Elizabeth Taylor in Iran

Currently on view at LTMH Gallery, NYC.

Call for participation: women art enthusiasts

Your help is greatly appreciated! I want to hear from you!

Talk to me! Feedback from women in the Arab art scene

Please repost or tweet!

Call for participation: women art enthusiasts in the Arab world

I am conducting research on the phenomenon of women-only viewings at art fairs and museums in the Arab Gulf. If you attend or enjoy art events in the Gulf or the Arab world in general, I'd like to speak with you. We can communicate via email in Arabic French, or English, or via Skype or G-Chat in English or French - unfortunately I am not funded to travel to the Gulf to meet in person. I am happy to protect your privacy in any way you wish.

Below are the kinds of questions I'd like to get a variety of answers to:
What do you think about women-only viewings?
Are they helpful? Does it encourage or discourage you from attending exhibitions? Would you attend if women-only viewings were not scheduled? Do you attend the exhibitions during non-restricted hours?
How do you respond to the idea that women-only events are a “regional custom”? What is your interpretation of this phenomenon? Why do you think it is happening, what do you think is the cause?

I don't have an argument I want to make from your feedback or an agenda, but am generally interested in understanding how different people respond to this occurrence. Please find me at eaharrington at gmail or beth_slnanthro on Twitter; you're also welcome to leave a comment on this blog with a way to get in touch with you.

Film Review: The Forgotten Space, or On Modernity, Globalization & Space

Allan Sekula and Noel Burch have made a film essay entitled The Forgotten Space. The film screened at LACMA on Saturday night, sponsored by LACMA and Redcat.

Sekula and Burch write, "Our film is about globalization and the sea, the "forgotten space" of our modernity. First and foremost, globalization is the penetration of the multinational corporate economy into every nook and cranny of human life." They cite that 90% of the world's cargo moves by sea - even though most people don't imagine that to be so. It makes sense, though, if you think about it; all the cheap plastic stuff and clothing made in Bangladesh, Cambodia or the Philippines must come to the US and to Western Europe somehow. That's exactly Sekula and Burch's point - the sea, and this globalization of modernity, the flow of trade is invisible to most of us.

The film essay form isn't a documentary, though it kind of feels like it at first. You have to get yourself to see the art in it, rather than expect it to be a documentary. That is what Sekula and Burch are after - the Brechtian "distanciation" that comes from the discontinuities, the illusion of the documentary.

It reminded me of Professor Gilsenan talking about the feel of places in our graduate seminar on the anthropology of cities, the idea of places: ports as dirty places, liminal, places of passing through and moving on, transitional - and in that, scary because they are not stable places, they represent an unfixed lifestyle. Marseilles used to be considered so filthy, so immoral.

The film's message also addresses globalization, modernity and trade. In this vein, the film is very much about neoliberalism: it is all about flow, and speed of transaction. Modernity and globalization are measured in speed of flow: flow of goods, peoples, information (see: Christopher Parker, Ahmed Kanna). Speed is king. Cindi Katz also wrote about the way neoliberalism divides places, creates spaces of modernity and spaces of not modernity. The insidious effect, Katz argues, is that these divisions reify and deepen existing categorizations especially including class and power divides, while simultaneously hiding the divisive nature of these distinctions. It is not a honest distinguishing, then, but a hiding of facts, a covering of unmodern bodies and spaces - removing them from view. So that the flow can continue unobstructed.

And Sekula and Burch are here to show us images from these forgotten spaces, the Katzian hidden spaces left out of the flow of modernity and globalization and neoliberalism. They show us a Dutch village, Doel, that disappears because of the expansion of the port of Antwerp; the boxy containers that transport goods from China to the US and back around the world again - but containing what exactly; Korean and Indonesian workers aboard the ships that move that cargo but can't speak the same language; Aussies and Brits working in naval academies in Hong Kong; and jobless, formerly middle class Americans who are now homeless, living in a tent city in Ontario, CA. The film surveys these disparate people, left from the flow of modernization; they have been sidelined, and Sekula & Burch give them a voice.



The question that remains is, are we willing to hear these voices if it means higher prices on our goods manufactured in other places, transported here by cogs in the forgotten machine of sea trade? If it means less speed, less flow? Will we place the human above the flow?

Call for feedback! Women art enthusiasts in the Gulf

Please repost or tweet!

Call for participation: women art enthuasiasts in the Arab Gulf

I am starting research on the phenomenon of women-only viewings at art fairs and museums in the Arab Gulf. If you attend or enjoy art events in the Gulf, I'd like to speak with you. We can communicate via email in Arabic or English, or via Skype or G-Chat in English - unfortunately I am not funded to travel to the Gulf to meet in person. I am happy to protect your privacy in any way you wish.

Below are the kinds of questions I'd like to get a variety of answers to:
What do you think about women-only viewings?
Are they helpful? Does it encourage or discourage you from attending exhibitions? Would you attend if women-only viewings were not scheduled? Do you attend the exhibitions during non-restricted hours?
How do you respond to the idea that women-only events are a “regional custom”? What is your interpretation of this phenomenon? Why do you think it is happening, what do you think is the cause?

