Monographs by Mechtild Widrich
Monumental Cares. Sites of History and Contemporary Art, Jan 10, 2023
My new book, "Monumental cares" looks at the monument debates of the past decade together with ev... more My new book, "Monumental cares" looks at the monument debates of the past decade together with events that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as climate crisis, migration, and local and global political tensions. The book argues that history is being materialized by contemporary artists and activists in a register that harks back to the engaged realism of nineteenth-century art, updated to do justice both to embodied experiences of caring, and also to vaster, less tangible systems of power and information. A multidirectional theory of site-specificity brings together objects, photographic mediums, but also debates about changing audiences in our current migration society.
What to do with monumental markers, particularly when these are the products of terror that require removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization? And how to work towards an accessible public sphere, in which history allows for a democratic present?
Artists in the book include: Alexandra Pirici, Emilio Rojas, Ai Weiwei, Carey Young, Yael Bartana, Dan Perjovschi, Catherine Opie, Cai Guo-Qiang, Eiko Otake, Monika Bonvicini, Honore Daumier, Doris Salcedo, Ana Lupas, and others.
Performative Monuments. The Rematerialisation of Public Art, 2014
This chapter of my book "Performative Monuments" (2014) starts with a short introduction to the s... more This chapter of my book "Performative Monuments" (2014) starts with a short introduction to the scene around the Viennese Actionists, to then look closely on the work of VALIE EXPORT, in particular as she relates to film, speech, performative force. The focus is on the audience and media theory around 1970, and leads me from EXPORT's Tapp- und Tastkino (Touch Cinema), and the series of Body Configurations to her architectural works (monuments, art spaces) and the competition for a Holocaust memorial in Vienna. The chapter before this one discusses VALIE EXPORT's Genital Panic.
'Mechtild Widrich's astonishing and original book connects performance histories, feminist theory... more 'Mechtild Widrich's astonishing and original book connects performance histories, feminist theory and speech act theory to elucidate the "event character" of public art by contemporary artists. With her bracing formulation of the "performative monument" and her probing analysis of photographic documentation of live acts, Widrich advances a powerful argument about the stakes of spectatorship, temporality and collective memory.'
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley
-----------------------------------------------
'Rigorously researched and argued, this important book will become required reading not only on the history and theory of performance art but also on the history of the "performative" itself as it has transformed public art and commemoration. With ideals of participation and engagement now commonplace in these arenas, Performative monuments shows us in vivid detail how these new ideals emerged and how problematic they have become. Ultimately, this book offers a hopeful message that art can perform its own investigation of the social world and lead us to engage in new and better practices of collective responsibility.'
Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh -- .
---------------------------------------------
"A slide projection of a Balkan capital city with the government buildings painted out; a Trojan horse made of scrap wood looming above the Venice lagoon; a lead column signed as resistance against neo-fascist tendencies; a tunnel made of stone and glass to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. All these interventions in the art-historical tradition of memorials and monuments were in fact made by performance artists. How does this fit into the common story that sets the seemingly transient live art of the 1960s, with its anarchic street actions, in opposition to official monument culture? I argue that performance, once reputed as an antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and messy embodiment, in fact holds the key to its contemporary revival.
This transformation could only take place, however, through the exploration of problems internal to performance: how to document or otherwise visually symbolize ephemeral, undocumented, even impossible actions. In solving this problem through the self-conscious use of documentary photography, film, and diagrammatic collage, performance artists found themselves referring to the past: not just their own and that of their actions, but of their political and cultural context, which, more than the act itself, proves elusive for later audiences. Performance, made durable and rhetorically powerful through photographic documents, thus gave rise to a kind of monument that was self-reflexive, taking account of its conditions of possibility and involving the audience in conventional transactions with binding social force. For the first time, there is the possibility of the ‘democratisation’ of history in these monuments through the delegation of authority from artist and state to the public, but with democratisation comes the danger of subjective self-indulgence and reassuring spectacle.
Connecting speech act and photography theory with media and memory studies, my book is an original contribution to the current debate on performance and art in public space, re-evaluating both the supposed one-time encounter of performance art and its loss to documentation, and the assumption that contemporary commemoration has democratically turned ‘against itself’ through countermonuments that refuse authority."
