gray Period.” The experimen- Philadelphia ICA in the U.S., Kakwisa el Songe, Vuela el Hierro
tation that had flourished in the early years after the revolu- (Kakuisa of Songe, Flight of Iron) (fig. 9.1), refers directly
tion suddenly faltered, though by the middle of the decade to Palo. Rising from behind a small iron bowl, a reference
formal innovation was once again accepted—as long as it did to the nganga, the site of a Palo initiate’s spiritual power,
not directly oppose state policies.
Arts education, a priority in the early
days of the revolutionary govern-
ment, also suffered during the early
1970s. Then, in 1976, the govern-
ment founded the Instituto Superior
del Artes (ISA), a graduate school
that renewed the official Cuban com-
mitment to the arts and fostered stu-
dents and teachers who encouraged,
and themselves produced, socially
engaged, aesthetically experimen-
tal, and conceptually challenging
art. Though issues of censorship
and control did not disappear, it was
once again possible to create mean-
ingful art within the Cuban system.
In contrast to the stultifying experi-
ence of Soviet artists, art students
in Cuba left graduate school in the 9.1 Jose Bedia, Kakuisa el Songe, Vuela el Hierro (Kakuisa of Songe, Flight of Iron), 1994.
early 1980s with a sense of purpose Installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Courtesy George Adams Gallery,
and community. New York.

Cuban Experiments
 9.2 Jose Bedia, The Island That
Died, 1996. Acrylic on canvas,
7\ Vax 108" (VSG
261.62 cm). Private collection,
Buenos Aires. Courtesy George
Adams Gallery, New York.

is a towering figure painted directly on the wall. This Bedia’s work is an exploration of conflict in contemporary
floating body is the spirit Sarabanda, Bedia’s patron spirit life and an invitation to participate in spiritual and personal
and a motif repeated throughout his oeuvre. Kakuwisa el growth. A second interpretation of Bedia’s work hinges on
Songe presents the protection and power of faith, but it what art historian Robert Farris Thompson has defined as
is also about problems of the material world. Two pro- “primalism,” which, in its attitudes to non-Western art, stands
pellers extend from the arms of the great spirit, drawing in stark contrast to primitivism.? Pablo Picasso’s use of the
on Sarabanda’s traditional association with metal and materials that he found in the anthropology museum in Paris
evoking flight and emigration. Economic challenges at and elsewhere in the first years of the twentieth century is a
home and increased opportunities abroad led Bedia to famous example of primitivism. The North African masks’
leave Cuba in 1990, going first to Mexico City, then in “exotic” origins and formal invention provided Picasso with
1993 to Miami. He has spent much of his professional an important inspiration for his painting Les Demoiselles
life creating installations in museums and galleries around d’Avignon (1907) and invested the figures with a mysterious
the world, acting as an ambassador for his culture and a his- and troubling sexual energy, but their precise meanings were
torian of the Americas. Many of his works present motifs of of little interest to him and of no significance in his use of
travel: ships journey from sea to sky, roads vanish into the dis- them. Primalism, Thompson argues, reverses the priorities
tance. Sarabanda often rises, as he does in Kakuisa el Songe, to of primitivism by embracing such works’ original function,
watch over the itinerant artist and outsider. In all of Bedia’s context, and meanings. To be a primalist thus requires con-
work, religious icons and symbols from capitalist, Commu- siderable cultural education and experience; in this regard
nist, and developing nations guide the individual along his or Bedia was obviously amply suited to the task. In addition
her way. to Palo, Bedia’s work makes reference to African religions
Observers of Bedia’s art have interpreted his tactics in that he encountered while serving with the Cuban army in
different ways. One reading focuses on the artist’s frequent Angola, Native American religion, which he learned about
depictions of an “everyman” figure. Such characters include during his training with a Lakota shaman, and Christianity.
the reclining and fishing men in The Island That Died (1996) Furthermore, he draws inspiration from his extensive col-
(fig. 9.2), who are generalized enough in their appearance lection of African, Native American, Pre-Columbian, and
to serve as surrogates for nearly any viewer. Art historian Oceanic art. Bedia’s practice, Thompson argues, “blends con-
and curator Charles Merewether has described how these temporary art with sacred impulses from beyond the West” in
figures anchor Bedia’s work in viewers’ sense of self while all a manner that “involves direct sacrifice, a giving back, rigor-
around them whirl “historical and contemporary encoun- ous tests of body and mind, and the nurturing of trust and
ters between cultures and countries” and “between the friendship with native artists and philosophers.” Rather than
every day and the sacred sphere.”! Gods, ships, spirits, and focusing on the “common man” and other aspects of Bedia’s
people inhabit Bedia’s world. In Merewether’s interpretation, work that will be immediately comprehensible to most viewers,

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

Thompson’s primalism emphasizes features, such as the a polychrome wood statue of the Cuban hero José Marti,
nganga in Kakuisa el Songe, that will remain incomprehensi- exemplifies Elso’s ability to intertwine political history, spir-
ble to the uninitiated. While the universal fishing man in The ituality, and aesthetics. The sculpture presents Marti, author
Island That Died awaits the viewer to join him, the primalist of Our America (1891), regarded by many as the founding
Kakuisa el Songe announces how long and hard that journey manifesto of Latin American politics and Cuban identity,
may prove, and what special knowledge and study will be as frail and wounded. Wooden blades puncture his body
required to survive it. and the ground around him. The paint that colors his flesh
and clothing is abraded. Mud is caked on his torso. The
ELSO “Volumen I” also featured the work of Juan Francisco figure raises a machete in his right hand as his eyes stare out
Elso Padilla (1956-88), another young artist who positioned intensely. Marti, killed in the war of independence fought
his work at the intersection between fine arts and indigenous with Spain, is the father-figure of the Cuban nation. Elso’s
religion. It is a characteristic of Afro-Cuban practices, unlike subject matter in the work, however, is spiritual as well as
their African antecedents, that they incorporate features political and historical.
of different religions. Elso, like Bedia, found inspiration in The most powerful invocation of the spirit in Por America
Native American, Christian, and Afro-Cuban traditions. In is not visible to the viewer. Elso practiced Santeria, a Cuban
addition to religious content, he also addressed the history religion rooted in the African Yoruba faith. Before complet-
of Cuba and Latin America and his own biography in sculp- ing the sculpture, Elso and his wife performed a Santeria rite
ture that mixed materials such as sticks, twine, blood, iron, of fidelity and love. As part of the ceremony they made offer-
wood, and paint. Por América (For America) (1986) (fig. 9.3), ings of their blood and mixed them together. After the ritual,
Elso took some of the blood and placed it in a
cavity he had carved in the back of Por America.
The rite sanctifies the relationship of the lovers
and the blood that they have offered together. By
placing the sacred substance inside the sculpture,
Elso seems to enlist the help of the Cuban poet-
revolutionary to safeguard his oath of love. Elso’s
act also invests the sculpture with the sacred
power rooted in Santeria. Marti had written that
the key to creating a strong, successful society in
Latin America was awareness of the region’s com-
plexities and knowledge of its history and tradi-
tions. “Our Greece must take priority over the
Greece which is not ours,” he wrote, arguing that
the region’s past and not European history be
used as the example for creating a strong modern
Latin America.* “Our America,” as he said, would
survive only by rejecting racism and embrac-
ing the variety of indigenous cultures as well as
external resources that proved useful for local
needs. Elso’s act echoes such sentiments. When
he died at age thirty-two of leukemia, he left a
body of work that in its poetic and philosophical
breadth remains a touchstone for contemporary
Cuban art.

FLAVIO GARCIANDIA Spiritualism and assem-

blage were not the only themes or approaches
on display in “Volumen I.” Flavio Garciandia
(b. 1954) crafted paintings from irreverent
combinations of political and popular symbols.
Like his Russian Sots Art contemporaries (see
Chapter 8), Garciandia composed his works by
9.3 Juan Elso, Por América (For America), 1986. Carved wood, plaster, and earth,
rearranging the iconography and typography of
figure approx. three-quarter life size. Entire piece, dimensions variable. Collection
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, Washington, D.C. official propaganda, mixing it with other features
Courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York. of visual culture including kitsch and graffiti.

Cuban Experiments
 9.4 Flavio Garciandia, Untitled, 1990.
Acrylic and glitter on canvas, 59Y%2 x 667A"
(150 x 170 cm). Collection Krings-Ernest,
Cologne, Germany. Courtesy the artist.

Garciandia’s goal was to represent the visual life of ordinary approximately a decade of the “Gray Period,” ideologi-
Cubans without repeating the ideological hierarchy that cal pressures from Moscow had relaxed and the biennial
prioritizes the expressions of the state. Hence, in paintings appeared to herald a revival of Cuban independence.
such as Untitled (1990) (fig. 9.4), all manner of objects— Later editions of the biennial went somewhat awry owing
hammers, sickles, amulets, palm trees, girders, penises, and to the financial crisis of the later 1980s. Artistic freedom was
stars intertwine and overlap in a flat, clear style that uses a also threatened by ideological mandates, called “Rectifica-
bright palette and is suggestive of a stylistic amalgamation tion,” issued in 1986. Troubled by the increasing instabil-
of elements drawn from advertising, propaganda, and wall- ity in the Soviet Union, the Cuban government rejected the
paper. Garciandia presents Cuban visual culture in what he idea of glasnost (see Chapter 8) and moved in the opposite
calls an “uncontrollable kaleidoscope,”* his works staging a direction. Rectification placed limits on free speech and by
“clash between provocative sexual and political symbols and 1989 numerous exhibitions had been canceled. As a result,
a perverse decorativism.”° In the United States and Europe, many artists felt they could not pursue their careers in Cuba.
the barrage of advertising created an ambiguous chaos out of Taking advantage of the relative ease of travel to Mexico,
which artists such as Ashley Bickerton and Sylvie Fleury (see they emigrated, invigorating the Mexico City art scene in
Chapter 5) created their maps of identity and adventure. By the process. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the
way of contrast, working in a politically authoritarian context, Cuban economy shrank by 35 percent and basic goods
Garciandia took an ordered environment and turned it became scarce almost overnight. Fuel reserves for both indus-
upside down, creating new relationships between high and trial and domestic use fell by 90 percent. This was the begin-
low, official and alternative. ning of what Castro called the “Special Period,” which, he
said, required the strength and sacrifice of all Cubans. Faced
The Second Generation with severe economic privation and government censorship,
In 1984, the Cuban government invited the world to visit nearly all the artists who had participated in the “Volumen”
the first Havana Biennial. President Fidel Castro himself exhibition and who were still in Cuba now left.
was credited with initiating the event and its mission of
spotlighting Third World artists. The results success- KCHO One of the first artists to step into the gap left by
fully demonstrated the vitality of art outside the U.S. and the “Volumen” artists was Alexis Leyva Machado (b. 1970),
European centers and Cuba’s leadership of Third World known as Kcho (pronounced Kah-cho). His nickname and
culture. During the 1960s, Cuba had pronounced itself the carpentry skills came from his father; informality and craft
revolutionary leader for the Third World and played a signifi- are integral to his art, which constitutes an effective, flexible,
cant role in political and military struggles in Latin America and legible metaphor for Cuban life. By the early 1990s, Kcho
and Africa. During the 1970s, this international role gave had developed an assemblage technique similar to Elso’s,
way to tightening bonds with the Soviet Union. Now, after combining natural and manmade materials to represent

ana. Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

nationally meaningful symbols and scenes. In Seal (1990), he two months after the close of the biennial, 35,000 people
created a monumental version of the Cuban national seal out set out for Miami on makeshift boats in what was the largest
of sticks, branches, leaves, and twine. In place of the key that exodus from the island since the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.
occupies the central panel of the crest, Kcho set a machete, Many died in the attempt. The U.S., concerned about its
a symbol for the Cuban sugar economy. Sugar is the primary ability to support the sudden influx of immigrants, ended
export of Cuba and itself a symbol of Cuban history, identity, its thirty-five-year policy of welcoming Cuban citizens—at
and ambition. It is also intimately connected to the lives of the same time President Castro announced he would not
ordinary Cubans, many of whom have participated in the prevent Cubans from leaving. These changes in U.S. and
exhausting work of harvesting it. In addition, the sugar har- Cuban policy led to claims that Castro was emptying his
vests are part of the political imagery of revolutionary heroes prisons into the sea and horrific images of U.S. Coast Guard
such as Castro and Che Guevara, as well as of the history of vessels chasing down and arresting Cubans who had survived
colonial occupation. Kcho’s nuanced use of materials and for days on rafts. Though, in retrospect, Regatta appears
symbols brings together the cultural and natural identities of presciently political and even potentially critical of the gov-
his homeland while evoking the struggle for survival that has ernment, in the spring of 1994 it did not encounter trouble
marked the country’s history. from Cuban officials. In fact, the piece marked the start of
At the fifth Havana Biennial in 1994, Kcho presented Kcho’s career as an art star in Cuba and abroad. He has since
Regatta (1993) (fig. 9.5), a flotilla of small boats roughly enjoyed the full support of the government and even of
crafted from debris found on a beach and placed like toys on Castro personally. After the biennial, Kcho was invited to take
the floor of the historic Morro Castle. As a country, Cuba is part in a residency at the Ludwig Foundation in Germany,
often conceived of as a vessel afloat on a difficult sea. Regatta for which he created a circular assembly of small lead boats.
modifies the metaphor slightly to present a community of Rather than oriented so as to suggest a destination or con-
individuals joined together by their common relationship frontation, this fleet faces inward toward itself.
to the sea. While all of Cuba is bound to the ocean, Kcho’s Kcho continued developing his imagery of the sea in a
childhood on the Isla de la Juventud, a small island approxi- large installation. In Speaking of the Obvious Was Never a Pleas-
mately four hours from Havana by boat, lends added bio- ure for Us (1997) (fig. 9.6), a balsero, the sort of makeshift
graphical relevance to the theme. In Morro Castle, Kcho’s boat used by Cubans to flee to Florida, is integrated into a
fleet faced north from Havana Harbor toward Miami, issuing composition balancing the shelter of a tent with the forward
what appeared an ambiguous challenge: Was the work pre- motion of a flotilla. A single boat, suspended a few feet in the
senting a challenge to the U.S. or a threat of mass emigra- air, supports a pyramidal arrangement of furniture. Below, a
tion to the Cuban government? Life in Cuba was getting small cluster of bottles huddle together like a liquid shadow.
increasingly difficult in the “Special Period”; Regatta cer- Sandbags and a wooden scaffold adorned with garments,
tainly expressed a longing for something better. Less than chairs, nets, oil drums, and small figures frame the scene.

9.5 Kcho, Regatta, 1994. Small boats

crafted from driftwood, overall ca. 19’ 8"
x 9' 10" (6 x 3 m). Ludwig Collection,
Germany.

Cuban Experiments
 9.6 Kcho, Speaking of the Obvious Was
Never a Pleasure for Us, 1997. Detail.
Mixed media. Installation view at the Billy
Rose Pavilion, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem,
summer 1997.

9.7 |brahim Miranda, Vida Disipada II

(Dissipated Life II) from Metamorphosis series,
2010. Mixed media on maps, dimensions
variable. Installation view at Servando Art
Gallery, Havana, 2011. Courtesy Estudio
Ibrahim Miranda.

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

This is neither an image of moving forward nor of staying Union in the late 1980s. In 1990, he sponsored “KUBA OK,”
still; its meaning does not conform to a utopian vision or to the first major exhibition of contemporary Cuban art in
contemporary social criticism. Rather, Kcho’s installation Europe, and subsequently purchased two-thirds of the work
evokes transitional states. The small figures that roam the in the show. He also funded exhibitions and cultural activi-
work must make do in the spaces between progress and stasis. ties in Cuba before finally establishing the Ludwig Founda-
Raised in the period of Rectification, Kcho creates art that tion in Havana in 1994, which provided important contacts
evokes situations, but does not point the finger of blame or between Cuban artists and the outside world. Such ties nec-
even offer critique; that is left to the viewer. essarily created dilemmas. Artists of the 1990s, for instance,
faced a temptation to cater to visiting collectors and cura-
IBRAHIM MIRANDA One of the most beautiful and (as in tors. The artist team of Eduardo Ponjuan (b. 1956) and René
Regatta) poetic uses of the Cuban geography as a metaphor Francisco Rodriguez (b. 1960) captured the threat from
for the character and condition of Cuban culture is a series foreign investment to Cuban identity in Dream, Art and Market
of prints by Ibrahim Miranda (b. 1969) called Metamorphosis (Portrait of Peter Ludwig) (1993-94) (fig. 9.8), which
(2010) (fig. 9.7). Miranda is a painter and printmaker of appeared in the 1994 biennial. Eschewing the styles discussed
Kcho’s generation who has been active in Havana since the thus far and disregarding traditional Cuban themes, Ponjuan
mid-1990s. Metamorphosis is a suite of mixed-media prints and Francisco created a portrait of Peter Ludwig in a Photo-
depicting an evolving map of Cuba. In one image the island realistic style surrounded by a series of attributes: examples
drifts in the current like seaweed, in another it swims. Flora of Pop art, an exhibition catalogue, and a view of Havana.
and fauna are printed over it on one page while an image Ludwig sits like a svengali, transforming the young Cuban
of Adam and Eve is stamped across it on another. Miranda’s portraitists into international artists fluent in the lingua
island changes character as it moves from the deep sea to the franca of Western styles. The anxiety about participating in
Hebrew Bible, evoking different aspects of Cuban history, the international market was all the more intense because
culture, and tradition. Throughout all the transformations support such as that provided by Ludwig was the primary way
Miranda creates in the Metamorphosis imagery, cartographic artists were able to survive the “Special Period.”
inscriptions remain, asserting that the island, like all mapped In the late 1980s, Francisco had initiated a series of pro-
territories, is always a social and historical fact, as political as jects that started with conversations and then developed into
Kcho’s seal. collaborations with other artists and the communities in
which he lived and worked. Basing his artistic practice on the
RENE FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ The Havana 1994 biennial was needs of his audience became the foundation of what Fran-
underwritten in large part by international funds, provided cisco called his “Pragmatic Pedagogy,” and it had as much
chiefly by the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, a cultural devel- to do with his teaching at the ISA as with making art. In the
opment organization established by German entrepreneur classroom, Francisco adopted a horizontal rather than verti-
and collector Peter Ludwig. Ludwig had become interested cal structure that dispensed with the traditional hierarchical
in Cuban art after learning about it on trips to the Soviet roles of master and pupil. Pragmatic Pedagogy defines art

9.8 René Francisco Rodriguez & Eduardo Ponjuan,

Dream, Art and Market (Portrait of Peter Ludwig),
1993-94. Pencil and oil paint on primed canvas,
70% x 79 x 1%" (180.3 x 200.7 x 4 cm).
Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich. Courtesy
the artist.

Cuban Experiments
and education as means of transmitting knowledge between repairs. If DUPP’s proposed services were accepted, members
those who make art and those who live with it, and between would take up residence with the families while they pro-
teachers and students. Knowledge is constantly in flux and duced the desired environment or finished the required task.
each side of the equation is in need of the other through- The project redefined artistic practice for those who partici-
out the conception, execution, and reception of art. Every- pated. Members developed their plumbing and plastering
one involved is an artist. In addition to responding to the skills as much as their painterly ones. Moreover, the creative
practical needs of the ordinary Cubans during the “Special process was shaped by conversations with people far outside
Period,” Francisco, like many of his generation, was deeply the traditional art world, people whose aesthetics were often
influenced by Joseph Beuys (see Chapter 1). For Francisco guided more by kitsch and patriotism than design theory,
and his peers and students at the ISA, Beuys’s definition of art history, or investment potential. Reflecting on the forma-
art as social sculpture and belief in the creative power of tion of DUPP, Francisco has explained that the privations
every person were key ideas. and political pressures of the “Special Period” rendered the
In 1989, Francisco and his students formed the artist example of the “Volumen” generation, with its objects, exhi-
group DUPP, which stood for Desde Una Pedagogica Pragmat- bition schedules, and poetic metaphors, irrelevant. What was
ica (“From a Pragmatic Pedagogy”). Their intention was to required instead was Pragmatic Pedagogy and the creation of
put their teaching philosophy into action, stepping out of processes, objects, and aesthetics that responded to the new
the classroom to make art in stores, streets, and apartments political and economic circumstances.
as well as in studios and galleries. An early DUPP project, La
Casa Nacional (1990) (fig. 9.9), began with the group inter- CARLOS GARAICOA René Francisco was not the only artist to
viewing residents of Old Havana to see what services they feel that the “Special Period” had rendered existing modes
could provide for them. The answers varied: Some people of art making insufficient. He was also not the only one to
requested art objects, others wanted assistance with home turn to the city to help him define a relevant new artistic
practice. The streets of Havana, however, inspired dreams
as well as activism, as is abundantly evident in the photog-
raphy, sculpture, and drawing of Carlos Garaicoa (b. 1967).
Garaicoa graduated from the ISA in 1991 and quickly found
inspiration in Havana’s architecture. In the 1960s, the revolu-
tionary government effectively nationalized large portions of
the city. The mansions of affluent supporters of the deposed
regime became state buildings or were divided into multi-
family homes. Religious buildings were taken over, and in
the famous instance of the founding of the ISA, a golf club
became an art school. The result of this forced reattribu-
tion of functions was to render the visual cues of the exist-
ing architecture unreliable. Compounding the confusion,
the hasty collectivization of Havana was done with the expec-
tation that as the nation moved forward, the city would be
rebuilt. Cuba failed to find economic prosperity, however,
and the temporary solutions of the 1960s became perma-
nent. As such, an aesthetic of decay and contingency came to
dominate the capital.
Garaicoa found metaphors for self and society in the sym-
bolic confusion and idiosyncratic form of post-revolutionary
Havana. The inspiration for About the Construction of the Real
Tower of Babel (1994-95) (fig. 9.10) came from one of his
many photographs of the scaffolding that collects around
weakened buildings in his neighborhood of Old Havana.
These temporary structures once indicated construction
work, but had metamorphosed into semi-permanent struc-
tural supports, holding up buildings awaiting perpetually
deferred repairs. From these street scenes Garaicoa created
fantasies in which magic gardens and gentle giants support
the crumbling facades of Havana. In About the Construction, a
9.9 DUPP, La Casa Nacional, 1990. A DUPP artist at work, compromised foundation supports a gold-banded pyramid
Old Havana. Courtesy Galeria DUPP. that reaches high above the endangered streets. Here is a

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 2 ore ot Ls igs
ss onstavccion oF
n \énonocas Foane ot ae

PROYECTO
ener
(pttnthin ar)

SV prea, Rant, shpptmndadionns

Bh Foe yp gt hye Anak *
Sa, On m)
Aas

9.10 Carlos Garaicoa, About the Construction of the Real Tower of Babel,
1994-95. Color photograph, 19% x 23%" (50 x 60 cm) and ink drawing
on vegetable-+tiber paper 845% x 59%"(215 x 150 cm). Private collection.
Courtesy the artist.

contemporary Tower of Babel, a monument built on unsta-

ble ground and conveying the pathos and desperation of Mapping the Global Present
failed utopian dreams. Garaicoa observed that his genera- The poignancy of Garaicoa’s About the Construction of the Real
tion “never got the chance of a life beyond politics,” but their Tower of Babel lies in the directness with which it projects the
work is not clearly partisan and their attitude toward politi- limits of comprehension. The viewer, like the artist, sees the
cal solutions is ambiguous.° Kcho invests contemporary situ- dilapidation of reality and dreams of imaginary supports to
ations with mythological dimensions similar to the narratives hold up the collapsing city. In another piece from the series,
of Bedia, but without the specificity of the older artist’s faith; Garaicoa drew the first hallucinogenic mushroom farm in
Francisco turns to the community with appeals for collabo- Havana, again juxtaposing reality with an invented and escap-
ration not unlike the ones that have consistently inspired ist remedy. Finding a way to respond in the realm of the real
Cubans to make sacrifices for the nation since the revolu- is difficult. Francisco found one solution, but he has admit-
tion; and Garaicoa has cultivated a careful balance between ted that few of his students follow his example. The Cuban
general allegorical evocations andjudiciously placed, specifi- situation is extreme, yet it is also representative ofa large part
cally Cuban details. The utopian vision of the Cuban nation, of the world. The paths of the global economy have trans-
the unsteady alliance with the Soviet and post-Soviet world, formed the geography of production and distribution, creat-
and its antagonistic relationship with the Unites States have ing dramatic demographic shifts. The political and cultural
contributed to the complex political attitudes taken toward responses to such changes have profoundly impacted indi-
the challenges of Cuban life. Likewise the insight and inspi- vidual lives and been a source for a great variety of art. The
ration shown in the first Havana Biennial was real, and rep- section that follows introduces three artists—Shirin Neshat,
resented the culmination of a long-standing Cuban project Shahzia Sikander, and Yinka Shonibare, MBE—whose lives
of drawing on the historical and cultural heterogeneity of and art chart three very different paths through the global
the nation to lead a truly diverse and oppressed world. The present. Unlike the previous discussion, these three do
Cuban example provides instructive evidence of the com- not form a group and do not share common background,
plexity of mapping the global turns of contemporary art and media, or subject matter. Rather, each is representative of a
has had great resonance. growing number of prominent artists who were raised and

Mapping the Global Present

 trained largely outside the West, whose art has been exhib- California, Berkeley, the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the
ited primarily in Western museums and international bienni- Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) had transformed her homeland, so
als, and highlights the variety of traditions and meanings at that Neshat deemed it unsafe to return there. Instead, she
play in the contemporary art world. The photography, film, moved to New York, but, unlike the many artists discussed in
painting, sculpture, and installation of these very different this book who followed a similar path from art school to Man-
artists connect and juxtapose a wide variety of cultural tradi- hattan in the 1980s, Neshat found the experience debilitat-
tions, artistic styles, and political convictions from the Middle ing. It would take her eight years and a long-awaited return
East, South Asia, West Africa, Europe, and North America. trip to Iran in 1990 before she started making art again.
Mapping this global present and grappling with the losses it Upon returning to the U.S. from her visit home, Neshat began
creates, the options it provides, and the identities it produces Women of Allah\(1993-97), a series of staged photographs of
have become projects of a great significance to the new mil- veiled women, occasionally shown in groups or accompanied
lennium and its art. by children or men, but most often pictured alone and with
weapons (fig. 9.11). Dressed in what had become the legis-
Shirin Neshat lated public attire for women in Iran, Neshat’s subjects, often
In 1975, at age seventeen, Iranian-born photographer and played by the artist herself, appear in provocative poses. A
video- and filmmaker Shirin Neshat arrived in California. woman sits with the barrel of a gun projecting from under
By 1982, when she had completed her MFA at University of her hair or between her bare feet. Bullets are held in open
hands. On the photographs, where the skin of the
women is not covered by clothing, Neshat lettered
Farsi poetry by women writers connected to very dif-
ferent aspects of Iranian feminist thought. The lines
of Forough Farrokhzad (1935-67) addressing the
difficulty of living under the traditional restrictions
of Persian society decorate the flesh of one woman.
Other images bear the poetry of Tahereh Saffarzadeh
(1936-2008), which celebrates the revolution and the
liberating power of the traditions of Islam. Neshat’s
images juxtapose sensuality, spirituality, power, and
violence, and, particularly in light of their inclu-
sion of texts, complicate any stereotypical notions of
Iranian femininity. Women ofAllah renewed Neshat’s
capacity and commitment as an artist, and initiated
what she has called “a visual discourse on the subject
of feminism and contemporary Islam—a discourse
that puts certain myths and realities to the test, claim-
ing that they are far more complex than most of us
have imagined.”’
To create Women of Allah, Neshat acted as direc-
tor, producer, and even actor. She composed the
images, created the sets, arranged the models or
posed herself, but hired professional photographers
to work behind the cameras. In 1997, she took what
in retrospect looks like the next logical step, turning
to film, a move that coincided with a growing interest
in video art in the wider art world. By the late 1990s,
it was common to see exhibitions dominated by video
installations. Turbulent (1998) (fig. 9.12) is the first
of three black-and-white, two-channel projections
that Neshat created to examine gender dynamics in
Iranian culture. It was followed by Rapture (1999) and
Fervor (2000).
Turbulent consists of facing projections which
9.11 Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence from the Women ofAllah series, 1994. begin on one side with a man singing a traditional
Black and white resin-coated print and ink. Photograph by Cynthia Preston. © Shirin thirteenth-century Sufi love song to a rapt audience
Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels of men. On the other screen a silent woman stands

228 | Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 9.12 Shirin Neshat,
Turbulent, 1998. Production
still. © Shirin Neshat
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery,
New York and Brussels.

on the stage of an empty theater. The male figure is Neshat’s normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new
frequent collaborator Shojoa Youssefi Azari but the voice is language of desire.”*
that of a popular Iranian singer. For those few in her audi- The presence of oppositional dichotomies defines the
ence of primarily Western museum- and gallery-visitors who structure and content of Neshat’s videos into the early 2000s.
recognize the music, there is therefore a distance between She has explained that her intent in works such as Turbu-
what is seen and heard. This discrepancy becomes more lent was to approach gender in contemporary Iran through
pointed in the second half of the piece. Throughout the binaries, in this case “empty theater/full theater, rational/
man’s performance the woman, played by composer and irrational, traditional music/nontraditional music, and com-
recording artist Sussan Deyhim, waits silent and still. She munal/solitary.”” As Deyhim’s unprecedented song suggests,
stands veiled with her back to the camera as the man strives, however, while binaries might determine the normative rela-
as Neshat has explained, to reach mystical revelation through tionship between men and women, they do not limit how
song. When the man has finished and his audience has given individuals can act, think, or create. With Soliloquy (1999)
him a warm ovation, Deyhim begins a wordless melody. The and Fervor (2000), Neshat continued to investigate the place
song, which Deyhim composed herself, is an acrobatic vocal and power of individuals in Iranian society. Projections
feat that sounds nothing like the music we were listening to including Rapture (1999) and Passage (2001) further examine
before. The camera circles the woman as the urgency and the power of ritual and collective behavior. Rapture includes
intensity of her singing increase. When she then falls silent, footage only of large numbers of men or women,
with no
the man and his audience stand aghast. Women were not close-ups on individuals. It contrasts the actions of a hundred
permitted to perform in Iran. One challenge Neshat posed men dressed in contemporary attire as they occupy a medi-
with Turbulent was to represent women reaching the spiritual eval fort with those of the same number of women beyond
heights music provides for men by cleverly circumventing the the fortified walls. The viewer is invited to extrapolate from
restrictions of contemporary society: The woman sings but the actions a narrative in which women create spaces and pat-
her music is not recognizable as song and as there is no audi- terns beyond the existing social order. In 2009, Neshat, again
ence in the concert hall it does not constitute a performance. with Azari, created a feature-length film, Women Without Men,
Neshat has portrayed what Laura Mulvey described in her which gave historical specificity to the philosophical, emo-
essay on “the Gaze” (see Chapter 2): “The thrill that comes tional, and cultural concerns conveyed in the earlier videos.
from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcend- Based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Shahmush
ing outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with Parsipur, it follows the lives of four women in Iran during

Mapping the Global Present

the collapse of the democratically elected government in marked by a desire to start from the particular. As has been
1953. As the populist government falls to a British- and U.S.- addressed in Chapters 6 and 7, work that explored histories
supported military coup, Neshat utilizes the aesthetics of her and identities outside the dominant narratives of Western
videos—with their saturated palettes, slow pacing, graceful power were finding audiences in the art world. Neshat’s
choreography and staging, and contrast of open landscapes Women of Allah was quickly integrated into exhibitions and
with confined architecture—to imagine women’s attempts to her films were enthusiastically received.
create identities and homes for themselves.
If the 1980s were dominated by art that in one way or Shahzia Sikander
another took aim at universalizing discourses, whether by In the late 1990s, Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969) began build-
critiquing practices of representation (as did the appropria- ing an art of layered icons, styles, and media. Her work in
tion artists), reimagining means of expression (the Neo- miniature and large-scale painting, installation, and digital
Expressionists), or displaying an ambiguous fascination with animation has produced a complex representation of the
capitalist culture (the commodity artists), the 1990s were interconnecting cultures, histories, and phenomena that

9.13 Shahzia Sikander,

Pleasure Pillars, 2001.
Vegetable color, dry pigment,
watercolor, ink, and tea on
wasli paper, 12 x 10"
(30.5 x 25.4 cm). © 2012
Shahzia Sikander. Image
courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins &
Co., New York.

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

constitute her experience of contemporary life. Sikander was their representation evokes their original Mughal context
born in Pakistan and trained as a miniaturist at the National and their movements seem to carve out room for themselves
College of Arts, Lahore. While nearly all of her peers were in the painting. In the center, a delicately rendered portrait
immersing themselves in Western traditions, Sikander fol- based on the artist herself supports a fantastic horned head-
lowed a workshop-style curriculum that demanded a deep dress and floats over two headless figures, one based on the
historical and practical understanding of Persian, Indian, Greek goddess Venus and the other on a Hindu devata, or
and Pakistani art. Though intimately connected to centuries- deity. Between them, two hearts, one red and one blue, are
old traditions and a craft-oriented practice, miniature paint- connected by a single artery. Sikander has called these two
ing proved surprisingly in tune with contemporary art theory. central figures outcasts from the canon, female characters
As Sikander noted, all traditions of miniature painting rely standing for those people ignored in the dominant histori-
on copying and appropriation and thus have little to do cal narratives of East and West. The two appear as the central
with the concept of originality that was being so forcefully part of a larger series, Maligned Monsters, begun around 2000.
critiqued at the time. Across her oeuvre, and often in a In 2002, they were painted on banners hanging outside the
single image, one can see references to the staged romances Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the lower left of
popular in Kangra miniatures, the refined control of Mughal Pleasure Pillars, Sikander rendered a dying deer and a lion
draftsmanship, and the open, raw appearance of Rajput feasting on a bull, allegories of power in traditional hunting
painting. Each of these styles in turn exhibits various inte- scenes. At the top of the scene, a fighter jet flies toward the
grations of Hindi, Muslim, and Sikh cultures and alludes to viewer while at the lower left Sikander has painted a circular
many nationalities—including Persian, Indian, Chinese, Paki- seal of similar warplanes, their arrangement transforming a
stani, and even European ones. Upon moving to the United threatening object into a pattern alluding to floral designs
States in 1993, first to study at the Rhode Island School and invoking thoughts of gardens, which in Urdu poetry
of Design and then to do postgraduate work in Houston, signify exile and also revolution and rebirth. Such mutable
Sikander incorporated into her work references to Western forms are of particular interest to Sikander. Dots cascade
abstraction and Expressionism, as well as U.S. symbols such across the surface of the picture, alluding to bombs as well
as cowboy boots and fighter planes. She cultivated various as Modernist abstractions. Next to the jet is a second flying
means of layering forms and styles so that every element was figure, part human, with great open wings and the head of
recontextualized without losing its original significance. As an eagle, who swoops in from the right: This is Garuda, who
she explained: “Physical, emotional, geographical, cultural in the Hindu tradition is said to be powerful enough to oblit-
and psychological boundaries among cultures exist. But, erate the world, provides protection, and most importantly
being an artist means pointing to the shifting nature of such carries on his back the supreme deity, Vishnu. Sikander
boundaries.”!® depicts his movement across the surface of the composition
Pleasure Pillars (2001) (fig. 9.13), painted using water- in Opposition to the approaching path of the warplane, jux-
color, dry pigment, vegetable color, tea, and ink, provides an taposing the divine path of the spirit with the secular course
example of Sikander’s layering of forms and histories as well of the plane. Consistent with Sikander’s interest in forms and
as of her technical prowess. It is part of an extended project symbols that migrate between cultures and resist any singu-
on which she was working in New York in late 2001 when the lar identification or meaning, Garuda appears in both the
World Trade Center was destroyed. She described how, in Hindu and Buddhist traditions as well as being used as a state
the aftermath of the violence, objects and experiences that symbol for different South Asian nations.
had meant one thing before the event seemed to take on new Just four years after arriving in the U.S., Sikander had
meanings afterward. The phenomenon of familiar things already been included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Her
accruing new and changing significance in the wake of the work immediately captured the art world’s attention for its
crisis resonated with Sikander’s use of symbols and styles as intricacy and the international character of its references.
hinges between different traditions and cultures. Pleasure Cultural theorists embraced the way Sikander articulated dif
Pillars represents a moment at which her practice, though ference in her work. Most notably, Homi Bhabha, who had
essentially unchanged, acquired a specific relevance to the been theorizing hybridity as the natural state of the contem-
political realities of the twenty-first century. The image is an porary global citizen, adopted Sikander as a prime example
assembly of spaces and figures evoking different cultures, his- of this tendency. Rather than appealing to any essential cul-
tories, and artistic traditions. tural identity, Bhabha’s hybrid citizen is a traveler constituted
In a 2008 interview, Sikander described the core of her by the many influences that surround him or her. Within a
practice as the production of “interstitial spaces” that serve fragmented global experience, one responds to the tradi-
as a “third space,” a “political space,” “ a transgressive space,” tions, practices, and meanings that one encounters with per-
and “a space of the ideal, the fantastical, the subliminal.”" sonal experiences, emotions, and ideas in order to create a
Such spaces begin in the art and extend out into the experi- home in a “third space.”!* This space, full of cultural, histori-
ence of the viewer and the artist. At the four corners of Pleas- cal, and ideological content, fosters the production of one’s
ure Pillars are dancers from the historic text the Badshahnama, own culture and identity, neither of which, Bhabha asserts,

Mapping the Global Present

9.14 Shahzia Sikander, spiNN, 2003. Six film stills. Digital animation (color, so und}, 6 minutes 38 seconds.
© 2012 Shahzia Sikander. Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

is ever whole, but is always open to integration with others’ Sikander’s multivalent collections of sources and styles offer a
cultures and to translation into others’ practices. Sikander map of hybrid experience and her practice a model for living
elaborates that the “third space” she strives to create is “con- in the contemporary world.
structed not simply within the piece but also through a larger Sikander has expanded the physical element of her art
set of relationships that surround the work” and address into three-dimensional space in the form of large-scale instal-
the question of “[h]ow to be between.” In this context, lations in which she paints on walls and on overlapping

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

sheets of papers and fabrics that move in the gentle breezes syncopated African rhythms starts to falter, however, as one
in the gallery, drawing her work closer to the viewer’s body. learns the rather complicated and global history of the seem-
She has also collaborated with choreographer and dancer ingly “African” source of the textiles.
Sharmilla Desai, confronting the spaces of theory with The fabric Shonibare uses as source material and support
those of the body. In contrast, animated work such as spiNN in Double Dutch is Dutch wax fabric, which most viewers would
(2003) (fig. 9.14) integrates the tradition of the miniature identify as characteristically African. Its history, however,
with digital innovations, suggesting the links between tradi- charts a rather circuitous route through Africa, Southeast
tional aesthetics and histories and virtual technologies. To Asia, and Europe. In the nineteenth century, Manchester
make spiNN, the artist scanned painted images into digital textile mills began producing copies of Dutch machine-
animation software and set the parts in motion across a flat made versions of handmade Indonesian batiks. The British
screen. Sikander has embraced multiple styles and media as then sold these second-generation imitations in West Africa,
a means of opening her art to systems of meaning that locate where they became very popular, leading English produc-
the “inbetween” of our corporeal, cultural, and technologi- ers to design further examples specifically for the African
cal identities. market. In the 1960s, clothing made of Dutch wax fabric
was worn in Africa as a sign of anti-colonialist nationalism
Yinka Shonibare MBE and was adopted as a sign of pan-African pride by expatriate
A very different presentation of the network of cultures, tra- and diasporic Africans around the world. Thus Double Dutch,
ditions, and aesthetics linking former colonies with colonial which appeared initially to be a juxtaposition of Western
powers can be seen in the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE avant-garde and African craft traditions, is in fact a product
(b. 1962). Raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and London, England, of acomplex exchange of forms, cultures, and money in both
Shonibare has created abstract and representational prac- colonial and postcolonial society. In the artist’s words, it is
tices that initiate often surprising dialogues between Africa all about “pretend authenticity’—a sense of meaning that is
and the West. Double Dutch (1994) (fig. 9.15) typifies his jux- rooted in what we make of the world rather than any inher-
taposition of recognizably European and African aesthetic ent or essential truth.
tropes—in this case, the Western Minimalist grid contrasts Shonibare also uses the fabrics more directly in his work,
with the African textile-inspired abstractions. The binary for instance in tableaux showing headless mannequins
structure that seems to pit rational Western order against caught indulging in the typical pursuits of the English

—
j
|

ze
: Wy
oN

9.15 Yinka Shonibare MBE, Double Dutch, 1994. Emulsion, acrylic on textiles, 50 panels. Overall dimensions 131 x 231%" (332 x 588 cm);
each panel 12% x 8% x 1%" (32 x 22 x 4.5 cm). © Yinka Shonibare. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Mapping the Global Present

 aristocracy. The figures ice-skate, hunt, invent, duel, and Grand Tour—the name given to the trips to Italy members
have sex while dressed in Victorian fashions—all tailored of the British upper classes customarily took to visit the great
to perfection, by the artist, in Dutch wax fabrics. The “skin” cultural sites of antiquity and the Renaissance, beginning in
pigment of the mannequins, seen at the hands and necks, the late seventeenth century—Shonibare learned that it had
is gray or tan, conveying a mixture of races to match the also served as an important rite in the sexual education of
integration of cultures signified by the clothing. Though the aristocracy.
the opposition of colonizer and colonized remains overt, While Gallantry and Criminal Conversation presents sexual
Shonibare’s vision of society undermines the dichotomy of conquest as analogous to the cultural intermixing enacted in
Europe and Africa. The artist revels in the conundrum that, the costumes) other installations suggest that the fluid boun-
in so far as his work reads as African, there is nothing that daries within European and non-European cultures were
could be called indigenous about it. Likewise, its apparent not all carnal. The Age of Enlightenment series (2008) includes
Englishness is dependent on myths of national character that portraits of Enlightenment figures including the German
are consumed as readily by the English as the fabrics were philosopher Immanuel Kant (fig. 9.17) and the Scottish
consumed by Africans. political economist Adam Smith dressed in Shonibare’s
Within Shonibare’s tableaux, souvenirs, symbols, and couture, but this time afflicted with disabilities as well as
representations of Europe, Africa, modernity, and tradition missing their heads. Kant, for instance, has no legs. These
circulate freely among the bodies of fancifully dressed man- great thinkers, minus their heads and many of their limbs
nequins and through the space of the museum. The intent and wrapped in Shonibare’s signs of miscegenation, fill
is to be “critical of the relations of power through parody, journals and muse over their writings. The production of
excess, and complicity,” Shonibare has explained.!? His is knowledge arises from thinkers built out of the fragments
not a frontal critique; political issues, he has reflected, had of African and European culture. In 1990, sociologist Paul
already been “well-raised, and I felt that it had been done. Gilroy wrote that the histories related by black British artists
Wouldn’t it be good to just surprise people?”!® Assuming a revealed that “our story is not the other story after all but
level of political awareness in his audience that earlier gen- the story of England in the modern world.”!” The story
erations of artists could not, Shonibare raises issues of colo- Shonibare tells is an English history of crossing of boun-
nialism with a sense of theatricality that is often entertaining, daries rather than enforcing them. In’ 2004, Shonibare
but also quite bleak. The specter of violence that lurks in the was granted and accepted the title of MBE (Member of the
background of all his scenes with headless actors makes a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), suggesting,
more forceful appearance in Gallantry and Criminal Conversa- perhaps, that this story was beginning to be more widely rec-
tion (2002) (fig. 9.16), a multifigure composition of sexual ognized. The artist responded by incorporating the title into
conquest and English tourism. While he was researching the his name.

9.16 Yinka Shonibare MBE,

Gallantry and Criminal
Conversation, 2002. Installation.
Mixed media. © Yinka Shonibare.
Courtesy the artist and Brooklyn
Museum, New York. Photography
by Christine Grant.

234 Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 vital means of learning about—and_learn-
ing from—the rapid changes at the turn of
the millennium.

Takashi Murakami
Since the 1990s, Takashi Murakami has appro-
priated the style, content, and production
practices of popular youth culture to articulate
a national aesthetic, comment on post-World
War II history, and develop an engaging and
commercially successful oeuvre. In 1993, he
created DOB, a mouselike creature whose
large ears and round face spell out the letters
of his name, which is derived from a nonsense
phrase beginning dobozite (“why”). Murakami
imbued DOB with the enigmatic allure of
Hello Kitty and the prankster energy of Mickey
Mouse. The character appeared in paintings
and sculptures, as well as on toys and cloth-
ing, revealing a personality that was irrepress-
9.17 Yinka Shonibare MBE, The Age of Enlightenment—Immanuel Kant, 2008. ibly cute, or kawau, a Japanese term referring
Installation. Mixed media. Copyright the artist. Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, to the prevalent taste, shaped by pre-teen
London, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. girls, for flowers, ponies, and big-eyed, pastel-
colored cartoon characters. Murakami also
cast DOB in the roles of hero and monster.
Youth Culture as a Measure
Paintings such as Jan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002)
of Global Change (fig. 9.18) demonstrate Murakami’s ability to transform his
While Neshat, Sikander, and Shonibare engaged history and pop-culture references into an expression of turn-of-the-
art history to address the complex interchanges between millennium anxiety. DOB, still recognizable by his round
cultures and nations, Japanese artist, art historian, and cul- head and with the “D” and “B” still legible on his ears, has
tural impresario Takashi Murakami (b. 1963) argued that grown to a gargantuan size, sprouted abscesses of smaller
the intersections of personal, national, and global identity DOBs that push through his skin, and lost all control of his
are best addressed through the aesthetics of entertainment body. The carefully rendered contours fail to contain the
with particular attention to youth. The increasing deferral leaking fluids that DOB projects onto the kawaii landscape
of adulthood, due in large part to the difficulty of securing of flowers and hills. An inscription reads: “As my tongue
employment, and the pressure this put on young people was flays to pieces, my headache intensifies and my eyes have
one effect of the economic changes at the end of the millen- become blind. As shit and piss flow, an excruciating pain runs
nium: The future promised to children was disappearing as through my entire body and I sense death is near.”'* Through
they reached it. Murakami was not alone in identifying this Murakami’s fantastic compositions and vibrant surfaces,
difficult transition as a subject that might provide insight DOB’s ultimate prank appears to be to seduce the viewer into
into many contemporary anxieties. Along with a number a world of pain and anguish.
of artists, including Yoshitomo Nara and Chiho Aoshima, In addition to drawing on the iconic sensibility of the
Murakami has generated a beautiful and searching inquiry Disney and Sanrio corporations, creators of Mickey Mouse
into what it means to come of age in contemporary Japan. and Hello Kitty respectively, Murakami adopted their pro-
Artists around the world have also identified adolescents duction methods by setting up a large workshop-cum-factory
and the culture they support as a means to grapple with the and various merchandising outlets for his work. The name
changes wrought by globalism. Cao Fei in the Pearl River Murakami gave to his studio initially—the Hiropon Factory
Delta and Yang Fudong in Shanghai look at the ramifications (renamed Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. in 2001)—alludes to Andy
of change in China on the younger generations, while two Warhol’s Factory , but as an operation it goes well beyond art-
European artists, Phil Collins and Rineke Dijkstra, capture historical homage: It variously creates art, represents artists,
the similarity of experience and temperament among young develops and distributes merchandise, publishes books, and
people across cultures. Dijkstra’s portraits in locations as even produces the art fair GEISAI. By the twenty-first century,
distant as the Ukraine and North Carolina, and Collins’s Murakami had achieved a global reach and, like Warhol
videos of karaoke in Indonesia and Colombia suggest that before him, had successfully stepped outside the framework
attention to mass culture and its adolescent consumers is a of the art world.

Youth Culture as a Measure of Global Change [235

9.18 Takashi Murakami, Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan, 2002. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, 141% x 283% x 2%" (360 x
720 x 6.7 cm). Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami. © 2002 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

While Murakami was introducing DOB to the world, he anti-social reflex of a large portion of Japanese youth—but,
remained attentive to audiences at home, particularly the he insisted, they stood in contrast to the violence of Miyazaki
otaku, devoted fans and obsessive collectors of Japanese ani- or Aum Shinrikyo.
mation (anime) and comic books (manga). His work enlisted Murakami’s complicated relationship with the otakw is
otaku culture to address identity, desire, emotion, and sexual- evident in a series of sculptures completed between 1997 and
ity in the Japanese context and in explicitly Japanese terms. 2000 which appear to be manga figurines enlarged to human
By the 1990s, the otaku had become a sizable group, shaping scale. The culminating piece is the Second Mission Project Ko*
the image of Japanese culture inside and outside the country. (1997-2000) (fig. 9.19), a female figure metamorphosing
Many younger Japanese found in such pursuits a means from a sexualized combatant into a fighter plane. This three-
of escape and accomplishment not available to them else- part installation was created with the designer Bome, famous
where. They also found themselves at the center of a media for his own line of highly finished figurines, and Vi-Shop, a
frenzy. In 1993, police captured Tsutomu Miyazaki, a serial professional manga manufacturer. Collaboration with top-
killer who had targeted young girls and photographed their level otaku creators was essential if the work was to assume the
dead bodies. Miyazaki’s home was searched and his room qualities of otaku paraphernalia while existing as art. Joining
was found to be full of anime, manga, and related figurines. these two categories of material culture at a level of parity,
As a result, the mass media associated the obsessions of the rather than using one to provide expertise or inspiration for
otaku with the pathology of the murderer. Across Japan, mil- the other, proved very difficult. When it was completed, the
lions of parents looked into the rooms of their teenage chil- high level of detail and finish in the Second Mission Project Ko’,
dren and saw collections identical to Miyazaki’s (Murakami’s the narrative complexity of its transformation from human to
own room was not dissimilar). In 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo machine, and its emotionally evocative quality engaged otaku
cult released lethal Sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system, viewers. The producer of Second Mission Project Ko’, Masahiko
injuring thousands and killing eleven. The terrorists’ head- Asano, described the otaku figurine as an “object of love, an
quarters were raided and typical otaku objects were found assertion of identity that says ‘look what I have created,’ and
among their weaponry and propaganda. Again the media an outlet for sexual desire.”*° Second Mission Project Ko? recon-
connected the ofaku with criminality. Murakami felt that textualizes this drive for love, self, and sex in artworld terms.
this perception, though unfairly made in the news, was While the otaku admired Murakami’s sincerity and profes-
important. “Most of the newly developed cults consist of sionalism, when it was exhibited many were appalled that
people like the otaku,” he explained, “so severely ... alien- the object of their desire had been put on display so pub-
ated that they either choose to join these cults or create new licly. The word otaku means “home,” and it is a central tenet
cults.”'? In Japanese culture, which Murakami felt was really of otaku culture that collections are safely protected from
a collection of isolated subcultures, the otaku revealed the the outside world. Murakami’s project put that intimate,

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 9.19 Takashi Murakami,
Second Mission Project Ko?
(ga-walk type) in foreground
and Second Mission Project
Ko? (human type) in
background, 1997-2000.
Original Design Model
Ors WZ: Pe BOME; Arrangement
Director Masahiko Asano;
Macquette Production
MODEL KINGDOM;
life-sized figure production
Fuyuki Shinada (Vi-shop)
Wonder Festival Installation
view/Tokyo BigSite, Tokyo,
2000 © 1997-2000
Takashi Murakami/Kaikai
Kiki Co., Lid. All Rights
Reserved. Special thanks to
KAIYODO Co., ltd

sheltered space in the spotlight, allowing it to be discussed in and U.S. animation are among important sources for Japa-
relation to the concerns of art and history. nese artists. Murakami compares the Superflat style to the
Murakami, who has a PhD in art history from the Tokyo “Flatten Image” function in Photoshop, which compresses
National University of Fine Arts and Music, provided a his- all the layers on which one composes into a single digital
torical reading of the otaku and of his own art. In his “Tokyo surface. This device provides a metaphor for the appear-
Pop Manifesto” (1999), Murakami associated adolescent ance of Japanese art and its manner of integrating other tra-
obsessions and the history of postwar Japan: “Postwar Japan ditions. Murakami presented his art-historical argument in
was given life and nurtured by America. We were shown that three exhibitions, “Superflat” (2000), “Coloriage” (2002),
the true meaning of life is meaninglessness, and were taught and “Little Boy” (2005), which included everything from
to live without thought. Our society and hierarchies were dis- sculptures and paintings to posters and toys by a wide range
mantled. We were forced into a system that does not produce of designers and artists including Murakami himself. “Little
‘adults.’”?! The otaku were one of many manifestations of Boy’—the codename of the atom bomb dropped by the U.S.
the enforced infantilization of Japanese society by the West. on Hiroshima in 1945—included “Article 9,” the provision in
Social scientists throughout the 1980s and 1990s identified the Japanese constitution written after World War II which
aspects of Japanese culture, including its technological savvy forbids the rebuilding of the Japanese military, printed across
and the role of teenage girls in popular culture, as part of this a gallery wall, so maintaining the centrality of politics in the
history. Murakami continued his analysis to argue that such world of art and play.
phenomena were also a source of creativity: “Three appar-
ently negative factors, including 1) a value system based on Yoshitomo Nara and Chiho Aoshima
an infantile sensibility, 2) a society without any definitive Among the artists Murakami has featured in his exhibitions,
standard of wealth, and 3) amateurism, are now helping to Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) and Chiho Aoshima (b. 1974) rep-
engender a new world of creativity.” resent different takes on the integration of youth culture and
In the essay “A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art” (2000), fine art. Nara began populating his work with disruptive little
Murakami provided an art-historical lineage for what is known girls whose wide-eyed kawaii appearance was infused with a
as Tokyo Pop that extends back through eighteenth- and touch of punk-rock irony and knowing violence while he was
nineteenth-century prints to seventeenth-century screen in Cologne in the 1990s. With her diminutive size, surly gaze,
paintings. The defining characteristic of Japanese art, and violent temper, the protagonist of Dead Flower (1994)
Murakami concludes, is its insistent two-dimensionality. This (fig. 9.20) is characteristic of his work. Nara’s European
“Superfiat” style is an aesthetic and a cultural attitude that experience encouraged a different combination of subcul-
rejects hierarchies of high and low and is open to influences tures and art than is found in Murakami’s work; his aesthetic
from other cultures. Chinese painting, European Surrealism, leans to a comparatively painterly approach. Nevertheless,

la
Youth Culture as A
a Measure Clol
of Global Ghanc
Change
 might include. In paintings such as Magma Spirit Explodes:
Tsunami Is Dreadful (2004) (fig. 9.21), she places doe-eyed
nymphs at the center of the fiery demise of civilization. Other
scenes lavish attention on the characters’ erotic reveries.
Though the settings shift from urban dreams to natural disas-
ters to Arcadian idylls, Aoshima’s characters exhibit a consist-
ent ambivalence toward whatever surrounds them. Fire may
lick their flesh, ropes may bind their limbs, but the girls gaze
out past their surroundings, as though the scenes we see exist
only in their or our imaginations.

