Charles Gentry, David Redmon, and Ashley Sabin Kamp Katrina (2007), 75 minutes Directed by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon Photography by Redmon and Sabin Edited by Tim Messler, Sabin and Redmon Music by Eric Taxier Produced by Deborah Smith and Dale Smith “Kamp Katrina” was supposed to provide a communal shelter in the aftermath of the devastating storm of late summer 2005.  The tent village was located in the garden backyard of a house on Alvar Street, in the post-Katrina “melting pot” of New Orleans’ Upper 9th Ward.  The inhabitants included the homeowners—an eclectic Native American woman known as Ms. Pearl and her husband David Cross, the owner of a home-repair business—and their traumatized guests, who are mostly poor, white, working-class addicts and survivors.  Although it is inspiring to witness the dedication and generosity of the hosts, there is also a necessary toughness in their mission, as campers are evicted for fighting, stealing, or substance abuse.  Maybe most viewers are not surprised to see the social order break down as it surely does at Kamp …

Maria T. Brodine Much of the existing literature about the practice of blogging, citizen media/journalism, and other online “counterpublics” assumes that the emergence of a globalized “digital culture” is inherently democratic due to the fact that any participant is allowed “to post and upload files, information, and news without a formal editorial moderation or filtering process.”1 Recent ethnographic studies are beginning to explore the political and economic aspects of the World Wide Web—and its relationship with offline activities—in more depth, highlighting the complexities of digital culture.2 This ethnographic case study of post-Katrina blogging in New Orleans seeks to further problematize the notion of independent media as inherently democratic or exclusively digital. I argue that by taking a material culture studies/actor network theory approach—which means, in part, acknowledging that no technologies are indifferent, and that all are political3—we can better understand how bloggers and blogs, through a kind of political economy generated by practices such as “linking,” form a social hierarchy, essentially instituting a “peer-review process” by which certain blogs or bloggers become more reputable than others. Secondly, …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Okwui Enwezor 21st CENTURY COSMOPOLITANISM As can be expected, organizing a large international exhibition with global ambition requires some proximity to various scenes of artistic production scattered in near and far-flung corners of the globe. An important requirement for the curator or researcher working to know these artistic scenes, entails being equally alert to the dark murmurings in the cultural and political scenarios that are adjacent to the spaces where the activities of art occur. For example, to reach artists working in Havana from New York necessitated passing through Toronto, thus exposing one such political scenario, namely that artists and curators living on each side of the dividing walls of the U.S./Cuba ideological separation must constantly negotiate. My several trips to Cuba for more than a decade have invariably involved the kind of triangulation that requires passing through way stations such as Montego Bay, Mexico City, the Bahamas, and Toronto. My recent visit was no different. In all these trips—from Havana to Caracas, Singapore to Berlin, Seoul to …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Hyejong Yoo “The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic! All of the Republic of Korea’s powers are from its citizens!”1 These words come from “The Constitution Article One,” a song that, along with popular protest songs from the 1970s and ’80s democratization movements, was widely sung during the 2008 Candlelight Vigil protests. The reappearance of earlier protest songs reflects not only the citizens’ recurring memories of Korea’s previous democratization movements, but also their ongoing struggle for democracy. In this paper, I explore how the diverse group of Koreans who participated in the Candlelight Vigil protests attempted to re-make the Korean nation-state outside the framework of existing politics by integrating the notion of democratic civil society with their creative, cultural, and tactical dissent.2 Here, they aspired to re-envision their national community as a place where citizens directly intervene in the political decision-making process through everyday civil discourse, in opposition to the incommunicative government of Lee Myung-bak (2007-2012).3 In examining the Candlelight Vigil protest of June 10, 2008, held …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Rika Iezumi Hiro WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHY?: ABSENCE What is Photography?/Shashin to wa nanika? (hereafter, What Is Photography?)1 is a 1976 video performance made by Tokyo-based video artist and film animator Nakajima Kō and Video Earth, the video art collective co-founded by Nakajima in 1973 (fig. 1).2 Mimicking a commercial photo shoot with a nude female model, the work consists of a double-channel projection featuring a 26 minute black-and-white video of the performance on the left, and an approximately 21 minute “slide show” of black-and-white photographs of the model taken by the participating artists on the right. In its ideal presentation, a wall display of selected photographic prints should accompany the projection. The work was screened only once in Japan, without any photographic prints, as part of a self-curated video screening event at a “rental gallery”-cum-auditorium at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in the late 1970s.3 However, there was no “public,” so to speak, in this audience, which was wholly comprised of the group’s members and their close friends. Furthermore, the entrance was …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Caitlin Bruce The Great Wall of China is an iconic and complex sign that has been used by both state officials and Chinese avant-garde artists since the end of the Cultural Revolution to make claims about and on behalf of Chinese society.1 This state/artist confrontation around a singular, fixed object contributes to an oppositional reading of China’s public sphere, a standoff between a monolithic state and a monolithic society around a singular symbol of antiquity. Graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai complicates this reading, and throws into sharp relief China’s status as a fraught territory trying to navigate the dual tides of globalization and cultural nationalism.2 Projects like Zhang Dali’s Dialogue/Duihua endeavor in Beijing and multiple graffiti interventions like those along Moganshan Road in Shanghai highlight the development of an emerging revision of Chinese public culture, with graffiti art acting as both evidence of and communicative infrastructure for often subtle but significant changes. Rather than mere embellishment, graffiti is a composition in traces: an enigmatic address by an author …

