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Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco Campus
Contact: Kate Moore 415.551.9251
10:15
Panel 1: Revealing Currents
Moderator: Leigh Markopoulos
Rory Padeken
Collecting Chance: Snapshots of Memory in Tacita Dean's FLOH
Jen Banta
What Is the Mystery? Abstraction and the Path of Self-Enlightenment in the Life and Painting of Bernice Bing
Zachary Royer Scholz
Alternative to the Alternative: The Changing Face of San Francisco's Independent Art Spaces
Liu Congyun
Challenge the Changes: Works of Four Young Contemporary Chinese Artists
12:00: Lunch
(Join Us in the Nave)
1:30
Panel 2: Fantastic Productions
Moderator: Caetlin Benson-Allott
Camellia George
The Future Is Fabulous: A Critical Anthropology of Fabbing
Molly Mitchell
American Tribal Style Belly Dance: Improvising a Feminine Subjectivity
2:30 Break
2:45
Panel 3: Urban Apparitions
Moderator: Ted Purves
Adrienne Skye Roberts
Homesick: The Search for Belonging in New Orleans's Landscape of Loss
Duane Deterville
Drawing Down Ancestors: Defining the Afriscape Through Ground Markings and Street Altars
Paola Santoscoy
Being-With-One-Another: Art as Enactment
4:00
Closing Remarks
Tirza True Latimer, Chair, Visual and Critical Studies
4:45
Reception (Join us in the Nave)
What Is the Mystery? Abstraction and the Path of Self-Enlightenment in the Life and Painting of Bernice Bing
My office, perched above the SOMArts Cultural Center gallery, is a site for exchange, community, politics, laughter, and ambitious cultural production. SOMArts, one of four city-owned cultural centers, has history in every crevice. The ineffable presence of those who came before pervades the space. Stored in the rafters above my desk, for example, is a painting from 1980 by Bernice Bing titled Burney Falls, one of several that she painted of that location in Northern California, sometimes called the eighth wonder of the natural world.
0000000Spontaneous moments arise at SOMArts, and I find myself in conversation with people who knew Bing. Her life had a catalyzing effect on a group of people who came together after her death to remember and honor her, and who remain loosely connected. Lydia Matthews writes, “Hers was a powerfully sustained yet quiet career. This kind of artist can easily fall through historical cracks if we do not diligently keep her memory alive.”
0000000Bing has indeed largely fallen through the cracks, though in her time she was quite visible. In the 1950s she was among the first generation of postwar women artists active in California. After graduation she enjoyed a one-person exhibition at the Batman Gallery, one of several Beat galleries that appeared briefly during the late 1950s and early 1960s in San Francisco. Bing appears in the poster announcing her 1961 show, surrounded by her paintings in her studio above the Noodle Factory in North Beach, a hub of Beat activity. She received early critical acclaim in Artforum reviews by the critic James Monte in 1963 and 1964. It seemed to be the beginning of a promising career, but recognition waned substantially over the ensuing years, partly due to her difficulties in surviving financially as an artist, the time she devoted to administrative duties (including her role as the first executive director of the South of Market Cultural Center, now SOMArts), and her failing health.
0000000What were the conditions that contributed to Bing’s marginalization? This project reframes the decades of Abstract Expressionism and the Beat movement in San Francisco, examining issues of historical erasure, gender, and the quest for identity, with the aim of expanding the art historical canon to accommodate the visionary painter Bernice Bing.
Challenge the Changes: Works of Four Young Contemporary Chinese Artists
The Chinese artists Ma Liang, Yang Yongliang, Chi Peng, and Zhu Feng all began their careers after the year 2000. Having grown up in the unstable and transient realities of China in the 1980s and 1990s, they have experienced the ongoing challenges of a changing society. But rather than focusing on a nostalgic view of the past, their work questions the present and looks to the future. Drawing on the power of the new millennium and standing on the shoulders of giants—not just from their own country, but also from an international, intergenerational, and interactive global network—they look ahead and step forward.
This new generation of artists builds on the work of its predecessors, in particular Xu Bing and Ai Weiwei, who brought international recognition to contemporary Chinese art. It also looks to Hong Lei, who at the end of the last millennium initiated an experiment in the reinterpretation of Chinese painting via new media such as photography, and to Miao Xiaochun, who began a trend of producing large-scale imagery via digital technology and computer graphics.
