Eve Kalyva | University of Kent (original) (raw)
Books by Eve Kalyva
Introduction to the Dialogues on the Future of Radical Women: Feminism and Latin American Art, 2023
This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a sta... more This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a starting point to discuss Latin American art today, addressing its history, legacy, and contribution to positive social change through the prism of feminism. Seeking to challenge hegemonic readings of the categories of “Latin America” and “feminism” while reinstating the contribution of Latin American women, Latina/Latinx, and Chicana/Chicanx artists to art and critical thought today, the exhibition Radical Women proposed novel ways of displaying art from the region by embracing multiplicity, attending to the particularity of different contexts, and bringing to the fore common threads of critical and creative practice. Building on that premise, these contributions expand on the original exhibition’s time frame and consider the persistence of feminism and its changing status in Latin American art after 1985. They explore recent artistic practices, curatorial projects, and art historical scholarship; reflect on strategies of display, audience engagement, societal concerns, and epistemological premises; and consider different ways of conceptualizing Latin American and feminist identities, legacies, and genealogies today. By doing so, this Dialogues seeks to enrich and diversify our understanding of past and current practices, as well as highlight the intricate connections and resonances that exist between the two. Contributions by curators (Fajardo-Hill, Rjeille), scholars (Fernández, Lamoni), and artists (Antivilo, Motta) span issues in political activism, ecology, technology, education, genealogy, colonization, heritage, and memory. What emerges is a sense of the field’s present concerns and the ways this is shaping the future direction of feminism in Latin American art and art history.
Palgrave/Macmillan, 2017
This book examines the use of image and text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a critical strat... more This book examines the use of image and text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a critical strategy to challenge the ideological and institutional demands placed on art. While conceptual art is generally identified by its use of language, the aim of this book is show how exactly language was used.
In particular, this book asks: How has the presence of language in a visual art context changed the ways art is talked about, theorised and produced?
Image and Text in Conceptual Art demonstrates how artworks communicate in context and evaluates their critical potential. It considers international case studies across Europe and North and South America (with an emphasis on UK and Argentina); and draws resources from art history and theory, philosophy, discourse analysis, social semiotics, literary criticism and sociology.
Engaging the critical and social dimensions of art, it proposes three interdisciplinary methods of analysis that consider the work’s performative gesture, its logico-semantic relations and the rhetorical operations in the discursive creation of meaning. This book offers a historiography of conceptual art in its socio-political context; and makes an original contribution to the theory of art that can be applied beyond conceptual art.
Synthesis, academic peer-reviewed journal of comparative literary studies, 2014
There is a tendency with new media technologies towards information exchange via interaction. Wit... more There is a tendency with new media technologies towards information exchange via interaction. With applications such as hypertexts, pervasive games, and social network sites, new media are characterised by flexibility in data morphology and manipulation, including generating, structuring, storing, and sharing data. While the reader becomes user (and often co-author) rather than recipient, new technologies not only transform the materiality of the text as a container of information, but also the activity of reading and writing and its theorisation in new (meta)spaces.
The rise of new media calls for reconsiderations of binaries such as author/reader, producer/consumer, and source centre/periphery, the role of the participating audience, and the nature of information exchange. Such re-articulation(s) could further be situated in relation to the political impetus of technological developments and the new ways of engaging and performing the world that these enable. Put differently, new media alter the material applications and critical potential of the networks of production and dissemination of information, as well as the communities within which these operate and help create. As such, the activity of reading/writing in new media becomes a particular material and social practice that can open up and create new, more democratic spaces.
This guest issue of Synthesis offers a critical discussion on new media. It aims to re-examine the relations across information, user, and medium under a new paradigm of interactivity, and to address pressing questions regarding ethics and responsibility in our globalised, digitalised era. Special focus have the cultural, societal, and political implications of the use of new technologies, and the modes, effects, and theorisations of acting (on) the text in new media.
parallax: academic journal for cultural analysis, critical theory and philosophy, 2009
"Disturbing spaces" can be understood as a metaphor for challenging a given structure or an order... more "Disturbing spaces" can be understood as a metaphor for challenging a given structure or an order; but also as a symptom of spatial difference when operating from within specific framewokrs. It refers to processes that manipulate the space of activity, be it the 2-D page or the 3-D room; to the juxtaposition of words, pictures, objects and bodies; and to the spatial and temporal configuration of things and their distance. "Disturbing spaces" can also be understood with reference to the metaphorical space of reflection, of ordering and of classification, of orthodoxy and of the canon. Likewise, it can refer to the domain of methodologies and typographies, as well as to linguistic orders, visual structures and cognitive processes.
With this plurality in mind, this special issue of parallax asks: How does one – as a philosopher, a writer or an artist – move in-between spaces? Such move can take place, for example, from the mental space of formulation of ideas and rhetorical operations to the embodied space of physical impact and back again. Furthermore, how does one act on the metaphysical space of theory from within the space of experience?
We invite discussions on various strategies that, by disturbing the spatio-temporal configuration of experienced space, open up the space for critical reflection; or that confront the canon with a premise that nourishes the possibility of doubt. What demands does the frame (of reference, of regulations, of limitations) make on the structure of the physical object? What are the frame/object’s internal and external limits and how can one invent and sustain alternative conditions of meaning and intelligibility?
Disturbing spaces entails knowledge of the object’s physical location and therefore depends on the context of its experience and the conditions of its exposure. Thus, one may arrive at a disjoined critical stand by way of upsetting the order of things, yet this disruption of the frame of reference will also cause one to fall back to a provisional starting point. If so, is it possible to retain this experience and to use it in order to reflect on and repeat such a performance? Where would one locate strategies that disturb the embodied/ mental space, and that tease their distance? Would a self-reflective operation create a new space, reconfigure the same space anew or remain in a metaphysical space?
Questioning the notion of impossibility and of impossible strategies not as a prohibition but as a tangent, this issue of parallax allows its space to become a meta-space of dialogue across philosophy, literary and art criticism, semantics and discourse analysis.
