CulturalPolitics

KATHE BURKHART: FAMOUS FOR FIFTEEN SECONDS

Fuck You: from the Liz Taylor Series (Cleopatra). Acrylic, composition leaf on canvas. 72 × 48 inches, 1984.

Cultural Politics
Vol.4, Number 2, July 2008

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See also:
Alexander Grey Associates, New York: Kathe Burkhart
P.S.1/Moma: Kathe Burkhart solo exhibition (Oct/2007-Jan/2008)

KATHE BURKHART IS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST AND WRITER. HER WORK HAS BEEN EXHIBITED INTERNATIONALLY, INCLUDING AT PS1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER (MOMA), THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM, WEATHERSPOON MUSEUM, AND NEUBERGER MUSEUM (USA); BANFF CENTRE FOR THE ARTS (CANADA); SMAK MUSEUM (BELGIUM); THE FLASHART MUSEUM, 1993 VENICE BIENNALE, AND GALLERIA D’ARTE MODERNA BOLOGNA (ITALY); AND THE GRONINGEN AND HELMOND MUSEUMS (NETHERLANDS). SHE HAS HAD THIRTY SOLO EXHIBITIONS, AMONG THEM AT PARTICIPANT INC., ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, MITCHELL ALGUS GALLERY, SCHROEDER ROMERO GALLERY, FEATURE INC. (ALL IN NYC), AND AT GALERIE LUMEN TRAVO (AMSTERDAM). HER WORK APPEARED ON THE COVER OF FLASHART IN DECEMBER 1990 AND WAS THE SUBJECT OF THE FEATURE ARTICLE “BAD GIRL MADE GOOD.” BURKHART HAS RECEIVED GRANTS FROM THE MONDRIAAN FOUNDATION, CHANGE, ARTS INTERNATIONAL, ART MATTERS, AND THE AMSTERDAM FOUNDATION FOR FINE ART, DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF THREE BOOKS OF FICTION, DEUX AMES SOEURS (BETWEEN THE LINES) HACHETTE LITTERATURES, 2005; DEUX POIDS, DEUX MESURES (THE DOUBLE STANDARD) HACHETTE LITTERATURES, 2002; AND PARTICIPANT PRESS, 2005, AND FROM UNDER THE 8 BALL, LINE, 1985. SHE TEACHES ART AND CRITICAL THEORY AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, AND DIVIDES HER TIME BETWEEN NEW YORK AND AMSTERDAM. THE LIZ TAYLOR SERIES: THE FIRST TWENTY FIVE YEARS, WAS PUBLISHED BY REGENCY ARTS PRESS IN NOVEMBER 2007.

> FAMOUS FOR FIFTEEN SECONDS

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
-- Andy Warhol

When I first began making the Liz Taylor Series of paintings in 1982 as a graduate student at CalArts, the world was quite a different place. People loved stars then, of course (they always have and always will); but the desire to become one, for most, remained mostly in the realm of fantasy and projection. There was no celebrity culture per se – no Real World full of American Idols, Apprentices, Big Brothers, Survivors, Bachelors, Extreme Makeovers, Fear Factors, Rich Girls, Trailer Park Boys, Art Stars, or Iconoclasts – that according to the commercials will “change the way you see celebrity.” There were no websites like YouTube.com or MySpace.com where a subscriber can create his own personal fan club, or magazines like ME in which “ordinary people” are rendered as celebrities, or celebrities are rendered as ordinary people.

Today, mainstream popular culture has taken the obses-sion with celebrities to such an extreme level that I cannot possibly hope to compete with it in my artistic practice. Still, I want to trace the current obsession with celebrity as a backdrop to one long strand of my work, the Liz Taylor Series.

STEPHEN ANDREWS: BASED ON A TRUE STORY

Images courtesy of the artist and Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto; more

See also:
Stephen Andrews, Platform Gallery, Seattle, WA; more

Cultural Politics
Vol. 2, No. 3, November 2006

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STEPHEN ANDREWS WAS BORN IN 1956 IN SARNIA, ONTARIO, CANADA. HE HAS EXHIBITED HIS ARTWORK IN CANADA, THE U.S., BRAZIL, SCOTLAND, FRANCE, AND JAPAN. HE IS REPRESENTED IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA, AS WELL AS MANY PRIVATE COLLECTIONS. HIS WORK DEALS WITH MEMORY, IDENTITY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THEIR REPRESENTATIONS IN VARIOUS MEDIA.