Inspired by all of these practices, the younger generation continues the investigation of Chinese classics through new media. Ma Liang and Yang Yongliang reinterpret Chinese classical painting, displaying a changed attitude toward the past. Having benefited from the enlarged global context for contemporary Chinese art enabled by the older generation, the young artists also focus on testing the characteristics of the medium itself. For instance, Zhu Feng mimics Thomas Ruff’s Stars (1989–92) and pushes the ambiguity of photography to an extreme, while Chi Peng explores the narrative capability of digital media while telling stories of his generation. These artists take a global perspective in questioning and challenging where and how to locate the current situation of Chinese culture. Ma Liang’s installation work and Zhu Feng’s photographs focus on their personal experiences in the United States. The self, beyond anything else, is the essential core of their work.
One hundred years ago the great Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan asked another great poet-philosopher, Tagore of India, if the difference between Eastern and Western culture was one of “type” or one of “grade.” Today, the young generation of artists is more pragmatic. The answer is always there; it is simply waiting for them to grab it.
Drawing Down Ancestors: Defining the Afriscape Through Ground Markings and Street Altars
After the recent brutal killing of an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in Oakland, the common occurrence of death by gun violence in black communities once again came to the forefront of national attention. This presentation explores the manner in which black people in these communities respond to tragic events of this kind: by creating altars to the slain. The altars often reflect iconography and practices related to the ancestor veneration of African diasporic religions.
Umbanda, an Afri-Brazilian religion, is one of the most prominent African diasporic religions. In one of its rituals, called gira, initiates in a trance state manifest a variety of African ancestral spirits known as preto velhos, or “old blacks,” and create drawings on the ground that signal the spirits’ presence. These drawings, or pontos riscados, are a visual event, and one of the many ways in which the evolving ritual practice of ancestor veneration works to reclaim histories. The pontos riscados use a matrix of signs and ideograms influenced by African Kongo cosmology.
In addition to explaining the meanings of some of the signs and symbols in pontos riscados, this presentation will explore the common denominators between the vernacular altars created on the streets of Oakland and the pontos riscados created in Rio de Janeiro. The comparison highlights some of the larger social and cultural commonalities between the black community in the favela or Morro do Jacarezinho of Rio de Janeiro and the black communities of East and West Oakland, including the presence of gun violence and the frequent gun-related deaths of young black men that result from rampant crack and cocaine dealing. The presentation theorizes the role of secular ritual in the creation of urban street altars. The intersection between creative expression and secular ritual provides the victims of traumatic experience with an opportunity to facilitate communal mourning and healing. Agency is reclaimed in these representational spaces, which reveal important insights about African diasporic identity.
The Future Is Fabulous: A Critical Anthropology of Fabbing
Consumer culture maintains an ambivalent relationship with the products populating our lives; we have feelings of both alienated discomfort and sincere love and attachment for our “things.” Our conception of production lingers in a turn-of-the-century capitalist mythology of industrial manufacturing: dirty, mechanistic, and forceful. This vision is irreconcilable with the clean modes of production familiar to information and service workers. Self-imposed ecological disaster and increasingly apparent social inequities demand a revolution in our relationship to “stuff.” Yet the global outsourcing of production, along with personal and cultural identities forged through consumption, leave us without the means to understand contemporary object making.
0000000Enter “fabbing” (personal digital fabrication), a collection of intertwined—if immature—production and information technologies. Fab promises to empower every person to design and manufacture his or her own products, but the ways in which this technology will actually accomplish such a goal remain fuzzy. The technological utopias that fab envisions project a completed futurist narrative, but offer only a few clues as to how we might get there. A development such as fab changes how we conceptualize production, and radically realigns consumer-product and designer-product relationships. Fabbing technology represents real-life science fiction, complete with Enlightenment-like progress narratives, tech fantasies, shifting subjectivities, and power relations. It also proposes an unprecedented expansion of product design as a discipline.
0000000To comprehend the changes this technology offers, we turn to science fiction and futurism—discourses that imagine utopias resulting from technological innovation. We envision new relationships to the material world, like the replicator in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a favorite reference for fab’s inventor-evangelists. But these images and rhetoric make up more than futurist utopian fantasies; they drive technology development. These science fictions also construct new subject positions, from which we can act with alacrity in a complicated, data-saturated future.
0000000This presentation investigates fabbing in light of our advancing datascape (the mass of digital information used to model human behavior) and its effect on designing, buying, and interacting with products. It also considers current trends such as product customization (selecting the colors and features of a Mini Cooper, for example) and targeted marketing, though these developments only seem to multiply the possibilities for constructing our identities through consumption. The project seeks to understand the rhetorical, practical, and epistemological changes embedded in the emergence of fab, a technology that could empower both consumers and designers.
