Approximately three years ago, motivated by the desire to learn from each other’s feminist scholarship, faculty and graduate students affiliated with the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Tech (VT) began meeting to explore the innumerable ways in which gender, bodies, and technology converge and collide. One of the many positive outcomes of these discussions was this invigorating, forward-thinking Gender, Bodies, and Technology conference, where topics ranged from the social implications of servile fembots to radical artistic envisionings of female avatars. That it gestated in a Women’s and Gender Studies Program may be unsurprising to those who already appreciate the field’s interdisciplinary nature and non-hierarchical approach to pedagogy. In an era where academia too often prioritizes elite intellectuals with highly specialized knowledge, however, it was refreshing to be reminded just how beneficial interdisciplinarity and scholarship from all levels can truly be.

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Riding the ferry home from Cockatoo Island invites reflection. Cockatoo is the biggest island in Sydney Harbour and among seven venues showing work in the 17th Biennale of Sydney. A former convict prison and defunct shipyard, the site provokes consideration of a key concern in Artistic Director David Elliot’s take on the 17th Biennale of Sydney, namely how the colonizing impulse has been, by turn, internalized and resisted in cultures around the world. After sitting in its many darkened chambers lit by the flicker of film, one gains a sense of the powerful mediating role of video in negotiating personal and national identities in a post-colonial world.

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Levitating before a massive rocky mountainside dusted with snow, the leaders of Germany’s most powerful corporations sit at long tables. Some are attentive while others are distracted. The tables float in front of the rock face or perhaps are somehow mounted to it. Above the mountains, the corporate logos float against a flat gray sky. Below the mountains, a vast audience, seen from behind, looks up toward the board members. The audience, faceless and gray, is shrouded in darkness.

Completed in haste to debut at his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in the spring of 2001, Andreas Gursky’s Stockholder Meeting, Diptych was received at the time with a mixture of puzzlement and hostility. While the show was up, word of mouth had it that the image was “weird.” Edward Leffingwell wrote in Art in America that “in the polyglot hubbub that was part of the experience of repeated visits to the galleries, viewers stopped to figure out this work. Some seemed uncomfortable with the technology that had helped to create this cut-and-paste Rushmore, voicing uncertainty about its implications.”1 Most were less charitable. Peter Plagens, in an otherwise positive review, wrote in Newsweek that the image, “sacrifices too much of what Gursky himself calls his ‘connection to the real world’ to the computer.”2 Michael Kimmelman, who wrote in the New York Times that Gursky’s art “is instantly attractive to the point of alarm,” similarly suggested that “Mr. Gursky’s least successful work . . . a hokey montage with flat-footed minimalist pretense, ratchets up the technical gadgetry until it becomes the subject of the art, an uninteresting result. When there’s magic it entails traditional formal satisfaction.”3 Finally, Michael Fried, with an uncharacteristic lack of explanation, dismissed Stockholder Meeting in his 2008 book on contemporary photography as “one of the few outright failures in Gursky’s retrospective exhibition.”4

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“Photography is used to give evidence, and the evidence is always deceiving.”1 In an interview with Alain Fleischer and Didier Semin, Christian Boltanski makes a disturbing confession about a truth seemingly inherent to photography: it is a lie. Boltanski uses similar anecdotes and narratives in all of his interviews, offering up some explanation of his own mythology and the role of photography in his life and out—he claims it is easier to make art than to live2—and further, the role of the artist in the world. Comparing the work of the artist to that of a saint, he states:

I believe that which is important about an artist is what you can call the exemplary life, like the exemplary lives of the saints. An artist is not an example because he is virtuous, but because the unfolding of his life is exemplary. I am very interested in the lives of the desert saints and the manner in which we talk about them. The way people talk about artists is very similar: in both cases, it’s a question of lives that transmit a message more by example, by images, than by words.3

