Writing
Manifesto for an Expanded Field
by Leah Schreiber
Truly contemporary art is not easily categorized.
The Modernist divisions of art(ist)s are OUTMODED.
These categories can be made to become almost infinitely malleable.
Therefore, the terms provided by Modernist divisions are equally OUTMODED.
Contemporary Artists are mediators of information- communicators through an experiential language.
Art reconnects us with the value of human experience as extraordinary and not to be overlooked.
It engages the wonder, investigation, and creative expression that keeps humans moving forward.
My art speaks to the corporeal experience of being, making, and learning in order to counter a culture that distracts the individual from the intimacy of the personal experience of the everyday body.
“Perception is not simply a question of vision, but involves the whole body.”
– Merleau-Ponty
I make experiential drawings
that combine an investigation of reality, with an investigation of the aesthetic.
These artworks express an incessant materiality,
a process that asks the materials to provide the direction,
a process of obsessive production in a language of lines-
a language that expresses movement, direction, space and time across all mediums.
This work exists between the divisions provided by art history’s terms.
I will not be tied down to one material.
I will not be tied down to one way of thinking.
I will not be tied down to one way of making.
I will not be tied down to one way of being.
I am calling for an Expanded Field for all artists.
It is time to DESEGREGATE.
Constantly in flux, I can only be defined by the acknowledgement that I am many things at once.
I am a Painter
I am a Sculptor
I am a Printmaker
I am a Designer
I am a Video Artist
I am a Performer
I am a Photographer
I am a Teacher
I am a Student
I am a Participant
I am an Investigator
I am a Researcher
I am a Writer
I am an Editor
I am a Builder
I am a Maker
I am a Collector
I am a Thinker
I am a Voice
In Contemporary terms,
I am a TRANSDISCIPLINARY ARTIST.
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 10:06 pm. Add a comment
© 2009 Leah Schreiber
Another object based artwork that engages the physical body of the ‘viewer’ in order to realize the full potential for meaning in the work is Chalk by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, an artist team that has been collaborating in art and life for over a decade. According to JJ Charlesworth in his essay “Power Plays”, Allora and Calzadilla present a combination of “cultures and histories…with a curiosity about how these might reengage with the political situations of today, a strategy of redeployment that renews attention to artistic histories, but also seeks to dissolve them into something …politically active” (Charlesworth 82). Through the juxtaposition of physical materials that together propose new ideological understandings, the work of these artists is always challenging the cultural status quo.
For Chalk (2002), they made 24 sticks of large school chalk, five feet long and ten inches in diameter. In an interview for the PBS program Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, these large sticks placed in the Plaza de Armas in Lima at the capital’s governmental center, were both an “ideological tool” and a “geological substance”. The scale of the chalk required that the people either break off a section, or work together to draw and write notes, and soon local laid-off workers began to use the chalk to write letters of protest, creating a social and political forum for public concerns (“Paradox”). According the Art21 interview, eventually riot police came and “arrested” the work, putting the sculptures in “a paddy wagon”, and even power-washed away the chalk traces (“Paradox”).
This work is important because it engages the body of the viewer in a situation that provides an opportunity for self-expression, as well as social action. The constructed situation in order to incite action and interaction between people was argued by French Marxist theorist Guy Debord. Concerned with the perpetuating nature of societal structures, Debord wrote about productive modes of criticality that would expose and perhaps eventually counter deeply routed systems of societal control.
In Society of the Spectacle, Debord discusses perpetuating societal structures, stating that if one tries to analyze the structure of their society, they will be using the categories devised by that society and therefore will be using its structure in the critique (11). This inability to escape the methodology of that which one wishes to analyze is problematic for the critical voice. One example provided by Debord is that of union workers, who by their attempt to protest the abuse of the proletariat, become part of the system against which they fought, reinforcing the system’s hierarchal order (96). He also states that when someone critiques the unpleasant results of the system, they are not being critical of the system itself, and therefore are missing the point (197). With these concerns in mind, it seems that the narrative of Chalk in Lima points to the rehashing of the power struggle there. The people create a system of protest in front of a governmental building, and then the government uses their resources and power over those people to remove their communication tool, the chalk. However, Debord’s arguments also leave room for methods of opposition.
In Participation, Bishop explains that when something is a “spectacle”, it insinuates complaisance, and therefore a lack of agency. She notes that just as Guy Debord suggested as a counter to the self-perpetuating societal hierarchies, artists are constructing “situations” where activity would involve the audience in a way that removed the division between audience and event. This blending of audience and spectacle counters the spectacle as a distraction from agency. Thereby, new understandings of relationships through these situations can also create “new social realities” (Bishop 13). According to this conceptualization of the situation created byChalk, the real merit of the piece is in the provided social experience, and the communicative action of the participants. By providing a platform for the physical bodies to interact with the art objects, the “spectator” becomes part of the work, providing agency through self-expression, determinism, and a connected community.
