Unknown photographer, Lee Miller in steel helmet specially designed for using a camera, Normandy, France 1944, black-and-white photograph (photograph © The Penrose Collection, England 2016, all rights reserved, www.leemiller.co.uk)

Lee Miller: A Woman’s War. Exhibition organized by Hilary Roberts. Imperial War Museum, London, October 15, 2015–April 24, 2016

Hilary Roberts, ed. Lee Miller: A Woman’s War. Exh. cat., with introduction by Antony Penrose. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. 224 pp., 156 b/w ills. $55

Lee Miller. Exhibition organized by Walter Moser. Albertina Museum, Vienna, May 8–August 16, 2015; as The Indestructible Lee Miller, cocurated by Bonnie Clearwater, NSU Art Museum, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL, October 4, 2015–February 14, 2016; and as Lee Miller—Photographs, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, March 19–June 12, 2016

Walter Moser and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, eds. Lee Miller. With texts in English and German by Anna Hanreich, Astrid Mahler, Elissa Mailänder, Moser, and Ute Wrocklage, and visual essays by Anna Artaker and Tatiana Lecomte. Exh. cat. Vienna: Albertina, and Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz Verlag, 2015. 160 pp., 6 color ills., 130 b/w. $45, paper

In the past year alone, photographs by Lee Miller have been featured in two large-scale, international exhibitions: Lee Miller: A Woman’s War (London) and Lee Miller (Vienna, Berlin, and Fort Lauderdale). Both exhibitions argue that Miller’s life and work were extraordinary, an approach which is very often the emphasis of monographic shows featuring the photographer. Frequently Miller’s personal life—specifically certain experiences which could have negatively influenced her point of view—is highlighted and can overshadow the reception of her image-making in the context of the photographic medium and its history. As viewers, curators, and art historians, we cannot determine or comprehend the impact of Miller’s psyche on her work, and frankly, though it may embellish an already captivating biography, the exercise is ultimately unproductive. One can, however, both identify the characteristics of Miller’s practice that almost directly communicate Surrealist tenets or reference the history of photography, and observe Miller’s unique compositional framing of wartime scenes that were entirely lacking an art-historical language or audience. In other words, it is Miller’s photographs which should remain in focus. Rife with complexities, Miller’s almost contradictory point of view consists of a close proximity to her subjects, both living and dead, and a unique type of cool, psychological distance.

Hilary Roberts, ed., Lee Miller: A Woman’s War

That said, a conversation with Hilary Roberts, curator of Lee Miller: A Woman’s War, revealed that the exhibition attempts to recast our vision of women’s contributions to the Second World War effort and pay tribute to Miller’s unique agility and perseverance during such turbulent world events. Viewers are encouraged to accept the idea of “war as an evolution” and discover the many ways in which women were instrumental in creating the stability necessary for constant change. Undoubtedly, the concept is an important one; the exhibition, however, looks only through Miller’s lens rather than expanding into the—albeit diminutive —spectrum of female war-correspondent photographers. For this reason, A Woman’s War appears to have been argued inversely: if Miller, then Women. A more productive strategy might read: if Women, then Miller. To attempt to understand the wartime experiences of all women, both the extraordinary and ordinary, through the lens of Miller is an ambitious objective that cannot help but fall short. If Miller is designated as the case study at hand, she is truly a unique one.

Mounted on an upper level of the recently glamorized Imperial War Museum in London, Lee Miller: A Woman’s War welcomes visitors with an oversize, three-dimensional title piece in anodized steel. Overhead lighting beams down, dramatizing each letter with intense, shadowed underscoring. Roberts explains that the title evokes Miller’s commitment to the experiences of women during the Second World War. In 1942, only one year after the introduction of female conscription in Great Britain, Miller obtained official US military accreditation as a war correspondent for Condé Nast press.¹ Among her first projects was documenting the activities of both the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Women’s Royal Naval Service; Roberts notes, however, that the political atmosphere of the mid-twentieth century did not allow for much flexibility in Miller’s role. She was often assigned photo stories believed relevant to the primarily female readerships of British and American Vogue. “Fashion for Factories,” an article on how to make industrial looks more appealing for women new to the work of mass production, features Miller’s images modeling factory uniforms and masks. Despite the article’s already curious editorial pitch, Miller’s photographs show a clear connection to Surrealist tropes: the bizarre marriage of fashion and war leading to protective eyewear as the latest fashion accessory. Frequently making such references to Surrealism, Miller’s photographs are populated with mannequins, disembodied limbs, and graphic violence, in addition to her general penchant for decontextualization.

A slide show follows the title piece, displaying somewhat unrelated but diverse subjects captured by Miller: personal photos from vacations with fellow Surrealists, fashion shoots produced in the rubble of the London Blitz, and Miller in uniform at Vogue’s London studio. Painted portraits of the photographer by Pablo Picasso and Roland Penrose (Miller’s second husband) flank the large lightbox, emphasizing this early—and perhaps as the exhibition begins to imply, foremost—role assumed by Miller. Beyond the portraits, an exhibition label makes direct and detailed reference to Miller’s childhood experience with sexual assault, strongly implies her father was a predatory figure, and prepares visitors to encounter varied manipulations of Miller by sundry male figures throughout the course of her life. Such biographical details, unfortunately, set the tone of the exhibition and mark the point from which the conceptual framework—women’s experiences during wartime—begins to fray. The exhibition that follows is organized chronologically with sections focusing on “Women before the Second World War,” “Women in Wartime Britain, 1939–44,” “Women in Wartime Europe, 1944–45,” and “Women and the Aftermath of War.”

Attempting to boost morale despite the encroaching realities of war, Miller worked with Vogue UK to continue producing fashion features during wartime. Steeped in the visual tropes of Surrealism, Miller’s photographic tactics hardly change when confronted with destruction, injury, death, and eventually, the atrocities of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.

Lee Miller, Woman accused of collaborating with the Germans, Rennes, France, 1944, black-and-white photograph (photograph © Lee Miller Archives England 2016, all rights reserved, www.leemiller.co.uk)

In the feature essay in the exhibition catalogue, which includes an introduction by Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, Roberts posits that given these circumstances, Miller often utilizes a “feminized language” in order to appeal to Vogue’s mostly female readership (Roberts catalogue, 21). Conversely, I argue that Miller inserts highly visual language that communicates more as poetic than gendered. The majority of her wires to Audrey Withers, the social-advocacy-driven wartime editor-in-chief of Vogue UK, feature no such “feminization.” When faced with the horrors of a former Gestapo prison in Cologne and the liberations in spring 1945, Miller writes with urgency, citing Germans with “fat-covered nerves” who were deliberately overlooking the atrocities.² Miller’s anger is palpable and her message is direct. She asks readers to recognize— rather to believe—that the torture and murder of millions took place: a message not yet fully accepted as truth in the United States. Miller, unafraid, calls Germans “schizophrenics,” “audacious”, “the enemy,” “slimy,” and “repugnant,” and warns readers to be wary of differentiating between the elite SS members and the “normal” German citizens who “ignored the activities of their lovers and spouses and sons.”³

Miller’s writing is mirrored by the extreme proximity found in her images, which often insert her directly into the scene. Miller’s step-by-step approach, as revealed by her contact sheets, differed from most other war correspondents and photo-journalists during wartime. According to friend, collaborator, and Life magazine photojournalist David E. Scherman, when faced with train cars filled with the dead at Dachau, Miller climbed inside the container in order to record the reactions of US Army soldiers. Miller crops her images to graphic squares, decontextualizes scenes, and lacks “common subjects” or perspectives which were often the focus for other war photographers. Specifically, Margaret Bourke-White, already a well-known photographer at the time and also working as a war correspondent, gained access to many of the same locations within hours of Miller. When we compare both photographers’ contact sheets with those of Scherman, Miller’s point-of-view remains uniquely close to her subjects. Although it is unclear whether or not Miller completely staged any of her wartime images by moving objects, we do know that Miller occasionally intervened by posing her subjects. In the only well-documented case of staging, Miller herself returns to the role of model with the help of Scherman. Sitting nude in Hitler’s Munich-residence bathtub, Miller’s combat boots sit before her, soiling the bathmat with the dirt and ashes of Dachau. The photographers constructed the scene together, propping Heinrich Hoffmann’s iconic photographic portrait of Hitler on one side of the bathroom and Rudolf Kaesbach’s classical nude sculpture on the other. The image was in fact published in “Hitleriana,” a story for the July 1945 issue of Vogue UK. It resurfaced during the 1990s, however, when Antony Penrose found boxes of his mother’s negatives and reintroduced her wartime work into circulation. Roberts communicated that she did not want this image, arguably Miller’s best-remembered photograph today, to overshadow the photographer’s other work. Yet its digital reprint is noticeably larger than most others presented in the exhibition.

Walter Moser and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, eds., Lee Miller

Lee Miller: A Woman’s War also presents a selection of ephemera owned by Miller—her uniform, brass knuckles, identification cards, and even loot from Eva Braun’s Munich apartment—which form the perimeter of the show. These additions significantly complement the narrative throughout the exhibition, add to the biographical focus, and interestingly loosen the often-felt repetitiveness of photographic exhibitions by enlivening the images. This could also be the impetus behind Roberts’s decision to sporadically paint selected walls in vibrant hues, an homage to Miller and Roland Penrose’s Farley Farm house that stands in contrast to the drab colors on other walls, which are in turn meant to mimic those of female US war correspondent uniforms. Midway through the show, a darkened cinema space loops newsreels featuring Miller and her Vogue colleagues, as well as an interview with Scherman from the 1985 Channel 4 documentary The Lives of Lee Miller. The Imperial War Museum exhibition also includes some examples of images submitted by Miller to Vogue but disallowed from publication. Presented with the British Ministry of Information’s original marginalia in red and blue ink, they are the only vintage prints included in the show. The decision to produce modern digital reprints of Miller’s negatives supports an interest in creating a consistent aesthetic; however, their presentation leaves much to be desired. Although Miller was not particularly known for her printing process and often hired assistants for darkroom work, there is something to be said about seeing prints from the period of production, despite their being small and incongruous.

In sharp contrast, Lee Miller, curated by Walter Moser and as mounted at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, features almost exclusively vintage prints in a highly diverse, yet perhaps more traditionally presented photography show. Featuring over five decades of Miller’s work through one hundred objects, the exhibition focuses on Miller’s learned “Surrealist visual idiom,” her ongoing dialogue/collaboration with Man Ray, and her development into a war correspondent (foreword to Moser and Schröder, 7). Also organized chronologically, the exhibition is installed within multiple open-bay galleries and displays some archival materials such as letters between her and Roland Penrose, as well as Miller’s photo stories in various issues of both British and American Vogue.

The catalogue features an essay by Astrid Mahler, “Formative Years: Lee Miller and Surrealism,” which draws the reader’s attention to significant arguments made on behalf of Miller’s production, autonomy, and complexity as an image-maker. Mahler introduces Whitney Chadwick’s argument that Miller was the first woman involved in the Surrealist movement “to seek an aesthetic, rather than a personal identity” (Moser and Schröder, 11),⁴ as well as Amy J. Lyford’s questioning of the Miller literature’s consistent return to Man Ray and his photographs of her, when attention should remain on the images taken by Miller.⁵ Mahler argues that “the common ‘muse-model-lover’ scheme into which the partners of famous artists are generally placed is not appropriate for Miller” and the exhibition intentionally reflects this core issue (Moser and Schröder, 11). As such, Neck (1930), an image commonly credited—concept, staging, and production—only to Man Ray, is the first image on display when one enters the exhibition. The accompanying label expounds Mahler’s argument, stating that Miller’s active role in the creation of this image suggests not just that it is collaborative in nature, but that Miller may have produced it autonomously.

In fact, Miller’s images often grappled with subject matter deemed more taboo than the work of Man Ray; she thus pushed the Surrealist envelope just as much, if not more than her male counterparts. Taken during a commissioned visit to a hospital, Severed Breast from Radical Surgery in a Place Setting (ca. 1930) portrays a disembodied female breast in the center of a stark, white dinner plate. Miller stages the image with a placemat and the proper silverware setting, perhaps presenting viewers with a graphic commentary on the treatment of female bodies in Surrealist art practice. This is undoubtedly a radical gesture, and Mahler posits further that the breast voids the sexualized male gaze, evidencing that Miller’s independence and abilities extend even further beyond the Surrealist circle.

Lee Miller with David E. Scherman, Lee Miller in Hitler´s Bathtub, Munich, Germany, 1945, black-and-white photograph (photograph © Lee Miller Archives England 2016, all rights reserved, www.leemiller.co.uk)

Following the narrative line of the show, Anna Hanreich’s essay for the Lee Miller catalogue carefully profiles Miller’s wartime photographic practice, also comparing her images to those of other female photographer war correspondents: Thérèse Bonney, Bourke-White, Georgette M. (Dickey) Chapelle, and Toni Frissell. Such comparisons still support arguments of Miller’s unmatched proximity and eye for bizarre compositions. In her essay on Miller’s images from Buchenwald and Dachau, Ute Wrocklage, like Roberts, discusses the careful military censorship process, but also reveals that some of Miller’s published images were in fact cropped by the editorial style team at Condé Nast. The most poignant example shows a group of five liberated prisoners, identified by their striped trousers, gazing at a pile of human bones. Vogue USA determined that for an American public still wary of the veracity and extent of Nazi war crimes, Miller’s image appeared too posed. As a result, they cropped the heads (and piercing eye contact) of the men, leaving only the discernable patterned uniform bottoms on view. Regardless, Wrocklage rightly notes the complexities of Miller’s process in a side-by-side comparison to photographs by Scherman, who was with Miller in both camps.

Miller and Scherman’s awareness of the National Socialist use of ideology is again striking when the Berlin exhibition draws the viewer’s attention to the series of photographs taken in Hitler’s Munich apartment, as well as in Eva Braun’s single-family home. Elissa Mailänder’s essay points to the photographers’ calculated deconstruction of the Hitler myth, noting one curious example of Miller inviting Russian refugees into Braun’s home. Miller photographs the women rummaging through Braun’s makeup, applying it in front of her full-length vanity set. Not often featured in Miller exhibitions and possibly never shown before, the image’s banality actually bears witness to the relative fragility of the cult of personality. In an act of defiance, Miller juxtaposes the domestic, private, and privileged space of Braun with the very real consequences of persecution and a small, residual triumph.

Lee Miller concludes with photographs of Vienna from one of Miller’s final wartime reports, just weeks after the Third Reich’s surrender. After fifty-three air raids and the eventual liberation by the Red Army, the occupied city lay in ruins. The exhibition displays photographs of bomb damage, hospitalized children, and black-market transactions of forbidden or rare goods. Although the official narrative portrayed Austria as a victim—in Miller’s words “liberated instead of conquered”—she is insistent in letters to Roland Penrose that the Austrians are just as responsible as Germans (Miller quoted in Moser and Schröder, 137).⁶ Exhibition curator Moser argues that Miller’s images are “visual admonishments” of this state myth, citing the political lucidity of her unpublished writings as significant connective tissue for interpreting her seemingly more mundane images (Moser and Schröder, 74). Viewers leave the exhibition with a sense of Miller’s development and sustained autonomy, that her competence and skill extend beyond the role of muse, student, or model. This final gallery of images from Vienna only affirms Miller’s evolution from a “desire to agitate” to a hardened, post-conflict maturity (foreword to Moser and Schröder, 7).

Similarly, Lee Miller: A Woman’s War reveals that Miller’s images are complex not because she was documenting women’s wartime contributions—this was her assignment—but rather due to her ability to bypass (some of) the boundaries of her gender role, a remarkable feat for this period. Roberts enhances this achievement with quotations by Miller posted throughout the journey-like galleries: Miller’s “visions of gender” reading as equality, freedom, and the ability to create one’s own security. Unfortunately, we are soon catapulted back into the reality that the roles Miller began to transcend still possess certain and enduring rigidities. Viewers are faced with a final, monumental lightbox image of Miller in her kitchen and then immediately confronted with the exhibition gift shop’s kitschy byproducts of museum-survival-capitalism: a compact mirror, a manicure set, jewelry.

Lauren Richman, a PhD candidate in the department of art history at Southern Methodist University, is currently conducting dissertation research in Berlin. Her research examines the photographic medium as integral to the multilayered, postwar “reconstruction” of German cultural and national identity in Cold War–divided Berlin.

The post Lee Miller, Challenging Convention appeared first on Art Journal Open.

We are witnessing a resurgence of creative and scholarly work that seeks to bridge science and engineering with the arts, design, and the humanities. These practices connect both the arts and sciences, hence the term art-science, and the arts and the engineering sciences and technology, hence the term “art and technology.” Ever since we have divided knowledge into ways of knowing, with disciplinary approaches that focus on specific fields, there has been a need to link the fields and methodologies periodically. The branches of the tree of knowledge, however, inevitably grow apart. Today we are realizing that the dynamic network of knowledge, or a field of fields, provides a more fluid metaphor; unfortunately, our organizations are still mostly organized in tree structures. Consequently, the art-science literature necessarily addresses both creative and scholarly work, and their methodologies, as well as social and institutional issues that enable or block such work.

In the early nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt, one of the found-ers of modern observational science, insisted on a productive fusion of the sciences, arts, and humanities in his vision of the “Kosmos” (see Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, Knopf, 2015). In the late nineteenth century, T. H. Huxley argued for the introduction of science as a required subject in the United Kingdom at a time when education was steeped in the classics, with little science. Surprisingly, he tied ability in scientific research to competency in arts and crafts (see T. H. Huxley on Education: A Selection from His Writings, ed. Cyril Bibby, Cambridge Texts and Studies in the History of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2010). In these periods, the arts, humanities, and classics were dominant educational tropes, whereas of course today, in our techno-scientific society, the balance is reversed.

As longtime executive editor of Leonardo Publications (MIT Press), I have witnessed during the past ten years a sociological expansion of art-science-technology work. In particular the emergence of numerous programs in higher education that reflect, and drive interest within, government and industry is surprising, with an emergent cohort of young professionals under the age of thirty-five. A thriving ecology of maker, hacker, and coworking spaces embeds such work in local and community settings that bring to the fore a diversity of methods and scholarship.

I sometimes caricature this growth by intoning the mantra, “art, science, technology, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurs, employment,” as questions of the humanities, well-being, ethics, and value systems often remain inconspicuous. The current surge in interest, sometimes called “STEM to STEAM” in the United States, is driven largely by three simple side effects of digital culture. (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. See http://stemtosteam.org/.) The phrase STEM to STEAM emerged during workshops organized by the US National Science Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities. It was articulated in particular by John Maeda and his colleagues at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Rhode Island Congressional delegation. The discussion lead to the formation of the STEAM Caucus in the US Congress.

First, shared technologies entrain shared epistemologies and ontologies, reminding us of the arguments of both actor-network theory in the social sciences and embodied cognition. Second, digital tools and networks enable new forms and modes of collaboration. Finally, the development of significant employment in what used to be called the “creative” industries—more generally the new industries emerging from digital culture—has attracted the attention of policymakers.