Cao Fei and the U-theque Collective

Facing economic and cultural transformation in her home
city of Guangzhou, China, Cao Fei (b. 1978) also turned
to domestic youth culture and found a source of creative
community-building. Cao made her international reputa-
tion while still in her mid-twenties with a body of work about
Chinese teenagers engaged in live-action role-playing games
in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province in the
Pearl River Delta (PRD). The PRD is at the heart of China's
9.20 Yoshitomo Nara, Dead Flower, 1994. Acrylic on cotton, 39% x unprecedented industrial, technological, and urban expan-
39%" (100 x 100 cm). © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy Pace Gallery. sion. Cao’s subjects, such as the two figures depicted in A
Photograph courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Mirage (2004) (fig. 9.22), are COSPlayers, young men and
women who traverse the city in costume, enacting adventures
he shares Murakami’s conviction that the otaku sensibility is a inspired by the digital avatars they have created in computer
suitable foundation for contemporary Japanese art. and online games. Cao explains the appeal of such games
Aoshima had no formal artistic training when Murakami with reference to contemporary modernization: “China
included her in “Tokyo Girls Bravo,” (1999) the first of three is growing at high speed and the development of the new
exhibitions of that title featuring the work of young female cities in pace with the global economy is confusing. On many
artists. Shortly after, she joimed Murakami’s studio. Her levels, all of us, young and old, lose our way. Costume players,
work, initially produced entirely on a computer using Illus- or COSPlayers, juxtapose their fantasy world as an expres-
trator software, and more recently including sculpture and sion of alienation from traditional values. They represent the
drawing, embraces the linear clarity of Murakami’s style marginality of my generation.”?* Cao Fei’s COSPlayers have
while exploring pictorial space and filling it with narrative appropriated an element of global culture—in this case, Japa-
inventions that revolve and evolve around a range of female nese animated fantasy characters—and used them to create
protagonists. If Murakami points forcefully to subculture a community for themselves at home. Cao collaborated with
fantasies as a source of insight into contemporary society, her subjects to convey the character and significance of the
Aoshima expands our understanding of what such visions cosmology they created.

9.21 Chiho Aoshima, Magma Spirit Explodes: Tsunami Is Dreadful, 2004. Chromogenic print, 34% x 2317" (87 x 589 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art.
Courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami. © 2004 Chiho Aoshima/Kaikai Kiki Co., Lid. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 9.22 Cao Fei, A Mirage
from COSPlayers series,
2004. Digital C-print,
294 x 39%" (74.3 x
99.7 cm). Courtesy the
artist and Lombard Freid
Gallery

A Mirage, a photograph Cao created in conjunction with send text messages while her father or grandfather reads the
her video COSPlayers (2004), depicts a moment in the fantasy. paper. Compared to their fantasy life with its action, risks,
In a field of tall grass and flowers outside the city, a leopard and camaraderie, the scenes of reality that conclude the film
stalks a zebra and a gazelle. The animals are all fiberglass. A are poignantly vacant.
young girl dressed as an anime warrior rests on the back of Pop culture and fantasy are not the only means to create
the predator while her counterpart, a slight male dressed in meaning and community in Cao’s China. Together with film-
black, rides the zebra. The boy holds a cluster of black bal- maker, curator, and critic Ou Ning (b. 1969) and the col-
loons. The video reveals that the boy and girl had previously lective U-theque, she has documented other strategies for
met in combat, but in A Mirage they are at peace, distracted surviving the development of Guangzhou. The district of San
but connected in an artificial Serengeti. Soon these tranquil Yuan Li has been of particular interest. Once famous for
heroes will fight, die, and be resurrected to return home, he providing shelter to the anti-British resistance during the
to clean his sword while his father watches television, she to nineteenth-century Opium Wars, the village is now surrounded
by metropolitan expansion. As a legal entity, however, it read the environment. Here, peasants who had lost their
has remained outside the zoning and development over- livelihoods in the country found that with a little ingenu-
sight of the city that encircles it. This means that it is also ity they could become landlords. Rising real-estate prices
without input into the urban change that affects it. The resi- outside the village encouraged renters to move to San Yuan
dents have responded by supporting a layered black-market Li, so local property owners found themselves pushing the
economy and an organic pattern of architectural growth. To physical limits of their homes to generate fresh income: New
explore the survival of San Yuan Li, Cao Fei and U-theque units were put on top of old ones, rooms were cantilevered
took digital video cameras into the streets, following individu- over alleys, and porches became apartments. In the process
als and alleyways to create informal video diaries that were of editing the film, Cao and Ou combined footage, often
then edited into a short film, San Yuan Li (2003) (fig. 9.23). increased the\speed of segments, and repeated moments in
While working on San Yuan Li, the filmmakers made the which the camera spins through the narrow alleys or pin-
neighborhood their home, learning its stories and how to points details of architecture or urban activity. The effect
of this digital post-production transports the eye thorough
the space of San Yuan Li in a very different way than that in
which the body is forced to walk through its narrow streets
and steep stairwells. In its desperate accommodation of
the encroachment of the metropolis, San Yuan Li is shown
to have transcended the scale of a village. With the ground
level cut off from the sun by the telescoping architecture, the
U-theque filmmakers discovered that nature had reappeared
nearer to the sky. On top of the city, on the terraces and roofs
of San Yuan Li, residents had planted gardens, installed gold-
fish ponds, and built aviaries. San Yuan Li appears as a both a
parody of the ebullient claims of economic and architectural
growth that surround it, and an alternative to the escapist
response to societal change chronicled in'COSPlayers.

Yang Fudong
To the north, in Shanghai, filmmaker and photographer
Yang Fudong (b. 1971) also turned his attention to the chal-
lenges facing young people in a changing China. In a series
of works, Yang created intricate scenarios expressing the mel-
ancholy and anxiety experienced by a generation of Chinese
youth who felt that the realization of their dreams had been
deferred by forces they could not even identify. The con-
flicted emotions of his generation, Yang felt, corresponded to
an ambiguity in the national reform movement encapsulated
by Deng Xiaoping’s famous 1992 pronouncement “To get
rich is glorious,” made in praise of Western economic values,
just three years after the brutal suppression of the Western-
inspired democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. Yang
moved to Shanghai in 1998 to work as a game designer but
soon decided that film was the perfect tool for speaking to
the concerns of his generation. His memories of watching
detective and mystery movies at the military base where he
grew up, and his knowledge of film history, gleaned primarily
through reading, made the medium appear rich in ambigui-
ties, partial answers, and poetic gaps. As a result, Yang’s work
has developed an aesthetic of lacunae and allusion—so dif-
ferent from Cao Fei’s use of digital media—that is perfectly
suited to his sense both of film and of alienation in contem-
porary China.
Yang’s monumental five-part film Seven Intellectuals in
9.23 U-theque, San Yuan Li, 2003. Film directed by Ou Ning and Cao a Bamboo Forest (2003-07) (fig. 9.24) speaks to the per-
Fei. Running time 40 minutes sonal and psychological challenges of entering the global
9.24 Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, 2003-07. Photograph
© Yang Fudong, courtesy ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai

economy. It is an extended portrait of a generation that a retreat for millennia. Of the function of landscape, Yang
has compromised its dreams in order to enter a society that explains: “Sometimes I feel landscape is kind of thinking
has no place for it. The protagonists journey through the by your heart, or a kind of emotional state. When you lose
woods and streams of the Yellow Mountain in Anhui Proy- your heart, you shall not see the landscape even if it is beauti-
ince, southwest of Shanghai. They wander through rural vil- ful.”** The protagonists of Yang’s film do not find a home or
lages and city streets, often pining for earlier moments in even reach a conclusion about what they should do next, but
history. Dressed in costumes from the 1940s, but speaking a they do see the landscape. The film’s first lines of dialogue
thoroughly contemporary Chinese, Yang’s seven intellectu- are a musing on the paucity of representation in the face of
als mimic the revolutionary exile of the Seven Sages of the direct experience. One of the women speaks: “The days when
Bamboo Grove in the third century, who protested the poli- I had never been to the Yellow Mountain it was no more
tics of their day by fleeing to the mountains to practice free than a postcard to me. Those strange rocks and stones and
speech and live unfettered lives. Though Yang’s characters huge pine trees did not look real. But when I was finally in
share the discontent of their predecessors, they lack their the Yellow Mountain I had a different feeling. That moment I
passion and creative energy. These young men and women was standing on the top of the mountain. Surrounded by the
are not angered by life so much as estranged from it. One pervasive clouds and mist, I felt I was flying in the sky.” The
muses: “Sometimes having belief is a mistake ... it also leads speaker encounters the landscape as a catalyst for sensing
you to confusion ... I just want to follow my heart though it her heart, her past, and her present. In the experience of the
is vulnerable, filled with frustrations and failures. I am far real place, there is a sensation of unity and purpose. It is fol-
away from my existence.” The conversations and journeys lowed, however, by nihilism as the speaker recounts that her
of the seven intellectuals are marked by cycles of assertion next impulse is to leap to her death. Yang’s film does not con-
and doubt. Yang tells us that his characters, like himself and clude with any such clear or tragic resolution. In the end, the
the actors, who are his friends, had dreams and ideals but group find themselves back where they started. “They return
lost them due to something unknown, an internal problem to the city, devoid of identity. Perhaps they are many people,
within themselves or an external social one—they cannot say. perhaps they are seven. Perhaps they are in a dream. From
Yang expresses the characters’ indecision and disappoint- beginning to end, they cannot find their position. They are
ment through their languorous journey from the contem- still a collective of youth, a future, unknown collective,” Yang
porary Chinese city up into mountains that have served as writes.*°

Youth Culture as a Measure of Global Change

 9.25 Phil Collins, the world won't listen, 2004-07. Film stills. Synchronized three-channel color video projection with sound,
ca. 60 minutes. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Phil Collins performers take the microphone and demonstrate the

Murakami’s “Superflat” concept argued that the founda- potency of pop culture in creating community and identity
tions for contemporary Japanese art, whether they lay in his- in places distant in space and time from Thatcherite Britain,
torical traditions or the otaku, were inherently multicultural. home to the original fans of the band. Collins’s installation
East and West, Disney and Sanrio, were layered and flat- juxtaposes simultaneous performances, thereby highlight-
tened in Murakami’s art to build a national aesthetic for the ing the global nature of pop culture. These young partici-
twenty-first century. Likewise, Cao Fei observed the Chinese pants, many of whom know the lyrics without actually being
present as integrating cultural forms from abroad. English- able to speak English, sing with invigorating and contagious
born photographer and vidéomaker Phil Collins (b. 1970) abandon. They perform solo or with friends; they laugh and
took another hybrid cultural form, karaoke, to examine cry and, most of all, use Western pop culture to propel them-
the community-building of millennial teenagers. Collins’s selves beyond their isolation and circumstances.
three-channel projection the world won't listen (2004-07) Karaoke has been of interest to many artists of Collins’s
(fig. 9.25) features teenagers and young adults in Bogota, generation. U.S. mixed-media artist Andrea Bowers (see
Colombia, Istanbul, Turkey, and Jakarta and Bandung, Indo- Chapter 11) has filmed karaoke performers while Korean
nesia, singing the melancholic, angst-ridden songs of the sculptor Lee Bul (b. 1964) has created customized karaoke
1980s U.K. pop band The Smiths. Collins created the audio booths and projections. In each case, it is the individual
tracks with the guitarist of Aterciopelados, one of the most singer and his or her immediate context that are under
significant Latin American pop bands of the 2000s. The scrutiny—in Bowers’s work, by elaborating on the give-and-

mT! Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 9.26 lee Bul, Live Forever,
|, land Ill, 200)
Installation view. Mixed
media. Fabric Workshop
and Museum, Philadelphia,
2001. Courtesy the artist
and Lehmann Maupin
Gallery, New York and
Hong Kong

take of performer and audience, in Lee’s, by isolating the communities not obviously connected by class, race, national-
performer from his or her audience. Lee’s Live Forever ity, or politics.
(2001) (fig. 9.26), with its futuristic racing-car design and Collins has spoken about his art as a means of investigat-
cyborg aesthetic, suggests the power of karaoke to transport ing the changing character of politics and identity “in the
the performer into another realm entirely. Collins’s empa- flexible framework of desire, consumerism, or popular
thetic filmmaking in the world won't listen, with its close-up culture.” the world won't listen is a case studyy, of such change.
oO

yet sympathetic cinematography and generous sound qual- Not only does Collins’s work illustrate the changing func-
ity, transforms the singers into stars, alone in the spotlight. tion and context of culture, it anticipates the responses to
At the same time the world won’t listen, its title taken from such change. At first glance, the piece invites the Western
a 1987 collection of Smiths’ songs, steps out of England viewer to indulge in a patronizing smile at the quaint
to explore the extent to which the world does listen. The failures of non-Westerners trying to sing in English. The
contours and character of the world mapped by the work international appeal of black hair dye, goth clothes, and
are very different from the alienated shelter The Smiths Morrissey’s persona appears to demonstrate the steam-
provided for their first fans in the U.S. and Europe of roller effect of globalization by which middlebrow Western
the 1980s. Collins presents a community of listeners, extend- mass media crushes local cultures. Places such as Colom-
ing from Jakarta to Dallas, Texas, where the piece was first bia, Turkey, and Indonesia are struggling to articulate their
shown in its entirety, to Glasgow, where it received its first own economies and politics in the shadow of neighboring
European screening. powers, whether North American, European, or Asian, and
Accompanying the installation, Collins exhibited enlarge- are most vulnerable to such hegemonic Western universal-
ments of the letters written by Smiths frontman and lyri- ism. the world won't listen, however, layers such presumptions
cist Morrissey to music magazines in the years before he with its celebration of a global youth culture that claims
formed the band. They reveal a writer consumed by the ownership of whatever pieces of culture it finds relevant.
minutiae of his subculture and committed to rigorously Collins’s they shoot horses (2004), a seven-hour, two-screen pro-
defending its quality and its borders. There is a sense of jection of a dance marathon staged in Ramallah, Palestine,
embattlement in these letters that has nothing to do with presents another view of such cultural appropriation. In
the outward reach and aesthetic carelessness of Collins’s the video, nine teenagers dance to U.S. R&B and European
subjects. In the face of the bunker mentality that sup- pop until they are no longer able to stand. Like the singers
ported The Smiths’ original fanbase as they raged against in the world won't listen, these dancers are compelling to the
Thatcherite Britain and the Reaganite U.S. and sought point of being heartbreaking as they give themselves over to
allies among other members of the alienated and disen- the music. Collins is explicit in his desire to make us fall in
franchised youth, Collins projects a network of interrelated love, as he did, with his subjects—but we are also meant to
wonder why it might seem strange to European or U.S. and the ground on which they stand. Looking out from
viewers that kids from Jakarta, or Istanbul, or Bogota, or this narrow envelope of space, the teenagers appear caught
Ramallah, would care about The Smiths or choose to dance between the proportions of children and adults and exhibit
to European pop. The Western origins of these bits of global expressions and body language that convey attitudes in flux
culture are less significant than their creative manipulation between confidence and profound insecurity. Despite the
by kids all over the world. intimacy of the portraits and the clear connection between
photographer and subject, we do not get to know these
Rineke Dijkstra young people. There is a compelling uniformity about the
Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) has taken swimmers in Ukraine and at Coney Island. As we view image
a similar interest in, and shown a matching empathy with, after image, we witness an apparently universal sense of dis-
adolescents on the cusp of adulthood. In 1992, Dijkstra left tance shared by Dijkstra’s adolescent subjects. In addition
a career as a commercial photographer and began pho- to the bathers, Dijkstra has photographed Israeli military
tographing teenagers at beaches in the U.S., Poland, and inductees, teenage British clubbers, young bullfighters, and
Ukraine (fig. 9.27). Her approach remained close to what new mothers. Several series follow the same person, return-
it had been when she was being paid to take portraits of busi- ing to document them as they mature into young adulthood.
nessmen. The subjects are positioned in the center of the Dijkstra captures, in the words of one writer, “the desire to
image, tightly framed, and caught in a very shallow depth arrest youth, to distill and study it so that perhaps we might
of field that limits the focus to little more than the person know it as we never could when we were in between things

9.27 Rineke Dijkstra, Odessa, Ukraine,

August 4, 1993. Chromogenic print
60% x 50%" (153 x 129 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Courtesy of the artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

ourselves.”*” For the artist, the portraits expose what adults image-and-text installation and book on sea commerce by
learn to hide; she might have added that they even show the U.S. photographer Allan Sekula (b. 1951), developed this
act of hiding. tradition in a distinctly contemporary direction by combin-
Adolescence as a shared as well as symbolic experience is ing mid-twentieth-century photojournalism, Conceptual
the subject of Dijkstra’s two-track video The Buzz Club, Liver- art, and an interest in the aesthetics of the commonplace to
pool, England/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, Netherlands (1996-97). depict the realities of late twentieth-century economic net-
For the piece, Dijkstra traveled to dance clubs in working- works. Though often formally beautiful, juxtaposing messy
class towns. The Buzz Club and Mysteryworld are not trend- human activity with the formal rigor provided by the horizon
setting nightclubs filled with the rich and famous. Rather, or the geometry of cargo containers and ports, Sekula’s pho-
these are places where ordinary kids grow up. For the work, tographs favor signs of economic and cultural exchange
she filmed her subjects in an area separate from the bar over the romantic myths of the ocean. His photography and
and dancefloor; as a result, they are shown surrounded by writing established a model for what amounts to a genre of
the sounds of the club, but not by other clubgoers. At first related work by artists all over the world, that applies the
they stand there, nearly as static as the subjects of Dijkstra’s technology of the camera to reflect on the economic and
photographs. Then, as they get more comfortable or bored, political exploitation of the planet.
their bodies start to move with the music; occasionally they
dance as if no one were watching. The transformation from Zoe Leonard
anxiety to action, even of the most limited kind, is compel- With her series Analogue (1998-2007) (fig. 9.29), U.S. pho-
ling, all the more so since the adolescent self-consciousness tographer Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) created a similar map
never disappears from Dijkstra’s subjects. Unlike the adults charting the collapse of what used to be called the “rag
who performed for Andy Warhol’s screen tests, an obvious trade” and the survival of its shadow economy in the col-
precedent for Dijkstra’s film, these kids do not flourish in lection and sale of used clothes in developing nations. The
the excitement of playing a movie star—instead, they slowly textile industry had supported immigrant populations in
reveal flashes of confidence and insecurity as they enact what the U.S. throughout much of the twentieth century, but by
amounts to an allegory for the awkward, ill-defined passage the turn of the millennium small-scale clothiers had been
into adulthood. almost entirely replaced by corporate manufacturing, so
dramatically changing the face of the industry. Leonard
charts the latter-day fate of the original rag trade. Analogue
Imaging the Global Economy begins with photographs of the repair shops, run-down
Since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, photog- boutiques, and corner stores that at one time supported
raphy has proved a particularly effective cartographic art a thriving garment trade in Leonard’s Lower Manhattan
form, providing evidence of the world beyond to viewers and includes 400 images (selected from over 10,000) that
left behind at home. Fish Story (1988-95) (fig. 9.28), an document a network of connections that pass from the

9.28 Allan Sekula, Hammerhead

crane unloading 40-foot
containers from Asian ports.
American President Lines
terminal, Los Angeles harbor. San
Pedro, California, November
1992, from the series Fish Story
(1988-95). Dye destruction color
print, 24% x 31% x 1%", framed
(62.8 x 79.3 x 4.4 cm). Courtesy
of the artist and Christopher
Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica.

Imaging the Global Economy

 9.29 Zoe leonard, Analogue,
1998-2009. Detail. Whole
series contains 412 C-prints and
gelatin-silver prints, each 11 x
11" (28 x 28 cm). Edition of 3.
© the artist. Courtesy Galerie
Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Oo:
TR
©
er
o
()
m
=
sad
ad
ri

U.S. into Latin America and Africa. In pursuit of this falter- Chen Chieh-jen
ing economy, Leonard has incorporated images of a variety Factory (2003) (fig. 9.30) by Taiwanese photographer and
of other low-end trades such as repair shops and dry-goods filmmaker Chen Chieh-jen (b. 1960) is a study of one place
stores into Analogue. on the networks suggested by Sekula’s and Leonard’s work.
Analogue consists of a long series of square photographs In the early 1990s, Taiwan had just come out of almost
that recall the serialism of Conceptual art seen in Hans four decades of martial law, declared at an end in 1987,
Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. (see fig. 1.18) or the typological pho- and was also enduring a dramatic downturn in its economy.
tography of Berndt and Hilla Becher. Both precedents estab- In tandem with these developments there was a notable
lished serial presentation as a sign of political and intellectual increase in the creation of art addressing political themes.”
concern. A longer look at Analogue, however, reveals not just It was at this time that Chen took a hiatus from making art
a historian’s interest in a fading economy, but a more per and began researching his family and local and military
sonal, tactile attachment to outdated technologies. Analogue history, and exploring as much as he could of the physi-
is a collection of gelatin silver and C-prints: The technol- cal remnants of modern Taiwanese history. When he began
ogy involved is analogue as opposed to digital. Many of the making art again in the late 1990s, he started creating a
images depict photography shops and photographs, linking “genealogy,” he explained, of those “who are suppressed, cut
Leonard’s outmoded medium with her subject matter. By off by the multiple, soft structures of ... exclusion that col-
celebrating the fragile survival of print photography in the laborate with the new world of ... contemporary consumer
context of an investigation into economic hardship, Leonard culture.”*? This twofold concern—on the one hand with the
alludes to the social traditions of Modernist photography. histories that have been excised, and on the other with the
What some might perceive as a romantic attraction to his- consequences of embracing global capitalism—took on par-
toric media is also a link binding the social, spiritual, and ticular importance as the country was going through its first
emotional gravity of past art with the political concerns of presidential elections. Questions about the domestic and
the present. international character of this next chapter in the history

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 9.30 Chen Chieh-jen,
Factory, 2003.
Production still, 4136 x
Vp (05 x 180 em).
Courtesy of the artist and
Chi-Wen Gallery.

of Taiwan were thus of pressing concern. Chen began by the Lien Fu operation. The scenes remind the viewer that it
looking at historical examples of the exercise of power in the is not only the flows of capital being funneled to China now
region, completing a series of photography and a video based instead of Taiwan that have brought about the economic
on images of war and torture. He then turned to contem- collapse—it is also the history of the policies of the Taiwan-
porary history with a series of films that examine the cost of ese state. The lesson is meant to be broadly applicable. “In
Taiwan’s willingness to turn itself into “a downstream process- places all over the world,” Chen writes, “labourers have had
ing site for multi-national capital.”®? Factory (2003) is one of similar experiences—a production relationship between the
these films. ‘wwansplanted’ and the ‘untransplanted.’ In order to find low-
Following the dramatic downturn in the economy in 1987 priced labour, factories constantly shift locations. But after
and in the face of the increasing collaboration between being abandoned, unemployed workers have no choice but
Chinese manufacturing and Western economic interests, to linger on in the same place.”*! Chen’s subsequent films
many Taiwanese factories went bankrupt. During his explora- have looked at the difficulty of travel out of Taiwan as well
tions in the 1990s, Chen visited a number of disused indus- as at U.S. support of the Taiwanese state during the period
trial sites. He also discovered the Lien Fu garment workers of martial law. Chen’s work thus elaborates on the history of
who had been abruptly dismissed from their jobs, some after internationalism in Taiwan, beginning in the colonial period
over twenty years of service, when the factory lost business in when it was under Chinese and Japanese rule, through the
the mid-1990s. Severance packages and retirement benefits period of the Kuomintang when U.S. support maintained the
that had been promised were never paid. The workers pro- state, and into the present period in which Taiwan faces the
tested, but to no avail. Chen created Factory by inviting some impact of global capitalism.
of the women back to their place of work to be filmed in slow
long shots in the now-abandoned space. They are shown
Nodes on the Global Network:
standing among the old desks and chairs, some piled to the
ceiling, or seated at sewing machines, rented by the artist, to
israel and Palestine
evoke the space as it was a decade before. The women did not As Chen Chieh-jen’s work demonstrates, contemporary post-
want to talk publicly about their situation, so Chen took their colonal globalization has very particular local consequences
silence as a formal conceit: Factory has no audio track, the that are rooted in historical internationalism. Mapping the
silent passing of time creating an aural complement to the global present requires an exploration in time as well as
vast empty spaces of the building. space. This chapter concludes with two works that invite us to
In addition to capturing the vacant spaces of the economic reflect on the geographical and historical dimensions of the
collapse, Factory is an effort at overcoming the consumer- Arab-Israeli conflict. The first, Where We Come From (2001-03)
induced historical amnesia that the artist saw all around by U.S.-Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, pays particular atten-
himself. Into the contemporary footage Chen splices propa- tion to the political geography of exile by focusing on the
ganda material from the 1960s showing productive workers restrictions placed on the movements of Palestinians. The
and satisfied investors parading through a factory not unlike piece highlights the degree to which it is the state, through

Nodes on the Global Network: Israel and Palestine

passports and citizenship laws, that determine our relation- consists of the requests, written in Arabic and English, and
ship to home and family. The second work, Summer Camp photographs documenting Jacir’s fulfillment of the errands
(2007) by Israeli Yael Bartana, narrows the geographical framed and displayed in pairs. The artist satisfied the desires
focus to a single Palestinian home, and with documentary of others in a fashion that further restrictions enacted in
footage and references to Zionist cinema of the 1930s alerts 2004 have made impossible to repeat. Her work presents,
the viewer to the history of Israeli nation-building and the as Edward Said suggested, “a creative juxtaposition of wish,
complexity of creating homes and communities that chal- [and] wish fulfillment ... that Palestinians cannot experience
lenge the existing politics of place. in the present.”** Hanging in a gallery as a series of prosaic
documents, Where We Come From recalls work such as Hans
Emily Jacir Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. (see fig. 1.18) and Mary Kelly’s Post-
Emily Jacir’s (b. 1970) Where We Come From (fig. 9.31) is Partum Document (see fig. 1.29) and thus conveys its identity
a simply conceived and executed performance piece. It not only as a narrative of exile but as information to be inte-
is rooted in an artistic tradition dating from the 1960s and grated into a larger argument for political action.
1970s which stages, documents, or otherwise draws atten-
tion to ordinary activities, and in so doing shows them to Yael Bartana
be politically or personally significant (see Chapter 1). The Yael Bartana’s (b. 1970) Summer Camp (fig. 9.32) shows one
point is not to create new objects, but to invite the audience modest, yet symbolically significant, political action. The
to look again at what already exists. Jacir’s activity here is work consists of a makeshift auditorium specially constructed
travel. Having lived all over the world, in Saudi Arabia, Italy, to screen a short film documenting the Israeli Committee
the U.S., and the West Bank, and possessing a U.S. passport, Against House Demolition (ICAHD) rebuilding a Palestinian
she has spent her whole life, she says, “going back and forth home. The home had been demolished by Israeli Defense
between Palestine and other parts of the world.”*? She has Forces (IDF) and, since ICAHD lacked official authorization
enjoyed a freedom of movement that is not granted to her for its action, once rebuilt, it would likely be destroyed again.
fellow Palestinians, either those in the West Bank, Gaza, or Building homes in the unforgiving desert lies at the heart of
in exile. Drawing attention to the exceptional nature of her Israeli national identity, whether as a historic reminder of the
mobility, she approached Palestinians inside and outside formation of the nation in the 1940s or, more recently, as a
their homeland and asked, “If Icould do anything for you, political statement in the action of constructing settlements
anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” Answers include in the occupied territories. ICAHD is a group of Israelis, Pal-
visiting grave sites, meeting with relatives, going on a date, estinians, and others who are investing this patriotic act with
and other personal and rather mundane tasks. The artwork critical meaning. Opposing the actions of the IDF represents

Go to Gaza and cat Sayadiyeh,

As acitizen of Israel, 1 arn forbidden from
entering Gaza.

~Sonia
‘Born in Yama, living in &h-Rasn
Isnclt
Father axelMother Frno Tanna

9.31 Emily Jacir,Where We Come From, 2001-03. Detail (Sonia). One American passport, 30 texts, 32 C-type prints, and 1 video;
text (Sonia): 9¥2 x 12" (24 x 30.5 cm); photo (Sonia): 15 x 15"(38 x 38 cm). © Emily Jacir, courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Chapter 9 Engaging the Global Present

 sie

9.32 Yael Bartana, Summer Camp, 2007. Film still. One-channel video and sound installation, 12 minutes.
Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

a direct criticism of existing Israeli policies toward Palestini- rebar than it is out of the intersecting forces of political will
ans. With its focus on Jews and Palestinians building together, and individual commitment. The original home was not
Bartana’s work’s subject appears to be a new chapter in the strong enough to withstand the political actions of the Jeru-
construction of the nation. The film and soundtrack of salem municipality that oversees the region in which it is
Summer Camp imitate iconic Zionist propaganda films of the located or the IDF, which enacts the government’s policy of
1930s, specifically Helmar Lerski’s Avodah (1935). Though home demolition. As an object, it was clearly not physically
using only footage of the contemporary volunteers, Bartana strong enough to withstand the bulldozers. In the film it is
appropriated the style and in parts the sequencing of the being rebuilt in the full knowledge that it will likely survive
earlier film when it came to editing and assembling her own only in the work of art that itself, as presented at Documenta
work. On the outside of the theater hang posters for Swmmer 12 in 2007, is housed in a temporary structure at a tempo-
Camp that use the heroic poses and fragmented aesthetic of rary exhibition.
1930s avant-garde film. Both Lerski’s and Bartana’s films are Much of the work discussed in this chapter approaches
glosses on the Zionist slogan “We have come to the land to the question of how to represent the realities of globalism
build and be rebuilt in it,” and in each case the filmmakers by attempting to visualize the economic, cultural, biographi-
aim to create a catalyst within the larger political theater of cal, and political networks that connect different parts of the
the Middle East. Just as the success of the Zionist state sup- world. Jacir’s Where We Come From shares with works by Allan
ported by Lerski depends on the political will of the par- Sekula, Phil Collins, Zoe Leonard, and José Bedia, among
ticipants, the multicultural Israel proposed by Bartana and others, an interest in describing and mapping such con-
ICAHD will be the product not of house-builders but of the nections. Bartana’s Summer Camp, like Flavio Garciandia’s
wider society in which they build. Untitled, René Francisco and DUPP’s Casa Nacional, Shahzia
Once completed, the house featured in Summer Camp Sikander’s Pleasure Pillars, and Cao Fei’s COSPlayers, presents
enters into multiple narratives. It is simultaneously a home, a sense of the character of locations that are defined by their
an act of political resistance, a statement of ethical and philo- existence as contingent meeting points of different politi-
sophical intent, a crime, and part of an artwork. It is different cal, economic, and social forces. All places might be similarly
from the homes to which those building it will return, which viewed as intersections. These works are models for under-
are, in turn, different from each other. Above all, this home standing the nodes and networks that make up the cartog-
is a fragile object that is constructed less out of concrete and raphy of the present.

Nodes on the Global Network: Israel and Palestine

 New Metaphors and New Narratives

n many ways, Chapter 10 revisits issues already raised in importantly the call to take seriously the consequences
Chapter 1: At the beginning of the new millennium, artists of artistic conventions had been internalized. Matthew
were again concerned with creating new metaphors out Ritchie, a British-born painter, noted that his generation
of the materials in their studios and out of what they saw no longer faced the “obligation to perpetuate or dismantle
in the world, just as James Rosenquist did in /-J/1 (see fig. ... We [could] just go off and start to build new structures.”!
1.1) or Nancy Spero in Notes in Time on Women (1979) (see The impulse to create new forms had been felt with great
fig. 1.26). The first half of the chapter addresses a variety of urgency by the artists with whom this book began. Robert
painters and sculptors whose work highlights the particu- Rauschenberg’s ip (CxS is, WAS). Helio Oiticica’s
larities of their chosen media, but who, unlike strict formal- Tropicalia (see fig. 1.8), and the Fluxus and feminist recon-
ists, are intent on using aesthetic decisions to signify social, textualizations of everyday actions were ail such efforts at cre-
political, and philosophical content. The second half of ating new structures expressive of the changing world. The
the chapter examines the work of artists, several working in post-World War II generation, however, was also vigorously
video and new media, for whom the complexities of story- rejecting the priorities of the previous era, and this need to
telling capture the viewers’ attention as much if not more clear the ground continued to drive much political art up
than the content of the those stories. There is more to this to and including appropriation in the early 1980s. By the
art than formal questions, of course, but my concern in the 1990s, however, as Ritchie suggested, museum and gallery
final chapters is to demonstrate that the broadened perspec- visitors all over the world witnessed increasingly construc-
tives and critical visions brought to art making since the late tive rather than deconstructive practices. The applicability
1970s have created an environment in which aesthetic con- of Pop art and appropriation practices to Russian, Chinese,
cerns, from color choices to how one tells a story, are under- Cuban, and Japanese, as well as U.S. and European, artists,
stood to intersect with open networks of meaning that are, and the evident compatibility of Minimalism with body art or
in turn, inflected by an artist’s means of presentation. Con- historical content demonstrated that all-or-nothing positions
temporary art is the result of a life lived, to use Jean-Francois were no longer necessary. Form and content were under-
Lyotard’s formulation, with a “sensitivity to differences” and stood to be in an ongoing relationship that demanded criti-
an ability to “tolerate the incommensurable.” The art of the cal attention, and audiences could be counted on to provide
previous two chapters has, in many ways, pointed to differ- it. Certainly, art and art-history students were now being
ence and incommensurability. The art of this chapter and provided with critical tools that had been unavailable twenty
the next invites a discussion of what it means to experiment years before.
with the building blocks of any art—form, narrative, and This chapter focuses on a group of artists, primarily from
experience as discussed in Chapter 11—in a world defined by the U.S. and Europe, who interrogate the relationship of
such instability. abstraction and representation and who experiment with
The artists discussed in this chapter began their careers permutations of narrative. Many others could have been
while the battles over painting begun in the late 1970s included. A glance back at earlier chapters reveals artists,
were raging (see Chapters 2 and 3). The debates over the including Shahzia Sikander, Yinka Shonibare, and Zhang
supposed “end of painting” and critiques of conventional Xiaogang, who were just as concerned with the signifying
forms of narrative had sharpened the theoretical tools potential of painting as the artists discussed here. Likewise,
with which artists, critics, and audiences dissected art and numerous challenges to narrative traditions have already
culture. By the turn of the millennium, the polemical brink- been presented through the work of Yang Fudong, Cao Fei,
manship characteristic of the 1980s had relaxed, but more Kara Walker, and Walid Raad, among others. The division

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

that becomes obvious in such lists, in which non-Western Amy Sillman
and non-white artists enter the discussion of contemporary Amy Sillman (b. 1956) finished her undergraduate educa-
art due to the explicit content of their work, is consistent tion at the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1979. Paint-
with patterns evident in larger artworld institutions, from ing had become unfashionable over the preceding decade
museums to auctions and academia. Does this mean that or so owing to its alleged complicity with the structures
Shahzia Sikander cares more about addressing her experi- of power or its mere “decorativeness,” or both. But it was
ence as a Pakistani woman living in the West than the affec- during this very time at the School of Visual Arts that
tive and intellectual power of painting? Certainly not, and Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were beginning to
neither were Cao Fei and Ou Ning indifferent to the signify- breathe life back into painting by taking it out of the studio
ing power of digital video as they shot footage for San Yuan Li and into the streets. Far beyond the classrooms of the
(see fig. 9.23). The experimentation with form and narrative School of Visual Arts, artists such as Martin Kippenberger
discussed in this chapter explores a familiar problem shared and Mike Kelley, were simultaneously integrating critique
by many artists—that of making one’s formal practice rel- and celebration in their painting through their extravagant
evant to the contemporary environment. The legacy of over combinations of excess, virtuosity, and travesty. Sillman,
twenty years of incorporating and building upon the decon- a very different personality, hunkered down, supported
structions and demystifications of the 1960s and 1970s put herself by taking a variety of jobs, and painted. She
artists in a position to create new metaphors that would be showed intermittently in the 1980s but waited until 1995 to
meaningful in a changed world and new forms of narrative return for a graduate degree in painting. Her work since
suited to the new millennium. the late 1990s evokes sources in Abstract Expressionism and
children’s art, and enlists figurative styles from cartoons to
life studies.
Relearning to Paint Before her time at the School of Visual Arts, Sillman’s
The renewed attention to the formal aspects of art—the commitment to painting had already been shaped by the
properties of particular media, the character of abstrac- eclectic art scene in her hometown of Chicago. Instead of
tion, the structures of narrative—found critical outlets in viewing the medium as a hegemonic force of Modernism,
the work of writers including Dave Hickey in Las Vegas, Sillman learned from the Chicago Imagists including Ed
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in Los Angeles, and David Batchelor in Paschke (see fig. 5.1) and the Hairy Who, a group of paint-
London, who argued forcefully for a heightened apprecia- ers interested in unorthodox conjunctions of abstractions
tion of visual pleasure in art and popular culture. Exhibitions and representation and also associated with the school of the
celebrating a veritable renaissance of visual expression and Art Institute of Chicago, that painting could address con-
narrative painting includd “Beau Monde,” SITE Santa Fe, tent ranging from strip clubs to the psyche, in styles that
New Mexico (2001) curated by Dave Hickey, “The Mystery of evoke both Cubism and comic books. In the galleries of
Painting,” Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2001), “Painting at the the Art Institute of Chicago, she was also exposed to what
Edge of the World,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), might be called art’s “minor histories,” a term popular in
“Dear Painter, Paint Me,” Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002), the theoretical writings of the 1970s and 1980s that des-
and “Remote Viewing (Invented Worlds in Recent Painting ignates the many events that give nuance to and even
and Drawing),” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York contradict the dominant narratives of official history.
(2005), and the continued support and promotion of paint- Here, Sillman began her lifelong connection to the art of
ing by the Saatchi Gallery, London, throughout the 1990s Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) and Yves Tanguy (1900-
culminating in “The Triumph of Painting” (2005). 55); the Arts and Crafts designs of William Morris (1834-96),
The phenomenon extended beyond painting to include Indian miniatures, and Early Renaissance Sienese painting
sculpture, photography, and video. Though this critical and also became important sources for her. Once in New York,
curatorial focus on painting was concentrated in the West, she worked for May Stevens, a painter and co-producer of
work by artists such as Sikander and Takashi Murakami the feminist arts journal Heresies. Exposure to the artists and
(see Chapter 9), as well as the international range of the writers associated with the journal further directed Sillman to
participants in the shows noted above, indicated that if the painting at the margins of art history.
end of painting had been glimpsedin many locales, it had Sillman’s Bed (2006) (fig. 10.1) features a couple lying
never been reached. What this means for contemporary art close together, arms intertwined, their bodies cupped like
remains unresolved to this day. Unlike the return to painting spoons. The figures are half-covered with sheets and pillows,
announced in the early 1980s which struck a decidedly anti- greens and blues. The paint hovers on the canvas in layers
historical tone, the artists discussed here have explicitly con- that alternately reveal and hide a yellow ground brushed
sidered their craft and its past. As a result, viewers are often irregularly across the canvas. Floating above and beside the
encouraged to think critically about the aesthetic choices couple is a shadowy outline of a third figure, all limbs and
made by the artist and to find meaning as well as beauty in head, extending its reach across the bed. Compared to a
the results. painting such as Francesco Clemente’s Abbraccio (1983) (see

Relearning to Paint
 10.1 Amy Sillman, Bed, 2006.
Oil on canvas, 91 x 84"
(231.1 x 213.4 cm). © 2013
Amy Sillman. Image courtesy of
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

10.2 Amy Sillman, P& H 2

(Behemoth), 2007. Oil on canvas,
84% x 93" (214.6 x 236.2 cm).
© 2012 Amy Sillman. Image
courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.,
New York.

fig. 3.12), in which the artist enlists the expressive

power of paint to clarify the psychological weight
and ecstasy of two bodies becoming one, Bed is
decidedly ambiguous. “This is not just fragmen-
tary imagery but also fragmentary process and
fragmentary consciousness,” Sillman explains.?
The narrative, protagonists, emotional content,
and paint are all in flux and bound, she says, to
“subconscious structure[s]” that are themselves
merely evocative fragments.’ Sillman’s paint-
ings include representation, abstraction, and
text, all of which seem to extend the promise of
meaning. In each case, however, the artist with-
holds clarity through distortion, fragmentation,
erasure, and obliteration, confronting the signify-
ing function of the picture with the physical prop-
erties of paint: “To scrape it, move it, to push it
around, and water it down and wipe it off
because it has got such a good procedural
durability. I don’t think oil painting would be

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

all that interesting if you weren’t going to essentially use Cecily Brown
its materiality as one of your tools.”* Her intent is to pursue Sillman’s re-entry in the art world in the late 1990s coincided
and inspire free association unbounded by the limits with an explosion of figurative art that restaged a variety
of speech. of approaches to picture making. John Currin (b. 1962)
It was only after completing Bed and feeling she needed reflected on Old Master compositions and_ techniques,
more information about the figure that Sillman began Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) exhibited seemingly effortless
working with models. She asked couples with whom she was and emotionally penetrating portraits based on celebrity
close to pose for her, first drawing from life and then impro- photos, and Cecily Brown (b. 1969) reveled in sexually deliri-
vising. The ultimately abstract nature of the paintings, such ous forays into expressive figuration. Brown described her
as P & H 2 (Behemoth) (2007) (fig. 10.2), reveals Sillman’s experience as she finished her training at the Slade School
priorities. Observation joins formal invention and personal in London and moved to New York to start her career in the
expression as one more means of linking the painting with early 1990s: “I was ashamed of my pleasure in painting, my
source material in the world. Sillman compares the continual predilection for emotionally charged subjects and for my
shift between sensual, emotional, conceptual, and aesthetic love of dead painters. I eventually gave up painting; unable
references to a “crazy loop with your body of feeling, auto- to come up with a good reason to be doing it, or to justify
feeling, seeing and auto-seeing and not quite knowing where it, I seized up.”” By the end of the decade, however, it had
a thing or a body ends and begins.”° The results, to use the become “an intoxicating time to be painting, and New York
language of the artist and her critics, are teetering, imper- an exhilarating and sympathetic climate; the mood is gener-
iled, tipping, slightly wrong, abject, off, awkward. Painting is ous and open and eclectic.”* Paintings such as Night Passage
a means of responding to a world in flux and a way of reveal- (1999) (fig. 10.3) feature dramatic painterly surfaces that
ing, in Sillman’s words, “estrangement and otherness as ... stage scenes of erotic seduction and psychoanalytical revela-
profound pleasures.”° tion. Brown’s oeuvre engages bodies, sex, and pleasure as

10.3 Cecily
Brown, Night
Passage, 1999.
Oil on linen, 100
x 110" (254 x
279.4 cm).
© Cecily Brown.
Courtesy Gagosian
Gallery.

Relearning to Paint
well as the history of post-World War II figurative abstraction painting, assemblage, and sculpture into the conceptual
in the form of William de Kooning and Francis Bacon. The project of the drawings.
breadth of Brown’s references and the assertive manner in Mapping and travel have a long relationship with modern
which she makes them her own turned her work into state- and contemporary art. Starting with the roots of Modern-
ments of a late-century feminist art. Painting, figurative and ism in the seventeenth century and captured in works such
abstract, appeared once again to be an exciting and produc- as Vermeer’s Art of Painting (1666), cartography, exploration,
tive means of advancing one’s art. and art have often been inseparable. Works by Daniel Buren,
Suzanne Lacy, Anselm Kiefer, Nari Ward, and Zoe Leonard
Franz Ackermann illustrate how mapping has been a bedrock of contemporary
In 1991, Franz Ackermann (b. 1963) finished graduate political and\\Conceptual art. With Ackermann’s work—as
studies in painting at the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste, well as that of Odili Donald Odita and Ingrid Calame (see
Hamburg,g and won a DAAD scholarship to travel to Hong below)—mapping provides the foundation for increasingly
Kong. He spent his time there exploring the city before expansive forms of art. Upon completing numerous Mental
returning to his very small apartment to create what he Maps, Ackermann “discard[ed] the watercolor as a sketch, as
called Mental Maps of the world outside (fig. 10.4). These an impression—discarding this brevity,”!° and turned to the
drawings, which came to include motifs taken from his trav- materiality of the everyday. Paintings and installations, he
els all over Asia, are small abstracted visions of landmarks, explained, move from cartographic abstractions to more
incidents, objects, streets, and journeys that represent “a direct and representational engagement with the real. “I am
retrospective recording of the dynamism and energy” or quite certain,” he said, “a painterly aspect [can] be found in
the “boredom and melancholy” of a location.? The Mental any hotel room, in any dormitory of the world.”!! In his new
Maps are cartographic abstractions that address the emotional work, the fluctuations of information and the perambulations
traces and physical impact of urban space. Upon his return of the artist meet the architecture and design of the real.
to Germany in 1992, Ackermann would devote himself After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the meaning and
to paintings and large-scale installations that integrate context of travel changed dramatically. Ackermann observed:

BY
<

10.4 Franz Ackermann, Untitled (Mental Map: no.10, public parking lots), 1994. Mixed media on paper,
SY x 7Y2" (13 x 19 cm). Courtesy White Cube.

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

 sSsenerse—

10.5 Franz Ackermann, Home, Home Again, 2006. Installation view at White Cube, Hoxton Square, London,
April 21-May 20, 2006. © Franz Ackermann. Courtesy White Cube

“Suddenly you couldn’t move around freely anymore. Trave- analogue regions and corporeal travelers. Things as well as
ling became a political act. And all at once we were forced ideas, presence as well as appearance, remain critical.
to realize that at every moment, somewhere in the world,
wars are being fought for territorial gain, a fact that had Odili Donald Odita
been almost forgotten amid all the globalization hype.”! The integration of representation and abstraction that con-
Ackermann’s work after 2001 has admitted a sense of fore- stitutes Ackerman’s practice is given a different spin in the
boding that tempers the romance inherent in the Mental work of Nigerian-born, U.S.-raised and -trained Odili Donald
Maps of the 1990s. In his installation at the White Cube Odita (b. 1966). Signifying the breadth of his concerns,
gallery in London in 2006, Home, Home Again (fig. 10.5), he Odita’s early installations often combined collaged and
included a row of eighty-eight photographs of hotels over appropriated images with the abstract paintings that have
which he had drawn lines as if the buildings were caught in since become the heart of his practice. These installations—
the cross hairs of a gun sight. The allusion to sniper fire pro- including his first New York show, “Color Tincony. ein 999%
vides an uncharacteristically literal connection to the visually which juxtaposed photo-based work integrating fashion,
explosive paintings that dominated the exhibition. Architec- advertising, and news imagery—link consumer culture with
tural features suggesting waiting rooms and even detention global and racial politics, but also with his abstract paint-
chambers were built in the gallery, confronting the expansive ings. In the context of the overtly political representations,
spaces of the paintings and the implied threat of the photo- abstractions such as Present Tense (1999) (fig. 10.6) invite
graphs with signs and spaces of interrogation and incarcera- the viewer to search out the common ground between the
tion. In this installation, viewers were not encouraged to paintings and the photographs. One answer lies in Odita’s
let their minds wander as freely as in Ackermann’s earlier observation that “all visual materials are culturally grounded,
paintings or the Mental Maps. Ackermann’s insistence on the and it is important to recognize where their meaning is
continued relevance of objects and circumstances on the derived.”! This is a familiar point, rooted in the re-evaluation
ground in a world proudly proclaiming itself deterritorialized of geometric abstraction that began in the 1980s, but Odita’s
reminds the viewer that our virtual digital networks include juxtapositions are both forceful and quite open-ended.

Relearning to Paint
 10.6 Odili Donald Odita,
Present Tense, 1999.
Acrylic on canvas
84 x OA" (2DiieasOrx
264.16 cm). Image
courtesy the artist.