Debord’s suggested situations act as a counter to societal power hierarchies through the conscious acknowledgement of the perpetuating ideologies. So, perhaps by creating an event in which the existing power hierarchies were played out between the governed and the governing, Chalk reinforces those hierarchies. Or, one could make the argument that by consciously framing these divisions, the event becomes a public acknowledgement, raising awareness about the threat the collective voice poses to those in power.
According to Charlesworth, the success of Chalk was in its demonstration of the difference between art in the gallery and art in public, where people and art are regulated by governmental structures like the police, and how the participation of the public creates a new political statement, “leaving art as an odd residue, literally to be washed away” (84). Thus, Chalk is can also be understood as an example of constructed art experience as a threat to the institution, bringing to the fore the agency in social interactions that promote a collective voice.
Nicolas Bourriaud, in Relational Aesthetics, writes of successful art as intending to extend outside of the actual location of the work, through a process of “transparency” and “inter-human negotiation” (41). Considering this conception of artistic value,Chalk once again shows its strength through its process of direct engagement between bodies, and dialogues initiated through physical interactions with art objects. This directness is made clear through the material of chalk as a didactic tool, as well as through the person-to-person cooperation and the political disruption within the temporal experience of writing the chalked statements. Then, ultimately having those tools seized by the institutional force of government completed the work by implicating the power of relational expression as a threat to the hierarchy of power created by such institutions.
As Relational Aesthetics argues, the constructed relational experience intends to move beyond the moment of the art event. By providing the place and circumstances for interpersonal engagement, the artist is encouraging dialogue with the hope that the dialogue spreads and continues, creating a viral intercourse. It is in this continuation that relational work has political power. So, Chalk is not only advocating agency for the moment of the event, it promotes the spread of agency by encouraging those on the sidelines to participate directly in other aspects of communication and community.
This focus on the action of the viewer rather than the action of the artists is an important aspect in much of the artwork categorized as Participation. By creating a work that depends on the specific reactions and interactions of viewers, Allora and Calzadilla surrender their control over the work, rendering the collaboration of the participants as author over the final result. As described by Bishop, the relinquishing of authorship is one of the primary factors of Participation art, partly because it opens up the work to risks and the unintentional (Bishop 12). This sharing of the power inherent in the position of ‘author’ allows the viewer to take on multiple positions in the work – as spectator, friend, protestor, composer, reporter, etc. Additionally, this multiplicity of positions available to the participant in Chalk specifically, also depends on the location of the event.
Though this essay has been focused on Chalk in Lima, it has existed in many locations. This fact brings us to yet another important element of the work, its relationship to Site-Specific art. The artists carefully sought out various sites where the sculptures could be placed in order to engage various public dialogues. This mobility of Chalk points to the range of possible situations it may create, but also to the importance of the site to the content of the work. With each location, the context changes, and therefore so does the literal and conceptual message.
In his book One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon discusses site-specificity as being both about the importance of a physical site, but also about the discursive site of a work. He writes that while contemporary “site-oriented practices [are] concerned to integrate art more directly into the realm of the social” through a “critique of culture that is inclusive of nonart spaces”, they are more recently defined by a “discursively determined site” (24, 26). Therefore, Chalk is site-specific both through its relationship to the public domain and public spaces, but is also site-specific through its discursive relationship with social and political agency and civil action.
So, Chalk is an important example of a participatory artwork that requires the engagement of the physical body of the viewer in order for its full potential for meaning to be realized. Like with Elastic Net, the content of the art is in the actions of the viewer, where the divisions between spectator/event, subject/object are blurred. Additionally, in considering the theories of Guy Debord, Chalk functions as a counter to the perpetuating hierarchal social system through a conscious and active exposure of that system. By bringing together physical bodies and calling those bodies to action, engagement with the chalk sculptures created site and group specific communication. This interaction promotes freedom of expression, and community involvement, heightening the self-awareness of those viewing and those acting, by presenting them with a decision about their own ability to act.
While Elastic Net and Chalk each require the direct physical interaction between body and object, Bruce Nauman found different ways of engaging the viewers’ physical experience. In the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Nauman made multiple architectural and experience based sculptures that required action by the physical body of the viewer, however the interaction is more controlled, and less about viewers acting directly upon the sculptures. Rather, the viewer participates by entering the sculpture. One such work is Live-Taped Video Corridor, made in 1970. This work was comprised of a constructed narrow hall or passageway between two large white walls. The ‘viewer’ could enter at one end of the hall, and at the other end were two monitors stacked on the floor. Both monitors show video of the empty hallway but when the visitor enters the hallway, she sees herself in the top monitor. As she progresses further into the corridor, in the monitor she sees herself walking away, because the closed-circuit camera is positioned behind her.