Book chapters by Eve Kalyva
Madrid: Reina Sofía, 2015
Santiago de Chile: University Adolfo Ibáñez/GEAP-Latinoamérica, 2013
Este artículo examina desarrollos en la escena cultural antes y después la última dictadura argen... more Este artículo examina desarrollos en la escena cultural antes y después la última dictadura argentina. A través de actividades publicas de grabado, y de la participación de Juan Carlos Romero en grupos artísticos y sindicales, se investiga cómo las relaciones sociales se inscriben en el espacio urbano, y cómo el espacio urbano se transforma como lugar de actividad artística y pública donde se formulan redes, estructuras y nuevas formas de co-existencia.
Si bien el grabado es defendido como una forma de arte popularizada y democratizadora, el contexto histórico en los años sesenta y setenta se caracteriza por la profesionalización del grabado como metier y la salvaguardia de su estatus como arte. En repuesta, este artículo sugiere un marco más amplio para definir y evaluar el acto de ‘llevar el grabado a la calle’ como un acto histórico paralelo a avances tecnológicos, la organización del mercado y de los trabajadores, y procesos de modernización y de desarrollo neoliberal.
Palabras claves
Arte público, grabado, dictadura, modernización, Romero
Abstract
This article examines developments in the cultural sphere before and after Argentina's last dictatorship. Through public printmaking activities, and the participation of Juan Carlos Romero in artists’ groups and workers’ unions, it investigates how social relations are inscribed in the urban space, and how the urban space is transformed as the site of public and artistic activity where networks, structures and new forms of co-existence are formulated.
While printmaking is advocated as a popularised and democratising art form, the historical context in the sixties and seventies is characterised by the professionalisation of printmaking as a metier and by the safeguarding of its status as art. In response, this paper suggests a broader framework for defining and evaluating the act of 'taking printmaking to the streets' as a historical activity parallel to technological advances, the organisation of the market and of the workers, and processes of modernisation and neoliberal development.
Key words
Public art, printmaking, dictatorship, modernisation, Romero
Leeds: The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, 2009
Papers by Eve Kalyva
This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity in both theoretical a... more This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity in both theoretical and practical terms. Contemporary art can be understood as a particular temporal definition of art production in relation to the historical moment; with this in mind, we wish to address the implications or potential ramifications of the term ‘contemporaneity’ in relation to art, history, and criticism. While art practices have developed new ways of engaging the spatio-temporal continuum of experience, the notion of contemporaneity has been considered in relation to historicity and memory, ethics, and the value of the new (Groys, Agamben, Deleuze, Riegl). In this light, we invite particular focus on how the concept of contemporaneity is problematized and interrogated in installations and works that use new time-manipulating technologies. Installation and performance art intensify the experiential dimensions of art that thematize the now. Equally, the use of new technologies re-activates an enquiry into different types of contemporaneity and the relation of art making to historicity. For their part, and responding to the immediacy of such practices, twenty-first century art institutions have developed more fluid forms of presentation and more readily-available forms of public engagement (e-bulletins, blogs, podcasts). With this session we encourage papers that explore the temporality of art in works (and their presentations) that themselves engage with the notion of time. How do works deal with time, engage with a particular time or instance, and negotiate their own temporal limits?
The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division bet... more The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division between high and low culture. Many artistic practices have challenged this binary, where the concept of gallery enclosure can be understood as a literal and figurative qualifier of art: a space that is distinct from, yet exists within, the wider social sphere. Especially in twentieth and twenty-first century art, the use of language has facilitated a material and discursive transgression beyond the traditional art-object and its institutional isolation. Works that combine image and text have appeared on gallery walls, the popular press, and other public sites such as billboards and pavements. Such activities widen the engagement with art and open new channels of communication and participation. They also challenge, and often alter, the traditional hierarchies that underline the artworld, from the production of art to its display and consumption. Acknowledging the manifold social practices of contemporary art, as well as the diversity of scholarship that IAWIS-AIERTI embraces, this session wishes to address the presence of image and text in the public sphere from both a historical and critical perspective. In what ways can the use of language in art practices transform the domain of the artworld? How have art institutions shifted their policies in response to such practices? With this session, we also hope to consider the sociality of art, as this becomes evident by artistic practices that transgress the gallery enclosure of art.
The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division bet... more The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division between high and low culture. Many artistic practices have challenged this binary, where the concept of gallery enclosure can be understood as a literal and figurative qualifier of art: a space that is distinct from, yet exists within, the wider social sphere. Especially in twentieth and twenty-first century art, the use of language has facilitated a material and discursive transgression beyond the traditional art-object and its institutional isolation. Works that combine image and text have appeared on gallery walls, the popular press, and other public sites such as billboards and pavements. Such activities widen the engagement with art and open new channels of communication and participation. They also challenge, and often alter, the traditional hierarchies that underline the artworld, from the production of art to its display and consumption. Acknowledging the manifold social practices o...
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a sta... more This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a starting point to discuss Latin American art today, addressing its history, legacy, and contribution to positive social change through the prism of feminism. Seeking to challenge hegemonic readings of the categories of “Latin America” and “feminism” while reinstating the contribution of Latin American women, Latina/Latinx, and Chicana/Chicanx artists to art and critical thought today, the exhibition Radical Women proposed novel ways of displaying art from the region by embracing multiplicity, attending to the particularity of different contexts, and bringing to the fore common threads of critical and creative practice. Building on that premise, these contributions expand on the original exhibition’s time frame and consider the persistence of feminism and its changing status in Latin American art after 1985. They explore recent artistic practices, curatorial projects, and art historical scho...
Social media are intrinsic to marketing. They contribute to the intensification of consumerist cu... more Social media are intrinsic to marketing. They contribute to the intensification of consumerist culture, and, together with prevalent neo-liberal policies across the educational and the cultural sectors, shift the dynamics of our access to knowledge and culture. This causes changes in museum policies and the traditional model of plan–produce–publish and affects the institutional position and validity of criticism. The essay tries to identify these changes and reflect on the state of criticism today. It examines different artworks that use social media, and suggests an interdisciplinary approach that, based on social semiotics, turns attention to the act of communication. By understanding art criticism as interpretation in operation, we can negotiate its position within overlapping discursive frameworks and evaluate the social and critical dimensions of art. The English version of the essay is made available on Sešit’s website at http://vvp.avu.cz/sesit/. Klíčová slova umělecká kritik...
