Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Tactical Biopolitics: a review.

Monday, March 1st, 2010

“How can we know for sure these days that the truck driver repairing his exhaust at the crossroads in your neighborhood is not a silent conceptual artist engaging you in a thought-through performative experience? ” asks Jens Houser in “Observations on an Art of Growing Interest,” part of the collection of essays in Tactical Biopolitics. An engaging overview of scientists as artists, artists as ethnographers, activists as sociologists, and women who do agility trials with their dogs as philosophers, Tactical Biopolitics presents the words and works of people who profoundly engage their ethics with their craft.

Largely centered around issues of biology and bioethics, the book often wades deep into the waters of scientific jargon and academic word-whirlpools. When it emerges into common reality, however, it does so resonantly. While artist Kathy High gives a factual breakdown of her reasons for working with a group of former lab rats (they were predisposed to have her same health issues), we get caught up in the story of the rodents, their namings and personalities. Donna J. Haraway manages to make us forget agility trials as a means to make dogs literally jump through hoops and see them instead as an exercise in human-animal communication.

The book emerged from a conference on BioArt and the Public Sphere at UC Irvine in 2005. It is, write editors Beatriz de Costa and Kavita Philip, “a hybrid, made possible by two recent histories: the enormously creative practices at the intersection of technoscience, activism, and art; and the explosion of cross-disciplinary conversations following Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics.

We see artists confronted with the ethics of working with living tissue, witness the affect racism has on modern scientific research, and learn of the evolution of activist’s tactics for getting AIDS medicine to patients who need it. We hear artists talking about life in labs, and scientist talking about the craft of ethical living. It’s a smorgasboard of modern ethical thought, of challenges to the definitions of professional fields. It’s fantastic reading for anyone interested in cross-disciplinary work. But largely, it is the story of people using the tools they have at their disposal to positively engage with an increasingly complicated and manipulated world. So while the authors featured in Tactical Biopolitics might not be the truck driver in your neighborhood, they are, like him, attempting to fix what’s broken.

Land Art Internet coma.

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Thanksgiving long past, and holiday feasts ahead, but I’m already stuffed, thank you, with this years’ steady eco-art diet of Land Art adventures and COP15 coverage. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with art-nerd-glee. There is such a thing as an information coma, I swear.

The art-and-landscape dishes started churning out of the Nevada Museum of Art kitchen with its LAND/ART symposium way back in June: that event kicked off a summer-into-fall series of lectures, performances, exhibits and tours that made NMA the best excuse to want to go to Nevada since Burning Man. Later in the year Land Arts of the American West, a field program directed by Chris Taylor, took some lucky followers on a tour of renowned site-specific installations and Land Artworks. Unfortunately, some of us had to stay at home with our Winnebagos, experiencing most of the glory over the internet.

This month, while the delegates at COP15 tried to negotiate our way into a non-binding middle ground, Ian Garrett and William Shaw told us what artists were doing to mitigate the damage. There’s great coverage of actions, protests and memes by Shaw on the RSA blog– Garrett did comprehensive exhibition coverage and interviews for CSPA. It seems the artworks that struck the most resonant chord were also political actions: New Life Copenhagen, The Yes Men’s fake press release, actions that addressed COP15′s inaccessibility and ineffectiveness. Comedian Eugene Mirman voiced a couple of unanswered questions. The philosophical culmination is GOOD COP, an alternative Bella Center installed at Gallery Poulsen Contemporary Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where everyone from Daryl Hannah to Bill McKibben got some time on the mic to make their international declarations. If the dialogue keeps running this fierce, I’m not worried. That is to say: Burp.

Art Nature Dialogues: a review.

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Ideas are a bit like oxygen. The right amount allows us functionality;  too much and we get all high. Such is the feeling you get after a read of Art Nature Dialogues, wherein John K. Grande interviews a series of environmental artists.  There’s a spectacular array of materials and viewpoints, from the manure sculptures of Jerilea Zempel to the interventions of Betty Beaumont. What emerges is not only a concise study of environmental artists and their motivations, but an opportunity to examine the way artists describe their work.

When asked what brought them together as artists, for instance, Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit , known for such works as The Stream Path, reply:

“The face of working as a pair, in situ and outside brings a fundamental social dimension to our work, firstly about ‘minimal ethnic unity,’ . . . Being two, we develop the minimal conditions of collaboration and codependance, of synergy, of respect of the sharing, of conflict and contract . .”

To be blunt: What? Not every artist is quite so over-articulate, but the language of the interviews ranges from the simple and practical to the etheral and other-worldly. I’d love to be able to draw a parallel here between the quality of an artist’s work and the words they use to describe it, but that parallel would be nothing but gaudy bauble-words.

That same lung-opening high you might get from The Stream Path is present in Spin Offs by Patrick Dougherty, or Mario Reis’ river paintings. It’s what makes the artists particularly relevant and exciting (despite, not because of, their habit of comparing themselves to Andy Goldsworthy). These artists have struck a chord, gone beyond the Land Art movement of the 70s (which, they will tell you, was limitied in its true connection to place), and articulated relationships, feelings and memes that speak to where we are now(-ish).

It’s all summed up very well in a quote from Hamish Fulton, an artist of long walks:

Art is essential in a healthy society. As they say, art is like oxygen. Whether we say art is profound, or worth investing in, sexy, or a rip-off and and rubbish, it doesn’t matter, because all those crazy and insulting and wonderful qualities all go to make up what we call contemporary art.

Non-Toxic Eco-Art Roundup

Monday, July 6th, 2009

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Since it’s recently been made public that supposedly “inert” ingredients of pesticides like Roundup are not, in fact, not so very inert, we thought we’d celebrate (hem hem) with a short overview of detoxifying eco-art events.

You might have seen the buzz for it, but the LAND/ART symposium just passed.  We were forced to miss it this year, but there are some riveting descriptions on the Smudge Studio Blog. Especially check out CLUI’s Bus Tour of New Mexico’s Superlative Ground-Sky Resonances. The title is super-intellectual: the journey is all about enchantment and the atomic bomb. Feeling detoxified yet?

Fellow eco-art blogger Abigail Doan altered us to the presence of Aviva Rahmani’s new booklet: What the World Needs is a Good Housekeeper. we just got it in the mail. It’s a small, bound overview of the Rahmani’s process, detailing some of her artistic work in collaboration with restoration ecologists, scientists and architects.  An instructional pamphlet, if you will. A quote: “The value of an artist’s eye is to see relationships that might otherwise be missed.”

Lastly: they are always having fun in the Netherlands. The image above is from Yang Zhichao’ s Planting Grass, currently featured in an exhibition called  Foodprint at Stroom in The Hague. Featuring works by Fritz Haeg, Agnes Denes, and Atelier Van Lieshout,  it examines our relationship with food and landscape. The artworks are paired with a timeline that parellels advances in industrial food production with the development of European and American art. Very mentally refreshing.