Doris Salcedo, born in 1958 in Bogota, Colombia, is a leading member of a new generation of artists who have achieved international acclaim during the past five years, partly as a result of their choosing to live and work in their countries of birth…

In Colombia, where Salcedo lives and works, the incidence of violent death has risen over the past fifty years to the point where it has become the primary threat to the social fabric. Although this violence does not discriminate between urban and rural victims, its most devastating effects can be witnessed in the less developed regions where Salcedo has traveled on a regular basis during the past decade. Seeking out and interviewing the survivors of violence, the artist is completely absorbed in acting as a secondary witness to the event, to the point where it becomes impossible for her to even try and revisit or reconstruct the original traumatic act for us. As she explains:

“I have come to meet people that have had the generosity of sharing with me their pain. Pain is constantly being revived. I think that allows for the establishment of another type of relation with reality. The distance between them and me disappears, allowing their pain to take over me, to take over my center. If I manage to make a good piece that circulates in the center of society, then their pain will enter into the core of this society. The victims will become the main protagonists.”

Like much of Salcedo’s work of the recent past, Unland incorporates elements of architecture and domestic life that are indirectly connected to the individuals whose stories she has committed to heart. By creating the semblance of shelter, the artist constructs a site where the careful addition of personal effects and/or human and animal fragments signals the transformation of ordinary materials into an intimate encounter with the reconstructed memory of loss. In his catalogue essay for this exhibition, Charles Merewether details the effect of such encounters in Salcedo’s work of the early 1990s:

“Plates, clothing, buttons, zippers and bones are grafted, compressed, and compacted into the surfaces of pieces of furniture. Chairs are covered by a fine skin of lace as if seared into the wood, bones are embedded into the side of a cabinet, a spoon forced between the seams of wood of a kitchen bureau. We may say the furniture appears wounded, both physically and psychically.”

Following previous work that often used humor and slapstick comedy as a vehicle for comprehending specific moments in popular culture and art history, Tim Lee presents a series of new works that operate within the loose confines of an artistic-social laboratory/studio experiment in order to offer a complex inquiry into the connection between highly charged socio-political movements and their transformative impact on the artistic avant-garde. With sources ranging from Alexander Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, Bruce Nauman and Public Enemy, the artist combines the templates of varying artistic entities into one cohesive body of work – including video, photography, sculpture and painting – in order to glean a greater (or askance) knowledge of each.

In Party For Your Right To Fight, Public Enemy, 1988, the artist simultaneously re-visits the conventions of early video art as practiced by Bruce Nauman in the late sixties, and Public Enemy’s landmark
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, Public Enemy, 1988 and Fear Of A Black Planet, Public Enemy, 1990 are two photographs that document in explicit detail the artist’s attempt to lie perfectly still on the studio floor for one hour. With exposures timed to last with the length of each Public Enemy album, the artist uses various performative strategies -¬ including poses of street protest, Nauman’s early endurance videos, the imagining of the body as a piece of modernist sculpture, and the psychic possibility of levitation – in order to conflate an understanding of these histories. Accordingly, Retrospective, Public Enemy 1988-91 is a two-channel video installation that features the artist repetitively drumming a selection of drum beats taken from Public Enemy tracks that are, in turn, sampled from previously recorded LPs. Recorded live and continuously over the stretch of one hour, the artist makes a contemporary attempt to return, in 2006, late 80s/early 90s electronic drum samples back to its 60s/70s acoustic origins.

Born in Seoul, Korea in 1975, Tim Lee lives and works in Vancouver. His work is represented in public collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Canada; Collection de Arte Contemporanea Fundacion, Madrid; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Tate Modern, London. Recent exhibitions include New Work/New Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Intertidal, MuHKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium; and Appearances, Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal. Upcoming projects include group exhibitions at Klosterfelde, Berlin, and the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and a solo exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2007.

