Abstract This essay in memory of Anthony Vidler explores the ways in which his obsessive mode of thinking and writing was primarily historiographic and ultimately autobiographical as it reversed itself towards the future. Vidler was not a historian who wrote but a writer who over time produced the effect of being a historian. He was a scholar in reverse, a trained architect and insightful architectural critic fixated on the ongoing legacy, from Plato to the latest digital zealots, of utopian dreams of an idealized architecture that would incubate an equitable society and the dystopian effects of the always unsuccessful attempts to realize those dreams. Vidler portrayed architecture and the social life it supposedly serves as permanently suspended between utopia and dystopia. Colin Rowe, his first tutor at Cambridge University in 1960, triggered this life-long obsession by pointing to Emil Kaufmann's writing about the precocious modernity of enlightenment architects, especially the ideal city imagined in the late 18th century by Claude-Nicolaus Ledoux, symptomatically the only architect referred to by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Vidler never let go of Ledoux, continuously reshaping him and an endless chain of architects from the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with Tony Garnier and Le Corbusier. Kaufmann and Rowe haunt all the work, as does Walter Benjamin, whose inversion of history likewise turned on the relationship between Fourier's philosophy and a specific architectural typology.
{"title":"Anthony Vidler in Reverse","authors":"Mark Wigley","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00511","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay in memory of Anthony Vidler explores the ways in which his obsessive mode of thinking and writing was primarily historiographic and ultimately autobiographical as it reversed itself towards the future. Vidler was not a historian who wrote but a writer who over time produced the effect of being a historian. He was a scholar in reverse, a trained architect and insightful architectural critic fixated on the ongoing legacy, from Plato to the latest digital zealots, of utopian dreams of an idealized architecture that would incubate an equitable society and the dystopian effects of the always unsuccessful attempts to realize those dreams. Vidler portrayed architecture and the social life it supposedly serves as permanently suspended between utopia and dystopia. Colin Rowe, his first tutor at Cambridge University in 1960, triggered this life-long obsession by pointing to Emil Kaufmann's writing about the precocious modernity of enlightenment architects, especially the ideal city imagined in the late 18th century by Claude-Nicolaus Ledoux, symptomatically the only architect referred to by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Vidler never let go of Ledoux, continuously reshaping him and an endless chain of architects from the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with Tony Garnier and Le Corbusier. Kaufmann and Rowe haunt all the work, as does Walter Benjamin, whose inversion of history likewise turned on the relationship between Fourier's philosophy and a specific architectural typology.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140778148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract “On Collaboration” attempts to situate the withdrawal of support from the magazine Artforum (precipitated by the firing of its editor-in-chief David Velasco in October 2023) within a longer history of institutional antagonism. It compares strategies of opposition available to the avant-garde and counterculture in the 1960s (as exemplified by Fluxus's George Maciunas and the novelist Thomas Pynchon) with those that emerged in the 1970s, with particular attention paid to the machinery that sustained the appearance of the art world and, more broadly, the public sphere. Citing Vito Acconci's contributions to the exhibition ROOMS P.S. 1 (1976), it argues that much of what has been historically recognized as strategies of institutional opposition from the 1970s onward, including institutional critique and the alternative space movement, might be better understood within a framework of “institutional collaboration.”