Here, to fully participate in the work the viewer must choose to physically move through the sculpture, visually engaging with the unattainable image of the self always getting smaller as one tries to get closer. According to Janet Kraynak’s essay, “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman’s Environments”, the role of the viewer in this sort of work is one of performance and action rather than one of passive observation (Kraynak 23). This performative element seems to have a connection to the roles of the viewer in bothElastic Net and Chalk, yet there are important differences in these roles. While Clark and Allora/Calzadilla were intending connection and agency through the direct interaction of viewers with their sculptural objects, Nauman is more focused on creating self-awareness through disconnection.
The presence of the viewer in the space, and that viewer’s relationship to what is on the monitors is really the primary importance of the work. Through Live-Taped Video Corridor, Nauman provides a fragmented awareness through the disjointed relationship between having the experience, and seeing oneself having the experience: “physically and psychologically, the viewer continually confronts a collapse of identification between her experience as a body/subject and her image or representation” (Kraynak 24). Since the viewer can never fully connect with her own image on the screen, the experience of the viewer is one of disorientation and a psychological uncertainty, as the participant realizes that she is being monitored, yet she is monitoring herself (Zbikowski). This disconnected experience of self and not-self relates back to the concepts discussed by Kate Linker.
In “Representations and Sexuality”, Linker explains that representations are the primary factor in identity construction. Here, the monitor acts like the Lacanian mirror, exposing to the viewer that there is a difference between the actual body, and the representation of the body. Yet, this acknowledgment of difference also leads to the awareness that others see you as different from themselves. Accordingly, Live-Taped Video Corridor puts viewers in the position of seeing themselves as others see them- as separate from the self. This disconnection between representations of self and actual self could more importantly be understood as the “counterlanguage” Linker finally proposes.
By presenting a form of representation that makes the viewer the subject, but denies the viewer a relationship with the representation, Nauman severs the correlation between the two. Therefore, by manipulating the viewers’ subjectivity, as well as the viewers’ ability to relate to that subjectivity, this artwork causes a heightened awareness of the difference between mediated and physical experience. Additionally, by making the participant both the seer and the seen, Nauman confuses the rigid categories of subject and object, active and passive, placing the participant in multiple positions – a denial of the rigid identifying categories. However, Nauman’s manipulation of the viewers and their experience has additional conceptual relevance.
Nauman’s manipulation of the relationship between the artwork and the viewer, wherein the viewer becomes a “sculptural element” is common to his works, and it is through the controlled viewer experience that this work is completed (Kraynak 24). By constructing the experience in a way that specifically directs the viewer and limits the possible actions and interactions with the work, he does not give up the control that participatory artworks usually forgo. This physically constricting and directing space can also be seen as a commentary on the institutional control over the body, however as the other artists attempted to point to institutional control through interactions between people, Nauman seems to use tactics that exaggerate the isolating experience.
The relationship of the scale of space to the body is important to the cultural and educational structures that influence the relationship with the Self. Michel Foucault argues that institutions use scale to control the construction of identity by controlling the body.
As described earlier, Foucault’s “mechanisms of discipline”, such as surveillance, distribution, regulation and spatial partitioning, are methods that affect the behaviors of the body. These institutional controls define the ‘place’ of the body, which affects the understanding of self and the construction of identity. So, one might understand Live-Taped Video Corridor as a sculpture that reproduces the control and disjunction caused by the institutional practices of surveillance, body regulation, and spatial partitioning –methods for maintaining an efficient and manageable population.
Furthermore, in contrast to the shared authorship in Elastic Net and Chalk, Nauman’s work asserts control over the participant though the maintenance of his own authorship. In the essay “Bruce Nauman: The Viewer as Art”, Josh Weihnacht assesses Nauman’s role as author in works like Live-Taped Video Corridor. Weihnacht reminds the reader that according to Barthes, the relationship between the viewer and a work of art is where meaning is created, the artist is not the primary maker of meaning in a work of art: “The author does not produce meaning, the viewer and the conditions in which the viewer receives the work produces the meaning” (Weihnacht par5). However, it is important to consider the control Nauman yields over the participating viewer in the corridor work.
Weihnacht points out that Barthes is suggesting that the artist has no control over the way a viewer experiences a work, and therefore does not have the ability to create specific meanings through it. Yet, when discussing the limited range of movements and interactions provided by Live-Taped Video Corridor, Nauman makes it very clear that he designed the experience so that the viewer could not “invent what they thought was going on” (Weihnacht par8). Thus, the work requires the participation of the physical body of the viewer while providing tight restrictions on the kind of experience that participant will have. Hence making the participant a subject of the work, yet denying them any sense of authorship.
And so, Live-Taped Video Corridor requires the viewer to move through the sculpture, making their physical presence essential to the conceptual completion of the work. Through the reproduction of institutional practices, Nauman provides a participatory sculpture that manages the relationship between the body and its image. Through this controlled disconnection, the work incites in the viewer a critical awareness of the divisions between the real and mediated experience.
In conclusion, Participation artworks often pursue an active and empowered subject through the participatory experience, generating the agency necessary for governance over her own socio-political situation. Commonly challenging issues of authorship and community, this movement is concerned with creating awareness and activity against the social and political frameworks that yield control over individuals.
