silvia kolbowski - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by silvia kolbowski
Art Journal, Sep 1, 2007
The following text and images are excerpts from a performance presented at the Look of Law confer... more The following text and images are excerpts from a performance presented at the Look of Law conference. The performance included parts of an e-mail exchange with the artist Walid Raad, held in the summer of 2006 (and published in its entirety in Silvia Kolbowski/Walid Raad [ART Press, Between Artists Series, New York, 2006]).
October, 2000
After a number of years of observing the resurgent interest in Conceptual art in Europe, the Unit... more After a number of years of observing the resurgent interest in Conceptual art in Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia and Latin America, I was motivated to produce a project that would raise some questions about its return. This return has taken various forms: retrospectives, revived careers, academic and press attention, market interest, the coining of the term neo-conceptualism, and, more recently, books. The intended purpose of this project was to slow down the rapidity with which this return occurred, in order to be able to look more closely at its significance. I thought that if I asked artists to speak from memory about conceptual projects from the past, the recountings would include both valuable recollections and the fallacies of human memory. It seemed that these fallacies, the stutters of memory, so to speak, could trouble the fluidity of the official return. In 1998, I sent letters to sixty artists, asking them to participate in this project. Forty artists agreed to respond to the following statement: "Briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time. For the sake of this project, the definition of conceptual art would be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, film, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theater." * This project was first exhibited in September 1999 at American Fine Arts Gallery, New York, and in January 2000 at The Oliver Art Center, CCAC, Oakland. Another version was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, 2000. Note that in order to capture some of the spoken quality of the recordings in text form, pauses in speech are indicated by ellipses. Although the installation format allows the spectator to distinguish between male and female voices, the printed version does not. Thanks to Makram El-Kadi, who assisted in the coordination of the project, and to all the artists for their generous contributions of time and thoughts.
October, 1994
... Martha Buskirk: It's also interesting that some of the hostility seems related to the fa... more ... Martha Buskirk: It's also interesting that some of the hostility seems related to the fact that you can't resolve Morris into a signature style. ... Kolbowski: I was going to say that artists like Richter dealt with painting but exam-ined it on its own terms, and a number of women in the ...
October, 1998
Hal Foster: Can you give us a general summary of the competition process? Terence Riley: In brief... more Hal Foster: Can you give us a general summary of the competition process? Terence Riley: In brief, a lot of paper was generated by the selection process. Underlying the process of the museum selecting an architect is the presupposition that, for the architect to develop a proposal or a scheme, the museum has to be able to explain to the architect its position on a variety of important issues. In a day-to-day mode, people who work in a building rarely think about how these issues can be expressed in architecture. They might think about renovating or expanding or altering space, but it's difficult to actually get people to reconceptualize how they do things and how that relates to spatial issues. To overcome this, our process involved discussions among curators, staff, and trustees, as well as other people at various closed conferences, such as the one at Pocantico, which included a number of architects, museum directors, critics, historians, and writers, and more public forums such as the lecture series last fall.
October, 2012
is a collective art project and student residency program t hat defines it self on it s website a... more is a collective art project and student residency program t hat defines it self on it s website as "a home where t he Artist/Practitioner, the Student and the Institution have collapsed roles as they attempt to coevolve with an emergent strategy." Together with some Mildred's Lane participants, Matthew has been involved with both that project and other collective art endeavors. At the end of his lecture and as an extension of the concepts he had discussed, Holmes encouraged the visiting audience and residency art students to participate in a locally organized event called SlowFloat, "a day of activity combining art, outdoor recreation, music, local food and discussions about our water and food sheds," intended to raise awareness about the dire environmental dangers of hydraulic gas fracturing that currently threaten the region and the Delaware River that runs through it. During the question-and-answer session after the talk, one audience member offered a rousing call to agitate by painting protest slogans across local roads and streets. As a weekend resident of the area for the past twenty years, I responded to that comment, and to what seemed to be its positive audience reception, by trying to describe the fragile political and emotional economy that exists in an area inhabited by mostly right-wing longtime residents and more-recent residents and weekenders of liberal and left politics. Having worked closely with anti-fracking groups in the area for four years, I was aware of personal threats received by vocal opponents of gas fracking in a largely Republican county where even the members of the Town Board of Supervisors, an elected political body charged with overseeing the dangerous process, have all leased their land to fracking corporations that have lawyered up and hired private guards. As an artist, I articulated the need to consider the productive limits facing artistic engagement with such issues in regions with complex ideological histories. Needless to say, in discussions of art and activism today the notion of limits is not a popular one. But the event initiated a conversation between Matthew and me about the rubrics "art and politics" and "art and activism." David Joselit's argument in October 138 regarding shifts in relationships 1.
