2013 Theoretical Archaeology Group – Chicago, USA

Session: The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology

Date: Friday, May 10, 2013, 9:00-12:00pm

Venue:

Room 208, 2nd Floor

Gleacher Conference Center of the Booth Business School (downtown campus)

University of Chicago. 450 N Cityfront Plaza Dr # 1.

Session Abstract

As a prelude to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s upcoming exhibition “The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology” curated by Dieter Roelstraete, this session will bring together a panel of thinkers and practitioners from the arts and archaeology to explore issues arising from the exploration of the interstitial space between art and archaeology. Beyond a shared disciplinary history within art history and antiquarianism, art and archaeology share sensibilities around approaches to material, time, process, performance, liveness, assemblage, fragmentation, decomposition, reconstruction, archive, and representation. Both order things in specific, intentioned ways, creating conditions of possibility for making meaning and sense in the world. Over the last two decades, there has been increasing symmetry between art and archaeology. Within archaeology, scholars and practitioners such as Colin Renfrew (1999; 2005 also see Renfrew et al 2004), Michael Shanks (1991; also see Shanks & Pearson 2001), Tim Ingold (2011; 2007), Ruth Tringham (2007; 2009) and Doug Bailey (2005; 2008), amongst others, have undertaken substantive work exploring the possibilities of a mingling of archaeological and artistic practices. Within contemporary art, there has been a symmetrical interest in archaeological, and more broadly historical, practices (both in aesthetic form, conceptual intent, and epistemological process) as they relate to growing movements in contemporary arts practice around concerns about art as research and research as art – responding to a shared moment, rife with anxiety about remembering that which is threatened by forgetting, revealing that which has been committed to oblivion, liberating and empowering through that which is marginalized by disappearance, and narrating and visualizing the past as an act of resistance.

Organizers

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University

Dieter Roelstraete, Manilow Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Presentations

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University

Title: The Art of the Past: Before and after Archaeology

Abstract:

With intellectual and disciplinary roots in art history, early modern science, and antiquarianism, the field of archaeology exists within the arts, humanities, and sciences. As with their antiquarian forebears whose work to compose images of the past slipped easily from art to science and back again, contemporary archaeologists compose pasts from traces, residues, absences, and presences appropriating, mixing, and inventing techniques and methods from across the academy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a resurgence of interest in the composition of the past within contemporary arts practice. With some artists focusing directly on archaeology and the act of excavation and processing of finds in particular, some archaeologists, such as Colin Renfrew, Ruth Tringham, Michael Shanks, and Doug Bailey, have endeavored to meet this interest within the arts, sustaining critical, interdisciplinary work on the renewal of the past through both archaeological as well as artistic practices. In many cases, archaeologists themselves have transgressed disciplinary strictures engaging artists directly through residencies and commissions and in some cases taking to making art themselves. Collectively, there is evidence of a concerted effort within both archaeology and art to address the composition of the past—not as an end result of technological analysis but as the beginning of a possibility for renewal through process. Doing away with the rubric of a scientifically managed past, perhaps we may be witnessing a revival of an avant-gardist past, akin to the predusciplinary spirit of antiquarianism, that is not confined by disciplinary strictures or epistemic conventions, where the past is not a destination but a continual process of composition and renewal.

Dieter Roelstraete, Manilow Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Title: Field Notes: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art

Abstract:

The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology traces the interest in history, archaeology, and archival research that defines some of the most highly regarded art of the last decade. Consisting almost entirely of work produced after the year 2000, The Way of the Shovel re-imagines the art world as an alternative “History Channel” that is as concerned with remembering histories as it is with challenging their truthfulness. The tools of the archaeological trade—the titular shovel, for example—are likewise examined in relation to the act (and art) of excavating. The exhibition is arranged according to several conceptual underpinnings. In the first strand, archaeology is considered metaphorically, with an emphasis on art that takes the form of historical, often archival, research. Most of this work is photographic in nature, much of it moving-image based, and explores art’s documentary powers. Key figures in this category include Phil Collins, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Joachim Koester, Deimantas Narkevicius, Anri Sala, Hito Steyerl, and Ana Torfs, among others. In the second strand, archaeology is considered more literally, in works that question the relationship between matter (stuff, things) and historical truth. This section features the sculptural work of artists such as Cyprien Gaillard, Daniel Knorr, Michael Rakowitz, and Simon Starling, as well as artworks that address the political dimension of archaeology by Mariana Castillo Deball and Jean-Luc Moulène. Two “exhibitions-within-the-exhibition” take a closer look at the towering figure of Robert Smithson, art’s quintessential searcher, and at psychoanalysis as an archaeology of the mind. In these subsections, we encounter the work of Jason Lazarus, Tony Tasset, Shellburne Thurber, and others.