{"title":"On Collaboration","authors":"Colby Chamberlain","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00506","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “On Collaboration” attempts to situate the withdrawal of support from the magazine Artforum (precipitated by the firing of its editor-in-chief David Velasco in October 2023) within a longer history of institutional antagonism. It compares strategies of opposition available to the avant-garde and counterculture in the 1960s (as exemplified by Fluxus's George Maciunas and the novelist Thomas Pynchon) with those that emerged in the 1970s, with particular attention paid to the machinery that sustained the appearance of the art world and, more broadly, the public sphere. Citing Vito Acconci's contributions to the exhibition ROOMS P.S. 1 (1976), it argues that much of what has been historically recognized as strategies of institutional opposition from the 1970s onward, including institutional critique and the alternative space movement, might be better understood within a framework of “institutional collaboration.”","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140757352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Paul Chan reflects on his experiences as an artist working in and out of domains of technology, from truetype fonts and pirated software to datasets and machine-learning frameworks. He recounts periods of his artistic life when he abandoned technologies as instruments of production. And he offers an idiosyncratic account of a lineage of artists and writers he admires who used and abused technology in aspects of their work—including Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, the Left Bank Group in 1960s, Yvonne Rainer, Theodor Adorno and the Radio Research Project; the bio-cybernetic work of free-jazz musician, programmer, and artist Milford Graves; the pioneering sound work of Maryanne Amacher; and the writer Claudia La Rocco—and how their dynamic and at times contentious relationship with technology proved vital to their understanding of what art under the influence of historical and social progress looks like.
摘要 陈保罗回顾了他作为艺术家在技术领域内外工作的经历，从真实字体和盗版软件到数据集和机器学习框架。他回顾了自己艺术生涯中放弃技术作为生产工具的时期。他还以特立独行的方式讲述了他所敬仰的艺术家和作家们在工作中使用和滥用技术的故事，其中包括阿涅斯-瓦尔达（Agnès Varda）、克里斯-马克（Chris Marker）、20 世纪 60 年代的左岸小组（Left Bank Group）、伊冯娜-雷纳（Yvonne Rainer）、西奥多-阿多诺（Theodor Adorno）和无线电研究项目（Radio Research Project）；自由爵士乐音乐家、程序员和艺术家米尔福德-格雷夫斯（Milford Graves）的生物控制论作品；玛丽安-阿马赫（Maryanne Amacher）的先锋声音作品；作家克劳迪娅-拉罗科（Claudia La Rocco）--以及他们与技术之间充满活力、时而充满争议的关系如何对他们理解历史和社会进步影响下的艺术至关重要。
{"title":"Machina Aesthetica: Impressions on Art in and out of the Machine Age*","authors":"Paul Chan","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00505","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Paul Chan reflects on his experiences as an artist working in and out of domains of technology, from truetype fonts and pirated software to datasets and machine-learning frameworks. He recounts periods of his artistic life when he abandoned technologies as instruments of production. And he offers an idiosyncratic account of a lineage of artists and writers he admires who used and abused technology in aspects of their work—including Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, the Left Bank Group in 1960s, Yvonne Rainer, Theodor Adorno and the Radio Research Project; the bio-cybernetic work of free-jazz musician, programmer, and artist Milford Graves; the pioneering sound work of Maryanne Amacher; and the writer Claudia La Rocco—and how their dynamic and at times contentious relationship with technology proved vital to their understanding of what art under the influence of historical and social progress looks like.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140776508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract There is an exhibition currently hanging in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Far removed from the clamor of the street and the jostling of the crowd, a selection of delicately conceived and exquisitely executed drawings remind us that, even in the age of pragmatism, ideal architecture still preoccupies creative minds. From the recent past and the lived present, these studies speak of impossible futures, irresistible impulses, and inconsequential fantasies. Hoary technotopia from Archigram; satyrical dreamscapes from Superstudio; metalinguistics from Argentina's nouvelle vague; eclecticism, superrationalism, and painterly metaphor from New York's (and Princeton's) Five add up to form a picture of the whole tangled web of idealism and counter-idealism that has constituted today's attempt at visionary architecture. This exhibition raises, as do all such manifestations of the realm of utopia, questions as to the relation between art and daily life.