Latin American Research Review, 2016
is a sociologist and artist. He has worked in various media and new technologies, and has partici... more is a sociologist and artist. He has worked in various media and new technologies, and has participated in collective projects and investigation groups. In 1968, he took part in the artistic-political interventions of Tucumán Arde and at Experiencias 68' (Instituto di Tella, Buenos Aires). His work focuses on social structures, communication networks, collaborative creation and cultural experimentation. Selected projects include the lyrics for the music group Virus (1980s), the START Foundation (1999-), the journal ramona (2000-2010), Sociedades Experimentales (University of Buenos Aires, 2004) and the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (2008-), a centre of investigation, exhibition and education. In 2010, Jacoby participated at the 29th São Paulo Biennial with El alma nunca piensa sin imagen [The soul never thinks without image] (2010). Set up as an electoral office for Dilma Rousseff, the presidential candidate of the Workers' Party during the 2010 elections, the work was covered from view after being considered as breaking the regulations prohibiting the transmission of propaganda in places run http://epublishing.ekt.gr | e
Latin American Research Review, 2016
The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitica... more The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitical and economic changes at a global scale call for reconsiderations of the relation between art and power and its role in processes of democratization. This article examines art’s social function and its understanding as transformative social praxis—an activity that reflects upon the world and seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically reflects upon its own condition and relation to that world. It specifically suggests the idea of art’s rhetoric in order to conceptualize art’s critical potential and identify processes that generate and displace meaning across artistic, sociopolitical, and discursive contexts. Tucumán Arde (1968) in Argentina, Colectivo Actiones de Arte’s Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) in Chile, and Proyecto Venus (2000–2006), based in Buenos Aires, use interdisciplinary methodologies to critically intersect the public sphere. They scrutinize art’s position in society, seek to raise awareness, and act as alternative networks of information and socialization.
RESUMEN:
La transformación de las sociedades latinoamericanas post-1970 y las recientes reformas sociopolíticas y económicas pide reconsiderar la relación entre el arte y el poder, y su papel en los procesos de democratización. Este artículo examina la función social del arte y su comprensión como transformadora praxis social—una actividad que reflexiona sobre el mundo y trata de cambiarlo, y que al mismo tiempo reflexiona críticamente sobre su propia condición y relación con ese mundo—. Específicamente, con el fin de conceptualizar el potencial crítico del arte, se sugiere la idea de la retórica del arte. Esto ayuda a identificar los procesos que generan y que desplazan el significado a través contextos artísticos, sociopolíticos y discursivos. Tucumán Arde (1968) en Argentina, Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) por CADA en Chile, y Proyecto Venus (2000–2006) basado en Buenos Aires emplean metodologías interdisciplinarias para intersectar críticamente la esfera pública. Examinan la posición del arte en la sociedad, apuntan a concientizar, y actúan como redes alternativas de información y de socialización.
![Research paper thumbnail of Article: ‘Where are my keys? The now of critique in a plurality of voices'. Notebook for Art, Theory, and Related Zones (2016) [Revised]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/46402056/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Notebook for Art, Theory, and Related Zones, 2016
The increasing use of social media and new technologies both in artistic production and cultural ... more The increasing use of social media and new technologies both in artistic production and cultural promotion causes shifts in the artworld dynamics and the production of knowledge. This is specifically in terms of the amplification of the now, the quantifiable validation based on visibility and the commodification of human connectedness. They moreover affect museum policies and change the museum’s public image from a cultural-educational institution to a museum-brand with a user-oriented social media profile.
How can, in this context, the critical voice of criticism be recuperated from the marketable validation-by-numbers that has come to dominate institutional policies? Discourse analysis understands language as a social semiotic in operation. With this in mind, this paper suggests the idea of ‘interpretation in operation’ as a social, interdisciplinary way of writing about art. Accordingly, one must examine how art communicates across institutional, discursive, geo-political and social contexts; determine the meaning-making processes that enable social interaction and the interpretive frameworks, social conventions and power structures that condition them; and evaluate what is achieved by this act.
Social Semiotics, 2014
This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece and Victor ... more This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece and Victor Burgin’s Room, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s examination of the logical relationship between propositions and the world and M.A.K. Halliday’s discussion of social semiotics. It reconsiders the use of language in conceptual art practices from a wider sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and aims to show how their juxtaposition of different voices within a public context negotiates the space of art as a social space. Focusing on how artworks communicate in context, the following discussion presents the historical as well as the discursive environment in which Arnatt’s and Burgin’s works are situated and received; moreover, it examines how these works critically manipulate viewing and reading regimes, frameworks of evaluation and patterns of communication in order to create a situation of particular tension between perceptual and conceptual apprehension. In wider terms, this article demonstrates how critically engaged artworks manipulate the conditions of communication by utilizing loan rhetoric (a rhetoric external to the art context) and displace associate meaning in order to challenge the institutionalization of art’s production and function. In doing so, they critically stage and contest the power structures that support corresponding hierarchies across producer, audience and mediator, and bring art’s social modality into focus. Investigating the manipulation of language in conceptual art, this article proposes a method of analysis that becomes fundamental in studying contemporary multi-modal art production, and in understanding the dialectics of art’s communication and critical potential.
