LONDON.- Michael Landy, one of the most acclaimed and respected British artists of his generation, transforms the South London Gallery into Art Bin, a container for the disposal of works of art. Over the course of the sixweek exhibition the enormous 600m³ bin will gradually fill up as people discard their art works in it, ultimately creating, in Michael Landy’s words, “a monument to creative failure”. Landy famously destroyed all his possessions in his 2001 installation Break Down ... More"
A History of Visual Culture is a history of ideas. The recent explosion of interest in visual culture suggests the phenomenon is very recent. But visual culture has a history. Knowledge began to be systematically grounded in observation and display from the Enlightenment. Since then, from the age of industrialisation and colonialism to today's globalised world, visual culture has continued to shape our ways of thinking and of interpreting the world.
Carefully structured to cover a wide history and geography, A History of Visual Culture is divided into themed sections - Revolt and Revolution; Science and Empiricism; Gaze and Spectacle; Acquisition, Display, and Desire; Conquest, Colonialism, and Globalization; Image and Reality; Media and Visual Technologies. Each section presents a carefully selected range of case studies from across the last 250 years, designed to illustrate how all kinds of visual media have shaped our technology, aesthetics, politics and culture.
About the editors
Jane Kromm is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York and author of The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500-1850. Susan Benforado Bakewell is an independent curator and scholar, and has taught at the University of Texas, Arlington and Southern Methodist University. She is co-editor of Voices in New Mexico Art.
Contents
General Introduction
Jane Kromm
Part One: Revolt and Revolution
Introduction
Chapter 1: Helen Weston, 'The Politics of Visibility in Revolutionary France: Projecting on the Streets'
Chapter 2: Richard Taws, '19th c. Revolutions and Strategies of Visual Persuasion'
Chapter 3: Elizabeth Guffey, 'Socialist Movements and the Development of the Political Poster'
Chapter 4: Jelena Stojanoviæ, 'Avant-gardes and the Culture of Protest: The Use-Value of Iconoclasm'
Part Two: Science and Empiricism
Introduction
Chapter 5: Jane Kromm, 'To Collect is to Quantify and Describe: Visual Practices in the Development of Modern Science'
Chapter 6: Fae Brauer, 'The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism'
Chapter 7: Heather McPherson, 'Biology and Crime: Degeneracy and the Visual Trace'
Chapter 8: Nancy Anderson, 'Visual Models and Scientific Breakthroughs; The Virus and the Geodesic Dome: Pattern, Production, Abstraction and the Ready-Made Model'
Part Three: Gaze and Spectacle
Introduction
Chapter 9: Temma Balducci, 'Gaze, Body and Sexuality: Modern Rituals of Looking and Being Looked at'
Chapter 10: Jane Kromm, 'The Flâneur/Flâneuse Phenomenon'
Chapter 11: Elana Shapira, 'Gaze and Spectacle in the Calibration of Class and Gender: Visual Culture in Vienna 1900'
Chapter 12: Fae Brauer, 'The Stigmata of Abjection: Degenerate Limbs, Hysterical Skin and the Tattooed Body'
Part Four: Acquisition, Display, and Desire
Introduction
Chapter 13: Jane Kromm, 'To the Arcade: The World of the Shop and the Store'
Chapter 14: Amy Ogata, '”To See is to Know:” Visual Knowledge at the International Expositions'
Chapter 15: Susan Bakewell, 'Changing Museum Spaces: From the Prado to the Guggenheim Bilbao'
Chapter 16: Michael Golec, 'Design for a Display Culture: Domestic Engineering to Design Research'
Part Five: Conquest, Colonialism, and Globalization
Introduction
Chapter 17: Matthew Potter, 'Orientalism and its Visual Regimes: Lovis Corinth and Imperialism in the Art of the Kaiserreich'
Chapter 18: Marcus Wood, 'Marketing the Slave Trade: Slavery, Photography and Emancipation'
Chapter 19: Kim Masteller, 'Cultures of Confiscation: The Collection, Appropriation and Destruction of South Asian Art'
Chapter 20: Nada Shabout, 'Trading Cultures: The Boundary Issues of Globalization'
Part Six: Image and Reality
Introduction
Chapter 21: Joy Sperling, 'Multiples and Reproductions: Prints and Photographs in 19th c. England; Visual Communities, Cultures, and Class'
Chapter 22: Jane Kromm, 'Inventing the Mise-en-scène: German Expressionism and the Silent Film Set'
Chapter 23: Sarah Warren, 'The Reality of the Abstract Image: Re-thinking Spirituality in Abstraction'
Part Seven: Media and Visual Technologies
Introduction
Chapter 24: Brenda DeMartini-Squires, 'Now You See It: Disinformation and Disorientation on the Internet'
Chapter 25: Kathryn Shields, 'Carnival Mirrors: The Hermetic World of the Music Video'
Chapter 26: Matt Ferranto, 'Digital Self-fashioning in Cyberspace: The New Digital Self-Portrait'
Chapter 27A: Martin Danahay, 'Video Games: Art, Cinema and Interactivity'
Chapter 27B: Chris Kaczmarek, 'What You See is What You Get, or Reality is What you Take From It'
“This is the only treatment of visual culture with a broad temporal reach across a range of Western art practices that emphasizes the historical specificity of the visual experience. The approach – to highlight the key themes in visual culture and to illustrate these themes chronologically through carefully chosen case studies - is very effective.”