Boltanski’s message remains consistent: his biographical images are false. With every work, with every interview, Boltanski believes that a part of him dies, as is the case with all of his subjects. But this death is not the end; it is, rather, another beginning. He continues: “The more people speak of Christian Boltanski, the less he exists. The more biographies and texts there are, the more the person becomes mythical.”4 Rooted in memories—both his autobiographical work as well as his anonymous sketches of Jews, dead Swiss, dissolved families, and strangers—his work constructs and contorts these memories, creating imagined fragments that together form narratives comparable to the greatest of literary fictions. One particularly commanding piece is the 1996 installation “La Vie Impossible.” The resulting artist’s book, published in 2001 under the same title, will be one focus of this discussion, which will place this piece within the larger context of Boltanski’s oeuvre—particularly his installation, “Personnes” (2010), which was on display this winter at the Grand Palais in Paris. Both works confirm the significance of ideas such as existence and representation to contemporary discussions about the expanding field of photography. To begin, one must examine the book itself, the object that avows to contain the impossible life of Christian Boltanski.

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In 1971 Linda Nochlin asked the art world, “Why have there been no great women artists?” Her subsequent answer suggested that it was institutional boundaries that hindered women from having the same access as their male counterparts. Forty years later the answer to this question has changed. As Catherine Morris suggests here, “The participation and influence of women in the art world is enormous.” Morris is the third director and curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Part exhibition space, part education facility, the Center is focused on raising awareness of the cultural contributions of feminism to the arts. The exhibition space is anchored by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79), which was created at the time that “feminism” came into common use as a term relating to a particular political and social sensibility in art. Moreover, the Center has traced the history of feminism as far back as the prehistoric age with exhibitions like the “Fertile Goddess” (2008–09) and has gone on to document trends in contemporary video art with “Beyond the Electric Mirror” (2009–10).

The looming question remains: What is feminist art? What arises are only more questions. The cycle of exhibitions that have come through the Center, and those that are forthcoming, only further challenge audience perceptions of what feminist art is and can be. Nonetheless, the task of defining both the history and current state of feminism does not seem to overwhelm Morris. She came to the Center in 2009 after serving as Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has used her short tenure to organize “Kiki Smith: Soujourn,” which examines universal experiences of life from birth to death, and a small exhibition on the 1864 Brooklyn Sanitary Fair. What makes the Center so unique and, as Morris suggests, so important, is the opportunity to present the lineage of an art practice that has no geographic or chronological boundaries.

In the following conversation, Morris discusses her background in feminist art, her perspective of its historic and changing role and the future of both the Center and feminist art practices. This conversation took place at Morris’s office on April 12, 2010.

Harry J. Weil: In 2006, for MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, you organized “9 Evenings Reconsidered,” an exhibition that examined Bell Laboratories’ bringing together of a group of avant-garde artists with ten scientists. The result was a series of Happenings that took place in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York. Several of the artists are now celebrated figures, like Robert Rauschenberg, Steve Paxton, and John Cage. Among them were also some of the earliest pioneers of performance art, including Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay. What was it like to have both men and women working with a technology that few predicted would ever be so instrumental to the creation and reception of art?

Catherine Morris: There was a lot of openness in this group as they came together in the early 1960s in Lower Manhattan. Not only was there an acceptance of women artists, but an acceptance of dance and dance practices. This acceptance was essential to the group’s development. The work of those women was on par with the men who participated. However, there was obviously a lot of sexism involved. Despite this, what made “9 Evenings” so important and influential, in addition to the engineering aspect and use of new technology, was the community aspect and the way in which different artists came together to complete this project. This was about collaboration. These artists were working together closely before that and it made “9 Evenings” quite successful.

