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One Place After Another : Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
No full textKwon traces the development of site-specific art from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining site-specificity as a locus of the dynamic relationship between place and identity in late capitalism. The author distinguishes the more recent work from the earlier by highlighting how it points to the exhaustion of the rhetoric of political progressivism inherent in the practice. Characterising community as an inoperative spectre, Kwon calls for new models of belonging. Index. Circa 300 bibl. ref
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In the New Body: Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions (1960-61) and their Acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Get PDFThis study, focusing on the 2015 acquisition of Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions, a suite of performance works first shown in New York in 1960 and 1961, by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), details the museum’s first acquisition of historical dance works and an important model for collecting live performance and time-based artworks. Most commentators agree that because it is a living, temporal, and embodied experience, dance cannot be held in a repository such as an archive, library, or museum. But without a consensus on what constitutes dance “preservation,” and as the museum deals with the changes brought by non-object-based ephemeral art, it may offer another avenue for thinking about dance’s continuation into the future, which is reflected in Forti’s arrangements with MoMA. My treatment tracks the changes: the transfer, translation, and (re)invention of Forti’s artworks as well as the museum at the moment of their encounter, which newly defined the works as well as the institution. The case study offers insight into transformations of the art object, evolutions of the institutions that care for them, and changes in values for both visual art and dance over the last half-century. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation brings together art history, dance history, performance studies, and conservation and museum studies to build upon the mostly monographic studies of Forti to date that treat the historical and contemporary conditions of the artist’s work separately. The co-articulation of Forti’s Dance Constructions with MoMA represents a convergence of dance and art as well as the past and the present, shedding critical light on the artworks as well as the processes of making history.A theoretical introduction identifies the key conceptual problematics underlying art, dance, and institutions that are generated by considering Forti’s dances and the museum together, laying out the terms for the discussion that follows. Part I looks back to the emergence of the Dance Constructions from Forti’s nascent practice, produced within an interdisciplinary landscape of experimentation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The performances proposed new models of movement and composition for dance, while also examining sculptural questions and the nature of artworks more generally. Posing very basic questions about bodies and objects—even turning bodies into objects—they made radical propositions that shaped future work in dance and art. Part II of the dissertation details the materials and procedures developed by the artist and the museum for MoMA’s 2015 acquisition of the Dance Constructions. Using models from both dance and visual art, protocols were developed that challenge, revise, and offer alternative definitions for issues central to the art museum: the art object, authenticity and provenance, and continuation/conservation. The process gave the Dance Constructions new resources and definition, bringing to light aspects of the works that were unconscious, unknown, or otherwise unspecified prior to that point while at the same time providing for their future. Tracking the Dance Constructions through time from inception to institutional acquisition reveals shifts in the core functions of the museum since the 1960s, as well as changes in dance and evolutions of Forti’s practice. This raises legal, ethical, and practical issues in addition to aesthetic ones, which implicate all postwar art as potential objects of museum acquisition, and contains lessons for historians, practitioners, and institutions alike
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The Curator as the Artist’s Friend: Henry Geldzahler Negotiating Artistic Autonomy in the 1960s
Get PDFDuring his lifetime, curator Henry Geldzahler was known primarily as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first contemporary art curator, a role he held from 1960 to 1977. From 1966 to 1969, he also served as the first Program Director of the Visual Arts Program of the newly established National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Although Geldzahler held these prominent positions—and also enjoyed outsize celebrity and notoriety—his activities have escaped substantive analysis. This dissertation critically examines Geldzahler’s roles in the 1960s in relation to the problem of artistic autonomy. In addition to offering the first monographic study of the curator’s major spheres of work, this dissertation situates his activities as tactics of exchange that continually re-negotiated the artistic field’s imbricated structural relationship to politics, economy, and media. Geldzahler provides an alternative model that moves beyond capitulation, cooptation, and/or critique. Holistically speaking, these older frameworks for understanding the problem of artistic autonomy in the 1960s render that problem as a matter of either-or. A model of capitulation might mourn the loss of art’s purported separation and bemoan its contamination. A model of critique or cooptation may scrutinize art’s instrumentalization, and seek to reassert the independence of artistic practice through forms of so-called rejection or resistance. Yet, whether in his relationships with artists, his governmental role in arts public policy, or through his exhibition making, Geldzahler’s activity seldom settled neatly inside or outside the purview of the artist or the contours of the artistic field. Instead, his negotiations variously expanded, transmuted, undid, and/or reconstituted the status of the artwork and artist through continuous exchange with different fields of non-artistic practice.