Kathleen Stewart Howe, Art and Art History, Pomona College
The title, All City Writers, describes a vast research on the Writing movement, focusing particularly on the process of its exportation from New York to all of Europe during the 80s. The first part of the research analyzes how graffiti in media such as movies, videos, magazines, and books from New York influenced Europe. When images of the New York subway arrived in London, Paris, Munich and Amsterdam, a huge milestone was set: a first generation of European graffiti writers started to follow the letters, the method, the techniques, and the general lifestyle of New York in the 70s. The book, a massive volume of more than 400 pages, has been conceived as an imaginary newspaper. The chronicles it contains have not been penned by real journalists or narrators, but by people who define themselves as ‘writers’. In this volume, a chorus of uncensored voices in the first person reveal their knowledge of European cities, their infrastructures, interstices and neighbourhoods. This is the generation who in the last two decades of the 20th Century imported the countercultural phenomenon from New York commonly known as “Graffiti”.
At the outset, the obsessive repetition of a tag and the search for urban fame became a widespread and spontaneous act, an infinite ego trip that was rarely dissociated from the reproduction of the chosen letters. In these pages, European writers abandon the compulsive act of tagging for a moment, to narrate the city and cast a personal eye – not always detached – on the trains, the streets and the urban surroundings that common citizens generally cannot or will not acknowledge. The chapters that compose this book focus on specific themes, comparable to the sections of a daily newspaper, presented here as special reports on the New York subway, the European network or the first urban strongholds. The combination of these elements, including, among others, a detailed, in-depth description of the phenomenon’s explosion in Italy during the 90’s, provides a unique history of the variety of pathways they explored and documents the desires of an entire generation intent on describing and interpreting their cultural movement.Through historic and detailed documentation deriving from a singular urban episode, the New York City Subway, All City Writers wants to investigate the evolution and the consequences of a countercultural phenomenon, which in the last decades has provoked a change in the rules of aesthetics and communication in modern day society.
Today I'm flying Finnair to Japan. It's been a couple of years, but that's okay; I like to leave long enough between trips for Japan's unfamiliarity and difference to gather afresh. Even if it's just for a few precious hours, I want to feel like a Japan virgin again.
If every time feels a little like the first time, what did the first time feel like? Well, I landed in Japan in 1992 and 1993 into a very particular time, place and culture. Anthropologists of 20th century Japanese subculture call the thing I encountered 'Parco-Saison Culture'. Press them for more precision and they'll distinguish those terms: the Parco Culture period actually lasted from 1975 to 1985, and the Saison period from 1983 to 1993. So technically, I arrived in 'late Saison Japan'. All the artifacts I saw and bought (Poison Girlfriend CDs, Sony Walkmans, copies of CUTiE magazine) are technically Late Saison Japan artifacts, bought from late Saison stores (Wave Records, Libro books). Even unrelated phenomena -- the Animal of Airs shop Hibiki Tokiwa kept in Aoyama, the Nadiff bookstore -- had close family ties to the Saison empire. Nadiff, for instance, was started by the manager of the Libro bookshop inside the Ikebukuro branch of Parco. In British terms, that's as if Magma had started life as a spin-off from Selfridges.
The Japan I witnessed in the early 90s consisted of a small hill between Shibuya Station and Yoyogi Park. Here was my hotel, the Tobu. Here was chic department store Parco, and the club where I played my concerts, the Quattro, located (it seemed bizarre at the time) atop a department store and reached by escalators which traversed the deserted sales floors after closing time. Here also were LOFT and OIOI, the Parco art gallery, the record store Wave, and the arty basement bookshop Libro (Saison Culture loves Italian names, clearly). Not far off was Muji, another specialty store owned by Seibu.
