Monthly Archive: June 2018

Fold, Hexagonal presents the impossibility of entering into the language of others and suggests the ways in which such an exclusion can open up a space of imagination around words. This space of imagination includes the visual and bodily experiences of language as well as the physical space that writing occupies. The “Hexagonal” of the title alludes to the infinite hexagonal rooms featured in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” and also evokes an open-ended linguistic space. The project features hexagonal forms staged on folded, lined paper, reflected and fragmented by multiple mirrors that alter their directions … Read more

Hélio Oiticica’s “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica’s project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making … Read more

Hélio Oiticica’s “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica’s project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making … Read more

Between 1974 and 1975, Zoran Popović, a conceptual artist from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and his wife Jasna Tijardović, an art historian, spent a year in New York. During that time they engaged closely with the New York Art and Language group. This friendship and collaboration resulted in a rare instance of East-West exchange in Conceptual art: Popović and Tijardović published both co-authored and individual articles in the US journal The Fox, and members of Art and Language (Mel Ramsden, Michael Corris, and Jill Breakstone) gave a seminar in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center in the fall of 1975. One of the most … Read more

This review essay addresses the complex significance of materiality in From Our Hands, a recent site-specific installation at New York City’s 80WSE Gallery produced by Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Cree artist from Northern Ontario. Situating Linklater’s practice as an instance of indigenous institutional critique––an approach that re-functions postconceptual artistic strategies in accordance with the distinct aesthetic, political, and ontological concerns of colonized native populations––the essay examines the ways in which such work might disable longstanding assumptions at a moment when indigenous contemporary art is receiving increased attention. In addition to materiality, the text focuses on a group of qualities with … Read more

Despite the fact that the growing reception of Antonio Dias (b. 1944) in the English-speaking world is happening under the sign of global art history, the trajectory of the Brazilian artist in the 1960s and 1970s actually suggests both a counter-genealogy and a counter-geography of the global. This essay explores this situation by recontextualizing Dias’s emergence vis-à-vis the critical debate on realism and underdevelopment that marked the Rio de Janeiro avant-gardist scene of the mid- to late-1960s and involved writers such as Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Mário Pedrosa, Pierre Restany, and Frederico Morais. It subsequently argues that such critical terms … Read more

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi’s Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom … Read more