: R A W NENT
A ict l M f n R o E C l P of Globa The Age
January 29–March 7, 2015 GUEST CURATOR Pamela Allara
EVENTS INTRODUCTION If one is to judge from the artistic record provided by museums, human history has been synonymous with constant warfare. Images of armed men marching forth to defend a given regime or battle against it are ubiquitous. In the century since World War I, called ‘the war to end all wars,’ battles have raged on around the globe. Countries continue to devote countless resources and employ military force to establish political dominance, promote religious ideals, and impose their systems of government. In response, as the one remaining superpower, the United States has based its economy on maintaining military dominance. However, the goals of our military interventions remain vague, as the many conflicts surfacing world-wide rarely have clear lines of demarcation between right and wrong, totalitarianism, or freedom. In addition, due to increasing mechanization and specularization, the very nature of warfare has changed, further challenging the concept of a ‘just war.’ Contemporary artists have addressed this distressingly complex and morally ambiguous situation in a variety of challenging ways. “Permanent War” organizes their approaches into five themes: Mechanized Bodies and Combat as Performance are presented in the Mrs. E Ross Anderson Auditorium; Living in a War Zone, Conflict as Media Entertainment, and Landscape as Cemetery are installed in the Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery.
ABOUT THE CURATOR Pamela Allara is an art historian, curator, and critic. The author of a monograph on Alice Neel, Allara taught modern and contemporary art for many years at Tufts University and Brandeis University. Her recent research has investigated social activism in contemporary South African art. In 2012, she organized “The Boston-Joburg Connection: Collaboration and Exchange at Artist Proof Studio, 1983-2012” for the Tufts University Art Gallery. Her articles have been published in African Arts, Nka and de Arte, among others. She is currently a Visiting Researcher in the African Studies Center at Boston University.
OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, January 29, 5–7 pm Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery and Mrs. E. Ross Anderson Auditorium ARTIST TALKS Monday, February 2, 12:30–1:30 pm Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery Bonnie Donohue and Bill Burke discuss their work in the exhibition CURATORIAL PRESENTATION + TOUR WITH CURATOR PAMELA ALLARA Thursday, February 12, 6:30–7:30pm Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery and Mrs. E. Ross Anderson Auditorium POETRY READING WITH STEVE DALACHINSKY Thursday, February 19, 6:30–7:30 pm Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery ARTIST TALKS Monday, February 23, 12:30–1:30 pm Mrs. E. Ross Anderson Auditorium Claire Beckett and Ken Hruby discuss their work in the exhibition GALLERY HOURS: Monday–Saturday: 10 am–5 pm Thursday: 10 am–8 pm Closed Sundays and holidays ON THE COVER Claire Beckett, Marine Lance Corporal Nicole Camala Veen playing the role of an Iraqi nurse in the town of Wadi Al-Sahara, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, CA from the Simulating Iraq Series, 2008. Archival ink jet print. Courtesy of the artist and the Carroll and Sons Gallery.
PAUL STOPFORTH No matter how powerful they may seem, empires eventually fall, leaving behind their once seemingly impregnable fortresses. As an activist artist in apartheid South Africa, where censorship was severe, Stopforth made some of the strongest oppositional images of the era, among them Elegy (for Steve Biko), 1981, based on photographs of the Black Consciousness leader’s tortured body. Looking back on that era as a recent citizen of the United States, Stopforth signals the internal contradictions of totalitarian rule with an impressively constructed but functionally useless fort from the era of the Anglo Boer War at the turn of the 20th century. According to the artist: “Empire Building is based on a number of stone forts built by the British during the Anglo Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902) in an attempt to control the tactical movements of Boer guerilla fighters. The length of the fort has been extended and distorted by the rooftop being repeated at the bottom of the structure thereby enclosing the whole of this impossible building within itself… with no clearly defined exit. The image is a metaphor for the ongoing histories of powerful countries that in their search for economic control over raw materials such as rubber, diamonds, gold, oil, etc., invade other countries and through superior armaments and military force take over these natural resources and the local inhabitants. These ‘empire builders’ make no attempts to engage or negotiate with the people and the countries they occupy, and as a result they are doomed to engage in never ending conflict.” Born in Johannesburg, Stopforth left South Africa for Boston in the late 1980s. He has taught at Harvard University and is currently on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since 1971 he has exhibited his work in galleries and museums in South Africa, the United States and Europe. His work is held in many public and private collections. www.paulstopforth.com
Paul Stopforth, Empire Building, 2003. Mixed media on panel.
