Dimensions Spring 2012

ART JOURNAL

Dimensions Art Journal VOLUME FIVE ISSUE TWO SPRING TWENTY-TWELVE

Contents

The Scriptor Incarnate

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Rebecca Schultz

Everything Old is New Again

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Sinclaire Marber

Interview: Nontiskelelo Mutiti

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Susanna Koetter

The Woodblock Prints of Tran Cong Dung

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Conor Lauesen

Artist Profile: Rachel Rosenberg

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Ilana Harris-Babou

RafaĂŤl Rozandall Angie Shih

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14 Dominique Jefferson

19 Jane Long

35 Leeron Tur-Kaspa

42 Ellen Su

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Letter from the Editors “Why is it so different this time?�

A joint art/art history journal faces the challenge of its own medium. The journal format, while conducive to the tranmission of critical text, places certain limitations on the reproduction and appreciation of visual art. This basic problem of transmitting the work of art across various media is reflected in both the critical and visual content of this issue.

We hope you enjoy.

Ilana Harris-Babou and Robert Liles

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The Scriptor Incarnate: Philip Guston and Barthes’s Death of the Author

Roland Barthes declares the Author dead, irrelevant and impossible, and replaces him with a new kind of “modern scriptor,” whose existence consists only in the act of making.

This new kind of writer calls to mind a certain kind of GreenREBECCA bergian, New York SCHULTZ School abstract expressionist: Barthes’s ART HISTORY modern scriptor is a “hand,” which, “cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins” . Like Greenberg’s Pollock, Barthes’s modern scriptor is an imitator of imitating : a “pure” painter, whose hand is equal with the marks it makes, whose origin and whose subject both are paint itself. Philip Guston’s figurative paintings of the 1970s are, on the one hand, an obvious denunciation, both of abstract expressionism and also of this kind of disembodied, authorless purity. The subjects of many of these paintings are fleshy, corpulent heads and hands, figures for the author that both invent and grow out of the images around them. In these late works, the author is not dissolved into gesture or into paint

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itself; rather, the painting becomes the life, the incarnation or the flesh of the author, who is embodied therein.

However, there is perhaps a kind of death of the author in this as well, in a way that is Barthesian, but not Greenbergian: Guston’s figurative paintings are impure, fleshy and rife with images, and, in them, Guston the artist dissolves into Guston the painted, painting head, which is both creator and creature, and which, like Barthes’s disembodied scriptor, consists in and is equal with the gesture of its own making.

For Barthes, the modern artwork must not take its life from any consciousness outside of itself – rather, these Authorless works are necessarily sui generis, born of and complete in themselves.

In the work of Mallarmé, for instance – whom Barthes cites as one of the first artists to free language from authorial ownership – words become pictorial.

Words or phrases are set apart from one another on the page such that they are no longer merely the means to which meaning, or syntax, or some larger authorial intention, is the end.

Rather, words become aesthetic objects, actors and ends in themselves. If the words, and the various iterations of meanings and syntaxes they suggest have any focal point, it is

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not the author but rather the reader, who must synthesize all of them. The disappearance of the Author in this way necessitates or gives way to a kind of self-invention that is pure – and, in particular, whose purity is a bit like that of Greenberg’s formalism: language acting as itself; mimesis imitating mimesis. In this formal purity of self-invention consists, according to Barthes, a kind of disembodied eternity, a transient moment that is perpetually present: “The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, and is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing…there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now”. The text, authorless, pure and for itself, does not partake in external realities or embodiments. Whereas the work of a traditional Author to his text is that of “father to son,” past to future, the modern scriptor has no history, and he and his text create for one another an eternal present.

Guston’s 1973 painting Ancient Painter seems a deliberate rejection of Barthes’s notion of disembodied, authorless purity. The painting’s background is a translucent, brushy pink, in which the painter’s hand is evident and which in moments is mixed with black

(Above) Philip Guston, Ancient Painter, 1973. and appears dirty. Two red lines in the bottom third of the canvas imply the edge of a table or perhaps the frame of a painting. The hand at the painting’s center is the same red as the lines below it and as the formless shapes above it; the hand itself is stubby, with short, phallic fingers that between them clutch a pencil, which draws a line on a rectangular surface that disappears off the painting’s right edge. The plane on which the hand draws is, in one sense, equal with the rest of the larger picture plane: it is just the outline of a rectangle, and its surface is the brushy pink of the rest of the painting.

The disembodied hand, which in this sense, paints Guston’s painting, not its

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own separate one, might, in this way, seem to operate as a kind of literalization of Barthes’s notion of “the modern scriptor born simultaneously with his text”. The hand is disembodied: it is physically attached to a pencil, rather than to an arm. The hand paints the surface on which it sits; it is, it would seem, an author that takes its life from and lives only in the act of its own drawing.

But, finally, the fleshy hand is condemned both to partake of the drawing he makes and nonetheless also remain necessarily outside of it. The hand’s own drawing is, in one sense, an extension or a part of Guston’s painting; in another sense, though, it is another, identical painting, rotated ninety degrees and oriented vertically. Whereas the painting in which the hand sits – Guston’s painting – disappears off the top edge of the canvas, the drawing that the hand makes disappears off the right edge.

Likewise, the left edge of the hand’s painting seems to reflect or to imitate the bottom edge of Guston’s: it has on the outside a thickly painted red line, and on the inside a thin line, which in the larger, horizontal painting Guston has drawn in red and which in the smaller vertical painting the hand is in the process of drawing in black. The hand – red, corpulent, phallic – which sits flatly against the horizontal plane in which it lives, cannot hope to enter the ethereal, mimetic plane that it draws – the “vertical plane of imaginary projection,” perhaps, in

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which Yve-Alain Bois accuses Greenberg of wrongly placing Pollock’s drip paintings, which were made on the floor, and which, like Guston’s hand, were too physical and too embodied to enter the plane of pure optics or pure mirage.