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For more than three weeks, Greece was rocked by demonstrations and rioting. Thousands took to the streets of Athens in protest of the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy by a police officer who did not obey commands, and instead executed the law himself in the district of Exarchia on December 6, 2008. The unrest quickly spread to Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, and to other parts of the country. Clashes also occurred in parts of Cyprus, while demonstrations were organized in other European cities. In central Athens, protesters, including secondary school pupils, students, and anarchists, battled riot police by smashing the windows of banks, car dealerships, and supermarket chains. They burned vehicles and buildings by detonating petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails. Official media in Athens and around the world have spent a significant amount of media time analyzing, in various sociologically inspired roundtable discussions, the possible reasons for this sudden disquiet, which, despite the official international media condemnation, was supported by the majority of Greece’s population. The riots introduce a series of difficult questions: Why were there so many people on the streets without a specific political motivation? Why the aggressive exposition of lootings in the center of a civilized European city? Why did these massive riots not result in a storming of the Winter Palace? Why, in the end, did they not lead to a revision of the country’s current political agenda as the people demanded? Through critical discussions of the December 2008 Athens riots, this essay seeks to investigate the specific “politics of visibility,” as deployed in public space and appropriated by the official and radical media and the internet. It approaches the Athenian events not as a singular and contingent moment in political life, but as the symptom of the structural failures of current consensual politics as depicted worldwide in the depoliticization of citizens and the lack of voluntary co-operatism. It explores the discursive and visual mechanisms within society and critically addresses possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Philosopher Simon Critchley recently observed that, “[P]olitics is always about nomination. It is about naming a political subjectivity and organizing politically around that name.”1 Drawing on this statement, this essay seeks to determine this naming process, which would inform radical politics while addressing its mechanisms of visuality.

Current debate in political, social, and ideological arenas is driven less by an opaque discursiveness than by a supposedly transparent “imperative to visualize.” A number of art historians researching the field of visual studies often use various concepts to analyze the intertwining of imagemaking, hegemonic ideology, and power relations. Art historian Mieke Bal points out that what she considers “worth studying, more than images per se, are visual regimes, including the dominant one—the one that dominates us. . . . If we fail to do this,” she writes, “the currently dominant regime [will] hold us imprisoned while remaining invisible and resistant to critique.”2 Similarly, historian T.J. Clark uses the term “image regime” and the processes of concealed power formation in order to describe the way images monopolize subjectivities. He explicitly proposes a politicized critique of the visual subject as constructed by modernity:

The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. Being “fully part” means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service.3

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On January 12, 2010, at 4:53pm in Haiti, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude struck the poorest country in the Americas, flattening buildings and injuring and killing hundreds of thousands of people. The epicenter was just south of the town of Léogâne. Millions of people were affected, including those from many other countries that quickly dispatched an array of relief efforts. Despite this assistance, significant landmarks like the Presidential Palace and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti were destroyed. Rescue and recovery missions retrieved an exorbitant number of bodies, many of which were left in empty lots due to the lack of facilities and available burial space. Mass graves were necessary, despite the fact that Haitian culture celebrates individual rituals. In addition, emergency medical procedures, such as amputations, were conducted by foreign doctors who worked aggressively to prevent the spread of disease. In a single day, Haiti was irrevocably altered. The day after, photographer Ron Haviv flew down on assignment for People magazine to document the devastation. Haviv’s new series of approximately forty photographs, titled “Haiti: 12 January 2010,” attempts to capture the overwhelming aftermath of this event that undeniably affected the world.

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In an age of rampant celebrity, the subtitle “The Artist is Present” might seem a tawdry play on the promise of seeing a superstar artist in the flesh; for each day of this exhibition’s duration, Marina Abramović performed her new work of the same name. As she sat at a small table in the museum’s massive atrium, visitors were invited to sit across from her for as long as they chose, basking in the presence of one of the most charismatic performance artists of our time. This clearly appealed to many: during my visit the line to do so remained indeterminably long, and in the cafeteria I overheard an adolescent tell her mother, “I liked the artist who stares the best.” But the subtitle also denoted what makes performance art so potent. For the art to be efficacious, the breath-taking, heart-pumping, pheromone-emitting body of the artist must be present.