ES: I D O B D E VISION ECHANIZ OLOGICAL
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FROM
CHN ODY TO TE B D E R O THE ARM
PAUL EMMANUEL “I would like to say that I am committed to deconstructing limiting cultural assumptions concerning masculinity. But the truth is there is no such cleverness…I am not sure if my work comes from a profound intellectual grasp of social realities. It comes out of being a sensual participant in the world…” 3SAI: A Rite of Passage explores transitions in male identity through the head shaving ritual of young military recruits at the Third South African Infantry Battalion (3SAI) in Kimberley, South Africa. The construction of masculinity through military indoctrination and the loss of human potential that process entails has been Emmanuel’s dominant theme. The head shaving becomes a symbolic castration that prepares them for the rigid routines they experience, as their potential selves—expressed by their t-shirts—fly into the air in the intercut installation, The Lightweights (2007). Born in 1969 in Kabwe, Zambia, Emmanuel now lives in Johannesburg. A graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, Emmanuel was the first recipient of an Ampersand Foundation residency in New York in 1997. In 2004, he mounted the first of his site-specific installations, The Lost Men. The Lost Men Grahamstown consisted of banners depicting the artist’s body embossed with the names of Xhosa and British soldiers who died in the Xhosa Wars, (1820s–1850). The Lost Men Mozambique followed in 2007, and most recently, he created The Lost Men France (2014), at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, as part of the commemoration of the centennial of World War I. His solo museum exhibition “Transitions” traveled to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in 2010. 3SAI: A Rite of Passage won the 2009 jury prize at Edinburgh’s 4th Africa-InMotion International Film Festival, and the 2010 Best Experimental Film Award at the 5th Sardinia International Film Festival.
http://www.paulemmanuel.net/
Paul Emmanuel, 3SAI: A Rite of Passage, 2008. Stills from high definition digital video. 14 min. Courtesy of the artist.
ADAM HARVEY “Collectively, Stealth Wear is a vision for fashion that addresses the rise of surveillance, the power of those who survey, and the growing need to exert control over what we are slowly losing: our privacy.”
TREVOR PAGLEN
Harvey’s range of anti-drone clothing was created to hide the wearer from heat detection technologies. The disjunction between a fashion statement and protective garments is at once jarring and humorous. According to the artist, “Conceptually, these garments align themselves with the rationale behind the traditional hijab and burqa: to act as ‘the veil which separates man or the world from God,’ replacing God with drone…Stealth Wear explores the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance.” Harvey lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is an artist, designer and technologist, with a focus on surveillance and privacy technologies. In 2010 he earned a masters at the Tisch School of Arts, New York University’s program, where he studied physical computing. Prior to NYU, he earned a degree in Integrative Arts with a background in mechanical engineering from Pennsylvania State University. Harvey runs the Privacy Gift Shop, an online marketplace for counter-surveillance and privacy products. He is currently working on the Surveillance Trend Report, a bi-monthly newsletter, and a commission from Rhizome.
http://ahprojects.com
Adam Harvey, Anti-Drone Burqa from Stealth Wear Series, 2013. Silver-plated nylon exterior, black nylon interior. Designed in collaboration with Johanna Bloomfield. Model: Ashley Tate. Photo by Adam Harvey. 30 x 30 inches. © Adam Harvey. Courtesy of the artist.