I don't have an argument I want to make from your feedback or an agenda, but am generally interested in understanding how different people respond to this occurrence. Please find me at eaharrington at gmail or beth_slnanthro on Twitter; you're also welcome to leave a comment on this blog with a way to get in touch with you.


Abstract:
Viewings for Women Only: The Creation of Homosocial Space through Art Exhibitions in the Arab Gulf

When the new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi held an initial exhibition of Picasso in 2008, organizers elected to schedule regular viewings restricted to women. The press statement noted that this is a "regional custom to allow women to socialize - and that its inclusion in the retrospective's schedule was meant as a peace offering to the community."
My paper explores the creation of homosocial spaces and their intersection with art, museums, and global politics. I examine the ways in which certain works of art are perceived to be problematic or sexual when viewed in mixed gender settings, and what this solution says about constructions and elicitations of desire. Same-sex settings are seen as neutralizing potentially inflammatory works - does this mean that works are perceived as dangerous not for their inherent content but in their moment and space of their witnessing? Thus, I explore the varying and shifting legibilities of works when they are framed and viewed in different spaces and constructs.
I argue this event demonstrates an attempt by the exhibition organizers, who have links to the Emirati government, to embed museum-going and art viewing behaviors within what Bourdieu would consider the habitus, customs perceived to be established and comfortable for local women. Interviews with Gulf female art visitors and examining other women-only activities for socializing helps to more fully contextualize this practice. This research explores this instance of female homosocial space in relation to similar phenomena in other communities, such as the Aboriginal Australian community, that restrict and divide viewings of art works by gender, drawing on the work of Fred Myers; it also explores the ways that art has previously created homosocial spaces and opened the topic of same-sex desire in Qajar art.

Curator of Exhibits job @ Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum

Opening: Curator of Exhibits
The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum has an immediate opening for an experienced Curator of Exhibits. He/She will manage the museum’s Exhibits Division and oversee a staff of two people—an Exhibits Manager and an Exhibits Coordinator. General responsibilities include overseeing the planning, building and installing of exhibits relevant to the museum’s mission of interpreting and disseminating information on the Seminoles. Acting as a division head within the programming area, and reporting to the Programs Officer, he/she will be a vital and integral player on the museum staff. The Curator of Exhibits should be a team player and demonstrate a willingness to advocate for exhibition excellence, promoting esprit de corps, and promoting the museum’s unique mission.

Posted: August 4, 2011
Job Type: Full-Time
Job Duration: Indefinite
Min Education: Master's Degree
Min Experience: 5-7 Years
Required Travel: 10-25%
Job ID: 8432172
Position Title: Curator of Exhibits
Company Name: Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum
Job Function: Exhibitions
Entry Level: No
Location(s): Clewiston, Big Cypress Reservation, 33440, United States

More here.

Opportunities!

CFP: Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851-1938
Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851 - 1938 University of Wolverhampton,
26-27 April 2012 Research has for a long time focused on world fairs, great exhibitions or
expositions universelles in the capitals of Europe and in the large cities
of the USA. Their crucial role in communicating ideas about the identities
of the exhibiting nations (and their relation to other cultures) and in
showcasing contemporary art and design has been examined in detail.
However, in the heyday of these spectacular events - in the second half of
the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century - smaller
cities and regional centres, such as Liege, Poznan, Edinburgh or
Wolverhampton, staged their own 'great exhibitions' modelled on those held
in the national (or imperial) centres. Their goals, although executed on a
more modest scale, were often the same and involved the promotion and sale
of goods but also communication of ideas, ideologies and identities. These
smaller shows usually had large ambitions and tried to engage not only the
local population but also national and international audiences and
exhibitors.

This symposium turns attention to the exhibitions of arts and industries
in the regions outside the capitals and to the assumptions that lay behind
them. Its main focus will be placed on their ambitions, originality,
relationship to the ��greater�� exhibitions and, in particular,
their engagement with visual culture. The questions explored may include:

- what ambitions motivated the idea of staging an exhibition in the
particular location and what were its objectives

- what was the long-term impact of the show on the region, nationally
and internationally

- how were the arts displayed at the exhibition and what role they
played

- what specific influence did exhibitions like the Great Exhibition or
Expositions Universelles in Paris have on the exhibitions in the margins?


The symposium encourages an inter-disciplinary approach to the topic and
papers are therefore welcome from scholars in a wide range of disciplines,
including the history of art and design, history, politics, anthropology,
ethnography, cultural studies etc. A network of researchers interested in
the subject of exhibition cultures will be created through the symposium
as further academic activities on the theme are planned (a publication and
a research network). News about the symposium and the research network
will be posted at http://greatexhibitions.blogspot.com.

Please send your paper proposals of up to 250 words to Dr. Marta Filipova
at Marta.Filipova@wlv.ac.uk by 1 November 2011.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Monday, August 15, 2011
LAST CALL FOR NOMINATIONS
Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology

The Michael M. Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology is awarded annually to individuals for innovative work in museum anthropology, which is understood to entail outstanding single or multi-authored books, published catalogues, temporary and permanent exhibits, repatriation projects, collaborations with descendant communities, educational or outreach projects, multimedia works, and other endeavors. Individuals can be nominated by any member of CMA. A letter of nomination and any supporting material should accompany a copy of the evidence of the work under consideration. The CMA President will appoint a prize committee of three people at the CMA Board of Directors meeting held at the AAA Annual Meeting. The prize committee will review the works and the prize-winners will be notified in advance of the annual AAA meetings so that they can consider attending. The prize winner will be announced at the AAA Annual Meeting and presented with a certificate of the award.

