DAILY SERVING » Martha Rosler

Best of 2014 – #Hashtags: Culture, Class, and the New Economy

admin — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 08:00:32 +0000

As part of our ten-year anniversary celebrations, we’re considering the best of a decade of arts criticism. Today’s selection comes from our executive director Michele Carlson, who writes, “I reread this essay the same day that San Francisco’s first fleet of self-driving Uber cars rolled out and one sailed straight through a red light in front of SFMOMA. This comes on the heels of the tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland that cannot be disconnected from the unmanageable housing and gentrification crisis facing the Bay Area. Anuradha Vikram’s essay is still poignant, reminding us of how quickly a city changes, how fiercely that impacts its citizens, and how immovable the proverbial peg remains.” This article was originally published on January 27, 2014.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): John Gourley “Gringo” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

#access #technology #gentrification #class #labor #place

The recent election of Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York was hailed by many as a sign that the trend of economic displacement in major American urban centers was coming to an end. De Blasio ran on a progressive platform of government that serves the neediest, rather than campaign donors, and won handily on that message despite the city’s twelve prior years of wealth consolidation under billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even de Blasio’s art credentials are more populist than those of his philanthropist predecessor, whose namesake corporation appears on the donor boards of several major institutions in the city. While many have greeted his inauguration with a level of optimism not seen since President Obama’s first term, far fewer have raised the necessary question of what exactly defines the problems and the solutions we hope he will seek. Using current discussions of gentrification, shifting labor conditions, and the role of the arts in creativity and culture, I will attempt to do this here.

Artist Martha Rosler’s recent book, Culture Class (2013), is a herculean attempt to frame the scope and the terms of the gentrification debate as it concerns artists and other laborers in the new “creative economy.” Her critique centers on the influential theories of Richard Florida, whose Rise of the Creative Class (2002) is credited with establishing that term. Rosler gained prominence in the 1970s as a conceptual photographer and video artist deconstructing the implicit social conditioning conveyed by popular images in works such as The Bowery in Two Descriptive Systems (1974-75) and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home (1967-72). Her extensively researched book identifies other theorists of urban renewal, addressing their perspectives from race, gender, and class angles. Her discussion of Florida’s legacy outlines how his acolytes in business, education, and urban planning have promoted an idea of contemporary white-collar labor as a creative pursuit while promoting investment in the arts as a benefit to property values. As such, wage laborers are encouraged to consider themselves engaged in fulfilling acts of creativity rather than trading their labor for compensation. Artists are supported and valued for their ability to revitalize buildings and neighborhoods rather than for their contributions to the breadth of human experience.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anonymous “Death Star Data Center” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

This strategy has successfully reversed the long-held convention that business is politically conservative and profit-oriented while art is politically liberal and concerned with the life of the mind. Instead, today one often hears that contemporary art is a space of conservatism and profiteering while industry, particularly tech, is a haven for progressive values and invention. For example, San Francisco gallerist-turned-entrepreneur Raman Frey suggests in a blog post that art insiders are a “community [that] views dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers with disdain,” while technology leaders “see how value manifests from exactly these dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers.” He laments artists’ perceived lack of interest in “bigger pie” thinking but never questions what the pie might be made of, that others do not want a slice. Frey is not alone in his opinions; rather, he is articulating a view shared by many in tech who cannot see why their stratospheric acquisitions of money and influence would be understood as anything but positive. Regular readers of this column will know I am no defender of art-world elitism, and some of Frey’s criticisms of San Francisco’s art scene ring true. However, he paints with too broad a brush, faulting artists for disdaining wealth and influence, yet conflating those same artists with the old-money bloodsuckers he terms “art-world bigwigs.” Meanwhile, the same tech leaders that he lauds for recognizing the value of dissent have yet to acknowledge the validity of criticisms leveled by many in the communities their employees are rapidly displacing.

