Natasha Adamou
Natasha is Lecturer in Art History and Stage Leader in the BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Prior to joining Central Saint Martins, Natasha held positions as an Early Career Research Fellow at the Kingston School of Art, London (2016-18); Henry Moore Foundation–British School at Rome Fellow in Sculpture (2015-16); and Visiting Fellow at the School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex (2015-16). Her areas of expertise are in the use of found objects in contemporary sculpture; replicas and reconstructions; sculpture and the postindustrial city; exhibition histories; and critical theory. She has published essays on the work of Gabriel Orozco in the Sculpture Journal (Liverpool University Press, December 2016), and in the book Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America (I.B.Tauris, 2016).
Natasha is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled: Readymade, Found Object, Replica: Contemporary Sculpture and the Post-industrial City, which expands on her doctoral thesis about the role of found objects and their replicas in redefining sculpture after the 1980s. She is also developing a research project about reconstructing exhibitions that will result in the publication of an edited volume http://reconstructing-exhibitions.smvi.co/
In the past, Natasha worked in international art exhibitions and galleries in New York and Athens, including the exhibition Monument to Now at The Dakis Joannou Collection, Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art (Athens, 2004); Outlook--International Art Exhibition curated by Christos M. Joachimides (Athens, 2003); apexart: international curatorial programme (New York); and as Director at the Breeder Gallery (Athens).
Supervisors: Professor Margaret Iversen
Natasha is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled: Readymade, Found Object, Replica: Contemporary Sculpture and the Post-industrial City, which expands on her doctoral thesis about the role of found objects and their replicas in redefining sculpture after the 1980s. She is also developing a research project about reconstructing exhibitions that will result in the publication of an edited volume http://reconstructing-exhibitions.smvi.co/
In the past, Natasha worked in international art exhibitions and galleries in New York and Athens, including the exhibition Monument to Now at The Dakis Joannou Collection, Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art (Athens, 2004); Outlook--International Art Exhibition curated by Christos M. Joachimides (Athens, 2003); apexart: international curatorial programme (New York); and as Director at the Breeder Gallery (Athens).
Supervisors: Professor Margaret Iversen
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CALL FOR PAPERS by Natasha Adamou
* Please send proposals for a paper including title, abstract (250 words maximum) and a short bio to Dr Natasha Adamou at [email protected]
For more information concerning the conference, see: http://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/
Books by Natasha Adamou
The project aims to advance the emerging scholarship on exhibition reconstructions by bringing together art historians, curators, artists and other museum professionals to share their diverse viewpoints from the fields of art history, curating, museology, art practice, and cultural heritage.
Following two successful events, we are currently seeking contributions for an edited volume, as the first comprehensive study on revisiting past
exhibitions. Please send us your proposed titles and abstracts (350 words) by September 15, 2017.
Reconstructing exhibitions is led by Dr. Michaela Giebelhausen (Central Saint Martins, UAL) and Dr. Natasha Adamou (Kingston University London; Central Saint Martins, UAL). For further info please contact us at [email protected]; [email protected]
Topics may include but are not limited to:
-Negotiating a critical vocabulary: re-staging, reconstruction, re-
enactment, revisiting, sequel, replication, revival, re-creation, iteration
-The role of reconstructions for museums and art institutions in rewriting their own histories
-The role of archives in exhibition reconstructions
-Critique of archives as ideological structures
-What is the contemporary critical value of reconstructions?
-Institutional and curatorial motivations for restaging exhibitions
-The relationship between exhibition histories and art history
-Failures of restagings (i.e. fetishisation)
-Emerging counter-narratives
-Reconstructions, museum collections, patronage, value
-The educational role of reconstructions
-Reconstructions as critique of cultural colonialism
-Audience experience: Remembering and mis-remembering, or from remembered to experienced
-Reconstructions and the art market
-Restagings and identity politics (i.e. revisiting histories of feminism etc) -Reconstructions and their influence on curatorial practice
-The artist’s role in exhibition reconstructions
- Interviews / Oral histories
Past Events:
“The Return of History: Reconstructing art exhibitions in the 21st century” Association of Art Historians (AAH) 42nd Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh (7-9 April 2016) http://www.aah.org.uk/annual- conference/sessions2016/session34
“Reconstructions, Restagings, Re-enactments: Revisiting seminal art exhibitions in the twenty-first century”, International Research Workshop, Futuro House, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in collaboration with Kingston University London (31 March 2017)
http://reconstructing-exhibitions.smvi.co
Reconstructing Exhibitions has been generously supported by the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London.
