April 14, 2011. Can artists meaningfully participate in the political process? And if so, how? These questions drive the practices of many artists concerned with issues of domination, exclusion, and equality. Art Practical’s third thematic issue, “Performance: The Body Politic,” examines more than four decades of the marriage between politics and performance art in the Bay Area. For the artists profiled, the body serves as a political arena in and of itself. Interviews with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Lynn Hershman Leeson provide insight into the practices of two of the region’s seminal performance artists, whose work with race and gender have influenced countless artists. A series of interviews and essays pulls this historical thread through to the current day. Jeanne Gerrity’s essay on Wafaa Yasin and Carol Anne McChrystal’s essay on the performance series “Self Expression Night” illuminate ways in which contemporary emerging performers address their bodies’ resistance to, or complicity with, dominant political ideologies and structures. Enjoy. —MHT
Such a history of civic engagement has fomented a performance art tradition that pays special attention to the politics of the body. For those who are denied access to, or for those who voluntarily eschew, traditional political outlets, their own bodies can become a sites of political transformation or contestation.
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When Life is invoked in art practice, it is often equated pretty quickly with associations like “freedom,” “spontaneity,” and “disruption,” and I thought it was worth thinking about some other elements, especially the elements of the world that make Life possible.
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Unlike more relational models’ claims to social action, political engagement, and audience participation liaising between art and daily praxis, Self Expression Night’s ambivalent rubric declined to offer alternative or new models for living.
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Central to the structure of MOCA was the fact that it was not a collecting institution. This lent itself to fostering Conceptual art that would be ephemeral and performative. Marioni says that everything that happened at MOCA in its first years was “action by sculptors.”
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Yasin’s performances reflect her desire to educate, and possibly even change, her audience, and in doing so they draw from her position as a perpetual outsider to express universal displacement.
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What I get out of burlesque is being able to unabashedly perform sexuality and race. It’s expected for me to play with themes around sexuality. The other thing that I get out of it is that I can be silly, which is how I think about my sexuality.
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Performance artists may have all sorts of social shortcomings, and we may be terrible with administering our finances or sustaining a nine to five job, but when it comes to crossing borders, we make very good intercultural diplomats. I think that if governments were more enlightened, they would make good use of us.
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Locke’s works are the antithesis of messy, sensationalized spectacles. Rather they are rigorous, almost meditative actions, poetic and often studded with the levity of their absurdity. Her projects generally involve two primary tools—the trained body (hers and/or others) and the still or video camera either recording or producing a live feed.
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One looks at these projects together and understands that Hershman Leeson has consistently and successfully expanded the possibilities for sites of encounter with art throughout her career. Her work has been both embodied and interactive; she has situated it far outside the institutional realm of the museum, in places that are liminal and virtual. She has gone beyond representing identity to producing identities.
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A big component of the work that I’m doing now comes from an assignment that I used to give my students: to make a piece for one person. These days I'm doing a lot of performance where the participants in the piece are the audience. It’s something that we’re doing together—a kinky, queer, sexual play—and I'm not interested in everybody having equal access to that. I think that you treat an experience differently when you have to win access to it.