I didn't know it at the time, but my first Japan visit was circumscribed almost entirely by a world conceived and invented by one man, Seiji Tsutsumi. A novelist, award-winning poet, and one-time member of the Japanese communist party, the young Seiji inherited the department store business from his father. Yasujiro Tsutsumi founded the Seibu empire in 1912. Typically for Japan, it consisted of a department store (Seibu) and a railway line to bring people to it (the Seibu line). Seiji's half-brother Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, a much tougher cookie, inherited ten times as much as Seiji did when the old man died in 1964, and by 1990 Yoshiaki was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in the world, thanks to property and transport holdings in bubble-era Tokyo. But Seiji was the artistic one. He retired in 1991, but the Japan I first encountered bore his mark the way quattrocento Florence bore the imprint of the renaissance princes. (Like the princes, these magnates were financially corrupt, allied to the mafia, and autocratic, but that's another story, and one Seiji was well out of by the time the prison sentences were being handed down.)
While his half-brother (and rival) did business the way businessmen all over the world do, refined and cultivated Seiji got to work creating something rather more poetic; a cultural environment in Shibuya, a blend of art and commerce. A department store doesn't need an excellent art bookstore in the basement, its own culture magazine (Bikkuri House, which published 130 issues between 1974 and 1985, and whose readers were called 'housers'), a concert venue, or a well-curated gallery. It doesn't need to commission arty postmodern posters and adverts from the likes of Eiko Ishioka, or music from Sakamoto and Hosono. But Seiji wanted Parco-Saison culture to have these facilities, and he had the power to make it happen. It's something we still see today -- look at the way Soichiro Fukutake, CEO of the Benesse Corporation, is revitalising the islands of the Seto Inland Sea with cultural patronage, art tourism, museums by international architects, and a series of commissions.
Seiji Tsutsumi left such a mark on shoppers that one blog account measures the separate impacts he had on a succession of Japanese generations, from the Baby Boomers and the Apathetics to the Juniors and the Blanks, and across a succession of cities (Parco brought Saison Culture to Sapporo in 1990, so the capital of Hokkaido lived its Saison a little later than Tokyo).
The YouTube clips reveal Parco's interest in sophisticated visual culture. I saw some of these commercials on my hotel TV during my first trips to Tokyo, but I didn't catch the earliest, purest phase of them. Art director Eiko Ishioka, for instance, was headhunted to make posters and TV spots for Parco in the late 70s after working for Shiseido. According to The Postmodern Arts by Nigel Wheale (Routledge, 1995): 'In 1978 she directed a one-minute TV commercial to promote Parco, a new Japanese department store. The ad showed Faye Dunaway wearing a black dress against a black background, peeling and eating a hard-boiled egg. The department store name was faded up for the last few seconds of the action, and a low-key voice-over uttered a sentence in broken English: 'This is film for Parco.' The ad was highly successful, and Eiko rationalized its effects in terms of performance art: eating an egg was a totally 'global act' done by rich and poor, advanced and developing peoples.'
Much later, in 2001, I signed a deal with the Parco label Quattro (located directly across the road from the Loft store on the same Shibuya hill) and made a record for them with Emi Necozawa. It was deeply uncommercial, and sold almost nothing, but the label didn't seem to care. Perhaps that huge empire -- 'Saison Culture' -- gave them a certain stability, even if it was achieved by sleight of hand. Four years later the police raided Seibu, and accusations of insider dealing and falsification of share ownership flew. The company was acquired by the owners of 7-Eleven. But Parco still stands on top of that hill in Shibuya. And although the money this time comes from a British University rather than Quattro-Parco concerts, the credit card that paid for my plane tickets carries the Saison logo.
BREMEN.- Susanne M. Winterling works primarily in film, collage and photography. The various media of the individual installations developed for each of the exhibition contexts lead, altogether, to a whole. Her works produce thereby a system of concrete references, without resulting in the telling of a distinct story or following any clear narrative threads. But instead, meaning emerges in a delicate weave of references; narrative volatilizing and branching out.