Keywords: conceptual art; logico-semantics; word and image; Keith Arnatt; Victor Burgin; social semiotics
Synthesis, academic peer-reviewed journal of comparative literary studies, 2014
A text is a process of sharing, the shared creation of meaning. M. A. K. Halliday, "So you say "p... more A text is a process of sharing, the shared creation of meaning. M. A. K. Halliday, "So you say "pass"…thank you three muchly"
Caiana, 2013
This article offers a comparative and interdisciplinary study of semiotic inscription as an artis... more This article offers a comparative and interdisciplinary study of semiotic inscription as an artistic critical means, and suggests understanding the use of language as a strategy of negotiating the space of art as a public and therefore social space. As a case study, it considers conceptual art practices, in particular Victor Burgin’s Room (1970) and Juan Carlos Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970), while discussing the wider engagement with discourse in this period within and beyond the art historical enquiry, the modernist art paradigm and the distinction conceptual art/conceptualism. Informed by Wittgenstein and Halliday, this article examines how artworks communicate in context across the logico-semiotic and semantic planes (that is, how their parts interrelate and how they correlate to the world). It aims to underline the importance of context both in terms of defining the availability of artistic means and of evaluating the suitability of selected means to communicate. Artworks can manipulate and disturb habitual modes of reading and viewing and advance questions regarding the function and legitimation not only of the object of art but also in relation to associate activities across the public sphere that art occupies, where power structures operate and assign value, reproduce and contain meaning.
Key words:
conceptual art, visual social semiotics, art and politics, Victor Burgin; Juan Carlos Romero
Resumen
Este artículo ofrece un estudio comparativo e interdisciplinario de la inscripción semiótica como medio artístico crítico, y sugiere la comprensión del uso del lenguaje como estrategia de negociación del espacio del arte como espacio público y por lo tanto social. Considera prácticas artísticas conceptuales, en particular Room (1970) de Victor Burgin y Swift en Swift (1970) de Juan Carlos Romero, mientras que discute la atención al discurso en este período dentro y más allá de la investigación histórico-artística, el paradigma del arte modernista, y la distinción arte conceptual/conceptualismo. Informado por Wittgenstein y Halliday, examina cómo las obras de arte se comunican en contexto del nivel logico-semiótico y semántico (es decir, cómo sus partes se interrelacionan y relacionan al mundo). Su objetivo es destacar la importancia del contexto tanto en términos de definir la disponibilidad de medios artísticos y de evaluar su idoneidad de comunicar. Obras de arte pueden manipular y alterar los modos habituales de leer y ver, y avanzar preguntas acerca de la función y legitimación no sólo del objeto de arte, sino también en relación con actividades asociadas a través de la esfera pública que el arte ocupa, donde las estructuras de poder operan y asignan valor, reproducen y contienen significado.
Palabras claves:
arte conceptual; semiótica social visual; arte y política; Victor Burgin; Juan Carlos Romero
Afuera, 2013
This article examines developments in the cultural sphere before and after Argentina's last dicta... more This article examines developments in the cultural sphere before and after Argentina's last dictatorship. Through public printmaking activities, and the participation of Juan Carlos Romero in artists’ groups and workers’ unions, it investigates how social relations are inscribed in the urban space, and how the urban space is transformed as the site of public and artistic activity where networks, structures and new forms of co-existence are formulated.
While printmaking is advocated as a popularised and democratising art form, the historical context in the sixties and seventies is characterised by the professionalisation of printmaking as a metier and by the safeguarding of its status as art. In response, this paper suggests a broader framework for defining and evaluating the act of 'taking printmaking to the streets' as a historical activity parallel to technological advances, the organisation of the market and of the workers, and processes of modernisation and neoliberal development.
Key words
Public art, printmaking, dictatorship, modernisation, Romero
Resumen
Este artículo examina desarrollos en la escena cultural antes y después la última dictadura argentina. A través de actividades publicas de grabado, y de la participación de Juan Carlos Romero en grupos artísticos y sindicales, se investiga cómo las relaciones sociales se inscriben en el espacio urbano, y cómo el espacio urbano se transforma como lugar de actividad artística y pública donde se formulan redes, estructuras y nuevas formas de co-existencia.
Si bien el grabado es defendido como una forma de arte popularizada y democratizadora, el contexto histórico en los años sesenta y setenta se caracteriza por la profesionalización del grabado como metier y la salvaguardia de su estatus como arte. En repuesta, este artículo sugiere un marco más amplio para definir y evaluar el acto de ‘llevar el grabado a la calle’ como un acto histórico paralelo a avances tecnológicos, la organización del mercado y de los trabajadores, y procesos de modernización y de desarrollo neoliberal.
Palabras claves
Arte público, grabado, dictadura, modernización, Romero
Introduction to the Dialogues on the Future of Radical Women: Feminism and Latin American Art, 2023
This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a sta... more This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a starting point to discuss Latin American art today, addressing its history, legacy, and contribution to positive social change through the prism of feminism. Seeking to challenge hegemonic readings of the categories of “Latin America” and “feminism” while reinstating the contribution of Latin American women, Latina/Latinx, and Chicana/Chicanx artists to art and critical thought today, the exhibition Radical Women proposed novel ways of displaying art from the region by embracing multiplicity, attending to the particularity of different contexts, and bringing to the fore common threads of critical and creative practice. Building on that premise, these contributions expand on the original exhibition’s time frame and consider the persistence of feminism and its changing status in Latin American art after 1985. They explore recent artistic practices, curatorial projects, and art historical scholarship; reflect on strategies of display, audience engagement, societal concerns, and epistemological premises; and consider different ways of conceptualizing Latin American and feminist identities, legacies, and genealogies today. By doing so, this Dialogues seeks to enrich and diversify our understanding of past and current practices, as well as highlight the intricate connections and resonances that exist between the two. Contributions by curators (Fajardo-Hill, Rjeille), scholars (Fernández, Lamoni), and artists (Antivilo, Motta) span issues in political activism, ecology, technology, education, genealogy, colonization, heritage, and memory. What emerges is a sense of the field’s present concerns and the ways this is shaping the future direction of feminism in Latin American art and art history.
Palgrave/Macmillan, 2017
This book examines the use of image and text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a critical strat... more This book examines the use of image and text juxtapositions in conceptual art as a critical strategy to challenge the ideological and institutional demands placed on art. While conceptual art is generally identified by its use of language, the aim of this book is show how exactly language was used.
In particular, this book asks: How has the presence of language in a visual art context changed the ways art is talked about, theorised and produced?
