So, the conference: (I didn't get around to taking actual photos at the event, but here are some screencaps of my presentation)
My presentation on Teresa Margolles was well received and I had some really great feedback. Our panel, entitled "Social and Political Landscapes," also included a talk on Francis Alys' performance of retracing an Israeli-Palestinian border on foot with green paint, and a talk on Yugoslavian modernist war memorial sculpture. Our panel moderator, U of T's Dr. Alison Syme, had some interesting suggestions regarding other art historical precedents for the kind of (albeit sparse) imagery that Margolles is working within - from memento mori to Warhol's oxidation paintings, and other audience members also chimed in with references from medieval iconography and minimalist sculpture. It was a really interesting constellation of references! I was slightly nervous talking about material that is so viscerally immediate - especially just before lunch - and considering I took a really phenomenological approach that emphasized my first-person experience engaging with the installation. But thankfully, the other presenters seemed to agree that this approach was appropriate for the material.
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| Margolles - Plancha (detail) |
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| Andy Warhol - Oxidation Painting - 1978 |
Interestingly enough, I also found my talk had some parallels with the keynote speech, given by Princeton's Dr. Nathan Arrington, which explored the representations of dead soldiers in ancient Greece. He spoke at length of a series of vases which depict the living in contact with the dead - often represented through two figures reaching out to touch each other (but never fully making contact), with a funeral monument standing in between them. During the question period I spoke to him further about this displaced touch - as it seemed as if the funerary monument was acting as a stand-in for the body of the dead soldier, allowing the living person to retain a form of haptic engagement with their lost loved one. This resonated quite strongly with my interpretation of Margolles' work, and the way that her vapourized water also functions like a displaced sensorial engagement with the dead - how we somehow feel or are affected by a connection that carries no immediate sensorial evidence. He and I got to speak a bit about this during the reception, he had some interesting suggestions for my own project as well - he was curious about the significance of Margolles choosing ten metal plates for her installation - and he convinced me to look further into that detail of her work.
The Vtape Research Trip:
I had a great time at Vtape as well! I'm not sure if I already mentioned this, but I worked there temporarily last summer as a collections assessment assistant - so it was lovely catching up with my old coworkers, friends and bosses. Incidentally, they were setting up for a new screening and show on the work of Jorge Lozano, a Toronto-based Latino filmmaker, so I got to take a peek at some of the work they were displaying, which spanned his decades-long career exploring issues of cultural exchange and Latin-American identity.So I spent a few hours watching some work in Vtape's massive collection - and I had some help from some of their resident experts, in order to pick out some awesome work that engages with the thematics that I'm exploring here. I found a really vast assortment of material from a variety of different perspectives - there's a lot of documentation of early feminist performances in the 1970s, and some more recent work by new feminist and queer artists who are taking up similar themes but complicating them in new ways, and a lot of material that explores bodily waste and the limits of corporeal excess in ways that I find both disgusting and alluring! I've certainly given myself a lot to talk about and think over - and piles of notes to sort through. But as I sort through some of that material, here's some photos of some of the work I watched - consider it as a 'teaser' for what's to come!
And other things I'm thinking over:
1. I want to readdress some of the ideas I was considering in my post on Yayoi Kusama, using Deleuze and Guattari's work on the 'body without organs' concept in A Thousand Plateaus.
2. I'm presenting at a second graduate
conference in Toronto! This one's in March at York University. The
paper's on a site-specific installation by a Montreal-based artist that
looks at the entropic breakdown of domestic space - so I think there are
some interesting correlations between that project and this area of
inquiry. I might try to kill two birds with one stone (so to speak) and
use this platform to work out some of those ideas further.3. I've been speaking a bit with one of my fellow "Liquid Intelligence" teammates, Richard, about possibly joining forces in creating a weekly reading group/screening series/gallery visiting crew. I'm still pretty excited about the idea - there's a lot of places where are separate research projects intersect in some interesting ways - so I'll keep you, dear blog, posted as I continue developing that.
Ok, so that's about it! Apologies again for my long absence over Christmas and early January, now the Liquid Bodies Archive is back in full swing :)
- Daniella