KEN HRUBY
Paglen lives and works in New York City. He holds a B.A. from U.C Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. In his investigations of state secrecy, military symbology and visuality, his work blurs lines between science, contemporary art, and journalism. A prolific author and lecturer, his books include Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009) and The Last Pictures (2012).
Hruby recounts that until the 1960s the medical and command staffs in the United States military performed unannounced, pre-dawn visual inspections of the troops in order to control the spread of STDs. The “short arm” referred of course to the penis, one of the many terms for male genitalia, including “plumbing.” The men stood on their footlockers to make inspection for ‘leakage’ easier for their commanders. In Hruby’s caustically ironic installation, the hybrid plumbing fixtures are rigid and immobile, the insignia of maleness transformed into lifeless hardware. “For reasons that become clear only after serving on active duty in the military for an extended period of time, the use of correct nomenclature was imperative. It insured that there was minimal misunderstanding when events moved fast and communications got muddled in the “fog of war…” The rules were pounded in from the first days of basic training; one never called their weapon a “gun;” it was a rifle. To insure that you never repeated the error of your ways, if you happened to forget the distinction, the Drill Sergeant would require you to hold your rifle out at arm’s length with one hand and grab your crotch with the other while reciting, “this is my rifle, this is my gun, One is for fighting’ the other’s for fun,” while alternating squeezes to the appropriate places.”
From a 2014 lecture, “Art as Evidence,” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt: “What I want out of art is things that help us see the historical moment we are living in…learning how to see secrecy.” From Blank Spots on the Map: “Creating secret geographies has meant…[among other things] making the nation’s economy dependent upon military spending, and turning our own history into a state secret.” secret.”
http://www.paglen.com
Born at a cavalry post in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Hruby graduated from West Point with an infantry commission in l961. For the following twenty-one years, he served in a wide variety of command and staff positions, including advisor to infantry and ranger battalions in Vietnam and two combat tours on the DMZ in Korea. Upon completion of military service, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he received a prestigious Traveling Scholars Award and is on the continuing faculty in sculpture.
http://www.kenhruby.com
Drone Vision presents a stream of unencrypted video that was intercepted by an amateur satellite hacker from an open channel on a commercial communications satellite, permitting us to see if not to understand classified information. Numerous American surveillance aircraft and drones are piloted from the ground; at least 400 remote control drone strikes have been directed at Pakistan in the past few years alone. What is the relation between mechanical vision and human volition? In an interview at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, Paglen has noted that, “…there are enormous economic, social and political infrastructures that need to be in place to create and sustain something like classified flight testing. Over time, when you build these types of infrastructures, you end up developing a state within the state that has very different rules and different ways of operating than what we would think of as a kind of democratic state.”
Ken Hruby, Short Arm Inspection, 1993. Detail from mixed media installation with plumbing parts. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Trevor Paglen, Drone Vision, 2010. Still from video. 5 min. 20 sec. Courtesy of the artist.
CE: N A M R O F PER MUST ADOPT A ROLE, S A T A B M E CO , EVERYON R ATOR. DLESS WA N E F O A INTERROG R R O IM T IN AN E ER, VIC EM FIGHT AMONG TH
LAMIA JOREIGE Joreige has described the repeated actions in Replay as a metaphor for “Violence as rupture… projected onto any act, at that singular instant when the real and the non-real are indiscernible.”
CLAIRE BECKETT These images document the training of Unites States combat troops in simulated Iraqi and Afghani villages. Constructed in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin and other venues, the villages are designed to prepare the soldiers for insurgent uprisings, suicide bombings, and other terrorist maneuvers. Returning soldiers and Hollywood stuntmen play the role of Iraqi soldiers and civilians. According to a New York Times article from 2006, “The troops who come here are at the heart of a vast shift in American war-fighting strategy, a multibillion-dollar effort to remodel the Army on the fly…from its historic emphasis on big army-to-army battles to the more subtle tactics of defeating a guerrilla insurgency.” The recruits in Beckett’s subtle portraits seem to be struggling to adopt their new roles. With respect to the portraits, Beckett asks: “What does it feel like for a young soldier to have their first encounter with profound cultural difference in this environment? What is the experience of a refugee, or of a veteran suffering from PTSD, when reenacting the context of their real life trauma?” Beckett received her BA in Anthropology from Kenyon College and her MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, and she has received grants from the Magenta Foundation, Photolucida’s Critical Mass Juried Selection, and the New England Institute of Art.