Staying abreast of interdisciplinary developments is always challenging. Terminologies are unstable, as for example with the evolution of terms such as kinetic art, experimental film, video art, electronic art, digital art, computer art, interactive art, new media art, and so on. (The Electronic Literature Organization has developed taxonomy and terminology projects tied to the semantic web; http://eliterature.org/.) The loci of creative work and scholarship are similarly unstable, with no standard model or curriculum comparable to what has developed in better-defined disciplinary fields. Institutional innovation and evolution, however, have been rapid: key institutions, such as György Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, the research facilities at Bell Labs, and Xerox PARC have come and gone. New institutions have been springing up, from ArtsCatalyst in London and the Science Gallery in Dublin to the PSL SACRe program in Paris dedicated to research and pedagogy in the field (see www.artscatalyst.org/, https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/, and www.ensad.fr/recherche/doctorat-sacre-psl). New professional organizations are also emerging, such as the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (http://a2ru.org/). A growing literature that studies these groups has emerged over the last fifty years (see, for instance, Craig Harris, Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, MIT Press, 1999), while a number of historians—among them Linda Henderson, Oliver Grau, Patrick McCray, Erkki Huhtamo, and Edward Shanken—are developing a new literature.

In this annotated bibliography, I provide a snapshot of resources that are useful starting points. I apologize for the selective nature of this compilation and openly declare my conflict of interest for pointing to several projects in which I have been involved through the Leonardo Publications program. A second bias is that I myself was originally trained in the physical sciences, hence many of these references are from scientists advocating art-science work; there are many asymmetries in the field of fields and, perhaps surprisingly, art-and-design-led art-science programs are more developed in general that those in science-led institutions. (An important development in the past few years, under the leadership of the US National Academy of Sciences and its cultural director J. D. Talasek, has been the Academy’s monthly art-science discussion series DASER; see www.cpnas.org/events/experience-future-events-daser.html.)

Steve Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002)

I have chosen to start with the work of the late Steve Wilson, an artist who successfully synthesizes the rapidly expanding landscape. He captures the transition in the late 1990s, when artists began investing their energies in fields of science beyond digital technologies. As Wilson points out, one of the surprising areas that rapidly saw art-science work was the intersection of art and biology. The pioneering work of artists such as Joe Davis, Eduardo Kac, George Gessert, and Natalie Jeremijenko has expanded with the labs of Symbiotica (www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/) and Suzanne Anker, as well as the practice of Ellen Levy and the Trust Me I’m an Artist consortium in Europe (http://trustmeimanartist.eu/). (See also Meta Life, compiled by Yvan Tina, a companion site to a Leonardo anthology on the topic: http://synthbioart.texashats.org/about//.) Wilson details how artists, often using digital arts as a lingua franca, are now working in astronomy and space exploration, ecology, physics, and almost all areas of science. His book was an early advocate of research practice in art and the practice-based (or research-led) PhD in art and design (see www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/PhD-art-design/PhD-art-design.html).

Jill Scott, ed., Artists-in-Labs: Processes of Inquiry (Vienna: Springer, 2006)

Numerous books document specific art-science initiatives, for instance the movement to host artists in research laboratories. This book is the first of several that Jill Scott has published on the latter phenomenon. Her anthology documents the work of artists in research labs in Switzerland. Part of the Planetary Collegium program established by Roy Ascott, a pioneer in telematic art (www6.plymouth.ac.uk/researchcover/rcp.asp?pagetype=G&page=273), This volume is characteristic of books that document both the process of art-science collaboration and the production of work to be exhibited or performed. Anthropologists such as James Leach have investigated the terrain, and the artists-in-labs field has expanded recently with large institutions such as CERN imitating such residencies (www.jamesleach.net/ and http://arts.cern/home). Other examples are the Djerassi Foundation art-science residencies (www.djerassi.org/scientific-delirium-madness.html) and the European Southern Observatory initiative, described below.

Roger F. Malina, Carol Strohecker, and Carol LaFayette, eds., Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation: Enabling New Forms of Collaboration among Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012; for a free PDF, see www.mitpressjournals.org/page/NSF_SEAD)

A recent report of relevance, the result of a project I chaired—I need to declare again my conflict of interest—develops in depth the ongoing transdisciplinary trends. The report identifies thirteen processes the contributors view as enabling the conditions for interesting art-science or art-technology work. These include “embedding”—the need for public engagement and negotiation to break out of the hermetic world within which science and engineering are discussed in order to connect with the larger context of the digital, open science, and citizen science movements. A second is “translating”—or problem-driven connections among academic, commercial, and civil societies—which highlights the deep differences in methodology among the academic disciplines and which is magnified when work is translated to commercial or public spaces. The report carried out limited demographic analysis, pointing to an emerging, growing group of “hybrid” individuals who have higher-education training and a career in the arts, design, or humanities and a second professional training and a career in a field of science or engineering. The spread of art-science projects and programs is international, with initiatives in South Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The Ars Electronica European Digital Arts and Sciences Network has recently been launched, including collaboration with the European Southern Observatory in Chile (www.aec.at/press/en/2014/12/17/art-science-european-digital-art-and-science-network/). The European Union Science Technology and the Arts (STARTS) initiative has emerged recently as a sponsor of such work (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/ict-art-starts-platform). More theoretically, the “interdisciplinary turn” has itself been under intense study in the area of Translation Studies (as in the work of Doris Bachmann-Medick, www.bachmann-medick.de/).

There is a growing literature, and some stabilization of the terminology, on interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity (as in the work of Allen F. Repko, coauthor of several books on interdisciplinarity; see the list at https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/allen-f-repko). Francois-Joseph Lapointe coined the term “paradisciplinarity” for the work of hybrid individuals like himself; he holds PhDs in molecular biology and in dance (https://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/how-i-became-an-artscientist-a-tale-of-paradisciplinarity/). These discussions focus on the need to establish collaboration methodologies and training, but also to draw on design thinking approaches, which avoid disciplinary framing in favor of problem- or inquiry-driven strategies. One example is a new book by the computer scientist Ben Shneiderman.

Ben Shneiderman, The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)

Shneiderman has a long history of innovation, particularly in areas of human-computer interaction. His particular angle in this book is the articulation of two core principles, ABC and SED. The Applied and Basic Combined (ABC) principle argues that projects that pursue both basic and applied goals at the same time have a higher chance of producing advances in both areas. The Science Engineering and Design (SED) principle argues that blending the methods of science, engineering, and design produces work of greater impact. SED, the integration of art and design practices, consolidates a forty-year evolution during which researchers and corporations came to understand the weakness embedded in corporate human–computer interface thinking and methodologies. Shneiderman notes that a number of art and design schools have become prominent training grounds for technology professionals, including the Ontario College of Art and Design, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College at the University of London, the Rhode Island School of Art and Design—birthplace of the STEM to STEAM argument—and the Savannah College of Art and Design. John Maeda of RISD has recently pointed out that design companies are now acquisition targets of Silicon Valley companies. The book includes useful case studies and exemplars that are helpful to understand the practical ways through which theoretical ideas are translated to practice.

Committee on the Science of Team Science; Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; and National Research Council, Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science, ed. Nancy J. Cooke and Margaret L. Hilton (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2015; for a free PDF, see www.nap.edu/19007)

This US National Academies of Science report from the Science of Team Science movement is a particularly useful summary of the state of the art for collaboration methodologies. Although focused on the medical sciences, many of the techniques and methods are applicable to collaborations that bridge the arts and sciences. The report documents the dramatic growth of teamwork and team size in the sciences and engineering, and also recently in the social sciences. Useful documentation of social science studies demonstrates that heterogeneous teams (with respect to gender, age, discipline, and ethnicity) are more likely to show unusual productivity than those that are homogeneous. Separate chapters address techniques and methods for online and for non-colocated collaborations (for practical training and best-practice manuals, see www.scienceofteamscience.org/scits-a-team-science-resources). The work of artists coupled to science and engineering also shows the growth and development of collaborative practices. The literature is full of appeals to the terminology, often attributed to the design company IDEO, that identifies “T-shaped” and “Pi-shaped” individuals, with deep disciplinary knowledge in one or two disciplines, as well as broader expertise that facilitates and enables deep collaboration.

Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005; for a free PDF, see www.nap.edu/catalog/11153/facilitating-interdisciplinary-research)

This report originated within the science and engineering community, where the same issue of how to enable appropriate transdisciplinary work has long been debated. It and others have led to significant investment by the Keck Foundation in the Futures Initiatives, which recently included the arts and design in its remit (www.keckfutures.org/conferences/art-sem/index.html).

The focus on the need for public engagement is the result of an evolution from an emphasis on education to informal education, from outreach to public engagement. These issues are developed in depth by social scientists such as Helga Nowotny, a former president of the European Research Council, who advocates the development of “socially robust” knowledge (www.helga-nowotny.eu/).

Helga Nowotny, The Cunning of Uncertainty (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2015)

Nowotny’s recent book continues the line of argument about changes needed in the social embedding and risk-averse culture of much of science and engineering today. The coupling to the arts and humanities is part of a creativity and innovation rationale.

The observation on the growing number of “hybrid” individuals is situated within the larger field of creativity and innovation studies. One example is the work of Robert Root-Bernstein, whose series of longitudinal studies of successful scientists and engineers has fed into these debates (https://msu.edu/~rootbern/rootbern/Welcome.html).

Robert Root-Bernstein, “Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society and Sigma XI Members,” Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology 1, no. 2 (2008): 51–63, and at www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/1035/arts-foster-scientific-success.pdf.

This study examines all Nobel laureates between 1901 and 2005, and members of the National Academy of Science, the Royal Society, and Sigma XI. It argues for a correlation between success as a scientist and evidence of a simultaneous art or craft avocation. Additionally, a large number of artists and musicians show an avocation for science. This finding has important policy implications in light of the marginalization of arts in most curricula and connects to the thinking of Humboldt and Huxley in the nineteenth century. The challenge is articulating the causation pathways rather than the existence of correlations. Root-Bernstein has recently concluded a massive review of all the existing studies demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating arts, music, performing, crafts, and design into science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medical education. The US National Academies of science, engineering, and medicine have launched a two-year study seeking to review the current activity and the evidence of the benefits, and to make policy recommendations.

One thread of the discourse is the revival of the two cultures debate reinitiated by C. P. Snow in 1959 (with which I am generally unsympathetic), in particular the promotion of a “third culture” concept exemplified by the recent work of John Brockman and Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, These approaches bring in cultural and media studies to understand the current developments, and the literature is rich with a mixture of the work of scholars and practitioners themselves. See for example:

Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, ed., Towards the Third Culture: The Co-Existence of Art, Science and Technology (Gdansk: Center for Contemporary Art, 2011; a free bilingual Polish-English PDF is available after registration at https://unilodz.academia.edu/RyszardWKluszczyński).

The particularities of art-science practice today include the intentional mixing of conceptual and research work, the creation of original artwork, and innovation in disseminating the results. These mixed practices, with multimodal goals, were largely developed in England during the “creative industries” movement of the 1990s, in programs at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths, and other art and design schools in Europe. An example of this approach to which I was recently introduced is the work of PhD student Emile de Visscher, a well-explicated mix of theoretical and conceptual work; it ranges from prototyping concepts in works which can be viewed both as art installations and technological prototypes, to experimental publication of results by a community of practice. In this case de Visscher’s work is deeply embedded in local social issues, seeking to develop alternative ideas on the creation of industries that are part of the “slow innovation” approach (www.edevisscher.com/).

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, eds., Art @ Science (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1998)

Within the art-science creative community we see exemplars such as Sommerer and her husband, Mignonneau, at the University of Art and Design in Vienna (www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/). I note in passing the number of prominent married couples involved, such as Woody and Steina Vasulka, and Helen and Newton Harrison, but also numerous small and large teams. Some artists whose work requires technological innovation have oscillated between academia, industrial settings, and private practice, with the development of artworks that often require technological innovation. The “third culture” is then a praxis that involves a change of context and a fluidity between differing objectives in the projects, rather than a theoretical construct as exemplified by the writings of, say, the biologist E. O. Wilson.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, dist. Random House, 1998)

Wilson’s synthetic approach appropriates the term “consilience” from William Whewell’s two-volume Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1847), where it has the sense of the fusion of two or more lines of induction drawn from different sets of phenomena. Wilson lays out an agenda for a grand unification of different strands of knowledge, to bridge the arts and sciences and begin to erase the false boundary separating the social from the natural sciences. One has the sense that, for him, approaches to verifiable knowledge will be scientific; the debate is deeply engaged and can be acrimonious with the emergence of digital humanities and now, “cultural science.” Champions of portions of Wilson’s agenda include the art historian Maximilian Schich, who charts cultural history and evolution using data science techniques; he has recently published a YouTube video that has now had a million views (“Charting Culture” at www.schich.info/). For Wilson, the evocation of the meaning and quality of life and experience will continue to be the province of the arts, their appreciation enhanced by an informed criticism newly aware of their cultural, cognitive science, and genetic bases. In this concept of consilience, the divides between the transcendental and qualitative, the empirical, and a quantitative basis for ethics will vanish. Arguing against this grand holistic vision are not only artists and scholars in the humanities, but also scientists who are wary of “grand unification” theories.

Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, eds., Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)

This multiauthor volume rethinks the consilience issue, arguing rather for integrative common grounds (such as integrating over time scales of study, or physical scales). The editors advocate a “second wave consilience that aims to move beyond eliminative reductionism to respect emergent levels of truth” (24–28), “move beyond the nature-nurture debate to recognize the importance of gene-culture co-evolution” (28–30), and “move beyond disciplinary chauvinism to recognize that consilience is a two-way street” (30–34). They foreground the fact that underlying assumptions, such as mind-body dualism, must inevitably be examined.

Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, La Science n’est pas l’art : Brèves rencontres (Paris: Hermann, 2010)

One articulate proponent of the “separate but equal” view of art and science is the physicist Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, editor of the French interdisciplinary journal Alliage (http://revel.unice.fr/alliage/). In this book—not yet available in English translation—he vigorously defends the epistemic boundaries between the arts and sciences, advocating rather the mechanism of “creative friction” between artists and scientists in, to use his term, “brèves rencontres.”

A growing literature documents the key postwar initiatives such as the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (organized by Jasia Reichardt, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1968), the Experiments in Art and Technology movement, and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies that became the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT. In addition, a growing number of historians are analyzing and contextualizing the various developments. One historically significant report is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1971 Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971, 1971 (http://archive.org/stream/reportonarttechn00losa_/reportonarttechn00losa#page/n0/mode/2up). A key art historian in the field is Linda Henderson, whose seminal monograph of 1983 has recently been updated:

Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)

Henderson traces the history of interaction between artists, scientists, and engineers from the nineteenth century to the present. A key period is the beginning of the twentieth century, when artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, László Moholy-Nagy, and Kazimir Malevich were familiar with contemporary work in physics and mathematics on higher dimensionality and relativity theory. Interest by artists in the spatial fourth dimension experienced a resurgence during the later 1950s and 1960s, and the growing impact of this new conception of space figures in the writings and work of Irene Rice-Pereira, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery group of the 1960s. Later, with the development in the 1980s of both string theory in physics (with its ten- or eleven-dimensional universes) and computer graphics, artists were able to appropriate both the concepts and the formalisms, as seen in work by Tony Robbin and the digital architect Marcos Novak. More recently, the string theorist Lisa Randall has collaborated with the composer Hèctor Parra to produce the new-media opera Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes (for a review, see www.allmusic.com/album/hèctor-parra-hypermusic-prologue-mw0001975010). One driver of these new forms of art-science practice is the convening of art and science communities: although they are often sequestered in their own disciplinary practices, the thresholds for collaboration have been lowered due to internet connectivity. The crucial nature of the convening was emphasized in the report described above, “Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation.” The mechanism for such convening is often socially centered, as was the case at the turn of the nineteenth century. In his book Art and Physics: Parallel  Visions in Space, Time, and Light (New York: Morrow, 1993), Leonard Shlain demonstrates how changes in music and literature synchronized with those occurring in art and physics through the interaction of social circles.

Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012)

In addition to the rapid development of collaborations between artists and biological scientists, one finds the interaction of the arts with the neurosciences and cognitive sciences. Drawing on contemporary neurobiology, initial explorations by, for instance, Semir Zeki and Jean-Pierre Changeux resulted in the area now called neuroaesthetics. In Age of Insight, the medical science Nobel laureate and neuropsychiatrist Kandel retraces the interactions of art and science in Vienna at the turn of the last century, where artists and scientists from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Kokoshka argued that “only by going below surface appearances can we find reality” (16). He contends that this period is a good exemplar for what is possible today, as at that time leading artists and philosophers were also influenced by this research, thanks to the intellectual melting-pot provided by the university, coffee-houses, and private salons in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Their exchanges led to ideas that were exploited by the scientists and the artists alike. The book is a refreshing historical contextualization of current art-science developments and in particular argues for avoiding a narrowing to “art in service of science” or the reverse.

In closing let me point to some resources to which I have contributed and that may be of interest.

Leonardo LABS Abstracts:

The Leonardo Abstracts Service project created and run by the artist Sheila Pinkel is a database of titles and abstracts of PhD, MA, and MFA theses in the art-science-technology field. The database is collaboratively filtered through an annual call for authors to deposit their thesis abstracts, and a peer review committee that reads and ranks them (www.leonardo.info/isast/LABS.html).

Other Bibliographies:

Over the years Leonardo has solicited and published annotated bibliographies on topics such as developments in the Soviet Union, synesthesia, and space and the arts, all under the rubric of Leonardo Art, Science and Technology Bibliographies. The latest is by Richard Wirth on ProSocial Gaming. There is an open call for bibliographies (http://leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/biblios.html). Another relevant annotated bibliography is Kathryn Evans’s “Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities” (CDASH, at http://www.utdallas.edu/atec/cdash/). Finally, I note a useful academic networking group, the Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF), which is an affiliate member project of the College Art Association and is currently chaired by J. D. Talasek, of the US National Academy of Science (www.leonardo.info/isast/LEAF.html).

It is appropriate to mention here the growing art-science “field of fields,” in particular, to note the place in the intellectual landscape of “gray literature.” Reviewing citations in books and journals, one observes an increase in references to material that is self-published by members of the creative community, the organizations, and networks in forms that do not go through traditional publishing or review processes. This grow-ing professional literature, termed “gray literature,” is ephemeral, perhaps, yet highly influential; in addition, several efforts are under way to aggregate the more influential material with some form of selectivity, such as the ARTECA aggregator (http://arteca.mit.edu/landing/).

Please note that all URLs in this bibliography were current as of June 28, 2016.

I would like to acknowledge the rewarding collaborations with the SEAD working group: Carol Lafayette, Carol Strohecker, and Robert Thill, and with my colleagues at Leonardo/OLATS Annick Bureaud and Yvan Tina.

Roger F. Malina is an astrophysicist, editor, and art-science researcher based in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has served for thirty-five years as executive editor of Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. http://malina.diatrope.com

The post Art-Science: An Annotated Bibliography appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker, Spit Party, 2014, looping performance video, 12 min., 19 sec. (artwork © Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, February 6–May 7, 2016

The daring neologism “wetware” proved to be the most apposite term to coalesce the intermedia work of nine international artists affiliated with bioart into one exhibition. Bioart is the field of creative expression in which artists use living matter – cells, bacteria, embryos, plants, flesh, and more – to make works of art, installations, and performances. Like the art it described at the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine, the word “wetware” is at once specific and suggestive, capacious while difficult to pin down. Not to be confused with hardware, software, or meatware—the last being its closest variant—wetware names the interface between the biological and mechanical that makes uneasy, blurry distinctions between the living and nonliving, the natural and artificial, and the animate and inanimate. The fluidity of this crossing point lies at the center of Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation, an exhibition cocurated by Jens Hauser and David Familian, with work by Adam Brown, Gilberto Esparza, Thomas Feuerstein, Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker, Orkan Telhan, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, and Anna Dumitriu. Similar to “biomediality,” Hauser’s word for the convergence of “hard, soft, and wetware,” the exhibition was motivated by the merging of fields, epistemologies, and materials.¹ The greater field of biology within art is based on a fusion of many fields, the most central of which are art, architecture, design, synthetic biology, genetics, and biocomputation.