Edited Books and Journals by Mechtild Widrich
Future Anterior, 2018
As guest co-editor for Future Anterior "Ex Situ. On Moving Monuments", this volume looks into wha... more As guest co-editor for Future Anterior "Ex Situ. On Moving Monuments", this volume looks into what is both a myth and a paradigm: the geographical stability and permanence of monuments. The myth of immutability has not lost any of its power. The demand that they be moved or even dismantled has been met, from the cultural conservative and political far right of the spectrum, with hypocritical calls to defend the 'unchanging beauty' or historical content of the problematic objects, as if monuments too and not just gun-toting vigilantes must “stand their ground” against forces of change. I uploaded the introduction (Mechtild Widrich and Jorge-Otero Pailos), and the abstracts of the texts. Future Anterior can be accessed through JStor. The texts were written in 2017 and 18, but the volume was delayed, and came out in 2020.
My article "Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media" can be found under "papers."
The book is based on a two-day-workshop, organized by Philip Ursprung and Mechtild Widrich that w... more The book is based on a two-day-workshop, organized by Philip Ursprung and Mechtild Widrich that was centered around the topic of "presence" and took place at Cabaret Voltaire in February 2013. Besides the editors, scientists and practitioners from different disciplines such as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Mark Jarzombek, Amelia Jones, Rebecca Schneider, Thomas Levin, Nina Zschocke, Dieter Mersch and Peter Zumthor were among the participants.
The conversations were subsequently transcribed based on the form of a theatrical polylogue. Comments by Michael Hampe as a "voice from offstage" as well as short essays were added later on, so that the conversation is happening on several temporal layers simultaneously.
I am putting up the first pages and my essay, which the designers put sideways to indicate a different time level as well as the biographies.
Concept and Design
Elektrosmog, Zurich
Marina Brugger
Adeline Mollard
Marco Walser
With
Jürg Berthold
Elisabeth Bronfen
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Mark Jarzombek
Amelia Jones
Pál Kelemen
Elke Krasny
Thomas Y. Levin
Dieter Mersch
Rebecca Schneider
Philip Ursprung
Mechtild Widrich
Nina Zschocke
Peter Zumthor
If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central ... more If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st Century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it? Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This volume breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture, and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Review of] Mark Jarzombek, Mechtild Widrich (eds.), Krzysztof Wodiczko: City of Refuge. A 9/11 Memorial (London: Black Dog, 2009)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/6979273/thumbnails/1.jpg)
"Thoughtfully edited by Mark Jarzom-bek and Mechtild Widrich, City of Refuge creates the type of... more "Thoughtfully edited by Mark Jarzom-bek and Mechtild Widrich, City of Refuge creates the type of open debate theproposed memorial is intended to offer."
Kathleen McQueen, The Art Book
"City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial is a fascinating insight into Krzysztof Wodiczko’s practice, the political and personal concepts pushing his project forward, and the idea of social responsibility infused in his work. It is a proposal parallel to the World Trade Center Memorial but with the aim of provoking a more active and critical commemoration of the September 11 terrorist attacks, understood in their historical and political context, and in the light of their domestic and international fallout.
Drawing his main argument from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Wodiczko imagines a memorial that is at once utopian and continuous with the concrete realities of the post-9/11 climate of fear permeating the Western world. It is a passionate attempt at readdressing the narratives of closure, hostility and terror, through a memorial that encourages open, critical and democratic discourse. The resulting City of Refuge is a memorial in action: on one hand an ongoing critique of a passive remembering of the attack and an investigation into the deeper causes of ‘terror’, and on the other a visionary and ambitious public art project in New York, reckoning with the catastrophe and its political implications in terms of a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’.