Public address, critical practices and representation are the topics guiding these open-forum dis... more Public address, critical practices and representation are the topics guiding these open-forum discussions held at the Dia Art Foundation in 1987 to promote public access to intellectual work-in progress. Cicra 40 bibl. ref.
Playing handball at school The street light Feeling proud of her schoolwork Looking at herself in... more Playing handball at school The street light Feeling proud of her schoolwork Looking at herself in the mirror Entering the seventh grade Playing in the backyard The food cans in the kitchen cabinet Going to the school dance Doing her homework Tasting that there's too ...
... Mrs. Annalee Newman, Timothy Nye, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr... more ... Mrs. Annalee Newman, Timothy Nye, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf-Serra, Robert Shapazian, Mr ... It spares only the signs that are consumed on the spot, that manage not to survive the thing of which they are ...
October, 2018
From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers inv... more From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histories do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art historians seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives? A Questionnaire on Monuments 5
The authors question gender, representation, ideology and social practice from different theoreti... more The authors question gender, representation, ideology and social practice from different theoretical positions within feminist art, addressing socialization, women's self-representation, working class women's struggles and psychoanalysis. 18 bibl. ref.
Art Journal, Sep 1, 2007
The following text and images are excerpts from a performance presented at the Look of Law confer... more The following text and images are excerpts from a performance presented at the Look of Law conference. The performance included parts of an e-mail exchange with the artist Walid Raad, held in the summer of 2006 (and published in its entirety in Silvia Kolbowski/Walid Raad [ART Press, Between Artists Series, New York, 2006]).
October, 2000
After a number of years of observing the resurgent interest in Conceptual art in Europe, the Unit... more After a number of years of observing the resurgent interest in Conceptual art in Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia and Latin America, I was motivated to produce a project that would raise some questions about its return. This return has taken various forms: retrospectives, revived careers, academic and press attention, market interest, the coining of the term neo-conceptualism, and, more recently, books. The intended purpose of this project was to slow down the rapidity with which this return occurred, in order to be able to look more closely at its significance. I thought that if I asked artists to speak from memory about conceptual projects from the past, the recountings would include both valuable recollections and the fallacies of human memory. It seemed that these fallacies, the stutters of memory, so to speak, could trouble the fluidity of the official return. In 1998, I sent letters to sixty artists, asking them to participate in this project. Forty artists agreed to respond to the following statement: "Briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time. For the sake of this project, the definition of conceptual art would be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, film, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theater." * This project was first exhibited in September 1999 at American Fine Arts Gallery, New York, and in January 2000 at The Oliver Art Center, CCAC, Oakland. Another version was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, 2000. Note that in order to capture some of the spoken quality of the recordings in text form, pauses in speech are indicated by ellipses. Although the installation format allows the spectator to distinguish between male and female voices, the printed version does not. Thanks to Makram El-Kadi, who assisted in the coordination of the project, and to all the artists for their generous contributions of time and thoughts.
