Art & Culture

How can black and indigenous artists employ, appropriate, and reconfigure these visual, epistemic technologies? And how can this engagement contest the dominance of Western perspectives in supposedly neutral institutions and practices? In this essay, I analyze how Luiseño-Diegueño/Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist James Luna (1950 - 2018), Brazilian visual artist and researcher Rosana Paulino (°1967) and Cuban visual artist Ricardo Brey (°1955) interact with a variety of these colonial tools. Firstly, I will be examining Luna’s first performance of 'Artifact Piece' (1987) and how it challenged narratives of authenticity and extinction permeated by museal displays of Native Americans. Secondly, I consider Paulino’s 'Assentamento series' (2012 - 2013) and how it references the role of photography and science in the objectification of (enslaved) black women. And, finally, I analyze how Brey’s faux-historical manuscript, inspired by the diaries of German discoverer Alexander von Humboldt titled 'Tomo I Genera Plantarum' (1982), recenters ostracised, non-Western forms of knowledge (making).
This essay was written for the Seminar Contemporary Art (2023- 2024) taught by Sven Lutticken at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

In Media America, the opening chapter to the publication Guerilla Television (1971), American film director Michael Shamberg and alternate culture think-tank RainDance Corporation describe the quick rise to ubiquity of television since its mass-market introduction in the 1950s. Television soon grew out to be a medium synonymous with mass entertainment and, according to the authors, mass sedation and diminishing communication.

The existence of this constant, 24-hour stream of information turned out to be a productive, creative space for visual artists who, both with and without the consent of TV networks, would stage ‘TV disruptions’, in which they would insert one of their artworks into the scheduled programming.  Visual artists Keith Arnatt, VALIE EXPORT, and Chris Burden, for instance, all saw this potential of the mass medium. For Self-Burial (Television Interference Project) (1969) Arnatt interjected contextless photographs of himself disappearing into a hole in the ground on  German broadcasting channel WDR II (Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne) across nine days. This differs from EXPORT’s TV disruption Facing a Family (1971), in which she tried to mirror the position of the television viewer by placing a dining family before the camera. Finally, Burden had a more radical, if not violent approach, with his work TV Hijack (1972), in which he effectively took over what was supposed to be an artist interview by holding his interviewer at knifepoint.

These works do not only show the interesting dialogues taking place between the art world and popular culture, but each also very explicitly engages with the viewer by either making them aware of their own behaviors or by implicating them as witnesses to violence or disappearance. It is with these concepts (televised disruption and spectatorship) that I would like to engage in this research paper.

What is the historical context for these TV interruptions and why were they seen as such a fruitful format? How did these artworks engage with their viewers when they were first released? And, lastly, how does this compare to their presentation in the current museal context?

In this essay I offer a close reading of "Les Piques" (1992-1993), an installation by French artist Annette Messager consisting of over a hundred steel poles from which ragdolls and gruesome drawings hang. I do so by focusing on four recurring themes that appear both in "Les Piques" and throughout Messager’s oeuvre. First, I explore Messager’s employment of fragmentation, both in her portrayal of the human body and in her artistic persona. Subsequently, I annalyse her engagement with innocence through her use of dolls. Thirdly, I discuss Messager’s use of domestic materials. And finally, I annalyse how Messager avoids the sensationalization of war through abstraction.

(How) Can an artist commit to something? How does this manifest itself in artistic production? And, are there parameters by which this commitment can be judged? In this Commitment: A Study into Endurance, Engagement, and Survival in Visual Art I aim to investigate commitment as a viable framework through which to approach art and artistic practice. This seems especially pertinent in the current art world climate in which many artists and institutions attempt to situate themselves as political actors, while simultaneously facing scrutiny by conservative and progressive critics, historians, audiences, and theorists alike. By approaching artistic, and institutional practices through the lens of commitment I hope to open up a space to pinpoint values intrinsic to thinking about, making, or otherwise engaging with art, which often remain vague. Commitment allows one to engage with the mettle and ‘heart’ of a practice while also focusing on the discrepancies or congruences of stated intention and result. It is a broad, alternative framework that approaches the relative success or value of an artwork or institution from the perspectives of consistency and sincerity — be that formal, conceptual, physical or political. y the lion's share of this thesis will be taken up by three analytical chapters each focussing on a different body of works by a different artist. By looking at the practice of these artists, the flexibility inherent in commitment will become apparent: The commitment of a work can be studied regardless of medium, concept, reception, and/or aesthetics. These case studies do not serve to illustrate the definition formulated in the introduction, but allow an expansion thereof. The question is therefore twofold: What can commitment as a framework tell us about these practices? And what can these practices tell us about commitment as a framework?

In 1979, American artist Michael Asher (1943 - 2012) participated in the 73rd American Art Exhibition hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago. His work consisted of an almost imperceptible, yet impactful change to the museum’s façade. With the support of the Institute, Asher relocated a bronze replica of George Washington - originally a marble by French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon (1741 - 1828) - from where it was perched at the top of the Art Institute’s grand staircase and placed it in the museum’s modest 18th century picture gallery. This intervention was framed by a brochure in which Asher directed visitors to George Washington’s new location and elucidated his intentions: “In this work, I am interested in the way sculpture functions when it is viewed in its 18th Century context instead of in its prior relationship to the façade of the building where it has been for 54 [sic] years. Once inside Gallery 219 the sculpture can be seen in connection with the ideas of other European works of the same period.” After the exhibition finished the statue was relocated within the museum and later moved to the Mayor’s office, leaving no trace of the installation’s existence.

Though seemingly innocuous, Asher’s reference to context situates the piece in an intricate art historical debate about the (ir)relevance of placing artworks into context. Different art historians have questioned whether it is possible to interpret a work without placing it into context, or, on the contrary, if contextualization does nothing more than detract and distract from the value of the art object.

Besides these field-specific inquiries a broader question can be asked: What is context? As Griselda Pollock observes in Feminist Interventions in the History of Art (1988): “Context seems a term so self-evident that it needs no decoding.” Yet it is a slippery word that does not lend itself to definition easily: Is it personal? Collective? Ideological? Physical? As its etymology (LAT: contexere - to weave; contextus - connection) reveals, context represents an intricate tissue of interwoven relationships that tends to tighten, knot, and, snag when attempts are made to unscramble it.

In this essay, a selection of twentieth-century, art historical approaches to context(ualization) will be presented, along with a reading of Michael Asher’s 1979 George Washington at the Art Institute of Chicago installation and his 2005 remake of the piece.