Though different in approach and conceptual intention, Elastic Net , Chalk and Live-Taped Video Corridor all require the physical participation of the viewers’ body in order to activate the objects’ full potential for meaning. By collapsing the dialectical divides between viewer and maker, same and other, active and passive, these works negate normative identifying categories that assert control over the understanding of place and self. These artworks prove that emphasis on physical relationships and experiences brings critical awareness to participants, countering the divisions caused by institutional structures and a mediated culture.
Works Cited
Amor, Monica. “Lygia Clark”. Art Nexus. 31 (1999); 52-59.
Bishop, Claire. “Viewers as Producers”. Participation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Bois, Yve-Alain. “Nostalgia of the Body”. October. 69 (1994): 85-109.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Les presses du reel, 2002.
Charlesworth, JJ. “Allora and Calzadilla: Power Plays”. Art Review.15 (2007): 82- 85.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Frieling, Rudolf. “Toward Participation in Art”. The Art of Participation 1950 to Now. SFMoMA: San Fransico, 2008.
Grace, Daphne. The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature. Sterling: Pluto Press, 2004.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Understanding Feminist Philosophy). New York: Routledge, 2004.
Kraynak, Janet. “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman’s Environments”. Grey Room. 10 (2003): 22-45.
Kwon, Miwon. “One Place After Another.” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Malden: Blackwell, 2005: 32-49.
Linker, Kate. “Representation and Sexuality.” Parachute No. 32, Fall 1983.
McLaren, Margaret, A. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.
Osthoff, Simone. “Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future”. Leonardo. 30.4 (1997): 279-289.
“Paradox: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.”Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Season 4: Episode 4. Public Broadcasting Station. November 18, 2007.
Pellico, Melissa. “Lygia Clark”. The Art of Participation 1950 to Now. SFMoMA: San Fransico, 2008.
Sarup, Madan. Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 1996.
Smith, Richard Alan. After Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Weihnacht, Josh. “Bruce Nauman: The Viewer as Art” April 1997. Input Pattern.
12 April 2009 <http://www.inputpattern.com/portfolio/text/nauman/paper.html>.
Zbikowski, Dörte. “Bruce Nauman”. 2001 ctrl[space]: Rhetorics of Survailance. 12 April 2009 <http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/e/texts/41?print-friendly=true>.
© 2009 Leah Schreiber
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago at 7:31 pm. Add a comment
The Physical Body in Object Based Participation
© 2009 Leah Schreiber
Since the 1960s, there have been a series of important art movements reacting to or against Modernism’s autonomous art object. Of these reactions, which vary in approach and focus, the important similarity is the consideration of the viewer as an important part of the meaning making process. Movements like Minimalism, Process art, Land and Body art express the natural progression of contemporary art toward an investment in the physical engagement of the viewer.
For example, in Minimalism, new uses of materials and simple repetitive forms drew attention to the relationship between the work and the viewer, making spatial experience an important part of sculpture. Process art focused on the action of making, and the experience of the material by creating a representation of the artists’ actions. For example, artists like Robert Morris and Eva Hesse emphasized the temporal experience, pointing to the relationship between materials, time, and the physical body in artwork. Land art relied on both the physical action of making as well as the physical participation of experiencing altered landscapes, proving the physical experience of the viewer as a necessary part of the work. In addition, Performance artists like Carolee Schneemann and Vito Acconci used the relationship between the physical body of the artist and viewer to consider the boundaries between personal and public space.
While each of these working methods engages the physical body of the viewer in different ways, there have also been a host of artists that felt the importance of the viewer to an artwork could be examined and reiterated through an even more direct relationship between artwork and viewer. Such artists began to make work that required the interaction of the viewer, creating a movement now referred to as Participation art.
According to Claire Bishop in her introduction to Participation, a collection of critical documents on the topic of Participation art, this movement is driven by three primary arguments or goals. The first is an interest in producing an active and empowered subject through the participatory experience, generating the agency necessary for governance over her own socio-political situation. The second goal or argument mentioned by Bishop is the question of authorship. By creating a work that requires the action of the viewer, the artist surrenders control over the work. By making it a more collective creation and sharing authorship over the final result, they subvert the Modernist understanding of the singular genius artist. The third goal often given in making participatory work is to invoke or reinforce a sense of community: “a restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning” (Bishop 12). Thus, with these reasons for the use of participation in art, it is clear that this movement was concerned with the advancement and expansion of art, as well as with creating awareness and activity against the social and political frameworks that yield control over individuals.
While these goals and concerns are a common factor in Participation, there are also important differences in the methods and approaches used by artists in the movement. For example, there is a conceptual and experiential difference between works that focus on the viewer participating through sharing their ideas or personal narratives in a work, viewers participating in a constructed event, and viewers physically interacting with an artist-designed object. More recently, artists interested in participation have turned their focus to the new developments in software technology, which seems to be earning its own designation as Interactive art. Each of these methodologies for constructing a participatory artwork has validity and a marked impact on our understanding of the ever-expanding boundary between art and life, yet this essay will focus specifically on object-based participation, and the importance of the physical relationship between the viewer and the object.
