A proposal to Arttransponder http://www.arttransponder.net/index.php?id=20&L=1
Last fall I was invited to teach a graduate seminar at the California College of Art in San Francisco. I developed a course that would allow me to extend my studio practice and research through the process of teaching the course, Points of Penetration: The Grotesque Body and Humor in Art. My teaching methodology involved a collaborative and two way learning process, structured around the idea of shared power within the classroom, myself acting as a facilitator that received and transmitted information.
The Grotesque functions as a model of perpetual growth and mutation, disturbing any form of boundary or hierarchical condition. It is a frame for looking at the in-between, the other, the space between inner and outer. It also offers a frame to think about social and political agency with its upsetting of boundaries and inherent ties to liberatory forms of laughter. Part of the course’s conception had to do with a desire to extend the discussions beyond the classroom and to begin to construct a community that could debate, exchange and influence each other’s art practice. This is the origin of my first proposal to Arttransponder. I chose Arttransponder specifically because of it’s support of experimental artistic and social models. The desire to have an exhibition exploring the Grotesque is about wanting to continue building on the structure of this community into a wider and wider dialogue; from seminar to online blog to exhibition to public programs engaging international artists with how these themes have impacted their work.
I propose an exhibition that presents the unfinished and growing relation between myself and my ex-students as a model of the grotesque in action, with a larger thematic exploration of the work generated from our discussions. Divided into three sections: Aesthetics, Politics and Social/Biological Difference, the exhibition, accompanying catalogue, participatory online archive and discussion group, and public programs engaging Berlin based artists, will present the next phase of our dialogue on the grotesque, moving out of the classroom and into a public and international space.
The members of the group include Maja Ruznic, Annie McKnight, Raphael Noz, Patrick Hillman, Maggie Haas, Zina Al-Shukri, Alice Warnecke, Brigid Mason and Rajkamal Kahlon.
Raphael Noz is a performance artist whose works play on the contradictory spaces of personal and cultural shame, both his and his audience’s, imperial history and play through the use of the hybrid character, Cortezuma, a blending of Montezuma and Cortez. Contribution: Video Projection that deals with colonial history and the doubling of identity.
Alice Warnecke is an artist employing painting, photography, video and projection to unpack the gendered histories of both painting and the larger field of vision within which it’s situated.
Contribution: An edition of flip book for the viewer to take that enacts the disappearance and remaking of the penis into and from her mouth। The books are accompanied by a projected animation of the flip book.
Annie McKnight is an artist questioning the value systems attached to materials both precious and debased. Trained as a metal smith, she has been exploring the intersections of taxidermy and jewelry making.Contribution: an installation of the taxidermy process and her hybrid objects.
Brigid Mason is an artist exploring the hidden narratives of childhood found in photographic snapshots through painting.Contribution: A painting that uses the symbolism of the costume as a metaphor to explore the representation of self and other.
Zina Al-Shukri expresses a violent form of portraiture through her use and erasure of mark making materials.Contribution: life-size drawing.
Patrick Hillman is an artist challenging representations of love, normativity and gay male identity using strategies of morbid humor and camp. Contribution: A pre-memorial project, of embroidered portraits of men on pillowcases. The images are derived from gay personal ads that reference a willingness to engage in barebacking.
Maja Ruznick is an artist exploring the themes of repressed violence and war. Her intimate experiences with the Serbian war are fictionalized in her writing and enacted through her markmaking process.Contribution: An installation of small ink drawings and writings.
Maggie Haas is an artist working in between the spaces of craft and fine art, painting and sculpture, crude materials and refined detail. Recurring throughout her work is a repetitive and obsessive pattern, at once organic and threatening.Contribution: Floor Installation of sculpture
Rajkamal Kahlon interrogates the ideological positions of representation as they are linked to forms of racial and colonial authority. In her dialectical engagement with historical texts she critiques the will to "make" humans implicit in the visual practices backed by repressive regimes of power in part through the use of violent imagery framed by psychedelia and the human body turned grotesque through its traumatic encounters with colonialism, military rule and torture.Contribution: Video Projection of autopsy texts into the viewer’s space and onto their bodies. The ideas is about using the viewer’s body as a surrogate for the visually absent bodies of the Iraqi and Afghan men described internally and externally in the text.
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