Image and Text in Conceptual Art demonstrates how artworks communicate in context and evaluates their critical potential. It considers international case studies across Europe and North and South America (with an emphasis on UK and Argentina); and draws resources from art history and theory, philosophy, discourse analysis, social semiotics, literary criticism and sociology.
Engaging the critical and social dimensions of art, it proposes three interdisciplinary methods of analysis that consider the work’s performative gesture, its logico-semantic relations and the rhetorical operations in the discursive creation of meaning. This book offers a historiography of conceptual art in its socio-political context; and makes an original contribution to the theory of art that can be applied beyond conceptual art.
Synthesis, academic peer-reviewed journal of comparative literary studies, 2014
There is a tendency with new media technologies towards information exchange via interaction. Wit... more There is a tendency with new media technologies towards information exchange via interaction. With applications such as hypertexts, pervasive games, and social network sites, new media are characterised by flexibility in data morphology and manipulation, including generating, structuring, storing, and sharing data. While the reader becomes user (and often co-author) rather than recipient, new technologies not only transform the materiality of the text as a container of information, but also the activity of reading and writing and its theorisation in new (meta)spaces.
The rise of new media calls for reconsiderations of binaries such as author/reader, producer/consumer, and source centre/periphery, the role of the participating audience, and the nature of information exchange. Such re-articulation(s) could further be situated in relation to the political impetus of technological developments and the new ways of engaging and performing the world that these enable. Put differently, new media alter the material applications and critical potential of the networks of production and dissemination of information, as well as the communities within which these operate and help create. As such, the activity of reading/writing in new media becomes a particular material and social practice that can open up and create new, more democratic spaces.
This guest issue of Synthesis offers a critical discussion on new media. It aims to re-examine the relations across information, user, and medium under a new paradigm of interactivity, and to address pressing questions regarding ethics and responsibility in our globalised, digitalised era. Special focus have the cultural, societal, and political implications of the use of new technologies, and the modes, effects, and theorisations of acting (on) the text in new media.
parallax: academic journal for cultural analysis, critical theory and philosophy, 2009
"Disturbing spaces" can be understood as a metaphor for challenging a given structure or an order... more "Disturbing spaces" can be understood as a metaphor for challenging a given structure or an order; but also as a symptom of spatial difference when operating from within specific framewokrs. It refers to processes that manipulate the space of activity, be it the 2-D page or the 3-D room; to the juxtaposition of words, pictures, objects and bodies; and to the spatial and temporal configuration of things and their distance. "Disturbing spaces" can also be understood with reference to the metaphorical space of reflection, of ordering and of classification, of orthodoxy and of the canon. Likewise, it can refer to the domain of methodologies and typographies, as well as to linguistic orders, visual structures and cognitive processes.
With this plurality in mind, this special issue of parallax asks: How does one – as a philosopher, a writer or an artist – move in-between spaces? Such move can take place, for example, from the mental space of formulation of ideas and rhetorical operations to the embodied space of physical impact and back again. Furthermore, how does one act on the metaphysical space of theory from within the space of experience?
We invite discussions on various strategies that, by disturbing the spatio-temporal configuration of experienced space, open up the space for critical reflection; or that confront the canon with a premise that nourishes the possibility of doubt. What demands does the frame (of reference, of regulations, of limitations) make on the structure of the physical object? What are the frame/object’s internal and external limits and how can one invent and sustain alternative conditions of meaning and intelligibility?
Disturbing spaces entails knowledge of the object’s physical location and therefore depends on the context of its experience and the conditions of its exposure. Thus, one may arrive at a disjoined critical stand by way of upsetting the order of things, yet this disruption of the frame of reference will also cause one to fall back to a provisional starting point. If so, is it possible to retain this experience and to use it in order to reflect on and repeat such a performance? Where would one locate strategies that disturb the embodied/ mental space, and that tease their distance? Would a self-reflective operation create a new space, reconfigure the same space anew or remain in a metaphysical space?
Questioning the notion of impossibility and of impossible strategies not as a prohibition but as a tangent, this issue of parallax allows its space to become a meta-space of dialogue across philosophy, literary and art criticism, semantics and discourse analysis.
Madrid: Reina Sofía, 2015
Santiago de Chile: University Adolfo Ibáñez/GEAP-Latinoamérica, 2013
Este artículo examina desarrollos en la escena cultural antes y después la última dictadura argen... more Este artículo examina desarrollos en la escena cultural antes y después la última dictadura argentina. A través de actividades publicas de grabado, y de la participación de Juan Carlos Romero en grupos artísticos y sindicales, se investiga cómo las relaciones sociales se inscriben en el espacio urbano, y cómo el espacio urbano se transforma como lugar de actividad artística y pública donde se formulan redes, estructuras y nuevas formas de co-existencia.
Si bien el grabado es defendido como una forma de arte popularizada y democratizadora, el contexto histórico en los años sesenta y setenta se caracteriza por la profesionalización del grabado como metier y la salvaguardia de su estatus como arte. En repuesta, este artículo sugiere un marco más amplio para definir y evaluar el acto de ‘llevar el grabado a la calle’ como un acto histórico paralelo a avances tecnológicos, la organización del mercado y de los trabajadores, y procesos de modernización y de desarrollo neoliberal.
Palabras claves
Arte público, grabado, dictadura, modernización, Romero
Abstract
This article examines developments in the cultural sphere before and after Argentina's last dictatorship. Through public printmaking activities, and the participation of Juan Carlos Romero in artists’ groups and workers’ unions, it investigates how social relations are inscribed in the urban space, and how the urban space is transformed as the site of public and artistic activity where networks, structures and new forms of co-existence are formulated.
While printmaking is advocated as a popularised and democratising art form, the historical context in the sixties and seventies is characterised by the professionalisation of printmaking as a metier and by the safeguarding of its status as art. In response, this paper suggests a broader framework for defining and evaluating the act of 'taking printmaking to the streets' as a historical activity parallel to technological advances, the organisation of the market and of the workers, and processes of modernisation and neoliberal development.