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010) Barbara London My fascination with contemporary art in Asia began in the early 1970s upon meeting Nam June Paik, the Korean-born, Japan and German educated artist living in New York. An avid reader (in at least four languages) of cutting edge information (in a range of disciplines including history, philosophy, economics, science, and art), he exuberantly exchanged ideas. With a mischievous smile and a twinkle in his eyes, Paik thrived on experimentation and surprise. While he shared John Cage‘s interest in chance operations, Paik’s concerns had more to do with discovering new possibilities. He relished the aleatory‘s correlations to modern software and hardware music composition tools, synthesizers, and effects processors with their “randomization” features, which became central to his creative processes in video. Recycling became a fundamental aspect of Paik‘s work for practical (economic) and aesthetic reasons, with the TV as a core building block. I took great delight in Paik‘s observation from a public lecture: “I believe in timing. Somehow, you have to be at a certain …

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Yael Raviv Speech leaves no mark in space. . . . But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. —Susan Stewart, 1993 Following a recent presentation of Miwa Koizumi’s installation NY Ice Cream Flavors at Umami: food and art festival (2008) I heard an audience member comment on Koizumi’s lox ice cream: “this could use more acid.” This remark, though insightful from a culinary point of view, seemed somehow irrelevant in this particular case. When I later tried to understand why the comment disturbed me, I realized it embodied many of the questions I had regarding the discussion and analysis of food in the context of artistic performance. The slippage between food as artistic medium and food as culinary medium is most pronounced in live performance, particularly performances involving actual consumption. This ambiguity calls into question the tools we currently use for the analysis of these performances: whether we use terminology borrowed from the culinary world or from …

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Kate H. Hanson British filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s video installation during the 2009 Venice Biennale took Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (1562-63) as its subject.1 The installation, based on a digital reproduction of the painting recently placed in its original home of the San Giorgio refectory, used multiple screens as well as digital and audio effects to dissect the work’s formal structures, highlight specific characters in the scene, and create dramatic effects with music and imagined conversations. Greenaway, in line with the scores of admiring artists preceding him, chose to highlight the more worldly aspects of the work: the gossip amongst guests, worries of servants about food supplies, and soaring music. The continued popularity of this sixteenth century painting clearly indicates that Veronese’s work has the ability to speak to viewers in the twenty-first century as well as its original Renaissance audience. Two years after Paolo Veronese (1528-88) completed the Wedding at Cana for the refectory of the monastery San Giorgio Maggiore, resident monk Benedetto Guidi …