Nomination:
• Deadline: SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
• The nominator must be a current CMA member in good standing
• Self-nominations are allowed
• Hard copies or electronic copies of nomination packets and materials must be sent by the nominator to each of the three prize committee members
• Nomination packets should include a cover letter and the work under consideration (or evidence of it), as well as any supporting materials, such as letters of support, media coverage, DVDs, etc.
• Nomination packets will not be returned

Evaluation Criteria:
• Creativity: Is the project a unique and creative exploration of museum anthropology’s central themes, tensions, and histories?
• Timeliness: Does the project say something important about museum anthropology’s current predicaments and unknown future?
• Depth: In what ways does the project penetrate into the complexity of material culture and the study of it through novel methods and theories?
• Impact: Does the project have the potential to make broad and lasting impacts in museum anthropology?

Process and Rules:
• A three-person prize committee of CMA members, headed by a committee chair, will be constituted by the current CMA President at the annual AAA Board of Directors meeting each year
• The committee will be formally announced by January 15 annually, with the addresses of each committee member publicized
• All nomination materials must be received by September 1, although incomplete nominations may still be considered based on the materials provided
• If no qualified nominations are made, the prize committee may elect to refrain from presenting the award for that year

Instructions:
For the 2011 competition, send one copy of the nomination packet to each committee member:

Jennifer Kramer
Curator of the Pacific Northwest
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
UBC Museum of Anthropology
6393 NW Marine Dr.
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Canada
Email: Jennifer.kramer@ubc.ca

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
Department of Anthropology
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
2001 Colorado Boulevard
Denver, CO 80205
USA
Email: Chip.C-C@dmns.org

Kathleen Adams
Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
402 Coffey Hall
Loyola University Chicago
1032 W. Sheridan Road,
Chicago, IL 60660
USA
Email: kadams@luc.edu

Any questions should be directed to the prize committee chair at jennifer.kramer@ubc.ca.
------------------------------------------------------------------
NYC-based photographers who are interested in volunteering to shoot for Open House NY should contact me! October 15-16.

OPEN CALL/CFP: FOLK ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE RESIDENCIES

reposted from the Philadelphia Folklore Project -
OPEN CALL: FOLK ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE RESIDENCIES
Show and share your work in our gallery

The Philadelphia Folklore Project announces new exhibition opportunities for people working in local communities and addressing social change. (For a pdf of this page, click here.)

If you are directly creating folk and traditional arts or doing documentary work about local grassroots community experiences and expressions, we invite you to apply. Propose a project that can have meaningful impact, both for you and more widely. Residencies offer stipends of $1,000 - $3,000 as well as an exhibition in our gallery between September 2011 and August 2012.

Who: We invite proposals from Philadelphia-area residents who work in community artistic traditions/folk arts or who conduct grassroots or ethnographic documentation. By folk arts, we mean community-based arts: traditions rooted in shared and evolving heritage or experiences. We see folk arts as collective traditions: arts that represent more than an individual vision.

What: Projects that can be done for $3,000 or less, and installed over 1-3 months at PFP are possible. In addition to the stipend and space*, we provide a public opening reception, publicity and interpretive materials, and technical assistance as needed. PFP staff will support exhibition planning and production, develop publicity and interpretive materials, and support community outreach and public programs. Artists chosen for residencies are asked to present at least one public event sharing or talking about their cultural or documentary work and the issues it addresses, and to participate in several meetings with PFP staff and other residents. We expect to support up to 5 different projects.

When: Application deadline, July 1, 2011. Residency projects will be on display for 1-3 months between September 2011 and August 2012. (Exhibition durations will vary depending on proposed projects).

Where: Exhibitions will be installed at PFP, 735 S. 50th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19143

Why this program? People working in folk and traditional arts create meaningful alternatives for their communities, but lack many kinds of resources to sustain their practice. We value folk arts: the spaces they claim, the relationships they embody, and the possibilities they offer. We invite you to bring your arts and concerns into our gallery, and to consider how our space and support can help you take next steps in work that matters.



Read more about the CFP here.

NYC History: Greenwood Cemetery

Well, now that Hatred is buried, we can move forward as a planet, right?

Recently I visited Greenwood Cemetery for the first time, which is mildly embarrassing given that I've lived 20 blocks away from this historic landmark for 2 years now. Perhaps I felt that cemeteries are morbid (or a site of abjectourism, perhaps?), but I'm glad I got over my hangup!

Greenwood Cemetery was founded in 1838, and spans 478 acres of hilly, once-rural Brooklyn. Famous folks are buried here, from Bill the Butcher (see: Gangs of New York), Louis Comfort Tiffany, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, and Susan Smith McKinney-Stewards, New York's first black woman doctor.





