Artists working on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border have, since the 1970s Chicano movement... more Artists working on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border have, since the 1970s Chicano movement, actively explored this charged site in generating socially conscious art projects. This border art, formerly seen as “marginal,” is explored in this book as central to an interrogation of site-specificity and globalization – particularly in the medium of performance art. Based on an analysis of artworks from four decades by artists such as the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Coco Fusco, Felipe Ehrenberg, and the collaborative team of Allora and Calzadilla, this book claims that border artists both anticipated and responded to larger economic and social shifts, particularly the trade relations heralded by NAFTA in 1994. Site-specificity and performance became complex and sometimes contradictory tools that these artists used to make statements on the nature of economic and political relations between North and South, rich and poor, American and Mexican, citizen and immigrant. Art, rather than pure political action, is particularly equipped to encourage such exploration, as the indeterminacy of art (rather than the determinacy of political action) allows for the processes of social change. This line of inquiry can be extended to other border and transnational regions. Rethinking art and art history from its “borders” – literal and metaphorical – ultimately destabilizes traditional art historiographic narratives in a productive way.
This article analyzes the political implications of artists’ engagement with Google Earth. It con... more This article analyzes the political implications of artists’ engagement with Google Earth. It considers Internet-based series from Clement Valla, Mishka Henner, Jenny Odell, and Jon Rafman that search for publicly available imagery within Google’s software. Taking into account Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s theorization of “evil media” and its power to shape politics on a large scale, I argue that this Google-enabled work constitutes a political critique of the standardization and dissemination of digital representations of physical space. Although technological homogenization smooths over the realities of global inequality, it does so in tandem with a regime of digital censorship and surveillance through which corporate and governmental entities work together. Through their engagements with Google, Valla, Henner, Odell, and Rafman disturb the image of a globalized world seamlessly integrated to promote the flow of ideas and capital.
This article analyzes how the complex and often contradictory immigration politics of the 1970s C... more This article analyzes how the complex and often contradictory immigration politics of the 1970s Chicano movement led to the development of Border Art in the San Diego region. Chicano leader Herman Baca insisted upon the importance of resolving the immigration debate, but cast the question in terms of a global system of inequity. Artists of the movement were forced to mediate between presenting the public with visions of a borderless world and circumscribing a Chicano “nation” within the U.S. Southwest. San Diego’s Chicano Park murals betray this tension, and several of the artists involved would go on to found the first border art collective. Freed from the entanglements of Chicano politics and the burden of nationalism, “Border Art” could focus on human rights violations and economic inequality.
This paper analyzes a contemporary activist art project and proposes an alternate way to consider... more This paper analyzes a contemporary activist art project and proposes an alternate way to consider questions of evaluation with regards to art and social change. London-based artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler undertook a residency at the University of Toronto from September through October of 2012. This paper considers their multi-pronged approach to generating dialogues within the University in light of larger questions about the evaluative problems concerning socially motivated art. This paper argues that analyzing the project’s relationship to art institutions and the University gallery allows us to regard their work as a curatorial project rather than a purely activist one. Mirza and Butler’s work can be considered a museum-based experiment in making connections within the University, as well as between Toronto and other global movements.
The Mudéjar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture... more The Mudéjar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture and ornamentation originated with Arab craftsmen living in reconquered medieval Spain. Embraced by Spanish Christians, Mudéjar traveled over the course of the next four centuries, becoming part of the architectural history of Latin America, especially present-day Mexico and Peru. The style’s transmission across different religions and cultures attests to its ability to unify disparate groups of people under a common visual language. How, then, did mudejar managto gain popularity across reconquered Spain, so much so that it spread to the New World colonies? In this article, I argue that art and architecture move more fluidly than ideologies across boundaries, physical and political. The theory of transculturation makes it possible to understand how an architectural style such as Mudéjar can be generated from a cultural clash and move to an entirely different context. Developed in 1947 by Cuban scholar and theorist Fernando Ortíz, transculturation posited means by which cultures mix to create something entirely new. This process is often violent, the result of intense conflict and persecution, and one culture is almost always defeated in the process. The contributions of both societies, however, coexist in the final product, whether technological, artistic, or even agricultural. I argue that mudejar in Latin America is a product of two separate transculturations: the adoption of Arab design and ornamentation by Spanish Christians, and the subsequent transference of these forms to the New World through the work of indigenous laborers.
The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nesto... more The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nestor García Canclini (1995), Walter D. Mignolo (2000), and others as a liminal space, generating new kinds of hybridity in the minds and actions of so-called “border subjects.” Anzaldua identified with the spiritual, primal, indigenous roots that were hidden by years of Americanization. García Canclini offered up the notion of “hybrid cultures” in which the modern and the traditional not only coexist to create something new. Finally, Mignolo delved into the psychological mindset of the border subject, identifying a kind of “border thinking” that defines not only physical but internal borders. These theorizations were a response to the mixing of art and culture on international borders, at which a distinct society was being formed. In turn, these attempts to understand the border have influenced an artistic response that embraces the notion of site as a performative gesture. It is in this theoretical context that I will contrast two border performances, The Cloud by Alfredo Jaar (2000) and One Flew over the Void by Javier Téllez (2005).
