by Jean Marie Carey | 1 Jun 2007 | Art History
“One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” by Miwon Kwon reprinted in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung.
Architectural theorist, occasional curator, and UCLA professor of contemporary art history Miwon Kwon dissects the meaning of the word “place” as it pertains to art in public places and the changing role of the installation-maker in “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” This essay which originally appeared in the influential journal October in 1997 was such a success in the critical theory community that Kwon published a book-length updated edition in 2002.
Kwon makes several points though her primary thesis is simply that site-specific art has changed greatly since the so-to-speak groundbreaking days of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and smaller but no less controversial pieces such as Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc ((“One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity†by Miwon Kwon reprinted in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985 edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Malden, Masachusetts, 2005). 32)) along with notions of commerce and integrity.
(more…)
by Jean Marie Carey | 22 May 2007 | Art History
(more…)
by Jean Marie Carey | 11 May 2007 | Art History
“White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory” by Jane Gaines and “Sexuality in the Field of Vision” by Jacqueline Rose reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, (Sage Publications, London, 2006).
Five hundred years after his death Leonardo continues to be a subject of fascination and a certain sort of “fan fiction†as evinced by Dan Brown’z improbably popular The Da Vinci Code and that one of the master’s works, the painting called the Mona Lisa, attracts dissertations and research (some revealing – it is now known with near certainty who the model for the painting actually was). Something of Leonardo’s nature can be found in the writings in his notebook accompanying his sketches.
Pregnant cow
Pregnant cow. Polk County, Florida
Leonardo asked again and again in his margins “Is anything ever finished?†It is clear from his devotion to studies culled from observing autopsies and his inventions of warfare that Leonardo was interested in applied science and process. It is impossible to know for sure but one might deduce from Leonardo’s exhibited nature and the strong awareness the artists filtering through the Medici court of their own provincial and individual identities that Leonardo probably would not have had interest in nor patience with the notions of repression and gender anxiety brought forth from Austria and Germany of the early Twentieth Century.
This obvious logic is of little significance to English professor and Palestinian sympathizer Jacqueline Rose. In her essay “Sexuality in the Field of Vision†Rose notes Sigmund Freud’s simultaneous fascination and repulsion reactions to Leonardo’s sketches of laughing women and couples in coitus. Writing in 1986, Rose says these sketches have become a lost part of Leonardo’s oeuvre (in fact the intervening two decades have seen a great resurgence in interest in these drawings).
In any case Rose is only tangentially commenting on Leonardo. Her main points are actually tepid restatements of what in 1986 were familiar tenets of feminist philosophy in regard to gaze, possession, and viewing. Fundamentally, Roses says, “women are meant to look perfect,†a charity that in turn releases the male viewer, so to speak, not to feel anxiety lack and castration phobias. Yet Rose believes that any fixed and secure concept held by the individual of her or particularly his sexual identity is an illusion and a fantasy, waiting to be disrupted lapses or breaks in the maintained projection of the ideal.
This awakening from the dream of human life is in fact a positive development and indeed a goal of contemporary art – that is, “art which today addresses the presence of the sexual in representation – to expose … the fantasy and in the same gesture, to trouble, break up, or rupture the visual field before our eyes.â€
Jane Gaines, a feminist theorist at Duke University who must be quite busy these days, adds conceptualization about race to Rose’s ideations about gender and gaze. In fact Gaines slightly manipulates both reality and the real to expound on some highly specious points she wishes to make using as an example, of all things, the 1975 Diana Ross vehicle Mahogany.
(more…)
by Jean Marie Carey | 30 Apr 2007 | Art History
“Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America” by Mary Louise Pratt reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, (Sage Publications, London, 2006).
In “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America” linguistics professor Mary Louise Pratt describes how verbose explorer and compulsive documentarian Alexander von Humboldt came through his writings to define the European and American perception of South America from the beginning of the 1800s until, to some extent, the present day.
Pratt begins by describing the itinerary of Humboldt and his colleague Aimé Bonpland. Over a period of five years beginning in 1799, the two men and a contingent of assistants and porters, having landed in Venezuela, navigated the waterways of the Orinoco and Amazon, scaled Andean peaks, and crossed Peru, Argentina, Mexico, and Ecuador. Pratt notes that the men were not precisely explorers in the context of charting unknown geographies as “Humboldt and Bonpland never once stepped beyond the boundaries of the Spanish colonial infrastructure.â€
Humboldt’s innovation was rather to reinvent the idea of South America as refracted through a Germanic strain of Romanticism. Humboldt affiliates himself and his dramatic writing with a rather anti-scientific linking of South America, as a singular entity despite its varied microenvironments, with the concept of nature as an irrational and enormous force, “a spectacle capable of overwhelming human knowledge and understanding.†Pratt reports that Humboldt also had something of a unique mode of writing, one which eschewed conventional travel “journalism†and narrative voices and structures in favor or essays filled with emotional descriptions of various tableaux and impassioned, occult-flavored analyses of virtually every aspect of the five-year journey
New World, Asian, and African Primates
A page from a 1792 edition of An Encyclopedia of Animals shows apes from Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Personal images.