JOURNAL ARTICLES by Natasha Adamou
the aesthetic quality of an artwork. It then goes on to address ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ by Jacques Rancière, which incorporates the notion of the ‘distribution (or partition) of the sensible’ as its main analytical tool. Finally, it introduces Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘undecidability’, as employed by Rancière, in order to set an appropriate theoretical context in which to consider Décor’s aesthetic and critical currency.
BOOK CHAPTERS by Natasha Adamou
Book Reviews by Natasha Adamou
Events Organised by Natasha Adamou
This session invites proposals for papers that probe the art-historical, theoretical, and political implications of restaging paradigmatic exhibitions. Potential approaches include (but are not limited to) examining particular case studies, such as individual exhibitions or institutions; addressing theoretical issues that cut across different historical moments or geographies; or considering how the reconstruction of historically significant exhibitions engages with larger debates about the role of museums in rewriting their own histories, in renegotiating national identity and cultural memory, in advancing new perspectives in postcolonial theory, and in mediating politics.
AAH2016 Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, 7-9 April, 2016
For more info: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session34
11:00-12:00 Keynote lecture: Dr. David Hulks (Colchester School of Art; University of East Anglia) Art History and the Mind: Questioning the shift from Psychoanalysis to Neuroscience
12:00-12:10 Coffee and Tea
12:10-13:30 Shaun Camp (University Campus Suffolk) Play: Object Relating and True Self
Ann-Cathrin Drews (Münster Art Academy) From Form to Psyche: Psychoanalytical Constellations in Modern and Contemporary Art
13:30-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30-16:00 Hephzibah Rendle-Short (Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London) Twin Axis: Enigma in the Clinic and Studio
Drew Elizabeth Bucilla (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Dream-work, Constellation, Map: Joseph Cornell’s Method
WORKSHOP 2
14:00- 18:00, Saturday 8 June 2013
Seminar Room 3+4
Art History Department
University College London
This event is free but registration is required.
To register, please email: [email protected]
14:00 – 15:00 Keynote: Prof. Janet Sayers (Psychology Department, University of Kent) Two-way traffic in art and psychoanalysis
15:00 – 15:10 Coffee and Tea
15:10 – 16:30 Maïté Marciano (Kingston University) Divergent perspectives on Magritte's Time Transfixed
Jenny Nachtigall (UCL) Techniques of recording in Dada performance and psychoanalysis
16:30 – 16:40 Short Break
16:40 – 18:00 Robert Kilroy (Trinity College Dublin) Psychoanalysis and Art History: From Parallelism to Parallax
Yasco Horsman (Leiden University) Listening to Art: On Theodor Reik’s notion of the Third Ear
http://arthistoryandpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/programme/
http://arthistoryandpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/abstracts/
"14:00 – 15:00 Keynote: Prof. Margaret Iversen (School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex) Carving, Modelling, Casting
Session 2:
15:10 – 16:30 Andrés Montenegro (University of Essex) Displacements of the Uncanny
Rosa Nogués (Kingston University) The Body of Sexuation: Feminist Art Practice
Session 3:
16:40 – 18:00 Imogen Wiltshire (University of Birmingham) Painting as Psychotherapy: The Crossover Between Art and Psychoanalysis at Arthur Segal’s Painting School for Professionals and Non-Professionals (1937- 1944)
Iain Matheson (Independent Researcher) William Burroughs, un hombre invisible: the meta-psychology of l’ecriture in a speculative case of Bionian psychosis""
Conference Presentations by Natasha Adamou
This paper explores, first, how Orozco’s work negotiates ideas related to architectural sculpture, while drawing attention on the role of the replica (including its spatiotemporal relation to the original). Secondly, it examines how Orozco internalizes with this work, and by using replication, aspects of modernist architecture, in order to recast his own identity as a sculptor at the turn of the twenty-first century. Finally, I suggest that the best way to discuss Orozco’s replica, initially conceived in the context of Scarpa’s sculpture garden in the Italian Pavilion in Venice, is by focusing on the history of the modernist pavilion where the intersection between architecture and sculpture is particularly fertile, even if little-researched.