The Bacillus subtilis LexA protein represses the SOS response to DNA damage by binding as a dimer... more The Bacillus subtilis LexA protein represses the SOS response to DNA damage by binding as a dimer to the consensus operator sequence 5′-CGAACN4GTTCG-3′. To characterize the requirements for LexA binding to SOS operators, we determined the operator bases needed for site-specific binding as well as the LexA amino acids required for operator recognition. Using mobility shift assays to determine equilibrium constants for B.subtilis LexA binding to recA operator mutants, we found that several single base substitutions within the 14 bp recA operator sequence destabilized binding enough to abolish site-specific binding. Our results show that the AT base pairs at the third and fourth positions from the 5′ end of a 7 bp half-site are essential and that the preferred binding site for a LexA dimer is 5′-CGAACATATGTTCG-3′. Binding studies with LexA mutants, in which the solvent accessible amino acid residues in the putative DNA binding domain were mutated, indicate that Arg-49 and His-46 are essential for binding and that Lys-53 and Ala-48 are also involved in operator recognition. Guided by our mutational analyses as well as hydroxyl radical footprinting studies of the dinC and recA operators we docked a computer model of B.subtilis LexA on the preferred operator sequence in silico. Our model suggests that binding by a LexA dimer involves bending of the DNA helix within the internal 4 bp of the operator.
“Affective Landscapes/Empathic Objects: Digital Documentary and Non-human Ecologies” analyzes two... more “Affective Landscapes/Empathic Objects: Digital Documentary and Non-human Ecologies” analyzes two documentaries - Leviathan (2012), by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and the interactive web-based Bear 71 (2012), by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes. Leviathan and Plastic Bag both present a quasi-documentary narrative told from the point of view of non-humans: fish on a commercial fishing boat and a bear in Banff National Park, Alberta. By placing the viewer in the role of the nonhuman, these works forge a connection with what were initially props in the human story. Ultimately, such projects encourage consideration of the economic and ecological roles that non-humans play, engaging with the discourses of post-humanism and new materialism. In particular, the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway guides this study, as it engages Latour’s idea of the collective and Haraway’s thoughtful considerations of interspecies communication. My contention is that digital art (although relying upon the very technologies that environmental activism seeks to expose or curtail) allows for a re-envisioning of the landscape - freed from material constraints and the political import of that physicality - that allows the genre to engage critical discourses on climate change, human-nonhuman interaction, and political ecology. Leviathan does so by destabilizing the dominant point of view. The film, shot on seemingly indestructible GoPro cameras, veers between roiling underwater footage, fish-eye views, detached aerial perspectives, and, most disturbingly, the cold, unwavering gaze of the stationary lens. Rather than understanding the workings of a commercial fishing trawler as a whole, the viewer receives the information in disjointed parts. I will argue that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel work on an aesthetic and sensorial register that intertwines the human with the animal (and, ultimately, the non-human), visualizing how the boundary between human and non-human is porous and subject to the arbitrary demarcations of industrial capital. In Bear 71, the viewer navigates this digital landscape while the documentary plays in the background; he or she may toggle between video feeds of the film, as well as security camera footage showing the other inhabitants of Banff. The paring down of the landscape serves both to disorient the viewer and to subvert the human impulse to romanticize nature. The disorientation occurs precisely because the landscape has been coded into a matrix of symbols, colors, and icons. We cannot wax rhapsodic about the abstracted digital landscape in the same way that we can the mimetically encoded photograph, or, even better, the park itself. It is not enough to reveal this unbalance, however; the true work of the film is to illustrate the extent of human intervention. In doing so, Allison and Mendes ask us to renegotiate our relationship with the environment. Ultimately, it is through a digitally-enabled exchange of properties between human and non-human, the blurring of boundaries and erasing of a subject-object distinction, that a true political ecology can form.
The notion of “slow violence,” a term coined in 2013 by literary theorist Rob Nixon, serves as a ... more The notion of “slow violence,” a term coined in 2013 by literary theorist Rob Nixon, serves as a particularly enigmatic reminder of the unequal distribution of global wealth and planetary harm. In his text, Nixon elaborates that slow violence “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” According to Nixon, this phenomenon is invisible, insidious, creeping, akin to Rachel Carson’s “death by indirection.” When artists depict the landscapes of non-Western “nature,” global inequality, industrial development, and post-industrial change, the slow violence of the anthropocene is revealed. This paper will analyze how two contemporary photographers render the invisible visible, drawing attention to human impact on the environment of the developing world.
Chinese photographer Yao Lu tricks the viewer into conflating traditional landscape painting with retouched photographs of construction sites, garbage dumps, and other marks of human intervention. His series New Landscapes (begun 2006) relies heavily on photoshop and framing devices to re-cast these scenes within the tropes of historical Chinese landscapes. With their initial appearance, the photographs lull the viewer into a false sense of aesthetic contemplation, until the shock of recognition takes over. By comparison, South African photographer Gideon Mendel documents flood survivors in the immediate aftermath of natural disaster for his series Drowning World (begun 2007). Unlike Yao’s approach to landscape, Mendel focuses on the human toll of slow violence. While not limited to developing nations, Gideon’s photographs of these regions in particular bring attention to the changing landscape of the anthropocene. Images from the series were later used in protests and other political demonstrations. Taken together, these landscapes, traditional and non-traditional, digitally manipulated or not, present a complex portrait of slow violence and the effects of the anthropocene - its impact on the earth and on the human populations most at risk.
Can digital media effectively convey the message of environmental activism? It appears counterint... more Can digital media effectively convey the message of environmental activism? It appears counterintuitive; after all, the plight of the environment, whether global climate change, factory farming, or lost biodiversity, is rooted in what one might term the “natural” world. Internet art, then, relies on the very technologies that environmental activism seeks to expose or curtail. This paper will analyze how artists exploit the parameters of the Internet to de-center what it means to be human and allow for an expanded definition of “environment,” beyond that of human perception.