Greenwood is absolutely beautiful, and relaxing.





And the lovely Greenwood Chapel:



I highly recommend taking a walk through Greenwood during the summer. It's a calming throwback to Old New York, and one of the few places in America with substantive and lengthy history.

Displaying the (Australian) Nation: Looking at Representation at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Recently I had the good fortune to be in Melbourne, Australia, and I visited the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). The NGV is vaguely akin to the Smithsonian, and so there are several branches, including the Ian Potter Center that includes some very interesting work.


The entryway to the main NGV Galleries (free, by the way) is beautiful, covered in a falling water installation.


In these galleries, a few works in particular caught my attention.
Marjetica Potrc is an artist and architect from Ljubljana. Her work Urban, 2001, is a series of photographs of urban spaces and buildings.



Potrc complicates easy narratives around these images of urban life, both cluttered (slums) and glamorous or sleek (skyscrapers) by layering text around and through them that tells fragments of stories. Information panels tell the viewer, "Each depictions of the city considers community, a sense of place and belonging, and conversely, detachment and alienation." I found Potrc's work thought-provoking, and an interesting juxtaposition of her artistic and architectural talents.



I also enjoyed
Yayoi Kusama's installation of Tender are the stairs to Heaven (2004). Something about the ladder streaming upwards and the slowly melting colors was tremendously relaxing and meditative.

Nearby, another branch of the NGV, is the Ian Potter Centre.


This branch contains the Qantas-funded Aboriginal Art Galleries, which include both traditional/historical works as well as contemporary art.


The galleries are spacious and airy, and look like this:




Traditional decorative weaving is also included.


Wall text from artists remind visitors that painting is a political and agentive act, and that the history of Aboriginal painting in Australia has been laden with difficulty, tension and struggle. As scholar Fred Myers relates, Aboriginal artists were often taken advantage of by gallerists and dealers as their work came to represent the Australian nation, a nation which did not necessarily acknowledge rights to these same peoples.



Some of the text panels read like the works on display are purely artistic, with no additional or interpretive information presented, whereas others include part of the artist's story, which helps the works to be seen as cultural artifacts (rather than as purely art works). It is also critical to clarify that providing descriptions that help the viewer decipher these works can be read in two ways: first, that as Bourdieu tells us, all art is read and understood by decoding certain symbols and its legibility, that is, that its meaning is encoded and understood by those who know the key and find it legible and so providing this type of key and description helps build this lexicon in the viewers, which they can then carry to interpret other works; alternatively, providing such a key can come across as condescending or as acknowledging these works' location outside the historic Western art canon.



I was really taken by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrala's A bushtucker's story, below.

And a closeup:

I just thought this painting was stunning in its complexity, delicate colors, and careful details. It reminded me of Monet's gardens at Giverny, if seen through a Seurrat-ian eye.

Other paintings were depicted very clearly as cultural artifacts that allowed the visitor a view into Aboriginal culture and beliefs around certain social practices or understandings, as this painting, Mimih spirit and human reproduction.


Another work I found compelling was Ruby Tjangawa Williamson's Puli murpu (Mountain range). Wall text assists the viewer in deciphering the image.




In the contemporary art section, I was completely mesmerized by Samantha Hobson's Bust 'im up, 2000, seen below in details. I have also included the wall panel, so readers can see that Hobson's geographic and tribal affiliation. The galleries are clearly attempting to promote seeing these artists as individuals, with distinct cultural, geographic, and social backgrounds.





And finally, Mirdidingkingathi Jurwunda Sally Gabori's 2008 work, Ninjiki, is absolutely incredible. If I could cover a wall with this painting, and another with Lee Krasner's Gaea, 1966...



Overall, the NGV is making strides to promote varied and nuanced interpretations of works by Aboriginal artists, which is positive and should be encouraged and valued (not all museums are so nuanced in their thinking and representation of native peoples). However, when I went to the gift shop to look for postcards of the works I had fallen in love with (those above!), I was saddened to find that the only postcards available were from the "main" galleries, and there were no postcards of works in the Aboriginal galleries for sale. Thus it seems that wall panels and display aside, the NGV and its gift shop are still rooted in a normative and normalizing view of what constitutes "art."

Stuart Hall on Hegemony

"Hegemony...is never completed. It is always trying to enclose more differences within itself. Not within itself. It doesn't want the differences to look exactly like it. But it wants the projects of its individual and smaller identities to be only possible if the larger one becomes possible. That is how Thatcherism locates smaller identities within itself. You want to have the traditional family? You cannot do it for yourself because it depends on larger political and economic things. If you want to do that, you must come inside my larger project. You must identify yourself with the larger things inside my project. That is how you become part of history. You become a little cog in the larger part of history.
Now that is a different game from saying, "I want everybody to be exactly a replica of me." It is a more complicated game. But there is a moment when it always declares itself to be universal and closed, and that is the moment of naturalization. That's the moment when it wants its boundaries to be coterminous with the truth, with the reality of history. And that is always the moment which, I think, escapes it. That's my hope. Something had better be escaping it."

from "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethniticies"

Catalina Perra: Stitching Together Reality by Jailee Rychen

Today's guest post is written by Jailee Rychen.