{"title":"Architecture, Poetry, and Everyday Life","authors":"Anthony Vidler","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00509","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There is an exhibition currently hanging in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Far removed from the clamor of the street and the jostling of the crowd, a selection of delicately conceived and exquisitely executed drawings remind us that, even in the age of pragmatism, ideal architecture still preoccupies creative minds. From the recent past and the lived present, these studies speak of impossible futures, irresistible impulses, and inconsequential fantasies. Hoary technotopia from Archigram; satyrical dreamscapes from Superstudio; metalinguistics from Argentina's nouvelle vague; eclecticism, superrationalism, and painterly metaphor from New York's (and Princeton's) Five add up to form a picture of the whole tangled web of idealism and counter-idealism that has constituted today's attempt at visionary architecture. This exhibition raises, as do all such manifestations of the realm of utopia, questions as to the relation between art and daily life.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140787464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract On October 19, 2023, we lost Anthony Violer, a longtime friend of this magazine. A brilliant historian of architecture whose deep scholarship and intellectual curiosity ranged from Ledoux to his own contemporaries, Tony was also an astute reader of art and theory, and he was always alert not only to the historical conditions of a given practice but also to its conceptual implications and political ramifications. In manifold ways Tony instructed us, inspired us, committed us, and delighted us with his theatrical imagination and subversive wit.
{"title":"Anthony Vidler (1941-2023)","authors":"Hal Foster","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00508","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract On October 19, 2023, we lost Anthony Violer, a longtime friend of this magazine. A brilliant historian of architecture whose deep scholarship and intellectual curiosity ranged from Ledoux to his own contemporaries, Tony was also an astute reader of art and theory, and he was always alert not only to the historical conditions of a given practice but also to its conceptual implications and political ramifications. In manifold ways Tony instructed us, inspired us, committed us, and delighted us with his theatrical imagination and subversive wit.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140785243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract I was born on July 4, 1941, in East Knoyle, Wiltshire. Some symbolic import might be gained from the fact that East Knoyle was also the birthplace of Christopher Wren and close to Philip Webb's mansion “Clouds”; also symbolic, given my later life in the United States, was the date itself. My family moved back to Essex later that year. My memories of the war must date from late 1944 and the first months of 1945: air-raid sirens, the huddle beneath the kitchen table (a steel Morrison shelter), the whining of V-2s toward the end of the war, and even once a shock wave that pushed me to the pavement. Also, a few weeks of evacuation to my grandparents in Warwickshire, close to Coventry, which had sustained the better part of the 1941 blitz, and to another shelter, dug in the back garden, of reinforced concrete, damp and cool and a favorite hideout.
{"title":"Fragments of an Autobiography","authors":"Anthony Vidler","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00510","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract I was born on July 4, 1941, in East Knoyle, Wiltshire. Some symbolic import might be gained from the fact that East Knoyle was also the birthplace of Christopher Wren and close to Philip Webb's mansion “Clouds”; also symbolic, given my later life in the United States, was the date itself. My family moved back to Essex later that year. My memories of the war must date from late 1944 and the first months of 1945: air-raid sirens, the huddle beneath the kitchen table (a steel Morrison shelter), the whining of V-2s toward the end of the war, and even once a shock wave that pushed me to the pavement. Also, a few weeks of evacuation to my grandparents in Warwickshire, close to Coventry, which had sustained the better part of the 1941 blitz, and to another shelter, dug in the back garden, of reinforced concrete, damp and cool and a favorite hideout.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140760822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The honking of the geese going south was beginning to get on his nerves. How to work with that going on. And the library was getting colder. The day had been grey, the soil damp, the air raw and feeling like snow. It might snow tonight. Not a long walk home though—and the apartment was at least warm. If it wasn't for the people upstairs, creaking, stamping (or that's what it sounded like), and shouting—but maybe just talking given the thin walls. Maybe they were using Skype—his own had long since ceased to connect. Needs a new password, or better, someone to call. He had felt the walls this morning—damp and a little soft— old plasterboard, wooden panels slightly buckled from heat and damp in that order. How could they let the housing get so run-down? But that was how monasteries worked, and this, all said and done, was a sort of monastery. Without the religion of course. But religion was there all right—under the radar, couched in academic formulae, a kind of ersatz nonbelief in belief. He had heard it at lunch—the endless parroting of rehashed research, of half-baked theories, of platitudes about how good the food was, or how much better the food was yesterday, or how interesting the mixed cold vegetarian salad was, or that you couldn't count on anything these days, or you are new here aren't you? Kindly inquiries, sensitive overtures, only half-listening to the replies.
