and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales
Donald Rodney, who died in 1998 at the age of 36, was part of the BLK Art Group and a forerunner, in many ways, of what we would now call Disability Arts. Rodney’s limning of his intersectional identities—born in West Bromwich, UK, to Jamaican parents, he lived with sickle cell anemia—keeps relevant and resonant his keen ability to employ new materials and ahead-of-his-time technologies. His monumental oil pastels on x-rays, kinetic and animatronic sculptures, sketchbooks, and installations pierce the sociopolitical culture of racism, colonialism, and ableism still rampant today.
That Berwick isn’t especially cosmopolitan is one of the observations that sometimes comes to hand in write-ups of the festival, but it would seem to assume a baseline scale or native habitat for film festivals and conceptual works—as though a market town is somehow less contemporary than Berlin, Venice, or Shanghai. I don’t think that’s true. When I came to Berwick my train passed a prison and decommissioned coal mines, then a silo for a Scottish broadband supplier, a scrapyard full of detached screens and windows, and a barley processing plant that distributes malt to New Zealand, South Africa, and Japan. This is a fair setting for a fluid, pluralist, work-in-progress program.
In [siccer] (2023), a live performance at REDCAT accompanied by an interdisciplinary installation at ICA LA, artist and choreographer Will Rawls uses the voice and body to explore how Blackness resists capture in spaces historically designed to erase it. In both the performance and exhibition, five (sometimes six) dancers are caught in a stop-motion photo shoot. They evade the amplified shutter clicks of an ever-present camera, poised atop a tripod facing the green screen backdrop. Through Holland Andrews’s sonic interventions, chroma key staging, and disruptions of genre, [siccer] dismantles the media apparatuses that seek to render Blackness visible, legible, and consumable.
In a recent review of Mark Leckey’s work, Laura McLean-Ferris wrote of the artist’s remarkable ability to conjure the feeling of “being overcome” that is typically associated with religious experience. Her article—and its citation of Peter Schjeldahl’s comparably revelatory encounter with Piero della Francesca—prompted the question of why this type of experience should be so exceptional in the life of an art critic. Shouldn’t those of us who spend our days going to exhibitions regularly be overwhelmed? Shouldn’t every work of art at least aspire to these effects? Have we become jaded, or is something else going on?
Throughout his fifty-year career, the London-based French artist continued playfully reflecting on the changing relationship of the contemporary art field towards its peripheries. These once-forbidden pleasures included pop culture and the counterculture, domesticity and the “House Beautiful,” androgyny, ornamentation, dandyism, “minor” artistic practices (figures like Jean Cocteau, a member of what he termed the “B list” of art history), male vulnerability and autobiographic exposure, and “applied” arts such as wallpaper, textile, and furniture design.
Fragmentos Espacio de Arte y Memoria follows the example of local leaders, including former Bogotá mayor and social practice artist Antanas Mockus, in its aim: to fuse art and policy and bring publics together to process the trauma of decades of war. Curator Carolina Cerón gathers pieces by five Colombian artists—Mónica Restrepo, Ana María Montenegro, María Leguizamo, David Medina, and María Isabel Arango—whose work “bridges past and present.” The show poses the question of what to do with sociopolitical and cultural memory of years of armed conflict and an imperfect peace process, set against the resolutely violent backdrop of Doris Salcedo’s monument.
Leiden University’s announcement that it will “phase out” the funding for its Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) is not just a bureaucratic decision; it is a profound and short-sighted blow to the intellectual, cultural, and artistic fabric of the Netherlands.