Gilberto Esparza, Pepenadores (Gleaners), 2010–2015, motors from toys, galvanized wire and technological scraps (artwork © Gilberto Esparza; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

The concept of wetware is not just about machines, but an everyday life molded and manipulated by science as an industrial complex. Wetware circulates widely through epigenetic passageways in and beyond our bodies. It is in our homes through mass-market Direct-to-Consumer Genetic products, in our food through Big Agriculture’s use of antibiotics in animal feed, and in our environment writ large through mammalian waste effluence that is collectively permeated by a gamut of drugs, from the antibacterial to psychotropic. “With the advent of disciplines such as synthetic biology… ‘meaty’ and ‘wet’ living machines…may largely reproduce, proliferate, and become pervasive, while being hardly identifiable,” explains Hauser.² In this context, “wetware… can mean protocols and devices used in molecular biology and synthetic biology. It encompasses the biological and systems theoretical understanding of life and disrupts the border between organisms and machines.”³ While it is everywhere, wetware can feel like it is nowhere not only because of its constructed and staged naturalism, but also because of the ambiguity which reigns from it. It is one of several forces destabilizing the definition of “life” within the natural sciences, connected to the field of synthetic biology and the miraculous gene-editing tool CRISPR.⁴

Gilberto Esparza, Moscas (Flies), 2010–2014, motor from cellular phone, copper wire, and controller (artwork © Gilberto Esparza; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “wetware” first appeared in 1975 in the journal Nature to distinguish an electronic computer made up of “hard and software” from a “chemical automaton” which “needs an additional component, a chemical reaction system which might be called ‘wetware.’”⁵ Rudy Rucker published Wetware in 1988, a science fiction thriller about “meatbops,” a new life form based on the fusion of robots, software codes, and “DNA wetware.”⁶ While newly created, it is still a term with historicity—Hauser claims wetware is the most recent incarnation of “the historical fascination with staging aliveness,” which “permeates cultural history” in the form of “anthropomorphic statues and pneumatic figures.”⁷ Writing in 2002, Jessica Riskin situated the term within this history, focusing in particular on examples of “eighteenth-century wetware,” such as Pierre Jacquet-Droz and Jacques de Vaucanson’s automata.⁸ With the normativity of algorithms, computers, and digital technology, the term has become common in the new millennium. Theorist Richard Doyle cast it in the plural with the 2003 publication of Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Here, wetware is not just a thing but field of possibilities: a set of “familiars—a zone of interactivity between humans and animals…that blur the contours of human subjectivity,” while, “supplement[ing] [William] Burroughs’s analysis of weapons and their ecologies.”⁹ Neuroscientist Dennis Bray underscored the computational nature of cell function in the 2009 book Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell. Bray elides computer into biological function by way of shared temporality, explaining wetware as the “short-term memory” of bacteria “that tells them whether conditions are better at this instant of time than a few seconds ago.”¹⁰

Adam Brown, The Great Work of the Metal Lover, 2012, glass alchemical bioreactor, gas manifold and gas tank filled with hydrogen and carbon dioxide, made in collaboration with Kazem Kashefi (artwork © Adam Brown; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine). View of the alchemical installation.

Camouflaged by both the seamlessness and user-friendly nature of biotechnology today, wetware is everywhere. The bio-performance art of Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker pivots on the hidden-in-plain-sight omnipresence of wetware. Installed in the exhibition as a single-channel video, Spit Party is a genetic performance project in which the two act out with an audience the process of home genetic testing known as “direct-to-consumer genetics” or DCG. The duo espouses “free speech and free spit,” inspiring interest in the audience to make their genetic information public as visual information. They distribute tubes and informed consent forms, asking for permission to harvest individual saliva samples, which are then visualized as large images of DNA bands. Participants are encouraged to interact with projected DNA images.

Adam Brown, The Great Work of the Metal Lover, 2012, scanning electron microscope showing gold deposits produced by bacteria, twenty-four-karat gold leaf, made in collaboration with Kazem Kashefi (artwork © Adam Brown; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine). View of image made with gold using a scanning electron microscope.

Anthropologist of science Stefan Helmreich, whose thinking influenced the curators of Wetware, demarcates the ambiguous space of life with “limit biologies.”¹¹ Limit biologies set in relief life in the extreme. They embody “a worry about ends” and an “argument from the future,” which above all else “point to larger instabilities in concepts of nature—organic, earthly, cosmic.”¹² Helmreich’s three examples of limit biologies—artificial life, oceanic extremophiles, and astrobiology—inscribe the thresholds of biological life shaping the exhibition Wetware. Gilberto Esparza’s work approximates Helmreich’s artificial life while bearing the mechanical trappings of artificial intelligence. Esparza’s Pepenadores (Gleaners), made from recycled motors of toys, crawl amid mechanical detritus, while Moscas (Flies), mechanical insects made from discarded cell phone vibrators attached to invisible metal lines, zigzag above and around viewers’ heads. Adam Brown’s work catalyzes marine bacteria to create a natural element, deploying marine extremophiles—deep-sea bacterial life that defies all odds by living in hypersaline habitats, high pressures, and extreme temperatures. Brown’s The Great Work of the Metal Lover is an alchemical machine hosting the metallotolerant extremophilic bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans that, under the engineered atmosphere created in the gallery, produces gold. Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s Luminiferous Drift delves into astrobiology to ponder the signature of life as extraterrestrial. The viewer walks into a dark room cordoned off by black curtains and looks over a small whirling, circular bath of water in which primordial cellular conditions have been recreated. From nano- to meso-, the scales of life overlap and fuse. While the living matter within the works is often invisible to the bare eye, the works themselves—given full shape by various armatures, frames, podia, and mechanical contraptions—are at the scale of mid-size sculptures.

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, Luminiferous Drift, 2016, pneumatic macro-chip, mixed aqueous solutions (including chemo-luminescent enzymes), oil, rotating bath of water, sound by Richard Chartier (artwork © Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

The exhibition destabilizes scientific definitions of life in order to disfigure and decenter anthropocentrism across fields. It is one of several recent bioart exhibitions with this motivation. Emergent Ecologies, curated by Eben Kirskey and a “swarm” of other curators, was an exhibition held in spring 2016 featuring almost 100 artists that took place at Kilroy Metal Ceiling, a large, makeshift space in Brooklyn.¹³ The exhibition focused on emergent forms of life that are deleterious and beneficial, and how diseases as well as new forms of post-volcanic life subvert “dominant political strategies, economic systems, or agricultural practices.”¹⁴ Two exhibitions, Mind the Gut—forthcoming at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, Denmark¹⁵ —and Gut Instinct: Art, Design, and the Microbiome—an online exhibition sponsored by the SciArt Center of New York—focus on gut bacteria, the microbiome, the gut-brain axis, and how putative mind is organismal and extends beyond the brain across the body.¹⁶

Anna Dumitriu, Engineered Antibody, 2015–2016, twenty-one amino acids, polymer clay, Coomassie Brilliant Blue dye, jewellery wire, cotton calico, vintage tatted linen lace, silk, and embroidery, based on research by Xiang Li (Liu Lab, University of California, Irvine) (artwork © Anna Dumitriu; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

The work in Wetware bears the intellectual and material challenges of high conceptualism and new media art. The work demands much scientific and technological knowledge on the part of its viewers, and an openness to the idea that machines and biotechnological effects (lab work involving enzymes, viruses, and genetic information) constitute a form of art. It would be remiss to understand Anna Dumitriu’s three projects in the exhibition—Engineered Antibody, Necklace, and Faster Mutation—solely in terms of how they look according to the leitmotifs of femininity and traditional women’s work. They are also fundamentally about her collaboration with scientists, a result of her residency working with researchers in the Liu Lab for Synthetic Evolution at the University of California, Irvine. Dumitriu’s Engineered Antibody looks like a colorful strand of beads atop a filigree of blue lace. Its deeper meaning is woven into what it is: a necklace made up of 452 handmade beads containing the actual twenty-one amino acids of an antibody purified from the blood of an HIV positive patient. Living matter connects to language in that their biological stuff is connected to the metaphor that amino acids are the “beads of life”—the idea that scientists enlist to describe structures of proteins constructed from chains of amino acids.

Anna Dumitriu, Necklace, 2015–2016, modified E. coli bacteria containing mutated engineered antibody, agar, Petri dishes, made in collaboration with Felix Grun (Center for Complex Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine) with scientific support from Liu Lab, University of California, Irvine (artwork © Anna Dumitriu; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

For most viewers, a full understanding of this work would require long, explanatory exhibition plaques (which were happily absent at the Beall), a lot of background reading, and an interview with the artist. Given that none of these things were readily available, Dumitriu’s work and the exhibition overall might seem opaque, intransigent, and frustrating. For many viewers this kind of difficulty—what Theodor Adorno called a “negative dialectic”—is the quintessence of true art. It constitutes a mode of resistance that is political in its refusal to be easily consumed, exchanged within the marketplace, and co-opted by bourgeois norms of taste and beauty. While the bioart of Wetware depends on the ongoing innovation of science within a free market, it does not heedlessly condone that industry or market. Rather, it evaluates and interrogates these systems, which are imbedded in other systems, combining scientific methodologies with the tools of abstract thinking inherent to art. It creates an instance of what I have elsewhere identified as the “Bildung of bioart”— the formation, culture, maturation, up-building, and education of bioart.¹⁷

Anna Dumitriu, Faster Mutation, 2015–2016, replica plating velvet squares printed with engineered yeast cells, embroidery, appliqué, and plasmid DNA, made in collaboration with Ziwei Zhong (Liu Lab, University of California, Irvine) (artwork © Anna Dumitriu; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

Anna Dumitriu, detail of Faster Mutation, 2015–2016, replica plating velvet squares printed with engineered yeast cells, embroidery, appliqué, and plasmid DNA, made in collaboration with Ziwei Zhong (Liu Lab, University of California, Irvine) (artwork © Anna Dumitriu; photograph provided by Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine)

That said, the exhibition fortunately did not sacrifice aesthetic form and matter for an ethics of iconoclasm rooted in biotechnology. There were plenty of art cues in the form of shapes, sounds, and materials. Installers carefully positioned works on pedestals, scrupulously choreographed spaces, smartly painted the walls dark grey, and judiciously orchestrated lighting in the large exhibition space of the Beall. Aesthetics occupied a unique position here for, while the show was not concerned with connoisseurship or the classical delectation of beautiful objects, there was an intended and staged aesthesis—a bodily recognition of form and ideas—present throughout the entire exhibition space. Each work triggered the deep-felt frisson that comes with the “aha” of new knowledge, scientific literacy, and making connections between art, science, and their shared history. This genre of work catalyzes the awe and wonder that comes with recognition of biological complexity that few other forms of art can.

Charissa Terranova is associate professor of aesthetic studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and coeditor (with Meredith Tromble) of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016). She is the inaugural director and curator of Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency, and regularly curates and writes art criticism. With Davidson College Professor of Biology Dave Wessner, in February 2016 she cocurated Gut Instinct: Art, Design, and the Microbiome, an online exhibition about art, the gut-brain axis, and gastrointestinal microbiome. In the fall of 2015 at Gray Matters Gallery in Dallas, Texas Terranova curated Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images, an exhibition about art and the scientific concept of “chirality,” or non-superimposable mirror images.

The post Between Negative Dialectics and Biological Aesthesis appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Nancy Holt, sunlight in Sun Tunnels, 1976, still from Troublemakers (photograph by Nancy Holt © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, provided by Summitridge Pictures and RSJC LLC)

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. James Crump, director and writer, 2015. With Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Germano Celant, Paula Cooper, Walter De Maria, Virginia Dwan, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Dennis Oppenheim, Charles Ross, Pamela Sharp, Willoughby Sharp, Robert Smithson, Harald Szeemann, and Lawrence Weiner. New York: Summitridge Pictures and RSJC LLC, 2015. Digital film, b/w and col. footage, 72 min. In release. For information on educational/nontheatrical rentals, purchases, and streaming licenses, see http://firstrunfeatures.com/educationalsales_orderinginfo.html.

An essential moment in the 2015 film Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art occurs ten minutes from the end, when a time-lapse sequence with Virginia Dwan voiceover states that Nancy Holt’s 1976 Sun Tunnels “can only be seen in durational time. It isn’t something you just look at, get, and walk away. When you are out in the middle of the desert, it’s so vast, you can be overwhelmed. But the tunnels will give you a framing device, an orienting device.” It is a rare moment in the film, with a fixed camera recording the shift of light and shadow across a day. Both camera and artwork become legible as frames bridging celestial and individual experience.

Imagine if in addition to capturing shifts in one day—a temporal unit relevant to human perception—Troublemakers had been able to describe this or the other iconic earthworks on a more geologic scale, or at least across the span of their contemporary lives. If we imagine director James Crump constructing something akin to Andy Warhol’s film Empire (1964), a potential emerges of using Land art to see not only through Holt’s tubes but outward beyond their existence as objects. Suddenly it becomes possible to imagine the works as actions, or attitudes, becoming form within a myriad of nested interconnections, spanning narratives of personal history and geomorphological evolution.¹ They become legible as measures between time and space, linked by the dynamics of weather and visitation, out there doing their work even when no one is watching. As if they were sleeping in, or with, the land.

A longer view scale would portray the solitude of the 1980s and 1990s as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) remained underwater existing largely as art-world myth; its emergence in the early 2000s as the lake receded to reveal crystalline encrustation; then onward to present day with the continued hydraulic recession pulling the brine and its saline lens nearly a mile from the apparent shoreline.² This expanded scale would also reveal the slow melting of hard edges at Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70) and its glacial progression from mark of man to a geologic pattern of erosion and dissipation.³ At The Lightning Field (1977) by Walter De Maria, the focus shift could move attention from stainless steel poles as objects and lightning strikes as extraordinary instances to the field operating as an index of more subtle and persistent shifts of light at sunrise and sunset, relative moisture of atmosphere and ground, all collaborating with the texture of the sky to fuse the work with its surroundings. Yet, here stumbles the imagined film as measure of the actual. De Maria was adamant about the limits of photography to capture an understanding of The Lightning Field. He more often used photography as a form of promotion rather than as surrogate of the art experience.

The opening sequence of Troublemakers travels through barren desert and bleached atmosphere (complete with the telltale geometry of a Bureau of Land Management sign marking access to a dry lake bed, ostensibly in the Mojave Desert), tracking onto the lone figure of Heizer walking along curved tire marks inscribed into a playa. Voiceover narration begins with a view of Spiral Jetty from a helicopter cresting Rozel Point, followed by a cut to Smithson trotting iconically out to the end of the jetty. The conceptual terrain of the film is unfurled by Crump’s narration: a group of artists in the 1960s, operating largely from New York, take up land as subject and material in an effort to depart from gallery limitations of classical painting and sculpture. Monumental scale, audacity, and ambition are cited as reasons their works remain impressive.

What follows is a collage of archival footage and tracking stills with mostly disembodied voiceovers unpacking the thoughts of the the players and producers with occasional establishing sequences from the commentators.⁴ Absent are more contemporary voices such as Miwon Kwon, Matthew Coolidge, and Ann Reynolds. Archival material, including portions of artworks cut and resequenced, as well as rarely seen footage, is used to animate the narrative as it unfolds.⁵ The sound design ranges from atmospheric to sentimental. Productive contradictions and complexities are noted, but rarely unpacked. The film ends with nostalgic tribute to, and competition between, the three icons of the period — Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria.

Michael Heizer, Circular Surface, Planar Displacement Drawing, 1969. El Mirage Dry Lake, California, 1969 (photograph © Gianfranco Gorgoni, provided by Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

This brings us to the trouble with Troublemakers, which we shall dispense with quickly, as there is plenty of merit to the film and lessons we can carry into the intricacies of human-land explorations. The inward focus on tribute to individual identity, competition, and objectified historical artifacts is the primary weakness, preventing a more powerful outward reading through generative reverberations of cultural agency and infrastructure that made the ambitious vision of the period possible. For example, it is wonderful Dwan has such a presence in the film, even as it is puzzling and revealing that the inquiry rarely turns to her role as gallerist and actions as producer as subjects worthy of investigation. Since a contemporary experience in the landscape of the New West is precluded, mostly by the reliance on archival footage, too often documentation of the actual works themselves remain nostalgic backdrop for the film’s thesis.⁶ The remaining conundrum is the insistent reinforcing of what Phillip Kaiser and Miwon Kwan call “the reductive and outdated presumption of opposition between art and art institutions” when “such thinking is a cliché that should be abandoned.”⁷ If anything, the film powerfully demonstrates the importance of institutions—gallery, museum, magazine—to foster, support, and disseminate art in new ways that import land into culture:

This art involved, from the start, key collectors, patrons, dealers, and curators playing their part to support its production, public presentation, and distribution. These figures, along with the artists, contended with the difficult challenges of what to exhibit in a gallery or museum setting, and how to do so, as well as the translation of such work into the existing exchange system of ownership and/or sale. This reality is too often misunderstood and reductively characterized to claim Land art as an anti-institution and antimarket practice, by definition. Actually it would be more accurate to say that Land art encouraged a hyperawareness of the conditions of production, presentation, and distribution among those who engaged with it directly.⁸

Essential lessons of the film pivot from the importance of getting out there to make, or find, compelling contemporary art. Willoughby Sharp makes the impassioned case: “I think the ability to find good new artists is not an ability, you just have to go out there. You don’t find it waiting in your office in New York City, because it isn’t happening in New York City, it’s happening in Los Angeles, and Germany, Warsaw, and these other places. There’s a lot of really good art. The part of it that stimulates me is to go out and meet a few of these people and try and get them into a magazine context. And they want it. As you said, they want to be a part of history, they want to be a part of the art world” (Sharp in the film under review, 18:14–18:56). The genuine dangers of venturing into the desert map onto the risks of connecting with cultural media landscapes. The struggles Liza Béar and Sharp faced to sustain the economics of their Avalanche magazine are far overshadowed by its impact on the vision and visibility of the contemporary scene.

Central to this vision is the experiential reality of the viewer to complete the art and the primacy of perception occurring from within the work. Land art activates its promise to operate as a lens seeing across apparently objective limits of the work into its audience and the world beyond. Time manifest in geologically distant traces, and immediate happenings, becomes especially charged when the poles between temporal scales connect with durations of anticipation, travel, and overnight stays to perceive the work as intended by its author. Distance is registered in time on a series of levels. For some the voyage to the American West is itself part of the saga, followed by dirt roads, proximate and often disorienting directions, and then the slippage between expectation and ground-truth realities.