A crucial distinction here is the one between artist and designer, which Rosler makes but Frey does not. This is best expressed by Ben Davis in his book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013). He says, “The opposition between art and design here is above all a difference between two different class-based notions of creative labor.”[i] Davis suggests that we ought to define “working class” and “middle class” based not on earnings, but on relative autonomy of the worker. By his equation, a low-paid artist might be a member of the “middle class” because she sets her own schedule, decides which projects to complete and in what order of priority, and creates products (works of art) according to her own interests and specifications, only introducing them to a market when they are complete. A highly paid engineer might be a member of the “working class” because she works assigned hours, chooses and prioritizes projects based on management imperatives, puts her labor for hire on the open market, and creates products according to the needs and conditions of clients or end users. This configuration shocks many artists who have aligned themselves politically with the working class and the poor, as it surely does many engineers endowed with cars, homes, and disposable income. However, while CEOs of technology companies and their youngest employees may wholly believe in their own autonomy and their radical break from the past, many tech workers in their 30s and 40s have come up against company hierarchies and policies designed to let them know when their quest for self-determination runs counter to the will of their superiors. The lucky few have enough money put aside to quit and pursue their own agendas, including art. The majority are just barely hanging on in cities where a low six-figure salary is barely sufficient to meet middle-class expectations of home ownership and parenthood.

Michal Wisniowski. “Guard Secrets” Google Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

Historian Michael Parenti says, “You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.” Perhaps the most resonant criticism of gentrification’s effects on urban communities is that the increased wealth of new arrivals is matched by increasing ethnic and social homogeneity. The new creative economy disproportionately benefits the same people who benefited from the old order: white, college-educated males from families already privy to some degree of economic and social influence. Given that the interests of this group are already aligned with the interests of the ruling class, it is no wonder that so many of them believe themselves unleashed. Their entire orbits circulate around the peg. This reality renders claims of “disruption” hollow, in that one cannot truly disrupt that on which one wholly depends. In this context, the only ethnic and gender minorities who can excel are those whose class status situates them near the peg as well, and the only critiques that gain traction are ones that position this privileged class as a solution to rather than a source of social problems.

Rebecca Solnit has written at length about the tangible effects of the creative economy on San Francisco, symbolized by the newly ubiquitous “Google Bus.” She links the imperialist underpinnings of contemporary tech with respect to privacy and data security to tech companies’ fraught relationships with the communities that surround them. She is undoubtedly correct to raise the alarm regarding Google, Facebook, and others’ relentless quest to monetize our attention and market our personal data. She is also on point with her assessment that the new, young creative professionals moving in are technologically wired but socially disconnected. She makes a few missteps as well, for example ascribing certain antisocial behaviors to technology workers as a class that could be explained equally by the relative youth and immaturity of the new arrivals. For someone with as long a history in San Francisco and the Bay Area as Solnit, it is surprising to hear her talk about the current rent boom as a wholly new phenomenon when it is clearly the second round of a cycle that began in the 1990s. Even so, Solnit has used her high profile to bring attention to the negative effects of San Francisco’s Richard Florida-esque transformation. Even more than New York, San Francisco is a city identified with the creative economy, and one where the very counterculture that gentrification has displaced is continually dangled in front of new recruits as evidence of their own ingenuity and autonomy within the corporate system.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen “Class War” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

The mythology of the creative economy explains much of why San Franciscans who have pioneered this approach to work are under-invested in the arts despite some apparent affinities. Why support artists with your hard-earned income when you are fully convinced you are an artist yourself, and a more valuable one? Why make the effort to understand artists’ concerns as grounded in history and social justice, when it is more comfortable to characterize them, as Raman Frey puts it, as encumbered by “suspicion of wealth, fame, and influence”? Rebecca Solnit takes the opposite position: “The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley’s values all too well, and a lot of us don’t like them.” While history has produced scores of artists who also sit close to the peg, the avant-garde tradition includes a healthy measure of informed political and social dissent. Technology and design entrepreneurs have engaged in politics to further industry interests such as net neutrality and looser immigration policies, but have done little to create a space for public dialogue and social critique that would rival the efforts put forth by artists in this regard.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[i] Ben Davis, “Art and Class,” 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (New York: Haymarket Books, 2013), 15.

If You Don’t Know Me By Now, You Will Never Never Never Know Me at Fundacja Arton

Bean Gilsdorf — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 07:00:52 +0000

In light of Monday’s women-led strike in Poland, in which thousands of people in over sixty cities gathered to protest the government’s proposal to completely ban abortion, If You Don’t Know Me By Now, You Will Never Never Never Know Me at Fundacja Arton seems exceptionally prescient. The exhibition brings together seven works of film or video made by women between the years of 1973 and 1982, presenting a small but influential selection of startlingly direct explorations of femininity and culture.

