Annika von Hausswolff

  A Given Moment in the History of Coming into Being, 2002

 By Annika von Hausswolff. You can see more of her work here.

Thomas Ruff's Students

The photographs below are by students of Thomas Ruff in Düsseldorf. Click here for a link to the class website with all of the student portfolios.

By Juergen Staak

By Stephanie Purschler

By Hye-Mi Kim

By Hye-Mi Kim

E.J. Bellocq, Nan Goldin, & Ryan McGinley : Sexuality in photography from 1908-2008

Above image by Nan Goldin. (1981)

Anyone aware of the current Ryan McGinley/Tiny Vices inspired trend in snapshot-style photography of youth culture should note its precedent: Nan Goldin's raw and emotional 1986 Aperture monologue, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.  Below is one of McGinley's most famous photographs, an example of McGinley's more light-hearted 21st-century version of Goldin's Ballad.

Ryan McGinley.  Dakota (Hair), 2004.

In light of this, I thought it might be interesting to look at what came before Nan Goldin. I found an essay by Nan Goldin on the work of E.J. Bellocq, who photographed in the Storyville whorehouses in New Orleans in the early 20th century. The essay was published in Art Forum in 1997. If you would like to read the essay, you can find it here. 

 

Below image by E.J. Bellocq

 If Foucault had been an art theorist, I think he might have been interested.

The New Curatorial Model: Dialogue and Dialectic

Below are a few of the opening paragraphs of an essay I recently wrote after a recent trip to visit various Biennales in Korea and China with Okwui Enwezor. Of course, this is not the full essay. There are about 11 more pages that discuss the Gwuangju Biennale in more detail, but  I did not post those pages here. 

There is no doubt about it. We are in the age of full-on globalization. Old notions of autonomous nation-states crumple under the pressures of transnational identities and global exchange. Okwui Enwezor makes the important point that, while globalization is nothing new, the current speed and scale at which globalization now unfolds is unprecedented.[2] In the field of contemporary art, a result of this new global structure is the emergence of a new curatorial method that makes global discourse and exchange its purpose. New curatorial projects that demonstrate this curatorial strategy are popping up around the globe. These projects aim to create dialectical spaces for heterogeneous ideas to flourish in a manner that simultaneously encourages solidarity between disparate geographical and socio-political locals while promoting the fluid exchange of ideas. As it asserts that the subject is only realized through interaction or dialogue with that which is outside of itself, and that synthesis grows out of the paradoxes and antinomies inherent in disparate subjectivities, the new curatorial model articulates the structure of the Hegelian dialectic.

The basic structure of Hegel’s dialectic includes three sequential terms: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Within this framework, paradox and contradiction become the basis for the realization of subjectivity[3]. Through an interaction with its antithesis, the thesis becomes alienated from itself. The paradox between thesis and antithesis is resolved via the process of synthesis, which then operates as the springboard on which to base a new thesis.[4] According to this model, subjectivity is neither autonomous nor static, but relational and dynamic, constantly in conversation with the outside world. The thesis (or subject) gains its subjectivity in relation to that which is outside of itself. It is this dialectical framework that is realized by 21st century curators as a means to explore the current state of globalism. The dialectical structure is employed as a means by which to encourage dialogue. This essay will present examples of this dialectic and subsequent dialogue within the 7th Gwuangju Biennale, “Annual Report.”

In the 7th Gwuangju Biennale, "Annual Report," the most significant discursive mode is reflection because, as posed by Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of the exhibition, “in providing such a reflexive site for the presentation of contemporary art, Gwuangju Biennale has today assumed a dialectical position in debates focused on the task of reorienting the role of cultural and institutional networks of cotemporary art.”[5] The act of reflection makes it possible to explore paradoxical ideas within the context of 21st century globalism and globalization.

The following paragraphs explore modes of reflection as the crux of the new dialectical and dialogical curatorial model.

The first mode of reflection is historical. Due to its origins as an event specifically created for the commemoration of the student uprising that occurred in Gwuangju in 1980, the Gwuangju Biennale enters into a site-specific mode of historical reflection. Curators of the Gwuangju Biennale face the task of engaging the dialectic between the local and the global, the past and the present. They must find the intersection between the specificity of Korea’s tumultuous democratization movement and the more universal 21st century conversation on the topic of globalization. In their exploration of this dialectic between past and present, local and global, the curators aim to create a discursive atmosphere among Korean citizens within and across generations as well as between Koreans and the foreigners who might visit the exhibition. The Gwuangju portion of the “position paper,” Spring, curated by Claire Tancons, enables this historical reflection.....

...........