Catalina Parra, Coming your way, 1991

The method of stitching that appears in the collage works of Chilean artist Catalina Parra has been a defining element of her creative process since early in her artistic career. Her collage work is made from cut up newspapers, rearranged and reconstructed through the application of red stitches. She adopted the practice of stitching after learning of an old Araucanian myth that tells the story of a tribe that would sew shut all of the orifices of a creature so that evil spirits could not escape. The creature is referred to as the imbunche and its ideological significance manifests itself throughout Parra’s work. Stemming from this tale, stitching has become a metaphor for grotesque manipulation, suppression and censorship. On the other hand, the artist also describes the act of sewing in terms of its relationship with feminine handiwork. The stitches can be seen as representations of the process of mending or restoring that which has been torn or destroyed. Stitching is not only just an act of restoration but also is an act of creation: stitching together parts in order to form a whole. Parra states that often women possess a natural tendency to fix or restore things in order to form a new, more beautiful reality. The use of stitching in her work is, therefore, simultaneously violent and generative. It is a method of reinvention that questions the reality that we are given on a daily basis through authoritative methods of communication, represented in her pieces by the newspaper.

The use of the stitch is an example of Parra’s own language of political critique, one that is not based on literal depictions or obvious imagery but delicately and ambiguously implied in her work. While she was living in Germany she was very impressed and influenced by the work of John Heartfield whose political collages of photographic images portrayed a strong anti-fascist message during the time of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. She says her work as has been informed by the sensibility found in Heartfield’s work but her experience as an artist living and working in various countries around the globe, under various political conditions, has inevitably led to the development of a different language of critique. While working in Chile during the dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet, Parra learned that through the subtle use of materials and juxtapositions she could produce work in a language that served as camouflage; her strong oppositional message about the Pinochet regime, encoded within the materials she used, was not detected by government authorities. “In order to speak of the pain and suffering caused by the silencing of democracy, the artist invented a language of double meaning, an esoteric language that unsuspicious drew upon the theme of the myth of the imbunche.”(1) Her work created a new space, a new reality where she was free to express her feelings of sorrow and defiance towards the harsh political reality that her home country was facing. At a time when artists, writers and intellectuals were all being thrown in prison for their rebellious stance against the dictatorship, Parra’s work was being openly exhibited in Chile. Proof that she was successful in stitching together a new space of contestation when one could not be found elsewhere.

Catalina Parra, It's Indisputable, 1992

In Parra’s newspaper collages, she does not directly state a particular position nor does she explicitly provide an obvious message; she delicately alters text so that the meaning is only slightly skewed. She cuts and inserts other images. In many cases, she removes the product being advertised in order to widen the viewer’s scope of interpretation. Parra’s method of double meaning referred to above effectively exposes a similar method of hidden meaning that is employed within the original newspaper material that she utilizes in her collages. Parra exposes the hypocritical and ironic messages of headlines such as “The Human Touch, the Financial Edge” and “It’s Undisputable.” What she does is dissect and re-contextualize them in a manner that challenges the original, underlying meaning behind them. In order to expose the hidden messages of the media that she uses, Parra employs similarly ambiguous and carefully meditated artistic language. Therefore, from a certain perspective, the artist builds her critique by emulating the methods of the media that is the subject of her critique.

Creating work that mimics the language of the object being critiqued echoes the theoretical ideas of Guy Debord. Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle is in fact related to Parra’s vision of our modern lives within a capitalist and consumer-obsessed society. Debord’s concept of spectacular society is defined as a society that is so highly dominated by images that it is no longer able to identify true reality from the reality superficially produced by the media. Debord describes the spectacle, as “both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality.”(2) Debord, like Parra in her collages, stresses that to analyze and challenge the spectacle we are required to utilize the language of the spectacle itself.

It seems evident that both Parra and Debord share the perspective that we cannot find a space outside of the dominant and omnipresent mode of communication from which to stage a revolt; such a space does not exist. The revolt, then, must come from within. From Parra’s collage work she suggests that if we can subvert the reality that we are supposed to accept as real, if we can learn to question and critique the flow of information, images and language that we receive, we may then be able to begin to construct or stitch together a new, more aware and conscious reality; one that is perhaps more beautiful.

1. Julia P. Herzberg, Catalina Parra in Retrospect: Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, New York, February 6-April 4, 1992, Bronx, N.Y.: The Gallery, 1991, 13.
2. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994, 7.

Jailee Rychen is a recent graduate of NYU's Museum Studies graduate program, and a New York-based independent curator and art professional. Her collected writings for TheExaminer.com can be found here.

Pamela Tinnen on Abjectourism

Today's post is written by Pamela Tinnen, whose research explores tourism, voyeurism, death and the body.

“The almost fashionable success of anatomy cannot be attributed solely to scientific curiosity. It is not hard to understand; it corresponds to an attraction to certain ill-defined things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain”
- Philipe Ariés

People are fascinated by images of death. What happens when the deceased body becomes transformed into a commonplace voyeuristic experience? Corpses are already available for touristic consumption in a variety of contexts. Mummies from ancient Egypt, archaeological or anthropological collections of skeletons, and holy relics such as the embalmed corpses of saints are several examples of institutionalized human remains where the general public is welcome to engage with the physical presence of death. Sites that house dead human bodies and body parts advance questions regarding the propriety of displaying corpses as museum objects, but more importantly, they reflect a societal compulsion to witness reflections of death.

