This is an article from Art in America published in their March 2023 issue. It’s an interview with three artists that I’m interested in, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Crystal Z Campbell, and particularly Jill Magid.
Public Secrets - investigating, uncovering, and recovering secrets buried in banal materials. Pieces of evidence hiding in plain sight.
Artists using work to investigate injustices.
Copyright law vs. an artists legacy persistent presence of military aircraft overhead.
Viewers, question the way things are, tihnk critically about narratives easily taken for granted.
Taking clues and turning them into artworks meant to questions dominant assumptions.
Information Age - we take in more data than we can process, rely increasingly on media to make sense of it all. Perceptive abilities decline and atrophy, we become passive consumers.
Formal challenges and ethical dilemmas.
Jill: “I’m more interested in probing the ethical implications of facts than in representing facts themselves”
In my work, I’m interested in understanding and posing questions to systems of power, usually, the work is indexical to that system, whether it’s a surveillance system or copyright law.
Hamdan: “Clearly, we’re living amid a crisis of storytelling. The conventional ways in which stories are being told seem not to land effectively. So I think it’s necessary to experiment with forms as which we speak to issues, hopefully allowing them to be better felt and understood."
"Also, I don’t think art is a place where you add a layer of aesthetic practice to the telling of stories or the relaying of issues.”
^ I think that what he’s talking about here is the practice of manipulating the visuals or art to say something specific? Also, he says stories are aestheticized in the news, that could mean that the stories presented are contextualized and somewhat subjective in some aspects. His work is about claim making more than storytelling.
Magid says that aesthetics are the politics. In her piece about Luis Barragan, she talks about how his work is being held by “Vitra”. They have all copyrights to his work, so if you try to reproduce one of his images, you are committing copyright violations. Instead she had her framer frame one of the images from his books with the book, but made it so that the book isnt seen. Drilled through the book to frame the image. So “The form materializes the constraint of the copyright law”.
Places that I could investigate:
- I think that social media needs a critical analysis, how cookies and information is transferred from the consumer to giant corporations to feed us garbage and products we think we need.