Contemporaneity (E-Journal)
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Artist Statement: rial and tERROR
Full text linkArtist statement to accompany the work rial and tERROR (2011), included in this issue of Contemporaneity
Mapping Collected Memory: An Exploration of Memory-Based Navigation in Amman, Jordan
Full text linkThe purpose of this research is to explore navigational and image-making methods in a context where maps and formal address systems have been minimally consulted in recent years. This investigation is approached by way of a research-based art project on subjective cartography, which was carried out from 2009 to 2010 during a Fulbright fellowship to Amman, Jordan. The project examines the mutability of a specific location as well as its relationship between obsolescence in cartographic resources and the photographic medium. By reaching out to Ammani residents for informal tours of the city, selected guides were asked to narrate their experiences of navigating the city by memory and then directed to point out key landmarks during this process. Later, these tours were re-memorized and landmarks were photographed as a representation of the afterimage to capture high-quality still images through the use of a large-format photographic device. These afterimages are not intended to serve as documents or memorials of Amman but rather as ruminations on the faculties of memory in an ever-changing environment. This subjective experience, or the observation of a city’s minutiae amid wayfinding, poses a series of inquiries, vis-a?-vis memory-based navigation and the role of still images, as an alternative to the panoptic view of a map. The result is a meditative project considering the plasticity of an urban entity, presented as a composition of written material and large-scale photographs, fragments of the city that when viewed as a series come together as a constellation of a subjective whole.
Description: Likewise, as Technical Experts, But Not (At All) by Way of Culture (2012-2013).
No full textArtist\u27s Description of the video artwork Likewise, as Technical Experts, But Not (At All) by Way of Culture (2012-2013) included in this edition of Contemporaneity
On the Coevalities of the Contemporary in Cambodia: Review: Sampot: The Collection of Small Things by Chan Dany
Full text linkA review of visual artist Chan Dany’s solo exhibition Sampot: The Collection of Small Things, held at SA SA BASSAC gallery in Phnom Penh from May 23 to July 28, 2013, incorporating some reflections on contemporaneity in Cambodia.
Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalization
Full text linkAn edited transcript of a colloquium between Terry Smith, Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, and Saloni Mathur, Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of California, Los Angeles, held at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, on October 17, 2012
Trying to Live Now: Chronotopic Figures in Jenny Watson’s A Painted Page Series
Full text linkBetween late 1979 and early 1980, Australian artist Jenny Watson painted a sequence of six works, each with the title A Painted Page. Combining gridded, painted reproductions of photographs, newspapers and department store catalogues with roughly painted fields of color, the series brought together a range of recent styles and painterly idioms: pop, photorealism, and non-objective abstraction. Watson’s evocation of styles considered dated, corrupted or redundant by contemporary critics was read as a sign of the decline of modernism and the emergence of a postmodernism inflected with irony and a cool, “new wave” sensibility. An examination of the Painted Pages in the context of Watson’s interest in autobiography and her association with the women’s art movement, however, reveals the works to be subjective, highly personal reflections on memory, self and artistic aspiration. Drawing on Bahktin’s model of the chronotope, this paper argues for a spatio-temporal reading of Watson’s Painted Pages rather than the crude model of stylistic redundancy and succession. Watson’s source images register temporal orders ranging across the daily, the seasonal and the epochal. Her paintings transpose Bahktin’s typology of quotidian, provincial and “adventuristic” time into autobiographical paintings of teenage memories, the vicissitudes of the art world and punk subcultures. Collectively, the Painted Pages established a chronotopic field; neither an aggregation of moments nor a collaged evocation of a period but a point at which Watson closed off one kind of time (an art critical time of currency and succession) and opened up another (of subjectivity and affective experience)
Today\u27s Cutting Edge is Tomorrow’s Obsolete: An Interview with Cory Arcangel and Tina Kukielski
Full text linkExhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh from November 3, 2012 to January 27, 2013, Cory Arcangel: Masters was a wide-ranging, multi-sensory survey of the artist’s major works to date. The following interviews with Arcangel and the exhibition’s curator Tina Kukielski were conducted in February 2013, and discuss the conceptual, curatorial, and aesthetic issues raised by the exhibition.
Skin Deep: Surfacing with Leigh-Ann Pahapill
Full text linkGabrielle Gopinath examines works from Leigh-Ann Pahapill’s compilation video and exhibition titled Likewise, as technical experts, but not (at all) by way of culture (2012-2013)
Unfolding the In-between Image: The Emergence of an Incipient Image at the Intersection of Still and Moving Images
Full text linkAs digital technology has transformed various aspects of our screen culture over the past few decades, we have been witnessing a disappearing boundary between photographic still images and cinematic moving images. An emerging in-between image has become increasingly prominent in this new image culture, which attempts to negotiate the grey area between stillness and movement. This in-between image, manifest in a variety of formats and media, points to an increasingly solid middle ground between the traditional divisions of still and moving images. This paper builds a conceptual framework for analysing this new type of image and explores both the roots of this emergent category before focusing on its contemporary trajectory as exemplified by the work of Adad Hannah, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and James Nares.
“The Great Palace of American Civilization”: Allen Eaton’s Arts and Crafts of the Homelands, 1919-1932
Full text linkAllen Eaton’s Arts and Crafts of the Homelands exhibition premiered in Buffalo, New York in 1919, where it drew record crowds to the Albright Gallery. Iterations of the display soon opened in Albany, Rochester, and then in several other cities across the United States. Arts and Crafts of the Homelands showcased European craftwork of local immigrant groups to celebrate a model of early twentieth-century American pluralism. This article examines the aims of exhibit organizers, immigrant presenters, and native-born visitors to these exhibitions. The structure of the displays—which highlighted domestic tableaux of old-world objects—obfuscated the contemporary contributions of immigrant groups to American cultural and economic forums. I argue, however, that local groups took advantage of the exhibit’s performance spaces to assert their active presence in American public life.