Solveig Nelson, PhD | The Art Institute of Chicago (original) (raw)

Solveig Nelson, PhD

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Papers by Solveig Nelson, PhD

Research paper thumbnail of The Life and Legacy of Thing

Research paper thumbnail of PHANTOM LIMBS SOLVEIG NELSON ON SIMONE FORTI'S HOLOGRAMS

Research paper thumbnail of 'The Whole World Is (Still) Watching,' Essay for Video Data Bank TV, curated by Solveig Nelson, featuring the art works of Sadie Benning, Dara Birnbaum, Leah Gilliam, Tom Kalin, Gran Fury, Tom Rubnitz, Suzie Silver

For videos please contact the Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org

Research paper thumbnail of "Joyce Pensato," Corbett vs. Dempsey, Artforum print, March 2017

Research paper thumbnail of "Lee Godie," Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Artforum print, February 2016

Research paper thumbnail of "A spectacle of entrance, exits, and changing coalitions," MFA Thesis Show Catalogue, University of Chicago

is the first MFA thesis show in the University of Chicago's studio art program in which the gradu... more is the first MFA thesis show in the University of Chicago's studio art program in which the graduating class decided to come together and exhibit as a single entity. Limitations in gallery space have required expanding the site of the exhibition, from cinemas to emergency exits. While the group exhibition format gestures toward social relationsa collectivity-there is no stable center or singular point of gravity.

Research paper thumbnail of "The Freedom Principle Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now," Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Artforum Print, Focus Review, November 2015

‘The Freedom Principle: -xperiments in Art and Viusic 1965 to Now” AT THE THRESHOLD of this exhibition is Glenn Ligon’s Give Us a Poem, 2007, positioned immediatel adjacent to the show title that spans the entirety of the gallery’s outer wall. Ligon’s neon wall work quotes Muhammad Ali’s response to a 1975 Harvard audience’s request for a poem. Ali's succinct answer—‘Me / We!”— is illuminated in an alternating pattern, the two words stacked one atop the other. Ligon’s use of reflexive symmetry plays on the collectivity called for by Ali to amplify a central question of “The Freedom Principle”: How does contemporary art revisit black cultural nationalisms of the 1960s in ways both critical and affirmative? That is to say: What was—or is—the Black Arts Movement? This expansive exhibition places two seminal and interrelated Chicago groups founded during the ’60s—the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA)—in conversation with later works that engage unresolved tensions within a movement that called for collaborative organization (and the anonymity such collectivity sometimes entails) while advocating for self-determination and individual agency. In emphasizing collectives, curators Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete challenge art history’s monographic focus and present the Black Arts Movement as a complex system, productively unwieldy in its embrace of visual art and sound and in its integration of myriad media—all in the service, paradoxically, of separatist politics. ‘The Freedom Principle,” which takes its title from critic John Litweiler’s book about jazz’s increasingly abstract manifestations after World War Il, examines the dialogue between American free jazz and .ostwar visual art. The show was occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the AACM, an organization of orimarily African American musicians founded in 1965 on Chicago’s South Side. Since its inception, the

Research paper thumbnail of "Space Age," on "Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–1971,” Graham Foundation, Artforum print, Column, January 2015 pdf

IN 1966, David Antin declared that environment was “a pretty dead word.” The critic was being more than a little ironic, yet his pronouncement diagnosed a real anxiety. For artists and critics across the ideological spectrum, environment had become a difficult—and destabilizing—term. For some, it invited a departure from ideals of flatness, threatening the art object’s increasingly precarious autonomy. For others, including those sympathetic to art’s expanded field, environment had a worrying association with movement, a disruption of the one-to-one encounter between viewer and static image. For still others, however, the allure of the word held firm. A case in point is the series of two- to four-week workshops that were organized by dancer Anna Halprin, and her husband, architect Lawrence Halprin, in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Occurring across three California landscapes—San Francisco, the nearby coastal community of Sea Ranch, and the wooded areas around the couple’s Kentfield home—and open to students of dance and architecture, the workshops aimed to foster a “collective creativity,” emphasizing both movement and interdisciplinarity in ways that represented a counternarrative of sorts to East Coast critics’ focus on the status and legacy of painting. Thanks to “Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971,” an important exhibition by the Graham Foundation in Chicago, the Halprin collaborations are finally receiving their due. solveignelson | logout ADVERTISE BACKISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE

Research paper thumbnail of "Josef Koudelka," Art Institute of Chicago, Artforum print, November 2014

Research paper thumbnail of "R.H. Quaytman," Renaissance Society, Artforum print, April 2013

Research paper thumbnail of "Casilda Sánchez," Aspect Ratio, Artforum print, December 2013

Casilda Sánchez's best-known digital-video installation, As Inside as the Eye Can See, 2009, pict... more Casilda Sánchez's best-known digital-video installation, As Inside as the Eye Can See, 2009, pictures two eyes with long lashes approaching each other in extreme close-up. This confrontation between anatomies brings to mind the physical and social collisions of body art, but it also reads as a pun on Clement Greenberg's celebration of painting as an appeal to "eyesight alone." Sánchez's first solo exhibition, mounted at Aspect Ratio, continued to play with conventions of vision and picturing that have been historically linked to painting, but were here approached through the material conditions of the moving image.

