#social practice

[chuckhistory]

Do You Believe In Modern Art?

[rhinocerosproject]

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[rrresearch]

Cecilia Vicuña

b. 22 July 1948 — Santiago, Chile

Notable Works: 

Brain Forest Quipu (2022)

Quipu Womb (2017)

Kuntur Ko (2012)

Kon Kon (2010)

Quipu Menstrual (2006/2021)

What is Poetry to You (1980)

Precarios (1966-2017)

Precarios: Objects of Resistance for the Chilean Resistance (1973-4)

Videos:

Vimeo – Cecilia Vicuña

Meet the artists | Cecilia Vicuña 

Living Quipu | Cecilia Vicuña

Disappeared Quipu | Cecilia Vicuña

Further Reading:

“Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña”

“The Material Etymologies of Cecilia Vicuña: Art, Sculpture, and Poetic Communities”

The New York Times | “Cecilia Vicuña’s Desire Lines”

Wallpaper | “Cecilia Vicuña: the artist reclaiming oppressed histories with vigour, resilience and love”

Frieze | “A Form of Praying’: The Performances of Cecilia Vicuña”

Frieze | “The Sound and Feel of Cecilia Vicuña’s Art”

Art Review | “The erotic socialism of Cecilia Vicuña”

See Also: 

Tribu No

Soft Sculpture

[tiffanysinghcurrent]

Scenes of the Treasure House 2 channel projection  that depicts scenes of women's empowerment, peace and hope. Traditionally made by women, the paper-cuts are transformed into screens for the films. The films follow my creative process and journey of motherhood as everyday life is woven together with documentation of the social practice commissions. These commissions have supported indigenous peoples of China and Taiwan by honouring localised artforms made by the Hmong and Amis people.

[blueglowdistress]

Hannah Höch

German, 1889–1978

Known for her incisively political collages and photomontages (a form she helped pioneer), Hannah Höch appropriated and recombined images and text from mass media to critique popular culture, the failings of the Weimar Republic, and the socially constructed roles of women. After meeting artist and writer Raoul Hausmann in 1917, Höch became associated with the Berlin Dada group, a circle of mostly male artists who satirized and critiqued German culture and society following World War I. She exhibited in their exhibitions, including the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, and her photomontages received critical acclaim despite the patronizing views of her male peers. She reflected, “Most of our male colleagues continued for a long while to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status.”

The technical proficiency and symbolic significance of Höch’s compositions refute any notion that she was an “amateur.” She astutely spliced together photographs or photographic reproductions she cut from popular magazines, illustrated journals, and fashion publications, recontextualizing them in a dynamic and layered style. She noted that “there are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages—above all they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products.”

Höch explored gender and identity in her work, and in particular she humorously criticized the concept of the “New Woman” in Weimar Germany, a vision of a woman who was purportedly man’s equal. In Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum she combined images of a Cameroonian mask and the face of silent film star Maria Falconetti, topped with a headdress comprised of kitchen utensils. Höch’s amalgamation of a traditional African mask, an iconic female celebrity, and tools of domesticity references the style of 1920s avant-garde theater and fashion and offers an evocative commentary on feminist symbols of the time.

Although the Berlin Dada group fractured in the early 1920s, Höch continued to create socially critical work. She was banned from exhibiting during the Nazi regime, but she remained in Germany during World War II, retreating to a house outside Berlin where she continued to make work. In 1945, after the end of the war, she began exhibiting again. Before her death in 1978, her significant contribution to the German avant-garde was recognized through retrospectives of her work in Paris and Berlin in 1976.

Höch’s bold collisions and combinations of fragments of widely circulated images connected her work to the world and captured the rebellious, critical spirit of the interwar period, which felt to many like a new age. Through her radical experimentations, she developed an essential artistic language of the avant-garde that reverberates to this day.

text from MoMA

[anniekoh]

art as social practice and with/in public policy

Antigone in Ferguson: A modern tragedy is now a Greek tragedy David Freedlander (Daily Beast, 2017)

A body, killed dead by the state, lies unburied in full public view. The authorities say that the corpse deserves to be punished, that the body is that of an invader’s, someone who is a danger and a threat to the community. Chaos ensues, as the community grapples with notions of justice and fairness.

This is the brief story of Antigone. And it is the story of Michael Brown, too, the unarmed African-American teenager who was shot by police on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, setting off days of clashes between protesters and police.

