ART JOURNALPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2023.2180277
Nancy P. Lin
{"title":"Song Dong’s Performative Futility: Action, Impact, and Efficacy in Contemporary Chinese Performance Art","authors":"Nancy P. Lin","doi":"10.1080/00043249.2023.2180277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2023.2180277","url":null,"abstract":"In a number of photographed performance works from the mid-1990s the artist Song Dong 宋冬 (b. 1966) dramatized futile actions that appeared to lack any lasting impact. This article examines these works as part of a larger group of contemporary performances in 1990s China that features futile acts and ephemeral effects. It explores the stakes of such artistic gestures during a period characterized by a contradictory sense of both socio-economic agency and political impotence. Informed by recent scholarship on performativity and mediation, the article develops the term “performative futility” to assess the ways in which Song’s works stage an expanded temporal relationship between the futile performance and its performance photograph. Reconceptualizing notions of action, impact, and efficacy, Song’s works rethink performance art’s longstanding emphasis on the immediacy of action and offer an alternative to the popular trope of the Chinese artist-as-dissident. Ultimately, the article sheds light on the highly nuanced ways in which Song and other Chinese performance artists of the period articulated new forms of agency and visibility within a postsocialist context. Challenging assumptions about the politics of contemporary art practice, it lays the groundwork for a more rigorous understanding of the politics of aesthetics in China.","PeriodicalId":45681,"journal":{"name":"ART JOURNAL","volume":"82 1","pages":"34 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44581682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ART JOURNALPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2023.2194800
E. Chambers
{"title":"“Who can do something, do what they can”","authors":"E. Chambers","doi":"10.1080/00043249.2023.2194800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2023.2194800","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45681,"journal":{"name":"ART JOURNAL","volume":"82 1","pages":"5 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42785542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ART JOURNALPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2023.2194793
Meme Omogbai
{"title":"Director's Letter","authors":"Meme Omogbai","doi":"10.1080/00043249.2023.2194793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2023.2194793","url":null,"abstract":"Once you have been approved for funding from the Staff Professional Development Program, the following will occur: 1. The approved money will be transferred to the index number that you supplied on your application. 2. You are responsible for following all standard travel or procurement policies and procedures 3. You are responsible for completing a Post Report within 30 days of completing the event. If you do not submit the Report, we will transfer the money back into the Professional Development Fund. 4. If you do not spend the authorized amount, please contact the Professional Development Committee so that any unused portion can be transferred back into the Staff Professional Development Fund. 5. Funds will be audited for compliance.","PeriodicalId":45681,"journal":{"name":"ART JOURNAL","volume":" ","pages":"4 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48969562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ART JOURNALPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2023.2180282
Katherine J. Lennard
{"title":"Histories “Made out of Pictures and Words Just Kept”","authors":"Katherine J. Lennard","doi":"10.1080/00043249.2023.2180282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2023.2180282","url":null,"abstract":"futures. These futures include both alternative futures stemming from the archival past and new futures whose potential is opened up through reapproaching, subverting, intervening in, and engaging with the archive. As Hochberg remarks in her afterward, “What I think these films and the works I engage with throughout the book teach us is that we must move beyond the investment in saving the past (from being forever lost) and that we must learn to read and engage the present itself as an archive: a set of testimonies of a possible future and a possible becoming” (emphasis in original, 133). Overall, the examples Hochberg brings forward to demonstrate how the archive, typically seen as evidence of the past, is utilized by artists to explore futures are compelling. I look forward to additional scholarship from Hochberg and others in the field that expand on these ideas—examining interventions with the archive in other mediums and exploring other throughlines in the future-facing visions of many contemporary Palestinian artists.","PeriodicalId":45681,"journal":{"name":"ART JOURNAL","volume":"82 1","pages":"91 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44309533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ART JOURNALPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2023.2180283
Pinar Uner Yilmaz
{"title":"Collective Consciousness in the Age of Crisis","authors":"Pinar Uner Yilmaz","doi":"10.1080/00043249.2023.2180283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2023.2180283","url":null,"abstract":"ogy that remains “opaque to the white gaze” and unsettles tidy distinction between the fictive and the factual (99). Practicing its own form of overexposure, each chapter in The Matter of Black Living contains multiple subsections, each titled and geared toward a central artifact, yet Womack’s retelling takes detours in a manner that slows down and takes in the rich cultural and black intellectual life that surrounds her inquiry. It is this “overexposure” that unsettles the argumentative promise of a tidy, linear story, one with quickly discernible causes and eects or characters who act with consistency. Womack models a way of holding all the pieces together; of moving with the liveliness that surrounds each text, the hopes and dreams that motivated each experiment with racial data; and of sitting still with a text when the material asks it of her. Womack expands the archive and story of racial data while showing a careful, ethical way to move through it. Extending her metaphors of looking that recur, it feels as though Womack leaves open the aperture of her critical viewing longer in the hopes of providing a fuller picture. In this way, she beautifully navigates the very tensions between the historical, data, and literary archive she reads and the necessity of sitting with the matter of Black living.","PeriodicalId":45681,"journal":{"name":"ART JOURNAL","volume":"82 1","pages":"96 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46859297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ART JOURNALPub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2022.2133299
E. Hill
{"title":"Submerged Narratives: Memorializing Enslavement in Eve Sandler’s Mami Wata Crossing","authors":"E. Hill","doi":"10.1080/00043249.2022.2133299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2022.2133299","url":null,"abstract":"In Harlem-based artist Eve Sandler’s installation Mami Wata Crossing (2008), text, image, object, and film converge to form an intimate memorial to enslaved ancestors and also honors transatlantic water spirits called Mami Wata. Sandler engages maternal lineages by mobilizing practices honoring water spirits—often characterized as migratory maternal figures—as a lens through which to reconfigure memories of the slave trade and narratives of women’s labor. As a presentation of Black women’s narratives of diasporic belonging within the United States, the installation emerges as an alternative archive of materials that allows for the experiential activation of family histories and Afro-Atlantic ritual practices as lived realities. The installation expands the purview of a slave memorial by combining media whose impermanence challenges the purpose of monumental public art within understandings of Black women’s histories. Sandler seeks diasporic cultural connection by ritually performing historical haunting. In this article, I propose a rethinking of ways that public institutions make room for visual representation of African American women’s histories by reconnecting these histories to Afro-Atlantic ritual practices. I argue that, by activating inherited objects as a sacred material history, Sandler memorializes gendered experiences of enslavement and nonlinear, submerged narratives through the recurrent visual form of the Afro-Atlantic altar. In Sandler’s work, the submerged narrative indicates a historical remix made visible, the remnant contents of family albums, homes, and bits of agrarian landscapes lashed together as a signal buoy for that which remains out of sight.","PeriodicalId":45681,"journal":{"name":"ART JOURNAL","volume":"81 1","pages":"24 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47481659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}