October, 1994
... Martha Buskirk: It's also interesting that some of the hostility seems related to the fa... more ... Martha Buskirk: It's also interesting that some of the hostility seems related to the fact that you can't resolve Morris into a signature style. ... Kolbowski: I was going to say that artists like Richter dealt with painting but exam-ined it on its own terms, and a number of women in the ...
October, 1998
Hal Foster: Can you give us a general summary of the competition process? Terence Riley: In brief... more Hal Foster: Can you give us a general summary of the competition process? Terence Riley: In brief, a lot of paper was generated by the selection process. Underlying the process of the museum selecting an architect is the presupposition that, for the architect to develop a proposal or a scheme, the museum has to be able to explain to the architect its position on a variety of important issues. In a day-to-day mode, people who work in a building rarely think about how these issues can be expressed in architecture. They might think about renovating or expanding or altering space, but it's difficult to actually get people to reconceptualize how they do things and how that relates to spatial issues. To overcome this, our process involved discussions among curators, staff, and trustees, as well as other people at various closed conferences, such as the one at Pocantico, which included a number of architects, museum directors, critics, historians, and writers, and more public forums such as the lecture series last fall.
October, 2012
is a collective art project and student residency program t hat defines it self on it s website a... more is a collective art project and student residency program t hat defines it self on it s website as "a home where t he Artist/Practitioner, the Student and the Institution have collapsed roles as they attempt to coevolve with an emergent strategy." Together with some Mildred's Lane participants, Matthew has been involved with both that project and other collective art endeavors. At the end of his lecture and as an extension of the concepts he had discussed, Holmes encouraged the visiting audience and residency art students to participate in a locally organized event called SlowFloat, "a day of activity combining art, outdoor recreation, music, local food and discussions about our water and food sheds," intended to raise awareness about the dire environmental dangers of hydraulic gas fracturing that currently threaten the region and the Delaware River that runs through it. During the question-and-answer session after the talk, one audience member offered a rousing call to agitate by painting protest slogans across local roads and streets. As a weekend resident of the area for the past twenty years, I responded to that comment, and to what seemed to be its positive audience reception, by trying to describe the fragile political and emotional economy that exists in an area inhabited by mostly right-wing longtime residents and more-recent residents and weekenders of liberal and left politics. Having worked closely with anti-fracking groups in the area for four years, I was aware of personal threats received by vocal opponents of gas fracking in a largely Republican county where even the members of the Town Board of Supervisors, an elected political body charged with overseeing the dangerous process, have all leased their land to fracking corporations that have lawyered up and hired private guards. As an artist, I articulated the need to consider the productive limits facing artistic engagement with such issues in regions with complex ideological histories. Needless to say, in discussions of art and activism today the notion of limits is not a popular one. But the event initiated a conversation between Matthew and me about the rubrics "art and politics" and "art and activism." David Joselit's argument in October 138 regarding shifts in relationships 1.
Public address, critical practices and representation are the topics guiding these open-forum dis... more Public address, critical practices and representation are the topics guiding these open-forum discussions held at the Dia Art Foundation in 1987 to promote public access to intellectual work-in progress. Cicra 40 bibl. ref.
Playing handball at school The street light Feeling proud of her schoolwork Looking at herself in... more Playing handball at school The street light Feeling proud of her schoolwork Looking at herself in the mirror Entering the seventh grade Playing in the backyard The food cans in the kitchen cabinet Going to the school dance Doing her homework Tasting that there's too ...
... Mrs. Annalee Newman, Timothy Nye, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr... more ... Mrs. Annalee Newman, Timothy Nye, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf-Serra, Robert Shapazian, Mr ... It spares only the signs that are consumed on the spot, that manage not to survive the thing of which they are ...
October, 2018
From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers inv... more From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histories do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art historians seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives? A Questionnaire on Monuments 5
The authors question gender, representation, ideology and social practice from different theoreti... more The authors question gender, representation, ideology and social practice from different theoretical positions within feminist art, addressing socialization, women's self-representation, working class women's struggles and psychoanalysis. 18 bibl. ref.