American Tribal Style Belly Dance: Improvising a Feminine Subjectivity
American Tribal Style emerged in the 1980s as a restructured dance form—in terms of both costume and movement—that counters prevailing stereotypes of belly dance. By insisting on a group format, it demonstrates the communal bonds that many women experience through their participation. By presenting as a collective, dancing to each other as well as to the audience, and, most importantly, witnessing one another on stage, the tribal dynamic performs women’s relationships to the dance, to each other, and to their own sensuality that are more complex than simple attempts to seduce the crowd.
Historically, belly dance was received by audiences in the United States through the lens of a colonial, masculine subject interpreting the Oriental dance as a feminine erotic spectacle staged for his personal consumption. Nineteenth-century European and American travelers sought out female performers and relayed back to an avid West sensationalized stories of their choreographic and sexual exploits. This cemented the reputation of belly dance in the West as a display of feminine sexuality intended exclusively for male titillation.
During the 1960s and 1970s a growing wave of American women reclaimed belly dance as a form of female empowerment. To them, belly dance celebrated a specifically feminine erotic agency grounded in the expressive movements of a woman’s hips, abdomen, and torso. Many women found self-esteem through a dance vocabulary that they felt helped them negotiate a space in which they could accept and celebrate their bodies, outside of Western norms of beauty and comportment. But when they performed for the public they often encountered the entrenched view that their performance demeaned them as sexual objects of the male gaze. This lack of agency accorded to the belly dancing body is symptomatic of a Western subjectivity that locates the dancer in economies of representation that are Orientalist, and that privilege the gaze as an exclusively masculine enterprise. The American dancers’ newfound agency went largely unregistered by nondancers.
In American Tribal Style, the dance studio becomes the grounds for resisting this image of the dancer as passive, sexualized spectacle. Within the structure of group improvisation, everyone is leader and follower, performer and witness, in an ever-changing flow. The gaze is defetishized, becoming a medium of communication and exchange among dancers in a circuit that includes the audience but does not pander to it. American Tribal Style thus provides an intervention into the masculine, colonialist model of subjectivity through its emphasis on women’s collectivity and improvisational communicative practices that center on the dancer’s body.
Collecting Chance: Snapshots of Memory in Tacita Dean’s Floh
Chance is a central theme in the work of Tacita Dean. Moments of the unexpected, situations and opportunities gone unnoticed, and memories left behind offer up a window onto the reality that one desires. Indeed, it is through the imaginary and make-believe that Dean explores life’s chance occurrences by remembering what gets forgotten and representing those things that are on the verge of disappearing. These ideas are taken up and thoroughly examined in Floh (2001), a signed, limited edition of 4,000 hardbound books, each comprised of 163 found photographs. The artist acquired the photographs at flea markets in cities across Europe and the United States over a seven-year period.
0000000Dean took special care to reproduce every photograph she found—reflecting the intimacy inherent in vernacular photographs—but her particular arrangement of the images indicates a desire to create a deeply reflexive work, and also a carefully calculated intrusion into the photographs’ private world. Dean’s use of found imagery also illustrates the multifarious possibilities of analog photography, a medium on the verge of obsolescence. Her intrusion, or precise arrangements of the photographs through pairing, doubling, and multiplying, evokes a sense of fated coincidence and nostalgic melancholy—ideas consciously used by Dean throughout her artistic practice—that one often encounters with found photographs. Her editing process also invites viewers to second-guess the truth value of the images. Through Floh Dean highlights an important and strange nuance of photography: that what one sees might not be true but is often what is imagined.
Homesick: The Search for Belonging in New Orleans’s Landscape of Loss
New Orleans is a city I have come to know through the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. During the summer of 2006 I traveled to the Lower Ninth Ward to offer my assistance in the rebuilding efforts. The neighborhood was emptied of its longtime residents, their absence marked by vacant houses and piles of belongings. In the wake of the storm, numerous nonprofit relief organizations responded to the Lower Ninth Ward and similarly decimated neighborhoods and with them came thousands of volunteers, the majority of whom had backgrounds similar to mine: middle-class, well educated, politically active, white, in their 20s.This volunteer population occupied the space of a historic community of color. Economic and social privilege made their mobility possible.
When I arrived, I was not yet aware of how significant the experience of volunteering would be for my generation. New Orleans was for me a pre-planned destination on a cross-country road trip. I was 22 years old, had recently graduated from college, and was searching for a temporary solution to the restlessness of this period of my life. Hurricane Katrina made visible the severely dysfunctional underbelly of America, mainly the huge economic disparities suffered by people of color, and it called many young people to action. Volunteering became more than an act of civic responsibility; it provided people with purpose, direction, and a community with which to engage.
