Residency 3 Summary, Feb 2013


Critique Feedback
  • Carolyn Christov-Barkagiev:
Crit 1: “I think the time-based project was a lot more successful than your images… they are too literal… Sometimes it is important for [feminists] to go to another trajectory… a sophisticated way of looking at the notion of the spiritual not just as a religious impulse but as an impulse to go on a retreat, to look at it from a more philosophical perspective… looking at the suspension of meaning and the fundamental articulation of that space, of not knowing…”
Crit 2: “You are actually using the male stereotypes of the witch… Increase the fiction but in a more embodied way, without eliminating the gothic, it could be about shaping and molding the spaces that people experience… Looking at Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s art could really liberate your work.”
 
  • Deborah Davidson:
“I can imagine a multiplicity of these small objects on display… Mark Dion is interested in having the archive as his art… Fred Wilson challenges the idea of who owns the narrative? … You might think about setting up an installation of video and objects where you ‘trap’ the audience in a “psychological” space… Get focused for your thesis and the other things will show through in the work anyway. Carol Walker and William Kentridge use the projected shadow… I think your work has the possibility of doing one thing and another at the same time.”

  • Sunanda Sanyal:
“Conceptually where have you decided to go?... My impression is that you have some very rich ideas and some rich images but you don’t have a thesis yet… there is no cohesive body of arguments yet… As images they are extremely captivating, if you have five of them in a row, they draw you and you go them like in a trance… what is not clear to me is what the captivation is about and on what grounds I’m standing conceptually… you’re claiming camp but you are not playful enough”

  • Laurel Sparks:
 “ Dieter Roth is very elusive with his concoctions… Tom Burkhart talks about making fun of painting while being fully devotional. Kenneth Anger’s occult pieces are campy, satanic, hallucinogenic, with mythological archetypes as well as serious and haunting…  I think you need rooms or channels with your archetypes to go into the space with them… theatre is going to be important… have an installation with video projections but also a space in the dark lit with candles so that you’re really camping it up … keep negotiating how cheesy you want to make your work, find your edge and then push past it… have you shot any videos of the snowglobes? I feel that they have movement… Stick with the low-budget, naïve, kitchen-witch quality but look at Kentridge’s timing…”

  • Cesare Pietroiusti:
“As an artist you have to get to the bottom of your thing, your direction radically and mercilessly.”
“ These images don’t convey drama in the theatrical sense, the plates have more magical potential than these… [write a] thesis on the element of the magical object seen from the point of view of the feminist and her interpretation of the male gaze on the female and her tools… How the male gaze/art/literature/theatre represented the objects used by the witch, so you put yourself in the position of re-elaborating something from the point of view of the woman… look at the paraphernalia of witches… Having the object at the cross between performance art sculpture and spirituality [is] a very strong thing…the woman that identified herself as a witch because of being threatened… how that identity was embraced in objects that were used.”
“Think about installing something like this in a closet like Fred Wilson, you have to think unconventionally how to display the work…”

  • Beth Campbell:
“I don’t have the process of the mysterious when I look at the images, I have it through signs… the audio (of the animation) was doing two different things, the clicking was intimate/bodily and the thud was outside in the world so you created two different spaces… Instead of having the symbolic or aesthetic of the mysticism you can have objects that embody it… the animation was a richer work with more metaphor and layering”
 “Animism - the position of the subject and object shifting so that we’re coming from the position of the object.”

Seminar – Professional Development
Ideas:
  • I am extremely grateful for this highly informative and practical seminar that is crucial for people like me who have no experience. However, the main questions that I was asking myself were “What are my choices as an artist? What if I don’t want to show in a gallery and produce art for income? How realistic is it to have the intention of showing work but not selling it?”. I intend to explore this further after my graduation, Marina Abramovic comes to mind.

Critical Theory III
Ideas:
    • Incredibly interesting and entertaining sessions dissecting the historical (Hegelian) construct of the world (including art, women, nature and “primitives”) from the point of view of Western, white, middle-class males.

Goals for the Semester
    • To formulate an outline for a thesis and produce work towards that end.
    • To explore time-based/film and audio work further.
    • To experiment with displaying work in unconventional ways.

List of Readings
  • ‘The Scarlet Letter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ by Anne Radcliffe
  • ‘The Gothic’ by Gilda Williams
  • ‘Ghostly Matters’ by Avery Gordon
·         ‘How Like a Leaf’ by Thyrza Goodeve
  • ‘The Uncanny’, ‘Fetishism’, ‘Totem and Taboo’ by Freud
·         ‘When Species Meet’, ‘Co-relation of Akasha Trees and Ants’ by Donna Harraway
  • ‘The Politics of Piety’ by Saba Mahmood
  • ‘Echolalias’, ‘The Enemy of All’ by Daniel Heller-Roazen
  • ‘Potentialities’ by Giorio Agamben
  • ‘Moby Dick’, ‘Bartleby, the Scivener’ by Herman Melville
  •  ‘Animism’ by Anselm Franke (YouTube - The New School)

Artists/People for Research
  • Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
  • Chiara Fumai - Documenta 13 project
  • Pierre Huyghe – Documenta 13 project
  • Mona Hatoum – Hair drawings
  • Dieter Roth
  • Kenneth Anger
  • Brothers Quay
  • Jan Svankmajer
  • Xander Marro
  • Mark Dion
  • Fred Wilson
  • Kara Walker
  • William Kentridge (Norton lectures, Harvard)
  • Helene Cixous
  • Raffaello Sanzio (Italian theatre)
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky (‘The Holy Mountain’)
  • Jane Bennett 
  • Latour

Practical Tips
  • Use artist talk to discuss issues/ideas not covered in the thesis
  •  ‘Apex’ magnets for hanging photos
  • ‘Pilot Air’ for shipping

No comments:

Post a Comment