Literature, music, art, architecture and in particular film history become artistic materials for Winterling in just the same ways as everyday objects are staged in her works. They can be of a porcelain cup from an erstwhile family manufacturer, a bird's feather that changes colour in differing light, the delicate flying fiery spikes of a sparkler or of the historical inscription discovered at an exhibition site. These elements of cultural history and the everyday encircle and mould each of us. Thereupon they determine the actual moulding both of identity and individuality and general societal realities. Therefore when Winterling implements everyday objects, film, literature and historical references in her works, her choice tells us, on the one hand, of her personal proclivities. On the other hand they refer to material which is also (consciously or unconsciously) known to the observer and therefore can be filled with their own perceptions, without the necessity of attaining knowledge through linked facts that descend too far into detail.
Through a sensitive grasp of the atmospheres and histories of the discovered exhibition spaces Winterling links the references from various areas in poetically charged arrangements. For the exhibition '...dreaming is nursed in darkness' at the GAK, the inscription of a founders crest at the Weserburg building indicating the Teerhof's (Teer = tar, Hof = yard) original significance as a tar works for 15th century shipbuilding, a quote by French existentialist Jean Genet and the explosion of a powder tower on the site of the Teerhof in the 18th century form the starting point for a versatility of works developed specifically for this occasion.
Thus a close up of a burning sparkler is played back in 16mm film format, links to the historical incident of the destruction of the 'bride' as the former powder tower at the Teerhof had been called and refers to the immanent beauty of the destructive incidents of fire and explosion. Various sculptures of tar and feathers and another 16mm film, showing the colour-changing feathers in their dance-like movement in a dark room, refers back to the name-giving history of the Teerhof. But likewise it plays on the custom in the Middle Ages to 'tar and feather' as a punishment and form of torture. Here too, the aesthetic beauty of the motif is brought about in singular contradistinction to the image evoked by their history. Such subsidiary perceptions and the material of tar, so bound up with black, pervades and forms the appearance of the whole exhibition – in frames, film backgrounds or the gleaming fabric panels which accentuate the elongated spaces of the GAK and are thus duplicated by the Weserburg tunnel situated in front of the door.
Another element of the presentation is formed by a modified cast of the crest/emblem inscription fixed above the tunnel entrance of the Weserburg. It alters the original formulation from 'männlichen festen Wollen' (firm masculine want) to 'weibliches festes Wollen' (firm feminine want) indicating at once the absurdity of such gender specific attributions upon which character traits are based. Furthermore it elucidates on the propagation of anachronistic, male and female connotations, which pervade our language to this day and pose questions on societal power structures. The historical crest is countered by a quote by Jean Genet the French existentialist that not only donates the title of the exhibition at GAK but is to be found again as an inscription in the presentation ('A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness'). In this way the exhibition title acts as a copula between the individual elements of the presentation such as the numerous reflecting surfaces, which are to be found in themselves – in the thought, that dreams are not only nurtured from positive and light, but can grow quite equally from the darkness, that 'grandeur' develops only where the debate also admits the violent aspects of things and where beauty is accorded its dark side.
Susanne M. Winterling (born, 1970) lives in Berlin. After taking part in international group exhibitions such as the Berlin Biennial 2008, at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel and the Kunsthalle Malmő and solo presentations in Vienna, St. Louis and Tokyo the presentation at GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The exhibition has been created in cooperation with the Badischen Kunstverein Karlsruhe.
A woman took the stage of a Seattle design conference in 1995 and smashed a computer to smithereens with a sledgehammer. Passions were raging full-boil during the so-called legibility wars, as tradition-based graphic designers — in love with clean, simple advertising and magazine layouts — looked with horror at a new generation of font designers and illustrators who used computer programs as a tool for shredding, shattering, melting and otherwise rethinking the way words and pictures came together to sell a message.
On hand to report on the fracas was Émigré magazine. Over the course of 69 issues that now reside in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the magazine championed experimentalists and routinely got lambasted by the old guard for advocating “the cult of ugly.” Émigré No. 70: The Look Back Issue hits bookstores Saturday. Weighing in at nearly 6 pounds, the 512-page volume costs $50 and comes bundled with a booklet of fiery letters to the editors, a CD-ROM with music and videos published by Émigré and a commemorative poster.
The book, edited by Émigré co-founder and designer Rudy VanderLans and published by Gingko Press, features all the eye-popping magazine covers (including those pictured above and below), plus essays and interviews from The Designers Republic, Allen Hori, Rick Valicenti, Vaughan Oliver, Mr. Keedy, Lorraine Wild and others.
VanderLans likens the late 20th century’s computer-inspired design movement to “punk music in the ’70s and ’80s.”
