#brian wallis

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Free Renty: Lanier v. Harvard

New post on a must see documentary

“The question is, who owns the rights to the violence of the past? Is it the victim or the perpetrator? ” — Tamara Lanier, Free Renty https://www.freerentyfilm.com This week, I attended a Together Films virtual screening of Free Renty: Lanier v. Harvard, organized by genealogist Nicka Smith. Directed by David Gruber, the documentary covers the years that Tamara K. Lanier contacted and was…

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[rachelrushing]

Apparently white men still write art history.

Land and Environmental Art Edited by Jeffrey Kastner Survey by Brian Wallis

Aside from the almost humorous lack of discussion about women artists, this survey hit home for my personal work in a lot of ways. The editor breaks down this type of art into five categories, Integration, Interruption, Involvement, Implementation, and Imaging.

The survey begins with a description of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro including the outlandish goals of the summit, the colonial tensions amongst inhabitants of the Souther Hemisphere, and the Greenpeace banner on Sugar Loaf Mountain with a graphic of the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth and labels reading SOLD and VENDIDO. Wallis also brings up Mark Dion’s installation A Meter of Jungle in which Dion assumes the character of a naturalist and sets up a section of jungle floor in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Bringing a section of the Earth into the museum provided a “change in context from the original locale to the museum (and) was meant self-consciously to mimic the imperialistic basis of natural history itself.” (23) The only problem I have with this reference is that bringing in a white American to talk about this just reinforces that imperialistic attitude. I don’t mean to imply that Dion can’t make work that he wants to, but that for this survey to honor the post-colonial attitude of the times, Wallis shouldn’t have begun his survey with a white man.

Wallis goes on to discuss Earthworks and Postmodernism. There are a few key points I really appreciate. I enjoy the discussion of a movement or generation of artwork that resists acquisition, David Pepper’s assertion of “natural rights”, and the acknowledgement that much of the Earthworks exhibition consisted of photographs of work that could not be scaled or transported to fit within the gallery.

Reading this survey was a very conflicting experience because there are some many ideas in here that I have been needing to verbalize or have clarified for my own work, and yet the whole time there seemed to be a thread of contradiction running through the pages. Wallis quotes Smithson in his discussion of Nature and nature.

Secondly, Smithson argued that despite their apparent subject, earthworks had little to do with conventional notions of landscape or nature. ‘The desert’, he wrote, ‘is less “nature” than concept, a place that swallows up boundaries’. Finally, Smithson claimed that ‘the more compelling artists today are concerned with “place” or “site”. By this Smithson meant not only specific overlooked locations, but also a conceptual relation between viewers and boundaries, inside and outside, centre and periphery. (26)

This shifting of perspective from the desert being a place of “nature”, which in this case I apply the meaning of wildness, otherness, and non-humanness where processes and cycles reign supreme, to a concept of openness and freedom presents the same problem that Wallis later addresses with Thoreau. On page 35 he discusses the ‘ideal lyricism’ of Thoreau’s perspective on Nature, which American artists were skeptical and suspicious of. And yet the conceptual openness and lack of boundaries that Smithson advocates of the desert rings familiar to the “romantic strain of transcendentalism” of Thoreau. These are both white men coming into a Wild State to declare their own identity and the identity or purpose of the State they are in. This just wreaks of White Privilege and Colonialism.

The role of women in this movement seems to also be glossed over. The main mentions of women include the acknowledgment of Nancy Holt as Smithson’s wife, 2 paragraphs on second-wave feminist theory, and a discussion of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Even though Wallis briefly mentions Holt and Jeanne-Claude, the only feminist artist whose work he describes is Mary Beth Edelson. Wallis says her work “typifies the impulse among some feminist artists of the 1970s to combine myths, dreams, and spiritual images in rituals that referred to nature and earth goddesses.” (34) This description is more annoying than enlightening. I find “typified” references to feminist art boring and shallow, especially when included in a “survey” of any larger art genre or movement. Considering how long and in-depth Wallis goes to talk about other works by Smithson, Long, De Maria, Beuys, and others, the description of a female artist’s work as “impluse” is base and insulting. Eventually Wallis brings up Ukeles and her work with the New York City Sanitation Department. Maybe this is just me wanting to dislike the weak inclusion of women in this survey, but the discussion of Ukeles’ work almost seems like someone read a draft of this survey and said, “Dude, you gotta include at least 2 women in this or people will lose their shit.”

Again, aside from another art historical survey being written from the perspective of a privileged white man, I really enjoyed this read. The framing of a shift towards Postmodernism through the lens of Land Art is revealing and relevant to the way I want to move forward in my own work. Phrases like “a geography of difference”, “natural processes as metaphors for the spatial structure of social systems”, “necessary aesthetics”, “spatial practices”, “ a new awareness of the vitalism of public sites, an interest in reclaiming lost or suppressed histories”, and “alluding to a poststructuralism where meaning and power are not determined by a single dominant viewpoint” excite and inspire me. I’ll end with a quote from Foucault on page 40 about the hope of symbolic artistic action.

Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction [and] to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

[resourcemagtelevision]

International Center of Photography (ICP) with Brian Wallis

International Center of Photography Deputy Director and Chief Curator Brian Wallis shows a gist of the more than 150,000 photographs exhibited by the ICP beginning in 1839 and through the modern age of photography. Comprising mostly of historic photojournalism and documentary photography, the vault of the ICP mirrors the heavenly world of any photography enthusiasts all over the world. This short video takes viewers into the rich history of the ICP curating and selecting the best photographs ever taken in our collective history.

[icpccsbardsymposium2012]

[b-case]

wallis, brian.  "black bodies, white science: louis agassiz's slave daguerreotypes." american art, 9.2. (1995), pp. 38-61: 

"...the type is clearly situated within a system that denies its subject even as it establishes overt relations between its mute subjects.  the emphasis on body occurs at the expense of speech..."