Ancient Painter is, perhaps, the assertion of an artist who wants to give up authorship and dissolve himself into pure gesture, but knows it to be impossible. In using the hand as a symbol for art-making, Guston is appropriating a long, triumphant tradition: in Durer’s 1501 Self Portrait, the hand comes to symbolize the Renaissance celebration of selfhood, the transcendent creative power and divinity of the artist, who poses as a Christ figure. Guston’s fleshy hand,

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however – the “ancient painter” who for ages has made vertical, mimetic images of his external, physical world – fails to create an image of himself.

He fails also to disappear into pure abstraction, pure mimesis: he is too corpulent, too impure, too much embodied in the world.

Like Ancient Painter, Guston’s 1974 painting Waking Up, takes as its subject an artist-figure who is at once disembodied and all too embodied.

He is a bulbous pink head, whose body disappears under a pink blanket, revealing only huge feet at the other end of the canvas. The wall behind the figure’s pink bed is black, and on it other heads and shoes are outlined in white. The head seems to dream, imagine, or, perhaps, draw

(Above) Durer’s Self Portrait, 1501

these shapes with the pink tip of his cigarette. Like the hand in Ancient Painter, the pink head is fleshy and physical, more real than the scene he dreams or draws, which, like a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave, is a mere imaginary projection, a kind of afterimage that disappears upon waking. The head is, however, itself also disembodied and imaginary: it is a floating head, cut off from the body, with a huge floating eyeball, that might stand for non-physicality or nonexistence outside of the act of looking or conceiving. In the act of dreaming or of imagining we are disembodied; it is only upon waking that the head might find the pink, fleshy body again. The head’s blackand-white dream is a vertical, mimetic mirage, and in it, slightly left of the painting’s center, the head faces an outline of itself without corpulence or flesh: a similar eyeball in a similar head, which disappears into the black background.

In the act of dreaming, imagining or making – which, in the moment of “waking up,” has just passed – the fleshy pink head disappears into his mimetic image of himself, and, by the same token, so too does Guston. The canvas, in which the pink figure has his bed, is itself bedlike: it is bed-shaped, of bed proportions, but mounted on the wall and thus made vertical.

The canvas is a bed projected onto a vertical, imaginary plane. In the act of making, Guston the body – the physical, corpulent being who lies on his bed – disappears and exists only

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in the insubstantial, vertical world of image-making. He becomes disembodied and is only dreaming.

Finally, the only physical manifestation in the world of Guston in the transient act of making, or dreaming, is the painting itself – which in turn, is a mere afterimage, a scene of waking up, or of a failure to dream. The sleeper or artist-figure is here, like Barthes’s modern scriptor, “born simultaneously with his text, and in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing”.

The author dissolves, which is to say – with Barthes and not, perhaps, with Greenberg – that he is incarnated only in the painting. The incarnation is a literal one – the fat red hand of Ancient Painter, the pink head of Waking Up both seem to be made of flesh, corpulent and not dissolvable into line or dream. Nonetheless, these works are mimetic images of the act of making, projected onto an imaginary plane, and in this sense they do engage with the idea of abstraction and of a kind of purity.

They are uninterested in Greenberg’s pure abstraction, however: for Guston, the imitation of imitation, the painting as an expression simply of painting, necessarily involves the bodily and the material, and even the grotesquely, the ridiculously so.

It also necessarily involves failure. For Barthes, the failure of authorship has

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to do with the impossibility of originality: the modern scriptor is no creative figure; instead, he has the power to “mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as to never to rest on any one of them.

Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words”. Guston, too, is a kind of translator: the tropes of painting a hand or of painting a figure dreaming as a metaphor for the act of painting itself go back to the Renaissance – to Durer’s Self Portrait, and Giotto’s Legend of Saint Francis. In repeating these tropes, Guston illustrates a kind of failure of transcendent, creative authorship: the hand is too carnal and bodily to enter the drawing he makes; the pink head wakes from his dream.

As in Ancient Painter, we are too gross, too fleshy, too clumsy to dissolve into disembodied purity – into a line itself, a mirage of mirage.

Instead, mimetic projection necessarily involves images: the pink head of Waking Up dreams, and cannot help but dream, of himself. The traditional Author is dead, as Barthes proclaims: the painting is the mirage, the transient imaginings of its maker, but it is also necessarily his flesh, and his incarnation and his instantiation in the world.

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Everything Old is New Again: The 2012 Brucennial and Whitney Biennial

The atmosphere of the Brucennial is one of utter chaos in the best sense of the word. The three-floor space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan has immense walls hung floor to ceiling with paintings, prints, and photographs – a SINCLAIRE reincarnation of the MARBER nineteenth century avant-garde salon. A BIENNIAL work scribbled on the REPORT wall aptly describes the curatorial style: “There’s nothing you can frame that can’t be framed/ There’s nothing you can claim that can’t be claimed/ There’s nothing you can hang that can’t be hanged.” Emerging artists are exhibited among notables such JeanMichel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, and George Condo. The selected works by these masters, which lend credibility to the widely-unknown majority are timely: a Hirst spot print after the worldwide Gagosian exhibitions, a Sherman history painting coinciding with her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and a quintessential George Condo portrait following his retrospective at the New Museum.

Brucennial artist Dale McNeil described the energetic space as “a dialogue between artists and people and museums,” and he is not wrong.

As haphazard as the show may appear,

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with names of artists written in pencil on the wall and no complete list of works, it is timely and strategic.

A collaborative arts group of rotating members founded in 2001, the Bruce High Quality foundation is – according to the Whitney in their 2010 Biennial description – “a group of anonymous artists, [that] uses performances and pranks to critique the art world.” Their self described mission: “The Bruce High Quality Foundation, the official arbiter of the estate of Bruce High Quality, is dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of the late social sculptor, Bruce High Quality. In the spirit of the life and work of Bruce High Quality, we aspire to invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring. Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions.” The first Brucennial occurred in 2010, opening on the same day as the Whitney Biennial (in which the Bruce High Quality Foundation was participating), a clear challenge to museums and museumgoers. Most artists involved in this year’s Brucennial were contacted via an email chain with a minor selection process and far more artists – around 400 – than the Whitney Biennial could ever conceive

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of including. The amount of work on display is such that it would require several trips to absorb everything in the constantly moving, dynamic space.

