Category Archives: Power Dynamics

Carey Young “Body Techniques (after A Line in Ireland, Richard Long, 1974)” 2007

woman walking on materials in the desert

Carey Young

“Carey Young‘s series ‘Body Techniques‘ recreates several works from the canon of performance art from the late 1960s and early 1970s, including pieces by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, and Valie Export. Many of these earlier-generation artists undertook their projects by walking into a public space to create a kind of experiment (or, in Nauman’s case, conducting an experiment by walking around the space of his studio).

Long’s ‘Line in Ireland’ offers the viewer a point of entry into a quintessentially romantic wilderness, free of people. The art of the late 1960s often negated the idea of the art object as a luxury commodity by focusing on performance or the artist’s own body, on process rather than product, or on using natural or basic materials. Carey’s image inverts such binary terms, with some ironies.

Her work, like Long’s, shows a place that seems uninhabited. Yet Young’s work also inverts the attitudes associating walking with unfettered liberty, heroic (male) creativity and boundless natural landscapes. She suggests that such concepts are escapist fictions: her uniform of a business suit implies that the world we live in is one where art, money, and big business are more entangled than ever. Creativity and capital are unavoidably intertwined, rather than separable: we cannot ‘walk out’ of either. In her work, no space – conceptual or physical – escapes the process of commodification. ‘Body Techniques’ is accordingly set in Dubai: a place seemingly emblematic of twenty-first century capitalism where almost nobody travels by foot. The gargantuan tower blocks in the background, created with petro-dollars, ensure that walking, and the pleasures and chance encounters of perambulation, have been abolished.” [credit]

“Body Techniques (2007) is a series of eight photographs that considers the interrelationships between art and globalized commerce. The title of the series refers to a phrase originally coined by Marcel Mauss and developed by Pierre Bourdieu as habitus, which describes how an operational context or behavior can be affected by institutions or ideologies.

Set in the vast building sites of Dubai and Sharjah’s futuristic corporate landscape, we see Carey Young alone and dressed in a suit, her actions reworking some of the classic performance-based works associated with Conceptual art, including pieces by Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Dennis Oppenheim and Valie Export. In thus recasting earlier works centered around the physicality of the body in time and space, it is ambiguous whether the artist is molding herself to the landscape or exploring ways of resisting it.

The locations for Young’s photographs are a series of empty, uninhabited ‘new build’ developments reminiscent of Las Vegas, rising from the desert’s tabula rasa aimed at bombastic luxury and spectacle and intended for thousands of incoming Western corporate executives. The architectural style is consummate ‘global village’ – a business theme park composed of swathes of multinational HQs and Italianate McVillas. These non-places could eventually compose an entire world-view: a hyperreal, corporate vision of utopia. Half-constructed backdrops are used as a ‘stage’ for the action, with the artist appearing as one tiny individual, overwhelmed, dislocated from, or even belittled by the corporate surroundings, while dressed up to play a role within it.” [credit]

Guy Debord, Drifting / Dérive (1958), Situationists

an abstract map with red arrows

Guy Debord, The Naked City

Guy Debord established the Situationist method of the dérive (drifting) as a playful technique for wandering through cities without the usual motives for movement (work or leisure activities), but instead the attractions of the terrain, with its “psycho-geographic” effects. (credit: Walk Ways catalog)

While similar to the flâneur, the dérive is influenced by urban studies (especially Henri Lefebvre). (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012).

Read a more detailed account of the dérive from Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” first published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958): Debord-Theory_Of_The_Derive

Definition: Letting go of the usual reasons for walking – and being drawn by the affordances and attractions of the place.

The Drift or Dérive is one of the basic situationist practices advocated by Guy Debord and others. It’s a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and an awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

Merlin Coverley mentions psychogeography has these core elements: [credit]

the political aspect,
a philosophy of opposition to the status quo,
this idea of walking, of walking the city in particular,
the idea of an urban movement,
and the psychological component of how human behaviour is affected by place

Recently the idea of the drift has been extended in the practice of Mythogeography, where its characteristics are described thus:

- Best with groups of between three and six.
- There should be no destination, only a starting point and a time. A journey to change space, not march through it.
- To drift something has to be at stake – status, certainty, identity, sleep.
- In a drift, self must be in some kind of jeopardy.
- There may need to be a catapult: starting at an unusual time of day, taking a taxi ride blindfold asking to be dropped off at a spot with no signage, leaping onto the first bus or tram you see.
- There may be a theme: wormholes, micro-worlds, peripheral vision – whatever you want.
- Be tourists in your own town.
- Use the things around you as if they were dramatic texts, act them out.
- “…on a ‘drift’ we found ourselves at a Moto Service Station on the edge of the city. In the restaurant they had a guarantee printed on little cards. They’d give you your money back if you weren’t “completely satisfied” with your meal. So we organised to meet there on our next drift with about 10 other people; we ate big breakfasts and asked for our money back, because, philosophically, a cooked breakfast could never ‘completely satisfy’ a socially and culturally healthy person, not ‘completely satisfy’ all their desires and passions, not a human being. We got the money, but more importantly numerous staff were commandeered to interview us and we turned a restaurant into a debate about desire and fulfilment.”
- The drift should be led by its periphery and guided by atmospheres not maps.
- A static drift: stay still and let the world drift to you.
- When you drift, use wrecked things you find to make new things (this is called détournement – using dead art and uncivil signs to create unfamiliar languages). Make situations: build miniature wooden villages, giant insects from branches, ritual doorways from burnt remnants, make a small model shed from the wood of a full-sized one and process it from shed to shed until you reach the sea. Construct things from what you find, enact imaginary searches, bogus investigations, gather testimonies for new religions. Just build!!! Leave stories, situations and constructions for any drifters that follow you, they’ll re-make them in their own ways.

Transcript of a Dérive

Credit to Jesse Bell, Notes on My Dunce Cap.

Time/Place begun:
Person/Persons a Party to the Initial Plan:
Description of the Dérive’s Shape:
Misunderstandings Created/ Discovered:
Signed/Dated:

Occupy Oakland protesters (2011) Photo by Noah Berger, Oakland

Connections to 21st Century

“In addition to inspiring artists, architects and urban planners, the Situationist International’s take-back of public space is credited as catalyzing the The Occupy movement.

“We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement…One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Spectacle. The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme … and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.” – Kalle Lasn, editor and co-founder of Adbusters, the group and magazine credited for Occupy Wall Street’s initial concept and publicity.” (credit)

Exercises:

Credits and references:

Emma Sulkowicz, Carry That Weight (2014)

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Content Warning: Sexual Assault

people with a mattress in front of a building

Emma Sulkowicz, Carry That Weight (2014)

“On October 29th, a group of Columbia University students left 28 mattresses on the steps of university president Lee Bollinger’s house. Within an hour, the mattresses were in a dumpster, and the students responsible were hit with a $471 fine to cover the clean-up cost. But while Columbia’s administration was quick to dismiss the incident, students around the country have done the opposite.The mattresses were part of Columbia undergrad Emma Sulkowicz’s senior art thesis, a protest project called Carry That Weight. Sulkowicz has pledged to carry a mattress with her everywhere she goes on campus until the man who she says sexually assaulted her is no longer at Columbia, whether he is expelled, chooses to leave, or graduates in May 2015. Her protest has received a degree of national attention that would be unlikely if it happened anywhere other than an Ivy League university based in Manhattan – but Sulkowicz and her fellow campus activists have acknowledged their privileged position and are focused on directing that attention to other schools. On the day that students carried those 28 mattresses, representing the 28 students who have filed Title IX complaints against Columbia, organizers at over 130 schools participated in a national day of action in solidarity with survivors of sexual and domestic violence on campuses. “

James Bay Cree youth, The Journey of Nishiyuu (2013)

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Six youths and a guide left Whapmagoostui in January to snowshoe and walk to Ottawa in support of the Idle No More movement. They called the trek “The Journey of Nishiyuu,” which means “The Journey of the People” in Cree.

The group numbered nearly 400 in the trek’s final hours, according to volunteers and Gatineau police, after other children and youth from Cree and Algonquin communities joined them along the way. Thousands more people joined them on Monday afternoon at Parliament Hill as their journey came to an end.

The group’s wish to meet with the prime minister was not met, as Stephen Harper was in Toronto Monday for a special ceremony to greet two Chinese pandas en route to the Toronto Zoo.

But Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt did meet with a small group of the original walkers late in the day. No cameras were allowed at the meeting, but the minister was said to have accepted an invitation to visit their First Nation this summer and learn more about their concerns.