More »August 18, 2011. We've reached the end of our second year of issue production, and in honor of the occasion, have asked some of our writers to reflect on the events of the past twelve months. Art Practical’s mission is to create a historical record of contemporary artistic practices and to foster artistic production through critical writing and public programming. We participate in a continuous spectrum of activity, conversation, and critique as part of the everyday lives of artists, curators, viewers, and…
August 4, 2011. We are in the midst of what, during my East Coast childhood, would be the long pause of summer. The heat rose off of every surface and from every body, so much so that moving was something one did reluctantly, and only after much consideration. These are perhaps conducive conditions for looking at art, at least in the way Mark Van Proyen advocates for in his review: “the only way to come to terms with this…is to silently sit there…
July 14, 2011. In the current issue, Shannon Jackson quotes Tenderloin Economic Development Project director Elvin Padilla expressing her desired goal that individual artists “invite someone else along.” Jackson uses that phrase to evaluate the social dynamics underlying aesthetic decisions in storefront art, but it could also be understood as a litmus test that other writers apply in assessing the push and pull of the mostly digitally produced work reviewed here. For example, Brady Welch notes that the Whitney’s exhibition of Cory…
June 30, 2011. This morning, I noticed that still pinned to a sweater in my closet was the “Free Ai Weiwei” button I have been wearing periodically over the last two months. Given that last week Ai had been freed on bail after confessing to tax fraud and for health reasons, according to the Chinese government, the button suddenly amounted to little more than an outmoded accessory. It is also a prime example of what Hou Hanru describes in his letter to Hans Ulrich…
June 16, 2011. In her conversation with Bad at Sports, artist Julie Ault notes that the language she presently uses to describe Group Material’s early decisions and projects historicizes those experiences, creating a framework in which the past is skewed and the consciousness of the original moment is replaced by the context of hindsight. We all do this: use the words through which we now understand ourselves to describe our past actions. Perhaps it’s an effort to create continuity between…
June 2, 2011. In the Middle East, demonstrations and demands for regime change continue to grow, despite the threat of deadly force; in Syria, the gory images of a thirteen-year-old child brutally tortured and killed by the army have catalyzed protesters nationwide. The Arab Spring extends into summer, and Americans are nothing more than uneasy bystanders to the toppling of totalitarian rule while we cope with visions of our own rubble: tornado-ravaged Joplin, Missouri, and the news that ideological bickering may force this nation to default…
Criticism can be so embedded in analysis that when other forces make their way in, they feel disruptive. In two very different conversations, artists Dean Smith and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez shift associations with their work away from minimalism and toward more ineffable sensibilities, treading into unpopular territory by evoking the notion of spirituality. But are the two concepts—minimalism and spirituality—so opposed? Certainly minimalism’s calculations don’t align with spirituality’s lack of articulation, its embrace of the…
I am inclined to consider the National Endowment for the Arts of the 1960s and ’70s as a mythical creature. For my generation and the one coming up, the NEA is little more than a castrated, sacrificial animal that the Republican Party trots out to the altar anytime the national budget comes under review. But while the money is gone, a surviving legacy of that era is the creation of artist-run initiatives. These days, such projects are mostly seeded by what Christine Wong…
March 24, 2011.
The line between reality and unreality is always frayed. As artists toy with artifice and plant red herrings, we find the rug pulled from beneath us and are left with only a work's physical or psychological presence to orient ourselves—in Bill Berkson's words, we must feel the mud underneath our feet. So it is that Mary Anne Kluth finds a greater reality in an artificial rock present in space than a…
March 10, 2011.
We are very excited to announce our collaboration with SFMOMA’s Open Space blog on a three-part series of conversations to be held at the museum. Entitled Shop Talk, the conversations will focus on survival strategies artists develop and adopt to gain recognition and financial viability. We’ll examine the ways artists attempt to restructure market conditions to accommodate, support, or help further the social reach of their work’s aesthetic and critical capacities.…
February 24, 2011.