Natasha Adamou
School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex
Precariousness has been an important concept since Dada and Surrealism, well into Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art during the Sixties, when it became a dominant aesthetic mode. This paper examines how notions of the transient were incorporated in the work of Gabriel Orozco since the early Nineties. Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box, shown at the Venice Biennale (1993), was thrown away minutes before the exhibition began because they thought it was trash. This caused the artist to come up with the idea of using replacements as an important artistic technique. In 2006, he assembled Mobile Matrix, the found skeleton of a whale, for a permanent installation at the José Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City, in collaboration with museum curator and anthropologist Marco Barrera Bassols. The same year Orozco fabricated Dark Wave, an artificial whale skeleton cast in calcium carbonate and resin with graphite, which he describes as ‘a mirror image of the original’. In 2013, he produced La DS Cornaline, a newly-made replica of his iconic La DS from 1993.
Replicas are often produced when artworks have been lost or destroyed, in order to save them from oblivion, or to create artists’ versions and editions. This paper problematizes the notion of precariousness by considering how strategies of replacement and replication go hand in hand with the idea of the transient or the ephemeral. It also examines the status of replicas in institutions and on the market to determine how different types of material precariousness and diverse preservation techniques contribute to the construction of their meaning and value.
Natasha Adamou
School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex
The exhibition Surrealism and the Object, which opened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on October 30, 2013, was publicized as ‘the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to surrealist sculpture … that retraces the various stages in the story of the surrealist “challenge” to sculpture through the use of everyday objects’, bringing into view the contested relation between surrealist practice and traditional art categories, including sculpture. At the same time, along with the recent tendency to canonize early twentieth century avant-garde practices, the Pompidou exhibition historicizes the surrealist object as part of modern sculpture.
In his text ‘Surrealist Objects’ (1931), an introductory account on the role and nature of objects in surrealism, Salvador Dalí proclaimed Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball (1930-31) as the precursor of surrealist objects. Dalí stresses, however, that Giacometti’s work maintains a relation to the category of sculpture, while surrealist objects break with traditional artistic categories. Dalí further observes that the originality of the surrealist objects is that they have no formal concerns: ‘they depend solely on everyone’s loving imagination and are extra-sculptural’. As such, they advance a new era in art away from modernist discourses on beauty and formal appreciation. Rather than contributing to the demise of sculpture, however, surrealist objects have opened the discursive field of sculpture to different methodologies and disciplines including psychoanalysis and ethnography. This paper examines, then, how the parameters of the crisis of sculpture pronounced by surrealism in the 1930s, are being renegotiated today, paradoxically, with the critical reception of the surrealist object in sculptural terms, giving rise to a renewed interest in sculpture at the turn of the twenty-first century.
In the early 1930s, Salvador Dalí started developing the method of paranoia-criticism to explore the critical and creative potential of paranoia “to systematize confusion.” In “Concerning the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture” (1933), Dalí discusses anachronism (the “delirious-concrete”), to introduce a vertiginous time and space where “elements of the past are summoned to life again, combined and being merged with one another to attain the highest degree of aesthetic depreciation” (Minotaure, 1933). Dalí develops the paranoiac-critical method by implementing anachronism, simulation, and the synchronicity between making and interpreting. Fischer admires Dalí for his ability to overthrow the limits of art making, however, the relevance of paranoia-criticism to contemporary art has yet to be investigated. I suggest that any sustained study of it has been overlooked in favor of André Breton’s psychic automatism that Dalí both drew upon and challenged.
This paper addresses Fischer’s curatorial innovations that put pressure on the construction of art history and historiography by upsetting notions of before/after, past/present, in light of Dalí’s investigations on paranoia and anachronism. The method proposes a subversive model for the production of art historical narratives, breaking with ideas of history as a linear chronology, problematizing at once the construction of an artist’s identity and art history’s own.
"
To sabotage an institution and break up with tradition has been a long- standing strategy of the historical avant-gardes. This paper examines Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box (1993) and Yielding Stone (1992) first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993. The two works were intentionally set up to resist spectacle in the historical and institutional context they were exhibited: a global biennial, at a time when the art world was dominated by large-scale installations and paintings. Orozco’s ‘slight’ works attracted substantial criticism in the press surrounding the exhibition, because they were seen to undermine an internationally prestigious event. Art historian Guy Brett moreover observes the annoyance the Empty Shoebox has often caused, when museum registrars despair from insuring as an artwork a nondescript empty box that can easily get destroyed or thrown away. Francesco Bonami, the curator of that year’s Biennale, recounts how the Yielding Stone, a lump of plasticine the weight of the artist, was heavily handled by the visitors during the exhibition, to the point of it being stabbed with a plastic fork. He explains that both works were “born to be destroyed, abused without pity,” discarded, thrown away.