Letítia Parente. Task 1, 1982; video, color, sound; 1:56.

Of all the works in the show, American audiences will be most familiar with Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which the artist dons an apron and demonstrates the uses of an abecedarium of kitchen implements: bowl, chopper, dish, eggbeater. This is a straight-faced inventory; Rosler simply announces the name of each tool and then pantomimes its use. But unlike a cheerful Julia Child–style exposition, the violence in Rosler’s gestures exposes the resentment behind the toil of household drudgery. When she announces ice pick, she stabs it dramatically into a chopping block like a modern-day Clytemnestra.

In a similarly domestic vein, Letítia Parente’s Task 1 (1982) shows a woman in light-colored clothes lying face-down on an ironing board; a woman in a black dress proceeds to iron her body. As the second woman moves the hot tool over the first’s back and legs, she uses her free hand to smooth the folds of cloth, communicating care for the woman underneath the fabric while firmly auditing her appearance. The double-edged message will not be mysterious to any contemporary user of the internet, where “fitspo” memes, slut-shaming tweets, and gender-policing Facebook posts show that women continue to be harsh judges of each other’s appearance and status, often under the guise of “just wanting to help.”

Sanja Iveković. Make Up, Make Down, 1978; video, color, sound; 5:00.

Sanja Iveković’s Make Up, Make Down (1978) displaces the fantasy of ideal beauty from the frame. To a soundtrack of disco music, the artist applies foundation, mascara, eye shadow, and liner to her features—but her face is offscreen, and only her white-camisole-clad torso is visible. Well-groomed hands uncap the various elements of maquillage and sensuously twist up their contents, as though for an advertisement or other commercial display. Yet by withholding her face, the artist implies that her actions are meant to please herself alone.

In a completely different direction, Ewa Partum’s Tautological Cinema (1974) explores the conventions of structural cinema, beginning with text counting the meters of celluloid used to film “1 metr,” “2 metry,” and so on; but after three, the title card reads, “etc.” In another shot, the artist plucks the leaves off a small branch, going slowly down the left side, yanking the leaf at the tip, and then up the right, but before the branch is stripped bare, again a card reads “etc.” The middle sequence shows the artist herself, holding a finger to her lips, plugging her ears, covering her eyes, or with tape in an X over her mouth—with these incomplete and blocked messages, Partum asserts that the intention of the artist can’t ever be fully communicated.

Jolanta Marcolla. Kiss, 1975; 16mm film, no sound; 1:51.

This may also be the case in Jolanta Marcolla’s Kiss (1975), in which the artist repeatedly kisses her index and middle fingers and then moves her hand toward the camera. Each iteration of this action is followed by a flash of white light. Standing outside against a brick wall, she smiles and makes eye contact with the viewer. Although the gallery materials claim the work “refers to the objectification of the female image in popular culture,” the artist seems less to be enacting a critique than simply enjoying herself; as she blows kisses and a breeze casually ruffles her dark, curly hair, her happiness seems genuine and unforced.

Lisa Steele. Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects, 1974; video, black and white, sound; 12:00.

The objectification of the nude female body, so deeply entrenched within our systems of representation, is upended in various ways in the exhibition. Lisa Steele’s Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects (1974) begins with a distance shot of the naked artist, who walks toward the camera and then points, in close-up, to the scars on her body. She matter-of-factly recounts the incidents that produced these “defects,” such as an emergency transfusion as a baby, multiple childhood accidents on bikes and roller skates, and then finally, to the scar at the base of one breast from a 1974 surgery to remove a benign tumor. At the end, she steps away from the camera again, sings “Happy Birthday to Me,” dresses herself, and walks out of the frame. The soberness of this display points toward mortality rather than eroticism. Natalia LL’s Impressions (1973) mainly shows the artist’s naked torso as she harshly manipulates her breasts by jumping, squeezing, and lifting/dropping them. Although the gestures mimic the conventional ways in which porn actresses touch themselves, the artist’s maneuverings look painful instead of seductive. Other, shorter shots portray her belly, sucked in and then distended, or her shoulder, armpit, or ear; there are quick cutaways to a figure moving in a living room, but the footage is so grainy that it often takes a moment to identify which body part is filling the frame.