I will consider two Internet-based projects: Maya Lin’s What is Missing? (2012) and Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71 (2012). With the advent of the Internet and near-constant connectivity, individualism gives way to an online collectivity, as is explored in What is Missing? Lin’s online project takes advantage of the crowdsourced nature of the Internet to collect and visualize anecdotal data. For this web-based memorial, the escalating loss of biodiversity takes visual form through the recollections of the masses, as well as literary, historical, and ancient sources. The second project, the interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), questions whether or not there can be a true relationship between humans and non-humans. In 2009, Bruno Latour called for a true political ecology, one generated by removing the human/non-human dichotomy (as well as that of politics and nature). By narrating from the perspective of Bear 71 herself, Allison and Mendes ostensibly seek to forge such a connection between a single bear in Banff National Park and the online viewer/participants. The footage, however, is all taken from surveillance cameras placed throughout the so-called “wilderness,” and the human/non-human relationship becomes one of mutual antagonism rather than spiritual communion. Ultimately, both projects use the connectivity of the Internet to reconsider of the economic, ecological, and social roles that non-humans play.
This paper considers the material side of the Yes Men’s socially activist practice. The artist co... more This paper considers the material side of the Yes Men’s socially activist practice. The artist collective (headed by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) is one of the most visible practitioners of tactical media since the late 1990s. Along with their digital presence, the group offers fake products for corporate use, such as the “Management Leisure Suit” and the “Exxon Climate Change Victim Candles.” Online, their “Haliburton Survivaball” presents an exaggerated vision of neoliberal ideology. While wearing one, an individual (while self-propelled and self-sustaining) can survive any of the coming natural disasters. The physical objects - the survivaball suits - are far less effective. YouTube and Vimeo clips, as well as the group’s third film, The Yes Men Are Revolting (forthcoming), give the global audience a taste of the Survivaballs as demonstration devices. The performers attempt to protest as the balls render every action comically inept. This disparity between the salvation promised by the digital rendering and the comic failure of the fully-realized physical object evokes the bait-and-switch of the technological solutions proffered by proponents of neoliberalism.
The politics of immigration and trade policy on the U.S.-Mexico border are as complex as they are... more The politics of immigration and trade policy on the U.S.-Mexico border are as complex as they are compelling. Artists have been drawn to the physical site of the frontera, the human rights concerns it presents, and the overarching question of the ethics of globalization. Beginning in 1986, performance artists used the border region to interrogate well-established ideas of site-specificity and, in conjunction with developments of the early 1990s, using the fluid definition of “site” to parallel the fluidity of borders. This talk will discuss the shifts from site-specificity to what I term “portability,” a movement both away from and towards the border region.
Clement Valla’s Postcards From Google Earth provides the viewer with a disconcerting mashup of vi... more Clement Valla’s Postcards From Google Earth provides the viewer with a disconcerting mashup of virtual and real, presented in the form of digital snapshots of Google’s popular satellite imagery. Valla seeks out the moments in the program in which the conversion from 2D to 3D imagery fails, the result of the algorithm working properly, not of any glitch in the system. The landscapes read as a surrealist’s fantasy - bridges and highway overpasses are rendered as limp or disconnected, dangling off a precipice. The Postcards find these moments at which our illusion of seamless connection between the virtual and the real is shattered, and the viewer is left to dig a way out of a (literal) uncanny valley. My paper will analyze how this artwork and others like it allow us to understand that the points of contact between the digital world and the material one are simultaneously real and illusory.
By the early 1980s, graffiti writers in New York had attracted the attention of the art world. As... more By the early 1980s, graffiti writers in New York had attracted the attention of the art world. As documented in the film Style Wars, among others, the encounter between these writers, collectors, gallerists and critics was awkward at best and exploitative at worst. In addition, the translation of street style to the indoor spaces of the gallery removed all context. The sense of immediacy, the rush of the urban environment, and the hint of anarchy inherent to graffiti were all neutered within the white cube.
If the New York City subway system was the first open air gallery, then organized spaces such as São Paulo’s Museu Aberto and Miami’s Wynwood Walls have sought to re-create the aesthetic, if not the spirit, of those early days. By establishing open-air, outdoor areas for the production of murals, tags, and other pieces, developers and city officials have legitimated street art as a product for public consumption. These open-air galleries become sites for pilgrimage, carefully curated (in the case of Wynwood) and presenting a kind of augmented reality for the art-going public. On the other hand, these spaces still carry the stamp of the art world, and the works within are presented more as high art than street culture.
This paper will consider the dynamics of these open air museums in contemporary street art culture, and will explore questions of high and low, public and private, and curated vs. anarchic spaces. I will argue that open-air museums represent a particularly productive fusion of the art market with alternative culture. The result of this development, while not recapturing the spirit of 1970s New York, is far cry from those gallery encounters of the early 80s.
Artists working on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border have, since the 1970s Chicano movement... more Artists working on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border have, since the 1970s Chicano movement, actively explored this charged site in generating socially conscious art projects. This border art, formerly seen as “marginal,” is explored in this book as central to an interrogation of site-specificity and globalization – particularly in the medium of performance art. Based on an analysis of artworks from four decades by artists such as the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Coco Fusco, Felipe Ehrenberg, and the collaborative team of Allora and Calzadilla, this book claims that border artists both anticipated and responded to larger economic and social shifts, particularly the trade relations heralded by NAFTA in 1994. Site-specificity and performance became complex and sometimes contradictory tools that these artists used to make statements on the nature of economic and political relations between North and South, rich and poor, American and Mexican, citizen and immigrant. Art, rather than pure political action, is particularly equipped to encourage such exploration, as the indeterminacy of art (rather than the determinacy of political action) allows for the processes of social change. This line of inquiry can be extended to other border and transnational regions. Rethinking art and art history from its “borders” – literal and metaphorical – ultimately destabilizes traditional art historiographic narratives in a productive way.