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Cary Levine Paul McCarthy’s 1974 performance Hot Dog was an intimate affair, enacted before a small group of friends in his basement studio in Los Angeles. McCarthy began by methodically stripping down to his underwear and shaving most of the hair off his body. These opening routines, performed without acknowledging the spectators he had invited, served to immediately re-assert the privacy of his performance and its locale, leaving the audience in the awkward position of having gathered to witness someone consumed by his own personal habits. In what came next, McCarthy put his visitors’ most fundamental standards of individual and social propriety to the test. Artist Barbara Smith later described the scene: He stuffs his penis into a hot dog bun and tapes it on, then smears his ass with mustard. . . . He approaches the tables and sits nearby, drinking ketchup and stuffing his mouth with hot dogs. . . . Binding his head with gauze and adding more hot dogs, he finally …

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Janine Catalano People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? . . . They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. . . . [I]t happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . and warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. . . . There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.1 Despite its daily importance—necessity, even—food has often been glossed over, taken for granted, not seen as appropriate fodder for those working in the arts, and certainly not for those studying the arts. Legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher’s above words, written in 1943, suggest this general attitude to be the case among writers between and during the world wars, contrasting the “honor” of writing with an implied humility, unworthiness, …

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Julia Pine What man cannot do, bread can. —Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 19421 “Bread,” wrote Salvador Dalí in 1945, “has always been one of the oldest fetishistic and obsessive subjects in my work, the one to which I have remained the most faithful.”2 Despite having been largely overlooked in Dalí’s work, bread—like the crutch, the lobster, and the detumescent clock—does in fact appear with remarkable frequency throughout the artist’s oeuvre.3 This essay considers the presence and significance of bread in Dalí’s visual and literary production from the 1920s to the 1970s by reviewing his many bread-related writings and works of art; it also assesses the artist’s attempts to establish the image of bread as a personal device or “trademark” in terms of what media history scholar Paul Rutherford calls “the Dalí brand.”4 Dalí’s famous persona as artistic showman, exemplified by his mountebank’s moustache, was in large part established through the use of various images that were intended, like contemporary product branding, …

Issue 13: After Post-Colonialism? (Spring 2009) Cynthia Foo On October 1, 2008, Benedict Anderson presented a talk at Columbia University in which he discussed his upcoming book, a biography of the Chinese-Indonesian journalist Kwee Thiam Tjing. Having found a book of Kwee’s writings in a second-hand bookshop in Indonesia in 1962, Anderson describes his surprise that no one could identify the pseudonymous author, who wrote what Anderson considers to be “the greatest piece of prose written in the first half of the 20th century by anybody in Indonesia.” For years after Kwee’s death, Anderson explains, details of the journalist’s life and work were forgotten. It was only recently that Anderson was himself able to write about the author, in the process considering the role of cosmopolitanism in the life of the colonial subject. Kwee wrote mainly during the period between the failed local Communist uprisings of 1926-‘27 and the end of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia. Anderson explains that Kwee’s writings detail and often parody the complicated relationships among the Dutch, Indonesian, and Chinese populations. The complex …

Issue 13: After Post-Colonialism? (Spring 2009) Charlotte McIvor Roddy Doyle famously posited a relationship between the Irish and African-Americans thus in his 1987 novel The Committments: –The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads. They nearly gasped: it was so true. –An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin’ everythin’. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin. —–Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud. He grinned. He’d impressed himself again. He’d won them. They couldn’t say anything.1 Jimmy Rabitte, band manager, uses this turn of phrase to convince his motley crowd of Dublin Irish musicians to form a soul band, although the phrase was later reimagined in the film as, “The Irish are the blacks of Europe” [emphasis mine]. In 1987, in the midst of the continuing Troubles in the North, long posited by some as an anti-colonial war, and ongoing poverty in the Republic, Rabbitte’s statement had a particular resonance. It captured the confused ethnic identity of the Irish throughout the 19th and 20th centuries as well as …

