Reenacting a Many Possible Past: An Interview with Irina Botea
Irina Botea, "Out of the Bear," video and photos, 2004
In college, I worked at a barn and my boss kept a special reenactment pony. The horse was prized above all others and regularly traveled the Southeast to reenact Civil War battles. My boss was very proud of this practice and boasted that he and his horse had worked together on the set of Mel Gibson’s Patriot (this was his mark of success). He also complained that standard tents of 1860 were not big enough to accommodate his 2002 stature, though here, too, there was a blushing kind of pride: he considered himself greater, at least physically, then the forefathers he so admired. Perhaps because he struck me as such a comical authority, I did not think very deeply about his reenactment practice. Like many things, it seemed such an obscure fascination as to be easily dismissed. I also took the lens of history for granted.
I’ve since discovered the beauty of an unsteady past; I’ve grown suspicious of historical interpretations that seem too sure of themselves. Talking to Irina Botea, I gathered more perspective. Via reenactment, Irina Botea delivers the past into the present. As one intent on facilitating freedom, Botea examines the preciousness of documentation while delving into personal, political histories. Her work examines the potential possibilities of choice embedded in every outcome — while also exciting, it involves sometimes difficult, empathic responses. She is a photographer, a performer, a filmmaker, and a teacher. These various facets of her creative work weave in and out of one another.
Irina Botea, "Out of the Bear," video and photos, 2004
Irina Botea: The Courage Of The People is a really amazing example of reenactment. Jorge Sanjinés went to a village where police murdered miners from a tin mine when they tried to unionize; the miners wanted to join Ché. Sanjinés came back three of four years later to reenact the event with the survivors. It’s striking because at the beginning they make a statement, “We have reenacted this because we want to make sure that the history is told the way we want it to be told.” I mean, it’s a very conscious decision to mediate their history. This is important in reenactment, this attempt at personal mediation. When you know the ending, you’re really focused on how something happened and what possibilities were not taken advantage of. I think that’s very important for the present.
Caroline Picard: Do you feel like there are opportunities to take new steps [within a reenactment]?
IB: Absolutely. And they really happen during reenactments. It’s not just a repetition of the past—because you can never really repeat it—it’s a remediation of the past for the present.
Relational Aesthetics is the New Black: DIY Art School
Barbie's Bruegal Picnic, 2009. Picnic at Mildred's Lane. Courtesy of J. Morgan Puett.
Relational art functions as a response to the technological advances of everyday life, with virtual profiles acting as surrogates for human interaction. Less obvious are the ways in which the art institution embraces or rejects it. How does the alternative model of education reiterate artists’ philosophies of social practice and how has the myth of the “Art School Crisis” become a catalyst for these alternatives? The popularity of artist-run schools like Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente and Mark Dion’s Mildred’s Lane Project prove that social practice has moved out of the white cube and into the educational system to become a vital influence on contemporary art education.
Consider Eliasson’s Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin and Mark Dion’s Mildred’s Lane Project in Pennsylvania where the curriculum is a direct consequence of the artists’ practice. In these settings, art must make a connection between working, living, research and experimentation. According to Eliasson, the problem with traditional art education is clear. “The hierarchical transmission of knowledge practiced in many art schools is clearly unproductive: the inflexible categories of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ working in a sealed-off environment…have taken responsibility away from the students, distancing them from real work in real life.” As a laboratory, his Institute promotes experimentation as a means to “make the voice of art heard” while its participants form a relationship with the members of the community. Dion’s Mildred’s Lane, situated on 92 acres in rural Pennsylvania, is a collaborative long-term experiment between artists Dion and J. Morgan Puett. The research-driven art projects encourage the connectedness of art practice to everyday life by questioning students’ art practice in relation to their environment. To rethink the studio, the students visit alternative farms and discuss cooking and cleaning as part of the course of study.
John Baldessari in "Art in the Twenty-First Century," production still, 2009 © Art21, Inc.
Every so often, there comes along a retrospective exhibition or mid-career survey that puts to rest whatever doubts I may have had as to where a particular artist sits in my personal pantheon of favorite artists. It is on these rare occasions when, afforded the luxury of considering his or her work en masse, an artist that I may have been ambivalent about finally clicks into place in my mind, and I gain a newfound clarity as to the significance of that artist’s oeuvre to me. Two recent exhibitions come to mind that have affected me in this way, almost single-handedly shoring up my interest in the artist: the Tate Modern’s 2005 exhibition Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments and the Neuberger Museum’s Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary in 2010.
John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been added to this list. Pure Beauty marks the first major survey of Baldessari’s work in the United States in over twenty years, and offers the chance to see more than 140 works by the pioneering conceptual artist, spanning from 1962 to 2010. And while it is really the critical mass of works in the show that allowed me to appreciate Baldessari on a new level, I will share here my thoughts on a couple of works that helped to finally put Baldessari over the top in my mind.