Often in sites of so-termed Dark Tourism, aspects of the death experience are qualified through an individual confrontation with a private thanatological experience. When I visit, for example, Ground Zero, Auschwitz, or the Vietnam Memorial, I become aware of the fleeting nature of life, feel sympathy, and, as a result, experience a heightened sense of my own mortality. I become aware of the death subject by situating it within a time and place wherein the death itself is an abstraction of the non-present dead subject(s). Confronting the implication of death, the viewing subject likely identifies with the death subject and feelings of emotional and physical empathy occur. However, this is distinct/ (different) from sites that host physical displays of the dead human body. Indeed, although the abstract concept of ‘death’ is often conflated with the objects that represent it—cadaver, corpse, specimen, remains, carcass, bones, skeleton, mummy, etc.—‘death’ is not the dead body. When the viewing subject confronts a physical (often anonymous) human specimen, s/he encounters a dead object, rather than a death experience. Concepts of mortality are also called into question, but, more precisely, we confront the limitations of our physical bodies.

Public fascination with displays of the dead and the dying human body is a complicated phenomenon not easily attributed to one specific motivator. Perhaps galvanized by scientific, forensic, intellectual, religious or emotional curiosity, the general public will often engage in practices of tourism that condone and produce demand for displays of the dead. By inquiring into the history and trajectory of public dissection, professional and popular anatomical museums, and contemporary exhibitions like Body Worlds, I attempt to distinguish that the impetus which drives the touristic consumption of death-objects (corpses) is separate from that which drives scholarship of Dark Tourism, and therefore concedes demand for a new field of museum studies research which focuses specifically on tourism for physical human remains.

Concentrating on the development of the field’s audience and objects, I begin with a synopsis of the historic relationship that Western society has held with the touristic consumption of the death-object. Following this survey, I speculate on the degrees and experiential elements of death-object tourism, which I have named Abjectourism, that situate it as a unique and largely unconsidered form of lurid tourism.

For more on Tinnen and her work, please visit her website here.

Image above is a Damien Hirst installation.

Iranian Photographer: Newsha Tavakolian

Here's an excerpt of a paper I presented last weekend at BEND!, a symposium on photography, gender, and feminism at Princeton. To see Tavakolian's work, click here.

Tavakolian's series Maria consists of several black and white photographs of a woman going about her daily life in her apartment and the streets of Tehran. Tavakolian’s text around these images shares that Maria was born as a male, named Asgar, and underwent a sex-change operation sanctified by the Iranian government. After the operation, when Maria informed her wife, the two told their children that Asgar had died in a trucking accident and subsequently introduced Maria as a distant relative. However, Maria's children disowned her after reading her true story in a gossip newspaper. She now lives alone in downtown Tehran, unable to work as no women work as truck drivers (her former profession), and with no family. Tavakolian's sensitive portraits of Maria capture the difficulty of living in her space, both urban and psychological. The first portrait in the series shows Maria holding up the gossip paper that resulted in the loss of her family. Half of Maria’s face is obscured but matched by the photograph of her on the front page of the paper, wearing a scarf and heavily made up. The symmetry of her face on the paper and in the photograph is Picasso-esque; it is also noteworthy that Tavakolian encourages us to look closely, revealing layers in her photograph that includes another photograph within it, akin to a hall of mirrors. She implies that more readings and stories are there beneath the initial surface of the image. The second image is of Maria's masculine hand, nails painted, over her brassiere. Here, the viewer reads conflicting gender codes within one image, and is not offered an easy solution as Maria’s face and gender exist outside the photographer’s frame. Another image shows Maria’s hands holding out a photograph of herself as Asgar; however, no other details appear in this photograph of a photograph, creating a distinct separation between Maria’s identity and Asgar’s identity. In another, Maria rides alone in a bus, with two younger women wrapped in black headscarves conversing behind her. Their presence, and their active conversation, as evidenced by the blurs of motion, highlights Maria's loneliness and her tenuous, liminal position as a woman without family in Iran. This photograph complements the next in the series, in which Maria is foregrounded in a pool of light, sitting at a restaurant alone with crowds of diners at the darkened tables behind her. Again, Maria is part of the urban scene and simultaneously distinct from it.

Other images in the series show Maria dressing in her Tehran apartment: in her undergarments, posing fully dressed, or applying makeup. The final image in the series displays a pile of suitcases, bags and boxes stacked against a wall: a testament, perhaps to Maria's portability and a sense of mobility, of being able to depart immediately if necessary, again reinforcing her fragile position. Tavakolian forces the viewer to see Maria as an individual in this series, complicating easy ideas of gender binaries. She also pushes at stereotypical Western attitudes of Iran being Islamic and very conservative. This series appears very documentary; Tavakolian’s decision to use black-and-white to capture Maria’s story is also noteworthy. This choice renders the series more akin to photography that appears in the newspaper, and thus more documentary and serious; however the use of the binary black-and-white could also be a playful poke at the habit of binaries that Maria’s situation collapses.