http://clairebeckett.com/
COCO FUSCO
Claire Beckett, Above Medina Jabal Town, National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA, 2009. Archival ink jet print. 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and the Carroll and Sons Gallery.
Fusco describes Operation Atropos as follows: “In July 2005, I took a course led by former US military interrogators designed for people in the private sector who want to learn their techniques for extracting information. I took a group of six women with me and filmed our workshop…The training involved an immersive simulation of being prisoners of war: we were ambushed, captured, stripped, searched, thrown in the pen and subject to several interrogations. Afterwards, in a classroom scenario, the tactics used against us were analyzed and we were taught to do what had been done to us.” Atropos was one of the Three Fates in Greek Mythology. It was she “who chose the mechanism of death and ended the life of each mortal by cutting their thread with her ‘abhorred shears.’” 1 .In Operation Atropos, U.S. military interrogators adopt the role of Fate. The video suggests that torture and abuse are not ‘isolated incidents,’ but government policies carried out routinely. In this military course in do-it-yourself torture, Fusco and six friends are submitted to a milder version of what has been inflicted on our captured combatants. Perhaps because images of torture and abuse are standard components of TV dramas and video games, undergoing a course in torture techniques can seem like an interesting leisure-time activity. Fusco lives and works in New York City. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, she received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University. Widely recognized for performance videos such as The Couple in the Cage (1993) and A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006–08), Fusco is currently the MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT, where she is working on a new book entitled Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropos
http://www.cocofusco.com/
Using both archival documents and fictitious elements, Joreige reflects on the relation between individual stories and the collective history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-90), as well as the war between Israel and Hezbollah (2006). In her installation, photographic fragments from the Lebanese wars are reenacted by two anonymous performers, a man and a woman. Separated by the sea, the man never stops dying and the woman never stops running, reminding us that war destroys civilian life. During conflict, fear and death are endlessly repeated/replayed.
Lamia Joreige, Replay, 2000. Stills from three-channel video installation with text and book: La Guerre du Liban: Images et Chronologie. (Dar Al-Massira, 1978). Courtesy of the artist and the Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York.
Born in Lebanon, Joreige lives and works in Beirut. She received her BFA in painting and filmmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. The co-founder and co-director of Beirut Art Center, she has presented her work widely, including at the Tate Modern, The Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan, and most recently in the 2014 exhibition “Here and Elsewhere: (contemporary art from and about the Arab world)” at the New Museum in New York. Joreige is the author of Time and the Other (2004) and Ici et peut-être ailleurs (short fiction; 2003).
http://www.lamiajoreige.com
Coco Fusco, Operation Atropos, 2006. Still from single channel video. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Coco Fusco/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
NE: O Z R A DS. W A N R NEVER EN I A W , G A E N R I A LIV CONFLICT A FORMER
Penjweny was born in Penjwin, Iraq and lives in Baghdad, Iraq. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Penjweny moved from Kurdistan to Baghdad, documenting the lives of Iraqis during and after the war. One of the region’s more prominent photographers and filmmakers, his work has addressed the psychological impact of the decades of war and its devastation on Iraqi civilians. In his series, I Wish (2012), he photographed individuals in rural areas expressing dreams they would never be able to fulfill; in After War (2001), he made street photographs that registered the restricted lives of civilians. His photographic series, Saddam Is Here, shown at the New Museum in 2014, consists of portraits of individuals in their homes with a photograph of Saddam Hussein covering their faces.