The first work is A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation (1966-1968), which opens the exhibition. Baldessari’s text painting consists of a set of canvases detailing the work’s own existence and exhibition history since its conception in 1966. The first canvas records the date, time and location that Baldessari conceived of the work, and documents its realization and initial exhibition. As the work’s instructions (which are also included on the initial canvas) dictate, additional panels are added to accommodate the ever-growing exhibition history of the work, with the most recent canvas marking the current show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the dates of the exhibition. Endlessly expanding, A Painting That Is Its Own Documentation complicates traditional notions of the art object and process, and succinctly introduces visitors to Baldessari’s deadpan and rigorous conceptualism.
In Flux Samples: An Interview with Young Joon Kwak
Young Joon Kwak, "Invocation," 2010, (still) video
Young Joon Kwak and I met a week before his solo-show, Eating Without A Face & Death Rites. The work was inspired by his time spent at the ACRE residency this previous summer. Everything was near completion. His studio was full of works-in-progress and was largely based around the idea of compost (what was a practical aspect of life at ACRE). Roxaboxen Exhibitions, the site of his exhibition, used to be a funeral parlor and Young’s studio is in the basement. Running alongside the stairwell, there is a ramp that used to bear coffins between floors; it is possible that bodies were prepared in the same room Young uses as a studio, what feels fitting given the topic of our conversation and his interest in life/death cycles. In all his work, as a writer, performance artist, collaborator, and sculptor, he strives to occupy the liminal space between identifiable categories in order to maintain a level of freedom. As such, the traditional identity of the singular, static self is a constantly shifting, accumulation of parts. Similarly, the “artist” as a singular and possibly heroic identity is problematic and something Young struggles to shed. Culling his materials from banal sites of everyday life, he appropriates objects already imbued with meaning, samples and reconfigures them in order to devise an uncanny experience.
Young Joon Kwak, "The Big Reveal & Jerry Curl Queen," 2010, mixed media
Young Joon Kwak: Jasbir K Puar’s book Terrorist Assemblages solidified a lot of what I was interested in about trauma, affect, and queer theory. She talks about how people are kept in line as citizens and the cooption of queer identities—the nature by which any attempt to produce a new subjectivity eventually gets co-opted into the system of capitalism. Puar proposes the “assemblage,” as a theoretical framework for imagining new forms of agency. Rather than normative static identities, the assemblage is formless, fragmented, and always in transition—falling apart and coming back together. A sort of continual cycle of death and regeneration. Puar talks about affect as that which is of outside commodified senses: indescribable bodily sensations, weird ticks, or feelings. Throughout the year I was trying to imagine empty spaces, these holes or gateways, that are the passageways for affect. The seams between the fragments of the assemblage, wherein unexpected interactions and transformations may occur.
Letter from London: Terry O’Neill Award Show at Hotshoe Gallery
Teri Havens, "Richard's Camp," 2006, from the series "The Last Free Place." Toned silver gelatin print.
Guest blogger Kerim Aytac is filling in for regular columnist Ben Street this month while he makes his millions. — Ed.
It’s hard to see the work of emerging photographers hung in London. There are relatively few dedicated photography galleries and even fewer showing the work of fresh talent. To emerge as a photographer or photographic artist is indeed a complicated thing. Where does one emerge to? The art world now purports to accept photographic practice as part of its remit, but perhaps understandably, only a particular style or type makes it through. Compared to our European neighbours, France and Germany in particular, or our American cousins, the desire here is very small for those who cannot access the art market. The resulting polarization is a well-tread truism: Photography as Art or Art as Photography. Practitioners who occupy the middle ground seem to emerge elsewhere. The only other method by which to be successful, it seems, is as a genre-specific virtuoso; the best in fashion, the best in portraiture, and so on. Photojournalism, bar the work of a few genuinely inventive die-hards like Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, has lost cultural credence, falling off the tightrope it walked for so many years between form and function. As a result of all this, the main way that large sections of the British public get to access photography is when there is a Prize.
The Prize is, as curatorial concept, a comforting thing for the visitor. It is reassuring to know so many artists are baying for one’s attention. The visitor is encouraged to think: try hard, work hard, and one day, maybe, if I have the time and have nothing else even marginally more interesting to do, you might be worth an acknowledgement in the form of my attendance. The foregrounding of the gate-keeping process that cultural institutions routinely employ allows the public to feel its affections are being earned as opposed to foisted upon. In London, both the Taylor-Wessing Portrait Prize, held annually at the National Portrait Gallery, and the also-yearly World Press Photo held at the Royal Festival Hall, are always big hits. It might be cynical to suggest this is partly due to the fact that these reward the efforts of those working in genres closely aligned to what photography seems to be for: functions rather than concepts. The Turner Prize of fine art photography, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is consistently considered contentious and comprehensive, but only rewards those already established and blue-chip. Perhaps the Terry O’Neill Awards, a new(ish) prize in a new(ish) space showing new(ish?) work, will break the mold and provide a forum for those emerging to gain exposure.