In order to understand the potential of the participatory object in contemporary art, this essay will consider three specific artworks that require the physical participation of the viewers’ body in order to activate the objects’ full potential for meaning: Elastic Net by Lygia Clark, Chalk by collaborators Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadillas, and Live-Taped Video Corridor by Bruce Nauman. Though made by very different artists with different conceptual intentions, each of these three works emphasizes the interaction and physical experience of the viewers’ relationship with a physical object. This essay will also discuss how through this experience, each of the works incite in the participant a heightened awareness of Self through critical action against normative constructions of identity.
According to Madan Sarup, in Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World, “identity is a construction, a consequence of a process of interaction between people, institutions and practices” (14). This process of interaction was very important to the artistic practice of Lygia Clark, an artist from Brazil who worked throughout her career to find new ways to physically engage the viewer with and in her works. A co-founder of the Neo-Constructionist movement with her close friend and collaborator Helio Oiticica, Clark and her fellow Neo-Constructionists developed a collection of works that moved from a focus on the object to a focus on the bodily experience (286). Over the course of her career, Lygia Clark made some important artworks that challenge the Modernist conception of the object by creating objects that require the viewer’s body for their conceptual completion. Clark called these works ‘Relational Objects’, as they often involved a level of interpersonal relationship in the interaction with the objects. Curiously, Clark eventually refused to participate in the exhibition system after deciding that her work was more about social and psychological therapy than museum-oriented artwork (Bois 87). In light of the current conversations in contemporary art regarding the value of relationality in art, it seems she may have been a pioneer for the Relational art of the 1990s. Perhaps she would have felt differently about the place of her work in the more accepting artistic climate that developed from her relational artwork contributions.
One such work by Lygia Clark is Elastic Net from 1973. For this work, the artist invited a group of participants to create a large net form, made from elastic ropes. According to Amor, after forming the net as a group, Clark asked the participants to “intertwine themselves to become a collective body” (Amor par13). Thereby, the participants are brought together physically though common action to form the net that then spatially binds their bodies together. Here, the participants have some control over the experience of Elastic Net, because the group dynamic of the participants has an effect on the exact use of the net, adding to the variability of experience with each Elastic Net session (Pellico 104). In other words, the group experience as well as the individual experience of those engaged in the work depends on the relational element that is both created for and by the object.
As with other works by Lygia Clark, Elastic Net work requires manipulation by the viewer to expose the full potential and range of meaning in the work. In her article, “Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticia: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future”, Simone Osthoff writes that Clark “encourages the spectator to use his own energy to become aware of himself” (280). This self awareness is created not only with the physical work of making the piece, but with the physical connection with other bodies, an important experience in a culture of personal space and mediated experience.
The physical requirement of the participant in this work has both literal and symbolic connotations of activity as agency, shared authorship and reiteration of community, the three primary goals outlined by Claire Bishop. As explained by Osthoff, the participants in this work are “weaving a web of relationships around the body’s internal and external spaces” (Osthoff 280). By involving the organic nature of the web, and the literal connection between bodies as a symbol for both collective humanism as well as the perceptual connections between body and mind, this work collapses the divisions of space and the body, allowing the agency of the viewer to be the maker of meaning through interaction and physical connections. According to Amor, for the concept of a unified body through the groups entanglement within the maluable net to be complete, the participant must allow the physical and intellectual awareness of the body to accept the symbolic: “Imagination plays here a crucial role as a mediator between body and the mind as sites of understanding” (Amor par**). This investment in the collusion of the mind/body binary also speaks to Clark’s interest in the relationship between the subjective and psychological.
As she became more interested in thinking of her work as psychological group therapy, Clark constructed objects and situations that challenged the constricted nature of the institution, and exposed the potential of critique through “liberated social interactions” (Frieling 43). There are various ways the interaction created by Elastic Net can be understood as institutional critique. One way is that by making an artwork with a group of participants, the traditional role of the insular genius artist of Modernism is challenged, as there is no singular author or complete object for display- the object is created and activated only by the participation of the group. According to the artist, through this reliance on the physicality of the participants, there is “no more separation between subject and object. It is an embrace, a fusion” (Amor par8). This fusion of subject and object not only challenges ideas of artists, artworks, and viewers as separate entities, but perhaps more importantly speaks to important critical theories on the constructedness of cultural and personal identities, as explained by Michel Foucault, Kate Linker, and Jacques Derrida.
For example, through the unifying symbol of Elastic Net, the bodies of the participants are tangled into one, therefore defying the institutional control over the body through partitioning as described by Michel Foucault. In Docile Bodies, he writes that institutional control over bodies is achieved by dividing the observed into as many separate spaces as there are bodies. The isolation of bodies from one another provides the ability to “establish presents and absence”, “locate”, and “supervise”, just as in a factory or a jail, where the cellular division of those enclosed creates a feeling of isolation as well as being constantly assessed, ultimately limiting “confusion” (143).