“Punk was a direct reaction to glam/stadium rock (Bowie/Roxie Music, etc.),” he told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “Did it change music? Not really. Glam rock is still being made. But punk added something to the mix. It expanded our idea of what music was, and how it could be recorded, performed and distributed. I think that’s the legacy of design of the ’90s. We reacted to an institutionalized Modernism that had gone stale.”
VanderLans talks about DIY design, the punk-rock aesthetic and the game-changing Apple Macintosh in the interview below.
Hendrick Goltzius' 'Jupiter and Antiope' Among Highlights of Sotheby's Sale
Hendrick Goltzius, 'Jupiter and Antiope', 1612. (122 x 178 cm.), 48 x 70 inches. Est. $8/12 million. Photo: Sotheby's.
A monumental masterpiece (48 x 70 in. (122 x 178 cm)) by the great 17th century Dutch artist
Hendrick Goltzius will be offered early next year in Sotheby’s sale of Important Old Master
Paintings in New York on 28 January 2010. Goltzius’ paintings are extremely rare and Jupiter
and Antiope is the most important by the artist to appear at auction in more than 25 years
est. $8/12 million, £4.8/7.3 million). Executed in 1612, the painting was formerly in the collection
of Abraham Adelsberger (1863-1940), a German Jew who was one of the most successful toy
manufacturers of the early 20th century. In the year following Adelsberger’s death, his
son-in-law was forced to sell the painting to the Nazi leader Hermann Göring to ensure the
safety of his family. The painting was recovered by the Allied forces in 1945 and sent to the
Dutch Government. Over the course of the next 64 years, the painting was loaned to three
institutions in the Netherlands, including the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, where it hung
from 1985 until this year. In March 2009, the painting was restituted to the heirs of its original
owner, Abraham Adelsberger. Prior to exhibition and sale in New York in January, the painting
will be exhibited at Sotheby’s London from 4 –9 December 2009.
George Wachter, Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings Department Worldwide said,
“As Goltzius only started painting in 1600 and died seventeen years later, only a limited number
of significant oils were executed by this great master and the present work ranks among his
greatest. It evokes an enormous reaction due to its size and subject matter, and the impact
of its eroticism speaks for itself.”
Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617)
In 1600, when he abandoned printmaking and began painting, Goltzius was the most famous
engraver in the Netherlands and perhaps all of Europe. His style had evolved from the extreme
contortions of Haarlem Mannerism toward the more classicizing influence of Italy, where he
had lived from 1590 to 1591. However, it was painting, not printmaking, that was considered
the highest art form, and at the dawn of the new century Goltzius decided to take up the
challenge of working in a new medium. In the seventeen years before his death he painted
more than 50 pictures and was soon recognized as the premiere painter in Haarlem, surpassing
his rival Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem. Paintings by Goltzius can be found in major museum
collections including the Rijksmuseum, The Los Angeles County Museum, the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, among others. The first major retrospective of the artist’s work was organized
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum in 2003.
Jupiter and Antiope
Jupiter and Antiope is one of a number of large-scale paintings of nudes that Goltzuis executed
between 1600 and 1617. In the present mythological scene, Goltzius captures the moment before
Antiope, the beautiful daughter of Nycteus and Thebes, was seduced by Jupiter in the form of
a satyr. The highly charged scene depicts Antiope asleep on her bed, propped up by a stack
of gorgeously-colored cushions. She is naked apart from her earrings, a pearl necklace and a
tiny strip of fabric that accentuates rather than hides her nudity. At her feet kneels Jupiter in
the form of a satyr, his look and attitude that of a half-wild creature consumed by lust. He
stares fixedly at Antiope, his mouth in a rigid grin and his arms and back tensed, literally ready
to pounce. In his right hand he holds an apple and some pears - an offering to Antiope – which,
like the grapes in the foreground, are symbols of fertility. Scattered throughout the composition
are other references to the event that is about to occur, including the inverted slippers beside
Jupiter's knee and the overturned chamber pot, both of which represent female sexual organs.
In the background of the painting is a somewhat ambiguous figure – a young satyr - who holds
his left index finger to his lip while lightly pinching Antiope’s nipple. Scholars have debated
the meaning of the gesture – possibly communicating caution to Jupiter to be quiet, or perhaps
he is pointing at his mouth symbolizing Jupiter’s intent to devour Antiope.