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LINKS:

• Lisson Gallery
• Prague Biennale

Paul Pfeiffer, Study for Morning After the Deluge, 2001, LCD monitor, metal armature, DVD player and digital video loop, 5 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 60″. All images courtesy of the artist and The Project, New York.
Winner of the Whitney Museum’s first Bucksbaum award in 2000, Paul Pfeiffer has received attention over the last few years for his provocative digital video production. I first became interested in Pfeiffer’s work when I saw John 3:16, a mesmerizing image of a basketball floating in the center of the screen while the court, spectators and the hands of the players seem to spin around its fixed center. As an unending loop, the work anchors the title’s biblical connotations of eternal life, while the cropped and spliced NBA footage makes reference to the almost religious spectacle of professional sports. Many of Pfeiffer’s works use found footage and images from popular culture to explore the relations among race, religion, art and human thought. They also link practices of image-making across historical periods, from painting and theater to cinema and television, inviting the audience to reflect on the conditions that delimit or define both spectacle and spectator. One such work, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, consists of four photographs of Marilyn Monroe from which the movie star’s image has been digitally removed, leaving only a monochrome background. A different kind of erasure is at play in The Long Count, in which the original television broadcasts of Muhammad Ali’s major championship fights are digitally edited so that the bodies of both boxers are removed from the ring, leaving only ghostly outlines to dance across the screen. Both works use digital editing to address the question of historical visibility or invisibility, emphasizing the power of image culture to confer the status of the “real” onto the past or onto human bodies in the present. Last fall Paul asked if I would like to have a dialogue with him about our mutual interests in image production, digital media and race politics for Bomb. The resulting transcript is less an interview than a conversation inspired by critical themes in Pfeiffer’s work.

read article: http://www.bombsite.com/pfeiffer/pfeiffer.html

February 6 – June 5, 2005

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Including work by 20 Los-Angeles-based artists, THING uncovers the most innovative contemporary sculpture from the up-and-coming generation. Probing the formal and conceptual trajectories of sculpture in Los Angeles, THING includes a broad selection of works and addresses a wide range of sculptural practices, attempting to make sense of new materials, forms, methods, and concerns of this promising generation of emerging Angeleno artists. THING offers viewers a chance to examine how the vital and provocative sculpture being produced by L.A.’s younger set extends local traditions and lineages, and also taps into and shapes broader cultural streams. As Los Angeles has become a defining force in international contemporary art, the exhibition, though focusing on Los Angeles, provides a compelling view into the state of sculpture today.

Taft Green
Reaction Facets: International Seaport; Port 1 of 2; energy distribution, holding light, memory of Vermeer
2004

Domestic and imported hardwoods, paint, steel, fabric.

Nathan Mabry
A Touching Moment (Tooting My Own Horn)
2005

Terra-cotta, wood, paint.

LINK: Exhibition website

http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Beuys-Joseph_Sonne-Statt-Reagan_1982.mov

Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986)

Sonne Statt Reagan

4 mb (.mov), 1′ 57″
1982

MP3 of Sonne stat reagan from the Fluxus Anthology

Beuys tried his luck as a pop singer as part of his political commitment. His song ‘Sonne statt Reagan’ attacks Ronald Reagan’s arms policy. The song was issued as a record and Beuys appeared before big audiences with it during the peace movement’s demonstrations and also with the group Die Desserteure in the ARD television broadcast ‘Bananas’ on 3.7.1982.

‘Regen”, pronounced like ‘Reagan’, is the German for ‘rain’. 

“We House” at Southern Exposure Gallery, 2006

studies for “Pocket House”

Sasha Petrenko’s latest architecturally inspired project is titled Pocket-house. This portable one-person shelter is built with a modified boat building technique consisting of laminated strips of plywood. Conveniently, the structure is perfectly scaled to fit on top of Petrenko’s 1989 Acura Legend. The structure is then transported to various locations in Northern California where the artist temporarily resides and photographically documents her experience inside Pocket-house. The minimal yet comfortable structure features light and sound systems, plus sleeping and storage areas that are powered by either a 12 volt power generated by the Acura Legend or 120 volt supplied by her friendly host.  Inspired by her experiences as an artist attempting to afford a home of her own, Petrenko’s photographs of her project comment on the basic needs of daily living through alternative means, exploring ideas about place, shelter and affordable housing.

LINKS:

• artist website

Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc discovers beauty in the unplanned urban landscapes of shantytowns, trailer parks, and barrios. In her installations in various art institutions across the globe, she sends instructions to the musum staff on how to build her installations–often inspired by a type of shelter found halfway across the world–out of local materials. Here she instructs/constructs a massive installation of housing units based on observations made of temporary shelters and gated communities in Caracas, the West Bank, and West Palm Beach.