Set up in 2008 in honour of one of the surviving photographic legends of the Swinging London of the sixties, the award invites submissions in all genres, including Fine Art as a type in itself, so long as they are “dynamic images that portray a compelling narrative.” The judging panel consists of both photographers and specialists as well as Mr O’Neill himself. Such loose criteria make for an unpredictable selection in an interesting show, held for the first time this year at the consistently brilliant Hotshoe Gallery in Farringdon, London.
Out of Line
Luis Camnitzer "The Instrument and Its Work", 1976 Image: MoMA.org
If you get the opportunity in the next month, take some time to see On Line: Drawing Through the 20th Century at the Museum of Modern Art. And if you happen to be there today or this Friday, stop by and say hello since I will be visiting with two of my introductory Studio Art classes. We will be on an adventure of sorts, looking into the history of drawing and simultaneously exploring how an exhibition about line can influence an upcoming unit on sculpture.
From the moment you enter the show, you’re asked to reconsider what drawing is and has become. Works like Luis Camnitzer’s “Two Parallel Lines” and Mimi Gellman’s “nightdrawing 1″ incorporate mixed-media, installation, performance and photography, for example. Even video plays into the mix of defining and redefining drawing, such as Edith Dekyndt’s “A Is Hotter Than B”, where smoke forms the lines that slowly move through the 9-minute loop.
While MoMA states that, “On Line argues for an expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time,” this is a show about line first and perhaps the history of drawing second. Nevertheless, it’s an amazing survey show that allows for students to examine their preconceptions, and perhaps even their misconceptions, about drawing today. It takes the most fundamental element of design and literally blows it up six ways to Sunday. And that’s why I am so interested in sharing this exhibit with my students. While we could take most of our time to view the blockbuster Abstract Expressionist New York, it feels like a worthwhile challenge to see if we can not only expand our collective ideas about drawing, but also consider how it can shape our work with sculpture.
During our visit, students will be asked to sketch, answer some reflective questions and begin thinking about how this show can inspire a sculpture that simply begins with a line. Our visit incorporates active viewing vs. passive looking. The sculpture students eventually create may be thematic, but it must begin with a line. It may wind up being representational or abstract, but it must be influenced by something experienced, or realized, during the visit. And after spending some focused time with works by Trisha Brown, Julie Mehretu, Marcel Duchamp, Eva Hesse, Arturo Herrera, Robert Rauschenberg, Cecilia Vicuña, Emily Kam Kngwarray and Ellen Gallagher, to name just a small fraction of the artists featured, I am sure we will have plenty to work with.
Perhaps we will see you there?
Open Enrollment: So My Last Semester Lies Ahead, Then What?
While I chip away at my thesis and look toward my last semester at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), I have begun to think of my future, a career path in the arts, what that should be, where I should look, and if I will be able to find anything in this murky economy when most of the budget cuts are, sadly, made to the arts.
Many of my colleagues are no doubt considering these things as well — us and another million graduate students soon to be entering the reality of the world around us. I am not cynical, but I would be lying if I said I am not terrified by the prospect of re-entering the world of the working, a world that is sadly at a loss for prospects for many people, especially those of us in the arts.
For a very long time, since my days as an undergraduate, I have worked very hard in a variety of arts-related fields and capacities. My hard work was a labor of love since I was rarely paid for the work I did. This has always been okay with me because of the love of what I am doing. But there comes a time when the real world taps on my shoulder and says, “Carrie, it’s time to have a career.”
Memorial Photographs: An Interview with Jason Lazarus
Jason Lazarus
When Michael Jackson died, an impromptu dance party took place just outside my window. A young woman pulled up in a car wearing her best 80s outfit; she turned on her hazards and took a votive candle and a stuffed monkey from the back seat . Resting those against a nearby lamppost, she left the car windows down and played the same 5 MJ songs while dancing in the street. More and more people gathered around her, many started to dance with. The ceremony lasted about four hours.
Jason Lazarus, "Untitled," found Family of Man catalogue with marginalia, 2010. Archival inkjet, 60" x 89".