New and unpublished hand-drawn sketches and digital montages animate the text, creating a vivid picture of memory at work. Wodiczko’s project is complemented by a concentration on learning and proactive programs of engagement, encouraging new and informed practical initiatives, paving the way to a less unjust world. The book is supported by text from leading scholars in a variety of disciplines: Mark Jarzombek, Daniel Bertrand Monk, Lisa Saltzman, Kirk Savage, Andrew Shanken and Mechtild Widrich. Their contributions constitute a forum published alongside Wodiczko’s text, ensuring an engaging and timely debate."
Mechtild Widrich (ed.), Microcosms. No. 30 of thresholds Magazine (MIT Dept. of Architecture) --full version
Werner Hanak, Mechtild Widrich (eds.), Wien II. Leopoldstadt. Die andere Heimatkunde (Vienna: Brandstätter)
Translations and Critical Editions by Mechtild Widrich
Bloomsbury London/New York, May 2015
In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the n... more In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty.
Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aesthetics-of-ugliness-9781472568878/#sthash.ABAx8SlQ.dpuf
Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.”
Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
Published Papers by Mechtild Widrich
From Rags to Monuments: Ana Lupaş’s Humid Installation
Art Margins Online, 2022
In the article “From Rags to Monuments: Ana Lupaş’s Humid Installation,” I explore the reception ... more In the article “From Rags to Monuments: Ana Lupaş’s Humid Installation,” I explore the reception history of the Romanian artist’s works, the art’s complicated movements between rural and urban spaces and offer a fresh perspective on commemorative practices. The paper is online https://artmargins.com/from-rags-to-monuments-ana-lupass-humid-installation/
¿Cómo hacer democráticos nuestros monumentos?
Arcadia, 2020
Please use the link to see the text of my lecture "Performative materials and activist commemora... more Please use the link to see the text of my lecture "Performative materials and activist commemoration" which was the closing event of the academic cycle 'The trauma and the fugitive monument' , at Fragmentos in Bogotá.
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/materiales-performativos-y-conmemoracion-activista/202002/
I discuss some of my most recent research topics , such as the role of social networks in the construction of the public sphere and in commemoration, the environmentally conscious use of materials for the construction of objects and the role of "care" regarding monuments as a manifestation of links between citizens and responsibility with history.
Monumentos, experiencia y memoria
Arcadia, 2020
Public Art Journal CAP Cadernos de Arte Pública, 2020
Talk given at Fragmentos, Bogotá, September 2020.
Monument debates in the second decade of the tw... more Talk given at Fragmentos, Bogotá, September 2020.
Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.
Future Anterior 15.2.
This essay does not just claim that contemporary engagement with monuments and contemporary artis... more This essay does not just claim that contemporary engagement with monuments and contemporary artistic practice includes an extension of
history construction through social media; there is no doubt
about this. Monuments are already a mediation that reshapes constructions of past events for the present. Real-time digital documentation makes possible different levels of engagement, resistance, and re-mediation, on the side of production and later in the many layers of reception, in various (often newly constructed) public spheres, which are of course not less regulated. How do artists take into account this social media reality,
how to understand social engagement and performative interaction as monuments or with monuments, and how do we need to understand site in such a situation? I start with a project by Cai Guo-Qiang, discuss the current state of site-specificity, how site relates to the debate around Confederate Monuments, to then dive into a discussion of artist Alexandra Pirici.
This issue of Arch+ was published on the occasion of the Swiss contribution to the Venice Archite... more This issue of Arch+ was published on the occasion of the Swiss contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennial 2016 by Christian Kerez. I discuss the impact of presence on architectural space, the relationship between artistic experimentation and architecture, to arrive at a tentative reconsideration of architecture and its limits.
Art Journal, Jul 8, 2016
I approach the the National Gallery of Singapore as part of a contemporary art geography, which i... more I approach the the National Gallery of Singapore as part of a contemporary art geography, which is not purely tied to a fixed location, but is a shifting and malleable construction comprising real territory, its imagination, and its representation in various media. My interest is in the interconnections between national, regional, and global affiliations in the context of the Singapore art scene, and I look at institutions, curatorial strategies, performance art, but also at the way nature is being configured in the context of nation building. My theoretical starting points are site-specificity, monuments and re-performance, not so much as opposed entities but as interrelated parts of a larger inquiry into the representation of artifacts and their institutions on a global stage.
Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur, Oct 2014
Anhand von VALIE EXPORTs Serie der Körperkonfigurationen und deren Verwendung im Film Unsichtbare... more Anhand von VALIE EXPORTs Serie der Körperkonfigurationen und deren Verwendung im Film Unsichtbare Gegner historisiert dieser Artikel die Frage des Materials Körper hinsichtlich von Mediatisierung, fotografischer Reproduktion und künstlerischer Nachbearbeitung. Die strukturellen Machtanalysen von Althusser, Foucault und Deleuze sowie feministische Theorien der 1970er und 1980er Jahre werden an EXPORTs Praxis aus einem zeitgenössischen Kontext der ausgedehnten Performancekunst beleuchtet.
Through analysis of VALIE EXPORT’s series Body Configurations and its use in the film Invisible Adversaries, this article historicizes the body as material from the standpoints of mediatization, photographic reproduction, and retrospective artistic modification. The structural analyses of power in the writings of Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze, as well as feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, are illuminated through EXPORT’s practice, essentially in a contemporary context of expanded performance art.
TDR. The Drama Review T217, Feb 2013
By investigating the reputedly “direct art” of Viennese Actionism, Günter Brus’s Vienna Walk and ... more By investigating the reputedly “direct art” of Viennese Actionism, Günter Brus’s Vienna Walk and the Picture Compendium of Viennese Actionism compiled by Peter Weibel and VALIE EXPORT, I reconsider the role of the audience of live events. I argue that they constitute an “informative” audience for later readers. The documents carry into the future some of the (real, staged, or imagined) social context and reactions of an initial, “uninformed” audience, thus setting the stage for imaginative engagement on the part of still-unknown spectators.
Uploads
Monographs by Mechtild Widrich
What to do with monumental markers, particularly when these are the products of terror that require removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization? And how to work towards an accessible public sphere, in which history allows for a democratic present?
Artists in the book include: Alexandra Pirici, Emilio Rojas, Ai Weiwei, Carey Young, Yael Bartana, Dan Perjovschi, Catherine Opie, Cai Guo-Qiang, Eiko Otake, Monika Bonvicini, Honore Daumier, Doris Salcedo, Ana Lupas, and others.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley
-----------------------------------------------
'Rigorously researched and argued, this important book will become required reading not only on the history and theory of performance art but also on the history of the "performative" itself as it has transformed public art and commemoration. With ideals of participation and engagement now commonplace in these arenas, Performative monuments shows us in vivid detail how these new ideals emerged and how problematic they have become. Ultimately, this book offers a hopeful message that art can perform its own investigation of the social world and lead us to engage in new and better practices of collective responsibility.'
Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh -- .
---------------------------------------------
"A slide projection of a Balkan capital city with the government buildings painted out; a Trojan horse made of scrap wood looming above the Venice lagoon; a lead column signed as resistance against neo-fascist tendencies; a tunnel made of stone and glass to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. All these interventions in the art-historical tradition of memorials and monuments were in fact made by performance artists. How does this fit into the common story that sets the seemingly transient live art of the 1960s, with its anarchic street actions, in opposition to official monument culture? I argue that performance, once reputed as an antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and messy embodiment, in fact holds the key to its contemporary revival.
This transformation could only take place, however, through the exploration of problems internal to performance: how to document or otherwise visually symbolize ephemeral, undocumented, even impossible actions. In solving this problem through the self-conscious use of documentary photography, film, and diagrammatic collage, performance artists found themselves referring to the past: not just their own and that of their actions, but of their political and cultural context, which, more than the act itself, proves elusive for later audiences. Performance, made durable and rhetorically powerful through photographic documents, thus gave rise to a kind of monument that was self-reflexive, taking account of its conditions of possibility and involving the audience in conventional transactions with binding social force. For the first time, there is the possibility of the ‘democratisation’ of history in these monuments through the delegation of authority from artist and state to the public, but with democratisation comes the danger of subjective self-indulgence and reassuring spectacle.
