a+D
BFA Fine Art Exhibition 2012 | May 4 – June 2, 2012
sub•imago noun — the stage of development in an
insect in which the insect is winged and capable of flight but not yet sexually mature. Occurs only in Mayflies (Ephemeroptera). With sexual maturity, the insect becomes an imago (Entz).
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BY DOUGLAS GABRIEL
ON MULTIPLYING POSSIBILITIES THROUGH SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES Undergraduates struggle to develop a practice creating objects that may be of questionable value to their society. This is especially true for the current generation of American students who face an unprecedented climate of economic and political anxiety. For the graduating class of 2012 at Columbia College Chicago, their final semester is pushed forward due to the close proximity in time and space of the NATO summit. In this environment, it can be easy to question how the creative practice one has spent years fostering can impact the world in a meaningful way. ART EDUCATION IS TRAUMATIC.
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Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex, a set of foam core, fiberglass and wooden models referencing architectural components of every school the artist ever attended, was first shown at Metro Pictures in New York in 1995. Originally, Kelley intended to use a series of drawings of the infrastructures made from memory as blueprints, but concluded that they did not contain enough information to produce three-dimensional models. Photographs were used to accurately recreate the exteriors of the buildings, but for the interiors, Kelley used only his inconclusive drawings as guides, replacing any spaces he could not remember with solid, obstructing blocks. The project was part of the artist’s commentary on “Repressed Memory Syndrome,” a topic generating hysteria in the media at the time. In cases like the McMartin Preschool Trial, evidence was asserted that abuse occurred in locations of which the victim had inadequate or no memories. Kelley responded to his own inability to remember certain areas within his school with Abuse Report (1995), in which he filled out a child abuse report indicting his former teacher, abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffmann, for “institutional abuse of … formalist training.” Kelley’s act of turning educational “trauma” into physical barricades imagines a situation where the conflicts and struggles of art education become physical barriers that limit the possibilities available for a subject to move through and act in a space. His impenetrable blocks impose a deadening, restrictive presence. Discussing limitations, the theorist Michel de Certeau writes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life that, despite the organizing function of barriers, a walker “also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege[s], transform[s] or abandon[s] spatial elements” (De Certeau, 98). De Certeau goes on to cite Charlie Chaplin’s choreography as an example of such creative modification of the world, in that the actor “multiplies the possibilities of his cane,” assigning new meanings and purpose to the object (De Certeau, 98). This example shows us how the function of objects and signifiers can be revised through creative lived experience. Subjects who recognize the transformative power they exert as agents moving through the world are able to multiply possibilities for being and acting in multiple environments, rather than submitting to normative modes.
What characterizes the class of 2012 fine art students at Columbia College Chicago is their perception of economic, political and personal barriers as instruments that propel and multiply the possibilities of their practices and self knowledge. In this essay I will show how these artists develop what philosopher Michel Foucault calls “naive knowledges.” These operate apart from official hierarchies, leading to new knowledges of the self that diverge from fixed and established categories. I will then show how this creative tactic functions to produce what De Certeau calls “poetic geography,” space that is liberated and transformed by subjects who actively assign new meanings to otherwise fixed signs in the world. Foucault’s postulation of “naive knowledges” began with his book Madness and Civilization, in which he discussed how the “Renaissance Madman” was not subjected to confinement or regarded as suffering from disease. Rather, this subject was considered to exhibit a potentially revelatory mode of thought apart from the norm (Foucault, 66). The madman was allowed to produce other forms of knowledge that could coexist with normative modes of being. For Foucault, the eventual great confinement of the mad is evidence of the ways in which official hierarchies of knowledge began to disable alternate modes of thought. He identified the use of terms like “pathological” and “delinquent” as strategies that divide and limit other modes of thought through a process of total normalization. The goal is to continuously produce subjects who think and act only in accord with “correct and functional” modes of being. The term artist can signify a contemporary madman, as this nomenclature gives license to violate social codes and behaviors in ways that are not available to other roles in society. While the artist might occupy a high social standing, the knowledge he produces is almost always relegated to a lowly position in the hierarchy of ideas, and is rarely taken seriously as official knowledges. In addition to demonizing terminology, another strategy Foucault recognized was the tendency to turn selfknowledge into pure data. An example is the way in which medical practice uses a person’s performative but insufficient knowledge of his own body as raw data from which to make a clinical diagnosis. Artists generate phenomenological knowledge through lived experience, but hierarchies of ideas insist on the subservient relationship this discourse has to official knowledges, like a patient to a doctor. In identifying these strategies of subjection, Foucault became interested in the knowledges that have been marginalized throughout history by official hierarchies of ideas. He called these “naive knowledges”
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because they were ranked beneath scientific modes of thought: “By subjugated knowledges … I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systematisation” (Power/Knowledge, 81–2). Foucault’s critical approach is archeological in that it is concerned with uncovering the “historical contents,” or buried discourses of what Toby Miller calls “unruly subjects,” as opposed to the “well tempered subjects” that occupy established categories of knowledge (Miller, 180).