These objects, that David Joselit called “impossible objects,” are at once subject to violence, and inflict violence upon the institutional context they are presented. This paper then asks: What happens to an artwork when its function in the institutional context is violently disrupted by its own conditions? Furthermore, how do these conditions of self-sabotage affect and change the institutional context? To the extend that such strategies of violent disruption draw on the legacies of the historical avant-gardes, how can a relation between contemporary practices and its precedents be negotiated in terms of sabotage, a radical break with the past? Finally, what happens when these works gain in time a high visibility in the art world, both in terms of their photographic documentation and circulation, and through their presence in major international museums and exhibitions? How do they hold up to the conditions of their own historicization?
In a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco resists the art historian's tendency to look at his photographic practice in the light of conceptual art strategies because the work is not conceptual in the sense of involving textual references and notions of the archive. Orozco claims that in conceptual art the photograph is treated like a relic. On the contrary, Orozco's conception of "photography as a hole" opens up his inquiry into the realm of "the real." In this paper, I argue that the way the artist employs photography in recording his found objects and exploring the notion of "reality" is more in line with André Breton's conception of surrealist artists as sensitive recording instruments, the strategy of automatism and the idea of the marvelous."
* Please send proposals for a paper including title, abstract (250 words maximum) and a short bio to Dr Natasha Adamou at [email protected]
For more information concerning the conference, see: http://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/
The project aims to advance the emerging scholarship on exhibition reconstructions by bringing together art historians, curators, artists and other museum professionals to share their diverse viewpoints from the fields of art history, curating, museology, art practice, and cultural heritage.
Following two successful events, we are currently seeking contributions for an edited volume, as the first comprehensive study on revisiting past
exhibitions. Please send us your proposed titles and abstracts (350 words) by September 15, 2017.
Reconstructing exhibitions is led by Dr. Michaela Giebelhausen (Central Saint Martins, UAL) and Dr. Natasha Adamou (Kingston University London; Central Saint Martins, UAL). For further info please contact us at [email protected]; [email protected]
Topics may include but are not limited to:
-Negotiating a critical vocabulary: re-staging, reconstruction, re-
enactment, revisiting, sequel, replication, revival, re-creation, iteration
-The role of reconstructions for museums and art institutions in rewriting their own histories
-The role of archives in exhibition reconstructions
-Critique of archives as ideological structures
-What is the contemporary critical value of reconstructions?
-Institutional and curatorial motivations for restaging exhibitions
-The relationship between exhibition histories and art history
-Failures of restagings (i.e. fetishisation)
-Emerging counter-narratives
-Reconstructions, museum collections, patronage, value
-The educational role of reconstructions
-Reconstructions as critique of cultural colonialism
-Audience experience: Remembering and mis-remembering, or from remembered to experienced
-Reconstructions and the art market
-Restagings and identity politics (i.e. revisiting histories of feminism etc) -Reconstructions and their influence on curatorial practice
-The artist’s role in exhibition reconstructions
- Interviews / Oral histories
Past Events:
“The Return of History: Reconstructing art exhibitions in the 21st century” Association of Art Historians (AAH) 42nd Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh (7-9 April 2016) http://www.aah.org.uk/annual- conference/sessions2016/session34
“Reconstructions, Restagings, Re-enactments: Revisiting seminal art exhibitions in the twenty-first century”, International Research Workshop, Futuro House, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in collaboration with Kingston University London (31 March 2017)
http://reconstructing-exhibitions.smvi.co
Reconstructing Exhibitions has been generously supported by the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London.
the aesthetic quality of an artwork. It then goes on to address ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ by Jacques Rancière, which incorporates the notion of the ‘distribution (or partition) of the sensible’ as its main analytical tool. Finally, it introduces Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘undecidability’, as employed by Rancière, in order to set an appropriate theoretical context in which to consider Décor’s aesthetic and critical currency.
This session invites proposals for papers that probe the art-historical, theoretical, and political implications of restaging paradigmatic exhibitions. Potential approaches include (but are not limited to) examining particular case studies, such as individual exhibitions or institutions; addressing theoretical issues that cut across different historical moments or geographies; or considering how the reconstruction of historically significant exhibitions engages with larger debates about the role of museums in rewriting their own histories, in renegotiating national identity and cultural memory, in advancing new perspectives in postcolonial theory, and in mediating politics.