Aerial partial view of Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969–70, production still from Troublemakers, 2014 (photograph © Summitridge Pictures and RSJC LLC)

Double Negative and forty-three minutes into the film, there is a tracking boom shot from mesa edge that moves from the horizon down into the work. Between this horizon carved by foothills and Mormon Mesa is the truly monumental expanse of the Virgin River valley extending to the east, perpendicularly, of Heizer’s cut. It’s a visual sweep experienced by all visitors yet rarely included in documentation of the work. Displacements of Land art are often far more transformational within our perceptions than in the physical remoteness of a work’s location.⁹ Germano Celant, an active commentator in Troublemakers, underscores the importance of how the image of the Earth as an object, brought back by early space exploration, expanded the potential of the planet to become a site to operate on. Follow the Virgin River past where it joins the Muddy River and opens into Lake Mead, a vast body of water impounded by Hoover Dam and a white bathtub ring of mineral deposition. Whatever environmental concerns may remain of iconic Land art, all told they pale in comparison to the impacts of impounding water west of the one-hundredth meridian or global war.¹⁰ Early in the film, Dennis Oppenheim asserts that Land art “meant real time. It meant real worlds. Something like the Vietnam War was something that occurred on the same battlefield. It occurred in the same system as a real world” (Oppenheim, 4:48 to 5:00). It carries forward the marriage of reason and nightmare entombed in the abandoned bomb-test towers of Enewetak Atoll in J. G. Ballard’s story The Terminal Beach: “Travern replied firmly. ‘For me the H-bomb is a symbol of absolute freedom. Unlike Eatherly I feel it’s given me the right—the obligation, even—to do anything I choose.’”¹¹ Our relationship to the planet is hardly stable, nor has it become any less vital to human identity, or survival. Again, this is where the story of Land art has the promise to reveal greater complexity and opportunity than attempts at singular canonization.

Gazing intently at the gigantic sun we at last decipher the riddle of its unfamiliar aspect. It was not a single flaming star, but millions upon millions of them, all clustering thickly, together like bees in a swarm. Their packed density made up the deceptive appearance of solid impenetrable flame. It was, in fact, a vast spiral nebula of innumerable suns.¹²

The expanding infrastructural or institutional nebula, while perhaps a trickier subject, remains a potent legacy of Land art creation, continued stewardship, and access. Dwan’s fingerprints cross the full spectrum, from the continuing momentum of the Dia Art Foundation, which now includes Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and De Maria’s Lightning Field and New York Earth Room (1977), as well as outgrowths like Judd’s Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati (1986), with James Turrell’s Roden Crater and Heizer’s City following suit. Extending the spectrum we find Double Negative, Sun Tunnels, and the ghost of De Maria’s Las Vegas Piece (1969) owned by various entities, yet left largely open to the continuum of time and place. They have no wall labels, yet can be readily found through resources such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation.¹³

Art, or any human activity, situated in the land necessitates a wide perspective of examination.¹⁴ Monumental artworks—like industrial mines, sprawling suburbs, or ecological preserves—rarely, if ever, operate autonomously. Other visitors populate the mix, from weekend voyagers and solstice seekers to Boy Scouts, biologists, coyotes, and gun shooters

Walter De Maria, Desert Cross, 1969, El Mirage Dry Lake, California, 1969 (photograph © Gianfranco Gorgoni, provided by Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles)

In recent years, “Where is the frame of Spiral Jetty?” has emerged as a productive question. Is it at the limits of the 1970 photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni? Can it be found in the film or essay—both autonomous artworks and not works of documentation—that followed the physical construction?¹⁵ This question often emerges at Rozel Point, the site of Smithson’s earthwork, within groups organized by Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University while they are camping and traveling for two months to examine the complexities of the human-land interface in the New West. Our arrival at the site is part of a circumnavigation of the Great Salt Lake, with an orbit that includes extraction industries to the south, the ATK Rocket Garden and Golden Spike National Monument to the northeast, and the blank ground along the way were once stood an abandoned pink trailer, a burned-out pickup truck, and an amphibious vehicle.¹⁶ We set a temporary camp at the end of the road.¹⁷ The question remains latent as people explore the artwork and surrounding territory. At sunset all watch intently as the fading light shifts, glowing and pulsing with color in the curious atmosphere of the northern arm of the lake. Dinner conversation opens schisms between lived experience and expectation, and ruminations continuing while we screen the 1970 Spiral Jetty film. The cinematic mash-up of earthmoving equipment and dinosaur skeletons in the American Museum of Natural History activates the oil-exploration jetty visited earlier in the day. Now, sitting in the darkness, looking west across Spiral Jetty into the entropic sink of the Great Salt Lake, the afterimages of orange-pink water, white salt, black tar, desiccated birds, and oolitic sand animate our view. As our eyes dark-adapt, a host of additional information comes into focus. To the southeast, settlement along the Wasatch Range from Brigham City to Provo mutes the stars with sodium-vapor light. Perceptible to the south, if we are quiet, is the deep rumble of train engines tugging across the transcontinental line on the Lucin Cutoff, the engineering repair of the 1950s that bisected the lake and created the northern arm as a salt sink, fostering halophilic bacteria that give the water its milky orange-red cast. This otherworldly quality was a key attractor for Smithson. To the southwest we see—or sense, really—the oddly soft glow in the atmosphere, appearing from no visible ground light sources, that marks the activities of Hill Air Force Base. If we have a keen eye, patience, and a moonless sky, the constellation Perseus, slayer of monsters, appears, riding the ecliptic around the northern sky to lead our eyes and memories from east to west across the lake toward Sun Tunnels.

While we may argue over intentions of authors and where frames were meant to be located, over time the limits and extensions of art are defined by audience—by culture. In this way, Land art operates just as Heizer proclaims in Troublemakers: “You can’t trade this thing, you can’t put it in your pocket, if you have a war you can’t move it around. It’s not worth anything. In fact, it’s an obligation” (Heizer, 9:50–10:00). The obligation is perceptual. Rather than looking inward, only to what was made, by whom, and when, the more generative position is to look outward, from Land art as “image/platform,” through authors and audience, into the amalgamated worlds within which all is enmeshed.¹⁸

The trailer for the film can be viewed at http://troublemakersthefilm.com.

---

Chris Taylor is director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University ( landarts.org/) and an associate professor of architecture. The books Land Arts of the American West and Incubo Atacama Lab chronicle the evolution of his research across the arid lands of the Americas. He is currently working to create the Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform ( gslep.org) to facilitate visual and performative research within the vastly under-explored landscape of the Great Salt Lake.

1. It is significant to note the film tracks the relationships among the three pivotal exhibitions: Earth Works at Dwan Gallery, New York, 1968; Earth ArtWhen Attitudes Become Form, Bern Kunsthalle, 1969. ↩
2. Art world myth is evidenced in Tacita Dean’s 1997 audio work, Trying to Find Spiral Jetty, see www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/tacita-dean-recent-films-and-other-works/tacita-dean-recent-films–3, as of April 20, 2016: “This sound work documents my journey to try and find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), following faxed directions I received from Utah Arts Council. . . . The fact that I can never be sure that I found the risen or submerged jetty . . . inspired me to partially construct the documentation of this journey.” ↩
3. See Chris Taylor, “Scanning Double Negative,” in Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain. ed. Stan Allen and Marc McQuade (Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, with Princeton University, 2011), 373–79. ↩
4. The players include Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Nancy Holt, Dennis Oppenheim, and Charles Ross. Producers are Virginia Dwan and Willoughby Sharp, and among the commentators are Germano Celant, Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Carl Andre, Paula Cooper, Harald Szeemann, and Gianfranco Gorgoni. ↩
5. The asynchronous cutting or sampling of distinct artworks presents them as raw documentary evidence. Within a painting analogy, imagine using the Ken Burns effect to present Leonardo’s Mona Lisa\ as a cubist portrait with the nose above the left eye. Of particular note among these artworks are Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 1970, 16mm col. film, 35 min.; Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1978, 16mm col. film, 27 min.; Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, East Coast, West Coast, 1969, b/w video, 22 min.; Walter De Maria, Hard Core, 1969, 16mm film, 27 min.; Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mono Lake, 1968, ed. Holt 2004, Super8 col. film, 20 min. All except the De Maria are distributed as video by Electronic Arts Intermix, at eai.org. ↩
6. See Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Making the Most of Words,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Gay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 184, cited in Lucy Lippard, “Peripheral Vision,” in Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert, Land Arts of the American West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 336–45. ↩
7. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, “Ends of the Earth and Back,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, dist. Prestel, 2012), 18. ↩
8. Ibid., 22. ↩
9. Comparing Smithson in The Spiral Jetty to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Ann Reynolds writes, “Smithson counts on the familiarity of that sequence to be part of the viewing experience of his version of it in The Spiral Jetty. His cooled down play-acting and literal refusal of visual access to his expressions and the rather static camera techniques reinforce the emotional objectivity he hopes to express. He, rather than his situation in the landscape, is remote. But this remoteness, while parodying a scene of seemingly intense, directly expressed emotion, resonates because it is familiar, just distanced . . . perhaps so viewers can register it as an objectified experience, a feeling turned into a thing, and they can recognize what they bring to these situations and the patterns for dealing with them. One might say that through his pantomime, Smithson succeeds at presenting a remote yet simultaneously proximate world.” Reynolds, “Remoteness: Distant et loin de tout,” in Robert Smithson: Mémoire et entropie, ed. J.-P. Criqui and C. Flécheux (Paris: Les Presses du réel, forthcoming in 2016). ↩
10. See Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954). ↩
11. J. G. Ballard, “The Terminal Beach,” in The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1964; New York: Picador, 1978), 257. ↩
12. John Taine (pseud. of Eric Temple Bell), The Time Stream (1931; Providence: Buffalo Book Co., 1946). Robert Smithson included this passage in his voiceover for the 1970 film The Spiral Jetty, and this segment of his film is included in Troublemakers. ↩
13. See Center for Land Use Interpretation, “Land Use Database,” at http://clui.org/ludb, as of April 20, 2016. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, at clui.org, is “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” ↩
14. From J. B. Jackson we learn that the study of landscape cannot solely examine the proper garden, palace, or monument. Landscape is an inclusive container that brings the trailer park and the road into our view. See J. B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). ↩
15. I refer to Smithson’s 1970 film The Spiral Jetty and his essay “The Spiral Jetty,” in Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: Braziller, 1972). ↩
16. As part of a 2006 beautification effort, all the vehicles were removed, along with other industrial debris on the oil exploration jetty. ↩
17. The road to Spiral Jetty was widened and smoothed in 2011 to promote increased access. ↩
18. “Image/platform” is from Ann Reynolds, “Casting Glances: Reconsidering Smithson’s ‘Documentary’ Process,” in Art in the Landscape (Marfa: Chinati Foundation, 2000), 55–71. ↩

The post Troubling Troublemakers appeared first on Art Journal Open.

]]>

Parul Dave-Mukherji, Naman P. Ahuja, and Kavita Singh, eds. InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia

Parul Dave-Mukherji, Naman P. Ahuja, and Kavita Singh, eds. InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia. New Delhi: Sage, 2013. 288 pp., 112 ills. $36 paper

InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia is dedicated to the late Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962–2001), an adivasi (indigenous) artist from central India who committed suicide in Japan. Shyam’s life and death epitomize the paradoxes and perils of the globalizing art world. He was discovered by J. Swaminathan, an influential Indian artist and critic who became the director of Roopankar, the art museum at Bharat Bhavan, a cultural center established in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in 1982.¹ Shyam developed an art style based on his imagination, individual memories, and collective myths. His work was shown in the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris in 1989, and in Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists, curated by Jyotindra Jain, at the Crafts Museum in New Delhi in 1998. During a 2001 residency at the privately owned Mithila Museum, which commissions and displays folk and tribal art from India, Shyam hanged himself, allegedly because his Japanese patron denied his requested passage home.² The website for the Mithila Museum, located in Tokamachi, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, claims: “Unlike in the native environment where these paintings are drawn, in Japan the Mithila and Indian aboriginal groups create their art in an environment where a higher degree of refinement and creativity is possible.”³

Fourteen years after his death, a cottage industry of Gond art has emerged, drawing on Shyam’s distinctive style and employing the artist’s son, Mayank Shyam, and wife, Nankusia Bai, as well as many other adivasi artists in and around Patangarh, Madhya Pradesh, where Shyam was born and raised. The Jangarh kalam (style), as one journalist put it, has been used to sell tribal shows in Paris and children’s books in India, not to mention contemporary art to a growing class of international collectors.⁴ Rather than being a success story of the art world, the classic narrative of an isolated genius rising against all odds, Shyam’s career highlights hierarchy and inequity. It serves as a cautionary tale of violence and marginalization amid the widespread celebration of a newly global and postcolonial order in the art world.⁵

Reminding the reader that Shyam was named Jangarh after the jangan (census) officers who visited his village on the day of his birth, the editors of InFlux write: “He was born on the day people in his village were counted and died when he realized that only his paintings counted” (xvii).

By beginning InFlux with an image by and a remembrance of Shyam, the editors Parul Dave-Mukherji, Naman P. Ahuja, and Kavita Singh, who teach in the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, signal their commitment to critically examining the effects of globalization on contemporary art in Asia. The book resists a triumphalist narrative of arrival and acceptance, of Asia’s arrival into global art markets and the acceptance of Asian art in an international art world. It also resists an essentializing account of Asia—as a continent or civilization—and instead illuminates contested notions of Asian identity. Hence the editors’ conscious decision to subtitle the volume “contemporary art in Asia” as opposed to “contemporary Asian art.” The former enables a fluid and flexible understanding of belonging to Asia, one that encompasses Marian Pastor Roces’s metaphor of curating barbarians, which is indebted to the Filipino nationalist José Rizal (1861–1896) and the German critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), and Rustom Bharucha’s analysis of the civilizational ideals and cosmopolitan identities of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913). Such intellectual touchstones—Rizal, Benjamin, Tagore, and Okakura—at once historicize and destabilize what it means to be Asian.

Divided into three sections focused on culture (“Section 1: Contested Terrains and Critical Reimaginings,” edited by Dave-Mukherji), geography (“Section 2: Tropes and Places,” edited by Ahuja), and exhibitions (“Section 3: Interventions in the Public Sphere,” edited by Singh), InFlux begins with a general introduction by Geeta Kapur, a critic and curator based in New Delhi, whose model of socially and politically committed cultural practice has been enormously influential in India and elsewhere. Like Okwui Enwezor and Gerardo Mosquera, Kapur places questions of postcolonial identity and history at the forefront of her curatorial work and thereby of an international art world. In her introduction, she explains how most of the InFlux essays originated from the conference “Elective Affinities and Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in Asia,” which was sponsored by the Biennale Society in New Delhi in 2007. The conference, an occasion to ponder the need for an “Asia-centered” biennale in New Delhi, became an opportunity for a “‘considered’ negation” of the project (ix). Kapur understands this negation as the work of critique. Indeed, a dialectical method of viewing art and society is evident in her essay “Curating Across Agnostic Worlds,” which provides a historical overview of the changing role of the curator and postcolonial exhibitions from the 1960s onward.

Reflecting on her practice as a critic and curator in an international field, Kapur contextualizes the explosion of “Southern biennales” since the 1990s within a long history of decolonizing interventions in the art world, from the Bienal de São Paulo, established in 1951, to the Bienal de La Habana and Magiciens de la terre in the 1980s. For Kapur, the goal of exhibitions is to “develop agonistic sets of relationships, where the curator stages the contradictions of the global contemporary, and acting in the manner of a friendly ‘enemy,’ makes the symbolic space that artworks inhabit more adversarial” (175, emphasis in the original). Such curating complements the work of the artist, a figure who is “always situated, but also always liminal to the established order of things, both at once, and therefore peculiarly placed to question the hegemonic tendencies of national and global, ethnic and imperialist ideologies” (176, emphasis in the original). This utopian notion of art and the artist is a consistent thread in Kapur’s writing since the 1960s, evident in her remarkable essay In Quest of Identity: Art and Indigenism in Post-Colonial Culture with Special Reference to Contemporary Indian Painting.⁶

Many of the contributions to InFlux share aesthetic and political solidarities with Kapur, particularly in their focus on curating as a creative and ethical act. The figure of the curator emerges as at least as important as the artist in the contemporary art world, and the role of the curator is understood expansively and imaginatively. Consider Pastor Roces’s evocation of an “Asian barbarian” who “is obliged to take up the word curator to contaminate a precious art world category, transmogrifying it to evoke a multitude of acts: prompting laughter, unease, and metanoia in the play amidst powerful and weak languages; perceiving and circulating visual forms for cross-infiltrations of networks; contriving event thresholds that recombine metaphoric traditions; proliferating a barbaric artist/curator creature for as [sic] contagion” (63–64). Her charge to “curator barbarians—barbarians who curate and curators who take on barbarians” is “to neither indulge in exceptionalism nor slip into reduction, provided that the assertion is grounded in the specific character and order of heterogeneity in Asia” (63).

In a similar spirit, Arshiya Lokhandwala proposes that Asia is “a useful construct” to critique the current order of globalization and examine its effects across diverse areas of the world (42). This ambivalence toward and skepticism of Asia as a stable ground or geopolitical truth—and therefore as the basis for scholarly or artistic inquiry—extends across the essays. Gayatri Sinha analyzes the map and globe as metaphors in contemporary Indian art that imagine a terrain extending from Baghdad to Bharat [India] and recall historical models of imagining Asia, from the travel accounts of al-Biruni (ca. 1030) to painting in the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir in the early seventeenth century (51). For Sinha, these metaphors have emerged in a new age of empire as “cartographic necessities” (49). Shaheen Merali discusses the exhibition he organized in Madrid in 2009, Indian Popular Culture . . . and Beyond: The Untold (the Rise of) Schisms, which probed the boundaries of India, Asia, and the world through the lens of popular culture. With the exhibition, he aimed “to start the uncoiling of this aspect of Indian culture—which has so attracted outsiders,” and in so doing, remake territories, geographies, and identities (184).

Oscar Ho Hing-kay and Charles Merewether vividly sketch the function of the curator as creator and conscience, alternately interventionist and witness-observer. Ho discusses the reification of Lo Ting, a mythical amphibian and a metaphor for the city of Hong Kong invented in and through exhibition practice, and highlights the powerful effects of exhibitions in creating place and society rather than merely reflecting them. Mimicking the display strategies of history museums, Ho presented Lo Ting in an exhibition about the history of Hong Kong on the eve of its handover to China in 1997. What began as “a fabrication of Hong Kong history” was eventually adopted into the curriculum of secondary schools as “local history” (229–30). For Ho, this process represented “a collective creative act against hegemonic domination” (231). Merewether reflects on the aestheticization of politics in photographs of the victims of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime displayed at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide (the erstwhile high school–turned–concentration camp S-21 prison) in Phnom Penh, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While Ho contemplates fakes exhibited in a history museum, Merewether asks us to consider how truths are displayed and viewed in diverse institutional frameworks, including in a history museum claiming to remember the dead, both documented and undocumented (twenty thousand prisoners were held in Tuol Sleng; photographs of seven thousand survive). Highlighting an intimate if fraught relationship between archives and museums, Merewether discusses theories of trauma, testimony, and truth, and performs the role of curator as cultural critic, citing the intellectual and ethical examples of Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben.

InFlux offers an unusual view of the art world from Asia, with many contributors located in India and others based in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. China is largely absent from the volume, though some contributors, notably Kapur and John Clark, frame their projects within the context of the spectacular rise of Chinese contemporary art since the 1990s. Indeed, one can view the volume—and the 2007 conference from which it arose—as a challenge to the hegemony of Western and Chinese art in the contemporary art world. Even as many scholars have turned their attention to globalizing processes in the art world, scholarship on contemporary art tends to focus on practices and practitioners situated in the West. The discourse on globalization and contemporary art is still dominated by views from London and New York, or Basel and Berlin, and occasionally reflects biennales elsewhere—in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, or Singapore, for example—with relatively few critics and scholars attending to the problems of art making and exhibitions in cities without biennales, or nations without established systems of patronage for art.