Sadly, it was this very caveat that made Abramović’s first large-scale retrospective in the United States problematic. Given its impetus—Abramović’s desire to preserve what was conceived as an ephemeral art form—the show was a priori paradoxical. The magnitude of her artistic practice alone, however, is astonishing, and praise was inarguably long overdue. Nevertheless, the sum re-presentation of these once revolutionary works was cacophonous, with too many screens, too many soundtracks, and too few didactics, leaving the viewer sensorially overwhelmed and intellectually bereft. Along with the artist’s presence, performance art’s power typically arises from the fact that there is only one performance to experience and interpret. Here, with more than fifty works jammed into four galleries, only mayhem reigned.

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After one leisurely finishes a cup of Turkish coffee, a dense liquid known for its thick, molasses-like qualities, the saucer is placed on the top of the cup and is turned upside down. The cup is rotated clockwise three times. The coffee drinker makes a wish and places the cup and saucer on the ground or a table to cool and dry while casual talk continues. Afterward, a person with a trained eye—usually a friend or relative—will read the fortune of the drinker by using the coffee residue that forms abstract shapes and patterns in the cup. This ceremony was the foundation for Lara Baladi’s recent exhibition “Diary of the Future” at the Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai.

Entering the exhibition, the work appeared to be playful and inviting with its tightly cropped macro imagery of coffee residue, forming sensuous and beautifully abstracted forms. Yet, upon closer observation of the work, one senses melancholy. Consisting of five works—three large-scale and two smaller-scale, no larger than four feet wide—the exhibition used the coffee fortune-telling ritual to reexamine notions of memory, loss, and destiny.

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Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) rises above the harbor like the giant pilothouse of a grounded tanker. It is surrounded by a vast expanse of parking lots and glass box office buildings—some of which sit empty. Perched above the ocean, it has floundered just a few hundred miles away from art’s central marketplace—New York City—never utterly swallowed by the sea but never, it seems, moving (as the saying goes) “full steam ahead.”

A dulled predictability ribs the museum’s programming like the whalebone splinters in a Victorian corset. Recent shows have featured the overly precious sculptures of Tara Donovan and the banal revolutionary graphic chants of Shepard Fairey. These crowd-pleasing efforts—including the arrest by Boston Police of Fairey at the opening of his 2009 show—contain the shrill notes of a carnival barker and none of the bite or excitement of anything worthwhile. To be fair, these shows are on the museum circuit and the ICA would be foolish to turn up its nose at these staunchly popular “acts,” gilded with mainstream acclaim.

[“Art as Redemption” by Karen vanMeenen]

The recent retrospective of Jacob Holdt’s photographs at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents images taken during his six-year journey “vagabonding” around the United States from the early to mid-1970s and features newer images and unseen photographs from his personal archive. Holdt compiled a remarkably intimate collection of portraits of the downtrodden people he encountered while living a near-penniless existence alongside his subjects. Whether living with African Americans in the rural South, sleeping in the slums of East Coast cities, mingling with Ku Klux Klan members, or attending gala dinners in Houston, the diversity of the subjects Holdt photographed is remarkable. The quality of the photographs is even more astonishing when one considers his lack of technical training and employment of a cheap half-frame camera to record his encounters.

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Roger Ballen’s retrospective display at the George Eastman House begins with early photographic work from the1980s, published in the books Dorps (1986) and Platteland (1994). Mostly documentary in nature, the images were made in small towns in South Africa where Ballen was working as a geologist.

Ballen credits Dresie and Casie, twins, Western Transvaal (1993), from Platteland, as the image for which he is best known. The twin brothers have unusually shaped features, exhibiting ears and mouths slightly larger than expected for their narrow, elongated heads. In addition, the photograph accentuates the oddity by showing one brother with a clean work shirt while the other’s is soiled. Both men are slightly drooling, which adds to the uncomfortable feeling one has when looking at these subjects.