Unlike the Neo-Geo focus on power, meaning in Odita’s she meticulously records the marks left by oil, tires, foot
paintings lies in a variety of personal, social, geographical, steps, the weather, and machinery. In addition to ordinary
and historical sources. The angular network of browns, pinks, streets, Calame has traced in the New York Stock Exchange,
yellows, and blues in Present Tense is inflected with references churches, and abandoned playgrounds and factories. In
to African textiles and landscapes, as well as to computer some instances, such as From #258 Drawing (Tracings from the
screens and the mass media. Color for Odita is a means of Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the LA River) (2007) (fig.
invoking other places, many paintings using a palette based 10.7), the final work references multiple sites. After she or
on trips the artist made to Africa, as well as to his childhood her assistants have traced the stains, Calame labels the docu-
home in Ohio. In addition, he selects colors that evoke televi- ments and assembles them, layering the tracings in what she
sion screens, thus mapping the real and the virtual across the calls “constellations,” which are then retraced onto sheets
surface of his canvases. The collision of these sources, like of Mylar or painted in enamel on aluminum. The painted
the fractured compositions themselves, generates a dialogue constellations carry with them the aesthetic appeal of chaos,
across cultures and borders in which technology, craft, city, the refined control of Calame’s steady hand and consid-
and nature are all points of contact. ered palette, and the narrative mystery of reconstructing the
actions that produced the stains in the first place. Stains, she
Ingrid Calame says, “index events,” and with each new tracing her archive of
The sensitivity to the cultural meaning of abstraction finds a forms and associations grows richer.'*
very literal example in the 1:1-scale vision of Ingrid Calame’s Calame’s works on the speedway accumulate “events” from
indexical abstractions. The LA-based Calame (b. 1965) throughout the history of the track. Captured prominently
has made fidelity to the shape (and scale) of the world the among the skidded tire tracks and dripped residues of motor
defining feature of her work. In 1994, while making more oil, coolant, and fuel are very specific marks, including the
traditional oil-on-canvas paintings, she looked down at the doughnut-shaped skid marks made by Indy 500 winnersin
studio floor. The shapes of the dripped and spilled paint celebration of victory. The vibrant and artificial colors of
she saw there inspired her to devise a practice based on the logos and details that cover the cars inspired the palette
finding rather than making marks. Calame traces stains. of From #258 Drawing. Calame’s tracings from the LA River,
Laying sheets of translucent Mylar on sidewalks, streets, a space identified with different subcultures than those that
playgrounds, and parking lots, as well as on floors and walls, use the speedway, record the residue left by water that flows

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

10.7 Ingrid Calame, From #258 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the LA River), 2007.
Enamel paint on aluminum, 71 x 119 x 1%" (180.34 x 302.26 x 2.8 cm). Indianapolis Museum of Art, Carmen & Mark
Holeman Contemporary Fund 2008.3 © the artist. Image Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York & Shanghai.

through the culverts as well as deliberate signs of human the place.”!°

15
As much as we are brought face to face with the
presence. One can make out fragments of graffiti among the precise record of human presence in this or that factory,
broad vertical bands of From #258 Drawing. Calame’s paint- street, racetrack, or neighborhood, Calame’s signs achieve an
ings and drawings of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and independence from their referents in the world and a visual
the Los Angeles River together cover hundreds of square and emotional identity within the networks of her art.
feet, mimicking the scale of the sites as well as the appear-
ance of their surfaces. Albert Oehlen
The all-over fluid indexicality of Calame’s abstractions has As Franz Ackermann traveled the world, painters in Germany
been compared to Jackson Pollock’s signature drip paintings: continued to have a strong impact on late-twentieth-century
Her works share much with the mesmerizing weblike quality painting. Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke dominated dis-
of Pollock’s brand of Abstract Expressionism. Neverthe- cussions of painting and the circles based around Martin
less, Calame’s work is striking for its distance from Abstract Kippenberger in the west and Leipzig-based Neo Rauch
Expressionism’s gestural immediacy. Each of her paint- (b. 1960) in the east were drawing considerable attention.
ings, regardless of its aesthetic seduction, is also an archive Rauch’s personal combination of Socialist Realism, theatri-
of marks in the world, each one studiously copied and filed cal narration, and painterly abstraction in paintings such as
away in the artist’s studio. This encyclopedic and analytic Schicht (Shift) (1999) (fig. 10.8) set the tone for a new gener-
quality mediates the more emotive aspects of the work in a ation of painters from the former East Germany. The work of
way foreign to her mid-century predecessors. Calame shares Albert Oehlen (b. 1954), born in the western city of Krefeld,
with all the artists discussed in this section a commitment adds nuance to explorations into the properties and pos-
to art that is referential, indexical, and even semiotic at the sibilities for painting at the turn of the millennium. Before
same time as being abstract, evocative, and visually poetic. attending art school at the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste,
John Yau (b. 1950), poet, critic, and longtime ally of paint- Hamburg, in the mid-1970s, where he studied with Polke
ers, wrote of Calame’s work: “The forms begin to float free and met Kippenberger, Oehlen worked at a bookstore and
from their literalness, while the staccato colors and asyndetic created performances. He prepared a legal brief against his
transitions [those without conjunctions] bounce you all over previous teachers for the intellectual damage he considered

Relearning to Paint (257

 10.8 Neo Rauch, Schicht (Shift),
1999. Oil on canvas, 78% x
70%" (200 x 180 cm). Courtesy
Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/
Berlin and David Zwirner, New
York.

himself to have incurred in their courses and performed Since 1992, he has maintained a home and studio in Spain
the Bread Roll Initiative, in which he and fellow artist Werner and, like Kippenberger, Oehlen has created work in which
Buttner threw ham rolls over the Berlin Wall. The sandwiches cultural as well as aesthetic and personal references collide.
were a gesture of solidarity with the East, serving as both food Maintaining a sense of incoherence was quite difficult
and a metaphor for the divided city. After art school, Oehlen for Oehlen. Recounting a discussion with friend and writer
returned to Berlin, where he continued to collaborate with Rainald Goetz, he remarked: “It became obvious [by the
Buttner and others, including his own brother Markus mid-1990s] that I had convinced myself I was producing
Oehlen, Kippenberger, A.R. Penck, Jorg Immendorf, and the work that was clear and precise. [Goetz] told me that beliey-
band Red Krayola. The Berlin scene was vibrant and competi- ing yourself to have achieved clarity was a stupid state to be
tive, with artistic and social jousting between Oehlen’s group, in. The tone of his comments was along the lines of ‘More is
led by Kippenberger, and the Newe Wilde (Young Wild Ones) more’—that you shouldn’t abandon content.”!” In response,
painters such as Helmut Middendorf and Rainer Fetting (see Oehlen redoubled his efforts to treat his canvas as a site of
Chapter 3). Comparing the art of the two groups, Oehlen inconsistency and chaos. Using paint, collage, and comput-
remarked: “We were much more devious ... We mixed up ers, Oehlen borrowed from the history of art, the appear-
techniques, introduced things those people wouldn’t have ance of graphics software, and all manner of visual culture.
used and played other tricks ... We weren’t worried whether Oehlen’s El Pez Roncando (The Fish Snoring) (2001) (fig. 10.9)
it was coherent and comprehensible.”'® Their art recorded presents laser-printed patterns designed with computer soft-
the collision between any number of styles, genres, images, ware and a mouse, lines and fields copied from computer
and materials. Oehlen left Germany for Andalucia, Spain, with monitors, spills and gestural flourishes achieved with the
Kippenberger in 1987, moving to Madrid the following year. energy and technique of expressionist painting, carefully

EL Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

10.9 Albert Oehlen, El Pez Roncando (The Fish Snoring), 2001. Mixed media on canvas,
9A x 149%" (240 x 380 cm). © Albert Oehlen. Courtesy Gallery Grasslin, Frankfurt.

rendered features and forms, styl-

ized images of animals, people,
and things, and _ photographs.
Many of these elements are com-
patible with one another and unite
the composition formally and con-
ceptually. More often than not,
however, each passage appears to
have only a coincidental relation-
ship with the ones above and below
it, creating a sense of disjunction
or indifference across the canvas.
When Oehlen wants coherence, he
chooses a unifying element, such
as a consistent expressionist style
or a uniform gray palette as in Bad
(Bath) (2003) (fig. 10.10), into-
which he then introduces features
such as a heavily outlined profile,

10.10 Albert Cehlen, Bad (Bath), 2003.

Oil on canvas, 110% x 118%" (280 x
300 cm). Private collection. © Albert
Oehlen/Jérg and Phillip von Bruchhausen.
the partially rendered bath for which the work is titled, and Jorge Pardo
floating geometric forms that fight against the cohesion of Los Angeles-based sculptor Jorge Pardo (b. 1963) calls
the painting. his work “unmanageable.”!® It is not that the work itself is
Painting has survived, Oehlen comments, because it unwieldy, dense, or overly complicated. On the contrary,
permits “the visible working through of inferences, misun- Pardo’s output, which has included lamps, chairs, and houses
derstandings, ideas to be criticized, and also your own mis- as well as murals, paintings, and prints, is not only easily
takes. It’s not a principle, not a justification—it’s work. It incorporated into daily life, but is also unfalteringly beauti-
means nothing else.”!* Like Thomas Lawson’s argument in ful. Its unmanageability, like the open-ended character of
“Last Exit: Painting” (1981), a pro-painting manifesto written Oehlen’s painting or the awkward expressionism of Sillman’s,
to counter the dire polemics being leveled against the medium lies in the exponentially multiplying contexts that inform
at the time, Oehlen asserts that painting is powerful to the each object. Faced with a sculpture that doubles variously as
degree that it is enmeshed in the social forces that shape a lamp, a chair, or even a house, the viewer confronts many
daily life and the mass media: Painting does not transcend contradictory meanings. A sculpture based this closely on a
life. Like the other artists discussed in this chapter, materiality cabinet or a chair maintains its link to the kitchen whether
as well as referentiality are critical to his work. The emotive it is displayed in a museum or a private house. The viewer
reactions we have toward the washes or the flourishes of chooses the significance and even function of the object
sprayed or violently brushed paint are as important as the without the help of an authoritative guide. The lamps that
associations we bring to the reindeer, eyes, and computer- fill the Mountain Bar, Los Angeles, which Pardo designed
generated lines in kl Pez Roncando. Oehlen’s juxtaposi- in 2003 (fig. 10.11), refer through their abstract organic
tion of mutually exclusive meanings and effects on a single forms to sculpture by Jean Arp (1886-1966) or Constan-
surface testifies to the flexibility of painting in the twenty- tin Brancusi (1876-1957) as well as to the critical legacy of
first century and to the willingness of audiences to see it as Neo-Geo. Nonetheless, the Mountain Bar lamps are also light-
a medium of instability and flux. For Oehlen, art in the new ing fixtures and as such participate in a discourse of design
millennium is not a place to create clarity and refinement, and utility that relates as much to IKEA as it does to Modern-
nor is it an excuse to reject them. Rather, a painting is a field ism. This active relationship to diverse contexts permits the
in which to work with the complexity of contemporary life. artist to reach out to meanings and associations produced in
the homes, restaurants, libraries, bookstores, museums, and
even malls that house his art.
Space and Sculpture Raised in Havana and Chicago, Pardo moved to Los
The work that began Chapter 10 represented both a renewed Angeles for art school, finishing an MFA at the Art Center in
investment in painting as a source of visual pleasure and a 1988. One of the earliest exhibitions in which he participated,
means to connect with life outside the canvas. Most often, at the Bliss Gallery in Pasadena, California in 1987, involved
the allusions to the world were made in the language of Pardo and his friends going door to door to invite neigh-
painting—colors, compositions, patterns, and even images bors to contribute art or objects that they thought should be
becoming meaningful through their relation to sources in shown in a gallery in the manner of Group Material’s “The
the world. Increasingly, however, artists could be seen using People’s Choice” show (see Chapter 4). For his first solo
devices more traditionally associated with sculpture as in show, Pardo turned for inspiration to the mundane spaces
Ackermann’s Home, Home Again. By the 2000s, Odita and found in every home—closets, garages, basements—exhibit-
Calame were both experimenting with wall-painting—wrap- ing a group of sculptures that took their form, though not
ping the viewers’ space with evocative and sensual abstrac- their substance, from ordinary objects. For Ladder (1989),
tions. It was not a stretch then to find that some of the most he disassembled a ladder purchased at a hardware store and
optically rich and even painterly works of the turn of the replaced parts of it with bits of expensive African bubinga
millennium were as likely to be identified as sculpture and wood, local redwood, fir, and cheap particle board. Each
architecture as they were to be called painting. The follow- of these different woods has its own aesthetic, cultural, and
ing section begins with a discussion of the simultaneous emotive associations, and market value. The history of Marcel
utilization of geometric and organic abstraction in museum- Duchamp’s readymades lurks close to the surface of Pardo’s
quality sculpture, domestic objects, and restaurant décor. objects while the relationship between pre-existing forms and
Work by Jorge Pardo represents the extreme flexibility of handmade processes in his work reflects similar conundrums
styles of abstraction to join, sometimes uncomfortably, ter- found in Jasper Johns’s flags, targets, and ale and coffee
ritory from the overtly artistic to the mundane. The artists cans from the 1950s and 1960s. But unlike Duchamp, who
that follow, Katharina Grosse and Jessica Stockholder, create asserted that his readymades were about choice alone, or
self-conscious interventions into museum space applying Johns, who rejected the real-world connotations of the flags
vibrant color to complex installations and to walls, windows, and targets, Pardo welcomes every extra-artistic connection
and doors dematerializing the architecture of the gallery and his objects make. As one sits down to order a drink under a
materializing the space within it. Pardo lamp or buy a book at a Pardo-designed bookstore, it

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

10.11 Jorge Pardo, Mountain Bar, Los Angeles, 2003. Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

can be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the art from possibility that the whole thing was a scam on Pardo’s part to
the design or the intellectual inquiry from the commercial get a “free” house. Controlling these conversations proved, to
appeal. The expected status of art as discursive intervention use Pardo’s term, “unmanageable.”
or aesthetic addition is under siege from the multiple con- 4166 Sea View Lane is a residential structure with guest
texts in which the work takes on meaning. quarters and studio space. It is approximately 3,000 square
In the mid-1990s, the Museum of Contemporary Art, feet in area, well within the average size for properties in
Los Angeles, invited Pardo to produce a solo exhibition. the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles where
Having worked with domestic objects as a source of inspira- it is located. Unlike neighboring homes that rise to acquire
tion, Pardo decided to up the ante for the MoCA show and ocean views, Pardo’s home hugs the gentle slope of the
proposed building a house. The museum agreed and con- landscape. It is also unusual in expanding right to the edge
tributed the funds it would have spent on a more traditional of the property line, where it displays a solid exterior wall.
exhibition, around 10 percent of the total cost of the struc- The interior of the house, Pardo explains, is an exercise in
ture; Pardo raised the rest on his own. In 1998, 4166 Sea View creating “interestingly made space.” Pardo laid out the
Lane (fig. 10.12) finally opened. Audiences were invited to rooms in a long angular path, with several abrupt turns and
tour the house during specific hours, chosen to avoid dis- oblique views that contrast with the necessarily horizontal
turbing the neighbors. When the show closed, Pardo moved and vertical character of the walls and floors. These geomet-
in. 4166 Sea View Lane mingles discourses on domesticity, ric features contrast with the organic abundance of a central
art, architecture, real estate, construction, and community, garden that is visible from nearly every point in the house.
raising questions about the intellectual merit of the project, Pardo also designed furniture, paintings, and fixtures that
the formal beauty of the house, the structural integrity of accent the contrast between geometric and organic systems
the foundations, the potential value of the property, and the in the architecture.

Space and Sculpture

10.12 Jorge Pardo, 4166 Sea View Lane, 1998. Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Like the historical Modernist homes that dot the Los the painting as an object and toward color and space inde-
Angeles cityscape and the Latin American villas that color pendent of canvas support. Grosse was inspired by Renais-
California vernacular architecture, 4166 Sea View Lane pro- sance palazzi and the attention their designers had given to
vides abundant intrusions of exterior and interior. However, every square inch of the interior. Returning to her studio,
as critic Chris Kraus has remarked, in contrast to his archi- she experimented with ways of activating the environment
tectural forebears, Pardo does not treat the outside as the around the work as well as inside it. Her solution was an
vibrant and final element necessary for the completion of the air compressor set to propel 270 liters of paint per minute.
more passive interior space. In 4166 Sea View Lane, one sees Attaching an airbrush and tanks of paint to the machine,
the landscape through glass walls. Standing securely inside Grosse took aim and sent jets of paint across walls, floors, ceil-
the home, Kraus argues, forecloses the sensation produced ings, furniture, windows, and anything else that caught her
by open widows that there is a way, and therefore a need, to eye—even other artworks.
escape. Inside and outside are conceived as different and Grosse began spraypainting with rather formalist inter-
independent elements and designed with “an equivalent ests in the properties and potential of her medium. She
balance that is active.”*! 4166 Sea View Lane possesses, Kraus explained: “I was making wall paintings with paintbrushes,
continues, “a strange absence of longing,” in which one following the format of the wall itself. It occurred to me that
doesn’t pine for an elsewhere.** The house finds its raison I was working as if with objects and I thought that my paint-
détre in the careful attention to composition, surface, shape, ing should be more independent from the space and its
and color, and the proposition that a house, like a painting, is surface. This is what spray-painting allowed.”*? Mural paint-
informed by the world but also significant on its own. ing demands that the artist address the surface of the wall,
attending to its limits, carefully maneuvering around corners
Katharina Grosse and edges. Spraypainting, on the other hand, shifts the pri-
In 1992, Berlin-based painter Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) ority to the pigment and the painter. Wall, window, floor,
won the Villa Romana Award, a residency and fellowship ceiling, stairs—anything in the path of the spraygun gets
in Florence, and as a result changed her practice to more painted. Though her first spray piece, Jnversion (1998), at
actively engage space. In Italy, her interest turned away from the Bern Kunsthalle, was monochrome, subsequent pieces

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

such as Cincy (2006) (fig. 10.13) at the Contemporary Arts to the gaze and a synoptic structure with regard to time.”*4
Center, Cincinnati, lavish their host institution with vibrant While the artist invents her relationship to space, feeling her
hues of luminescent paint. Liberated from canvas and frame, way around the rooms and slowing or quickening her move-
Grosse’s paint possesses its own spatial qualities that effec- ments as she sees fit, the viewer, with a clear vision of the
tively dematerialize the surfaces it strikes. Walls and floors environment and an immediate apprehension of the com-
cease to securely define the end of a room when jets of red, plete work, is in control of the temporality of his or her
yellow, blue, and green careen across them. The depth sug- experience. The viewing experience reverses the balance
gested by hot and cool color fields on the floor has nothing of time and space experienced by the artist. Though this
to do with the limits of the room, while the yellow, green, contrast is relevant to all painting, Grosse’s practice takes it
and orange sprayed on the windows close in a space that the to extremes.
architecture had left open. Grosse has described her creative process as the reification
To create her installations, Grosse seals the room around in paint of the act of looking. As the contrast between the
her and approaches the walls, ceiling, and floor in a full-body temporal and spatial features of the work indicates, seeing
suit and helmet. Photographs of her at work look like images and painting are categorically differentiated in her work.
taken in outer space or deep under water. Because of the She notes: “A picture cannot share the reality from which it
force of the spray, the limited visibility allowed by her protec- comes.” It may begin with observations in the world but the
tive gear, and the twists and turns of the architecture, Grosse process of art making must lead to an image “independent
is never able to see more than a fragment of the work as she enough, not only from the process of its manufacture but
creates it. With only a rough idea of what the finished work also from the initial idea and the theory that surrounds it.”*
will look like, she composes in the moment, spontaneously The continued appeal of the aesthetic solutions created for
playing fresh fragments off against those laid down before it. the Florentine palazzi, and their ability to inspire Grosse’s
The artist experiences a heightened awareness of the relation- twenty-first-century spraypainted response, demonstrate the
ship of adjacent parts, but it is the viewer who encounters the impact of the interiors, independent of the context in which
work as a simultaneous whole. Painting, in Grosse’s words, they were created. Likewise, Grosse asserts that, to be success-
“allows you [the viewer] a panoptical structure with regard ful, her own work must not be too bound to its sources.

10.13 Katharina Grosse, Cincy, 2006. Installation at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Spraypaint, styrofoam, and soil. Image courtesy BUREAU N.

Space and Sculpture

 ~
lurator, critic, and museum director Ulrich Loock (b. She associates metallic pigments and spraypainting with the
1953) developed the relationship between looking and popular arts of auto-body detailing and graffiti, but, like
spraypainting in Grosse’s work, arguing that the latter is an Oehlen, refuses to describe the effect of the work in terms
extension of the institutional critique work of artists such as of its sources or their styles. Grosse’s work follows the path
Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser (see Chapter 1). Skeptical set out by institutional critique but, unlike her Conceptual
of the opticality favored by Greenbergian formalism, institu- art predecessors, she is committed to the visual pleasures and
tional critique rejected the effects of paint in favor of a criti- capacities of paint. The opposition of the open-ended refer-
cal appreciation of painting, directing viewers’ attention away ences of Grosse’s materials and the emotive and even destruc-
from the art object itself to focus on the cultural institutions tive character of her style within the rigid structure of the
that determine its value. Grosse, Loock wrote, is painting in museum suggests the critical potential of her work.
the space of this redirected gaze. Jorge Pardo expressed a
similar impulse to use the insights of institutional critique Jessica Stockholder
to expand the arena in which one can paint to include many The work of U.S. sculptor Jessica Stockholder (b. 1959) offers
new contexts, from museums to kitchens. Grosse has focused a useful point of comparison. As both artist and educator,
primarily on cultural institutions as a place to explore the Stockholder has been influential in asserting the expansive
visual and intellectual power of paint. potential of paint divorced from the brush and canvas.
In addition to connecting Grosse’s sprayed paint with the Installations such as her Your Skin in This Weather Bourne Eye-
deflected gaze of institutional critique, Loock helpfully dis- Threads & Swollen Perfume ... (1995) (fig. 10.14) spread
tinguished between the opticality praised by the formalists out to occupy all available space, with orchestrated assem-
and the visuality embraced by this new generation of paint- blages that display a sense of the theatrical and the logic
ers. Opticality tended to be confined to the work of art—the of painting in three dimensions. Stockholder paints with
artist learned the properties of his or her medium and the things—plastic tubs, extension cords, ropes, fruit, carpets,
viewer’s attention remained focused on the artwork. Visuality lumber—to produce stages and objects through and around
is opticality diverted to anything the eye might find before it. which spectators travel. A work such as Your Skin appears
Like Oehlen copying and pasting across his computer screen as a fragmented assembly of layered vistas to be collected
or Ackermann collecting views and memories from all over and experienced as one might on a walk through a city or
the world, Grosse encourages viewers to relish the visual the woods. Taking a few steps offers the spectator a fresh
properties of her paint, the aesthetics of the surfaces on scenic view that more often than not renders the last one
which it falls, and any associations that either might conjure. not only impossible to see, but hard to remember. A shift in

10.14 Jessica
Stockholder, Your Skin in
this Weather Bourne
Eye-Threads & Swollen
Perfume ..., 1995. Paint,
concrete, structolite,
miscellaneous building
materials, carpet lamps,
electrical cord, purple
plastic stacking crates,
swimming-pool liner,
welded steel, stuffed
pillows, papiermaché,
balls. DIA Center for the
Arts. Courtesy Mitchell
Innes & Nash.

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

perspective and the yellow extension cords that cascade Neo-Expressionist storytelling in the early 1980s. As examples
through the wind generated by electric fans become the in this book suggest, however, there were instances in which
frame for another view. On a website accompanying the fiction continued to be of interest to the art world. Narra-
installation, Stockholder prominently featured snapshots of tive and even cosmological art was embraced when it was the
objects and environments in nature, thus introducing infor- product of Soviet, Chinese, or African-American cultures,
mation from the landscape to the sculpted spaces inside the where the production of alternative worlds and systems was
gallery. She created fluid transitions for Your Skin between perceived to be a defensive gesture rather than the hegem-
the space and materials of the sculpture and the informa- onic one it appeared to be when it came from the Western
tion and images provided through the architecture of the mainstream. Such practices could also be comfortably cel-
website. Unlike Grosse’s practice, in which each work threat- ebrated when the stories being told were clearly imbricated
ens to violate the integrity of the institution that supports it, in systems outside the image—the works of Leon Golub and
Stockholder’s remains loyal to the museum as a stage for Kara Walker serve as very different examples of this. In these
individual and aesthetic experience, even extending the cases, narrative could be understood as a political instru-
peripatetic character and exploratory logic established in the ment. At the other end of the spectrum, some artists chose
gallery into the virtual realm of cyberspace. to label their work as cosmological as a way of insisting that,
no matter how much a work of art seemed indistinguishable
from a moment in life, it was in fact art. Nicolas Bourriaud’s
The Power of Fiction theorizing of relational aesthetics and artworks as “models
As painters and sculptors have been re-examining their of sociability” engaged cosmological thinking.*° Artists Liam
media, another group of artists have been thinking hard Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, both of whom are central to
about the utility of fiction. Art has always provided viewers Bourriaud’s discussions, have described their work in terms
with new worlds, places of alternative systems of logic and of models and cosmologies to insure that interactions we
order in which to take refuge from the chaos of the outside might have with and within it are not confused with real life,
world. For some artists, fiction provides distance from the but rather are recognized as artistic experiences.
world, while for others it is a space in which to reimagine
the potency of storytelling for life in the new millennium. By Matthew Ritchie
the end of the century, there was a sense that striking down In 1995, when asked to explain his first solo show, U.K.-born,
the teleological necessity of Modernist claims was a progres- U.S.-based painter Matthew Ritchie (b. 1964) said his goal
sive act that, regretfully, had functioned less as a corrective was to create an “independent system and a model of models”
to Western Modernist hegemony than as a means to substi- that could “describe the internal architecture of making
tute one power for another. If artists, art historians, and paintings.”*” He had chosen painting, he explained, because
critics were to avoid letting the power of the past determine it “most closely resembles the internal operations of the
the parameters of the resistance that faced it, a trap out- mind, in its conjunction of the fantastic and the mundane
lined by Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema suspended in an organic delirium.”** 28 Paintings such as
in the 1970s, the properties of narrative communication as Mr. Universe (1998) (fig. 10.15) are explosive convul-
well as those of formal expression had to be reconsidered. sions of color and form, and map out the activities of a cast
The fictive potential of art thus came to be explored with an of characters rooted in biblical narratives, popular culture,
intensity that matched the examination of media demon- archaic legends, Classical literature, and science. They also
strated by the painters and sculptors discussed above. The represent thought. Each character represents abilities, per-
last sections of this chapter will examine first a few examples sonality traits, convictions, and states of being. Ritchie is a
of cosmological art, which proposes that the artist’s task is to prolific writer who publishes accounts of his characters and
create a world with enough internal coherence to provide analyses of the scientific theories that give form to the terrain
motivation and logic for the elements within it, and then less and plots that they inhabit. In the end, he aims to visualize
systematic excursions into fiction and the spaces of contem- not only how we make art, but also how we think and how the
porary life. physical world—from cell growth to the Big Bang—functions.
A cosmology relies on a division between art and life Ritchie’s cosmology revolves around the adventures of
such that the systems presentedin the former realm are forty-nine characters he introduced in groups between 1995
not undermined by those in the latter. Both religious and and 2002. The first were the seven Watchers, forced to flee
Modernist art are typically cosmological as each proposes to Heaven for sexually enticing Adam’s children. Mulcifer,
offer clear systems to viewers, who are encouraged to accept the builder, symbol of the frontal lobe of the brain, was the
them and the values they promote. For most critics in the “matrix of information” for the Watchers and the index for
1970s and early 1980s, attention to fictive systems and the entire project.?? Upon being thrown down to Earth, the
hermetic narratives appeared not only retrograde, but also Watchers broke apart, sending their attributes into the world.
potentially dangerous. Fears that such qualities were com- Seeking out the attributes that had formerly belonged to the
plicit with conservative politics underlay the rejection of Watchers, and chronicling the addition of new features to life

The Power of Fiction

on Earth, led Ritchie to create more characters. There are of time. Ritchie also imagines the Golem and a collection of
ordinary subjects—including an actress, an astronaut, and a superheroes, angels, and mythical creatures, each of which is
swimmer—but most are rather extraordinary. We meet the its own reification of ideas, emotions, and qualities.
seven Gamblers, personifications of quantum-mechanical forces Ritchie’s oeuvre includes geological and crystalline assem-
of the universe who play a game symbolizing the beginning
é d L=
blies of Sintra, a plastic membrane, affixed directly to the wall

10.16 Matthew Ritchie,

Universal Adversary
2006. Mixed media.

Narratives
and spreading across the floor, architectural structures made results of such differentiation. Within the cosmology of The
of laser-cut metal sheets, lightboxes, computer animations, Cremaster Cycle, Barney weaves webs of people, things, places,
and many works on paper and canvas. Drawing, however, sounds, colors, shapes, and movements, all of which signify
remains the foundation of his studio practice. Mr. Universe, and actualize indeterminacy.
which is oil and marker on canvas, presents a scenario Despite the centrality of film to Barney’s career, he con-
typical of Ritchie’s work of the 1990s. There is a central form siders himself first and foremost a sculptor. Each of the
painted with interlocking polygons of flat pigment overlaid films features sustained examinations of sculptures and sets
with various forms of notation sketching out objects or tex- built with unstable substances including petroleum jelly, ice,
tures and suggesting geometries and theorems. Like most beeswax, and tapioca. Such materials suggest entropy and
of Ritchie’s work, Mr: Universe is a map and an image; it is an link Barney’s work to the Process art of Eva Hesse (1936-70)
ideogram describing a moment in the history of the universe, and Robert Smithson as well as the work of Joseph Beuys
with notations indicating features of its growth or character (see Chapter 1). Like these earlier artists, Barney forced his
and a depiction of a landmass in the throes of geological entropic materials to meet with resistance as provided by
change. The duality of maps and pictures, ideas and things, materials as varied as the body, architecture, geography, and
corresponds to the dual nature of Ritchie’s protagonists as even film. The plot of The Cremaster Cycle reiterates the per-
characters and symbols. This conjunction of cartographic or petual play of give and take, transformation and obstruction,
conceptual descriptions with representational and physical and entropy and containment performed by his materials.
qualities is amplified in later works such as Universal Adversary Cremaster 4 (1994) (fig. 10.17) was the first film in the
(2006) (fig. 10.16), in which the viewer is surrounded by cycle to be made, and its storyline is the clearest. Barney
illuminated screens and ornamented scaffolding, and is even plays the Loughton Candidate, a satyr on the cusp of adult-
sent up a staircase to a crow’s-nest from which to view scenes hood whose impending maturation is the centerpiece of
of a maritime apocalypse.
The visual and narrative complexity of
Ritchie’s work ensures the cosmological integ-
rity of the system. Simultaneously, however, it is
the correlation of certain elements with aspects
of reality that ensures the relevance of the
work. The notation across the surface of Mr.
Universe, which resembles scientific data, or the
title “Universal Adversary,” which is lifted from
U.S. military jargon, links the invention in the
art to exploration of the real world, reminding
the viewer that the purpose of this cosmology
is to produce a model for how we think about
our universe and how we create within it.

Matthew Barney
Ritchie invented and complicated his cosmo-
logical structures to visualize processes of intel-
lectual, artistic, and even planetary creation.
U.S. artist Matthew Barney (b. 1967), whose
work consists of films, sculptures, installations,
drawings, and performances, turned to cos-
mologies with a similarly abstract aim: to give
sculptural form to the potential for transforma-
tion in the absence of its resolution. In other
words, the challenge is to represent change as
a process without resorting to sculpting states
of before and after. His monumental Cremaster
Cycle (1994-2002) is a five-film series that
explores gender differentiation without resolv-
ing its protagonists into either male or female
positions. The films and related photography
and sculpture explore the ability to become 10.17 Matthew Barney, Cremaster 4,. The Loughton Candidate, 1994. Production still.
one or another gender without showing the © 1994 Matthew Barney. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

The Power of Fiction

the plot. During the film, he examines the roots of horns on movies named for it, the cremaster muscle fulfills a real func-
his head which may grow and so mark his sexual maturity as tion that imitates, symbolizes, and even represents a transfor-
male, or they may not, thus stabilizing his gender as female. mation that it nonetheless does not effect. Barney conceives
He dances and finally submerges himself first in the ocean of video and film in a similar fashion, as a means to repre-
and then in a narrow underground fissure that ends with a sent power and also to create skepticism about the things it
long tunnel lined with petroleum jelly. Objects such as the depicts. He has listed his exposure to the performance videos
tunnel and jelly, and motorcycles that race around the Isle of of Marina Abramovié and Ulay (see Chapter 7) as an impor-
Man, U.K., (where the film was shot) carry the plot as much tant influence on his work, both for the impact of the perfor-
as the actors do. The urgency of the protagonist’s develop- mances and also for the sensation that he felt, while watching
ment is conveyed by the speeding vehicles, the difficulty by them of examining evidence, that as such invited suspicion as
the narrow passageway, and the sexual nature of the process well as inspiration. This potential of video and film to fiction-
emphasized by the highly masculine yet clearly female bodies alize their contents like the obscure and extravagant plots
of a collection of cross-dressing Sibyls that bring to mind provides a means of insulating Barney’s cosmology from the
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. In other episodes of real world of the viewers to whom it is addressed.
the cycle the potential for change is expressed by characters Barney has said that the Cremaster Cycle “could be consid-
including architects, masons, nymphs, queens, and bees, ered a system that seeks freedom by decentralizing its energy,
objects such as cars, buildings, and furniture, and scenes attempting to hybridize itself into a web of available cultural
including horse races, séances, executions, and the slow vehicles.”*? The web extends to biological and geological
arrangement of grapes inside a blimp. Every object in the phenomena, popular culture, history, sports, and Barney’s
films is, in fact, a character and every character is, in Barney’s own narrative inventions. Cremaster 2 (1999) illustrates the
words, a “physical state.”*° Elaborating states of being while breadth of its creator’s cosmology. This film revolves around
shortcircuiting narrative resolution subverts the classic Holly- the execution on January 17, 1977 in Salt Lake City, Utah
wood film that relies, as Laura Mulvey theorized (see Chapter of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, the performances of
2), on both the delectation of details, amply provided by Harry Houdini, and the life of bees. Gilmore was the first
Barney, and the cathartic resolution of the plot, which he person to be executed in the United States after the Supreme
denies. Cremaster 4, like all the films in the cycle, ends with Court lifted its 1972-76 ban on the death, penalty. He entered
the protagonist’s gender still in question. popular lore through Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song
The relationship between narrative, the body, and the (1979), a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the last months of
mind in The Cremaster Cycle can be gleaned from Barney’s Gilmore’s life that Mailer then adapted into an Emmy Award-
comments on Greek art: “There’s something about classical winning television movie in 1982. Barney approached Mailer
contrapposto [the pose in which the weight of the figure has for Cremaster 2 and cast the writer as Harry Houdini, who Gil-
been shifted to one foot in preparation to move]—it’s quiv- more’s grandmother claimed was the father of Gary’s father,
ering on the threshold between hubris and some kind of Frank. The paternal triad of Frank Gilmore, Norman Mailer,
real but repressed omnipotence, All these amazing things and Harry Houdini is one of the associative networks that fill
can happen on that threshold, these powerful internal nar- Barney’s films. Gilmore’s parents, his victims, his girlfriend,
ratives.”*! The conventional interpretation of contrapposto the police, the country singer Johnny Cash, as well as the
presents the pose as an expression of human potential landscape of Utah, the life of bees, and many other symbols
divorced from any specific task. Unlike representations of and objects intertwine to illuminate the end of Gilmore’s
heroes in the midst of great deeds, a figure shown in contrap- life, but they never define a clear plot or stable resolution.
posto expresses power by deferring action. Barney layers this As Mailer said of Barney’s filmmaking: “For people who want
reading with the suggestion that the subject’s power is kept in to follow the story, it’s hopeless, they'll hate the work. But
reserve due to a psychic confusion of ambition and anxiety. there’s an intensity of perception, and a visceral experience
Actualization of power in Barney’s reading of contrapposto you have when you watch his stuff which is extraordinary.”**
is triply subverted, first by the artist who sculpts his figure to In addition to screening the films, Barney exhibits por
demonstrate undirected physical readiness, then by the arro- tions of the sets and related sculpture, thus extending his cos-
gant and false claims of hubris, and finally by the repression mology into the gallery. The Cabinet of Harry Houdini (1999)
of the character’s actual and profound abilities. Such a con- (fig. 10.18) from Cremaster 2 suggests power through the
fusion of indirection, effort, and identity runs through The dumbbells while the Mormon context that permeates the
Cremaster Cycle. The title also alludes to the ambiguous rela- Gilmore narrative is symbolized by the honeycomb, an allu-
tionship between physical and psychological power. Cremas- sion to the bee, a symbol of the religion. Displayed in the
ter is the name of the muscle that controls the rise and fall gallery, the work is an inverted reflection of the objects in
of the male testicles. Its actions in the fetus coincide with the the films. Full cosmological and even aesthetic elaboration
rise and fall of the reproductive organs and the subsequent of the sculpture requires knowledge of the films. Attention
determination of sex. Barney points out that the cremaster to potentiality and particularity is shared by Barney’s contem-
muscle does not control gender differentiation. Like the poraries, who often present the self in perpetual flux. Unlike

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

 10.18 Matthew Barney, The
Cabinet of Harry Houdini, 1999.
Cast nylon, salt epoxy resin,
woven polypropylene, prosthetic
plastic, and beeswax, 835% x
COR Si2 224 5 220
185.4 cm). Astrup Fearnley
collection, Oslo. © 1999 Matthew
Barney. Courtesy Gladstone
Gallery, New York and Brussels.

the identity art of the 1980s and 1990s, Barney’s system and certain kind of reality.”*° The challenge is to create narratives
the shifting identity positions within it are contained by the that open up fissures to the “parallel scenarios,” the “utopias,
cosmology of the films. Barney’s choice of cosmological story- negotiations, and failures,” that are found in the “elsewhere”
telling provides a setting in which to develop artistic ideas of “real existence.” In his words: “to actualize this narrative,
that, like medical experimentation, require a sterile environ- we must inhabit it.”*°
ment uncontaminated by the variables of real life. Though Huyghe creates films, photographs, installations,
and sculptures, his primary medium is narrative. He offers
Pierre Huyghe fragmented and layered segments of stories to collaborators
French artist Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962) shifts the discussion who use them to create new narratives which, in turn, provide
from self-contained cosmologies that signify their relevance material to audiences and to new collaborators. In interviews,
to the outside world as models or analogies, to strategies he refers to the stories as “scores” or “the scenario,” terms
for dissolving the boundaries between artistic narrative and that indicate performativity, reproducibility, and even chance:
actual reality. He begins with an understanding of narrative One writes the score for others to interpret. Likewise, a sce-
in which “[e]verything that resembles a narrative refers to nario—as opposed to a plan—is partial and opens itself to
an elsewhere, an elsewhere that is also a before, where things unknown elements that may appear during the execution
had a real existence.”** Unlike the cosmologies of Ritchie of the work. The Third Memory (1999) (fig. 10.19), a two-
or Barney, Huyghe’s stories are significant in the degree channel re-enactment of a bank robbery, looks to Hollywood
that they point to real opportunities outside the narrative. movies, television news, autobiography, and reality TV as
In fact, Huyghe’s ambition is even greater. He proposes to sources, and puts authorial power in the hands of the bank
“investigate how a fiction, how a story, could in fact produce a robber. Streamside Day Follies (2003) adds traditional community

The Power of Fiction

10.19 Pierre Huyghe, The Third Memory, 1999. Film stills. Double projection, beta digital video monitor.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

festivals and contemporary tales of suburban development is a story he had told many times before to newspapers and
into the mix while inviting an entire neighborhood to take on television in the mid- and late 1970s. Huyghe noted:
ownership of the tale. Both works demonstrate Huyghe’s “John has his memory of the fact and the viewers have their
scoring and are case studies of the productivity of narrative. memory of the fiction. I am interested in this confusion of
The Third Memory reimagines the heist dramatized in the reality and fiction.”*’ It is a strength of the work that it reveals
Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), starring Al the degree to which fiction and reality are intertwined
Pacino as lead gunman John Wojtowicz, renamed Sonny for both the protagonist and the audience. At one point
Wortzik in the movie. Huyghe saw the movie in the 1990s Wojtowitz says: “The cops keep trying to provoke us. In the
and invited the real Wojtowicz, who served fourteen years for real movie the cops fire on us.” Describing the actual event
the crime, to Paris to recount his memories of the robbery. as the “real movie” is a Freudian slip that underlines the com-
Wojtowicz accepted and was filmed directing a cast of hired plicated nature of our experience of the past. It also serves
actors to reenact the crime with him on a set Huyghe built as a reminder that an event and its representation are cat-
to resemble the bank in the movie. Several times during egorically different, though the experience of each is real,
the work, Huyghe uses the second screen to show Al Pacino with consequences for our understanding of the world and
playing Wojtowicz or period news footage of the real ourselves. One does not leave The Third Memory with a sense
Wojtowicz during the robbery. The event itself—as Wojtowicz of truth about what really happened. Rather, we experience a
tells it and as Pacino acted it—was highly theatrical. The 1975 reality that combines the events that occurred with the stories
movie poster declared: “The robbery should have taken 10 that carry them.
minutes. 4 hours later, the bank was like a circus sideshow. Reflecting on the diversity of his projects, Huyghe has
8 hours later, it was the hottest thing on live T.-V. 12 hours noted that with every work a new poetics of production is
later, it was all history. And it’s all true.” The inherent drama invented. Of Streamside Day (2003) (fig. 10.20) he says: “I
of the event, however, is less significant for Huyghe than the occupy both sides of a divide: I build up a fiction and then I
manner and consequences of its retelling. The robbery was make a documentary of this fiction. The point is: we should
one of the first crimes to be committed in front of televi- invent reality before filming it. We need to ‘re-scenarize’ the
sion cameras. Almost as soon as the police arrived, camera real.”** Streamside Day centers on Streamside Day, a festival ini-
crews were on the scene, transforming the Brooklyn side- tiated, or scored, by Huyghe to commemorate the founding
walk into a stage and Wojtowicz and the police into actors. of a housing development, Streamside Knolls, in the Hudson
News of events at the bank was broadcast throughout the River Valley in New York. In consultation with the residents,
day, even interrupting a nationally televised speech by Presi- Huyghe set a date and posted announcements: “Welcome to
dent Richard Nixon. Wojtowicz deftly stepped into his role Streamside Day Celebration.” Elements included: “Parade
of leading man, darting in and out of the bank, confronting and Costumes, Balloons and T-Shirts, Lemonade and Green
the police, and talking to the cameras. His actions, as well as Cotton Candy, Donuts and ‘Streamside Day Cake.’” Also
the news broadcasts of them, constitute the first narrative in planned were: “Cookie decorating, building houses out of
Huyghe’s work. They provide part of the “score,” not only for cardboard boxes and a Wild Pet Parade.” In addition Huyghe
The Third Memory, but also for Dog Day Afternoon, which pro- retooled the sound system on an ice-cream truck, assembled
vides the second and most familiar element of the “score.” an artificial moon, and set up a stage. The town supervisor, a
Wojtowicz’s retelling of the crime, his arrest, and his involve- position akin to mayor, and the real-estate developer respon-
ment with Dog Day Afternoon constitutes a third narrative. It sible for the site were invited to speak, and a musician sang

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

 tectural installation. To view the work,
one enters what appears to be an empty
room, around the edges of which hang
walls that have been painted metallic
hues of green, alluding, for Huyghe, to
the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. The
walls soon start moving along tracks in
the ceiling to form a shimmering pen-
tagon in the center of the room. This
structure is one of Huyghe’s follies—
small whimsical elements of garden
architecture designed to decorate the
landscape of an estate. A film is then
projected on the inside of these walls,
presenting a short documentary that
culminates in a musical performance,
a second folly. The story Streamside Day
presents begins with idyllic scenes of
nature. A fawn and a bunny lie together
in the woods. A waterfall cascades into
a quiet pond. The fawn then makes its
way into the nearly finished neighbor-
hood of Streamside. Meanwhile, a young
couple and their two daughters drive
to their new home. They are shown a
model of the development that includes
their new house and the girls set off to
play in the nearby woods. Above them,
the vines and trees take on an ominous
aspect of looming figures, but before
the fantasy turns black the celebration
begins. This new introduction is not
part of the Streamside Day Celebra-
10.20 Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day, 2003. Film still. Digital video projection from film and video
transfers, 26 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. tion; it is, instead, part of the fantasy
created for the gallery audience. Pro-
viding the viewer with an architectural
space akin to an emerald jewel box,
an original composition, “Streamside Celebration.” Having along with visions of nature straight out of a Disney movie,
placed these elements into the setting like objects in an frames Huyghe’s film with conventional cultural construc-
interactive installation, Huyghe then picked up the camera. tions regarding nature. The documentary scenes of the cel-
Most of the resulting film records what happened as the ebration that follow are thus doubly undermined, first, by
new residents of Streamside Knolls marched through their the artifice of Huyghe’s deliberate planning and, second, by
still-unfinished neighborhood, played music, dressed up, ate, the architectural and cinematic fictions in the gallery. For
danced, and made Streamside Day into an event. Huyghe the viewer, the status of any “reality” here is impossible to
hoped that future residents would replay the fiction he had determine. As the fake moon grows brighter in the sky, even
created, making it an annual celebration. When he discussed the wall text that explains the reality of Streamside Knolls in
the project, he was careful to say that he did not think Fishkill, New York is not enough to dispel the feeling that
artists should own the burden of fixing the world, but that everything here is fake. If we return to Huyghe’s discus-
the narratives they create should add something to reality. sion of the function of narrative, we realize that it is just at
In addition to the celebration itself and any possible trad- the moment when the work most clearly resembles a narra-
ition it may give rise to, the song and programming for tive that we are alerted to the “elsewhere” that surrounds the
a community center were real products that came out of story we are being shown. For the gallery viewer, the narra-
Huyghe’s fiction. tives of Streamside Day point to “utopias, negotiations, and fail-
The Streamside Day celebration became the “score” for ures” of cities, suburban developments, small towns, or even
Streamside Day Follies, a temporary cinematic and archi- Kansas and Oz.

The Power of Fiction

Janet Cardiff one that is necessarily different for each participant. At
The next artists to be discussed incorporate into their explo- those moments when the recording coincides with facts on
rations of narrative explicit appreciation for the pleasure of the ground—such as hearing actual musicians playing in the
being entertained. Canadian artist Janet Cardiff (b. 1957), park while music is being described in the audio or seeing
who splits her time between rural western Canada and Berlin, a man approach as one is being discussed in the story—
has created one of the most striking formats in contemporary Cardiff’s narrative with its mixture of historical fact and
art. Speaking into a binaural recording device, essentially a fiction is combined with daily life by the incidental interac-
dummy head with microphones mounted in its ears, Cardiff tions of the listener with the surrounding environment. In
creates audio walks, providing her audience with a sound- the process of listening and walking, Cardiff's audience gains
track while the real world supplies the visuals. In headphones a heightened awareness of both what is real and what is not.
provided by the artist, Cardiff's voice speaks gently as though Cardiff and‘her husband, George Bures Miller (b. 1960),
she is standing just behind us. Birds sing to the left, a man who helps produce the walks and with whom Cardiff col-
approaches and walks by us on the right, his footsteps getting laborates on sculptural and sound installations, have listed
softer as he passes into the distance. Just beyond the tunnel movies, theaters, and amusement parks as influences. These
we are standing beneath, it rains. These sonic and spatial are all places where the viewer suspends control in exchange
effects compete with our sensual apprehension of the actual for entertainment. Cardiff has responded to the common
spaces through which we walk. Sometimes Cardiff's excur- critique of her work that it is manipulative: “Everything in
sions pass through crowded public spaces, sometimes they our culture is about manipulation. Our behavior is always
lead one on nearly solitary strolls. Often fragments of her modified, and that was one of the subtexts of my walk pieces.
stories are synchronized with what is occurring in the land- It is a manipulation—but it’s also like a child’s game in
scape. The people that pass in the recording correspond with that you have the freedom to give up your power, it’s really
those on the street beside you, or an object described in the about that pleasure.”*! Cardiff's audio walks suggest that
story appears in front of you. These instances of synchronic- one of the pleasures we can afford ourselves in the early
ity amplify the effect of being, as Cardiff describes it, “inside twenty-first century is that of stepping into a story delivered
the filmic experience.”*? in such a way as to meddle with our ability to distinguish fact
Like many of the visual artists discussed in this chapter, from fiction.
Cardiff describes her process as “layering.” She will go over
and over a site, walking through it, videotaping it, learn- Francesco Vezzoli
ing as much as she can from the location and researching At the opening of the 2005 Venice Biennale and again at the
its history. In Munster Walk (1997), she imagines a German 2006 Whitney Biennial, long lines formed outside a small
man traversing the sidewalks where his dead daughter once screening room built into the galleries. Inside, there were
walked. As Cardiff relays details from the environment and plush velvet seats, red curtains, and a silver screen. Dramatic
narrates fragments of a story about a daughter, or a mother, music with crisply edited voiceover and frequent screams of
we hear other voices—of a boy and an older man. In Her Long pleasure and distress surrounded the spectator and bled teas-
Black Hair (2004), a walk through Central Park in Manhattan, ingly into the neighboring rooms. The film being screened
Cardiff layers the sounds of musicians who seem to be near was Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (2005) (fig.
the listener with gunshots fired, she tells us, to control the 10.21) by the Milan-based artist Francesco Vezzoli (b. 1971)
goats and pigs grazing in the park—a detail from the city’s and it advertised a blockbuster movie based on Vidal’s script
past. Soon after, we hear strollers and nannies, along with dramatizing the life of the Roman emperor and infamous
the consistent rhythm of footsteps, which we are instructed tyrant Caligula (12-41 cr). The original film had become
to follow with our own. In this fashion the listener keeps pace mired in creative conflict and was eventually released in
with Cardiff's tour, hearing moments in the narrative at par- 1979 with Vidal’s name removed. It failed badly at the box
ticular places in the park and on occasion being prompted office. Vezzoli’s trailer promised finally to bestow upon Vidal,
to compare the scene with photographs provided at the Caligula, and a cast of stars the glory they deserved. However,
start of the journey. Discussing her creative process, Cardiff Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula was a preview for
has said: “Actually the way we approach audio is also very a film Vezzoli had no intention of making. The five-minute
similar to printmaking ... You can take different sources spectacle joined other Vezzoli projects: a completed pilot for
from all over, and then you collage them together. Conceptu- a reality TV show that never aired, an election campaign for
ally I always found that interesting; you can take something candidates who did not exist, a premiere of a play that never
recorded now and footage that was recorded 20 years ago, opened, promotion for an exhibition that did not exist, and
and you can seamlessly put them together in audio. It’s like an advertising campaign for a perfume with no scent.
a mixture of time and space.”*° Drawing on what she sees as The trailer opens with Gore Vidal sitting outside a villa
a societal instinct to reframe experiences in terms of stories, in Los Angeles and speaking: “What is the point of telling
Cardiff relies on her audience to collaborate with her in the story of someone who is somewhat insane at a very dark
turning the layered fragments into a narrative experience, point in human history? I think the answer to that is: Every

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

10.21 Francesco Vezzoli, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, 2005. Film stills featuring Adriana Asti
(top lett), Gore Vidal (bottom left), and Milla Jovovich (bottom right). © Francesco Vezzoli. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

point in human history is dark.” Then titles fill the screen, melodrama and wealth. “I wanted to create something
the volume increases, and a second voice intones: “Through- that contained the visual richness of an opera, something
out the course of human history there have been only three stuffed with quotations, loaded with references and details,”
truly great stories ... The first was the immaculate birth of he explained.” Once viewers have been seduced, there is
Christ. The second was the untimely death of Christ. And ample opportunity to ask them to reflect on the specious
the third and greatest-by-far- belonged to this man. Caligula.” presentation of stars and sex or on the hubris of empire,
The anticipated remake promises to be “so passionate in its whether in Rome or Hollywood.
extremes you can literally feel it coating you in the taboo” Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in London in
and stocked “with an international cast of superstars more 1995, Vezzoli has drawn attention to a remarkable variety of
decadent than your wildest dreams.” The latter is most cer- the narrative strategies that permeate contemporary culture,
tainly true. Like all of Vezzoli’s productions, his Caligula including televised drama, reality television, classic and
is indeed stocked with stars, all of whom agreed to work on experimental film, movie advertising, avant-garde theater,
the project for free. Helen Mirren, who was in the original entertainment news, soap operas, and biography. He uses
film, Benicio Del Toro, Adriana Asti, Milla Jovovich, Karen narrative to invite the viewer into what he considers the core
Black, and Courtney Love are all featured. Donatello Versace of his artistic project—the investigation of sites of power,
designed the costumes. Vezzoli has said that the melodra- entertainment being only one. In 2007, he demonstrated his
matic story of the Roman emperor was attractive as an alle- interest in moving into other realms of power with Democrazy,
gory for the excesses of George W. Bush’s presidency. But dueling promotional videos supporting two fictional presi-
the Trailer is hardly a cautionary tale. This is a romp through dential candidates. Vezzoli enlisted the services of political
Hollywood in which history, fiction, fame, and sexual fantasy strategists who had advised U.S. presidents George W. Bush and
comically and seductively, collide. After Vezzoli began Bill Clinton. By using political professionals, Vezzoli insured
enlisting the help of film icons in the late 1990s, he was cri- that the spoken lines would be real, as authentic as if they
tiqued for being too much of a fan. His response was that had genuinely been uttered on the campaign trail. It was simply
his art reflected upon the way we wrap our imaginations in that in this case the politicians were fake. Vezzoli cast U.S.

