┐ Hanne Darboven – Cultural History └

Posted on February 10, 2013 by N

Bill Carke: You first saw Cultural History in 1996 at the Dia Art Foundation’s Chelsea space. Can you recall what your response to the work was back then and how it’s evolved since?

Dan Adler: (Laughs) My initial response was of being overwhelmed! The installation took up several large galleries. And, the amount of material to look at! Over 1,600 panels containing thousands of sheets of paper and all these uncanny-looking sculptural objects punctuating the exhibition. I took notes at the time as a way of dealing with my feelings of intimidation, my fear of the work. So, it’s fortunate that I’ve had such a long time to reflect on the work and my notes, and to consider it in relation to other major statements, such as Richter’s Atlas. This gradually made Cultural History less intimidating for me.

BC: How familiar were you with her work before experiencing Cultural History?

DA: I was familiar with some early drawings – the Konstruktonen series made in the mid 1960s, but these are very different from Cultural History. They are humble in terms of scale and materials, consisting of numbers and graphs on paper. Because of that simplicity, they are considered key Conceptual works; the emphasis is on the ideas contained within the calculations. Cultural History, however, is concerned with issues such as historical memory, the reception of traumatic events, and the material reality of things. So, the Cultural History installation was a big surprise because it contrasted with what I though her work was.

BC: I feel her concern with history, especially Germany’s turbulent 20th century history, is shared by a number of her contemporaries. You mentioned Gerhardt Richter, but when I was reading your book, I also thought a lot about Christian Boltanski.

DA: Yes, both he and Darboven convey the events of the Holocaust and other traumatic situations in their work, and how that history is coldly archived, transmitted and distorted by historians, the culture industry and the media. They both deal with the politics of transmission, but in very different ways. By this, I mean the ways through which those horrors have been received by us photographically and textually. We live in a world in which there are forces distracting us from those realities, and that capitalize and make money off of those realities.

BC: You talk about earlier attempts to create atlas-like works in the book, such as Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas from 1929, but it seems to me that a work like Cultural History could only have been made in the latter half of the 20th century. I say this because when Warburg was constructing his atlas, history was probably conceived of in a more linear way – of one event happening after another rather than things occurring simultaneously. Word of events taking place on the other side of the world took days, if sometimes not weeks, to spread. Today, we learn about events almost immediately. We have much more of a sense of the simultaneity of events; however, this seems to have a levelling effect. The media often seems to give equal weight to everything. News of a celebrity having a meltdown is delivered to us in the same format as news of the latest complex developments in the Middle East. Cultural History seems to presage our current situation.

DA: Yes, there is a feeling of dilution of the power of the image today. For example, in Cultural History, we’ll see an image of Hitler saluting, followed immediately by an image of a cartoon picturing a baby eating. The images are brought down to the same level of information. No one subject is more relevant than another.

BC: Darboven’s work is critical of this.

DA: Yes, absolutely. Cultural History is meant to raise our awareness of how we have become detached from our own histories. The role of the culture industry is to detach us from such realities. Its role is to create spectacles that pacify us and make us less aware of ways of subverting the powers that be. One way is to keep us in a constant state of visual stimulation, which distracts us from the realities and injustices of history. The culture industry and the media are always forcing us onto the next thing. Think about the injustices that occurred during the Iraq war. Doesn’t it feel like we’ve already forgotten about them?

BC: Another element of Darboven’s work you mention is the act of itemizing, list-making and cataloguing. Again, this is a trait she shares with Boltanski, as well as artists like Mario Merz or Alighiero Boetti. What is the purpose of Darboven’s itemizing?

DA: Cultural History gathers together varied things as pre-World War II postcards, pin-ups of film and rock stars, World War I-era German cigarette cards, geometric diagrams for textiles, illustrated covers from Der Spiegel and Der Stern; the contents of an exhibition catalogue devoted to post-War European and American art, musical score sheets, pages of numerical calculations and a form of repetitive cursive writing, and imagery from some of Darboven’s earlier works. It also includes three-dimensional objects such as animal figures, a robot, a crescent moon hanging from the ceiling, a kiosk, a ceramic bust of a moustached man, a pair of shop-window mannequins wearing jogging attire, and a book placed on a pedestal. Darboven’s is a personal and non-hierarchical collection of materials, and it provokes consideration of how history is made and related. It draws distinctions between history and information, everyday and historical significance, and documentary and aesthetic import. Her work powerfully questions the division between the personal and the universal, as it operates in the process of portraying history. Most importantly, her work refuses to answer the call for interpretive synthesis.