One visitor I overheard said this was his sixth trip and he would be coming back later that day.

The humorously critical eye, characteristic of the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s own work, is the thematic thread holding the Brucennial together. There are countless derivative paintings attempting to emulate Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Eric Fischl and Barbra Kruger, to name a few. However, the works that explicitly comment on influential artists sharing the room are those that reinforce the philosophy of the entire exhibition; for instance Elliot Larkin’s gnome garden, complete with a topless Andy Warhol (scar visible) feeding a hose into a tiny goldfish pool, Jonah Hill’s minimalist letters spelling out “Drugs > Judd” and Gibby Haynes piece that proclaims “Go to hell Larry, Mary and Klaus.”

Ironically, in a show meant to be cutting-edge and represent the newest of the new, artists, curators, and viewers seem drawn to the works that comment on the past. Even more ironic is the fact that though the Brucennial and the Biennial represent very different faces of the

contemporary art world, the two exhibitions seem to have come to the same conclusion this year.

There was a line curving around 75th and Madison before the Whitney Museum of American Art had even opened and the museum staff that unbolted the doors at eleven seemed tired. Over 75 years after the first Whitney Biennial, the show is still considered the premier exhibition of emerging American artists involving all media, from painting to sculpture to photography to multimedia installations and performances, a growing aspect of the past few biennials. Having come from the Brucennial, the most jarring difference between the two is simply the amount of space. The majority of the museum’s five floors are given wholly to the Biennial. The entire first floor gallery is devoted to Oscar Tuazon’s 2012 installation, For Hire, a constructed series of modular spaces which viewers are invited to walk through; it gives the impression that it has always been part of that room.

Furthermore, this is the first biennial in which almost an entire floor has been converted to “a dynamic, 6,000-square-foot performance space for music, dance, theater, and other events” that will change over the biennial’s three-month run. Single

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installations get their own rooms, individual pieces have breathing space and one can contemplate a sole work far more easily in the Whitney Biennial than the Brucennial.

Nonetheless, this individualization of works does not seem to limit the number of collaborative pieces involving elaborate sound, lighting, painting, sculpture, and mechanics in this year’s exhibition. Sarah Michelson’s dressing room is a white metal constructed space with a series of mirrors and tissues laid upon a table, begging the visitor to sit down and use them. Behind the grated “walls” of her dressing room are large paintings by Tim Davy presumably of Michelson as they have “Sarah” in each title. Last Spring, an eerie, almost haunted house like installation involving strobe lighting, wallpaper, a mechanized sculpture of a boy and a spoken word soundtrack to accompany it, was the collaboration of four artists from around the world, who each created the separate elements of the piece.

However, none of these installations seems startlingly new and again, there was an abundance of derivative and unexciting abstract paintings that seem to unnecessarily fill up wall space. As with the Brucennial, the

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strongest pieces in a show focusing on new work were ones that commented on the old. Elaine Reicheck’s series of digital tapestries in the Biennial focus on the Classical myths of Ariadne, incorporating text and art history into a monumental tapestry of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne as well as into a smaller one that uses discreet symbols from the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, such as a ball of yarn (likewise a commentary on the artist’s own work, which often involves hand embroidery). Nick Mauss’s Concern, Crush, Desire, an installation set up in a small hallway that visitors walk through between galleries, also stood out with velvet and cotton applique walls parodying the elaborate halls of baroque palaces. Richard Hawkin’s collages utilized cut-out images of Francis Bacon and Willem De Kooning paintings along with written poetry and Chinese characters. In a twist on a similar theme, acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog created Hearsay of the Soul, a work that attempts to bring attention to an unknown artist of the past. The installation consists of a dark room with video screens on all sides, on which he has projected the prints of Hercules Segers, a little-known contemporary of Rembrandt, with music by contemporary Dutch

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musician Ernst Reijseger. While the Whitney Biennial seems to have accepted its oxymoronic position as the mainstream showcase for cuttingedge art and the Brucennial maintains its antiestablishment cache, the artists of both exhibitions suffer from a shared “anxiety of influence.�

The Whitney Biennial will be on view until May 27, 2012. The Brucennial will be on view through April 20, 2012.

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INTERVIEW:

NONTSIKELELO MUTITI Hello, and welcome to my one man show. No song and dance here. No big production. Lights. Camera. Action. But, since we’re here together, why don’t we have a conversation? For the next six minutes, won’t you entertain me. A little back and forth, are you ready? Shall we?

I had to expand upon the invitation above written in Nontsikelelo Mutiti’s (ART ‘13) thesis composite. Vascillating between poetry, script, candid description, and personal narrative, Nontsi’s written component flowed seemlessly into her visual practice in the graphic design program. I meet Nontsi by her desk, riffing different layerings of patterned paper. “I need to work with my hands. This is how I get my most work done.� Behind her hang screen-printed posters, families of combs, pins, CDs, and rolls of Batik-looking fabric. I look closer at the cloth. Coca Cola bottles.

Those Kanye glasses. Soft serve vanilla ice creams. Nontsi collects and regurgitates, beatifully, quickly forgotten phenotypes of the every-day. She aggregates encounters with people and objects, sifts and reorganizes, in order to remind people of their existance and how they came to be.

Nontsikelelo Mutiti reflects on distributing (formerly) banal histories, medium, and canons with Susanna Koetter. how do you choose what to collect?

I guess my work is sort of autobiographical. I started collecting combs after my older sister bought me a set of 10.

