CANON Visual and Critical Studies 2017
INTRODUCTION
Canon is an unruly journal. Created by first year Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) students, it is meant, in part, to be an exercise in collaboration and production involving a large number of participants. The parameters of Canon are left intentionally vague, allowing room for innovation and experimentation within the amorphous field of visual and critical studies. Necessarily, the content and form are to be decided by the cohort on a year-to-year basis. In the past, Canon has taken many different forms, themes, and contained a wide variety of content: a traditional journal, a pamphlet, a website, and an accordion-fold zine are just a few of the many past examples. As one might expect, for the 2017 issue of Canon there were vastly different ideas with differing motivations; all 13 members of the cohort had their own conception of what Canon was and how they wanted it to be materialized. One of the most intriguing challenges of this project was to consolidate them all into one working concept. But we are here and we accomplished the task. In our planning, we split the production into two parts: a question and answer portion among colleagues and the individual creation of a personal object that recontextualize those answers. Serving not only as a glimpse into our own personal
practices, the question and answer model serves as a way for the reader to understand our own similarities and differences and, therefore, understand each of us on a deeper level. Based on alphabetical order, starting with Corinne Butta and ending with Celia Wickham, we asked the following person on the list (provided at the end of this booklet) two questions informed by the interviewee’s interests. The results are 13 personal texts which relate our own concerns and personal modes of production. The texts consist of a wide range of media such as images, video, creative writing, and scholarly writing. The next stage of Canon took the form of object-making that aimed to recontextualize the question and answer portion. Taking our cues from the readings of Research and Production, taught and informed by Joseph Grigely and his own artistic practice, we decided to take on the issue of what it means for objects, texts, and images to be disseminated to a wider readership. Who holds authority over the meaning of a specific text, if there is one central authority? What does it mean to look in different ways? What does it mean to read in different ways? How does context affect meaning? All of these questions were raised in class and we decided to continue exploring them within the pages of Canon. The 13 objects you see before you, one for each student, were created to better understand these questions. Each of us placed all of the responses within a found publication, a second context, outside of the framework they were originally produced. The found objects have been used, with folded pages, coffee stains, rips, ink fingerprints, defects that result from everyday use. They bring a quality of an artifact where the residue of the personal collides with the public material culture which circulates and frames our historical context. As with the question and answer process, each object is a personal document that is informed by our own artistic practice and interests therein. By taking the initiative to recontextualize each of our personal answers, what results is an example of how a reader creates meaning through looking and reading. The issue that comes along with recontextualization, of how meaning is created, could be considered the overarching theme for the 2017 issue of Canon. Dissemination of concepts and texts take place at every step of the production process: from translating the concepts and concerns of the other into questions to ask them, to answering those questions, to individually recontextualizing those answers into an object that, in part, responded to them. We have now reached the moment of presenta-
tion, when the control over meaning has been lost, when that task is given emphatically to you, the reader. Each object is an invitation to examine, handle, read, and look not only with the above questions in mind but, also, with your own questions. Within the framework each object creates, we invite you to create your own meaning and form your own connections to these objects. They come out of a personal place in each of us with the encouragement that they affect something personal in you; that you, the reader, make personal connections to our personal connections. Hopefully they will spark the same creative energy that Canon has sparked in us. They are as much yours as they are ours.
BIOGRAPHIES
Corinne Butta is from Baltimore, Maryland. She will graduate with a BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Her work focuses mainly on the representation of “crisis� in moving image.
For Canon 2017, her edition explores transparency, taking the dialogue between its participants as a starting place to explore the ways in which the text has organized and is in conversation with itself as much as its reader.