excerpt of an interview with Dan Adler, author of “Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880-1983″, by Bill Clarke. continue reading here
More of Hanne’s work here

┐ Craig Ritchie └

Posted on September 9, 2012 by N

“In the Malaficia project, London based photographer Craig Ritchie delves into a Scottish area that was once a central location for witch trials and executions. This gruesome piece of history is not what first meets the eye when browsing through Ritchie’s images of East Neuk: the elegant houses, the forests, elderly people and other moments of daily lives. However, as Ritchie indicates in his website, “It took very little to be considered a witch; a ruined crop field, a petty argument over money, a spurned lover, or maybe the fisherman’s catch was poor.”

This indication may remind the viewer the unforeseeable storms that lie beneath the mundane surface. After all, “What better way to gain the upper hand over another person or family than to accuse them of witchcraft?” Ritchie, so it seems, uncovers how the Malaficia, the hammer of the witches, can be found in every corner of a geographical grid – whether imagined or painfully concrete. The first phase of the project is a photobook that can be viewed and purchased through Ritchie’s website. Currently, the work is also on view in a number of galleries. And here’s a little more about the motivation, future and aims of the project:

How did you find yourself haunted by witches?

The work emanated from an arts residency I undertook in The East Neuk of Fife, Scotland. The remit of the residency was to produce work that was connected to the East Neuk, an area of fishing villages situated between Edinburgh and St Andrews on the East Coast. Prior research of the area revealed that the place was at one point a hotspot of European witch trials and murders which seemed like an interesting subject matter to tackle, not least because the events occurred hundreds of years ago which presents obvious challenges.

What did you find when you arrived to East Neuk? How was the project received

The East Neuk is a bit of a hotbead for artists and in fact the Pittenweem Arts Festival, which this year celebrated its 30^th edition, is one of the most popular in Scotland. The locals are therefore used to visitors from afar and in that regard my presence there raised few eyebrows. Intriguingly though, there appear to be a kind of collective anxiety about their witch past, with people almost reluctant to engage too deeply in discussions around the local witch history.

It’s more than just my imagination as well – there are no monuments to the damned (surprising in terms of the amount of murders we’re actually talking about); it’s difficult to locally find much in the way of literature, and unlike in most places with such a past there is no real tourism centered on the witches. I did find one local who offered witch tours a few times a year, but when I phoned him it transpired he lived in Crouch End in London!

In terms of the locals in the project, I simply asked people who I thought looked interesting, who either fitted my loose narratives or who I thought were interesting enough in their appearance to consider building narratives around. This emerged out of my day-to-day encounters with the place – I didn’t actively seek out locals as such.”

Excerpt of an interview by Rotem Rozental. Continue reading here

More of Craig’s work here

┐ Helga Härenstam └

Posted on September 3, 2012 by N

The Society is a fictious documentary, trough which Helga Härenstam has been looking for and/or constructing environments, scenes and events, that are based on memories from the small society where she grew up. The people photographed in these series are Härenstam herself, her family and other people that she is close to.

The series is a puzzle of pictures dealing with the borders between documentary and staged, the real and the unreal and the past and the present. The title The Society, is inspired by a place, where Helga Härenstam partly grew up. This place does have a name, but is simply called ”the society”. Härenstam found the ambiguousness of the word society interesting though it refers to a context of world politics and states that shut in and shut out citizens depending on where they are considered to belong. At the same time it refers to this small community, which basically functions in the same way, just on a minor scale.

The Society tells several stories about growing up in a rural area that slowly becomes abandoned. A transitional place is formed between the past and the present ways of how the society functions and between the past and the present way ones memory functions.

taken from HIPPOLYTE STUDIO

more of Helga’s work here

┐ Carrie May Weems └

Posted on June 12, 2012 by N

installation view from African Jewels, 2009

Carrie’s web home here

┐ The Chicago Conspiracy └

Posted on June 6, 2012 by N

A must see! Full video here

This is a trailer for our upcoming feature length documentary based in Chile and the Mapuche indigenous territory of Wallmapu. The concept for the film was born with the death of a former military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. His regime murdered thousands and tortured tens of thousands after the military coup on September 11, 1973.