Issue 13: After Post-Colonialism? (Spring 2009) Mark R. Westmoreland In Mona Hatoum’s experimental video, Measures of Distance (1981), she densely layers fragmented clips of audio recording, written correspondence, and intimate images in a way that accentuates the distance of exile. Nude photos of Hatoum’s mother appear in close-up, rendering them initially undecipherable. A second visual layer of hand-written letters from Hatoum’s mother further obscures the images on screen, the letters themselves only revealing fragmented Arabic script that prevents the viewer from reading more than a few discontinuous phrases. Meanwhile, we hear a conversation in Arabic between two women that competes with the louder voice-over translations in English. While these communiqués between Hatoum in London and her mother in Beirut are themselves markers of separation, the way the layers compete and obscure each other speaks directly to the infrastructural ruptures of phone lines and postal services during the Lebanese civil wars. Furthermore, the way the narrative reveals familial tension offers another dimension of distance inflected but not caused by Hatoum’s exile. While ostensibly about family relations …

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Kate Eichhorn The archive and desktop are already synonymous. Once denoting a material repository of documents governed by an established institution (e.g., a state archive), definitions of the archive continue to loosen. For a new generation of readers and writers, the archive may be known only as a site of virtual storage. However, even for a generation more intimately acquainted with and attached to the material world of documents, the desktop can easily be understood as a type of archive, or gateway to the archives. Not only is it a site of storage, a repository of documents, but also a space governed by a specific order, or a set of laws. Both the desktop’s visible order (the icons of folders and documents), and its hidden order (the code underpinning this smooth iconography), determines where and how we manage our personal files and subsequently, what relations of knowledge are rendered visible. If the desktop is recognized as a type of archive, it follows …

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Pashmina Murthy One of the first comprehensive official documents on female infanticide in India was an epistolary communication by Col. Walker, the Resident of Baroda, in 1808. While there had been some enquiry into the matter in the late eighteenth century, Walker ‘s document was among the first communiqués to merit serious attention. Structured as an exposé of the crime among a particular group of Rajputs, the Jahrejahs, he set out to uncover evidence of the crime within the group – the existence of the crime itself was not in doubt. In his opening sentences of the letter, where he establishes the aim of the work, Walker declares, “I shall endeavour to ascertain the Origin and History of a Practice, the most barbarous that ever owed its existence either to the Wickedness, or Weakness of human nature.”1 The subtext of this sweeping declaration appears to state that the practice exists and has a discernible origin as well as history, but merely needs …

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Elisabeth R. Friedman In 1941 the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, living in exile in the south of France, created an unprecedented work of art combining image, text and music. Before Salomon died in Auschwitz at age twenty-six she had created more than 1,300 gouaches, 769 of which comprise what the artist entitled Life? or Theater? A Singspiel, or A Play with Music. Painted with only primary colors (red, yellow and blue) and white, and mixing them to create vivid hues, the images are a fictionalized autobiography, incorporating as “characters” important and influential individuals in her life. In Life? or Theater? Salomon narrates the story of her life, her family and the German Jewish cultural world that was destroyed in the Holocaust. While it is often read as an act of defiance in the face of Nazi persecution, Life? or Theater? also illustrates the artist’s struggle to live in the aftermath of the suicides of her grandmother, her mother and her aunt, …

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Dore Bowen Seeing that which had previously been invisible becomes an activity that renews the exoticism of territorial conquests of the past. But seeing that which is not really seen becomes an activity that exists for itself. This activity is not exotic but endotic, because it renews the very conditions of perception. —Paul Virilio1 The Journey Out In the civil archives of Paris one can study strange missives—written notes found in the pockets of eighteenth-century illiterates who drowned in the Seine. Why would farmers, barge operators, and nomadic souls with no knowledge of written language have carried scribbled notes on their person? Historian Arlette Farge ponders this enigma, suggesting that these notes may have been part of a verbal process whereby thoughts were whispered to a member of the literate public who then transcribed them; these texts were then carried by travelers with other symbols such as good luck charms and memorabilia. Consequently, rather than being a form of self-expression, Farge suggests that …