LINK:

• artist’s website
• “Urgent Architecture” book

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Fred Wilson

Commenting on his unorthodox artistic practice, Wilson has said that, although he studied art, he no longer has a strong desire to make things with his hands. “I get everything that satisfies my soul,” he says, “from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.” Thus, Wilson creates new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections, along with wall labels, sound, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects. His installations lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. While appropriating curatorial methods and strategies, Wilson maintains his subjective view of the museum environment and the works he presents. He questions—and forces the viewer to question—how curators shape interpretations of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display, and what kinds of biases our cultural institutions express.

• bio and images at PBS’ “Art21″ series

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Gail Wight

Zoo Kit

wooden box, felt, text
test tubes, DNA in solution
6″ x 12″ x 18″
1997

A small wooden box with racks of test tubes holds the DNA for land, air, and sea animals, the DNA for flora to sustain them, and the DNA for a zoo keeper. A tribute to Fluxus.

In attempts to understand thinking, I have:
made maps of various nervous systems, practiced art while under hypnosis, designed an artificial intelligence to read my tarot, read for hours to fish, conducted biochemical experiments on myself and others, executed medical illustrations in black velvet, worked on cognitive research projects, documented dissections of humans, dissected machines and failed to put most of them back together, freely made up vocabulary as needed, removed my teeth to model information systems, self-induced phobias concerning consciousness in the plant kingdom, donated my body to science and then requested it be returned, observed nerve development in vivo, choreographed synaptic responses, translated EEGs into music, conducted a cartesian exorcism on myself, and attempted to create cognitive models of my own confused state.
———————-
Rirkrit Tiravanija

Since the early 1990s, Tiravanija has explored a new aesthetic paradigm of interactivity. He has cooked and served food to his audiences, set up a recording studio in a museum, reconstructed his apartment inside a gallery for visitors’ use, corresponded via the Internet while on an American road trip with Thai students, and provided opportunities for numerous other everyday activities to occur within art spaces. Tiravanija is a catalyst; he creates situations in which visitors are invited to participate or perform. In turn, their shared experiences activate the artwork, giving it meaning and altering its form.

• Guggenheim museum project
• interview with Ami Barak

—————
Mark Dion

In many of his works, Dion re-creates the categorization and exhibition practices of museums. In this piece, his concern is to explore how a subjective understanding of nature becomes established as history by a particular group of people at a particular time. The result is a fictive–or personal–view of history that reflects on the subjective and sometimes arbitrary nature of scientific methodology.

Mark Dion, Alexander Wilson-Studio, 1999, wooden structure, mixed media, 8 x 12 x 9ft. (installation view)

Mark Dion, Alexander Wilson-Studio, 1999, wooden structure, mixed media, 8 x 12 x 9ft. (installation view detail)

• Mark Dion: New England Digs
• Tate Museum project: Tate Thames Dig

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Exhibition: “Art of the Encyclopedic”
at the Carnegie Museum, 2003

Art of the Encyclopedic is guest curated by Paul Vanouse, Assistant Professor of Art, University at Buffalo and features the works of digiatal artists Natalie Bookchin, Brian Collier, Julia Dzwonkoski, Omar and Carlos Estrada, Caroline Koebel, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Walid Raad, and Igor Vamos.

Art of the Encyclopedic is a meta-commentary on both exhibition curation as well as the historic function of the Carnegie Art Center (formerly the Carnegie Library). The exhibition is about classification, organization, categorization, archiving and public display. Furthermore, the exhibition is interested in displaying, in actual gallery space, qualities of contemporary information technologies, i.e. the world wide web, that tend toward exhaustive re-cataloging of existing information. For instance, many museum web-sites have hyperlinks to other museum collections, often creating recursive loops of references to one another so that our primary experience is of navigating linkages and information hierarchies and secondarily of the discreet information that they organize.

Art of the Encyclopedic is intended to highlight artworks that embody these systematic, hyper-rationalized processes and, of course, to further organize these works in the exhibition space. The works planned incorporate a variety of media including, photography, video, found-objects, text, and digital media. Read more…

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Rebecca Bollinger

“Last Year by Color and Composition” 2002

A digital movie made from every picture stored on my computer during one years time – eBay photos, personal snapshots, search result pictures, work documentation, photos of drawings, travel pictures (mostly anonymous,) pie charts and graphs, quotes, maps and logos – organized by color and composition.

