HISTORY CONTEMP ART paper

RODNEY KING When Rodney King was caught by the Los Angeles police after a high-speed chase on March 3, 1991, the officers pulled him out of the car and beat him brutally. Amateur cameraman George Holliday caught it all on videotape. The four L.A.P.D. officers involved were indicted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force by a police officer. However, after a three-month trial, a predominantly white jury acquitted the officers, inflaming citizens and sparking the violent 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

ACT UP Poster, 1987; David Wojnarowicz film still, A Fire in My Belly, 1989; ACT UP Protest

The Perfect Moment, Curated by Janet Kardon, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1988

Robert Mapplethorpe,

Man in a Polyester Suit, 1980 and Calla

Lily, 1985

Andres Serrano, Immersion (Piss Christ), 1987; Projection of a Mapplethorpe self-portrait at the Corcoran Gallery on June 30, 1989.

“The Helms Amendment,” 1989 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

“None of the funds authorized to be appropriated for the NEA or the NEH may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgement of the NEA or NEH may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” Jesse Helms, US Senator, North Carolina

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque – Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993

Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992 (In collaboration with Diedrich Diederichsen) Portrait of Angela Davis and Theodor Adorno

Country USA Founded and folded 1974–ongoing Key contributors Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Joan Copjec, Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsch, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson

On the heels of the 1974 furore over Lynda Benglis’ provocative advertisement in Artforum, editors Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson resigned to establish their own magazine.

October – named after Oktybar, Sergei Eisenstein’s film commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Bolshvik Revolution in 1917 – was established in 1976 as an antidote to the market-driven advertising-filled art glossies. In the early days it looked at Minimalism through the prism of French Structuralism; later Yve-Alain Bois joined the journal, whose work fused Structuralism and Greenbergian formalism. As post-Structuralism evolved, the editors began catalyzing criticism through Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and especially, Jacques Lacan.

The October group has certainly shaped Postmodern theory, and if the ghost of Clement Greenberg lingers less often around the October office than it used to, the writing in October today does display a subtle shift away from issues of authorship, which have been side-stepped by a less authoritarian critical method. The old guard, and the ambitious younger generation of critics and historians the journal supports, is still firmly rooted in the academic realm. Indeed, many are now on the top university faculties and increasingly considered the new modern art history establishment.

Freize, “Collected Writings,” June 1, 2006.

The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial

Author(s): Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Silvia Kolbowski, Miwon Kwon and Benjamin Buchloh October, Vol. 66 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 3-27

The Politics of the

Signifier, p. 4

Rosalind Krauss (in response to Hal Foster): One of the things that I find symptomatic of the situation you are calling the return of the signified is the tendency of recent art criticism to avoid talking about the art itself and instead just to name a set of ideas that the art might invoke. I was struck reading the catalog texts for the Whitney Biennial by this constant deflection of attention from the texture of the work…I’ll given an example…I was particularly struck by Lorna Simpson’s work, especially the interplay it set up on the facing walls between the grid constituted by the mouth pieces of a massive variety of different brass instruments on the one hand, and the truncation of the black body presented simply through a photograph of lips on the other hand….

Lorna Simpson, Hypothetical, installation,

Whitney Museum 1993

The Politics of the

Signifier, p. 4/5

Krauss (con’t): Here there was a sense of two different taxonomic spaces: on the one side, the field of of the object, of all the different horn types from tuba to bugle; on the other side, this taxonomy of the body, the body cut up racially, ethnographically, and also stereotypically because of the association between black body and brass music—the jazz trumpeter and so on…Then, on the wall bridging the two “grids,” there was the newspaper clipping about Tom Bradley being asked whether, were he not mayor of Los Angeles, would he, as a black man, be afraid after the Rodney King Verdict. And he said, “No, I wouldn’t be afraid; I’d be angry,” I thought that was irrelevant to the piece and not very interesting…

Lorna Simpson: Hypothetical, 1992 (three details) As David Kiehl wrote : “…It takes its title from a framed newspaper excerpt regarding a question posed to Tom Bradley, the African American mayor of Los Angeles, in the wake of the city’s riots following the April, 1992 acquittal of the LAPD officers charged with beating African American motorist Rodney King. Asked if whether he would now be afraid to be a black man in Los Angeles if he were not the mayor, Mr. Bradley paused, then said: “No, I would not be scared. I would be angry.” The aural component of Hypothetical is inspired by the constraints of spoken language: silent mouthpieces from wind instruments are installed directly into the wall as sculptural forms, accompanied by hidden speakers projecting the muted sound of labored breathing as if struggling to reach a cohesive melody.