The Chicago Conspiracy takes its name from the approximately 25 Chilean economists who attended the University of Chicago and other prestigious universities beginning in the 1960s to study under the neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. After embracing Friedman’s neoliberal ideas, these economists returned to assist Pinochet’s military regime in imposing free market policies. They privatized nearly every aspect of society, and Chile soon became a classic example of free market capitalism under the barrel of a gun.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about today. We began this documentary with the death of a dictator, but we continue with the legacy of a dictatorship.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the Day of the Youth Combatant. On this day, two young brothers and militants of the MIR, Rafael and Eduardo Vergara, were gunned down by police as they walked through the politically active community Villa Francia. March 29 is not only about the Vergara brothers—it is a day to remember all youth combatants who have died under the dictatorship and current democratic regime.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the students who fight a dictatorship-era educational law put into place on the last day of military rule. Over 700,000 students went on strike in 2006 to protest the privatized educational system. Police brutally repressed student marches and occupations.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the neighborhoods lining the outskirts of Santiago. They were originally land occupations, and later became centers of armed resistance against the military dictatorship. A number of them, such as la Victoria and Villa Francia, continue as areas of confrontational discontent to this day.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the Mapuche conflict. The Mapuche people valiantly resisted Spanish occupation, and continue to resist the Chilean state and the multinational corporations who strip Mapuche territory for forestry plantations, mines, dams and farming plantations. The government has utilized the dictatorship-era anti-terrorism law to jail Mapuche community members in struggle. Two young weichafes (Mapuche warriors), Alex Lemún and Matías Catrileo, were recently killed by Chilean police—one in 2002, the other in 2008.

The Chicago Conspiracy is a response to a global conspiracy of neoliberalism, militarism and authoritarianism.

┐ Michal Heiman └

Posted on May 23, 2012 by N

CRITICAL IMAGE: MICHAL HEIMAN, By Dr. Ariella Azoulay

Michal Heiman chose the position of the spectator looking at someone else’s photographs taken by someone else, in which someone else is photographed, which someone else collected. Heiman turns this quintessential position of spectator (in a museum, but not only) into her own, elaboration and giving it back to it to spectator, whom she transforms not only into the subject of the artistic image but also into the subject of the psychological image. This is the spectator who is asked, on several levels, to assume Heiman’s position and to reproduce it. When Heiman looks at these photographs of her mother-in-law, she is following classifications which are latent in the family album, acting within the framework of the restrictions and advantages of her family relations with the photographed (her mother-in-law), attuned to the route she traced on her meticulously planned journeys as well as in random rambles. Though Heiman does this without relinquishing essential activities of the subject’s position, such as sorting, selecting, classifying, etc, she performs these activities as an accumulative sum of activities familiar from two institutions and practices – the musial and the psychological. The images she presents to the “subject” of her “test” are mediated through these two institution/ practices. They are presented in a “test” box by an “examiner”, who also duplicates Heiman’s positioning, obviously without the possibility of identity between the two of them, between them and the photographed, or between them and the “subject” of the “test”. These relations of similarity and difference between the personae/ positions dissolve the established hierarchical relations which institutions/ practices such as the museum and the psychology apparatus seek to preserve, and point to their fluidity. Heiman is attracted to these two systems, seduced by one and functioning within the other, but at the same time she criticizes them, especially by turning one against the other. She bypasses the museal apparatus by way of the psychological apparatus. Within the framework f the museum institution she develops exchange relations borrowed from the psychological apparatus, rather than those practiced in the museum I which the boundaries of the subject are predetermined by the way he or she is placed in front of the artistic object. The relations of replacement that Heiman proposes are those existing in the psychoanalytical situation, with one crucial difference: they are not continuous in time, and the analyst cannot gain knowledge relating to the analysand and take an active part in subjectivizing her. Thus the therapeutic situation is divested of its characteristic power relations. The activating of the general patterns of the structure of the therapeutic situation in a museum setting through the “test” mode of the M.H.T., provides an opportunity to disrupt the museum order. This order is based on complex relations of silence, both on the part of the museum object and on the part of the museum subject, and on the distinction between the different subject of art – -the artist and the spectator. The museum spectator is invited to induce the mute object to speak, but only later, and outside the boundaries of the site. Heiman’s spectator is invited to induce the scene to speak at the site itself. The existence of the images Heiman offers for viewing and voicing violates the standard norms of presentation, and serves as a point of departure for unexpected encounters with conveyor of parallel, contradictory, other images, encounters in which she finds herself being led no less than leading.