I only needed one but she has been up in arms about me not combing my hair for the 461 days I had been in the United States. I only need one comb, but then I had so many and I was like, “I’m not going to use any of these!â€? they reminded me of another set my mother had brought home when I was eleven. they DUH VR EHDXWLIXO DQG VWUDQJH VR PDQ\ GLŇŹHUHQW VKDSHV WKH\ KDYH HDFK KDYH GLŇŹHUHQW SHUVRQDOLWLHV WKH FRPE LV PRUH WKDQ just a tool to take the knots out of my head- I am connected to my family and friends through this object. I can’t tell you KRZ PDQ\ PHPRULHV , KDYH RI VLWWLQJ RQ WKH ÂťRRU EHWZHHQ getting my hair braided. it is not just about the ideas that surround presentation and standards of beauty. it is about ritual and relationships to real people, a community. now I have sixty two combs. Forty unique shapes.

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you have talked about collecting as being a part of your work within itself, and how this process of collecting becomes a part of a personal narrative. and in your writing you addressed a bit about captions as being mediators between the work and what the viewer “ought to know,” so I guess I’m wondering if you feel like your work necessitates captions?

Does your viewer need captions to be informed about the personal nature of your work?

I think I do, but I think I am the caption (laughs).

I think um, you know, the example that we spoke about the combs where there is this story behind it and also in the text I sent you there is that transcript of my interaction with the bootleg CD seller. I am so much a part of the work and I’ve come to realize there is a performative aspect to the pieces as well. being able to give people a little piece of that story, I think that adds value or gives them an in, helping them to see what’s going on in the images.

so do you think they get access to those stories through you or do you think the work can speak for itself? well, to be honest, I think a lot of people have been having GLҬLFXOW\ DFFHVVLQJ PHDQLQJ IURP WKH ZRUN D VLPSOH WKLQJ OLNH a comb is so loaded. there is a history of people making work about beauty and identity in this culture. that discourse can WKURZ SHRSOH RҬ , KDYH WR EHKDYH DV D PRGHUDWRU D ORW RI WKH time. I wish that I didn’t have to, but I do like the performative aspect of it.

like the history of how the object came into existence? ya, ya. and I guess for me maybe it should be a goal to allow these things to live in the world without any narration, but also I’m not against somebody coming across my work and having to work a bit harder to understand it. people don’t seem to expect that from graphic design. also I am working ZLWK D VSHFLºF YRFDEXODU\ , WKLQN ZKHQ SHRSOH EHFRPH IDPLOLDU with the components and characters in my work they are better at picking up the meaning. they understand the modules of the language.

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, ZDV JRQQD DVN \RX DERXW KRZ \RXU ZRUN ºWV ZLWKLQ WKH ºHOG RI design. with reference to the interdisciplinary methods— another reason why I liked your writing was that it felt like it was a part of the work itself. you know, how it wavered between styles, starting as something extremely poetic transforming into something descriptive, engaging the reader LQ GLҏHUHQW ZD\V DQG WKHQ WXUQLQJ LQWR D VFULSW­FDQ \RX WDON a bit about this?

I think that piece of text is the caption. I tried not to explain the work, but bring people to a place where they can have some kind of experience with the context.

is this common in the design program? I feel like a reading of your work fringes more within the realm of traditional media because, like painting or sculpture, you’re communicationg something rich that’s also incredibly ambiguous. but this could very well be due to my lack of exposure to design process and practice.

well, I came here as a preliminary year student because I didn’t have like a really strong background in graphic design.

I used to paint portraits on commission. In my own independent work I used traditional objects and every day items. they were really self portraits. I can allow myself to become totally immersed in one sort of problem or one area of thinking or trying to express something. an artist can try to solve one WKLQJ IRU VR PDQ\ \HDUV DQG WU\ WR GR LW LQ VR PDQ\ GLҏHUHQW ways and be very involved‌ I think there’s an aspect of that in graphic design but it’s also unapologetic about changing directions and changing mediums and changing the visual qualLW\ , GHºQLWHO\ ZRXOG QHYHU VD\ ,¹P D ŽGHVLJQHU¹V GHVLJQHU¯ but you are very right about the reproducible quality of my work. I think that’s why I decided to invest some time in this ºHOG , ZDV ORRNLQJ IRU FKDQQHOV WKDW ZRXOG KHOS PH JHW P\ work in people’s hands. I like the idea of multiple. Drawing and painting are still very important to me, but I to broaden my skill set and think about distribution.

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so you think that’s a problem with painting? you know, painting has a tradition of living within certain LQVWLWXWLRQDO VSDFHV DQG WKDW¹V ºQH LW DOVR KDV D OLIH outside of that realm, even within communities. coming from Zimbabwe where the art world is much more insular and elitist. the audience I wanted my work to reach actually enters into these spaces. they never go to the National Gallery, or Gallery Delta. I needed to revaluate what I was doing and how I was going about trying to get at people a much broader community.

so design switches the viewing space surrounding the object.

The object comes to the viewer’s space rather than the other way around

yes. you have to think about distribution all the time. I don’t know if I’ll ever work as a graphic designer, but I decided I really wanted the experience of being immersed in a space where you have to consider those kinds of things: how something is getting out to people, what form can it take? how they will interact with it. One day I’m making a video, the next day a collage, next day I’m setting a book, or making a SRVWHU EHLQJ DEOH WR H[SORUH GLŇŹHUHQW PHGLD KDV EHHQ really liberating. granted, artists operate in so many GLŇŹHUHQW PRGHV LW ZDV KDUG IRU PH WR VHH WKDW ZKHQ , ZDV EDFN home. yeah, I was thinking it’s interesting how on every level of your process— from collecting to organizing those references on a poster or fabric to a larger, macro level of organizing a book—it reminded me of when when you wrote, “we are making history every day,â€? in your thesis statement........... .....I

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mean it was kind of enigmatic but at the same time the way that you’re harnessing design seems to entail a kind of self-conscious curation, shedding light on a mundane, scattered object. ,W VHHPV WR UHHFW WKH VHOHFWLYH QDWXUH RI KLVWRU\ itself. yes, you are articulating what I’m doing in way that I wish I FRXOG KDYH VDLG LW ,W LV GHºQLWHO\ FXUDWLQJ DQG LW LV GHºQLWHO\ WLHG WR KLVWRU\ ,¹YH EHHQ H[SRVHG WR FHUWDLQ LPDJHV because somebody else decided those things are noteworthy. I am often working with things that are so familiar that they could almost go unnoticed, like, 99 cent plastic combs, $1 buttons $3 bootleg CDs and fake Dutch Wax Fabric. There are stories behind all these objects, some are personal, and others belong to a much bigger context.