What does it mean to be an artist, critic, curator, and citizen in Almaty, Beirut, Tehran, Lahore, Mumbai, Phnom Penh, and Bangkok, to name some of the locations examined in the volume? The answer, more often than not, is contingent on practices and discourses in Cambridge, Amsterdam, New York, Madrid, and Paris, as the essays by Clark, Kapur, Merali, Negar Azimi, Quddus Mirza, and Valeria Ibraeva suggest. Artists and artworks circulate in networks that extend across Asia and the world, and these networks are constituted and constrained by relations of power. At a video art exhibition in Tehran in 2005, where the work of eight young artists was on display in “a small independent gallery,” Azimi wonders whether the “artists have been up late watching Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist living in America,” whose work is “very dramatic, very Manichean, very East-meets-West in uncomfortable fashion,” and highly successful in the art world (97). Mirza considers how contemporary artists from Pakistan such as Rashid Rana, Hamra Abbas, Imran Qureshi, Jamil Baloch, and David Alesworth mobilize tropes of beauty and violence to represent the nation. In order to meet the demands of an international public, Pakistani artists, according to Mirza, must produce work that corresponds either to the “beautiful art of miniature making” or to spectacularized “images of violence and terror” (91). In Kazakhstan, Ibraeva argues, contemporary art is “largely an export product,” and in the 1990s the media often described artists as “‘troublemakers,’ ‘hell-raisers,’ and ‘CIA agents’” (141, 137). Referring to Kazakh exhibitions in 2003 and 2004, she notes the return of “a heightened exoticism with camels, yurts, and the distant steppe” despite trenchant critiques by artists and critics of the idealizing images associated with Soviet and post-Soviet official mythmaking (143). Collectively, the Asia conjured by these contributors is transnational and transcontinental, a complex product of cultural and commercial exchanges with the West and other regions of the world such as Africa and Latin America.

InFlux’s conceptualization of Asia is different than that of the US academy, which divides the continent into geopolitical regions of South, Southeast, Central, East, and sometimes Northeast Asia (West Asia, in the US context, is still studied under the rubrics of the Middle East or Near East, though the Far East as a category has largely disappeared from critical academic discourse). One measure of this difference lies in the essays by Azimi, Ibraeva, Mirza, Ranjit Hoskote, and Nancy Adajania that focus on problems of religion and secularism in India, the imaginative geography of Islam, cultures of nomadism and nationalism in post-Soviet republics, and the global landscape created by the US-led war on terror. To counter stereotypical images of Asia as “the Silk Route, the Rice Bowl, or the Mega-city” in contemporary exhibition practice, Hoskote excavates a history of the “Far West” and evokes an image of “the House of Islam,” casting it as “a spectrum of alternatives, overlaps, fade-outs, palimpsest occasions, and rebel silhouettes” (105, 111). He proposes: “Islam is often the metoikos, the Stranger in the House of Asia interpreted as a curatorial conception—the person of no fixed address, the haphazard member of the herd. Let us consider the claim that this metoikos makes on us” (107). Hoskote concludes with a rhetorical question: “Can we model our conceptual curation of the House of Islam in the manner of al-Andalus, as a near-utopian ecumene of engaged divergences?” (111). Thus, this critic explores the past as a model for the future.

Problems of religion and secularism in the present animate Adajania’s essay on sacrality, spirituality, and ritual in the work of three contemporary Indian artists: Shilpa Gupta, Jehangir Jani, and Vidya Kamat. By her account, these artists “use their religious and ethnic legacies as cultural materials, pointers toward the investigation of a selfhood that is embedded in family, group, and lineage—a territory that is anterior to, though imbricated in, the more generalizing norms of citizenship” (117–18). In so doing, they challenge both a secular Left consensus in the art world and the political culture of Hindu majoritarianism in India, and claim a position for the artist as “insider/outsider or participant/witness . . . so that empathy and analysis, detachment and concern, become quick-changing conditions of encounter rather than fixed and distinct parameters of approach” (118). Such positions were foreclosed or marginalized by modernist practice in India; their appearance in the contemporary art world can be viewed as a rejection or rethinking of modernism.

S. Santosh extends Adajania’s critique of modernism in India, which he views as the cultural practices of an “upper-caste national bourgeois[ie] in the name of national identity, authenticity, and sovereignty” (200). For Santosh, the case of Ramkinkar Baij (1906–1980), a modernist sculptor and painter based in Bengal, exemplifies the biases and exclusions of a hegemonic national art history. Citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature, he identifies a minor impulse in the works of the contemporary Indian artists Savi Sawarkar and Zakkir Hussain, inheritors of Baij’s radical project to represent subaltern consciousness. Santosh redefines Dalit (literally, broken or crushed; the contemporary political identity claimed by people classified as untouchables under the Hindu caste system) as an aesthetic and a community that can “break away from statist, anthropological, and religious categories of caste, tribe, and class.” Dalit aesthetics offer a “counter-institutional mode of production” (210). According to Santosh, a “minoritarian” and “anti-essentialist” notion of Dalit can resignify “caste as an analytical category” that yields “possibilities of decentering, differentiation, relationality, liminality, sharing, and linkage” (210). Thus, contemporary art provides a space for the emergence of new forms of social and political subjectivity. This emergence is the subject of Y. S. Alone’s essay on Sawarkar’s iconography, which highlights the coarticulation of caste and gender difference. Alone views the artist’s paintings of Dalit women, specifically of devadasis (women who, as children, are given by their parents to the temple and dedicated to the goddess), as “translating marks of caste into pictorial codes,” a gesture that distinguishes Sawarkar’s practice of art (215).

The absence of critical voices from mainland China and the lack of an extended discussion of the phenomenon of contemporary Chinese art is perhaps the greatest strength and weakness of the volume. InFlux provides a different regional perspective than many popular and scholarly accounts of contemporary Asian art that focus on China to the exclusion of practices and discourses elsewhere. In the twenty-first century, the Chinese art market has emerged as the second largest in the world after that of the United States.⁷ In Asia, China is an old and new force to be reckoned with. The contributors to InFlux are uniquely positioned to offer new insights into the global influence of Chinese art, yet the volume does not take up this opportunity. This omission may be related to the location of the original conference and the editors in New Delhi, which has had a troubled relationship with Beijing since the Sino-Indian War in 1962. Cultural exchange between the two Asian nations is low, and barriers to trade have been high in the past. InFlux reflects these social and historical conditions and brings other trade routes and geographies into focus: those that connect South Asia and Southeast Asia to Central Asia and West Asia.

Richly illustrated and compellingly argued, InFlux will be of interest to scholars of modern and contemporary art, museum studies, Asian studies, and cultural studies. It is a welcome addition to our knowledge of the globalizing art world and a critical step toward reimagining Asia and contemporary art.

Sonal Khullar is an associate professor of South Asian art history at the University of Washington. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (University of California Press, 2015). Her current research focuses on conflict, collaboration, and globalization in South Asia.

The post Barbarians at the Gates: Contemporary Art and Globalization in Asia appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media

Giuliana Bruno. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 277 pp., 80 color ills., 6 b/w. $45, $36 e-book

Giuliana Bruno’s latest book is that rarest of gems: a patient and profound intellectual engagement, sweeping in scope, which is nonetheless a pleasure to read. It is this latter quality that first strikes the reader of Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Although I will have cause to expand on this further, it is worth noting at the outset that Bruno’s work has consistently been marked by her characteristically intimate and mellifluous prose (she is remarkably attuned to etymological concerns and often weaves complex skeins of argument structured around wordplay). Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1992), which emerged from Bruno’s NYU dissertation, displayed her formidable grasp of the history and theory of moving images, architecture, and the visual arts. Moving smoothly across often-discontinuous terrain, she mapped out a cultural geography that focused on the work of Elvira Notari, a major yet (until then) marginalized Italian filmmaker.

In the years since, Bruno’s peculiar yet emphatically interdisciplinary touch has resulted in a collection of essays investigating the ongoing spatialization of art and the construction of a “public intimacy” across the fields of art and architecture (Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, 2007), and a magisterial exploration of the history of the spatiovisual arts as they have developed into modernity (Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, 2002). Atlas of Emotion saw Bruno developing some radical concepts that shift critical focus from optics to haptics. Linking the history of sight with its operations in space (site), and emphasizing the crucial importance of motion to the production of emotion, Bruno called for an unusual approach to visual studies. Her efforts have not gone unnoticed; Streetwalking on a Ruined Map received the 1993 Katherine Singer Kovács award for the best book in film studies, and Atlas of Emotion won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz award for the “world’s best book on the moving image.”

We are clearly moving in illustrious circles here. The purpose of this opening sketch is twofold: on the one hand, I want to trace the general contours of Bruno’s highly idiosyncratic approach to visual studies (one that, as I’ll indicate later, holds significant promise for contemporary currents in the fields of film and visual studies and the history of art). On the other, it concerns me—given the daring scope and originality that has marked Bruno’s work—that there are hardly any critical reviews or sustained engagements with her evolving thought to be found today. In part, I’m convinced that this lack has something to do with the shackles of disciplinary specificity that tend to constrain our work. In this context, perhaps my own enthusiasm for Bruno’s work stems from my professional allegiance to the disciplines of both cinema and media studies and the history of art. The sheer breadth of knowledge that Bruno seems capable of bringing to bear—ranging across centuries of thought on vision and visuality, space, architecture, the body, cartography, museology, optics, haptics, and virtually every other relevant topic—can prove overwhelming to the reader accustomed to the specialization of most scholarship.

That is not to suggest that Bruno lacks precision or analytical depth. Not at all. Rather, Bruno delights in tracing a meandering narrative (she freely mingles critical acuity with a personal voice that is often effortlessly graceful) across a vast landscape, pausing occasionally to look closely at some interesting object or other. Building on concepts already articulated in her previous books, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media both deepens Bruno’s theoretical contributions and presents her definitive work to date.

Something of the ambition of Surface reveals itself when one peruses the acknowledgments section. Across four large-format pages (the book is large and lavishly illustrated), we encounter the names of scholars, critics, artists, and institutions representing architecture and the visual arts, cinema, and critical theory. Before delving into a work of such obvious scope, scrutinizing this section provides a map of sorts to Bruno’s enterprise. Introducing the book by quoting Lucretius’s words from De Rerum Natura (“There exist what we call images of things / Which as it were peeled off from the surfaces of objects / Fly this way and that through the air . . .”), Bruno begins with a gesture of defiance.

Her defiance here consists in arguing for “materiality in the virtual age, seeking to show how it manifests itself on the surface tension of media in our times” (2). As most of us are likely aware, the question of materiality—or the lack thereof under the pressures of “the digital”—has come under intense scrutiny in the past decade or two. For example, Bruno’s former colleague at Harvard’s department of visual and environmental studies, D. N. Rodowick, has written at length on the “desubstantiated image” and the virtual afterlife of film in the digital era. Against the grain of much contemporary denigration of materiality, Bruno sets out a claim for revising our notions of materiality such that it is “not a question of materials but rather . . . the substance of material relations.” Thus bypassing staid quarrels over medium-specificity, Bruno seeks to map the shifting terrain between the “rapidly changing materials and media” of our time, all the while remaining aware of the ways in which such a mapping may be established, distorted, or simply reconfigured. This book represents her investigation of “the space of those relations, questioning how they manifest themselves on the surface of different media” (2).

An obvious question at this point: why surface? Surely an alternate account of the persistence of materiality in our time is welcome, but why privilege the surface of media? Bruno responds by positing that we ought to understand materiality as, principally, a “surface condition,” that we should think of the surface “configured as an architecture.” Reorienting our understanding of surface and materiality thus, the surface becomes a “site of mediation and projection,” or a “material reconfiguration of the relation between subjects and with objects” (3). Thinking of the surface necessitates thinking widely, and over the course of the book we encounter objects from the realms of architecture, fashion, the visual arts, and of course cinema and media. In line with Bruno’s sustained move away from optical frameworks in favor of thinking haptically, her chief mode of encountering artworks here is “by way of . . . tangible, ‘superficial’ contact” which, as she writes, allows us to “apprehend the art object and the space of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy” (3). Surface, therefore, is here configured as a specific site where “forms of mediation, transfer, and transformation can take place” (3).

Surface does not unfold in linear fashion. This may be one of the book’s greatest strengths or its most frustrating aspect, depending on how willing one might be to indulge writing that strives to perform what it thinks through in theory. Bruno herself considers this an important point, noting toward the end of the introduction that her book’s “articulation is rather braided, interlaced, and layered,” that it moves “in forms of assemblage and clusters of thoughts” (9). Thus, chapters 3–6 comprise what might be taken as the central elements of Surface, with those before and after these chapters serving as extensions of, or specific instantiations of, the overarching arguments of the book. Such a fashioning of the book will be familiar to those who read Atlas of Emotion; given the sprawling nature of Bruno’s project both there and in the present book, I found this nonlinear strategy refreshing rather than cumbersome.

How is the surface theorized, then? Over the first two chapters, Bruno introduces (via Gilles Deleuze) the notion of the fold. Identifying an architecture of the fold across the visual arts, fashion (particularly in the work of Issey Miyake), and cinema (in the films of Wong Kar-wai), she develops ways in which mood and affect, motion and “e-motion” may be fashioned or “architected.” In a compelling synopsis, Bruno argues that the “fabrications of visual fabric, fashion, architecture, and film are home to an archive of mental imagings and affective residues” (32). She then links the concept of habitus (“mode of being”) to habitare (“dwelling”), which leads to the Italian abito (“dress” or “address”) and subsequently to the German Wand (“wall and screen”) and Gewand (“garment or clothing”). It’s a rhetorical dance typical of Bruno and is far more convincing when one follows the rhythms of her writing than when introduced via such a bald summary.

The second chapter focuses closely on the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, exploring how his films conceive of fashion as architecture and cities as fabric. Disentangling cinema’s historic affiliation with both fashion (the Lumières’ and Edison’s Serpentine Dance films) and a more literal labor of tailoring (cutting and splicing of celluloid), Bruno desires a different approach to theorizing fashion, “one that is able to account for the way fashion works as a fabric of the visual in a larger field of spatiovisual fabrications” (40). Sidestepping well-worn concerns with “spectacle and commodity,” she wants a “playful form of sartorial theorization” that is “connected more closely to the history of art and the design of space, and to their theorization” (40). The fold, as it unfolds over these two chapters, becomes for Bruno a potent (and very different) approach to viewing cinema and its fashioning, since it is ultimately “itself a moving image, for it is an image of thought . . . [it] finally represents the unfolding of experience” (41).

The screen becomes a central object of concern for chapters 3–6. Over these four chapters, Bruno takes aim at the “relationship between architecture and cinema as it is knit together on the modern screen” (55). Such an ambition takes her across the work of James Turrell, the early cinema of Edwin S. Porter, the installations of Carlos Garaicoa and Robert Irwin, the expanded cinema of Bill Viola and Anthony McCall, Kryzstof Wodiczko’s public projections, and works by Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Tacita Dean, Diller Scofidio and Renfro, Bill Morrison, Christian Marclay, Peter Greenaway, Renzo Piano, and Olafur Eliasson—among others. It’s an exhilarating—and nearly exhausting—trek across disciplinary lines that nonetheless illuminates how artists with diverse creative and critical attitudes have been rethinking screen architecture in recent years. In Pipilotti Rist’s work, for example, Bruno discerns how “the fabric of the screen has endured but at the same time changed geometry” (102). Layers Mama Layers (2010) serves to illustrate “the ever-present environmental screen-effect within which we now live.” The screen surface, for Bruno, today “extends to an entire screen environment that itself becomes experienced as a surrounding membrane” (102).

Bruno isn’t the first to pay such close attention to matters of surface, of course. One recalls David Joselit’s influential article from 2000, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness.”¹ Bruno herself also alludes to David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi’s 2002 book, Surface Architecture. Bruno’s greatest contribution here lies in her sustained theorization of the screen, working in media-archaeological fashion to look both to the history of the screen and to its ongoing transformations today in order to advance our understanding of what screens might be tomorrow. As she asserts, the “shift to the digital” can become a “field of relations, engaging a flexibility that empowers the body” (93–94, channeling Mark B. N. Hansen). Thus does it constitute a “defining material cultural shift.” It is the surface, Bruno argues, that “is poised to be at the center of this process of rematerialization insofar as it is constituted, by its very nature, as an architectural partition. The surface is a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects . . . it can become a site of screening and projection. . . . [T]he material of surface becomes the site of expression of a new materiality as the surface is texturally reconfigured to hold different forms of material relation and convey their transformation” (94). This passage is perhaps the clearest formulation of the central stakes of her book.

Bruno also develops a notion of “surface tension” through these chapters, discovering it at work in Wodiczko’s projections and Gerhard Richter’s installations, as well as in Dean’s and Morrison’s celluloid works. Such tension makes itself felt on the surface of media (actual screens, walls, or the surface of film—the “film” of film) as a layering of time, space, and affective charge. More: surface tension brings to the fore a “geometry that engages glass, window, wall, canvas, and screen fabric, and fundamentally shifts the terms of the use of these mediums by conflating their qualities on the surface” (83; the tension at work here is in Richter’s 2003 installation, Six Gray Mirrors). In sum, surface tension appears akin to a kind of palimpsest effect, with different modalities of the “screen-membrane” engaged simultaneously.

One of the clearest pictures that builds through these chapters is that of the increasingly—and interestingly—confused relationship between screen, fabric, canvas, and (what was conventionally considered) architecture. Bruno points out, “As architecture rethinks the distinctions between structure and ornament, function and décor, form and façade, the surface . . . becomes an entity in itself. In contemporary times, surface turns into actual architecture” (93). Indeed, as she asserts later, the “mediatic configurations of art and architecture” are “converging in surface tension as they partake of common material ground. Art is melting into spatial construction and . . . architecture has become one of the most influential forms of imaging” (187). Although her numerous examples and analyses abundantly support such statements, I was perplexed to discover that she does not discuss the fairly recent phenomenon of architectural projection mapping at all. Given its recent prominence as a mode of public art or installation, perhaps Bruno was simply first to the market. Still, I cannot help thinking that much of what Bruno develops here would be served wonderfully by a sustained exploration of architectural projection mapping.

The final chapters of Surface (8–10) are a rich display of Bruno’s ability to blend her critical and personal voices. Focusing on the surface architecture and subjective landscape of projection as an art form, chapter 8 investigates how art and architecture can rely on projection as “mental, psychic processes exhibited in the material world in the form of space” (9). Einfühlung, which Bruno defines as a “feeling into” or an empathy with objects and spaces as much as with human subjects, receives close attention here. Chapters 9 and 10 are both highly personal reflections: the first unfolds as a travelogue, documenting the urban surfaces of Havana—a place evidently rich with significance for the author. Chapter 10 is constructed as a letter to Sally Potter, discussing her film Yes (2004). It is a skillful weaving-together of the concerns with surface, materiality, and media that have animated Bruno’s thinking throughout the book, and I was particularly struck by a section that takes up Peter Eisenman’s discussion of blurring as a process of becoming. Bruno develops this to highlight the traversals of surfaces and layers that are involved in reading or representing the action of blurring.

I have not attempted, in this review, to offer a comprehensive overview of Surface. It would in any case be a futile effort, considering the expansive nature of Bruno’s project and her particularly nonlinear unfolding of thought. Rather, I have tried to identify those elements which, I feel, are most conducive to advancing the emerging field of screen studies (or to borrow from Erkki Huhtamo, “screenology”). Screens matter now as they never have before. Bruno is obviously aware of this, since it is precisely around the concept of the screen—as well as its literal and figurative architectures—that she unfolds the central chapters of her book. Although the screen has received much attention recently (see, for example, the work of Huhtamo, Kate Mondloch, and Francesco Casetti), most of the attention has been in a historical vein. What is needed is rich description and theoretical work—and Surface is perhaps the first major effort to provide just that. Bruno’s meandering mode of scholarship and steadfast refusal to concede disciplinary limits certainly make her work challenging. But I think it is more productive to find here, not to mention in Public Intimacy and Atlas of Emotion, an enormously rich body of work that develops new concepts for new media. Taken together, these books give us a critical vocabulary for engaging with the growing conflation of screen practices and screen architectures. Paying close attention to the “expanded spectatorial relations” that are “activated, both physically and imaginatively mobilized” (7) as a consequence of our proliferating screens today, Surface sets the stage for further critical encounters with the screen—as surface and as architectural form.