This article analyzes the political implications of artists’ engagement with Google Earth. It con... more This article analyzes the political implications of artists’ engagement with Google Earth. It considers Internet-based series from Clement Valla, Mishka Henner, Jenny Odell, and Jon Rafman that search for publicly available imagery within Google’s software. Taking into account Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s theorization of “evil media” and its power to shape politics on a large scale, I argue that this Google-enabled work constitutes a political critique of the standardization and dissemination of digital representations of physical space. Although technological homogenization smooths over the realities of global inequality, it does so in tandem with a regime of digital censorship and surveillance through which corporate and governmental entities work together. Through their engagements with Google, Valla, Henner, Odell, and Rafman disturb the image of a globalized world seamlessly integrated to promote the flow of ideas and capital.
This article analyzes how the complex and often contradictory immigration politics of the 1970s C... more This article analyzes how the complex and often contradictory immigration politics of the 1970s Chicano movement led to the development of Border Art in the San Diego region. Chicano leader Herman Baca insisted upon the importance of resolving the immigration debate, but cast the question in terms of a global system of inequity. Artists of the movement were forced to mediate between presenting the public with visions of a borderless world and circumscribing a Chicano “nation” within the U.S. Southwest. San Diego’s Chicano Park murals betray this tension, and several of the artists involved would go on to found the first border art collective. Freed from the entanglements of Chicano politics and the burden of nationalism, “Border Art” could focus on human rights violations and economic inequality.
This paper analyzes a contemporary activist art project and proposes an alternate way to consider... more This paper analyzes a contemporary activist art project and proposes an alternate way to consider questions of evaluation with regards to art and social change. London-based artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler undertook a residency at the University of Toronto from September through October of 2012. This paper considers their multi-pronged approach to generating dialogues within the University in light of larger questions about the evaluative problems concerning socially motivated art. This paper argues that analyzing the project’s relationship to art institutions and the University gallery allows us to regard their work as a curatorial project rather than a purely activist one. Mirza and Butler’s work can be considered a museum-based experiment in making connections within the University, as well as between Toronto and other global movements.
The Mudéjar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture... more The Mudéjar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture and ornamentation originated with Arab craftsmen living in reconquered medieval Spain. Embraced by Spanish Christians, Mudéjar traveled over the course of the next four centuries, becoming part of the architectural history of Latin America, especially present-day Mexico and Peru. The style’s transmission across different religions and cultures attests to its ability to unify disparate groups of people under a common visual language. How, then, did mudejar managto gain popularity across reconquered Spain, so much so that it spread to the New World colonies? In this article, I argue that art and architecture move more fluidly than ideologies across boundaries, physical and political. The theory of transculturation makes it possible to understand how an architectural style such as Mudéjar can be generated from a cultural clash and move to an entirely different context. Developed in 1947 by Cuban scholar and theorist Fernando Ortíz, transculturation posited means by which cultures mix to create something entirely new. This process is often violent, the result of intense conflict and persecution, and one culture is almost always defeated in the process. The contributions of both societies, however, coexist in the final product, whether technological, artistic, or even agricultural. I argue that mudejar in Latin America is a product of two separate transculturations: the adoption of Arab design and ornamentation by Spanish Christians, and the subsequent transference of these forms to the New World through the work of indigenous laborers.
The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nesto... more The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nestor García Canclini (1995), Walter D. Mignolo (2000), and others as a liminal space, generating new kinds of hybridity in the minds and actions of so-called “border subjects.” Anzaldua identified with the spiritual, primal, indigenous roots that were hidden by years of Americanization. García Canclini offered up the notion of “hybrid cultures” in which the modern and the traditional not only coexist to create something new. Finally, Mignolo delved into the psychological mindset of the border subject, identifying a kind of “border thinking” that defines not only physical but internal borders. These theorizations were a response to the mixing of art and culture on international borders, at which a distinct society was being formed. In turn, these attempts to understand the border have influenced an artistic response that embraces the notion of site as a performative gesture. It is in this theoretical context that I will contrast two border performances, The Cloud by Alfredo Jaar (2000) and One Flew over the Void by Javier Téllez (2005).
The Bacillus subtilis LexA protein represses the SOS response to DNA damage by binding as a dimer... more The Bacillus subtilis LexA protein represses the SOS response to DNA damage by binding as a dimer to the consensus operator sequence 5′-CGAACN4GTTCG-3′. To characterize the requirements for LexA binding to SOS operators, we determined the operator bases needed for site-specific binding as well as the LexA amino acids required for operator recognition. Using mobility shift assays to determine equilibrium constants for B.subtilis LexA binding to recA operator mutants, we found that several single base substitutions within the 14 bp recA operator sequence destabilized binding enough to abolish site-specific binding. Our results show that the AT base pairs at the third and fourth positions from the 5′ end of a 7 bp half-site are essential and that the preferred binding site for a LexA dimer is 5′-CGAACATATGTTCG-3′. Binding studies with LexA mutants, in which the solvent accessible amino acid residues in the putative DNA binding domain were mutated, indicate that Arg-49 and His-46 are essential for binding and that Lys-53 and Ala-48 are also involved in operator recognition. Guided by our mutational analyses as well as hydroxyl radical footprinting studies of the dinC and recA operators we docked a computer model of B.subtilis LexA on the preferred operator sequence in silico. Our model suggests that binding by a LexA dimer involves bending of the DNA helix within the internal 4 bp of the operator.