{"title":"Anthony Vidler's IAS Mystery","authors":"Anthony Vidler","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00513","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The honking of the geese going south was beginning to get on his nerves. How to work with that going on. And the library was getting colder. The day had been grey, the soil damp, the air raw and feeling like snow. It might snow tonight. Not a long walk home though—and the apartment was at least warm. If it wasn't for the people upstairs, creaking, stamping (or that's what it sounded like), and shouting—but maybe just talking given the thin walls. Maybe they were using Skype—his own had long since ceased to connect. Needs a new password, or better, someone to call. He had felt the walls this morning—damp and a little soft— old plasterboard, wooden panels slightly buckled from heat and damp in that order. How could they let the housing get so run-down? But that was how monasteries worked, and this, all said and done, was a sort of monastery. Without the religion of course. But religion was there all right—under the radar, couched in academic formulae, a kind of ersatz nonbelief in belief. He had heard it at lunch—the endless parroting of rehashed research, of half-baked theories, of platitudes about how good the food was, or how much better the food was yesterday, or how interesting the mixed cold vegetarian salad was, or that you couldn't count on anything these days, or you are new here aren't you? Kindly inquiries, sensitive overtures, only half-listening to the replies.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140795029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Architectural historians often manifest a strong design impulse in their writing. This essay traces the theoretical arc traversing Anthony Vidler's individual essays and book projects as the parabolic imprint of his historiographic design. Based on unpublished manuscripts of the architectural historian's preliminary book outlines, drafts, and reading notes on authors such as Émile Zola, Sigmund Freud, and Georges Bataille, the article follows the route from Vidler's early research on utopia, Claude Nicholas Ledoux, and ideas of the French Enlightenment to his later books on “the architectural uncanny” and modern spatial psychopathologies in “warped space,” foregrounding the continuity of Vidler's “historical project” from the Enlightenment to the histories of twentieth-century architectural modernism. The article closes with an overview of Vidler's two latest book projects (currently unpublished), “Architecture After the Rain,” an autobiographically driven reevaluation of architectural modernism in Britain after World War II, and “Second Best Utopia,” a compilation of essays on “Utopics” from Plato to Fredric Jameson that argues for the abiding relevance of utopian ideas in the present.
{"title":"Von … bis, from… to: The Arc of Anthony Vidler's Architecture","authors":"Spyros Papapetros","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00512","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Architectural historians often manifest a strong design impulse in their writing. This essay traces the theoretical arc traversing Anthony Vidler's individual essays and book projects as the parabolic imprint of his historiographic design. Based on unpublished manuscripts of the architectural historian's preliminary book outlines, drafts, and reading notes on authors such as Émile Zola, Sigmund Freud, and Georges Bataille, the article follows the route from Vidler's early research on utopia, Claude Nicholas Ledoux, and ideas of the French Enlightenment to his later books on “the architectural uncanny” and modern spatial psychopathologies in “warped space,” foregrounding the continuity of Vidler's “historical project” from the Enlightenment to the histories of twentieth-century architectural modernism. The article closes with an overview of Vidler's two latest book projects (currently unpublished), “Architecture After the Rain,” an autobiographically driven reevaluation of architectural modernism in Britain after World War II, and “Second Best Utopia,” a compilation of essays on “Utopics” from Plato to Fredric Jameson that argues for the abiding relevance of utopian ideas in the present.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140762387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article analyzes the significance of cyclical forms in the art of Hanne Darboven by reexamining the place of Constructivism and capitalism in her work. It tracks the lasting importance of El Lissitzky for her understanding of the relation between art and mathematics, revealing how Darboven borrowed from Lissitzky a particular interest in oscillatory dynamics. Further, it establishes the influence on Darboven's artistic practice of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, particularly his method of note-taking—derived from accountants' ledgers—called sudeln. While sudeln works exhibit the oscillatory dynamics described by Lissitzky, they also offers a language for the vast array of citations that Darboven inscribed in her art. The concept of sudeln thus provides a framework for understanding the self-organizing and autopoietic operations that underwrite the paper machines of Darboven's practice. The article concludes by locating this same cyclical, oscillatory form in the most fundamental and abstract of Darboven's gestures, the wavy script that she called Schriftschwünge. In doing so, the article discovers an unexpected emergence of the biographical in Darboven's artworks, notebooks, and letters, in contrast to the anonymous and depersonalized aesthetic with which she is often associated.