Swagato Chakravorty is a PhD student in History of Art and Film and Media Studies (combined) at Yale University. He works at the interstices of screen practices, screen architectures, and embodied spectatorial experience. Related interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art (especially modern and contemporary art), histories of film theory, visuality in the long nineteenth century, the history of science and technology, and contemporary media theory. In 2015–16 he will be a Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the department of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art.

The post Superficial Thinking: Screen Practices and Screen Architectures appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Sharon Kivland ‘s Freud on Holiday books

Sharon Kivland. Freud on Holiday. 8 illustrated vols., with b/w ills. Prices below are in pounds sterling. Order online at www.cornerhousepublications.org. For details, write to publications@cornerhouse.org.

Vol. I. Freud Dreams of Rome. Introduction by Forbes Morlock. York, UK: Information as Material, 2006. 32 pp. £17.50

Vol. II. A Disturbance of Memory. In English and Greek. Introduction by Craig Saper. York, UK: Information as Material, 2007, and Athens: Cube Art, 2008. 179 pp. £16.50

Vol. III. The Forgetting of a Proper Name. York, UK: Information as Material, and Athens: Cube Art, 2011. 56 pp. £12.50

Vol. IV. Sharon Kivland with Lucia Farinati. A Cavernous Defile—Part 1. Foreword by Forbes Morlock. York, UK: Information as Material, and Athens: Cube Art, 2013.

Appendix 1. Freud’s Weather. York, UK: Information as Material, 2012. 16 pp. £7.50

Appendix 2. Freud’s Dining. York, UK: Information as Material, 2013. 16 pp. £7.50

Appendix 3. Freud’s Hotels. York, UK: Information as Material, 2013. 24 pp. £7.50

Appendix 4. Freud’s Shopping. York, UK: Information as Material, 2013. 24 pp. £7.50

Sharon Kivland’s suite of eight books, Freud on Holiday, is an account of her absorbing project of understanding what may be known of Sigmund Freud and of what may be thought of through Freud as “oneself,” in this instance, by taking his holidays as reconstructed from his psychoanalytic writing, letters, and biographies, and the memoirs of others.

Kivland’s compelling travel narratives are presented through the devices of certain conceptual art (raw accumulation of information, resolutely low-resolution black-and-white images)¹ and the restrained covers that evoke Samuel French professional editions of plays. Kivland draws oblique attention to the ethos of self-theorizing authority latent in these moves, as if October were putting out a stocking stuffer. These nimble, erudite books take the form of apparently breezy and matter-of-fact narratives, and at the same time snag the reader on almost overlooked ironies and feints. Kivland offers insidiously poignant insights both into the ambitions, false starts, and hesitations that dogged Freud’s travel itineraries and intellectual trajectory, and into her own ostensible project, which (again, ironically) disguises itself as a biographer’s quest for explanations or origins in the life lived.

Kivland does not present Freud’s holidays chronologically, but reconstructs them around states of Freud’s mind in certain places: a dream of Rome, a feeling of melancholy in Trieste, a disturbance of memory in Athens, and the navigation of the “cavernous defile” (of actual mountain climbing and of the unconscious in dream). Where Freud visited the same place several times, separate incidents overlap as one state of confusion or memory lapse inflects another, and as Kivland elides her experience, her own Reisemalheurs, migraines, and “occasional mild depression,” with Freud’s (IV:18; references are to volume and page number, though some shorter volumes are not paginated). This points to the questions: By what authority may one know how Freud felt or what he meant? What possible revisitation or reenactment could induce a duplicate or similar state of mind? And, in any event, can a state of mind be modeled? Kivland lightly but intensely models the ways in which Freud has so shaped our understanding of thought that Freud can only be thought through Freud, on Freudian terms.

Kivland draws attention to the misalignments inherent in her reconstructions: her son (who is also, enigmatically, her nephew), her sister, and her proxy Lucia Farinati must substitute for Freud’s travel companions, his wife, sister-in-law, brother, and children. She is thwarted by the intervening century, changes in transport, timetables (Freud’s holidays are incompatible with her son’s school holidays), hotels and buildings no longer there, and so on. Even if she got to Dubrovnik, she wryly points out, how could she arrange an “encounter with a stranger, whom I hoped would prove to be a lawyer, with whom I would discuss ethnic conflicts, politics, the customs of Turks living in Bosnia (the high value they placed on sexual enjoyment and their resignation to death), the magnificent frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto by the painter whose name I would have forgotten?” (III:24). Warping temporalities and ill-fitting actors—and the fact that Freud was on holiday and Kivland is not—create a sense that Freud’s travels have become Kivland’s own screen memory. That serves her quest, which, Craig Saper says in his introduction to volume II, may be “simply put,” as finding the unconscious while on vacation (II:10).

That is a deliberately disingenuous quest, because neither vacations, as being not at home, nor the unconscious can be “simply put.” Kivland’s narratives are complex divagations that take walking as the operative metaphor for narrative structure, quests, and unconscious mental processes as described by Freud. The first book of the series, Freud Dreams of Rome, begins with Anna Freud’s 1948 dream that her father was wandering around lost. Although she was occupied with other things, he called to her. She felt obliged to stop what she was doing to go out walking with him; and yet she resented his call. This is one walk that models Kivland’s own path, structured by the detours, impediments, and mechanisms of substitution, displacement, and overdetermination operating in the Freudian unconscious. When Kivland tells us that her own writing is neurotically inhibited, her inhibition is informed by, even necessitated by, Freud’s observation that “both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act.”² Kivland dryly observes, “As you can imagine, this has given me tremendous difficulties in completing this paper” (I:1). That this particular passage is also found at the end of Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Mehlman’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” points to another inhibition, which is that intellectual precedents and referents, like associations in the unconscious, are endless.

Another narrative frame arising from Anna Freud’s dream is a sense of inertial undoing: “It is as if a renunciation or a form of progress has been undone because she has been called” (I:1). That double direction or stalling is developed in Derrida’s account of the rhythms of Freud’s writing, which, in the sway of the death drive pulling the organism back to an preorganic stasis, “mimes walking, does not cease walking without advancing, regularly sketching out one step more without gaining an inch of ground.”³ Kivland will declare that her writing too is prone to this movement that “caused no movement” (IV: 42). Her prose runs to long recursive sentences and passages that often end in a kind of retreat: “I still do not understand what he meant” (II:87). When Kivland gives a sustained description of Freud’s early, ungratifying, smelly work in Trieste, dissecting eel after eel in the search for the testes, and in search of his own distinction as a scientist, it works as an allegory of the same problem of progress (II:31). Kivland’s project, as a digressive quest narrative, like the irretrievable eel testicles, is both futile and fertile.

Kivland writes ingeniously self-declared borrowed voices, humorously, movingly, and conversationally, with self-interruptive anxieties: “What? —oh yes . . .” she blurts, as if ventriloquizing the Rosalind Krauss of The Picasso Papers (I:4). We hear the off-kilter ingratiation of tourist brochures (“Oh, it is a precious and intimate ensemble that makes guests feel that they are in a private residence,” III:11), or the flattering, urbane voice of advertising that slyly frames Louis Vuitton as copublisher of Derrida’s Counterpath (the target audience might profit from “a series of travel scrapbooks so memories will never fade, illustrated by renowned artists to capture the atmosphere of their chosen cities and containing some blank pages for personal notes and impressions,” III:8). We hear the academic grant applicant justifying the methodology of her exigent “holiday work,” well aware of the predetermined “outcomes” demanded by bureaucracy.

Kivland attends to prose rhythm: where things are most close to the bone, she tactically moves to cantering point form, as if to get past the difficulty: “After Anna’s birth in 1895, sexual abstinence was the only answer: his pleasures were limited: he was not allowed to smoke anything decent and he was done begetting children” (IV:43). One effective device is the use of adjectives so generic as to evaporate descriptive force, in the manner of holiday postcards or tourist brochures: “lovely,” “enchanting,” “wonderful,” “attractive,” “splendid.” These failing adjectives may point more gravely to language’s failure to be adequate to any given situation, to fall into numb euphemism, as in Freud’s observation that the death of a father is “the most poignant loss” (IV:17).

The problem of establishing a persuasive authoritative voice is worked through in Kivland’s long expository tangents freighted with information. The intelligence of this tactic is that the evidentiary value of facticity is undermined by the sheer accumulation of facts. If Freud’s children return from an excursion with burrs, twigs, leaves, insects, and snails stuck to their loden coats, Kivland will give a detailed technical description of loden’s manufacture (IV: 28–29). There are similarly excurses on the implications of wildflowers, mushrooms, walking sticks, and trains. Where these seem tangential—what does the manufacture of loden have to do with it?—they are most pertinent: a psychoanalyst might well be drawn to the phallic “fuller’s teasel,” that “prickly flowering plant with a cup-like form made where the sessile leaves meet the stem” used to brush loden, and to its shaved nap, as she well knows (IV:29). Folk costumes and uniforms and their accessories, as worn by Freud’s children, by Kivland, by her traveling proxy Farinati, and by anonymous locals in tourist postcards, crop up throughout. Although now a “costume of tourism and beer gardens” (IV:30), they generate an uneasy psychosexual undertow of the seductive völkisch nationalism (the “attractive” embroidered laces of her son’s lederhosen) that accessorized uniformed Fascism, and of the anti-Semitism that refracted Freud (here) as wandering Jew (IV:31–32).

Kivland’s seemingly and intermittently obsessive, circling descriptions of things always yield something of Freud. When she points out that a dirndl for holiday photographs may now be rented, and that “hourly rates are also available” (IV:31), that hourly rate points to measured time. Time erupts through these narratives, inflected by Freud’s own grappling with the delays and deferral between present perception and the filtration of the mnemic system with its traces and erasures, and with the difference between time in the unconscious and conscious.⁴ To condense one of Kivland’s characteristically veering narratives: Taking a wrong turn on the way to the Freud Museum in Vienna, she found herself in a street that she realized she had been in once before when writing her first book about Freud’s “Dora” case, and then recognized the Hotel Orient where part of the film The Third Man, based on the novels of Arthur Schnitzler, was filmed. Freud approved Schnitzler’s insights into sexuality. (Kivland points outside her text at every turn: we might add Schnitzler’s Reigen, structured as a round of sexual encounters, beginning and ending with the same “whore.”) The Hotel Orient, she tells us, opened in 1896 as a maison de passe, renting rooms by the hour. That paid hour is refracted by the metered hour imposed by technological modernity and railway timetables, horaires, which are echoed in the strict psychoanalytic hour that meant to signal a conscious scientizing rigor in approaching the unconscious, in which the past covertly governs thought in the present. Kivland reminds us that the French railway crossing sign, un train peut en cacher un autre, pertains in the unconscious (IV:66). In machine modernity, a train timetable hides something unruly that disrupts the train of thought.

While it is impossible to encapsulate Kivland’s accounts of Freud’s different incidents and travels, Rome is a key case, beginning with Freud’s frequent postponing of his journey to the city, which he dreamt about four times while working on The Interpretation of Dreams. Kivland’s photographs of Rome are inscrutable, not the received angles on monuments and vistas that the proto-tourist might imagine. It is as if we were near but not yet at what we mean to see. (The outmoded technique of gluing in the photographs enhances the sense of something archaic or uncanny in the photographs themselves.) Rome functioned in a peculiar way for Freud, as its secular classicism was a bulwark against the Rome of Christian anti-Semitism (I:5–6). In keeping with symbolic representations in the unconscious, Freud’s Rome is overdetermined by other towns and cities he visited and dreamt about (Paris, Siena, Trieste), and by other voyagers (the classical Ulysses, Leopold Bloom) and writers (sometimes Jewish) associated with them (Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba, as well as James Joyce), brought together in a snarl of correspondence and coincidences.

Cryptically interposed through Freud on Holiday are drawings, tourist and childhood snapshots, personal and anonymous, from the truly poignant to the unnerving: everyone looks like a revenant in an old photograph, but now with an accrued, knowing chic. That is, Kivland is the master of wrenchingly unstable tone, pulling the mat out from under our positions at every turn. There are also postcards and the texts of postcards sent to Kivland from her unknown correspondents in the elliptical manner of the genre. The postcard chapters are called “envois,” engaging with Derrida’s metaphor of the post office that transmits or stores all texts, reconfiguring history, and disrupting chronology, cause and effect, and precedence. In the postal, everyone is a facteur de la vérité transmitting and recasting narratives from her own particular unverifiable perspective, and when Kivland invites the artist Farinati to be her proxy on Freud’s holidays in northern Italy, it is as a facteur de la vérité (IV:73).

In Freud Dreams of Rome Kivland proposes the narrative model of a walk, which draws attention to the way her text will refer to others: “The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk: at the beginning, the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees)” (I:1). Kivland navigates that forest of authors, precedents, and heirs (as, in her other work, she has followed Marx and Freud in Paris, “in the shadow of Lacan”), knowing that, with what she knows, she cannot walk except “in the footsteps of.” Derrida’s postal particularly traces the problematic paths of influence and predecessors. Crucial to Derrida’s dismantling of Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter” is Lacan’s failure to mention the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte’s earlier analysis of Poe’s story, in which the letter hanging on a little knob on the kitchen fireplace is a symbol of female genitalia.⁵ Derrida accuses Lacan of dismissing the legacy of a woman psychoanalyst: “Why relegate the question to the kitchen, as if to an outbuilding, and the woman who answers it to the status of a cook?”⁶ Enter Kivland as woman, psychoanalyst, and facteur de la vérité. Her Derridean postal work may identify lacunae within the narrative, producing a piece of “supplementary history” that can be embedded in abîme within “another lacuna that is bigger or smaller,” like psychoanalytic matryoshka dolls of the (missing) maternal phallus.⁷

As walker as woman as follower Kivland situates herself within Derrida’s investigations of psychoanalysis, and within his argument with Lacan, involving suppression of sources, questions of legacy, and the role of woman as and as not phallus. Where Derrida countered Lacan’s logocentric claim that “a letter always arrives at its destination” with the necessity that a letter “always might not arrive at its destination,”⁸ Kivland negotiates the conflicting predecessors: she would like to believe that a letter or postcard always arrives at its destination while being “haunted” by the idea that it may not (II: 45). Her postcards shuttle texts and temporalities to frame her “following” (both in the sense of coming after, and of comprehending what is being said), treating her quandaries with light ironies. Freud on Holiday is a test case of following, amending, acknowledging, and perhaps losing the plot of what has been written before.

Kivland’s position and voice as a woman is always at stake: she moves in and out of the positions of women actual, literary, mythic, imagined—Anna Freud, Antigone, Lucia Joyce. She traces the difficulties of a quest or narrative undertaken by a walker, especially Anna Freud, who, as a psychoanalyst, was the only one of Freud’s children to fulfill the metaphorical “walking in the footsteps of.” But Kivland’s Anna Freud is also Anna Freud as questioned by Derrida through Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi—more forest of authors—who had asked whether Anna Freud could in fact speak in her father’s name.⁹ (Freud had not wanted psychoanalysis to be “Jewish,” but rather a universal model of the mind; yet after the Second World War Anna declared that it was an honor for psychoanalysis to be considered a “Jewish science.”) Who may speak for whom? By what authority could Anna Freud, not only as Freud’s daughter, but also as a woman, speak even for herself? Kivland refers to her own “impossible reconstructions” as “an act of ventriloquism,” but hopes that there is more at work than simply “an imitation of speech and voice, an empty parroting” (IV:18). Yet arguably the parrot’s version is already a modification, a Derridean lacuna.

In A Cavernous Defile, Kivland identifies with the “Gradiva,” a Roman relief of a woman walking with a peculiar high step, graceful and forceful. That relief was transformed in Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1903) and in Freud’s long analysis of the novel, so that Gradiva became not so much an active walker as a hallucinated, misrecognized object, a consequence of repression and male desire. Could Kivland’s walking possibly reclaim Gradiva’s self-possession? When Kivland concludes that she will go back to Rome “as Anna and Sigmund,” but “above all” as herself (IV:132), we want to imagine that Kivland has worked through, or walked off, whatever inhibited her.

Through Kivland’s writing there is a graver undertow of mortality than that afforded by four hundred dissected eels: in the cryogenic pall of postcards and photographs, in Freud’s theme of dead fathers, which now include Freud. As we read, models for narrative structured like the unconscious accumulate, from the weird looping ribbons of eel testicles to the branching threadlike spread of mycelium (given Freud’s love of mushroom hunting). With the tragicomic incongruity of representations in the unconscious, these ribbons and threads overdetermine the spool in the famous fort-da game played by Freud’s grandson, who wished for his mother’s return: a spool is cast away and retrieved by the string, a child crouches down to make himself appear and disappear in the mirror. Freud’s account of the fort-da game became an act of his own devastating mourning.

From the theoretical thicket—the cavernous defile, the forest—Kivland emerges into four little appendix books, Freud’s Weather, Freud’s Dining, Freud’s Hotels, Freud’s Shopping. Sometimes the accounts are Freud’s, sometimes Kivland’s, sometimes they are from hotel brochures. They are minor records and footnotes as the main story, setting up their own narratives, pleasurably taking the floor. She says she regrets not making an appendix book on Freud’s mentions of his intestinal troubles “to which I do not think I can devote an entire pamphlet” (IV:84). Here, the eel’s testicles find a looping counterpart.

Kivland’s work yields Freuds—father, mushroom hunter, traveler, thinker, walker, writer—but, unlike one train concealing another, yields no concealed Freud. These compelling narratives do not tend toward one particular aha moment or devastating Derridean lacuna that might be plucked from the mise-en-abîme. Kivland’s enterprise could be contrasted with the more usual investigative procedure of the historian or biographer. For example, in order to fathom the causes of an incident of Freud’s forgetting a name and his persistent “Moses complex,” Franz Maciejewski retraced a holiday Freud had taken in1898 with his sister-in-law Minna, and discovered from an old hotel register that they had shared a room as man and wife. This has caused consternation in psychoanalytic circles. Kivland turns to the Minna question with oblique wit, noting that Freud and Minna were overcome by a “paralyzing weakness” in Innsbruck; and yet, she says, she will not add to the speculation on the subject of their relationship (IV:25 and IV:43).

At the end of A Cavernous Defile, Kivland talks to Vera, the present-day proprietor of the hotel where Freud stayed. Unlike Maciejewski’s hotelier, Vera doesn’t have much to reveal that isn’t in the hotel brochure, except that “a man from Rome, a writer,” comes to stay in the hotel every year, and that he is writing a book about Freud’s holidays there (IV:115). Yet we know, thanks to Kivland’s oblique signals throughout, that whatever the aspiration or intention of this double may be, he too will never attain or become his object of study. A caution to us all.

This review was originally published in the Spring 2015 issue of Art Journal.

