SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
Transmodernities/Translocalities: Panel Discussion
12:30 p.m. – 3 p.m. Polycentric sessions and screenings, San Francisco
Art Institute, Lecture hall and classrooms
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I would like to propose a presentation that
introduces the contemporary practice of assemblage as a globalized,
shared visual culture that is a direct response to the material and
discursive formation of contemporary capitalism after the enactment
of the IMF and the World Bank. I will present some assemblage practices
from the 1960s as they deal with the power of capitalism’s objects
to effectively disseminate a global economic discourse. I am specifically
interested in the ways that artists have appropriated mass-produced
objects with a common set of “strategies of excess,” even
as their art remains specific to their local aesthetic, subjective,
cultural, and political economies. These strategies of excess are ways
in which artists model their practices on capitalism’s boundless
energy and proliferation of goods across national boundaries. Their
works often, in uncanny ways, imitate capitalism’s methods of
expansion, dispersion, and connection on a global scale yet still manage
to formulate new kinds of social relationships that offer alternatives
of global capitalism.
In the brief time I have to present material,
I’d like to focus my discussion of this common strategy on four
“geographic” nodes as they interrelate: New York, Paris,
and Tokyo, and Brazil. I start in the heart of postwar capitalism with
New York: Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Allan Kaprow,
and Carolee Schneemann, use the trash of capitalism (coming from the
belly of the beast itself) to reassemble objects that potential call
for different uses. Coca-Cola Plan (1958) by Rauschenberg, for instance,
models the way he “re-marketed” Coca-Cola bottles as junky
DIY sculpture, including instructions for viewers to make their own.
While Rauschenberg self-consciously played with hyper-marketing practices
of New York, the Parisian Nouveaux Réalistes expressed a deep
ambivalence about the effects of Coca-Colonization in France with their
spectacularization of trash in pieces such as Arman’s Le Plein
(1960) and Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960). In Japan,
the anxieties about Americanization, in the context of the Anpo crisis
(1960), manifested in the performance pieces and objects of Akasegawa
Genpei, Yoshimura Masunobu, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, who were associated
with the “Neo-Dada” movement in Japan as well as Hi Red
Center (an avant-garde group loosely affiliated with Fluxus International
and in direct conversation with internationally-exposed American artists
such as Rauschenberg). Like the Nouveaux Réalistes, their combination
of appropriated objects and absurdist actions play upon the power of
spectacle culture. In the case of these Japanese artists though, their
excessive performances focused more on the psychic effects of the integration
of what Akasegawa calls the “flesh” of capitalism with the
human body. This same concern with the “body” of capitalism
is also evident in the work of the artists in Brazil associated with
the Neo-Concretists. The best known of the group, Hélio Oiticica
and Lygia Clark, were both interested in adapting the powerful hold
that capitalism’s objects have over us into transformative political
action. Oiticica’s Parangolés (1965), for example, exploit
burlap shipping material and methods of advertising to transform Brazil’s
underclass into visible, moving agit-prop performers. With these examples,
I will argue for the visual practice of assemblage as an open and changeable
visual form intervening directly in the semiotic, material, and social
flows of capitalist excess. This is what makes it both culturally specific
and “globalized.”
Participant's Bio:
Jaimey Hamilton received her Ph.D. (2006) from Boston University in
the field contemporary art, visual culture, and theory, and holds a
B.A. in the History of Art and Visual Culture from University of California,
Santa Cruz (1995). Her research concerns the intersection of contemporary
subjectivity, commodity culture, mass media, and the visual arts in
a global context. Her current book project, Strategies of Excess, is
a history of postwar assemblage in relation to an increasingly Americanized
contemporary consumer culture in the 50s and 60s. It reconstructs this
particular moment in which international avant-garde practices (in the
U.S., Europe, South America and Japan in particular) seem to be fascinated
by, but also anxious about, the materialism of postwar capitalism. This
book is part of her wider interest in appropriation as an artistic mode
that is increasingly relevant in a world comprised of global flows of
goods, people, and culture. She has published articles in In_Visible
Culture and TinFish Press and has a forthcoming article in October.
To view “The Way We Loop ‘Now’: Eddying in the Flows
of Media,” In_Visible Culture, no.8 (2004) go to: http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_8/hamilton.html.
She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses
on the following topics: survey of global art and visual culture since
1945, contemporary theory and criticism, representing identity in contemporary
art, mixed media in contemporary art, installation art, and avant-garde
film and video.