Geldzahler’s negotiating yielded a simultaneous array of effects, sometimes quite contradictory. In one sense, the curator appropriated extra-artistic forces—from politics, commerce, and mass media—to redefine the artist’s status and differently accommodate the place and value of their activity. Yet, in another sense, the curator’s tactics also at times re-inscribed fallacies or misuses of artistic autonomy endemic to a creative field that is conceived erroneously as a hermetic zone of pure art and culture. Given such contradictions, it is important to recognize that Geldzahler’s story defies easy assessment of right or wrong, critical or reactionary, conservative or progressive. Rather, his negotiations crossing various boundaries present an opportunity to more fully consider the uneven, multifaceted, and perpetually shifting structural organization of cultural production.
“Friendship” and the idea of “the artist’s friend” were primary factors in Geldzahler’s negotiations of cultural production and of artistic autonomy in particular. As such, this dissertation addresses his actual friendships with artists as well as the actions and motivations attributed to friendship in general to critically assess Geldzahler’s reputation as “the artist’s friend” and his negotiation of the “virtues and vices” of friendship, to paraphrase philosopher C.S. Lewis. This study is interested to understand how friendship facilitated Geldzahler’s navigation of art’s structural relationship to political forces at the NEA and with economic, social, and journalistic forces at the Met. Ultimately, this dissertation surfaces “the curator as the artist’s friend,” interrogating Geldzahler’s model to grapple with the ways artistic autonomy—in belief or in real practice—is constructed through interpersonal negotiation and, very often, according to the complex terms of mutual recognition, affection, and partiality associated with friendship
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The Syntax of Sites: Art and United States Urban Infrastructure, 1956-1980
Get PDFThrough chapter-length studies of works by Isamu Noguchi (Chase Manhattan Plaza, 1956-64), Robert Smithson (Dallas/Fort Worth Regional Airport, 1966-67) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles (New York City sanitation system, 1977-80), this dissertation proposes a dialogic relationship between the historical emergence of site-engaged artworks and the “mega-project era” in U.S. urban policy, a surge of federally-funded infrastructure projects that dramatically reimagined and reshaped U.S. cities. Contemporary artworks are typically marginalized within the historical understanding of large-scale urbanist schemas, narrated as either decorative addenda to the cityscape or reactive counterproposals to planning projects. This dissertation argues that both these dominant art historical models have not gone far enough to examine art’s multimodal engagement with the materials, sites and processes of urbanism during the 1950s–1970s, a period in which urban infrastructure emerged as a new arena for advanced art practice and discourse.The study thus presents a rejoinder to art historian Rosalind Krauss’ influential concept, as outlined in her 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” that post-1960 sculpture began to share its logical structure with those of architecture and landscape, broadly-defined. By presenting a selective history of urbanism alongside analysis of exemplary artworks by Noguchi, Smithson and Ukeles, this dissertation grounds art’s “expanded field” in the representational systems and material output of urban planning and civil engineering, fields that were simultaneously undergoing systemic change related to federalist programs of urban reconstruction. The dissertation asserts that well-known categories such as site-specific art, systems art, and Land art should be seen as various means of comprehending a historically-specific project of urban transformation. At the same time, urbanism sought new terms of engagement with art, as planners and architects contracted “artist consultants” on the means of producing the future of U.S. cities. And, finally, this embedded position within urbanism enabled art’s epistemological inquiry into the era’s infrastructure as a new “syntax of sites.
