Amy Zhang

Respondent: Sara Bloem

Previously seen in Open Media Critical Discussion…

• Podcast• Dirty laundry

What’s New (Amy’s Reactionto the Class’s Reaction)

• Research• Audio– “I’m A Rapist”– “It Happens to Everyone Right”– “Man wrongly accused of rape trying to clear

name”• Plans for final installation in gallery space

My Reaction to Amy’s Reaction to the Class’s Reaction

• Immediate thoughts• Artists• Writers and critics– Precariousness– Vulnerability– Defiance

• Moving forward

Tamara Albaitis

• Gamble (2006)• http://www.burnthebox.org/gamble.html

Tamara Albaitis (cont.)

• Out and In (2005)• http://www.burnthebox.org/outandin.html

Georg Klein

• Mirrorsongs (2010)• http://www.georgklein.de/installations/024_mirrorsongs_ev.html

Gioni – Ask the Dust

• “Traditionally, sculpture has been the territory where permanence is celebrated. The history of sculpture overlaps and intersects with that of the funerary monument, where an effigy is frozen to preserve forever a person’s features or memory… The shock of modern art finds one of its strongest visual metaphors in the deposition of the sculptural object from its pedestal or, better yet, in the disappearance of the pedestal as it gets absorbed by the sculpture itself.”

Hal Foster – The Art of the Decade

• “…this state of insecurity is not natural but constructed – a political condition produced by a power on whose favor we depend and which we can only petition.”

Judith Butler – “Violence, Mourning, Politics”

• “[My] essay pursues the problem of a primary vulnerability to others, one that one cannot will away without ceasing to be human. … What counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”

Moving forward

• Installation – Unsculptural sculpture• Audio + visual (physical) components• Intrusion in to the space as a perforation of

our community

Questions

• What is the role of naivete in making? When does it hinder or help the process?

• What are sophisticated and unsophisticated ways of documenting trauma?

• What level of sophistication do we demand from work in order to take it seriously?

• How can we best synthesize non-art material and turn it into “art”?

• Is Amy’s body of research more suitable for presentation as a paper than as a sculptural piece?