The Politics of the

Signifier, p. 6

Krauss (con’t): Then I read Thelma Golden’s catalog essay “What’s White…?” And there she presents us with the one meaning of the piece: it’s the Wall of Jericho; black is going to well up, and the Wall will be shattered. Moreover, in her description, she said that it is a wall of trumpets. Not only is this inaccurate on the basic level of description, since there is the mouthpiece of every conceivable kind of brass instrument. But it is also not accurate to say that the work is solely about black rage. If that is what Lorna Simpson thinks too, well, there is no reason to privilege the intention of the artist. You make a work, just as any one of us writes a text: you present it, you publish it, it’s out there, and its meaning is at work in a public space. And if we believe in a public space, which is the space of the political, then I don’t think we should privilege the artist or the curator saying that this is strictly about one thing–here, that it is strictly about black rage. It is partly about black rage [but it is also about the grid] and many other formal devices [she employed to make the piece….”

The Wall of Jericho

The Wall of Jericho was destroyed when the Israelites walked around it for seven days carrying the Ark of the Covenant. On the seventh day, Joshua commanded his people to blow their trumpets made of rams' horns and shout at the walls until they finally fell down.

The Politics of the

Signifier, p. 9

Benjamin Buchloh (In response to Krauss): There is another model of aesthetic production and experience at work throughout history, which is the highly structured model of communicative actions based on the assumption of intentionality and communication, on very focused statements made in a preconceived mode of address— targeting specific audiences. This model positions itself in direct opposition to the assumption that a competent reading audience will at all times be capable of absorbing the multiplicity of the artwork…I am challenging that assumption that the political as Rosalind has defined it is universally accepted….

Krauss (responds): I don’t think you addressed what I said. Once you make a work…once it appears in public space, it is open to many readings, and you can’t control its meaning. Your notion is that it is univocal, that the communication channels are pure and controllable, is something I deeply doubt. The multiplicity of readings will be there willy-nilly. And I wonder what kind of politics it is to pretend that you can control it—and what notion of public space [that proposes].

Andrea Fraser Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) is a single channel video in which the American artist Andrea Fraser leads a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the guise of a fictional docent named Jane Castleton. Dressed in a smart grey suit, Castleton, who introduces herself as a ‘guest’, ‘a volunteer’ and ‘an artist’, speaks directly to the camera as she walks around the museum. Alongside conventional elements of a gallery tour – such as the history of the institution and its collection – Castleton offers her thoughts on the building’s toilets, cloakroom and shop. She also pronounces, in strange digressions and with great passion, on broader political and social ideas. The language Fraser employs in her performance appears to be a parody of the descriptions commonly provided by docents, with Castleton applying extensive and exaggerated praise to the items she encounters. There is often an odd disjuncture between the docent’s words and the objects she is describing, such as when she points to an exit sign and claims, ‘this picture is a brilliant example of a brilliant school’. Throughout the tour Castleton repeatedly returns to questions of personal taste, and the notions of grace, dignity and order that she feels artworks, museums and gallery visitors should embody.

Andrea Fraser Notes on the Margin, 1990/2013 Gracie Mansion/Hammer Museum 15 wall texts Dimensions variable

For Take It or Leave It, Andrea Fraser expanded her 1990 work Notes on the Margin. Adopting the form of the museum wall text, the work consists of fifteen labels (the original version had seven) interspersed throughout the exhibition. Originally created for an eponymous exhibition at Gracie Mansion in New York City, several of the texts are appropriated from statements made by US senators and congressmen, such as Senators Jesse Helms and Charles Grassley, who advocated censorship and the reduction of government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989.