The artists in Subimago function like Foucault’s unruly historical subjects, actively creating alternative knowledges. This critical method does not result in a singular emancipating project, but rather calls forth a multitude of approaches and knowledges. Through strategies ranging from investigations into the semantics of visual culture (Kirsa Molina) to performances that question the limits of knowledge itself (Simon Floeter), blueprints of real and contrived environments (Julia Mlakar), and research based inquiry of early twentieth century media and subject matter (Samantha Doyle), among many others, the artists in Subimago offer viewers an opportunity to experience unconventional ways of relating to the self and to the world. The artists’ relationships to the hierarchies of knowledge stand in sharp relief against the simultaneous presence of the NATO summit. The official knowledges descending upon the city of Chicago isolate and confine counter knowledges such as the Occupy movement through a series of permanent security ordinances and surveillance measures. As political anxiety manifests throughout the city, the need for new ways of thinking is critical. Foucault warns that “a transformation that remains within the same mode of thought … can merely be a superficial transformation” (Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 155). Protest and resistance that remains within the same discourse can even work to secure the position of official knowledges, as seen in the way the city of Chicago multiplied the disciplinary authority of its officials on its streets.
How then do alternative knowledges function to impose transformation apart from official discourses? De Certeau describes a transformative tactic evidenced by subjects who, walking through a city, give new meanings and associations to street names: “Saints-Peres, Corentin Celton, Red Square … these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passersby.” These spaces are liberated by the creative subject who, in reassigning meaning, forces the signs to “detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve” (De Certeau, 104). De Certeau depicts liberated space as a “poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.” The liberating element is the creative act of ascribing new meanings to signs, which “insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement” (De Certeau, 105). Like the street signs that become detached from their original signification, or like Charlie Chaplin’s cane, official knowledges are always open to modification. This is the effect of unruly subjects. Though the knowledge production of artists occupies a lowly position, it can be a very effective force. Artists, like subjects walking through the city, covertly alter meanings in significant ways. Through the production of naive knowledges, they dismount signifiers from fixed definitions and reassign meanings in the spaces around them. As world leaders gather to reproduce normative ways of thinking and relating to the world, the artists in Subimago demonstrate alternatives available to us through creative, lived experience. The impervious blocks of traumatic space in Educational Complex extend from Mike Kelley’s map drawings. Maps, according to De Certeau, assume an all-seeing birds-eyeview, similar to Renaissance painters who “represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed.” The map fails to correspond with the vantage point of lived experience, which is inclined to temporary active mapping or “actions of privilege and agency which breathe life into—if only for a moment—certain possibilities” (De Certeau, 98). The artists in Subimago operate apart from the fictional view from on high, which turns political, economical and personal traumas and anxieties into solidified, impenetrable barriers. Instead, they engage the world though lived experience, actively multiplying knowledges and possibilities and attaching new meanings to signs around them. Viewers of this exhibition are afforded the chance to glimpse, if only for a moment, a poetic geography outside the official hierarchies of knowledge;
Douglas Gabriel is an artist and critic based in Seoul, South Korea. He is a 2010 graduate of Columbia College Chicago. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print. Entz, Chuck. “Subimago”. BugGuide.com. Iowa State University Entomology. 19 Feb. 2009. Web. (26 Jan. 2012). Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. United Kingdom: Routledge, 1967. Print. —. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Print. —. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Trans. C. Gordon. Brighton. London: Harvester Press, 1980. Print. Miller, Toby. The Well Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: St. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Print.