Eduardo J. Chaidez is from Oakland, CA. He majored in both Art Prac-
tice and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently a MA candidate in Visual and Critical Studies, he is also employed as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism at SAIC. Primarily focused on oil painting, Eduardo is interested in the multivalence of representation through the lenses of Art Practice, Art History, and Ethnic Studies. Painting provides an entryway into discussions about race, class, history and politics while simultaneously filling a personal void created by experiences as a first generation Chicano. His work is contextually driven
while in conversation with history as a way to situate and understand who he is, where he came from, and why he’s here. Through this introspection Eduardo aims to produce understandings of self, community, and the experiences of being a person of color in the US. In his Canon edition, Eduardo explores the representation and construction of space, place and self-reflection in mapping practices.
Amanda Ellison-Goldenberg holds a BA in Philosophy from the Uni-
versity of Toronto. She is currently an MA candidate in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute where she also works as a Writing Fellow and Student Editorial Assistant. For Canon 2017 she has contributed a computer programming manual aimed at beginners looking to plot astronomical coordinates on their home system. The endeavour, which sees the collaboratively generated content printed on clear matte labels and pasted over the logic portions of the text, is meant to disrupt traditional attempts to “read” the manual as such, forcing the viewer to make new, possibly unforeseen, connections.
Evan Graham is from Adrian, Michigan. He holds a BA in Art History
from the University of Notre Dame. Along with studying for an MA in VCS, he works as a teaching assistant for the VCS department as well as being an assistant to the Directors of SAIC’s Fashion Resource Center. Evan’s interests lie with how we experience the world through visual and textual products. More specifically, he is interested in the body, both mental and physical, as it emerges from the field of fashion and garment. His practice is comprised entirely of writing, both scholarly, creative, and above all personal. Evan envisages his writing as a personal document of his own experience that serves as an invitation for readers to continue with their own observations and connections. For Canon, he examines the role the fashion magazine, with its connections to garment and celebrity, has on conceptions of ourselves.
Siamack Hajimohamad B-I-O-V-C-S Juan Carlos Herrera is a visual artist and writer born in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2007 he received his BA degree in Literature from Universidad
Central de Venezuela (Central University of Venezuela) and in 2009 an MA in Spanish from The University of Iowa. Currently, he is pursuing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, works as photo-editor for Fnewsmagazine and is co-director of a private gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood dedicated to contemporary visual arts. For Canon, Juan collaborates with a comic book intervention. He appropriates the visual discourse of a comic produced in the US and translated into Spanish for consumption in Latin America, to talk about his photo documentary work with Drag Kings and BDSM culture. Through this reappropriation he aims to problematize one of the colonizing visual discourses that has been part of the asymmetrical cultural exchange between the United States and Latin American. As an individual that stands amidst these two cultural spaces, Juan explores the efforts to ostracize the LGBTQ and BDSM community in both cultures, which serve as a connecting thread for the formation of national identities in The Americas.
Stephanie Koch received a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Currently, she is pursuing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute.
Primarily focused on image-based research, she considers the relationship between language, history, and culture: narratives which promote nation-building and how images can elicit an emotional attachment and create collectives. For Canon 2017, she found a 1868 book The History of the Great Republic from a Christian Stand-point. Between the pages, a version of the United States’s history resides, a story which underlies many of the American beliefs and views that create our current position. With a scalpel, she cleanly removed the pages and printed our own words and images over the text. With silk-cotton thread, she stitched the pages back into the book to reframe our stories with that of a national history. By layering our words over that of the author’s, by placing our images alongside the revered portraits of our founding fathers, she aims to recontextualize our texts within a framework of the Christian fundamentalism which guides this country. It is the hope that a latent story of our country’s history is revealed, a present and enduring story at odds with the common narrative of discovery, manifest destiny, and slavery.
Tiara Nord has a BA in Art History and a Certificate in LGBT Studies from
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently pursuing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies with an interest in the body and video art. She is exploring the role of the body in shaping our attraction to the aesthetics that defy traditional standards of beauty, spanning from the macabre to technology. Her choice for Canon includes a U-Matic tape found at a thrift store and, by chance, its contents on YouTube--a 1985 R&B music video. She creates a coexistence between past and present by superimposing the Canon dialogue over the video. As a commentary on the current nature of conversation, she exploits our decreased attention span and evolved sense of visual multitasking.