In Tavakolian's series May your wish come true, the veil and chador are re-presented as powerful and haunting symbols of women's agency and choice. In these images, Tavakolian takes full-body portraits of women participating in Moharram, a commemoration period for the 3rd imam in Shii' tradition. During the height of the celebrations, women are forbidden to speak until they visit 40 houses and in each light a candle to Imam Hussein. As the women traverse the streets to perform their visits, they are fully chadored. The first image is of three women in full-length black chadors, with red bands of Persian script around the tops of their heads. Only their hands are visible. The second image, of a woman alone, displays nothing but her face, and barely visible under a lace face-covering as she stands against a graffiti-covered city wall. Here Tavakolian playfully juxtaposes a stereotype of the modern urban (graffiti) and a stereotype of the backward non-urban (woman in chador); however, like the woman barely visible through the lace of her niqab (face-veil), it is clear there is a deeper story underneath the stereotypes. Another image in the series shows a woman chadored with a child next to her, pulling on her sleeve: the child’s veil is brightly patterned and orange, a splash of vibrant color and movement next to her mother’s silent, unmoving form. The fourth image in the series is particularly jolting: a woman with a blue headscarf stands with her face close to the camera, a colorful flag decorated with emblems behind her. The very top of her forehead and hairline are visible, but her face is covered by a thin, tightly stretched black cloth that reveals the ghost-like outline of her eyes, nose and mouth. The photograph is unsettling as it hints at her humanity, personality, and likeness but does not satisfy the viewer looking for her face; the viewer is left unsatisfied, wanting more. The final image in the series is of a woman in a full flowing black chador, with a ghastly neon green gauze face cover. The green face veil is ghastly in being opposite of normal hue for a human face. In these images, the women possess full control over their image, refusing to give in to the pressure of the viewer. As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod notes, women “decide for whom they feel it is appropriate to veil.”[1] In this construction, the veiled women demonstrate agency, choice, and power in controlling the gaze of others. The women in the images could see everything while their images were being captured, but the photographer (and subsequently the viewer) is the one with a limited perception. Also, this series is captured in color, despite the muted tones of these women’s clothing that would have lent themselves well to black and white. Perhaps Tavakolian has done this to purposefully underscore the contemporary, alive nature of these images. Further, do viewers read these works differently knowing also that the women are silent as they perform their visits? Rather than affirming that silence implies consent, the women in these images retain all power over their images and voices, whereas the photographer and viewer are kept at a distance.

---

[1] Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104: 3 (Sept 02): 786.

BEND! Conference at Princeton - April, 2011

I am delighted to be presenting at the below symposium at Princeton next month. I'm going to be discussing the explorations of gender and identity in the work of Iranian photographers Shadi Ghadirian (below) and Newsha Tavakolian (above). More soon!

----------------------------------------------------

BEND! Photography, Gender, & the Politics of Representation

An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Princeton University, April 22-23, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor George Baker, Department of Art History, UCLA

The past decade has witnessed widespread institutional and scholarly efforts to historicize the relation between art and feminism, and between art and identity politics. These efforts unfold in a present that is often characterized as “post-gender” and/or “post-racial.” Just as categories of identity seem to lose traction in cultural discourse, so boundaries between artistic media become unfixed. Yet photographic representation is increasingly pervasive, and increasingly bound to the performance of subjectivity.

This symposium aims to consider the interrelated production of gender and photography, along with their dissolution as stable categories of inquiry. An interrogation of photography today requires looking within as well as beyond the boundaries of traditional art-historical frameworks. It compels us to account for the political and social dimensions in which photography participates, and demands that we re-consider the mise-en-scène of photography’s production as art.

How has the evolution of photography—from b/w to color, from analogue to digital, from mass media to social media—served to articulate or blur aesthetic and subjective differences? What politics of representation emerge when the individual can be both agent and object of photographic voyeurism, exhibitionism, and surveillance? Might photography's expanded field offer the potential for reshaping feminist politics today?

We invite participants to explore historical, existing and possible relationships between photography and the (re)production of gender, from the perspectives of visual culture, philosophy, (art) history, and art practice. Papers might consider photography in relation to:

gender bending - histories and politics of sexuality - performance and/or portraiture - the construction of masculinity - women artists - representations of gender, race, and class - advocacy, activism, and political practice - feminist politics, ethics, and aesthetics - medical and biological discourses - capitalism, terrorism, and war

Frances Jacobus-Parker / Elena Peregrina-Salvador / Mareike Stoll
PhD Candidates
Departments of Art & Archaeology / Spanish & Portuguese / German
Princeton University

Mythologizing the West

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 11/18/2010


From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.

Contemporary Iranian Art: Shadi Ghadirian

Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look. Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil. To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons. This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs. The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people. Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.

Contemporary Arab Art: Walid Raad

from the delighted observationist archives

This is amazing.

Go to the Atlas Group's website, and pick Archive > A > Raad.




Raad placed colored dots over the bullet marks in buildings and the urban environment in Lebanon in the 80s, based on the tracemarks of the bullets which often etched various colors into the buildings.