7 walkers began journey

David Kawapit, 18, is one of the original seven walkers who set out from Whapmagoostui.

“It feels really good, but at the same time I’m really sad that it’s ending,” he said on Sunday as the group reached Chelsea, Que., about a three-hour walk from Ottawa. “Because a lot of us shared a lot good times here, sad times, but we all stuck together.”

Others on the walk have told Kawapit it’s helping them deal with personal struggles, Kawapit said, including depression and suicidal thoughts. Kawapit struggles with the same.

“It feels really good that a lot of people are paying attention to what’s going on, and that a lot of these guys that are walking with us are helping themselves on this journey.

“But this journey’s really shown me a lot — how much I can help people. And it’s really given me a better understanding of life. I’ve made a lot of friends here, so there’s no way I’m going to leave them.”

“An Indigenous-led Social Movement

Idle No More started in November 2012, among Treaty People in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta protesting the Canadian government’s dismantling of environmental protection laws, endangering First Nations who live on the land. Born out of face-to-face organizing and popular education, but fluent in social media and new technologies, Idle No More has connected the most remote reserves to each other, to urbanized Indigenous people, and to the non-Indigenous population.

Led by women, and with a call for refounded nation-to-nation relations based on mutual respect, Idle No More rapidly grew into an inclusive, continent-wide network of urban and rural Indigenous working hand in hand with non-Indigenous allies to build a movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky.” [credit]

Cesar Chavez, March for Justice (1966)

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Cesar Chavez

“In the spring of 1966, a small group of California farmworkers and their supporters captured the attention of the nation.

On the morning of March 17, 1966, nearly a hundred striking farmworkers, most of them Mexican American and Filipino, set out on foot from the small town of Delano, bound for the state capital in Sacramento 280 miles to the north. As they passed through the dusty highways and farming communities of the Central Valley, they were joined by student activists, union organizers, civil rights workers, and members of the clergy, all drawn to the remote regions of California in support of the farmworker struggle.

For six months, the farmworkers had been on strike. They refused to harvest grapes in the vineyards around Delano until the growers met their demands for higher pay, safer working conditions, and recognition of their unions, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC).

But farmworkers were at a severe disadvantage in their efforts to negotiate the terms of their employment. They lacked the basic labor protections guaranteed to other American workers, including the right to union representation and equal treatment under the law. Whereas other workers could appeal to the federal government if their employers refused to bargain with their unions, farmworkers had no legal basis for making their demands. Instead, they took their pleas for justice directly to the American public.

From March 17 to April 10, 1966, the farmworkers and their growing number of supporters marched to shine a light on the conditions in the fields, exerting pressure on growers and government officials to finally take action. By the time the march concluded in Sacramento, the NFWA had won its first union contract, a landmark victory for the farmworkers and the beginning of what was not only a labor movement, but a cause—la causa—demanding for farmworkers the fundamental rights and freedoms to which other American workers were entitled.

The 1966 farmworker march was not only a part of the farmworkers’ struggle for justice; it was a key moment in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. The farmworkers who marched from Delano to Sacramento represented the large, seasonal labor force, composed overwhelmingly of people of color, whose labor made California’s thriving agricultural industry possible. Although their labor produced fortunes from the soil, they were subjected to poor wages and working conditions. Farmworkers also experienced legal and illegal discrimination. In the farmworker movement, like the broader Civil Rights Movement, economic inequality and social injustice went hand in hand. By forging a unique coalition of labor, civil rights, and religious leaders, farmworkers successfully overcame the entrenched power structures of California agriculture. Their movement challenged some of the most powerful people and corporations in the state, demonstrating a remarkable resilience and ingenuity on the path from Delano to Sacramento.”

Millie Chen, Tour (2014)

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a video showing on the wall of a dark room

Millie Chen, Tour (2014)

Walking across these sites, Chen actively and physically engages with the land to process difficult events. The audio includes lullabies from the countries represented in the work.

“Tour, 2014, an audio-video installation that contemplates arguably “healed” genocide sites, provokes the question: How can we sustain the memory of that which has become invisible? How can we possibly represent such horrific history and maintain the critical specificity of the local within a narrative about the global? Events that occurred over the last century retain heat as some victims and perpetrators are still alive, and justice, truth, and reconciliation processes are still underway. Yet, with the passage of this amount of time, these genocidal events are already archived as history—we have gained some distance from them, and have even started forgetting: Murambi, Rwanda (April 16–22, 1994); Choeung Ek, Cambodia (April 17, 1975–January 7, 1979); Treblinka, Poland (July 23, 1942–October 19, 1943); Wounded Knee, United States (December 29, 1890).

