Nicolei Gupit - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Drafts by Nicolei Gupit

Thinking Like a Work of Art as a Triply Jeopardized Self As a minoritized woman and artist of col... more Thinking Like a Work of Art as a Triply Jeopardized Self As a minoritized woman and artist of color in the United States, my firsthand experiences compel me to make works of art about struggle and hardship. In her book Woman, Native, Other, distinguished filmmaker and postcolonial theorist Trinh Minh-ha reminds us that "the minor-ity's voice is always personal; that of the majority , always impersonal. Logic dictates. Man thinks, woman feels…Our province, we hear, is the heart, not the mind, which many of us have come to loathe and despise, for we believe it has a sex, a male one however, for reasons of (in)security…We must forget ourselves. We are therefore triply jeopardized: as a writer, as a woman, and as a woman of color" (Minh-ha 28). I have come to understand that because I am triply jeopardized as an artistresearcher, as a woman of color, and as one who grew up in poverty, my art practice is viewed as inherently autobiographical and tied to accounts of feelings. With that in mind, I create works of art across various mediaincluding but not limited to video art, painting, sculpture, and installation art-to challenge conventional notions of identity-based work by grounding my research on data and offering a critical lens from which to view present-day neoliberal America. In this paper, I will draw from texts by Stephen Best, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mike Davis, Svetlana Boym, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres among others, to elaborate on the broad concepts that guide and shape eight works of art that I have produced from 2019 to 2021. To start with, I invite you to engage in a thought experiment in which we assume it is possible to reason 'like a work of art.' In his book, None Like Us, African American criticism researcher and English professor Stephen Best declares, "It is a comportment that is 'not about art' at all, but 'inside art'-a comportment that involves thinking like a work of art" (Best 62). For Best, to think like a work of art means to give oneself permission to be opaque, push against expectations to be categorized, and resist any definitions of what constitutes the self. As an example, Best discusses one of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's shimmering constructions of woven aluminum bottle caps and copper wire titled Fading Cloth (2005). Best asks us to put aside what the artwork is 'about,' meaning what the artist

Interpellation and Opacity David Hammons, a multi-media American artist rooted in the Black urban... more Interpellation and Opacity David Hammons, a multi-media American artist rooted in the Black urban experience, started making his body prints in 1968 during one of the most violent, politically charged years in recent U.S. history: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and protests against the Vietnam War reached unprecedented levels. To manifest his body prints, he made impressions of his body by first coating his torso, face, arms, hair, and clothes in greasy substances like margarine. Then, he pressed sections of his body onto a sheet of paper before sprinkling pigment on the surface. His artistic process demonstrates the entangling of graphic art with performance: the body's imprint suggests duration and impermanence through its translucent quality. He stated in a 1970 interview with Joseph A. Young at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "When I lie down on the paper which is first placed on the floor, I have to carefully decide how to get up after I have made the impression that I want. Sometimes I lie there for perhaps three minutes or even longer just figuring out how I can get off the paper without smudging the image that I'm trying to print" (Three Graphic Artists 7). The durational aspect of his artistic process demonstrates his strong desire to control the levels of opacity and legibility of his body's image. Juxtaposed with political embellishments like the American flag and layered with visual and conceptual content that allude to Black culture and key historical moments in Black history, his body prints emphasize how the Black body experiences firsthand the racial tensions in the United States.

Thinking Like a Work of Art as a Triply Jeopardized Self As a minoritized woman and artist of col... more Thinking Like a Work of Art as a Triply Jeopardized Self As a minoritized woman and artist of color in the United States, my firsthand experiences compel me to make works of art about struggle and hardship. In her book Woman, Native, Other, distinguished filmmaker and postcolonial theorist Trinh Minh-ha reminds us that "the minor-ity's voice is always personal; that of the majority , always impersonal. Logic dictates. Man thinks, woman feels…Our province, we hear, is the heart, not the mind, which many of us have come to loathe and despise, for we believe it has a sex, a male one however, for reasons of (in)security…We must forget ourselves. We are therefore triply jeopardized: as a writer, as a woman, and as a woman of color" (Minh-ha 28). I have come to understand that because I am triply jeopardized as an artistresearcher, as a woman of color, and as one who grew up in poverty, my art practice is viewed as inherently autobiographical and tied to accounts of feelings. With that in mind, I create works of art across various mediaincluding but not limited to video art, painting, sculpture, and installation art-to challenge conventional notions of identity-based work by grounding my research on data and offering a critical lens from which to view present-day neoliberal America. In this paper, I will draw from texts by Stephen Best, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mike Davis, Svetlana Boym, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres among others, to elaborate on the broad concepts that guide and shape eight works of art that I have produced from 2019 to 2021. To start with, I invite you to engage in a thought experiment in which we assume it is possible to reason 'like a work of art.' In his book, None Like Us, African American criticism researcher and English professor Stephen Best declares, "It is a comportment that is 'not about art' at all, but 'inside art'-a comportment that involves thinking like a work of art" (Best 62). For Best, to think like a work of art means to give oneself permission to be opaque, push against expectations to be categorized, and resist any definitions of what constitutes the self. As an example, Best discusses one of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's shimmering constructions of woven aluminum bottle caps and copper wire titled Fading Cloth (2005). Best asks us to put aside what the artwork is 'about,' meaning what the artist

Interpellation and Opacity David Hammons, a multi-media American artist rooted in the Black urban... more Interpellation and Opacity David Hammons, a multi-media American artist rooted in the Black urban experience, started making his body prints in 1968 during one of the most violent, politically charged years in recent U.S. history: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and protests against the Vietnam War reached unprecedented levels. To manifest his body prints, he made impressions of his body by first coating his torso, face, arms, hair, and clothes in greasy substances like margarine. Then, he pressed sections of his body onto a sheet of paper before sprinkling pigment on the surface. His artistic process demonstrates the entangling of graphic art with performance: the body's imprint suggests duration and impermanence through its translucent quality. He stated in a 1970 interview with Joseph A. Young at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "When I lie down on the paper which is first placed on the floor, I have to carefully decide how to get up after I have made the impression that I want. Sometimes I lie there for perhaps three minutes or even longer just figuring out how I can get off the paper without smudging the image that I'm trying to print" (Three Graphic Artists 7). The durational aspect of his artistic process demonstrates his strong desire to control the levels of opacity and legibility of his body's image. Juxtaposed with political embellishments like the American flag and layered with visual and conceptual content that allude to Black culture and key historical moments in Black history, his body prints emphasize how the Black body experiences firsthand the racial tensions in the United States.