S LIVING IN
N FOR CIVILIA
BILL BURKE Although the United States played a major role in the victory against the Axis powers in WWII, subsequent interventions across the globe have failed to achieve political stability or democracy. Burke has returned to the scenes of the United States’ Asian wars, meeting with and befriending former enemies. Through texts, collages and photographic images, the artworks in Mine Fields chronicle his second trip to Southeast Asia in the 1980s to locate members of the Khmer Rouge (1972–75). A decade after the Khmer Rouge fled Cambodia, leaving in its wake a horrific genocide, its soldiers (and their families) proudly display their weapons and terrorist strategies.
www.jamalpenjweny.com
T: N E M N I A T R EPLAY, E T N E L INSTANT R A A I U IN D T N E O C IN TS HIDDEN. S TRUE COS S DISASTER CT AS M
CONFLI
, IT NT BAT RANGE YCLE PRESE M C O S C W F E O N T U -7 THE 24 THOSE O AGE, WHEN INMENT FOR TA R E T N E IN A MEDIA F ORM O ECOMES A F CONFLICT B
From I Want to Take Picture (2007): “Bill Burke grew up—like so many young boys—groomed for war. With the aid of movies, magazines, and TV, he envisioned himself somehow, somewhere, as being in combat. Yet when he was of military age he became terrified of it, and was relieved when he failed his draft physical. In 1982 Burke decided to go to Thailand and Cambodia to give himself the Southeast Asia experience that he managed to escape in the sixties.” A faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Burke has received NEA grants and a John Simon Guggenheim grant for his work. Between 1982 and 2001, he photographed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, former French colonies and sites of US-led wars. The work resulted in two artist’s books I Want To Take Picture, (1987/2007) and Mine Fields, (1995), both published by Nexus Press. Subsequently, Burke has published a third book, Autrefois Maison Privée that traces the political and economic histories of that region through its architecture.
HARUN FAROCKI
Bill Burke, Abandoned U.S. Consulate, Danang, 1994 Gelatin silver print from a Polaroid negative 16” x 20” Courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
http://www.binhfoto.com/
Farocki has noted that, “In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer.” Establishing a critical dialogue with images, image-making, and the institutions that produce them, Farocki’s work reveals increasingly complex relationships between people and machines, vision and violence. Serious Games II is the second in a four-part video series in which Farocki examined the use of virtual reality in training troops or helping them to deal with trauma. Like Claire Beckett, Harocki went to the virtual villages established by the U.S. army to train recruits. Born in then German-annexed Czechoslovakia, Farocki (1944–2014) studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. Beginning in 1966, he created over 120 productions for television or cinema, and since 1996, his work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Documenta 12 in 2007. Until his untimely death last year, he was a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His work addresses the links between technology, politics, and coercion.
JAMAL PENJWENY Exhibited in the Iraqi Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Another World documents the clandestine activities of Iraqi men forced to smuggle liquor and arms across the border into Iran in order to earn a living. Even if they are able to evade the police, they endure rejection by family members for handling liquor and smelling like their pack animals. Without hope for gainful employment and lacking selfrespect, these bitter and unhappy young men are part of the continuing collateral damage of the Iraq Wars.
From Trevor Paglen’s tribute to Harun Farocki, Operational Images, e-flux journal, #59, 11/2014: “Something new was happening in the world of images, something that the theoretical tools of visual studies and art history couldn’t account for: the machines were starting to see for themselves. Harun Farocki was one of the first to notice that image-making machines and algorithms were poised to inaugurate a new visual regime. Instead of simply representing things in the world, the machines and their images were starting to “do” things in the world. In fields from marketing to warfare, human eyes were becoming anachronistic. It was, as Farocki would famously call it, the advent of ‘operational images.’”
With respect to his New Leaders series (2011), Penjweny wrote: “Did it ever cross your mind, having an animal to be representing you in politics and which you can vote for in an election?...Usually, politicians give promises, to win an election or to hold onto power. And when they get in power they abuse it in a way or another. Would animals do the same way?”
http://farocki-film.de/ Jamal Penjweny, Another World, 2013. Still from video. 16 min. 36 sec. Courtesy of the artist.