Doug Bailey, Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University

Title: Going beyond and letting go: non-archaeological art and non-artistic archaeology.

Abstract:

Almost without exception workers at the interfaces of art and archaeology have restricted themselves to the boundaries of their respective discipline and discourse. Whether it is an archaeological investigation of ancient art and artefacts or an artistic recreation of past places, peoples and events, we have not grasped firmly enough the accompanying opportunities for transformative thinking and practice. In this paper, I argue that artists and archaeologists will benefit from moving beyond the current restrictions and limitations. The result will be a lack of discipline (in every sense of that phrase) that will have innovative and transformative things to say, show, do, and make around key issues of modern thinking in the humanities and social sciences. This paper will draw examples from prehistoric and contemporary art as well as from recent work by colleagues who have broken through and broken free.

Rebecca Keller, artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Title: Excavating History, Artists in Historic Sites

Abstract:

Historic sites are palimpsests: places where stories are layered over other stories.

My installations, writing and exhibitions, done under the umbrella title “Excavating History’ involve unearthing new connections and complicating the existing narratives of historic sites, collections and archives.

Beginning with intensive research which unfolds into a sort of ‘rigorous imagining,” my work unpacks and expands the meanings embedded in historic sites and archives. These acts of excavation bring to light the multi-layered (and perhaps subconscious) interpretive and narrative frameworks that have shaped our assumptions, world views and politics.

These projects are done in dialogue with the site; more than site-specific, I think of them as “site-complicit.” This approach is related to the increasing interest in art-as-research, as well as to the capacity of art to produce social relations. Excavating History projects are driven by the conviction that the meanings embedded in our public historic sites can be connected to contemporary social issues and help us envision alternate futures. A book, “Excavating History: Artists Take on Historic Sites” was released in 2012 by Stepsister Press

Jack Green, Chief Curator, Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago

&

Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago

Title: Curatorial responses to Danh Vo’s We The People at the Oriental Institute Museum

Abstract:

We present our curatorial thoughts and experiences in collaborating on the recent exhibition of Danh Vo’s We The People at the University of Chicago. We The People consists of life-size fragments of a replica of the Statue of Liberty made from sheet copper that are dispersed around the world. Vo does not assign specific meaning beyond the reproduction and spread of the pieces, although it is considered to draw upon Vo’s own life story as a refugee from Vietnam and notions of fragmentation of freedom and democracy. As part of the Renaissance Society’s exhibit of Danh Vo’s work, pieces were dispersed within interior and exterior spaces around the University of Chicago campus, including the Mesopotamian galleries at the Oriental Institute Museum, which specializes in the archaeology, history, and art of the ancient Middle East. The theme of fragmentation and dispersal was key within a space containing reconstructed fragments of ancient sculpture from the imperial city of Khorsabad (modern Iraq), which are now distributed in museums across the world. Although Vo leaves the political implications of his Statue of Liberty fragments to visitors’ own interpretations, the exhibit’s archaeological setting at the Oriental Institute led to new ways of considering Vo’s work and generated unexpected historical, archaeological, and curatorial responses.

Michael Rakowitz, artist and Department of Art Theory & Practice, Northwestern University

Title: Artist’s Statement

Abstract:

Based between Chicago and New York City, Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American conceptual artist who operates within art spaces and beyond them. With his series paraSITE, Rakowitz built customized, inflatable shelters for the homeless using a mere budget of $5.00 for plastic bags and waterproof tape for each project, and the exterior vents of buildings for heat. In Return, produced by Creative Time in 2004, Rakowitz reopened his grandfather’s import and export business, Davison’s & Co., which first operated in Baghdad and then relocated to New York when his family was exiled in 1946. Rakowitz’s resurrected family business offered free shipping to Iraq three months after the U.S. declared stifling trade restrictions on the country. Spoils of 2011, another Rakowitz and Creative Time collaboration, took a more provocative and personal approach to American-Iraqi relations. Housed at Park Avenue Autumn restaurant, the “culinary/art experience” provided patrons with rich traditional Iraqi dishes served on rare pieces of fine China from Saddam Hussein’s personal collection. More surprising than the sensory tensions experienced by each diner, notably the contrast between the “sweetness of the Iraqi date syrup, and the…bitter provenance of the dishware,” was the dramatic conclusion of the project. A cease-and-desist letter from the State Department calling for the “surrender” of the plates abruptly ended Spoils, and resulted in their return to Iraqi territory. It was, according to Rakowitz, a “kind of perfect” ending to the project.

