Embodiment

ABSTRACTS

Embodiment and the Politics of Intervention. Chair: Edit Tóth.

Scott Sherer, "The Enduring Rupture of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric"

Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History, UTSA

scott.sherer@utsa.edu

The Enduring Rupture of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

In the award-winning volume of text and images Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014) explores discourses of race and gender, demonstrating how embodied experiences enter historical narratives and how the past influences contemporary possibilities and future potential. The essays are based largely on Rankine’s reflections of events and encounters in her own life, of those of her friends, and of the influences of mass media and her contemplation of a range of visual materials including those from disciplines of fine arts photography, photojournalism, painting, etching, drawing, as well as mixed media approaches and photographs of contemporary sculpture. In this essay, I explore how Rankine orchestrates verbal and visual correlations and fractures to prompt her readers to recognize, consider, and challenge the targeted threats and the routine of cultural violence that impact the individual and saturate the character of everyday life.

Jenna Ann Altomonte and Todd Michael Rowan, "America Point Blank: Artistic Activism and the Culture of Censorship in the Age of Mass Shootings,"

Jenna Ann Altomonte, Assistant Professor of Art History, Mississippi State University jaltomonte@caad.msstate.edu

Todd Michael Rowan, MFA candidate, University of New Orleans

America Point Blank: Artistic Activism and the Culture of Censorship in the Age of Mass Shootings

Since January 2021, over 240 mass shootings have occurred across the United States of America, resulting in 283 deaths. Critics often cite the need for stricter gun control legislation, preventative design, mental health counseling, and an increase in law enforcement presence as remedies for reducing casualties. Politicians use the evening news as a pulpit, offering their support and “thoughts and prayers,” while failing to legislate against gun ownership or reduce the availability of high caliber assault rifles. Considering the epidemic of mass shootings in America, we critically evaluate the varied responses by anti-gun advocates and artist-activists who critique the culture of gun-related censorship in America. We cite two examples produced by survivors and critics of mass shootings. The first example originates from the 2018 March for Our Lives Rally held in Washington D.C. The rally was organized after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In this example, we unpack the art of sonic absence using actual footage from survivor Emma Gonzalez’s six minutes and 20 seconds of silence. In the second example, we examine the socially engaged dimensions of #UNLOAD, an artist-activist collective that incorporates performance and public-art installations to actively confront gun violence. In each example, survivors and critics use their lived experiences to subvert the oft-spoken statement, “thoughts and prayers.” Rather, each activist/collective opts for creative, interactive performances that actively educate the public about gun-violence and the traumatic after-effects created in the wake of mass shootings.

Greg Blair, Using the Body in Contemporary Art Practices, Assistant Professor of Art and Design, Art and Design Department, University of Southern Indiana

gblair1@usi.edu

Using the Body in Contemporary Art Practices

One of the most powerful aspects of the human body is its potential to disrupt our expectations and urge us to question why those expectations existed in the first place. As an art educator, I have utilized this potential to challenge students to create a site intervention by using the human body. These interventions are intended to make the viewer think about the space in which the intervention is produced, and how its identity has been formed, along with the normalized behaviors that have been sanctioned for that space. This paper will share student examples of bodily site interventions and place them in contextual lineage with similar projects created by Santiago Sierra, Miranda July, and Selma Selman. Through this analysis, it is demonstrated that these projects, by both student and professional artists, are political acts because they address politics of place, biopolitics, and the imposition of hegemonic power. In doing so, these projects form both an assertive desire for change and a dissatisfied proclamation which creates a tear in the “screen of received cultural assumptions.”^[i]

[i] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 3.