I was thinking about when you said you didn’t want your ZRUN WR EH OLNH D SDSHU ZHOO ºUVW , JXHVV WKHUH DUH misconceptions about papers, paper writing—that it feels so externalized and distanced from the thing itself. but WKH IDFW WKDW \RX¹UH H[WUDFWLQJ VRPHWKLQJ VSHFLºF WKDW LV personally and publically symbolic becomes a lens through ZKLFK \RX FDQ ºOWHU FHUWDLQ LQIRUPDWLRQ ZKLFK LV IXQQ\ because in many ways that’s like essay writing! it relates a lot to history, and its distinction with memory...how memory is purely personal but inaccessible and it’s not really shared, and conversely history as a shared narrative, belonging to everyone but not being anyone’s own story. you’ve picked with something that‌ LUWV ZLWK WKH WZR

yeah! yeah‌ like with that body of combs—that body contains a purely inaccessible, personal narrative and yet they were also quite literally imposed upon you without your choice. you’re making art, but also playing a role of art historian. yeah, I guess that’s true (laughs). but I think it’s more a subconscious thing, it’s just a way that I work because I’m referring to history. my work is always going to be multifaceted. I don’t think I’m anywhere close to where I’d want to be but realizing how all of these things are playing into the work or what people are getting form the work has been extremely valuable.

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...I’m wondering what you are getting from the work?

hm.

I guess I see things that are normally scattered extracted such that we notice them or see them in a new way. they’re displaced, decontextualized. I guess what I’m wondering about when one extracts those things from their use or environment, like a comb in a bathroom, is it... I’m not sure how I’m supposed to read it... like I’m not sure if I’m supposed to read it as “A comb is a comb is a comb,â€? or “what does this bobby pin mean?â€? am I supposed to acknowledge the symbolic or cultural value it possesses or is it supposed to make me realize the arbitrariness of that symbolic value? and if so, in terms of creating a history or highlight something that is often overlooked, what about it are we supposed to acknowledge? how is someone supposed to read that object when it’s taken away from its use value? we see that all the time in museums. objects are taken in, documented, studied and displayed out of context. they are set aside to be markers that refer to a group of people or person at a particular place and time. I’m QRW GRLQJ DQ\WKLQJ GLŇŹHUHQW MXVW WDNLQJ WKLQJV RXW RI WKH world and showing presenting them, or re-presenting them. I would like the viewer to acknowledge the symbolic nature of the object and to see it for what it is and means now. also you’re talking about the arbitrary nature of the object. I like that an arbitrary thing can hold a lot of meaning. I like that tension. I could make gold-plated combs, or original Dutch Wax from Vlisco, but I’m not going to do that. I really like the fact that all these things are replicas of something else. but then there’s something else that makes it valuable, that makes you think of the mark of a situation or triggers a memory.

if my work can do that then I would be happy.

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The Woodblock Prints of Tran Cong Dung: Juxtaposition, Material and the Modern

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“I’d like to make things less complicated by concealing several items.”

—Tran Cong Dung

transform; clarity of content and figuration blooms as legible Forms/figures register.

Tran Cong Dung understands materiality, texture and the experiences constituted of and by CONOR the modern– it is in his LAUESEN work that content and form blurs edge and Art speaks with fresh ART REFLECTIONS breadth. Dung’s interest in legibility, space, and appropriation are most apparent in the panoply of woodcuts and prints he has constructed throughout the past ten years (figure 1).

Dung’s ongoing project of photographs, woodcuts, paintings, and prints portray these concerns.

Voices once silenced speak and the opacity of shadow’s weeping tears into clouded sunsets engender the marks of his hand, brush and knife with a pathos similar to softened fire (figure 2).

The poetically tumultuous construction of cloud-like spaces – blank, black and absent – in Tran Cong Dung’s woodblock prints generously

The figurations of myriad objects within his various compositions, particularly the miasmic rendering of bicycles in movement, imbue the art with voice and force: fleeing, fleeting, smothered in melancholic street life, the bike ride – ostensibly moving aimlessly, handlebars with no rider find places to navigate (figure 3): dust, smoke and the veils of modernity grip into the grooves of canvas and wood. Effortlessly still, however, the bike stilled slips on; the bike rides through narrow alley-ways and the cracked nuances of imagined old quarter streets glimmer as tires pass over gravel leaving stamped prints.

Ghostless bodies ride on bikes that at once disappear we – as subjects and spectators are witness; the process of seeing brings life to the work. This may be the poetically charged gesture most resonant in Dung’s work: Dung offers viewers a moment to see to witness, to contemplate. Bicycles negotiate the wood picture plane rhyme with the

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tire’s rub in the road and rubber smears that kiss the pavement – roads and pavement more present in their absence. Stasis and then speed; alacrity paused and pressed forward; fast then slow intervals and cadences pedal with grace and a final haunting stillness stumbles to a halting broken brake.

These collapses and concealed figures are most legible in this smaller woodcut (figure 4). This smaller work – a sketch of sorts transformed into a woodcut – has many of the same undergirding principles that Dung allows his major works to evoke more brashly. The bikes are directionless as veils cover: blankets of cloth, plastic bags wrapped, clouds materialized, or rain jackets twisted and tied are the lids that sequester the bike.