AAH2016 Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, 7-9 April, 2016
For more info: http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session34
11:00-12:00 Keynote lecture: Dr. David Hulks (Colchester School of Art; University of East Anglia) Art History and the Mind: Questioning the shift from Psychoanalysis to Neuroscience
12:00-12:10 Coffee and Tea
12:10-13:30 Shaun Camp (University Campus Suffolk) Play: Object Relating and True Self
Ann-Cathrin Drews (Münster Art Academy) From Form to Psyche: Psychoanalytical Constellations in Modern and Contemporary Art
13:30-14:30 Lunch Break
14:30-16:00 Hephzibah Rendle-Short (Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London) Twin Axis: Enigma in the Clinic and Studio
Drew Elizabeth Bucilla (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Dream-work, Constellation, Map: Joseph Cornell’s Method
WORKSHOP 2
14:00- 18:00, Saturday 8 June 2013
Seminar Room 3+4
Art History Department
University College London
This event is free but registration is required.
To register, please email: [email protected]
14:00 – 15:00 Keynote: Prof. Janet Sayers (Psychology Department, University of Kent) Two-way traffic in art and psychoanalysis
15:00 – 15:10 Coffee and Tea
15:10 – 16:30 Maïté Marciano (Kingston University) Divergent perspectives on Magritte's Time Transfixed
Jenny Nachtigall (UCL) Techniques of recording in Dada performance and psychoanalysis
16:30 – 16:40 Short Break
16:40 – 18:00 Robert Kilroy (Trinity College Dublin) Psychoanalysis and Art History: From Parallelism to Parallax
Yasco Horsman (Leiden University) Listening to Art: On Theodor Reik’s notion of the Third Ear
http://arthistoryandpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/programme/
http://arthistoryandpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com/abstracts/
"14:00 – 15:00 Keynote: Prof. Margaret Iversen (School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex) Carving, Modelling, Casting
Session 2:
15:10 – 16:30 Andrés Montenegro (University of Essex) Displacements of the Uncanny
Rosa Nogués (Kingston University) The Body of Sexuation: Feminist Art Practice
Session 3:
16:40 – 18:00 Imogen Wiltshire (University of Birmingham) Painting as Psychotherapy: The Crossover Between Art and Psychoanalysis at Arthur Segal’s Painting School for Professionals and Non-Professionals (1937- 1944)
Iain Matheson (Independent Researcher) William Burroughs, un hombre invisible: the meta-psychology of l’ecriture in a speculative case of Bionian psychosis""
This paper explores, first, how Orozco’s work negotiates ideas related to architectural sculpture, while drawing attention on the role of the replica (including its spatiotemporal relation to the original). Secondly, it examines how Orozco internalizes with this work, and by using replication, aspects of modernist architecture, in order to recast his own identity as a sculptor at the turn of the twenty-first century. Finally, I suggest that the best way to discuss Orozco’s replica, initially conceived in the context of Scarpa’s sculpture garden in the Italian Pavilion in Venice, is by focusing on the history of the modernist pavilion where the intersection between architecture and sculpture is particularly fertile, even if little-researched.
Natasha Adamou
School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex
Precariousness has been an important concept since Dada and Surrealism, well into Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art during the Sixties, when it became a dominant aesthetic mode. This paper examines how notions of the transient were incorporated in the work of Gabriel Orozco since the early Nineties. Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box, shown at the Venice Biennale (1993), was thrown away minutes before the exhibition began because they thought it was trash. This caused the artist to come up with the idea of using replacements as an important artistic technique. In 2006, he assembled Mobile Matrix, the found skeleton of a whale, for a permanent installation at the José Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City, in collaboration with museum curator and anthropologist Marco Barrera Bassols. The same year Orozco fabricated Dark Wave, an artificial whale skeleton cast in calcium carbonate and resin with graphite, which he describes as ‘a mirror image of the original’. In 2013, he produced La DS Cornaline, a newly-made replica of his iconic La DS from 1993.
Replicas are often produced when artworks have been lost or destroyed, in order to save them from oblivion, or to create artists’ versions and editions. This paper problematizes the notion of precariousness by considering how strategies of replacement and replication go hand in hand with the idea of the transient or the ephemeral. It also examines the status of replicas in institutions and on the market to determine how different types of material precariousness and diverse preservation techniques contribute to the construction of their meaning and value.
Natasha Adamou
School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex
The exhibition Surrealism and the Object, which opened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on October 30, 2013, was publicized as ‘the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to surrealist sculpture … that retraces the various stages in the story of the surrealist “challenge” to sculpture through the use of everyday objects’, bringing into view the contested relation between surrealist practice and traditional art categories, including sculpture. At the same time, along with the recent tendency to canonize early twentieth century avant-garde practices, the Pompidou exhibition historicizes the surrealist object as part of modern sculpture.