What unites these works, beyond the gender of their creators and a willingness to explore certain patterns of identity constructed around femininity, is the invitation to viewers to complete the scene in some way, whether to stand in for a lover who receives blown kisses, to visualize a woman’s made-up face, or to mentally keep the film rolling in order to fulfill the potential action implied by an “etc.” Is it a stretch to say that the acts of mental extension required by these works share, in some small way, common cause with Monday’s protest? Having stood for hours with a crowd of 30,000 people in Warsaw, it strikes me that both the necessity—and ability—to envision a world in which women are equal to men, and in control of their own bodies, reveals the ultimately political nature of the imagination. This exhibition and Monday’s protest both illustrate that poignant imaginings and simple but meaningful acts by women, even when not specifically aligned with feminist politics, can constitute a powerful indictment of inequality.

If You Don’t Know Me By Now, You Will Never Never Never Know Me is on view at Arton Foundation in Warsaw through October 30, 2016.

Summer Session – #Hashtags: Culture, Class and the New Economy

admin — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 07:00:51 +0000

The first theme in our Summer Session series is labor, and today we’re revisiting Anuradha Vikram’s essay on the so-called creative economy and its effects: “The mythology of the creative economy explains much of why San Franciscans who have pioneered this approach to work are under-invested in the arts despite some apparent affinities. Why support artists with your hard-earned income when you are fully convinced you are an artist yourself, and a more valuable one?” This article was originally published on January 27, 2014.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): John Gourley “Gringo” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

#access #technology #gentrification #class #labor #place

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anonymous “Death Star Data Center” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

This strategy has successfully reversed the long-held convention that business is politically conservative and profit-oriented while art is politically liberal and concerned with the life of the mind. Instead, today one often hears that contemporary art is a space of conservatism and profiteering while industry, particularly tech, is a haven for progressive values and invention. For example, San Francisco gallerist turned entrepreneur Raman Frey suggests in a blog post that art insiders are a “community [that] views dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers with disdain,” while technology leaders “see how value manifests from exactly these dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers.” He laments artists’ perceived lack of interest in “bigger pie” thinking but never questions what the pie might be made of, that others do not want a slice. Frey is not alone in his opinions; rather, he is articulating a view shared by many in tech who cannot see why their stratospheric acquisitions of money and influence would be understood as anything but positive. Regular readers of this column will know I am no defender of art-world elitism, and some of Frey’s criticisms of San Francisco’s art scene ring true. However, he paints with too broad a brush, faulting artists for disdaining wealth and influence, yet conflating those same artists with the old-money bloodsuckers he terms “art world bigwigs.” Meanwhile, the same tech leaders that he lauds for recognizing the value of dissent have yet to acknowledge the validity of criticisms leveled by many in the communities their employees are rapidly displacing.

Michal Wisniowski. “Guard Secrets” Google Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[i] Ben Davis, “Art and Class,” 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (New York: Haymarket Books, 2013), 15.

From the Archives– #Hashtags: Institutionalized Critique

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 08:00:48 +0000

Here at Daily Serving, we’re excited that Andrea Fraser is the focus of a year-long series of events (and a published text) at the Wattis. Today from the archives we bring you Anuradha Vikram’s review of the Hammer Museum’s 2014 show Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology, which includes an extended reflection on Fraser’s noteworthy early performance Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk and how Fraser’s career has “paralleled that of institutional critique as a discipline.” This review was originally published on April 7, 2014.

Andrea Fraser. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989; single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound; 30:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

#museums #historicity #institutional critique #detournement #appropriation

The exhibition Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology at UCLA’s Hammer Museum is an effort to comprehensively document the artistic modes of appropriation and institutional critique that emerged in American contemporary art of the 1970s–1990s. While related, these are two distinct forms—appropriation being the art of repurposing images and forms from an established, original context to a new, transformative one, while institutional critique is generally defined by installation-based art practices that appropriate and détourne forms and images from within institutional contexts such as museums and academia. Artists associated with institutional critique include Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper, all of whose work is included at the Hammer. Within the period of the exhibition’s scope, these artists had practices that were boundary-pushing and provocative. Nonetheless, that era is more than twenty years in the past, and the edginess and discomfort associated with these artists has largely given way to sanctification. As the critique generation enters the canon, it’s appropriate to ask whether the form of institutional critique can evolve to remain relevant and keep pressure on institutions that remain problematic and change-averse.