The Power of Fiction

actress Sharon Stone and French philosopher Bernard-Henri a cast including Cate Blanchett, Abigail Breslin, Natalie
Lévy as the candidates. The prevalence of actor-politicians Portman, David Straithairn, and Anita Ekberg at the Guggen-
such as Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger in con- heim Museum, New York. John Galliano and Miuccia Prada
temporary politics, however, contributes to the confusion of designed and contributed several costumes. A stage was built
reality and fiction in Democrazy, as does the fact that Stone in the center of the rotunda around which VIP seating was
and Lévy have each contributed to public dialogues on inter- arranged. Additional special viewing areas were provided to
national issues. Lévy also worked in a limited advisory capac- guests in the museum’s upper levels, while the downstairs
ity for French president Jacques Chirac. Both of Vezzoli’s auditorium accommodated the remaining ticket holders.
actors were as likely to be real candidates as any number of The auditorium seating offered no direct view of the stage,
genuine celebrities-turned-politicians. “My true purpose,” but did have Cate Blanchett seated on its stage in front of
Vezzoli explained, “is to penetrate into the structures that eight screens broadcasting a live feed of the production
today hold power ... I want to represent the ways these struc- upstairs. Blanchett left when she was required to make her
tures, whether they are reality shows, Hollywood, or elective entrance on the main stage at the conclusion of the play.
campaigns, control the media and seduce the masses so that The fanfare of the production was matched by confusion
they can manipulate them. With Democrazy | wanted to go created at the night of the performance. The museum’s
where a lot of people thought I would never be able to go.”* doors were opened to the audience about an hour later than
A few months after the opening of Democrazy in Venice, advertised. In addition to the tension caused by this delay,
Vezzoli turned back to the world of art and fame to produce there was considerable upset because the event had been
RIGHT YOU ARE (IF YOU THINK YOU ARE), a premiere of a advertised as free to the public, but few if any tickets were
play by Luigi Pirandello that would never run (fig. 10.22). actually made available. Attendance was largely a matter of
The event purported to be a unique production of a theatri- being invited or, one might say, being cast in the role of audi-
cal work originally written to tests the limits of narrative. In ence member. The scenario appeared to repeat the pattern
actuality it was an assemblage of several different storylines, of entitlement by which stars and socialites get the privileged
of which the Pirandello play was only one. Vezzoli assembled seats while the rest watch from a distance or read about it in

10.22 Francesco Vezzoli, RIGHT YOU ARE (IF YOU THINK YOU ARE), 2007. Live performance at the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (PerformaO7). © Francesco Vezzoli. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

New Narratives
the papers. Once the play began, however, it became evident Unlike those artists with whom this chapter began, whose
that this narrative of privilege, like the narrative of the play art remains rooted in painting or sculpture, Arcangel and
and the drama of the event itself, was part of a composition Trecartin mine the computer monitor and television screen
best viewed from afar. The actors sat in a circle, with their for content and form, and then return their creative ener-
backs to the audience, and performed the play as a reading. gies to those very same screens and even their original
They had neither rehearsed nor memorized their lines. The audiences. The results further develop the visual and meta-
VIPs could see very little and were being filmed for the audi- phoric potential of computer-based and online commu-
ence in the theater below, alongside the actors, all of whom nication for conveying the character and aesthetics of the
were performing for the camera. Vezzoli recounted: “That new century. Arcangel’s interest in entertainment technolo-
night at the museum the real art was the gathering of all gies such as early video games, the storage capacity of the
those people (artists, actors, curators, critics, journalists, Internet, especially as evidenced in blog and Twitter feeds,
and socialites) as symbols of their social and public roles and and the way each deteriorates with age and use, suggests
their interaction with themselves.” very different meanings from Trecartin’s manipulations of
Vezzoli’s claim was essentially that everybody upstairs at Internet communication to generate fragmented, centrifu-
the Guggenheim was part of his work, assembled, indeed gal, and metamorphosing expressions of emotion, person-
appropriated, from their personal and professional lives ality, and even social analysis. This discussion will start with
to be re-presented for the viewing public downstairs. The Arcangel’s appropriation-based, abstract, and often contem-
overflow guests, no doubt disappointed not to have the VIP plative work before addressing Trecartin’s high-speed and
seats, turned out to be the ones who not only got the clear- expressive videos.
est picture of the play, but also the only view of the “real
art” in its entirety. Questions were raised about who looks at Cory Arcangel
whom, how power functions to permit access (in this case to In early 2000, Cory Arcangel (b. 1978), recently graduated
the stars), and also how it can be subverted by vision, both from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, began cre-
the directorial gaze of the artist and the surveilling eyes of ating an eclectic body of work that seemed to fit no genre.
the audience downstairs. Narrative here, as in the work of As he described it: “When I graduated from school, I inves-
Huyghe and Cardiff, was presented so that the seduction tigated all the different outlets for my work and participated
of the plot was disrupted by a self-consciousness regarding in them all. That included underground film festivals, per-
the mechanics and social meaning of its telling. As with the formance spaces, non-profits, museums, galleries, the web,
painters in this chapter, beauty and absorption are accompa- and even self-organized tours. So I pretty much made work
nied by connections to the real world. Work such as Vezzoli’s for any context that existed and still do to this day.”* The
demonstrates how the critiques of the previous decades— question of labels, for himself or what he was making, was set
from Laura Mulvey’s analysis of cinema and “the Gaze,” aside. Arcangel found his first bit of artworld fame thanks to
to deconstructions of painting and mass media—have not a rather rudimentary computer animation of white clouds
prevented contemporary artists from turning to traditional slowly and uniformly crossing a sky-blue field. Many viewers,
genres and conventional forms. Artists still paint and stories particularly those who were children of middle-class homes
are still told. Both are done, however, with an awareness of in the 1980s, could be counted on to recognize the scene as
their limits and, often, an eagerness to reject purity of form coming from the Super Mario Brothers video game manu-
or the exclusivity of narrative. factured by Nintendo. Arcangel created the piece, called
Super Mario Clouds (2002), by hacking into a game cartridge
and removing everything except for the sky and the clouds.
Narrativity 2.0 The process of winnowing the game down to its background
As the references in the work discussed earlier in this chapter highlights its formal qualities: its ability to present fields of
to computer graphics, networked systems, and the aesthetics color produced by light and to include objects and colors
of the Internet demonstrate, the impulse to think through in motion. Arcangel makes clear his formalist, even Green-
form and narrative is being transformed by digital and bergian (see Introduction) attention to media specific-
online technologies. Two very different artists, Cory Arcangel ity in the tutorial “How to Make Super Mario Clouds.” This
and Ryan Trecartin, work in close dialogue with traditional text, posted online, provides instructions for replicating the
media while being clearly immersed in the aesthetics and work as well as a history of Arcangel’s source material. The
experience of YouTube, Photoshop, and Web 2.0, as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games including
increasingly interactive Internet is called. Much as Pop artists Super Mario Brothers, he explains, constituted a technologi-
of the 1960s expanded their artistic vocabulary by drawing cal advance in the gaming industry because they utilized two
on the aesthetics, of pop: culture, Arcangel and Trecartin chips, one containing the graphics and the other the pro-
make work that is both formally and conceptually embed- gramming that directs where and when the imagery appears.
ded in the style and culture of commercially defined modes Arcangel created Super Mario Clouds, and an extensive body
of representation. of related works, by appropriating the graphics chip and

Narrativity 2.0
 modifying the programming chip. Limiting his interven-
tion to manipulating the assembly language of the program
gave Arcangel “control over the machine and assure[d]
me that aesthetic choices are based on the hardware of the
machine." Super Mario Clouds, like the game itself, looks as
it does because it takes full advantage of the graphics capabil-
ity of the NES. In Greenberg’s terms, Arcangel demonstrated it)
the “irreplaceability” of his medium, ironically one destined iat
for rapid obsolescence. He then made Super Mario Clouds 2k3 ea
(2003), for which the animated sky took on cinematic dimen-
sions for projection in museums; The Making of Super Mario
Clouds (2004), a silent, real-time documentation of the artist
cracking the NES Super Mario Brothers game; and finally,
with Paper Rad (a collective of three like-minded artists),
the Super Mario Movie (2005) (fig. 10.23), a virtuosic fifteen-
minute display combining music and animation created
within the media limitations of the NES system. These works
and a host of related video-game modifications have been
compared to Minimalism for their reduced geometric com-
positions, Pop art for their sources, Conceptual art for their
use of instructions, and Fluxus for their fascination with
the everyday.
Arcangel’s debt to 1960s traditions, particularly avant-
garde music and Fluxus art, is made explicit in his Struc-
tural Film (2007), a variation on Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film
(1964-65) (see fig. 1.3). For the piece, Archangel simulated
the empty celluloid of Paik’s film using the “Aged Film” filter
on iMovie software and then had the digital file saved in a
second program, QuickTime, and transferred to 16mm film.
The transfer process produced an image quality that not only
evokes the analogue experience of watching the light pass
through Paik’s film and land on the silver screen, but also
interrupts the illusion with pixelated irregularities that reveal
Arcangel’s digital medium, Structural Film stakes out a histori- :
cal reference for Arcangel’s interest in media technology, but ® :
it is only one such source. A very different tradition—one WyyyYeryyy:
linked to the early 1980s practice, called cracking, of break- am : cant
ing through the copyright codes of game cartridges to insert
personalized features into the software is another impor
tant source for his work. The DIY aesthetic of cracking shares
a spirit of individuality and anti-authoritarianism with graf-
fiti art, which was gaining visibility at the same moment
(see
Chapter 4). Arcangel made this legacy explicit in Low-Level
Allstars (2003), a compilation of period crack tags—introduc-
tions literally graffitied into the software. The tags appear as
several seconds of animation advertising the prowess of the
digital intruder. Created for the Commodore 64 system, a
lower-resolution, single-chip predecessor of the NES, the
tags are character-based and black-and-white. As assertions
of individuality within the digital architecture, these tags set

10.23 Cory Arcangel in collaboration with Paper Rad, Super Mario

Movie, 2005. Hacked Nintendo Entertainment System Super Mario
Brothers cartridge, Nintendo Entertainment System game console, and artist
software. © Cory Arcangel. Courtesy of Cory Arcangel and Lisson Gallery

276) Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

the stage for such twenty-first-century projects as those of IAA provided by JPEG technology has created the recogniz-
and Hasah Elahi (see Chapter 11), or the attempts of hacker ably pixelated images that characterize the aesthetic of the
groups such as Anonymous to leave their mark on contempo- first decade of the new millennium. His 2009 retrospective
rary cyberspace. at the Nederlands Institute voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam,
Arcangel has described his art as a means of finding open was called “Depreciated,” linking the information loss to
spaces within technology that are not defined by its conven- economics and extending the significance of deterioration
tional rules and limits. Praising his success, critics have made from an influence on style to a metaphor for social conditions.
much of the meditative repetition of clouds in Super Mario It is not only animated surrogates who struggle through
Clouds or the unending open road in FI Racer Mod (2004), virtual space to maintain familiar forms of productivity; real
for which Arcangel removed everything but the road and people populate Arcangel’s televisual arena as well. Following
distant mountains from an automobile racing game: Here, it the example of appropriation artists of the 1980s, Arcangel
appears, is the open space of technology awaiting our entry. has enlisted the Internet as an archive of attempts, both suc-
Super Mario Movie raises the bar for aesthetic tension and cessful and not, to create and communicate within the tech-
narrative drama in Arcangel’s work, but also suggests that nologies provided by contemporary culture. These works,
technology might offer something more somber than empty including Working On My Novel (2010 and 2012 editions) (fig.
space. It begins with the Mario logo which is followed by 10.24), Sorry I Haven't Posted (2010), and follow my other twitter
the words: “As a video game grows old its content and inter- (2011), consist of reposting entries submitted to social media
nal logic deteriorate. For a character caught in this break- sites that include the title phrase of the work. Working On My
down problems affect every area of life.” The scenes that Novel is a list of Tweets—short messages of no more than 140
follow stretch the technical limits and opportunities of the characters posted on the Twitter website—announcing their
Nintendo game system to chronicle Mario’s path through authors’ involvement with a creative activity from which they
a virtual landscape that explodes in vibrant colors and loud are taking at least a short break. The immediate impact is,
music, also generated by the game system, and degrades into of course, humor—though it can also be overwhelming to
collections of icons, colored squares, and letters. More text be confronted by hundreds of paused novelists or a cascade
appears periodically but soon likewise degrades into illeg- of apologies. Arcangel’s appropriations, however, are much
ible collections of characters. The theme of deterioration more than a joke; these works point to an archive of shared
through repetition or the passage of time is a common theme experience that, due to the connectivity of the Internet, can
in Arcangel’s oeuvre. His essay “On Compression” (2007-08) be shared, even if only marginally. We are also being shown
describes how the data loss that occurs in the compression a collective portrait of effort and desire, produced like the

Working On My Novel (WrknOnMyNovel) on Twitter

wW https: //twitter.com/WrknOnMyNovel Twitter, inc, & }

4 Working On My Novel
WrknOnMyNovel
cted by Cory Arcangel

Ellie Coover filic! 2

After a long day yesterday, | am ready to go back into the world of
science fiction and continue working on my novel.

Philip Roland Dumont

Considering working on my novel again

Tweets

ret
Following
Jordy Ay’ |
| really need to start working on my novel again |
Followers

Favorites

Lists “=——— Joe Lombardo

... blasting some ©LivePhish Vol. 9 (Townshend, VT - 8/26/89) and
working on my novel...

10.24 Cory Arcangel, Working On

2 Donell jackson © Don=
My Novel, 2012. Twitter feed. © Cory Bs “gy Working on my Novel and watching Scary movies :)
Arcangel. Courtesy of Cory Arcangel e

and Lisson Gallery.

Narrativity 2.0
paintings and sculptures discussed earlier through layers will, while not being classified or grouped very easily.”** In
of associative fragments—albeit Tweets rather than colors, order to avoid the traps of definition, Trecartin composes
images, or objects. While the novel sits unfinished and the with what he calls situations, configurations of experience,
author posts, we learn of many other things occupying peo- environments, and relationships built from details of norma-
ple’s lives: writers express pride and disappointment, families tive and alternative constructions of family, identity, friend-
are raised, riots are broadcast on TV ... Despite or perhaps ship, and work. Any Everis full of awkward family encounters,
because of the standardization and limited detail, the dominating co-workers, ambitious artists, and melodramatic
instances of difference appear quite starkly, drawing atten- friends, presented in fractured episodes and with dialogue
tion to individuality within the technological space. Of Sorry delivered in a transfixing if not fully comprehensible fusion
T Haven't Posted, for which he was reposting up to fifty contri- of corporate-speak and youth slang; the situations include
butions a day, Arcangel wrote on his own website: “There are vignettes of the business operations of K-CoreaINC., a hier-
some really touching ones out there. Enjoy!” archically organized corporation perpetually promising the
horizontal structure of a friendship group as its employees,
Ryan Trecartin called Koreas, spread from offices to airplanes and hotels.
With an aesthetic shaped by the Internet and a sensitivity to In The Re’Search (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-10) we meet Told,
the impact of global economics and social media on the early a teenage rock band that models creative collaboration and
twenty-first century, U.S. video artist Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) friendship, and participates in a larger mass-culture situa-
has submitted old-fashioned face make-up, costumes, tion defined by the collective infatuation for suicidal reality
and sets to digital editing software and produced results star Sammy B. In Sibling Topics (Section A) (2009), Trecartin
that generate physical and metaphoric power that recalls created a family with similarly fluid qualities. In this work,
the impact of James Rosenquist’s /-J//. Like Rosenquist, three quadruplets receive a video message from their dead
Trecartin has integrated the style and technology of contem- mother telling them about their murdering absent father
porary media to replicate the most representative qualities who had a fetish for threes—hence the estrangement of their
of contemporary life. In 1965, Pop artists concentrated on fourth sibling. The perpetual motion of the work’s layered
the collision of advertising, urban growth, and the threat of organization, as situations lead to and interrupt others over
the military-industrial complex; in 2010, Trecartin addressed the four hours of Any Ever, as well as the overlapping informa-
the integration of digital video, telecommunications, and tion within the frames of the video and layered audio tracks,
global capitalism. Unlike Rosenquist, Trecartin begins his is dizzying and invites repeated viewing, facilitated by the art-
projects with words, not images. His high-keyed, fast-paced ist’s choice to make all his work available online.
video works, such as the nearly four-hour, seven-part Any Ever The motivation for Trecartin’s situation-based practice
(2009-10) (fig. 10.25) that includes all the works discussed lies in its power to subvert the determinism of linear narra-
here, start with poetry, lists, and long scripts that are then tive; situations generate infinite opportunities for charac-
transformed into scenes and sets for the camera. Trecartin ters to align and realign within the work and for viewers to
has emphasized that this linguistic foundation is profoundly make fresh connections throughout. Careers, kinship, and
affected by the economy, describing his characters as “pro- interests join the protagonists of Any Ever, while similarities
jections that come out of [capitalist] word systems.”!” Names between the details of their personalities, possessions, or
including Able, Y-Ready, Wait, and Free Lance indicate a even names encourage viewers to link temporally disparate
character’s position in the workforce while those such as scenes within the series, much as color or shape can join spa-
Britta and Adobe identify favored objects of consumption. In tially distant features of architecture, painting, or sculpture.
Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-10) Wait, played by the artist, In form and content, situations match contemporary exist-
announces: “I love learning about myself through other peo- ence. “We’re all networked and we’re maintaining our own
ple’s products,” concisely explaining thereby the relationship discrete networks of multiple selves, too. And we’re moving
between the individual, the self, and society in contemporary towards more corporeal expressions of this. Versions of your-
capitalist culture. self layered together might actually be an emerging form of
The embrace of consumption-fueled self-actualization, collaboration,” Trecartin explains.*® Such layering has partic-
similar to that examined in Sylvia Fleury’s work of the 1990s ular importance with regard to gender and sexuality. When
(see Chapter 5), led Trecartin to conceive of identity as pressed about the frequent merging of tropes of masculin-
dependent primarily on individual impulses such as taste and ity, femininity, and hetero- and homosexuality in his work,
desire, which are more subject to choice and change than Trecartin explained: “I see it less as a lack of distinction in
exterior forces of history or essential traits of character. He binary terms and more as an exploration of territories within
elaborates: “As people explore and expand into spaces that infinite gender creation, individualization and specificity. I
are not dependent on the body, but rather the mind, the con- imagine this as a type of multiplex space. I’m often interested
struction and use of one’s personality can become the most in realities where gender takes a back-seat to personality
defining aspect to identify. And the thing I love about per articulation.”°° Any Ever presents life on a stage where iden-
sonality is that it can be added to, changed or re-worked at tity, community, desire, and values are in a constant state of

Chapter 10 New Metaphors and New Narratives

 10.25 Ryan Trecartin, Roamie
View: History Enhancement
(Re’Search Wait’S) (top) and
The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S)
(bottom), 2009-10, from Any
Ever series. Film stills. Courtesy
of the artist and Elizabeth Dee,
New York

generation through language (descriptions of selves, others, with the concerns of artists within art movements as diverse
and circumstances), bodies (refined through surgery, pros- as Minimalism, appropriation, and feminism whose practice
thetics, costumes, and cosmetics), and art (sculptures, paint- aimed to separate the objects of their attention, whether
ings, and interior decoration), as well as undergoing an a form, an image, or a person from the contexts that had
almost simultaneous destruction. over-determined their meanings and limited their potential
The value Trecartin places on individual capacity and (see Chapter 1). After isolating parts of speech and activi-
the opportunity for change can be gleaned from his studio ties, Trecartin devotes enormous energy to post-production.
practice. After the initial script has been written and deliv- In the editing process, for which he favors consumer-ready
ered to the actors, artist and actors collaborate to interpret software such as iMovie and Adobe After Effects rather than
the words into events for the camera. Actors are limited to high-end products, and where he makes heavy use of anima-
takes as short as single lines or actions, often changing and tion and audio manipulation, he gives the situations their
repeating them until they lose any relation to their context. individual character and connective potential. The process
Talking with Cindy Sherman, Trecartin explained that the that began with writing, and continued in the analogue
“performances are made to be cropped, altered, repurposed, practices of set-building, costuming, and acting, reaches
and enhanced. Each line is said, on average, about twenty-five completion in a practice defined by contemporary technol-
times ... everything is performed for the edit.”°! This com- ogy. Any Ever is not only saturated in the social and techno-
pulsion to repeat destroys any dependence the single parts logical facts of the present but is also a manifestation of the
may have upon a framing narrative, and thus emphasizes the digitally mediated and physically direct means with which we
individuality of any remark or gesture. Such a focus resonates experience them.

Narrativity 2.0 iCcchelZe

tials
|
 The Art of Contemporary Experience

istorian of science Bruno Latour (b. 1947) has argued generate. This largely liberating and often meditative work is
that observations about the environment, like the con- followed in a second section by art addressing the ideologi-
clusions we draw about ourselves and others, are in cal and technological constraints placed on experience by
perpetual flux and depend not only on objective changes in its surveillance. The theoretical and technological discus-
the world, but also on the shifting perspective of its viewers. sions of power raised in part two are complemented by a
What we need, he says, is “a test to measure our bearings final section that offers artistic analyses of a wide variety of
accurately.”! As Latour turned his eye to art, writing per- media and their effect on our ability to make sense of our
ceptively on Danish-Icelandic sculptor and photographer interactions with the world. As with the art discussed in the
Olafur Eliasson, he clarified the entanglements that compli- previous chapter, the material presented here revisits some
cate such a test: “If there’s one thing we don’t believe in any of the issues regarding art and life that were introduced in
more it’s the possibility of being emancipated, freed from the 1960s and 1970s. It is work that either self-consciously
all attachments, blissfully unaware of the consequences of produces experiences or critically examines the nature of
our actions.”* Artists in this chapter provide us with differ- our experience in light of questions raised over the last few
ent means of finding our bearings in a world that requires decades. Hirschhorn describes his art as a “tool to encounter
awareness. The art discussed in this chapter, whether a simu- the world,” and this book concludes with a selection of work
lated electrical storm as in Eliasson’s Your strange certainty still about such encounters.
kept (1996) (see fig. 11.1) or a cardboard and aluminum foil
cavern as in Cavemanman (2002) by Swiss-born, Paris-based
sculptor Thomas Hirschhorn (see fig. 11.12), is explicitly The Experience of Experience
conceptual—signifying within arguments about art, society, Asking viewers to be wholly engaged with the material world
nature, and self—and also phenomenological, to be expe- while simultaneously critically examining what they find
rienced as directly as rain. This work demands that viewers there is not new. Seventeenth-century Baroque art typically
layer their sensual apprehension of form with an intellec- juxtaposed the physicality of the here-and-now with the
tual analysis of content, or vice versa, envelop their concep- ethereal realm of the divine, or celebrated the effects of the
tual appreciation with a physical response. French sculptor natural world while simultaneously using them to express
and video artist Pierre Huyghe (see Chapter 10) explained civic and nationalist politics. An immediate precedent for
that, coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, “we all became twenty-first-century artists concerned with perception and
extremely self-conscious and aware about the consequences contemplation is the art of the 1960s California-based Light
of our actions.”* The lesson for the twenty-first century, he and Space artists. Robert Irwin (b. 1928), one of the central
determined, was that “conclusions should be suspended but figures of the movement, described his work to Eliasson in
the tension should remain.”* Not every artist in this chapter terms of “perceiving yourself perceiving.”° Irwin created
would agree with Huyghe about the necessity of suspending works in which shadows and reflections appear to share
conclusions. All, however, demonstrate a self-conscious atten- the same visual and physical properties as objects in space.
tion to consequences and produce art that visualizes, concep- Unlike their peers Hans Haacke, Terry Fox, and Gregory
tualizes, and even amplifies rather than resolves tension. Battcock, who alerted the viewer to the politics of process
Chapter 11 is divided into three sections starting with a (see Chapter 1), Light and Space artists strove to exclude spe-
discussion of art that celebrates the complexities of experi- cific cultural or historical references, enlisting only abstract
ence, and the virtue of paying close attention to the sensa- effects of lights, color, and space. James Turrell (b. 1943) cut
tions we feel, the associations they evoke, and the ideas they openings in gallery roofs, creating rectangular planes that

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

appear to be both windows and wall paintings. The open Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 2003, he outlined a pro-
sky appears flat like a painted screen. As the color of the grammatic investigation: “I would like to think about the con-
sky above changes throughout the day, Turrell’s works are ditions of our orientation when confronted with partial or
transformed: An unarticulated composition of pale blue, for total absence of the sources that support our orientation.”7
instance, might take on vibrant striations of red and orange. When our senses, memory, expectations, perspective, logic,
Suddenly a bird or plane might cross the scene, break- and emotions fail us, how might we regain our bearings?
ing the illusion of flatness, and we see the new protagonist Eliasson sculpts by recontextualizing fragments of natural
flying through deep space. Such art is not about fooling the phenomena. He gives us rooms of rain, mist, clouds, and
eye, but rather creating opportunities for viewers to arrive light. He creates waterfalls, rainbows, electric storms, and
at different yet accurate perceptions about the physical ice plates. The visual, aural, and physical sensations created
world. Shadows, reflections, and solid objects are all equally by the work are familiar from our experiences in nature,
real; color expanding in two dimensions and light moving but they are displaced in the art. Your strange certainty still
through space are both facts in our environment. In the kept (1996) (fig. 11.1) invites the viewer to be confused and
spaces he has created in Roden Crater, Arizona, Turrell has amused by a wall of water droplets suspended in midair, and
expanded the scale of his work from the built environment also to examine the hoses, pump, plastic-covered basin, and
to the Earth and stars. One looks out from the basin of this strobe light that create the illusion. By inserting the hardware
extinct volcano to see the sky alternately appear as infinite of the sculpture among the constituent elements of the land-
space and finite surface. Such sensations provide a point of scape—in this case, the flash of light and the gentle fall of
reference for the nature of self-conscious perception in art of rain—Eliasson represents the sensations created by nature
the early twenty-first century. but divorces them from the means that generally produce
them. Though the artifice involved in creating the effect
Olafur Eliasson is revealed, the sense of wonder is no less powerful and, in
Unlike the earlier Light and Space artists, Olafur Eliasson fact, the chains of associations are enhanced. Flashing lights
(b. 1967) is committed to muddying the experience of seeing and splashing water will remind some viewers of a lightning
oneself seeing with cultural cues. When selected to represent storm, while others, entranced perhaps by the rhythm of the

11.1 Olafur Eliasson, Your strange certainty still kept, 1996. Water, strobe lights, acrylic, foil, wood, hose, and
pump. Installation view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 1996. Courtesy of The Dakis Joannou Collection,
Athens, Greece.
 11.2 Olafur Eliasson, Your
colour memory, 2004.
Stainless steel, wood,
fluorescent lights, color filter
foil (red, green, blue),
projection foil, fabric, and
control unit. Installation view
at Arcadia University Art
Gallery, Glenside,
Pennsylvania, 2004.
Photographer: Aaron lgler.
Courtesy of Astrup Fearnley
Museet for Moderne Kunst,
Oslo, Norway.

strobe, will think of nightclubs. Eliasson’s sublime isolation afterimage that soon overwhelms the perception of the red.
of time, motion, and gravity and his overt presentation of At this point, the red of the wall changes and the green of
mechanics, technology, and artifice integrate phenomenol- the afterimage competes with the new color that produces
ogy and technology, nature and culture. a second corresponding afterimage. As Eliasson points out,
Light and Space artists heighten our awareness of the each viewer’s experience is dependent on when he or she
human being as a sensing body; Eliasson treats such sensual entered the piece, and the combinations of color and after-
experiences as conduits to social meaning. A large part of image will be different for everyone. Viewers can reset their
his oeuvre comprises photographs of islands, fissures, rivers, vision by stepping inside a small dark room built off the
basalt crystals, waterfalls, and the horizon in Iceland. When main room. Eliasson concludes an essay he wrote to accom-
asked directly what nature means to him, however, Eliasson pany Your colour memory by asserting that “in preserving
explains, “I don’t believe that ‘nature’ as such—as a funda- the freedom of each visitor to experience something that
mentally truthful or ‘natural’ state of things—exists.”* His may differ from the experiences of others, art can con-
work is about engagement, a term he uses in its physical, tinue to have a significant impact on both the individual
intellectual, and ethical meanings. Art historian Mieke Bal and society as a whole.”!’ This ethical imperative, he insists,
has historicized Eliasson’s concerns, describing his art as should be shared by individual viewers and also by institu-
a reinvention of the Baroque attitude in which “subjects tions that presume to engage art and audiences. To this
must engage with their environments, neither detached nor end, Eliasson has developed a new type of art school that he
immersed but active, on innovative, creative and responsible has begun to realize through a variety of seminars and work-
terms.”’ Eliasson explains: “Engagement has consequences shops in his studio and around the world. In 2009, at the
and these entail a heightened feeling of responsibility.”! Universitat der Kunste in Berlin, he established the Institut
Standing in front of Your strange certainty still kept, a viewer fur Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments)
observes both the effects of the weather and the signs of which serves as a “laboratory for experience.” Aiming to
artifice and so gains insight into our experience of nature cultivate a pedagogy of experimentation, the Institut invites
and art. Your colour memory (2004) (fig. 11.2), a curved participants to invent means of creating, activating, and ana-
room whose walls glow with a slowly changing spectrum of lyzing actions and phenomena that occur in all manner of
colors, solicits an engagement with community and time spaces, from urban to natural, architectural to personal. The
as well as nature and the senses. The space of the work fills goal, like the experience of Your colour memory, is to encour-
with a color—deep red or magenta, yellow, blues, greens— age experience and its analysis in order to “strengthen our
which changes every thirty seconds. After approximately ability to re-negotiate our surroundings,” and to “co-produce
fifteen seconds in the red light, the retina produces a green society.”!®

282 | Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

Ernesto Neto was constructed primarily using Lycra and polyamide gauze,
Working on nearly the other side of the world, Brazilian stretched to form walls and supported by an intricate system
sculptor Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) approaches the problem of pulleys and teardrop-shaped gauze counterweights filled
of art making in a similarly enveloping, if rather more with heavy pellets, spices, or Styrofoam balls. The installa-
romantic, fashion than Eliasson. The working assumption tion, occupying nearly 2,000 square feet, took on the appear-
of art that invites us to see ourselves seeing, as Eliasson has ance of a biomorphic, amoebalike cathedral, glowing as light
put it, is that there is a distinction between body and mind, passed through its lilac, blue, and gold walls. The scents of
between experience and perception. The role of the artist is the spices—including clove, cumin, ginger, and pepper—
to connect these two aspects of our being. Neto creates from and most of all the movement and clear pleasure of the audi-
the position that there is no duality in our being,Fare that, on ence filled the space. Anthropodino, like most of Neto’s work,
the contrary, it is as “body-minds that we connect the things was made to be entered—people walked through the gently
in this world, in life—the way we touch, the way we feel, the enclosing corridors of its ethereal domes, pausing to lie on
way we think and the way we deal.”'* The ideal work of art a bed of pillows and gaze up into a collection of hanging
to address the human as a fully sentient and sensual being pendulums. Orifices stitched into the walls gave the piece a
is an environment that resembles, in Neto’s discussions, a decidedly corporeal quality while also serving as an invita-
party or a dance. Anthropodino (2009) (fig. 11.3) was one tion to peer, and even reach through, from one space to
such environment. another. Children and adults played in the ball pool and a
Occupying the Park Avenue Armory in New York City sense of wonder pervaded the installation. The mere fact of
from May 14 to June 14, 2009, Anthropodino was a network of hearing laughter and seeing kids running happily around an
navelike rooms, skeletal corridors, small caverns, and open artwork is enough to make one aware of the striking quality
pools and pads filled with cushions and balls. The structure of Neto’s art.

11.3 Ernesto Neto, Anthropodino, 2009. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by Park
Avenue Armory for Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and Galeria
Fortes Vilaca, Sao Paulo.
 9)
The array of sensations Neto marshaled for Anthropo- content of the work.”?! Horn’s work includes Minimalist-
dino was remarkable. Even his small individual sculptures inspired sculptures, serial photography of people, build-
integrate the viewing mind with the smelling, touching, ings, and water, installations of letters and words, columns
and hearing body. Neto discusses this movement of eye and of glacial water, and many books. Horn enlists materials such
body across and even through the surfaces of his work as a as glass, rubber, and gold which produce sculpture that has,
dance intended to bring the viewer to a state in which cus- in her words, “credible ... physical reality.”*? All of her work
tomary divisions of mind and body, self and other, are weak- depends on an “integral use of the world ... a necessary inclu-
ened and life can be experienced without dualities. Like sion of circumstances.”*? Horn’s appeal to the materiality of
Neto’s understanding of the mind-body, his perception of everyday life and the circumstances surrounding the artwork
the world we encounter, either in the artwork or outside it, leads to an experience for the viewer that connects him or
is as a “cultural-physical” entity.'° It is the artist’s responsibil- her to a network of associations drawn from life as much as
ity, he claims, to engage the viewer with the “physical, psycho- from art. By the twenty-first century, art as experience could
logical and mental ... field of events where the relationship be literal. Test Site (2006) (fig. 11.4), by Sweden-based
between the individuality of men and their world occurs.”!® Belgian sculptor Carsten Holler (b. 1961), is a series of multi-
This art experience is one in which judgment and knowl- story slides on which visitors at the Tate Modern museum in
edge are created by “thinking through our
pores.”"’ It is significant that such thinking
is not only about the self, and that pleas-
ure can be experienced through critical-
ity or analysis. In fact, Neto has devoted
considerable time to more evidently social
and political issues. In 2003, with fellow
artists Marcio Botner (b. 1970) and Laura
Lima (b. 1971), he opened a gallery in
his hometown of Rio de Janeiro called
A Gentil Carioca (which, roughly trans-
lated, means “Gentle People of Rio”) to
provide a meeting place and exhibition
spaces for artists in the region. A Gentil
Carioca programs events in different sites
from bars to performance spaces and
has provided a platform for political and
pedagogical activity. As in the creation of
a sculpture or installation, so in curating
an exhibition, producing a symposium, or
hosting a party, the art lies in our ability,
Neto asserts, to “create conditions of
possibility.
so G17 718

Roni Horn
Ernesto Neto has said that his goal in
making work is to produce a sensation
akin to “that moment [in seduction] when
both of your faces change into something
else because the erotic charge is so high,
when your bodies move towards each
other.”!? Olafur Eliasson has described
the content of his work as the moment
his audience is transformed “from a state
of indifference to a state of difference.”2°
U.S. sculptor Roni Horn (b. 1955) has
also defined her work in terms ofits ability
to produce, rather than represent or
record, experience. “The acquiring of an 11.4 Carsten Héller, Test Site, 2006. Five slides. Installation view “Unilever Series: Carsten
actual experience is,” Horn asserts, “the Holler.” Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2006. Courtesy of the artist/Air de Paris, Paris.

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

London were invited to play. A popular sculpture, Holler’s sculpture takes time. Comparing the two parts requires
piece prompted viewers to tap into their inner child and moving between the spaces and is dependent on the viewer’s
move through the museum in a spirit of adventure, sociabil- patience and memory. Even the presence of other people
ity, and fun, In the early 1980s, when Horn was leaving gradu- moving around the gallery and the sculpture can make deter-
ate school, the kinds of experience of particular interest to mining the relationship between the two parts difficult. The
artists were defined in more overtly political terms by works work “unfolds.”** Horn explains:
such as Barbara Kruger’s billboards and Jenny Holzer’s dis-
You go into a space and see a simple disc. It doesn’t
plays (see Chapter 2). In 1979, Donald Judd (see Chapter
look like much: it isn’t, until you walk in and see that
1) began the construction of a specially designed exhibi-
it is a three-dimensional cone-shaped object which is
tion space for his own work and that of John Chamberlain
familiar but has certain subtle formal qualities which
and Dan Flavin. The facility, in Marfa, Texas, opened to the
make it different, which take away from it being famil-
public in 1986, reinserting the transcendent Minimalist
iar. It becomes memorable. Then you go into the next
experience into the 1980s art world. Each of these examples
room and enact exactly the same experience, but of
treats the viewer differently: On Holler’s slides we are a child,
course it’s unexpected and it’s so many minutes later;
in front of Kruger’s billboard we are citizens, and in Marfa
it’s a slightly younger experience in your life. Whereas
we are eyes and a soul. Horn’s oeuvre and the meaning and
when you walked into the first room, you had the
experiences it produces draw on all of these identities.
experience of something unique, you can’t have that a
“Piece for Two Rooms” (1986)—one of four paired “iden-
second time.?”°
tities,” or ways of presenting the works, that make up Things
That Happen Again (1986-91) (fig. 11.5), one of which is The first object is the premise for considering the relation-
in Marfa—consists of two identically machined sections of ship between the familiar and the strange, between what one
forged copper cones. The two pieces are placed in adjacent knows from habit and memory and what one learns from
rooms so that when visitors encounter the first object they exploration and novelty. The second object, because it makes
cannot see the second. Unlike a Minimalist work by Judd, itself known seconds after the first, elicits different questions
which one experiences entirely in the present tense, Horn’s and different reactions. In common with much of Horn’s

11.5 Roni Horn, Things That Happen Again, 1986. Here shown presented as "Piece for Two Rooms,” with two solid copper
forms-installed in separate rooms. Diameter 11% x 17" (29.1 x 43.2 cm) each, length 35" (88.9 cm) each. Installation view
at Tate Modern, London, 2009. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

The Experience of Experience

oeuvre, Things That Happen Again muses on how sameness, sensations associated with water. In 1998, she was invited to
repetition, and doubling can be means of sensing and con- London to consider a project on the Thames that led to Stal
templating difference. She writes: “the idea of the identi- Water: The River Thames for Example (1999). The Thames is a
cal is a paradox since you always have a here and a there, a particularly dramatic urban waterway. In addition to its long,
now and a then.”*° The here-and-now of experience and the often violent history as the central artery of London, it is tidal
there-and-then of memory are prompted by the object and and moves through the city with considerable force. The
lead the viewer, Horn says, “to the foundation of identity.”?’ river continues to attract suicides and violent deaths. When
In an unusually direct discussion of the personal meaning in Horn arrived in London she looked closely at the water. She
her work, Horn describes her interest in pairs, copies, and interviewed people who lived and worked on or near it and
mimicry as “profoundly (although not exclusively) related did historical research. She photographed the surface of
to my sexuality and androgyny.”** As in many works by Felix the water, avoiding cityscape traditions that present rivers as
Gonzalez-Torres (see Chapter 7), with whom Horn became symbols of nature harnessed for the power of culture. In Stl
close in the early 1990s, Things That Happen Again invites Water, the Thames appears as a substance and a surface with
reflection on the deeply personal and individual experience changing properties, one day luminescent, the next flatly
of difference and similarity. opaque, variously rippled and reflective. Across the images
Complementing the unstable heart of the presumably of Sill Water, Horn typed small numbers that annotate the
stable concept of sameness, Horn creates moments of stasis eddies, small waves, and patches of still water. At the bottom
in the flow of water. Her impossible project of staying water of the photographs are footnotes: passages from descrip-
has included documenting glaciers, rivers, mist, the changing tions concerning the river, lines from songs, snippets of over-
atmospheric conditions of Iceland, and even the appearance heard conversations, poems, thoughts. While the footnotes
and emotions of people as they endure and indulge in the assign meaning, they also contain it, stilling the streams of

11.6 Roni Horn, Vatnasafn/Library of Water, 2007. Permanent installation, since 2007, initiated by Artangel.
Stykkishélmur, Iceland. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

r|\ Deere
Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience
association the river provokes just as the photographs freeze illustrates Kwon’s thesis. In the early 1990s, he pursued two
its current. Sill Water forms an encyclopedia of moving water, paths, enrolling as an art student in the Whitney Studio
an index to the Thames. In 2001, Horn made the reference- Program and taking biology at the City College of New York.
book metaphor explicit by publishing ninety-five of the Dion kept his two interests separate until he perceived, he
images without footnotes as Dictionary of Water. says, “that nature is one of the most sophisticated arenas for
Horn started traveling to Iceland in the mid-1970s and has the production of ideology.”*° Having recognized the social,
often described the country as her studio and her medium. intellectual, and political function of nature, he incorporated
In 2003, she acquired an abandoned library perched high the environment as both the subject and the site of his art.
above Stykkisholmur harbor. To create Vatnasafn/Library of His subsequent work maintained his original love of nature
Water (2007) (fig. 11.6), she made some architectural modi- while exploring the dual identity of the environment as both
fications and installed twenty-four glass columns, each filled self-evident and socially inscribed.
with water from one of the island’s major glaciers. Standing On Tropical Nature (1991) characterizes Dion’s early envi-
inside the structure and facing out of the windows that Horn ronmental art. Playing the role of explorer/naturalist,
enlarged to extend from floor to ceiling, one looks out to the Dion spent three weeks in the rainforest near the source of
sea and sky that envelop Iceland. It was the Icelandic land- the Orinoco River in Venezuela. Here, he collected speci-
scape and culture that helped Horn figure out how to inte- mens and sent them back to the Sala Mendoza art museum
grate matter with the ephemeral nature of experience. She in Caracas. Once a week, the curators who had commis-
explains: “Iceland taught me to taste experience. Because sioned the work received crates of butterflies, soil samples,
that’s possible here—possible because of the intensely physi- branches, seedpods, shells, and more. Dion also sent arti-
cal nature of experience on this island. This palpable quality facts gathered from members of his party including lan-
has been one lesson. Sensual experience balances the intel- terns, clothes, trowels, notebooks, plastic tubs, a camera, and
lect and here the best of both worlds exists in provocative shoes. The collection fell well outside the normal discipli-
union.”*? Empowered by the landscape, Horn built Vatnasafn nary boundaries of either art or science museums. Without
into a lighthouse illuminated by the very elements—water, taxonomic guides or instructions from the artist to transform
stone, and light—that had made her own experience of the collection into a cohesive, not to mention coherent,
Iceland personally transformative. The columns of water, exhibition, the curators had to display the materials based
which at the bottom reveal sediment from the glaciers, on improvised criteria. The viewer was left to muse over the
deliver the substance of the view from the library into its specimens and puzzle out the logic of an exhibition. Dion
interior. Horn set into a dense rubber floor English and had forced the Sala Mendoza curators to liberate their prac-
Icelandic words describing the weather, thus juxtaposing, tice from the conventions of both the history of art and scien-
as in Stall Water, the flux of water and the flow of language. tific display.
Horn has been outspoken about the risk of global warming Dion has continued to give considerable attention to
to the Icelandic landscape, and the library is a means to museums and strategies of display. It is a telling aspect
draw attention to political as well as sensual realities. Horn of Dion’s work, exemplified by New England Digs (2001)
positions the viewer as a light in this beacon able to encoun- (fig. 11.7), for which Dion and his assistants collected and
ter art and the world with a balance of the senses and presented artifacts from sites in rural and industrial New
the intellect. England, that as it disregards best practices or even archeo-
logical common sense it balances a critique of disciplinary
Mark Dion categories with pleasure in the historical record. Dion, who
The artists discussed thus far have created, through their was born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, returned
work, a syntax for sensual and intellectual engagement with to New England to excavate a riverbed, a tavern, and a farm.
the world. U.S. sculptor Mark Dion (b. 1961) begins with the The resulting display exhibits little regard for provenance
scientific means we already have to contemplate our place in and no respect for chronological distinctions. Instead, Dion
the world. He dons a lab coat and steps into the roles of bota- creates a contemporary version of the Wunderkabinett, the
nist, ichthyologist, entomologist, biologist, herbalist, arche- German name for the “cabinets of curiosities” filled with all
ologist, and, ultimately, in a new outfit, curator. Though his manner of natural and scientific wonders by collectors in
work addresses specific locales, from the Amazon Rainforest earlier centuries. The cabinet built for New England Digs is
to New England, art historian Miwon Kwon has persuasively filled with all manner of ordinary things. Mid-nineteenth-
argued that Dion’s art is primarily discursive, meaning that century broken glass from O’Malley’s Tavern is displayed with
its most important context is an intellectual discourse rather twentieth-century litter. Long objects might be displayed with
than a geographic site. As such, a work such as On Tropical similarly shaped items, or blue things put together regardless
Nature (1991), which involved collecting specimens from of date or original location. A drawer full of neatly arranged
the rain forest, signifies most directly within a discussion swizzle sticks, beads, combs, lightbulbs, buttons, and broken
of the natural sciences and museology and then, only sec- dolls’ heads, though emotionally suggestive, lacks any of
ondarily, with regard to the rainforest. Dion’s education the chronological or typological precision demanded of a

The Experience of Experience 287

 11.7 Mark Dion, New
England Digs, 2001.
Mixed media. Courtesy
the artist and Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery, New
York.

contemporary archeological display. This encounter with For the work, Dion carefully transported the tree and the life
the past, similar to the dialogue with nature presented in On growing under its protection to the renovated Seattle water-
Tropical Nature, asks us to reflect on the customary means by front. The Vivarium now provides visitors with an encoun-
which museums and viewers turn experience of the world ter with a cross section of nature, functioning as it would in
into knowledge. the forest.
Through his art and statements Dion makes it clear that Docents and kiosks provide the educational component
his work is driven by experience and wonder. No amount in the Vivarium, but it is the effect of defamiliarization that
of theoretical analysis and self-scrutiny is allowed to over- is the work’s most singular achievement. Inside the room,
whelm the record of insect, plant, animal, and human life Dion has installed green tinted-glass roofing panels to simu-
his work presents. Provoked by Dion’s talk of wonder, Kwon late the effect of light passing through the canopy of the
asked him rather pointedly, “How do you provoke a sense forest. The space mimics the shape of the fallen tree with
of the marvelous or generate curiosity in our day and age?” its towering root system and tapering trunk. State-of-the-art
Dion’s response was to simply cite truth and biodiversity, water-filtration and temperature-control systems replicate
and the opportunity to experience both is nowhere more on the atmosphere of the forest. In an urban park, however,
display than in his Vivarrwm Neukom (2004-06) (fig. 11.8) in just yards away from a major road intersection and railroad
Olympic Park, Seattle, Washington.*! The Vivarium is a fallen tracks, the features that emulate the forest “enhance the
60-foot western hemlock tree, known as a nurse log, housed uncanniness of nature,” as Dion describes it.°? The emerald
in a climate-controlled enclosure that simulates its original light and moist air are otherworldly. The angular plan of
ecosystem. The tree, found in an area of old-growth forest the architecture creates a sense of acceleration as one looks
near Seattle, began its life about the time the city was settled down the length of the trunk lying prone on its plinth like
by European explorers. When such massive trees expired a massive cadaver on an examination table. Visitors look
in the then-thickly forested region, they became hosts to directly into the decaying body of the hemlock as though
vibrant ecosystems that perpetuated the development of the they were among the species living off the tree. True to the
forest. Now, of course, the forest has been largely cleared for Romantic tradition, there is strong sense of the sublime here,
lumber and urban development. Dion found his particular but Dion’s space is colored by the absurdity and even the
hemlock tree on protected land, where it had been resting cruelty of putting a tree on life support. The artist is quick to
for over a decade. It was already home to a variety of wildlife. point out the tragic and farcical element of the project. The

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

11.8 Mark Dion, Vivarium Neukom, 2004-06. Hemlock tree. Greenhouse length 80' (24.38 m).
Olympic Park, Seattle. Seattle Art Museum. © Mark Dion.