Foucault also argues that institutions use scale to control the construction of identity by controlling the body. In After Postmodernism, Richard Alan Smith lists some of the methods for body control that Foucault called “mechanisms of discipline”, such as surveillance, distribution, regulation and spatial partitioning (103). Each of these methods uses spatial divisions to affect the behaviors of the body. For example, in the educational institution, the divisions of students through partitioned classrooms and tight desks control the body of the student, minimizing their movement and body position options, which also allows the student to be more easily watched. This is just one example, but the concept can be applied in many ways (and has been), showing the institutional ability to define the ‘place’ of the body by locating it as individual: “discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space” (Foucault 141). This application of Foucault supports the old adage “divide and conquer”, which implies that through the fragmenting separation of bodies, the agency of those bodies is lost to the institution that provides the partition. Thus, Elastic Net could be understood as subverting the institutional organization of individual spaces for individual bodies, as it reconnects the bodies involved, undermining the power of institutional analysis that seeks to provide segregating labels through binary divisions of good/bad, mad/sane, normal/abnormal.
Additionally, in Elastic Net, the artist’s statement about the collusion of the subject and object is an example of binary collapse. According to Osthoff, this work creates an “acknowledgement of the coexistence of opposites within the same space: internal and external, subjective and objective, metaphorical and literal” (Osthoff 282). This ‘coexistance of opposites’ is an important issue in critical theory on power hierarchies and their influence and control over constructions of identity and Self. For example, as explained by Carolyn Korsmeyer in her book Gender and Aesthetics, “human traits and activities are paired in conceptual hierarchies that systematically place women and ‘feminine’ traits and activities in subordinate positions” (Korsmeyer 15). Therefore, while dichotomous organizations may be commonly used to the point of seeming necessary for understanding our world, the can also present socio-political mores as natural or biological facts.
Additionally, in the book Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity, Margret McLaren states, “Foucault sees identity categories as normative and exclusionary. Furthermore, identity categories often become reified and naturalized. This hides the contingency of identity categories as socially and historically produced” (McLaren 118). Hence, the denial of categorical divisions in Elastic Net through blending the understanding of subject and object, works to collapse socio-political binaries presented as authorial and normalizing.
Kate Linker also discusses authorial and normalizing categories in her essay, “Representation and Sexuality”. In the essay, she discusses the formation of the subject through language, and explains the Lacanian concept of identity as being a relationship of difference (398). Linker wrote that the “human subject” is “in perpetual formation” and the “unconscious and sexuality [are] constructed through language; modes of representation that characterize our relation with others” (394). This fluxing conception of identity presented by Linker reminds us of the identifying power of labels, as well as the influence of our outward relationships on the construction of Self.
Linker explains that in Lacan’s mirror theory, the young child learns about his identity through seeing her reflection and the understanding of difference- “I” only exists when there is the sign of “not-I”, the divisions of subject and object (Linker 400). Yet, Elastic Net confuses this clear identification of the subject and object. By denying the bodies involved their separateness from each other and the net itself, Elastic Net blends the authorial ‘I’ with that which is not ‘I’, therefore breaking binary boundaries around identity.
This collusion of binaries through a collusion of bodies can also be understood through Deconstruction. As presented in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction is the consideration of meaning through analysis of oppositions in order to show that binaries in language are unstable and externally constructed. He and other important philosophers present the importance of an in-between space of indeterminate identity as one of agency and meaning. Homi Bhabha calls this in-between state “hybridity” and he writes, “the function of the hybrid is to disturb the systematic construction of knowledge, so that the normal mediums of cultural authority become ‘virtually unrecognizable’” (Grace 197). Here, Bhabha points to the capacity of indeterminacy to expose the constructedness of identity through the subject’s existence between identifying categories. In considering these influential theories on agency through binary collapse, one can better understand the value of Clark’s work.
By providing an experience that involves the physical act of creating a material bridge that binds bodies together, Elastic Net presents a tool for the negation of the authorial and self-identifying ‘I’, as well as an opportunity for the collusion of binaries between self and other, inside and outside, metaphorical and literal. This blending of identifying constructions offers an expanded relational awareness between participants, as well as symbolically denies the institutional divisions between bodies that reduce physical and psychological agency.
Works Cited
Amor, Monica. “Lygia Clark”. Art Nexus. 31 (1999); 52-59.
Bishop, Claire. “Viewers as Producers”. Participation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Bois, Yve-Alain. “Nostalgia of the Body”. October. 69 (1994): 85-109.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Les presses du reel, 2002. Charlesworth, JJ. “Allora and Calzadilla: Power Plays”. Art Review.15 (2007): 82- 85.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Frieling, Rudolf. “Toward Participation in Art”. The Art of Participation 1950 to Now. SFMoMA: San Fransico, 2008.