The first work I saw at the Hammer was Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), a performative lecture and collection tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s a fitting introduction to the exhibition’s larger issues. In this work, Fraser, in the guise of a docent, articulates the unspoken class privilege that underpins American art museums that are invested in a Neo-Classical ideology imported from Europe. Fraser’s casual noblesse oblige is jarring, her distinction between the haves and have-nots blunt, but her tone differs dramatically from that of today’s tycoons who tend to favor more inclusive and populist rhetoric while disinvesting in culture as a public benefit. By comparison, one might even feel a kind of nostalgia for the targets of Fraser’s critique. Fraser’s own ascent to the highest levels of the art world has paralleled that of institutional critique as a discipline. As her profile has risen, the forms of her critique have shifted, from models rooted in her body and in specific sites to works that engage the global networks of back-room deals and questionable funding sources that underpin contemporary art markets worldwide. Like the medium of institutional critique itself, Fraser is embedded in and supported by the very institutions she critiques. As such, her often stark analyses are themselves circumscribed by the targets of her criticism, softening her impact. This is a challenging condition shared by many of the artists in the Hammer show because they must be inside the institutions in order to critique them from within, but their criticisms are also instrumentalized and dampened by the institutional context.

Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973; Perspex units, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink;
15 units: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) each. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton. Image courtesy of the Artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York.

A panel discussion, “The Future of Institutional Critique,” brought several artists together with the exhibition curators Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton to discuss these very issues. Fraser joined Mary Kelly, Dara Birnbaum, and Judith Barry in a discussion of the philosophical and psychoanalytic doctrines that gave rise to the conceptual methodology of institutional critique that they each employ. As a form, institutional critique exists somewhere between installation art and curatorial practice. Its basis in Marxist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory manifests through emphasis of material as historical trace, audience as subject and object, and labor as performance. For example, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1977), an excerpt of which is on view at the Hammer, is a material archive of objects associated with the artist’s young son. When Kelly marks her child’s onesies with intersubjectivity axis diagrams derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, framing them as art objects, she makes transparent her own deeply personal need to nurture her son’s developing sense of self and her struggle to balance that with the cool, critical distance of the conceptual artist. It is the artist’s vulnerability as much as her intellect that causes the work to remain vital and powerful. Conversely, time has softened the critical position of Dara Birnbaum’s PM Magazine (1982), a remixing of early 1980s television from a feminist perspective, that today appears charmingly nostalgic. Birnbaum’s more recent work Arabesque (2011) abandons such anachronistic technology to apply a feminist critique to the history of classical music, invoking the story of Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, a 19th-century composer couple whose artistic talents were more equally matched than their relative levels of renown would suggest. These works are historicized through their presentation at the Hammer as elsewhere, but the pressures of parenthood (including scarce time and insufficient support structures) that Mary Kelly documents, and the unequal treatment of men and women in creative professions that Dara Birnbaum confronts, remain very present concerns for a majority of viewers.These realities were articulated at the panel discussion yet go unremarked within the exhibition itself.

Dara Birnbaum. PM Magazine, 1982; single-channel video, color, stereo sound; bromide enlargement with speed-rail suspension system, painted wall; 71 x 95 x 20 1/8 in. (180.3 x 241.3 x 51.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer (1984.7). Photo by Nathan Keay, © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Because the Hammer exhibition is framed as a historical survey, it does not represent institutional critique as a living discipline but rather as a contained movement. The downside of this approach is that it can perpetuate the impression that institutional critique is either no longer achievable or no longer necessary. On the contrary, the form is being revived by a younger generation that includes Occupy Museums and GULF (Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction). Like the Art Workers’ Coalition—a movement that profoundly influenced the generation of artists represented at the Hammer—these contemporary collectives are concerned with fair labor practices at art museums that increasingly operate like multinational corporations. These groups, rooted in a political theater of the streets, are staging interventions in museums to protest precarious employment at home and exploitative conditions abroad. On March 29, GULF staged an intervention at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in protest of the conditions of extreme indenture faced by thousands of mostly Bangladeshi temporary workers being imported into Abu Dhabi to build the Guggenheim and Louvre complexes on Saadiyat Island. On a crowded Saturday evening, the group dropped onto patrons thousands of printed “dollar bills” bearing slogans criticizing the museum’s complicity with abusive labor practices. As museums become more invested in global branding and more embedded in global markets, the future of institutional critique must include a push for greater transparency and attention to the money trail that drives the human impact of the global business of art.

