Contemporaneity (E-Journal)
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Exhibition Review: Regina Mamou “Unfortunately, It Was Paradise” Chicago, IL, City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower October 2013 - January 19, 2014
No full textMist shrouds an open field; the softness suffocates. In Fieldwork (Blue) Regina Mamou stages the paradox of immanence and imminence—God always and everywhere on the verge of appearing: a stifling remoteness, an intimate distance. The "field" could be visual, physical, conceptual; The "work" is the visual object, the photograph, or the physical work of agriculture, or the conceptual realm of the divine: God in the godliness of good works, of work accomplished in the service of collective wellbeing
The Round Table 02 ??: A Conversation with the No Name Painting Group
Full text linkThe following is a transcript of a conversation between three members of the No Name Painting Group, as well as Gao Minglu, Madeline Eschenburg, Ellen Larson, and Dong Li Hui. This interview was originally conducted in Chinese and has been edited for clarity
Decoding Double Desire: A Conversation with Ian McLean
Full text linkIan McLean, editor of Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, discusses his book with Marina Tyquiengco.
Taboo Icons: The Bodily Photography of Andres Serrano
Full text link Andres Serrano’s photography is often dismissed as being shocking for the sake of being shocking. His infamous photograph Piss Christ (1987) is the oft-cited example at the center of the National Endowment for the Arts controversies during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s. I return to Piss Christ as a way to expand the interpretative scope of Serrano’s early photographs, which I call “taboo icons” because of their ambiguity and ability to crisscross symbolic boundaries in the unstable space between sacred and profane, thus making his images both powerful and potentially dangerous. Building upon previous scholarship that draws connections between modern and early modern aesthetic practices, I look to the material practices of Christianity in medieval Europe characterized by a sophisticated visual culture that mixed both the physical and the spiritual. The intensifying rejection and reverence of matter resulted in divergent responses, yet the contradictory nature of matter remained central to the ideological beliefs of Christianity where the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection are at its core. Serrano’s visceral photographs are emphatically material and can productively be read vis-à-vis medieval visual culture. In doing so, this reading changes the narrow perception of Serrano’s early photographs and provides an alternative understanding of his artistic project that reinserts religion into contemporary American art discourse
Curatorial Practice as Production of Visual & Spatial Knowledge: Panel Discussion, October 4, 2014
Full text linkThe following is a transcription of a conversation between curators of art, science, and digital data about how their practice creates knowledge in their respective fields. Drawn from Pittsburgh’s rich institutional resources, the panelists include Dan Byers, (then) Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art; Dr. Alison Langmead, Director, Visual Media Workshop, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Assistant Professor, School of Information Scienes, University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Cynthia Morton, Associate Curator of Botany, Carnegie Museum of Natural History; and Dr. Terry Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh. Moderated by Nicole Scalissi, PhD candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh. The panel took place as a part of Debating Visual Knowledge, a symposium organized by graduate students in Information Science and History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, October 3-5, 2014. The transcription has been edited for clarity.Curatorial Practice as Production of Visual & Spatial Knowledg
Nostalgia and La Jetée
Full text linkThis essay contemplates Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1962) via Svetlana Boym’s conceptualization of “restorative” versus “reflective” nostalgia. It looks in part at the film’s presentation of the protagonist’s restorative nostalgia, but unlike previous examinations of nostalgia’s role in La Jetée, this essay foregrounds the viewer’s own experience of a reflective nostalgia for the film. The author considers her personal and subjective, and historically specific, encounters with La Jetée in relation to how the film may produce a similar nostalgia in others through its storytelling and unusual combination of photographic and cinematic form. Drawing also on Réda Bensmaïa’s semiotic and psychoanalytic analysis of the film’s “pictogrammatic” quality, the essay further considers the possible roles of trauma and masochism in the film and for its viewers, and relates the experience of watching La Jetée to that of watching An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (also 1962). The essay therefore situates both films in the context of historically situated yet ever-changing lived experience
"Enlivening and - Dividing": An Aporia of Illumination
Full text linkIn 1798, Karl August Böttiger paid a nocturnal visit to the Gallery of Antiques in Dresden, illuminating the statues with a torch. At first glance, this seems to be yet another example of a popular practice for visiting galleries c.1800. Illuminating the sculptures by torchlight was a popular means of enlivening the objects, set in motion by the light flickering on their surfaces. The collections were thus meant to become a place where cold, white stone comes to life, and where the beholder becomes part of a revived antiquity.This was precisely what Böttiger intended, too. But to him, the effect of the torchlight appeared to be, as he wrote, “enlivening and – dividing!” The torchlight highlighted not only the beauty of the sculptures but also their modern restorations. Böttiger apparently failed to experience the living presence of the antique celebrated by many of his contemporaries (e.g. Goethe, Moritz).This essay focuses on the consequence of such a perception of sculptures as historically multi-layered objects. Böttiger’s experience resulted in a problematic situation. In trying to view the sculptures as contemporaries, he hoped to become ancient himself. But this operation failed in the moment when the sculptures themselves appeared to be anachronistic, impure palimpsests. In consequence, galleries may not only be the place were art history as chronological Stilgeschichte was born. They may also be the site where this perception changed into the experience of a more chaotic shape of time
Foreword ??
Full text linkAn introduction to the Open Ground Blog interviews included in this issue of Contemporaneity.
Thoughts & Things 01 ????
Full text linkThe following is a month-long email exchange in which the editors of Open Ground Blog outlined their thoughts and goals for the website
Network Ambivalence
Full text linkThe language of networks now describes everything from the Internet to the economy to terrorist organizations. In distinction to a common view of networks as a universal, originary, or necessary form that promises to explain everything from neural structures to online traffic, this essay emphasizes the contingency of the network imaginary. Network form, in its role as our current cultural dominant, makes scarcely imaginable the possibility of an alternative or an outside uninflected by networks. If so many things and relationships are figured as networks, however, then what is not a network? If a network points towards particular logics and qualities of relation in our historical present, what others might we envision in the future? In many ways, these questions are unanswerable from within the contemporary moment. Instead of seeking an avant-garde approach (to move beyond networks) or opting out of networks (in some cases, to recover elements of pre-networked existence), this essay proposes a third orientation: one of ambivalence that operates as a mode of extreme presence. I propose the concept of "network aesthetics," which can be tracked across artistic media and cultural forms, as a model, style, and pedagogy for approaching interconnection in the twenty-first century. The following essay is excerpted from Network Ambivalence (Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press).