Grace, Daphne. The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature. Sterling: Pluto Press, 2004. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Understanding Feminist Philosophy). New York: Routledge, 2004. Kraynak, Janet. “Dependent Participation: Bruce Nauman’s Environments”. Grey Room. 10 (2003): 22-45.
Kwon, Miwon. “One Place After Another.” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Malden: Blackwell, 2005: 32-49.
Linker, Kate. “Representation and Sexuality.” Parachute No. 32, Fall 1983.
McLaren, Margaret, A. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.
Osthoff, Simone. “Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future”. Leonardo. 30.4 (1997): 279-289.
“Paradox: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.”Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Season 4: Episode 4. Public Broadcasting Station. November 18, 2007.
Pellico, Melissa. “Lygia Clark”. The Art of Participation 1950 to Now. SFMoMA: San Fransico, 2008.
Sarup, Madan. Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 1996.
Smith, Richard Alan. After Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Weihnacht, Josh. “Bruce Nauman: The Viewer as Art” April 1997. Input Pattern.
12 April 2009 <http://www.inputpattern.com/portfolio/text/nauman/paper.html>.
Zbikowski, Dörte. “Bruce Nauman”. 2001 ctrl[space]: Rhetorics of Survailance. 12 April 2009 <http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/e/texts/41?print-friendly=true>.
© 2009 Leah Schreiber
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago at 7:29 pm. Add a comment
The words Spectacle and Compendium each refer to presentation. According to Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, a spectacle is a showy display, or a marvel. A compendium is a collection or an abstract. These words work together to inform about the intentions of a set of images or objects. They imply a viewer, and an intention of being viewed. However, spectacle seems to imply something tremendous, and a compendium by nature is a simplification of something tremendous. Each of these words is important to my thinking, because in a way, the work becomes a spectacle through its visual presence. Yet the artworks are using a simplified strategy to portray a set of very complex ideas about the body and experience. This relationship between the simplified and the complex is also found in next set of words: Order/Complexity.
Order refers to arrangement and clarity. Complexity is something that is very involved, and has many parts, yet may or may not be organized or in order. By providing an order to something that is complex, one can make that complexity more easily digestible. I have illustrated my interest in order through the groups of paintings, and their placement in the gallery. The diagrammatical image itself attempts to give order to that which is complex, by choosing specific pieces of the information, and editing the information deemed unnecessary.
In my paintings, I am using the concepts and visual language of scientific diagrams, however through the acts of editing and integration, invention occurs. Invention posed against document is my next word set. A document is understood as being official on some level, as an accurate record. The relationship between invention and document is relevant because a diagram is understood as portraying information in a way that is supposed to be useful and/or educational, making it a document. My artworks’ use of diagrammatical imagery implies that they hold useful information for the viewer. Still, their inventedness renders them useless as diagrams, highlighting the constructed nature of diagrams, and therefore threatening the legitimacy of diagrams as factual documents.
The words concrete and illusory are yet another dichotomous pairing, demonstrated in the artwork and concepts of this exhibition. Documents as well as diagrams are understood as being concrete through their articulation and accuracy. Yet, as just stated, the act of removing this articulation through the editing of vital information, and the abstraction of the diagrammatical value through the mixing or juxtaposition of images obscures this concreteness. Thus, in the process of inventing imagery using diagrammatical reference, the painted diagram is rendered fallacious, or illusory.
An apposite addition to the pairings listed is play and analyze. These too are a dichotomous pair, emphasizing the apparent difference between science and fiction. Yet, my work functions to break down this dichotomy, by using play to facilitate analysis. Through the process of making, and the inventedness of the images I produce, I use issues of play to challenge conventional ideas of research. Through the deconstruction of the scientific document, I both prevent the reality of the surveyed subject, and expose its reality as constructed, providing the viewer the opportunity to analyze the nature of scientific fact and record.
Scale and number are terms that refer to the organizational principles of both geographical maps and biological diagrams. Each uses scale and numbering systems to provide selected details about the object or area it portrays. My work also uses these principles. For example, Representation, Reproduction, Shadow uses the scale of the body to create a relationship with the viewer, and Medial, Lateral, Proximal, as well as the other painting sets on the wall, uses a numbering system to emphasize the installation methodology or order.
Frontal and Spatial are also terms that refer to elements of my work. As a painter, I have a certain understanding of space, and as I work to expand this understanding, I have been pushing my work into a more spatial existence, yet these more spatial works, like Produce, Cast, Passage, and Representation, Reproduction, Shadow also have a primarily frontal reading. These terms also refer to the diagram itself, which tends to provide a flat image of a spatial object or area, providing the viewer with a singular viewpoint. This creates a frontal experience, a distortion of a dimensional reality.
Related to issues of experience, are the terms organic and rigid. The body is an organic entity, changing, forming, reforming and aging. Yet, we understand that which explains it, the institution of science and scientific education as rigid. Again, biological beings and matter are organic, yet the systems with which we attempt to record them and survey them are rigid. My work investigates this idea by offsetting the rigidity of the diagram, and making it more referential of the organic experience. By an organic process of idea development, and the use of organic forms in works like Representation, Reproduction, Shadow, I intend to counter the rigidity of technical instruction.
