Doris Salcedo's and Cruel Optimism (2012)

 

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant states that the goal of her project is to explore relations of desire and obstacles.  She explains, cruel optimism exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing… It might rest on something like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being.”  Her assertion is aimed at responding to the repetitive and exhausting position of the politically depressed that seek repair of what may constitutively be broken; however, for Berlant this pressure to resolve “can eventually split the activity of optimism from expectation and demand [towards the suspension of] one’s attachment to the political, to one’s sense of membership in the idea of the polity.”  In terms of the project of contemporary art, the desire to be recognized, to be seen, in the globalized biennial format, suggests that the artist carries their identity to a political forefront, by which the First World assumes that the problem of inclusion has been resolved.  Problematically, in the process towards being present, her identity reaffirms the hierarchical structure of exclusivity.  Doris Salcedo’s identity and participation in the globalized biennial places her in a identity double bind, where she must utilize the “local” and memory to point towards political absence.

Hospitable Topography

Forthcoming in summer of 2014

 

This journey began with an experiment.  What could happen if a group of curators, in different stages of their careers, journeyed into one very specific part of the world?  The Scottish Highlands served as an uncharted space for the curators who began an expedition into understanding hospitality and the concept of traveling as a form of research.  While each curator approached the project with a unique perspective, the conversations shared led to various forms of understanding the concept of travel. As an emerging professional, it was impossible to not view this project as a point of departure—one that could later serve as the groundwork towards charting the stepping stones of a larger methodological process.  In this essay, I focus on isolating conceptual and practical standards that served as a way of thinking about traveling as curatorial research for socially engaged practices.  By exploring this project through the metaphor of geography, I trace terms that were developed throughout the journey, further using them as strategies to consider the dynamics behind emergent socially engaged projects. 

Kounellis at Work: Arte Povera and Italian Political Identity (2013)

The Italian political landscape before and during the Cold War was one that was shaped by external economic factors that equally attempted to push Italy towards integration into the nascent European Union.  The project was launched by a government that had two goals in mind—to revitalize its economy, largely drawing from the agrarian south and transforming the region into a stronger industrial sector by focusing on coal and steel, and through the reconstruction of its citizens with an identity that distanced itself from its recent fascist episode.  Negotiations between Italy and the European Coal and Steel Community, settled by 1951 indicated that indeed the Italian government had successfully and simultaneously achieved both goals—Italy received access to the coal and steel industry, a strong source of economic flow for central Italy, and an anticipated acceptance towards a rehabilitated identity.  As a response to the changes that were occurring, Italian artists were centering their work on the representation of the change in Italian perspectives.  Film and visual arts would turn to the everyday life of impoverished communities and people and recenter their political identity.  Germano Celant’s essay, printed months after the opening of his exhibition, “Arte Povera e IM Spazio” begins, “First comes the human being and then the system… society presumes to make prepackaged human beings, ready for consumption.”[1]  His words spoke to the ambitious made by the Italian government less than twenty years before.  As citizens lost sight of what constituted Italian culture, artists sought to interrupt hegemonic trajectories in exchange for revisions of what was already in place, what already constituted their everyday.  Artists aligned with the Arte Povera movement understood that a national awakening had to occur through the subversion of materials that already constituted Italian life: political disorientation, politico-religious alignments, and raw goods.  Jannis Kounellis, one of Celant’s featured artists at the Arte Povera exhibition interrupted his own artistic development over the period of two years, refraining from any sort of artistic production between 1956 and 1958, to consider how the formation of “history’s fragments” could be reassembled in his artwork.  His artistic project led him toward the reconstruction not only of his practice, but also of Italian self-perception.

 

 

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[1] Ibid. 1967.

Suspension, Release, Pleasure: Mapping and Seeing the Text in Public Art (2011)

The fittingly titled chapter on discourse, Remarks and Consequences, in Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, concludes by stating “one is not seeking… to pass from the text to thought, from talk to silence, from the exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the pure collection of the moment.”[1]  His conclusion on the subject of the statement is one that concisely replicates models in speech, subjectivity, identity, and metaphorically, through the physical landscape.  The experience of text, as it traverses from concept or idea, to communicative dialogue, from the internalized to the publicized, does not undergo a translation of meaning, but rather a stronger reliance on spectatorship.  In conceptual works of art, where text lies at the core of the operation, the text itself is not transformed but is transforming.  Policy, the regulation of behavior, bodies, and business, is created through text.  We are contracted into agreement with the city by abiding its policies and regulations.  Perhaps, it is in the administrative conditions public policy that public art as Foucault gathers, attempts to pass from spatial dispersion to a pure collection of a moment.  To propose that there is a fixed definition of what defines public art is as great of a folly as proposing that the interpretation of how public art operates is also regulated.  As W.T.J. Mitchell suggests in Art in the Public Sphere, the controversial nature of public art can be seen as “a signal that modernism can no longer mediate public and private spheres on its own terms, but must submit itself to social negotiation, and anticipate reactions ranging from violence to indifference”[2] It is here that I locate the destabilizing effects of text-based works.  In order to assess the process by which projects achieve a destabilizing nature, I am particularly interested in investigating works that antagonize public space.  I was first introduced into the issues with public art, through the Centennial Map project created by Jennifer Urso, and furthermore found Jenny Holzer’s work to be revelatory of the effects of text in public space.

 

 

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[1] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage,1972), 76.

 

[2] W.T.J. Mitchell, Art in the Public Sphere,” (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3.