“Affective Landscapes/Empathic Objects: Digital Documentary and Non-human Ecologies” analyzes two... more “Affective Landscapes/Empathic Objects: Digital Documentary and Non-human Ecologies” analyzes two documentaries - Leviathan (2012), by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and the interactive web-based Bear 71 (2012), by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes. Leviathan and Plastic Bag both present a quasi-documentary narrative told from the point of view of non-humans: fish on a commercial fishing boat and a bear in Banff National Park, Alberta. By placing the viewer in the role of the nonhuman, these works forge a connection with what were initially props in the human story. Ultimately, such projects encourage consideration of the economic and ecological roles that non-humans play, engaging with the discourses of post-humanism and new materialism. In particular, the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway guides this study, as it engages Latour’s idea of the collective and Haraway’s thoughtful considerations of interspecies communication. My contention is that digital art (although relying upon the very technologies that environmental activism seeks to expose or curtail) allows for a re-envisioning of the landscape - freed from material constraints and the political import of that physicality - that allows the genre to engage critical discourses on climate change, human-nonhuman interaction, and political ecology. Leviathan does so by destabilizing the dominant point of view. The film, shot on seemingly indestructible GoPro cameras, veers between roiling underwater footage, fish-eye views, detached aerial perspectives, and, most disturbingly, the cold, unwavering gaze of the stationary lens. Rather than understanding the workings of a commercial fishing trawler as a whole, the viewer receives the information in disjointed parts. I will argue that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel work on an aesthetic and sensorial register that intertwines the human with the animal (and, ultimately, the non-human), visualizing how the boundary between human and non-human is porous and subject to the arbitrary demarcations of industrial capital. In Bear 71, the viewer navigates this digital landscape while the documentary plays in the background; he or she may toggle between video feeds of the film, as well as security camera footage showing the other inhabitants of Banff. The paring down of the landscape serves both to disorient the viewer and to subvert the human impulse to romanticize nature. The disorientation occurs precisely because the landscape has been coded into a matrix of symbols, colors, and icons. We cannot wax rhapsodic about the abstracted digital landscape in the same way that we can the mimetically encoded photograph, or, even better, the park itself. It is not enough to reveal this unbalance, however; the true work of the film is to illustrate the extent of human intervention. In doing so, Allison and Mendes ask us to renegotiate our relationship with the environment. Ultimately, it is through a digitally-enabled exchange of properties between human and non-human, the blurring of boundaries and erasing of a subject-object distinction, that a true political ecology can form.
The notion of “slow violence,” a term coined in 2013 by literary theorist Rob Nixon, serves as a ... more The notion of “slow violence,” a term coined in 2013 by literary theorist Rob Nixon, serves as a particularly enigmatic reminder of the unequal distribution of global wealth and planetary harm. In his text, Nixon elaborates that slow violence “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” According to Nixon, this phenomenon is invisible, insidious, creeping, akin to Rachel Carson’s “death by indirection.” When artists depict the landscapes of non-Western “nature,” global inequality, industrial development, and post-industrial change, the slow violence of the anthropocene is revealed. This paper will analyze how two contemporary photographers render the invisible visible, drawing attention to human impact on the environment of the developing world.
Chinese photographer Yao Lu tricks the viewer into conflating traditional landscape painting with retouched photographs of construction sites, garbage dumps, and other marks of human intervention. His series New Landscapes (begun 2006) relies heavily on photoshop and framing devices to re-cast these scenes within the tropes of historical Chinese landscapes. With their initial appearance, the photographs lull the viewer into a false sense of aesthetic contemplation, until the shock of recognition takes over. By comparison, South African photographer Gideon Mendel documents flood survivors in the immediate aftermath of natural disaster for his series Drowning World (begun 2007). Unlike Yao’s approach to landscape, Mendel focuses on the human toll of slow violence. While not limited to developing nations, Gideon’s photographs of these regions in particular bring attention to the changing landscape of the anthropocene. Images from the series were later used in protests and other political demonstrations. Taken together, these landscapes, traditional and non-traditional, digitally manipulated or not, present a complex portrait of slow violence and the effects of the anthropocene - its impact on the earth and on the human populations most at risk.
Can digital media effectively convey the message of environmental activism? It appears counterint... more Can digital media effectively convey the message of environmental activism? It appears counterintuitive; after all, the plight of the environment, whether global climate change, factory farming, or lost biodiversity, is rooted in what one might term the “natural” world. Internet art, then, relies on the very technologies that environmental activism seeks to expose or curtail. This paper will analyze how artists exploit the parameters of the Internet to de-center what it means to be human and allow for an expanded definition of “environment,” beyond that of human perception.
I will consider two Internet-based projects: Maya Lin’s What is Missing? (2012) and Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71 (2012). With the advent of the Internet and near-constant connectivity, individualism gives way to an online collectivity, as is explored in What is Missing? Lin’s online project takes advantage of the crowdsourced nature of the Internet to collect and visualize anecdotal data. For this web-based memorial, the escalating loss of biodiversity takes visual form through the recollections of the masses, as well as literary, historical, and ancient sources. The second project, the interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), questions whether or not there can be a true relationship between humans and non-humans. In 2009, Bruno Latour called for a true political ecology, one generated by removing the human/non-human dichotomy (as well as that of politics and nature). By narrating from the perspective of Bear 71 herself, Allison and Mendes ostensibly seek to forge such a connection between a single bear in Banff National Park and the online viewer/participants. The footage, however, is all taken from surveillance cameras placed throughout the so-called “wilderness,” and the human/non-human relationship becomes one of mutual antagonism rather than spiritual communion. Ultimately, both projects use the connectivity of the Internet to reconsider of the economic, ecological, and social roles that non-humans play.