Reading about Antigone in Ferguson (and now I forget why I was chasing the idea of modern day remakes through an internet wormhole) and the article above sent me in multiple directions

Besides Theater of War, the [NYC’s New York City Department of Cultural Affairs called Public Artists in Residence] program has brought the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera into work with the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs on a project called CycleNews that involves immigrant women cycling through their neighborhoods with handcrafted pamphlets letting residents know of services available to them, and taking the residents’ concerns back to governmental agencies.

It also brought artist Mary Miss to work alongside the city’s Department of Design and Construction on a project that gets artists to collaborate further on city planning projects.

“It’s about bringing the creativity of artists into the public sector to see how these artists can be problem solvers and creatively envision different ways of looking at some of the issues we face,” said Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of cultural affairs. “There is something an artist can do that is like therapy without calling it therapy. It has a different angle on it.”

[Photo of CycleNews featuring Mujeres en Movimiento; a project developed by Tania Bruguera]

For her PAIR residency, Tania asked the question: how can immigrant communities begin to trust the government and how, in turn, will the government demonstrate that it trusts immigrant communities? To address this question, Bruguera joined forces with long-time collaborators Mujeres en Movimiento, who use tactics from art and community organizing to advocate for neighborhood improvements, as well as Kollektiv Migrantas, a participatory design collective specializing in migrant rights. Together, the group created CycleNews, a two-way bike messenger service to communicate trusted, first-hand information between city agencies and immigrant communities.

For CycleNews, the Mujeres trained with MOIA to develop strategies to educate and engage immigrant residents about rights and services available to them through MOIA. Working with the Kollektiv Migrantas, Bruguera, the Mujeres, MOIA, and DCLA co-created picture-based materials outlining critical MOIA services to share with the Corona community. Every weekend for the duration of CycleNews, the Mujeres became creative bike messengers, delivering this specially-crafted information on acid yellow CycleNews bicycles. As messengers, the Mujeres served as direct points of contact between immigrant communities and government institutions and bring first-hand feedback, ideas, hopes, and fears to City officials.

Public Artists in Residence at NYC’s Dept of Cultural Affairs

PAIR is based on the premise that artists are creative problem-solvers. They are able to create long-term and lasting impact by working collaboratively and in open-ended processes to build community bonds, open channels for two-way dialogue, and reimagine realities to create new possibilities for those who experience and participate in the work.

Through a series of conversations, DCLA and a partner City Agency decide on a broad population, challenge, and/or goal the partner agency wishes to focus on. With Commissioner-level support, DCLA issues an open call for artists or recommends artists based on artistic excellence and demonstrated knowledge of the particular social issues addressed in the residency. The final artist selection is made in partnership with both agencies.

Each PAIR is a minimum of one year. The residency begins with a research phase, during which the artist spends time at the agency meeting staff and learning about its operations and initiatives while also introducing their art practice and process to agency staff. The research phase concludes with a proposal from the artist outlining one or more public-facing participatory projects that will be implemented in partnership with the agency. Artists receive a fee, as well as in-kind resources such as desk space with the partner agency, an access to DCLA’s Materials for the Arts.

Current Public Artists in Residence (PAIRs) - 2019: Taja Lindley; Laura Nova; Julia Weist; Janet Zweig

Past Public Artists in Residence (PAIRs): Rachel Barnard; Tania Bruguera; Onyedika Chuke; Bryan Doerries; Tatyana Fazlalizadeh; Ebony Noelle Golden; The Lost Collective; Mary Miss; Social Design Collective and Christine Tinsley

[womensartprojectasia]

Merging the panels together to create the Red Carpet. This process has been a labour intensive one as we decided not to use the sewing machine in any way to replicate the integrity and processes of the community outreach partnerships. As the work speaks to the traditional woman's role, transmitted from generation to generation  from mother to daughter. The nature of the materiality responds to one of the oldest creative industries for women.  As needlework was one of the few occupations considered acceptable for women, but it did not pay a living wage.  Women had an important role in extending the longevity of items of sewn items. Sewing was used for mending. Clothing that was faded would be turned inside-out so that it could continue to be worn, and sometimes had to be taken apart and reassembled in order to suit this purpose. All these histories and techniques are reapplied to this contemporary artwork that seeks to re-position craft as fine art.