Innovations

Innovations in Modern/Contemporary Art. Chair: Paula Wisotzki.

Madalen Claire Benson, mcbenson@ucsc.edu / 831.332.6534
The Hunt: Local Embodied Knowledge as an Assertion of Rights in Duane Linklater and Brian Jungen’s Film “Modest Livelihood”
Inheritance asserts Indigenous rights. The passing on of local knowledge confirms presence when faced with violent and forced removal. Yet, for inheritance to assert rights, it necessitates a form of embodied, often local, knowledge to extend out into concepts of the global, such as universal human rights. This dichotomy demands that the living, breathing vessel of information must physically persist, operating according to inherited ways of being. Meanwhile, the Western episteme has continuously foregrounded the division of the corporeal body from so-called universal objectivity. At the intersection of this contradiction, where local knowledge and global universalism collide, many land claims are left unresolved, and potentially unresolvable.
In this paper I will interrogate these complexities as they converge in Duane Linklater and Brian Jungen 2012 50-minute colour silent lm documenting a moose hunt. The lm centers around an act of inheritance of hunting and tracking methods from Jungen’s uncle and elder, Jack Askoty. Taking place on Jugen’s treaty lands in the Peace River Region of Northeastern British Columbia, the lm shows Asktoy taking Jugen and Linklater to his hunting camp to teach them tracking techniques. Next they embark on their hunt, eventually killing a moose, and harvesting its remains while ravens circle above for anything that is left in the snow. In passing down the act of hunting, not only is livelihood asserted, but rights are retained. These rights concern territory, and material forms of survivance that enable bodies to dwell with and occupy land through a tethering to place.

Tola Porter tolaporter@wustl.edu
From Joseph Beuys to Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Can Static Public Sculpture Function as “Social Sculpture”?
Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture,” the best-known example of which is, 7000 Oaks (Documenta, 1982), has inspired contemporary social practice artists, such as Pedro Reyes’ 2008 project Palos por Pistolas, to transform three dimensional sculptural objects into agents for social and environmental benefit. However, there are some artworks whose conception and content align with the precepts of social practice by raising crucial social issues but whose materials are not transformed by audience engagement, a hallmark of both Beuys’ social sculpture and the more recent genre of social practice.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s oeuvre offers several key examples of this conundrum. His 2014 sculpture entitled 7000 Cords (after Beuys), is a minimalist sculpture composed of seven cords of firewood in steel frames. The stacked fuel references the carbon cycle and raises viewers’ environmental consciousness, but the wood is never burned. A series of three related public sculptures, Weatherfield No. 1 (2013), Weatherfield No. 2 (2018), and Weather Station (2020) marry an ecological and social message with a traditional three-dimensional form that is not altered by its audience. These works raise the question of how static sculpture - sculpture that is not transformed by audience participation and intervention – benefits audiences. Fashioning an answer is surprisingly difficult and the topic is seldom explored in art historical scholarship. Using the framework of social practice art, and employing phenomenological and Marxist lenses, this paper will explore the gulf between the intended outcomes of social practice, which are direct and tangible, and the nuanced and nebulous impact of traditional public sculpture. This paper poses the question: Can static public sculpture function as social sculpture?

Sarah Richter sarahd.richter@gmail.com.
Decolonizing Art History Through the Representation of Sally Hemmings
Audre Lorde’s speech and paper, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, was delivered at the New York University for the Humanities conference in 1984. Within this powerful three-page statement, Lorde reminds us poignantly in the title that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and also asks a question that resonates across the ivory towers of university systems: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Art history was developed as an elite field of study founded by wealthy and powerful white men. They developed the myth of the lone, white male artist as genius that has dominated and created the canon of Art History and its discourses. Arts of non-white, non-western and marginalized communities have been erased from or used to emphasize the genius of Western artists. The discipline has only recently begun a self-reflexive look at curriculum that would, as Lorde states, examines the patriarchal systems that structure the discipline. In the last two years amidst COVID, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the attack on Critical Race Theory, my recent work in developing African American Art History courses has focused on privileging perspectives and artwork of Black Feminists Scholars, Artists, Activists, Musicians, etc. This paper will use the study of the dominant historical narratives of and contemporary challenges to the representations of Sally Hemmings. Drawing on the current exhibition at Monticello about Sally Hemmings, how can art history take this exhibition as a move towards decolonizing the narrative? While Sally Hemming’s voice is absent, how can museums, educators, and visitors work together to decolonize the whitewashed narrative of art history as exemplified by this papers case study of Sally Hemmings artistic representation.