Milena Tomic | OCAD University (original) (raw)
Refereed Articles by Milena Tomic
Word & Image, 2017
Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based “un-art” as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his H... more Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based “un-art” as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his Happenings, Environments, and Activities had to be radically reimagined, not reenacted on a stage set or reconstructed from photographs. Shortly before his death in 2006, Kaprow assembled visual and verbal information connected to his key works, but provided artists, curators, and scholars with few rules about how to approach them. Generally speaking, the reinventor’s task is to produce difference through fidelity to whatever is so essential in the work that it can survive its dramatic transformation. While some understood this as careful attention to a work’s central metaphor, others took a more literalist approach, reenacting the largely verbal scores to the letter; still others combined the two approaches, exploiting the productive tension—or parallax shift—between a work’s literal and figurative elements. Through this notion of a parallax shift that brackets out certain elements to produce various meanings, this article explores different iterations of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Yard (1961), Baggage (1972), and Easy (1972). Filled with the same productive contradictions as his writing, Kaprow’s un-art here emerges through the interventions of André Lepecki, Otobong Nkanga, William Pope.L, Sharon Hayes, and Florian Dombois as central to the ongoing historicizing of live art.
Oxford Art Journal, Dec 2013
OBJECT: UCL Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, 2012
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009
Other Publications by Milena Tomic
Oxford Art Online, Dec 2012
Oxford Art Online, Dec 2012
Reviews/Criticism by Milena Tomic
vol. 104, no. 10 (November 2016): 159–60
Art in America, vol. 103, no. 11 (December 2015): 145–46
Word & Image, 2017
Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based “un-art” as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his H... more Allan Kaprow conceived of his score-based “un-art” as unrepeatable yet open to reinvention: his Happenings, Environments, and Activities had to be radically reimagined, not reenacted on a stage set or reconstructed from photographs. Shortly before his death in 2006, Kaprow assembled visual and verbal information connected to his key works, but provided artists, curators, and scholars with few rules about how to approach them. Generally speaking, the reinventor’s task is to produce difference through fidelity to whatever is so essential in the work that it can survive its dramatic transformation. While some understood this as careful attention to a work’s central metaphor, others took a more literalist approach, reenacting the largely verbal scores to the letter; still others combined the two approaches, exploiting the productive tension—or parallax shift—between a work’s literal and figurative elements. Through this notion of a parallax shift that brackets out certain elements to produce various meanings, this article explores different iterations of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Yard (1961), Baggage (1972), and Easy (1972). Filled with the same productive contradictions as his writing, Kaprow’s un-art here emerges through the interventions of André Lepecki, Otobong Nkanga, William Pope.L, Sharon Hayes, and Florian Dombois as central to the ongoing historicizing of live art.
Oxford Art Journal, Dec 2013
OBJECT: UCL Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, 2012
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009
Oxford Art Online, Dec 2012
Oxford Art Online, Dec 2012
vol. 104, no. 10 (November 2016): 159–60
Art in America, vol. 103, no. 11 (December 2015): 145–46
Border Crossings, Sep 2014
Border Crossings, Mar 2014
OBJECT: Graduate Articles and Reviews in Art History and Visual Culture, 2013
Studies of performance art have long been mired in questions of documentation, repetition, and re... more Studies of performance art have long been mired in questions of documentation, repetition, and reification. Scholars such as Sven Lütticken, Rebecca Schneider and Judith Butler have addressed a “repeat performance” that pervades all social relations under capitalism. In response, recent works by a number of artists show a changed approach in which live performance art is already an image or object designed for display or reproduction. This panel sets out to discuss the becoming-image or becoming-object of ephemeral, body-based work through such topics as: artistic engagements with repertories of gesture drawn from high culture and popular media or with historical systems of formal notation; the commodification of performance art within an “experience economy”; the institutional development of specific vocabularies and formal aesthetic criteria; and attempts to codify durational works for re-enactment by other bodies in other contexts. We welcome papers and artistic contributions that engage with new thinking on contemporary performance and its formalization in a broadly geographic, political and interdisciplinary sense.
Session Chairs: Jessica Santone and Milena Tomic
Contact: jessica.santone atgmail.com; m.tomic @ alumni.ucl.ac.uk
Deadline for Submissions, June 4, 2013
Please submit abstracts (150-word maximum) for 20-minute papers directly to the session chairs, along with a brief curriculum vitae (300-word maximum) that specifies your rank and institutional affiliation (if applicable).
The communist world acts as a key prop in Clement Greenberg's classic 1939 definition of kitsch, ... more The communist world acts as a key prop in Clement Greenberg's classic 1939 definition of kitsch, in the form of the kitsch-loving " Russian peasant " and the totalitarian government that debases culture to the level of the masses. Since that dismissal, more nuanced perspectives on the status of kitsch under communism emerged in the former East. Czech-born Milan Kundera's 1982 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being involves a central character at war against the kitsch of Czechoslovak communist culture, a kitsch which Kundera links to a denial of doubt, irony, and death. Serbian art historian Miško Šuvaković identifies kitsch as a critical tactic in alternatives to Western postmodern art from Central Europe and the Balkans, one that alternately expressed hope for a transcendent leap between the everyday and the singularity of art and diagnosed the limit of politics as such. Chinese art historian and critic Gao Minglu allies the term " double kitsch " to Chinese contemporary art that stages Pop-like collisions of global consumerist icons and central figures from communist propaganda. This session invites papers on histories and theories of kitsch in all communist and formerly communist contexts. We are particularly interested in papers that probe kitsch's problematization of the boundaries between criticality and complacency; that explore the reception and use of kitsch found in contexts where mass production was decoupled from capitalist accumulation; and that make fresh connections between kitsch and extant narratives of modern and postmodern art.