The post Not Getting There Is Half the Fun: Holidays with Freud appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America

Bound to Appear is not about the comforts of representation. In other words, this work does not circle back to dominant representations that erase the violent and untenable realities of being black. This ruse of representational access suggests that black experience is penetrable, relatable, and speakable. This book is definitely not about recuperative or romantic understandings of black experience, black artists, or black art writ large. In short, it doesn’t make us feel good. Instead, it leads us to the limits of representational discourse, to something deeper and more opaque. This book is about the antiportrait, everyday objects with violent histories, and installations that call attention to how the visual field is always already touched by blackness, if not saturated by it.

Huey Copeland articulates the uncomfortable and often purposefully neglected shared genealogy between the materialized object and the black body. As Hortense Spillers so brilliantly details in her iconic 1987 article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”—a piece of writing that Copeland himself returns to throughout Bound to Appear—this shared genealogy between objects and black bodies can be traced to the Middle Passage, where human cargo was accounted for based on its quantifiable relationship to money.¹ This system of valuation translated across varying objects in the ship’s hold, from barrels of sugar to black captives, where worth was determined based on rules of accounting (72). Thus, the Middle Passage marks an attempted ontological and epistemological equivalence between black sentient beings and objects extracted for trade. This desired and imposed equivalence, though limited in its ability to account for how and when these black “things” resist, lingers both structurally and visually within contemporary art.

Copeland’s book turns to site-specific installations executed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, years that geopolitically also generated a peculiar discursive and material turn toward “multiculturalism” and “globalization”—terms often said to embody cultural formations of the decade. This turn often praised cultural formations that attended to apolitical meditations on the diasporic, and often away from the specificity of blackness in the United States. Copeland turns to Fred Wilson, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, and Renée Green, whose works critique the romance afforded to the discourse of multicultural diaspora precisely through their centralization of slavery as an originary diasporic practice, the foundational entry into modernity, and the primary zone of racialization.

Copeland examines multiple works by this cohort of black American artists whose oeuvre marks how blackness was and is structured by slavery through their uses of installations that foregrounded the body (both in terms of flesh and object)—its presence, absence, and abjection—in all its subjection and radical capacity. Each chapter leads us into strategies for materializing slavery and its afterlives, as well as for reconceptualizing the terms of black freedom.

In chapter 1, we are introduced to Wilson’s work as it posits a particular rhetoric of redress that accounts for how his famed juxtapositions are usually read. Copeland insists that Wilson’s best-known show, Mining the Museum (1992), is often hailed precisely because it is said to register the “speech of reformist grievance” that is a legible and even acceptable way to package black suffering, even while Wilson stages moments of immense, incomprehensible loss that works against the grain of reformism itself (21). In this reading, Copeland extends Wilson’s work by positing Wilson’s ability to adjust vision through the language of redress. By this means, Wilson stages “rhetorics of reparative speech” as a demonstration of black approaches to figuration that open up new conditions of possibility for seeing, hearing, or feeling black suffering in ways that do not register upon arrival (26).

For example, in a compelling argumentative turn, Copeland details Wilson’s display of a large unglazed clay water jug made around 1830 by a slave named Melinda. The jug was placed alongside other examples of “slaves’ creative labor” in a darkened hallway near the close of the exhibition (49). Copeland describes the jug’s presence as a particular turn in Wilson’s methodology of display, in which the object is placed without the sort of sonic, textual, or archival juxtapositions that appear elsewhere throughout Mining. The jug’s presentation, as the “recalcitrant fact of the thing itself,” recalibrates the viewer’s sight in such a way that one is urged to think through the history of objects, objecthood, and blackness as a history of sentient thingness imbued with radicality (49). Or, as Copeland so brilliantly illuminates, Melinda’s jug extends Martin Heidegger’s jug, as it offers an “opportunity both to hear things in all of their radical alterity and to apprehend the flesh that undergirds the historical construction of objecthood” (50).

While Wilson’s uses of objects often stage comprehensible models to account for black grievance, Copeland suggests in his second chapter that Simpson’s work aims to haunt the viewer, and therefore works within the racialized and sexualized excesses of black pain. In his discussion of Simpson’s Five Rooms (1991), Copeland unfolds how the history of slavery aligns with the history of the object. He offers us a psychoanalytic analysis of the materialized object that we can use in art history—one that tracks how transitional objects (as theorized by Donald Winnecott), part-objects (Melanie Klein), and malignant objects map directly onto Simpson’s particular figuration of the black body. According to Copeland, Simpson’s Five Rooms applies objects as extensions of (rather than departures from) her earlier figurative bodies in antiportraits such as Guarded Conditions (1989). Her use of rice, water, and dolls is staged to make present the black female body, while also activating gestures toward the “alreadymade” quality of blackness with or without figures, objects, bodies, or artworks that maintain its presence. In an exceptional turn on the art-historical embrace of the Duchampian readymade, Copeland rhetorically assembles how in Five Rooms, “blackness is ‘alreadymade,’ capable of being evoked with the lightest of touches” (99). As alreadymade, blackness is a historical object/subject/feeling/being that reaches far before the 1913 call to see commodities in other lights, stagings, and presentations. The lightness of touch refers to both the haptic weight of Duchamp’s heavy-handedness and the color of his epidermis—both epistemologically referenced in Simpson’s works with or without the figure and always through the material objects of slavery and its afterlives. In other words, the natural world of trees is colored by the haptic and epidermal weight of lynching; each grain of rice transfigured by both commodity and communion as crucial components to the slave economy; and the clarity of water marked with the opacity of slaves who jumped overboard to escape the “peculiar institution”—each is colored, each is lighted, each is marked, each is alreadymade by blackness.

The alreadymade quality of blackness displayed in Five Rooms offers us the stage on which chapter 3 introduces the notion of black resistance, which in Ligon’s practice is visualized as what Copeland terms “fugitivity.” Copeland demonstrates how the artist’s uses of text and color play with how blackness constitutes formal, technical, historical, and social meanings. In other words, black text printed on white walls embraces the politics of contrast and reveals the contours of racialization. Ligon’s practice, as Copeland contends, is to give shape to the nothingness that has come to constitute blackness (110). While those shapes often share sharp edges—most of Ligon’s works are framed by the uses of square or rectangular composition—Copeland limits a discussion of the politics of sharp edges in relation to the politics of blackness, which I believe would further his argument on the tenacity and searing surfaces and interiors of Ligon’s work.

However, Copeland details how both lawlessness and fugitivity are spatial practices that appear in Ligon’s early critiques of the delimitations that organize black movement in cities through “lines of force” that structure the “policing function of the grid” (120). Works such as Picky (1993) conceptually seed what would become the material of To Disembark (1993), primarily through their assertion that black fugitivity requires transitory states of being that are historically preceded by and learned through slavery (121). The notion of fugitivity sediments in Copeland’s discussion of the shipping crates that appear in To Disembark. Ligon’s boxes cite and site Henry “Box” Brown’s heroic 1849 escape from slavery, a feat he completed by shipping himself across state lines in a three-foot-wide, two-foot-long wooden box. Copeland’s writing on Ligon’s crates suggests that fugitivity operates as both a synonym for blackness and a strategy for black people. In other words, Copeland poetically grants subjectivity to these crates as slave-surrogates, which as objects and commodities echo the object-status of the enslaved, and therefore become—through surface and interior—kinds of blackened bodies that anchor in place the spatial practices of fugitives. Elsewhere, Copeland hauntingly notes that while the black body is absented in To Disembark, we are thrown onto the “skin of the object”—these crates become “corporeal armors” that protect the fugitives inside, while also somehow becoming black themselves (145). Once again Copeland instantiates how the emptying-out that these crates produce leads us to the structural (versus only visual) dereliction of fugitives, and therefore all blacks.

In his final chapter, Copeland turns to the work of Green as she stages the vexed multiplicity of black placelessness marked by the omnipresence of slavery’s touch. This chapter focuses on three visual and tactile deployments that could have been conceptually bridged with more fortitude: spatial enclosures, placelessness, and finally decorative fabrications. While all three embody Green’s oeuvre, Copeland’s analysis particularly shines when he discusses Green’s 1990 installation Sites of Genealogy, at PS1 in Queens, in which he centralizes her conceptual and site-specific uses of two kinds of black literary narratives—Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Copeland fleshes out Green’s particular citational and situational methods in the attic space in Sites, in which Green constructed a space similar to that once constructed by Jacobs herself. Green shaped the attic space into a place of spatial enclosure where the artist was herself protected by a stringed border within which she was free to write, rest, weave, mount a ladder, or peer through a telescope affixed to the building’s exterior (163). In many ways an extension of Jacobs’s garret, in which she hid for seven years to escape her master’s sexual advances while retaining a peephole through which she could constantly see his movements to and from the building, Green mobilized the immanent ambiguity under constraint that embodies the black female gaze in the history of contemporary art (164). Copeland insightfully asserts that Jacobs’s small, self-bored hole is an activation of her incarceration and thus amplifies Green’s deployment of a literally telescopic gaze—both unevenly sighting/siting/citing black female uses of the look to manage the scenes of their subjection.

In his discussion of black placelessness, Copeland calls Green’s primary tactic a petit marronage (borrowing the definition from the historian Richard Price), that is, the “practice among New World slave populations of ‘repetitive or periodic truancy with temporary goals’” (172). In his analysis, Green’s wandering sojourns attended to the “differential meaning of migration in the modern era” in light of how slavery marked the first forced, globalized, diasporic migration of entire populations, and thus all contemporary understandings of movement and transportability must contend with what it means to move, wander, and self-transport if one is black (172). The punishing calibration of enforced placelessness makes its way into Green’s video experiments, which explore what it means to be black and in touch with the ground beneath one’s feet—a practice that requires understanding the value of place, without having access to it.

Finally, the chapter ends with an extended discussion of Green’s arguably best-known work, Mise-en-Scène (1991), and its later iterations. Copeland beautifully details the visual imagery Green eventually borrowed in the making of her own toile after her initial exhibition in Nantes, France. During a 1992 residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Green produced her own fabric, which captured the horrors contemporaneous with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century production of toile in Nantes (179). Copeland illuminates the fabric’s circulation during the triangular trade in which African slaves were sold in exchange for raw cotton, which was sold to merchants to produce textiles that were used to purchase more slaves (178). The fabric—made with the very cotton picked by slaves who were themselves bought and sold to make more fabric—operates in Green’s work for its decorative tactility. Copeland tracks the visual iconography of slavery Green imbricates into the fabric’s traditional white background with leisurely patterning in order to situate its eventual application to sofas, chairs, curtains, and other staples of interior domestic space. In this move, another kind of spatial enclosure is created—one that argues domestic space or home is perhaps only available to white life with all its sentient and decorative luxuries. While the fabric itself is, of course, structured by black experience and history, the fabric’s application calls attention to white domestic luxuries produced by slave labor. Green self-fabricates black subjection into the very materials produced from black enslavement.

In this final gesture, Copeland’s analysis of Green’s uses of spatial enclosure, placelessness, and the racialization of decorative fabrics could have circled back to the interplay among looking, moving, and touching—all three of which are activated throughout Green’s works discussed here. With further elaboration on the triangulation of looking, moving, and touching—much like the triangulation of the transatlantic slave trade—Copeland could have furthered an implied argument pertaining to Green’s critique of modernity’s pleasures, all of which require the structural degradation of black bodies.

Bound to Appear seamlessly threads how blackness inhabits the visual field in ways that differ from other kinds of racialized and sexualized subject formations. This difference is marked by how blackness shares genealogical proximity to the object—a centralizing figure in the history of contemporary art. Copeland tracks how Wilson, Simpson, Ligon, and Green misdirect art history’s romance with the object by confrontationally staging scenes in which objects that were once taxonomized in relation to slaves come to act as surrogates for black bodies. By presenting objects as radical substitutes for people, Copeland argues, these contemporary black artists create conceptual racial antagonisms from which we cannot escape precisely because these antagonisms unequivocally argue that the material world is, albeit unevenly, touched, inflected, and made by blackness. Bound to Appear adjusts our vision, tunes our listening practices, and recalibrates our haptic sensibilities to see blackness everywhere, in all its pain and promises of resistance.

Sampada Aranke holds a PhD in performance studies and is currently a visiting assistant professor in art history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research and writing engage performance theories of embodiment, corpses and corporeality, histories of dispossession, radical print media, and black cultural theory.

This review originally appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Art Journal.

The post Objects Made Black appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013 (photograph by Jonathan Muzikar © 2013 Museum of Modern Art)

On view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 15 to September 23, 2013, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes was expansive, densely packed, exhaustive, and, similar to past architecture shows organized by MoMA’s former Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design Barry Bergdoll, rewarding but exhausting. With more than three hundred twenty objects, including drawings, paintings, maquettes, films, found objects, and reconstructed interiors, the show did not so much redefine the illustrious career of the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965, né Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) as play out the earthy side of the man—curves and crags rather than right angles and smooth surfaces. The show gave primacy to the Swiss Jura instead of the French dalle, asymmetrical mountains over artificial ground data, while, in reality, it is the latter that would ultimately have greater material presence in the architect’s oeuvre.

That la dalle, or the plinth, was elemental to Le Corbusier’s practice but not framed as catalytic here, however, does not mean the show’s focus on the natural landscape was off base or wrong-headed. Rather, what emerges from this broad overview of the land and site in his work is a rethinking of the hardness of such artificial surfaces. We find a union of the soft and firm—a warm and tactile sense of cold architectural construction—bodying forth from the exhibition. Or perhaps I should say, such a union rallied forth from the body itself, as this exhibition suggests (even if ever so slightly) a turn toward a revisionist, body-based modernism.

Bergdoll and guest curator Jean-Louis Cohen, a professor of architectural history at New York University, resituated Le Corbusier’s modernism in terms of the ground plane, i.e., site-specificity and place. This review, like the show, pivots according to two primary terms: landscape and revisionist modernism. Situating this resituating, as it were, is no easy task. There have been no remarkable trends in either area—landscape and ecology, or revisionist modernism—of architectural discourse lately. There have been, perhaps more simply stated, some important mile markers. First, thus, a lay of the land . . .

In the realm of “landscape,” the Cooper Union hosted an exhibition on a related topic, Lessons from Modernism: Environmental Design Considerations in 20th Century Architecture, January–March 2013. On the West Coast, several exhibitions focused on the site-specific nature of modern architecture in Los Angeles as part of the omnibus curatorial extravaganza Pacific Standard Time, April through September 2013. Most topical of all, the book The Modern Architectural Landscape (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) by Caroline Constant, who spoke in September at the MoMA symposium connected to the exhibition, looks to earth and environment in Le Corbusier’s work as well as in that of other moderns, including Mies van der Rohe, Erik Gunnar Asplund, and Jože Plečnik.

There is very little in the way of a broad movement of revisionist modernism currently underway. We might nonetheless look to Lukasz Stanek’s edited anthology, Team 10 East: Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2014), for a will to reframe modernism. Stanek’s book follows after more than a decade the overt attempt at category-busting in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (2001), edited by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault. Prior to such accounts, we must look deeper into the past to find instances of late and hybrid modernisms, such as those as offered up in Reyner Banham’s Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (University of Chicago Press, 1969) and Leo Marx’s literature-based The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964).

Then there is the ever-vibrant discourse of territoire/territory in Europe, which seems to be the closest approximation of an ongoing trend in rethinking modern architectural and planning initiatives in landscape, region, and environmental transformation. In the last two years alone, there have been exhibitions of the work of the French architect Dominique Perrault, of Flemish architecture and the Belgian landscape, and of contemporary art, collecting, and regional architecture practices, all of which were organized under the theme of territory.

To locate the strongest, most palpable instance of modernism after modernism in the present moment, one must look outside the confines of conventional architecture and urban practices. Rather than revisionist modernism, the equally lively contemporary art, design, and theory practices of media and new media art constitute a striking instance of nonstop modernism—i.e., modernism that never quit. The interactive media work of architect-artists such as Philip Beesley, Manuel Kretzer, and Ted Krueger are part of the continuation in the twenty-first century of Bauhaus light-art and mid-twentieth-century kinetic sculpture and early digital art.

Le Corbusier, Cabanon, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, 1951–52, re-creation of the interior, 2006, manufactured by Cassina SpA, Milan (photograph by Jonathan Muzikar © 2013 Museum of Modern Art)

Where do the themes of landscape and revisionist modernism within Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes fit in this overview of our current moment? The show falls somewhere along the edges, rather than at the center of any of these beginnings. This non-edgy edginess tells plainly this: Bergdoll and Cohen are not trailblazers or avant-gardists seeking to revolutionize Le Corbusier but wise and strategic keepers of Le Corbusier’s myth, legend, and reality. They retell the story of Le Corbusier’s practice markedly not in the more loaded ideological terms of “ecology,” “environment,” or “nature,” but according to the slightly pallid term “landscape.” With its deep connections to classical training in architecture (by way of sketches made during the Grand Tour) and to classical training in painting (by way of Claude Lorrain, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze), landscape safely, that is, nonpolitically, shines the light of newness on Le Corbusier. This was not a political show, neither a prise de parole for global warming nor a cri de coeur for the Kyoto Protocol. While not taking an overtly green or even ideologically ecological stand, the stakes were, at the same time, implicit enough. With melting glacial poles weighing on the collective consciousness and the limitations of petroleum pressing, it is the right time for a Le Corbusier of the landscape.

At the same time, the idea that those who know and love Le Corbusier would have ever located him far from landscape is preposterous in the first place. His work was always about landscape, its many splendors, artificial and otherwise. Cohen looked precisely to this condition, reframing Le Corbusier according to a dynamic, protean, and manmade conceptualization of the landscape. In an essay in the compendious exhibition catalogue, Cohen writes about landscape in Le Corbusier’s work as a matter of both soil and sand, grounded and aerial, tactile and acoustic. He explains, “Landscape’s most fertile role in Le Corbusier’s thinking retained nothing of the literal; it involves neither geographic interpretation nor landscape’s active or reactive presence in his project. Landscape was edifying . . . because it generated analogies and metaphors, figures of speech that had immense importance in all of his work, as his most provocative aphorisms such as ‘The house is a machine for living in.’”¹ As hard surfaces reveal their fleshy underbelly, so too does the machine show its humanity.

The sprawling exhibition was organized around four themes, creating an intermittently linear narrative to the show: the landscape of found objects, domestic landscape, architectural landscape of the modern city, and vast planned territories. The curators launched the exhibition with a Janus-faced symbol: a reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s getaway cabin on the shores of the Mediter­ranean, the Cabanon from Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (1951–52), where Le Corbusier conceptualized his later work and where he died. It is a small and simple space with bark-covered exterior planks and a casually appointed interior, and with rustic modern furniture crafted by the carpenter Charles Barberis. The cabin was a small space for big ideas, where the architect escaped to chisel away at projects as part of the ongoing process of the thinking and rethinking of architecture. This reconstruction offers a modern approximation of the primitive hut on the frontispiece to Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essay on Architecture (1755). Like Laugier’s hut, and, for that matter, the trope of the primitive as it wandered its way through modernism of la longue durée, Le Corbusier’s Monte Carlo rustic cabin is a symbolic space intended to catalyze intellectual and creative apertures—openings to the new.

Beyond this point the exhibition wended its ways through the life of Le Corbusier primarily by way of objects—a notable and important quality of the exhibition. While there were plenty of architectural renderings, they were, largely speaking, a minority. There were many sketches but few instrumental drawings. Le Corbusier’s “stuff” is far more present in the show, including furniture, small and large architectural and urban models, and films, but also the glassware that apparently inspired some of his Purist paintings from the early 1920s, the “Objects of Poetic Reaction” (shells, bone, tree bark) that inspired his Léger-influenced paintings of the late 1920s, and of course many of the actual paintings. These objects functioned as muse-like objects of allure. As they invited unwarranted touch, they underscored the tactile side of the architect’s greater artistic practice, pointing as well to the many paintings in which they appear.