Connecting speech act and photography theory with media and memory studies, my book is an original contribution to the current debate on performance and art in public space, re-evaluating both the supposed one-time encounter of performance art and its loss to documentation, and the assumption that contemporary commemoration has democratically turned ‘against itself’ through countermonuments that refuse authority."
Edited Books and Journals by Mechtild Widrich
My article "Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media" can be found under "papers."
The conversations were subsequently transcribed based on the form of a theatrical polylogue. Comments by Michael Hampe as a "voice from offstage" as well as short essays were added later on, so that the conversation is happening on several temporal layers simultaneously.
I am putting up the first pages and my essay, which the designers put sideways to indicate a different time level as well as the biographies.
Concept and Design
Elektrosmog, Zurich
Marina Brugger
Adeline Mollard
Marco Walser
With
Jürg Berthold
Elisabeth Bronfen
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Mark Jarzombek
Amelia Jones
Pál Kelemen
Elke Krasny
Thomas Y. Levin
Dieter Mersch
Rebecca Schneider
Philip Ursprung
Mechtild Widrich
Nina Zschocke
Peter Zumthor
Kathleen McQueen, The Art Book
"City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial is a fascinating insight into Krzysztof Wodiczko’s practice, the political and personal concepts pushing his project forward, and the idea of social responsibility infused in his work. It is a proposal parallel to the World Trade Center Memorial but with the aim of provoking a more active and critical commemoration of the September 11 terrorist attacks, understood in their historical and political context, and in the light of their domestic and international fallout.
Drawing his main argument from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Wodiczko imagines a memorial that is at once utopian and continuous with the concrete realities of the post-9/11 climate of fear permeating the Western world. It is a passionate attempt at readdressing the narratives of closure, hostility and terror, through a memorial that encourages open, critical and democratic discourse. The resulting City of Refuge is a memorial in action: on one hand an ongoing critique of a passive remembering of the attack and an investigation into the deeper causes of ‘terror’, and on the other a visionary and ambitious public art project in New York, reckoning with the catastrophe and its political implications in terms of a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’.
New and unpublished hand-drawn sketches and digital montages animate the text, creating a vivid picture of memory at work. Wodiczko’s project is complemented by a concentration on learning and proactive programs of engagement, encouraging new and informed practical initiatives, paving the way to a less unjust world. The book is supported by text from leading scholars in a variety of disciplines: Mark Jarzombek, Daniel Bertrand Monk, Lisa Saltzman, Kirk Savage, Andrew Shanken and Mechtild Widrich. Their contributions constitute a forum published alongside Wodiczko’s text, ensuring an engaging and timely debate."
Translations and Critical Editions by Mechtild Widrich
Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aesthetics-of-ugliness-9781472568878/#sthash.ABAx8SlQ.dpuf
Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.”
Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
Published Papers by Mechtild Widrich
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/materiales-performativos-y-conmemoracion-activista/202002/
I discuss some of my most recent research topics , such as the role of social networks in the construction of the public sphere and in commemoration, the environmentally conscious use of materials for the construction of objects and the role of "care" regarding monuments as a manifestation of links between citizens and responsibility with history.
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/la-participacion-y-la-arquitectura-estan-interrelacionadas/202008/
Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.
history construction through social media; there is no doubt
about this. Monuments are already a mediation that reshapes constructions of past events for the present. Real-time digital documentation makes possible different levels of engagement, resistance, and re-mediation, on the side of production and later in the many layers of reception, in various (often newly constructed) public spheres, which are of course not less regulated. How do artists take into account this social media reality,
how to understand social engagement and performative interaction as monuments or with monuments, and how do we need to understand site in such a situation? I start with a project by Cai Guo-Qiang, discuss the current state of site-specificity, how site relates to the debate around Confederate Monuments, to then dive into a discussion of artist Alexandra Pirici.
Through analysis of VALIE EXPORT’s series Body Configurations and its use in the film Invisible Adversaries, this article historicizes the body as material from the standpoints of mediatization, photographic reproduction, and retrospective artistic modification. The structural analyses of power in the writings of Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze, as well as feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, are illuminated through EXPORT’s practice, essentially in a contemporary context of expanded performance art.