Sub-Rural # 54, “Channeling” at the MoCP

A finely tuned exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography calls attention to issues of media, social practice, fuzzy logic, and humanistic philosophy’s influence on modern and contemporary art reception. Artist curators Joan Giroux and Alice Maude-Roxby have assembled eleven international artists that span mediums, continents, and generations, with work that conflicts with standard body/object relations for viewers as well as trends in screen consumption. The show is alert to issues of gender, race, and transnational cultural theory with its insights into mass culture criticism. The difference here is an expansive act of critical reception re-invigorated by an unfixed artistic subjectivity that embraces the fuzzy psychological space of the contemporary. The curators ask us to concentrate on the way the body influences “how performance and photography can break through overarching conditions, oppressions and the confines of language.”

Although the curators make a case for various links between radical cultural complexity with the lead medium of photography folding into tropes of film and installation, the artists are not merely linked by political subject or theory. Instead, they investigate the margins of personal histories through art that values a sort of speculative figuration with psychological and linguistic flexibility. Narrative flow is implied but signifies beyond categorical deductions and tidy conclusions.

 

 

Radical formal art has circulated for decades metaphorically engaging real life and politics, describing scales of intelligence, and channeling art experience. What it also did, however, was reroute the art that preceded it. Once effectively re-constructed, it became clear how dependent visual culture’s dialogue with the past truly is. Current forms of construction, place, and narrative have blossomed when individual artists could re-design their own idea of utopian alternatives from fragments of art that coexist with other bodies of knowledge. More recently radical and ideological content buried in suburban, rural and regional art has validated fresh examples of art language and self-inquiry that no longer concealed the depth of ancestral values beneath the shell of empirical, binary culture – evident above in Paul Nazareth’s “Tree of Forgetting.”

The mixed media artist EJ Hill posits his own image in an upending of power relations ingrained in cultural institutions. His work constitutes a practice of engaging his relationship between cultural oppression in the construction of Black, Queer, American bodies. His method of disarming and de-controlling the experience of his education are extraordinarily metaphoric and episodic. His “Victory Laps” series consists photography by his collaborator, Texas Isaiah, portraying the frayed paths of his school experiences. He presses the photo document to materialize a common struggle with a fraudulent sociopolitical system about nation and myth.

In Anna Oppermann’s, “Untitled (from the ensemble Being an Artist), 1975–1976” the artist commits to revealing a routine page of the life of the artist by toying with the longstanding tradition of the still life. Oppermann originally swathed her family’s kitchen with a still life composition of fabric, and incidental objects and gradually transferred it her studio which simulated of Dadaist installation and model cubic architecture. The result parodies the preciousness of a methodical and relatively mundane, studio exercise and implies other original sites, conditions of authorship, and pastiches of gendered performance. It theatricalizes a hallowed site of creativity with collage-based abstraction, and camouflage suggestive of Kurt Schwitters’ late 1920’s “Merzbau.” The 1970’s date of her self-study installation posits the initial occasion of channeling, folding the past into the present with archeological opportunity.

Susan Hiller presented a wall monument derived from The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in Postman’s Park, London. The artist photographed 41 markers of individuals whom sacrificed their lives to save another. The artist arranged the photographs into an imposing architectural structure embedded in about 12 running feet of wall-space and an adjacent park bench. The work includes a tape of the artist who encourages the viewer to conjure such acts in the present with an estimation of their own concept of courage and self-sacrifice. The commemorative structure of  “Monument (Colonial Version),” requires viewers to speculate how past events, absent bodies, and present space might ameliorate crises.

A subtext for radical photographers and body artists is often a staggering flow of interactivity and esteem for art > life as a kind of ideological experiment. Add that to a generational redefinition of subjectivity with only the social sciences providing clearer intentions of principled advocacy and consequence. Ritual images (art) of the present move pretty far beyond the frame. Activist subjects appropriate a page from the “uncertainty principle” to exploit the difference between where an object is and where we thought it was. Aspirational, autonomous, and transformative evidence thrive here in a clinic of variable forms.