Harun Farocki, Serious Games II: Three Dead, 2010. Still from single-channel video. 8 min. Color, sound. Courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York.
RICHARD MOSSE In Mosse’s documentary Killcam, wheelchair-bound Iraq War veterans in a Long Island hospital entertain themselves with video war games, perhaps as a form of therapy providing a satisfying narrative of victory. The interspersed leaked footage of actual combat in Iraq provides a narrative of their experiences that, for the viewer, merges trauma with play. Killcam speaks directly to the nature of global contemporary conflict, which is fought with media images as much as it is waged on the ground. The old rules of war no longer apply in this era of media spectacle. Once released from the hospital, the veterans may well be sent to yet another front in the constantly shifting ‘war against terror.’
CEMETERY:
E SCA S A E P BEARING TH A , IN C A S R R E D T LAN NDONED S, JUST ABA , NO GRAVES
Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, Mosse received his BA in English literature from Kings College London, a postgraduate diploma in fine art from Goldsmith’s College, and his MFA in photography from Yale University. His work addresses the painful realities of war through distancing techniques such as the use of infrared film that challenge ‘calcified mass-media narratives’. Mosse’s six-channel video installation, The Enclave, which represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, engages with the endless conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in which 5.4 million people have died since 1998. His previous work has chronicled the devastation of the wars in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere.
MARK TRIBE
Richard Mosse, Killcam, 2008. Stills from video. 5 min 52 sec. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Mark Tribe’s work explores the intersection of media technology and politics. The project Rare Earth includes photographs and still videos of landscapes found in combat video games. These unspoiled landscapes could be considered an extension of the tradition of bucolic landscape painting and photography in 19th century American art. At that time, such landscapes reinforced the idea of America as a virgin land free of the corruption of Europe, a vision that permitted the US to see itself “as a redemptive force in a world scarred by European imperialism in World War I,” according to historian David Reynolds. Today these seductive settings serve to further aestheticize the spectacle of combat, lifting war above the realm of politics or morality.
www.marktribe.net
Arnold’s recent photographic series and monograph, Topography As Fate, is based on The Desert War: The Classic Trilogy on the North African Campaign 1940–43 by Alan Moorehead (1944). Collaborating with battlefield expert Steven Hamilton, Arnold used WWII military maps to locate the critical sites of the North African campaign, in areas that remain inaccessible geographically and often dangerous. During this arduous undertaking, he discovered that even after 70 years, evidence of the battles still litter the landscapes, ironic memorials to those who fought and died there. In contrast to the lush but constructed landscapes in Tribe’s Rare Earth, which more closely resemble the ideal of a cemetery as a public park, (exemplified in Boston by Forest Hills), these landscapes appear dry and infertile: a natural cemetery. The images presented here were made in Libya, where conflict has resumed after 2011’s Arab Spring. From Topography as Fate: “Thousands of miles from home, largely untraveled and ignorant of lands and peoples outside his [the soldier’s] home country, he was dropped onto the shores of what must have seemed to him a dangerous and alien environment—his understanding of the land limited to stereotype, myth and the relevant army field manual.”
In an article in The New York Times on February 21, 2013, Tribe stated that the images and videos in Rare Earth constitute “…a new genre of landscape representation that is freighted and fraught with complex agendas having to do with violence and power, preparedness, self-defense, camaraderie and manhood...It is interesting that most game publishers invest tremendous resources in producing beautiful, vivid, lush landscapes as backdrops for violent conflict…They seem to see nature as the ultimate stage on which to perform acts of aggression.” Tribe received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. The Chair of the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he maintains a studio in Long Island City. The author of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (2010), and New Media Art (2006), he founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
IAL
NO MEMOR
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Mosse describes himself as “an artist who works in war zones.”