He realized later that the color of the bullets corresponded to their country of origin, and he had created an archive of the countries that sold ammunition during the war.

More soon - on Raad, whose work has been a joyful discovery.
So much to do, so much to prove, so little time.

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 12/10/2010.

Looking at Africa: The Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

from the delighted observationist archives



Ngugi wa Thiong'o is not a small name in African literature. He and Chinua Achebe famously debated whether it was possible to write in the language of the colonizer: can the formerly colonized (even that is debated, is colonialism every truly over?) write and express themselves in the language of the colonizer? Does that constitute a mental adherence or subjugation to a form of expression, a way of seeing the world, that belongs to the colonizer? Because of this, despite being in exile from his native Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has written in Gikuyu. He translates his novels himself into English.

My question, after reading the mammoth 776-page Wizard of the Crow, shares that same concern of retaining African voices and expression. Does the magical realism of Wizard detract from the seriousness of the other depictions in the book? If despotism, corruption, and bribery are as despicable as they seem, and so egregious as to endanger so many lives, does the magical realism of the Ruler's illness, of the magical and mysterious disguises of Kamiti and Nyawira, make the reader take the corruption less seriously too? Does that endanger our thinking about Africa, or strengthen it? Open it?

The story is a rich one, tracing the lives of several characters as they grow or diminish in power in the state of Aburiria. I appreciated the irony of Kamiti, who becomes (by accident, largely, but also by fate) the Wizard of the Crow, falling prey to an illness he himself divined in others. The Wizard was also Kamiti, Nyawira was herself also the Wizard, but also the Limping Witch, and assumed many disguises and characters in the book. I took this to be an interesting comment and depiction of the many faces we assume in our daily lives, manipulating others or being manipulated.

Thiong'o ends with an optimistic note: the discovery that Arigaigai Gathere (A.G.) had saved the Wizard's life in the fatal shootout scene towards the end of the novel. A.G., as a policeman, had throughout the story believed in the Wizard's power, but was an agent of the state. In the end, he seemed to be the only character who escaped a fate of either government agent (powerful at some times, and taken from power viciously by enemies at others) or citizen fighting the government. In the end, A.G. is the only one who wrote his own fate. Haki ya mungu.

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 1/6/2011.

Political Geographies: Putting Khanna & Anderson together

from the delighted observationist archives



I recently discovered LinkTV on my tv, which is amazing. It is also noteworthy in that Link carries Al Jazeera English here in America. What people don't seem to realize is that AJE is actually a great news source and not a terrorist organization...but that's a sidebar, albeit related, to the discussion of political geographies that I'm concerned with this evening.

Link also replayed the above video of Parag Khanna speaking at TED in 2009. He discusses the Middle East, mentioning that these countries are often "uncomfortable" in the borders left them by colonial realities. I didn't hear Khanna reference Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, but I'd be highly surprised if the articulate Khanna has not read this incredible and (rightly) influential tome.

In Anderson's revised edition (1991), Anderson added a chapter on "Census, Map, Museum." He writes about how these elements are crucial in providing information to buttress, describe, divide? the imagined community of the nation. Anderson writes that these "three institutions of power which, although invented before the mid nineteenth century, changed their form and function as the colonized zones entered the age of mechanical reproduction. These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum" (163). Anderson points out that maps essentially create imaginary boundaries, and that the word country connotes "bounded territorial space" (173). To this end, Khanna points out that Africa's map is covered with "suspiciously straight lines." The lines show how unnatural, how inorganic, these national boundaries are.

Khanna ends by noting that "Geopolitics is constantly morphing - we are always searching for equilibrium, we fear changes on the map...but the inertia of our current borders is far worse. We focus on the lines that cross borders, the infrastructures lines, we'll end up with the world we want: a borderless one."

I question, do we truly want a borderless world? Khanna opened with a note about 90% of the world's population living outside of the 40 biggest population centers in the world. Are borders meant to give those within them a sense of belonging, or to keep others out? They do in fact provide definitions we rely on, especially in this country (ie, American, Mexican). Khanna is right, borders denote power and money and the flows of both. Are we - here, in the US, in particular - willing to give up some of our privilege to really truly begin to stabilize the world? Power, wealth, and privilege cannot continue to be located in such small loci as the world's population expands and demands their fair share of these privileges.

As I write this, I watch images of the protests in Egypt as its people attempt to redefine their country, their rights as citizens, their image and place in the world. (Meanwhile, Egyptian state tv, according to reports, continues to show soap operas & cooking shows instead of international news.) Commentary runs on about how these protests, and those in Tunisia and in Yemen, can destabilize Israel or the entire Arab world, even though the US claims to support burgeoning democracy. Interestingly enough, this political struggle reflects Khanna's point about internal lines: the news I get on Facebook and via Twitter, from those I went to school for Middle Eastern studies with, and my other Syrian connections, is faster, and more...honest (in my view) than what I see a day later on the international news. There are no borders, in a sense, in the age of information (despite Mubarak's attempt to shut down all internet communication services). But how far gone are the very real borders and mentally calcified divisions that have seemingly evaporated in the digital world?

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 2/2/2011