Aslı Özdoyuran was born in Istanbul, Turkey, Asli lives and works in
Chicago. She received her BFA with an emphasis on sculpture in 2016 and is working towards a BA in Visual and Critical Studies in 2017. Perhaps an obstinate cry, like the tangerine skin that stitches itself with its own pith, or the reorientation of swimming pool lanes that playfully help me formulate: does my body shape the space or the space shapes my body? Starting with this question, I focus on the subtle elements of my vibrant surroundings, paying attention to the language of things and their conversation with the human.
Joshi Radin investigates questions of power, empathy and ideology
through images, text and performance. She is an MA candidate and New Artist Society Scholar in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she completed her MFA as a Merit Scholar in the Photography Department in 2016. The collaborative artist-research trio, A Program for Plants, with Linda Tegg MFA ‘16 and Brian M. John MFA ‘16, embarked on an exploration into the possibilities for human empathy with non-human kinds through the support of a Shapiro Center EAGER grant. Over the course of generating multiple platforms for engagement, APP conducted a workshop to learn a portion of Yvonne Rainer’s iconic minimalist work, Trio A, of which a version was subsequently performed for various plant audiences. For Canon 2017, I contributed a sequence of still images from my performance of Trio A: Horticultural Fragment for a plant audience at the Lincoln Park Conser-
vatory as a response to questions regarding the hope or possibilities for human empathy.
John A. Stevens was raised and educated in the Midwest. After attain-
ing a degree in English Lit. and Philosophy from William Jewell College in 2013, he moved to NYC to pursue a career in the arts. Stevens’ work hijacks a modernist vocabulary to explore the postmodern subject as a visual body within the panoptic and indexical systems of our spectral society. Through photography and traditional media Stevens explores his own identity and the nebulous afflictions it suffers under the dynamic and alienating influences of contemporary society. His edition of Canon is a memorial to the field of Visual Critical Studies. Cremated, the Canon becomes almost unrecognizable except for fragments of text still visible in the ashes. Under those conditions the work achieves a true collective illegibility that cannot be differentiated and may instead be understood as a unique whole in which individual practices become a gesture of one meaning: a cannon of VCS as it exists in 2018. “We scatter the ashes of our future as a gesture to recognize and affirm our present conditions as subjects of a doomed civilization.”
Zach Vanes received a BA in English Literature and Film Studies from
DePauw University. Educational images inform his investigations into communication and identification. Often, this investigatory practice results in video and text. Well Bless My Soul, What’s Wrong With Me juxtaposes a parodic photo history with the personal histories of thirteen contributors. A children’s pastime adapted for savvy adults, Where’s Elvis incorporates history into a vaguely sardonic form of the I Spy and Where’s Waldo books. The parameters of the survey, 1977 - 1997, include events that influenced the childhoods of the contributors within this edition of canon. I wanted to explore where the novelty of each image begins and ends. Layering the contributors’ search for meaning over an image that demands searching seemed appropriate.
Celia Wickham holds a BA in Filmmaking from the Manchester School of Art in the UK, and is currently pursuing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
Celia engages with a variety of artistic practices and methods, including film, video, installation, collage, writing and performance, addressing notions of female identity, familial traces and the archiving of memory in her work. Celia is also the founder and editor of feminist arts publication Milk and Honey, and has curated a variety of events and exhibitions throughout the UK over the past several years. Through her contribution to Canon, Celia aims to examine gendered spaces of knowledge production and dissemination, provoking a re-construction of the ways in which we experience. Through the works’ ephemeral propositions, Celia aims to provide an entry point to a more experiential and disembodied realm of knowing.
QUESTIONS The following are the questions that accompany the responses found in every one of the 13 objects. They are listed here to give you a guide to further decode the objects.
