Third Text
Issues
Volume 30, 2016
Issues 1–2
Numbers 138–139, January–March 2016
Infecting the City: Site-situational Performance and Ambulatory Hermeneutics 1–26
Ruth Simbao
This article proposes the term ‘site-situational’ art or performance as a meaningful shift beyond ‘site-specificity’ and as a way to develop forward-moving and relational understandings of place. While place falls prey to Western, modernist stereotypes of closed, territorial geographic systems, site-situational readings, radical forms of ‘recognition’ and ambulatory hermeneutics enable an understanding of place as a wandering signifier, a trickster figure, and an in-the-moment conversation between environments and living beings. Through an analysis of the 2009 Infecting the City performing arts festival in South Africa, the article links site-situational performance to situational understandings of identification in the context of migration and xenophobia. It connects the participatory creative resistance aspired to by the Situationists that transforms situations rather than just recognises them, to the potential mutuality that can be experienced when one recognises oneself in the face of a ‘foreigner’ as well as the potential culpability that accompanies pro-active recognition-on-the-run.
Mike Kelley and the Supermax: The Traumatic Architecture of Artificial Memory 27–42
Albert Stabler
Mike Kelley's 1995 sculpture ‘Educational Complex’, an architectural model that amalgamates every school Kelley ever attended, presents an ambivalent narrative on the psychology of memory and trauma, using institutional forms to comment on the unconscious. Memory and architecture merge similarly in the writings and images of Renaissance mystic and scholar Giordano Bruno. The idea of imaginary architecture is linked with punishment in the Carceri d'Invenzione, a series of eighteenth-century prints and drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Both the Complex and the Carceri reference subterranean spaces of shadow and illusion, and thus have an affinity with Plato's cave, with Freudian psychoanalysis, and with the mental torture inflicted by spaces of solitary confinement in contemporary American prisons. This article attempts to bring together discourses of irrationalism in Western intellectual history in order to suggest that ‘Educational Complex’ offers both a context and a critique for modern spaces of punishment.
Begin Again … Closer … in NYL: Planes and Paradoxes of Here and There, and Other Writing, Walking and Water Spacings by Renée Green 43–59
Ana Balona de Oliveira
This article examines recent video works by Renée Green, alongside previous works, in the context of the solo exhibition ‘Spacing’, which took place at Lumiar Cité in Lisbon in 2016. It begins and ends with a focus on the recent ‘Walking in NYL’ (2016), and ‘Begin Again, Begin Again’ (2015), respectively, and in between analyses these works’ intimate connections to the earlier ‘Come Closer’ (2008), ‘Endless Dreams and Water Between’ (2009), ‘Excess’ (2009), and ‘Climates and Paradoxes’ (2005). The article discusses Green’s ongoing engagements with the colonial, anti- and post-colonial collective histories of Lusophone geographies, from the perspective of the artist’s own affective trajectories between North and South America, Europe and Africa. The analysis is woven around the works’ poetic examination of history, memory, utopia, desire, language and landscape, whether architectural, urban or natural; the inhabitation of and dislocation between times, spaces and places. It highlights the back-and-forth temporality and desire at play in between Green’s various works.
Swedish Colonialism, Exotic Africans and Romantic Anti-Capitalism: Notes on the Comic Series ‘Johan Vilde’ 60-75
Robert Aman
Minor Transnational Brazilian Art: Lyrical Abstraction and the Case of Manabu Mabe 76–89
Mariola V Alvarez
This article examines the emergence of Lyrical Abstraction in Brazil in the late 1950s. Mostly forgotten in the contemporary moment in favour of Geometric Abstraction, the author reconsiders the rivalry between these two forms of abstract art and the influence on European styles of Art Informel and Tachisme. Lyrical Abstraction was predominantly practiced by Japanese immigrants in Brazil, and as a result the artists and their art challenged the category of national art as formed by European colonisation. Through the case study of Japanese Brazilian artist Manabu Mabe, the author argues for Lyrical Abstraction as a transnational art that brings together Japanese, European and Brazilian influences. Brazilian lyrical abstraction disorders the idea of national art as defined only in contrast to the international, the typical binary throughout the history of Brazilian modern art.
Playing and Dying Between the Real and the Hyperreal: Processes of Mediation in Mroué’s ‘The Pixelated Revolution’ and Cardiff and Bures Miller’s ‘Alter Bahnhof Video Walk’ 90–99
Laura M F Bertens
At dOCUMENTA 13 ‘The Pixelated Revolution’ by Rabih Mroué (2012) and the ‘Alter Bahnhof Video Walk’ by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2012) were shown, both of which explore processes and risks of mediation through video cameras. Mroué’s work provides an analysis of amateur videos of the Syrian war in which the camera operator films a sharpshooter and continues filming until the sharpshooter shoots; what motivates the camera operator to keep on filming in the face of life-threatening danger? Cardiff and Bures Miller allow the audience to experience the alienating effect of conflating virtual and actual reality, by leading the participant through Kassel’s Alter Bahnhof with an iPod video walk. This article explores the mechanisms at play within and the interaction between these two artworks, using Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy, immediacy and remediation as well as Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
The Artist Was Present: Documentation, Reconstruction, and Interpretation of Performance Art in China 100–116
J P Park
Chinese art historical writings from as early as the medieval period present descriptions of the practice of artists who worked in manners similar to those of contemporary performance artists. Such early works are, however, only accounted for in the form of written texts. Similarly, certain performance works by Chinese artists of the 1980s and 1990s are often preserved only in documentary photographs or textual (or even oral) accounts. In both cases, the genre of performance art, a form of artistic creation composed of undeniable visuality, spatiality and duration, is instantiated by frozen stills and written texts that have a limited degree of temporality and materiality. Scrutinising the ambivalent relationship between the absence of visual coordinates and the presence of textual narratives, this article will question the (im)possibility of achieving an exact reconstruction of such performance works, and thus explore the possibility of textual archeology in the discipline of art history.
Painting Portraits in Private: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Henri Matisse in Morocco 117–137
Jeanette Hoorn
Henri Matisse and Hilda Rix left Paris in early February 1912 for the Moroccan city of Tangier. They stayed in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France for most of February and March. Matisse visited again in October of that year while Rix returned in 1914 accompanied by her sister. Rix’s painting style took a new turn, developing a post-impressionist style in oils that incorporated abstraction, a primary palette and a flattened picture plain. Both artists executed portraits, working with the same models, in an unused room provided by the owner of the hotel, that became a temporary studio space. Matisse complained that his radical compositions met with derision from the hotel’s guests. Their art and letters produced in Tangier reveal the challenges they experienced in finding models and painting in public and in private. They were both representatives of European colonising cultures and committed advocates of modernism and of Morocco. Rix adopted a counter-orientalist position in lectures and articles upon her return to Australia.
‘There Is Another Turkey out There’: The Gezi Revolt as an Event 138–146
Ali Rıza Taşkale
This article aims to conceptualise the Gezi revolt as an eventual intervention into history. Based on the participatory observation of the author as well as primary and secondary sources, it addresses the Gezi revolt from a Deleuzean perspective. Firstly, it briefly discusses the chain of events that triggered Gezi. It then turns to the relation between the virtual and the actual. In this respect, Gezi as a revolutionary event is approached via the concept of ‘kairos’, establishing a link between the actual conditions and the virtual possibilities. Finally, the article explores the alternative political possibilities of Gezi as a revolutionary process.
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