The Beginning of a Thought on Installation Art

In an attempt to re-compress some of the art and literature I’ve gathered in the past few years, I’ve been slowly pinning down corners of a subject I want to pursue in my graduate work. The recurring themes in my undergraduate studies circle around the art institutional space, how it can be transformative and plastic, validating and self-critical. Within the discourses on artistic space, I find myself returning to the idea of Installation Art, which cannot be called a medium by art historical tradition, but has in the past 40 years acquired the valence of a coagulated genre, and thus slipped into art world’s vocabulary. I have noticed a discrepancy in documentation and critical perspectives on installation art relative to its high visibility in contemporary exhibitions. While museum attention implies a certain validation in artistic and cultural currency, installation art has yet to move into the discourse of art history. This might be because the genre is perceived to be relatively young, but I would guess that this is more because installation is part performative, part conceptual, and incredibly fragile.

In the handful of survey books I’ve come in contact with, I frequently return to two prominent volumes: MOCA San Diego’s Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996 (1997), and Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (2009). They offer competing methodologies by way of introduction to their subject. Continue reading…

The Cloisters, between Pilgrimage and Tourism

This was a miniature conference paper I gave this week. I was trying to locate the Cloisters, as both a museum and a medieval (contemporary) construction, relative to traditions of pilgrimage and tourism.

In the modern age of tourism, museums have achieved landmark status. For one who sees “everything as a sign of itself,” [1] museums are convenient concentrations of cultural artifacts employed to typify the conditions under which they were made. Fortunately for New York tourists and tour organizations, the majority of these museums are concentrated in upper-middle Manhattan. City Sites NY, a popular tour bus franchise, advertises that both their “All Around Town” and “Uptown Tour Bus” tours include visits to the Museum Mile [2], and is therefore a must. The visibility of these museums contributes to their high visitor traffic, and perpetuates their canonization in the New York tourist experience.

Excluded from these franchised museum loops is the Cloisters. This is in part due to its distance from central Manhattan: it is 5.6 miles north of its parent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose inclusion on bus tours is almost guaranteed. The Cloisters’ absence from the museum canon may also have to do with its specialization in medieval art: its narrow focus appeals to a necessarily smaller audience. Thus, obscure enough in location and content to have eluded the double-decker’s radius of interest, the Cloisters occupies a different category of destinations working along and at odds with touristic practice. Continue reading…

Vogue, Vogue, Gender, Repetition, Erasure

I wrote this piece recently on Madonna’s music video “Vogue.” It was fun to write, so I thought I’d edit it and include it here.

Feathers part like curtains to announce the beginning of a performance. Figures impeccably dressed strike poses and are interspersed at intervals between objects of art. In participating in the same space as paintings and sculpture, they acquire the attributes of being visually constructed and topically determined. But, beneath surfaces, there are only more surfaces denying interiority. The figures are thus postured to be apprehended through their presentations. Their personae and their appearances inscribe themselves in each other as they are being simultaneously determined.

Continue reading…

Tourism, and its Semiotics in Museums

I recently reread “Semiotics of Tourism” by Jonathan Culler and was reminded of its usefulness in examining museums.

In it, Culler makes a nuanced reading of touristic habits and its significance for contemporary semiotics. His Tourist is one who deals in the currency of signs and signifiers, who reads “cities, landscapes, and cultures as sign systems.” (155) This means also that what registers is only what is apparent; the Tourist’s understanding is apprehended through surfaces. His world is only what the Tourist can Structurally infer. His are [sites/sights].

A topically oriented being, the Tourist is also exempt from the criticism of his counterpart, the so-called Traveler, who seeks the truth via pure essence and the authentic. Culler astutely points out that the notion of authenticity is constructed, recognized as such only when given the markers of its own authentic-ness. (161) In other words, authenticity is conferred when affirmed by an authority figure, a cultural construction. Authenticity as that which opposes superficiality is thus destabilized, if not entirely denied. Semiotic participation vis-à-vis the Tourist is thus inevitable and ubiquitous.

The idea of constructing [site/sight] is particularly relevant to the museum. The [site/sight] is denoted with what Culler calls “markers,” which operates triply: representing it, giving information on its significance, and making it recognizable. (159) Markers construct [sites/sights] in reverse; they precede the existence of a significant object.

Is this not what museums do? Perhaps their markers are quadruple: they also collect the [sites/sights] (here, objects) into one space where the importance of one confirms the importance of another and visa versa. Museums are vehicles of semiotic presumptions.

Yet the constructive power of museums thus reveals the shortcomings of Culler’s argument. Like the museum, he is limited because he assumes the tourist’s unconflicted subjectivity, assumes a universality to touristic practice, and in groups signs into distinct cultural systems. The institution, the participants, and their exchange, are more opaque than they are rendered here.*

• Jonathan Culler. “The Semiotics of Tourism.” Framing the Sign. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

* I was told that this criticism was too hasty, please drop me a line if anyone is interested in talking about Culler in greater depth. I would love to keep the conversation going.

Contemplating the Pink Tree

Below is a writing exercise I completed for a course on the subject of the representation of the human figure in visual culture and literature, especially in the Judeo-Christian and Western imaginations.

There is nothing immediately unusual about John Currin’s “the Pink Tree.” The subject is reminiscently classical and thus feels familiar to the western viewer. The figures are also rendered in the vocabulary of traditional western beauty—fair hair, delicate features, red lips, rosy skin. The figure on the right even assumes the serpentine pose found frequently in depictions of women in classical antiquity. As a result, the women feel timeless. They not only not only reference a tradition of representation, but also bear no traits that tie them to a historical moment. In addition to being without chronologic location, the women are suspended in space by the flat black background. The visual cues of the painting suggest that the work fits well into a western tradition of representation.

Continue reading…

Anticipating Studios (Yoshimoto Nara)

Months ago in August, the Asia Society had a five-day open studio in which visitors could go watch the famed Yoshimoto Nara construct his installation for their upcoming show. I managed to go during the middle of the construction process, at a time when the artist was not present and did not make himself present for the duration of my visit. The visit was uncanny and slightly uncomfortable for me. Really, it took me until now to locate the source of this affect in the misalignment of the expectations inscribed in a studio visit, and what might actually (not) occur there.

The studio visit(or) expects to be witness to an authentic creativity. In this one expectation are pack several individually problematic assumptions. It assumes that the moment of the visit(or) will intersect with something worth seeing. It assumes that the visit(or) is neutral. It assumes that productivity is visible. It assumes the artist is a demonstrable being. The visit(or) then is affected by pressurized anticipation, not entirely unlike the touristic mentality.*

What people don’t anticipate is the artist not presenting himself, or rather, the artist’s agency in non-compliance with the nature of the visit. The visit(or) may be founded on the acknowledgement of an abstract creative agency, but lacking in an understanding of a subjective agency closely tied to the individual body (to take bathroom breaks, to be in a bad mood, to be unproductive). The show title, “Nobody’s Fool,” is a worthwhile consideration here. I felt sheepish after I realized I was standing around and waiting.

*For more on what I mean by tourism, please see what I wrote on “the Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign by Jonathan Culler.