Roundtable Discussion

The Roundtable portion of the session will feature all presenters and organizers as well as:

Pamela Bannos, Distinguished Senior Lecturer, Department of Art Theory and Practice, Northwestern University

Read it here.

Read it here.

Read it here.

Read it here.

Celeste Prize is an international contemporary arts prize open to emerging and mid-career artists worldwide without limits of age, sex or experience. The prize gives voice to thousands of artists, promoting their works with commitment and professionalism.

More information here: http://www.celesteprize.com/celesteprize2013/

The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology

As a prelude to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s upcoming exhibition The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology curated by Dieter Roelstraete, this session will bring together a panel of thinkers and practitioners from the arts and archaeology to explore issues arising from the exploration of the interstitial space between art and archaeology. Beyond a shared disciplinary history within art history and antiquarianism, art and archaeology share sensibilities around approaches to material, time, process, performance, liveness, assemblage, fragmentation, decomposition, reconstruction, archive, and representation. Both order things in specific, intentioned ways, creating conditions of possibility for making meaning and sense in the world. Over the last two decades, there has been increasing symmetry between art and archaeology. Within archaeology, scholars and practitioners such as Colin Renfrew (1999; 2005 also see Renfrew et al 2004), Michael Shanks (1991; also see Shanks & Pearson 2001), Tim Ingold (2011; 2007), Ruth Tringham (2007; 2009) and Doug Bailey (2005; 2008), amongst others, have undertaken substantive work exploring the possibilities of a mingling of archaeological and artistic practices. Within contemporary art, there has been a symmetrical interest in archaeological, and more broadly historical, practices (both in aesthetic form, conceptual intent, and epistemological process) as they relate to growing movements in contemporary arts practice around concerns about art as research and research as art – responding to a shared moment, rife with anxiety about remembering that which is threatened by forgetting, revealing that which has been committed to oblivion, liberating and empowering through that which is marginalized by disappearance, and narrating and visualizing the past as an act of resistance.

Featured participants include:

Doug Bailey, Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University

Rebecca Keller, artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Jack Green, Chief Curator, Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago

Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago

Michael Rakowitz, artist and Department of Art Theory & Practice, Northwestern University

Pamela Bannos, Distinguished Senior Lecturer, Department of Art Theory and Practice, Northwestern University

Ten years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom and twenty-three years since the first Gulf War, the ramifications of the armed invasions and occupations of the Republic of Iraq by the United States continue to be felt by the Iraqi people as well as throughout the Middle East and the world. Amidst these fraught conflicts, artists have offered responses to the complexities of war and the challenges of its aftermath. The Art and War in Iraq symposium brings together American, Iraqi, and Middle Eastern artists, scholars, and critics to address the impacts of the wars in Iraq and the wider conflicts in the Middle East, with special attention to contemporary artistic practices in Iraq and its diaspora.

The symposium marks the opening of the Bell Gallery’s spring exhibitions— the American premier of The Ashes Series by Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal and I am Sorry It is Difficult to Start by American artist Daniel Heyman. In addition, a screening of Rory Kennedy’s documentary film entitled Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, will be held on April 18, at 5:30 pm in the List Art Center Auditorium. All events are free and open to the public.

Participants include
Wafaa Bilal, Artist and Assistant Arts Professor, Photography, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Lecture: Making the Invisible Visible

Daniel Heyman, Artist and Lecturer, Rhode Island School of Design, and Critic, Princeton University
Lecture: The Iraqi Portraits

Meir Wigoder, School of Communication, Sapir College, Sderot and the Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University
Lecture: Constructing Deconstruction: Wafaa Bilal’s The Ashes Series

Susanne Slavick, Artist and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon University
Lecture: Out of Rubble

Rijin Sahakian, Founding Director, Sada for contemporary Iraqi art
Lecture: The right to engage: Arts production in Baghdad

Nada Shabout, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute (CAMCSI), University of North Texas
Moderator for final panel discussion

Support for the Art and War in Iraq is provided by Brown University’s Woods Lectureship,Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Modern Culture and Media, and Creative Arts Council

Information and tickets →

Artist Jin Shan discusses the ideas behind his installation “My dad is Li Gang! 我爸是李刚!” (2012) in the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.

Video footage by Ian Alden Russell, Andy Romer Photography, Frank Mullin, and Tara Cavanaugh.

More information: http://ianaldenrussell.com/projects/my-dad-is-li-gang-我爸是李刚

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