Nomadmedia, On Critical Art Ensemble

Schneider, Rebecca

doi:10.1162/10542040051058519

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…There is thus an iterative, looping dimension to the process. Although the Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) have different approaches to exposition (Holte, 2006; Kanouse, 2005; McKenzie and Schneider, 2000; Schneider, 2000), perhaps the technique of tracing could be seen as akin to the work of the CLUI and CAE as, with tracing, there is an attempt to aestheticize and confront something hidden, something tense, and creatively make it known and public.…”

Section: Exploring the Technique Of Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tailings and tracings: using art and social science to explore the limits of visual methods at mining and industrial ruins

Walby

Davis

2022

Visual Communication

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This article examines a novel approach to visual methods that artist Ben Davis has developed based on sociologist Kevin Walby’s research into decommissioned industrial sites, which is referred to here as tracing. Disrupting the over-reliance on photographic representation in visual methods in the social sciences, the authors integrate audio recordings of interviews, as well as photos, maps, and building plans for pop-up mining communities into visual art works to provide a counter-visual analysis of the landscapes depicted in Kevin Walby’s photographs of Uranium City. After reviewing literature on environmental degradation and on visual methods, the article elaborates on Ben Davis’s practice of tracing as a technique representing the feeling of decomposition and decay generated by the harms of industrial resource extraction. The authors argue that the technique of tracing excavates layered histories of place, providing a way of creating new interpretations of social and environmental issues. They then discuss how this counter-visual analysis and approach to tracing enables a trans-disciplinary and dialogical space for engagement with academics, artists, and activists to explore issues centered on land, contamination, and justice.

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Section: Exploring the Technique Of Tracingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tailings and tracings: using art and social science to explore the limits of visual methods at mining and industrial ruins

Walby

Davis

2022

Visual Communication

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“…Certainly, such a distinction has animated discussions on the political character and import of BioArt as work that articulates an explicit manifesto for social change has been applauded over and against that which is regarded as merely sensuous. Critical Art Ensemble’s (CAE) Flesh Machine 5 (1997–8), for example, which addressed the eugenics‐based discourse and practice of reproductive experts, has been described as ‘art that intersects with activist practices’ (Schneider 2000, 123) and as presenting ‘one of the most complex models of civil practice (and “disobedience”) to date’ (Giannachi 2006, 45). The performance itself, as presented at museums and galleries in Brussels, Helsinki, Vienna and Ljubljana, opens up in a space designed to echo a Biology Hall, wherein two members of CAE present a lecture on reproductive technologies.…”

Section: Life As An Expressive Mediummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These parodies, while they may blur the line between theatre and real life, and hence undercut the notion of art as a form of re‐presentation, are not, however, intended to render ambiguous the message itself. While audience members are encouraged to immerse themselves in the workings of the medical‐scientific community – indeed, the rhetoric of the donor test has been ‘abducted’ from a real clinic (Schneider 2000) – this is considered a pedagogic device, one that democratises such ‘expertise’ and encourages members of the public to question the relations between science and capitalism. Indeed, in their account of their work, CAE makes clear their belief that a corporeal immersion in the practice of reproductive control is required in order for an awareness of the issues to emerge: ‘For the theatre of everyday life to function pedagogically, the participants involved must have direct experience of the given issue’ (Critical Art Ensemble 2000, 160).…”

Section: Life As An Expressive Mediummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the CAE, then, and a series of commentators –Schneider (2000), Thacker (2005), Giannachi (2006) and Hauser (2008)– their work is unquestionably political because, all concur, it exposes the realities of global capitalism and seeks to resist the same. The reverse of this, of course, is that when artists undertake work that thrives on ambiguity, work that may indicate a series of conflicting aims, or undercut the notion of explanation, it becomes a much more contentious issue as to whether or not what they do is political.…”

Section: Life As An Expressive Mediummentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creating the semi‐living: on politics, aesthetics and the more‐than‐human

Dixon

2009

Trans Inst British Geog

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Though geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a technoscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancière, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, however, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more‐than‐human world of Semi‐Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modern‐day technoscientific biology operates.

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“…6 Accustomed to First Amendment protections of freedom of expression, neither the artists nor the scientist imagined that CAE's provocative mission and tactics would bring Homeland Security, operating through the U.S. criminal justice system, down upon their heads. 7 Why was the power of the state unleashed in this instance of domestic 5 For discussion of their work, see CAE (1998CAE ( , 2000aCAE ( , 2000b and Schneider (2000). Joan Hawkins (2005) describes CAE's work: "They formed in 1987; originally from Tallahassee, they soon moved into the Eastern urban scene and became participants in a finde-siècle cultural formation.…”

Section: The Death Of Hope (Kurtz)mentioning

confidence: 99%