This paper considers the material side of the Yes Men’s socially activist practice. The artist co... more This paper considers the material side of the Yes Men’s socially activist practice. The artist collective (headed by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) is one of the most visible practitioners of tactical media since the late 1990s. Along with their digital presence, the group offers fake products for corporate use, such as the “Management Leisure Suit” and the “Exxon Climate Change Victim Candles.” Online, their “Haliburton Survivaball” presents an exaggerated vision of neoliberal ideology. While wearing one, an individual (while self-propelled and self-sustaining) can survive any of the coming natural disasters. The physical objects - the survivaball suits - are far less effective. YouTube and Vimeo clips, as well as the group’s third film, The Yes Men Are Revolting (forthcoming), give the global audience a taste of the Survivaballs as demonstration devices. The performers attempt to protest as the balls render every action comically inept. This disparity between the salvation promised by the digital rendering and the comic failure of the fully-realized physical object evokes the bait-and-switch of the technological solutions proffered by proponents of neoliberalism.
The politics of immigration and trade policy on the U.S.-Mexico border are as complex as they are... more The politics of immigration and trade policy on the U.S.-Mexico border are as complex as they are compelling. Artists have been drawn to the physical site of the frontera, the human rights concerns it presents, and the overarching question of the ethics of globalization. Beginning in 1986, performance artists used the border region to interrogate well-established ideas of site-specificity and, in conjunction with developments of the early 1990s, using the fluid definition of “site” to parallel the fluidity of borders. This talk will discuss the shifts from site-specificity to what I term “portability,” a movement both away from and towards the border region.
Clement Valla’s Postcards From Google Earth provides the viewer with a disconcerting mashup of vi... more Clement Valla’s Postcards From Google Earth provides the viewer with a disconcerting mashup of virtual and real, presented in the form of digital snapshots of Google’s popular satellite imagery. Valla seeks out the moments in the program in which the conversion from 2D to 3D imagery fails, the result of the algorithm working properly, not of any glitch in the system. The landscapes read as a surrealist’s fantasy - bridges and highway overpasses are rendered as limp or disconnected, dangling off a precipice. The Postcards find these moments at which our illusion of seamless connection between the virtual and the real is shattered, and the viewer is left to dig a way out of a (literal) uncanny valley. My paper will analyze how this artwork and others like it allow us to understand that the points of contact between the digital world and the material one are simultaneously real and illusory.
By the early 1980s, graffiti writers in New York had attracted the attention of the art world. As... more By the early 1980s, graffiti writers in New York had attracted the attention of the art world. As documented in the film Style Wars, among others, the encounter between these writers, collectors, gallerists and critics was awkward at best and exploitative at worst. In addition, the translation of street style to the indoor spaces of the gallery removed all context. The sense of immediacy, the rush of the urban environment, and the hint of anarchy inherent to graffiti were all neutered within the white cube.
If the New York City subway system was the first open air gallery, then organized spaces such as São Paulo’s Museu Aberto and Miami’s Wynwood Walls have sought to re-create the aesthetic, if not the spirit, of those early days. By establishing open-air, outdoor areas for the production of murals, tags, and other pieces, developers and city officials have legitimated street art as a product for public consumption. These open-air galleries become sites for pilgrimage, carefully curated (in the case of Wynwood) and presenting a kind of augmented reality for the art-going public. On the other hand, these spaces still carry the stamp of the art world, and the works within are presented more as high art than street culture.
This paper will consider the dynamics of these open air museums in contemporary street art culture, and will explore questions of high and low, public and private, and curated vs. anarchic spaces. I will argue that open-air museums represent a particularly productive fusion of the art market with alternative culture. The result of this development, while not recapturing the spirit of 1970s New York, is far cry from those gallery encounters of the early 80s.
The mudejar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture... more The mudejar phenomenon is unparalleled in the history of architecture. This style of architecture and ornamentation originated with Arab craftsmen living in reconquered medieval Spain. Embraced by Spanish Christians, mudejar traveled over the course of the next four centuries, becoming part of the architectural history of Latin America, especially present-day Mexico and Peru. The style’s transmission across different religions and cultures attests to its ability to unify disparate groups of people under a common visual language. To complicate matters further, mudejar is an architectural style with no internal cohesion or governing theory, a term that, for some, fails to qualify as a “style” in itself. Art and architectural historians speak of mudejar “fragments” and “reminiscences,” describing wooden geometric ceilings or patterns of ornamentation rather than entire structures or building programs. How, then, did mudejar manage to gain popularity across reconquered Spain, so much so that it spread to the New World colonies? In this paper, I argue that art and architecture move more fluidly than ideologies across boundaries, physical and political. The theory of transculturation makes it possible to understand how an architectural style such as mudejar can be generated from a cultural clash and move to an entirely different context. Developed in 1947 by Cuban scholar and theorist Fernando Ortíz, transculturation posited means by which cultures mix to create something entirely new. This process is often violent, the result of intense conflict and persecution, and one culture is almost always defeated in the process. The contributions of both societies, however, coexist in the final product, whether technological, artistic, or even agricultural. I argue that mudejar in Latin America is a product of two separate transculturations: the adoption of Arab design and ornamentation by Spanish Christians, and the subsequent transference of these forms to the New World through the work of indigenous laborers.
