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land art
This past week in class, we discussed land art. Land art, in a way, demystifies the “artist as creator” trope, steering instead towards artist as arranger of found materials. Gabriel Orozco’s practice exemplifies this, as part of his artist manifesto is not having a studio and instead, seeing the world as his studio. Other artists, especially within the indigenous community also have particular relationships with the land. Having had very different traditions of honoring the land and seeing the land as their history, artists like Cannupa Hanska Luger discuss his past feelings of being burdened with his people’s land being stolen from them, he discusses his realization that this land was never anyone’s to begin with. This opening up of the discussion, that land was never meant for human ownership, broadens the way he approaches land art as well. Perhaps this is relevant to the distinctions from artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, who despite working with the same ‘medium’ creates works of art that are still monumental. Goldsworthy and Smithson literally re-arrange parts of the earth (there feels something metaphorical about the physical moving of boulders / earth). I think this is an interesting contrast to other land artists who create more ephemeral works, like Cecilia Vicuna, whose precarios sculptures of sticks in the seashore etc reflected her transient status as an exile.
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Atul Bhalla/Guadalupe Maravilla
Atul Bhalla is a multi-disciplinary artist who looks at the role of water and its relationship to the environment and to New Delhi where he resides. He started his talk discussing the dependence of the New Delhi residents on water, as the supply of water there is consistently low, from the time he was growing up to now. His photographs of water often take on a near-spiritual quality, showing water “as both a source and symbol of renewal and reexamination.”
Guadalupe Maravilla is also a multi-disciplinary artist. His work is also informed by the physical environment, but in the sense of immigration/migration, especially border crossings like his own. His performances often take on and create “new mythologies” that use symbols of the past and present to create different variants of the future. His drawings also take on the qualities of cartography, often using old manuscripts in combination with drawings made from the Tripa Chuca game, a game in which two people draw lines. Before the pandemic, he held healing sessions/seminars where he brought in people who practice sound healing, herbal medicine, etc. to teach people from the undocumented community.
In that way, Maravilla’s work largely intersects with what Nato Thompson and Pablo Helguera discuss as ‘social practice,’ or artwork that blends into life-work. Like Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses which very much create real impact in the Houston Community, Maravilla’s healing seminars and mutual aid funds are incredibly impactful to the undocumented community that he has access to.
week of 11/30-12/7
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Atul Bhalla photos
https://www.sepiaeye.com/atul-bhalla
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Guadalupe Maravilla video
https://whitney.org/media/38966
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Jaishri Abichandari
Jaishri Abichandari is an artist-curator working in NYC. Her work explores feminist subjectivities and South Asian identity. Though she did not talk as much about her own work, in looking into it, I found it to add to a recurring conversation that we’ve discussed with artists like Chitra Ghanesh, whether in terms of being between cultures or the inspiration from queering traditional imagery.
Last year, she curated a trilogy of shows called Utopian Imagination at the Ford Foundation For Social Justice. The first part was called Perilous Bodies, referencing both the violence (historically and currently) heaivy inflicted upon Black, Brown, Indingenous, and Queer. However, the term bodies (“bodies of water”) could also point to ecological violence and waste. In this first show were many artists we’ve discussed like Dread Scott and David Antonio Cruz, and having seen their work in isolation and now in conversation with other artists, it felt like their work fit really well in this show. I was also really struck by installation of missiles by Mahwish Chishty that are inescapably placed, unlike the reality of American complicity/US enacted violence in the Middle East that can be easy to hide.
The second show was called Radical Love, using love as an antidote to the violence of the first show. I loved how Abichandari themed this show with a maximalist aesthetic, how the works shown like Ebony Patterson’s installation do not withhold from abundance in their visual languages. The third show was Utopian Imagination, which created a futurism that centered Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Queer bodies at the forefront, not unlike our earlier class discussion of Wangechi Mutu’s afrofuturism as a means of reclaiming what can be.
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Photos from “narrow distances”
https://hyperallergic.com/478550/ka-man-tse-narrow-distances/
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Interview w/ Ka-Man Tse
https://urbanautica.com/interview/ka-men-tse-on-being-seen-queering-time-and-taking-up-spaces/634
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Ka-Man Tse
Ka-Man Tse is a photographer and video artist whose work explores the intersection of Asian-American and queer identities. Her work is intersectional in nature, bridging Asia and Asian America and the personal and public spaces that queer bodies move through. Her early work was influenced by Michael Jang’s photo series “The Jangs,” which was both a humorous and introspective reflection of Chinese-American family life. In Tse’s early photos, she pictures upstate NY Chinese restaurants as an exploration of the time and labor that builds these spaces. She also spent time photographing her own family, but shifts beyond that in her narrow distances book, which focuses more on the queer community in Hong Kong and New York. This act is reflective also of the kinship theory within queer theory, that community and family can be found outside of blood relations. Thus, the view of kinship in narrow distances is expansive. The photographs feel vulnerable and close, perhaps reflective of the bonds formed between photographer and subject, and all the backstories behind. One of the stories was of the person whispering into a house like Tony Leung in In The Mood For Love, recalling the weight of secrets and what it means to release one. Another was of the couple who met during smoke breaks in a lower level of their office, and chose to match for their portrait—pointing to the small intimacies they knew and shared and perhaps the public was not privileged too.
In Tse’s talk, hearing the stories behind each photo was probably one of the most enjoyable parts—and I wonder what is lost to a viewer who can’t access these stories. This isn’t to say that the photographs cannot stand alone, but that the experience of viewing them / knowing them is radically different in hearing Tse tell us these stories.
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Nicole Awai
Nicole Awai is a multimedia artist whose works span drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and more. She often incorporates found objects such as nail polish and doll parts, often to engage in cultural critique. These conversations often span a global reach, engaging both domestic issues such as the colonial history embedded in American monuments, the ecological implications of the Trinidadian asphaltum and how the material language of the ‘black ooze’ in her work radically embodies a multiplicity of identities and landscapes.
One of her more recent works, Persistent Resistance of the Liquid Land grapples with many of these questions. A painting emerges out of the corner of two walls, spreading into the room. Bird-like objects and images of an African American man from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn are just a couple of the elements that make up this installation. While including this symbolic figure, Awai also creates a monument of her own, subverting the tropes of American nationalism that may be conventionally associated with the ‘problematic’ monuments that have been re-evaluated in recent years. Marsha Pearce writes that this installation “provides a way of seeing a current global condition that is defined by greater liquidity.” In many ways this work also embodies Kwame Anthony Appiah’s assertion that “Western civilization” is not the hallmark of progress. Even if it was lauded as so, Awai visualizes for us, a future of globalism that is not enclosed, rigid, bounded, but liquid.
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