Viwarium can sustain the nurse log for decades, but bring- other things, fully functional hand-built guns. His most
ing the tree under the protection of society as an object of notorious show ensured his then-gallerist, Mary Boone, was
artistic and educational interest limits its productive capac- arrested on weapons-possession charges. The guns, like all
ity. Isolated from the ecosystem of the forest, the hemlock of Sachs’s subsequent work, were constructed from found
tree can display its role as host to a complex ecosystem, but materials in a process he called “American Bricolage.” Sachs
cannot contribute to the environment from which it came. credits British sculptor Richard Wentworth (b. 1947), whom
Dion has created a space in which one can be educated about he encountered in London while studying architecture in
the environment, but in which one is also overwhelmed by the late 1980s, with inspiring his practice. Wentworth’s work
the strange beauty of entering botanical time and arboreal celebrates “Making do and getting by,” by which he means
space. In his notes, he wrote: “This is a knock-out piece, with the contingent, ad hoc, and DIY solutions we devise when
an accessible core and a rich poetic resonance.”*’ The poetry faced with immediate problems and are pressed for time
of Dion’s work addresses nature as defined and confined and money. No effort is made to hide the mechanics of an
by human actions, as well as as an ecological phenomenon object or to beautify it. Sachs has been rather explicit about
beyond the grasp of comprehension. embracing Wentworth’s pragmatism in his own practice. His
rules, circulated in one of his self-published manuals, include
Tom Sachs “Paint first, cut second” and “Be thorough no detail
Tom Sachs (b. 1966) entered the New York art scene in the should be left unacknowledged or unattended.” These insure
late 1990s with an interest in social constructions of knowl- that he, his assistants, and the viewer are continually atten-
edge and power quite different than those of Dion’s biolo- tive to the processes of making.*‘ In the guns, we see how the
gists and curators. His first exhibitions included, among wood—salvaged from police barricades—fits together with

The Experience of Experience

 11.9 Tom Sachs, Apollo Lunar
Excursion Module (LEM),
2007-201 2. Installation.
Courtesy the artist.

springs, screws, and pipes purchased from a hardware store. Hasselblad cameras such as were on board the actual NASA
Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) (2007-12) (fig. 11.9), a Lunar Exploration Module, a variety of interior monitors
1:1 scale model of the Apollo 11 Lunar Exploration Module for the astronauts, and a landing computer outfitted with
with customized Mission Control, displays the plywood, PVC the 1979 Atari video game Lunar Lander. The entire mission
piping, extension cords, iPods, and police barricade lumber has also been edited into a short film, available for viewing
that keep the work together and functioning. These sculp- online. When Sachs’s Space Program was shown at the
tures and installations become models for the transformation Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, after the exteriormounted
of thought into action and desire into objects. They are also Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly of the LEM had opened
explorations of the myths of U.S. identity in which bootstrap and one of the Hasselblads had begun taking photographs,
resourcefulness and rugged individualism meet an uneasy Sachs’s team dug up samples of the gallery floor. Pieces of
balance between idealism and violence. concrete were collected, catalogued, and preserved. Watch-
Sachs’s Space Program captures the breadth and depth ing the scene, the viewer marvels over Sachs’s encyclopedic
of his project and returns our discussion to the intersec- knowledge of NASA’s work and the innumerable ways in
tions of nature and culture, science and art. In addition to which he re-creates its solutions. The problem facing NASA
the Lunar Excursion Module, this work includes space suits was putting a man on the moon. Sachs’s Space Program
with functional circulation and filtration systems, provisions, addresses quite different circumstances and in so doing raises
reconnaissance and communication devices, shotguns, side the question: What exactly is being simulated?
arms, and headquarters for technicians operating outside The Apollo space program of the 1960s and early 1970s
the vehicle. A wall of monitors in Mission Control connected expressed the limitless reach of the national imagina-
to closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in and on the tion and provided evidence of U.S. ingenuity. For many of
Lunar Excursion Module displays all parts of the voyage. Sachs Sachs’s generation, the image of Neil Armstrong stepping
uses a wide variety of televisual technology. In addition to onto the lunar surface suggested a future full of possibili-
the bank of monitors, there are fully functioning handmade ties. His Space Program generates the kind of awe one feels

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

11.10 Tom Sachs, Installation view of Mission Control (2007-12) at Space Program 2.0: MARS, 2012
Courtesy the artist.

encountering the real relics of manned space flights at the installed a few years earlier, and at least some familiar forms
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. With of life were on hand to witness it. Sachs’s Space Program, like
cargo units filled with Jack Daniel’s whiskey, baked beans, the smallest of his objects, reminds the viewer that science
cigarettes, a collection of LPs, and a turntable, however, it’s and technology are ultimately instances of making do and
clear that this voyage isn’t going to end in the Sea of Tran- getting by, inspired by and shaped according to the needs,
quility. Outfitting his meticulously fabricated details of space desires, and limitations of the here-and-now.
travel with accouterments of distinctly earthly pleasures,
Sachs invites reflection on the meaning the Apollo mission
had for us here on Earth. In the spring of 2012, Sachs’s Space
Program 2.0: MARS touched down on Mars with a mission to Experience in the work discussed thus far has been variously
find life (fig. 11.10). Convinced by engineers at the Jet Pro- intimate, sensual, humorous, and intellectual. Artists have
pulsion Lab to abandon a second voyage to the moon and to striven to connect viewers to a renewed sense of themselves
follow President Barack Obama’s orders to direct attention to and others, and have drawn attention to our environment
the red planet instead, Sachs set about repurposing as much or even to outer space. There are times when the viewer’s
of his lunar technology as possible and investigating what was involvement is limited, but even then we are reminded
required for the new journey. Less an anthropological and by the work that its primary aim is not representational.
somewhat nostalgic expedition through the science of the We are not invited into Your colour memory to see the colors
past, the Martian mission involves a close look at what we now Eliasson has created, but to experience their effect. Like-
know about space travel. Sachs has held whiteboard sessions wise, though Sachs’s Space Program 2.0: MARS as a model has
detailing the challenges of reaching, orbiting, entering, and much to say about the meaning of the NASA space program,
exiting Martian airspace, as well as surviving on the planet’s it is a fully independent project, justified not by its resem-
surface. Because of the timing of the orbits of Earth and blance to the JPL or NASA experiments but by the satisfac-
Mars, once an expedition team reaches its destination it has tory execution of its own mission. Such investments in the
to remain there for nearly a year until it is possible to return. production of experiences in the museum, however, like
The landing took place at the Armory building on the Upper any traditional works of art, have the side effect of prior-
East Side of Manhattan, where Neto’s Anthropodino had been itizing the spaces of art over those of life. By contrast, the

Experience Observed
 A PERCEZIONE
ATTENZIONE: picuieoe mmreano
Ne cde hay =,

11.11 Antoni Muntadas On Translation: Warning, 1999-2005. Installation at the Spanish Pavilion, Venice
Biennale, 2005. Courtesy the artist

artists discussed in the final portion of this book develop a with graffiti and posters that made it look like a mix of the
variety of strategies to look at how we experience our lives Paleolithic-era Lascaux Caves in France, contemporary Times
outside the gallery. These works address questions of sur- Square, and a college dorm room. Books on political theory,
veillance and power in the first section, and the media and globalization, economics, and culture lined shelves hung too
representation in the second. This art responds in different high to be reached. Gargantuan versions of similar texts lay
ways to the injunction that Spanish video and installation stacked on the cave floors. Charts, tables, and pages copied
artist Antoni Muntadas (b. 1942) has plastered on billboards from essays were plastered on the walls. Empty beer and soda
and museums: “Warning: Perception requires Involvement” cans littered the floor. Finally, there were bodies: aluminum
(fig. 11.11). foil-covered mannequins and cardboard cutouts, many head-
less and most connected to each other and the walls with
Thomas Hirschhorn twists of foil. Explosive charges, made of paper and foil, were
The work of Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957) can be seen as a laid throughout the rooms and connected to the texts and
political inquiry into the operations of contemporary culture figures. Hirschhorn has described Cavemanman as the aban-
and a philosophical version of Sachs’s and Wentworth’s doned home of a reclusive philosopher who has indulged
making do and getting by. Filled with allusions to politi- in his “all-consuming preoccupation with the achievement
cal and critical theory, intellectual history, and philosophy, of equality between all human beings, all over the world.””
Hirschhorn’s art provides a centrifugal invitation to reimag- “1 Man = 1 Man” is scrawled over and over throughout the
ine the world. Cavemanman (2002) (fig. 11.12), the result rooms, expressing the democratic impulse of Hirschhorn’s
of intensive accumulation and apparently manic assem- philosopher. The philosophical clutter recalls Ilya Kabakov’s
blage characterized as much by haste as by desire, typi- The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (see fig. 8.1).
fies Hirschhorn’s art. For the piece, the artist and a team Rather than retreating from the precise Soviet experience of
of assistants transformed a gallery into corridors and caves Kabakovy’s Man, however, Hirschhorn’s philosopher appears
of cardboard, packing tape, and two-by-fours. White walls to have sought respite and resolution from a more general-
disappeared and the new surfaces were quickly covered ized and globalized condition.

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

 11.12 Thomas Hirschhorn, Cavemanman,
2002. Mixed media installation. Barbara
Gladstone Gallery, New York.

The formal and intellectual excess of Cavemanman is single image of the collapsing towers, and the resulting
typical of Hirschhorn’s work. It presents his signature mix of ruins—and how this single image wants to have power
heady intellectual content—books in the cave are authored over me. Although we know perfectly well that there are
by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Simone Weil, Alexis de ruins in Grozny, and that there are ruins in Palestine,
Tocqueville—and_ mass-cultural favorites represented by and that there are ruins all over the world, this picture
posters of The Beatles, Madonna, and Che Guevara. Even alone claims to have the greatest power over me. I want
more important than the intellectual and political arguments to combat this power by producing a huge number of
placed in front of the viewer is the continual presentation other images.*°
of options of all sorts—spatial and visual as well as political
Hirschhorn seeks to undermine the hegemonic power of the
and intellectual. This collision of information is based on
isolated single image with a multiplicity of representations—
Hirschhorn’s insistent rejection of singularity of any sort, par-
not to reduce the consequences of any one tragedy or to
ticularly representational. For every crisis, event, or idea that
conflate New York, Grozny, and Gaza, but rather to put the
he addresses, he collects many images. Discussing his work
crises of contemporary life in context. Hirschhorn’s aim is to
with art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hirschhorn takes
demonstrate that there are relationships between the differ-
the example of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World
ent ruins and to initiate a dialogue between writers who have
Trade Center in New York:
thought about such things and viewers who step into and
I don’t believe in the superiority of the single image around Hirschhorn’s work.
because I know that the single image is utilized as a tool Like Sachs and Eliasson, Hirschhorn deliberately reveals
of exerting power. Let’s take the example of 9/11—this his process. However, the wonder of Space Program 2.0: MARS

Experience Observed
 What really is seen
to be
in the world - in our world.

O MAKE ART MEANS

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an is an a
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iL Concept of Joseph Beuys il
TO MAKE ARTMMEANS TO RE

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iphotography (Art) as a weapon ! Y | must be

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I To
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11.13 Thomas Hirschhorn, Where Do | Stand? What Do | Want?, 2007. Mixed media.
Courtesy the artist.

or Your strange certainty still kept is irrelevant to Cavemanman. (2007) (fig. 11.13) spells out the power of art to create
Mind, body, and world come together in the latter with little “density without hierarchy,” “ambition + universality,” and
mystery. Hirschhorn’s materials have no inherent value and “Amoekl
gl,
his technique requires no special skills. “Quality, no! Energy,
yes!” he often says. The cave, with its accumulation of objects Hasan M. Elahi
and ideas knit together in a precarious network of tape and One of the most common, if often invisible, instances of poli-
foil, both mimics Hirschhorn’s process of wrestling with ideas tics intruding upon daily experience is state- and corporate-
and provides space for active reflection. “I want to impli- sponsored surveillance, and numerous artists have taken this
cate the viewer,” he says, “not so much in my work as in the infringement on privacy as the subject of their work. Though
issues that my work deals with. I hope that I can make people surveillance art, focusing on the technology, imagery, and
think and relate to the world as human beings.”*’ The goal of infrastructure of covert observation of public and private
reflection, for Hirschhorn, is change. He explains: “Without spaces, was established by the late 1990s, it took on a par-
serious thought there obviously can’t be any meaning- ticular urgency after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the
ful political action, and I hope that I can make people feel World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Wash-
involved in the world.”** Every object, book, poster, and scrap ington, D.C., when local and national governments as well
of cardboard has a link to reality. Thus, thinking about Cave- as private organizations in the U.S. and Europe dramatically
manman or any of Hirschhorn’s work is necessarily a matter increased their use of CCTV surveillance of public space.
of both art and life. Without the signs of value imparted by Legislation such as the U.S. Patriot Act authorized less visible
precious materials, white-walled galleries, or directive art- forms of intrusion, and restrictions were tightened worldwide
ist’s statements, viewers are left to confront the parts of the on travel, immigration, and the granting ofvisas and asylum.
work and the juxtapositions Hirschhorn creates on their own. U.S. video and new-media artist Hasan M. Elahi (b. 1972)
Hirschhorn’s manifesto Where Do I Stand? What Do I Want? captured the post-September 11 anxiety in his web-based

Chapter 1] The Art of Contemporary Experience

 re
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11.14 Hasan M. Elahi, Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project,

2003-ongoing. Blog trackingtransience.net, access date February 25,
2013. The six small images are archive images. Courtesy the artist.

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project (2003—ongoing) (fig.

11.14). Returning to the U.S. from the Netherlands in June
2002, Elahi was detained by the Federal Bureau of Investi-
gation on suspicion of engaging in terrorist activities. Born
in Bangladesh, Elahi was interrogated regarding his travels
abroad and his activities around the time of the September
11 attacks. By way of response, he decided to turn surveil-
: : + November 10°
lance technologies on himself to create a twenty-four-hour 08:24PM =
alibi for himself. He began recording nearly every aspect of 5 ag tae +
his life, maintaining a log of all the credit-card transactions
and phone calls he made and even taking photographs
of his meals and the toilets he-used. He also developed
software that used Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites
to document his whereabouts and upload details to the pub-
licly accessible website, trackingtransience.net. The logs of
Elahi’s website indicate it has had many visits from the FBI
and even from the President’s office. Elahi mines this data-
base of information and images to create additional video
and installation work, also under the title Tracking Transience:
The Orwell Project, that prompts reflection on the afterlife of

Experience Observed
11.15 Jill Magid, Evidence Locker, 2004. Film stills. DVD, edited CCTV footage and audio, 18 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon lambert.

the Panopticon (see Chapter 5) and the production of self To begin, Magid, like Elahi, established herself as the
under conditions of constant observation. The excessiveness target of surveillance. She enlisted the help of City Watch, a
of his project suggests that relinquishing privacy is not the surveillance system of over 200 CCTV cameras that monitor
key to security. If everyone facilitated the state’s scrutiny of public spaces in Liverpool. She dressed in red so she would
our lives in this way, the quantity of data would overwhelm be easy to spot and maintained contact with an operator who
the system. A digital uprising, overwhelming the authorities followed her movements through the city. We see her sitting
through data overload, however, is not the point of Elahi’s at a café, walking through the streets, and often looking up
work. The character of life for millions of people has been at the cameras. In one segment she is on the phone with
transformed in the last decades. For everything from social- the camera operator and closes her eyes as we hear his voice
izing to protesting, the Internet and cell-phone technology guide her slowly through a crowd. City Watch accumulates
have opened up expansive new networks. These technolo- footage in thirty-one-day blocks that are then archived in an
gies, as Elahi’s work suggests, are as useful for keeping track evidence locker for seven years. Magid’s segments have them-
of us as they are for facilitating our connections. Cell phones, selves become part of the public record, available in thirty-
GPS devices, credit cards, key cards, shopping cards, even one short segments accessible via evidencelocker.net. Each
library cards produce new forms of visibility. Tracking Transi- episode is accompanied by a letter to the operator, report-
ence invites us to pay attention to this virtual experience and ing her daily activities in detail far exceeding what is visible
its consequences in the material world. in the video. Magid’s missives are personal and at times read
like love letters. In making Evidence Locker, she reported:
Jill Magid “My body became part of the system ... It was the most inti-
Video artist and writer Jill Magid (b. 1973) has noted of mate experience of my life.”*! Despite being the hero of the
the increase in municipality-sponsored surveillance: “The story, Magid is not the sole surrogate for the viewer. One of
camera in its static position seems to favor its context over the the City Watch operators develops a prominent supporting
pedestrians passing though it. It seems to say: The city is per- role, becoming, as the letters reveal, an object of the artist’s
manent, the civilian ephemeral.”*” Magid has taken advan- affection. She even meets him toward the end of the perfor-
tage of the theatrical potential of this situation to become mance. Magid notes: “Some viewers identify with the control-
949
an actor on the constantly monitored urban stage. There are ler and some identify with me.” Evidence Locker, like much of
aspects of oneself, she explains, that are only accessible if we Magid’s work, explores the effects of surveillance on subjec-
internalize the role of the observer. Role-playing,2, a central tivity and relationships in contemporary life.
aspect of identity theories in the 1990s, is the conceptual and
formal foundation of Evidence Locker (2004) (fig. 11.15), a The Institute of Applied Autonomy
video and web project that Magid created for the 2004 Liver- Elahi and Magid both use the means of surveillance to
pool Biennial in England. connect with others, Elahi reaching out through his website

ee r 4 | a ae fe Cn esl ye |
ster 1 The Art of Contemporary Experience
 11.16 Institute of Applied
Autonomy with Trevor Paglen,
Terminal Air, 2007. Screen grab
and details of airtraftic tracking
program. Courtesy the artist

Terminal Air

and Magid letting the cameras lead her to a brief meeting CCTV cameras. In fact, there is almost no way to cross Man-
with one of her watchers. These limited and fleeting hattan without being observed by devices in banks, corpo-
moments of contact, however, ultimately serve to emphasize rate offices, and even lumber yards. The maps generated by
the isolation inherent in a culture of surveillance. The Insti- iSee can be used for navigating the island relatively unseen,
tute of Applied Autonomy (IAA) proposes a collective public but are just as significant for illustrating the degree to which
with the desire to overcome the isolating function of surveil- public space is monitored and revealing what properties are
lance. Founded in 1998, the IAA is a research and develop- being most carefully observed.
ment organization “dedicated to the cause of individual and If iSee is directed at subverting surveillance and reclaim-
collective self-determination.” It creates and shares “tech- ing urban space, Terminal Air (2007) (fig. 11.16) attempts
nologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.” to repurpose the technologies of surveillance to undermine
IAA hardware and software are designed to allow the public state secrecy. The program logs the movements of airplanes
to challenge state and corporate control of technologies of that have been used by the United States government for
surveillance and secrecy. Its 2See (2001) is an interactive map extraordinary rendition, one of the most controversial prac-
that allows users to plot routes through Manhattan that avoid tices of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror’-related foreign

= eres Ont Ree |

cCxperience Upservea
policy, which involves the undocumented transportation of and the sublime can be quite powerful and is something
individuals suspected of terrorist activities to undisclosed visual art can be quite good at dealing with.”** Photography
locations outside the U.S. for the purpose of enlisting inter- is Paglen’s primary tool for pushing the limits of understand-
rogation procedures that violate U.S. law. The IAA is limited ing, though it is one toward which he shows great skepticism.
in its ability to track this clandestine practice. Nonetheless, His Limit Telephotography presents the discrepancy between
Terminal Air trains a public eye on its mechanisms. the promise of photography to reveal the truth and its inher-
ent limits. For these works, Paglen points telescopic lenses
Trevor Paglen developed for photographing outer space at classified mili-
IAA created Terminal Air in collaboration with geographer tary sites up.to 40 miles away. The images indubitably show
and photographer Trevor Paglen (b. 1974), whose projects soldiers and military operations but, despite their supposedly
highlight the aesthetic and political applications of technol- extraterrestrial powers, the cameras produce often blurry
ogies of observation. Paglen has found and photographed and awkwardly cropped results that confirm little else. The
classified military bases, spy satellites, and secret CIA prisons, photographs provide only partial knowledge—photograph-
as well as the geography of extraordinary rendition, includ- ing the secret world does not exactly expose its secrets in
ing the airplanes tracked in Terminal Ar, law offices, admin- detail.
istrative office buildings, airports, and detention facilities.” Paglen’s The Other Night Sky, a series begun in 2007 and
This “American geography of secrecy” extends, as Paglen including DMSP 5B/F4 from Pyramid Lake Indian Reserva-
notes, all over the world, from expected sites such as Wash- tion (Military Meteorological Satellite; 1973-054A) (2009) (fig.
ington, D.C. and Kabul, Afganistan, to less obvious loca- 11.17), addresses the role of photography differently. The
tions such as Dedham, Massachusetts, Smithfield, North ostensible subject of the photograph is the tufa domes rising
Carolina, Rabat, Morocco, and Adana, Turkey.*? Perhaps out of the lake. It recalls nineteenth-century photographs
the most shocking feature of Paglen’s work is
that the vast networks of covert operations he
has uncovered have been found through ordi-
nary means. He explains: “This secret state has
to intersect the visible world in all sorts of dif-
ferent places, because it can’t be a completely
self-contained thing, and those intersections ...
in the materiality of the surface of the earth”
can be seen and represented.*° While research-
ing these intersections, Paglen reaches out to
plane-spotters who log the comings and goings
of aircraft all over the world, similar groups of
satellite observers, and amateur investigators
of all sorts who maintain records, often online.
Like Paglen, these communities are alert for
aberrations such as planes landing in irregular
locations and at odd times or objects orbiting
the Earth outside registered flight paths. Com-
bining research, travel, and the use of telescopic
lenses, Paglen’s oeuvre serves as an archive of
information he has been able to uncover about
the Black Ops run by the U.S. government.
Paglen diverges from the plane-spotters or
IAA in his commitment to exceeding a docu-
mentary or political function and creating a
critical engagement with the history of art and
aesthetics. He is particularly interested in the
power of art as a tool to encounter the sublime,
defined by Paglen as “those moments where we
can sense that we cannot sense, let alone under-
stand something.”*” In response to reaching
the limits of understanding, one has recourse,
Paglen asserts, to “aesthetics,” which have “often 11.17 Trevor Paglen, DMSP 5B/F4 from Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation (Military
been linked to notions of freedom: ambiguity Meteorological Satellite; 1973-054A), 2009. Photograph. Courtesy the artist.

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

of the site taken by Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840-82) for the book, ends with a discussion of artists whose work pre-
the U.S. government-sponsored King Survey in the 1860s. sents and promotes transformative action—often no more
O’Sullivan had been employed to document the breadth of complicated than locking arms or more radical than raising a
the continent, demonstrating the geographical expanse and child. The drawings and videos by Los Angeles-based Andrea
natural resources available to the U.S. nation and laying the Bowers capture moments in the history of non-violence that,
groundwork for its westward expansion. These first photo- like the photography of Catherine Opie, end the chapter
graphs of the American landscape were both aesthetically with images of the experience of politics at the beginning of
and politically motivated. In DMSP 5B/F4, Paglen documents the twenty-first century.
a light horizontal line cutting across the sky, above the tufa
domes that had captured O’Sullivan’s attention. This is the Harun Farocki
reflection of the sun in the body of a reconnaissance satel- Paglen’s DMSP 5B/F4 is the product of pointing a camera at
lite captured by the long exposure of Paglen’s camera, itself the underside of U.S. democracy, at the eyes that observe the
computer-controlled to locate the path of the officially non- Earth in secret. It documents one means of producing what
existent object. DMSP 5B/F4 is a representation of the land- German filmmaker Harun Farocki (b. 1944) has called “oper
scape being observed. With images such as O’Sullivan’s as m, 6
ational imagery”: “Images that do not try to represent reality
its art-historical source, The Other Night Sky unites historical but are part of a technical operation.”°? Beginning with Eye/
and contemporary efforts to observe and represent the land- Machine (2000-03) (fig. 11.18), a series of three two-channel
scape. DMSP 5B/F+4 is a beautiful photograph, with its limited installations, and War at a Distance (2003), its single-channel
palette of luminescent earth tones and contrast between the version, Farocki has examined such operational imagery as it
heightened detail on the dome that had been O’Sullivan’s appears in both manufacturing and military technology.
subject and the blurred lines of the satellite that is Paglen’s. In Eye/Machine and War at a Distance, Farocki juxtaposes
It elegantly merges the surveilling eye of the classified satel- assembly-line production and weapons technology with a
lite, the documentary gaze of Paglen as investigator, and the particular concern for how both have been transformed to
imperialist view of O'Sullivan, to present a history of ways of rely on images. Scenes from the factory floor show the use
seeing and a window into the secret geography of the twenty- of sensory robotics to guide the assembly of machine parts.
first century. Of particular interest to Farocki is the ubiquity of image-
recognition technology. In place of the crowded shop floors
of the first Industrial Revolution, Farocki presents the fully
Mass Media, Personal Experience, automated and nearly emptied factories that typify contem-
and Politics porary production. Contrasting the presence of products
Surveillance art drew attention to the fact that in our world with the absence of people, these works pursue a question
all spaces, and the experiences that occur in them, are that art historian Georges Didi Huberman (b. 1953) has pro-
subject to and possess political power. In this work, daily posed anchors all of Farocki’s practice: “Why, in which way,
life is the object of a technology of observation extending and how does the production of images take part in the destruc-
from the stars to our bedrooms. The politics of experience, tion of human beings?”?' Eye/Machine and War at a Distance
however, is not only a matter of policing society or subvert- detail the second half of this proposal by showing imagery
ing control. Beginning with the work of German filmmaker used to sell weapons systems and footage recorded by missile-
Harun Farocki, the last section of this book examines work mounted cameras, the latter dating from between World War
that treats the body as a tool for action and understanding. II and the Gulf Wars. Created entirely with found footage,
Like the surveillance artists, Farocki and the collection of Eye/Machine and War at a Distance are composed of imagery
painters, photographers, film and video artists, sculptors, produced by the military-industrial complex, edited to
and performance artists discussed in the following section convey Farocki’s political and philosophical perspective. At
contemplate experience as connected and understood pre- the end of the film Farocki’s narrator points to the common
dominately through its representation in various forms of economic foundation for the depopulated fields of industrial
mass media from newspapers and television to computer production and those of military destruction: “Manual work
simulations and virtual reality. The earliest work discussed in is being abolished here and at the same time being displaced
this section is a film from the 1960s in which Farocki, in the to poorer countries. Today wars too are more likely to take
guise of a television newscaster, burns himself in an attempt place in poorer countries than in rich ones. The rich coun-
to more accurately report on the war in Vietnam. The works tries’ highly developed weapons no longer find an enemy
of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, U.S. video artist Silvia who is their equal.”
Kolbowski, and Israeli/U.S. video artist Omer Fast discussed Despite delivering a clearly critical message regarding
here, like those of Farocki, analyze different forms of imagery the unobstructed escalation of the military and the role of
and provoke sensual as well as intellectual and visual appre- images within that rise, Farocki’s intent is not strictly didactic.
ciation of topics relating to the experience and representa- As Huberman again points out, Farocki’s work since the late
tion of global politics, particularly of war. The chapter, and 1960s has required participation: not in terms of sharing

Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics

 11.18 Harun Farocki, Auge/Maschine (Eye/Machine) I-III, 2001-03. Video. Double channel installation, sound,
color, 25/17/15 minutes. © Harun Farocki Courtesy: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/Salzburg

meals or manipulating the artwork as in the genre of “rela- of all images in Farocki’s work. Words are needed and an
tional aesthetics” (see Chapter 7), but by demanding the offscreen narrator speaks them: “A cigarette burns at 400
viewer share in the analysis and critique of the facts before degrees, napalm burns at 3,000 degrees.” With this detail
her or him. No image is trusted to speak on its own. In one Farocki’s action becomes anchored not in his pain or the
of his earliest and most shocking films, /nextinguishable Fire reactions of the viewer but in the recounted, though not
(1969), Farocki initiated a discussion about the culpability represented, reality of the war in Vietnam. Throughout his
of the scientific community in relation to the Vietnam War career, Farocki has developed multiple strategies for jux-
by drawing attention to the logistics of napalm production, taposing images that draw attention to their necessarily
the political utility of dividing the labor involved, and the interdependent character. As the rest of Jnextinguishable Fire
limitations of representation in addressing the issue. Farocki repeatedly demonstrates, it falls to the individual to carefully
begins the film by showing himself reading a translated testi- examine as many fragments of information and imagery as
mony of a Vietnamese civilian recounting a napalm attack. He possible in order to comprehend and respond to social prod-
then poses the question of how this atrocity can be addressed ucts of all kinds, from politics to science and technology.
in film. Images of flesh burning or wounded bodies, Farocki Farocki’s work is motivated by an ethical commitment to
calmly explains, will cause the viewer to look away, feel exposing the mechanics of representation in contemporary
assaulted, and dismiss the issue entirely. Farocki then takes a society. Recent examples include Deep Play (2007), a twelve-
lit cigarette from off-screen and presses it into the bare skin channel video installation based upon the broadcast of the
of his forearm. The action, though surprising and distress- 2006 Soccer World Cup Final, and Serious Games (2009-10),
ing, is not explained by either the disruption it creates or the a four-part, multichannel installation documenting virtual-
pain it causes. As an image alone, it “calls for an appraisal reality combat simulations used for U.S. operations in
within language,” to use Huberman’s characterization Afghanistan. Both works develop the analysis of operational

olem |ee } TI kd f ie we f ona

lapte he - orf Contemporary
| y Experience
|
 imagery through calculated juxtapositions of appropriated producer and sound engineer Matthias Rajmann (b. 1965),
representational footage with virtual images, including a started researching the military use of immersive virtual-
range of computer-generated, image-recognition, artificial- reality software for pre- and post-tour-of-duty training. The
intelligence, and video-game materials. Commissioned for programs, developed by the University of Southern Califor-
Documenta 12, Deep Play uses a great variety of operational nia’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), simulate
imagery generated in contexts other than factory production Afghani and Iraqi terrain and a variety of probable combat-
and military destruction. On one monitor Farocki shows the ant exchanges. Serious Games juxtaposes computer-generated
telecast of the World Cup Final, which extended to a penalty scenarios with Farocki’s own footage of military personnel
shootout that gave Italy the victory over France. The other operating the systems. Serious Games I: Watson Is Down (2010)
eleven monitors present a range of imagery produced in follows a team of four infantry soldiers along a virtual trans-
conjunction with the game. There is footage generated by port route in Afghanistan. The trainees function as a unit
security cameras, filmed analysis of the game, video of com- learning to maneuver the vehicle, navigate away from IEDs
mentators, displays showing individual players’ movements (Improvised Explosive Devices), coordinate with friendly
and energy expenditure, and computer-rendered represen- units, and return enemy fire. Unable to adequately defend
tations of the players for video-game development, to name themselves, the gunner, Watson, is shot and killed, at which
but a few of the examples Farocki found. The results dem- point a new category of problem arises: What is to be done
onstrate the degree to which moving-image production, well with a virtual cadaver? After a pause in which the driver
beyond broadcast material, is integral to the sports and enter- asks what they should do with Watson, the unit moves on in
tainment economies. More important to questions about silence as the living Watson leans back in his chair, red-faced,
the social function of representations, Deep Play suggests and lets out a frustrated sigh. Watson Is Down demonstrates
that deciphering how images function and how meaning is that virtual reality not only simulates spaces and events but
created in our society requires understanding a vast reservoir also stimulates real-life camaraderie and adrenalin. In the
of material, much of which circulates far from the general confusing moment of virtual death, the body asserts itself—
public’s gaze. To look at it through the lens of Guy Debord’s reborn in the death of the image.
writing (see Chapter 5), which was fundamental to Farocki’s In addition to presenting virtual reality as a staging
early thinking, images are not only the face of the spectacle ground in which to learn tactics, Serious Games also uti-
but also its unseen machinery, and artists are in a unique lizes ICT systems created to help GIs process experiences
position to provide insight into both. of trauma and death. Unlike the preparatory function of
Though virtual reality appears in Eye/Machine, War at Dis- the training materials in Watson Is Down or Serious Games II:
tance, and Deep Play, these works rely primarily on represen- Three Dead, the environments in Serious Games IIT: Immersion
tational images captured in the real world. Serious Games, (2009) and Serious Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow (2010)
on the other hand, addresses the complex relationship (fig. 11.19) were programmed to enhance memory of real
between experiences had in virtual reality and in life outside experiences rather than to anticipate them. The ICT software
it. Farocki began the project when one of his collaborators, in these cases was created to help the soldier relive traumatic

Speed|2a

11.19 Harun Farocki, Eine Sonne ohne Schatten (A Sun with No Shadow)—Serious Games IV, 2010. Video.
Installation, sound, color, 7 minutes 39 seconds, col. A+B. © Harun Farocki 2012. Image courtesy Galerie
Thaddaeus Ropac.

Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics

experiences for therapeutic sessions with a councilor or psy- Luc Tuymans
chologist. Like the imagery in Eye/Machine and Farocki’s In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it appeared to artists
earlier work, the operational capacity of these simulations that the mass media either prevented the unmediated
is enhanced by their ability to approximate the appearance experience of reality a@ la Guy Debord’s Society of the
of the world. The simulations, however, are not depend- Spectacle, manipulated the viewer as in Foucault’s analysis
ent on any sources in the material world. On one screen of of power, or replaced reality altogether d@ /a Baudrillard’s
Immersion, we see a war zone not unlike the setting of popular simulacra. Artists responded by approaching the image
video games. The software was, in fact, adopted from Full world variously with the theoretical precision of appropria-
Spectrum Warrior, a training system and X-Box video game tion, the cavalier humor of a Kippenberger, or the nihil-
developed previously by ICT. On the second screen of ism of Neo-Expressionism. Artists in the twenty-first century
Immersion, Farocki shows footage he has taken of a soldier have continued dissecting the power of representation. Cri-
walking us through a clearly traumatic mission in which tique, however, has been contextualized with a sense that
the commanding officer was dismembered by an explo- the mass media, like the world it purports to represent,
sive device. The soldier recounts being paralyzed with fear is open for mediation. In the words of Belgian painter Luc
and describes feeling nauseous and almost unable to speak Tuymans (b. 1958): “There are no more images that come
about it. The emotional intensity of Immersion reaches a criti- across as a totality, no more universal images.”°? In fact,
cal point near the end of the twenty-minute video when the Tuymans argues, painting highlights the fissures in what still
soldier crouches down as if to get out of the virtual terrain purports to be universal by enveloping the photographic
and away from the memory. When he finally does rise, he images we “digest” with the physicality that “shakes loose the
removes the headset on which he has been viewing the sim- emotional element within the viewer,” inviting us to “deci-
ulated terrain and with a grin and a laugh acknowledges a pher and decode.”°*
round of applause. Farocki had not taken his camera crew Tuymans’s paintings address a range of dramatic and often
into an actual therapy session, but instead documented a upsetting subject matter, including the Holocaust, postco-
demonstration of the software by military therapists and ICT lonial liberation struggles, resurgent nationalisms, and war
developers, staged to show the efficacy of simulated imagery generally. Nonetheless, they are not, he asserts, “witness-
as a therapeutic tool. /mmersion places the viewer in front of ing elements” created to convince the viewer of anything.”
a copy for which there is no original, a truly Baudrillardian Instead, each work presents fragments that must be fitted
simulacrum (see Chapter 5). into contexts whose relevance is determined by the viewer.
Farocki provides a side-by-side comparison of pre- and The viewer must convince him- or herself. Tuymans selects
post-deployment virtual spaces in Serious Games IV: A Sun topics and sources that are so overdetermined by history or
with No Shadow. Copied segments of the training session from contemporary politics that his paintings draw upon com-
Watson Is Down appear again, this time coupled with scenes peting political and social discourses. Moreover, it is one of
from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) therapy ses- Tuymans’s accomplishments that his paintings refer to
sions. Without the drama the actor provided in Jmmersion, explicit political content while also being open to other nar
A Sun with No Shadow concentrates on the character of the ratives. The Secretary of State (2005) (fig. 11.20), a portrait of
simulations, revealing the degree to which the soldiers U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, is one of his more
trained in a virtual-image bank stripped of actual people, celebrated portraits. The painting is based on a televised
face, upon their return, a similarly neutralized territory in appearance and references both the camera that produced
which to begin post-combat recovery. The operational func- the image and the television set that carried it. We recognize
tion of images in Eye/Machine and War at a Distance that dis- that the tightly cropped face is the result of a zoom lens on
pensed with the body to facilitate the smooth operation of a television camera, and the pale cast of the painting evokes
the factory or war machine here eliminates real places so as the light of a television screen. Tuymans provides only the
to help soldiers survive what they have experienced in them. slightest indication of personality—Dr. Rice’s slightly squint-
As Jan Verwoert wrote of this piece: “The before and after ing eyes and pursed lips add a somewhat anti-social cast to
match to such a degree that it is as if the in between [the war] her expression. The iconic presentation of the isolated head
never happened.” A Sun with No Shadow, however, points to is a product of the style of news broadcasting, but it also
this in-between in a way that is at once mundane and horri- reflects the role played by the secretary of state as one of the
fying. Looking over the pre-deployment training and post- few “faces” of U.S. policy during the Second Gulf War.
tour-of-duty therapy simulations, Farocki noticed that in the Though much can be gleaned from The Secretary of State,
second there were no shadows, an occurrence he supposed much is missing. Tuymans reproduced his subject’s iconic
to be simply the result of needing to save money on program- presentation but not the circumstances that give it impor
ming costs. Cost-benefit analyses notwithstanding, the loss tance. We recognize the televisual format but do not know
of shadow remains a potent metaphor for war as the event the specific events being reported. The reason for Dr. Rice’s
in which the solid matter and living beings that cast them expression is unknown and we are not shown her whole face,
are destroyed. nor the rest of her body. Each detail Tuymans paints seems to

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

 11.20 luc Tuymans, The Secretary
of State, 2005. Oil on canvas,
18 x 24V4" (45.7 x 61.9 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Courtesy Studio Lue Tuymans.

limit what we can say with certainty about the subject, forcing and the quickly edited sequences in a news report or sport-
the viewer away from the canvas to grapple with its context. ing event. Even the dimensions of The Secretary of State (18 by
This reduction of the image, Tuymans says, “is frightening, 24% inches) allude to the standard size of a television screen
very powerful ... Then you know and you can see at once rather than the traditional, much larger, vertically oriented
that you can’t see everything. This non-experience of the state portrait. Having established the mass-media aesthetic,
image is something very important, especially because you Tuymans then contrasts the televisual source of his imagery
are asking the viewer to make up for this lack.”°° Like the hys- with his painterly style. The brushstrokes on the small paint-
terical documents of Raad and the Atlas Group (see Chapter ing are visible, as are the layers of paint and even the texture
6), Tuymans’s paintings distinguish themselves from mimetic of the canvas below them. Tuymans paints with subtle modu-
representations, and ask the viewer to reconstruct the paths lations of color exemplified in the passages of warmer ocher
that connect the image to constellations of political, histori- hues that breathe volume into the subject’s face. The Secretary
cal, emotional, and aesthetic facts. of State is typical of a body of work in which Tuymans con-
Tuymans’s formal challenge, like his conceptual one, fronts the ubiquitous generality of the televised image with
is to paint images that are demonstrably incomplete—the the material individuality of painting, thereby locating his
surfaces often only lightly covered, the compositions frag- subject at the intersection of the globalized flow of informa-
mentary, and even the subject matter, as in The Secretary of tion and the localized experience of daily life.
State, only partially defined—yet that are clearly finished as
works of art. The viewer must recognize the work as a frag- Silvia Kolbowski
ment or a presentation of lack, rather than as an empty Writer and curator Nato Thompson has argued forcefully
composition or a half-done canvas. Tuymans begins most of that understanding the relationship between sensation and
his paintings by making quick sketches or watercolors from representation is essential to the urgent task of articulat-
images he has found or photographs he has taken. He then ing how images work in and out of works of art. “In order
paints from these small studies, putting significant distance to understand contemporary politics,” Thompson claims,
between the photographic source and the final work. Like “we must understand that a war of affect is being played out
Cindy Sherman (see Chapter 2), Tuymans implies a narra- across a landscape of spectacle.”®” Theorists writing about
tive context for his images by quoting cinematic conventions the spectacle since Debord (see Chapter 5) have consistently
including the cropped view, the close-up, the camera pan, predicted that global citizenry would be numbed and over-
and artificial lighting. He also relies heavily on television aes- whelmed by the mass media. Thompson, on the other hand,
thetics: the light of the screen, the extreme, often arbitrary and a host of others including Jacques Ranciére and Bruno
close-ups produced by news crews, the abrupt transitions as Latour, have found in contemporary society new forms of
the camera is trained and retrained on the heart of an event, sensation with the potential to engage spectacle critically.

Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics

 nuanced examination of the role of various
forms of representation in the creation and
contemplation of crisis.
Both the Duras/Resnais film and Kolbowski’s
After Hiroshima Mon Amour begin with an
image of hoarfrost before slowly shifting to
ash-covered flesh and then to the naked skin
of two lovers. After Hiroshima Mon Amour then
introduces action in Iraq and the dialogue,
given in the form of subtitles but not actually
spoken, begins. The first two lines are those of
the Duras/Resnais original but their order is
reversed. “I saw everything,” we read as we see
a soldier’s perspective as he forcibly enters an
Iraqi home. The scene is tense and confusing.
You) saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.
Then a second subtitle, “You saw nothing in
Hiroshima. Nothing,” transports us back from
11.21 Silvia Kolbowski, After Hiroshima Mon Amour, 2008. Video still of projection loop. the early twenty-first-century Middle East
Video, 16mm, 22 mins. Courtesy the artist. to mid-twentieth-century Japan. Kolbowski
continues to intercut her sources, connect-
ing the present with 1959 and 1945, and Iraq
Visual artists at the turn of the millennium were well posi- and New Orleans with Hiroshima, and also linking up film,
tioned to assess the political and personal consequences of video, Internet, and fine art. By triangulating Katrina, Iraq,
living as much with representations of the material world as and Hiroshima, Kolbowski proposes that there are important
with actual experiences in it. In the new millennium Silvia similarities between the internal and international politics
Kolbowski (see Chapters 2 and 6) continued to address the in and beyond the West as well as between those after World
collision of body, psyche, and mass media with a critical eye War IJ and today; her formal choices, however, indicate that
toward the dominance of television and cinema. Like many there have also been significant changes since Hiroshima Mon
of the artists discussed in this chapter, she upholds fiction as Amour was made.
an important means to subvert the dominant narratives of The Duras/Resnais film is about the inevitability of having
power and to process experiences of war and trauma. to confront the spiritual, psychological, and political after-
Silvia Kolbowski has been addressing the political and math of the bombing of Hiroshima and the impossibility
psychological impact of media representations since the of reconciling oneself to it or its impact: One can neither
beginning of her career in the early 1980s. Her twenty-two- avoid it nor engage it. This condition corresponds to what
minute projection After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2008) (fig. Jalal Toufic described as post-crisis status in his discussion
11.21) borrows its plot from the 1959 Alain Resnais film of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Beirut in Undying Love or Love
Hiroshima Mon Amour and appropriates its imagery from Dies (2002) (see Chapter 6). Resnais and Duras demonstrated
uploaded footage taken by U.S. troops on active duty in Iraq, how art can give form to this contradiction, even if it cannot
first-person reportage of the devastation in post-Hurricane resolve it. In their story, the historical trauma of the nuclear
Katrina New Orleans, and fragments of Resnais’s film. As attack on Japan is approached obliquely through the fleet-
she had in her earlier work, including Model Pleasure (see fig. ing relationship between two lovers, a visiting French actress
2.10), Kolbowski practices an impure form of appropriation, and a Japanese architect. When Kolbowski integrates the love
at one moment representing the original untouched and at story into her film, she casts ten actors of different races and
the next submitting it to dramatic modification. She removed ethnicities in the roles of the fictional protagonists. The two
individual frames from the Resnais original to give her lovers and the many actors complement the unseen subjects
version a choppier, more abstracted appearance. For several who recorded the imagery of Baghdad and New Orleans.
scenes that use contemporary video footage, she dramatically Duras and Resnais had invited the viewer to identify with the
altered the color and layered the imagery to present Iraq and actions or inactions of the protagonists. Kolbowski, by mul-
New Orleans as related examples of U.S. hubris and indif- tiplying the actors who play the couple and the photogra-
ference. Afler Hiroshima Mon Amour also includes several re- phers who document the scenes, collectivizes the experience
enacted scenes that, like the rest of the film, rely on Margaret that was so individuated and personalized in the original.
Duras’s screenplay and synopsis for Hiroshima Mon Amour for Duras and Resnais, like Adorno, Fautrier, and Pollock,
their dialogue but take license with its directions and staging. answered the question as to whether art would survive
The result of Kolbowski’s assemblage is a bold presenta- human barbarism; it did, but in the hands of the first post
tion of the aggression and indifference of U.S. power and a World War II generation it tended to place the burden of

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

experience and expression on the individual, whether it was These works evolved from interviews with people who lived
the painter in the studio or the viewer alone before the work. and worked between history and its representation. Spielberg’s
It has become critically important to Kolbowski that her work List, a two-channel video, features Polish residents of Krakéw
should convey the fact that historical events and the means who had worked as extras on the set of Schindler’s List. The
through which they occur and are made known have “psy- documentary style of much of the footage and Fast’s careful
chical dimension[s].” Her art, she explains, “draws out an editing suggest that we are listening to Holocaust survivors,
affective response,” and thus instigates an inquiry into the but when a woman’s story of being captured by the SS ends
connection between the individual and society.°* Kolbowski, with a laugh, or a photograph of the concentration camps is
like Farocki and the artists who will close this chapter, sug- time-stamped “March 3, 1993,” it becomes apparent that the
gests that we can and must grapple with the cost of barbarism occupation being recollected is of Poland by Hollywood, not
as it is experienced, in communities and using our capacities Nazis. Though many of the speakers take pleasure in remi-
as both thinking and feeling subjects. niscing about the film and make no connections to the war
itself, others discuss the sincere emotional conflict raised
Omer Fast by the decision to participate in Spielberg’s retelling. One
Israeli/U.S. video artist Omer Fast (b. 1972) has approached young man poignantly describes how troubling he found
questions of history, memory, and trauma_ through his own preference to be cast as a German instead of a Jew.
single- and multiple-channel projections of appropriated Spielberg’s List presents and provokes the experience of emo-
material, documentary film, and fully scripted drama. Since tional conflict that is layered upon the traumas of history by
completing his MFA at Hunter College in New York in 2000, our attempts to represent them.
he has been creating work that examines the impact on our In 2006, Fast set out for another “super-space,” a training
“consciousness” of encountering the world with “screens and facility at Fort Irwin, California, that included simulations
cameras as very much part of our sensory/memory appa- of Iraqi and Afghan terrain. While waiting at Fort Hood
ratus.”°” He began his investigation by thinking about the military base in Texas to be granted access permission, Fast
spaces of actual experience in relation to those of its rep- interviewed GIs recently returned from the war in Iraq.
resentation—that is, the difference between sites and sets. When authorization to go to Fort Irwin failed to arrive, these
Projects such as Spielberg’s List (2003), filmed in Krakow, conversations became the basis for The Casting (2007) (fig.
Poland, near the collapsing, abandoned set of Steven Spiel- 11.22), a four-screen projection dramatizing two events from
berg’s movie Schindler’s List (1993), and Godville (2005), a GI’s deployment to the Middle East, and the casting of
shot at Colonial Williamsburg, a living-history museum in the film about it. The work consists of two two-sided projec-
Virginia, began as considerations of places in which site tions that hang side by side. On the front are scenes of actors
and set were confused, “kind of super-space[s] ... that con- frozen in tableaux vivants illustrating the narration of then-
flate .. . historical events with their later representations. »60
Sergeant Ronn Cantu. The production values are high and

11.22 Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007. Film still, 4 channels, 14 minutes, 35mm transferred to video/sound.
Commissioned by Museum moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Wien. Collection: Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Courtesy of the artist, Arratia Beer, Berlin and gb Agency, Paris.

Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics

the scenes look like they might be stills until an actor moves Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) by the U.S. military, strikes a differ-
a bit or smoke and sand blow by, thus reminding the viewer ent balance between documentation and drama, interview
that the medium is moving film. Cantu describes the acci- and editing. Named for the most effective distance from
dental killing of a boy on a highway outside Baghdad as the the ground for carrying out satellite surveillance, the video
actors tense with the effort of remaining still. Fast explains _ intertwines three variations of a fictional interview with the
that “instead of substituting the pathos of the soldier’s story pilot of a Predator Drone with three fragments of an actual
with the pathos of actors acting, I am going to give you the conversation with its sensor operator, the second member
pathos of the body under duress.”°! Folded into this story is of the two-person team that controls the plane. The sensor
a second one about a Christmas Day date with a German girl operator, identified by Fast only as Brandon, was stationed
whom Cantu met while he was stationed in Bavaria. This nar- in the U.S. while he executed surveillance and combat mis-
rative includes an awkward introduction to her family and sions in Afghanistan remotely. He provided Fast with details
the revelation that the girl cuts herself. “It’s not painful at about Predator surveillance capacities, combat protocol,
all,” she says of the act. “It just helps me to remember things soldiers’ daily lives, and some specifics about individual
that happen to me.” Discussing the self-harming and the missions. Over the course of the piece, the sensor operator
accidental murder is clearly upsetting to the soldier. Toward also discusses “virtual stress,” the impact of engaging in real
the end of the film, he comments that, due to the intensity warfare from within the realm of representation. Despite
and chaos of the experience, he remembers everything that serving from a room safe in Las Vegas, the soldiers operat-
occurred, but that he cannot be trusted to put the events in ing the warplane with a camera and remote controls, as
the right order—his memories and the story that is being both Brandon and his fictional pilot counterpart declare,
made from them are two different things. are nonetheless active in the war zone every day. Soldiers
The projections that play on the rear of the screens reveal in the virtual theater of war confront death and experience
how much editing was required to create the narration heard symptoms of PTSD every bit as real as if they had been sta-
on the front. We see Sergeant Cantu being interviewed tioned in Iraq or Afghanistan. 5000 Feet, like After Hiroshima
before his second tour of duty in Iraq, after which he would Mon Amour, draws attention to the psychological impact of
be promoted to the rank of staff sergeant and become an out- historical events and the means of representation by which
spoken critic of the war. A sentence or two are uttered and we encounter and engage them. The operating modes of
then we see the image jerk as the film is cut to incorporate global war, maintained by virtual realities, have brought us
a different sentence, phrase, word, or even syllable into the out the other side of the simulacra theorized by Baudrillard
narration: The footage of the speaking subject is a constantly in the 1980s. It is not that Kolbowski and Fast, and certainly
shifting series of fragments cut and pasted together. Shot not the soldiers their work features, are announcing the
over several days, the Sergeant is seen in different clothes, return of any historically distant or nostalgically imagined
often changing appearance from word to word, making Fast’s real. Instead, contemporary life is shown to be real in both its
editing clearly visible. The overt presentation of the artifice virtual and material forms.
here suggests the possibility that the entire narrative is a fab- The war story told by the pilot, played by U.S. actor Denis
rication—and the story of the girl cutting herself was indeed O’Hare (b. 1962), follows a man and his family as targeted
the invention of the artist. Study of the interview reveals that combatants stop them on a country road. The family and
much of the Iraqi encounter did come from Cantu’s per- the soldiers, identified as Taliban militia, are then all killed
sonal experience, however. The stories in The Casting sound in the U.S. missile attack. This story is accompanied by the
plausible, convey truths, and come from the mouths of Fast’s pilot’s musings on a variety of other stories he finds relevant.
subjects, but have uncertain relationship to their experience. Fast again uses re-enactment, though this time with fully
Even the sentence in which the Sergeant admits that he is moving actors rather than the tableaux vivants of The Casting.
not sure about the order of events, a comment that seems so He cast the scene with what look like middle- and working-
natural for someone retelling a traumatic event, was not his class whites and located the action in terrain evoking the
own. Fast says of his working process: “Often I’m dealing with outskirts of a generic U.S. suburb. When O’Hare describes
people who have experienced things in their bodies and are the dress of the suspected enemy as typical of the south, Fast
then forced at some distance in time to recollect those expe- somewhat comically shows his actors dressed in plaid shirts,
riences. So the loss of experience, the wanting to recapture work boots, and baseball caps. This is but one detail that illus-
its immediacy, this is articulated in the work, both explicitly trates how all stories, from personal ones to news accounts,
[though the narrative] and through the editing.”*? “Com- are dependent on associative chains made by the listener.
pulsive cutting,” as Fast refers to his own editing, becomes a In a related piece, Her Face Was Covered, Part 2 (2011), Fast
means and a metaphor for the effort required to transform clarifies his interest in such incidental connections. Pre-
the miasma of experience into stories and histories that can sented as a slide show with alternating images and texts,
be remembered and retold. Her Face Was Covered tells the story of another drone attack.
5000 Feet Is the Best (2011) (fig. 11.23), a thirty-minute Sometimes the images provide the expected visual infor
single-channel video about the operation of Unmanned mation: “So, basically there’s a truck,” is followed by a slide

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

 11.23 Omer Fast,
5000 Feet Is the
Best, 2011. Film
still, digital video,
Courtesy
p
aris

Berlin

of a yellow moving truck. Often, however, as when “and out and amplifying details such as lights, shadows, and colors
the order is given to stop the convoy” is followed by an that were dormant throughout the first telling. The effect
image of a waitress, words and image do not coincide as is breathtaking and draws attention not only to the artifice
expected. These works convey some of the complexity of how of filmmaking but also to the variety of details that at any
experience is filtered through the personal and cultural data- moment can be brought to bear on fleshing out our memo-
banks of representations. ries and turning them into stories and history.
Fast’s own craft plays a major role in 5000 Feet Is the Best.
Its scenes are richly and meticulously staged, profession- Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie
ally acted, and exquisitely edited. Unlike in the previously Since her first exhibitions in the late 1990s, Los Angeles-based
discussed work, however, Fast does not use editing to fabri- Andrea Bowers (b. 1965) has been focusing on commu-
cate the narration. Instead, the readily apparent and virtu- nity and activism, producing what amounts to an archive of
osic edits are enlisted for aesthetic and emotional impact. protest and democratic actions. Bowers was born and raised
By the third time the pilot submits to his interviewer, the in a small working-class town in northern Ohio. She received
room feels like it has filled with cameras, each one freneti- a traditional studio training in college before immers-
cally feeding images into the central eye of the editor, picking ing herself in the conceptual and political environment
of CalArts in the early 1990s. Interested in crowds, Bowers vast fields of white paper. The exhaustive detail invites the
began making drawings of moments of connection between viewer to peer closely at bodies suspended in poses of action
strangers as well as portraits of individuation. Her protago- and collapse. Protestors rally but the site of their demon-
nists become themselves as they join together in celebra- stration is revealed only outside the drawing in the titles or,
tion or even simple fandom. In 2003, she began drawing a as in the unusual case of Nonviolent Protest Training: Abalone
history of democratic protest. “It had just been a matter of Alliance Camp, in an accompanying clipping. In other draw-
time,” she explained, “before documenting people’s actions ings, the demonstrators are drawn hanging limply, with their
turned into documenting people’s activism.” Bowers has bodies descending unsupported toward the ground, the
since made compelling work about undocumented citizens, result of Bowers excluding the arresting officers, the sur-
at-risk populations, abortion, the environment, feminism, rounding architecture, landscape, and witnesses from the
and AIDS that addresses political empowerment in the face images. These are portraits of resistance separated from the
of crisis. Her material comes primarily from interviews, many agents of authority. Bowers has described her labor-intensive
of which she films and incorporates into the final work, and method of meticulously transcribing the source photograph
archives. Though the lives and events she focuses on are in minute detail as a means of letting the body transmit infor
often dramatic and complex, her staging and presentation mation to the mind.™ The physicality of her process, like the
are controlled and simple: People read letters, write notes, imagery itself, offers a conduit from protestors’ acts of resist-
teach, watch, and speak. At times her subjects might dance, ance to viewers’ acts of perception.
or sing, or hold each other. Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training (2004), a two-channel
Bowers’s work on activism began with series of drawings video related to Nonviolent Protest Training, further develops
and video works about non-violent civil disobedience that Bowers’s thinking about the integration of bodies and poli-
present a philosophical and practical guide to resistance tics. For the film, Bowers enlisted a group of ten dancers to
and self-determination at the turn of the millennium. She take a course in non-violent civil disobedience. Political
executed the drawings, including Nonviolent Protest Train- action groups typically offer such training sessions to educate
ing: Abalone Alliance Camp, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, themselves and others in the forms their resistance takes and
1981 and San Luis Obispo County Telegraph-Tribune, Sept 14, to build a sense of purpose and community. At the start of
1981 (2004) (fig. 11.24), in a Photorealist style, isolating the video, the two anonymous facilitaté6rs present a history
the activists from their context and surrounding them with of non-violence and prompt the dancers to think about the

11.24 Andrea Bowers, Nonviolent Protest Training: Abalone Alliance Camp, Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, 1981
and San Luis Obispo County Telegraph-Tribune, Sept 14, 1981, 2004. Graphite on paper and newspaper page, diptych;
graphite 38 x 49%" (96.5 x 126.36 cm), newspaper 23 x 14" (58.42 x 35.56 cm]. Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York. Partial and promised gift of Steven G. Perelman. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Project.