The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nesto... more The U.S.-Mexico border region has been theorized in the writings of Gloria Anzaldua (1987), Nestor García Canclini (1995), Walter D. Mignolo (2000), and others as a liminal space, generating new kinds of hybridity in the minds and actions of so-called “border subjects.” Anzaldua identified with the spiritual, primal, indigenous roots that were hidden by years of Americanization. García Canclini offered up the notion of “hybrid cultures” in which the modern and the traditional not only coexist to create something new. Finally, Mignolo delved into the psychological mindset of the border subject, identifying a kind of “border thinking” that defines not only physical but internal borders. These theorizations were a response to the mixing of art and culture on international borders, at which a distinct society was being formed. In turn, these attempts to understand the border have influenced an artistic response that embraces the notion of site as a performative gesture. It is in this theoretical context that I will contrast two border performances, The Cloud by Alfredo Jaar (2000) and One Flew over the Void by Javier Téllez (2005). Jaar’s piece, a somber act of commemoration, is overshadowed by the significance of site, while Téllez’ performance (which includes a human cannonball shot across the border) initiates a discussion of border mentality and the psychological barriers to migration. These pieces mark points on a trajectory of “border art” from a charged site of mourning and memory to a more fluid representation of the global dynamics at work on the border.
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, 2015
This chapter analyzes three works of Border Art that use aestheticized forms of protest to interr... more This chapter analyzes three works of Border Art that use aestheticized forms of protest to interrogate social and political divides. Using the tropes of protest, artists can intervene in complex international situations, distilling debates into a visual language and emphasizing the similarities between each side of the border rather than difference. The Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) staged the first U.S.-Mexico border performance, End of the Line (1986), to subvert the dominant construction of the border region as war zone. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s three Vieques interventions (2001-2005) mine a different geographic region, but continue to use the aesthetics of protest to interpret the U.S. neocolonial militarization of Puerto Rico and its island territory. Tania Candiani’s 2009 Battleground piece in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso continues this interrogation of borders and war by interpreting defense and aggression within the framework of narcoviolence.
U.S.-Mexico Border Spaces: Arts, Built Environments, and Landscapes, edited by Katherine G. Morrissey and John-Michael H. Warner (University of Arizona Press)
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Leviathan does so by destabilizing the dominant point of view. The film, shot on seemingly indestructible GoPro cameras, veers between roiling underwater footage, fish-eye views, detached aerial perspectives, and, most disturbingly, the cold, unwavering gaze of the stationary lens. Rather than understanding the workings of a commercial fishing trawler as a whole, the viewer receives the information in disjointed parts. I will argue that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel work on an aesthetic and sensorial register that intertwines the human with the animal (and, ultimately, the non-human), visualizing how the boundary between human and non-human is porous and subject to the arbitrary demarcations of industrial capital.
In Bear 71, the viewer navigates this digital landscape while the documentary plays in the background; he or she may toggle between video feeds of the film, as well as security camera footage showing the other inhabitants of Banff. The paring down of the landscape serves both to disorient the viewer and to subvert the human impulse to romanticize nature. The disorientation occurs precisely because the landscape has been coded into a matrix of symbols, colors, and icons. We cannot wax rhapsodic about the abstracted digital landscape in the same way that we can the mimetically encoded photograph, or, even better, the park itself. It is not enough to reveal this unbalance, however; the true work of the film is to illustrate the extent of human intervention. In doing so, Allison and Mendes ask us to renegotiate our relationship with the environment. Ultimately, it is through a digitally-enabled exchange of properties between human and non-human, the blurring of boundaries and erasing of a subject-object distinction, that a true political ecology can form.
Chinese photographer Yao Lu tricks the viewer into conflating traditional landscape painting with retouched photographs of construction sites, garbage dumps, and other marks of human intervention. His series New Landscapes (begun 2006) relies heavily on photoshop and framing devices to re-cast these scenes within the tropes of historical Chinese landscapes. With their initial appearance, the photographs lull the viewer into a false sense of aesthetic contemplation, until the shock of recognition takes over. By comparison, South African photographer Gideon Mendel documents flood survivors in the immediate aftermath of natural disaster for his series Drowning World (begun 2007). Unlike Yao’s approach to landscape, Mendel focuses on the human toll of slow violence. While not limited to developing nations, Gideon’s photographs of these regions in particular bring attention to the changing landscape of the anthropocene. Images from the series were later used in protests and other political demonstrations. Taken together, these landscapes, traditional and non-traditional, digitally manipulated or not, present a complex portrait of slow violence and the effects of the anthropocene - its impact on the earth and on the human populations most at risk.
I will consider two Internet-based projects: Maya Lin’s What is Missing? (2012) and Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71 (2012). With the advent of the Internet and near-constant connectivity, individualism gives way to an online collectivity, as is explored in What is Missing? Lin’s online project takes advantage of the crowdsourced nature of the Internet to collect and visualize anecdotal data. For this web-based memorial, the escalating loss of biodiversity takes visual form through the recollections of the masses, as well as literary, historical, and ancient sources. The second project, the interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), questions whether or not there can be a true relationship between humans and non-humans. In 2009, Bruno Latour called for a true political ecology, one generated by removing the human/non-human dichotomy (as well as that of politics and nature). By narrating from the perspective of Bear 71 herself, Allison and Mendes ostensibly seek to forge such a connection between a single bear in Banff National Park and the online viewer/participants. The footage, however, is all taken from surveillance cameras placed throughout the so-called “wilderness,” and the human/non-human relationship becomes one of mutual antagonism rather than spiritual communion. Ultimately, both projects use the connectivity of the Internet to reconsider of the economic, ecological, and social roles that non-humans play.
If the New York City subway system was the first open air gallery, then organized spaces such as São Paulo’s Museu Aberto and Miami’s Wynwood Walls have sought to re-create the aesthetic, if not the spirit, of those early days. By establishing open-air, outdoor areas for the production of murals, tags, and other pieces, developers and city officials have legitimated street art as a product for public consumption. These open-air galleries become sites for pilgrimage, carefully curated (in the case of Wynwood) and presenting a kind of augmented reality for the art-going public. On the other hand, these spaces still carry the stamp of the art world, and the works within are presented more as high art than street culture.