Michael Jackson epitomizes celebrity and, while alive, collapsed under the weight of his own signification. He was not a person, he was a pop star, and works like Jeff Koons‘s Michael Jackson and Bubbles is endemic of the mockery/adulation his life possessed. Jason Lazarus dives headfirst into that din. While his Michael Jackson Memorial Procession is one piece of many, he consistently manages to memorialize events, transforming their potential irony into intimate, artistic monuments. Similarly, when Lazarus and Claire went to get an HIV test, it was a performative gesture. While she took the test, she had not been previously concerned about her health. Lazarus asked her to do it. Nevertheless the fifteen minute wait period transcended that performance as it gathered anxiety. The photograph was taken, as evidence. [Claire awaiting 15 minute HIV test results, (Chicago)] Photography is a suspicious medium. Lazarus acknowledges this and uses it to his advantage.
Caroline Picard: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be an artist? Would you call yourself an artist? What would you characterize as your medium?
Jason Lazarus: I moved from Kansas City, MO, to Chicago to attend DePaul University, where I majored in marketing…upon graduation I worked in marketing at Court Theatre in Chicago. Court features contemporary adaptations of classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, et al. And I swear that was my introduction to creative conceptual thinking, watching them mount alternative costume, set, and script strategies. At the same time, I just happened to start taking photography classes at night for fun at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center.
Jason Lazarus, "Claire awaiting 15 minute HIV test results (Chicago)," 2010, archival inkjet
CP: Do you feel like there are any pivotal moments in your artistic development? What would those be and why were they significant?
JL: Yes, I had no art background whatsoever and then just plunged into an MFA program at Columbia College in Chicago, where I focused on photography, worried about whether I could “make it” there or anywhere. Midway through, the Chair of the department, Bob Thall, told me he was worried about me when I enrolled, that they had barely let me into the program. He added that [because of my] critique I had, to him, proved he had made the right bet to let me in. That felt good. Later I was working at an apartment leasing agency and almost took a job teaching high school math in NYC, but decided to redouble my efforts to be an artist. Soon after, I was teaching at Columbia College, the start of my teaching career. It was an epically important moment, now, when I look back.
Weekly Roundup
Kara Walker, "Darkytown Rebellion," 2001 © Mudam Luxemburg (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean), © Kara Walker, Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.
In the first weekly roundup of 2011: a Cai Guo Qiang New Year’s celebration in Taipei, Barry McGee in Brazil, two artists make art “scherenschnitte,” Richard Serra is ready for TV, and more.
- Barry McGee gives us a video, Transfer SP Brasil, that documents his time in Sao Paulo this past summer for the Transfer exhibition.
- Carrie Mae Weems will collaborate with composer Dr. Gregory Wanamaker, a professor of composition at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music, who has been awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Access to Artistic Excellence Grant.
- Cai Guo Qiang presented a 90-minute 2011 New Year’s Eve gala celebration in Taipei. “Respecting life, heaven and earth” was the theme of the event, which highlighted natural disasters such as the 7.3-magnitude earthquake of September 21, 1999 and the catastrophic flood caused by Typhoon Morakot in 2009.
Light and Desire: An Interview with Melanie Schiff
Melanie Schiff, "Self-Portrait After John's Party," 2008, Digital C print
While always being aware of her work, Melanie Schiff snapped into focus shortly after I first heard about Ox-bow, the School of the Art Insitute’s residency program in Saugatuck, Michigan. Friends came back from a summer there looking a little wild. Melanie’s work–color-rich photographs of youths blending into trees, whiskey bottles glinting like a candle in a bath of morning sun–offers a portrait, not just of Ox-bow, but of a feral, post-adolescent youth. It would be inaccurate to distill her prolific energy into one characterization; her work is lush, well-composed and ever-sensitive to silky light. Those aesthetic concerns transcend specific subjects. In addition to empty skate-park landscapes and attic rooms, she has made self-portraits with bong hits, another with raspberry-nipples, another involves spewing water in the sun (always reminds me of Tony Tasset), or the one above, where she reclines in a sea of empty bottles glinting like a deteriorated Jeff Wall interior: these gestures position her-self-as-artist, approximately tied to a flanking landscape of, often exclusive, culture. Whether holding the Neil Young album before her head, or photographing a motel room once occupied by Kurt Cobain, her presence adds an idiosyncratic awareness to these cultural referents. In an effort to explore that affect, I asked her a series of questions, primarily about the camera and its gaze. This is one interview in a series of many that explores the self on either side of the camera, while thinking through the respective position of the artist.
Melanie Schiff, "Emergency," 2006, Digital C print, 28" x 20"
Caroline Picard: What happens to your perspective when you look through the camera?
Melanie Schiff: I think a lot of it is just practice. When I look through a camera, everything exists on a plane; now start to try and organize the visual space, which is a lot easier said than done. It can be fairly frustrating — many times things don’t translate right away and it takes a lot of problem solving. I think there are perspectives that I find pleasurable that I also feel have a universal appeal. Art history is an archive of compositions, and you end up referencing them consciously or not. I feel like when I’m trying to compose a photograph, that there’s almost a sweet spot in the frame, and it’s just about trying to figure out where that is.