40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city’s streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelone on the internet…

How to navigate: This site is built as a blog, so those of you familiar with standard blogs will pick it up easily. You can browse the content in several ways:

1. Scroll directly down the page to read entries. Recent ones are at the top, and older ones are at the end
2. Choose a “category” at the right-hand column to get specific information
3. Get class information, syllabus, and contact information at the top navigation bar
4. Check out the art-related “links” also at the right-hand column to view other sites of interest, but aren’t necessarily related to the class content

NOTE: Each entry has a “more” link, that if clicked, will take you to a more extensive write-up complete with further images and informative links. Don’t forget to access these! Also, if scrolling down a page, click on the “previous entries” link to see older posts.

I’ll be showing my own work sometime during the semester, but if you are interested now you can view it at my website: http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com

Looking forward to working with all of you this semester!

Climbing “crampons” for feet:

Climbing hardware

Pet harnesses:

“Maggie, Daniell, Finley & Kaizen, San Francisco”, 2003, c-print, 13.5”x20”, ed. of 5.

“Terry, London”,
2001, c-print, 20” x 13.5”, ed. of 5

“Shane, London”,
2001, c-print, 9 3/8” x 14”, ed. of 5

“Natasha, Peter, Zack and Imogen pose against a garden trellis, bathed in the soft light of a spring afternoon. Man and wife, with one boy and one girl, they are the very embodiment of the wholesome nuclear family…except that they’re all naked. Sort of.

In fact, they’re clad head to toe in hand-knitted mohair bodysuits, from which sprout gender-appropriate appendages and thick strands of body hair. Naked suits, if you will. Mom stares blankly ahead, her pillowy pink breasts askew, as her little girl reaches over to poke at dad’s fuzzy knitted member. Father and brother look on, grinning. Somehow, perhaps because the suits are so goofy and the subjects so clearly delighted, this scenario manages not to be creepy.

In Anna Maltz’s new series One Size Fits All, families of various configurations don the same suits and pose for conventional portraits, to riotous effect. Julia, Sandra, Katie & Jazz, San Francisco make the case for the two-mommy family (though one gamely dons the daddy suit). Sarah, Peter, Ariel, Calypso, Lola & Arthur, London, are a glowing clan straight out of Rubens – or perhaps Darger, given that the little girls sport tiny penises. Maltz has also created a superman outfit and a mermaid suit, worn to great effect by her bemused subjects.

Whether Maltz is challenging traditional definitions of family and gender, exploring societal taboos or simply having a ball dressing up her friends, these images aptly convey both the tension and liberation of slipping into a costume to become someone new.”

LINKS:

• Elizabeth Olivera Galler

Capri Battery, 1985.

Informed by diverse sources, including German history, Shamanism, and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, Beuys’s unique outlook evolved throughout his career. Beuys later expanded his artistic definition to include “social sculpture” which resulted from public interaction and discussion. His work methods can best be seen in his showcases or glass cases containing objects found or created by him. Another essential feature of the exhibition are the artist’s own drawings, which he described as the “energy source” inspiring his work in other media.

“I have always tried to show why art has to do with life. Only from art can a new concept of economics be formed, in terms of human need, not in the sense of use and consumption, politics and property, but above all in terms of the production of spiritual goods…”

Schlitten (Sled), 1969, Wooden sled, felt, straps, flashlight, fat, stamped in oil
133/4 x 357/16 x 133/4 inches

LINKS:

• Harvard Art Museum exhibition
• Walker Art Center exhibition: “Joseph Beuys Multiples”
• biography

“Untitled (Fourth of Ten Corner Constructions),” 1983
maroon and black acrylic yarn