The emphasis on the everyday things of his life is ideological in a productive way: it helps to define landscape as quotidian and a matter of philosophical materialism. In the portion of the exhibition devoted to his early development in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, for example, the walls were covered with the perspective drawings, small sketches, and midsize watercolors by Le Corbusier and the large paintings of his teacher Charles L’Eplattenier, but notably few other architectural drawings. Without plans or axonometrics of the Villa Jeanneret-Perret or Villa Schwob, Le Corbusier reads in this entry space of the exhibition as sensuous and affective rather than cerebral and rational, a designer of landscape and feeling rather than hard transaction.

The film clips, contemporary panoramic photographs of existing projects, and an ancillary but fresh organizational theme of “airplane views” undergird the soft and fuzzy interface between technology and the mortal coil. Shot by Le Corbusier in the 1930s and recently discovered, silent films evinced the centrality of play in his design, showing young people moving energetically through his white cubic architecture. Smiling, lithe, and clad in bathing suits, they exercised in small groups, racing up and down ramps. Commissioned especially for the show, Richard Pare’s panoramic photographs of Le Corbusier’s work in the present offered an unexpected counterpoint to the many and sometimes leaden artifacts of the show. Pare’s long, tight photos of seven projects—made from digital files based on negatives—functioned as a twenty-first-century respite in the world of contemporary technology. Hung high above the din of the objects below, they looked from afar like sharp photorealist paintings or high-definition screens. Pare’s photographs invigorated Le Corbusier’s work in ways perhaps unforeseen, with shots of color pixels making for a touristic sense of real-time viewing. Further rethinking the view from afar, the curators’ emphasis on the airplane as a writing tool serves to reposition the totalizing Gestalt of the modernist plan-masse. Rather than cool, rational, and popping forth in full form from the head of a genius, this was modernism as tactile and in-process: a matter of the human-machine in motion and the prosthetic. In a catalogue essay, Bergdoll expands this sentiment through Le Corbusier’s love of the airplane: “Airplanes were an integral part of the way he conceived of his buildings as instruments for crafting both optical and bodily relationships to landscapes; the notion of the landscape encompassed everything from the physical occupation of an interior to the projected occupation of an exterior framed by any number of devices.”² The landscape as a theme in Le Corbusier’s work was truly fathomless: a matter of mountains, cars, concrete, and otherworldly imaginings. At the same time, each landscape generated a dialect of precision and homogeneity. In the small watercolor Landscape of Lake Geneva (1918), the Swiss mountains are evanescent though very real and site-specific. By contrast, his proposal for the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva (1927) shows a complete complex of buildings, a totalizing plan-masse that could have been anywhere. In an axonometric view from the west, there is not a single mountain in view. Following a similar pattern of variations on a theme, São Paulo, Rio de Janiero, and Algiers became would-be locales for sinuous architectures born from seemingly bland automotive infrastructure. While our collective caricature of the automobile is that it wreaks homogenous havoc in its wake, for Le Corbusier it was a way to sculpt the landscape and create unique and mesmerizing architecture and experiences for drivers, so many earthbound cyborgs.

Parsing Le Corbusier’s lifework into periods, the exhibition knit tightly together the beginning and the end, leaving his middle career as not so much an afterthought but simply part of the systemic passage-through. From this perspective, the placeless, diagrammatic Do-mi-no House (1914) culminates not in the Maison Citrohan (1920–22) or the Quartiers Modernes Frugès at Pessac (1924–26), but in the sublimity of the Philips Pavilion (1958) at the Exposition Universelle in Brussels, with the schematic simplicity of the former coming to full fruition in the fierce yawp of angular and sonic form that was Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis’s poème électronique.

Charissa N. Terranova is the author of Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (University of Texas Press, 2014). She teaches the history of contemporary art, modern architecture, and media and new media theory at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is currently writing a prehistory of the digital image in art, Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image in Art, 1920–1970 (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris, London). It traces the role of cognition, Gestalt psychology, and theoretical biology in the unfolding of an aesthetic and philosophy of the light-image.

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Art Journal.

The post Between Ecology and Looking Back: Environment and Revisionism in Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes appeared first on Art Journal Open.

Claire Elliott and Robert Gober. Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible. Houston: The Menil Collection, 2013. 112 pp., 71 color ills. $60

Chuck Smith. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle. New York: Power House Books, 2013.

Although mystery has surrounded the life of Forrest Bess since he died in 1977, quite a bit of the cloud is dispelled in Chuck Smith’s new book, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle. A follow-up to a film Smith made in 1999, it is an ideal combination of monograph and biography. Copies and quotes from correspondence (found in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art), photos of Bess in his isolated bayou home studio and the watery landscape surrounding it, and numerous plates of his riveting small paintings give a real sense of the life of this extremely arcane artist.

Smith’s intimate knowledge of details is crucial as the story becomes increasingly bizarre. Bess began experiencing visions when he was a child, and after an early period of figurative expressionism influenced by Van Gogh, his paintings were exclusively copied from shapes that he saw in the brief moments when he closed his eyes before and after sleep. Bess also believed that uniting his male and female sides by becoming a pseudo-hermaphrodite would lead to psychic wholeness. His writings include an extensive thesis, marshaling examples culled from religious, mythological, alchemic, and literary texts to support his desire for an opening between his penis and his testicles that could contain another penis.

Bess is perhaps unique among self-taught visionary artists because the purity and originality of his paintings are so familiar to a modernist, reductive sensibility. Non-mainstream spiritual sects such as theosophy influenced many of the inventors of abstract painting, including Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich, but these ideas did not seem to completely dominate their art or life as Bess’s thesis did; nor were they so dangerously physical. The therapeutic nature of Bess’s work, along with his desire for a radical transformation, suggest that he believed that he had to change his material body in order to be able to continue to create.

In addition to the spiritual benefits of becoming a hermaphrodite, which Bess believed would provide unimpeded access to the unconscious and a unified psyche, he hoped that backed-up testosterone would flow into his body, restoring his youth and health. As Smith reports, he was happy to find evidence for this expectation in the research of the Austrian endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, who had experimented with causing the hormone to increase in the body by tying off the vas deferens in rat and dogs, then men, and had published a book with photographic evidence of the regeneration thus produced (Smith, 88–89). Bess believed that such pseudo hermaphroditism could lead to immortality.

The art historian Meyer Schapiro and gallerist Betty Parsons (who also represented Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman) listened to Bess sympathetically, but they were captivated by the simplicity and power of his images rather than by his theories. “These grave little pictures, so broad and firm in conception, have held up over the years,” Schapiro wrote in the catalogue essay for a retrospective exhibition at the Parsons Gallery in 1962. “We cannot read them as the author does; but, undeciphered, we feel the beauty and completeness of his art” (quoted in Smith, 118).

Claire Elliott and Robert Gober. Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible. Houston: The Menil Collection, 2013.

Smith writes in his preface that “I have tried to act more as an editor than a writer; restraining my subjectivity as much as possible,” and indeed a large part of the book consists of quoted letters (6). Thus, Smith does not attempt much analysis of the work, leaving that to Bess and his correspondents. Aspects of Bess’s biography are organized, partially chronologically and partially by theme, including chapters on his theories, his surgeries, and his friendship with Schapiro.

Bess was born in Bay City, Texas, on October 5, 1911. His father was a roughneck, performing skilled manual labor in oil fields, and also selling land leases. Penniless after retiring, he moved to the tiny coastal town of Chinquapin and began selling tiny bait shrimp to fishermen. On his mother’s side, Bess was descended from painters. His grandmother (who died in an insane asylum) made fantastic images that were later destroyed by Bess’s mother and uncle. His mother made naive pictures of houses and trees.

Although he was athletic and did well in school, Bess grew up feeling like an outsider, perhaps due to his growing awareness of attraction to other men. Homosexuality was problematic, since revelation always led to trouble. He confided to someone at home and was ostracized. After spending time working in oilfields and traveling to Mexico, he moved to Houston, where he felt he was too masculine to fit into the gay scene. During the Second World War, he did well in the army until he got drunk and opened up. A homophobe hit him in the head with a pipe, precipitating a nervous breakdown.

After the army Bess lived in San Antonio, where he painted and sold frames, and then moved to Chinquapin to help his father with the bait business. He was happy to get away from other artists and live at the site of his childhood vacations, where he could focus more clearly on his visions. Once there, however, he stayed in the closet to protect his father’s business. Still, he privately embraced his sexual orientation, which he confided in letters to friends. “I swore the day I got out of the army that never again would anyone have the opportunity to use a lead pipe—heels, or blackmail against me for being homosexual,” Bess wrote in 1949 to his Woodstock friends Sidney and Rosalie Berkowitz. “There is no reason to declare to the whole world that I am ‘queer,’ however should I be asked there would be no reason to lie or hide anything” (quoted in Smith, 28).

Bess’s mature body of work began when he decided to paint a hallucination that terrified him during the mental breakdown that followed the army attack. “ONLY BY PAINTING THE goddamned thing out have all my symptoms of anxiety disappeared,” wrote Bess to Parsons. “Now the mind could be given free reign [sic], unfettered. It had unlimited visions which it could call as it wanted them—it could dictate and I would not consciously try to control or create” (35).

Although he painted in isolation, Bess was not a recluse. Between 1949 and 1967, he had six solo shows with Parsons in New York, and he had a number of faithful collectors. A Chicago businessman, Earle Ludgin, bought work and corresponded from afar, while Texas friend Harry Burkhardt and his partner Jim Wilford helped take care of Bess before he died; they amassed a group of forty-five paintings. Bess was always anxious to communicate the meaning of his work, and even published a touching article in the Bay City Tribune, May 9, 1951—quoted in full by Smith—explaining his visionary paintings to his Texas neighbors (36–37). His correspondence with Parsons, Schapiro, and others continued for years. At Chinquapin, where his home could only be reached by boat, visitors and bait customers often arrived; after he moved back to Bay City, his birthplace, Bess became quite friendly with people living nearby.

Inspired by learning of indigenous peo¬ple from Australia who still practice subincision as an initiation rite, Bess finally began his actual physical transformations by cutting into his perineum in 1952, after getting drunk to dull the pain. “I hacked away, scared as hell,” he wrote to Schapiro. “A terrific cramp came in my side, the razor blade slipped from my hand and I was knocked on the floor. . . . But Meyer, the unconscious flooded in beautifully—I had found entrance to the world within myself—a beautiful dimension that had ever been talked about, but not very clearly” (67).

Smith seems to be the only writer to report the full details of Bess’s later surgery, done clandestinely in 1960 by a local physician named Dr. R. H. Jackson, who operated after hours for a fee of six hundred dollars. Subsequently, Bess continued enlarging the opening in his perineum and proudly mailed out photos of the results. Smith also quotes in its entirety a letter by Bess to another frequent correspondent, the sex researcher Dr. John Money (who worked at Johns Hopkins University). Explicit descriptions of his newly possible internal urethral orgasms, both alone and with several partners, demonstrated to Bess the operation’s success (110–11).

Disaster struck in 1961 when Hurricane Carla destroyed Bess’s home/studio along with his larger paintings. He rebuilt, but things were never the same. Skin cancer developed on his nose, and his alcohol consumption increased. He moved back to Bay City to be near his mother; when she died two years later, he became chronically depressed.

Bess stopped painting in 1970 and began to decline rapidly in 1974. His neighbors complained of seeing him partially nude on his porch several times, and eventually he was arrested. To prevent his incarceration, his brother Milton committed him to the San Antonio State Mental Hospital; he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, partially because they didn’t believe he was a well-known artist. Meanwhile, a show was being planned for the Everson Museum in Syracuse that would travel to the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art; on top of that, Bess was receiving a monthly grant of one hundred twenty-five dollars from the Rothko Foundation.

Five months later, Bess was transferred to the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Waco, and in 1975 he was moved to a nursing home. Friends thought he looked twenty years older than his actual age of sixty-four. His last show was in 1977, arranged by women who belonged to the Bay City Arts League. “Bess came to the opening in a wheelchair,” Smith writes, “and, even though the show was a long way from the galleries in New York, he appeared to enjoy the attention. Ironically, this humble show in a small Texas town was to be his last. Six months later, on November 10, 1977, Bess died of a stroke in his bed at Bay Villa” (138).

Bess’s thesis of hermaphroditism was an outpouring of his core beliefs, and he wanted it seen with his work, but Parsons had always demurred. As she stated in a 1958 letter, “Concerning the hanging of your thesis in your next show, I do not feel I want to. No matter what the relationship is between art and medicine, I would rather keep it purely on the aesthetic plain” [sic] (87). This attitude persisted in the posthumous presentation of his work until the present day.

Four years after Bess died, Barbara Haskell curated a one-person retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, while a 1984 traveling exhibition brought together Alfred Jensen, Myron Stout, and Bess—three artists whose interest in spirituality was evident in their work. Another large solo show took place at New York’s Hirschl and Adler Gallery in 1988; it later traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Bess’s work was perceived as a crucial precedent for the sensitive, small-scale abstraction popular with some artists at the time, a reaction, perhaps, against the dominant Neo-Expressionism. Bess’s theories were usually noted in the paintings’ critical reception, but they remained in the background, largely unexplored.

Bess’s work has been rarely exhibited since the 1990s, but in 2012 a single, jewel-like gallery in the Whitney Biennial was hung with his paintings, organized by the artist Robert Gober. Documentary fragments from his now-lost thesis were also on view in vitrines and on the walls, fulfilling the wish Parsons had so vigorously denied. The Biennial also included arcane collages by Richard Hawkins incorporating reproductions of photographs by Hans Bellmer along with writing inspired by Jean Genet, Wu Tsang’s re-creation of a Los Angeles drag bar, and fashion collages by the lesbian activist K8 Hardy. The mystery and singularity of Bess’s images remained, but they acquired an entirely new significance in this context.

At the same time, Houston’s Menil Collection was assembling a large solo show, Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible. The Menil has a history with Bess: after Schapiro introduced founders John and Dominique de Menil to his work, they bought two paintings and joined his circle of correspondents. Since the exhibition was serendipitously planned around the same time as the Whitney Biennial, Menil curator Claire Elliott invited Gober to participate in the show as well, including his documentary material and writing in the exhibition and catalogue.

In her opening section, Elliott writes, “One attempts to avoid stereotyping Bess as a mad genius—to recognize the theories as a major underpinning of the work and acknowledge the surgeries, and their fright¬ening elements of self-harm, without allowing all of this to overwhelm the paintings themselves” (Elliott, 11). Hence, she pays much attention to the work’s physical details. She sensitively discusses materials, along with technique, framing, and the development of ideas. Bess kept a sketchbook by his bed, Elliott explains, to make immediate black-and-white drawings of his visions. After carefully outlining the shapes in pencil on the canvas, Bess applied paint with brushes or palette knives. Colors usually came straight from the tube, but Bess sometimes added sand. Textures could vary from thin to thick or from glossy to matte, and frames were handmade from found strips of wood.

Bess’s stylistic relationship with others in Parsons’s stable is also covered. Although his approach to the act of painting—preconceived shapes painted carefully on small canvases—was diametrically opposed to the Abstract Expressionist preoccupation with large-scale improvisation, an interest in the collective unconscious was common to all. Elliott also notes that Bess’s work did not develop in the same way as the work of artists in New York. His paintings could be very divergent, but his style did not evolve. In contrast to Smith’s single page, Elliott devotes a substantial section to the expanding post¬humous reception of Bess’s work. Taking note of each substantial exhibition, she traces his popularity in the 1980s and attributes the waning of interest in Bess during subsequent decades to the growing predominance of photography and installation. Although gay and lesbian studies became more and more crucial in the art of the 1990s, Elliott also wonders if Bess’s sexuality and theories were too extreme to be assimilated at the time.

A brief contribution to the catalogue by Gober focuses on Bess’s longing to unite male and female within one body; it also helps to realize Gober’s own desire to fulfill Bess’s wish to have his paintings and theories considered as one. Gober’s timing, perhaps, was influenced by the evolution of public attitudes toward gender variation, which, along with transsexuality, has increasingly fascinated contemporary artists and audi¬ences, as transition (surgical or not) from one sex to another (or remaining in between) is no longer rare.

In comparing these two books, it is interesting to note that even after so many years there is still some disagreement about the details of Bess’s life. For example, Elliott claims that Bess met Parsons when he traveled to New York to find a gallery (16), while Smith says he was introduced to her by a friend in San Antonio and the she agreed to give him a show after seeing slides (8). Gober does not believe that Bess found a doctor to do his surgery, or that his opening was ever large enough to accommodate a penis of any size (93), while Smith identifies the doctor who performed the surgery and quotes Bess’s descriptions of the sexual experiences that followed (110–11).

The two books also differ in their production values. The Menil catalogue (appropriately for the record of an exhibition) is elegantly designed, with high-quality paper stock and single-page illustrations of each painting. The paper is heavier, and each painting gets its own page—Smith often places one atop the other, although always in sensitive combinations. But if the Menil catalogue is a more luxurious volume, Smith abundantly satisfies the reader’s curiosity about biographical details that others leave vague. He also provides background informa¬tion on alchemy that readers unfamiliar with such arcana will find useful.

In his journals and correspondence, Bess notated a lexicon of symbols. The collection (culled from letters) reproduced in the Menil catalogue includes simple shapes denoting holes, testicles, anuses, trees, time, and death (Elliott, 100–1). His paintings, as Elliott notes, cannot be so simply inter¬preted, and the relationship between his theories and his practice is enigmatic. If he was simply copying the shapes he saw in his mind, as he insisted, the symbols must have come later—making it seem as if he were trying to fit his theories into his art in the same way he arranged mythology, religion, and alchemy into his underlying grand and almost paranoid narrative of hermaphroditism. Nevertheless, each painting manages to be completely specific and abstract at once— no easy feat.

The conundrum of Bess lies in the con¬trast between the spirituality so crucial to his paintings and the gritty corporeality of his physical transformations. The attraction of his paintings is rooted in the forthright yet modest materiality with which they commu¬nicate Bess’s otherworldly visions, while the disturbing nature of his ideas of hermaphroditism lies in the way they connect the most abject details of sexuality and waste elimina¬tion with the highest allegorical mysteries.

A painting from 1957—The Hermaphrodite—features a red-and-white lozenge floating in the center of a black three-leaf clover shape placed against a field of thickly applied blackish green. The image is mysterious, but on its own it would hardly bring to mind the quotation Smith has placed below it: “In my canvas The Hermaphrodite, then, the membrane has been cut, and we have a view of the stretched urethra—red and white in the form of teeth—the vagina dentata. The curve of the thumb as it stretches the frenum and skin is seen dimly” (Bess quoted in Smith, 101).

Bess often described his self-surgery as an act of self-mutilation, but it could also be seen as a daring act of self-transformation, a willingness to endanger the most vulnerable male parts. Bess considered himself merely a conduit for his visions, rather than an artist, but isn’t that a romantic description of the ultimate state of creativity, when the self disappears and the work flows out by itself? The paintings are compelling and startling. But is it the pull of insanity or spiritual enlightenment that we see? Bess himself did not know. You close your eyes, you see something, and you paint it. What could be more direct? When I close my eyes I see nothing but shadows. Bess saw a blazing world of symbols.

This review originally appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of Art Journal.

The post The Aesthetic Gold of a Ravished Spouse of the Godhead appeared first on Art Journal Open.