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Jasmine Al-Masri Red, Yellow, Orange, and Taupe, 2011. Acrylic on found panel. 11" x 4" 6
Linda Benjamin Flaccid 2, 2011. Clear rubber-tinted and installed on top of wire. 48" x 36" x 6"
Christina Doelling Uncle Bill’s, 2011. Embroidered Handkerchief. 7" x 7" 7
Samantha Doyle Meat Locker, 2012. Intaglio Print. 7" x 5"
Shayna Cott Tablet, 2011. Cast concrete. 12" x 10" x 8" 8
Nick Ernst Pretty Bird, 2011. Etching. 15" x 11" 9
Brent Hjertstedt Untitled01, 2012. Digital. 10" x 15" 10
Grace O’Brien Smell Boxes, 2012. Wood, plastic, various olfactory materials. 6" x 6" x 5"
DUSTY JAMES Artificially Alive and Marking Time / I Wonder If You Saw Things My Way, 2011. Acrylic and sewing patterns and trash on wood. 72" x 96" 11
Ian Morrison The Cock and the Jewel, 2011. Pen and Ink, colored in Photoshop. 12" x 8" 12
Adeline Kreis Birds of Paradise, 2011. Photo, hats, fake flowers, paint, Amanda, Alayna, Keelah. 16" x 24"
Kirsa Molina KIJG705APS(Glimmer), 2011. Styrene. 25.75" x 26" 13
Sean Murphy Leonard, 2012. Gouache on Panel. 8" x 8"
Emily Jane Perkins Something From Nothing, 2012. Ceramic, hot glue, and paint. 15" x 8" x 5" 14
Simon Floeter Gesso, 2011. Video. 6:26 minutes
RyKeyn Bailey METAMORPHIC SWAY, 2011. Screen print. 15" x 11" 15
Nicole Fennell Untitled, 2011. Cardboard, screw eyes, spray paint, string. 24" x 24"
Erol Scott Harris {ins.idea.boveout}, 2012. Acrylic, oil on wood panel. 22" x 30" 16
Julia Mlakar Playscape, 2012. Installation (detail): cardboard, acrylic paint, nails, fishing line. Dimensions variable 17
Caitlin Ryan Drag, 2011. Video
Katie Quade in/animate, 2011/2012. Concrete, wire. Dimensions variable
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Matt Schieren Rhapsody in Blue, 2011. Mixed media on paper. 15" x 22"
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Katrina Petrauskas Untitled, 2011. Manipulated digital image
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Chelsea Schneider Untitled, 2012. Mixed media. Dimensions variable
Kelly Schulz Piano, 2010. Photograph. 16" x 20" 21
Lizzy Szwaya Clay Print One and Two, 2011. Terra cotta clay. Dimensions variable 22
Natalie Walser Hands, 2011. Cross stitching. 9"
Acknowledgments The 2012 Fine Arts graduates thank the staff, faculty and administration of the A+D Department, the Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery, and the Portfolio Center for their support and assistance over the past years, and especially this year as we prepared for this final exhibition. Special thanks to Doug Gabriel for writing the catalog text, to Shayna Cott for creating our Manifest website, and to Samantha Doyle, Nicole Fennell, and Kirsa Molina for co-curating the exhibition. Thanks to Joan Giroux for organizing. This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design Department and the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago. 23
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Jasmine Al-Masri
Erol Scott Harris
Emily Jane Perkins
RyKeyn Bailey
Brent Hjertstedt
Katrina Petrauskas
Linda Benjamin
Dusty James
Katie Quade
Shayna Cott
Adeline Kreis
Caitlin Ryan
Christina Doelling
Julia Mlakar
Matt Schieren
Samantha Doyle
Kirsa Molina
Chelsea Schneider
Nick Ernst
Ian Morrison
Kelly Schulz
Nicole Fennell
Sean Murphy
Lizzy Szwaya
Simon Floeter
Grace O’Brien
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manifestbfa.virb.com Cover:
LINDA BENJAMIN Maps, 2011. Clear rubber relief and acrylic paint. 18" x 12"
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