A history of human atrocities can become easily absorbed, literally, back into the land. Despite the fact that the violent impact of humans scars the earth, nature can readily absorb these acts of horror, often ironically becoming more verdant as a result. But the brutal facts remain. It is only through the persistence of individuals retelling past events that we can keep alive the history, even as acts of atrocity continue to be perpetrated in the present.

The installations and videos of Millie Chen (Canadian, born Taiwan, 1962) function as sensory experiences that question the perceptual and ideological assumptions of the audience. With her focus on sociopolitical inquiry, Chen explores how art can address the human condition through surrogate cues. About her working practice, Chen states, “Essential to my practice is the role of sensory modes of perception in the generation of knowledge. I have experimented with materiality and with immaterial, non-visual elements like sound and scent within specific contexts in order to interrupt habits of viewing. Within my visual art practice, the act of looking is interrogated.””

Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne (1980)

“At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.” – Sophie Calle

photos of a man walking away from the viewer in the city

“Sophie Calle’s urban expeditions might be thought to recall Vito Acconci’s seminal performance work ‘Following’, made a decade earlier in which he tailed strangers chosen at random without their knowledge, up until they left public space for their homes or offices. In Calle’s work however, the relationship between the artist and their public is different. This is not merely because the expected gender roles, where men act as predators and women are vulnerable, are inverted. The artist’s motivations are unknowable, her ultimate goals opaque, and her behavior seemingly contradictory.

If we might imagine Acconci’s role implies that he is dangerous – is a stalker or assailant – Calle’s activities imply she is a kind of private detective or spy in pursuit of knowing more about a person than they do themselves. The presentation of her works as a kind of diary is intentionally alarming. We are meant to feel both a distance from her or repugnance at her behavior and, despite this, a simultaneous sympathy for or intimacy with her. Unlike a normal detective story, Calle’s work leaves us with both ‘who’ and ‘why’ left unresolved.” [credit]

photos and text installed in a gallery in a long line

“She met a man, Henri B., at a party. He said he was moving to Venice, so she moved to Venice and there, she began to follow him. Suite Vénitienne was the resulting book, first published in 1979 …Calle documents her attempts to follow her subject. She phoned hundreds of hotels, even visited the police station, to find out where he was staying, and persuaded a woman who lived opposite to let her photograph him from her window. Her photographs show the back of a raincoated man as he travels through the winding Venetian streets, a surreal and striking backdrop to her internalised mission. The very beauty of her surroundings has a filmic quality, intensifying the thriller-esque narrative of her project. Sometimes her means of following Henri B. are methodical – enlisting Venetian friends to make a phone call on her behalf – and sometimes arbitrary – following a delivery boy to see if he will lead her to him.” [credit]

Credit: //www.mersytzimopoulou.com/blog/2018/11/28/sophie-calle-suite-vnitienne-1979

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture (1973)

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a person wearing a T-shaped sculpture on their head

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture

Head Sculpture (1973) by Efrat Natan (1947-) has photo documentation that presents a descriptive view of what occurred during the walking performance, and what it looked like from multiple angles. In this work, Natan used a wearable T-shaped sculpture that narrowed the field of view and hearing for the wearer, emphasizing concepts of surveillance and mapping. The photographs showcase both the sculpture and the figure in the street.

“Natan walked through the streets of Tel Aviv, her head covered by a hollow plywood, T-shaped box/mask/sculpture the morning after [the independence day] military parade [in Jerusalem, five months before the outbreak of the Fourth Arab-Israeli War], meld[ing] the language of minimalism, body art and installation art of that period with Christian influences (public self-signifying is a mark of Cain; the act is one of walking the Via Dolorosa).” [credit] The sculpture “can be read as a cross, as an airplane, and even as an angel with outspread wings.” [credit]

“The Minimalism went well with my shyness: it was a kind of mask. The space, which sits strongly in my body, led me to Body Art”, Natan says. Body Art sets up the artist’s body as a central object to be viewed, and puts the tension between the body as subject and as object in the center of the action.” [credit]