While this early work is included, it is clearly not the main focus of the exhibition. The show is dominated by the last three of Ballen’s projects: Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005), and Boarding House (2009), where his work abandons any notion of documentary style and digs deeper into the depths of his mind and the human condition as a whole. In these newer projects Ballen moves indoors to make his photographs and begins to direct his subjects. Thus both artists and subject become participants and collaborators in the construction and organization of the photographs. It was with the beginning of the Outland project that Ballen stopped photographing in the countryside, instead exclusively photographing in Johannesburg. In a recent lecture at the George Eastman House, Ballen said his work from this project “created a reality that I refer to as the Outland.”1 We see the people becoming more like props in the image, given equal weight as the other sculptural elements in the frame arranged as tableaux. Head inside shirt (2001), for instance, shows a squatting subject whose head is tucked into his or her shirt, creating an echo of the crude metal sculpture on the other side of the frame. In the subject’s hand is a toy that appears to be a stegosaurus, creating a third visual relationship. In an interview playing in the gallery, from Lens Culture’s “Conversations with Photographers” series, Ballen reveals that his projects all begin with a word that he then spends the next few years trying to define. Shadow Chamber is a name given to the abandoned office building of a mining company that was home to a small population of people and animals. Boarding House attempts to define the possibilities related to the transience that is associated with such places.

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Globalization and the spread of new forms of media have transformed the kinds of messages that we are exposed to daily, demanding that we develop new interpretive skills and new forms of literacy. For educators, this transformation has spawned significant questions about what students need to know in order to succeed in the contemporary world and how students best acquire the necessary knowledge. The fourteen collected essays in David R. Cole and Darren L. Pullen’s edited volume Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theory and Practice (2009) offer a range of theoretical and practical answers to these questions through an exploration of the nature of pedagogy and learning in a world where multiple forms of literacy are a requirement.

A foundation for the questions explored in this collection was laid in 1996 when a group of scholars—drawn from cultural studies, education, linguistics, literary analysis, and the sociology of education—met in New Hampshire to make projections about the future of literacy education. The ten scholars involved, later known as the New London Group, surmised that models of literacy learning based in reading and writing skills are outmoded for today’s world. In response, the group proposed the term “multiliteracies” to encompass the multiplicity of types of media and texts now available, while also highlighting the linguistic and cultural diversity among today’s learners. Building on the work of this group, Ian Brown, Lori Lockyer, and Peter Caputi argue in this collection that, in the face of “new technologies, globalization of national economies, the proliferation of information, lifelong educational experiences, the diversity of cultural perspectives . . . [and] new teaching and learning practices” (192), our thinking about literacy must be expanded to encompass a variety of critical approaches—including cross-cultural analysis, interdisciplinary skills, visual literacy, media literacy, technological competency, and so on. Thus varied literacy abilities are needed if students are to develop the skills necessary for employment in the contemporary workplace and critically examine and effectively participate in the political and social world.

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The men who were to head the Czech State Security Surveillance Directorate all seem rather weary-looking and average. This dreariness dates the photographs of these security apparatchiks (profiled by Miroslav Urbanek) to after the post-war Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia. Like in most police states, these men were simply cogs in a larger, hugely insecure machine where spying created a fragile daily existence, even for members of the security apparatus. Everyone was suspected of something. Crimes against the state—real and imagined—were sought out with a fierce energy, both bestial and comic. Only the most privileged were considered beyond reproach, and even then, the tables could quickly turn. This pervasive surveillance and culture of informing destabilized Czech society and created an imbalance that strove to minimalize internal opposition. One is reminded of the story of a well-respected East German general, a man the system considered beyond reproach, whose wife had been spying on him their entire married life together.

The truth of the “police state” has recently come to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union and democratization of many Eastern European countries and, as a result, the archives of many police states have been uncovered. A part of one such archive has recently come to attention—the photo surveillance of the people of Prague by the security services.

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