www.richardmosse.com/
EN. N FORGOTT
E BEE S THAT HAV IE R O T IS H F RS O
Mark Tribe, Grunder Hill Road from Rare Earth Series, 2012. Inkjet print on paper. 24 x 38 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Arnold is a photographer, filmmaker, artist, and teacher. He graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1995, where he has also taught as an adjunct professor and in 2013 earned a Traveling Fellowship. Recently, he has been a Visiting Lecturer at Columbia University.
www.matthewarnoldphotography.com
Matthew Arnold, Artillery Emplacement, Bunker Z84, Wadi Zitoune Battlefield, Libya, 2012 from Topography as Fate: North Africa Battlefields of World War II Series. Archival pigment prints. 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
SIG BANG SCHMIDT AND STEVE DALACHINSKY The artist and poet first began to collaborate when Schmidt had a studio in New York City (1991–96). Their recent book, Flying Home: a 21st Century View on World War I (2015) includes a selection of the images. Although there were few photojournalists covering WWI, Schmidt was able to locate various archives online, which served as the source material for the paintings. The resulting haunting images and poems are both a moving memorial and a cry of outrage.
Bonnie Donohue, Bunker in a Storm, Vieques, Puerto Rico, 2005. Archival Digital Print. 15 x 45.4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
BONNIE DONOHUE A photographer and video artist whose work maps places of conflict, loss, and displacement, carefully researches and documents these locations over time. Her long-term project in Vieques, Puerto Rico at the end of the United States military era culminated in the large-scale public art event, Contested Territory: A Reclamation of the Island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. The exhibition took place in one of the munitions storage bunkers she had photographed in 2004–05, and included the photograph of the Squatter’s Shack shown here. The young boy in the photograph, now an old man, attended the exhibition. The landscape/cemetery is currently being resurrected, but its future use is in limbo.
“The land that I am photographing was under U.S. Navy jurisdiction for over 60 years, and is currently “undeveloped” in any conventional sense of the word. The Navy expropriated the property in 1941 and relinquished it, under relentless popular protest, in May 2003. Its unique Caribbean location and “unspoiled” nature has stimulated the appetites of speculators… Therefore, the current state of the landscape will never be the same again. I have seized this moment to document the transitory phase...” Donohue is a full time faculty member in Photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop, SUNY Buffalo. She has exhibited throughout the United States, in Europe, and most recently in Puerto Rico with her traveling exhibition, “Vieques: A Long Way Home” (2014).
www.smfa.edu/bonnie-donohue
According to Sig Bang Schmidt: “One aspect of the work I do is that I try to catch the uncertain relation between life and death. Another is the question of how to determine what we think “reality” is, or when do phenomena become “real” or “unreal”. I think digital over- painting opens a wider and more intimate view of photographic documentation. With bright colour and fragmentation I want to get the attention of the viewer, to look beyond an image. “ Steve Dalachinsky has written: “In the collaboration with Sig, what we try to show are the agonies of a specific (war-) period of time - the “karma” in this insanity of World War One. At the same time we hope that we have managed to transcend that era by creating a work of art that is both universal and timely.” Sig Bang Schmidt was born in Hockenheim, Germany and lives as an independent artist in Vienna, Austria. Originally a student of physics at Freie Universität Berlin, he has expressed his passion for the nature of reality through works of science and art. He has contributed to group exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Vienna. Poet/collagist Steve Dalachinsky, was born in Brooklyn, NY, and lives and works there today. His book The Final Nite won the PEN Oakland National Book Award. His most recent books include Fools Gold (2014), and Flying Home, his collaboration with Schmidt (Paris, Lit Up Press 2015). Well-known on the free jazz scene, his latest CD is The Fallout of Dreams with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach (2014). In 2014 he was named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et Lettres in Paris, France.
Sig Bang Schmidt and Steve Dalachinsky, The Great War (WWI), 2002–04. Page from the book of WWI photographs overpainted digitally (Schmidt) with accompanying poetry (Dalachinsky). Courtesy of the artist and the poet.
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