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Above Sea: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Ruins of Shanghai's New Heaven on Earth
Get PDFShanghai (translated as Above Sea) has long been characterized as Mainland China's most East meets West, and modern metropolis. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, artists, designers, and filmmakers have confronted this identity, formulating diverging notions of Chinese modernity and contemporaneity vis-à-vis Shanghai's cultural hybridity. This dissertation examines these formulations by analyzing examples of art, as well as fashion, print media, and film produced in dialogue with cross-cultural Shanghai in three key periods: the 1920s-30s during the city's semi-colonial modernist heyday, the 1960s-70s during the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua dageming), and the 1990s-2000s as Shanghai has re-emerged as a global center. My analyses problematize the trope of East meets West that has long informed the discourses both on Shanghai and modern and contemporary Chinese art, by exposing other cultural collisions (e.g., semi-colonial cosmopolitanism vs. anti-imperialist nationalism in the 1920s-30s, Maoist collectivity vs. individualism in the 1960s-70s, and local identities vs. globalization in the 1990s-2000s). The examples explored (e.g., Liang You/Young Companion magazine, revolutionary woodcuts, and painting by Parisian-trained artist, Pang Xunqin, in the 1920s-30s, socialist realist murals, revolutionary Peking opera, and a documentary by Italian auteur, Michelangelo Antonioni, in the 1960s-70s, installations by transnational artists, Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, and films by Shanghai-based artists, Zhou Tiehai and Yang Fudong, in the 1990s-2000s) span time, media, and national boundaries, allowing for analyses of diverging notions of Chinese modernity and contemporaneity vis-à-vis visual culture and its transnational movements. Many of these examples are locationally linked through a particular neighborhood said to epitomize contemporary Shanghai. Today the site of Xintiandi (translated as New Heaven on Earth), a retail and cultural complex in Shanghai's former French Concession, this neighborhood encompasses an underground history of revolutionary art, film, and design, which this dissertation uncovers. While filtered through the lens of Shanghai, this dissertation confronts broader issues, including the stakes of non-Western art's integration into art historical canons, and the role modern and contemporary Chinese art plays in the emergence of a globalized culture industry
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Art on the Internet and the Digital Public Sphere, 1994 - 2003
Get PDFThis dissertation narrates the development of internet art, a diverse set of practices united by their interrogation of the technological, social, and/or political bases of computer networks. Covering the period from 1994, when internet art coalesced around the rise of the World Wide Web, to 2003, when both internet art and internet culture writ large began to respond to the rise of social media and web 2.0 technologies, the dissertation homes in on specific net art projects that variously engaged or challenged this period’s most persistent claim: that the internet is a new, digital public sphere. By studying how these artworks critiqued this claim, the dissertation uncovers three major models through which net art has asserted the publicness of computer networks—as an interpersonal network that connects or unites strangers into groups; as a virtual space akin to physical spaces of public gathering, discourse, and visibility; and as a unique platform for public speech, a new mass media potentially accessible to all.Claims for the public status of computer networks rest on their ability to circulate information and facilitate discussion and debate. This definition of publicness is rooted in the concept of the classical public sphere as theorized by J�rgen Habermas. The dissertation thus reviews Habermas’s model of the classical public sphere, and its most significant critiques, in order to interrogate the terms of a digital public sphere. The dissertation also engages Michael Warner’s work on the formation of publics, counterpublics, and the mass-cultural public sphere; Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s analysis of shared experience as the foundation of the formation of public spheres and the role of mass media in this process; Henri Lefebvre’s articulation of the social production of space; and Gilles Deleuze and Alexander Galloway’s respective analyses of the role of network logics in systems of control. As a whole, the dissertation provides an historical account and critical analysis of internet art that encompasses not only its technological evolution but also its confrontation with the claims of publicness upon which our understanding of computer networks, and the art made on and about them, are founded
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“Something More Real than Reality”: Picasso’s Material Pursuit of the Sur-Réal (1926-1933)
Get PDFThis paper examines an artwork produced by Pablo Picasso in 1933 to be photographed and reproduced on the inaugural cover of the important surrealist-oriented luxury art revue Minotaure. In the format of a maquette, the work is the culmination of a little-discussed period of intense material exploration and experimentation for the artist. Through a close study of the work, including the artist’s engagement with his own past cubist collage strategies of the 1910s, this paper unpacks Picasso’s ambiguous identification with the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 30s. In addition to analyzing the work in relation to André Breton’s messianic espousal of revelatory chance operations and the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille’s insurgent theories of base materialism and the informe, this paper shows how Picasso’s work problematizes these aesthetic models in order to articulate, through a series of formal contradictions and material idiosyncrasies, the possibilities of the “sur-réal,” a term coined by Picasso to describe “something more real than reality.