The Gwuangju Biennale is certainly not the only articulation of the new dialectical curatorial strategy taking hold across the globe. Anton Vidokle’s project, Night School is an artistic project in the form of a temporary school that takes place at the New Museum. Night School is a year of monthly seminars that “use the museum as a site to shape a critically engaged public through art discourse.” The project itself is the creation of discursive space. A newer project, Museum as Hub, is the collaborative project of five arts institutions around the world (Insa Art Space, South Korea; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico; Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Egypt; and Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands). Museum as Hub offers this statement as the banner on its website homepage: “Museum as Hub is an international partnership of arts organizations considering the role of contemporary art and how to engage audiences around the world, encouraging critical discourse and exploration of artistic practice,” and then, “Hub partners will commission artists significant to their institutional goals to address the subject with a focus on discursive and interactive projects.” Third, the Long March Project exemplifies the discursive curatorial strategy. The founder and organizer of the project describes the project as

"a complex, multi-platform, international arts organization and ongoing art project, that can be simultaneously considered a curatorial lab; a publishing house; an artistic collection; a meeting place; a gallery space; a consultancy; a commissioning and production atelier; artistic facilitator; and author. From a critical distance, all of these avenues of production aim to provocatively construct, and in turn renew, presumed action and thinking concerning ‘contemporary art’." [13]

this is not the end of the essay, but I am not going to post the rest, because I've already posted too much. I have audio footage of an interview with the founder of the Long March Project, in China. Once I edit this footage, I will post it here.

[3] Kim O’Connor, “Dialectic,” University of Chicago School of Media Theory,
Keywords Glossary Project, 2003, (accessed October 16, 2008).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Enwezor, Okwui, “The Politics of Spectacle,” in the 7th Gwuangju Biennale exhibition
catalogue, edited by Okwui Enwezor, 34. Korea: Gwuangju Biennale Foundation and BOM (Books on the Move), 2008.

[6] Tancons, Claire. “Spring.” In the 7th Gwuangju Biennale exhibition catalogue, edited by
Okwui Enwezor, 349. Korea: Gwuangju Biennale Foundation and BOM (Books on the Move), 2008.

[11] Sung Hyen Park, “Bokdukbang Project,” in the 7th Gwuangju Biennale exhibition catalogue, edited by Okwui Enwezor, 324. Korea: Gwuangju Biennale Foundation and BOM (Books on the Move), 2008.

[12] Hoskote, Ranjit. “Scales of Elaboration,” In the 7th Gwuangju Biennale exhibition
catalogue, edited by Okwui Enwezor, (47). Korea: Gwuangju Biennale Foundation and BOM (Books on the Move), 2008.

[13] The Long March Project homepage   (accessed on October 17, 2008). >

Penelope Umbrico

   Suns from Flickr by Penelope Umbrico.



Kandinsky? Nope, not even close. Upon further examination, it becomes evident that this colorful collage is a compilation of hundreds of individual glossy photographs. The author of this piece is conceptual artist, Penelope Umbrico. Through this piece, Umbrico explores issues of authorship in a time when the word “Google” functions as both a noun and a verb. Umbrico’s Suns from Flickr responds to the effects of an increasingly global world in which ideas are uploaded, downloaded, exhibited, and discarded over wireless airwaves, and it is no longer sufficient to pin artists under the same age-old definitions of static authorship.
         For this piece, Umbrico conducted a search for the word “sunset” on the photo-sharing website, Flickr. Her search returned over three-million photographs taken by other Flickr users. Umbrico then downloaded the images, isolated the suns from each photo, and printed them as individual photos, several hundred of which are included in this piece. Displayed side-by-side in a large rectangle, each photo loses its individual identity and context, and becomes part of a greater whole, under new authorship. Through this process of decontextualization, Umbrico cuts the umbilical cord between each photograph and its original author, and in doing so, questions the notion of a static authorship. With Suns, Umbrico suggests that perhaps our definition of authorship needs to be redefined to catch up with the transnational cross-pollination of ideas that occurs in every moment of the 21st Century.
          Umbrico is certainly not the first artist to destabilize the traditional role of the author through a process of decontextualization. Marcel Duchamp destabilized notions of art and authorship with his famous urinal, and later, Andy Warhol posed similar questions by decontextualizing the Campbell’s soup can. However, Umbrico’s Suns adds a new element to the equation: the Internet. In these days where Wikipedia reigns, is there really such a thing as a stabilized and singular author? And more importantly, does it matter? While I believe that authorship will always matter, and artists must always be accountable for their claims to authorship, Umbrico’s Suns draws attention to the urgent need for a reevaluation of authorship in relation to the rapid globalization of the art world as a result of the Internet.

P.S. Another thought on this piece that I've had since I wrote the above paragraphs: I helped Penelope install this piece for an exhibition a few months back, and I found it interesting that she had a group of us (mostly students) installing the piece, one photo at a time. She let us pick each photo form a stack of hundreds, and choose where we would glue it to the wall. That created an element of chance in the creation of the piece. It is different each time it is installed. In addition to chance of aesthetic organization, the physical construction was not done by Peneleope alone, but by a group working together. All of this comes together to underline her questions of collective authorship.

Brian Ulrich

       Images by Brian Ulrich.

 In his series titled Copia, Ulrich examines the American culture of over-consumption and mass production. Ulrich places the viewer in the place of the consumer, which allows the viewer to experience the effect of a departure from intimate local business and an increased reliance on big-business retail stores. Consumption becomes a ritual that takes little thought or self-evaluation. The process of consumption is made so easy, that the general public no longer needs to exert any effort. Consumption is mechanized. Faced with a choice, the consumer chooses the cheapest soda or the shortest line, because they all lead to the same de-humanizing end-point. Through his photos, Ulrich draws attention to economic, social, and political implications of our consumer-driven culture.

Erika Neola

Work by Erika Neola.