Celia → Corinne Given your research into the visualized structures of “crisis,” how has this fed into your experience or response to the current political condition here in the US? In Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark which traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades, she comments in the introduction “inside the word emergency is the word emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.” Can you respond to this? Corinne → Eduardo What is the relationship between representation and reference in your painting practice? You mentioned the gaze in relation to making value judgements about what is seen/worth seeing. How do you see these ideas fitting into representational portraiture? Can a portrait have a gaze?
How do the dynamics of personal and collective histories come to bear on your practice? Eduardo → Amanda You’ve talked about the concept of “radical destabilization” as something that has always been of interest to you. Could you elaborate more on this concept and talk about how radical destabilization is important to/for/in research? Could you list some key philosophers/authors/works for you? Amanda → Evan A case could be made that high fashion is inaccessible and divorced from the struggles of the everyday – despite this, your work seems to emphasize the instrumentality of the act of looking. What do you take the merits of this kind of relationship to be? What are your thoughts on celebrity culture? Evan → Siamack In your writing, you choose found postcards that prominently feature photographs that are connected with moments in Iranian history. How did you come to find these photographs? Why were you personally drawn to write about them? Siamack → Juan Unknown Juan → Stephanie For some time, in academia we have understood that national and racial identities are constructed by textual and visual narrative discourses approved or sanctioned by the status quo, discourses that are circulated in popular media. In an era where we have the perception of having more control of the construction of our personal and group identities, but in
which we have witnessed a resurgence of intolerant discourse, where and how do you think it is more effective for black and brown bodies in this country to (re)build their historical image and combat the narratives coming from the radicalized white-nationalist discourses? How do you address the problem of confusing the perception of more control in the construction of our cultural and personal narratives with combating the dominant discourses with the political power to affect our immediate present? Stephanie → Tiara You’re all about the body and experience, but in thinking about what drives you to those questions, can you speak to how your own body and your own experience led you to these interests? You’re interested in the aesthetics of negative affects (i.e. disgust, fear, pain). Also, public and private experience in regards to bodily functions. Of all media you turn to film, and not even the making of film, but the process of editing to think about these concepts. Why use film, and again, specifically editing to represent, share, and investigate the body and its experiences? What do you feel is the connection between body and video? Tiara → Asli Your work is concerned with the physical limits of the body and its limitations in a public space. The body is limited biologically and socially, that is, it contends with itself and the constraints of society. How do you explore these limitations in your work? Asli → Joshi I am very moved by the meditation on empathy in your work, and I can’t help but think of the time we live in. More than ever, we long for empathy. I guess what I would like to pose to you is: what is the relationship of empathy to action? And, where do you place your deed in this spectrum? As a maker and a thinker, how do you define the conditions of work? Joshi → John I’m curious about how you understand the relationship between abstraction and the politics of a subject, or how you navigate the politics of
queerness and identity through abstraction. What might be the reasons for eliding, evading, or approaching a question indirectly? Are there artists you look to who are working between these questions of the political, social and sexual using abstract forms? Where do you find pleasure? John → Zach 1. Who am I? 2. Who are you? Zach → Celia What would you say the human purpose is? What would you rather be, if you had the choice?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Joseph Grigely for the immense help and guidance at all points of this process. This would not have been as productive without you. Thank you to Annette Lepique and Teena McClelland for the immense administrative support, your knowledge of Canon was a huge help. Thank you to Shawn Smith for assistance with the budget and emotional support. Finally thank you to the VCS department, including all faculty and staff, for giving us the opportunity and the funding to make this project happen. Exploration and innovation are key to the educational project of VCS and we are grateful that you allowed us room to create. The Department of Visual and Critical Studies MAVCS Class of 2017 The School of The Art Institute of Chicago Editor: Evan Graham Design: John A. Stevens Cover: Eduardo J. Chaidez Illustration: Cow thing from a book in class Published in March of 2017 Service Bureau @ SAIC 37 S. Wabash Ave. Chicago, IL 60603 Edition of 100 Instagram: @VisualCriticalStudies