Outside the Gallery

Suzaan Boettger, In the Missionary Position: Recent Feminist Ecological Art

Boettger points out the large numbers of females producing ecological artwork and offers an explanation of this phenomena by positioning the artwork in a conversation between feminism and ecology.

Examples of a small number of artists creating problem-solving works that address specific environmental situations are Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Betty Beaumont, Harriet Feigenbaum, Patricia Johnson Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Jody Pinto

254: “When women focus on nature in their work, there is a parallelism between their own historically secondary status and that of nature’s” ...”These women are applying their traditional social role as caregivers to the recuperation of the earth”

“Ecofeminism seeks to break the mental structure that establishes difference and fosters dominance and to replace it with one that emphasizes affinity and promotes egalitarianism”

How can we understand recent ecological art as both a reclamation by women of their “traditional social role as caregivers” and a radical (re)imagining of a “different kind of culture and politics that would integrate intuitive, spiritual, and rational forms of knowledge, embracing both science and magic insofar as they enable us to transform the nature-culture distinction and to envision and create a free, ecological society”? (261)

[Jody Pinto, Papago Park project] “demanded that the artist become historian, botanist, hydrologist, visionary designer, and administrator” (257).

In what ways does the inherent interdisciplinarity of engaging in this type of work contribute to or complicate the notion of creating a different kind of culture and politics based on affinity and egalitarianism?

In what ways are site-specific reclamation projects different from public sculptural installations in the ways they navigate the public/private and in what ways do the framing of these projects and the extent of collaboration with localities influence public perceptions and reactions?

Are ecological art projects devalued in the art world because they are collectively owned, cannot be inserted into a gallery/museum context in their original manifestations, thus defying commodification? Does the localized context of these works play in to their valuation?

How can we understand the distinctions between the work of male ecological artists (Goldsworth, Smithson) and the work of the female artists featured in Boettger’s article?

Rachel Whiteread/ House

Ian Sinclair:

“House is public, front-lawn art-- a sponsored bastard” (20).

“Contemporary art is about credit: the metamorphosis of money into power” (22).

“Freelance aerosol revisionists” (22).

Nick Couldry:

“What happens when multiple textual and other practices confront each other in a public space that is also a site in media narratives?” (96).

“Although House provoked a split in opinion, both sides shared on thing: they misrepresented each other” (102).

Rachel Whiteread’s House raises a multitude of questions about public/private space, memory, nostalgia, permanence, entropy, class and racial divisions, money and power, institutional and bureaucratic political structures, voice and media representations.

In the wave of controversy surrounding House, Couldry asserts that both debate about housing and the fact that Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner prize were largely overlooked in the conversations.

How can we understand the ways that politicization of House and the events surrounding it relate to the intentions of the artist? Was the work hijacked into a political power struggle that made dialogue impossible?

The example of House raises larger questions about the processes behind public art. Who is representing whom and how did they get into a position to do so? Who is a part of the process of creation and which voices come through in the product (artist, local community, institutions, politicians)? How can dialogue occur through a collaborative visioning process that brings diverse players to the table?

Contours of Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale

Neil Smith:

“Indeed it works as critical art only to the extent that it is simultaneously functional. In this symbiosis of the functional and symbolic object, the Homeless Vehicle reveals a vital dimension of a spatialized politics, namely the importance of scale” (54).

“By setting boundaries, scale can be constructed as a means of constraint and exclusion, a means of imposing identity, but a politics of scale can also become a weapon of expansion and inclusion, a means of enlarging identities” (78).

People that are homeless are literally defined by their spatial positioning sans home. Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicles are not only functional, but challenge notions of homeless identity by opening possibilities for new notions of public/private movement and the occupation of those realms by individuals.

Issues of visibility, exclusion/ inclusion, spatial delineation, mobility (spatially and socially) are all addressed in the article and through the Homeless Vehicles.

The evolutionary and collaborative nature of Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicles is an important aspect of the work, as well as the recognition that the vehicles are not intended to be a solution to the problem of homelessness.

In what ways do the Homeless Vehicles complicate ideas of public and private space?

How do these vehicles challenge capitalist power configurations?

According to the artist, “the movement of carts through new york are acts of resistance” (http://www.designboom.com/eng/archi/wodiczko.html) Is this movement as an act of resistance on the part of those using the carts? The artist? Do those who see a cart in the streets unconsciously or consciously recognize them as acts of resistance?