One can take their pick of these different patches of detritus that putatively protects the bike’s body.

Either way, each of these Things is used - manipulated - to hide the bicycle; stationary or in motion the bike has been made concealed.

To conceal and unveil in a flat picture plane bestows imagination, ghostly shadows, and the ephemeral with abundant presence: the blindfolded

body of the rider, the ring of the bicycle’s rims rotating, and the blanketed herds who cover their bicycles from sun, dust, smoke and eyes of the world are not listening; there is no hearing as the waves of motorbikes, the roar of old car engines and the hiss of antiquated Chinese-made public buses drench the city with alarm and the clatter of traffic. Noise rules. The nose, eyes, and most evocatively, the ears, have all been lost.

These next two prints tug the viewer into the work (figure 5, 6). The tension and torque of the bicycle persist.

Temporarily finds solace or stillness in the ambiguous and contorted flex of lines (figure 7) found in this central detail: a bike disembodied; a city torn apart; a body frightened in perpetual flux; or, a newspaper-like box or voice bubble empty, lineless and vacuous.

The magnetism of this inverted – almost vulgar – central detail is in stark juxtaposition to the world of bikes created. This dissonant interruption seems to be the centrifugal hinge that gives rise to the blooming vortex that composes the work’s entirety. The prick, the sliver, the crisply cut shapes

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at center position the work.

Centrifugally and centripetally the eye refuses to stay still; the work calmly refuses and withdraws; repose and surrender find patience in the imagined fluidity of Dung’s process of art, as well as the oceanic turns of the bicycles navigational capabilities. The movements of figures, the disguise of imagery, and the landscape of blackness brightened cast this scene.

In this reading, the potentiality of the bicycle in both swelling life and flaming demise is then etched into the fragmented print. Dung’s work refuses trite narration and reduction; the bicycles act; they are dynamic, tense, motivated and symbolic. The assemblage of figures and veils as such in Dung’s work textures; the depth and length of the picture plane appears with malleability and stretch: concealed objects appear as masses of bicycles swimming in vapid space reform the landscape; possibilities change and streets absent in the prints live again as the wood’s own attenuation reaches outward; sidewalks, bodies and bicycles live again and the city

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appropriates its own geography yet once again (figure 8).

Read in contrast to the melancholic and famous streetscapes of Bui Xuan Phai, Dung’s prints, figurations and dynamism gift the viewer with figures made live again. Bikes have meaning and resonance. They develop novel identification through Dung’s generous renderings: flailing legs in motion – gangly or bulbous, aged or youthful, political or civic, sensuous or mordant - each again contains now cultural corporeality. The layered motifs and legible images permeate the work with a discernible and loaded pathos. Insular reflection, complicated configurations of symbols, and the internal structuring of art/artist in the modern moment carefully balance the levity of graceful marks and cloudless skies of skin dyed black.

Seen through a different register, Dung’s work critiques the labyrinthine experience of modernity: negotiating changing cultural behaviors, busy street corners saturated with public life, and a Western pathos that envisages

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progress and commodity with supremacy are all under scrupulous inspection. This contestation also addresses the experience of subjectivity and objectivity, one’s own sensual and optical experience of art.

There are variegated degrees of playfulness as visual motifs and traditions are invoked with a gallantly cavalier spirit and squinting eye. To imaginatively ride and glide, to speak speechless into the wind, to walk the curved narrow antique streets of Dung’s prints imbricate the viewer – the subject – with a bodily experience. The viewer here is also graced with a tinge of humor; the ostensibly static dialectic of black and white, seen and hidden, fragment and whole, is placed into potently poetic Hericlitean flux. One’s own experience with the work is made further complex as the banal tropes, nominal labels and putatively-named origins of tradition -- form: the woodblock print, and mediation/ content: the bicycle and topography— oscillate and thus confront the looking glass with new spectacles.

The introversion and inversion of the normative is thus at play; the black and white dice have been rolled. Dung’s artist’s sensibilities speak through the work: introspection, dissonance, and courageous indifference to the current stasis of contemporary art is

made palpable through Dung’s own familiarity with the Other. Dung remains knotted to his own convictions and the profundity of art. To be experimental, modern and diffident while remaining considerate of opacity and obfuscation anywhere is a monumental struggle. In Vietnam, however, this conviction and boldly defiant gesture engenders the final art pieces with even greater pathos.

The process of the art, the density of the texture in myriad mediums, and the powerful reception one has to seeing Dung’s art, bestows all of the work with an almost alchemic historical sensibility.

There is dynamism, awareness and honesty; the unraveling process in time and space imbue the final woodcuts and prints with an internal logic: awareness of the layering commentary, as well as the folded out and in process of ‘art-making,’ are one and the same as many of the fundamental issues confronted by Dung’s final staged settings – the photograph transformed to drawing; the woodcut morphed into the woodblock print. In process, form and content the fragmentary defines experience and creation.

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Fragmentation as an ontological nest is not atomized but rather becomes more palpable as the work is digested. Narrative is disassembled and the reconfiguration of space appropriates the projects of modernity, cultural identification and civilization at large as Dung’s bikes continue to fly in clouds.

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ARTIST PROFILE: RACHEL ROSENBERG Yale Athlete. Yale artist. What happens when these two roles come together?

Rachel Rosenberg (DC ’12) sits on the narrow sliver of Venn Diagram that ILANA HARRIS- spans Payne WhitBABOU ney Gymnasium and Chapel Street. While STAFF there are other artREPORTER ist/athletes at Yale, she is perhaps the only one who decidedly addressees her sport, diving, in her work.

Rosenberg picked sculpture because she found the concentration more “open” than painting. Earlier on during her tenure in the sculpture department, Rosenberg made participatory works that framed the body of anyone who engaged with them.

Oftentimes the active body was that of her classmates and professors.