Key words
Public art, printmaking, dictatorship, modernisation, Romero
Leeds: The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, 2009
This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity in both theoretical a... more This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity in both theoretical and practical terms. Contemporary art can be understood as a particular temporal definition of art production in relation to the historical moment; with this in mind, we wish to address the implications or potential ramifications of the term ‘contemporaneity’ in relation to art, history, and criticism. While art practices have developed new ways of engaging the spatio-temporal continuum of experience, the notion of contemporaneity has been considered in relation to historicity and memory, ethics, and the value of the new (Groys, Agamben, Deleuze, Riegl). In this light, we invite particular focus on how the concept of contemporaneity is problematized and interrogated in installations and works that use new time-manipulating technologies. Installation and performance art intensify the experiential dimensions of art that thematize the now. Equally, the use of new technologies re-activates an enquiry into different types of contemporaneity and the relation of art making to historicity. For their part, and responding to the immediacy of such practices, twenty-first century art institutions have developed more fluid forms of presentation and more readily-available forms of public engagement (e-bulletins, blogs, podcasts). With this session we encourage papers that explore the temporality of art in works (and their presentations) that themselves engage with the notion of time. How do works deal with time, engage with a particular time or instance, and negotiate their own temporal limits?
The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division bet... more The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division between high and low culture. Many artistic practices have challenged this binary, where the concept of gallery enclosure can be understood as a literal and figurative qualifier of art: a space that is distinct from, yet exists within, the wider social sphere. Especially in twentieth and twenty-first century art, the use of language has facilitated a material and discursive transgression beyond the traditional art-object and its institutional isolation. Works that combine image and text have appeared on gallery walls, the popular press, and other public sites such as billboards and pavements. Such activities widen the engagement with art and open new channels of communication and participation. They also challenge, and often alter, the traditional hierarchies that underline the artworld, from the production of art to its display and consumption. Acknowledging the manifold social practices of contemporary art, as well as the diversity of scholarship that IAWIS-AIERTI embraces, this session wishes to address the presence of image and text in the public sphere from both a historical and critical perspective. In what ways can the use of language in art practices transform the domain of the artworld? How have art institutions shifted their policies in response to such practices? With this session, we also hope to consider the sociality of art, as this becomes evident by artistic practices that transgress the gallery enclosure of art.
The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division bet... more The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division between high and low culture. Many artistic practices have challenged this binary, where the concept of gallery enclosure can be understood as a literal and figurative qualifier of art: a space that is distinct from, yet exists within, the wider social sphere. Especially in twentieth and twenty-first century art, the use of language has facilitated a material and discursive transgression beyond the traditional art-object and its institutional isolation. Works that combine image and text have appeared on gallery walls, the popular press, and other public sites such as billboards and pavements. Such activities widen the engagement with art and open new channels of communication and participation. They also challenge, and often alter, the traditional hierarchies that underline the artworld, from the production of art to its display and consumption. Acknowledging the manifold social practices o...
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a sta... more This Dialogues takes the 2017–18 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 as a starting point to discuss Latin American art today, addressing its history, legacy, and contribution to positive social change through the prism of feminism. Seeking to challenge hegemonic readings of the categories of “Latin America” and “feminism” while reinstating the contribution of Latin American women, Latina/Latinx, and Chicana/Chicanx artists to art and critical thought today, the exhibition Radical Women proposed novel ways of displaying art from the region by embracing multiplicity, attending to the particularity of different contexts, and bringing to the fore common threads of critical and creative practice. Building on that premise, these contributions expand on the original exhibition’s time frame and consider the persistence of feminism and its changing status in Latin American art after 1985. They explore recent artistic practices, curatorial projects, and art historical scho...
Social media are intrinsic to marketing. They contribute to the intensification of consumerist cu... more Social media are intrinsic to marketing. They contribute to the intensification of consumerist culture, and, together with prevalent neo-liberal policies across the educational and the cultural sectors, shift the dynamics of our access to knowledge and culture. This causes changes in museum policies and the traditional model of plan–produce–publish and affects the institutional position and validity of criticism. The essay tries to identify these changes and reflect on the state of criticism today. It examines different artworks that use social media, and suggests an interdisciplinary approach that, based on social semiotics, turns attention to the act of communication. By understanding art criticism as interpretation in operation, we can negotiate its position within overlapping discursive frameworks and evaluate the social and critical dimensions of art. The English version of the essay is made available on Sešit’s website at http://vvp.avu.cz/sesit/. Klíčová slova umělecká kritik...
Latin American Research Review, 2016
is a sociologist and artist. He has worked in various media and new technologies, and has partici... more is a sociologist and artist. He has worked in various media and new technologies, and has participated in collective projects and investigation groups. In 1968, he took part in the artistic-political interventions of Tucumán Arde and at Experiencias 68' (Instituto di Tella, Buenos Aires). His work focuses on social structures, communication networks, collaborative creation and cultural experimentation. Selected projects include the lyrics for the music group Virus (1980s), the START Foundation (1999-), the journal ramona (2000-2010), Sociedades Experimentales (University of Buenos Aires, 2004) and the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (2008-), a centre of investigation, exhibition and education. In 2010, Jacoby participated at the 29th São Paulo Biennial with El alma nunca piensa sin imagen [The soul never thinks without image] (2010). Set up as an electoral office for Dilma Rousseff, the presidential candidate of the Workers' Party during the 2010 elections, the work was covered from view after being considered as breaking the regulations prohibiting the transmission of propaganda in places run http://epublishing.ekt.gr | e
Latin American Research Review, 2016
The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitica... more The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitical and economic changes at a global scale call for reconsiderations of the relation between art and power and its role in processes of democratization. This article examines art’s social function and its understanding as transformative social praxis—an activity that reflects upon the world and seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically reflects upon its own condition and relation to that world. It specifically suggests the idea of art’s rhetoric in order to conceptualize art’s critical potential and identify processes that generate and displace meaning across artistic, sociopolitical, and discursive contexts. Tucumán Arde (1968) in Argentina, Colectivo Actiones de Arte’s Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) in Chile, and Proyecto Venus (2000–2006), based in Buenos Aires, use interdisciplinary methodologies to critically intersect the public sphere. They scrutinize art’s position in society, seek to raise awareness, and act as alternative networks of information and socialization.