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum through May 18, 2014.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

#Hashtags: Institutionalized Critique

Anuradha Vikram — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 07:00:53 +0000

#museums #historicity #institutional critique #detournement #appropriation

Andrea Fraser. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989; single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound; 30:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum through May 18, 2014.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

#Hashtags: Culture, Class, and the New Economy

Anuradha Vikram — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 08:00:37 +0000

#access #technology #gentrification #class #labor #place

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): John Gourley “Gringo” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

This strategy has successfully reversed the long-held convention that business is politically conservative and profit-oriented while art is politically liberal and concerned with the life of the mind. Instead, today one often hears that contemporary art is a space of conservatism and profiteering while industry, particularly tech, is a haven for progressive values and invention. For example, San Francisco gallerist turned entrepreneur Raman Frey suggests in a blog post that art insiders are a “community [that] views dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers with disdain,” while technology leaders “see how value manifests from exactly these dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers.” He laments artists’ perceived lack of interest in “bigger pie” thinking but never questions what the pie might be made of, that others do not want a slice. Frey is not alone in his opinions; rather, he is articulating a view shared by many in tech who cannot see why their stratospheric acquisitions of money and influence would be understood as anything but positive. Regular readers of this column will know I am no defender of art-world elitism, and some of Frey’s criticisms of San Francisco’s art scene ring true. However, he paints with too broad a brush, faulting artists for disdaining wealth and influence, yet conflating those same artists with the old-money bloodsuckers he terms “art world bigwigs.” Meanwhile, the same tech leaders that he lauds for recognizing the value of dissent have yet to acknowledge the validity of criticisms leveled by many in the communities their employees are rapidly displacing.

Michal Wisniowski. “Guard Secrets” Google Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[i] Ben Davis, “Art and Class,” 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (New York: Haymarket Books, 2013), 15.

Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House

Marilyn Goh — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:00:19 +0000

Ming Wong, Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow (still), 2010, 5 channel video installation, 12:58 minutes, colour, sound, © the artist.

The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House threw open its doors to the public on 13 March 2011 with 63 artists from 30 countries presenting 161 works across four exhibition venues.

Predicated on the belief that contemporary artistic practices are largely driven by discursive acts of exchange and transactions, Open House records the ensuing visual dialogue and contested ways of seeing that emerge when communication channels are laid open. According to Creative Director Matthew Ngui, the focus this year is “on the city as site and as home, where art engages audiences and represents realities through unique creative processes”. With the curatorial objective of prioritizing these artistic processes (founding ideas, initial emotional compulsions and artistic intentions) – all of which inevitably function within a complex network of socio-historical and cultural spaces and discourses –, Open House engages with the local experience by hosting its works in emblematic and culturally significant sites (read: converted colonial-style buildings carrying the collective memory of the country’s history).

Such site-specific installations however, invariably demand that the works are examined in relation to the difficult spaces created by the architecture of the buildings, and it is precisely therein that the Biennale disappoints. If process-oriented site-specificity endeavors to augment several things – like emphasizing performative aspects that such charged spaces are wont to engender or constructing an enhanced community network for instance – the paucity of connections made between particular spatial dimensions and the artwork generates instead, a random walking route that feels akin to an exhaustive tourist list of sightseeing spots to tackle before the sun goes down.

Matt Mullican, That persons work with single bedsheets, 2007, bedsheets, mixed media ( 26 sheets and 22 bars), 246 x 165 cm. Installation gesamt 8 x 8m, Höhe 2,5m Photo: Lisa Rastl. Image courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna.