installation with acrylic yarn

Fred Sandback: Remarks on my Sculpture 1966-86 In 1966 I found myself engaged in a sort of assemblage of odd pieces of industrial material, connected in series. The singsong interrelationship of the parts didn’t have much energy or conviction. In response to my complaints about sculpture m general, and the incoherence of mine in particular, George Sugarman said something to the effect: “Well, if you are so sick of all the parts, why not just make a line with a ball of string and be done with it?” The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire, was the outline of a rectangular solid — a 2″ x 4″ — lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it. I think my first attraction to this situation was to the way it allowed me to play with something both existing and not existing at the same time. The thing itself the 2″ x 4″ — was just as material as it could be — a volume of air and light above the surface of the floor. Yet my forming of it, the shape and dimension of that figure, had an ambiguous and transient quality. It was funny too — it had an anecdotal quality on the order of “first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is …,” but in reverse. I didn’t have a highly defined set of goals at this point. I did, indeed, want to make sculpture — and I suppose that’s interesting — I didn’t draw much of my impetus at all from the American painting of the 50′s, or at least not nearly as much as from older sculpture. I spent one summer trying, with limited success, to draw Michelangelo’s slaves every day. When I got around to the first string pieces, it wasn’t so much, in retrospect, that I wanted to make sculpture without a composition of parts, or sculpture without positive and negative spaces, as that I just wanted to make sculpture and these other things just seemed to be getting in the way. I did have a strong gut feeling from the beginning though, and that was wanting to be able to make sculpture that didn’t have an inside. Otherwise, thinking about the nature of place, or a place — my being there with or in it — and the nature of the interaction between the two was interesting. And at that point the thinking was perhaps more interesting than the doing, though it’s of course the latter that has sustained my interest. * My feeling persists that all of my sculpture is part of a continuing attitude and relationship to things. That is, sometimes, I don’t see various sculptures so much as being discrete objects, but rather more as instances of a generalized need to be in some sort of constituting material relationship with my environment. The sculptures address themselves to the particular space and time that they’re in, but it may be that the more complete situation that I’m after is only constructed in time slowly, with the individual sculptures as its constituent parts. I don’t feel that once a piece is made, then it’s done with. I continue to work with older schemata and formats, and often begin to get what I want out of them only after many reworkings. Though the same substructure may be used many times, it appears each time in a new light. It is the measure of the relative success of a piece, not necessarily that a new structure emerges, but that a familiar one attains, in its present manifestation, a particular vibrancy or actuality. It seems to work best when the format is so fully internalized and taken for granted that it doesn’t demand much of my active concern. Like the ‘U’-shaped freestanding pieces that I started work on in Bregenz in 1973. I’m still using that shape. – It’s more like a tool or a musical note that I can push around until I get it right. There’s a lot of push and pull in these pieces. * Straight lines tend to be perceived as purist and geometrical, and I am forever being warned to ‘loosen up,’ as when Spoerri prescribed great bowls of lentil soup to cure me of my puritanical fanaticism. It’s a consequence of wanting the volume of sculpture without the opaque mass that I have the lines. They are more or less simple facts though, and not instances of a geometry or some other larger order just what the hand does. The line is a means to mediate the quality or timbre of a situation, and has a structure which is quick and abstract and more or less thinkable, but it’s the tonality or, if you want, wholeness of a situation that is what I’m trying to get at. My intrusions are usually modest, perhaps because it seems like it’s that first moment when things start to coalesce that is interesting. Most of my work now is executed in and for a particular place. It’s always been conceived with at least a generalized sort of place in mind, but these pieces are now bound to one site. This doesn’t mean that I won’t redo a piece in a new location, but it will be a whole new kettle of fish. There are things that I want to do, but until they have a place they remain necessarily vague and indeterminate. The work is ‘about’ any number of things, but ‘being in a place’, would be right up there on the list. Around 1968, a friend and I coined the term ‘pedestrian space’, which seemed to fit the work we were doing at the time. It certainly wasn’t painting’s space that we were after, nor that of sculpture, for the most part. Pedestrian space was literal, flat-footed, and everyday. The idea was to have the work right there along with everything else in the world, not up on a spatial pedestal. The term also involved the idea of utility — that a sculpture was there to be engaged actively, and it had utopian glimmerings of art and life happily cohabiting.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Film still from Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), 1986; A film about a chain reaction

Peter Fischli and David Weiss have been working collaboratively since 1979, attempting to recreate on a human scale the states of order and balance that govern and inspire our lives. Their valiant, delicate, beautifully inept efforts to defy mobility, immobility, and gravity are documented in two photographic series titled Wursterie (Wurst Series) and Stiller Nachmittag (Quiet Afternoon), and their film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go).

These artworks record the acrobatic and precarious arrangements of such household items as carrots, cheese graters, tires, clothes baskets, and chairs. The characteristics of these objects dictate their interaction, and signify their interdependency and equality. These characteristics and their visual relationships may be extended to symbolize the networks and systems that make up “ordered and civilized’ society.

Film stills from Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), 1986
A film about a chain reaction

Inside a warehouse, a precarious 70-100 feet long structure has been constructed using various items. When this is set in motion, a chain reaction ensues. Fire, water, law of gravity as well as chemistry determine the life-cycle of objects – of things. It brings about a story concerning cause and effect, mechanism and art, improbability and precision.

LINKS:

• exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Chicago
• video available at amazon.com