{"title":"Cycle and Citation: What Hanne Darboven Calls Thinking*","authors":"William Stewart","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00507","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the significance of cyclical forms in the art of Hanne Darboven by reexamining the place of Constructivism and capitalism in her work. It tracks the lasting importance of El Lissitzky for her understanding of the relation between art and mathematics, revealing how Darboven borrowed from Lissitzky a particular interest in oscillatory dynamics. Further, it establishes the influence on Darboven's artistic practice of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, particularly his method of note-taking—derived from accountants' ledgers—called sudeln. While sudeln works exhibit the oscillatory dynamics described by Lissitzky, they also offers a language for the vast array of citations that Darboven inscribed in her art. The concept of sudeln thus provides a framework for understanding the self-organizing and autopoietic operations that underwrite the paper machines of Darboven's practice. The article concludes by locating this same cyclical, oscillatory form in the most fundamental and abstract of Darboven's gestures, the wavy script that she called Schriftschwünge. In doing so, the article discovers an unexpected emergence of the biographical in Darboven's artworks, notebooks, and letters, in contrast to the anonymous and depersonalized aesthetic with which she is often associated.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140793966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In 1988, the Greenlandic Inuk and Danish artist Pia Arke and her Danish partner, Michael Petersen, painted two monochrome squares: one atop a mountain overlooking the capital of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), another in central Copenhagen. The earthworks are anomalous to both artists' oeuvres, yet in this essay, I propose that their iterative structure and enigmatic form provide a lens through which to reassess the development of Arke's early career. In addition to establishing continuity between her views on painting and photography, and on both media's relations to land, the project's fragmented site-specificity evokes larger, representational challenges within the struggle for Inuit self-determination in Kalaallit Nunaat. Identical in material and scale yet marked by undeniable, site-specific differences, the earthworks prompt reflection on the increasingly opaque forms colonial power adopted in response to growing demands for Indigenous sovereignty. This essay, in turn, argues for understanding Arke's cultivation of opaque form in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a response to these political contradictions.
{"title":"A Monochrome at Ukkusissaq: Pia Arke's Home-Rule Earthworks*","authors":"D. Norman","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00487","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1988, the Greenlandic Inuk and Danish artist Pia Arke and her Danish partner, Michael Petersen, painted two monochrome squares: one atop a mountain overlooking the capital of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), another in central Copenhagen. The earthworks are anomalous to both artists' oeuvres, yet in this essay, I propose that their iterative structure and enigmatic form provide a lens through which to reassess the development of Arke's early career. In addition to establishing continuity between her views on painting and photography, and on both media's relations to land, the project's fragmented site-specificity evokes larger, representational challenges within the struggle for Inuit self-determination in Kalaallit Nunaat. Identical in material and scale yet marked by undeniable, site-specific differences, the earthworks prompt reflection on the increasingly opaque forms colonial power adopted in response to growing demands for Indigenous sovereignty. This essay, in turn, argues for understanding Arke's cultivation of opaque form in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a response to these political contradictions.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44101668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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