That is not to say that the show doesn’t try to explore what happens when traditional boundaries that demarcate private and public spheres are breached. On the contrary, it makes an earnest but at times literal attempt to do so through artists such as Arin Rungjang’s research piece on Thai-migrant workers who have made their private experiences for public consumption, or through Martha Rosler’s public garden that was constructed in dialogue with students, local community groups and artists. Roslisham Ismail’s investigation into the buying and eating habits of the local population offers us intimate, transgressive moments of the degustatory sort in Secret Affair (2010 – 2011), a food installation of 6 refrigerators storing the consumables of several families.

Staples of contemporary art themes – subversion, displacement and the extent to which how much one sacrifices for art – are revisited in other contemplative pieces. For Matt Mullican, an artist whose practices have since the 1970s, been informed by the creation of art under hypnosis, That Person’s work with single bedsheets (2007) documents the devices of the hyperconscious (his trance persona is aptly called That Person) and the fluidity of fiction and reality. Scandinavian art duo of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset known for “Drama Queens” at the Old Vic (a neat survey of 20th century art history enhanced by the voices of stage actors) and Prada Marfa in the Texan landscape, replicated an Old German Barn in the hangar of the Old Kallang Airport accompanied by hunky blokes clad in lederhosen.

Video installations seem to dominate the Biennale and are arguably, the most exciting of the lot, though much of these works have already premiered elsewhere. The priority given to the moving image here seems to be a curatorial acknowledgement of ever-increasing expansion of the visual vocabulary of artists and of the changing relationship between spectator and the artwork. Named after Robert Rauschenberg’s near-identical paintings Factum I and Factum II (1957), Candice Breitz presents Factum (2010), a multi-channel video installation in a series of in-depth video portraits of twins – and one set of triplets, exploring forces that drive individuality and identity. Breitz films each twin in isolation from their sibling and reveals their starkly differing personalities and beliefs in a video diptych that demolishes common assumptions about twins’ ideological similarities.

Candice Breitz, Factum, 2009, six dual channel and one three channel video and sound installation, various times, © the artist.

Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010. Duration: 28 minutes, 23 seconds HD Video. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.

In a 4-part video installation Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S) (2010), Ryan Trecartin’s cast of camera-loving characters compete for attention in an overstimulated sphere where non-existent hierarchies and social rules hold the power to unleash assaultive fantasies. In this digitized, exhibitionist space of web-video sharing, re-fashioning one’s own identity is a not an act of volition but a necessity borne out of escaping repressive forces. Over-the-top emotional exchanges, androgynous dressing and fragmented scenes of image-text combination are frenetically documented in a chaotic montage amid electronica and exaggerated sound effects. Trecartin’s mismatched and effortless cast ultimately deconstruct contemporary cultural sensibilities as unstable and farcical.

Omer Fast, De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message), 2007. Image: Courtesy of the artist. Production still: Erik De Cnodder.

The fragmentation of narrative that video art permits is fully utilized in Omer Fast’s De Grote Boodschap (The Big Message) (2007). In 27 minutes, several panoramic shots of 4 scenarios create worlds marked by reversals and contradictions. Shot like a drama series with a convoluted plot that is centered on a dying elderly woman tormented by memories from the Second World War, Fast’s narrative is supercharged with racial overtones. Also exploring issues on race, identity and gender is Ming Wong’s Devo Patire. Domani (2010), an appropriation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which he plays all the characters in an archetypal family plunged into an identity crisis after encountering a stranger. The theatrical emphasis on the viewer’s experiential/spatial encounter with the moving image naturally engenders the need for interactivity, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003). Frequency and Volume assesses human perceptions and kinetic energies within a built environment, using the shadows of gallery viewers as a form of embodied representation.

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The Singapore Biennale 2011: Open House is the 3^rd Biennale held in Singapore since 2006 and will run until 15 May 2011. Conceived by Artistic Director Matthew Ngui and curators Russell Storer and Trevor Smith, Open House is organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the National Heritage Board and supported by the National Arts Council. It is held across several venues: Old Kallang Airport, National Museum of Singapore, SAM@8Q and the Singapore Art Museum.