In his text ‘Surrealist Objects’ (1931), an introductory account on the role and nature of objects in surrealism, Salvador Dalí proclaimed Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball (1930-31) as the precursor of surrealist objects. Dalí stresses, however, that Giacometti’s work maintains a relation to the category of sculpture, while surrealist objects break with traditional artistic categories. Dalí further observes that the originality of the surrealist objects is that they have no formal concerns: ‘they depend solely on everyone’s loving imagination and are extra-sculptural’. As such, they advance a new era in art away from modernist discourses on beauty and formal appreciation. Rather than contributing to the demise of sculpture, however, surrealist objects have opened the discursive field of sculpture to different methodologies and disciplines including psychoanalysis and ethnography. This paper examines, then, how the parameters of the crisis of sculpture pronounced by surrealism in the 1930s, are being renegotiated today, paradoxically, with the critical reception of the surrealist object in sculptural terms, giving rise to a renewed interest in sculpture at the turn of the twenty-first century.
In the early 1930s, Salvador Dalí started developing the method of paranoia-criticism to explore the critical and creative potential of paranoia “to systematize confusion.” In “Concerning the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture” (1933), Dalí discusses anachronism (the “delirious-concrete”), to introduce a vertiginous time and space where “elements of the past are summoned to life again, combined and being merged with one another to attain the highest degree of aesthetic depreciation” (Minotaure, 1933). Dalí develops the paranoiac-critical method by implementing anachronism, simulation, and the synchronicity between making and interpreting. Fischer admires Dalí for his ability to overthrow the limits of art making, however, the relevance of paranoia-criticism to contemporary art has yet to be investigated. I suggest that any sustained study of it has been overlooked in favor of André Breton’s psychic automatism that Dalí both drew upon and challenged.
This paper addresses Fischer’s curatorial innovations that put pressure on the construction of art history and historiography by upsetting notions of before/after, past/present, in light of Dalí’s investigations on paranoia and anachronism. The method proposes a subversive model for the production of art historical narratives, breaking with ideas of history as a linear chronology, problematizing at once the construction of an artist’s identity and art history’s own.
"
To sabotage an institution and break up with tradition has been a long- standing strategy of the historical avant-gardes. This paper examines Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box (1993) and Yielding Stone (1992) first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993. The two works were intentionally set up to resist spectacle in the historical and institutional context they were exhibited: a global biennial, at a time when the art world was dominated by large-scale installations and paintings. Orozco’s ‘slight’ works attracted substantial criticism in the press surrounding the exhibition, because they were seen to undermine an internationally prestigious event. Art historian Guy Brett moreover observes the annoyance the Empty Shoebox has often caused, when museum registrars despair from insuring as an artwork a nondescript empty box that can easily get destroyed or thrown away. Francesco Bonami, the curator of that year’s Biennale, recounts how the Yielding Stone, a lump of plasticine the weight of the artist, was heavily handled by the visitors during the exhibition, to the point of it being stabbed with a plastic fork. He explains that both works were “born to be destroyed, abused without pity,” discarded, thrown away.
These objects, that David Joselit called “impossible objects,” are at once subject to violence, and inflict violence upon the institutional context they are presented. This paper then asks: What happens to an artwork when its function in the institutional context is violently disrupted by its own conditions? Furthermore, how do these conditions of self-sabotage affect and change the institutional context? To the extend that such strategies of violent disruption draw on the legacies of the historical avant-gardes, how can a relation between contemporary practices and its precedents be negotiated in terms of sabotage, a radical break with the past? Finally, what happens when these works gain in time a high visibility in the art world, both in terms of their photographic documentation and circulation, and through their presence in major international museums and exhibitions? How do they hold up to the conditions of their own historicization?
In a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco resists the art historian's tendency to look at his photographic practice in the light of conceptual art strategies because the work is not conceptual in the sense of involving textual references and notions of the archive. Orozco claims that in conceptual art the photograph is treated like a relic. On the contrary, Orozco's conception of "photography as a hole" opens up his inquiry into the realm of "the real." In this paper, I argue that the way the artist employs photography in recording his found objects and exploring the notion of "reality" is more in line with André Breton's conception of surrealist artists as sensitive recording instruments, the strategy of automatism and the idea of the marvelous."