In Roland Barthes’ essay “Myth Today,” he notes that myth can take on any object and is defined, not by that object, but by how it shapes it into form. Myth-making is a process that happens in speech, in writing, in image-making. Barthes is careful to note that each activity calls upon a different type of consciousness and that with visualization, further distinctions come into play between, for example, an original and its reproductions. In this…
February 10, 2011. During the editorial team’s recent jaunt down to Los Angeles, we held numerous conversations with artists from both there and the Bay Area. Some of those conversations are documented in this issue’s features, and more will be presented in the coming weeks, as podcasts and articles. Because of the dislocation from our usual vantage point, we decided to explore the means by which artists create their own geography. In what ways do they formulate their practice in relation to…
January 27, 2011. The editorial team and some of our writers are heading to Los Angeles this weekend for the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair. There, we will be hosting a series of interviews and moderating a panel that ask the participating artists from the Bay Area and LA to consider their practice in relation to place. Art Practical is not interested in either delineating geographic boundaries around artists or defining regional aesthetics, but in investigating art’s potential to coalesce…
January 13, 2011. Included in this issue are video excerpts from Part I and II of the Critical Sources: Writing about Art in the Bay Area workshop held at The Lab in October 2009 and 2010. In Part II, Bill Berkson describes the need for a sensorial encounter with a work of art, batting away the words that might swarm up between him and the art. Similarly Spencer Young notes in his review of Blue Skies From Now On the rare opportunity to be…
December 31, 2010. Looking over the issues from the past twelve months, what immediately jumps out are the lively and thought-provoking conversations our contributors have had with artists, curators, writers, and even a cognitive scientist. Many of these have been the result of our partnerships with the podcast Bad at Sports and journal Talking Cure. Brian Andrews and Duncan MacKenzie of B@S, in particular, take an inquisitive and informed approach that combines an evident respect for their subject with self-depreciating…
December 20, 2010. Embedded in the outcries that led to the censorship of A Fire in My Belly from the current (privately funded) exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was the hackneyed refrain of “not with taxpayer dollars,” which could portend further attempts to erode the already sparse civic funds available to the arts. But, as Matthew Rana points out in his feature in this issue (and echoing questions raised by the Shadowshop exhibition), concerns about support for artistic activity are…
December 16, 2010. This special edition of Issue 2.7 is in response to the removal of David Wojnarowicz's 1987 film A Fire in My Belly from the Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C. In protest of the Smithsonian’s act of censorship, we have replaced all the images intended for inclusion in this issue with a still from Wojnarowicz’s film; this version will run through Saturday, December 18. In using…
December 2, 2010. The San Francisco Bay Area is known as a region of transplanted natives—individuals who spent their formative years elsewhere, but who feel the inexorable influence of this place. Surrounded by water and fog, its shape-shifting sensibility is cultural as well as geographic: one becomes oneself here. Variations on fluidity pervade this issue: Julio Cesar Morales discusses appropriative economic strategies that blur political and cultural boundaries; Elyse Mallouk examines how the ephemera of dematerialized artworks can morph into entities with their own…
November 18, 2010. For our second thematic issue, Art Practical has departed from its traditional format to consider local artistic practices in the context of our regional preoccupation with food. The San Francisco Bay Area is a prominent, even pioneering voice in a culinary movement that foregrounds all things local, organic, and humanely produced. Motivated by a strong curiosity and an awareness of the increased presence of food being used in artistic contexts, we’ve gathered together perspectives that collectively paint an image…
October 28, 2010. As Renny Pritikin notes in his review of Hauntology at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, haunting is not tied to the past in the way one might anticipate; it has meaning only in the present. A ghost demands to be accounted for as part of current cultural formation. The sociologist Avery Gordon notes that its motivations are to “force a something that must be done that structures the domain of the present and the prerogatives of the future.”1 In…
October 14, 2010. Myths distill the messy, complicated interactions of daily life into iconic gestures, and the process of myth creation—with all due credit to Roland Barthes—is one of elevation and valuation. Four reviews in this issue explore and dissemble that process: Glen Helfand’s examination of Matthew Barney’s epic performance, KHU; John Zarobell’s reflection on Huckleberry Finn; and Jeanne Gerrity’s and Christina Wiles’ takes on Until Today. <…
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September 30, 2010. The coincidence this week of my blog post on SFMOMA’s Open Space and Spencer Young’s review of Castration Myth at Steven Wolf Fine Arts is further underscored by the effort by both to situate the events of September 11 in unrelated images. As Young notes, the destruction of the Twin Towers was the most mediated and spectacular event in contemporary history, and so the re-coordination along different sight lines becomes, in part, an effort to reconsider encounter. This…
September 16, 2010. We are excited to launch the start of our issue year with our second annual Shotgun Round. In this issue, our regular contributors offer quick, thoughtful impressions of the new season of exhibitions in the Bay Area, as well as of events that occurred since our last issue in mid-August. The Shotgun Round pays homage to the origins of Art Practical, but also reflects the sheer volume of activity that greets us each fall. The thirty-four shotguns included here are only a…