> BASED ON A TRUE STORY

In the days following the bombings on the London Underground in 2005, I was astounded by the telling and retelling, and then the amending and re-amending, of that “story”: the killing of a Brazilian man, Jean de Menezes. What was exceptional was the short timeframe in which these different versions emerged. Initially we were told the shooting had been “directly linked to the ongoing and expanding anti-terrorist operation” and that upon leaving the apartment that was under surveillance, Mr. de Menezes matched the description of one of the suspects being sought. It was later revealed that his identity couldn’t be confirmed because the officer was “relieving himself” at the time. Scotland Yard said de Menezes’ “clothing and behaviour” added to their suspicions. By the time de Menezes had walked to Stockwell Underground station, there had been a positive identification. He (or a police officer) vaulted over the turnstile at the subway (or not, depending on whom you listened to). He ran to catch the train unaware that he was being “hotly pursued” by officers. The fact that he wasn’t wearing suspicious clothing, hadn’t refused to obey police instructions, wasn’t running from police and wasn’t their man in the first place seemed to have been overlooked in the initial police account. This was admitted to later, after documents were leaked and CCTV footage contradicted the police statements.

JORDAN CRANDALL: AN AXIS OF INTENSITY

Cultural Politics
Vol. 2, No. 1, March 2006
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artist's website: http://jordancrandall.com
More info

Images: Screen grabs from a video recording of the Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana in Baghdad. (2004), courtesy of the artist.

Jordan Crandall is a media artist and theorist. He is Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University  of California, San Diego. Crandall works in film, video, and new technologies that are particular to military and surveillance culture. His earlier works include the site-specific video installation Suspension (1997) commissioned by Documenta X in Kassel; a seven-part video installation entitled Drive (1998-99), commissioned by the NeueGalerie am LandesmuseumJoanneum and the ZentrumfürKunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlshrue; a six-part video installation entitled Heatseeking (2000), commissioned by inSITE in San Diego and Tijuana; and Trigger (2002), a two-channel video installation which debuted in October 2002 at Henry Urbach Architecture, New York, supported by the New York State Department of Cultural Affairs and ARTSPACE, San Francisco and New York.

> AN AXIS OF INTENSITY

EXT – BAGHDAD STREET – DAY

We are watching a video recording of the Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana in Baghdad.

We see a US Army tank approaching Dana.

        Suddenly --

as eye, camera and weapon align

        and a shot traverses the image screen --

 

we

feel

 

            the camera-body
   

                                tumble to the ground,

JOY GARNETT: FOLLOW THE IMAGE

Cultural Politics
Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2005
FREE DOWNLOAD [PDF] at Ingenta.

More info: http://joygarnett.com

ABSTRACT
New York artist Joy Garnett outlines her methods as a painter who works from sampled or found images. She discusses her relationship to her sources, which have included science photographs, declassified military and news media imagery. She describes the challenges she has encountered while working with different types of source material: from technical obstacles (invisible phenomena that require lenses and other optical devices) to socio-political mediation (government secrecy and the search for declassified imagery), to legal encumbrances (accusations of “piracy” and copyright infringement regarding a sampled image). Garnett explains her sense of the continued relevance and critical potential of art in light of these challenges, specifically the uses of painting in an age of mass production and digital technology.

JOY GARNETT STUDIED PAINTING AT L’ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS IN PARIS AND COMPLETED HER MFA AT THE CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK. HER THIRD SOLO EXHIBITION, "RIOT," OPENED AT DEBS & CO., NEW YORK IN JANUARY 2004, AND PRESENTED NEW PAINTINGS BASED ON NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS OF FIGURES IN STATES OF EMOTIONAL OR PHYSICAL EXTREMITY. SHE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A PROJECT ABOUT WAR AND GLOBAL NOMADISM CALLED "LOST HIGHWAY."

> FOLLOW THE IMAGE

I am crazy for images. I spend part of every day trolling the Web, collecting photographs and video stills. I gravitate toward scenes of political crisis, social unrest, war and disaster – images one normally sees in newspapers and on television. Because images in the media go by quickly, I feel compelled to stop them and keep them from slipping away. Once an image is isolated on my monitor I can control it; by printing it out I make it “mine,” at least for a short while. Eventually I’ll make a painting based on it. Of course, these images are hardly mine; I am just one of many potential authors. Circulating in the public domain [sic; this should read: public sphere] where they are copied, recycled and remixed for different purposes, media images are open to a variety of appropriations, uses and recontextualizations.

I tend to let my printouts sit for a while in folders. As time goes by their original context becomes difficult to remember and impossible to decipher, if one relies solely on visual evidence and memory. In this way they gradually become more generalized pictures of someone’s fear or anger, of protest or an explosion or a war. I lay my prints out on the floor, shuffle them around, crop and fold and try different things with them. The images themselves offer no resistance to this game. As I work, I become aware of an overarching “media narrative” – a loose confluence of news, advertising and entertainment, of constructed meanings, purported truths and generally held versions of events. The media narrative reinforces itself through repetition, and to some degree it influences our understanding of events as they unfold in regions remote to us. Though powerful and ubiquitous, it is subject to mitigating factors and from time to time spins out of control. We live in its thrall, by turns consuming and contributing to it, intentionally or unconsciously. My artwork taps into the media narrative in order to turn it into something else; I slow it down and rework bits of it. The resulting paintings are infused with this generalized narrative, yet they function slowly and ambiguously on some obscure, yet intimate level. I relish trafficking in the tensions that exist between these contradictory vehicles of information and expression.