Chapter 11 The Art of Contemporary Experience

meaning and purpose of violence and its alternatives. In 10), the line between actor and subject, reality and represen-
terms analogous to those used by political theorists, they spell tation, is left intentionally vague. By presenting the dancers’
out the organizational structure of resistance in the twenty- experience of the training, Bowers encourages the viewers
first century while detailing ground operations of the World to identify with them as subjects, while she also uses them as
Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington in 1999. representations of politically engaged citizens.
They describe the non-hierarchical structure, compared Since Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training, Bowers has
often by observers to swarms or insect colonies, by which mined contemporary politics for her archive of non-violent
thousands of individuals from hundreds of different interest resistance. The United States v. Tim DeChristopher (2010) (fig.
groups were able to coordinate actions in a common pursuit. 11.25) continues her investigation of experience and repre-
The instruction is presented primarily in the left-hand pro- sentation as well as chronicling political agency in the twenty-
jection. On the right, though not exclusively, the dancers first century. The film is a single-channel projected video
become students; they share their ideas about violence and that cuts between panoramic vistas of the desert landscape,
protest, and then enact non-violent actions. The video bal- most often snow-covered and under cloudy skies, footage of
ances the didactic content with a demonstration of the physi- climate activist Tim DeChristopher shot relatively close up as
cal aesthetics of protest. he tells his story, and scenes of Bowers walking into the fore-
Unlike the facilitators or their usual students, the dancers ground of the landscape and writing a number on a chalk-
did not identify themselves as activists; they were simply on board. The film repeats combinations of these scenes, with
a job, in essence playing the role of young activists. Toward slightly different views, numbers, and moments from the
the end of the film, Bowers presents the dancers sitting narrative. The story DeChristopher tells is of his successful
cross-legged on the floor with their arms intertwined as the bid, despite having no money or intention to possess, to buy
facilitators approach the group in the role of police officers. fourteen parcels of public land in the Southwest U.S. being
The students’ bodies become obstructions that have to be sold at auction by the Bush administration in the last days of
carried away, and as viewers watch one can nearly feel their 2008. The fact that he won the 22,000 acres (at $1.8 million)
weight being dragged across the floor. Bowers has captured prevented private oil interests from acquiring the land, dis-
the physicality of the experience, and also the new social rupted the sale, and publicized the auction, which was later
relationship of the dancers, who, regardless of their politics declared to have been illegal. By his action, DeChristopher
or reason for being in the training session, have become a successfully re-presented the land as part of the nation to be
community. As in the work of Fast or Huyghe (see Chapter preserved rather than as a mapped commodity to be sold.

11.25 Andrea Bowers, United States v. Tim DeChristopher, 2010. Single-channel HD video (color with sound),
16:15 minutes looped. Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Projects.

Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics

 11.26 Catherine Opie, Joanne,
Betsy & Olivia, Bayside,
Queens, 1998. Chromogenic
print, 40 x 50" (101.6 x
127 cm). Edition of 5 + 2 APs.
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los
Angeles. © Catherine Opie.

‘
jjf

Paw

As he speaks in the film, it becomes clear that the numbers taken from any family photo-album, they are large-format
Bowers writes are the lot numbers of the land on which she photographs that require significant forethought and
stands. With these numbers raised between the space of the deliver a heightened degree of detail and luminescence.
gallery and those of the landscape, Bowers presents the land Opie’s deliberately produced images foster a contempla-
as both physically real and symbolically significant: It is both tive approach from the viewer, not unlike the formal strat-
land to be experienced and a commodity to be sold. It is the egy Sally Mann used in Immediate Family (see Chapter Hae
role of activists to argue for one side of the equation over One looks longer at scenes we think we already know and
the other. search the details of the sitters’ homes, the nuances of their
In a published conversation in 2007, Bowers and pho- body language, and the light and color of the photographs
tographer Catherine Opie (b. 1961) posed the question of to glean insight into lives defined by far more than sexual
whether artists have the power to change the world. Like orientation.
Bowers, Opie has produced a large body of work that invites Opie’s work, in its creation of a visual language for dif-
viewers to think deeply about both difference and activism. ference that is rooted in the lives of her subjects and not
In the late 1990s, she traveled around the U.S. photograph- the fears of society, is clearly political. Nonetheless, Opie
ing lesbian households for a series she called Domestic. The comments to Bowers that it has become difficult to be a
scenes, including Joanne, Belsy & Olivia, Bayside, Queens, 1998 political artist at a time in which idealism seems to have no
(fig. 11.26), are casually posed pictures of couples and fami- place. Opie’s photographs of demonstrations and public cel-
lies in mostly middle-class homes. Parents hold their chil- ebrations, including Untitled #1 (Jan. 20th, 2009) (2009) (fig.
dren, couples hold each other’s hands, looks are exchanged 11.27) from the /nauguration series provides a record of this
or avoided. The settings and the affections are familiar from “aporia,” the sense of emptiness and doubt within twenty-
households everywhere in the country. Unlike photographers first-century politics, even at its moments of greatest success.
such as Nan Goldin or Robert Mapplethorpe (see Chapters Bowers strikes a more optimistic position, claiming “that art
4 and 7) whose subjects also lived outside the mainstream, can have an effect on people’s political philosophies, and
Opie refuses to use any of the expected signs of difference. that has to occur before their participation in activism.”
These particular domestic scenes are different, however: As much as consciousness-raising and moral argument is
Though the idea of lesbian parents and alternative families part of Bowers’s work, it is notable that she, like Thomas
may be accepted in many parts of the world, the reality of Hirschhorn, thinks that her success lies in the realm of phi-
it is often met with prejudice and it is most certainly not losophy. Opie, too, acknowledges that, regardless of however
the norm. Secondly, while composed to look like snapshots one answers the question of whether art changes the world,

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11.27 Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Jan. 20th, 2009) from the Inauguration series, 2009. C-print, 37.5 x 50"
(95.3 x 127 cm). Edition of 5 + 2 APs. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. © Catherine Opie.

one can make work that “creates the recognition of the possi- discussed in this chapter, and throughout this book, proposes
bility of change,” and that is the foundation for political and an art and politics of resistance. Bowers’s and Opie’s dia-
social transformation.” logue, like that between Kolbowski and Raad, or the politi-
Bowers’s work, in which movement, speech, and sensa- cal and pedagogical considerations of many of the other
tion, community, education, and maturation, and even par- artists discussed in this chapter, testifies to the seriousness
enthood and friendship constitute political action, extends with which artists are taking the creative potential of occupy-
the 1970s feminist notion that the personal is political. ing the intersections between contemporary art and life. The
Her work also elaborates the related Foucauldian insight art of the 1970s discussed in Chapter 1 drew attention to the
that political power is not limited to regulation or disci- critical lenses through which we might view the confronta-
pline but has evolved into a process for shaping social life tion between life and power, focusing particularly on issues of
and subjectivity. Foucault used the term “biopolitics” to gender, race, and class. As the art world has extended its net-
describe the mechanisms by which life was so affected, and works and become less securely tethered to the local politics
it has become central to political theory in the twenty-first of artworld centers, the legacy of the critical analyses refined
century. Family, work, and school are key sites where human in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and inflected by the art and
life is politically shaped; they are also sites where human theory of the 1990s, can be felt in the twenty-first-century
beings can act to remake the world based on the kind of appeal to see and feel with sensitivity, to think openly, and to
life they want to lead. Bowers’s work, like most of the work be active in the studio, museum, and the world beyond.

Mass Media, Personal Experience, and Politics

Endnotes

Introduction Chapter 1: Discovering the Contemporary 17 Sol Lewitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art”

1 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern i “The F111: An Interview with James (1969), in Ellen Johnson, ed., American
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: Rosenquist by G.R. Swenson,” Partisan Review, Artists on Art, New York: Harper and Row,
University of Minnesota Press, 1984, xxiii. 32 (Fall 1965), 599, and Peter Selz, “The 1982, 125.
Ibid., xxv. Flaccid Art,” Partisan Review (Summer 1963), Ibid.
Alfred Barr, “Introduction,” The New American
win 313-16, reprinted in Steven Henry Madoff, Willoughby Sharp, “Notes Toward an
Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley: University Understanding of Earth Art,” Earth Art,
1958-59. Organized by the International Program of California Press, 1997, 85. Ithaca, N.Y.: Office of University
of the Museum of Modern Art, New York under the no Quoted in unsigned article “Everything Clear Publications, Cornell University, 1970, n.p.,
Auspices of the International Council at the Now?” Newsweek (Feb. 26, 1962), 86-87, reprinted in Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Land and
Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York: reprinted in Steven Henry Madoff, ibid., 187. Environmental Art, New York: Phaidon Press:
Museum of Modern Art, 1959. ow Sidney Tillim, “Rosenquist at the Met: 1998, 199-200:199.
4 The critical reception of “The New American Avant-Garde or Red Guard” Artforwm (April 20 Ibid.
Painting” was chronicled in the exhibition 1968), 46-49, reprinted in Madoff, 21 Allan Kaprow, “The Shape of the Art
catalogue published on the occasion of the 258-62:258. Environment: How Anti-Form Is
final stop of the show, in London in 1959. See cs Marcia Tucker, James Rosenquist, New York: Anti-Form?” Artforum (April 1968), 32-33:33
“As the Critics Saw It,” in The New American Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972, 22 Gregory Battcock, “The Politics of Space,”
Painting, 7-14. passim. Arts (Feb. 1970), 40-43:41.
5 Serge Guilbaut, one ofthe earliest historians or Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” based on a 23 Ibid., 42.
to draw attention to the adoption of U.S. art lecture at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, 24 Ibid., 43.
for Cold War political purposes, called his 1968, published in part (including his 25 Willoughby Sharp, “Elemental Gesture:
account How New York Stole the Idea of Modern discussion of flatbed painting) in Steinberg, Terry Fox,” Arts (May 1970), 48-51:48.
Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, “Reflections on the State of Criticism,” 26 Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, New York:
1983. The author explains that the body of Artforum (March 1972), 37-49, and then in Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1979,
the text was completed between 1975 and full in Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York: 86.
1978, ix. Oxford University Press, 1972, 55-92:82. 27 Joseph Bueys, “Interview with Willoughby
6 Hugo Ball, “Statement, May 15, 1916, a Dick Higgins, “A Child’s History of Fluxus” Sharp,” Artforwm (Dec. 1969), 47.
Zurich,” facsimile and translation in Robert (1979), in Achille Bonita Oliva, Gabriella De 28 Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for Field
Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, Mila, and Claudio Cerritelli, eds., Ubi Fluxus Character” (1973), trans. Caroline Tisdall in
2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Ibi Motus 1990-1962, Milan: Mazzotta, 1990, Art into Society, Society into Art, London:
Press, 1981, xxv, 30. 172-74. Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974, 48,
7 Cited in TJ. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, New x Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Judd, reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 234. Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax: The Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000, Malden, MA:
8 Kazimir Malevich, “The Non-Objective Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 929.
World,” (1926), selections reprinted in Design, 2005, 181. 29 Joseph Beuys, “Untitled Statements,”
(ca.
Herschel Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, ao Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” 1973) in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz eds.,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, reprinted in Ellen Johnson, ed., American Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A
337-646: 43, 346. Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, New York: Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, (Berkeley:
9 Alfred Barr, The New American Painting, ibid., Harper and Row, 1982, 117. University of California Press, 1996), 633.
68. oe Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in 30 Jon Bird, Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real,
10 Michel Tapié, “The Necessity of an Autre Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, London: Reaktion, 2000, 55.
Esthetic,” (1953), in Tapié, Observations, ed. 7 Sculptors (Philadelphia: ICA, 1965), 31 Jack Burnham, “Hans Haacke’s Canceled
Paul and Ester Jenckins, New York: George reprinted in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: Show at the Guggenheim,” Artforum (June
Wittenborn, Inc., 1956, 19. The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of 1971), 67-71:71.
11 [bid. California, 1996, 4-6:4 32 Ibid., 70.
12 Claes Oldenburg, “I Am for an Art” (1961), 10 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture” (1966), 33 Adrian Piper, “In Support of Meta Art,”
reprinted in Ellen Johnson, ed., American in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Artforum (Oct. 1973), 79-81:79.
Artists on Art, New York: Harper and Row, Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of 34 Statement in “Politics,” a column in Artforum
1982, 97-101:98. California Press, 1995, 222—35:232. (May 1971), 12.
13 This and the following citations from a_ Cited in Guy Brett, “Lygia Clark: Six Cells,” 3 oO Larry Neal “The Cultural Front,” Liberator
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) are from in Le Fundacio Antoni Tapiés, Lygia Clark, (June 1965). Neal met with AfriCOBRA
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston: Barcelona: Le Fundacio, 1998, 22. members at the 1970 Congress on
Beacon Press, 1961, 3-21. Lynn Gumbert, Ned Rifkin, and Marcia Functional Aspects of Black Art
14 Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Tucker, Early Work: Lynda Benglis/Joan Brown/ (CONFABA), organized by students on
Painting,” Partisan Review (Spring 1955), Luis Jiminez/Gary Stephan, New York: The Donaldson’s African-American art-history
reprinted and revised in Greenberg, Art and New Museum, 1982, 11. course at Northwestern University. Others
Culture, 208. 13 Accessed online at http://www.ubu.com/ groups, notably Latino and Chicano ones,
15 bid. concept/serra_verb.html. enlisted the same logic to underscore their
16 Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First 14 Robert Smithson, “Spiral Jetty (1972),” in own mural projects.
Seven Years of His Art” (1962), in Steinberg, Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected 36 Barbara Jones-Hogu, “The History,
Other Criteria, New York: Oxford University Writings, ibid., 143-53:146. Philosophy and Aesthetics of AfriCOBRA,”
Press, 1972, 17-54:22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in AFRICOBRA III, Amherst: University of
17 [bid. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Massachusetts, 1973, n.p.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 37 Wadsworth Jarrell in Robert L. Douglas,
1983, 109. Wadsworth Jarrell: The Artist as Revolutionary,
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Books,
Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 1996, 29.
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969, 38 Barbara Jones-Hogu, “The History,
14. Philosophy and Aesthetics of AfriCOBRA,”
ibid.
39 Ibid. oO See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the 3 = Therese Lichtenstein, “Cindy Sherman,”
40 Ibid. Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Arts (Jan. 1983), 3.
41 Jeff Donaldson, “Artist Statement,” in Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. E}nr Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Suitable for
AfriCOBRA ITT, ibid., n.p. and reprinted in 6 Jeanne Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” Arts Framing: The Critical Recasting of Cindy
Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA Manifesto? Ten in (Summer 1985), 141-44. Sherman,” Parkett 29 (1991), 112-21.
Search of aNation,” NKA 30 (Spring 2012), 7 Ibid. 33 Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
83: 81. ao Douglas Crimp, “Appropriating Cinema,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After
42 Barbara Jones-Hogu, “The History, Appropriation,” in Jmage Scavengers: Modernism, New York: The New Museum,
Philosophy and Aesthetics of AfriCOBRA,” Photographers (Philadelphia: Institute of 1984, 363.
ibid. Contemporary Art, 1983), 30, cited in Crimp, 34 Laurie Anderson. “Language is a Virus from
43 Emory Douglas, “Revolutionary Art/Black “Boys in My Bedroom,” Art in America 78 Outer Space,” on United States Live, New
Liberation” (1968), in Philip Sheldon Foner (February 1990), 47-49:47. York: Warner Brothers, 1983. The phrase is,
and Clayborne Carson, eds., The Black 2 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Winning the in fact, William Burroughs’s, used by
Panthers Speak, Cambridge: Da Capo Press, Game When the Rules Have Changed,” Anderson in her own form of appropriation.
19955016. Screen, 26:6 (Nov.—Dec 1984), 90. 35 The risk that art, even modern art, might
Ibid. Douglas notes Newton’s perception of Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, resist this inclination to become another
the black community as being visual in St. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 13. attribute of power was illustrated in a press
Clair Bourne, “An Artist for the People: An “In the Picture: Jeff Rian in Conversation conference at the UN on Feb. 5, 2003 in
Interview with Emory Douglas,” in Sam with Richard Prince,” in Rosetta Brooks et which U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell
Durant, ed., Black Panther: The Revolutionary al., Richard Prince, London: Phaidon, 2003, explained why war must be waged against
Art ofEmory Douglas, New York: Rizzoli 2007, 12 Iraq. Behind the podium was a tapestry of
200. Tbid., 9. Picasso’s 1937 work Guernica. To avoid the
45 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological Lisa Phillips, Richard Prince, New York: possibility that this work might not be
State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992, 25. turned into an innocuous monochrome by
Investigation)” (Jan.—April 1969), in “Imthe Picture,” 16, the cameras, the UN publicity team had the
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Richard Prince, Why J Go to the Movies Alone tapestry covered.
Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, New York: Tanam Press, 1983, 11. 36 Allan McCollum, “In the Collection Of ...,”
1971, 127-86:133. Ibid., 11. Wedge (Winter-Spring 1985), 64.
46 Ibid. Ibid., 13. 37 Andrea Fraser, “In and Out of Place,” Art in
47 Nancy Spero, “Interview with Jo Anna Isaak,” Carter Ratcliff, “Art and Resentment,” Art in America (June 1985), 122.
in Jon Bird,Jo Anna Isaak, and Sylére America 70 (Summer 1982), 9-13. 38 Cited in Dan Cameron, “Four Installations:
Lotringer, Nancy Spero, New York: Phaidon, Laura Mulvey, “A Phantasmagoria of the Francesc Torres, Mierle Ukeles, Louise
2006, 18. Female Body,” New Left Review 188 (July/ Lawler/Allan McCollum and TODT,” Arts
48 Héleéne Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” August 1991) 136-51 on Sherman and (Dec. 1984), 70.
in Elaine Marx and Isabelle de Courtivron, Crimp, “Boys in My Bedroom,” Art in America 39 Craig Owens, “From Work to Frame, or, Is
New French Feminisms, New York: Schocken 78 (February 1990), 47—49 are good There Life After ‘The Death of the Author,’”
Books, 1980, 245-64:250. examples of this. in Owens, Beyond Recognition, Berkeley:
49 Ibid., 253. 20 “Untitled Statement” (1982) and “Interview University of California Press, 1992, 122-39,
50 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, with Els Barents” (1982), reprinted in makes clear that critics and advertisers in the
Womanhouse, Valencia: Feminist Art Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories 1980s identified the U.S. and even the global
Program, California Institute of the Arts, and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley: imagination in the same terms. Kruger and
1972, n.p. University of California Press, 1996, 791-94. Stallone were two sides of the same coin.
51 Ibid. : 2 = Sandy Nairne, State of the Art: Ideas and Images Owens even suggests that the art world was
52 Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti, “Negative of the 1980s, London: Chatto & Windus, also infected with the need for the hero
Capability as Practice in Women’s Art,” 1987, 132. Sherman emphasized her worship that Kruger critiques.
Studio International, 191:979 (1976), 24-25, concern with reaching a wide public in 40 Rosalyn Deutsch, “Breaking Ground:
in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds., 2003, saying that she “wanted to find Barbara Kruger’s Spatial Practice,” in Ann
Framing Feminism, London and New York: something that anyone could relate to Goldstein et al., Barbara Kruger: Thinking of
Pandora, 1987, 279. — without knowing about contemporary art”: You, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary
53 Ibid. “Cindy Sherman Talks to David Frankel,” Art, 1999, 77.
54 Ibid., 278. Artforum (March 2003), 54. 4 an Lynn Tillman, “Interview with Barbara
55 Martha Rosler, “The Private and the Public 22 Sandy Nairne, State of the Art, ibid., 133, and Kruger,” in zbed., 196.
Feminist Art in California,” Artforum (Sept. “Cindy Sherman Talks to David Frankel,” 42 Gary Indiana, “The War at Home, » * in zbid.,
1977), 66—74:70. ibid., passim. 9.
56 Cindy Nemser, “Interview with Members of 2 ao Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the 43 Kate Linker, Love For Sale, New York: H.N.

AIR,” Arts (Dec.—Jan. 1973), 58-59:59. Avant-Garde,” in Krauss, The Originality of the Abrams, 1990, 17.
57 Martha Rosler, “The Private and the Public Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, ibid., 44 Bruce Ferguson, “Wordsmith: An Interview
Feminist Art in California,” ibid., 68. 162. with Jenny Holzer,” Art in America 74 (Dec.
58 Ibid., 68-69. 24 Ibid., 168. 1986), 109-14:113.
59 Cindy Nemser, “Four Artists of Sensuality,” 25 Ibid., 168-70. 45 In Jeanne Siegel, “Jenny Holzer’s Language
Arts (March 1975), 73-75. 26 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Games,” Arts (Dec. 1985), reprinted in
Photography” (1931), reprinted in Alan Siegel, Artwords 2: Discourse on the Early SOs,
Chapter 2: Taking Pictures Tractenberg, ed., Classic Essays of Photography, Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1988, 285-97.
1 See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October8 Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980, 46 Bruce Ferguson, “Wordsmith: An Interview
(Spring 1978), 75-88. 199-216. with Jenny Holzer,” ibid.
nN Michael Fried, ’Art and Objecthood,” 27 Peter Schjeldahl, “Shermanettes,” Art in 47 See David Joselit, “Voices, Bodies and
Artforum (June 1967), reprinted in Gregory America (March 1982), 110-11. Spaces: The Art of Jenny Holzer,” in Joselit
Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical 2 foo} Peter Schjeldahl, “The Oracle of Images,” in et al., Jenny Holzer, London: Phaidon, 1998,
Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Cindy Sherman, New York: Whitney Museum 48-54.
Press, 1995, 147. of American Art, 1987, 8. 48 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Allegorical
oo Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: 29 Ken Johnson, “Cindy Sherman and the Procedures,” Artforum 21:1 (Sept. 1982), 48.
Towards a Theory of Post-modernism (Parts Anti-Self: An Interpretation of her Imagery,” 49 Hal Foster, “Subversive Signs,” Art in America

1-2), October 12-13 (Spring and Summer Arts (Noy. 1987), 47-53. 70:10 (Noy. 1982), 88-92: 88.
1980). 30 Judith Williamson, “Images of Women,” 50 Craig Owens, “The Medusa Effect, or, The
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” ibid., 85. Screen (Noy. 1983), 105. Specular Ruse,” in Owens, Beyond

Endnotes
 Recognition, Berkeley: University of 24 Mira Schor, “Appropriated Sexuality,” Museum,” Parachute 46 (March—May 1987),
California Press, 1992, 191-200. M/E/A/N/I/N/G (Dec. 1986), reprinted in in Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, 313, and
51 Thid., 88. Susan Bee and Mira Schor, eds., M/E/A/N/I/ Andreas Huyssen, “Anselm Kiefer: The
N/G: An Anthology ofArtists’ Writings, Theory, Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,”
Cc hapter 3: Back to the Easel and Criticism, Durham, NC; Duke University October 48 (1989), 25-26.
1 Christos M. Joachimides, “A New Spirit in Press, 2000, 24—36:29, 50 See A. Wildermuth, “Crisis of
Painting,” in Joachimides, Norman Ibid., 32. Interpretation,” Flash Art (March 1984),
Rosenthal, and Nicolas Serota, eds., A New § Douglas Crimp, “End of Painting,” in Crimp, 8-18, and Achille Bonito Oliva, The
Spirit in Painting, London: Royal Academy of On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge: MIT International Trans-avantgarde, ibid.
Art, 1981,14. Press, 1993, 90. 5 See Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art afler
Ibid. 27 Thomas McEvily, “Royal Slumming: Auschwitz, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Zetlgeist, New York: Jean-Michel Basquiat Here Below,” Artforum Press, 1999, 107-10, for a summary of the
George Braziller, Inc,, 1983, 9. (Noy. 1992), 96, and bell hooks, “Altars of German reactions, and Huyssen, “Kiefer in
René Ricard, “Julian Schnabel’s Plate Sacrifice: Re-Membering Basquiat,” Art in Berlin,” October 62 (Fall 1992).
Paintings at Mary Boone,” Art in America America (June 1983), 70. Donald Kuspit, “Flak from the Radicals: The
(Nov. 1979), 125-26:125. 28 Achille Bonito Oliva, The International American Case Against German Painting,”
a Jeff Perrone, “Boy Do I Love Art or Whate” Trans-avanigarde, Milan: Giancarlo Politi in Jack Cowart, ed., Expressions: New Art from
Arts (Sept. 1981), 72-78:72. Editore, 1982, 40-42, Germany, St. Louis: St. Louis Art Museum,
> Christos M. Joachimides, “A New Spirit in Thid., 50. 1983, 46.
Painting,” ibid., 14. Tbid., 50, Lk~ Peter Schjeldahl, “Our Kiefer,” Art in America
x So titled in the 1987 Whitechapel show, Ibid., 56. (March 1988), 116-27.
Julian Schnabel, Julian Schnabel: Painting Ibid. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and
1975-87, London: Whitechapel Gallery, Francesco Clemente, Clemente, New York: Society” (1967), in Adorno, Prisms,
1987, Vintage Books, 1987, 17. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, 17-34:34.
Ibid., 104. See Pincus-Witten, “Julian Photo in Danny Berger, “Sandro Chia in His Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after
Schnabel: Blind Faith,” Arts (Feb. 1982), Studio: An Interview,” Print Collectors Auschwitz, ibid.
152-55:155: “Iam interested in madness or Newsletter (Jan.—Feb, 1982), 168; quote in Steven Henry Madoff, “Anselm Kiefer: A
paranoia or angst—as they are emotional Jamey Gamrell, “Sandro Chia at Castelli Call to Memory,” Art News (Oct. 1987), 129.
states that are meditations on death.” Green,” Artin America (Oct. 1983), 188. Ibid.
g
Statement, July 11, 1986, in Julian Schnabel, Carter Ratcliff, “On lconography and Some Andreas Huyssen, “Anselm Kiefer; The
Julian Schnabel: Painting 1975-87, ibid., 104, Italians,” Artin America (Sept. 1982), Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,”
10 Thid., 105. 152-59; 154, Ratcliff traces a variety of October48 (1989), 25-45:39.
11 Jeff Perrone, “Boy Do I Love Art or What,” precedents of the water-carrier figure, a7 Donald Kuspit, “Anselm Kiefer,” in Siegel,
ibid., 77. 36 Danny Berger, “Sandro Chia in his Studio: Artwords 2 (1987), 89.
12 Eric Fischl, Mric Misch, New York: Vintage An Interview,” ibid., 169. 60 Laurie Attias, “Anselm Kiefer’s Identity
Books, 1987, 33. Ann Percy, /rancesco Clemente: Three Worlds, Crisis (the Artist and Post-Reunification
13 Thid. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Germany),” Art News 96 (June 1997), 110.
14 Constance W. Glenn, “Conversation with the 1990, 20. 6 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 444, cited
Artist,” in Constance W, Glenn and Lucinda Ibid., 50, in Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after
Barnes, Lric isch: Scenes Before the Lye, Long Danny Berger, “Francesco Clemente at the Auschwitz, ibid., 20 in an extended discussion
Beach, CA: University Art Museum, 1986, Metropolitan; An Interview,” Print Collectors of Celan, Adorno, and Kiefer,
Wy Newsletter 13 (March/April), 1982:12. 62 Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, New York: Harry
a 1981 statement reprinted in Peter Robert Storr, “Realm of the Senses,” Art in N. Abrams, 2001, 140.
Schjeldahl, “Witness,” in David Whitney, ed., America (Novy. 1987), 134, 6a Armin Wildermuth, “A Crisis of
Ine Fischl, New York: Art in America, and Merope Lolis, “Francesco Clemente,” Arts Interpretation,” Mash Art 116 (March 1984),
Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 1988, 22-23 (Sept. 1981), 23, and Donald Kuspit, 12. Fetting confirms the anti-conceptual
> Eric Fischl, ibid., 43. “Francesco Clemente at Mary Boone and stance in Helena Kontova, “Rainer Fetting
17 Schnabel, cited in Christian Hubert et al., Sperone Westwater,” Art in America (Nov. Interview,” Mash Art 115 (Jan, 1984), 16.
“Post-Modernism: A Symposium,” Real Life 1983), 227. 64 Paul Maenz, “Interview with Paul Maenz,”
Magazine (Summer 1981), 9, and Salle in Michael Cannell, “Francesco Clemente,” Flash Art 117 (April 1984), Maenz
Salle, “The Paintings Are Dead,” Cover (May Arts (June 1983), 4. characterizes the various regions of the
1979), reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Blasted Thomas Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting,” serman art scene, assigning a particular
Allegories, New York: The New Museum, Artforum (Oct, 1981), reprinted in Brian media focus to the Berlin painters in
1987, 325. Wallis, ed., Art afler Modernism, New York: contrast to others.
Walter Robinson, “David Salle,” Artin The New Museum, 1984, 160. 65an Dorothea Dietrich, “A Conversation with
America (March 1980), 117-118; cf. Georgia Julia Kristeva, Powers ofHorror, New York: Markus Lupertz,” Print Collectors Newsletter,
Marsh interview with David Salle, Bomb (Fall Columbia University Press, 1982, 1-2. 12, for Immendorff’s critique of Liipertz’s
1985), reprinted in Jeanne Seigel, Artwords Edit DeAk, “A Chameleon in a State of apoliticality, and Douglas Crimp, “The Post
2: Discourse on the Karly 80s, Ann Arbor: UMI Grace,” Artforum (Feb, 1981), 37. Modern Museum,” ibid., for a more
Press, 1988, 173-75, Salle’s denial is from > Robert Storr, “Realm of the Senses,” zbid., substantial critique. cf, Dietrich, “Allegories
Robert Pincus-Witten, “Pure Painter: An 140, of Power; Markus Lupertz’s ‘German
Interview with David Salle,” Aris (Nov, 1985), Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Figures of Motifs,” Art Journal 48 (Summer 1989),
79. Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” October 16 164-70,
19 Peter Schjeldahl, “David Salle,” in Jeanne (Spring 1981), 66 Ernst Busche, “Violent Painting,” Mash Art
Siegel, Artwords 2: Discourse on the Early 80s, Calvin Tompkins “The Art World: An End to 101 (Jan, 1981), 27-31:29.
ibid., 165, and Pincus-Witten, “Pure Painter,” Chauvinism,” The New Yorker (Dec. 7, 1981), 6 as Rosalyn Deutsche, “Alienation in Berlin:
ibid., 80. 146-54, Tompkins notes leana Sonnabend, Kirchner’s Street Scenes,” Art in America
20 Christian Hubert et al., “Post-Modernism: A Marian Goodman, and Mary Boone at the (Jan. 1983), 65-72.
Symposium,” Real Life Magazine (Summer German Pavilion and details the surge of 6a Donald Kuspit, “Acts of Aggression; German
1981), 4—10:4. European Neo-Expressionist exhibitions in Painting Today, Part II,” Art in America (Jan.
Ibid. New York in the previous few years. 1983), 132.
Robert Pincus-Witten, “Pure Painter,” ibid., Ag The connection between the rhetoric of 69 “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo
80. political normalization and the critical Goes to Bitburg),” Ramones, Animal Boy
Ibid. enthusiasm for the new painting is made in (1986).
Douglas Crimp, “The Post Modern

Endnotes
70 A.R. Penck, “From My Vantage Point,” in ABC No Rio and Collaborative Projects, 15 Peter Halley, “Statements (1983),” reprinted
A.R. Penck, New York: Mary Boone/ Michael 1985, 22. in Peter Halley, Collected Essays 1981-1987,
Werner Gallery, 1984, reprinted in John Yau, 12 “Reflections of aLong Distance Runner: Zurich: Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, 1988,
A.R. Penck, New York: Abrams, 1993, 117. Conversation between David Hammons and 25.
71 Statement of May 1978, reprinted in Barbara Deborah Menaker Rothschild,” in Yardbird 16 [bid., 256.
Theimann, “Jorg Immendorff works in the Suite, Williamstown, MA: Williams College 17 Society of the Spectacle was published with no
Ludwig Collection (1978-1987),” in State Museum ofArt, 1994, 48. copyright. It can be fully accessed online ata
Russian Museum & Ludwig Museum in the 13 Joan Acocella, “Plastic Heaven,” Artforum number of sites including http://www.
Russian Museum, Jorg Immendorff: All Things (Jan. 1992), 64-67:65. marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/.
Hawe the Tendency to Change, St. Petersburg: 14 “Roundtable for Education and Democracy,” 18 Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of
State Russian Museum, 2001, 36. in Brian Wallis, ed., Democracy: A Project by Simulacra,” reprinted in Art after Modernism:
72 Heinz Althofer, “The Morality of Painting,” Group Material, Discussions in Contemporary Rethinking Representation, New York: The New
in Tayfun Belgin, ed., Immendorff: Bilder, Culture, Number 5, New York: Dia Art Museum, 1984, 253.
Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 2000, Foundation, 59. 19 “Ross Bleckner,” interview with Peter Drake,
155-68:158. 15 “Gran Fury,” April 12, 1989 interview with Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986), 66—67:66.
73 Donald Judd, “Local History,” Art Year Book 7 David Deitcher in Russell Ferguson, William 20 “Talking Abstract: Part Two,” interview with
(1964), in Judd, Donald Judd:Complete Olander, Marcia Tucker, and Karen Fiss, Lilly Wei, Art in America (Dec. 1987), 114.
Writings 1959-1975, Halifax: The Press of Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and 21 Constance Lewallen, “Sherrie Levine,”
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Culture, New York: The New Museum of Journal of Contemporary Art 6 (1993), available
1975; 151. Contemporary Art, 1990, 196-208:198. online at http://www,jca-online.com/
74 Jutta Koether, “Who Is Martin Kippenberger 16 “On Site Specificity: A Discussion with Hal slevine.html.
and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Foster, Renée Green, Mitchell Kane, Miwon 22 Jeanne Siegel, “Geometry Desurfacing: Ross
Things About Hime” Artscribe International Kwon, John Lindell, Helen Molesworth,” Bleckner,” Arts magazine (March 1986),
(Jan.—Feb. 1989), 52-57:53. Documents 2 (Spring 1994), 11-22, 14-15. reprinted in Siegel, Artwords 2: Discourse on
75 Stephen Prina, “Kippenberger’s Tact,” in 17 Cylena Simonds, “Public Audit: An Interview the Early Eighties, Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988, 230.
Daniel Bauman et al., Martin Kippenberger, with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David 23 Martha Buskirk, “Interviews with Sherrie
Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1998, 96-125: 98. Avalos,” Afterimage (Summer 1994), 8-11:8. Levine, Louise Lawler, and Fred Wilson,”
76 Jutta Koether, “Who Is Martin Kippenberger 18 “David Avalos and Jean Parisi,” in Art Out October 70 (Fall 1994), 99-112:100.
Beer 201d.,53. There, Chicago: School of the Art Institute of 24 Clive Robertson, “Reconstructing Futures,”
77 Jutta Koether, “Martin Kippenberger,” Flash Chicago, 1996, 62. in General Idea, General Idea’s Reconstructing
Art 156 (Jan.—Feb. 1991). 19 To clarify the question of taxes paid by Futures, Toronto: General Idea, ca. 1978, n.p.
non-citizens, Avalos, Sisco, and Hock note 25 Thid.
Chapter 4: Into the Streets that when you buy something you 26 General Idea, “Glamour,” FILE Megazine 3:1
1 Included in the group were John Fekner, automatically pay taxes: Sales taxes and (1975), 21.
Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Tom Otterness, luxury taxes, for instance, do not require 27 Thid., 22.
Kenny Scharf, Christie Rupp, and Kiki Smith, citizenship. 28 General Idea, General Idea, 1968-1984, Basel:
nearly all of whom would make their way 20 Cylena Simonds, “Public Audit,” ibid., 9. Kunsthalle, 1985, 25.
inside the art world during the 1980s. 29 General Idea, General Idea’s Reconstructing
nm Coosje van Bruggen, the curator delegated to Chapter 5: Commodities and Futures, ibid., n.p.
oversee the U.S. contributions, was Consumerism 30 Jbid.
supportive of Holzer’s plan to invite Fashion _ Peter Nagy, “From Criticism to Complicity,” 31 par “Conversation between John Armleder and
Moda. Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986), 46—49:46. Raphaela Platow,” in Martin Engler, John M.
3 Jeffrey Deitch, “Report from Times Square,” 2 John M. Armleder, Spark Vett, Parker Armleder: Everything Is Not Enough, Waltham:
Art in America (Sept. 1980), 59. The most Williams, and Sylvie Fleury, “John Armleder Rose Museum ofArt, 2006, 96—114:107.
acute analysis of the show came from Lucy R. at any Speed,” Parkett 50:50 (1997), 36-42. 32 “Rosemarie Trockel talks to Isabelle Graw,”
Lippard, writing under a pseudonym, Anne 3 Jeff Koons, Jeff Koons Handbook, New York: Artforum (March 2003), 225.
Ominous, “Sex and Death and Shock and Rizzoli, 1992, 36. 33 Jutta Koether, “Interview with Rosemarie
Shlock,” Artforum (Oct. 1980), 50-55. 4 Monika Spruth and Rosemarie Trockel, “Do Trockel,” Flash Art 134 (May 1987),
4 Carlo McCormick, “Guide to East Village women and men really want the same thing?” 40-42:41,.
Artists,” supplement to Phyllis Plous, Neo-York: Eau de Cologne (November 1985), 29. 34 Sidra Stitch, Rosemarie Trockel, New York:
Report on a Phenomenon, Santa Barbara: 5 Jeff Koons, Jeff Koons Handbook, 33. Prestel, 1991.
University Art Museum, 1984, 1. 6 Ibid., 48. 35 “Rosemarie Trockel Talks to Isabelle Graw,”
oO Carlo McCormick and Walter Robinson, 7 Ibid., 78. ibid., 273.
“Slouching Toward Avenue D,” Art in America 8 Germano Celant, “Haim Steinbach’s Wild 36 Jutta Koether, “The Nonchalance of
(Summer 1984), 137. Wild West,” Artforwm 26:4 (Dec. 1987), Continuous Tense-ness,” Parkett 58 (2000),
6 David Wojnarowicz, Close to Knives, New York: 75-79:77. passim and cf fn 4.
Vintage Books, 1991, 122-23, 9 [bid., 75. 37 Ibid., 104-08:104.
7 Ibid. 10 bid. 38 Tbid., 108.
8 John Carlin, “Angel with a Gun: David 11 Mike Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, 39 Peter Schjeldahl, “Loony Koons,” 7 Days
Wojnarowicz, 1954-1992,” in Dan Cameron Conversations, Proposals, Cambridge, MA: (Dec. 14, 1988), 66.
et al., Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz, New MIT Press, 2004, frontispiece. 40 Cited in Negar Azimi, “Fluffy Farhad,”
York: The New Museum, 1999, 93. 12 See Robert Storr, “An Interview with Mike Bidoun (Spring 2010), 32-37:32-33.
9 Mark Holborn, “Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Kelley,” Art in America (June 1994), 90-93:92, 41 [bid., 37.
Sexual Dependency: Interview by Mark and Jutta Koether, “Interview with Mike
Holborn,” Aperture (Summer 1986), Kelley,” Jowrnal of Contemporary Art (Cologne, Chapter 6: Memory and History
38-45:41. Germany) (Summer 1994), 7-24, reprinted 1 “Report of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
10 Group Material, Statement (1985), in John C. Welchman, ed., Mike Kelley: Design Competition,” Records of the
reprinted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Interviews, Conversations and Chit-Chat Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Container
eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary (1986-2004), Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2005, 3/66 Manuscripts Division, Library of
Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: 95-117. Congress, cited in Daniel Abramson, “Maya
University of California Press, 1996, 895. 13 Isabelle Graw, “Interview,” in John C. Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines,
11 Artists’ statement, reprinted in Alan Moore Welchman et al., Mike Kelley, London: and Minimalism,” Critical Inquiry 22:4,
and Marc Miller, eds., ABC No Rio Dinero: The Phaidon, 1999, 8—41:16. (Summer 1996), 679-709:687.
Story of a Lower East Side Gallery, New York: 14 Mike Kelley, Minor Histories, ibid., 62.

Endnotes
2 Doris von Drateln, “Jochen Gerz’s Visual 20 Thid, Citizen Artist: 20 Years ofArtin the Public Arena.
Poetry,” rans, Ingeborg yon Zitzewitz, a1 Katya Garcia-Anton, “Silent Witnesses: Doris An Anthology from High Performance Magazine,
Conlemporanea 2 (Sept, L989), 47, Salcedo at the Tate Gallery,” The Art 1978-1998, Gardiner, NY: Critical Press,
Michael Gibson, “Hamburg: Sinking Newspaper94 (July~Aug. 1999), 21, 1998, 29-39,
Feelings,” ARTnews 86 (Summer 1987), 22 Corinne Diserens, “William Kentridge: 7 Cited inJill O'Bryan, “Saint Orlan Faces
106-07:107, cited in James I, Young, “The Unwilling Suspensions of Disbelief,” Art Press Reincarnation,” Art Journal (Winter 1997),
CounterMonument; Memory Against ltself 255 (March 2000), 26, 52,
in Germany Today,” Criaeal Inquiry 18:2 rt:ws Carolyn Christov-Bakargiey, “Interview: 8 Janet A, Kaplan, “Deeper and Deeper:
(Winter 1992), 267-96:283, Young Carolyn Christov-Bakargieyv in Conversation Interview with Marina Abramovic,” Art
elaborated the discussion of the with William Kentridge,” in Dan Cameron et Journal (Summer 1999), 7.
countermonument in fames Young, Al al., William Kentridge, London; Phaidon, 9 Thid.
Memory 's dee, New Haven: Yale University 1999, 14, 10 David Frankel, “In Her Own Words:
Press, 2002, Thid,, 31, Interview with David Frankel,” in Helene
4 Jochen Gerz, “Toward Public Authorship,” Jessica Dubow and Ruth Rosengarten, Posner, Kiki Smith, New York: Monacelli,
Third Text 18:6 (2004), 649=56:652, “History as the Main Complaint; William 2005, 38-39,
5 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, Kentridge and the Making of Post-Apartheid =_ Claudia Gould, “But It Makes You Think
London; Continuum, 2006, 15, South Africa,” Art History 27:4 (Sept, 2004), About What You Think About Too:
4 Jacques Ranciere, “The Work of the Image,” 679, Conversation with Kiki Smith,” in Linda
in Lisa LeFeuvre et al,, Lsther Shaleu-Gers, ) Artist statement, www,theatlasgroup.org. Shearer and Claudia Gould, Kiki Smith,
Paris: Jeu de paume, 2010, accessible from Alan Gilbert, “Walid Ra'ad,” Bomb81 (Fall Williamstown, MA; William College Museum
the artist's website http://wwwshalevegerz, PO02), accessed at www. bombsite,com/ of Art and Columbus and Ohio: Wexner
net/DE/15-09-2006/ work image, pdt, issues/81/articles/2504, Center for the Arts, Ohio State University,
Leshe Gamhi, “Christian Boltanskt: A Waled Sadek, “A Matter of Words, (Art and 1992, 66, (It was jointly published by the two
Conversation with Leshe Cami,” The Print Artists in Beirut, Lebanon),” Parachute (Oct. institutions. )
Gollector’s Newsletter 23:6 (Jan.-Keb, 1993), 2002), 34, 12 Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, London:
201-06;202, 29 Thid. Phaidon, 1997, 122.
Susan Taumarkin Goodman, “Might Artists; A Ibid, 13 “Mona Hatoum Interviewed by Janine
Cultural Context,” in The Jewish Museum, Deseription of the Berlin event in Andre Antoni,” Bomb 63 (Spring 1998), reprinted
Fyrom the Inside Out: Hight Gontemporary Artists, Lepecki, “After All, the ‘Terror Was Not in Laura Steward Hoen, ed., Mona Halowm:
New York; The Jewish Museum, 19938, Without Reason’; Unfiled Notes on the Atlas Domestic Disturbance, North Adams, MA: Mass
22-39:25. Group Archive,” TDR: The Drama Review, MOCA and Santa Fe, NM: SITE Santa Fe,
i] Howard N, Fox, Mleanor Antin, Los Angeles: 50:8 (E191) (Pall 2006), 97, 2001, 26,
Los Angeles Gounty Museum of Art, 1999, 2 Alan Gilbert, “Walid Ra’ad,” ibid, 14 Laurel Berger, “Mona Hatoum: In Between,
132, Thid. Outside, and in the Margins,” Arinews (Sept.
10 Transeript of acceptance speech at the Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad, Between 1994), 149, 8
National Foundation for Jewish Culture Artists: Silvia Kolbowski, Walid Raad, New a Edward W, Said, “The Art of Displacement:
Awards held at the Hudson Theater, New York: A.R.T, Press, 2006, 26, Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables,” in
York City, May 18, L998, Jalal Toufie, Undying Love or Love Dies, Tate Gallery, Mona Hatowm;: The Entire World
“In Conversation: Whitheld Lovell with John Sausalito, C.A,; PostApollo Press, 2002, as a Foreign Land, London; 'Tate Gallery,
Yau,” Brooklyn Rail July=Aug, 2006), quoted in Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad, 2000, 17.
accessed online at http://www, brooklynrail, Between Artists, ibid,, 55, 16 Nancy Spector, Helix Gonzalez-Torres, New
ore /2006/07 /art/whitheld-lovell, 56 Jalal Toute, Undeserving Lebanon, online at York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995, 147-50,
2 “Whitheld Lovell in Conversation with http:/ /wwwjalaltoufic,com/downloads/ 17 ‘Tim Rollins, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” in
Leslie King-Hammond,” in Whitheld Lovell, Jalal Toufie Undeserving Lebanon, pdf; Lucinda Barnes et al., eds., Between Artists:
The Art of Whitfield Lovell: Whispers from the Forthcoming Books, 2007, 9. Twelve Contemporary American Artists Interview
Walls, San Francisco; Pomegranate Press, Andre Lepecki, “In the Mist of the Event; Twelve Contemporary American Artists, Los
2008, 53=65:53, Performance and the Activation of Memory Angeles: A.R.T. Press, 1996, 81-101:88.
James Hannaham, “Pea Ball Bounce; in the Atlas Group Archive,” in Kassandrea 18 Cited in Ad Reinhardt, Joseph Kosuth, and
Interview with Kara Walker,” /nvervlew 28:11 Nakas and Britta Schmitz, eds., The Atlas Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Symptoms of
(Noy, 1998), T1419: 119, Group (1989-2004): A Project by Walid Raad, Interference, Conditions ofPossibility, London:
The letter was circulated widely, Sections KOln: Walther Konig, 2006, 61-65:62, Camden Arts Centre, 1994, 76,
including this passage are reprinted in 19 Janine Antoni, “Janine Antoni; Biting Sums
numerous discussions of Walker's work Chapter 7: Culture, Body, Self Up My Relationship to Art History,” Mash Art
including Mark Reinhardt, “The Art of 1 From an unpublished manuscript, cited in 26:171 (Summer 1993), 104-05, and Ewa
Racial Profiling,” in lan Berry, Darby Petra Barreras del Rio, “Ana Mendieta: A Lajer-Burcharth, “Antoni’s Difference,” in
English, Vivian Patterson, wand Mark Historical Overview,” in Barreras del Rio and Dan Cameron et al,, Janine Antoni, Kusnacht,
Reinhardt, eds,, Kara Walkers Narratives of a John Perreault, eds., Ana Mendieta: A Switzerland: Ink Tree, 2000, 44—45.
Negress, Cambridge; MIP Press, 2008, Retrospective, New York; New Museum, 1987, 20 Carmen Boullosa, “Gabriel Orozco,” Bomb
LO8=29:119. a Cited in Kaira M, Cabanas, “Ana Mendieta: 98 (Winter 2007), accessed online at www.
“Reading Black Through White in the Work Pain of Cuba, Body LAm,” Woman's Art bombsite,com/issues/98 /articles/ 2862.
of Kara Walker: A Discussion Between Jowmal 20:1 (Spring-Summer, 1999), 2 Artist’s notebook, reproduced and
Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs,” Art 12=17:14, translated in Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity,
History 26:3 Quune 2003), 422=41;440, = Laura Roulet, “Ana Mendieta and Carl Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum ofArt,
16 Kara Walker, “The Debate Continues: Kara Andre; Duet of Leaf and Stone,” Art Journal 1999, 160-63,
Walker's Response,” /niernational Review of 63:3 (Ball 2004), 90, 2 “Interview with Gerard Matt,” in Lucas
African American Art 15:2 (1998), 48=49;49, Adrian Piper, “In Support of Meta Art,” Gehrmann et al., Teresa Margolles, Vienna:
/ Charles H, Rowell, “An Interview with Kerry Artforum (Oct, 1973), 79-81:79, Kunsthalle Wien Project Space, 2003, 19-20.
James Marshall,” Cadlaloo 21:1 (Winter za Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Interview with Tehching 23 “Santiago Sierra by Teresa Margolles,” Bomb
1998), 263=72:265 Hsieh,” in Paula Orrell, ed, Marina Abramovic 86 (Winter 2004), accessed online at http://
Ibid., 270, and The Future ofPerformance, New York: www, bombsite.com/issues/86/articles/
2606
19 Carlos Basualdo, “Interview: Carlos Basualdo Prestel, 2010, 96, March 2009,
in Conversation with Doris Saleedo,” in » Quotes in this paragraph are from “The Year 24 Ibid.
Naney Prineenthal, Carlos Basualdo, and of the Rope; An Interview with Linda 25 Coco Fusco, “The Unbearable Weightiness
Andreas Huyssen, Denis Salcedo, London: Montano and Tehching Hsieh,” in Linda of Beings; Artin Mexico after NAFTA,” in
Phaidon, 2000, 6-35: 14, Frye Burnham and Steven Durland, eds., The