This paper will consider the dynamics of these open air museums in contemporary street art culture, and will explore questions of high and low, public and private, and curated vs. anarchic spaces. I will argue that open-air museums represent a particularly productive fusion of the art market with alternative culture. The result of this development, while not recapturing the spirit of 1970s New York, is far cry from those gallery encounters of the early 80s.
Leviathan does so by destabilizing the dominant point of view. The film, shot on seemingly indestructible GoPro cameras, veers between roiling underwater footage, fish-eye views, detached aerial perspectives, and, most disturbingly, the cold, unwavering gaze of the stationary lens. Rather than understanding the workings of a commercial fishing trawler as a whole, the viewer receives the information in disjointed parts. I will argue that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel work on an aesthetic and sensorial register that intertwines the human with the animal (and, ultimately, the non-human), visualizing how the boundary between human and non-human is porous and subject to the arbitrary demarcations of industrial capital.
In Bear 71, the viewer navigates this digital landscape while the documentary plays in the background; he or she may toggle between video feeds of the film, as well as security camera footage showing the other inhabitants of Banff. The paring down of the landscape serves both to disorient the viewer and to subvert the human impulse to romanticize nature. The disorientation occurs precisely because the landscape has been coded into a matrix of symbols, colors, and icons. We cannot wax rhapsodic about the abstracted digital landscape in the same way that we can the mimetically encoded photograph, or, even better, the park itself. It is not enough to reveal this unbalance, however; the true work of the film is to illustrate the extent of human intervention. In doing so, Allison and Mendes ask us to renegotiate our relationship with the environment. Ultimately, it is through a digitally-enabled exchange of properties between human and non-human, the blurring of boundaries and erasing of a subject-object distinction, that a true political ecology can form.
Chinese photographer Yao Lu tricks the viewer into conflating traditional landscape painting with retouched photographs of construction sites, garbage dumps, and other marks of human intervention. His series New Landscapes (begun 2006) relies heavily on photoshop and framing devices to re-cast these scenes within the tropes of historical Chinese landscapes. With their initial appearance, the photographs lull the viewer into a false sense of aesthetic contemplation, until the shock of recognition takes over. By comparison, South African photographer Gideon Mendel documents flood survivors in the immediate aftermath of natural disaster for his series Drowning World (begun 2007). Unlike Yao’s approach to landscape, Mendel focuses on the human toll of slow violence. While not limited to developing nations, Gideon’s photographs of these regions in particular bring attention to the changing landscape of the anthropocene. Images from the series were later used in protests and other political demonstrations. Taken together, these landscapes, traditional and non-traditional, digitally manipulated or not, present a complex portrait of slow violence and the effects of the anthropocene - its impact on the earth and on the human populations most at risk.
I will consider two Internet-based projects: Maya Lin’s What is Missing? (2012) and Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ Bear 71 (2012). With the advent of the Internet and near-constant connectivity, individualism gives way to an online collectivity, as is explored in What is Missing? Lin’s online project takes advantage of the crowdsourced nature of the Internet to collect and visualize anecdotal data. For this web-based memorial, the escalating loss of biodiversity takes visual form through the recollections of the masses, as well as literary, historical, and ancient sources. The second project, the interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012), questions whether or not there can be a true relationship between humans and non-humans. In 2009, Bruno Latour called for a true political ecology, one generated by removing the human/non-human dichotomy (as well as that of politics and nature). By narrating from the perspective of Bear 71 herself, Allison and Mendes ostensibly seek to forge such a connection between a single bear in Banff National Park and the online viewer/participants. The footage, however, is all taken from surveillance cameras placed throughout the so-called “wilderness,” and the human/non-human relationship becomes one of mutual antagonism rather than spiritual communion. Ultimately, both projects use the connectivity of the Internet to reconsider of the economic, ecological, and social roles that non-humans play.
If the New York City subway system was the first open air gallery, then organized spaces such as São Paulo’s Museu Aberto and Miami’s Wynwood Walls have sought to re-create the aesthetic, if not the spirit, of those early days. By establishing open-air, outdoor areas for the production of murals, tags, and other pieces, developers and city officials have legitimated street art as a product for public consumption. These open-air galleries become sites for pilgrimage, carefully curated (in the case of Wynwood) and presenting a kind of augmented reality for the art-going public. On the other hand, these spaces still carry the stamp of the art world, and the works within are presented more as high art than street culture.
This paper will consider the dynamics of these open air museums in contemporary street art culture, and will explore questions of high and low, public and private, and curated vs. anarchic spaces. I will argue that open-air museums represent a particularly productive fusion of the art market with alternative culture. The result of this development, while not recapturing the spirit of 1970s New York, is far cry from those gallery encounters of the early 80s.
In this paper, I argue that art and architecture move more fluidly than ideologies across boundaries, physical and political. The theory of transculturation makes it possible to understand how an architectural style such as mudejar can be generated from a cultural clash and move to an entirely different context. Developed in 1947 by Cuban scholar and theorist Fernando Ortíz, transculturation posited means by which cultures mix to create something entirely new. This process is often violent, the result of intense conflict and persecution, and one culture is almost always defeated in the process. The contributions of both societies, however, coexist in the final product, whether technological, artistic, or even agricultural. I argue that mudejar in Latin America is a product of two separate transculturations: the adoption of Arab design and ornamentation by Spanish Christians, and the subsequent transference of these forms to the New World through the work of indigenous laborers.