Pratt imagines Humboldt’s creation of a sensation of what would come to be identified as “otherness.†He achieves this effect first be describing the South American continent as an isolating, barren expanse and then populating it with an exhaustive catalogue of weather systems, botanical wonders (such as curare), ecologies of the extreme – high mountains and windblown pampas – and exotics in the persons of Spanish colonials and missionaries and indigenous peoples. Humboldt was apparently a man of no small ego, and, Pratt asserts, though he purported to be channeling Nature with a capital “N†as the main character and presumptive narrator of his more than 30 volumes on the South American escapade, these capacious journals are actually Humboldt, and by extension the Nineteenth Century European holding forth.
This personality was a familiar one, Pratt says, even given Humboldt’s extraordinary blowhardness; Europeans had experience with this sort of projection from the earlier experience of colonizing North America.
Pratt notes that the enduring impressions of Humboldt’s oeuvre – most especially Views of Nature, a volume revised twice in the author’s life to the exclusion of his own autobiography – can be attributed in great part not just to a societal interest in South America and the ease of acceptance of Humboldt’s worldview, but to the man’s singular gift of relentless self-promotion. While Bonpland returned to (and remained in) South America following the initial five-year exploration, Humboldt devoted his energy to becoming and remaining a continental public intellectual. Pratt describes how other notable Romantic scholars of the day – particularly Frederich Schiller, whom Humboldt fawningly quotes in Views of Nature – did not return Humboldt’s admiration. Yet Pratt concludes by suggesting Humboldt achieved his philosophical Romantic ambition of pointing out the emerging relationships and differences between Europe and not just the Americas but also the rest of the world.
by Jean Marie Carey | 12 Apr 2007 | Art History
“White” by Richard Dyer reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, 2006.
British film historian and academic is today best known for his book-length analysis of the David Fincher movie Se7en and was recently quoted extensively in the media on the work of Nino Rota when the composer – the original focus of Dyer’s scholastic inquiries – died. But one of Dyer’s earlier fields of interest concerned the representation of binary oppositions in the cinema. “White†originally appeared as an essay in a 1988 issue of Screen magazine (that version excerpted by Evans and Hall) but eventually became a book unto itself.
Dyer’s main points are that caucasians as a group are not consciously represented as such in cinema, and that awareness of subcultures in film, even when sensitively represented in non-mainstream movies, has in fact contributed the continued perceptions of separation, marginalization, and alienation amid “non-dominant groups.â€
Dyer is also concerned simply with the word “white†and its historical connotations. He discusses commonly accepted tenets of the physiological aspects of human vision and the conventions of the color wheel, in which “black is the absence of all colour†and “white is no colour because it is all colours.†Dyer extrapolates that the accepted definition of white as a convention of synthesis allows the more figurative notion of whiteness to occupy the cognitive spectrum of what is considered normal. This unanalyzed fact of whiteness has the cumulative cultural effect of preventing nominative media critics from seeing and therefore openly addressing and maintaining a dialogue about white identity.
Dyer purports to explore issues around whiteness denied through a study of three films: Jezebel, a 1938 movie featuring a rebellious, defiant Bette Davis character; Simba, an early (1955) attempt at an “issues†feature set in Kenya; and Night of the Living Dead, the 1969 horror film that has transcended the genre to become generally regarded as something of a groundbreaking classic. Unfortunately the remarks included in this excerpt are confined to what is probably the most tedious film to view though the one most neatly underscoring Dyer’s points, Simba.
Dyer doesn’t compare Simba to a similar film from the same era, Zulu, though clearly it is that type of movie: The main (white) character, played by Dirk Bogarde, goes to Kenya to deal with the death of a family member and while there encounters a violent uprising by an indigenous (black) tribe, the Mau-Mau. Dyer points out that the racist conventions one would expect in such a film are present, including scenes filmed in high contrast lighting which place the black characters interacting nonverbally and gesticulating in shadow or at night, while the white characters are seen speaking proper English in well-lighted daylight settings. Dyer continues, though, to address the subtext of Simba. Explicit colonial binarism is imparted through the film’s assumed values, as rational and thus implicitly more civilized black Kenyans are offered the hopeful eventual outcome of one day being as well-behaved as their British visitors.
“Simba is, then, an endorsement of the moral superiority of white values of reason, order and boundedness,†Dyer concludes, though he allows that in some way the white characters in this period film are incapacitated by their own lameness despite their self-control.
“White†by Richard Dyer, reprinted in Visual Culture: The Reader edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. (Sage Publications, London, 2006)
(more…)