This past fall she carefully constructed wooden box resting atop four long yet sturdy stilts. We are meant to lift ourselves into this box, which provides only enough room for us when we are squeezed into the fetal position. With legs lifted inside, we become invisible to the external world. The work is like the cupboard a child crawls into to hide from mother until dinnertime. But this storage space is stripped of any sort of utilitarian function.

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Entering into the work becomes a decadent indulgence in isolationist neuroses. The experience is a mixture of claustrophobia and womb-like security. A participant in the work becomes keenly aware of their difference from surrounding space. There is an emotional alienation from everyone who is outside of the box, and the feeling of corporeal distance from the artist herself. The work is made to fit Rosenberg’s body perfectly, anyone larger must squeeze, and anyone smaller feels enveloped.

Her newest project, to be shown in her senior thesis, is a synthesis of earlier intentions and more specific themes related to Rosenberg’s double life as an athlete. She has been diving competitively since she was 12 and captained the Varsity Diving team this past year. Being a team player consumed a large portion of her Yale career; most varsity sports require around 20 hours per week from their athletes. Rosenberg says, “I didn’t have that much time at Yale to be making art... not that anyone has any time for anything.” Finding a way to bring time on the diving board a bit closer to time in the studio, and vice versa, was inevitable.

When beginning to assess how her sports practice related to her studio

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practice, Rosenberg thought about “how unstable the body is... it’s never going to be the same. You can always get fat. You can always get skinny.

You’re never going to be the same strength one day to the next.” Her body became the medium through which she could evaluate notions of progress, both physical and intellectual. She is currently exploring the impossibility of fixing the organic self through physical action, noting that “exercise is conceived of as a one to one thing: you exercise and you see results. But often times it’s not lived out that way.”

If “practice makes perfect,” then what happens when practice is looped digitally? Perfection becomes the sum of a set of sequential variations. For one of the videos to be shown in her thesis installation, Rosenberg attached a camera to her head and jumped off the diving board at the Payne Whitney pool obsessively. She keeps count all the while: ”This is the 5,253rd inward dive pike of my life... this is the 5,254th inward dive pike of my life...”

Are we meant to take this numerically ascending mantra at face value? How could she keep track of numbers that exceed the human scale? As we mark time with her, each slight variation between dives becomes apparent. We see the dive from her

perspective, and from this vantage point we can see how little visual information a dive provides. We begin to be aware of how we cannot share in the physical experience of Rosenberg’s dive and we come to know that this absent layer of sensation is the most important part of the experience. It is what makes the 5,255th dive different from the 5,256th.

When asked for her opinion about Paul Thek’s Diver (which she had never heard of) Rosenberg was initially distraught that someone else might have addressed her concerns. But once she saw an image of the piece, she was reassured. Responding to the form of the figure represented, she says: “This is a terrible position, this is just not right. I don’t know who he was using, but this is not it” So what is it that makes a good diver? To Rosenberg, the ideal diver would “have to have the perfect physical make up, [be] very quick and strong, with good body awareness.” They would be “someone who can focus and do something perfectly every time, indefinitely.”

Is Rachel going to continue diving after college? “No,” she says, “that is a full retirement.” And what about art? For that, Rachel has a plan: “Find some craigslist housing. And then move in with some artists that I don’t

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know and make something. Or make weird videos in my room and put them on youtube and call myself an artist... and then I’ll go to show openings and schmooze, and probably not get my work shown. Ever. In any capacity. And then I’ll get a job as a barista. And then I’ll run out of money, and the I’ll go back to Cleveland and stop making art... That’s what I foresee… But if I get involved in some sort of art making adventure that is sustainable, maybe I’ll get an MFA.”

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Rafaël Rozandall: the Artist’s Web

The Internet, for Rafaël Rozandaal, is the perfect canvas. As a popular artist in the movement of Internet art, his creations are websites–– programmed and coded for aesthetic enjoyment. Internet art, his medium of ANGIE choice, is distinctly different from art SHIH on the Internet.

INTERNET As the Rozendaal REFLECTIONS himself mentioned when interviewed, he “didn’t want to make a ‘portfolio’ website,” filled with online depictions of art created offline (ie, pictures of paintings or sculptures); rather, he wanted “things created specifically for the Internet.” His art often takes advantage of its unique medium by being interactive, asking for viewer (or perhaps “user” is more accurate) participation.

Rozandaal’s works of art are titled by necessity: their name is in the URL address. They run the gamut from simply descriptive (flamingcursor.com, which is a blank, black screen over which your cursor seems to be the end of a sparking match) to somehow meaningful, or at least nudging toward some sort of meaning (whywashesad.com, which features a stylized, cartoonish sky with clouds

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that you “pop”).

The visual style of his websites covers an expansive range. Some are cartoonishly animated, others abstract, still others realistic. His piece, electricboogiewoogie.com, is a mobilized recreation of Broadway Boogie Woogie, by Piet Mondrian—an artist he names among his influences, a list that also includes Dali, Magritte, and Malevich, along with South Park, David Lynch, Slayer, and Black Sabbath.

His works are very often whimsical, like misternicehands.com, which depicts an extended index finger that, when pulled, triggers a long, resounding fart. Seekers of meaning and aesthetic revelation might have difficulty excavating much from there.

But sometimes his websites seem to be hinting at something oddly significant task the user vague, complex questions. Allicandois.com features a pitch-black background, with a spinning blue and red double helix form in the center. The unfinished phrase of a title asks us to fill in the blank, using this image as our only clue. Does this piece ask us to contemplate our existence as purely DNA, this spinning double helix

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truly the only thing at the base of our existence? Or, perhaps, “all I can do is” refers to our larger human achievements. Does this blue and red spiral mock us then, insisting that our endeavors will all be swept away and that all we can do is merely fulfill our biological legacy? Traveling down these thought paths can also make one feel quite over-analytical, giving the title yet another meaning: all I can do is blindly search for a complex explanation for this piece. His pieces are often perversely resistant to analysis.

