Resingularity / art talk (original) (raw)
Related papers
Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film
Studies in European Cinema, 2019
Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies (2009) is a video installation (screened as a 20-channel piece at galleries across Europe and as a single-screen film at London’s Tate Modern) that brings together 20 different public assemblies – ranging from funerals to marches, protests and celebrations. The film provides a microcosm of contemporary European nationalism, exemplified in the convening of citizens in public spaces. This article analyses Democracies in order to unpack its technical approach to the bodies and spaces it documents. This involves two key points of departure. First, a phenomenological reconsideration of the observational documentary mode, which simultaneously critiques one of the foremost forms of representing reality and reignites its potential. Zmijewski’s observationalism is freshly engaged through the use of counter-intuitive framing devices and highly evocative proximity to the body throughout, encouraging the consideration of the aesthetics of assembly in contemporary Europe. Second, I turn to the site of exhibition, questioning the historical tendency to locate radical art in the museum. I situate Democracies in debates around ‘socially engaged art’, arguing that its form of engagement is one not of healing the ‘social bond’, but of immanent critique, holding to account institutional complicity as much as the producers and spectators that partake in textual meaning.
Exposed 'Gazes'— representation in the expanded field of exhibition-making
The seemingly immovable boundary between the colonized and the colonizers, between the observers and the observed that was to be drawn, reinforced and, most of all, discursively maintained was naturally perforated in the everyday and resistive practices around the exhibition by a "return gaze". However, within the "exhibitionary display" these gazes are neither represented nor representable: in order to see the articulation of a subjectivization through the gaze as "indigène on display" and possibly simultaneously as "indigène" audience, we must leave or complicate the framework of the assumptions of a cultural politics and observation within the governmentality discourse surrounding the "exhibitionary complex". (Kuster, 2007, n.p.)
Returning Anew: Sequential Experience in the Jewett Art Center
Atmosphere Symposium, Winnipeg, 2014
The creation of sensuous places has recently assumed a full-bodied experience that drawing, photography or video cannot quite capture. This paper analyzes one such place, the interior of the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley College (1955-1958) by Paul Rudolph. Noted for its ornamental exterior screen, the interior has almost entirely been forgotten. Unmistakably indebted to the picturesque sequences of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the Jewett Art Center includes a memorable stair and gallery that structures an unfolding sequence whereby vision and movement are fused into a tactile experience. The deceptively simple plan of the art gallery can be explained as a set of procedures that enrich the act of following an attenuated route: constrict a path; alter the speed of ascent and descent; disassemble the exterior wall and double its component parts; screen views to the exterior; and insert an insistent occluding plane. The effect is that movement reinforces sight through parallax and peripheral vision. As foreground and background rotate about the visitor at varying speeds, a heightened sense of depth is created. In addition, alternatively occluded and disclosed views add clarity to the immersive experience. A visitor consistently returns to view the same feature from a new vantage point. The effect is an uncanny and disarming deception; the space is continually new but familiar. By returning on itself, each sequence grows beyond its enclosure. A participant also begins to notice other things. The material restraint, for example, directs attention to subtleties of light. Here, meaning is experiential and participatory rather than symbolic and interpretive. Rather than contemplate meaning, we are called to action; the display of art is fused into a meandering visual field holding the promise of a continuously unfolding and sensuous experience.
Evental Aesthetics Vol. 1 No. 3 (2012) - Art and the City
2012
For now, you are nothing more or less than a flâneur. t's tempting to offer such luxurious counsel to readers of this issue, the third issue of Evental Aesthetics and our last for 2012. A flâneur is a sort of person that we are perhaps most likely to associate with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's work does not explicitly feature in the pages that follow, but the approach to urban realms that he deemed characteristic of flâneurs might indeed be useful to those readers who journey from the heart of Manhattan to Singapore and Brazilian shantytowns, via Paris, the suburbs of Los Angeles, and Lagos, guided by our contributors. It might even seem that some wish for a bit of flânerie guided the editors to this theme, Art and the City. It might seem that our aim is to entice city-dwellers and visitors to take the time to wander urban spaces in search of nothing in particular, except perhaps the insightenlightening, disturbing, or both -that sometimes attends the experience of art, in this case art inspired or on offer by the city.
2006
The publication documents the exhibition, nature of the collaboration and element of cultural interaction involved in the Seeing Walls project. It aims to situate the work and the exhibition as a whole within a relevant theoretical and critical framework. The installation (exhibition) was constructed with the notion of creating ‘little visual disturbances’ within the field of vision – disturbances that mitigate against an overall unifying impression of the ‘show’. The intention of simulating a self-conscious pictorial ‘fracture’ (hence ‘seeing walls’) comes out of problem-finding in conventional artistic, studio based methodologies. The pieces in this installation consist of a loosely interlocking ‘mesh’ of especially constructed objects, wall drawings, ‘ruined texts’ and video, often with urban or domestic connotations.
The mobile spectator is a familiar figure in theorisations of moving image installation, recurring in various accounts of the differences and continuities between the cinema and the museum as spaces of exhibition and reception. Some of these accounts are concerned with the role of mobility in enhancing, or undermining, critical reflection. Jeffrey Skoller, for example, rejects the notion (advanced by several curators) that the mobile viewer's "critical awareness is heightened by choosing his or her own degree of attentiveness", claiming instead that transience undermines the modes of reflective engagement potentially enabled by cinema. 1 Others envisage mobile spectatorship in the gallery or museum as a point of connection with historical or contemporary modes of spatio-temporal experience. Giuliana Bruno, for example, argues that the forms of mobile recollection elicited by moving image installations in the museum are crucial to understanding the historical, cultural and architectural linkages between the museum, cinema, and many other sites of public intimacy, ranging from the memory theatre of the Renaissance era to the picturesque landscape, panoramic and dioramic stages, window displays and painting. 2 John Osborne, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of exhibitions that, instead of seeking to block out distraction, actually engage with new configurations of attention and distraction through the exploration of spatio-temporal rhythms, including those associated with the prevalence of the computer screen. 3 Hito Steyerl's research offers a somewhat different perspective on mobile spectatorship, as it emphasises the labour of moving image consumption. Noting that several former factories (as well as churches, train stations etc.) have been repurposed as art museums, Steyerl highlights the work performed in these spaces by "crowds" of people "bending and crouching in order to