RESUMEN:
La transformación de las sociedades latinoamericanas post-1970 y las recientes reformas sociopolíticas y económicas pide reconsiderar la relación entre el arte y el poder, y su papel en los procesos de democratización. Este artículo examina la función social del arte y su comprensión como transformadora praxis social—una actividad que reflexiona sobre el mundo y trata de cambiarlo, y que al mismo tiempo reflexiona críticamente sobre su propia condición y relación con ese mundo—. Específicamente, con el fin de conceptualizar el potencial crítico del arte, se sugiere la idea de la retórica del arte. Esto ayuda a identificar los procesos que generan y que desplazan el significado a través contextos artísticos, sociopolíticos y discursivos. Tucumán Arde (1968) en Argentina, Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) por CADA en Chile, y Proyecto Venus (2000–2006) basado en Buenos Aires emplean metodologías interdisciplinarias para intersectar críticamente la esfera pública. Examinan la posición del arte en la sociedad, apuntan a concientizar, y actúan como redes alternativas de información y de socialización.
Notebook for Art, Theory, and Related Zones, 2016
The increasing use of social media and new technologies both in artistic production and cultural ... more The increasing use of social media and new technologies both in artistic production and cultural promotion causes shifts in the artworld dynamics and the production of knowledge. This is specifically in terms of the amplification of the now, the quantifiable validation based on visibility and the commodification of human connectedness. They moreover affect museum policies and change the museum’s public image from a cultural-educational institution to a museum-brand with a user-oriented social media profile.
How can, in this context, the critical voice of criticism be recuperated from the marketable validation-by-numbers that has come to dominate institutional policies? Discourse analysis understands language as a social semiotic in operation. With this in mind, this paper suggests the idea of ‘interpretation in operation’ as a social, interdisciplinary way of writing about art. Accordingly, one must examine how art communicates across institutional, discursive, geo-political and social contexts; determine the meaning-making processes that enable social interaction and the interpretive frameworks, social conventions and power structures that condition them; and evaluate what is achieved by this act.
Social Semiotics, 2014
This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece and Victor ... more This article suggests a logico-semantic analysis of Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece and Victor Burgin’s Room, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s examination of the logical relationship between propositions and the world and M.A.K. Halliday’s discussion of social semiotics. It reconsiders the use of language in conceptual art practices from a wider sociological and interdisciplinary perspective, and aims to show how their juxtaposition of different voices within a public context negotiates the space of art as a social space. Focusing on how artworks communicate in context, the following discussion presents the historical as well as the discursive environment in which Arnatt’s and Burgin’s works are situated and received; moreover, it examines how these works critically manipulate viewing and reading regimes, frameworks of evaluation and patterns of communication in order to create a situation of particular tension between perceptual and conceptual apprehension. In wider terms, this article demonstrates how critically engaged artworks manipulate the conditions of communication by utilizing loan rhetoric (a rhetoric external to the art context) and displace associate meaning in order to challenge the institutionalization of art’s production and function. In doing so, they critically stage and contest the power structures that support corresponding hierarchies across producer, audience and mediator, and bring art’s social modality into focus. Investigating the manipulation of language in conceptual art, this article proposes a method of analysis that becomes fundamental in studying contemporary multi-modal art production, and in understanding the dialectics of art’s communication and critical potential.
Keywords: conceptual art; logico-semantics; word and image; Keith Arnatt; Victor Burgin; social semiotics
Synthesis, academic peer-reviewed journal of comparative literary studies, 2014
A text is a process of sharing, the shared creation of meaning. M. A. K. Halliday, "So you say "p... more A text is a process of sharing, the shared creation of meaning. M. A. K. Halliday, "So you say "pass"…thank you three muchly"
Caiana, 2013
This article offers a comparative and interdisciplinary study of semiotic inscription as an artis... more This article offers a comparative and interdisciplinary study of semiotic inscription as an artistic critical means, and suggests understanding the use of language as a strategy of negotiating the space of art as a public and therefore social space. As a case study, it considers conceptual art practices, in particular Victor Burgin’s Room (1970) and Juan Carlos Romero’s Swift en Swift (1970), while discussing the wider engagement with discourse in this period within and beyond the art historical enquiry, the modernist art paradigm and the distinction conceptual art/conceptualism. Informed by Wittgenstein and Halliday, this article examines how artworks communicate in context across the logico-semiotic and semantic planes (that is, how their parts interrelate and how they correlate to the world). It aims to underline the importance of context both in terms of defining the availability of artistic means and of evaluating the suitability of selected means to communicate. Artworks can manipulate and disturb habitual modes of reading and viewing and advance questions regarding the function and legitimation not only of the object of art but also in relation to associate activities across the public sphere that art occupies, where power structures operate and assign value, reproduce and contain meaning.
Key words:
conceptual art, visual social semiotics, art and politics, Victor Burgin; Juan Carlos Romero
Resumen
Este artículo ofrece un estudio comparativo e interdisciplinario de la inscripción semiótica como medio artístico crítico, y sugiere la comprensión del uso del lenguaje como estrategia de negociación del espacio del arte como espacio público y por lo tanto social. Considera prácticas artísticas conceptuales, en particular Room (1970) de Victor Burgin y Swift en Swift (1970) de Juan Carlos Romero, mientras que discute la atención al discurso en este período dentro y más allá de la investigación histórico-artística, el paradigma del arte modernista, y la distinción arte conceptual/conceptualismo. Informado por Wittgenstein y Halliday, examina cómo las obras de arte se comunican en contexto del nivel logico-semiótico y semántico (es decir, cómo sus partes se interrelacionan y relacionan al mundo). Su objetivo es destacar la importancia del contexto tanto en términos de definir la disponibilidad de medios artísticos y de evaluar su idoneidad de comunicar. Obras de arte pueden manipular y alterar los modos habituales de leer y ver, y avanzar preguntas acerca de la función y legitimación no sólo del objeto de arte, sino también en relación con actividades asociadas a través de la esfera pública que el arte ocupa, donde las estructuras de poder operan y asignan valor, reproducen y contienen significado.