Inherent in the idea of Internet art is the ideal of democracy: everyone has equal access, and the artist bypasses the conventional gallery or museum route. Rozendaal himself seems seemed to be inspired by such egalitarianism in art school, leading him to the idea of creating Internet art.

He remembers feeling “great empowerment” at the idea of the Internet as this leveled playing field, where anyone “can just start a website.” And while that remains true, websites need more than just ideas: they require technical knowledge of coding, knowledge that Rozendaal has still not completely mastered. He creates “about a third of [his] works” himself, but usually works with a programmer

(Reinier Feijen in particular).

Interestingly, his work is somehow able to be both universally accessible and oddly difficult to merely happen upon. His domain names are specific and the sites usually stand alone, without clickable links to other sites.

However, Rozendaal has faith in the mysterious social workings of the web.

In a statement that humorously recalls the famous line from Field of Dreams, Rozendaal noted that “if you post good things people will see them.”

He usually shares his new works on his blog or via a social network like Twitter, and the flurry of shares, retweets, and Facebook posts take over from there––with much success.

He acquires about 15 million unique visits to his website per year.

Rozendaal also works in projector art, and is the founder of the so-called BYOB––Bring Your Own Beamer–– events which take place anywhere in the world, can be started by anyone, and try to bring together artists who work with light installations. For him, it seems that projection is more closely related to the Internet than one might imagine. To Rozendaal, the Internet is more than just an open window on a computer screen––he sees “the Internet escaping machines, being all

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around us…like sound from different speakers.” Projection, with its immersive quality, achieves the effect he must hope his Internet art has, but in a more tangible way.

The development of Internet art feels somehow unsurprising, even inevitable.

The existence of the web along with the glowing and flickering, faceless and nameless users that populate it nearly begs for a new kind of language, a new medium of artistic expression.

Rozandaal’s art, along with that of other Internet artists, is an attempt to give voice to the bizarre yet sometimes oddly natural online world of connectivity and loneliness in which we now live.

Much of Rozendaal’s work seems to mimic our everyday experience of that world. There is a disturbing quality to some of his pieces, a flitting back and forth over the boundary of meditative and mind-numbing that sometimes can feel familiar. For example, in biglongnow.com, the user is confronted with a sketch of a door and the noise of a doorbell. Upon pulling back the door, one finds another door blocking the frame. And then another. And then another, opening up a fan of hinged doors, allowing no passage through the white wall backdrop. All of the doors are complete with disconcertingly realistic

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touches: they seem to obey the laws of physics, they slamslamming loudly when they hit each other. But the one maddeningly unrealistic touch is that the doors keep appearing out of the wall. After pulling back (possibly) dozens of doors, I the user feels an odd sense of deja vu. “I have been here before.” Probably not in this specific disturbingly sparse web creation, but I have definitely inhabited this the feeling before created by this piece is familiar.

The repetitive uselessness of it all, the clicking while very consciously knowing it would yield truly nothing nearly defines my daily Internet usage.

Thoughtless refreshing of my a Gmail inbox, browsing through photo albums on Facebook of people so far removed that from me that I can’t recognize ano single face is recognizable, endlessly scrolling through Tweets from news sources I’ve never readreporting distant information. The monotony of connectivity, the boredom of having the most updated– but useless–information at your fingertips at every second. It’s truly: the Big Long Now. There seems to be a fascination, on the artist’s part, with the way in which the Internet can be both boundless and highly limited. Fallingfalling.com,

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which uses simple graphic planes that seem to be falling downward, collapsing amorphously. The work, features an auditory illusion called the “Shepard tone:.” As the planes continue to fall, this tone also seems to be continually descending in pitch—but actually is not getting lower at all. The illusion of infinity feels key to understanding his work and, of course, the Internet itself. In a self-made video about some of his works, Rozendaal describes a serendipitous programming error in his site towardsandbeyond.com. It depicts a maze, not unlike those featured in the Windows screensavers of the 1990s, built out of brightly colored planes. However, due to limited memory, the maze cannot remember all four “views” surrounding you. So if you turn to your right four times, rather than ending where you began, you’re faced with an unfamiliar pathway somewhere else entirely. The maze is impossible; you’re trapped in an always-expanding infinity.

Rozendaal describes his work as trying for an “intensification of perception.”

And it seems as if he truly has found this perfect balance between the mind numbing and the meditative, leaving us poised for some sort of Internet revelation.

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Footnotes Rebecca Schultz 1. Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author.” Aspen 5-6 (1967) 2. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Partisan Review (1939) 3. Bois, Yve-Alain. “Whose Formalism?” The Art Bulletin (March 1996) Guston, Philip. Ancient Painter (1973), oil on canvas. Saint Louis Art Museum, Bequest of Musa Guston. Copyright Estate of Philip Guston.

Dürer, Albrecht. Self-Portrait (1500), oil on wood panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

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VOLUME 5 No. 2 SPRING 2012

Staff Editors in Chief:

Ilana Harris-Babou Robert Liles

Associate Editors:

Alexandra Dennett Susanna Koetter Emma Sokoloff

Design:

Susanna Koetter Andrew Nelson

Special Thanks to the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale History of Art Department, UOFC, and Yale Printing and Publishing Services

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Antiquaries in Britain

Making History

Gazes Returned

1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut Tuesday–Saturday 10–5; Sunday 12–5 Admission is free · 877 brit art · britishart.yale.edu

art in focus Yale Student Guide Exhibition April 13–July 29, 2012

The Technical Examination of Early English Panel Painting

February 2–May 27, 2012 Organized by the Society of Antiquaries of London in association with the Yale Center for British Art and the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College

ya l e c e n t e r f o r b r i t i s h a r t left Roll Chronicle (detail, Noah’s Ark), mid-fifteenth century, illumination with colored inks and tints on vellum rolls, By Permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London. right Unknown artist, A Lady and Her Two Children (detail), 1624, oil on English oak constructed of three vertical boards, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

www.yale.edu/dimensions