Provenance
Abraham Adelsberger was born on 23 April 1863 in Hockenheim, Germany. He established
himself as one of the most successful manufacturers of tin-plate toys in the early 20th century,
while at the same time nurturing a passion for art and building an impressive gallery at his home
in Nuremberg. As fears for his safety increased, he fled Germany in 1938 and joined his daughter
and her family in Amsterdam - managing to take several of his paintings with him, including
Jupiter and Antiope. Following his death two years later, his son-in-law was forced to sell the
painting to Hermann Göring to ensure the safety of his family. His family went into hiding from
1943 onwards and all survived. Adelsberger’s wife, Clothilde, was deported to Bergen-Belsen,
but also survived the concentration camp and the war. Göring, who assembled one of the mos
t important collections of Old Masters in Europe at the time, had at least four works by or
attributed to Goltzius in his collection, of which the present work was the most important.
He took the painting to Carinhall, his country retreat in the north of Brandenburg, and in early
1945, he ordered the evacuation of his entire art collection to protect it from the advancing
Russian forces. The following year, the painting was recovered by the Allied forces and taken
to the Central Collecting Point in Munich. From there, as was the common practice, the painting
was returned to the country from which it has been stolen - the Netherlands. Over the course
of the next several decades, the painting was loaned to several Dutch institutions including the
Kunsthistorisch Institute, Utrecht (1952-78), the Groningen Museum, Groningen (1979-85) and
the Frans Hals Museum (1985-2009), which was particularly apt given that Goltzius lived much
of his adult life in Haarlem. In March 2009, the painting was restituted to the heirs of Abraham
Adelsberger by the Dutch government.
Kristi Engle Gallery,
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com
"Officials today took the rare step of publicly releasing photos of women connected in some way to convicted murderer Bill Bradford, hoping the public might help identify them. While detectives believe some have been murdered, they can't say conclusively and hope publicity might bring witnesses - or the women themselves - forward."
-Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2006
In his first project with Kristi Engle Gallery, artist Michael Arata uses the medium of painting as a process of photographic manipulation. This series of works entitled Remember features 54 small paintings (acrylic on panel), each a portrait of a young woman, hair carefully rendered but with faces blanked out. The hairstyles are all of a kind fashionable in the late 70s and early 80s and place the women in a distinctive place in time. That place tragically coincides with the 1984 arrest and conviction of William Bradford for the murders of two young women in the Los Angeles area.
Posing as a freelance fashion photographer, Bradford persuaded women to model for him, luring them to the Mojave Desert and other desolate locations. Immediately after his arrest, while searching Bradford's apartment, the police discovered a collection of chilling photographs, 54 in total, of pretty young women posing for the camera. With no information that could identify any of the women, all the police could do was wonder who they were and what had happened to them. In 2006, detectives looking through a cold case file found the photographs. Using the web as a way to disseminate the images more widely than was possible at the time, they were published on the LAPD website with a hope of identifying any of the women. These posted photographs became the basis for Arata's project, an exploration of identification and memory through the means of photographic portraiture. Inevitably, the meaning of these photos has shifted since their initial creation and continues to shift following Arata's appropriation and, no doubt, beyond that. Law enforcement posted these photographs in order to individually identify the women, but as a collection, the portraits are also an expression of group classification. The group of people it presents to us today reveals a cultural drive to construct a self image infused with a fear of victimization.
A hairstyle is often a very carefully chosen component of one's own personal identification. Arata's careful rendering of the hair, while blocking out the women's faces, brings into focus individual difference just as it obliterates identity. They are all different and all, somehow, the same. Our knowledge that all of these women are possible victims lends a distinct eeriness to the absence of smiling faces. As the set of photographs consolidates these individual women into a unified group, feelings towards them and their fate as individuals can be kept at arm's length, lessening our personal discomfort. Arata aims to remind us of this cultural habit so that this negation of personal comfort becomes a discomfort in itself. Distinctly aware of the potential missteps this project is fraught with, Arata's aim is to present a sincere memorial to these women in such as way as to critically examine our understanding of the nameless victim as a cultural effect.
Michael Arata has been active in the Los Angeles art community since 1987. His most recent work was exhibited at the San Diego International Art Fair. His work has been shown both locally and internationally.
Superfamous is the studio of interaction designer Folkert Gorter, primarily engaged in graphic and interactive design with a focus on networks and communities. Folkert holds a Master of Arts in Interactive Multimedia and Interaction Design from the Utrecht School of Art, faculty Art, Media & Technology, The Netherlands. He lives in Los Angeles, California."
Click on any text below to see Folkert's remarkable posts from the blog "but does it float."