Endnotes
 Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, New 15 Huang Rui, “Preface to the First Stars Art accessed at http://www.wendagu.com/
York: Routledge, 2001, 61-77. Exhibition (Xingxing Meizhan) (1979)” in publications/wenda-gu-interiews /
26 Ibid., 67. Wu Hung, ed., Contemporary Chinese Art: melissa-chu.html.
Primary Documents, New York: Museum of 3 = Translated in Britta Erickson, Words Without
Chapter 8: Eastward Expansion: Modern Art, 2010, 7 Meaning, Meaning Without Words: The Art of
Contemporary Art in Russia and China The twelve were Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Xu Bing, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian,
_ Robert Storr, “An Interview with Ilya Yan Li, Wang Keping, Yang Yiping, Qu 2001, 38.
Kabakoy,” Art in America (Jan. 1995), 68. Leilei, Mao Lizi, Bo Yun, Zhong Ahcheng, 3< Qian Zhijian, “Performing Bodies: Zhang
nn ““With Russia on Your Back’: A Conversation Shao Fei, Li Shuang, and Ai Weiwei. Huan, Ma Liuming, and Performance Art in
Between Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys,” See Gao Minglu, The Wall: Reshaping China,” Art Journal (Summer 1999), 63.
Parkett 34 (1992), 30-41:38. Contemporary Chinese Art, Buffalo, N.Y. : 33 Ind.
eo http://www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com/ Albright Knox Art Gallery, 2005, 370. 34 [bid., 65-66.
text/10_2.html. Bo Yun, Mao Lizi, and Yang Yiping remained 35or Gao Minglu, “Private Experience and Public
Margarita Tupitsyn introduced this in China, and Ai Weiwei, though the first to Happenings: The Performance Art of Zhang
comparison to Western audiences in her Sots leave, has since returned. Huan,” in Zhang Huan, Pilgrimage to
Art exhibition at the New Museum in New Li Xianting (co-curator of the 1989 “China/ Santiago, Barcelona: Xunda de Galicia and
York in 1986 and it was developed with Avant-Garde” show), writing under the Cotthem Gallery, 2001. Accessed online at
point-by-point comparisons in David A. Ross pseudonym LiJiantun, claimed that half the http://www.zhanghuan.com/ListText,
etal., Between Spring and Summer: Soviet young Chinese artists working in the 1980s asp?id=1 March 2009.
Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Capitalism, did so under a style influenced by 3a On the sale of work from “China/
Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1990. Rauschenberg. See “The Significance Is Not Avant-Garde,” see Maggie Ma, “Memories of
See particularly Tupitsyn, “U-Turn of the the Art” (1986) in Wu Hung, Contemporary 1989,” Artzine, http://www.artzinechina.
U-topia,” in ibid., 35-51. Chinese Art: Primary Documents, 62-63. Gao com/display_vol_aid252_en.html, accessed
o Margarita Tupitsyn, “Sots Art: The Russian Minglu, the chief curator of “China/ July 16, 2010.
Deconstructive Force,” in the New Museum, Avant-Garde” and signatory of the 37 Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, Fuck Off, Shanghai:
Sots Art, New York: The New Museum, 1986, introduction, also described the Fastlink Gallery, 2000, n.p.
4-15:4. Rauschenberg exhibition as “the most
i Quotes in this paragraph are from Gerald provocative foreign exhibition” of the Chapter 9: Engaging the Global Present
Pirob, “Art and Ideology: Excerpts from an period, though he claimed that interest in a 1 Charles Merewether, “Preface: The
Interview with Alexander Kosolapov,” in New Rauschenberg-like collage aesthetic could Encounter,” in Judith Bettleheim et al.,
Directions: Essays on Aspects of the Permanent be found in pre-1985 Chinese art. See Gao Cronicas Americanas: Obras de José Bedia,
Collection by Members of the Rutgers University Minglu, “The ’85 Movement” (1986) in Wu Monterrey, Mexico: Museo de Arte
Faculty in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Hung and Peggy Wang, Contemporary Chinese Contemporaneo de Monterrey, 1997,
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Art: Primary Documents, New York: The 30-36:33.
Brunswick, NJ: The Museum, 1991, 3—7:6. Museum of Modern Art, 2010, 61. 2 Quotes in this paragraph are from Robert
x SeeJo Anna Isaak, “The Future of Disillusion: Because Wenda Gu has adopted the Western Farris Thompson, “Sacred Silhouettes,” Ari in
Sex, Truth, and Photography in the Former custom of placing his given name first and America (July 1997), 64—71:70.
Soviet Union,” Art Jowrnal
53:2 (Summer family name second, I refer to him as Wenda 3 José Marti, “Our America,” translated and
1994), 47. This issue of Art Journal is devoted Gu. When he exhibited in “China/ reprinted in Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and
to Russian photography and offers a good Avant-Garde,” however, he was referred to as Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, eds., The Cuba
overview of the subject as well as some Gu Wenda. Reader; History , Culture, Politics, Durham, NC:
in-depth discussions. = Gao Minglu et al., China/Avant-Garde, China Duke University Press, 2003, 122-—27:124.
ao Oleg Kulik in S. Khripoun, “Empire Bites Art Gallery: Beijing, 1989, n.p. 4 Artist statement, Sixth Biennial of Sydney,
Back: Oleg Kulik’s “Canine Performance’ at Ibid. cited in Charles Merewether, “Light Me
Deitch Projects,” Thing Reviews (April 27, “Wang Guangyi in Conversation with Paul Another Cuba: Late Modernism After the
1199;7);,. 1. Gladston” (Nov. 2007), interview in Paul Revolution,” in Merewether, Made in
o See the discussion of the body in post-Soviet Gladston, Avant-Garde Art Groups in China, Havana: Contemporary Art from Cuba, Sydney:
art in Pat Simpson, “Peripheralizing 1979-89, Bristol: Intellect—University of Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1988,
Patriarchy: Gender and-Identity in Post Chicago Press, forthcoming 2013. The 6-17:10.
Soviet Art: A View from the West,” Oxford Art Northern Arts Group included Shu Qun, 5 Ibid., 25.
Journal 27:3 (2004). Liu Yan, Ren Jian, Gao Minglu, Li Xianting, 7 Lorenzo Fusi, “A Conversation with Carlos
10 Oleg Kulik, “Why Have I Bitten a Man?” in Wang Xiaojian, Zhou Yan, and Huang Garaicoa,” in Carlos Garaicoa, Carlos
Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern Zhuan. Wang Guanyi was the vice-chairman. Garaicoa: Capablanca’s Real Passion, Prato,
and Central European Art Since the 1950s, New artasiapacific.com/Magazine/77/ Italy: Gli Ori, 2005, 101-15:106.
York: MoMA, 2002, 349. Reasoning WithIdolsWangGuangyi, accessed x Interview by Gerald Matt, in Shirin Neshat,
_ Wenda Gu, “the divine comedy of our January 2013 Serpentine Gallery: London, 2000, 27, cited
times—a thesis on united nations art project 25 Jerome Sans, China Talks: Interviews with 32 in Bill Horrigan, ed., Shirin Neshat: Two
& its time and environment,” posted on the Contemporary Artists, Hong Kong: Timezone, Installations, Horrigan: Bill Wexner Center,
artist’s website, http://www.wendagu.com/ 2009, 187. 2000, 10.
home.html, 1995. Forever Lasting Love is the English title of the o Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
12 Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz, work as it appeared in the 2011 Sotheby’s Cinema,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art Afler
Anti-Technologies of Resistance, 2000, http:// Hong Kong sale of the Ullens collection. It Modernism, New York: The New Museum,
subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors/ was published by Gao Minglu as Eternal Life: 1984, 363.
brenertext.html. See also Brener and see Gao, The Wall, ibid., 99. © Bill Horrigan, ed., Shirin Neshat: Two
Schurz, The Art ofDestruction, Ljubljana: Zhang explains the history of these Installations, ibid., 21.
Blossom vy. Fruit SAMIZDAT, 2004. paintings in Sans, China Talks, ibid., 186-93. 10 Bridget L. Goodbody, “From Lover to Foe
13 Oleg Kulik, “The Gobi Test, or the Huang Yongping, “Xiaming Dada— and Back Again,” Art Asia Pacific 43 (Winter
Unbearable Charm of Mongolia,” in La Postmodern?” (1986), excerpt reprinted in 2005), 62.
Biennale di Venezia 51: Always a Little Further, Walker Art Center, House of Oracles: A Huang 11 “Shahzia Sikander in Conversation with
Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Yong Ping Retrospective, Minneapolis: Walker Fereshteh Daftari,” in Shahzia Sikander,
Venezia, 2005, 178. Art Center, 2005, '76—77:77. Shazia Sikander: Intimate Ambivalence,
14 Oleg Kulik, “The Gobi Test, or the Ibid. Birmingham, U.K.: Ikon Gallery, 2008,
Unbearable Charm of Mongolia,” in La —) Melissa Chiu, “The Crisis of Calligraphy and 53-64:58.
Biennale di Venezia 51, ibid. the New Way of Tea: An Interview with 12 Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space:
Wenda Gu,” Orientations 33:3 (March 2002), Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in

Endnotes
 Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, 31 Artist statement, http://www.iniva.org/ Antipodes: Inside the White Cube, London:
Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, exhibitions_projects/2009/chen_chieh_ White Cube, 2003, 58-69. Accessed online at
207-21:211. jen/introduction. http://www.katharinagrosse.com/info.php.
“Chillava Klatch: Shahzia Sikander 32 Stella Rollig and Emily Jacir, “Interview,” in 24 Ibid.
Interviewed by Homi Bhaba,” in Sikander, Stella Rollig and Genoveva Rickert, eds., 25 Katharina Grosse and Ulrich Loock,

Shahzia Sikander, Chicago: Renaissance Emily Jacir—Belongings, Linz: O.K. Centrum “Katharina Grosse in Conversation with
Society, University of Chicago, 1999, fir Gegenwartskunst Oberosterreich, 2004, Ulrich Loock: Painting on
16-21:21. 6-19:4. Three-Dimensional Supports,” in Katharina
Kobena Mercer, “Art That Is Ethnic in 33 Edward S. Said, “Emily Jacir,” Grand Street 72 Grosse: Atoms Outside Eggs, Museu Serralves:
Inverted Commas,” Frieze 25 (Nov.—Dec. (Fall 2003), 206. Porto, 2007, 19-71, accessed online at
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com/issue/article/art_that_is_ethnic_in_ Chapter 10: New Metaphors and New 26 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,

inverted_commas/June 2012. Narratives Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998, 70.

Yinka Shonibare, “Poetic License,” in D. _ Matthew Ritchie, “Information, Cells & Evil,” 27 Owen Drolet, “Matthew Ritchie Interview,”
Burrows, ed., Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Art:21, online edition, http://www.pbs.org/ Urban Desires (1995), http://desires.
Blue?, Birmingham: Article Press, 1998, 73. art21/artists/ritchie/clip1.html. com/1.3/Art/docs/ritchie.html
Lori Waxman, “Yinka Shonibare: Interview,” n Phong Bui, “Brooklyn Rail: Amy Sillman with 28 Ibid.
New Art Examiner 28:3 (2000), 36-37:37. Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail (April 2006), 29 Jennifer Berman, “Matthew Ritchie,” Bomb
Paul Gilroy, “The Art of Darkness: Black Art online at http://brooklynrail.org/2006/04/ (Spring 1997), accessed online at http://
and the Problems of Belonging to England,” art/amy-sillman-with-phong-bui. www.bombsite.com/issues/59/
Third Text 10 (Spring 1990), 52. ao Ian Berry, “Ugly Feelings: A Dialogue with articles/2035.
Cited in Mika Yoshitake, “The Meaning of Amy Sillman,” in Berry and Anne Ellegood, 30 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Artist Project: Matthew
the Nonsense of Excess,” in Paul Schimmel Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular, Saratoga Barney,” Tate Magazine 2 (Nov.—Dec. 2002),
et al., OMurakami, Los Angeles: The Springs, New York: The Frances Young Tang accessed online at http://www.tate.org.uk/
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007, Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2008, magazine /issue2/barney.htm.
111-27:111. 5=23:5. 3— Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, “Travels in
Mako Wakasa, “Takashi Murakami,” Journal 4 Phong Bui, “Brooklyn Rail,” ibid. Hypertrophia: Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
of Contemporary Art (2000), accessed online 5 Tbid. Talks with Matthew Barney,” Artforum (May
at http://www.jca-online.com/murakami. a Amy Sillman and Gregg Bordowitz, Amy 1995), 66-69:68-69.
html. Sillman and Gregg Bordowitz: Between Artists, 32 Matthew Barney and Arthur C. Danto, “A
2 —) Masahiko Asano, “Special Interview: Figures New York: Art Resources Transfer 2007, 41. Dialogue on Blood and Iron: Matthew
4,” in Takahashi Murakami, Swmmon Cecily Brown, “Painting Epiphany,” Flash Art Barney and Arthur C. Danto on Joseph
Monsters? Open the Door? Heal? Or Die?, Tokyo: (May/June 1998), 76—79:76. Bueys,” Modern Painters (Sept. 2006),
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001, 8 Ibid., 78. 62-69:65.
94-95:95, J Aneta Panek, “Franz Ackermann, Voyages 33 Calvin Tomkins, “His-Body, Himself:
2= Takashi Murakami, “Greetings, You Are Paralléles/Franz Ackermann: What a Long, Matthew Barney’s Strange and Passionate
Alive: Tokyo Pop Manifesto,” in Kokoku hihyo Long Trip It’s Been,” Art Press 14 (2005), Exploration of Gender,” The New Yorker (Jan.
(Advertisement Criticism) 226 (April 1, 1999), 38-43:41. 27, 2003).
selection reprinted in Murakami, ed., Little 10 Stephan Urbaschek, “What Is a Dream 34 Pierre Huyghe in “Artist Questionnaire: 21
Boy: The Arts ofJapan’s Exploding Subculture, Sequence in Painting? An Informal Responses,” October 100 (Spring 2002), 6-97:
New York: Japan Society 2005, 152. Conversation with Franz Ackermann in a oe
22 Ibid. Garden in Karlsruhe, April 2005,” in Rainald 35 George Baker, “An Interview with Pierre
23 Carolee Thea, “Cao Fei: Global Player,” Art Schumacher, ed., /magination Becomes Reality Huyghe,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 80-106:84.
Asia Pacific (Fall 2006), 66—67:66. Part 1: Expanded Paint Tools, Munich: 36 Pierre Huyghe in “Artist Questionnaire: 21
24 Questions for interview with Yang Fudong, Sammlung Goetz, 2005, 44—55:48. Responses,” ibid.
Copenhagen,
June 2008, Shanghai: Ibid. 37 Adrian Dannat, “Where Fact and Fiction
ShangART Gallery, 2008. http://www. Aneta Panek, “Franz Ackermann,” zbid., 43. Meet,” The Art Newspaper (March 31, 2005).
shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/ Olu Oguibe, “Artists on Artists,” BOMB 89 38 George Baker, “An Interview with Pierre
id/1115. (Fall 2004). Huyghe,” zbid., 106.
25 Yang Fudong, “Seven Intellectuals in the Cited in Margo A. Crutchfield, “Secular 39 Atom Egoyan “Janet Cardiff,” Bomb 79
Bamboo Forest: Postscript by Yang Fudong? Response 2 A.M.,” MOCA Cleveland (May (Spring 2002), 60-67:62.
(2009), http://www.shanghartgallery.com/ 2003). 40 Michael Juul Holm and Mette Marcus, eds.,
galleryarchive/texts/id/1382. 15 John Yau, “Ingrid Calame Constellations,” Louisiana Contemporary: Janet Cardiff and
26 Michelle Roecchi and Massimiliano Gioni, Brooklyn Rail (Oct. 2007), accessed online at George Bures Miller, Humlebeek: Louisiana
“Phil Collins: Face Value,” Flash Art http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/10/ Museum of Modern Art, 2006.
(Jan.—Feb, 2002), 84-86:84. artseen/ingrid-calame-constellations. 4= Carolee Thea, “Inexplicable Symbiosis: A
27 Jan Avgikos, “Rineke Dijkstra: Marian 16 Jorg Heiser and Jan Verwoert, “Ordinary Conversation with Janet Cardiff,” Sculpture
Goodman Gallery,” Ariforwm (Noy. 2003), Madness: An Interview with Albert Oehlen,” (Jan.—Feb. 2003), accessed on the artist’s
188. Frieze 78 (Oct. 2003). Accessed online at website.
28 See Hsiao Chong-ray, “From Radical http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/ 42 Helena Kontova and Massimiliano Gioni,
Criticism to Gradual Sedimentation—The ordinary_madness/. “Francesco Vezzoli: Group Portrait with a
Current Mentality of Contemporary Art in Ibid. Lady,” Flash Art 219 (2001).
Taiwan (1988-1999),” in Victoria Lu, ed., Diedrich Diederichsen, “The Rules of the 43 Marcella Beccaria, “Francesco Vezzoli:
Visions ofPluralism: Contemporary Art in Game,” Artforum 33:3 (Nov. 1994), 66—71:71. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in
Taiwan 1988-1999, Kaohsiung, Taiwan: Lane Relyea, “Interview,” in Christine Végh Cristina Garbagna, ed., Francesco Vezzoli:
Mountain Art Culture and Education et al., Jorge Pardo, New York: Phaidon, 2008, Democrazy, Milan: Electa, 2007, 180.
Foundation, 1999. Zon 44 Francesco Vezzoli, “Francesco Vezzoli and
29 Chen Chieh-jen, “About the Form of My 20 Fritz Haeg, “Interview with Jorge Pardo,” Nancy Spector in Conversation,” in Vezzoli,
Works,” www.asa.de/magazine/iss2/3chen. Index Magazine, LA Design Special Right You Are (If You Think You Are) by Luigi
htm. Supplement (May-June 1999), n.p. Pirandello, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2009,
30 Amy Cheng and Chen Chieh-jen, “On 2 = Chris Kraus, “Focus: 4166 Sea View Lane,” in 105-08.
Lingchi: Echoes ofa Historical Photograph,” Végh et al., Jorge Pardo, 105-14:108. 45 Interview with Cory Arcangel by Petra Heck,
Yishu (March 2003), 81. 22 Ibid., 112. Aug. 25, 2009, at http://nimk.nl/eng/
23 Louise Neri and Katharina Grosse, “Painting cory-arcangel-depreciated/
in the Expanded Field” in Louise Neri, ed., interview-cory-arcangel.

Endnotes
46 Cory Arcangel, “Super Mario Clouds” 20 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hans Ulrich Obrist & 45 “Ida Hirsenfelder—Interview with Trevor
(2002/2003) in Raphael Gygax and Heike Olafur Eliasson: Conversation Series 13, Koln: Paglen,” in Trevor Paglen: Contradictions of the
Munder, eds., Cory Arcangel (BEIGE), Zurich: Walter Konig, 2008, 157. Hidden Landscapes, exhibition brochure
JRP Ringer, 2005, 106-15:107. 2_ Lynne Cooke, “Interview: Lynne Cooke in accompanying “Trevor Paglen: A Hidden
47 Katie Kitamura and Hari Kunzru, “Ryan Conversation with Roni Horn,” in Louise Landscape,” Aksioma Project Space,
Trecartin in Conversation,” Frieze 142 (Oct. Neri et al., Roni Horn, London: Phaidon, Ljubljana, April 2011.
2011), 202. 2000, 6-25:23. 46 Ibid.
48 Whitney Ford, “The Q & A: Ryan Trecartin, 22 Ibid., 22. 47 Seth Curcio, “Seeing is Believing: An
Video Artist,” The Economist at http:// 23 Mimi Thompson, “Roni Horn,” Bomb 28 Interview with Trevor Paglen,” Daily Serving
moreintelligentlife.com/blog/ (Summer 1989), reprinted in Speak Out!: The (Feb. 24, 2011), http://dailyserving.
whitney-ford/qa-ryan-trecartin. Best of Bomb Magazine’s Interviews with Artists, com/2011/02/interview-with-trevor-
49 Katie Kitamura and Hari Kunzru, “Ryan New York: New Art Publications, 1997, paglen/.
Trecartin in Conversation,” ibid., 203. 80-86:85. 48 Ibid.
50 Whitney Ford, “The Q & A,” ibid. Lynne Cooke, “Interview,” ibid., 20. 49 See Timothy O'Sullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid
51 Cindy Sherman, “Cindy Sherman Interviews 25 Ibid. Lake, Nevada (King Survey), 1867,
Ryan Trecartin,” in Ryan Trecartin et al., Any 26 Collier Schorr, “Weather Girls Interview with Smithsonian American Art Museum
Ever: Ryan Trecartin, New York: Skira Rizzoli, Collier Schorr,” Frieze 32 (Jan.—Feb. 1997), Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs
2011, 144. 43-47, http://www.frieze.com/issue/ Collection made possible in part by the
article/weather_girls/. This sentiment is Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Chapter 11: The Art of Contemporary repeated almost word for word in undated Endowment, 1994.91.142.
Experience notes published in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, 50 Georges Didi Huberman, “How to Open
1 Bruno Latour “Atmosphére, Atmosphére,” in New York: Whitney Museum of American Your Eyes,” in Haroun Farocki, Against
Susan May, ed., Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Art, 2009, 137. What? Against Whom?, London: Koenig
Project, London: The Tate, 2003, 35. 27 Ibid. Books, 2009, 46 and Harun Farocki, “Le
2 Ibid. 28 Ibid. Point de Vue de la Guerre,” Trafic 50 (2004),
ao George Baker, “An Interview with Pierre 29 Keynote Speech, Graduating Class of 2006, 449.
Huyghe,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 80-106:99. Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik, 5_ Georges Didi-Huberman, “How to Open
4 Ibid. accessible on the artist’s website. Your Eyes,” in Haroun Farocki, ibid.
oO Thomas Hirschhorn, Where Do I Stand? What 30 Miwon Kwon, “Interview: Miwon Kwon in 52 Jan Verwoert, “See What Shows—On the
Do I Want?, London: Art Review Ltd., 2007, Conversation with Mark Dion,” in Lisa Practice of Haroun Farocki,” in Yilmaz
23. Graziose Corrin et al., Mark Dion, London: Dziewior, ed., Haroun Farocki: Soft Montages,
a Olafur Eliasson “Take Your Time: A Phaidon, 1997, 8-33:9. Bregenz, Austria: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2011,
Conversation, Olafur Eliasson and Robert 3= Ibid., 18. 16-32:27.
Irwin,” in Madeleine Grynsztejn, ed., Take 32 Mark Dion, “Neukom Vivarium,” Art 21 53 Eric Suchére, “Luc Tuymans: More than a
Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, San Francisco: San interview, http://www.pbs.org/art21/ Medium,” Art Press (July—Aug. 2002),
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007, artists/dion/clip1].html. 26-31:31.
51-61:55. 33 Mark Dion, “Notes: Seattle Art Museum— 5 rs Wilhelm Sasnal and Luc Tuymans, “When
x Olafur Eliasson, ed., Olafur Eliasson: The Blind Olympic Sculpture Park Proposal II,” Luc Tuymans met Wilhelm Sasnal ...,” Art
Pavilion, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz reproduced in Mark Dion et al., Mark Dion: Review (Feb. 2008), 42-49:45.
Publishers, 2004, n.p. The Natural History of the Museum, Paris: 55 Yasmine van Pee, “Unnatural Resources:
eo Angela Rosenberg, “Olafur Eliasson: Beyond Archibooks, 2007. Luc Tuymans,” Modern Painters (Oct. 2007),
Nordic Romanticism,” Flash Art (May-June 34 The last two quotes are in Tom Sachs and 66-75:69,
2003), 110-13:110. John Furgason, Ten Bullets, 2005, published 56 Eric Suchére, “Luc Tuymans: More Than a
oc Mieke Bal, “Light Politics,” in Madeleine by the artist. Medium,” zdzd., 31.
Grynsztejn, ed., Take Your Time, ibid., 35 Press release for Cavemanman, Barbara 57 Nato Thompson, “Spectacular Feelings: The
153-81:156-57. Gladstone Gallery, 2002. Rise of Affect in Contemporary Politics,”
10 Olafur Eliasson, “Your Engagement Has 36 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “An Interview with blog entry, March 19, 2012, http://
Consequences,” in Emma Ridgway, ed., Thomas Hirschhorn,” October 113 (Summer natothompson.wordpress.
Experiment Marathon: Serpentine Gallery, 2005), 77-100:93. com/2012/03/19/spectacular-feelings-
Reykjavik: Reykjavik Art Museum, 2009, 37 Thomas Hirschhorn, “1000 Words: Thomas the-rise-of-affect-in-contemporary-politics/.
accessed online from the artist’s website. Hirschhorn Talks About His Critical 58 Emily Apter, “In Conversation: Silvia
11 Olafur Eliasson, “Some Ideas About Colour,” Laboratory,” Artforum (March 2000), 109. Kolbowski with Emily Apter,” Brooklyn Rail
in Ismail Soyugenc and Richard Torchia, 38 Ibid. (Oct. 2011), online at http://brooklynrail.
Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory, Glenside, 39 Thomas Hirschhorn, Where Do I Stand? What org/2011/10/art/silvia-kolbowski-with-
Pennsylvania: Arcadia University Art Gallery, Do I Want? 2007, 22-23. emily-apter.
2006. 40 Geert Lovink, “Surveillance, Performance, 59 Omer Fast, “Back to the Present,” Displayer
12 Olafur Eliasson, “Nothing Is Ever the Same,” Self-Surveillance Interview with Jill Magid,” 03 (2009), 115.
mission statement for the Institut fur Institute ofNetwork Cultures (Oct. 29, 2004). 60 Ibid., 114.
Raumexperimente, http://www. Accessed online at http://www. 6= Marcus Verhagen, “Pleasure and Pain: Omer
raumexperimente.net/text-en.html. networkcultures.org/weblog/ Fast Interviewed by Marcus Verhagen,” Art
13 Ibid. archives/2004/10/surveillance_pe.html. Monthly 330 (Oct. 2009), 4.
14 Bill Arning, “Ernesto Neto,” Bomb 70 4) Eva Wiseman, “Is It Art? Search Me ... Why 62 Ibid., 3.
(Winter 2000), http://www.bombsite.com/ Artist Jill Magid Loves an Authority Figure,” 63 Andrea Bowers, “Interview with Sam Durant
issues/70/articles/2274. = The Observer (Sept. 27, 2009), “Features” and Monica Bonvicini,” Neue Review (Dec.
15 [bid. section 14. 2003), 5.
16 bid. Geert Lovink, “Surveillance, Performance, 64 Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie, Between

17 bid. Self-Surveillance,” zbzd. Artists: Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie, New
18 Fernanda Gomes, “Fernanda Gomes and 43 www.appliedautonomy.com/mission.html. York: Art Resources Transfer, 2008, 33.
Ernesto Neto,” Bomb 102 (Winter 2008), For details, see Trevor Paglen and A. C. 65 Ibid.
http://www.bombsite.com/issues/102/ Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the 66 Tbid., 53.
articles/3039. CIA’s Rendition Flights, New York: Melville 67 Ibid., 54.
19 Bill Arning, “Ernesto Neto,” Bomb'70 House, 2006, and Alexis Bhagat and Lize
(Winter 2000), http://www.bombsite.com/ Mogel, eds., An Allas of Radical Cartography,
issues/70/articles/2274. Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics &
Protest, 2008.

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Picture Credits

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Index

Abbraccio (Embrace) (Clemente) 77, 251, 3.12 alternative art 91, 92-101 Attie, Shimon 149-50
ABC No Rio gallery, New York 15, 93, 94, 100 Althusser, Louis 10, 15, 38, 39 The Wniting on the Wall 149-50, 6.10
About the Construction of the Real Tower of Babel Amerika series (Rollins with K.O.S.) 109, 4.20 Attorney Street ... (Wong) 4.11
(Garaicoa) 226-7, 9.10 Analogue series (Leonard) 245-6, 9.29 Auge/Maschine (Farocki) 11.18
Abramovié, Marina 175, 177-8, 179, 181, 214, Anderson, Laurie 57 Ault, Julie (Group Material) 101, 102
268 Andrews, Benny 33 Autel Chases (Boltanski) 146-7, 6.6
Art Must Be Beautiful 177 animation 161-2, 219, 233, 236, 238, 267, Avalos, David 112-15
The Biography 178, 187, 7.13 275-7, 279 911: A House Gone Wrong (as BAW/TAF) 114,
Breathing in, Breathing Out (with Ulay) 177 Annunciation after Titian (Richter) 66, 79, 3.2 4.25
Freeing the Voice 177 Anthropodino (Neto) 283-4, 291, 11.3 Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate (with Hock and
Interruption in Space (with Ulay) 177 “Anti-Form” art 23, 27, 38 Sisco) 114, 4.26
The Lovers—The Great Wall Walk (with Ulay) Antin, Eleanor 150-1 Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation
Wide ee L2 The Last Night of Rasputin 150 (with Hock and Sisco) 113, 115, 4.24
Nightsea Crossing (with Ulay) 177 Man Without a World 150, 6.11 avant-garde art 11, 12, 49, 53, 54, 65, 72, 74, 78,
Shoes for Departure 178, 7.14 Vilna Nights 150-1, 6.12 200, 201, 219
Abstract Expressionism 12-13, 27, 65, 66, 79, Antoni, Janine 102, 186-7 Avodah (dir. Lerski) 249
85, 124, 182, 186, 218, 219, 251, 257 Butterfly Kisses 186, 187, 7.23 Azari, Shojoa Youssefi 229
Ackermann, Franz 254-5, 257, 264 Gnaw 186, 187, 7.24
Home, Home Again 255, 260, 10.5 Lipstick/Phenylethylamine Boutique 186-7 B3 Bolide Box 3 “Africana” (Oiticica) 1.7
Mental Maps series 254, 255, 10.4 Loving Care 186, 187 Bacon, Francis 254
Untitled (Mental Map: no. 10... )10.4 Any Ever series (Trecartin) 278-9 Bad (Bath) (Oehlen) 259-60, 10.10
ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) Aoshima, Chiho 235, 237, 238 Bad Boy (Fischl) 69-70, 3.5
47,111,112 Magma Spirit Explodes ... 238, 9.21 Bal, Mieke 282
Actionism 38, 177 “apartment art” see “unofficial art” Balaclava (Trockel) 135-6, 5.20
activist art 34, 38, 39, 40, 47-8, 57-64, 110-15, Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) (Sachs) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Goldin) 99
183, 226, 307-10 290, 11.9 Balloon Dog (Magenta) (Koons) 5.23
Adorno, Theodor 80, 82, 143, 146, 304 Appearance (Collective Actions group) 201 Barney, Matthew 267-9
African-American experience in art 33-7, 72-4, appropriation art 15, 46-7, 64, 65, 70, 85, 92-3, The Cabinet of Harry Houdini 268, 10.18
103, 104, 140, 151-9, 172-3 97, 113, 116, 128-9, 230, 250, 277-8, 304 The Cremaster Cycle 267-9, 10.17, 10.18
African art 73, 219, 220, 233-4, 256 and activist art 47-8, 57-64 Barry, Robert
see also South African art installations 58, 60-1, 152-3, 155 All the Things I Know But Am Not Thinking 27
African Self-Hybridization ... (ORLAN) 176, 7.11 photography 47, 48-9, 51, 52-4, 56-7, 58, 64, Bartana, Yael 248-9
AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad 146-7, 152 Summer Camp 248-9, 9.32
Relevant Artists) 35-7 Arcangel, Cory 275-8 Barthes, Roland 10, 38, 102
After Hiroshima Mon Amour (Kolbowski) 304-5, FI Racer Mod 277 Baselitz, Georg 65, 78, 79, 83, 84, 88
306, 11.21 follow my other twitter 277 Eagle in the Window 79, 3.14
After Joan Miro (Levine) 5.12 Low-Level Allstars 276 Model for a Sculpture 78, 3.13
After Walker Evans: 7 (Levine) 48, 49, 130, 2.3 “On Compression” (essay) 277 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 72-4, 93, 94-5, 251
Age of Enlightenment series (Shonibare) 234, Sorry I Haven't Posted 277, 278 Gold Griot 73
9.17 4 Structural Film 276 Grillo 73, 74, 3.7
Ahearn, John 93, 107-9, 110 Super Mario Clouds 275, 276, 277 Undiscovered Genius 73, 3.8
Homage to the People of the South Bronx ... 109, Super Mario Movie 276, 277, 10.23 Untitled (with Warhol) 74, 3.9
4.19 Working On My Novel 277, 10.24 Untitled: The Daros Suite of Thirty-two Drawings
Raymond and Toby 110, 4.21 architecture and design in art 41, 53, 81, 118, (8
Ai Weiwei 138, 212-14, 216, 217 124, 226-7, 260-2 Batchelor, David 251
Black Cover Book 213 Armleder, John M. 116, 132-4, 137 Battcock, Gregory 27-8, 30, 102, 280
Dropping a Han-Dynasty Urn 213, 8.21 Ne dites pas non! (Don't say no!) 133, 134, 5.17 Baudelaire, Charles 11
Gray Cover Book 213 Untitled Furniture Sculpture 144 133, 5.18 Baudrillard,
Jean 116, 126, 127, 129, 196, 201
Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo 213-14 Arp, Jean 260 “Forget Foucault” 126
Perspective series 217 Arranged by Donald Marron ... (Lawler) 58 Bearden, Romare 33
Table with Three Legs 213, 8.22 Art Informel 65, 66 Tomorrow I Might Be Far Away 1.20
White Cover Book 213 Art Must Be Beautiful (Abramovi¢c) 177 “Beau Monde” exhibition, New Mexico (2001)
AIDS (General Idea) 131-2, 5.15 Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate (Sisco, Hock and 25)
AIDS and art 96, 98, 103, 110, 111-12, 115, Avalos) 114-15, 4.26 BECC (Black Emergency Cultural Coalition)
131-2, 184-5 The Artist’s Kiss (ORLAN) 175 33-4, 43
AIDS Timeline (Group Material) 103, 111, 4.12 Artists Space gallery, New York 15, 46, 47, 119 Becher, Berndt and Hilla 246
AIR (Artists in Residence) gallery, New York 43, Asher, Michael 32, 69 Beckmann, Max 87
171 Ashford, Doug (Group Material) 101, 102 Bed (Sillman) 251-2, 10.1
Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Atlas Group 164-6, 303 Bed-In (Lennon and Ono) 27
Panic) (EXPORT) 38 Missing Lebanese Wars ... (with Raad) 164-5, Bedia, José 172, 219-21, 227, 249
Alien (dir. Scott) 55, 2.9 6.25 The Island That Died 220, 221, 9.2
All the Things I Know But Am Not Thinking My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair (with Raad) - Kakuisa el Songe ... 219-20, 221, 9.1
(Barry) 27 165-6, 6.26 Benglis, Lynda 23
Almstadtstrasse 43 (Attie) 149, 6.10 Atrabiliarios (Salcedo) 161, 6.22 Quartered Meteor 25, 1.9

327
Better Homes, Better Gardens (Marshall) 158, 6.20 Calame, Ingrid 254, 256-7, 260 Collective Actions group 201
Beuys, Joseph 28-9, 44, 66, 85, 90, 93, 102, 171, From #258 Drawing...256-7, 10.7 Appearance 201
189, 203, 210, 226, 267 Calle, Sophie 180-1 Gazing at the Waterfall 201
Felt Suit 1.16 No Sex Last Night (Double Blind) (with The Collector paintings (Immendorff) 88
I Like America and America Likes Me 203 Shephard) 180-1, 7.16 Collins, Phil 235, 242, 243-4, 249
Bickerton, Ashley 116, 120-1, 136, 138, 200, Take Cave of Yourself 181, '7.17 they shoot horses 243
222 calligraphy 202, 204, 210-11 the world won't listen 242, 243-4, 9.25
Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) 120-1, 5.5 Canada (Boltanski) 147, 6.7 Colombian art 160-1, 167
La Bicycleta (Osorio) 104, 4.15 Cao Fei 235, 238-40, 242, 250, 251 Colour Bar Lounge (General Idea) 130
The Biography (Abramovyic) 178, 187, 7.13 COSPlayers series 238, 239, 249, 9.22 commodity art 116, 117-24, 132-9, 200, 213,
Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) A Mirage 238, 239, 9.22 230
33-4, 43 San Yuan Li (with Ou Ning and U-theque) community art LOI-10, 154, 308-9, 311
The Black Panther (Douglas) 37, 1.23 240, 251, 9.23 Conceptual art 25-7, 56, 64, 69, 74, 88, 141, 142,
Black-Red-Gold I—dithyrambic (Lipertz) 84, 3.20 Cardiff, Janet 272 144, 179, 180-1, 185, 191, 246, 254, 276
Bleckner, Ross 116, 127-8, 130 Her Long Black Hair 272 Concrete Art 22
Departure 127-8, 5.11 Munster Walk 272 Constructivism 11, 200, 201
Bloodlines series (Zhang Xiaogang) 209, 8.16 Carlin, John 98 “Coolade Color” 36
body art 99, 122, 169, 171-92, 214-16, 228-30, La Casa Nacional (Francisco and DUPP) 226, Corps étranger (Foreign Body) (Hatoum) 184, 7.21
250, 299-311 249, 9.9 COSPlayers series (Cao Fei) 238, 239, 249, 9.22
“body sculptures” (ORLAN) 175 The Casting (Fast) 305-6, 11.22 Cradle of Happiness (Moshiri) 138, 5.24
Boltanski, Christian 146-7, 148 The Casual Passer-by ... (Dimitrijevic) 0.8 The Cremaster Cycle (Barney) 267-9, 10.17, 10.18
Autel Chases 146-7, 6.6 Catalyses (Piper) 172-3, 7.7 Criminals and Celebrities (Prince) 51, 2.6
Canada 147, 6.7 Cavemanman (Hirschhorn) 280, 292-3, 294, Crimp, Douglas 46, 47, 48, 50, 72
Research and Presentation ... 146 11.12 Crocheted Environment (Wilding) 41
Bome 236 “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) Cuban art 171-2, 218-27, 250
Second Mission Project Ko? (with Murakami and (Magritte) 49 installations 219-20, 223, 225
Vi-Shop) 236-7, 9.19 Celan, Paul 82, 143 Cubism 11, 53, 66, 74, 78
Book from the Sky (Xu Bing) 205, 211-12, 8.20 “Death Fugue” 82-3 Cucchi, Enzo 65, 75
Border Arts Workshop/'Taller de Arte Crest la viel (That's life!) (Fleury) 136 “Culture Wars” 110, 168-70, 179
Fronteriza (BAW/TAF) 114 Cézanne, Paul 11 Current of Life painting 204, 205, 207
911; A House Gone Wrong 114, 4.25 Chamberlain,
John 285 Currin, John 253
Borofsky, Jonathan 68, 86 Change of Scenery (Buren) 33 Gut Piece (Ono) 38, 1.24
Running Man 67-8, 3.3 Charles, Michael Ray 154, 155, 156
Botner, Marcio 284 (Liberty Brothers Permanent Daily Circus) Blue Dadaism 12, 13, 50, 96, 101-2, 124, 133, 134,
Bourriaud, Nicolas 185, 186, 265 Period 154, 156, 6.15 210, 213
Relational Aesthetics 185-6 Chen Chieh-jen 246-7 Dali, Salvador 11
Bowers, Andrea 242, 243, 299, 307-10, 311 Factory 246, 247, 9.30 Danger (Bulatoy) 198
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training 308-9 Chia, Sandro 65, 75-6, 77 Davis, Angela 36, 1.22
Nonviolent Protest Training ... 308, 11.24 Water Bearer '75—6, 3.10 Day Is Done project (Kelley) 123-4, 5.8
The United States v. Tim DeChristopher 309-10, Chicago, Judy 41-2, 71, 167 De Kooning, Willem 14, 65, 66, 68, 254
11.25 The Dinner Party 42, 167, 1.28 Woman 1 0.4
Brancusi, Constantin 260 “China/Avant Garde” exhibition, Beijing Dead Flower (Nara) 237, 9.20
Brave (Fleury) 136-7, 5.21 (1989) 204-5, 206, 207, 209, 211-12, 214, DeAk, Edit 77
Bread Roll Initiative (Oehlen and Buttner) 258 216 “Dear Painter, Paint Me” exhibition, Paris
Breath Piece (Ono) 27 Chinese art 14-15, 17, 204-17, 235, 238-41, (2002) 251
Breathing in, Breathing Oul (Abramovié and 250 The Death ofFashion (Schnabel) 68, 3.4
Ulay) 177 installations 202-3, 205, 209, 210, 211-12, Debord, Guy 126, 301, 303
Brener, Alexander 33, 201, 202, 203 213-14 Society ofthe Spectacle 126, 302
Bronson, A.A. (General Idea) 130 performance art 213, 214-16 DeChristopher, Tim 309-10
Brown, Cecily 253-4 Chuikoy, Ivan 194 Deconstructionism LO, 11, 200
Night Passage 10.3 Cincy (Grosse) 262-3, 10.13 Deep Play (Farocki) 300-1
Die Briicke 65, 84 Cixous, Héléne 40 Deep South series (Mann) 7.4
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 78, 293 “The Laugh of the Medusa” 40 Defoliation Piece (Fox) 28, 1.15
Bulatoy, Erik 194, 196, 198 Clark, Lygia 22-3 Deleuze, Gilles 74
Danger 198 Counter Reliefs 23 Anti-Oedipus (with Guattari) 25-6
Perestroika 198-9, 8.6 Es Cleaning Event... (Hi Red Center) 20, 1.4 Democracy project (Group Material) 102, 115
Buren, Daniel 32-3, 64, 92, 181, 254 Clemente, Francesco 65, 75, 76-8 Democrazy (Vezzoli) 273-4
Change ofScenery 33 Abbraccio (Embrace) '77, 251, 3.12 Denes, Agnes 43
Photo-sowvenir...33, 1.19 Francesco Clemente Pinxit series 76, 3.11 Departure (Bleckner) 127-8, 5.11
Butterfly Kisses (Antoni) 186, 187, 7.23 Close, Chuck 37 Derrida, Jacques 10, 38
Buttner, Werner 258 COBRA (Coalition of Black Revolutionary design in art seearchitecture and design
Bread Roll Initiative (with Oehlen) 258 Artists) 35 Deutsche, Rosalyn 60, 84
see also AriCOBRA Deyhim, Sussan 229
Cabinet Making (Wilson) 155, 6.17 Cocinado (Cooking) (Soto) 104 digital media in art 176, 230, 233, 237, 240, 251,
The Cabinet of Harry Houdini (Barney) 268, 10.18 Colab (Collaborative Projects) 15, 69, 91, 93, 275-9, 294-6, 297-8
Café Deutschland series (Immendorff) 85, 86-7, 96, 98, 107, 121, 181 Dijkstra, Rineke 235, 244—5
92, 3.22 Collection ofForty Plaster Surrogates (McCollum) The Buzz Club, Livenpool ... 245
Cage, John 210 2.12 Odessa, Ukraine 9.27

Index
Dimitrijevic, Braco Evidence Locker (Magid) 296 Fetting, Rainer 65, 78, 84, 258
The Casual Passer-by ... 0.8 experience and art 17, 19-20, 28-9, 280-91 film and video art 248-9
The Dinner Party (Chicago) 42, 167, 1.28 body art 171-2, 173-5, 177-89, 299-311 body art 180-1, 184, 228-30
Dion, Mark 287-9 Chinese art 208-9, 214-15 Chinese art 238-41
New England Digs 287-8, 11.7 digital art 277-9 commodity art 123-4
On Tropical Nature 287, 288 feminist art 39-45 digital media 278-9
Vivarium Neukom 288-9, 11.8 film and video art 294-6, 299-302, 303-10 and experience 294-6, 299-302, 303-10
Dix, Otto 87 global art 219-20, 230-49, 250 feminist art 38, 42-3, 228-30
DMSP 5B/F4 ... (Paglen) 298-9, 11.17 installations 22, 40, 45, 104-5, 219-20, 232-4, and globalism 228-30, 238-42, 243-4, 245,
Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. 262-5, 281-94, 295, 299-302 246, 247-9
Museum? (Guerrilla Girls) 62, 2.18 and mass media 299-311 and memory 150-1
Dog Day Afternoon (dir. Lumet) 270 Minimalism 21-2 narrative art 267-71
Dog House (Kulik) 201-2, 8.9 narrative art 269-72 Neo-Geo art 130
Domestic series (Opie) 310, 11.26 Neo-expressionism 70, 77-8, 82-3, 88 Russian art 203-4
Donaldson,
Jeff 35, 37, 41 performance art 43-4, 171-8, 179, 183, war art 161-4, 166-7
Double Dutch (Shonibare) 233, 9.15 214-15, 269-72, 296-7, 299 and youth culture 238-42, 243-4, 245
Douglas, Emory 37 photography 298-9, 310-11 see also animation; digital media in art
The Black Panther 37, 1.23 Russian art 196, 202 films and art 52-3, 54-6, 157, 249, 268, 270,
Drawer (Johns) 0.5 space in art 263-5 272-3, 304
Dream, Art and Market (Portrait of Peter Ludwig) street art 97-8, 104-5 see also film and video art
(Francisco and Ponjuan) 225, 9.8 surveillance and power 280, 291-9 The First Language (Spero) 40
Dropping a Han-Dynasty Urn (Ai Weiwei) 213, see also African-American experience in art; Fischl, Eric 65, 69-70
8.21 identity and selfin art; memory in art Bad Boy 69-70, 3.5
Dubow, Jessica 163 EXPORT, VALIE 38, 39 Fish Story series (Sekula) 9.28
Dubuffet, Jean 13, 65 Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: 5000 Feet Is the Best (Fast) 306, 307, 11.23
Duchamp, Marcel 47, 118, 128-9, 210, 212, 260 Genital Panic 38 Flames, Dragons, and Titles (Prince) 51
DUPP (Desde Una Pedagogica Pragmatica) Expressionism 65, 66, 68, 69, 74, 84-5, 124 Flavin, Dan 184, 285
226 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction Fleury, Sylvie 136-8, 200, 222, 278
Going After a Trace ... 172, 7.6 (Kelley) 123-4, 5.8 Brave 136-7, 5.21
La Casa Nacional (with Francisco) 226, 249, Eye/Machine series (Farocki) 299, 301, 302, Cest la vie! (That's life!) 136
3:9 11.18 Formula One Dress 137-8, 5.22
Duras, Margaret 304 Fluxus 19-20, 28, 38, 44, 101-2, 132, 250, 276
Dyogot, Yekaterina 200 F-111 (Rosenquist) 18-19, 167, 250, 278, 1.1 Fly (Ono) 38, 171, 1.25
F1 Racer Mod (Arcangel) 277 follow my other twitter (Arcangel) 277
Eagle in the Window (Baselitz) 79, 3.14 Factory (Chen Chieh-jen) 246, 247, 9.30 Fonvizin, Artur 194
Eakins, Thomas 107 Falk, Robert 194—5 Footballers (Moukhin) 8.8
Earth art see Land art Fardo de 1000 x 400 x 250 cm (Sierra) 191 Forever Lasting Love (Zhang Xiaogang) 207-8,
“Earth Art” exhibition, New York (1970) 27, 30 Farmhouse Hale County, Alabama (Evans) 48-9, 209, 8.15
East Village art scene, New York 63, 73, 93-4, 2.4 formalism 13, 14, 19, 37, 85, 183, 250, 262, 264,
100, 101, 102, 108, 116, 119, 121, 127, 214 Farocki, Harun 299-302, 305 275
Educational Complex (Kelley) 122-3, 5.7 Auge/Maschine 11.18 Formula One Dress (Fleury) 137-8, 5.22
Edwards, Melvin 34 Deep Play 300-1 Fort Apache: The Bronx (film, 1980) 100, 108
Eggs to Breasts (Hodgetts) 41, 1.27 Eye/Machine series 299, 301, 302, 11.18 Foster, Hal 64, 72
*85 New Wave Movement 204, 205, 210 Inextinguishable Fire 300 Foucault, Michel 10, 38, 39, 125, 126, 132, 140,
Eins, Stefan 91 Serious Games series 300-2, 11.19 196, 302, 311
El Pez Roncando (The Fish Snoring) (Oehlen) A Sun with No Shadow 302, 11.19 Discipline and Punish 125-6
258-9, 260, 10.9 War at a Distance 299, 301, 302 4166 Sea View Lane exhibition, Los Angeles
Elahi, Hasah M. 277, 294-6, 297 Farrokhzad, Forough 228 (1998, Pardo) 261-2, 10.12
Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project 294-6, Fashion Moda gallery, New York 15, 91-2, 93, Fox, Terry 28, 102, 280
11.14 107, 119, 181, 4.2 Defoliation Piece 29, 1.15
Eliasson, Olafur 280, 281-2, 284, 293 concession stall at Documenta 7 4.1 A Sketch for Impacted Lead 28
Your colour memory 282, 291, 11.2 Fast, Omer 299, 305-6, 309 Francesco Clemente Pinxit series (Clemente) 76,
Your strange certainty still kept 280, 281-2, The Casting 305-6, 11.22 3.11
293-4, 11.1 5000 Feet Is the Best 306, 307, 11.23 Francisco Rodriguez, René 172, 225-6, 227
Elso (Juan Francisco Elso Padilla) 172, 221, Godville 305 Dream, Art and Market (Portrait of Peter Ludwig)
222 Her Face Was Covered .. 306-7 (with Ponjuan) 225, 9.8
Por América (For America) 221, 9.3 Spielberg's List 305 La Casa Nacional (with DUPP) 226, 249, 9.9
Emin, Tracey 179-80 Fautrier, Jean 13, 65, 304 Fraser, Andrea 33, 58, 264
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 179, 181 Head of a Hostage #1 0.3 Museum Highlights ... 33
Just Love Me 180, 7.15 Favorsky, Vladimir 194 Frazier, Susan 41
You Should Have Loved Me 179 Felix in Exile (Kentridge) 162-3, 6.23 Freeing the Voice (Abramovi¢) 177
En el Aire (In the Air) (Margolles) 190, 7.27 Felt Suit (Beuys) 1.16 Freud, Sigmund 54, 55, 56, 123, 166, 196
Esculturas Rupestres (Cave Sculpture) (Mendieta) feminist art 11, 20, 27, 37, 38-45, 48, 54, 56-7, Fried, Michael 47
172, 7.6 62, 134-7, 171, 179, 250 From #258 Drawing...(Calame) 256-7, 10.7
Eshgh (Love) (Moshiri) 138, 139, 5.25 Feminist Art Program (FAP) 41, 43, 71 Frozen North Pole no. 28 (Wang Guangyi) 8.12
Evans, Walker 48, 49 Womanhouse 41, 42, 43, 171, 1.27 “Fuck Off” exhibition, Shanghai (2000) 217
Farmhouse Hale County, Alabama 48-9, 2.4 Feng Boyi 213, 217 Funny (Wilson) 154, 6.16
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (Emin) 179, 181 Fervor (Neshat) 228, 229 Fusco, Coco 104-5, 191