Michal Heiman’s “test” is intended for women. It suggests that they look at a number of pictures of a woman-a mother figure and her own mother-in-law – and a few pictures of women who were inscribed in a history which is not only theirs. The first photographed figure is like a magnified stereotype of the (Jewish) mother figure. She is more (and less) than a citizen of the (Jewish) state. She doesn’t tour like a tourist, looking rather like the proprietress who comes to collect the rent or to be nice to the tenants and improve their conditions of living. She embodies much of what is repressed in that State, and precisely the close relationship to her presents an opportunity to take a straight look and see how it “really” looks. How the overbearingness, excessiveness, and unusefulness of this figure looks. She has herself photographed incessantly, in any place, on any occasion. She is always ready with the camera “just in case”- this may be the decisive moment, so she had better have proofs, evidence, in her hands. For one mustn’t let destiny rule the world alone. Together with her, in the same box, there are seven other women. These are women whose “decisive moment” indeed caught up with them. Each of them experienced a “crucial” moment, performed an act, and this actually justified a portrait, an image, an immortalization, but there was no camera to immortalize the moment. The portrait that they bequeathed is thus a portrait which does not bear witness to the incisive moment but keeps manifesting the decisive relation between them and the social order they disturbed and whose rules they sought to suspend. It thus constitutes a double portrait- a portrait of them and of the social order they challenged. The first one is of the three (surviving) quintuplets the Dionne sister, who having been put on public display as children together with their two other sisters, eventually broke the silence to bring this glaring abuse of a child’s body to light (and to claim damages for themselves). The second is of Ulrike Meinhof, leader of the Baader Meinhof group, from whose portrait it is always possible to revert to the boundaries of the rules of the game of the democratic state, a game in which everything is negotiable, except the rules of the game and so allowing the exclusion o any player attempting to put those rules I question. The third photograph is of Leila Khaled, the Palestinian freedom fighter who became famous for skyjacking in which she was involved. Khaled expropriated the time of the flight passengers to point to the time and the place of which her people, the Palestinian people, had been robbed. The fourth portrait, of Eva Hesse, an artist who put her body in the center of her art long before the artistic discourse could have contained such a manifestation, evidenced an apparatus saturated with violence and the tensions between an individual, a body, and a position from which to see, speak out, and act, and the last portrait, of Kochava Levy, who found herself in a hotel that was occupied by terrorists, and masterfully played – with her unprecedented feat of conducting negotiations with the terrorists – the role assigned to her by history.

(Dr. Ariella Azoulay, D’Israel: Barry Frydlender, Michal Heiman, Efrat Shvily, and Dana & Boaz Zonshine, Le Qartier, Center of Contemporary Art, Quimper, 1999 [pp. 33-34] )

More of Michal’s work here

┐ Burkhard von Harder └

Posted on May 5, 2012 by N

@ Burkhard von Harder, untitled, from the project Cold war in a trash bag

Cold War in a Trash Bag is based on recently found anonymous Cold War photographic footage from the Ukraine. In the summer of 2010 thousands of abandoned black and white negatives were discovered in Vinnitsa, a place only 250 km away from Chernobyl. In miserable condition, the ripped, scratched and torn filmstrips obviously had been completely forgotten and left decaying through the first 20 years of the country’s independence. They could be saved from disposal and taken abroad where 5000 of them were put through a painstaking scanning process so far. The results show solarisation processes and other signs of deterioration leading to new imagery – more publications on the subject to follow.

More of Burkhard’s work here and a preview of the book “Cold War in a Trash Bag” here

┐ Jananne Al-Ani └

Posted on May 2, 2012 by N

The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People

@ Sharjah Art Foundation, 2010

┐ Farhad Ahrarnia └

Posted on April 27, 2012 by N

© Farhad Ahrarnia, ballet pars no.3
HAND EMBROIDERY ON DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY PRINTED ON CANVAS
SILK & COTTON THREAD AND NEEDLES, 2008-10

More of Farhad’s work here

┐ April, 25th └

Posted on April 25, 2012 by N

WHAT ARE THE REVOLUTIONARY COUNCILS?