Palabras claves:
arte conceptual; semiótica social visual; arte y política; Victor Burgin; Juan Carlos Romero
Afuera, 2013
This article examines developments in the cultural sphere before and after Argentina's last dicta... more This article examines developments in the cultural sphere before and after Argentina's last dictatorship. Through public printmaking activities, and the participation of Juan Carlos Romero in artists’ groups and workers’ unions, it investigates how social relations are inscribed in the urban space, and how the urban space is transformed as the site of public and artistic activity where networks, structures and new forms of co-existence are formulated.
While printmaking is advocated as a popularised and democratising art form, the historical context in the sixties and seventies is characterised by the professionalisation of printmaking as a metier and by the safeguarding of its status as art. In response, this paper suggests a broader framework for defining and evaluating the act of 'taking printmaking to the streets' as a historical activity parallel to technological advances, the organisation of the market and of the workers, and processes of modernisation and neoliberal development.
Key words
Public art, printmaking, dictatorship, modernisation, Romero
Resumen
Este artículo examina desarrollos en la escena cultural antes y después la última dictadura argentina. A través de actividades publicas de grabado, y de la participación de Juan Carlos Romero en grupos artísticos y sindicales, se investiga cómo las relaciones sociales se inscriben en el espacio urbano, y cómo el espacio urbano se transforma como lugar de actividad artística y pública donde se formulan redes, estructuras y nuevas formas de co-existencia.
Si bien el grabado es defendido como una forma de arte popularizada y democratizadora, el contexto histórico en los años sesenta y setenta se caracteriza por la profesionalización del grabado como metier y la salvaguardia de su estatus como arte. En repuesta, este artículo sugiere un marco más amplio para definir y evaluar el acto de ‘llevar el grabado a la calle’ como un acto histórico paralelo a avances tecnológicos, la organización del mercado y de los trabajadores, y procesos de modernización y de desarrollo neoliberal.
Palabras claves
Arte público, grabado, dictadura, modernización, Romero
parallax: academic journal for cultural analysis, critical theory and philosophy, 2009
Session convenors: Eve Kalyva (e.m.kalyva@gmail.com) and Ignaz Cassar (ignazcassar@yahoo.co.uk... more Session convenors: Eve Kalyva (e.m.kalyva@gmail.com) and
Ignaz Cassar (ignazcassar@yahoo.co.uk)
The divide between art and language has historically functioned as a metaphor of the division between high and low culture. Many artistic practices have challenged this binary, where the concept of gallery enclosure can be understood as a literal and figurative qualifier of art: a space that is distinct from, yet exists within, the wider social sphere.
Especially in twentieth and twenty-first century art, the use of language has facilitated a material and discursive transgression beyond the traditional art-object and its institutional isolation. Works that combine image and text have appeared on gallery walls, the popular press, and other public sites such as billboards and pavements. Such activities widen the engagement with art and open new channels of communication and participation. They also challenge, and often alter, the traditional hierarchies that underline the artworld, from the production of art to its display and consumption.
Acknowledging the manifold social practices of contemporary art and the diversity of scholarship that IAWIS-AIERTI embraces, this session wishes to address the presence of image and text in the public sphere from both a historical and critical perspective. In what ways can the use of language in art practices transform the domain of the artworld? How have art institutions shifted their policies in response to such practices? With this session, we also hope to consider the sociality of art, as this becomes evident by artistic practices that transgress the gallery enclosure of art.
The papers in this session discuss the social interaction with works that manipulate the visual and the textual beyond the traditional frame of art – a frame that can be understood in material, institutional, and theoretical terms. They address subversive displays of word and image and the shifts between public readings and private gaze; the rhetoric of public art and how language is used to challenge the divides such as private/public and elitist/communal; spatial transgression as institutional critique and practices that work ‘around’ the frame; and open-access art in new sites: from art magazines and postcards to billboards, the internet, and social networking sites.
Session programme:
Miriam Kienle (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), ‘Pasted and Posted: Ray Johnson’s Networked Art, 1955-65’
Eve Kalyva (University of Buenos Aires), ‘Across North and South: Conceptual Art Practices in a Variety of Contexts’
Jody B. Cutler (St. John's University), ‘“I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White”: The Resonant Afterlife of those Notorious Museum Tags’
Date & Time: Friday, 15 February 2013, 5:30 PM-7:00 PM
Location: Hilton New York, Madison Suite, 2nd Floor
Further information and conference particulars, including travel and accommodation information, can be found at http://conference.collegeart.org/2013/ and http://www.iawis.org/home.php.
Session Abstract: This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity i... more Session Abstract:
This session wishes to query the current attention to art’s contemporaneity in both theoretical and practical terms. Contemporary art can be understood as a particular temporal definition of art production pertaining to the historical moment, and the notion of contemporaneity has been considered in relation to historicity and memory, ethics, and the value of the new (Groys, Agamben, Deleuze, Riegl). In this light, the session seeks to address the implications of contemporaneity with regard to art, history, and criticism.
However, recent art practices (notably installation and performance) have developed novel ways of engaging the spatio-temporal continuum of experience, while institutions enlist more readily-available forms of presentation and public engagement (e-bulletins, blogs, podcasts). The session’s contributions thus explore the temporality of art in works (and their presentations) that themselves engage with the notion of time. How is contemporaneity, as concept, interrogated in installations, performance, and artworks that manipulate time? How do artworks use time-manipulating technologies (raw feed, time-delays/loops), implicate time, and negotiate temporal limits? Can we discern a politics of installing temporality/collectively staging time? What philosophical reflections on temporality and experience can we ascertain in an age of globalization and instant information?
For more information see the College Art Association Annual Conference website at http://conference.collegeart.org/2013/.