In the process of learning, which too is an organic process, we attempt to know. Incased in the process of knowing is the ability to reflect and remember our experiences, which leads to the next word set I will examine, knowing and remembering. These words are part of an organic progression of experiences, but can also be products of structured learning, as through institutional systems that teach through technical apparatus, like technology and diagrammatical data. My work calls up this kind of learning through the appropriation of diagrammatical imagery, reminding the viewer of the separation or disconnection between the organic, experienced knowledge, and the knowledge provided by institutional systems of technical language.
This institutionally provided knowledge is part of a historical system of information dissemination. This history provides the old system a certain understood value. The terms nostalgia and currency come into play here. Nostalgia refers to a longing for things from the past, perhaps of a ‘simpler’ time. This abstracted or nostalgic memory actually provides value or currency to the ways of the past. I use source material from a variety of time periods in my work, yet am aware of the nostalgic sense created by the more historical references. It is important to note however, that I see this recognition of history not as a longing for the past, but as a way of bringing the history of these constructed educational forms to the forefront, and reminding the viewer of that engrained presence in our understanding of science.
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 4:59 pm. Add a comment
The role of representation in the understanding of identity is substantial. It seems that all we know is based on representations. In the critical essay, “Foucault and the Natural Sciences”, Joseph Rouse explains, “knowledge only exists through its reproduction and circulation” (154). In other words, scientific knowledge is based on a presentation of that finding, either through language or image, and the dissemination of that representation. Actually, according to A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography, the term representation stands for all forms of meaning depiction, which includes all forms of language (McDowell 234).
The importance of representations through language becomes apparent when one considers the power of labeling and naming as identity constructors, contributing to the classification and regulation of the body. According to Madan Sarup, in Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World, “identities are not free-floating; they are limited by borders and boundaries” (3). This statement, applied to the labeling and naming by outside sources in order to classify or regulate subjects, shows that the use of language produces identity-constructing boundaries.
Critical theorists like Kate Linker address representations’ relationship to identity and the cultural structures that form it. In her essay “Representations and Sexuality”, Linker states that our understanding of self is created not by biology, but by representations: “difference…[is] a historical formation continually produced, reproduced, and rigidified in signifying practices” (Linker 393). Though she is specifically concerned with constructions of gender, her argument is valid to all constructed identities.
In the same essay, Linker describes the Lacanian theory of self-conception and identity as being initiated through seeing one’s reflection in the mirror. According to Lacan, it is at this moment that you realize how others see you, and begin to understand your ‘self’ as being separate from things that are ‘not-self’ (408). Additionally, she reminds us that we learn about our reality through the representations our society provides us: “Since reality can be known only through the forms that articulate it, there can be no reality outside of representation” (Linker 392). Finally, Linker proposes the creation of a “counterlanguage”: one that defies the confines of patriarchal language, and reclaims power over representations of the body (Linker 415).
Kate Linker is not the only source of critical theory on the topic of identity construction through representations. In bell hooks’ essay titled “The Oppositional Gaze”, hooks reminds us that representations not only construct identity, they are a reflection of the society they come from: “Identification can only be made through recognition, and all recognition is itself confirmation of the ideology of the status quo” (hooks 96). Therefore, Sarup, Linker and hooks attest to the power of representations in the construction of identity, by reflecting the ideologies of the cultural structures that shape that identity.
The artwork in my exhibition focuses on representations from the field of science. These scientific representations are usually accepted as valid and factual due to the technical processes that produce them. However, this trust in scientific images as ‘universal truths’ is incorrect. In “Foucault and the Problem of Self-Constitution”, author Mark Poster discusses Foucault’s arguments from Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic regarding scientific research. Poster writes, “In these works, Foucault questioned the centered, authorial, scientific subject, undermining its claims of transcendent objectivity by demonstrating the connection of science to power, the roots of truth in the soil of politics” (64). In this passage, Poster is revealing the relationship of science to the structures that control knowledge by controlling money, accessibility, and even legislature. However, through the appropriation of scientific representations, my work intends to use these identifying tools as a ‘counterlanguage’ that both highlights the construction of the image, and undermines what A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography refers to as a hierarchy of power “between the researcher and the researched” (McDowell 235).
Cited
hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze.” The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Amelia Jones. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Linker, Kate. “Representation and Sexuality.” Parachute No. 32, Fall 1983.
McDowell, Linda. A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Poster, Mark. “Foucault and the Problem of Self-Constitution”. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions. Ed. John Caputo and Mark Yount. University Park: Penn State UP, 1993: 63-80.
Rouse, Joseph. “Foucault and the Natural Sciences”. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions. Ed. John Caputo and Mark Yount. University Park: Penn State UP, 1993: 137-162.
Sarup, Madan. Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 1996.
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 4:27 pm. Add a comment