Research paper thumbnail of "Gretchen Bender," exhibition Review, Poor Farm , November 2012, Artforum print

Research paper thumbnail of "Sadie Benning, Early Videos," Interview by Solveig Nelson, 2004, Wexner Center for the Arts

Research paper thumbnail of The Life and Legacy of Thing

Research paper thumbnail of PHANTOM LIMBS SOLVEIG NELSON ON SIMONE FORTI'S HOLOGRAMS

Research paper thumbnail of 'The Whole World Is (Still) Watching,' Essay for Video Data Bank TV, curated by Solveig Nelson, featuring the art works of Sadie Benning, Dara Birnbaum, Leah Gilliam, Tom Kalin, Gran Fury, Tom Rubnitz, Suzie Silver

For videos please contact the Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org

Research paper thumbnail of "Joyce Pensato," Corbett vs. Dempsey, Artforum print, March 2017

Research paper thumbnail of "Lee Godie," Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Artforum print, February 2016

Research paper thumbnail of "A spectacle of entrance, exits, and changing coalitions," MFA Thesis Show Catalogue, University of Chicago

is the first MFA thesis show in the University of Chicago's studio art program in which the gradu... more is the first MFA thesis show in the University of Chicago's studio art program in which the graduating class decided to come together and exhibit as a single entity. Limitations in gallery space have required expanding the site of the exhibition, from cinemas to emergency exits. While the group exhibition format gestures toward social relationsa collectivity-there is no stable center or singular point of gravity.

Research paper thumbnail of "The Freedom Principle Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now," Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Artforum Print, Focus Review, November 2015

‘The Freedom Principle: -xperiments in Art and Viusic 1965 to Now” AT THE THRESHOLD of this exhibition is Glenn Ligon’s Give Us a Poem, 2007, positioned immediatel adjacent to the show title that spans the entirety of the gallery’s outer wall. Ligon’s neon wall work quotes Muhammad Ali’s response to a 1975 Harvard audience’s request for a poem. Ali's succinct answer—‘Me / We!”— is illuminated in an alternating pattern, the two words stacked one atop the other. Ligon’s use of reflexive symmetry plays on the collectivity called for by Ali to amplify a central question of “The Freedom Principle”: How does contemporary art revisit black cultural nationalisms of the 1960s in ways both critical and affirmative? That is to say: What was—or is—the Black Arts Movement? This expansive exhibition places two seminal and interrelated Chicago groups founded during the ’60s—the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA)—in conversation with later works that engage unresolved tensions within a movement that called for collaborative organization (and the anonymity such collectivity sometimes entails) while advocating for self-determination and individual agency. In emphasizing collectives, curators Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete challenge art history’s monographic focus and present the Black Arts Movement as a complex system, productively unwieldy in its embrace of visual art and sound and in its integration of myriad media—all in the service, paradoxically, of separatist politics. ‘The Freedom Principle,” which takes its title from critic John Litweiler’s book about jazz’s increasingly abstract manifestations after World War Il, examines the dialogue between American free jazz and .ostwar visual art. The show was occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the AACM, an organization of orimarily African American musicians founded in 1965 on Chicago’s South Side. Since its inception, the

Research paper thumbnail of "Space Age," on "Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–1971,” Graham Foundation, Artforum print, Column, January 2015 pdf

IN 1966, David Antin declared that environment was “a pretty dead word.” The critic was being more than a little ironic, yet his pronouncement diagnosed a real anxiety. For artists and critics across the ideological spectrum, environment had become a difficult—and destabilizing—term. For some, it invited a departure from ideals of flatness, threatening the art object’s increasingly precarious autonomy. For others, including those sympathetic to art’s expanded field, environment had a worrying association with movement, a disruption of the one-to-one encounter between viewer and static image. For still others, however, the allure of the word held firm. A case in point is the series of two- to four-week workshops that were organized by dancer Anna Halprin, and her husband, architect Lawrence Halprin, in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Occurring across three California landscapes—San Francisco, the nearby coastal community of Sea Ranch, and the wooded areas around the couple’s Kentfield home—and open to students of dance and architecture, the workshops aimed to foster a “collective creativity,” emphasizing both movement and interdisciplinarity in ways that represented a counternarrative of sorts to East Coast critics’ focus on the status and legacy of painting. Thanks to “Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971,” an important exhibition by the Graham Foundation in Chicago, the Halprin collaborations are finally receiving their due. solveignelson | logout ADVERTISE BACKISSUES CONTACT US SUBSCRIBE

Research paper thumbnail of "Josef Koudelka," Art Institute of Chicago, Artforum print, November 2014

Research paper thumbnail of "R.H. Quaytman," Renaissance Society, Artforum print, April 2013

Research paper thumbnail of "Casilda Sánchez," Aspect Ratio, Artforum print, December 2013

Casilda Sánchez's best-known digital-video installation, As Inside as the Eye Can See, 2009, pict... more Casilda Sánchez's best-known digital-video installation, As Inside as the Eye Can See, 2009, pictures two eyes with long lashes approaching each other in extreme close-up. This confrontation between anatomies brings to mind the physical and social collisions of body art, but it also reads as a pun on Clement Greenberg's celebration of painting as an appeal to "eyesight alone." Sánchez's first solo exhibition, mounted at Aspect Ratio, continued to play with conventions of vision and picturing that have been historically linked to painting, but were here approached through the material conditions of the moving image.

Research paper thumbnail of "Gretchen Bender," exhibition Review, Poor Farm , November 2012, Artforum print

Research paper thumbnail of "Sadie Benning, Early Videos," Interview by Solveig Nelson, 2004, Wexner Center for the Arts

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