Prior to 1933. the Portuguese working class had been able to conduct its economic struggle openly through the trade unions. On September 23 of that year. a fascist trade union law was passed. modelled explicitly on the repressive .. Carta Lavori” instituted byMussolini in Fascist Italy. The existing trade unions were abolished and highly-fragmented. state-controlled labor syndicates. which existed right up to the coup of April 25. 1974. came into being.

The response of the Portuguese working class to this repressive 1933 law was immediate and widespread. Among the most militant responses was the insurrection in the Marinha Grande. the glassproduction belt 25 miles north of Lisbon where the entire population had built a long tradition of struggle. Militants of the regional Communist Party. of the CGT [the national anarcho-syndicalist trade union federation]. and numerous local organizations collaborated in a Revolutionary Committee. defining a strategy for taking control of the region so that the economic and political struggle could continue. Prior to April 25. 1974. the Revolutionary Council (also called a Soviet] of Marinha Grande marked the high tide of workingclass struggle in Portugal. The proposal to construct Revolutionary Councils in Portugal today also comes from this industrial region. It is an outgrowth of the particular conditions of struggle imposed by the rule of the Armed Forces Movement since the 25th of April.

(…)

Tapping the experience of France in 1968. militants of various factory committees. with the support of the PRBIBR. convened a Congress on April 19. 1975 which was attended by delegates of more than 200 factories and 60 military units. A Provisional Secretariat was established by the Congress to coordinate the work of building the Councils. It had some 50 seats. 35 of which were filled at the Congress itself. Eleven foundry and steel workers. a cork worker. an office worker. an electronics worker. a teacher, a hotel worker, a graphic-arts worker. one unemployed worker. and 11 military people [soldiers. sailors. and junior officers] joined regional representatives from the North. from Alentejo and Algarve. Marinha Grande. Viana do Castelo. and the Covilha.

The Revolutionary Councils have enabled some of the groups participating in the revolutionary process in Portugal to transcend the “revisionist/orthodox” debate which has hampered the growth of the working-class left. This the Councils do by questioning the existence of the concept of orthodoxy. The Communist Party’s preference for working within the state apparatus and for being “responsible” to the MFA is viewed by the Councils as a function of material interests. not bad ideas and deviations from orthodoxy. The Communist Party. the Councils charge. is constructing state capitalism. not “betraying” the working class. This analysis has enabled the Councils and some other forces to benefit from the Communist Party’s real strength – its mass base in the working class – in building the revolutionary movement. rather than consigning themselves to perpetual. harping criticism of the PCP.

The Councils have also attempted to address themselves to clarifying the relationship of the MFA to the revolutionary sectors of the working class. They established a specific form in which. for the first time. revolutionary elements in the MFA and throughout the armed forces could collaborate. in an on-going organizational form. with the rest of the working class. This was a big switch from the endless streams of proposals for more “democracy” and “participation” proposed from above by the MFA and the Provisional Governments.

To date. the largest single show of strength by the Revolutionary Councils acting alone was the march of June 17. 1975. attended by some 40.000 and led by the workers of Lisnave. This march demanded that the Constituent Assembly be dissolved and that the authority to constitute a new regime be passed on to the Revolutionary Councils.

It is important here to distinguish the Revolutionary Councils from the Factory Committees. The Councils are a specific organization. They are. at the moment. the political front. the movement for direct assault on state power. of the most militant sectors of the working class. The Interempresa. or Inter-Enterprise Committee. still exists and coordinates the day-to-day struggles of the factory committees. Similarly. the Secretariat of Revolutionary and Autonomous Neighborhood Commissions. a coordinating body representing the most militant neighborhood commissions. still functions and recently held a Congress to evaluate the work of the last year and elaborate a program for the next. Independent groups such as the Soldiers United for Victory. an insurgent group who defied the new “Moderate” government and held a march in the streets of Porto in mid-September. 1975. are still defining their relationships to the other independent organizations of the class. The Revolutionary Councils do not claim or attempt to subordinate or take over the struggles in each neighborhood. barracks. village. or factory. The continuation of these struggles. they say. will be as decisive a factor in enabling the Councils to take power some day. as they were in the very birth of the Council organization.

Stu Gedal, Documents of the Worker’s Struggle

Nihilsentimentalgia

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