Index
Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (Shonibare) Grillo (Basquiat) 73, 74, 3.7 Hobbs, Robert 157
234, 9.16 Grosse, Katharina 260, 262—4, 265 Hoch, Hannah 96-7
Gallardo, Arturo Angulo (SEMEFO) 189 Cincy 262-3 Hock, Louis 112-15
Garaicoa, Carlos 226-7 Inversion 262 Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate (with Avalos and
About the Construction ofthe Real Tower ofBabel Grosz, Georg 87 Sisco) 114, 4.26
226-7, 9.10 Group Material 15, 33, 101-3, 108, 112, 184, Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation
Garciandia, Flavio 172, 219, 221-2 185, 186, 260 (with Avalos and Sisco) 113, 115, 4.24
Untitled 249, 9.4 AIDS Timeline 103, 111, 4.12 Hodgetts, Vicki 41
The Garden Project (Marshall) 158, 6.20 Democracy project 102, 115 Eggs to Breasts 41, 1.27
Gates, Henry Louis,
Jr. 157 The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) Hogarth, William 87
Gauguin, Paul 11 101-2, 4.12 Rake’s Progress 87
“the Gaze” 52, 54-6, 70, 229, 263, 275 Guattari, Pierre-Félix 74 Holler, Carsten
Gazing at the Waterfall (Collective Actions Anti-Oedipus (with Deleuze) 25-6 Test Site 284—5, 11.4
group) 201 Guernica (Picasso) 33 the Holocaust 82-3, 143-4, 145, 146-8, 149-50,
General Idea 130-2 Guerrilla Girls 47, 57, 62 302
AIDS 131-2, 5.15 Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Holocaust Memorial (Whiteread) 148, 149, 150,
Colour Bar Lounge 130 Museum?
62, 2.18 6.9
Mar-Bells 131 Gun Murder (Serrano) 7.2 Holzer, Jenny 57, 62-4, 69, 91-2, 93, 103, 109,
Miss General Idea 1984 Pavilion 131, 5.14 Gutai 38, 171 134, 136, 285
One Day and One Year of AZT 132, 5.16 Survival series 63-4
Seats of Power 131 Haacke, Hans 30, 33, 64, 92, 191, 264, 280 Truisms series 63-4, 92, 2.19
Test Tube 130 Grass Grows 30 Homage to the People of the South Bronx: ...
Géricault, Théodore 71 Shapolsky et al. ... 30-1, 44, 64, 92, 246, 248, (Ahearn) 109, 4.19
Géricault’s Arm (Salle) 71, 3.6 1.18 Home, Home Again (Ackermann) 255, 260, 10.5
German Motifs series (Lupertz) 84 Hairy Who 251 Homeless Vehicle Project with David Lurie
Germany's Spiritual Heroes (Kiefer) 80 Halley, Peter 116, 124-7, 129-30, 131, 132 (Wodiczko) 106-7, 4.17
Gerz, Jochen and Esther 144—5 The Place 126-7, 5.10 Horn, Roni 284, 285-7
Monument Against Fascism 144-5, 150, 6.5 “The Crisis in Geometry” 126 Still Water ... 286-7
Gilbert and George 215 Two Cells with Circulating Conduit 5.9 Things That Happen Again 285-6, 11.5
Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy 251 Hammerhead crane unloading... (Sekula) 245, Vatnasafn/Library of Water 287, 11.6
Gilliam, Sam 34 9.28 House (Whiteread) 148-9, 6.8
Gillick, Liam 265 Hammons, David 101, 103 House ofOracles (Huang Yong Ping) 210, 8.18
globalism and art 10, 170, 183, 186, 193, Higher Goals 103-4, 4.14 Hsieh, Tehching 171, 173-5, 212, 213, 214
218-19, 227-49 Spade with Chains 103 One Year Performance (Cage Piece) 173, 174, 7.8
Gnaw (Antoni) 186, 187, 7.24 Han Dynasty Urn with Coca-Cola Logo (Ai Weiwei) One Year Performance (Rope Piece) (with
Gobi Test (Kulik) 203-4, 8.11 213-14 Montano) 174-5, 7.9
Godville (Fast) 305 Happenings (Kaprow) 27 Huang Yong Ping 205, 209-10
Goetz, Rainald 258 Haring, Keith 93, 94-6, 98, 251 “A History of Chinese Painting ...” 209, 8.17
Gogh, Vincent van 11, 206 Mural (with Scharf, A-One, Daze, LA2) 4.5 House of Oracles 210, 8.18
Going After a Trace... (DUPP) 172, 7.6 Untitled 4.7 Huberman, Georges Didi 299-300
Gold Griot (Basquiat) 73 Untitled Subway Drawing 95, 4.6 Huyghe, Pierre 269-71, 280, 309
Gold Marilyn (Warhol) 118 “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition, New York Streamside Day 269, 270-1, 10.20
Goldin, Nan 98-9, 100, 101, 310 (1969) 33-4 The Third Memory 269, 270, 10.19
The Ballad ofSexual Dependency 99 Hart, Frederick Huyssen, Andreas 81, 82, 142
Rise & Nancy on the lounge chair, NYC 99, 4.10 The Three Soldiers 142, 197, 6.3
Goldstein, Jack 46 Hatoum, Mona 182, 183-4, 218 I Bite America and America Bites Me (Kulik) 203
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 46, 47, 2.1 Corps étranger (Foreign Body) 184, 7.21 I Like America and America Likes Me (Beuys) 203
Golf Ball (Lichtenstein) 18, 1.2 The Light at the End 183-4, 7.20 IAA (Institute of Applied Autonomy) 277, 296-8
Golub, Leon 30, 39, 109, 265 Under Siege 183, 184 See 297
Vietnam IT1.17 Head ofaHostage #1 (Fautrier) 0.3 TerminalAir (with Paglen) 297-8, 11.16
Gone ... (Walker) 155, 6.18 Heartfield, John 96-7 Ideal Settings: For Presentation and Display (Lawler
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 102, 182—3, 184—6, 286 Heftige Malerei (“Violent Painting”) 83-5, 88, and McCollum) 58, 2.15
Certificates of Authenticity and Ownership 134, 3.19, 3.20 identity and self in art 15, 42-3, 52-7, 99, 103,
185 Her Face Was Covered .. (Fast) 306-7 112-13, 122, 156-7, 170-1, 192, 247-8
“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA) 184-5, 7.22 Her Long Black Hair (Cardiff) 272 see also body art; experience and art
graffiti art 73, 74, 91, 94-6, 100, 109, 264, 276 Hesse, Eva 267 Immediate Family series (Mann) 169, 310, 7.3
Gran Fury 111-12 Hi Red Center 20 Immediate Photography group 200
Kissing Doesn't Kill... 111-12, 4.23 Cleaning Event ... 20, 1.4 Immendorff,
Jorg 65, 85-8, 258
Let The Record Show 111, 132, 4.22 Hickey, Dave 251 Café Deutschland series 85, 86-7, 92, 3.22
The New York Crimes project 111 Higgens, Dick 19 The Collector paintings 88
“Grand Tour 2007” exhibition 17 Higher Goals (Hammons) 103-4, 4.14 Put Germany in Order 87-8, 3.24
Grass Grows (Haacke) 30 Hiroshima Mon Amour (dir. Resnais, screenplay In the Collection of ..., (McCollum) 54, 58, 2.13
Great Criticism—Coca-Cola (Wang Guangyi) by Duras) 304 Inauguration series (Opie) 310, 11.27
206-7, 8.14 Hirschhorn, Thomas 280, 292-4, 310 Indian miniature painting 76, 77, 219, 230,
Green Gallery Installation (Morris) 22, 23, 1.6 Cavemanman 280, 292-3, 294, 11.12 231-3, 251
Greenberg, Clement 13-14, 15, 18 Where Do I Stand? What Do I Want? 294, 11.13 Indiana, Gary 61, 62
“American-Type Painting” (1955) 14 “A History of Chinese Painting ...” (Huang Yong Indiana, Robert
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) 14 Ping) 209, 8.17 LOVE design 131-2

Index
Inextinguishable Fire (Farocki) 300 Push Pull 27 Kosolapoy, Alexander 194, 197, 199-200
Inflated—A Horse (Yang Maoyuan) 217 “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock 27 Manifesto 197-8, 200, 8.4
installations 16, 116, 255 Yard 27 Symbols ofthe Century 199, 200, 8.7
African-American art 152-4, 155, 157 karaoke and art 235, 242-3 Kosuth, Joseph 185
appropriation art 58, 60-1, 152-3, 155 Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) 222-5, 227 Kraus, Chris 262
body art 181, 184-7, 189-91 Regatta 223, 9.5 Krauss, Rosalind 49, 53
Chinese art 202-3, 205, 209, 210, 211-12, Seal 223 Kristeva, Julia
213-14 Speaking of the Obvious Was Never a Pleasure
for Powers ofHorror’77
commodity art 117-20, 121-3, 133, 134, 138 Us 223, 225, 9.6 Kruger, Barbara 52, 57, 60-2, 64, 92, 103, 111,
Conceptual art 33, 92 Kelley, Mike 88, 121-4, 251 132, 134, 136, 180, 218, 285
Cuban art 219-20, 223, 225 Day Is Done project 123-4, 5.8 installation, Mary Boone Gallery 60-1, 2.17
and experience 22, 40, 45, 104-5, 219-20, Educational Complex 122-3, 5.7 Untitled (We don’t need another hero) 60, 13'7,
232-4, 262-5, 281-94, 295, 299-302 Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction 2.16
feminist art 40, 44 123-4, 5.8 “KUBA OR” exhibition (1990) 225
and globalism 232-4, 243 Minor Histories 122 Kulik, Oleg 201-2, 203-4
Minimalism 22, 23 More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid 121, Dog House 201-2, 8.9
narrative art 266—7 5.6 Gobi Test 203-4, 8.11
Neo-Expressionism 67-8 “Towards a Utopian Arts Complex” I Bite America and America Bites Me 203
Neo-Geo art 131, 132, 134 exhibition, New York 122, 123 Kuspit, Donald 78, 85
Russian art 195-6, 202-3 The Wages of Sin 121, 5.6 Kwon, Miwon 287, 288
space in art 22, 23, 262-5, 285-6 Kelly, Ellsworth 143
street art 103-5, 108-9, 111, 114 Memorial 143-4, 6.4 Lacan, Jacques 38, 42
war art 146—7, 160-1 Kelly, Mary 42-3 Lacy, Suzanne 44-5, 172, 254
and youth culture 243 Post-Partum Document ... 42, 248, 1.29 Three Weeks in January 44—5, 1.31
Institute of Applied Autonomy see IAA Kentridge, William 161-4 Three Weeks in May 44, 171
institutional critique art 30-3, 37, 101, 123, 264 Felix in Exile 162-3, 6.23 Ladder (Pardo) 260
Interior Scroll (Schneeman) 171 Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City After Paris 161 Land art 25, 27, 28, 30, 43, 141, 184
International with Monument gallery, New Stereoscope 163-4, 6.24 Larry and Bobby Kissing (Mapplethorpe) 7.1
York 93, 116, 119, 131 Tide Table 161 The Last Night of Rasputin (Antin) 150
“Interpol” exhibition, Stockholm (1996) 202-3 Kids ofSurvival (K.O.S.) project 101, 109 Last Soviet Monumental Artseries (Moukhin)
Interruption in Space (Abramovié and Ulay) 177 Amerika series (with Rollins) 109, 4.20 200-1, 8.8
Inversion (Grosse) 262 Kiefer, Anselm 65, 78, 79, 80-3, 85, 88, 142, Latour, Bruno 280, 303
Irwin, Robert 280 156, 166, 254 Lawler, Louise 47, 57, 58, 134
iSee (IAA) 297 Germany's Spiritual Heroes 80 Arranged by Donald Marron ... 58
The Island That Died (Bedia) 220, 221, 9.2 Occupations 81, 3.16 Ideal Settings: Kor Presentation and Display (with
Iversen, Margaret 189 Shulamite 83, 3.18 McCollum) 58, 2.15
The Ways of Worldly Wisdom ... 80, 3.15 Pollock and Tureen 58, 2.14
Jacir, Emily 247-8 Your Golden Hair, Margarete 82-3, 3.17 Lawson, Thomas
Where We Come From 247-8, 249, 9.31 Your Golden Hair, Margarete—Midsummer Night “Last Exit: Painting” 260
Japanese art 20, 38, 138, 171, 235-8, 242, 250 83 Lead Chevron IT (Levine) 129, 5.13
Jarrell, Jae 35 Kiki Smith, 1983 (Smith) 181 Lebanese art 160, 164-6, 183
“Revolutionary Suit” 36 Kim, Byron 93 Lee Bul 242, 243
Jarrell, Wadsworth 35 Kippenberger, Martin 88-90, 134, 251, 257, Live Forever 243, 9.26
Revolutionary 36, 37, 1.22 - 258, 302 Lennon, John 111
Jim Beam—J.B. Turner Train (Koons) 118, 119, Metro-Net series 90 Bed-In (with Ono) 27
5.3 Self-Portrait 88, 89, 3.25 “War is Over! If You Want It” (with Ono) 26-7,
Joanne, Betsey & Olivia (Opie) 11.26 Untitled 90, 3.26 1.13
Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City After Paris Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 65, 84 Leonard, Zoe 245-6, 249, 254
(Kentridge) 161 Kissing Doesn't Kill...(Gran Fury) 111-12, 4.23 Analogue series 245-6, 9.29
Johns, Jasper 14, 71, 260 Kitchen (Weltsch) 1.27 Lepecki, André 166
Drawer 0.5 Koether, Jutta 88-9, 90, 136, 137 Lerski, Helmar 249
Jones, Kellie 73 Kokoschka, Oskar 65 Let The Record Show (Gran Fury) 111, 132, 4.22
Jones-Hogu, Barbara 37 Kolbowski, Silvia 47, 48, 52, 56-7, 60, 64, 165, Levine, Sherrie 47, 52, 54, 60, 64, 92, 116, 124,
Judd, Donald 20-1, 23, 88, 118, 124, 285 166, 299, 303-5, 306, 311 127, 128-30, 131
“Specific Objects” 20 After Hiroshima Mon Amour 304—5, 306, 11.21 After Joan Miro 5.12
Untitled 1.5 Model Pleasure series 56, 304, 2.10 After Walker Evans: 7 48, 49, 130, 2.3
Just Love Me (Emin) 180, 7.15 Monumental Prop/portions series 56-7, 137, Lead Chevron IT 129, 5.13
20 Presidents series 47, 48, 53, 57, 2.2
Kabakoy, Ilya 194-6, 203 Komar, Vitaly 194, 196, 198 Untitled (Lead Chevron I) 130
The Man who Flew into His Picture 195-6, 202, The Origin of Socialist Realism (with Melamid) Untitled (President 4) 47, 2.2
292, 8.2, 8.3 198, 8.5 LeWitt, Sol 27, 143
The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment Koons, Jeff 50, 116, 117-19, 121, 124, 138, 212 “Sentences on Conceptual Art” 27, 30
195, 8.1 Balloon Dog (Magenta) 5.23 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes 27, 1.14
Ten Characters series 195-6, 202, 292, 8.1-8.3 Jim Beam—J.B. Turner Train 118, 119, 5.3 (Liberty Brothers Permanent Daily Circus) Blue
Kakuisa el Songe ... (Bedia) 219-20, 221, 9.1 “Luxury and Degradation” show, New York Period (Charles) 154, 156, 6.15
Kaprow, Allan 27, 69 (1986) 119 ; Lichtenstein, Roy 58
Happenings 27 New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker 118, 5.2 Golf Ball 18, 1.2
Household 27 “The New” show (1980) 117-18 Lichtenstein, Therese 54

Index
Light and Space art 280-2 Marshall, Kerry James 158-9 More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid
The Light at the End (Hatoum) 183-4, 7.20 Better Homes, Better Gardens 158, 6.20 (Kelley) 121, 5.6
Lima, Laura 284 The Garden Project 158, 6.20 The Morgue series (Serrano) 7.2
Limit Telephotography (Paglen) 298 Lost Boys series 159, 6.21 Morris, Robert 21-2, 25, 28
Lin, Maya 141, 142, 143 Marti, José 221 “Anti-Form” 23, 27, 38
Vietnam Velerans Memorial 140, 141-3, 144, Martin, Jean-Hubert 16, 209, 218 Green Gallery Installation 22, 23, 1.6
145, 160, 197, 6.1, 6.2 Mary Boone Gallery, New York 68, 289 Untitled 25, 1.10
Lindell, John (Gran Fury) 112 installation by Kruger 60-1, 2.17 Morris, William 251
Line of30cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person McCollum, Allan 57-8, 64 Moshiri, Farhad 138-9
(Sierra) 191, 7.29 In the Collection of ....54, 58, 2.13 Cradle of Happiness 138, 5.24
Linen Closet (Orgel) 41 Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates 2.12 Eshgh (Love) 138, 139, 5.25
Lippard, Lucy 43, 172 Ideal Settings: For Presentation and Display (with Mosset, Olivier 32, 137
Lipstick/Phenylethylamine Boutique (Antoni) Lawler) 58, 2.13 Moukhin, Igor 200-1
186-7 surrogates series 57-8, 2.12 Footballers 8.8
Live Forever (Lee Bul) 243, 9.26 McCormick, Carlo 94 Last Soviet Monumental Art series 200-1, 8.8
Live Free or Die (Prince) 51 McDermott, David 94 Mountain Bar lamps, Los Angeles (Pardo) 260,
Loock, Ulrich 264 McLaughlin, Mundy (Group Material) 101 10.11
Lost Boys series (Marshall) 159, 6.21 Melamid, Aleksandr 194, 196, 198 Mr. Universe (Ritchie) 267, 10.15
LOVE design (Indiana) 131-2 The Origin of Socialist Realism (with Komar) Muhammad Ali (Warhol) 66, 3.1
Lovell, Whitfield 152-3 198, 8.5 Mulheimer Freiheit group 134
Whispers from the Walls 152-3, 154, 6.13 Memorial (E. Kelly) 143-4, 6.4 Mulvey, Laura 196
Loving Care (Antoni) 186, 187 Memorial Project (Nguyen-Hatsushiba) 166-7, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 54-6,
Low-Level Allstars (Arcangel) 276 6.27 229, 265, 268, 275
Lucy (Smith) 182 memory in art 12-13, 104, 123, 140, 145, 146, Munster Walk (Cardiff) 272
Ludwig, Peter 225, 9.8 147, 150-1, 209 Muntadas, Antoni 292
Lumet, Sidney 270 see also experience and art On Translation: Warning 292, 11.11
Lupertz, Markus 65, 78, 84, 85 Mendieta, Ana 171-2 Murakami, Takashi 138, 235-7, 238, 242, 251
Black-Red-Gold I—dithyrambic 84, 3.20 Esculturas Rupestres (Cave Sculpture) \'72, 7.6 “A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art” (essay)
German Motifs series 84 Silueta (Silhouettes) series 171-2, 7.5 237, 242
“Luxury and Degradation” show, New York Untitled 7.5 Second Mission Project Ko? 236-7, 9.19
(Koons, 1986) 119 Mental Maps series (Ackermann) 254, 255, 10.4 Second Mission Project Ko’ (with Bome and
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 10, 74, 140, 167, 250 Merewether, Charles 220 Vi-Shop) 236-7
The Postmodern Condition 10-11 MesuRages (ORLAN) 175 Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan 235,
Metamorphosis (Miranda) 225, 9.7 9.18
Ma Liuming 214, 215-16 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Goldstein) 46, 47, 2.1 “Tokyo Pop Manifesto” (essay) 237
Ma Liuming Walking the Great Wall 216, 8.25 Metro-Net series (Kippenberger) 90 Mural (Haring, Scharf, A-One, Daze, LA2) 4.5
Ma Liuming Walking the Great Wall (Ma Mexican art 189-92, 222 Museum Highlights ... (Fraser) 33
Liuming) 216, 8.25 Mezhaninov, Mikhail 194 My Hands Are My Heart (G. Orozco) 188, 189,
MacGough, Peter 94 Mid American (Paschke) 5.1 7.25
“Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition, Paris Middendorf, Helmut 78, 84, 88, 258 My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair (Atlas Group
(1989) 16, 209, 218, 219, 0.8 White Painting 83-4, 3.19 with Raad) 165-6, 6.26
Magid, Jill 296, 297 miniature painting 76, 77, 219, 230, 231-3, 251 “The Mystery of Painting” exhibition, Munich
Evidence Locker 296 Minimalism 20-2, 23, 28, 32, 56, 74, 118, 124, (2001) 251
Magma Spirit Explodes ... (Aoshima) 238, 9.21 132, 141, 143, 144, 160, 182, 183, 184,
Magritte, René 186-7, 276, 285 Nara, Yoshitomo 235, 237-8
“Ceci nest pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) 49 Mining the Museum (Wilson) 155, 6.17 Dead Flower 237, 9.20
Malevich, Kasimir 12, 124, 203 A Mirage (Cao Fei) 238, 239, 9.22 narrative art 10-11, 69-70, 75, 76, 78-9, 84,
Matligned Monsters series (Sikander) 231 Miranda, Ibrahim 225 265-79
The Man who Flew into His Picture (Kabakov) Metamorphosis 225, 9.7 Ne dites pas non! (Don't say no!) (Armleder) 133,
195-6, 202, 292, 8.2, 8.3 Miro, Joan 11, 128, 129 134, 5.17
The Man who Hew into Space from His Apartment Mironenko, Sergei 201 Nemser, Cindy 45
(Kabakoy) 195, 8.1 Miss General Idea 1984 Pavilion (General Idea) Neo-Concrete art 22-3, 171
Man Without a World (Antin) 150, 6.11 131, 5.14 Neo-Expressionism 50, 65-8, 116, 121, 124,
Manet, Edouard 11 Missing Lebanese Wars ... (Atlas Group with 128, 134, 141, 158, 230, 265, 302
Manifesto (Kosolapov) 197-8, 200, 8.4 Raad) 164—5, 6.25 Germany 15, 65, 67-8, 78-90
Mann, Sally 169-70, 179 = Model for a Sculpture (Baselitz) 78, 3.13 Italy 65, 74-8
Deep South series 7.4 Model Pleasure series (Kolbowski) 304, 2.10 United States 65, 68-74, 77, 92, 93
Immediate Family series 169, 310, 7.3 Modernism 14, 39, 47, 48-50, 53, 74, 76, 85, Neo-Geo (neo-geometric) art 116, 124-32, 133,
New Mothers 7.3 133, 134-5, 246, 265 134, 138, 186, 256, 260
Untitled (#30) 7.4 see also Neo-Geo art Neshat, Shirin 227, 228-30, 235
Mao Zedong—AO (Wang Guangyi) 206, 8.13 Mondrian, Piet 124, 128, 129 Fervor 228, 229
Mapplethorpe, Robert 168, 169, 310 Montano, Linda Passage 229
Larry and Bobby Kissing 7.1 One Year Performance (Rope Piece) (with Hsieh) Rapture 228, 229
Mar-Bells (General Idea) 131 174-5, 7.9 Rebellious Silence 9.11
Margolles, Teresa 189-91, 192 Monument Against Fascism (Jochen and Esther Soliloquy 229
En el Aire (In the Air) 190, 7.27 Gerz) 144-5, 150, 6.5 Turbulent 228-9, 9.12
Untitled 190-1 Monumental Prop/portions series (Kolbowski) Women of Allah series 228, 230, 9.11
Marioni, Tom 174 56-7, 137, 2.11 Women Without Men 229-30

Index
Neto, Ernesto 283-4 Ono, Yoko 38, 39, 111 Perestroika (Bulatov) 198-9, 8.6
Anthropodino 283-4, 291, 11.3 Bed-In (with Lennon) 27 “The Perfect Moment” exhibition,
Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) movement Breath Piece 27 Philadelphia (1988) 168
87 Cut Piece 38, 1.24 performance art 179, 258
Neue Wilde (Young Wild Ones) movement 258 Fly 38, 171, 1.25 as body art 171-8, 183, 191-2, 214-16
“The New American Painting” exhibition, New “War is Over! IfYou Want It” (with Lennon) Chinese art 213, 214-16
York (1958-59) 0.2, 12, 14 26-7, 1.13 Conceptual art 20, 27, 28, 29
New England Digs (Dion) 287-8, 11.7 Op Art 127-8, 130, 133 and experience 43-4, 171-8, 179, 183,
New Mothers (Mann) 7.3 Opie, Catherine 299, 310-11 214-15, 269-72, 296-7, 299
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Domestic series 310, 11.26 feminist art 38, 43-4
94, 111, 117-18, 4.22 Inauguration series 310, 11.27 institutional critique 33
New Realism 204 Joanne, Betsey & Olivia 310, 11.26 narrative art 267-8, 269-75
New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker (Koons) 118, Untitled #1 (Jan. 20th, 1999) 310, 11.27 and photography 28, 38, 45
5.2 Organization for Black American Culture Russian art 200, 201-2, 203
“A New Spirit in Painting” exhibition, London (OBAC) 35 Perspective series (Ai Weiwei) 217
(1981) 65, 66, 67, 68, 92 Organization for Direct Democracy 29, 30 Peyton, Elizabeth 253
The New York Crimes project (Gran Fury) 111 Orgel, Sandy Photo-souvenir: ... (Buren) 33, 1.19
Nguyen-Hatsushiba,
Jun 166-7 Linen Closet 41 photography
Memorial Project 166-7, 6.27 ORLAN 175-6, 179, 187 appropriation art 47, 48-9, 51, 52-4, 56-7,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 84 African Self-Hybridization ... 176, 7.11 58, 64, 146-7, 152
Night Passage (Brown) 10.3 The Artist’s Kiss 175 body art 176, 188
Nightsea Crossing (Abramovi¢ and Ulay) 177 “body sculptures” 175 Chinese art 238-9
911: A House Gone Wrong (BAW/TAF) 114, MesuRages 175 and “Culture Wars” 168-70
4.25 Omnipresence 176, 7.10 and experience 298-9, 310-11
Nitsch, Hermann 177 The Reincarnation of Saint-ORLAN 175-6 and globalism 238-9, 244-6
No Crying in the Barbershop (Osorio) 105-6, Orozco, Carlos Lopez (SEMEFO) 189 institutional critique 30-1
4.16 Orozco, Gabriel 102, 188-9 Neo-Expressionism 81
No Sex Last Night (Double Blind) (Calle and My Hands Are My Heart 188, 189, 7.25 performance art 28, 38, 45
Shephard) 180-1, 7.16 Yielding Stone 188-9, 7.26 Russian art 200-1, 203
Nochlin, Linda Osorio, Pepon 101, 104-6 street art 98-9
“Why Have There Been No Great Women La Bicycleta 104, 4.15 and war 146-7, 149-50, 164, 165-6
Artists?” 38 No Crying in the Barbershop 105-6, 4.16 and youth culture 238-9
Nolde, Emil 65 The Scene of the Crime 105 see also Photorealism
Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training (Bowers) O'Sullivan, Timothy H. 299 Photorealism 37, 204, 225
308-9 otaku culture 236-7, 238, 242 Picasso, Pablo 11, 33, 66, 81, 90, 206, 220
Nonviolent Protest Training...(Bowers) 308, The Other Night Sky series (Paglen) 298-9, Guernica 33
11.24 ililibs Standing Female Nude 0.1
Northern Arts Group, China 204, 205, 206, Otterness, Tom 93 “Pictures” exhibition, New York (1977) 15,
207 Ou Ning 239, 240, 251 46-7, 48
Notes in Time on Women (Spero) 40, 250, 1.26 San Yuan Li (with Cao Fei and U-theque) Pinero, Miguel 100
Nuyorican poetry movement 100 240, 251, 9.23 Piper, Adrian 32, 33, 171, 172-3, 175, 179
Owens, Craig 47, 52, 64, 72 Catalyses 172-3, 7.7
OBAC 35 Piss Christ (Serrano) 169
Wall of Respect 35, 167, 1.21 P & H 2 (Behemoth) (Silman) 253, 10.2 The Place (Halley) 126-7, 5.10
Occupations (Kiefer) 81, 3.16 Paglen, Trevor 298-9 Pleasure Pillars (Sikander) 231, 249, 9.13
Odessa, Ukraine (Dijkstra) 9.27 DMSP 5B/F4 ... 298-9, 11.17 “Political Pop” art 206, 207
Odita, Odili Donald 254, 255-6, 260 Limit Telephotography 298 politics and art 10, 12-13, 15, 20, 29-33, 52,
Present Tense 255, 256, 10.6 The Other Night Sky series 298-9, 11.17 85-8, 91-4, 97-107, 130-2, 182-92, 227-8,
Oehlen, Albert 257-60, 264 Terminal
Air (with IAA) 297-8, 11.16 247-9, 254-5, 273-4, 292-6, 299-304, 307,
Bad (Bath) 259-60, 10.10 Paik, Nam June 19, 20 309, 310-11
Bread Roll Initiative (with Buttner) 258 Zen
for Film 19-20, 276, 1.3 see also activist art; Chinese art; Cuban art;
El Pez Roncando (The Fish Snoring) 258-9, 260, “Painting at the Edge of the World” exhibition, feminist art; revolutionary art; Russian
10.9 Minneapolis (2001) 251 art; war and art
Oehlen, Markus 258 Paladino, Mimmo 75 Polke, Sigmar 85, 257
Oiticica, Hélio 22 Pardo, Jorge 260-2, 264 Watchtower 3.21
B3 Bolide Box 3 “Africana” 1.7 4166 Sea View Lane exhibition, Los Angeles Pollock, Jackson 12, 14, 27, 58, 65, 81, 257, 304
Tropicalia 23, 250, 1.8 (1998) 261-2, 10.12 Pollock and Tureen (Lawler) 58, 2.14
Oldenburg, Claes 13 Ladder 260, Ponjuan, Eduardo 225
Oliva, Achille Bonito 65, 72, 74, 75, 76 Mountain Bar lamps, Los Angeles 260, 10.11 Dream, Art and Market (Portrait of Peter Ludwig)
Omnipresence (ORLAN) 176, 7.10 Parmentier, Michel 32 (with Francisco) 225, 9.8
On Translation: Warning (Muntadas) 292, 11.11 Partz, Felix (General Idea) 130 Pop art 18-19, 20, 37, 50, 66, 68, 74, 85, 118,
On Tropical Nature (Dion) 287, 288 Paschke, Ed 117, 251 124, 199, 213, 218, 219, 250, 275, 276, 278
One Day and One Year ofAZT (General Idea) Mid American 5.1 Pop Shop 94, 96
132, 5.16 Passage (Neshat) 229 Por América (For America) (Elso) 221, 9.3
One Year Performance (Cage Piece) (Hsieh) 173, Penck, A.R. (Ralf Winkler) 65, 78, 86, 258 Post-Minimal Glitz (Zwillinger) 94, 4.4
174, 7.8 What Is Gravitation?
IIT 86, 3.23 : Post-Partum Document... (M. Kelly) 42, 248, 1.29
One Year Performance (Rope Piece) (Hsieh and The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) show Postimpressionism 11, 194-5
Montano) 174-5, 7.9 (Group Material, 1981) 101-2, 4.12 Postmodernism 11, 53, 64, 210

Index
Poststructuralism 10, 13, 38, 39, 126 Robertson, Clive 130 Serra, Richard 25, 28, 143
“Pragmatic Pedagogy” 225-6 Robinson, Walter 94 Prop 1.11
Present Tense (Odita) 255, 256, 10.6 Rodchenko, Alexander 200, 201 Serrano, Andres 169
PRESENTING NEGRO SCENES ... (Walker) 157, Rollins, Tim (Group Material) 101, 109 Gun Murder 7.2
6.19 Amerika series (with K.O.S.) 109, 4.20 The Morgue series 169, 7.2
Presidents series (Levine) 47, 48, 53, 57, 2.2 Kids of Survival (K.O.S.) project 101, 109 Piss Christ 169
Prina, Stephen 88, 89 Rose, Jacqueline 166 Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (Yang
Prince, Richard 47, 50-2, 54 Rosengarten, Ruth 163 Fudong) 240-1, 9.24
Criminals and Celebrities 51, 2.6 Rosenquist, James 18, 19, 20, 167, 278 Sex Series (Wojnarowicz) 97, 4.8
Flames, Dragons, and Titles 51 F-111 18-19, 167, 250, 278, 1.1 Shaley-Gerz, Esther see Gerz, Jochen and Esther
Live Free or Die 51 Rosler, Martha 43-4, 45, 113, 172 Shapiro, Joel 143
Untitled, (Cowboy) 51, 2.5 Semiotics of the Kitchen 43-4, 171, 1.30 Shapolsky et al. ... (Haacke) 30-1, 44, 64, 92,
Untitled (For Catherine Deneuve) 51 Rothko, Mark 12-13 246, 248, 1.18
Why I Go to the Movies Alone (book) 51, 52, 54 Running Man (Borofsky) 67-8, 3.3 Sharp, Willoughby 27, 30
Process art 20, 23-5, 28, 29, 171, 182, 186, 191, Russian art 12, 17, 124, 193-204, 250 Shephard, Greg 181
267 film and video art 203-4 No Sex Last Night (Double Blind) (with Calle)
Productivism 200 installations 195-6, 202-3 180-1, 7.16
Projection Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch performance art 200, 201-2, 203 Sherman, Cindy 47, 54-6, 60, 64, 134, 136,
(Wodiczko) 107, 4.18 photography 200-1, 203 303
Prop (Serra) 1.11 Rustic Realism 204 Untitled #15253, 2.8
Push Pull (Kaprow) 27 Untitled Film Stills 52-3, 56, 57, 2.7
Put Germany in Order (Immendorff) 87-8, 3.24 Sachs, Tom 289-91, 293 “Shine” 36
Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) 290, Shoes for Departure (Abramovi¢) 178, 7.14
Quartered Meteor (Benglis) 25, 1.9 11.9 Shonibare, Yinka, MBE 227, 233—4, 250
Space Program 2.0; MARS 291, 293-4, 11.10 Age of Enlightenment series 234, 9.17
Raad, Walid 164-6, 250, 303, 311 Space Program series 290-1 Double Dutch 233, 9.15
Missing Lebanese Wars ... (with Atlas Group) Sadek, Waled 165 Gallantry and Criminal Conversation 234, 9.16
164-5, 6.25 Saffarzadeh, Tahereh 228 Shu Qun 204-5
My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair (with Atlas Said, Edward 184, 248 Shulamite (Kiefer) 83, 3.18
Group) 165-6, 6.26 Orientalism 184 Shy Satanist (Kelley) 5.8
Ranciere, Jacques 145, 303 Salcedo, Doris 160-1, 166 Sierra, Santiago 33, 189, 191-2
The Politics of Aesthetics 145-6 Alrabiliarios 161, 6.22 Fardo de 1000 x 400 x 250 cm 191
Rapture (Neshat) 228, 229 Salle, David 65, 69, 70-2, 73, 77, 88 Line of 30cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person
Rationalist Painting 204, 205-6 Géricault’s Arm 71, 3.6 191, 7.29
Rauch, Neo 257 Saltzman, Lisa 81 The Wall of a Gallery Pulled Out ... 191-2,
Schicht (Shift) 257, 10.8 San Yuan Li (Cao Fei, Ou Ning and U-theque) 7.30
Rauschenberg, Robert 19, 47, 78, 204, 210 240, 251, 9.23 Workers Who Cannot Be Paid .... 192
Thaw 15, 250, 0.6 Sandler, Irving 12 Sikander, Shahzia 227, 230-3, 235, 250, 251
Raymond and Toby (Ahearn) 110, 4.21 The Triumph of American Painting 12 Maligned Monsters series 231
Reagan, Ronald and Reaganite policies 15, 45, Sauzeau, Anne-Marie 41-2, 45 Pleasure Pillars 231, 249, 9.13
60, 68, 85, 94, 110, 243, 274 The Scene of the Crime (Osorio) 105 spiNN 233, 9.14
“The Real Estate Show,” New York (1980) 93 Schapiro, Miriam 41, 71 silhouettes 48, 155, 156-7
Rebellious Silence (Neshat) 9.11 Scharf, Kenny 93, 94-5 Sillman, Amy 251-3, 260
Regatta (Kcho) 223, 9.5 Mural (with Haring, A-One, Daze, LA2) 4.5 Bed 251-2, 10.1
The Reincarnation ofSaint-ORLAN (ORLAN) Schicht (Shift) (Rauch) 257, 10.8 P & H 2 (Behemoth) 253, 10.2
175-6 Schindler’s List (Spielberg) 305 Silueta (Silhouettes) series (Mendieta) 171-2,
“Remote Viewing” exhibition, New York (2005) Schnabel, Julian 65, 67, 68-9, 70, 71, 73, 88 7.5
251 The Death of Fashion 68, 3.4 Sisco, Elizabeth 112-15
The Re’Search ... (Trecartin) 278, 10.25 St. Sebastian Born 1951 68 Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate (with Avalos and
Research and Presentation ... (Boltanski) 146 Schneeman, Carolee Hock) 114, 4.26
Resnais, Alain 304 Interior Scroll 171 Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation
Revolutionary (W. Jarrell) 36, 37, 1.22 Schor, Mira 71 (with Avalos and Hock) 113, 115, 4.24
revolutionary art 12, 30, 35-7 Schurz, Barbara 203 A Sketch for Impacted Lead (Fox) 28
Ricard, René 67, 68, 73-4, 77 Scott, Ridley 55 Slotkin, Terise 4.3
Rice, Condoleezza 302, 11.20 Sculpture Projekte Munster exhibition (2007) Smith, Kiki 93, 98, 181-2, 184
Richter, Gerhard 66, 67, 79, 85, 257 - 9 Kiki Smith, 1983 181
Annunciation after Titian 66, 79, 3.2 Seal (Kcho) 223 Lucy 182
RIGHT YOU ARE (IF YOU THINK YOU ARE) Seats ofPower (General Idea) 131 Untitled (1989-90) 181, 7.18
(Vezzoli) 274-5, 10.22 Second Mission Project Ko? (Murakami with Bome Untitled (1990) 182, 7.19
Rise & Nancy on the lounge chair, NYC (Goldin) and Vi-Shop) 236-7, 9.19 Smith, Maggie 99
99, 4.10 The Secretary of State (Tuymans) 302-3, 11.20 The Smiths 242, 243, 244
Ritchie, Matthew 250, 265-7 Sekula, Allan 245, 246, 249 Smithson, Robert 21, 25, 191, 267
Mr. Universe 267, 10.15 Fish Story series 245, 9.28 Spiral Jetty 25, 1.12
Universal Adversary 267, 10.16 Hammerhead crane unloading...245, 9.28 Socialist Realism 79, 194, 196-7, 198, 199,
Rites of Way (Ward) 153, 154, 6.14 Self-Portrait (Kippenberger) 88, 89, 3.25 200-1, 204, 257
RMS (Repressed Memory Syndrome) Therapy SEMEFO 189 Soliloquy (Neshat) 229
123 Semiotics of the Kitchen (Rosler) 43-4, 171, 1.30 Solitary Animal (Sun Yuan) 217, 8.26
Roamie View ... (Trecartin) 10.25 Serious Games series (Farocki) 300-2, 11.19 Sorry I Haven't Posted (Arcangel) 277, 278

Index
S.0.S Starification Object Series (Wilke) 45, 171, Tang Song 205 U-theque collective 239-40
1.32 Tanguy, Yves 251 San Yuan Li 240, 251, 9.23
Soto, Merian Tapié, Michel 13 Ulay 177, 268
Cocinado (Cooking) 104 Ten Characters series (Kabakov) 195-6, 202, 292, Breathing in, Breathing Out (with Abramovié)
Sots Art (Socialist Pop Art) 194, 196-200, 203, 8.1-8.3 177
221 Terminal
Air (IAA and Paglen) 297-8, 11.16 Interruption in Space (with Abramovié) 177
South African art 161-4 Test Site (Holler) 284-5, 11.4 The Lovers—The Great Wall Walk (with
South Bronx art scene, New York 91, 93, Test Tube (General Idea) 130 Abramovi¢) 177, 7.12
107-10 Thatcher, Margaret and Thatcherite policies Nightsea Crossing (with Abramovié) 177
Southwest Arts Group, China 207 15, 45, 242, 243 ultra red (Steinbach) 119
Soviet art see Russian art Thaw (Rauschenberg) 15, 250, 0.6 “An Uncooperative Approach” exhibition,
space in art 12, 20-3, 27, 32, 57-64, 148-9, 260, The Buzz Club, Liverpool... (Dijkstra) 245 Shanghai (2000) 217
262-5, 285-6 The Lovers—The Great Wall Walk (Abramovié Under Siege (Hatoum) 183, 184
Space Program 2.0: MARS (Sachs) 291, 293-4, and Ulay) 177, 7.12 Undiscovered Genius (Basquiat) 73, 3.8
11.10 “The New” show (Koons, 1980) 117-18 united nations series (Wenda Gu) 202-3, 211,
“Spaces” exhibition, New York (1970) 27-8 The Origin of Socialist Realism (Melamid and 8.10, 8.19
Spade with Chains (Hammons) 103 Komar) 198, 8.5 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Speaking of the Obvious Was Never a Pleasure for Us Thelma and Louise (dir. Scott) 55 143-4, 148, 6.4
(Kcho) 223, 225, 9.6 they shoot horses (Collins) 243 The United States v. Tim DeChristopher (Bowers)
Spero, Nancy 39-40, 43, 181 Things That Happen Again (Horn) 285-6, 11.5 309-10, 11.25
The First Language 40 The Third Memory (Huyghe) 269, 270, 10.19 Universal Adversary (Ritchie) 267, 10.16
Notes in Time on Women 40, 250, 1.26 Thompson, Nato 303 “unofficial art” 194-6, 198, 201, 204
Torture of Women 40 Thompson, Robert Farris 220-1 Untitled (Cowboy) (Prince) 51, 2.5
Spielberg, Steven 305 The Three Soldiers (Hart) 142, 197, 6.3 Untitled #1 (Jan. 20th, 1999) (Opie) 310, 11.27
Spielberg's List (Fast) 305 Three Weeks in January (Lacy) 44-5, 1.31 Untitled #152 (Sherman) 53, 2.8
spiNN (Sikander) 233, 9.14 Three Weeks in May (Lacy) 44, 171 Untitled (#30) (Mann) 7.4
Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 25, 1.12 Tillim, Sidney 18 Untitled (Basquiat and Warhol) 74, 3.9
St. Sebastian Born 1951 (Schnabel) 68 “The Times Square Show,” New York (1980) 73, Untitled (For Catherine Deneuve) (Prince) 51
Standing Female Nude (Picasso) 0.1 93, 98, 181, 4.3 Untitled (Garciandia) 249, 9.4
“Stars Art Exhibition,” Beijing (1979) 15, 204, Tiravanija, Rirkrit 186, 265 Untitled (Haring) 4.7
205, 216, 217 To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond (Zhang Huan) Untitled (Judd) 1.5
Stars Painters Society 204, 210, 212, 216 215, 8.24 Untitled (Kippenberger) 90, 3.26
Steinbach, Haim 116, 117, 119-20, 137 Tomorrow I Might Be Far Away (Bearden) 1.20 Untitled (Lead Chevron 1) (Levine) 130
supremely black 119, 5.4 Tompkins, Calvin 78 Untitled (Margolles) 190-1, 7.28
ultra red 119 Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) (Bickerton) Untitled (Mendieta) 7.5
untitled (walking canes, fireplace sets) #2 119 120-1, 5.5 Untitled (Mental Map: no. 10... ) (Ackermann)
Steinberg, Leo 14, 19 Toroni, Niele 32 10.4
Stella, Frank 21 Torres, Rigoberto 107, 108 Untitled (Morris) 25, 1.10
Stereoscope (Kentridge) 163-4, 6.24 Torres Llorca, Rubén 219 Untitled (One Day This Kid) (Wojnarowicz) 97-8,
Stettheimer, Florine 251 Torture of Women (Spero) 40 4.9
Stevens, May 251 Toufic, Jalal 166 Untitled (President 4) (Levine) 47, 2.2
Stieglitz, Alfred 11-12, 49 Undeserving Lebanon 166 Untitled (Smith, 1989-90) 181, 7.18
Still Water...(Horn) 286-7 Undying Love or Love Dies 166, 304 Untitled (Smith, 1990) 182, 7.19
Stockholder, Jessica 260, 264-5 “Towards a Utopian Arts Complex” exhibition, Untitled (Trockel) 134-5, 5.19
Your Skin in this Weather...264-5, 10.14 New York (Kelley) 122, 123 untitled (walking canes, fireplace sets) #2
Storr, Robert 77 Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project (Elahi) (Steinbach) 119
Strand, Paul 49 294-6, 11.14 Untitled (We don’t need another hero) (Kruger) 60,
Streamside Day (Huyghe) 269, 270-1, 10.20 Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula 137, 2.16
street art 91-2, 110-15 (Vezzoli) 272-3, 10.21 Untitled: The Daros Suite of Thirty-two Drawings
see also alternative art; community art “Transavantgarde” movement 65, 74-5, 76, 77 (Basquiat) 73
Structural Film (Arcangel) 276 Trecartin, Ryan 275, 278-9 “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA)
Structuralism 38-9 Any Ever series 278-9, 10.25 (Gonzalez-Torres) 184-5, 7.22
Summer Camp (Bartana) 248-9, 9.32 “The Triumph of Painting” exhibition, London Untitled Film Stills (Sherman) 52-3, 56, 57, 2.7
A Sun with No Shadow (Farocki) 302, 11.19 (2005) 251 Untitled from Sex Series (Wojnarowicz) 4.8
Sun Yuan Trockel, Rosemarie 116, 132, 134-6 Untitled Furniture Sculpture 144 (Armleder) 133,
Solitary Animal 217, 8.26 Balaclava 135-6, 5.20 5.18
Super Mario Clouds (Arcangel) 275, 276, 277 Untitled 134-5, 5.19 Untitled Subway Drawing (Haring) 95, 4.6
Super Mario Movie (Arcangel) 276, 277, 10.23 Tropicalia (Oiticica) 23, 250, 1.8
Suprematism 11, 12, 124 Truisms series (Holzer) 63-4, 92, 2.19 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (LeWitt) 27,
supremely black (Steinbach) 119, 5.4 Turbulent (Neshat) 228-9, 9.12 1.14
Surrealism 49, 129 Turrell, James 280-1 Vassiliev, Oleg 194
surrogates series (McCollum) 57-8, 2.12 Tuymans, Luc 299, 302-3 Vatnasafn/Library of Water (Horn) 287, 11.6
Survival series (Holzer) 63-4 The Secretary of State 302-3, 11.20 Vezzoli, Francesco 272-5
Symbols of the Century (Kosolapov) 199, 200, 8.7 12 Square Meters (Zhang Huan) 214-15, 8.23 Democracy 273-4
Two Cells with Circulating Conduit (Halley) RIGHT YOU ARE (IF YOU THINK YOU ARE)
Table with Three Legs (Ai Weiwei) 213, 8.22 5.9 274-5, 10.22
Taller de Arte Fronteriza (TAF) see Border Arts 200 One-Dollar Bills (Warhol) 15, 47, 0.7 Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula
Workshop Twombly, Cy 73 272-3, 10.21

Index
Vi-Shop 236 The Ways of Worldly Wisdom ... (Kiefer) 80, 3.15 Wong, Martin 100-1, 108
Second Mission Project Ko? (with Murakami and Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation Attorney Street ... 100-1, 4.11
Bome) 236-7, 9.19 (Sisco, Hock and Avalos) 113, 115, 4.24 Workers Who Cannot Be Paid .... (Sierra) 192
Vienna Secessionists 11, 65 Weltsch, Robin 41 Working On My Novel (Arcangel) 277, 10.24
Vietnam IT (Golub) 1.17 Kitchen 1.27 the world won't listen (Collins) 242, 243-4, 9.25
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Lin) 140, 141-3, 144, Wenda Gu 202-3, 205, 210-11 The Writing on the Wall (Attie) 149-50, 6.10
145, 160, 197, 6.1, 6.2 uniled nations series 202-3, 211, 8.10, 8.19
Vilna Nights (Antin) 150-1, 6.12 Wentworth, Richard 289 Xiamen Dada 204, 205, 209, 210
“Violent Painting” see Heflige Malerei What Is Gravitation? ITT (Penck) 86, 3.23 Xiao Lu 205, 214
Vivarium Neukom (Dion) 288-9, 11.8 Where Do I Stand? What Do I Want? (Hirschhorn) Xu Bing 204, 210-12, 213, 216
“Volumen I” exhibition, Havana (1981) 15, 294, 11.13 Book from the Sky 205, 211-12, 8.20
172, 219-22 Where We Come From (Jacir) 247-8, 249, 9.31
Whispers from the Walls (Lovell) 152-3, 154, Yang Fudong 235, 240-1, 250
The Wages ofSin (Kelley) 121, 5.6 6.13 Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest 240-1, 9.24
Walker, Kara 155-7, 158, 166, 250, 265 White, Charles 103, 158 Yang Maoyuan
Gone ... 155, 6.18 White Painting (Middendorf) 83-4, 3.19 Inflated—A Horse 217
PRESENTING NEGRO SCENES ... 157, 6.19 Whiteread, Rachel 147-9 Yard (Kaprow) 27
The Wall ofaGallery Pulled Out ... (Sierra) Holocaust Memorial 148, 149, 150, 6.9 Yau, John 257
191-2, 7.30 House 148-9, 6.8 Yielding Stone (G. Orozco) 188-9, 7.26
Wall of Respect (OBAC) 35, 167, 1.21 Whitman, Walt You Should Have Loved Me (Emin) 179
Wang Guangyi 204-7, 209, 218 Leaves of Grass 99 Your colour memory (Eliasson) 282, 291, 11.2
Frozen North Pole no. 28 8.12 Wigington, Clarence 154 Your Golden Hair, Margarete (Kiefer) 82-3, 3.17
Great Criticism series 206 Wilding, Faith Your Golden Hair, Margarete—Midsummer Night
Great Criticism—Coca-Cola 206-7, 8.14 Crocheted Environment 41 (Kiefer) 83
Mao Zedong—AO 206, 8.13 Wilke, Hannah 44, 45 Your Skin in this Weather... (Stockholder) 264-5,
Wang Nanming 217 S.O.8 Starification Object Series 45, 171, 1.32 10.14
WAR (Women Artists in Revolt) 43 Williams, Gerald 35 Your strange certainty still kept (Eliasson) 280,
war and art 12, 13, 30, 80-3, 107, 140, 145-8, Williamson, Judith 54 . 281-2, 293-4, 11.1
151, 159-60, 166, 167, 299, 300-2, 304-7 Wilson, Fred 33, 155, 156 youth culture and art 85, 122, 235-45, 278
civil wars 159-67 Funny 154, 6.16
the Holocaust 82-3, 143-4, 145, 146-8, 149 Mining the Museum 155, 6.17 Zavaleta, Juan Luis Garcia (SEMEFO) 189
war memorials 140-5 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 33, 101, 106-7, 113 “Zeitgeist” exhibition, Berlin (1982) 65, 67-8,
War at a Distance (Farocki) 299, 301, 302 Homeless Vehicle Project with David Lurie 106-7, 79
“War is Over! If You Want It” (Lennon and Ono) 4.17 Zen for Film (Paik) 19-20, 276, 1.3
26-7, 1.13 Projection Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch Zhang Huan 214-15, 216
Ward, Nari 153-4, 254 107, 4.18 To Raise the Level ofaFish Pond 215, 8.24
Rites of Way 153, 154, 6.14 Wojnarowicz, David 96-8, 100, 179 12 Square Meters 214-15, 8.23
Warhol, Andy 47, 66-7, 74, 90, 117, 126-7, 180, Sex Series 97, 4.8 Zhang Xiaogang 205, 207-9, 216, 250
212, 235, 245 Untitled (One Day This Kid) 97-8, 4.9 Bloodlines series 209, 8.16
200 One-Dollar Bills 15, 47, 0.7 Untitled from Sex Series 4.8 Forever Lasting Love 207-8, 209, 8.15
Gold Marilyn 118 Woman I (de Kooning) 0.4 Zimmer, Berndt 84
Muhammad Ali 66, 3.1 Womanhouse (Feminist Art Program) 41, 42, 43, Zontal, Jorge (General Idea) 130
Untitled (with Basquiat) 74, 3.9 17627 “Zoocentrism” 203-4
Watchtower (Polke) 3.21 Women ofAllah series (Neshat) 228, 230, 9.11 Zwillinger, Rhonda
Water Bearer (Chia) 75-6, 3.10 Women Without Men (Neshat) 229-30 Post-Minimal Glitz 94, 4.4

Index
Peter R. Kalb is the Cynthia L. and Theodore
S. Berenson Professor of Contemporary Art at
Brandeis University where he teaches modern
and contemporary art history. He is also the
author of High Drama: The New York Cityscapes
of Georgia O'Keeffe and Margaret Bourke-White.
His scholarship addresses issues in twentieth-
and twenty-first-century art and criticism and
he serves as the Boston-based corresponding
editor for Art in Amenica.

For more information, or to order, go to

www.laurenceking.com

For our current catalogue please email

[email protected]

Front cover: Zhang Huan,

To Raise the Level of a Fish Pond, 1997.
Performance, Beijing, China.
Courtesy Zhang Huan Studio.

Back cover: Tom Sachs, Apollo Lunar

Excursion Module (LEM), 2007-2012.
Installation. Courtesy the artist.
Photo: Josh White.
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ISBN 978-1-78067-280-9
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