“The T-shape is reminiscent of the children’s house in her kibbutz. The sculpture’s visual appearance calls to mind Robert Morris or Charlotte Posenenske. Due to her restricted field of vision, Natan could only see part of the people surrounding her.” [credit] ”

“The kibbutz, where she had lived from her second year of elementary school until the end of her 11th-grade year in high school. The T-shaped structure of the children’s house, the most familiar architectural structure of her life in the kibbutz, contained bedrooms, a dining room, the showers, and a classroom. The long side of the children’s house, with the dining room in the center and the bedrooms on both its sides, faced west.” [credit]

“Head Sculpture (1973) was Efrat Natan’s first street performance to a chance audience. In many ways, this work was a harbinger of an artistic genre of quiet action in the public space, which was recognized thanks to the remaining photographic images. Such works, that combine body art and minimalist sculpture, are formed in a space that is devoid of institutional artistic context, with the very occurrence often affecting the content of the work. Thus, for example, the title of this work was given by two random tourists who were observing Natan walking along Dizengoff and Frishman Streets, her head stuck in a hollow MDF sculpture in the shape of a cross, or the letter X or a plus sign. One tourist said to the other: “Look! A head sculpture!”” [credit]

From the Wanderlust catalog: “Natan draws on her upbringing in her work, which reflects the Israel “religion of labor” and the ideological imperative of “making do with little.”

“The flattened aerial perspective transforms the human form into a sculptural object and suggests modes of surveillance and mapping, which are emphasized by the function of the sculpture itself”

“Her performance suggests a framing and reduction of the senses and the ambiguity inherent in collecting a narrow field of vision and hearing.”

Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

Teresa Murak, Procession (1974)

“In the very early spring of 1974, the artist put on herself a cress seeds coat grown earlier (the working method being a reference to the tradition of handiwork and “female labor”), and set out on a Procession through the streets of Warsaw, thus introducing the figure of Mother Nature into a realm specifically belonging to culture. This gesture, primarily referring to the relationship between the feminine and the natural being—also a main focus essential to feminism, albeit differently—present in corporal feminism, was at the same time a political one, an intervention in urban space which manifested a sensitivity extremely different to that officially valid in the People’s Republic of Poland.

The cress seed, a small fast-growing plant with a distinctive smell, became Teresa Murak’s trademark. Co-existing with the artist, in most cases the plant becomes the subject of her examination and the object of care while her art practice connected with the seeds is based on the idea of co-existence.

The action was documented on photos as well as oral history.” [credit]

Mary Mattingly, House and Universe (2013)

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Mary Mattingly, Pull, 2013

“Based on philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book Poetics of Space with a chapter by the same name, House and Universe describes duality and interdependency within local and nonlocal space. House and Universe is an allegorical series of photographs that combined living systems like floating geodesic capsules with bundles of personal objects I had collected and carried with me. When I was making this work in 2013, I had bundled almost everything in my possession into seven large boulder-like forms that could be rolled or pushed.

One photograph shows a place I lived in between a series of storms when the houses were covered in whatever scrap was available. A bundle sculpture is in front of the homes, symbolically connecting climate disasters with consumption.

That title alludes to the story of Sisyphus (the trickster who was tricked in the end) which stuck with me throughout the series, as I dragged these bundles from one place to another, across towns where I was invited to recreate performances, and back into and out of exhibitions and studio spaces.

Another image shows a naked body of a person in my life from behind, with a large boulder of things provocatively titled Life of Objects.

Own it.us was made at the same time: an online library that catalogs the things I bundled and illustrates the pathways of these objects, and how they came into my life. I’ve spent considerable time living in and within ecosystems or shelters I’ve co-built, some pictured in House and Universe, those experiences have asked me to reconsider my surroundings, to vision how collections can function as monuments to consumption, and how, as an inhabitant of NYC, I help make the collective monument called a landfill.

In absurd performances, I would pull the bundles through NYC, Really to emphasize the weight of these objects.

The sculptures’ wrappings are inextricably intertwined like cycles of production – through a chain of formal and informal exchanges, an object is mined, made, distributed, bought, exchanged, eventually thrown away, where it becomes something else. The photographs of these things echo the cobbled together things themselves: pieced together with images of disparate place, time, and space. Like time capsules, they function as obstructions and proposals. They block, interfere, and frame an encounter.”