13.04.2015 - 29.06.2015
As we pace around them in exhibitions, shape them in studios and evoke them in conversations, art objects also look back at us, and we probably pervade their minds as much as they do ours. How can we access their impressions of us? Are they collecting us in their museums?
The changing nature of the art object fluctuates along with our expectations. We hope for it to be a vehicle for transcendence as well as a tool for historical analysis. Bewildering yet familiar, sometimes rational and always clairvoyant, this object has crossed the 20th century as a polymorphic entity: from flat monochrome to monumental sculpture, handcrafted or industrial, sanctified artifact or prop, symbol of social status, as well as a sign of protest. Worth nothing or millions, existing only when it is named, or perhaps resisting language through material dexterity. Every art object is a clock, ticking in and out of synch with history, waiting to be recognized from within the cracks of official discourses, always one step ahead of us in the negotiation with the unknown.
In the second issue of Terremoto, authors will discuss the politics, narratives, and properties impregnating the art object through a series of stories, essays, and conversations, thus building a panorama on these issues while coping with the wide range of sensibilities considered in its line of inquiry.
2
2015
2 2015
13.04.2015
Issue 2: Things
Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio
The Witch’s Cradle is a 16mm film by avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, that was filmed in 1943 in Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century in New York. This essay examines how the film’s narratives become triggers for sensory exploration between the actress and her surroundings, and speculates on the mystery around the unfinished film, the artist’s collaboration, and the relationship between the actors and the architectural space of Art of This Century.
2 2015
20.04.2015
Issue 2: Things
Patrik Haggren
Trying out French sociologist Roger Caillois’ method of “rational delirium,” Patrik Haggren compares movements of matter accumulated in rock and manual labor activities recorded with long exposure photography by scientific managers in the 1910’s. The photographs visualized movement by means of the capitalist abstraction of a disembodied way of thinking, yet also indicated abstraction and thought as belonging to matter.
Read along rock formations in which Caillois saw imaginations of landscapes and animals, the photographs can be looked at as sensuous, rather than conceptual, points of view.
2 2015
27.04.2015
Issue 2: Things
Natalia Valencia
Natalia Valencia and Aurora Pellizzi discuss the symbolic value and temporality of traditional textile techniques in the Mexican artist’s research – weaving stories and gender critique into talismanic objects.
2 2015
04.05.2015
Issue 2: Things
Julien Creuzet, Dorothée Dupuis
Can we transform our relationship to objects which encapsulate problematic moments of history —especially in relation to post-colonial traumas— by talking about them differently, notably through poetry, music and movement? Dorothée Dupuis in conversation with the words, sounds and images of French-Martinican artist Julien Creuzet.
2 2015
11.05.2015
Issue 2: Things
Linda Mai Green
The “boom,” or the postwar economic miracle, lifted Italy out of the fiscal doldrums but into an uncertain future where rapid economic growth threatened to eclipse earlier lifestyles. The female protagonists in Michelangelo Antonioni’s films of the 1960s, especially L’Eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964) become ciphers for the disorienting collapse of the links between the material and immaterial, body and psyche.
2 2015
18.05.2015
Issue 2: Things
Daniel Garza Usabiaga
Debora Delmar Corp. combines mass-produced objects of daily use (like those that can be purchased at Costco, BB&B or Zara Home) to create assemblages and installations that critique these objects’ symbolic value -as bearers of ideas of well-being, pleasure, comfort and social mobility- therefore challenging the very ideals about them that are promoted through advertising and mass media.
2 2015
25.05.2015
Issue 2: Things
João Laia
The development of representational technologies such as high definition digital video has led to a visual culture defined by abstract and stylized images that contradict the promise of realistic depictions the technology once held. This essay looks at artistic practices which underline paradoxes in contemporary representational technologies, thus questioning current dominant visual regimes.
2 2015
01.06.2015
Issue 2: Things
Steven Shaviro
A conference held at Goldsmiths College in 2007 is regarded as the founding moment of Speculative Real- ism; its earliest protagonists were Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. In the following contribution, Steven Shaviro portrays the theories of an emerging group – perceived by outsiders as a new school of thought or even as an exclusive “boys’ club.” What do their approaches have in common, and where do they diverge? Wherein lies the speculative momentum of this philosophy, and what are the premises it objects to?
2 2015
08.06.2015
Issue 2: Things
Leonel Alfonso Juracán Lemus
Every object produced by men is a demonstration of our helplessness against nature. By assigning imaginary values to nature and building systems with them, we become objects of our own constructions. Are numbers objects ? Is our breath the object of words?
2 2015
15.06.2015
Issue 2: Things
Chris Sharp
…and how it may resonate today.
2 2015
22.06.2015
Issue 2: Things
Tobi Maier
Starting from his research in the history of artists organizing processions and parades, the São Paulo based curator Tobi Maier asks: How do objects and costumes employed during these rituals move between the utilitarian and the symbolic? How do they mediate in public practice? What are these performative events leaving behind beyond their unique temporality?
2 2015
29.06.2015
Issue 2: Things
Carolina Sanín
Drawing from Lewis Carroll’s inexhaustible Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carolina Sanín reflects on the artistic creation of written and visual metaphors as figures of negotiation between possible worlds. Translated from the original in Spanish by Ulrik Sebastian Lopez.