As they work to rebuild and bring back displaced residents, the nonlocal volunteers in post-Katrina New Orleans simultaneously develop their own attachments to the city and contribute to its changing racial demographics and social fabric. Considering the inadequate response from the government, their work has been extremely beneficial. Yet their presence signifies a double-edged sword, and it raises the important question of whether or not the presence of predominately white volunteers reinforces the structural and institutional racism that enabled them to come to New Orleans in the first place.
In the years since, many volunteers have made the transition from visitor to resident. Their search for home was fueled by their own mobility and the American ideal of something new lying over the horizon. As the story continues to unfold, the nonlocal volunteers mark a new chapter in a deeply rooted and historically significant city—a city that remains delicately balanced between a traumatic past and an undetermined future.
Being-With-One-Another: Art as Enactment
There are many types of collectivities, various modes of being together that affect the way we perceive our surroundings and ourselves. Some implicate us more than others. Some we see from a distance; others we experience closely, from the inside; and some we are part of. Others we only suspect. Collectivities are forms of being-with, a simultaneous sharing of space and time. They generate an experience of mutuality that participates in the social and public domains, producing meaning through the relations we establish with-one-another.
0000000This presentation investigates images of “collectivity” and its visibility in the public space. Focusing on contemporary art strategies that deal with the creation of performative collectivities, it examines the boundaries defining certain practices as artistic and others as political. I am interested in how art as enactment and collective representation navigates these contours, testing them, by making possible new modes of being together.
0000000In spring 2003 I traveled to Panama City to attend a contemporary art event titled ciudadMULTIPLEcity. Most of the works in the project took place in the streets: installations, events, and situations “responding to the specificity of the context and the urban environment,” as the curators explained in the various press releases and printed materials. I encountered one of these actions one day while walking around the city. A group of young men and women surrounded me, as well as other people around me, subtly gesturing—their index fingers to their lips—for us to remain silent. The gesture was soon replicated by other passersby, generating a feeling of uneasiness among a group of people, bringing them (us) together in a joint venture, one with no apparent cause. This silent collectivity is a performative work by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs and the Mexican filmmaker Rafael Ortega.
0000000Through a close reading of 1 Minute of Silence (2003) and its situational context, this study attempts to bring to the surface its embedded aesthetic ideas and sociopolitical implications. By inducing a crowd to unite in a single action, Alÿs and Ortega transform silence into presence, as opposed to absence. 1 Minute of Silence performs a sensorial transformation that becomes political as a result of the redistribution of spaces and roles in the public arena, thus opening the possibility of thinking differently about communality and social power.
Alternative to the Alternative: The Changing Face of San Francisco’s Independent Art Spaces
Perched on the edge of the continent, San Francisco has long been home to more alternative art spaces per capita than any other American city. As times have changed, these exceptionally generative sites have continually adapted to their shifting terrain. Today, in the face of catastrophically diminished funding, these fiercely independent organizations are increasingly appropriating commercial practices in order to survive.
Though the current shift toward commercial strategies is affecting the entire alternative arts sphere, it most dramatically manifests itself in newly forming spaces. Unlike older alternative spaces, which have long utilized marginal commercial activities such as art auctions and ticket sales, these new spaces are integrating commercial practices more centrally into their programming. These activities, whether revenue-raising exhibitions, products, events, or publications, can seem identical to those of commercial galleries, but often they critically engage the very market forces they exploit. For example, Hallway Bathroom Gallery hosts an online exhibition called Blank Art Objects that sells works on paper anonymously for $100 each; only after purchasing a work does the buyer discover the identity of the artist, thereby casting into sharp relief the fetishization of art celebrity.
0000000While it is exciting to see today’s independent spaces using the market to support their dynamic, experimental programming, such commercial engagement of course carries with it worrisome potentials. Beyond the immediate hazards of market commoditization, the commercial activities of today’s upstart art spaces call into question the historical distinction between commercial and alternative arts activity. Rather than suggesting that a useful distinction can no longer be made, this destabilization suggests that the art landscape needs to be fundamentally remapped. This redefinition should not generate a clean divide based on a single criterion such as tax status, organizational structure, or any other specific practice. Instead it must compare each organization’s cumulative affect, based on whether it uses capital to expand art or art to expand capital. Such a redefinition will highlight spaces that expand artistic discourse and thus merit support and patronage.
Thesis Symposium