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Constructing Home: Allegories of Labor in Larry Sultan's Homeland (2006-2009)
Get PDFThis paper examines a series of photographs produced by American artist Larry Sultan (1946-2009) titled, Homeland. Made between 2006 and 2009—a financially tumultuous period when the collapse of the US housing market would precipitate what was known as the Great Recession—the images depict suburban landscapes populated by immigrant day laborers. In treating these sites as staged fictions, Sultan introduces visual and narrative ambiguities, which, I argue, reveal the complex underpinnings of suburbia’s social and aesthetic construction. Focusing on Creek, Santa Rosa (2009) as an exemplary work from the series, the paper traces the narrative anomalies of the picture, alongside the technical specificities of the photograph’s production, in order to present an allegorical framework through which the larger socio-economic conditions of labor and the fragile economies of home might newly be addressed
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Site Insecurities: Thomas Hirschhorn's Skulptur-Sortier-Station (1997 and on)
Get PDFThis paper is a study of Skulptur-Sortier-Station (1997), a sculpture by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn (1957-), which was first realized for the third "Skulptur. Projekte in Münster," an international exhibition that takes place every ten years in Germany. Attending closely to the work's unique material qualities, the circumstances of its original realization, and the implications of its subsequent reiterations in other European cities, this paper argues that Skulptur-Sortier-Station proposes a new sculptural syntax by destabilizing received notions of the relation between object and site. The work's site condition is such that it engages (in order to ultimately reject) the modernist model of sculpture as autonomous and nomadic, as well as the postmodernist model of sculpture as site-specific and context-bound. Repeatedly dismantled and reconstructed in a potentially ongoing series of locations, Skulptur-Sortier-Station is a precarious physical structure that inhabits and produces a precarious spatial condition. I argue that this precariousness is in itself a contemporary sculptural value for Hirschhorn and is related to theories of "non-place," a new paradigm of contemporary space as decentered and transient
Stage Encounters: Trisha Brown, Robert Whitman, and the “Cine-choreography” of Homemade (1966)
Get PDFThis thesis examines Homemade, the collaborative, multi-media project that dancer/choreographer Trisha Brown and experimental filmmaker Robert Whitman staged in 1966. Against current understandings of the work as primarily a choreographic intervention into the canon of postmodern dance, this thesis argues for the project’s reclassification as an instance of “cine-choreography,” a hybrid medium which transforms through the co-presentation of dance and film the respective “real” and representational effects of postmodern dance and “expanded cinema.” Drawing on Homemade’s crucial and generally ignored cinematic component, a 16mm color film directed and edited by Whitman that was projected “on screen” during Brown’s live dance, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of Homemade’s interdisciplinary status by considering the work’s conceptual proximity to Whitman’s expanded cinematic practice from the early 1960s, as well as the project’s relation to Brown and Whitman’s individual experiments with live and mediated modes of performance in the years just prior to their 1966 collaboration
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